Geography Archives: United States

KARL MARX: A Life by Francis WheenBUY THIS BOOK It is fitting that a man who framed a dialectic based on violent contradiction — on thrust and counter-thrust, struggle and counter-struggle — should have lived a life fraught with contradictions.  In Francis Wheen’s biography, Karl Marx is neither hero nor nemesis, but a man of […]

When I was in high school, I lived on a military base and socialized and worked with GIs opposed to the war in Vietnam.  These guys weren’t very different from me — we liked rock and soul music and we liked to get high — yet most of them had experienced war.  That was something […]

Social critics, from Ida B. Wells to Noam Chomsky, recognize that the elite press can serve as the best tool against the elite.  Today’s business magazines have no problem “naming the system,” and they write with clarity and frankness on the inner workings of capitalism and imperialism.  My good friend and correspondent Skip recently sent […]

Trade Unions and Social Forums Since 2001, trade unions and other social movements, ranging from environmentalists to women’s organizations, from urban youth movements to indigenous peoples fighting for land rights, have come together at the World Social Forum (WSF) to debate and promote alternatives to the race-to-the-bottom, corporate model of globalization.  While participation from U.S. […]

Una tradición menor del pensamiento conservador es la definición del adversario dialéctico por su falta de moral y por sus deficiencias mentales.  Como esto nunca llega a ser un argumento, se encubre el exabrupto con algún razonamiento fragmentado y repetido, propio del pensamiento posmoderno de la propaganda política.  No es casualidad que en América Latina […]

I’ve been listening to Wynton Marsalis’ new disc From the Plantation to the Penitentiary a lot.  It’s got the music — a neat jazz combo running through a variety of styles.  It’s just enough bop and bebop so it doesn’t put one to sleep like a Kenny G. solo, but it’s not an avalanche of […]

Havana.  April 4, 2007 The Camp David meeting has just ended.  We all listened with interest to the press conference by the presidents of the United States and Brazil, as well as news about the meeting and opinions stated. Confronted by the demands of his Brazilian visitor regarding import tariffs and subsidies that protect and […]

  Judging by the intensity of the debate that plagued much of the 2004 presidential election, the divisiveness of the Vietnam war has not been resolved.  If anything it has festered, inflamed by similar concerns and questions regarding the legality, morality, purpose, and necessity of the war in Iraq.  The continued polemic about a war […]

“The rich are not like you and me.”  “The poor will always be with us.”  Get real and accept it, we are told.  Give alms and aid to the poor, tax the rich.  Establish private foundations, be a responsible trust baby and give.  You’ve heard it all and maybe even believe it in your heart. […]

Q.  2007 is the 140th anniversary of the publication of Volume One of Marx’s Capital.  In your opinion, what is its main contribution to understanding contemporary capitalism? Marx’s object in Capital was to explain capital as a social relation in the fullest dialectical sense and in the process to describe its law(s) of motion.  I […]

From Protest to Resistance I didn’t make it to the march on the Pentagon.  The storm up and down the east coast of the United States knocked down a thirty foot tree in my yard in Asheville, North Carolina, messed up my flight from Asheville to Washington, DC, and left me with a choice of […]

We talk often of military service in war as a civic and patriotic duty.  But as the realities of combat and of the battlefield become apparent, patriotic sentiments, political ideologies, and mythologies fade quickly beneath the screams of the unbearable pain of the mutilated and the dying.  Ultimately, warriors fight, kill, and accept injury and […]

In the jargon of military recruiters, “influencers” is the term used to refer to the family members, close friends, and peers of those young women and men who are considering enlistment in the U.S. armed forces.  It’s the circle of people in the daily home, school, work, religious, and social life of the potential inductee […]

Local 2627, DC 37, AFSCME interviews labor leader Houzan Mahmoud. This interview was conducted on March 5, 2007, at an event sponsored by the Center for Study of Working Class Life and cosponsored by U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW).  Houzan Mahmoud is the international representative of the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in […]

When people think of militant political action in the United States, their thoughts usually turn to cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.  The South and the Pacific Northwest probably don’t immediately spring to mind.  This is despite the rich legacy of militant labor protest in the filed, woods, and apple orchards of the […]

Raising the minimum wage and increasing the level of social assistance is a component part of challenging the large, low-wage multinationals that make up the vast majority employers of the working poor.  The largest of them all is Wal-Mart. For socialists, Wal-Mart is more than just a series of big retail stores that threaten our […]

His foot, that is.  After four years of conducting an illegal war in Iraq, which has killed almost one million people, maimed, wounded and dislocated millions more, tortured countless thousands, and in general brutalized and destroyed a once sovereign, secular country, wreaking havoc and disgrace in the world for his own country, the military’s top […]

Folks often ask, rather cynically, where are the students protesting the war?  Well, the answer is that they are there — on their campuses and in the dorms — organizing speakers, rallies, and teach-ins.  The fact that folks off campus do not hear about these events does not mean that they aren’t happening.  What it […]

  NOTE: The paper below was written in the early months of January 2001.  While the paper’s anticipation of the centrifugal forces pulling at the labor movement and the possibility of international unions “literally leaving the AFL-CIO” unfortunately proved prescient of the Change to Win split, it has been even more difficult than anticipated to […]

February 14, 2007 To:  The Honorable Immigration Judge, I’m a 2nd grade Two-Way Spanish Immersion (TWI) teacher at Rosa Parks school in Berkeley.  Today is Valentine’s Day.  It was my last day with one of my top students, Gerardo Espinoza.  His father, Felipe Espinoza Senior, received an order of deportation and is moving the family […]