NM's blog

An view by Sirantos Fotopoulos The protests now convulsing Iran are the inevitable revolt of a working-class pushed beyond the limits of survival. Inflation has shredded wages, the rial’s collapse has turned food, fuel, and medicine into luxuries, and millions of people who once lived precariously now find themselves unable to make a living at all. Shopkeepers, bazaar merchants, transport workers, students, and casual laborers are protesting the daily violence of an economy organized to extract obedience through deprivation. When bread becomes unaffordable, dissent is the first step towards survival. The Iranian state’s response has been brutally consistent — repression first, reform never. Security forces have met demonstrations with live ammunition, mass arrests, beatings, and intimidation. Internet blackouts attempt to sever workers from one another, isolating struggles city by city. The message is unmistakable: survival is conditional on silent obedience. To demand wages that keep ...

" Hitler's disdain for the complacency of the 'old' bourgeoisie was life-long. But he honoured thrusting meritocrats. Notably, one of Hitler's early and long-standing heroes was the United States automobile magnate, Henry Ford, whom he lauded for his entrepreneurial brilliance and rabid anti-Semitism . Indeed, the Führer celebrated the entrepreneur as a bearer of racial superiority in any national population , and had nothing but contempt for democ­racy in the economy. For example, Hitler rebuked Otto Strasser, an anti-free-market Nazi, in 1930: 'The capitalists have worked their way to the top through their capacity, and on the basis of this selection, which again only proves their higher race, they have a right to lead.' Faced with the prospect of social turmoil or even Communist revolution, the German middle classes were willing to be cajoled by Hitler. The Protestant theolo­gian, Paul Tillich, writing in 1933, anxiously observed the bourgeoisie ready...