Disaster Capitalism in HaitiSenior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C., Jake Johnston, is the author of Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti (Saint Martin’s Press, 2024). He was the premier analyst for the center’s “Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch website since 2010, just weeks after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti.” Originally from Portland ME, and now residing in Washington D.C., Johnston has contributed to the New York Times, The Nation, The Boston Review, and The Intercept. Journalist and author Naomi Klein praised Johnston for his “stubborn commitment to tracking Haiti’s struggles for a just recovery and real democracy — and his deft narrative and investigative skills.” Yale historian Greg Grandin remarked that “Aid State is a harrowing journey into the heart of modern neocolonial darkness, revealing the thick network of international organizations, including The United Nations, that have occupied Haiti for decades.” And professor of French and African American studies at Yale, Marlene L. Daut, stated that the book “should be required reading for all world leaders before they even think about meddling in Haitian politics — challenging popular notions of what it means to best support Haiti and with decades-long experience reporting on Haitian affairs to support his shrewd analysis, [the author] dismantles the idea that aid after disaster has anything to do with humanitarianism.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/22/disaster-capitalism-in-haiti/In the UK, Poverty Is Driving Mental Illness Among the YoungIf you’ve spent any time at all on TikTok recently, you’ll have seen plenty of videos from young people despairing about life in the UK. Videos with captions like “Why is everything so expensive?” “Why is rent so high?” “Why can’t I get a doctor’s appointment?” are going viral every day. With no clear answers, let alone solutions, to any of these questions, many are opting to leave the country altogether. Now more than ever, young people feel as though they are facing these challenges alone. Without the social and community infrastructure that was destroyed by austerity, they have nowhere to go for support. And the hypercompetitive culture created by neoliberal capitalism — reinforced by a toxic “hustle” mindset pushed by some of the most popular voices on social media — encourages them to blame themselves when things get tough. It would be easy to dismiss these trends as the complaints of young people unused to hard work. But their concerns are borne out by the statistics. In the wake of the financial crisis, the UK experienced the longest period of wage stagnation in modern history. A study by the Resolution Foundation showed that by 2023, this flatlining of wages had left workers, on average, £11,000 worse off per year than if precrisis trends had continued. The same study showed that UK workers were £4,000 worse off than their German counterparts due to wage stagnation. When inflation was low, this crisis went somewhat under the radar. The worst affected were groups like private renters, low-paid workers, and those receiving social security, which had been subjected to deep cuts by successive governments. But when prices started to rise, the squeeze between low incomes and high costs became clear to everyone.
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/uk-poverty-mental-illness-youngRosa Luxemburg: Blanquism and Social DemocracyComrade Plekhanov has published an exhaustive article in the Courrier entitled, How far does the right go?, in which he accuses the Bolsheviks of Blanquism. It is not incumbent upon us to defend the Russian comrades upon whom comrade Plekhanov rains the blows of his erudition and dialectic. They are perfectly capable of doing so themselves. But it is worth commenting on certain remarks which our readers too will find of interest. That is why we are devoting some space to them. In order to define Blanquism comrade Plekhanov quotes Engels on Blanqui – a French revolutionary of the 1840s, whose name is used to describe the tendency.
Engels says: “In his political activity he was mainly a ‘man of action’, believing that a small and well organised minority, who would attempt a political stroke of force at the opportune moment, could carry the mass of the people with them by a few successes at the start and thus make a victorious revolu tion … “From Blanqui’s assumption, that any revolution may be made by the outbreak of a small revolutionary minority, follows of itself the necessity of a dictatorship after the success of the venture. This is, of course, a dictatorship, not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small minority that has made the revolution, and who are themselves previously organised under the dictatorship of one or several individuals” (F. Engels, The programme of the Blanquist fugitives from the Commune, 1873). [1] Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s comrade in arms, is undoubtedly a great authority, but whether this characteristic of Blanqui is perfectly just can still be discussed. For in 1848 Blanqui did not foresee his club [2] forming a “small minority” at all; on the contrary, in a period of powerful revolutionary upsurge, he was certain that, upon his call, the entire working people – if not in France, then at least in Paris – would rise up to fight the ignominious and criminal policies of the bourgeois government, which was trying to “steal victory from the people”. Nevertheless, this is not the main question. What concerns us is whether, as comrade Plekhanov strives to demonstrate, Engels’ description of Blanqui can be applied to the Bolsheviks (whom comrade Plekhanov labels the “minority” moreover, because they found themselves in a minority at the reunification congress). [3] He says exactly: “This whole description applies completely to our present minority.” And he justifies this proposition on the following basis: “The relationship of the Blanquists with the popular masses was utopian in the sense that they had not understood the meaning of the revolutionary autonomy of the masses. According to their schemes, only the conspirators were active properly speaking, while the masses were content to support them, led by a well organised minority.” And comrade Plekhanov affirms that this is “Blanquism’s original sin”, to which the Russian Bolshevik [4] comrades (we prefer to keep to this usual denomination) succumbed. In our opinion this reproach has not been substantiated by comrade Plekhanov. For the comparison with the members of Narodnaya Volya [5], who were effectively Blanquists, proves nothing, and the malicious remark that Zhelyabov [6], the hero and leader of Narodnaya Volya, was gifted with a sharper political instinct than the Bolshevik leader, Lenin, is in too bad taste to ponder over. For the rest, as we have said, it is not for us to go guns blazing to defend the Bolsheviks and comrade Lenin: they have not yet been flummoxed by anybody. What is important is to go to the heart of the question and ask: in the current Russian revolution is Blanquism possible? If such a tendency could only exist, could it exert some sort of influence?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html