Author: Admin

Men’s Feminism: August Bebel and the German Socialist Movement by Anne Lopes and Gary Roth (Amherst, New York, Humanity Books, 2000), 261 pages, $52 hardcover. MEN’S FEMINISM SETS out with an important purpose—rescuing August Bebel, the leading 19th century German socialist leader who authored a pioneering text on women’s liberation, Women and Socialism. This is…

JACK BARISONZI, LIFELONG socialist and activist and for many years a member of Solidarity, died in an auto accident twenty miles west of Madison, Wisconsin on November 8, 2003, his 70th birthday. Jack was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on November 8, 1933.  He joined the Socialist Workers Party as a teenager in the Twin…

“Reviewing Red” is a new column appearing several times a year in which Against the Current editor Alan Wald considers recent books and other publications on cultural and historical topics pertaining to socialist activists, students, and scholars. SCHOLARSHIP ABOUT THE African American Left, a hearty subject area for many decades, has taken a quantum leap…

Tariq Ali was interviewed by Suzi Weissman for her program “Beneath the Surface” on Pacifica radio station KPFK, November 17, 2003.  It is abridged for publication here. Tariq Ali is a filmmaker and an editor of New Left Review and Verso Books, and an antiwar activist since the Vietnam War era. Many thanks to Walter…

THE DEPARTMENT OF Commerce announced on October 30 that the U.S. economy had grown at a 7.2% annual rate in the third quarter of 2003.  Since these statistics are constantly being revised, one wonders what they really mean. (Recall that the “productivity miracle” of the second half of the 1990’s almost disappeared in retrospective downward…

THE MAJOR POLICE riot in Miami around the November 19-21 Free Trade of the Americas Ministerial Summit was an operation undoubtedly as thoroughly planned as it was obscene.  This was a deliberate, bare-knuckled threat: Assemble in 2004 against war, “free trade,” the Republican Convention or roundup of immigrants under the police-state monstrosity known as Homeland…

AFTER SIX months in government, where are Lula and the Brazilian Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) going?  The reform of the pensions recently approved in parliament is a negative sign: it cuts into retired workers’ benefits, particularly in the public services, and it entails paying off the system’s deficit by imposing an eleven percent…

ARIEL SHARON’S RIGHT of Return, or shall we say his Return to the Right, has led Israelis and Palestinians full circle in their cycle of violence.  Sadly, they are now one level closer to hell, and it will be even more difficult for them to survive.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (Martin Luther King Jr., August 28, 1963)

THE AGENDA OF the Bush administration is showing cracks on both foreign and domestic fronts.  The open question right now is what kind of alternative agenda will be available. An important beginning in reviving the movement that filled the streets around the world earlier this year will be the mass mobilization called for October 25…