By Mark Rudd (August 29, 2017) I woke up at 2 am last night thinking: How can you talk about socialism in the US without taking into account two salient characteristics of this country’s history and present: racism and militarism? Obviously John Judis has no problem with this question, since he never mentions either. I love Scandinavian socialism as a…
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By Joseph Orosco (August 15, 2017) As someone who regularly teaches about the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I often spend time discussing with students the ways in which King’s ideas are taken out of context and turned into sound bites in order to support positions he would not himself have taken. The most obvious example is how…
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By Joseph Orosco (April 6, 2017) In an interview in her new collection, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis is asked about being a pioneer in developing the concept of intersectionality. She responds: There were many pioneers of intersectionality but I do think it is important to acknowledge an organization that existed in New York in the late sixties and…
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By Mark Rudd (April 4, 2017) Today is April 4, the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. M.L. King Jr’s historic speech at Riverside Church in NYC in which he broke his long silence on Vietnam and made the crucial link between militarism and poverty and racism. I consider this the left’s origin speech. It’s who we are, what we stand for….
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By Chris Crass Let’s be clear, when those in power and their media call for people to be “peaceful” in the face of endemic and sanctioned racist state violence, they aren’t calling for a return to disruptive and militant non-violent direct action unleashed by the Civil Rights movement, even if they insultingly call up Dr. King to denounce the #BaltimoreUprising.
By Mark Naison Spring, 1965. A junior at Columbia, I joyously prepared for the tennis season, which offered me the opportunity to play number-one singles. Two high-profile political issues deeply troubled me: the bombing of North Vietnam and President Johnson’s unwillingness to move aggressively to secure voting rights for African Americans in Southern States.
By Joseph Orosco In Winter of 2014, I taught a seminar on the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. The class takes a historical view of King’s work, tracing his thinking from the period of the Montgomery Bus Boycott until his final works dealing with the Vietnam War and the Poor People’s March. I asked students, at the…
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By Chris Crass Martin Luther King, Jr. day is a celebration, honoring of, and re-commitment to Black Freedom struggle.
By Mark Naison Our political leaders and the business elites they serve are hoping the passionate discourse about police practices, race and class inspired by the death of Mike Brown and the events that followed will disappear and fade into the background the way Occupy Wall Street did when its encampments were evicted. They are probably right.
Laurie Childers is an artist, ceramics instructor, and singer/songwriter in Corvallis, Oregon. In the 1980s, she worked around the world with artisans building fuel-efficient cookstoves and learned much about the effect of foreign and domestic economic policies upon the lives of real people as well as the land.
By José-Antonio Orosco and originally published in the Times of Trenton guest opinion column on January 20, 2014. Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize. One of the most striking aspects of his acceptance speech is the hope he expressed in humanity’s ability to overcome war. This was no mere idealism on his part. Less…
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