Archive | Commentary

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.

Prison Notebooks sets the tone with “Animality and Industrialism,” Gramsci’s original work-in-progress header for the section he’d eventually label “Americanism and Fordism.”

In 2023, TV studios cut back on both product and labor—and labor struck back. Writers and actors, having had enough of belt tightening and penny pinching, joined many other unions in either threatening to strike or striking. Workers changed how the story was told, showing that studios, their bloated salaries, and their failure to compensate those actually creating the profit, were to blame for the current conjuncture.

Competition over fresh, clean water supplies is leading corporations and their partners in government into situations that transform water from a useful common good to a scarce, exchangeable asset. This process of commodification and financialization is imbricated in an ongoing colonization of nature, one starkly illustrated in settler colonial contexts like Australia.

We must redefine Soviet Georgia beyond mere nostalgia—not to consign it to the past but to invigorate it, making it a dynamic force in shaping new visions for the world.

The story of Medu is not just a South or southern African story, but an international one. No single liberation struggle can exist without the circulation and exchange of ideas, strategies, material resources, political solidarity, and culture across the globe.

Given the many contemporary global challenges—such as climate change, far-right extremism, pandemics, and the increasing threat of nuclear war—it is urgent to develop a strategic, organizational, and theoretical perspective for the international left. Daniel Benson interviews Paweł Wargan on these and other questions.

In this short commentary, John Bellamy Foster describes the term after which Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism is famously named.

The COP28 summit taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates from 30 November to 12 December is a colossal illusion, a mirage in the desert.

In the early hours of Monday, May 15, 2023, the historical highway marker recognizing the birthplace of a renown feminist, anti-racist labor organizer and defender of reproductive rights was taken down. The marker was formally approved and erected by the State, following years of community effort on behalf of this locally-born female hero. It stood […]