Why Socialism? By Albert Einstein

https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

"Despite being hailed as a “development round” — ostensibly focused on the needs of the poorest nations — the latest series of global trade negotiations stalled as governments in the Global South, led by India and China, resisted further opening their markets to North American, Western European, and Japanese capital. They also insisted that governments in the Global North open their markets to agricultural exports from the South by reducing trade barriers, especially their massive subsidies to domestic agribusiness."

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/okonjo-iweala-wto-representation/

#video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHTMidTLO60

"By analyzing the DNA in root tips and tracing the movement of molecules through underground conduits, Simard has discovered that fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits. Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts. And if a tree is on the brink of death, it sometimes bequeaths a substantial share of its carbon to its neighbors."

"Since Darwin, biologists have emphasized the perspective of the individual. They have stressed the perpetual contest among discrete species, the struggle of each organism to survive and reproduce within a given population and, underlying it all, the single-minded ambitions of selfish genes. Now and then, however, some scientists have advocated, sometimes controversially, for a greater focus on cooperation over self-interest and on the emergent properties of living systems rather than their units."

" Five hundred million years ago, as both plants and fungi continued oozing out of the sea and onto land, they encountered wide expanses of barren rock and impoverished soil. Plants could spin sunlight into sugar for energy, but they had trouble extracting mineral nutrients from the earth. Fungi were in the opposite predicament. Had they remained separate, their early attempts at colonization might have faltered or failed. Instead, these two castaways — members of entirely different kingdoms of life — formed an intimate partnership. Together they spread across the continents, transformed rock into rich soil and filled the atmosphere with oxygen.

Eventually, different types of plants and fungi evolved more specialized symbioses. Forests expanded and diversified, both above- and below ground. What one tree produced was no longer confined to itself and its symbiotic partners. Shuttled through buried networks of root and fungus, the water, food and information in a forest began traveling greater distances and in more complex patterns than ever before. Over the eons, through the compounded effects of symbiosis and coevolution, forests developed a kind of circulatory system. Trees and fungi were once small, unacquainted ocean expats, still slick with seawater, searching for new opportunities. Together, they became a collective life form of unprecedented might and magnanimity.

After a few hours of digging up roots and collecting samples, we began to hike back down the valley. In the distance, the granite peaks of the Selkirks bristled with clusters of conifers. A breeze flung the scent of pine toward us. To our right, a furtive squirrel buried something in the dirt and dashed off. Like a seed waiting for the right conditions, a passage from “The Overstory” suddenly sprouted in my consciousness: “There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/02/magazine/tree-communication-mycorrhiza.html

"The key figures in the Capitol attack seem drawn primarily from the ranks of small business owners, military and police officers, politicians’ families, and a familiar rogues’ gallery of petty grifters and violent far-right thugs that coalesced out of the dregs of the Tea Party. These are the representatives of a rapidly maturing vanguard of principled reactionaries within the petit bourgeois. They are members of the middle class who oppose democracy, whether in its mass, working-class form, or its liberal bourgeois one."

"Black Lives Matter and the lockdown protests: here were two starkly different visions of freedom. While the former sought to expand democracy, fight repression, and champion worker demands for universal healthcare, rent hiatus, and more plentiful and reliable unemployment benefits, the latter sought the very opposite in the name of a narrowly circumscribed kind of freedom—the freedom of small business owners to do business. To the extent that any part of the lockdown protesters’ complaint was legitimate, it was true that the federal government’s response largely did hang struggling small ventures out to dry, preferring instead to funnel relief funds to large corporations. But their complaint wasn’t merely that they couldn’t live—it was specifically that they couldn’t live as bosses wielding their monopoly on capital. They wanted to ensure that workers remained “free” of access to material support that might weaken their bosses’ economic leverage over them—and thus interfere with the bosses’ “freedom” to compel poor people to work in unsafe conditions."

"We tend to think of the delusional and irrational nonsense in fascists’ heads as a cause for their behavior. It is instead, quite frequently, a consequence of their aims. To value living human beings so cheaply requires a flight from reason; accordingly, right-wing authoritarians turn away from facts and reality, weaving mental knots that justify their inhumane program. A whole ecosystem of conspiracy and superstition swells up to enable the convenient delusion. Thus Donald Trump is not simply a profligate charlatan and bully but a hero, a champion of children, and an enemy of the Devil himself."

"for all the mysticism, the people who showed up on January 6 made calculated, self-serving, and clear-eyed decisions based on their interests and their perceived immunity from accountability. While recent arrests and Trump’s refusal to issue pardons on their behalf seem to have proven them wrong about their perceived impunity, it was not unreasonable for them to have assumed that the law would look the other way and demonstrate tremendous laxity for affluent whites"

"From the point of view of capitalism, given the choice between far-right authoritarianism and profits on the one hand and socialism, democracy, and human freedom on the other, the former will always emerge as the lesser evil. I do not mean to suggest that fascism is immediately imminent in the United States as a dominant mode of public governance. It is not. Still, we cannot entertain complacency about an increasingly sizable and belligerent far-right authoritarian movement that is confidently putting forward its own fascist solutions to social and economic crisis."

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/from-the-lockdown-protests-to-the-capitol/

#books

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18742_workers-self-management-in-argentina-contesting-neo-liberalism-by-occupying-companies-creating-cooperatives-and-recuperating-autogestion-by-marcelo-vieta-reviewed-by-jerome-warren/