Archive | Commentary

This commentary provides an overview of carbon and biodiversity offsets as an expansion of global capitalism under the western environmental agenda marshalled against development in Africa.

Notwithstanding Mao’s admonition to his PLO visitors to avoid book worship—including and especially of his own works—his writings on guerrilla warfare had by then become canon, and for good reason.

As Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza enters its sixth month, Qiao Collective presents an urgent intervention from Charles Xu on the Palestinian resistance and the place of China, its people, and their revolutionary legacy in the global solidarity movement.

The early history of the Industrial Workers of the World has become the stuff of legend for the U.S. socialist left. Key to the legendary status of the early IWW is the notion that the organization was a “singing union.”

Music and politics are alike in belonging, in principle, to everyone. We all have tunes running through our heads, we all sway to certain rhythms, and, in times not long past, it was common for almost everyone to sing.

The national Girl Scouts are threatening legal action against a St. Louis troop for the crime of making bracelets to raise money for Gaza’s children.

The factual situation is that China’s economy, as it heads into 2024, has far outgrown all other major comparable economies.

Parts 3 and 4 of an interview with Michael D. Yates by Farooque Chowdhury.

The widespread ownership of crypto currencies in countries like Turkey and Argentina has created the grounds for a very reactionary economic understanding among broad social segments, especially among young people.

The People’s Science Movement in India has few parallels in the world in concept, scale, and scope.

Parts 1 and 2 of an interview with Michael D. Yates by Farooque Chowdhury. The emancipation of labor is one of the foremost questions in all exploitative societies and societies in transition.

The centenary of the death of Vladimir Illich Ulyanov, Lenin, is an appropriate occasion to invite the younger generations of militants to recover the formidable theoretical legacy of the great Russian revolutionary.

The renewed hunger strike of fifteen political prisoners of the Mapuche resistance movement in Chile has reached a highly critical stage. Their loved ones are calling for a week of action in the lead up to their appeal hearing on February 9.

The dictatorship in Argentina—one of the cruelest and bloodiest in the region—was in full swing. Among the thirty thousand disappeared by the state were an estimated five hundred babies and children, either taken along with their parents or born in the camps under brutal, inhumane conditions. Their grandmothers would do anything to find them.

In January 2023, a reporter from Yomiuri Shimbun asked the press secretary of Japan’s foreign ministry, Hikariko Ono, for a definition of the term ‘Global South’.

The new formation is led by Sahra Wagenknecht (born 1969), one of the most dynamic politicians of her generation in Germany and a former star in Die Linke, and Amira Mohamed Ali. It is called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, BSW) and it launched in early January 2024.

It has been a scant 30 years since the ‘end of history’ was declared by bourgeois ideologists in pantomimes of wish-fulfillment for sensing the inviolability of United States imperialism. For peoples’ struggles and movements feeling the boot of imperialism on their necks, no such end was in sight.

In this panel, Kali Akuno, John Bellamy Foster, Chris Gilbert, and M.E. O’Brien examine the commune and communal organizing as part of the project of revolutionary social transformation. The speakers address how socialist communes can be used to abolish the logic of capitalism, which is based on the exploitation of human beings, the expropriation of nature, and oppression.

The perpetual production of ever-changing forms of poverty is an inevitable part of the creative destruction that characterizes capitalism. The form of the poverty changes, but poverty remains.

Ian Angus’s Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and  the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2016) continues to be well received worldwide. This is the introduction to the most recent edition released in the autumn of 2023—a Portuguese translation from the noted Brazilian publishing house Boitempo.