The United Nations has warned that Gaza faces a “human-made abyss” and that rebuilding the territory could cost more than $70 billion over several decades, The Guardian reported. A report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) highlighted that Israel’s military operations have “significantly undermined every pillar of survival” for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, leaving the population in “extreme, multidimensional impoverishment.”

UNCTAD noted that Gaza’s economy contracted by 87% between 2023 and 2024, reducing GDP per capita to just $161, among the lowest in the world. The West Bank has also suffered from economic decline, attributed to violence, settlement expansion, and restrictions on worker mobility. The report added that withholding of fiscal transfers by Israel has limited the Palestinian Authority’s ability to provide essential services or invest in recovery, at a time when urgent rebuilding and crisis response are needed.

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The effort appears mostly driven by national security concerns, particularly a desire for the government to prop up strategic industries and lessen America’s reliance on foreign countries like China for key resources. Some officials are hopeful the equity stakes will generate a windfall for taxpayers, but the likelihood of that is unclear. Many of the companies are facing financial headwinds, and some could take years to become profitable.

The unusual government intervention into the private market is fueling some concerns, including the opacity of the process, the potential for favoritism, corruption and market distortions, along with the possible loss of taxpayer funds should the investments fail.

Aaron Bartnick, a fellow at Columbia University and a former Biden White House official, said there were serious questions about whether the government role in private industry would address national security vulnerabilities and deliver a return on taxpayer dollars.

“In the absence of a clearly articulated strategy,” he said, the concern was that “this could just devolve to arbitrary deals that favor friends or disfavor foes.”

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The Whitlam government’s removal took place amid immense worldwide political instability that triggered ruling class fears of social revolution, including in Australia.

The period from 1968 to 1975 was marked by the most convulsive uprisings of the international working class since the aftermath of World War II. Not only was US imperialism facing opposition at home and internationally to its barbaric neo-colonial war in Vietnam. Workers internationally were on the offensive, demanding higher wages and better conditions.

In May-June 1968, France was convulsed by an indefinite general strike that brought the government of President Charles De Gaulle’s regime to its knees and it only survived with the assistance of the Stalinist Communist Party. In Italy, a wave of strikes erupted in what became known as the “Hot Autumn” of 1969. In 1970, the social democratic-Stalinist “Popular Unity” coalition Allende government was elected in Chile on the basis of a raft of populist promises to ameliorate social conditions.

In 1974, workers’ struggles erupted in Britain, culminating in the bringing down of the Heath Conservative government. In the same year, President Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 as US imperialism and its puppet government plunged toward final defeat in Vietnam in April 1975. In Europe, military and fascist dictatorships fell one after another in Portugal, Greece and Spain from 1974 to 1976, amid mass popular opposition.

These political upheavals were fuelled by a deep crisis of the profit system internationally, as the post-World War II boom was coming to an end. The ability of US imperialism to stabilise global capitalism based on its own overwhelming economic domination and the betrayals by Stalinism of the post-war, working-class upsurge was ending. International trade and financial arrangements had been underpinned by the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which made the US dollar a world currency convertible to gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce.

In August 1971, facing inflation at home and a looming international run on gold, Nixon ended the gold backing for the US dollar, destabilising the global monetary system. That gave rise to stagflation—soaring inflation and unemployment—intensified by the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973–74 and the worst worldwide recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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The great English historian, Christopher Hill, writing on the causes of the English revolution pointed out that despite the bravery of the revolutionists they were unable to overcome the monarchy’s blocking of reforms because they had a “stop in the mind” they believed in the dominant ideology of the time that the King was King by “divine right” he was God’s representative on earth. It’s hard to challenge that. But that ideology was shattered when along came Cromwell who suggested they cut off the King’s head and see what happens. The ideology was a sham and a new day was born.

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For the reformist left, the oxymoron of capitalist democracy could simply be ignored. Now, the reformist left felt it became part of the club; it had the illusion – as most of the so-called leftists have until today – that it could change the system from the inside, while in reality, it was the system that was changing the left.

Although neoliberalism and postmodernism are two sides of the same coin, their existential condition was the capitulation of the anti-capitalist left. Meanwhile, its new task became to provide legitimation for the system both abroad and at home.

Post-World War II has been virtually universally conceived in an anti-historical fashion. Not only the rise of fascism appeared as an anomaly, disconnected from its liberal ties, but also the so-called welfare system (or Keynesianism) was embraced acritically. It ignores its existence as a reaction to the Soviet Union’s welfare state. Moreover, without a socialist path going on, it is, in fact, a system of managing and controlling the (precarity of the) masses so that any emancipatory expectation never comes to fruition while the system is assimilated and protected by those same people being exploited.

And this connects with the second function of the Keynesian system, namely, to destroy any empathy towards the other, to reaffirm the values of capitalist egoism. While third-world countries were being plundered and those who fought against classical colonialism were demonised, capitalist welfare was sustained on the backbone of underdeveloped countries.

The reformist left therefore renders war, plunder, destruction, and exploitation as reasonable enterprises. Simultaneously, the power of the left, which was previously anchored on the people, faded; the people, conversely, lost representation because the reformists not only parroted the narratives of the status quo but distanced themselves from the masses with their irrational claims disconnected from the broad demands of the people in their daily lives.

This, in turn, resulted not only in the lack of representation of the people by the intelligentsia but even more importantly in the total de-politicisation of the masses, whose spiritual lives lost connection with the world around them. “There is no such thing as society,” as Margaret Thatcher proclaimed.

Consequently, people were not only atomised at work by the capitalist class, their power as a class, which had existed until that moment, was declared extinct. Now, there was only economic, political, and social atomisation.

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Even before police apprehended Luigi Mangione, Tik Tok users bestowed a nickname on the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson: the adjustor. The label refers to insurance adjustors who evaluate claims to determine liability and negotiate settlements. The play on words points to the intense anger that many Americans feel for a health care system that seems more concerned with generating profits than saving and enhancing lives. Now, finally, someone was taking action to even the scales. The term, and the act that inspired it, are closely tied to our present moment. Yet they also sit within a historical tradition, that of the giustiziere or “avenging executioner” that dates to the nineteenth century. The most iconic example is Gaetano Bresci, a thirty-year-old silk weaver who assassinated the King of Italy, Umberto I, on July 29, 1900.

On that day, as the king was about to depart from the Parco Reale in Monza, a city not far from Milan, where he had presided over a gymnastics contest, Bresci shot him three times. The king died within minutes. Bresci, who was born in Tuscany and later moved to Paterson, New Jersey, had returned to Italy in spring 1900. He assassinated the king as punishment for his having signed a decree imposing martial law to quell the May 1898 protests in Milan against rising food prices — before bestowing Italy’s highest military honors on the general who ordered grapeshot to be used against the unarmed demonstrators, killing hundreds. The government’s lethal response was the latest in a series of repressive measures intended to thwart efforts by industrial and agricultural workers to fight economic exploitation and force their way into a political process that had long excluded them and ignored their interests.

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