The World Bank says it can fight poverty through technical solutions. But poverty is inherently political Alf Gunvald Nilsen The future of work and the future of poverty are closely bound up with each other. Global value chains, those webs of firms criss-crossing the world that collectively bring products to market, have driven economic growth… Read More Global inequality is the World Bank’s elephant in the room
Hell hath no fury like corporate power scorned, writes Norman Solomon of the general-election battle over the next mayor of New York City. By Norman Solomon; Common Dreams The Supreme Court’s first chief justice, John Jay, would have empathized with the billionaires who’ve been freaking out ever since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of… Read More The Billionaire Frenzy Over Zohran Mamdani
First posted July 07, 2015 Anil Nauriya NB: This is an important contribution to the historiography of Indian nationalism, and of socialist theorising in India. The paper is available online here: Non-violent Action and Socialist Radicalism: Narendra Deva in India’s freedom movement IntroductionThe dynamic that linked non-violent movements for Indian freedom in the first half… Read More Non-violent Action and Socialist Radicalism: Narendra Deva in India’s freedom movement
NB: An important interview about an important book. DS Documents unearthed by Robert Parry and reported in an article entitled When Israel/Neocons Favoured Iran show that Israel’s Likud government of Menachem Begin became an important source of covert arms supplies to Iran after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, with the profits being invested in Jewish… Read More The People First: Rohini Hensman on Democracy, Resistance, and the Global Left
The major intellectual and moral preoccupations of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died this week at the age of 96, speak to key issues of modernity and morality that leftists will be grappling with for a long time. Nick French: Alasdair MacIntyre Leaves a Legacy to Wrestle With lasdair MacIntyre, the preeminent moral philosopher known for… Read More Alasdair MacIntyre Leaves a Legacy to Wrestle With / Alasdair MacIntyre obituary
Both Perestroika and Thatcherism, then, meant scaling back economic and social security to drive efficiency gains and shift labor and capital from declining to rising industries. If this similarity between East and West is unsettling to readers today, it is nonetheless one that, as Bartel’s archival work demonstrates, was recognized behind closed doors at the… Read More No Alternative?
Situationist International and the Students of Strasbourg November 1966 On the Poverty of Student Life: The Little Pamphlet that Started a Revolution The Situationist International (SI) was founded in 1957 by a half-dozen European avant-garde artists. Recent historical events, chiefly workers uprisings in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, convinced them that a social revolution was… Read More On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for Doing Away With It (Strasbourg, 1966)
Jairus Banaji I’ve divided this presentation into four distinct parts.[1] A shorthand description of these might be Imagine these themes as chapters to a book called Introduction to a History of Capitalism. So, what this talk sets out to do is simply construct a framework where we can think about capitalism historically. To start with the conventional narratives,… Read More Retotalising Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction to its History
Gareth Dale Hungarian social theorist Karl Polanyi is best known for his exploration of the collapse of liberal institutions that occurred between 1914 and 1945. His book, The Great Transformation, traces the catastrophes of those decades to the globalisation of market liberalism. In his view, the attempt by liberal social engineers to establish a “self-regulated” market… Read More The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi is a classic critique of capitalism – but it wasn’t an overnight success
By Jairus Banaji Paul Mattick Sr. (1904–1981), left Germany for the US when he was 22. Mattick saw the revolutions in Russia and China as ‘not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense, leading to the “association of free and equal producers”, but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism’. ‘Marxism served here… Read More Paul Mattick Sr. (1904–1981)
After the truth-shower 