Subjects Archives: Marxism

The number of films on national figures like Gandhi, Ambedkar, Savarkar, and Bhagat Singh, as well as films like Lagaan and Gadar, in recent years point to an interest in revaluation and reinterpretation of history, especially that of the freedom struggle, in India. That this has happened in the last few years needs an explanation. […]

Monthly Review‘s July-August issue, focused on the theme of “Socialism for the 21st Century,” made me ponder the question of possible working-class organizing in the 21st century to build resistance to capitalism, the resistance that can dialectically develop into socialism. Harry Magdoff and Fred Magdoff wrote in “Approaching Socialism”: “[I]ntellectuals and specialists cannot derive a […]

The exiled German philosopher Walter Benjamin, 48 years old, portly and with a heart condition, joined a hiking tour group in Banyuls-sur-Mer on the French side of the Pyrenees on September 24, 1940. He had no backpack, only a briefcase. He let the group return without him and spent the night on the open hillside. […]

It had been five years since I last set foot in China as a graduate student doing research on Chinese workers’ protests of privatization in Zhengzhou City, the (ironic) site of the February 7th incident memorial that commemorates the repression of the first general strike against colonial administrators of the rail system in 19231  In […]

  [Peter Berkowitz is a long-time Monthly Review subscriber. He was in New Orleans bringing his son Ernesto to begin his freshman year at Loyola when they were caught in the hurricane. Peter and Ernesto spent five days on the street by the Convention Center. Below is a letter Peter sent to his mother upon […]

In the Spring of 2005, workers’ votes in France and the Netherlands made the difference in defeating the draft European constitution and ending socialist party control of the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg. In the few weeks after those momentous events, most politicians and reporters offered one basic explanation. It tells us much more about the […]

Two films, Paheli and Matrubhumi: A Nation without Women, hit theatres in India within weeks of each other. Significantly, both the films, directed by Amol Palekar and Manish Jha respectively, have or claim to have women at the centre of their discourse. In the promos of Paheli, the producer-actor Shah Rukh Khan talked of the […]

See the Bible. The Bible is a textbook. It is all you will ever need to know about anthropology, zoology, astronomy, psychology, or nuclear fission. Why is the Bible all you need to know? Because President George W. Bush said that the theory of “Intelligent Design” should be taught along with the Darwinian theory of […]

“So far as I am aware,” wrote Paul Sweezy in 1973, “the political economy of the automobile has never been subjected to serious analysis in the Marxian literature.” Amazingly, despite the apparent onset of global warming, “peak oil,” and permanent petro-war, Sweezy’s observation remains true today.  We Marxians have not yet begun to do more […]

  |

Because Japan chose to invade several colonial outposts of the West, the war in the Pacific laid bare the inherent racism of the colonial structure. In the United States and Britain, the Japanese were more hated than the Germans. The race card was played to the hilt through a variety of Allied propaganda methods. Spurred […]

Although the widely celebrated consumer sovereignty allows people to choose whether to consume Coke or Pepsi, nobody could even dream of suggesting that workers can act as sovereign individuals within their place of employment. Ideologists mouth comforting platitudes that depict people as sovereign individuals in their role as consumers, but obviously ultimate control of the […]

[The following is the concluding section of Michael A. Lebowitz’s talk “Socialism Doesn’t Drop from the Sky,” presented to the National Conference of Revolutionary Students for the Construction of Socialism of the XXI Century in Merida, Venezuela on 24 July 2005. — Ed.] In the same way that Marx was prepared to change his own […]

Hey, lady. You got a problem with my hat? I mean, look. I was just walking down Fort Washington Avenue, minding my own business on my way to the A Train, and you — an ordinary, middle-aged white lady in a blue plaid housedress — stop to glare at my hat. How friendly is that? […]

  Good morning. President Hargrove, leaders, and members of the Canadian Auto Workers, I wish to thank you very much for inviting me to speak with you today. This is a great honor and I have been looking forward to this opportunity. If all goes according to some plans, by the end of July, the […]

This past winter we heard reports of a heated dispute within the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), the guiding party of the revolutionary struggle in Nepal. The old regime in Nepal, a brutal military dictatorship under King Gyanendra Shah, on February 1st, 2005, carried out a coup against the remnants of legality within that part of the country it still controlled—the central valley of Nepal (containing the capital Kathmandu), and the area immediately surrounding the army’s fortified bases elsewhere, primarily in district towns. The rest of the country has been liberated, and is self-governing under revolutionary leadership, with the CPN(M) playing the leading role. But Nepal’s limited communication links with the rest of the world are concentrated in Kathmandu, and the royal military government was able to sever all links not under its control at the time of the February 1st coup. Under these circumstances it was not possible to determine the trustworthiness of the various reports of the dispute with the CPN(M) leadership

[The following is a speech delivered by Jerry Tucker on March 12, 2005 at the conference on “Work and Social Movements in the United States” at University of Paris – Sorbonne (March 10-12, 2005). Tucker will report daily on the AFL-CIO 2005 convention in Chicago on July 25-28. — Ed.] There is today a rare […]

Many reading the Wall Street Journal on May 13, 2005, must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief, looked back and then rubbed them again. A front page story headlined “As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls” informed the largely business readership of that paper that the old Benjamin Franklin-Horatio Alger myth of […]

Who is the most cited and discussed economist in the world? Don’t waste time looking among Nobel Prize winners and other stars of the mainstream media. André Gunder Frank is by far the most cited and most discussed, as shown by a number of studies on the subject and by the more than 30,000 entries he has on the Internet

I met André Gunder Frank and his wife Marta Fuentes in 1967. Our long conversation convinced us that we were intellectually on the same wavelength. “Modernization Theory,” then dominant, ascribed the “underdevelopment” of the Third World to the retarded and incomplete formation of its capitalist institutions. Marxist orthodoxy, as represented by the Communist Parties, presented its own version of this view and characterized Latin America as “semi-feudal.” Frank put forward a new and entirely different thesis: that from its very origins Latin America had been constructed within the framework of capitalist development as the periphery of the newly arising centers of Europe’s Atlantic seabord. For my part, I had undertaken to analyze the integration of Asia and Africa into the capitalist system in light of the requirements of “accumulation on a global scale,” a process that by its inner logic had to produce a polarization of wealth and power