If accumulating wealth is the basic objective of capitalism, organising production using wage labour is only one of the ways it can be achieved. What finance does is to open an alternative route to reach the same objective, that is via transaction.
Archive | Newswire
The Crisis of US Imperial Governance and the Struggle for a New World
They don’t want to tell you about how the US has interfered in every election in Russia since the Soviet Union fell, or how it has led bloody proxy wars and coups in over fifty countries in as many years.
The need to radicalize the Bolivarian Revolution
The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is facing its most challenging times. The right-wing opposition, backed by the United States, is engaged in a full-blown “regime change” campaign, with violent protests occurring daily for over 2 months and resulting in over 50 casualties. The chavista supporters of the government have also taken to the streets in […]
Samidoun Statement of Solidarity with U.S. Prisoners on Hunger Strike in Folsom State Prison
“[M]en stand again, just as unified, ready to sacrifice their bodies, health, and life to achieve what has already been hard fought for and accomplished. Why must California prisoners continue to sacrifice health and life, involve lawyers and courts, in order to be treated like human beings? We will continue to remind CDCR officials they […]
Cornel West: American Philosopher, Activist, Professor, Jazzman ‘In the Life of the Mind’
The arts and humanities have a key role to play in the response to injustice, he said, by offering “exemplars” as much as ideas. But they often get distracted by their own petty squabbles and obsessions. His imitation of a polite, simpering, white academic, using words like “diversity” and “text,” drew especially raucous laughter.
We won’t always have Paris
Donald Trump today sentenced Planet Earth to death. Whether he has the power actually to have that sentence carried out is open to serious question.
Let’s Rebuild a Democratic Global Trade Union Movement
This whole project to hollow out institutions has only one aim which is the creation of a predatory state whose only reason for existence is to accumulate and plunder the country’s resources for the benefit of family members of Jacob Zuma, as well as the network of greedy, corrupt families who also benefit from crony […]
Venezuela is deep into civil war
Following the script by the experts and strategists of the CIA, specialized in destabilizing and tearing down governments, counter-revolutionary tactics in Venezuela have made a “quality jump”: what began with a warm-up on the streets has now transitioned to a non-declared (but nonetheless bloody) civil war.
U.S.-funded White Helmets assist in public execution in rebel-held Syria for at least the second time
In a new video Syria Civil Defense members—popularly know as the “White Helmets,” the Nobel Prize-nominated group that has received at least $23 million in funding from USAID (a wing of the State Department)—are shown assisting in a public execution in a rebel-held town in Syria. It is at least the second such execution video […]
Honest Accounts 2017: How the world profits from Africa’s wealth
Research for this report calculates the movement of financial resources into and out of Africa and some key costs imposed on Africa by the rest of the world. We find that the countries of Africa are collectively net creditors to the rest of the world, to the tune of $41.3 billion in 2015.1 Thus much […]
Interview with Oscar López Rivera: “Fighting is not a Futile Exercise”
While many of us could hardly concentrate on everyday matters as we thought obsessively about the fragile and unfortunate fate of Oscar López Rivera, the former political prisoner painted peacefully in the prison in Terre Haute Indiana. Then on January 17, at 3:30 pm a guard called him to let him know that he had […]
‘We need direct elections now and an emergency plan for the people’
Leader of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), Joao Pedro Stedile, on the Brazilian political scenario, the role of the O Globo media network, the internal divisions among the putschists, and the need of building a transition government and the people’s project of Brazil.
Final examination given in the class “Economics of Socialism,” taught by Paul Sweezy in 1940
During my recent archival visit to Harvard, I was able to copy a magnificent trove of final examinations in economics (up through 1949…there is much more going forward, but I had to move on). Now I begin the curatorial work of pairing some of those examinations to course materials I have posted earlier and where the exam […]
Dimwitted and dangerous
Since losing the presidential elections the Democratic Party has been waging non-stop war against President Trump, focusing on his allegedly dubious connections with Russia. Abetting them have been members of the security and intelligence services who have been leaking information to the press. You might say that ‘all is well in love and war’, and […]
Trump nominates actual fascist David Clarke for Department of Homeland Security
Words like fascist and authoritarian get thrown around too promiscuously. But there is no other way to describe David Clarke, who today announced that he was named assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. (The Department has not confirmed Clarke’s appointment.) Clarke occupies the extremist, anti-democratic fringe of far-right officials, even by the standards […]
Anything wrong with eco-socialism?
Political feasibility becomes irrelevant when science teaches us that this is the course human society must follow if we are to survive.
Labour’s manifesto is a shift to the left: it’s no time for compromises with the right
It must be part of a bold and insurgent campaign based on resistance to racism, austerity and war that focusses on mass rallies and mobilisations. Giving in to the right can only make it weaker.
Exclusive: Gardiner on defence, manifesto, Boulton—and being internet sensation
As the SKWAWKBOX examined this morning, Labour spokesman and front-bencher Barry Gardiner has become one of the sensations of the General Election campaign so far, with his charming but emphatic handling of various mainstream media interviewers.
Argentina: memory, unity and mobilization is the recipe to make Macri Retreat
May Square was, once again, the containment wall under the umbrella of the human rights organizations, which beyond their lamentable divisions, are the only reference that all great majorities respect. Precisely because when the society was muted by terror, from there emerged the first voices of pain, anger and decision so that impunity would not […]
Standoff in Venezuela
Venezuela has been rocked in recent weeks by almost daily protests and counter-protests, as right-wing opponents of socialist President Nicolas Maduro seek to bring down his government.
