A “Letter Against U.S. Imperialism” has been circulating in leftist circles. It views the protests in Iran in a reductionist manner and unequivocally rejects them.
The Letter has been signed globally by well-known leftist organizations, activists and academics including Vijay Prashad, . . .
Latin America is experiencing an abrupt change generated by enormous confrontations between the dispossessed and the privileged. This confrontation includes both revolts by the people and reactions by the oppressors.
The October Revolts
The uprising in Chile is the most important event . . .
“We are protesting against problems in the whole system in general. We reached a crisis where we noticed that the system cannot handle it anymore.”
— a protester in Chile.
Our world is on fire. Not only forests but also cities are . . .
The rank-and-file strategy continues to be a topic of both debate and practice. This is enormously encouraging news. When I encountered the rank-and-file strategy as a young labor activist, the fact that activists were even talking about it offered a . . .
The Set-Up
Last week Piñera’s government went from receiving the lowest public approval of any government in Chile’s modern history to a breath of fresh air with the passing of the controversial “El ACUERDO DE PAZ Y NUEVA CONSTITUCIÓN” . . .
Montpellier, France, Nov. 18, 2019
This weekend the Yellow Vests celebrated their first birthday, with convivial barbeques on traffic circles (roundabouts) all over France followed by direct actions like liberating tollbooths. Although number of protestors has declined to about 10% of . . .
Remember when the Berlin Wall came down? I do.
Glued to TVs in DeKalb, Illinois, my college friends and I watched in envy and amazement as the young Berliners on our screens swarmed all over that unholy edifice attacking it with . . .
Franck Gaudichaud is a specialist of contemporary Chile, president of the association France Amerique Latine and member of the editorial board of Contretemps. He is a political scientist and teaches Latin American history at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France. Here he develops several hypothesis bout Chile and the development of the current mobilization which has been ongoing since mid-October.
After nearly 14 years in power, the government of Evo Morales fell in a little less than a month, due to allegations of fraud and the desire to remain in power. Previously, Morales was a campesino leader, but this time . . .
The left and workers in general won a significant victory in Seattle on Nov. 5. Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative candidate for Seattle City Council won her third consecutive term against a concerted and well-funded business offensive. At the end of . . .
The coup d’état against Bolivian president Evo Morales has generated the kind of anguish that great defeats of revolutionary struggles evoke: Allende’s fall, Che’s death in combat, defeat in the Spanish Civil War. “Criticism is no passion of the head, . . .
In Eric Blanc’s recent article for Jacobin Magazine titled, “How Bernie Helped Spark the Teachers’ Revolt,” Blanc condenses one of the primary claims he originally made in his book, Red State Revolt (2019): that Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run is . . .
Two hours of discussion with Kurdish Turkish, Kurdish Iranian, Syrian Swiss socialists to be followed by 30 minutes for Q and A with the Facebook audience.
Greg Shupak and I, as he notes, differ on one key interpretation of U.S. intervention in Syria. For him, the U.S. intervention, as it shifted its focus to defeating ISIS, never meant a shift away from an anti-Assad stance; rather, . . .
In “Syria, the United States, and the Left,” Ella Wind criticizes my April 2018 article, “U.S. Out of Syria.” Wind says that I misrepresent U.S. policy towards Syria by “demonstrate[ing] the scale and ferocity of the U.S. intervention by a . . .
Chile has exploded in social protests for the past several days, initially ignited by an increase in the metro fare. The initial protests developed into a national strike, even though conservative President Sebastián Piñera rescinded the four percent increase . . .
With a new generation of militant radical organizers looking to industrialize into union jobs and kick-start a new militant minority in the U.S. labor movement, their effort is receiving both wide support and wary when not damning criticism. Among the . . .
Gutter journalism is unfortunately not the preserve of openly right-wing tabloids. There has existed since the advent of Stalinism a “left-wing” strand of public mudslinging: Zhdanov was the counterpart of Goebbels. The Stalinist slander apparatus originally targeted the USSR’s left-wing . . .
We have never seen so many upheavals in so few years in France.
Society has been turned completely upside down in a way that is totally unprecedented. The social programs won after the Second World War have been savaged and democratic . . .
Much has been made of a supposed leftward shift in the Democratic Party over the last three years. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, four new Democratic congresswomen known as “the Squad,” began capturing widespread media attention, . . .
In his analysis of the procedural shortcomings at the Democratic Socialists of America’s national convention, Andrew Sernatinger calls for the organization to imagine “a theory of democracy beyond voting.” Democracy is a “moving target,” he notes, and while he doesn’t . . .
