Geography Archives: Global

There are literally thousands of NGOs, the better known being Oxfam, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International.

Before the pandemic, private equity had amassed $2.5 trillion–more than the GDP of Italy–in ‘dry powder,’ waiting for distressed assets to plunder. Covid-19 provided them with the perfect opportunity.

The U.S. government and many media outlets have queried WHO findings that do not corroborate theories promoted by Washington, such as the virus escaping from a Chinese laboratory.

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.”

Who are The Red Nation? Let them tell you.

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.

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.

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’.

Goldman Sachs is openly saying in financial reports that curing people of terrible diseases is not good for business.

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.

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.

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.

CounterSpin interview with Kimberly Inez McGuire on abortion realities.

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.

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.

We thought climate catastrophe the main danger. Now we know there is another. A double-whammy ecological crisis threatens collapse into dystopian chaos.

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.

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.

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.

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.