Archive | Newswire

When e-commerce monolith Amazon introduced the Key in October, it was the latest in a series of innovations aimed at making our lives more user-friendly. Available exclusively to subscribers of Amazon Prime, the Key system—which consists of a programmable smart lock for the front door of one’s house, and a high-definition camera mounted nearby to record the activity of those who come and go—allowed users to have “Amazon packages securely delivered just inside your front door,” as opposed to having those purchases left on a front porch or in a mailroom.

The 21st century has already welcomed back Karl Marx (1818-1883), rather on the assumption that he had faded away and has now returned to haunt us. After the financial crashes of 2008, his leonine face appeared on international news magazine covers, feature articles in quality broadsheets, TV documentaries and blogposts. The questions Why now? and Why Marx? are easily answered: capitalism suddenly appeared unstable, unmanageable, dangerously fragile and anxiously threatening.

A New York Times headline screams “As Venezuela collapses, children are dying of hunger.” Lurid pictures show dead infants. A companion “article of the day teaching activities,” asks: “Why do some young children choose to live on the streets instead of at home with their families?”

MISHA GLENNY’S new series McMafia was launched on BBC TV on New Year’s Day. It is an appropriate if depressing opener for the new year.

Comrades 2017 was a year where the global crisis of capitalism deepened. Just like the 2008 global financial crisis, capitalism demonstrated once more that it has failed humanity and has no solutions for problems that are confronting society.

People tend to have a distorted picture of U.S. capitalism’s operation, believing that the great majority of Americans are doing well, benefiting from the system’s long-term growth and profit generation. Unfortunately, this is not true. Median wealth has been declining, leaving growing numbers of working people increasingly vulnerable to the ups and downs of economic […]

The U.S. State Department has endorsed the outcome of the November 26 elections in Honduras, which was surely the most farcical electoral process in recent history.

Colin Barker of Manchester rs21 introduced a panel discussion to launch the book Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression at the recent Historical Materialism conference in London . We reproduce Colin’s presentation here.

1968 – 50 years ago – was the highpoint of the radicalism that had been sweeping the globe through the mid-60s from Belfast to Berlin, from Mexico to Melbourne, from Paris to Prague. It was a year of revolution and repression, of struggle and solidarity, of wild optimism and crushing defeat.

After the Global Financial Crisis, Steve Keen achieved worldwide acclaim with his book Debunking Economics (2011). It attacked the core tenets of neoclassical economics and some of its heterodox rivals. It also revealed Hyman Minsky’s post-Keynesianism as the most promising route to a scientific revolution in economics.

My father was a socialist, who participated in the Resistance against the Nazis. My mother leaned more towards anarchism. My first philosophy teacher, Jean Paul Sartre, was a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party. When I was a teenager, there was a terrible colonial war in Algeria and I stood up against it. When I was 30, May ‘68 happened, a huge movement of young people and workers. In short, my entire education led me towards politics in its revolutionary and communist form.

In announcing his long-avoided royal commission into banking, Malcolm Turnbull said that “it will not put capitalism on trial”. What a shame!

We live in one of the darkest moments in American history,” Cornel West begins his new introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition of Race Matters, published on December 5, 2017.

Bitcoin has left the world of finance gasping. Although the total market value of all that cryptocurrency in circulation is only a fraction of the value of the world’s financial assets, the rapid rise in the value of the currency has made it the most wanted of those assets. On January 1, 2017, the currency was trading between $972 and $990 a unit. By December 7, it was trading between $14,063 and $17,363.

92 Somali nationals who were deported from the United States earlier this month are suing the Trump administration over “slave ship conditions” on the plane back home. They were denied access to food, water and bathrooms for nearly two days while on the plane.

The last four decades have been marked by rising wage inequality, with the vast majority of American workers experiencing wage stagnation while those at the top rung of the economic ladder reap the benefits of growth in productivity. These dynamics mean that many workers struggle to make ends meet; in 2016 one in five families in which at least one person worked were living below 200 percent of the federal poverty line (U.S. Census Bureau 2017).

Just a week ago, Colombian social leaders denouncing the murder of another one showed up to the press conference with masks covering their faces in order to avoid risking to lose their own lives—such is the danger of defending human rights in Colombia.

Reiterating Mao’s teachings is one of the essentials in the area of political education as a new generation is joining people’s struggle.

No doubt about it, the recently passed tax bill is terrible for working people.  But as Lance Taylor states in a blog post titled “Why Stopping Tax ‘Reform’ Won’t Stop Inequality”: “Inequality isn’t driven by taxes—its driven by the power of capital in relation to workers.”  Said differently we need to concentrate our efforts on shifting the balance of class power.  And that means, among other things, putting more of our energy into workplace organizing and revitalizing the trade union movement.

The meeting, attended by thousands of people, was thrilling and inspiring; all Italian communist parties and organisations, as well as environmentalist groups, social and community centres and workers associations took part in it.