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In 1947, thousands of youth brigade volunteers from around the world joined their Yugoslav comrades in the hills of Bosnia to build a railroad. As the most popular song from the construction sites put it, not only were these activists making a railroad, but the railroad made them.

Articles in this series: Commons and classes before capitalism ‘Systematic theft of communal property’ Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back  by Ian Angus In 1542, Henry VIII gave his friend and privy councilor Sir William Herbert a gift: the buildings and lands of a […]

The most scandalous fact of the current period is that 2.37 billion people are struggling to eat. Most of them are in developing countries, but many are in advanced industrial states.

How have K-12 schools been treated by the state-corporate complex since the start of the pandemic? An analysis of federal policies leads to the conclusion that U.S. schools must be kept open at any cost for two main reasons: maintain an adequate reserve army of labor and quell the idea that any alternative (e.g., less work and publicly compensated costs of living) is possible.

The consequences of the current U.S. sanctions regime, and collusion with the Venezuelan opposition, have been devastating for the Venezuelan people. Against a suffocating embargo and corrupt bureaucracy, the revolution will survive only if the grassroots reinvent it.

“There is no socialist blueprint. If you think there is a socialist blueprint, then you will only be a utopian. The formation of economic policies has to be done with the collaboration of those on whose behalf you are going to change structures.”

In North America, the European colonization started during the 17th century, mainly led by England and France, before undergoing a rapid expansion during the 18thcentury, an era also marked by massive importation of African slaves

Politicians and the media work hard to give the impression that millions of low-wage workers are constantly seeking entry into the U.S. Most U.S. news consumers would probably be astonished to learn that the undocumented population here actually declined during the years from 2008 to 2016. It continued to decline at least until 2019.

After the German elections on September 26th it took, as usual, weeks and weeks for the three coalition parties to agree on one program, full of compromises, pledges and promises (some of which may even been be kept) and to resolve quarrels over who gets which cabinet seat.

Money on the Left discusses “vulnerability theory” with Martha Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University. Going beyond the politics of non-discrimination and formal equality that animate liberal politics and policies, Fineman underscores the human being’s embodied vulnerability throughout the life cycle in order to politicize, rather than pathologize prevailing structures of social dependence.

The acuity of Hunton’s insights, seen in retrospect so many decades later, offers astounding reading. Throughout, he has one clear aim: to let the peoples of the struggling masses in the emerging nations seize their own destiny.

The persecution of Julian Assange is a fundamental assault on journalism, press freedom, and freedom of expression.

Eugene V. Debs may be my all-time favorite American and Karl Marx my all-time favorite journalist. But my employer for a decade was The Wall Street Journal, and for another decade it was the Los Angeles Times.

Deprived of land and common rights, the English poor were forced into wage-labor. CAPITAL VERSUS COMMONS, 4

Financial capital, once cut loose from its original role as a modest helper of a real economy of production to meet human needs, inevitably becomes speculative capital geared solely to its own self-expansion. In earlier times no one ever dreamed that speculative capital, a phenomenon as old as capitalism itself, could grow to dominate a national economy, let alone the whole world. But it has.

Wen’s vision is of a China which would be increasingly self-reliant, delinking from the American dominated global capitalism and developing its own key technologies and productive capacities, while at the same time continuing to engage with other emerging economies which share a desire to be free of Western neo-imperial control.

At the recent conference of the Society for the Social Study of Science, I came to the conclusion that the history of Marxism in relation to science and technology studies is an increasingly forgotten story.

The Western world lives in discontent. Progressive models have failed to maintain the levels of politicisation, mystique, capacity to question, transformative purpose, and possibilities of concrete changes for the masses.

Do not believe them when they tell you the left is divided. There is no division. The (anti-imperialist) Left is standing with the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. The rest are either confused or advocating an imperialist political project.

In the week before the COP26 international summit, John Bellamy Foster analyzed the climate emergency and how we can achieve climate justice.