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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This previously unpublished essay is taken from volume 1 of Mészáros’s Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, which remained incomplete at the time of his death in October 2017.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.
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Jorit, artist behind Che Guevara, Ahed Tamimi mural: ‘graffiti is the voice of protest’
Italian street artist Jorit Agoch unveiled one of the largest and most impressive murals of the Latin American revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara days ahead of the 51st anniversary of his assassination at the hands of the Bolivian army in La Higuera, Bolivia.
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You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well
Sitting in his office, Donald Trump meets with the head of his economic advisors Gary Cohn. Cohn jokes with Trump. He says, make a speech and say that the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border is ready to be built: the materials are on hand, labour is eager. The only thing that engineers are worrying about is how to spell–over the 2000-kilometre border–the word TRUMP.
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Geoengineering as dispossession
The Political Economy of Land Use in an Era of Climate Urgency.
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Is the answer really ‘in our genes’?
RICHARD DAWKINS, author of one of the best known texts on human nature, The Selfish Gene, declares we are “machines created by our genes”–that “[w]e are survival machines–robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
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Geoengineering and environmental capitalism
If, as history shows, fantasies of weather and climate control have chiefly served commercial and military interests, why should we expect the future to be different?
—James Fleming, Fixing the Sky -
A sound ecological policy cannot be achieved within a capitalist framework
“Ecosocialist politics is based on recognizing that a sound ecological policy cannot be achieved within a capitalist framework. In order to restore (to the extent possible) the health of the ecosphere, it is necessary that economic decisions be no longer based on the capitalist goals of maximizing profit and accumulating wealth.”
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After win by Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro, world’s capitalists salivate over ‘new investment opportunities’
“Capitalism only asks whether fascism is profitable.”
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Who will control the Earth’s thermostat?
Geoengineering is a risky business. So risky, in fact, that it should be banned.