#61 - March 2013
Theory
Several books and articles have already been published on the emergence, dynamics and defeat (at least temporary) of the Occupy movements in the US. To date, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has not played a major role in the evaluation of...
Introduction: Marx, History and Theory
At the core of Karl Marx’s contributions, both to politics and to our wider understanding of the world, is the recognition that the capitalist form of society is but one in...
Repression and Resistance
Alan Blueford, Trayvon Martin, and Oscar Grant
For months, the Blueford family begged the Oakland City Council for answers to why and how their son Alan had been murdered by an Oakland police officer in May, 2012...
Introduction
Virginia’s prisons claimed 22 years of my life. Those years were not kind or gentle. The last 14 were spent in extreme solitary confinement, in Virginia’s remote supermaxes – Red Onion and Wallens...
Problems of Transition
I
In the northwest corner of Beijing lie the ruins of Yuanmingyuan, or Garden of Perfect Splendor, the “other” or OldSummerPalace. Destroyed by a British and French expeditionary force in 1860, with what little...
Few outside China would think of China as a socialist, or Marxist, society. Inside China the views vary widely, but few would say, without qualifiers, as the Constitution does, that China is socialist. No one – anywhere – now sees China...
post res perditas (Machiavelli, after the fall of the Republic)
felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas (Virgil on Lucretius)
- Overview
This essay explores the...
Book Reviews
Tadeusz Kowalik, From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012)
Professor Tadeusz Kowalik (1926-2012) was one of the few Polish economists who...
Immanuel Ness, Guest Workers and Resistance to U.S. Corporate Despotism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011)
Either to improve living standards or out of sheer economic necessity, workers have...
Kate Hudson, The New European Left: A Socialism for the Twenty-First Century? (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Kate Hudson is a longstanding British Communist activist, though she...
George Katsiaficas, Asia's Unknown Uprisings, Vol. 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012)
George Katsiaficas, the prolific student of mass movements, offers an...
Benjamin Shepard, Play, Creativity, and Social Movements: If I Can’t Dance, It’s Not My Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Shepard’s new sociological text theorizes how play has come to be one of...
Ronnie Kasrils, The Unlikely Secret Agent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010)
Few figures rival Ronnie Kasrils in personifying South Africa’s revolutionary trajectory from the day the armed struggle...
David Gilbert, Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012)
For organizers and students of history too young to have touched the 1960s, that decade...
Carl Davidson, ed., Revolutionary Youth & the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS (Pittsburgh: Changemaker Publications, 2011...
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George C. Comninel is Associate Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, where he teaches political theory. He has written on the French Revolution, the transition between feudalism and capitalism,...