Archive | July, 2017

  • RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - JULY 16: An expatriate Venezuelan casts her ballot during an unofficial referendum, or plebiscite, held by Venezuela's opposition against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government on July 16, 2017 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Voting was conducted across 2,000 polling centers in Venezuela and in more than 80 countries around the world amidst a severe crisis in Venezuela. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

    Venezuela sees “historic” turnout in National Constituent Assembly elections

    Speaking from the Plaza Bolivar in Caracas shortly after the CNE announcement, President Nicolas Maduro hailed the large vote total as indicative of the new body’s legitimacy.

  • Development in Cambodia

    Land grabs and uneven development in Cambodia

    The global labor arbitrage means the only competitive “advantage” available to most countries is forcing workers to accept slave wages and environmental standards low enough to lure in multinationals. If the population resists, the only means available to diffuse it is brutal repression.

  • Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro holds the Venezuelan flag next to singer "El Potro Alvarez" during a rally in Caracas on Thursday

    Trump is not the Venezuelan supreme court

    The US Empire consists of allied governments like Canada, private media companies and prominent NGOs who all share its delusion that it is entitled to decide which government is a “dictatorship” that “must go”. It is a truly formidable and lethal system of misinformation. Leftists should always have done more to challenge the US Empire on Venezuela during the Chavista era, and to challenge imperialism in general. We really need to step up now.

  • President Donald Trump spoke to Long Island law enforcement officers and officials Friday at Suffolk County Community College about their successes

    Trump just delivered the most chilling speech of his presidency

    Trump sent a message to Latinos in America — both unauthorized immigrants who are liable to be arrested by ICE at any time and might be falsely accused of gang membership in the process, and legal immigrants and citizens who nonetheless might “look like a gang member” to the wrong person based on the color of their skin. Trump is telling them there is no one who can keep them safe.

  • Charles Koch, seen in 2012. Has he enlisted the University of Utah in a campaign against teaching Marx? (Bo Rader / Associated PressP)

    Did the Koch family buy a piece of the University of Utah to ‘balance’ a Marxist faculty?

    Koch and the countering of Marxian and Keynesian econoimcs at the University of Utah.

  • Donald Trump with the Rev. Pat Robertson in 2016 at Virginia’s Regent University, founded by Robertson. This month Robertson was granted a White House interview with the president for the Christian Broadcasting Network, also founded by the televangelist. (Steve Helber / AP)

    Trump and the christian fascists

    Donald Trump’s ideological vacuum, the more he is isolated and attacked, is being filled by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism, with its network of megachurches, schools, universities and law schools and its vast radio and television empire, is a potent ally for a beleaguered White House.

  • Supporters of President Nicolás Maduro participate in a rally in Caracas in support of the national Constituent Assembly

    The crisis in Venezuela and the left

    The media keep silent about the violence of the Venezuelan opposition and the prevailing repression by the right-wing governments of Latin America. The Right’s strategy of an institutional coup faces serious limits, but the Left must address this new threat, supporting anti-imperialist decisions and making a distinction between the capitalist boycott and the government’s ineffectiveness.

  • Jeremy Corbyn

    The Momentum video that has divided opinion

    I just don’t get why Jeremy Corbyn is so popular.

  • Google

    New Google algorithm restricts access to left-wing, progressive web sites

    The company said in a blog post that the central purpose of the change to its search algorithm was to give the search giant greater control in identifying content deemed objectionable by its guidelines. It declared that it had “improved our evaluation methods and made algorithmic updates” in order “to surface more authoritative content.”

  • U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a "Made in America" products showcase event at the White House in Washington, U.S., July 17, 2017.Carlos Barria

    Trump hits Venezuela with new sanctions as CIA chief plugs intervention

    The Trump government’s latest sanctions against Caracas come just two days after Venezuelan Foreign Minister Samuel Moncada publicly revealed that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was working alongside governments in Mexico and Colombia to topple the Maduro government.

  • Police remove Okinawans protesting the planned expansion of a U.S. military base at Camp Schwab, Nago, Okinawa. Image: © Masaya Noda / Greenpeace.

    Fighting for Okinawa

    Our story though, is much more than three short paragraphs in a textbook. It is a story about a people’s determination for sovereignty in the face of imperialism, resilience in midst of colonization, and perseverance for peace as survivors of war. Our story is urgent and it is a call for global action in the name of peace and justice. The history of Okinawa is a story of resistance but also a call to the world.

  • Militant particularism and ecosocialism

    Militant particularism and ecosocialism

    Marx showed how history was materially transformed through a series of contradictions toward greater complexity, but held out the promise of one particular class representing the universal interests of humanity, if activated within objective conditions by political agency. The problem today is that cyclical and conjunctural crises that have propelled capitalism to hegemonic global reach and to the point of near absolute structural crisis have also eliminated resistance in the form of a consequential collective agent that would avert ecological collapse.

  • We can do it with $15 an hour and a union

    Unions fight inequality

    The decline in unionization is one of the most important factors promoting the concentration of income at the upper end of the income distribution. The statement may not surprise you, but the fact that this was the conclusion of an IMF study of the causes of inequality might.

  • US debates sanctions on Nicaragua or backing Venezuela

    US debates sanctions on Nicaragua for backing Venezuela

    The United States Committee on Foreign Relations is due to discuss the bill known as the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act of 2017, or Nica Act on Thursday. It seeks to add conditions to the provision of aid from international financial institutions to the country.

  • Grim conditions in nineteenth-century factories such as this one in Sheffield, UK, inspired Das Kapital

    In retrospect: Das Kapital

    The book’s impact on economics, politics and current affairs has been formidable, and aspects of Marx’s thinking have permeated areas of scientific research as disparate as robotics and evolutionary theory.

  • Black Workers Power

    Does David Roediger disagree with Ellen Meiksins Wood?

    How does race relate to class in capitalism? Is it intrinsic and essential to the reproduction of capital, or merely an accidental feature of particular capitals? In this recent essay by Richard Seymour, and originally published on his Patreon, Seymour considers a debate within Marxism on the relationship between class, race and capitalism.

  • A US MQ-9 Reaper assassination drone

    Drone warfare: The death of precision

    With Obama’s “precision ethos” behind us and the “Trump doctrine” ahead. Neither is perfect, but latter with the priority for percision gone, is much more dangerous.

  • Trump criticized the "fake news" media, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in his speech at the Boy Scouts Jamboree Monday night. (Photo: Алексей М/Flickr/cc)

    Boy Scouts Jamboree compared to Hitler Youth Rally after Trump’s speech

    The president spoke to 24,000 Scouts ranging in age from 12 to 18, as eight presidents have before him. Unlike previous presidents, however, Trump appeared to view the event as an opportunity to slam his political opponents and the news media, call for “loyalty,” and rail against the “cesspool” of Washington, D.C., as the audience cheered

  • Venezuela

    The beginning of a crucial week in Venezuela

    While President Trump threatens to enact sanctions on Venezuela, this week will be crucial in the insurrectionary offensive of the opposition and imperialism. The hope for human rights and the breakdown of inequality is on its way.

  • Participants march in the '1,000 figures' demonstration

    G20: 80,000 people demonstrate against the world’s elite and in favor of solidarity and the earth

    This is the story of eight people who together own as much wealth as one-half of humanity, or 3.5 billion of the planet’s inhabitants. These eight people have some good friends, who met last weekend in Hamburg. Twenty heads of state discussed over two days the best way to guarantee that their eight friends, and also they themselves, would become even richer. Welcome to the G20.