Geography Archives: Global

The birth anniversary of Friedrich Engels, collaborator, co-thinker and a long-time friend of Karl Marx falls tomorrow, 28 November 2020.

A second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping across the world with countries reporting record daily case numbers and the World Health Organization (WHO) warning that the death toll could be much higher than during the first wave earlier this year.

Today marks 200 years since the birth of Friedrich Engels, the revolutionary leader who, side by side with Marx, elaborated a good part of what we know today as the theoretical bases of Marxism and built the first international organizations of “insurrectionist wage slaves” who adopted communism as the name for their objective.

The total level of global indebtedness now sits at an astronomical $277 trillion, an increase of $15 trillion since 2019. This amount is equivalent to 365% of the global gross domestic product.

Exploitation begins with the terms on which workers sell their labour power to capital. Marx saw that 140 years ago, and it hasn’t changed since.

Top meteorologist: only a complete transformation of our industrial, energy and transport systems can stop climate change.

One of my frustrations with contemporary Marxist philosophy is the way in which the word ‘dialectical’ is often employed like a magical wand to sanctify various relational phenomena.

Recently, mainstream economics has been forced to acknowledge some of the explicit and implicit forms of discrimination and bias that are rampant in the discipline, thanks in particular to some brave interventions by some women economists.

The death rate from these new infections may be lower than in the first wave last March-April, but hospitalizations are reaching new peaks in the U.S. and parts of Europe.

Hobsbawm’s thinking was guided by dialectical materialism, which was a scientific outlook based on analysis. It always accounted for unpredictable human agency and, though economic factors played the principal role in the development of history, this study rejects the claim that Hobsbawm was a mechanical determinist.

Karl Marx’s 1875 critique of the German Social Democratic Party provides a withering examination of capitalism’s ‘wicked ways’ and a guide to what the commons is and how to bring it about.

We believe that socialism provides the solution to the world’s ills and that marxist theory gives us the tools to enact social change we so desperately need.  

The third major influence on Marx’s critique of political economy (in addition to and combined with classical economics and Hegel’s philosophy) was utopian socialism.

In the millions of pages written about Karl Marx, his final years have been somewhat neglected.

As the Artic sea ice rapidly melts and the communities across the world suffer dire consequences, we are experiencing the tragedies from emitting greenhouse gases from human activities into the atmosphere.

John Bellamy Foster’s brilliant recovery of a century of ecological and socialist thought will inform, enable, and inspire a new generation of reds and greens.

Federici demonstrates that unpaid labor–especially that of women confined to the domestic sphere and of enslaved workers–is a necessary support for waged labor.

Finally, after much uncertainty, on the anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917, the numbers added up and U.S. President Donald Trump found that–despite winning over 70 million votes–he would not be re-elected.

On the right, identity politics is leveraged to deliberately divide and fracture workers, pitting them against each other, most frequently on the basis of race, gender, religion, or nationality.

Katherine Connelly interviews Dana Mills, author of a new biography on Rosa Luxemburg, on her crucial contribution to revolutionary thought.