Subjects Archives: Marxism

  • Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky on Fascism, Trump, and the state of the union

    Over the past few months, as the disturbing prospect of a Trump administration became a disturbing reality, I decided to reach out to Noam Chomsky, the philosopher whose writing, speaking and activism has for more than 50 years provided unparalleled insight and challenges to the American and global political systems. Our conversation, as it appears here, took place as a series of email exchanges over the past two months. Although Professor Chomsky was extremely busy, because of our past intellectual exchange, he graciously provided time for this interview.

  • Wonder Woman with her allies--"the humane members of the world community, represented by the U.S.–Chris Pine is the male lead and Gadot’s love interest–and a ragtag support group that includes a Scot, a native American, and a generic Arab, presumably symbolizing 'moderate' Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan," writes Jonathan Cook (Photo: Clay Enos/Warner Bros)

    Wonder Woman is a hero only the military-industrial complex could create

    For a while I have been pondering whether to write a review of the newly released “Wonder Woman,” to peel back the layer of comic book fun to reveal below the film’s disturbing and not-so-covert political and militaristic messages.

    There is usually a noisy crowd who deride any such review with shouts of “Lighten up! It’s only a movie!”–as though popular culture is neither popular nor culture, the soundtrack to our lives that slowly shapes our assumptions and our values, and does so at a level we rarely examine critically.

  • Ad for Kakkoos (Latrine)

    Toilet tales

    Kakkoos (Latrine) is a Tamil documentary that is a powerful indictment of society’s apathy towards the thousands who are tasked with cleaning public toilets and sewers. The filmmaker Divya Bharathi talks about why she made a documentary and what is the task at hand, post its tremendous success.

  • Class Ceiling

    The shifting politics of inequality and the class ceiling

    Britain’s class landscape has changed: it is more polarised at the extremes and messier in the middle. The distinction between middle and working class is less clear-cut. The elite is able to set political agendas and entrench their own privilege. The left needs a clear narrative showing how privilege leads to gross unfairness—and effective policies […]

  • Face to face. Phil Collins and the lichen-encrusted statue

    Phil Collins: why I took a Soviet statue of Engels across Europe to Manchester

    Friedrich Engels spent two decades in Manchester. The horrific conditions he saw in the cradle of industrialism forged his great works. But the city has never commemorated him – until now.

  • Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason

    David Harvey: Marx, Capital and the madness of economic reason

    David Harvey, one of the most influential figures in geography and urban studies, and among the most cited intellectuals of all time across the humanities and social sciences, delivered a featured lecture, “Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason.” at the 2017 AAG annual Meeting.

  • Seymour Hersh

    Seymour Hersh dishes on new exposé upending the official story about Trump and Syrian chemical attacks

    Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who famously exposed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, and more recently, the U.S. military’s abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. This weekend, Hersh reported that the alleged chemical attack in Idlib, Syria, this March was not perpetrated by the Syrian military, as the Trump administration has claimed

  • President Donald Trump signing the new Cuba policy

    US Cuba policy has been hijacked by Cuban-Americans

    US policy toward Cuba (Trump reverses Obama’s Cuba deal, limiting travel and trade, 17 June) has been hijacked by a clique of Cuban-American politicians, who have sold their support in Congress to President Donald Trump. Above all, these individuals – and Trump – have demonstrated the corrupt and clientelist nature of the US political system. Can such a system serve as a symbol of “freedom” to anyone in the world?

  • W. E. B. Du Bois mural in Philadelphia, 2011. Photograph by Laurenellen McCann / Flickr

    W. E. B. Du Bois’s revolutions

    “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.” With this sober stroke of his insurgent pen, the 93-year-old scholar joined the Communist Party.

  • Our duty to win

    Organizing a strategy that is likely to win is no easy task. After all, the enemies of the working class are more powerful today than ever before; they have control over the military, the media, the courts, the politicians, and even the unions. The fight against the patriarchal capitalist system, therefore, must be strategic to be effective.

  • Seymour Hersh

    Trump ignored intel before bombing Syria

    When the US bombed a Syrian military airfield in April, the White House said US intelligence had confirmed the Assad regime used chemical weapons in the town of Khan Sheikhun.… Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reports US intelligence actually warned president Trump it had no evidence that the Syrian military had used sarin gas.

  • When you reject class-based politics

    When you reject class-based politics

    If you reject from the outset the idea of uniting a majority based on shared economic interests, then pretty much all you’ve got left is the “thoughtful and humane co-optation” of racism and xenophobia.

  • Comic about Trump in the LA Times

    John Bellamy Foster interviewed on Law and Disorder radio

    Is Trump a neofascist? Thoughtful analysts on the left like Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler think he is. But mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism. They call him a right wing populist. What is neofascism? Right wing Populism? Does it really matter what Trump is called? The great German playwright and political thinker who lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign, Berthold Brecht, asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he’s willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it fourth?” We speak today with John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the venerable magazine “Monthly Review”. He wrote the lead article in the current June 2017 issue titled “This Is Not Populism.”

  • Global trade from G77 to high income countries (World Bank)

    Imperialism still alive and kicking

    With the reassertion of the dominance of finance, in the guise now of an international finance capital, the third world States have withdrawn from supporting petty producers, a process of income deflation is in full swing, and the imperialist arrangement is back in place, because of which we can see once more a tendency towards a secular decline in per capita food-grain availability in the third world as in the colonial period.

  • Toilet paper money roll

    The U.S. is where the rich are the richest

    In the U.S., where wealth is most highly concentrated, almost a quarter of income goes to the rich. So it should come as no surprise that a big chunk of the world’s richest call America home. Two out of five millionaires and billionaires live there, and their ranks are growing fast.

  • The prospect of change

    The prospect of change

    A limited partial breach has been made in the neoliberal edifice, through the demonstration by Corbyn, McDonnell and their allies that a programme and leadership that challenges these orthodoxies and proposes alternatives to them can do better electorally than those which conform to it.

  • Capitalists Tipping Scales "Change"

    Finance, Crisis, and Stagnation

    In this presentation Mexie begins to elaborate the theory of monopoly capitalism developed by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, incorporating recent theoretical development by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney. Mexie has produced a number of other videos on the topic as well.

  • A union march in Detroit

    Improving our quality of life will require rebuilding union strength

    Unions provide workers with voice and the means to use their collective strength to gain job security and say over key aspects of their conditions of employment, including scheduling and safety. These gains are significant in our “employment at will” economy.

  • Attendees at York University's international conference on "Marx’s Capital after 150 Years"

    York hosts international conference on “Marx’s Capital after 150 Years”

    An international conference to mark the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Marx’s Capital was held May 24 to 26 at York University.

  • May-Corbyn

    The general election in Great Britain

    When it came to the general election in Britain, everything was settled in advance. The Conservative Party led by Theresa May was supposed to prevail. The Labour Party, victim of its own confusion, its refusal to support the will of millions of members and voters who wanted to put an end to the straitjacket of the European Union, was supposed to be trounced.