On May 7, the Chilean right scored a major victory in elections to choose delegates to draft a new constitution for the country. The conservatives, who mostly want to maintain the current constitution drawn up under the Pinochet dictatorship, have more than the 60 percent support in the constitutional council they need to write the new constitution without having to offer any concessions to the left.
Marxist economic theory suggests that slumps will happen when the profitability of capital starts falling; eventually leading to a fall in total profits in an economy. Those profits can further be squeezed by increases in the cost of capital i.e. interest costs on borrowing.
The article is the first of a three-part series, first published in French at Tendance CLAIRE of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France. The text is supported by the Clear Tendency of the NPA and the International Workers’ League.
When we say that the Democratic Party is a bourgeois party, it’s because no matter who votes for it—and the majority of Democratic voters are workers—the party apparatus itself is set up to reflect, and to some extent, organize, the political interests of the capitalist class.
There are by now an estimated 100 million people globally who have fled their homelands or become internally displaced by war, political repression or ethnic violence; by environmental destruction or economic collapse; or in many cases, by lethal combinations of these modern plagues.
The oppressed, not only in Ukraine and Russia but worldwide, require horizontal solidarity and empathy rather than rigid geopolitical thinking and campism. Only then can the workers’ movement triumph and pave the way for peace and socialism!
First Republic is the third bank to fail after the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature. In total, $47bn in bank assets have disappeared into smoke, the losses being taken in part by the shareholders and holders of the bonds in these banks. But there has also been a cost to public funds.
A large part of the left often seems ashamed of having at one time defended egalitarian politics. The extent to which many left-wing leaders go to pretend that they have never defended these politics, or that they are not to much of an irritant the economic powers-that-be, has led them to adopt ways of intervening in politics with people and parties that was characteristic of those on their right.
So far in 2023, state lawmakers have introduced a record-breaking least 483 anti-trans bills. Put differently, only four states have not done so. These include banning parents from allowing their teens to attend drag shows, barring insurance companies from covering gender-affirming medical care (already in use for several decades), and even making it illegal for parents and medical providers to dispense gender affirming care to minors.
This “new machine” is supposed to press the corporations to pay their fair share. But given the dynamics of electoral politics—where there is always another election to plan for—and where Johnson will be looking to shore up his support, that “new machine” can become the vehicle by which Johnson’s wing of the Democratic Party co-opts another generation of activists.
From 1999 to 2009, an average of 1.3 structures were destroyed for every 4 square miles burned (1,000 hectares, or 10 square kilometers). This average more than doubled to 3.4 during the following decade, 2010-2020.
This year alone, state lawmakers have introduced a staggering 483 anti-trans bills, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, which compiles information from civil rights groups and other sources. Only four states have not had an anti-trans bill introduced this session.
Not only are the strike days consecutive, but all doctors have been called out, including those who work in emergency care. This puts the BMA at the forefront of the present trade union upsurge, and it is a significant step forward from the union’s last wave of strikes in 2016, which ended with the government unilaterally imposing an unpopular contract on junior doctors.
Senior officials in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Cabinet—including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—and numerous right-wing lawmakers joined a crowd of as many as 20,000 pro-apartheid demonstrators who marched to Evyatar in a bid to legitimize the outpost, The Times of Israel reports.
What is certain is that credit terms are tightening, bank lending will drop and companies in the productive sectors will find it increasingly difficult to raise funds to invest and households to buy big ticket items. That is going to accelerate economies into a slump this year.
