ERIC ZUESSE—So: if Andrew Cuomo is responsible for N.Y.’s having more coronavirus cases (360,000) than all nations but the U.S. (1,700,000) and Brazil (377,000), and Russia (362,000), then is that because all of these places are especially corrupt?
Could be. But the percentages per population are, of course, far more significant a measure, and here those are, expressed as cases per million population: U.S.=5,211; Brazil=1,779; Russia=2,483; N.Y.=19,202.
In just a few minutes Caleb provides a reliable chart to locate where true Marxist knowledge and practice reside. Not in the abstruse formulations of existentialists like Sartre or Camus, not to mention the impenetrable narcissistic nonsense of postmodernists, nor the angst-riddled whining and gyrations of liberals like Susan Sontag or Gloria Steinem, or in other voices of the fashionable (and comfortable) “New Left”, but among real people, some of them leaders, like Xi Jinping, who have lived in and struggled among those working extremely hard, often risking their lives, to build socialism, in this case “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which, like all socialisms as per Marxist theory, is only the bridge to a much better future society denominated communism.
WJ ASTORE—In 1969 America reached the moon! We respected science. Many Americans were trying to end a disastrous war in Vietnam. People marched for civil rights, they fought for equal rights, there was a sense America’s potential was nearly limitless.
WTF in 2020? Many Americans, including our president, don’t respect science. We fire doctors for calling out quack medical cures. We put a breeder of labradoodles in charge of our Covid-19 pandemic response. Wars just go on forever with little resistance. We’re sliding backwards in rights for minorities, for women, for workers. And the space program? Moribund in the USA. We’re very much stuck on earth, an earth that is less hospitable to life than it was fifty years ago.
A Chinese laboratory has been developing a drug it believes has the power to bring the coronavirus pandemic to a halt. The outbreak first emerged in China late last year before spreading across the world, prompting an international race to find treatments and vaccines. A drug being tested by scientists at China’s prestigious Peking University could not only shorten the recovery time for those infected, but even offer short-term immunity from the virus, researchers say.
BRUCE LERRO—Who developed revolutionary theory? For the Old Left, revolutionary theory was developed by professional revolutionaries inside the Communist Party or by members of trade unions. At least hypothetically if not actually, Leninist theory should be informed by political practice in organizing the working class and its struggles. On the other hand, led by the Frankfurt school, New Leftist theory was developed not within a party or a union but within the academy. Most New Leftist theory after 1970 came out of universities, whether structuralism, Foucault, post-structuralist or postmodernist.