Pension fund managers, private equity firms and other financial players are moving aggressively to snatch up lands around the world with access to water for irrigation. Their strategy is to pump as much water as they can and as fast as they can into the production of crops, like fruits and nuts, that reap high… Read More Squeezing communities dry: water grabbing by the global food industry
Bhaskar Sunkara You wouldn’t have guessed he was in enemy territory. Addressing 2,500 people at New York’s Hunter College one June night in 1983, Maurice Bishop won the crowd over with ease, covering everything from the Palestinian struggle to Ronald Reagan’s Medicaid cuts. At one point, the 39-year-old prime minister of Grenada described a “secret report” from… Read More The US invaded the island of Grenada 40 years ago. The legacy of revolution lives on
First posted June 29, 2016 “It is no exaggeration to say that with 1989 a long historical phase – the one initiated by the October Revolution of 1917 – came to its end. From now on, whatever might be the future of socialism, it will have to be established on radically new foundations, beyond the… Read More Conceptualizing an Emancipatory Alternative: István Mészáros’s ‘Beyond Capital’
The confusion has been encouraged over decades by propagandistic journalism…. reporting that refers to the hostility in Israel / Palestine as being between “Jews and Arabs”: a total misnomer… there are “Arab” members of the Jewish faith and Jews who oppose the Zionist project of a “Jewish state” of Israel… Unions should argue for the… Read More Gaza, trades unions, fascism & oppression
By Dilip Simeon NB: This is an extended reminiscence of a conversation about Ranajit Guha and the Naxalite movement. The conversation was arranged at the request of the Bangla journal Anustup; and took place between me and a History honours student at the University of Delhi. (I am obliged to Anustup for having prompted this… Read More A Political Man: Memories of Ranajit Guha
Yanis Varoufakis On 7th February 2023, I returned to the Chamber to discuss a wide variety of issues, beginning with a Europe-at-war, post-Brexit Britain, the New Cold War that marks capitalism’s global transition to (what I call Technofeudalism), the state of the Left in Eastern Europe and more. Thanks Cambridge Union! https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2023/03/24/britain-europe-the-new-cold-war-finance-technofeudalism-at-the-cambridge-union/
We’re now in servitude to the fiefdoms of our new global masters, Lord Zuckerberg of Facelandia and Sir Musk of the rotten borough of X… Technofeudalism feels like an important new book. It’s a big-picture hypothesis rooted in a historical account of how capitalism came into being that describes what is happening in terms of an… Read More ‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech
It may well be that the future of the world, and thus the sense of the present and the significance of the past, will depend in the last analysis on contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s work – from Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947) by Alexandre Kojève Alexandre Kojève was an immense influence on many… Read More The scar of identity
NB: What enables someone who has been a communist all his life become an ultra-chauvinist overnight? What lies beneath the slippery nature of ideology, and what is the difference between political philosophy and ideology? Why do Leninist parties in power enforce single-party dictatorships? What is the communist understanding of law and justice – is it… Read More Multipolarity, the Mantra of Authoritarianism
I value George Orwell’s writing for his devotion to truthfulness and his recognition of all the ways that truths get corrupted. This is why, even if his private mores are of his time, his public writing still gives us tools to think about ours. By Rebecca Solnit The feminist writer Moira Donegan recently mocked contemporary social… Read More George Orwell in an age of moralists
After the truth-shower 