Current IssueFrom the Editors
Since Donald Trump has taken up residence in the White House, the country has faced a series of political controversies, a barrage of right-wing legislative and regulatory initiatives, a growing far-right movement, but also a broadening resistance from various sectors of society. Trump: Political Crisis, Right-wing Policies, and the Resistance
Donald Trump’s first six months as president of the United States has been bad in so many ways that it is hard to know where to begin. One Hundred Years of the Russian Revolution: A Retrospective View
At a distance of one hundred years, the Russian Revolution, which truly shook the world, deserves to be remembered once more in terms of its emancipatory significance and its downfall and betrayal. This revolution would not have happened had it not been for the crucial role played by the Bolshevik party. It is true that the profound crisis affecting the Russian society, worsened by the country’s disastrous participation in World War I, could have sooner or later led to a massive upheaval. But it is questionable that a socialist revolution would have taken place without the organizational skills of the Bolshevik party and the political, strategic, and tactical genius of V.I. Lenin. The Russian Revolution, Soviets, and Socialist DemocracyAn Interview with Suzi Weissman
“Revolutions are the mad inspiration of history” Leon Trotsky, My Life
The Tragic Fate of Workers’ Russia
[This is the second of three articles commemorating the Russian Revolution of 1917 and analyzing its fate under Stalin. The first part, “Glorious Harbinger of a New Society: the Bolshevik Revolution,” was published in the previous issue of New Politics, number 62, winter 2017. The text below is slightly expanded from what appeared in the print issue.] Soon after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 3, 1918, the Soviet republic was under siege. Various anti-Bolshevik forces, some supported by the Allies or the Central Powers, were gathering. If these forces succeeded in reversing the October Revolution, what would be the result? Antonio Gramsci: From War to Revolution
Eighty years after his death, Antonio Gramsci is among the most influential Marxist intellectuals across the board. By the end of World War II, liberal intellectuals had already found in him “a Marxist you can take home to Mother.” The tone was set by Benedetto Croce, who allegedly gushed in 1947, upon reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, “He’s one of us!”1 It reached the point that the Sardinian activist can be presented today as no less than the guarantor of “Italian Democracy.”2 Looking Back at the June 1967 Middle East War
JUNE 2017 IS THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the 1967 Middle East War—the June War or, as Israelis like to call it, the Six Day War. Why should we care today about this historical event? For one, the war—with its resulting conquests, refugees, and shifting alliances—helped define the modern Middle East and make it one of the world’s great flash points for further conflict. But there are other reasons as well why this war bears re-examination. Self-organization in the 2016 Palestinian Teachers Strike
From February 14 to March 13, 2016, 35,000 Palestinian teachers in the West Bank government-run school system were on strike. The teachers’ goal was to hold the Palestinian Authority to the terms of a 2013 agreement between the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT) and the Ministry of Education, an agreement the Palestinian Authority had reneged on for three years running. (Ma’an News, Feb. 16, 2016) Socialism from Below? Bolivia in an Age of Extractivism
Bolivia received global attention for its anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist social movements in the twenty-first century. Best known perhaps were the Water Wars, against water privatization, in 2000 and the Gas Wars, demanding nationalization of the gas industry, in 2003. These rebellions entailed a radical rethinking of natural resource use and distribution. Puerto Rico and PROMESA: Reaffirming Colonialism
“Puerto Rico will be in a death spiral!” With this dramatic announcement, Governor Alejandro García Padilla transformed the island nation’s long-simmering debt overhang problem into an international spectacle. A financial mess that seemingly concerned only institutional investors, municipal bondholders, and some hedge fund managers exploded into a full-blown debt crisis with disquieting parallels to the situation in Greece. Remembering Dependency TheoryA Marxist-Humanist Review
This article aims to show that dependency theory underlines vividly the problem of examining the logic of capital independent of Marx’s concept of value. It is impossible to completely understand the essence of Marx’s critique of political economy, especially a vision of an alternative to capitalism, without grasping value as distinct from exchange value. The distinction is of vital importance, since uprooting relations of exchange cannot itself eliminate the defining principle of capitalism: abstract labor, production for the sake of value. U.S. Workers in the Late Neoliberal EraThe Pressures, the Changes, the Potential
Capitalism in the United States and across the world has gone through a series of mind-bending crises, spatial “fixes,” and continuous restructurings that have disoriented organized labor in most of the developed economies since the beginning of the neoliberal era in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Left, the Right, and Globalization
Don’t be tricked into thinking that what is going on is a debate about “free trade”—the unhindered exchange of goods—because it is not. Agrarian Reform and the Radicalization of Food Politics
If you’ve seen any of the documentaries that are critical of U.S. agriculture, then you’re most likely aware of the increase in some innovative and somewhat unconventional experiments in growing food—bee hives and gardens on hospital roof tops, abandoned warehouses turned into greenhouses, farms that double as a local community’s source of fresh produce and the pizzeria. The Jewish Role in the Industrial Workers of the World
The most radical and militant union in American history was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), colloquially known as the Wobblies. Its active years were from 1905 to 1919, or at best until mid-1920 when it led its last major struggles—a maritime workers strike in California and a miners strike in Colorado. Fierce government repression during and after World War I, along with vigilante violence and internal divisions, dealt the IWW blows from which it never recovered. The mass industrial union movement during the New Deal passed it by. Yet, the IWW continues to exist on a small scale to this day. Harvey, Klein, Smith, Foster: Militant Particularism and Ecosocialism
In “Militant Particularism and Global Ambition: The Conceptual Politics of Place, Space, and Environment in the Work of Raymond Williams” (1995), David Harvey discusses the challenges presented by moving from place out across time. In the midst of his involvement in a participatory research project within a high-stakes local struggle against the closure of an automotive plant, he was accused of being a “free-floating Marxist intellectual,” an outsider, and he was given the “evil eye” and asked to explain “where his loyalties lay.” (71) This is in an environment where people were losing jobs, and families and communities were being destroyed. Art Spiegelman on Si Lewen
Reading, actually looking obsessively at the pages of, this volume and non-volume inevitably brings to mind an unpublished, uncompleted 1967 essay by Herbert Marcuse, “Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz,” translated and published after his death. Here Marcuse says, in part, The Real Tragedy of Che Guevara's LIfe
In Latin America we have a saying, “Poner el dedo en la llaga,” a phrase that means to call attention to a delicate or worrisome point. However, llaga means literally an open sore or ulcer. I believe that Cuban socialist and scholar Samuel Farber puts his finger indeed on a significant sore point in revolutionary history with his latest book, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice. While recognizing the undeniable determination, egalitarianism, and selflessness of Che Guevara in his fight against imperialism, Farber meticulously exposes the contradictions of Che’s thought and the political, economic, and social detours that Guevara took in his honest quest for a better world. A Complete Story of AtticaAt long last
Heather Ann Thompson has written a magnificent history of the Attica Prison uprising, the deadliest prison rebellion in U.S. history. It is a long book, nearly 600 pages of text and another 150 of notes and apparatus. It’s a timely book: Attica casts its uneasy shadow over our halting steps to unwind the social catastrophe that is mass incarceration. Memories of Struggle and Despair in the Philippines
In the foreword to Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years, the authors write it “was not intended to be about communists and communism”—still the book provides remarkable insights into the Philippine communist movement. The book is a collective memoir of the surviving Quimpo family, relating their lives during the years of the Marcos dictatorship from the early seventies to the mid-eighties. With many of the siblings involved in the revolutionary movement, their memories furnish stories of underground organizing, imprisonment and torture, repression and resistance. Marvin Mandell, Who Fought for Equality, for Life, and for Art
In 1996, at the height of the culture wars, Marvin Mandell joined the battle, writing a long essay, “Canon on the Left,” in which he argued that the left should not allow conservatives to claim the literary canon. While he of course supported the expansion of the canon to include all of the writers of color, as well as the women and all of the others who had been neglected and excluded, he refused to allow the right to claim the great tradition of European literature. He concluded the essay with these words: |
Blogs & On-Line FeaturesOn the One Hundredth Anniversary of Two Revolutions: Russia and Georgia, Bolshevism or MenshevismBook Review
Eric Lee. The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921. London: Zed Books, 2017. 259 pages. Timeline. Notes. Index. (For further information see: http://www.ericlee.info/theexperiment/) In his new book The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgtten Revolution, 1918-1921 the journalist and historian Eric Lee does two things. First, he tells the little known and complicated story of the Georgian Revolution and the short-lived independent state that it created.
Hugo Blanco: The Future Is Indigenous
On a gray Saturday afternoon in Lima, Peru, this past April, I received a phone call from Hugo Blanco, veteran guerilla and survivor of multiple death sentences. “You wanted to talk?” he asked. “Come over now.” An hour later, after a ride through the city’s torturous streets, I was in the plaza in front of his house, an unpretentious single-level in a middle-class neighborhood north of the colonial center. I knocked and collected myself; I hadn’t actually expected him to respond to my request. The Workers of the World Do Need to UniteAn interview with Steve Early
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You have written a book about the city of Richmond, California, where you live, prefaced by Senator Bernie Sanders: Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. This book shows us the experience of this city that has won struggles such as raise the local minimum wage, defeat a casino development project, challenge home foreclosures and evictions, and seek fair taxation of Big Oil and Big Soda. Can we say that the Richmond experience should inspire progressive activists in other cities around the world? Walter Benjamin and the Political Practices of the Alt-right
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin was one of the great analysts of liberal capitalism during a time when its days seemed numbered and fascism was ascendant across Europe. Much of his work is taken up with looking at how the cultural products and processes characteristic of a civilization are reflective of the inner psychic and spiritual tensions roiling beneath the surface of hegemonic ideologies. Right Hooks
David Neiwart, Alt-Right: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. Verso Books, 2017. Think of this book as a basket of deplorables. It’s thick on illuminating descriptions of renascent white nationalists, gun-enamored militia poseurs, conspiracy-theory mongers, Ku Klux Klansmen and women, Christian Identitarians and proto-Nazis benefitting from and legitimized by the sordid presidency of Donald Trump. It’s thin on explaining why such phenomena persist or have arisen as political thuggery in 21st-century America. Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists – Founding Statement of Principles
We are an alliance of Middle Eastern socialists opposed to all the international and Middle Eastern regional imperialist powers and their wars, whether the U.S., Russia and China or Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. We also oppose other authoritarian regimes such as Assad’s in Syria and El Sisi’s in Egypt as well as religious fundamentalism whether of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood. Although the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah consider themselves gradualists and oppose the Jihadism of Al Qaeda and ISIS, all of these organizations share the goal of establishing a state based on Shari’a Law and preserving the current capitalist order. Bolshevism, Real and Imagined: A Reply to Mitchell Cohen
The greatest flaw of Mitchell Cohen’s “What Lenin’s Critics Got Right” in the most recent Dissent is that it repeats what Lars T. Lih, independent researcher and author of Lenin Rediscovered:‘What Is To Be Done’ In Context (Haymarket, 2008) and a biography of Lenin (Reaktion Books, 2011), calls the “standard textbook interpretation” of Lenin’s thought and, by extension, Bolshevism as a movement.
US vs Free Syrian Army vs Jabhat al-Nusra (and ISIS)History of a hidden three-way conflict
IntroductionThis article deals with a specific aspect of the US role in the Syrian conflict: its drive to co-opt the Free Syrian Army (FSA) into a proxy force to fight only the jihadist forces of Jabhat al-Nusra (now Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, or JFS) and the Islamic State (ISIS/Daesh), while giving up their fight against the Assad regime. Marx’s Capital After 150 Years: Revolutionary Reflections
What does it mean to celebrate and concretize for today Marx’s greatest work, Capital, Vol. I? Such a discussion is terribly important at this juncture, when we are in a new situation where even some sectors of the right have started to attack neoliberalism. The Brexit vote in the UK, the large vote for Le Pen in France despite her eventual defeat by a neoliberal candidate, and above all, the Trump campaign have placed on the agenda a new form of right-wing populism with neofascist overtones that breaks with some key features of neoliberalism, such as free trade pacts, somewhat more open borders, and “humanitarian” intervention. At the same time, Trump as president has put forth an incoherent agenda that contains major continuities with neoliberal austerity and old-style militarism, above all in the attempt to gut Obamacare. The Campus Antifascist Network’s United Front Against Fascism
Since Donald Trump’s election in November, 2016, more than 150 university campuses in North America have been postered or fliered by white supremacist, neo-Nazi, or white nationalist groups. Most common have been flierings by American Vanguard, a Neo-Nazi formation with paramilitary characteristics, and Identity Europa, a self-proclaimed white nationalist fraternity founded by a former acolyte of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Academic Freedom Goes to Court
Peaceful protest carries no guarantee against violence. In mid-May, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, came to the United States to meet with Donald Trump, who had made haste to congratulate him on winning a referendum in April. Its provisions would – according to the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe – undercut “the model of a democratic presidential system based on the separation of powers” and thereby “risk degeneration into an authoritarian presidential system.” Why should we care about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?
In the early hours of November 27th, employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) woke up to a world of contested allegiances. Advocated by Senator Elizabeth Warren and set up by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, CFPB was created in 2011 as an independent Federal agency tasked with protecting consumers in the financial sector. Since it was this sector’s predatory exploitation of low-income racialized communities that triggered the subprime mortgage crisis, this agency was intended to regulate finance across consumer services like mortgages, student loans, and credit cards. As such, the founding of the agency received large support from consumer groups and their Democratic allies in the Federal administration. Republicans, for their part, dutifully (and unsurprisingly) rendered the agency as another burden on the “free” market.[i] Such conflicts are hardly news and government employees are in this sense always in the precarious position that their jobs might be discarded with every new administration. Rarely, however, do these conflicts take the absurd character we could witness the following few days. Jones Victory in Alabama's Senate Race: Pause in that Sigh of ReliefAnd while you're doing that, subscribe and donate to New Politics!
Though we wouldn’t know it from mainstream media coverage, the sigh of relief many progressives will breathe at Moore’s defeat should be tempered with the knowledge that Jones will likely not be a reliable ally on issues on which the Democrats should all be expected to fight the GOP and Trump. An exit poll of voter opinions showed over 40% of Alabama voters, Democrats and Republicans alike, gave an unfavorable rating to both parties.
Standing Up for Palestine: BDS More than Ever!
IF THERE WAS any “Israel-Palestine peace process,” Donald Trump torched it with his December 6 announcement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of the U.S. embassy to that bitterly contested city. But there are two more important underlying realities. A Greek Tragedy Foretold
Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment And The Weak Suffer What They Must? Along with French economist Thomas Piketty, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis is making economics sexy again. Journalists enjoyed snapping photos of Varoufakis, clad in a black leather coat, commuting to the finance ministry’s offices on his Yamaha motorcycle. But his short tenure in the Greek government was marked by clashes with the country’s creditors and ultimately with the leadership of Syriza, the left-wing party that came to power in Greece in early 2015. |