“There is very little class consciousness in this country,” one high-level leader in the AFL-CIO told me several years back, during the nadir of the Bush-Republican Party stranglehold on the US government. “So, if the labor movement is going to grow, build strength, win victories and win more political power, we need to build coalitions with the community,” he concluded.

Since the collapse of the socialist experiment in the USSR and Eastern Europe the question of how to make socialism successful has become more pertinent than ever before.

Historically, straight Marxists’ attitudes toward LGBT comrades and movements have ranged from the virulently homophobic (condemning homosexuality as a “bourgeois deviation”) to tolerance (Lenin decriminalized homosexual acts in the USSR, although Stalin later re-imposed Czarist-era repression), to wholehearted support.

Psychologists today use the term alienation to refer to an extraordinary variety of psychological disorders, including loss of self, anxiety states, anomie, despair, depersonalization, rootlessness, apathy, loneliness, atomization, powerlessness, isolation, pessimism and the loss of beliefs or values.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his short essay “Madness and Society,” begins by assuming what needs to be proved: that the attitude towards "madmen" (his term) has not fundamentally changed from earlier, medieval society.

All Lenin’s theoretical contributions to Marxist economics were meant as interventions in the struggle for correct revolutionary practice; they were not dissertations developing Marxist economics as such. The contributions are far-ranging, but are located within a common perspective that characterized Lenin, namely his view of the revolution as a concrete project.

No organization or institution can long exist in a condition of stasis; organizations in general and political parties and social movements in particular have to adjust to new conditions.

The June 28 coup d’etat in Honduras, in which left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by a right-wing military, political and judicial conspiracy, was aimed not only at Zelaya personally, but at a much larger international phenomenon which I will call the “Bolivarian dynamic.”

This essay is going to assess colonialism and the class structure inherited as a main determinant of current development in Latin American countries. First of all, we must highlight statistics published by the World Bank: 1.4 billion people in developing countries are living under the extreme poverty.

Who needs Shakespeare? Apparently the stage needs him, for he is the most staged dramatist of our times. There has hardly been a period since his death in 1616 when his plays have not been shown.

Barack Obama's opponents regularly charge him with being a socialist and of favoring socialistic measures. There is little or no discussion of what socialism entails.

To little fanfare, the federal minimum wage rose to $7.25 per hour July 24th. It was the third scheduled raise in the minimum wage since 2007. A higher federal minimum wage is the best kind of economic stimulus for working families, say workers’ rights advocates and even some business owners.

Martin Luther’s 95 Theses on the Wittenberg Cathedral door helped put an end to the Middle Ages and heralded the dawn of the age of capitalism. Almost half a millennium later, world capitalism is going through rocky times, a new US administration is exploring new approaches, and socialist ideas are once again entering public discussion.

Anyone who reads Marx’s great work Capital today, and the number of new readers is growing, will find, before they hit the first chapter, six prefaces (four to German editions and one each to the French and English editions) and two afterwords (to the French and to the second German editions).

¿Cuál es el objetivo de las reformas económicas promovidas por la administración Obama? ¿Qué medida de progreso ha habido, o que se puede esperar de las propuestas de reforma para el avance de la seguridad y de los intereses de los trabajadores?

There is a very common view that the current financial crisis of the capitalist world, and its fall-out in the form of the most severe slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s, are a consequence of “greed” on the part of the financial sector.

Dublin – The knowledge by developed countries that a billion of the world’s population are starving and many more millions living in abject poverty is not new. The method of ignoring this crime against humanity is to give them charity and make grand-sounding statements while organizing a world political and economic system that has ruthlessly robbed most of the world of the right to live decently.

What is the objective of the economic reforms advocated by the Obama administration? What measure of progress has there been, or can be expected, from the proposed reforms for the security and advancement of working peoples economic interests?

John Maynard Keynes, though bourgeois in his outlook, was a remarkably insightful economist, whose book Economic Consequences of the Peace was copiously quoted by Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International to argue that conditions had ripened for the world revolution.

If the last 30 years were an era of reaction, then the coming decade could turn into an era of reform, even radical reform. Six months into the Obama presidency, I would say without hesitation that the landscape, atmosphere, conversation and agenda have strikingly changed compared to the previous eight years.