Subjects Archives: Marxism

  • Bolivia: Indigenous Government Defies US-backed Fascists

    Relative calm has returned to Bolivia following a three-week offensive of violence and terrorism launched by the US-backed right-wing opposition denounced by Bolivian President Evo Morales as a “civil coup.” This campaign of terror, centered on the four resource-rich eastern departments (Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni, and Tarija) known as the media luna (half moon), was […]

  • Women of Venezuela’s PSUV

    Canadian socialist Jeffery R. Webber interviews women leaders of PSUV in the state of Mérida. Teresa Mora and María Linares at the PSUV’s Mérida headquarters In the early afternoon of September 8, 2008, I sat down at the state headquarters of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), in the city of Mérida, for an […]

  • Venezuela’s Bolivarian Process, Democracy, and Socialism: A View from the PSUV in Mérida

    Canadian socialist Jeffery R. Webber interviewed Oscar González, Coordinator of Organization of Social Movements for Popular Power in the Mérida branch of  the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) – Mérida, Venezuela, September 5, 2008. JRW: First, can we start off with your name and position in this organization? Oscar González The PSUV headquarters in […]

  • The APPO Two Years On: Where Now for Oaxaca’s Social Movement?

    This fall in Oaxaca marks a season of commemorations.  Already marches for fallen APPO members Jose Jimenez Colmenares and Lorenzo San Pablo Cervantes have woven their ways through the streets of the city, pausing at the spots they were murdered in 2006, holding ceremonies at the Cathedral.  Twenty-four more such processions await Oaxaca in the […]

  • Radical Women National Conference: The Persistent Power of Socialist Feminism

    October 3-6, 2008 San Francisco The Women’s Building, 3543 18th St. Speakers Embattled civil liberties attorney Lynne Stewart Activists and scholars from Central America, China, Australia, and the U.S. Key topics Multi-racial organizing in a society divided by racism The dynamic leadership of youth and queers Women of color and immigrant women spark a labor […]

  • Anti-Maoism, McCarthyism, and the Indian State

    Being the only “policeman” who “has ever risen to so much influence in India,” Indian National Security Adviser MK Narayanan seldom minces words in revealing the designs of the Indian State for “national security.”  He recently pronounced the focus of the state’s strategy against leftist militancy in the country.  In an interview with the Straits […]

  • Marxist Bestsellers Increase JCP Membership and Alarm Conservatives in Japan

      The Japanese Communist Party is suddenly attracting many new members.  According to the party’s press release, the membership peaked at 500,000 in 1990 when it began its decline, and it has been hovering around 400,000 over the last ten years, but 9,000 have joined the party since the JCP central committee’s fifth general meeting […]

  • Help Keep the Marian Residence for Women Open

    With sincere apologies for such short notice: please send messages of support for Marian Residence, a shelter and transitional housing program for homeless women in San Francisco, to SF mayor’s office, if possible in advance of press conference on Wednesday, August 20, at 11 a.m. (and please copy messages to for purposes of a tally). […]

  • Hiroshima Message, 2008

      This is Vanunu Mordechai from East Jerusalem. I’m the man who exposed Israel’s atomic secretes 22 years ago, in 1986, sentenced to 18 years in prison. Now, since my release in 2004, I have not been allowed to leave Israel. I’m still under Israel’s power, imprisoned in East Jerusalem. Today, I’m reading my message […]

  • From Black Power to Ethnic Politics: Class Contradictions of Black Nationalism

    Cedric Johnson.  Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics.   University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Cedric Johnson‘s Revolutionaries to Race Leaders traces the ideological cooptation of one of the twentieth century’s most vibrant social movements.  The Black Nationalist resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s demanded nothing short of self-determination, […]

  • The Turkish Crisis, the Generals, and the Left

    For the last several months Turkey has been immersed in a major political crisis as various sections of the Turkish ruling classes openly feud.  It has pitted the ruling, Islamic-influenced AKP government against sections of the Turkish military, political, and judicial elites.  It is also dispute over the direction of Turkish economic restructuring as well […]

  • New Books by Marta Harnecker and Michael A. Lebowitz for Debate on Socialism

    3 August 2008 — The Fundación Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM), in contribution to the necessary debate on how to build the kind of socialism we want, announces the publication of two important contributions to this debate: El camino al desarrollo humano: ¿capitalismo o socialismo? (The Road to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?) by Michael A. […]

  • If Socialism Fails: The Spectre of 21st Century Barbarism

    From the first day it appeared online, Climate and Capitalism’s masthead has carried the slogan “Ecosocialism or Barbarism: there is no third way.”  We’ve been quite clear that ecosocialism is not a new theory or brand of socialism — it is socialism with Marx’s important insights on ecology restored, socialism committed to the fight against […]

  • Narrating Women’s Roles and Resistance in Palestinian Politics

      Frances Hasso.  Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan.  Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East Series. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005.  ix + 231 pp.  Bibliography, index.  $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8156-3087-6. Frances Hasso makes abundantly clear what her book, Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan, […]

  • Rethinking Venezuelan Politics

    Steve Ellner.  Rethinking Venezuelan Politics: Class, Conflict, and the Chavez Phenomenon.   Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 2008. Since the arrival of Hugo Chavez on the Venezuelan scene — and later, for the left and the right, on the world scene — he’s been the source of considerable interest.  Is he a new caudillo in […]

  • The Rise of Food Fascism: Allied to Global Agribusiness, Agrarian Elite Foments Coup in Bolivia

      Like many third-world countries, Bolivia is experiencing food shortages and rising food prices attributable to a global food marketing system driven by multinational agribusiness corporations.  With sixty percent of the Bolivian population living in poverty and thirty-three percent in extreme poverty, the price of the basic food canasta — including wheat, rice, corn, soy […]

  • Lebanon: Five Reasons That Demand Women’s Participation in Government

    In his book entitled Silence of the Poor, French writer Henri Guillemin said that those who were the foundation of the victory of the Revolution of 1789, the urban and rural poor, including women, were excluded from politics by an electoral law giving the right to elect and be elected only to citizens who could […]

  • Bolivia: Between Popular Reform and Illegal Resistance

      Two members from a rightwing Santa Cruz youth group were arrested outside the Trompillo airport on June 19 with a rifle, telescopic sight, and 300 rounds of ammunition in a purported assassination attempt on President Evo Morales.  In an unprecedented and highly questionable move, the accused were freed the very next day by a […]

  • Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the American Empire

    Narrated by Viggo Mortensen.  Art by Mike Konopacki.  Video editing by Eric Wold.  The video is based on Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle, A People’s History of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2008). | | Print

  • Sex sans the City (A Post-Marxist Preview)

    Many capitalist roaders say the Left is out of touch with popular culture.  Well, I say NYET to that!  Here, for instance, is an episode of Sex and the City that I translated for my Marxist-Leninist study group, so that we may better throw off our Tiffany chains. [Scene I: Chic, Upper West Side restaurant] […]