Speech accepting the 2013 Libertador Prize for Critical Thought, awarded for A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-first Century Socialism, Caracas, Venezuela, August 15, 2014 I completed this book one month after the physical disappearance of President Hugo Chávez, without whose intervention in Latin America this book could not have been written. Many of […]
Geography Archives: Americas
South America, Central America, United States & Canada
National Lawyers Guild, Other Legal Organizations Urge International Criminal Court to Investigate War Crimes by Israeli, U.S. Leaders in Gaza
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Center for Constitutional Rights, International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Arab Lawyers Union, and American Association of Jurists (Asociación Americana de Juristas)sent a letter on Friday, August 22 to Fatou Bensouda, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), urging her to initiate an investigation of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against […]
Shoppers Without Borders: Cure for Media-Inflicted War Wounds
Paige Turner, a 29-year-old graduate of Grinnell College’s creative writing program, came to New York to start her life as a novelist. She got some gigs chronicling upscale Manhattan lifestyles for glossy magazines: “good background for my first socially conscious bestseller!” Things were going great — she was online most of the day, researching fashion […]
Unraveling Capitalist Globalization
Despite the prolonged global economic crisis since 2007/2008, neo-liberal economic thought and practice continue to reign supreme. In his important book Capitalist Globalization: Consequences, Resistance, and Alternatives (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Martin Hart-Landsberg makes a number of key interventions unraveling the myth of neo-liberalism as well as the dynamics underlying capitalist accumulation. First, he identifies […]
I See Palestine
In response to Roger Cohen, “Why Americans See Israel the Way They Do,” New York Times, August 3, 2014. . . . The bias of the cowboy-and-Indians movies I grew up on in the 1950s has long been exposed: swallowing up Native American land was the aim, and the myth of the dangerous savages who […]
In Shared Sorrow: Remembering ‘Comrade’ Nirmal da
This tribute to one of India’s finest radical economists first appeared in Analytical Monthly Review, May 2014. AMR, published from Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Nirmal Kumar Chandra (1936-2014), referred to by his dear friend, Ashok Mitra, in The Telegraph (April 4, 2014) as “The Compleat Economist”, was in […]
On Capital, Real Socialism, and Venezuela: An Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz
Gülden Özcan and Bora Erdağı: In some of the interviews you gave, you talked about your own everyday life experiences that led you to discover that Marx’s total critique of capitalism is an unfinished project. In this discovery, you emphasized elsewhere that your class background and political struggle you were involved in have played an […]
Across the Atlantic: A Month in the USA
What a trip! I had last visited my American home country three years earlier; some things hadn’t changed much, some things had. As ever, piled high, were many contrasts and contradictions. My first goal was my class reunion (the 65th!!!), partly in the Harvard Yard, sober and dignified even when filled with thousands of new […]
Once Again on “Environmental Catastrophism”: A Reply to Sam Gindin
Last year in Monthly Review, I debated Eddie Yuen, an anarchist who believes it is a mistake for radicals to focus on telling the truth about the global environmental crisis, because “awareness of climate crisis does not necessarily lead to increased political engagement.” Not only can such awareness lead to apathy, he wrote, but “environmental […]
Bhagat Singh: Eighty-Three Years On
Chaman Lal. Understanding Bhagat Singh. Delhi: Aakar, 2013. pp. 245. Left Traditions in South Asia Bhagat Singh is to South Asia what Che Guevara is to Latin America — a popular iconic figure who continues to inspire generations of youth in the subcontinent in their struggles against imperialism and the trajectory of national politics after […]
Targeting Elbit Systems in the Month Against the Apartheid Wall
Surveillance. It’s in the headlines and on the tips of tongues. As technology offers new possibilities for connection, it also offers new means to keep tabs on people. Surveillance has become seemingly ubiquitous, from the NSA reading emails to drones in the skies. A nation that has for 66 years been ruling over an indigenous […]
The Desperate Choices Behind Child Migration
As someone who just returned from living and working in El Salvador, I’m still having a hard time adjusting to our mainstream media’s never-ending wave of know-nothing commentary on the subject of immigration. A case in point is the column penned by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on Sunday, June 22nd. Douthat expresses alarm […]
Letter to Maradona
Unforgettable Friend: Every day I have the pleasure of following your program, on TeleSur, on the spectacular World Cup of football; thanks to your program I can see the extraordinary level of that universal sport. I do not think a proper education for young people in any country is possible without sports and, in the […]
The Baran-Marcuse Letters: “The Truth Is the Whole”
The issue that Paul Baran and my father Herbert Marcuse confronted in their correspondence1 was, I suspect, what was an ongoing and troublesome theme for them both, analytically and politically. It was a paradox that my father often formulated as: “You need new men and women to make a revolution, but you need a […]
A Response to FIFA’s “Setting the Record Straight”
On 10 June 2014 FIFA released a “Frequently Asked Questions” pamphlet “Setting the Record Straight” on what it purports to be some misconceptions about FIFA’s role and the socio-economic impact of the FIFA World Cup. The release of the pamphlet is significant as it is the first time that FIFA has been forced by […]
The Open Veins of Eduardo Galeano
In a recent Washington Post article entitled “Latin Americans Are Embracing Globalization and Their Former Colonial Masters,” written by a political science professor from the University of Colorado, the author begins with the following sentence: “Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano recently renounced his 1971 classic, Open Veins of Latin America, one of a few books admitted […]
Venezuela: Questions about Democracy and a Free Press
First question: Why? If Venezuela’s government is a dictatorship, why have there been 18 elections in 15 years under the late president Hugo Chávez Frías (d. 2013) and his democratically elected successor Nicolás Maduro? Why is it that according to many international observers Venezuela’s democratic elections are, in the words of ex-president Jimmy Carter, “the […]
Fall Delegation to Bolivia: Presidential Election, Food Sovereignty, and Indigenous Resistance!
Bolivia is the first country in the hemisphere to be governed by an indigenous president. Learn about indigenous struggles for sovereignty over food, land, and water. Meet with farmers, community leaders, government leaders, and others. Experience the rich culture of the Andes and soak in the sights, sounds, people, and politics in this historic moment […]
Eduardo Galeano on Open Veins of Latin America . . . and Other Stories
As you may know, Larry Rohter of the New York Times spun this story as if it were a “God That Failed” episode. So, here it is in English, for the record. — Ed. In 1998, I interviewed the writer Rachel de Queiroz (1910-2003), and she confessed to me that she felt “mortal antipathy” […]
Notes Toward a New American Marxism
When I first read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, it was 1967 and I was doing my last book report for the nuns at Holy Family High. I would graduate in June but not without making some kind of statement about how angry I was to have been forced to attend this school. I was […]
