Subjects Archives: Marxism

  Michael Lebowitz.  The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.  Pp 192; $15.95 Only about ten or fifteen years ago, leftist theory was in a sorry state.  It seemed as if socialism had ceased to be a viable project with the fall of the Soviet Union.  Instead of an alternative […]

Apparently, my skirt was too short for “West Beirut” according to my relative, who lives in “East Beirut.”  She was certain I would get harassed.  She did not delve deeply into the issue, but simply reiterated that the “type of people” who lived in “West Beirut” were not open-minded enough for short skirts and did […]

  On 17 January 1961 Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic first and only elected prime minister of Congo, was brutally murdered.  The circumstances of his death remain a mystery, the identity of his killers unknown. In 1956 Lumumba was a post office clerk; four years later he would be prime minister.  In between he had been […]

“If Katy Perry read Marx, her music would probably sound something like this.” Video by bphillis.  To the tune of “I Kissed a Girl.” | Print

  Act I In the second half of the 1990s, at the onset of his first term as Brazil’s president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, or FHC for short, faced a dilemma.  To honor his recent conversion to the Washington Consensus, he had to get rid of State companies to make money to pay the interests on […]

Maziar Behrooz.  Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran.  I.B. Tauris, 2000. The role of the left in the Iranian Revolution is complicated, what Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek would call the ‘vanishing mediator’ of the event.  The fact that at their peak Iranian Marxists commanded the loyalty of millions, and […]

  This month, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution to tighten sanctions on Iran, imposing a ban on arms sales and expanding a freeze on assets of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in response to the country’s uranium-enrichment activities, which Tehran says are for peaceful purposes but other countries contend are driven […]

(PU) A recently released study has found that heterosexuals can, with effort, become gay.  Eighty-six percent of a survey group of straight women and men were able, through various forms of reparative therapy, to transform their sexual orientation and achieve “good homosexual functioning.” Dr. Marvin Flabcock, of the American Psychiatric and Floral Design Association, conducted […]

  [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad said in a June 12 television interview that the government has “no role” in the fight against “bad veiling” and social behaviors that are considered un-Islamic and immoral. “The government has nothing to do with it and doesn’t interfere in it.  We consider it insulting when a man and a […]

  Colin Leys is an honorary professor of politics at Goldsmiths College London, who has worked in the UK, Africa and Canada.  He was until recently the co-editor of Socialist Register.  One of Colin’s books is Market-Driven Politics.  A week before the UK general election Edward Lewis spoke to him about some of the themes […]

The climate crisis and efforts to tackle it have witnessed unprecedented mobilisation of popular movements, NGOs, think tanks, experts, intellectuals and activists, as was evident at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen last December.  Of course, this “civil society” activism has embraced a very wide spectrum of opinion.  Amongst the most vociferous, at various gatherings as […]

  Christopher Candland.  Labor, Democratization and Development in India and Pakistan.  London: Routledge, 2007.  216 pages. This book, by Christopher Candland, sets out to provide a documented analytical and empirical study of the linkages between organized labor, development, and democratization in India and Pakistan from the colonial period till date.  It attempts to explain why […]

  Max Lane, Unfinished Nation: Indonesia before and after Suharto, Verso, 2008. There was a time when everyone seemed to be talking about Indonesia.  Well, they were talking about it on Joe Duffy and Pat Kenny at least, and that’s as near as makes no difference in this country.  As East Timor voted to extricate […]

  The Fourth Strini Moodley Annual Memorial Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 13 May 2010 I In her historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, which is played out against the backdrop of the Great French Revolution through an illuminating character analysis and synthesis of three of that revolution’s most prominent personalities, viz., Maximilien Robespierre, Georges […]

  This year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the UAW in May 1935.  In December 1936, UAW members seized GM’s Flint plants in a sit-down strike and held on for 44 days to force GM to recognize their union.  The victory set off a wave of organizing across the Midwest.  For decades […]

$O$ Will exchange lifetime socialist jacket for lifetime Popular Party jacket Juan Kalvellido, born in Cádiz, Andalucía, Spain in 1968, is a working-class cartoonist who has never stopped believing in revolution.  He currently lives in Fuengirola, Málaga, Spain.  This cartoon was published by Rebelión on 18 May 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi […]

The student movement and the strike it has sustained for almost a month at the main campus of the state-run University of Puerto Rico (UPR), which has spread to 10 of the 11 UPR campuses, catalyzed a massive social movement convening a national strike today, May 18, 2010. As recent as October 15, 2009, a […]

The transition . . . at the expense of victims of Francoism. Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist.  This cartoon was published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 9 April 2010.  Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón was indicted, and suspended from his post on 14 […]

  On 26 April 2010, the management of Middlesex University in London, England announced that it was cutting all its philosophy programs and shutting down the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, the top-rated research department at Middlesex.  The statement below offers solidarity from Zagreb, Croatia to the campaigners to Save Middlesex Philosophy. — […]

A longtime reader of Monthly Review, and a Marxist for all his adult life, Alexander Saxton might be one of the oldest, continuously active radicals in the United States.  Born in Manhattan in 1919, he met the novelist, John Dos Passos, and the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, when he was a young man, and […]