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Geography Archives: Global

Abstract landscape following your fascinations (Oil painting by Holly Van Hart)

Inequality and the ecological transition

Last month Branko Milanovic published a blog post about the Yellow Vest movement against the fuel tax in France. He was worried–like many analysts–that the uprising proves it will be virtually impossible to roll out the policies necessary to reduce carbon emissions. He’s convinced that people simply won’t accept it.

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Red-Green Revolution

Victor Wallis – Red-Green Revolution

The scale of environmental crisis is absolutely terrifying. So I was very pleased to read Victor Wallis’ new book Red-Green Revolution which aims to both explain capitalism and environmental destruction and offer a clear strategy for building a movement to challenge both.

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Silvia Federici

Marx imagined a totally asexual worker

​Silvia Federici is one of the most important feminist thinkers of our time–anyone looking for profound analyses of the role of housework, violence against women, or the importance of control over the body in capitalism inevitably encounters her writings.

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Interview: Why We Occupied Our General Motors Factory in Oshawa ... Labor Notes

General Motors’ factories should not be closed

It’s become something of a shopworn cliché to say that “for every problem, there’s an opportunity.” However, I submit that this adage might well apply to General Motors’ November 26th announcement that it will be eliminating more than 14,000 jobs and closing seven factories worldwide by the end of next year, including four factories in […]

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People's Climate March - Wikipedia

When “green” doesn’t “grow”

The onslaught of extreme weather and the increasingly stark scientific assessment leave no doubt that we face an ecological and civilizational emergency. But in the year since COP23 in Bonn, Germany, a constant stream of headlines and reports have confirmed that governments are not on track to meet their climate commitments.

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Living Amidst the Catastrophes of “the Living Contradiction”

Living amidst the catastrophes of “the Living Contradiction”

“By its nature,” Marx writes in the climactic passage of a magnificent but very dense section of the Grundrisse, capital “posits a barrier to labor and value-creation in contradiction to its tendency to expand them boundlessly. And in as much as it both posits a barrier specific to itself, and on the other side equally […]

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Map of NATO enlargement since 1949

Is Russia imperialist?

Is Russia Imperialist is a look at capitalist Russia today and its place in the world economic system. In this article we look at the degree capitalist Russia today shares in the features outlined by Lenin in his book Imperialism. We consider the role Russian capitalist monopolies play in the world imperialist system, the nature […]

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Wiktor Szymanowicz : Barcroft Media via Getty Images

The political roots of falling wage growth

It’s now official: workers around the world are falling behind. The International Labor Organization’s (ILO) latest Global Wage Report finds that, excluding China, real (inflation-adjusted) wages grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in 2017, down from 1.8% in 2016. That is the slowest pace since 2008.

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Karl Marx statue - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) ABC

Marx for me (and hopefully for others too)

Yesterday I had a conversation about my work, about how and why I started studying inequality more than 30 years ago, what was my motivation, how it was  to work on income inequality in an officially classless (and non-democratic) society, did the World Bank care about inequality etc.

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Political correctness and the rise of the right

Political correctness and the rise of the right

The honest answer is that I was asked to write something reflecting on Trump by my then editor at Scribe. In the immediate wake of the 2016 presidential election, many people were dumbfounded by the news out of the U.S. How could such an odious figure–such a transparent bigot and fraud–win power?

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