Archive | Commentary

Even little victories are rare in the East German industrial landscape. But it is always worthwhile to oppose evil witches and even defy autocrats wearing golden caps full of diamonds and rubies.

The deepening of economic globalization appears to have ground to a halt and the process may even unravel a little. The sudden stop has surprised economists, whose belief in globalization has strong parallels with Fukuyama’s (1989) flawed end of history hypothesis.

The enormous dangers that rapid climate change present to humanity as a whole, and the inability of the existing capitalist political-economic structure to address them, symbolized by the presence of Donald Trump in the White House, have engendered a desperate search for technofixes in the form of schemes for geoengineering, defined as massive, deliberate human interventions to manipulate the entire climate or the planet as a whole.

The Marxism 2018 festival, hosted by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), took place last week in a context of deepening political polarisation across the world.

The urgent task of defeating the right in the upcoming elections cannot come at the price of compromising the future. If the new radical left fails to put forward a clear critique of Lula’s legacy the dissatisfaction with the intrinsic limits of neo-developmentalism will be easily captured by new voices on the right.

The savings that states have projected from Medicaid work requirements come from reducing Medicaid coverage rather than by lifting people out of poverty.

This is a spot-on history of the birth of the American empire. But beyond recounting the regional and national events celebrated on the monument, re-viewing the Texas revolution in a world-historical perspective offers a far more insightful understanding of the conflict that occurred in northern Mexico in the 19^th century.

The rise of extreme right wing politics is a response by sections of the ruling classes internationally to the economic stagnation.

Germany’s politicians played the chicken game last week, testing which party, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union or its Bavarian “sister party”, Horst Seehofer’s Christian Social Union, would be the first to swerve.

Nuclear power is enormously expensive and yet successive U.S. governments, including that of President Donald Trump, have supported the industry in many ways. The net result is that various costs are passed on to society at large, while the profits accruing from this pursuit are privatized.

Today, academic freedom is increasingly under threat from marketisation, in particular as a result of the mutually reinforcing pressures on academics to meet instrumental, neoliberal economic objectives, imposed from above via national-level performance management systems–the TEF, REF and KEF–and from below through local-level, bureaucracy-heavy managerialism.v

MPN spoke to Yasha Levine, the author of “Surveillance Valley,” and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about the rise of the Amazon.com empire and the merger of Big Data, finance capitalism, and the U.S. state apparatus.

We need to remember that these protests aren’t about political views: they’re about government officials violating international law, U.S. treaty obligations, and basic human rights.

Letting the law of capitalist value govern society makes building socialism almost impossible because, even if the general guidelines of capitalist value seem to be acceptable, all it takes is for the market to plunge for you to lose your bearings entirely.

Capitalism as a system functions irrationally because social and ecological concerns cannot be taken into account when making business decisions. Profits before all else.

Agreement between the two NATO allies highlights wrongheaded analysts in corporate and alternative media in the West who have played up ‘U.S.-Turkey conflict’ over Syria and falsely argued that Russia is backing Turkey’s anti-Kurdish violations of Syrian sovereignty.

Mexico’s July 1 elections represent a moment of political restructuring in the midst of a profound crisis in Mexico’s current regime. In this context, the question of whether or not to vote is secondary to the need to organize the anti-capitalist left, either to seize the opening that a victory by Andrés Manuel López Obrador could provide to build a united workers’ movement to the left of his party, or to defend against the very real possibility of another fraudulent “victory” by representatives of the PRI-PAN alliance.

As we head into the 2018 elections feminists of all sorts must make sure that there is a revolutionary commitment to restructure the massive system of oppression maintained by sexual violence. Becoming a part of the existing structure is not enough—nor is simply being female.

Virtually unknown in the west, the great Russian geologist and geochemist pioneered scientific study of life’s impact on the Earth.

The May 20, 2018 elections in Venezuela were a victory for the popular sectors and a defeat for the U.S. backed opposition, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD).