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A Monthly Review project providing daily news and analysis of capitalism, imperialism and inequality rooted in Marxian political economy
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has just released a brief—but very important—report on the impact of heat stress on workers. What the ILO finds is that the areas of the world most threatened by heat deaths of workers are Southern Asia and Western Africa.
Peter Linebaugh’s book comes with a long subtitle, a pithy summary of its contents: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, of Kate and Ned Despard. His timeframe is the period between 1789 and 1804 when, in his view, a series of connected events took […]
It’s officially summer. Time for a swim, a cold beer, and a new slew of catastrophic climate changes…
Michael Roberts takes issue with my blog post “Why Stagnation,” which presented the analysis in a recent article I coauthored with Deepankar Basu. We argued that social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory can explain the current stagnation in the U.S. economy.
When I was ten years old, I read and re-read a stack of decades-old Modern Mechanix magazines that I found in my grandfather’s basement. Throughout the Great Depression, MM regaled its readers with breathless accounts of technological marvels that were going to change the world, very soon.
Starting in the late 1960s, ‘radical geography’ became a crucial avenue of intellectual innovation in contemporary Marxism. For a generation, its basic orientation was two-fold: (1) politicise ‘space’ by challenging the stranglehold of specialists (architects, urban planners, designers, military planners, regional and development officials) in the spatial disciplines, and (2) insist, simultaneously, on the importance […]
Alan MacLeod interviewed Noam Chomsky via Skype on March 13, 2018, for MacLeod’s new book Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. They discussed the origins of the classic work of media criticism (co-authored with Edward Herman) Manufacturing Consent, the role of that book’s “propaganda model” today, Google and Facebook, Donald Trump and Russia, […]
“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” ― Philip K. Dick
Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism offers an account of why these earlier expectations were not matched by experience. While the contradictions of market solutions have not gone away, the difference this time is that we are just over a decade away from the IPCC’s 2030 benchmark for 1.5°C. The concentration and centralisation of emissions […]
Chapter 25 of Karl Marx’s, Capital, vol. 1 (“The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”), not only explains the working conditions of the world’s peoples today; it also explains the conditions of our whole existence. Marx’s general law is nothing less than the lever upon which all our lives now pivot.
In 21st century capitalism, Marxist theory remains a crucial means to interpret the socioeconomic present and potentials for political change. But Marxism as a method is also important culturally, in understanding the ideas, attitudes and beliefs that exist today, and how they have developed historically through various social forces.
The capitalist extracts surplus labour from his workpeople, for which he does not pay.
This is the second in a series of posts comprising a symposium on the Marxist tradition of state theory and its contemporary lineages.
Our worlds richest have a great deal of money. They also have the power to decide whether our civilization sinks or swims. So what can we do?
“For humanity, comrades,” writes Frantz Fanon at the close of his monumental The Wretched of the Earth, “we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’. Terrible inequalities in our world keep humanity divided.
The climate apocalypse will soon kill all of us (including the plutocrats), if we don’t take drastic measures right away. But the plutocrats are blocking those measures, because they don’t want anything cutting into their short-term profits. In this video I discuss the crazy culture that has us headed toward extinction. To survive, we need […]
The inversion of Hegel’s dialectics is based on the assumption that it is the “self-development of the idea” of which, therefore, the dialectic of facts is only the image, while the dialectic in our minds is but the reflection of the actual development taking place in the natural world and human history in obedience to […]
In total, Avaaz reported over 500 suspect pages and groups to Facebook, which were followed by nearly 32 million people and generated over 67 million “interactions” (comments, likes, shares) in the last three months alone.
No matter how successful the Right may be in the short-run in mobilising people around a divisive agenda, it is incapable of leading them out of the current economic crisis. It is only the Left that can provide a way out.
“If you can actually influence how people think, through social media, then you can have a lot more control” of their political behavior, said Valentine.
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