The Chinese central bank’s decision last week to let the yuan depreciate, in three stages by almost 4 percent against the US dollar, was officially explained as a move towards greater market determination of its exchange rate. Though this explanation pacified stock markets around the world, China’s devaluation of the currency portends a serious accentuation […]
Geography Archives: Asia
Countries in the continent of Asia
Europe’s Moment of Truth
Greek Premier Alexis Tsipras’ acceptance of an “austerity package” on July 13, which contained measures rejected by the Greek people in a referendum barely a week before, represents not just an abject surrender by the Syriza government, or a sign of contempt on the part of German finance capital for the Greek electorate; it marks […]
Vulliamy and Hartmann on Srebrenica: A Study in Propaganda
In their recent article on “How Britain and the US Decided to Abandon Srebrenica to Its Fate” (Observer, July 5, 20151), Ed Vulliamy, a veteran reporter for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and Florence Hartmann, a reporter and former spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia […]
Sendika.Org Will Not Be Silenced!
We won’t accept oppression, and we won’t bow to censorship. To the attention of friend and foe alike: Amid its murder of socialist youth via the jihadist gangs that it has fed at the cost of many lives in the Middle East, its call to war amid the bombing of Kandil, as well as its […]
The Spectre of the Thirties
The Reserve Bank of India, as is to be expected, has been denying that its governor Raghuram Rajan had ever suggested that the world was facing the possibility of a 1930s-type Great Depression. Members of the “global financial community” are not supposed to say such things; so even if Dr Rajan did, a denial was […]
“Universal Health Care” in Free Market Paradise
Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Below is the editorial in its June 2015 issue. — Ed. The essence of “free market” ideology is exposed clearly when the health of the human body is at issue. When outcomes are determined on the basis of […]
The Idea of India
When the ‘fascist’ Narendra Modi was coming close to becoming India’s Prime Minister, intellectuals told us that he would be a threat to the very idea of an inclusive and democratic India. Amartya Sen declared that he cannot be part of an India which has Modi as its PM. Modi is now PM, but nowhere […]
A Doctor’s Degree at 102
102-year-old Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport receives diploma 77-years after Nazis denied it http://t.co/KBB4iyTPfo — Ruptly (@Ruptly) June 9, 2015 The frail, white-haired little lady stepping slowly up onto the stage of the Babylon cinema theater in Berlin — to giant applause — was not wearing a collegiate cap and gown. But she had undoubtedly made academic history. […]
Unending Hard Times: Whose Is the Toil and Whose Is the Wealth?
John Bellamy Foster and Robert W McChesney. The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012; Kharagpur, India: Cornerstone Publications, 2013. pp x + 227. Rs 150. The secular decline of decadal average annual real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of the […]
Marta Harnecker on New Paths Toward 21st Century Socialism
Introduction by Richard Fidler Among the many panels and plenaries at the Conference of the Society for Socialist Studies, which met in Ottawa June 2-5, was a Book Launch for Marta Harnecker’s latest English-language book, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism (translated by Federico Fuentes), Monthly Review Press. The featured speaker […]
Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China
China’s leadership has called in recent years for the creation of a new “ecological civilization.” Some have viewed this as a departure from Marxism and a concession to Western-style “ecological modernization.” However, embedded in classical Marxism, as represented by the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was a powerful ecological critique. Marx explicitly defined […]
The Declining World Foreign Exchange Reserves
If one adds up the foreign exchange reserves of all the countries in the world, including under the term “reserves” what these countries hold in the form of gold, US dollars, other reserve currencies, Special Drawing Rights of the IMF, and also liquid assets such as short-term Treasury Bills of the US government, then the […]
Kashmir — Hell of Internal Colonialism
When it comes to Kashmir, official mendacity in India seems to cross all bounds. So even a prominent member of the Indian Establishment felt that the Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar’s recent (May 22) open advocacy of “kaante-se-kaanta-nikaalte-hein” (a-thorn-to-remove-a-thorn) counterinsurgency tactics was “terrible” and that he should withdraw his out-of-line statement forthwith. “You have to neutralise […]
Misconceptions about Neo-Liberalism
Neo-Liberalism is often seen only as an economic policy. This per se might not matter, since a specific set of economic measures do, no doubt, fall under the rubric of neo-liberalism. But by reducing neo-liberalism only to a set of economic measures, a misleading impression is often conveyed that this set of measures are a […]
Final Solution Revisited (Work in Progress: Gujarat 10 Years Later)
Gomtipur (Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India) was once called the Manchester of Gujarat. Did the decline of the mills contribute to the rise of the rightwing? Gujarat/ Malegaon films’ update: April 14. 2015 (rakeshs.distribution@gmail.com) #Crowdfunding #FinalSolutionRevisited… Posted by Rakesh Sharma on Tuesday, April 14, 2015 Rakesh Sharma is an internationally-acclaimed Indian documentary filmmaker. Follow Sharma on […]
Challenging American Exceptionalism
President Barack Obama stood behind the podium and apologized for inadvertently killing two Western hostages — including one American — during a drone strike in Pakistan. Obama said, “one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional, is our willingness to confront squarely our […]
Remembering Robert Weil: Intellectual and Political Activist
Robert Weil, author of the powerful critique of Deng Xiaoping’s “reforms” entitled Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of Market Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996, republished in India by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur), quietly passed away in California on 12 March 2014. Almost a year after, on 15 February 2015 a […]
Anatomy of a Hatchet Job: Regarding Women Cross DMZ in CNN’s Situation Room
A television news program opens with a clip of marching soldiers, an obligatory image when the subject is North Korea. A voiceover intones: “A bold, ambitious plan apparently sanctioned by Kim Jong Un. Is he in league with the women’s group to promote peace between North and South Korea?” The program in question is the […]
The Writing Is on the Wall: Join Veterans For Peace’s Memorial Day Letter-Writing Campaign
The Pentagon is intent upon taking control of how we remember the American War in Vietnam. Their myth-making has already begun and will continue for a decade of fifty-year commemorations. Some of us are not going to stand by and let this happen. We are fighting back. We in Veterans For Peace are taking our […]
Syriza’s Slip
The victory of a Left Alliance, Syriza, in the Greek elections on January 25, was a matter of great significance, especially because that victory was based on a promise that Syriza would get rid of the memoranda imposing austerity on Greece by the “Troika” (the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF). Syriza’s […]
