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Sober Up Liberals: The U.S. Constitution Sucks
Review of Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022). People in the United States generally have confidence in the country’s political system, believing that it has the capacity to solve meaningful problems. Conservatives and liberals alike sincerely respect what they consider the nation’s sacrosanct Constitution, established […]
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Silence of the Lambs: How the Russian Communists have responded to the Wagner mutiny and Prigozhin’s Empire
The calls have begun in Mosco, for keeping intact Yevgeny Prigozhin’s conglomerate of military budget contractors. The reason argued is that they have established themselves so strategically in the logistics of the military services that they cannot be purged without doing greater damage than Prigozhin himself has caused. In short, a Russian oligarch who knows too much, with too many mouths to feed, too many pockets to fill, and so too big to fail.
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A Patriot’s Fourth of July: Berlin Bulletin No. 213
Despite all doubts, despite fearful weaponry, at home or abroad, can we still call ourselves patriotic? In fact, is that a good thing to be?
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Dossier no. 66: The world needs a new socialist development theory
Across the world, evidence of human misery is increasingly easy to find. The data collected and reported by international agencies is stunning. Billions of people around the planet lack access to adequate education, healthcare, food, and shelter, as well as information and culture.
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Thoughts on the Significance of the CPC for the Global Left
The sheer scale of China’s development has been a world-shaping event.
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Beyond the Greece Boat Disaster: Tracing the Roots of the Migration Crisis
Today’s immigrant policies and political discourses across most parts of the Global North are reminiscent of a colonial Othering.
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Marx, the Anthropocene, and the Metabolic Rift
A Polen Ekoloji seminar featuring John Bellamy Foster on the theoretical and historical background of Marx, the Anthropocene, and the metabolic rift.
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The idea of degrowth communism was Marx’s last breakthrough—and perhaps most important
Even if Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito had not written Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, the left today would still need to take the idea of degrowth seriously. This is because, economist and anthropologist Jason Hickel explains, “while it’s possible to transition to 100 percent renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates.”
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Brawling on the brink: Berlin Bulletin no. 211, June 7, 2023
“NATO—the U.S.-dominated global war machine—whose policy is ‘full dominance spectrum,’ contrary to its claims, is not a defensive organization. Its purpose has been to act as an instrument for U.S. world domination and to prevent all challenges to U.S. hegemony.” —Mairead Maguire
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The Political Tragedy of Capitalist Rule
Society is made up of parts that work together, sometimes more and sometimes less successfully, to produce its livelihood and reproduce itself.
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Why China’s socialist economy is more efficient than capitalism
The difficulty the U.S. faces in its current attempts to damage China’s economy was analysed in detail in the article “The U.S. is trying to persuade China to commit suicide”. Reduced to essentials, the U.S. problem is that it possesses no external economic levers powerful enough to derail China’s economy.
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Food for Thought: Pueblo a Pueblo Promotes Grassroots Food Sovereignty (Part IV)
An innovative form of food distribution has been key for schools and communes.
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New Deal for Higher Ed w/ Jennifer Mittelstadt
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.
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Agroecology for Life: Pueblo a Pueblo Builds Food Sovereignty (Part III)
A grassroots organization is building a new model for the production and distribution of food based on mutuality.
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How “peaceful protests” in Nicaragua became an attempted coup
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.
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“Peak China” – a new low in Western attempts to persuade China to commit suicide
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.
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Circumventing the Blockade: Pueblo a Pueblo Builds Grassroots Food Sovereignty (Part II)
An organization that brings together rural producers with urban consumers breaks with the dictates of the market.
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Venezuela: Food is not a commodity, it’s a human right: Pueblo a Pueblo Builds Food Sovereignty (Part I)
An organization that brings together rural producers with urban consumers breaks with the dictates of the market.
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Defiant Cuba Celebrates May Day
Mainstream reports on this past May Day celebration in Cuba leave out a key element: the imperialist economic and financial blockade.
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Poetry politics and war: Berlin Bulletin no. 210, May 3, 2023
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”.