Subjects Archives: Ideology

James A. Tyner.  The Business of War: Workers, Warriors, and Hostages in Occupied Iraq.  Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006.  viii + 152 pp.  Bibliography, index.  ISBN 978-0-7546-4791-1. In The Business of War, James A. Tyner provides an engaged and readable synthesis of scholarship and informed polemic produced in response to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation […]

It is surely no surprise to readers of MRZine that, in a presidential election race in which an African-American man is not just the front-runner for the Democratic Party nomination, but has a strong chance of winning the White House in November, racism has been front and center.  Four years ago, in his keynote speech […]

When I was growing up in the 1950s, a photo of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1932-1945) still hung in the homes of some family members and friends.  Our only four-term president was remembered by them as the leader — and even the savior — of the country.  Those like my parents, who experienced the Great […]

  Pledge of Commitment: People of Faith with Palestine in Struggle Our world is in crisis.  We face a growing, more aggressive empire with an insatiable appetite for consuming the resources of our world, subverting justice and humanity by its desire to strengthen its global hegemony; destroying the environment; feeding racist ideologies and practices of […]

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 […]

Reeling from the blow that it received in the aftermath of the Colombian military’s illegal incursion on March 1 into Ecuador — which resulted in the brutal massacre of a number of civilians and members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), including its chief negotiator Raul Reyes — US imperialism has once again […]

  The events in Kenya after the much criticized and controversial elections of 27 December 2007 have exposed the planned failures of our nascent democracy and the ideological rot and inadequacy across the Kenyan body politic.  This has left many wondering what actually went wrong.  I posit that an ideologically bankrupt political process that revolves around access […]

This important article by Álvaro García Linera, now Vice President of Bolivia, was first published in 2005. It traces the contradictory evolution of the two most influential revolutionary currents in the country’s 20th century history and argues that Marxism, as originally interpreted by its Bolivian adherents, failed to address the outstanding concerns of the indigenous majority. García Linera suggests, however, that the evolution of indianismo in recent decades opens perspectives for a renewal of Marxist thought and potentially the reconciliation of the two currents in a higher synthesis. Although framed within the Bolivian context, his argument clearly has implications for the national and anti-imperialist struggle in other parts of Abya Yale (the indigenous name for the Western hemisphere).

THE UNIVERSITY IN CHAINS by Henry A. GirouxBUY THIS BOOK Henry Giroux’s The University in Chains is a crisp, powerful book about the crisis in American higher education.  Basically, the university has been buffeted by the three forces that have defined the US under the Bush administration (and, for that matter, for some time before): […]

The Federal Reserve is led by an inveterate “free market solves all economic problems best” kind of guy.  Mr. Bernanke loves Milton Friedman passionately and says so.  This is what big business wants to hear when it is making lots of money, when it wants tax reductions to boost profits, and when it wants government […]

Legitimacy is a central yet understudied concept in world politics.  Let me give you an example of how it works in our everyday lives.  If I were to wield a stick menacingly and run around the SOAS campus in London proclaiming that I am an academic, very few people would be persuaded.  What I need […]

  On August 8, 2007 a German labor court in Nuremberg issued a temporary restraining order preventing a strike called by the GDL train drivers’ union, to the delight of the business press. The strike had been approved by a great majority of the train drivers, and was due to start on August 9th.  The state-owned […]

Michael Heinrich is a political scientist and mathematician in Berlin and a member of the editorial board of Prokla — journal for critical social science.  Below is an interview with the “. . . ums Ganze!” [. . . All or Nothing!] coalition. “…ums Ganze!”: The federal government has staked out a position for the […]

Por alguna razón, la frase “la violencia engendra violencia” se popularizó en todo el mundo al mismo tiempo que su significado implícito se mantenía restringido a la violencia del oprimido.  Es decir, la violencia del amo sobre el esclavo es invisible en un estado de esclavitud, como en un estado de opresión la fuerza que […]

Michael Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University, is the editor of the recently published Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America (NYU Press).  What motivated you to edit a collection on “New Conservatism”? The motivation was two-fold.  First, there was a real need to dissect American conservatism […]

James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006) 190 pages, $16.95 paperback. Widely known as an expert in Latin American history and social movements, and a prolific critic of U.S. imperialism, James Petras has ventured forth in his latest book The Power of Israel in the United States, and […]

When the chairman of Iran’s Jewish Council, Haroun Yashayaei, criticized President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a letter condemning his remarks on the Holocaust, he was supported by a range of Iranian intellectuals, artists, poets, and others both within the country and without.  For those amongst us with some understanding about the Jewish presence in Iranian history, […]

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 […]

  An interview with Luis Jalandoni, chairperson of the National Democratic Front-Philippines Negotiating Panel, follows E. San Juan, Jr.’s analysis. The February visit of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, Prof. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, reconfirmed the barbarism of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s de facto martial-law regime in the Philippines.  Stavenhagen bewailed the worsening pattern of […]

  Need a crash course on the present state of the world?  Want to untangle the terminology, separate the victims from the victimizers, understand the dynamics of unilateralism, and deduce what can be done about it all?  I’d like to introduce you to a small literary arsenal. A good place to begin is the book […]