Subjects Archives: Movements

Hundreds of thousands of Thai Red Shirt pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets of Bangkok and other cities over the weekend.  This was a show of force to prove the strength of the movement and to dispel any lies by the royalist government and the media that the Red Shirts are not representative of the […]

  “The times we live in reflect that in Latin America and the Caribbean the confrontation between historic forces is getting worse.” — Raul Castro On February 23, 2010, incarcerated Cuban Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after a prolonged hunger strike, despite the efforts of Cuban medical personnel to treat him and prevent the ending of […]

  “It’s necessary to campaign on my record,” Nicolas Sarkozy had told UMP leaders in the regional elections, before prudently beating a retreat when polls revealed the darkening sky for the party.  Despite the same old cliché repeated by UMP spokespeople according to the dictate of the Élysée, the fact remains that voters clearly rejected […]

  Jana K. Lipman.  Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.  x + 325 pp.  $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25539-5; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-25540-1. A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to serve on a Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations panel with Jana K. Lipman. […]

  Two major lessons emerge from the first round of the regional elections The magnitude of abstention by millions of youth, workers, and the unemployed, who mostly wished to register their rejection of the political parties that have alternated in power and that are responsible for aggravating their conditions of life.   The vigor of […]

Vice President Joseph Biden set out to massage U.S.-Israeli relations this week, but instead ran up against the reality of Israeli politics, manifested in the Netanyahu government’s announcement of the construction of 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem.  The result, as described by the normally rhetorically sober Financial Times, has been to expose “an emasculated […]

  The austerity measures imposed on Greek workers to reduce the deficits are nothing but a prelude of what may happen to the other European countries.  The Greek crisis demonstrates the divisions in the ruling class on the strategies to adopt. For the second time since December 2008, Greece is at the heart of politics […]

  Jean-Clément Martin, Violence et Révolution: Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national.  Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006. 339 pp.  Bibliography and index.  23.00 Euros (pb).  ISBN 2-02-043842-9. This work subtitles itself an “essay on the birth of a national myth”.  The “myth” in question, as the first pages of the Introduction make clear, is […]

  Robert Allen, Les Tribunaux criminels sous la Révolution et l’Empire, 1792-1811.  Collection « Histoire » Translated by James Steven Bryant (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005) 318 pp. 22€ ISBN 2-7535-00095-9. At the end of the Old Regime, the judicial system of the kingdom stood accused of all manner of barbarities and atrocities — […]

  Sukant Chandan interviews Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled and Palestinian Gaza resident and revolutionary Shireen Said for International Women’s Day 2010 Leila Khaled: “Palestinian women have a fundamental role in uniting Palestinians” The Palestinian people’s oppression continues due primarily to the financial, diplomatic, and military support that the Zionist state receives from the USA and […]

  Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech.  Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.  xiii + 334 pp.  Figures, notes, bibliography, and index.  $49.95 U.S. (cl).  ISBN 0-19-536775-1. In this impressive first book, Charles Walton explores the fate of free speech […]

  Democracy Insurgent is a majority people-of-color activist group animated by principles of democracy, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, queer liberation, Third World Feminism, and workers’ power.  We are based in Seattle, Washington.  We are a member group of the UW Student Worker Coalition.  Find out more at <nobudgetcutsuw.blogspot.com> and <democracyinsurgent.org>.  Contact us at <d.insurg@gmail.com>. | | Print […]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Brasilia to mount a full court press on the Brazilian government to support a United Nations Security Council resolution imposing tougher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear activities.  (Brazil is presently one of the Council’s ten non-permanent members.)  And, as accumulating media reports indicate, she was politely but […]

  Brasilia — President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva just reiterated, in a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that Brazil will continue to maintain commercial relations with Iran and will seek a peaceful solution to Iran’s nuclear issue. After meeting with Hillary Clinton at the Bank of Brazil Cultural Center, the provisional […]

Last week, just after we had completed our regional tour to Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his own journey to Damascus, for highly publicized meetings with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, HAMAS Political Bureau chief Khalid Mishal, and a “resistance” summit with Assad and Hizballah Secretary General Shaykh Hassan Nasrallah.  Ahmadinejad’s trip […]

  In 2005 the Tanta Flax & Oils Company was privatized and subsequently bought by Saudi investor Abdellah El-Ka’aky.  In May 2009, workers launched a five-month strike backed by the state-controlled Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (EFTU).  An agreement was reached but workers went back on strike in December to protest the deteriorating conditions in […]

  Interview by Aleix Bombila, for En Lucha (Spain), of John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, and author of Marx’s Ecology and The Ecological Revolution En Lucha: In your book Marx’s Ecology you argue that Marxism has a lot to offer to the ecologist movement.  What kind of united work can be established between […]

Decisive battles between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution loom on the horizon in Venezuela. The campaign for the September 26 National Assembly elections will be a crucial battle between the supporters of socialist President Hugo Chavez and the US-backed right-wing opposition. But these battles, part of the class struggle between the poor majority and […]

Union members who support single-payer health care have a message for Barack Obama: Ditch the compromised health care legislation that congressional Democrats cooked up and take another look at a Medicare-for-all system. When Obama used his State of the Union address to tell people to “let him know” if there’s a better approach that “will […]

  After fourteen hours of negotiations, the Jan Peter Balkenende government failed, on Saturday, 20 February, to agree on whether to maintain the Dutch contingent in Afghanistan.  The Prime Minister announced, in the middle of the night, the resignation of his coalition, which included his party the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), the (social democrat) Labor […]