Geography Archives: Italy

  • Sacco and Vanzetti

    “If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men.  I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure.  Now we are not a failure.  This is our career and our triumph.  Never in our full life can we hope to do such work […]

  • Where We Are Headed [Hacia dónde vamos]

      Annual Fundraising AppealFriends of MRZine and Monthly Review! The continuing existence of MRZine and Monthly Review depends on the support of our readers.  Unlike many other publications, we make all new Monthly Review articles, as well as MRZine articles, available online, free of charge.  We do so without drawing any advertising money at all […]

  • Afghanistan: Bush’s Other War

    Annual Fundraising Appeal Friends of MRZine and Monthly Review! The continuing existence of MRZine and Monthly Review depends on the support of our readers.  Unlike many other publications, we make all new Monthly Review articles, as well as MRZine articles, available online, free of charge.  We do so without drawing any advertising money at all […]

  • The Slow Suicide of the West [El lento suicidio de Occidente]

    Occidente aparece, de pronto, desprovisto de sus mejores virtudes, construidas siglo sobre siglo, ocupado ahora en reproducir sus propios defectos y en copiar los defectos ajenos, como lo son el autoritarismo y la persecución preventiva de inocentes.  Virtudes como la tolerancia y la autocrítica nunca formaron parte de su debilidad, como se pretende ahora, sino […]

  • Post-American Geopolitics

    I. Three Metropoles, Four Peripheries Many of us on the Left have pondered what would replace the Cold War division of the planet into the First, Second, and Third World.  Though the three worlds thesis was arbitrary at best — the social divisions within nation-states are often more significant than the distinctions between nation-states — […]

  • A Marxist Poet: The Legacy of Gillo Pontecorvo

    Pauline Kael, the American film critic, once said that Gillo Pontecorvo was the most dangerous kind of Marxist: a Marxist poet.  When the Italian film director died last week at the age of 86, he had not made a full-length feature in over twenty-five years.  Yet the potency of Pontecorvo’s firebrand poetry can still be […]

  • To End the Israeli-Arab Conflict [En finir avec le conflit israélo-arabe]

    Nous appelons, alors que le Moyen-Orient est plongé dans sa crise la plus grave depuis des années, à une action urgente de la part de la communauté internationale en vue d’un règlement global au conflit israélo-arabe. Nous sommes tous perdants dans ce conflit, à l’exception des extrémistes, qui prospèrent à travers le monde en exploitant […]

  • It’s Not Race or Class — It’s Race and Class: An Interview with Roderick Bush

    WE ARE NOT WHAT WE SEEM: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century by Roderick D. BushBUY THIS BOOK Roderick Bush is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at St. John’s University in New York.  He is the author of We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in […]

  • Class Struggle and Socialist Revolution in the Philippines: Understanding the Crisis of U.S. Hegemony, Arroyo State Terrorism, and Neoliberal Globalization

      Prodded by Amnesty International (AI), the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Asian Human Rights Commission, Reporters Without Borders, and other international organizations, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo recently cobbled a group to look into the allegations of massive human rights violations — over 729 victims of extrajudicial killings, and 180 involuntary “disappearances,” by the latest count — during her […]

  • On Soccer and Suffering

    Like millions of other Italian Americans, I rejoiced in Italy‘s dramatic penalty-kick World Cup victory over France.  For a country that has given us little to cheer about recently, it was a welcome and much-needed celebration, a festival combining benign patriotism, wistful nostalgia, and a release for long-suffering fans. In fact, both the country and […]

  • The Fifth Day of the Aggression

    Circular of the Political Bureau of the Lebanese Communist Party on Current Developments for Party Organizations and Friends On Current Developments: The Fifth Day of the Aggression Since the start of the aggression, our party has defined its position and stance as being at the head of those opposing with all possible means the aggression […]

  • When Worlds Collide

      When Fabio Grosso placed his penalty kick into the back of the French goal, Italians around the globe erupted into a state of euphoria.  I was one of those Italians, hungrily following every kicked ball throughout Italy’s run to winning its fourth World Cup, which ranks second only to Brazil’s five.  For my brother […]

  • Adieu, Zizou

    The “beautiful game” bade him a cruel farewell, much of polite society denounced him, and the FIFA president threatened to take back his Golden Ball award.  But some things just don’t change.  An adoring crowd in Paris gave the Les Bleus a heroes’ welcome and Zizou the farewell he deserved.  The French President could have […]

  • L’Affaire Zidane: “Some Things Are Bigger than Football”

      Like many millions of fans of “Les Bleus,” France’s multi-ethnic football team, I was stunned and dismayed by the strange denouement of last Sunday’s World Cup final.  Our hero Zinedine Zidane, the greatest player of his generation and an exemplary figure in many ways, was ejected from the game with ten minutes to go […]

  • Bush in Stralsund: “Not Welcome, Mr. President!”

    How welcomes can vary in content within one week in Germany! In the past four weeks, Germany was seized by a soccer fever which sometimes seemed almost alarming.  The outdoor temperature was steadily hot and dry, but it was the hot fever of flag-waving patriotism — or was it nationalism — which affected so many. […]

  • Reflections on the June 9-10, 2006 Hong Kong Conference: “The Fortieth Anniversary: Rethinking the Genealogy and Legacy of the Cultural Revolution”

      Flying into Hong Kong with my wife, Amy Demarest, early in the morning of June 8, 2006 and jetlagged, I wasn’t sure I’d be up to the next two days of a fully packed conference on the Cultural Revolution.  The conference was sponsored by the China Study Group, Monthly Review, and the Contemporary China […]

  • The Muslim Presence in the Racist Mind

    In one of her last essays published in the United Kingdom, the late Susan Sontag compared the pictures of tortured Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq with the photographs “of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, […]

  • “The Caiman”: Moretti Faces the Soul of Italy [“Le Caïman”: Moretti face à l’âme italienne]

    Par quel étrange paradoxe Le Caïman, qui est moins personnel que Je suis un autarcique (1976), moins drôle que Sogni d’Oro (1981), moins virtuose que Palombella Rossa (1989), moins émouvant que Journal intime (1993) ou moins romanesque que La Chambre du fils (2001), se révèle-t-il le film le plus fort réalisé à ce jour par […]

  • What’s the Matter with U.S. Organized Labor? An Interview with Robert Fitch

      SOLIDARITY FOR SALE: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise by ROBERT FITCH AUTHOR’S NOTE READ EXCERPT BUY THIS BOOK Michael D. Yates: Robert, let’s start off with a question not directly connected to your book Solidarity for Sale.  Some commentators say that today labor unions and labor movements are irrelevant […]

  • In Venezuela, Oil Sows Emancipation [Venezuela: Petróleo sembrando emancipación]

    Los datos divulgados recientemente por el Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) confirman que la economía venezolana exhibió un crecimiento de 10,2% en el cuarto trimestre de 2005 en relación con el mismo período del año anterior, acumulando la novena alza consecutiva a partir del último trimestre de 2003.  El resultado final del PIB en 2005 […]