Stories about Thinking Politically.
The coronavirus pandemic may be global in scale, but its material impact on ordinary workers thus far has varied widely from one country to another — as has the relief offered by national governments when it comes to the lost wages and potential layoffs.
Our strategic perspective is evidently a revolutionary one, not limited to modest reforms that would leave capitalism as the globally dominant mode of production of essential goods and services. In our previous ten articles, published in Green Social Thought, we have at some length argued that capitalism, with its accompanying ideology, is itself the main barrier to environmentally and socially sustainable relationships for making our way on Earth.
This article continues an argument we began in Learning from history, previously published on www.greensocialthought.org. Evidently, socialist movements arose historically under circumstances that were not necessarily favorable to the enduring achievement of a socialist alternative. Under these circumstances some socialist movements set their sights no higher than the achievement of modest reforms of capitalism. Others declared their revolutionary successes to be the beginning of a socialist transformation.
The nation that considers itself to be the apex of capitalist achievement on planet Earth turns out to have no health care system worthy of the name–a testament to the sucking moral vacuum at America’s imperial, white settler colony core. A lowly virus–a form of being that exists at the very border between “life” and “not-life”–has revealed the world’s superpower as butt-naked and very much afraid.
Why go back to the 1920s when the militant white supremacists of current generation are either products of, or influenced by, the “third Klan” of the 1970s and 1980s?
In our previous articles published in Green Social Thought, we have identified the existential crisis we now face as a systemic one. We have argued that the now globally dominant capitalist socio-economic relationships and their cultural attributes are not only associated with the emergence of an existential crisis, but also causal. To achieve an ecologically sustainable future for humanity requires the building of an alternative socio-economic system, one historically and again popularly identified with some form of socialism.
It has always been clear to Black Agenda Report that the post-Sixties betrayals of the Black Misleadership Class necessitated that a future Black liberation movement must be largely an internal Black struggle to uproot the corrupted elements in our polity. False unity has become Black folks’ Achilles Heel, allowing Black charlatans free rein in our communities and reserving most elected positions for servants of Capital. The Democratic Party is a predatory edifice of Black disempowerment, from which our people must either free themselves, or become agents of their own perpetual oppression and accomplices in the degradation of humanity, worldwide.
Aaj Woh Kashmir Hai Mehkoom-O-Faqeer Kal Jise Ahl-E-Nazar Kehte Thay Iran-E-Sagheer (Today that land of Kashmir, under the heels of the enemy, has become weak, helpless and poor. Once known among the wise as Little Iran)
Richard D. Wolff is a name familiar to readers and viewers of alternative media. His articles are published on sites such as Truthout and Truthdig. Wolff has also appeared many times on Pacifica’s Democracy Now! Program, recently debating liberal economist Paul Krugman on the meaning of socialism. He also hosts the show Economic Update. Wolf has a knack for explaining left-wing economics for laypeople. His newest book, Understanding Socialism, provides a lucid, and easy to read introduction to the question of what socialism really is.
After the outbreak of the most intense and massive social protests ever recorded in the history of Chile, on November 16 the government and most political parties signed an agreement to restore peace and public order and initiate a process to draft a new constitution.
The protests, triggered by the rise in subway fares on Oct. 18, called into question the supposed Chilean success story of the neoliberal economic model implemented in the country during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). Developed by the so-called Chicago Boys, successive administrations since the 1990 return to democracy in 1990 sustained the model as state policy.
