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Subjects Archives: Movements

William Pelz - "A People's History of Modern Europe" | Seminary Co-op Bookstores

Making their own history

More than half a century ago, E. P. Thompson pioneered a new approach to labor history in The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson was dismayed with the bourgeois idea that history is made by great men, and the occasional princess or queen, but also frustrated with socialist histories that replace statesmen and business […]

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Working at Facebook

Who’s working for Facebook?

There are plenty of reasons to be interested in—and, even more, concerned about—Facebook. Many of them are raised in the recent review of Facebook-related books by John Lanchester [ht: db]: the fragmentation of the polity (via the targeting of posts), the dissemination of “fake news” (which played an important role in the 2016 U.S. presidential […]

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Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse remembered

We are, the 1960s radical generation, now once more marching, marching, sometimes it seems mostly with the Millennials by our side. And here comes the ghost of Herbert Marcuse, who was so much with us the first time around.

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Activist being handcuffed in Berkley antifa protests

Thugs and journalists

The repetition of words like “thug” and “gang” in media coverage of anti-fascist demonstrators suggests the degree to which mainstream journalists, and centrists more widely, understand challenges to the state in the same euphemisms with which they express their own deep anti-blackness.

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Chirlane McCray and Bill de Blasio

A tale of many cities: potholes in the road to municipal reform

As a growing number of groups on the left have begun dabbling in local electoral politics—most notably via the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA-backed candidacies)—we would do well to heed the warning of Juan Gonzalez about the “consultant class” (currently in the employ of Mayor de Blasio). The allure of corner-cutting political consultants, corporate […]

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Mural commemorating the Bolivian Revolution

People are radicalizing the Bolivarian Revolution

For those confused by the recent headlines on Venezuela, this is a point worth explaining. The so-called ‘peaceful’ ‘pro-democracy’ demonstrators of the opposition had made threats against those who planned to participate in the Constituent Assembly elections, leaving many people fearful to vote in their own communities, particularly those with a strong opposition presence. This […]

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Sheriff Joe Arpaio standing in front of Arizona inmates at Tent City.

Freedom rider: Joe Arpaio is no aberration

Even most leftish white Americans like to think that their country is good and its institutions are fair and equitable. According to this wishful thinking human rights abuses only happen in faraway places and injustices here are resolved by reining in a few bad apples. The facts say otherwise and prove that the United States […]

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Ernest Mandel

Ernest Mandel: a life for the revolution

This documentary looks back at Mandel’s life and 60 years of struggles: from the Civil War in Spain to the fall of the Berlin Wall, with segments on Algeria, Che Guevara, Vietnam, the 1960-1961 Belgian general strike, May 68, Portugal, Chile, feminism, workers control, the Sandinistas and more.

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Right-wing protestors flying the Nazi flag along with the the Confederate flag

Fascism in the United States

The combination of the Nazi flag and the Confederate flag is a standard feature of the Right’s iconography—the linkage between a desire for White domination with a rehabilitation of the ‘lost cause’ of the Confederacy. This period of great economic instability has produced some truly morbid symptoms.

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Cyber Attack. Alex Skopje.

U.S. wages cyberwar abroad under cover of ‘activism’

Like many other episodes of extraterritorial political interference up to and including military intervention, America’s meddling in Thailand is done on behalf of corporate interests seeking to expand their respective and collective hegemony both regionally in Asia vís-a-vís Beijing, and globally.

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