Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism

http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/robinson/Assets/pdf/Crisis%20of%20Humanity.pdf
World Economy  www.worldfinancialreview.com  May - June 2014 Pg 14 – 16

Global Capitalism:
Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism

By William I. Robinson

About the Author

William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies, at the University of California - Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Promoting Polyarchy (1996), Transnational Conflicts (2003), A Theory of Global Capitalism  (2004), Latin America and Global Capitalism(2008), and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014).

World capitalism is experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history. Global capitalism is a qualitatively new stage in the open ended evolution of capitalism characterised by the rise of transnational capital, a transnational capitalist class, and a transnational state. Below, William I. Robinson argues that the global crisis is structural and threatens to become systemic, raising the specter of collapse and a global police state in the face of ecological holocaust, concentration of the means of violence, displacement of billions, limits to extensive expansion and crises of state legitimacy, and suggests that a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward to the poor majority of humanity is the only viable solution.

The New Global Capitalism and the 21st Century Crisis

The world capitalist system is arguably experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history. World capitalism has experienced a profound restructuring through globalisation over the past few decades and has been transformed in ways that make it fundamentally distinct from its earlier incarnations. Similarly, the current crisis exhibits features that set it apart from earlier crises of the system and raise the stakes for humanity. If we are to avert disastrous outcomes we must understand both the nature of the new global capitalism and the nature of its crisis. Analysis of capitalist globalisation provides a template for probing a wide range of social, political, cultural and ideological processes in this 21st century. Following Marx, we want to focus on the internal dynamics of capitalism to understand crisis. And following the global capitalism perspective, we want to see how capitalism has qualitatively evolved in recent decades.

What is the Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)

A documentary about the history of the fight of the rural workers in Brazil. Go here for the list of videos

What is the MST?

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Portuguese, is a mass social movement, formed by rural workers and by all those who want to fight for land reform and against injustice and social inequality in rural areas.

The MST was born through a process of occupying latifundios (large landed estates) and become a national movement in 1984.  Over more than two decades , the movement has led more than 2,500 land occupations, with about 370,000 families - families that today settled on 7.5 million hectares of land that they won as a result of the occupations. Through their organizing, these families continue to push for schools, credit for agricultural production and cooperatives, and access to health care.

Currently, there are approximately 900 encampment holding 150,000 landless families in Brazil.  Those camped, as well as those already settled, remain mobilized, ready to exercise their full citizenship, by fighting for the realization of their political, social economic, environmental and cultural rights.

Editorial. Rebeldía Zapatista (Zapatista Rebellion)

the Word of the EZLN

Front Cover of Rebeldía Zapatista #2

We rebellious Zapatistas, along with our mother earth, are threatened with destruction in our Mexican homeland. Both above and below the earth’s surface, the bad governments and bad rich people, all neoliberal capitalists, want to commodify everything they see.

They want to own everything.

They are destructive, they are murderers, criminals, rapists. They are cruel and inhuman, they torture and disappear people, and they are corrupt. They are every bad thing you can imagine, they do not care about humanity. They are, in fact, inhuman.

They are few, but they decide everything about how they will dominate countries that let themselves be dominated. They have made underdeveloped countries into their plantations, and made the underdeveloped capitalist so-called governments of those countries into their overseers.

This is what has happened in Mexico. The neoliberal transnational corporations are the bosses, their plantation is called Mexico, the current overseer is named Enrique Peña Nieto, the administrators are 
Manuel Velasco in Chiapas and the other so-called state governors, and the badly named municipal “presidents” are the foremen.

This is why we rose up against this system at dawn on January 1, 1994.

Mining, the destruction of land by neo-colonialists

AGAINST THE IMPERIALISM AND NEOCOLONIALISM OF MINING COMPANIES, THE CURRENT BATTLE OF THE PEOPLES

A New Store for Zapatista Women’s Cooperative

** Organization is required to win, NGO’s from several countries point out in Puebla
** Emissaries from Mexico, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador expose abuses of transnationals

By: Rosa Rojas

Tlamanca, Puebla, March 15, 2014

The struggle against extractive mining “it’s not only for our life, but also an anti-imperialist struggle and against neo-colonialism that is imposed on the peoples with the servile attitude of the neoliberal governments and the agreements on free trade and on protection for foreign investment,” according to what was made clear here today after the exposure of particular cases of problems with mining companies that communities from different states of the country confront, as well as those in Panama, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.