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A people’s analysis of a world on fire
As popular movements across the world have been warning, we are undergoing a crisis of the capitalist system globally.
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Class struggle against growth
The Future is Degrowth: A Guide To a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan (Verso 2022) and Climate Change is Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso 2022) are Verso’s two most recent “guides” to combating the climate crisis.
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Free market genocides: The real history of trade
Yves here. This piece gives a wide ranging, historically based description of how free market ideology supported colonialist exploitation and often expropriation under the banner of trade.
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Capital, governments, multilateral agencies and non-governmental organizations
Abstract: Contemporary transnational capital aims at full spectrum dominance over the entire political economy of our planet. We learn from the first sentence of the Foreword of Karl Marx (1859), Zur Kritik derPolitischen Ökonomie: Erstes Heft, that he wished to critically investigate the system of bourgeois economy involving the six domains of capital, landed property, […]
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Without culture, freedom is impossible: The Thirty-Eighth Newsletter (2022)
In 2002, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro Ruz visited the country’s National Ballet School to inaugurate the 18th Havana International Ballet Festival.
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The need for alienation
In his early Paris manuscripts (1844), the young Karl Marx defined “alienation” as an estrangement from the product of one’s labor. The modern factory, with its specialized division-of-labor (which even Adam Smith deplored as necessary but dehumanizing), exponentially increased productive output—but at the price of deskilling and condemning the worker to a single, repetitive task.
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BAR Book Forum: Maano Ramutsindela, Frank Matose, and Tafadzwa Mushonga’s Book, “The Violence of Conservation in Africa”
Maano Ramutsindela, Frank Matose, and Tafadzwa Mushonga: “The book places African states and their behaviors towards African people in conservation spaces within the global environmental agendas of powerful states and well-funded conservation organizations. It interprets conservation as an ideology referencing African landscapes without people. Such an ideology separates people from their biophysical and cultural milieus, leading to conservation violence authorized by states against their citizens.”
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Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation
The Cuban Revolution came about in a country subordinated to the U.S. from all points of view. Although we had the façade of a republic, we were a perfect colony, exemplary in economic, commercial, diplomatic, and political terms, and almost in cultural terms.
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Inflation targeting farce: High costs, moot benefits
Sep 20, 2022 (IPS). Policymakers have become obsessed with achieving low inflation. Many central banks adopt inflation targeting (IT) monetary policy (MP) frameworks in various ways. Some have mandates to keep inflation at 2% over the medium term. Many believe this ensures sustained long-term prosperity.
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It’s time to call it what it is: A capitalism-induced ecological crisis
One-third of Pakistan is under water. Record heat waves blanket the globe driving up temperatures beyond what humans can survive. Polar glaciers are melting much faster than scientists predicted. Droughts, fires and floods are ravaging the planet, forcing the displacement of tens of millions of people. And this is just the beginning.
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My revolutionary inspiration, Barbara Ehrenreich
Remembrances of the late author have focused on her best-selling Nickel and Dimed with only rare acknowledgement of the major roles she played in women’s liberation and U.S. socialism.
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The failed serotonin theory of depression: A Marxist analysis
A recent study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry sent shockwaves across the scientific community and popular outlets as it disproved the predominant “serotonin hypothesis” of depression.
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Degrowth is the only path to a sustainable future
It is incumbent upon us as a species to seriously consider radical alternative, anti-capitalist and ecological futures
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The global South has lost $152 trillion through unequal exchange since 1960
Dependency and world-systems theorists have long argued that “unequal exchange” is a key driver of global inequality.
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Occupy 2.0
Are you ready for Occupy 2.0? Hell Yeah!
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U.S. still fails to grant visas for Russian delegation to attend UNGA
Russia still waits for the U.S. to act on its “legal obligation” and provide the Russian delegation with the necessary visas to attend the UN General Assembly session.
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Re-embedding the economy to rethink (sustainable) development
This famous sentence from Joseph Ki-Zerbo could be translated as ‘we do not enforce development; we develop ourselves.’ However, development paradigms have been largely influenced by external views, mainly those of Western countries.
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Giant mobile billboard campaign for Julian Assange goes viral and will keep on truckin’ round the Nation’s Capital
What started as a one-man “shame-on-you” protest against the Justice Department—launched by comedian-activist Randy Credico—has gone viral as “Buy-a-Billboard-for-Julian” Campaign supported by activists worldwide. Co-Founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, Ben Cohen, pledged: “I’ll Match Each and Every Donation to The Julian Assange Mobile Billboard Campaign”
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Life expectancy and human development in the 21st century
Life expectancy is one of the best measures of human development.
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Background checks, algorithms, and the re-making of the abnormal
A great deal of attention has been paid to the problems of carceral injustice and the increasing use of AI for things such as predictive policing.