Is the wolf of academic repression once more at the door of the University of Michigan (U-M)?
This brilliant essay is an attempt to recover a hidden and rather discreet tradition: the tradition of "left-wing melancholia." This state of mind does not make up part of the Left's canonical narrative: the Left is more given to celebrating glorious triumphs than tragic defeats. Nonetheless, the memory of these defeats — from June 1848 to May 1871, January 1919 and September 1973 — and solidarity with the defeated nourish revolutionary history like an invisible underground river. In the depths of resignation, this left-wing melancholia is a red thread that crosses revolutionary culture, from Auguste Blanqui to critical cinema, passing by way of Gustave Courbet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Walter Benjamin. Traverso forcefully — and counter-intuitively — reveals the full subversive, emancipatory charge of revolutionary mourning.
Spain's far right is enjoying its biggest breakthrough since the 1970s. But it grows from a reactionary swamp that has festered ever since Franco's dictatorship.
Mario Mieli's book, written in the late 70s, reveals a world lost to us now – the radicalisation of the late 60s and early 70s, which provided the context for what was then called the gay liberation movement. Huge mobilisations arose against the war in Vietnam, while black people in the US rose in rebellion in cities across America after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 – rebellions which inspired the Stonewall riot, the founding event of the gay liberation movement, the following year. In Britain, a national miners' strike brought down the Tory government in 1974. Many on the far left believed that capitalism was in its death agonies and that revolution was on the agenda of the day.
Socialists are in a hurry these days. With the idea of socialism catching on among a widening swath of the U.S. population, and class conflict showing signs of heating up there can be little time for idle talk. Rather, there is an urgent need to diagnose the current political and economic situation, identify what is new and what is not about that situation, and propose a strategy for the way forward based on the diagnosis.
The National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser has rejected an adjournment motion moved by Ali Wazir, the lone leftist member from North Waziristan, to debate Baba Jan's case in the lower house of Parliament. The motion was also signed by Pashtun Tahafooz Movement (PTM) leader MNA Mohsin Dawar and MNA Riaz Fatyana.
The Italian feminist Cinzia Arruzza is an associate professor of philosophy at the New School of Social Research in New York and author of the book Dangerous Liaisons: Marriages and Divorces between Marxism and Feminism. She has just finished writing a “Manifesto for a Feminism for the 99%” along with Nancy Fraser and Tithi Bhattacharya. In this interview for ctxt - Revista Contexto Josefina L. Martínez asked her about the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, gender and class, in the new wave of international feminism.
For the first time, the Pakistan Army has accepted that they do not own Okara Military Farms agriculture land.
Demonstrations erupted on the streets of Budapest after the Hungarian parliament—controlled by the fourth consecutive super majority of Fidesz government—had just passed three crucial laws in a rapid parliamentary voting on 12th December, which oppositional parties claimed unlawful. The three major elements in the government's package were the Overtime Act, which quickly became better known as the “Slave law”, the centralization of the courts nomination procedure, and educational amendments, which permit the privatization of public universities.
Can it all really be Donald Trump's fault? Do the antics of the worst, most malicious and willfully ignorant president in modern U.S. history serve to explain the spread of authoritarian regimes, racist and anti-immigrant parties, and rightwing fake-populism across much of the planet?
A young trade unionist Aatika Fizazi, a member of the national bureau of the National Union of Agricultural Workers (SNOVA) and general secretary of his local section in the Chtouka Ait Baha region (Agadir), was dismissed on 18/10/2018, with two comrades Noureddine el Bouhali and Abdelmoumen Haddaqui, by the management of DUROC.
Tuesday, December, 4 was a normal day in Albania. The news went out that the students of the Faculty of Architecture were boycotting school. The reason was a governmental decision to charge students approximately 30 Euros for each postponed exam. The news spread like wildfire in each faculty of the public universities of Tirana.
What would it take to keep these assembly and transmission plants open?
Donald Trump's sudden decision to withdraw 2000 U.S. troops from Syria is a green light to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to decimate the Kurds in what remains of Rojava in northern Syria. Earlier this year, Turkey invaded the Afrin area with the assistance of Syrian reactionary armed opposition groups, leading to the forced displacement of large sections of Afrin's Kurdish population and continuous violations of the human rights of the local population.
During the past two weeks, the ongoing wave of protests and strikes in Iran have gained a new intensity.