He said, well if you’re not busy, on Thursday we have a demonstration in front of the Israeli embassy. He added, “we actually do this every Thursday.” Then Natalie added, “and have done so every Thursday for the last 13 years.” Mind you, this was December. | more…
By examining the Special Period that Cuba went through, Ross gives us an example of how during periods of austerity, workers do not and should not need to pay the price of the crisis. For those who still think that Cuba is far from their ideal, I would like to paraphrase Marx. In theory, we assume that the laws of the socialist mode of production develop in their pure form. In reality, this is only an approximation; the approximation is all the more exact, the more socialism is developed and the less it is adulterated by survivals of earlier economic conditions with which it is amalgamated. | more…
As inter-imperialist rivalry now intensifies, especially between the U.S. and Russian and China, with each scrambling to secure allies and advantages against one another, the U.S. will cling to Israel and drag Jews, Palestinians and the other people of the region through a new hellish round of suffering for the sake of defending the American imperium…. | more…
In 1960, Davis was sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to answer questions about his membership in the Communist Party. Davis’s lawyers defended him with the innovative legal argument that the First Amendment barred such questioning. While Davis lost in the courts, his legal battles were still an important effort in a larger battle to extend the parameters on political speech. | more…
When world war erupted in 1914 Chamberlain extolled the German war effort. Germany’s defeat in 1918 devastated Chamberlain and may have negatively affected his health. After the war Chamberlain embraced the theory promoted by militarists, monarchists, and rising fascists that Germany had not lost the war but were betrayed by the liberals, Social Democrats and Jews…. | more…
For Gilbert the commune represents a recovery of Marx, in particular the romantic Marx who saw revolutionary potential among the Iroquois Confederacy, Algerian peasants and Russian peasant communes… | more…
The cause of COVID-19 and other such pathogens is not found just in the object of any one infectious agent or its clinical course, but also in the field of ecosystemic relations that capital and other structural causes have pinned back to their own advantage … the hidden-in-plain-sight truth behind the pandemic: global capital drove the deforestation and development that exposed us to new pathogens…. | more…
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.” | more…
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…. | more…
Watch this discussion about Helena Sheehan’s new memoir, “Until We Fall,” and come along on Sheehan’s travels as she tracks the fallout from the transition from flawed forms of socialism to a particularly predatory form of capitalism. | more…
Faced with the implosion of the economy at the beginning of the 1990s and eschewing the neoliberal approach of placing the burden of social downturns on the poorest and weakest members of society, the Cuban government had to impose many restrictions on the consumption of all its citizens to distribute the hardships. How this was done is the heart of understanding the workers’ parliaments as a case study of workers exercising workers’ power, and hence as a case study of a particular dramatic and important event in Cuba’s 60-year effort to build socialism. | more…
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. | more…
“…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.” | more…