Geography Archives: Global

In the final stage of fascism, the fascist state has consolidated power and freed itself of its petty-bourgeois class origins. Poulantzas says that this is the most brutal stage, for it involves violent purges at the state level to remove the petty-bourgeoisie, and terroristic repression over the masses.

What is the capitalist democratic state and how should it be confronted? This question has bedevilled the left for generations. On the one hand, a social democratic conception of the state as a neutral institution that needs to be occupied and captured by bureaucrats with the right ideas has lead to experiments in socialist governance that have failed to overcome the private power of capitalists and turned toward neoliberal reversals

Against this plan led today by Trump and his collaborators, free peoples from all over the world are on the front line with Venezuela. Therefore, international solidarity with their struggle is an inescapable moral imperative for all women and all men of good will.

Enter Marx, the first thinker, Marshall believes, to make these two worlds connect. It was Marx, after all, who wanted to discover the underlying unity of life. Marx’s horizon is vast and his vision packs together an enormous range of things and ideas that nobody had thought of throwing together before, breaking down boundaries, piling things together that seem to clash and totter on the brink.

The casualisation of work is no aberration of capitalism. It is the logical outcome of a system based on profit. Precarious work is the product of processes within capitalism that Karl Marx described over 150 years ago.

We can start with the Grande Dame of anti-environmentalism: Koch-sponsored Brendan O’Neill, who Debrorah Orr reminds us “has already devoted a thousand or so of his rancid words to ‘The cult of Greta Thunberg’”.

Clearly there will be ecological issues to resolve once capitalism has been defeated, but that will require a system being put in place that is capable of dealing with the disaster. In other words a society that is not based on the competitive accumulation of capital.

They can be a force for change, explains Rachel Thain-Gray

Socialism is the rational alternative to the disaster that is capitalism. Its basic premise is that production and distribution should be organised to satisfy human need. Already we have the resources, the technology and the infrastructure required to provide every human with the necessities of life and more. So in one sense, socialism is the simple call for a rationally organised society.

In the wake of Saturday’s debate between intellectual superstars Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson, an onslaught of mockery has appeared online satirizing the clash between the highly-memeable thinkers.

On 26 April 1937, twelve bombers of the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria flew low over the Basque country of Spain in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). They tore down over the small town of Guernica, where they let loose their fiery arsenal. Almost two thousand people died in this defenceless town.

Once seen as the vanguard of a new social order, the contemporary labor movement has been written off by many progressive activists and scholars as a relic of the past. They should not be so hasty. Rather than spelling the beginning of the end for organized labor, globalization has brought new opportunities for reinvention, and a sea change in both trade unions and the wider labor movement.

Labor Notes is one of the most successful socialist projects in the labor movement in U.S. history. It has trained and connected tens of thousands of union militants throughout the world.

Facebook’s cryptocurrency initiative furthers an agenda of neoliberal financialization, writes Josh Gabert-Doyon

Taking as its point of departure this observation, itself a feature of 50 books by Samir Amin, the film depicts the audacious struggles of, as well as interviews with, addresses by and special moments involving this most outstanding intellectual of the South.

here is currently a welcome call to “decolonise” universities and academia.1 This is about more than demanding the removal of statues of old imperialists.

Camilla Royle looks at the new climate activism.

The title of this newsletter comes from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a poem called This Hour of Chain and Noose (Tauq o dar ka Mausam, 1951).

If you’re waiting for some elite politician to fix this ecological mess you will be hung out to dry well past humanity’s expiration date.

‘Our aim is to create moments in time when humanity stops and fully considers the extent of the harm we have done’.