Throughout Eastern Europe, there was an unleashing of pent-up questions, hopes, and fears brewing for decades. There was a sense that the ground was trembling underneath these experiments in socialism. It was clear to most of us that socialism could only survive through radical democratization. | more…
For a century, the counterrevolutionary reaction to the events of October 1917 has arguably been the most determining ideological factor in Western politics. Today the victory of that counterrevolution is complete, but Western powers still need their inherited antithesis, in changing form, as self-justification. | more…
Russell was both a liberal and a socialist, a combination perfectly comprehensible in his time, but almost unthinkable today. As a liberal, he opposed concentrations of power in all its military, governmental, and religious manifestations. But as a socialist, he equally opposed the concentrations of power stemming from the private ownership of the means of production, which therefore had to be put under social control. | more…
The liberation struggles of peoples in the global South have been and still are closely linked with the challenge to capitalism. Indeed, the conflicts between capitalism and socialism and between North and South are inseparable. No socialism is imaginable outside of universalism, which implies the equality of peoples. | more…
Gaining Independence in 1975, Mozambique’s government proclaimed a progressive approach toward women’s liberation, seeing it as essential for the continued success of the revolution. Stephanie J. Urdang, who traveled often to Mozambique, examines women’s status there ten years later, talking with women in factories and fields, village co-operatives, and state farms. Urdang produces an inspiring yet sobering picture of how African women continued to struggle for their survival and their liberation. Drawing on scholarly research as well as first-hand investigation, And Still They Dance says much about the daily lives of women living in independent Mozambique after the revolution. | more…
In the last several years, the left has experienced a series of defeats, and the grip of capital has tightened. The recent reversals in Latin America are a warning. We live in an age where a new era of revolutionary social change, unlike any that came before it, is the only hope—not just for ourselves, but for the chain of human generations. | more…
Since Trump’s election, mainstream commentary has generally avoided the question of fascism or neofascism, preferring instead to apply the vaguer, safer notion of “populism.” In today’s political context, however, it is crucial to understand not only how the failures of neoliberalism give rise to neofascist movements, but also to connect these to the structural crisis of concentrated, financialized, and globalized capitalism. | more…
What can a class analysis tell us about fascism’s national particularities and early forms? Why was there no mass movement for a separate fascist party in the United States? The lessons of several now-forgotten works of scholarship from the 1930s are critical to our understanding of American fascism—not only for what they tell us about its history, but also about how to fight it today. | more…
Argentina has long been plagued by cycles of economic mismanagement, including multiple failed neoliberal experiments. Before his election as president, Mauricio Macri promised resumed growth, an export boom, lower inflation, a smaller budget deficit, and less poverty. Since then, has the new neoliberalism outperformed the old? | more…
Did the accreditation crisis and subsequent labor struggle at City College of San Francisco represent a failure of union democracy, or a hard-won victory against corporate education reform? Rick Baum’s recent article on this question, “A Teachers Union Against Itself” (published the April 2017 issue of Monthly Review) prompted a lively response from AFT Local 2121 members and supporters. This correspondence article collects their letters, as well as a reply by Baum. | more…
In an idyllic canyon near Santiago, a group of twelve women were electric with emotion from sharing personal stories and experiences, and, of course, from singing. Deep bonds were forged among participants, few of whom knew each other prior to the workshop. They were there to compose women-identified songs in a setting that alternated between individual and group composition. | more…
Guinea-Bissau, a small country on the West Coast of Africa, had been a colony of Portugal for 500 years, and with the 1926 rise of a Portuguese fascist dictatorship, colonization of the country became both brutal and complete. In 1956, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) was founded by Amilcar Cabral and a few country people. At first, PAIGC’s goal was to organize workers in the towns, hoping that through demonstrations and strikes they would convince the Portuguese to negotiate for independence. It soon became clear that this approach to independence would not work. Each demonstration was met with violence, until the 1959 massacre of fifty dockworkers holding a peaceful demonstration at Pidgiguiti. This was a turning point for PAIGC: they realized that independence could not be won without an armed struggle, one that had to be based on the mass participation of the people. This book focuses on the way in which PAIGC ideology integrated the emancipation of women into the total revolution: the way it emphasized the need for women to play an equal political, economic, and social role in both the armed struggle and the construction of a new society. | more…