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Reflections on the history of imperialism and empire-building. Understanding past and current trends, and how the past shapes the present material conditions in the global order, especially with regards to international relations. 

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U.S. Imperialism is the reason for the Taliban's recent successes in Afghanistan

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  The original, cringe-worthy dedication title card of Rambo III , before being edited out in subsequent post-9/11 DVD copies and television airings. The Taliban were one of the groups that sprang from the U.S.-created and U.S.-backed Mujahideen, who were made with the ultimate goal in mind of destroying the Soviet Union. The United States saw an opportunity for its anti-communist goals in the exiled, ousted, reactionary, neo-feudalist landowning class who were willing to betray their country, to undo all the revolutionary gains and progress (which included women's emancipation) made by the popular socialist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and to bring the country back to what is essentially the stone ages. While the United States does not necessarily preach Wahhabist or Salafist ideology itself, they were very useful tools, due to their highly sectarian nature, in countering the progressive anti-imperialist forces -- whom they saw as foils and bitter 'archenemies...
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The Paradox of ‘Anti-War’ Capitalism: Peace Movements, Disarmament, and the War in Ukraine (excerpt)

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  Throughout the duration of the Russia-Ukraine War, the poverty of real Marxist analysis is very apparent in some  very confused sections of the left [1] (as well as those who are purportedly left, but are clearly aligned with right-wing forces) who have committed themselves to either being apologists for Russia’s aggression and to championing multipolar capitalism, or cheerleading for the NATO-led alliance with the desire to draw out the conflict for as long as possible. They refuse to see the war as an inter-imperialist conflict, with U.S. imperialism competing with Russian imperialism over who gets to keep Ukraine as a colony, and who gets to have a puppet government that will be friendly to their respective bourgeois interests. But perhaps one of the most curious aspects of these Western “anti-war” movements is how quick they are to  call for the United States, Canada, the UK, and other U.S.-aligned countries to disarm [2]; as well as being quick to claim that these ...
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Neo-Malthusianism: Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, and the Crisis of Capitalism

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  The  American Eugenics Society’s flashlight exhibit  at the 1926 Fitter Families Contest, emphasizing the “overpopulation” of “defectives” in the American gene pool. Neo-Malthusianism is the notion that the world needs to be drastically depopulated and that “humans are a cancerous tumor eating up the world’s resources.” Its proponents would have the poor believe that they themselves are responsible for their own misery — rather than the real culprits, the capitalist class who profit from imperialist plunder and environmental destruction. Now that capitalism is entering into a new crisis, alarms are once again being raised for “overpopulation”, and Neo-Malthusianism is making a resurgence, particularly in environmental discourse, with encouragement from the capitalist class. There is no doubt that climate change is a very real and urgent matter, with greenhouse gas emissions leaking into the Earth’s atmosphere due to significantly increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels a...
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