World

BY JOHN P. RUEHL Photograph Source: 朱華龍 – Zhu Hua Long – CC BY 2.0 In early 2023, India surpassed China as the most populous country in the world with the latter having 850,000 fewer people by the end of 2022—marking the country’s first population decline since famine struck from 1959 to 1961. While this reduction may seem modest considering China’s 1.4 billion population currently, an ongoing decline is anticipated, with UN projections suggesting that China’s population could dwindle to below 800 million by 2100. Populations fluctuate through immigration, emigration, deaths, and births. China’s previous one-child policy, enforced from 1980 to 2015, and the resulting gender imbalance slowed its birth rate. The Chinese government is now trying to ...

For decades, Oxfam shops have been a common fixture on British high streets. Their twin-track approach of selling cheap second-hand clothes, used books, tantalising bric-a-brac and ethically-sourced products from developing countries, with the promise of charitable contributions winging their way to the wretchedly poor overseas, has appeared to be a winning formula: spending and salvation. In a single transaction, Oxfam meets the needs of the enlightened shopper worrying about conspicuous consumption – or, with the deepening economic crisis, in need of cheap clothes – while promising to address the global economic inequalities that leave faraway war-torn villages desperate for clean water. Regardless of how popular or profitable its shops have been, Oxfam is aware that the need...

BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Hyena on the Animal Wall, Cardiff Castle, Wales. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. “If you’re not mad at the world, you don’t have what it takes.” – Sun Ra + A trove of newly disclosed documents show how Robert Oppenheimer’s boss, the imperious Gen. Lesley Groves, repeatedly downplayed the risk of radiation exposure from atomic testing and the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves. Groves claimed those hit with lethal doses of radiation would die “without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.” It turns out that Oppenheimer himself was intimately aware of Groves’ deceptions about the dangers of radioactive fallout. But even after leaving the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer kept quiet about the grotesque consequenc...

Reams of WW1 historiography serve only to conceal the essence of that terrible conflagration – which gave birth in its turn to the era of proletarian revolution. Harpal Brar Subscribe to our  channel The first world war, a result of the inbuilt and inescapable contradictions of capitalist imperialism, was both proof of the rottenness and decay of that system and the beginning of its end. As a system, imperialism has been declining ever since, notwithstanding some shortlived jubilation following the counter-revolutions in the socialist countries of Europe and central Asia. Imperialism today, while driving ever harder to war, is enmeshed in an even deeper crisis that drove it into the war of 1914-18. A new wave of revolutions is bound to be the result, and workers everywh...