Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation's capital to attend what was billed as "the largest climate rally in history" and I haven't been able to get the experience -- or a question that haunted me -- out of my mind. Where was everybody? First, though, the obvious...
scientific
Green energy won’t save the earth without social change | by Ian Angus
The most popular techno-fix for global warming is green energy. If energy companies would only deploy wind, hydro, solar, geothermal or nuclear, then emission-intensive fossil fuels will eventually disappear. But will that actually work? A new study by Richard York of...
The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons | by Ian Angus
Is community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is privatization the...
Death of a mensch and anti-racist scientist : Phillip Tobias
Phillip Tobias, who died on 7th June 2012 aged 86, was probably South Africa’s most honoured and decorated scientist. He was world renowned for his path-finding work in palaeoanthropology that combined studies of paleontology and physical anthropology. At a time when...
The Spear | by Steven Robbins
BRETT Murray’s The Spear has generated an extraordinary amount of media and political commentary, social media twittering, marches and protests, including the defacing of the painting itself. The rage expressed by many in response to the depiction of the private parts...
The Spear that divided the nation | by Professor Robins
BRETT Murray’s The Spear has generated an extraordinary amount of media and political commentary, social media twittering, marches and protests, including the defacing of the painting itself. The rage expressed by many in response to the depiction of the private parts...
The Green economy: a new stage of capitalist expansion | by Campaign No to the Green Economy
In keeping with the official documents, the Rio+20 summit of Governments is being called to provide a response to the multiple problems humankind is facing today, starting with the severe environmental crisis, poverty, and the global economic crisis. Except instead of...
Love and Its Discontents: Irony, Reason, Romance | by Eva Illouz
...in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love. Like falling in love. Do the young still fall in love, or is that mechanism obsolete by now, unnecessary,...
Is Marxism deterministic? | by Phil Gasper
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...


