This republican conception sees freedom not as the absence of interference (as liberalism would have it) but as the absence of domination by others: of their arbitrary power over you.

the spine of Leipold’s argument is that Marx and Engels, starting with a purely political democratic republicanism, were persuaded to a communism that was initially anti-political (as were the communisms of the “utopian socialists” later criticized in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere), but then moved to a new form of communism, which placed democratic political revolution first — not as the end point, but as the necessary first step toward communism. And at the same time Marx and Engels grounded this possibility on the struggle for political power of the proletariat as a class.

The conception of the democratic republic as the necessary first step to communism was Marx’s conception: Leipold has, I think, shown this beyond rebuttal. But it is still possible to argue that Marx was wrong on this question. And it is also possible to argue that Marx’s and Engels’s conception of the road to socialism is superseded by twentieth-century developments.

I put on one side the argument for the “coalitions of the oppressed” approach. It has resulted in handing the issue of class to the right wing, producing “Vote Harris: Get Trump” and analogous results across the world, and as a result far worse outcomes for the oppressed than the old conception of prioritizing the working class.

Democratic republicanism is essential to effective economic planning; and because it is essential to effective economic planning, it is also essential to believable socialism.

The second and more immediate is that at a low level, capital rules through the support of the managerialist labor bureaucracy — from its right wing in the “AFL-CIA” to its left wing in the full-timers of the Trotskyist left. We need to overcome this managerialist labor bureaucracy in order to actually challenge capital.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/republicanism-karl-marx-leipold-review/

This is the blind spot running through all of Abundance’s anecdotes: the limits of the private sector. The primary conceit is that in many areas, the private sector is ready to invest—and to invest big—if politicians would only lift public barriers standing in their way. There is little evidence that is true. In reality, corporate executives and managers make investment decisions based on expected profits. Even when zoning restrictions are favorable, developers evaluate a range of investment options before committing to construction. They are looking not only for positive returns but for higher returns than alternative option. The much-touted housing boom in Austin is a case in point: after a few years of above-average building activity led to modest rent reductions, residential developers reduced construction substantially. The burst of construction made only a small dent in the dramatic increase in rents since 2010.

Along with the state-guided enterprises of China, Klein and Thompson’s preferred corporate model is the AT&T of midcentury—a highly innovative enterprise credited with developing technologies like the laser, photovoltaic cell, and transistor. They attribute AT&T’s long-term orientation and accomplishments to its status as a secure, government-protected monopoly. If that AT&T existed today, large shareholders would balk at risky, long-term investment in speculative engineering and scientific projects. Indeed, this is what happened when a durable monopoly of our era tried to replicate the AT&T success. In 2010 Google set up Google X for an elite group of employees to pursue long-term projects, but by 2015 Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat imposed a more short-term, cautious orientation on the venture as part of a broader effort to reduce costs and disburse more cash to shareholders.

The government could do a lot to change corporate behavior—by banning stock buybacks, for example, or requiring firms to give workers and consumers board representation.
________________

The book says nothing about why the New Deal was so successful, nor about the populist politics—including Franklin Roosevelt’s contempt for “economic royalists”—that undergirded it. Most Americans had electrification, but not electric modernization. The private sector failed to deliver electric modernization simply because it wasn’t profitable. FDR refused to accept this status quo and believed that electric modernization was a necessity. He offered a program that was part conservative, part radical: stressing that private ownership should be the norm in electricity, but endorsing much stronger public control over private utilities. Even as he examined the finer points of utility cost accounting, his rhetoric was populist and combative. Soon after taking office, Roosevelt worked with Congress to put the Portland program into practice. In his first 100 days, Congress established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to build and operate dams on the Tennessee River and its tributaries.

Roosevelt and Congress also launched a major rural electrification program. Created in 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) offered low-cost credit to build power lines in the countryside. The carrot of cheap financing was not enough to get private utilities off the sidelines. (This experience should counsel against optimism about tax credits and other enticements to clean energy development today.) Instead, the REA turned to a largely untested institutional form—consumer-owned rural electric cooperatives—to build these lines.
Thanks to federal support, the rates of farm electrification skyrocketed in just two decades, rising from one in ten in 1935 to more than nine in ten in 1955. Rural cooperatives did the bulk of this line extension, but the private sector stepped up once the federal government showed that rural electrification was a profitable undertaking

That public abundance is still possible. Americans got a small taste of real “supply-side” liberalism in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Through this program, EPB of Chattanooga, a municipally owned utility created in the 1930s, obtained a federal grant to build a citywide fiber optic network. The utility used these funds to deliver the nation’s first 1 gigabyte per second broadband service, helping attract tech companies and workers to the newly dubbed “Gig City.” Replicating this success on a national scale and across a range of urgent challenges calls for a serious revival of New Deal politics, not a doubling down on the ethos of neoliberalism—however appealingly rebranded.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-real-path-to-abundance/

Mentre il ministro si concede passerelle e telecamere, la Direzione investigativa antimafia ha però acceso i riflettori. Sono cinque le procure distrettuali già coinvolte – Reggio Calabria, Messina, Catania, Catanzaro e Milano – e tutte si stanno concentrando sulle aree da espropriare e sui subappalti, ambiti storicamente sensibili alle infiltrazioni mafiose.

Un campanello d’allarme squillato forte anche per il caso dell’ex procuratore aggiunto Michele Prestipino, finito sotto procedimento disciplinare perché avrebbe rivelato informazioni riservate a Gianni De Gennaro (presidente di Eurolink, il consorzio incaricato della realizzazione del ponte) e a Francesco Gratteri, responsabile della sicurezza di Webuild. Prestipino, intercettato dalla procura di Caltanissetta, parlava di indagini in corso su imprenditori siciliani. Ora l'inchiesta si sposta a Roma.

Bonelli denuncia come «nei documenti ufficiali degli espropri per il Ponte compaiano nomi legati a Cosa Nostra e alla 'Ndrangheta».

L’elenco è inquietante: i terreni espropriati includerebbero proprietà riconducibili agli eredi di Santo Sfameni, figura storica dei clan del Messinese, già condannato per gravi reati. Tra i fondi agricoli c’è anche un casolare di Villafranca Tirrena, già rifugio di latitanti e teatro di summit mafiosi, tra cui quelli con Angelo Siino – “ministro dei lavori pubblici” di Cosa Nostra – e il boss Michelangelo Alfano. Sul versante calabrese, notizie risalenti all'aprile 2024 hanno evidenziato come terreni nel comune di Limbadi (provincia di Vibo Valentia), appartenenti a Carmina Antonia Mancuso (figlia del boss Ciccio Mancuso) e a Francesco Naso (imprenditore condannato in primo grado per associazione mafiosa nel processo Rinascita Scott e ritenuto vicino al clan Mancuso), siano inclusi nelle procedure di esproprio.

Il Documento di finanza pubblica 2025 certifica lo spostamento di 1,6 miliardi dai Fondi di coesione e sviluppo di Calabria e Sicilia per finanziare il progetto.

https://www.editorialedomani.it/fatti/ponte-stretto-salvini-reggio-calabria-mafia-comitati-sindacati-nq0wpj3u

Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html

Trump appears to be building an unprecedented spy machine that could track Americans
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-palantir-surveillance-americans-rcna210017