Dirge for my country
February 1, 2017
is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Made in Detroit: Poems.
Article Subjects and Geography: Movements
Marx on Immigration: Workers, Wages, and Legal Status
February 1, 2017
Given the intense and often bitter debates over immigration now taking place in the United States and Europe…. [Marx's thoughts on the subject have] received surprisingly little attention from the modern left.… [Marx wrote about immigrant workers] nearly 150 years ago, and he was certainly not infallible, but a great deal of his analysis sounds remarkably contemporary.… [And among his insights, largely ignored by economists and activists alike, is] the one Marx considered "most important of all": the way immigration can be used to create "a working class divided into two hostile camps."
The Tyranny of Monopoly-Finance Capital: A Chinese Perspective
February 1, 2017
Since the 1980s, economic growth in the core capitalist countries has been driven by an enormous expansion of financial capital, accompanied by steady deindustrialization. In recent years, the monopoly power of this financial capital has displayed increasingly tyrannical characteristics: it depends for its continued growth on ever-increasing indebtedness and dependence in developing nations, widening the divide between rich and poor and ultimately fostering state violence that serves to suppress popular resistance.… [Today,] military and monetary strength work together to profit from inequality and instability in emerging economies.
The Brazilian Crisis: Corruption, Neoliberalism, and the Primary Sector
February 1, 2017
In discussing the Brazilian situation, it is easy to focus on the dramas of individual politicians and institutions. But to look only at this level of the crisis is to ignore the deeper economic conditions that have driven the country's politics to the edge.… The deeper contradiction, however, lies with the natural-resource economy, in which government revenue and social spending require royalties that are controlled by a small, unaccountable elite…. The left's only viable response…is to demand a radical restructuring of the primary sector and a reinvigorated opposition to neoliberalism.
Ecology and Revolution: A Letter to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, July 31, 1974
February 1, 2017
In the early 1970s, MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy increasingly introduced ecological themes into the magazine, and began to question the viability of unlimited, exponential economic growth in a limited biosphere. Sweezy, in particular, was deeply interested in ecological problems, a topic he began to write on in this period, in essays such as "Cars and Cities"…, and to which he returned on various occasions until the end of his life.… [In this 1974 letter to the influential ecological economist, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Sweezy outlined] the revolutionary implications of ecology, and the break that these necessitated with pure "economism"—a rupture that only a truly revolutionary socialism could bring about.
A People’s Theater on Skid Row
February 1, 2017
In Acting Like It Matters, James McEnteer gives a compassionate account of John Malpede—actor, activist, and co-creator of the political theatre troupe the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)—and of the Skid Row community that is the organization's heart and soul. The story of Malpede and the LAPD is one of life as art and art as life, and its protagonists are the dehumanized homeless citizens of Los Angeles and their compatriots in cities across the United States and the world, who represent a growing part of today's global working class pushed out of the formal economy.
Sovereignty and the State of Emergency: France and the United States
January 1, 2017
Following the July 14, 2016, massacre in Nice, French President François Hollande once again extended for three months a state of emergency that was to have ended on July 26. An initial, twelve-day state of emergency had been declared after the Paris attacks and extended for three months by a law of November 2015. Still another three-month extension was added and came to an end on May 26, only to be extended for two additional months. Despite the obvious ineffectiveness of such a measure…it has been extended yet again, through January 2017.… This normalization of the "state of exception" has provoked only a muted public reaction. France has thus entered into a permanent state of emergency. This choice is not the result of exceptional events to which the country must respond, but rather expresses an intention to change the political system, as shown by the move to constitutionalize the state of emergency.
‘I Grew Up with Extraordinary People’
January 1, 2017
Aleida Guevara March is the daughter of Che Guevara and Aleida March. She is a pediatrician at William Soler Children's Hospital in Havana, and teaches at the Escuela Latina-Americana de Medicina and at a primary school for children with disabilities. As a member of the Cuban Communist Party, she often participates in political debates across the globe. As a pediatrician, she has worked in Angola, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. She has two adult daughters and works closely with the Centro de Estudios Che Guevara, where her mother is the director.
Policing the Poor in Detroit
January 1, 2017
On the afternoon of November 15, 2013, 150 police officers raided the Colony Arms, a low-income housing complex on Detroit's East Side. One resident described the scene: "I saw…cop cars with the sirens…some kind of tank blocking the back alley, at least two helicopters doing I don't know what…. The officers had real, real long rifles. It was like the army or something…like an invasion…." In all, thirty arrests were made, twenty-one related to parking violations. These arrests yielded a total of zero convictions. The raid occurred on a Friday; all those arrested were released from jail by Monday. The raid was declared a resounding success by the Detroit Police Department (DPD) and all of the city's major media outlets. The raid on the Colony Arms inaugurated Operation Restore Order, a series of seventeen paramilitary police operations carried out between 2013 and 2015. Over the course of the operation, police made over a thousand arrests; as in the Colony Arms raid, however, these yielded little in the way of prosecutions.
The Story of Why I Am Here: Or, A Woman Connects Oppressions
January 1, 2017
Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, and activist. Her most recent book is The World Will Follow Joy (New Press, 2013). This article was originally a speech delivered at a Peace for Cuba Rally on February 1, 1992, and first published in MR in June 1994. Walker's words remain as relevant today as when they were first spoken.