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Fissures in the global order mean both risks and opportunities
Cracks in the US-EU alliance could mean political openings for the working classes living in the West as well as in Global South nations. In a world facing climate catastrophe, skyrocketing levels of inequality, the threat of more war and even a nuclear war, the costs of missing any such opportunity would be nothing short of tectonic.
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Canada and the new Cold War
As Owen Schalk and Henry Heller explain, given Ottawa’s increasingly belligerent actions in the Pacific, its growing military cooperation with states hostile to Beijing, and the openly antagonistic way Canadian officials discuss China, it seems that Canada wants to delink its economy from China’s in order to prepare for a direct military confrontation.
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The world economy is changing—the people know, but their leaders don’t
The year 2020 marked parity between the total GDP of the G7 and the total GDP of the BRICS group. Since then, the BRICS economies grew faster than the G7 economies. Now a third of total world output comes from the BRICS countries while the G7 accounts for below 30 percent. The American people clearly sense what their leaders desperately deny. That difference haunts US politics.
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Central Asia in the multipolar world
Given that US foreign policy is dominated by an obsession with countering Russian- and Chinese-led economic integration initiatives, it is difficult to read Washington’s increased engagement with Central Asia as anything but an effort to contain Moscow and Beijing, which have similarly upped their investments in the region in recent years.
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Is AMLO’s resource nationalism raising the odds of a coup?
AMLO’s commitment to securing Mexico’s energy sovereignty has been a source of tension between his administration and the US and Canadian governments. Ottawa and Washington want to maintain favourable access to Mexican energy resources for their own companies, an agenda that is diametrically opposed to AMLO’s “fourth transformation” policies.
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The World Bank and the BRICS Bank have new leaders and different outlooks
The BRICS Bank is a young institution compared to the World Bank, but it has considerable financial resources and will need to be innovative in providing assistance that does not lead to endemic debt. Whether the new BRICS Think Tank Network for Finance will be able to break with the IMF’s orthodoxy is yet to be seen.
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To renew working class resistance, the labour movement must be democratized
Now in its fourth edition, From Consent to Coercion: The Continuing Assault on Labour remains an invaluable tool for understanding how the state and capital manage the subordination of labour. The new edition contains timely material that wrestles with the pressing issues of precarity and polarization and the dire need to rebuild and renew socialist politics. The following is excerpted from the book.
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Why news of population decline and economic slowdown isn’t necessarily a bad thing
Sure, the end of economic expansion and population growth is a challenging prospect. But it’s not nearly as daunting as the crisis we are setting up for ourselves if we continue to destroy nature through wasteful consumption and pollution. China’s slowdown is a welcome opportunity to get our priorities straight and set ourselves on a path of sustainable happiness and wellbeing.
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Against multipolar imperialism
Placing our faith in the reshuffling of the US hegemon’s power to a multipolarity of national elites to unlock better conditions of struggle would be idealism in its own right. Revolutionary anti-imperialist struggles must remain vigilantly pluralist and anti-authoritarian, and see multipolarity without socialist democracy as merely another expression of imperialism, rather than its death knell.
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Venezuela’s Seed Law should be a global model
The imposition of patented transgenic seeds onto rural communities has had a catastrophic impact on human livelihoods and biodiversity protection. In many countries, seeds have traditionally been the collective property of farmers—however, these farmers’ right to control their own seed supply is being attacked by corporate forces which have captured capitalist states around the world.