Geography Archives: Asia

  John Bellamy Foster is best-known as author of Marx’s Ecology (2000; in which he corrects the popular misapprehension that Marx did not ‘get’ environmental limits), and as editor of Monthly Review (monthlyreview.org), the journal founded by Marxist economist Paul Sweezy in the late 1940s.  In his latest book, The Endless Crisis (2012; written with […]

Russia, as travelers have noted over the centuries, is immense.  Most of it is far from large bodies of water.  And yet, in a first visit after many years, I came upon some unusual islands right in the heart of the country.  But they were not islands in the geographic sense.  Some were children’s islands. […]

The International Crisis Group (ICG) sells itself as “working to prevent conflict worldwide” but there is one country where their mission looks more like promoting rather than preventing conflict.  Exhibit A is their report on Venezuela, released on Friday. There is a lot wrong with this report — most of it reads like a statement […]

The official death toll from the April collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which housed clothing factories, has now passed 1,100.  How exactly will the staggering costs of that overwhelming tragedy be figured?  Will they count as part of capitalism’s contribution to economic development across Asia, Africa, and Latin America? In capitalism’s […]

  Red Ant Dream / Maati Ke Laal (2013) 120 minutes; English version, with subtitles Direction: Sanjay Kak Photography: Ranjan Palit, Sanjay Kak and Setu Sound Design: Madhu Apsara Writers: Sanjay Kak and Tarun Bharatiya Editing: Tarun Bharatiya www.redantdream.com You are far away from the sterile atmosphere of much of academia with its politically correct […]

“These people who are commonly known as leaders view politics and religion as that crippled, lame and injured man, displaying whom our beggars normally beg for money.  These so-called leaders go about carrying the carcasses of politics and religion on their shoulders, and to simple-minded people who are in the habit of accepting every word […]

The battle of the Hong Kong dockers, as Union of Hong Kong Dock Workers (UHKDW) Secretary Wong Yu Loy reveals, was important not only because of the rarity of strikes in Hong Kong, or because it was a pitched battle with Hong Kong’s wealthiest corporate magnate, but also because of the way corporate globalization set […]

Laal is a revolutionary band from Pakistan.  Lyrics by Habib Jalib.  Directed by Taimur Rahman. | Print

Since Marx, we know that what characterizes and differentiates societies is the way in which they organize the production, distribution and use of the material and symbolic resources
they possess. In other words, the mode of production¹ is what defines the material content of the social life of the distinct human territorial collectivities (nations, peoples, communities), within which there can be differentiated the historically specific form in which each of their components develop, and the manner in which various existing modes of production interrelate within the same society.

  Bangladesh stands petrified as an unprecedented horror unfolds in Savar, near the capital city of Dhaka.  In the morning of the 24th of April, a nine-story building crashed down in Savar Bazaar.  Thousands of garments workers were in the building.  The death toll, as of this writing, was more than 175, with over 1,000 […]

  On 22nd April, Roza Tuletaeva, one of the activists from the Zhanaozen oil workers’ strike, started a hunger strike.  She has taken this extreme step because she has been refused essential medical aid at the women’s prison colony in Atyrau, where she is currently serving a lengthy jail sentence.  She was arrested after the […]

In the final weeks of a six-month prison sentence for protesting remote-control murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, I can only reflect on my time of captivity in light of the crimes that brought me here.  In these ominous times, it is America’s officials and judges and not the anarchists […]

  Aijaz Ahmad: Ever since this young man [Kim Jong-un] became the president, the head of state, of North Korea . . . the West has been testing his will, to see whether he can be stared down. . . .  Every year these very provocative war games take place, involving South Korea and the […]

The late, late snow has finally disappeared from Berlin’s streets.  Visible once again, here and there, are the “stumble stones” — Stolpersteine in German. Many Berlin tourists will enjoy the night life.  They may also look upwards — at the giant TV tower, the Brandenburg Gate, at ancient and less ancient churches.  There is a […]

A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000 years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else. This is not to confuse intelligent life with the existence of life which, from its elemental forms in our solar system, emerged millions of years ago. […]

Part 1: Mexican Workers Win Ownership of Tire Plant With Three-Year Strike “If the owners don’t want it, let’s run it ourselves.”  When a factory closes, the idea of turning it into a worker-owned co-operative sometimes comes up — and usually dies. The hurdles to buying a plant, even a failing plant, are huge, and […]

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa‘s idea that we are not “living in an epoch of change” but rather “in a change of epoch” is very much to the point.  There is an obvious worldwide decline of existing imperialisms and historic changes in the correlation of social, class, and nation-state forces.  There have arisen popular movements of […]

  This article was featured in the March 2013 issue of Analytical Monthly Review, a sister edition of Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. — Ed. Some young people gathered on the crossroads of Shahbagh in Dhaka on February 5, 2013, to protest against the judgment of the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) which […]

Tunis, Tunisia Tens of thousands of people marched through downtown Tunis on Tuesday in a spirited march celebrating the beginning the 13th World Social Forum — the first to be held in an Arab country.  The majority of marchers were from Tunisia and neighboring nations, but there was substantial representation from Europe, as well as […]

When Hugo Chávez triumphed in the 1998 presidential elections, the neoliberal capitalist model was already foundering.  The choice then was none other than whether to re-establish the neoliberal capitalist model — clearly with some changes including greater concern for social issues, but still motivated by the same logic of profit seeking — or to go […]