Subjects Archives: Marxism

It may be hard, but I want you to try to think back a decade, actually slightly less than a decade. In 2000, we were celebrating the millennium, and if you remember what was happening at that time, it was an enormous celebration of a new global capitalism, of globalization, of the end of conflict in the world, of a new world order.

The moment was of course metaphysically necessary—that capital incarnate itself as man and come among us. The question we must ask rather is how this descent occurs, for that determines all that follows.

“The overwhelming character of the ecological crisis will eventually…[force workers to recognize] that the main material conditions determining their lives are both economic and environmental—and indeed that the latter are more far-reaching.”

The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report earlier this week on “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” apparently based on the fact that “coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” even though Marx’s birth was in May (1818).

The second round of elections in Brazil will take place Oct. 28, and this time two opponents will face off. On the one side is Fernando Haddad from the Workers’ Party (PT) who promises to continue the project started by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

Mike Peters explores the legacy of Steve Biko, a radical who spent his life fighting for Black liberation and for the overthrow of the Apartheid government in South Africa.

If you look at headlines from the last year, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major fossil fuel companies have seemingly turned a new page on climate change.

The key issue is the U.S.’s desire to return to the 90’s status of the world’s sole hegemon.

“We have relations of domination, new ways in which imperialism manifests itself. That’s the reality of Europe, not the fairy stories of an alliance of nations, overcoming national borders, becoming one big, happy family.”

Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States).

Council staff make history with biggest strike over equal pay.

Widespread privatisation of public goods in many societies is systematically eliminating human rights protections and further marginalising those living in poverty, according to a hard-hitting new report. The report was transmitted to the UN General Assembly on 19 October.

FAR-RIGHT Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s son has threatened violence against the country’s Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) if it blocks his father from running in Sunday’s second-round poll.

Trump said the United States will develop the weapons unless Russia and China agree to a halt on development.

War is romantic only when it is limited to the confines of a sanitized imagination. Movies that portray heroic soldiers vanquishing demonic enemy combatants or rescuing fallen comrades may whip up jingoistic war fever, but horrific images of real children and elders maimed, scarred, dismembered and killed during armed conflicts have the power to end wars.

Intersectionality, a way of thinking about the nature and causes of social inequality, proposes that the effects of multiple forms of oppression are cumulative and, as the term suggests, interwoven.

“Proletarians [Proletarier] of all countries, unite!” It is with these ringing words that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously conclude their Communist Manifesto in 1848 (MECW 6: 519; MEW 4: 493, sometimes my translation).

An important work of Marxist history and theory restores class struggle to central place in explaining how capitalism arose and grew, and can eventually be overcome.

Proceed with caution: the CIA, NSA, FBI and DOD are your ‘friends’ on Facebook, writes Lauren Smith.

The former Klu Klux Klan leader said Bolsonaro “sounds like one of us.”