Geography Archives: Global

The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C released today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), provides a stark profile of the disruptive climate futures we face with rising temperatures and the ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transitions across major sectors of the global economy that are now needed if warming is to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

In a world of isolation and a left which tends towards despondency, collective joy is our weapon against neoliberalism. Sam Swann reflects on The World Transformed 2018

This secret memo was discovered in the waste basket of a high-ranking staffer in the European Commission. The memo from “the Coalition” begins “Dear Angela, Teresa, Emmanuel…” and has a further list of first names—heads of state and secretaries or ministers of finance, health and human services—were mostly scribbled over with marker.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is soon going to release an important report to help inform global efforts to limit climate change. The special report details the impacts of a global average temperature increase of 1.5°C relative to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pathways to limit temperature increase to that level.

The originality of Marx’s Capital is often underestimated. Countless commentaries have appeared, but only a few have taken the full measure of Capital’s truly unique and counter-intuitive outlook. Critics generally assume that Marx was pursuing familiar questions of economics or philosophy in a fresh way–that his aim was to explain profits, history, or ontology.

The United Nations General Assembly opened its 73rd session this year with a massive downpour in New York City. Flood-waters licked at the edge of the city, as world leaders gathered inside the 18 acres of land on the Turtle Bay area of Manhattan island. U.S. President Donald Trump–as usual–stole all the headlines.

What might socialist development look like? Mainstream conceptions of development deem capital accumulation the bedrock upon which to achieve human development. In these conceptions of change, labouring classes are regarded as fuel for the development motor, which in turn justifies their exploitation and oppression. In contrast, how would a non-exploitative socialist development strategy be operationalised? This article advances a 10-point plan for sustainable socialist transformation.

“All nations of the world should resist socialism and the misery that it brings to everyone,” the U.S. President stated, in what was a cynical and absurd speech, with all the rhetoric of the Cold War.

Business ethics, with Karl Marx

Marx’s thought with regard to ecology has been neglected for a long time or has been misunderstood, both within and outside Marxism. Saito shows that Marx’s concern with the relation between humankind and nature is already present at an early stage of his thinking.

The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was “a trailblazer for independent journalism”, wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common.

Back in 2019, the US/UK trade deal called the Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (ATIP) was signed by Washington and the new Prime Minister of Gt Britain after the failure of the previous administration to secure a deal with the European Union.

Climate change catastrophe is, as this article is written, facing hundreds of thousands on the eastern seaboard of the United States and on the Philippines island of Luzon, as Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut make landfall simultaneously. Mangkhut also threatens Hong Kong, South China and maybe Vietnam.

The Social Wealth Fund plan is insidious in the sense that it has the capacity to redirect vast amounts of energy and resources toward a goal presented as “socialist” when in reality it is fundamentally incompatible with socialism. We must bring the discussion out into the open to prevent such seductive ideas from compromising the basic vision and integrity of socialism.

‘The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.’ —Marx

What does it mean for whites if climate change is real?

Our global ecological crisis has created an increasing interest in Marx’s theory of metabolic rift as a crucial aspect of capitalism (Foster 2013). To appreciate fully how capitalism creates this rift, it is important to examine the human metabolic relation with nature in general and theoretical terms.

What passes for Critical Theory today is nugatory; it is philosophically weak, and politically compromised. In Thompson’s words, the project has ‘abandoned the search for the real mechanisms and sources of social power’.

In Syria, the battle for the province of Idlib has begun. Over the course of the past few years, the remnants of the hardened fighters have retreated to this region on the Syria-Turkish border, where they have been under the overall command of an al-Qaeda inspired group.

Although a truth of science is not equivalent to the consensus of scientists, neither historically nor now, there are times when scientific facts (or truths) are of such compelling importance that a near consensus of scientific practitioners ought to be regarded as fact. Yes, when I began smoking cigarettes at age fifteen there was something […]