April 2021
Start Early, Stay Late: Planning for Care in Old Age
Covid-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.
Find out more »Socialist Register 2021: Beyond Digital Capitalism (the entire series)
Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living Continues on April 20, with 4 more (and maybe 5 more) sessions after that on Sundays or Tuesdays until May 2 There are tickets for each session for those who are unable to be present for this series. The series tickets provide entrance to the remaining 6 presentations with discussions. “In addressing how far digital technology has become integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades the 21st century, we were…
Find out more »Health Care, Technology, and Socialized Medicine
While the immediate task of controlling the current pandemic determines the actions of states, medical institutions, and research laboratories, several critical microbiologists, virologists, and political economists have done well to ask the structural question about the metabolic and ecological rifts that have unleashed new dangers for humanity. But for 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.
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