[Focus on the Global South, 2003] It is in response to the growing clamor for alternatives to the current system of global governance that Focus has elaborated the strategy of deglobalisation as the guiding paradigm for its programmatic work in the next three-year period. Deglobalisation is not a synonym for withdrawing from the world economy.  It means a process of restructuring the world economic and poli ...

It's been 97 years since Lenin first wrote what has since become a "classic" of Marxism: The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, hereafter referred to as SR. I propose to discuss the significance of this work for today (the beginning of the 21st Century) and so will not spend a lot of time discussing its relevance to the world of 97 years ...

The overthrow of all intellectual property leaves unanswered the question of how to control the exploitation of the cultural commons by digital capitalists. ...

From housing to wages, David Harvey says examining capitalism's contradictions can point the way towards an alternative world. Five years ago next month Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in US history. Its collapse was to signal the beginning of the Great Recession – the most substantial world historic crisis of capitalism since the second world war. How should we understand the fundamentals ...

The European Union owes its existence to the efforts of political elites who could count on the passive consent of their more or less indifferent populations as long as the peoples could regard the Union as also being in their economic interests all things considered. The Union legitimized itself in the eyes of the citizens primarily through its outcomes and not so much from the fact that it fulfilled the c ...

Though Margaret Thatcher is no longer among the living, her ideology lives on. That ideology – known today as neoliberalism, “free market fundamentalism” in a phrase coined by George Soros – is strikingly unique. Apart from religious beliefs, is there any example of an ideology that has been so thoroughly disproven yet maintains an aura of respectability? The basic premise of neoliberalism – that “free mark ...

In this animate, academic David Harvey looks beyond capitalism towards a new social order. Can we find a more responsible, just, and humane economic system? This RSA Animate was taken from a lecture given as part of the RSA's free public lecture programme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0 ...

For all its vaunted efficiency, capitalism has foisted wasteful inequality and environmental ruin on us. There is an alternative. What's efficiency got to do with capitalism? The short answer is little or nothing. Economic and social collapses in Detroit, Cleveland and many other US cities did not happen because production was inefficient there. Efficiency problems did not cause the longer-term economic dec ...

Radicals have a habit of speaking in the conditional. Underlying all their talk about the changes they’d like to see in the world is the uneasy knowledge that our social system places rigid limits on how much change can be accomplished now. “After the revolution…” is the wistful, ironic preface to many a fondly expressed wish on the Left. ...

At some point, there is a tilt; there always is. Then we shall settle down into our new historical system. Wallerstein foresees one of two possibilities: more hierarchy, exploitation and polarization; or a system that has never yet existed, based on relative democracy and relative equality. ...