A viral tweet decrying the idea of work became a TikTok meme celebrating individualist influencer culture and the lives of the idle rich. But real freedom from the drudgery of labor requires collective action — and building a world beyond capitalism.
Alfred Adler was ahead of his time in centering what he called “social interest” in his psychological theories. His approach sought to combat shame and alienation and encourage concern for the common good — a psychological application of his socialist values.
“(The system) is just not delivering that strong responsible sustainable wages growth that we need to see, which has been absent from our economy for the best of the decade,” he told ABC Radio on Thursday.“
We’re not naive about this issue being contentious.”
Dr Chalmers said working Australians had gone backwards under the current enterprise bargaining system while businesses were recording large profits.
Recently released Australian Bureau of Statistics data for the June quarter showed pay packets were falling behind the rising cost of living.
The business community has broadly opposed the multi-employer bargaining proposal.
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a fierce debate over realism as an approach to thinking about foreign policy. Historian Daniel Bessner tells Jacobin what socialists can learn from realism and what they should reject.
As Harry Truman once said, “Socialism is a scare word they’ve hurled at every advance the people have made. Socialism is what they called public power, social security, deposit insurance, and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for anything that helps all people.”
From Otto von Bismarck to Joe Biden, capitalist politicians have tried to cure the system’s ills without transforming society. But it takes socialists to really change the world for the better.
Trump’s friends Putin, Kim Jong Un but not Communism?
The hallucinatory world of anticommunism-without-communism is dangerous and violent. Its partisans believe they face an existential threat, which in principle licenses almost any level of violence. The state, as historian Ellen Schrecker points out, has been the teeth of most anti-communist networks. But it has often been bolstered by private militias, whether they be Minutemen, Klans, squadristi, the Sturmabteilung or Brazil’s Green Shirts. That is the significance of the eruptions of militia violence in the US, the hate mobs in India, and the Green Shirt revivalists in Brazil. When these people start to see red, blood flows in the streets.
Conservatives are sounding the alarm bell about a Marxist takeover, with at least one philosopher urging liberals to join forces with the Right to destroy the socialist bogeyman. But the values of liberalism have much more in common with socialism than the Right — and liberals sincerely committed to advancing freedom and equality should unite with leftists.
How might we imagine a transition to a socialist economy? There are clues in unlikely places: the management practices of some private corporations, which have been developing planned, democratic economies in miniature.
Democratic Socialism practices trust in Individuals (ODT)
What the Swedish experiment demonstrates, is that there’s a way to navigate these unprecedented public health challenges without recklessly imposing police state policies and without doing irreparable harm to the economy. And, yes, the results of this experiment are not yet known, but what we do know is that most nations cannot simply print-up trillions of dollars to counter the knock-on effects of bringing the economy to a screeching halt. These countries must dip into their reserves or take out loans from the IMF in order to recover from the lack of production and activity. That means they’re going to face years of slow growth and high unemployment to dig out from the mess their leaders created for them.
When you look back through the ignominious history of the Republican movement and the LNP, there isn’t a single right-wing MP worth a dime. Every commitment made to a vile, nasty off-shore war (such as Korea, Vietnam and the horrendous genocidal Iraqi war) has been under a Republican/LNP government who consistently use war, terror, hatred and fear to divide nations. When things look bleak in the polls, the war-mongering right-wing are always prepared to stoop to using war as the last resort to cling onto power with bloodstained fingers – ready and willing to sacrifice millions of lives and spend billions to distract focus from their horrendous policies and/or use hatred and division for their own political agenda. It is always a hate-filled, xenophobic right wing government that drags us into war and it always takes a left-wing, socialist government to get us out of it!
Trump has put US companies on alert that he might force them to withdraw from China, where they have $256 billion invested. He says he is given this power by the 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.
The Republican Party has spent over a century warning against government involvement in the private sector, but now their leader is doing it big time. Trump ordering companies around about where they can invest is a form of fascism or rightwing national socialism. Left socialism is about public sector economic activity for the good of people. National socialism is the state usurping economic resources on behalf of a small corporate and high-official elite.
The US Congress has given up many of its constitutional prerogatives over the years to the imperial presidency, something connived at by major party leaders such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Trump should not have the ability to set tariffs on foreign countries by tweet. The regulation of interstate commerce is a congressional prerogative.
The Republican party has come out swinging against socialism – a strategy sure to be a mainstay of its 2020 campaigns. “Our opposition to our socialist colleagues,” the Wyoming senator Liz Cheney claimed, referring to the congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, “has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion, or with their race. It has to do with the content of their policies. They are wrong when they attempt to impose the fraud of socialism on the American people. They are wrong when they pursue policies that would steal power from the American people and give that power to the government.”
I keep hearing a lot about “socialism” these days, mainly from Donald Trump and Fox News, trying to scare Americans about initiatives like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, universal child care, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for these.
Well, I’m here to ask you to ignore the scaremongering.
The policies Republicans smear as Stalinist are a good deal more popular than their own. By Jim Hightower | May 1, 2019
“Socialism,” snarled Donald Trump at a recent pep rally of far-right Republicans. The obedient crowd of Trumpistas snarled back in unison: So-sh’ll-izz-ummm!
There you have the entire intellectual content of the GOP’s 2020 re-election strategy under Generalissimo Trump: Slap Democrats with a scurrilous campaign branding them as Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin re-incarnate.
It’s not just Trump hissing out the socialist label in a frantic McCarthyesque attempt to make it stick by mindless repetition, but also Republican lawmakers. Unfortunately for them, they’re overplaying a weak hand and bumbling over their own ignorance.
Texas Senator John Cornyn, for example, compared Democrats who support ideas like Medicare-for-All to Mussolini.
Apparently, Cornyn is unaware that the brutish Italian dictator was no socialist, but a fascist. Mussolini’s ideology of ultra-nationalism, masculine authoritarianism, suppression of democratic rights, and rule by wealthy elites is the opposite of the progressive agenda. Indeed, it describes the policies of — guess who? — Trump and his acolytes, including Cornyn!
Question to edicated and semi-Educated Americans still believe this bunk? The “we” is bad and the “me” is good? (ODT)
The President faces an uphill battle – his poll numbers are some of the worst in history and he faced a drubbing in November’s midterm election. One way to boost Trump’s prospects is to shift the focus from his turbulent tenure to his eventual opponent and his frightful portrayal of that alternative.
President Trump expressed “alarm” at what he termed “new calls to adopt socialism in our country.” “Tonight,” he proclaimed, “we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” The line received a standing ovation from Republicans and Democrats alike, yet recent polls show that socialism is growing in popularity in the U.S., with a net positive rating among Democrats. Newly-elected Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are both members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and policy proposals identified with the socialist movement, such as debt-free college and universal health care, are gaining traction on the left. To discuss America’s long-held resistance to socialism and its current rise in popularity, Mehdi Hasan is joined by Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruenig.
Or should we forget the Three Rs and introduce the Four Cs (Communication, Creativity, Critical Thought and Collaboration)? Teaching children to reproduce what is when in a few years it will no longer be, seems pointless because many of the jobs they are thinking about doing or are already training to do will not exist in ten years’ time. It has been estimated that up to half of our large companies will disappear before 2030, along with up to 40 per cent of the jobs which exist today.
Therefore tailoring the education program to meet the needs of transferable skills in a world in which flexible working conditions and freelancing will be the norm, makes sense. And it makes sense to have started yesterday. As a first step. And as a crucial one because if we do not address these needs, now, then we will lose the next generation to joblessness, homelessness, dispondency, demoralization, marginalization, in some cases criminality and terrorism. In a globalized world, education counts not only at home but in the distant corners of the world.
Havana, Cuba – The United States of America has finally revived diplomatic relations with the neighbouring island nation of Cuba after more than five decades.
The communist nation was kept on a tight leash by the world’s most powerful nation, since severing of diplomatic ties in 1961 nearly two years after the Cuban revolution brought Fidel Castro to power.
Cuba, a nation of about 11 million people, endured nearly half-a- century of enmity, crippling trade embargo, and American spy plots.
It was cut off from international trade but Cubans learned to live with limited resources.
Despite the odds, the country developed one of the finest healthcare systems in the world.
Art and culture, particularly music, also flourished under communist rule. In spite of sanctions, Cuba managed to attract international tourists on the back of its rich cultural heritage and pristine beaches.
Nearly two million tourists visited the island in the first six months of this year, bringing billions of dollars into the country.
Booming tourism has offered Cubans an extra income that they could not have dreamt of with low-paying government jobs. Waiters are one of the biggest earners compared to much-respected professions of medicine and teaching that pay as low as $40 a month.
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