Geography Archives: Global

In parts one and two of this series I’ve talked about the fact that there are two conflicting versions of intersectionality, one employed by some honest to god leftists who reach backward across decades to ventriloquize the term into the mouths of the Cohambee comrades, of Audre Lord, even of Claudia Jones and Sojourner Truth, and how this exists alongside another, hegemonic version of intersectionality deployed by the corporate funded lawyers, media and the nonprofit sector which invented the term in the first place for reasons Cohambee or Claudia Jones would never touch.

After the twin victories of Brexit and Trump in 2016, observers across the political spectrum described a face-off between populism and neoliberal globalism. Davos Man, we were told, stood shamed before the wrath of the masses. In a series of electoral defeats for the center and left, the world’s elites were reaping the fruits of the inequality and democratic disempowerment they had sown.

TODAY’S ruling that oil giant Shell cannot be pursued in British courts for activities that took place in Nigeria is bad news for poor communities the world over—and for the planet.

Just nine years ago, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, Newsweek declared that “we are all socialists now.”

The capitalist crisis will deepen as new bubbles created by easy money begin to burst.

In a couple of previous posts on Legal Form, Rob Hunter has reminded us of the importance and aptness of a Marxist approach to the analysis of public law. Hunter’s intervention could not be more timely: even after the economic and financial crisis, and despite the comeback of Marxism as a relevant intellectual source at least within certain legal domains (think, for example, of international law) [1], there has not yet been a Marxist revival in constitutional studies. One possible explanation for this phenomenon (though likely not the only one) is the discredit and almost total obliteration of the best-known Marxist contribution to constitutional studies: Lassalle’s notion of the material constitution.

Marx’s ‘Capital’ is one of the most important texts of the modern era and continues to resonate today. Professor David Harvey, the world’s leading expert on Karl Marx, explains the continued importance of Marx’s analysis and how we can apply it to today’s economy and society.

Foucault, Chomsky, and Fanon are all radical leftists in one way or another.

My view is that liberal critics of populism, standing on their heads, get it wrong. If made to stand on their feet, they’d have to admit that populism actually represents the failure of liberal democracy.

I had a friend who as a child wrote to Ursula Le Guin. He was feeling miserable, bad things had happened to him and he wanted to run away to Earthsea. He told her that he felt ashamed that he wasn’t facing up to life, felt it was a failing that he just wanted to live a fantasy.

Veteran labor activist Bill Fletcher jr. talks about how capitalism is based on the slave trade and colonialism, the Black contribution to Marxism, and the need to organize.

1. Introduction Capitalist development is based upon labour exploitation and environmental destruction. Through sexism and racism it has established second class citizens who are doubly-exploited. Democracy under capitalism is of the ‘low-intensity’ variety—where decision over economic resource generation and use are off-limits to the majority of the population, and where political systems facilitate the (mis)representation […]

Karl Marx was a materialist – more than that, he was a historical materialist. Marxists, in order to establish their credentials in political arguments, frequently claim that they are giving a materialist analysis of a phenomenon. The claim that a materialist analysis is being provided both attests to the Marxist credentials of the argument, and validates the attitudes and actions that follow from that analysis.

For those on the Left, finance seems like a bourgeois pastime. Many of us outright despise the stuff. While the petit bourgeoisie drool over dividends and diversification, we prefer to focus on crisis and class.

A literalist, out-of-context reading of Marx can get one into trouble, or at the very least, leave you hopelessly confused. For help, I look to David Harvey. Perhaps the preeminent expert on Marx’s Capital in the English-speaking world, Harvey meticulously reconstructed Marx’s approach to money in his major treatise, Limits to Capital (1982).

Editors’ note: This is the first in a series of ENTITLE blog articles that critically engage with the ongoing discussions about “eco-modernist socialism” and “communist futurism”, projected in Jacobin magazine’s climate change issue ‘Earth, Wind, and Fire.’ 

Forida is a 22-year-old sewing machine operator in a clothing factory in Dahka, Bangladesh. She often works 12-hour days producing clothes for brands such as H&M and Target. Sometimes, during busy production cycles, the hours are even longer.

Since the collapse of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, many on the left seem to have swallowed the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism.

According to John Bellamy Foster, the world environmental crisis is a systemic crisis, a product of capitalism, and requires systemic changes in the capitalist system. He says that environmental sustainability is incompatible with capitalism.

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated the obvious: The United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. He also said the public allowing this violence would lead to a kind of national spiritual death that would continue to make the U.S. state a danger to the world.