Geography Archives: Soviet Union (USSR)

The United States has already lost the war in Afghanistan, just as it has lost the war in Iraq. President Barack Obama’s vast expansion of the Afghan war announced Dec. 1, and the extension of the violence into neighboring Pakistan, are intended to camouflage the reality of defeat, as was the Bush Administration’s “surge” in […]

  A Historical Perspective We all know that when a glass of tea is three quarters full, it is also one quarter empty.  I would like to dismiss the empty part of this dialectic first, the history that pertains to the self, to me, and then to talk a bit more of the history concerning […]

Take a look at the map.  Afghanistan is next to or near Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan, and India.  These are all countries that are vitally important to the United States as key allies or enemies, and as potential economic and political competitors.  Afghanistan is also next to Turkmenistan and other Central Asian Republics that are […]

  Farzana Shaikh.  Making Sense of Pakistan.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.  ix + 274 pp.  $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14962-4. Farzana Shaikh offers a scholarly and erudite study of the competition to define and establish a “national” identity for Pakistan.  The author argues that contested visions of the religious nature of the postcolonial state […]

  John Bellamy Foster is the editor of the socialist magazine Monthly Review and teaches sociology at the University of Oregon.  He has written on numerous subjects, from political economy to Marxist theory.  This year Foster published The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace With the Planet. Max van Lingen is a student of political philosophy and […]

The global crisis has undermined the neo-liberalist phase of capitalism that dominated the last 30 years of the world economy.  It has likewise challenged the hegemony of neo-classical economics as the theoretical rationale of neo-liberalism’s celebration of private enterprise and markets.  The form this challenge takes is a revival of Keynesian economics.  As the crisis […]

  Addressing delegates at the International Encounter of Left Parties held in Caracas, November 19-21, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez stated: “the time has come for us to convoke the Fifth International.”  Face with the capitalist crisis and the threat of war that is putting at risk the future of humanity, “the people are clamoring for” […]

  Just what good is freedom if no one is free, And folks go to jail if they dare disagree? And lawyers get punished for doing their jobs? And folks are afraid of the White House lynch mob? Lynne Stewart was doing what she had to do Protecting her client and civil rights, too. She […]

  The Sixth Annual Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture, Barnard College, 5 November 2009 The right to religious freedom is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular liberal democracies, one that guarantees the peaceful coexistence of religiously diverse populations.  Enshrined in national constitutions and international laws and treaties, the right to religious liberty promises […]

  Paper presented at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation conference “The Global Crisis and Africa: Struggles for Alternatives,” Randburg, 19 November 2009 There is an ecological crisis in the world and this crisis can be traced to capitalism.  There is deforestation due to the trade in timber.  There is climate change due to unsafe production methods. […]

“I’m a representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which was established in 1977 as a women’s organization struggling for women’s rights.  But, after the former Soviet Union’s invasion, RAWA got involved in resistance against the Soviets and the puppet regime of theirs.  After 1992, RAWA started to focus on anti-fundamentalist […]

The Harold Wolpe Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 5 November 2009 In 1982, I published a book, jointly with Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank, entitled Dynamics of Global Crisis.  This was not its original title.  We had proposed the title, Crisis, What Crisis?  The U.S. publisher did not like that title, but we […]

I hate to sound like the grouchy Grinch.  Here in Berlin radio and TV are celebrating the Fall of the Wall twenty years ago so intensively there’s hardly a moment for the weather report, which, unfortunately for all the planned events, turned out nasty and rainy.  From my window I just watched the fireworks’ brave […]

In the months following the outbreak of the financial crisis in late 2007, the general climate among economists and economic commentators was kind of a stupor.  Mainstream economists and conservative politicians — who had clamored for decades for the government to keep its hands off the economy, for balanced budgets, and for taxes as low […]

Dr. Baburam Bhattarai is a leading figure of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist. WPRM: Thank you for meeting with us today.  In your article in The Worker #4 ‘The Political Economy of the People’s War’ you write that “the transformation of one social system into another, or the destruction of the old by the […]

Tariq Ali, a co-editor of New Left Review, is the author of The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power as well as more than a dozen other books. Raza Naeem: Given that much of your recent writing has focused exclusively on Latin America and the Middle East, why this sudden motivation to […]

Part 1: Eight Years and Counting The United States invasion and occupation of Afghanistan entered its ninth year in October, and the majority of Americans now tell opinion polls they want it to end.  So far the war has failed to achieve U.S. objectives, and it is likely the Obama Administration’s expansion of the fighting […]

  To Candidate Member of the Politburo of the CC CPSU USSR Minister of Defense Comrade Dmitry Timofeevich Yazov Moscow, USSR Ministry of Defense The Afghan problem continues to attract attention in the sphere of international affairs.  It begins to cause a certain concern on the part of the Soviet people as well.  This is […]

The Maoist movement in India is a direct consequence of the tragedy of India ruled by her big bourgeoisie and governed by parties co-opted by that class-fraction.  The movement now threatens the accumulation of capital in its areas of influence, prompting the Indian state to intensify its barbaric counter-insurgency strategy to throttle it.  In trying […]

Mike Whitney: In your new book, The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know, you allude to right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, which promote a “free market” ideology.  How successful have these organizations been in shaping public opinion about capitalism?  Do you think that […]