It is not necessary to dwell upon the characteristics of our revolution; upon its original form, with its dashes of spontaneity which marked the transition from a revolution of national liberation to a socialist revolution; one full of rapidly passing stages, led by the same…
Throughout history we observe that people use political language in the way accorded to them by tradition, even when that political language — that conceptual language — no longer corresponds to reality. I think this is happening today among Communists and Marxists in Brazil.
The world today is divided into two halves: the one where capitalism is exercised to full consequence, and the one where socialism has taken root. However, we cannot group all countries under a capitalist life-system in one single bucket. There are marked differences among them.
As a soldier, Alberto Bayo fought in the Rif War and against the fascists in Spain. As a teacher, he taught Fidel, Che, and the revolutionaries who would one day liberate Cuba.
This is a unique revolution which some people maintain contradicts one of the most orthodox premises of the revolutionary movement, expressed by Lenin: “Without a revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement.” It would be suitable to say that revolutionary theory, as…
Despite the desires of its pontiffs and overseers, the capitalist literary process does not manage to escape the germs that creep into it from the base structure on which it rests, and to which it is tethered. The inherent contradictions — the growing and mortal contradictions…
1. Being Chavista means valorizing and being guided by LOVE: love for one’s neighbor, for one’s country, for those who suffer, for the People. It means knowing how to listen to those who most need to be heard and learning, together, how to handle problems — with…
It’s possible to discern a bifurcation in the theoretical history of Marxism. If we represent this history as a great tree that splits near the base into two thick, well-defined branches — which in turn have divisions and subdivisions of their own — this would not be far removed…
Let us broach a polemical subject. The British author George Orwell is very well known for works such as Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and his book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Throughout 2022 I intend to discuss each of these…
In 1993, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Italian journalist and liberal politician Jas Gawronski interviewed Fidel Castro in Havana. In the course of the conversation Fidel Castro defends the legitimacy of socialism in China and Vietnam, explains why he has some…
Nowadays it is almost commonplace to recognize that the fall of the USSR was a turning point in world history, after which market economy and Western-style democracy became almost unquestionable values. What is less discussed is the extent to which this process controls not only…
Whenever there is a political incident in Latin America, instead of informing and clarifying, many “experts” set out to insist over and over that the situation is too complex to be understood in terms of archaic left-right dichotomies.
There is a fundamental contradiction in many of the Marxist studies that are produced in the West. Every time that they speak of Marxism in Asia — in China, Korea or Vietnam — or when they speak of popular movements in Africa such as in Egypt or Libya, they highlight the…
The US tried hard to build Fidel Castro into a boogeyman. We translated this 1991 interview to help dismantle the myth. Holding forth on immigration and environmentalism, Castro embodies what Muriel Rukeyser said about communists being “exiles from the future.”