The Ukrainian publicist Ivan Dzyuba wrote Internationalism or Russification? A Study in the Soviet Nationalities Problem in 1965. Nikita Khrushchev had just been succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev. For several reasons, republishing the book today is a good idea. This 60-year-old book is surprisingly interesting and not only because in 2014 Putin launched a new attempt to Russify Ukraine through force of arms.
Resistance Work” of Women Workers
26 July, byDaria Saburova has written a fascinating three-month wartime field study of the Ukrainian mining town of Krivih Rih (which happens to be the home town of president Zelensky). It focuses on the voluntary “resistance work” of working-class women in this town. (For now, “Resistance Work” of Women Workers. The Ukrainian working classes in the face of war is in French only.)
This is a “situated” investigation: it breaks with the “geo-political” approaches that dominate a section of the left (...)
Cause at Heart: Socialists & the Abolition of Antisemitism
26 July“…the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.” —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952
I. The Latest Form of Jew-Baiting
For decades a bogus accusation of antisemitism was tolerated by too many people as the two-bit rhetorical ruse of pro-Zionists to shield their nationalist project from scrutiny by Arab and especially Palestinian anti-colonial challengers in the Middle East.
In the United States, it also served to divert attention from criticisms of evidence of Israeli state (...)
The Revolutionary Life and Times of Michel Pablo
30 March, byThe Greek revolutionary Michel Pablo had a remarkable, globe-spanning career, from wartime resistance activity to his work supplying weapons and finance for the Algerian independence struggle. He’s finally gotten the biography he deserves.
Marx, Communism and Degrowth
21 March, byMarx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
The life of an unorthodox Marxist
27 February, byIncarcerated by a Greek dictator, narrowly escaping the Nazis in occupied France, and tried and convicted of aiding the Algerian revolution in the Netherlands in 1961: never a dull moment for the well-dressed revolutionary Mihalis Raptis. Hall Greenland has written a sympathetic but critical biography of the man better known as Michel Pablo, long-time secretary of the Fourth International.
Saito, Marx and the Anthropocene
27 February, byKohei Saito has become an important voice in the debates about Marxism and ecosocialism. His books deal with four key issues: the relation between capitalism and nature; between ecology and socialism; the agents and means of attaining ecosocialism (or degrowth communism) and the evolution of Marx’s views regarding these issues.
Revisiting Rosa Luxemburg’s Writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution
27 February, byThe newest addition of the planned seventeen volumes of the writing of Rosa Luxemburg, including thousands of pages that have only recently been identified and have never been available in English, is a critical contribution to our understanding of her life and work.
Boycott “celebrities” and companies that endanger the lives and violate the dignity of oppressed people
28 January, by“We abolish the despicable reactionary “culture” that thrives at the expense of oppressed people, endangering their lives and sacrificing their inescapable grief.”
Black Mirror back to back
19 July 2023, byCharlie Brooker’s near-future tech frightener Black Mirror Series Six has just landed on Netflix. Some of the review responses have been lukewarm, and the worry boils down to a shift of emphasis in the series. Up to now, Black Mirror has been interrogating our relationship with technology, with what it is doing to relationships between people. We could say that it has been showing how late capitalism has mutated from classic capitalism, in which relations between people are replaced with relations between things, commodities, to a dystopic world in which we are replaced with relations between images.
