Subjects Archives: Marxism

  • Religion for Radicals: An Interview with Terry Eagleton

      Literary critic Terry Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.”  He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room. Nathan Schneider: Rather […]

  • Class War

    US workers’ real wages (money wages adjusted for the prices workers actually pay) have not risen from their levels in the 1970s.  Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that real wages continued to stagnate through 2009.  Across the same 30-year period, the productivity of labor kept rising: the average worker produced ever more output […]

  • Other Inscriptions: Sexual Difference and History Writing between Futures Past and Present

    Joseph Andoni Massad.  Desiring Arabs.   Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 . xiv + 453 pp.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-50958-7. With Desiring Arabs, Joseph Massad makes a significant contribution to the existing scholarship on sexuality.  He merits praise for boldly tackling the problematic of knowledge in a world that continues to be unevenly carved […]

  • Socialism and Welfarism

    Socialism consists not just in building a humane society; it consists not just in the maintenance of full employment (or near full employment together with sufficient unemployment benefits); it consists not just in the creation of a Welfare State, even one that takes care of its citizens “from the cradle to the grave”; it consists […]

  • About No Sex in the City

      Suad Amiry Presents No Sex in the City, 10 October 2007 Suad Amiry Speaks at the Casa Internazionale delle Donne, Roma. January 2009 Suad Amiry, Public Lecture, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, 8 April 2008 Play now: Excerpt from Ines Gramigna and Virginia Fiume, “Portrait of a Lady: Encounter with Suad Amiry” (Alternative […]

  • The Gay Electronic Intifada of Lebanon

    “Intifada” is Arabic for uprising.  People of the Lebanese gay community and their supporters are working very hard on their own intifada of supporting LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersexual, and Queer) people and defeating homophobia.  A lot of this work is being done by Helem and Meem.  I personally work with Helem (“Dream” in […]

  • The Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, and Foreign Policy in Focus: Subverting the UN Charter in the Name of Human Rights

    It was just a matter of time before members of the collapsing left enlisted in the imperial attack on the most fundamental principles of the UN Charter, and added their voices to the growing chorus of support for Western power-projection under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).  But this […]

  • Will Iran Get to Have Three Women Ministers?

    President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s landmark decision to nominate three women for cabinet posts in his second administration bodes well for his post-election promise to usher in a “new era” in Iran. The choice of three females for top ministerial positions will be interpreted by critics as a ploy by Ahmadinejad to compensate for any perceived legitimacy […]

  • I Did What My Heart Told Me to Do

      This is not the first time that I stand trial for my beliefs.  But it is the first time that they will probably be able to stop me. I always knew that many people silently supported me, and that if I ever got into trouble they would stand behind me.  This moment has come. […]

  • Honduran Resistance to the World: Organize a Boycott against the Military-Business Dictatorship of Roberto Micheletti

      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, […]

  • Iran’s “Leftist” Don Quixotes

      In the 1970s, when Iran’s Fedayeen and Mojahedin1 groups were engaged in an urban guerrilla struggle against the former Shah’s dictatorial regime, a faction of the Iranian Student Association (ISA) in the United States called Ehyaa2 had managed to convince some in the US Left, in particular America’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), that a […]

  • Venezuela: Class Struggle Heats Up over Battle for Workers’ Control

    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 Decline of Manufacturing and Machine Tools, and the Future of American Industry and the Working Class

    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.  […]

  • Telling the Stories of Iranian Women’s Lives

      I was 10 years old and every week my mother would buy Zan-e Rooz (Today’s Woman), Iran’s highest circulation women-oriented publication, from the neighborhood newsstand.  She always said that when I read a magazine I can speak better.  My sisters and I would wait for the magazine every Saturday, and I particularly enjoyed reading […]

  • On Sexual Politics in Modern Iran

      From Nawal el Saadawi to Janet Afary Dear Janet, I am glad to see you’ve been reading my work since you were a graduate student.  Did you read my work in English or Persian?  (I write in Arabic.)  I very much enjoyed your book: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran.  Egypt, my country, and Iran […]

  • Against Tolerance: Islam, Sexuality, and the Politics of Belonging in the Netherlands

      The Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek argues that tolerance constitutes a mystifying discourse veiling what is really at the heart of political and social struggle.  There is good reason, Zizek argues, that someone like Martin Luther King didn’t make use of the concept.  The struggle against racism is not a struggle for tolerance, […]

  • Feminists in Resistance: For the Defense of Democracy in Honduras

    28 June 2009 29 June 2009 30 June 2009 30 June 2009 1 July 2009 1 July 2009 4 July 2009 5 July 2009 6 July 2009 7 July 2009 Red Lésbica Cattrachas is a lesbian feminist group.  For more information, contact Cattrachas general coordinator Indyra M. Aguilar: .

  • Maimonides: Turn Him Over and Over Again for Everything Is in Him

      Arthur Hyman, Alfred Ivry, ed.  Maimonidean Studies.  Volume 5. Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House, 2008.  442 pp. $49.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-88125-941-4. The fifth volume of Maimonidean Studies is an eclectic amalgam of studies, the majority of which are based on papers delivered at a conference in New York City commemorating the 800th anniversary of […]

  • Reflections on the Left

    Perhaps the most significant feature of the recent Indian election is the loss suffered by the Left.  The BJP’s defeat was more or less anticipated, except by the psephologists, as was some loss by the Left; but the actual extent of the Left’s loss has been quite staggering.  True, its vote share has fallen only […]

  • The Indigenous in Honduras Denounce Humiliating Treatment of Honduran Women

      The curfew is not the only means of population control — now the de facto government is bent on suppressing the visibly identifiable sectors, in this case the indigenous population of the Central American country. Antonio Martínez, an indigenous leader, via TeleSur, reported on Wednesday that the international agencies that talk so much about […]