Subjects Archives: Culture

All of our world’s worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don’t use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people’s understanding of what’s going on.

With just over 98 percent of the precincts counted, the triumph of Gustavo Petro, candidate of the Historic Pact, in the second round of the Colombian presidential elections was confirmed.

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.

Gustavo Petro won Colombia’s June 19 election, becoming its first ever left-wing president. We analyze what this means for Latin America, the US, Venezuela, the military, paramilitary groups, the powerful oligarchy, and social movements.

Mask-lessness is becoming contagious and normalised in a world that is far from “normal”.

June is Pride Month. It is a time to celebrate. It’s also a time to remember the struggle for equal rights, a history we are continually encouraged to forsake, fragment, and forget.

Oleksandra Koval, director of the Ukrainian Book Institute (part of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture), has claimed that they will begin working towards withdrawing over 100 million so-called ‘propaganda’ books from public libraries in Ukraine.

In the run-up to June’s parliamentary elections, the political atmosphere in France has been transformed by a new left alliance, the New Popular Union. How useful is it and what are its prospects?

It is quite common to think of the black man in the United States who finds himself in a moment of danger. But let us talk about the adivasi people in India who are in a similar situation. Not just danger, but they — their life, culture, forests and land — are facing a situation of accelerated danger.

for Uvalde and other schools…

U.S. corporate media has provided glowing coverage to Paul Gray, a notorious American white nationalist fighting in Ukraine. A DHS document warns he’s not the only U.S. fascist drawn to Kiev.

Action films, horror films, romantic comedies, science fiction, documentaries–film plays a big part of our lives. Film matters, not only because it was the most popular cultural art form of the 20th century, but because film connects to so many areas of our lives in so many different ways. Not only in the way we visualise our lives, but the ways in which we understand and communicate them.

Two mass shootings in quick succession brought out the worst in Americans. The anger and grief were followed by the usual lies and pretense that violence here is somehow mysterious. Political leaders advocate state violence all the time, calling for new victims to be created here and around the world.

Amidst intense fighting under way, Russian forces entered Severodonetsk city in Luhansk, Donbass region, May 24, 2022

On 11 May 2022, an Israeli sniper fired at the head of the veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh as she reported on an Israeli military raid on a refugee settlement in Jenin (part of the Occupied Palestine Territories).

If you do not know this sordid character, you should know that the man is one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi party Pravy Sektor, a party that is very influential in military circles and very active in repression and assassinations.

The Chinese communist base area of Yan’an was a literal and metaphorical stage for envisioning, experimenting, and building a new society and a new human being.

Of all classes, the middle class is the one with the most people clamouring to be part of it. Many members of the ruling class prefer the label “middle” to one that makes capitalist dominance so overt. Many workers think that having a middle-income job by default puts them in the middle class. And people who want to downplay the working class’s revolutionary potential prefer to say,

The problem of precarious employment, non-standard labor relations concerns today an increasing number of employees. 

This week, Grace talks to John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review. They discuss Marx’s theory of nature and the relationship between humanity and nature under capitalism.