Hormuz to Asia. Cuba goes solar. Gramsci on sex and production & Brecht on shooting people like me.
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
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Lucian Freud, Man’s Head, Self Portrait, 1963
America’s LNG decade
The home price an American household on a median income can afford.
Source: Wall Street Journal
The Strait of Hormuz really is an umbilical cord between the Middle East and Asia
Source: Financial Times
Under impact of US embargo Cuba is going solar
in the 12 months to April 2025 Cuba’s imports of Chinese solar panels grew by a factor of 34, faster than anywhere else in the world. The island has gone from having almost no solar power a few years ago to levels which help it cope with Mr Trump’s embargo.
Source: The Economist
China’s gig economy is huge and expanding ominously
New Deal: the capitalist state takes on the notion of “permanent revolution”
In fact one could say that, in relation to changing state forms, only the experience of the New Deal makes explicit what I have found to be a fundamental characteristic of Keynesianism: the recognition of (a) a changed relationship between the economic forces in play and (b) a matching restructuring of capital’s hegemony in this new context. It makes this recognition explicit by radically altering the rules of the game, through a striking synthesis between the enthusiasm for reconstruction exhibited by capital’s ruling elite and long-standing constitutional practices of ‘due process’, now updated. Here, finally, we have a capitalist state audaciously taking on board and recuperating, for its own preservation, the notion of ‘permanent revolution’. And it does so with no reservations, asserting its own class essence as a capitalist state and shunning the taint of populist or traditional progressive ideologies. What is imposed is a capitalist reformism that is very different from social democratic whinings about imbalances in the system and is supremely confident about being able to resolve its problems through self-reproduction.
Source: A. Negri “John Maynard Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State” (1967)
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Lucian Freud, Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait), 1965
Gramsci on sex and production
The formation of a new feminine personality is the most important question of an ethical and civil order connected with the sexual question . Until women can attain not only a genuine independence i n relation to men but also a new way of conceiving themselves and their role in sexual relations , the sexual question will remain full of unhealthy characteristics and caution must be exercised in proposals for new legislation . Every crisis brought about by unilateral coercion in the sexual field unleashes a ‘romantic’ reaction which could be aggravated by the abolition of organized legal prostitution . All these factors make any form of regulation of sex and any attempt to create a new sexual ethic suited to the new meth ods of production and work extremely complicated and difficult.
However, it is still necessary to attempt this regulation and to attempt to create a new ethic . It is worth drawing attention to the way in which industri alists (Ford in particul ar) have been concerned with the sexual affairs of their employees and with their family arrangements in general . One should not be misled , any more than in the case of prohibition , by the ‘puritanical’ appearance assumed by this concern . The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalized .
Source: Selection from Prison Notebooks, 294-7 (022§3 )
Affluence defined through provisions
And its opposite, the economics of expenditure
Lucian Freud, Painter Working, Reflection (detail), 1993
