The popularity of “build back better” as a slogan reflects that no-one in their right mind would be overly enthused by the idea of “building back the same”.

Wittenoom is an abandoned town in the desert north of Perth. Once, it had a population of almost 1,000, making it the biggest town in the Pilbara. Now, it’s been removed from maps and cut off from all essential services, to stop people from visiting.

The scale of the climate crisis has driven a new generation of radical young activists to demand “system change, not climate change”.

We are witnessing an aggressive build-up by the U.S. and its allies for a confrontation with China. The Biden administration is making massive upgrades to the US’s military capacity, and sharply reorienting it to focus on China.

There is no doubt among scientists that the increasing frequency of extreme weather and associated disasters like fires is a result of climate change.

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Crime and Punishment, wrote, “The darker the night, the brighter the stars”.

Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism provides the key to understanding the environmental catastrophe we’re witnessing, and to gaining a clearer picture of what’s needed to repair our damaged relationship with the Earth.

In countries where public health restrictions were in place, they were half-baked or have been lifted too soon. Where they are imposing them now, it’s too late; the Delta variant of the coronavirus is surging around the world.

The first decades of the 21st century have been a gilded age for the world’s super-rich. While the mass of humanity has struggled through successive economic crises, accelerating climate and environmental breakdown and now a devastating global pandemic, the billionaire class’s wealth has piled up to ever more dizzying heights.

As temperature records were smashed all up and down the Pacific coast in the last week of June, reports emerged of rolling blackouts, buckling roads, damaged wires and newly sparked wildfires.

Wherever the forces of destruction attempt to cut down trees, pollute our air and water, and rip away the earth for minerals, women have been leading the resistance. In the cities and communities, women have fought for clean water, air, and land for their families to flourish.

Forty years after his death, Robert Nesta Marley retains a unique position as possibly the only Third World musical superstar, widely known by millions of people around the globe.

State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell explained—in a now removed article in Dagens Industri, a Stockholm-based financial newspaper—that the country’s strategy to contain the virus would not “compromise our social functioning in a way that is more detrimental to any profits”.

Counter-revolutionary violence has reached new heights in Myanmar, as the Tatmadaw (the country’s military) attempts to terrorise a nationwide uprising into submission.

Capitalist society is divided into different classes, and the relationships between those classes shape the production of wealth, the dissemination of ideas and the nature of politics.

The word “exploitation” is special for Marxists because it contains a unique insight about the way wealth is produced in class societies.

It all began as the sun rose over the districts of Montmartre and Belleville on 18 March 1871. Army soldiers began seizing nearly 250 cannon that had been placed in these radical, working-class areas by the National Guard, a popular Parisian militia. The soldiers had been sent by the head of the new republican government, Adolphe Thiers.

Rosa Luxemburg, one of the great leaders in the history of the socialist movement, was born in Poland (then a province of the Russian empire) 150 years ago this month, on 5 March 1871.

Of all the reasons to be angry during the pandemic—the profit-first response of governments, the neglected state of the health system, the environmental crisis underpinning the disaster, the millions dead—it has been people buying extra toilet paper that has elicited the most outrage.

If half a million people in the United States were murdered by an evil cult, the leaders of which said that they would keep killing thousands a day to satisfy their rapacious urge for power and money, what do you think the response would be?