Calls for a final solution

 In our time, dominated by technocentric dreams of green and digital transitions, the neoliberal emphasis on entrepreneurial "opportunities" for the expansion of capital markets neglects an important transition aimed at social and ecological justice. 

 This alienated political-economic imperative requires a critical perspective from below. Pasquinelli moves in the right direction, as the question of socialism is inscribed in the logic of the book. He looks at AI as a technology that is the expression of conflictual social relations and affects power, as all machines (or the means of production) do under capitalistic rule. As Marx wrote in Capital: CHAPTER FOUR: THE GENERAL FORMULA FOR CAPITAL: "The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews

Marx & Friends in their own words

 “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”

SOLIDNARDOSC

  Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009).

Kołakowski was one of the great philosophers and essayists of the twentieth century—and, despite living in exile after 1968, a hero of anti-communist resistance in his home country. After the fall of the Polish People’s Republic in 1989, Kołakowski was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration. His death made the nation’s front pages. He was buried with military honors and recognized with a minute’s silence in parliament. Yet, in his three adoptive countries—Canada, the United States, and Britain, where he settled for the last four decades of his life—he remains mostly unknown.

Insofar as people have heard of Kołakowski, it is usually for his vast, three-volume history and critique of Marxism, Main Currents of Marxism, published in Polish between 1976 and 1978 and in English translation in 1978. It is considered by many to be the devastating final word on communism. Unfortunately, this has led to a tendency to treat Kołakowski as a single-issue thinker: a former-communist-turned-critic who contributed heroically to the philosophical dismantling of Marxism, but whose ideas are largely irrelevant to the problems we face today. 

This is a great mistake. 

Modernity’s Patching Up | Portico

Kirch Kinder Kitsch

WHAT DO YOU CALL Arson attacks on at least 30 churches?

‘Depraved’ by Daisy Dixon | Book Review - WSJ

A GOOD START

Anabolic rift

 When the Manchester socialite should have cause to regret my flatus.

Robinson's chapter "Beyond the Theory of Imperialism" in his 2018 book Into the Compest states: "The classical image of imperialism as a relation of external domination is now outdated…. The end of the extensive enlargement of capitalism is the end of the imperialist era of world capitalism. The system still conquers space, nature, and human beings…. But it is not imperialism in the old sense either of rival national capitals or conquest by core states of precapitalist regions" that should be the subject of analysis today. Instead, what is needed is a theory of global capitalism that would displace all of this, focusing mainly on shifting "spatial dynamics."

Chibbering idiots

 Chibber's attack on the very concept of hegemonic monopoly capital revealed his ignorance of the enormous growth in recent decades in the concentration and centralization of capital associated with successive merger waves, leading to the continuing augmentation of monopoly power, along with the centralization of finance. In Marxist Communist China the social imperialism is manifest.

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

Centering Gramsci's pivotal pyramid inversion

 And setting the Marxist shitpile rightside up

Adopting an explicit flat-world perspective not entirely unlike that which was later promoted by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his 2005 work, The World Is Flat, Hardt and Negri argued that the hierarchical imperialism of old had now been displaced by the "smooth space of the capitalist world market." It was "no longer possible," they pronounced, "to demarcate large geographical zones as center and periphery, North and South." In fact, "imperialism," they went so far as to assert, "actually creates a straitjacket for capital" by interfering with capitalism's flat-world propensities. Hardt and Negri were to give their notion of a rules-based, global-constitutional order, modeled on the United States, which was at the same time decentered and deterritorialized, the name "Empire," to distinguish it from imperialism.

Lord and Lady Marx

 the existence of a labor aristocracy at some level is difficult to deny on any realistic basis. An indication of this is that study after study has confirmed that the AFL-CIO union leadership in the United States historically has been oriented to business unionism and is closely tied to the military-industrial complex. It thus has been complicit with the established order. AFL-CIO leadership has worked with the CIA throughout the post-Second World War era to repress progressive unions throughout the Global South, backing the most exploitative regimes. There is no doubt that in these and other respects, the upper stratum of labor (or its representatives) has opportunistically opposed the needs of both the majority of workers in the United States and the world proletarian movement as a whole. The labor leadership in Europe associated with social democratic parties has historically exhibited similar propensities.