Feudalism

You pay little attention to the systems of your body — circulatory, digestive, pulmonary — unless something goes wrong. These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up and down stairs,…

Gravediggers open new graves as the number of dead rose after the COVID-19 outbreak, at Vila Formosa cemetery, Brazil’s biggest cemetery, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Thursday, 2020. (REUTERS/Amanda Perobelli )By Sherriff Ghali Ibrahim, I write not as an encomium to the Chinese authorities; I write not just because of…

The European People’s Party group called on Wednesday (13 May) for an EU law to prevent oligarchs and land-grabbers drawing on EU subsidies at the expense of small and medium-sized farming businesses. The practice is widespread in countries in Eastern Europe and Italy. The New York Times published in November…

The last thing this polarized Republic needs is, well, more polarization, but that is what we are contracting from the pandemic. Americans, irrespective of region, broadly want the same things, such as safety, a return to normalcy, and an end to dependence on China for medical supplies, but they differ…

The coronavirus has further divided the world, while neoliberalism has made things worse, writes Dr Oliver Villar. THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has blamed China and now the World Health Organisation (WHO) for the pandemic, seeking to distract blame from the neoliberal model of capitalism adopted in much of the Western world since the…

You pay little attention to the systems of your body — circulatory, digestive, pulmonary — unless something goes wrong. These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up and down stairs,…

Even before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, America, like most higher-income countries, was already heading toward a neo-feudal future: massive inequality, ever-greater concentrations of power, and increasingly widespread embrace of a uniform (albeit secular) religion. The pandemic, all too reminiscent of the great plagues of the Middle Ages, seems…

“Small-scale commercial production is, every moment of every day, giving birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie…wherever there is small business and freedom of trade, capitalism appears.”— V.I. Lenin A great connoisseur as well as sworn enemy of the free market, Vladimir Lenin might smile a bit if he witnessed…

Mailing Address CounterPunch PO Box 228 Petrolia, CA 95558 Telephone 1(707) 629-3683 Editorial Jeffrey St. Clair, Editor Joshua Frank, Managing Editor Nathaniel St. Clair, Social Media Alexander Cockburn, 1941-2012 Read More

As the coronavirus ravages lives and economies, it is also pressing at the seams of societies. Severe political polarization has already been tearing apart many democracies, from India and Poland to Turkey and the United States. In responding to the virus, will polarized countries accelerate the winner-take-all battles that are…