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Completing Marx’s Project: An Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz
Michael A. Lebowitz, the author of Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, argues that Capital, taken alone, is one-sided, given Marx’s intention to also write a book on wage-labor. The incompleteness of Marx’s work has helped produce a left whose theory is distorted and characterized by economism and programmatic narrowness. I […]
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Workers’ Rights ARE Human Rights — Not Just in the USA, but around the World
Click on the image for a larger view. Chicago, 2005 In the middle of a blizzard in Chicago on December 8, 2005, I stood with about 250-300 union members and supporters at the Haymarket Memorial, chanting, “Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights.” This was one of a number of rallies around the country that the AFL-CIO […]
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King’s “Revolution in Values” Revisited
I. A Brooklyn federal court in March 2005 dismissed a civil suit filed on behalf of millions of Vietnamese against U.S. chemical companies charged with war crimes for having supplied the military with Agent Orange. The dismissal was on technical grounds, not on its merits; the contention that the chemical defoliants used during the […]
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Through a Capitalist Looking-Glass:Standard and Poor’s Rates Latin America
Capitalism always stays focused on the bottom line — profit — but occasionally finds more than it is looking for. Such is the case with Standard and Poor’s recent research report, “Credit FAQ: The Impact of the Rise of the Left on Latin American Sovereign Ratings” (17 January 2006). While doing research to update the […]
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Dismantling the Central American Gangs and Recovering a Lost Generation
Guatemala City, Guatemala Carlos, my driver, was a former federal policeman. He weighed a good two hundred pounds and was well over six feet. He was assigned to me by a local businessman whom I knew in Guatemala City after I explained that I wanted to visit some areas where I could see gang activity. […]
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Naming The System
Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort. This was a nation with no large standing army, with […]
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Cuba and Venezuela: A Bolivarian Partnership
José Martí and Simón Bolívar, two of Latin America’s most respected independence fighters, recognized nearly a century ago that their homelands would never be free of imperial domination, until Latin America came together in solidarity as a united force. Martí and Bolívar’s insights remain relevant in the age of neo-liberal globalization. The colonizers of […]
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Bolivia’s Trial by Fire
The Social Movements and the State Among the presidential candidates that ran in the December election, Evo Morales has the broadest ties to the country’s social movements. However, he has played limited roles in the popular uprisings of recent years. During the height of the gas war in 2003, when massive mobilizations were organized to […]
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Books about Yesterday’s Activism for Activists of Tomorrow
Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds. “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 533 pages. Max Elbaum. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London: Verso, 2002. 370 pages, including index. Barry Sheppard. The Party, A Political Memoir, The Socialist Workers […]
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Evo Morales, el socialismo comunitario y el Bloque Regional de PoderEvo Morales, Communitarian Socialism, and the Regional Power Block
1. Evo Morales y el socialismo “Evo, ¿que entienden tú y el MAS por socialismo?”, le pregunté durante aquellos horribles días de matanza de Sánchez de Losada, en La Paz, en febrero del 2003, donde estaba invitado por el Comité Ejecutivo de la Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). “Vivir en comunidad y en igualdad”, me contestó. […]
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Invisible Immigrant Workers in Our Midst
In October 2005, I ran into several Guatemalan guest workers in a village laundromat. My first guess was that they worked on a large dairy farm, but in my poor Spanish and their almost non-existent English, we managed to communicate, and they made me understand that their jobs were in new home construction! I […]
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Washington and Wall Street Look Southward . . . for Barrels of Oil
On January 1, 2006, thirty-two private oil companies in Venezuela lost their contracts to operate independently. The replaced contracts were given to the oil companies by the pre-Chavez government in Caracas during the 1990s, the latest in a series of oil agreements that were much more beneficial to the oil companies than they were to […]
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A Strange Program of Exchange
In the late seventies, I joined the Peace Corps, fresh out of college with a degree in Plant and Soil Science. Maybe I did it for for idealism, maybe for a youthful sense of altruism or adventure, maybe to escape a future of employment at Cargill or Monsanto, or all of these. Whatever the reason, […]
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Contraindications: A Review of Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s Blood on the Border
To many of us in the United States, the US contra war against the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s seems like very long ago. Since the CIA-manufactured defeat of the revolutionary government in Managua — a defeat engineered through mercenary war, media manipulations, CIA and Special Forces covert ops, drug-running and arms smuggling by people […]
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“Damage Control”: The Corporate Media’s Service to the Empire
In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky posit that the “‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” (p. 298).1 Lately, however, the media has been taking […]
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CNN’s Mounting Slanders against Latin American Democracy
As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explain in Manufacturing Consent, which stories do and do not receive coverage in the commercially-dominated U.S. news media can be very accurately predicted based on whether or not they can pass through five institutional “filters.” To make it onto the air, a story has to have these five qualities: […]
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Understanding Hugo Chávez
Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution: Hugo Chávez Talks to Marta Harnecker, trans. Chesa Boudin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005) 203 pages, $15.95 paperback. UNDERSTANDING THE VENEZUELAN REVOLUTION: Hugo Chávez Talks to Marta Harnecker (Trans. Chesa Boudin)BUY THIS BOOK Who is this guy who refuses to be intimidated by Bush and his legions of mercenaries and […]
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Showdown in the Andes: Bolivian Election Likely to Shift Latin America Further to Left
In Washington, he’s been referred to as a “narco-terrorist” and a “threatto stability.” In Bolivia, he’s simply called “Evo.” For many in the Andean country, presidential candidate Evo Morales represents a way out of poverty and marginalization. He has pledged to nationalize the country’s natural gas reserves, reject any US-backed free-trade agreement, and join the […]
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Saturday, December 10, 1960: The Debate That Never Happened
At 9:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Saturday, December 10, 1960, NBC television was supposed to broadcast something truly exceptional: a debate on the topic of “U.S. policy toward Latin America” between liberal theorist A. A. Berle and the radical “Texas wobbly” sociologist C. Wright Mills. To the enduring loss of the world, the scheduled debate […]
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The New Cooperative Movement in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Process
I arrived in Caracas in July 2005 with a few contacts at different cooperatives, anxious about how I would sort through the more than 70,000 cooperatives that the Superintendencia Nacional de Cooperativas (National Superintendence of Cooperatives — SUNACOOP) had referred to in its recent press statements. Indeed, I found cooperatives everywhere. Between one night and […]