Category: Left Politics

What does it mean to be a left anti-imperialist today? Stephen R. Shalom interviews Gilbert Achcar.

Why are some Western ‘anti-imperialists’ determined to whitewash China’s well-documented crimes against the Uighurs?

Macron’s newest orders banning demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine reveal even more clearly the real nature of France’s anti-Muslim campaign, one that the U.S. and French Left have with few exceptions mostly ignored.

In March 1871, in the aftermath of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, ordinary Parisians rose up and took control of their city for themselves. Join a panel of authors on June 3 to discuss the enduring legacy of the great Paris Commune and its lessons for today.

Talk of mass ‘joint struggle’ against the Zionist regime in the present circumstances is facile, but it is a mistake to think in a rigid static way.

The Israeli working class is a settler-colonial, active collaborator with Israeli capitalism in the continued ethnic cleansing and occupation project of Israeli apartheid.

The issues that gave rise to Trump still exist, and so far, they aren’t being adequately addressed by the Biden administration. Meanwhile, the Trump wing continues its domination of the Republican Party. The country is still deep in the woods.

Join us for this online event on Sunday, April 25, 2pm ET/1pm CT/12pm MT/11am PT. Sponsored by: New Politics, puntorojo, Rampant, and Tempest.

The logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a recipe for empty cynicism.

Most Americans, 60%, now favor stricter gun control laws, up by almost ten percent from a few years ago. Yet the U.S. government has proven unable to do anything about this problem. Why is that?

The lesson of the Russian NEP is that economic liberalization does not necessarily signify the democratization of a country, and that it may be accompanied by the elimination of democracy.

Disreputable writers and outlets, often operating under the aegis of “independent journalism” with purportedly “leftwing” views, are spreading corrosive propaganda and disinformation that aims to strip Syrians of political agency.

Union democracy or more accurately the transformation of major unions into living democratic participatory organizations and cultures is a necessity precisely because of the corporations’ massive powers of resistance.

The problem with the campist perspective is that it so fixates on the role of imperialism and places so much emphasis on its ‘anti-imperialist camp’ that it ends up taking a very forgiving view of oppressive regimes.

Hal Draper proposed that Jews and Arabs could engage in “joint struggle from below, cemented by common national-revolutionary aims and common social interests.” What Draper contended in 1954 is still true today; the Zionist state has been a disaster for Israel’s Jews.

Any renewal of the socialist project in the 21st century must assimilate Rosa Luxemburg’s insights on democracy and freedom as both means and end.

Dave Roediger wrote in 2000, “[T]he extent to which Abu-Jamal knows that he needs to identify with the labor movement, and that some in the labor movement know that they need to support him, signals what the working class movement is becoming and can be.”

Scholars and activists respond to the spirited attacks by Jacobin and Monthly Review on Yaku Pérez, the indigenous candidate in Ecuador’s presidential election.

Leo Panitch was a genuine organic intellectual. He was a great teacher and a good friend. He should not have left us so soon and so suddenly. But we should all be grateful for what he gave to the left, to his students, to his comrades.

The ongoing Indian farmers’ protest in reaction to corporatisation of agricultural land and access to Mandis (open markets) demands an urgent legal reexamination of its impact on agrarian labour and small-scale farmers.

While Trump remains a major figure and his mass base a serious problem, today his party is weaker than ever. While Republican disarray benefits Democrats, Biden’s party still faces COVID, economic depression, climate change, and racism.