Subjects Archives: Class

In his speech Friday at the Federal Reserve’s annual summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell made one thing clear: America’s financial oligarchy is determined to make the working class bear the cost of the deepening economic crisis.

Luxury cruises are an expression of capitalism’s worst instincts.

Without class struggle the emancipatory potential of degrowth will fail to be realized. A revolutionary pedagogy can help to unify them.

White supremacist arrogance was the order of the day when Nancy Pelosi ignored a red line set by the Chinese government and visited Taiwan. The Speaker of the House showed stereotypical and racist attitudes towards that country and began a chain of events that won’t go well for the U.S.

Capitalism is a system that has an innate tendency to get into a cul-de-sac of crisis, and the only way it knows for coming out of crisis is by further exploitation of the working class.

We have to recognize that there is a pathway forward for humanity, but that the capitalist world system, and today’s governments that are largely subservient to corporations and the wealthy, are blocking that pathway, simply because it requires revolutionary-scale socioecological change.

Two recent articles in Open Democracy report responses from Ukrainian trade unions to the “Lugano Declaration”, which came out of a conference between high Western and Ukrainian officials in Switzerland last week and sets out plans for economic reconstruction “after the war is over” by the Ukrainian Oligarchy* and its major imperial sponsors; the U.S., UK and EU.

The war in Ukraine, rising oil prices and spiralling global inflation have fuelled food scarcity and surges in the price of basic goods in Egypt. Most worrying among the goods affected is bread, which makes up almost 40 percent of the average Egyptian’s diet.

Who, or what, is the “middle class”? Most people identify themselves as middle class, but what does that mean, and what difference does it make?

How a new class of “salts”—radicals who take jobs to help unionization—is boosting the organizing efforts of long-term workers.

The chancellor of the exchequer of Britain, whose official residence is only next door to the British prime minister’s, is Rishi Sunak, a person of Indian origin. Britain’s home secretary is Priti Patel, also of Indian origin.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR. A class war is being waged in the name of fighting inflation. All too many central bankers are raising interest rates at the expense of working people’s families, supposedly to check price increases.

Who rules Australia? The politicians, the ultra-wealthy class of capitalists or the high-powered bureaucrats who run the state—the military generals, court justices, heads of government departments and so on? The answer is all three. Together, they make up the Australian ruling class.

Of all classes, the middle class is the one with the most people clamouring to be part of it. Many members of the ruling class prefer the label “middle” to one that makes capitalist dominance so overt. Many workers think that having a middle-income job by default puts them in the middle class. And people who want to downplay the working class’s revolutionary potential prefer to say,

More than 160 years ago, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, in the “Communist Manifesto,” described workers as those “who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital”.

In 1974 Walter Rodney and his family returned to Guyana. Rodney immediately faced a country divided between the Indian and African working class, and the brutal and divisive regime of Forbes Burnham. Rodney produced an impressive body of historical work which provided a Marxist explanation for the divide of the country’s working people. Chinedu Chukwudinma continues the story of Rodney’s revolutionary life.

If history should be any teacher, it has taught us this: the state has no interest in serving the needs of the masses of Black people in this country, who are poor and working class.

The United States is the most powerful capitalist nation in the world. Socialism cannot ultimately achieve victory without the success of the American working class. The struggles we are seeing now are just the beginning of the awakening of this colossus that will change the course of history.

Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point–whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to shift toward a new militancy toward capitalism.

By “People of the Book” it meant principally Jews and Christians. These book-based religions were an intellectual innovation. The book-basis gave Christianity and Islam an expansive power and a cultural breadth that earlier religions had not had.