Geography Archives: Global

“If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.” Thus reads one of the Hopi prophecies which echo throughout Philip Glass’s haunting soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi (1982).

Nearly three million people have reportedly been killed by the novel coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2) and upwards of 128 million people have been infected by the virus, many with long-lasting health repercussions.

After over a year of suffering, death, and profound transformations of everyday life, International Women’s Day 2021 is an opportunity to take stock of the COVID-19 crisis so far and craft visions for a future centred on the value of social reproduction.

I spent a tremendous amount of time digging around in old socialist and union newspapers, journals, magazines and pamphlets where I expected to read the work of earnest revolutionaries discussing socialist strategy and news from the latest strikes around the world. Of course, I found all that and more. – Michael Mark Cohen

COVID has upended urban life as we once knew it. But it intensified already existing pathologies, those contaminating “normal,” pre-pandemic life. Our present urban reality is one of the de-encounter, a thinning down rather than thickening up, the dispersion and dilution of city life, its fear and loathing.

The ‘crisis of politics,’ which cannot be denied today even by the system’s worst apologists represents a profound crisis of legitimacy of the established social metabolic mode of reproduction and its overall framework of political control. This is what has brought about the historical actuality of the socialist offensive, although the pursuit of its own “line of least resistance” by labor continues to favor for the moment the maintenance of the existing order, despite the increasingly obvious inability of that order to “deliver the goods” as the once overwhelmingly accepted foundation of its legitimacy.

Women around the world spend an average of four hours and twenty-five minutes per day on unpaid care work, while men spend an average of one hour and twenty-three minutes per day on the same kind of work.

As industrial agriculture encroaches into the last wild places of the Earth, it’s unleashing dangerous pathogens. Time to heal the metabolic rift between ecology and economy, suggests Rob Wallace.

One year after the COVID-19 pandemic began, U.S. billionaires have made out like gangbusters at the expense of workers.

A Book review symposium on Lilia D. Monzó’s “A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity” (2019, Peter Lang Publishing) by Kitonga, Macrine, Magill, and Rodriguez — Editors

Degrowth has arrived. It makes appearances in mainstream newspapers, radio discussions and even the blog pieces of mainstream economists. In the last year several books have appeared, one of them published in the UK, by Penguin no less.

To manufacture consent for its own constant aggressions the U.S. claims its competitors are guilty of even greater crimes–sheer inventions that never happened.

Samir Amin’s life and work left behind many important legacies, which can continue to enrich us if only we recognise them adequately. He brought an indefatigable ‘optimism of the will’ to complex processes of political, social and economic change, involving an energy that was not deterred at all by the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ that his razor-sharp mind could generate.

March 8 commemorates the revolutionary working woman. The communist Clara Zetkin proposed the commemoration at the conference of socialist women in 1910, to honor the struggle of women against capitalist exploitation.

For Marxist ecofeminists, the domination of men over women in society and nature at large is therefore not a result of patriarchal ideas alone.

In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty has gathered his data meticulously and provided a useful analysis of the unequal distribution of wealth and income, yet some of his definitions are somewhat confusing and even questionable.

We need to decolonize our understanding of antisemitism as a matter of urgency. And that means ditching the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Industrial agriculture, habitat destruction, global commodity chains and the travel network have set up this perfect storm of conditions, not just for COVID, but also for future pandemics.

Humanity stands at a dangerous crossroads: a conflict between making profits and saving human life is clearly emerging, with the latter being sacrificed by the ruling class for the former.

Here the main question is not what is said but why it is said. And this question of why is not related to the personal situation, interests, or discursive strategies of the speakers. Men cannot know what is good for them; they very often profess ideologies that are directly detrimental to their interests.