The three states in Eastern Germany now facing elections (two of them on Sunday) will be forced to decide on coalitions; no party will be strong enough to rule alone, most likely not even in two-party tandems.
Archive | August, 2019
Corinna Lotz – Finding Ilyenkov: How a Soviet Philosopher Who Stood Up for Dialectics Continues to Inspire
Corinna Lotz’ Finding Ilyenkov can be read in a few hours, but for those readers taken with its ideas and appeal to the relevance of Ilyenkov’s life and theory, this book provides a salient and fecund starting point for any variety of in-depth engagements relating to Ilyenkov, dialectical materialism and creative Soviet Marxism.
Announcing the 2019 Food Sovereignty prize honorees
The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance is very excited to announce the winners of the 2019 Food Sovereignty Prize. Urban Tilth (Richmond, CA) is the domestic honoree, and Plan Pueblo a Pueblo (Plan People to People; Venezuela) is the international honoree.
Is Warren talented enough to betray the people as masterfully as Obama?
Elizabeth Warren is seen as a counter Bernie Sanders, but she will melt (like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) if she stops raising Democrats’ expectations to bust corporate power.
A month ahead of Global Climate Strike, thousands pledge to attend rallies across planet to ‘turn up the political heat’ and demand action
“Time is running out. This decade is our last chance to stop the destruction of our people and our planet… This is why we strike.”
Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance
Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but ratherabundance (see Sahlins, 1976; Galbraith, 1998; Latouche, 2014; D’Alisa et al., 2014).
Hungering for the language of class war
Dark skies persist over coastal Brazil, where the country’s major population centres are to be found. This year, there have been 40,341 fires in the Amazon, the highest since 2010.
The quiet death of the “white Bernie bro” attack
A majority of Sanders supporters are non-white, in contrast to all the other top tier candidates, including Kamala Harris.
Antifa: the anti-fascist handbook – book review
The long history of anti-fascist mobilisation, outlined in Bray’s Antifa, underlines the importance of broad alliances for mass mobilisations, argues Thomas Gibbs.
Brazil’s Bolsonaro causes global outrage over Amazon fires
The far-right populist leader initially dismissed the hundreds of blazes and then questioned whether activist groups might have started the fires in an effort to damage the credibility of his government, which has called for looser environmental regulations in the world’s largest rainforest to spur development.
A rate cut that failed to please
On 31 July, the United States Federal Reserve System (U.S. Fed) announced its decision to cut its benchmark short-term interest rate by one quarter of a percentage point to a target range between 2% and 2.25%. It also announced that it would put an end to its policy of selling chunks of its holdings of […]
German unions are waking up to the climate disaster
The call to stop the production of coal and cars often sounds like a threat to jobs. But German trade unions have realized that the green transition needs to happen—and they’re fighting to make sure it’s bosses, not workers, who pay for climate justice.
The next European country as a strategic target of the far-right
Nationalism has always been, to some degree, a feature across Europe’s political spectrum, but in recent years, fostered by the likes of Donald Trump and funded by American religious ‘conservatives’ there has been an explosion in voter support for right-wing and populist parties.
What the New Deal can teach us about winning a Green New Deal: Part III—the First New Deal
If we hope to win a Green New Deal we will have to build a movement that is not only powerful enough to push the federal government to take on new responsibilities with new capacities, but also has the political maturity required to appreciate the contested nature of state policy and the vision necessary to […]
The systemic crisis of world capitalism
THE hallmark of a systemic, as distinct from a cyclical or sporadic, crisis of capitalism is that every effort to resolve the crisis within the broad confines of the system, defined in terms of its prevailing class configuration, only worsens the crisis.
Review of Money and Totality by Fred Moseley
Today, as the global economy flounders from crisis to crisis, Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the essential basis for a correct understanding of what is going on. Moseley’s book reaffirms key elements of this analysis.
Syria: A new low in nasty propaganda
It may be a new low in propaganda. National Public Radio (NPR) used the news that Syrian First Lady Asma Assad had overcome breast cancer to mock her and continue the information war against Syria. They interviewed a Human Rights Watch staffer named Lama Fakih who is an American from Michigan now based in Beirut.
Remembering Samir Amin: a Marxist of the South
With the passing of the great anti-imperialist and Marxist intellectual Samir Amin on August 12 of last year, the international communist movement lost a giant.
Bernie Sander’s climate plan is more radical than his opponents’ – and more likely to succeed
IF YOU TRIED to design a program with the aim of offending the top brass of the world’s most powerful corporations and the politicians whose careers they bankroll, you’d get something like what Bernie Sanders unveiled today in his $16.3 trillion Green New Deal platform.
Prabir Purkayastha on How Big Data’s Threat to Elections and Democracy Is Quickly Becoming a Global Problem
The cost of the 2016 U.S. elections was $6.5 billion if we combine the presidential and congressional elections. The Indian Parliamentary election of 2019 outspent the 2016 U.S. 2016 election, costing about $8.6 billion.
