Subjects Archives: Socialism

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

MARTIN LUTHER KING spoke with vision against capitalism, and about the kind of changes needed to replace it: the following quotes reflect some of King’s key thoughts on the subject as US citizens mark Martin Luther King Day.

A young Venezuelan intellectual argues that the revolutionary potential of Chavismo may be in abeyance, but it could come back to life again.

It’s good that there are now plenty of young people that like the idea of socialism. But if they don’t really know what socialism is, they also don’t know what capitalists will do to resist it.

Samir Amin’s life resembled that of Karl Marx: a man without a homeland, but one whose home was a chosen commitment to a historical project.

The low turnout can, in part, be attributed to opposition abstention, but is comparable to previous elections of this nature.

A five-year-old revolutionary movement in Nepal brings together program and commitment in a way that powerfully prefigures communist society.

In this interview, VA talks with a key cadre of the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force, an organization based in the 23 Enero barrio that has worked to build Venezuela’s most emblematic urban commune.

Many wonder how it is possible, following the democratic governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula, and Dilma Rousseff, that Brazilians have elected as President a shady federal deputy and die-hard defender of the military dictatorship that ruledthe country 1964-1985.

In an interview with Mexican newspaper La Jornada, Jeremy Corbyn said international efforts challenging economic injustice and inequality is needed.

In the West, since at least the myth of Gaea, the earth has been seen as something feminine. For ecofeminists, the linkage has had profound, and malign, consequences for our treatment both of nature and of women.

An election of “firsts:” Women, LGBTQ, Muslims, African-Americans and Native Americans score seats in the House and Senate.

The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report earlier this week on “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” apparently based on the fact that “coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” even though Marx’s birth was in May (1818).

The second round of elections in Brazil will take place Oct. 28, and this time two opponents will face off. On the one side is Fernando Haddad from the Workers’ Party (PT) who promises to continue the project started by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

“We have relations of domination, new ways in which imperialism manifests itself. That’s the reality of Europe, not the fairy stories of an alliance of nations, overcoming national borders, becoming one big, happy family.”

Commune activist Gerardo Rojas remembers Chavez’s proposals for the construction of socialism and uses them to analyze the government’s current attempts to revitalize the economy.

“There are two things I will never accept, colonialism and racism. What many people do not realize is that Europe’s wealth is built on five centuries of exploitation of third world peoples, and that there is something like a historical obligation of reparation, of solidarity at least.”

The originality of Marx’s Capital is often underestimated. Countless commentaries have appeared, but only a few have taken the full measure of Capital’s truly unique and counter-intuitive outlook. Critics generally assume that Marx was pursuing familiar questions of economics or philosophy in a fresh way–that his aim was to explain profits, history, or ontology.

Project Cybersyn was an ambitious political and economic project introduced by Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile in the early 1970s. It was an experiment of socialist design that attempted to harness pioneering cybernetic models of complex systems to run a national economy.

Labour needs to develop a socialist strategy that goes beyond a single election manifesto. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin look at the challenge of state transformation.