Geography Archives: Global

When income growth slows down in an economy, so does the growth of tax revenue within the given tax regime. Since the government has certain expenditure obligations, to meet these obligations it has to either impose additional taxes or expand its fiscal deficit.

According to McCarthy, Marx rejects the view of justice in liberalism, which is limited to individual rights and fair distribution and provides a new one based on Aristotle’s definition of social justice grounded in ethics and politics.

The discussions and debates that have accompanied the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth since 2018 have provided an important opportunity to re-examine heretofore neglected aspects of his political and philosophical legacy. Foremost among them is the extent to which his body of work provides conceptual resources for developing a viable emancipatory to capitalism in the 21st century.

Christopher Caudwell, who died at age 29 fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, wrote: “Either the devil has come amongst us having great power, or there is a causal explanation for a disease common to economics, science, and art.” That disease, he recognized, was the self-alienation of humanity under capitalism

Millions of people are on the streets, from India to Chile. Democracy is both their promise and it is what has betrayed them. They aspire to the democratic spirit but find that democratic institutions–saturated by money and power–are inadequate. They are on the streets for more democracy, deeper democracy, a different kind of democracy.

John Foster gives a radio interview on Ecological Revolution

The climate crisis isn’t a future we must fight to avoid. It’s an already unfolding reality. It’s the intensification of extreme weather–cyclones, storms and floods, droughts and deadly heat waves.

In 2015, United Nations member states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which include an imperative to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” Yet, in the last four years, matters have deteriorated significantly.

The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric. Bruno Latour, for instance, imagines that when we speak about what is ‘critical’, we have in mind a fully negative project, a practice of debunking and dismantling hegemonic presumptions about the world, and that critical theory only intensifies skepticism and lacks transformative power and commitment to emancipatory ideals.

Paraphrasing a passage from Marx in the Grundrisse, Stavros Tombazos remarks that “every economy is in the end an economy of time” (2014, 13). This is to say that the productivity of labour, the accumulation of wealth, and the circulation of goods and resources which make up an economy in its broadest sense are all components of a particular organisation of time.

Until several days ago, I was a journalist at Newsweek. I decided to hand my resignation in because, in essence, I was given a simple choice. On one hand, I could continue to be employed by the company, stay in their chic London offices and earn a steady salary—only if I adhered to what could or could not be reported and suppressed vital facts. Alternatively, I could leave the company and tell the truth.

It’s not hard to see why young people are embracing socialism. It isn’t simply that they can see a probable grim future under capitalism as they know it: more and more low-wage, high surveillance jobs versus more budget and psychological stress as most also have higher fixed costs (rentier housing costs, student loan payments, even more “asset lite, rent heavy” systems, ever-escalating health care costs).

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In recent years and in the face of unprecedented changes in the climate system, some previously unknown and risky solutions have been proposed to put a halt to the chain of climate disasters, or at least to slow down the speed of their onslaught.

A quarter century ago, Victoria Sandino Palmera joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC-EP). She had previously been a militant in the Communist Party and–when FARC-EP was above ground in the 1990s–joined the Patriotic Pole. But the repression of what she calls the ‘traditional oligarchy’ sent her back to the jungle over and over again. Victoria Sandino made it clear that she was not keen on this war. ‘We didn’t take up weapons because we felt the need to use violence’

The Coming Revolution is an impressive guide for Marxists looking for a way to approach contemporary capitalism, argues Josh Newman

On 25 November 1960, three of four of the Mirabal sisters – María Teresa, Minerva, and Patria – of the Dominican Republic were assassinated for their resistance against the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. The youngest of the three – María Teresa – said before her death, ‘Perhaps what we have most near is death, but that idea does not frighten me. We shall continue to fight for justice’.

The global disorder and the experiences of the systemic crisis we have experienced for more than a decade (economic crisis, crisis of political legitimacy, crisis of social reproduction and crisis of the limits of the planet) have generated a need to understand that cannot be covered by partial analyses but requires a theory of totality.

The current global social tensions have in common the rejection of inequality and the loss of democratic control. The engine driving these challenges may well be the fading relevance of neoliberalism, which is aggravating its own crisis and opening the door to confrontation.

A recent study that found no general decline in the numbers of species in individual ecosystems has sparked controversy. Some scientists see it as evidence of how species adapt, while others see it as a sign that common invasive species, such as rats and mosquitoes, are the real winners.

In the Bandung Conference of 1955, the governments and peoples of Asia and Africa expressed their ambitions to reconstruct a global system based on the recognition of the rights of countries that had previously been under the yoke of colonialism. In that period, “the rights to development,” as applied to the frameworks for negotiating multipolarity constituted the basis of globalization. These rights would force the imperial powers to adapt to new realities.