An analysis of the revelations of the torture of prisoners by US guards at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and its implications for the region – Editors

An assessment of Rosa Luxemburg’s life and work on the occasion of the publication of the Rosa Luxemburg Reader.  Among Luxemburg’s concepts discussed are socialist democracy, her critique of Lenin, and her analysis of imperialism. Recently Eduardo Galeano has referred to her concept of democracy in a critique of Cuba, while Slavoj Zizek has distorted her critique of Lenin in order to attack her – Editors

The new form of imperialism eschews direct territorial control and is driven by the tendential decline in the rate of profit.  More than oil, current US imperialism’s militarization creates an image of power that attracts needed foreign capital, but this is a shaky foundation – Editors

A discussion of Hegel’s concept of absolute negativity as ground for Marxist dialectics, in light of the work of Gillian Rose and especially Raya Dunayevskaya, as well as the differing forms of the dialectic found in the writings of Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno – Editors

George W. Bush’s illegal, unwarranted and barbarous war against Iraq clearly has nothing to do with “liberating” the Iraqi people and everything to do with extending U.S. global power at the expense of both the Iraqi AND American populace. The U.S. war against Iraq is rooted in its drive for single world mastery. It’s been with us since the end of World War II, when the U.S. contended with Russia for world domination. By 1991 the collapse of the Soviet Union forced one side to drop out of this drive for world domination. Yet the U.S. continued its drive, unencumbered by competition from another superpower  – Editors

Of the many issues facing the effort to rethink the idea of revolution today, few are more vexing than that of state power. Does social revolution center on the political seizure of state power? If it doesn”t, what must be done instead? Can a revolution transform human relations so fundamentally that we will not again be confronted with a statist bureaucracy after the overthrow of the old?

What is new today is not that the U.S. is willing to unilaterally invade other countries, but that Bush has declared the right to do so against any country, at any time, at any spot on the globe. There is a growing base for building a movement that is totally opposed to both Bush’s war against Iraq and his effort to plunge this country into permanent military adventurism. Yet to realize this potential it is essential for anti-war activists not to repeat the mistakes of the past by simply projecting a narrow, knee-jerk reaction to U.S. policies. We cannot afford to ignore the crimes of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein just because we oppose Bush. We cannot ignore the suffering of the Kurds just because some of their leaders are being used by the U.S. – Editors

Through his brutal attacks on Gaza, reminiscent of his criminal actions in Lebanon in 1982, Israel’s Ariel Sharon is trying to rid the minds of Israelis and Palestinians of the very idea that they can ever live in peace with one another – Editors

A tribute to the Chinese philosopher and journalist Wang Ruoshui (1926-2002), who was persecuted from the 1960s onwards for defending socialist humanism.  He came under particular attack in the 1980s for arguing that alienation existed under “socialism” in China. Later coming into contact with US Marxist-Humanists, Wang wrote the preface to the 1999 Chinese translation of Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom – Editors

The crisis afflicting the anti-war movement goes deeper than the dominance of one or another “vanguard” party, though they have done plenty of damage. Rather, the problem is political and conceptual: a failure to recognize that the present moment calls for a total view, in which opposition to U.S. imperialism is made absolutely inseparable from a critique of reactionary Islamic fundamentalism and a projection of the kind of new, human society we are for – Editors

A two-fold disaster descended upon the world with the cruel and inhuman terrorist attack on New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11. The first was the terrorist attack, which created a level of destruction and mayhem not seen in a U.S. city since the Civil War. The second is the Bush administration’s response to it by declaring a “state of war” and engaging in total militarization, at home and abroad.

A review of Georg Lukacs’s recently discovered manuscript, published as Tailism and the Dialectic. This previously unpublished book was written as a defense of Lukacs’s  History and Class Consciousness (1923) in response to attacks on it from within the Communist International by Abram Deborin and Laszlo Rudas. Originally composed in 1925 or 1926, Lukacs’s Tailism is somewhat of a disappointment in that it reduces the concept of subjectivity to a defense of the vanguard party. At the same time, Lukacs continues in muted form his earlier critique of Engels’s scientism and the book contains some brilliant insights on Hegel. It is unfortunate that philosophers like Slavoj Zizek and Trotskyist writers like Jonathan Rees have embraced Tailism uncritically today, using it to attack Rosa Luxemburg for having criticized Lenin’s single-party state – Editors