BOURGEOIS LEFT

Liberal egalitarians tended to insist that what mattered were institutional solutions to current inequalities; past injustices weren’t relevant, and arguments that relied on historical claims were rejected.

CHRIS HEDGES INTERVIEW—This is a rather extraordinary interview for a variety of reasons. For one, Hedges is given space to say what he likes about the topics he is most interested in, chiefly the implosion and extreme toxicity of late-stage capitalism. Apparently, VICE News, which since this interview has become an almost complete propaganda tool for the Deep State, one designed to lure younger viewers wary of the mainstream engines of disinformation (CBS, CNN, NYTimes, Fox, etc.), felt they could not totally control Hedges, and they were right. 

DANNY HAIPHONG—There would be no Jay-Z/NFL collaboration without Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the hundreds of young, mostly Black men around the country whose lives have been taken prematurely by way of police murder. Disaster capitalism feeds off Black death.  And to protect the inevitability of Black death, the real billionaire capitalists such as Epstein who control the means of production (including fictitious finance) must operate in relative secrecy while Jay-Z and the rest of the Black misleadership class publicly shame and condemn any independent and politically left striving that emerges from the Black polity.

MARGO STILES—When you talk decadence in a world overrun by morally indifferent humans, Bravo’s shows, (an NBC property) nurtured by Andy Cohen, especially the Real Housewives franchises, take the cake. I admit watching them often: they CAN be entertaining. But what bothers me no end is how this bunch of mostly well-off people WASTE their celebrityhood in endless petty bickering punctuated by bouts of outrageous self-pampering. Their egos are so fragile, their vision of life so myopic, that the slightest real or imagined slight is cause for a feud that can last ages.

RAINER SHEA—The DPRK has a multi-party system that’s tremendously more democratic than what we have in the United States, and that’s delivered the country’s people universal healthcare, free food and housing, and guaranteed employment. China’s anti-poverty programs of recent decades have been so successful that poverty is coming close to no longer existing in China, with the country’s current extreme poverty rate hovering below 1%. After both of these countries overcome the economic war that the capitalist world is waging against them, as well as complete their efforts towards transitioning to green energy, they’ll stand as paragons of Marxist social development…