Wuhan is known colloquially as one of the “four furnaces” (四大火炉) of China for its oppressively hot humid summer, shared with Chongqing, Nanjing and alternately Nanchang or Changsha, all bustling cities with long histories along or near the Yangtze river valley. Of the four, Wuhan, however, is also sprinkled with literal furnaces: the massive urban complex acts as a sort of nucleus for the steel, concrete and other construction-related industries of China, its landscape dotted with the slowly-cooling blast furnaces of the remnant state-owned iron and steel foundries, now plagued by overproduction and forced into a contentious new round of downsizing, privatization and general restructuring—itself resulting in several large strikes and protests in the last five years. The city is essentially the construction capital of China, which means it has played a particularly important role in the period after the global economic crisis, since these were the years in which Chinese growth was buoyed by the funneling of investment funds into infrastructure and real estate projects. Wuhan not only fed this bubble with its oversupply of building materials and civil engineers but also, in so doing, became a real estate boomtown of its own. According to our own calculations, in 2018-2019 the total area dedicated to construction sites in Wuhan was equivalent to the size of Hong Kong island as a whole.
“Livio Maitan’s last book”
28 November 2019, byThis address was given by Franco Turigliatto at the launch of Livio Maitan’s book Memoirs of a critical communist: Towards a history of the Fourth International at the Historical Materialism conference in London in November 2019.
Why the Kurds Should Be Supported
20 November 2019, byThis article, published in 1963 by the Israeli revolutionary socialist group Matzpen, was authored by one of its founders, the Palestinian Marxist Jabra Nicola. At the time the article was written, Iraq was in the midst of a sequence of violent upheavals and military coups that would ultimately result in the ascendance of Saddam Hussein.
India and the Colonial Debt
10 October 2019, by“The former Indian minister and a member of the parliament, Shashi Tharoor demanded Britain to pay reparations to India and other former colonies for its decades of imperial rule. He made the case in a debate entitled ‘This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies’, organised by the famous debating society, the Oxford Union in 2015.
The Left and Right in Latin America Today: An Interview with Claudio Katz
21 June 2019, by ,On May 5, 2019 I spoke with Argentine economist Claudio Katz in his Buenos Aires apartment. We discussed themes from his last two books, Neoliberalismo, neodesarrollismo, socialismo (Neoliberalism, neodevelopmentalism, socialism, 2016) and La teorÃa de la dependencia, cincuenta años después (Dependency theory, fifty years later, 2018), as well as the complexities of the current regional conjuncture. In an incisive and wide-ranging survey, Katz explains the root causes and timing of the decline of the latest wave of Latin American progressive governments. At the same time, he emphasizes the fragility of the “conservative restoration” as it has unfolded in its wake, captured most eloquently perhaps in the paralysis of the Jair Bolsonaro government in Brazil.
Jasic Struggle: Debate Among Chinese Maoists
13 May 2019, byLast July, 2018, 89 workers at the Shenzhen Jasic Technology Co. Ltd. demanded the right to set up a workplace union. Although over the past decade there have been a growing number of disputes and strikes by Shenzhen workers, the Jasic case is unusual because it was openly supported by a group of self-proclaimed Maoists and Marxist university students and recent graduates.
Israel’s Insider Radical
6 May 2019, byHaneen Zoabi has survived insults, death threats, and the vagaries of the Israeli justice system. But the first Palestinian woman to represent an Arab party in Israel’s Knesset wants something more — to be heard.
The Fall of al-Bashir: Mapping Contestation Forces in Sudan
2 May 2019, byThe removal of President al-Bashir and the takeover by the military did nothing to convince protesters to go home or dampen their call for regime change. Crowds of protesters continue to demonstrate, rejecting the military’s move as a regime coup, and demand the handover of power to a civilian transitional government. Now that Sudan’s future transition remains unclear while it searches for a viable democratic alternative, it is important to examine the origins of the contestation forces that shook the country for the last four months and the different phases of their formation.
A Red-Green Manifesto for the 21st Century
1 May 2019, by ,Only a mass socialist, feminist, internationalist, pro-peasant, anti-racist, indigenous, and anti-colonial movement can save humanity
From the BRICS countries to the townships: racial and social segregation continues
30 April 2019, byReport on CADTM International’s mission to South Africa from 31 March to 12 April 2019.
