Archive | Commentary

Steve Ellner: “The basic contradiction of capitalism is at the point of production, the contradiction between the interests of the working class and those of capitalists.”

While so many in the world hold their breath for Harris or Trump it would also be wise to keep an eye on Germany. A sharp eye!

Book Launch: “The Dialectics of Ecology”

Professor Saibaba’s life, or rather, Sai’s life, for that is what his friends called him, cannot be adequately understood without situating him in an authentic history and “present as history” of the Indian society of which he was a part.

Chinese scholar Wang Hui looks back at the twentieth century, which was born out of the multiple revolutions in the peripheral areas of the world, including China.

Forty years later, Lehlohonolo Kennedy Mahlatsi looks back on the Vaal Uprising in South Africa, which marked a turning point in the growth of mass-based organizations throughout the country and the mass rejection of apartheid colonial rule.

Despite all the many years, those who hated the GDR still hate it today. Indeed, they seem to fear it, and continue almost daily to revile its memories—like kicking an old horse cadaver which might yet bite or strike out with a hoof or two.

John Bellamy Foster speaks with Daniel Tutt about the work of István Mészáros and Paul Baran, contemporary irrationalist tendencies in left ecological thought, intensifying global class struggles, and the continued relevance of Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason (1952), recently reissued with an introduction by Enzo Traverso by Verso in 2021.

Andy Higginbottom reviews Adam Hanieh’s crucial new book, Crude Capitalism.

Tings Chak and Vijay Prashad take stock of seventy-five years of the Chinese Revolution.

Most worried of all are the people in eastern Germany, the one-time German Democratic Republic founded so hopefully almost exactly 75 years ago, October 7, 1949, and buried—triumphantly for a large number—41 years later, on October 3, 1990.

This dossier catalogues the immense cultural production of the Telangana armed struggle in India and how it inspired the people to participate in cycles of protest against colonialism, monarchy, and landlordism, building on the idea that art and culture are both produced by the class struggle and, in turn, produce the class struggle.

Owen Schalk details how Canada’s policies—the hostile moves toward geopolitical opponents, efforts to decrease economic ties to China through critical minerals exploration, and hundreds of billions of dollars in projected military spending over the next decades—do not make Canadians safer.

Is the AfD a fascist party? Björn Höcke, its boss  in Thuringia, one of its three best-known national leaders and its main rabble-rouser, has never concealed his admiration for Germany’s days of swastika glory.

Kevin Potter analyzes the punishing memory culture surrounding Palestine activism at the University of Vienna.

Baldwin theorizes whiteness as the psychology of empire.

Kyle Ferrana details the brutal legacy of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific.

The Tricontinental presents a broad overview of the Latin American far right’s political, economic, and cultural programs and how the absence of a real left political project that secures better living conditions has thrown different fractions of the working class into the grip of neofascism.

H. Bruce Franklin, who died on May 19, 2024, at the age of 90, ranks among the great public intellectuals of our time. Carolyn L. Karcher writes on his immense legacy as a teacher, activist, and scholar.

The wedding of Indian billionaire heir Anant Ambani and pharmaceutical heiress Radhika Anant Ambani seems to be never-ending. It’s not just good business sense for the Ambanis, it’s also a way we are socialized into Hindutva-neoliberalism.