-
RIP Immanuel Wallerstein — “This is the end; this is the beginning”
A towering intellectual, pathbreaking thinker, and preeminent sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein passed away. He lived a deep commitment to scholarship, justice and change.
-
Corinna Lotz – Finding Ilyenkov: How a Soviet Philosopher Who Stood Up for Dialectics Continues to Inspire
Corinna Lotz’ Finding Ilyenkov can be read in a few hours, but for those readers taken with its ideas and appeal to the relevance of Ilyenkov’s life and theory, this book provides a salient and fecund starting point for any variety of in-depth engagements relating to Ilyenkov, dialectical materialism and creative Soviet Marxism.
-
A month ahead of Global Climate Strike, thousands pledge to attend rallies across planet to ‘turn up the political heat’ and demand action
“Time is running out. This decade is our last chance to stop the destruction of our people and our planet… This is why we strike.”
-
Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance
Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but ratherabundance (see Sahlins, 1976; Galbraith, 1998; Latouche, 2014; D’Alisa et al., 2014).
-
The systemic crisis of world capitalism
THE hallmark of a systemic, as distinct from a cyclical or sporadic, crisis of capitalism is that every effort to resolve the crisis within the broad confines of the system, defined in terms of its prevailing class configuration, only worsens the crisis.
-
Review of Money and Totality by Fred Moseley
Today, as the global economy flounders from crisis to crisis, Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the essential basis for a correct understanding of what is going on. Moseley’s book reaffirms key elements of this analysis.
-
Syria: A new low in nasty propaganda
It may be a new low in propaganda. National Public Radio (NPR) used the news that Syrian First Lady Asma Assad had overcome breast cancer to mock her and continue the information war against Syria. They interviewed a Human Rights Watch staffer named Lama Fakih who is an American from Michigan now based in Beirut.
-
Remembering Samir Amin: a Marxist of the South
With the passing of the great anti-imperialist and Marxist intellectual Samir Amin on August 12 of last year, the international communist movement lost a giant.
-
Prabir Purkayastha on How Big Data’s Threat to Elections and Democracy Is Quickly Becoming a Global Problem
The cost of the 2016 U.S. elections was $6.5 billion if we combine the presidential and congressional elections. The Indian Parliamentary election of 2019 outspent the 2016 U.S. 2016 election, costing about $8.6 billion.
-
Henry A. Giroux and the culture of neoliberal fascism
HENRY A. GIROUX’s book The Terror of the Unforeseen analyzes the conditions that have enabled and led to Donald Trump’s rule and the consequences of that rule, that have ushered in an authoritarian version of capitalism. Giroux provides a realistic analysis that holds out the hope that, through collective efforts, change is possible and democracy can be saved.
-
Blacks don’t blame immigrants for the boss’s crimes
Large proportions of African Americans registered strong opposition to building a wall on the southern border, keeping undocumented people in limbo, and mass deportations.
-
Top 1% up $21 Trillion. Bottom 50% down $900 Billion.
The insights of this new data series are many, but for this post here I want to highlight a single eye-popping statistic. Between 1989 and 2018, the top 1 percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion. The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.
-
Hybrid wars are destroying Democracies
In Brazil recently, I gave an interview to Brasil de Fato, which was born in 2003 as the weekly magazine of the World Social Forum. It is now one of the most important windows into Brazil’s political world. The newsletter this week carries the text of most of the interview.
-
What did Engels say about revolution?
Engels was a revolutionary democrat and a revolutionary realist, argues Dragan Plavšić
-
Outsourcing exploitation: global labor-value chains
Through their control over supply chains, multinationals based in the global north exploit workers in the global south.
-
Green designs for 21st century socialism
Before turning to the subject matter at hand two abiding issues in Marxist thinking need to be addressed. First, when Marx inveighed against Utopian Socialist futuristic model building, he never intended it to become a mantra dissuading socialists from thinking practically about socialist institutional design.
-
CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978
Typical worker compensation has risen only 12% during that time
-
Financial turbulence continues as major economies move towards recession
In response to the Wall Street decline, markets in Asia fell, with Japan’s Topix index down 1 percent while the Australian market dropped 2.9 percent, wiping $60 billion off share values. Markets in Europe also fell before recovering some of their losses later in the day.
-
The commodity and the making of “woman”
If we have little interest in the scholasticism and the baroque arcana of contemporary marxist theoretical debates, the wealth of marxist theory can be neither dismissed nor ignored. And debates around marxist inspired feminism are a case in point.
-
Review: Marx/Engels – Gesamtausgabe
Was Marx an ecologist and does Marx’s theory offer a coherent theoretical and practical approach for ecologists in the 21st century? The publication of Marx’s excerpts and notes on ecology from the mid-1860s may help to answer that question.