Archive | Commentary

Israel assumed that by destroying Gaza, it would eradicate the resistance. However, that calculation was deeply flawed. The resistance in Gaza is directly tied to the Palestinian people. It’s not about eliminating a specific number of fighters but about the enduring bond between the people and the resistance itself.

A statement from Katherine Franke, a longtime Columbia Law professor who was terminated after defending student Gaza protests.

I’m old enough to remember, just barely, the Great Depression: lines of shabby men waiting for free soup, better-dressed men selling apples on streetcorners, miles of evil-smelling, self-made shacks in a Hooverville near Newark.… In February 1937 I recall the movie newsreel with happy, unshaven sit-down strikers at GM in Flint, waving from the factory windows in a dramatic (Communist-led) victory which changed the USA.

Liberal opinion holds that the international monetary and financial system is a device for promoting the interests of all participating countries by providing a convenient payments arrangement within which trade can be carried on. The reality however is altogether different: the international system is founded upon the hegemony of western imperialism, and in turn sustains this hegemony.

How can we transcend the alienation of humanity and nature, and create a world of substantive equality and ecological sustainability?

On November 6 and 7, fascist goons from Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli professional football club, descended on the streets of Amsterdam, chanting proudly about murdered children in Gaza while assaulting local houses, passers-by, and taxi drivers that appeared pro-Palestinian or Arab.

John Bellamy Foster describes Einstein’s radical political commitments, including his efforts in relation to the founding of Brandeis University, his role in the Henry Wallace campaign, and his seminal essay “Why Socialism?”

In Africa, the leading forces of capitalism have ruthlessly wielded a neoliberal conception of corruption to undermine states’ sovereignty and open the continent to plunder at the hands of Western multinational corporations.

Deborah Veneziale provides a useful analysis of the 2024 US elections.

Billions were spent both on aid to the Zelensky government…as an urgent defense necessity to counter “the Russian threat.” This threat has appeared and reappeared in Germany in 1914, the 1930s, after 1945 and now again, louder than ever, with similar barked Prussian commands: “Achtung! Die Russen kommen!” as dangerously false as ever, and often followed by eastward expansion, invasion and, far too often, catastrophe, with atomic annihilation an added danger this time around.

The BRICS declaration presumes that the international institutions in their current state are flawed because they are dominated by imperialist countries and are not representative enough; but they are flawed because their very essence is flawed, no matter how they are governed.

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.