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The “spectre of communism” haunts the world: 172 years of the Communist Manifesto
Tens of thousands of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America publicly read the Communist Manifesto to commemorate the 172nd year since its first publication in 1848.
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Why didn’t Marx finish Capital?
The question why Marx’s Capital remained unfinished has occupied many for more than a century.
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New starting point(s): Marx, technological revolutions and changes in the centre-periphery divide
This paper presents the last book that Marx excerpted in his life: La Physique Moderne, written by Hospitalier and published in 1882. This last Notebook (B156, in the IISG’s archives) contains hints of other issues that he was researching in his last years, especially societies at the periphery.
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Shakespeare’s Tempest and Capitalism: The Storm of History
As well as being significant in terms of Shakespeare’ s own aesthetic output, The Tempest provides a vivid window into the tumultuous historical currents and contradictions of the epoch in which the great playwright lived, syphoning them into its ethereal and haunting poetry. Helen C. Scott’s excellent and timely study of the play is a book of two parts
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1131: Capitalism and ecological theft
Sociologist John Bellamy Foster on the modern divide between humanity and nature and his book “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift” from Monthly Review.
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You write injustice on the Earth; we will write revolution in the skies
‘Scientists are wrong’, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano said with a warm smile on his face. ‘Human beings are not made of atoms; they are made of stories’. It is why we want to sing and draw, tell each other about our lives and our hopes, talk about the wonders in our lives and the wonders that we dream about. These dreams–this art–are what make us get up each day, smile, and go forward into the world.
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No excuses–we have to shut down the fossil fuel industry
In the face of an ecological catastrophe as enormous and terrifying as this season’s bushfires, you might think that policy might begin to shift, as those in power face up to the reality of human-induced climate change. But you’d be wrong.
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Capitalism, socialism and over-production crises
Unlike capitalism, socialism avoids any waste or slack, such as is caused by an over-production crisis, by raising the consumption of workers appropriately to avert it.
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Isabelle Garo on Marx’s strategic thought and the spirit of revolt
The present context in France and across the world is quite bad for the exploited and oppressed in general, as also for the organised workers’ movement. This long term weakening in the conditions of capitalist crises gave the green light to the ruling classes to take out their revenge at the end of the 1970s and wind back the limited but real social gains of the post-war period.
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The climate and the fat tail risk
My gap year ends in August, but it doesn’t take a college degree in economics to realise that our remaining 1,5° carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don’t add up.
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Marxism and the Climate Crisis: African Eco-Socialist Alternatives
There is a rich inheritance of emancipatory Marxism in Africa, which includes Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Samir Amin, Sam Moyo, Harold Wolpe and many others. Today, Satgar argues, the challenge is to defeat carbon capitalism accelerating the climate crisis and fomenting exclusionary nationalisms and for this there has to be a return to Marx.
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Rosa Luxemburg and debt as an imperialist instrument
In her book titled The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913, Rosa Luxemburg devoted an entire chapter to international loans in order to show how the great capitalist powers of the time used the credits granted by their bankers to the countries of the periphery to exercise economic, military and political domination on the latter.
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Climate Change and Rebellion: an interview with John Molyneux
In an interview with the socialist writer and activist, John Molyneux, ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig asks him about climate change, capitalism and socialist transformation. In an important initiative John has recently founded the Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) which brings together activists and researchers from across the Global North and South.
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Blue Acceleration: Capitalism’s growing assault on the oceans
“A new phase in humanity’s relationship with the biosphere, where the ocean is not only crucial but is being fundamentally changed”
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A possible Communist redefinition of love
In In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou defined love as a form of “minimal communism [where] the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts.”(1) Earlier in the book, Badiou provided a more elegant statement, associating the act of loving to “learn[ing] that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity.”
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The marginalization of Marxism in academia
There is a difference between some amount of salt and zero amount of salt. There is a difference between a limited amount of salt and a significant amount of salt. When the amount/quantity of a thing gets reduced below a level or when it is increased above a level, then that thing itself does not exist or almost ceases to exist (it loses its essence). Instead of salt, think Marxism.
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The war in Libya will never end
General Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army (LNA) continue to partly encircle Libya’s capital, Tripoli. Not only does the LNA threaten Tripoli, but it is within striking distance of Libya’s third-largest city, Misrata.
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Welcome to Global Ecosocialist Network
The Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) is being launched at a moment of extreme danger for humanity. The intensity of the crisis and the scale of the danger is hard to grasp or express adequately because, unless you are in one of the parts of the world currently experiencing extreme weather, it cannot yet literally be seen. And even where the danger is actually being experienced there are very powerful forces at work to obscure its real causes.
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Climate journalism and fossil fuel ads: an unholy marriage?
NBC’s Camel News Caravan was one of the earliest television news programs in the United States. Sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, the program had an anchorman who not only kept an ashtray on his desk and often smoked while delivering the news, but also encouraged viewers to light up a Camel.
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Where is the rift? Marx, Lacan, capitalism, and ecology
When, decades ago, ecology emerged as a crucial theoretical and practical issue, many Marxists (as well as critics of Marxism) noted that nature–more precisely, the exact ontological status of nature–is the one topic where even the crudest dialectical materialism has an advantage over Western Marxism.