Archive | July, 2021

Released last year but receiving as yet very little English-language press coverage, Der Junge Karl Marx is a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man. That said, I cannot vouch for the chase scene. Regarding which, more anon.

Writing his 1974 book Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, U.S. Marxist and political economist Harry Braverman noted that Karl Marx had demonstrated that processes of production are constantly transformed by the driving force of capital accumulation.

Today with the height of imperial arrogance and hubris, the U.S. State Department issued a joint statement to further its plans to destroy Cuba and all the gains it has made in health, education and welfare.

The United Nations Food Systems Summit has become one of the most controversial events of this year due to corporate take over. Civil society activists came together during the pre-summit to register their protest.

Glen Ford spent more than four decades delivering the news from a Black perspective on a national scale.

Remembering Leo Panitch

Hale released a total of 17 documents, of which 11 were marked secret and top-secret. One exposed that during one five-month period of the operation, civilian casualties constituted over 90% of the victims of drone strikes.

A new open-source study concludes that Syrian insurgents carried out the Ghouta sarin chemical attack in August 2013. The explosive findings add to a growing body of public evidence that undermines U.S.-led efforts to blame the Syrian government, which almost led to U.S. military intervention.

On 23 July 2021, a full-page appeal appeared in the New York Times calling on United States President Joe Biden to withdraw the vindictive U.S. blockade against Cuba.

Canadian mining companies own $2.5 billion of Burkina Faso’s gold, and the country is one of the most poverty-stricken in Africa.

This guide is designed to help understand the central ideas in Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review, (2017)

Many activists in the United States are working to build a movement for a Green New Deal transformation of the economy. Not surprisingly, a growing number look to the World War II conversion of the U.S. economy from civilian to military production for inspiration and policy ideas. 

Georgi Dimitrov, president of the Communist International, had, at its Seventh Congress, characterised a fascist State as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary section of finance capital”

Ben & Jerry’s decision to halt its operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Jerusalem has pro-Israel editors working overtime.

Property violence kills no one. And yet, to say it again, I’m not today advocating property violence. I am, on the other hand, advocating a discussion of it. – Thomas Neuburger

On July 22, U.S. President Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris released a “fact sheet” on U.S. “measures” against Cuba. The release from the White House said that Cuba was a “top priority for the Biden-Harris administration.”

“It’s striking how similar the techniques [are] that Fox News uses to frighten people about the U.S. vaccination campaign and those that The New York Times, Reuters and others use to scare people about Chinese vaccines.” — Jim Naureckas, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

To legitimize slavery and its atrocities, western imperialism birthed racism, idea of superiority of whites over Black people.

Public opinion has been shaken by the ‘discovery’ of unmarked graves of children who died in residential schools. The word ‘discovery’ has to be placed in quotation marks because Indigenous communities have been saying for many years that terrible things happened at these places. The time has come to call this what it is–a genocide.

In the last dozen years after the 2008 world food price spike, the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has become an inclusive forum for civil society and corporate interests to debate how best to advance food security. Unsurprisingly, CFS has long addressed food systems.