Geography Archives: Global

The week from September 20 till September 27 has been designated as the week of the ‘Climate Strike’. It is an unprecedented event in its ambition to disrupt business as usual.

It is very common for leftist commentators to use the term ‘neoliberalism’ in their analysis of a political situation or social struggle. The term is frequently used in socialist political economy, cultural studies, and even mainstream liberal newspapers.

The death of Immanuel Wallerstein deprives us of an exceptional mind and an astute critic of capitalist society. This is a doubly lamentable loss at a moment as critical as the present, when the international system suffers under the combined pressures of the tensions provoked by the decline of U.S. imperialism and of the systemic crisis of capitalism.

Activists of All Ages, Labor Groups, Faith Leaders, Businesses and More Join Youth-Led Climate Strikes in Intergenerational Demand for Climate Action

We must act now.

Without self-determination, socialism becomes an economistic demand that fails to account for imperial rule.

Call it “socialism” or something else — but that is the future we need.

Using green sensibilities to rally people around a nationalist ideology is also at the core of the AfD’s agenda. The party, which does not seem to see a contradiction in its embrace of “a healthy environment” and climate-change denial,  fuels fears that climate politics could threaten Germany’s national sovereignty — for example, if ending fossil-fuel production would make the country dependent on oil and coal imports. The AfD’s new environmental agenda is thus not merely a rejection of the German government’s climate policies. It is an attempt at pushing back against a growing climate justice movement and international demands for a global response to the climate crisis.

During the debate about the global poverty numbers that unfolded earlier this year, the Bloomberg opinion columnist Noah Smith wrote a piece discussing some of my claims. In the months since a number of people have asked me to respond.

Last summer, protesters in Oregon set up a makeshift camp outside the Portland office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Similar encampments soon spread across the country, from Chicago to Los Angeles and New York. Horrified by stories of family separation and images of children in detention centers along the southern border, a consequence of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, activists demanded the agency immediately disband.

Ahead of the September 20 Climate Strike, Eoghan Ó’Ceannabháin breaks down the failings of the far right and the liberal establishment in tackling global climate change.

Last week, Agence France-Presse got its hands on a draft UN report called Special Report on the Ocean and Cyrosphere in a Changing Climate. This 900-page document is study of the oceans for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007.

A towering intellectual, pathbreaking thinker, and preeminent sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein passed away. He lived a deep commitment to scholarship, justice and change.

Corinna Lotz’ Finding Ilyenkov can be read in a few hours, but for those readers taken with its ideas and appeal to the relevance of Ilyenkov’s life and theory, this book provides a salient and fecund starting point for any variety of in-depth engagements relating to Ilyenkov, dialectical materialism and creative Soviet Marxism.

“Time is running out. This decade is our last chance to stop the destruction of our people and our planet… This is why we strike.”

Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but ratherabundance (see Sahlins, 1976; Galbraith, 1998; Latouche, 2014; D’Alisa et al., 2014).

THE hallmark of a systemic, as distinct from a cyclical or sporadic, crisis of capitalism is that every effort to resolve the crisis within the broad confines of the system, defined in terms of its prevailing class configuration, only worsens the crisis.

Today, as the global economy flounders from crisis to crisis, Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the essential basis for a correct understanding of what is going on. Moseley’s book reaffirms key elements of this analysis.

It may be a new low in propaganda. National Public Radio (NPR) used the news that Syrian First Lady Asma Assad had overcome breast cancer to mock her and continue the information war against Syria.  They interviewed a Human Rights Watch staffer named Lama Fakih who is an American from Michigan now based in Beirut.

With the passing of the great anti-imperialist and Marxist intellectual Samir Amin on August 12 of last year, the international communist movement lost a giant.