Archive | Commentary

  This is Sid Shniad’s presentation to the LaborTech 2006 panel on “The Corporate Media Assault and Developing a Labor Media Strategy” (18 November 2006). — Ed. This panel is called Corporate Media Assault and Developing a Labor Media Strategy.  In my view, the issue should be framed as a discussion of the overall corporate […]

  “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’  But . . . the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” — Martin Luther King, Jr.1 “The truth […]

NAKED IMPERIALISM:The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance by John Bellamy FosterREAD EXCERPTBUY THIS BOOK John Bellamy Foster’s Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance was published by Monthly Review Press in May 2006.  It consists of essays written between September 2001 and September 2005, addressing the origins of today’s undisguised imperialism, led by the […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its November 2006 issue features the following editorial.  — Ed. The November 8, 2006 agreement between the seven parties alliance (“SPA”) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (“CPN(M)”) brings peace, confirms the subjection of king and army […]

Peter McLaren, Rage and Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism, and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 394 pages, paper $32.95. “One morning they gave us a guinea pig.  It came to the house in a cage.  At midday, I opened the door of the cage.  I returned home at nightfall and […]

Occidente aparece, de pronto, desprovisto de sus mejores virtudes, construidas siglo sobre siglo, ocupado ahora en reproducir sus propios defectos y en copiar los defectos ajenos, como lo son el autoritarismo y la persecución preventiva de inocentes.  Virtudes como la tolerancia y la autocrítica nunca formaron parte de su debilidad, como se pretende ahora, sino […]

Come ye, O Light in the Loafer.  Come ye, O Friend of Dorothy.  Ye conservative homosexuals who looked to the Democrats and were rebuked by their lurid liberal election gains.  Ye right-thinking rump-rangers who looked to the Republicans, only to be scorned as left-leaning “queers.”  Ye passing-for-straight poofs who turned in despair to the preacher […]

Exit polls conducted at last week’s elections reveal the contradictions and limits of the Democrats’ victories.  As reported in the New York Times (November 9, 2006, page P7), the four fifths of US voters who are white preferred Republicans (52 to 48 percent), while Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians chose Democrats (by 89 to 11, 70 […]

South of the Border The residents of the colonias of Matamoros, Mexico are refugees of the modern free trade wars.  Located near the maquiladora factories south of the US-Mexico border in the lower Rio Grande Valley, the impoverished colonias provide sharp contrast to the affluent suburbs and bustling shopping malls just across the river in […]

  The bus rumbled along a highway in southwest Iran, passing a series of anti-aircraft batteries and rickety guard towers before pulling in through a checkpoint to the Bushehr nuclear plant compound.  Having anticipated significant difficulties finding, much less nearing, the reactor, I stared in stunned silence at its dome.  So much for state secrets.  […]

RELIGION AND THE HUMAN PROSPECT by Alexander SaxtonBUY THIS BOOK I first met Alexander Saxton in 1997 at a conference on the “problem of whiteness,” held at the University of California, Berkeley, at which we were both speakers.  Although we had never met, I considered him a mentor, particular his book, The Rise and Fall […]

I. Three Metropoles, Four Peripheries Many of us on the Left have pondered what would replace the Cold War division of the planet into the First, Second, and Third World.  Though the three worlds thesis was arbitrary at best — the social divisions within nation-states are often more significant than the distinctions between nation-states — […]

The man in the cardboard box wakes up in America on the morning after the election after a night of clattering in the fuzz of high frequency bands the static on the screen attracts the dust of Emperors and Czars and postmen. He tastes the residue on his tongue babies cry, the smoke of the […]

Harry Kelber, My 70 Years in the Labor Movement.  379pp, $20 pbk.  Labor Educator Press, 25 Washington St., Suite 302, Brooklyn NY 11201. This is a revised edition of an underappreciated 1996 self-published classic by one of the most remarkable figures in the last half-century of American labor. What makes Harry Kelber still tick, at […]

To the congressional winners of Campaign 2006: as you savor your victory and prepare to take office in January, consider this bit of free advice on how to make those tough decisions you’ll soon face on the war: pick a number. It’s simple.  Pick a number.  Any number.  It doesn’t much matter which number, as […]

What a treacherous weekend! Campaigning in Greeley, Colorado on Saturday, the WAR PRESIDENT said (to tumultuous applause), “My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision, and the world is better off for it.”  But perhaps not for the 655,000 Iraqis killed on the WAR PRESIDENT’s watch since he lied his way into this […]

Orhan Pamuk in The Black Book jokingly referred to Ibn ‘Arabi as “the existentialist of all time.”  In his Sufism and Deconstruction: A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi, Ian Almond, a teacher of English literature at Bosphorus University, is not interested in giving the medieval Sufi mystic a catchy label.  Rather, his aim […]

The government offensive against Muslims in America met fresh opposition yesterday in Albany, New York when dozens of leaders of the anti-war movement and other progressive causes joined with Muslims to protest the recent guilty verdicts in the trial of Imam Yassin Aref and Mohammed Musharraf Hossain. Aref and Hossain were accused and convicted of […]

An Introduction to Marx’ Notion of Money What is money?  This question hardly plays a role in everyday commerce.  What matters is that there is enough.  Bourgeois economic theories reduce money to its economic function.  But the ubiquity of money is fateful and presupposes certain conditions.  Hence, the critique of financial markets is incomplete when […]

Most people know that Detroit, the once-vibrant automotive capital, has been in an economic tailspin for decades.  Legions of “post-industrial” analyses have properly assigned responsibility for it to profit-motivated factors in capitalist decision-making since the late 1950s.  The human cost of the tailspin is nearly beyond comprehension for those who are not directly affected by […]