Archive | Commentary

Water is a class issue. Its distribution has never been equitable. What the residents of Cape Town will struggle with is what more than one billion residents of informal settlements across the planet deal with each day.

“Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies, the essential element of which consists in continual metabolic interchange with the natural environment outside them.”

The reason for the swift fall of Afrin was not because fighters fled, as rumored in racist anti-Kurdish circles, but because an the army of takfiris (Turkish mercenaries) advancing under the cover of Turkish bombers and some 37,000 ground troops.

There is an indisputable righteousness in the resistance of the region’s Kurds, who are fighting in defense of their lands.

In late 1965 the rumblings of the Cultural Revolution had begun, due to grumblings over corruption, revisionism (“taking the capitalist road,” selling out socialism, etc.) and the snooty technocratism of urbanites. The party, led by Mao, saw these trends as threats to the common good, the revolution, and the Party’s “Heavenly Mandate” – the millennia-old concept that China’s rulers are chosen by Heaven to rule, and that they must actually display this divinity via perfectly moral conduct and leadership…or else revolt is justified.

If we don’t start challenging neoliberal hegemony soon, the non-West will eventually have little choice but to challenge it for themselves.

A compilation of relevant historical notes reflecting upon the bombing of Syria on April 13, 2018 by the United States, United Kingdom, and France.

Extreme rates of exploitation in the Global South is a palpable, directly observable fact. We don’t need a theory to know this but we do need a theory if we are to understand what we can see and work out the consequences that flow from it.

In addition to subsumption of teaching and research, the third mission of neoliberal marketisation has been termed, “knowledge exchange.” The introduction of this mission represents not only a fundamental attack on the academic profession, but also a desperate attempt to marshal the knowledge-producing powers of universities to kick-start a stagnating post-crisis global economy.

Indian Americans’ susceptibility to conservative politics in the U.S. is itself a contradictory affair—on the one hand they have largely voted Democrat, but have publicly remained ambivalent about racial politics in the country. One key element of this ambivalence is the question of affirmative action and meritocracy.

That China and the U.S. are moving in opposite directions is not a new trend, but it has been brought into sharper focus in the Trump era. Growing anxious about its diminishing international authority, the U.S. demonstrates increasing hostility towards China.

What were these indefatigable protesters demanding this time, here in Berlin and at rainy meetings, marches and bicycle parades during the long Easter weekend in over a hundred cities and towns all over Germany?

Given the context of Ernaux’s book, which traces different instances of French and world political history over the span of 66 years, one can clearly infer that the “we” of this passage refers to French people and, by extension, Western Europeans as a larger group. As a Macedonian, I am inclined to think that I am not and probably never will be a part of this “we”.

Sixteen months into the Civil War Karl Marx—as if anticipating apologists like Brooks 160 years later—criticized Lincoln for “trying to conduct it along constitutional” lines. It pleased him to no end, then, when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation more than a month later.

BACK in May 2017, just prior to the British general election, I wrote a piece arguing that a victory for Theresa May would see Britain dragged further towards war with Russia.

Unions have no choice but to put major resources into confronting the reality of precarious work and organising around whatever can be won in the workplace. Otherwise they will simply wither.

Dogs and suitcases are personal property under the law. For the most part, that enables humans to use, neglect, and abuse them indiscriminately. Dogs and other nonhumans have been property at least since the invention of money as suggested by the common etymologies of “chattel,” “cattle,” and “capital.”

Raoul Peck, the Haitian lmmaker, opens his film—Der Junge Karl Marx (2017)—in the forests of Prussia. Peasants gather fallen wood. They look cold and hungry.… Some of the peasants die. Even fallen wood is not allowed to them.

Strict weapons’ laws in the old East Germany, undoubtedly a restriction of on freedom, meant that there were virtually no shooting deaths and never a single mass shooting, in schools or anywhere else.

When David Harvey says “the historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries has largely been reversed over the last thirty years,” his readers will reasonably assume that he refers to a defining feature of imperialism, namely the plunder of living labour and natural wealth in colonies and semi-colonies by rising capitalist powers in Europe and North America. Indeed, he leaves no doubt about this, since he prefaced these words with reference to “the old categories of imperialism.” But here we encounter the first of his many obfuscations.