Subjects Archives: Marxism

  Addressing delegates at the International Encounter of Left Parties held in Caracas, November 19-21, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez stated: “the time has come for us to convoke the Fifth International.”  Face with the capitalist crisis and the threat of war that is putting at risk the future of humanity, “the people are clamoring for” […]

Anuradha Ghandy (Anu as we knew her) was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) [CPI (Maoist)]. Early on, she developed a sense of obligation to the poor; she joined them in their struggle for bread and roses, the fight for a richer and a fuller life for all. Tragically, cerebral malaria took her away in April last year. What is this spirit that made her selflessly adopt the cause of the damned of the Indian earth—the exploited, the oppressed, and the dominated—as her own? The risks of joining the Maoist long march seem far too dangerous to most people, but not for her—bold, courageous and decisive, yet kind, gentle and considerate. Perhaps her days were numbered, marked as she was on the dossiers of the Indian state’s repressive apparatus as one of the most wanted “left-wing extremists”. That oppressive, brutal structure has been executing a barbaric counter-insurgency strategy—designed to maintain the status quo—against the Maoist movement in India. What is it that is driving the Indian state, hell bent as it is to cripple and maim the spirit that inspires persons like Anu? Practically the whole Indian polity.

In his wild and slanderous “Open Letter to Amnesty International” (signed, fittingly, “Yours, in disgust and despair”),2 The Guardian-Observer‘s veteran reporter Ed Vulliamy explains that two “main concerns” motivated him to draft his repudiation of AI’s choice of Noam Chomsky to deliver this 2009 Stand Up for Justice lecture: One is that the “pain” individuals […]

  Paper presented at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation conference “The Global Crisis and Africa: Struggles for Alternatives,” Randburg, 19 November 2009 There is an ecological crisis in the world and this crisis can be traced to capitalism.  There is deforestation due to the trade in timber.  There is climate change due to unsafe production methods. […]

“I’m a representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which was established in 1977 as a women’s organization struggling for women’s rights.  But, after the former Soviet Union’s invasion, RAWA got involved in resistance against the Soviets and the puppet regime of theirs.  After 1992, RAWA started to focus on anti-fundamentalist […]

  During my teaching career I’ve worked under nine different superintendents.  I’ve taught for nearly 30 years, so the average reign of a Milwaukee superintendent has been a little over three years, about normal for big city school districts. While some people, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, decry these short tenures as a […]

  “When you look at conflict zones, in all conflict zones, you see that the more militarized our spaces and our places, the more violence against women increases. . . .  This constant anxiety and uncertainty, living in constant uncertainty changes the entire life, especially of a woman. . . .  Domestic violence increases, patriarchal, […]

In the months following the outbreak of the financial crisis in late 2007, the general climate among economists and economic commentators was kind of a stupor.  Mainstream economists and conservative politicians — who had clamored for decades for the government to keep its hands off the economy, for balanced budgets, and for taxes as low […]

  If we examine the status of women strictly from the socioeconomic perspective, this portrayal of reunification [as the silencing in which traces of the East German social, cultural, and ideological framework were erased and replaced by the Western capitalist social, economic, and cultural framework] seems apt.  Indeed, scholars persistently describe the reunification as a […]

You may have heard that a Pennsylvania district attorney recently dropped all charges against two anarchists who were accused of using Twitter last September at the G-20 summit protests, to keep activists informed of police arrests and surveillance. But the federal government remains on this case, in the wake of an FBI search of the […]

Paper delivered at the plenary session of the 2009 National Conference of the Philippine Sociological Society held at the PSSC Building on 16 October 2009 Why does the ideology of neoliberalism still exercise such influence in the Philippines despite the challenges it has faced from both the Asian and now global financial crisis? This paper […]

Based in New Delhi, Zakia Nizami Soman is one of the founder members of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan(BMMA), a movement of Muslim women across India struggling for their citizenship rights.  In this interview with Yoginder Sikand, she talks about the BMMA’s work and reflects on the daunting challenges facing Muslim women in India today. […]

  The Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture, School of Oriental and African Studies University of London, 2009 I feel both honoured and gratified to be offering the 7th Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture.  This gives me the opportunity to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Tony for his unwavering support and friendship over the years.  When I […]

  In 1992, I was a thwarted, guilt-ridden and depressed revolutionary, living underground with my lesbian partner and two-year old daughter in St. Louis.  I was part of a tiny group that had gone underground at the beginning of the 1980s, responding to the collapse of the mass movements after the end of the Vietnam […]

  Rauda Morcos has every right to hate the press.  On July 2003, the Israeli newspaper Yedeot Ahronot interviewed Morcos about her poetry but also announced to the world that she was a lesbian. Following the public outing, Rauda Morcos’ car windows were smashed, the tires punctured, and she received countless threatening phone calls and […]

  Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality (Raw Nerve Books) came out in July 2008.  The book presents an unprecedented compilation of critical articles by scholars and activists, which address the manifold ways in which questions regarding ‘race’ and racism are silenced in queer politics and theory.  Out of Place was very well received.  […]

The government of President Leonel Fernández, with the support of the powerful Catholic Church and the far right (known as the Nazionalistas), will soon adopt a new constitution that will set the country back decades. The new constitution is part of a ruling class attack on working people in a desperate attempt to preserve the […]

  Play now: Doug Henwood: What I think I like about your work is that you don’t romanticize the working class.  Your story of the town you grew up in, the community that is very stratified by ethnicity, race, and religion — this is not an innocent, dynamic working class that we would like to […]

Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa, one of the most celebrated voices of Latin America, died on Sunday, 4 October 2009, at the age of 74 after a long illness, according to the announcement by the hospital where she had been under intensive care since 18 September 2009. Nicknamed “La Negra,” she won the hearts and minds […]

  I don’t want to serve. . . .  I think that in fighting in the cinema, through our movies, for a freer, more authentic expression, with weapons that can include joie de vivre and comedy, we are waging the same war as those who fight on the barricades. — Dušan Makavejev (1971) Infamous Yugoslavian […]