#59 - July 2012
The nationwide Occupy movement that took off in the US in late 2011 – inspired in part by popular movements around the world – has changed the landscape of our work. It signals a vastly increased receptivity to socialist ideas, and has...
I am honored to be here this evening.
Because you are the light of the world.
I’m not saying this to flatter,
But because we have to understand it deeply.
Your genius has been to seize upon the emerging hopes of...
Following on the heels of the Arab Spring, the disappointments of the Obama Administration, and economic turbulence on scale with the great depression, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) burst onto the scene last September, announcing itself with...
Here in the church they call Wall Street, money is worshipped as bankers drink the earth’s blood and feast on her flesh. War machines of epic proportions are financed – and sent out to kill, maim, and destroy millions of people from...
Howard Zinn would have loved to see you all here today, and to have been part of this historical moment. He believed that we should each do the right thing regardless of whether or not it has a visible impact. When a positive impact...
Every year I teach classes on US social policy and community health. We usually watch the film Unnatural Causes, a documentary about the ways inequalities in wealth are reflected in our health. The film explores indicators of...
The wintering over of the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) portends an American Spring like what has come to be called the Arab Spring. An enlarged and ennobled struggle between pernicious elements of vulture, predatory, and global...
After three years of economic crisis that has caused increasing economic hardship for most of the world population, the year 2011 started with a blast of hope in the form of a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests in the...
It has been a common criticism of President Obama that he raised hopes for fundamental change only to compromise too readily with conservative forces. Since he took office amid the financial crisis that began in 2008, banks and...
This is what democracy looks like! – Protest chant in Seattle (1999) We are the 99%! - OWS
Many observers have rightly drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and previous social movements. The Anti-Globalization or...
Many racism theorists believe that color-blind ideology, which became prominent during the late 1960s-early 1970s, is the dominant racist ideology of the 21st century, becoming. Unlike earlier racist ideologies, color-blind...
The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is embedded within and traverses the technologies of the 21st century. Much of what OWS protests stems from a social and economic environment facilitated by new technologies. Wall Street...
If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, has the tree fallen? This is an age-old philosophical question. A similar question might have been asked of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement: if a collective of demonstrators...
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Across America for the past quarter century or more, municipalities, counties, states, public institutions, and universities have embraced the concept of “1% for Art” and have taken it upon themselves in the spirit of humanism and civic...
Things could be otherwise.
-- Raymond Ruyer, defining utopia
1.1. In the Ice Age (A Counter-project to Xiung Xi-ling)
All that we feel is the freezing storm But who is there to...
Istvan Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Volume I: The Social Determination of Method; Volume II: The Dialectic of Structure and History (New York: Monthly Review Press,...
Book Reviews
Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied (Kettering, Ohio: Erythros Press & Media LLC, 2011)
On February 25, 1956, a speech was given in Moscow which has been called the most important speech of the 20th...
Steve Early, The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old?
Steve Early addresses here the fate of the US labor movement in the context of the “civil wars”...
Benjamin Shepard and Greg Smithsimon, The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces
What would it take to claw into the chewing-gum-splattered, rubber tire-scarred, asphalt...
Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation
Ten years ago, I favourably reviewed the original edition of Fleischer and Zames’ landmark text on...
Steve Brouwer, Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care
In 1967 Ernesto “Che” Guevara was murdered in a remote area of Bolivia after he was...
D.H. Melhem, Art and Politics/Politics and Art
The back cover this eighth book of D.H. Melhem’s poetry posts this trenchant observation by fellow poet Philip Appleman:
Belying all of prior...
Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxist Theory
Eric Hobsbawm’s How to Change the World is a powerful text that arrives at a needful moment in history. In the wake...
Michael Perelman, The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers
At times of high unemployment like the present, workers who complain about their...
Samir Amin, Global History: A View from the South
Samir Amin offers a comprehensive view of his work, bringing together his earlier publications into an analysis that moves from the introduction of his...
Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche
French Theory, and by extension postmodernism, as the cliché goes, is nietzschean. Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche attacks not Postmodern Theory, but its favorite...
Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought
Although C. Wright Mills died in 1962, his sociological legacy remains a contested subject in the discipline. Mills...
Jaafar Aksikas, Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the Post-Colonial Arab World
Jaafar Aksikas’s book represents an important contribution to cultural studies. It offers a full-...
John Marsh, Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality
The financial crisis of late 2007 and its aftermath highlighted the scourge of unemployment and underemployment. While...
S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature
Perhaps the most crucial lesson that arises out of the dialectical materialist method designed by Marx and Engels is the contradiction between capitalist...
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Fabian Balardini is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Oil Price Cycles: 1973-2010: A Theoretical...