Back in the day, I would have been listening to Public Enemy. I would also include Dead Prez. I don’t know if I listen to stuff that’s considered political to get that feeling.

At this time, Communists in Venezuela were persecuted, and many were murdered. So the Party went to underground again. In the 1980s, Party work involved building Party clubs in the various communities. The clubs recruited individuals to the Party and worked in opposition to the oppressive capitalist government of the time.

Tran Doc Loi remains confident in the future prospects of socialism. I sat down with Tran, who chairs the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union, the youth wing of Vietnam’s Communist Party, after his presentation at the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students.

Leon Lefson is 90 years old and has the energy of men half his age. A Sacramento resident, he has been a political activist for decades. His working life includes a stint as a research assistant for the famed labor historian Philip Foner.

"I mentioned before there is always a patriotic element in the resistance movement, but it is small. We estimate this to be maybe 5 to 10 percent no more of the overall operations that take place. The problem there is that such groups haven’t manifested themselves politically yet..."

Phyllis Bennis is an internationally recognized expert on the Middle East, a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a founder of United for Peace and Justice, and the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis.

I have a problem with the idea that people are simply being duped or that they have "false consciousness." This is the wrong approach, because so-called cultural issues are real.

A representative of the Sudanese Communist Party discusses the situation in Darfur, its history, and ways to bring about a political resolution.

Editor’s Note: Michael Parenti is a widely acclaimed author and activist. His work includes Against Empire, Blackshirts and Reds, History as Mystery, To Kill a Nation, and most recently, Superpatriotism. Here Parenti begins by discussing his history of Rome and the life of Julius Caesar, The Assassination of Julius Caesar.

"We are a group of mothers in poverty. We came together 18 years ago to produce a newspaper, Mother Warriors Voice, to give a voice to moms, especially single moms in poverty because the war on the poor seemed to be targeting our families. All of the stereotypes and war propaganda against us made it difficult to raise our children. "

Raquel Rivera’s groundbreaking book New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone is of the first works that seriously studies the impact of Latinos on hip hop music and culture and conversely of hip hop on Latinos. She is currently working with writer and visual artist Tanya Torres on a collection of essays inspired by New York Puerto Rican artists and cultural workers, tentatively titled De un Pájaro Las Dos Patas y Otros Ensayos or Two Feet of the Same Bird and Other Essays.

You can probably divide up the right into three broad categories: the secular right, the Christian right, and the xenophobic right. Everyone to the right of the Republican Party is sometimes lumped together in a variety of ways. And although they overlap, they really make up different sectors that sometimes can agree on an agenda and sometimes can’t. So coalition-building is crucial to their success.

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David Laibman is Professor of Economics at the City University of New York and editor of Science and Society. He is the author of Value, Technical Change and Crisis: Explorations in Marxist Economic Theory and Capitalist Macrodynamics: A Systematic Introduction. He was also formerly the assistant editor of New World Review.

Editor’s Note: Toni Smith was the starting forward/center and team captain at Manhattanville College in New York and recently graduated. The media spotlight shone on her in the spring of 2003 as she, among millions of others, decided to protest US militarism and war.

Lester Rodney was the sports editor of the Daily Worker between 1936 and 1958. His contributions to sports history and to the working-class movement is detailed in Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports by Irwin Silber (Temple University Press, 2003).

Rahul Mahajan is a nationally known peace and justice activist. He publishes a daily political analysis on his weblog EmpireNotes.org and has written two books: Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade.

Doug Henwood is the editor of Left Business Observer and a contributing editor for The Nation. He hosts a radio program on WBAI in New York. He has also written three books: The State of the USA, Wall Street and After the New Economy. Here he discusses globalization and current trends in the US economy.

In January of 2003, Laura Bush invited a number of poets to the White House for a symposium to celebrate “Poetry and the American Voice.” Peace activist, publisher and poet, Sam Hamill, declined. Hamill said that he “could not in good faith visit the White House following the news of George W. Bush’s plan for a unilateral ‘shock and awe’ attack on Iraq.”

Editor’s Note: Paula Vogel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. She has written The Baltimore Waltz, How I Learned to Drive, Hot N Throbbing, Desdemona, The Mineola Twins, The Long Christmas Ride Home, And Baby Makes Seven and The Oldest Profession. Elena Mora conducted this interview.