The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) is considered the big winner of the 2021 legislative elections despite the victory of Vladimir Putin’s governing United Russia party. Russian authorities have been accused of large-scale vote rigging in the election process over the weekend, while the Kremlin denies the allegations.
With 95.05% of the voting results processed, CPRF gains 19.20% of the votes, while the United Russia party secures 49.63% of the ballots on the party list to the State Duma (lower house of parliament).
An important and principled academic journal dealing with the theory and practice of Marxism and socialism, Monthly Review, was established by Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy in 1949, at an especially difficult time for the U.S. left-wing movement, when it was encountering attacks and slanders under the Truman Doctrine and McCarthyism. Nevertheless, Monthly Review grew and eventually became one of the world’s most influential left-wing magazines. Over seventy years, it has published articles from numerous well-known social activists including Albert Einstein, W. E. B. DuBois, Che Guevara, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, and Bernie Sanders. It has also brought together and developed many renowned Marxist scholars, such as Harry Magdoff, Paul A. Baran, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Robert W. McChesney, and John Bellamy Foster. In this way, it has made an outstanding contribution to the development not only of Marxist theory in the United States, but of world socialism as well.
China is currently the world’s largest economy measured by purchasing power parity. As the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy reshapes the global geopolitical map, Western mainstream media has begun to define China as a new imperialist power that exploits cheap energy and raw materials from developing countries. Some Marxist intellectuals and political groups, drawing from the Leninist theory of imperialism, argue that the rise of monopoly Chinese capital and its rapid expansion in the world market have turned China into a capitalist imperialistic country.
Whether China has become an imperialist country is a question of crucial importance for the global class struggle. I argue that although China has developed an exploitative relationship with South Asia, Africa, and other raw material exporters, on the whole, China continues to transfer a greater amount of surplus value to the core countries in the capitalist world system than it receives from the periphery. China is thus best described as a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system.
Editor’s Note | We recognize that COVID-19 coverage can inflame passions and is prone to controversy. In the past, MintPress News has published varying viewpoints on the topic (including ones that stand in contrast to those represented in the following article). We strive to provide well-researched articles representing a diversity of views to our readers in the interest of fostering healthy discussion in the public interest.
WUHAN, CHINA — While many people have already criticized the lack of evidence and scientific basis for the hypothesis that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory, both critics and proponents of the lab-leak theory appear to have uncritically accepted false or unproven premises regarding work done at the laboratory most often implicated in these speculations, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Some of the most prominent accusations pointed at the WIV are that it was conducting research as part of China’s alleged biowarfare program, and was conducting its experiments in substandard biosafety conditions. The implication is that if the WIV lied about not having SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, the virus would also be more likely to have originated from there owing to their inadequate biosafety standards. However, after investigating these widely circulated claims and contacting several scientists, it turns out there is actually little evidence for any of these allegations.
By now it is obvious that the mainstream media does not cover any good news whatsoever about Venezuela. Even non-political issues are always accompanied by a poisoned cliché sentence or two about “dictator”, “authoritarian regime”, “collapsed economy” “humanitarian crisis”, etc. etc.
So, the game-changing news that there are peace talks being held in México City between the Venezuelan government and opposition parties is ignored. México is acting as host and facilitator with the kingdoms of Norway and Netherlands, and the Russian Federation as mediators. This seminal event has been scarcely reported by the North American media or commented on by politicians. Not a peep. Perhaps it is because neither the USA nor Canada have been permitted to be part of these negotiations, although certainly the USA has tried, and failed, to worm itself in.
President Nicolas Maduro, Mexico, Sep. 18, 2021. | Photo: Twitter/ @NicolasMaduro
President Nicolas Maduro called for the reactivation of mechanisms for analyzing economic, social, political, and trade integration proposals.
Addressing the VI Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro reiterated the need to set up a “powerful” bloc’s General Secretariat to promote the region’s multilateralism, integration, and cooperation.
As part of the commemoration of the 211 years of the Independence of Mexico, the annual military parade, held in Mexico City, had Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel as this year’s guest of honor. In a speech given before the parade, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), President of Mexico, highlighted the injustice suffered by the Cuban people due to the ongoing US blockade, and urged US President Joe Biden to lift the blockade against Cuba.
“The government that I represent respectfully calls on the US government to lift the blockade imposed on Cuba, because no state has the right to subdue another nation, another country,” declared the president of Mexico. “It is necessary to remember what George Washington said: ‘Nations must not take advantage of the misfortune of other peoples.’ To put it frankly, it looks bad for the US government to use their blockade as an impediment to the well-being of the Cuban people so that they are forced by necessity to confront their own government.”
On Friday, September 17, the People’s Republic of China firmly rejected the illegal detention of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab and urged the United States to respect the norms that govern international law.
Zhao Lijian, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry, stated at a press conference that the US “has been playing a shameful role in regard to Venezuela. The US has constantly abused political and judicial maneuvers, including sanctions and extraditions; with the purpose of meddling in the internal affairs of Venezuela.”
Lijian went on to point out that the US harassment policy “affects the regular international personnel exchange and endangers mutual trust and cooperation between countries,” and due to this reason “China firmly rejects this.”
‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. So wrote an Irishman a century ago, a meditation on the difficulties of establishing a revolution in political and cultural consciousness out of the wreckage of dead traditions, war, disappointments and the endurance of conservative reaction.
Revolutionaries have long been concerned with temporality; what to do when the luggage and garbage of the past litters the present, diminishing the possibilities of collective freedom in the future; what to do when time runs out or history stops, or when you’re living too late.
It’s been the end times for a long time now. Once it was postmodernism, late capitalism and ‘New Times’; a generation later, capitalist realism and that line about the end of the world. These days, clairvoyants have taken to reading the tea leaves in Gramsci. Perhaps one day someone will write a PhD on the second life of one line over the 2010s and 2020s: ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’
A horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus affinis) exits a cave at dusk, in Perak state in Malaysia, one of the countries where severe acute respiratory syndrome–related viruses may frequently infect people.FLETCHER & BAYLIS/SCIENCE SOURCE
Only two new coronaviruses have spread globally the past 2 decades: SARS-CoV, which caused an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But that may just be the tip of the iceberg of undetected infections with related viruses emerging from bats, a new paper claims. In a preprint published yesterday researchers estimate that an average of 400,000 people are likely infected with SARS-related coronaviruses every year, in spillovers that never grow into detectable outbreaks.
Although that number comes with big caveats, “It should be eye-opening to the entire scientific community that we don’t know very much about the frequency of zoonotic spillover,” says virologist Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan, who was not involved in the work. That needs to change, she says, “because otherwise we grossly underestimate it.”
Journal of People 