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Currently viewing articles tagged with Capitalism.
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Dispatches from the Detriot USSF #2
Unlike the World Social Forum and Social Forums in other countries,the USSF has few NGOs here and no celebrity stars. These were mostly people from local groups of grassroot activists.
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Morbid Symptoms, Current Healthcare Struggles
Leo Panitch and Colin Leys have just brought out the 2010 annual volume of the Socialist Register, Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism, published by Merlin Press in London, Monthly Review Press in the US and Fernwood Books in Canada. The book provides a path-breaking assessment of health under capitalism, providing a systematic account of the antagonistic relationship between capitalism and human bodies, of how modern healthcare has been deeply penetrated by neoliberal capitalism, and the ways in which healthcare workers, activists and socialists are struggling and pursuing alternatives paths of solidarity in human health.
Socialist Project recently asked Greg Albo to interview Colin Leys about the book and about current healthcare struggles.
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Economics For Everyone
Economics For Everyone is an invaluable book and a necessary addition to the library of popular educators, trade unionists, activists, or any person trying to make sense of the conundrum that is modern capitalism. And as Stanford makes clear, the first step to transforming the system is knowing how it works and for whom. To this end, Stanford’s book has made a vital contribution.
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Latin America: Social Movements in Times of Economic Crises
The most striking aspect of the prolonged and deepening world recession/depression is the relative and absolute passivity of the working and middle class in the face of massive job losses, big cuts in wages, health care and pension payments and mounting housing foreclosures. To explore some tentative hypotheses of why there is little organized protest, we need to examine the historical-structural antecedents to the world economic depression.
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Keynes and the crisis
A spectre has returned to haunt the left — the spectre of Keynes. The Left kept it at bay in the 1950s and 1960s by pretending that “reformist” and “ineffectual” “Keynesianism” was Keynes. But it was so far removed from Keynes’ profound critique of the doctrine and reality of capitalism that one eminent economist called it “bastard Keynesianism.”
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Critique of Intelligent Design
Roughly coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, this timely, interesting, and important book is a firm rejection of the attempts by the contemporary intelligent design (ID) movement to force a religious worldview into the domains of natural and social science. In their examination of the struggle between science and religion, the book’s authors come down forcefully on the side of science, and at the same time shed light on two critical aspects of this debate that have been hitherto largely neglected. First, the writings properly connect the current debate between materialism and creationism to its millennia-long history and thereby provide a valuable historical perspective. Second, they crucially expose the true objectives of the intelligent design movement, goals that entail not only redefining the natural sciences, but also the social sciences as well.
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British Columbia’s Meaningless Climate Debate
Judging by the response of mainstream environmentalists, British Columbia’s recent provincial election was a referendum on how to fight climate change. The Liberal incumbents proposed no change to the carbon tax they introduced last year. The opposition New Democratic Party wanted to replace the tax with “a ‘cap and trade’ plan — just like U.S. President Obama.”
Prominent green NGOs, including the David Suzuki Foundation, the Pembina Institute, and ForestEthics, blasted the NDP for taking a “backward step.” A Pembina representative wrote: “The carbon tax is already showing results. It is important for British Columbia to keep moving forward on climate change rather than starting over again.” The Liberals won the election, so BC’s green future is assured. Right? Wrong.
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US-Latin American Relations
One of the most striking aspect of contemporary US-Latin American relations is the profound divergence between the hopes, expectations and positive image of the Obama regime and the policies, strategies and practices which are being pursued. Many so-called progressive North American commentators and not a few Latin American writers have ignored the most elementary features of US foreign policy, and focused exclusively on the highly deceptive rhetoric of “change” and “new beginnings.” A serious understanding of US foreign policy toward Latin America requires a discussion of the main objectives of the Obama regime, the global priorities of imperial policy in times of multiple wars and world depression.
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Unions and the crisis
The political and economic setting facing the union movement today is the most difficult since the Great Depression. Unions have already confronted two decades of unrelenting assault from neoliberal policies of labour-market flexibility, austerity and political conservatism. Then, the global financial crisis ripped across the entire world market. Many forecasts for 2009 are projecting negative growth for the world economy as a whole for the first time since the 1930s.
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Actually, it’s the system, President Obama
Global capitalism’s deterioration is fast outrunning the disorganized, uncoordinated patchwork of too-little-too-late government “programs.” Nothing illustrates this sorry spectacle better than the twists and turns of U.S. monetary policy to be executed by the Federal Reserve, and Congress’s just-passed “stimulus” program, about to be enacted by the Obama administration.
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