CAPITALIST FRONTS

CALEB MAUPIN—In old Rome we could already see the contours of a proletariat, argues Caleb Maupin, with all attendant ills of surviving only on the sale of their labor. Christ, e notes, was a proletarian: a carpenter, a free man, who neither a slave nor a landlord. His doctrines were seen as dangerous to the status quo, hence his persecution, and the rise of a “mild version” of radical Christianity, a form of early social democracy. 

YOEL BITRAN—In 1989, a combination of mass protests and rising international condemnation forced the dictatorship to call for elections. But the Chilean oligarchy—which consists of the traditional land-owning aristocracy and newer generations of capitalist families—knew that though the dictator would fall, their constitution would stay intact. This meant, as Guzman predicted, that any significant changes would be rendered impossible. Thirty years later, Chile continued to have an extremely high level of economic inequality, with the highest income gap in the OECD countries.

JAY THARAPPEL—On one end of the spectrum there’s Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah who all argued that an unjust status quo is preferable to the anarchy that would likely follow its overthrow, whereas on the other end of the spectrum, there are the Zaydis who argue that Muslims have an obligation to rebel against unjust and corrupt rulers.

Saudi Arabia is favourable to the “quietism” of the former sort, whereas the Yemeni national resistance led by Ansarullah are Zaydis, who far from being “sectarian” are more accurately the bridge between Sunni & Shia in the sense that they accept the legitimacy of the first three Caliphs (proto-Sunni) while reserving their preference for Ali (proto-Shia), and therefore, they are sometimes referred to as “the Sunnis of the Shia, and the Shia of the Sunnis”.

Their petition circulation effort drew major support on social media in the days after the initial protests in Cuba, helping to stitch together a left-reinforcement to the edifice of the mainstream press, which described the event as an uprising by “political dissidents” against an “oppressive bureaucratic regime” in the pursuit of democracy and freedom of expression. The definition of “freedom” pursued and the political orientation of the protesters in question differed between the tales spun by the New York Times and those of the Socialist Worker, but the story was the same: Repressive government arbitrarily detains political dissidents.

BRUCE LERRO—The Sullivanian Institute was a spin-off organization that broke away in 1957 from the work of Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan was sensitive to the social side of psychological dynamics and among other insights blamed the nuclear family for the formation of the ideal capitalist consumer. Both Dr. Jane Pearce and Saul Newton took these criticisms of the nuclear family much further. In 1963, Pearce and Newton coauthored a book called Conditions of Human Growth. In that book they identified the family as socially isolating the individual from developing healthy relationships with friends, especially in adolescence and adulthood. Open-ended friendships, both sexual and otherwise, were the way out of the infantilization of the nuclear family and the road to maturity. For them, friendships are the first potential of experience of love between equals.