Archive | Commentary

Tiny Crawford Lake, near Toronto, holds a detailed record of radical global change.

Review of Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022). People in the United States generally have confidence in the country’s political system, believing that it has the capacity to solve meaningful problems. Conservatives and liberals alike sincerely respect what they consider the nation’s sacrosanct Constitution, established […]

The calls have begun in Mosco, for keeping intact Yevgeny Prigozhin’s conglomerate of military budget contractors. The reason argued is that they have established themselves so strategically in the logistics of the military services that they cannot be purged without doing greater damage than Prigozhin himself has caused. In short, a Russian oligarch who knows too much, with too many mouths to feed, too many pockets to fill, and so too big to fail.

Despite all doubts, despite fearful weaponry, at home or abroad, can we still call ourselves patriotic? In fact, is that a good thing to be?

Across the world, evidence of human misery is increasingly easy to find. The data collected and reported by international agencies is stunning. Billions of people around the planet lack access to adequate education, healthcare, food, and shelter, as well as information and culture.

The sheer scale of China’s development has been a world-shaping event.

Today’s immigrant policies and political discourses across most parts of the Global North are reminiscent of a colonial Othering.

A Polen Ekoloji seminar featuring John Bellamy Foster on the theoretical and historical background of Marx, the Anthropocene, and the metabolic rift.

Even if Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito had not written Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, the left today would still need to take the idea of degrowth seriously. This is because, economist and anthropologist Jason Hickel explains, “while it’s possible to transition to 100 percent renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates.”

How is it that a country like Argentina, with its vast rural territory, longstanding agricultural tradition, and capacity to produce food for hundreds of millions of people, is plagued by hunger and malnourishment?

“NATO—the U.S.-dominated global war machine—whose policy is ‘full dominance spectrum,’ contrary to its claims, is not a defensive organization. Its purpose has been to act as an instrument for U.S. world domination and to prevent all challenges to U.S. hegemony.” —Mairead Maguire

The difficulty the U.S. faces in its current attempts to damage China’s economy was analysed in detail in the article “The U.S. is trying to persuade China to commit suicide”. Reduced to essentials, the U.S. problem is that it possesses no external economic levers powerful enough to derail China’s economy.

An innovative form of food distribution has been key for schools and communes.

A grassroots organization is building a new model for the production and distribution of food based on mutuality.

Five years ago, Nicaragua was subject to a violent insurrection that lasted from April through July, 2018. In the second of four articles, we look at how initial support for the coup relied on widespread use of social media.

One of the latest covers of the magazine The Economist carries a headline “Peak China”. This, as its name suggests, is a claim that while during the last seven decades China’s has enjoyed a peaceful “rise”, specifically in relation to the U.S., this has now ended. It was the latest of decades long wildly inaccurate predictions regarding China.

An organization that brings together rural producers with urban consumers breaks with the dictates of the market.

Mainstream reports on this past May Day celebration in Cuba leave out a key element: the imperialist economic and financial blockade.

The fearful destruction, the displacement of families, above all the killing and maiming must be deplored, condemned and brought to an end. But the underlying reasons for this terrible war, concealed in the media, must also be mercilessly examined, regardless of well-orchestrated accusations of “Putin-friendship” or “left-over allegiance to a past Soviet Russia”.

In this latest dossier, the Tricontinental offers a broad analysis of the living and working conditions of India’s large and diverse working class.