Women weren’t just the Russian Revolution’s spark, but the motor that drove it forward.
Building Socialism in Cuba
10 July 2017, byIn July 2016, thanks to a 20 percent reduction in oil shipments from Venezuela, Cuba’s economy minister Marino Murillo announced a 6 percent cut in electricity and a 28 percent cut in fuel. Meanwhile, he ordered an immediate drop in public sector energy use, with consequent working-hour reductions for state employees, and warned of possible blackouts, raising the specter of the dark and hungry days of the Special Period of the nineties.
Socialism as a wager, from Lucien Goldmann to Daniel Bensaïd
15 May 2017, byLucien Goldmann (1913-1970) is one of the most important representatives of the humanistic and historicist current of Marxism in the twentieth century. His works of philosophy and sociology of culture – including “The Hidden God” (1955), an innovative study of the tragic world vision in Pascal and Racine – are strongly marked by the influence of the Lukacs of “History and Class Consciousness” and are radically opposed to positivist or structuralist readings of Marxism. A Romanian Jew who had lived in France since the 1930s, Goldmann identified with a self-managed socialism, critical of both social-democracy and Stalinism. Whereas in the United States and in Latin America his thought and work continue to generate a very keen interest, a strange forgetfulness seems to have affected him in France. [1] It is true that this is a sociology in total rupture with the dominant tradition of French social science, stretching from Auguste Comte to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, via Emile Durkheim. But, on the other hand, through his reinterpretation of Pascal, he is nonetheless the heir of a dissenting current of French modern culture.
Three years after super typhoon Yolanda’s passing, social reconstruction of damaged communities
10 May 2017, byYolanda (Haiyan by its international name), the strongest typhoon touching land ever registered, devastated the center of the Philippine archipelago in November 2013 [2]. In July 2016, two years and eight months after, when I landed on Tacloban airport, life had returned to normal. The churches, all new, were dominating — they were rebuilt in priority, before the hospitals, even if it were possible to receive communion under a canopy, while an operating room could prove very useful to a surgeon. Carcasses of buildings that have not yet been rebuilt still stand and there is what one does not see: these “internal refugees”, these “displaced persons”, still without homes, pushed away in the peripheral areas or recently driven to the mountainside.
Syria and the Left
8 May 2017, byBehind the humanitarian disaster of the Syrian civil war is a political crisis the Left urgently needs to understand.
Being Brave Because It Is Right
17 April 2017, byApril 13 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the death of Dutch socialist revolutionary Henk Sneevliet, whom the Nazis murdered alongside seven of his comrades. Sneevliet had served as leader of the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front, an underground organization founded immediately after the German invasion in May 1940. By then, Sneevliet was already a prominent socialist; before the war, he traveled all over the world, supporting small communist parties and building solidarity.
Voting on Dictatorship
16 April 2017, byThis is a crucial time for Turkey. The past few years, marked by tumult and repression, have led up to a constitutional referendum that will help decide the country’s future. If approved, the amendments would install a state system with a dictatorial president at the center.
Interview with Joseph Daher on Hezbollah and the Syrian Revolution
25 March 2017, byJoseph Daher is a Swiss-Syrian socialist activist, academic, and founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever. He is the author of Hezbollah: Political Economy of the Party of God, Pluto Press, London, 2016 (distributed in the US by Univeristy of Chicago Press). Oriana P. spoke with him during the conference on Syria at Barnard College in New York on Feb. 16th 2017 for RAWP report.
Lenin and Trotsky confronting the bureaucracy
19 March 2017, byThis study was first prepared for a training course and presented in the summer of 1989. The French version was published on January 21, 2016 on the occasion of the 92nd anniversary of Lenin’s death, followed by an English translation. The last part of the text titled “The struggle of Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and the Fourth International for a Socialist Democracy” has been added in January 2017.
Constitutional gerrymandering and murderous consolidation of capitalist nepotism
18 January 2017, byFrom Angola to Chad, Central Africa, including Equatorial Guinea, is the sub-region most affected by the decline in oil prices, because it is dependent on oil revenues. An oligarchic resistance to the respect of the rules of the democratic game, in the form of a new type of authoritarian regime combining a formal multiparty regime with a repressive confiscation of power, characterized by nepotism, is closely related to this rentier character.
Thus, in a direction contrary to the wind that blew from North Africa in 2010-2011, sweeping away in 2014 the Blaise Compaoré regime in Burkina Faso, in 2016, the Congolese, Chadian and Gabonese peoples were forced to suffer, for another term of office, disgraced regimes. The people of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), confronted with the postponement of the elections, which extended the presidency of Kabila, have already seen dozens of people killed following the repression of popular demonstrations. So we could speak of a "spirit of sub-region". Without forgetting that in Côte d’Ivoire Ouattara has had a constitution drafted that allows the president to appoint one third of the members of the Senate.
Footnotes
[1] The only biography published of Goldmann, Mitchell Cohen, The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Princeton University Press, 1994 has not been translated into French.
[2] The strong winds being estimated at 230km/hr over 10 minutes and up to 315 km/hr over 1 minute
