Current events and the state of the world

It has been a very sad August when we allow the media to affect us.  Thousands of people dying unnecessarily, in war and conflict, in protests and on the streets, from Missouri to Gaza, from Kurdistan to Damascus, from Donetsk to Santiago, armies, states, police, brutally slaughter their perceived enemies. In Syria the latest count of deaths since the uprising begun has reached 170,000 people and with the ISIS the numbers are climbing.  In Gaza 2,100 is the last count in a few weeks.  In Ukraine it is questionable what the numbers are but lately different sides refer to 2,000.  In Africa the numbers are never so important to the western media to report, until the Ebola epidemic  came and the media took an interest as far as this epidemic may cause a threat elsewhere.  Yet there is one constant statistic that not many are reporting in the mass media.  Over 60,000 people a day, nearly half being children, are dying from the simple cause of the lack of nutrients and clean water.  Meanwhile if one is to divide the annual world production of corn (alone) by the population one will find the corn produced alone can prevent death from hunger.  An enormous amount of food is produced worldwide, maybe "too much" according to economists who are waged by corporations that benefit from the rise of the price of commodities.

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.

From Fire to Autonomy: Zapatistas, 20 Years of Walking Slowly

Saturday, 25 January 2014 09:28  

By Andalusia Knoll and Itandehui Reyes,  truth-out.org

Note: truth-out does great work in sharing knowledge about the reasons we should not yet give up any struggle.  In this great piece one should not overlook this paragraph:
mandar obedenciedo (command by obeying): to serve and not be served; represent and not supplant; build and not destroy; propose and not impose; and convince, not defeat, from below not above.

Speaking in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, on a cold drizzly New Year's Eve, the Zapatista Comandante Hortensia addressed the crowd: "Twenty-five or 30 years ago we were completely deceived, manipulated, subjugated, forgotten, drowned in ignorance and misery." She was communicating the official words of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) on the 20th anniversary of their rebellion, when thousands of indigenous people rose up in arms, took over dozens of major towns and villages in this southern state, and declared "enough is enough, never again will there be a homeland that doesn't include us."
Comandante Hortensia went on to explain how over the past two decades, they have constructed their own autonomous government, complete with their own health and education system, based in the indigenous traditions of their ancestors. Despite the continual efforts of the "neoliberal bad government" to displace them from their land, the Zapatistas have successfully recuperated thousands of acres of land on which they have constructed communities that are governed "from the bottom up." Community members participate in rotating government positions that operate under the democratic principle of "mandar obedeciendo" (commanding by obeying).

Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination

A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Saturday, 30 November 2013 09:50 By Javier Sethness, Truthout | Op-Ed

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(Image: Bloomsbury)Professor John P. Clark's The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist - socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and the earth from the yoke of dominion." Taking equally from Buddhism as from dialectical philosophy, Clark stresses the importance of enlightenment, mindfulness and awakening as preconditions of revolutionary political praxis. And although he implicitly seems to agree with the overall thesis of the (anti)catastrophist line developed by Sasha Lilley and company, he also affirms the productivity of a commitment to truth that squarely confronts the profoundly shocking, traumatic and even convulsive nature of such truth: the very first page of his preface acknowledges the sixth mass extinction in which terrestrial life is at present entrapped and notes the "horror" of a capitalist world in which billions go without the basic necessities of a good life. Advancing the philosophy and practice of communitarian anarchism as an exit from the depraved present, Clark dedicates much of his text to examining the anti-authoritarian and cooperative spirit of humanity, as embodied in many of the customs of pre-modern or "traditional" societies, as in the history of Western revolutionary movements. In this sense, Clark does well to distance himself from the Eurocentrism advanced by many Western radical thinkers, including social ecologist Murray Bookchin, whose imprint on The Impossible Community is otherwise nearly palpable.

Gold, Copper, Iron, Petroleum, Uranium, Water, and now Bitcoin

The world has gone mad or what we thought as sanity is not really

far from madness?  This is how silly their value system is that one does not really need to dig mountains, melt ore, have vaults, and make laws and rules to create value.  One can seat on their PC and harvest/mine coins that are not made out of any matter, use them to buy and sell material goods and services, and get wealthy collecting those virtual coins that no state and central bank in the world regulates.  Yes, gold coins are just as silly but cost lives and do tremendous damage to the land their harvested from.  The question we ask is not whether such a currency can replace other currencies or be used as a universal currency for international trade but whether this "value" system is as silly as any of capitalism's value systems. 

Here we have a description and summary of what this late madness of virtual currency is by a globally respected economics journal "The Economist".  The longer this phenomenon lasts and the longer states are unable or unwilling to control and repress it the more the traditional value systems prove their irrationality.  Thousands, millions maybe, died in battles and wars over gold and other resources so states and the elites behind them can maintain domination over land and lives.  For what?  For regulating, usually to their benefit, the accumulation in wealth, power, and control, based on a virtual and irrational value system.  Bitcoins have reduced