Chinese peasant struggles from 1959 to 2014
Submitted by Nao on Jun 23 2014 05:02
Overview of the main forms of peasant collective action against capital and the state in China from 1959 to 2014, with a focus on the past two decades.
Climate, class, and the Neolithic revolution
Submitted by Out of the Woods on Jun 9 2014 13:11
Climate change helped make human civilisation possible. Does it now threaten its existence?
Fields, factories and workshops - Peter Kropotkin
Fields, factories and workshops: or industry combined with agriculture and brain work with manual work is Peter Kropotkin's landmark anarchist text laying out possible foundations for anarchist society. While somewhat dated today, it still contains much of relevance.
Thais failed effort to corner rice market
Submitted by Empire Logistics on Feb 25 2014 03:18
As late as 2010, Thailand was the biggest exporter of rice, but in 2008 an attempt to corner the world rice market (much like the Hunt Brothers had tried to do with silver in the 1970s) failed miserably. Part of the current crisis in Thailand is due to Yingluck Shinawatra's role in this scheme.
Twelve years a slave - Solomon Northup
Submitted by Steven. on Jan 27 2014 17:52
A harrowing first person account of a free African-American being kidnapped into slavery in Louisiana for 12 years. First published in 1853, in 2014 the book was turned into a major motion picture directed by Steve McQueen. Trigger warning for physical and sexual violence.
A brief explanation of the concept of territory and its implications - Miquel Amorós
An explanation of the meaning of “territory”, illustrated in its historical, social, economic and political context from the times of Cleisthenes to today’s pathological “anti-cities” and mutilated rural areas, as the dynamic unity of humanity as transformative agent and nature as abstract totality, and its significance for the “anti-developmentalist critique” that seeks to reunify the these two aspects of the world in a two-pronged struggle to restore the emancipatory nature of the city (the agora, “city air makes one free”) and the salutary aspects of rural life (the commons, etc.), a struggle that goes by the name of “territorial defense”, the pivot of the modern social revolution.
Bread riots down supply chains: From Cairo to Longview
Submitted by Empire Logistics on Sep 16 2013 06:47
One of the forms in which the working class exists today is at the various nodal points along global commodity chains. Even the global production of food is increasingly based on a just-in-time system of production, distribution and consumption -- in addition to being financialized and subject to speculative bubbles. But these commodity chains are vulnerable and this suggests struggles could spread down these chains.
Levellers, True Levellers, and the Diggers of 1649
An incomplete dramatisation of the founding of the True Levellers or the "Diggers" and their first agrarian commune.
The progress of domestication - René Riesel
René Riesel’s reflections on the anti-GMO sabotage campaigns of 1998-2001 in France, the subsequent responses of the supporters of GMO research, the Montpellier and Agen trials and the resulting opportunistic political manipulations and media circuses, and the broader implications of GMOs, and the loyal opposition that wants to reinforce the power of the state in order to regulate them, within the context of the accelerating “domestication” and totalitarian conditioning of the population in a society he characterizes as a “world-laboratory where the sterilization of historical life is assayed”.
Unused farm land occupied in Vienna
Submitted by schmecks on May 7 2013 15:09
On Saturday, May 4th activists of the initiative „Solidarity Agriculture“, in short SoliLa!, occupied some farm land in the 21st district in Vienna, which was not cultivated or used in another way for years.
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