Subjects Archives: Marxism

The protesters’ immediate demand is for governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign, but the mobilizations have also highlighted the widespread rejection of Puerto Rico’s status as a colony of the U.S.

Impossible to deny the reality of poverty in our world. Studies of the data on income and wealth routinely show that billions of people on the planet live with minimal access to resources. These studies demonstrate that poverty cannot be measured merely by the financial resources that are not available; they demonstrate how billions of people have no access to electricity, safe drinking water, education, or health care.

Based on remarks by Mr Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva, Deputy General Manager of the BIS, at the Conference of the Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), Paris, 17 April 2019.

We know it’s bad but not quite how bad. We know we should do more about protecting our personal data but either we can’t be bothered or don’t know how.

It is not the collapse of Conservatism causing the rise of the far-right in America, Europe and Britain, it is the opposite.  It is, however, important to understand that this is exactly how fascism comes to power.

The BBC’s Panorama on antisemitism in the Labour Party provides no real evidence and shows how cynical the smear campaign is, argues David McAllister

While capturing Venezuela’s oil was and obviously remains the objective, the destruction of Chavismo as an example and inspiration also was and remains a key consideration.

Left tech bros are honing Marx into a capitalist tool

Britain’s leading newspaper The Guardian, which has relentlessly attacked Jeremy Corbyn and his leftist allies, published but then quickly removed an open letter signed by Noam Chomsky defending Labour MP Chris Williamson from “anti-Semitism” smears.

From the Algeria to algorithms, Lizzie O’Shea argues that Frantz Fanon’s ideas have much to offer us as we seek to understand, and resist, some of the most profound challenges of living in the digital age.

The battle against Big Tech has now decisively emerged as a new front in the fight for the right to the city

Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Progress in Political Economy — The idea of mass strikes within the Marxist tradition has been most powerful against capitalism. With the idea of strikes, Marx wants to bring about an epistemological change in the working class, “so they would know that they are, together, ‘the agent of production’, and that if they stopped, then production stopped.” Different models of mass strikes have been practised and reterritorialised worldwide from its origins in Western Europe. There has been debate on how the working class today responds to the current changes of capitalist development.

After the first round of Democratic primary debates, the line from corporate media and their overwhelmingly centrist sources was clear: The Democrats are moving dangerously to the left, at their own peril.

In any event the dialectics of art will continue.

Despite its reputation as the wealthiest generation, baby boomers (generally considered to be those born between 1946 and 1964) are facing a retirement nightmare.

The debate over inequality has become hotter world-wide. While Trump had introduced substantial tax cuts for the rich in 2017, and Britain’s Boris Johnson, the front-runner to succeed Teresa May, has promised to do the same if he becomes Prime Minister, there are strong proposals for taxing the rich which have also been mooted. Bernie Sanders had such a proposal for the U.S. during the time that he was seeking the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

We are frequently told that capitalism equals ‘freedom’; that it is the organic product of ‘human nature’. But far from arising naturally, the birth of the ‘free’ market is built on violence, dispossession, and enslavement.

On the one hand, people who spend most of their time working develop an understanding of the ‘practical transformation of the world’. This framework is implicit in the workers’ activity, since the worker–given the theft of their time–is often prevented from having a ‘clear theoretical consciousness of this practical activity’.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research launches its eighteenth dossier, “The Only Answer Is to Mobilize the Workers.” The challenges facing Indian workers and their strategies to fight back are explained through the insights and expertise of K. Hemalata, president of the Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).

Humankind and the environment are hurtling toward unprecedented ecological crises. Global warming, sea level rise, and weather extremes due to carbon emissions are catastrophic enough, but they will mix and combine with ocean acidification, air and chemical pollution, water shortages, deforestation, fishery collapse, soil erosion, and mass extinction, throwing both nature and society off a cliff into the unknown.