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The debate over inequality
The debate over inequality has become hotter world-wide. While Trump had introduced substantial tax cuts for the rich in 2017, and Britain’s Boris Johnson, the front-runner to succeed Teresa May, has promised to do the same if he becomes Prime Minister, there are strong proposals for taxing the rich which have also been mooted. Bernie Sanders had such a proposal for the U.S. during the time that he was seeking the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.
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Freedom and slavery: the birth of capital
We are frequently told that capitalism equals ‘freedom’; that it is the organic product of ‘human nature’. But far from arising naturally, the birth of the ‘free’ market is built on violence, dispossession, and enslavement.
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Oral opening statement from Michael Mann testimony to U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing on climate change & natural disasters
And I would also like to emphasize that we’re using the term “natural disasters” but in many cases there is absolutely nothing natural about the disasters we are talking about. We’re not saying they have been caused by climate change, we’re saying that it has worsened them. That’s what the research shows.
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Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature
On the one hand, people who spend most of their time working develop an understanding of the ‘practical transformation of the world’. This framework is implicit in the workers’ activity, since the worker–given the theft of their time–is often prevented from having a ‘clear theoretical consciousness of this practical activity’.
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Our globe is burning!
Peter Linebaugh’s book comes with a long subtitle, a pithy summary of its contents: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, of Kate and Ned Despard. His timeframe is the period between 1789 and 1804 when, in his view, a series of connected events took place in England, Ireland, France, the Caribbean and North America that formed an Atlantic crucible forging the capitalist world we have lived in since.
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Climate change, dust bowls, fishery collapse: metabolic rifts of capitalism and the need for socialism
Humankind and the environment are hurtling toward unprecedented ecological crises. Global warming, sea level rise, and weather extremes due to carbon emissions are catastrophic enough, but they will mix and combine with ocean acidification, air and chemical pollution, water shortages, deforestation, fishery collapse, soil erosion, and mass extinction, throwing both nature and society off a cliff into the unknown.
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Hooray, the Arctic is melting! Say WHAT?
It’s officially summer. Time for a swim, a cold beer, and a new slew of catastrophic climate changes…
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The promised land
Palestine really was the Promised Land. So much so that it was promised to three different groups within a couple of years.
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British firm ‘hosts canned lion hunts’
Blackthorn Safaris, based in Oswestry, hosts ‘canned’ hunts on an estate 40 miles north of the mining town of Kimberly, in South Africa’s Northern Cape district.
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My friend is in a prison in Ecuador
This article was first published on June 10, 2019 in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Two months ago, the police in Ecuador arrested my friend Ola Bini at Quito airport. Ola was on his way to Japan for a two-week martial arts course. He’s a software developer from Sweden who has lived in Ecuador since 2013. […]
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It’s not just profitability: a response to Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts takes issue with my blog post “Why Stagnation,” which presented the analysis in a recent article I coauthored with Deepankar Basu. We argued that social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory can explain the current stagnation in the U.S. economy.
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U.S. and Canada are backing an elite white minority in Venezuela
The U.S. and Canada are not supporting “the return of democracy” in Venezuela as they claim. Instead, they are following in their shameful histories of colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, illegal wars of aggression, and overthrowing governments.
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Gee Whiz! Communism is sure gonna be keen!
When I was ten years old, I read and re-read a stack of decades-old Modern Mechanix magazines that I found in my grandfather’s basement. Throughout the Great Depression, MM regaled its readers with breathless accounts of technological marvels that were going to change the world, very soon.
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The UN climate talks are coming to Britain. The climate justice movement will be ready
This week it was announced that the 2020 United Nations climate change conference–the so-called ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP)–is set to take place in the UK.
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‘Report the urgency! This is a climate emergency!’
“This is the biggest crisis in human history. What are we going to tell our children when they ask us: why didn’t we do anything to stop it while we still had time?”
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Marxism, space and a few urban questions: a rough guide to the English language Lliterature
Starting in the late 1960s, ‘radical geography’ became a crucial avenue of intellectual innovation in contemporary Marxism. For a generation, its basic orientation was two-fold: (1) politicise ‘space’ by challenging the stranglehold of specialists (architects, urban planners, designers, military planners, regional and development officials) in the spatial disciplines, and (2) insist, simultaneously, on the importance of spatial questions within the various currents of the left.
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Iran ‘violates’ nuclear deal, after U.S. ‘withdraws’
Quick question: Does the U.S. ever break, breach or violate its international agreements?
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How Wall Street colonized the Caribbean
The expansion of banks such as Citigroup into Cuba, Haiti, and beyond reveal a story of capitalism built on blood, labor, and racial lines.
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Marta Harnecker, presente!
The international left has lost one of its most lucid intellectual, pedagogical educators and determined activists with the passing of Marta Harnecker on June 14, aged 82.
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In Dutch still lifes, dark secrets hide behind exotic delicacies
The Dutch Golden Age led to a tremendous outpouring of still-life paintings in the 17th century. Since then, critics have generally belonged to two opposing schools of thought when it comes to interpreting them.