"Far from being peculiar to this or that crisis, workers' control initiatives have arisen along with every revolutionary crisis that has yet occurred in industrialized or even partly industrialized countries.

Lenin never spelled out what aspects of the production process the workers would be empowered to judge. What this meant in practice, however, is clearly suggested in his remarks about Taylorism, namely, that if a given method can quadruple productivity for the benefit of the capitalists, it can just as well do so for the benefit of the working class. In line with this approach, the Soviet government reacted with consistent disfavor to workers' managerial initiatives, even where the alternative was a factory-shutdown. [...] The acceptance of Taylorist methods was just one component--albeit a central one--of Lenin's larger view of the Russian economy as still requiring full development of the capitalist production process even if under (presumed) working class leadership. [...] Lenin treats workers' self-management as being not only premature but even counterproductive to his overall strategy for reaching socialism by way of state capitalism.

In the Italian factories, by contrast, "absenteeism among workers was negligible, discipline effective, combativity widely diffused. Antonio Gramsci gave a clear example of such a link when he wrote: "The proletarian dictatorship can only be embodied in a type of organization that is specific to the activity
of producers, not wage-earners, the slaves of capital. The factory council is the nucleus of this organization.... The factory council is the model of the proletarian State."

The Spanish Civil War provided the occasion, in certain regions of the country, for the closest approach yet made to a society fully based on workers' control. The most notable aspects of the Spanish experience may be summarized as follows. First, workers' control was practiced in every sector of the economy. While it went furthest in agriculture, in at least one city (Barcelona) it was also introduced in all industries and services. Second, the structural changes were very radical, often entailing the elimination of certain managerial positions, the equalization of wages, and, in some peasant collectives, the abolition of money. Particularly impressive is the fact that, where land-expropriations took place, the peasants almost invariably preferred communal ownership to parcellization. Third, even the most radical of the changes were introduced directly and immediately, placing maximum reliance on the participation of the masses to the highest level of their abilities. Fourth, contrary to many stereotypes, the changes in question were not necessarily made at the expense of efficiency, but instead often involved advances in technology or coordination, as in the consolidation of the Barcelona bakeries and the vertical integration of the Catalan lumber industry. And finally, it was in some places close to three years before the self-managed operations were suppressed by force of arms. There was thus ample time for them to prove themselves as practical arrangements.

Allende's Chile was a direct successor to revolutionary Spain in more ways than one: electoral stimulus, workers' initiatives, conflicts within the left, decisive foreign support to the right, and crushing defeat. In some ways, of course, Chile never reached the levels attained in Spain. Thus, the
Chilean workers and peasants remained for the most part unarmed, and there were no whole regions of the country that they controlled. Nevertheless, there is one important sense in which the Chilean case carries the accumulated experience of workers' control another step forward: namely, that the
interaction between class-conscious workers and the elected government was a great deal more fluid. In effect, the autonomous workers' initiatives were, to a greater extent than in either Italy or Spain, an offshoot of the struggle that was being conducted at state level.

It should hardly be necessary to say that the struggles for workers' control and for socialism are inseparable. And yet the problem that has arisen again and again in practice is that they have found themselves organizationally in conflict. "Socialism" has been the formal monopoly of a political party (or parties), while self- management has been the direct expression of the workers and peasants themselves. Whichever one has prevailed, the result has been a setback in the movement toward a classless society. "Socialism" without self- management has revived or perpetuated rigid social strata,
while self- management without a strong political direction has simply been suppressed"

http://www.net4dem.org/cyrev/archive/Misc.%20Articles/WorkersControl/WorkersControl.pdf

Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza — through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment — into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area. Anyone caught outside its boundaries would be killed, and buildings throughout the rest of the enclave would likely be razed to the ground.

Without mincing words, this “humanitarian zone,” as Magal so kindly put it, in which the army intends to corral Gaza’s 2 million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.

[...]

For “voluntary departure” to be sufficiently successful to enable annexation and re-establishment of Jewish settlements in the Strip, one would think that at least 70 percent of Gaza’s residents would have to be removed — meaning more than 1.5 million people. This goal is utterly unrealistic given the current political circumstances, both within Gaza and across the Arab world.

https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-concentration-camp-expulsion/

Senza un piano di politiche industriali e misure di stimolo economico per l’industria dell’auto mirate alla transizione alla mobilità elettrica, al 2030 il valore della produzione del comparto potrebbe infatti registrare un calo del 56-58%, per un valore stimato fino a 7,49 miliardi di dollari.

Causando, nel peggiore degli scenari, la perdita di 94mila posti di lavoro con un conseguente “costo” in termini di cassa integrazione di due miliardi di dollari.

Sono i risultati dell’analisi commissionata da ECCO, il think tank italiano sul clima, e dalla Federazione europei dei trasporti e dell’ambiente (Transport and Environment, T&E), a un gruppo di economisti della Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa e del Centro ricerche Enrico Fermi di Roma.

https://altreconomia.it/i-costi-della-mancata-transizione-allelettrico-dellindustria-automobilistica-italiana/

"The variety of capitalism that has formed in China—marked by overcapacity, real estate crises, surging local government debt, unemployment, and slowing growth—has driven the country’s own version of militarised neoliberalism. Put simply, as with Bidenomics, the Chinese version of militarised neoliberalism emerges as a response to pressure in the global capitalist system but also reflects China’s different position within that system in relation to the United States."

"repressive Gulf State regimes with access to capital markets. As widely reported, Prosperity7, part of the Saudi Arabian state-owned oil group Aramco’s venture capital arm, has added to Chinese Government funds for developing a new national rival to the United States’ OpenAI (Olcott 2024). The investment is indicative of Saudi Arabia’s new accumulation strategy to support an ecosystem that could guard against Silicon Valley dominance in AI by investing in China’s global production networks. Concurrently, Chinese companies such as Lenovo and Tencent Cloud have reportedly expanded into Saudi Arabia and built manufacturing plants there."

"Superficially it would appear that the appointment of these engineers reflects a version of technocracy in which ‘scientific experts advise the decision-makers and politicians consult scientists in accordance with practical needs’ (Habermas 1970: 66–67). Yet, our argument is that this is not simply about the dominance of these engineering technocrats or a new form of nationalist industrial policy but rather is symptomatic of the emergence of a new capitalist class. In particular, this group is inextricably linked to the new constellation of state capital and finance that now occupies a central position within the current investment-heavy regime (Chen 2020; Cheng 2022). As explained earlier, SOEs with specialisations mirroring those of US industry incumbents in key areas have sprung to prominence, as the state realises the enormity of the self-sufficiency project in the wake of global ‘de-risking China’ imperatives. Therefore, the emergence of technocratic elites is indicative of the growing clout of the military-industrial engineers and scientists in the processes of Chinese state capitalist accumulation amid combined pressures."

"Even though China’s technocracy is led by engineers who are well-equipped with advanced education, rich corporate experience, and technological knowhow, they are, first and foremost, party-state cadres and statist business-class elites. Their promotion to top CCP leadership positions is indicative of ‘the party-state’s further control of the economy by enlarging the state sector to such an extent that it overwhelms the private sector’ (Wu 2024: 4). In this setting, unlike in the United States, would-be entrepreneurs find it difficult to access investment capital given the government’s strong emphasis on technology and heavy industries, which by nature require a more state-led approach. As Suzuki (2024) reports, startups once nurtured under the slogan ‘massive entrepreneurship and innovation by all’ (大众创业万众创流), popularised by the late Li Keqiang, have been rolling back their business.

In China, a key feature of technology-centred accumulation is the rise of what we call the new STEM technocrats—engineers and applied technology specialists who play a crucial role in shaping industrial policy, from electric vehicles to AI. Equally important is the growing influence of what we term the ‘interior bourgeoisie’—a domestic capitalist class rooted in and shaped by the Chinese State but increasingly oriented towards global markets. This interior bourgeoisie, comprising both key state-owned and private firms, has emerged as the new hegemonic faction within the state structure. This position enables them to implement distributive measures while continuing to develop transnational linkages and alliances."

https://madeinchinajournal.com/2025/03/20/engineering-chinas-militarised-neoliberalism-class-state-and-technology/

Almost a year old but still

The ruling on presidential immunity is just the latest piece of evidence that shows that originalism was just a confidence game by the right to gain power. The court’s conservative majority has revealed itself to be a corrupt political machine with both short- and long-term goals. Today, the court is determined to protect Donald Trump and the Republican Party; longer-term, its mandate is to protect and defend the powers of those who will enable white minority rule in America for years to come.

The court’s immunity ruling is nearly a blank check for Trump, a brazen attempt to protect him from his ongoing criminal cases and to grant him virtually unlimited power if he gets back into the White House. With its ruling, the Supreme Court’s right-wing block has made it clear: They are tired of democracy. The justices want a dictator.

But they only want a right-wing dictator. It is not hard to imagine how differently the justices would have ruled if the question of presidential immunity had come before them in a case involving a Democratic president.

In order to get confirmed, Trump’s appointees to the court lied to the Senate by claiming that they saw Roe v. Wade as settled law; they ripped it up as soon as they consolidated their power on the court. In quick succession, they have gone after voting rights, affirmative action, gun control, environmental regulations, while sending out the word that now is a good time for conservative lawyers to bring their most extreme lawsuits to the court in order to create more right-wing precedents. This court could ban access to contraceptives next; another target could be a reversal on the legalization of gay marriage. The court is now so radical that it would not be surprising to see it go after Brown versus Board of Education, the historic Supreme Court ruling that declared that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional and which helped formed the basis for integration.

This court will be remembered like the justices behind the Dredd Scott decision, the worst ruling by the Supreme Court in American history. Their robes don’t hide their naked grab for political power.

https://theintercept.com/2024/07/01/supreme-court-trump-presidential-immunity/

In a whistleblower disclosure filed with Congress and corroborated by internal documents, NPR reports, Berulis said that the DOGE employees first set up a process to hide their activities on the servers, rather than allowing account activity to be tracked. This alone is a “red flag,” cybersecurity experts said, and a technique mimicking what a malicious hacker may use when trying to infiltrate government systems.

Berulis noticed soon after the raid began that a DOGE engineer was working on a “backdoor” to the NLRB’s case management system, which would allow the rogue group to extract information surreptitiously. Then, he saw within the system’s metrics that there was a massive spike in data being extracted from the network and sent to an unknown location that could contain a huge amount of case information.

The IT worker first spoke out internally against the DOGE raid — but when he did, his attorney has said, someone taped a threatening note to his door that contained sensitive personal information about him, as well as pictures of him walking his dog that looked like they were taken by a drone.

Meanwhile, the information exfiltrated by DOGE includes a huge amount of sensitive information about American workers, including “ongoing contested labor cases, lists of union activists, internal case notes, personal information from Social Security numbers to home addresses, proprietary corporate data and more information that never gets published openly,” NPR wrote.

At one point just minutes after DOGE accessed the systems, for instance, employees noticed log-in attempts from an IP address located in Russia — attempts that used a newly-created DOGE account with the correct username and password.

https://truthout.org/articles/whistleblower-who-exposed-doge-raid-of-nlrb-data-finds-threats-taped-to-his-door/

The article describes how Central ND News, a fake local newspaper, was used as a propaganda tool by the oil company Energy Transfer during its legal battle with Greenpeace over the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Though disguised as a regular newspaper, the publication focused on discrediting protesters and praising the pipeline company, promoting old stories as if they were current news. Greenpeace argued in court that this was a calculated attempt to sway jurors, but the trial proceeded—and ended with a North Dakota jury awarding Energy Transfer over $660 million in damages from Greenpeace.

This case is framed as part of a broader trend of “pink slime journalism”—a term coined to describe partisan outlets that masquerade as legitimate local news. These outlets, often backed by right-wing donors or corporations, publish algorithm-generated or biased content in favor of their sponsors. The company behind Central ND News, Metric Media, is tied to a history of misleading media operations. This kind of pseudo-journalism is now more widespread than actual local newspapers in the U.S., posing a growing threat to journalism, democratic discourse, and free speech.

The piece also notes that Democrats have their own version—Courier Newsroom—though the main focus is on right-wing abuses and their implications for activism, protest rights, and public trust in media

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/pink-slime-journalism-greenpeace-big-oil/