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Published bimonthly since 1986, AGAINST THE CURRENT is a Solidarity-sponsored analytical journal for the broad revolutionary left. The May/June 2012 issue features a Marxist reflection on patriotism and flag fetishism by Bertell Ollman. Malik Miah examines the murder of Trayvon Martin, James Clark discusses the Occupy movement, Bill Balderson and Claudette Begin lay out the problems and potential around the California Millionaires Tax campaign and Dianne Feeley describes the state takeover of Motor City. ATC’s international coverage includes Alexi Gusev’s perspectives on Putin’s Russia, Joana Mortágua on Portuguese workers opposition to austerity policies and an interview with Carl Finamore following his second trip to Egypt during their year of revolution. Subscribe today!
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International Viewpoint is the monthly English-language magazine of the Fourth International. IV is a window to radical alternatives world-wide, carrying reports, analysis and debates from all corners of the globe. Correspondents in over 50 countries report on popular struggles, and the debates that are shaping the left of tomorrow.
05/20/12 14:43
The outcome of the November 2012 election is clear: It will be the most vicious and racist in modern U.S. history, and by far the most expensive of all time. Are critical issues at stake in this political year? Absolutely, yes — but not the questions we'll get to vote on.
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IV448 - May 2012
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USA
05/20/12 14:39
We print the speech made by Dharmasiri Lankapeli, member of the Politbureau of the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP – Sri Lanka section of the Fourth International) at the joint opposition demonstration and rally on International Workers Day in Jaffna.
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IV448 - May 2012
05/19/12 16:42
Six months after the formation of the Monti government, the popularity the professor-ministers had enjoyed through the discredit which had accompanied the end of the Berlusconi era has begun to wane, even if the horizon does not present any credible political alternative.
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IV448 - May 2012
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Italy
Order these eye-catching buttons to spread the demand for social and economic justice. If you don't have paypal, email us!
Reads Bail out People, not Wall Street!. Around the edge, these 2 1/8" buttons read "Free Health Care," "Defend Public Services," "Living Wage Jobs," "Free Higher Education," "Troops Home Now," "Rebuild the Gulf Coast," and "Affordable Housing."
Brown and black buttons demand: "Bring all the Troops Home Now!" Wear one everywhere to start a conversation about why US occupation can never be a force for liberation, and people's needs should come before the massive military budget.
These 2 1/8" buttons read, in Spanish and English: ¡Alto a las deporaciones - Legalización para todos! Stop the deportations - Legalization for all!
Reply to Jim T
Well, not really a "tinge of pleasure," but I do feel a very quick moment of inspiration before some piece of agitprop art. Mostly because I feel a sharp nostalgia for a time - before my own, for the most part - when revolutions were a more a matter of everyday news, daily struggles, and not, as our supposedly 'postrevolutionary' common sense tries to tell us today, pieces of a bygone history.
But mostly I feel towards intentionally revolutionary or agitprop art the way I feel towards comic books or video games. Temporarily amusing, but not very durable and life-transforming, as great works of art can be.
Another tack is to flip the question, and ask how is any real art is possible in a monopoly industrial capitalist mass society? Here we can think of Adorno's famous statement that no poetry is possible after Auschwitz. I wouldn't go that far, but when I look at the art of the Renaissance, for example, poised on the edge between a feudal society and growing merchantile capitalist world, and compare the aesthetic 'production' of today, I have to wonder.
Artistic truths live in ambiguity, nuance, and wonderment. Confrontation with the ultimate questions, like death. Capitalism lives in abstract quantity, destroys particularity and experience, and reduces everything to callous exchange in the cash nexus. Capital lives by stealing more and more time from us; and real art requires lots of free time and practice. The destruction of murals, and the commodification of other cultural realms, is a clear example of what capitalism requires for itself, and what it needs to negate.
got to go for now...