Feudalism

The biggest problem with the future is that you can’t know what it will be. When Ronald Reagan was elected United States president in 1980, we did not at the time realize a new era of capitalism had begun; that the ascension of Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher…

Freelance jobs are “feudalism,” says California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez. She persuaded California’s legislature to pass a new law reclassifying freelance workers as employees. That means many people who hire them must now give them benefits like overtime, unemployment insurance, etc. Politicians said it would help freelancers a lot. Of course,…

For the past half century, China has gone from successfully exploiting global markets to seeking to impose its own authoritarian system on the rest of the world. This winter is all about much of the rest of the world saying, “No thanks.” The poor handling of the coronavirus represents the…

Written by Dipankar Ghose | Updated: March 15, 2020 1:37:55 pm At Guna, the political battlefield of the Scindias, more than 200 km from Gwalior, a majority of the Congress workers have decided the side they are on.In Gwalior, the name is inescapable. Atop the Gwalior Fort, looking out at…

Capital is Karl Marx’s theory of capitalism. Capitalism is a mode of production, a historical social system (as were primitive communism, the slave states of Greece and Rome and feudalism). After primitive communism, society divided into social classes. Class societies are composed of (1) an economy, based on the relationship…

The Black Death begat the end of feudalism and the start of the Renaissance.In the seventeenth century a golden age of architecture and science emerged from a London ravaged by fire and plague. Pestilence can be the cradle of creative destruction, and perhaps it can move us past the age of…

The 1967 collage The Two Superman is as striking as it is misleading. The media portrayal of the Cold War projected a battle of equals, but the Soviet Union was never able to compete with the U.S. The illustration, which served as the cover for the fourth issue of the…

Professor Wole SoyinkaProfessor Wole Soyinka, playwright and Nobel laureate has said Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State does not have friends who could have advised him against the dethronement of Muhammadu Sanusi II. On Monday, the government of Kano dethroned Sanusi as Emir of Kano and sent him into exile…

Demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station during Influenza Pandemic in 1918. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Viruses are killers, not just of humans but of powerful civilizations. Can they also bring down strong economies? A look back in history demonstrates how this has happened and…

By Olu Fasan AS I was about to write this week’s column, the news came via Twitter that the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, had been dethroned. He was deposed on March 9, just over a month after he warned that: “If the North does not change, the North…