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Anti-capitalist politics in the time of COVID-19
When trying to interpret, understand and analyze the daily flow of news, I tend to locate what is happening against the background of two distinctive but intersecting models of how capitalism works.
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Yanis Varoufakis on the economic and political impact of the Coronavirus | DiEM25
Yanis Varoufakis, DiEM25 co-founder and MeRA25 MP, on the economic and political impact of the coronavirus.
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UN Chief warns of coming recession for the Planet
Bumping elbows at the United Nations.
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Capitalism is killing us. We have to destroy it
COVID-19 has challenged humanity: on what principles do you organise your society? The pandemic could have been defeated by cooperation, planning, transparency, and social solidarity. But instead, it was born into a society based on competition, secrecy, lies, and greed.
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The mutilated world is moved by the nurses and doctors
SARS-Co-2 or COVID-19 moves swiftly across the planet, leaving no region untouched. It is a powerful virus, with a long enough incubation period to hide the symptoms and therefore to gather more and more people in its deadly arms.
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Facing a liquidity tsunami? Profit, risk, and discipline in emerging markets
In April 2012, at the White House on her first visit to the United States since her election in 2010, Brazilian president Brazil Dilma Rousseff scolded advanced capitalist economies for unleashing a ‘tsunami de liquidez’, a ‘liquidity tsunami’, onto the developing world.
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The rise of AI-Capitalism: An interview with Nick Dyer-Witheford
The political answer is not acceleration but refusal. And this is indeed what is has begun to manifest, in a variety of social rebellions. This includes the strikes of gig economy labor, the protests of Silicon Valley tech workers, anti-surveillance movements, urban protests against the smart city, defections from social media sites, algorithmic-bias busting, and “techlash” against the oligopolistic concentration of digital powers.
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How global agriculture grew a pandemic
What are the underlying structural reasons for the coronavirus outbreak? According to Monthly Review Press author Rob Wallace, you have to look at global agriculture if you really want to understand the nature of global outbreaks.
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Chelsea Manning supporters raise a Quarter Million dollars in two days
In the likely event that you need some news to give you a bit of faith in humanity today, you should know that supporters of whistleblower Chelsea Manning have raised over a quarter million dollars to pay the cruel, draconian fine that was heaped upon her for her principled stand against testifying at corrupt secret grand jury proceedings.
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Alone against the Virus
Decades of neoliberal austerity will make it harder to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever, we must rebuild our social safety net and forge a New Deal for public health.
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All too relevant: Marx’s critique of rights and neoliberal human rights
Jessica Whyte’s new book, The Morals of the Market, demonstrates the kind of scholarship we all aspire to: insightful, thought-provoking, and, above all, accessible and engaging. In it, she traces the “historical and conceptual relations between human rights and neoliberalism”.
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Can Coronavirus force policy types to think clearly about intellectual property?
It will be hard to decide the most Trumpian moment in his dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, but my nomination is Trump’s meeting with executives from several pharmaceutical companies, where he discussed developing a vaccine. According to Trump, he asked them to “speed it up,” and they said that they would.
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Letter from the great wound
These are miserable times. The statistics of deprivation and death are gruesome. Far too many people struggle with hunger; roughly nine million of them dying each year from complications due to malnutrition (a child dies somewhere in the world around every ten seconds because of this).
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“Capitalism is a disease hotspot”
The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure or—better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to the proliferation of capitalist food production and distribution.
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The uses of “populism”
CLASS struggle occurs in the realm of concepts too. The World Bank for instance systematically counters Left concepts by employing a novel tactic: it uses the very same concepts as are used by the Left, but gives them a wholly different meaning; as a result they either come to mean something entirely different from what the Left had originally meant by them, or, at the very least, they become fuzzy and hence useless to the Left. In either case the power of the Left concept is neutralised.
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United States Imposed Economic Sanctions: The Big Heist
The money trail of U.S. Sanctions leads to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which—behind the shadow of secrecy laws that effectively prohibit any form of public accountability—facilitates the theft of public wealth from targeted countries on a scale only previously accomplished through military invasion and occupation.
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Re-enchanting the world: Silvia Federici on feminism and the politics of the commons
In her recent volume Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2019), Silvia Federici fruitfully brings together feminist reflections with discussions of the commons as a possible way of overcoming capitalism.
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“Absolute freedom of critique and discussion lies at the heart of the interests of the workers’ movement, and it must be pursued at all costs.”
On Rosa Luxemburg’s birthday, we present an extract from her 1906 essay “Critique in the Workers’ Movement,” available in English for the first time.
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Johnstone brings her moral compass to our Dantesque world
It is one of the great personal accounts of the anguished decline of our uncivilization, both a riveting eye-witness account of many of the horrors and perfidies, and a primer for students of history and all those struggling to not only dismantle the beast, but to prepare us for what follows it.
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We who were nothing and have become everything shall construct a new and better world
On 8 March 1917 (23 February by the old Julian calendar), a hundred women in the textile factories in Petrograd decided to go on strike; they went amongst the other factories and called their fellow workers onto the streets. Before long, around 200,000 workers–led by the women–marched through the streets.