The success of Science of Well-Being, a course taught by Yale University on the Internet to nearly three and a half million students, has become one of the cultural phenomena of the pandemic.
Critique of ideology
Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency has become the reference book of environmentalism during the pandemic. It includes quotes galore from Rosa Luxemburg, invocations of ecological Leninism, the call to expropriate the oil companies and long arguments in favor of a type of tactical catastrophism that would be a tailwind for revolutionaries. But for what revolution? Who and for what purpose would make it?
Feminism is not a movement fighting for equality, but an identity-based movement that for almost a century and a half has been committed to the framing of working women in favor of the expectations of social advancement of a part of the female petty bourgeoisie. Since its origins, it has been linked to the militaristic framing of the working class and to the most destructive mercantilizing morality.
If the political game were simply honest, no matter how class-slanted it were, a confusing indicator which makes invisible the most elementary social divisions, such as the gender gap, would have an extremely limited use. However, such an indicator lies at the heart of the Spanish government’s program and is one of the main banners of IWD (March 8th). The gender gap discourse has served to hide what was happening in the labor market and to “storm the heavens” of management boards by a part of the female petty bourgeoisie. Now it is beginning to mutate… into something even worse.
Riots and democracy are the buzz on all the front pages and television news these days in Spain. Politicians and protesters oppose these two concepts while remaining within the same ideological universe: some say riots occur because there is no democracy, while others say there is no place for riots in a democracy. If we already discussed the counterproductive nature of riots ariots as a tactic, today we will critique the reactionary ideology peddled to us by one or the other side during this empty debate.
The transition from a demonstration to a confrontation with the police can occur for a thousand causes. In Linares we have seen one, in the recent demonstrations in Russia we have seen a different one. However, it turns out to be very different when riots, physical confrontations against the police are the form and goal of the demonstration, the form of expression chosen to vindicate instead of a development or byproduct of the original goals.
In many books, in educational institutions and in the media we are told that technology created the industrial revolution and other great social changes. But it is not true, it is not enough to suggest or invent new technologies to solve our needs, which are universal, it is necessary to change social relations. And that starts here and now, it is not a task for a hypothetical tomorrow.
A new article in response to what our readers are asking about different forms of discrimination and how to fight them.
We answer some questions about “indigenism” that were agreed upon by several readers after the publication of “To Understand Bolivia”.
The culture of a decadent society sterilizes, idiotizes and kills. And this, at this point, is a true rampaging meat grinder leaving only desolation in its wake.
Empiricism and mechanicism served as the basis for the great political and social apparatuses of capitalism, today completely obsolete, rigid and incapable of guaranteeing a future for workers and humanity. No vertical machinery led by an exploiting class will guarantee the satisfaction of human needs, however techno-futurist it may present itself.
Why are racialism and feminism replacing movements for «equality of rights» There is a certain pattern in the way these movements expanded globally in the last four years. Feminism and Anglo-Saxon-style racialism share identical arguments and tools in their structure. However, while feminism has been adopted as a state ideology in several continental European countries, racialism is receiving, especially in France, a head-on response from the state itself and its left wing.
Feudalism and capitalism generated their own ideological and knowledge systems in response to the interests and activities of their ruling classes. Both the aristocratic liberal arts and the mechanical arts of workshops, doctors and merchants, pushed the knowledge of Humanity during their respective rising periods. And in the same way, the monopoly of both put brakes on the development of the [[productive forces]] during their respective [[decadence|periods of decline]]. Both were and are partial visions of the maximum possibilities offered to Humanity… possibilities that can only begin to take shape by bringing together a Humanity divided into classes.
The insistence on “neoliberalism” was in fact the insistence on the validity of an “alternative capitalism”, reformed and allegedly possible. In other words, it was not even reformist, because reformism intended the possibility of overcoming capitalism through reforms, and these only aspired to make it livable… without managing to be less utopian and therefore reactionary.