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Humanity’s collective awakening will unfold in ways that nobody is anticipating, for the same reasons an individual’s awakening always unfolds in ways they can’t anticipate.
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — There is one last hope for the United States. It does not lie in the ballot box. It lies in the union organizing and strikes by workers at Amazon, Starbucks, Uber, Lyft, John Deere, Kellogg, the Special Metals plant in Huntington, West Virginia, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the Northwest Carpenters Union, Kroger, teachers in Chicago, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, fast-food workers, hundreds of nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
The following open letter was issued by an international coalition of prominent scientists and governance scholars on January 17, 2022. It calls for an international treaty to outlaw attempts to reduce global heating by blocking sunlight from reaching earth.
by Richard Falk
[Prefatory Note: The following essay was published on the website of This View of Life (TVOL) thisviewoflife.com, which brings to bear the views of science and evolutionary biology on a series of global challenges increasingly overwhelming the capabilities of civilizational modernity. A series of related articles can be found on the TVOL website. My essay was published there on January 13, 2022.]
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CAPITAL VERSUS COMMONS, 5
Articles in this series:
by Ian Angus
In 1542, Henry VIII gave his friend and privy councilor Sir William Herbert a gift: the buildings and lands of a dissolved monastery, Wilton Abbey near Salisbury. Herbert didn’t need farmland, so he had the buildings torn down, expelled the monastery’s tenants, and physically destroyed an entire village. In their place he built a large mansion, and fenced off the surrounding lands as a private park for hunting.
In this second post on the annual ASSA economics conference, I look at the papers and presentations made by radical and heterodox economists. These presentations are mostly under the auspices of the Union of Radical Political Economics (URPE) sessions, but the Association of Evolutionary Economics also provided an umbrella for some sessions.
The mainstream was focused on whether the US and world economy were set to recover strongly or not after COVID; whether the hike in inflation would eventually subside or not and what to do about it. The heterodox sessions were more focused, as you would expect, on the fault-lines in modern capitalist economies and why inequality of wealth and income has risen.
By Claire Robinson
The preliminary EU report on glyphosate prepared by the Dutch, Hungarian, French and Swedish regulatory agencies fails to take account of the vast majority of recent studies published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, according to a report by the association Générations Futures.
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly Climate & Capitalism feature, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
Leonardo Boff
I believe that this leap, with our participation, especially the victims of the exploitation of capitalism, can occur and would be within the possibilities of the history of the universe and the Earth: from the current destructive chaos, we can move on to generative chaos of a new way of being and inhabiting planet Earth.
Image by Geoff Livingston via FlickrOriginally posted Oct. 27, 2020 | goingundergroundRT on Oct 26, 2020
We speak to William Robinson, author of The Global Police State. He discusses how capitalism’s crises have fuelled the rise of the global police state, the drastic inequality and poverty that has become a theme of modern capitalism which necessitates the global police state, whether there is class warfare on the poor, the growing industry of militarism and oppression and much more!
Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented genetically engineered seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. Data platforms, private equity firms, e-commerce giants and AI-controlled farming systems.
The decline of the U.S. empire began much earlier than when Washington’s downward trend in global influence became widely acknowledged. As far back as the middle of the twentieth century, the U.S.-led order that formed after the second world war began to come apart. In 1949, the empire lost China to communism, an event which would ultimately produce the current shift towards a new China-led multipolar order. The additional setbacks that imperialism had to undergo to reach this point began shortly after, with the Indochina wars that Washington would become embroiled in during the mid-twentieth century. Even as the empire garnered great victories during these decades, successfully carrying out numerous anti-communist coups which allowed for unprecedented exportations of capital to the peripheral countries, with each war there would appear more cracks in U.S. hegemony.
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Everyone who’s freaking out about wokeness and identity politics can relax. Liberals are 100 percent certain to get bored with that schtick and forget all about it without having helped a single member of any minority or marginalized group. Ask the immigrants and the kids in cages.
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There are now 2,776 articles on the Climate & Capitalism website. How many have you read?
In 2021, Climate & Capitalism published 91 new articles. These attracted the most readers.
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by Paul Buhl
The Cancer of Colonialism: W. Alphaeus Hunton, Black Liberation and the Daily Worker 1944-46. Edited with an Introduction by Tony Pecinovsky. Foreword by Vijay Prashad. New York: International Publishers, 2021. 353pp, $19.99.
This highly unusual book highlights a forgotten journalist and thinker, but just as much, the assiduous research and interpretations by Tony Pecinovsky, a St. Louis activist and non-academic scholar, on the history of the U.S. Left. W.A. Hunton, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, was “the kind of absolutely honest and unselfish scholar who is apt to be trampled on and neglected in the present American world.” (p.177) Thanks to Pecinovsky, Hunton is rediscovered.
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
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[There are a mass of videos at the end of this piece, but due to the fact that WordPress only allows direct Youtube video links, you won’t be able to view them here, so hopefully supplying the links will do the job! B]
The coronavirus pandemic: panic vs. totalitarianism (Twitter)SPR and several independent geopolitical analysts have been warning since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic that the pandemic might be used as a rationale or pretext to impose a global digital biometric identity system, introduced as “vaccine passports”, that may later be expanded into a Chinese-style “social credit” population control system.
Building and clothmaking were among the largest industrial occupations in the 17th century.Articles in this series:
by Ian Angus
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
—Bertolt Brecht, “A Worker Reads History”
Much academic debate about the origin of capitalism has actually been about the origin of capitalists. Were they originally aristocrats, or gentry, or merchants, or successful farmers? Far less attention has been paid to Brecht’s penetrating question: who did the actual work?
Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: news you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education.
Much like Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald began to be condemned by liberals only post-Trump. The liberal visceral hatred of Donald Trump has trumped rational discourse.
By Riva Enteen
Street’s CounterPunch article, “Glenn Greenwald is Not Your Misunderstood Left Comrade,” obstructs political dialogue and struggle. He gives no substantive rebuttal to a Greenwald article that declares “grotesque” the sight of “masked servants and unmasked elite at the New York Met Gala.” In a classic ad hominem attack, since Street couldn’t summon up an intelligent response, he just hurled insults. Sadly, this is what currently passes for political debate.
The New Dark Age 