Selim Gool

Some thoughts on the covid-19 virus: This biological crisis has created panic in financial markets. Stock markets have plunged as much 30% in the space of weeks - economy in recession.  Troops checking all borders, roads and airports ... what next?

Some thoughts on the covid-19 virus: This biological crisis has created panic in financial markets. Stock markets have plunged as much 30% in the space of weeks. The fantasy world of every rising financial assets funded by ever lower borrowing costs is over.

COVID-19 appears to be an ‘unknown unknown’, like the ‘black swan’-type global financial crash that triggered the Great Recession over ten years ago. But COVID-19, just like that financial crash, is not really a bolt out of the blue – a so-called ‘shock’ (to use the terminology of Naomi Klein: Disaster Capitalism or Coronavirus Capitalism @ https://readersupportednews.org/.../61903-focus..., to an otherwise harmoniously growing capitalist economy.

Even before the pandemic struck, in most major capitalist economies, whether in the so-called developed world or in the ‘developing’ economies of the ‘Global South’, economic activity was slowing to a stop, with some economies already contracting in national output and investment, and many others on the brink.

BE PREPARED! "here is every possibility that the pandemic will trigger a worldwide economic collapse and a massive intensification of the social tensions created by 40 years of neoliberalism and 10 years of austerity. Expect forms of police power trialled in the context of the pandemic then to be deployed again and again as the global crisis deepens in other ways.

For it will deepen.

The coronavirus crisis provides a lens through which to observe the deep pathology of neoliberal capitalism – the grotesque profiteering of the international capitalist class, the shocking negligence of political elites and state agencies, and the way in which unregulated processes of capital accumulation trample human need and shred planetary eco-systems.

Three factors – agribusiness, urbanisation, and globalisation – have combined to turn this natural process into what Mike Davis calls ‘the monster at our door’ (@ https://jacobinmag.com/.../mike-davis-coronavirus...). The world has, in effect, become a gigantic Petri-dish for the cultivation and dissemination of new strains of deadly disease.

Fast rising demand for meat has driven a ‘livestock revolution’, with global meat production increasing from about 150 million tonnes in 1990 to more than twice that today. The response of capital-intensive agribusiness has included the commodification of wild species and a wholesale shift to intensive factory production.

Rising numbers of diverse animals in close proximity means increasing chances of virus mutation and species jumping. Needless to say, the agribusiness complexes generate vast amounts of waste, much of which is simply dumped, and sometimes turns out to be contaminated.

Alongside are the ever-growing slum cities of neoliberal industrialisation in the Global South, where highly concentrated populations are forced to live in squalor, overcrowding, underemployment with only the most rudimentary levels of public-health infrastructure.

Here are the virus pressure-cookers for replicating disease once a mutant strain has made the leap from animal to human.

Then there are the globalised supply-chains and increased movements of people, with sea-freight trebled and air travel up eight-fold in the last four decades, giving us a mechanism for turning a localised outbreak into a global pandemic in double-quick time.

Like the social devastation and ecological destruction wrought by competitive capital accumulation, the production and distribution of disease is, for the system, just another ‘externality’. It does not register on corporate capital’s balance sheets. It is therefore irrelevant to the accumulation process. (from: COVID-19: The politics of the pandemic - @ http://links.org.au/covid-19-the-politics-of-the-pandemic. (As is happening NOW in the USA and the EU countries, a regime of the Hard Right, not the Centre Right – who will use the opportunity to test-run the more authoritarian or totalitarian forms of state control they favour).

This may prove very necessary for them.

There is every possibility that the pandemic will trigger a worldwide economic collapse and a massive intensification of the social tensions created by 40 years of neoliberalism and 10 years of austerity. (also: It was the virus that did it, @ https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/.../it-was-the.../

It was the bad winter @ https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/it-was-the-bad-winter/?fbclid=IwAR3VyK8RVIExXNiNSrC1-gxjrlRgl0PG7eiryScDoF09JdOr5lE7XbPsQsQ

China today

Is Xi Jinping Attaining Cult Status Like Mao Zedong?

Xi Jinping consolidates grip over Chinese Communist Party apparatus

https://www.facebook.com/notes/selim-gool/what-is-to-be-done-an-anti-stalinistpopulist-declaration-or-a-anti-freedom-chart/10153428123176025/

@ https://www.globalresearch.ca/chinas-strategic-economic-planning-versus-americas-failed-capitalism/5616703

@ https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/xi-takes-full-control-of-chinas-future/

Democratic South Africa inherited a racially skewed public service in which 95.5% of the top 3,239 civil servants were white, and only 0.6% black African. Black Africans made up the vast majority of public servants in the lower ranks, with a few middle and senior level public servants in the homeland governments. The size of the task facing the new government was daunting. South Africa had to merge the many administrations of the central government and the various homelands into one coherent, vastly extended administrative system, and at the same time develop policies and practices to ameliorate the ravages of Apartheid and its colonial and settler predecessors. To add to these difficulties, the ANC was faced with an administrative system and top civil servants who they felt they could not trust. Nonetheless, an effective restructuring occurred in which a three sphere system (national, provincial and local government) was created, incorporating all the previous administrations and rationalising the previously fragmented local governments. The three spheres are independent and interdependent which makes central control difficult and some in Government would therefore have preferred them to be tiered.

After providing an overview of the most important
social and political developments of the working
class and oppressed, as well as their organizations,
we shall now move on to a discussion of several issues
related to this revolutionary tactic.

We have shown that petty-bourgeois populist parties
have become important forces in recent years, and it is
therefore crucial for revolutionaries to apply the united
front tactic towards such forces. Clearly this includes the
call for joint actions against neoliberal governments, imperialist
aggression, etc.

What should be the attitude of revolutionaries towards
petty-bourgeois populist parties? And how should they
apply the united front tactic to such parties during elections
as well as when formulating slogans calling for the
desired type of governmental control?

See below:  Basically we need a "Political Revolution" against the crony capitalist caste of ANC weasels who run the State and much of its machinery! OK you are confused: what the fuck does this dude mean ... obfuscation seems to be his thing: well, see here: The slogan of the workers’ government, based on the poor peasants and the urban poor is of particular importance due to the crisis of leadership!

A revolutionary socialist programme for a workers’ government, based on the poor peasants and the urban poor should always include slogans that mark the decisive break with the bourgeoisie, black or "white", and the kleptocrats in the State machinery and the petty bourgeois strata who rule the ANC and its "Alliance".

From War Communism (1917/18 to 1921) and the New Economic Policy (N.E.P.) there was continual debate and revision of economic policy, on labour management and economic planning, till in 1928 the Stalin faction in the Bolshevik Party launched an all drive to "collectivize agriculture" and launch the "Forced Industrialization" drive from 1928.

The effects and "politics of production" is discussed critically.

A number of important questions will be addressed in this discussion:  who benefits from social policies arising from Multiculturalism and "Identity Politics", and secondly,  do these policies serve to strengthen the working class or are they decisive.

The classic debates on "the transition from capitalism to communism (socialism)" are addressed from the opening remarks of Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and other works, to the debates from the late ´60s and 70´s from writers like Ernest Mandel and Paul Foot.

The current interventions and debates on "Democratic Socialism" in the wake of the statements  Bernie Sanders in the USA are reviewed and  critically examined. 

A bibliography is also provided.

My birthdate, on 14th April 1948, also coincided with many international events:  the birth of the independent State of India almost exactly 9 months earlier; and the coming to power of the extreme Afrikaaner Nationalists under D.F. Malan in that year.  This was to be turning-point in our history.  But after Sharpville in 1960, the country nevertheless undertook a breathtaking industrialization and  I was sucked into the process as a semi-skilled worker in our infant IT (data processing) sector.

We witnessed the transition from Segregation to Apartheid - in residential areas, in schooling and in housing - as well as the rise and human settlement of new suburban and peri-urban areas out on the dusty and previously unpopulated Cape Flats. I look at the changes in society with the new apartheid policies being introduced and how it affected human and social relations, at a macro and micro level.

So this is my tale from age 12 to 21 in Black River & Athlone in Cape Town; later in Lund in Sweden from 1969 till c. 1977.

My academic studies, political activities and loves and losses.

Part 1:  The Gools of Cape Town -  A Family Memoir

A South African Muslim family in search of radical modernity

Part 1: The Elders

The First Generation

Paternal grandparent - J. Mohammed Hamid Gool 

Maternal grandparent – Ahmed M. Nagdee

Family connection:  Dr Abdullah Abdurahman

Their personal histories, marriages, careers, lives and times, situating their personal and family backgrounds in India and Java; connections with Mohandas Gandhi and South African Indian politics, Nationalist Politics with an internationalist perspective.  The Rise and then Breakup of an anti-Stalinist Left and the hegemony of Populist Nationalism after 1950s.

The Second Generation: Into the 19th Century in South Africa - from exclusivist Indian politics to the United Front

a. Z. Cissie Abdurahman-Gool  - aunt - daughter of Abdullah

b. Dr. Hamid Gool - husband of Cissie

c. Dr. Goolam Hoosen Gool my father

d. Mrs. Hawa Halima Nagdee-Gool - my mother

by  Selim Yusuf Gool

When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Durban from Bombay in 1893, he was a natty 23-year-old British-trained lawyer, hired to help represent one wealthy Muslim Indian trader in one dreary civil suit against another, and primarily interested in matters of religion and diet, not politics: in an early advertisement he proclaimed himself an “Agent for the Esoteric Christian Union and the London Vegetarian Society.” 

But he changed over time and in that process helped change his environment. In fact, Gandhi was born a Gujarathi bania, who grew up in Gujarat with all the prejudices and quirks of his caste and gradually transformed himself into a hero in the eyes of the larger world through his tireless struggles in first elite Indian politics and later in mass resistance, in spirituality and in the practice of non-violent, passive resistance  to racial injustice in South Africa.

Although the outcomes of Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns in South Africa were neither clear-cut nor long-lasting: after one, his own supporters beat him bloody because he thought he’d settled too quickly for a compromise with the government. But these mass campaigns had  taught him how to move, or manipulate, the masses — not only middle-class Hindu and Muslim immigrants but the poorest of the poor as well. He had, as he himself said, found his “vocation in life.”

Witness how in his South African endeavour, there was deep and passionate participation from Tamils, Parsees, Muslims, Christians, European Jews, and the Chinese.  People like Henry Polak, Millie Polak, Sonja Schlesin, Hermann Kallenbach, Thambi Naidoo, Joseph Doke, L. W. Ritch contributed greatly to the Indians' struggle. 

Only the native Africans were conspicuous by their absence.  If Gandhi was racially prejudiced against native Africans when he arrived in SA in 1893, it was also the sign of the times when all "races" were prejudiced against one another - a carefully grafted racial hierarchy constructed by Empire - the Indians looking at native Africans as less civilized than themselves and the whites looking at all dark races as genetically inferior in all aspects.

However, to Gandhi's credit, over a span of the next twenty years he evolved to realize that the struggles of the native Africans to be no different from his own for the Indians and he came to empathize with their plight.

For their part, the Africans had their prejudices about Indians as well.  John Dube remarked to a friend that while he had once thought the plantation coolies crude and uncivilized, now he had acquired a sense of respect for all Indians, looking at their indomitable spirit in rising against the unjust laws.

Soon after returning to India in 1915, Gandhi set forth what he called the “four pillars on which the structure of swaraj” — self-rule — “would ever rest”: an unshakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims; universal acceptance of the doctrine of nonviolence, as tenet, not tactic; the transformation of India’s approximately 650,000 villages by spinning and other self-sustaining handicrafts; and an end to the malignant concept of untouchability -  We can view Gandhi’s noble but doomed battles to achieve them all.

He made a host of enemies along the way — orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a crook or a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary mystic. Maybe he was that also?

But no antagonist was more implacable than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the brilliant, quick-tempered untouchable leader — still largely unknown in the West — who saw the Mahatma’s non-violent efforts to eradicate untouchability as a sideshow at best. He even objected to the word ­Gandhi coined for his people — “Harijans” or “children of God” — as patronizing; he preferred “Dalits,” from the Sanskrit for “crushed,” “broken.”

Once calling himself "a Flemish internationalist of Jewish origin", Ernest Mandel can be put in a line of "Non-Jewish Jews", to paraphrase a well-known formulation of Isaac Deutscher, whose stance was uncompromisingly internationalist and whose very intention was to resolve humanity's vital question "Socialism or Barbarism" in favour of socialism and to "overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being" (K. Marx).

In the tradition of such outstanding Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg or Leon Trotsky, scholarly and theoretical work on the one side and revolutionary, propagandistic, political and organisational activities on the other side were inseparably linked in Ernest Mandel, thus "belonging to a species that has become increasingly endangered in [the] second half of the twentieth century: theoreticians of militant Marxism.  His advocacy of "workers´ self-management" and of "workers´control" from below (see file:  "On Nationalisation, Workers Control and Self-Management") was unique in the socialist movement of the time, which itself had been conditioned by Bureaucratic Centralism, or the Stalinist conception on planning and management, and brought on a charge of "Luxemburgism".

View also at:  @ https://www.facebook.com/notes/selim-gool/ernest-mandel-on-workers-control-workers-self-management-an-introduction-and-som/10152870804156025?pnref=story

Rising inequality is the issue for 21st century capitalism for Piketty. 

But what about booms and slumps and the recurrent breakdowns in capital accumulation? 
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What does Piketty have to say about those in relation to his ‘fundamental laws’?

Piketty suggests policy solutions to the rising inequality of wealth. 

Are they appropriate and realistic?

My extended review will try to answer these questions ...

What can we do with what Thomas Piketty teaches us about capital in the twenty-first century?

View @ https://www.facebook.com/notes/selim-gool/what-can-we-do-with-what-thomas-piketty-teaches-us-about-capital-in-the-twenty-f/10152125562421916
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SORRY: Unable to upload file at present (wrong file type) so access via facebook

Discussion of Piketty in Michael Roberts:

"The last 30 years in the so-called neoliberal era has destroyed millions of reasonably paid, full-time secure jobs, especially in lower skilled manufacturing sectors.  This has enable the capitalist sector to raise the rate of exploitation to counteract the fall in profitability experienced by most leading capitalist economies between 1965 and the early 1980s.  

Average income from employment has stagnated, even if average ‘compensation’ (health insurance, pensions etc) has risen somewhat.  Over the same period, top layers of the employed workforce (chief executives etc), as agents of neo-liberal policies in the workplace, have seen spectacular rises in income and wealth.

The stagnation and recent collapse in average real incomes alongside the continued rise in the real incomes of the top 1% since the start of the Great Recession brings me to discuss the invaluable work of  French economist, Thomas Piketty.  Along with Emmanuel Saez and Anthony Atkinson (see post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/the-story-of-inequality/), Piketty has provided seminal statistics on the inequality of income and wealth in the major economies. 

Piketty now has new book out (Capital in the 21st century) that analyses the changes in the inequality of income and wealth since the capitalist mode of production became dominant from the end of the 18th century.  His 900 page book is partly summarised in this article

@ http://www.voxeu.org/article/capital-back. and here is one chapter, piketc6.  There are also some interesting reviews here: Piketty2013Cologne and here Milanovic on Piketty MPRA_paper_52384

According to Piketty, inequality is now approaching prewar levels.  This rise in inequality is not due to better education for the top earners or even super star status like footballers.  It is mainly due to a rise in income from the ownership of capital assets:   “Economists used to believe that the ratio of aggregate wealth to income is constant over time, but it is not.”  

The wealth-to-income ratios of rich countries have been increasing since the 1970s. In the top eight developed economies, according to official national balance sheets, aggregate private wealth has risen from about two to three times national income in 1970 to a range of four to seven times today.

Figure 1. Private wealth / national income ratios, 1970-2010

Source: Authors’ computations using country national accounts. Private wealth = non-financial assets + financial assets – financial liabilities (household & non-profit sectors).

Piketty shows that the postwar decades – marked by relatively low capital wealth – appear to be a historical anomaly. High wealth-to-income ratios were the norm in Europe throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Then the world wars, low saving rates, and a number of anti-capital policies provoked a large drop in private wealth, from six to seven times national income to about two times in the aftermath of World War II. The wealth-to-income ratios have been rising ever since, to the extent that they appear to be returning to their 19th-century levels. In the US, the wealth-to-income ratio has also followed a U-shape evolution, but less marked (Figure 2 - Private wealth / national income ratios, 1870-2010: Europe vs. USA).

Source: Authors’ computations using country national accounts. Data are decennial averages (1910-1913 averages for Europe). Europe is the average of UK, France and Germany.

In his book, Piketty considers the reasons for this. In particular, he compared his model in his book, called Capital in the 21st century,with Marx’s model in his 19th century book, the first to be calledCapital.

Piketty says: “capitalists are concerned to accumulate each year more capital, by will power and perpetuation, or just because their life is already sufficiently high, … and then the “return the capital must necessarily be reduced more and more and become infinitely close to zero, otherwise the share of income going to capital would “eventually devour the all of the national income”…  

So there is a “dynamic contradiction pointed to by Marx”. Capitalists must accumulate more to boost productivity “in a desperate attempt to fight against the downward trend in the rate of return”.  

This is a bastardised version of Marx’s accumulation theory.  Piketty really adopts a neoclassical version of diminishing returns as capital grows. The fall in the rate of return is not due to the inability of capitalists to exploit labour power enough but due to an ‘excess’ of capital.  

Piketty reckons that productivity growth is infinite and thus can compensate indefinitely for the decline in the rate of profit.  That apparently is why Marx’s law of profitability proved wrong as capitalism grew over the last 150 years.  But he also recognises that, as capital accumulates and the share of capital in national income rises, it threatens intensified class struggle.

So Marx was on the right lines, in a way.  If only he had looked at the statistics, as Piketty has done.  

Marx had “a fairly anecdotal, unsystematic available statistics approach. In particular, it does not seek to know if the high capital intensity that he believes detected in the accounts of some manufacturing sectors is representative of the British economy in as a whole…this is most amazing in a book (Capital) dedicated for a large part to the question of the accumulation of capital.  

Marx makes no attempt to estimate the national capital stock despite the earlier work of Colquhoun in the years 1800-1810 or the later work of Giffen from 1870-1880…which is all the more regrettable as this would have allowed him to confirm to some extent his intuitions on the huge accumulation of private capital that characterizes the time, and especially to clarify his own model.”

Piketty is no Marxist or even an anti-capitalist economist.  But he recognises the threat to the system that growing inequality is creating and he has glimmerings of an understanding of why inequality is endemic under capitalism.  It is not the result of better skilled workers being paid more, but is caused by the division between income from the ownership of the means of production and income from selling your labour power. Inequality cannot disappear or even be reduced significantly without ending that division in the organisation of society.  So the lost generation will stay lost.


@  http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/americas-lost-generation-and-pikettys-rise-in-capitals-share/
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Still unable to download file:

DISCUSSIONS AROUND PIKETTY´ S BOOK: "CAPITAL IN THE 21st CENTURY" - some links and voices of disention:

@ https://www.facebook.com/notes/selim-gool/what-can-we-do-with-what-thomas-piketty-teaches-us-about-capital-in-the-twenty-f/10152125562421916

What can we do with what Thomas Piketty teaches us about capital in the twenty-first century? - Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press 2014
by Eric Toussaint @ http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article3394
Réflexions sur « Le capital au XXIe siècle » de Thomas Piketty, par François Chesnais, @ http://cadtm.org/Reflexions-sur-Le-capital-au-XXIe

Piketty and Marx, by Tomáš Tengely-Evans, @http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=991&issue=143

The Piketty Panic, by Paul Krugman, @ http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-piketty-panic/
What the 1% Don’t Want You to Know, @ http://zcomm.org/zvideo/what-the-1-dont-want-you-to-know/
Read more:
Michael Roberts: @http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/piketty-in-french-its-worse/

Michael Roberts: @ http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/thomas-piketty-and-the-search-for-r/

Leftist commentary on Piketty’s book generally makes two points.  First, Piketty provides valuable statistical ammunition for activists and organizers in the labor and social movements on the extent of wealth inequality in several major capitalist societies since the late 18th century. Second, Piketty is far from an anti‑capitalist radical.
Piketty rejects Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production and believes that changes in taxation on wealth could alleviate inequality while preserving the ‘efficiencies of the market economy.’  He conceives of capital as a
stock of assets used to produce income rather than as a relation between
classes; focuses on the distribution of profits, rent and wages rather than social
production; and rejects Marx’s fundamental insight that the same underlying
forces that make capitalism incredibly dynamic inevitably lead to periodic crises.

Still, with few exceptions  most left commentary on Piketty has not gone beyond distinguishing his investigation of capital from that of Marx. Put another way, they have not demonstrated how Piketty’s non‑Marxist conceptual framework cannot explain the patterns of inequality he documents.

view @ https://www.facebook.com/notes/10152421802471025/

View also he .rtf by Charlie Post included

Some Observations on the South African Literary Tradition and the case of Nadine Gordimer: A Dissident´ s View

In my opinion, Nadine Gordimer followed in that great white liberal literary tradition of Alan Paton, of "Cry The Beloved Country" (1948) fame, which made him one of South Africa's best known writers... (anyway) that is how I discovered why Nadine Gordimer could not be my literary or intellectual lodestar.

Anyway, by the early 1970s a more dynamic, and to my mind more "street-wise" and sassy group of young Black writers (through their poetry, drama and short stories), had burst on the literary scene in South Africa (Mafika Pascal Gwala, Mongane Wally Serote, Sipho Sepamla, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Njabulo Ndebele and Mbulelo Mzamane):
generally speaking OF and FOR the Black youth and communities.

The Black Consciousness (BC) political current had arrived, as had the "Soweto Generation" - a postwar generation, many of whom also had secured secondary and tertiary education and later became lecturers (often abroad) and social/political activists or public administrators.

These "Black" writers and intellectuals of the BC political current spoke with a directness and vigour I found not in a Paton or a Gordimer or others their ilk.

A different lived experience and political outlook most definitely - they spoke to me of our common oppression and struggle, not with the "Jim Comes To Jo´ burg" condescending set of liberal platitudes and its Master-Servant paternalistic moralistic political attitude.

“The ‘first’ New Left was born in 1956, a conjuncture—not just a year—bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and on the other by the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone.

The New Left represented the coming together of two related but different traditions—also of two political experiences or generations. One was the tradition I would call, for want of a better term, communist humanism, symbolized by the New Reasoner and its founders, John Saville and Edward and Dorothy Thompson.

The second is perhaps best described as an independent socialist tradition, whose centre of gravity lay in the left student generation of the 1950s and which maintained some distance from ‘party’ affiliations.

Towards 1968: The period 1965-7 saw a series of escalating student struggles in British universities: a number of these were over calls for dis-investment by universities in apartheid South Africa.
Indeed South Africa was prior to Vietnam, the one international issue that united the left over a long period.

The raw material that saw an explosion of radicalism was coming together through the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (in Britain) and student radicalism, ignited by events in Vietnam, Czechoslovakia , Southern Africa and France.

Cuba´s Road to "Socialism in one Country" I want here to look at the political phenomenon of "Castroism" or "Guevarism" as an important political trend in Third Word politics-not least in Southern Africa.

The real, imagined, mythological and ideological identification of a generation of the New Left drew its inspiration from Castroism (and the Maoist "Cultural Revolution" from the mid-1960s)-and it is necessary with a Balance Sheet of its POSITIVE as well as NEGATIVE results and consequences for political action today. Background:

There are the globalised supply-chains and increased movements of people, with sea-freight trebled and air travel up eight-fold in the last four decades, giving us a mechanism for turning a localised outbreak into a global pandemic in double-quick time.


Like the social devastation and ecological destruction wrought by competitive capital accumulation, the production and distribution of disease is, for the system, just another ‘externality’. It does not register on corporate capital’s balance sheets. It is therefore irrelevant to the accumulation process. (from: COVID-19: The politics of the pandemic - @ http://links.org.au/covid-19-the-politics-of-the-pandemic)

Some thoughts on the covid-19 virus: This biological crisis has created panic in financial markets. Stock markets have plunged as much as 30% in the space of weeks - the global economy in recession Troops checking all borders, roads and airports ... what next? The ultra-Right marching in the streets!

On the local municipal (Metro) elections in South Africa on the 3rd August

see results analysed:  @ http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-08-15-analysis-da-vs-anc-shattering-myths-creating-new-perceptions/#.V7FbSyOLS_E

Dispatches from Alternate Reality: Zuma and ANCYL lead the way to ANC 2017 conference by RANJENI MUNUSAMY  @  http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-08-19-dispatches-from-alternate-reality-zuma-and-ancyl-lead-the-way-to-anc-2017-conference/#.V7g1JyOLReU

The African National Congress is beginning to lose its absolute hold over black workers; Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters are growing rapidly and presenting a serious challenge to the corrupt leadership of Jacob Zuma and his vice president Cyril Ramaphosa, a man widely labelled “the butcher of Marikana” due to his role in the slaughter of 34 striking miners there.

Unprecedented reverses for the ANC in local South African elections.

The huge reserves of moral and political legitimacy won in the struggle against Apartheid have finally been used up in the implementation of neoliberalism ...

Book Review: "We are Cuba - How a revolutionary people have survived in a post-soviet world, Helen Jaffe" by Dr Selim Gool
@ https://www.bookdepository.com/We-Are-Cuba.../9780300230031 By (author) Helen Yaffe, ISBN13 9780300230031 - Publication date, 06 April 2020, Publisher Yale University Press

The Economics of Socialist Development in Cuba, 1961 - 1964

Selim Gool

Goal: We witness the incredible creativity and sacrifice of Cuban workers to free themselves from the grip of imperialism. We eavesdrop on the discussions on the Law of Value led by Che - the `Great Debate' from 1961 - 1964. Many international contributors participate.

We discover Che's innermost thoughts about socialist transition as he reads and annotates the Soviet Manual of Political Economy.

We watch the development and implementation of the Budgetary Finance System, in opposition to the soviet Auto-Financing System.

Of the brace of new books available on the new South Africa, only two or three are remarkabe for their insights and penetrating political analysis. More recent biographies of ex-President Thabo Mbeki (Gumede and Gevisser), present President Jacob Zuma (Gordin) and former ANC MP 'Mac' Maharaj (O'Malley) provide a look into the inner workings of the ruling African National Congress.
I can recommend the following works. In his study of corruption in the ANC in government, 'Eye on the Money: One Man's Crusade against Corruption' (Umuzi, Johannesburg, 2007), the anti-apartheid banker Terry Crawford-Browne writes that the 'arms deal' is 'central to the succession crisis that dominates the ANC', while Andrew Feinstein's 'After the Party: A Personal and Political Journal Inside the ANC' (2007, 2009), is in fact an 'insider' expose of the wheeling n' dealing behind the 'arms deal', "which has poisoned the whole political system".

The latter quote is from R. W. ('Bill') Johnson's tour de force of 646 pages, 'South Africa's Brave New World - The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid', on the last page in fact. The cover blurb says it all: "(this) new book tells the story of South Africa from the magic period from 1994 to the bitter disappointment of the present ... At the heart of the book lies the ruinous figure of Thabo Mbeki, whose over-reaching ambitions led to catastrophic failure on almost every front.

Economics Course Material Note 1 - Boom, Slump and Bust .... capitalism´s ups-and-downs
ECO-MONICS FOR THE UN-BELIEVER
A cautious word from your sponsor:  In this 'Age of Dis-Information', it is good that we have some reliable tutors who can provide a glossary of terms and terminology that is unfettered from the cliches and unashamed lies of the yellow tabloids, the Economics Professors in all the academic institutions in the Western World (Samuelson and co) and the rubbish that is put out by the business journalists who rely on whispers, rumours, hearsay and manufactured statistics 'Made in Washington' [or any other capital really] as it is "falsified"!
So here are some alternative concepts and explanations to explain the 'Crisis of Capital'(alt. Finance Capital - FinansKapitalensKrise):
... as Alice was told by the curious figure Humpty Dumpty in "Alice_in_Wonderland":
" ..... a word is what I make it to mean!"