The Article: The 2006 Elections and the Rightward Shift by Robert Brenner in the New Left Review.

The Text: How should the Democrats’ 2006 recapture of Congress be interpreted in the context of the broader trends in American politics over the last decades? In what follows, I will examine the development of the two parties against the background of underlying shifts in the balance of class forces in America, to read the conjuncture of 2006 against the deeper structural movements of the American polity—from the labour struggles of the 1930s and construction of the New Deal Democrats, through the Great Society reforms of the postwar boom, to the political paradigms of the capitalist offensive with the onset of the long downturn. Within this framework, I will argue that the rise of the Republican right, building from bases in an expanding, non-unionized South, has introduced a new dynamic into us politics that aims to push the pro-corporate agenda beyond anything even Reagan had contemplated.

The Article: Can the West avoid Russia’s fate in Afghanistan? After the Soviets left defeated, a war hero from the SAS and one from the Red Army say the same mistakes are being made by Mark Franchetti in the Times (UK).

The Text: The white flashes of explosions and red traces of artillery fire filled the moonlit sky on the night of October 7, 2001, as Britain and the US launched the war in Afghanistan against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

From the roof of a mud-caked house in Tobdara, a mountainside village high above the Shomali valley, 30 miles north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, I watched as allied war planes and cruise missiles streaked beyond a high ridge separating us from the front line.

The Article: Are Americans a Broken People? Why We’ve Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression by Bruce E. Levine at Alternet.

The Text: Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

The Article: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books.

The Text: Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime.

When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an “interventionary” state, many of those same Americans respond: “But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.”

The Article: The class struggle in the Roman Republic by Alan Woods presented by In Defense of Marxism. [PBH Editors Note: I spent a lot of time cleaning up the formatting and text to make this more readable]

The Text:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” (Marx and Engels,

Read more... | No Comments »

The Article: The Right To The City by David Harvey in the New Left Review.

The Text: We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city.

Has the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years contributed to human well-being? The city, in the words of urban sociologist Robert Park, is:

Read more... | No Comments »