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Chávez Proposes International of Left Parties [Propone Chávez Internacional de partidos de izquierda]
Caracas, 25 ago (PL) Partidos y movimientos de izquierda de América Latina y el Caribe fueron convocados hoy por el presidente venezolano, Hugo Chávez, a realizar en 2008 una reunión para crear una organización internacional. Al hablar ante miles de aspirantes a miembros del Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), Chávez precisó que recientemente conversó […]
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Alliance of Hope: Read and Hear Tariq Ali’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN by Tariq AliBUY THIS BOOK The Pirates of the Caribbean identified by Tariq Ali in his slender volume titled the same are Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and of course, Fidel Castro, the “Old Man,” of Cuba. These three men and the movements they lead, according to Ali, […]
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Rutgers-Venezuela
Rutgers Students Visit Hugo Chavez Jason Bellifemini is one of the Rutgers students who recently visited Venezuela and co-authored “Traveling Rutgers University Students Share Their Views on Developments in Venezuela” (MRZine, 4 June 2007). Bellifemini has put together an interactive Web site, with many photo albums, to share his and other Rutgers students’ experience […]
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Fighting with Audacity, Intelligence, and Realism
Achievements of the Cuban Revolution are well known to Monthly Review readers. What is striking about Raúl Castro Ruz’s address on 26 July 2007 (an excerpt from which is reproduced below), on the occasion of Cuba’s National Day of Rebellion, is not his tribute to them but his candid assessment of the “errors which […]
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Apartheid Americana
Two of my friends were just beaten and arrested by Brooklyn police. My friends, Michael Tarif Warren and Evelyn Warren, are African-American attorneys whose work consists, in part, of defending victims of police violence. I want to tell you about how police punched and humiliated these good people on the corner of Vanderbilt and Atlantic, […]
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Castro as Machiavelli: Bush and Cuban Exiles
Imperial rulers and violently fixated Cuban exiles need Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program to accelerate learning processes and not continue to repeat mistakes. Hey, on Cuba policy, it’s only been 48 years! Fidel Castro, in contrast, learned fast. He used Washington and Miami to improvise material for three chapters in future releases of Machiavelli’s […]
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Achievements and Limits of the First United States Social Forum
The first US Social Forum wrapped up on Sunday, July 1 in Atlanta, Georgia. That it happened at all seems almost miraculous. It is hard to remember any previous comparable gathering of diverse currents of US social movements. This is not a particularly dynamic moment in their history — the anti-war movement is bland […]
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Setting Priorities Straight in the Struggle: On Iran and the Iranian Role in the Arab Region
Before we deal with the topic of the Iranian role in the Arab region, it is useful to recall the complexity of Iran and its different entanglements: For one, Iran is not a “Banana Republic,” and its regime is not a puppet or a client regime of Imperialism. Iran has a regional project and works […]
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Building It Now in Venezuela: Socialism for the 21st Century (Parts 1-8)
Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, winner of the Isaac Deutscher memorial prize for 2004, and Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, just published by Monthly Review Press. The videos were […]
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An American Student’s Perspective on the Venezuelan Revolution
I recently returned from an eleven-day trip to Venezuela, traveling with fellow students from Rutgers University. The country has been the scene of intense political strife and polarization throughout the nearly ten years that Hugo Chávez’s government has been in power, and during our stay we witnessed various aspects of this conflict. We arrived […]
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Antena 3 and YouTube Censor Debate on Non-Renewal of RCTV License [Antena 3 y YouTube censuran un debate sobre la no renovación de la concesión a RCTV]
Todos los grandes medios de todo el globo alzaron su voz contra el gobierno democrático de Venezuela por la no renovación de la licencia de la televisión RCTV. Las continuas irregularidades en su funcionamiento y, el apoyo al golpe de estado no eran obstáculos para conservar su frecuencia, ya que la “libertad de expresión” de […]
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The US and the 21st Century
Introductory Note: This essay is an adaptation and reworking of a historic 1963 document of the Students for a Democratic Society. Its original was mimeographed in several thousand copies and distributed jointly by the SDS National Office and the newly-created Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). America and the New Era was intended to be […]
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A Light Within (the Heart of Empire): The 2007 US Social Forum
What happens when hundreds or even thousands of small and not-so-small organizations come together to meet, dialogue, and present their ideas over the course of a long weekend? The World Social Forum (WSF), an annual gathering of tens of thousands of people from over 100 countries, has provided this space for those able to […]
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In Favor of Democracy in the Media, for the Legitimate Right of the Venezuelan Government to Decide Who Shall Broadcast on Its Airwaves [A favor de la democracia en los medios, por el derecho legítimo del gobierno venezolano a disponer del espacio radioeléctrico]
A mediados de los años setenta, los países no alineados reclamaron un Nuevo Orden Mundial económico e informativo. Esa decisión provocó con el tiempo la retirada de Estados Unidos de la UNESCO. Durante muchas décadas, apenas cinco grandes monopolios retuvieron el control de los flujos informativos. Es solamente ahora cuando la exigencia de entender la […]
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Traveling Rutgers University Students Share Their Views on Developments in Venezuela
We, a delegation of students from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, were in Caracas this Saturday at a peaceful demonstration. Imagine a protest that was more of a celebration than an angry mob. Imagine ordinary citizens without ulterior agendas or motives celebrating the right to self-determination in the face of economic imperialism. But, […]
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Zero Hour for Venezuela’s RCTV
The expiration of Venezuelan broadcaster RCTV‘s public concession draws near: at 11:59pm on Sunday, May 27th, RCTV’s concession will expire without renewal, and its space on channel 2 will be handed over to the newly-founded Venezuelan Social Television (TVes), which will begin broadcasts at 12:15am on May 28th. This sovereign decision of the Venezuelan government […]
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The Tragedy Threatening Our Species
I cannot speak as an economist or a scientist. I simply speak as a politician who wishes to unravel the economists’ and scientists’ arguments one way or another. I also try to sense the motivations of each one of those who make statements on these matters. Just twenty-two years ago, here in Havana, we had […]
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Cairo Conference Calls for World Resistance against Imperialism
(Because most conference participants face repressive conditions in their homelands, individual’s names are omitted from this report. — JR) Part OneA New Pole of Anti-Imperialist Leadership CAIRO, EGYPT — More than 1,500 activists from the Middle East and around the world met in Cairo, March 29-April 1, under the banner “Towards an International Alliance against […]
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Capital and Nature: An Interview with Paul Burkett
1. The year 2007 marks the 140th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Marx’s Capital. In your perspective, what is the main contribution of that major work to the understanding of contemporary capitalism? Marx’s Capital establishes three essential contradictions of capitalism which grow in intensity as the system develops historically. These contradictions […]
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Labour for Palestine: Can We Build the BDS Campaign?
Just less than a year ago in May 2006, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario unanimously passed in convention its path-breaking Resolution 50 in support for the global campaign against Israeli apartheid. The resolution called on the union to educate its members on the apartheid nature of the Israeli state. It also mandated […]