The Arab revolts of the past year represent an important shift politically (and not only for the Arab world) that is important to seek to understand. The following essay, reprinted from a recent issue of New Left Review, is valuable not only for a beginning analysis but for its historical sketch of the development of the “gearbox of [...]
Posts under ‘History’
What do we recognize a revolution?
Wu Ming is a novelist collective, a pseudonym for a group of Italian novelists who have written several novels, some of which (Manituana, Altai, and 54) have been translated into English. Rather than a sociological or analytic approach (‘what are the necessary features of a revolution?’) these two members of Wu Ming take a rather [...]
Assessing Mao and the Chinese Revolution
Mao Zedong has suffered, perhaps more than any other great revolutionist of the 20th century, from a long history (or campaign) of opprobrium linked with a lack of understanding (or refusal to really investigate), which has spanned most of the left as well as much of the academic world. For the latter it’s been the [...]
The Cultural Revolution in China: what was its meaning?
The Cultural Revolution in China (the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was its official title) was one of the great revolutionary political events of the 20th century, and coming to grips with it is part of what’s essential, I believe, to any renewal of the communist hypothesis (to use Badiou’s very apt term). The following essay [...]
The discovery of Marx’s Grundrisse
Marx’s Grundrisse (Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, or Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy) is a large work, comprising notebooks or drafts of material, written in 1857-58 in the midst of his extensive (and intense) economic studies, as he was thinking of methods of approach and presentation. As the following piece recounts, the [...]
What could the end of capitalism look like?
We’ve had some interesting and important discussions on this site (see, recently, the comments on the Henwood piece and on the interview with Albo, Gindin, and Panitch) which have sometimes referenced fictitious capital and have often come back to three very large questions: the character and cause of the neoliberal period of the past 30 [...]
Where America meets central Asia, China, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Baluchistan and (oh, yes) Pakistan
This analytic essay is not precisely theoretical, but it bears on some of our discussions concerning imperialist strategy and the ways in which the contemporary world is shaping up (or being shaped). Don Hamerquist drew attention to the article in connection with his essay published here. Kiren Aziz Chaudhry is Professor of Political Science at [...]
What is the distinction between war and peace?
One of the legacies of the past decade — the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the “war on terror,” the attacks on civil liberties, and now the financial crisis and deepest recession of the post-WW2 era — has been a resuscitation of something like “golden age” thinking: the idea that there was a time before [...]
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