#49 - March 2009
Less than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and ensuing triumphalist proclamations of the “end of history,” socialism is back on the public agenda, even in the United States. The issues, in the US context, are not yet...
Articles
[Ed. Note: Dagmar Barnouw died without being able to revise this article for publication. Her husband Jeffrey Barnouw kindly offered to undertake the revisions we requested, for which we are most grateful to him. He wrote the following...
We have to learn how to read words that have been erased, that is our story, we, a people whose story is erased and its language erased, so if we do not learn how to read what has been erased, all will be lost. -- Elias Khoury...
Beginning with the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, a chain reaction of revolts and uprisings swept through East Asia. Gwangju’s “beautiful community,” her people’s spontaneous creation of a Citizens’ Army and self-governing Commune, despite...
Creating a Policy Infrastructure for Corporate Polluters
Acting on the perception that strong environmental regulations are detrimental to the competitiveness of US industry in the global economy, capital has...
Manifestos
Translated by Miriam Boyer
[The March 2008 issue of Socialism and Democracy included an article by Ingar Solty that analyzed Germany’s new national left party, DIE LINKE, founded in 2007. The following article by...
I. Between Revolt and Utopia: Revolution
0. The world is constant revolution, and the world is us. We are revolution, and yet making revolution may be the most difficult thing in the world. The world revolts...
Photo Essay
Introduction
We live in a world of images—television, movies, magazines, and billboards. These images float about us, weaving in and out of our planes of vision, our lines of sight. They latch onto crevices in...
Report
Introduction
Two compelling images of ordinary older Cubans appear in Fernando Perez’s 2003 Suite Habana, the melancholy and beautiful film that captures hard life in Cuba. One is of a 79-year-old woman who drops...
Poetry
Born in 1937 in the USA
not yet a war year though war was coming
along with its patent leather and bowtied photographers
When I say I feel like a rusty Dodge
I reveal my age and my brand in an age of brands...
(for Rosa Luxemburg, Socialist revolutionary, murdered in Berlin, January 1919)
Her body dumped into the canal.
How did the water greet
the fist of her heart?
Nichts. Das ist alles.
Is...
for Jonas Moffet and Katie Miranda, who perform circus routines at checkpoints in the occupied territories
Then said they unto him, What shall we do unto thee,
that the sea may be calm...
Book Reviews
Michael A. Lebowitz, Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006)
The collapse of the Soviet system and the consolidation of the world capitalist order has...
Retort [Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts], Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London & New York: Verso, 2006...
Hamideh Sedghi, Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling, and Reveiling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
It is a commonplace in political gender studies that women’s bodies,...
Michael D. Yates, ed., More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007)
The contemporary United States is a nation deeply divided along economic lines....
Bill Fletcher, Jr. & Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
In...
Aviva Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
What is the connection between factory closures...
Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
Long the bogeyman of much of civil rights scholarship, Black Power now...
Camilo Mejia, Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia (New York: The New Press, 2007).
In this lively narrative Mejia rails against war in general and American foreign...
Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
The purpose of this book is to chronicle an intellectual history of American...
Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, eds., New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge, 2006)
In a paper in this volume Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff contend that human subjects...
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
This book represents the first large-scale attempt to analyze the increasingly...
Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).
The publication of volumes around the life and work of Pan...
E. San Juan, Jr., In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).
E. San Juan, Jr., U.S. Imperialism and Revolution...
Casey Blake, ed., The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
This collection of essays explores the negotiations between artists,...
Annelies Laschitza, Die Liebknechts: Karl und Sophie – Politik und Familie (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2007).
In my history textbook in Denmark in the 1950s, mention was made of the fact that Karl Liebknecht...
2008 was the 60th anniversary of the war between Arab nations and the new State of Israel, established by the United Nations partition plan in 1947. Israel commemorates it as the war of Independence; Palestinian Arabs, both Christian...
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Dagmar Barnouw (1936-2008) taught at the University of Southern California from 1985 until her death. She was the author of over 150 articles and 12 books, including studies of Hannah Arendt, Siegfried Kracauer, and V....