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Post by Admin on Aug 28, 2020 20:06:10 GMT
This looks excellent - how capitalism radically alters our sense of who we are: "Critics of capitalism often focus on exploitation or the unequal distribution of wealth and power. In this class, we will excavate a closely related view, one richly represented in several radical traditions: that capitalism makes and remakes us all as particular kinds of people—in ways that harm us and prevent us from flourishing. This is an introduction to the philosophical critique of social pathology, in which critics have charged capitalist society with demeaning and distorting our experience of ourselves. We will explore the development of modern Euro-American capitalism from a bureaucratic market society at the turn of the twentieth century, to social-democratic prosperity, to contemporary neoliberalism. We will ask how these transformations overhauled subjectivities, shaping our attitudes, feelings, behaviors and identities. Throughout, our question will be: What does it mean for people to be not just impoverished or enriched, but remade by capitalism? We’ll begin with an introduction to the critique of social pathology, reading Rousseau’s Second Discourse as a classic statement of the problem and seeing how twentieth century rewritings from Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon expanded Rousseau’s concern with the interrelations of property, domination and subject-formation. We will discuss contemporary theories of social pathology in work by Axel Honneth and others, alongside similar ideas in the cultural criticism of Mark Fisher, asking above all whether the concept of social pathology is indelibly tied to humanism. We’ll then launch our historical survey of twentieth century capitalism with a focus on Max Weber and his Marxist disciple and critic Georg Lukács. Next, we will examine Frankfurt School critiques of social-democratic prosperity from Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, both deeply influenced by Freud. And, lastly, we’ll turn to the study of neoliberal selfhood in Michel Foucault and the contemporary affect theory of Lauren Berlant. This class will introduce you to the Weberian, Freudian and Foucaultian traditions, but with a twist: our focus will be on the question, “how has capitalism shaped who we are?” (Brooklyn Institute for Social Research) Course Schedule Thursday, 6:30-9:30PM BST September 24 — October 15, 2020 4 weeks Capitalism and the Self Instructor: Barnaby Raine This is an online course. thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/london/capitalism-and-the-self/
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Post by Admin on Aug 29, 2020 0:53:30 GMT
The fact that Jeff Bezos became the world's first $200 billion man at a time of unprecedented human pain and suffering is morally grotesque... former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich tweeted that "American capitalism is off the rails," lamenting the billionaires' unprecedented wealth at a time when "30 million Americans report that their households don't have enough food in the past week." Published on Friday, August 28, 2020 byCommon Dreams 'American Capitalism Is Off the Rails': Bezos Now Worth $200 Billion as Millions Struggle to Afford Essentials Protesters rally outside Bezos' D.C. to demand $30/hr minimum wage for Amazon workers after world's richest man sets new wealth record. byBrett Wilkins, staff writer Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has become the first person in history to surpass $200 billion in net worth after his company's stock rose by 2% on Wednesday. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index, Bezos is now worth $75 billion more than the world's second-wealthiest person, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg ($111 billion) and Tesla CEO Elon Musk ($105 billion) round out the centibillionaire's club. The combined wealth of those four men is roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Thailand or Sweden, the world's 22nd and 23rd largest economies, according to World Bank figures. "The fact that Jeff Bezos became the world's first $200 billion man at a time of unprecedented human pain and suffering is morally grotesque," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted in response to the news. "Billionaires should not be able to make $800 billion during a pandemic," he added, referring to newly-published research from the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans For Tax Fairness. Progressive economist and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich tweeted that "American capitalism is off the rails," lamenting the billionaires' unprecedented wealth at a time when "30 million Americans report that their households don't have enough food in the past week." The fact that Jeff Bezos became the world's first $200 billion man at a time of unprecedented human pain and suffering is morally grotesque. No. Billionaires should not be allowed to make $800 billion during a pandemic. Our job: Tax the rich and expand Medicare to all. t.co/6qPvbB8avT— Bernie Sanders (@sensanders) August 26, 2020 Today Jeff Bezos's net worth hit $200 billion and Elon Musk's hit $100 billion. Yet 30 million Americans report that their households didn't have enough food in the past week. American capitalism is off the rails. — Robert Reich (@rbreich) August 26, 2020 The Washington Examiner reports former Amazon warehouse employee Chris Smalls led a Thursday protest outside Bezos' Washington, D.C. home in response to the news of the Washington Post owner's milestone. Around 100 protesters rallied in the tony Kalorama neighborhood, some of them building a mock guillotine on the sidewalk outside Bezos' $23 million mansion. "If we're working for you and you're not taking care of us, we're coming for you," declared Smalls, according to Bloomberg Technology. "Give a reason why we don't deserve a $30 minimum wage when this man makes $4,000 a second," he added. Smalls then led demonstrators in a chant of, "If we don't get it, shut it down!" Protesters build a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos’s house. Yesterday the Amazon billionaire was reported to become the first man worth $200 billion. pic.twitter.com/tY1wb0F1uj — Nic Rowan (@nicxtempore) August 27, 2020 "Hey Jeff Bezos, I'm going to let you know something today," said Smalls. "We are just getting started. We're going to every single location you've got across the country and set up shop until you meet our demands as workers." Chris Smalls’s message to Bezos: “If we don’t get it, we shut it down.” pic.twitter.com/tBiNcm5YQO — Nic Rowan (@nicxtempore) August 27, 2020 Smalls told the gathered crowd about his own employment history at Amazon, and accused the company of not doing enough to protect its workers during the coronavirus pandemic. Smalls was fired shortly after helping to organize a work stoppage at the company's Staten Island warehouse over a lack of protective gear and hazard pay during the deadly outbreak. David Zapolsky, Amazon's general counsel, then told Bezos and other company executives that public relations efforts should focus on smearing Smalls, who he described as "not smart or articulate." Amazon employees like Smalls have been increasingly vocal about improving pay and working conditions, especially during the pandemic, during which numerous Amazon workers have died. It's not only warehouse workers who are speaking—and walking—out; in May, Tim Bray, a well-known senior engineer and vice president, resigned in "dismay" over what he called the "chickenshit" move of "firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19." An Amazon VP resigned May 1 "in dismay" over firings of employees who brought attention to coronavirus concerns among warehouse workers. he called the company "chickenshit" in an open letter on his website: t.co/xlWEgG7mXq— suhauna hussain (@suhaunah) May 4, 2020 Much of Bezos' new wealth is a result of changing consumer habits during the pandemic. Amazon stock has surged more than 80% since January. Bezos would be even richer had he not divorced his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott last year. As part of their settlement, he agreed to hand over 25% of his Amazon stock, which is now worth $63 billion, according to Forbes. Comparisun, a business research company, projects Bezos will become the world's first trillionaire by the year 2026. There have been growing calls to break up big tech companies like Amazon. Lawmakers including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (R-N.Y.) have said that Amazon and other tech giants should be broken up on antitrust grounds. Sen. Elizabeth Warren: "Look, my views on Mark Zuckerberg are pretty clear. He runs a company that has too much political power... We need to break up these big tech companies. We need to restore democracy." pic.twitter.com/51vD1s6VjC — The Hill (@thehill) October 21, 2019 Warren says this is necessary in order "to restore the balance of power in our democracy, to promote competition, and to ensure that the next generation of technology innovation is as vibrant as the last," while senior Ocasio-Ortez adviser Dan Riffle has famously asserted that "every billionaire is a policy failure." Last month, Bezos, along with other tech CEOs including Zuckerberg, Apple's Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai of Google's parent company Alphabet, faced a grilling from lawmakers on Capitol Hill during which Rep. David Cicilline (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, called them "emperors of the online economy." "[They] enjoy the power to pick winners and losers, shake down small businesses, and enrich themselves while choking off competitors," said Cicilline. Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
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Post by Admin on Aug 31, 2020 16:56:49 GMT
"The vast, growing social inequality in the nation, and its grotesque waste of economic resources on militarism are but two manifestations of this state. That is the outcome of decades of US corporate capitalism. All Western states tend to share similar deformities, but the American version of the disease is at its most virulent and moribund." AUGUST 31, 2020 BY DANDELIONSALAD Why the US is Doomed, by Finian Cunningham dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2020/08/31/why-the-us-is-doomed-by-finian-cunningham/by Finian Cunningham Writer, Dandelion Salad East Africa Crossposted from Sputnik August 31, 2020 The fatal trouble with the US is that it has a chronic political disease. But none of the political class, including “populist” President Donald Trump, have a diagnosis to offer. And any remedial action always requires accurate diagnosis. What we have instead are all sorts of quack, or at best inaccurate, assessments, which never lead to remedial action, but rather to a compounding of problems because the problems are left unaddressed and neglected and ultimately allowed to fester. The basic problem is that the United States has devolved into a hyper militarized oligarchic state. The vast, growing social inequality in the nation, and its grotesque waste of economic resources on militarism are but two manifestations of this state. That is the outcome of decades of US corporate capitalism. All Western states tend to share similar deformities, but the American version of the disease is at its most virulent and moribund. The next problem is that there is no informed public debate, awareness or political leadership to diagnose the disease and how to cure it. We just witnessed the two ruling political parties hold their national conventions to nominate presidential candidates. For the Democrats and Joe Biden, the “problem” is all about getting rid of incumbent White House occupant Donald Trump. For the Republicans and Trump, the “problem” is all about defeating “far left radicals” and “socialists” as allegedly represented by Biden and the Democrats. The Republican rallying call is particularly ludicrous. To equate Democrats and career politicians like Joe Biden as “socialist” is an audacious and bewildering falsehood. The truth is both parties are but two faces of the same coin. That coin is the oligarchic system of American capitalism and its reliance on the monstrous military industrial complex. Sneakily, the Democratic leadership tries to misdirect public misgivings about the Trump presidency by making the forthcoming November election a referendum on personality. But the Democratic party establishment will never permit a more accurate critique of America’s problems because the party is after all an instrument of the system, just as the Republicans are. The notion of “right” and left” or “conservative” and “liberal” is a misconception. The Democrats endeavor to blame it all on Trump in order to distract from the core problem which is the system itself. Perhaps some Democrats are privately aware of a more accurate analysis. But for whatever reason – political cowardice, media censorship – they don’t speak out. Some may say Bernie Sanders and his ilk come close to a proper analysis of all that’s wrong. But then why do they endorse Joe Biden who is a long-time friend of the oligarchic system and its record of countless overseas wars? Lamentably, the way things stand, the US is heading for much greater political division and social chaos. The majority of ordinary Americans are being turned against each other because they are being misled and misdirected by false narratives. Instead of being united by a common suffering and exploitation by the oligarchic system, American citizens are being driven into futile factionalism by fake political “representatives”. Trump sermonizes about saving America from “socialism”. Biden implores voters to save America from “Trumpism”. Trump’s supporters see a patriotic duty to defend the nation from “Marxists” and “anarchists”. Throw into the conspiratorial delirium stacks of assault rifles and no wonder people are beginning to shoot each other dead. What the US needs is a genuine political third party, one that transcends the status quo of “two-party stitch-up” for the oligarchy. One that offers Americans an accurate political analysis for why their country is imploding from inequality, police brutality, debt and endless imperialist wars. What the US needs is a mobilization of the population against the corrupt oligarchy of which Trump and Biden and their party cronies are creations. Until that happens, the US is doomed to descend into even more failure with frightening potential for civil war and fascism. All because the political disease of American corporate capitalism is allowed to persist. Finian Cunningham, is a columnist at the Strategic Culture Foundation, Sputnik, and a Writer on Dandelion Salad. He can be reached at cunninghamfinian@gmail.com.
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2020 11:37:45 GMT
“This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism” – Einstein Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein Posted onSeptember 9, 2018 by Golgonooza thehumandivine.org/2018/09/09/why-socialism-by-albert-einstein/Albert Einstein wrote Why Socialism? for the first issue of the journal Monthly Review. In the article he analyses the structures and processes of capitalism, noting that the profit motive of a capitalist society, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, leads to erratic economic cycles of booms and depressions, while also promoting selfishness instead of cooperation. He suggests that the educational system of such a society would be severely undermined because people will educate themselves only to advance their careers. According to Einstein, this leads to both the “crippling of individuals” and the erosion of human creativity. Einstein also saw that in capitalist societies, political parties and politicians are inevitably corrupted by financial contributions made by owners of large capital amounts, with the result that the system “cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society”. For these reasons, he concludes, socialism is not only socially desirable but also historically inevitable.
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2020 15:03:45 GMT
SEPTEMBER 3, 2020 In the Worst of Times, the Billionaire Elite Plunder Working Class America by NICK BAKER www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/03/in-the-worst-of-times-the-billionaire-elite-plunder-working-class-america/In the midst of a global pandemic, unprecedented economic collapse, mass unemployment, hunger and desperation, the stock market is booming and the richest of the rich are richer than ever before. Since March, more than 58 million people in the U.S. have filed for unemployment. The Internal Revenue Service now predicts that the U.S. economy will have almost 40 million fewer jobs in 2021 than they predicted before the pandemic, as a result of the prolonged economic depression. As it becomes widely recognized that the economy is not going to “bounce right back” into full activity – even when coronavirus cases do eventually decline – and that the current depression will continue for a long time, companies are doing anything they can to drive their stock prices higher. Desperate to maintain their profits, many large corporations are planning massive layoffs and acknowledging that currently furloughed workers are not going to have jobs to come back to. The Wall Street Journal reports that a recent study found, “nearly half of U.S. employers that furloughed or laid off staff because of COVID-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.” The companies say low-paid workers will be the first to be cut. Twice as many workers had their pay cut by July 1 as during the Bush-Obama recession that began in 2009, according to the Washington Post. More than 10 million private sector workers have had their wages cut or been forced to work part-time. Car company Tesla forced all workers to take a 10 percent pay cut from mid-April until July. In the same period, Tesla stock skyrocketed, and CEO Elon Musk’s net worth has now quadrupled from $25 billion to over $100 billion. Business software company Salesforce announced record sales levels one day and layoffs of 1,000 workers the next. The company’s stock rose 26 percent. Among small businesses, another study found that 50 percent of all small-business employees who were furloughed since March are still without work. Twenty-eight percent are still furloughed; 22 percent have been permanently laid off. Even in the government’s rigged and severely undercounted unemployment statistics, the number of people who have been unemployed 15-26 weeks is nearly double what it was at the height of the 2009 recession — and exponentially higher than at any other time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The “stimulus” bills signed by Trump and passed by Democrats have already given away trillions to major corporations and tens of billions in tax cuts to the richest Americans. Even two-thirds of the original set of supposedly “small-business”-focused Paycheck Protection Program loans went to large corporations, such as Ritz Carlton, while gifting billions in fees to the banks that distributed the loans. While millions of low-wage workers, “many of whom work in service jobs in hard-hit industries such as hospitality, travel and retail…have lost jobs, been furloughed or seen their hours cut,” writes the Wall Street Journal, “the livelihoods of white-collar professionals…have remained largely intact.” The super-rich are getting richer than ever On August 18 — a day when 1,349 people died of COVID-19 and tens of millions were unemployed — the S&P 500 stock index hit an all-time record high with the tech-focused Nasdaq 100 index already well into record territory. Financial newspapers announced a new “bull market,” predicting that stock prices would only go higher. The runaway success of the stock market in the present context has come as a shock to many people. Barely two weeks before stocks reached an all-time high, the United States announced the largest 3-month fall in the economy since the Great Depression. Even calling it the largest doesn’t quite capture the magnitude. The 9.5 percent contraction from April to June was four times larger than the previous largest drop since World War II. Economies around the world are in freefall. The GDP of the OECD countries, the world’s largest economies, fell almost 10 percent in the same period — also four times greater than in the 2009 global collapse — and global GDP is expected to decrease by 5 percent this year, a historic amount. Yet the stock market blithely rushes along, as the mega-rich try to squeeze the last drops they can out of it, ahead of the abyss. Bloomberg News reports that the 500 richest people in the world have increased their wealth by $871 billion so far this year, though “the surge in wealth is especially concentrated in the upper ranks of the billionaires index.” During the week of August 24–28 alone, the world’s 500 wealthiest people increased their wealth by $209 billion. The world’s 10 richest billionaires now collectively have more than $1 trillion. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world by a wide margin, now boasts personal wealth of $204.6 billion, as of August 26. His riches largely come from Amazon stock, which has risen 80 percent so far this year. Bezos’s wealth has nearly doubled during the pandemic, including one single day in which he made $13 billion. Historical estimates vary, but most agree that John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie are the only U.S. tycoons who have ever had more money, adjusted for inflation, than Jeff Bezos now has. The largest stock gains this year have gone to the largest companies, especially in tech, as the pandemic and the economic collapse have become a boon for monopoly capitalism. Tech monopoly Apple is now the world’s most valuable company, with its total stock worth over $2 trillion — the first company ever to reach that mark — having increased by $1 trillion in just 21 weeks. The secret to Apple’s incredible success? It has engaged in the largest stock buybacks in history, re-purchasing $360 billion of its own stock since 2012, according to the New York Times. This self-enrichment tactic inflates the value of a company’s stock by buying it back from shareholders, thus giving money directly to the shareholders by the tens and hundreds of billions and enriching them further by decreasing the number of remaining shares available for investors to buy — driving up the share price. Apple has spent $141 billion on buybacks in the past two years alone, after Trump’s 2017 tax cuts enabled the company to return to the U.S. tax-free $252 billion in profits. Apple had held the money in tax havens for years, explicitly refusing to pay taxes and claiming that, if returned to the U.S., the money would be used to “create” tens of thousands of jobs — but that they wouldn’t do it if they had to pay taxes. Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act removed the repatriation tax on the same false premise, and, once returned, the money was used for its intended purpose all along and given straight to the company’s millionaire and billionaire shareholders. One of those billionaires is the company’s CEO Tim Cook — though his wealth of $1 billion is rather pitiful by ruling class standards. Other tech monopolies like Microsoft and Google have also seen enormous increases. Both Amazon and Microsoft are on pace to join Apple at the $2 trillion level later this year. The only other publicly traded company in the world that comes close is Saudi ARAMCO, the Saudi Arabian state oil and gas company. By comparison, the total stock of Walmart, by far the world’s largest company by revenue — i.e., actual products made and sold — is worth $370 billion. Giving the lie to this wild stock rally, corporate profits fell almost 25% through the first half of 2020, despite consumer spending – the overwhelming majority of the U.S. economy – being heavily propped up by the $600 unemployment supplement, near-zero interest rates, and to a lesser extent the $1200 stimulus checks. The unemployment supplement effectively replaced the lost wages of unemployed workers, enabling them to continue making needed purchases, while low interest rates have fueled a spending bonanza for the wealthy who have been largely unscathed by the economic depression. These overheated and entirely fictitious stock market gains are the reason that CEOs, leading shareholders and corporate executives have dumped more than $50 billion in stock since May. CNN notes that these “insiders,” as they are known, “are privy to more information about the true health of their companies than average investors. And if they were confident in the market rally, insiders would be unlikely to sell now.” With the unemployment supplement ending and no future stimulus checks announced, spending by the wealthy alone will not be enough the maintain the façade covering an economy in the midst of an historic collapse. Working class suffers while the rich splurge “The recession is over for the rich, but the working class is far from recovered,” wrote the Washington Post on August 18. Less than half – 42 percent – of jobs lost during the pandemic have returned, with workers in low-wage jobs being the least likely to be back working. People of color and women have fared worst. Women make up two thirds of those employed in the 40 lowest-paid jobs, with women of color making up the majority of low-paid workers. “Black men and women have recovered about 20 percent of the jobs they lost in the pandemic,” reports the Post, while white men and women have recovered 40 and 45 percent of their lost jobs, respectively. Between February and May 2020, 11 million jobs held by women have disappeared. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that “one in five working-age adults is unemployed because COVID-19 upended their child-care arrangements,” with women three times more likely than men to have to leave their jobs – and up to five times more likely to decrease their work hours – to take care of children. The losses in the workplace that women are facing today will be felt for decades. Some 30–50 million people in the U.S. are at risk of eviction in the coming months, as temporary eviction protections end. In a recent U.S. Census Bureau survey, “nearly half of Hispanic renters and 42 percent of Black renters said they had ‘no confidence’ or only ‘slight confidence’ they could pay their August rent,” the article states. At the same time, food prices are rising at the fastest rate in nearly 50 years, making meat and eggs unaffordable for many. The price of beef alone is up 25 percent this year. The same Census Bureau survey found that “20 percent of Hispanic households with children and nearly a quarter of Black households with children say they don’t have enough to eat.” The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 27 million people in the U.S. have lost their health insurance during the pandemic. While tens of millions of working-class people struggle, starve, and are constantly threatened and harassed by their landlords, record-low interest rates are fueling huge spending sprees for the wealthy. Mortgage interest rates are at the lowest in U.S. history, leading to record levels of house purchases by those who have no financial worries. Car sales, too, are benefiting from low interest rates. “Some dealerships have had their best July ever,” reports the Post. Needless to say, these cars are not part of the miles-long lines at drive-up food banks. Though tens of millions are now jobless, retail sales have returned to pre-pandemic levels, with massive gains going to big box stores such as Target, Walmart, and Home Depot, which are seeing their largest sales in history. Meanwhile 100,000 small businesses closed permanently by mid-May and estimates are that hundreds of thousands more will not survive the pandemic and the burgeoning economic depression, putting additional millions of workers out of work. As the small businesses close, the Walmarts and Targets move in to take their place. This is part of the process by which capitalism translates catastrophe into “opportunity,” accelerating its tendency towards monopoly and consolidating the marketplace into fewer and fewer hands in a desperate search for higher profits. Fed prints shovelfuls of money for the rich The Federal Reserve Bank has been constantly printing money and forking it over to the rich. In the last economic collapse, under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the total amount came to over $29 trillion. No doubt the final accounting this time around will leave that number far behind. The August 18 New York Times, noting the ever-widening economic gap between capitalists and workers, says that the Federal Reserve has no plans to stop driving piles of cash to the rich anytime soon. “The Fed has started new programs to buy Treasury bonds and other financial assets to calm investors, and is financing those programs by essentially creating new money,” writes the Times. At the beginning of the crisis, the Fed instantly bought $3 trillion of the Treasury and corporate bonds, largely in the form of buying huge amounts of corporate debt from major companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Exxon Mobil, Walmart, AT&T and Visa. These large purchases of debt by the Fed both fund the companies and drive down the cost of issuing debt for the companies. While the Federal Reserve Bank has a program to lend to small and medium-sized businesses, called the Main Street Lending Program, it has made almost no loans to these companies. Of the $600 billion earmarked for the program, only $92 million – 0.015% – has been loaned. This is because the commercial banks who set up the loans and keep a small percentage while selling the rest to the Fed, are not interested in making small, near-zero-interest loans to small businesses with almost no expected profit and a greater downside if the small companies go under. The banks would much rather be using their funds to make enormous, higher-interest, much more profitable loans to massive corporations in need of large amounts of debt to get themselves through the economic crisis. In this way, the natural profit-driven mechanics of capitalism ensure that larger companies crowd out the smaller ones, agglomerating to themselves ever greater shares of the marketplace. Monopoly capitalism consolidates its gains The stock market has rebounded after the shortest “bear market” in history — “a marked display of what analysts describe, by turns, as optimism, hubris or sheer speculative greed,” says The New York Times. Maintaining these stock surges, however, “is heavily reliant on federal spending, easy monetary policy and continued signs of progress in the hunt for virus vaccines.” The reader may note that such things as lower unemployment, more social spending, higher wages, and lower coronavirus case numbers and deaths in the short-term – not to mention even actual corporate revenue and profits – are not among the concerns of the stock market. While stock indexes may be at record highs, the gains are far from universal, even among major companies. “Almost all the gains in major stock market indexes this year are attributable to the surging share prices of a few giant technology companies, foremost among them Apple, Amazon and Microsoft,” reports The New York Times. “A weak economy can actually be quite good for Wall Street,” explains the Times, “if it means that the Fed keeps the river of freshly created money — what’s known on Wall Street as liquidity — flowing into financial markets.” The Times notes that this is why studies show “little connection” between economic growth and the stock market. On August 27, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell announced that the central bank would be keeping interest rates at near zero for the long-term, even if it causes inflation to rise, all but stating outright the government’s intention to try to drive the stock market up as high as it possibly can. Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America Global Research, quoted in The New York Times, calls this the “nihilistic” bull market of 2020. “The performance of the market in the face of such dire expectations for growth, he wrote, is just the latest example of investors betting that low growth will prompt the Fed to continue pushing money into the financial system, ultimately bolstering stocks. In other words, stocks are going up not because of economic optimism, but because the future looks fairly grim.” It’s much worse than 2009 Many economists, including Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, predict that this downturn will last a very long time — and for good reason. It took the U.S. economy nearly 10 years to add the number of jobs that have been wiped out so far this year. The share of the population that has a job is at its lowest level since the 1960s — and far lower than at any point during the Great Recession. Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts that the U.S. economy will contract by 4.6% this year — nearly double the 2.5% contraction in 2009, the worst year of the Great Recession. With states’ tax revenue plummeting while workers were laid-off or furloughed en masse, state governments are now seeking to re-balance their budgets not by raising taxes on the rich — heaven forbid! — who have received 95% of income gains since the Great Recession of ten years ago, but by massive austerity suffered by workers and the poor, disproportionately women and people of color. Already, 2.8 million state and local government workers have lost their jobs since February — over four times more than the 750,000 jobs cut during five years in the Bush-Obama recession. There are estimates that the jobs of 2.8 million more state and local government workers could be cut. These massive cuts to jobs for state and local government workers come on top of already enormous cuts in public employment. Before the pandemic, twenty-one states and Washington D.C. still had fewer government jobs than in July 2008. Those jobs are especially likely to be held by women and people of color — and are much more likely than average to be unionized. Public sector unionization is currently at 37 percent, compared with 7 percent in the private sector. California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has imposed a 10 percent pay cut on all state employees and suspended planned pay raises. Newsom, who is a multi-millionaire, pledged that his own pay would also be cut 10 percent, but the Sacramento Bee found two months later that he had not taken any cut at all and kept receiving his full $17,000 per month salary. Democratic governor of New York Andrew Cuomo is planning similar massive austerity. Cuomo and state Democrats are cutting billions from Medicaid during a pandemic, alongside massive cuts to public education. Cuomo, who briefly became a media darling for his daily COVID-19 press conferences that took the pandemic much more seriously than Trump, refuses to raise taxes on rich New Yorkers. New York City is home to 92 billionaires. What more is there to say about a diseased system in which the worst of times for the vast majority becomes the best of times for the corporate elite? Capitalism – administered in turn by its twin parties of war and plunder – cannot be reformed. It must be abolished, at the hands of the vast majority who suffer its inherent evils. Today, the first legions of those forces are in the streets in unprecedented numbers, condemning capitalism’s systemic racism. They portend earthshaking struggles in the period ahead.
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2020 17:28:58 GMT
Is Your Job Bullshit? David Graeber on Capitalism’s Endless Busywork In his new book, the anarchist and anthropologist looks at why almost 40 percent of us think our jobs are meaningless. DAYTON MARTINDALEMAY 10, 2018 inthesetimes.com/article/capitalism-job-bullshit-david-graeber-busywork-laborDavid Graeber had a hypothesis. The anthropologist grew up working-class in New York, and while his scholarship garnered accolades, he’s never felt at home in the world of academia. From his time as a professor at Yale (ended prematurely, he believes, due to his anarchist activism) to his current gig at the London School of Economics, he kept running into professional managers who didn’t seem to do much. Over drinks, some confessed they actually didn’t do much; they spent a few hours a week working and the rest browsing cat memes. Graeber developed a suspicion that this was rather common and, in 2013, wrote an essay for Strike! magazine, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It was just a hypothesis—halfway a joke—but the piece was translated into at least a dozen languages and reprinted all over the internet, where it elicited floods of comments from people saying: “I have a bullshit job.” A subsequent YouGov survey found that 37 percent of British workers believe their job makes no “meaningful contribution to the world”—more than Graeber expected. So, he dug deeper, soliciting testimonials and researching the political, cultural and economic structures that encourage millions of people to effectively waste 40 hours a week. The result is Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a playful and provocative take on what he calls “a scar across our collective soul.” In These Times spoke to Graeber about the jobs problem, its causes and the future of capitalism. How did you determine what counts as a “bullshit job”? DG: I’m not going to tell anyone who thinks their job is meaningful and important that it isn’t. People weren’t saying, “I market selfie sticks, selfie sticks are stupid, that’s a bullshit job.” They assumed that, if someone actually wants something, then it’s not bullshit. They weren’t judgmental about consumer taste. A bullshit job is a job that the person doing it believes is pointless, and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better place. The existence of bullshit jobs seems to cut against the idea that capitalism is efficient and squeezes labor. DG: Capitalism treats blue-collar and white-collar wage earners differently than salary earners. Since the 1980s, anybody who has a non-bullshit job, who is doing actual work, has seen their work downsized, sped up and Taylorized. Simultaneously, capitalism has produced endless bullshit white-collar jobs, which are designed to make you identify with the sensibilities of managers. I call this managerial feudalism, whereby they keep adding more and more and more levels of intermediary executives. If you’re an executive you need to have an assistant or else you’re not important, so they hire these flunkies. It has to do with power, really. It screws up the creative industries. Movies have seven different levels of executives, who all have these complicated titles. They all fuck with the script and everything turns into mush. People point out this is why movies are so bad now. In universities, you have this managerial class that’s taken over from the professors. They don’t know what the hell professors do. The more distant the managers are from what they’re managing, the more numbers they need because they don’t understand teaching themselves, and as a result we professors have to spend a larger and larger percentage of our time translating our activities into these quantitative terms that they set out. You would think that somebody would raise an objection to this. It’s quite remarkable actually how you have something that’s such a glaring contradiction in the basic ideology of capitalism and nobody talks about it. Why else have bullshit jobs been increasing? DG: There is this rise-of-the-robots logic, this fear that gradually technology is going to throw more and more people out of work. People say, “Look, it hasn’t happened.” I think it did happen, but they made up these imaginary jobs to keep us working anyway, because we have an irrational economy that makes people work eight hours whether or not there’s anything to do. Can you have a surer sign of a stupid economic system than one in which the prospect of getting rid of onerous labor is considered a problem? Any rational economic system would redistribute the necessary work in a reasonable way and everybody would work less. It’s striking how much people report hating their bullshit job. DG: They’re miserable! Two or three people said they kind of like their bullshit jobs, but the overwhelming majority, they’re sick all the time. They talk about depression, they talk about complex illnesses, psychological and physical and immune problems that all clearly have to do with tension and anxiety and depression. And also they’re mean to each other. They scream at each other. The more meaningless the work, the more people suffer doing it and the worse they treat each other. Does this unhappiness indicate something more fundamental? DG: Psychologist Karl Groos used this phrase, and it always struck me, “the pleasure of being a cause.” When children first realize that when they knock something over, they can do it again in the same way and it will have the same result, there is a kind of pure joy and happiness. This becomes the basis of your sense of agency and sense of self for the rest of your life. When you deprive children of that agency, they almost feel catatonic. That shows we are creatures who need projects of transforming the world around us. If we can’t do that, we hardly exist. So this theory of human nature promulgated by economists and right-wing politicians that people basically want something for nothing—that if you just give them money they’re going to laze around and watch TV and get drunk all day—it’s not true. What are some of the ways out? DG: I’ve been working with people who’ve become big advocates for a universal basic income. It’s not the only solution, but it conforms with my political instincts. People think that is odd because I’m an anarchist. Why would I want a policy where the government would just give people money? Isn’t that giving power to the government? I say, no. A basic income would be the perfect leftist antibureaucratic policy. It would not only reduce the number of bureaucrats, but it would get rid of the worst of them, the annoying ones who decide whether you’re really poor enough to deserve this, or whether you’re really married to that person or whether you really live in that room. Besides, they’re unhappy, those intrusive bureaucrats about whom you wonder, “How can they live with themselves?” Well a lot of them can’t. Those guys would be off the hook. They could go form a rock band or restore antique furniture or do something nice. What drew you to explore bullshit jobs? DG: I have tended to focus on the ideological strong points of the other side. That’s what my book Debt: The First 5,000 Years came out of— most people think that people who owe money and don’t pay it back are bad. With bullshit jobs, there is the idea that if you’re not working hard at something you don’t enjoy, then you’re a bad person and don’t deserve public relief. Those deeply rooted beliefs are the strongest weapons capitalism has. The anthropologist’s role is to take things that seem natural and point out that they’re not, that they’re social constructs and that we could easily do things another way. It’s inherently liberating. Your explanation suggest capitalism is a less totalizing system than some might think. DG: It’s rapidly transforming into something that might not even be capitalism, though it might be just as bad. When we think of something as totalizing, we assume that to get from one totalizing thing to another you need some kind of fundamental break. But historical change tends to be somewhat gradual and complicated. At what point does the other stuff mixed in with capitalism mean it’s not even capitalism anymore? I remember having this argument with conventional Marxists about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Okay, say that capitalism started around 1500. And the Marxists insist that capitalism is organized around wage labor. But wage labor was marginal until the industrial revolution, around 1750. How can you say that wage labor is central to capitalism if, for 250 years, it was a tiny element? And of course the Marxist will say, “Well you’re not thinking dialectically. From 1500 to 1750, people were in a process that was going to lead to wage labor, they just didn’t realize it yet.” And I realized, wait a minute, if that’s the case, how do we know that we are even in capitalism now? Maybe we are already 100 years into a process leading us to something and we don’t even know what it is. By that logic, capitalism could have ended in like 1950, and we’ll only fully know what replaced it in 2175. David Graeber en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_GraeberDavid Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020)[1] was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist and author known for his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). He was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics.[2] Overview As an assistant professor and associate professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998 to 2007, Graeber specialised in theories of value and social theory. The university's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy.[3] He went on to become, from 2007 to 2013, reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.[4] His activism includes protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, "We are the 99 percent".[5] (He accepted credit for the description "the 99%" but stated that others had expanded it into the slogan. [6])
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2020 18:20:30 GMT
Industrial Meat Production Exposes the Sickness of Global Capitalism By Adrienne Buller From Covid-19 outbreaks to terrible working conditions, disastrous impacts on the planet and animal cruelty, industrial meat production reveals the destructive nature of modern capitalism. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/09/the-meat-processing-industry-exposes-the-sickness-of-global-capitalismLast month, news emerged that 75 workers at the Banham poultry processing plant in Norfolk had tested positive for Covid-19. Tragically, this was just one in a series of outbreaks in meat processing plants in the UK and beyond. In Canada, a staggering 391 workers at Winnipeg’s Cargill meat processing plant contracted the virus before operations were suspended, while in the US meat processing plants were linked to 17,000 cases in April and May alone, according to the Centre for Disease Control. The reasons for these outbreaks are complex, with cold factory temperatures and close worker proximity possible contributing factors. However, these conditions alone don’t explain the number and severity of recent outbreaks associated with meat processing. As journalist India Bourke recently outlined, there exists a “general disregard for regulation and welfare” in the industry worldwide, not only for basic labour and safety regulations, but also with respect to the extensively documented physical and mental health consequences associated with meat-packing. There is a clear chain linking these outbreaks with the wider disregard for welfare that has long plagued the industry: a steep imbalance of power between corporations and workers enabling conditions of exploitation. For instance, in a recent Unite survey of an overwhelmingly migrant-staffed plant suffering a Covid-19 outbreak, 2/3rds of staff said that they had come to work while feeling unwell, and closer to 70% reported that they could not afford to take time off and lose pay as a result. These findings reflect broadly on an industry in which 62% of workers in meat processing plants are EU27 nationals, and say they are treated by their corporate employers as “disposable assets.” The outbreaks in Norfolk and beyond serve as a harrowing reminder that socialists should care about industrial meat production. However, the relationship between intensive livestock farming and Covid-19 outbreaks is just one item in a lengthy and longstanding list of problems associated with the industry. From an environmental perspective, livestock production is a catastrophic problem, contributing 14.5% of global anthropogenic emissions while consuming 40% of habitable land and driving unfathomable levels of deforestation, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. 60% of mammalian life on the planet is now comprised of livestock, with just 4% made up by wild species. And although Chinese ‘wet markets’ have been the target of frequent criticism following the Covid-19 outbreak, the reality is that new zoonotic illnesses, alongside growing antibiotic resistance, are far more related to industrial animal agriculture and associated deforestation. The psychological toll of work in industrial slaughterhouses has been extensively documented, and the industry has a long record of poor worker welfare, particularly for migrant and undocumented workers, who often have no recourse in the case of mistreatment or violations of their rights. In the US, poultry producers have used prisoners and unpaid participants in addiction treatment programmes for labour. The industry’s global supply chains are also linked to violence and threats against indigenous peoples. And the its power is growing: over the past several decades, livestock production and processing has become increasingly concentrated – with one US hedge fund manager recently blaming the meat processing ‘oligopoly’ for poor supply chain resilience to the shocks of Covid-19 – and corporate giants like Tyson Foods have come to wield immense influence and lobbying power. Despite this, the Left, with notable recent exceptions, has often failed to engage with the question of industrial livestock production. In my own experience, this has stemmed from an understandable wariness of slipping into debates about lifestyle choices, particularly with respect to the climate crisis. There is also concern that the changes needed risk compromising jobs or impacting the cost of living when the working class has been pummeled by a decade of austerity and multiple economic crises. As a result, the issue has largely fallen to surface-level debates over the merits of vegan alternatives and ‘ethical’ consumption. And while there is nothing wrong with opting for Quorn nuggets, allowing individual moralism to remain the frame through which tackling the livestock industry is debated will never create the change needed, and neglects the various cultural and economic nuances behind our consumption of meat. Rather, tackling the meat industry should be understood as every bit as structural and systemic as the challenges relating to fossil fuels. The question of the decline of any industry that provides significant employment, or where transition risks placing a burden on the working class, is a complex one. Meat processing provides 97,000 jobs in the UK alone, and intensively produced meat – in large part owing to millions in annual subsidies – is often a cheap dietary staple. By comparison, Oil & Gas UK estimates that some 34,000 people are directly employed in oil and gas production, with several hundred thousand jobs associated with the industry more broadly. As with meat production, these jobs are often highly geographically concentrated, with entire communities structured around the infrastructure. Much like fossil fuel use, this issue is also one of inequality: there are clear correlations between rising incomes and rising meat consumption, and wealthy countries consume significantly more meat on average than poorer countries. Yet it is poorer countries who are on the frontlines not only of emission-fueled climate breakdown, but also of the environmental degradation associated with industrial livestock production. Much like ‘Big Oil,’ the global livestock industry is dominated by vast and powerful firms, whose power must be challenged. In the same way that the Left has come to champion a just transition for the fossil fuel industry, we must question industrial meat production and the commodification of the natural world. But we must also demand justice for the people who are exploited in the process of doing so; workers who have been particularly let down during this crisis. Over one hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle made the socialist case against the intensive livestock industry; today, as we grapple with a global pandemic in the midst of an accelerating climate emergency, that case is more urgent than ever.
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2020 18:25:13 GMT
The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it David Graeber The Bank of England's dose of honesty throws the theoretical basis for austerity out the window Tue 18 Mar 2014 10.47 GMT amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/truth-money-iou-bank-of-england-austerityBack in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, "there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning". Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window. To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank. The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes. It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: "Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … "In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money 'multiplied up' into more loans and deposits." In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with "quantitative easing" they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects. What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite. Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it's obviously true. The Bank's job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It's possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford. But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it. Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that's what's happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2020 19:51:31 GMT
High Speed Rail: The Insanity of Civilisation August 31, 2020 Deep Green Resistance News Service 2 Comments In this writing Ben asks questions about a rail development that is destroying the natural world. He asks what it would take to stop the development and why we are not all talking about it. Is high speed rail the pinnacle of civilisations’ insanity? By Ben Warner Probably not, unfortunately, but it is an excellent example. Standing in the same place for centuries should mean something. The men must have made a mistake. They have destroyed a National Asset. The National Heritage has a list of criteria for granting protected status that includes being in the same place for centuries. Why have they just demolished a possible candidate for the National Heritage List for England? The answer is, it was a tree who was razed to the ground and not a building. The tree was in the way of “progress” and those who get in the way are often crushed.< Imagine a country so insane it would spend £100 billion during a pandemic and one of the worst recessions in human history, just to speed up a journey by 20 minutes. That’s 5 billion a minute. Imagine the same project would destroy over 700 wildlife sites including sites designated by that same culture as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSI) and not be carbon ‘friendly’ for at least a hundred years. Imagine it would simultaneously threaten the water supply of its biggest city and use between 6 and 10 million liters of water during its construction. Now imagine the same project has been made obsolete by a virus that has stopped people travelling for business. Of course you do not have to imagine it. The country is the UK and it is as insane as the culture it is part of Industrial civilisation. dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/habitat-loss/the-insanity-of-civilisation/
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Post by Admin on Sept 4, 2020 17:02:41 GMT
W.E.B. Du Bois exposed capitalist and colonialist roots of white supremacy February 21, 2020 11:10 AM CDT BY JOEL WENDLAND-LIU peoplesworld.org/article/w-e-b-du-bois-exposed-capitalist-and-colonialist-roots-of-white-supremacy/In his extraordinary, if neglected, book The World and Africa, W.E.B. Du Bois details a history of Africa before European exploration, the enslavement of tens of millions, and the imposition of colonialism. In so doing, he assembles a compendium of the continent’s contributions to human development, its role in shaping the histories of Europe and Asia, as well as the diversity of its languages, cultures, and peoples. Debunking false white supremacist notions of racial difference as eternal or natural, Du Bois explores the historical relationships between African nations and societies and other parts of the world. He shows that the migration of the world’s peoples across continents and their regular interactions defy modern claims that humans can be divided meaningfully into races and ethnic groups. Well ahead of its time, The World and Africa crafts a historical image of the continent freed from the racist constraints imposed on it by European thought. European thinkers had imagined Africa as a place without a history, as subjected solely to the will of nature and thus suitable for subjugation. Du Bois enlists large amounts of historical evidence that undermined white supremacist theories of racial purity and of racial types. So-called “race science” had relied on absurd notions of purity, usually linked to wild claims about how shapes of skulls, colors of skin, and textures of hair proved the racial beauty and cultural and biological superiority of white people. Du Bois shows how these premises don’t match the evidence about the migration, interactions, and practices of humans for the vast majority of its history. In addition to exposing the lies and contradictions in white supremacist race theory, Du Bois showed that white racism, European colonialism, and the logic of capitalism were the true causes of two World Wars and inevitable future conflict. Of singular importance is Du Bois’s discussion of the state of the world in 1947 (the year of the book’s publication) that inspired his investigations into this topic. World War II had just come to a close with the nuclear annihilation of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in Japan. Additionally, systematic atrocities in a racist European holocaust, merciless Japanese imperialism in China and Southeast Asia, and human-orchestrated famines across South Asia had seen tens of millions of people erased from existence. The “collapse of Europe,” however, stood out above all else in Du Bois’s mind. Its colonialist, white supremacist, and capitalist systems made the disasters of the 20th century. The crisis of the first global war and the subsequent collapse of capitalism directly resulted from the rivalry for control of colonial territory. Du Bois argues that the insurgency of the working class represented by the Russian Revolution shaped the political terrain in the interwar years. The capitalist class responded with its support for the wave of emergent fascist regimes in Italy, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and their spheres of influence. Initially, colonialist regimes in Britain and France appeased the fascists to maintain capitalism’s power and to construct a militarist front against the working-class revolution in the East. In straightforward terms, Du Bois defined the West’s attempt to appease Hitler as the natural outcome of its demand for profit, need for cheap labor, and logic of surplus-value extraction. According to Du Bois, Hitler was allowed some expansion, but not “the balance of power” in Europe. Meanwhile, Britain, France, and the U.S. stood ready to fight to protect their control over their colonies and semi-colonies. Because Hitler’s logic (identical with the logic of capitalism and imperialism) demanded that he seek more than what the West offered, war and conflict were inevitable. The West wanted Hitler to fight the communists rather than to claim Western colonial possessions or try to restore Germany’s economic power. But Hitler had to have more. “The real battle then began,” Du Bois argues. “[T]he battle of the Nazi-Fascist oligarchy against the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Hitler’s strategy: crush Russia, then take on Britain. In this equation, Japan sided with Hitler to stake its claims on European colonies in Asia. As the war came to a close, Western Europe refused to learn the lesson of this catastrophe as it sought to retain control over its colonial holdings and to exclude non-white countries from its Atlantic Charter. The French fought to keep Indo-China; the Dutch scrambled to maintain a foothold in the South Pacific, and the British set its power against Indian independence. Meanwhile, the U.S. fashioned indirect forms of domination through debt, financial instruments, and trade.
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Post by Admin on Sept 6, 2020 1:07:55 GMT
Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse. Instead of never-ending progress, today’s kids face a world on the edge of collapse. What next? by Malcolm Harris December 16, 2019 www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/16/102389/keynes-was-wrong-gen-z-will-have-it-worse/The founder of macroeconomics predicted that capitalism would last for approximately 450 years. That’s the length of time between 1580, when Queen Elizabeth invested Spanish gold stolen by Francis Drake, and 2030, the year by which John Maynard Keynes assumed humanity would have solved the problem of our needs and moved on to higher concerns. It’s true that today the system seems on the edge of transformation, but not in the way Keynes hoped. Gen Z’s fate was supposed to be to relax into a life of leisure and creativity. Instead it is bracing for stagnant wages and ecological crisis. In a famous essay from the early 1930s called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes imagined the world 100 years in the future. He spotted phenomena like job automation (which he called “technological unemployment”) coming, but those changes, he believed, augured progress: progress toward a better society, progress toward collective liberation from work. He was worried that the transition to this world without toil might be psychologically difficult, and so he suggested that three-hour workdays could serve as a transitional program, allowing us to put off the profound question of what to do when there’s nothing left to do. Well, we know the grandchildren in the title of Keynes’s essay: they’re the kids and younger adults of today. The prime-age workforce of 2030 was born between 1976 and 2005. And though the precise predictions he made about the rate of economic growth and accumulation were strikingly accurate, what they mean for this generation is very different from what he imagined. Instead of progress toward a labor-free utopia, America has experienced disappearing jobs as a kind of economic climate change. Apocalyptic forecasts loom while poor and working-class communities take the brunt of the early impacts: wage stagnation, deregulated and unsafe workplaces, an epidemic of opioid addiction. The increasingly profligate wealth on the other end of society is no less disturbing. What the hell happened? To figure out why Generation Z isn’t going to be Generation EZ, we have to ask some fundamental questions about economics, technology, and progress. After we assumed for a century that a better world would appear on top of our accumulated stuff, the assumptions appear unfounded. Things are getting worse. As recently as the first web boom two decades ago, it was still possible to talk about technological development and economic expansion as being good for everybody. Take Webvan, the early (and subsequently much derided) grocery delivery startup. The company planned to combine the efficiencies of the internet and other advances in information and logistics to provide better-quality products at lower prices, delivered directly to consumers by higher-paid and better-trained workers. It’s a univocal, Keynesian vision of development: not only do all involved benefit individually as consumers, employees, or capitalists, but society itself steps together up the mountain toward the elimination of necessity and a higher plane of being. When Webvan went belly-up, analysts assumed it meant the core idea was hopelessly wrong: it just doesn’t make sense to use human capacity to bring individual people their supermarket orders. Harvard Business School professor John Deighton, when asked about the future of the industry in 2001, said, “Home-delivered groceries? Never.” Yet less than 20 years later I can have one of the world’s few trillion-dollar companies (Amazon) deliver my order via its grocery brand (Whole Foods) in an hour. And if that’s not fast enough, there are various platform services (Instacart, Postmates, and others) through which I can hire someone to go pick my order up and bring it to me immediately. Buzzing clouds of freelance servants, always in motion. For consumers, these services have made life more convenient. For owners, stock prices and corporate profits have been cruising higher and higher for decades. But as workers, we have suffered. Gone is the Webvan vision of highly trained, highly paid, upwardly mobile, stock-holding delivery drivers. Amazon’s treatment of its workers at all levels is so intensely exploitative that former employees have created their own form of writing: the “report-back,” an essay that exposes the particular, common hardships of working at the firm. It’s one part worker’s inquiry, one part trauma diary.
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Post by Admin on Sept 10, 2020 23:07:46 GMT
"Mark’s talent to recognize and identify both the limits to emancipatory politics, but also to envision a desire to transcend these limits is what makes both this book and his own legacy so revealing and liberating. As the book shows, the foundations for a new world are already with us, and the only thing preventing their realization are the political and ideological constraints that preserve the plenty for the few. In honour of Mark’s work, and the legacy of Capitalist Realism, perhaps it is time (because we haven’t got any left) to make the realism of #communist desire our rallying call against the reified realism of capital. •" Reading Capitalist Realism Ten Years On THEORY • September 7, 2020 • Matthew Flisfeder Today, in the interregnum of the post-crisis, austerity-driven, global neoliberal capitalist society, we are confronted with a range of contradictions potentially threatening our very way of life on Earth. From looming ecological catastrophes and the threat of the capitalocene, to the rise of artificial intelligence and digital automation threatening stagnation, to refugee crises and culture wars, and even to a resurgence of new economic crises unforeseen by mainstream economists, it would appear as though it is more necessary than ever to challenge the old Thatcherite dogma that “there is no alternative” (TINA) to the existing system. That hopeless, cynical claim that even if capitalism is full of flaws and fissures, it is still the least bad system we’ve got, so grin and bear it… But resisting this reified and disavowed root of the conundrum in the very capitalism that the TINA formula defends – if we are to confront these problems head on – perhaps it is time for us on the Left to be somewhat more pragmatic about what or how we even envision the future of the post-capitalist world. We need, perhaps, to be much more realistic; but in what sense? socialistproject.ca/2020/09/reading-capitalist-realism-ten-years-on/
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Post by Admin on Sept 10, 2020 23:51:54 GMT
We’re In The First Stages Of What Could Be The Final Implosion For American Capitalism March 28, 2020 Rainer Shea The system we live under is a drug addict. It’s perpetually fixated on getting the next surge of profits, on maintaining the intake of financial assets that keeps it afloat. If an obstacle appears, it will find a way to keep the flow of capital going by sacrificing the wellbeing of those not in the exploiting class. Now that Covid-19 has presented an obstacle by forcing tens of millions of Americans out of work, the system’s only solution is to siphon vast amounts of wealth to the rich while forcing poor and working people to sacrifice our health and resources. In terms of the relief fund that the government will inevitably need to pay to keep the economy semi-stable, Republicans and Democrats are both trying to figure out how to give the bare minimum amount of money to the poor. All of the lower income people who are struggling to pay rent, bills, and other expenses will get a payment of only $1200, and the money likely won’t come until around two months from now. Throughout this time, it’s estimated that the U.S. unemployment rate will rise towards about 30%, and a steady income will also become harder to find for many of those who can still work. This is because our economic crisis isn’t just the result of a quarantine. The quarantine has been one of the catalysts that’s set off a massive and long-foreseeable financial bubble. The debt-ridden housing market is part of it, the unsustainable banking system is part of it, and the inflated stock market is part of it. In the coming months and years, it will escalate into the greatest downturn since the Great Depression, far worse than the 2008 crash. We’re in the first stages of what could be the final implosion for American capitalismmedium.com/@rainershea612/were-in-the-first-stages-of-what-could-be-the-final-implosion-for-american-capitalism-cfb5fe5e4cac
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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 12:56:06 GMT
How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/cancel-culture-and-problem-woke-capitalism/614086/Story by Helen Lewis JULY 14, 2020 GLOBAL Link Copied Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent. Commentators warn of “mob justice,” while activists exult in their newfound power to change the world. Both groups are right, and wrong. Because the best way to see the firings, outings, and online denunciations grouped together as “cancel culture” is not through a social lens, but an economic one. Take the fall of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, which seems inevitable in hindsight—Everyone knew he was a sex pest! There were even jokes about it on 30 Rock! But it took The New York Times months of reporting to ready its first story for publishing; the newspaper was taking on someone with deep pockets and a history of intimidating critics into silence. Then the story went off like a hand grenade. Suddenly, the mood—and the economic incentives—shifted. People who had been afraid of Weinstein were instead afraid of being taken down alongside him. The removal of Weinstein from his company, and his subsequent conviction for rape, is a good outcome. But the mechanism it revealed is more morally ambiguous: The court of public opinion was the only forum left after workplace protections and the judicial system had failed. The writer Jon Schwarz once described the “iron law of institutions,” under which people with seniority inside an institution care more about preserving their power within the institution than they do about the power of the institution as a whole. That self-preservation instinct also operates when private companies—institutions built on maximizing shareholder value, or other capitalist principles—struggle to acclimatize to life in a world where many consumers vocally support social-justice causes. Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool. But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival. (I’m not using the word woke here in a sneering, pejorative sense, but to highlight that the original definition of wokeness is incompatible with capitalism. Also, I’m not taking credit for the coinage: The writer Ross Douthat got there first.) In fact, let’s go further: Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social-media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy, and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves. Read: Stop firing the innocent Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the random firings of individuals, some of whose infractions are minor, and some of whom are entirely innocent of any bad behavior. In the first group goes the graphic designer Sue Schafer, outed by The Washington Post for attending a party in ironic blackface—a tone-deaf attempt to mock Megyn Kelly for not seeing what was wrong with blackface. Schafer, a private individual, was confronted at the party over the costume, went home in tears, and apologized to the hosts the next day. When the Post ran a story naming her, she was fired. New York magazine found numerous Post reporters unwilling to defend the decision to run the story—and plenty of unease that the article seemed more interested in exonerating the Post than fighting racism. Even less understandable is the case of Niel Golightly, the communications chief at the aircraft company Boeing, who stepped down over a 33-year-old article arguing that women should not serve in the military. When Barack Obama, a notably progressive president, only changed his mind on gay marriage in the 2010s, how many Americans’ views from 1987 would hold up to scrutiny by today’s standards? This mechanism is not, as it is sometimes presented, a long-overdue settling of scores by underrepresented voices. It is a reflexive jerk of the knee by the powerful, a demonstration of institutions’ unwillingness to tolerate any controversy, whether those complaining are liberal or conservative. Another case where the punishment does not fit the offense is that of the police detective Florissa Fuentes, who reposted a picture from her niece taken at a Black Lives Matter protest. One of those pictured held a sign reading who do we call when the murderer wear the badge. Another sign, according to the Times, “implied that people should shoot back at the police.” Fuentes, a 30-year-old single mother of three children, deleted the post and apologized, but was fired nonetheless. Read: Brands have nothing real to say about racism In the second group, the blameless, lies Emmanuel Cafferty, a truck driver who appears to have been tricked into making an “okay” symbol by a driver he cut off at a traffic light. The inevitable viral video claimed that this was a deliberate use of the symbol as a white-power gesture, and he was promptly fired. Cafferty is a working-class man in his 40s from San Diego. The loss of his job hit him hard enough that he saw a counselor. “A man can learn from making a mistake,” he told my colleague Yascha Mounk. “But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.” The phrase is haunting—not being racist is not going to save you if the lightning strikes. Nor is the fact that your comments lie decades in the past, or that they have been misinterpreted by bad-faith actors, or that you didn’t make them. The ground—your life—is scorched just the same. It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets. We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease. But we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established. Afraid of the reputational damage that can be incurred in minutes, companies are behaving in ways that range from thoughtless and uncaring to sadistic. For Cafferty’s employer, what’s one random truck driver versus the PR bump of being able to cut off a bad news cycle by saying you’ve fired your “white-supremacist employee”?
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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 20:03:00 GMT
UNITED WORLD ( Andre Vltchek ) - Once again, white, mainly Anglo-Saxon men “know the best”: be it regarding the recent anti-racist protests in the United States, or the origin of COVID-19 , the New Depression , the Fires across America . Even if they know precious nothing, absolutely nothing, they are still often considered to be the best informed, the most qualified “experts” because they have suitable names, looks, and pronunciation. Because they are white, groomed a certain way, and able to lie in the acceptable manner. A few hours ago, I watched a dialogue between two ‘experts,’ which was uploaded online by “independent” North American media. They were discussing COVID-19. What was particularly striking was the arrogance: “we know everything, and you know nothing”, the little sarcastic smiles; the two men were clearly demonstrating degenerate spite for the world. Naturally, both were white. As in “ White “ I am not talking so much about their color of skin as their attitude and culture. In the 40-some minutes during which they spoke, there were no references to the tremendous victory of The People’s Republic of China over the pandemic. No mention of the successes of Vietnam or the doctors of Cuba. It was just them speaking. It was about them, about their world, and definitely not about the objective truth. The same publication basically kicked me out, and stopped reprinting my essays immediately after our opinions began to differ on important topics such as Russia Gate , the uprising in the United States, COVID-19, and China. When I stopped behaving in accordance with acceptable white beliefs , theories and values, I was out. It was not my place or my right to speak about the West in this crucial historical moment. After all, I was just some Russia/Chinese other. This was the moment for the rulers of the world to shine. They and they alone were qualified to define the crises in their own society. Their publications closed their doors to those who were “ Others “ . Not all, but most certainly did. These “ Others “ are sometimes allowed to criticize their own countries. They are once in a while permitted to trash their fellow non-white nations. But never, ever are they tolerated as prominent critics of the West and its rulers. They are also not allowed to make any important intellectual judgments: in the West, even in establishment media that so called bastion of objectivity , Chinese people are not trusted to decide whether their country is Socialist or not! Such decisions are made for them in the halls of Washington, on the sound stages of Los Angeles and Toronto , in the news rooms of London, and New York . And , even if on social media Facebook and Twitter that so called bastion of “ left book “ you dare to contradict Western Trotskyists or anarcho-syndicalists uninformed opinion about China - you will be laughed at , silenced, censored and prevented from replying . It means nothing to the western “ experts “ that China has one of the oldest and greatest cultures on Earth. Same with Iran , if it is a socialist country , that is decided in Paris or New York, not in Teheran. What happened in the Soviet Union between the two world wars is not up to Russians to decide or even have an opinion about, unless it follows the western hollywood Cold War mantra of “ Stalin and USSR evil “ , “ Reagan and USA good “ . All great non-Western nations are expected to learn about themselves from some American , British, Swiss, or Canadian deletants, whose only claim to fame is that they are white and from the West. Once, a taxi driver in Tehran was complaining to me: “White Westerners come to my country for the first time. They know nothing about Iran. But, 5 minutes into the ride, they begin lecturing me about my own nation.” White Westerners are allowed to criticize whatever and wherever they want. It matters nothing how much or how little they know about it. Mostly they know nothing, absolutely nothing, but so what? Often, they even manage to infiltrate important media outlets and universities in independent countries and teach revolutionaries about their own revolution. Ridiculous? Bizarre? Yes, it is, but it is happening! Now, as the West is collapsing, there are wild conspiracy theories from Russia Gate to QAnon flying around all over the place , among the establishment “ Left “ and the right . Ridiculous, moronic inventions and speculations are printed day after day. Even some serious international media outlets based in the non-Western world have been falling into the trap. They are hiring entire armies of mainstream British, Irish, and North American writers to impress their readers who would never tolerate being ‘lectured’ by people of other colors and cultures. The West, intellectually and morally confused and corrupt, has not been able to think rationally, it is thoroughly brainwashed. That applies to both writers and the readers. It cannot live without “familiar faces,” without familiar lines of thought. Despite its confusion, it insists on talking. It demands to be listened to. The West believes it is impossible to learn from others. It only knows how to dictate, how to preach, but what it says is nothing more than incomprehensible rubbish. It racist, phantasmagoric, irrational drivel. Western political talk, academic chatter, Hollywood mental hallucinogenic degeneracy, Disney-land brain damage since early childhood, and the mass media’s surreal narratives are reducing the human race to nothing, to an intellectual zero. Chaos and pathological lack of logic are upholding the status quo. Under such conditions, no progressive ideology could survive. Therefore, this is the most suitable milieu for the white Western boys and their global dictatorship. It is time for the majority of Western speakers to shut up, start listening. Ideally, some would be held accountable for their actions. Easier said than done! But there is no other way. The time has come for the West to sit down, shut up and listen to the rest of the world uwidata.com/13688-the-time-has-come-for-the-west-to-sit-down-shut-up-and-listen-to-the-rest-of-the-world/
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