CAPITALIST SYSTEMIC POVERTY

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.

Since the US has moved to the step of landing a military cargo plane in Taiwan island, escalating the situation to a tipping point of military action, each step they take may trigger military friction and confrontation. They must understand the mainland is much better prepared for this kind of clash, both in terms of real action and willpower.

FRANK SCOTT—The horrendous death toll inflicted by the virus is thought by many to be the work of a Chinese plot to exterminate everyone on earth but the Chinese and blame it on America, an American plot to exterminate everyone on earth but Americans and blame it on China, and assorted tales of twitness and omni-anti-social media to make those two sound relatively thoughtful. The fact that capitalism has transformed nature and made it far more easy to spread a lethal virus than to feed, clothe and shelter billions of people has escaped many, even some critics of capital who seem shocked that big pharma profits from illness. Hello? As does every and all other business entities and aspects of free market private profit pursuit which has less to do with evil individuals and far more to do with a corrupt debased system controlled by minorities at ever great cost to the majority.

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.