István Mészáros, a Classic of the 21st Century
In the recent apology of the capital, the maker of the perpetual motion in history, there is no trace of any revolutionary: the new apologists slavishly follow its uncontrolled commandments, exactly in the period of its fall. All of them, unilaterally say that there is no alternative to this system – denounces the classic of the 21st century the mainstream bourgeois ideology of our times.
At the Beginning of a Long Road: the Decline of Capitalism, Nostalgia and Hope in the 21st Century
In the 2008 crisis, government subventions were used to fight it – urging consumers to purchase cars and property – but the price of the temporarily recovery was rising state debt with no control. The decline of the core of capitalism, the US economy, will drag in the whole world. By deploying all of its anti-crisis tools accumulated over its history, the by now ‘outworn capitalism’ is not able to curb its serious diseases. We cannot expect a simple replacement of the unipolar world with an effective multipolar one but a very lasting decline. Barbarism is marching on the streets but the suppressed are also preparing to rise up.
The Dialectic of Social and Ecological Metabolism: Marx, Mészáros, and the Absolute Limits of Capital
István Mészáros wrote already about the structural crisis of capital in the early 1970s with a strong ecological critique. The capital system, points out Mészáros, is not a mechanism that can be logically controlled. On the contrary, the logic of capital overwrites everything, including heath care, education, production and the ecology. The drive for eternal accumulation undermines the conditions of existence. The logic of capital contradicts the ecological approach but a socialist society will be built on social and ecological sustainability.
The Long Twentieth Century and Barriers to China’s Hegemonic Succession
By examining the systemic contradictions of present day capitalism, Giovanni Arrighi came up with a provocative hypothesis, namely no state could became globally hegemonic after the demise of the hegemony of the US, thus the further operation of global capitalism can be questioned. However, he later he forecast that China will be the next hegemonic power. The profound analysis economic, geostrategic and ecological factors suggest that Arrighi was over optimistic concerning China as its way to hegemony is full of barriers, similarly to the huge obstacles in the way of capitalism to long term existence.
The Criminalisation of History. Lustration, Litigation and Compensation in the Czech, Polish and Hungarian Practice (1989-2012)
The study outlines the practice of ‘history policy’ of the Czech, Polish and Hungarian political right in the past 20 years. This summary is a reaction to the frontal attack on national history by the Hungarian right wing government, which declared the period 1944-1989 as criminal, expelling it from the thousand year long history of Hungary. Although this phenomenon is not typically Hungarian – there were also attempts in the Czech Republic and Poland for biased reinterpretations – the criminalisation of history is uniquely extreme here.