Subjects Archives: Movements

  • Net Neutrality - Wake Up Call

    The FCC’s plan to end Net Neutrality: What you need to know

    The details of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to destroy Net Neutrality are out. And they’re even worse than expected. Our lawyers and policy experts are reviewing the reports and gathering details about Pai’s plan. This is our first read on the most important details you need to know about this proposal. We will update this post as new details emerge.  

  • Bags of corn flour left to rot seen inside Demaseca's company plant in Venezuela. | Photo: Alba Movimientos

    Venezuelan company lets 55 tons of flour rot

    The company received more than US$85 million in government subsidies in 2015 for the production and distribution of food at fair prices.

  • Capitalism

    Not with a bang but with a (prolonged) Whimper

    It is probably obvious to everyone that global capitalism is in dire straits, notwithstanding the brave talking up of output recovery that now characterises almost every meeting of the international governing elite. Even so, discussions of the end of capitalism still typically seem overstated and futile, not least because those hoping and mobilising for bringing in an alternative system are everywhere so scattered, weak and demoralised

  • Engels’ “theoretical moment”?

    In Marx and Engels’ Collected Works volume 47, I found a very interesting letter written by Engels to August Bebel. It was written about a month and half after Marx’s death, April 30 1883. Bebel seems to have suggested Engels to move somewhere else in Europe. Engels’ justifications to continue staying in England is quite remarkable.

  • [Archive photo] The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) Picture: Reuters

    NUMSA condemns the military coup in Zimbabwe

    Pressed by the military forces, the president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has finally resigned from his seat after 37 years in power. Although his resignation was celebrated by many, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa warns that nothing good ever came from a military coup in Africa.

  • Abstract art from László Moholy-Nagy

    Against legal fetishism (part two)

    Couching Trump as a “lawless” autocrat-in-the-making has become a matter of routine, something of a mantra repeated by “liberals” and “conservatives” alike. The trouble with this characterization is not that it is inaccurate, but rather that it is incomplete.

  • Abstract art from László Moholy-Nagy

    Against legal fetishism (part one)

    Law here, law there, law everywhere. The first nine months of the Trump administration have thrust questions about the force of law, legal strategy and tactics, and the role of judges in the United States’ much-vaunted system of constitutional checks and balances to the fore of public attention.

  • Political economy of labour repression in the United States

    Why is the book called “Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States”, and not the “History of Labor Repression in the United States”? Considering it is a rather comprehensive survey of labour history in the US, how do you explain your choice of the title?

  • Woody Wood / CC BY-NC 2.0

    Just say no to NAFTA

    The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is unpopular with many working people in the United States, who correctly blame it for encouraging capital flight, job losses, deindustrialization, and wage suppression.

  • Russian Revolution

    What the Russian Revolution proved possible

    Nov. 7, 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the seizure of power by workers and peasants in the Russian Revolution, regarded as the most world-altering event in the history of civilization.

  • Solidarity Summit

    Venezuela hosts Global Solidarity Summit

    Human rights activists, grassroots organizers, and progressive political party representatives from around the world have gathered in Caracas to denounce U.S. economic and military aggression against Venezuela.

  • “Halting at Noon.” Slaves kneeling to pray while chained together. (New York Public Library)

    Faith, myths, and Black Prometheus

    The mythologizing thought and rhetoric that sees in human struggles the pitting of god against god is as ancient as any human storytelling. More recently Black Theologians have seen in the history of black people the need to efface a white God who condones oppression and to replace him with a black God of the oppressed. Hickman’s book provides the link that ties the ancient and the modern together.

  • Precarious Work! The Reserve Army of Labour (Mexie)

    Precarious Work! The Reserve Army of Labor

    The Reserve Army of Labor

  • A Li’l Orange President, a product of trumPets®, first name in Trump-survival products!, stands on his cage door. | SUSIE DAY

    How to make the Trump era seem like fake news

    Congratulations, smart American shopper! You have just overcome months of electorally induced PTSD by purchasing a Li’l Orange President®! These droll, five-inch-high orange neo-fascist dudes are living genetic replicas of our current U.S. president!

  • Photo Credit: Resumen Medio Oriente

    Yemen, the most forgotten country in the world

    Since May 2015, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has sustained a permanent military invasion against Yemen, the poorest country of the Middle East. The House of Saud argues that the lands and air attacks are due to the advancement of the Ansarolá movement, born in the core of the Houthis tribe which exercises the Zaydi shi’a Islam.

  • Berlin Bulletin by Victor Grossman

    From gender to Jamaica

    It didn’t affect many people directly, but even small victories are welcome these days. Germany’s Constitutional Court just ruled that no-one should be forced to declare themselves officially male or female. It thus created a third open category anyone can opt for (or be opted by parents when still a child). I think everyone can […]

  • Nicos Poulantzas

    Poulantzas and the juridical constitution of the subject

    Although Nicos Poulantzas is rightly regarded as one of the most innovative Marxist theoreticians of the state, most analyses tend to focus on his account of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state in the organization of the hegemonic bloc of the capitalist class.

  • The South produces epistemologically-based theory—it’s not just a provider of native experimentation

    A century after the Bolshevik Revolution

    In the world we’re living in, it’s not enough to solve the tension between capital and work, the ongoing crisis of civilization urgently demands that we address the tension between capital and nature, which is currently compromising the existence of life in our planet.

  • An image allegedly taken after the destruction of Monument to the Victory of the people of Slavonia in Croatia, 1992.

    Only intelligent planning can save us

    Universalism is not an innocent concept. In “The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism,” published shortly after the fall of historical communism, Ágnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, former Marxist philosophers and disciples of Georg Lukács, accused Marx and his followers of turning the Hegelian concept of universalism into a philosophy of praxis, a “predictive and action-orienting device” applied to change the world.

  • Hexenverbrennung

    Silvia Federici, ‘Caliban and the Witch’

    Caliban and the Witch is a reminder that it is the task of feminists and Marxists alike to demand that the sphere of reproduction and continuing forms of colonialism be seen as key sources of value for capitalism and therefore as key sites of struggle against it.