Cultural Logic
Publication/Event Date: 
January, 2010
Joseph G. Ramsey, editor

This special issue of Cultural Logic on “Culture and Crisis” appears at an exciting
juncture, at a moment when the relationship between these two terms – Culture. Crisis –
is shifting and shaking before our very eyes and feet.  The long suppressed is breaking

Brecht Forum
Publication/Event Date: 
October, 2011
Manny Ness, Dario Azzelini & Victor Wallis

Capitalism would have us believe we need our bosses. Envisioning a post-Capitalist society implies challenging this proposition. This volume, edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, reveals the history of workers who dare to disagree.

Rethinking Marxism
Publication/Event Date: 
January, 2012

This special issue of Rethinking Marxism, on Marxism and nationalism, has been planned with the hope of starting a series of reflections coming to terms with nations,nationalism, and their relation to capitalism, with a view to exploring the possibilities Marxism can open for political transformation. The authors’ individual takes onnationalism and its relation to Marxism are in part overlapping and in part not, if not contrary to one another. We think, however, that it is this kind of very open discussionwith multiple perspectives that is needed for a rejuvenation of Marxism and a furthering of its fortunes.

 

Radical History Review
Publication/Event Date: 
October, 2011
Jim O'Brien

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, have been a recurrent theme — sometimes implicit, often front and center — of U.S. politics throughout the past decade. How to interpret and understand them has been a crucial question. In the tragedy’s immediate aftermath, the George W. Bush administration struck a theme that resonated with the American public: the attacks constituted an out- of- the- blue declaration of war against an unsuspecting and entirely innocent victim, namely, the United States. “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world,” the president told the nation on the evening of the attacks, as he promised a “war against terrorism.”1 This initial historicizing of the 9/11 attacks soon became embedded in other official speeches and documents and in the public mind. It possessed not only a congenial explanatory power but also an enormous power to mobilize. It fueled a war in Afghanistan and subsequently, with leaps of logic, the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Continue reading: http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/2011/111/5.full.pdf+html

Radical History Review
Publication/Event Date: 
October, 2010
Peter Linebaugh

Enclosure, like capital, is a term that is physically precise, even technical (hedge, fence, wall), and expressive of concepts of unfreedom (incarceration, imprisonment, immurement). In our time it has been an important interpretative idea for understanding neoliberalism, the historical suppression of women as in Silvia Federici, the carceral archipelago as in Michel Foucault’s great confinement, or capitalist amassment as in David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession.1 In our time it has also been an important empirical fact. On the one hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the current moment; on the other hand, the vain security fence between Mexico and the United States, and the hideous gigantism of the Israeli wall immuring Palestine, also define the current moment.

Continue reading: http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/2010/108/11.full.pdf+html

Socialist Project
Publication/Event Date: 
September, 2011
Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly

This pamphlet was produced by the Public Sector Campaign of the Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly, September 2011.

“The Great Recession – the product of government incompetence and corporate greed – should have lit a fire under workers everywhere. It hasn’t. Politicians should be on the defensive. They aren't. We are. Employers should be making concessions. They don’t. We do. Their lawyers should be grovelling. Instead, our leaders are cowering. Their silk ties should feel tighter. Instead, our boots feel heavier. Their nights should be sleepless. Instead, our dreams are crushed.

Socialist Project
Publication/Event Date: 
November, 2011

Completely unexpected, 2011 has emerged as a year of revolt against neoliberalism and austerity, from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Plaça de Catalunya of the indignados to Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street. The overthrow of long-standing authoritarian regimes in the Arab world re-asserted the moral and organizational capacities of workers and popular movements to transform the world.

Socialist Register
Publication/Event Date: 
September, 2011
Melisa R. Serrano and Edlira Xhafa

Capitalism is not the only form of economy. Alternative economies—people’s economies—exist in which human needs and relationships are more important than competition and profit.

Forms of solidarity economy built on the principles and values of cooperation, equality, self-determination and democracy, exist and are taking shape in many parts of the world. These forms include household economies, barter economies, collective economies including cooperatives, worker-controlled economies, subsistence market economies, community budgeting, participatory budgeting, community-based local currency exchange systems, and ethical trading, among others. Labor organizations have also provided spaces for building capacities in the struggle to defy capitalism.

The paper aims to contribute to the discourse on alternatives to capitalism. We go about by first examining recent works dealing with the issue of alternatives to capitalism (and neoliberalism). We define `alternative’ as an on-going multi-dimensional, non-deterministic process of people’s economic and political struggle beyond the capitalist logic, whether macro, meso or micro, to change their circumstances and simultaneously transform themselves in the process. Full development of human potential based on equality, solidarity and sustainability through democratic participatory processes is at the core of an alternative.  Then, we look at how various forms of peoples’ solidarity economies and state-initiated democratic participatory schemes become spaces or provide spaces for the development of counter-consciousness (outside the capitalist `common sense’) and concomitantly build capacities for the development of projects, initiatives and economies beyond the capitalist logic. By addressing changes in the mode of production and the labor process within their spaces, we argue that many of these organizations, projects and initiatives, are the ‘materialization’ or actual
manifestation of non-capitalist alternatives.

Socialist Project
Publication/Event Date: 
August, 2011
Leo Panitch

A common response of the left to the financial crisis that broke out in the USA in 2007-08 was often a kind of Michael Moore-type populist one: Why are you bailing the banks out? Let them go under. This kind of response was, of course, utterly irresponsible, with no thought given to what would happen to the savings of workers, let alone to the paychecks deposited into their bank accounts, or even to the fact that what was at stake was the roofs over their heads. On the other hand, the even more common response was all about asserting state responsibility: This crisis is the result of the government not having done its duty: governments are supposed to regulate capital, and they didn't do so. But this response was in fact fundamentally misleading. The United States has the most regulated financial system in the world by far if you measure it in terms of the number of statutes on the books, the number of pages of administrative regulation, the amount of time and effort and staff that is engaged in the supervision of the financial system. But that system is organized in such a way as to facilitate the financialization of capitalism, not only in the U.S. itself, but in fact around the world. Without this, the globalization of capitalism in recent decades would not have been possible.

marc
Publication/Event Date: 
March, 2011
Perry Anderson

Contrary to a well-known English dictum, stoical if self-exonerating, all political lives do not end in failure. In postwar Europe, it is enough to think of Adenauer or De Gasperi, or perhaps even more impressively, Franco. But it is true that, in democratic conditions, to be more popular at the close than at the outset of a prolonged period in office is rare. Rarer still – indeed, virtually unheard of – is for such popularity to reflect, not appeasement or moderation, but a radicalisation in government. Today, there is only one ruler in the world who can claim this achievement, the former worker who in January stepped down as president of Brazil, enjoying the approval of 80 per cent of its citizens. By any criterion, Luiz Inácio da Silva is the most successful politician of his time.

Monthly Review
Publication/Event Date: 
July, 2011
Richard D. Wolff
Throughout its history, capitalism never succeeded in preventing recurring economic cycles or crises.  However, they were usually contained within the system.  Economic crises usually did not become social crises; the system itself was usually not called into question.  Transition to a different system was then an idea kept away from public discussion, a project kept from public action.  During cyclical downturns production was reduced, unemployment and bankruptcies rose, deflation often hit and hurt, and mass working-class suffering spread.  Downturns typically drove down wages and the prices of productive inputs.  Eventually, those declines provided sufficient profit opportunities for employers to resume production.  Then downturns became upturns, the unemployed (or at least some of them) were rehired, and prosperity replaced depression until the next cyclical downturn (usually within a few years).  Before the 1930s, government interventions to offset or manage downturns were mostly marginal, minor and sporadic.  Mass resignation to endure "hard times" was the norm, although voices for fighting back were also evident.
Monthly Review
Publication/Event Date: 
January, 2011
Fred Magdoff

Given the overwhelming harm being done to the world’s environment and to its people, it is essential today to consider how we might organize a truly ecological civilization—one that exists in harmony with natural systems—instead of trying to overwhelm and dominate nature.

Rethinking Marxism
Publication/Event Date: 
June, 2011


Edited and introduced by Maliha Safri, the twin origins of this exchange—Safri's activist and scholarly work on class analyses of worker cooperatives undertaken in conjunction with the U.S. Social Forum, and, concurrently, the conversations among various members of the Association for Economic and Social Analysis around the analysis done by J. K. Gibson-Graham on worker cooperatives—offer some insight into the stakes of this discussion. As Safri tells us, these exchanges began to take a more public form at last year's Left Forum and produced the collection of essays presented here.

Socialist Project
Publication/Event Date: 
May, 2011

The current political conjuncture is dominated by enduring struggles and new dilemmas for the Left trying to stop the bleeding. The enduring financial crisis has posed the matter starkly: is neoliberalism in terminal crisis and over, or are the ruling classes intensifying its distributive norms and its political form? The outcome of the May Federal election revealed some of the same patterns: an historical consolidation of the hard Right Conservative government of Stephen Harper, and an unprecedented electoral surge for the social democratic NDP (and however harsh one is on the nature of contemporary social democracy, it is the first time that any political party in North America who has its ideological roots in socialism has captured such a significant part of the electorate and emerged as the second party).

 

Brecht Forum
Publication/Event Date: 
April, 2011
Vandana Shiva with Maude Barlow, Cormac Cullinan & Pablo Solon. Moderated by David Harvey

David Harvey and the co-authors of the new book, The Rights of Nature , discuss how to transform our relationship with the environment to address climate change and related problems like natural disasters.

Rethinking Marxism
Publication/Event Date: 
January, 2011
Iraklis Oikonomou

This research note examines whether the status of EU-U.S. military relations confirms the increasingly popular notion of a transnational capitalist class, integrated on a global scale and accompanied by the cessation of interimperialist rivalry. It focuses on two cases: formation of the European Security and Defense Policy and the setting-up of an EU armaments policy as well as the respective transatlantic struggles over the nature of these two policies. It concludes by highlighting empirical inconsistencies in the transnationalist argument, as demonstrated by the continuation of transatlantic competition over the formation of a separate EU military-industrial identity.

Science and Society
Publication/Event Date: 
January, 2011
Roberta Garner & Larry Garner, Daniel Gaido, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Mel Rothenberg, David Laibman
Brecht Forum
Publication/Event Date: 
December, 2010
Bill Fletcher & Nikhil Singh in New York talk with Jack O'Dell via Skype in Vancouver

This event was a book party for the publication of Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell edited  by NikHil Pal Singh.

Jack O’Dell is a legendary strategist and organizer, whose career spans the National Maritime Union in the 1940s, the underground left in the South in the 1950s, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Freedomways in the 1960s, and the Rainbow/PUSH campaigns of the 1970s and 80s.

Rethinking Marxism
Publication/Event Date: 
January, 2011

We open the issue with “Under the Dome: The Ethics and Politics of Reading Capital,” a special symposium devoted to readings of Capital by graduate students at Notre Dame. As David Ruccio writes in his introduction, “It's one thing to read about Capital, or to listen to lectures on the Marxian method. It's something else entirely to read the text of Capital and develop an understanding of Marx's method in action.” Taken together, the symposium's contributors demonstrate the value of open-ended, aleatory readings of Capital.

Turbulence
Publication/Event Date: 
December, 2010

We are trapped in a state of limbo, neither one thing nor the other. For more than two years, the world has been wracked by a series of interrelated crises, and they show no sign of being resolved anytime soon. The unshakable certainties of neoliberalism, which held us fast for so long, have collapsed. Yet we seem unable to move on. Anger and protest have erupted around different aspects of the crises, but no common or consistent reaction has seemed able to cohere. A general sense of frustration marks the attempts to break free from the morass of a failing world.

Left Turn
Eric Tang

Once upon a time, being labeled an affiliate of the state was a nasty indictment in radical movements. Today some of the movement’s best and brightest openly and proudly claim membership in organizations whose link to the state—either through direct public funding or mere tax-reporting—are unambiguous and well-documented.

Left Turn
Andrea Smith

Both scholars and activists have tended to periodize the feminist movement into the so-called first, second, and third waves of feminism. The “first wave” is characterized by the white suffragette movement; the “second wave” is characterized by the formation of the National Organization for Women, abortion rights politics, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendments.

ZCom
Michael Albert

1.   Where did parecon come from? What is its history?

Participatory economics, or parecon, came mainly from the cumulative struggles of diverse populations trying to win liberation from capitalism. Parecon owes, in particular, to the anarchist and the libertarian socialist heritage, to the most recent experiences of the New Left of the Sixties, but also to every historical uprising and project aimed at eliminating class rule from the beginning to the present. It has learned from successes and from failures.

The Nation
Publication/Event Date: 
March, 2009
Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr.
Socialism's all the rage. "We Are All Socialists Now," Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we're already living in the U.S.S.A. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive friends) have to say about capitalism's current troubles? We've asked them, and you can read their spirited replies in the forum that follows this essay.   --The Editors (from March 23, 2009 edition of The Nation.)
Brecht Forum
Publication/Event Date: 
September, 2010
Luis Bonilla-Molina, Victor Rodríguez Alvarez, Miguel Ángel Pérez Pirela & Juan Carlos Monedero. Moderated by Venezuelan Consul General Carol Delgado.

This forum took place on September 19, 2010 at the Brecht Forum in New York City.

Socialist Register
Publication/Event Date: 
January, 2010
Colin Leys

There is a widespread belief that capitalism is responsible for the huge improvements in health that have occurred over the last century and a quarter. Capitalism is seen as the supreme engine of growth, and growth is seen as the crucial condition for health improvement. But it is not. Poor countries can and sometimes do have better health than rich ones. The US is held up as a ‘world leader’ in medicine when it is really a world leader in healthcare market failure, spending almost a fifth of its huge national income to produce overall health outcomes little better, and in some respects worse, than those of neighbouring Cuba, with a per capita income barely a twentieth as large. ‘Breakthroughs’ in health science and technology – in nuclear medicine, genetic medicine, or nanotechnology – are treated as triumphs of capitalist investment in research. But most innovative medical research is actually done in state-funded medical schools and research laboratories.

Socialist Project
Marta Harnecker

What's happening is a renovation of left-wing thought. The ideas of revolutions that we used to defend in the 1970s and 1980s, in practice, have not materialized. So, left-wing thought has had to open itself up to new realities and search for new interpretations. It has had to develop more flexibility in order to understand that revolutionary processes, for example, can begin by simply winning administrative power. 

New Labor Forum
Rick Wolff

We are overdue for a new strategy. Labor and the Left are at low points in long declines. One cause has been adherence to a failed strategy. We need to acknowledge that reality and answer two linked questions. First, what part of getting into this situation was our own doing? Second, what changes in labor’s and the Left’s strategy could revive the two groups and rebuild their coalition into a powerful political force? To answer the first question: labor’s and the Left’s strategic attitude toward capitalism undermined both partners and their coalition. To answer the second: changing their attitude toward capitalism could, I believe, revive them significantly in the near future.

Socialism and Democracy
Kevin B. Anderson

Despite the revival of interest in Marx since the economic crisis hit, some important ideological and conceptual barriers continue to block what would be a very positive step, returning to Marx as the primary source of leftist critique of capitalist modernity as a whole, and as providing the theoretical ground for its overcoming [Aufhebung].

Socialism and Democracy
Raúl Zibechi

The end of 2008 marked the ten-year anniversary of Hugo Chávez's first electoral victory (December 6, 1998), which initiated a new period marked by the emergence of progressive and left governments in South America.

Rethinking Marxism
Richard D. Wolff

 Paul Krugman, stuck in the old Keynesian rut amidst its blinders.  The recession would be over, he says, if only the government ran more and bigger deficits to provide the needed fiscal boost.  If only the Obama people and those crazy Republicans were less afraid of such bold government action, less befuddled by ideology, and less ignorant of economics.

Science and Society
David Laibman

This review article appeared in Science & Society, Fall 2009.

Brecht Forum
Publication/Event Date: 
January, 2010
David Harvey

A talk given at the World Social Forum 2010, Porto Alegre
The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints.  Three percent compound growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades).

Brecht Forum
Publication/Event Date: 
October, 1998
Maria Helena Moreira Alves, Barbara Fields, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, Daniel Singer, Cornel West, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Moderated by Steve Brier

Part I
Steve Brier: This is obviously a time of great insecurity and distress both emotionally and physically and of great confusion politically and ideologically across the globe. The realities we confront are imposed by a world capitalism that is at the same time vigorous and expansionist and in decline and crisis. How do we understand this current moment and the profound distress it is creating across the globe? How do we understand it and relate to it?

marc

by Van Gosse
The Huffington Post, May 27, 2010
Almost every day I get a message from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele denouncing President Obama's "radical socialist" policies. Fox News relentlessly sounds this chorus, and some Americans agree, rallying with posters featuring hammer-and-sickle drawings and pictures of Stalin next to our elected leader. For the rest of the world, this sounds pretty silly: they know what socialism looks like, and we have nothing like it.

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