A few days before the first round of a presidential election turned into a war rage contest, the “consulting firms scandal” seems to be consolidating as the big election campaign issue. On March 17, the French Senate published a report denouncing the massive use of consulting firms -especially the US firm McKinsey- during the 5 years of Macron’s government.
“Food security” is moving to the forefront of the priorities of European states. The agrarian war economy that shaped the EU in the Cold War is back on the immediate agenda. Far beyond sunflower and grains, globally there will come a famine and a new international division of agri-food production; and in Europe a regression of social relations in the countryside and a new push towards the most harmful elements of the agri-food industry. Agri-food production is on the way to becoming war production.
News of an outbreak of protests in Cuba leapt through agencies to media outlets around the world yesterday. Beginning in San Antonio de los Baños, protests spread in a matter of hours from the West to the East of the country and ended up surrounding the Capitol in Havana. The regime’s response was swift: exculpatory speeches, calls for civil confrontation and door-to-door repression all night long.
The EU wants to bring into being a New European Bauhaus that will be an integral part of the Green Deal. In January, the design process was launched. Since then, speeches and roadmaps have proliferated. The Green Deal uses the housing problem to impose capital’s pressing need to recompose the rate of profit through a massive transfer of income from labor to capital. That is why not coincidentally the ruling classes are once again taking the Bauhaus as a reference. And that is why it is worthwhile to dwell on the study of the original Bauhaus, what it reflected and what it meant for capitalist competition and the lives of workers.
Germany is raising its climate targets. It changes its Climate Law by committing to a 65% reduction in emissions by 2030. The formal cause, a Constitutional Court ruling. The real cause: competition with the US. The important thing: each push of the Green Deal increases economic contradictions, weighs down production and imposes an increasingly dark horizon on living and working conditions. In the increased competition, the state centralizes and looks for new ways to turn broken private companies into state-owned enterprises. There is nothing progressive about this. We are not closer to socialism, but to a war economy.
Raúl Castro has announced his upcoming retirement at the age of 89, 62 years after the M26J guerrillas entered Havana and 60 years after Fidel Castro proclaimed Cuba’s entry into the Russian bloc. The retirement of the last active commander of Sierra Maestra from the political leadership of the Cuban ruling class occurs in the midst of the latest acceleration of the agonizing and perennial crisis of a national capital in ruins.
We begin a new series of articles that investigate the relationship between feminism and war since its emergence in the United States and Great Britain in the 19th century up to the present day. Why has feminism always been linked to the war effort and why has it hoisted up as its banner the mobilization of women workers for the world wars?
We are told of tax havens as a kind of small parasitic states stealing tax revenues from large states by eroding their revenue-raising capacity and social policies. Nothing could be more untrue. Tax havens were established as such as a result of the deliberate policies of large states, Germany, France, Great Britain, the USA… and Spain, whose relationship with Andorra and Gibraltar fits into that general pattern.
In this second part, we will critique the ideology used by the detractors of tax-evading youtubers. According to the former, evading taxes would exemplify a lack of solidarity because social spending depends on tax collection and because, in addition, taxes would allow a redistribution of wealth capable of curbing the trend towards the concentration of income in the hands of capital.
A new offensive against the living conditions of Cuban workers begins. On the horizon, even famine.
A brief historical perspective of Ethiopia to understand how and why this country of 110 million people is now facing the abyss of a new war between factions.
The Chinese bureaucracy has set its goals for 2025 and 2035 this week. They will shape the imperialist crisis and conflict throughout the world.
Roadkill is the political series of the season on the BBC. The narrative is built on the wake of the «House of Cards» of the nineties, but without the Shakespearean histrionics and the overdose of cynicism of the original model. In fact, Roadkill is one of the few political series that encourages real political reflection.
Spanish ruling class is worried, they are in solidarity with the florist, the shopkeeper, the hotelier, the small guesthouse and even the nightclub.. But nobody should think that they will share the state’s booty with the small fry, the massive subsidies or the big projects financed with European funds. One thing is to be supportive and another to lose volume of income. No, big capital is “sympathetic” with its small SME brothers in its own way: for its own benefit and putting the lives of the workers under fire.
Was there ever a Chilean «path to socialism»? What was the Allende presidency? On the 47th anniversary of the military coup, we recovered and published in our archive the FOR’s publications on Chile during those years.
The new wave of economic nationalism involves four vectors which, although they were already present and emerging in recent years, have gained strength with the pandemic, seemingly contradicting the “neo-liberal” hegemonic discourses of the last thirty years: limitations on the purchase of companies by foreign capital, renationalization of productive chains, nationalizations and the promotion of state production.
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.