Subjects Archives: Marxism

  • Anti-Arab Racism, Islam, and the Left

    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 […]

  • Game Show Theory: Race, Class, and Survivor

    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 […]

  • Interview with Paul LeBlanc

      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), […]

  • A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the Nation-State

    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 […]

  • Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships

    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 […]

  • I Don’t Want to Love You, But I Do

    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

      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 […]

  • McDonough Calls Canada’s Gov’t on War Crime Complicity

    July 14, 2006 Hon. Peter MacKay Minister of Foreign Affairs Lester B. Pearson Bldg., A-10 125 Sussex Dr. Ottawa, ON K1A 0G2 Dear Minister, I write to express outrage at your government’s response to the destruction levelled by Israel on the innocent civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. The world has rightly condemned the killings and […]

  • Impeach the President of the United States

    We have pledged to help reclaim the honor of the United States of America.  Accordingly, we call for the impeachment of the president of the United States, George W. Bush. Since lying in combat could needlessly cost the lives of fighting men and women, West Point graduates have been trained to live by a code […]

  • “Seeger Sessions”:Springsteen Makes Folk Classics Come Alive

    I was fortunate enough to attend the Bruce Springsteen “Seeger Sessions” concert in Saratoga Springs, New York, Monday. June 19th. The current Springsteen tour is in support of his new album, We Shall Overcome:The Seeger Sessions, inspired by a request to do a Pete Seeger song for a tribute, which morphed, according to Springsteen, into […]

  • Some Comments on the Class Foundations of the Occupation

      The original Hebrew version of this article was published in Teoria ve-Bikoret [Theory and Criticism] 24 (2004): 203-211. I Two main processes have shaped the character of Israeli society in the past three decades: the privatization revolution and the perpetuation of the occupation.  The underlying interdependence of these two processes has comprised the political […]

  • State and Gender Violence in Atenco [Violencia de Estado, Violencia de Género en Atenco]

    ¿Qué mujer en México, sin importar sus ideas, puede honestamente quedarse callada? Los días 3 y 4 de mayo del 2006, quedarán en la memoria de los habitantes de San Salvador Atenco, como unos de los días más tristes y violentos de su historia contemporánea.  Este pueblo, de unos 33 mil habitantes, dependientes aún de […]

  • Queen Hussein

      The Palestinian gay and lesbian community has yet to leave the closet, but it’s on its way.  Today it’s possible to go to parties of gays from the Occupied Territories and see young residents of the West Bank perform drag.  They have not told their mother about this, but one day they intend to […]

  • Identity, Class, and Bite Me, David Horowitz

    All my life, I have wanted to be a cutting-edge, Queer Studies academic.  And now that I have written my first opus deconstructing a Western literary classic, I am!  All I have to do is send this in to the London Review of Books, and wait to be mercilessly attacked by rightwing critics like David […]

  • First Working-Class Film and Video Festival in Turkey a “Resounding Success”

      The first international working-class film and video festival titled “Against Neo-Liberalism, 20 Countries and 40 Films” was held in Turkey in early May 2006 — a resounding success.  Over 8,000 attended the various film screenings, and, for the first time, working people in Turkey had an opportunity to see the global struggle of other […]

  • Immigration and Class

    Migration between countries occurs if and when it “resolves” social and especially class contradictions inside both of them.  One set of contradictions pushes people out of a country just as another set of contradictions in other countries pulls them in.  Finally, while migration “resolves” some social contradictions, it likewise engenders or aggravates others. These days, […]

  • Nepal and Venezuela:For Popular Democracy, against Ceremonial Democracy

    Any serious and honest survey of the Maoist movement would convey the truth that its main agenda has been to establish essential democratic institutions that devolve political and economic power to the masses.   In every negotiation with the King and the parliamentary forces, the Maoists have asked for an unconditional constituent assembly, during whose election […]

  • Filipino American Hip-Hop and Class Consciousness: Renewing the Spirit of Carlos Bulosan

    “Filipino writers in the Philippines [and the United States] have a great task ahead of them, but also a great future.  The field is wide open.  They should rewrite everything written about the Philippines and the Filipino people from the materialist, dialectical point of view — this being, the only [way] to understand and interpret […]

  • Minneapolis-St. Paul, 9 April 2006

      Yiwen Cheng lives in Kansas City, and Stephen Philion lives in Minneapolis.

  • The “Dirty Thirty’s” Peter McLaren Reflects on the Crisis of Academic Freedom

    Peter McLaren David Gabbard and Karen Anijar Appleton, “Fearless Speech in Fearful Times: An Essay Review of Capitalists and Conquerors, Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism, and Teaching Peter McLaren,” MRZine, 30 October 2005 Peter McLaren is Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of […]