CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM

P. GREANVILLE—By running professional hypocrites and pseudo progressives like Obama the Democrats dig their own graves. The Republicans make no bones about being a bunch of bastards, servants of the rich and powerful. But the Democrats pretend they are not. And hell, with their prostituted media shills and loads of posturing, they often succeed in fooling a lot of people. But eventually people get tired. Trump emerged as a viable candidate because of the Democrats’—especially the Clinton and Obama mafia—betrayals. Now they are working on repeating the same strategy in 2020.

PETER KOENIG—The murderous coup, followed by almost 20 years of brutal military rule by Augusto Pinochet (1973 to 1990), with torture, killings, human rights abuses left and right – was accompanied by an atrocious economic regime imposed by Washington hired, so-called “Chicago Boys” – ruining the country, privatizing social services, national infrastructures and natural resources – except for Chile’s and the world’s largest copper mine, CODELCO which was not privatized during the Pinochet years. The military would not allow it – for reasons of “national security”.

Since the 1990s, increased production and the trade of intermediate manufactured components has integrated the world economy in unprecedented ways. Hyperspecialization is the novel process, identified in the report, whereby supplier firms access advanced markets by focussing on the production of a limited range of components. This kind of sub-product specialization is organized through GVCs and coordinated by lead firms. By 2008, 52 per cent of world trade occurred under such arrangements.

PEPE ESCOBAR—Which bring us, inevitably, to the immediate future of Lula – still hanging, and hostage to a supremely flawed Supreme Court. Even conservative businessmen admit that the only possible cure for Brazil’s political recovery – not to mention rebuilding an economic model centered on wealth distribution – is represented by “Free Lula.”

JOHN B FOSTER—Neoliberalism can be defined as an integrated ruling-class political-ideological project, associated with the rise of monopoly-finance capital, the principal strategic aim of which is to embed the state in capitalist market relations. Hence, the state’s traditional role in safeguarding social reproduction—if largely on capitalist-class terms—is now reduced solely to one of promoting capitalist reproduction. The goal is nothing less than the creation of an absolute capitalism. All of this serves to heighten the extreme human and ecological destructiveness that characterizes our time.