The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the late 20th century, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, “people recognize themselves in their commodities.” Marcuse’s critique of needs, made more than 50 years ago, was not directed at the issues of scarce resources or ecological waste, although he was aware even at that time that Marx was insufficiently critical of the continuum of progress and that there needed to be “a restoration of nature after the horrors of capitalist industrialisation have been done away with.”

Marcuse directed his critique at the way people, in the act of satisfying our aspirations, reproduce dependence on the very exploitive apparatus that perpetuates our servitude. Hours of work in the United States have been growing since 1950, along with a doubling of consumption per capita between 1950 and 1990. Marcuse suggested that this “voluntary servitude (voluntary inasmuch as it is introjected into the individual) … can be broken only through a political practice which reaches the roots of containment and contentment in the infrastructure of man [sic], a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values.”

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In an article this week, Fu Xiaoqiang, president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), said the world had entered a decisive phase of transition, marked by accelerating multipolarity, intensifying security concerns and growing strain on a global order shaped by Western dominance.
“Market appeal, technological innovation and institutional influence are becoming the core metrics of competition, reshaping how states pursue power and legitimacy,” he said in a review published on Tuesday by the Beijing-based think tank affiliated with the Ministry of State Security.
Fu attributed this shift to a new wave of technological and industrial transformation driven by advances in artificial intelligence, new energy, biotechnology and digital infrastructure.

He said these factors were rapidly reconfiguring global supply chains and innovation networks and exposing the limits of an international order built around Western industrial and financial dominance.

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Lifesaving items – including some medical and shelter equipment – appear on an Israeli blacklist of dual-use items, which the government says must be tightly restricted because they could be exploited and weaponized by Hamas or other terror groups in the Strip.

Despite this, Israeli authorities have, for at least a month, let private businesses bring several dual-use goods – including generators and metal pallets – through the same checkpoints that currently block such items for aid groups, the Guardian said.

The equipment is now being sold openly in Gaza markets, said the news outlet, citing military, diplomatic and humanitarian sources.

“It seems highly improbable that the Israelis don’t know about them,” the outlet quoted an unnamed diplomatic source as saying. “It’s very shocking that these things are able to enter through commercial channels.”

Gazan-born analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib told The Guardian regarding commercial deliveries to Gaza that “you’re not just paying fees and taxes to Hamas in Gaza, you’re paying fees and taxes to merchants on the Israeli side.”

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Scientific theories viewed the town-country antagonism as a hallmark of class society with capitalism intensifying the idiocy of rural life through isolation and exploitation. In India colonial rule disrupted pre-capitalist village communities imposing land revenue systems that facilitated primitive accumulation. Post-independence mixed economy policies prioritized urban-industrial development widening the divide. Neo-liberal reforms since 1991 accelerated uneven development bypassing classical agrarian transition and proletarianization.

The rural-urban divide represents a profound and enduring inequality, where rural areas – home to about 65% of the population- systematically subsidize urban prosperity through resource extraction, cheap food, migrant labour, while remaining deprived. This dynamic resembles internal colonialism, a concept where dominant urban centres exploit peripheral rural regions in a manner analogous to historical colonial extraction. The divide is also characterized by stark disparities in economic opportunities, political influence and access to health, education and life expectancy. These inequalities represent a structural, long-term system of internal colonization subsidizes urban prosperity through agricultural production, labour migration and resource transfers while enduring persistent deprivation.

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While U.S. policymakers escalate Cold War-style rhetoric and impose higher tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, most Americans remain unaware that the world’s best-selling EV isn’t a Tesla—it’s China’s BYD. Meanwhile, General Motors now sells more cars in China than in the U.S., and China is steadily expanding its influence across global industries, from technology to infrastructure. Washington’s response? Protectionist policies and economic nationalism that leave American consumers paying more for less.

In this eye-opening lecture, economist Richard Wolff explains how the U.S. has become the world’s largest debtor, borrowing from China even as it engages in proxy conflicts against Russia, China’s ally. Wolff reveals the contradictions of a capitalist system in decline: while foreign nations build railroads in Africa, Americans struggle with overpriced everyday goods. The global economic balance is shifting rapidly. BRICS countries now outpace the G7 in production, China and India grow at twice the U.S. rate, and Western governments lack a clear plan to regain competitiveness. According to Wolff, America’s challenges are not the result of foreign interference—they are the outcome of decades of corporate profit-driven decisions.

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China’s BYD poised to overtake Tesla as world’s top EV seller for the first time

Chinese auto giant BYD on Friday is expected to dethrone U.S. rival Tesla

as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles on a calendar-year basis.

The milestone would cap an extraordinary rise for BYD, a company Tesla’s Elon Musk once dismissed by laughing at their products during a 2011 Bloomberg interview.

The two carmakers are poised to publish their final annual sales figures for 2025, although based on available sales data, it appears all but certain that BYD will officially surpass Tesla.

In a statement published Thursday, BYD said sales of its battery-powered cars rose nearly 28% to 2.26 million units. Tesla has not yet released its 2025 sales figures, although it is expected to do so later in the day.

On Monday, Tesla compiled an average estimate for 1.6 million vehicle deliveries in 2025, down roughly 8% from 2024, putting the company on track for its second straight annual drop.

How did the free-market ideas attain influence? It’s because capitalists and wealthy people in the United States pushed for a shift away from the welfare state for reasons that had nothing to do with the appeal of the ideas.

Why did they do it? It’s a response to a decade of economic stagnation in the 1970s. Under that stagnation, American businesses came to the conclusion that the only way they could come out of the economic malaise was by doing two things: rolling back the welfare state and dismantling the trade union movement. Why? The welfare state imposed a lot of costs on business along with the regulations that came with it, such as the demand for good pensions, the demand for safety, and the demand for a level of corporate taxation that could fund all the government programs.

When your margins are going down, when your rate of return on investments is being squeezed, now every little cost that you’re having to incur has a marginally greater impact on you than when you had high profits and high margins. And back then, you felt that you could absorb all the demands that the welfare state was making on you as a business.

Now, when your profit margins are shrinking, you’re desperate to reduce your costs. And the welfare state imposes a lot of extra costs on your normal business operations. So you’re trying to now strip down all your costs so it’s just the business operations.

The problem is, if you’re going to do that, you come up against the trade union movement, which has a place in the Democratic Party and has workplace power. If you try to take away the welfare state, you’re impacting and hurting workers. So they’re going to fight back.

This means that if you want to roll back the welfare state, you’ve got to dismantle the agency that’s been supporting it, which is the trade union movement. If you put this into economic language, you can say, “We want to return to free markets.”

How? First, you don’t want the regulations of the welfare state. You don’t want the demands that it’s making on you. You don’t want all the prohibitions that it’s put on your investment activity. And you don’t want high taxation.

Second, you want to free up the labor market. What’s the key word? “Flexibility.” You want labor market flexibility. That’s the justification; that’s not the reason you’re doing it. You don’t care about labor market regulation per se. What you care about is cheap wages and freedom to hire and fire.

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One of the classic effects of famine is that it intensifies the exploitation of women; the sale of women and girls, for example, tends to increase. The sexual exploitation of poor, rural, lower-caste, and tribal women by the tears (landlords) had been difficult to escape even before the crisis. In the wake of the cyclone and later famine, many women lost or sold all their possessions and lost a male guardian due to abandonment or death. Those who migrated to Calcutta frequently had only begging or prostitution available as strategies for survival; often, regular meals were the only payment. Anthropologist Tarak Chandra Das suggests that a large proportion of the girls aged 15 and younger who migrated to Calcutta during the famine disappeared into brothels; in late 1943, entire boatloads of girls for sale were reported in ports of East Bengal. Girls were also prostituted to soldiers, with boys acting as pimps. Families sent their young girls to wealthy landowners overnight in exchange for minimal amounts of money or rice or sold them outright into prostitution; girls were sometimes enticed with sweet treats and kidnapped by pimps. Very often, these girls lived in constant fear of injury or death, but the brothels were their sole means of survival, or they were unable to escape. Women who had been sexually exploited could not later expect any social acceptance or a return to their home or family. Bina Agarwal writes that such women became permanent outcasts in a society that highly values female chastity, rejected by both their birth family and their husband’s family.

An unknown number of children, some tens of thousands, were orphaned. Many others were abandoned, sometimes by the roadside or at orphanages, or sold for as much as two maunds (one maund was roughly equal to 37 kilograms (82 lb)) or as little as one seer (1 kilogram (2.2 lb)) of unhusked rice, or for trifling amounts of cash. Sometimes, they were purchased as household servants, where they would “grow up as little better than domestic slaves.” They were also purchased by sexual predators. Altogether, according to Historian Greenough, the victimization and exploitation of these women and children was an immense social cost of the famine.

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But according to Wolff, the rift developed after Trump went behind Epstein’s back and successfully bid on a property in Palm Beach worth tens of millions of dollars, as he told co-host Joanna Coles on the latest episode of their podcast Inside Trump’s Head.

“These guys… they’re devoted to their private plans, but the thing that really makes them crazy is real estate—their quest for real estate,” Wolff said. “If they get screwed in a real estate deal, that breaks up any rich guy relationship.”

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How many people will the Trump administration deport this year? Will Gaza suffer from mass famine? These are serious questions with lives at stake.

They’re also betting propositions that two buzzy startups will let you gamble on.

The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced.

Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds.

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Aryeh’s tours have gained a cult following, often attracting people obsessed with “liminal spaces,” a term given to places that represent in-between stages, connecting two different eras or experiences. By this definition, a parking lot or an empty hallway can be considered a liminal space, as can an abandoned structure, paused mid-demolition. Many people report feeling unsettled or haunted in liminal spaces, and some anthropologists believe this is because our bodies innately know we’re not supposed to dwell in them. They are, after all, not a destination, but a portal, a gateway to another world. But despite this disconnect, many people report feeling a strange, forbidden pull towards liminal spaces. There are digital and in-person communities around the world dedicated to sharing these experiences. r/LiminalSpace on Reddit, for example, has one million followers who post daily photos of bridges and doorways and food courts, of highways that stretch into oblivion. “Dude, that’s so liminal,” others will respond.

For the liminal space curious, semi-abandoned suburban shopping malls are a perfect example of this phenomenon: something purpose-built that’s long-since lost that purpose, yet sits in limbo awaiting its next iteration—a nod to the past, an amorphous fumble toward the future.

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