Meatpacking Workers Say Attendance Policies Force Them to Work With Covid-19 Symptoms. ~~ HEATHER SCHLITZ

https://inthesetimes.com/article/meatpacking-workers-attendance-policy-covid-19

As the pandemic rages, punitive attendance policies at corporate meat plants coerce sick workers into showing up, according to activists, experts and the workers themselves.

The Envy of the World Still has no Functioning Democracy ~~ Paul Street

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/11/the-envy-of-the-world-still-no-functioning-democracy-here/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Nobody Said Biden’s Name

I walked up to Chicago’s Trump Tower down the middle of Michigan Avenue last Saturday night. Within four blocks of the hated structure, both sides of the street were jammed with cars full of young LatinX, Black, and white folks honking their horns, hanging out car windows, waving, roaring their engines, playing YG’s chart-topping hit “(FTD) Fuck Donald Trump,” and aiming bird flips at the Trump building. Young people of all races and ethnicities danced on all four corners of Michigan and Wacker.

It was one Hell of a celebration. As well it should have been. Donald Trump is a vicious, pandemic-spreading white-supremacist, eco-exterminist, uber-narcissist, and instinctual fascist who richly deserves Noam Chomsky’s description of him as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” A second Trump term would be a tragedy from which the nation and world might never recover.

Anyone on the “the left” who wouldn’t like to see Trump removed from the world’s most dangerous job is morally and intellectually comatose.

Afterword to Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program ~~ PETER LINEBAUGH

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/11/afterword-to-karl-marx-critique-of-the-gotha-program/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Don’t Let Up: Fascism isn’t Dead Yet ~~ PETE DOLACK

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/08/dont-let-up-fascism-isnt-dead-yet/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

Even if Joe Biden had won the U.S. presidency by the expected landslide, the threat of fascism would remain. And not simply because Trumpites are not going away anytime soon.

Donald Trump doesn’t have the intelligence, competence or sufficient ruling-class backing to actually become a fascist dictator. His desire to be one, however, has been more than sufficient to necessitate the widest possible movement against him and the social forces he will continue to represent, and there is no doubt his authoritarian impulses would have become still worse had he won a second term. What little democracy is left in the United States’ capitalist formal democracy would have been further reduced.

What Socialists Would Do in America—If They Could

- https://www.dissentmagazine.org

“Capitalism is dying,” wrote Michael Harrington forty years ago. “It will not, however, disappear on a given day, or in a given month or even year. Its demise will take place as a his­toric process that could lead to democratic so­cialism—or to a new kind of collectivist and authoritarian society.”

Michael Harrington ▪ Fall 1978

Capitalism is Double-Billing Us: We Pay From Our Wallets Only to be Robbed of Our Future ~~ Jonathan Cook

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/28/capitalism-is-double-billing-us-we-pay-from-our-wallets-only-to-be-robbed-of-our-future/

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 how externalities work and how they have come to dominate every sphere of our lives is to understand how we are destroying our planet – and offer at the same time the signpost to a better future.

Engels and Marriage

https://mronline.org/2020/11/06/engels-and-marriage/

~~Posted for Collectivist ~~

One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India

https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-32-communist-movement-in-india/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

On 17 October 2020, the Indian communist movement looks back on a century of courageous resistance against tyranny, oppression, and exploitation. This was a century of sacrifices by hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries of the Indian communist movement who pledged their lives to the dream of an egalitarian and a truly democratic society. Thousands of cadre were martyred on this path and many more continue to carry forward the dream and the fight in the face of state repression, violence, and infinite efforts at subversion.