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Facebook’s Troll Hunter in Chief Nathaniel Gleicher tied to Neocon think tank
While Facebook claims impartiality in its crackdown on “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the loyalties of the man charged with carrying out that mission. if his resume is any indication, are not with the users.
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Vintage comics against war
The next phase of rebellious art, I have thought all this time, belonged to the rise of the Underground Comix of the later 1960s, with one tip of the hat to the campus satire magazines that in some places gave artists like Austin’s Gilbert Shelton a start, and another to Harvey Kurtzman’s failed magazines after Mad, especially Help! (1961-65).
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A new abnormal
Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats—nuclear weapons and climate change—were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger.
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Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019)
Erik Olin Wright was radicalized in the 1960s and remained a Marxist because his moral compass simply wouldn’t allow him to drift away. With his death, the Left has lost one of its most brilliant intellectuals.
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What the mountain taught the mouse
Inequality is sexist. It is also transphobic and racist. This is a reality demonstrated by Oxfam’s recent report on wealth and inequality, and a reality well understood by the people who live it.
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Make MLK’s teachings part of school curriculum
Dr Martin Luther King’s writings and speeches “should be a part of the curriculum of public schools,” said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, based in Newark, New Jersey.
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Inequality and the ecological transition
Last month Branko Milanovic published a blog post about the Yellow Vest movement against the fuel tax in France. He was worried–like many analysts–that the uprising proves it will be virtually impossible to roll out the policies necessary to reduce carbon emissions. He’s convinced that people simply won’t accept it.
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Victor Wallis – Red-Green Revolution
The scale of environmental crisis is absolutely terrifying. So I was very pleased to read Victor Wallis’ new book Red-Green Revolution which aims to both explain capitalism and environmental destruction and offer a clear strategy for building a movement to challenge both.
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My hopes lie shattered
Late last year, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton went to Miami (USA), where he coined a new–chilling–phrase: troika of tyranny. It echoed former U.S. President George W. Bush’s phrase, axis of evil. Bush’s axis included Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
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Marx imagined a totally asexual worker
Silvia Federici is one of the most important feminist thinkers of our time–anyone looking for profound analyses of the role of housework, violence against women, or the importance of control over the body in capitalism inevitably encounters her writings.
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The rise of the student worker
The student population today is unrecognisable from that of a generation or more ago, writes Matt Myers. And it is central to any socialist project for the future.
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General Motors’ factories should not be closed
It’s become something of a shopworn cliché to say that “for every problem, there’s an opportunity.” However, I submit that this adage might well apply to General Motors’ November 26th announcement that it will be eliminating more than 14,000 jobs and closing seven factories worldwide by the end of next year, including four factories in the U.S. and one in Canada.
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The roots of Karl Marx’s anti-Colonialism
Through his relationship with the Chartist radical and labor poet Ernest Jones, Karl Marx came to realize the necessity of opposing slavery and colonialism in ending capitalism.
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The art of the revolution will be internationalist
The ideological battle must be fought not only with words but also with the production of images and visuals that propel the work of movements forward.
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When “green” doesn’t “grow”
The onslaught of extreme weather and the increasingly stark scientific assessment leave no doubt that we face an ecological and civilizational emergency. But in the year since COP23 in Bonn, Germany, a constant stream of headlines and reports have confirmed that governments are not on track to meet their climate commitments.
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Living amidst the catastrophes of “the Living Contradiction”
“By its nature,” Marx writes in the climactic passage of a magnificent but very dense section of the Grundrisse, capital “posits a barrier to labor and value-creation in contradiction to its tendency to expand them boundlessly. And in as much as it both posits a barrier specific to itself, and on the other side equally drives over and beyond every barrier, it is the living contradiction.”
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Is Russia imperialist?
Is Russia Imperialist is a look at capitalist Russia today and its place in the world economic system. In this article we look at the degree capitalist Russia today shares in the features outlined by Lenin in his book Imperialism. We consider the role Russian capitalist monopolies play in the world imperialist system, the nature of Russia’s export trade, the export of Russian capital, the world role played by Russian finance capital, and finally Russian military power.
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The political roots of falling wage growth
It’s now official: workers around the world are falling behind. The International Labor Organization’s (ILO) latest Global Wage Report finds that, excluding China, real (inflation-adjusted) wages grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in 2017, down from 1.8% in 2016. That is the slowest pace since 2008.
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Marx for me (and hopefully for others too)
Yesterday I had a conversation about my work, about how and why I started studying inequality more than 30 years ago, what was my motivation, how it was to work on income inequality in an officially classless (and non-democratic) society, did the World Bank care about inequality etc.
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Political correctness and the rise of the right
The honest answer is that I was asked to write something reflecting on Trump by my then editor at Scribe. In the immediate wake of the 2016 presidential election, many people were dumbfounded by the news out of the U.S. How could such an odious figure–such a transparent bigot and fraud–win power?