A few years ago, capitalism was reinvented in California’s Silicon Valley. China has been following suit and can now show a thing or two about the “artificial intelligence” business. So as not to be left behind by this epochal progress, Berlin’s politicians are vigorously trying to “digitize the economy.” How this is actually advancing capitalist competition is easily overlooked.

In 2023, the American auto union UAW — United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America — astonished domestic and foreign observers with a six week industrial action against America’s proud “Big Three” auto companies — GM, Ford, Stellantis. No wonder. After all, it was demanding a wage increase of more than 40 percent over the next four years as well as the abolition of the “two-tier” pay system which stipulates lower wages — almost 50 percent less per hour — and a lower pension for all workers hired after 2007. In addition, “cost of living allowances” — a type of annual compensation for inflation — are being brought back. The UAW demanded all this to reverse the drastic concessions that had been extorted from it a decade and a half ago when the Obama administration averted the bankruptcy of its employers in the wake of the financial crisis by mobilizing a huge amount of government loans.

That sure was traumatic for the nation. For the first time since 1814, the Capitol in Washington is ransacked, but this time not by foreign soldiers acting on the orders of a hostile, undemocratic monarch. On the contrary, it’s ardent American patriots, bursting with love for “freedom and democracy,” who are going at it certain that they are only claiming their good democratic right to “four more years!” under the rule of their favorite president.

The Cuban leadership has decided on far-reaching reforms. Promoting foreign exchange–earning economic sectors and attracting foreign capital; committing state-owned companies to profit-oriented production standards; dismissing at least one million state employees; considerably expanding the small-scale private sector and promoting private farmers; abolishing what remains of state-guaranteed basic services as soon as possible. The government justifies its list of measures by pointing to the country’s catastrophic budget situation, which makes painful corrections unavoidable. At the same time, however, it promises that these measures will “preserve socialism, strengthen it and make it truly irreversible.” (Raúl Castro) GᴇɢᴇɴSᴛᴀɴᴅᴘᴜɴᴋᴛ takes the reforms as an opportunity to critically assess the current end point as well as the general intentions, barriers, contradictions, and negative progress of fifty years of Cuban “socialism” — with an epilogue on Cuban friendship and enmity past and present.

Racism no longer exists in a modern bourgeois polity in the form of a state’s legal decree or permission to discriminate against sections of the population to the point of eliminating them. There is no colonial privilege that legitimizes ruling over ‘uncivilized’ peoples, no Nuremberg Laws that make citizenship dependent on belonging to an Aryan master race entitled to dominate the world, and no right to own people that lays down slavery as an integral part of the political economy. — What is there instead?

For months now, a dispute has been raging in Israel acknowledged to be dividing the nation and throwing the state into crisis. It has seized both the political class democratically organized into parties, and large sections of the population. On the surface, the issue is a reform of certain aspects of Israel’s judicial system and, above all, the relation of the judicial to the executive and legislative “powers,” especially in terms of the reciprocal veto rights of the parliament and the Supreme Court. It is in fact clear to all those involved in the national divide that the reform of the judiciary, while presenting a significant change to the separation of state powers, is as such merely a part and, above all, a symbol of a dispute that goes far beyond the question of how the state is organized. What is it all about?

The question of what the war in Ukraine is all about, what’s at stake there, is not asked in the West’s democratic public sphere (example: Germany), but rather is outstripped by a politico-moral answer. To wit: the Kremlin is all about conquering, suppressing democracy in Ukraine and in general, embarking on a new Russian imperialism; the Supreme Commander-in-Chief wants personal power. Ukraine is fighting to defend itself against illegal aggression and protect democratic values. The NATO states are helping the victim of an attack that violates international law, promoting the European peace order and the rules-based world order overall. After a year and a half of war in Ukraine, the world is more ideologically in order than it’s been for a long time. Experts and government advisors of the two nuclear powers involved in Ukraine quite seriously pose the question of what is at stake in Ukraine for each of them and in general, and as professional partisans they give somewhat different answers. In Russia, there is debate about the pros and cons of using nuclear weapons; in the USA, there are firm views on this. Both are documented below in order to draw some conclusions about the nature of the deterrent relationship between the USA and Russia.

Gun owners, like all Americans, see themselves as acknowledged personifications of their state power, as incarnating what makes “America” what it is and needs to be defended against all internal and external threats whether one owns a gun or not. So un-American activities are more like what those people are up to who want to ban gun ownership, thereby violating the rules governing the pursuit of happiness.