Healthcare
Start Early, Stay Late: Planning for Care in Old Age
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsCovid-19 has exposed too many weaknesses in the neoliberal capitalist system to count, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable. For 10 years our international, interdisciplinary research team has been documenting the profound weaknesses in nursing home care within Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US. The lines between for-profit and not have become increasingly blurred by various neoliberal strategies. One of these involves non-profit and state-owned homes contracting out services to for-profit firms as – in denial of the literature on the determinants of health – services such as food, housekeeping, and laundry have been defined out of care and dismissed as ancillary. This contracting out has not only undermined teamwork, but has also resulted in poor food, inadequate cleaning, and limited laundry – all of which threaten health.
Health Care, Technology, and Socialized Medicine with Pratyush and Pritha Chandra
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFor the ecological crisis to become a ground to rethink structural transformation, it is not enough to locate it in the wreckage that capitalism accumulates. It must be understood as constitutive to capitalist social relations, having an intimate connection to the robbery of labor. It is in this sense that the particularization of these crises in the form of pathogens and impending diseases becomes crucial. This helps us to understand the ecological rift as central to everyday life and struggle in capitalism, and also to imagine a transformational class politics.
Socialist Register 2021: Life After the Pandemic with Christoph Hermann
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile debt is essential in a profit-driven economy, it is pointless in a needs-based economy. When the goal is that everybody receives what she/he needs, there is no need to go into debt. In this presentation Christoph will present some ideas for a needs-based economy.
Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBy engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers' inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organizational forms and objectives. These workers’ inquiries, from call center workers to platform, trucking, cleaning, logistics, mining, auto factories, teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energizing unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers' organizations.
After the Pandemic: Rebuilding the Medicare for All Movement
The Covid crisis drove home both the absurdity of linking healthcare to employment and the importance of treating healthcare as a decommodified public good. But the politics of the emerging post pandemic period are not conducive to big, transformative initiatives like Medicare for All.
Mutant Ecologies in the Age of Genomic Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn their new book Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital, Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante assess recent developments in genomic science, genome editing and the biotech industry, presenting a critical cartography of the shifting landscapes of capital accumulation conjured by such innovations. Discussants: Ariel Salleh and Stuart Newman.