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What went wrong with the first COVID-19 shutdown?
In the spring, we shut down our lives and our economy in hopes of reducing the spread of COVID-19 enough to be able to manage it through widespread testing and contact tracing. In spite of that shutdown, today the virus is raging virtually uncontrolled. We didn’t stick with it until the job was done.
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A matter of life and death: What war and the pandemic have in common
Patrick Cockburn examines the threads between the pandemic and the media’s coverage of age of endless war.
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Dear Future Generations: Sorry
An Apology Letter to Future Generations. Sorry.
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Saul Williams on Trump & the politics of fear
Saul Williams On Trump & The Politics Of Fear
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Reflections on Marxism and Law: A Review of Igor Shoikhedbrod’s Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism
The book complicates the common narrative that Marx was the quintessential critic of liberal rights. Shoikhedbrod’s close and careful reading of Marx’s texts is insightful and targeted. The book helps readers to think about the role of law and rights under capitalism, and also to imagine its future in a communist society.
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It is late, but it is early morning if we insist a little
Nothing happens in Beirut and Lebanon that is transparent; plots of all kinds unravel against the ordinary hopes of the population.
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Dead Zones: Industrial agriculture versus ocean life
Worldwide, there are now over a thousand coastal areas where fish can’t breathe. The nitrogen that makes crops grow is also destroying offshore ecosystems.
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‘He was a militant till his last breath’
Samir Amin’s works are not the only things he left behind. His legacy was a guide to those who want to change the world.
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A second Manifesto for the World Social Forum? From an Open Space to a Space for Action
Is the World Social Forum (WSF), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021, just an open space or can it (should it) also be a space for action? This question has been discussed for years in the WSF International Council, and so far, it has not been possible to reach a conclusion.
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The organic intellectual: Remembering Samir Amin two years on
‘In our era, when we consider the destructive (ecological and military) might at the disposal of the powers-that-be, the risk, denounced by Marx in his time, that war will end up destroying all the opposing camps, is real. The alternate path demands the lucid and organized intervention of the internationalist front of workers and peoples.’
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The Internationalist Lenin. Self-determination and anti-colonialism.
In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.[1] The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled.
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Fanon and the ‘rationality of revolt’
Fanon’s idea that the measure of time not be that of the moment but that of the rest of the world takes on urgent significance as climate extinction meets global pandemic.
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Five graphic novels and cartoons to politicise and criticise
Comics, graphic novels, narrative drawing, illustrated fiction–call it what you like–is a growing arena for serious social and political commentary.
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Do not reach for the sky just to surrender
The novel coronavirus continues its march through the world, with 18 million confirmed cases and at least 685,000 deaths. Of these, the United States of America, Brazil, and India are the worst-hit, harbouring about half of the world’s cases.
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A review of Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century
What can a virus tell us about climate breakdown, in its causation and in humanity’s response?
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Happy Birthday: Critique of Dialectical Reason!
On the 60th anniversary of Jean-Paul Sartre’s key text on Marxism, Robert Boncardo shows us why it is still relevant, and urgently needed, today.
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Critique of the Gotha Programme – Karl Marx
On this episode of Red Menace Alyson and Breht discuss ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ by Karl Marx
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John Bellamy Foster: Marxs Ecology – review
Marx’s Ecology: John Bellamy Foster details the ecological foundation of Marx’s critique of capitalism and argues that it has great relevance to understanding the environmental crisis we face today.
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10 new albums for a world in crisis
Here’s a look back at July’s political news and the best new albums that related to it.
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Crisis and Virus: COVID-19 in context
“Now this liberal virus, which pollutes contemporary social thought and eliminates the capacity to understand the world, let alone to transform it, has profoundly penetrated the whole of the ‘historical left’ formed in the aftermath of the Second World War” (Samir Amin, 2003, 41)