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January 23, 2024

End the Genocide Now: A CALL TO ACTION!

We the undersigned declare our opposition to the United States government’s support and unconditional funding for the state of Israel, Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and its merciless genocide against the Palestinian people.

We oppose U.S. imperialism in Palestine, across the Middle East, and everywhere else in the world. Both the United States and Israel are settler-colonial states built on land theft, violence against indigenous populations, and resource extraction. We refuse to see Palestinian blood shed for western oil. We support the Palestinian right to self-determination.

We fight for the rights of the oppressed everywhere in the world, including within the United States. We are opposed to fascism, capitalism, and all colonial projects.

July 10, 2023

by Bill V. Mullen

Why Indiana and the Rest of the U.S. Needs a Revolutionary Socialist Movement

If you mention Indiana to someone on the U.S. Left, they are likely to know two things: that Eugene Debs, the one-time leader of the American Socialist Party, was born there; and that Indiana was a birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. In the first 30 years of the 20th century, these forces fought tooth and nail over the direction of Indiana and American politics: the Socialist Party held an inaugural ratification convention in Indianapolis in 1901, and held its national convention there in 1912, when Debs got more than a million votes running for President.

April 24, 2023

by Puntorojo Editorial Collective

Urgency for Resistance: Interview with Madison Abortion and Reproductive Rights Coalition for Healthcare (MARRCH)

On July 4th of 2022, there was a very large gathering at the state capitol in Madison, and there was a speak-out, inviting community members to come up and speak on a bullhorn about how Roe v Wade being overturned had affected their reproductive rights, fertility, and just life in general. And they shared stories that were very personal. The organizers there had passed around a notebook asking for those serious about joining a social movement or creating a social movement to put their name and email or phone number in there so that they could follow up later.

July 19, 2022

by Justin Akers Chacón

The Making of a System in Crisis: the ungovernability of 21st century capitalism

As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in their foundational exposition of historical materialism and the dialectics of social transformation, a mode of production in crisis does not collapse under the weight of its own malfunction; it has to dismantled and replaced through the self-conscious action of a rising revolutionary class.
The multiplying crises of capitalism have led to internal dysfunction and debilitations that render its operations increasingly out of sync with the needs and basic sustenance of the vast majority of humanity and the rest of the natural world. It is rapidly reaching the limits of its own capacity for self-reproduction, and cannot seem to persist without inducing even greater calamity and instability. As the capitalist system trudges on in this linear trajectory, a cumulative transformation is well underway: where more will have to be sacrificed so that capitalism may live on.

March 22, 2021

by Zack Frailey Escobar

Return of the Spectre

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Left and the various social movements associated with it have been caught in a cycle of helplessness. From the riots of the Anti-globalization movement to the Occupy movement, social ferment erupts onto the scene in the form of mass protests, only to be crushed by police power and then co-opted by hegemonic liberalism. This process is dialectically both a symptom and a cause of an ethos that reduces politics to a set of individual moral endeavors, rather than a collective project of liberation. Unable even to raise Lenin’s (in)famous query, “What is to be Done?”, a Left seemingly afraid of its own shadow has been stuck asking itself – “What do we want?”

September 21, 2020

by Puntorojo Editorial Collective

Puntorojo: first anniversary and relaunch

With this issue of Puntorojo, we celebrate our one-year anniversary and announce the re-launch of our magazine and our new Patreon page. We want to take this opportunity to thank our earliest supporters! We encourage you to follow us on social media, reflect on what we have published and accomplished, and join with us as we grow and take Puntorojo Magazine in new directions. With this issue of Puntorojo, we celebrate our one-year anniversary and announce the re-launch of our magazine and our new Patreon page. We want to take this opportunity to thank our earliest supporters! We encourage you and new supporters to follow us on social media, reflect on what we have published and accomplished over the first year, and join with us as we grow and take Puntorojo Magazine in new directions.

September 7, 2020

by Lupita Romero and Eric Nava-Perez

Honoring the past to forge a new future: the Chicano Moratorium 50 years on

This past weekend in Los Angeles, thousands took to the streets to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium, the largest Chicano-led mass protest in U.S. history. On August 29th, 1970, over 20,000 Mexican and Chicano youth poured throughout the streets of Los Angeles to protest the Vietnam war, police brutality, and ongoing inequality that the Mexican and Chicano community faced in California and throughout the southwest.

August 25, 2020

by Héctor Rivera

The Resurrection of José Carlos Mariátegui

The last couple of years have seen an increased interest in the life and work of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. Several left publications in the United States [1,2,3,4] have introduced readers to this original thinker and even the Economist [5] featured a sympathetic but characteristically bourgeois profile on the revolutionary. The global relevance of Mariátegui and his contributions to the art world were also featured last year in an exquisitely curated exhibition that travelled to Madrid, Spain, Lima, Peru, Austin, Texas, and Mexico City–which I was able to view firsthand [6].
This newfound interest in Mariátegui is a welcomed development, since this thinker hasn’t always enjoyed such popularity outside of Peru, the academy, or latinamericanist Marxist circles. However, translations of some of Mariategui’s key works have been available in the US since the 1970s. In 2011, Monthly Review Press published a lengthy anthology edited by Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker that is bound to become a reference text for Mariátegui studies. [7] Nevertheless, the work of this pioneering Marxist is being slowly embraced, and he is rapidly gaining a following in the English-speaking world.