Geography Archives: Russia

  Samuel Grove [SG]: For a while now you’ve been working on and defending the old idea of ‘the will of the people’, and you’ve described it in terms of a ‘dialectical voluntarism’; what do you mean by this? Peter Hallward [PH]: I’m not stuck on the terminology, and I’m leery of the way these […]

Let me begin with food — fast food.  Let me invite you in.  Looking around, there’s no denying it: this is Burger King.  It could be in Augusta, ME, or Anaheim, CA, and the fatty Whoppers taste the same.  But it’s not — most customers here speak German, some maybe Turkish (the biggest minority).  For […]

The Venezuelan state is intervening in retail businesses around the country, principally those that trade in domestic appliances.  This apparently modest decision, taken a week ago, has set in motion an interesting process of push and pull.  Long lines outside the intervened stores and some disorder inside meet with predictable outcry about “mobs” and “communism” […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its October 2013 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. When the last of the British army departed on February 28, 1948, they marched to the Gateway of India — not yet obstructed by yellow concrete barricades — […]

Twenty-five years ago, I, a hapless reporter on assignment, went to the DC Jail and met the woman who was to be my life’s partner.  I interviewed her about her political bombing case; we fell in love; I visited her in various prisons for 11 years; she was released; we’re now spending the rest of […]

Upon the release of the Indian edition of Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker’s José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology (Kharagpur: Cornerstone Publications, 2013; originally New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), Vanden is in India on a lecture tour to spread the word about the ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui.  On this occasion, we are publishing […]

The following comments were made at a panel on the topic “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” May 19 at a conference titled “Which Way Forward for Psychoanalysis?” and sponsored by the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry at the University of Chicago.  While Freud and psychoanalysis were a focus on the event, other themes running throughout […]

Russia, as travelers have noted over the centuries, is immense.  Most of it is far from large bodies of water.  And yet, in a first visit after many years, I came upon some unusual islands right in the heart of the country.  But they were not islands in the geographic sense.  Some were children’s islands. […]

  Red Ant Dream / Maati Ke Laal (2013) 120 minutes; English version, with subtitles Direction: Sanjay Kak Photography: Ranjan Palit, Sanjay Kak and Setu Sound Design: Madhu Apsara Writers: Sanjay Kak and Tarun Bharatiya Editing: Tarun Bharatiya www.redantdream.com You are far away from the sterile atmosphere of much of academia with its politically correct […]

Former U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire from Northern Ireland are two of twenty participants from seven countries that will participate in an international delegation to Syria, May 2-10, 2013.  The purpose of the delegation is to meet with communities affected by the fighting, with a view towards facilitating peace and […]

Since Marx, we know that what characterizes and differentiates societies is the way in which they organize the production, distribution and use of the material and symbolic resources
they possess. In other words, the mode of production¹ is what defines the material content of the social life of the distinct human territorial collectivities (nations, peoples, communities), within which there can be differentiated the historically specific form in which each of their components develop, and the manner in which various existing modes of production interrelate within the same society.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa‘s idea that we are not “living in an epoch of change” but rather “in a change of epoch” is very much to the point.  There is an obvious worldwide decline of existing imperialisms and historic changes in the correlation of social, class, and nation-state forces.  There have arisen popular movements of […]

In the many homages to Hugo Chávez in recent weeks, there is an important element that suffers almost complete neglect.  For want of a better term we could call it “Leninism.”  By this, of course, I do not mean the tired, formulaic (and basically anti-Leninist) doctrine that generally bears that name.  It is precisely the […]

  A terrorist car bombing in close proximity to the Russian Embassy in Damascus which occurred on February 21, 2013 and was carried out by a suicide terrorist bomber, resulted in numerous victims and wounded among civilians, including students of a secondary school.  The chancellery and the housing compound of the Russian Embassy were significantly […]

On February 3, 120 socialists took part in a Toronto meeting to celebrate publication of Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922, available in paperback from Haymarket Books.  This 1,300-page volume is the seventh book of documents on the world revolutionary movement in Lenin’s time edited by John […]

First, a glance at long-past history — at the American hero Friedrich Wilhelm Augustin von Steuben, known as Baron Steuben.  In many ways he was really a phony.  His noble title and rank as “Prussian Lieutenant General” were inventions; he had really been dropped from Friedrich the Great’s army as a lowly captain.  That he […]

Things in Berlin are all really up in the air!  No, cancel that!  Just the opposite; they are grounded — indefinitely!  That giant new hub airport for Berlin, named after Willy Brandt, was due to be opened last June after weeks and months of ballyhoo.  But it wasn’t.  Something was not quite OK with the […]

On 27 October, 2012, Gennady Zyuganov gave a rather important speech.  Presented at the 14th plenum of the central committee, it sought to provide the framework for renewing and improving the theoretical work of the party.  But this is not any party and Zyuganov is not any leader, for the party is the Russian Communist […]

  One of the Left’s great challenges is to understand when the great watershed of change is upon people and seize the time.  Racism, sexism, inequality, and uncertain futures have weighed heavily on the conscience of many a movement.  For every great moment, hundreds of crushing defeats never to be remembered are handed down.  Once […]

  Here is the full-text of what I said — as also, what I wanted to say but restrained myself because of the time constraint or because of my diffidence — at the book release of Gautam Navlakha’s Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion (Penguin Books, 2012), organised by Sanhati at the Gandhi […]