"Democratic socialism adopts a “foreign policy” that sheds the false claim to domestic social unity that nationalism rests on, instead grounding its relationship to the rest of the world on the organic fraternity of laboring humanity. Democratic socialism breaks down the artificial distinction between domestic and foreign affairs; after all, what national capital does abroad—trade, invest, exploit, plunder, make war— reverberates in the “homeland,” creating landscapes of industrial ruins, sweated labor, “wounded warriors,” military-industrial complexes, and a militarized society that in the end is bound to undermine democracy. Democratic socialism is an antidote to capitalist rivalry among nations and the subordination of the global South, whether those confrontations manifest as tariffs or troops."

#extract

"Neoliberalism is more than a laundry list of policies and “best practices.” It is a holistic ethos and vision for society, one that aims to remake as many areas of life as possible on the model of market competition. This ambition extends from the global level down to the most intimate recesses of our self-image and self-worth—every country, every institution, every individual human being must be refashioned into a self-branding, self-promoting market competitor."

"How does neoliberalism justify such quasi-totalitarian aims? In the same way that every social order justifies itself: by presenting itself as a moral order that reflects unassailable moral values. Laws and policies and money and police officers are the source of any social order’s power, but its moral values are the source of its legitimacy. In the case of neoliberalism, the central value is freedom. Market competition is the best way to organize society in the neoliberal view because the market is all about people voluntarily coming together to freely choose between goods and services. Governments, labor unions, and collective politics are untrustworthy because they apply one-size-fits-all policies that don’t respect individual freedom."

https://christiansocialism.com/neoliberalism-joe-biden-covid-demons-theology/

european capitalism

#extract

"Given the operations of monopoly capitalism and its technological apparatus, the largely uncontrolled development of synthetic materials results in a particularly dangerous situation, often referred to as “the risk society.”45 In the words of Peter Haff, a professor of environmental engineering at Duke University, a capitalist technostructure “has emerged possessing no global mechanism of metabolic regulation. Regulation of metabolism introduces the possibility of a new timescale into system dynamics—a lifetime—the time over which the system exists in a stable metabolic state. But without an intrinsic lifetime, i.e., lacking enforced setpoint values for energy use,” this system “acts only in the moment, without regard to the more distant future, necessarily biased towards increasing consumption of energy and materials,” racing ahead “without much concern for its own longevity,” much less the continuance of what is external to it."

https://monthlyreview.org/2021/09/01/the-capitalinian/

#extract intermittent energy, eco-socialist planning

We must do the difficult work of reaching out to and reconciling with people who aren’t like us — the slow, painful work of reconciling within the brutality of capitalist alienation. On the left, there’s a common, facile framing that treats people “unlike us” as committed and socially engaged conservatives; the truth is that people unlike us are the vast sea of people so alienated they have no connections and no activist sentiments whatsoever. These are the people we need to reach, and we can’t do that until we wrap our heads around how profoundly capitalism has destroyed our communities’ social bonds in order to monetize the wreckage. Knowing and loving our neighbors isn’t ancillary to communism. It may actually be the whole point.

christiansocialism.com/social-bonds-christianity-marxism-organizing/

"The city is divided into four quarters, which together make up 31 communes. Each commune includes about 100 to 250 households. One to four communes each share a komîngeh (neighbourhood office), a public space that anyone can visit during opening hours – even just to drink tea. The process of local self-government in these neighbourhoods can be divided between two main areas: administration (the basic supply and distribution of resources) and politics (law, culture, education and health).

These two areas are organised by specific commissions at all political levels, from the communes up. Typical commissions include health, economy, defence, education, art and culture. In addition to linking horizontally, these commissions also link and communicate with each other vertically. For example, the defence commission of a commune organises the HPC (civil defence forces) at the local level. At the same time, it meets with the defence commissions of the next higher unit of the district defence commission, while the district defence commission exchanges information with the cantonal defence commission, and so on. Written reports thus reach the top from below, while at the same time coordinative top-down processes take place.

In elections for the co-chairs of commissions, only residents of the respective commune are eligible for election. Before the revolution, the national state appointed administrators who not only did not speak Kurdish but an elitist bureaucratic Arabic. Today, the neighbourhood offices are run by people from the neighbourhood who share the same everyday language and life with the residents."

https://www.redpepper.org.uk/rojavas-everyday-democracy/