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Review

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Leave Capitalism Behind

Science fiction has entered our dialectical dystopian reality. Climate catastrophe, war, violence, the rise of fascism. Capitalism harms and destroys nature, human beings, and the possibility of a future. The capitalist imperialist US-Israel-UK axis has murdered thousands of Palestinians, displaced even more, and is currently carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people. How do we, as revolutionary socialists and abolitionists, find hope in each other and the world?

You will not find that hope in the Netflix’s “Leave the World Behind.” Unlike Julia Roberts’s character, Amanda, who declares before the opening credits “I fucking hate people”–We fucking love people. We love the people. The poor people, the queers, the misfits, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. People with disabilities, homeless people, sex workers, the working poor, the international working class. Leave the World Behind is misanthropic, nihilistic, neoliberal defeatist, pro-military propaganda reinforcing racism and eco-fascism.

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 A Darkly Comedic Portrayal of Pinochet’s Blood-Soaked Legacy 

“El Conde” (Pablo Larraín) depicts former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) as a still-living 250-year old vampire. In the film, “the count” has his real origins in France, where he became the sworn enemy of all revolutions after he deserted the army of King Louis XVI to flee the revolution of 1789. In the present day, Pinochet is finally ready to die, feeling humiliated by his country’s hatred of him, but finds himself unable to do so. What ensues is a properly gruesome dark comedy for its subject matter, at its best when it leans into the lurid behavior of its bloodthirsty main character and his vain, money-grubbing family.

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Barbie is a Reactionary Movie Masquerading as Feminism

Do we really need another review of the Barbie movie? It’s a stupid movie, with serious plot holes, and virtually zero character development. The reviews defend the movie against right wing attacks, praise it for starting discussions about patriarchy worldwide, and laud Gerwig for subverting gender roles and showing audiences what true acceptance and female support looks like. Gerwig achieves all of this through creating a satirical Barbie world that looks amazingly like the Barbie dolls and accessories we played with and coveted as kids from the 1960s through the 1990s.

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Oppenheimer Whitewashes U.S. Capitalism’s Crimes Against Humanity

As I sat watching the Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer all I could think of was Edward Said. In his famous essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Said argued that there was no way to understand the ideology of Zionism—-the idea of Jewish racial supremacy—without examining the experience of those who suffered from it, namely Palestinians like himself.

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The Long Shadow of Michael Harrington: A Review of A Failure of Vision

Doug Greene’s new biography of Michael Harrington brings crucial historical context to debates on the socialist Left today. It is essential reading for newly minted socialists and seasoned activists alike.
Even among socialists, Michael Harrington is an obscure figure, but his work has enormous relevance today, for better and for worse. Harrington rose to national prominence as “the man who discovered poverty” with his 1962 book The Other America, a moving expose on poverty in the United States. In today’s context, his most important contribution is his role as the prominent founder and ideologue of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA has in the last few years become the largest self-described socialist organization in the U.S., since the heyday of the Socialist Party in the early 20th century.

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Return of the Spectre

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Left and the various social movements associated with it have been caught in a cycle of helplessness. From the riots of the Anti-globalization movement to the Occupy movement, social ferment erupts onto the scene in the form of mass protests, only to be crushed by police power and then co-opted by hegemonic liberalism. This process is dialectically both a symptom and a cause of an ethos that reduces politics to a set of individual moral endeavors, rather than a collective project of liberation. Unable even to raise Lenin’s (in)famous query, “What is to be Done?”, a Left seemingly afraid of its own shadow has been stuck asking itself – “What do we want?”

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From Palestine to Mexico, border walls have got to go!

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” is more than a slogan, it’s the call of a liberation movement. The Palestinian struggle for liberation is international and the fight for socialism begins when we unite to fight imperialism, colonialism and capitalism. The anthology Palestine: A Socialist Introduction published by Haymarket Books, gives us an overview of the possibilities of a better world, starting with Palestinian liberation. Editors Sumaya Awad and brian bean (brian bean is written in lowercase) offer us a succinct historical background of Palestinian liberation and an internationalist framework of socialism from below through which we can view this struggle.

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History, memory, and politics: “unforgetting” in the diaspora

Born in San Francisco, California, Roberto Lovato was raised in the shadow of silence surrounding family history and trauma, a commonly shared experience among those in the Salvadoran diaspora. In Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas (2020) Lovato shares his experience growing up surrounded by this omnipresent silence and the personal and political stakes of intergenerational forgetting. Lovato states “the machete dismembers our humanity from our stories” (xxiii). He uses the machete as a metaphor to describe the ways the social fabric of this community has been cut, wounded, and

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The Resurrection of José Carlos Mariátegui

The last couple of years have seen an increased interest in the life and work of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. Several left publications in the United States [1,2,3,4] have introduced readers to this original thinker and even the Economist [5] featured a sympathetic but characteristically bourgeois profile on the revolutionary. The global relevance of Mariátegui and his contributions to the art world were also featured last year in an exquisitely curated exhibition that travelled to Madrid, Spain, Lima, Peru, Austin, Texas, and Mexico City–which I was able to view firsthand [6].
This newfound interest in Mariátegui is a welcomed development, since this thinker hasn’t always enjoyed such popularity outside of Peru, the academy, or latinamericanist Marxist circles. However, translations of some of Mariategui’s key works have been available in the US since the 1970s. In 2011, Monthly Review Press published a lengthy anthology edited by Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker that is bound to become a reference text for Mariátegui studies. [7] Nevertheless, the work of this pioneering Marxist is being slowly embraced, and he is rapidly gaining a following in the English-speaking world.

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La lucha contra el fascismo: lecciones del pasado

Las crisis sanitarias y económicas desatadas por el COVID-19 han movilizado las fuerzas de extrema derecha en todo el mundo. La izquierda socialista necesita aprender de las luchas del Siglo XX para confrontar estas fuerzas antes de que se transformen en movimientos de masas. Puntorojo ofrece esta reseña sobre el libro Fighting Fascism (2017), publicado por Haymarket Books en inglés, para presentar a nuestros lectores un resumen de las teorías y estrategias aplicadas por la Comunista Internacional para luchar contra este fenómeno reaccionario. Ante la crisis actual, organizarnos en amplias coaliciones contra la extrema derecha es una cuestión de vida o muerte para los socialistas, la lucha feminista, y los movimientos indígenas.

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