Archive | October, 2018

Widespread privatisation of public goods in many societies is systematically eliminating human rights protections and further marginalising those living in poverty, according to a hard-hitting new report. The report was transmitted to the UN General Assembly on 19 October.

FAR-RIGHT Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s son has threatened violence against the country’s Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) if it blocks his father from running in Sunday’s second-round poll.

Sivamohan Valluvan and Eleanor Penny unpack neoliberal attitudes to migration and ‘low-value’ humans.

Trump said the United States will develop the weapons unless Russia and China agree to a halt on development.

There is a famous old left phrase, ‘socialism or barbarism’: there is no choice but to find a way to stop capitalism’s destructive logic, because if left unchecked it will create catastrophe.

Leaked document details BusinessEurope’s campaign to undermine EU attempts to cut climate emissions.

War is romantic only when it is limited to the confines of a sanitized imagination. Movies that portray heroic soldiers vanquishing demonic enemy combatants or rescuing fallen comrades may whip up jingoistic war fever, but horrific images of real children and elders maimed, scarred, dismembered and killed during armed conflicts have the power to end wars.

Intersectionality, a way of thinking about the nature and causes of social inequality, proposes that the effects of multiple forms of oppression are cumulative and, as the term suggests, interwoven.

The late French filmmaker, François Truffaut, once claimed “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film”—referring to the adventure and thrill of combat, the (usually) clear-cut heroes and villains, and the opportunity for the film-maker to indulge in spectacular pyrotechnics and loud, cinema-shaking explosions of sound.

International financial transactions using foreign currency were reportedly blocked, agroindustrial and pharmaceutical sectors said.

‘We are losing the fight against famine’, said the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock to the UN Security Council on 21 September. He was talking about Yemen, which has been bombarded by the monstrous anger of the Saudi-Emirati guns from March 2015.

“Proletarians [Proletarier] of all countries, unite!” It is with these ringing words that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously conclude their Communist Manifesto in 1848 (MECW 6: 519; MEW 4: 493, sometimes my translation).

An important work of Marxist history and theory restores class struggle to central place in explaining how capitalism arose and grew, and can eventually be overcome.

In the summer of 2018, the Indian State of Kerala was hit by severe rains and flood–the heaviest in nearly a century. The deluge affected 5.4 million people in this southern Indian state with a population of 35 million.

Last weekend was surely the most complex in ages! Were the results favorable for “the good side”?

Proceed with caution: the CIA, NSA, FBI and DOD are your ‘friends’ on Facebook, writes Lauren Smith.

Voting rights violations are emerging across several states with less than a month before the conclusion of midterm elections in the United States.

The global reaction to two landmark new reports suggests the world could well lose that confrontation.

The former Klu Klux Klan leader said Bolsonaro “sounds like one of us.”

In the aftermath of Nepal’s near revolution, diverse Maoist leaders are attempting to regroup and move forward again.