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 FeaturesSyria and the Left
Behind the humanitarian disaster of the Syrian civil war is a political crisis the Left urgently needs to understand. The Syrian tragedy is a key moral and political question today. Yet it has not been easy for leftists around the world to decide where they stand on Syria. Opposition, Protest, Resistance to Trump Muslim Ban – Day 2
Trump’s Muslim Ban Spurs Strong Resistance: Thousands at Airport Protests
Thousands from New York City to Seattle went on January 28 to the nation’s major airports to protest President Donald’s Trump’s order banning for 120 days Muslim immigrants and refugees from seven nations, an order issued that same day. The protests, initiated by immigrant rights groups through social media, took place not only at the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York—where it grew to several thousand—but also at Dulles in Washington, D.C., O’Hare in Chicago, and at the Los Angeles and San Francisco airports.
Redeeming the revolution: A review of “October 1917 - Workers in Power”
Fred Leplat and Alex de Jong, eds. October 1917 – Workers in Power. London: Merlin Press, the IIRE and Resistance Books, 2016. 256 pages Nearly a century ago, the workers and peasants of Russia overthrew the Provisional Government and established the world’s first socialist republic. It was a seminal moment in human history. For the capitalists of the world, it was an event to be feared and they marshaled their forces to contain Bolshevism. Women's March 2017: The Birth Of a New Women's Movement (?)
I See America Marching Again
I see America marching again, Labor and "Pussy Power"
We brought family, friends, supporters, male and female, protesting the human rights and climate deniers whom Trump has brought with him into office. There was some diversity but this was primarily a march of young White women who carried signs about their bodies, “Pussy power” being the most prominent at the New York march. “Pussy power” strikes me as especially apt. Like women who fight patriarchy, it’s naughty. It evokes the strength in numbers. Most of all, the march birthed a new social movement which will owe its life to pussy.
Millions of Women March Against Trump and His Policies
Millions of women around the world marched on Saturday, January 21, to repudiate Republican Donald Trump’s presidency, his vulgar and misogynistic language and behavior, and his anti-woman policies. On Trump’s first full-day as president, he was greeted in Washington, D.C. by a magnificent pink demonstration of women in protest promising he would face four years of resistance.
Left of Death: The Socialist Case Against the Death Penalty
On January 10, 2017, white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof was sentenced to death by a jury of his peers in federal court. He was deemed competent to stand trial multiple times, despite serious questions regarding his mental stability. He was afforded what, by all means, appeared to be a competent legal team to defend him against the charges stemming from the shooting of ten (killing nine) Black church-goers at Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Church in South Carolina on June 17, 2015, though Roof decided to abandon legal counsel at several points in the legal process. Roof was 21 years old at the time of the attack—barely old enough to legally consume alcohol and not old enough to even rent a car. He has expressed nothing resembling regret for his crimes, and in fact has remained steadfast in his justification for them. Assuming the psychological experts are right and Roof lacks any kind of relevant mental illness, I have no sympathy for Roof nor should anyone else. I even understand the visceral desire to want to see Roof suffer the ultimate penalty for his crimes. What labor should learn from Trump’s victory
Michael Hirsch, Saulo Colon, Murray Schneider, and Lois Weiner respond to an exchange between Larry Cohen and Randi Weingarten and Leo Casey in New Labor Forum about what organized labor could and should have done differently so as to avoid Donald Trump’s victory. We hope to encourage wide-ranging debate among labor activists and supporters about these issues. You can reply on our blog, below, or in the comments section of the New Labor Forum reprint of our article.
Russia and the Left
[Note: This article is forthcoming in the Winter 2017 issue of New Politics.] What explains the enthusiasm in certain quarters of the left for Vladimir Putin and Russia? Why do some cheer on Russian bombing in Syria, dismissing out of hand the evidence from Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch1 that they are criminally targeting hospitals? Why do some try to justify Russia’s takeover of Crimea or its blatant intervention in Ukraine?
Mass Protests Across Mexico against Gas, Electrical Price Increases
Tens of thousands in every state in Mexico have for the last week joined protests against President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government after it raised prices on gasoline by between 14 and 20 percent and electric rates by 4.5 percent. The protests so far are not as well organized, as disciplined, or as large as the recent teachers’ strikes over the education reform law or the demonstrations in protest of the forced disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa Teachers College students, but the demonstrations against the gasolinazo are national in scope and involve broader sectors of society.
Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall…
Trump is President. To avoid repeating the causes of Trump winning requires knowing what the causes were. Statement on My Satirical Christmas Tweet
On Christmas Eve, I sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, 'white genocide.' For those who haven't bothered to do their research, “white genocide” is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I'm glad to have mocked it. The End of the “American Century”: Whither US Global Hegemony and the Indispensable Nation?
“This is the end, my only friend, the end/Of our elaborate plans, the end/Of everything that stands, the end/No safety or surprise, the end.” - Jim Morrison, The Doors Will Donald Trump’s ascension to the imperial presidency mark the nadir of the declension of the United States as the global hegemon? While Trump’s fantasies about “making America great again” do not explicitly rely on promoting the US as the “indispensable nation,” they, nonetheless, deploy strategies to resurrect the fossil fuel driven expansion of the military industrial state that marked the post-World War II period of US global dominance. Does Trump’s criticism of NATO and “nation building” suggest a less interventionist foreign policy, or does his commitment to white nationalism still augur a redeemer nation, primed to contest those who would challenge US global hegemony? Given the present contradictions of US global hegemony and the policies and posturing of a Trump and his proposed Administration, are we witnessing the end of the American Century and its institutional and ideological commitment to the US as the “indispensable” nation? |