Subjects Archives: Revolutions

The present context in France and across the world is quite bad for the exploited and oppressed in general, as also for the organised workers’ movement. This long term weakening in the conditions of capitalist crises gave the green light to the ruling classes to take out their revenge at the end of the 1970s and wind back the limited but real social gains of the post-war period.

On 17 January, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led the Friday prayers for the first time in eight years. He mocked the ‘American clowns’ who threatened Iran and said that Iran’s response to the U.S. assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani was a ‘slap in the face’ of U.S. power.

Millions of people are on the streets, from India to Chile. Democracy is both their promise and it is what has betrayed them. They aspire to the democratic spirit but find that democratic institutions–saturated by money and power–are inadequate. They are on the streets for more democracy, deeper democracy, a different kind of democracy.

In the middle of the year, we Venezuelans received a visit from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michel Bachelet, on the occasion of meeting with the different political actors in the country to “evaluate” the complex economic and social environment brought about by the White House’s decision.

The ‘stubborn class struggle’ inside the revolutionary process should provide someone who is not part of the revolutionary process itself to be sympathetic not to this or that policy of a government, but to the difficulty—and necessity—of the process itself.

Most public discussions on climate change are based on global surface temperature only, an inadequate measure to capture the breadth of human activities and the real dangers stemming from a warming planet. Policymakers and the public now urgently need access to a set of indicators that convey the effects of human activities.

From Chile to Lebanon, young people are demonstrating—in street protests and voting booths—that they’ve had enough of being disciplined and punished by the current development model.

It’s all kicking off everywhere in 2019. Haitians are revolting against a corrupt political system and their President Jovenel Moïse, who many see as a kleptocratic U.S. puppet. In Ecuador, huge public manifestations managed to force President Lenín Moreno to backtrack on his IMF-backed neoliberal package that would have sharply cut government spending and increased transport prices (FAIR.org, 10/23/19).

In Capital Is Dead, Mckenzie Wark argues that the dominance of the capitalist class may be ending. In order to grasp this epochal transition, leftists must follow the young Marx—and abandon or adapt inherited modes of thought.

The American occupation of Haiti lasted from 1915–34. The U.S. subjected Haitians to the hated forced labor system of the corvée, seized control over Haitian finance, and rewrote the Haitian Constitution at gunpoint, enabling foreign companies to acquire land in the country. The distorting and oppressive impacts of the U.S. occupation have been felt in Haitian society ever since.

Engels was a revolutionary democrat and a revolutionary realist, argues Dragan Plavšić

The Corriente Revolucionaria Bolívar y Zamora interviewed Ángel Prado, the spokesperson of the Socialist Commune El Maizal, a campesino organization dedicated to building socialism at the grassroots level in Venezuela.

In this talk, Tanner Mirrlees scrutinizes the rhetorics of “technological optimism,” “technological pessimism,” and “technological revolutionism,” discusses the political economy of communication, highlights how capitalism’s basic logics endure in the “digital age,” and concludes with an overview of how workers, citizens, and publics are trying to redesign and rebuild the digital age in support of working class power, participatory democracy, and social justice.

An interview with Marxist philosopher Joshua Moufawad-Paul about the science of revolution at a time when socialism is supposedly becoming mainstream.

We need all of the cultural workers today—from graphic designers to cartoonists, programmers to poets, psychologists to meme-makers—to seize what we know in order to dream and to construct a world that is not only possible, but necessary.

Reinaldo Iturriza examines the current situation in Venezuela, as the Bolivarian Revolution comes under attack from the same neoliberal forces that fuelled its rise.

On January 1 in India, 5.5 million women formed a 620-kilometer wall across the length of the state of Kerala to fight for women’s rights to the Sabrimala temple. On the same day, Cuba celebrated 60 years since the 1959 revolution, which has been a persistent thorn in the side of global capital ever since.

It is sad to see how completely misrepresented Adam Smith (1723-1790) is when pundits call upon him to vindicate neoliberalism and the status quo. It seems many have not really bothered to read his works.

In this episode, we’re joined by Jamee Moudud, a professor of economics at Sarah Lawrence College, Jamee draws on the tradition of critical legal studies to extend the constitutional theory of money to new historical and international contexts.

This previously unpublished essay is taken from volume 1 of Mészáros’s Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, which remained incomplete at the time of his death in October 2017. —The Editors