No matter who “won” the U.S. election, what will not change is the capitalist organization of the country’s economy.
The great majority of enterprises will continue to be owned and operated by a small minority of Americans. They will continue to use their positions atop the capitalist system to expand their wealth, “economize their labor costs,” and thereby deepen the United States’ inequalities of wealth and income.
Excerpts from Power Anywhere Where There's People = A Speech By Fred Hampton
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fhamptonspeech.html
We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's black and sometimes he's white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2019/10/25/communists-fight-racism-and-evictions/
~~ posted for Collectivist ~~
Despite the race riot and segregated housing, Chicago’s Black population more than doubled in the 1920s and reached 233,903 by 1930. Even in 1940, during the Great Depression, the figure climbed to 277,731.
A small Mexican community also grew, despite the massive deportations of the early 1930s. About 5 percent of workers at the Armour and Swift packinghouses were Mexican.
The Chicago Defender became one of the best known African American newspapers and was distributed countrywide. In 1928, the African American Oscar DePriest was elected from Chicago to the House of Representatives. He became the first Black member of Congress since George Henry White of North Carolina was driven out in 1901.
https://mronline.org/2020/11/04/119166/
~~ posted for Collectivist ~~
The United States boasts one of the most farcical democratic systems to have been invented. The country’s constitution is an eighteenth-century relic penned by merchants and slave owners, amendments to which can be blocked by as few as 13 states representing less than 4 percent of the population. Its Supreme Court, conservative by nature and stacked with tenured-for-life justices, provides an institutional anti-majoritarian check on the popular will.
In recognition of election day
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5725/
The world’s workers have always been and still are the world’s slaves. They have borne all the burdens of the race and built all the monuments along the track of civilization; they have produced all the world’s wealth and supported all the world’s governments. They have conquered all things but their own freedom. They are still the subject class in every nation on earth and the chief function of every government is to keep them at the mercy of their masters.
https://socialistaction.org/2020/11/01/trump-biden-2-dueling-billionaire-backed-liars/
If I were a high school debate referee I’d score Joe Biden the winner big time in the October 22 final debate with the nation’s moron accidental president Donald Trump. But it wasn’t a high school debate wherein each side is assigned in advance to take opposing sides of a question. In Trump-Biden 2 both debaters took the stage to defend the same side, that is, the corporate capitalist elite who really run the country regardless of which candidate gets to live in the White House.
What is the connection between the coronavirus and the climate crisis?Andreas Malm’s brilliant polemic Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, written within a matter of weeks as the worldwide lockdown took hold, argues that their common root and cure are in plain view, if we are willing to see, and act.
COVID-19 is not an act of God that came out of a clear blue sky, but, like climate change, the consequence of rapacious extraction of the Earth’s resources. As we pry ever deeper into the primordial wildernesses where viruses lurk for materials and animals to buy and sell, hacking down tropical forests, blowing up limestone caverns, and draining wetlands, we drive out the diseases and their carriers: bats, rats, mice, anthropods, mosquitoes and locusts. For Malm it’s ‘rather as if the human economy had resolved to lift up the container of coronaviruses and other pathogens and pour the load over itself.’
~~ Posted for Collectivist ~~
The fear of socialism is mostly based on one idea: that the end of the road of bigger government is the totalitarian horror of the early twentieth century.
Sure, there are other objections, usually involving muttered words like “market” and “efficiency.” But for the fathers of neoliberalism like Friedrich Hayek, what it really came down to was the fear that every increase in the role of the state was just one more step toward the chimneys of Dachau: power concentrated among a know-it-all elite deaf to the problems facing its people; ever-present surveillance of the population, whether “suspect” or not; a vast, armed bureaucracy ready to stamp out dissent; countless bodies locked and tortured in prisons; and a state that asserts the power to treat its citizens as mere subjects while demanding secrecy and impunity for itself.
~~ Posted for Collectivist ~~
Oct. 28 — In the final days of campaigning before the 2020 elections, every form of media is saturated with advertising for the Democratic and Republican candidates in local, state and national elections.
The focus is mainly on the presidential campaigns. The far-right Trump campaign is openly racist and white supremacist, with Trump’s call-out to the neofascist Proud Boys to “stand by.” The campaign’s slogan is, in the words of the New York Post endorsement of Trump, “Make America Great Again, Again.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/13.htm
Capitalism cannot be at a standstill for a single moment. It must forever be moving forward. Competition, which is keenest in a period of crisis like the present, calls for the invention of an increasing number of new devices to reduce the cost of production. But the domination of capital converts all these devices into instruments for the further exploitation of the workers.
The Taylor system is one of these devices.
https://archive.iww.org/history/library/Haywood/GeneralStrike/
Among the best parts are in the questions and answers at the end.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/class-war-climate-change-overpopulation-carbon
~~ posted for Collectivist ~~
A new report shows that the world’s top 1 percent is responsible for double the emissions of the entire bottom half of the planet. The message is clear: to fight climate change, we have to fight the ruling class.
https://mronline.org/2020/10/20/competing-with-nature-covid-19-as-a-capitalist-virus/
~~ posted for Collectivist ~~
The COVID-19 pandemic shows no signs of abating as the death toll climbs ever higher around the world. Spectre’s Ashley Smith interviews epidemiologist Rob Wallace about the global capitalist roots of the current pandemic, the likelihood of future pandemics, and the types of organized resistance necessary to prevent them.
Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist with the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps. He is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and the just-released Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19. He has consulted with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Considered as a foundational document, presented are links to various formats of the Manifesto of the Communist Party
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
PDF version:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf
Audio:
https://www.marxists.org/audiobooks/archive/marx-engels/communist-manifesto/index.htm
Ebook:
https://blackagendareport.com/we-cant-be-free-until-we-fully-abolish-slavery
Through a loophole in the 13th Amendment, governments and corporations profit from cheap, incarcerated labor.
https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/as-the-global-hegemon-collapses-can-private-property-be-far-behind
This article lays out clearly the rights given to private property - including the fiction of depreciation of capital, and how these are exploited by the capitalist class at the expense of the working class.
http://kermito.com/blog/thomas-jefferson-father-of-white-supremacy/
Part:
When you hear the name Thomas Jefferson, it is likely followed by “founding father”, “hero”, “patriot”, and other such reverent terms. Amongst the mildly critical—or anyone not in complete denial—you’ll hear it acknowledged that he was also a slaver, and that there were some inherent contradictions between this and the idea that “All men are created equal”. The more critical still may point out that he was also a rapist, in that his relationship with Sally Hemmings was a matter of obligation for her, as she was his “property”.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/16/the-coup-already-underway/
This might be a good time for Americans to stop masochistically worshipping at the feet of their nation’s authoritarian Constitution. A proto-fascistic genocidal racist maniac and anti-science eco-exterminist determined to kill two million more Americans with COVID-19 sits in the White House thanks in no small part due to the absurdly venerated 1788 United States Constitution.
https://socialistworker.org/2004-1/487/487_09_Class.php
CLASS IS commonly viewed as something based upon income level: upper, middle, lower. The other popular idea is that we are all basically "middle class"--with perhaps a minority "underclass" of poor people. |
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/pjproudhon/the-malthusians
Dr. Malthus, an economist, an Englishman, once wrote the following words:
“A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders…”[1]
A fair day's wages for a fair day's work? But what is a fair day's wages, and what is a fair day's work?
~~ Posted for Collectivist ~~
- Excerpt - Writing the Communist Manifesto - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toeib1Xd4Pk&feature=youtu.be
and
- Movie Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVTDoZLssg8&feature=youtu.be
And a Movie review:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/young-karl-marx-raoul-peck-engels
https://www.workers.org/2020/10/51840/
~~ posted for collectivist ~~
After police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., demonstrators across the U.S. called for defunding police departments. The Center for Popular Democracy Action, in a June 10 report, estimates $100 billion is spent each year in the U.S. on policing — between 20% to 45% of municipal budgets. (https://populardemocracy.org/news-and-publications/congress-must-divest-billion-dollar-police-budget-and-invest-public-education)
As activists target state and municipal funding sources, it is important to shine the spotlight on often hidden corporate police funding. A popular street chant against the police has been “Who do they protect? Who do they serve?”
Another question must also be asked: Who protects the police?
After the first round of the French presidential elections, several liberal commentators condemned the defeated leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon for refusing to endorse the centrist Emmanuel Macron. His decision was portrayed as a failure to oppose the far-right Front National, and it was argued that many of his supporters were likely to vote for Marine Le Pen in the second round. Comparisons were drawn with the US presidential elections and the alleged failure of Bernie Sanders supporters to back Hilary Clinton over Donald Trump.
Following are articles on philanthropy/charity and how they obscure the violence of capitalism:
They Offer Charity Instead of Justice ~~ Paul D'Amato
and
Philanthropy: the Capitalist Art of Deception ~~ Susan Rosenthal
This thread will be dedicated to feuds, animosities, and all other hostilities. You may verbally flame, stomp, kick, and gaslight your opponent on this thread at will if you just gotta have it to get you through the day. Flame wars on political threads that are completely off-topic will be deleted and the participants will be asked to bring it here. If hostile back and forth exchanges on political threads are on topic they will remain.
For this thread and going forward, if commenters insist on engaging in their feuds on the political thread, they will simply be brought here for their convenience if we have time - otherwise, they will be deleted.
A couple of articles on the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army 75 years ago (before Jan 2020)
http://www.pcp.pt/en/75-years-liberation-auschwitz-soviet-army
~~ by the Portuguese Communist Party ~~
Today we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Army's liberation of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, where more than one million and one hundred thousand human beings were systematically murdered in the gas chambers, by hunger and disease, in the shootings and under torture.
(Or, the Age of Disintegration)
Umair Haque - https://eand.co/what-happens-when-people-find-out-capitalism-was-a-lie-78137aca7072
It’s hardly just America. In Britain, there is the spectacular folly of Brexit. Australia is burning, even while the government refuses to take climate change seriously. The world is destabilizing, fracturing, unravelling, coming undone. Why? And what does the future hold?
The truth, my friends, may be grimmer — and yet a little more hopeful, in a strange and funny way — than you might think. Let me start at the beginning.
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlet/socialism-and-religion/
~~ Thanks to Red Robbo for this contribution: "October 12 is Freethought Day so the theme of Socialism and Religion seems appropriate. Banish gods from the skies and capitalists from the earth!"
In the midst of a global pandemic, unprecedented economic collapse, mass unemployment, hunger and desperation, the stock market is booming and the richest of the rich are richer than ever before.
If anyone wishes to post civil rights music or music about class struggle, this is a good place to put it.
----------
Rutha Mae Harris has never been afraid to sing in front of a crowd. Even as a 22-year-old facing the 250,000 people who had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 for the historic march on Washington, she felt excited rather than scared. After all, at earlier protests, she had faced police pointing batons, fire hoses and even guns, and each time, when she sang, her terror faded away.
A few related pieces on the subject of nations, nationalism, war and class struggle.
In Whose War Shall We Fight ~~ E. Debs
and selected quotes on the subject by Red Robbo
https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/privatizing-the-common-good-the-21st-century-enclosures-are-here
~~ posted for Collectivist~~
Fossil capital has been granted immense power, producing life-giving heat and light but also plunging communities into darkness when they fail to return outsize profits. In 2011, DTE Energy, the investor-owned utility (IOU) that controls southeast Michigan’s energy infrastructure, repossessed one thousand streetlights from Highland Park, a city in the larger metropolis of Detroit. The city was left in the dark. Like many other Black-majority cities across Michigan, Highland Park was struggling at the time with capital flight and spiraling levels of austerity. Once home to Ford and Chrysler auto assembly plants and the well-paying jobs that they generated, Highland Park had seen its fortunes crash in the 1990s and the 2000s as the automakers shipped jobs abroad.
https://mronline.org/2020/10/07/trumps-turn-from-immigration-to-the-enemy-within/
~~Posted for Collectivist ~~
LISTENING TO Donald Trump describe the U.S. in 2016 was to hear a story of a nation in peril of losing its identity to waves of brown-skinned invaders. Immigration and the border, particularly the urgent need to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, dominated Trump’s campaign rhetoric. Once in office, the president’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, rammed through one punishing initiative after another, banning travelers from Muslim-majority countries, separating immigrant children from their parents to deter others from making the journey north, forcing tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in the border’s most dangerous cities, and plowing through protected lands to stand up towering new sections of border wall. Today, asylum at the border is effectively dead, and Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is using the coronavirus as a pretext to boot immigrants out of the country–including families, children, and babies–as swiftly as possible.
So it may have come as a surprise to some that immigration hardly came up at all in the first presidential debate of 2020. This is at least partially due to the fact that the Trump administration’s framing of its priorities has evolved over the past several months, as waves of protests challenging the power and brutality of American policing have swept the country. Without question, the anti-immigrant machinery marches on. In July, the Migration Policy Institute catalogued more than 400 executive actions the administration has taken on immigration since Trump’s inauguration. Those policies continue to impact countless individuals and families across the country and around the world every day, and if the claims of a former top DHS official are true, Miller has an immigration campaign of “shock and awe” drawn up and ready to go should Trump remain in office. But with those efforts simultaneously in motion, the Trump administration has increasingly and prominently centered purported threats posed by leftists, anarchists, and anti-fascists in its bid to hold onto power. This widening of the threat aperture is straight out of the authoritarian playbook, said Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.”
The Daily People Sept. 3, 1906
The “practical” man sneers at socialism as visionary, unattainable, and without any immediate social value.
Immersed in his own private affairs, and judging the world from the limited horizon which they afford, he fails to perceive that socialism is the only vital economic, political and moral force of modern times.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/bosses-union-busting-trump-nlrb-labor-intimidation
Labor unions are more popular than they’ve been in over 15 years. Yet a record-low number of workers belong to them. The gap between the public perception of unions and their actual membership illustrates just how difficult it’s become for workers to organize.
In a new report, the progressive think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found evidence that employers are increasingly brazen in seeking to obstruct workers’ attempts to unionize. Records of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees private-sector labor rights and union elections, reveal that in more than 40% of the 3,260 union elections during 2016 and 2017, employers have been charged with unfair labor practices aimed at undermining electoral procedures and retaliating against pro-union workers.
~~ posted for Collectivist ~~
https://mronline.org/2020/10/03/capital-and-covid-why-the-left-needs-disability-liberation/
~~ Posted for Collectivist ~~
This all could’ve gone differently. Bob Woodward revealed that Donald Trump knew in February that COVID was airborne, information both men declined to share with the rest of the us until just now. Congress was also briefed. Their only response was to adjust their investment portfolios. The rich have been given a head start to prepare, to plan for millions of deaths, and to prevent their own. In the meantime, the rest of us must work— if work is even available.
I was laid off on the first day of the Texas lockdown. I’d been on FMLA for an illness related to a disability. As Marx said in Capital, Volume I:
Suppose you were in want of an additional workman, and two were to apply, both equally well qualified in other respects, but one had lost a thumb or a forefinger, which would you engage?
The same logic applies to who gets fired first. The cripple, of course.
http://www.greanvillepost.com/2016/09/30/unreliability-spinelessness-of-the-western-left/
Andre Vltchek - Itinerant Philosopher and Journalist, 30 September 2016
It is tough to fight any real war. And it takes true guts, discipline and determination to win it.
For years and decades, the so-called ‘left’ in the West has been moderately critical of North American (and sometimes even of European) imperialism and neo-colonialm. But whenever some individual or country rose up and began openly challenging the Empire, most of the Western left-wing intellectuals simply closed their eyes, and refused to offer their full, unconditional support to those who were putting their lives (and often even the existence of their countries) on the line.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1903/06/caproperty.htm
Individual property can only exist in a primitive stage of human life, because of its two attributes, it is the product of the owner's labour, and it is used by him.
These two qualities, regarded is indispensable to and inseparable from individual property, have left so strong an impression upon the human mind that the defenders of capitalism idiotically state that property is the reward of toil. Nevertheless, capitalist production can only exist when individual property is stripped of the two attributes which alone justify it.
Personal wealth is still, indeed, the result of labour, but it no longer belongs to the workers who produce it; the means of production (land, machinery, mines, &c.) are not owned by the wage-workers who use them, but by the capitalist who has not made them, and who does not work them. Capitalist property does not, consequently, possess the two attributes of individual property.
https://www.anarchistagency.com/commentary/why-anarchism-is-dangerous/
Anarchists frighten privileged elites and their authoritarian followers not simply because the primary goals of the movement have been to abolish the sources of elite power – the state, patriarchy, and capitalism – but because anarchism offers a viable alternative form of social and political organization grounded in workplace collectives, neighborhood assemblies, bottom-up federations, child-centered free schools, and a variety of cultural organizations operating on the basis of cooperation, solidarity, mutual aid, and direct, participatory democracy. Opposed to all forms of hierarchy, domination, and exploitation, anarchists work to create a culture grounded in equal access to resources making the genuine exercise of freedom possible. Over the past century and a half, and particularly in the last two decades, the self-managing principles of anarchism have proliferated around the world and have also become part of the standard operating procedures of protest. Since elites would be rendered redundant in an anarchist egalitarian society, no wonder rulers tremble at the thought of anarchist jurisdictions.
~~posted for Collectivist
Millions have spent the past four years horrified by the experience of the increasingly authoritarian Trump administration, that deliberately stokes racist division. But many are nonetheless disappointed that his main opponent, Joe Biden, is a corporate tool who was an architect of mass incarceration and whose campaign message boils down to “I’m not Trump.”
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article4013
~~ posted for Collectivist
The concept of eco-socialism is based on a double paradoxical note: the solution to the “ecological crisis” due to the capitalist mode of production necessitates a response of a socialist type, whilst the environmental balance sheet of “actually existing socialism” is catastrophic. I will briefly develop these two elements and then present some foundations of an eco-socialist aggiornamento as it is conceived inside the “International Eco-socialist Network”. I hope to bring forward evidence that eco-socialism is something more than a new label on an old bottle: a necessary alternative adapted to the challenges of our times. [1]
Using the pandemic as an excuse, the Trump administration has all but canceled immigration to the United States. But while the president cracked down on families seeking asylum from life-threatening conditions, he’s still allowed big industries to hire low-wage laborers from other countries. Under the H2 visa program, record numbers are entering the country, recruited directly by industries such as meat-processing and agriculture, which determine who gets into the country and for how long.
USPS workers are finding everyday ways to get the mail delivered in a timely way, despite attacks and austerity.
https://www.leftvoice.org/presidential-debate-1-the-squabbles-of-capital
The first presidential debate, for all its drama and chaos, showed that there are actually very few political differences between the two candidates. While it is certainly alarming to watch Donald Trump continue his increasingly overt overtures to the far right, we must understand that it is the working class, not Joe Biden, that has the power to fight back against the far-right.
~~ Posted for Collectivist
In 2018 and 2019, leftist writers, organizers, and pundits were exclaiming that U.S. workers were on the move, striking even in the “red” states that had voted for Donald Trump. Claims were made that the presidential campaigns for Bernie Sanders and the rapid growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were largely responsible for this rise in militancy by long-suffering laborers, who had seen their economic circumstances deteriorate for decades. Left-wing journalists interviewed striking teachers and automobile workers, reporting on a new mood of combativeness. After years of slumber, perhaps the working class was awakening.1
https://blackagendareport.com/make-corporate-landlords-pay-bills-during-pandemic
~~ Posted for Collectivist
Elected officials and corporate landlords haven’t taken any meaningful action to prevent the crisis from hitting poor people of color hardest.
Anaylisis of Historical Global Developments and their Relevance to the
Internal Situation of the United States
Written by dmorista
In this article I will endeavor to try to look at the current world situation, and particularly that of the U.S, in socioeconomic, political, and military terms, in a historical perspective. I will use some of the theoretical systems developed on the left, to analyze the Capitalist world milieu and the nations and socioeconomic systems that compose it. First a discussion of some of the basic concepts and theoretical constucts I will use to couch my arguments. Those who are familiar with World-Systems Theory mignt want to go to the end of main body of the article and read the concluding section: Application of World Systems Theory to the Current Situation.
Introduction:
There can be no doubt, as we look at the great sweep of human history, that great civilizations and empires; are “born”; they “rise”; they pass through a period of “greatness”, during which their power, institutions, and culture reach a peak; and eventually they “decay and fall”. There has been a lot of theoretical work on these issues, especially for the particular case of Empires that rise to the level of being the Global Hegemon; a position that the U.S. has occupied for around a century, but would seem to be sliding out of at this time. The time period during which the U.S., to one degree or another, occupied that position stretches from around 1908 to the present day. The dynamics of the situation, how it affected the U.S. internally, and who the other major powers, rivals, and allies that were involved has changed over time.
The examination of Capitalism, Global Hegemony, and the dynamics of the various Global Hegemons has been taken up by many scholars. Among the most prominent are Immanuel Wallerstein, George Modelski, and Giovanni Arrighi. Wallerstein, whose analysis proposed that there is a World System of capitalism, engendered a school of thought called World-Systems Theory. Wallerstein propounded and expanded upon these ideas in a 4 volume work in which he proposed that Holland was the first Global Hegemonic Power, then the British Empire, and finally the United States; and he analyzed the operations of capitalism during these respective Hegemonic Epochs in great detail (Wallerstein, 1974, 1980, 1989, 2011). Wallerstein proposed relatively short periods of what he termed “Uncontested Hegemony” exercised by each of those three societies, (See Table 1). He examined developments outside of those restricted time periods in great detail, but did not propose a formalized framework for a recurring cycle of developments, inside and outside of the respective Hegemonic Powers, that explained these events. George Modelski described 5 global hegemonies each about one century in length, and proposed a set of cyclical events that helped explain the recurring phenomenon of Hegemonic Rise, Ascendancy, and eventual Decline (Modelski, 1987). {See Table 2A in the Appendix for Modelski's proposal and Table 2 in the text for my modification of it}. Giovanni Arrighi outlined the occurrence of 4 global hegemonies, each with increasing power and control over the global economic system, but ironically of declining temporal length (Arrighi, 1988). {See Table 3A in the Appendix for Modelski's proposal and Table 3 in the text for my very slight modification of it}. Joshua Goldstein writing about Long Economic Cycles and political power among the major powers, proposed his own explanation of the evolution of Great Power Global Hegemony (Goldstein, 1988). All the major variants of theories proposing a World Capitalist System and a succession of hegemonic powers agree on two things: that in the last few decades of its power, the ruling class of the declining hegemon shifts over from actual productive capitalism to financial capitalism; and that “Hegemonic Wars”, of particularly horrific intensity and length, mark the transition from one hegemony to the next.
Some theorists have proposed that the first hegemon was Portugal, and they advance involved arguments as to why Portugal was hegemonic (the Portugese Empire did have more extensive holdings in Asia and Africa than the Spanish Empire did) rather than Spain. The Spanish Empire, however, was actually larger and it produced far more of the gold and silver; that played a pivotal role in the economic developments of the 15th - 17th centuries. I prefer to just call the first Hegemonic Epoch that of “Iberia” for the reason that it involves the two empires; that were the first and the second empires to control areas in both the “Old World” (Eurasia and Africa) and also in the “New World” (the Americas), i.e. the first truly global empires. I also think that France was the third Global Hegemon, or a very close miss, that had its period of hegemony, or near hegemony, after that of Holland and before that of the British Empire. There is plenty of evidence to support either the postion that France was a hegemonic power, and perhaps more that affirms that it was not, it is beyond the scope of this essay to address it at any length.1 All historians are in agreement that, neither Spain nor Portugal, had the sophisticated financial institutions needed to process the wealth that flowed into those countries; and that therefore their banking was handled by financial institutions in the Italian city states, most notably Genoa and Venice. Giovanni Arrighi argues that Genoa was actually the first Global Hegemonic power and that both Portugal, and Spain, depended on the Genoese Bankers; and in turn were manipulated by them to utilize their geographic, military, and political power, largely in the service of Genoa's ruling class' agenda; he discussed this at length in his seminal book on the subject (Arrighi, 1988)
https://www.workers.org/2020/09/51532/
The writer is First Secretary of Workers World Party.
The head of the U.S. Postal Service is sabotaging delivery of ballots through the mail. Trump is acting like he won’t step down even if he’s defeated in the elections. And it appears that right-wing and neo-fascist forces, who have guns, are getting ready to go into the streets after the elections to support an attempted coup. Every group and activist ready to fight fascism in the streets should be making preparations right now to intervene in the event of any fascist developments in November.
The political crisis in the ruling class that is playing itself out in the presidential election is not really about Trump, any more than it’s about saving democracy, decency and all the other stuff that Democratic Party leaders are shouting about.
This crisis is about the capitalist system starting to break down and fall apart, and what must be done to rescue capitalism and U.S. imperialism from demise.
This crisis has been building for a long time. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the course of the crisis; it’s like pouring gasoline on a burning police station.
https://www.kmjn.org/snippets/brecht35_fascism.html
Fascism is a historic phase of capitalism; in this sense it is something new and at the same time old. In Fascist countries capitalism continues to exist, but only in the form of Fascism; and Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism.
But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth? What will be the practical results of such truth?
Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat. They are not against the property relations which engender barbarism; they are only against barbarism itself. They raise their voices against barbarism, and they do so in countries where precisely the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers wash their hands before weighing the meat.
https://socialistworker.org/2004-1/495/495_09_Socialism.php
Socialism: What will it look like?
By Paul D'Amato | April 16, 2004 | Page 9
"WE KNOW what you're against. What are you for/" is a question that we socialists get a lot. Socialism was well summed up by Eugene Debs: "The collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interests of all the people! That is the demand.
"The elimination of rent, interest and profit and the production of wealth to satisfy the wants of all the people! That is the demand. The end of...class rule, of master and slave, of ignorance and vice, of poverty and shame, of cruelty and crime...That is the demand."
https://ibw21.org/editors-choice/this-land-is-not-your-land/
~~~ Posted for Collectivist ~~~
In his first annual message to the U.S. Congress, in 1829, U.S. President Andrew Jackson—a slave-owning real estate speculator already famous for burning down Creek settlements and hounding the survivors of the Creek War of 1813–14—called for the “voluntary” migration of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River. Six months later, in the spring of 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act into law. This measure gave the president the authority to negotiate with Native American tribes for their fertile lands. The statute set off waves of litigation, mineral prospecting, and land speculation—not to mention waves of violence committed by nonnative settlers against Native Americans.
https://blackagendareport.com/top-trump-official-asks-feds-charge-protesters-sedition
The rarely used statute could put protesters accused of using violence in prison for up to 20 years.
“The charge does not require evidence of any purported plot against the state.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/x09.htm
The enemies of the working people, the landowners and capitalists say that the workers and peasants cannot live without them. "If it were not for us," they say, "there would be nobody to maintain order, to give out work, and to compel people to work. If it were not for us everything would collapse, and the state would fall to pieces. We have been driven away, but chaos will bring us back again." But this sort of talk by the landowners and capitalists will not confuse, intimidate, or deceive the workers and peasants. An army needs the strictest discipline; nevertheless the class-conscious workers succeeded in uniting the peasants, succeeded in taking the old tsarist officers into their service, succeeded in building a victorious army.
