-
“Indian racism towards Black people is almost worse than white peoples’ racism” An Interview with Arundhati Roy
We ourselves live in a pretty sick society that seems incapable of feelings of sisterhood, brotherhood, solidarity.
-
Turkey’s big bet has put Libya in center of a global power struggle
The series of debilitating military setbacks that Libya’s renegade general Khalifa Haftar suffered in recent months have spurred diplomatic activities over the conflict in the country. But the war is far from over.
-
Living is no laughing matter
The United States government has withdrawn its support for the World Health Organisation (WHO) based on accusations that the WHO has not been forthcoming about the novel coronavirus and based on U.S. President Donald Trump’s questioning of the WHO’s independence from China, calling the organisation a ‘puppet of China’.
-
The problem of external debt
There is a massive problem of external debt building up for the third world, of which the recent Argentine debt crisis was only one manifestation. At the root of the problem is the collapse of primary commodity prices in the world market which began in April 2011.
-
Inauthentic behavior: SouthFront is the latest victim of the Facebook banhammer
The censorship of alternative media is becoming more widespread. The latest victim to fall to Facebook and YouTube’s overzealous banhammer is well-known conflict watchdog website, SouthFront.
-
Tear down the racist statues, end racist debt and pay for reparations
Bring down the statues, surely. But more than that: cancel the debt and provide reparations to the formerly colonized for the centuries of theft and brutality.
-
Dossier 20: Health is a political choice
In the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25 offers an expanded vision of what it could mean to be a human being. Human beings, it notes, have ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being’. This includes ‘food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’; human beings also have the ‘right to security’, which means they have the right to compensation for any lack of livelihood due to circumstances beyond their control.
-
Marx, ecology and industrial agriculture
British climate activist and socialist Martin Empson writes on why the fight against climate change must be a fight for system change and for socialism.
-
“A riot is the language of the unheard”
More than 50 years ago (on 14 April 1967), Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of his famous speeches, on “The Other America,” at Stanford University.* King patiently explained to the audience of students and faculty members that, while in his view “riots are socially destructive and self-defeating,” they are “in the final analysis. . .the language of the unheard.”
-
George Floyd protests: Police escalating violence across America
While some in media have condemned the protests as violent “looters” imposing “tyranny” upon the country, much of the violence is being deliberately instigated and propagated by an out of control police force that appears to have gone berserk over the widespread public challenge to their authority and their impunity to act as they wish.
-
Families, in times of pandemic and always
Families vary, in terms of their composition, structure, and functioning, but all play a key role in society and require special attention from government.
-
Capitalism & the home
We have become used to ‘stay at home’ in the corner of our TV screens, behind nightly government press conferences, repeated over and over on the radio and in social media.
-
Taiwan and WHO in the COVID-19 pandemic
The ruling establishment’s intrigue against the WHO might seem at odds with Taiwan’s failed bid to join the World Health Assembly (WHA) this past May, but there was no contradiction between Taiwan being seen fighting a David and Goliath-like battle with both the WHO and China, thereby flaring up geopolitical tensions from without. Both served the interests of the ruling class of Taiwan.
-
If you do not feel for humanity, you have forgotten to be human
The coronavirus continues its contagious march across the planet: almost 350,000 known deaths and over 5.4 million people infected. Meanwhile, in the Bay of Bengal, Cyclone Amphan makes its fierce landing, its immense energy tearing a corridor through Bangladesh and India (Odisha and West Bengal).
-
Bethune’s socialized medicine and the public health crisis today
We are at war! The heads of states throughout the globe are posing as chieftains in this quixotic war against an enemy who no one understands.
-
U.S. declares a vaccine war on the World
Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war in May, but not against the virus. It was against the world.
-
Teaching Marx in a pandemic
Barnaby Raine writes to mark the launch of a new class on Marx and his writing, as part of The Brooklyn Institute summer season
-
Facing the ecosocial crisis: Is a socialist planning of the economy feasible?
The current ecological and social crisis, a crisis which has seen its effects increased by a public health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is a crisis which raises serious concerns over environmental sustainability and social polarization and which has a fundamental cause: the blind logic pursued by our economy system, where everything is secondary to profits.
-
Apocalypse never: what coronavirus teaches us about doomsday denial
he current pandemic is giving humanity a crash course in apocalypse management. Whether COVID-19 is actually apocalyptic or not is debatable, but the pandemic has many of the characteristics that we associate with something of that scale.
-
Oil price collapse & the crisis
Is oil a stranded asset? Or is the system defunct? This thought-provoking talk was given by Andy Higginbottom, Associate Professor in the Politics Department of Kingston University in Britain. In this talk he looks at Marx’s theory of rent as surplus profit and its parallels within the oil markets.