NP: For four years we’ve had an African-American president, and that has led some people to argue that we are living in a post-racial society. What do you think of this argument?
Author: Dan La Botz
DAN LA BOTZ is a Brooklyn-based teacher, writer and activist. He is a co-editor of New Politics.
An Ascending Trajectory?: Ten of the Most Important Social Conflicts in the United States in 2012
[This article was written for a foreign audience, so I have spelled out some things that might otherwise be taken for granted when writing for an American reading public.]
Mexican Congress Approves Education "Reform"
The Mexican Congress has in near record time approved a new law on education called for by the new president Enrique Peña Nieto intended to reassert government control over the country's education system, break the power of the Mexican Teachers Union bureaucracy, and improve the quality of education. At the heart of the new law is a regular teacher evaluation with increased emphasis on merit.
Istanbul Mayor Bans Freedom and Solidarity Party Campaign
While in Istanbul last week I participated in a march and demonstration by the Freedom and Solidarity Party (ODP) on Dec. 9 to launch a campaign to link grassroots community organizations to a broader program for social and political change in Turkey. The march of hundreds of ODP members of all ages, some of them families with children, was a peaceful event though the chants were militant. "Let us live like human beings. Take the government's hands off the people," was one. And periodically the marchers shouted, "Revolt!"
Mexico's Opposition Parties Sign "Pact for Mexico," Left in Disarray, Radical Youth in Violent Rebellion
Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico's new president who took office on December 1, carried out a shrewd political maneuver the very next day, convincing the opposition parties to join him in signing a "Pact for Mexico," calling for the completion of the neoliberal transformation begun in the 1980s.
MORENA Established As a New Party on the Mexican Left
The Movement of National Regeneration (MORENA), which served as the campaign organization of Andrés Manuel López Obrador for president of Mexico in the election held this past summer, has transformed itself into a new political party on the Mexican left. López Obrador has now brought into existence a new party that will compete with the Party of the Democratic Revolution that put him forward for president in 2006 and 2012.
China: From Bureaucratic Communism to Bureaucratic Capitalism
The election last week of Xi Jinping to the chairmanship of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), together with six others who with Xi constitute the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the party, represents entrenchment of what the Chinese Marxist intellectual Au Loong Yu has called “bureaucratic capitalism.”[1] The bureaucratic capitalists, many of them princelings, that is, sons of the founders of China’s Communist government, have through their control of the state and crony state-corporation relationships come to dominate the heart
Lessons of the American Revolutionary Left of the 1970s
Book review of: Michael Staudenmaier. Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986. Oakland: AK Press, 2012. Bibliography, index. 387 pages. Paperback, $19.95.
Film Review: “The Master”
Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film “The Master,” starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Laura Dern, might alternatively have been titled “Masters and Followers,” for the movie is as much about his followers as it is about the character of the master, Lancaster Dodd (played by Hoffman).
Movie Review: “Death by China,” a film by Peter Navarro
To call this feature-length film xenophobic, fear-mongering and hysterical almost understates the case. The whole thing is so over-the-top that, like a bad horror movie where you can see the strings moving the monster, it leaves us numbed and bored or perhaps laughing. Yet it’s not funny.
review
Latin American Marxist: José Carlos Mariátegui
While most English speakers don’t know him, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui ranks as one of the great Marxists of the twentieth century. It was Mariátegui who originally asked the question which seems so relevant today: How does one make socialism in Latin America with Indians? He answered by turning the question around in the other direction: Indians in Latin America will be at the center of the fight for socialism in Latin America.
Statement on Mexican Election from Group in Veracruz
[Introduction by Dan La Botz: As tens of thousands throughout the country protest the results of Mexico’s presidential elections, a group in the State of Veracruz has issued a statement calling upon Mexicans to both refuse to recognize the results of the election and to engage in a campaign of civil disobedience to make it impossible for the new government to rule.
Occupy and Labor: Introduction
Labor unions have traditionally claimed to speak for the American working class. Occupy claims to speak for the 99%, for the working class and then some. The claim by both the unions and Occupy to speak for working people simultaneously lays the basis for cooperation and sets the stage for conflict. The two forces could not be more different.
review
The Situation of the Situationists: A Cultural Left in France in the 1950s and 60s
Most of us, if we know anything at all about the Situationist International, know Guy Debord’s brilliant and famous pamphlet The Society of the Spectacle and, if we are old enough, perhaps remember the striking cover of its English language edition showing rows of moviegoers sitting passively and expectantly in a theater wearing 3-D glasses.
“A Dangerous Method”: Freud, Jung, and Spielrein
David Cronenberg’s new film “A Dangerous Method” begins in the opening years of the twentieth century with the delivery to the Burghölzli Clinic of the Zurich Hospital of a young woman named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly) who, suffering from hysteria, becomes one of the early patients to undergo psychoanalysis. Spielrein, a wealthy, well-educated, and lovely young Russian Jewish woman—whose hysterical outbreaks express themselves in fits, tortuous postures, tormented speech, and bizarre behavior—comes under the care of Dr.
The Movement for Justice and Equality in Mauritania
New Politics interviews an MJEM activist in the United States
From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy the World: The Emergence of a Mass Movement
The Occupy movement has changed the American political landscape. We are at the opening of a new mass movement and a radicalization that presage an era of coming social upheaval and class conflict that require the left to both analyze these developments and to develop a strategy to intervene. The left today, small, divided, and weak, must develop an approach that will make it possible for it to grow and unite so that it can influence events.
Occupy the Democratic Party? No Way!
At a moment when Occupy faces severe police repression and cold weather, and as we are both extending our movement to the streets and rethinking our future, various pressures are beginning to build with the objective of taking our movement into the Democratic Party.
From Occupy Wall Street, to Occupy America, to Occupy the World
The emergence of a mass movement, the beginning of a new radicalization
The Stones Cry Out: The Power of the Occupation in the City Square
And some of the Pharisees among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. —Luke 19:39-40
Top
Please Donate or Subscribe to New Politics!
