Archive | Commentary

The DRC’s vast mineral wealth contrasts with its extreme poverty, caused by exploitation and conflict. The dossier emphasises sovereignty and dignity, echoing Congolese activists’ visions for freedom.

As there can only be one price standard in any functioning economic system the transition from one price standard to another cannot take place gradually, or in a mixed way, but must take place sharply, and therefore completely in a very short time frame.

Far from water-logged Bavaria, immensely worse destruction is bloodily wrecking two million lives, and with Germany, though so distant, deeply involved. Of course I mean Palestine, especially Gaza. For decades the media has distorted or ignored what has been happening there. After October 7th ignoring it was no longer possible, here or anywhere.

The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, based in Berlin, recently issued a bulletin entitled, “Seven Reasons Not to Leave Lenin to Our Enemies.” This was intriguing because Rosa was one of Lenin’s sternest critics, and during the Cold War era, her works found print in the United States as vindication of current U.S. policies against the Soviet Union.

This dossier looks at how the U.S.-led New Cold War against China is destabilizing Northeast Asia, focusing on the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan Strait, and Japan.

As a former college teacher, one who witnessed the attacks on those who protested against the War in Vietnam and who studied the repression on campuses during the McCarthy period, I became so appalled at what was being done to our brave and courageous college students that I began to write letters to the leaders of what are, in reality, academic enterprises.

Superficially in the recent period the U.S. has attempted to display two apparently contradictory sides of its policy to China.

It was May 10^th in Germany’s terrible year 1933, Hitler had been in power for hardly three months, when students and staff emptied the university libraries of forbidden books and threw them, an estimated 20,000 books by over a hundred authors, into the flames of a giant bonfire.… No books were burned this time in early May. But there were ironic parallels, some all too alarming!

John Green on the fiftieth anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution.

Piero and Nino exchanged ideas, criticized one another, encouraged each other; Nino often used Piero, seven-years his junior, as an intellectual sounding board, as a trusted interlocutor, asking for advice, for suggestions, whether his friend could chase up a source, a book or journal, a magazine or newspaper article, could he confirm this fact and that, find out some precise detail about Croce’s historical studies, if Machiavelli ever wrote anything about economics, or David Ricardo about philosophy.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the Administration’s suspension of students engaged in peaceful protest and their arrest by the New York City Police Department.

Despite the fact that China’s economy continues to far outgrow all major Western economies the Western media is energetically promoting a myth that China’s economy either has or is about to drastically slow down.

This dossier focuses on the MST’s tactics and forms of organisation and why it is the only peasant social movement in Brazil’s history that has managed to survive for over a decade in the face of the political, economic, and military power of Brazil’s large landowners.

Veteran Cleveland writer and photographer Scott MacGregor recovered a manuscript written by his uncle Hugh O’Neill, which turned into Captured! A World War II Memoir. In it, O’Neill weaves a real-life tale of his life as a prisoner of the Germans in the last year of the Second World War and Cleveland comic artist Gary Dumm, who has worked with the best of the genre, Harvey Pekar in particular, provides vivid illustrations.

It is time to position ourselves at the pivotal intersection where the celebration of neurodiversity meets the call for social justice.

Covid-19 was the least unexpected pandemic in history. Why were governments not prepared?

New York State’s Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974 permits the regulation of residential rents  (“rent stabilization”) on the declaration of a housing emergency in New York City when the vacancy rate falls below 5%, or by similar declarations in municipalities in the suburban New York City counties of Nassau, Westchester and Rockland.

Weapons, weapons, weapons—the more the better! With ever louder talk about “the foe” and “protective measures”, as if Putin were amassing troops or maneuvering warships along German borders—instead of just the opposite taking place in the Baltic and Lithuania…The blitzkrieg-laden spirit of 1941 Germany is all over the media.

This dossier looks at the history and unfinished work of women’s liberation in the German Democratic Republic, such as its achievements, legacy, and the challenges it faced.

Paul Buhle reviews “The Communist Women’s Movement,” a collection of documents of a global women’s communist movement.