David Barsamian interviewed the well-known anti-imperialist writer and broadcaster Tariq Ali in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on October 26, 2011 for International Socialist Review.
Occupy Movement Goals: Socialist Revolution or Capitalist Reforms?
21 November 2011, byAt last count 900 U.S. cities have joined the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Five hundred other cities and towns on every continent have joined the mushrooming mobilizations in solidarity. With each repressive blow, the movement comes back stronger—more inclusive, more confident, and more clearly focused.
Militarization, military intervention and the absence of strategy
21 November 2011, byI was able to attend the meeting of the Syrian opposition that was held on October 8-9 in Sweden, near the capital Stockholm. A number of male and female activists operating in Syria and abroad joined with prominent figures from the Syrian Coordination Committee (SNC - who had come from Syria for the event) in the presence of the most prominent member of the Syrian National Council – its president, Burhan Ghalioun.
China studies Marxism: twelve pro-capitalist lines
9 November 2011, byCapitalism in China is rapidly uprooting and throwing into the market-place all that seemed fixed and fast frozen since the revolution in 1949 but, as with all other forms of capitalism, this market is all but free. The bureaucracy holds in place systems of authority necessary for capital accumulation, and the Chinese state is a key player in the enrichment of a new bourgeoisie. There are particular political-economic and ideological conditions for this transition, of course, and one of the most important is the legacy of Maoism, and how the claim to be a socialist country is squared with the rapid abandonment of each and every tenet of socialism.
The Stones Cry Out: The Power of the Occupation in the City Square
9 November 2011, byWhere does the tremendous power of the occupation of city spaces, particularly the square, come from? The occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo brought down the Mubarak dictatorship, the indignados in assembly in the plazas shook the Spanish authorities, and Occupy Wall Street and its offspring across the United States have frightened city and state governments setting off a wave of police repression and state violence. The pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 led the Chinese Communist Party to send in the army, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands. What is the threat and what is the power inherent in the occupation of city spaces?
In the eye of the storm: the debt crisis in the European Union
26 October 2011, byIn July-September 2011 the stock markets were again shaken at international level. The crisis has become deeper in the EU, particularly with respect to debts. The Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM) interviewed Eric Toussaint about various facets of this new stage in the crisis in a seven-part interview published initially on their website.
Che Guevara in Search of a New Socialism
24 September 2011, byIN AN ARTICLE published in 1928, José Carlos Mariátegui, the true founder of Latin American Marxism, wrote: “Of course, we do not want socialism in Latin America to be an imitation or a copy. It must be a heroic creation. We must inspire Indo-American socialism with our own reality, our own language. That is a mission worthy of a new generation.” His warning went unheard. In that same year the Latin American communist movement fell under the influence of the Stalinist paradigm, which for close to a half century imposed on it an imitation of the ideology of the Soviet bureaucracy and its so-called “actually existing socialism.”
The spark ignites in the action - the philosophy of praxis in the thought of Rosa Luxemburg
20 May 2011, byIn his presentation of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (1845), which he published posthumously in 1888, Engels described them as “the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook”. Indeed, in this little text Marx surpasses dialectically – the celebrated Aufhebung: negation/conservation/elevation – the preceding materialism and idealism, and formulates a new theory, which we could describe as the philosophy of praxis. While the French materialists of the eighteenth century insisted on the need to change material circumstances so that human beings could change, the German idealists affirmed that, thanks to the formation of a new consciousness of individuals, society would be changed.
Islam, sexuality, and the politics of belonging in the Netherlands
8 June 2009, bySex seems to play a key role in the Dutch politics of belonging. Sex – especially homosexuality – is instrumentalized by the nationalist right who uses it to represent immigrants as ‘strangers’ who threaten tolerant, modern, Dutch society. Tolerance, power, and xenophobia come to be increasingly entwined in the Netherlands. A plea against ‘tolerance’ as the foundation for political and social struggle.
Seventy years since the formation of the Fourth International
29 September 2008, by“Workers – men and women – of the world, unite under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!”