capitalism
Trumpism: A Morbid Symptom of Declining Empire
The second Trump administration exposes the deepening crisis of US imperialism and deterioration of its preeminence within the global capitalist system. While still the dominant global economic and military power, the US is seeing fracture and decline in the “world order” that it has constructed and maintained through bipartisan commitment and execution since the end of World War II. It is facing counter-hegemonic challenges by Russia and its emergent allies in Central Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as by political division and political fragmentation among its allies in Europe and Asia; by Chinese economic influence across Asia and Africa and its subsequent burgeoning military buildup; and from Iran and its aligned forces across the Middle East.
Class Warfare, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and the Revolutionary Alternative
In a “dog-eat-dog world” the existence of nonprofit companies has restored some folks’ hopes in humanity. People working in the nonprofit world are viewed in a somewhat saintly light. Rather than working for an oil company or trading stocks, nonprofit organizations in theory exist to help people without the motivating factor of profit. This provides masses of caring people with an avenue for supposedly supporting their neighbors: You’re feeling empathetic or ashamed? Donate now!
Leave Capitalism Behind
Science fiction has entered our dialectical dystopian reality. Climate catastrophe, war, violence, the rise of fascism. Capitalism harms and destroys nature, human beings, and the possibility of a future. The capitalist imperialist US-Israel-UK axis has murdered thousands of Palestinians, displaced even more, and is currently carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people. How do we, as revolutionary socialists and abolitionists, find hope in each other and the world?
You will not find that hope in the Netflix’s “Leave the World Behind.” Unlike Julia Roberts’s character, Amanda, who declares before the opening credits “I fucking hate people”–We fucking love people. We love the people. The poor people, the queers, the misfits, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. People with disabilities, homeless people, sex workers, the working poor, the international working class. Leave the World Behind is misanthropic, nihilistic, neoliberal defeatist, pro-military propaganda reinforcing racism and eco-fascism.
Un Sistema Totalmente Arbitrario y Explotador
Llegar a los 55 años para muchos hombres de clase trabajadora se está convirtiendo en una amenaza persistente, en un miedo real que podría cambiar sus vidas de manera drástica.
¿Qué pasa a los 55 años actualmente, que provoca perder el sueño en muchos hombres?
La crisis económica, la falta de empleo y las altas rentas golpean fuertemente a un gran sector de hombres y mujeres de esta edad. Especialmente hombres que representan el sostén de la familia.
The American Way of Fascism
We are living through a period of reemergence, rise, and surge of far right and fascist forces internationally. This includes reconstructed fascist political parties and movements from the past, alongside novel and neo-fascist formations taking shape inside capitalist states and electoral systems in the present.
The miasma of fascist regeneration emanates from within the cascading crises of the capitalist system, increasing in both depth and frequency over the last two decades. This crises include recurring episodes of recession and stagnation; imperialist and inter-imperial conflict and war; distress, weakening, and collapse of traditional bourgeois political parties; and the rising frequency and intensity of class struggle, authoritarianism, culminating in both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements.
Capital’s Card Tricks: student debt relief amid rising interest rates & inflation
The Democrats have spent the majority of the past two years kissing the feet of the party’s rightmost members, fossil fuel lackey Joe Manchin and Arizona-based narcissist Kyrsten Sinema, and trying to hide Joe Biden from TV cameras. After a total lack of response to the catastrophic overturning of Roe v. Wade, and with their poll numbers in the mud, it seemed like they were a party adrift, no longer driven even by the paper-thin motivation to win elections. In the run up to the midterms, however, the Democrats have shown that they still have a few tricks up their sleeve in the form of (some) student debt relief—that is, if the right-wing doesn’t block it through its allies in the judiciary.
Marx Against Moloch
The fact that the real nature of capital has been completely and utterly mystified is evidenced by the currency of the phrase “human capital.” In the same way that legal titles to income or land become “capital” in the imagination of the landlord or the financial speculator, the liberal press and intellectual class imagine that the development of individual human beings can be classified as such, so that we are perpetually encouraged to see ourselves as little entrepreneurs investing in ourselves as we pay exorbitant costs for a university education and take out loans which only enrich the bankers. Today, however, this logic is being taken to a new extreme. A piece in the New Yorker about a delightful bit of innovation in financial technologies provides a glimpse into the idyllic future capitalism has in store for us: Soon, you will be able to sell yourself!
The Making of a System in Crisis: the ungovernability of 21st century capitalism
As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in their foundational exposition of historical materialism and the dialectics of social transformation, a mode of production in crisis does not collapse under the weight of its own malfunction; it has to dismantled and replaced through the self-conscious action of a rising revolutionary class.
The multiplying crises of capitalism have led to internal dysfunction and debilitations that render its operations increasingly out of sync with the needs and basic sustenance of the vast majority of humanity and the rest of the natural world. It is rapidly reaching the limits of its own capacity for self-reproduction, and cannot seem to persist without inducing even greater calamity and instability. As the capitalist system trudges on in this linear trajectory, a cumulative transformation is well underway: where more will have to be sacrificed so that capitalism may live on.
Empire at Ground Zero in Ukraine
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the quickening of a regionwide war assemblage presents itself in classical Euro-Atlantic form as the dress rehearsal for the next world war. The incessant building up of the stage and setting that counters the rival imperial houses, the alignment or realignments of supporting actors and bit players, and the clichéd tonalities of righteousness and evil; all giving way to the thunderous violence of death and destruction in an enlarging war theater.
