A provocative and deep criticism of South Korean capitalism, Squid Game offers several stark observations on the depredations of the system. Capitalism has forced working-class people like Gi-hun into such dire material conditions that blood-sport is seen as a lesser evil.
The HSE spent over 180,000 euro on mindfulness and 89,000 on yoga sessions over a three year period. Mindfulness is being vaunted as a solve-all intervention for a host of social problems, fits in closely with the individualised logic of capitalism, and diverts attention and resources from real changes that could improve people’s lives and challenge the economic system that governs over daily attacks on people’s mental health and wellbeing.
“The idea of CATU is a union outside of the workplace. An organisation that is built by the community to organise and fight for the community’s interests. The scope is extremely large. Primarily, CATU is involved in the housing struggle because it believes that real power lies in the hands of ordinary people when they unite together to defend their interests against those that exploit our communities and turn housing into a mere commodity. Ordinary people, organised, united, and standing ready to fight for their interests scares the living daylights out of exploiters and those who take their trust for granted. The statement that real power lies in the hands of ordinary people is entirely correct.”
Football, or as it’s known here, soccer, is known as “the beautiful game”. A sport that unites young and old! But the truth is that football does anything but unite, it separates men from women, white people from people of colour, homosexual people from heterosexual people. It isn’t just the far-right leaning section of fans either, this is deeply ingrained in the history of the sport with its governing bodies such as FIFA and UEFA.
Despite Estonia trying to present itself as a social democratic, Scandinavian-style country open to all, at the heart of the culture and education system is a sympathetic relationship to fascism, stemming from the WWII period.
So as long as Britney Spears remains “sick” in the eyes of the public, her conservatorship will continue under the guise of protection – not sick enough to cease work but too sick to have any agency. It is at this point where capitalism and disability justice intersect, where Britney is stripped of all control whilst simultaneously denied effective care.
“This “White Knight” syndrome that runs rampant throughout leftist spaces is ridiculous and it needs to stop. Women and misogyny-affected people have come to expect misogyny from the right, yet when it comes from the left, from men they trust and call comrades, it is a painful reminder of how patriarchy and internalised misogyny is virtually inescapable”.
The rise of racist attacks against East Asians in the West is not due to individual hatred or fringe populists like Donald Trump. In reality, this rise in racism is due to centuries of white supremacist ideology, which is perpetuated by Western hegemony and its imperialist interests. Reading this article, one may take away that only the far-right is to worry about, but when you look at how the majority of leftists, centrists, and centre-right individuals perpetuate these ideas about China, especially through the media, it is clear that liberals enable and accentuate the fascist narratives around China.
“Capitalism has had a transformative effect on our society’s approach to health. To say that health is an unchanging aspect of all cultures or historical epochs is simply not true. For example, there is a lot to be said about how capitalism fosters and promotes physical health. Under capitalism, it is usually done for purely individualistic aesthetic purposes. In the hands of companies, these become powerful ideological forces which grant advertisers a worrying degree of influence over us, as they can essentially control the images we think we should have of ourselves. Health becomes almost domineering and transforms into its opposite, a sickness. Women are still generally promoted as sex objects for consumption and men are also presented by companies in the same narrow manner.”
“Have you ever heard of the “Warm Bath Theory”? It was an idea published by Talcott Parsons, a sociologist who created this idea that the nuclear family prevents its adult members from behaving in dysfunctional ways and encourages them to conform to social norms. The warm bath theory suggests that a man could come home from a stressful day at work and relax into his family/wife, like a warm bath, relieving his stress.
However, as communists, we know that this theory is outdated and quite frankly, full of shit. Fran Ansley, a Marxist-Feminist rephrased it as women being “takers of shit”, in other words when men come home and try to relieve their stress from working in a capitalist system, they do so by taking their frustrations out on their wives.”