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Friday, Jan 22, 2021 When I first considered myself a socialist revolutionary in 1970, I was hounded by free marketers’ challenge: “name me one country where socialism works”. These market fundamentalists would then hold up the most strident expectations for socialism: Everyone is exactly equal with no classes. There is an abundance of goods which are conveniently circulated. Political rule is not dictatorial. All competition is banished. People are working together, collectively and creatively. The state has withered away. Anything less than this was pro...

How Augustus rebuilt Rome The collapse of the Roman republic, and the establishment amid its rubble of the rule of the Caesars, constitutes the primal political narrative of the West. In 49 BC, a system of government founded on the conviction that the only conceivable alternative to liberty was death spectacularly imploded. The claim of Julius Caesar, the greatest general of his day, to a primacy over his fellow citizens resulted first in civil war, and then – after he had crushed his ­domestic foes as he had previously crushed the various tribes of Gaul – in his assassination. Two mor...

I bring up this tired old cliché because of its applicability to the Parentis, father and son. The father, Michael Parenti, is a hardcore Communist activist who wrote for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) theoretical journal Political Affairs among other CP publications. He is the author of 23 books (some used as college texts) and countless more articles. His specialized area of focus is on the structural class conflict of capitalist society and power. His communist affiliations were written up in the pioneering study book, Covert Cadre” Inside the Institute for Policy Studies by S. Stev...

by Paul Haeder / December 14th, 2020 It’s an unprecedented coalition of business networks that have come together to raise our ambition. Not just to help our individual CEOs succeed, we’ll do that for sure. But to actually bring their voices together to help shift culture. So that the pushback on the BRT [Business Roundtable] from different business publications or other people within the business community lessens. So there’s less of a headwind culturally for this type of leadership.  — Jay Coen Gilbert, co-founder of B Lab and B Corporations [Source] [These are not good people, and...

The Shock Doctrine. Capitalism has always existed One of the first things you will be told about capitalism is that it has always existed. This is claimed by Adam Smith as well as the neoclassical economists. This is hardly the case for the entire school of Marxists and economic institutionalists who will tell you that capitalism is roughly 500 years old. In addition, no anthropologist will agree that tribal societies or even agricultural civilizations like Egypt, Mesopotamia, China or India had purely capitalist economic exchanges within their societies. Even external trade cannot be charact...