As the notion of a Green New Deal rapidly spreads as an answer to capitalism in US and UK media and political circles, our lead article in July 2019 asks if Green capitalism can propose a real solution to the ecological crisis and the human crises of poverty, austerity, immigration and racism.

Green capitalism and the large scale investment in environmental technologies ‘neither breaks with neoliberalism, nor can potentially reverse environmental disaster’, argues Jerry Harris, an authority on global capitalism, in his lead article on ‘The future of globalisation’.

Rather than providing a radical solution, the merging of sustainable development to neoliberal ideas of growth markets is a form of ‘sustainable accumulation’ through which ‘global investments and regulations are presented as planetary environmental solutions’.

Harris is determined that: ‘The Left must play a decisive role in pushing capitalism towards a deep structural transformation, linking the ecological crisis to the human crises of poverty, austerity, immigration, and racism […] We can’t stop the exploitation of the planet without stopping the exploitation of humanity’ – and this must be pushed by social movements from below.

In a similar vein, leading educational theorist Henry A. Giroux argues in his piece in the July issue on ‘Neoliberalism and the weaponising of education and language’ that ‘the struggle against neoliberalism has to begin with a struggle for education’. Giroux highlights the wave of resistance against neoliberal approaches to education that are taking place through strikes and walkouts in the US.

Two other articles, one by Victoria Canning on women and asylum in northern Europe and another by Mark Payne on Slovak Roma school students navigating the educations system in Sheffield, reveal the devastating impact of neoliberal policies on human rights and education respectively.

Articles

• The future of globalisation: neo-fascism or the Green New Deal by Jerry Harris
• Neoliberalism and the weaponising of language and education by Henry A. Giroux
• Degradation by design: women and asylum in northern Europe by Victoria Canning
• School life on the margins: Slovak Roma pupils negotiating education by Mark Payne

Commentary

• The Kashmir conflict and human rights by Sabzar Ahmad Bhat 

Reviews

• The Common Wind: Afro-American currents in the age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius S. Scott (Anita Rupprecht)
• Insurgent Empire: anticolonial resistance and British dissent by Priyamvada Gopal (John Newsinger)
• The Hawthorn Archive: letters from the utopian margins by Avery F. Gordon (Eddie Bruce-Jones)
• Making All Black Lives Matter: reimagining freedom in the 21^st century by Barbara Ransby (Jenny Bourne)
• Media, Crime and Racism edited by Monish Bhatia, Scott Poynting and Waqas Tufail (Sophia Siddiqui)
• A world turned upside down? Socialist Register 2019 edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo (Liz Fekete)
• Into the Tempest: essays on the new global capitalism by William I. Robinson (Jerry Harris)
• Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire by Jeffrey Hill (Chris Searle)
• The Skull of Alum Bheg: the life and death of a rebel of 1857 by Kim A. Wagner (John Newsinger)

 

Further links

Order the July 2019 issue of Race & Class for £5 here

View the whole issue online here