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…
Losurdo’s key move is to contrast ‘Western Marxism’ systematically with an ‘Eastern Marxism’, presented as its productive antithesis. The Western variant, Losurdo agrees with other accounts, was born out of a reaction against the slaughter of the First World War, and the magnetism of the revolution in Russia. The outlook of its earliest thinkers—Bloch, Lukács, Benjamin—was, however, from the outset impregnated with a set of themes that went back to the anarchism of Bakunin’s time: notably a hostility to science, associated with capitalism, and to the state of any kind, associated with tyranny. To these it added a messianic streak of eschatological expectation, inherited from a judeo-christian past, that looked forward to salvation for humanity in communism, conceived as the proximate coming of a classless society in which money and the state would disappear. Such utopian hopes vested in a beleaguered USSR were bound to be disappointed…. | 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…
“Domitila’s book serves as an example, a living testimony, of what it means to fight for democracy; that is, democracy not only as the right to vote every five years, but also the right to associate, to think, to organize, and discuss fundamental issues, such as salary, rights, constitutional guarantees, and party politics, in one’s community. This is democracy as a continuous and daily affair, an everyday practice…” -From the Foreword to the Argentine edition | 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…
While Mina, Sofie, and the other Jewish residents knelt in front of the synagogue, one of the Nazis threw a match onto the gasoline-soaked floor of the building. As the synagogue burned, Judenberg’s residents were ordered to shout, “We are burning the synagogue! We are burning the synagogue!” Mina and other Judenberg residents cried bitterly as they watched the building that was so central to the life of their close-knit community burn to ashes…. | more…
The book’s political heart is the chapter which discusses national sovereignty and begins with a succinct history of the nation state. Lage views Cuban sovereignty as a safeguard of Cuba’s social project, protecting it from neoliberal capitalism and the ills it has wrought on the ‘underdeveloped’ world…. | more…
In a speech on January 15, 1960, a year after the Revolution came to power, Fidel Castro remarked that, “The future of Cuba will necessarily be a future of men (sic) of science.” The landscape would change dramatically.
The Cuban Academy of Sciences was reactivated in 1962. In succession came: the National Center for Scientific Research (1965), the Center for Biological Research (1982); the Center of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (1986) with its 38 scientific institutions, the Immunoassay Center (1987), the vaccine-manufacturing Finlay Institute (1991), the National Center for Biopreparations (1992), and the Center for Molecular Immunology (1994)…. | more…
John Bellamy Foster describes Einstein’s radical political commitments, including his efforts in relation to the founding of Brandeis University, his role in the Henry Wallace campaign, and his seminal essay “Why Socialism?” | more…
Very soon after the loss of her life-partner, a giant of the Irish left, author of ‘Until We Fall’ and ‘Navigating the Zeitgeist’, Helena Sheehan shows as much commitment as ever…. | more…
