July 1, 2020
Organized labor—based on white-exclusive and later white-dominated, though not necessarily exclusive, trade unions—formed itself as part of the settler state, not in the sense of being an apparatus of the state, but in the sense of accepting certain important precepts. The unions took for granted the nature of the settler state and, as such, conceived that the unions were to exist to serve the "legitimate" population, or at least the working class of the legitimate population.
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July 1, 2020
Capitalism is a global racialized structure. Although many of the exploited working class are white peoples, people of color, especially women of color, have generally borne the brunt of the human suffering inflicted by capitalism. There is no doubt that colonialism and U.S. slavery were economic systems, but they were also brutal attacks on non-Western peoples.
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July 1, 2020
Oliver Cromwell Cox insisted on dealing with the crucial issues of his time and on telling the truth as he saw it, regardless of whose toes may have been stepped on or whose sensibilities may have been injured. He has aided in preventing the complete stultification of academic social science and in the long run exercised an immense influence on American life.
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June 1, 2020
The current massive oil glut is the product of the effects of the tight oil or shale oil revolution, which for a time turned the United States into the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. Now, suddenly as a result of an overproduction of world oil, made far worse by the sudden falloff in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are witnessing the possible euthanasia of the U.S. tight oil industry, bleeding cash even before the oil price collapse and encumbered with mountains of debt.
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June 1, 2020
Since the late twentieth century, capitalist globalization has increasingly adopted the form of interlinked commodity chains controlled by multinational corporations, connecting various production zones, primarily in the Global South, with the apex of world consumption, finance, and accumulation primarily in the Global North. COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed by capitalism.
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June 1, 2020
In 2021, Angela Merkel's fourth and last term as the chancellor of Germany will end. To understand Merkel's domestic and foreign policy, one must understand the country she inherited. She came to power in 2005 following the first center-left government since 1982, the government of Gerhard Schröder, and was in the fortunate position of becoming chancellor after a coalition government of social democrats and Greens had done the devil's bidding of implementing very unpopular neoliberal policies to the sole benefit of German capital and the rich.
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June 1, 2020
A new poem by Marge Piercy.
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June 1, 2020
A new poem from Marge Piercy.
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May 1, 2020
In its wider economic, ecological, epidemiological, and public health context, the current COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the enormous dangers of the metabolic rift in human ecology and epidemiology brought on by capitalist social relations in the age of monopoly-finance capital, global agribusiness, and intricate, globe-spanning supply chains associated with the extreme exploitation and expropriation of both human beings and nature. Neoliberalism, representing the inner logic of capitalism, has left the world vulnerable to catastrophe wherever it has come into play.
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May 1, 2020
COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is now officially a pandemic. As of late March, whole cities are sheltered in place and, one by one, hospitals are lighting up in medical gridlock brought about by surges in patients.
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