Advertising Is a “Serious Health Threat”—to the Environment
Climate change has brought the global environmental crisis to its crux. The primary point that must be noted is that the pace of climate change is accelerating much more rapidly than had been forecast. Accumulation of carbon dioxide, rising temperatures, melting of the polar ice caps and of the “eternal snows,” droughts, floods: all are speeding up and previous scientific analyses, the ink scarcely dry, turn out to have been too optimistic. More and more, in projections for the next one, two, or three decades, the highest estimates are becoming accepted minima. And to that must be added the all-too-little-studied amplifying factors that today pose the risk of a qualitative leap in the greenhouse effect leading to runaway global warming.… | more |
There is a rather unusual document among Marx’s writings. It is titled, “Peuchet: vom Selbstmord” (Gesellschaftspiegel, zweiter Band, Heft VII, Elberfeld, Januar 1846), and it is composed of translated excerpts from Jacques Peuchet’s Du Suicide et de ses Causes (a chapter from his memoirs). The book under review is an English translation of this document, combined with introductions by editors Kevin Anderson and Eric Plaut. As we shall see, this small and almost forgotten article by Marx is a precious contribution to a richer understanding of the evils of modern bourgeois society, of the suffering that its patriarchal family structure inflicts on women, and of the broad and universal scope of socialism… | more |
A “Red” Government in the South of Brazil
For ten years, the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) has run city hall in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul state (on the border with Uruguay) and one of the main cities in the country. The PT is quite an original party, founded in 1980 by unionists, leftist Christians, and Marxist militants, all convinced that the emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves and stirred by the desire to invent a different, radical, democratic, libertarian socialism that breaks with the old models of Stalinism and social democracy. The current mayor, Raul Pont, a former director of the teachers’ union, belongs to the PT’s most radical current, the Socialist Democracy tendency, which bases itself on the Fourth International … | more |
Global neoliberalism parades victoriously through our era, monopolizing its discourse and ideology. To confront the inherent perversity of the capitalist system’s universal domination we need, more than ever, alternative modes of thinking and acting that are universal, global, planetary. We need ideas and models that, in a thoroughly radical fashion, confront the worship of the market and of money which has become the dominant credo of the moment. As is the case with very few other leftist leaders of the twentieth century, the legacy of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara—universal spirit, internationalist and consistent revolutionary—continues to mount such a challenge.… | more |
