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Showing posts from March, 2009

Reimagining Socialism: A Nation Forum

By Immanuel Wallerstein There seem to me to be two occasions, which require two plans for the world left, and in particular for the US left. The first occasion is in the short run. The world is in a deep depression, which will only get worse for at least the next one or two years. The immediate short run is what concerns most people who are facing joblessness, seriously lowered income and in many cases homelessness. If left movements have no plan for this short run, they cannot connect in any meaningful way with most people. The second occasion is the structural crisis of capitalism as a world system, which is facing, in my opinion, its certain demise in the next twenty to forty years. This is the middle run. And if the left has no plan for this middle run, what replaces capitalism as a world system will be something worse, probably far worse, than the terrible system in which we have been living for the past five centuries. The two occasions require different, but combined, tactics.

Imperialism of Crisis: Part II

Robert Kurz , editor and co - publisher of the theoretical magazine "Krisis", has just published (Mars 2003) in Germany "War of the world order, the end of the sovereignty and transformations of imperialism at the time of the globalisation". Now he is in EXIT: http://www.exit-online.org Introduction The capitalism is not a Buddhist ceremony, an anhistoric look cannot apprehend it. The always identical logic of the principle of valorisation doesn't provoke its eternal return, but an irreversible historic process to the qualitatively changing conditions. Such a world constellation only must be explained in all time regarding the basis development of the world capital. Every time that a phase of valorisation is exhausted, the political institutions, afferent concepts and ideologies become also obsolete. This is verified especially for the stage of maturity reached at the end of the XXth century by the world system. Since 80’s the third industrial revolution, the

Capitalism and Imperialism

Part 1 Even though Malaysia decolonized more than 50 years ago but the mentality of the colonial masters is well rooted. This mentality can be classified as post capitalism and imperialism. First let one explain about the capitalism, “Capitalism is a difficult, problematic term; it applies to a diversity of phenomenon spread across disparate historical cultures with substantially variable world views. However, the term is an Enlightenment European term used to describe European practices; so the term "capitalism" means more than just a body of social practices easily applied across geographical and historical distances, it is also a "way of thinking," and as a way of thinking does not necessarily apply to earlier European origins of capitalism or to capitalism as practiced in other cultures. The earliest forms of capitalism—which we call "mercantilism"—originate in Rome, the Middle East, and the early Middle Ages. Mercantilism might be roughly defined as t