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“I felt an urgency the publishing industry did not share”: Michael Mark Cohen and cartooning capitalism
I spent a tremendous amount of time digging around in old socialist and union newspapers, journals, magazines and pamphlets where I expected to read the work of earnest revolutionaries discussing socialist strategy and news from the latest strikes around the world. Of course, I found all that and more. – Michael Mark Cohen
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The Historical Challenges Facing the Socialist Movement
The ‘crisis of politics,’ which cannot be denied today even by the system’s worst apologists represents a profound crisis of legitimacy of the established social metabolic mode of reproduction and its overall framework of political control. This is what has brought about the historical actuality of the socialist offensive, although the pursuit of its own “line of least resistance” by labor continues to favor for the moment the maintenance of the existing order, despite the increasingly obvious inability of that order to “deliver the goods” as the once overwhelmingly accepted foundation of its legitimacy.
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Who are the 10 biggest pandemic profiteers?
One year after the COVID-19 pandemic began, U.S. billionaires have made out like gangbusters at the expense of workers.
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Jack Ma is not the problem
Broadly speaking, beneath these diverse incidents lies a single force. A great teacher and his generation warned of and suppressed it, but it has sprouted once more since the 1980s. After 40 years, it has taken root in multiple facets of our lives, including thought, society, reality and power.
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Interpreting contemporary imperialism: lessons from Samir Amin
Samir Amin’s life and work left behind many important legacies, which can continue to enrich us if only we recognise them adequately. He brought an indefatigable ‘optimism of the will’ to complex processes of political, social and economic change, involving an energy that was not deterred at all by the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ that his razor-sharp mind could generate.
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Thomas Piketty and Karl Marx: Two totally different visions of Capital
In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty has gathered his data meticulously and provided a useful analysis of the unequal distribution of wealth and income, yet some of his definitions are somewhat confusing and even questionable.
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February revolution in Burma
The shell of the old Burmese society is cracking under the nationwide street protests against the military dictatorship, sparked by the small group of Mandalay protesters on February 6, 2021.
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Newfoundland = New found fish
While treasure fleets carried silver to Spain, far more ships were carrying men, fish and whale oil across the North Atlantic.
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Taxes on the rich: One-sixth of what they used to be
A new IPS briefing paper highlights the unique role of tax policy in wealth concentration.
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Wall Street admits curing diseases is bad for business
Goldman Sachs is openly saying in financial reports that curing people of terrible diseases is not good for business.
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Commodity cod & factory ships
Beginning a series on the role of fishing in the birth and spread of capitalism, and the role of capitalism in today’s mass extinction of ocean life.
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Are we not all in search of tomorrow
Money floods the system, eats into the loyalties of politicians, corrupts the institutions of civil society, and shapes the narratives of the media. It matters that the dominant classes in our world own the main communications outlets and that these outlets shape the way people decipher the world around us.
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How ExxonMobil uses divide and rule to get its way in South America
ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies (newly merged in 1998), signed an agreement with the government of Guyana in 1999 to develop the Stabroek block, which is off the coast of the disputed Essequibo region.
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The Franciscan Invention of the New World with Julia McClure
Money on the Left is joined by Julia McClure, lecturer in Late Medieval & Early Modern Global History at the University of Glasgow. McClure’s 2017 book, The Franciscan Invention of the World, draws compelling and confounding conclusions about the role of the late Medieval Franciscans in shaping the modern capitalist and colonialist world. We talk with McClure […]
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Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism by Ashley J Bohrer reviewed by Christian Lotz
In Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism its author, Ashley J. Bohrer, presents a tour de force, offering and contributing to a wide-ranging debate that has occupied left academic and activist audiences for some time now.
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Capitalism, romanticism, and nature
Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy’s Romantic Anti-capitalism and Nature is an extremely interesting book—enjoyable, informative, and intellectually stimulating.
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Capitalism and the Telos of the Neoliberal Civilizing Mission
In 1931 the British Colonial Office submitted a special report to the Council of the League of Nations on the “Progress of Iraq” in the previous decade. Since the First World War had ended with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the confiscation of its territories, Iraq had been governed as a British mandate, under the supervision of the League.
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American capitalism’s endless military drive
The U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) has announced that weapons exports have risen by 2.8% to $175 billion in 2020. In their annual briefing on U.S. arms sales, the Pentagon and State Department cold-bloodedly described this increase as an “accomplishment.”
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Towards a geopolitics of popular power
Lecture given at the event: “The Collapse of the Unlawful State and the Recovery of Democracy”, held in La Paz, on December 14, 2020, in the auditorium of the Vice Presidency of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.
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Capitalism and catastrophe
The 2020 crisis we’ve endured isn’t an aberration of the system but, as Alex Callinicos argues, an aspect of its permanent crisis.