Geography Archives: Global

The book complicates the common narrative that Marx was the quintessential critic of liberal rights. Shoikhedbrod’s close and careful reading of Marx’s texts is insightful and targeted. The book helps readers to think about the role of law and rights under capitalism, and also to imagine its future in a communist society.

Nothing happens in Beirut and Lebanon that is transparent; plots of all kinds unravel against the ordinary hopes of the population.

Worldwide, there are now over a thousand coastal areas where fish can’t breathe. The nitrogen that makes crops grow is also destroying offshore ecosystems.

Samir Amin’s works are not the only things he left behind. His legacy was a guide to those who want to change the world.

Is the World Social Forum (WSF), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021, just an open space or can it (should it) also be a space for action? This question has been discussed for years in the WSF International Council, and so far, it has not been possible to reach a conclusion.

‘In our era, when we consider the destructive (ecological and military) might at the disposal of the powers-that-be, the risk, denounced by Marx in his time, that war will end up destroying all the opposing camps, is real. The alternate path demands the lucid and organized intervention of the internationalist front of workers and peoples.’

In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.[1] The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled.

Fanon’s idea that the measure of time not be that of the moment but that of the rest of the world takes on urgent significance as climate extinction meets global pandemic.

Comics, graphic novels, narrative drawing, illustrated fiction–call it what you like–is a growing arena for serious social and political commentary.

The novel coronavirus continues its march through the world, with 18 million confirmed cases and at least 685,000 deaths. Of these, the United States of America, Brazil, and India are the worst-hit, harbouring about half of the world’s cases.

What can a virus tell us about climate breakdown, in its causation and in humanity’s response?

On the 60th anniversary of Jean-Paul Sartre’s key text on Marxism, Robert Boncardo shows us why it is still relevant, and urgently needed, today.

On this episode of Red Menace Alyson and Breht discuss ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ by Karl Marx

Marx’s Ecology: John Bellamy Foster details the ecological foundation of Marx’s critique of capitalism and argues that it has great relevance to understanding the environmental crisis we face today.

Here’s a look back at July’s political news and the best new albums that related to it.

“Now this liberal virus, which pollutes contemporary social thought and eliminates the capacity to understand the world, let alone to transform it, has profoundly penetrated the whole of the ‘historical left’ formed in the aftermath of the Second World War” (Samir Amin, 2003, 41)

The back cover of Diana Johnstone’s Circle in the Darkness calls the memoir “a veteran journalist’s lucid, uncompromising tour through half a century of contemporary history,” one that “recounts in detail how the Western Left betrayed its historical principles of social justice and peace and let itself be lured into approval of aggressive U.S.-NATO wars on the fallacious grounds of ‘human rights.’”

It is therefore from 1971-72, after the emergence of the first ecological movements and following his reading of the pioneering works of Elmar Altvater, Harry Rothman and Barry Commoner, that he began to integrate the ecological dimension into his thinking.

On 23 July, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the world now has 15 million people infected by COVID-19.

Recent activity around solar geoengineering is sparking debate over its role in climate policy. Backed by billionaires, and with connections to the U.S. military, solar geoengineering offers nothing but an Earth engineered to fit the needs of capital. It is antithetical to a radical climate movement.