10 years after the Iraq War

The inevitability of failure -- and of success

LEADING PUBLIC MEMBER of the Socialist Workers Party of the United Kingdom, Richard Seymour, who made a name for himself with the book The Liberal Defense of Murder (2008), polemicizing against campaigns of “humanitarian” military intervention such as the Iraq War, recently released his book on the late Christopher Hitchens, Unhitched, demonstrating that Hitchens remains an enduring and indeed indispensable phenomenon in the present system of thinking on the “Left.” [Read More]

Book Review: Terry Eagleton, _Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate_

Book Review: Terry Eagleton, _Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate_
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 STUDY THE STALLS OF A SEMINARY BATHROOM and chances are you will find the following scrawled out in ballpoint: “Nietzsche: God is Dead. God: Nietzsche is dead.” The quip relies on a misreading – God, for Nietzsche, did not die like your grandmother or pet turtle might die. God died like a language might die. In a secular world, belief becomes unbelievable. But the bathroom graffiti retains a bit of truth. [Read More]

The Imperialism Question and the Twentieth Century

A panel discussion event held on May 28, 2010, at the 2010 Platypus International Convention held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Atiya Khan Spencer A. Leonard Sunit Singh Description To many on the Left today, opposition to imperialism has become a political litmus test of sorts, but historically anti-imperialism was by no means an exclusively leftist political project whether we are speaking of right-wing anti-colonialism in the metropole or in the colonies. [Read More]

Going it alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left

Book Review: Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (eds.). *Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left*.

Going it alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left
New York: New York University Press, 2008. IF IT DID NOT COME TO END IN 1989, as conservative critic Francis Fukuyama expected, this is because, in Hegel’s sense, as freedom’s self-realization in time, History had already ceased. Long before the new geopolitical configurations and institutional forms of the post-Soviet world, a new and unprecedented, though scarcely recognized, political situation had taken shape: The last threads of continuity connecting the present with the long epoch of political emancipation were severed. [Read More]

Afghanistan, internationalism and the Left

THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW was conducted as an email exchange between Andony Melathopoulos and Terry Glavin in December 2008. Terry Glavin is a Canadian journalist, an outspoken critic of the anti-war movement’s call to withdrawal foreign troops from Afghanistan and a founder of the Afghanistan Canada Solidarity Committee (afghanistan-canada-solidarity.org). Andony Melathopoulos: You just returned from a trip to Afghanistan and have been busy writing about your experience in the Canadian news media and, most recently, in an online piece in Democratiya (”Afghanistan: A Choice of Comrades,” Winter (15), 2008). [Read More]