Current IssueFrom the Editors
We have had an extraordinary presidential primary in 2016: in addition to the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, we have an authoritarian demagogue, Donald Trump, who has unleashed a reactionary rage which harkens back to fascism, and another, Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist. The Foreign Policies of Sanders, Trump, and ClintonAmerica and the World in 2016 and Beyond
The world today is faced with crises on virtually every front, and any assessment of the foreign policy positions of the two major parties’ 2016 presidential candidates must measure how well they respond to these crises. The Contemporary Crisis of the American Ideology
Surveying the political scene in America, we are now witnessing the shattering of the last remnants of the American ideology that has maintained itself—despite strains—for almost 70 years. The ideas that justified the American economic and political system in the minds of most of our citizens throughout that long period came under stress during earlier storms—from the 1950s to the 1970s in particular—and a few beams and joists cracked but did not give way. Today the manifold crises of capitalism mean that the entire existing intellectual structure of American capitalism is breaking up. And because of the role that the U.S. capitalist class plays in the world, this represents a crisis of world capitalist leadership and legitimacy. The question then arises: What will the country’s rulers attempt to put in its place, and what alternative explanation will we on the left and in the labor movement be able to offer to the country’s workers? Welfare Reform and the Ghost of the “Welfare Queen”
Like a spectral apparition from a Shakespeare play or an M. Night Shyamalan film, the dreaded ghost of welfare reform is making a ghoulish comeback on Capitol Hill just in time for its twentieth anniversary. Kiddin’ on the SquareThe Politics and Poetics of Mose Allison’s Blues
In October 1969, pianist/ singer/composer Mose Allison recorded “Monsters of the Id.” At a time when recent history had witnessed a police riot at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention, the police crackdown on protesters at Berkeley’s People’s Park, and popular backlash against anti-war, New Left, counter-culture, and Black Power sentiment, Allison began by warning that the title characters no longer remain hidden, but have come out in full view. To the accompaniment of a slightly discordant horn section, Allison—singing in his characteristic style, with its idiosyncratic pauses and accents—spins a variety of often ghoulish metaphors that remain just as timely in today’s era of Tea Party, torture reports, Stand Your Ground, and Donald Trump: “They’re sprouting through the cracks ... They’re deputizing maniacs / Creatures from the swamp rewrite their own Mein Kampf.” The Neo-colonization of Central America
The colonization of Latin America never ended, it merely changed forms. Today this conquest continues, with transnational companies driving neo-colonization grounded in the continued exploitation of natural resources. This is nowhere more true than in Central America. The force of neo-colonization is strengthened by free-trade agreements and development plans that guarantee a company’s right to investment above the rights of the citizenry. Meanwhile, the indigenous populations face renewed dispossession and eviction to make way for global capital’s conquest. The Struggle Against Syriza’s Austerity Program
“The Hammer Blow of the Revolution”Rosa Luxemburg’s Critique of Bourgeois Democracy
Feminisms of the Left
Theses on Saving the Planet
Food Justice + Food SovereigntyCan the U.S. Food Justice Movement Join the Global Movement?
In the United States today, there is a fresh opening for progressive alliances. The various movements—Black Lives Matter, the Fight for $15, climate change, immigrant rights, LGBT rights, Bernie—have different roots, structures, and foci, but they share a recognition that we are being crushed by the newest form of capitalism—as they call it in Latin America, “capitalismo salvaje”1 (savage capitalism)—and that we must stand up to it with all our might, with all our people. Bogdan Denitch
Art Lipow
Donald Rooum
After Bernie—Party Time?
Death, Politics, and the Anthropocene
Blueprints for the Future
Designing Socialism is a complete reprint, as an e-book, of the special April 2012 issue of the American academic Marxist journal Science & Society. It continues that publication’s tradition of providing, as stated by its usual editor David Laibman, “a major worldwide pulse-taking of the state of play in theoretical socialism” every April of the years ending in “2” in every decade (Campbell, ed., 7). Syria Is Burning, But What Fuels the Fire?
Syria is the focus of the world’s attention. However, the closer the lens is focused, the more the picture seems obscured. Is what we are seeing a revolution? Is it a proxy war by international forces? Or, especially now with the emergence of the Islamic State, is this Islamic authoritarianism asserting itself? These questions are vital for anyone trying to piece together a picture of what is happening and especially for activists trying to understand what is at stake in Syria and what attitude to take toward events as they unfold. Secular Stagnation and Rosa Luxemburg’s Breakdown Theory
Memory and the Movies
This book is a fascinating incursion into the multiple oppositional uses of memory in world cinema. It shows, in a lively and insightful way, how movies bring the memory of past struggles forward into the present, to serve as an inspiration for the future. Inez Hedges distinguishes eight types of cultural cinematographic memory, which correspond to the eight chapters of the book: Homage to E.P. Thompson
Democracy, from King Hammurabi’s Time to Tomorrow
Radical America
Workers’ Stories of their Strikes in China
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Blogs & On-Line FeaturesWe Fight for Socialism over Barbarism
How Trump Won: Seizing the Anti-Establishment Ground through Racial and Economic Nationalism On November 8, voters in the United States narrowly elected an openly racist, misogynist and nativist candidate for president. Donald Trump succeeded in defining himself as an anti-establishment candidate who will end dynastic rule in Washington, D.C., by elites who care little for “forgotten Americans.” The election of Trump and the struggle ahead
1. The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States is a shocking and dangerous turn of events--not only for the U.S., but for the entire world. It is a decisive shift, representing the latest failure of center-right and center-left parties in the advanced capitalist countries in the wake of the Great Recession, opening the way for the triumph of a candidate who used right-wing populism to stoke racism, xenophobia and reaction. Mass Incarceration and Its Mystification: A Review of "The 13th"
When prisoners in Alabama last spring proposed a national strike to protest “prison slavery,” they called out the infamous clause in the Thirteenth Amendment. The amendment most known for abolishing slavery included a rider that sanctioned slavery “as punishment for a crime wherein the party shall have been duly convicted.” ![]() Irish Anti-Colonial Solidarity with Indigenous People
#NoDAPL In 1847 as a famine created by both climate and man was unleashing death and destruction across Ireland, a group of charitable people across the Atlantic ocean raised money for those affected. They raised 170dollars and these people who managed to raise such a considerable amount of money were themselves without any prosperity but gave what they had because they knew the hardships famine and opression brought, they were Native Americans of the Choctaw Nation. Letter from Standing Rock
Build the Left to Defeat the Right
Like millions of people here and around the world, we woke up this morning dismayed and frightened that Donald Trump has been elected President. Whatever we each thought of the Democratic Party and of Hillary Clinton, none of us wanted to believe that a plurality of voters could bring themselves to vote for Trump. His victory is part of a global pattern of an ascendant, populist right, following in the wake of the similarly unexpected vote in favor of Brexit in the UK, and, like Brexit, it is being celebrated by right wing nationalist leaders in Europe like Marine Le Pen. Letter to American Friends and Comrades
Dear Friends and Comrades, Today is a terrible one for America and the world. Trump’s Victory: What American Federation of Teachers President Weingarten should say
Solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux and all the Struggles of Indigenous Peoples
The Black Workers for Justice support the struggles of the indigenous peoples to defend their land and treaty rights and their struggles for environmental justice. And in this moment we are in full support of the resistance of the Standing Rock Sioux to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). We call on all people to support them politically and materially. Our Postwork Future: A Prospect to Win or to Lose?
It borders on a disservice to characterize Four Futures: Life After Capitalism as a primer on contemporary political philosophy, since Peter Frase, the author, explodes any expectation of pedantry in his prose, or more importantly, in his approach to political theory, which he calls “social science fiction.” Towards an Anarchist Money and Monetary System: An Interview with Nathan Cedric Tankus
Though conceived out of conversations concerning the Eurozone crisis in summer 2015, this interview with Nathan Cedric Tankus engages with heightened focus by the left on finance capita. Tankus is research scholar at the Modern Money Network, an organization committed to: “The creation and improvement of monetary and financial institutions governed by the public and directed in support of public purpose; The universal, enforceable and inalienable right of every person to participate in economic life in a manner consistent with basic principles of justice, fairness, equality and dignity; The security of individuals, families and communities, the development of autonomous, non-state entities and the flourishing of civil society as critical components of economic freedom” as well as principles of ecological sustainability and intellectual freedom. Behind the Demonstrations in Morocco
Final Dispatch from Greece
Dear Friends and Family,
I've been in Salonica just over a month. All my time here has been as a volunteer in the Elpida Refugee Center, working mainly in the communal kitchen or in the food distribution center.
A courageous Syrian collective challenges both ISIS and Assad in Raqqa
Just hours after Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced that the United States is preparing to launch an offensive against the Syrian city of Raqqa, Abdalaziz Alhamza, a 25-year-old Raqqa native, spoke to a New York City audience about his hometown. Before the Islamic State captured the city in 2014, he recalled, few people outside of Syria had heard of Raqqa, “but now, most people hear about our city as the capital of ISIS.” Alhamza, an activist-journalist and founding member of the resistance group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, or RBSS, has risked his life for the past several years in order to tell a different story. “Almost no one there has joined ISIS. We should be known as the capital of resistance.”
Third Parties—My Personal Experience
I joined the Peace and Freedom Party under the guidance of leaders of the International Socialists (IS), including Mike Parker and Jack Weinberg, in 1967-68. This was my only real involvement in a third party. It was not only long ago, it was a different context: there was a large, lively left movement, which at the time appeared to be still growing (we hoped). Thus the P & F was conceived of—and briefly was—a movement party. That’s why it may be worth a look back. To get the party on the ballot in California, we had to get people to change their party registration, via a registrar, often from Democratic, to P & F. Some 107,000 did so in California, which was remarkable. The same year George Wallace used the same procedure to get an almost exact number of registrants for his party. I recall an IS member, J.B., said to me “I just wish we had his demographics!” So true. |