A few days in my “old man’s” factory have sufficed to bring me face to face with this beastliness, which I had rather overlooked. …, it is impossible to carry on communist propaganda on a large scale and at the same time engage in huckstering and industry.
Frederick Engels, “Letter to Marx. January 20 1845”
The fourth anniversary of October 25 (November 7) is approaching.
The farther that great day recedes from us, the more clearly we see the significance of the proletarian revolution in Russia, and the more deeply we reflect upon the practical experience of our work as a whole.
Very briefly and, of course, in very incomplete and rough outline, this significance and experience may be summed up as follows.
The direct and immediate object of the revolution in Russia was a bourgeois-democratic one, namely, to destroy the survivals of medievalism and sweep them away completely, to purge Russia of this barbarism, of this shame, and to remove this immense obstacle to all culture and progress in our country.
And we can justifiably pride ourselves on having carried out that purge with greater determination and much more rapidly, boldly and successfully, and, from the point of view of its effect on the masses, much more widely and deeply, than the great French Revolution over one hundred and twenty-five years ago.
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Thirty-seven years of history bear witness to and validate the importance of holding the 14th Havana Biennial – despite pandemics, blockades and boycott attempts – given the commitment to continue serving as a point of convergence for horizontal dialogue and open interaction among creators, curators, cultural leaders and intermediaries in the circulation of art from different latitudes.
The event has the backing of the artists, curators and specialists who will participate, as was announced to the press by its director Nelson Ramirez de Arellano, who called for respecting and supporting the efforts of those who, around the world, have put their energies into making the Biennial possible.
Two years ago, in a series of articles on Disrupting the nitrogen cycle, I described how fossil fuels and industrial agriculture have created a major rift in the Earth System’s metabolism, by releasing more than twice as much reactive nitrogen into the environment as nature alone has ever produced.
“In particular, close to 200 million metric tons of synthetic fertilizers are used every year — and most of the reactive nitrogen they contain escapes into the broader environment, polluting air and water and disrupting ecosystems. … It is painfully clear that any serious effort to prevent ecological catastrophes in this century must include reining in the overproduction of reactive nitrogen.”
An under-studied part of nitrogen pollution is the nitrous oxide gas that microorganisms in the soil give off as a byproduct of the nitrogen biochemical cycle. Nitrogen stimulates nitrous oxide production, so adding nitrogen fertilizers to soil increases emissions.
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In a statement about the tension in the Belarusian-Polish border the Secretariat of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) underlines that “the lives of refugees are not a tool in imperialist antagonisms” and calls for an end to the imperialist interventions which are the root of refugee-migrant crisis, The statement reads:
“The tension on the Belarusian border with Poland is intensifying every day at the expense of thousands of stranded migrants and refugees who are treated like a tennis-ball in the EU – USA – NATO geopolitical confrontation with Belarus and Russia.
This session is a discussion of the Deutscher Prize Winning Book 2020 ‘The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: Marxian Ecology and the Struggle for Freedom as Necessity’ – John Bellamy Foster.
This is NOT the Deutscher Prize Lecture – it is a discussion of the prize winning book. The lecture can be accessed and downloaded at –
https://cldcnas.synology.me:9887/d/s/…
The Discussants are
John Bellamy Foster (University of Oregon, USA)
Helena Sheehan (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Stefano B. Longo (North Carolina State University, Lund University, Sweden)
Chair: Alfredo Saad Filho.
This session will also announce the 2021 Prize winner. The shortlist is:
Francesca Antonini – Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci: Hegemony and the Crisis of Modernity (Brill)
Himani Bannerji – The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender (Brill)
Maïa Pal – Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (Cambridge)
Panagiotis Sotiris – A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser (Brill)
Ronald Grigor Suny – Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton)
Ntina Tzouvala – Capitalism As Civilisation: A History of International Law (Cambridge)
Read More »False Social Value’ and Real Imperial State Power
Andy Higginbottom, Kingston University, London
The dynamics of International exploitation
Roberto Veneziani, Queen Mary University of London. UK; Jonathan Cogliano, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA; Naoki Yoshihara, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
The International Legal Life of Imperial Rentier Capitalism
Christine Schwobel-Patel, University of Warwick, UK
Technological revolutions, global capitalism and the periphery
Eduardo Albuquerque, UFMG, Brazil
Disposable time, surplus population, and the limitation of the hours of labour
Tom Walker, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Theorising Residential Capitalism: Land Rent, Capital Accumulation, and Housing Provision
Javier Zacares, University of Durham, UK
The New Scramble for Africa: Land Ownership, Agrarian Change and the Real Subsumption of Africa to Capital
Sébastien Rioux, Université de Montréal, Canada
Central Banks as Hegemonic Apparatuses
Galip Yalman, METU, Turkey
Capitalist social reproduction by destruction: A Marxist Feminist approach to the study of soldiers
Jasmine Chorley Foster, University of Toronto, Canada
New Horizons of Possibility for Class Struggle: Organising for Social Reproduction in (Post-)Pandemic Times
Arianna Introva, Open University In Scotland
Marx, Robots, and Social Reproduction
Jamie Kelly Vassar College, USA
Throughout the pandemic, the UK government has taken an ‘arms-length’ approach to the economic survival of Higher Education, providing no financial support and little guidance for workers in the sector. In the immediate term, this resulted in significant job losses in the sector, as university managers directed short-term cost-saving measures against casualised workers. It also led to a health and safety crisis, as university leaders were forced to maintain student recruitment figures in a context widely identified by scientific authorities as a “vector of infectious disease transmission”. Conversely, the state has taken an increasingly active role in certain areas of HE in a bid to further entrench right-wing neoliberal orthodoxies: Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, recently announced the government’s decision to route public funding toward STEM subjects, cutting funding for ‘high cost’ Arts and Design courses by 50% while pushing all universities to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
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Journal of People 