Archive | December, 2020

Columbia University PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature Tiana Reid finds that her students benefit from reading volume one of Karl Marx’s “Capital.” “There are so many literary wsys to read it, which I don’t think blunt the more radical political reading,” said Reid, who conducts research in Black Studies, Marxism and feminism. 

The money trail of U.S. Sanctions leads to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which—behind the shadow of secrecy laws that effectively prohibit any form of public accountability—facilitates the theft of public wealth from targeted countries on a scale only previously accomplished through military invasion and occupation.

In one of the non-stop e-mails that I receive from my hospital administration on a more than daily basis, there was a paragraph on “how to be responsible on social media”, with some recommendations that we all can agree on.

As Naomi Klein laid out in her bestseller “Shock Doctrine,” the wealthy elite use the confusion caused by economic and other disasters to quickly force through pro-free-market legislation.

Elections are supposed to solve problems by reordering government, adopting new policies, and putting new people in control. But how many elections must Israel have before it realizes it can do none of those things because it’s caught in an intractable constitutional bind?

Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, wants to build an electric car factory in Brazil. He was supposed to meet Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, in Miami in early March, but he was too busy; instead, Musk will go to Brazil sometime this year.

In her recent volume Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2019), Silvia Federici fruitfully brings together feminist reflections with discussions of the commons as a possible way of overcoming capitalism.

On Rosa Luxemburg’s birthday, we present an extract from her 1906 essay “Critique in the Workers’ Movement,” available in English for the first time.

It is one of the great personal accounts of the anguished decline of our uncivilization, both a riveting eye-witness account of many of the horrors and perfidies, and a primer for students of history and all those struggling to not only dismantle the beast, but to prepare us for what follows it.

The U.S. blockade of Cuba is like the sun; neither will disappear soon. But different: the U.S. politicians and people are aware of the sun, but may have forgotten about the Cuba blockade. It’s persisted for almost 60 years, basically unchanged. The following is about change.

Lebanon’s state prosecutor suspended an order on Thursday to freeze the assets of 20 local banks, warning it would plunge the country and its financial sector into chaos, according to a copy of the decision seen by Reuters.

With its support tanking at home, Nicaragua’s opposition is seeking to win over public opinion in the West. A factually-challenged, distortion laden article in Vox by a familiar anti-Sandinista activist exhibited the campaign’s strategy.

“All people of conscience must condemn this anti-Semitism against the most visible Jewish politician in the country.”

Black youth see the truth, and will act on it, we are certain.

We, the hosts of the Money on the Left podcast, write to express our solidarity with the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) graduate students participating in an ongoing wildcat strike for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). We extend our full support to not only the 82 UCSC graduate students who the UC administration […]

As the 21st Century’s second decade opens, the increasingly severe symptoms of climate change comprise a pivot in the struggle for hegemony, globally and within national formations. With the highest per capital carbon emissions among the G20 states, Canada is a climate laggard and, in some respects, a first-world petro-state (Nikiforuk 2010), organized as a regime of obstruction (the title of an edited collection to be published this May, Carroll 2020d).

On 8 March 1917 (23 February by the old Julian calendar), a hundred women in the textile factories in Petrograd decided to go on strike; they went amongst the other factories and called their fellow workers onto the streets. Before long, around 200,000 workers–led by the women–marched through the streets.

Hardly anyone in Australia has heard of José Carlos Mariátegui. Yet in South America he holds an important place in revolutionary history.

To me, the Lebanese crisis looks like, in the first instance, as a foreign exchange and international transactions crisis, a classic developing country crisis in the era of financialisation. As such it is closely connected to the country’s policy on the exchange rate. The fixed peg policy chosen by the Lebanese ruling class and operated by the central bank and the government for a long time, has proven destructive. The country’s economy is under great pressure because the strong pound has damaged Lebanese competitiveness on an international scale and facilitated the growth of domestic credit.

In a repeat of the gutter journalism used to justify the 2003 Iraq War, the New York Times has had to “yellow-cake” up a foul brew of innuendo, half-truths, misrepresentations, outright lies—spiked fiercely with stereotypes, racial hatred, and red-baiting—to makes its case for a China “cover-up.”