“At twenty-five,” wrote Randolph Bourne in 1913, “I find myself full of the wildest radicalism, and look with dismay at my childhood friends who are already settled down, and have achieved babies and responsibilities.”1 In the seven remaining years of his brief life, Bourne’s refusal to reconcile himself to convention or existing society, his “wildest radicalism,” only deepened.
He made proposals. We carried them out. -- Bertolt Brecht
The idea of “race” is surely the most efficient instrument of social domination produced in the last 500 years. Dating from the very beginning of the formation of the Americas and of capitalism (at the turn of the 16th century), in the ensuing centuries it was imposed on the population of the whole planet as an aspect of European colonial domination.1
To understand the current hardships of Al Quds University and other Palestinian educational institutions, it is necessary to explore the geography of Israeli occupation. This particular geography is the outcome of four decades of iron-fisted Israeli colonial rule in the West Bank and Gaza. It shows the racist character of the degradation and humiliation to which the Palestinian people are subjected daily as well as the debilitating socio-economic effects of long-standing Israeli Zionist colonizing policies.
As the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world,1 the US now imprisons over 2 million people, most of whom are poor/working class and people of color.
Most people don’t quite relate US prisons to government-sponsored torture. We can thank the mainstream corporate media and politicians for this. Since the 1960s and 1970s they’ve persistently projected the false image of US prisons as resorts where criminal predators eat chips, lift weights, and watch videos all day, much like the images given of slavery as an experience that Black folks actually enjoyed. These false images are sustainable because the real world of prisons is a hidden one, concealed behind walls and razor wire, inaccessible to the public.
The field of American Studies underwent significant changes in the 1980s as a result of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the ‘60s. Native American literature for the first time became part of the canon, along with many previously ignored classics from the African American and Latina/o traditions. Women’s writing gained a new prominence, and the established white male writers were reread with a close eye to the peculiar gaps and aporias of their texts.
‘There is no alternative.’ This has been a consistent theme of politicians, corporate officials, and intellectuals for the past twenty-five years. Global capitalism has been presented as an inevitable, irreversible process that is beyond the control of states. Besides, we are told, global capitalism is good for everyone, in terms of both economic prosperity and the spread of democracy, so even if there were an alternative it would not be desirable (Steger 2005).
In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society -- the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
-- Karl Marx, Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (1859)
The ever intensifying calls for the building of a ‘21st-century socialism’ spearheaded by Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales mark another phase in the stunning resurrection of the global left. Comprehensively different from its cold war predecessor it may be, but the defining characteristic of today’s left is still its unflinching opposition to global capitalism.