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by Will Griffin
Writer, Dandelion Salad
April 10, 2020
“There are two main reasons for this. The capitalist class learned how to pacify revolutionary spirit and that was through promoting petty bourgeois ideology. The second reason of why revolutions haven’t been successful or even more difficult to make in imperialist centers is because of concessions.” — Will Griffin
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by Fazal Rahman, Ph.D.
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published on imperialismandthethirdworld, Apr. 7, 2020
April 8, 2020
The novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) is devastating the lives, cultures, mass psychologies, and economies of countries around the world. Here, I will not reproduce the damages it has inflicted in various countries. The news media are overflowing with such information. In this article, I will briefly outline the developing politico-economic effects, crises, and consequences of this pandemic.
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by Will Griffin
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Peace Report
March 27, 2020
“As Marxists, we understand that it is the material conditions that create our reality. It is the material conditions, the objective material conditions in which we understand, we analyze and that is where we go forward to create strategies and tactics to change society and to understand society.” — Will Griffin
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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Mar. 14, 2020
March 25, 2020
Since the beginning of colonialism, there’s existed a category of middle class people who’ve shared certain economic and social interests with the capitalist class. These interests consist of the wealth, security, and opportunities that one receives while benefiting from imperialism. And since these benefits are shared both by the property-owning class, much of the working class, and even some of the poor within the core imperialist countries, the rich have been able to keep most of the people in these countries opposed to socialist revolution.
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by Ellen Brown
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Web of Debt Blog, Mar. 21, 2020
March 22, 2020
In what is being called the worst financial crisis since 1929, the US stock market has lost a third of its value in the space of a month, wiping out all of its gains of the last three years. When the Federal Reserve tried to ride to the rescue, it only succeeded in making matters worse. The government then pulled out all the stops. To our staunchly capitalist leaders, socialism is suddenly looking good.
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by Will Griffin
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Peace Report
March 15, 2020
“From the masses to the masses simply means to absorb the ideas from the masses and then bring them back to the masses in the form of a revolutionary theory.”
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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Feb. 28, 2020
March 5, 2020
Haruki Murakami said that “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.” It’s with this self-awareness of my attraction to the apocalypse that I confront the converging crises of our era. These crises point towards an outcome that’s not as dire as the literal end of the world, but that still conjures the sense of fascinated suspense which Murakami described.
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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Feb. 25, 2020
February 28, 2020
When liberal politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders say that we can solve inequality by taxing the rich, they’re trying to make it seem like the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is a legislative dispute instead of a class war. They’re proposing that the interests of the ruling oligarchs can be reconciled with our interests, and that all this will take is a rearrangement of the tax system.
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by Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
February 27, 2020
The Democrats’ Quandary
To hear the candidates debate, you would think that their fight was over who could best beat Trump. But when Trump’s billionaire twin Mike Bloomberg throws a quarter-billion dollars into an ad campaign to bypass the candidates actually running for votes in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, it’s obvious that what really is at issue is the future of the Democrat Party. Bloomberg is banking on a brokered convention held by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in which money votes. (If “corporations are people,” so is money in today’s political world.)
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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Feb. 20, 2020
February 23, 2020
Five years ago, an investigation from InsideClimate News confirmed what one might have intuitively suspected: that the leaders of Exxon Mobil were well aware of the science of global warming before it became a public issue. The investigation showed that as far back as the 1970s, Exxon had engaged in research that determined carbon dioxide was heating up the planet, corroborating observations about the effects of fossil fuels on the climate that scientists had been making since the 1890s.
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Updated: Feb. 28, 2020
by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Feb. 12, 2020
February 19, 2020
When you compare socialist countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam, and the DPRK with neoliberal countries like the United States and Britain, a particular factor stands out in how their developments have differed: the socialist countries have vastly more social cohesion than their counterparts do. By this, I mean they have a lack of serious political polarization and a relatively small amount of ethnic or class divides. In these countries, most people think favorably of the governing parties, racial and religious violence aren’t sanctioned by the state, and strong social safety nets and firm checks on private business keep inequality from becoming too pronounced. These places aren’t perfect, but they lack the deep rottenness that pervades neoliberal societies.
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“We’re gonna focus on two core philosophical components of Marxism: Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism. We’re going to show how both of these can be used to better understand the world and change it for the good of all poor and colonized people like ourselves. And in doing so we can debunk this widespread narrative in mainstream media that Marxism is somehow an outdated dogmatic religion. We can demonstrate that Marxism is truly a science and a weapon for revolutionary change.” — Ramiro Fúnez
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with Chris Hedges and Richard D. Wolff
RT America on Feb 8, 2020
On the show this week Chris Hedges talks to economist Richard Wolff about his new book Understanding Socialism. Wolff explains how in the socialist dream work is something we should want to engage in, that means something to us, that brings us into relationships with other people that we value, that make us better people as we interact with them, “it’s a transformation of life.”
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TheRealNews on Feb 5, 2020
Once we understand how Trump and Trumpism came about, as a reaction to capitalism’s global crisis, we can see how the impeachment battle is really a battle for dominance within the US ruling class, says globalization sociologist William I. Robinson.
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by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
February 3, 2020
The super-indoctrinated, Trump-voting American working class, dulled by the mass media and the “American dream”, has changed very little since the crushing of the great textile strikes that swept the United States in the 1920s. Not an iota of class-consciousness has it absorbed. (Nor has it been explained and offered to all wage earners in sufficient doses.) For also the middle classes, crushed by an ever more desperate, an “end of times” form of capitalism, has not yet grasped that they too are now part of the American proletariat. In that respect it seems that the old, often criticized word proletariat is still quite adequate.
