Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted. Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012, 222 pp., $ 11.62 Rather than a historical or dialectical analysis of “actually existing socialism”, ‘The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted’ should be read more as an exercise in the moral […]
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Metastasis of the Islamic State
by Vijay Prashad Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the anti-Assad powers, refuse to join a united front with Iran, Iraq and Syria to tackle the IS threat. With absent coordination, the Islamic State will continue to thrive. IS has slipped through the cracks of regional disunity. Comfortable in its bastions along the Euphrates […]
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Hope in a Hopeless Place
Why is there no anti-war movement in Russia? Because today there are so few who are ready to go into the streets in order to publicly throw in the face of the state accusations of prolonging the war in Eastern Ukraine? Such are the questions that we continue to pose to each other, those […]
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War for the Map
The political map does not show corruption schemes, diagrams of wealth, transactions to the offshore zones, structures of the world economy, hidden political agreements, maps of domination and alienation. When I listen to the conversations about “United Ukraine”, I get a feeling that translators of this message do not really understand what they are […]
Russian anti-fascist Alexei Gaskarov’s statement in court translated into English by the Russian Reader with an afterward by Gabriel Levy. The verdicts on the second group of defendants in the Bolotnaya Square case – brought against participants in the Russian protest movement of 2011-12 – will be announced on 18 August in Zamoskvoretsky Court in […]
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Lithuania: The Myth of the Passive Mass
“Not every recession-hit country in Europe is like wayward Greece, Portugal and Spain, amazingly Lithuanian unions went along with the government’s policies. There were no street riots a la Greece” -Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 2010 caption on a Mayday poster in Lithuania (on the left): “He who saws hunger, reaps anger.” In the wake […]
On July 24 the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament Oleksandr Turchynov announced the disbanding of the parliamentary group of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) over a ridiculous technicality. The court trial over CPU’s ban as a political party started the same day with the next session of the court scheduled for mid-August. The CPU […]
by Ian Rintoul solidarity.net.au 29.07.2014 The shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 over rebel held territory in eastern Ukraine is a terrible tragedy. It has cost 289 lives, including 37 Australian citizens and permanent residents. Sadly, six researchers and advocates attending the International AIDS conference in Melbourne were among the dead. The dead are […]
Results of protests, repressions and concessions monitoring by the Centre for Society Research (Kiev) On July 9th at a press conference in the UNIAN information agency, the Centre for Society Research presented the results of monitoring of protests, repression and concessions, supported by the International Renaissance Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy, that took […]
The need for a “third way,” one that is different from the rabid support for one of the sides in the Ukrainian crisis, a way about which several of have written in the last few months, is especially evident today, because it is the only chance to reconstitute the almost completely broken democratic opposition in […]