A new Podcast series from Economic Update and Democracy at Work is worth your attention.

As some have noticed, I am a fan of David Harvey’s work, but not necessarily a follower, and in a different life would have liked to have worked with Richard Wolff.

Following on NYBE’s thinking on the US MidTerm elections, this video is worth your attention if only because Richard Wolff interviews David Harvey (at 15:11):x

Democracy at Work podcast: Anti-Capitalist Chronicles (bi-monthly) @democracyatwork.info/ACC  and patreon.com/economicupdate

Key takeaway: One hopes that a class in itself  becomes a class for itself.

suppose every airport worker went on strike for two days

One hopes that women in the new Congress will make a difference.

The problem is as indicated one of agency “who disempowers people… Capital”, and when alienation becomes opposition. For example Harvey has more hope for the Labour party in the UK.

Much of the problem is about followers and fans of ideological position, as much as the language of idiots claiming No Labels (its National Leader is Joe Lieberman) is a purely neoliberal stunt (a.k.a. centrist dumbf*ckery) in an age where the norm is revanchist partisanship bordering on RW authoritarianism:x

Actually I prefer Harvey’s earlier, more scientific and analytic work. In another lifetime I would have been a geography undergrad and would have studied with him at Johns Hopkins, but with my usual grad school luck, would have gotten there after he went to CUNY. On a personal note the above video reminded me of when undergraduates helped unionize the college’s non-office staff, and it only took nearly 50 years to unionize undergraduate student workers. This is the same decades-long problem of unionizing the lumpen of grad student workers.

This Harvey podcast is a new development, so if you haven’t seen his lectures on YouTube, please have a listen and perhaps come back to discuss.x

From the first podcast:

• Capital growth at compound rates continues to be a big deal when considering reinvestment
• Expansion under capitalist development at the physical level becomes more problematic (concrete consumption in China)
• Expansion of the monetary system is implied (hence MMT)
• Non-productive activities (see 2007-8 property markets)
• Monetary expansion benefited the ruling class excessively (Quantitative Easing) at the cost to the lower classes (£3k versus 325k)
• Corporate banks (car companies are more about their banks)
• Financialized economy has costs/benefits (Mutual Aid Societies)
• The dominance of the speculative side (Kochs, etc) and its exploitation of the credit side
• OWS needs reinvigoration (see student debt peonage)

Further podcasts engage the issue of what is to be done… about the NeoLiberal Project.

What E.J. Dionne wrote in 2010 about “No-labelism” is no less relevant, if only because the ultimate brand-maven is POTUS* serving capital by his lies and dumbf*ckery. And “problem solving” especially championed by a single elite group, only affirms the asymmetry of the solutions.

The basic difficulty arises from a false equivalence they make between our current "left" and our current "right." The truth is that the American right is much farther from anything that can fairly be described as "the center" than is the left.

Indeed, there is no far left to speak of anymore. Even among socialists—I'm talking about real ones—almost all now acknowledge the benefits of markets, no longer propose state ownership of the means of production, and accept the inevitability of inequalities in wealth and income. What they oppose is the rise of extreme inequalities that are antithetical to both a healthy democracy and a healthy market economy.

In the meantime, large parts of the right have moved to positions that Ronald Reagan didn't dare take, or abandoned in the name of realism: voucherizing Medicare, partially privatizing Social Security, insisting that the New Deal represented an unconstitutional power grab, and eviscerating inheritance taxes and progressive income taxes.

newrepublic.com/...

And on the disinformation front, we need to be reminded that disinformation is a feature (not a bug) in US-Russian relations since under Trump we may yet have that first tactical nuclear weapon used in an actual battle.

In response to this claim, a civic-minded scientist has subjected the stunt to the rigors of scientific peer review and posted the results on Overthinking It, a blog with a tagline of “where we subject the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn’t deserve.” After a careful and extremely thorough crunching of the numbers comparing drag, wind resistance, the energy and force of an atomic bomb blast versus a solid Frigidaire, Dr. David Shechner concluded that, sadly, it just wasn’t possible. Then he goes ahead and lists all the ways that beloved hero and professor of archaeology Indiana Jones would perish in the blast. In short, sorry George Lucas, but it’s back to digging the bomb shelter in the basement.

newsfeed.time.com/…

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation called for a ban on the film, accusing the production team of "demonizing" the Soviet Union.^[137] A party official said: "In 1957 the USSR was not sending terrorists to America but sending the Sputnik satellite into space!"^[138] Spielberg responded: "When we decided the fourth installment would take place in 1957, we had no choice but to make the Russians the enemies. World War II had just ended and the Cold War had begun. The U.S. didn't have any other enemies at the time."^[139] 

en.wikipedia.org/...