CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM

CALEB MAUPIN—At this point it’s worth recaling that all these calamities were created by the elites’ obstinate allegiance to incurably irrational predatory capitalism, which, devious rhetoric aside, continues to this day.  The legitimacy /representational problem is serious, and they know it. Heck, even Americans, world famous for their political cluelessness are now ferociously alienated from their own media and political establishment (not yet from capitalism itself, though, as they have been heavily indoctrinated to believe it is “the American way”). These crises, of which the massive and incurable unemployment, caused by capitalism’s periodic”overproduction”, now aggravated by the digital revolution, constitute a perennial challenge to the elites’ governance, can be overcome only through two paths: socialism or barbarism. (The latter by definition only a temporary fix). 

PHILIP M GIRALDI—It is well past time to get rid of the Israel parasite that feeds on the American government and people. The special relationship with Israel, sanctified in the halls of Congress and by a Jewish dominated media, does nothing good for the United States and for the American people. Israel’s constant interference in the U.S. political system and economy comes at a huge cost, both in dollars and in terms of actual American interests.

And then there are the hot buttons which, if the U.S. actually had a functional government that is responsive to the people, should have been pushed long ago. Israel is ranked by the FBI as the number one “friendly” country in terms of its spying against the United States. Pollard is an exception, but Israeli spies are routinely slapped on the wrist when caught and never face prosecution.

Jimmy Dore denounces the cowardly betrayal of alternative journalism by Cenk Uygur, head of the Young Turks, and in particular Julian Assange, a man horribly persecuted by the reigning oligarchy for revealing the empire’s ugly political and war crimes. Jimmy spares no words in his public flogging of Uygur, who is now one more CIA asset repeating the agency’s dangerous falsehoods. 

BRUCE LERRO—As a young social revolutionary, I made my way through a fair amount of the anarchist and Marxist literature and one of the descriptions that intrigued me most was Marx and Engels’ description of social evolution. They depicted it as a spiral. Rather than a linear or cyclic way of showing social movement, they presented it in the form of thesis-antithesis and synthesis. The thesis phase was within primitive egalitarian societies. Then there was a long antithesis in which social classes formed – slave societies, feudal societies and then capitalism. Out of this came a crisis which could result in a synthesis – first socialism, then communism. What I liked about the synthesis was that it was not just a compromise between thesis and antithesis. Rather, it twisted its way up to another dimension, a qualitative leap in which there is a partial return to the thesis but on a higher level. Synthetic communism was a return to primitive communism but on a higher level, an egalitarian level, but with abundant material conditions informed by the surplus created by capitalism.

JONATHAN COOK–If the corporate elite can no longer find a way to foist a neoliberal technocrat like Biden on the public, they will choose the populism of a Trump over the populism of a Sanders every time. And as they own the media, they can craft the stories we hear: about who we are, what is possible and where we are heading. If we allow it, our imaginations will be twisted and deformed in the image of the deranged totem they choose.