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‘Toward the United Front’: Translations for the Twenty-first Century
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 […]
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What Would Karl and Rosa Say?
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 […]
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Where Is the Left in the Austere Germany of the “Patriots”?
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 […]
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Zyuganov and Religion: On the Current State of the Russian Communist Party
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 […]
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Catastrophism — Left, Right, and Center
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 […]
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‘Naxalbari . . . Will Never Die’: The Power of Memory and Dreams
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 […]
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“Collectivized Torture”: Drone Warfare and the Dark Side of Counterinsurgency
The recent Stanford University report on drone strikes in Pakistan, Living Under Drones, raises the possibility that the US is intentionally using drones, not merely as hi-tech assassination devices, but also as weapons of state terror intended to subdue unruly regions and populations. The appalling reality of drone warfare along the Afghanistan border closely resembles […]
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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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Can Syria Avoid the Fate of Libya and Iraq? Interview with Issa Chaer
Dr Issa Chaer is a member of the Syrian Social Club (based in England). Carlos Martinez: Thanks very much for agreeing to be interviewed. You have been very active in spreading information about the Syria conflict. Can you explain why you have chosen to give so much time and energy to this cause? Issa Chaer: […]
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Some Memories of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy
In 1949, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman created Monthly Review. In the same year, Paul Baran and I began to teach in the San Francisco Bay Area: Baran at Stanford, myself at UC Berkeley. As the years unfolded, we worked together politically in the area with the same social aims and values. Meanwhile, the two […]
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The Story of a Ring
A small but moving episode marked the regular annual meeting of the German organization Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic 1936-1939 (Kämpfer und Freunde der Spanischen Republik 1936-1939). It was the first such meeting without a single veteran; the last volunteer in Germany, Fritz Teppich, died last winter, and none of the tiny, decreasing […]
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All Sorts of Roguery? The ‘Financial Aristocracy’ and Government à Bon Marché in India
My voice is a crime, My thoughts anarchy, Because I do not sing to their tunes, I do not carry them on my shoulders. — Cherabandaraju, who was the lead accused in a “conspiracy case” involving poets and their poetry. It’s been two decades and a year since India’s elite embraced neo-liberalism. Money — the […]
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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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Announcing the “Saving the Syrian Homeland” Conference
The situation in the country has exacerbated to the point now it started threatening the social fabric and national sovereignty, which we and the national forces of democratic opposition sought to avoid compromising. However, the authority neglected the social fabric and national sovereignty and placed them in the field of conflict to reaffirm the […]
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Debating Amnesty About Syria and Double Standards
I sent the following note to Amnesty on June 16 after it put out a detailed report on the conflict in Syria: Dear Amnesty In your most recent report on Syria you ask the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo on the Syrian government. You ask for no such arms embargo on the […]
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Interview with Ammar Waqqaf Regarding the Crisis in Syria
Ammar Waqqaf is an independent Syrian political analyst based in England. Q: Why do you think the western powers are so keen to see regime change in Syria? A: Western powers would be fools not to exploit such an opportunity to turn a key regional player from an opposing side into an allied one. Achieving […]
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The World Seen from the South: Interview with Samir Amin
I would like to focus this interview on three distinct but related questions: your vision of the world and the possibilities of changing it; your conceptual and political proposal on the implosion of capitalism and delinking from it; your analysis of the global context, seen especially from Africa and the Middle East. What is your […]
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Communist Parties Win 11 Seats in Syrian Parliamentary Elections
The first Syrian parliamentary elections under the new constitution, passed by 90% of voters in a referendum with 57% turnout, concluded in May with seat gains for Syria’s Communist Parties. The elections had a turnout of 51% (active duty military and police were ineligible) and voters elected 250 representatives from 16 geographic constituencies. The majority […]
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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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Against Eco-incarceration: Class Struggle and Indigenous Rights in India
Whereas once the primitive was our savage other, today the native is the bearer of an alternative future. In the late 1980s the Kayapo Chief Raoni, with his spectacular feathered headdress, accompanied the pop star Sting on concert tours to enlighten western audiences of the ecological disaster in the Amazon that came hand-in-hand with human […]