Author: Gowani

by JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

What defines global capitalism today? Are we moving into a new age of techno-feudalism, or is monopoly capitalism still the dominant force? In this in-depth interview, John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and leading Marxist thinker, joins India & Global Left to unpack the core structure of global capitalism, imperialism, and the new global economic order. Foster challenges the popular idea of “techno-feudalism,” arguing that capitalism—not technology—still drives exploitation and inequality. He explains why this narrative often reflects social democratic illusions about technology, welfare states, and the role of the Global South.

About John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, is editor of Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine published monthly in New York City. His research is devoted to critical inquiries into theory and history, focusing primarily on the economic, political and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also encompassing the wider realm of social theory as a whole. He has published numerous articles and books focusing on the political economy of capitalism and the economic crisis, ecology and the ecological crisis, and Marxist theory: (with Brett Clark) The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift; The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology; (with Paul Burkett) Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (2016); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014); (with Robert W. McChesney) The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (2012); (with Fred Magdoff) What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (2011); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (2009); (with Fred Magdoff) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (2009); The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (2009); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (2008); Ecology Against Capitalism (2002); Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000); (with Frederick H. Buttel and Fred Magdoff) Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (2000); The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment (1999); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert W. McChesney) Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (1998); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood) In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (1997); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (1986); (with Henryk Szlajfer) The Faltering Economy: The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capitalism (1984). His work is published in at least twenty-five languages. Visit johnbellamyfoster.org for a collection of most of Foster’s works currently available online.

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ALTERNATIVES INTERNATIONAL

Interview with Gus Massiah by Catherine Tricot was published in Revue Regards on February 6, 2025

Catherine Tricot: How do you understand these tumultuous times?

Gustave Massiah: We are in a moment of structural crisis in the capitalist mode of production, a change in historical period that goes far beyond the election of Donald Trump. Even if Trump’s election dramatically changes the situation and introduces new uncertainties. Social, ecological, and democratic issues are being challenged and disrupted, and are being redefined at different levels: local, national, regional, and global. We are in a period of rupture, of structural crisis in the capitalist mode of production, but this does not mean an end to capitalism.

What are these disruptions that allow you to talk about a rupture?

I would say: decolonization and the rise of the South; ecology; democracy; and finally, new social relationships, particularly with regard to digital technology.

One initial consequence is that social classes are changing, starting with the financial bourgeoisie. Trump, Milei, and Musk have lost all sense of proportion, and this is the first time we have seen such a violent assertion of the power of billionaires. The productive class is also in turmoil with the transformation of work and skills. And, on a global scale and in every society, the rise of the working poor and the middle class.

A second consequence, linked to ecology, is the crisis of productivism. Class changes and the crisis of productivism are reflected in the rise of social movements that are both complementary and alternative to social classes: the women’s movement, ecology, anti-racism, immigration, indigenous peoples, housing and the city, and education.

These factors lead me to say that we are in a period of historic change, of crisis in the mode of production.

Is the rise of the far right around the world a reaction to these changes?

Yes, in part. But not only that. The rise of the far right is partly due to fear and rejection of social movements that are disrupting the dominant ideology. When Trump attacks women and trans people, he is violently expressing his fear of these changes.

To understand the rise of the far right, I asked myself what had happened in previous changes and crises in the capitalist mode of production. I realized that all the structural crises of the capitalist mode of production began with a rise of the far right, followed by responses from the left and then by a transformation of capitalism. This timing of crises is very striking.

To identify the crises of the capitalist mode of production, we can start with the structural financial crises of 1873, 1929, 1976, and 2008. Each financial crisis marks a rupture; it is the culmination of a period of crisis lasting twenty to forty years, with its social, ideological, and cultural struggles, often accompanied by wars.

The crisis of 1873 was followed by the Long Depression, which lasted from 1873 to 1896. It marked the transition from liberal capitalism to monopoly capitalism with the emergence of large industrial groups, significant intervention by banks, and the development of financial capitalism. The period began with the extreme right (and with Patrice de MacMahon in France) and continued, till around 1890, with the emergence of the new extreme right (with Charles Maurras in France). However, it was during this crisis that the First International was created in London in 1864 and the Paris Commune in 1871. These were the left-wing responses to this crisis of capitalism. This crisis continued with the second industrial revolution, from 1880 to 1914, which saw the rise of electricity, oil, and chemicals.

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by EMILY CATANEO

In “Born,” Lucy Inglis reexamines history through the lens of gender roles, medical authority, and bodily autonomy.

In 1545 in the Duchy of Savoy, northwest of what is now Italy, a woman named Isabella della Volpe became pregnant. As she approached full term, Isabella suffered what was then called a brain obstruction — likely a stroke — and died. Her midwife discovered that the baby was still alive, and her attendants pressed the physician to deliver via Cesarean section. But he refused, and by the time a barber-surgeon arrived to cut the baby out, it was too late: The little girl, named Camilla, lived only a few minutes. Amid the horrors, though, there was humanity and compassion: “The women who surrounded Isabella in her final days acted with autonomy and empathy in trying to save her daughter.”

For every Isabella, whose story was recorded in unusual detail, there are billions of other women who’ve experienced the pain, danger, sorrow, love, and communal joy of pregnancy and childbirth. It is this social, medical, and feminist history that historian Lucy Inglis sets out to chronicle in her latest book, “Born: A History of Childbirth.” Inglis started her career blogging and writing about Georgian London, which she followed up with a book about the history of opium. In “Born,” she continues her tradition of examining the sweep of human history through an uncommon lens: the mundane and yet extraordinary process by which human beings are conceived and emerge into the world. Her book joins a recent spate of work, such as Cat Bohannon’s “Eve,” that reexamines human history through an intimate female lens.

BOOK REVIEW — “Born: A History of Childbirth,’’ by Lucy Inglis (Pegasus Books, 336 pages).

“The story of how we are born is the story of us all, and so we must go back to the start,” writes Inglis, and indeed she means the very start. Her narrative begins during the Upper Paleolithic, tens of thousands of years ago, the era to which archaeologists date our first evidence of the history of childbirth: cave paintings of women giving birth among stags and bears. It continues through other glimmers of information about early humans’ experience of and culture around childbirth, from the ginseng and myrrh prescribed to pregnant women in Mesopotamia to the Venus of Hohle Fels, one of the world’s oldest statues. This Venus is a 2.4-inch figurine that was discovered in Swabia, Germany, which depicts a woman with a distended belly, genitals that “appear more like a wound than a sexual organ,” Inglis observes, and spread legs — quite possibly “a ‘real’ woman postpartum.”

In some respects, Inglis’ book is a history of technological advances. In the course of her narrative, we learn about many firsts. The first recorded pregnancy test dates from ancient Egypt, where women would urinate in a bag of barley and a bag of wheat to determine if they were pregnant with a boy, a girl, or not pregnant at all. The first recorded oral contraceptive dates to Cyrene, a North African Greek city-state, where women took a now-extinct herb called silphion to control their fertility. The first obstetrics manual was written in ancient Rome, and the first speculums and forceps likely hailed from Islamic Spain.

Undark for more

Around 900 years ago, a Maya scribe made Códice Maya de México, a sacred book that tracked and predicted the movements of the planet Venus. Today it is the oldest book of the Americas, one of only four surviving Maya manuscripts that predate the arrival of Europeans. A remarkable testament to the complexity of Indigenous astronomy, Códice Maya de México is on display in the US for the first time in 50 years.

Getty has joined forces with Smarthistory to bring you an in-depth look at select works within our collection, whether you’re looking to learn more at home or want to make art more accessible in your classroom. This video series illuminates art history concepts through fun, unscripted conversations between art historians, curators, archaeologists, and artists, committed to a fresh take on the history of visual arts.

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by RAVI KANT

In a democracy, when the politicians thrive but the people don’t, what the system needs is not reform but rescue

When the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014, it rode a wave of discontent fueled by corruption scandals, inflation and unemployment. Narendra Modi promised a new era, one built on Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas (“Together with All, Development for All”). The promise was of governance, development and an end to “elite culture.”

A decade later, the record shows a more complex reality in which the slogan seems to have benefited the political class more than the people.

The Association for Democratic Reforms has released data showing that 93% of members elected in 2024 to the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament, are millionaires, each of whose millions of rupees in assets total more than $120,000 in US dollars. 

India’s democracy is rapidly tilting toward rule by the ultra-wealthy, plutocracy in the making. Leading this trend is the very party that claims to end the elite culture.

A democracy for the privileged

In the general election of 2024, 34 (14%) of the 240 candidates who emerged victorious from the ruling BJP declared assets equivalent to $6 million or more, 130 (54%) claimed wealth between $120,000 to $1.2 million, while another 63 (26%) reported assets between $1.2 million and $6 million.  The assets of just 13 BJP winners (5%) were under $120,000 USD. 

In the main opposition Congress Party, 93% of the 99 elected members are also millionaires. Among other parties with more than 20 seats, about 90% of winners fall in the millionaire category as well.

In 2024, winning BJP members reported an average wealth of nearly $6 million compared with $2.8 million for Congress members.

Asia Times for more

by NADDA OSMAN

Facing global condemnation for war crimes in Gaza, Israel is turning to paid influencers, content creators, and AI tools to reshape its public perception

What was supposed to be a quiet meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a cohort of pro-Israel influencers last month has had a loud impact, revealing what has been described as a desperate attempt by the government to polish Tel Aviv’s perception globally, amid mounting criticism for war crimes in Gaza.

The influencers are estimated to have been paid around $7,000 per post across various platforms, all on Israel’s behalf, according to media reports.

Records filed with the Department of Justice show that the Israeli government hired a firm called Bridges Partners LLC to manage the influencer network, which has been code-named “Esther Project”.

Bridges states its work was to “assist with promoting cultural interchange between the United States and Israel,” while contracts show up to $900,000 in payments to be divided up over several months to cover upfront payments, concept development, influencer fees, production and agency costs.

In the New York meeting with influencers, Netanyahu stressed that social media is a new tool to counter waning public support for Israel and its growing pariah status amid the two-year war on Gaza.

The UN, human rights organisations, and legal experts have all labelled Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, while the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, and a genocide case is pending at the ICJ.

Public support for Israel in Europe and the United States is at an all-time low, with more Americans now sympathising with Palestinians rather than Israel for the first time since polling began in 1998.

In late September, more countries, such as the UK, Canada, France, Australia, and Portugal, formally recognised a Palestinian state.

Meet the influencers

A range of influencers from different sectors attended the roundtable. Among them were Lizzy Savetsky, a lifestyle and fashion figure, Miriam Ezagui, a US-based nurse who posts on TikTok about Jewish orthodox life and traditions, as well as Zach Sage Fox, who posts pro-Israel videos.

In February, Savetsky shared a video of Jewish supremacist Rabbi Meir Kahane, a violent fanatic who routinely espoused anti-Arab and Palestinian rhetoric. In a caption to one of her social media posts, Savetsky writes, “The only language Arabs understand is force and fear”, paraphrasing Kahane.

Yair Netanyahu, the Prime Minister’s son, who has been at the centre of several social media scandals in recent years, was also among the influencers. Most recently, he denied that there was a famine in Gaza, blaming images of starving children on genetic issues.

A New York City-based influencer, Debra Lea, who attended the meeting, posted a photo saying it was an “honour” to meet Netanyahu, calling him “one of the greatest politicians of all time”.

In response to a question she posed at the meeting, Netanyahu hinted at his strategy to have a larger Israeli influence on TikTok.

“Weapons change over time. We can’t fight today with swords or with cavalry, we have these new things – drones – I won’t get into that. But we have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we’re engaged – and the most important one is social media,” he said.

‘Paid propaganda’

The meeting has garnered a critical response from media commentators and experts, who say that Israel is becoming increasingly desperate in attempts to improve its public image.

New Arab for more

by THIJS BROEKKAMP

The Netherlands faces another far-right victory in this month’s elections. But a resurgence of anti-fascist organizing suggests extremists remain a loud minority, writes Thijs Broekkamp.

On a grey afternoon in Schiedam, a small Dutch city near Rotterdam, police horses line the streets as a few hundred protesters gather to oppose the opening of an asylum centre. Across the Netherlands, demonstrations like this now occur every few days, as migration remains the dominant theme in Dutch politics. The government has twice collapsed over the issue, most recently in June, leading to new elections in late October. Ideas of a ‘great replacement’ and the notion that the Netherlands is ‘full’ are widespread, fueled by right-wing politicians. Since Trump lookalike Geert Wilders’ far-right, anti-immigration Party for Freedom (PVV) won the 2023 elections in a landslide, extremist views have become increasingly normalized.

Across from the main square in Schiedam stands a smaller counter-demonstration of about 30 people, encircled by police. It was organized by Anti-Fascist Action Netherlands (AFA), a loose network opposing racist and fascist movements. Many participants wear masks or scarves over their faces as they hold a banner that reads ‘Refugees are welcome here’. A young woman says the face coverings are in response to many cases of doxing, where right-wing protesters post people’s personal information online.

‘I’m quite nervous,’ she says. ‘It’s my first protest and the atmosphere is tense.’ 

The woman has good reason to be on edge. A few weeks earlier, chaos erupted during a large anti-immigration rally in The Hague. Masked men set police cars on fire, waved flags of the NSB – the Dutch fascist and Nazi party from World War II – attacked journalists, vandalized the offices of D66, a centrist political party and attempted to storm the parliament building.

But these events appear to have awakened the left-wing protest movement, which is less visible and organized than the far right. Only five of the 16 AFA branches remain since the network’s founding in the 1990s – marches that once drew hundreds of people now only bring in around a dozen. Their decline is linked to the shift of far-right activity from street-level violence to parliamentary politics, making traditional local anti-fascist street protests less relevant and effective.  At the same time the mainstreaming of far-right rhetoric means the fascist label no longer sparks the same level of public concern.

Continental Reach

The events in Schiedam are a familiar scene across the continent, where seven European Union states have far-right governments in power – including the Netherlands. Once celebrated as a beacon of tolerance, Dutch society is wrestling with rising racism. Since 2001, anti-Islamic sentiment has grown, workplace discrimination remains a problem and battles over racist traditions like Zwarte Piet (Blackface) have intensified. The 2021 benefits scandal – in which thousands of mostly migrant families were wrongly accused of fraud – exposed institutional racism at the heart of a supposedly liberal government.

When Wilders founded the PVV in 2006, other parties refused to work with him because of his extremist agenda. Yet over time, mainstream parties – especially the centrist People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) – gradually adopted tougher language on migration  to win back voters drifting to the right. In 2023, after caving to public pressure to address the housing crisis and the growing number of refugees, the liberal VVD no longer ruled out cooperation, forming a coalition government with the PVV and two other parties. This sharp right turn made Wilders seem less radical and granted legitimacy to his party. 

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by TOM ENGELHARDT

Or Golfing While Rome Burns

Yes, in the ever more ominously unsettled (dis-)United States of Donald J. Trump, I recently went to the “hate America” rally in New York City. Or at least that’s what Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson insisted it was. Who knew that so unbelievably many Americans, millions of us across the United States, would “hate” this country enough to go out and march in the recent No Kings demonstrations, even in places where we might have feared being in distinct danger from the troops of “our” president?

In the days before the latest No Kings demonstrations, no matter whom I talked to or where they lived, they seemed to be planning to go to their local version of that march/rally. My neighbors, other city people, suburbanites, even friends living in the countryside. And despite the people I knew who had marched in the first round of No Kings rallies, as I did, that wasn’t true then. This time, just about everybody turned out, or so it seemed! 

Oh, wait! I suddenly thought of someone who wasn’t there. Oops, let me take that back. He was there, he just didn’t know it. He was on sign after sign after sign, doing this, doing that, doing the inconceivable — or do I mean, sadly enough, the all-too-conceivable?

Take this one that I copied down, for example:

“Tyrant

Rapist

Usurper

Madman

Pedophile”

And I’m sure you know just what the first letters of those five words spell out!

“Only Butterflies Should Become Monarchs”

For me, that march began not at 50th Street and Seventh Avenue where I came out of the subway, but at the subway platform uptown where I was waiting to get on a train to the march. I suddenly noticed that the elderly woman (and I say that advisedly as an elderly man) standing next to me was carrying a handmade sign — the first of literally thousands I would see that day — that said, “No dictators/no kings” and, when I asked her about it, she promptly replied, “I would have called Trump a cunt, but he lacks the depth and warmth.” 

I finally made it off that subway train with literally hundreds of other soon-to-be protesters and ever so slowly managed to make my way up the packed stairs onto an instantly packed Seventh Avenue at the edge of New York’s Times Square. At least as far as I could tell, President Trump wasn’t there himself, preparing to march down Seventh Avenue in his old hometown of New York City with staggering numbers of other New Yorkers and me. News reports, based on police estimates, suggested that “more than 100,000” of us in my hometown and “nearly seven million” Americans in “more than 2,700” demonstrations nationwide actively protested — and when it comes to anti-Trump demonstrations, those doing the figures never exaggerate but almost invariably underestimate. (All I can tell you is that it was a stunning vista, with protesters, unbelievable numbers of whom carried homemade signs, literally packing the streets in a rally that would stretch from 47th Street to 14th Street with no space to spare.)

And yet, though he wasn’t in New York that day, it isn’t that Donald Trump never appears anywhere. In fact, only the previous Saturday, I’d actually (almost) seen him. I was visiting an old friend in Washington, D.C., and we were taking a walk along a canal that leads to the Potomac River when suddenly we came upon a man with an elaborate camera on a stand and began chatting. He was, it turned out, working for a TV news network and his camera was pointed at an extended grassy area across the Potomac, which, he told us, was a golf course. At that very moment, it seemed, America’s king — oops, sorry, Donald Trump — was evidently playing a round of golf there and the cameraman was waiting for him to make it to the seventh hole, which, he said, was right where we were then looking.

Hey, and it was a relief to know that Donald Trump, just two years younger than me, was outdoors, too. As it happens, in my 81-plus years on this planet, I’ve only been on a golf course once in my life. Still, on that recent trip, I was indeed nearly in the presence of “our” president who, on the weekend of the No Kings demonstrations, was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for a $1 million-a-plate dinner and undoubtedly playing golf again. And on that more recent Saturday, when I took that long walk (or, in terms of pacing, more like a crawl) down Seventh Avenue in his former hometown, from 47th street to 14th street, with — or so it seemed to me — a trillion other New Yorkers, I felt as if I were again in “his” presence, given all the fantastic handmade signs people were carrying, which said things like: “Only butterflies should become Monarchs” (with, of course, an image of the president on it).

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by RAHIM KURWA

The U.S. housing market has been ensnared in a growing affordability crisis for decades.

The problem has gotten dramatically worse in recent years. Since 2019, home prices are up 60% nationwide. A record-high 22 million renters are “cost-burdened” – spending more than 30% of their income on housing.

Meanwhile, stagnant wages, limited housing supply and lagging federal assistance have helped leave more than 770,000 Americans homeless.

Despite these varied reasons, Vice President JD Vance has blamed the housing affordability crisis on undocumented immigrants. In August 2025, he attributed rising housing costs to immigration: “You cannot flood the United States of America with … people who have no legal right to be here, have them compete against young American families for homes, and not expect the price to skyrocket.”

Deportations, he argued, would lower housing prices. “Why has housing leveled off over the past six months? I really believe the main driver is … negative net migration.”

Despite Vance’s claims, research shows that immigration is not a substantial cause of unaffordable housing. In fact, studies have found that deportations exacerbate housing shortages through reductions in the construction workforce, which lead to lower production of housing units and higher prices.

From this perspective, its hard to see the administration’s deportation policy as a real effort to solve the housing crisis. Rather, it is using the housing crisis as a way to justify mass deportations to the public.

The current administration’s anti-immigrant housing policy reflects a long history of xenophobia in housing. As a sociologist of housing, I’ve traced the history of racial segregation in housing in Los Angeles County. I have found that the same far-right groups that sought to defeat public housing construction and maintain racially restrictive agreements in post-World War II Los Angeles also advocated to ban immigrants from U.S. housing programs.

Earlier anti-immigrant housing plans

Among the leaders of these efforts was the far-right politician and activist Gerald L.K. Smith. Described in 1976 by historian John Morton Blum as “the most infamous American fascist,” Smith helped bridge the American right’s 1940s conspiratorial and isolationist America First era and its 1960s anti-civil rights era.

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