The background to the article reprinted here is the “long boom” of western capitalism during the 1950s and 1960s. It first appeared in International Socialism journal in Spring 1967. On the surface it appeared that the capitalist system had stabilised itself, had broken out of the boom-slump cycle and was now able to offer the workers of Western Europe and North America a steady increase in living standards.
This was a frustrating world for Marxists, who found themselves subject to two temptations. One was to surrender to the claims poured out by the system’s apologists that capitalism had solved its problems and that the path of gradual reform offered a sure road to socialism. The other was to deny the obvious signs of stability and prosperity and assert that capitalism was on the verge of imminent, catastrophic collapse. If these temptations were to be avoided, and Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s contradictions was to hold, then the long boom must be explained.
Tag: West Germany
Don’t Blame Karl Marx for ‘Cultural Marxism’
Don’t Blame Karl Marx for ‘Cultural Marxism’
You might think that a history of cultural Marxism would start with Marx, but the poorly coiffed Prussian has almost nothing to do with this tale of insidious infiltration. Instead, the theory took off in the late 1990s due to speeches, essays, and books by William Lind, then with the Free Congress Foundation, and Patrick Buchanan, the firebrand conservative columnist, TV talking head, and sometime presidential candidate. (The idea, though not the name, was hatched earlier, in a 1992 monograph called “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness.” It was written by a disciple of the noted conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche.)
Related:
The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism
Read More »ECOWAS: A PRIMER
ECOWAS in the larger context of Africa’s historic interactions with China, France, USA, UK and Russia
ECOWAS : A PRIMER
The Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist
In December 1982, following Israel’s devastating invasion of Lebanon six months earlier, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution A/RES/37/43 concerning the ‘[i]mportance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination’. It endorsed, without qualification, ‘the inalienable right’ of the Palestinian people to ‘self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside interference’, and reaffirmed the legitimacy of their struggle for those rights ‘by all available means, including armed struggle’. It also strongly condemned Israel’s ‘expansionist activities in the Middle East’ and ‘continual bombing of Palestinian civilians’, both said to ‘constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of the self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people’. In the four decades since then, Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people and its colonisation of their land has not ceased. Up to the present moment, all over historical Palestine, from the Gaza Strip to Sheikh Jarrah, Palestinians are still under that same occupation, subject to suffocating control over virtually every aspect of their lives – and the sadistic, unaccountable violence of the Zionist state.
The Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist
Declassified: Yugoslavia’s ‘Propaganda Value’ for British Spies
Declassified files shed fascinating light on how during the Cold War, Yugoslavia was a subject of intense cloak-and-dagger interest to British intelligence propagandists within Information Research Department (IRD).
Declassified: Yugoslavia’s ‘Propaganda Value’ for British Spies
Related:
History, on this day : Babi Yar, September 29, 1941
In the previous days, a placard has appeared in Kiev, that the German Nazi forces have seized on September 19, 1941, after 45 days of Soviet resistance
History, on this day : Babi Yar, September 29, 1941
How Canada emerged as a haven for Ukrainian SS “Galicia Division” veterans and other Nazi accomplices and war criminals
Aided by the corporate media, Canada’s political establishment is trying to claim that parliament’s honouring last Friday of the 98-year-old Nazi Waffen SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka was the result of an unfortunate gaffe—a gaffe for which the House of Commons Speaker, Anthony Rota, is exclusively responsible.
The World Socialist Web Site has already exposed this false narrative at length.
Here we are republishing an article that first appeared on the WSWS on July 29, 2019. It discusses how and why Ottawa threw open its doors to Hunka and some 2,000 Ukrainian SS veterans. As the article explains, this was part of a broader policy of providing a safe haven to the Nazis’ Ukrainian fascist allies, so as to use them to advance Canadian imperialism’s interests at home and abroad.
Working in concert with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), which had been founded at the government’s behest at the beginning of World War II, Ottawa used the Ukrainian fascists to combat left-wing influence among Canada’s large Ukrainian worker-farmer population and the labour movement more generally. The government also worked with the UCC to foment a rabidly anticommunist, virulently anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism in collaboration with the CIA and British intelligence.
In recent decades, as Canada’s government under Liberals and Conservatives alike has worked with Washington and its NATO partners to harness Ukraine to NATO and the European Union, Ottawa’s alliance with the UCC and the Ukrainian far right has become an ever more important element of Canadian foreign policy.
A more extensive examination of the alliance between Canadian imperialism and the Ukrainian far right can be found in the May 2022 WSWS series “Canadian imperialism’s fascist friends,” including its fourth part: “How Ottawa provided the Ukrainian fascists refuge and incubated and promoted far-right Ukrainian nationalism.”
How Canada emerged as a haven for Ukrainian SS “Galicia Division” veterans and other Nazi accomplices and war criminals
How NATO seduced the European Left
The anti-war movement has fallen for a progressive circus
How NATO seduced the European Left
Previously:
Angelina Jolie’s MI6 Interview Shows Just How Connected Hollywood Is To the Deep State
The World Economic Forum has outed itself as anti-Palestinian
The World Economic Forum has outed itself as anti-Palestinian
A few months later, I received a letter indefinitely suspending my membership. My request for the reasons for my suspension and an appeal has gone completely ignored. So much for the values of “stakeholder capitalism” and “cooperation in a fragmented world” that WEF publicly espouses. More like racism, abuse of power, and lack of transparency. I have learned firsthand that some YGLs are informants leaking private communications directly to the WEF’s leadership. Feels more like an authoritarian regime that spies on its constituency and loathes free speech than a global forum. As for my former YGLs, only a handful of true leaders actually protested my suspension. The silence of the remaining supposed “young global leaders” was deafening, but in retrospect, I realize that their silence is expressive of the exact type of Machiavellian leadership that the WEF seeks to foster.
Related:
The World Economic Forum adheres to the principles of independence, impartiality, moral integrity and intellectual integrity.
[2021] Can we improve the world by remaining impartial?
What do you do when violent conflict erupts, innocent people get killed, and human rights are being violated? I believe any person with a heart and a moral compass would feel compelled to condemn the aggressors. Not doing so feels wrong on a moral level, and could raise the risk of further escalation. Are we misguided then, as an international institution, to not speak out unequivocally when conflicts emerge, and innocent people suffer? Are we “hiding” behind our impartiality?
[2022] Klaus Schwab and Børge Brende Statement on Ukraine
We therefore deeply condemn the aggression by Russia against Ukraine, the attacks and atrocities.
Why the West Pushes Serbia to Recognize Kosovo
The West continues pressuring Serbia to implicitly recognize Kosovo – the Serbian breakaway region that unilaterally declared independence in 2008. At the same time, the European Union and the United States expect Belgrade to resolutely support Ukraine’s ambitions to retake Crimea, the Donbass, as well as parts of the Zaporizhzhia and the Kherson regions that are still under Russia’s control.
Why the West Pushes Serbia to Recognize Kosovo
Related:
Serbia Rules Out Signing EU Plan Over Kosovo’s UN Membership
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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