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Lower the curtain, change the scene. The atmosphere in the government building in Berlin on August 2nd is fully different, not a bit of similarity. Those present, most in tailored apparel, sit in soft leather chairs and sip aromatic drinks from fine glassware. Who are they? Germany’s power people!

I think Marxism analyses the contemporary world in a way which nobody else did. Lenin had said the strength of Marxism lies in the fact that it is true. The point is that it is a genuine scientific discovery.

Without understanding the particular plight of trans women, only a blunted and partial view of gender is possible. And without a systemic view of gender, political solutions to that plight will be equally limited.

The global labor arbitrage means the only competitive “advantage” available to most countries is forcing workers to accept slave wages and environmental standards low enough to lure in multinationals. If the population resists, the only means available to diffuse it is brutal repression.

This is the story of eight people who together own as much wealth as one-half of humanity, or 3.5 billion of the planet’s inhabitants. These eight people have some good friends, who met last weekend in Hamburg. Twenty heads of state discussed over two days the best way to guarantee that their eight friends, and also they themselves, would become even richer. Welcome to the G20.

The upper classes of Venezuela are trying to regain their lost fiefdom. The program of violence they are implementing, which has rocked Venezuela since April 4, 2017, is part of that effort.

Trump did us all an enormous favor. His election was such a shock that millions of people went into the street. And to see women in the lead meant a great deal to me as a feminist.

Largely unbeknownst to the general public, many media executives and top journalists of almost all major U.S. news outlets, political and business magazines, public broadcasters and press agencies have long been members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The neoliberal right has succeeded in pushing concentrations of wealth and income to an ever smaller group of tycoons at the top, while the pluralizing Left…has had precarious (and highly variable) success in its efforts to advance the standing of African Americans, Hispanics, women, diverse sexualities, and several religious faiths.… One minority placed in a bind between these two opposing drives…has been the white working and lower middle class. Portions of it have taken revenge for this neglect…. That has created happy hunting grounds for a new kind of neo-fascist movement, one that would extend white triumphalism, intimidate the media, attack Muslims, Mexicans, and independent women, perfect the use of Big Lies, suppress minority voting, allow refugee pressures to grow as the effects of the Anthropocene accelerate, sacrifice diplomacy to dangerous military excursions, and displace science and the professoriate as independent centers of knowledge and pubic authority.

Our very modes of thinking about the social are fragmented, or intersectional…[which is] why intersectionality has become such an important paradigm for feminism. It conceives of different experiences of oppression and exploitation as coming from different and separate systems and tries to recombine the fragments of oppression without denying their singularity. Social Reproduction Feminism seeks to include and to go beyond intersectionality by saying both that we need to understand capitalism as the very specific socio-economic system in which those forms of oppression are generated and nourished, and that there are not ‘separate’ systems of oppression or exploitation under capitalism that can be understood in isolation one from the other.

John Bellamy Foster’s essay,“Third Nature: Edward Said on Ecology and Imperialism” is taken from Vijay Prashad, ed., Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017), pp. 50-57. This edited collection was organized around Naomi Klein’s 2016 Edward W. Said Lecture, “Let Them Drown,” originally published in the June 2016 issue of […]

Persistent economic stagnation together with neoliberal austerity has at this point seriously undermined the stability of the liberal-democratic state and thus the political command sector of the capitalist system. This has led to a dangerous resurgence of political movements in the fascist genus (fascism, neofascism, post-fascism), representing an alternative way of managing the state of the capitalist system, opposed to liberal democracy.

David Wallace-Wells has a cover story on climate change in New York magazine that has kicked up quite a discussion. It’s about worst-case scenarios…[and] the dystopian future the piece describes is much worse, and forecast to happen much sooner, than most people.… I won’t rehearse the parade of horribles.… Instead, I want to address some of the critical reaction to the piece, which I have found … irksome.

Abby Martin goes on the deadly front lines of the anti government protests in Venezuela and follows the evolution of a typical guarimba—or opposition barricade. She explains what the targets from the opposition reveal about the nature of the movement and breaks down the reality of the death toll that has rocked the nation since the unrest began, and how a lynch mob campaign came after her and the Empire Files team for reporting these facts.

I wonder whether those so horrified today were sickened then at US attacks on others’ sovereignty. There has been lots of masquerading, I think, by disguised provocateurs or indignant sovereignty defenders. Their threats against even hesitant moves toward dialogue, disarmament, de-escalation in the world’s charged atmosphere are what truly sicken me—and frighten me!

Almost 50% of union members in the United States today work in the public sector. By necessity, they will have to play a major role in the rebuilding of organized labor. But like private sector unions before them, government employee unions face circumstances threatening their very existence.

Years ago the 35th US president made a speech in Germany, four words of which, in American-accented German, remain famous: “Ich bin ein Berliner!”—“I am a Berliner!” That was John F. Kennedy. Will the 45th president, soon to visit Germany’s second city, emulate him and tweet “I am a Hamburger! Wow!”

The fundamental changes I would advocate are those that would: dramatically boost worker power; secure a progressive and growing funding base for a needed expansion of public housing and infrastructure and public spending on health care, education, and transportation; and end the production and use of fossil fuels and significantly reduce greenhouse emissions.

On June 20 The Atlantic posted an article by Peter Beinart claiming that the Democrats had “lost their way on immigration.” While the article has been lauded by Rightwingers, it is mostly a compendium of familiar sound bites on immigration, presented without much understanding of the issues.

This year, Ramadan—the ninth month of the Islamic year, in which observant Muslims fast to commemorate the revelation of the Quran—happens to coincide with most of Gay Pride month. Quiet as it’s kept, there are uncounted numbers of queer Muslims in the gay community. One of them is Izzadine Mustafa.