Geography Archives: Global

The question of economic growth and its relation to the climate crisis is a subject of increasing discussion. Here we offer a Marxist view on this critical issue for the environmental movement.

There are works that come down to us with question-marks blazing like sawed-off shotguns, scattering here and there and everywhere sparks that illuminate our own restless search for answers. Ralegh’s so-called Cynthia cycle, Sade’s 120 Days, Fourier’s New Amorous World, Lautremont’s Poesies, Lenin’s notes on Hegel, Randolph Bourne’s essay on The State Jacque Vaches War letters, Duchamp’s Green Box, the Samuel Greenberg manuscripts.

The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.

“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” (Karl Marx)

Capitalism is deeply unjust. It is a system under which labour power has itself become a commodity and is bought and sold on the market like any other object of exchange

We live in an age of unprecedented historical crisis. Its severity can be gauged by the fact that we are not facing a more or less extensive cyclic crisis of capitalism as experienced in the past, but the deepening structural crisis of the capital system itself.

In complete contrast to its founding ideals, the WHO is now captured by wealthy countries and corporations at the cost of millions of poor globally.

The world’s most sophisticated commercially-available spyware may be being abused, according to an investigation by 17 media organisations in ten countries.

Taken together, these form a devastating critique of world renowned Marxist David Harvey’s insistence that the concept and theory of imperialism is not relevant to understand today’s world.

The 20th century muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair once opined that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

This process started in the second half of the 1880s with Friedrich Engels’ editorial interventions on Marx’s manuscripts related to the theme of Capital within his incomplete research programme for a Critique of Political Economy.

Umberto Eco’s inventory of proto-fascist characteristics comprised 14 elements. It will not be difficult for us to recognise the variant of many of these in Narendra Modi’s New India.

The current complex of COVID-induced crises fits hand-in-glove with the system’s “normal” operation. Stability has been the delusional realm of a small sliver of the Global North, awash in post-World War Two imperialism and the repeated reinvention (and re-imposition) of various plantation systems of cheap and racialized labor.

Released last year but receiving as yet very little English-language press coverage, Der Junge Karl Marx is a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man. That said, I cannot vouch for the chase scene. Regarding which, more anon.

Writing his 1974 book Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, U.S. Marxist and political economist Harry Braverman noted that Karl Marx had demonstrated that processes of production are constantly transformed by the driving force of capital accumulation.

The United Nations Food Systems Summit has become one of the most controversial events of this year due to corporate take over. Civil society activists came together during the pre-summit to register their protest.

Remembering Leo Panitch

On 23 July 2021, a full-page appeal appeared in the New York Times calling on United States President Joe Biden to withdraw the vindictive U.S. blockade against Cuba.

This guide is designed to help understand the central ideas in Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review, (2017)

Georgi Dimitrov, president of the Communist International, had, at its Seventh Congress, characterised a fascist State as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary section of finance capital”