Portside

The film represents an important moment in pop culture history, and I’m happy I got to witness it. But the hype raises political expectations too high

The radical right is useful for the mainstream right to cover over the accumulation of wealth that would be difficult to defend, and to channel the resentment of the precarious classes who are rights-deprived against the “others,” against “alien cultures” invading “the homeland.”

The South African poet Ronelda S. Kamfer pokes a sharp finger at trendy styles of race and color among women she deems “dumb as shit.”

The President's budget is a reflection of the administration's priorities. And this administration and their GOP co-horts in Congress want to slash over a trillion dollars with cuts to programs for some of the nation's most vulnerable. A massive increase in the military budget and war preparations comes at the expense of slashing all kinds of social programs.

Since World War II Israel and its pre-state paramilitary organizations have assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world - some 2,300 "targeted killing operations," most of them against Palestinians, but also aimed at Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians and others. In the name of state security, Israeli officials didn't just walk the line of legality, they trampled it.

Saying Marxism is a science is preface. Add organized sarcasm and we come closer to mocking not so much intimate feelings associated with worldly illusions but their form in a particular perishable world. It aims to give new form to certain aspirations, the better to regenerate them. Yet if Marxist movements are to be effective, they must create new tastes and a new language for struggles to be born. Sarcasm then is about what outrages our sense of what should be.

Across Long Island and throughout the city, some 120,000 Teamsters are getting prepped to become a “sanctuary union.” In 27 shops, business agents, supervisors and front-line workers are getting schooled on their rights under U.S. law — and when and how to challenge federal immigration agents who show up to search their work sites. In fundamental labor terms, it follows one simple rule: Union solidarity first, immigration status second.

Graves form part of a collective memory of socialism. They force an acknowledgement of the ideas those revolutionaries died to defend. Fascism's armies sought to bury those ideas forever, along with the people who held them, in the Nazis' "thousand-year Reich." Learning lessons from Germany for our struggle against those that fought against racism, slavery, the Confederacy and white supremacy.