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An often overlooked region of India is a beacon to the world for taking on the coronavirus
In a pandemic, a rational person would much rather live in a society governed by the norms of socialism than of capitalism, a society where people rally together to overcome a virus; than to live in a society where fear pervades and where stigmatization becomes the antidote to collective action.
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Unemployment pandemic
Capitalist crises are neither predictable nor do they stem from a single cause. Instead, at least as I see it, the possibility of a crisis is always there but the causes and triggers are all historical and therefore multiple and varied.
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The role of intellectuals in the Bolivarian Revolution: A conversation with Luis Britto Garcia
Venezuela’s most acclaimed contemporary writer talks about the Bolivarian Revolution and its dialectical relation with cultural producers.
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Anti-capitalist politics in the time of COVID-19
When trying to interpret, understand and analyze the daily flow of news, I tend to locate what is happening against the background of two distinctive but intersecting models of how capitalism works.
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Liberal NPCs hate Russia, Conservative NPCs hate China
The frenzied, shrieking hysteria I’m witnessing right now among Trump’s base regarding China looks and moves in the exact same way the mental zombification of Russia hysteria looked and moved when it began tearing through rank-and-file Democrats in late 2016 and early 2017. The seething, screaming vitriol I get from the MAGA crowd on social media when I talk about this is identical to what I got during that period from Democrats: just as irrational, just as vituperative, and just as emotion-driven.
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What is ‘social democracy’?
GOOD question! Look up the term in a dictionary and you’ll find a definition something along the lines of “an ideology that advocates or supports political, social and economic interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a representative democracy and capitalist economy.”
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The mutilated world is moved by the nurses and doctors
SARS-Co-2 or COVID-19 moves swiftly across the planet, leaving no region untouched. It is a powerful virus, with a long enough incubation period to hide the symptoms and therefore to gather more and more people in its deadly arms.
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Mike Davis on COVID-19: The monster is finally at the door
We are in the early stages of a medical Katrina. Despite years of warnings about avian flu and other pandemics, inventories of basic emergency equipment such as respirators aren’t sufficient to deal with the expected flood of critical cases.
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Engels’ pause and the condition of the working class in England
Engels was just 24 years old when he wrote the Condition. He had already developed left-wing ideas when he was despatched to England at the end of 1842 to work in the family firm of Ermen and Engels, manufacturers of sewing thread in Manchester.
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Building Capacity with Money on the Left
This month’s Money on the Left episode departs from the show’s regular interview format to reflect on the past, present and future of the Money on the Left project as a whole. We focus, in particular, on a recent special scholarly journal issue dedicated to Money on the Left, which was published by Liminalities: A […]
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Facing a liquidity tsunami? Profit, risk, and discipline in emerging markets
In April 2012, at the White House on her first visit to the United States since her election in 2010, Brazilian president Brazil Dilma Rousseff scolded advanced capitalist economies for unleashing a ‘tsunami de liquidez’, a ‘liquidity tsunami’, onto the developing world.
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12 ways the U.S. invasion of Iraq lives on in infamy
While the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by ramping up the conflict there.
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Alone against the Virus
Decades of neoliberal austerity will make it harder to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever, we must rebuild our social safety net and forge a New Deal for public health.
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All too relevant: Marx’s critique of rights and neoliberal human rights
Jessica Whyte’s new book, The Morals of the Market, demonstrates the kind of scholarship we all aspire to: insightful, thought-provoking, and, above all, accessible and engaging. In it, she traces the “historical and conceptual relations between human rights and neoliberalism”.
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Can the U.S. learn from China’s determined response to Coronavirus?
Red Lines host Anya Parampil provides a global Coronavirus update, explaining how China suppressed the pandemic with a determined and centralized strategy that was heavily criticized in the West.
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Chris Hedges: Americans face a one-choice Election—The Oligarchy
Pulitzer-winning author and host of “On Contact” Chris Hedges joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the influence of lobbyists on establishment media in their coverage of politics and that donors, bankers and billionaires have on the U.S. political process.
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Julian Assange must be supported
If the U.S. government succeeds in extraditing Julian Assange, it will be a major victory for U.S. imperialism–a promise that anyone getting in its way will ultimately pay the price.
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The uses of “populism”
CLASS struggle occurs in the realm of concepts too. The World Bank for instance systematically counters Left concepts by employing a novel tactic: it uses the very same concepts as are used by the Left, but gives them a wholly different meaning; as a result they either come to mean something entirely different from what the Left had originally meant by them, or, at the very least, they become fuzzy and hence useless to the Left. In either case the power of the Left concept is neutralised.
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Media malfunction as Sanders notes positive aspects of Latin American socialism
When 60 Minutes (2/24/20) asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about his past support for aspects of Cuba’s socialist revolution, as well as for Nicaragua’s 1979–90 leftist Sandinista government, Sanders responded by saying he opposes what he described as the “authoritarian” features of the Cuban government, while noting that after the 1959 revolution, Cuba launched “a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”
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Marx’s ‘Capital’ as a literary experience
Columbia University PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature Tiana Reid finds that her students benefit from reading volume one of Karl Marx’s “Capital.” “There are so many literary wsys to read it, which I don’t think blunt the more radical political reading,” said Reid, who conducts research in Black Studies, Marxism and feminism.