Geography Archives: Global

Recent debates have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

The new U.S. financed counter-revolution hopes to manipulate sensitive issues and create the conditions for a social confrontation, for conflict and destabilization of the country.

Alexandra Day reviews Silvia Federici’s seminal work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

Over the past four decades or so, various leftists have become more sensitive to the environmental degradation in developed and developing capitalist societies and post-revolutionary societies, particularly in the former Soviet Union and, in recent times, China.

The New Zealand elections as a gain and as a limitation for the left — Editors.

Over the centuries, humans have survived tragedy through the incredible stoicism of not moving, of standing one’s ground, of resisting, of engaging in tremendous creativity. Perhaps we can use the time alone to think collectively, to reflect together on how we might reconstruct the public realm of our cities.

Michael Burawoy’s Symbolic Violence is a Marxist critique of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. This fascinating book explores some of Bourdieu’s contradictions by staging a series of ‘conversations’ between the French sociologist and a range of important, mostly Marxist, thinkers whose writings Bourdieu ignored or dismissed in footnotes, even though he ought to have engaged explicitly with their ideas.

The Social Dilemma that is currently streaming on Netflix has garnered much attention by raising a single question–how have we come to accept as normal the fact that a few hundred tech-enthusiasts in Silicon Valley has had an unprecedented impact on billions of lives around the world? Directed by Jeff Orlowski, the Social Dilemma features tech industry insiders raising ethical concerns about business models that shape our everyday digital experience.

A ferocious polemic by Andreas Malm, written as the worldwide lockdown took hold, summons the imagery of Soviet war communism to impress the urgency of our predicament.

Those who “go beyond” Karl Marx’s programme of economic liberation based on the socialisation of the means of production and “reach” a programme based on the federation of economic communes remind me of this promise of Sartre.

Alethea Warrington describes how the fossil fuels industry hopes to change its image but not its practice.

WEALTH distribution data are notoriously difficult to interpret. This is because variations in stock prices affect wealth distribution, so that a stock market boom suddenly makes the rich appear much richer, while a stock market collapse makes wealth distribution less unequal overnight.

Peter Linebaugh interviewed by Johnny Flynn of Independent Left.

With phrases like “protect the vulnerable” & “underlying conditions” currently all around us, disability activist Ruth Flood looks at the horrendous treatment of disabled people under capitalism.

According to the IMF, about half of Low Income Economies (LIEs) are now in danger of debt default.  ‘Emerging market’ debt to GDP has increased from 40% to 60% in this crisis.

Since 1987 the ocean has warmed 4.5 times as fast as in the previous three decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that even if emissions are substantially reduced, by 2100 the ocean will heat 2 to 4 times as much as it has since 1970–and if emissions are not cut, it will heat 5 to 7 times as much.

If I’m not a part of the solution, then I’m a part of the problem.

Global emissions fell by 8.8 per cent in the first half of this year amid restrictions on movement and economic activity owing to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report.

Russia on Tuesday offered to freeze its current arsenal, and proposed an extension of the treaty by one year. The treaty signed in 2010 capped the number of nuclear warheads by the two countries and its deployment.

But where did Marx’s critique of mainstream economics come from? It certainly did not emerge in one fell swoop, as a ready-made theory of capitalism. And it wasn’t produced in isolation, independently of the society within which it was first produced and then further elaborated.