In July 2021, in a year which presented few reasons to be happy, the garment workers of Sindh province in Pakistan had cause to celebrate. The provincial government had just announced a 40% increase to the minimum wage, raising it from 17,000 to 25,000 rupees (from €84 to €124 at the current exchange rate) per… Read More Pakistan’s wage struggle shows the fragility of progress in the global garment industry
Two Russian journalists working for a popular pro-Kremlin website filled it with anti-war articles on Monday morning in a rare act of dissent as the country celebrated the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. The articles on Lenta.ru called President Vladimir Putin a “pitiful paranoid dictator” and accused him of waging “the bloodiest war of the 21st… Read More ‘Paranoid dictator’: Russian journalists fill pro-Kremlin site with anti-war articles
The Ruling this week forces all Americans to now follow the strict religious beliefs of the Catholic Church and much of Christianity which has concocted a fantasy that a fertilized egg is a human being – even though their own founder and God, Jesus Christ, never said any such thing. In fact, the word “abortion”… Read More Michael Moore: The Forced Birth Ruling
The US and Russia, faded relics of the Cold War, unable to accept their terminal decline, launch futile and self-defeating wars to reclaim their lost imperial power. Blinded by what Barbara Tuchman calls “the bellicose frivolity of senile empires,” we are marching ominously towards war with Russia. How else might we explain Secretary of Defense… Read More Hedges: The Age of Self-Delusion
This is a song at the end of the film Dark Waters (2019), about the lawyer who became Duponts worst nightmare. Dark Waters, tells of the toxic spills scandal that led to US chemicals giant DuPont paying US$671 million (£516 million) to settle more than 3,500 lawsuits in 2017. The company’s plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia had been contaminating the… Read More Dupont and the forever toxic chemicals / Tom Petty I Won't Back Down
Last week I received a draft petition to the Election Commission of India from a well known writer and activist of civil society about the use of EVMs, with the request to obtain endorsements for it. I forwarded it to about twenty contacts, all well read people, engaged with and concerned about the state of… Read More Avay Shukla on the bulldozing of Indian democracy
The white gunman and the ‘rioters, anarchists, arsonists and flag-burners’ Ahmed Diaa Dardir // RP 2.11 (December 2021) On 25 August 2020, seventeen-year-old (white) Kyle Rittenhouse shot three antiracist protesters in the US state of Wisconsin, killing two and seriously injuring the third. Equally shocking was the impunity with which the shooting was carried out. Rittenhouse was protected… Read More Ahmed Diaa Dardir: The threshold of fire
NB: Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was one of the greatest writers of our times. He wrote during a tumultuous historical period. Deutsches Requiem, posted below, a short story written in 1946, is an imaginary testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal, Otto Dietrich zur Linde. Before getting to the story, I post two paragraphs he wrote in 1944,… Read More Jorge Luis Borges – Deutsches Requiem: a short story (1946)
Miłosz is best known outside Poland for The Captive Mind (1953), his study of how Eastern European intellectuals were seduced by Stalinism. Through several character portraits, he showed how a combination of opportunism, exhaustion, and hope led Polish writers to swallow the pill of contentment in exchange for compliance. Some prospered, like “Alpha, the Moralist” (based on… Read More Miłosz’s Magic Mountain. By Joy Neumeyer
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance… Read More Anjan Basu: What Can Karl Marx Offer to the 21st Century?
