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‘The Fire Boom’
In this excerpt from Mike Davis’s classic book ‘The Ecology of Fear’, he explores the tinderbox of the wealthy “Los Angeles frontiers” and the massive public resources dedicated to keep it from igniting.
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Talking shit
What links Karl Marx, William S. Burroughs, Dalit struggles in India and the Yetties’ famous Muckspreader Song? Ed Emery writes on the centrality of excrement, both metaphorical and literal, to the modern world.
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Mike Davis on becoming a Marxist
After losing a coveted niche in the trucking industry, I started UCLA as an adult freshman, attracted by rumors of a high-powered seminar on Capital led by Bob Brenner in the History Department.
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Pañuelos Verdes, Acompañamiento, Solidaridad
The Global South has much to teach the Global North about fighting for reproductive justice, providing abortions to whoever needs them, regardless of the law–and about building a mass, international, feminist movement.
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‘Why are you acting the Marxist?’ Frédéric Lordon on Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital and Ideology’
On 31 January, at the Bourse du travail in Paris, Frédéric Lordon debated with Thomas Piketty on his book ‘Capital and Ideology’, at the invitation of Les Amis de L’Humanité. The following text is Frédéric Lordon’s opening speech, with minimal revisions.
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The struggle to live in the present
In Capital Is Dead, Mckenzie Wark argues that the dominance of the capitalist class may be ending. In order to grasp this epochal transition, leftists must follow the young Marx—and abandon or adapt inherited modes of thought.
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Julian Assange outside the Gate of Hell
I’ve been to see Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy several times, mainly when Rafael Correa was President and the Embassy felt like a liberated space. A few weeks ago I met him again. By now Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, had capitulated on every level to the American Empire.
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In defence of Metabolic Rift Theory
One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.
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Mapping social reproduction theory
Let us slightly modify the question “who teaches the teacher?” and ask this of Marxism: If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker? Put another way: What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?
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Alain Badiou debates reformist Laurent Joffrin
Alain Badiou is former chair of philosophy at École normale supérleure and author of In Praise of Politics. Laurent Joffrin is editor of Libération newspaper—and a reformist who defends existing social democracy. Alain Badiou recently announced that he would stop running his seminar. He also announced that he would soon be publishing The Immanence of Truths, completing […]
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Limits on free speech
Judith Butler asks what happens when free speech clashes with other basic values.
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Red scientist: two strands from a life in three colours
An exploration of Bernal’s contribution to the politicization of science and scientists, above all the development of the Social Relations of Science movement.
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Political power and dissent in post-revolutionary societies
Marx’s original definition concerned political power as the direct manifestation of class antagonism, coupled with its opposite: the abolition of political power properly so-called in a fully realized socialist society. But what happens in between? Is it possible to break entrenched political power without necessarily resorting to the exercise of a fully articulated system of political power?
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The effect of the whip: The Frankfurt school and the oppression of women
Stuart Jeffries on the Frankfurt School’s absence of women and the points of contact between the thinkers associated with the Institute für Sozialforschung and theorists of feminism.
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Thugs and journalists
The repetition of words like “thug” and “gang” in media coverage of anti-fascist demonstrators suggests the degree to which mainstream journalists, and centrists more widely, understand challenges to the state in the same euphemisms with which they express their own deep anti-blackness.
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Does David Roediger disagree with Ellen Meiksins Wood?
How does race relate to class in capitalism? Is it intrinsic and essential to the reproduction of capital, or merely an accidental feature of particular capitals? In this recent essay by Richard Seymour, and originally published on his Patreon, Seymour considers a debate within Marxism on the relationship between class, race and capitalism.