Archive | Commentary

Five years ago, Nicaragua was subject to a violent insurrection that lasted from April through July, 2018. In the second of four articles, we look at how initial support for the coup relied on widespread use of social media.

One of the latest covers of the magazine The Economist carries a headline “Peak China”. This, as its name suggests, is a claim that while during the last seven decades China’s has enjoyed a peaceful “rise”, specifically in relation to the U.S., this has now ended. It was the latest of decades long wildly inaccurate predictions regarding China.

An organization that brings together rural producers with urban consumers breaks with the dictates of the market.

Mainstream reports on this past May Day celebration in Cuba leave out a key element: the imperialist economic and financial blockade.

The fearful destruction, the displacement of families, above all the killing and maiming must be deplored, condemned and brought to an end. But the underlying reasons for this terrible war, concealed in the media, must also be mercilessly examined, regardless of well-orchestrated accusations of “Putin-friendship” or “left-over allegiance to a past Soviet Russia”.

In this latest dossier, the Tricontinental offers a broad analysis of the living and working conditions of India’s large and diverse working class.

‘The threat to privacy and data security posed by language models like ChatGPT is real enough. I frankly doubt that there’s any practical way to contain them. The most effective means that I can think of…to counter the spread of malicious doctrines and ideology are education in critical thinking, organization to encourage deliberation, and modes of intellectual self-defense.’ —Noam Chomsky

Wenhua Zongheng is a newly launched international publication bringing together articles originally produced in the Mainland China magazine of the same name in Chinese. It is jointly published in English, Spanish and Portuguese, by Wenhua Zongheng, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, and Dongsheng—which produces the newsletter News on China.

Before the pandemic was announced by the World Health Organisation in March 2020, the poorer nations of the world already struggled with seriously high—and unpayable—levels of debt.

In the first few months of 2018, Nicaragua hardly appeared to be a strong candidate for an attempted coup. Daniel Ortega’s government had an 80 per cent approval rating in a poll a few months earlier.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the brutal murder of the South African Communist Party (SACP) General Secretary, Comrade Thembisile Martin “Chris” Hani.

This world needs revolutionaries who refuse orders to kill and exploit. Two midwives named Shifra and Puah were such revolutionaries. When a racist ruler asked them to limit the reproduction of slaves—out of fear of a slave uprising—they disobeyed.

Only an ecosocialist revolution can stop our demise, but capitalism’s behemoth keeps people deceitful and mostly unaware of being on the verge of a catastrophic end. We must arise—now!

John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, Deborah Veneziale, and Vijay Prashad, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 108 pages, $15. The “singular reality” (my phrase) on display here is the imagined reality in the mind’s eye of Beltline/Pentagon global strategists. Few readers will be surprised at the cravings of […]

The U.S. knows from its experience in defeating Germany, Japan, and the “Asian Tigers,” that a decisive way to slow a competitor’s growth rate is to get it to reduce its level of investment, which is what it is now trying to do to China.

In the current global climate of conflict and division, it is essential to develop lines of communication and encourage exchange between China, the West, and the developing world.

Ian Angus on chemical warfare against insects.

I recall a circle game from my childhood; after each round another chair was removed, leaving one more child out. We called it “Going to Jerusalem.” Last week Israeli boss Netanyahu arrived FROM Jerusalem. After two days he was out of the Berlin circle—one day too early.

After the truth about the Nord Stream pipeline explosion came to light, the whole world knows that the United States was behind the destruction of critical infrastructure. In fact, the destruction of infrastructure is not a new method to achieve America’s purpose.

In late December, tenants at the Lofts at Cargill Falls Mill in Putnam, Connecticut, an old mill town, received a letter from the Northeast District Department of Health notifying them that a toddler living in the residential complex had severe lead poisoning.