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Racism and the Class Struggle: The Meaning of Black Revolt in the United States

Having just written his groundbreaking book, The American Revolution, Detroit autoworker James Boggs sat down in the early 1960s to continue his study of revolution. Boggs looked at the Black Power uprisings then beginning in the United States within the global context of the overthrow of rightwing puppet regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Racism and the Class Struggle, Boggs produced thirteen powerful and prescient chapters that wrestled with topics such as the specific character of American capitalism and its intricate relationship to American democracy, the historic mission of the Black revolution in the United States, and the need for the 1960s Black

Woman using a mobile phone

The Telecom Industry in India: Free Market or Monopoly-Finance Capital?

The success of the telecommunications industry in India has been heralded as a “miracle.” But a miracle for whom? The answer, Rahul Varman writes, has clearly been the capitalist class, who, over three decades, have amassed tremendous wealth and power through the machinations of large firms, in collusion with the Indian government. | more…

How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution: Reviving Socialism after the Collapse of the Soviet Union

How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution brings us to the heart of one of the most precarious and transformational moments in Cuba’s evolution. As the Soviet Union fell to pieces in the 1990s, Cuba managed to evade the fate of its primary trading ally. How was this possible, especially as Cuba endured relentless attacks from the capitalist behemoth directly to its north? | more…

Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution

Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution

Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by a new more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The onset of the Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift” in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world’s population. | more…

Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle

Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle

For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market. | more…

Panopticon

Panopticon

Capitalism’s two main underpinnings are control and exploitation/expropriation. While there are many sites of control they are all generally supportive of the interests of capital, namely, the endless drive to accumulate wealth. They all help to ensure that we behave so that the system continues to reproduce itself. Since workplaces are the sites where profits are extracted from our labor, it is here that control is most critical. | more…

Giving War a Chance

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the ultimate agenda-setting, strategic planning, and consensus-forming organization of the U.S. capitalist ruling class. The latest book to come out of the CFR orbit, Strategy of Denial (2021), thus provides an opportunity to concretely observe how the monopoly capitalist ruling class is preparing the people of the United States for what could be a catastrophic world war. | more…

Eleanor Burke Leacock

Bury Class Society Before It Buries Us All: Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Vision for a Marxist Feminist Anthropology

Eleanor Burke Leacock taught that transhistorical, universal male dominance is a myth, not a fact. Writing during the grimmest period of Cold War reaction, Leacock put forward a critique of the mainstream U.S. ideology, which took for granted the idea that there were only two genders, in binary opposition to each other, and that these were the direct product of so-called male and female nature. | more…

Flooding on Laboulle avenue in Tilff, Belgium

The Planetary Rift

The widespread view on the left that Marx had adopted an extreme productivist view of the human domination of nature—and hence had failed to perceive the natural limits to production and ecological contradictions in general, giving them at most only marginal attention—was contradicted by his theory of the metabolic rift. | more…

5G technology booth

The Political Economy of the U.S.-China Technology War

One of the key components of U.S.-China strategic competition is the technology war, the essence and implications of which can be further understood in the broader context of the international division of labor and the two countries’ internal contradictions. From this front, we can decipher the antagonism between different classes/groups within and across the two countries. | more…