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We’re joined by Jennifer Mittelstadt (@MittelstadtJen), professor of history at Rutgers University, to discuss her involvement with Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education. We speak with Mittelstadt about how Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education is organizing to address the most pressing threats to US public higher education today, as well as about how her own scholarship on publicly-provisioned welfare systems in the United States shapes her political organizing and advocacy.

A grassroots organization is building a new model for the production and distribution of food based on mutuality.

Five years ago, Nicaragua was subject to a violent insurrection that lasted from April through July, 2018. In the second of four articles, we look at how initial support for the coup relied on widespread use of social media.

One of the latest covers of the magazine The Economist carries a headline “Peak China”. This, as its name suggests, is a claim that while during the last seven decades China’s has enjoyed a peaceful “rise”, specifically in relation to the U.S., this has now ended. It was the latest of decades long wildly inaccurate predictions regarding China.

An organization that brings together rural producers with urban consumers breaks with the dictates of the market.

An organization that brings together rural producers with urban consumers breaks with the dictates of the market.

Mainstream reports on this past May Day celebration in Cuba leave out a key element: the imperialist economic and financial blockade.

The fearful destruction, the displacement of families, above all the killing and maiming must be deplored, condemned and brought to an end. But the underlying reasons for this terrible war, concealed in the media, must also be mercilessly examined, regardless of well-orchestrated accusations of “Putin-friendship” or “left-over allegiance to a past Soviet Russia”.

In this latest dossier, the Tricontinental offers a broad analysis of the living and working conditions of India’s large and diverse working class.

Elizabeth S. Anker joins Money on the Left to discuss her provocative new book, On Paradox: The Claims of Theory (Duke University Press, 2022). Anker is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and Professor of Law in the Cornell Law School. In On Paradox, Anker contends that faith in the logic of paradox has been the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century. She attributes the ubiquity of paradox in the humanities to its appeal as an incisive tool for exposing and dismantling hierarchies. Anker, however, suggests that paradox not only generates the very exclusions it critiques but also creates a disempowering haze of indecision. 

In “The Dialectics of Dependency,” Ruy Mauro Marini developed a theory of dependency and unequal exchange that is still invaluable today.

“While socialists need to begin with the existing concepts of fairness as reflected in the moral economy of the working class, to the extent that those concepts of fairness are contrary to the principle advanced in the Communist Manifesto that ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,’ they must be rejected.” —Michael Lebowitz

‘The threat to privacy and data security posed by language models like ChatGPT is real enough. I frankly doubt that there’s any practical way to contain them. The most effective means that I can think of…to counter the spread of malicious doctrines and ideology are education in critical thinking, organization to encourage deliberation, and modes of intellectual self-defense.’ —Noam Chomsky

The dangers and immense suffering caused by all attempts at solving deep-seated social problems by militaristic interventions, on any scale, are obvious enough. If, however, we look more closely at the historical trend of militaristic adventures, it becomes frighteningly clear that they show an ever greater intensification and an ever-increasing scale, from local confrontations to two horrendous world wars in the twentieth century, and to the potential annihilation of humankind when we reach our own time.

Before the pandemic was announced by the World Health Organisation in March 2020, the poorer nations of the world already struggled with seriously high—and unpayable—levels of debt.

In the first few months of 2018, Nicaragua hardly appeared to be a strong candidate for an attempted coup. Daniel Ortega’s government had an 80 per cent approval rating in a poll a few months earlier.

As the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report tells us, there is still a chance to keep warming at no more than the 1.5°C target, but tipping points to climate catastrophes much worse than we are witnessing now will kick in if this target is breached. It is now crystal clear that ongoing wars, in particular the Ukraine war, create huge obstacles to the global cooperation necessary for any chance of meeting the 1.5°C warming target. Following the lead of China’s peace plan, we should support the call for an immediate ceasefire in the Ukraine war, and for all parties involved to negotiate.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the brutal murder of the South African Communist Party (SACP) General Secretary, Comrade Thembisile Martin “Chris” Hani.

This world needs revolutionaries who refuse orders to kill and exploit. Two midwives named Shifra and Puah were such revolutionaries. When a racist ruler asked them to limit the reproduction of slaves—out of fear of a slave uprising—they disobeyed.

Only an ecosocialist revolution can stop our demise, but capitalism’s behemoth keeps people deceitful and mostly unaware of being on the verge of a catastrophic end. We must arise—now!