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Prabir Purkayastha on How Big Data’s Threat to Elections and Democracy Is Quickly Becoming a Global Problem
The cost of the 2016 U.S. elections was $6.5 billion if we combine the presidential and congressional elections. The Indian Parliamentary election of 2019 outspent the 2016 U.S. 2016 election, costing about $8.6 billion.
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Henry A. Giroux and the culture of neoliberal fascism
HENRY A. GIROUX’s book The Terror of the Unforeseen analyzes the conditions that have enabled and led to Donald Trump’s rule and the consequences of that rule, that have ushered in an authoritarian version of capitalism. Giroux provides a realistic analysis that holds out the hope that, through collective efforts, change is possible and democracy can be saved.
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Blacks don’t blame immigrants for the boss’s crimes
Large proportions of African Americans registered strong opposition to building a wall on the southern border, keeping undocumented people in limbo, and mass deportations.
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Top 1% up $21 Trillion. Bottom 50% down $900 Billion.
The insights of this new data series are many, but for this post here I want to highlight a single eye-popping statistic. Between 1989 and 2018, the top 1 percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion. The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.
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Hybrid wars are destroying Democracies
In Brazil recently, I gave an interview to Brasil de Fato, which was born in 2003 as the weekly magazine of the World Social Forum. It is now one of the most important windows into Brazil’s political world. The newsletter this week carries the text of most of the interview.
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What did Engels say about revolution?
Engels was a revolutionary democrat and a revolutionary realist, argues Dragan Plavšić
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Outsourcing exploitation: global labor-value chains
Through their control over supply chains, multinationals based in the global north exploit workers in the global south.
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Green designs for 21st century socialism
Before turning to the subject matter at hand two abiding issues in Marxist thinking need to be addressed. First, when Marx inveighed against Utopian Socialist futuristic model building, he never intended it to become a mantra dissuading socialists from thinking practically about socialist institutional design.
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CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978
Typical worker compensation has risen only 12% during that time
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Financial turbulence continues as major economies move towards recession
In response to the Wall Street decline, markets in Asia fell, with Japan’s Topix index down 1 percent while the Australian market dropped 2.9 percent, wiping $60 billion off share values. Markets in Europe also fell before recovering some of their losses later in the day.
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The commodity and the making of “woman”
If we have little interest in the scholasticism and the baroque arcana of contemporary marxist theoretical debates, the wealth of marxist theory can be neither dismissed nor ignored. And debates around marxist inspired feminism are a case in point.
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Review: Marx/Engels – Gesamtausgabe
Was Marx an ecologist and does Marx’s theory offer a coherent theoretical and practical approach for ecologists in the 21st century? The publication of Marx’s excerpts and notes on ecology from the mid-1860s may help to answer that question.
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Ian Angus on the politics of ecosocialism
Ecosocialism — in particular the Marxist wing of the ecosocialist movement — builds and acts on that understanding.
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Hegel on labor and freedom
Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel is especially clear on Hegel’s conception of labor and freedom. This is provided in Kojève’s analysis of the Master-Slave section of Hegel’s Phenomenology in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.
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Why Marx matters: capitalism and the Metabolic Rift
CO2 was identified as a prime driver of global warming in the 1950s and has been the subject of many international meetings over the past 30 years. Despite increasing calls to reduce carbon emissions, they continue to rise faster and faster.
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Crisis, which crisis? climate change and capitalism
The essays compiled in this special issue of Key Words address the theme of crisis. But which crisis?
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Marxism and the philosophy of science
Marxists are primarily known for their concern with the development of human society and political struggle. As materialists, however, Marxists necessarily look to developments in science and new ways of understanding the material world.
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Miliband’s masterpiece
Fifty years after it was published, The State in Capitalist Society remains indispensable for any socialist movement with ambitions of government.
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Arctic fires: “You have to go to a different planet to find a more persistent type”
Here’s a sentence for you: The Arctic is burning. Yes, that Arctic—the traditionally cold and wet one, large swaths of which are being consumed by an astonishing number of wildfires, from Russia to Greenland to Alaska.
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Homage to OSPAAAL, the organisation of solidarity for the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America
We live world where the aspirations of the workers and peasants are arrogantly dismissed. It is a world where the violence of a B-52 bomber is seen as reasonable, whereas the cries for an end to hunger are seen as utopian.