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Letters from our readers

On “Financial turbulence mounts as global economy slides deeper into slump

 

 

How often have I heard over my lifetime, proclaimed as “facts” evident to the naked eye, the complete failure of Marx’s “predictions,” that is, the increasing impoverishment of the working class, the concentration of capital, the collapse of the capitalist system leading the working class to act for itself to “expropriate the expropriators.” All that sounded quaint and dated to a very long line of political commentators and scholars when “Young Marx” or “Marx the Sociologist” and later the “Re-imagined Marx” of the post-modernists were all the rage.

 

And now behold the imperialist adventures and desperate financial gambits to prop up a system on life-support:

 

Rosa Luxemburg saw imperialism as “simultaneously a historical method of prolonging the existence of capitalism and the most certain means of putting an end to its existence in the shortest possible time,” as the disasters of various invasions show.

Again, “the more capital through militarism, in the world at large as at home, liquidates the non-capitalist strata and depresses the condition of all working people, the more does the daily history of capital accumulation in the world become a chain of political and social catastrophes and convulsions which, together with the periodic catastrophes in the form of crisis, will make the continuation of capital impossible... even before capitalism has reached the natural self created barriers of its economic development”:

 

So there, Bernsteins of my youth!

 

AL
Toronto, Canada
17 April 2012

On “The American working class and the 2012 election

When is an election not an election? I was sitting in a Burger King yesterday listening to people talk about the upcoming election. They were mostly talking about their dissatisfaction with the choices for president. Most of them were so unsatisfied that they were saying that they were not going to vote. Vote or not, they are going to get one (Obama or Romney) for president. Now if the choices for president are so bad that over 50 percent of eligible voters do not vote, have we had an election, or has the peoples vote for none of the above went uncounted?

 

RD
Oklahoma, USA
18 April 2012

On “The ‘Mommy wars’ and media manipulation in the US election

I’d like to know why women’s choices to work or not to work have to be the battleground between two sets of Tweedledee and Tweedledum political parties. For all we know, Ann Romney could be doing volunteer work or running a business from home while raising five children. At the same time, do the Republicans and Democrats have any policies that actually help both working and non-working women irrespective of class? Policies like providing more money for childcare, maternity leave and clinics and hospitals that help children? This tired business of pitting working women against non-working women is diverting public attention away from the real issue of helping families and the lack of policies that address their problems.

 

Jennifer H
14 April 2012

On “Americas Summit ends in fiasco for Obama

 

Thank you Bill Van Auken for a very detailed review of the Americas Summit wherein America is facing a growing independent “South” intent on gradually disconnecting from US hegemony. This is certainly the goal for most of the world’s developing nations, and intent behind EU strategies that seek greater economic cooperation with BRIC nations and less financial control by Wall Street and the City. EU nations, however, will be faced with the “German boot” from above and unforeseeable social and civil uprisings from below in their attempt to forge a “Euroland” rigidly constructed along neo-liberal capitalist formulas. It is no easy future ahead for workers anywhere capital has triumphed over humanity, and like the Beast smelling its own imminent destruction, capital will grow more beastly as it sees its end approaching….

 

An aside: WSWS has promoted education as a goal. Indeed, it must move forward as a top priority. Our hearts and minds must be with the young people of today. They will reap the lethal results of their forebears; watch a nation destroy itself; live through mass upheaval and hell. Some are lost to the rightists who preach hate, others are moving cautiously but aimlessly, yet others have a spark but don’t understand the nature of their resistance. The goals of socialism are the goals of humanity! That is what young people need to hear. Humanity!!! They will respond.

 

The young must survive, so to be here to build a new America, and a new world.

 

Michael B
Maine, USA
17 April 2012

 

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