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Getting away with murder: ‘clash’ as media euphemism for ‘massacre’
After deposing Evo Morales in a U.S.-backed coup November 11, Bolivia’s military selected Jeanine Añez as president. Añez immediately signed a decree pre-exonerating security forces of all crimes during their “re-establishment of order,” understood by all sides as a license to kill. Those same forces have now conducted massacres of Morales supporters near the cities of Cochabamba and La Paz.
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The inorganic body in the early Marx
The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric. Bruno Latour, for instance, imagines that when we speak about what is ‘critical’, we have in mind a fully negative project, a practice of debunking and dismantling hegemonic presumptions about the world, and that critical theory only intensifies skepticism and lacks transformative power and commitment to emancipatory ideals.
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The real interest of the United States and transnational corporations in Latin America and the Caribbean
What are the real interests of the U.S. and corporations in the region? Freedom, democracy, human rights? No. Their goal is to preserve imperialist domination of our natural resources.
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The issue-less impeachment: the corporate democrats stand for nothing, so they impeach for nothing
The corporate Democrats are effectively exonerating themselves and their Republican brethren of the full spectrum of lawlessness that is everyday politics in the belly of the racist, imperial beast.
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“Anyone to my left is an antisemite”
Labour’s massive loss to the Tories has bummed out a lot of people. Everyone’s discussing it and arguing about what went wrong and who’s to blame. I don’t have any special insight into UK politics, but one thing that really shocked me about the election is the way that Jewish identity and fabricated charges of antisemitism were weaponized in a smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the mild leftwing shift of his Labour Party.
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Metabolic monstrosities: Vampire capital in the Anthropocene
Paraphrasing a passage from Marx in the Grundrisse, Stavros Tombazos remarks that “every economy is in the end an economy of time” (2014, 13). This is to say that the productivity of labour, the accumulation of wealth, and the circulation of goods and resources which make up an economy in its broadest sense are all components of a particular organisation of time.
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Misleading narratives on Labour’s defeat have a purpose
GAWAIN LITTLE looks in detail at the different aspects of Labour’s election defeat.
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Lies, Newsweek and control of the media narrative: First-hand account
Until several days ago, I was a journalist at Newsweek. I decided to hand my resignation in because, in essence, I was given a simple choice. On one hand, I could continue to be employed by the company, stay in their chic London offices and earn a steady salary—only if I adhered to what could or could not be reported and suppressed vital facts. Alternatively, I could leave the company and tell the truth.
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The “fixing capitalism” headfake
It’s not hard to see why young people are embracing socialism. It isn’t simply that they can see a probable grim future under capitalism as they know it: more and more low-wage, high surveillance jobs versus more budget and psychological stress as most also have higher fixed costs (rentier housing costs, student loan payments, even more “asset lite, rent heavy” systems, ever-escalating health care costs).
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Geoengineering is no climate fix. But calling it a moral hazard could be counterproductive
Desperate times call for desperate measures. In recent years and in the face of unprecedented changes in the climate system, some previously unknown and risky solutions have been proposed to put a halt to the chain of climate disasters, or at least to slow down the speed of their onslaught.
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Millions in France strike against austerity
France’s mass strikes have mobilized millions, persisting into a sixth day, in an attempt to forestall severe cuts to the social gains of the working class.
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Evo Morales on prohibition to wear Indigenous garments in Ministry HQ
Bolivia ‘s leader Evo Morales reacted to an internal memo from the foreign ministry of the de facto government in Bolivia, prohibiting personal use of traditional Indian attire inside the headquarters of the ministry during the workday.
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Limits of the Green New Deal
The Green New Deal is an exciting social program generating a great deal of interest on the left. Like its predecessor, the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the GND holds out the promise of preventing the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change, and guaranteeing a better standard of living for its participants.
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If you want peace, you get war; if you want war, you get rich
A quarter century ago, Victoria Sandino Palmera joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC-EP). She had previously been a militant in the Communist Party and–when FARC-EP was above ground in the 1990s–joined the Patriotic Pole. But the repression of what she calls the ‘traditional oligarchy’ sent her back to the jungle over and over again. Victoria Sandino made it clear that she was not keen on this war. ‘We didn’t take up weapons because we felt the need to use violence’
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The vilification of Jeremy Corbyn
The vilification of the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, as an antisemite has intensified in the run up to the December 12 election in Britain. What makes this especially troubling, not to say bizarre, is that since he first became a member of parliament in 1983 Corbyn has been the most consistent campaigner against all forms of racism.
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Unfinished business: The Battle of Seattle twenty years on
The anti-neoliberal spirit of the Seattle protests of two decades encapsulated an internationalist but anti-globalisation mass movement that has lessons for us today, argue Chris Nineham and Feyzi Ismail
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“Booming” economy means more bad jobs and faster race to the bottom
For the past 30 years, no matter which party has been in power, the U.S. economy has produced more and more “bad” jobs–because the Race to the Bottom is ruling class policy.
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Moving jobs to Mexico was a feature, not a bug, of NAFTA
The Washington Post (11/21/19) gave readers the official story about NAFTA, diverging seriously from reality, in a piece on the status of negotiations on the new NAFTA.
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The Coming Revolution: Capitalism in the 21st Century
The Coming Revolution is an impressive guide for Marxists looking for a way to approach contemporary capitalism, argues Josh Newman
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Good and dead
Chicago, never an enlightened city, where in a December 4, 1969 predawn west side raid at 2337 W. Monroe, fourteen cops in cahoots with, we now know, the FBI, blasted their way Capone style, ninety-nine flying bullets into a Black Panther apartment.