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It is both an honor and a pleasure to be here at the event of marking the 75th Anniversary of the Ceylon Bank Employees Union. First, let me offer my heartfelt greetings to CBEU, its office bearers and membership. CBEU has had a proud and celebrated history of struggles that helped immensely to record so many victories to improve the conditions of the working class in general and the bank employees in particular.

Not an April Fool’s joke. Here are the facts: Four days ago (March 29) the ultra-conservative Dean of the Montpellier University Law School was summoned to police headquarters, interrogated, hauled into court, and held over in jail for arraignment by the Chief Prosecutor–all on the complaint of nine student strikers, who claim to have been brutally assaulted with Dean Philippe Pétel’s active complicity while ‘occupying’ a school auditorium.

The 2016 presidential exit polls “substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters…and overestimated the white college-educated Democratic electorate,” New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (3/29/18) writes.

Using Marx’s critique of political economy, it’s possible for workers employed in a variety of industries to calculate the value of their work and how this value is divided between employer and employee. It becomes possible to calculate the socially necessary labor time and surplus labor time, worker wages and employer profits in their particular workplace.

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.

With the acceptance of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s invitation, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited China from the 25th of this month to the 28th, for the first time since assuming office in 2011. Timed just before Kim’s meeting with the South Korean President Moon Jae-in the next month, followed by a summit with U.S President Donald Trump-where the prospects of denuclearization is expected to be discussed-this meeting with Xi Jinping, in which Kim has reaffirmed his commitment to denuclearization, has been seen my observers as a crucial diplomatic development.

It started with a few hundred West Virginia teachers and school employees pulling one-day walkouts. It became an unqualified victory in that state, which educators elsewhere were quick to emulate.

The commoditisation of education which makes it completely incapable of providing students with the wherewithal to engage in any active and worthwhile public discourse, has proceeded apace under the neo-liberal regime.

How has a science focused on capital accumulation been used to overturn tried and true models of agriculture to the detriment of the environment and indigenous livelihoods?

The Labour leader played an active part in organising against and resisting the National Front in the late ’70s.

Today, one hundred and fifty years after the publication of the first volume of Capital, Marx remains our contemporary.

In a recent interview that went viral, Russian President Vladimir Putin repudiated NBC journalist Megyn Kelly, when she pressed him on the so-called “Russiagate” scandal.

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.”

The concept of class poses profound problems for theory and practice. This is true across the academic disciplines and in the confused incoherence around “class issues” when concepts of class surface in economic, political and cultural discourses.

On February 22nd the University and College Union (UCU) called for the beginning of a nation wide strike in response to Universities UK’s (UUK) attempt to shift of the Universities Superannuation Scheme from a defined benefit pension to a defined contribution pension.

The long-term costs of allowing a handful of corporations to take over healthcare and agriculture in developing countries, in exchange for vaccinations and hybrid seeds sold at discounted price, will be paid by populations in the Global South once the process of monopolization is complete.

Russian officials are voicing a full-throated dismissal of British accusations that Russia used a nerve agent referred to as “Novichok” in an attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The Russian Ambassador to the U.K., Alexander Yakovenko, is further charging London with making accusations in poor faith, while raising questions over whether the poison was already in the possession of the British government.

Marx’s Capital has been heralded for many things, but providing an exhaustive account of a future socialist society isn’t one of them.

Material collected by Cambridge Analytica via Facebook quizzes—which included detailed psychological profiles of unsuspecting users for the purpose of “behavioral microtargeting”—was used by the campaigns of Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and right-wing Super PACs tied to billionaire Robert Mercer.

Although many of us would like to answer this question with a resounding “No!” and insist that our region is well prepared to defend itself against the 1823 pretensions of President James Monroe, with his “America for Americans” -which must be understood as “America for the United States”- it would be a serious mistake to underestimate the risks.