Archive | Commentary

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 […]

Is it a tragedy or a new hope? After months, in fact years of inner-party squabbling in Germany’s LINKE party (The Left), the die has been cast, the Rubicon crossed, and Sahra Wagenknecht, with nine other Bundestag deputies, has quit the party and announced their decision to found a new party in January.

Ninety-seven years back, via Giovanni Battista Morgagni, number 25, was a more modest lodging house, home of a quietly discreet pensionante called Antonio Gramsci.

In most major media accounts of settler terror against Palestinians, Israeli settler-vigilantes invariably escape critical categorization beyond the moniker of “extremist.”  Portrayals of these perpetrators of violence invariably focus on the theme of fanaticism while presenting these figures as unsavory if misguided fringe elements in Israeli society.  Such characterizations are naïve and incomplete. 

Again the USA marked Veterans’ Day. Now all leading German parties also want such a “Veteranentag”—to honor all those past patriots who wore uniforms, voluntarily or not, and certainly to inspire many more reluctant young men or women to put on army boots and shoulder arms.… Not so many may recall that the earlier “Armistice Day” marked the end of World War One.

The list of negative things one can say about Joe Biden gets longer by the day.

If I were in Israel today I might well have fears from above, but immensely worse ones if I were in Gaza. Or the West Bank. As for Trump, I do still have fears of a come-back, despite his legal troubles. But my fears for world peace: are they unfounded, perhaps nightmare products of an upset stomach?

Mohammed El-Kurd is an award-winning poet, writer, journalist and organizing from Jerusalem, Occupied Palestine. He is the Palestinian correspondent for The Nation and a Civic Media Fellow at the University of Southern California. Mohammed will talk about the representation and misrepresentation of Palestinians in the U.S.

When looking at the current geopolitical moment, it is a rather painful exercise to figure out what role Europe—and the remnants of its progressive force—can play. Can Europe become a somewhat progressive force for the good of the world, or is the entire continent destined to be consummated by the NATO-led appetite for war?