Today’s youth are increasingly unhappy with the way their elders are running the world.
Their ire was most recently expressed when thousands of teenagers and others across the country marched on March 24 demanding more gun control, a little over a month after more than a dozen of their peers were shot and killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida.Read More »
BRAZIL’S Supreme Court decision to send former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to jail is a nakedly political act.
The most popular president in Brazil’s history is also the front-runner in polls for elections due in October. His Workers’ Party government oversaw massive poverty reduction and redistribution of wealth that saw per capita household income rise 27 per cent in eight years.Read More »
Latin America‘s leaders are expressing their solidarity and condemning Brazil‘s decision to deny former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva‘s habeas corpuspetition as a blow to democracy.
Twenty-first-century monopoly-finance capitalism constitutes what Karl Marx once called an “age of dissolution.”1 All that is solid in the current mode of production is melting into air. Hence, it is no longer realistic to treat—even by way of abstraction—the crucial political-economic struggles of our day as if they were confined primarily to the exploitation of labor within production. Instead, social conflicts are increasingly being fought over capitalism’s expropriation and spoliation of its wider social and natural environment.2 This historical shift and the deepening fissures that it has produced can be seen in the growth of what David Harvey has termed “anti-value politics,” directed at the boundaries of the system and visible in such forms as the ecological movement, growing conflicts over social reproduction in the household/family and gender/sexuality, and global resistance to the expansion of imperialism/racism.3 To understand these rapidly changing conditions, it is necessary to dig much deeper than before into capital’s external logic of expropriation, as it was first delineated in Marx’s writings during the Industrial Revolution.4Most important, because at the root of the problem, is the extreme expropriation of the earth itself and the consequent transformation in social relations.Read More »
The first thing that struck my eyes when I arrived in Asansol for the first time to join my present job three and a half years ago was the large towering gate at the entrance of the city, on top of the gate was (and still is) written in bold engravings – “City of Brotherhood”. Anyone visiting the city (it is the second largest city in West Bengal after Kolkata) and quite a large number of people including journalists, political leaders, Union ministers, fact-finding teams have of late flocked to the city through that gate. Asansol was in the national headlines recently for all the wrong reasons but I hardly saw anyone drawing our attention, while reporting on communal discord in Asansol on national television to the reigning leitmotif on the entrance of the city – amity or brotherhood. But why this proud flaunting of such a singular feature of the city through specially engraved words at the entry gate?Read More »
Many Nepal watchers would have been relieved to know that K.P. Oli, the new prime minister of the country, is making India his first port of call. After fuelling his election campaign with ultra-nationalist rhetoric, he was able to lead the coalition of Left parties to a landslide majority. For the first time in decades, an Indian prime minister has a counterpart in Kathmandu who commands a stable government.Read More »
This contribution draws on time spent interviewing, walking with villagers and witnessing the eroding base of women’s security and empowerment in rural and informal sectors in some African countries, a trend that has heightened in the last decade. The countries in question share some common features: a colonial legacy of peoples displaced from their ancestral lands; vast and valuable natural resources; high illiteracy rates among rural populations; patchy rural infrastructure; the vestiges of weakened traditional accountability systems; and investment policies that significantly favour the industrial commodity chain [*] over peasant-based food sovereignty.
In the 19th century, a bright young Belgian mathematician named Pierre-François Verhulst turned his attention to the question of how to model the growth of human populations over time. Forty years earlier, Thomas Malthus asserted that in times of plenty, populations double at a constant rate, i.e. they grow geometrically. Verhulst recognised, however, that resources like food and water are rarely plentiful. He wrote:Read More »
Journal of People 