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A crisis like no other: social reproduction and the regeneration of capitalist life during the COVID-19 pandemic
As the COVID-19 health crisis deepens, it looks increasingly clear that the short-term collapse in global output is likely to exceed that of any recession in the last 150 years–that is, in the entire history of capitalism. The ILO estimates that the crisis will lead to the destruction of 195 million jobs. Hence, after discussing at length the epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic, media attention is now increasingly focused on how to restart the global economic engine.
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The pandemic and the global economy
Developing countries face collapsing international trade, falling remittances, sharp reversals of capital flows, and currency depreciation. Only bold policies—debt relief, international financing, planning, and more—will avert further catastrophe.
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Marxism and Ecology in a time of pandemic: John Bellamy Foster, Amy Leather & Martin Empson
Join John Bellamy Foster, Amy Leather & Martin Empson to discuss Marxism and ecology in a time of pandemic. The global environmental crisis has demonstrated how the system’s drive to accumulate means that capitalism puts profit before people and planet.
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Coronavirus, crisis, and the end of neoliberalism
Suddenly, we find ourselves in a transformed world. Empty streets, closed shops, unusually clear skies, and climbing death tolls: something unprecedented is unfolding before our eyes.
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Critical realism and Marxism
From roughly the 17th century human inquiry about our world assumed an attitude we understand as “scientific” and to demarcate itself from religion or “metaphysics.”
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Marx in the era of pandemic capitalism
How could Karl Marx (1818–1883) help us interpret the current crisis? His theory of history offers critical resources to interpret the unprecedented crisis which is shaking the world today, while indicating at the same time that ‘the world after’ so much mentioned could only be anti-capitalist.
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Some oil producing nations agree to cut production 10%
Oil-producing nations led by Russia, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia reached an unprecedented agreement on Sunday to cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels per day, or nearly 10 percent of what is currently produced, as The New York Times reported.
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Finance versus the people in the era of the pandemic
THE current pandemic has brought to the fore, and with exceptional clarity, the fundamental contradiction underlying contemporary globalisation, namely, the contradiction between the interests of finance and those of the people. Indeed this contradiction, which characterizes the era of globalisation as a whole, has now come to a head.
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#MintTheCoin & COVID Relief with the Modern Money Network
Rohan Grey and Nathan Tankus join Money on the Left to discuss the flurry of debate about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) arising out of the Coronavirus crisis. We focus, in particular, on the Modern Money Network’s multi-pronged efforts to illuminate and remedy the resulting economic devastation. At the center of our conversation is Rohan’s contribution […]
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Resistance growing to covid-capitalism
Covid-19 has laid bare a fundamental truth: that capitalist healthcare is a contradiction in terms, since capital–like the killer virus–cares for nothing but reproducing itself.
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Understanding vaccines during COVID-19
Dr. Jo Anne Welsch, currently working on vaccine development for low and middle income countries at a global health organization, discusses how vaccines are developed and tested, and the implications of the process for the coronavirus.
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John Pilger: Can we trust our governments in what they say to us about Coronavirus? No, we can’t, absolutely not!
On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to legendary journalist and film-maker John Pilger about the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
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Pandemic and socialism
As COVID-19 grips the world, in country after country, there is socialization of healthcare and of production of some essential goods, which markedly departs from the capitalist norm
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Femicide does not respect the quarantine
Days, weeks, months, an indeterminate amount of time as the world seems paralysed by the journey of SARS-CoV-2. The lack of certainty increases the anxiety. This virus, as Arundhati Roy writes, ‘seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow [of capital].
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Erich Fromm’s Marxist Sociology forty years later
Erich Fromm (1900-1980), who passed forty years ago March of this year, was a leading Marxian sociologist who made considerable contributions to U.S. sociology and to U.S. Marxism. Best known for books such as Escape from Freedom, The Sane Society, and The Art of Loving, Fromm’s account of authoritarianism and critique of mid-twentieth century “consumer capitalism” influenced millions both inside and outside of academia.
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The Coronavirus is stirring the impulse to communism
The Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the most acute problems of our collective life, its main contradictions.
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Why are we still exchanging goods on the market?
Empty hotel rooms, bare supermarket shelves, factories producing jet engines and luxury cars instead of ventilators, governments competing with each other to purchase testing kits and masks. This way of organising society doesn’t make sense.
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This pandemic is ecological breakdown: Different tempo, same song
Comparisons between the toll of COVID-19 and climate change are not helpful because they view each as two separate “things”
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Mike Davis on pandemics, super-capitalism and the struggles of tomorrow
The coronavirus pandemic is overwhelming to comprehend. There are now hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases. Tens of thousands have died. Nations are on lockdown as the disease continues to spread. The planet is in crisis.
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Spoken Word Poetry – ‘this world we live in’
TheTamim is a young and very passionate boy who writes about his upmost emotions and feelings, not only towards the world but also distintive individuals across history.