Archive | December, 2020

The conceptualisation of property in a economic sense harks back to John Locke. These days property is commonly separated into four categories.

Neither the Indian political leadership nor the “deep state” seems to grasp that the geopolitics of the South Asian region is transforming with far-reaching consequences.

The right-wing menace, its violence and threat of a genuine fascist take-over, is far from ceasing with the happy ending of a Grimm fairy-tale. Thuringia is where the Nazis gained their first foothold in 1930 and the AfD leader here today, Bjorn Hoecke, is the most vicious and dangerous man in Germany.

Chile has responded to anti-neoliberal protests with brutally violent repression. 10,365 people have been detained; 3765 treated for wounds in hospitals; and 2122 shot, 445 in the eye according to a conservative estimate by the state-backed National Institute of Human Rights.

Venezuelan analyst Oscar Forero contextualises the accusation that Venezuela is immersed in illegal drug activity.

Despite protests of historic proportions fueled by anger over corruption and a brutal right-wing crackdown, the unrest in Colombia has garnered remarkably little international media attention compared to Venezuela.

Just below the steps leading to the engraved words of George Washington “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government”, members of the People’s MTA, Rise and Resist’s Elevator Action Group, Disabled In Action, The Peoples Power Assemblies NYC were demonstrating for their right to justice.

What’s in a name? Being a Marxist means being a revolutionary anticapitalist, a fighter against all forms of oppression, an internationalist who wants to end capitalism around the whole world, and a believer in the power of the working class.

“Don’t want to hear Greta Thunberg or Extinction Rebellion? Try J.P. Morgan instead.”

Tens of thousands of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America publicly read the Communist Manifesto to commemorate the 172nd year since its first publication in 1848.

Climate change, unchecked, promises planetary disaster. All forms of life are threatened. Scientific evidence strongly suggests capitalistforms of production and consumption gave rise to climate change in the first place and have allowed the process to advance.

The question why Marx’s Capital remained unfinished has occupied many for more than a century.

This paper presents the last book that Marx excerpted in his life: La Physique Moderne, written by Hospitalier and published in 1882. This last Notebook (B156, in the IISG’s archives) contains hints of other issues that he was researching in his last years, especially societies at the periphery.

If, somehow, Bernie Sanders is allowed to win the nomination, Michael Bloomberg and other plutocrats will have created a Democratic Party machinery purpose-built to defy Sanders–as nominee, and even as president.

Chile is today in the midst of an unprecedented constituent process 30 years after the return of democracy, where the possibility of a new constitution has opened a discussion about what sort of country we want, and which rights should be enshrined in the drafting of this fundamental document.

As well as being significant in terms of Shakespeare’ s own aesthetic output, The Tempest provides a vivid window into the tumultuous historical currents and contradictions of the epoch in which the great playwright lived, syphoning them into its ethereal and haunting poetry. Helen C. Scott’s excellent and timely study of the play is a book of two parts

Sociologist John Bellamy Foster on the modern divide between humanity and nature and his book “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift” from Monthly Review.

One thing about U.S. President Donald Trump is that he can be brutally frank. Trump recently picked up the phone and called British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to convey his displeasure over the latter’s decision to allow Huawei to operate in the UK despite Washington’s repeated urgings.

‘Scientists are wrong’, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano said with a warm smile on his face. ‘Human beings are not made of atoms; they are made of stories’. It is why we want to sing and draw, tell each other about our lives and our hopes, talk about the wonders in our lives and the wonders that we dream about. These dreams–this art–are what make us get up each day, smile, and go forward into the world.

The sociologist never levels the “authoritarian” charge against his own government, despite the United States’ murderous lawlessness at home and abroad—mass deportations, illegal wars, serial police killings, etc.—all in the absence of any credible external threat.