Larry Summers and Paul Krugman have recently identified the phenomenon of stagnation. Given that they are giants in today’s economic policy conversation, their views have naturally received enormous attention. That attention is very welcome because the issue is so important. However, there is also a danger that their dominance risks crowding out other explanations of […]
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Monthly Review Magazine
Venezuela: Socialism Is Still a Real and Inspiring Possibility
In one of his last important public discourses, popularly known as the Golpe de Timón speech, the late President Hugo Chávez told a joke about an indigenous tribe and a priest. The priest baptized the indigenous people giving them Christian names, held communion, and told them not to eat meat on Friday but rather fish […]
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Venezuela
As protests have been taking place in Venezuela for the last couple of weeks, it is good to check on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Empire’s “stealth” destabilizer. What has the NED been up to in Venezuela? Before going into details, it is important to note what the NED is and is […]
Violent Protests in Venezuela Fit a Pattern
Venezuela’s latest round of violent protests appears to fit a pattern and represents the tug-and-pull nature of the country’s divided opposition. Several times over the past 15 years since the late, former president Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, the political opposition has launched violent protests aimed at forcing the current president out of office. […]
Come Together: Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Solidarity March
All the leaders and many of the active members of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU) — arbitrarily held responsible for the violent 18 July 2012 incident in the Manesar works of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd in the province of Haryana — 148 of them, repeatedly denied bail, are in jail since August of that […]
As a Class for Itself
Numsa General Secretary’s Presentation to the Cape Town Press Club, February 11, 2014 I speak to you today with a powerful and united mandate from 341,150 metalworkers. They made their views extremely clear in our workers’ parliament in December last year — the parliament we called the Numsa Special National Congress. In that parliament […]
Michał Kalecki and Oskar Lange in the 21st Century
Jan Toporowski: It is . . . possible to identify in The General Theory and Kalecki‘s work key ideas that they had in common. The first is that in a capitalist economy output and employment are determined by business investment, so unless investment is high enough the economy is unlikely to be at full employment. […]
Private Prisons Are Unconstitutional
A new report by In the Public Interest, available at www.inthepublicinterest.org/article/criminal-how-lockup-quotas-and-low-crime-taxes-guarantee-profits-private-prison-corporations, documents the increased use of private prisons to house the large and growing population of incarcerated Americans. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, five to seven times that of comparable countries. See my article “Lawyers, Jails, and the Law’s Fake Bargains,” […]
Treme Rewrites Post-Katrina History. And That’s a Good Thing.
After three and a half seasons, HBO’s Treme concluded in December, and last week the entire series became available as a box set. The show started with low ratings that got lower as time went on, never won many awards, and divided critics. But as time passes and more audiences discover the show, it may […]
Tarek Mehanna: His Tragic Immoderation
I have become a card-carrying, tax-paying moderate, thanks to a study I found in Politico.com. In this study, psychologists Kaitlin Toner and Mark Leary discovered that the more extreme politicians’ views are, the more they think they’re right. In fact, politicians’ “belief superiority” — the certainty that their own viewpoints are correct — was linked […]
Europe’s Future — Wanna Bet?
There are many TV talk shows in Germany, sometimes hot, often vacuous. But the one on January 16th hit the roof, with far more people watching it afterwards via Internet than at the time it was aired. And their comments, by the thousand, were mostly pounded away in great anger! A main cause of such […]
Europe’s Future — Wanna Bet?
There are many TV talk shows in Germany, sometimes hot, often vacuous. But the one on January 16th hit the roof, with far more people watching it afterwards via Internet than at the time it was aired. And their comments, by the thousand, were mostly pounded away in great anger! A main cause of such […]
A History of US Intransigence, from Cuba to Colombia
Cuba solidarity activists rallied in Bogota’s Policarpo district on January 26 to celebrate Cuban national hero José Martí’s 161st birthday. Martí, champion of “Our America” — lands south of the Rio Grande River — launched an anti-imperialist movement that persists in Cuba more than a century later. Colombian revolutionary struggle mirrors that durability. U.S intransigence […]
Learning About Participation Without an Instructor: Introducing Documentary Videos Produced by MEPLA, the Center for Research on Popular Memory in Latin America
“Here I would like to talk especially about the documentaries that we have produced about the participation of people in communities and how to produce videos for educating grassroots community leaders who in general do not have any formal education but are interested in working in communities.” — Marta Harnecker English Español Marta Harnecker is […]
We Emptied Our Pockets Out of Joy: The Anniversary of the January 25 Revolution
These are images you have never seen before, or maybe you have but you did not pay attention to them. Though these are images of everyday life, they hide sites of pain, corners of terror, the places left behind by martyrs. Most of these images were taken in spaces where the state’s security forces kidnapped, […]
The “Brown International” of the European Far Right
In the lead-up to the international day of action against fascism on 22 March, Thanasis Kampagiannis, writing in the latest issue of Σοσιαλισμός από Κάτω (Socialism From Below), the theoretical journal of the Greek Socialist Workers Party (SEK), looks at the danger of a major far Right breakthrough in May’s European Parliament elections and […]
“The Death of Social Democracy in the Age of Global Monopoly-Finance Capital”: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster
Tassos Tsakiroglou: How urgent do you consider the necessity to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat? John Bellamy Foster: The urgency of understanding the interconnections between the economic impassse and the ecological emergency derives from the combined threats they pose to […]
Guerrilla Girls of the FARC-EP: Making War, Peace, and History
If regular armies are generally a man’s world, guerrillas and insurgent forces are just the contrary. There women have always had a central role. Think of Agustina of Aragon, Olga Benário, Tania Bunke, Maria Grajales, and Celia Sánchez, or even (stretching a bit) the legendary Amazons. It is not for nothing that Liberté — the […]
A Call for Justice — Free the Cuban 5: An Interview with Netfa Freeman
Netfa Freeman is a longtime activist/organizer who has worked on Cuba solidarity issues for several years. A frequent traveler to Cuba, Netfa talks about his visit last November in support of the Cuban 5. Gregory Elich: You’ve recently returned from Cuba, where you attended the Ninth International Colloquium to Free the Cuban 5. In 1998, […]
GroKo Politics: No Change of Key in Germany
Some suggested the German “Word of the Year” should be “whistleblower” — in the Denglish language here breezily called “Neu-Deutsch” (“New German”). But chosen instead was “GroKo,” headline shorthand for “Grosse Koalition,” a term used constantly during three months of wrangling between Germany’s two biggest parties, once seen as “irreconcilable foes,” to form a nice […]
