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When Opposition Calls for “Free” and “Fair” Elections to Guarantee “Democracy” in Venezuela, What Do They Mean?

Since Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, the US has attacked the Bolivarian Revolution in multiple ways, including through propaganda that categorize it as “authoritarian,” “unfree,” and “undemocratic.” This US propaganda assault is intended to dictate what should be done in Venezuela, including a return to “democracy,” with “free” and “fair” elections. Emboldened by […]
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The Complicity of the Experts: When Knowledge Fails in an Age of War
You may know that in Macedonia the academic disciplines of international relations, geopolitics, and international security were introduced long after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Everything started from scratch, and I would say that these fields are still in their infancy. With rare exceptions. In global terms, we are Lilliputians. Our academic community is small, our […]
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Not a Third Party, a Third Force

In Part One of this planned series of articles, I wrote about the historical timeliness of a ‘third force’ strategy. I said, “This isn’t something pulled out of the air, or someone’s lofty dreams. It is grounded in historical experience in the United States over the last 60 or so years.” A progressive “third force,” […]
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An Alliance of Socialists and Conservatives Against Liberal Centrism: Not Such Strange Fellows After All

Orientation The socialist left trashes attempts to unite the left and right Is it possible to oppose this centrist drift to the middle of the political spectrum by uniting socialists and conservatives? In the United States socialists howl at the prospect of uniting with conservatives. “How stupid” they might say. “Conservatives are pro-capitalists, pro-war and […]
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A New Era of Political Mobilization Is Dawning
Born in South Africa just a few years after the end of World War II and reared by activists in the anti-apartheid movement, I witnessed my parents’ struggle against fascism and its accompanying racism in both my country of birth and Europe. This created in me a sense of the fragility of democracy and fear […]
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Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative Part II

Orientation Unfortunately, in the United States the terms “liberal, “democracy” and “capitalism” are all mushed together according to the following logic: All democratic societies are liberal; All liberal societies are capitalist and All democratic societies are capitalist In Part I of my article, I challenged this logic because many capitalist societies have dictatorships and some […]
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Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative

You’ve always looked for leaders, strong men with no faults. There aren’t any. There are only men like yourselves. Speaking of leaders, they change, they desert, die. There are no leaders but yourselves. A united people is the only lasting strength. — Emiliano Zapata, 1952, to his followers In Yankeedom, the terms “liberal”, “democracy” and […]
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Michael Parenti, 1933-2026
With the death of Michael Parenti, we have lost one of the greatest dissident voices in American history. Parenti earned a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1962, and taught at a number of colleges and universities, never attaining a tenured position because he was “red-baited out of my college-teaching profession and left […]
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Beyond “We the People”: Rethinking Democracy
At its best, democracy implies collective self-rule: the idea that people should have real power over the conditions of their lives. Yet democracy has often functioned less as a lived practice and more as a legitimizing language—invoked to authorize states, consolidate authority, or justify exclusion behind claims of popular consent. I am not a historian, […]
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Anti-Democracy

Killing Democracy should at bare minimum be a university textbook, distributed to every institution of higher learning in America. Ideally, it would be required reading for every literate citizen of the U.S. Qualitatively, it is on the same level as Howard Zinn’s monumental work, A People’s History of the United States. Like that landmark work, […]