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Imperialism and India’s food economy
The problem before metropolitan capitalism therefore is: how to acquire control over the use of this tropical land-mass in order to obtain the products it needs?
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Living is no laughing matter
The United States government has withdrawn its support for the World Health Organisation (WHO) based on accusations that the WHO has not been forthcoming about the novel coronavirus and based on U.S. President Donald Trump’s questioning of the WHO’s independence from China, calling the organisation a ‘puppet of China’.
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Iran’s skyrocketing stock exchange signals historic political shift
In Iran, this spring brings a historic opportunity for neoliberal opposition parties personified by President Rouhani. The utopian dream will now get its first chance to prove itself as a cash-starved Islamic Republic embarks on its boldest ever embrace of privatization of state-owned companies.
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A consumer economy?
Richard Heinberg is a very important scholar and an apparently lovely human being. His books are always penetrating, and both his contribution to and his review of Michael Moore’s corporate-green-censored movie, Planet of the Humans, demonstrate his continuing efforts to speak crucially unheard truths.
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Dossier 20: Health is a political choice
In the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25 offers an expanded vision of what it could mean to be a human being. Human beings, it notes, have ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being’. This includes ‘food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’; human beings also have the ‘right to security’, which means they have the right to compensation for any lack of livelihood due to circumstances beyond their control.
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The treason of the ruling class
They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state.
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The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism – book review
Mike Davis’ The Monster Enters updates his earlier book on capitalism and pandemic disease to reflect on the current failure of the neoliberal state, finds Elaine Graham-Leigh
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Capitalism & the home
We have become used to ‘stay at home’ in the corner of our TV screens, behind nightly government press conferences, repeated over and over on the radio and in social media.
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Catastrophe capitalism and the COVID-19 crisis
ÖŞK: In an interview with Michael D. Yates (“Trump, neo-fascism, and the COVID-19 Pandemic,”April 11, 2020, MR Online) you mentioned that “Capitalism is in its biggest crisis this century.” What makes this crisis the “biggest”? What will the outcome of this crisis look like? Will this crisis and failure lead to a major change in […]
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Oil price collapse & the crisis
Is oil a stranded asset? Or is the system defunct? This thought-provoking talk was given by Andy Higginbottom, Associate Professor in the Politics Department of Kingston University in Britain. In this talk he looks at Marx’s theory of rent as surplus profit and its parallels within the oil markets.
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Growth figures underscore economic crisis amidst COVID
Early evidence on the intensity and drivers of the COVID-induced crisis in the U.S. and Europe suggests that the official response may lengthen the recession and delay recovery
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Death cult capitalism
Death cult capitalism–now the dominant variety–accepts some losses among the royal caste as an acceptable trade-off for creating a world in which millions of lives are extinguished to lube the system and keep the good stuff rolling in, feeding the insatiable parasites at the top whose lust for short term profits has no end.
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Is postcolonial capitalism a thing to itself? Reviewing Sanyal’s – Rethinking Capitalist Development
In all, Sanyal’s work is engaging, remarkable in its cross-disciplinarity, and fresh. Though its influence has been concentrated in Indian academia, I urge my colleagues elsewhere to give it a read. It will definitely make you think.
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Disease capitalism and COVID-19: Hunger in the belly of the beast
For capital, profits come from disease, not peoples’ health. COVID-19 shows the consequence of disease capitalism in a globalized world, the rich—countries or individuals—will not be spared either.
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Capitalism and Nature – A really inconvenient truth
The balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but it is still there: a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot safely be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a [person] perched on the edge of a cliff. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. [Humans], too, [are] part of this balance.
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“Humans” are not the problem: Reflections on a “useless” documentary
With nearly everyone trapped at home for the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, Michael Moore released a film that picks apart the U.S. environmental movement as it may have looked ten years ago, and then misleadingly presents it as breaking news.
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Epidemics and capitalism
The article seeks to re-emphasise that as capitalism exploits society and nature for its own expanded reproduction, it cannot but revolutionise the productive forces, in terms of science and technology. On the other hand, however, it also creates fetters to the realisation of the potential that it creates, by making it a slave to the logic of profit.
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The Politics of the coronavirus conjuncture in Ireland
The election in Ireland in early February marked a clear acceleration of the country’s ongoing left turn over recent years. Then came the virus.
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America’s super-rich see their wealth rise by $282 Billion in three weeks of pandemic
America’s billionaires have accrued more wealth in the past three weeks alone than they made in total prior to 1980.
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A crisis like no other: social reproduction and the regeneration of capitalist life during the COVID-19 pandemic
As the COVID-19 health crisis deepens, it looks increasingly clear that the short-term collapse in global output is likely to exceed that of any recession in the last 150 years–that is, in the entire history of capitalism. The ILO estimates that the crisis will lead to the destruction of 195 million jobs. Hence, after discussing at length the epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic, media attention is now increasingly focused on how to restart the global economic engine.