International Peoples’ Assembly. Working class communities around the world are organizing against capitalism. They are also forging a new international movement of solidarity and cooperation in the International People’s Assembly. How can organizers build international unity, and oppose the tools used by the ruling class to divide and defeat the popular movements that are expanding democracy while fighting to save the planet? Brian is joined at the People’s Summit for Democracy by Stephanie Weatherbee Brito with the International Peoples’ Assembly. Source link
capitalism
37 posts
Above Photo: Shipping is behind a supply chain crisis that is grinding global capitalism to a halt. Harold Smith / Getty Images. Capitalism rests on a network of privately-owned infrastructure, with shipping at its heart. But now the industry is in chaos as the profiteering of rentier corporations sends the world system into meltdown. Larry Fink, the CEO of the world’s largest asset manager, recently wrote in his letter to shareholders that globalization as we know it is over. The war in Ukraine, he argues, marks a turning point in the world economy—though the momentum of globalization had been slowing for many years. Fink’s […]
Above Photo: Babylon Bee The baby formula shortage is not a glitch in the system. It actually exemplifies everything that goes wrong when the profit motive rules. Capitalism can’t ensure a food supply or anything else that humans need. “Socialism doesn’t work” is repeated like a mantra. We’re told endlessly that capitalism provides jobs, housing, food, and health care in this country when it does a very bad job of doing all these things. The United States is said to be “the richest country in the world,” a strange statement which implies that the people are prosperous even though they aren’t. […]
Above Photo: Jeremy Hunsinger. Russia’s war on Ukraine both reflects and deepens a global split that should remind us of Karl Marx’s famous remark: “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.” The United Kingdom already lost its particular social order—its empire—while the United States is now losing its. Despite differences, both of these social orders shared a mostly private form of capitalist relations of […]
Capitalism, Nationalism, And Copaganda By Ezra Brain, Left Voice. March 3, 2022 Capitalism, Nationalism, And Copaganda2022-03-032022-03-03https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/03/220303-2.jpg200px200px Above Photo: Sarahbeth Maney / The New York Times. Biden’s First State Of The Union. Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address reveled in nationalism, vague promises, and anti-Russian rhetoric. But, behind all the sloganeering, the speech revealed that Biden intends to stay the course on his disastrous governing strategy of empty promises that have categorically failed the working class and oppressed. In a room filled with maskless war criminals and Ukrainian flags, President Joe Biden said, in perhaps the most obvious sentence ever […]
Above Photo: Christopher Campbell / Unsplash. The declines of U.S. capitalism and of its imperial position provoke fear among its mainstream politicians. Their response, in large part, has been to deny that any such decline is happening. These politicians do this partly by acting as though the U.S. remains in the globally dominant position it occupied in the second half of the 20th century. Thus, to maintain this illusion, they start wars in the Middle East, maintain military bases in dozens of countries, intervene in other countries at will and describe the U.S. as the global guarantor of peace, security, and […]
Before Colombia’s national uprising exploded in April 2021, struggles for justice in a majority Black port city set in motion a historic new wave of social protest. In 2017, Junior Jein, a rapper from Buenaventura [Colombia], released a song that became the anthem of a protest. But he did not appear in the music video. Instead, karaoke-style lyrics play alongside a CGI television set that shows clips of police motorcades patrolling the city, cops raiding neighborhoods, and children choking on tear gas. In the background, a steady fire burns through a chain link fence bordered by the yellow and green flags […]
For the end of the year, Clearing the FOG speaks with economist Richard Wolff about the current state of United States capitalism. Wolff explains that the United States is experiencing the greatest crisis in its history – a severe economic crisis at the same time as a pandemic, as well as the climate crisis. This is unprecedented. Unlike the great depression in the last century, when the wealth divide shrank, inequality is worsening. On top of that, US empire is in decline. Wolff discusses the current state of inflation and supply chain disruption and the forces behind them. Instead of facing […]
This may sound either arrogant or forgetful, but I could not possibly remember the number of times I was in the same room or at the same protest as Desmond Tutu. And the main reason I know he was there is because I was there listening to him speak, often from a distance of not more than two meters or so. I say this not to associate myself with the great man — though I’ll forgive you for thinking I’m a terrible, narcissistic name-dropper — but just to be sure we all know this all really happened, because I saw and […]
Above photo: weather.com. The weekend of December 10-11, 2021, saw a reported 30 tornadoes hitting several states from Arkansas to Illinois; as of this writing, 74 people are confirmed dead and several buildings severely damaged or totally demolished. All the cases of death and destruction are devastating; however, the most telling and unconscionable are the deaths of eight people at a candle-making factory in Mayfield, Kentucky, and six in an Amazon facility in Edwardsville, Illinois. What makes these two cases significant is that they most likely could have been avoided, but once again capitalism’s insatiable greed is significantly responsible for these […]
Above Photo: A child embraces a globe shaped balloon during a rally held ahead of the start of the 2015 Paris World Climate Change Conference, known as the COP21 summit, in Rome, Italy , November 29, 2015. Reuters/Alessandro Bianchi. A second leak from the Sixth Report of the UN panel of experts, originally obtained by CTXT, clearly states that the only way to avoid climate collapse is to move away from an economic model based on perpetual growth. A leaked draft of the third part of the upcoming IPCC report establishes that we must move away from the current capitalist model […]
Above Photo: People’s World Inaction on the climate crisis is to be expected when capital is valued more than humanity. The cataclysms of the interlinked crises of COVID and climate change were elucidated this past year in ways that cannot be repudiated. Following the release of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPPC) most recent report on the state of global warming, UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres characterized it as, “a code red for humanity .” In short, the report found that absent immediate and decisive measures to address planetary warming, the worst-case scenarios of climate change will be soon realized for […]
Message For COP26 Negotiators As we gather in Glasgow for two weeks of deliberations for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties #26, (COP26) otherwise known as the “Conference of Polluters” or the “Conference of Profiteers,” we must be like Jesus in the temple overturning the tables of the money changers. We can no longer accept business as usual in the vein of moneyed interests suppressing ambition and holding us back from the bold commitments necessary to turn the tide of climate change. Too often, we members of frontline communities convene at these meetings, raise our voices and demands, yet […]
Public Health Or Private Wealth? The titans of global capitalism are exploiting the Covid-19 crisis to institute social credit-style digital ID systems across the West. The death by starvation of Etwariya Devi, a 67-year-old widow from the rural Indian state of Jharkhand, might have passed without notice had it not been part of a more widespread trend. Like 1.3 billion of her fellow Indians, Devi had been pushed to enroll in a biometric digital ID system called Aadhaar in order to access public services, including her monthly allotment of 25kg of rice. When her fingerprint failed to register with the shoddy system, […]
Above Photo: Fibonacci Blue Chilean author and human rights advocate Ariel Dorfman recently memorialized Orlando Letelier, President Allende’s foreign minister. Agents of dictator Augusto Pinochet murdered Letelier in Washington in 1976. Dorfman noted that Chile and the United States were “on excellent, indeed obscenely excellent, terms (like they are today, shamefully, between the United States and the corrupt regime in Honduras).” The Honduran government headed by president Juan Orlando Hernández does have excellent relations with the United States. The alliance is toxic, however, what with the continued hold of capitalism on an already unjust, dysfunctional society. Hondurans will choose a new president on November […]
Above Photo: Nathaniel St. Clair Democracy exists if and when a community organizes its self-governance around the full participation, on an equal basis, of all the members of the community. Its other, autocracy, exists when a community organizes (or allows) its governance by an individual or subgroup of that community, a ruler. Universal suffrage is clearly a step toward at least formal democracy because voters elect leaders. How real this formal democracy is depends on the inclusivity of the population voting and the concrete reality of voters’ equal influence on the election’s outcome. Residential communities in many parts of the modern […]
Ecosocialism: An Alternative To Global Capitalism By Hans Baer, Green Left. November 4, 2020 Ecosocialism: An Alternative To Global Capitalism2020-11-042020-11-04https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/11/eco-e1604523189738.jpg200px200px Above photo: Climate justice rally, Sydney, February. Peter Boyle. Over the past four decades or so, various leftists have become more sensitive to the environmental degradation in developed and developing capitalist societies and post-revolutionary societies, particularly in the former Soviet Union and, in recent times, China. As a result, they have sought to develop an ecosocialism, ecoMarxism or ecological Marxism. Robert Albritton in Eco-Socialism for Now and the Future: Practical Utopias and Rational Action states that the earliest use of the term of […]
Why We Need To End Capitalism To Defeat Fascism By Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. October 26, 2020 Why We Need To End Capitalism To Defeat Fascism2020-10-262020-10-26https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/10/fascism-e1603727489593.jpg200px200px With the presidential election coming up, there is a lot of focus on how the election will go and who will win. One thing is certain, no matter which corporate candidate wins, the people and the planet will lose. To understand where we are and how we got here, I speak with Gabriel Rockhill, a philosopher, author and activist. He explains the connections between our governance structure and capitalism and how both liberal democracy […]
Capitalism Is Double-Billing Us October 26, 2020 Capitalism Is Double-Billing Us2020-10-262020-10-26https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/10/pollution.jpg200px200px Above photo: Getty images. We pay from our wallets only for our future to be stolen from us. Here is a word that risks deterring you from reading on much further, even though it may hold the key to understanding why we are in such a terrible political, economic and social mess. That word is “externalities”. It sounds like a piece of economic jargon. It is a piece of economic jargon. But it is also the foundation stone on which the west’s current economic and ideological system has been built. Focusing on […]
Book Review: ‘Capitalism On A Ventilator’ By Ted Kelly, Workers.org. October 15, 2020 Book Review: ‘Capitalism On A Ventilator’2020-10-152020-10-15https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/10/capitalismventilatorcover-e1602790822543.png200px200px Above photo: The impact of COVID-19 in China And the U.S. “Capitalism on a Ventilator: The Impact of COVID-19 in China & the U.S” chronicles the terminal decline of capitalism. The book itself is an example of what can be accomplished through cooperation by progressive working-class organizations. This anthology is a collaboration by social justice advocates like Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace, Margaret Flowers and the late Kevin Zeese from Popular Resistance, The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal, historian and journalist […]
The city of Seattle apparently paid street artists to restore a Black Lives Matter mural near the former CHOP autonomous zone, in the process funding such eyebrow-raising messages as “ACAB,” “abolish ICE” and “100% Antifa.” Twitter user Kitty Schackleford posted a livestream video Wednesday of an unidentified artist showing parts of the mural with messages written on the BLM letters, including “abolish capitalism,”“F**k 12” and “pigs will be pigs.” Apparently the city of Seattle is paying artists, including this militant streamer to permanently restore the Black Lives Matter mural outside the CHOP zone. “ACAB,” “no good cops in a racist system,” […]
Pope Francis sounded downright woke in parts of a newly released encyclical – railing against free market, private property, racism and social injustice – but he couldn’t get through the title without offending some observers. Francis said the Covid-19 pandemic proved that free-market policies have failed to produce the societal benefits promised by their proponents. “The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith,” the pope wrote in his third encyclical, called “Fratelli Tutti,” to all Catholic bishops. So-called “trickle-down” economics fail to create promised “spillover” that resolves inequality, giving […]
Pope Francis celebrates Mass in the crypt of the Basilica of St. Francis, in Assisi, on Oct. 3, 2020. Vatican Media via AP hide caption toggle caption Vatican Media via AP Pope Francis celebrates Mass in the crypt of the Basilica of St. Francis, in Assisi, on Oct. 3, 2020. Vatican Media via AP Pope Francis has presented his blueprint for a post-COVID-19 world, covering a vast number of issues from fraternity and income inequality to immigration and social injustice. The document, released Sunday, is his third encyclical — the most authoritative form of papal teaching. Its title is Fratelli Tutti, […]
The failed revolution The internet in 2030? To answer, two assumptions: First, we are still alive. Second, things on Earth are improving for more than just a few as we shake off our 20th century monetary systems and our 18th century systems of governance. There has been a radical transformation in these infrastructures of sociality for two main reasons: First, survival. The old political, monetary and communication structures simply cannot process the informational complexity necessary to sustain planetary life with 8 billion people. There are social movements demanding new forms of cooperation that take their needs and aspirations into account. Second, […]
Modern US Racial Capitalism By Charisse Burden-Stelly, Monthly Review. September 22, 2020 Modern US Racial Capitalism2020-09-222020-09-22https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/09/bacc-e1600784755926.jpg200px200px Above photo: From Facebook – Save Bethesda African Cemetery. Some theoretical insights. In recent years, “racial capitalism” has ascended across the humanities and social sciences. It has arisen as a conceptual framework to understand the mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalist exploitation, inter alia, on a global scale, in specific localities, in discrete historical moments, in the entrenchment of the carceral state, and in the era of neoliberalization and permanent war.1 This increased interest, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in nature, is conveyed in the myriad race and capitalism […]
Recapping the biggest stories of the week, including Joe Biden’s China plan, a market holding pattern and, of course, the strange competitive saga of SUSHI. Source link
Scheer Intelligence: Trump Is The Sweaty Armpit Of Monopoly Capitalism By Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. September 11, 2020 Scheer Intelligence: Trump Is The Sweaty Armpit Of Monopoly Capitalism2020-09-112020-09-11https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/09/page-header-1-e1599869565421.jpg200px200px Above image: By Mr. Fish. The journalist examines how the greatest danger to American society doesn’t come from the White House, but from a few obscenely powerful corporations. Over the past several decades, the largest corporations have absorbed and destroyed all opposition–big and small–and slowly come to play a role in every aspect of Americans’ lives. That’s the central argument of journalist David Dayen’s latest book, Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power. On this […]
Price Point Bitcoin was slightly lower early Friday, leaving the cryptocurrency on track for its first weekly price decline since mid-July. The largest cryptocurrency broke above $12,000 earlier in the week and failed to hold the gains, though John Willock, CEO of crypto asset manager Tritum, told CoinDesk Thursday that “maybe we’ve got $13,500 in the next phase up in the coming days.” You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. […]
The Commie Democrat convention kicked off Monday evening and it was a total dumpster fire. Socialist Bernie Sanders lashed out at President Trump and bragged about how far left the Democrat party has moved. “Our movement continues and is getting stronger every day. Many of the ideas we fought for just a few years ago were considered radical are now mainstream,” Bernie Sanders said. The Democrat party has embraced neo-Marxists who are openly calling for the destruction of Capitalism. TRENDING: BREAKING: 4Chan Identifies One of the Portland Rioters Who Attempted to Kill Driver as ‘Keese Love’ Democrat convention speaker and far-left […]
Capitalism May Not Survive The 2020 Global Crisis July 24, 2020 Capitalism May Not Survive The 2020 Global Crisis2020-07-242020-07-24https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/07/wolff.jpg200px200px Above photo: Getty Images/pidjoe. The crisis will cut deeper and last longer than many predict. The current global crisis triggered by Covid-19 is the third capitalist crash in this century. And governments’ incapacity to consider non-capitalist solutions threatens to keep deepening this crisis into capitalism’s worst. The first was in early 2000. Because it was triggered by the absurdly high prices of dot-com stocks, it got named the “dotcom crisis.” In 2008, the trigger was widespread subprime mortgage default in the US and the crash […]
US Capitalism Is In Total Meltdown By Sarah Jaffe , The Progressive. July 24, 2020 US Capitalism Is In Total Meltdown2020-07-242020-07-24https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/07/hurricane-katrina-e1595616539642.jpg200px200px Above photo: >A plea for help appears on the roof of a home flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, Sept. 4, 2005. Getty Images/ Robert Galbraith. The COVID-19 pandemic is like Hurricane Katrina, but for the entire country. And things are only going to get worse. In 2005, when the federal, state, and local governments spectacularly failed the residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, there was a sense of shock from both inside and outside of […]
COVID-19 Exposes The Weakness Of Capitalism By Richard D. Wolff, Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. July 11, 2020 COVID-19 Exposes The Weakness Of Capitalism2020-07-112020-07-11https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/07/health-care-wealth-care-e1594485979198.jpg200px200px Above photo: John Flores. COVID-19 exposes the sham of orthodox economics. 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 […]
Pandemic Capitalism: Pervasive Inequality Is A Chosen Catastrophe By Chris Oestereich, Open Democracy. July 8, 2020 Pandemic Capitalism: Pervasive Inequality Is A Chosen Catastrophe2020-07-082020-07-08https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/07/capitalism-isnt-working-unity-by-andy-roberts-from-flickr-cc-by-2.0.-e1594226873394.jpg200px200px Above photo: Capitalism Isn’t Working, Unity, By Andy Roberts, from Flickr, CC BY 2.0. It’s Time To Rethink. I was a canary in the economic coal mine. It was a normal workday. I woke up and started my daily routine. Brush, shave, shower, dress… Except that morning’s routine stopped when I found myself face down in the shower. Scared and confused, I called out to my wife. She helped me up and got me to a doctor, who found […]
Capitalism – The Cause Of COVID-19 Deaths By Sara Flounders, Workers.org. June 29, 2020 Capitalism – The Cause Of COVID-19 Deaths2020-06-292020-06-28https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/06/chinapa-e1593397958142.jpg200px200px Above photo: China set up a system for checking the people entering residential buildings for COVID-19 symptoms. Here a security guard checks temperatures on Feb. 26 in Beijing. 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 […]
Police Violence And Racism Have Always Been Tools Of Capitalism By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance. June 21, 2020 Police Violence And Racism Have Always Been Tools Of Capitalism2020-06-212020-06-21https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/06/police1percent-e1592781124667.jpg200px200px 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 […]
When Shoshana Zuboff returns my call 15 minutes late, it’s because her previous call with an organization in Israel dropped halfway through and it took them a while to reconnect. Such is the peril of functioning in quarantine, even as tech companies exert more power than ever. Rather than having time over the summer to reflect and plan her next book as she intended, Zuboff has been very busy with people wanting to speak with her and do virtual events. It’s part of the reason that for the last four months we’ve been trying to schedule a call, only to have […]
As Elon Musk sues Californian authorities for stopping a Tesla factory from reopening, he has found a somewhat novel way of dealing with his critics – dismissing them with short Russian insults. The target of Musk’s Cyrillic ire is Robert Reich, an economist and labor secretary under the Clinton administration. A well-known proponent of fairer distribution of wealth, Reich shared a story about the Tesla CEO’s plans for legal action in the Golden State with the comment: “Elon Musk threatens to take away people’s jobs unless he’s allowed to risk their health. Capitalism at its worst.” Elon Musk threatens to take […]