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New film documents life of anti-war writer
Vonnegut, like the novel’s Billy Pilgrim, witnessed the effects of the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II—a massacre and a war crime. In the novel, Pilgrim mentally flees the terrible memories by fantasising about extraterrestrial time travel, but can’t stop his mind from straying back to the trauma.
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Climate crisis poses stark choice: Socialism or Extinction
In his latest book, Socialism or Extinction: The Meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Disaster, Martin Empson neatly lays out his argument as to why the climate crisis cannot be solved under capitalism.
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Blue borders, dark bodies: The Mediterranean as a site of racist murder
Borders barely exist for these white bodies; rather, borders are lived as a hot summer inconvenience of queues at airport security. But for the dark bodies carrying their Global South passports, the Mediterranean is a humiliating border.
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Walter Rodney: A people’s professor
Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript.
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Fifty Years After ‘The Limits to Growth’: Dennis Meadows interviewed by Juan Bordera
Dennis Meadows: Climate change, inflation, food shortages are symptoms of a bigger problem.
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Review: ‘COVID-19 and the Structural Crises of our Time’
Covid-19 and the Structural Crises of our Time (CSCT) is a very timely and important book, written by Mah-Hui Lim, a one-time sociology professor who went on to work in international banking, and Michael Heng Siam-Hang, a former professor of management studies.
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Red Theory: Marxism and the Law of Value
In our previous article we looked at what a commodity is and examined use-value and exchange-value. This discussion of value is a cornerstone of Marx’s critique of political economy. The value of any commodity is equal to the socially necessary labor time required to produce that commodity.
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How private corporations stole the sea from the Commons
For most of human history, the oceans have been seen as a global commons, the benefits and resources of which belong to us all in equal measure. But our seas–and the marine environment as a whole–are being ravaged by exploitation for corporate profit. The result is a social, economic and ecological crisis that threatens the very life support system of the Earth.
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Power: A re-envisaged state and energy justice
Our contemporary era of perpetual crises demands, we contend, a critical reappraisal of the state’s potential role, to supplant the predominant market-led responses to crisis, to advance a more equitable society. Historically, all major theories of the state—liberal and radical—have been generated in tumultuous eras.
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Economics and the law of the hammer
As yours truly has reported repeatedly during the last couple of years, university students all over the world are increasingly beginning to question if the kind of economics they are taught–mainstream economics–really is of any value. Some have even started to question if economics is a science.
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Marx’s ‘Capital’
Capitalism comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. So concludes Marx after a lengthy account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism near the end of Capital, Volume I.
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Nationalise energy firms, unions demand as BP reports £6.9bn profits and energy bills soar
Fossil fuel firm’s profits are ‘an insult to families struggling to get by,’ TUC says.
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Inflation as a political power play gone wrong – Project Syndicate op-e
Pivotal economic crises frequently evoke multiple explanations that are all correct while missing the point.
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Former Bolivian President Evo Morales calls for a Global campaign to eliminate NATO
In interview with British journalist, Morales says the U.S. uses NATO to provoke wars and sell weapons. U.S./UK-backed coup against him in 2019 was undertaken for lithium and because his government advanced an alternative economic model to the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”
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Glen Ford’s irreplaceable journalism
In the best sense of the word a journalist is someone who brings to the public sphere accurate, well sourced information, and rigorous analysis.
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Two hundred years of Mendel’s genetic revolution and the fight against scientific racism
In July this year, the world is celebrating 200 years of Gregor Mendel’s birth, widely accepted as the father of genetics.
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All that I ask is that you fight for peace today: The Thirtieth Newsletter (2022)
Gas shipments through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which runs from Russia to Germany, were reduced to 40% of capacity in June, a cut that Moscow said was due to delays in the servicing of a turbine by the German firm Siemens.
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Rebuilding collective intelligence
Human capital theory cannot solve our economic woes. David Ridley says we need a socialist alternative.
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From Commodity Fetishism to Teleological Positing: Lukács’s Concept of Labor and Its Relevance
The concept of labor constituted a pivotal problematic in Georg Lukács’s theoretical development throughout his Marxist years.
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Studying society for the working class: Marx’s first preface to “Capital”
In the preface to the first edition of volume one of Capital, dated July 25, 1867, Marx introduces the book’s “ultimate aim”: “to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society”. Looking back 155 years later, it’s clear the book not only accomplished that aim but continues to do so today.