250 years after his birth, Beethoven’s music still has an exhilarating, subversive power. His revolution of artistic form was intimately linked to his sympathy for the political revolutions of his time.
In the year of the great composer’s 250th birthday, we can retune our ears to pick up the subversive and passionately democratic nature of his music.
Over the 60 years of the Cuban revolution, the corporate media has implanted in us a negative image of Cuba through their distortions of the country’s political and economic system, their discounting the revolution’s achievements...
Is there a democratic road to socialism? And if so, what does it mean for socialists today?
The opportunity for organizers is to parlay the widespread and deeply felt revulsion to Trump as a vile individual into a deeper structural analysis by building on-ramps to a movement to destroy the structures and systems behind him.
Marx is often remembered as a political economist or philosopher. But he made his mark as a journalist. Marx was never content to sit back and let history take its course; he felt compelled to persuade, to use the workings of the news cycle as bits of evidence that his world view is the most sound.
In the spirit of Gil Scott-Heron, a half century and a technological transformation later.
China Miéville looks at the Revolution as a hopeful flashpoint that briefly showed the promise of socialist transformation, before descending first into an authoritarian nightmare and then today's corrupt capitalism. Written with an urgency designed for our era of struggle absent clear political ideologies or unified mass socialist organizations, Mieville focuses on the revolutionary moment, using his skill as a story teller to see the participants in real time.
Our 21st-century Finland Station won’t be a paradise. You might feel heartbreak and misery there. But it will be a place that allows so many now crushed by inequity to participate in the creation of a new world.
Fidel Castro's life, and the example of the Cuban Revolution, demonstrates the enduring relevance of state power. It is fundamentally irresponsible for anyone on the left to think one can avoid the question of power, and let someone else face its contradictions and deformations. Somebody will exercise it, for good or ill. Fidel Castro embraced this question, choosing to wield power in as many ways possible for what he deemed social goods, even on the global scale.
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