“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 […]
Subjects Archives: Marxism
Class Struggle and Socialist Revolution in the Philippines: Understanding the Crisis of U.S. Hegemony, Arroyo State Terrorism, and Neoliberal Globalization
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 […]
Same-Sex Love in India: Open Letters against Section 377
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 […]
One of the Goals Is to Open Offices in Various Countries of the World: CIM Is Determined Not to Repeat Errors of the Socialism of the 20th Century [Una de las metas es abrir sedes en varios países del mundo Instan a no repetir errores del socialismo del siglo XX]
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 […]
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 […]
