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Anti-materialism, capitalism, and violence against the human body: some preliminary comments
There are two kinds of on-going ‘attack’ on the materiality of the body (and nature) in capitalist society. A discursive attack inspired by post-structuralism; and an actual, objectively-existing, material attack by capital and its state. The latter is the focus of this article.
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Five revolutions: how bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis
“Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies, the essential element of which consists in continual metabolic interchange with the natural environment outside them.”
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Eleanor Marx: the Jewess of Jew’s walk
Eleanor Marx changed the world. Foremother of socialist-feminism, trade unionist, internationalist, her father’s first biographer and editor of his key works, she had left a colossal heritage in many spheres of life.
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Lies, damned lies, and neocolonialism
If we don’t start challenging neoliberal hegemony soon, the non-West will eventually have little choice but to challenge it for themselves.
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Exploitation and super-exploitation
Extreme rates of exploitation in the Global South is a palpable, directly observable fact. We don’t need a theory to know this but we do need a theory if we are to understand what we can see and work out the consequences that flow from it.
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We struggle against illegitimate public and private debt which are at the core of the capitalist system
What we are fighting is a capitalist system that destroys nature.
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Commoditisation and the public sphere
The commoditisation of education which makes it completely incapable of providing students with the wherewithal to engage in any active and worthwhile public discourse, has proceeded apace under the neo-liberal regime.
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Precarious work and contemporary capitalism
Unions have no choice but to put major resources into confronting the reality of precarious work and organising around whatever can be won in the workplace. Otherwise they will simply wither.
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Ecological destruction in the name of science
How has a science focused on capital accumulation been used to overturn tried and true models of agriculture to the detriment of the environment and indigenous livelihoods?
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The danger of being wrong about animal rights
Dogs and suitcases are personal property under the law. For the most part, that enables humans to use, neglect, and abuse them indiscriminately. Dogs and other nonhumans have been property at least since the invention of money as suggested by the common etymologies of “chattel,” “cattle,” and “capital.”
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Marx’s concept of class
The concept of class poses profound problems for theory and practice. This is true across the academic disciplines and in the confused incoherence around “class issues” when concepts of class surface in economic, political and cultural discourses.
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The vision of the new society in Marx’s Capital
Marx’s Capital has been heralded for many things, but providing an exhaustive account of a future socialist society isn’t one of them.
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Working Document 1: In the ruins of the present
Raoul Peck, the Haitian lmmaker, opens his film—Der Junge Karl Marx (2017)—in the forests of Prussia. Peasants gather fallen wood. They look cold and hungry.… Some of the peasants die. Even fallen wood is not allowed to them.
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Can the Monroe Doctrine triumph in the 21st century?
Although many of us would like to answer this question with a resounding “No!” and insist that our region is well prepared to defend itself against the 1823 pretensions of President James Monroe, with his “America for Americans” -which must be understood as “America for the United States”- it would be a serious mistake to underestimate the risks.
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Gender and capital 150 years later
We are witnessing an era of conservative backlash on gender rights. Nearly across the board, women make less than men, make up a majority of those in poverty (70% of those in extreme poverty), and face the real prospect of becoming a victim of sexual violence (1-3 internationally).
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Google and corporate news giants forge alliance to defeat independent journalism
The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”
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Imperialist realities vs. the myths of David Harvey
When David Harvey says “the historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries has largely been reversed over the last thirty years,” his readers will reasonably assume that he refers to a defining feature of imperialism, namely the plunder of living labour and natural wealth in colonies and semi-colonies by rising capitalist powers in Europe and North America. Indeed, he leaves no doubt about this, since he prefaced these words with reference to “the old categories of imperialism.” But here we encounter the first of his many obfuscations.
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Does capitalism depend on credit?
Credit is essential for the continuation of capitalism but also a major source of its instability, writes the Marx Memorial Library.
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded & Gregg Levine on Fukushima Daichi radiation
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz tells us about her new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment.
Then we talk with journalist Gregg Levine about his special investigation for The Nation Magazine into the deaths and illnesses afflicting U.S. sailors exposed to radiation from the Fukushima Daichi meltdown. It’s titled “Seven Years on, Sailors Exposed to Fukushima Radiation Seek Their Day in Court.”
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In defence of Metabolic Rift Theory
One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.