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The feminist eagles
Long before the present resurrection of this emboldened feminist movement (forcing people to frantically Google the term), I sensed it coming as the teacher advisor of my high school’s feminist club, the Feminist Eagles.
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Radical food politics: hunger is political
Mexie on the politics of food and hunger.
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Safe spaces for colonial apologists
The recent controversies about Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project and UK Universities Minister Jo Johnson’s attack on “safe space culture” have both been defended on freedom of speech grounds. However, they are better understood as retrenching colonial thinking in universities.
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Trashing the planet for profit
Before I began this essay I read through some of my past forays that mentioned climate change and capitalism, the first I think, being in 2006 where I opined in a piece on the ‘War on Terror’.
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The gender divide: tracking women’s state prison growth
The story of women’s prison growth has been obscured by overly broad discussions of the “total” prison population for too long. This report sheds more light on women in the era of mass incarceration by tracking prison population trends since 1978 for all 50 states.
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Lula’s witch trial: who are the TRF4?
Some are calling it the Coup’s endgame, others the “final battle” for Brasil’s next decade.
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The elephant in the world
The authors of the report confirm what Branko Milanovic and others had previously discovered: that a representation of the unequal gains in world economic growth in recent decades looks like an elephant. Thus, the real incomes of the bottom 50 percent of the world’s population (except the poorest, at the very bottom) have increased, the incomes of those in the middle (especially the working-class in the United States and Western Europe) have decreased, and the global top 1 percent has captured an outsized portion of world economic growth since 1980.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 […]
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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.