Geography Archives: Global

New technological platforms like Uber are promising to reshape society: but what is the impact for people and the world we live in? What does this mean for our environment?

On July 21st Paul Le Blanc sat down at his Pittsburgh home with Vaios Triantafyllou for an interview on issues related to a radicalization process that he sees unfolding in the United States today, and possible revolutionary strategies for the future. Le Blanc is uniquely qualified to address these themes, with more than half a […]

In what I call the pan-European world (North America; western, northern, and southern Europe; and Australasia), the basic electoral choice for the last century or so has been between two centrist parties, center-right versus center-left. There have been other parties further left and further right but they were essentially marginal.

We may be living through one of those moments in history that future historians will look back on as a watershed, a period of flux that marked a transition to quite different economic and social arrangements. Unfortunately, in human history a ‘moment’ can be a very long time.

Growing concerns about climate change and other environmental trends have set off the next round of old Malthusian diagnoses, raising the specter of overpopulation. In this context, it bears repeating that under capitalism the “population problem” is about ideological and social control and has nothing to do with demographics or ecology.

Tariq Ali is a British-Pakistani writer, journalist, historian, filmmaker, political activist, and public intellectual.

This video illustrates how drastically temperatures in each of the world’s 191 countries have changed over the last century.

Monopoly vs. competition

Preliminary indications are that we took roughly a 10% hit to overall traffic in April and May, a significant part of which may have been from the same cause.

The conflict between the needs of the majority and the interests of the few runs throughout our economy.

Amazon is an unusual company. With a market capitalization hitting $500bn at the end of July and no profit to show, it is not a company trying to be a part of the market, it is trying to become the market.

The company said in a blog post that the central purpose of the change to its search algorithm was to give the search giant greater control in identifying content deemed objectionable by its guidelines. It declared that it had “improved our evaluation methods and made algorithmic updates” in order “to surface more authoritative content.”

Marx showed how history was materially transformed through a series of contradictions toward greater complexity, but held out the promise of one particular class representing the universal interests of humanity, if activated within objective conditions by political agency. The problem today is that cyclical and conjunctural crises that have propelled capitalism to hegemonic global reach and to the point of near absolute structural crisis have also eliminated resistance in the form of a consequential collective agent that would avert ecological collapse.

How does race relate to class in capitalism? Is it intrinsic and essential to the reproduction of capital, or merely an accidental feature of particular capitals? In this recent essay by Richard Seymour, and originally published on his Patreon, Seymour considers a debate within Marxism on the relationship between class, race and capitalism.

This is the story of eight people who together own as much wealth as one-half of humanity, or 3.5 billion of the planet’s inhabitants. These eight people have some good friends, who met last weekend in Hamburg. Twenty heads of state discussed over two days the best way to guarantee that their eight friends, and also they themselves, would become even richer. Welcome to the G20.

The latest issue of the London Review of International Law features an interesting review essay by Robert Howse, in which he makes the case for progressive international lawyers attending to the discipline of economics and the insights that can be gained from it, in particular from what he sees as more progressive economists. Howse’s essay […]

Largely unbeknownst to the general public, many media executives and top journalists of almost all major U.S. news outlets, political and business magazines, public broadcasters and press agencies have long been members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The neoliberal right has succeeded in pushing concentrations of wealth and income to an ever smaller group of tycoons at the top, while the pluralizing Left…has had precarious (and highly variable) success in its efforts to advance the standing of African Americans, Hispanics, women, diverse sexualities, and several religious faiths.… One minority placed in a bind between these two opposing drives…has been the white working and lower middle class. Portions of it have taken revenge for this neglect…. That has created happy hunting grounds for a new kind of neo-fascist movement, one that would extend white triumphalism, intimidate the media, attack Muslims, Mexicans, and independent women, perfect the use of Big Lies, suppress minority voting, allow refugee pressures to grow as the effects of the Anthropocene accelerate, sacrifice diplomacy to dangerous military excursions, and displace science and the professoriate as independent centers of knowledge and pubic authority.

John Bellamy Foster’s essay,“Third Nature: Edward Said on Ecology and Imperialism” is taken from Vijay Prashad, ed., Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017), pp. 50-57. This edited collection was organized around Naomi Klein’s 2016 Edward W. Said Lecture, “Let Them Drown,” originally published in the June 2016 issue of […]

Persistent economic stagnation together with neoliberal austerity has at this point seriously undermined the stability of the liberal-democratic state and thus the political command sector of the capitalist system. This has led to a dangerous resurgence of political movements in the fascist genus (fascism, neofascism, post-fascism), representing an alternative way of managing the state of the capitalist system, opposed to liberal democracy.