Browsing: Politics
France: the Pandemic and Black Lives Matter
Claude Serfati writes from Paris
Ten Days that May Have Changed the World: An Internationalist Perspective in Six Parts
Rebellion is the Gateway to Our Future
Rampant editorial collective statement PostedJune 1, 2020 If police brutality, the pandemic, and impending economic depression robbed us all of a future, this rebellion is the beginning of our collective struggle to take it back. We are in the middle of the most powerful upsurge of nationwide urban rebellions since the 1960s. This rebellion is a long time coming. While the future is uncertain, it is clear that a tremendous force was unlocked by the demonstrators who faced off against the police in every major American city this weekend. The nation has followed the example of those in Minneapolis who…
PREGNANT PAUSE: Remarks on the Corona Crisis
from Ken Knabb We were already living in a general global crisis, but most people were only vaguely aware of it since it was manifested in a confusing array of particular crises — social, political, economic, environmental. Climate change is the most momentous of these crises, but it is so complicated and so gradual that it has been easy for most people to ignore it. The corona crisis has been sudden, undeniable, and inescapable. It is also taking place in an unprecedented context. If this crisis had taken place fifty or sixty years ago, we would have been totally at…
Lenin at 150 – an appreciation
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” – Lenin (born April 22, 1870) David McNally writes: I have long been allergic to the Lenin cult nurtured in many quarters. More than one radical group has been ruined by puffed up “generals” passing off their hectoring commands in place of real politics. But Lenin himself, that’s another story. Perry Anderson once observed that Lenin effectively created a Marxist “science of politics.” But there is more to it than that. It is true that Lenin was uniquely attentive to the concrete specificities of political struggle. The…
COVID-19: marking the death knell of the old world and midwife to the new
In just two weeks the world has been educated as to the incompatibility of free market neoliberal nostrums and the political and geopolitical order they support with the needs of humanity and the planet. On a national and international level coronavirus is ravaging not only the lives of its victims and those affected by its social and economic consequences, it has taken a bludgeon to a status quo that is now lies broken and blooded on the ground. To watch Donald Trump and Boris Johnson address their respective nations to update them on the pandemic’s impact and their response is…