capitalism

European Left-wing political scientists find difficult to understand that the colonial contradiction is at the heart of our present, they think it’s a conceptual error, something anachronistic, that the joyful postmodernity – the one that delivers their Macs to them at home – has gone beyond all that, and that Trump or Bolsonaro are racist accidents of History, or of the “free world”. It’s just the opposite. Under the advertising varnish of capitalist globalization, the deep History of our world has never disappeared, it has even come back to the surface, even stronger.

A friend happens to run a web-archiving service and has been coming under intense pressure to remove allegedly “false” Web-pages from his archive’s records. This would be censorship by that Web-archive. I sent him this note arguing that he should not:
Once you get into doing that, you will lose all credibility yourself.

150 years ago, on April 21, 1870, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, was born. According to many, he was the greatest revolutionary of all times, a man who gave birth to both internationalism and anti-imperialism.
It is time to “revisit Communism”. It is also time to ask some basic, essential questions:

How is it possible that a system so logical, progressive, and so superior to what is, up till now, governing the world, failed to permanently overthrow the nihilism and brutality of capitalism, imperialism and neo-colonialism?

The inability of the outdated capitalist economic system to provide for the needs of the people and to sustain itself has been exposed repeatedly throughout history.
However, 2020 is revealing just how grave and profound the failures and dangers of this exhausted system of advanced commodity production are. Even mainstream news sources cannot prettify the numbers.

Armed police transporting suspected members of a communist youth group, Jakarta, Indonesia, October 10, 1965.  Photo Credit: Vincent Bevins)
I’m guessing that “Jakarta Is Coming” or “Plan Jakarta” won’t elicit immediate recognition from most of you and until very recently that was also true for me. But before defining it, here’s a bit of necessary background:

  In an earlier post last month, I had discussed the global rise of the Right as related to the revolt of the ‘little man’ (a term I borrow from Wilhelm Reich) and his search for a ‘father-figure’ of authority. I had also argued in that post that the revolt of the little man in … Continue reading ‘National Populisms’, the Little Man and Big Men →

When it comes to Aboriginal land rights in Australia, several contradictions emanate. In May, the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation which represents Aboriginal communities, won exclusive native title rights to land which is mined by Fortescue Metals Group. With legal possession of their land, the Aboriginal communities can now seek compensation for economic and spiritual damage inflicted by the mining corporation – a move that shows legal recognition of Aboriginal claims over land and its usage.

THIS IS THE FINAL PART OF A THREE PART POST India has been effectively under an RSS coup d’etat  since May 2019, after the  extremely dubious “sweeping victory” of the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections. Since then, there has been a concerted and relentless onslaught on democracy from the twin forces of Hindu chaudhrahat … Continue reading Part III – THE VIRUS, THE MUSLIM AND THE MIGRANT: Rewilding, pirate care and solidarity →