[Antonio] Gramsci's words and actions explain their assessment, though I think we should refrain from using the term "model intellectual" for him or others.

Technologies can be liberating, but it can also be a tool of coercion and control.

Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.

You also have to get beyond that to dismantle the system of production for profit rather than production for use. That means dismantling at least large parts of market systems.

All you have to do is read the business literature. In the 1930s they were very frightened and they were concerned about how the rising power of the masses was hazardous to industrialists.

Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, is moving towards a degree of independence.

This would be a very good moment to institute a call for imposing the Chemical Weapons Convention on the Middle East. The actual Chemical Weapons Convention. Not the version that [Barack] Obama presented in his address to the nation and that media commentators repeat. What he said is that the convention bars the use of chemical weapons. He knows better. And so do the commentators. The Chemical Weapons Convention calls for banning the production, storage and use of chemical weapons, not just the use. So why omit production and storage?