Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan Shaffer. Image by Duncan […]
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People in Global South countries have agency. They can and do understand the realities of their material conditions. Apparently it is necessary to write the preceding two sentences.
You, dear reader, may be wondering why I have written such obvious statements. Don’t people everywhere possess agency, the ability to understand and act upon the political, cultural and social conditions of their community, nation and country? Yes of course they do. So why write the obvious? Because it appears that there are those, sadly partisans of the Left, that don’t believe the peoples of the Global South have agency.
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Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier Miranda. Image by Javier […]
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Image by Alexander Mils. As has long been the case, the U.S. health care system is by far the world’s most expensive while providing the worst results among the world’s advanced capitalist countries. And that expense continues to get larger and more unaffordable. Just how large is the cost of private profit in health care? […]
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Why don’t we have a maximum wage? Asking that question is another way of asking why some people can rake in millions while others struggle to earn enough to eat. A maximum wage might be one way to tamp down some of the massive inequality that exists around the world. The political conditions for a […]
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Image by Planet Volumes.
Although any country that challenges domination by United States corporate or military power will inevitably be the target of a sustained demonization campaign, the lies consistently issued in a torrent against Venezuela are beyond the usual level of invective. Venezuela is the most lied-about country in the corporate press of the Global North, especially in U.S. corporate media outlets.
That Venezuela has sought to align its economy to benefit its own people, instituting an impressive array of social services, health programs and political structures to facilitate grassroots participation, has drawn the consistent ire of U.S. authorities. An unrelenting cascade of lies is necessary to generate public support for the unrelenting campaign targeting the Bolivarian Revolution.
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Image by Hennie Stander.
We are endlessly and repetitively treated to sermons on the wonders of capitalism. Everybody will be taken care of, with the proviso that you are willing to work. As I have had frequent cause to note, that a line has to be furiously propagated across every channel speaks to a lack of concrete reality. And as more people, especially young people, see that they have declining possibilities, more questioning inevitably arises.
The only thing worse in capitalism to having a job, however unpleasant, is not having a job. Unemployment benefits are barely at starvation rates and end all too soon. Naturally, that is worse in the United States than most other advanced capitalist countries of the Global North. Six months is the limit set at a rate well less than half of what your wages were in the job you just lost. And given that six months is the average time necessary to secure new employment, that means around half of those collecting unemployment insurance will likely have a spell of no income at all.
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Image by Dan Cristian Pădureț.
You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. That should be a commonplace idea. And that inevitably means facing up to the necessity of putting an end to capitalism in favor of an economic system of rationality, sustainability and equity for all the world’s peoples.
It can’t be said too many times that the concept of “green capitalism” is a chimera. Unfortunately, belief in that chimera is not limited to the world’s center-left political parties; it extends to the world’s Green parties. Various “Green New Deal” programs have been floated in recent years, generally revolving around a massive buildout of renewable-energy infrastructure and strengthening the social safety net. On their own, there is no rational argument that such programs, should they materialize, would not provide some benefits. But how transformative are such programs?
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Image by Marcel Strauß.
As always when a representative of the right wing tells you he or she is campaigning to bring “freedom,” be afraid. Very afraid. For “freedom” in these cases means freedom for the richest financiers and industrialists to do whatever they want.
For them, “Freedom” is for capital, not for human beings without capital to invest. Today’s exhibit is the offensive against working people that is taking place in Argentina, where the new extreme right president, Javier Milei, is determined to see how far capitalist ideology can be pushed. So far, Argentines have pushed back but Milei, cheered on by domestic and international big business leaders, is nothing if not determined to ram through his austerity packages. And he has shown no inclination to allow mere democracy to stand in his way.
Nonetheless, there is no surprise here. President Milei ran on a program of extreme austerity, brandishing a chainsaw at his election rallies. Unfortunately, enough Argentines bought his siren songs, or were desperate enough to try anything given the country’s punishing inflation, to elect him, ending a one-term period in executive office by the ordinarily dominant Peronists. Alas, doing something new for the sake of doing something new, when it is aimed at you, rarely works. And here there is actually nothing new. President Milei simply promoted standard hard right ideology, albeit promoting it with unusual vigor. Snake oil is snake oil, as Argentine working people are already finding out.
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One of the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States has allowed an decades-long ethnic cleansing to morph into a genocide, a horror that could be stopped with one phone call; has escalated the drilling of oil and gas despite the existential threat of global warming; forced railroad workers to swallow a bad contract by breaking their strike; and spent his Senate career as an errand boy for banks. And that’s the lesser evil!
Joe Biden really is the lesser evil in this dismal race for the White House, and that such an office holder is easily not the worst candidate is surely sufficient to illustrate the decline of the world’s still extraordinarily dangerous superpower. Out of more than 300 million people, this is the best the country can do? Given the quite understandable reluctance (to put it mildly) for the types of folks who are reading these words to contemplate voting either for President Biden or Donald Trump, what do we do when the lesser evil is so evil that he has the sobriquet “Genocide” attached to his name?
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Image by Jon Tyson.
Who decided we should give all our money to landlords? Did you vote for that? I didn’t. You didn’t, either. And if you have thoughts of leaving renting behind to buy, the costs of mortgages are, not surprisingly, rising dramatically as well.
As far as I know, no landlord has been recorded as holding a literal gun to the head of tenants to sign a lease. But then there is no need for them to do so, as “market forces” do the work for them. At bottom, the problem is that housing is a capitalist market commodity. As long as housing remains a commodity, housing costs will continue to become ever more unaffordable. To put this in other words: As long as housing is not a human right, but instead something that has to be competed for and owned by a small number of people, the holders of the good (housing) will take advantage and jack up prices as high as possible.
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Image by Li-An Lim.
It’s not true that humanity is committing suicide, as exemplified by the COP28 farce of a climate summit. The world’s industrialists and financiers are committing humanity to ecocide. More than ever, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Death by capitalism. That phrase has a certain catchy feeling to it. But it’s no joke, is it? No, no joke at all.
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Image by Etienne Girardet.
If capitalism is such a natural outcome of human nature, why were systematic violence and draconian laws necessary to establish it? And if greed is the primary motivation for human beings, how could the vast majority of human existence have been in hunter-gatherer societies in which cooperation was the most valuable behavior?
Cheerleaders for capitalism — who generate endless arguments that greed is not only good but the dominant human motivation — tend to not dwell on the origination of the system, either implying it has always been with us or that it is the “natural” result of development. Critics of capitalism, interestingly, seem much more interested in the system’s origins than are its boosters. Perhaps the bloody history of how capitalism slowly supplanted feudalism in northwest Europe, and then spread through slavery, conquest, colonialism and routine inflictions of brute force makes for a less than appealing picture. It is not for nothing that Marx wrote, “If money … ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
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Conditions for working people continue to get worse. The right to strike, or to join a union, is denied by increasing numbers of the world’s governments. The 2023 Global Rights Index report issued by the International Trade Union Confederation makes for grim reading, as has consistently been the case for the decade that the ITUC has issued its yearly reports.
Once again, there is no country on Earth that fully protects workers’ rights, the Global Rights Index report informs us. Nothing new here, as this was the case in the 2022 report, and all the reports before that. Neoliberalism does not have a human face.
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James N. Wallace – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress
The 50th anniversary of the first 9/11 — the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government headed by Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende — is this month. Chilean working people made enormous advances during the first year of the Allende government, formally a multiparty coalition known as Popular Unity, before Chilean capitalists, U.S. corporate interests firmly backed by the Nixon administration and right-wing elements in both countries were able to regroup and begin a heavy-handed sabotage campaign waged with increasing vehemence. In this excerpt from What Do We Need Bosses For?: Toward Economic Democracy, some of those first-year successes are recounted but the bourgeois forces are already beginning their efforts to obstruct and ultimately reverse all advancement.
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Image by Scott Goodwil.
Market fundamentalists would have us believe that if only we left the provisioning of all human needs to the tender mercies of unregulated markets, a cornucopia of fabulous wealth would trickle down to all. A powerful fire hose of propaganda ceaselessly proclaims this, amply funded by those whose interest lie in accumulating unlimited wealth without regard to social or environmental harm.
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Image by Jon Tyson.
It can happen here. “Here” being any country in which capitalism rules. When does a bourgeois formal democracy tip over into fascism? That is a question that needs an answer in many places, certainly not excepting the United States, which has already experienced a self-coup attempt with unmistakable fascist overtones.
We’re referencing Donald Trump’s attempt at a self-coup, to use the Latin American phrase, in January 2021. Many people, even on the Left, laugh at that day’s events, pointing out that the would-be putsch had no chance of success. It did have no chance of success. That does not mean it should be cavalierly dismissed; on the contrary, it should be taken with utmost seriousness. Hitler’s beer hall putsch of 1923 had no chance of success, either, and his violent movement remained on the lunatic fringe for several more years. But we know how German history would turn out.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.
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When we conceptualize the power that maintains capitalism, violence and ideology readily come to mind. Despite the vast inequality, grotesque exploitation, contempt for life and the environment, chronic instability and the rebellions that repeatedly arise and sometimes take power, capitalism seems firmer in the saddle than ever, spreading its suffocating tentacles to virtually every place on Earth.
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Image by Markus Krisetya.
Every so often, the World Bank puts out a paper that calls for better social protection or at least a somewhat better deal for working people. The public relations people there evidently believe we have very short memories.
No, dear reader, the World Bank has not changed its function, nor have elephants begun to fly. Without any hint of irony, the World Bank’s latest attempt at selective amnesia is what it calls its “Social Protection and Jobs” strategy, in which it purports to advocate that the world’s national governments “greatly expand effective coverage of social protection programs” and “significantly increase the scale and quality of economic inclusion and labor market programs.” Hilariously, the World Bank titles its 136-page report fleshing out this strategy “Charting a Course Towards Universal Social Protection: Resilience, Equity, and Opportunity for All.”
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Image by Xavier Balderas Cejudo.
This has become, sadly, a yearly ritual by now. The world’s governments gather together to discuss what should be done about global warming, and finish their time together by issuing statements of concern while doing little concrete to actually solve the problem. And so it is with COP27.
The 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to use the formal name for COP27, ended with what has the appearance of a breakthrough: An agreement on the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund for Global South countries severely affected by weather and environmental disasters triggered by global warming, and for which they bear almost no responsibility. This finally fulfills a pledge made at the 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen.
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Image by Hennie Stander.
If there is one message that seemed to surface through last month’s crucial meetings of the Communist Party of China it is continuity. The inference that might best be taken is no significant change from the path on which the party has led China in recent years should be expected.
That path, despite the oft-used slogan “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” has been a restructuring of the economy toward capitalism, albeit a gradual entry on Chinese terms and keeping the “commanding heights” of the economy in state hands. If we attempt to grasp the meaning of the communiqués and reports issued surrounding the party’s 20th National Congress, it would be better to observe through a holistic lens rather than fixating on personalities.
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Image by Markus Spiske.
There is no respite from class warfare. Past annual Global Rights Index reports issued by the International Trade Union Confederation have invariably shown that there is no country on Earth that fully protects workers’ rights and the 2022 edition is not only not an exception but finds that repression of labor organizing is increasing.
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Image by Alexander Grey.
The size of the financial industry bears no relation to the economy. Self-mythological panegyrics aside, the finance industry confiscates money; it doesn’t create it. How much? Get out your calculators, and maybe you’ll have to find a way to add a couple of digits to what your screen can hold.
Perhaps the total amount of money extracted by financiers (or, more to the point, speculators) is not quite as large as Douglas Adams’ description of space in the, yes, increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers’ Trilogy, as “Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.” But it’s close.
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Image by Lerone Pieters.
It is bewildering to see the Russia/Ukraine war be reduced to a cheering contest, as if a football game were being watched. For those along much of the political spectrum, this cheering for “our side” is not a surprise given the well-oiled propaganda apparatus that constitutes most of the corporate media. But many on the Left have substituted cheerleading for analysis, on both sides.
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It seems vastly easier to imagine the future as a dystopian nightmare than as a time when today’s problems are mostly behind humanity. For every work of optimism, such as Star Trek, there are dozens of works imagining a nightmare world of deprivation, environmental destruction and severe repression amidst a world of people scrambling to survive anyway they can in a war of all against all.
Even if a cultural byproduct rather than an intentional construction, this depressing ratio of future scenarios is the inevitable result of capitalism. From cradle to grave, we are endlessly bombarded with propaganda incessantly telling us that humans are competitive, not cooperative, and that individualism is the highest expression of “freedom.” Cut-throat competition is the natural way of the world, as natural as the tides of the ocean, and that participation in struggles against other human beings is the only possible method of organization in a world in which countries and nations also compete fiercely because the world must be organized into “winners” and “losers” through competition. Greed is not only good, it is the primary characteristic driving human behavior because markets sort who those “winners” and “losers” are.
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Many well-meaning people lament that our economic system is “not working.” But that isn’t true if we apply some historical context. What has capitalism wrought since its earliest days?
Capitalism is a totalizing system built on slavery, colonialism, imperialism, plunder, deeply uneven power relations and exploitation. It remains a system where “might makes right” is the “rule of law.” The “innocence” of early capitalism is a fantastical myth purporting the existence of an earlier, innocent capitalism not yet befouled by anti-social behavior and violence or by greed.
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Capitalism marches on. And thus housing, because it is a capitalist commodity, has resumed its upward cost, putting ever more people at risk of homelessness, hunger, inability to access medical care and medications, or some combination of those.
There had been a temporary dip in the costs of rentals in 2020 as the pandemic threw a spanner into the economy, but the dynamics of capitalist markets have reasserted themselves. Rent is not only too damn high but getting higher, fast. And almost everywhere, not just in your city.
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More than two years on, it is hard to imagine there could be someone who is not sick of the pandemic. Although we can point to multiple reasons for the inability to bring Covid-19 under control, a prominent factor is corporate greed.
The elevation of the private profit of a few over the welfare of the many is, sadly, the ordinary course of events in a capitalist world. This is brightly illustrated by the failure of the world’s governments to prioritize health care over money as exemplified by the ongoing failure to make vaccines available to the Global South.
Business as usual, yes, and it would be easy enough to lament the standards of the United States and its wildly expensive health care system being exported to the rest of the world. The U.S. does play a role here, but this time the U.S. is not the biggest villain. The European Union, with its obstinate refusal to waive any intellectual property rule because of fealty to Covid-19 vaccine makers, has been the biggest roadblock.
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