Archive | May, 2021

Myth, an early and enduring human technology, will always be with us, in both unconscious and conscious forms. As we now face the slow-motion collapse of the biosphere, the call for new myths is not so much an escapist alternative to concrete analysis and action as a starting point.

Kerala, a state in the Indian union with a population of 35 million, has re-elected the Left Democratic Front (LDF) to lead the government for another five years. Since 1980, the people of Kerala have voted out the incumbent, seeking to alternate between the Left and the Right.

There can be no more excuses made for Democratic “progressives,” who steadfastly refuse to fight for what they know to be right.

The longest chapter in Capital is the fifteenth, on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry.”

For decades, kids who didn’t conform to the gender expected of them were forced to endure treatments designed to “cure” their gender nonconformity. This form of therapy, called “reparative” or “corrective,” typically involved instructing parents–and sometimes teachers–to subject children to constant surveillance and correction.

In 1898, upwardly mobile Blacks in Wilmington, NC were terrorized and slaughtered in a violent insurrection that set the stage for Jim Crow–and the next 123 years. Hardly anyone really knows about it.

On April 11, the second round of Ecuador’s presidential election saw the rightwing candidate Guillermo Lasso prevail by 52.4% to 47.6% over his left wing opponent Andres Arauz.

The television series Star Trek has appeared in several iterations with a few handfuls of movies thrown in that have fired the imaginations of viewers of all ages for nigh 55 years.

As the global challenge of climate change mounts and the coronavirus pandemic magnifies economic inequalities, Karl Marx, who pointed to the contradictions and limitations of capitalism, is gaining new admirers in Japan, particularly among the young.

Aggression, in international politics, is commonly defined as the use of armed force against another sovereign state, not justified by self-defense or international authority.

Cuba is celebrating from Tuesday to May 30 the 14th edition of the Conference against Homophobia and Transphobia, under the slogan ‘All rights for all people.’

COVID-19 has exacerbated the gendered impact of care work globally, but lessons can be learned from countries like China that have relied on community organizations for solutions.

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was criminal. It was criminal because of the immense force used to demolish Afghanistan’s physical infrastructure and to break open its social bonds.

Nodal spoke with Leonidas Iza, president of the Indigenous and Campesino Movement of Cotopaxi (MICC), in between two elections.

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress on April 28, Joe Biden made the calculation that he needed to directly address the needs of the working class.

Freedman notes that Guardian editor, Kath Viner, promised that her newspaper would ‘challenge the economic assumptions of the last three decades’, ‘challenge the powerful’ and ‘use clarity and imagination to build hope’.

The series continues with analyses of how indebtedness developed in other regions of the Global South.

The privatisation model pursued by successive governments, in health to education, has led to the perpetuation of class and caste divides, with the poor often left to suffer.

What is new with contemporary (global) leading corporations? If gigantic monopolies are a repeated phenomenon in capitalism’s history, why all the fuss we see every day regarding high concentration?

Scott McLemee reviews The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel by Richard Wright.