The theory that individual rights were inherited and endowed by nature as an inalienable right is a big assumption. In this scheme, preferential divine rights were extracted from natural law. The argument goes that in a state of nature we are not social creatures but rather co-exist in disorder and anarchy, therefore we must identify a natural right where the[Read More...]
“Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism?” -Max Horkheimer, from the essay “The Jews and Europe”, December 1939 Aren’t we all tired of capitalism? Haven’t most of us gotten sick of the drudgery, the monotony, the exploitation, sucking up to our bosses and management who pretend to care about the average worker? The[Read More...]
Everywhere along the shores of Planet Earth, endless development and the pressures of over-population continue to escalate a pitched battle among the people: It’s the Nimby’s versus the Yimby’s. So much so that this tale about what is happening on the North Shore of North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada could be called The Battle of North Shore, Planet Earth. “Here’s[Read More...]
“History has not ended, and the need to understand its main features is as great as ever. Certainly, academics must stop teaching the Trivial Pursuit version of History.” — Chris Harman One prejudice we all have to face up to is the idea that the key features of successive societies and human history have been a result of an[Read More...]
The morning papers bring me the news that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world. Actually he overtook Bill Gates for a few hours on Thursday as the richest person on earth as the Amazon share prices rose. Bill Gates regained his position as the richest person later in the day. So what the[Read More...]
Human beings are now waging war against life itself as we continue to destroy not just individual lives, local populations and entire species in vast numbers but also destroy the ecological systems that make life on Earth possible. By doing this we are now accelerating the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history and virtually eliminating any prospect of[Read More...]
A friend of mine from India tells a story about driving an old Volkswagen beetle from California to Virginia during his first year in the United States. In a freak ice storm in Texas he skidded off the road, leaving his car with a cracked windshield and badly dented doors and fenders. When he reached Virginia he took the car[Read More...]
In the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 soaredonto bestseller lists, as did Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which also hit TV screens in a storm of publicity. Zombies, fascists, and predators of every sort are now stalking the American imagination in ever-greater numbers and no wonder, given that guy in the Oval Office. Certainly, 2017 is already offering[Read More...]
The notion of economic growth as a regular, ongoing, self-sustained process no longer holds up to critical analysis. Even during what’s been called “The Glorious Thirty” – the years between the end of World War II and the 1974 oil crisis – growth occurred almost solely in industrialized countries and involved a minority of the world population; it was built[Read More...]
Resistance to the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants, climate change policy, and economic fairness has been fierce. But alongside these efforts—from flooding representatives’ phone lines to packing town hall meetings to marching in protest—it’s also important to begin the work of building alternatives to the systems that underlie the exploitation of people and planet. The understandable focus on Trump—with his[Read More...]
