abbassi

For sure a teethless Jackal is a dead Jackal. Capitalism is based on thrive for profit at any cost, even causing crises, wars and genocides.

On the one hand, there is the troubled exit from the pandemic crisis, still under the threat posed by the emergence of new Covid-19 variants. The pause on redundancies has come to an end in Italy. This, albeit partially, would have "spared" about 520,000 jobs in Italy up until now, according to Centro Einaudi’s estimates [25th Annual Report on Global Economy and Italy, June 2021]. Company closures and staff reductions (in a mixture of arrogance and callousness) have marked the summer months, only to announce a difficult autumn, when the redundancy ban will be lifted also for small businesses and services. However, it is clear how uncertain the workers’ condition remains, regardless of any collective agreement signed, and how necessary it is always to organize and fight for the defence of our class.

One must add future prospects to the lasting effects of the past. And the future is now called electrical and digital restructuring which, in the third decade of this century, is the updated version of the European restructuring. They indeed both follow the same rules and have the same raison d’être: the world contention, which pits industrial systems of a continental scale against each other, from Europe and America to China. One should not be surprised to see the ideological armour of this contention painted in the fashionable green of environmentalism, so that the poisonous content of an 1mperialist clash — which embitters workers against other workers — is concealed.

There is one small but fundamental problem with your example: USSR was a state capitalism and not a socialist "state". Lenin expected a socialist revolution in Germany while it failed. It failed and freikorps killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. For sure you cannot have a socialism in s backward country like Russia. Socialism, in Marxism-Leninism, as a science, is the dialectical negation of capitalism.

That's not human nature, since there is no abstract human nature! Human beings are social animals, it's all about “social relation!” It's all about conditions of the real material world. The slavery, feudalism or capitalism are not an arbitrary choices of human beings, they are social relations changing with class struggle! Why no powerful person or group wants to enslave, literally enslave, others? because this way, they make more profit! It is all about profit in the capitalism.

Bolshevik Island, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia

First RED, then BLUE, and last but not least GREEN!

If at the beginning of the 21st century electrification had technological limits in batteries, both in terms of cost and range, these are now partly overcome, because electric cars have a range of 240-450 km, more than enough for 95% of journeys of less than 50 km. The major obstacle remains the construction of a network of charging stations and their integration with the electricity grid. The race between China, Europe, and USA

UBS Evidence Lab, a team of UBS bank experts working in 55 specialised labs to provide data on investment decisions, predicts that cost parity between electric and internal combustion cars will be achieved in 2024 [Inside EVs, October 20th 2020]. By then, the development of car electrification will be self-sustaining without government subsidies.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), in its report " Electric Vehicle Outlook 2020", estimates that by 2022 carmakers will have 500 different models of electric cars available and that sales will rise from 2.1 million in 2019 to 26 million in 2030. The share of electric cars in total car sales will rise from 2.7% in 2020 to 28% 1n 2030. For the International Energy Agency (IEA), in the " Stated Policies" scenario, which considers evolution of the situation according to the policies already in place, the circulation of electric cars worldwide will reach 145 million by 2030, 7% of total circulation, and sales will be 35% of the total in China, 35% in Europe and 15% in the USA [LEA, Global EV Outlook 2021, April 2021].

According to these forecasts, China is leading the process of automotive electrification, the EU is racing hard to catch up, and the USA is lagging behind, although the Biden’s administration is attempting to make up lost ground with its electrification plan. The charging network

In 2019, there were 6.5 million private and 800,000 public charging points (aka charging stations) worldwide [IEA, Global EV Outlook 2020, June 2020]. Private charging points are those owned by households, while public charging points are owned by companies and are freely accessible to all motorists, just like any petrol station.

Another BNEF analysis [Bloomberg, March 23rd, 2021] shows China’s dynamism in building an infrastructure network: its 300,000 available public columns in 2018 have risen to 516,000 in 2019 and 800,000 in 2020.

According to McKinsey January 5th], by 2030 the USA will have between IT and 30 million private and 400,000 to 600,000 public charging points, the EU together with the UK between 28 and 35 million private and 500,000 to 900,000 public charging points, and China between 15 and 17 million private and 1.5 and 2.2 million public charging points. This large difference between the public and private charging points in China, the USA and Europe lies in the different distribution of the population in the territories.

In the USA and Europe, as people move to the suburbs, half to twothirds of the population now live in single dwellings with garages. This is why McKinsey predicts that by 2030 there will be twice as many private charging points as in China, where urbanisation is leading to a concentration of the population in cities with large apartment blocks and therefore twice as many public charging points. According to the McKinsey report, by 2030 there could be 54 to 82 million private and 2.4 to 3.7 million public charging stations in the world. A worldwide market has opened up, triggering a race to invest in this sector, and with it speculation.

On August 15th, 1971 (50 years ago) US President Richard Nixon declared that the ‘gold window’ was closed. The era of the convertibility of the dollar to gold was over, and the system that had been agreed upon by the victors of the war at Bretton Woods in 1944 collapsed: the regime of fixed but subject to periodical reviews exchange rates had lasted a quarter of a century.

Jeffrey Garten, Bill Clinton’s former Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade and managing director of the Blackstone Group and Lehman Brothers, is now a historian who has written about Nixon’s decision. He recalls that the turnaround came at a time when the amount of dollars in circulation in the world was four times the amount of gold held in reserve, inflation was rising, Washington was withdrawing troops from Vietnam, and Nixon, the month before, had announced his visit to Beijing, a historic event.

In 1959, the economist Robert Triffin had explained to Congress that there were "absurdities associated with the use of national currencies as international reserves" and that the contradiction was an "built-in de-stabilizer" of the national monetary system. The end of convertibility did not eliminate these "absurdities"; instead, it removed the only limit its creators had provided: the gold standard.

That is exactly "export of capital". We also see "import of labor force" since the developed countries struggling with demographic winter.

I didn't mean the point is the imports. The fact is that US is loosing his share of world GDP for decades, and new powers like China are rising. It is just like the decline of British empire at the late 19th and early 20th century and rise of new powers like US, Germany, Japan. We are witnessing the same phenomenon that Lenin called unequal development of capitalism in the imperialist stage. We would also see the same tensions and wars that we saw in the first half of 20th century.

Very interesting points; there is a scientific clarity in your analysis. But, I would like to add a point: the reality is that the production is in global scale now, the production has no borders, races, nationalities, but the capital has its local interests. The working class is a global class, while bourgeoisie is a local class. But since the bourgeoisie is the dominant class, it makes the working class divided. Like the role of black bourgeoisie in the disguising class struggle under the hood of racial issues. I think this small piece of text helps make my point a little bit clear: http://www.theinternationalism.org/2020/07/return-to-marx.ht...

If you read Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England, you'll see how capital works. It is the LAW of the capital, not an arbitrary decision: http://www.theinternationalism.org/2021/06/engels-in-new-cen...

It was always like this. Fairness in class society is a illusion!

Friedrich Engels memorably describes the poor sanitary condition of working-class neighbourhoods in mid-19th century England. At a certain point, typhus and cholera epidemics began to threaten bourgeois neighbourhoods, and only then was the government forced to take remedial action. Well, with the pandemic of the century, it is as if Engels had entered the 21st century, and the same contradiction was laid bare for the whole world. The Covid-19 catastrophe in India shows an elementary truth: Europe, America and China are completing colossal vaccination plans, but they will never be truly safe if the rest of the world, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, remains at the mercy of the virus and its mutations. And yet, even in the face of the evidence, the contention between powers to take advantage of vaccine diplomacy does not cease. The United States has put forward the promotional idea of suspending the patents of the pharmaceutical giants, perhaps in order to counter the Chinese offensive and drive a wedge between the EU and Beijing; Europe has laid the blame precisely on British and American protectionism; China, and to some extent Russia too, are always on the offensive in offering their vaccines. But those offers are a drop in the ocean of the billions of doses which are required. India, which aspired to be the world's pharmacy and a supplier for Africa and Asia, has been dragged into the maelstrom of its worst crisis since independence - one that is casting a shadow over its viability as a state and its ambitions as a power. It is now acknowledged that the world population must be vaccinated, but there remains a gulf between words and deeds. Furthermore, how many millions of deaths, in the end, will the deadly mixture of a lack of foresight, the struggle between capitals, the struggle between powers and the inability to unite efforts towards a collective goal have cost?

We can only repeat the same thing: the pandemic simultaneously shows the enormous potential of the productive forces, but also the fatal contradiction of which they are prisoners - that of a society divided into classes and the contention between states. Communism is a necessity for humanity: that is where the commitment to a truly humane society lies.

Engels in the New Century. (2021, June). Internationalism, 12.

In 1967, «Marx Is Not a Has-Been in Detroit» was a Lotta Comunista headline for a memorable event, the struggle of the black proletariat in the American automotive capital. The race issue concealed class contradiction in itself; the centre of the struggle remained the factories of the metropolises in the industrialised powers, and not the countryside which should have surrounded those cities in the then fashionable myths of Maoism and Third-Worldism.

Half a century later, a lot has changed, but not that class principle. The China of Mao Zedong's peasant populism has become an economic power playing on the same level as America and Europe; its industrial giants challenge those of the West which had once subjugated it, but hundreds of millions of Chinese proletarians have also been added to our world class. It's been quite a while, and since the time for a modern class struggle has also come to the Asian metropolises: Marx is not a has-been in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Canton, as he is not in the other immense urban concentrations of the new Asian powers. In the USA, fifty years of social mobility have made a black bourgeoisie and a black middle class grow alongside the black proletariat, but this has not changed the fact that discrimination because of the colour of one's skin continues to disguise class oppression. In the districts of the American metropolises it is social discrimination that links the new flows of immigrants born abroad to the Afro-American proletariat and the stratifications of white wage earners. Finally, the metropolises in Italy, Spain, France or Germany have also changed their faces: the most thankless jobs and the lowest steps on the wage scale have been entrusted to the immigrant proletariat, and also old Europe, which had even known the monsters of genocide, has rediscovered the shame of racism and xenophobia.

So then «Black lives matter»: no doubt about it, but woe betide the hypocritical denunciation of racism only in other people's homes. The lives of the desperate who continue to drown in the Mediterranean Sea matter; the farmhands forced to live in inhuman conditions matter; and the millions without legal protection on construction sites, in factories, warehouses and hotels matter. The pandemic of the century crisis has only shown openly what was there for all to see but that no one wanted to see. So then, to fight every oppression and every exploitation means returning to Marx. It means rediscovering the principle of class unity in the scientific consciousness of communism.

Return to Marx. (2020, July). Internationalism, 12.

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. This is Karl Marx, a century and a half ago, but since then the reality of a capitalism that has grown senile — in the late maturity of imperialist society — has imbued those words with a disconcerting and practical truth. Through globalisation, capital runs the markets at all latitudes, seeking out, from two billion wage-earners, the surplus value that keeps it alive. Moreover, in the old powers where capitalism was first born, before spreading to the whole world and feeding new aspirant powers - eager to redefine the partition, the whole scaffolding of the social system could not stand without a growing share of migrants in the labour force. Described by Lenin, the analyses of parasitic degeneration and the putrefaction of a capitalism in its imperialist phase, are science, like that of Marx, and not simple moralistic invective. In Europe, America, Japan, the demographic winter impresses upon us the tangible reality of stunted societies, increasingly aged, that can literally only survive by importing young people.

Vampiric in three senses, then: at home, in the export of capital and in the import of a labour force. Such a society clearly has no future, and in the uneasiness running through public opinion, in the resentments and the populist anger, a vague premonition is felt. In addition, the shadows of new grow ever taller, China above all, making the status quo of the world order unsustainable and thereby undermining the security of assets, safeguards and protections.

A future does exist, but not in capital: it exists in those two billion salaried workers who are its contradiction. There is no area in the world that does not show, concealed or in sudden explosions, the friction and collisions of the class antagonism. There is redemption in that struggle but that alone is not enough, under penalty of seeing our class instrumentalised, seized with fanaticism and ideologies or suffocated in repression, as is happening today in Chile, Lebanon, Algeria, Iraq, Iran and India. The struggle is only the first step; only a communist and an internationalist strategy open the way to the future.

Assange leaked documents showing US military killing innocent civilians in cold blood! Chinese military haven't killed yet; probably they will do in the next World War in around 15 years.

US politicians, especially if they are Republicans, prefer socialised medicine for themselves but free-market health care for everyone else

The Washington summit next week is the very symptom of what is so terribly wrong with American democracy, rather than what is wrong with democracy generally around the world that needs a course correction by American politicians

The roles played by Australia, Sweden and Britain under pressure from America to persecute the founder of WikiLeaks is well-known. However, Ecuador and its domestic politics in the past decade may be even more relevant, but little understood

As pointed out by at least one British pundit, the founder of WikiLeaks would have been celebrated and hailed as a hero by the West, instead of facing extradition to the US. Unfortunately, he exposed Western, especially American crimes, rather than Chinese ones

An antibody treatment for Covid-19 that reportedly cuts hospitalisations and deaths by 78 per cent in clinical trials is expected to be approved for use in China within weeks. Chinese viral immunologist Zhang Linqi is the driving force behind the antiviral cocktail which was put together in about two months. But in an interview with state television on November 18, 2021, Zhang noted that years of research was behind the treatment which appears to be effective against all known variants of Covid-19 now present in China.

I do understand why "people" do not recommend Lenin to you, and they recommend Kropotkin. Since they belong to a layers of classes that benefit from the interests resulting from imperialist force of your homeland. Lenin will analyze it with scientific rigor and will show how the reality works, and he will not talk about abstract ideas! Ideas are the reflections of movements in the material reality. There are classes! There are layers in each class! Read Lenin for science's sake! We are in a phase that we are preparing for a horrible world war over repartition of the world market. Don't end up in one the trenches!

Researchers are racing to determine whether a fast-spreading variant in South Africa poses a threat to COVID vaccines’ effectiveness.

The source of main problems (including rearmament, hunger and wars) are systemic problems in Marxian sense. That is, while humanity as a species have the technical and material conditions of solving most of the problems (hunger, most of diseases) and this is called "productive forces" (i.e. the social production in the global scale) in Marxian terminology, the "production relations" (i.e. the private ownership of the means of the production) impeding these productive forces. So, we have the anarchy in the global market. We have tensions between big groups and states. The capitalism, especially in its maturity phase called imperialism (articulated scientifically and clarity by Lenin), is not efficient enough anymore. Don't talk about USSR and China or Cuba, since in reality they were and are all state capitalism. Go back and read Marx, Engles and Lenin, not cheap talk by academic so-called Marxists or radical chic gauche buddies.

f-strings in Python are not just a way to easily substitute variables inside strings, they come with a wide array of conversion, formatting, and debugging options which we give examples of in this video.

Note: I'm trying a more informal style in this video so make sure to let me know if you like it better this way, as opposed to my usual cut-after-every-sentence editing.

Speculations abound about how SARS-CoV-2 came to be, but a few studies now raise an important question: Could the coronavirus have been spreading internationally much earlier than December 2019?

Just like the times before World Wars.

From the text: Amid the recent chip shortage, triggered by the pandemic’s economic shock waves, ASML’s products have become central to a geopolitical struggle between the US and China, with Washington making it a high priority to block China's access to the machines. The US government has successfully pressured the Dutch not to grant the export licenses needed to send the machines to China, and ASML says it has shipped none to the country.

"This is our archaeological handbook," says Chris Wild, brandishing The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, a muddy, thumbed paperback. "Engels."

This, though, is far from being the only contemporary account of late 19th-century living conditions in this part of inner-city Manchester. In 1870, the Manchester Guardian – as this paper was then known – published a series of articles on the city's slums, opening with a scene of 18 adults and several babies squeezed round a single fireplace. Along with Engels' account, the newspaper's archive reports proved influential in the decision to investigate this site. And, not one to leave an investigation unfinished, the Guardian has today returned to the same streets (Miller, Dantzic and Angel) near the city's Victoria Station.