Capitalism
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The planet cannot begin to heal until we rip the mask off the West’s war machine
Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. Continue reading
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Land Dispossession and Imperialism Repackaged as ‘Feeding the World’
The world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of rich and powerful land speculators and agribusiness corporations. Smallholder farmers are being criminalised and even made to disappear when it comes to the struggle for land. They are constantly exposed to systematic expulsion. Continue reading
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Meet The Anti-Regulation Groups Influencing Post-Brexit Trade Policy
A handful of prominent individuals from anti-regulation thinktanks with close ties to International Trade Secretary Liz Truss have been appointed to top government advisory boards guiding the future of UK post-Brexit trade policy. Continue reading
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The world is yours — for a price
The flight of the self-proclaimed prophet Shepherd Bushiri and his wife, in the process forgoing R400,000 in bail money, a Gulf Steam jet aircraft and a R5.5 million mansion, revealed how, with enough money, national borders become insignificant. On the other hand, working people in many regions of the world are being increasingly trapped not… Continue reading
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End of Neoliberalism? The Capitalist Reset and the Possibilities of a New Stage of Social Revolt
An important part of the international left has announced the end of neoliberalism and the return to the central role of the state. This would seem to indicate the possibility of a return to the tutelage of the State over the public, given the disastrous panorama that was shown with the COVID-19, as a result… Continue reading
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The Great Reset: The Final Assault on the Living Planet [It’s Not a Social Dilemma – It’s the Calculated Destruction of the Social Part III]
“Social license is being harvested to reset the capitalist system – under the guise of a climate emergency and saving the planet. This we know: the planet will not be saved by those that have destroyed it.” Continue reading
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DIANA JOHNSTONE: The Great Pretext … for Dystopia
By titling their recently published World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, the authors link the pandemic to their futuristic proposals in ways bound to be met with a chorus of “Aha!”s. In the current atmosphere of confusion and distrust, the glee with which economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret greet the pandemic as… Continue reading
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COVID vaccines: calling the shots
Before the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the world, the big pharmaceutical companies did little investment in vaccines for global diseases and viruses. It was just not profitable. Of the 18 largest US pharmaceutical companies, 15 had totally abandoned the field. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilizers and treatments for male impotence were profit leaders, not defences against hospital… Continue reading
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Facing the Anthropocene: An Update
Recent scientific work strengthens and extends the arguments in Ian Angus’s pathbreaking book on fossil capitalism and the crisis of the Earth System Continue reading
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Revealed: Boris Johnson’s controversial policy chief leading secretive NHS task force
Freedom of Information disclosures to openDemocracy show the new “No.10 Health and Social Care Taskforce” reports to a Steering Group chaired by Munira Mirza, the influential head of Boris Johnson’s policy unit, and that it “met weekly” from July to September with a further meeting in October. Continue reading
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Crony Capitalism: This case will reshape society
Kate Bingham heads up Britain’s vaccine task force. She’s a venture capitalist with no public health experience, married to a Conservative minister. Dido Harding leads the Test and Trace system. She has no public health experience and is the wife of a Conservative MP. Mike Coupe, is head of COVID-19 testing, and has – you… Continue reading
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Conspiracy and Class Power: A Talk by Michael Parenti
“Those larger institutional forces are directed by conscious human agency, and those agencies use conspiracy or non-conspiracy, they use conspiratorial forces or non-conspiratorial forces, and that the conspiratorial forces are important, they’re not rare exceptions, and that they are systemic in their nature and in their output.” – Michael Parenti (from this week’s lecture.) Continue reading
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The myth of a food crisis – new paper
The idea that the world might soon be unable to feed its human population is an old and powerful narrative that has recently been extensively exploited by agribusiness. In its modern form the idea rests on the surprisingly narrow foundations of a small number of mathematical food system models. These in turn rest on specific… Continue reading
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Glyphosate: Hypocrisy and Public Health in the UK
The government is extremely worried about a substance that could be contributing to a spiralling public health crisis that has been decades in the making. It has been detected in food and in urine. The government has therefore decided to carry out mass urine testing. It has found millions of ‘cases’. The more it tests,… Continue reading
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Calls for a public enquiry into awards of Covid-related contracts
The original brief of this website, set up ten years ago, was to raise awareness of the ‘revolving door’, rewards for failure, widespread behind-the-scene lobbying and party funding which corrupts the decision-making process here and abroad. There is currently a resurgence of such concerns, expressed here by Professor Prem Sikka and later by Sophie Hill,… Continue reading
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Exiting the false “jobs versus environment” dilemma
Amidst the renewed rise of obscene inequalities, a wave of protests is sweeping through Italy, from south to north. On the one hand, the pandemic has engendered an upsurge in workplace disputes to defend health and in mobilizations to protect the income of workers affected by COVID-19-related restrictions. On the other hand, however, we have… Continue reading
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Capitalism’s Coronavirus Catastrophe
Wall Street’s war machine includes 11 aircraft carriers and 5,800 nuclear weapons. Yet the capitalist government in the United States is helpless to combat the latest coronavirus surge. Continue reading
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Silvia Federici: The exploitation of women and the development of capitalism
Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is a classic work of anti-capitalist feminism. The book examines capitalism’s investment in sexism and racism, showing how the consolidation of the capitalist system depended on the subjugation of women, the enslavement of black and indigenous people, and the exploitation of the colonies. Federici demonstrates that unpaid labor–especially that… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 