Are nurses, teachers and analysts the wave of the future? Are their jobs, and others like them, less suitable to capitalism’s extract-and-monetize model and do they possibly prefigure post-capitalist regimes? Questions like these have transfixed macro social scientists since the mid-twentieth century. Every twenty years or so theorists hem [...]
Using the arts and humanities to suggest how society – including the economic system of capitalism -- could be transformed to promote health is even less common. German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht’s works can be excellent resources in efforts to accomplish this goal.
Specific analysis of how capitalism shapes the quality of living and working conditions – now termed the social determinants of health -- is now accumulating in the English-language public health literature. This is coming about because of the polycrises in employment security and wages, food insecurity and hunger, health and health care, housing, income and wealth inequality and environmental protection as a result of the acceptance of neo-liberal governance in many capitalist nations. The inability of even social democratic political parties to respond to these crises had led to increasing numbers of public health researchers endorsing Marx and Engels’s call for a rupture from capitalism towards a post-capitalist socialist society.
The US 1619 project is aimed at making visible the erasure of Black history and contributions of Africans to early America. Seldom noted, it was the Virginia Company that directed the labour of Africans first arriving on the White Lion that year – Virginia was not merely a generic [...]
Value did not destroy slavery, human actions did. My point is that those actions were mediated by value relations. It is high time to see capital in history again both in past and present. Perhaps all the more so now, that the combined crises of world democracy, world governance and global ecology demand collective action, but collective action seems insufficient to resolve them on its own.
Just as the profit imperative coldly choreographs the economic encounter, the test score imperative subtracts autonomy from the educational equation. The process of producing test scores deprofessionalizes teachers, disengages students, and mechanicalizes the art of teaching and learning. Teachers are tasked with transforming disimpassioned pupils into rote learners. Instruction becomes a means to the end of testing like the production of goods and services is a means to the end of profiting.
To realize the Right to Development, capitalist relations of production must be transcended, and socialism established.
Food banks delude the public into thinking food insecurity and hunger are being managed. Food banks allow governing authorities off the hook. Instead of passing laws and regulations and developing policies to reduce poverty and low wages, governments contribute funding to food banks.
My reading of 2011 in Libya suggests that the events did not produce something different, rather they largely emerged whilst more radical visions for the postcolonial future of the country had been gradually defeated. As it stands, capitalism’s promise of inclusion to the Global South is premised on the structural imperative to dominate it. Thus wars, sanctions and liberal interventions will continue to define the promise of capitalist modernity that haunts the present and future of the Global South.
The expansion of EdTech is built upon a longer-standing process of creating markets for schooling. Here a combination of markets and EdTech has served to standardize education, disrupt the connections between schools and local communities, deskill labour, and disadvantage marginalized groups.
