"Vietnam’s success in combatting the virus cannot therefore be attributed to state repression or economic centralization. Its swift-footed response was well within the means of richer liberal-democratic nations, had they summoned the political will.

[...] On 1 January a new Labour Code came into force, allowing the existence of independent Worker Representative Organisations for the first time, unaffiliated to the state-controlled General Confederation of Labour. This could mark a significant change in industrial relations, potentially freeing organized labour from the dominion of the Communist Party. But this victory may yet be counterbalanced by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, an agreement negotiated in secrecy over the past seven years, which has been widely condemned as an attempt to erode workers’ rights. It is thus an open question whether Vietnam’s decades-old tradition of self-organised labour militancy will persist into 2021, or whether the freedoms enshrined in the Labour Code will come up against greater obstacles."

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/vietnams-pandemic

Work sucks on principle, but it often sucks specifically because of bosses. A 2018 poll from Monster (the job search site, not the energy drink) found that 76 percent of Americans leave their jobs because of “toxic” bosses, whom they described as power-hungry, micromanaging, incompetent, or absent. Just 19 percent of people saw their bosses as helpful mentors and advocates. And more than half of people who leave their jobs do so because of their manager, according to research from a leadership consulting firm.

But the shallow anti-boss ethos of a Substack or Uber executive couldn’t be further from actual anti-boss labor formations. Worker cooperatives eradicate the boss structurally, not just superficially: Unlike gig economy giants, which make low-wage workers shoulder the travails of their jobs alone under the guise of freedom, co-ops do away with bosses by building a workplace founded on collective decision-making and mutual accountability. In this arrangement, workers get an equal say in the terms of their labor and the protections they’re afforded. Most co-ops achieve this through an elected board of directors in which at least half the members are employees. Running a company this way can become messy, but co-ops deliver on the promises of a bossless world where other models fail.

https://newrepublic.com/article/161062/age-disappearing-boss

The pandemic slump of 2020 matches that of the 1930s, so it should eventually provide a boost to profitability. But it required a world war to end the Great Depression of the 1930s. And if the Fed goes on ploughing credit into businesses to prop up the ‘zombies’ at the expense of productive investment, then the US economy under Biden will just return to the low growth, low investment, low wage growth economy of the last ten years since the Great Recession.

And if disillusionment in Biden’s policies rises, that could lay the political base for the return of something like Trumpism, which according to the Donald is “just beginning.”

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/01/20/bidens-four-years/

"If, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.

[...] Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.

[...] What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the economy” (a concept that didn’t even exist three hundred years ago), but the fact that we are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation"

thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse

#extract Karl Polanyi - The Essence of Fascism