Why was the United States so afraid of an independent South Vietnam? Well, I think the reason again is pretty clear from the internal government documents. Precisely what they were afraid of was that the "takeover" of South Vietnam by nationalist forces would not be brutal. They feared it would be conciliatory and that there would be successful social and economic development - and that the whole region might work.

There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind

Worker ownership within a state capitalist, semi-market system is better than private ownership but it has inherent problems. Markets have well-known inherent inefficiencies. They're very destructive.

In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

What happened in Syria was, President [Barack] Obama had made a statement announcing what he called his "red line": You can't use chemical weapons, you can do anything else but [use] chemical weapons.

There is always room for Gramsci's "optimism of the will."

To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.