In South Africa ten members of a militant shack dwellers organisation have been assassinated in the past six years. Yet many progressive organisations have distanced themselves from these militants. Jared Sacks exposes the complicity of a mainstream NGO that could have played an important role defending the movement against these political assassinations. Sacks argues that when movements refuse co-optation, repression, including assassination, become necessary to maintain power.

Comrades and Friends of MST (Landless Rural Workers' Movement) around the World,

We would like to share some of our views on this delicate moment of Brazilian politics in the last week of the election campaign:

A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx
By Sven-Eric Liedman
Translated by Jeffrey N. Skinner
Part of the Marx 200 series
Verso Books, 2018, 768 pages, $40 hardcover.
Amid an outpouring of discussion and new works marking the bicentennial of Karl

Following his new sanctions instituted against Iran, the dismissal by Donald Trump of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal is the continuation of the capitalist logic of militarization of the Middle East that was escalated by the last Bush administration and which has brought genocide and disastrous humanitarian crises to the region. 

CANCEL KAVANAUGH. WALK OUT AGAINST PATRIARCHY.
WE ARE SURVIVORS, BELIEVE US.

I was born a Jew, had a bris and Bar Mitzvah and attended Hebrew school afternoons and Sundays from the age of 7 to 13. I went to schul with my grandfather on holidays and in 1967 I volunteered to defend Israel in the Six-Day War. But I never got to go to Israel then and since the early 1970s, I have refused to visit because of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to the state as “the executive committee of the ruling class.” Reflecting the collective capitalist interest in maintaining its accumulation process, capable of forging compromises among competing sectors of its own and other classes, this committee was also meant to enforce legal norms, contracts, and other rules of the game.

Wealthy Bay Area investor David Crane is a leading promoter of the neoliberal agenda within the California Democratic Party. A former advisor to Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Crane is a widely-published critic of state and local tax initiatives, publicly-funded health care, public education, public employees and their pensions. He raises lots of money for “courageous” candidates willing to put “citizen interests” ahead of such “special interest” causes.

The Zinn Education Project has published a fine response to an article based on Sam Wineburg’s book, “Howard Zinn’s Anti-Textbook.”

David McReynolds was the first “Old Leftist” I ever met, back in 1996, at one of a number of ill-fated 1990s meetings of representatives of socialist organizations in New York City hoping for some sort of “left unity” around a common project. Strictly speaking, David wasn’t an “Old Leftist” – that label was affixed to members of the Socialist Party (SP), Communist Party (CP) or the Trotskyist grouplets of the 1930s and 1940s. David was “inbetween” the Old and New Lefts, joining both the SP and the radical-pacifist War Resisters League (WRL) in 1951.

The most popular defense of the NFL players protest argues that Colin Kaepernick, as well as those who have joined him, are not protesting the National Anthem or American identity in general, but only police violence. In kneeling at the start of every NFL game, the players perform a respectful nod to the military while simultaneously calling for a re-thinking of minority status in America.

The job for media pundits and intellectuals is often to question black and white narratives that are, in reality; washed in greys. But there are other times when things aren’t so complicated. There are times when one side clearly stands for inclusivism, creativity, empathy, mercy, mirth, humor, compassion and an unabashed zeal for the act of living, while the other side represents grim, cynical, self-interested raw power perpetuated by those who use violence to cover their insecurities, fears and incapacity to see that one’s reason for living on this earth has nothing to do with the allure of power and control. The arrest of renowned photographer Shahidul Alam by the Bangladeshi government is one these times.