Archive | Interview

  Shabnam Hashmi is one of India’s leading social activists.  She heads the New Delhi-based human rights group ANHAD.  In this interview, she discusses various aspects of Muslim leadership in contemporary India. Q: Indian Muslims often complain that they lack effective and sincere leaders.  Why is this so? A: When India gained independence, the Indian […]

Communism in the rest of the world seems to have collapsed.  What hope do you have of achieving a socialist state in India? The claim that there is no hope for socialism and communism, that they are dead, is mere propaganda unleashed by the imperialists and the apologists of capitalism.  The 20th century saw the […]

A longtime reader of Monthly Review, and a Marxist for all his adult life, Alexander Saxton might be one of the oldest, continuously active radicals in the United States.  Born in Manhattan in 1919, he met the novelist, John Dos Passos, and the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, when he was a young man, and […]

  Maged Abdel-Fattah is Egypt’s Ambassador to the United Nations. Ezzat Ibrahim: Egypt is president of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and New Agenda Coalition (NAC).  What kind of contribution are NAM and NAC expected to offer during the NPT revision conference? Maged Abdel-Fattah: First of all, NAM (118 member states) is a major player in […]

  Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 while at the same time sending more troops to the Afghanistan War.  What has become of the promise of “change”? I am one of the few who are not disillusioned, because I had no expectations.  I had written about Obama’s positions and prospects even before […]

  Solidair/Solidaire, the weekly journal of the Workers Party of Belgium (PVDA-PTB), interviewed John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, 26 April 2010 Solidair/Solidaire: Many green thinkers reject a Marxist analysis because they think that the Marxist approach to the economy is a very productivist one, focused on growth and seeing nature as “a free […]

  Paul Jay: So there’s a lot of talk about the growth and expansion in India and China, and especially India these days.  We’re hearing again about the Indian miracle.  Whose miracle is it, anyway?  And is it such? Jayati Ghosh: No, it’s not actually a miracle.  First of all, let me clarify.  India and […]

  You now describe yourself as a Marxist, with plans for a Marxist theory group in Hungary in addition to your ongoing work as a writer and political commentator from the Left.  Why Marx now?  In Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, Marxist ideas and theories were hard-pressed to survive their connection to state socialism […]

  EA: You are one of the leading theorists trying to develop the notion of the public sphere.  In what ways has globalisation affected the public sphere?  Has the public sphere become more transnational? NF: Today, the flow of public political discourse does not respect borders, but is often transnational.  The result is a serious […]

  Iran will be holding a nuclear disarmament conference with the motto “nuclear energy for all, nuclear weapons for none” on 17-18 April.  Iranian Diplomacy has interviewed Ramin Mehmanparast, spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to ask him about the objectives of the conference. You have told the press that the UN Secretary General […]

  Norman G. Finkelstein: Israel would not be so up in arms about the Goldstone Report, would not be so upset by it, were it not for the fact that, yes, they are very vulnerable to the public opinion, and they know very well the limits beyond which it may not express itself against them, […]

  Shlomo Swirski, Economist, Adva Center: The government cut its yearly budget for four consecutive years.  The cuts were very severe.  They hit the school system, universities, the health system, and, more than anything else, the social security system.  So, within two years the level of the poverty rate for families jumped from 17 to […]

  An interview with Egyptian economist Samir Amin: his latest book reiterates his search for alternatives to surpass capitalism, which he describes as “a historical parenthesis”; meanwhile, processes of migration are building a planet of slums. “Memoirs of an Independent Marxist”: that is the subtitle of A Life Looking Forward (Zed Books, 2006), the latest […]

  Jeff Halper: We’re one of the leading — I would say, modestly — peace and human rights organizations in Israel.  We started about thirteen years ago.  I’ve been involved for forty years in the Israeli peace movement.  During the Oslo peace process, during the 90s, the Israeli peace movement also, like other Israelis, invested […]

  What is the characteristic of the Latin American Left today? 20 years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell, there was no revolution foreseeable on the horizon.  However, it didn’t take long before a process began to emerge in Latin America with Hugo Chávez.  We have gone on to form governments with anti-neoliberal programs, though […]

  Listen to Cindy Sheehan’s interview with Hugo Chavez: Cindy Sheehan: President Chavez, thank you for allowing the truth to be told about Venezuela, and about you and your revolution.  Before the revolution, Venezuela was a nation ruled and used by the oligarchy.  How did the revolution begin and how has it remained relatively peaceful? […]

  EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral, and cognitive.  In your Yale lectures from the fall of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the […]

  Athens, Greece, 11.03.10. — Tens of thousands of trade unionists and anti-capitalists demonstrated during a nationwide strike against the cash-strapped government’s austerity measures.  People explain why the have taken to the streets. “Today’s 24-hour general strike was called by GSEE and ADEDY (private and public sector unions).  They are demanding that working people not […]

  Economist Heiner Flassbeck holds the German wage policy responsible for the problems of Greece. Neither the drastic Greek austerity program nor the proposed European Monetary Fund can help the euro zone out of its difficulties.  Instead, Heiner Flassbeck calls for higher wages in the Federal Republic of Germany in order to cope with the […]

  Sukant Chandan interviews Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled and Palestinian Gaza resident and revolutionary Shireen Said for International Women’s Day 2010 Leila Khaled: “Palestinian women have a fundamental role in uniting Palestinians” The Palestinian people’s oppression continues due primarily to the financial, diplomatic, and military support that the Zionist state receives from the USA and […]