Water is a class issue. Its distribution has never been equitable. What the residents of Cape Town will struggle with is what more than one billion residents of informal settlements across the planet deal with each day.
Subjects Archives: Marxism
Five revolutions: how bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis
“Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies, the essential element of which consists in continual metabolic interchange with the natural environment outside them.”
Eleanor Marx: the Jewess of Jew’s walk
Eleanor Marx changed the world. Foremother of socialist-feminism, trade unionist, internationalist, her father’s first biographer and editor of his key works, she had left a colossal heritage in many spheres of life.
The whitesplaining of history is over
When the academy was the exclusive playground of white men, it produced the theories of race, gender, and Western cultural superiority that underwrote imperialism abroad and inequality at home. In recent decades, women and people of color have been critical to producing new knowledge breaking down those long-dominant narratives. Sociological research confirms that greater diversity […]
Mao’s legacy defended, and famous swim decoded, for clueless academics
In late 1965 the rumblings of the Cultural Revolution had begun, due to grumblings over corruption, revisionism (“taking the capitalist road,” selling out socialism, etc.) and the snooty technocratism of urbanites. The party, led by Mao, saw these trends as threats to the common good, the revolution, and the Party’s “Heavenly Mandate” – the millennia-old […]
Lies, damned lies, and neocolonialism
If we don’t start challenging neoliberal hegemony soon, the non-West will eventually have little choice but to challenge it for themselves.
Exploitation and super-exploitation
Extreme rates of exploitation in the Global South is a palpable, directly observable fact. We don’t need a theory to know this but we do need a theory if we are to understand what we can see and work out the consequences that flow from it.
Peripheral Fascism—theory and practice
A short obituary for two dear comrades: Theotonio dos Santos (Carangola, 1936 – Rio de Janeiro, 2018) and Marielle Franco (Rio de Janeiro, 1979 – Rio de Janeiro 2018).
Growing disdain for America’s false democratic ideals
In 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) downgraded the U.S. democratic system. The EIU has an annual Democracy index that provides a snapshot of global democracy by rating countries on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. They are then classified into four types of governments: […]
The United States is an oligarchy, not a democracy
In the U.S., any policy change with little support from the upper class has about a one in five chance of becoming law, while those backed by the elites triumph in about half of occasions, even when they go against majority opinion.
Dreaming of communism: News from Nowhere
There can be no denying that the content of News from Nowhere, the utopian romance penned by painter, poet and designer William Morris, was heavily indebted to the writings of Karl Marx. Morris was exploring these from the spring of 1882, the year before Marx died and the year of his own 48th birthday. He […]
Aijaz Ahmad on Syria, U.S. and Palestine
A rational solution is possible for Syria, if the US wants to be rational. But with Kushner in the White House Palestine faces a grim future.
What’s a non-racist way to appeal to working-class whites? NYT‘s Edsall can’t think of any
The 2016 presidential exit polls “substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters…and overestimated the white college-educated Democratic electorate,” New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (3/29/18) writes.
Calculating surplus value to facilitate workplace organizing
Using Marx’s critique of political economy, it’s possible for workers employed in a variety of industries to calculate the value of their work and how this value is divided between employer and employee. It becomes possible to calculate the socially necessary labor time and surplus labor time, worker wages and employer profits in their particular […]
Jeremy Corbyn has a long and honorable record of opposing fascism, racism and anti-semitism
The Labour leader played an active part in organising against and resisting the National Front in the late ’70s.
Marx’s concept of class
The concept of class poses profound problems for theory and practice. This is true across the academic disciplines and in the confused incoherence around “class issues” when concepts of class surface in economic, political and cultural discourses.
The vision of the new society in Marx’s Capital
Marx’s Capital has been heralded for many things, but providing an exhaustive account of a future socialist society isn’t one of them.
Is another world possible?
On Reality Asserts Itself, Prof. Leo Panitch says it’s a dilemma that the gradualism of European social-democracy and attempts at a more radical transformation have so far both failed; Panitch says a first step towards democratizing the economy is to make finance a public utility – with host Paul Jay
Enclosed thinking
In a slave society, one can argue, the interest of the slaves lies in keeping the slave owner happy, for otherwise he is likely to flog and whip them mercilessly which would cause them great agony. Likewise in a caste society, one can argue, the interest of the Dalit lies in being as inconspicuous as […]
In defence of Metabolic Rift Theory
One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.
