Subjects Archives: Class

It was a packed room for the Trinity College Dublin Philosophical Society debate on whether private property should be abolished. I was the first speaker and spoke in an impassioned way for the motion. There was much expression of assent in the room.

“In fact, Zelenskiy is far closer to Lenin than to George Washington. He is a dictator. He is a dangerous authoritarian who has used $100 billion in U.S. tax dollars to erect a one-party police state in Ukraine.” Who wrote this?  It is the opinion posted on Twitter by Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Russia Today TV network (since 2005) and the Sputnik news agency (since 2014).

Within the heterogenous tradition of Marxism there are two diametrically opposed conceptions of popular culture: the elitist and vanguardist.

In today’s political climate, the word racism has become taboo.

A NEO-LIBERAL regime entails a spontaneous change in the balance of class power against the working class everywhere. This happens for a number of reasons.

In history and civics classrooms all over the United States, students are taught from an early age to revere the “Founding Fathers” for drafting a document that is the bulwark of democracy and freedom—the U.S. Constitution.

Mainstream media takes on the bad news on life expectancy barely mention international comparisons — notably ignoring China and Cuba — and neglect the political and economic context of the drop, writes WT WHITNEY Jr.

This summer’s strikes in Britain and the announcement by the RMT’s Mick Lynch that ‘the working class is back’ will have sent a collective shudder through the ranks of the establishment.

In 2002, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro Ruz visited the country’s National Ballet School to inaugurate the 18th Havana International Ballet Festival.

ECONOMISTS distinguish between two kinds of inflation: “demand-pull” and “cost-push”.

In his speech Friday at the Federal Reserve’s annual summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell made one thing clear: America’s financial oligarchy is determined to make the working class bear the cost of the deepening economic crisis.

Luxury cruises are an expression of capitalism’s worst instincts.

Without class struggle the emancipatory potential of degrowth will fail to be realized. A revolutionary pedagogy can help to unify them.

White supremacist arrogance was the order of the day when Nancy Pelosi ignored a red line set by the Chinese government and visited Taiwan. The Speaker of the House showed stereotypical and racist attitudes towards that country and began a chain of events that won’t go well for the U.S.

Capitalism is a system that has an innate tendency to get into a cul-de-sac of crisis, and the only way it knows for coming out of crisis is by further exploitation of the working class.

We have to recognize that there is a pathway forward for humanity, but that the capitalist world system, and today’s governments that are largely subservient to corporations and the wealthy, are blocking that pathway, simply because it requires revolutionary-scale socioecological change.

Two recent articles in Open Democracy report responses from Ukrainian trade unions to the “Lugano Declaration”, which came out of a conference between high Western and Ukrainian officials in Switzerland last week and sets out plans for economic reconstruction “after the war is over” by the Ukrainian Oligarchy* and its major imperial sponsors; the U.S., UK and EU.

The war in Ukraine, rising oil prices and spiralling global inflation have fuelled food scarcity and surges in the price of basic goods in Egypt. Most worrying among the goods affected is bread, which makes up almost 40 percent of the average Egyptian’s diet.

Who, or what, is the “middle class”? Most people identify themselves as middle class, but what does that mean, and what difference does it make?

How a new class of “salts”—radicals who take jobs to help unionization—is boosting the organizing efforts of long-term workers.