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Dissecting the Failure of Soviet “Socialism”
Michael A. Lebowitz. The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012. 222 p. In current discussions of twenty-first century socialism, the work of Michael Lebowitz has a unique merit: it is rooted in the experience of Cuba and Venezuela, where efforts in recent decades to move toward […]
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Our Right to Be Marxist-Leninists
The 70th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War will be commemorated the day after tomorrow, May 9. Given the time difference, while I write these lines, the soldiers and officials of the Army of the Russian Federation, full of pride, will be parading through Moscow’s Red Square with their characteristic quick, military steps. Lenin was […]
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NLG Queer Caucus Opposes Baltimore PD’s Treatment of Trans Woman Held in Men’s Prison
May 5, 2015 BALTIMORE — The Baltimore police department has much to answer for: the events of the last few weeks have drawn our attention to this, from the callous murder of Freddie Gray to the hundreds of people arrested protesting his murder who were then held for an unconstitutional length of time (47 […]
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A Dictionary of American Free Enterprise
Arms Sales A government jobs program (the lone acceptable government jobs program) working to deliver all the latest in U.S. defense industry hardware to all the international “good guys.” Associate A low-wage worker. Bubble (Financial) The artificial inflation of asset prices, which, although appearing to many of the “smartest people in the room” as if […]
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Challenging American Exceptionalism
President Barack Obama stood behind the podium and apologized for inadvertently killing two Western hostages — including one American — during a drone strike in Pakistan. Obama said, “one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional, is our willingness to confront squarely our […]
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Against a New Cold War, For a Rendezvous With Reality
Speech at the Bundestag, 19 March 2015, in response to Angela Merkel’s government’s statement on the European Council, 19-20 March 2015 Meine Antwort auf Angela #Merkel in der heutigen Bundestagsdebatte zum Europäischen Rat: https://t.co/BFcZNoW2Jx #Griechenland #Ukraine #EU — Sahra Wagenknecht (@SWagenknecht) March 19, 2015 Mr. President, honored ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Chancellor! At your best […]
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We Have Lost the Physical Presence of Eduardo Galeano, But His Legacy Is Eternal
Now we have lost the physical presence of our comrade Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan by birth, Caribbean and Latin American by life choice and political activism. The political persecution that he suffered at the hands of the dictatorships that devastated the Latin American continent, sponsored by the government of the United States, forced him to live […]
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Remembering Robert Weil: Intellectual and Political Activist
Robert Weil, author of the powerful critique of Deng Xiaoping’s “reforms” entitled Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of Market Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996, republished in India by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur), quietly passed away in California on 12 March 2014. Almost a year after, on 15 February 2015 a […]
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The Americas Summit on the Border of an Imperialist Abyss
Two features of contemporary imperialism are key to explaining the importance — or actually the relative unimportance — of the VII Summit of the Americas (organized by the OAS) recently held in Panama. One is that, in the post-World War II period, imperialism has operated in a context defined by the prevalence of relatively sovereign […]
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Anatomy of a Hatchet Job: Regarding Women Cross DMZ in CNN’s Situation Room
A television news program opens with a clip of marching soldiers, an obligatory image when the subject is North Korea. A voiceover intones: “A bold, ambitious plan apparently sanctioned by Kim Jong Un. Is he in league with the women’s group to promote peace between North and South Korea?” The program in question is the […]
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A History of a Counter-Revolution
Gerald Horne. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. NYU Press, 2014. In the conventional, celebratory liberal historical narrative about the Founding Fathers, the post-revolutionary persistence of slavery in the United States, along with women’s lack of essential political and legal rights, has long been regarded as […]
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Strike at the Helm
On October 7th, 2012, after hearing of his victory as the nation’s candidate with 56 percent of the vote, President Hugo Chávez Frias announced from a balcony in his hometown that a new cycle was beginning the very next day, October 8th.… Only a few days later, on October 20th, he headed the first meeting calling together the ministers of this new cycle, the Comandante called for a series of critiques and self-criticisms in order to expand efficiency, strengthen communal power, and further develop the National System of Public Media, among other themes regarding the construction of socialism.… This document synthesizes his words, as a tool for a debate in which we should all participate. -
Brazil: The Debacle of the PT
Perfil dos manifestantes do dia 15. Via @jornalSul21 pic.twitter.com/ere3lIVhGZ — Carlos Latuff (@LatuffCartoons) March 17, 2015 Hundreds of thousands of chiefly white middle-class protesters took to the streets in Brazil on 15 March in an organized upsurge of hatred against the federal administration led by President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, […]
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On “Sweet,” “Yellow Head,” and “Two-Spirit”
The Pillager band was the advance guard in the mid-eighteenth-century Ojibwe migration into what would become the state of Minnesota a century later. According to Ojibwe mythology, the Great Spirit (gichi-manidoo) had told them to migrate to a place where “the food grows on water.” Minnesota, with its plentiful wild rice (a sacred plant to […]
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Pay Me What You Owe Me Now! A Tivoli Committee Campaign Demanding Reparations for the Victims of the 2010 Tivoli Gardens Massacre
Lloyd D’Aguilar is a freelance journalist, filmmaker, and social critic. He is also a campaigner for social and economic justice and convener of the Tivoli Committee. Follow D’Aguilar on Twitter @LloydDAguilar. H/T to @HaitiAnalysis.
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The People of Vieques Join in the Call to Resist Military Aggression Against Our People
Communiqué from La Voz de Vieques on behalf of a people in struggle The general silence was strange in the face of the thinly veiled simulation exercises for a military occupation to crush the potential popular insurgency as a result of the fall of the colony. No one doubts that the colonial farce imposed […]
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Possibility of Escape
“That is also us, the possibility of us, if the wonderful accident of our birth had taken place elsewhere: you could be the refugee, I could be the torturer. To face that truth is also our burden. After all, each of us has been the bystander, the reasonable person who just happens not to hear, […]
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History of an Infamy
Translator’s Note: David Ravelo, arrested on September 14, 2010 and imprisoned in La Picota Prison in Bogota, is serving an 18-year sentence. Appeals have failed, although Colombia’s Supreme Court has been considering his case. His words below attest to a lifetime of, as he puts it, defending human rights. Beginning in the late 1980s […]
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Netanyahu, Censored Voices, and the False Narrative of Israeli Self-Defense
On March 3rd, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an impassioned plea to Congress to protect Israel by opposing diplomacy with Iran. Referring to “the remarkable alliance between Israel and the United States” which includes “generous military assistance and missile defense,” Netanyahu failed to mention that Israel has an arsenal of 100 or 200 nuclear […]
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American Exceptionalism, Working-Class Wars, and Working-Class Peace Movements
Christian Appy. American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. New York: Viking, 2015. Christian Appy is the author of two splendid previous books about the Vietnam War: Working-Class War and Patriots. Patriots was extraordinary in that it offered oral histories by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The main argument of Appy’s […]