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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

17 Aug

As part of my studies on national liberation and Marxism, I went back to reread some of the Frankfurt school. Interested in how their main thinkers slipped into a reactionary politics. The turn against politics and towards philosophy was part of the problem. The other part.......

.....was their reluctance to engage with the developments in the communist state system, the sniff of disapprobation at the Easterness of the entire Soviet project, a disavowal of the realm of necessity....and then, even more so......

.....was their absolute horror of socialism in the Third World, from China to Cuba. Horkheimer, in 1963, wrote of the ‘exaggerated natiobalisms’ of the ‘backward countries’, meaning the Bandung-NAM bloc. Hard to ignore this in any assessment of their turn away from the world.

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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

12 Aug

Kamala Harris is the Vice Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in the United States of America. The most important part of the previous sentence is "Democratic Party", which should alert the reader to a history of vacillation and surrender to the bourgeoisie.

There is no doubt that the Republican Party in the USA is a repellent hive of bigotry, with its political orientation oscillating between fascism and near-fascism, the teeth marks of an odious history on the surface. Trump is merely symptom of the rot.

The less odious faction of the US ruling class prefers the Democratic Party. It is less embarrassingly arcane in its politics, marginally less horrid in its treatment of the precious poor, but then to many people these margins are important.

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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

19 Jul

(Thread) The capitalist states (USA, UK, Brazil, India) are not going to get out of the pandemic soon. Their problem is that they gutted their public health systems and have no public sector facility to run testing, tracing, and isolation.

@rajshah

This not my opinion. @rajshah - president of @RockefellerFdn - says that the problem for the US is that it relies upon 'monopoly companies' that 'don't have enough capacity in their central processing systems for the volumes that are necessary right now'. He means Quest & LabCorp

These are indeed 'monopoly companies' & they are run on the profit motive, which means that they are just-in-time processing labs that do not have any 'capacity' ever to do more than normal lab work; anything more than that is inefficient for them.

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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

3 Mar

@SenSanders

[Thread on Socialism] I've been reading some of the debates around the candidacy of @SenSanders for the US presidency. Bernie is a Democratic Socialist. This is a powerful tradition within the United States that begins with the Workingmen's Party of the United States (1876).

@SenSanders

@SenSanders The Workingmen's Party - which becomes the Socialist Party - is only twenty years younger than the Republican Party. It has its roots firmly in the soil of US politics, and emerged into the mainstream as the principle defender of the railroad workers in the strike of 1877.

@SenSanders

@SenSanders Quite importantly, in 1878, the Workingmen's Party - an openly Marxist party - won 5 of the 7 seats in the Kentucky state legislature, the state now represented by the execrable @senatemajldr.

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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

13 Nov 19

I have been very disappointed with the way sections of the 'left' have reacted to the coup in Bolivia. Some have joined the hard right and the imperialist bloc to deny even that there was a coup; others have gone so far as to say that Evo Morales is personally power hungry.

@evoespueblo

These texts neglect that @evoespueblo represents hundreds of years of deprivation and struggle amongst the indigenous people of Bolivia, and decades of indigenous socialism that found its path through resource nationalism.

@evoespueblo

@evoespueblo These texts do not see that the Morales government's resource nationalism agenda was blocked at every turn by transnational mining firms, many of whom sued Bolivia in European arbitration panels for a total of nearly $2 billion. Morales's government fought these suits.

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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

3 Jul 19

@ilo

[Thread] The heatwave that has ripped through the northern hemisphere is an inconvenience, certainly, but it is a grave threat to workers in the fields and on building sites. The @ilo has released a new report on this problem. ilo.org/global/about-t….

@ilo

The @ilo's recommendation - mechanisation and skills development - are weak. More is needed. See my report - asiatimes.com/2019/07/opinio….

I close with the example of Kerala, where Left Democratic Front government - before the rains began - put a mandatory moratorium on work in the sun between 11am & 3pm. This is a start in the short-term. The longer term solution leads us towards the climate catastrophe.

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