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Venezuela’s Currency Adjustment: Necessary, But Is It Socialist?
There is little doubt, even among some opposition leaders (who normally oppose just about anything the government does), that the recent currency adjustment of the bolivar was economically necessary. It is a matter of basic math to realize that if inflation averaged 22% between 2005 and 2009 and each bolivar thereby lost about 72% of […]
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Check It Out: WSJ Favors Socialist Market Controls After All
So for the last 2 years the Wall Street Journal has been predicting the total fucking COLLAPSE of the Venezuelan economy because they stubbornly refused to devalue their currency. Well guess what? Over the weekend Venezuela finally bit the bullet and devalued the bolivar, so today the Wall Street Journal took their predictable victory […]
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A Tribute to Baltimore Socialist Bob Kaufman
In the early morning hours of December 25, 2009, we lost a revolutionary voice. Bob Kaufman, a life-long fighter for social and economic equality, succumbed after a protracted struggle with health complications stemming from a brutal attack in 2005. He was 78. Bob’s assailant was a drug-addicted tenant in his West Baltimore home. After […]
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Socialism Is the Path to Save the Planet
15th International Conference of the United Nations on Climate Change, Kingdom of Denmark, Wednesday, 16 December 2009 Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, Excellencies, friends, I promise that I will not talk more than most have spoken this afternoon. Allow me an initial comment which I would have liked to make as part of the […]
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Chavez’s Historic Call for a Fifth Socialist International
Addressing delegates at the International Encounter of Left Parties held in Caracas, November 19-21, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez stated: “the time has come for us to convoke the Fifth International.” Face with the capitalist crisis and the threat of war that is putting at risk the future of humanity, “the people are clamoring for” […]
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Socialists, the Environment and Ecosocialism
Paper presented at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation conference “The Global Crisis and Africa: Struggles for Alternatives,” Randburg, 19 November 2009 There is an ecological crisis in the world and this crisis can be traced to capitalism. There is deforestation due to the trade in timber. There is climate change due to unsafe production methods. […]
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Dismantling the Prisonhouse of Nations: A Socialist Prison Reform Proposal (SPRP)
The USA: Prisonhouse of Nations The United States deserves the title, the Prisonhouse of Nations:1 The US imprisons more of its citizens than any nation in the world. As of midyear 2008, over 2.3 million US citizens were behind bars and the prison population continues to expand as a result of the growing inequality and […]
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Give ‘Em Hell
In my video work, entitled Give ‘Em Hell (2008), I abruptly reveal today’s situation regarding migration in the UK. During the course of several days in the summer of 2008, I positioned protest banners on the streets of London and secretly recorded the unfolding scene with a hidden camera from the opposite side of […]
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Socialism and Welfarism
Socialism consists not just in building a humane society; it consists not just in the maintenance of full employment (or near full employment together with sufficient unemployment benefits); it consists not just in the creation of a Welfare State, even one that takes care of its citizens “from the cradle to the grave”; it consists […]
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Capitalist Crisis, Socialist Renewal
This much is clear: not in a long time has capitalism been so critically questioned in the US and “socialism” so widely debated as a social alternative. The left can and should seize this moment. One part of doing that is to formulate a new program — including a new definition of socialism — that […]
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Ecology, Capitalism, and Socialism
The keynote address at the “Climate Change, Social Change” conference (organized by Green Left Weekly), Sydney, Australia, 12 April 2008. This address became the basis for John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism” (Monthly Review, November 2008), which in turn became the last chapter of The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with […]
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21st Century Socialism on the Move — Reflections on “The Path for Human Development”
Within an otherwise bleak reality of capitalist crisis, Mike Lebowitz has provided us with an eloquent restatement of the case for socialism — The Path for Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism? This short text is now circulating widely in Venezuela, in Spanish, as a pocket-sized pamphlet, has been published in Monthly Review, and is […]
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President Chávez and Venezuela’s Socialist Elected Officials Meet to Discuss Political Strategy
On Wednesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez convened state governors, city mayors, and legislators from the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) to discuss the next stage in the construction of “21st Century Socialism,” following two important electoral victories for Chávez and his supporters over the past four months. Chávez urged governors and mayors to promote […]
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Is President Obama a Socialist?
It started in an interview with Chris Wallace during the presidential campaign. According to John McCain, Barack Obama was planning “redistribution of the wealth . . . [and] that’s one of the tenets of socialism.” Although McCain backed off his accusation shortly afterwards, Republicans have since revived it. Rep. John Boehner, Republican leader in the […]
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Those Alternative Socialist “Stimulus” Plans
There are, of course, other ways to “support and stimulate” the declining US economy: those that congressional debaters, presidential advisors, and the dutiful media never discuss. All the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury ever do is justify their functions as lenders and spenders “of last resort” (when the private sector will not). Neither ever […]
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Socialism and the Peasantry
One of the greatest insights of Karl Marx was his perception of the capitalist system as a self-acting, self-driven and “spontaneous” order. Far from being a malleable system, where intervention by the State could be used for bringing about basic changes in the mode of its functioning, in which case of course the need to […]
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Interview with Mariela Castro on the Future of Sex and Socialism in Cuba
Mariela Castro is Director of the National Center for Sex Education in Cuba. Anastasia Haydulina: One day your uncle Fidel Castro . . . is going to die. Do you think his death will change the status quo of your Cuba? Mariela Castro: First of all, the death of Fidel will bring great suffering […]
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Socialism Is Practical Christianity
“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English. We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history. Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]
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Socialism’s New American Opportunity
The US left today confronts a remarkable opportunity. George Bush and Sarah Palin effectively reopened the explicit debate over capitalism versus socialism. More than that, their interventions, combined with the current crisis of capitalism, disrupt the conventional, classic definitions of both isms. Thus, the debate over them is now transformed in advantageous ways for the […]
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US Citizen Diplomats Arrive in Iran, Invited by Ahmadinejad
In an effort to establish peaceful diplomacy with the government and people of Iran, and to model for the new Obama administration the power of cooperative good will, three highly regarded American peace makers have ventured to Iran. CodePink cofounders, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin, along with former Army Colonel and decorated Foreign Service […]