It is not only in the US that we see the fusion of Big Tech with militarized police forces and the slide into anti-democratic and authoritarian political systems. These are worldwide trends rooted in the structural contradictions of contemporary global capitalism.
Samantha Agarwal discusses the foundations of BJP rule in India and prospects for resistance. (From our Summer 2020 issue.)
Any form of anti-imperialist politics that focuses on nations invariably arrives at pitting one of the faces of capitalism against another, which can only ever reproduce the very system it claims to fight.
On December 21, 2020, the Iranian government sentenced Parvin Mohammadi, in absentia, to a year in prison on charges of “sedition.” She has refused to go to prison, continues to challenge the authorities, and has now gone into hiding.
King links race and class as the twin pillars of the capitalist exploitation that is the generator of poverty, economic inequality, spiritual disenchantment, and racial animosity in America and across the world.
The rise of the radical right is based on interrelated but distinct dynamics: market capitalism’s destructiveness; the Left’s failure to respond to market capitalism; and the Right’s ability to sustain the belief that the Left is still a threat.
It would be devastatingly stupid, complacent beyond belief, to expect US democracy to remain sufficiently stable in the coming years to deny this incipient fascism more opportunities to congeal, and grow.
Here are some of our most-viewed articles from the past year. They don’t represent the full-range of issues covered by New Politics or the full-range of perspectives that you will find on our website and in our pages, but they do give an idea of what was on the minds of our readers.
Biden is proposing to combine Obama’s muscular multilateralism with Trump’s focus on great power rivalry with China and Russia. This augurs not the peace that liberals hoped for, but a dangerous reassertion of U.S. imperial power.
“With this year’s worldwide renewal of the Black Lives Matter protests, readers could hardly ask for a better time to revisit the Haitian Revolution.” Review of Sudhir Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture.
Martin Comack reviews, The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s—Milton Cohen’s account of how the CPUSA attempted to establish relationships with three major American writers.
Anyone interested in getting a deeper understanding of how the 2019 Hong Kong rebellion fits into the bigger China picture and what might be coming around the corner, will do themselves a favor by reading Au Loong-Yu’s important new book.
Though Trump lost the election, his base has been strengthened over the course of it. To say now that the Left is winning downplays—perhaps unintentionally—the growing relevance and threat of the Right.
Because capitalism and racism are intertwined, and because of the role that racism plays in dividing the working class, if we want to fight against capitalism and class inequality, anti-racism has to be at the center of our activity.
Last year a wave of militant protests spread across North Africa and West Asia, in a sustained, historic series of popular struggles. Emma Wilde Botta reviews “A Region in Revolt: Mapping the Recent Uprisings in North Africa and West Asia” edited by Jade Saab.
Friedrich Engels, born 200 years ago on November 28, 1820, has been termed the ‘first Marxist’ in some commentaries and histories from the nineteenth century on, and with good reason.
An atomized, racially fragmented, demoralized working class will always be prone to Trumpism. If Biden and the Democrats stick to the policies they have implemented and backed ever since the late 1970s, disorganized workers will either further shift to Trumpism or (as is more likely with Blacks) simply abstain.
A satirical headline from the day the presidential election was called, captures the feeling of much of the Left: “Jubilant Reaction to Trump’s Defeat Quickly Soured by News of Biden Win.”
A movement against police brutality has swept across Nigeria. Mass protests have brought out tens of thousands of people in cities across the country. At the center of the fury is SARS, a notoriously brutal special unit of the police. Emma Wilde Botta speaks with Lagos-based Kasope Aleshinloye.
The Left mantra that ‘no one is going to save us but ourselves’ has been painfully understood by hundreds of thousands who have used direct action, creative resistance, self-organizing and fearless militancy—from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter to the Women’s March to fighting fascism in the streets.
For every 1,000 sexual assaults on women, 995 of those predators will walk free. So, why is it that this topic has been completely avoided during the election? Why is it that, in the year 2020, women still do not feel safe in the United States?
The New Politics Summer 2023 issue is now in the hands of subscribers, featuring articles on the left in Cuba and Puerto Rico, interviews with Kavita Krishnan and Jesse Hagopian, review essays by Kim Moody and Carl Mirra, and much, much more. Articles will be gradually released on the web.
