In 2004, Washington launched a whole new strategy of financial war, based on the role of the U.S. dollar as the hegemonic foreign-exchange currency, to cut off the economic circulation of targeted states. The United States has created, as part of its “rules-based international order,” a coercive global framework extending U.S. financial jurisdiction to every country, economic entity, and person engaged at any point in U.S. dollar transactions anywhere in the world. | more…
Assuming that the Anthropocene will soon be officially designated as the earth’s current epoch, there remains the question of the geological age with which the Anthropocene begins. Adopting the standard nomenclature for the naming of geological ages, the term Capitalinian is proposed as the most appropriate name for the new geological age, conforming to the historical period that environmental historians see as commencing around 1950, in the wake of the Second World War, the rise of multinational corporations, and the unleashing of the process of decolonization and global development. | more…
“Nation of immigrants” discourse is generally used to counter xenophobic fears, but the ideology behind it also works to erase the scourge of settler colonialism, the lives of Indigenous people, and the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants. | more…
The two Koreas—sharing a language, cultural traditions, history of imperial conquest and war, and interrupted family connections—both have mostly succeeded in controlling the pandemic, within different political-economic systems and with markedly different methods. | more…
In 1970, the French left-wing filmmaker Chris Marker made a twenty-minute documentary about the French left-wing publisher François Maspero. Fleetingly, we catch a glimpse of two publications pinned side by side on one wall, seemingly granted special placement: a copy of The Black Panther newspaper and a Monthly Review. Hardly surprising is this prominence: Maspero’s relationship with Monthly Review was always fraternal, both interfaced with one another, shared lists. Together, they helped define what that New in the Left would mean. | more…
The crux of Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living is simple: we need to redefine “the good life.” We need to move away from a culture that equates the good life with endless consumption and toward one that equates it with experiences that are not defined by the market. Not only is this transition ecologically necessary, but it will also lead to fairer, and far more pleasurable, experiences. | more…
