Articles

In response to the police murder of a 17-year-old youth, Nahel Merzouk, in the banlieue [variously translated as working class suburb, or even “inner city”] of Nanterre outside Paris, marginalized youth across the country engaged in nearly a week of clashes on the streets with police. During those nights of unrest, they also attacked and set fire […]

Since January, more-or-less weekly mass labor mobilizations have continued against a new law that would increase the retirement age from 62 to 64, even after it was rammed through without a vote on March 16. It should be noted that these days of action, ten of them so far, and two of them since March […]

Elizabeth Varon’s book, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, has just come to my attention, although it was published four years ago, in 2019. Whether intentionally or not, the book gives important illumination to Marxist debates over race, class, and slavery. And a briefer level, it also offers new insights the origins […]

In 1920, Lenin wrote of how, in approaching “the decisive battle” against capitalism with any chance of success, “one must count in millions and tens of millions” of workers in motion (“Left-Wing” Communism — An Infantile Disorder, Collected Works 31:94). France is not there yet, for its recent strikes have not directly challenged capitalism; nor did they […]

The death of Joseph Ratzinger, who served as Pope Benedict XVI (2005-13), was announced just as I was finishing Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, a confluence of the personal and the global that brought a certain chill to the spine. While Hoover administered the U.S. FBI for 50 years, repressing socialists and dissidents […]

This article will appear in Dissent’s Winter 2023 issue, out in January, and was published online on Dec. 2. The Italian version, trans. by Mauricio Acerbo, appeared in his blog,  Sandwiches di realtà.

This article will appear in Dissent’s Winter 2023 issue, out in January, and was published online on Dec. 2 here We are publishing the French version, which appeared in Entre les lignes entre les mots.

This article will appear in Dissent’s Winter 2023 issue, out in January, and was published online on Dec. 2. We are publishing the Turkish version, which appeared in fikrikadim. 

The massive protests in Iran, fueled by the audacity of young women and children, are rooted in over a century of struggle. This article will appear in Dissent‘s Winter 2023 issue, out in January. French Translation Italian Translation Turkish Translation  

On October 3, Tunisia’s UGTT labor confederation threatened to launch street protests if authoritarian President Kais Saied went ahead with plans to negotiate further austerity with the IMF. Sadly, it is unclear if this threat by the country’s largest labor organization will have any immediate effect on the country’s increasingly rapid slide into authoritarian rule.