Introduction by Richard Fidler Among the many panels and plenaries at the Conference of the Society for Socialist Studies, which met in Ottawa June 2-5, was a Book Launch for Marta Harnecker’s latest English-language book, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism (translated by Federico Fuentes), Monthly Review Press. The featured speaker […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China
China’s leadership has called in recent years for the creation of a new “ecological civilization.” Some have viewed this as a departure from Marxism and a concession to Western-style “ecological modernization.” However, embedded in classical Marxism, as represented by the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was a powerful ecological critique. Marx explicitly defined […]
Changing Captains on the Left
Wealthy, powerful heads of state and other bosses high up in the Bavarian Alps, and the vigorous protests from opposing crowds kept out of earshot downhill, largely stole media thunder this past weekend. Far lower in altitude and attention, with almost no thunder from the media or otherwise, another meeting was held in less scenic […]
Mészáros and the Emancipatory Transition: Beyond Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Part One In his work Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press, 2014), Thomas Piketty contributes much to understanding the inequalities of income, inheritance, capital, and wealth generated by the capital system. We are not likely to disagree with many of his insights based on his study of capital and wealth distribution. Among these […]
It’s Capitalism, Stupid!
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today’s politics that is content to treat […]
Misconceptions about Neo-Liberalism
Neo-Liberalism is often seen only as an economic policy. This per se might not matter, since a specific set of economic measures do, no doubt, fall under the rubric of neo-liberalism. But by reducing neo-liberalism only to a set of economic measures, a misleading impression is often conveyed that this set of measures are a […]
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 […]
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 […]
Scotland’s Democratic Revolution Challenges Both Austerity and the UK State
The May 7th UK general election, which saw the Conservatives win a slim majority, witnessed a democratic revolution of unprecedented scale in Scotland. England backed continued austerity, neo-liberal economics and £12 billion welfare spending cuts; the Scots overwhelmingly rejected that approach. In the UK parliament Scotland is represented by 59 MPs, of whom, before May, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Syriza’s Slip
The victory of a Left Alliance, Syriza, in the Greek elections on January 25, was a matter of great significance, especially because that victory was based on a promise that Syriza would get rid of the memoranda imposing austerity on Greece by the “Troika” (the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF). Syriza’s […]
Blockupy the ECB, Blockupy the NATO
I defied my advanced age to board a special train, with a thousand mostly young people, and join in the big “Blockupy” demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s big banking city. The trip, though not the usual four and a half but seven hours, retained till well into the night a spirit of happy anticipation. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Are Scotland’s Post-Referendum Politics Set to Challenge Austerity Britain?
First a bit of context on how we got here. Scotland was united with England to form Great Britain by the 1707 Treaty of Union, which was signed by a political elite with no democratic mandate who were largely bribed into agreement or, as Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns put it, “bought and sold for […]
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 […]
The European Union’s Anti-People Strategy, with a Special Focus on Greece
. . . So, our party [Communist Party of Greece, KKE] was very clear — for many years now — that the European Union is a union of capital and an anti-people hornet’s nest. The parties of the plutocracy in Greece as well as other countries lied to the peoples, fostered illusions that they […]
Before It Is Too Late
The renaming of Troika to Institutions, Memorandum to Agreement, and Lenders to Partners, the way fish is baptized “meat,” does not change the previous situation. Neither does it change, of course, the vote of the Greek people in the 25 January 2015 elections. The people voted for what SYRIZA promised: We will overthrow the […]
On the SYRIZA Government’s Agreement with the Eurogroup
No matter what you call it, the government’s agreement is in form and substance a clear extension of the memorandum, with strict supervision, with evaluation by the institutions (troika), and especially with the continuation of the anti-people reforms. Any revision of the program, e.g. lower primary surpluses, will be done not to actually relieve the […]
