Labour Mire
Understanding Sri Lanka's neoliberal / ethno-nationalist crisis.
Critical theorist Kanishka Goonewardena explores the roots of Sri Lanka's deep political crisis - as a domestic power struggle aligns with Chinese state infrastructure ambitions and Western neoliberal reform regime, popular anger surges along ethnic and nationalist lines, an energy the left must redirect upwards, to the feudal structures of the status quo.
Kanishka wrote the article The Crisis in Sri Lanka for Jacobin.
We need public money to pay for a future in the public's interest.
Geographer Lavinia Steinfort examines the potential of creating new, public money in the people’s interest - as a tool to fight the coming storm of climate change and the persistence of racial and economic injustice, and a way to bridge the gap between social movements and political power dug by private capital.
Lavinia wrote the essay The Power of Public Finance for the Future we Want for the Transnational Institute's State of Power 2019 report.
This one graph explains what Bill Gates doesn't understand about global poverty.
Anthropologist Jason Hickel explains what rich optimists Bill Gates and Steven Pinker don't understand about global poverty - from deeply flawed data sets and ignorance of the violent realities of colonialization, to a larger unwillingness to think about growing inequality under neoliberalism and our wasted capacity for ending suffering on a planet generating more and more wealth for fewer and fewer people.
Jason wrote the post A letter to Steven Pinker (and Bill Gates, for that matter) about global poverty at his site.
All the options are bad: Brexit and the contradictory landscape of British politics.
Writer Richard Seymour surveys the reoriented landscape of British politics and capital, before and after the Brexit vote - from a rift within the right over control of the Conservative Party, to Labour's lack of good options after a generation-long absence from class-based politics, with only reactionaries benefiting from a combustible, nationalist unity project that can't hold.
Richard is author of the essay Brexit and the "white working class" posted at his Patreon page.
Richard's publication Salvage just launched a Patreon campaign.
What kind of weight? Love poems to Black women imprisoned in America.
Writer DaMaris Hill traces a history, and present, of Black women imprisoned in America - under a parallel regime of sexual violence and exploitation in the Jim Crow era and beyond, subject to the edges of a legal and economic system built on repression, risking freedom and safety in the simple acts of navigating daily life in a racist country.
DaMaris is author of the book A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland from Bloomsbury.
Carbon, possibility and the problem with dinosaur dicks.
In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen thinks about the old dicks of the coaligarchy still running everything in our society, and what dinosaurs would say about being called dinosaurs, and what today's dinosaurs don't think about the New Green Deal, and why things might be possible if you think things might be possible.
