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There’s no other way to say it: Trump’s Arpaio pardon is fascist
This is a dark moment in American history, perhaps one of the darkest, illuminated only by the broad swath of conservatives, moderates, and liberals who have rejected what Trump and Arpaio stand for. Let us pray that they—we—prevail.
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150 years of Das Kapital: How relevant is Marx today?
This is a book that has been pronounced dead or obsolete many times, but it keeps bouncing back, with the latest recovery in interest and sales just after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. So why do so many people all over the world still read (or try to read) Karl Marx’s Capital today?
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Yanis Varoufakis’s self-incriminating account of the Greek Crisis (Part 1)
Yanis Varoufakis’s entire proposal regarding debt was and is unacceptable from a left-wing point of view because it presupposes evacuating any debate as to the legality and legitimacy of the debts whose repayment is being demanded of Greece.
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A critique of David Harvey’s analysis of imperialism
John Smith argues that prominent Marxian theorist David Harvey is an imperialism-denier who uses his considerable prestige as a prominent Marxist theoretician to miseducate his readers on the nature of contemporary imperialism.
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Forgetting to remember
It is a devastating fact that James Baldwin is our contemporary; so much so, that the matter of his relevance seems either pressing or redundant depending on to whom one speaks. Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, a “cinematic séance” (The Guardian), is being taken as the completion of Baldwin’s unfinished Remember This House, […]
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Charlottesville and Thuringia
Germany has no exact equivalent of the White House cabal; its leaders are highly educated and circumspect in their speeches. But growing threats in both countries are far too similar.
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After neoliberalism, what next?
We may be living through one of those moments in history that future historians will look back on as a watershed, a period of flux that marked a transition to quite different economic and social arrangements. Unfortunately, in human history a ‘moment’ can be a very long time.
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The faux antiracism of the Republican Party
As this tragedy unfolds let us hope that people do not forget who the enemies of antiracism are. They won’t be crashing cars into protestors, but their policies should be treated with the same rebuke that we have for Saturday’s driver.
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The weasel: Corey Stewart
As Republican politicians distance themselves from the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, the former chairman of Trump’s Virginia campaign blames the victims.
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The root of the climate crisis is capitalism, not demographics
Growing concerns about climate change and other environmental trends have set off the next round of old Malthusian diagnoses, raising the specter of overpopulation. In this context, it bears repeating that under capitalism the “population problem” is about ideological and social control and has nothing to do with demographics or ecology.
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Stand in solidarity with Venezuela against the threat of imperialist military intervention
The Right-wing in Venezuela have stated publicly that their tactic is to produce more violence and more chaos, with the hope that wide international media coverage will provoke foreign intervention in the country.
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Diesels and honorable men
Lower the curtain, change the scene. The atmosphere in the government building in Berlin on August 2nd is fully different, not a bit of similarity. Those present, most in tailored apparel, sit in soft leather chairs and sip aromatic drinks from fine glassware. Who are they? Germany’s power people!
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Transition and abolition: notes on Marxism and trans politics
Without understanding the particular plight of trans women, only a blunted and partial view of gender is possible. And without a systemic view of gender, political solutions to that plight will be equally limited.
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Land grabs and uneven development in Cambodia
The global labor arbitrage means the only competitive “advantage” available to most countries is forcing workers to accept slave wages and environmental standards low enough to lure in multinationals. If the population resists, the only means available to diffuse it is brutal repression.
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The disinformation campaign on Venezuela
The upper classes of Venezuela are trying to regain their lost fiefdom. The program of violence they are implementing, which has rocked Venezuela since April 4, 2017, is part of that effort.
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The American empire and its media
Largely unbeknownst to the general public, many media executives and top journalists of almost all major U.S. news outlets, political and business magazines, public broadcasters and press agencies have long been members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
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Third nature
John Bellamy Foster’s essay,“Third Nature: Edward Said on Ecology and Imperialism” is taken from Vijay Prashad, ed., Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017), pp. 50-57. This edited collection was organized around Naomi Klein’s 2016 Edward W. Said Lecture, “Let Them Drown,” originally published in the June 2016 issue of […]
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‘Our city is in ruins’: Crushing wars are raging on in Syria and Iraq with no end in sight
On 10 July 2017, Iraqi’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi arrived in the city of Mosul to declare it liberated from the Islamic State. What did al-Abadi see when he looked across the expanse of Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities? He would have seen not only the violence visited by ISIS upon this historic city – including destroying a large part of its Great Mosque of al-Nuri – but also the destruction of the city by this current onslaught that has lasted nine months.
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Haves, have-nots, and need-nots: The nuclear ban exposes hidden fault lines
A total of 147 non-nuclear states have expressed support for the ban treaty process, while 37 non-nuclear states have not.… [But] a single variable correlates almost perfectly with this breakdown: 89 percent of the non-nuclear states that have criticized the ban are “umbrella states” that belong to an alliance with a nuclear power or are actively seeking to join such an alliance, while only 4 percent of the non-nuclear states supporting the ban are umbrella states.
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Did that New York magazine climate story freak you out? Good.
David Wallace-Wells has a cover story on climate change in New York magazine that has kicked up quite a discussion. It’s about worst-case scenarios…[and] the dystopian future the piece describes is much worse, and forecast to happen much sooner, than most people.… I won’t rehearse the parade of horribles.… Instead, I want to address some of the critical reaction to the piece, which I have found … irksome.