Leo Panitch and Colin Leys have just brought out the 2010 annual volume of the Socialist Register, Morbid Symptoms: Health under Capitalism, published by Merlin Press in London, Monthly Review Press in the US, and Fernwood Books in Canada. The book provides a path-breaking assessment of health under capitalism, providing a systematic account of […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
Socialists, the Environment and Ecosocialism
Paper presented at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation conference “The Global Crisis and Africa: Struggles for Alternatives,” Randburg, 19 November 2009 There is an ecological crisis in the world and this crisis can be traced to capitalism. There is deforestation due to the trade in timber. There is climate change due to unsafe production methods. […]
Breaking the Vessels
OK, so the Palestinian Authority will not unilaterally declare an independent Palestinian state. In fact, the whole issue seems a misunderstanding. Concerned that the US has backtracked on a two state solution based on the 1967 borders and that Israel was getting the world used to the “fact” that the settlements and the Wall, rather […]
Afghan Women Say No More Troops
“I’m a representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which was established in 1977 as a women’s organization struggling for women’s rights. But, after the former Soviet Union’s invasion, RAWA got involved in resistance against the Soviets and the puppet regime of theirs. After 1992, RAWA started to focus on anti-fundamentalist […]
Honduras: The Constituent Assembly Is the Solution
One side is the barely veiled alliance between Washington and Micheletti. The other side consists of the Constitutional Zelaya Government, the National Front against the Coup d’Etat and the principal former presidential candidate linked to the latter who has decided to boycott the November 29 elections. The candidate had formally taken his final position […]
United States Propaganda in Iran: 1951-1953
Abstract: Using Jowett and O’Donnell’s system of propaganda analysis, the present case study concentrates on America’s dominant propaganda messages, techniques, and media channels used in Iran during the time period between 1951 and 1953. The chosen period is of historical significance since it entails the Iranian nationalization of oil crisis and the 1953 coup […]
On Being Sent Down from Yale
Edgar White was born in Montserrat West Indies. He has lived in the United States and England. His plays have been successfully presented in New York, London, and Africa. In the following autobiographical extract, he describes how his radical activities in the seventies led him to being sent down from Yale. for Cornel West It […]
Big City Superintendents: Dictatorship or Democracy? Lessons from Paulo Freire
During my teaching career I’ve worked under nine different superintendents. I’ve taught for nearly 30 years, so the average reign of a Milwaukee superintendent has been a little over three years, about normal for big city school districts. While some people, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, decry these short tenures as a […]
Defamation
Director’s Statement I first had the idea to make a film about anti-Semitism when my earlier work Checkpoint was released. In one of that film’s many reviews, I was called “the Israeli Mel Gibson,” not because of my good looks, but because the views I had expressed, critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, […]
Global Pollution
North versus South Cf. SOURCE: Financial Times, 18 October 2009 Laz (Humberto Lázaro Miranda Ramírez) is a Cuban cartoonist. This cartoon was first published by Juventud Rebelde. | | Print
Roots of Capitalist Stability and Instability
Prabhat Patnaik. The Value of Money. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2008/New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Excerpt: “Introduction.” Prabhat Patnaik is an eminent and prolific economist who has worked creatively for 40 years at the intersection of Marxian and Keynesian theoretical traditions. In addition to his writings on Marxism and Keynesianism per se, he has […]
On House Resolution 867: The Real Issue Is the Israeli Occupation
On 3 November 2009, the United States House of Representatives voted 344-36 in favor of House Resolution 867, making it Congress’ official response to the 575-page Report submitted by Justice Richard J. Goldstone to the United Nations Human Rights Council at the conclusion of a “fact-finding” mission on the Gaza conflict. The Resolution does little […]
International Tribunal on Trade Union Freedom Condemns Mexican Presidency
In Mexico City on October 28, the International Tribunal on Trade Union Freedom (October 26, 2009-May 1, 2010) concluded its first of two public sessions with a scathing preliminary report that condemned President Felipe Calderón for his violent union-busting measures since taking office after his questionable 2006 election. The Tribunal had been organized in […]
Disaster Imperialism, Starring the Starving of the Earth: The End of Poverty?
The End of Poverty? is a kind of bookend to Capitalism: A Love Story: if Michael Moore’s movie examines how private enterprise operates at home, writer/director Philippe Diaz ‘s documentary explores what happens when that economic system is exported to the Third World. As scathing exposes of exploitation these nonfiction films share much — ironic […]
Goldstonewalled! US Congress Endorses Israeli War Crimes
“It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” — Edward Said On the afternoon of November 3, 2009, the United States House of Representatives voted in favor of House Resolution 867 (H.Res.867), an AIPAC-backed bill that urges both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to “oppose unequivocally […]
Crisis of the Capitalist System: Where Do We Go from Here?
The Harold Wolpe Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 5 November 2009 In 1982, I published a book, jointly with Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank, entitled Dynamics of Global Crisis. This was not its original title. We had proposed the title, Crisis, What Crisis? The U.S. publisher did not like that title, but we […]
A Failed Economy
Amandla: Early in 2009 you published your book The Great Financial Crisis (coauthored with Fred Magdoff). Could you reflect now almost a year later on what made the current recession more severe than previous recessions? Why has it been compared to the Great Depression and what type of recovery are we likely to see? […]
Good Cop, Bad Cop Strategy? Clinton Appoints Former Embassy Hostage as Point Person on Iran
When the Iranian Revolution exploded on the world scene three decades ago, John Limbert was a greenhorn diplomat assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. After that station was taken over by revolutionary students, he spent 14 months as a political hostage in the building that came to be known as the “Nest of Spies.” […]
The Failure of Capitalism after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Interview with Victor Grossman
Play now: “Not everybody is happy about what happened after the Wall went down. In fact, it’s often referred to in East Germany not as German reunification but as West German annexation or even colonization, because the economy in East Germany took a nosedive after the two joined, the East and the West joined — […]
Questioning Assumptions about Gender and the Legacy of the GDR
If we examine the status of women strictly from the socioeconomic perspective, this portrayal of reunification [as the silencing in which traces of the East German social, cultural, and ideological framework were erased and replaced by the Western capitalist social, economic, and cultural framework] seems apt. Indeed, scholars persistently describe the reunification as a […]
