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Fulfilling orders: Automation, control and resistance at Amazon
After his brief space journey in July 2021, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos said, with disarming frankness, “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all of this.”
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Ianir Milevski (ed) “Marxist Archeology Today: Historical Materialist Perspectives in Archeology from America, Europe and the Near East in the 21st Century”
Archeology has always been a political science. Since its inception the field has attempted to trace our lineage as a species along the lines of identity, territory and culture. Though often portrayed as a discipline slightly closer to the hard sciences than historiography, it is much closer to its distant cousin in the social sciences than towards anything resembling an empirical practice.
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Ian Angus’s “The War Against the Commons”: A vital new history of the bloody rise of capitalism
Primitive accumulation is the historical process through which capitalists stole their wealth or took it by force. Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus has contributed an excellent new book on this history, covering the violent transition from feudalism to capitalism in depth while demonstrating its continuing relevance to the modern world..
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Vulture capitalism
Grace Blakeley is a media star of the radical left-wing of the British labour movement. She is a columnist for the left-wing journal, Tribune, and a regular panellist on political debates in broadcasting—often the only spokesperson on the left advocating socialist alternatives.
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Brett Christophers: “Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World”
Since the global financial crisis, big banks have taken a backseat, and asset managers have become the—often self-appointed—new experts and administrators of capitalism.
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‘What kind of American are you?’
The film Civil War addresses the paradox that the only way to stop polarisation is to take a side.
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“Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom” – book review
Vulture Capitalism demolishes the idea of the ‘free market’ in the corporate age, but has limitations in its analysis of capitalism and how to challenge it, argues Dominic Alexander.
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The GI Life in “The One We Had to Win”
Veteran Cleveland writer and photographer Scott MacGregor recovered a manuscript written by his uncle Hugh O’Neill, which turned into Captured! A World War II Memoir. In it, O’Neill weaves a real-life tale of his life as a prisoner of the Germans in the last year of the Second World War and Cleveland comic artist Gary Dumm, who has worked with the best of the genre, Harvey Pekar in particular, provides vivid illustrations.
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“Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire” – book review
This is an amazing history, one that should be on the list of every history class dealing with modern history, history of the British Empire, and further on to those studying economics, politics, and geopolitical strategies.
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Preconditions for disaster: “A People’s History of Covid” – extract
In this first of two extracts from Terina Hine’s new book, “A People’s History of Covid”, the impact of inequality and neoliberalism in the UK on the spread of Covid is outlined
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“The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776-1888” – book review
The Reckoning is a magnificent conclusion to a quartet of books on New World slavery, explaining the role of slavery and its abolition in the rise of American power, finds Chris Bambery.
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‘Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World’ – book review
Naomi Klein’s exploration of the spread of conspiracy theory and the ‘other Naomi’ is baggy but contains useful insights, argues Lindsey German.
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Lessons from history for women’s liberation
RON JACOBS points out that it wasn’t until anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements formed women’s liberation groups that the fundamental roots of oppression could be addressed.
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The Communist Women’s Movement in Retrospect
Paul Buhle reviews “The Communist Women’s Movement,” a collection of documents of a global women’s communist movement.
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Quarter-Earth reformism
Review of Matt Huber’s ‘Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet’
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“What Is Anti-Racism? And Why It Means Anti-Capitalism,” A book review
Arun Kundnani details the histories of liberal and radical anti-racism and argues that anti-racism ultimately means anti-capitalism.
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Reactionary ecology
For many continental philosophers, the first two decades of the new millennium were a time of vibrant matter, hyperobjects, and a weird fixation with intestinal microbes. The late Bruno Latour saw this ‘new materialist’ doctrine–which decentred the human subject in favour of the world of ‘things’, believed to have agency of their own–as a useful resource in his career-long polemic against Marxism.
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NECESSITY: A two-part documentary series on climate resistance
Grounded in people and places at the heart of the climate crisis, ‘Oil, Water and Climate Resistance’ traces the fight in Minnesota against the expansion of pipelines carrying toxic tar sands oil through North America.
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Dialectics, Science and Naturalism: An Outline
“Should one claim that, unless they have studied the Science of Logic, these scientists don’t know what they are doing? Doubtless, they know what they are doing but, philosophically speaking, they often do not know what they know and beyond a certain point this limitation cannot but have a regrettable influence on their work.” (Sève 2008: 91)
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Unravelling human history: the rise of class society and women’s oppression
Anthropology, since its inception, has been an ideologically contested–discipline, and the same is true of both primatology and zoology when they have been used to explain human evolution.