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1984-2024

‘ The decaying American empire ’ argument is disputable. The comparison with the collapse of the Soviet Union misses the different economic structures of the two countries. The US economic power has not been experiencing a long term stagnation, for example.  Actually, the argument should be the way around: in 1980s there was no ‘whip of external necessity’ compelling the US to outcompete the Soviet Union. The latter was not an economic threat to the US. Today China is the ‘external whip’ but to an already more powerful American economy – a dynamic one in terms of capital-intensive industries, productivity and an array of industrially-advanced allies and subordinates.

Quote of the Week: Justice

  'Justice?' The colonel was astounded. 'What is justice?' 'Justice, sir –' 'That's not what justice is,' the colonel jeered, and began pounding the table again with his big fat hand. 'That's what Karl Marx is. I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garrotting. That's what justice is when we've all got to be tough enough and rough enough to fight Billy Perolle. From the hip. Get it? —Joseph Heller,  Catch-22

Britain: ‘Landscapes of Capital’

My introduction: To understand the crisis of the National Health Service, the bad handling of the pandemic*, stagnant economy, weak productivity, a state struggling to invest adequately in the green economy, inability to build enough and affordable houses, expensive rent, decades of poor investment in infrastructure by OECD measures, consumption, and consumerism, driven by debt, Labour/Conservatives capitalist values, one has to look at the economic model of the British economy. In reviewing Brett Christophers’s work, Cédric Durant has provided a good overview of such an economic model of accumulation and its ramifications as well as some criticism of Christophers’s take on capitalism in general and what might replace it. ——— *I doubt it that the recently publish report will ever mention the economic model pursued by Britain for more than four decades and how it played a major role in the infrastructure of health and the well-being of the Brits. ***** Few today will need convincing th...

The Only Kind of “Political Violence” All U.S. Politicians Oppose

A bipartisan sampling of the world’s greatest perpetrators and enablers of political violence has rushed to condemn political violence following the   shooting attempt   on former President Donald Trump To say that “political violence” has “no place” in a society organized by political violence at home and abroad is to acquiesce to the normalization of that violence, so long as it is state and capitalist monopolized.

France Elections

“Given that each of the three forces has roughly two-thirds or more of the electorate who did not choose them, and each of them has thus been rejected by a majority of French voters, the message from the people is clear: we do not want to be governed by any of you. We do not want any of you in power, at least not solely.  The far right will thus not suffer, but on the contrary - it will benefit from the mess, political chaos and possible institutional deadlock that lies ahead, along with the potential policy failures of those who govern.” Yes, Alain Gabon. However, the article ignores French capitalism and imperialism and the French security state and provides a ‘nationalist’ domestic analysis, ignoring geopolitics and inter-societal determinants. 

Quote of the Week: Being on the Left

Being on the left means thinking of the world first, then of one’s country, then of ones’ relatives, then of oneself; being on the right means the opposite. Être de gauche c’est d’abord penser le monde, puis son pays, puis ses proches, puis soi ; être de droite c’est l’inverse. —Gilles Deleuze