Capitalism
Why Obama is not a socialist
Change the conversation, support rabble.ca today.
The Economist, the famous British magazine, in its first issues of 2013, ran on its cover a picture of U.S. President Obama wearing a striped shirt and a beret. It was a joke and a criticism directed towards Obama's politics.
In simple words, The Economist was clearly saying that the U.S. was becoming another version of France, a country with a long and strong history of social programs.
Of course, it didn't take long to have all the French media unleashing their wrath against those bad 'English' people with horrible taste.
Global capitalism and David McNally's monsters
Change the conversation, support rabble.ca today.
One of the many carnivalesque aspects of consumer society is the popular fascination -- and fashion -- oriented around various types of monsters. As with previous groups that rebelled via a parodic inversion against the regulatory demands of official culture -- such as hippies in the 1960s, skinheads in the 1980s and the occasional cyborg in the 1990s -- today's zombie and vampire enthusiasts present themselves in opposition to mainstream, bourgeois style, costume and aesthetics.
Cash Cab, globalization and expanding the welfare state
Change the conversation, support rabble.ca today.
Recently I asked some university students, hesitantly, if they watch Cash Cab. Hesitantly, since I know they don't watch much TV, or own one. For their demographic, TV is part of media history -- like town criers or the jungle telegraph -- versus its present, which is new media, social media: in a word, the Internet. They said they all watch it, enthusiastically, online.
Alternatives to Capitalism Workshop: The new Venezuela post-election six-year plan
Date: Thursday, December 13, 2012 - 6:30pm
Location
Centre for Social Justice/CSI Annex, Second Floor, Meeting Room #1
720 Bathurst Street
Toronto, ON
Canada
43° 39' 47.8476" N, 79° 24' 38.2248" W
See map: Google Maps
One of the central tasks of remaking socialism for the 21st century is insisting upon and exploring alternatives to capitalism. This has been the importance of the Venezuelan Revolution, and the politics emerging in the Bolivarian bloc of states. The recent re-election of Hugo Chavez has led to further radical proposals for socialization. But these require careful study and debate given the experience of Venezuela and the balance of class forces inside the country and the region. One of the central theorists of the new theory of the transition to socialism has been Michael Lebowitz, who draws extensively on the developments in Venezuela in his thinking on ‘real human development’. This meeting will for discussion of these issues in light of the new Venezuela programme.
Friedrich von Hayek: Neoliberalism's prophet
As the economic boom of the post-war period ended in the early 1970s, neoliberal ideology emerged as a rebellion against the statist strategies of the previous era. While neoliberalism was critical of Keynes it was also a further development of themes present in classical and neoclassical economic thought. Its most famous proponent was the economist-philosopher Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992). His theory till the 2012 U.S. elections constituted the central intellectual adversary for the global justice movements, the leftist states in Latin America and other critics of corporate capitalism.