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Halt and Catch Fire’s Surprising Finale: The Show Was the Opposite of What We Thought

Willa Paskin Slate
With AMC's Halt and Catch Fire's second season arriving soon, a reflection on the first. Halt and Catch Fire's finale reveals it was anti-capitalist all along. For all the early technical bells and whistles, Halt has a straightforward, pleasing story arc—a ragtag team that against long odds and many obstacles does the near impossible—that toward the season’s end ran into a genuinely thought-provoking hurdle: capitalism.

The Demolition of Workers’ Comp

Michael Grabell, ProPublica, and Howard Berkes, NPR ProPublica
Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America’s workers’ comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found. The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty.

The Meaning of International Women’s Day

Alexandra Kollantai / Marge Piercy Jacobin
The following article was published in Pravda one week before the first celebration of the “Day of International Solidarity among the Female Proletariat” on March 8, 1913. In St Petersburg this day was marked by a call for a campaign against women workers’ lack of economic and political rights and for the unity of the working class, led by the self-emancipation of women workers.

The Lost Counterculture

Stephen Maher Jacobin
Inherent Vice is perhaps the most brilliant depiction of the construction of neoliberal hegemony and the harsh end of the dreams of the 1960s generation. It speaks powerfully to the here and now, indicting the nostalgic escapism that yearns for “the sixties” and showing that this epochal world as commonly imagined never existed.

The Origins of Modern Policing

Sam Mitrani The Indypendent
The liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do.

The Latest Get-Rich Scheme

David Rosen CounterPunch
An increasing number of people are realizing that the entrepreneurial hucksters promoting “sharing” are abusing the deeper meaning of “trust,” “collaboration” and the simple generosity of spirit that makes people human.

Empire of Cotton

Sven Beckert The Atlantic
Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Failures of Actually Existing Economic Systems

Richard D Wolff, Truthout News Analysis Truthout
One lesson to draw from the GDR's history is that if socialist societies are to be run by, of and for the people, then the people have to be in charge and that includes within the economy. Democracies (both capitalist and socialist) will remain merely formal when the economy continues to be run by small self-selecting minorities. Those minorities will dominate until they are overthrown.

An Open Letter to Naomi Klein, about "This Changes Everything"

Ted Glick EcoWatch
Naomi Klein argues the urgency of climate crisis could form the basis of a powerful mass movement weaving all the seemingly disparate issues into a coherent narrative to protect humanity from the ravages of a savagely unjust economic system and a destabilized climate system. Climate activist Ted Glick responds, is it realistic to think, by 2018 or 2019, a mass social movement with an essentially revolutionary agenda is going to bring about the change in power relations?
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