"Song of Hope" (Japanese Communist Song)
Image: Photo from the Haguruma Theatre Troupe performing their drama "Wildfire" (野火), "which embodies Chairman Mao's great truth that political power comes from the barrel of a gun", on the 6th of April 1968.
#socialism #communism #capitalism #marxism #leninism #marxismleninism https://youtu.be/50aYUe734V8
Reason To Hate Capitalism #243 - Call it a plutocracy, kleptocracy or oligarchy - it is just Capitalism doing what Capitalism does - the rich having power over the poor - it’s what it was created for, it is a monster than can’t be tamed or reformed #capitalism #anticapitalism
Capitalists: capitalism and democracy are inextricable.
Also capitalists: “US Marine Corps Maj Gen Smedley Darlington Butler claimed he was recruited by a group of Wall Street financiers to lead a fascist coup against FDR and the US government in the summer of 1933 … Members included JP Morgan, Jr, Irénée du Pont, Robert Sterling Clark of the Singer sewing machine fortune, and the chief executives of General Motors, Birds Eye and General Foods.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-fdr-roosevelt-coup-attempt-1930s
None of this is new or surprising.
Capitalism is an awful creature. The force of money tears people limb from limb, or drains their lives away slowly, feasting on their suffering. It knows no morals, no glory, no honor, possessing only a cold emptiness inside its belly. The void longs to be filled, to have the starvation staved, yet no amount of human life can possibly satisfy the lust. Even nature itself is warped before this beast. Only wisdom defeats it.
Donald Trump: "I'M GONNA GO PUNCH IT IN THE FACE"
"Speech in Defense of the Tactics of the Communist International" (1921) by Vladimir Lenin. Audiobook. #socialism #communism #capitalism #marxism #leninism #marxismleninism https://youtu.be/LP00TPpTTRg
"Lenin on Petty-Bourgeois Revolutionism," intro to Section 3 1979, by Novosti Press Agency. Audiobook. #socialism #communism #capitalism #marxism #leninism #marxismleninism https://youtu.be/gtHQDqz2UFg
Analysis: "Autoworkers in U.S., Mexico Call for Solidarity"
"They are always harping on foreigners, foreigners, foreigners. But what about the capitalists?”
We need international solidarity against corporations’ attempts to sow division among exploited workers.
"This nationalistic viewpoint has not been working for us & has resulted in a lot of these layoffs. I want to see us grow together as a working class".
~Sean Crawford
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/4/8/uaw_tariffs_autoworkers_union
Robert W. McChesney, Who Warned of Corporate Media Control, Dies at 72 - In over a dozen books, he explored the failures of journalism and the internet, blaming c... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/business/media/robert-w-mcchesney-dead.html #capitalism(theoryandphilosophy) #democracy(theoryandphilosophy) #computersandtheinternet #politicsandgovernment #rocketthe(magazine) #deaths(obituaries) #booksandliterature #freedomofthepress #mcchesneyrobertw #newsandnewsmedia #sandersbernard
"a seasoned Project Design Specialist, has filed a lawsuit against his former employer, alleging egregious disability discrimination & wrongful termination. The complaint was filed...against Black Diamond Paver Stones & Landscape, Inc... Wheeler claims that he was unjustly terminated while recovering from a work-related injury and after making legally protected complaints about discrimination and retaliation." https://norcalrecord.com/stories/670766714-plaintiff-alleges-landscaping-company-violated-disability-rights-leading-to-wrongful-termination #Ableism #Capitalism
As egg prices soared at the supermarket, so did producer profits - The Washington Post
https://archive.ph/B5aYJ
"A USDA program doled out hundreds of millions in relief payments to big egg companies, even as the largest earned record profits."
If the tech bros could genetically manufacture human beings in a lab they would genocide the whole lot of us.
Behold one possible future.
I bought this before Elon Musk went-
Oh, when he was just an asshole billionaire, then?
"The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.
America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.
But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:"
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care
"British authorities regarded #Ireland’s misfortunes as evidence of the country’s incurable and willful medievalism [...] But as Scanlan is at pains to point out, the famine was in fact the result of forces within high #capitalism that were entirely modern [...] 'an unintended consequence of the increasing integration of global commerce.' "
Review of Padraic X. Scanlan's Rot: An Imperial History of the #IrishFamine
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/irish-famine-rot-scanlan/
Analysis: "Autoworkers in U.S., Mexico Call for Solidarity"
"They are always harping on foreigners, foreigners, foreigners. But what about the capitalists?”
We need international solidarity against corporations’ attempts to sow division among exploited workers.
"This nationalistic viewpoint has not been working for us & has resulted in a lot of these layoffs. I want to see us grow together as a working class".
~Sean Crawford
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/4/8/uaw_tariffs_autoworkers_union
Excerpts from an essay titled "The Great Energy Transition Myth"...
_______________________________________
Forget everything you thought you knew about energy transitions.
In his new book "More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy," Jean-Baptiste Fressoz dismantles the comforting narrative that humanity has transitioned from one energy source to another. We never really transitioned at all. We just piled on more energy sources to the older ones, intensifying our overall consumption.
Take coal for example. While it became dominant during the 19th century, vast quantities of wood were still needed to support the coal economy – to build mines, railways and infrastructure.
This pattern continues today. Despite the rise of renewable energy sources like wind and solar, global consumption of fossil fuels remains at record highs.
"Transition" has become capitalism’s favourite disguise.
_______________________________________
FULL ESSAY -- https://theclimatehistorian.substack.com/p/the-great-energy-transition-myth
While a lot of the stories in this thread focus on the cowardice of institutional actors in either submitting to, or even assisting the fascist Trump regime in installing a Christian Nationalist dictatorship, when the history of this political moment is written, it will be noted that it was actually big companies in the US private sector that embraced the regime's white nationalist policy platforms first and in doing so, helped legitimate Trump's quest to rule as King of America. Unlike institutional actors in higher education, lawyers targeted for revenge by Der Führer, or bodies controlled by the (openly fascist) US government through funding, large corporations in the private sector required little if any incentive to adopt Trump's authoritarian "anti-DEI" policies; indeed, companies like Walmart, Paramount, and even Victoria's Secret practically fell all over themselves to align with the regime's agenda, essentially obeying in advance, before the administration had to apply any pressure at all.
Why would they do that? As this short essay in The Guardian lays bare, the truth is that they never really wanted to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion even before the rise of Trump - which is why the programs they installed after the twin motivating factors of the George Floyd protests against police violence, and the COVID pandemic, were never really designed to achieve those objectives in the first place.
American corporations didn’t want to diversify, anyway
"Within days of taking office, Donald Trump signed an executive order that would eliminate Johnson’s civil rights order. The order directed the office of federal contract compliance to stop “promoting diversity” and holding contractors responsible for “affirmative action”. To Smith, the administration’s early actions amount to “a blatant effort in order to not only uphold the white power structure, but to remove any government responsibility to uphold the rights of individuals of color, specifically Black people”. It is the fruit of a conservative movement that has been trying to reverse course ever since the government began taking seriously efforts to protect the rights of Americans regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin.
In 2020, hundreds of private companies pledged to change their culture – to use their power and influence and, most importantly, money, to re-shape American society toward more just ends. Now, the three largest employers in the nation – Walmart, Amazon, and the federal government – have all rolled those policies back. Dozens of other corporations have turned back the clock on even pretending to care about equality in the workplace as well.
To businesses’ credit, they had a difficult task ahead of them in 2020. “They’re faced with putting a policy in place quickly that’s responsive and doesn’t sound like lip service to frustrated people,” Dawkins said. But in doing so, they made an admission: they had not been taking diversity seriously before – and the capitulation to the administration’s demands since has betrayed that truth. And they made clear their efforts were always lip service."
Look, I don't think it's really news that much of the American private sector's DEI initiatives were motivated more by *appearing* to oppose white supremacy and enforced social hierarchies in an increasingly Christian Nationalist political environment, than actually opposing those problems. This was pointed out long before Trump's second term, and obviously their actions since the regime was installed have demonstrated that critics were right to question the commitment of American corporations that directly profit from a white supremacist order that marks out certain groups of people for brutal exploitation. In that context then, it's important to understand that we are in fact not "all in this together" and a corporate sector that gladly donated to Trump's election campaigns must be understood as *active* partners in the installation of a Christian Nationalist dictatorship in America. The fact that they did so because they think it'll improve their bottom line is largely irrelevant; fascist collaboration is still fascist collaboration, regardless of the motives that inspire it.
