https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-02/china-k-visa-draws-fierce-criticism/105840312

“Invisible overtime” during 996 9am-9pm 6 days a week (whatever happened to the - 19th century - 8 hour day ?)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-25/china-invisible-overtime-reforms-labour-law-work-hours/103599992

#Capitalism #China #labourmovement #migrantworkers #overtime #StateCapitalism #STEM #WorkVisa

“The United States has entered a new era of state capitalism. The real question is no longer whether the state will act, but whose interests it will serve. … If progressives don’t seize this moment to define a democratic, public-minded industrial policy, they will find themselves living in one designed by the Trump administration.”

#Politics #USPolitics #StateCapitalism #Economics #IndustrialPolicy #WorkingClassPolitics #ProgressivePolitics

https://newrepublic.com/article/200025/trump-state-capitalism-intel-steel-democrats

I don't have much patience for Losurdo's Stalinist deliriums. In any case, it's awesome that just one of the dozens of famous marxist intellectuals of the 21st century is an apologist of the old USSR and its authoritarian state capitalism...! His critique/rant of Nietzsche just stinks. And Nietzsche is probably my favorite philosopher.

"Losurdo, a self-styled realist, felt that classical Marxism’s assumption that revolution had to happen in the leading capitalist countries was unfounded and needed to be revised. Overcoming capitalism would be a much more drawn out process than Marx, Engels, or Lenin had imagined, and would require state-building.

This brings in one of Losurdo’s favorite hobbyhorses: his thesis that the Marxist doctrine of the withering away of the state has had disastrous consequences for efforts to realize communism. He made this argument again and again throughout his œuvre, at times even arguing that the doctrine betrayed a harmful anarchist origin.80 Whereas Marx, Engels, and Lenin had predicted the eventual disappearance of state power, Losurdo believed that this millenarian forecast stood in need of revision (...) ” In contrast to this more positive attitude toward the state, Western Marxists seized on the most utopian elements of Marxism, “accentuat[ing] the messianic tendency in Marx and Engels.” Eastern Marxists were compelled to take the reins of power, and thus were not afraid to get their hands dirty. Lenin purportedly moved away from the fantasy of the withering away of the state in practice, according to Losurdo, even if he never officially renounced it in theory.
(...)
Needless to say, Losurdo diverged sharply from what Marx, Engels, and Lenin had to say on each score (...) His readings are so tendentious as to strain credulity, and must thus be compared with the source material to gauge the accuracy of his accusations."

https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/

#Marxism #Stalinism #Philosophy #Capitalism #State #StateCapitalism #WesternMarxism

"The texts collected here belong to the materials on ‘racket theory’ composed by members of the Institute for Social Research between 1941 and 1944. More specifically, they were mostly (probably) written by Max Horkheimer, albeit with considerable input from Theodor W. Adorno and occasional feedback from others.
(...)
The history of the ‘racket theory’ corpus is difficult to reconstruct. We have found it helpful to divide our subsequent analysis of the racket theory project into three major sections, which are not exclusive in terms of content. Our narrative starts with the earliest use of the term in Max Horkheimer’s essay “The End of Reason” (1942). After this, we turn to analyzing the stream of texts which were explicitly composed for or about publication(s), mostly written between spring 1942 and fall 1943. Then we treat the topic of reflexivity and the specific character of the racket theory project that flows from its particular form of reflexivity. Finally, we briefly discuss some particularities of the core racket theory texts before concluding. Translations from additional German sources are our own."

https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketIntro/

#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #StateCapitalism

"Alami and Dixon’s The Spectre of State Capitalism is a careful discussion of a topic often dealt with in platitudes and sound-bites. The authors cover uses of ‘state capitalism’ as an ideological tool, as well as serious scholarly work on the subject. They accept that ‘all capitalism is state capitalism to some extent,’ and ‘the new state capitalism may not be so new after all’ (5). But, at the same time, they detail the changes in the nature of the global economy, and argue that they must be reckoned with – that is, not just described, but explained.

The authors define state capitalism as an expansion of the state’s role in the world economy through state-capital hybrids (such as sovereign wealth funds, state enterprises and banks embedded in states), and increasingly statist policies (including industrial and development policies and economic nationalism). They argue that this expansion of the state’s economic and political role is not contingent. It is ‘structured by deep-seated, secular transformations’ in global capitalism (15). The economy itself they understand as ‘a world-historical totality’ (13), and not just a collection of disparate institutions and states."

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22211_the-spectre-of-state-capitalism-by-ilias-alami-and-adam-d-dixon-reviewed-by-j-d-evans/

#Capitalism #StateCapitalism #Marxism #PoliticalEconomy #Geopolitics #Ideology #Neoliberalism