MR Online
A Monthly Review project providing daily news and analysis of capitalism, imperialism and inequality rooted in Marxian political economy
The current ecological and social crisis, a crisis which has seen its effects increased by a public health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is a crisis which raises serious concerns over environmental sustainability and social polarization and which has a fundamental cause: the blind logic pursued by our economy system, where everything is secondary […]
he current pandemic is giving humanity a crash course in apocalypse management. Whether COVID-19 is actually apocalyptic or not is debatable, but the pandemic has many of the characteristics that we associate with something of that scale.
Is oil a stranded asset? Or is the system defunct? This thought-provoking talk was given by Andy Higginbottom, Associate Professor in the Politics Department of Kingston University in Britain. In this talk he looks at Marx’s theory of rent as surplus profit and its parallels within the oil markets.
Karl Marx has a reputation for being one of the foremost critics of liberalism and the discourse of rights. In Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism, political theorist Igor Shoikhedbrod contests this simplistic assumption.
The World is in Their Care calls our awareness down upon those who do the daily work which improves, repairs, and sustains life. All labor is shared. Bless the listener without whom their is no poet. This poem is dedicated to Jerry Tucker.
Taking a fresh look at animal production also involves considering its effect on world hunger.
The Keynes crisis, the Minsky crisis and the Means crisis
On 23 March, the UN Secretary General António Guterres called for a ceasefire. ‘The fury of the virus’, he said, ‘illustrates the folly of war’. In a recent report, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) wrote that the ‘call for a global ceasefire has not had the desired result’.
Sarah Jones, in The Coronavirus Class War in New York Magazine, does a neat, tidy job of kneecapping the notion that the anti-lockdown protests are manned by workers who want to get back to their jobs so they can start making money again.
There is a view of human history which holds effectively that there is little difference in essentials between modern, capitalist society and the societies of the past.
Infections with SARS-CoV-2 are now widespread, and as of 11 March 2020, 121,564 cases have been confirmed in more than 110 countries, with 4,373 deaths.
Here in the U.S., agribusiness lines up with pharmaceutical and military contractors in terms of being a political force to be reckoned with and, in effect, help run the country. Their needs are protected so that these pathogens have the best lawyers on the planet.
IN A PANDEMIC, “ESSENTIAL” LABORERS ARE WORKING, BUT THE LABOR MARKET ISN’T.
Mass deforestation, industrialised animal agriculture and reductions in biodiversity are among a number of factors which increase the likelihood of the emergence and spread of dangerous pathogens such as the coronavirus disease 2019, explains scientist Dr Rob Wallace in an exclusive interview with Sputnik.
Scientists are struggling to understand how Covid-19 affects people differently. Socialist Worker shows that the construct of race has more basis in exploitation than biology.
The U.S. veto trashes the UN’s efforts to convince armed factions in more than a dozen countries to call for temporary truces as the world battles the pandemic.
On 21 April, the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) David Beasley said that the world was experiencing a ‘hunger pandemic’. That day, the Global Network Against Food Crises and the Food Security Information Network released the 2020 Global Report on Food Crises.
Early evidence on the intensity and drivers of the COVID-induced crisis in the U.S. and Europe suggests that the official response may lengthen the recession and delay recovery
In particular, the existence of a reserve army serves to discipline labor, keeping its wage demands in check, since employed workers are forced to compete with unemployed and underemployed workers for the available jobs.
Every degree of global warming will push a billion people out of the human survival zone.
MR Press News Climate & Capitalism Monthly Review