Chris Hedges: Hear the 99% Roar

Yves Smiths posts an interview with Chris Hedges: Hear the 99% Roar on TVO. He answers some questions about his latest book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and the Occupy Movement in general.

Hedges sees the Occupy Movement as the genesis of a revolutionary movement. He sees parallels with the Solidarity and other East European movements of the 1980's as well as the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's.

Hedges says that the revolutionary movements develop from the declasse intellectuals favoured by Mikhail Bakunin rather than the proletariat promoted by Karl Marx. My understanding is that some intellectuals will separate themselves from the ruling class and align themselves with the oppressed class in order to articulate what the oppressed are feeling. The oppressed classes lead the revolution, not the intellectuals.

The Tea Party in the USA is seen by Hedges as a proto-Fascist movement. He gives a checklist rather than a class analysis of the movement. My own opinion is posted at Proto-Fascism in the USA back in 2005.

Hedges sees the Black Bloc movement as disruptive and divisive in the Occupy Movement because they allow the police and media to discredit the Occupy Movement as violent, and so alienate it from the main-stream. This goes against the non-violence that Hedges is promoting as a necessary prerequisite for a successful revolution.

Hedges sees the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 as a putsch rather than a social revolution. I see this as a canard to discredit the Bolshevik Party.

I think Hedges sees revolution as a change in the power structure. He would see that a corrupt elite is replaced by a more liberal one. I see revolution as a change in the social relations. Serfs would become workers. Or workers would become owners.

Read more!

The Promise and Circumscribed Potential of Worker-Owned Businesses « naked capitalism

Yves Smith writes about The Promise and Circumscribed Potential of Worker-Owned Businesses

While our prolonged economic downturn is concentrating power and wealth in fewer and fewer hands, it is also stimulating efforts to create more democratic business models.

Smith thinks that the standard reference model of the Mondragon Corporation is successful because it may in part be a reflection of Basque culture which did not have a Feudal system.

One city, Richmond, California, is promoting worker co-operatives. The main difficulty is that these co-operatives cannot find funding. Banks are suspicious of such ventures.

Smith quotes from the Financial Times:

According to the US Federation of Worker Co-operatives, these businesses are mostly in urban areas, at businesses such as restaurants and cab companies. In other industries, such as home healthcare, co-ops have helped to prevent employee attrition and provide more reliable care for the elderly. “The worker co-op takes a profession that is low pay, low morale, and high turnover and makes people worker-owners so they’ve got a vested interest in that business,” says Liz Bailey, interim chief executive of the National Cooperative Business Association.

Emphasis Mine

Read more!

Israeli court throws out family's lawsuit over death of US activist Rachel Corrie

Israeli court throws out family's lawsuit over death of US activist Rachel Corrie:

Corrie's family had accused Israel of intentionally and unlawfully killing their 23-year-old daughter, launching a civil case in the northern Israeli city of Haifa after a military investigation had cleared the army of wrongdoing.

The principal reason for the decision is that Israel was at war:

In a ruling read out to the court, judge Oded Gershon called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident," but said the state was not responsible because the incident had occurred during what he termed a war-time situation.

Since Israel has always been at war with the Palestinians, then there can only be “regrettable accidents” for which the Israeli state is not responsible, no matter what the IDF does.

What I find most disturbing in this article is:

Few Israelis showed much sympathy for Corrie's death, which took place at the height of the uprising in which thousands of Palestinians were killed and hundreds of Israelis died in suicide bombings.

So much for Israel being a light unto the nations of the Earth.

Read more!