Subjects Archives: Socialism

A new book exploring the theory, practice and history of socialist commune building in Venezuela.

The recent article Socialism and Ecological Survival in Monthly Review by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clarke makes three essential points about the past and future of the climate movement, is well worth reading in full and poses some crucial strategic questions that we have to confront and work through in praxis.

The title of this week’s episode is taken from an article to be published in September’s Monthly Review. The author, Jason Hickel, talks to Steve about the topic in his third visit to the podcast.

‘Left Feminisms’ offers an inspiring and accessible overview of feminism from a diverse array of left-wing thinkers, writes Marin Scarlett.

Isabel was, and will remain, an inspiration to us and to everyone else who was privileged to know her. We extend our deepest condolences and sympathies to her sons, Michael, Carl and Paul, and to her whole extended family, and many comrades and friends.

200 delegates from 40 organizations are gathering in South Africa for the “Dilemmas of Humanity: Pan African Dialogues to Build Socialism” conference. For the next four days, progressive movements and organizations will discuss the challenges posed by capitalism, and articulate the socialist way forward.

The Ecosocialist idea you’ve never heard of and might need.

Ursula Huws reflects on the history of ‘prefigurative’ approaches and community ownership models in the UK – and how these can be used to rethink public ownership amid the current cost-of-living crisis.

In 2017, the World Bank determined that the income threshold for poverty, which had been set at $1.90 per day, was far too low. They set the new poverty line at $2.15 per day, which accounted for over 700 million people.

Across the world, evidence of human misery is increasingly easy to find. The data collected and reported by international agencies is stunning. Billions of people around the planet lack access to adequate education, healthcare, food, and shelter, as well as information and culture.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx highlighted that “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones”.

The sheer scale of China’s development has been a world-shaping event.

Gabriel Rockhill “one of my favorite jokes that I’ve heard about the socialist project is the following: socialism looks good on paper, but in reality… you just get invaded by the United States.”

The difficulty the U.S. faces in its current attempts to damage China’s economy was analysed in detail in the article “The U.S. is trying to persuade China to commit suicide”. Reduced to essentials, the U.S. problem is that it possesses no external economic levers powerful enough to derail China’s economy.

Justin Akers Chacón, a socialist based in San Diego, California, campaigns for worker and migrant rights in the US-Mexico border region and is the author of The border crossed us: the case for opening the US-Mexico border. He caught up with Red Flag to discuss immigrant rights in the US under Democratic President Joe Biden.

Over 150 young leaders from a variety of organizations in the U.S. are in Cuba to participate in a solidarity brigade organized by the International Peoples’ Assembly. They are meeting with different sectors of Cuban society to learn about the impact of the U.S. blockade and experiences in building socialism.

In his recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou describes the past defeats of May 1968, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Paris Commune as well as those of factory occupations and other such struggles as defeats ‘covered with glory’.

“While socialists need to begin with the existing concepts of fairness as reflected in the moral economy of the working class, to the extent that those concepts of fairness are contrary to the principle advanced in the Communist Manifesto that ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,’ they must be rejected.” —Michael Lebowitz

Wenhua Zongheng is a newly launched international publication bringing together articles originally produced in the Mainland China magazine of the same name in Chinese. It is jointly published in English, Spanish and Portuguese, by Wenhua Zongheng, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, and Dongsheng—which produces the newsletter News on China.

Fewer (32%) said income taxes should be raised on all citizens except those with low income to finance socialism, and the fewest (20%) said a purchase tax on goods and services should be imposed to fund socialism.