Karl Marx, born on this day in 1818, was a foundational political theorist and journalist associated with the philosophy of Marxism.
Among Marx’s best-known texts are the “The Communist Manifesto” and the three-volume “Das Kapital”, in which he set out to define and explain the behavior of the capitalist mode of production.
Marx’s political and philosophical thought have had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.
Marx’s critical theories about society, economics and politics - collectively understood as Marxism - hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production, and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labor power in return for wages.
Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx concluded that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as socialism.
- 🐻Link to all Hexbear comms https://hexbear.net/post/1403966
- 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube](https://live.hexbear.net/c/movies
- 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread https://hexbear.net/post/4737618
- ⚔ Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread https://hexbear.net/post/4738774
- ✨ Talk with fellow Trans comrades in the New Weekly Trans thread https://hexbear.net/post/4735043
- 👊 New Weekly Improvement thread https://hexbear.net/post/4727606
- 🧡 Disabled comm megathread https://hexbear.net/post/4773155
- Parenting Chat https://hexbear.net/post/4729234
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
I work/study/do research in healthcare and I’ve been recently thinking about how much of modern medicine/healthcare is based on the guarantee of antibiotics working properly. On the other hand, there are more and more resistant bacteria floating around the communities, ie. outside the ICU where they usually come from.
Antibiotic resistance and development is yet another barrier that capitalism fundamentally cannot overcome, regardless of how many reforms you make. Research for new drugs take a long time and is very expensive. Along with this, the correct way of using antibiotics is avoiding overuse or just reducing the use in general, specially of new drugs that bacteria can’t resist yet. That means that companies can’t expect to make a profit out of any new drug that they develop, since trying to use them as little as possible is the rational way.
In other words, the profit motive is unable to create new antibiotics in the manner that the world needs right now, let alone in the much worse future. If we lose antibiotics, modern medicine mostly comes to a halt. For example, say goodbye to surgeries and also to your little niece that got an ear infection that every kid gets at least once. Tooth extractions becomes a very high risk procedure, too.
People died of tooth issues a lot in the past. Its shocking. Today its non-trival.
Antifungals are starting to get resisted by fungus too. It’s actually a really serious issue, and we don’t really have anything like Vancomycin or antibiotics of last resort for antifungals.
The Soviets had a loooong research program into bacteriophages that we’re more or less rediscovering. It’s one of those things, in Math you often have to name stuff after the 2nd person to discover it and in Biology apparently you’re the second group to discover it after some soviet scientists lol. Phage therapy could work as bacteria get more resistant to antibiotics - its also not energetically free for them to produce beta-lactamases, they stop eventually even if they retain the plasmid or genes for it.
But you’re absolutely right that this is a contradiction in healthcare under a profit motive. If research and production is for profit instead of for need - then we’re hooped unless they get some miracle, which is what this late stage of capitalism seems to be pinning it’s hopes on
are these the compounds that enable anti-biotic resistance?
One of them, yes! As an analogy, it’s as if a tree secreted a substance that breaks apart the chain of the chainsaw
Yeah they cut at the active compound in most antibiotics (antibiotics usually inhibit cell wall formation in bacteria, they can’t handle the osmotic pressure without a cell wall and more or less explode 🤘)
We’ve had a MDR fungus in one of the ICUs I work at
Poor dude had to get half his face removed due to it, then it started growing on the other half, too. The only risk factor he had was diabetes, btw