Paraguayan Sorrow:
Writings of Rafael Barrett, A Radical Voice in a Dispossessed Land
By Rafael Barrett
Edited by William Costa
240 pages / $26.00 / 978-1-68590-078-6
“…what makes you shudder is when he declares: “Now I’m going to pull up all the trees around the property so that it looks nice.”
Yes, the gleaming, stupid façade must look clean, bare, with its brazen colors that profane the softness of the rural tones. People must say: “This is the new house of so-and-so, that man who is now so rich.” It must be possible to contemplate the monument to so-and-so’s endeavors without obstruction. Trees are surplus to requirement: “They block the view.” And there is not only vanity in this eagerness to strip the ground: there is hatred, hatred of trees.
Is this possible? Hatred of beings that, unmoving, with their noble limbs always open, offer us the caress of their shade without ever tiring; the silent fertility of their fruits; the multifarious, exquisite poetry that they raise up to the sky? They claim that there are harmful plants. Perhaps there are, but that should not be reason to hate them. Our hatred condemns them. Our love would perhaps transform them and redeem them….” | more…
“In 2020, Blacks owned less than 3 percent of American businesses. Even this was misleading. The bulk of them were still mom-and-pop sole proprietorships, with one or two employees”…. | more…
A cautionary note: a report from Columbia Law School in 2021, eight years after Lage’s book was first published, cites Cuban statistics showing “a drop of almost 40% in exports of chemical products and related products between 2015 and 2019 … [And] medicinal and pharmaceutical products make up around 90% of the total exports of chemical products.” It seems that income derived from biotechnology exports is down. | more…
A responsible thinker, Angus tackles contradictions and doesn’t resort to facile discourse. “There’s a tendency in some of the degrowth movement (which advocates economic contraction for environmental reasons) to think the real problem is that everyday consumers are all greedy. But telling ordinary workers that they should have less probably isn’t a good start,” he warns. “We have to look at the degrowth issue as a social issue and at things in our societies like advertising and military spending, which produce profit but actually have negative effects on ordinary people’s lives, whether they realize it or not.” | more…
Gabriel Rockhill y Jennifer Ponce de León han escrito la Introducción a la versión inglesa de El Marxismo Occidental, titulada “El socialismo como liberación anti-colonial: lecciones contemporáneas de Losurdo”, en la que no sólo delinean las ideas-fuerza de Losurdo y el método de análisis que aplica en esta obra, sino que también ofrecen interesantes reflexiones sobre la “industria de la teoría” y el “socialismo realmente existente”…. | more…
Cabral goes so far as to ask whether in fact ‘the national liberation movement is not an imperialist initiative’ since he judges the character of the struggle as tending to bring the petit bourgeoisie to power…. | more…
As Reiman documents, the union’s reform faction then faced continuing resistance from well entrenched internal foes. Carey’s crackdown on crooks and leadership perks alienated large sections of the Teamster officialdom. In 1996, the still-powerful local officialdom, which backed two competing “Old Guard” candidates five years earlier, bankrolled a unified $4 million challenge to Carey. It was fronted by a local union lawyer with the most famous last name in Teamsterdom…. | more…
“The book under review furnishes ample proof that professional historians do not have the market cornered on rigorous historical method, and the most fascinating portions of Batterson’s brilliant book draw on reasoning methods that may be common to mathematicians but elude the practitioners of other disciplines….” –The Historian | more…
When I use the word “violence,” I do not mean random killing of those you oppose. Rather, I mean violence embedded in a radical political program. If a political group targets certain colonial or imperial leaders who are raining misery on their people with assassination, this is a legitimate use of violence. | more…
I wasn’t a terrorist—just a journalist, which, in Israel’s eyes, is almost as bad….Everything people learn in journalism school about risk management and safety in the field feels like mere theories on paper in Gaza. Being a journalist during this war means continuing to write your story with one hand on your phone because the second air strike on the targeted residential area scattered metal and glass shrapnel in your arm and destroyed your laptop. It means waiting for the drone to lift higher in the sky so you can escape its surveillance radar and bullets that target every moving object, especially those marked with “PRESS” on their chests… | more…
