Bombay, Our City Early on, in Anand Patwardhan‘s Bombay, Our City (1985), a passionate film made with the working people who live in Bombay’s slums and are coping with and organizing against their displacement by the police, the bureaucracy, and the business community, a woman reproaches the filmmakers. “Why do you take pictures of the […]
Archive | Commentary
Monthly Review Magazine
An Interview with David Roediger
WORKING TOWARD WHITENESS: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs by David R. RoedigerBUY THIS BOOK David Roediger, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a scholar of critical whiteness studies, delivered a talk titled “The Dilemmas of Popular Front Antiracism: Looking at The […]
On Murtha: Withdrawal, Redeployment, and the Antiwar Movement
Until last Thursday, the ideological battle lines of the occupation of Iraq were drawn around a central question — to “stay the course” or withdraw the troops immediately. Of course, the reality was more complicated, with many Americans who opposed the war arguing that to leave now would be “abandoning our responsibility” to Iraq, letting […]
Wal-Mart Protest in Brunswick, New York
Labor and community activists rallied on Saturday, November 19 at the proposed site of a Super Wal-Mart in Brunswick, New York. The site directly abuts a large wetland area that is a nesting and resting ground for geese, ducks and other wildlife. Walmart already has a 100,000 square foot store less than a mile down […]
Why the War Is Sexist (and Why We Can’t Ignore Gender Anymore; Here’s a Start for Organizing)
“Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice, and we want answers.” — Cindy Sheehan, Camp Casey, Crawford, Texas “If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of […]
A Hike in Sedona
Sedona is a small town about twenty-five miles south of Flagstaff in north central Arizona. USA Weekend recently voted it the “most beautiful place in America.” Sedona’s setting is stunning. To get there from Flagstaff, you drive down Oak Creek Canyon on a steep and heavily switch-backed road. As the canyon deepens, you are […]
Lost Lives and Impoverished Souls:The Failure of the Church in Latin America
When the conservative Catholic cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI, many observers saw this as the beginning of a reactionary period for the Catholic Church with the Cardinal’s well-known opposition to female clergy, gay unions, cloning, freedom of choice, ecumenical movements, use of contraceptives to prevent AIDS, liberation theology, community organization of lay […]
Homage to Nazim Hikmet
Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel, for example — I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation. Nazim Hikmet, “On Living,” 1947
Successful Student Walkouts across the Country, 2 November 2005: Reports from Seattle, Twin Cities, Tacoma, Boston
On November 2, 2005, thousands of students from across the country walked out of class and onto the streets to protest Bush’s war in Iraq and military recruitment in their schools. In August, the call went out from Youth Against War and Racism chapters across the country to mobilize for student walkouts and protests […]
FreedomChunks: A True Story from Canada’s Little War on Terror
Over the course of the whole debacle, there was a lot of criticism directed against Mandeep and me — even from our purported supporters — for the way that we handled the public relations angle of our case. Much was made, particularly, of the so-called “Kafka Declaration” episode wherein, against the cool protestations of our […]
New York Times Should Come Clean with Its Readers
To the Public Editor: I think the Times owes a response to James Bamford’s reporting (“The Man Who Sold the War”) on Judith Miller in Rolling Stone (17 November 2005). Miller, encouraged by the Rendon PR firm (which had largely created Chalabi‘s Iraqi National Congress) boosted the claims of Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri about Iraq’s […]
An Occupation Worth Applauding: Celebrate Un-Thanksgiving
Until the federal penitentiary was closed in 1963, Alcatraz Island was a place most folks tried to leave. On November 20, 1969, the island’s image underwent a drastic makeover. That was the day thousands of American Indians began an occupation that would last until June 11, 1971. The 1973 armed occupation of Wounded Knee along […]
Arlington Midwest
“Arlington Midwest,” a memorial of over 2,000 tombstones on display on the grounds of the Immaculate Heart of Mary motherhouse, in Monroe, Michigan, November 18-19. The IHM national headquarters building is in the background. Inspired by VFP Santa Barbara’s “Arlington West,” this memorial has been displayed three times in the Toledo area since the second […]
Cuba and the Lessons of Katrina
What explains why the “dictatorial regime” of Fidel Castro can do a vastly better job of saving the lives of its citizens from hurricanes while the “democratic” government in Washington has proven to be so apparently inept? In 2004, Hurricane Ivan, a category five storm, slammed Cuba with devastating force. Yet there was not […]
Tookie Williams and the Politics of the Death Penalty
“. . . what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims . . . its own brutality as eternal law? . . . [I]s there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these […]
Debating and Contesting the “New Economy”
For some time now, students of radical political economy have been preoccupied with interpreting the new phase of capitalism that has followed the postwar boom and been dominated by neoliberal ideas and policies. This has meant, on the one hand, a number of declarations of political endings — the end of corporatism, the end of […]
My Very Own Cleaning Lady
I always thought I’d do my own cleaning, never forget the working-class way of Italian American women like my mother who kept a broom beside her front door as if it were a sign that read, “we work hard, we clean hard so wipe your damn […]
The Architecture of Dreamworld 2: The Disarming Reflex
For fourteen years or so I lived with the most beautiful cat in the world. That, at any rate, was the way most people treated her. On pleasant days our cat would walk no further than the sidewalk. She would wait there all day, and almost every passer-by would stop, coo, exclaim at her wondrous […]
Meet Lila Rajiva and Discuss The Language of Empire
Lila Rajiva, the author of The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media, will discuss her book at the following venues. Wednesday, December 14 7:00 PM Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., T: 510-658-1448 OAKLAND, CA Thursday, December 15 7:30 PM The Marxist School of Sacramento, Sierra 2 Center, Curtis Hall, 2791-24th St., […]
Union Organizing in the Trenches
Thirty-five years ago, my Dad told me a story that I recall from time to time. It was about my mother’s father, Grandpa John Kelley. Grandpa lost his small Chicago moving business during the Great Depression. Soon after losing his business, he was lucky enough to land a job at the massive Electromotive train engine […]
