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The Dialectics of Art
In any event the dialectics of art will continue.
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Inequality metrics and the question of power
How should we measure inequality?
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Policing in the Anthropocene
How will the police respond to environmental direct action groups like Extinction Rebellion as climate breakdown reaches critical mass?
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Oral opening statement from Michael Mann testimony to U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing on climate change & natural disasters
And I would also like to emphasize that we’re using the term “natural disasters” but in many cases there is absolutely nothing natural about the disasters we are talking about. We’re not saying they have been caused by climate change, we’re saying that it has worsened them. That’s what the research shows.
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How working-class movements are moving beyond the confines of capitalism
The context for organizing today that faces working people across the world is one that must grapple with the challenges posed by a decentralized production process and a well-organized ruling class.
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Burnt workers are the newest wave of climate casualty
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has just released a brief—but very important—report on the impact of heat stress on workers. What the ILO finds is that the areas of the world most threatened by heat deaths of workers are Southern Asia and Western Africa.
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Our globe is burning!
Peter Linebaugh’s book comes with a long subtitle, a pithy summary of its contents: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, of Kate and Ned Despard. His timeframe is the period between 1789 and 1804 when, in his view, a series of connected events took place in England, Ireland, France, the Caribbean and North America that formed an Atlantic crucible forging the capitalist world we have lived in since.
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Hooray, the Arctic is melting! Say WHAT?
It’s officially summer. Time for a swim, a cold beer, and a new slew of catastrophic climate changes…
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It’s not just profitability: a response to Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts takes issue with my blog post “Why Stagnation,” which presented the analysis in a recent article I coauthored with Deepankar Basu. We argued that social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory can explain the current stagnation in the U.S. economy.
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Gee Whiz! Communism is sure gonna be keen!
When I was ten years old, I read and re-read a stack of decades-old Modern Mechanix magazines that I found in my grandfather’s basement. Throughout the Great Depression, MM regaled its readers with breathless accounts of technological marvels that were going to change the world, very soon.
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Marxism, space and a few urban questions: a rough guide to the English language Lliterature
Starting in the late 1960s, ‘radical geography’ became a crucial avenue of intellectual innovation in contemporary Marxism. For a generation, its basic orientation was two-fold: (1) politicise ‘space’ by challenging the stranglehold of specialists (architects, urban planners, designers, military planners, regional and development officials) in the spatial disciplines, and (2) insist, simultaneously, on the importance of spatial questions within the various currents of the left.
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Still Manufacturing Consent: an interview with Noam Chomsky
Alan MacLeod interviewed Noam Chomsky via Skype on March 13, 2018, for MacLeod’s new book Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. They discussed the origins of the classic work of media criticism (co-authored with Edward Herman) Manufacturing Consent, the role of that book’s “propaganda model” today, Google and Facebook, Donald Trump and Russia, fake news and Syria. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Technotyranny: the iron-fisted authoritarianism of the Surveillance State
“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” ― Philip K. Dick
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Carbon markets in a climate-changing capitalism
Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism offers an account of why these earlier expectations were not matched by experience. While the contradictions of market solutions have not gone away, the difference this time is that we are just over a decade away from the IPCC’s 2030 benchmark for 1.5°C. The concentration and centralisation of emissions instead points towards a different pathway that can meet this challenge – one that begins by confronting the disproportionate control the biggest polluters have over our climate future.
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Notes on Marx’s “General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”
Chapter 25 of Karl Marx’s, Capital, vol. 1 (“The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”), not only explains the working conditions of the world’s peoples today; it also explains the conditions of our whole existence. Marx’s general law is nothing less than the lever upon which all our lives now pivot.
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Barbara Foley 21st Century Marxist literary criticism
In 21st century capitalism, Marxist theory remains a crucial means to interpret the socioeconomic present and potentials for political change. But Marxism as a method is also important culturally, in understanding the ideas, attitudes and beliefs that exist today, and how they have developed historically through various social forces.
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Karl Marx II: An Analysis of my Father’s Chief Work
The capitalist extracts surplus labour from his workpeople, for which he does not pay.
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Capital and climate in the critique of the State
This is the second in a series of posts comprising a symposium on the Marxist tradition of state theory and its contemporary lineages.
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Global inequality in a time of climate emergency
Our worlds richest have a great deal of money. They also have the power to decide whether our civilization sinks or swims. So what can we do?
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Be careful of the crooked smile of powerful people
“For humanity, comrades,” writes Frantz Fanon at the close of his monumental The Wretched of the Earth, “we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’. Terrible inequalities in our world keep humanity divided.