the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

Even among Marx-friendly economists, the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor. But its technical validity is less important than the core message: workers are exploited because the value they create is undemocratically taken by capitalists. by Ben Burgis   Part 3 - G. A. Cohen’s Analysis of Exploitation In his 1989 book History, Labour, and Freedom , socialist philosopher G. A. Cohen points out that while most economists (including many contemporary Marxist economists) reject the labor theory of value, rank-and-file socialists often talk as if the LTV is obviously true. What explains the disconnect? The LTV, as Marx inherited it from Ricardo and sharpened it with his own analytic contributions, may or may not be true, but it certainly isn’t obvious. To begin with, the relationship between value and price that Marx postulated is complicated. A whole series of facts about competition and supply and demand pressures can carry the actual market price of a commodity far away from i

Leaked emails reveal British journalist Paul Mason plotting with an intel contractor to destroy The Grayzone through “relentless deplatforming” and a “full nuclear legal” attack. The scheme is part of a wider planned assault on the UK left.   by Kit Klarenberg and Max Blumenthal Part 3 - Khan and Mason plan pro-Ukraine propaganda shop backed by NATO states “through cutouts” Mason and Khan’s brazen attempt to de-platform and financially cripple an independent media outlet on the slanderous, fictional pretext it is actually a hostile foreign information operation is especially perverse given that other leaked emails in The Grayzone ’s possession reveal that Mason participated in a plan to construct a hostile foreign information operation of his own. The project appears to have been the brainchild of Andy Pryce, the head of the Counter Disinformation and Media Development unit at the UK Foreign Office, who helped guide the British government’s propaganda strategy around the Skripal poison

Iranian official says membership ‘would result in added values for both sides’.   Iran has submitted an application to become a member of the group of emerging economies known as the BRICS, an Iranian official said on Monday. Iran’s membership in the BRICS group, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, “ would result in added values for both sides, ” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said separately that Argentina had also applied to join the group. Argentinian officials could not be reached for immediate comment. Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez, currently in Europe, has in recent days reiterated his desire for Argentina to join BRICS. “ While the White House was thinking about what else to turn off in the world, ban or spoil, Argentina and Iran applied to join the BRICS, ” Zakharova wrote on the Telegram messaging app. Russia has long been pushing to forge closer ties with Asia, South America a

Declassified UK   The former Labour Party leader sits down with Declassified UK for his most candid interview yet – on the British media, UK military and intelligence services, Israel, Keir Starmer, Julian Assange and Saudi Arabia. 

Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal possibly criminal plot by pro-Leave elites to sabotage Theresa May’s Brexit deal, infiltrate government, spy on campaign groups, and replace May with Boris Johnson. by Kit Klarenberg       Intelligence cabal infiltrated UK civil service thanks to “centrally placed mole”     Ex-MI6 chief Richard Dearlove pitched espionage operations targeting civil service and campaign groups     Fake Democratic Party fronts run by CIA veterans were proposed to infiltrate pro-Remain groups     Cabal sought to spy on and disrupt Prime Minister’s top Brexit negotiator     Shadowy billionaires funded effort in total secret     Dearlove claimed credit for influencing government policy on Huawei     Cabal now seeking to remove Boris Johnson     These efforts could amount to charges of TREASON  Part 6 - Dare call it treason?   The emails and documents collated in this article represent but a negligible fraction of a gargantuan tranche of leaked files. But even thi

by Alan Macleod   Part 1   “Top Gun: Maverick” is a box-office smash, a massive hit with both critics and the public alike. Navy and Air Force units across the country have set up recruitment stalls inside movie halls, hoping to sign up individuals buzzed after watching the high-paced aviation action. But documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the movie was made only after an agreement was signed between Hollywood and the Pentagon, with the Navy insisting on “ weav[ing] in ” their “ key talking points ” in exchange for granting the production company extensive access to military hardware. Investigative journalist Tom Secker, author of “National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood,” was one of those who obtained the documents. Secker explained that “Top Gun: Maverick” was made with an explicit agenda behind it, telling MintPress :               It’s about rehabilitation of the military’s image in the wake of numerous

failed evolution   On 11 April 2019, the Ecuadorian government of traitor Lenin Moreno, invited the Metropolitan Police into the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and they arrested Julian Assange . Since then, Assange is kept in Belmarsh high security prison in London, without actual charges.   The real reason world's number one political prisoner is still kept in this high security prison, is because he exposed horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.   The ruthless Western imperialist regime wants to punish the No1 real journalist in the world and make him an example for any Whistleblower or real journalist who will attempt to expose its big crimes in the future.   And the Anglo-American axis has now become officially a fascist coalition , framed by the rest of its Western pets. UK's Home Secretary Priti Patel, one of the most ruthless ever, decided to extradite Julian Assange to US. No surprise of course. The only question we had in mind is

failed evolution   The sequences of the utter fraud:   Money overflow throughout society -> starts losing value -> financial crisis happens -> big banks and corporations dictate bailout programs for them, austerity and cuts for the rest of the society through their corrupted political puppets -> new and existed money is exclusively directed back to them -> starts re-gaining value -> crisis ends -> clueless politicians are happy because they managed to "control inflation" -> people lose homes, jobs, incomes and suffer   Other crisis happens -> prices soar in vital goods and services -> big banks and corporations dictate governments to freeze salaries using the inflation scare -> money value remains high with rising trends -> huge profits for big banks and corporations through soaring prices, tax cuts and subsidies -> crisis ends, prices stabilized -> clueless politicians are happy because they managed to "control inflation"

Colombia heads to the polls today to reject the far-right politics of Iván Duque and Álvaro Uribe and assert that the average Colombian is much more progressive than the traditional politicians who represent them.   by  Luciana Cadahia / Tamara Ospina Posse    Part 4 - Petro and Márqeuz   For too long, Colombian elites have been able to rely on a manufactured image: that of the Colombian people as violent, conservative, and uneducated, thus legitimizing the systematic use of violence against any attempt to “disturb the peace” — especially if it comes from political, social, and territorial movements. That being the case, Colombia’s popular sectors and working class have fashioned their own response to that stereotype: a mobilized, collective political agent in the streets and, as confirmed by March legislative elections where the Left took a majority of seats, in the institutional halls of power. This alliance between popular mobilization and political organization has given rise to th

Biden has reversed Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US forces from Somalia and will redeploy Special Operations Forces. It is just the latest move in a long history of destructive US-UK meddling in the Horn of Africa.    by TJ Coles   Part 5 - Exploiting “playgrounds for a new scramble in the Horn of Africa”   We cannot say that corporate-state media do not do their job. They have successfully kept the public ignorant and deluded on virtually every geopolitical issue of significance. Nor can we say that the “war on terror” has failed (i.e., that after 20 years terror groups still operate), because it is not designed to combat terrorism. It is designed to produce an endless cycle of tit-for-tat killings and to create extremist groups where none previously existed. Permanent counterterrorism is a thin smokescreen to justify “full spectrum dominance” to the voting and taxpaying American public whose purse is plundered to fund these wars. As we see from recent history, professed justifications

Even among Marx-friendly economists, the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor. But its technical validity is less important than the core message: workers are exploited because the value they create is undemocratically taken by capitalists. by Ben Burgis   Part 2 - Marx’s Analysis of Labor and Capital Marx spends the first five chapters of Capital analyzing several economic concepts, starting with commodities, money, and value. He then considers them in relation to capital, using his famous three-letter diagrams. For instance, even a subsistence farmer might sell some of the goods he and his family don’t need to buy products they can’t make — a chain of transactions that Marx renders as C-M-C (commodities-money-commodities). The capitalist does the opposite: M-C-M (money-commodities-money). While a miser simply keeps his money, perhaps filling a swimming pool with gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, the capitalist turns his cash into commodities and turns those commodities into mo

Leaked emails reveal British journalist Paul Mason plotting with an intel contractor to destroy The Grayzone through “relentless deplatforming” and a “full nuclear legal” attack. The scheme is part of a wider planned assault on the UK left.   by Kit Klarenberg and Max Blumenthal Part 2 - Khan and Mason collude to form anti-Grayzone coalition and shatter Corbynite left On April 30 this year, Paul Mason emailed Amil Khan, making clear he was “ keen to help ” de-platform The Grayzone . He attached a bizarrely constructed “ dynamic map of the ‘left’ pro-Putin infosphere ” that resembled a spider’s web, with a mess of arrows linking the names of members of parliament, media outlets, activists, causes, and British minority communities. The barely coherent, racially-tinged chart connected the Russian government, Russian state broadcaster RT, the People’s Republic of China, and Beijing-based tech millionaire-financier Roy Singham to the “Muslim Community,” “Young Networked Left” and “Black Com

Brazilian presidential frontrunner Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Petro's victory "strengthens democracy and progressive forces in Latin America." by Jake Johnson  Former guerrilla fighter and longtime lawmaker Gustavo Petro defeated a millionaire businessman viewed as Colombia's Donald Trump on Sunday to become the South American nation's first leftist president-elect, riding a wave of mass anger over inequality, poverty, and the corruption of the right-wing political establishment. " The government of hope has arrived, " Petro, a former member of the M-19 rebel organization that disarmed in 1990 and became an influential political party, told supporters gathered in Bogotá. " This story that we are writing today is a new story for Colombia, for Latin America, for the world. We are not going to betray this electorate. " Petro's running mate, environmental activist Francia Márquez, will become the first Black woman to serve as Colombia's

The president of far-right National Rally, meanwhile, celebrated a "historic breakthrough" as Le Pen's xenophobic party won a record 89 seats.   by Kenny Stancil   France's new left-wing coalition picked up enough votes during Sunday's legislative elections to help deny President Emmanuel Macron the absolute majority he needed to ram through his unpopular austerity agenda. Macron's neoliberal alliance Ensemble won the most seats in the National Assembly with 245 but fell well short of the 289 needed to control parliament. Meanwhile, the New Ecological and Social People's Union (NUPES)—the recently formed coalition led by leftist MP Jean-Luc Mélenchon—won 131 seats, more than doubling the combined number of representatives that its four parties had in 2017. NUPES, which brings together Mélenchon's France Unbowed, the center-left Socialist Party, French Communist Party, and Greens, campaigned on lowering the retirement age from 62 to 60, hiking the minim

Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal possibly criminal plot by pro-Leave elites to sabotage Theresa May’s Brexit deal, infiltrate government, spy on campaign groups, and replace May with Boris Johnson. by Kit Klarenberg       Intelligence cabal infiltrated UK civil service thanks to “centrally placed mole”     Ex-MI6 chief Richard Dearlove pitched espionage operations targeting civil service and campaign groups     Fake Democratic Party fronts run by CIA veterans were proposed to infiltrate pro-Remain groups     Cabal sought to spy on and disrupt Prime Minister’s top Brexit negotiator     Shadowy billionaires funded effort in total secret     Dearlove claimed credit for influencing government policy on Huawei     Cabal now seeking to remove Boris Johnson     These efforts could amount to charges of TREASON  Part 5 - The cabal turns on Johnson, seeks to infiltrate its mole, Farr, into the Home Office   More recent emails show Prins’ enthusiasm for the Prime Minister has conside

It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it. After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volte face and embraced anti-working-class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures.   by Christian Parenti   Part 12 - California, Virginia, and the political course correction   Indeed, as political medicine the Covid crisis worked: Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic helped get him out of office. But then the Democrats and liberal journalists got stuck in an ever more hysterical overreaction to Covid.  There seemed to be no off switch. Even when overly aggressive lockdowns in California triggered a recall election, Governor Gavin Newsom’s victory caused the politicians, pundits, and consultants to double down on Covid hysteria. Asked what his win meant for Democrats nationally, Newsom said, “ We need to stiffen our spines and lean in to

globinfo freexchange   The Anglo-American axis has now become officially a fascist coalition, framed by the rest of its Western pets. UK's Home Secretary Priti Patel, one of the most ruthless ever, decided to extradite Julian Assange to US. No surprise of course. The only question we had in mind is "what took her so long?" And the only answer we can think of, is the fear of an angry public response by Assange's supporters and ordinary people. And we should hope for that, during the time of the battle (and beyond) against that preposterous decision. It seems that the decision has terrified not only independent, but also some mainstream media outlets. As if they have suddenly woke up from a great shock, realizing now for good what this decision would truly mean for press freedom. An article in The Guardian is quite characteristic:   Murderers, torturers and war criminals will be toasting the British home secretary, Priti Patel, tonight. Her decision to approve t

Colombia heads to the polls today to reject the far-right politics of Iván Duque and Álvaro Uribe and assert that the average Colombian is much more progressive than the traditional politicians who represent them.   by  Luciana Cadahia / Tamara Ospina Posse    Part 3 - Social Upheaval   The elitist image of the Colombian people as politically unreliable dates back to the nineteenth century. The contemporary stigma, however, is a by-product of a confluence of two factors: the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and the doctrine of the “internal enemy” promoted by Álvaro Uribe. The interlocking doctrines have served the Colombian right to brand any expression of political activism or dissent as an act of terrorism. And even as both doctrines have waned, their lingering effects continue to damage the exercise of left-wing politics, freedom of thought, and social movements in Colombia. Building steam in 2019 and exploding in 2021, it took a monthslong, nationwide social upheaval to break