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?

In the wake of the deadly riot in Washington, DC, and with the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden just days away, Ben Hillier spoke to Mike Davis, author of Prisoners of the American Dream and Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory, about the crises and transformations of U.S. politics.

On 30 December, Argentina’s Senate voted to legalise abortion after many years of mass protests around the issue. In the wake of this important victory, Red Flag spoke to Cele Fierro, an activist with the anti-capitalist feminist group Juntas a la Izquierda and a member of the national leadership of the Movimiento de los Trabajadores (MST) in Argentina.

The ecological crisis—the disasters of earth, water, air and fire that are afflicting the global environment and the human society that depends on it—is a crisis of capitalism’s making. Karl Marx famously described capital as coming into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.

Millions of day labourers in India lost their jobs overnight earlier this year when Narendra Modi’s central government hastily announced a national lockdown.

Karl Marx developed his theory of revolution by arguing against would-be progressives who looked to the capitalist state as a force for progress.

Many have celebrated Joe Biden’s win in the U.S. presidential election as a major turning point in the battle to save the world from climate catastrophe. The liberal media have been Biden’s main advocates. For example, a 12 November editorial in the Guardian argued: “Joe Biden’s win will make a big difference to international efforts to deal with the climate emergency”.