Subjects Archives: Socialism

On Susan Ferguson’s book “Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction.“

2018, when president Xi Jinping lauded Marx as the greatest thinker of modern times at the closing speech of a 2-week celebration of his 200th anniversary and reaffirmed China’s commitment to his vision of communism, many on the left–and the right–were willing to take him seriously.

Independent and progressive candidates won more than a two-thirds majority in the Constitutional Convention, a body responsible for writing Chile’s new constitution.

A full generation has elapsed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in late 1991. Two years earlier, in 1989, the communist states of Eastern Europe dissolved, with the first salvo fired when Hungary opened its border.

This pandemic has affirmed that public healthcare needs cannot be adequately met under a profit-based system.

Nearly half a millennium ago Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Princedescribed three options for how a conquering power might treat states that it defeated in war but that “have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom.

The 149 proposals issued by the French Citizens’ Convention on Climate last June, with the goal of achieving at least a 40% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 compared to 1990, manifestly belong to a thoroughly reformist approach.

COVID-19 – A socialist response

The Movement Towards Socialism is the only party with a broad presence in the country’s nine regions.

Of all the reasons to be angry during the pandemic—the profit-first response of governments, the neglected state of the health system, the environmental crisis underpinning the disaster, the millions dead—it has been people buying extra toilet paper that has elicited the most outrage.

In 1911, a young Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) arrived in France, which had colonised his homeland of Vietnam. Though he had been raised with a patriotic spirit committed to anti-colonialism, Ho Chi Minh’s temperament did not allow him to retreat into a backward-looking romanticism.

It is important to see both Marx’s brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

Andres Arauz has 37 percent of voting intention in the most recent polls, compared to 24 percent of the banker Guillermo Lasso, his main competitor, who seeks to banish once and for all the failed model of 21st Century socialism.

Dr. Eduardo Martínez, president of the BioCubaFarma state pharmaceutical enterprise group, reports that work is advancing to expand production capacity of Cuba’s candidate vaccine Soberana 02.

Spokespeople from one of Venezuela’s flagship communes discuss the building of a communal city and the path towards Chávez’s communal state.

Now forgotten, Dr. Marie Equi (1872–1952) was a physician for working-class women and children, a lesbian, and a dynamic and flamboyant political activist. She was a “firebrand in the causes of suffrage, labor and peace, in Portland in the ’teens, ’20s, and ’30s.” A reformer turned revolutionary, Equi earned the nickname “Queen of the Bolsheviks,” one which spoke to her often imperious character as well as to her politics.

The dozen of Cuban medical brigades recently arrived in Panama will be deployed to the places assigned to fight COVID-19.

The death of Leo Panitch has made the world a darker place. His writings have carried us through some of the most difficult periods in the history of the socialist left, as wave after wave of the neoliberal onslaught broke workers’ organizations, serving up one defeat after the next. Leo’s work sustained so many of us during these years, pushing us on and pointing the way through the storm.

If “the revolutionary spirit of the last centuries, that is, the eagerness to liberate and to build a new house where freedom can dwell, [which] is unprecedented and unequaled in all prior history” properly begins with the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century, few would dispute that this eagerness for fundamental social transformation was in very large part carried into the world of the twentieth century by socialism’s revolutionary aspirations to transcend the capitalist order itself.

With a majority of the opposition boycotting and an abstention rate of almost 70%, the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) obtained 69% of the vote in the country’s December 6 National Assembly (AN) elections.