With claims that the South African Federation of Trade Unions is planning to embark on a two-day strike to intensify the struggle against the recent proposed amendments to Labour Relations Act, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and the National Minimum Wage Bill, it is a good time to examine the social conditions and the factors on which a mass strike can be born in the new phase of the struggle.
Putin’s latest assertion signals that the world imperialism is going to face tough days in future.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, said: “Either Russia is a sovereign country, or there is no Russia.”
The world imperialism is not habituated to listen to such assertions. It’s also a tough message to hirelings of the world imperialism. The masters and their lackeys have to review self-positions, both strategic and tactical, in light of Putin’s latest assertion: Not at the cost of sovereignty.Read More »
At the end of January 2018, the rollercoaster ride that is the Trump presidency took another unexpected turn: the leader of the free world claimed that the United States could reenter the 2015 Paris climate agreement—if the US were given a “completely different deal.” As Trump told ITV host Piers Morgan, “I believe in clean air. I believe in crystal-clear, beautiful . . . I believe in just having good cleanliness in all. Now, with that being said, if somebody said go back into the Paris accord, it would have to be a completely different deal because we had a horrible deal.” Trump also stated his (factually incorrect) opinion that polar ice caps are at “record levels.”1
…all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.
– Karl Marx, Capital vol 1
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and an economic shift in China it seemed that capitalism had become the only game in town. Karl Marx’s ideas could safely be relegated to the dustbin of history. However the global financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath sent many rushing back to the bin.Read More »
The problem with society and the framing of mental illness as a social ill.
Mental illness is a serious problem, reaching epidemic status, and the problem is increasing rapidly amongst young people not only in South Africa but globally. There is a tendency in society to either: (1) disregard mental illness as a serious problem, or (2) to recognise mental illness as a problem but fail to treat the underlying causes that result in mental illness. In this piece we will attempt to explain why this is the case, and what needs to be done about it.Read More »
As we’ve seen, metabolism, a defining feature of all life, always involves exchanges with the world outside the organism. Life cannot exist without ingesting matter and excreting waste. The fact that the Earth is a sphere surrounded by a vacuum, and that we have access only to its outer few kilometers, means that the amount of matter available for life to use is finite, and that life’s wastes have nowhere else to go.Read More »
Aftermath of a Coalition strike on Raqqa’s Malahi neighbourhood, which was reported to have killed up to 40 civilians, August 22nd 2017. Rubble and death is the signature of US empire’s meddling in the Middle East.Read More »
The following is an edited version of remarks Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford delivered to a panel on “Imagining an Authentic U.S. Left for the 21stCentury ,” at the Left Forum, in New York City, this past weekend.
Power to the People!
I’m honored to be among the folks that Paul Street invited to think with him about what an “authentic” left would look like in the United States. It’s something that many of us think about all the time.Read More »
Journal of People 