Geography Archives: Asia

Monthly Review‘s July-August issue, focused on the theme of “Socialism for the 21st Century,” made me ponder the question of possible working-class organizing in the 21st century to build resistance to capitalism, the resistance that can dialectically develop into socialism. Harry Magdoff and Fred Magdoff wrote in “Approaching Socialism”: “[I]ntellectuals and specialists cannot derive a […]

Activist Brian Bogart asked himself: “Our top industry has been the manufacture and sale of weapons — and we’re a peace-loving nation?” Inspired by this paradox, Bogart created Strike for Peace . . . described on its website as an attempt “to highlight for everyone’s sake the dominant role of the military industry in America’s […]

  [Click on the photos to see original images.] Part I. The World Festival of Youth and Students, August 8-15, 2005 Caracas, Venezuela, Seen from a Park Above Poor neighborhood — “barrio” — in Los Teques, the capital of the state of Miranda, near Caracas, where we spent our nights during the 16th World Festival […]

There is no precedent in US — or any other — history for the level of personal debt now carried by the American people. Consider the raw numbers. In 1974, Federal Reserve data show that US mortgage plus other consumer debt totaled $627 billion. By 1994, the total debt had risen to $4,206 billion, and […]

  In “new imperialism,” it is said, the American economy needs more instability abroad to maintain the health of its capital at home. Long before discourse on “new imperialism” became popular in the West, Palestinian intellectuals in refugee camps arrived at this very conclusion by simply reflecting upon the wretched conditions of their own existence. […]

  Introduction Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, this beautiful island in the Caribbean has aroused passions everywhere in the Americas.  Since its inception, the revolution has had a profound impact on the popular classes throughout Latin America and haunted the political elites and wealthy classes in the United States […]

BLOOD ON THE BORDER: A Memoir of the Contra War by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizBUY THIS BOOK Most people think of the U.S.-sponsored war against the Sandinistas (that came to be called, simply, the “Contra War”) as having taken place on the northern border of western Nicaragua and Honduras and on the southern border with Costa Rica. […]

Today the planet is an immense gulag. The resources of the periphery of the empire — the great majority of human beings — are channeled towards the imperial centre — the richest countries — in the manner of a colossal funnel. There are now in the world two practical routes of resistance to the US […]

Retired U.S. Army Lt. General William Odom is a Vietnam Veteran who, in the late 1970s, helped Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski use mujahedeen zealots to “give the Soviets their Vietnam” in Afghanistan.  In the mid-1980s, Odom worked for Ronald Reagan as Director of the National Security Agency. One week ago, this very same General […]

“Then came this battle called the Civil War, beginning in Kansas in 1854, and ending with the presidential elections of 1876, twenty awful years. The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again towards slavery. The whole weight of America was thrown to color caste.”1 — W.E.B. DuBois, Black […]

[The following was delivered, by Paul Buhle, to an audience of 150 Brown undergraduates preparing to watch the first night of the Dylan special directed by Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, 26 September 2005.] In my young political lifetime, from being your age to twice your age, there were three great individual singers […]

[The photographs below were contributed by the co-chairs of the Alachua County Labor Party Jenny Brown and Mark Piotrowski and Brown’s partner Joe Courter — Ed.] Madelaine and Harvey Dennenberg, of Maryland, march with the Labor Against the War delegation. Harvey is a Vietnam combat veteran. Photo by Jenny Brown Members of Transit Workers Union […]

The farmed salmon industry has recently been dealt yet another blow as the world learns about the contaminated product it offers for the public’s dinner plates.  In June, 2005, a multi-national aquaculture company, Stolt Sea Farms, confirmed that nearly 320,000 of its farmed salmon from British Columbia were contaminated with the illegal fungicide “malachite green” […]

  Hong Kong’s film industry dominated South East Asian markets for the latter half of the twentieth century. Local productions began declining, however, in the “high anxiety” of the countdown to the “return” of the British colonial city-state to Mainland China in 1997. But when the “handover” had come and gone, expected draconian restrictions failed […]

It had been five years since I last set foot in China as a graduate student doing research on Chinese workers’ protests of privatization in Zhengzhou City, the (ironic) site of the February 7th incident memorial that commemorates the repression of the first general strike against colonial administrators of the rail system in 19231  In […]

Cindy Sheehan has breathed new life into the U.S. antiwar movement. The Vacaville, CA mother did so — alone then with others — by protesting outside the Crawford, Texas ranch of a vacationing President Bush, dubbed “Camp Casey” for her son who died in oil-rich Iraq. Sheehan’s demand to speak with Bush about the “noble […]

The post-crisis trajectory of the South Korean economy has been a disaster for working people there, and South Korean labor and left movements are engaged in a very difficult struggle to roll back the ongoing neoliberal restructuring.  In this essay I discuss some of the challenges these movements face.  I do so because workers and […]

Today’s decision in Padilla v Hanft is bad news, though exactly how bad it is will depend on what the Supreme Court does with it — and who’s on that court. The long and the short of it is that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of the government to hold even […]

“The cavalry is coming!” announced a reporter on the Fox News Channel when National Guardsmen finally trooped into downtown New Orleans on the fourth day of apocalypse. I said to myself, “There they go again, racist Fox News.” I switched channels and found reporters and government officials repeating the same phrase: “The cavalry has arrived.” […]

David Houston changed my life.  If it weren’t for Dave, I wouldn’t be a political economist, a political activist, and I wouldn’t have a sense of my life as part of a larger historical struggle for economic and social justice. Dave, along with his friend David Bramhall who concentrated on teaching undergraduates, were the sole […]