No contest here: it’s Steph Curry, point guard of the NBA champion Golden State Warriors and the league’s MVP last year. Curry heard during the off season that neither he nor his team were quite deserving of the awards and titles that they won. Not surprisingly, this clamor in the sports world, which thanks to ESPN goes on all day and night (not complaining), has given Curry, if he needed any motivation this season, more than enough to prove his critics wrong and to repeat his exploits from last season. In the first week of league play Curry has been nothing short of magical, a ballerina and Houdini on the basketball floor. LeBron may still be the best player in the world, but Curry is a close second and no one is more entertaining to watch. The basketball in his hands is like a brush in Van Gogh’s. Both see and do things in their respective craft and art form that leave the rest of us mere mortals looking on in wonder.
This is part two of a three-part series. See part one here.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” – Karl Marx
“What childish innocence it is to present one’s own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument!” – Frederick Engels
If any of us wants to judge the conduct of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Syriza in their negotiations with the Eurogroup (the finance ministers and heads of state that make up the Eurozone) in July, a close look at the concrete situation in Greece and Europe is necessary. At the core of any analysis is an examination of the distribution of power among contending class and social forces, the larger socio-economic matrix in which these forces collide, and the parameters and limits of social change.
That may seem obvious and not require mentioning, but I’m afraid it’s a method some on the left seem averse to and thus avoid.
Click to read more: http://peoplesworld.org/
This is part one of a three-part series. Originally written for People’s World – check out the original article here.
The current crisis in Greece and the Eurozone is fluid and far from settled. The latest clash last month between Greece and its elite adversaries in Europe – Germany in the first place – is provoking a wide-ranging debate. I can’t claim to be an expert so what follows is offered in a provisional spirit.
“Reflections on Socialism” first appeared on CPUSA.org on June 4, 2005. Read it on CPUSA.org.
The main political task at this moment is to assemble the necessary social forces to defeat Bush and his counterparts in Congress and elsewhere.
“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” — Martin Luther King Jr.
“The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of the complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going for, body and soul. But … long, persistent work is required.
