Politics of the contemporary student Left

AT THE LEFT FORUM hosted by New York’s Pace University in April of this year, a panel discussion was held on the subject of Politics of the Contemporary Student Left: Hopes and Failures. Organized by Alex Hanna of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the panel consisted of Pam Nogales of Platypus, Carlos J. Pereira Di Salvo of USAS, and Laurie Rojas of Platypus. What follows is a transcript of each panelist’s formal presentation and the subsequent Q & A session. [Read More]

Book Review: Michael Rudolph West. *The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations*

Book Review: Michael Rudolph West. *The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations*
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. IF THE COLOR LINE WAS THE PROBLEM of the American 20th century, then the 20th century did not manage to solve it. De jure segregation ended some forty years ago, and American social norms mostly bar the public expression of racist sentiment or stereotype. Yet by any measure – access to quality healthcare and education, rate of incarceration, etc.—black Americans remain proportionally worse off than their white peers. [Read More]

The sport of protest

Resistance to the Olympics coming to Chicago

NO GAMES CHICAGO WAS FOUNDED in the summer of 2008 when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Chicago was among the bid cities for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. The group’s aim is to prevent Chicago from hosting the games – nothing more, nothing less. The reason for this opposition is No Games Chicago’s claim that, if Chicago wins the bid to host the Olympics, the city’s working class would bear the bulk of the costs. [Read More]

Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy
[Marx wrote,] “[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence.”1 This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch. [Read More]