Archive | Commentary

Do not believe them when they tell you the left is divided. There is no division. The (anti-imperialist) Left is standing with the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. The rest are either confused or advocating an imperialist political project.

In the week before the COP26 international summit, John Bellamy Foster analyzed the climate emergency and how we can achieve climate justice.

This long bloody madness has ended.

Can we learn to love peace at last?

To date, the Canadian government has acted as a reliable ally in the U.S.’s New Cold War against China. The need for Canada to change course is dire, but prospects are grim. Canada needs to break with this dangerous path and set course for peace and cooperation with China.

Professor Hudson talked about his formative years, and his turn to economics from music as he found his mentor Terence McCarthy’s speech about economics beautiful and asethetic.

John Bellamy Foster – Deutscher Memorial Lecture

Nicaragua’s electoral process far proceeds that of which the U.S. media has led the people of the United States to believe.

The declaration of a state of emergency by Guillermo Lasso is more likely about quelling opposition than guaranteeing security for Ecuadorians.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over […]

We cannot give ourselves the luxury of being technophobic, of negating the importance of technologies and their potential in the struggle. At the same time, we cannot believe in the idea that technology in itself will result in advances for the organised working class.

Fortunately, the scientific data produced by the IPCC makes it possible to calculate the real changes which are required to combat climate change.

According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), fiscal 2021’s final number of migrants apprehended or encountered at the southwestern border was 1,734,686, higher than the 1,643,679 total apprehensions for fiscal 2000.

How 16th century reformers fought privatization of land and capitalist agriculture.

The landslide victory of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in the Indian state of Kerala in April 2021 is a historic achievement.

The current situation might present an opportunity to strengthen mass movements and to steer the focus towards the rights and livelihoods of women and workers. The ongoing Indian farmers’ movement, which started before the pandemic and continues to stay strong, offers the opportunity to steer the national discourse towards such an agenda.

The most important election result is hardly discussed in the media—and when it is, then with satisfaction or joy. It is, in fact, a truly sad result. The Left (DIE LINKE) missed the red line level of 5%—but was miraculously saved by a special rule; if three or more delegates of a party win out in their own districts—with those first crosses—then their parties and their proportionate lists are saved, just as if they had reached 5%.

To continue the marginalization of Black and, more recently, Muslim groups, you do not have to suddenly turn society upside down or challenge the dominant religious white or secular culture, or even, as in Nazi Germany, change citizenship and property ownership rules—in contrast to periodic historic assaults on certain white ethno-religious groups, who, by comparison, have sometimes enjoyed bourgeois, socioeconomic class power.

While the framework of “vectoralism” proposed by McKenzie Wark in Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? proves inadequate for understanding contemporary political economy, the concept of value chains developed by Intan Suwandi (Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism) offers a promising alternative.

In January 2020, as the Verizon settlement was being worked out, the city released the NYC Internet Master Plan, which declared: “The private market has failed to deliver the internet in a way that works for all New Yorkers.”

In German elections—like the coming ones, as always on a Sunday—all you have to do is present the registration paper mailed to every citizen, then make crosses on a paper  ballot. No trouble with the boss, no missing work, long lines or quarrels about fraud or discrimination.  It sounds easy.