Place: Germany
Thirty Years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall
By: James FabrisNovember 20, 2019
Remember when the Berlin Wall came down? I do.
Glued to TVs in DeKalb, Illinois, my college friends and I watched in envy and amazement as the young Berliners on our screens swarmed all over that unholy edifice attacking it with . . .
How the Youth-Led Climate Strikes Became a Global Mass Movement
By: Nick EngelfriedSeptember 17, 2019
The Global Climate Strike is the result of a whole new generation taking bold action and could be the turning point for grassroots resistance to fossil fuels.
A Plant Closing War, Viewed From Inside
By: Steve EarlyJuly 16, 2019
Last winter, protesters wearing yellow vests commanded center stage in France. Their grassroots challenge to the neoliberal regime of President Emmanuel Macron drew on a long tradition of labor militancy, including factory closing fights. When these protesters still had blue . . .
Will German Social Democrats expel youth leader for socialist ideas?
By: Ron LareMay 17, 2019
The SPD — the Social Democratic Party of Germany — is Germany's oldest political party. Its history includes both revolutionary struggle against capitalism and the betrayal of revolution. Many still consider it a socialist party, and its youth organization identifies as Young Socialists.
100 years after the death of Rosa Luxemburg
By: Joe SabatiniJanuary 20, 2019
The deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht have haunted the imagination of the left for a century. Joe Sabatini reviews a recent publication exposing the events of their deaths, Klaus Gietinger's The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, as well as providing an introduction to some of the literary works inspired by the events of 15 January 1919.
War, Imperialism, and Class Polarization on a Global Scale
From East Asia to the Middle East and from South Africa to Europe
By: Kevin B. AndersonJuly 20, 2018
Adapted from a presentation to the Chicago Convention of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, July 13, 2018.
Lou Andreas-Salomé vs. The Patriarchy
By: Michael HirschApril 21, 2018
Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to Be Free
Directed by Cordula Kablitz-Post, 1 hr. 53 min
Cinema Libre Studios, 2016
This biopic is not subtle. From its opening scene featuring a pyre of books and a frenzied crowd cheering as a manic speaker justifies the burning of Marx, Trotsky, Freud and "everything that is not German" followed by a romp through Lou Andreas-Salomé's prodigiously intellectual life and her last days as a target of the Nazis, the film is as much about the pain of choosing a vaporous freedom as it is the flailing pursuit of fulfillment by a self-assertive, iconic woman.
Greece after the election — not a threat but an opportunity for Europe
By: newpoliticsFebruary 4, 2015
[Ed. note: The list of signatories to this declaration includes seven out of nine German trade union presidents, all members of the executive boards of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) and IG Metall, plus some (primarily social-democratic) politicians at the Bundestag and European Parliament levels, including the vice-chairman of the SPD, as well as numerous academics.]
The political landslide in Greece is an opportunity, not only for that crisis-ridden country but also for a fundamental reassessment and revision of EU economic and social policy.
The Left Party in Germany
By: Cornelia Hildebrandt
Winter 2015 (New Politics Vol. XV No. 2, Whole Number 58)
The Left Party is fighting for "a society in which no child has to grow up poor, in which all men and women can live a self-determined life in peace, dignity, and social security and can democratically shape social relations." In order to achieve this, it demands "a different economic and social system: democratic socialism."1 That is how the Lef
By: Bhaskar SunkaraOctober 6, 2013
Passionately watching last week's election returns* at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung's office in New York, without ever having been to Germany or learned more than a half-dozen German words, was an unusual experience. It was easy enough to orient my sympathies — as an American socialist they stood with the Left Party.
The Problem with the German Workers Council Movement –A Response to Comack
By: Dan La BotzSeptember 13, 2013
Martin Comack is absolutely correct to recognize that I wrote a Leninist critique of his book Wild Socialism about the revolutionary shop stewards or council movement that existed in Berlin at the time of World War I and on into the early 192
Response to Review of Wild Socialism
By: Martin ComackSeptember 12, 2013
I would like to comment on the Leninist critique of my book Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-21 by Dan La Botz on your website. His review contains several errors and misinterpretations.
Wild Socialism
By: Dan La BotzAugust 7, 2013
Book Review of Martin Comack. Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-1921. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. 97pp. Paperback or e-book: $24.99
Zündende Funke: The Spark Lights Up in Action
Rosa Luxemburg's Philosophy of Praxis
By: Michael Löwy
Summer 2013 (New Politics Vol. XIV No. 3, Whole Number 55)
There seems to exist a secret complicity between the rediscovery of Rosa Luxemburg and rebellious times. The last period when her life and writings raised much interest was in the 1960s and 70s, during the "street-fighting years" (Tariq Ali's expression). Could the recent publication of several of her works, in many parts of the world, be the sign of a new "critical" epoch? In the English speaking world, the good news is the project of publishing The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg in fourteen volumes, five of which only with her correspondence.
German Resistance to the Nazi State
By: Horst Brand
Winter 2012 (New Politics Vol. XIII No. 4, Whole Number 52)
The book's title translates a term, "Rote Kapelle," that the Gestapo applied to a relatively small circle of men and women in Berlin, active in seeking to weaken the political authority of the Hitler regime during the 1930s and early 1940s. The term, however, was meant to convey the notion that the group was involved in a Soviet conspiracy — a notion that survived the war and was perpetuated in the ensuing climate of a public opinion shaped by the cold war and hostility to the Soviet Union.
Behind the Euro Crisis: Germany Gambles on the Old Dream of European Hegemony
By: Richard GreemanNovember 17, 2011
German industrial and financial power is the key to understanding the complex and often confusing international maneuvers around the Crisis of the Euro. Germany is Europe's industrial powerhouse, the only country that has survived the Great Recession with a healthy economy, low unemployment, rising GDP, social stability and a favorable balance of trade. Yet, only within the solid framework of a strong European Union can Germany, Europe's principal creditor nation, ever hope to collect on her Southern European loans and investments.
Hannah Arendt Against the Facts
By: Gertrude EzorskyJuly 29, 2011
[The publication in 1963 of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt provoked a storm of controversy which has been going on for decades. Arendt, the author of the famed The Origins of Totalitarianism claimed that Eichmann, organizer of the Holocaust, was not a fanatic who hated Jews but a normal man, and that Jewish leaders and organizations cooperated with him to an extraordinary degree.