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Post by Admin on Jul 14, 2020 16:16:54 GMT
Capitalism and the Rise of Mental Illness "Many of the contemporary forms of illness and individual distress that we treat and engage with certainly seem to be correlated with and amplified by the processes and byproducts of capitalism. In fact, you might say that capitalism is in many respects a mental illness generating system – and if we are serious about tackling not only the effects of mental distress and illness, but also their causes and origins, we need to look more closely, more precisely, and more analytically at the nature of the political and economic womb out of which they emerge, and how psychology is fundamentally interwoven with every aspect of it." www.hamptonthink.org/read/a-mad-world-capitalism-and-the-rise-of-mental-illness
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2020 20:36:43 GMT
In this day of economic turmoil not experienced since the 1930s, the governments and the attendant banks are concentrating on their #1 priority, that of ensuring continued accumulation of 1% wealth through the provision of endless supplies of mad money to boost stock share prices and other financial assets of the rich like real estate. Back In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, massive amounts of money provided by the Fed, the European Central Bank and other central banks was deployed by the corporations in various forms of so-called “financial engineering” to boost profits and stock prices. Among the most prominent mechanisms were mergers and acquisitions and stock buybacks. They spent money faster than drunken sailors shore leave. In March 2020 the financial cavalry, the US Federal Reserve, again galloped over the hill to act as the backstop for the entire financial system by purchasing assets ranging from government bonds to commercial paper, April was the biggest month ever for new corporate bond sales. But no matter how much you pump up assets like a pregnant guppie, in the final analysis, financial assets are a claim on the surplus value that is extracted from the exploitation of the living labor of the working class. Value must be pumped back into the mountain of fictitious capital the ruling classes have created in order to bail themselves out through a “restructuring” of class relations via a mass buggery of the working class. Despite the plague threat to life, make the workers go back to work and the kids back to school toot suite and apply austerity so that safety nets not be allowed to become a “disincentive” to work This is a CLASS war. Period. The 1% gets the CL (cash loans) while the rest of us get it in the ASS. The politics of the capitalist debt economy By Nick Beams 14 July 2020 www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/14/debt-j14.htmlAs workers around the world confront the greatest threat to their jobs and living standards since the Great Depression, amid moves by governments to withdraw the very limited social support they have provided to meet the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial oligarchy has a very clear agenda. All the economic forces of the state—of both governments and central banks—must be mobilised to ensure its continued accumulation of wealth through the provision of endless supplies of money to boost share prices and other financial assets. This was set out most clearly in a note issued earlier this month by JPMorgan Chase, reported by Bloomberg. The note said that extremely loose monetary policy—the maintenance of ultra-low interest rates and massive purchases of debt by central banks—would have to be continued for a long time. “More debt, more liquidity, more asset reflation” was the bank’s conclusion. According to one of its leading strategists, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, there will be a $16 trillion increase in debt this year, taking the total amount of private and government debt in the global financial system to $200 trillion by the end of the year. So far this year, top-rated US corporations have issued almost as much debt as they did in the whole of 2019. The total raised by investment grade firms is just $27 billion less than the $1.15 trillion they issued over the course of 2019, putting them on course to exceed the record debt issuance of $1.37 trillion in 2017. Markets froze at the end of February and in the first weeks of March. But after the intervention by the US Federal Reserve, which stepped in to act as the backstop for the entire financial system by purchasing assets ranging from government bonds to commercial paper, April was the biggest month ever for new corporate bond sales. In part, this is the result of an effort by major corporations to insulate themselves from the effects of the pandemic. But this is by no means the only motivation. They are also taking advantage of the ultra-cheap money provided by the Fed and its commitment to support the corporate bond market, including the purchase of below investment-grade junk bonds. The debt binge is not a recent development. In this, as more generally, the pandemic has proved to be an accelerant of trends already underway long before it appeared on the scene. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, would-be reformers of the capitalist economy maintained that because the crisis had been sparked by increasingly risky debt-fuelled speculative operations of major banks in the sub-prime mortgage market and elsewhere, there needed to be a deleveraging of the financial system.
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Post by Admin on Jul 22, 2020 20:30:10 GMT
Native Land and African Bodies, the Source of U.S. Capitalism by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz monthlyreview.org/2015/02/01/native-land-and-african-bodies-the-source-of-u-s-capitalism/Had Marx written Capital in the early twenty-first century, knowing what he could not discern in 1867—that the global dominance of capital, through the military and imperialism, would be realized by the United States—this is the book he may have written using the methodology he developed in the mid-nineteenth century. What Walter Johnson desires is to change entirely the way we think about the history of the United States, particularly the development of capitalism. He also wants to change how we think about the application of dialectical materialism to the United States. Like Marx, Johnson marshals thick description to disclose the theses that emerge. The book comprises fourteen chapters that are interconnected and follow multiple themes, including critiques of historiography. The first chapter begins by telling the story of the violent expropriation of the land that the indigenous agriculturalists—the Muskogee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations—had farmed for millennia before the arrival of Europeans. Very few historical studies of U.S. slavery even mention the initial expropriation and ethnic cleansing of the territory as Johnson does. Following the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, Johnson writes that Andrew Jackson “spent the next fifteen years—first as a general in the U.S. Army, then as the military governor of Florida, and finally as the president of the United States—supervising the ethnic cleansing and racial pacification of the southeastern United States” (28). The homelands of the Indigenous nations had, through military force, been converted into a vast reserve for the cultivation of whiteness. With ethnic cleansing complete, slaveholders—with their reserve of capital, enslaved Africans—transformed the Mississippi Valley into the Cotton Kingdom that formed the basis for U.S. capitalism and world trade. “The extension of slavery into the Mississippi Valley gave an institution that was in decline at the end of the eighteenth century new life in the nineteenth. In 1800, there were around 100,000 slaves living within the boundaries of the present-day states of Mississippi and Louisiana; in 1840, there were more than 250,000; in 1860, more than 750,000” (32). The Haitian Revolution was linked to the development of the Mississippi Valley. In 1809, 10,000 Haitians arrived—although a third of them were free people of color, while the other two-thirds were slaveholders and their human property. Fear of another Haiti, exacerbated by the 1811 slave uprising along the river to New Orleans, brought about full U.S. government complicity and what Johnson calls in Chapter 8 “the carceral landscape.” In the aftermath of the revolt, those who supported federal governance in the Mississippi Valley emphasized the incompetence of the territorial militia and the indispensable role of the federal forces in their account of the way the rebellion had been suppressed.… Thenceforth the privilege of slaveholders (and other whites) in the Mississippi Valley was backed by the power of the U.S. Army…. Andrew Jackson’s one-time fear that an invading European army might “excite the Indians to War, the Negroes to insurrection, and then proceed to the Mississippi” was expunged with the bloody federal conquest of all of the above…. In the years that followed, the military conquest of the Mississippi Valley was “fulfilled” in the shape of the Cotton Kingdom. Jefferson’s “empire for liberty” was transformed into the credit-importing, cotton-exporting leading edge of the global economy of the nineteenth century. (33–34)
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Post by Admin on Jul 23, 2020 5:25:59 GMT
Published on Sunday, March 15, 2020 byCommon Dreams Toilet Paper Wars and the Shithouse of Capitalism bySimon Springer www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/15/toilet-paper-wars-and-shithouse-capitalismThe run on toilet paper has brought the failings of capitalism front and center to the bathroom of every house across Australia, a trend that has now spread to other countries. We are witnessing, in real-time and with stunning consequence, the stone-cold fact that markets are an ineffective mediator of resources, prone to the worst vagaries of herd mentality. Perceived impending shortages of toilet paper owing to the spread of COVID-19 set off widespread panic. We might be inclined to laugh at the implausibility of the whole scenario, but whether the situation is real or imagined is beside the point. The truth, which in this case may appear stranger than fiction, is that markets operate in the sweet spot between scarcity and fear. Those who stockpiled toilet paper are in no danger of running out, and many undoubtedly have way more rolls than they could ever hope to use in the course of several months. These individuals have successfully avoided catastrophe while stuffing up their fellow citizens in the process. The whole situation is quite literally a stinking mess. What is particularly tragic though, is that this story of scarcity and hoarding is a common one. It is the story of capitalism itself. Let’s pretend that we are talking about housing rather than toilet paper for a moment. The same principles actually apply. Those who got into the property market early, or have the ability to enter into the housing market at this stage, are the big winners. By early, we are talking several generations ago when land was cheaper and people were far fewer. It was a time when savvy buyers could accumulate vast portfolios. The payoff is that their children and grandchildren had to do very little to maintain the wealth that they inherited, other than continuing to extract value in the form of rent from the properties they owned. This is Donald Trump’s story, and it is one of extreme privilege and exploitation. His critics are often appalled by his lack of empathy, but Trump appears to have no conception of caring for the poor precisely because he doesn’t have to. In a similar fashion, if you have a good stockpile of toilet paper, you’re likely not so worried about what everyone else in your neighborhood might be doing. You’re just looking out for number one, so you can continue to do your number twos in peace. Much like the run on toilet paper produced winners and losers by creating a situation of scarcity, so too does the housing market have the same effect. Few can afford housing precisely because there has been a decades-long run on this commodity. The extension of the time scale makes it less obvious as to what is going on, but it is the exact same mechanism at play. Those who got into housing first have nothing to fear. They are not prone to the uncertainties that plague the experiences of those who lost out. Insecurity often comes in the form of inflated prices. While there have been examples of people trying to sell toilet paper at exorbitant prices on eBay, so far the demand has not matches sellers’ exploitative expectations. Housing is another matter, where those who did not get in early must pay inflated prices, subject themselves to an ongoing extraction of their means in the form of rent, or find themselves homeless. The fact that there are fistfights in grocery stores is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the desperation that a populace can express when placed in a context of crisis. Violence becomes inevitable, which is a terrifying thought when we recognize that housing is a systemic crisis. On the one hand people turning on each other is a reflection of an individualist society, a cultural understanding that only emboldens the wealthy. The poor seldom form solidarities that encourage them to turn on their oppressors by organizing events like rent strikes. They are too busy fighting each other over scraps to make ends meet.
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Post by Admin on Jul 23, 2020 18:58:38 GMT
Where economics meets psychology: a new biography reveals the full scope of John Maynard Keynes’s critique of unfettered capitalism, emphasizing "the essential role of psychology for Keynes’s thinking": “'The End of Laissez-Faire' (1926) heralded Keynes’s dramatic break with economic orthodoxy, signaled by his (then) heretical declaration, 'The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide.' This disenchantment would grow still more pointed in the depths of the Great Depression: laissez-faire capitalism, he declared, 'is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods.' The essay 'Laissez-Faire' marks the steps on the road to the Keynesian revolution that would culminate with the publication of his magnum opus, 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money', in 1936. The mass slaughter of World War I was the defining trauma for a generation of Europeans; it was also, for Keynes, where abstract economic theory collided with reality. Rushing to contain the financial panic unleashed by the commencement of hostilities (and taken aback by the short-sighted behavior of the financial community), Keynes learned from this experience, Carter argues, that markets 'were social, not mathematical phenomena.' The precariousness of financial sentiment, and the key role that psychology plays in shaping those instincts, would remain essential to Keynes’s writing throughout his career, a disposition likely honed by his principal responsibility serving in the Treasury Department during the war—finding ways to creatively scape the bottom of the barrel of British finance (and, increasingly, to manage its desperate economic dependence on the United States). After the war Keynes was attached to the British delegation in Paris, ultimately resigning in protest over the Treaty of Versailles, which he cogently argued would prove a disaster. His polemic against the treaty, 'The Economic Consequences of the Peac'e (1919), would unexpectedly bring him world fame; no one anticipated that a technocrat’s dissent would sell over 100,000 copies and find translation into a dozen languages. The book was described by Carter as 'a landmark of political theory and one of the most emotionally compelling works of economic literature ever written'. Carter is spot on in emphasizing the essential role of psychology, and especially the role of the collective sentiment of investors, for Keynes’s thinking. (Entrepreneurs were not driven by cold calculation but by 'animal spirits,' Keynes wrote, and investors were not rewarded for calculating the underlying value of an asset, but for their ability to divine what other market players would find attractive. This in turn meant that the financial sector, left to its own devices, was unstable and prone to crisis.) And Carter is exactly right to emphasize that Keynes’s urgent, underlying motives remained largely conservative: he wanted to save capitalism from itself. Unfettered capitalism—unfair, unjust, ugly, vacuous of social purpose, and ultimately inefficient—would bring about its own ruin. Worse still, left unreformed, it would likely unleash things that were much, much worse. It is hard to imagine improving on Carter’s final measure of his subject, which is worth quoting at length: ‘No European mind since Newton had impressed himself so profoundly on both the political and intellectual development of the world ... In his economic work he fused psychology, history, political theory, and observed financial experience like no other economist before or since. Few lives have ever been lived in the same vibrant, eclectic excess as Keynes lived his. He was a philosopher who rivaled Wittgenstein, a diplomat who became the financial hero of two world wars, a historian who uncovered peculiarities of great Enlightenment figures and ancient currencies, a journalist who enraged and inspired the public, the patron of a famed artistic movement. He was as vain, petty, shortsighted and impolitic as he was generous, kindhearted, and persuasive. Few who encountered him in his element came away from the experience unchanged'." Boston Review) CLASS & INEQUALITY The Keynesian Revolution A new biography reveals the full scope of John Maynard Keynes’s critique of unfettered capitalism, emphasizing the economist’s larger philosophical vision of the good life. JONATHAN KIRSHNER bostonreview.net/class-inequality/jonathan-kirshner-keynesian-revolution
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Post by Admin on Jul 24, 2020 20:11:37 GMT
Neoliberalism survives by destroying social cohesion medium.com/@rainershea612/neoliberalism-survives-by-destroying-social-cohesion-738a3a8553dfWhen you compare socialist countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam, and the DPRK with neoliberal countries like the United States and Britain, a particular factor stands out in how their developments have differed: the socialist countries have vastly more social cohesion than their counterparts do. By this, I mean they have a lack of serious political polarization and a relatively small amount of ethnic or class divides. In these countries, most people think favorably of the governing parties, racial and religious violence aren’t sanctioned by the state, and strong social safety nets and firm checks on private business keep inequality from becoming too pronounced. These places aren’t perfect, but they lack the deep rottenness that pervades neoliberal societies. The goal of neoliberalism is to ensure that property is protected over all other facets of society. The ability to make profits is streamlined under neoliberalism, with social safety nets, democratic rights, and humanitarian or environmental concerns being disregarded if they stand in the way of the ultimate priority. The neoliberal philosophers who supported Pinochet clarified that they didn’t believe mass executions and torture delegitimize a regime that fulfills the goals of the market. When the importance of profit usurps the importance of liberty, popular consensus, and social justice, most of society comes to live in alienation from their corporate-controlled government. A unified nation ceases to exist, with most people being either politically apathetic or entrenched in deep political and cultural divides. There’s a widespread sense of disconnect from the major institutions. Political literacy and material satisfaction become relegated to those within the higher classes, with the workers and the unemployed growing detached from the centers of power. This deterioration of the popular intellect happens both because the system benefits from having a proletariat which is too overworked to engage in politics, and because media and education under neoliberalism naturally discourage class conscious thought. When you’re constantly working and struggling to keep your livelihood afloat, you have little time and energy to pay attention to politics. And what you’ll get from the most accessible media sources reinforces the ruling class worldview that’s promoted by bourgeois academia. This dynamic of the exploited class being deprived of the education they need to overthrow their exploiters is of course nothing new. But neoliberalism is so uniquely good at making those in the exploited class fragmented, isolated, and divorced from class consciousness that during its almost half-century of global dominance, it’s managed to continuously increase wealth inequality without provoking revolt or meaningful opposition in most places. Instead, neoliberalism has made itself appear to many like an unavoidable step in the development of history, selling its policies as the routes towards growth and prosperity. The intelligentsia of both the mainstream right and “left” have embraced this paradigm of privatization, austerity, and expanded corporate monopolies. The bipartisan love for neoliberalism is best reflected in the fact that liberals and conservatives have consistently shared the desire to impose a corporatist system onto regime change target countries like Venezuela and Bolivia, the latter of which is currently being turned into a new version of the Pinochet regime through the machinations of U.S./NATO imperialism. Even in the United States in 2020, where half the country can be considered poor and household debt is at a record high, the vast majority of people aren’t doing anything to defy the system. And the constricting nature of neoliberalism explains why so few of them are joining socialist groups, carrying out civil disobedience, or working to educate themselves about proletarian revolutionary theory. It’s not just that their country’s traditional anti-capitalist organizing engines have been devastated, though the decline of America’s unions and the marginalization of its communists have contributed greatly to the American people’s apathy. It’s that in a neoliberal society, all the facets of everyday life make it convenient not to seek out developing revolutionary consciousness. When average worker productivity in the U.S. has increased by over 70% since 1970 while average wages have effectively dropped throughout this time, most people naturally put work and financial management over politics. When these efforts to maintain access to basic living arrangements have driven most Americans into thousands of dollars of credit card debt, the more money a working class person tries to save the worse their situation tends to get. If you fall too far behind, you’re not just penalized by exponential debt. You also experience the criminalization of poverty, where something like a broken taillight or a miscarriage of justice by a classist court system can get you fined or incarcerated. The shrinking of much of the proletarian consciousness to apolitical survival mode is one part of how neoliberalism’s architects have socially engineered the populace. It’s intertwined with another social behavior that’s been instilled by neoliberalism, which is a mentality of intense competition. In his article “What Kind Of Thing Is ‘Neoliberalism’?”, Jeremy Gilbert observes that “neoliberalism, from the moment of its inception, advocates a programme of deliberate intervention by government in order to encourage particular types of entrepreneurial, competitive and commercial behaviour in its citizens.” Amid this environment that encourages people to trample on those who lose out under capitalism, it’s no wonder why large numbers of Americans-including ones in the lower classes-tend to express in surveys that they feel the poor are to blame for their poverty. There’s a cultural obsession with success that can cause one to resent those not perceived to be contributing enough wealth, a resentment that one is especially susceptible to if they’re experiencing scarcity themselves and want to blame those who supposedly aren’t doing their share of the work. So suspicion, hostility, and fear are the main attitudes that the different facets of society express towards each other under neoliberalism, with community and solidarity not being nurtured by the centers of culture. Alienation, both in terms of people’s labor and in terms of people’s social relations, is what prevails. Of course, at a certain point people start to act against the system. Many millions throughout France, Chile, Ecuador, Iraq, Lebanon, Haiti, Honduras, and Hong Kong have protested in the last year because they’re angry at how bad social inequality has gotten under neoliberalism. (Note: I mention Hong Kong’s protests not because I support the fascist movement they represent, but because neoliberalism helped provoke them.) In January, a similar outrbreak of class anger happened in the U.S., where over a thousand poor and working class New Yorkers stormed the subway to demand free public transit and an end to the abusive presence of subway police. However, without the right guidance, these kinds of movements can become co-opted by the ruling class or be ineffective at achieving their goals. U.S. imperialist interests have turned the Lebanon protests into a weapon against Hezbollah and turned the Hong Kong protests into a weapon against the Communist Party of China. And without an analysis about imperialism or a consensus around the goal of socialist revolution, populist protest movements don’t have the tools to upturn the power structure. They lack a coherent plan for the future, mainly serving to be reactive. This is what happened to Occupy Wall Street. And in any case, bourgeois propagandists will try to undermine class struggles by appealing to reactionary sentiments and sowing further division among the people. The white supremacist Tomi Lahren said on Fox News in response to the recent subway protest: “Last Friday night, a group who calls themselves ‘Decolonize This Place’ called on New York City area communities to join them as they fucked shit up. So what are they so enraged about? They don’t think they should have to pay the fare — of get this — $2.75 cents. And they don’t want 500 new officers hired to police their indecent and unlawful behavior on and around the city transit system.” By portraying the city government’s daily tax on the poor as trivial and portraying the protesters as unreasonable, Lahren was trying to keep her audience alienated from people whose class grievances they could potentially sympathize with. It was also important for her to encourage solidarity with police officers. We can’t make such propaganda effective by failing to follow up events like the subway protest with a larger organizational effort. The steps towards creating a new society run through the methods that were used by Lenin, Mao, and the other architects of cohesive socialist societies. These methods are build the revolutionary vanguard, defeat the bourgeois power structure, and construct a proletarian-run democracy that makes social equality its focus.
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Post by Admin on Jul 24, 2020 20:39:29 GMT
Published on Friday, July 24, 2020 byThe Progressive U.S. Capitalism Is in Total Meltdown The COVID-19 pandemic is like Hurricane Katrina, but for the entire country. And things are only going to get worse. bySarah Jaffe www.commondreams.org/views/2020/07/24/us-capitalism-total-meltdownIn 2005, when the federal, state, and local governments spectacularly failed the residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, there was a sense of shock from both inside and outside of the country. The triumphalist narrative that “There Is No Alternative”—that neoliberal capitalism was the best and indeed the only way to do things—got its first cracks there, when we saw people stuck on rooftops and others sheltering without food and water in the convention center and Superdome. Somehow reporters could get in, and private security firms like Blackwater patrolled the streets, but the government could not or would not deliver relief to the mostly Black and poor residents who had been unable to evacuate before the storm. Many more cracks in capitalist realism—the name cultural theorist Mark Fisher memorably gave to the experience of living when it was easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism—sprouted during the 2008 financial crisis, when it could not be denied that capitalism itself was the problem, when even The Economist ran the headline “Capitalism at Bay.” Much of the decade after the crash was made up of less telegenic personal tragedies, rather than the spectacular collapse that Katrina had been. In that decade, ten million or so—no, we don’t have exact numbers—lost their homes to foreclosure. But for too many of those people, eviction was a private shame. And the movement that sprang up to fight them saved too few, even when it did manage to make one family’s loss into the community’s struggle. Nevertheless, capitalist realism held fast at the top layers of the ruling parties—yes, both of them—and still does, even as the meltdown proceeds apace. The COVID-19 pandemic is Katrina, but for the entire country, and its victims are also disproportionately Black and poor. The catastrophic unemployment numbers were bad enough, but with the end of the $600-a-week expanded pandemic unemployment insurance looming at the end of this week, things are most certainly going to get worse. The eviction crisis, where as many as twenty-three million renters may soon lose their homes, could make the previous ten years look quiet by comparison. It is no wonder that uprisings sprang up in this moment, and that they were led by Black youth, who have been America’s “canaries in the coal mine” for every crisis for more than a hundred years. And it is no surprise that our puffed-up President took the protests as a personal affront, and that he, as his compatriot Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton called for in an editorial in The New York Times, has sent in the troops. The fact that snatch and grabs are no longer only happening to immigrants, that police beatings are not just in the Black neighborhoods but are happening in the middle of downtown (very white) Portland, Oregon, to a self-proclaimed Moms Bloc, among others, is shocking but also predictable—especially for those of us who have followed the increasing militarization of policing. Fifty years ago, the Black Panthers were the target of the first big SWAT raid, and since then SWAT teams have spread into the suburbs. Time and again, state violence is first tested on troublemakers and in racialized communities, and then used on the rest of us. Neither Trump nor the protesters intend to go down easily. But the organizations that blossomed from the last round of uprisings, from Ferguson to Baton Rouge, kept learning and building in the quieter times. And the mutual aid networks that have sprung up in the recent months threaded through the rebellions, providing care to the abandoned people in abandoned places. As the crisis continues to get worse, the rebellions will grow. What other choice do people have? The burning of a police headquarters in Minneapolis might only be the beginning. Trump is threatening to send more federal troops into Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia—cities bigger than Portland, with much larger Black populations, cities that Trump has used as a metonym for the disorder he claims to oppose. The eyes of the world, however, are now open to the degree of instability in the heart of what was once a global superpower. American troops have failed to quell insurgencies in their most recent external adventures and, if Portland is anything to go by, they are unlikely to succeed at home. Chicago, in particular, is the city that turned away a Trump rally and, even though its protesters are already being brutalized by their homegrown cops, they remain in the streets. This week’s Strike for Black Lives, a massive walk-out action spanning 160 cities and many thousands of workers, according to its organizers, was a shot across the bow. While many of the participants were not actually on strike, we should see it as what union organizer Jane McAlevey calls a structure test—a demonstration of the potential chaos to be caused if this many workers did, in fact, go out on strike. Unemployment has undoubtedly been one of the factors making this a season of unrest, and those supposedly in charge simply have no plan to do anything about it. The situation is more complicated than the last crisis, the Great Recession, for which the U.S. government had no plan—simply putting people back to work, when the pandemic is still rampant, is a recipe for mass death, and the protesters have already given their answer to that: hell no. Capitalist realism may, in the coming months, finally get the stake in its heart it so richly deserves. But we should be clear-eyed about the size of the crisis that is roaring toward us, and what we will need to build to weather the worst of it. We have lived through nearly fifty years of the stripping away of what little security the American working class ever had, in a system that was never built for us to thrive. We need to begin to construct what will replace it.
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Post by Admin on Jul 26, 2020 10:42:16 GMT
sustainability not capitalism The world needs a new, nonviolent, non-trashing, economic and social system: wholosophy is a term I use (web-search for more). Here's a Blog that suggests what that Better New World could look like - a co-operative, fair-world, not-hierarchical possibility - based on an ethic and practice of peace, nonviolence minimized harm and maximized well-being. And by Tuesday! For more - please ask for a Reader - from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives sustainabilitynotcapitalism.blogspot.com/
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Post by Admin on Jul 26, 2020 21:54:50 GMT
When the architects of neoliberalism cobbled together their new economic order at Mont Pelerin, they included a moral vision with it. Co-opting the once revolutionary concepts of universal human rights, neoliberals refashioned the idea of freedom by tying it fundamentally to the free market, and turning it into a weapon to be used against anticolonial projects all over the world. When Neoliberalism Hijacked Human Rights BY JEANNE MOREFIELD jacobinmag.com/2020/01/morals-markets-human-rights-rise-neoliberalism-jessica-whyte
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Post by Admin on Jul 29, 2020 13:42:44 GMT
Western civilization, led by the US government and media, has embarked upon a campaign of mass psychological terrorism designed to cover for the collapsing economy, set up a new pretext for Wall Street’s ongoing plunder expedition, radically escalate the police state, deeply traumatize people into submission to total social conformity, and radically aggravate the anti-social, anti-human atomization of the people. The Ultimate Divide and Conquer It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over people who are isolated against each other and that therefore one of the primary concerns of tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from people acting together, acting in concert; isolated people are powerless by definition.” -Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Western civilization, led by the US government and media, has embarked upon a campaign of mass psychological terrorism designed to cover for the collapsing economy, set up a new pretext for Wall Street’s ongoing plunder expedition, radically escalate the police state, deeply traumatize people into submission to total social conformity, and radically aggravate the anti-social, anti-human atomization of the people. The pretext for this abomination is an epidemic which objectively is comparable to the seasonal flu and is caused by the same kind of Coronavirus we’ve endured so long without totalitarian rampages and mass insanity. The global evidence is converging on the facts: This flu is somewhat more contagious than the norm and is especially dangerous for those who are aged and already in poor health from pre-existing maladies. It is not especially dangerous for the rest of the population. The whole concept of “lockdowns” is exactly upside down, exactly the wrong way any sane society would respond to this circumstance. It’s the vulnerable who should be shielded while nature takes its course among the general population, who should go about life as usual. Dominionist-technocratic rigidity can’t prevent an epidemic from cycling through the population in spite of the delusions of that religion, especially since Western societies began their measures far too late anyway. So it’s best to let herd immunity develop as fast as it naturally will, at which time the virus recedes from lack of hosts (and is likely to mutate in a milder direction along the way). This is the only way to bring a safer environment for all including the most vulnerable. The fact that most societies have rejected the sane, scientific route in favor of doomed-to-fail attempts at a forcible violent segregation and sterilization is proof that governments aren’t concerned with the public health (as if we didn’t know that already from a thousand policies of poisoning the environment while gutting the health care system), but are very ardent to use this crisis they artificially generated in order radically to escalate their police state power toward totalitarian goals. The whole concept of self-isolation and anti-social “distancing” is radically anti-human. We evolved over millions of years to be social creatures living in tight-knit groups. Although modern societies ideologically and socioeconomically work to massify and atomize people, nevertheless almost all of us still seek close human companionship in our lives. (I suspect most of the internet police-state-mongers are not only fascists at heart but are confirmed misanthropic loners who couldn’t care less about human closeness.) This terror campaign seeks to blast to pieces any remaining human closeness, which means any remaining humanity as such, the better to isolate individual atoms for subjection to total domination. Arendt wrote profoundly on this goal of totalitarian governments, though even she didn’t envision a state-driven cult of the literal physical repulsion of every atom from every other atom. So far the people are submitting completely to a terror campaign dedicated to the total eradication of whatever community was left in the world, and especially whatever community was starting to be rebuilt. Some dream of this terror campaign somehow bringing about a magical collective transformation. They don’t explain how that is supposed to happen when everyone’s so terrorized they’re desperate to detach physically from their own shadows, let alone physically come together with other people. But any kind of political or social action, any kind of movement-building, requires close person-to-person contact. It seems that for most erstwhile self-alleged dissidents, the fact that social media is no substitute for face-to-face organizing and group action, a fact hitherto universally acknowledged by these dissidents, is another truth suddenly to be jettisoned replaced by its complete antithesis. Thus the terror campaign is a virus causing those it infects to abdicate all activism and all prospect for all future activism, for as long as they remain insane with the fever of this propaganda terror. Fair Use Excerpt. Read the rest here - off-guardian.org/2020/07/27/the-ultimate-divide-and-conquer/
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Post by Admin on Jul 29, 2020 16:13:19 GMT
Capitalism is not, as its defenders like to claim, defined by “free” or “private” enterprises. Likewise, “free” or “unregulated” markets do not define capitalism. Politics and ideology drive its defenders to choose those definitions over clearly better, different definitions. The causes and consequences of conflicts over definition are part of today’s mounting battles over capitalism. JULY 28, 2020 Many Terms That Are Frequently Used to Describe Capitalism Simply Don’t Hold Up Under Scrutiny by RICHARD D. WOLFF www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/28/many-terms-that-are-frequently-used-to-describe-capitalism-simply-dont-hold-up-under-scrutiny/
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Post by Admin on Aug 2, 2020 1:49:25 GMT
But at Least Capitalism Is Free and Democratic, Right? BY ERIK OLIN WRIGHT It might seem that way, but genuine freedom and democracy aren't compatible with capitalism. jacobinmag.com/2016/04/democracy-capitalism-freedom-friedman-wright-socialismIn the United States, many take for granted that freedom and democracy are inextricably connected with capitalism. Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, went so far as to argue that capitalism was a necessary condition for both. It is certainly true that the appearance and spread of capitalism brought with it a tremendous expansion of individual freedoms and, eventually, popular struggles for more democratic forms of political organization. The claim that capitalism fundamentally obstructs both freedom and democracy will then sound strange to many. To say that capitalism restricts the flourishing of these values is not to argue that capitalism has run counter to freedom and democracy in every instance. Rather, through the functioning of its most basic processes, capitalism generates severe deficits of both freedom and democracy that it can never remedy. Capitalism has promoted the emergence of certain limited forms of freedom and democracy, but it imposes a low ceiling on their further realization. At the core of these values is self-determination: the belief that people should be able to decide the conditions of their own lives to the fullest extent possible. When an action by a person affects only that person, then he or she ought to be able to engage in that activity without asking permission from anyone else. This is the context of freedom. But when an action affects the lives of others, then these other people should have a say in the activity. This is the context of democracy. In both, the paramount concern is that people retain as much control as possible over the shape their lives will take. In practice, virtually every choice a person makes will have some effect on others. It is impossible for everyone to contribute to every decision that concerns them, and any social system that insisted on such comprehensive democratic participation would impose an unbearable burden on people. What we need, therefore, is a set of rules to distinguish between questions of freedom and those of democracy. In our society, such a distinction is usually made with reference to the boundary between the private and public spheres. There is nothing natural or spontaneous about this line between the private and the public; it is forged and maintained by social processes. The tasks entailed by these processes are complex and often contested. The state vigorously enforces some public/private boundaries and leaves others to be upheld or dissolved as social norms. Often the boundary between the public and the private remains fuzzy. In a fully democratic society, the boundary itself is subject to democratic deliberation. Capitalism constructs the boundary between the public and private spheres in a way that constrains the realization of true individual freedom and reduces the scope of meaningful democracy. There are five ways in which this is readily apparent. Rest in Link.
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Post by Admin on Aug 11, 2020 10:02:11 GMT
AFTER 300 YEARS, IT’S TIME TO END CAPITALISM, NOT REFORM IT popularresistance.org/after-300-years-its-time-to-end-capitalism-not-reform-it/The United States is facing multiple crises with no signs of improvement on the horizon – a deep recession, high unemployment, millions of people soon to be displaced from their homes, a failed healthcare system in the midst of a pandemic, the climate crisis and more. We speak with Professor Richard Wolff, an economist and the author of “Democracy at Work”, about the history of capitalism and how it is inherently unstable. Prof. Wolff posits that the United States is now in a situation where capitalism is unlikely to survive. He describes why that is and the lessons we must learn from the fatal mistakes made when the US was in a similar situation one hundred years ago.
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Post by Admin on Aug 18, 2020 9:12:59 GMT
Why Capitalism is in Constant Conflict With Democracy posted by RICHARD WOLFF | 9609pt August 14, 2020 Article by Richard D. Wolff. www.rdwolff.com/capitalism_constant_conflict_with_democracyThe capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as the 2020 election looms. The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists who own and operate business enterprises—employers as a group—comprise a small social minority. In contrast, employees and their families are the social majority. The employer minority clearly dominates the micro-economy inside each enterprise. In capitalist corporations, the major shareholders and the board of directors they select make all the key decisions including distribution of the enterprise’s net revenues. Their decisions allocate large portions of those net revenues to themselves as shareholders’ dividends and top managers’ executive pay packages. Their incomes and wealth thus accumulate faster than the social averages. In privately held capitalist enterprises their owners and top managers behave similarly and enjoy a similar set of privileges. Unequally distributed income and wealth in modern societies flow chiefly from the internal organization of capitalist enterprises. The owners and their top managers then use their disproportionate wealth to shape and control the macro-economy and the politics interwoven with it. However, universal suffrage makes it possible for employees to undo capitalism’s underlying economic inequalities by political means when, for example, majorities win elections. Employees can elect politicians whose legislative, executive, and judicial decisions effectively reverse capitalism’s economic results. Tax, minimum wage, and government spending laws can redistribute income and wealth in many different ways. If redistribution is not how majorities choose to end unacceptable levels of inequality, they can take other steps. Majorities might, for example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism would disappear. Capitalism’s ongoing political problem has been how best to prevent employees from forming just such political majorities. During its recurring times of special difficulty (periodic crashes, wars, conflicts between monopolized and competitive industries, pandemics), capitalism’s political problem intensifies and broadens. It becomes how best to prevent employees’ political majorities from ending capitalism altogether and moving society to an alternative economic system. To solve capitalism’s political problem, capitalists as a small social minority must craft alliances with other social groups. Those alliances must be strong enough to defuse, deter, or destroy any and all emerging employee majorities that might threaten capitalists’ interests or their systems’ survival. The smaller or weaker the capitalist minorities are, the more the key alliance they form and rely upon is with the military. In many parts of the world, capitalism is secured by a military dictatorship that targets and destroys emerging movements for anti-capitalist change among employees or among non-capitalist sectors. Even where capitalists are a relatively large, well-established minority, if their social dominance is threatened, say by a large anti-capitalist movement from below, alliance with a military dictatorship may be a last resort survival mechanism. When such alliances culminate in mergers of capitalists and the state apparatus, fascism has arrived. During capitalism’s non-extreme moments, when not threatened by imminent social explosions, its basic political problem remains. Capitalists must block employee majorities from undoing the workings and results of the capitalist economic system and especially its characteristic distributions of income, wealth, power, and culture. To that end capitalists seek portions of the employee class to ally with, to disconnect from other, fellow employees. They usually work with and use political parties to form and sustain such alliances. In the words of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the capitalists use their allied political party to form a “political bloc” with portions of the employee class and possible others outside the capitalist economy. That bloc must be strong enough to thwart the anti-capitalist goals of movements among the employee class. Ideally, for capitalists, their bloc should rule the society—be the hegemonic power—by controlling mass media, winning elections, producing parliamentary majorities, and disseminating an ideology in schools and beyond that justifies capitalism. Capitalist hegemony would then keep anti-capitalist impulses disorganized or unable to build a social movement into a counter-hegemonic bloc strong enough to challenge capitalism’s hegemony. Trump illustrates the current conditions for capitalist hegemony. First and foremost, his government lavishly funds and celebrates the military. Secondly, he delivered to corporations and the rich a huge 2017 tax cut despite their having enjoyed several prior decades of wealth redistribution upward to them. Thirdly, he keeps deregulating capitalist enterprises and markets. To sustain his government’s largesse to its capitalist patrons, he notoriously cultivates traditional alliances with portions of the employee class. The Republican Party that Trump inherited and took over had let those lapse. They had weakened and led to dangerous political losses. They had to be rebuilt and strengthened or else the Republican Party could no longer be the means for capitalists to craft and organizationally sustain a hegemonic bloc. The GOP would then likely fade away, leaving the Democratic Party for the capitalists to ally with and use for such a hegemonic bloc. Capitalists have switched hegemonic allies and agents between the two major parties repeatedly in U.S. history. Just as the Republican Party let its alliances with sections of the employee class lapse, opening the space for Trump, so too did the Democratic Party with its traditional allies. That opened space for Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the progressives. To revive and rebuild the Republican Party as a hegemonic ally with U.S. capitalists, Trump had to give a good bit more to Christian fundamentalists, white supremacists, anti-immigration forces, chauvinists (and anti-foreigners), law-and-order enthusiasts, and gun lovers than the old GOP establishment did. That is why and how he defeated that establishment. For historical reasons, Clinton, Obama, and the old Democratic Party establishment survived yet again despite giving little to their employee class allies (workers, unions, African Americans, Latinx, women, students, academics, and the unemployed). They kept control of the party, blocked Sanders and the growing progressive challenge, and won the popular vote in 2016. They lost the election. Capitalists prefer to use the Republicans as their hegemonic partner because the Republicans more reliably and regularly deliver what capitalists want than the Democrats do. But if and when the Republican bloc of alliances weakens or otherwise functions inadequately as a hegemonic partner, U.S. capitalists will shift to the Democrats. They will accept less favorable policies, at least for a while, if they gain a solid hegemonic partner in return. Were Trump’s alliances with portions of the employee class to weaken or dissolve, U.S. capitalists will go with the Biden-Clinton-Obama Democrats instead. If needed, they would also go with the progressives, as they did in the 1930s with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Trump repeatedly aims to strengthen his alliances with the more than a third of American employees who seem to approve of his regime, no matter the offense given to others. He counts on that being enough for most capitalists to stay with the Republicans. After all, most capitalists prefer Republicans; his regime strongly supported the military and corporate profiteering. Only Trump’s and the Republicans’ colossal failures to prepare for or contain both the pandemic and the capitalism-caused economic crash could shift voter sentiment to elect Democrats. So Trump and the Republicans concentrate on denying those failures and distracting public attention from them. The Democratic Party establishment aims to persuade capitalists that a Biden regime will better manage the pandemic and crash, deliver a larger mass base to support capitalism, and only marginally reform its inequalities. For the progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party, a major choice looms. Many have felt it. On the one hand, progressives may access power as the most attractive hegemonic allies for capitalists. By sharpening rather than soft-pedaling social criticisms, progressives may give capitalist employers stronger hegemonic alliances with employees than the traditional Democratic establishment can or dares to offer. That is roughly what Trump did in displacing the traditional establishment of the Republican Party. On the other hand, progressives will be tempted by their own growth to break from the two-party alternation that keeps capitalism hegemonic. Instead, progressives could then open up U.S. politics so that the public would have greater free choice: an anti-capitalist and pro-socialist party competing against the two traditional pro-capitalist parties. Capitalism’s political problem arose from its intrinsically undemocratic juxtaposition of an employer minority and an employee majority. The contradictions of that structure clashed with universal suffrage. Endless political maneuvers around hegemonic blocs with alternative sections of the employees allowed capitalism to survive. However, eventually those contradictions would exceed the capacity of hegemonic maneuvers to contain and control them. A pandemic combined with a major economic crash may provoke and enable progressives to make the break, change U.S. politics, and realize the long-overdue social changes. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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Post by Admin on Aug 27, 2020 19:46:36 GMT
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