There are few terms in our political vocabulary as damning as ‘fanatic’. Beyond tolerance and impervious to communication, the fanatic stands outside the frame of political rationality, possessed by a violent conviction that brooks no argument and will only rest, if ever, once every rival view or way of life is eradicated. A fanatic, Winston […]
Subjects Archives: Marxism
Radical Black Women, Leadership, and the Struggle for Liberation
Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, eds. Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: New York University Press, 2009. ix + 353 pp. $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-8313-9; $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8147-8314-6. In the last two decades, a growing field of movement scholarship has complicated conventional representations […]
The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis This Time
Paper prepared for the American Sociological Association Meetings in Atlanta, August 16th, 2010. There are many explanations for the crisis of capital that began in 2007. But the one thing missing is an understanding of “systemic risks.” I was alerted to this when Her Majesty the Queen visited the London School of Economics and asked […]
Venezuela: In Transition towards Socialism?
Nationalization and Workers’ Control: Achievements and Limitations The economic, social and political situation in Venezuela has changed a lot since the failure of the constitutional reform in December 2007, which acted as a warning to the Chávez government.1 This failure had the effect however of reviving the debate on the need to have a socialist […]
Arguing Socialism
Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative (Monthly Review Press, 2010), 191 pp. Alan Maass, The Case for Socialism (Haymarket Books, 2010), 173 pp. Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010), xviii, 394 pp. The economic crisis beginning in 2007 punctured the dominance of neo-liberal ideology, without completely overturning it. To accomplish that, and force […]
The Future of Islamic Feminism: Interview with Margot Badran
Margot Badran is one of the most widely known scholars of Islamic feminism. A historian by training, she has authored many books including: Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences(Oneworld Press, Oxford, 2009); Feminism beyond East and West: New Gender Talk and Practice in Global Islam (New Delhi: Global Media Publications, 2007);as co-editor, Opening the […]
Class Struggle against Car Domination
A new political party, which won office in Montréal’s Plateau Mont-Royal borough last November, has begun to widen sidewalks, add bike paths and close some streets to traffic. Critics have accused them of engaging in class warfare. In a much discussed La Presse opinion piece, Luc Chartrand denigrated the “supposedly enlightened urban planning” measures […]
Quds Day Demonstrations in Iran
“Zionism has nothing to do with the teachings of Judaism. Zionism is a political ideology and quite different from Judaism. Therefore we as Jewish people condemn Zionists.” — Rahmatollah Rafiei, head of the Jewish community in Iran This video was released by Press TV on 3 September 2010. | Print
Christianity Is Socialism
“God is not angry. He is pleased with the revolution.” Produced by TatuyTv, a community media collective based in Mérida, Venezuela, in August 2010. For more information about TatuyTv, visit <www.tatuytelevision.blogspot.com>. | Print
The Greek Laboratory: Shock Doctrine and Popular Resistance
5 May 2010 “There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say […]
Photos, Representation, and the “Banality of Oppression”
“The peace movement, sexist as it was, expressed disenchantment with violence, super-technology and imperialism.” — Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born; Motherhood as Experience and Institution Pictures of former Israeli soldier Eden Abargil posing in front of blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian prisoners have caused some controversies in the media. Abargil did not think she had done […]
Marx and Engels on Music
In 1857 Charles Dana invited Karl Marx to contribute to the New American Cyclopaedia. Marx was the European political correspondent for the daily New York Tribune, of which Dana was the editor; Dana and George Ripley, his former mentor at the utopian colony of Brook Farm, were co-editors of the encyclopedia. In due time Marx […]
The Seduction of Feminism
Hester Eisenstein. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Paradigm 2009). xv, 293pp. The 20th century is often called the American century because of the US’s advance during that time to become the single greatest power in the world — economically, industrially and militarily. The century’s story […]
The State under Neo-liberalism
Much has been written on the subject of the capitalist State in the era of neo-liberalism. Two features of the “neo-liberal State” in particular have been highlighted.1 One relates to the change in the nature of the State, from being an entity apparently standing above society and intervening in its economic functioning in the interests […]
The New York Times Goes on the War Path to Cut the Pensions of the Upper Class (like Teachers, Custodians, and Garbage Collectors)
Columnists are given considerably more leeway than reporters, but serious newspapers still expect their pieces to bear some relationship to reality. This is why the Ron Lieber’s column warning of a class war (“The Coming Class War over Public Pensions”), with government workers as the new “haves,” may leave many readers wondering about the New […]
Puerto Rico Remembers Independence Fighter Lolita Lebrón
The Puerto Rican independence activist Lolita Lebrón died on Sunday August 1, 2010. She was 90 years old. Lebrón commanded a group of Puerto Rican independence advocates who attacked the Congress of the United States on March 1, 1954 to denounce the Island’s colonial situation under the US. That day, nationalists Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, […]
La Casa Rosa
La Casa Rosa tells the story of the necessity and difficulty of finding a way forward for every community impacted by free trade and migration. Drawing inspiration from the real lives and experiences of a group of women from the town of Tetlanohcan, Mexico, the play is the tale of two sisters struggling for […]
Cruel But Not Unusual: The Punishment of Women in U.S. Prisons, An Interview with Marilyn Buck and Laura Whitehorn
Marilyn Buck died on 3 August 2010, less than a month after her release from federal prison. The interview below was first published in the July-August 2001 issue of Monthly Review. — Ed. After years of neglect, the issue of women in prison has begun to receive attention in this country. Media accounts of overcrowding, […]
Nationalism, Liberalism, and Capitalism
The Economist (July 15) published an editorial on Egypt and Saudi Arabia (two dictatorial countries allied with the United States in the Middle East) expressing hope that they would become democratic in the future. What is surprising, however, is that in the same issue the magazine did a favorable review of a book by Stephen […]
Neoliberalism, Neocolonialism, and the Criminalization of “Homosexuality”: Interview with Scott Long
Nan Hunter and Scott Long
Scott Long: Around the world, there are existing sex laws being strengthened, there are new sex laws being passed. In Egypt you have people being jailed for homosexuality and for being HIV positive under what’s actually a prostitution law that dates from the fifties. In Burundi and Nigeria, you have people trying to pass […]
