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As COVID-19 grips the world, in country after country, there is socialization of healthcare and of production of some essential goods, which markedly departs from the capitalist norm

Ten days after the last central bank swap line announcement, the Federal Reserve followed up with an announcement of another facility meant to help a lower tier of central banks. In this facility the Federal Reserve would make a standing offer to temporarily purchase U.S. treasury securities from central banks (and supranational monetary institutions) and sell them back to them the following day.

All told, more than 16 million American workers have filed initial claims during the past three weeks.

M. WAS MIDWAY through her 12-hour shift in late March, sorting financial documents in a cavernous Long Island warehouse, when a supervisor stopped by and handed her a flyer. Several days earlier, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had signed an executive order shutting down most businesses, but M.’s warehouse had remained open because its purpose–mailing and shipping–was defined as essential.

The government, university bosses and national officials of the National Tertiary Education Union are combining to attack uni workers’ pay and conditions.

Days, weeks, months, an indeterminate amount of time as the world seems paralysed by the journey of SARS-CoV-2. The lack of certainty increases the anxiety. This virus, as Arundhati Roy writes, ‘seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow [of capital].

Erich Fromm (1900-1980), who passed forty years ago March of this year, was a leading Marxian sociologist who made considerable contributions to U.S. sociology and to U.S. Marxism. Best known for books such as Escape from Freedom, The Sane Society, and The Art of Loving, Fromm’s account of authoritarianism and critique of mid-twentieth century “consumer capitalism” influenced millions both inside and outside of academia.

Socialist ideas have been jeered and sneered at by the same establishment now faced with the consequences of their profit driven contempt. We should be done with those bellowing cheerleaders of capitalism, argues Eamonn McCann.

In the midst of a desolate scenario, when the United States has become the country with the highest number of those infected by the Coronavirus, President Donald Trump and his team of serial criminals like Elliott Abrams, Cuban-American Mauricio Claver-Carone, Marco Rubio and others, announced that their country and 22 other nations would launch a far-reaching operation against drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere, deploying naval and air force military reinforcements in the Caribbean Sea and the South Pacific.

There is growing interest in a Green New Deal, but far too little discussion among supporters about the challenging nature of the required economic transformation, the necessary role of public planning and ownership in shaping it, or the strategies necessary to institutionalize a strong worker-community voice in the process and final outcome.

At the risk of making it seem like central bank swap lines are the solution to every problem, a swap line for local and state governments is the perfect tool using the Federal Reserve’s existing legal authority and can facilitate supporting these local currencies.

The Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the most acute problems of our collective life, its main contradictions.

Empty hotel rooms, bare supermarket shelves, factories producing jet engines and luxury cars instead of ventilators, governments competing with each other to purchase testing kits and masks. This way of organising society doesn’t make sense.

Presentation by Rob Wallace, author of ‘Big Farms Make Big Flu’ and co-author of ”Neoliberal Ebola’ and ‘Clear-Cutting Disease Control’, Historical Materialism conference, 10 November 2019.

Comparisons between the toll of COVID-19 and climate change are not helpful because they view each as two separate “things”

In greeting you, with affection, I take the liberty of addressing you on the occasion of denouncing the severe events taking place against the peace and stability of Venezuela, at a time when the concern of the States and Governments should be focused on the protection of the life and health of their citizens, due to the acceleration of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

TheTamim is a young and very passionate boy who writes about his upmost emotions and feelings, not only towards the world but also distintive individuals across history.

Ali raps in his verses that America is not the great place people make it out to be. He reminds us that slavery was present only two generations ago and extremely violent hate crimes occurred in the country. He also compares paying taxes to paying a homeless man for crack. Tax money is just supporting the war in the Middle East.

Workers at Amazon, Instacart and Whole Foods protested on March 30 and 31 over concerns about unsafe working conditions, inadequate safety measures and lack of enough pay.