PHIL GASPER argues that Marx’s theory of history is vital for understanding social change, but it doesn’t claim that socialism is inevitable KARL MARX’S key idea, in the words of his collaborator Frederick Engels, was that “the production of the immediate material...
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Reflections on the Current Crisis and Its Effects | by Rémy Herrera
The crisis of capital at the present juncture when capitalism is deeply financialised is extremely difficult to resolve. The main structural problem of the system is the downward pressure on the rate of profit, but further financialisation is no longer a sustainable...
The key to ending the race to the bottom
A spectre starting to haunt the international labour movement — a spectre of a descent into barbarism. It is the image of a possible future, reflected in signs such as South Africa’s Olympians marching proudly in London in national colours, made in China, and in the...
Against Shell’s fracking arguments | by Jonathan Deal
Three oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell, Falcon Oil & Gas, and Bundu Oil & Gas, see massive opportunities in the exploration of natural gas trapped in the underground shale formations in the Karoo, a semi-desert area in South Africa. The Karoo is a sparsely...
The climate change government White Paper: the right colour for South Africa? | by Jacklyn Cock
The South African government’s climate change policy is rooted in a green neoliberal capitalism: reliance on market mechanisms, technological innovation and expanding markets. Underlying all these strategies is the broad process of commodification: the transformation...
Green Capitalism: One neoliberal response to crisis | by Larry Lohmann
‘Let’s put a value on Britain’s ecosystem services’ – the slogan has a nice ring to it. Perhaps we don’t fully understand the value of the wild plants, animals, and natural cycles around us, and if we did, we could appreciate and protect them better.But what is it...
Economic crisis and post-capitalism | Interview by Mat Little
Mat Little interviews the economist Harry Shutt about economic crisis and the left alternative. What marks Harry Shutt out as an economist is not that he predicted the financial crisis that struck in 2007 (two years before he warned of ‘an unavoidable financial...
The great billion dollar drug scam | by Khadija Sharife
Alongside pneumococcal diseases such as meningitis and pneumonia,rotavirus-related diarrhoea is a primary childhood killer in developing countries, thought to snuff out the lives of 500,000 children each and every year. An overwhelming 85 per cent of these children...
