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Dossier 3: Syria’s bloody and unforgiving war
Syria enters its eighth year of a bloody and unforgiving war. The death toll is catastrophic. After the number reached 200,000, the United Nations stopped keeping count.
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The true face of the global recovery
Optimistic assessments of the synchronised recovery across the world economy ignore the factors driving the weak upturn that make it fragile.
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Zone of storms
In the five essays presented in October 1917, renowned radical political economist, Samir Amin, pushes far beyond the immediate necessity of emphasizing the historical weight of October, and launches, into an ambitiously broad analysis of the trajectory of twenty first-century socialism.
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Anti-materialism, capitalism, and violence against the human body: some preliminary comments
There are two kinds of on-going ‘attack’ on the materiality of the body (and nature) in capitalist society. A discursive attack inspired by post-structuralism; and an actual, objectively-existing, material attack by capital and its state. The latter is the focus of this article.
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Dossier 2: Cities without water
Water is a class issue. Its distribution has never been equitable. What the residents of Cape Town will struggle with is what more than one billion residents of informal settlements across the planet deal with each day.
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Five revolutions: how bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis
“Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies, the essential element of which consists in continual metabolic interchange with the natural environment outside them.”
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When they occupied the land
The reason for the swift fall of Afrin was not because fighters fled, as rumored in racist anti-Kurdish circles, but because an the army of takfiris (Turkish mercenaries) advancing under the cover of Turkish bombers and some 37,000 ground troops.
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From Afrin: resisting neo-fascists and the need to return to Syria
There is an indisputable righteousness in the resistance of the region’s Kurds, who are fighting in defense of their lands.
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History notes: A scrap book of words and actions
A compilation of relevant historical notes reflecting upon the bombing of Syria on April 13, 2018 by the United States, United Kingdom, and France.
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Exploitation and super-exploitation
Extreme rates of exploitation in the Global South is a palpable, directly observable fact. We don’t need a theory to know this but we do need a theory if we are to understand what we can see and work out the consequences that flow from it.
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Peripheral Fascism—theory and practice
A short obituary for two dear comrades: Theotonio dos Santos (Carangola, 1936 – Rio de Janeiro, 2018) and Marielle Franco (Rio de Janeiro, 1979 – Rio de Janeiro 2018).
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Willetts the conqueror (part 5): knowledge exchange
In addition to subsumption of teaching and research, the third mission of neoliberal marketisation has been termed, “knowledge exchange.” The introduction of this mission represents not only a fundamental attack on the academic profession, but also a desperate attempt to marshal the knowledge-producing powers of universities to kick-start a stagnating post-crisis global economy.
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Recast(e)ing the model minority: Behind right wing Hindu politics in the U.S.
Indian Americans’ susceptibility to conservative politics in the U.S. is itself a contradictory affair—on the one hand they have largely voted Democrat, but have publicly remained ambivalent about racial politics in the country. One key element of this ambivalence is the question of affirmative action and meritocracy.
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China’s rise threatens U.S. imperialism, not American people
That China and the U.S. are moving in opposite directions is not a new trend, but it has been brought into sharper focus in the Trump era. Growing anxious about its diminishing international authority, the U.S. demonstrates increasing hostility towards China.
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Pentagon capitalism and silicon valley
The weaponized nature of the tech industry is a pandora’s box that may prove impossible to close. Yet Google’s employees are resisting their company’s continued work to upgrade the U.S. war machine.
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Easter march for peace
What were these indefatigable protesters demanding this time, here in Berlin and at rainy meetings, marches and bicycle parades during the long Easter weekend in over a hundred cities and towns all over Germany?
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Bourgeois fear of revolution means disowning the Civil War
Sixteen months into the Civil War Karl Marx—as if anticipating apologists like Brooks 160 years later—criticized Lincoln for “trying to conduct it along constitutional” lines. It pleased him to no end, then, when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation more than a month later.
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Purple bullying, ten years later: SEIU trustees trample membership rights
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.
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Precarious work and contemporary capitalism
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.
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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.