Six months ago, Gadaffi’s son Saif al-Islam was adored in the West as Libya’s best hope for a democratic transformation. Today it appears only a matter of time before ol’ Saif, having dodged the cruise missiles and bombs of his former benefactors only to be captured by rag-tag rebels, will appear before a court [...]
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Gilles Dauvé, otherwise known by his pen name Jean Barrot, has a long history of writing lucid, insightful texts that grapple with the very deepest questions the movement towards communism has to confront. [...] A brief and sloppy look at some of the ways in which the state intervened in economies in the supposedly laissez-faire 19th century. [...] Man and Fighter is the subtitle of Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen’s biography of Karl Marx. It is also readers’ first clue that the work is something unique, something that transcends the triviality of biography. [...] From a letter published in the November 1912 issue of International Socialist Review, we have an interesting and unusual rebuttal to the age-old claim that socialism is contrary to “human nature” (which seems to have arisen as a mere inversion of the claims of men like Hobbes and Hume, who argued that human nature [...] Magdoff and Foster’s The Great Financial Crisis is an enlightening history of the current capitalist crisis that is overshadowed by the authors’ political confusion. [...] Recent disasters in the mining sector suggest “people before profits” isn’t a realistic slogan and that capitalist competition necessitates a reckless drive to accumulate profits. [...] For good and ill, Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story is a product of the current crisis of capitalism. On the one hand, this crisis forced Moore to try and go beyond liberal critiques of a single issue, the usual fare for his documentaries. Thus, in his latest documentary Moore aimed to critically examine [...] Towards the end of a rather long drive home to my parents’ house, I turned on some of the local radio stations I’ve missed while living in another state. Tiring pretty quickly of the classic rock station I listened to at work hours each day for years, I turned the radio to NPR, where [...] Over the summer, I made a blog post here in which I argued that health care reform was a handout to the capitalist class at large at the expense of the “health” care companies. If reform legislation went against the interests of the pharmaceutical or insurance companies, went my reasoning, it was only to [...] The revolutionary message of “the Internationale” was separated by a huge chasm from the practice and ideology of most of those who lay claim to it. That is, until Billy Bragg transformed it into a song that Social Democrats and reformed Stalinists could really relate to. [...] On Friday, Oregon senator Jeff Merkley begged Kentucky senator Jim Bunning to drop his one-man opposition to the extension of unemployment benefits for over a million Americans. Bunning’s response? Tough shit. He also complained that because the Senate would not agree to drop debating an extension and adjourn, I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina [...] Deadly outbreaks of swine and bird flu are products of capitalism, not nature. [...] Howard Zinn is dead. While my own political development has led me down a different road than the one Zinn traveled for so long, he was so clearly such a good and kindly man that I can’t help but feeling a bit morose. His family and friends have my most sincere condolences. That said, [...] America today has a reputation for avarice, individualism, and a crude religiosity. These are not characteristics found in colonial America in great abundance. [...] In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously claimed that the ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of its ruling class. This assertion has been dismissed by all save for the serious students of history. We’re told that there’s a “marketplace of ideas” in which ideas fairly and freely compete, with [...] Racist violence in Italy shows the weakness of the working class. How can it be overcome? [...] Fischer over at Notes from Underground recently blogged about the BBC’s miniseries adaptation of Dickens’s Little Dorrit and the critique of capitalism implicit in it. I can’t comment on that work as the only Dickens I’ve read is his 1854 novel Hard Times, but that’s fine because Hard Times is one of the finest [...] The death of revolutionary energies lies in class collaboration. Democracy is class collaboration through lots of talk, fascism is plain class collaboration in fact. – Amadeo Bordiga. National defense and democracy – here are the solemn formulas of the capitulation of the proletariat to the will of the bourgeoisie! [...] Links to photo galleries showing the barbarity of capitalism in decline. [...] |
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To the extent possible, all content on this site is placed into the public domain by the author. In fact, the author feels no such statement is necessary; no man has the right to say how ideas, the products of tens of thousands of years of social intercourse, may or may not be used. |