Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden replied testily to Bernie Sanders during their last debate, saying that the immediate need was to defeat the coronavirus pandemic, that Bernie’s vaunted Revolution could wait. But then Biden went MIA for the next . . .
Fellow socialists and leftists, it is time to dispel that illusion that somehow Putin’s Russia of today is somehow positively connected to the USSR of yesterday. That simply is not the case.
It’s all over the news, mainstream and left/alternative alike, as well as social media, and is certainly one of the most important items of political news of recent vintage: after much consideration and testing of the political waters, Bernie Sanders (whom only the staid New York Times refers to as “Bernard”!), Independent Senator from Vermont and self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” is running for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
Moral Mondays has been established in Indiana. At a founding meeting in Indianapolis in mid-September, the organization adopted a “five-point agenda” similar to those of Moral Mondays movements in other states:
The continuing world recession that has now dragged on since late 2007, with no sign of abating, has renewed interest in Marx’s critique of capitalism. So much so that even respectably “mainstream” TIME.com now writes:
"Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap Forward into capitalism, communism faded into the quaint backdrop of James Bond movies or the deviant mantra of Kim Jong Un….
The Indiana University (IU) student strike of April 11-12, 2013, was an important milestone in new student activism.
With the emergence of anarchism as a significant ideology on the contemporary left, the idea of socialist-anarchist dialogue on political issues and socialist-anarchist alliance and cooperation on issues of mutual concern has gained significant currency on the socialist left. Socialist-anarchist alliance was raised rather gushingly by Ursula McTaggart in her article, "Can We Build Socialist-Anarchist Alliances?
We on the socialist left really do need to build a broad-as-possible socialist/left/progressive electoral movement. I know this will be anathema to many of the self-styled "revolutionary left," or, if advanced and advocated, only paid lip service. It is, however, the only way to establish a positive socialist and honestly progressive political presence in the United States today.
Michael A. Lebowitz. The Contradictions of "Real Socialism": The Conductor and the Conducted. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012. 222 pp., $15.95
On January 31, 2012, the Republican majorities in both the Indiana Senate and House passed "right-to-work" legislation, riding roughshod over both the Democratic minority and tens of thousands mobilized workers and their allies. Indiana thus became the first new "right-to-work" state since Oklahoma, which became one in 2002—and a possible harbinger of more defeats for organized labor to come.
(Written the Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 2011,when I was my usual long-term unemployed due to only temporary service work available at that time.—GF, May 18, 2012)
Most leftists know economist Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), if they know him at all, only through the superficial account of him given in Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers,[1] as only a fusty Victorian preoccupied with abstract mathematical models of economic equilibrium.
Noted socialist writer Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” That doesn’t just apply to the business and managerial classes alone—I submit, it can also apply to those who are economically comfortable either as workers or as retirees—and thus have no inkling of what it’s like to be one of the working poor, what it’s like to be chronically unemployed and “living” on a mere $600/month in unemployment compensation, to live
Review of Jason Berry, Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church, New York: Crown Publishers, 2011
Adapted from an article originally published in the May 2011 Indianapolis Peace & Justice Journal—GF
(I’m sure unemployed workers outside of Indiana have encountered very similar problems, and can relate well to this particular situation; just one more frustration added to the already-present myriad frustrations of being unemployed and not able to find a job. Originally published in the July 2011 Movement, monthly newspaper of the Indianapolis Peace & Justice Center—GF)
Carl Oglesby, the eloquent, bespectacled former president of the original Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) of the 1960s, died Tuesday, September 13, 2011, at his home in New Jersey. He was 76, and had been suffering from lung cancer. Oglesby was one of the New Left’s most articulate spokespersons, a fierce, scholarly critic of the Vietnam War and an insightful student of how the U.S. ruling class functioned.
…Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.
But you, when at last it comes to pass
That man can help his fellow man,
Do not judge us
Too harshly.
— Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity”
The New Politics Winter 2024 issue is now out, featuring articles on Israel’s war on Gaza, American and international politics, decolonial climate justice, a debate on Che Guevara, and political theory. Articles will be gradually released on the web.
