I think I have solved a small puzzle in socialist history. Climate & Capitalism‘s tagline, “Ecosocialism or barbarism: There is no third way,” is based on the slogan, “Socialism or Barbarism,” which Rosa Luxemburg raised to such great effect during World War I and the subsequent German revolution, and which has been adopted by many […]
Subjects Archives: Marxism
Socialism and Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises
Global capitalism has huge problems coping with the second worst collapse in its history. Its extreme and deepening inequalities have provoked millions to question and challenge capitalism. Yet socialists of all sorts now find it more difficult than ever to make effective criticisms and offer alternatives that inspire. Part of the problem lies with classic […]
On Capital, Real Socialism, and Venezuela: An Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz
Gülden Özcan and Bora Erdağı: In some of the interviews you gave, you talked about your own everyday life experiences that led you to discover that Marx’s total critique of capitalism is an unfinished project. In this discovery, you emphasized elsewhere that your class background and political struggle you were involved in have played an […]
Notes Toward a New American Marxism
When I first read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, it was 1967 and I was doing my last book report for the nuns at Holy Family High. I would graduate in June but not without making some kind of statement about how angry I was to have been forced to attend this school. I was […]
Imagining Socialism
Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. Edited by Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith. HarperPerennial, 304 pp., $15.99. The need for socialism became clear to me more than fifty years ago when I was working as an orderly in the University of Minnesota Hospitals. One of the patients I was working with in […]
Don’t Pray for Venezuela: The Struggle Against Contemporary Fascism
The progressivist view of history often goes hand in hand with the faith that a new class — sometimes the proletariat, at other times “the people” — has a privileged perspective or consciousness. If scientific (as opposed to vulgar) Marxism debunks this idea on a theoretical level — showing how commodity and money fetishism’s inversions […]
Ukraine Between “Popular Uprising for Democracy” and “Fascist Putsch”
Let’s begin with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s version. One can think what one likes about deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, but his election in 2012 was recognized as legitimate by international observers and, after a certain hesitation, by the defeated candidate, Yulia Timoshenko. In fact, relatively honest elections were just about the only positive […]
Venezuela: Socialism Is Still a Real and Inspiring Possibility
In one of his last important public discourses, popularly known as the Golpe de Timón speech, the late President Hugo Chávez told a joke about an indigenous tribe and a priest. The priest baptized the indigenous people giving them Christian names, held communion, and told them not to eat meat on Friday but rather fish […]
As a Class for Itself
Numsa General Secretary’s Presentation to the Cape Town Press Club, February 11, 2014 I speak to you today with a powerful and united mandate from 341,150 metalworkers. They made their views extremely clear in our workers’ parliament in December last year — the parliament we called the Numsa Special National Congress. In that parliament […]
“The Death of Social Democracy in the Age of Global Monopoly-Finance Capital”: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster
Tassos Tsakiroglou: How urgent do you consider the necessity to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat? John Bellamy Foster: The urgency of understanding the interconnections between the economic impassse and the ecological emergency derives from the combined threats they pose to […]
Rehabilitation of Liberation Theology
Christmas has just gone by, and we’ll soon be ringing in the New Year, a time when a “profound feeling of consolation and peace” overwhelms the faithful. But the buzz, created by Pope Francis’ “apostolic exhortation”, Evangelii Gaudium (EG, translated as “The Joy of the Gospel”), issued in late November, and the subsequent clarificatory […]
What Is Political Will?
Samuel Grove [SG]: For a while now you’ve been working on and defending the old idea of ‘the will of the people’, and you’ve described it in terms of a ‘dialectical voluntarism’; what do you mean by this? Peter Hallward [PH]: I’m not stuck on the terminology, and I’m leery of the way these […]
To Struggle With Hindutva Fascists Among the Adivasi Community
Samir Amin in “The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative” in our issue of October 2011 sets out the fundamental process of the “democratic” fraud: [A]ll hitherto existing societies have been based on a dual system of exploitation of labor (in various forms) and of concentration of the state’s powers on behalf of the […]
Climate Change and Socialism: An interview with John Bellamy Foster
Steve da Silva (SD): Over the last decade you have emerged as a leading thinker in synthesizing radical ecology with the Marxist tradition. From Marx’s Ecology (2000) to The Ecological Rift (2010) and everything in between, you’ve carried out the much needed intellectual work of recovering the overlooked ecological content of Marx’s original thought, presenting […]
Hindutva Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. The text below is based on the editorial in its September 2013 issue. — Ed. The parliamentary elections of 2014 are now casting their shadow ahead. The nationwide elections on a five-year schedule have become a festival, with […]
It’s in the (Indian) Air, Smells like Semi-Fascism
Public memory of how (the) fascists “use[d] and abuse[d] democratic freedoms in order to abolish them” (Hannah Arendt) was strong when, more than 60 years ago, India’s Constituent Assembly rejected the option of a presidential type of executive. But now, the coming general elections are being framed as a presidential-style contest between the Bharatiya Janata […]
Statement of Support to CUNY Students Attacked and Arrested in Peaceful Protests Against Ex-Gen. David Petraeus
On September 18, 2013, a press release issued by the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY stated: “Six students were arrested in a brutal, unprovoked police attack during a peaceful protest by the City University of New York’s students and faculty against CUNY’s appointment of former CIA chief ex-General David Petraeus. Students were […]
Municipal Bankruptcies, Pensions, and New Dimensions of Class Struggle in the United States
The news that Detroit has declared bankruptcy, the largest North American city to do so thus far, foreshadows an extension of the social crisis currently afflicting the centers of capitalism. As some observers have noted, Detroit is just the tip of the iceberg in what is sure to be a procession of indebted municipalities […]
Marx’s Nightmare
He awoke with the aftertaste of his nightmare weighing heavily on his fading recollection of factory-fed vampires in striped pantaloons red runnels of blood flowing from their culled smiles squeezing the tears of the night shift workers into small vials assembled on conveyor belts to be sealed, stamped and sold back to the workers for […]
The Zimmerman Verdict: Three Uneasy Pieces
George Zimmerman Proclaimed Honorary White Man SANFORD, FL — The Volunteer Fire Department and the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution have united across class lines to declare George Zimmerman, recently acquitted of murdering African-American youth Trayvon Martin, an “Honorary White Dude.” Mr. Zimmerman, whose driver’s license lists him as Hispanic, was […]
