Archive | Commentary

In recent weeks, it has become clear that three of the major parties constituting the Chavista coalition will not immediately dissolve themselves to pave the way for the construction of the unified socialist party (PSUV) that president Hugo Chávez has demanded be created to usher in the next phase of the revolution.  These “dissidents” include […]

Throughout its history and across its geography, capitalism has swung back and forth between private and state forms.  The former reduces while the latter enlarges the state’s intervention in the economy.  The economic events that precipitate swings (in both directions) have been various mixes of recession and widening inequality.  Political oscillations have paralleled the economic. […]

Because empire creates so many enemies it has to be rigorously defended.  To gain support of the citizenry, agents of empire create bogeymen, founded in fact but demonized, behind which the ongoing work of empire can be accomplished.  In the 20th century the demon was communism; in the 21st it is terrorism. Currently, defense of […]

Most of The Pursuit of Happyness (Dir. Gabriele Muccino, 2006) is about hard times hitting a good, smart, and hard-working man.  As the result of bad luck, mistreatment, disloyalty of friends, low wages, and high costs of housing, Chris Gardner (played by Will Smith) and his young son wind up homeless.  The film is so […]

RICHARD WRIGHT: The Life and Times by Hazel RowleyBUY THIS BOOK The author Richard Wright, whose works were recently republished by the Library of America, was a hospital orderly making thirteen dollars a week when he first experienced what literary biographers would call an epiphany.  It was in Chicago; the year was 1933.  The unlikely […]

“The rich are not like you and me.”  “The poor will always be with us.”  Get real and accept it, we are told.  Give alms and aid to the poor, tax the rich.  Establish private foundations, be a responsible trust baby and give.  You’ve heard it all and maybe even believe it in your heart. […]

Q.  2007 is the 140th anniversary of the publication of Volume One of Marx’s Capital.  In your opinion, what is its main contribution to understanding contemporary capitalism? Marx’s object in Capital was to explain capital as a social relation in the fullest dialectical sense and in the process to describe its law(s) of motion.  I […]

The active imagining of an alternate global politics could hardly be more pressing.  Mounting global inequalities, the turbulence of climate change, and recurring military interventions by Western powers have been the daily fare of the neoliberal world order.  This world order was constructed over the last two decades under the hegemony of the U.S., in […]

From Protest to Resistance I didn’t make it to the march on the Pentagon.  The storm up and down the east coast of the United States knocked down a thirty foot tree in my yard in Asheville, North Carolina, messed up my flight from Asheville to Washington, DC, and left me with a choice of […]

We talk often of military service in war as a civic and patriotic duty.  But as the realities of combat and of the battlefield become apparent, patriotic sentiments, political ideologies, and mythologies fade quickly beneath the screams of the unbearable pain of the mutilated and the dying.  Ultimately, warriors fight, kill, and accept injury and […]

Local 2627, DC 37, AFSCME interviews labor leader Houzan Mahmoud. This interview was conducted on March 5, 2007, at an event sponsored by the Center for Study of Working Class Life and cosponsored by U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW).  Houzan Mahmoud is the international representative of the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in […]

In the jargon of military recruiters, “influencers” is the term used to refer to the family members, close friends, and peers of those young women and men who are considering enlistment in the U.S. armed forces.  It’s the circle of people in the daily home, school, work, religious, and social life of the potential inductee […]

The Egyptian writer and novelist Nawal El Saadawi well known both in the Arab world and internationally is facing a political and religious campaign mounted against her by the authorities of Al-Azhar.  Basing themselves on a play written by her entitled “God Resigns at the Summit Meeting” published during the month of January 2007 in […]

When people think of militant political action in the United States, their thoughts usually turn to cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.  The South and the Pacific Northwest probably don’t immediately spring to mind.  This is despite the rich legacy of militant labor protest in the filed, woods, and apple orchards of the […]

The American mind is a turbulent canister of contradictions: A blood-splotched Guantanamo prison cell floating delicately on a lotus pond, An unkempt bedroom strewn with silk undergarments Where truth sits in comfortable exile, A victim of extraordinary rendition stuffed into the drawer of an adolescent’s bed Covered in locomotive quilting from Pottery Barn Kids, A […]

John Mage of Monthly Review and Bernard D’Mello. deputy editor of Economic and Political Weekly (“EPW”) of Mumbai, India, visited Nepal in February, and trekked into Rolpa, the original base area of the revolutionary “people’s war.”  The following account appears simultaneously on MRZine and in the current (March 17th) issue of EPW. Over the last […]

John Mage of Monthly Review, and Bernard D’Mello, deputy editor, Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, spoke to Comrade Nabina, senior battalion commander, fifth division, People’s Liberation Army, Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) on February 7, 2007 at the main cantonment site at Dahaban of Nuwagaon in Rolpa district, in mid-west Nepal.  What were the main […]

Raising the minimum wage and increasing the level of social assistance is a component part of challenging the large, low-wage multinationals that make up the vast majority employers of the working poor.  The largest of them all is Wal-Mart. For socialists, Wal-Mart is more than just a series of big retail stores that threaten our […]

It is now accepted across a wide spectrum of political thinking that the period of neoliberalism has sharpened income inequalities.  This has occurred along a number of dimensions.  The capitalist class has seen an increase in wealth from an increasing concentration of assets, a rapid run-up in asset prices, and corporate profits restored to historically […]

In the years preceding and immediately following the Second World War, the trade union movement served to transform work and life for industrial workers and their communities by creating the means to bargain for better wages and working conditions.  Now, in the first decade of the 21st century, North American hotel workers are engaged in […]