February 5, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal This text is being written in the heat of events, immediately following the mass protests that occurred in most regions of Russia on 23 and 31 January 2021. The total number of protesters throughout the country on 23 January was put by the authorities at fewer than 10,000, but by the opposition at more than 100,000. The largest of the demonstrations was, as usual, the one in Moscow, where according to the official count 4000 people came onto the streets, while unofficial figures put the number at 40,000. Similar numbers took part in the protests on 31 January, but this time the clashes were much more fierce, and according to various accounts, between 3000 and 4000 people were detained…
January 30, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Uneven Earth Countries of the Global South are facing a modern form of economic domination from foreign interests. The story of Europeans plundering Black and brown nations to profit from their natural resources is probably a familiar one. But now that nature itself has become commodified through the tourist economy, environmentalism functions as a justification for replicating the same old colonial power dynamics.
Under the banner of conservation, green nonprofits in the United States have begun using the government debt of previously colonized nations as a bargaining chip to force governments to create new nature preserves. Just over two years ago, the U.S.’s richest environmental organization, The Nature Conservancy, partnered with big European banks to coerce Seychelles, a small island nation 1,000 miles east of Kenya in the Indian Ocean, to issue “blue bonds.” These bonds ar
January 29, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Project As 2021 begins, many people in Manitoba are hopeful that the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us. The number of infections reported is falling. Effective vaccines have been approved and will eventually become widely available. Unfortunately, the pandemic is far from over and the worst could still lie ahead.
Manitoba, like most jurisdictions in Canada except the Atlantic provinces and Northern territories, is using a public-health strategy for responding to COVID-19 that hasn’t given us the protection and positive outcomes that we could have expected. This strategy – one of mitigation, to use the epidemiological term – has aimed to keep the virus from spreading so much that sick people overwhelm the hospital system.
January 29, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Life on the Left Claudio Katz presciently analyzes shifts in the imperialist order, the mainstay of global capitalism, and weighs what the increasing social and political polarization within the United States portends for the Biden administration in the effort to restore its sagging world dominance.
Katz is professor of economics at the University of Buenos Aires, as well as a researcher with CONICET (National Council for Science and Technology, Argentina) and a member of Economists of the Left. My translation from the text on his web page.
The United States’ failed imperial recovery
January 29,2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal We are living in a world that for most people is broken and that has broken most people. It is not a god given world, but one that has been constructed by those in power and that has left most people mired in deprivation.
Under COVID-19, this world has sunk to new lows. While hundreds of millions of people have become unemployed – and in South Africa the unemployment rate has now surpassed 42% – corporations have once again received trillions in bailouts from states to keep capitalism barely afloat. Indeed, we face the greatest capitalist crisis since the Great Depression, political turmoil is rife, reactionary ideas continue to abound, and little hope of a better future seems to exist.