Geography Archives: Global

A number of people have asked me to respond to a piece that Andrew McAfee wrote for Wired, promoting his book, which claims that rich countries – and specifically the United States – have accomplished the miracle of “green growth” and “dematerialization”, absolutely decoupling GDP from resource use.

Working people are forever kept on the brink of going broke. More than higher wages and better job security, a just economy requires giving them the power to choose and create their own futures.

Billionaires are “smart” enough. Their wealth now, in this pandemic, tops trillions of dollars.

New curriculum guidance will limit critical thinking and cement a neoliberal capitalist consensus. It should be setting off alarm bells, says Remi Joseph-Salisbury

Ashley Bohrer has provided this important piece of scholarship with her new book, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism.

The United States government was furious about the ‘irresponsible extravagances’ in Nkrumah’s book and decided to punish him by refusing to allow $300 million in short-term aid to cover the costs of importing food.

French historian Pierre de Vaissière’s description of a slave ship working the Atlantic trade in Saint-Domingue: Creole society and life under the Ancièn Regime, 1629-1789 cannot be forgotten: the hold below is hellish, naked bodies are chained, thrown back and forth by the middle passage seas, excrement is smeared about, and death feels a mere breath away.

2020 is the birthday year of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, whom most of us know as Lenin. If still alive, he would be 150 years old.

Ecosocialism and the de-growth movement are among the most important currents of the ecological left. Ecosocialists agree that a significant measure of de-growth in production and consumption is necessary in order to avoid ecological collapse.

Readers today will be more familiar with contemporary mainstream economics than with the mainstream economics of Marx’s day. So, let’s start there.

The ruling class is ruthless in trying to exploit crises, but we shouldn’t underestimate the turmoil it’s in and the opportunities to advance the struggle, argues Chris Nineham

Darius Simpson & Scout Bostley – “Lost Voices” (CUPSI 2015)

Gradual reforms can’t do the job: only profoundly radical measures can ensure human survival in an epoch of global sickening.

In the previous chapter, we saw that Marxian economics represents a two-fold critique: a critique of mainstream economic theory and a critique of capitalism, the economic and social system celebrated by mainstream economists.

This all could’ve gone differently. Bob Woodward revealed that Donald Trump knew in February that COVID was airborne, information both men declined to share with the rest of the us until just now.

Drapeau writes that the Communist Manifesto “considered Western imperialism as a progressive and beneficial force drawing underdeveloped societies into bourgeois civilization”.

It’s an obvious question for those of us living now, in the twenty-first century. Is Marxian economics still relevant?

Modern Times, directed by Charlie Chaplin, was released in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression. It opens with a clock marking the beginning of the working day and a sentence: “A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.”

In April 2020, a month after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the pandemic, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warned that the numbers of people who lived with acute hunger around the world would double due to COVID-19 by the end of 2020 ‘unless swift action is taken’.

One of the best reasons for studying Marxian economics is to understand all those criticisms—the criticisms of mainstream economic theory and the criticisms of capitalism.