Subjects Archives: Marxism

A group of union leaders, popular economy advocates, Senegalese street vendors, and militants from the Excluded Workers Movement and CTEP (MTE-CTEP) were taken into jail by Argentine police, in a situation marked by a high dose of violence and violation of their human rights Buenos Aires City.

The Social Wealth Fund plan is insidious in the sense that it has the capacity to redirect vast amounts of energy and resources toward a goal presented as “socialist” when in reality it is fundamentally incompatible with socialism. We must bring the discussion out into the open to prevent such seductive ideas from compromising the basic vision and integrity of socialism.

‘The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.’ —Marx

THE latest advert for Ukraine’s armed forces depicts chiselled military hunks over a caption: “THEY WILL PROTECT YOUR INVESTMENTS — Ukrainian Army: protecting the borders of civilisation.”

Legal advocates have scored some major class-related victories in 2018. In January, an appellate court held that the administration of California’s money bail system violated the Fourteenth Amendment rights of indigent defendants.

What does it mean for whites if climate change is real?

Our global ecological crisis has created an increasing interest in Marx’s theory of metabolic rift as a crucial aspect of capitalism (Foster 2013). To appreciate fully how capitalism creates this rift, it is important to examine the human metabolic relation with nature in general and theoretical terms.

The great social thinker, Samir Amin, has died. The social sciences have lost three unique figures in this year. First, the Brazilian Theotonio dos Santos, who inspired many to study the world system from a radical perspective. He was followed by the Peruvian Aníbal Quijano, who posed the concept of “cultural revolution” to give the peoples of Latin America their own identity.

What passes for Critical Theory today is nugatory; it is philosophically weak, and politically compromised. In Thompson’s words, the project has ‘abandoned the search for the real mechanisms and sources of social power’.

Israeli operatives and their U.S. lobbyists sprang into action when the Movement for Black Lives came out in support of the boycott Israel movement.

The search for explanations of our current political climate, especially the rise of nationalists like Marine LePen in France, Narendra Modi in India, and our own president in the United States, has led pundits to return to the concept of “authoritarian” tendencies as a psychological phenomenon.

A history of the left in the Labour Party highlights the need for a strong extra-parliamentary movement, argues Chris Nineham.

In Syria, the battle for the province of Idlib has begun. Over the course of the past few years, the remnants of the hardened fighters have retreated to this region on the Syria-Turkish border, where they have been under the overall command of an al-Qaeda inspired group.

Although a truth of science is not equivalent to the consensus of scientists, neither historically nor now, there are times when scientific facts (or truths) are of such compelling importance that a near consensus of scientific practitioners ought to be regarded as fact. Yes, when I began smoking cigarettes at age fifteen there was something […]

Sagar Abraham-Gonsalves writes about his clawing helplessness as his father, Vernon Gonsalves, was arrested on Tuesday in the Bhima-Koregaon case.

Within days of starting the war, Saudi Arabia imposed a total land, air and sea blockade, along with targeting vital agriculture and food supply infrastructure that sustains life for the 29 million Yemenis—all of which constitute war crimes under international law.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government and the Hindutvavadi “nationalist” movement’s demonic drive for cultural orthodoxy seems to know no bounds. What is alarming is the former’s support for and complicity in the acts of the latter, as also the Indian state’s control of its “necessary” enemies through the use of state terror, with the category “urban Naxals” singled out in the latest of such drives (in June and August 2018) that otherwise routinely target Muslims, militant oppressed nationalities, and “Maoists.”

Marxists have long understood that the workplace is the primary strategic site of class struggle, and that class struggle is essential for cohering a radicalized working-class majority with the capacity and will to overthrow capitalism in favor of socialism. At the same time, Marxists recognize our moral responsibility to oppose—and the strategic necessity to fight—all forms of exploitation and oppression.

“The Resistance” is steering so much of the left into a hard-right turn — including even Pacifica’s KPFA Radio-Berkeley.

VA’s Jeanette Charles reviews Maroon Comix, a book that tells the tales of maroons’ fight for freedom and self-determination and their legacy for today’s struggles.