Archive | December, 2019

After deposing Evo Morales in a U.S.-backed coup November 11, Bolivia’s military selected Jeanine Añez as president. Añez immediately signed a decree pre-exonerating security forces of all crimes during their “re-establishment of order,” understood by all sides as a license to kill. Those same forces have now conducted massacres of Morales supporters near the cities of Cochabamba and La Paz.

The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric. Bruno Latour, for instance, imagines that when we speak about what is ‘critical’, we have in mind a fully negative project, a practice of debunking and dismantling hegemonic presumptions about the world, and that critical theory only intensifies skepticism and lacks transformative power and commitment to emancipatory ideals.

This article is a book review of Ramzy Baroud’s The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story. Published in 2018, The Last Earth documents the lives of ordinary Palestinians and their battle against Israeli occupation. In the process of telling their stories, Baroud shows that the Palestinians not as passive victims of Israeli colonialism but as active participants in their struggle for a free Palestine, reminding readers that only the Palestinian people can bring about true change in the region.

On December 13, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law. This “fundamentally discriminatory” Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians.

What are the real interests of the U.S. and corporations in the region? Freedom, democracy, human rights? No. Their goal is to preserve imperialist domination of our natural resources.

The corporate Democrats are effectively exonerating themselves and their Republican brethren of the full spectrum of lawlessness that is everyday politics in the belly of the racist, imperial beast.

Labour’s massive loss to the Tories has bummed out a lot of people. Everyone’s discussing it and arguing about what went wrong and who’s to blame. I don’t have any special insight into UK politics, but one thing that really shocked me about the election is the way that Jewish identity and fabricated charges of antisemitism were weaponized in a smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the mild leftwing shift of his Labour Party.

Paraphrasing a passage from Marx in the Grundrisse, Stavros Tombazos remarks that “every economy is in the end an economy of time” (2014, 13). This is to say that the productivity of labour, the accumulation of wealth, and the circulation of goods and resources which make up an economy in its broadest sense are all components of a particular organisation of time.

GAWAIN LITTLE looks in detail at the different aspects of Labour’s election defeat.

Until several days ago, I was a journalist at Newsweek. I decided to hand my resignation in because, in essence, I was given a simple choice. On one hand, I could continue to be employed by the company, stay in their chic London offices and earn a steady salary—only if I adhered to what could or could not be reported and suppressed vital facts. Alternatively, I could leave the company and tell the truth.

It’s not hard to see why young people are embracing socialism. It isn’t simply that they can see a probable grim future under capitalism as they know it: more and more low-wage, high surveillance jobs versus more budget and psychological stress as most also have higher fixed costs (rentier housing costs, student loan payments, even more “asset lite, rent heavy” systems, ever-escalating health care costs).

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In recent years and in the face of unprecedented changes in the climate system, some previously unknown and risky solutions have been proposed to put a halt to the chain of climate disasters, or at least to slow down the speed of their onslaught.

This December, we bring you a special Christmas episode of our program, featuring the enigmatic operator behind the increasingly popular Twitter account known as “Neoclassical Marxism,” or @NMarxism. @NMarxism is a deeply satirical Twitter project, which deploys Modern Monetary Theory and some very dark humor to critique the neoclassical economics and neoliberal assumptions that unconsciously […]

France’s mass strikes have mobilized millions, persisting into a sixth day, in an attempt to forestall severe cuts to the social gains of the working class.

As soon as the scale of Labour’s shattering defeat began to emerge last night, pundits began to push the line that this was not just about Brexit but about Jeremy Corbyn and the shift towards socialism. No election is just about one issue—but the evidence backs up the argument that Brexit was the defining factor.

Bolivia ‘s leader Evo Morales reacted to an internal memo from the foreign ministry of the de facto government in Bolivia, prohibiting personal use of traditional Indian attire inside the headquarters of the ministry during the workday.

The Green New Deal is an exciting social program generating a great deal of interest on the left. Like its predecessor, the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the GND holds out the promise of preventing the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change, and guaranteeing a better standard of living for its participants.

A quarter century ago, Victoria Sandino Palmera joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC-EP). She had previously been a militant in the Communist Party and–when FARC-EP was above ground in the 1990s–joined the Patriotic Pole. But the repression of what she calls the ‘traditional oligarchy’ sent her back to the jungle over and over again. Victoria Sandino made it clear that she was not keen on this war. ‘We didn’t take up weapons because we felt the need to use violence’

The negative media barrage on Corbyn and Labour in the UK has been incessant but if Corbyn were to succeed it would be a major boost to the Sanders campaign in the U.S.

The vilification of the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, as an antisemite has intensified in the run up to the December 12 election in Britain. What makes this especially troubling, not to say bizarre, is that since he first became a member of parliament in 1983 Corbyn has been the most consistent campaigner against all forms of racism.