Africa Is on the Move
In 1975, Walter Rodney said, Africa is on the move. This line stays with me, digs deep into my sense of historical possibility. What did Rodney mean when he said that line? | more…
Histories of Racial Capitalism and the Dynamics of the Capitalist System
The term racial capitalism is a bit of a shibboleth. Those who invoke the phrase draw from a longstanding tradition of radical scholarship that brings attention to the material force of racialism in systems of capitalist domination. There is, however, a mounting critique that questions the term’s usefulness, casting doubt on the scholarly project initiated by Cedric Robinson. In the face of such concerns, Histories of Racial Capitalism is a much needed contribution. | more…
April 2022 (Volume 73, Number 11)
As we write these notes at the beginning of March 2022, the eight-year limited civil war in Ukraine has turned into a full-scale war. This represents a turning point in the New Cold War and a great human tragedy. By threatening global nuclear holocaust, these events are also now endangering the entire world. To understand the origins of the New Cold War and the onset of the current Russian entry into the Ukrainian civil war, it is necessary to go back to decisions associated with the creation of the New World Order made in Washington when the previous Cold War ended in 1991. | more…
The Defense of Nature: Resisting the Financializaton of the Earth
The rapid financialization of nature is promoting a Great Expropriation of the global commons and the dispossession of humanity on an unprecedented scale. | more…
The Political Economy of Systemic U.S. Militarism
The U.S. industrial-military-congressional complex is made up of the interdependent dynamics of military contractor corporations, military forces, intelligence agencies, and the civilian national security state, which take form as strategy, political-economy factors, and international affairs shift. | more…
The Bhima Koregaon Arrests and the Resistance in India
The cold-blooded murders of activists by state forces in India represents a historical pattern of extrajudicial repression. | more…
For an Ecosocialist Degrowth
Degrowth and ecosocialism are two of the most important movements—and proposals—on the radical side of the ecological spectrum. | more…
Standing Against Racism and Empire: Remembering Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Sutherland Martinez
Elizabeth “Betita” Sutherland Martinez spent her life fighting the death and destruction imposed by the White House and the Pentagon, from border jails to police barracks in every city and town across the United States. | more…
Obfuscation
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
March 2022 (Volume 73, Number 10)
The struggle over schools today requires battles over both the privatization of education and the current attempts to limit its social content and meaning. Those fighting against this changing totality must align themselves with the embattled radical teachers in the trenches. In the famous words of Grace Lee Boggs, more than a half-century ago, it is necessary to create “a new system of education that will have as its means and its end the development of the great masses of people to govern over themselves and administer over things.” | more…
Nature as a Mode of Accumulation: Capitalism and the Financialization of the Earth
From September to November 2021, overlapping with the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference negotiations in Glasgow, three major interrelated developments occurred in global finance. Taken together, these changes mark a turning point in the financial expropriation of the earth and the culmination of a theoretical shift in the dominant economic paradigm aimed at the unlimited accumulation of total capital, which is now seen as including “natural capital.” | more…
The End of the Trilogy
In Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, István Mészáros closes a trilogy that was first outlined in Marx’s Theory of Alienation, later greatly developed in Beyond Capital, and is now concluded in this new work. Throughout his immensely rich work, Mészáros developed, amid many original formulations, an increasingly relevant concept: capital’s order of social metabolic reproduction. | more…
A Commune Called ‘Che’: A Socialist Holdout in the Venezuelan Andes
The Che Guevara Commune is far removed from the bustle of Venezuela’s huge coastal cities. You reach it by following a steep winding road from the shores of Lake Maracaibo into La Culata National Park. Lush vegetation and tall bucare trees provide good shade for coffee and cacao, which has only begun to be farmed in recent decades in this region, due to the migration triggered by the construction of the Pan-American Highway along the lake’s perimeter in the 1950s. | more…