Archive | Commentary

Journalism professor, columnist and author Walt Brasch began writing his essential new book, America’s Unpatriotic Acts, shortly after Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act. “By exposure of what the federal government has done to our Constitutional rights during the past four years,” he explains, “I hope the people will fully understand that the claims by […]

Speaking from Cuba, where she was granted asylum after escaping from a US prison in 1979, Assata Shakur, the alleged “Bandit Queen” of the now defunct Black Liberation Army, announced today that she would hand over one million “HANDS OFF ASSATA” t-shirts to the person or persons who successfully apprehend US Secretary of Defense Donald […]

This past winter we heard reports of a heated dispute within the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), the guiding party of the revolutionary struggle in Nepal. The old regime in Nepal, a brutal military dictatorship under King Gyanendra Shah, on February 1st, 2005, carried out a coup against the remnants of legality within that part of the country it still controlled—the central valley of Nepal (containing the capital Kathmandu), and the area immediately surrounding the army’s fortified bases elsewhere, primarily in district towns. The rest of the country has been liberated, and is self-governing under revolutionary leadership, with the CPN(M) playing the leading role. But Nepal’s limited communication links with the rest of the world are concentrated in Kathmandu, and the royal military government was able to sever all links not under its control at the time of the February 1st coup. Under these circumstances it was not possible to determine the trustworthiness of the various reports of the dispute with the CPN(M) leadership

[The following is a speech delivered by Jerry Tucker on March 12, 2005 at the conference on “Work and Social Movements in the United States” at University of Paris – Sorbonne (March 10-12, 2005). Tucker will report daily on the AFL-CIO 2005 convention in Chicago on July 25-28. — Ed.] There is today a rare […]

  In Part One, I argued that capitalism produces very few jobs that utilize fully our human capacities to conceptualize and perform work.  Instead, most jobs are degraded and demand little of us.  I noted that of the ten jobs projected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to show the greatest job growth between […]

One of the bracing slogans to have emerged out of the May 1968 uprising in France was “Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible.”  Thirty-six years later, I propose that we revive the slogan, but now in its mirror-image, i.e.: “Be Utopian: Demand the Realistic.”  What’s my point? The fundamental principles animating the political left have always […]

Why should self-identified progressives and activists care about videogames? After all, don’t we have more important things to do — like stopping the Terror War, organizing unions, and constructing Left parties? Aren’t videogames just a frivolous luxury of First World consumers? Not so. Adorno noted long ago that the line between progress and regress becomes […]

                                 Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty (1926). Case decided: November 22, 1926 by the United States Supreme Court 6-3 in favor of the palintiff The desire to cryogenically keep the community as it is at a point in time The popular panacea for preceived problems: Pass a law                   And so communities across the […]

Thursday May 5, 2005 — AIDS activists from around the country arrived in Washington to place 8,500 pairs of shoes before the White House.  The shoes were meant to symbolize the 8,500 who die daily of AIDS worldwide.  “We want the president to look out the window and see his inaction,” explained ACT UP veteran […]

Across the US, urban industries provide key funds that local politicians use to get elected. In return, mayors typically organize their city governments to tax, to provide subsidies, to allocate city services, and to dispose of city-owned land for “economic development projects.” The chief beneficiaries of these projects are usually the leading local firms and […]

“Pas de vacances pour les bourgeois!” (no vacation for the bourgeois) was a favorite slogan at the Sorbonne during the May 1968 nationwide revolt in France. Not supported by any established political parties (including the CPF), the movement which originally started among students who took over the universities came to include workers who occupied factories […]

In the increasing “heat” of labor reform issues — which is not always the same as “light” — it has been discouraging to see how little attention has been paid to labor’s foreign policy issues.  This is, in my opinion, the 500-pound gorilla that no one wants to touch.  Yet, I argue it is absolutely […]

[Michael D. Yates’ Note: As readers of the June issue of Monthly Review magazine know, a fierce battle is raging inside organized labor in the United States.  Several unions within the AFL-CIO (the national federation of unions) are threatening to secede from the Federation, their leaders arguing that Federation leaders and many member unions are […]

  State terrorism is the use of state violence against innocent civilians to create fear in pursuit of a political objective — an ugly side of imperialism. There are two varieties of state terrorism: overt and covert. The most obvious examples of overt state terrorism are the 1937 bombing of Guernica and the 1945 atomic […]

[“The Experience of China” is an excerpt from “Approaching Socialism,” published in the July-August issue of Monthly Review in print. The full text of the article will be soon avaialbe at . — Ed.] When the Red Army, led by the Chinese Communist Party, entered Beijing in 1949, the work needed to create a road […]

I’m writing a preface for a new edition of my memoir, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, which first appeared in 1997 — it’s about my life growing up poor, rural, super-patriotic, and Christian fundamentalist in Oklahoma, and still becoming anti-imperialist, Marxist, anti-racist, and feminist.  I am trying to deal with the red-state (the South and […]

My four-year-old son is fond of asking me, “how goes the work?” Well, if he means working for economic justice, the answer is, “not so well, Sam.” Oh, there are signs of hope. The anti-globalization movement has challenged prerogatives of capital in the international economy. And the Bush administration’s attempt to privatize social security by […]

On July 2, 2005 I took a flight from Chicago to western Canada where I was scheduled to give a lecture to a group of teachers at the University of Calgary.  Clearing customs, I was directed to Immigration where a growing line of anxious or impatient arrivals — mostly dark-skinned, mostly young, I the glaring […]

New bargains every day in our packed aisles, come on! Trappist jams, lamps in the form of buddhas, striped baskets, ceramic bowls of potpourri that will never scent a room after the first five minutes. All the gifts you buy friends who thank you profusely before stowing them in a closet or taking them to […]

MRZINE: In your essay in the November 2004 Monthly Review entitled, “U.S. Imperialism Europe and the Middle East,” you conclude that, “Europe will be of left, the term ‘left’ being taken seriously, or will not be at all.”  As opposed to the views of almost all U.S. and U.K. commentators, are not then the “non” […]