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'Tomorrow is Too Late' -- When Fidel Castro Urged Urgent Climate Action at the 1992 Rio Summit

Fidel Castro Climate & Capitalism
The United Nations Earth Summit in 1992 took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was supposed to establish guidelines for sustainable development. At the Summit, then Cuban President Fidel Castro gave a speech (short), warning of the dire consequences of failing to reverse course. Castro long warned that capitalism was threatening to destroy human civilization through ecological destruction, with the poor of the global South its first victims. Speech reprinted below.

Measuring Global Inequality

Michael D. Yates Monthly Review
The response to growing economic inequality must start with mass resistance within every country and maximum solidarity among all workers and peasants, in rich and poor countries alike. The details of such struggles have to be worked out in each place. The key is solidarity among all workers and peasants, within and between the states of the world.

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To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice

Walter Johnson Boston Review
Not so much as a comprehensive weekly review of one unitary book, the following contribution is a synthetic culling of classics on white supremacy and racialism in the United States. We at Portside believe the essay is must reading, as are the books cited.

Sympathy for the Devil?

Seth Ackerman Jacobin
The numbers will be clear: downscale whites are a big pool of untapped votes. Yet if a cordon sanitaire is placed around that demographic territory and hung with the notorious label, “Trump Vote,” the Democrats will be even more likely to let the party system drift down its current path: into the culture-war politics of the reactionary Tammany-versus-Klan 1920s, rather than the class-based politics that followed.

Hydrocarbons and the Illusion of Sustainability

Kent A. Klitgaard Monthly Review
A system based on the fair distribution of use values, decent work, and production and consumption levels that remain within nature’s biophysical limits cannot occur without the abandonment of a social order based on profit and accumulation.

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Wall Street's Foreign Policy Wizards

Dominic Alexander Counterfire
The Council on Foreign Relations is a supercharged, highly connected establishment think tank. While producing reports and staffing varied policy working-groups, its recommendations are invariably market-based. CFR leaders and members pass through the revolving door of the federal government to high positions of authority, no matter which party holds power. The book under review, Wall Street's Think Tank, charts the council's key links to US imperial policy.

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Terry Eagleton: Still the most Formidable Critic of Populist Late-Capitalism

Melanie McDonagh New Statesman
Both analytical and droll, Terry Eagleton's Culture explores how culture evolved from rarified sphere to humble practices, and from a bulwark against industrialism's encroaches to present-day capitalism's most profitable export. Eagleton both illuminates culture's collusion with colonialism, nationalism, the decline of religion, the rise of and rule over the "uncultured" masses, as well a means for cultivating social life and social change.

Radical Leisure

Eva Swidler Monthly Review
In the seventy years since organized labor gave up on shorter hours, not only did the length of the U.S. work week bottom out, then begin a steady climb that still continues, but labor force participation rates also rose. Women work for pay at ever-increasing levels; the elderly work until death. Ever-more hours work are siphoned from households, drawing in ever-more people.
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