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Scientists warn the UN of capitalism’s imminent demise
Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources.
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‘Marx’s writing more relevant today than ever’
THE German political economist Wolfgang Streeck is one of the world’s leading critics of neoliberal capitalism. He received international attention for his essay “How will capitalism end?” written in 2014 for the New Left Review. The much-discussed essay was later republished in book form.
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Antonio Gramsci and the Modern Prince
In this period of global crises and ferment, radical and revolutionary activists are reaching for modes of organization and political practice that can help advance their struggle for human liberation. For growing numbers, the political and organizational perspectives of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin are becoming a pole of attraction–providing an increasingly desired coherence and revolutionary edge.
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Who’s working for your vote?
In 2018, Cambridge Analytica, the data mining and analytics company, dominated the news about political campaigning and data. But they are not alone in using personal data for political influence. Since we began actively documenting this industry, our global list has expanded to 329 organisations, and it is still growing.
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An Excerpt from Green Earth
Kim Stanley Robinson describes himself as “a patriot of the genre” of science fiction, writing at the intersection of science and politics for over three decades. His work is striking for its warmth and realism.
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Green paradoxes: How climate change policy preserves climate change causes
Why are societies failing to effectively respond to climate change? Why is it that “environmental degradation increases amid the growth of environmental attention and concern,” as Alexander Stoner and Andony Melathopoulos put it?
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What would Marx have said about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?
Twitter says it is about “what people are talking about right now”. Facebook argues its “mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them”.
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Amazon, Google & Big Tech’s productivity paradox
Whatever you may think of the multi-billionaire founders of Amazon and Alphabet-Google,(1) there would seem to be one undeniable fact about their companies: they have massively improved productivity. Amazon has an e-commerce system that delivers very efficiently; Google has revolutionised Internet search.
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The Historic Anachronism and Necessary Supersession of the State
This previously unpublished essay is taken from volume 1 of Mészáros’s Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, which remained incomplete at the time of his death in October 2017. —The Editors
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GMO potato creator now fears its impact on human health
Of all the genetic engineers who have renounced the technology—Arpad Pusztai, Belinda Martineau, Thierry Vrain and John Fagan, among others—because of its shortsighted approach and ability to produce unintended and potentially toxic consequences, Caius Rommens’ story may be the most compelling.
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Was the gravedigger thesis central to Marx’s theory of the working class?
This article summarizes Matt Vidal, “Was Marx wrong about the working class? Reconsidering the gravedigger thesis,” International Socialism 2018.
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Humanity faces simultaneous climate disasters: study
The future risk of dealing with multiple climate impacts at once depends on geography and whether humanity succeeds in rapidly drawing down greenhouse gas emissions.
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Neo-Liberalism and the diffusion of development
Capitalism in short was the panacea for mass poverty in the third world and not its progenitor as the Marxists had been arguing. The crisis that is enveloping the third world economies at present, is putting an end to that claim.
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The global rise of fascism: capitalism end game?
It is everywhere. In a few years, it has metastasized like a cancer, on all continents. Its fervent proponents and ill-informed supporters call it populism or nationalism. In the Italy, Germany, or Spain of the 1930s, however, this ideology of exclusion and fear, defined by a hatred of the other, together with a tyrannical executive power, was called by its proper name: fascism.
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Climate change is the product of how capitalism “values” nature
Capitalist industrialization has led us to the edge of the precipice of climate change, and avoiding the end of civilization as we know it may require the development of a view in direct opposition to the way in which capitalism “values” nature, according to John Bellamy Foster.
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Amazon’s accent recognition technology could tell the government where you’re from
AT THE BEGINNING of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.
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Living our lives inside a tragedy the size of the planet
After fifteen years in the cold, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned to Argentina this May. President Mauricio Macri promised to attract foreign direct investment and to make his country the ‘supermarket of the world’. Instead, Argentina’s economy went into a tailspin. The IMF entered with its shop-worn prescriptions, a recipe that it has effectively sold for the past four decades: structural adjustment.
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The neoliberal Upside Down
When the Great Financial Crisis hit in 2008, there was a gasp of guilty excitement on the left at the sudden re-emergence of the conditions for radical social change, after 30 years of what has become known even by mainstream economists as ‘neoliberalism’: an obsession with privatisation and financialisation that has made the world more […]
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Thirteen theses of marxism-feminism
In the face of the deep crises of capitalism, with all the safety valves unscrewed so that each crisis is merely an intensification of the previous one; with crises increasingly affecting the everyday lives and living conditions making planning more precarious for an increasing number of women left alone with a double burden to carry, I sent out a call to the Marxists among the feminists whom I had known from the movement of the 1970s, from meetings, trips, visiting professorships, to jointly deliberate the situation.
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Capitalism is killing patients…and their physicians
Physician burnout, depression, and suicide increasingly invade discussions within the medical field. Depression and suicide are more common among male and female physicians, with suicide rates 1.41 and 2.27 times greater than that of the general male and female populations, respectively.