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Post by Admin on Mar 5, 2020 21:23:47 GMT
“Luxemburg saw how capitalism would spin out of local European markets through imperialism. She saw that process taking place around her through the enslavement of African peoples by European nations, French colonialism in Algeria, and British colonialism in India, to name a few. This process remains a fact of life more than a century after Luxemburg’s time, and that is no coincidence. Capitalism must constantly seek new markets to suck up surplus value, a process that often involves forcing indigenous, noncapitalist peoples to participate in market exchange. Today, according to History Is a Weapon author Michael Parenti, North American and European companies have control of more than 75% of the mineral resources scattered across the rest of the globe. We can also point to how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was devastating to many small farmers in Mexico, forcing many to abandon their land and seek work in assembly plants known as maquiladoras. In South America, far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, with aid from the World Bank, has helped oversee the accelerated deforestation of the Amazon for agribusiness, dispossessing and disenfranchising Indigenous communities in favor of exploitative global agribusinesses with little regard for climate impact. Here in the U.S., in keeping with our long-standing tradition of settler colonialism, the Dakota Access Pipeline was routed through lands adjacent to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, threatening the community’s water supply and desecrating grave sites. Protests against the pipeline drilling were suppressed by police (think water cannons used to douse demonstrators in subzero temperatures) and key organizers with the cause were contacted by the FBI. Luxemburg’s prediction that a global "war" waged on Indigenous populations would soon "annihilate [them] as independent social structures" is something that still plays out every day.” www.teenvogue.com/story/who-is-rosa-luxemburg
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2020 19:45:45 GMT
It is useful to remember that revolution is clearly sanctioned in the United States in one of the nation’s foundational documents, the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Global warming and species extinction are entirely valid causes for the overturning of the existing structures of power. If we truly believe in the exceptionalism of this country, now surely is the time to act on the opportunity bequeathed to the people of the United States by the Founding Fathers. MARCH 3, 2020 Bernie and the Biotariat by JOHN DAVIS www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/03/bernie-and-the-biotariat/
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2020 19:46:56 GMT
MARCH 6, 2020 The Neoliberal Plague by ROB URIE For those who aren’t familiar with Albert Camus’ The Plague, disparate lives are brought together during a plague that sweeps through an Algerian city. Today, by way of the emergence of a lethal and highly communicable virus (Coronavirus), we— the people of the West, have an opportunity to reconsider what we mean to one another. The existential lesson is that through dread and angst we can choose to live, with the responsibilities that the choice entails, or just fade away. Through the virus, a new light is being shone on four decades of neoliberal reorganization of political economy. The combination of widespread economic marginalization and a lack of paid time off means that sick and highly contagious workers will have little economic choice but to spread the virus. And the insurance company pricing mechanism intended to dissuade people from overusing health care (‘skin in the game’) means that only very sick people will ‘buy’ health care they can’t afford. www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/06/the-neoliberal-plague/
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Post by Admin on Mar 7, 2020 21:32:12 GMT
"The ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace." What a great quote.
For me it suggests that one of the reasons why culture under late capitalism is so flimsy, distracting, spectacle-based, and anti-intellectual is because "thought" has been displaced onto the market, onto algorithms. So that "social decision-making" becomes technological, financial, logistic issues of providing products and commodities, not of questioning why we need products and commodities or what good they are actually doing.
It seems to key in very deeply to Hayek's ideal of the market as being the best way to solve the issue of what do we really want, and how to get it: the answer becomes a mechanism of supply and demand (one uncontrolled by any 'authoritarian' or parental State). But if what we really what are things like trust, love, social bonds, consciousness, peace, integrity, the market place model is stuffed, or rather wholly irrelevant - and indeed becomes a distraction and deterrent to those things. That is, to paraphrase Iain McGilchrist's great description of the left brain, the market does not know what the market does not know.
What I suspect underlies all this on a psychological level, as Land suggests below, is a hatred - or more precisely, a terror - at the prospect of allowing humans to actually decide and negotiate their own lives and well-being. A sort of profound unease at the complexities and ambiguities of human social interaction, one that tends to characterise hyper-left brain states and disorders - that those who run financial capitalism would perhaps prefer for things to be dealt with by something less messy, human, fallible, and imprecise - like an impersonal market.
"For Land the modern financial capitalism (he eschews the term neoliberalism as ill-defined) we see around us is borne of the displacement of the political consequences of wage labour relations away from the metropolis is not an incidental feature of capital accumulation, as the economic purists aligned to both the bourgeoisie and the workerist left assert.
It is rather the fundamental condition of capital as nothing other than an explicit aggression against the masses.
In this sense the whole modernist era of capitalism has been a fun-house mirror land of distraction, stage-craft, and displacement with an eye to keep the masses distracted in political chicanery, media-entertainment, spin-doctors, red herring politics, and the distortion of mega-security and foreign wars as a labor to save democracy.
As he puts it, 'Capital has always sought to distance itself in reality – i.e. geographically – from this brutal political infrastructure. After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace.'
His observation on Marx goes thusly: Marx's account of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ clearly demonstrates that the origin of wage labour relations is not itself economic, but lies in an overt war against the people, or their forced removal from previous conditions of subsistence."
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Post by Admin on Mar 11, 2020 21:06:49 GMT
Revolution and Chill: the Anticapitalist Streaming Service That’s Netflix for the 99% by Charlotte EnglandTwo years ago, filmmakers Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes approached a little-known political candidate who they had heard was running her own campaign on a shoestring budget, and asked if they could help. The two minute video they created for now-congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went viral; it’s amassed more than a million views on YouTube and spawned what is essentially a new sub-genre of campaign film. Ocasio-Cortez, of course, defied the odds to beat the ten-term incumbent and was elected US Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district. Since then, tropes from her video have been imitated by leftwing political candidates across the US and the UK, from Democrats in Wisconsin to midlands mayoral candidate Salma Yaqoob. Given the video’s success, you could reasonably expect Burton and Hayes – who quit their corporate jobs in video production and digital marketing to “bring the skills they gleaned in the private sector to leftist movements” – to have continued making politically meaningful campaign videos for electoral candidates, non-profits and unions through the company they founded, Means of Production. But in spring 2019 they pivoted sideways, announcing they instead wanted to launch “the world’s first worker-owned, post-capitalist streaming service”, a sort of leftist Netflix “for the 99%”. novaramedia.com/2020/03/04/revolution-and-chill-the-anticapitalist-streaming-service-thats-netflix-for-the-99/
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Post by Admin on Mar 13, 2020 2:14:45 GMT
"Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. 'The Collapse of Complex Societies', though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses." Full PDF: wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf
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Post by Admin on Mar 23, 2020 19:26:20 GMT
The coronavirus pandemic crisis intensifies Capitalism is at war with society 13 March 2020 www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/13/pers-m13.html"The coronavirus pandemic is developing into a social, economic and political crisis on a scale that is without precedent. Yesterday’s drastic fall in global markets and especially in the United States, where Wall Street recorded its greatest one-day loss since 1987, arose from the recognition that the pandemic will massively impact the world economy and profoundly disrupt the existing social order. Estimates of the probable scale of deaths from the illness are causing growing anxiety. The total number of confirmed infections worldwide is approaching 150,000 and rising exponentially, but this vastly understates reality. Due to the lack of adequate testing and the long latency period before symptoms, the actual number is far higher. The official death toll is now over 5,000, and the lives of countless millions throughout the world are in danger. Italy is deepening its nationwide lockdown, with virtually all stores closed and streets emptied. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that 60 to 70 percent of the population will become infected, meaning that millions will require intensive care or die. Iran has reportedly begun digging mass graves as the epidemic spirals out of control. France is closing all schools and universities. In the United States, major public sporting and entertainment events have been canceled, and grocery stores have quickly run out of basic necessities."
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Post by Admin on Mar 25, 2020 10:52:33 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 27, 2020 10:50:48 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 30, 2020 18:54:09 GMT
Why Has Liberalism Failed? by The Anti-Social Socialist + Transcript "The liberal class’ embrace of right-wing policies, its subservience to markets, bailouts for the rich and the crushing austerity for the poor and working classes has led to a legitimate rage among American workers. And in these moments of unfettered capitalism that human beings, as well as the natural world, become nothing more than commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or collapse." dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/why-has-liberalism-failed-by-the-anti-social-socialist-transcript/
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Post by Admin on Apr 1, 2020 16:32:02 GMT
Is Capitalism a Disease? monthlyreview.org/2000/09/01/is-capitalism-a-disease/Utterly opportunistic, but still very interesting: - it suggests that our historical difficulties in both dealing with and preventing wide health issues such as pandemics and plagues is related to the way our current scientific models and deracinated mentality views "disease". In the West, it notes, there is a “kind of scientific narrowness” - i.e. a de-contextualised approach to health care and welfare, a sort of hyper 'left brain' approach which prioritises detailed, very focussed and analytic approaches ( (ie what the article calls “tunnel vision”), but is very poor at understanding wider, more holistic, contextual, and environmental aspects and features of disease - which is of course how viruses work and spread - i.e., "the western scientific tradition of reductionism, which says that the way to understand a problem is to reduce it to its smallest elements and change things one at a time.” So the typical failure, it suggests, has been "a refusal to look at complexity. The successes have been successes of the small, where we could focus on isolated elements." The spread of plague in previous times, it observes, was crucially linked to social sanitation in medieval Europe, rates of poverty, and so on - just as the spread of COVID-19 is linked to the state of post-austerity social health systems today, and densely crowded and impoverished neighbourhoods. In this "class", of course - how we divided societies into rich and poor areas - plays a vital role: “There is a growing body of literature that says that the poor and oppressed are more vulnerable to nearly all health hazards. But we still don’t recognize class differences in the United States. Researchers discuss differences in income or a mother’s education level or even socioeconomic status. But U.S. epidemiology does not deal with class, even when class is the best predictor of life expectancy, of old-age disability, or the frequency of heart attacks. As a predictor of coronary disease, it is better to measure class position than to measure cholesterol.” It asks why our current health systems are so unable to deal with crises. "In the United States, even though we spend more than any other country on healthcare, we have among the worst results among the industrial countries". It suggests four reasons for this: "One, we don’t actually get more healthcare; we just spend more for it. The rate of profit of the pharmaceutical industry is greater than that of capitalism as a whole, and much of that is in the United States. Doctors’ salaries are huge, as are charges for hospital rooms. The consequence is that 'investment' per patient is enormous. Two, even when we do get more healthcare, it is not always good healthcare. We have more MRIs and more CT scans and more dialysis machines than most other countries. So why is our health not better?" [It suggests it’s because having invested so much money in these, the hospitals come to serve the machines, rather than the patients - e.g. "A hospital buys an expensive machine to attract both doctors and patients. But once on hand, it has to be used. You can’t allow an MRI machine to sit idle in the hospital, so doctors are encouraged to use it if only to amortize the institution’s investment ... But does it make sense have all that expensive equipment? Hospital administrators will tell you it does because the hospital down the road has it."] "Three, the healthcare system is built on a foundation of inequality. Only some of us actually receive or have access to the healthcare we need, while most don’t. Finally, the fourth hypothesis: we have created a sick society, even as we invest more and more to repair the damage. We are exposed to more pollution and increasing levels of stress and therefore exposed, ironically, to more opportunities to display our cardiac surgery skills. We make more people miserable, so we spend more on psychiatry and on psychotropic drugs. Ours is a sick society that demands ever greater expenditure to repair the damage to public health that it has itself inflicted." - Monthly Review It also notes a number of possible alternatives available: Ecosystem Health; The Environmental Justice Movement; Alternative Medicine; The Health Care for All Movement; and the Social Determination of Health (Richard Wilkinson “noticed that mere social hierarchy, social differentiation, makes your health worse everywhere, not only among those in extreme poverty". "A radical critique of medicine has to deal with the things that make people sick and the kind and quality of healthcare people get. A Marxist approach to health would attempt to integrate the insights of ecosystem health, environmental justice, the social determination of health, 'healthcare for all,' and alternative medicine."
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Post by Admin on Apr 1, 2020 18:43:39 GMT
March 31, 2020 UNDER CAPITALISM, A PANDEMIC IS A TIME OF POLITICAL AWAKENING "During a pandemic that is exacerbated by neoliberal capitalism, people are quickly becoming radicalized. We are realizing that we don’t actually need landlords, or bosses, or CEOs — these parasites that bleed the working class dry. They are, in other words, “non-essential.” In any civilized society, housing, healthcare, food, and education would be provided as a prerequisite to the mere concept of justice. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” This means industrial production and technology should be directed toward meeting human need first and foremost. We are human beings, and our lives can no longer be commodified." www.hamptonthink.org/read/under-capitalism-a-pandemic-is-a-time-of-political-awakening
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Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2020 21:04:18 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 3, 2020 1:02:42 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 4, 2020 18:41:01 GMT
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