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Post by Admin on May 5, 2020 14:05:03 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 16:46:25 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 25, 2020 10:43:34 GMT
“Disease is not an isolated phenomenon in an individual. It’s a culturally constructed paradigm.” Watch Dr. Gabor Maté explain how mental distress and pathology result from a materialist culture that “idealizes individualism and ignores our emotional needs” The truth will out... www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xzP_9-Y2qg
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Post by Admin on Jun 26, 2020 11:30:18 GMT
“In another fulfillment of the established patterns of neoliberalism, the social conditions that these companies are profiting off of is an exaggerated version of what life has long been like under late-state capitalism: systematically isolated from the community at large, filled with transactions that make daily activities commodified and artificial, and culturally defined by consumerism. Reflecting how advertisers have long tried to get people to associate their products with their personal identities, companies like Google and Amazon are now trying to get people to see them as friends that will help us all out during a difficult time.” Covid-19 commercialism is part of the neoliberal effort to undermine social cohesion medium.com/@rainershea612/covid-19-commercialism-is-part-of-the-neoliberal-effort-to-undermine-social-cohesion-29c94daf0e98
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Post by Admin on Jun 27, 2020 20:11:04 GMT
youtu.be/myH3gg5o0t0+ + + + + If you've ever wanted to understand what neoliberalism is, this is the series for you. Neoliberalism is an economic ideology that exists within the framework of capitalism. Over four decades ago, neoliberalism become the dominant economic paradigm of global society. In this video series, we'll trace the history of neoliberalism, starting with a survey of neoliberal philosophy and research, a historical reconstruction of the movement pushing for neoliberal policy solutions, witnessing the damage that neoliberalism did to its first victims in the developing world, and then charting neoliberalism's infiltration of the political systems of the United States and the United Kingdom. Learn how neoliberalism is generating crises for humanity at an unprecedented rate. _____________________________________________________ PATREON: www.patreon.com/barakalypsenowFACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/BarakalypseNow/TWITTER: twitter.com/BarakalypseNowYou can also view my work on FilmsForAction: www.filmsforaction.org/library/?category=all+videos
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Post by Admin on Jul 4, 2020 12:39:07 GMT
How Capitalism Causes Depression endofcapitalism.com/2018/01/09/how-capitalism-causes-depression/Terrific article by Johann Hari on his book 'Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression' in which he provides compelling evidence to support the argument that most of us are deeply unhappy, and this unhappiness is a completely rational response to the unhappy conditions of our lives that capitalism has produced. Specifically, Hari points out how the routine of work under capitalism is making us miserable: 'There is strong evidence that human beings need to feel their lives are meaningful – that they are doing something with purpose that makes a difference. It’s a natural psychological need. But between 2011 and 2012, the polling company Gallup conducted the most detailed study ever carried out of how people feel about the thing we spend most of our waking lives doing – our paid work. They found that 13% of people say they are “engaged” in their work – they find it meaningful and look forward to it. Some 63% say they are “not engaged”, which is defined as “sleepwalking through their workday”. And 24% are “actively disengaged”: they hate it.' Even the United Nations has concluded that "We need to move from focusing on ‘chemical imbalances’’ to focusing more on ‘power imbalances'”. So if we want to be happy, we also need to democratize the economy and give people the power to determine how they want to spend their time and what kinds of work they would actually enjoy doing. In the article he tells how Dr Joanne Cacciatore, of Arizona State University, explained that this debate reveals a key problem with how we talk about depression, anxiety and other forms of suffering: "we don’t, she said, 'consider context'. We act like human distress can be assessed solely on a checklist that can be separated out from our lives, and labelled as brain diseases. If we started to take people’s actual lives into account when we treat depression and anxiety, Joanne explained, it would require 'an entire system overhaul'. She told me that when 'you have a person with extreme human distress, [we need to] stop treating the symptoms. The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.' Around one in five US adults are taking at least one drug for a psychiatric problem. In Britain, antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in a decade, to the point where now one in 11 of us drug ourselves to deal with these feelings. It turns out that between 65 and 80% of people on antidepressants are depressed again within a year. This led Professor Kirsch to ask a more basic question, one he was surprised to be asking. How do we know depression is even caused by low serotonin at all? When he began to dig, it turned out that the evidence was strikingly shaky. Professor Andrew Scull of Princeton, writing in the Lancet, explained that attributing depression to spontaneously low serotonin is 'deeply misleading and unscientific'. Dr David Healy told me: 'There was never any basis for it, ever. It was just marketing copy.' So, what is really going on? When I interviewed social scientists all over the world – from São Paulo to Sydney, from Los Angeles to London – I started to see an unexpected picture emerge. We all know that every human being has basic physical needs: for food, for water, for shelter, for clean air. It turns out that, in the same way, all humans have certain basic psychological needs. We need to feel we belong. We need to feel valued. We need to feel we’re good at something. We need to feel we have a secure future. And there is growing evidence that our culture isn’t meeting those psychological needs for many – perhaps most – people. I kept learning that, in very different ways, we have become disconnected from things we really need, and this deep disconnection is driving this epidemic of depression and anxiety all around us. Most of the depressed and anxious people I know, I realised, are in the 87% who don’t like their work. I started to dig around to see if there is any evidence that this might be related to depression. It turned out that a breakthrough had been made in answering this question in the 1970s, by an Australian scientist called Michael Marmot. He wanted to investigate what causes stress in the workplace and believed he’d found the perfect lab in which to discover the answer: the British civil service, based in Whitehall. This small army of bureaucrats was divided into 19 different layers, from the permanent secretary at the top, down to the typists. What he wanted to know, at first, was: who’s more likely to have a stress-related heart attack – the big boss at the top, or somebody below him? Everybody told him: you’re wasting your time. Obviously, the boss is going to be more stressed because he’s got more responsibility. But when Marmot published his results, he revealed the truth to be the exact opposite. The lower an employee ranked in the hierarchy, the higher their stress levels and likelihood of having a heart attack. Now he wanted to know: why? And that’s when, after two more years studying civil servants, he discovered the biggest factor. It turns out if you have no control over your work, you are far more likely to become stressed – and, crucially, depressed. Humans have an innate need to feel that what we are doing, day-to-day, is meaningful. When you are controlled, you can’t create meaning out of your work. Suddenly, the depression of many of my friends, even those in fancy jobs – who spend most of their waking hours feeling controlled and unappreciated – started to look not like a problem with their brains, but a problem with their environments. I found the beginnings of an answer to the epidemic of meaningless work – in Baltimore. Meredith Mitchell used to wake up every morning with her heart racing with anxiety. She dreaded her office job. So she took a bold step – one that lots of people thought was crazy. Her husband, Josh, and their friends had worked for years in a bike store, where they were ordered around and constantly felt insecure. Most of them were depressed. One day, they decided to set up their own bike store, but they wanted to run it differently. Instead of having one guy at the top giving orders, they would run it as a democratic co-operative. This meant they would make decisions collectively, they would share out the best and worst jobs and they would all, together, be the boss. It would be like a busy democratic tribe. When I went to their store – Baltimore Bicycle Works – the staff explained how, in this different environment, their persistent depression and anxiety had largely lifted. Josh had seen for himself that depressions are very often, as he put it, 'rational reactions to the situation, not some kind of biological break'. He told me there is no need to run businesses anywhere in the old humiliating, depressing way – we could move together, as a culture, to workers controlling their own workplaces. Professor John Cacioppo of Chicago University taught me that being acutely lonely is as stressful as being punched in the face by a stranger – and massively increases your risk of depression. Dr Vincent Felitti in San Diego showed me that surviving severe childhood trauma makes you 3,100% more likely to attempt suicide as an adult. Professor Michael Chandler in Vancouver explained to me that if a community feels it has no control over the big decisions affecting it, the suicide rate will shoot up. In its official statement for World Health Day in 2017, the United Nations reviewed the best evidence and concluded that 'the dominant biomedical narrative of depression' is based on 'biased and selective use of research outcomes” that “must be abandoned'. 'We need to move from 'focusing on "chemical imbalances",' they said, to focusing more on “power imbalances”. If you are depressed and anxious, you are not a machine with malfunctioning parts. You are a human being with unmet needs. The only real way out of our epidemic of despair is for all of us, together, to begin to meet those human needs – for deep connection, to the things that really matter in life."
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Post by Admin on Jul 7, 2020 22:05:25 GMT
Published on Tuesday, July 07, 2020 byOpenDemocracy.net Pandemic Capitalism Pervasive inequality is a chosen catastrophe. It’s time for a rethink. byChris Oestereich www.commondreams.org/views/2020/07/07/pandemic-capitalism"We live our lives shackled to the ideas of dead economists. It’s a natural occurrence. It takes time, effort, and resources to galvanize human systems. New ideas take hold, become dominant, and ossify. Those who benefit try to maintain their place. But complex systems aren’t static. The longer and harder the status quo is maintained, the greater the system contorts. Eventually, it breaks and reforms. The question is how. The current flavor of ‘no holds barred’ capitalism sits at this precipice. For years, it has extracted everything within its reach. It has exploited our natural resources and damaged our ecosystems. It has claimed our time and effort, and even our hopes and dreams. All these things have been treated as resources to be mined for a system that’s systematically designed to benefit the few. The main idea underpinning the current version of capitalism is blindingly simple: you only have to remember one thing - that your job is to maximize profits. And you only have to accept one lie - that in doing so, you benefit the collective. That might be tough to swallow, but there’s a good trick involved: buying in uncritically allows you to believe that your self-interest is benevolent. That so many people are willing to do so is captured by Upton Sinclair’s famous quip, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” The result is an absurdist cargo cult in which the haves take ever more while telling themselves that manna is surely falling from heaven upon the masses. Growth remains the answer even in an era of environmental breakdown. But it’s a brittle system that’s collapsing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Our food system is a prime example. Problems arose early on in the pandemic as conditions in meatpacking plants played to the strengths of the virus. By late April 2020, 5,000 workers had tested positive and dozens of plants had closed. Millions of animals were led to slaughter with no intent of feeding people. Instead, they were killed in service of mitigating financial losses. At a time when hunger was rife, we learned that a system built for efficiency was indifferent to challenges beyond its balance sheets. Prior to the pandemic, 37 million Americans - 11 million of them children - lived in food-insecure households, meaning that they weren’t able to afford healthy food for their families. In June 2020, Feeding America, a national network of food banks, estimated that another 17 million individuals were at risk of joining that group. An April survey of mothers with children age 12 and under found that the percentage who were running out of food - and lacked enough money to purchase more - had jumped from an already dire range of 15-20% to around 40%. The result? Millions of animals were slaughtered for naught, while millions of people lacked proper sustenance. That outcome was the result of ‘good business decisions.’ The state of family finances is dire. A report published in 2019 found that nearly 40% of Americans couldn’t come up with $500 without selling something or taking out a loan. Another survey found that 49% were planning to live paycheck to paycheck, and that was before a coronavirus-led string of over 46 million unemployment claims. Meanwhile, the total wealth of US billionaires surged by over $600 billion. Jeff Bezos ‘earned’ $24 billion in that time. Viewed through the lens of race, this ugly picture becomes even more grotesque, since Black and Hispanic families have a fraction of the savings held by white families. They’re also far more likely to be renters, who lack the legal protections that benefit homeowners. Evictions, like incarcerations, hit such communities disproportionately, but the landlord still comes on the first of the month. Back in April 2020, nearly a third of renters didn’t pay their rent on time, a significant increase over 2019. States put eviction moratoriums in place as the wave of unemployment unfolded, but those protections are expiring. Amid a global pandemic, millions of people are at risk of being turned out into the streets. Why? The answer is simple: doing otherwise would refute the central premise of capitalism - profit. Its ideology is a one-trick pony that only knows one answer - more." Rest in Link.
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Post by Admin on Jul 9, 2020 20:54:27 GMT
All Capitalism - THE PANDEMIC SHOWS IT’S TIME FOR AN ALTERNATIVE TO AMERICAN CAPITALISM theappeal.org/coronavirus-pandemic-american-capitalism/The nation has an opportunity to take advantage of this transformative event and pursue an alternative to the current system. This piece is a commentary, part of The Appeal’s collection of opinion and analysis. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the inherent flaws of American capitalism, a profit-driven system of winners and losers that is unprepared to respond to a national emergency and ill-equipped to address the basic needs of society. While the coronavirus has created an historic economic crisis, a dire emergency of economic inequality and injustice in this country long predated the outbreak. Capitalism must undergo structural change. The nation has an opportunity to take advantage of this transformative event and pursue an alternative to the current system. The failures and shortcomings of American capitalism have made the country particularly vulnerable to a plague. Over 47 million people—more than 1 in 4 U.S. workers—have filed for unemployment since mid-March. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the pandemic is projected to cost the U.S. economy nearly $8 trillion in real GDP through 2030, prompting calls for more federal assistance to states and businesses to stave off permanent job loss. The coronavirus killed all jobs created since the Great Recession, and the economic environment rivals the Great Depression in severity of unemployment. Research suggests many of these jobs will never return. The newly unemployed now form mile-long bread lines as farmers destroy crops and euthanize herds.
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Post by Admin on Jul 29, 2020 22:03:43 GMT
Covid capitalism Tithi Bhattacharya Gareth Dale | 11th June 2020 theecologist.org/2020/jun/11/covid-capitalismNever has the global economy faced such a thorough challenge from a virus. Previous epidemics scythed through populations and ravaged livelihoods, but they remained contained on a regional scale or, where global, impacted the world economy less precipitously. Noteworthy too is the fact that never in recent memory have Euro-American countries, whose governments and media still dominate global public discourse, been so affected by a health crisis. Pandemics that kill people in Asia and Africa do not create quite the same reverberations in media conglomerates as they do when they hit the hearts of imperial hegemons. Covid-19 has starkly revealed not only the brutal systemic priorities of capitalism - profit-making over life-making - but also the relationship between capital and the capitalist state form. We should be attentive to this relationship in order to face a darker truth about this crisis: that it is far from an anomaly and that lacking a body blow to the system, we should prepare for a world where such crises and its effects become part of our daily lives. State In a recent article, Cinzia Arruzza and Felice Mometti have sketched the heterogeneity of responses of different governments to the pandemic. While some, such as Israel, India and Hungary, have certainly used the crisis to shore up authoritarianism, the pattern, according to Arruzza and Mometti, is by no means uniform. They cite examples of states such as the US where Trump, invoking the old racist ‘states’ rights’ trope, is letting state governors decide the course of action for their own states, and Italy and Germany where attempts to enhance executive powers is being challenged by other governing institutions such as the EU. Given this diversity of governance strategies, Arruzza and Mometti conclude, ‘[r]ather than imposing abstract formulas upon a complex reality, it is more useful to pay attention to the experimentation with diverse forms of governance, both novel and age-old, in the management of the pandemic.’ We agree with Arruzza and Mometti that states have responded differentially in their efforts to govern the crisis. Where we depart from their analysis is when they say that this disparateness implies that abstraction is redundant. We can begin with some general conclusions, drawing on the state-capital relationship. Turbulent First, just as at the start of the Great Depression, all governments are seeking to steer the rudder back to ‘business as usual’ as fast as they can. The effort is to project the crisis as a temporary aberration. Second, and following from the first, states are currently investing in life-making institutions - setting up hospitals, distributing food, compensating wages from state funds - but they are doing so because they are forced to and therefore always on a temporary basis, and often such efforts are buttressed by repressive measures. Third, in the coming period, we will see state policies seesaw between neoliberal and Keynesian - or even state-capitalist - responses. Such oscillations will undoubtedly produce much chaos at the level of politics. We will see both social democracy and centrism make comebacks, and there is the ever-present threat of authoritarian populism bordering into fascism, but we cannot let these turbulent currents at the level of the political blind us to what are steady pressures from capital: to accumulate with minimal sacrifice to profit and with scant respect for life. Citizens Fourth, the crisis is exacerbating existing oppression, amplifying the hardships and inequities imposed on Black and Brown people, on women, and on the poor. In tracing common drivers of the crisis, we explore in this essay what happens when the imperatives of life and life-making interface radically with the imperatives of profit-making. Because the crisis induced by the coronavirus is a public health crisis, questions of ‘economy’ and ‘welfare’ are thrust together in an unprecedented manner. We develop our analysis along two doubled axes: one, the dyad of welfare and repressive functions of capitalist states; and two, the dual tendencies towards state interventionism and neoliberalism that we are witnessing in states’ responses to the crisis. The first doubled relation concerns a state’s relationship to its citizens; the other is its relationship to capital. Welfare and Repression: A Troubled Twining There is always an intertwined and profoundly contradictory relationship between the welfare and repressive functions of capitalist states. Unlike states in previous class societies, capitalist states have always managed social welfare in order to maintain and constrain the material security of ‘their’ populations. They establish and shape, on a day-to-day basis, institutions of social reproduction of the workforce. These have included, simultaneously, tasks of educating and keeping healthy its citizens as well as labelling, policing, and surveilling them. These principles, of social policy and of profit-making, may clash in detail, but they share a common root. As one 19th century British Poor Law commissioner remarked: "It is an admitted maxim of social policy that the first charge upon the land must be the maintenance of those reared upon it. Society exists for the preservation of property; but subject to the condition that the wants of the few shall only be realized by first making provision for the necessities of the many." Today’s ‘commissioners’ tailor welfare institutions to the demands of markets and states for fit, educated workers to enhance capital’s competitive edge. Capital tries to impose its discipline on the biological rhythms of birth, ageing and death, but its relationship to life-making is one of reluctant dependence. It is dependent on a healthy, able-bodied workforce but reluctant to have resources diverted to life-making institutions. What makes this crisis so unusual is that it has forced to the fore capital’s dependence on its workforce.
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Post by Admin on Jul 31, 2020 17:24:47 GMT
“Amplified by social media and the rising culture of parasocial relationships, these efforts to profit off of our anxieties, loneliness, and desire for a purpose are deeply integrated into our everyday lives. The alienation that we feel as a result of living under late-stage capitalism is being exploited by a vast advertising machine, one that offers us countless ways to attain the illusion of having a purpose. “When what’s supposed to give us meaning and satisfaction has this shallow and artificial nature, it’s no wonder why so many people are unable to avoid giving in to despair. Suicides, which have been increasing in the U.S. since 2000, are climbing during the pandemic. Anxiety and depression, which have always been especially prevalent in neoliberal societies, are also on the rise. Those aged 18 to 29 are the most impacted by this general decline in mental health, with 36% of them reporting depression in a recent study and 42% of them reporting anxiety.” Late-stage capitalism is making us believe that we’re worthless medium.com/@rainershea612/late-stage-capitalism-is-making-us-believe-that-were-worthless-ec378e8a61d2
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Post by Admin on Jul 31, 2020 20:26:05 GMT
A new edition of Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Theodor Adorno is now 40% off! Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought. www.versobooks.com/books/3143-minima-moralia
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Post by Admin on Jul 31, 2020 22:55:33 GMT
The rich buy better health care and diets, second homes away from crowded cities, better connections to get government bailouts, and so on. Many of the poor are homeless. Tasteless advice to “shelter at home” is, for them, absurd. Low-income people are often crowded into the kinds of dense housing and dense working conditions that facilitate infection. Poor residents of low-cost nursing homes die disproportionally, as do prison inmates (mostly poor). Pandemic capitalism distributes death in inverse proportion to wealth and income. JULY 31, 2020 The Consequences of Inequality Can Be Fatal by RICHARD D. WOLFF www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/31/the-consequences-of-inequality-can-be-fatal/
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Post by Admin on Aug 28, 2020 19:17:09 GMT
Under capitalism, the decisions that shape society are made by those who own the wealth – and the rest of us have to work for them to survive. That's neither freedom nor democracy. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/capitalism-isnt-free-or-democraticMilton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, argued 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 organisation. 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 realisation. 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 realisation of true individual freedom and reduces the scope of meaningful democracy. There are five ways in which this is readily apparent.
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Post by Admin on Aug 28, 2020 19:21:19 GMT
The future has always been either socialism or barbarism. Here’s what the barbarism will look like if global socialist revolution doesn’t come.-Rainer Late-stage capitalism is creating a brutal new kind of global despotism medium.com/@rainershea612/late-stage-capitalism-is-creating-a-brutal-new-kind-of-global-despotism-d7d3b8575251The power structure that now dominates the globe is a logical extension of the project for colonizing Africa, Oceania, and the Americas that the European imperialist powers began over five centuries ago. From the start of this project, it’s been a constant rule for those in the colonizing powers that one’s society is at war with a weaker enemy. The indigenous people, who have been portrayed as not capable of running things, have had to be brought under the colonial boot according to the ideology of imperial conquest. And in accordance with the global rise of capitalism that colonialism precipitated, the same dynamic of subjugation has existed between the poor and the rich. Throughout their efforts to defeat their enemies, the imperialist powers of the last millennium and the empires that came before them have constantly been fighting against adversaries that can’t be totally subdued, even after they’ve been greatly weakened by slavery and mass extermination. The ethnic and religious groups that have been subjugated by imperialism have virtually all been able to survive, and have continued their cultures and their collective will to find self-determination. So they’ve constantly posed a challenge to the power of imperialism even as imperialism has ruled supreme, much like the existence of the proletariat has constantly put the rule of the bourgeoisie into question. The same tension has ultimately existed during every other unjust hierarchy. To maintain their control over this constant threat from the oppressed, the ruling class in the age of imperialism has used unprecedentedly powerful tools of warfare against groups which have stood in their way. Covert CIA operations alone are estimated to have killed at least six million people. The U.S. has used vast bombing campaigns, starvation sanctions, and most recently drone warfare to kill tens of millions of people since World War II. These methods of genocide have been replicated to great extents by Israel during its war against the Palestinians, and by Saudi Arabia during its war against the Yemenis. This all is added onto the millions of deaths that occur annually because of the poverty that’s sustained by global capitalism, and to the frequent killings of poor people by the ever-deadlier police states throughout the capitalist world. Despite these methods of warfare, imperialism and corporate power continue to be challenged. American hegemony is declining amid frayings of alliances among the NATO powers, failures from the U.S. to carry out its foreign policy goals in countries like Syria, and the rise of Chinese influence. Massive protests have broken out in neoliberal Third World countries like Chile and Honduras, and worker struggles are intensifying in places like France. Those in the global underclass are fighting as hard as ever, and in places like the DPRK and Venezuela they’ve already gained dominance through proletarian democracy. A power struggle is still in motion. It’s in motion because of the contradictions of capitalism, which have become heightened during the era of capitalist imperialism. By subjecting entire nations to invasions, severe poverty, and apartheid, imperialism makes the oppressive dynamics of capitalism so pronounced that revolts from the colonized people become inevitable. Added onto the conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat that’s inherent to all capitalist societies, this self-destructive aspect of imperialism has led to vast decolonization movements and successful socialist revolutions throughout the last century. As the U.S. empire weakens, this liberation movement is naturally gathering strength. The recent resurgence of Third World revolutionary energy is present even in Bolivia, where strong socialist and indigenous strains threaten to overtake the fascist regime that’s been installed in the country. But there’s still a way that the bourgeoisie can remain dominant in an era after the fall of the U.S. empire, and even in an era after the climate has collapsed. This transition can be accomplished by making the means for wielding political and social power-such as steady access to electricity, the ability to use weaponry, and reliable nourishment and shelter-available only to the rich. In the developed world, capitalism has sustained itself by letting most of the population share in the technological and economic gains that the system creates, however unequally they’re distributed. The United States and most other core imperialist nations have never experienced a socialist revolution because conditions for the broad masses haven’t deteriorated enough to provoke an effective class uprising. Many bourgeois leaders have deliberately tried to maintain this balance by allowing the welfare state to be expanded, which has deterred the proletariat from pursuing revolution. But faced with the collapse of the climate, the ruling class has overwhelmingly decided to keep making society ever more unequal instead of reducing inequality. Even in more progressive capitalist countries like Iceland, the prevailing decision within the political establishment has been to continue neoliberalism and not try to alleviate the wealth gap. Austerity has increased throughout almost the entire capitalist world since the 2008 financial crisis, wages have kept falling, and the power of the big banks and corporations is greater than ever. And the collapse of the climate hasn’t driven capitalist governments to resist corporate power, it’s caused there to be more privatization of services and more capitalist efforts to profit from crises. 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and 2017’s Hurricane Irma both caused there to be a wave of privatizations in the impacted areas, and the U.S. army and private military contractors used both disasters to increase the militarization of society. A recurring part of these responses to climate change has been an effort to more clearly define boundaries between the wealthy areas and the poorer areas. The lines between the wealthy areas (called the green zones) and the poor areas (called the red zones) was how the U.S. decided to distribute resources in Iraq during its post-invasion efforts to reconstruct the country. The green zone/red zone dichotomy, despite not usually being defined with such explicit language, is being increasingly applied to how resources are distributed around the globe. The homes and neighborhoods of the rich are protected from the threats of climate change-like was the case during 2018’s California fires-while poor communities are the ones that suffer. There’s a political purpose behind this environmentally created inequality, one that’s understood by the billionaires who’ve prepared for a later stage of the climate crisis by creating luxury survival compounds for themselves. It’s to deprive those outside the wealthy enclaves of the resources that they’ll need to survive, or at least to live with modern comforts, as the climate deteriorates. The logical conclusion of climate apartheid, as this 21st century class divide has been called, is a new kind of despotism that’s emerging while capitalism collapses. In a world that’s no longer climatically stable, and where resources have become scarce, the capitalist class will only be able to maintain their status and lifestyle by concentrating wealth at the very top. In other words, by replacing capitalism with a nakedly oppressive system that has virtually no social mobility. Now that capitalism has reached the long-anticipated point where it consumes too much of nature to be able to sustain itself, the elites are creating a new system which is much more centralized and tightly controlled than the one that preceded it. Since the Industrial Revolution, bourgeois societies have typically been liberal, with freedom of expression usually being legal and the proletariat being able to heavily consume and make a living when the economy was doing well. But now democracy is deteriorating around the capitalist world, and the neoliberal economies are in a perpetual state of decline that makes economic participation harder for the proletariat. Whereas capitalist markets overall grew massively in the 20th century, in the 21st century they’ve been shrinking. Trade and economic growth are slowing down, and the post-recession economic expansion has been dependent on financial bubbles and beneficial mainly for those in the upper strata. In the U.S., unemployment and underemployment still haven’t recovered from their pre-recession levels, and the global economy becomes more unequal every year. The next financial crash will create a situation far worse, one that’s exacerbated by the decline of the dollar and by the irreversible economic damage of climate change. All of these destabilizing factors within capitalist markets are naturally causing capitalist political systems to become less free, and capitalist economies to be more controlled by the state and its partnered corporate monopolies. Economic and climatic disruptions have caused a global rise in reactionary politics and a subsequent decline in democracy throughout much of the capitalist world. And the 2008 crash has caused the U.S. government to transfer many trillions of dollars to the biggest banks, enabling these private financial institutions to become larger than ever. Similar trends will follow as the collapse of capitalism continues. Power, both political and economic, will become consolidated as the system eats itself. The capitalist class will remain capitalists in the traditional sense only when they’re profiting in some way from the world’s disasters, or when they manage to profit from the labor of the few proletarians who manage to get jobs within the isolated societies of the rich. Otherwise they won’t exploit the proletariat nearly to the extent that they used to, because society won’t even be functional enough for labor and commerce to be robust. Most of the people in the world will be driven into poverty, become climate refugees, or simply die off, leaving the bourgeoisie with no choice but to shrink their business operations and retreat to their green zones. In such a situation, the ruling class will still be the dominant group, and they could expand their power in new areas. They could pursue capitalist development in eventually hospitable places like Greenland and Antarctica, they could colonize Mars, and they could even build cities that float on the ocean. But they’ll still need to stop the world’s underclass from overthrowing them, which will be harder than ever after the climate and economy have collapsed. Whether the bourgeoisie can retain its dominance amid the riots, vast influxes of refugees, and massive organized rebellions will depend on whether the bourgeoisie or the proletariat gain the upper hand over political and military power. The military will be such an important factor because like has been the case in most situations of potential revolution, the group with the military and police on its side will be the group that wins. And unless much of the global proletariat becomes well armed, like the ones in India’s Maoist militias have, this importance of who controls the state’s military forces will continue to apply. In this situation of an overwhelmingly unarmed global proletariat, the proletariat’s only current route for taking control of the militaries of the capitalist governments is to overwhelm these governments through mass civil disobedience. The proletariat has succeeded in this goal many times since the proletariat first achieved it during the Russian revolution. It most recently succeeded when mass strikes overthrew Sudan’s U.S.-backed dictatorship in April 2019. But this will need to happen in dozens of other places before the proletariat can truly tip the balance of global power in their favor. And the bourgeoisie is militarily safeguarding capitalist influence from the recent protests while regaining lost bourgeois territory in other areas. The armies and militarized police in France, Chile and the other besieged capitalist countries have so far used violent repression to stop protesters from taking control of the state apparatus. And last month’s U.S.-created coup in Bolivia, which was carried out by fascist paramilitary leaders and has been solidified through brutal repression, has restored bourgeois control over the country. The bourgeoisie will continue to use these kinds of tools to try to fortify and gain territory, whether this will involve a paramilitary crackdown within the United States, a military coup in Mexico, or an invasion of socialist Venezuela. And in the territories that they manage to control, the bourgeoisie will intensify policing and surveillance to extreme levels. In the U.S., which already has highly militarized police and a thorough digital state surveillance system, border security managers are using a private Israeli security firm to build a wall of total surveillance along the southern border. In the communities around the firm’s surveillance towers, people aren’t able to evade being directly watched. The firm plans to ultimately expand this intensely monitored zone to the entire perimeter of the country. This is one facet of the mass surveillance, censorship, and police state aspects that are being established around the capitalist world. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels recognized, the capitalist society that emerged from the old feudalist society did not abolish the ancient class antagonisms. It introduced new forms of oppression and new kinds of struggles between classes, ones that have mainly revolved around wage disputes and workplace rights. The new system that’s emerging amid late-stage capitalism is one which centers around a more severe type of class disparity than the one between employers and workers, which is the disparity between dictators and peasants. The U.S.-installed neoliberal regimes in Iraq and Honduras, which have kept their populations largely poor and unemployed while making their societies heavily militarized, are early examples of what will become the prevailing governing model. And always throughout this process of social collapse, there’s going to be an effort from the bourgeoisie to suppress or exterminate the sections of humanity which exist outside the green zones. When the victims of the crises in Iraq, Honduras, and elsewhere have fled to the core imperialist nations, these nations have responded by putting them in inhumane camps, deporting them back to the dangerous areas, and attacking them with chemical weapons. When people have been driven to homelessness by decades of neoliberal economic deterioration, the U.S. government has responded by making it easier for the homeless to be arrested. There’s an increasing drive to rid the world of the people whose presence interferes with the continued functioning of the class hierarchy, to cut away the excess within the red zones so that those in the green zones can make business continue. Because in the end, the green zones are the only ones that matter. In doing all of this, the bourgeoisie aims to finally end class antagonisms, to make themselves the undisputed power players in a world where those in the underclass are killed off or brought under control. At least this is how the bourgeoisie ideally hopes that events will unfold. Despite their best efforts, the class struggle isn’t going away any time soon, and there are still countless opportunities for history to be brought in a different direction. The world’s peasants and workers must fight back before it’s too late.
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Post by Admin on Aug 29, 2020 21:10:39 GMT
Why ‘Responsible’ Capitalism Is Not Enough By Nicole Aschoff In an era of runaway inequality and environmental destruction, corporate giants are rebranding as socially-conscious – but these problems are caused by the same system that makes them rich. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/why-responsible-capitalism-is-not-enoughJohn Mackey spent his formative years trying to divine the purpose of his life. After much soul-searching and lots of reading, he made an important decision: come hell or high water “he would follow his heart wherever it led him.” In 1980 his heart has led him to create and run Whole Foods Market — “a store that sells healthy food to people and provides good jobs.” More recently, Mackey has embarked on a grander mission: “to liberate the extraordinary power of business and capitalism to create a world in which all people live lives full of prosperity, love, and creativity — a world of compassion, freedom, and prosperity.” Mackey drives his early model Prius to work every day on a mission: he wants the planet to eat better, and he wants to teach other entrepreneurs the secrets of “conscious capitalism.” He believes that if businesspeople, and society more broadly, realise the incredible power of “conscious” businesses to create value and heal the planet, we can reverse the missteps of the past few decades. Whole Foods, Mackey believes, can create an “operating system” that is “in harmony with the fundamentals of human nature” and the planet. For the past thirty years companies have been told that their only social responsibility is to make a profit. In this ideological context, recent moves by mega-corporations like Kraft, Walmart, McDonald’s, Hewlett-Packard, Nordstrom, Nestlé, IKEA, Southwest Airlines, Zappos, and many more to scrutinise their supply chains and speed their adoption of sustainable practices is surprising and indicates growing concerns about the current global model of extraction, production, distribution, and consumption. In 1972 researchers at MIT published their eye-opening study The Limits to Growth. The project used computer simulations to demonstrate the potentially devastating impact of exponential capitalist growth in a closed system with finite resources. Examining growth trends in human population, industrialisation, pollution, and resource depletion, the report’s authors suggested possible scenarios of “overshoot and collapse” in the global system by the middle of the twenty-first century. In the decades since, a shared global consciousness has emerged that humans are destroying the planet. Some scientists have even started referring to the time since the rise of industrial capitalism as the Anthropocene era, arguing that humans are altering the planet in ways similar to major geological events in the past. Mackey agrees that the destructive actions of big corporations obsessed with the bottom line have damaged the environment, but he vehemently denies that the problem is capitalism. Mackey argues that true capitalism, or free-enterprise capitalism (free markets + free people), is a unique, inherently virtuous system that, properly harnessed, can heal the planet. Sure, companies have been misbehaving recently, but before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, Mackey implores us to remember that most of the wonderful things we have in the world, like cars, computers, antibiotics, and the Internet, are a product of free markets, not “government edict.” The “wondrous technologies that have shrunk time and distance” and freed us from “mindless drudgery” have become possible only because of free market capitalism — “unquestionably the greatest system for innovation and social cooperation that has ever existed.” Instead of blaming capitalism for inequality and environmental degradation, Mackey suggests that we should look at the actions of governments. Departing from the dominant idea that states have retreated from the market over the past three decades, Mackey argues states have become more interventionist than ever, and that in the process they have “fostered a mutant form of capitalism called crony capitalism” that is to blame for many of the problems societies face today. Mackey does not see crony capitalism as “real” capitalism. Instead it is a product of big government in which politicians trying to preserve their cushy jobs develop symbiotic, parasitic relationships with businesspeople too lazy or unimaginative to compete successfully in the marketplace. In Mackey’s story, crony capitalism has been exacerbated by the rising power of the financial sector and shareholder value ideology — the idea that firms are nothing more than a stream of assets designed to maximise profits for shareholders. Mackey argues that this obsession with greed and profits has “robbed most businesses of their ability to engage and connect with people” and has created “long-term systemic problems” that destroy profitability and that can be deeply damaging to people and to the planet. Instead of trying to get a handout from the government or make a quick buck on the stock market, Mackey says that companies need to roll up their sleeves and rethink how to run a business. The first thing they need to do is to realise that a business is a “social system,” not a hierarchy. Everyone matters. The free-market story is appealing. It references values like freedom, creativity, and beauty and counterposes itself against images of drudgery, dictatorship, and starvation. But the history of markets (and the firms that operate within them) is not a nature story. Today, the dominant discourse governing discussion of markets, states, and companies is neoliberalism, and Mackey’s free-market business model and historical narrative fit neatly within this framework. In this vision, the economic sphere is “an autonomous, self-adjusting, and self-regulated system that [can] achieve a natural equilibrium spontaneously and produce increased wealth.” But the free-market historical narrative lacks empirical weight. As economic historian Karl Polanyi argued decades ago, capitalist markets are a product of state engineering, not nature. The history of industrial development in the United States, often considered the epicentre of free markets, demonstrates the political nature of markets. The history of market formation in the US reveals an industrial structure supplied by goods and capital extracted from slave labour and facilitated through a state-sponsored, genocidal land grab. Far-reaching government legislation protected domestic markets and infant industries from external competition, and federal and state governments played a central role in the development of physical infrastructure (canals, railways, telegraphy) and the creation of huge bodies of agricultural and industrial knowledge — all essential elements in the genesis of American industrial capitalism. At the same time, society’s greatest inventions and innovations of the past two hundred years — rockets to the moon, penicillin, computers, the internet — were not bestowed upon us by lone entrepreneurs and firms operating in free markets under conditions of healthy competition. They were the work of institutions: CERN and the Department of Defense created the internet, while Bell Labs — a subdivision of AT&T, freed from market competition by federally granted monopoly rights — generated transistors, radar, information theory, “quality control,” and dozens of other innovations central to our epoch. Nearly every advance in science, technology, and mathematics emerged from people working together at universities supported by government funding. Creativity and innovation come from many places. Companies produce influential innovations, but so do other institutions that operate outside the confines of the profit motive, competitive markets, and the bottom line. As Cambridge professor of economics Ha-Joon Chang argues, this is neither theoretical quibbling nor simply a quest for historical “truth.” Instead, getting the historical narrative right is important because the stories we tell “deeply affect the very way in which we understand the nature and the development of the market, as well as its interrelationship with the state and other institutions.” Designating the market as natural and the state as unnatural is a convenient fiction for those wedded to the status quo. It makes the current distribution of power, wealth, and resources seem natural and thus inevitable and uncontestable. But of course this isn’t true. States shape, sustain, and often create, markets, including neoliberal markets. The complexion of those markets depends on the balance of class forces at any given point in time. Capitalist markets, and the inequality and degradation they engender, are a political creation not a product of nature. Nature and society (and states and markets) are inseparable — simultaneously produced by humans through ideological, political, and economic processes. Understanding this enables us to challenge the dominant idea of natural, free markets and the emancipatory potential of the firm promised by Mackey. Fine, you might say. Free markets don’t exist and other institutions like states clearly matter. But how are these other institutions going to stop global warming and rainforest destruction and species extinction? States, aside from the big players, appear weaker than ever (with less autonomy, power, authority), and their ability to tell corporations what to do is limited by their need for economic development and their membership in international bodies like the World Trade Organisation that explicitly prohibit most environmental restrictions. On the flip side, transnational corporations are stronger than ever. One giant company, like Unilever or Walmart, affects millions of people around the world every day through its global supply chains. Free markets don’t exist, but maybe corporations are still the best, most sensible, way to heal the planet. They have reach, influence, and an unrivaled ability to coordinate action quickly. In Mackey’s story an enlightened corporation with a positive mission that honours all its stakeholders can heal the planet. He says that a company can create a virtuous cycle of production and consumption that will stand the test of time if it treats its suppliers, its workers, and its community and the environment right. “Conscious capitalism,” while attractive in some respects, is not a solution to the environmental and social degradation that accompanies the system of for-profit production. The “coercive laws of competition” are inescapable in capitalism, which means that conscious business philosophies will be short-lived. More importantly, even sustainable production in a for-profit system will consume and destroy the planet’s resources. Sustainable business practices are designed to make global production easier and more profitable for companies in an increasingly competitive global environment. While they make consumers feel good and improve efficiency and waste at the unit level, eco-practices don’t slow down production and consumption at the systemic level. They speed up these processes, devouring resources at an ever-expanding rate. The widespread popularity of ethical consumption and lifestyle politics is a clear indication that people care about the environment and don’t want to destroy the planet. But the firm can’t be the driver of a radical project to reduce humanity’s ecological footprint. Firms are not democratic institutions, and they cannot escape the imperatives of capitalism. When consumers and environmental NGOs channel their desire for environmental justice through the firm, their desires get absorbed into business strategies for growth and expansion. By focusing on the firm, we legitimate its centrality and the entire for-profit production architecture. Society must decide what kind of world it wants to live in, and these decisions must be made through democratic structures and processes. Buying better things is not a substitute for the hard political choices that societies need to make about limiting consumption and resource use, and finding a replacement for the psychological crutch of consumerism. States seem toothless in the face of environmental degradation, but they are not inherently weak. They simply represent the existing balance of class forces. If we don’t want to live in an environmental wasteland, we must build up democratic institutions to organise production and consumption around the needs of humans, not the needs of capital.
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