Archive | Newswire

  • Rembrandt Belsazar

    The critique of value at Belshazzar’s feast

    In the years since the 2008 economic crisis, renewed interest in Marx and Marxism has begotten interest in heterogeneous varieties that in one way or another violate the framework of the “traditional,” “official,” or “orthodox” Marxism that underpinned the workers’ movement in Europe and state socialism in the countries of the Eastern bloc.

  • Tump and Putin

    The Anti-Empire Report #153

    “He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.” – President Trump re Vladimir Putin after their meeting in Vietnam.

  • 'Don't block my net' protesters

    Net neutrality repeal is only part of Trump’s surrender to corporate media

    The FCC is under attack—and so too is the First Amendment. As the primary regulator of how media and information gets to our nation’s citizens, the Federal Communications Commission has a critical role to play in protecting the open Internet, free speech, and free press in our democracy.

  • Evgeny Pashukanis

    Evgeny Pashukanis: Commodity-form theory of law

    Whether one believes that law is provided by God (Natural Law), is created by human intellect (Positivism), a gendered institution perpetuating patriarchy (Feminism) or the maintainer of the status quo against marginalised groups (Critical Legal Studies), undergirding those beliefs is the assumption that law is autonomous.

  • The American savings crisis, explained

    The American savings crisis, explained

    When you lay all that out, Americans’ terrible saving rate stops looking like such a mystery. In fact, it looks downright rational.

  • Berkeley 'Free Speech' week

    Limits on free speech

    Judith Butler asks what happens when free speech clashes with other basic values.

  • Aristocrats (Photo Credit: shutterstock)

    The financial aristocrats will eat themselves

    Even as far back as 1894, Karl Marx’s work saw that capitalism would devour its agents, writes DIEGO FUSARO.

  • Girl in protest. Photo Credit: Deutsche Welle

    16 days, at least 14 dead, hundreds detained and still no official election results

    On November 26, the Honduran people went to the polls to elect their president for the next four years. Whilst in all the other elections in Honduras where the results were released the same day or the next morning, it has been 16 days and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal has yet to release the official results.

  • Photo by Giovanni Arechavaleta on Unsplash

    Resilience is not enough

    In “The Other Side of Resilience” Renata Silberblatt and Eamon Tewell (Progressive City, October 2017) raise some important questions about the focus on resilience as a way to respond to floods, droughts, wildfires, and climate change. But they don’t go far enough. It’s not just that resilience is more complex than it seems and has multiple meanings, as they point out.

  • Trump Thug

    Trump’s thug-power, or does anybody still like Woody Allen?

    Let’s go back to when we were all a little younger and less terrified. Obama is president. I am talking to a slightly older, white, heterosexual male, highly esteemed by the academic world and by me. I, a lesbian, admire and trust this guy. We’re catching up, talking about life, books, friends. I tell him my friend Beth is having a hard time writing her memoir. She’s trying to decide if she should include the fact that her very famous father, a renowned attorney, had sexually molested her for years while she was growing up.

  • Maraget Thatcher

    The crisis in neoliberalism and its ramifications

    The neoliberal model that has dominated mainstream politics and economics for decades is in crisis.… Mass dissatisfaction has joined with the growing realisation by the managers of the capitalist system that neoliberal policies are incapable of dragging the world economy out of the rut in which it now finds itself 10 years after the onset of the global financial crisis.

  • chavistas.

    Chavismo virtually wipes U.S.-backed opposition from municipal map

    This is the worst electoral defeat for the opposition in Venezuela since 2005.

  • Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Boston: Brill, 2015)

    Review of Art and Value by Dr. Nizan Shaked

    Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics reveals the irreconcilable differences between the Marxist economic definition of the term ‘value’ and its other uses in relation to the art object. It corrects the faulty assumption that rare or historical objects bear intrinsic value, symptomatic of capitalist worldview. Beech’s analysis of art’s value-form is critical to unpacking the double ontological condition of art as both an object of collective symbolic value and a hoard of monetary value, since the two operate in mutually exclusive spheres, yet function to constitute one another. The book can help us understand the capitalist sleight of hand that allows art to flicker between two forms of being, making profit appear as value, and value appear as significance (and vice versa), the toggling between the two facilitating the transfer of commonly held symbolic value in support of the individual accumulation of wealth.

  • Honduras

    Honduras in flames

    The chaos surrounding last week’s presidential elections in Honduras reflects a rightwing consolidation of power in the country, abetted by the United States.

  • The 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances paints a grim picture of working class finances

    Martin Hart-Landsberg takes a look at the tragedy of what life is like for the working class. Allowing for us to directly see what we already know, that US capitalism works to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

  • Jeremy Corbyn Speaks On Labour's Anti-Semitism Inquiry Findings

    Jeremy Corbyn’s Geneva speech in full

    The Labour leader sets out a vision for a more just international order and a new and independent foreign policy for Britain when he becomes Prime Minister.

  • Japanese police carrying away a protestor. Photo: Eliza Egret

    A lifetime opposing the U.S. military on Okinawa

    There are eighty of us sitting down, linking arms, blocking the gates of a US military base. Private security guards are lined up behind us, while men in uniform film us from behind barbed-wire fences. Suddenly, Japanese police officers pile out of their vans in their dozens. They grab a protester, a woman in her seventies. She goes limp and screams “US bases out of Okinawa!” as they carry her away.

  • U.S. WILDFIRES CALIFORNIA

    As ‘epic winds’ drive California fires, climate change fuels the risk

    Santa Ana winds are whipping up wildfires in Southern California after a devastating season in wine country. Rising temps can make the West dangerously combustible.

  • WaPo’s one-sided cheerleading for coup and intervention in Venezuela

    The Washington Post has put out 15 opinion pieces on issues surrounding Venezuela, and they are disturbing and far from the truth.

  • How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System by Wolfgang Streeck, New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2017; pp 272, ₹499 (paperback).

    The future of capitalism

    Looking at the present and future system of capitalism, there is a vital crisis at the heart of it all. Democratic capitalism, starting out in the 18th century, has had its ups and downs but even Marx, Keynes, Rosa Luxemberg, and Kondratieff have all failed to establish theories to break out of the capitalist system.