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States have no inherent ‘right to exist’—but it’s a media fixation on Israel/Palestine
No state has an intrinsic “right to exist.” As international relations scholar Scott Burchill points out, there is no abstract “right to exist” in international law, or in “any serious theory of international relations.”
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The ideology and practice of the Red Nation
Who are The Red Nation? Let them tell you.
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Engels in the crosshairs
Frederick Engels was Karl Marx’s closest friend and collaborator. In the light of the ongoing ecological crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, Engels’ Dialectics of Nature takes on a new significance.
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The biopolitics of nursing homes
Historically, the châteaux of the Loire Valley were assessed by their windows. ‘A fifty-windowed castle’, an onlooker might surmise to suggest its worth. Russian boyars quantified their properties in souls–whether dead or alive, according to Gogol’s Dead Souls.
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The three apartheids of our times (money, medicine, food)
In the early months after the World Health Organisation announced the coronavirus pandemic, the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy wrote of her hope that the pandemic would be a ‘portal, a gateway between one world and the next’.
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Wall Street admits curing diseases is bad for business
Goldman Sachs is openly saying in financial reports that curing people of terrible diseases is not good for business.
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Changing the speculative game
January proved to be an unusual month in the U.S. equity market. The shares of GameStop, a brick-and-mortar retailer of gaming consoles and video games, had in the course of that month risen by close to 2000 per cent.
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Dawn: Marxism and National Liberation
Only at the end of his life did Karl Marx leave the shores of Europe and travel to a country under colonial dominion. This was when he went to Algeria in 1882. ‘For Mussulmans, there is no such thing as subordination’, Marx wrote to his daughter Laura Lafargue.
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Class, Gender, Race & Colonialism: The ‘Intersectionality’ of Marx
It is important to see both Marx’s brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.
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‘We need to talk about abortion as necessary healthcare and a social good’
CounterSpin interview with Kimberly Inez McGuire on abortion realities.
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Commodity cod & factory ships
Beginning a series on the role of fishing in the birth and spread of capitalism, and the role of capitalism in today’s mass extinction of ocean life.
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Are we not all in search of tomorrow
Money floods the system, eats into the loyalties of politicians, corrupts the institutions of civil society, and shapes the narratives of the media. It matters that the dominant classes in our world own the main communications outlets and that these outlets shape the way people decipher the world around us.
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Covid, climate, and ‘dual metabolic rupture’
We thought climate catastrophe the main danger. Now we know there is another. A double-whammy ecological crisis threatens collapse into dystopian chaos.
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How does Washington rob the entire world?
Against the backdrop of the recent change in the White House administration, and the absence of clear harbingers of the United States’ desire to reduce the number of armed conflicts around the world, it is worth noting that in many respects the present conflicts owe their existence to how they are pumped with American weaponry.
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Philosophy and Technology: A Perspective from Health Care and Law
The philosophical understanding of technology historically presents a pendular characteristic, swinging between enthusiasm and fear. The control of nature, the creation of artifacts that substitute what is naturally given, and the liberating while subjugating power of technology all give rise to enchantment and apprehension, which impact the philosophical horizon.
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The global struggle for bodily autonomy
The example of Sparta is an interesting precedent for the way in which people’s bodies have been controlled and utilized beyond their consent throughout history. The control of our bodies presupposes capitalism, but capitalism in turn has entrenched it.
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Caught in tangled web of vaccine nationalism
As known COVID-19 infections exceed 100 million internationally, with more than two million lives lost, rich countries are now quarrelling publicly over access to limited vaccine supplies. With ‘vaccine nationalism’ widespread, multilateral arrangements have not been able to address current challenges well.
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Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism by Ashley J Bohrer reviewed by Christian Lotz
In Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism its author, Ashley J. Bohrer, presents a tour de force, offering and contributing to a wide-ranging debate that has occupied left academic and activist audiences for some time now.
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We should all be outraged, but outrage is not a strong enough word
Someday the world will be free of the coronavirus. Then, we will glance backward at these years of misery inflicted by virions with spike proteins that have struck down millions of people and held social life in its grip.
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Philippines: International pressure to investigate Duterte crimes against humanity
If a United Nations report wouldn’t suffice, an international commission wants to prove there is a practical way justice will be assured and perpetrators of human rights violations in the Philippines be held accountable. The Independent International Commission of Investigation into Human Rights Violations in the Philippines or INVESTIGATE PH had a global launch Thursday, […]