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Bourgeois fear of revolution means disowning the Civil War
Sixteen months into the Civil War Karl Marx—as if anticipating apologists like Brooks 160 years later—criticized Lincoln for “trying to conduct it along constitutional” lines. It pleased him to no end, then, when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation more than a month later.
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50 years after 1968: students strikers attacked again
Not an April Fool’s joke. Here are the facts: Four days ago (March 29) the ultra-conservative Dean of the Montpellier University Law School was summoned to police headquarters, interrogated, hauled into court, and held over in jail for arraignment by the Chief Prosecutor–all on the complaint of nine student strikers, who claim to have been brutally assaulted with Dean Philippe Pétel’s active complicity while ‘occupying’ a school auditorium.
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What’s a non-racist way to appeal to working-class whites? NYT‘s Edsall can’t think of any
The 2016 presidential exit polls “substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters…and overestimated the white college-educated Democratic electorate,” New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (3/29/18) writes.
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Calculating surplus value to facilitate workplace organizing
Using Marx’s critique of political economy, it’s possible for workers employed in a variety of industries to calculate the value of their work and how this value is divided between employer and employee. It becomes possible to calculate the socially necessary labor time and surplus labor time, worker wages and employer profits in their particular workplace.
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Purple bullying, ten years later: SEIU trustees trample membership rights
At the Labor Notes conference in Chicago this coming weekend, 2,500 rank-and-file activists will attend the largest gathering ever hosted by the now Brooklyn-based labor education project. This will be the nineteenth Labor Notes conference, which started in 1981.
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Kim Jong-un restates his commitment to denuclearization. But will U.S. make way?
With the acceptance of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s invitation, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited China from the 25th of this month to the 28th, for the first time since assuming office in 2011. Timed just before Kim’s meeting with the South Korean President Moon Jae-in the next month, followed by a summit with U.S President Donald Trump-where the prospects of denuclearization is expected to be discussed-this meeting with Xi Jinping, in which Kim has reaffirmed his commitment to denuclearization, has been seen my observers as a crucial diplomatic development.
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Teachers strikes fever spreads
It started with a few hundred West Virginia teachers and school employees pulling one-day walkouts. It became an unqualified victory in that state, which educators elsewhere were quick to emulate.
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Interview with Joseph Halevi
Joseph Halevi was born in 1946 in Haifa, which then was part of British Palestine but since 1948 in Israel. Most of his earlier life was spent in Rome, where he graduated in Philosophy and Political Economy. He has been Professor of Economics at the Interna-ional University College Turin, Italy, since 2010.
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Technology and capitalism 150 years after Das Kapital
Today, one hundred and fifty years after the publication of the first volume of Capital, Marx remains our contemporary.
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How the United States ‘hacked’ Russia’s elections in the 1990s
In a recent interview that went viral, Russian President Vladimir Putin repudiated NBC journalist Megyn Kelly, when she pressed him on the so-called “Russiagate” scandal.
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Who will stop the U.S.-Russia arms race?
President Trump is drawing heat for congratulating Russian President Vladimir Putin on his re-election victory. During a phone call with Putin this week Trump reportedly ignored a written directive from his aides that instructed him, quote, do not congratulate. Speaking to MSNBC, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner echoed the outraged response from Republican Sen. John McCain.
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Surveillance capitalism and the state: Facebook devastated on multiple fronts as data theft crisis grows
Material collected by Cambridge Analytica via Facebook quizzes—which included detailed psychological profiles of unsuspecting users for the purpose of “behavioral microtargeting”—was used by the campaigns of Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and right-wing Super PACs tied to billionaire Robert Mercer.
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U.S. trade deficits, Trump trade policies, and capitalist globalization
Understandably concerned about the consequences of the large and sustained U.S. trade deficit, many workers have grown tired of waiting for so-called market forces to produce balance. Thus, they cheer Trump administration promises to correct the imbalance through tariffs or reworked trade agreements that will supposedly end unfair foreign trade practices.
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The new CIA director nominee and the massacre at My Lai
Protecting those who commit heinous crimes in the name of the U.S. government provides a dangerous precedent and could lead to the conclusion by many in the military and CIA that they can “get away with murder,” Ann Wright observes.
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Today’s capitalism was born in slavery
By 1830, one million Americans, most of them enslaved, grew cotton. Raw cotton was the most important export of the United States, at the center of America’s financial flows and emerging modern business practices, and at the core of its first modern manufacturing industry.
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Buyback this!
I have been arguing, since 2016, that one of the likely outcomes of the kind of corporate tax cuts Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have supported—and, as we saw, eventually rammed through—would be an increase in inequality.
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Half a year on from Hurricane Maria, many Puerto Ricans lack running water and electricity
PUERTO RICANS marked six months today since the formation of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island, causing about $100 billion (£72bn) in damage.
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Utopia and healthcare (part 2)
The dystopia of the American healthcare system certainly invites a utopian response—a ruthless criticism as well as a vision of an alternative.
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The market can’t solve a massacre
The massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, one month ago today, left seventeen children and school staff dead. It was the third highest-casualty mass shooting at an educational institution in American history (after Virginia Tech—32 dead—and Sandy Hook—27) and the ninth highest-casualty single-shooter mass shooting in modern American history.
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Washington’s century-long war on Russia
The United States has launched a three-pronged offensive on Russia. First, it’s attacking Russia’s economy via sanctions and oil-price manipulation. Second, it’s increasing the threats to Russia’s national security by arming and training militant proxies in Syria and Ukraine, and by encircling Russia with NATO forces and missile systems.