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Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film The Exterminating Angel is many things to many people. The eye of the bewildered beholder, beholden to his or her personal perspective, conditions the response. The plot is straightforward: a small coterie of wealthy Mexicans convene for a dinner party, only to find that they cannot leave the party — literally. There is no apparent physical impediment. Nothing visual blocks their exodus. Rather it is a kind of psychic inanition that collapses their will to leave. As each guest variously attempts to cross the threshold, a thought pops into his or her head rationalizing a reason …

I’ve been writing these Future Hope columns for 20 years, and several times I’ve quoted James Connolly, Irish labor, socialist and independence leader over a hundred years ago, on the importance of singing:

No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression. If such a movement has caught hold of the imagination of the masses they will seek a vent in song for the aspirations, the fears and the hopes, the loves and the hatreds engendered by the struggle. Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of …

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The US engineered another coup, this time Bolivia, and again our movement could not effectively counter pro-coup propaganda the US was selling to the public, let alone taking any action to stop it.

There is an imperative need for much greater long-term cooperative work to combat US interventions. Needed is a qualitatively higher level of unity of action among our networks to combat imperialism. Lenin, one of the most effective leaders of the struggles against the ruling classes, emphasized that “The proletariat has no other weapon in the fight for power except organization.”

The divisiveness among ourselves and our alliances is …

A refugee is someone who survived and who can create the future.

— Amela Koluder

Climate change does not respect border; it does not respect who you are — rich and poor, small and big. Therefore, this is what we call ‘global challenges,’ which require global solidarity.

— Ban Ki-moon

There are myriad reasons why people set down roots along the Oregon Coast: “the ocean,” “the air,” “the laid-back lifestyle,” “the small town feel of the towns,” “no rat race,” “the geological and ecological beauty.”

For others, like First Nations cultures (Coastal Salish), or Nehalem, their roots were set down thousands of years …

The Amazon rainforest is a crucial life-support ecosystem. Without its wondrous strength and power to generate hydrologic systems across the sky (as far north as Iowa), absorb and store carbon (CO2), and its miraculous life-giving endless supply of oxygen, civilization would cease to exist beyond scattered tribes, here and there.

Sad to say, a recent scientific analysis of the health of the Amazon rainforest is downright dismal. The world’s two leading Amazon scientists, Thomas Lovejoy (George Mason University) and Carlos Nobre (University of Sao Paulo) recently reported:

Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it …

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The Canadian media gets a failing grade when it comes to its coverage of chemical weapons in Syria.

Among the basic principles of reporting, as taught in every journalism school, are: Constantly strive for the truth; Give voice to all sides of a story; When new information comes to light about a story you reported, a correction must be issued or a follow-up produced.

But the Canadian media has ignored explosives revelations from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It’s a stark example of their complicity with belligerent Canadian foreign policy in Syria.

In May 2019 a member of the OPCW …

Two girls protesting child labour (by calling it child slavery) in the 1909 New York City Labor Day parade.

The Factory

“And such should childhood ever be,
The fairy well; to bring
To life’s worn, weary memory
The freshness of its spring.

But here the order is reversed,
And infancy, like age,
Knows of existence but its worst,
One dull and darkened page;—”

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon – The Vow of the Peacock and Other Poems  (1835)

Introduction

The idea of a child-centred Christmas is taken for granted now …

Orientation

As one of the co-founders of Planning Beyond Capitalism, you might ask why we would publish an article about atheism? Shouldn’t we just stick to political economy and leave people’s beliefs about the origin of the universe and our place in it for future generations to figure out?  We have many reasons for thinking that an atheist stance is crucial for revolutionaries to take. Politically, I trust atheists more than anyone else, because I trust that their political commitment is to this world since we do not have a back-door escape of some God looking after …

Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter addressed to three senior officials in Britain: John Gardiner, Under Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the British government; Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England; and Chris Wormald, Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health and Social Security.

Her letter focuses on the issue of food and the herbicide glyphosate. But the issues she discusses should not be regarded as being specific to the situation in Britain: they apply equally to countries across the world which are facilitating the interests of global …

The Democratic Party’s electoral strategy of impeaching Donald Trump is backfiring. Before impeachment, Trump was losing to each of the leading Democrats, but the latest USA Today/Suffolk University poll finds for the first time Trump defeating all of the leading Democratic candidates. Gallup reports that Trump’s approval has risen by six points since the launch of the impeachment inquiry. A CNN poll found that support for impeachment fell by five percent over the past month.

Rather than focus on issues that impact people’s lives — like racism and bigotry, the unfair economy that results in low wages, growing inequality, …

Transparency and accountability have never been the strong suits of non-profit and for-profit charter schools.

Unlike the nation’s public schools, all charter schools (about 7,100) are run by unelected individuals, and many, if not most, charter schools regularly violate open-meeting laws, are not subject to public records laws, and avoid audits.

In these and other ways, non-profit and for-profit charter schools do not really want to be answerable to the public because they highly value their inherently private status, which is what allows them to cynically operate as pay-the-rich schemes under the veneer of high ideals. Charter school operators desperately want the …

Globalization, Democracy, and Migration are themes which continually ignite both scholarly and non-scholarly debate.  Not so surprisingly, none of this is new. In his own inimitable way, the German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, touched upon all these current hot topics and more.

Kant’s political writings have only relatively recently been appreciated by the likes of political philosophers in the Anglo speaking world, a fact that was given a significant boost by the works of no one less than John Rawls especially in his A Theory of Justice and The Law of  Peoples.

Putting the recent reception of Kant’s work aside, we now …

On November 27 this year, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, delivered an address to the German Bundestag outlining his approach to understanding the mental health of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. These comprised two parts, the initial stage covering his diplomatic asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy, the second dealing with his formal detention in the United Kingdom at the hands of the UK legal and judicial system. The conclusion was a recapitulation of previous findings: that Assange has been subjected to a prolonged, state-sponsored effort in torture, …

Emmanuel Macron is a spiv, a first class spiv. Yet Emmanuel Macron is President of the French Republic, which is a worry.

The stamp of the man could have been readily gauged from his curious appointment and period as Economy Minister, August 2014 to August 2016, under President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Macron’s first action as Economy Minister was the privatization of the Toulouse-Blagnac airport (SATB). It was a process steeped in anomalies, for which reason it has been the subject of unprecedented court …

The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on the premise that the U.S. and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, and that they must therefore learn the lessons of Afghanistan to avoid making the same mistakes in future military occupations.

This premise misses the obvious lesson that Washington insiders refuse to learn: the underlying fault is not …