Geography Archives: Global

  • Marx and Social Justice

    Marx and Social Justice: Ethics and Natural Law in the Critique of Political Economy reviewed by Xuanpu Zhuang

    According to McCarthy, Marx rejects the view of justice in liberalism, which is limited to individual rights and fair distribution and provides a new one based on Aristotle’s definition of social justice grounded in ethics and politics.

  • Marx’s concept of socialism

    The discussions and debates that have accompanied the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth since 2018 have provided an important opportunity to re-examine heretofore neglected aspects of his political and philosophical legacy. Foremost among them is the extent to which his body of work provides conceptual resources for developing a viable emancipatory to capitalism in the 21st century.

  • Saul photo

    A culture of reconciliation with nature

    Christopher Caudwell, who died at age 29 fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, wrote: “Either the devil has come amongst us having great power, or there is a causal explanation for a disease common to economics, science, and art.” That disease, he recognized, was the self-alienation of humanity under capitalism

  • Vyshakh T (People’s Dispatch), Aishe Ghosh, Student leader, Delhi December 2019.

    We are the ones who will awaken the dawn

    Millions of people are on the streets, from India to Chile. Democracy is both their promise and it is what has betrayed them. They aspire to the democratic spirit but find that democratic institutions–saturated by money and power–are inadequate. They are on the streets for more democracy, deeper democracy, a different kind of democracy.

  • The Long Ecological Revolution | by John Bellamy Foster

    Ecological Revolution

    John Foster gives a radio interview on Ecological Revolution

  • How the rich plan to rule a burning planet

    How the rich plan to rule a burning planet

    The climate crisis isn’t a future we must fight to avoid. It’s an already unfolding reality. It’s the intensification of extreme weather–cyclones, storms and floods, droughts and deadly heat waves.

  • ``

    The growing threat of water wars

    In 2015, United Nations member states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which include an imperative to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” Yet, in the last four years, matters have deteriorated significantly.

  • The inorganic body in the early Marx

    The inorganic body in the early Marx

    The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric. Bruno Latour, for instance, imagines that when we speak about what is ‘critical’, we have in mind a fully negative project, a practice of debunking and dismantling hegemonic presumptions about the world, and that critical theory only intensifies skepticism and lacks transformative power and commitment to emancipatory ideals.

  • André Masson, “The Seeded Earth” (1942).

    Metabolic monstrosities: Vampire capital in the Anthropocene

    Paraphrasing a passage from Marx in the Grundrisse, Stavros Tombazos remarks that “every economy is in the end an economy of time” (2014, 13). This is to say that the productivity of labour, the accumulation of wealth, and the circulation of goods and resources which make up an economy in its broadest sense are all components of a particular organisation of time.

  • Greenlight article

    Lies, Newsweek and control of the media narrative: First-hand account

    Until several days ago, I was a journalist at Newsweek. I decided to hand my resignation in because, in essence, I was given a simple choice. On one hand, I could continue to be employed by the company, stay in their chic London offices and earn a steady salary—only if I adhered to what could or could not be reported and suppressed vital facts. Alternatively, I could leave the company and tell the truth.

  • Steam Community :: Guide :: The Game of Capitalism in DF2

    The “fixing capitalism” headfake

    It’s not hard to see why young people are embracing socialism. It isn’t simply that they can see a probable grim future under capitalism as they know it: more and more low-wage, high surveillance jobs versus more budget and psychological stress as most also have higher fixed costs (rentier housing costs, student loan payments, even more “asset lite, rent heavy” systems, ever-escalating health care costs).

  • Solar radiation management is perhaps the most controversial type of geoengineering. It would create a medium to block the sunlight from reaching the atmosphere, but it would also change our planet forever. Photo credit: author.

    Geoengineering is no climate fix. But calling it a moral hazard could be counterproductive

    Desperate times call for desperate measures. In recent years and in the face of unprecedented changes in the climate system, some previously unknown and risky solutions have been proposed to put a halt to the chain of climate disasters, or at least to slow down the speed of their onslaught.

  • ‘Why does the government take away rights from native people and give them to multinational corporations?’ Mobilisation in the Department of Cauca, 2013. Marcha Patriótica’s communication team.

    If you want peace, you get war; if you want war, you get rich

    A quarter century ago, Victoria Sandino Palmera joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC-EP). She had previously been a militant in the Communist Party and–when FARC-EP was above ground in the 1990s–joined the Patriotic Pole. But the repression of what she calls the ‘traditional oligarchy’ sent her back to the jungle over and over again. Victoria Sandino made it clear that she was not keen on this war. ‘We didn’t take up weapons because we felt the need to use violence’

  • coming revolution

    The Coming Revolution: Capitalism in the 21st Century

    The Coming Revolution is an impressive guide for Marxists looking for a way to approach contemporary capitalism, argues Josh Newman

  • The Forty-Ninth Newsletter (2019)

    The oppressive state is a macho rapist

    On 25 November 1960, three of four of the Mirabal sisters – María Teresa, Minerva, and Patria – of the Dominican Republic were assassinated for their resistance against the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. The youngest of the three – María Teresa – said before her death, ‘Perhaps what we have most near is death, but that idea does not frighten me. We shall continue to fight for justice’.

  • Statue

    Thinking and acting from Marxism today – Feminist proposals for a theoretical and strategic rearmament

    The global disorder and the experiences of the systemic crisis we have experienced for more than a decade (economic crisis, crisis of political legitimacy, crisis of social reproduction and crisis of the limits of the planet) have generated a need to understand that cannot be covered by partial analyses but requires a theory of totality.

  • The economic basis of the recent protests around the world.

    Social crises, crises of Democracy, neoliberalism in crisis

    The current global social tensions have in common the rejection of inequality and the loss of democratic control. The engine driving these challenges may well be the fading relevance of neoliberalism, which is aggravating its own crisis and opening the door to confrontation.

  • A coral reef near the Indonesian island of Bali. SHUTTERSTOCK

    Are numbers of species a true measure of ecosystem health?

    A recent study that found no general decline in the numbers of species in individual ecosystems has sparked controversy. Some scientists see it as evidence of how species adapt, while others see it as a sign that common invasive species, such as rats and mosquitoes, are the real winners.

  • World Flag

    An alternative to liberal globalization

    In the Bandung Conference of 1955, the governments and peoples of Asia and Africa expressed their ambitions to reconstruct a global system based on the recognition of the rights of countries that had previously been under the yoke of colonialism. In that period, “the rights to development,” as applied to the frameworks for negotiating multipolarity constituted the basis of globalization. These rights would force the imperial powers to adapt to new realities.

  • Emissions Gap Report 2019

    Emissions Gap Report 2019: Executive Summary

    This is the tenth edition of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report. It provides the latest assessment of scientific studies on current and estimated future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and compares these with the emission levels permissible for the world to progress on a least-cost pathway to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.