February 20, 2024
Protests against enclosure began as far back as 1450, when “tens of thousands of English peasants fought, and thousands died, to halt the spread of capitalist farming that was destroying their way of life.”
February 20, 2024
At the end of the postscript, Marini again emphasises the central concept of his work, namely that “dependent economy – and therefore the super-exploitation of labour – appears as a necessary condition of world capitalism” and that therefore “capitalist production, by developing labour’s productive powers, does not eliminate but rather accentuates the greater exploitation of the worker”...
February 20, 2024
'The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis' provides the historical insight that I associate with the best accounts of this kind: motives are complex, power a critical variable, timing an unpredictable factor, and rational argument not necessarily a winning strategy...
February 20, 2024
"...a woman in Gaza, her family had been bombed out of their home. But she was determined to make bread and she had found a hot plate. She was making these breads. She said you could get killed going to the bakery, you can’t go to the bakery. They're bombing the bakeries. So I'm doing this. Her kids are in the street, sitting under a tarpaulin. And she's making bread. That's a form of heroism, you know?
...I asked them, “Do you ever feel like you should leave?” They replied, 'We stay here. We're not leaving. This is our home.' That's a form of resistance."
February 20, 2024
This virtual panel examined the commune and communal organizing as part of the project of revolutionary social transformation. The speakers addressed how socialist communes can be used to abolish capitalism’s logic, based on the exploitation of the human being and the expropriation of nature, along with the range of oppressions (including racial, gender, sexual, and colonial oppression) in capitalist society. The speakers – Kali Akuno, John Bellamy Foster, Chris Gilbert, and M.E. O’Brien – drew from various theoretical perspectives and practical experiences.
February 20, 2024
Mass meetings took place in 80,000 workplaces, neighborhood committees, farmers’ organisations, and the Federation of Cuban Women. These acted as a two-way conduit, informing the workers and farmers of the reality of the situation while, at the same time, allowing for votes on different options, all unpalatable, but some more acceptable than others. By giving ordinary people a direct say and a stake in the solution of the crisis, the Workers’ Parliaments brought back a commitment to the social gains of the Revolution and enabled Cuban society to slowly emerge from the “Special Period.”
February 20, 2024
Saira Ro recently welcomed Esther Farmer, one of the coeditors of 'A Land With A People,' to discuss her participation in recent actions demanding justice for the Palestinian People....
February 20, 2024
as Marx showed, while accumulation creates an ever greater mass of means of production, this in itself begins to throw up barriers to the profitable reproduction of such great quantities of capital. This contradiction results in the intensification of competition between capitals over labour, raw materials and markets, not the least consequence of which is imperialist tension and war...
February 20, 2024
In 1990, reflecting on his CPUSA years, he wrote me that “I decided some time in the 70s that what I really ought to have been is a Shachtmanite . . . .” Afterward, he no longer identified himself as a “Marxist-Leninist” but told biographer Batterson that he was a “red-green eco-socialist.”
February 20, 2024
Peace was very much an option...Reading Izzy Stone’s reporting today, it’s striking the extent to which these mechanisms of Cold War still exist and are being used to wage a New Cold War. The military bases, the troop deployments, the nuclear threats that aimed to contain socialism and prevent the emergence of a multipolar world in the 1950s continue to serve the same purposes in 2023.
