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Interview with Michael Heinrich: “There Simply Aren’t Any Easy Solutions to Which One Can Adhere”
Michael Heinrich is a political scientist and mathematician in Berlin and a member of the editorial board of Prokla — journal for critical social science. Below is an interview with the “. . . ums Ganze!” [. . . All or Nothing!] coalition. “…ums Ganze!”: The federal government has staked out a position for the […]
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Building It Now in Venezuela: Socialism for the 21st Century (Parts 1-8)
Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, winner of the Isaac Deutscher memorial prize for 2004, and Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, just published by Monthly Review Press. The videos were […]
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Violence of the Master, Violence of the Slave [Violencia del amo, violencia del esclavo]
Por alguna razón, la frase “la violencia engendra violencia” se popularizó en todo el mundo al mismo tiempo que su significado implícito se mantenía restringido a la violencia del oprimido. Es decir, la violencia del amo sobre el esclavo es invisible en un estado de esclavitud, como en un estado de opresión la fuerza que […]
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Saadia Toor and Kourosh Shemirani on Liberal Imperialism and Women and Queers in Iran
Listen to Saadia Toor (Assistant Professor, Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, College of Staten Island) and Kourosh Shemirani (of the Queer Iranian Alliance) on Doug Henwood’s Behind the News (WBAI, 99.5 FM, 31 May 2007) on liberal imperialism and how Western leftists should think about the conditions of women and LGBTQ people in Iran and […]
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Interview with Michael Thompson: “New Conservatism” and the Student Left
Michael Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University, is the editor of the recently published Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America (NYU Press). What motivated you to edit a collection on “New Conservatism”? The motivation was two-fold. First, there was a real need to dissect American conservatism […]
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Class Considerations in a Globalized Economic Order
The following is the text of Delia D. Aguilar’s keynote address at the 22-23 March 2007 Pacific Northwest Regional Conference of the National Association for Chicana/o Studies, University of Washington: “Class Dismissed? Reintegrating Critical Studies of Class into Chicana and Chicano Studies.” — Ed. I cannot begin to tell you how delighted I am at […]
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Do Zionists Run America?
James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006) 190 pages, $16.95 paperback. Widely known as an expert in Latin American history and social movements, and a prolific critic of U.S. imperialism, James Petras has ventured forth in his latest book The Power of Israel in the United States, and […]
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On the Jewish Presence in Iranian History
When the chairman of Iran’s Jewish Council, Haroun Yashayaei, criticized President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a letter condemning his remarks on the Holocaust, he was supported by a range of Iranian intellectuals, artists, poets, and others both within the country and without. For those amongst us with some understanding about the Jewish presence in Iranian history, […]
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“We Talk about the Truth, and That’s Hard for People to Accept Sometimes”:A Conversation with Three Iraq Veterans against the War
When I was in high school, I lived on a military base and socialized and worked with GIs opposed to the war in Vietnam. These guys weren’t very different from me — we liked rock and soul music and we liked to get high — yet most of them had experienced war. That was something […]
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Neoliberalism and Canada’s Ruling Class
For a discipline explicitly engaged in the study of power, particularly as exercised in liberal democracies, it is striking how little Canadian political science has actually examined the concentration of private economic power, the political organization of the business classes and the extension of that power into the political realm. Indeed, Canadian political science has […]
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Wynton Marsalis Checks In on The Land That Never Has Been Yet: A Review of From the Plantation to the Penitentiary (Blue Note, 2007)
I’ve been listening to Wynton Marsalis’ new disc From the Plantation to the Penitentiary a lot. It’s got the music — a neat jazz combo running through a variety of styles. It’s just enough bop and bebop so it doesn’t put one to sleep like a Kenny G. solo, but it’s not an avalanche of […]
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Against Party Bureaucracy: Venezuela’s PSUV and Socialism from Below
In recent weeks, it has become clear that three of the major parties constituting the Chavista coalition will not immediately dissolve themselves to pave the way for the construction of the unified socialist party (PSUV) that president Hugo Chávez has demanded be created to usher in the next phase of the revolution. These “dissidents” include […]
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The Brotherhood of Warriors:1 The Love That Binds Us
We talk often of military service in war as a civic and patriotic duty. But as the realities of combat and of the battlefield become apparent, patriotic sentiments, political ideologies, and mythologies fade quickly beneath the screams of the unbearable pain of the mutilated and the dying. Ultimately, warriors fight, kill, and accept injury and […]
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Que(e)rying Islamophobia: Race, Sexuality, and Imperialism
Tune in to Out-FM this Monday the 12th of March at 11:00 AM on Pacifica Radio WBAI at 99.5 FM and at www.wbai.org. Brad Taylor hosts a discussion with CUNY- Staten Island Professor Saadia Toor and Kourosh Shemirani of Qiam (Queer Iranian Alliance) stemming from the discussion event hosted by Professor Toor at CUNY’s […]
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The Imperfect Sex: Why Is Sor Juana Not a Saint? [El sexo imperfecto. ¿Por qué Sor Juana no es Santa?]
Cada poder hegemónico en cada tiempo establece los límites de lo normal y, en consecuencia, de lo natural. Así, el poder que ordenaba la sociedad patriarcal se reservaba (se reserva) el derecho incuestionable de definir qué era un hombre y qué era una mujer. Cada vez que algún exaltado recurre al mediocre argumento de que […]
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U.S. Imperialism and Arroyo Regime in the Philippines on Trial at the Permanent People’s Tribunal, the Hague
An interview with Luis Jalandoni, chairperson of the National Democratic Front-Philippines Negotiating Panel, follows E. San Juan, Jr.’s analysis. The February visit of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, Prof. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, reconfirmed the barbarism of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s de facto martial-law regime in the Philippines. Stavenhagen bewailed the worsening pattern of […]
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Ammunition against the Empire
Need a crash course on the present state of the world? Want to untangle the terminology, separate the victims from the victimizers, understand the dynamics of unilateralism, and deduce what can be done about it all? I’d like to introduce you to a small literary arsenal. A good place to begin is the book […]
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Uses of History: Rang De Basanti and Lage Raho Munnabhai
The present being a product of the past, our attempt to understand history is a part of our endeavor to understand ourselves and shape our world today. However, it is also true that often our understanding of the present determines the way we look at history. So, when it is popular imagination that is involved […]
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Consuming Karl
Now that I have mastered the art of writing for social change, I have decided to become a famous literary agent! Of course, before I open my own agency, I’ll need to practice editing. Luckily, the right manuscript recently came to my attention, and I have just finished crafting this cutting-edge feedback. Dear Karl Marx […]
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Lebanon: Women against Civil War and Sectarian Divisions [Liban : Les femmes contre la guerre civile et les divisions confessionnelles]
Les derniers développements politiques au Liban, notamment les événements sanglants du jeudi 26 janvier, ont poussé les représentantes de 15 associations féminines libanaises (dont la « Ligue des droits de la femme libanaise », l’« Association « Wardé Boutros » des femmes communistes », « Kafa », « Les dames de Choueifat »…) ainsi que […]