Dérive

  Protests began in Chile during the middle of October following the announcement of a 30 peso fare increase for the national metro service. In response, students staged fare evasion campaigns using the slogan ¡Evade! and occupied dozens of metro stations. The protests have since grown in size, embracing long-standing resentment over income inequality and the privatization of resources such as education and utilities, as well as demands for the resignation of President Enrique Piñera. City walls are covered in various slogans, including Rosa Luxemburg’s famous dictum declaring “socialism or barbarism”, and demonstrators wave the flag of the indigenous Mapuche people. Various reports from the ground paint a compelling picture of class struggle in one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, where 1% of the population controls some 26% of the total wealth. By design, the neoliberal policies pushed forward under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinoche and continued...

  Martin Monath: A Jewish Resistance Fighter Among Nazi Soldiers By Nathaniel Flakin Pluto Press, $20.00. Martin Monath lived during tumultuous times; his short life intersected with events that included both World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Spanish Civil War. He was, as author and translator Nathaniel Flakin explains, a “child of war and revolution” (p. 7). Monath lived several lives under a host of different names, made many friends (and many more enemies), and died twice. Reshaping Monath’s life through a variety of hard-to-find sources, Flakin expertly places the story of one man within the larger context of what the late Eric Hobsbaum termed the Age of Extremes . Monath’s door into Marxism and the struggle for proletarian emancipation was not an uncommon one for young Jewish men growing up Berlin. In 1917, the Balfour Agreement sealed Britain's support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Antisemitism — what August Bebel call...