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How should socialists understand finance: remembering the lessons of Capital
For those on the Left, finance seems like a bourgeois pastime. Many of us outright despise the stuff. While the petit bourgeoisie drool over dividends and diversification, we prefer to focus on crisis and class.
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Martin Luther King’s radical anticapitalism
In a posthumously published essay, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”
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Warren Buffett & imperial economics
Warren Buffett is one of the wealthiest people in the world. He is also Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Hathaway, a huge U.S. investment conglomerate. Looking at Berkshire’s investment policy reveals some important features of the economics of imperialism today and the role of money capitalists.
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Utopia and the right to be lazy
Students are much too busy to think these days. So, when a junior comes to talk with me about the possibility of my directing their senior thesis, I ask them about their topic—and then their schedule. I explain to them that, if they really want to do a good project, they’re going to have to quit half the things they’re involved in.
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This is for the Guardian, NYT and the BBC: 1939 to 2018
Before I go any further with this let me state that I’m not a Trotskyist, or a Leninist, or a Stalinist or a Maoist (but I might have been all of the above, with exception of Maoist, at one time or another).
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Sympathy for Ahed Tamimi is not enough
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few weeks, it is unlikely that Ahed Tamimi’s story, will come as news to you, despite the mainstream media’s best efforts.
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Dismantling doomsday: Daniel Ellsberg on the risk of Nuclear apocalypse
Daniel Ellsberg is perhaps the premier whistleblower of all time, the man who in 1971 dragged the Pentagon Papers out of top-secret darkness into the light. Yet even as excerpts from the papers’ 7,000 pages were being published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers, Ellsberg was sitting on an entire second set of secrets, having nothing to do with Vietnam: all his material on nuclear policy, such as the operational plans for general nuclear war that he had drafted for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in his job as a RAND Corporation defense analyst.
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What’s wrong with colonialism?
I remember many years ago sitting through a seminar at Macquarie University in Sydney during my Honours studies in Politics. That particular seminar focused on Western colonialism in the South Pacific, and modern Western imperialism in general. I remember one thing vividly from that class that remained etched into my mind. It was a question that the lecturer asked U.S. repeatedly and insistently. ‘Why is it so important for indigenous people to maintain their identity? What is so bad with a particular way of life or culture disappearing?’
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Leaked nuclear posture review lays out policy changes that would increase risk of nuclear war
A draft of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review leaked to the Huffington Post indicates that the White House is planning changes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its nuclear-use policy that would increase the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.
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‘Socialism a necessity for human survival’
According to John Bellamy Foster, the world environmental crisis is a systemic crisis, a product of capitalism, and requires systemic changes in the capitalist system. He says that environmental sustainability is incompatible with capitalism.
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Why we must protect the world from the United States
Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated the obvious: The United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. He also said the public allowing this violence would lead to a kind of national spiritual death that would continue to make the U.S. state a danger to the world.
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On the contribution of István Mészáros (1930-2017) to critical thinking
István Mészáros, an outstanding Hungarian Marxist philosopher, died on October 1st 2017 in London. Born in Budapest in 1930 into a working-class family, brought up by his mother, he began working in industry at the age of twelve. He actually lied about his age, claiming to be sixteen, in order to be accepted by the factory.
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The U.S. role in turning countries into shitholes and provoking immigration
Since Trump is a racist, he thinks that countries get to have poor economic and security situations because of the race of the people that inhabit them. That is silly (and dangerous) as history and social science.
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Safe spaces for colonial apologists
The recent controversies about Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project and UK Universities Minister Jo Johnson’s attack on “safe space culture” have both been defended on freedom of speech grounds. However, they are better understood as retrenching colonial thinking in universities.
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Schumpeter’s two theories of imperialism
Schumpeter’s theory is interesting for several reasons. It was formulated at the same time as Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s and clearly with the knowledge of the two. It reacts to the exactly the same events as theirs. It is different though and it was held by Schumpeter throughout his life. The key text for Schumpeter’s theory is “The sociology of imperialisms” (note the plural) published in 1918-19.
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The Honduran dictatorship is ‘Made in the USA’: fraudulent elections greeted by huge protests
The U.S. State Department has endorsed the outcome of the November 26 elections in Honduras, which was surely the most farcical electoral process in recent history.
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“The seeds of revolt are present in many places”
Interview with John Bellamy Foster, Editor of Monthly Review. By JIPSON JOHN and JITHEESH P.M.
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Marx on imperialism
On February 19, 1881, Karl Marx had written a remarkable letter to N.F. Danielson, the renowned Narodnik economist who had also gone under the name of Nikolayon and whose work had been much discussed by Lenin.
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Yemen: A western-sponsored genocide
The lack of media interest makes it seem like a crisis unfolding in slow motion. But that is only because outrage and compassion are now meant to be weaponised when they can be useful in justifying imperialist interventions. For the Yemeni people the agony is real and there is no escaping it.
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‘Whether or not the Presidents change, the Generals remain connected’
CounterSpin interview with Suyapa Portillo on Honduras Electoral Chaos