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Capitalism

COVID19 Corruption: Wealthy And Well Connected Get Rich While People Suffer

July 12, 2020 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance. , , , ,
While corrupt elected officials and elites feed at the public trough, the economic collapse is hitting people in the United States hard. According to the newly released Bureau of Labor Statistics figures 47.2 percent of working-age people are without work and businesses are finding it impossible to pay their rent or keep their employees. The basic ability to feed children is in crisis, as nearly 14 million children in the United States went hungry in June, an increase of 10 million since 2018, and nearly three times the number of children who went hungry during the Great Recession, according to an analysis of Census data, Newsweek summarizes: "Nearly half of U.S. households' incomes have declined during the pandemic, with survey data showing both low-and high-income households being affected at about the same rate.

COVID-19 Exposes The Weakness Of Capitalism

July 11, 2020 Richard D. Wolff,  Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. , , ,
A cornerstone of orthodox economics is the idea that capitalists' decisions about investing and producing are inherently "efficient." This means that capitalists select among all alternative courses of action those whose costs are minimal and whose benefits are maximal. Keeping costs to the lowest possible level while producing goods and services that yield the most possible revenue is what maximizes profit, the difference between costs and revenues. Capitalism, we are told, is the best system because it drives all those in charge of production (the owners and top executives of enterprises) to maximize profits and thus economic efficiency. Capitalists get profits, and the rest of us benefit from the efficiency of production within a capitalist system.

The State And White Supremacy

July 9, 2020 Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
As an ongoing phenomenon, the analysis of what is referred to as the George Floyd, or now the “Black Lives Matter” demos, must be necessarily tentative. It has been instructive to observe how the energy and passion of the spontaneous militant response to the murder of George Floyd went from a movement that saw the burning of a police station transformed into one in which, according to Martin Schoots-McAlpine , the most militant demand was to make “minor amendments to municipal budgets.” I will resist the temptation of attempting to address all the components and will only focus on one central element in this short essay. That element is the nature and role of the state — an element that has almost disappeared from liberal/left discourse and analysis but is essential for understanding the current political moment.    

Pandemic Capitalism: Pervasive Inequality Is A Chosen Catastrophe

July 8, 2020 By Chris Oestereich, Open Democracy. , , ,
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.”

Why Is China Painted As ‘Capitalist’ By Western Media

July 7, 2020 Andre Vltchek, Popular Resistance. , , ,
To call China ‘capitalist’ is to smear China. It is as if to say: “Chinese people are precisely like us. China is doing to the world the same injustice, committing the same crimes as we have been doing for 500+ years.” Western, but particularly the British and the U.S. demagogy, have managed to reach ‘heights’ of nothing lesser than deadly perfection. They already conditioned billions of brains, in all corners of the world, forced them into the uniformed, servile way of thinking. All this is not just propaganda anymore; it is the true art of indoctrination. It hardly ever misses its target. And even if it fails to convince some strong individuals completely, it always leaves a mark on the psyche of even those who are struggling to be different and ‘independent.’ In short: Western propaganda is perfect. It is deadly. Until now, it is bulletproof.

Protest And Power

July 4, 2020 Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
The last thing the Black Misleadership Class wants is a Black power-seeking movement. Wedded as they are to a token “place” in the capitalist spoils system, these misleaders have shown remarkable loyalty to their bosses in the Democratic Party and, until recently, to the police that kills their constituents at will. Despite decades of Black grassroots warnings against the growing militarization of the U.S. police, in 2014 the Congressional Black Caucus voted 32 to 8 to continue the infamous Pentagon 1033 program that funneled billions of dollars in weapons and gear to local police departments. (A program that increased 24-fold under the First Black President, Barack Obama.) The “Black Lives Matter” movement was born only months later but had virtually no effect on the Black Caucus’s slavish politics. The Black Misleadership Class was impervious to pressures from within the Black community and responsive only to its handlers in the Democratic Party.

Capitalism – The Cause Of COVID-19 Deaths

June 29, 2020 Sara Flounders, Workers.org. , , ,
Does the COVID-19 virus operate differently in capitalist countries than in socialist countries? Based on a comparison of global numbers of fatalities, COVID-19 seems to appear in a more virulent form in capitalist countries. But  is this even possible? The impact of COVID-19 in capitalist countries is more than 20 to 50 times worse than in socialist countries or in countries with high levels of social mobilization. The longer and wider this virus spreads, the clearer this political difference becomes. By every possible measure of COVID and of deaths due to a host of many other neglected sicknesses, it is clear that the capitalist profit system itself is the greatest danger to people’s health and well-being.

How Racism Is An Essential Tool For Maintaining The Capitalist Order

June 26, 2020 Richard D. Wolff,  Economy for All.   , , , ,
Capitalism’s cyclical crises could potentially turn their victims against it and make them receptive to the system’s critics. This would more likely happen if everyone in the society were roughly equally vulnerable to cyclical downturns. Most employees would then rightly worry that their jobs would be lost in the next crash. They would periodically face income losses, interrupted educations, lost homes, and so on. Whatever relief employees felt if neighbors, rather than themselves, got fired, they would know that it might well be their turn in the next cycle. The losses, insecurities, and anxieties produced by such a capitalism would long ago have turned employees against it and provoked transition to a different system. U.S. capitalism solved its instability problem by making cyclical downturns afflict chiefly a minority subpart of the whole working class.

CHOP And The Juneteenth Longshore Strike

June 25, 2020 Socialist Revolution. , , ,
On June 19, the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU), a militant union of 42,000 members, shut down 29 ports along the West Coast of the United States and Canada, as workers withheld their labor for 8 hours. The strike was organized to demonstrate the labor movement’s solidarity with black lives after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and held on the Juneteenth anniversary of the emancipation of the last chattel slaves in the US in 1865. As part of the action, a mass demonstration marched through Oakland’s port and downtown, with several thousand in attendance. Boots Riley, a communist rapper and filmmaker, gave a militant speech to the crowd, emphasizing the critical importance of strikes in furthering the movement.

Capitalist Catastrophism

June 22, 2020 Kai Heron, ROAR Magazine. , , ,
We are not really in capitalist realism anymore, that we have in fact been leaving it for quite some time and that the signs of what might replace it in our pandemic-ridden and rapidly warming world are increasingly apparent. Unless there is a radical break from capitalism — a revolution — what will supplant capitalist realism is not the ability to imagine and fight for a post-capitalist future as Mason, Uetricht and Milburn had hoped, but something more ambiguous and perhaps ultimately worse. I call this something worse “capitalist catastrophism.” Capitalist catastrophism is what happens when capitalist realism begins to fray at the edges. It describes a situation in which capitalism can no longer determine what it means to be “realistic,” not because of the force of movements assembled against it but because capital’s self-undermining and ecologically destructive dynamics have outstripped capitalism’s powers to control them.

Police Violence And Racism Have Always Been Tools Of Capitalism

June 21, 2020 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance. , , , ,
The system-wide challenges the United States faces with policing are entrenched and deeply rooted. When the historical and current practices of police are examined, it is evident police have been designed to uphold the status quo including racial injustice and class inequality. Whenever political movements develop to respond to racial and class unfairness, the police have undermined their politically-protected constitutional rights. Police have used infiltration, surveillance, and violence against political movements seeking to end injustices throughout the history of the nation. It is the deeply embedded nature of these injustices and the structural problems in policing that are leading more people to conclude police must be completely transformed, if not abolished.

How Corporations Bankroll US Police Foundations

June 20, 2020 Gin Armstrong and Derek Seidman, Eyes on the Ties. , , ,
As calls to defund the police gain traction, bloated police budgets are coming under scrutiny for siphoning public resources away from black and brown communities. While police budgets are typically public documents that must be approved by elected officials, there are other institutions in place with the sole purpose of funneling even more resources toward law enforcement.  Police foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement with little public oversight. Annual fundraising events and parties like the St. Paul Police Foundation’s “Blue Nite Gala” and the Chicago Police Foundation’s “True Blue” event are huge moneymakers.

Building Power To Win Is The Revolutionary Approach To Bourgeois Electoralism

June 19, 2020 Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
The great African revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, reminded us that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolution.  His reminder was not a call for abstract theorizing, quite the contrary. What he meant was that one cannot  advance in practice unless that practice is guided by the most advanced understanding of the material and ideological conditions that revolutionary forces face.  Over the next two days we will ground ourselves in our particular realities as they relate to our strategic and tactical engagement with bourgeois electoral system in the United States.   Let’s begin:  The ongoing and current capitalist crisis has created the most serious crisis of legitimacy since the collapse of the capitalist economy during the years referred to as the Great Depression. 

COVID-19: A Polygraph For These Times

June 18, 2020 Pasqualina Curcio, Ultimas Noticias. , , ,
Like a lie detector, COVID-19 has made obvious at least two phenomena that have been taking place already over the past few years: the decline of the U.S. empire and the failure of capitalism. For a number of years now, the U.S. has been losing this super-power status, its economy has lost range, and the dollar has hit the skids.  Its international reserves do not cover even 2% of the exorbitant external debt and it is not sufficient for even 2 months of imports (hence the desperation to re-open the economy in the midst of the pandemic.)  for decades, the U.S. has imported more than it has exported,  and its commercial dependence on China is ever increasing.  The U.S. does not have the gold to back up its currency, and, to cap it off, has run out of petroleum reserves quite a while ago. COVID-19 has not only pointed out the economic weakness of the U.S.,  shown in the rude and arrogant attitude of the government in the midst of the pandemic, it has also served as a catalyst of world reorganization that has been years in the making.

What Would The Black Panthers Think Of Black Lives Matter?

June 18, 2020 Paul Street, Truthdig. , , ,
The U.S. ruling class, whose capitalist system is the historical midwife of modern racism, is not threatened by the racialist and black-capitalist BLM. But just to make sure that black anger is kept within safe political boundaries, a critical, cash-rich arm of concentrated wealth agreed last year to lavishly fund the group and a significant number of black middle class-led policy and advocacy groups coming in under its rubric. In August 2016, when I first heard that BLM had scored $100 million from the Ford Foundation and other elite philanthro-capitalists (including the Hill-Snowden Foundation, the NoVo Foundation, Solidaire, JPMorgan Chase and the Kellogg Foundation), I wrote it off as “fake news” from the right-wing noise machine. But the story checked out. The remarkable grant—a vast sum of money off the charts of normal foundation giving—was a matter of public record. Fred Hampton said "We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism."
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