The End of the FutureThe United States has long since become a developed country undergoing underdevelopment. Life expectancy is falling. People sleeping on park benches, in subway cars, or by the side of the road are on the rise. Whole towns and small cities have died along with the industries that once gave them life. Highways, bridges, tunnels, and electrical grids — indeed, the entire material infrastructure of public life — are scandalously rotted. Public services are run down, closed, or auctioned off to private enterprises. Child labor, once thought extinct, an industrial medievalism of the sweatshop era, now shows up in nearly every sector of the economy from industrial laundries and auto-parts plants to fast-food eateries and construction sites. Adult jobs, once thought secure, got converted into various forms of precarious or temporary employment. Two-wage-earner families now earn what one-wage-earner families used to. Pensions guaranteeing a retirement income have either been replaced by ones tied to the fickle oscillations of the stock market or not replaced at all. The social safety net, a metaphorical exaggeration even in its best days, has become a Dickensian embarrassment. Rural America is despoiled terrain, abandoned or the site of superexploitation by logistics and distribution networks. “Deaths of despair” — through drug and alcohol addiction, suicide — have become epidemic, in cities and in the countryside. Rights once taken for granted — the right to vote, the right to join a union — are now contested or, for all practical purposes, denied. In the words of famed management consultant Peter Drucker, “No class in history has ever risen faster than the blue-collar worker. And no class in history has ever fallen faster.” All within less than a century. Back in the days of tsarist Russia, during the late nineteenth century, a revolutionary movement known as the Narodniks (the word meant “going to the people”) tried to arouse the Russian peasantry to overthrow the tsar. It didn’t catch on. One activist of that era mourned that “history goes too slow.” We might say about our own moment that history has gone in reverse. This in turn has generated a peculiar political response both on the Right, where it might be expected, but also on the Left, where it is strikingly strange. Call it “the politics of restoration.”
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/left-politics-future-history-capitalism-progressHuman, All Too Inhuman, All Too Inhuman: The Epstein/MAGA World As The Will To PowerThe Epstein abominations, to state the obvious, are revealing, in lurid detail, hidden in plain sight, unnerving aspects of human nature; withal, what transpires during human sexuality is an analog, sublime and grotesque, redemptive and soul-decimating, of all things human. Epstein and his billionaire boys club exploitation of their victims are a microcosmic reflection of the capitalist macrocosm. According to the creed of the global economic elite, all things on planet earth and beyond into the cosmos (Elon’s maniacal fantasies involving his clown car rocketry) are fodder for exploitation. Due to the fact that the economic elite believe they possess the entitlement to throw the planet’s human life sustaining climate into exponential runaway because they cannot run their life-defying existence without fossil fuel – how is it conceivable that they would regard teenage girls and women from lesser socio-economic backgrounds as anything less than fodder for exploitation? We, of the lower economic orders, are regarded as commodified, disposable consorts on everyday, capitalist Epstein’s Islands, albeit with a scenery comprised of stripmalls in decline and health-decimating, fast food outlets. In short, we are not talking so much about sexuality but the violation of human beings, body and soul. Born into economic privilege, globe-trotting Ghislaine Maxwell scoured trailer parks in search of economically desperate teenage girls to service Jeffery Epstein’s hebephilic mania. Isn’t it obvious, from their insular perches of luxury, they view the entire planet as a trailer park? Donald Trump, to protect his adult diaper-draped hind, has transferred Maxwell to a Club Fed facility where the warden complains he is pressured to act as her luxury hotel concierge. The only way out of this dehumanizing setup is to break the cycle of exploitation — that is, molecule structure to insular, gated mansion, the capitalist order itself.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/16/human-all-too-inhuman-all-too-inhuman-the-epstein-maga-world-as-the-will-to-power/One party, two alternative visions: a turning point for the socialist leftWE ARE at a crossroads for the future of the British left. A new mass working-class party is in formation. With Labour in meltdown, the cost of living rising, and millions looking leftwards and rightwards for radical answers, this is a moment filled with potential. To say Your Party has had a difficult start would be an understatement. From the agonising delays that left 800,000 interested signatories frustrated and confused, through to the exclusions of prominent socialists on the eve of the party’s founding conference, it has sometimes felt like we have secured 60,000 members despite rather than because of the party’s unelected interim leadership. Yet we remain the biggest working-class and socialist political party in Britain since the second world war. This February, we elect Your Party’s new leadership, the central executive committee. Two rival slates have emerged: The Many, led by Jeremy Corbyn, and Grassroots Left, led by Zarah Sultana. We — Mel Mullings, Riccardo la Torre and Chloe Braddock — are standing as part of the Grassroots Left slate for CEC positions. But this election is not about Corbyn or Sultana, nor is it about the personalities on either slate. No — this election is about capital-P politics and two different visions for this party: what it should be, and what it should stand for. Trade unions must urgently re-evaluate their affiliation to a Labour Party that no longer serves them. We see the same unions marching every week against the genocide and fighting cuts to vital public service and attacks on jobs, yet many remain tethered to a government that fails to align with our core socialist principles. This contradiction is unsustainable. And we believe that Your Party will be a socialist vehicle for organised labour.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/one-party-two-alternative-visions-turning-point-socialist-left