Headlines

A view on Monetary Theory and Democratic Socialism

Jan. 2.– Medicare for All has quickly become a principal rallying cry for many progressives and leftists alike. Organizations ranging from Our Revolution, National Nurses United and certain branches of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have done much of the day-to-day work to bring single-payer health care to the forefront of political debate. Their efforts have helped push Medicare for All to the floors of the United States Senate and House. Currently, there are 16 senators and 120 Congress people cosponsoring Rep. John Conyers' (D-Michigan) Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act. 

With greater congressional backing of Conyers' bill and the grassroots surge in democratic socialist politics, questions have moved from the desirability to the viability of programs like Medicare for All. Partisans and opponents of social democracy alike are wondering, "Single-payer health care sounds great, but how can we pay for it? How can we pay for any universalistic program without going bankrupt?" If democratic socialists see social democracy as one of the key stepping stones towards a truly egalitarian society, the issue of how we can sustainably finance such programs is of the utmost importance.

• The clerics are struggling to control widespread unrest
• Protests have engulfed several cities in Iran
• Iran death toll rises as protests continue ← click for more 

 Midle East, Jan.2.– Incredibly, religious hardliners may have started the protests that have spread across Iran. Preachers in Mashhad, Iran’s second city and a stronghold of the clerical regime, called their followers onto the streets on December 28th to protest against rising prices, most recently of eggs. Many of those who turned out supported Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative cleric, in the presidential election last May. “Death to Rouhani,” they chanted, referring to President Hassan Rouhani, whose liberal economic policies they oppose and whose budget in December called for sweeping subsidy cuts.  

But their cries have been drowned out by a far broader swathe of Iranian malcontents. Even as the hardliners retreated, the protests spread to more than 20 cities, where Iranians of all stripes voiced pent-up anger over a lack of economic and political progress.

Havana, Dec.29.– After Raul’s announcement in his latest speech in front of the National Assembly, him stepping down as the President of the State Council and Council of Ministers seems to be pretty much definite. Everything is pointing towards Miguel Diaz-Canel being named his successor, the First Vice-President who rose up to the highest ranks of Cuban politics thanks to the post-Fidel purge that took some of the system’s key figures out of the game.

While it is true that there were strong indications, during the first half of this year, that this transfer of power might not happen, his nomination today is clear. Ambiguous declarations by figures close to power, such as Mariela Castro, have predicted that there may be “surprises”. The Vice-President himself has made sure to come off as a “die-hard Communist” in the few public images that have leaked of him, in a clear move to create trust among the population. And added to his absence from national press, there has been a sudden and unprecedented appearance of the Castro family’s descendents, both Fidel’s and Raul’s children.

 Dec.29.–  The Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s “permanent revolution” destroyed tens of millions of lives. From the communist victory in 1949 in the Chinese Civil War, through the upheaval, famine, and bloodletting of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until Mao’s death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set segments of Chinese society against one another in successive spasms of violent class warfare. As wave after wave of savagery swept China, millions were killed and millions more sent off to “reform through labor” and ruination.

Mao had expected this level of brutality. As he once declared: “A revolution is neither a dinner party, nor writing an essay, painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely, gentle, temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Today, even experts on Chinese history find it difficult to keep track of all the lethal “mass movements” that shaped Mao’s revolution and which the party invariably extolled with various slogans. Mao launched campaigns to “exterminate landlords” after the Communists came to power in 1949; to “suppress counterrevolutionaries” in the early 1950s; to purge “rightists” in the late 1950s; to overthrow “capitalist roaders” during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s; and to “rectify” young people’s thinking by shipping them off to China’s poorest rural areas during the Down to the Countryside Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.