Clyde Gonzalez
Crisis is the condition of everyday life in capital. Capitalism kills in silently effective ways without necessary recourse to spectacle, through institutional mechanisms like patent controls on life-saving drugs. This is why everyday squalor in the Middle East is equally, if not more, fitting a symbol for Marxists than Muslims in the ‘state of [...]
All Posts Tagged With: "Issue #4"
The sub-prime crisis
The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and “Resistance:” The problematic forms of “anticapitalism” today
Michael Albert, Chris Cutrone, Stephen Duncombe, Brian Holmes
“After the failure of the 1960s New Left, the underlying despair with regard to the real efficacy of political will, of political agency, in a historical situation of heightened helplessness, became a self-constitution as outsider, as other, rather than an instrument of transformation. Focused on the bureaucratic stasis [...]
Review: Introducing SDS, Columbia Revolt, 1969
Greg Gabrellas
A new chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed in February at the University of Chicago (UChicago) in tandem with chapters forming throughout the city and across the country. The new SDS is a national student organization dedicated to progressive political change, whose name was borrowed from the famous New Left [...]
Protest and regression: Notes on a recent protest
S.J. Benjamin
Alasdair Macintyre begins After Virtue with a parable: Populist demagogues declare war on the natural sciences. Every lab bombed, every chemistry department ransacked, every copy of Nature burned. Once the luddite swell subsides, a group of enlightened citizens attempt to reconstruct science from the remaining fragments. To us, natural science is a way of [...]
On the election violence in Kenya
Zeb Dingley
It may be that the political meaning of the recent violence in Kenya will exceed the explanatory capabilities of the news media, but the question itself has not yet adequately been posed. In place of a serious engagement with the crisis, coverage of the events has been characterized by genuine shock that this could [...]
Kenya: Move over grandpa: Marginalized youth and aging politics
Oketch Onyango
Writing from Kenya after 10 years of what he calls “international exile,” former Kenyan-Chicagoan Oketch Onyango told us that he intended on going back in late 2007 to “raise a little bit of hell in the political scene,” but went “running away from the commodity and bang full circle into it in the savanna!,” [...]
Half-time team talk: Mayday (UK) response on anarchism and Marxism
Trevor Bark
For issue #2 (February 2008), Chris Cutrone wrote, in “On anarchism and Marxism: a response to Mayday magazine (UK),” on behalf of Platypus, that the principal difference between anarchism and Marxism lies in the way “history” figures in any present estimations of ideology, conscious political program and organization, at the levels both of the [...]
Cracking the looking-glass: Perception, precarity, and everyday resistance
Tim Sarrantonio
“Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible.”
—Lewis Carroll
Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There (1871)
Let us assume, for a moment, the identity of Alice, the child protagonist of Lewis [...]
Yesterday, I was an anarchist
“We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.”
—Mao Tse-Tung
I just turned thirty. Fifteen years on the Left—that’s half my lifetime now and what it means [...]
