Tag Archives | Featured

At the Labor Notes conference in Chicago this coming weekend, 2,500 rank-and-file activists will attend the largest gathering ever hosted by the now Brooklyn-based labor education project. This will be the nineteenth Labor Notes conference, which started in 1981.

Unions have no choice but to put major resources into confronting the reality of precarious work and organising around whatever can be won in the workplace. Otherwise they will simply wither.

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.

Raoul Peck, the Haitian lmmaker, opens his film—Der Junge Karl Marx (2017)—in the forests of Prussia. Peasants gather fallen wood. They look cold and hungry.… Some of the peasants die. Even fallen wood is not allowed to them.

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.

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.”

When David Harvey says “the historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries has largely been reversed over the last thirty years,” his readers will reasonably assume that he refers to a defining feature of imperialism, namely the plunder of living labour and natural wealth in colonies and semi-colonies by rising capitalist powers in Europe and North America. Indeed, he leaves no doubt about this, since he prefaced these words with reference to “the old categories of imperialism.” But here we encounter the first of his many obfuscations.

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.

Credit is essential for the continuation of capitalism but also a major source of its instability, writes the Marx Memorial Library.

The March 2018 Italian elections open a chaotic period the outcome of which remains uncertain. Only a few years ago, the country was among the most “Euro-phile.” Now, the population is “Euro-skeptic” at level of 50% or more.

One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.

The crisis is not merely geopolitical. It is human. 75 million people live in the peninsula. This is about their lives and futures.

There have been some militant strikes in recent months, some are still going on. Can they help in developing healthy antidotes to foul-egg policies of the new government?

The success of The Young Karl Marx derives from Peck’s ability to demonstrate the relevance of Marx for the present.

In this MPN exclusive, we speak to Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster and Latin America studies scholar Harry L. Simón Salazar about the U.S. fight to maintain hegemony in Latin America, the rise of the right wing, and the danger of “regime change” in Venezuela.

This article argues that Marx, too, knew more about the future than his present. Indeed, far from being merely a theorist of mid- to late-19th century capitalism, he elaborated the basic mechanisms, tendencies, counter-tendencies, contradictions, and social antagonisms that still shape capital accumulation and bourgeois societalization at the start of the 21st century.

In the last decades, Western mainstream media have produced biased news and facilitated a selective discourse of shaming accompanied by devastating military interventions.

Only one force is genuinely suited to exposing the lies and redirecting emotions away from attacks on the poorest victims and towards solidarity with them against the truly guilty forces on high. It is the Left.

The British conservative media and party establishment are renewing their attempts to paint Jeremy Corbyn as a traitor. But given the failure of this approach in the past, why would they attempt it again?

Andreas Malm’s powerful critique of current environmental philosophies puts historical materialism and cutting-edge science at the center of a call for militant action.