Subjects Archives: Marxism

My sources have just confirmed this now.  The Cairo Public Transportation workers, who started a strike today in six garages — Nasr Station, Fateh Station, Ter’a Station, Amiriya Station, Mezzalat Station, Sawwah Station — have issued a statement with a list of demands, calling for overthrowing Mubarak.  No public buses will roam Cairo tomorrow, except […]

In a speech attacking ‘multiculturalism’ Prime Minister David Cameron argued for a “muscular liberalism” that would actively confront “extremist” ideologies — principally radical Islamism — that fail to conform to “Western values”.  The problem is not with Islam per se, he argued, but with those “distortion[s]” of Islam that reject “democracy, the rule of law, […]

Message from WSF 2011 “Neoliberal” globalization, thoroughly bankrupt, is now indeed on the defensive.  It has no legitimacy.  And people in revolt illustrate that.  In Latin America and Nepal, today in Egypt and Tunisia, and tomorrow elsewhere in the South, gigantic popular upsurges are felling regimes that were once at its service. Autocratic regimes are […]

István Mészáros.  Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Volume I: The Social Determination of Method.  Monthly Review Press, 2010.  463 pp. It is always infuriating to read in any mainstream publication the typical smug commentary on some erstwhile left-academic who had come to reject the ‘determinism’ of Marx’s theory of history.  It is one of […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.   | Print

The West has financed dictatorships in the Middle East and Arab World for more than a century. The pro-democracy protests against Western-backed dictatorships in the Arab world have shown, once again, the immense hypocrisy of our rulers.  Which side are the Western governments on — the side of protesters or the side of dictators?  The […]

  Protests sweeping Egypt have done more than raise hopes of democratic change.  Egypt’s women are hoping this might mark the start of a new era for them as well.  Women have been on the frontlines of the demonstrations, braving tear gas and gunfire, to call for the unseating of President Hosni Mubarak.  They helped […]

  “As soon as I saw the defiant tone and substance of Mubarak’s speech, I realized that he is not speaking for himself but for the US/Israeli sponsors. . . .  I just read the speech by Obama: it confirmed my suspicion, that basically Mubarak was permitted by the US to do with the Egyptian […]

So not only did Vodafone have a disgraceful role during the April 2008 Mahalla uprising, now also the company is sending out text messages announcing pro-Mubarak’s protests. Massive demonstration to start at noon this Wednesday from Mustafa Mahmoud Square, in support of President Mubarak Can activists in the UK sue the mother company? Hossam el-Hamalawy […]

A Plenary Address at the American Studies Association Presidential Panel, San Antonio, Texas, 18 November 2010 For Ruthie Gilmore. I am an imposter here: not a real American Studies scholar.  I went to graduate school in the late 1980s to study History and Anthropology.  My interest was in the contemporary history of India.  When I […]

Many of the most interesting — and from a left perspective, most disturbing — developments in U.S. politics today are occurring at the state level.  As the excellent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, the aftermath of the recession wrought by the financial crisis has plunged virtually every U.S. state into a deep […]

Towards the close to what is arguably Karl Marx’s most well-known treatment of religion appears the following sentence: Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation.  As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher . . . But if Protestantism was […]

  The attack on the public sector through pay freezes, furloughs, layoffs, and proposed cuts is also an attack on Black and Latino workers. Cuts to social safety nets hit Blacks and Latinos hardest. Video by United for a Fair Economy. Read United for a Fair Economy, “State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom?,” […]

  Excerpt: As family and work patterns have shifted over recent decades, the demand for time off from work to address family needs has grown rapidly.  Women — and increasingly men as well — often find themselves caught between the competing pressures of paid work and family responsibilities, especially when they become parents, or when […]

Bolivian President Evo Morales repealed on Friday night the decree issued five days ago to raise gasoline prices, after a meeting with his cabinet, trade unions, and social organizations in La Paz.

Introduction Molière’s 1670 his play, The Bourgeois Gentleman, presented before the court of Louis XIV, mocked a foolish, social-climbing merchant.  In his effort to remake himself, the merchant takes lessons to help him pass as an aristocrat.  In a basic lesson on language, he is both surprised and delighted to learn he had been speaking […]

The recent visit of two Afro-Colombians to the Boggs Center started me thinking dialectically about the paradigm shift in the concept and practice of Solidarity made necessary and possible by corporate globalization. In 1997 these Afro-Colombians, members of a small farming community in Uraba, Colombia, were among those displaced when a joint paramilitary and U.S.-backed […]

  Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman is a slim but muscular volume, whose pithy prose goes straight to the heart of the challenges currently facing contemporary feminism.  Constructed as a series of short, cut-to-the-chase essays on a diverse range of ‘raw-nerve’ topics, from Sarah Palin and the War on Iraq to the veil and pornography, […]

  Shahla Haeri: There are many misconceptions, but unfortunately the media are so very powerful.  The image that they have created has become so powerful that it becomes very difficult for people to get any other image, any other perceptions, of women in their mind.  There is this tendency to categorize, to generalize and lump […]

In his essay, “Degrow or Die?” in the December/January 2011 Red Pepper magazine, John Bellamy Foster criticized degrowth advocates’ proposals for shorter working hours as not “dealing with the unemployment problem directly” and as not being viable on a broad scale unless they were part of a transition to “a post-capitalist (indeed socialist) society.”  In […]