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Our globe is burning!
Peter Linebaugh’s book comes with a long subtitle, a pithy summary of its contents: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, of Kate and Ned Despard. His timeframe is the period between 1789 and 1804 when, in his view, a series of connected events took place in England, Ireland, France, the Caribbean and North America that formed an Atlantic crucible forging the capitalist world we have lived in since.
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Climate change, dust bowls, fishery collapse: metabolic rifts of capitalism and the need for socialism
Humankind and the environment are hurtling toward unprecedented ecological crises. Global warming, sea level rise, and weather extremes due to carbon emissions are catastrophic enough, but they will mix and combine with ocean acidification, air and chemical pollution, water shortages, deforestation, fishery collapse, soil erosion, and mass extinction, throwing both nature and society off a cliff into the unknown.
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Hooray, the Arctic is melting! Say WHAT?
It’s officially summer. Time for a swim, a cold beer, and a new slew of catastrophic climate changes…
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British firm ‘hosts canned lion hunts’
Blackthorn Safaris, based in Oswestry, hosts ‘canned’ hunts on an estate 40 miles north of the mining town of Kimberly, in South Africa’s Northern Cape district.
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It’s not just profitability: a response to Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts takes issue with my blog post “Why Stagnation,” which presented the analysis in a recent article I coauthored with Deepankar Basu. We argued that social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory can explain the current stagnation in the U.S. economy.
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U.S. and Canada are backing an elite white minority in Venezuela
The U.S. and Canada are not supporting “the return of democracy” in Venezuela as they claim. Instead, they are following in their shameful histories of colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, illegal wars of aggression, and overthrowing governments.
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The UN climate talks are coming to Britain. The climate justice movement will be ready
This week it was announced that the 2020 United Nations climate change conference–the so-called ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP)–is set to take place in the UK.
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‘Report the urgency! This is a climate emergency!’
“This is the biggest crisis in human history. What are we going to tell our children when they ask us: why didn’t we do anything to stop it while we still had time?”
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Marxism, space and a few urban questions: a rough guide to the English language Lliterature
Starting in the late 1960s, ‘radical geography’ became a crucial avenue of intellectual innovation in contemporary Marxism. For a generation, its basic orientation was two-fold: (1) politicise ‘space’ by challenging the stranglehold of specialists (architects, urban planners, designers, military planners, regional and development officials) in the spatial disciplines, and (2) insist, simultaneously, on the importance of spatial questions within the various currents of the left.
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Iran ‘violates’ nuclear deal, after U.S. ‘withdraws’
Quick question: Does the U.S. ever break, breach or violate its international agreements?
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How Wall Street colonized the Caribbean
The expansion of banks such as Citigroup into Cuba, Haiti, and beyond reveal a story of capitalism built on blood, labor, and racial lines.
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In Dutch still lifes, dark secrets hide behind exotic delicacies
The Dutch Golden Age led to a tremendous outpouring of still-life paintings in the 17th century. Since then, critics have generally belonged to two opposing schools of thought when it comes to interpreting them.
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Marx and the Dutch East India Company
In the final part of Capital, Volume I on “the so-called original accumulation”, Marx gives a dazzling overview of the often violent historical phenomena that contributed to the birth of the capitalist system, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
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War is hell’: as survivor of conflict, Rep. Ilhan Omar makes impassioned case against U.S. attack on Iran
Addressing President Donald Trump directly, the Minnesota congresswoman said, “Do not listen to the warmongers and war profiteers whispering in your ear.”
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Two weeks after massacre, Sudanese set to reclaim the streets
“To the tyrants who believed for a while that victory was theirs, we say, our people will rise up.. to recommence the journey and complete the revolution,” the SPA said as the protesters begin preparations to escalate.
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Still Manufacturing Consent: an interview with Noam Chomsky
Alan MacLeod interviewed Noam Chomsky via Skype on March 13, 2018, for MacLeod’s new book Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. They discussed the origins of the classic work of media criticism (co-authored with Edward Herman) Manufacturing Consent, the role of that book’s “propaganda model” today, Google and Facebook, Donald Trump and Russia, fake news and Syria. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Technotyranny: the iron-fisted authoritarianism of the Surveillance State
“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” ― Philip K. Dick
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Carbon markets in a climate-changing capitalism
Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism offers an account of why these earlier expectations were not matched by experience. While the contradictions of market solutions have not gone away, the difference this time is that we are just over a decade away from the IPCC’s 2030 benchmark for 1.5°C. The concentration and centralisation of emissions instead points towards a different pathway that can meet this challenge – one that begins by confronting the disproportionate control the biggest polluters have over our climate future.
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Barbara Foley 21st Century Marxist literary criticism
In 21st century capitalism, Marxist theory remains a crucial means to interpret the socioeconomic present and potentials for political change. But Marxism as a method is also important culturally, in understanding the ideas, attitudes and beliefs that exist today, and how they have developed historically through various social forces.
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Karl Marx II: An Analysis of my Father’s Chief Work
The capitalist extracts surplus labour from his workpeople, for which he does not pay.