Archive | Commentary

On the seventh of December 2006, 3,000 female garment workers went on strike in the Nile Delta town of Mahalla, which is home to 27,000 workers working in a textile mill, shoulder to shoulder.  It’s the biggest textile mill in the region.  These women workers went on strike and started marching in the factory compound, […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its August 2008 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. For those who recognise that there is an ecological crisis, a revolutionary Marxist perspective best sets out a practical view of our endangered surroundings.  This entire issue of […]

  Part 1: “Winners and Losers in the New China” PAUL JAY: So my question is: that [1989-1990] was a very politically charged time.  The authorities felt  besieged.  Now people say things have relaxed, things have changed, to some extent.  How much have they changed?  In today’s China, could you still be arrested for making […]

August 16, 2008 Yesterday I returned to the U.S. after spending three and a half weeks gathering information about the anti-displacement movement in India.  I traveled across five states in central and eastern India to the sites of projected industrial and mining projects and real estate developments.  I spoke with hundreds of villagers who are […]

The world has been witness this month to a mini-war in the Caucasus, and the rhetoric has been passionate, if largely irrelevant.  Geopolitics is a gigantic series of two-player chess games, in which the players seek positional advantage.  In these games, it is crucial to know the current rules that govern the moves. Knights are […]

Asunción, 15 August (EFE) — Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano today publicly apologized to Paraguayans for the war that his country, allied with Argentina and Brazil, fought against Paraguay between 1865 and 1870. “Let me take this opportunity to apologize as an Uruguayan, because that [imperialist] punishment [for the crime of protecting the workers and products […]

Russia’s response to the Georgian aggression against South Ossetia has been the central theme of the media for a week, and it’s scarcely noticed that the human tragedy in northwest Pakistan will probably be of no less great political significance.  On Friday, the ninth day of a punitive military expedition against Bajaur Agency in the […]

  Hailed as a subversive action flick for its portrayal of weapons industry corruption, Iron Man is a disappointing techno-imperialist fantasy, but its special effects will keep die-hard gadget fetishists on the edge of their seats. Based on Marvel’s successful Cold War-era comic book, Iron Man tells the story of American überman Tony Stark (Robert […]

Summary Paul Collier, in an attempt to bring development economics to a wider audience, has written a book that departs from what he calls the “grim apparatus of professional scholarship.”  The result is a book that is almost entirely unverifiable.  What is verifiable turns out to be an elaborate fiction.  Collier’s thesis is based upon […]

Negotiations between the MDC and ZANU-PF over the political future of Zimbabwe have reached a zenith in the past few weeks.  It now seems almost inevitable that some sort of deal will be attained by the political masters of the MDC and ZANU and that power sharing will become a reality.  The mediator in the […]

Due to its abundance of gas and oil resources, not many countries believe that Iran truly needs nuclear power for energy purposes.  However, when one looks at the energy situation in Iran, it becomes evident that there is in fact a dire need. Iran’s total electricity production capacity stands at 33,000 megawatts (MW).  75% is […]

  The 21 year old social partnership pact between unions, employers and the Government in Ireland is entering one of its periodic crises as one national pay agreement Towards 2016 begins to run out and talks on a successor have collapsed. The Government is expected to attempt resuscitation in late August or early September, writes Padraig […]

A former top leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) has been saved from expulsion and possible disgrace, and Germany’s oldest party, founded in 1863, has huffed and puffed its way out of one more pothole.  Wolfgang Clement, 68, once the powerful economics minister in the cabinet of Gerhard Schroeder, now on the board of […]

  The Orissa police detained Mr. David Pugh, a teacher from the US on 12th August along with advocate Miss Protima Das and an anti-displacement activist Mr. Pradeep who accompanied him assisting in translation and showing the area in Kalinganagar and Sukinda on their way back to Bhubaneswar. They were taken to the Badchan Police […]

Until the early 1980s, homes in the US were mostly owned by the families living in them.  By 2008, all that changed.  Now US homes are actually owned — about 60% of the average home — by mortgage lenders.  The families in them own the other 40% of the home’s value.  The average US home […]

Once more Georgia was launched into a situation of chaos and bloodshed.  A new fratricide war exploded with renewed strength on Georgian soil. To our great disillusion, the alerts of the Georgian Peace Committee and of progressive personalities of Georgia on the pernicious character of the militarization of the country and on the danger of […]

Perhaps some governments are unaware of the concrete facts, and so for that reason Raúl’s message setting Cuba’s position seemed to us to be very timely.  I shall be generous in the aspects that cannot be dealt with in a brief and precise official statement. The government of Georgia would never have launched its armed […]

  The Movement of Financial Capital In recent years, there has been an intensive, continuous process of concentration and centralization of corporations operating and controlling the entire production process of global agriculture. Concentration is the concept used in political economy to explain the movement of large corporations to combine, accumulate, and become large groups.  Thus, […]

MOSCOW (AFP) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev, who ordered the end of operations against Georgia, presented on Tuesday a plan to resolve the Russian-Georgian conflict.  Tbilisi for its part demanded NATO “military assistance.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov immediately warned that Russia will be forced to take further “measures” […]

“Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity must be respected.”  Had George Bush said what he said about Georgia from Beijing about Serbia as well, this is how he would have approached the so-called independence of Kosovo.  The truth, of course, is far from this.  The US was the first country to recognize […]