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Our history

The Women of 1917
13 July 2017, by Megan Trudell
Women weren’t just the Russian Revolution’s spark, but the motor that drove it forward.
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Cuba

Building Socialism in Cuba
10 July 2017, by Samuel Farber
In 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.
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Theory

Socialism as a wager, from Lucien Goldmann to Daniel Bensaïd
15 May 2017, by Michael Löwy
Lucien 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.
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Philippines

Three years after super typhoon Yolanda’s passing, social reconstruction of damaged communities
10 May 2017, by Pierre Rousset
Yolanda (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.
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Environment

Food sovereignty: a feminist struggle?
8 May 2017, by Aurélie Leroy
The starting point of this study is a paradox: among social, institutional and political actors, peasant and family farming are gradually becoming established as legitimate and credible alternatives to an agro-productivist model that has ’run out of steam’. [3] They address both environmental and food-related challenges, are sustainable and successful in agro-economic terms, contribute to social change and operate on a human scale. This is one side of the coin.
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Syria and the Left
8 May 2017, by Yasser Munif
Behind the humanitarian disaster of the Syrian civil war is a political crisis the Left urgently needs to understand.
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Feminism

Feminist Organising and the Women’s Strike: An Interview with Cinzia Arruzza
5 May 2017, by Cinzia Arruzza, George Souvlis
George Souvlis and Ankica Čakardić of Salvage spoke to Cinzia Arruzza, one of the organizers of the call for the International Women’s Strike in the US, about why she came to be an activists, her views on the women’s strike, and more broadly her political views.
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Understanding women’s oppression

Social Reproduction Beyond Intersectionality: An Interview
5 May 2017, by David McNally , Sue Ferguson
This interview with David McNally and Sue Ferguson was published in October 2015, on the occasion of the publication of a new version of Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women, for which they wrote a new Introduction.
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Sexual Politics

Materialism and Feminism
18 April 2017, by George Souvlis, Johanna Brenner
Johanna Brenner: I grew up in a staunchly liberal family and remained politically liberal until I joined the movement against the Vietnam war, where I was introduced to anti-imperialist politics and then Marxism and “third-camp” socialism. In the late 60’s I was part of the student left that turned toward organizing the working-class. I was a student at UCLA. We organized student support for a teamster wildcat strike and we had a group called the Student Worker Action Committee that published a newspaper, Picket Line, where we covered different worker and community struggles in Los Angeles. I was rather slow to embrace feminism, but in the 1970’s I got involved with a socialist-feminist group called CARASA (Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) which began in New York City. Some friends and comrades formed a Los Angeles branch of CARASA and we were able to connect to radical women of color doing community organizing around sterilization abuse in LA. From that point on, I have been deeply immersed in Marxist-feminist theory and politics.
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Our history

Being Brave Because It Is Right
17 April 2017, by Alex de Jong
April 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.
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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

Articles in this section

The Women of 1917

Building Socialism in Cuba

Socialism as a wager, from Lucien Goldmann to Daniel Bensaïd

Three years after super typhoon Yolanda’s passing, social reconstruction of damaged communities

Food sovereignty: a feminist struggle?

Syria and the Left

Feminist Organising and the Women’s Strike: An Interview with Cinzia Arruzza

Social Reproduction Beyond Intersectionality: An Interview

Materialism and Feminism

Being Brave Because It Is Right

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