• Skull with Sunglasses fossil

    Did that New York magazine climate story freak you out? Good.

    David Wallace-Wells has a cover story on climate change in New York magazine that has kicked up quite a discussion. It’s about worst-case scenarios…[and] the dystopian future the piece describes is much worse, and forecast to happen much sooner, than most people.… I won’t rehearse the parade of horribles.… Instead, I want to address some of the critical reaction to the piece, which I have found … irksome.

  • Women taking part in the International Women's Day march

    The pitfalls of radical feminism

    For many socialist feminists, critiquing liberal feminism is easy. Many of us came to socialism from liberalism and have a clear understanding of its limits and flaws. However, the history and substance of radical feminism is less well known. While the “radical” in radical feminism seems to suggest a politics that socialists would embrace… [it is] incompatible with socialist feminism. Plagued by a narrow understanding of gendered oppression and a misguided strategy for change, radical feminism ultimately fails to offer women a clear path to liberation.

  • Quote from Chief Justice Ed Warren in Sweezy v. New Hamphsire

    Sweezy at sixty

    I did not know that Albert Einstein was a socialist. Maybe I had known once, or more likely, never cared. But in 1949, when the great physicist and Nobel laureate declared his beliefs, in the innocuously titled “Why Socialism?,” a lot of people would have cared. Indeed, by 1953, Joseph McCarthy was after him, and people were sending hate mail to the Institute for Advanced Study asking that Einstein, a founding member of the research center, be sent packing.

  • Viva Cuba Libre!

    Cuba: critical thought in the socialist transition

    The distance that separates us today from the first issue of Pensamiento Crítico (Critical Thought) is exactly the same as the distance between this revolutionary, intellectual adventure and the October Revolution: half a century. The coincidence in this case is not limited to random chance.

  • Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky on Fascism, Trump, and the state of the union

    Over the past few months, as the disturbing prospect of a Trump administration became a disturbing reality, I decided to reach out to Noam Chomsky, the philosopher whose writing, speaking and activism has for more than 50 years provided unparalleled insight and challenges to the American and global political systems. Our conversation, as it appears here, took place as a series of email exchanges over the past two months. Although Professor Chomsky was extremely busy, because of our past intellectual exchange, he graciously provided time for this interview.

  • A British PR firm spread “white monopoly capital” to distract South Africans from mounting corruption

    A British PR firm spread “white monopoly capital” to distract South Africans from mounting corruption

    It takes a certain level of cynicism to race bait South Africans to protect profits. It’s downright underhanded to hire a public relations firm to do it professionally.

  • Wonder Woman with her allies--"the humane members of the world community, represented by the U.S.–Chris Pine is the male lead and Gadot’s love interest–and a ragtag support group that includes a Scot, a native American, and a generic Arab, presumably symbolizing 'moderate' Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan," writes Jonathan Cook (Photo: Clay Enos/Warner Bros)

    Wonder Woman is a hero only the military-industrial complex could create

    For a while I have been pondering whether to write a review of the newly released “Wonder Woman,” to peel back the layer of comic book fun to reveal below the film’s disturbing and not-so-covert political and militaristic messages.

    There is usually a noisy crowd who deride any such review with shouts of “Lighten up! It’s only a movie!”–as though popular culture is neither popular nor culture, the soundtrack to our lives that slowly shapes our assumptions and our values, and does so at a level we rarely examine critically.

  • ICE agents are thrilled with Trumps actions so far

    ICE officers told to take action against all undocumented immigrants encountered while on duty

    The head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit in charge of deportations has directed his officers to take action against all undocumented immigrants they may cross paths with, regardless of criminal histories. The guidance appears to go beyond the Trump administration’s publicly stated aims, and some advocates say may explain a marked increase in immigration arrests.

  • Venezuela: ‘our revolutionary democratic experience is at stake’

    Venezuela: ‘our revolutionary democratic experience is at stake’

    Revolutionary activist and sociologist Reinaldo Iturriza has spent many years working with popular movements in Venezuela and writing on the rise of Chavismo as a political movement of the poor. He also served as Minister for the Communes and Social Movements, and then Minister for Culture in President Nicolas Maduro’s cabinet between 2013 and 2016.

  • Class Ceiling

    The shifting politics of inequality and the class ceiling

    Britain’s class landscape has changed: it is more polarised at the extremes and messier in the middle. The distinction between middle and working class is less clear-cut. The elite is able to set political agendas and entrench their own privilege. The left needs a clear narrative showing how privilege leads to gross unfairness—and effective policies […]

  • Students at Bay Point Middle school work on a science assignment in 2011

    New Florida law lets any resident challenge what’s taught in science classes

    Any resident in Florida can now challenge what kids learn in public schools, thanks to a new law that science education advocates worry will make it harder to teach evolution and climate change.

  • President Donald Trump signing the new Cuba policy

    US Cuba policy has been hijacked by Cuban-Americans

    US policy toward Cuba (Trump reverses Obama’s Cuba deal, limiting travel and trade, 17 June) has been hijacked by a clique of Cuban-American politicians, who have sold their support in Congress to President Donald Trump. Above all, these individuals – and Trump – have demonstrated the corrupt and clientelist nature of the US political system. Can such a system serve as a symbol of “freedom” to anyone in the world?

  • W. E. B. Du Bois mural in Philadelphia, 2011. Photograph by Laurenellen McCann / Flickr

    W. E. B. Du Bois’s revolutions

    “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.” With this sober stroke of his insurgent pen, the 93-year-old scholar joined the Communist Party.

  • The MQ-9 Reaper, a combat drone, in flight

    Killer drones and the militarization of U.S. foreign policy

    In the eyes of many around the world, diplomacy has taken a back seat to military operations in U.S. foreign policy. The drone program is a prime example.

  • Toilet paper money roll

    The U.S. is where the rich are the richest

    In the U.S., where wealth is most highly concentrated, almost a quarter of income goes to the rich. So it should come as no surprise that a big chunk of the world’s richest call America home. Two out of five millionaires and billionaires live there, and their ranks are growing fast.

  • Over 170 years after Engels, Britain is still a country that murders its poor

    Over 170 years after Engels, Britain is still a country that murders its poor

    Spending cuts, deregulation, outsourcing: between them they have turned a state supposedly there to protect and support citizens into a machine to make money for the rich while punishing the poor. It’s never described like that, of course. Class warfare is passed off as book-keeping. Accountability is tossed aside for “commercial confidentiality”, while profiteering is dressed up as economic dynamism. One courtesy we should pay the victims of Grenfell is to drop the glossy-brochure euphemisms. Let’s get clear what happened to them: an act of social murder, straight out of Victorian times.

  • Since Trump’s election, 20 states have moved to criminalize dissent

    In what is being called the “biggest protest crackdown since the Civil Rights Era,” Republicans in at least 20 states have put forward or passed laws with the intention of making protest more difficult and the punishment for expressing dissent more draconian since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

  • The prospect of change

    The prospect of change

    A limited partial breach has been made in the neoliberal edifice, through the demonstration by Corbyn, McDonnell and their allies that a programme and leadership that challenges these orthodoxies and proposes alternatives to them can do better electorally than those which conform to it.

  • Capitalists Tipping Scales "Change"

    Finance, Crisis, and Stagnation

    In this presentation Mexie begins to elaborate the theory of monopoly capitalism developed by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, incorporating recent theoretical development by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney. Mexie has produced a number of other videos on the topic as well.

  • Tim Portlock, CA$H_4_GOLD

    This new museum imagines a world where capitalism is dead

    Visitors will be invited to reflect on capitalism as if looking back at it from a world in which capitalism is dead. “Much of the evidence of capitalism is either eroding over time or simply not known or easily accessible to the public,” the mission statement reads. “Our ambition is to connect and integrate these many efforts before the evidence is erased forever.”