Hysterical Populism and the Appetite of Leviathan (tags)
The relationship between economy and social order has been turned upside down: economy is no longer a function of an overarching culture, but conversely, "human society has sunk to being an accessory of the economic system" (Karl Polanyi). RK was founder of Exit & Krisis blogs.
Children suffer strongly from homeschooling in Lockdown (tags)
The situation, which UNICEF described as a "catastrophic education crisis" at the beginning of March, continues. In addition, errors, stereotypes, misjudgements and trivialization prevail in the discussion about children, Corona and digital distance learning.
Psychology as a method of domination (tags)
The current pandemic policy has given the world the ultimate understanding of how democracies (...) transform themselves into totalitarian because inhumane systems. (...) Long live the courage to resist and refute.
The Populist Makers and Dangerous Optimism (tags)
The people vote and capital decides. Another capitalism appears that is marked by an anti-liberal and intolerant culture. The goal of the new capitalists is the same as the old capitalists: to make the rich even richer. The governing elites gamble away the future of coming generations.
Against Market Radicalism (tags)
Capitalism is not "the end of history" as the American Francis Fukuyama postulated in 1992. The system question is open! The economy should be re-embedded in society. What seems rational in microeconomics collides with the irrationality of maximum profits as en end-in-itself
Is Economic Speculation a Form of Structural Violence? (tags)
According to neoclassical economic theory, the financial markets return to equilibrium. Problems only occur because of state intervention. The roaring twenties led to an enormous stock euphoria. In 2018, companies inflate their stocks in a $70 billion stock buy back program.
Capitalism as a Religion (tags)
"Capital is the only god that the whole world knows, sees, touches, smells, tastes and excites all our senses. It is the only god that doesn't encounter any atheists" (Paul Lafargue's little known genial satire "Religion of Capital" from 1887.
Labor Solidarity in Neoliberal Structural Change (tags)
The self-regulating market and the invisible hand were neoliberal theories of Frederick August von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Submission to the market was described as a natural law, as natural and self-evident as the rotation of the planets. Solidarity and unions were decried as barriers.
The Capitalism of Hopelessness (tags)
Regulated capitalism reached its peak in the class compromise of the 1960s when representatives of workers could put the screws on the steamroller CEOs a little. The enemy and dynamic are lost to capitalism. Capitalism flows into a society without utopia and alternative.
Book Review: "The Great Crash or the Century Crisis" by Elmar Altvater (tags)
Capitalism is at an end and the whole world is drawn into the mess. Preventing this is an ethical imperative and a political duty. The multiple crisis has dragged on for years. The political class allows this to happen. Political answers to the debacle can only be found with clarity on causes.
The Capitalism of Hopelessness (tags)
The capitalism of hopelessness is a capitalism where the enemy is lost, where capitalism can no longer fulfill its promise of prosperity for the people as in the 1960s and where capitalism neutralizes all utopian energy and alternatives. Public jobs must be created in the emergency.
Anarchy in UK: La explosi?n de la rabia (tags)
No pretenden derrocar al gobierno, quieren arrasar con todo lo existente. No piden reformas ni mejoras ni transformaciones, s?lo liberan la ira, la frustraci?n, el delirio y las pasiones contenidas.
Manifesto of Appalled Economists (tags)
State debts may be caused more by reduced corporate tax revenues than excess spending. Through "location competition," corporations play off state and countries and harvest tax write-offs and sweetheart-assessments. Through "state capture," the state becomes a trough.
OSASCO IN TV - CRITIC OF THE JOURNALISTIC REASON (tags)
Meditations on the "drip blood" TV journalism.
POLITICAL WITCH-HUNT IN THE PHILIPPINES (tags)
The case of Prof. Sarah Raymundo's firing at the University of the Philippines betokens the sharpening political contradictions and hegemonic crisis occurring in what William Blum calls the oldest longest-held colony of the US, currently ruled by the corrupt and brutal Arroyo regime praised by Barack Obama.
Taxes and Finance Capital: Back to the Feudal State (tags)
Taxes are the corrective to the furious free market. They safeguard the public interest, redistribution, public functions and services..For the oligarchs, tax is a confiscation and tax officials are highway robbers.. Tax reductions for the rich are the direrct cause of the debility of community.
THE FILIPINO PEASANT IMAGINATION VERSUS AMERICAN LEFTISM (tags)
The following remarks are intended to supplement the author's paper "Blueprint for a Bulosan Project" posted in the online journal OUR OWN VOICE. This essay critiques the position of "leftists" in the elite U.S. academies who claim a "manifest destiny" to civilize colonized subalterns and peasant radicals like the Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan who (they claim) have failed to take "America" out of a transnationalizing U.S. Studies. Are we seeing a replay of the "Thomasites" who produced generations of neocolonized "little brown brothers" now serving U.S. imperialist aggression in Iraq, Aghanistan, Palestine, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and in the Philippines, its former direct colony? "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea...."
FILIPINOS IN THE U.S.A. AND AROUND THE WORLD: WHENCE AND WHITHER? (tags)
About ten million Filipinos are now scattered in the U.S. and around the world, chiefly as exploited migrant labor. Meanwhile, 85 million Filipinos--with the exception of a tiny privileged minority--are sufffering and resisting the current repressive regime in a rapidly deteriorating neocolonized social order. The Philippines has one of the most durable and vibrant revolutionary traditions in the whole world--the first Asian people to revolt against Western colonialism. 4.1 million Filipinos died opposing U.S. domination in the Filipino-American War at the turn of the last century. Today Filipinos are engaged in a popular democratic revolutionary process against U.S. imperialism and its local agents. Can overseas Filipinos contribute to the radical transformation of a world afflicted by the atrocities and terrors of global capitalism?
Another world is possible. This is directed against the famous and thoughtless assumption of the impossibility of alterna-tives at the "end of history".. The substance of societies is tapped for financial institutions.
The Icy Normality of Hunger (tags)
"World agriciulture in its present state of development could feed 12 billion persons.. The daily silent genocide of hunger that occurs in icy normality is not a fate. People are responsible.. For Rousseau, there was no natural law of capital.."
The Twilight of Vanguardism (tags)
Revolutionary thinkers have been saying that the age of vanguardism is over for most of a century now. Outside of a handful of tiny sectarian groups, it's almost impossible to find a radical intellectuals seriously believe that their role should be to determine the correct historical analysis of the world situation, so as to lead the masses along in the one true revolutionary direction.
Social conflicts are always conflicts around terms and definitional power..Whoever has definitional power over what is reality and what is realpolitik dominates ideological semantics. Translated from the German