Subjects Archives: Socialism

Gülden Özcan and Bora Erdağı: In some of the interviews you gave, you talked about your own everyday life experiences that led you to discover that Marx’s total critique of capitalism is an unfinished project.  In this discovery, you emphasized elsewhere that your class background and political struggle you were involved in have played an […]

Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA.  Edited by Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith.  HarperPerennial, 304 pp., $15.99. The need for socialism became clear to me more than fifty years ago when I was working as an orderly in the University of Minnesota Hospitals.  One of the patients I was working with in […]

In one of his last important public discourses, popularly known as the Golpe de Timón speech, the late President Hugo Chávez told a joke about an indigenous tribe and a priest.  The priest baptized the indigenous people giving them Christian names, held communion, and told them not to eat meat on Friday but rather fish […]

Tassos Tsakiroglou: How urgent do you consider the necessity to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat? John Bellamy Foster: The urgency of understanding the interconnections between the economic impassse and the ecological emergency derives from the combined threats they pose to […]

Steve da Silva (SD): Over the last decade you have emerged as a leading thinker in synthesizing radical ecology with the Marxist tradition.  From Marx’s Ecology (2000) to The Ecological Rift (2010) and everything in between, you’ve carried out the much needed intellectual work of recovering the overlooked ecological content of Marx’s original thought, presenting […]

  John Bellamy Foster is best-known as author of Marx’s Ecology (2000; in which he corrects the popular misapprehension that Marx did not ‘get’ environmental limits), and as editor of Monthly Review (monthlyreview.org), the journal founded by Marxist economist Paul Sweezy in the late 1940s.  In his latest book, The Endless Crisis (2012; written with […]

Since Marx, we know that what characterizes and differentiates societies is the way in which they organize the production, distribution and use of the material and symbolic resources
they possess. In other words, the mode of production¹ is what defines the material content of the social life of the distinct human territorial collectivities (nations, peoples, communities), within which there can be differentiated the historically specific form in which each of their components develop, and the manner in which various existing modes of production interrelate within the same society.

  Rebekah Wetmore and Ryan Romard (RW/RR): The crisis of world capitalism starting in 2007 was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression and thus far the recovery, both globally and within Canada, has been weak at best.  With this mind, to what extent is the current crisis cyclical and in what […]

Bolivia’s government entered 2013 on an optimistic note.  Socialist-oriented projects aimed at shoring up national independence and protecting indigenous rights seemingly were on track.  Now, however, the government is having to deal with emerging reports of official corruption. Opinion surveys show that President Evo Morales, overwhelming victor in two presidential elections and one recall vote, […]

  The Guasú Front, which was the driving force behind the 2008 electoral triumph of President Fernando Lugo, and a broad spectrum of other social and political movements agreed to form the Front for Defense of Democracy (FDD), which “rejects and condemns the putschist government of Federico Franco” and calls upon people “to defend the […]

“We have the objective ground for building an alternative historical bloc, to use Gramsci’s language.  An alternative historical bloc — I would call it ‘anti-comprador.’” — Samir Amin Samir Amin is a Marxist economist.  Video by NewsClick (14 May 2012). | Print

In circles close to the former Zapatero administration, attempts have been made to represent former Prime Minister Zapatero as the politician who “sacrificed himself to save Spain,” comparing him to former German Chancellor Schröder who, though aware that he would antagonize his electoral base with his clearly neoliberal policies, went ahead with them, for he […]

  Dear comrades and friends, On May Day 2006, I was invited to celebrate with the members of the “Bund” in Israel.  I took my video camera with me.  I thought it will be a one-time occasion, but it became a five-and-half-year political and personal journey. Unlike my previous films (Matzpen and Madrid Before Hanita, […]

Papandreou writes on a blackboard as a punishment meted out by Germany and France: “I must not consult the Greek people I must not consult the Greek people I must not consult the Greek people I must not con. . . .” Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | […]

Meetings such as this play a vital role in building a movement that can stop the hell-bound train of capitalism, before it takes itself and all of humanity over the precipice.  Building such a movement is the most important thing anyone can do today — so I’m honored to have been invited to take part […]

  Nou dwe sèl mèt bout tè sa a: We should be the only owners of this land. From an anti-MINUSTAH protest last month.  Photo by Ansel Herz. This was Haitian protesters’ message at a demonstration last month against the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known by its French acronym, MINUSTAH.  October marks an upswing […]

  Daphne Berdahl.  On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany.  Edited by Matti Bunzl.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.  xx + 166 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35434-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22170-4. On the Social Life of Postsocialism; Memory, Consumption, Germany is a posthumous collection of Daphne Berdahl’s essays, written over the course of […]

  The Republicans have successfully changed the main emphasis of the economic debate from job creation to deficit control.  Why the urgency for balanced budgets?  After all, this anemic “recovery” has set itself apart from all previous post-war turnarounds precisely by its manifest failure to generate jobs.  Economic growth needs to considerably exceed 3% per […]

  Michael A. Lebowitz.  The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.  Monthly Review Press, New York, 2010. Michael Lebowitz’s important book portrays a vision of the socialist alternative to capitalism through a synthesis of some of Marx’s most important philosophical arguments concerning human development, revolutionary practice and radical democracy.  Developed from his experiences in Hugo Chavez’s […]

(Scene: an elevator, downstage right.  Stuck inside are ROY COHN and ETHEL ROSENBERG, characters in Tony Kushner’s landmark play, Angels in America.  McCarthyite lawyer, ROY prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of spying for the USSR and executed in 1953.  ETHEL now paces impatiently, pushing elevator buttons.  Above the stage, captions from recent […]