Archive for July 2011

The Folk scene in New York in the early Sixties provided a primer on what happens when Show Biz and celebrity overwhelm a Progressive community. Should you return, today, to the funky precincts once home to the Peace Eye Bookstore, Jack Smith’s legendary apartment/performance space, store front theaters, and all of New York’s old Village…

Appreciation of Labor Day requires an active sense of irony. Local celebrations of workers’ collective strength in the United States predated the declaration of May Day, its international equivalent. While May Day never took root in the United States, the day’s selection for a global event resulted from the earlier scheduling of an American one.…

The upheaval in Iran has shaken up Iranian and even regional politics. Not since the Palestinian Intifada of 1987 has the Middle East seen such a massive and persistent grassroots mobilization.  At the same time, the Iranian upheaval is also the product of deep divisions inside nation’s dominant classes.  On the one hand, reform-minded and…

Hossein Bashiriyeh is one of post-revolutionaryIran’s key political thinkers. Known as the father of political sociology in Iran, he has influenced, through his voluminous writings and his 24 years teaching political science at the University of Tehran (1983-2007), both the study and practice of politics in Iran. In his recent book Iran’s Intellectual Revolution, Mehran…

Who “Owns” Foreign Policy? In recent times there has been much talk about the power of lobbies or special interest groups to influence foreign policy.  For instance, did the oil lobby or the weapon’s manufacturers  play a role in George W. Bush Jr.’s decision to go to war in Iraq?  What sort of hold does…

Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism Eds. John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, & Sergio Tischler (London: Pluto Press 2009) Negativity and Revolution is a rigorously argued collection of critical essays, edited by John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, and Sergio Tischler that meshes Adorno’s forbiddingly dense Negative Dialectics with an open-ended autonomist Marxism, as such, there is…

In order to understand the significance of the ruptures of 1989, I want to put them into a broader historical context that began with the American and the French revolutions (themselves part of a wider movement that R.R. Palmer described in his classical study as The Age of Democratic Revolution).  But the political possibilities opened…

The concepts of tolerance and freedom according to Spinoza and Mendelssohn*  In this article, I would like to examine the political connotation of Spinoza’s concept of freedom, as elaborated in the Theological-Political Treatise. It does not deal in particular with its metaphysical connotation, as elaborated and defined in the Ethics. On the one hand the…

The present economic collapse is likely only the opening salvo of a much longer and broader age of crises. This period will produce changes at least as profound as those that marked the transition from feudal society to capitalism. It will change virtually everything about the way we live our lives. It will, in short,…

In Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions John Foran tells us revolution may occur whenever “a world systemic opening” occurs.  “This may be the result of distraction in the core economies by world war or depression, rivalries between one or more core powers, mixed messages sent to Third World dictators, or a…