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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Economies around the world were shocked and damaged over the course of 2022. Global capitalism had been brewing conflicts among the major powers for some time as their relative strengths and vulnerabilities shifted. US capitalism and its empire are widely perceived as waning. Europe’s role as a US ally and indeed its economic future became correspondingly riskier as a result.

The war in Ukraine is only one phase of a world-wide conflict that began earlier. In international relations, the driving forces are often obscured by surface occurrences, such as immediate military events and the din of apologetic or denunciatory rhetoric. What is at stake in Ukraine is not Ukraine: it is the future of globalized, neoliberal, financialized, US-ruled capitalism.

It’s becoming commonplace to suggest that a multipolar world order is emerging, one that will replace the US-dominated world system that has reined since the end of the Second World War and faced no serious challengers since the fall of the Soviet Union. As Greg Shupak writes, what is certain is that the old order will not fall without a great deal of struggle.