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Dresden and Its Dangerous Demonstrators
Dresden, Saxony’s beautiful capital, has a distinguished history. One ruler, August the Strong, could bend horseshoes with his bare hands and, so legend has it, sired 354 children. In 1697 he pushed and bribed his way onto the royal throne of neighboring Poland, made possible by his quick conversion to Catholicism. (His wife, refusing the […]
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Democracy, Hypocrisy, and President Gauck
In the USA Republicans are jubilant. Jubilation here in Germany is about an event twenty-five years ago: “We beat those red SOBs!” But is there not, hidden behind the confetti, helium balloons, and crowing of the victors in both Germany and the USA, an occasional jarring note of anxiety? A man with good reason for […]
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Humpty-Dumpty and the Fall of Berlin’s Wall
“Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall.” The children’s rhyme and its words Wall and Fall came to mind in connection with commemorations of the fall of the Berlin Wall — actually its opening up. Is such an allusion frivolous? Maybe. For millions, that event twenty-five years ago was marked by genuine, […]
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In Shared Sorrow: Remembering ‘Comrade’ Nirmal da
This tribute to one of India’s finest radical economists first appeared in Analytical Monthly Review, May 2014. AMR, published from Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Nirmal Kumar Chandra (1936-2014), referred to by his dear friend, Ashok Mitra, in The Telegraph (April 4, 2014) as “The Compleat Economist”, was in […]
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Germany’s Left Party on the EU and NATO
Running up a down escalator is itself mighty difficult. Trying to keep your footing both on an up and a down escalator at the same time is simply hard to imagine. Yet it gives an idea of Germany’s present Ukrainian policy. Soon after Soviet soldiers left East Germany between 1989 and 1994, the newly-unified country […]
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Germany: Threats of Violence, Hopes for Votes
All summer the threat of violence was in the air in Hellersdorf. This borough on the outskirts of East Berlin, once a huge site of modern high-rise buildings aimed at solving East German housing problems, provided homes for nearly 130,000 people. After “the Wall went down” many high-rise buildings were cropped from eleven to five […]
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The Sargasso Manuscript: Some Observations on Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
Susan Sontag. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. Edited by David Rieff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. I. David Rieff has played the last of Susan Sontag’s jokes upon the reader: to remain austerely cool, distant, and unsympathetic toward us even in “journals and notebooks.” The barbed wire of […]
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A Little-Known Film Master, Kurt Maetzig
An extraordinary mensch, an extraordinary filmmaker who made extraordinary films and lived to the extraordinary age of 101, Kurt Maetzig, who died last week, was virtually unknown in the United States, indeed, in the western world generally. The reason: he lived and worked in East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, whose films — many mediocre […]
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Tadeusz Kowalik, 1926-2012
Professor Tadeusz Kowalik (1926-2012) was a noted Polish economist who played a major role in Polish economic debates for more than a half century. A graduate of the University of Warsaw, Kowalik was a student of the distinguished Polish Marxist economist Oskar Lange and like his teacher, was a prominent advocate of market socialism […]
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No Deutschland Über Alles — and No Bris
Germany suffered two losses last week and underwent one very intimate decision. Whether the latter was a win or a loss depends on your (point of) view — about male circumcision. Most important to most Germans was probably their hope to win the European soccer championship, held this year in Poland and the Ukraine. Germany […]
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Sectarianism Versus Ecumenism: The Case of V.I. Lenin
Was Lenin, as the standard interpretations would have it, a sectarian who sought to destroy all who disagreed with him? Or did he also display ecumenist tendencies alongside, or in tension with, his sectarian bent? Is there perhaps a deeper relation between sectarianism and ecumenism in his work? The material from the time, especially before […]
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Marines in Darwin: US Energy Imperialism and the South China Sea
During Barack Obama’s visit to Australia in November 2011, the US and Australian governments announced the establishment of a permanent Marine presence in Darwin, located on South East Asia’s doorstep. By 2014, some 2, 500 Marines plus associated hardware such as military aircraft, tanks, artillery, and amphibious assault vehicles will be based near the […]
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Tough on Euros, Weak on Nazis
Hurray! Merkel won the day! It took a long night of backroom bargaining, but except for that Tory, David Cameron, all European Union members agreed to save the euro, save the economy, save the world! It had been on the brink of disaster, Sarkozy warned on the eve of the meeting: unless we reach agreement […]
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Deconstructing the Foundational Myths of Israel
Shlomo Sand. The Invention of the Jewish People. Verso, 2009. By this time already, after 60-plus years of heatedly arguing the topic back and forth, is there anything new and insightful to be said that might have a bearing on the Israel-Palestine conflict and help to bring some political and intellectual closure at long last […]
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Occupy Wall Street and the Celebrity Economists
The Occupy Wall Street movement has transfixed the nation. In just a few weeks, it has spread from Manhattan to hundreds of towns and cities, and it has now taken root in other countries. It has focused the widespread anger that we feel toward a tiny group of extraordinarily rich individuals (the 1%) who […]
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Before October: The Unbearable Romanticism of Western Marxism
Most Western Marxists suffer from a deep resentment: they have never experienced a successful communist revolution. For some unaccountable reason, all of those successful revolutions have happened in the ‘East’: Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, Vietnam and so on. And none of the few revolutions in the ‘West’, from Finland to Germany, […]
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Workers in Neocapitalist Romania
David A. Kideckel. Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. xii + 266 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34957-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-21940-4. During the last twenty years, Romanian mass media and most Romanian intellectuals have typically portrayed the miners of the Jiu Valley in Romania […]
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25,000 People March in Tel Aviv in Support of Palestinian State Based on 1967 Borders
About 25,000 people took part in a march in central Tel Aviv on Saturday evening supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. The march ended with a rally at the Tel Aviv Museum. MKs Dov Khenin (Hadash), Daniel Ben-Simon (Labor), Nino Abesadze (Kadima), and Zahava Galon (Meretz); the Mayor of […]
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Michal Kalecki and the Economics of Development
In the long and impressive catalogue of Michal Kalecki’s contributions to economics, the proportion of writings devoted to what is now called “development economics” is relatively small. And most of his work in this area is concise to the point of being terse, in short articles that simply state some crucial principles, typically without much […]
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Joint Statement of 58 Communist and Workers’ Parties against Imperialist Aggression in Libya
The imperialist killers headed by the USA, France, Britain and NATO as a whole and with the approval of the UN started a new imperialist war. This time in Libya. Their allegedly humanitarian pretexts are completely misleading! They throw dust into peoples’ eyes! Their real goals are the hydrocarbons in Libya. We, the Communist and […]