Archive | Commentary

  “I’m in Cuba, I love Cubans This communist talk is so confusing When it’s from China, the very mic that I’m using” Jay-Z is an American rapper, whose licensed trip to Cuba with Beyoncé has driven the anarchronistic Cuba embargo enforcers bonkers. | Print  

This video shows a panel discussion, moderated by Gayatri Gopinath, featuring the following scholars and papers: Katherine Fobear, “Queer Settlers: Exploring the Intersections of Colonial Violence and Settler Homonationalism With LGBTQ Refugees in Canada”; Colleen Jankovic, “Paranoia, the ‘Untold Story’ of Queer Palestine, and Non-Aligned Queer Solidarity”; Emrah Yıldız, “Alignments of International Refugee Law, Liberalism […]

  Resist CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, and the Greens — the Left Party (Die Linke) can hold its own only if it refuses to become another wing of the German Unity Party. In the coming months a comedy will be staged in Germany.  The piece is called “The Electoral Battle of the Two Camps.”  The leading […]

The anti-immigrant right has been mounting a scare campaign since late January about the supposed dangers of legalizing the country’s estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants. — “When you legalize those who are in the country illegally,” Rep. Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, announced on January 28, “it costs taxpayers millions of dollars, costs American workers […]

  I was fortunate this week.  I had a quick and easy crossing from Jordan back into Israel.  No delays, no questions, no invasive body searches and no lengthy rummaging through my luggage.  The border guard sitting next to the computer took my passport, opened it and looked at the screen, presumably to check for […]

Part 1: Mexican Workers Win Ownership of Tire Plant With Three-Year Strike “If the owners don’t want it, let’s run it ourselves.”  When a factory closes, the idea of turning it into a worker-owned co-operative sometimes comes up — and usually dies. The hurdles to buying a plant, even a failing plant, are huge, and […]

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa‘s idea that we are not “living in an epoch of change” but rather “in a change of epoch” is very much to the point.  There is an obvious worldwide decline of existing imperialisms and historic changes in the correlation of social, class, and nation-state forces.  There have arisen popular movements of […]

Angela Merkel’s face usually displays a rather plain, friendly, almost benign expression, matching her simple, benign words.  But in rare unguarded moments, some claim, they glimpse a very hard visage, which is matched, equally rarely, by hardly benign words, like her annoyed statement that Cyprus was “exhausting the patience of its euro partners.”  Yes, Angela […]

The truth about profits in the US is simple.  Ed Dolan’s recent piece in Seeking Alpha contains a graph that makes it all too clear. First, it’s clear that profits as a percentage of total US GDP have recovered from the crash of 2008.  Unemployment may still be over 50% higher than it was in […]

Why is there little or practically no information in the 2013-14 budget on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s pet scheme to bring about direct cash transfer payments to eventually replace price subsidies for food, fuel and fertiliser products?  Who are going to be the real beneficiaries of the direct cash transfers […]

  This article was featured in the March 2013 issue of Analytical Monthly Review, a sister edition of Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. — Ed. Some young people gathered on the crossroads of Shahbagh in Dhaka on February 5, 2013, to protest against the judgment of the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) which […]

  In a society where employees are only expected to perform well according to predetermined criteria, where loyalty to superiors and management is permanently tested through the nightmare of contract non-renewal, where there is a desire to transform universities into subsidiaries of monopoly capital, those who say “a university should not be like that” will […]

Tunis, Tunisia Tens of thousands of people marched through downtown Tunis on Tuesday in a spirited march celebrating the beginning the 13th World Social Forum — the first to be held in an Arab country.  The majority of marchers were from Tunisia and neighboring nations, but there was substantial representation from Europe, as well as […]

Bela Vista, Setúbal.Photo by Público.pt. Tony’s Mural.Photo by Mark Bergfeld. Ruben Marques, 18, died at the hands of the police in the barrio of Bela Vista, Setúbal, Portugal, on Saturday, March 16.  His crime: he crossed a red traffic light with his moped. The media blame the victim for not wearing a helmet, the Communist […]

. . . This year nobody went out to celebrate the revolution.  Instead we went out to finish what we started in January 2011. . . .  “There’s no food.  Muslim Brothers, liars all!  You tricked us in the name of religion!” . . .  We came out because we had no other choice in […]

In the many homages to Hugo Chávez in recent weeks, there is an important element that suffers almost complete neglect.  For want of a better term we could call it “Leninism.”  By this, of course, I do not mean the tired, formulaic (and basically anti-Leninist) doctrine that generally bears that name.  It is precisely the […]

The following comments were made by White Earth Chairwoman Erma J. Vizenor during her “State of the Nation Address,” March 7, 2013, in Mahnomen, Minnesota.  They are taken from the Nation’s newspaper, Anishinaabeg Today, March 13, 2013, reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. On Tuesday Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez passed away.  President Chavez was a […]

Fred Magdoff: What I would end with is just a couple of ideas — not to give you a blueprint of another type of system but a couple of ideas of what it might be like.  I would say one in which basically the economy and politics are both under social control, under democratic social […]

Hugo Chávez always said that a key book he had read during his prison years was Beyond Capital by his friend István Mészáros.  The book was brought to him by Jorge Giordani, who later became Venezuela’s chief minister in charge of economy under Chávez, the position that Giordani still holds today. The last time I […]

  The President of the World Forum for Alternatives (WFA), Egyptian economist Samir Amin, today paid tribute to the late president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, whose death he called a “great tragedy.” The neo-Marxist intellectual expressed his sadness for the death of the Venezuelan leader and his solidarity with the Venezuelan people in a communiqué […]