Archive | Commentary

The ambush on May 25 by Maoist guerrillas in the Darba Ghati valley (in the Sukma area of the Bastar region in southern Chhattisgarh), 345 kms south of the state capital of Raipur, of a convoy of provincial Congress Party leaders has shocked the Indian state apparatus.  The Z-plus and other categories of armed security […]

Speaking about the then dictator of Nicaragua, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said: “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”  Whether or not Roosevelt actually said it in so many words is disputable, but there is no doubt that it — i.e., dictatorship is licensed in […]

Dear comrades, friends, sisters, and brothers of our movement! This is an urgent call for more active international solidarity actions with people who are fighting for their democratic rights in all cities and towns of Turkey. Prime Minister Erdogan and his government are attacking people who are trying to voice their democratic demands in all […]

The KCK (Union of Communities in Kurdistan) Executive Council said that the Gezi Park protests, which began as social resistance, have sent a message calling for a new, democratic Turkey.  The KCK called on the Kurdish people to take initiative, saying that the Kurds should fulfill responsibility by working with the democratic forces in Turkey so that the Democratic Solution Process will develop on the right track.

The KCK Executive Council stated that the social resistance around Gezi Park has an important message.  Noting that the current situation poses significant consequences for Turkey’s transition into a democratic country, the council also warned against “opportunist” approaches.  The KCK called on the democratic and working-class sections of civil society to stand against potential barriers to the Democratic Solution Process.

  1. For days now Turkey has been witnessing a genuine popular movement.  The actions and protests, which have started in Istanbul and spread all over Turkey, have a massive, legitimate, and historic character.  The most important of all is the striking change in the mood of people.  The fear and apathy has been overcome […]

“You have to stay in the square, in Taksim, until the government accepts your demands.  Don’t leave it.  [Stay] there with your peaceful demonstration, your peaceful strike, sit-in.  And I call upon women to join it on a wide scale everywhere, in the squares in different cities, not only in Taksim.  Long live the people’s […]

  31 May 2013 This is our Tahrir. Friday evening.  This is probably the busiest street of Ankara at this time of the week.  It’s busy today, too — not with traffic, but with thousands of demonstrators. On the surface, everything has only to do with a public park, which is slated to be demolished […]

May 29, 2013 A few evenings ago, as the sky began to darken here in Kabul, Afghanistan, a small group of the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APVs) gathered for an informal presentation about WikiLeaks, its chief editor Julian Assange, and its most prominent contributor Bradley Manning.  Basir Bita, a regular visitor to the APV household, began […]

João Pedro Stédile, second from left, speaks to the Peasant Movement of Papay in Haiti.  Photo: Beverly Bell. João Pedro Stédile is an economist, co-founder and co-coordinator of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil, and leader among Latin American social movements.  He gave the following talk to hundreds of Haitian farmers at the 40th […]

  John Bellamy Foster is best-known as author of Marx’s Ecology (2000; in which he corrects the popular misapprehension that Marx did not ‘get’ environmental limits), and as editor of Monthly Review (monthlyreview.org), the journal founded by Marxist economist Paul Sweezy in the late 1940s.  In his latest book, The Endless Crisis (2012; written with […]

May 27, 2013 When she was 24 years old, in 1979, Fahima Vorgetts left Afghanistan.  By reputation, she had been outspoken, even rebellious, in her opposition to injustice and oppression; and family and friends, concerned for her safety, had urged her to go abroad.  Twenty-three years later, returning for the first time to her homeland, […]

The following comments were made at a panel on the topic “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” May 19 at a conference titled “Which Way Forward for Psychoanalysis?” and sponsored by the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry at the University of Chicago.  While Freud and psychoanalysis were a focus on the event, other themes running throughout […]

The last couple of weeks, I have been reading and grading hundreds of high school essays.  The students were asked to write about a person in the past whom they would like to meet and what questions they would ask them, given the opportunity.  It was gratifying to learn that, along with the predictable smattering […]

“I think that the freedom that we have . . . is the freedom not to repeat things, it is the freedom to discover what is the path we have to build within our context, our history and culture, our aspirations, our sense of belonging, our ideology, what we love most.” — Mariela Castro Espín […]

Russia, as travelers have noted over the centuries, is immense.  Most of it is far from large bodies of water.  And yet, in a first visit after many years, I came upon some unusual islands right in the heart of the country.  But they were not islands in the geographic sense.  Some were children’s islands. […]

Gay greetings, LGBT-town!  I’m your out-and-proud lesbian pundit.  You may recognize me from my latest blog entry, “How Gay Was My Condo.”  Today, I bring you a hard-hitting work of in-depth political analysis re: Private First Class Bradley Manning.  It seems some malcontents on the Board of San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade have suggested Private […]

The International Crisis Group (ICG) sells itself as “working to prevent conflict worldwide” but there is one country where their mission looks more like promoting rather than preventing conflict.  Exhibit A is their report on Venezuela, released on Friday. There is a lot wrong with this report — most of it reads like a statement […]

Some 50 to 60 union meat cutters and their supporters turned out on the afternoon of April 6 for a noisy protest against what they said was a lockout by Trade Fair, a chain of nine small supermarkets based in Queens, New York. Standing in a picket line on a busy sidewalk outside a Trade […]

The official death toll from the April collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which housed clothing factories, has now passed 1,100.  How exactly will the staggering costs of that overwhelming tragedy be figured?  Will they count as part of capitalism’s contribution to economic development across Asia, Africa, and Latin America? In capitalism’s […]

On Nakba Day, 15 May 2013, Palestinians will mark the passing of 65 years since the massive forced expulsion of Palestinians from their national homeland.  The Nakba commemorations demand reflection not only on the “catastrophe” of the loss of life, land, and property in 1948, but also on Israeli policies that are still dispossessing Palestinians […]