Subjects Archives: Marxism

  Has Canada become an imperialist state, as some on the Left argue?  On the surface, a case can be made.  Why did Canada participate in the kidnapping and expulsion of Haiti’s elected head of state, Jean-Bertrand Aristide?  Why are Canadian troops fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan while supporting a regime dominated by feudal warlords?  […]

FIGARO-Autor Siegfried Stadler bringt beides zusammen: die Märchen von Marx und die Märchen der Brüder Grimm.  Herausgekommen ist eine Radio-Märchenserie. “Es war einmal …” Karl Marx war ein Märchenerzähler.  Und das ist noch freundlich ausgedrückt, aus der Sicht derer, die ihn für den Begründer des real – existierenden Sozialismus halten, der den Menschen die Freiheit […]

Critical students of ethnically coded nationalism would agree: propagating the glory of “our” race or culture almost always entails the suppression of equal status for the race or culture that is represented as its other.  West Asia is no exception.  Iranian and Arab identity politics thwarted, perverted, and dismembered communitarian thinking for long periods in […]

Pauline Kael, the American film critic, once said that Gillo Pontecorvo was the most dangerous kind of Marxist: a Marxist poet.  When the Italian film director died last week at the age of 86, he had not made a full-length feature in over twenty-five years.  Yet the potency of Pontecorvo’s firebrand poetry can still be […]

For much of the period from the 70s through the 80s, I was quite concerned with the way in which Third World movements for national liberation were sidelining women’s issues and relegating these to the background.  In this piece I centerstage the Philippines which I believe may serve as an illustrative case.  Let me try […]

“Philosophy always comes on the scene too late.” — G.W.F. Hegel1 “They say we don’t stand for anything.  We do stand for anything.”  — Sen. Barack Obama2 For years it’s been a political commonplace to observe that the Republicans represent the party of ideas while the Democrats are the stupid party.  Even Bush-phobic Democrats like […]

Thursday, October 19 Que(e)rying Islamophobia: Race, Sexuality and Imperialism Reza Abbasi, “Two Lovers” (ca. 1630) Discourses of race, gender and sexuality have always served an important ideological function within imperialist projects, and the current phase of American imperialism, characterized by the War on Terror, is no exception.  Given the contemporary geo-political context, this imperialist project […]

WE ARE NOT WHAT WE SEEM: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century by Roderick D. BushBUY THIS BOOK Roderick Bush is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at St. John’s University in New York.  He is the author of We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in […]

  “We believe the production or use of nuclear weapons is immoral.” — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Hours after he spoke to the United Nations, the Iranian president made this clear, unequivocal statement to a group of us during a private meeting in New York.  The Mennonite Central Committee organized an extraordinary, private session for […]

The Second International’s Marxism, proletarian-and-European-centered, shared with the dominant ideology of that period a linear view of history—a view according to which all societies had first to pass through a stage of capitalist development (a stage whose seeds were being planted by colonialism which, by that very fact, was “historically positive”) before being able to aspire to socialism. The idea that the “development” of some (the dominating centers) and the “underdevelopment” of others (the dominated peripheries) were as inseparable as the two faces of a single coin, both being immanent outcomes of capitalism’s worldwide expansion, was completely alien to it

  Prodded by Amnesty International (AI), the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Asian Human Rights Commission, Reporters Without Borders, and other international organizations, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo recently cobbled a group to look into the allegations of massive human rights violations — over 729 victims of extrajudicial killings, and 180 involuntary “disappearances,” by the latest count — during her […]

To the Government of India, Members of the Judiciary, and All Citizens, To build a truly democratic and plural India, we must collectively fight against laws and policies that abuse human rights and limit fundamental freedoms. This is why we, concerned Indian citizens and people of Indian origin, support the overturning of Section 377 of […]

Michael Lebowitz, Martha Harnecker y Luis Bonilla.  Credito: MIGUEL ACURERO Caracas.  A pesar de tener activo cinco meses, ayer viernes fue presentado oficialmente el Centro Internacional Miranda (CMI), que tendrá como objetivo determinar los aspectos ideológicos que enmarcarán el proceso de transformación del país hacia el modo del socialismo del siglo XXI, con la participación […]

Racism against Arabs and Muslims long preceded the 9-11 terrorist attacks and has much of its roots in Western imperialism in the Middle East, especially Israel’s colonization of Palestine.  Yet, the escalation that we witness today can be traced to the war on terror launched after 9-11 by Bush and his neoconservative ideologues with the […]

It was Jay Gould who once bragged that he could pay half the working class to kill the other half.  In American labor history, that often meant fomenting and exploiting racism to divide and conquer.  Apparently, CBS wants to give us a TV metaphor for it: it announced that the contestants on the upcoming season […]

  Paul LeBlanc Paul LeBlanc is what I have called an “organic intellectual,” a scholar and activist who has risen directly out of the working class.  Paul is the author of many books, including A Short History of the U.S. Working Class (Humanity Books, 1999) and Black Liberation and the American Dream (Humanity Books 2003), […]

Matti Bunzl‘s work entitled “Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe,” published in American Ethnologist (Vol. 32, No. 4, November 2005), is groundbreaking.  It is evident from the article, as well as the commentaries on it that appeared in the same issue, that, to understand contemporary Europe, we need to rethink some […]

We, the undersigned — lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers — seek to offer friends and colleagues everywhere a new vision for securing governmental and private institutional recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families.  In so doing, we hope […]

A LOVE POEM24 July 2006 Some readers of my open letter to Amos Oz have been posing questions to me regarding how to deal with a group that calls for the destruction of Israel.  They tell me they are sick of Israel being described by the Left as inherently evil. I do not believe there […]

  The Current Crisis in Israel, Lebanon, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories — Bat Shalom Statement We, members of Bat Shalom, an Israeli women’s peace organization, dedicated to ending the occupation and achieving a just, sustainable peace based on a two-state solution, regard the continuously escalating use of violence and force in our region as […]