The Right Is Destroying Our Freedom and the Left Is Letting It Happen | Novara Media
With a nationalist far right resisting pandemic controls and progressives clamouring for them, the left needs a coherent response to metastasising state power - and fast.
As industrial agriculture encroaches into the last wild places of the Earth, it’s unleashing dangerous pathogens. Time to heal the metabolic rift between ecology and economy, suggests Rob Wallace.
Capitalism, class and Covid. Part 1: The issues at stake for working people.
In announcing the lockdown during the first wave of the Covid pandemic, the UK Government and public health bodies forecast a possible death toll of 20,000. At the time, even that number felt brutally shocking. Then ,as we witnessed the spiralling fatalities in Spain and Italy coupled with the grim scenes of improvise
Take the Vaccine. Reject anti-Science Vaxxers, Rightists, Conspiracy Theories
A dangerous coalition of anti-science, anti-vaccine organizations such as Freedom Angels has joined with right-wing militias in denouncing efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus, and impeding healthcare advocates, doctors and scientists. This, plus the general distrust in the government has meant that 30% of the population, including a third of health care professionals, have decided NOT to take any of the available vaccines against the coronavirus.
Competing with Nature: COVID-19 as a Capitalist Virus – Spectre Journal
Rob Wallace speaks about the global capitalist roots of the current pandemic, the likelihood of future pandemics, and the types of organized resistance necessary to prevent them.
Robert Brenner, Escalating Plunder, NLR 123, May–June 2020
In the US, amid soaring unemployment, loss of health insurance and rising poverty, a $4 trillion hand-out to capital, with Biden’s party and Trump’s shoulder to shoulder. Robert Brenner analyses the Covid-19 bailout in the broader context of a faltering productive economy and growing elite predation.
That globalization as it has been known, from its beginnings in the 70s and 80s and rapid acceleration in the ‘posthistorical’ 90s through today, has been under threat is not a new obse…
Commentators like to point to Wuhan’s “wet markets” as the source of the pandemic, but COVID-19 is the result of a much larger, global phenomenon of environmental degradation. Combatting both means putting the politics of food production and land use at the very heart of our socialist project.
There is revolution in the air now, but history shows the old order will fight back | Nesrine Malik
Coronavirus policies to help the vulnerable are already being jettisoned. Those who want change need to be up for the battle, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik
Gavin Smith: Rereading Marx on machines in the time of COVID-19
Gavin Smith, University of Toronto “One of the many perils lies in normalizing the ‘batshit crazy’ presently underway.”—Wallace, Liebman, Chavez & Wallace 2020: 5 The COVID-19 pandemic has stripped the veneer off capitalist society whether in its softer social democratic version or its bare-faced pseudo Darwinian version. Both the cause and the cure are down to the way capitals, now…
How Capitalism and Other Viruses Are Ravaging the Global South
Across the Global South, the coronavirus crisis has highlighted how IMF “structural adjustment” policies have undermined public health care. But the devastation wrought by the economic shutdown also owes to a longer-term ill: an exploitative global trade regime where the poorest countries finance the rich.