Lula, Brazil, and a World in Flux
The contentious United Nations COP30 climate summit, held in November 2025 in Belém, Brazil, provides a useful reference point for making sense of the host country’s global agenda, as well as president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s third term in office and broader political project. Analyzing the linkages between the domestic and international aspects of…
Read MoreThe Protestant Ethic after 120 Years
Commemorating a scholarly text now known only by title demands a certain circumspection that would not be required to honor a distinguished song, movie, or novel, each of which would boast a contingent of afficionados for whom allocating respect to the cultural product in question would be “natural.” Music in particular summons up enthusiastic endorsement…
Read MoreFrantz Fanon and the Crisis of Our Current Transitional Period
July 20th 2025 was the 100th birthday of Frantz Fanon that remarkable thinker, writer psychoanalyst and revolutionary from the Caribbean Island of Martinique. There were many celebrations of this very special milestone in many venues across the world, including the big one organized by the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) in Martinique. For me, it was…
Read MoreFanon and Anti-Fascism
I: Our Neo-Fascist reality Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is another massive neoliberal redistribution of US capitalist wealth that has gutted welfare reforms won by African-American struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. As much as the last piece of the puzzle, the military, is still being tailored to his authoritarian control, the massive budget for ICE…
Read MoreMasculine Rage at the End of the World
51 year old divorce raped man who is physically, financially, emotionally, and spiritually broken. Gave everything I had doing a dirty, dangerous, discomfortable industrial construction job only to be thrown out like garbage once she saw better. I thought love was forever but now I see that it was all a lie and I was…
Read MoreMaking Racism and Misogyny Great Again: The Emptiness and Misplaced Meaning of Angry Young White Men
History shows us that every demagogical dictator requires an equal and opposite enemy, the Evil Other whose mere existence threatens the demagogue’s people. The leader then calls for the good people to annihilate the Evil Other, and all traces of their alleged influence. In short, we are witnessing the rise of American fascism. What is…
Read MoreCrumb, Early and Late
Works Discussed: The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat, by Robert Crumb. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2026. Tales of Paranoia. By Robert Crumb. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2026. Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life. By Dan Nadel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025. Thanks to the comprehensive biography of Robert Crumb by Dan Nadel, based substantially upon the artist’s own archive,…
Read MoreDomenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it Can Be Reborn
Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo’s screed against Western Marxism is a product of the Cold War that dominated global politics between the end of World War II until the Fall and Collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989 and the early 1990s. The structuring Manichean dichotomy that organizes its polemic is a Battle between East and West, with…
Read MoreMeera Nanda’s Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism
Once confined to the arcane recesses of literary theory seminar rooms and abstruse academic journals, postcolonialism can say today that it is thoroughly in vogue. More than mere lingo for the self-righteous pseudo-left, it is now the policy for academic administrators who cannot seem to get on the bus fast enough. Even amidst the vigorous…
Read MoreTimothy Scott Johnson’s Repeating Revolutions: The French Revolution and the Algerian War
Repeating Revolutions examines how France’s revolutionary past became a working political language during Algeria’s struggle for decolonization from the 1930s through the 1960s. Johnson’s central claim is that invocations of “1789” mattered because they operated as historical analogies that shaped political perception and legitimated action. Defenders of empire appealed to revolutionary universalism to portray French…
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