Articles

Notes from the Editors, March 2022

Notes from the Editors, March 2022

by The Editors

March 1, 2022

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."

Nature as a Mode of Accumulation: Capitalism and the Financialization of the Earth

Nature as a Mode of Accumulation: Capitalism and the Financialization of the Earth

by John Bellamy Foster

March 1, 2022

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."

The End of the Trilogy

The End of the Trilogy

by Ricardo Antunes

March 1, 2022

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.

A Commune Called ‘Che’: A Socialist Holdout in the Venezuelan Andes

A Commune Called ‘Che’: A Socialist Holdout in the Venezuelan Andes

by Chris Gilbert

March 1, 2022

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.

Revisiting Marx on Race, Capitalism, and Revolution

by Kevin B. Anderson

March 1, 2022

Did Karl Marx have a theory of race and capitalism? Not exactly, but he theorized on these issues over four decades and much of what he wrote still speaks to us today. At a time of global and U.S. struggles for liberation in the face of a deeply racialized fascist threat, these writings are worth revisiting.

What 1930s Radicals Totally Knew: Scott Borchert on the Federal Writers’ Project

What 1930s Radicals Totally Knew: Scott Borchert on the Federal Writers’ Project

by Scott Borchertand Susie Day

March 1, 2022

The Great Depression is almost one century old. Today in the United States we remember this international economic collapse, and the suffering it engendered, by reading novels and essays about it, watching plays, viewing paintings—often forgetting that the U.S. government of that time encouraged and financially supported much of this art. Not only art: the Depression was one of the few times that the federal government ever stepped in to help ordinary people get on their feet.

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