NATO is celebrating its 75th anniversary as a war alliance and considers itself to be more necessary and more alive than ever before. Although it is not directly at war, it refers to the war in Ukraine as the “greatest security crisis in generations.” Russia’s violently asserted opposition to NATO’s eastward expansion has given the alliance back the enemy that constitutes its unity and that it had lost with the abdication of its system rival. And for the past two-and-a-half years, its proxy war in Ukraine has proved to be a productive force for the alliance’s power, extended its deployment area to 32 states, and added fuel to the members’ rearmament efforts, the financial level of which now finally largely meets the alliance’s requirements.
There is no summer slump in American political life this year. After all, the president will be elected in the fall. And because the post of the world’s most important ruler is at stake, the leader of the world power par excellence, every twist and turn in the American election campaign enjoys the attention of the whole world. And there has been no shortage of twists and turns so far: the first direct clash between the two candidates turns out to be such a disaster for the Democrats that Trump’s renewed election victory seems to be a safe bet. But just a few weeks later, nothing is certain: after Biden assures that only the Almighty himself can stop him from running again, he suddenly renounces in favor of his — even more unpopular — running mate Kamala Harris; contrary to all expectations, she is met with a wave of enthusiasm in the party and among the electorate. Just a few weeks later, she overtakes Trump in several polls.
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.
“I’m voting for the president I’ll make more money under” (an unnamed hard-working American on German television)
That is pretty close to America’s true soul: to the false materialism going with the capitalist competition that the land of unlimited opportunities excels at. But it is not even half the truth when it comes to the second wave of Donald Trump’s election campaign for “America first!” after 2016. The officially launched ‘culture clash’ between populist lies and democratic hypocrisy is about nothing less than the nation’s morality — that is, about the obedience of the people that the global might of the state is based on in the land of the free.
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.
In wartime, the morality of bourgeois society is turned upside down. What people must never do in peacetime — kill other people ---- they are now ordered to do. The right to life, one of the inalienable rights protected by basic law, now gives way to the duty to sacrifice one’s life for the state. This revaluation of values makes war the ultimate moral challenge. It provokes the need for justification, of all things.
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?