If human agency, driven by a model of economics and development gone berserk, is a major driving factor in the changes upon us, there is plenty to be learned from this region and many like it.
Archive | Commentary
Monthly Review Magazine
The IMF convenes in Washington, deaf to the suffering it causes across the planet
No one within the IMF meeting will raise the question of democracy, both in terms of the IMF’s own functioning and in terms of the IMF’s relationship with sovereign countries around the world.
Hands off Greta Thunberg!
Defenders of capitalism, joined by some on the left, are attacking the young woman who has become the symbol of a mass movement. Our place is by her side.
The Berlin Wall thirty years later
Even thirty years have not accustomed all ex-GDR citizens to seeing youngsters in the streets with their ragged dogs and paper cups for charitable donations, concert violinists begging money with Mozart in cold subway stations or, on icy nights, homeless huddled figures in sleeping bags on the stations’ concrete floors.
What to expect from Turkey’s coming invasion of Syria
Erdogan’s government is preparing to enter Syria for a major military operation against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is made up largely of Kurdish factions who set up this armed force to defend the mainly Kurdish enclave in northern Syria.
Capitalism ‘solves’ the Nitrogen Crisis: A brief history
Part Three of Ian Angus’s examination of the disruption of the global nitrogen cycle by an economic system that values profits more than life itself.
What media like best about Elizabeth Warren: She’s not Bernie Sanders
If Warren ever finds herself without media’s bête noire to draft off of—assuming her policy stances remain the same—the media headwinds can be expected to get much more intense for her.
Playing the Trump card
Clearly, the ingredients of anti-Trump cooking create a very mixed batter. Some spoonfuls may even contain a “Save Biden as candidate” flavor, outweighing the truly weighty reasons for baking a completely new kind of cake.
iPhone workers today are 25 times more exploited than textile workers in 19th Century England
A recent report by the International Labour Organisation shows that the total global labour force is now measured at 3.5 billion workers. This is the largest size of the global labour force in recorded history. Talk of the demise of workers is utterly premature when confronted with the weight of this data.
Notebook #2: The Rate of Exploitation
The rate of exploitation in the production of Apple’s iPhone X, which stands at 2458%, is 25 times the rate of exploitation that is gleaned from Marx’s examples in Capital, published in 1867.
The Venceremos Brigade at 50
As the U.S. ramps up its global efforts to protect genocidal racial capitalism, it is a crucial time for a new generation to study and learn from Cuba’s 60-year effort to build an alternative socio-economic system.
The Bidens, Trump, Kiev and impeachment
The impeachment drive is quickly gathering steam, and who can have any sympathy for that man in the Oval Office? But I wonder if some enthusiasts may not be digging deeply enough.
Greta Thunberg speech
Around the year 2030, we will be in a position where we probably set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.
Marx in the museum
One of Marx’s brightest concepts, perhaps his profoundest dialectical construct in Capital, is the “fetishism of commodities.” It emphasizes something very important about the foggy world of appearances and how can forget what lies within, behind what is immediately apparent. We can read it as a parable in which Marx tries to bring to life […]
“Down with the Rebels Against the Bill of Sale!”: Guy Endore’s radical reimagining of Haiti and revolution
The American occupation of Haiti lasted from 1915–34. The U.S. subjected Haitians to the hated forced labor system of the corvée, seized control over Haitian finance, and rewrote the Haitian Constitution at gunpoint, enabling foreign companies to acquire land in the country. The distorting and oppressive impacts of the U.S. occupation have been felt in […]
Dossier 20: When you ill-treat the African people, i see you
The Industrial & Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU)—a trade union, rural peasant movement, and urban squatters’ movement—formed on the docks in Cape Town in 1919. Within a decade, the ICU had expanded across Southern Africa without regard for national borders and counted people from various African countries and the Caribbean in its leadership, as well as […]
Understanding the fires in South America
Extractivist governments are stoking destruction in the Amazon and beyond. International alliances and Indigenous technologies can help protect the biome and support its 30 million inhabitants.
How can Sweden be a peace broker for the war in Yemen if it’s also selling the arms that make it possible?
Sweden might have some credibility if it banned weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It is not enough to be moved by the tragedy in Yemen. Action is necessary.
Mixed joy and great sorrow
In Saxon and Brandenburg, the leading parties held their lead and headed off the threat by the AfD. But in both states they were painfully weakened.
Are German greens on the left?
The three states in Eastern Germany now facing elections (two of them on Sunday) will be forced to decide on coalitions; no party will be strong enough to rule alone, most likely not even in two-party tandems.
