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The uses of “populism”
CLASS struggle occurs in the realm of concepts too. The World Bank for instance systematically counters Left concepts by employing a novel tactic: it uses the very same concepts as are used by the Left, but gives them a wholly different meaning; as a result they either come to mean something entirely different from what the Left had originally meant by them, or, at the very least, they become fuzzy and hence useless to the Left. In either case the power of the Left concept is neutralised.
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Media malfunction as Sanders notes positive aspects of Latin American socialism
When 60 Minutes (2/24/20) asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about his past support for aspects of Cuba’s socialist revolution, as well as for Nicaragua’s 1979–90 leftist Sandinista government, Sanders responded by saying he opposes what he described as the “authoritarian” features of the Cuban government, while noting that after the 1959 revolution, Cuba launched “a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”
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Marx’s ‘Capital’ as a literary experience
Columbia University PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature Tiana Reid finds that her students benefit from reading volume one of Karl Marx’s “Capital.” “There are so many literary wsys to read it, which I don’t think blunt the more radical political reading,” said Reid, who conducts research in Black Studies, Marxism and feminism.
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Israel hits a brick wall
Elections are supposed to solve problems by reordering government, adopting new policies, and putting new people in control. But how many elections must Israel have before it realizes it can do none of those things because it’s caught in an intractable constitutional bind?
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Re-enchanting the world: Silvia Federici on feminism and the politics of the commons
In her recent volume Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2019), Silvia Federici fruitfully brings together feminist reflections with discussions of the commons as a possible way of overcoming capitalism.
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“Absolute freedom of critique and discussion lies at the heart of the interests of the workers’ movement, and it must be pursued at all costs.”
On Rosa Luxemburg’s birthday, we present an extract from her 1906 essay “Critique in the Workers’ Movement,” available in English for the first time.
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Johnstone brings her moral compass to our Dantesque world
It is one of the great personal accounts of the anguished decline of our uncivilization, both a riveting eye-witness account of many of the horrors and perfidies, and a primer for students of history and all those struggling to not only dismantle the beast, but to prepare us for what follows it.
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Absolutely sickening—and scary’: Man unfurls Nazi flag at Bernie Sanders rally, heightening security concerns
“All people of conscience must condemn this anti-Semitism against the most visible Jewish politician in the country.”
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Fear pervades Black politics, and makes us agents of our own oppression
Black youth see the truth, and will act on it, we are certain.
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From fossil capitalism to energy democracy?
As the 21st Century’s second decade opens, the increasingly severe symptoms of climate change comprise a pivot in the struggle for hegemony, globally and within national formations. With the highest per capital carbon emissions among the G20 states, Canada is a climate laggard and, in some respects, a first-world petro-state (Nikiforuk 2010), organized as a regime of obstruction (the title of an edited collection to be published this May, Carroll 2020d).
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We who were nothing and have become everything shall construct a new and better world
On 8 March 1917 (23 February by the old Julian calendar), a hundred women in the textile factories in Petrograd decided to go on strike; they went amongst the other factories and called their fellow workers onto the streets. Before long, around 200,000 workers–led by the women–marched through the streets.
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Mariátegui: A South American revolutionary
Hardly anyone in Australia has heard of José Carlos Mariátegui. Yet in South America he holds an important place in revolutionary history.
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Dossier no. 26: Frantz Fanon: The brightness of metal
Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique on 25 July 1925. He died in the United States, from leukaemia, on 6 December 1961. He was thirty-six years old.
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Climate change and the class divide
No, we’re not all in it together. Our rulers are responsible for the system that’s creating an ecological catastrophe. As that crisis intensifies, it’s exposing and intensifying the divide between us and them.
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Supreme Court ruling hands U.S. Border Patrol a license to kill with impunity
The Supreme Court set a dangerous precedent yesterday when it ruled in favor of the U.S. Border Patrol in the cross-border murder of a young teenage boy who was shot in the face by an overzealous agent.
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A World no longer shaped by Atlantic powers
The annual Munich Security Conference that took place February 14-16 this year turned out to be an iconic event, drawing comparison with the one held in the same Bavarian city on February 10, 2007, where in a prophetic speech Russian President Vladimir Putin had criticized the world order characterized by the United States’ global hegemony and its “almost uncontained hyper use of force—military force—in international relations.”
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Show me the words that will reorder the World, or else keep silent
On the night before Red Books Day, on 21 February 2020, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, N. Sankaraiah–one of the thirty-two founders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)–read from M. Sivalingam’s new translation into Tamil of the Communist Manifesto. Comrade Sankaraiah, age 98, said that he had first read the Manifesto at age 18. Over the years, he returns to the book because each time he reads it the brazing prose teaches him something new. And something that–sadly–seems ageless.
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The problem with private property
The conceptualisation of property in a economic sense harks back to John Locke. These days property is commonly separated into four categories.
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Chile’s U.S.-backed gov’t is shooting anti-austerity protesters, blinding and maiming by the thousands
Chile has responded to anti-neoliberal protests with brutally violent repression. 10,365 people have been detained; 3765 treated for wounds in hospitals; and 2122 shot, 445 in the eye according to a conservative estimate by the state-backed National Institute of Human Rights.
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What does it mean to be a Marxist?
What’s in a name? Being a Marxist means being a revolutionary anticapitalist, a fighter against all forms of oppression, an internationalist who wants to end capitalism around the whole world, and a believer in the power of the working class.