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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.
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Capitalism’s weak doses of socialism to treat the economic infection of COVID-19
The same proposals that were demonized yesterday as radical socialism are embraced today to save the society from collapse.
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Pandemic story: failures, forebodings, signs of solidarity
A great hazard looms. Under duress and as chaos mounts, capital may find it useful to revert to the extremist, even brutal, measures figuring in its past.
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Marx in the era of pandemic capitalism
How could Karl Marx (1818–1883) help us interpret the current crisis? His theory of history offers critical resources to interpret the unprecedented crisis which is shaking the world today, while indicating at the same time that ‘the world after’ so much mentioned could only be anti-capitalist.
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Cuba: from AIDS, Dengue, and Ebola to COVID-19
Cuba’s preparation for COVID-19 began on January 1, 1959. On that day, it laid the foundations for what would become the discovery of novel drugs, bringing patients to the island, and sending medical aid abroad. Coping with HIV/AIDS, dengue fever and Ebola helped Cuba develop the ability to cope with pandemics, both internally and abroad.
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Pandemic and socialism
As COVID-19 grips the world, in country after country, there is socialization of healthcare and of production of some essential goods, which markedly departs from the capitalist norm
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Could COVID-19 bring down the U.S. empire?
With the U.S. failing and China taking a leadership role in the international response to this crisis, could the COVID-19 crisis mark a turning point in the transition to a multipolar world in which China will be just as important as a world leader as the United States?
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The connivance of capitalists
Socialist ideas have been jeered and sneered at by the same establishment now faced with the consequences of their profit driven contempt. We should be done with those bellowing cheerleaders of capitalism, argues Eamonn McCann.
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This pandemic is ecological breakdown: Different tempo, same song
Comparisons between the toll of COVID-19 and climate change are not helpful because they view each as two separate “things”
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Engels on nature and humanity
In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.
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Brother Ali – Uncle Sam Goddamn
Ali raps in his verses that America is not the great place people make it out to be. He reminds us that slavery was present only two generations ago and extremely violent hate crimes occurred in the country. He also compares paying taxes to paying a homeless man for crack. Tax money is just supporting the war in the Middle East.
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Why coronavirus could spark a capitalist supernova
There is no magic money tree – the ‘rescue packages’ aim to rescue a rotten system, and won’t work.
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Austria’s ‘Unsozial’ Capitalists in a Time of Crisis
In a move seemingly reserved only for cartoonish villains, one of Austria’s best-known millionaires, Attila Doğudan, CEO of DO &CO—one of the largest culinary companies in Austria, and who employs over 11,000 people worldwide—has used the COVID-19 crisis to orchestrate a widespread layoff campaign against all restaurant employees within Austria.