Archive | June, 2021

Tired of the urban grind, young Chinese are rejecting consumerism and decamping to the countryside. That’s not the same thing as fighting back.

A brief but spectacular achievement, the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1936-1939) provided jobs for some 13,000 destitute people at its height and created and produced 63,600 performances of 1,200 major theatrical works.

While by all accounts, Pedro Castillo won the second round presidential elections, his adversary has refused to concede, and many fear that tensions could escalate with the help of Peru’s loyal right and the newly appointed U.S. ambassador.

‘A man who acted as he thought best and who has been absolutely faithful to his convictions.’

In a capitalist society, there is always a good explanation for your poverty, your meaningless job (if you have a job), your difficulties and your general unhappiness. You are to blame.

Last week, the largest rich countries, home to most major transnational corporations (TNCs), agreed to a global minimum corporate income tax (GMCIT) rate. But the low rate proposed and other features will deprive developing countries of their just due yet again.

Venezuela’s efforts at the Copa America football tournament have also been derailed after 15 players and staffers caught the virus, prompting calls for an investigation.

India’s big capital, in close cahoots with the political class, took advantage of privatisation policies to seize public resources (including profitable public sector assets), acquire vast tracts of land by displacing village and forest communities, control the nation’s mineral resources, and undermine public sector banks through a cascading set of fraud and non-payment schemes.

In Latin America, coups d’état are always underway. When a government goes beyond being merely procedurally democratic and advances towards social justice, the always latent coup mechanisms are accelerated.

Just hours ahead of the NATO summit in Brussels on June 14, the military bloc’s secretary general, Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg, told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble that NATO will continue to expand its military capabilities but will not “mirror” its arch-adversary Russia.

We face many big challenges. And we will need strong, bold policies to meaningfully address them. Solving our child-care crisis is one of those challenges, and a study of World War II government efforts to ensure accessible and affordable high-quality child care points the way to the kind of bold action we need. 

Three Texan authors build on a long tradition of dissent from patriotic accounts of Texas history in a new book on the racism baked into our story of the Alamo.

Fueled by pandemic restrictions and a glut of qualified applicants, competition for internship slots is growing fiercer all the time.

With 99.998% of the ballots counted, left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo has secured 50.204% of the votes, while far-right Keiko Fujimori has obtained 49.796% of the votes. Yesterday, Fujimori requested the election authorities to annul the results from 802 polling stations nationwide

The Black political class is wedded to the centrist Democrats for its “fatback and biscuits” patronage.

How and why did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation?

Last month, the two regions were warned about missing energy intensity reduction targets.

Over the past few weeks, a video has gone viral of a man named Yaakov Fauci, in a New York accent, asserting to a Palestinian woman whose house that he has forcibly taken, “If I don’t steal it, someone else is going to steal it.”

Since the October Revolution, Marxism has experienced almost as many crises as capitalism itself. Meltdowns of capitalism usually come as little surprise to savvy Marxist theorists but economic crises are one thing; economic crisis plus a global pandemic is something else again, beyond an everyday capitalist norm, more akin to the political-economy of wartime. Pandemic, like war, threatens not only life and limb, but also solidarity and tender acts of human togetherness.

“Defunding” the police has often turned out to be an accounting trick, but community control of police – a righteous demand – must also ensure that all government functions address human needs. One year ago, thousands of people engaged in protest in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer. A persistent protest […]