Subjects Archives: Class

  June 28th of the this year when the Honduran population was preparing to participate in a popular opinion poll about the installation of a fourth ballot box in which it would decide whether or not to convoke a Constitutional Assembly, thousands of military soldiers kidnapped the Constitutional President of the Republic, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, […]

On July 22, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez again declared his complete support for the proposal by industrial workers for a new model of production based on workers’ control. This push from Chavez, part of the socialist revolution, aims at transforming Venezuela’s basic industry.  However, it faces resistance from within the state bureaucracy and the revolutionary […]

The U.S. economy continued in a deep recession and hopes for a rapid recovery faded as new national unemployment figures of 9.5 percent were announced early this month.  If one includes discouraged workers and the underemployed (those with part-time jobs who would like full-time work) in the calculations, then the figure soars to 16.5 percent.  […]

  Remarks delivered at the Thomas Foley Institute, Washington State University,, Pullman, Washington, April 18, 2009 Recently appointed Attorney General Eric Holder, whose parents hail from the Barbados, aroused instant ire when he remarked last February 18 that the U.S. remains a “nation of cowards” for not talking enough about things racial.  But is this […]

  “The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined or spiritual things could exist.  Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt. [. […]

  On March 24, 1999, NATO began an aerial bombing campaign against what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  For 78 days, bombs rained down on military targets and civilian infrastructure under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention.’  Operation Allied Force precipitated the displacement of over one million people and directly resulted in the deaths […]

She’s called Emmely; her real name is Barbara E. — with the family name omiited in line with legal practice here.  All over Germany people are talking about her, most frequently with anger in their voices.  For Emmely, a cashier in East Berlin, was fired by her discount store employer for allegedly filching 1.30 euro […]

“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]

OTTAWA — In a classic 19th century work, English journalist Walter Bagehot divided the Constitution into two parts.  The “efficient” part — the executive (cabinet) and legislative — was responsible for the business of government.  The “dignified” part, the Queen, was to put a human face on the capitalist state.  Bagehot noted, however, that the […]

  Keith David Watenpaugh.   Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class.   Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.  xi + 325 pp. $37.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-12169-7. One of the great modern landmarks of the city of Aleppo is the Baron Hotel.  The Mazloumians, a wealthy Armenian family of […]

Cedric Johnson.  Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics.   University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Cedric Johnson‘s Revolutionaries to Race Leaders traces the ideological cooptation of one of the twentieth century’s most vibrant social movements.  The Black Nationalist resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s demanded nothing short of self-determination, […]

Narrated by Viggo Mortensen.  Art by Mike Konopacki.  Video editing by Eric Wold.  The video is based on Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle, A People’s History of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2008). | | Print

The excavation of fossil fuels was a one-time bonanza: it provided cheap energy that temporarily quadrupled the earth’s carrying capacity in terms of human population.  Instead of an ever tightening immiseration of the working class and overthrow of the capitalist system, as expected by Marx, the one-time gift of fossil fuels led to a standoff […]

  Join us for a discussion of race, class, and the new economy with E. Paul Durrenberger, coauthor with Suzan Erem of On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5. On the Global Waterfront, new from Monthly Review Press, tells the present-day story of longshoremen in Charleston, South Carolina, who successfully confronted […]

  As everybody in our country knows, the Congress of South African Trade Unions has been at the forefront of the campaign to create jobs and eradicate poverty.  For years we have fought to ensure that this struggle is taken seriously and remains at the centre of the national agenda. COSATU has done everything in […]

6 April 2008 — The government’s police attacked the Mahalla workers’ strike.  Since the night of 5 April, so many worker leaders have been arrested.  Police besieged the city.  The strike couldn’t start in the morning.  In the afternoon, workers, their families, and the unemployed started demonstrations.  Police have attacked brutally with real bullets and […]

The world appears to be on the verge of an economic crisis and, if it turns out to be as serious as some think, one that could rival or exceed the great panics of the late nineteenth century and the decade-long Great Depression.  The crisis began with unscrupulous mortgage lending on an enormous scale, leading […]

Just as the slump in the US economy threatens to trigger a global recession, Australian authorities have pronounced inflation ‘public enemy number one’ and are trying to slow growth.  They tell workers to ‘exercise wage restraint’. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Industrial Relations Minister Julia Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan sing the same tune: workers […]

STRONG IN THE STRUGGLE: My Life as a Black Labor Activist by Lee Brown with Robert L. AllenBUY THIS BOOK Lee Brown’s memoir reads like a prizefighter’s.  And it’s right that it should.  The boxing talent he displayed in his hardscrabble youth served him well as an organizer, union leader and party militant.  Though the […]

The November 24th Australian election has resulted in a sharp defeat of the neoliberal pro-US John Howard government, and a victory for the slightly less neoliberal and pro-US Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party.  But what has not been much noticed in global commentary on the result is the intense class struggle atmosphere in […]