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Teachers strikes fever spreads
It started with a few hundred West Virginia teachers and school employees pulling one-day walkouts. It became an unqualified victory in that state, which educators elsewhere were quick to emulate.
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Interview with Joseph Halevi
Joseph Halevi was born in 1946 in Haifa, which then was part of British Palestine but since 1948 in Israel. Most of his earlier life was spent in Rome, where he graduated in Philosophy and Political Economy. He has been Professor of Economics at the Interna-ional University College Turin, Italy, since 2010.
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Technology and capitalism 150 years after Das Kapital
Today, one hundred and fifty years after the publication of the first volume of Capital, Marx remains our contemporary.
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How the United States ‘hacked’ Russia’s elections in the 1990s
In a recent interview that went viral, Russian President Vladimir Putin repudiated NBC journalist Megyn Kelly, when she pressed him on the so-called “Russiagate” scandal.
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The stormy petrel
In Moscow there has been something like a revival of interest in the immortal Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, who called himself Gorky, the Bitter One. Even Gorky’s portrait, which had been removed from the title page of the influential literary magazine Literaturnaja Gazeta, is shining there again next to Pushkin’s.
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The danger of being wrong about animal rights
Dogs and suitcases are personal property under the law. For the most part, that enables humans to use, neglect, and abuse them indiscriminately. Dogs and other nonhumans have been property at least since the invention of money as suggested by the common etymologies of “chattel,” “cattle,” and “capital.”
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University strikes: where do we go from here?
On February 22nd the University and College Union (UCU) called for the beginning of a nation wide strike in response to Universities UK’s (UUK) attempt to shift of the Universities Superannuation Scheme from a defined benefit pension to a defined contribution pension.
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Surveillance capitalism and the state: Facebook devastated on multiple fronts as data theft crisis grows
Material collected by Cambridge Analytica via Facebook quizzes—which included detailed psychological profiles of unsuspecting users for the purpose of “behavioral microtargeting”—was used by the campaigns of Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and right-wing Super PACs tied to billionaire Robert Mercer.
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Gun controls in old East Germany
Strict weapons’ laws in the old East Germany, undoubtedly a restriction of on freedom, meant that there were virtually no shooting deaths and never a single mass shooting, in schools or anywhere else.
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Google and corporate news giants forge alliance to defeat independent journalism
The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”
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Willetts the conqueror (part 4): audit culture
This reserve army provides an increasing number of desperate and mostly unionised workers to occupy the new, outsourced, deprofessionalised jobs while remind those lucky enough to retain work that they can be replaced if they dare to cause trouble.
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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 possible, in not ‘polluting’ the upper castes through his presence, for otherwise he is likely to be beaten and lynched.
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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.
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The Skripal poisoning: What lies behind UK-US ultimatums against Russia?
To those who say it is obvious that Russia poisoned Skripal, it is worth recalling the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, in which a deadly strain of anthrax was mailed to many U.S. officials in Washington, killing 5 people and infecting 17 more, shortly after the September 11 attacks. There again, media immediately blamed the attacks on obvious targets of U.S.-UK war threats—the Iraqi regime’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program and its alleged ties to Al Qaeda. These all proved to be lies, serving Washington’s foreign policy interests as it sought to go to war in Iraq.
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New CIA director Gina Haspel oversaw torture at a black site then lost evidence of it
As “chief of base” of a CIA Black Site in Thailand, Haspel oversaw the torture and waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, who still hasn’t been charged with a crime.
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Willetts the conqueror (part 3): human capital
The following post is the third instalment of the multi-part review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Life’, you can find here the Introduction; Part 1 and Part 2. Parts 3 and 4 take a slightly different approach, diving deeper into the fundamental principles of marketisation, which centre on the conversion of qualitative experience and practice into quantitatively measurable outcomes, which can in turn become proxies for higher education’s exchange value.
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Notes from the future
What’s happening in Cape Town now might soon happen to many places in the world. To prevent socio-ecological crises like this we need to manage our resources more rationally and collectively.
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A Review of The Young Karl Marx
The success of The Young Karl Marx derives from Peck’s ability to demonstrate the relevance of Marx for the present.
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2008 financial collapse all over again…? We need to understand the student loan speculation bubble
For those who may have missed it, a major economic indicator emerged regarding student loan debt last week. Excessive debt, like student loans, has become one of the biggest barriers to current economic growth in the United States. On Thursday, March 1, 2018, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, appeared before U.S. Congressional representatives.
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Willetts the conqueror (part 2): creative destruction
Welcome to Pt. 2 of the multi-part critical Review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Education’. This part of the Review focuses on Willetts’ plans for so-called ‘alternative providers’ – a euphemistic term which should be read as synonymous with for-profit colleges and universities – and his reflections on wanting to see a British higher education (HE) monopoly rise up to compete with global HE mega-corporations.