Subjects Archives: Culture

“Riots are often justified, what’s the French Revolution but a riot blessed by history”

We ourselves live in a pretty sick society that seems incapable of feelings of sisterhood, brotherhood, solidarity.

Fred Hampton’s politics are a lesson in how to fight racism and capitalism together, argues Sean Ledwith

Bring down the statues, surely. But more than that: cancel the debt and provide reparations to the formerly colonized for the centuries of theft and brutality.

In the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25 offers an expanded vision of what it could mean to be a human being. Human beings, it notes, have ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being’. This includes ‘food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’; human beings also have the ‘right to security’, which means they have the right to compensation for any lack of livelihood due to circumstances beyond their control.

The opening quotation, “Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight! Matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight!,” was taken from Chicago attorney and civil rights activist, Thomas “TNT” Todd.

Unapologetically honest, attendees witnessed some of the Bay’s most outspoken youth poets.

Across the country—in city after city—the people have erupted in righteous indignation to George Floyd’s recorded lynching. His extrajudicial murder set off a rebellion that had been primed by the highly publicized white-vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the botched, “no-knock” police raid that killed Breonna Taylor in her bed.

To lose your job when someone has died at your hands is a small price to pay.

More than 50 years ago (on 14 April 1967), Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of his famous speeches, on “The Other America,” at Stanford University.* King patiently explained to the audience of students and faculty members that, while in his view “riots are socially destructive and self-defeating,” they are “in the final analysis. . .the language of the unheard.”

Donald Trump is the culmination of how the Republican Party has been developing for years. Together they threaten to establish an authoritarian state in the service of big capital. They endanger the lives, health, and living standards of the working class and the rest of the population. But supporting the Democratic Party is not the solution.

Once again, Black America has surged to the front lines of the global struggle. This year, the United States has stood out primarily as a leading centre of right-wing lunacy, political breakdown and murderous incompetence in the pandemic. Now, it is showing the world something else: the potential for sudden eruptions of mass resistance that can change everything.

West explained the current anger over Floyd’s murder by police—one of whom, officer Derek Chauvin, was arrested Friday and charged with 3rd-degree murder and manslaughter—adds to a “perfect storm” of multiple failures and inequities that pre-exist under an American imperial system that people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and others have been warning about since the middle of last century.

Families vary, in terms of their composition, structure, and functioning, but all play a key role in society and require special attention from government.

We have become used to ‘stay at home’ in the corner of our TV screens, behind nightly government press conferences, repeated over and over on the radio and in social media.

George Floyd’s death by Blue Plague in Minneapolis was widely condemned by the same parties that have encouraged and funded the spread of the fatal contagion.

Toussaint stressed that freedom was something that had to be fought for and taken from below by the masses themselves.

Barnaby Raine writes to mark the launch of a new class on Marx and his writing, as part of The Brooklyn Institute summer season

The War Nerd dissects reporting on Saudi Arabia to show how the corporate media cares more about a dead Washington Post columnist than a quarter of a million Yemenis killed in a Western-backed war.

Newsclick brings you ‘Signs of Our Times,’ series of discussions between Vijay Prashad and Aijaz Ahmad