Review of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Part 1/3

July 6, 2016 Leading LightLeave a comment

Review of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Part 1/3 LLCO.org Part 2/3: https://llco.org/review-of-walter-rodneys-how-europe-underdeveloped-africa-part-23/ Part 3/3: https://llco.org/review-of-walter-rodneys-how-europe-underdeveloped-africa-part-33/ Walter Rodney was a writer and activist who was influential in the anti-imperialist, the Black Power, and socialist movements across the Black and African worlds. In 1980, Rodney was assassinated in his homeland of Guyana by a car bomb while participating in local …

Jackal bites jackal

October 29, 2014 Leading LightLeave a comment

Jackal bites jackal 29 October 2014 LLCO.org Recently, the leader of Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, Motiur Rahman Nizami was sentenced to hang by the neck until death. He was sentenced by a special tribunal that hears unresolved cases connected to the war of liberation that technically ended on December 3, 1971. This has caused much controversy. Many have feared …

Revisiting value and exploitation

June 11, 2010 Leading LightLeave a comment

When her father died in 1883, Eleanor Marx wrote an article celebrating her father’s achievements. At the heart of these was “his theory of value, by which Marx explains the origin and the continued accumulation of capital in the hands of a, thereby, privileged class.” What was seen as so important at the time of his death has fallen by the wayside over a century later among the majority of those calling themselves “Marxist.” So-called Marxists today are content to forget Marx’s true theory of value because of the embarrassing fact that it would, if taken literally, preclude most First World workers from being exploited. It would count them outside of the proletariat, outside the revolutionary class.

Review of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Eyes of the Heart

June 10, 2010 Leading LightLeave a comment

A decade ago, in his book Eyes of the Heart, Jean-Bertrand Aristide points out that Haiti’s story is unique, but, in many ways, typical of much of the Third World. Haiti was not always a poor country. There was a time when Haiti produced more wealth than all 13 original colonies of the United States. Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capitol, was busier than any port in France. However, France punished Haiti when Haiti gained its independence in a successful slave revolt. France launched a total war against the Haitian people, killing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying much of the country’s infrastructure.

Real versus Fake Marxism on Socialist Distribution

August 5, 2009 Leading LightLeave a comment

Real versus Fake Marxism on Socialist Distribution Prairie Fire5 August 2009LLCO.org A global, socialist distribution of the world’s wealth implies a distribution that approaches egalitarianism or a distribution where the only inequalities that exist are ones that benefit the proletariat and most oppressed segments of the global population. These distribution principles, taken together, can be described as roughly, reasonably egalitarian …

One billion go hungry… socialism is better than capitalism

June 28, 2009 Leading LightLeave a comment

The global financial meltdown has had devastating effects for the world’s poor according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. War, drought, political instability, high food prices are compounded by the financial meltdown. Today, according to the UN’s FAO, over one billion people go hungry. Hunger now affects one in six people.

Imperialism kills and keeps on killing in Vietnam, Iraq etc.

February 28, 2009 Leading LightLeave a comment

According to a recent, 2009 study by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense, land mines and unexploded ordnance dot the landscape of Vietnam even though the war ended nearly 35 years ago. More than one third of the land in six central Vietnamese provinces continues to be a serious hazard. According to Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense, 6.6 million hectares (6.3 million acres) are still contaminated.

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

January 17, 2006 Leading LightLeave a comment

Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs documents the rise of what she calls “raunch culture” and the roles that women in the United States play in that culture. The book documents something very real. However, it is not just a sociological report. It is also a polemic of sorts against the now popular camp of bourgeois feminists known as “sex-positive feminism.” The book is a return to the second wave bourgeois feminism. Levy has more in common with a Catherine Mackinnon or Andrea Dworkin than her sex-positive contemporaries. The book represents one kind of bourgeois feminism arguing against another. The book never overcomes the limits of bourgeois thought and bourgeois conceptions of gender. The book does not cover how its topic intersects with global class and imperialism.