Archive | Newswire

  • Golden Years Of British Comedy: The Swinging Sixties

    Which is more important – challenging class prejudice or promoting class struggle?

    A study last year by London University academics highlighted the shocking disparities in pay between individuals from different backgrounds. Most other papers treated this as minor news or ignored it altogether. The Morning Star rightly put it on the front page under the headline Working Class? That’ll be Six Grand off your Salary (and it was the only paper to mention TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady’s call for worker representation on company boards).

  • Schumpter

    Schumpeter’s two theories of imperialism

    Schumpeter’s theory is interesting for several reasons. It was formulated at the same time as Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s and clearly with the knowledge of the two. It reacts to the exactly the same events as theirs. It is different though and it was held by Schumpeter throughout his life. The key text for Schumpeter’s theory is “The sociology of imperialisms” (note the  plural) published in 1918-19.

  • “Just Do It” This is the slogan of Nike Inc., the multinational athletic apparel and shoe manufacturer, that we all recognize by its name, campaign, and “swoosh” logo.

    Advertising at the edge of the apocalypse

    In this article I wish to make a simple claim: 20th century advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it. As it achieves this it will be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of non-western peoples and will prevent the peoples of the world from achieving true happiness.

  • Wall Street. (Henry Han / Wikimedia Commons)

    The next financial crisis will be even worse than the last one

    We’ve made it through 2017. The first-season installment of presidential Tweetville is ending where it began, on the Palm Beach, Fla., golf course of Mar-a-Lago. Though we are no longer privy to all the footage behind the big white truck, we do know that, given the doubling of its membership fees, others on the course will have higher stakes in the 2018 influence game.

  • A demonstrator waves a huge Iranian flag during a pro-government rally

    Think Tank-Addicted media turn to regime change enthusiasts for Iran protest commentary

    Since the outbreak of mass demonstrations and unrest in Iran last week, U.S. media have mostly busied themselves with the question of not if we should “do something,” but what, exactly, that something should be. As usual, it’s simply taken for granted the United States has a divine right to intervene in the affairs of Iran, under the vague blanket of “human rights” and “democracy promotion.”

  • Last Jedi

    The Last Jedi is centrist slop masquerading as radical sci-fi

    The Last Jedi, the eighth episode of the legendary Star Wars series, has been out for less than 10 days but already boasts well over $650 million in revenue from the box office.

  • An Amazon Echo is displayed at CES 2017 at the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 5th, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo: David Becker/Getty Images)

    Is casual surveillance the future of capitalism?

    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.

  • Marx T-Shirt

    21st-century Marx

    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.

  • The Times laments the consequences of the policies it supports, while opposing solutions short of regime change. | Photo: Reuters

    Lamenting Venezuela’s ‘Humanitarian Crisis’ while blocking its resolution

    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?”

  • Amsterdam's Red Light District

    The new Mafia capitalism

    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.

  • NUMSA

    NUMSA New Year Statement: A clarion call to build a Revolutionary Workers Party!

    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.

  • Median household wealth by race

    Class, race, and U.S. wealth inequality

    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 […]

  • Protests against electoral fraud in Honduras. Photo by Warwrick Fry.

    The Honduran dictatorship is ‘Made in the USA’: fraudulent elections greeted by huge protests

    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.

  • Capitalism also depends upon domestic labor.

    Social Reproduction Theory: going beyond Marx’s Capital

    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.

  • Student protesters march in Paris in May 1968 PHOTO: Fondation Gilles Caron

    1968: The year the world shook

    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.

  • Can we avoid another financial crisis?

    Can we avoid another financial crisis?

    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.

  • Alain Badiou

    Alain Badiou: “The alleged power of capitalism … today is merely a reflection of the weakness of its opponent.”

    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.

  • C is for Capitalism

    Capitalism? Yes, let’s have a trial

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

  • Cornel West

    Cornel West: Neoliberalism has failed us

    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.

  • At an establishment in Sydney, Australia, that accepts payment in bitcoin.

    Making merry on bitcoin

    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.