April 1, 2017
While the political conflicts and social ramifications of public school reform are well known, basic questions about the movement remain underexamined. Who really leads it? What are their motives? We need a deeper understanding of this movement, its drivers, and its underlying aims.
April 1, 2017
How did a community college that had managed to serve and retain most of its student population and remain fiscally sound amid a recession and a budget crisis become the target of condemnation by accrediting authorities? The answer involves a disastrous collision of corporate education reform, administrative arrogance, and timid, undemocratic union leadership.
April 1, 2017
Although today there are some setbacks in the region, nobody can deny that there is a huge difference between the Latin America that Hugo Chávez inherited and the Latin America he left us. A new revolutionary subject has been created.
March 1, 2017
U.S. economic, military, and financial dominance have been ebbing for decades, leaving the United States in the position of a wounded mastodon within the world at large, a threat to all around it. Washington has repeatedly tried with very limited success to reverse this slide in its hegemonic role by means of geopolitical expansion, aimed at increasing its "strategic assets" across the globe. The result has been a constantly expanding theatre of global conflict.
March 1, 2017
The anthropocentric tendency to view nature or the environment as everything that is not human obscures the productive processes that go on in "nature." But non-human animals are also the purposeful producers of their own worlds: they too engage in their own species-specific objectifying activity that transforms what is, from their perspective, nature; they too build worlds in their own bodily image.
March 1, 2017
There is a degree of unpredictability in politics today that presents opportunities for those who aren't too constrained by past experience to see them. We're seeing the possibility of regenerating a left that has previously been ground down to the scale of atoms, one that, if it adapts creatively to the coming defeats, can prepare the ground for success. But that means recognizing that the history of the left is a history of defeats; it is a history of the vanquished.
March 1, 2017
England and Wales represent two very different, indeed incompatible, approaches to health care. In the former, health care has come under increasing threat from the predatory forces of privatization. In Wales, however, an explicit effort has been made to defend socialist values and formulate them for the twenty-first century, defending and expanding a system that puts the health and well-being of its citizens over profit.
March 1, 2017
Most accounts of Marx and Engels's lives, if they mention Carl Schorlemmer (1834–92) at all, refer to the renowned chemist only as a friend, without acknowledging his influence on their studies of the natural sciences. It is time to restore this neglected figure to his rightful place in the Marxian—and Engelsian—tradition.
March 1, 2017
For decades, academics have suggested that Engels downgraded and distorted Marx's thought. Today we are at last seeing the return of Engels, whose work continues to inform the struggles and inspire the hopes that define our own time.
March 1, 2017
As astronauts penetrate ever further into the cosmos, how are their bodies and subjectivities being transformed? While space travel remains governed by mechanisms of power and domination that tend to treat astronauts as tools, the practice of "space medicine" is now beginning to interact with astronauts' bodies in a more multidirectional, dialectical fashion.