A Left Electoral Strategy? France and the United States
When Bernie Sanders announced that he would seek the presidential nomination of the U.S. Democratic Party, few people took him very seriously. Hillary Clinton seemed to have so much support that her...
View ArticleThe Left and the Nation: Unresolved Ambiguities
The term “nation” has had many different meanings across the centuries. But these days, and ever since the French Revolution more or less, the term has been linked to the state, as in “nation-state.”...
View ArticleDeclining Demand: Is Reality Creeping In?
Neoliberal ideology has dominated world discourse for the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. The mantra has been that the only viable policy for governments and social movements was to...
View ArticleCollapse of the European Union? A Skeptical View
One of the many games pundits and politicians are playing these days is to spell out why and how the European Union (EU) is going to collapse, is already collapsing. Anyone who follows the news...
View ArticleAnti-Trumpism
I have been as appalled as anyone at the style and content of Donald Trump’s search for the U.S. presidency. I have at no point been tempted in any way to support him. I do not intend to vote for him....
View ArticleThe Left Loses the Election in Peru
Peru is one of the countries with a two-round presidential election. Unless one candidate obtains 50%+ on the first round, there is a second round with only the two candidates who had the most votes in...
View ArticleThe Spanish Drama
King Philip VI of Spain has announced that in the four months since the last elections, the elected members of parliament, and especially those representing the four main parties, were unable to make...
View ArticleBrazil: Coup or Fiasco?
The President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has been suspended from her office while she goes on trial by the Senate. If convicted, she would be removed from office, which is what is meant in Brazil by...
View ArticleThe Increasingly Unstable United States
We are used to thinking of instability in states as being located primarily in the global South. It is about those regions that pundits and politicians in the global North speak of “failed states” in...
View ArticleEthnicity: Impassioned, Impermanent, Important
Ethnicity refers to one of the basic realities of the modern world-system. We are all embedded in one or several groups that have a presumed (if remote) kinship base. These days we tend to refer to...
View ArticleBrexit: Symptom, Not Cause, of Turmoil
On June 23, the referendum on a British withdrawal from the European Union (EU) won by a clear margin. Politicians and pundits have treated this as an unprecedented and earth-shaking decision. They...
View ArticleBastille Day: France’s Ultra-Confused Present
Every year, France celebrates on July 14 the fall in 1789 of the Bastille, then the main prison in Paris. The celebration is meant to mark the end of the so-called Ancien Régime. It unifies the country...
View ArticleTurkey and Erdoğan: Rise and Fall?
Turkey is presently governed by the Justice and Development Party (AKP in its Turkish initials). The AKP was co-founded in 2001 by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He became Prime Minister in 2003 and served...
View ArticleSouth Africa’s ANC Is Slipping Away
After a long struggle, the system of apartheid in South Africa was overcome. Elections based on universal suffrage were held. The chief architect of this transformation was the African National...
View ArticleTrump vs. Clinton: Predictions Have Consequences
The world media, and especially U.S. media, are following with intense interest and concern the November presidential elections in the United States. Almost all the stories discuss which of the two...
View ArticleSecular Stagnation, or is it worse?
The world’s economists have been wrestling with something they have found difficult to explain. Why is it that stock market prices have continued to go up despite the fact that something called growth...
View ArticleHow Can Political Shift to the Right Be Stopped?
This is the question people left of center have been asking for some time now. In different ways, it is being posed in Latin America, in much of Europe, in Arab and Islamic countries, in southern...
View ArticleColombia: A Bright Light is Extinguished
The global scene has been miserable for the last decade at least, if not longer. The world is inundated by wars, big and small, that seem both unending and unendable; by horrendous cruelties about...
View ArticleThe World Social Forum Still Matters
The World Social Forum (WSF) has met regularly since its first meeting in Porto Alegre in 2001. And just as regularly, there have been analysts who have announced its demise as a relevant expression of...
View ArticleThe U.S. Election: It’s over at last, or is it?
Almost everyone is astonished at Trump’s victory. It is said that even Trump was astonished. And of course now everyone is explaining how it happened, although the explanations are different. And...
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