Archive | Interview

A Chavista author and former minister talks about the Bolivarian Revolution’s class basis and the risks that apathy poses to the political process.

The grandson of Chile’s former elected socialist President Salvador Allende, who was toppled in a 1973 CIA-orchestrated military coup, has lived in Venezuela for 10 years. The Grayzone’s Ben Norton interviewed Pablo Sepúlveda Allende in Caracas.

The history of capitalism as a world system is punctuated by struggles for world hegemony between declining hegemonic powers and rising states, usually leading to world wars. We are now in such a period, which had been building for some time under Obama and is now being pursued much more openly and belligerently under Trump.

The ruling class always tries to divide the working class. We must make certain that the working class is not divided internally and we can draw on the past to find examples of working-class organizations that have actively worked to generate a cohesive and class-conscious membership.

Back with Carl Zha of Silk & Steel podcast, who we last saw in our episode on the India-China border conflict.

CounterSpin interview with Carol Anderson on voter suppression.

The coordinator of a media platform that works with social movements talks to VA about the history and challenges of popular communication.

Two things seem certain at this point: (1) The Trump administration will continue to extend its heavy handed neofascist tactics in the next three months, seeking to expand its political base by these means, and (2) the White House and the Republican Party will try to engineer another set of stimulus payments/tax cuts in early September with Trump’s name all over it.

Janine Jackson interviewed legal scholar Marjorie Cohn about secret police in Portland for the July 24, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

A recording of our panel discussion on the Black Lives Matter movement. Featuring Elizabeth Hinton, Robin D. G. Kelley, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Brandon M. Terry, and Cornel West.

“If the small economy of Cuba can improve the health of millions of the world’s people, imagine what could be accomplished if America’s enormous productive capacity changed from creating useless and destructive junk to producing what people throughout the world actually need.”

O’Brien should really read up on Marxist-Leninist works. The people’s position is the fundamental political position of Marxist parties. People are the creators of history and the true driving force behind historical progress.

The Marxist theorist emphasizes that socialism involves people transforming themselves.

This book sets out to challenge some of the assumptions that undergird what I call the competitive society—that is, a society marked by winners and losers, a world in which Black people are routinely expected to bear the burden of loss and defeat.

Canadian Dimension in conversation with essayist, researcher and historian Max Ajl

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to writer, teacher and activist Victor Wallis about the prospect and need for ecosocialism. Wallis’ book is entitled ‘Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism’.

“Neofascism has its source in monopoly-finance capital, at the apex of the system, but depends for its existence on the ability to mobilize, with the help of a führer-like figure such as Trump, a very considerable part of the overall population.”

My sense, while reading this book, was of a twentieth century tradition now ripe to be reclaimed and revived, since, like Du Bois and his generation, we will surely need now to grasp the deep roots of our multiple crises if we are to be free of them and deliver a world to our children that is fit to inherit.

If “everything affects and is affected by every other thing,” we must respond to the dangers to human existence in the 21st century by changing the system, creating a different form of social metabolic reproduction. There is no other way.

We ourselves live in a pretty sick society that seems incapable of feelings of sisterhood, brotherhood, solidarity.