CLASS STRUGGLE

MAX KLEIN—As a result, under capitalism today, investment, innovation, and increased productivity are no longer as profitable for capitalists. These have all gone to the wall in the short-term pursuit of profit. Instead of investing in developing the productive forces of the economy, the bosses are making the working class pay for the crisis. The capitalists revert to simply lowering wages and making their employees work longer and more flexibly. Intermittent hours, lower pay, and excessively long working days’ is now the reality for more workers internationally.

CJ HOPKINS—Go back and read those quotes from the German Interior Ministry and the DHS again slowly. The message they are sending is unmistakeably clear. It might not seem all that new, but it is. Yes, they have been telling us “we are being attacked” and denouncing critics, protesters, and dissidents for twenty years (i.e., since the War on Terror was launched in 2001, and for the last four years in their War on Populism), but this is a whole new level of it … a fusion of official narratives and their respective official enemies into a singular, aggregate official narrative in which dissent will no longer be permitted. Instead, it will be criminalized, or it will be pathologized.

SUBHUTI2—It’s two mafia (maybe more) factions in a war of all against all with us little people serially screwed, sitting on the sidelines, mystified and confused over what the hell is going on. It’s democracy for the oligarchs, who get to fight it out with all the dirty tricks at their disposal. The voting machine and dead voters are the strategy of one faction, but that hardly lets Trump and his faction off the hook.

ALASTAIR CROOKE—We have today almost unlimited web access: Yet, its sheer overload seems to cause us to ‘dig in’, rather than ‘open up’. Anyone who wants it, can find a whole universe of alternative viewpoints online, but very few do. Paradoxically, the Information age has made us less willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. We cleave to the like-minded. We want to hear from the like-minded and have them as our friends.

And since it is so much easier to confirm our perspective and biases – and disdain others’ – the notion of politics by argument or consensus, is almost entirely lost. We can, and do, live in our segregated digital worlds, even when physically, those ‘others’ may indeed be our next door neighbour.

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).