Bring war criminals to justice

John Pilger says to Bring war criminals to justice.

The use of depleted Uranium (DU) in weapons by US and allied forces have led to an epidemic of cancers within Iraq. Yet, access to vital medical equipment is being denied, and the extent of the problem is being hidden:

The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the cancer program of the World Health organisation (WHO) in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: “Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq Sanctions Committee].”

He told me: “We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics.”

Recently, Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: “The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers.”

Today, a WHO report, the result on a landmark study conducted jointly with the Iraqi Ministry of Health has been “delayed”. Covering 10,800 households, it contains “damning evidence”, says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains “top secret”.

The report says that birth defects have risen to a “crisis” right across Iraqi society where DU and other toxic heavy metals were by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports “phenomenal” multiple cancers in entire families.

Dr Jawad Al-Ali had the abstract of his report published as EPIDEMIOLOGICAL STUDY AT THE SOUTH OF IRAQ (BASRAH CITY) for a conference, and there is a series of slides called The Effects of Wars on Iraq (some of the pictures are quite horrific).

So murder by radioactivity is acceptable if it is done in Iraq, while murder by cleaver is not if it is done in Woolwich.

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I am a racist and so are you

Helen Razer says that I am a racist and so are you.

Her conclusion is that:

Helen Razer is a horrid racist who selfishly fails to understand the pain of indigenous Australia.

…

I am white and I am Australian and I am a racist. The only way out of this shunless truth is to acknowledge it.

I agree. I am a white Australian who has benefited from the genocide of the Australian Aborigines and their continuing exploitation. I was brought up and educated to see them as sub-humans and not deserving of respect.

Yet, as I was an outsider because of my stutter, I had friends who were Aborigines during primary school. We were outcasts together.

Racism is something that is taught. It is an instrument of control. It separates people based on spurious categories.

We forget now, but white people used to discriminate against other white people.

In her book, “The History of White People, Nell Painter traces the evolution of whiteness as a concept passing from the Greeks to the Germans to the Nordic to the rich English to all English to include Irish and Germans to all Europeans and to those of 'mixed race'. She argues that whiteness is constructed to serve a political purpose. The enlargement is to co-opt former outsiders to become part of the system.

Malcolm X once said that:

You cannot have Capitalism without Racism.

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Compliance

Following on from Lack of Character?, I think the movie, “Compliance”, is a deeply disturbing one about how the perception of power can overcome moral scruples.

In this movie, the characters believe that they have no choice but to follow the dictates of the prank caller who calims to be a policeman. The mere assumption that teh caller is genuine is enough to give credibility to whatever lies they tell.

No matter how bizarre the request the caller makes, any moral scruples are quickly overcome by either threats or reasons. At the end of the movie, the manager is asked why didn't she stop the prank. Her reply was that the caller always had an answer to any objections she raised.

The prank only stopped when the gardener would not go along with the requests of the caller. His moral scruples were offended in such a way that he refused to comply with instructions.

What is important for me was that the higher the status of the employee or manager, the more likely they were to comply. Did this mean that advancement in a Capitalist economy requires one to overcome moral scruples? It would seem so.

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Lack of Character?

Dan Little questions the idea of immoral behaviour is due to a Lack of Character?

Little considers &ldqui;Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior by John Doris. Little puts Doris' thesis as:

the basic theory of action associated with virtue ethics and the theory of moral character is most likely incorrect. The character theory maintains that individuals have stable traits that lead them to behave similarly in a range of relevant but differing circumstances. A person with the traits of honesty or compassion will behave truthfully or benevolently in a range of circumstances, when it is easy to do so and when it is more difficult.

Doris' thesis is seen as an endorsement of situationism which …is the competing view that maintains that people's actions are more sensitive to features of the situation of action than to enduring underlying traits.

Little's conclusion is that:

Pure situationism seems to run deeply contrary to our ordinary, commonsense understandings of how and why people behave as they do. Doris doesn't have too much regard for commonsense when it comes to understanding behavior, though he does address the topic. But if we think about the people we've observed most closely in professional contexts, personal life, and politics, it seems hard to avoid the sober conclusion that these individuals do indeed have "character", for better or worse, and that their characters differ. This one can be counted on to deflect responsibility for bad outcomes in his or her division; that one is solidly committed to his spouse; and that one is forever expedient in appealing for votes. People differ in these ways in our ordinary experience; so it is difficult to find the experiments of Milgram or Zimbardo sufficient to erase our reliance on the idea of persistent character traits in ordinary people. (Could we design experiments that seek to evaluate characteristics like "avoids responsibility," "honors familial commitments," "acts out of devotion to principle"?)

My understanding of Marxist morality is that it tends towards situationism. People can only choose between the choices that their material circumstance allows.

For example, the necessity of earning a living may compel a person to accept an immoral job.

The purpose of a socialist revolution is to expand the choices available to workers so that they are not compelled to make immoral choices.

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Leninism for now

Paul Le Blanc writes about Leninism for now.

Le Blanc writes that:

Our purpose – as revolutionary socialists – is not simply to persuade people that socialism could be so much better than capitalism. Our purpose is not simply to protest, and organise protests, against capitalist injustice. Our purpose is not simply to organise struggles to bring about improvements under capitalism. Our purpose is not simply to interpret history and current events (or anything else) from a revolutionary socialist standpoint. Our primary purpose is to overturn existing power relationships, and to put political power into the hands of an organised, class-conscious working class (the class that we are part of, the class of the labouring majority), which is the key to establishing a socialist democracy.

Emphasis Mine

All revolutionary activity should be directed to that end. The daily struggles, protests, strikes, articles, newspapers are all conceived to raise the consciousness of the working class about its historic role and its historic duty. We are charged with saving the human species from Capitalism.

Le Blanc argues that:

The revolutionary vanguard is not those who claim to be building a revolutionary vanguard party under the banner of Lenin. The vanguard is a broad layer of the working class that has a significant degree of class-consciousness, that has some understanding of capitalism and the need to go beyond it, with some accumulated experience and commitment in the struggle against oppression and exploitation. Only when an organisation has a significant membership base in this layer can it be considered a revolutionary vanguard party.

Emphasis Mine

The problem is that no such party now exists. The reasons are many: the triumph of neo-liberalism; the destruction of unions; the fall of the Soviet Union; the re-emergence of Capitalism in China.

Le Blanc outlines a strategy to continue with a United Front approach of joining in the common struggle and learning from each other:

I think it is important for our different groups of the socialist left not to rush into hothouse efforts to forge some premature organisational unity. Instead we should focus on working together in real, practical struggles, with an eye towards possible unity, but with a focus on the actual struggles. Those struggles are the necessary, transformative precondition for possible unity. The only fruitful unity will come on the basis of joint action in such real, practical struggles. If such unity is achieved, the result might be a democratic, durable, well-run organisation of several thousand, with full-time organisers and new technologies being utilised to enable more and more people to become activist cadres working together to build local struggles, as well as advancing left-wing educational and cultural work, throughout the country. Such an organisation could

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Workers of the world unite!

James Adonis suggests that it is time for the Workers of the world unite!

The democratisation of the workplace, I suspect, is the way of the future. And by ‘democratisation’ I’m not referring merely to equality among employees and leaders when making decisions. I’m referring to employees themselves being both the owners and the leaders of the organisation. It’s already happening.

Besides referring to the standard example of Mondragon Corporation in Spain, Adonis refers to C-Mac Industries (Aust) as an employee-owned business. The website, however, says that it is a family and staff owned Australian company.

Adonis contends that employee-owned businesses perform better:

Data sourced by Employee Ownership Australia, a non-profit association helping organisations make the transition, show that these businesses have a higher rate of survival than other forms of enterprise. Employees, meanwhile, are four times less likely to be retrenched during a downturn. They also earn more than their peers working elsewhere.

And Adonis has the cheek to suggest that:

Putting people before profits. Surely that’s a good thing, right?

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Paul Le Blanc: The Third American Revolution — How do we get from the capitalist present to a socialist future?

Paul Le Blanc: The Third American Revolution — How do we get from the capitalist present to a socialist future?

Le Blanc defines Socialism as follows:

Socialism means rule by the people over the economic structures and resources that we need to keep ourselves alive and healthy, to engage in creative activity, to maintain good relationships with each other, to be able to have good and meaningful lives. The economy would be socially owned, democratically controlled and planfully utilised to meet the needs of all. It could be described as economic democracy.

This is to differentiate from the current system of dictatorship of the Capitalists, Formal democracy stops at the factory or office. Economic decisions are made in the interests of the owners, not society.

Change can only be brought about by struggle:

The actual history of the United States has been shaped and punctuated by struggles for freedom and social justice. To the extent that we have any freedoms at all and to the extent that there has been dignity and wellbeing for our people, it has only come about through the dynamics so perceptively described in 1857 by Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave who became a great spokesperson and organiser in the anti-slavery struggle:

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. … If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The key to the struggle is the development of consciousness:

The revolutionary socialist relies on the developing consciousness and power of a mass working-class base, putting pressure on all politicians, being in the hip pocket of none. To struggle successfully for reforms can help pave the way for mass socialist consciousness and a socialist future. The key is to build social movements and struggles that are politically independent of any pro-capitalist politicians. While some members of such movements will, in fact, support such politicians, the movement as a whole will need to remain independent in order to remain effective in being able to pressure all politicians.

A revolutionary party is part of the electoral process but is beholden to none. The electoral is part of the struggle:

Activists seeking to prepare the way for a socialist future face the challenge of developing tactics, educational and organising efforts and overarching strategies designed to build a durable mass socialist movement capable of winning meaningful victories in the here-and-now while preparing the way for the working-class majority coming to power, with a transition from capitalism to socialism. There will be a need to discuss, debate and define where electoral activities, street actions and other means toward that end fit into the overall scheme of things.

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What about Marx?

Dan Little asks What about Marx?.

Little concludes that:

So what about it? Is Marxism relevant today? Yes, if we can avoid the dogmatism and rigidity that were often associated with the tradition. Power, exploitation, class, structures of production and distribution, property relations, workplace hierarchy -- these features certainly continue to be an important part of our social world. We need to think of Marx's corpus as a multiple source of hypotheses and interpretations about how capitalism works. And we need to recognize fully that no theoretical framework captures the whole of history or society. Marxism is not a comprehensive theory of social organization and change. But it does provide a useful set of hypotheses about how some of the key social mechanisms work in a class-divided society. Seen from that perspective, Marxist thought serves as a sort of proto-paradigm or mental framework in terms of which to pursue more specific social and historical investigations.

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Eight die in Bangladesh garment factory fire as 18 more factories are closed down

Mass murder continues in Bangladesh as Eight die in Bangladesh garment factory fire as 18 more factories are closed down.

Nearly a thousand workers have been killed in recent weeks. And the response is:

The government at the weekend in a joint statement with the ILO and factory owners promised a labour law reform package that would allow "the right to collective bargaining" and provide for "occupational safety and health".

A United Nations expert group Wednesday urged international clothing brands not to pull out of the country but to work together with the government, international organisations, and civil society to address working conditions.

The reason companies moved production to countries like Bangladesh is because there were no unions and the lack of safe working conditions. This made production costs lower, and profits larger.

At least, the criminals have been arrested:

A preliminary government investigation blamed the collapse on the vibrations of giant electricity generators and police have arrested 12 people including the complex's owner and four garment factory owners in connection with the disaster.

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Hawkings joins Academic Boycott of Israel

Juan Cole reports that Hawkings joins Academic Boycott of Israel.

Physicist Stephen Hawkings’ decision to boycott the annual President’s Conference in Jerusalem this year has been confirmed by Cambridge University. The university initially attempted to deny a political motive and said Hawkings was not going because of his health. It acknowledged the political motive when [t]he Guardian newspaper provided it with a copy of Hawkings’ May 3 withdrawal letter

This campaign of BDS has been going on for several years. Samah Sabawi wrote, in 2011, that:

Supporters of the non-violent global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement — especially members of the Greens — have been subjected to abuse in a deliberate national campaign of misinformation and slurs orchestrated against them. It has questioned their values and integrity and falsely accused them of anti-Semitism.

A great evil, the Holocaust, is being used to justify another evil, the occupation of Palestine.

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And Then There Was One

Tom Engelhart riffs on And Then There Was One: Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth.

Engelhart writes that:

The present capitalist model (the only one available) for a rising power, whether China, India, or Brazil, is also a model for planetary decline, possibly of a precipitous nature. The very definition of success -- more middle-class consumers, more car owners, more shoppers, which means more energy used, more fossil fuels burned, more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere -- is also, as it never would have been before, the definition of failure. The greater the “success,” the more intense the droughts, the stronger the storms, the more extreme the weather, the higher the rise in sea levels, the hotter the temperatures, the greater the chaos in low-lying or tropical lands, the more profound the failure. The question is: Will this put an end to the previous patterns of history, including the until-now-predictable rise of the next great power, the next empire? On a devolving planet, is it even possible to imagine the next stage in imperial gigantism?

Human survival and Capitalism cannot continue to co-exist. We must make a choice.

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Suffering of Aboriginal people continues

John Pilger says that the Suffering of Aboriginal people continues.

In Western Australia, the brutal past of Rottnest Island is hidden away from the tourists who visit it.

What was done was the torture, humiliation and murder of the First Australians. Wrenched from their communities in an insidious genocide that divided and emasculated the indigenous nations, shackled men and boys as young as eight endured the perilous nine-hour journey in an open longboat. Cold, sick and terrified prisoners were jammed into a windowless "holding cell", like an oversized kennel.

Today, an historical plaque refers to it as The Boathouse. The suppression is breathtaking.

This suppression continues today:

During the boom, Aboriginal incarceration has more than doubled. Interned in often rat-infested cells, almost 60 per cent of the state's young prisoners are Aboriginal — out of 2.5 per cent of the population. While their mothers hold vigils outside, aboriginal children are held in solitary confinement in an adult jail.

A former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me the state was now "racking and stacking" black Australians. Their rate of incarceration is five times that of apartheid South Africa.

The Aboriginal stereotype is violent, yet the violence routinely meted out to black Australians by authority is of little interest. Deaths in custody are common. An elder known as Mr. Ward was arrested for driving under the influence on a bush road. In searing heat, he was driven more than 300 miles in the iron pod of a prison van run by the British security company GSL. Inside the mobile cell the temperature reached 50 degrees centigrade. Mr. Ward cooked to death, his stomach burned raw where he had collapsed on the van's scorching floor.

Yet Australians condemn Indonesia for its treatment of prisoners (only if they are young, white women).

And people wonder why Australia is violent and racist because that is what the governments practice daily against the Aborigines. State violence becomes normal behaviour.

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Notes on defining the working class (2)

Continuing on from yesterday's Notes on defining the working class.

I suppose the biggest threat to a Communist revolution is the loss of the social nature of work as automation increases. Workers will find themselves devoting more time to tending machines rather than interacting with other workers.

This interaction would have been about how to survive on the job. Now, it is not uncommon for a worker to get killed in a factory without anyone noticing that it has happened. There was even one case where a worker disappeared into a pool of water and no one noticed for several hours.

There is a contradiction in the increasing automation of the workplace. The development of the productive forces has to reach a certain level before a Communistic society becomes sustainable. Yet, the isolation of workers in the workplace means that the solidarity of workers is dissolved.

Yet, the proletariat is now garvitating to Department I. MacMillan seems to say that anyone else but the workers of Department II leading the revolution would deform it because they are not part of the productive process.

But the workers in Department I are developing the class consciousness about where they are in the economic process. Unfortunately, they are adhering to the petit bourgeiose view of the world.

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Notes on defining the working class

Stephanie McMillan posts some Notes on defining the working class.

McMillan insists that:

The point that is often forgotten though, and which I am insisting upon, is that productive workers, the working class, as the ones who are at the core (or foundation) of the entire capitalist economy, who produce the surplus value that allows the existence of profit and its re-investment as new capital, is the only class in fundamental antagonistic contradiction to capital. By emancipating themselves as workers, they have to destroy all the myriad social relations (in the economic, political and ideological fields) that make up capitalism. This puts them in a unique position.

From MacMillan's description, I assume she means that these workers are in Department II. It is these workers alone that produce the surplus value that Capitalists turn into profits.

This poses an interesting problem with the decline in absolute and relative numbers of productive workers. If the whole of Department II were to be automated, would McMillan say that a proletarian revolution would be impossible because the true proletariat no longer exists?

MacMillan goes on to say that:

Workers who produce surplus value are the only ones who, by asserting their interests and following them through to their endpoint–stopping exploitation–can end the production of surplus value, and thus the reproduction of capital. Only they can follow through to the goal of overturning capitalism. No other classes will go that far (and that has been shown, historically, time and time again). This is why the working class must lead the revolutionary process, if we are to achieve the defeat of capitalism. They have to build an alliance with all the other dominated classes, who will together overturn the system. But their line must lead, or capitalism will be quickly reproduced/restored (as occurred in the Soviet Union and China).

This would mean that the proletariat (workers in Department II) have a limited time in which to launch a true proletarian revolution before their class is annihlated through automation.

The problem for advanced economies like Australia, revolutionary consciousness is more likely to arise among the intellectual working classes: professionals; artisans; relatively privileged ones. This consciousness is driven by the precarious nature of the working life. And it would tend to be conservative in nature in order to keep the status quo.

This is probably why advanced economies would tend to go Fascist rather than Communistic in times of crises.

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The Incredible Shrinking Cost of Solar Energy Drives Mega-Projects around the World

Juan Cole points to The Incredible Shrinking Cost of Solar Energy Drives Mega-Projects around the World.

It is estimated that the all-in-cost for Solar panels will have dropped from USD1.29 per Watt in 2009 to USD0.42 per Watt in 2015. So much has the cost dropped that:

Construction has begun on the world’s largest solar plant. MidAmerican Solar and SunPower Corp. are building a 579 megawatt installation, the Antelope Valley Solar Project, in Kern and Los Angeles counties in California. That is half a gigawatt, just enormous. It will provide electricity to 400,000 homes in the state (roughly 2 million people?), and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 775,000 tons a year. The US emits 5 billion metric tons a year of C02, second only to China, and forms a big part of the world’s carbon problem all by itself. We just need 645 more of the Antelope Valley projects.

Cole overlooks the critical issue of suitable sites for solar plants. All of the easy sites are now being developed. This has certainly lowered the cost of adoption of solar technology, but the problem comes when marginal sites are brought online.

An interesting development has been:

Important new research also shows that hybrid plants that have both solar panels and wind turbines dramatically increase efficiency and help with integration into the electrical grid. Earlier concerns that the turbines would cast shadows and so detract from the efficiency of the solar panels appear to have been overblown. Because in most places in the US there is more sun in the summer and more wind in the winter, a combined plant keeps the electricity feeding into the grid at a more constant rate all year round, which is more desirable than big spikes and fall-offs.

This is a fortunate geography for the USA that they are able to create such hybrid plants.

No one seems to have considered the problem of dust on solar panels. Deserts have loose sand, and wind will severely hamper the collection of solar energy as well as abrade the equipment.

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Rediscovering Lenin

Phil Gasper writes on Rediscovering Lenin.

Gaspar argues that Lenin was not an elist as portrayed in Western propaganda, rejects the two (2) arguments raised by leftist critics of Leninist parties:

The first argument is that Leninism has always been undemocratic and elitist. The second argument is that it is implausible to think that the experience of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party that he led to power in the Russian Revolution of 1917 has any relevance for anti-capitalists today operating in completely different circumstances.

Gaspar argues that Lenin saw:

… the whole point of a revolutionary party was to prepare the way for revolution. Historical forces might present the opportunity for revolutionary change, but without active organisation and intervention, the ability to influence a mass movement during a period of intense crisis, and an understanding of when to advance and when to retreat, the moment would be lost. More than that, socialists would have to spend years patiently engaging in smaller struggles, both to learn how to lead as individuals and to build a party with the capacity to lead a successful revolution in the future.

The core tenet of the Leninist theory of the party is:

…the principle of democratic centralism, which he summed up as “freedom of discussion, unity of action”. Lenin argued for the need to “work tirelessly … to see to it that all the higher-standing bodies are elected, accountable and subject to recall”.

Gaspar concludes that:

The bottom line is that revolutionary organisations today need to draw on the most democratic elements of Lenin’s legacy, and where necessary to create new structures and processes of their own. Democratic centralism requires not just formal democracy before unity in action, but a culture of debate and discussion, where those in the minority can express their views fully.

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Kotok on Gold

Barry Ritholtz reposts Kotok on Gold.

Kotok argues that:

…gold still maintains one important characteristic out of the three that we attribute to a functional currency.

These three (3) characteristics Kotok describes as:

1. “…the ability to exchange easily in transactions”
2. “…act as a unit of account, a method of measurement”
3. “…store of value…”

Kotok argues that only third characteristic applied to gold these days. And it is in this characteristic that the fall in the gold price can be accounted for:

In pressing Cyprus to sell, Europeans have announced to the world that there may be a large seller of gold. World traders in gold and other commodities will quickly jump on that trade. They know that if Cyprus breaks loose with the sale of its gold, countries like Greece, Portugal, and Slovenia may be next. They cannot see buying gold, thereby raising gold’s US-dollar-denominated price, in such a circumstance; but they can see selling it short, or otherwise trading it to the downside.

Kotok speculates that the stated intention by the Bank of Japan to buy gold mat eventually force the price of gold back up, but the main price driver seems to be the fear of the retail investor about what is happening in Europe.

Gold is also a consumer item in that it is used in electronic devices for wiring, and in jewelery.

Kotok's characterisations of gold all stem from its first one. The historical ability of gold to be used in exchanges between people allowed it to become money.

Although it is possible for me to exchange oranges for apples, I may not be able to exchange apples for toilet paper. However, I could exchange oranges for gold, and then exchange the gold for toilet paper. It is this general acceptance by people in making exchanges that turns gold into money.

Because gold can be readily exchanged for any commodities that I desire, I can make comparisons between different types of commodities in terms of how much gold I could exchange for the commodity. So, the ability to be exchanged for any commodity makes gold a unit of account.

Since gold is not perishable as copper or apples or oranges or toilet paper, gold can still be exchanged for commodities at some future time. Thus, the store of value is merely the anticipation of an exchange for commodities.

So, we have a contradiction due to the historical process of gold ceasing to be money in general circulation, but retaining the possibility that it could become money again sometime in the future.

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Some Thoughts on Worker Control

Some thoughts on worker-control under Capitalism.

The examples cited in yesterday's post about how Occupy Sandy boosts worker-run coops amid rebuild are really sparse.

Except for Spain and Venezuela, the other examples are about workers who have been forced out of the Capitalist system by the closing of businesses, and they are filling a gap in the economy that the Capitalists are unwilling to fill.

My concern has been about the lack of political education that has occurred in these cases. The difference in Venezuela seems to be that the political ideological is driving the change to worker-control, instead of workers taking control because they have no other choice. There the education of the workers seems to be proceeding along with the take-over of businesses.

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Occupy Sandy boosts worker-run coops amid rebuild

Peter Rugh writes that Occupy Sandy boosts worker-run coops amid rebuild.

Rugh gives a brief overview of worker-run co-ops around the world, especially in the coastal neighbourhood of Far Rockaway in New York City:

One of those bigger projects is a worker-run cooperative initiative, organised by Occupy Sandy and supported by the Working World, a group that specialises in incubating collectively owned businesses.

The initiative is well suited to Far Rockaway because worker-run enterprises have a history of flourishing in environments of economic distress or political upheaval.

In 2001, when Argentina defaulted on its international loans and the country’s ownership class fled, Argentines took over abandoned factories and established networks of producers and distributors.

In Venezuela, worker-run cooperatives were at the heart of the vision for 21st-century socialism, and Hugo Chavez’s administration helped create tens of thousands of collectively owned businesses over the last 14 years.

Most notably, Spanish workers in the Basque region created the Mondragon Corporation, the world’s largest federation of cooperatives, during the Franco dictatorship in the 1950s. Today more than 250 enterprises operate under the Mondragon banner. The federation, which spans 77 countries and employs 83,000 workers, has been widely praised.

As noted yesterday, Australia is beginning to see some progress in the adoption of worker co-ops.

Rugh argues that one important, immediate advantage of work co-ops is that:

Worker-run cooperatives, in contrast, could offer a way for community members to sell the products of their labor without selling their labor itself — a shift that would keep capital within the community and cash in the pockets of workers.

On the political development of workers' consciousness, Rugh writes that:

Richard Wolff, professor of economics at the New School and author of Democracy at Work, a study of cooperative businesses, argues that forming cooperatives can be the first step in enacting a sweeping social and economic shift.

Wolff envisions a transformation, similar to the social shift from feudalism to capitalism, in which cooperatives replace corporations and goods are distributed through a democratically planned economy.

The cooperatives that Wolff talks about, and the ones that Occupy Sandy is aiming to establish, are more accurately known as worker self-directed enterprises: businesses that organise democratically collective ownership at the point of production.

I would think that Wolff is naive to believe that the Capitalists are going to let the worker co-ops take over without a fight. As I noted in Argentine Factory Wins Legal Battle:

The main problem is that of dual power in Argentina. Some factories are controlled by the workers but they are relying on the Capitalist state for legitimacy through the parliamentry system. This deprives the workers' movement of a growth in consciousness in the hope of accomodation within the Capitalist system.

Unfortunately, one cannot accelerate the education of the workers about the Capitalist system, and the mythologies that are maintained about it. The workers will learn at their own pace.

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Worker-owner sustainable industry one step closer

Susan Price writes that Worker-owner sustainable industry one step closer.

Price writes that:

After a successful crowd-funding campaign that raised the funds for a manufacturing licence, Earthworker Cooperative Australia and Eureka’s Future Workers Cooperative will install their first solar hot water unit in Melbourne on April 15.

Australia definitely lags behind the world with development of manufacturing co-operatives. Australia does have a history of co-operatives in agriculture (especially dairy farming, and sugar cane), and financial institutions (credit unions, and building societies).

It will be interesting to see how this co-operative develops in the future, and how the workers develop their consciousness about their place in the Capitalist system.

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Class Hatred and Bad Memories of Thatcher

Juan Cole muses on Class Hatred and Bad Memories of Thatcher.

Cole reports that:

The hatred for the late Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister, among a broad segment of the British public has manifested itself in visible and undeniable ways in the week after her death, but these are not highlighted on American television. The status quo corporate media are afraid of admitting that policy-makers who favor the rich and punish the middle and working classes are deeply hated by the latter. Dead leaders have to be represented on television as being revered by the entirety of the public (an imaginary public for which the corporate anchors can serve as ventriloquists). That many Americans despise Ronald Reagan is likewise an unmentionable on the airwaves.

The ideologocal state apparatus cannot deviate from the illusion that the neo-liberalism made Britain better. They must educate the under-class to correct thinking.

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Lose Your House, Collect $300

Ted Rall wonders why Why Aren’t Rioters Burning Down the Banks? in Lose Your House, Collect $300.

Rall reports that:

The foreclosure scandal helped spark the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Promising justice and compensation for the victims, President Obama’s Justice Department joined lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of several states.

Last year, Obama announced that the government had concluded a “landmark settlement” with the banks that would “deliver some measure of justice for those families that have been victims of their abusive practices.” The Politico newspaper called the $26 billion deal “a big win for the White House.” $26 billion. Sounds impressive, right?

Rall calculates that were about five (5) million people affected by these illegal practices by the banks. Most will get between $150 and $300 on average (assuming an average of two (2) people per household). The average for the overall settlement is $1,000.

Rall asks:

Why aren’t those five million people stringing up bank execs from telephone poles? It’s gotta be the Paxil.

I suppose it is the trained passivity of Western Society. Even the Occupy movement was heavily influenced by the non-violence mantra. This is probably why it faded from the scene. There is only so much that non-violence can achieve.

The basic premise of the non-violence is that the system can change peacefully and incrementally. But no system can contradict its core philosophy, and survive.

For Capitalism, the capitalists' return of investment has to be protected. Banks invested in these mortgages, so they should get their money back. This settlement is a small price to pay to let enough anger out of the system so that the thievery can continue unabated.

Rall is really appalled at:

But what really gets me is the 53 families who are getting $125,000 payouts for losing homes they were 100% up to date on.

Rall should realise that the only property rights that matter in a Capitalist system are those of the Capitalists which the state has been realiably protecting. The cops were protecting the stock markets and banks, not the homes of the workers.

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Capitalism and Inequality: What the Right and the Left Get Wrong

Jerry Z. Muller writes about Capitalism and Inequality: What the Right and the Left Get Wrong in the March/April 2013 edition of Foreign Affairs.

Muller describes what the acceptable limits of the debate about inequality are:

Recent political debate in the United States and other advanced capitalist democracies has been dominated by two issues: the rise of economic inequality and the scale of government intervention to address it.

Muller seems to be in the managed Capitalism camp.

Muller explains the reason for inequality as:

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it — because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords. (p.30)

So, Muller thinks that failure to achieve is the individual's fault. This is an interesting approach to take, however, because Muller admits that inequality arises naturally in the Capitalism through the inequality of opportunities which individuals are ill-equiped to take advantage of.

Muller is clearly worried that this inequality will lead to mischief caused by those who fail to understand that they are the problem, not the system:

Despite what many on the right think, however, this is a problem for everybody, not just those who are doing poorly or those who are ideologically committed to egalitarianism — because if left unaddressed, rising inequality and economic insecurity can erode social order and generate a populist backlash against the capitalist system at large. (p.30)

What Muller wants is:

Contemporary capitalist politics need to accept that inequality and insecurity will continue to be the inevitable result of market operations and find ways to shield citizens from their consequences — while somehow still preserving the dynamism that produces capitalism's vast economic and cultural benefits in the first place. (p.31)

Emphasis Mine

In Muller's view, there is no longer need to pretend that Capitalism will eventually make everyone better off. That is a myth.

What Muller fails to realise is that such government intervention requires teh exapnsion of the tax base which the rich are resisting. Since the wealth is accumulating at the top end, this means that the tax base is actually shrinking. So, we have the need to increase the tax base to avoid unrest, while those who are in danger refuse to sacrifice more of their wealth to do so.

All we need now is for some silly bitch to say: Let them cake!

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Game of Thrones and Our Scheming Elites

Yves Smith reviews Game of Thrones and Our Scheming Elites.

Smith is reading the series of books for "The Game of Thrones" by Martin:

The perspective in Martin’s books is a medieval reflection of the world envisioned by neoclassical economics, of isolated individuals working for their own self interest. There’s no real community in war-torn Westros, but even before the struggle broke out, the court was a hotbed of plots, spying, and ambition. Given the way, say, the Ptolemys plotted against each other, this isn’t necessarily that far removed from the dynamics of some pre-modern courts. But this is the through line of the series, the juice that carries readers forward. And sadly, this seems to be the juice that drives the world we live in now.

Before you get cynical and say, that’s just the way it is, that’s simply not accurate. The current level of corruption and cynicism is hardly inevitable; it’s a social construct. Look at Linux, where developers collaborated to produce code, for no money, out of pride in craft. Victor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, therapist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, would often start out by asking patients, “Why haven’t you killed yourself?” His experience was the things that people lived for were either people they loved or creative work (Lambert’s “Do what only you can do”). Similarly, psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has made a study of happiness, has concluded it comes through a state he calls flow, where one is deeply engrossed in an activity (for instance, the famed “zone” in sports).

The books and television series are all part of the ideological reproduction of Capitalism. It is necessary to educate humans to be self-centred so as to adjust them to the rampant individualism.

Communism allows people to develop themselves.

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Gradual institutional change

Dan Little investigates Gradual institutional change.

Little considers instiutions to have a degree of plasticity in that:

The basic idea of plasticity is that institutions and organizations are the product of various kinds of structured human action, and that they can change over time. So we shouldn't think of institutions as having fixed characteristics, or as though they were equilibrium systems that tend to return to their original states after perturbances. … And this approach makes plain the high degree of path-dependency that institutions display.

In other words, history explains institutions.

Little cites studies that:

The theory they offer of gradual institutional change is an actor-centered theory. Incremental change occurs as the result of the opportunistic and strategic choices made by a range of actors within the institution.

But one thing Little leaves out is how institutions collapse. What happens when the institution is unable to provide answers to the problems that it encounters?

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The Damaging Links Between Food, Fuel and Finance: A Growing Threat to Food Security

Yves Smith is worried about The Damaging Links Between Food, Fuel and Finance: A Growing Threat to Food Security.

Timothy Wise notes that the speculators are moving out of energy and into agricultural products because of the decreased volatilty in the former and the increase for the latter.

However, Wise also notes price movements between the stock market, oil, and commodity have become correlated over the past decade as deregulation has accelerated and energy companies began investing in biofuels.

The biggest losers have been the poor who see more and more of their income eaten up by price increases in foodstuffs. This has, in turn, created great political instability throughout the Third World.

The crisis in Capitalism has arisen because the profits can be more readily realised through speculation rather than through productive investment.

There are not that many technologies that are ready for investment. Green energy could be the exception.

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Margaret Thatcher is Dead, but Thatcherism Lives On

Baroness Thatcher is dead.

The heroine of the class war against the British working class is dead.

The brutalisation of British politics in a new age of Imperialism is her legacy.

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Mexico: Can worker-owners make a big factory run?

Jane Slaughter investigates Mexico: Can worker-owners make a big factory run?

Slaughter asks:

How does a workers' cooperative with 1050 members function? It’s hard enough for workers' ownership to succeed at any size, because any company that competes in a market is subject to the same cost-cutting rat race as a capitalist firm. Workers are impelled to hammer themselves and cut their own pay or be driven out of business. And most workers here have just a middle-school education.

Yet the TRADOC co-op translation: Democratic Workers of the West—is thriving. Enthusiastic worker-owners have modernised their plant, increasing productivity and quality through their skilled work. Those factors together with their admittedly low prices have made it possible for them to compete on the world market.

The workers have done away with foremen because they supervise themselves. The management of the plant is at three (3) levels:

1. “TRADOC holds a general assembly only twice a year, but that assembly holds veto power over important decisions such as selling assets, making investments and buying machinery.”
2. The day-to-day running is handled by an administrative council consisting of:
• Cooper Tyre of Findlay Ohio has four (4) members;
• TRADOC Co-op has three (3) members
3. A general manager who is not a member of the co-op.

Despite what Slaughter portrays, TRADOC is not really a worker-owned factory. The co-op is a minority shareholder with a capitalist firm as the majority shareholder.

Slaughter concludes that:

But once the co-op started: it’s a pleasure to relate that workers really do run a factory better than the bosses. Not only do they control the plant floor, with no need for overseers, they come up with ideas to improve production in both senses: more and better tyres, less scrap — but also fewer backbreaking jobs.

This the same experience as the FASINPAT Zanon plant in Argentina as reported in Argentine Factory Wins Legal Battle. However, the Mexican experience has not exposed the workers to the same political battles as seen in Argentina.

The Argentine experience is more interesting politically because the workers expropriated the property of the Capitalists. They had to be more politically conscious to do this. They were assisted in their struggle with the Capitalists by the local government. So, a true workers' movement has not been born yet. But the workers can reflect upon this experience.

It would be interesting to see how Pope Francis I interprets this Argentine experiences in his teachings.

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The Death of Peak Oil

The Oil Drum considers The Death of Peak Oil.

Although world-wide production was flat for several years leading to the news that "peak-oil" had been reached, changes in technology and inclusion of natural gas into production figures has changed that some what:

Let's start by taking a look at what happened to global oil production in the years since those two very different views were offered. Total world liquids production as reported by the EIA had reached 85.2 million barrels a day at the time Pickens issued his pronouncement. It briefly passed that level again in June 2006 and June 2008, though mostly was flat or down over 2005-2009 before resuming a modest and erratic climb since then. The most recent number (December 2012) was 89.3 million barrels a day, 4 mb/d higher than where it had been in May 2005, and 12 mb/d below the levels that Yergin had expected we'd be capable of by 2010.

But more than half of that 4 mb/d increase has come in the form of natural gas liquids-- which can't be used to make gasoline for your car-- and biofuels-- which require a significant energy input themselves to produce. If you look at just field production and lease condensate, the increase since May 2005 has only been 1.7 mb/d.

The biggest technological change has been using horizontal fracking:

The rush to judgment seems to be based on the remarkable recent success from using horizontal fracturing to extract oil from tighter rock formations. Here for example is a graph of production from the state of Texas, one of the areas experiencing the most dramatic growth in tight oil production. In 2012, Texas produced almost 2 million barrels each day, up 800,000 barrels a day from 2010.

I wonder if the horizontal fracturing used in the extraction of oil is as damaging as CSG fracking. The same concerns over earthquakes and contaimination of aquifiers would seem to be the same.

Farida Iqbal reveals in White paper reveals gas industry scared of global protests that enivornmental action is effective in stopping such practices.

The white paper accurately describes the methods that have made the movement so successful. It lists the four effective campaign strategies as “grassroots mobilisation, online and social media, direct action, and networking”.

…

The white paper describes the global diversity of the movement. Anti-fracking movements are driven by such varied concerns as the need to protect farmland, climate change, and a desire to protect local jobs.

Water, however, is a global issue. Around the world, anti-fracking movements are united by their concern for the amount of water extracted and the risk of water contamination.

We face a critical juncture in world history. Our industrial civilization is heavily dependent on oil for farming, transportation, and manufacturing. Yet, to continue economic growth, we must contaiminate our water supply and imperil the climate. The question is no longer about standards of living but of human survival.

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Noisy bigots drown out silent bias

Waleed Aly observes that Noisy bigots drown out silent bias.

Aly writes that:

No, our real problem is the subterranean racism that goes largely unremarked upon and that we seem unable even to detect. Like the racism revealed by an Australian National University study, which found you are significantly less likely to get a job interview if you have a non-European name. The researchers sent fake CVs in response to job advertisements, changing only the name of the applicant. It turns out that if your surname is Chinese, you have to apply for 68 per cent more jobs to get the same number of interviews as an Anglo-Australian. If you are Middle Eastern, it's 64 per cent. If you are indigenous, 35 per cent.

This is the polite racism of the educated middle class. It's not as shocking as the viral racist tirades we've seen lately. No doubt the human resources managers behind these statistics would be genuinely appalled by such acts of brazen, overt racism. Indeed, they probably enforce racial discrimination rules in their workplace and are proud to do so. Nonetheless, theirs is surely a more devastating, enduring racism. There is no event to film, just the daily, invisible operation of a silent, pervasive prejudice. It does not get called out. It's just the way things are; a structure of society.

Emphasis Mine

Malcolm X is reported to have once said that he would rather talk to a red-neck racist than to a liberal because the former is racist to your face, while the latter is racist behind your back. He is reported to have said that you cannot have Capitalism without racism.

The Capitalist needs racism to divide the international working class, and to justify the daily atrocities that it commits through stravation, war, poverty, prisons, and lack of medical care.

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Supply Chain Problems Hitting Hospitals Near You

Yves Smith reports that Supply Chain Problems Hitting Hospitals Near You.

Smith argues that cost-cutting by drug companies have put public-health at risk by reducing inventory costs and keeping demand high:

The reason that it might seem OK to squeeze hospitals is precisely that it’s hard to point a finger at the drug companies. But notice the comment that these shortages can affect people in ICUs. It’s not hard to imagine a hospital having to ration limited supplies, say if some sort of disaster (big explosion, natural disaster) led hospitals in an area to have a flood of emergency room patients.

This looks like a case where the invisible hand of the market leads to a decrease in the well-being of the community.

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Russia: An oligarch’s mistake, an oligarch’s fate

Boris Kagarlitsky writes an obituary for Boris Abramovich Berezovsky who died in London on March 23, 2013 in Russia: An oligarch’s mistake, an oligarch’s fate.

Berevovsky's tragedy was a failure to accept the constraints of capitalist rule in a dependent country:

Most of the oligarchs of the 1990s understood and accepted the new rules, at times helping to draw them up. Berezovsky, however, could not adapt his personal nature to the new regime, and it was this, far more than his political disagreements with President Putin, that sealed his downfall. Worst of all, once the Russian oligarch had arrived in that very same West which he had sincerely viewed as a model and ideal, he turned out to be incapable of fitting in with life there – neither with political life, nor even with business. Unlike his pupil and rival Roman Abramovich, who assimilated perfectly the first rule of successful business – don’t stick your neck out unless you have to – Berezovsky was constantly coming out with one initiative or another, getting involved in political conflicts, declaring his ideas.

Despite a Marxist education, he failed to appreciate the class interests of the Capitalists is about stability for exploitation.

The capitalists live in fear of the masses, and thereby employ a superstructure to keep the masses in their place through docility, bribes, fear, and division. Stirring up the masses is a very dangerous activity.

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The problem of relative privilege in the working class

Chris Slee ponders The problem of relative privilege in the working class.

Slee dislikes the term, “labour aristocracy”, and prefers to use “relative privilege” instead. It is this relative privilege that is the source of division among workers:

Material inequalities between different groups of workers can contribute to conflict between them. Often one group of workers will try to defend their position of relative privilege against other workers who are perceived as threatening it.

Slee argues that, given the global nature of the production process, the government should nationalise any factory is threaten by being moved off-shore:

How should Australian unions react when companies threaten to close a factory in Australia and move production to another country (whether a Third World or another imperialist country)?

We should argue that it is the responsibility of the Australian government to ensure that there are jobs with good pay and conditions for all workers in Australia. This means the government should take over factories threatened with closure and run them as public enterprises, or else provide the sacked workers with alternative work. Public housing, public transport and renewable energy are some of the areas that governments should invest in and create jobs.

Slee proposes that workers should aim for the leveling up of wages for all workers around the world:

One of our long-term goals should be to reduce inequality between workers in different countries, by raising the living standards of those in poorer countries. Pay rates should be leveled up, not leveled down as the capitalists would like.

Slee concludes that:

The struggle between solidarity and the defence of relative privilege is part of the struggle for a socialist world.

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'Is the Demand for Skill Falling?'

Mark thoma notes a reference to 'Is the Demand for Skill Falling?'

The referenced paper suggests that:

…in response to this demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers. This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together.

This would also run contrary to the narrative that people are not being hired because they are over-qualified.

If this conclusion is true, then we have:

• A stratum of disgruntled workers who are over-qualified for their current jobs and have a large student debt to pay off; and
• A stratum of disgruntled unemployed workers who are experiencing the harshness of being unemployed.

These conditions could lead to a revolt of some sort. It will probably be a fascist one if the first startum revolts first as more educated workers tend to lean towards the conservative end of the political spectrum.

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More on Devolution and the Walmartization of Our Economy

Yves Smith opines More on Devolution and the Walmartization of Our Economy.

Smith notes that Walmart has cut costs so much that they are losing customers because:

• Lines are too long at the checkout; and
• Products are not being stocked on the shelves.

These are all because there are too few employees per store.

The first problem can be overcome with automation through the use of self-checkout counters. But then there is the problem of customer fraud as they scan only some of their goods, or choose cheaper items from the look-up menus.

The second problem is more serious as stock has to be on the shelves in order for it to be sold. Even in Australia, it is not uncommon to see gaps on the shelves where popular products have sold out. Either you can switch brands, defer your purchase, or go elsewhere.

Once a company chooses a path of cost-cutting to achieve results, it is very hard for it to change its direction. Inertia in large organisations is just too great at times.

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Dear Rightwing Catholic Islamophobes: Pope Francis just washed the feet of a Poor Muslim

Juan Cole writes Dear Rightwing Catholic Islamophobes: Pope Francis just washed the feet of a Poor Muslim.

Pope Francis on Maundy Thursday declined to address enormous crowds. Instead he went to a prison to emulate Jesus’s act of humility before his crucifixion in washing the feet of his 12 disciples. The pope washed and kissed the feet of 12 inmates, two of them women and two of them Muslim (one of the women was Muslim). It is reported that some of the prisoners broke down in tears.

This pope is going to be different. But how different?

The pope is going to cause trouble for the conservatives:

These purveyors of hate speech against Muslims claim to be Catholics, and some of them are annoyingly Ultramontane, insisting on papal infallibility and trying to impose their values on all Americans.

Yet the person they hold to be the vicar of Christ has just given humankind a different charge, of humility and of service to the least in society, many of whom are Muslims.

It will be interesting to see how this pope advances the Catholic social teaching.

However, the main problem for the pope to overcome is to reconcile his actions during the dictatorship in Argentina. As Carlo Sands wrote recently:

Pope Francis is also heavily implicated in the crimes of Argentina's fascist junta — but as Jesus teaches, none of us are without sin. And, really, who among us can honestly say we have not kidnapped and tortured the odd priest?

The mainstream media coverage of world figures has sure been interesting of late. Apparently Pope Francis, who backed a dictatorship that slaughtered thousands, loves the poor. And Hugo Chavez, who redistributed wealth and lowered poverty, was a tyrant. The corporate press might not be much good at depicting reality, but at least its black-is-white message is consistent.

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Corporate Profitability

Mark Thoma notes the historic high levels of Corporate Profitability.

Economy built for profits not prosperity, by Lawrence Mishel, EPI: Newly released data on corporate profitability for 2012 show the continuation of historic levels of profitability despite excessive unemployment and stagnant wages for most workers. Specifically, the share of capital income (such as profits and interest, which are hereafter referred to as ‘profits’) in the corporate sector increased to 25.6 percent in 2012, the highest in any year since 1950-1951 and far higher than the 19.9 percent share prevailing over 1969-2007, the five business cycles preceding the financial crisis. …

Could the US economy be undergoing a fundamental change as it moves resources from Department II to Department I? If so, we should see a greater capital investment.

But the fundamental problem remains: the consumption can only be realised through wages and salaries. Since these, in total, are decreasing, then total consumption must fall as well. This means that profits must eventually decline as well.

Can an economy consist entirely of Department I?

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Michael Mann on power

Dan Little reviews Michael Mann on power.

Little describes Mann's model as follows:

One of the generalizing frameworks that he uses throughout all four volumes is what he refers to as the "IEMP model" of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political. He believes that these aspects of social reality are largely independent sets of institutions and processes, and they create different though complementary sources of power for individuals and groups within a given state of society. Here is the thumbnail he offers for each of these four high-level features of social power in Volume 3:

Ideological Power derives from the human need to find ultimate meaning in life, to share norms and values, and to participate in aesthetic and ritual practices with others. (V3, 6)

Economic Power derives from the human need to extract, transform, distribute, and consume the products of nature. Economic relations are powerful because they combine the intensive mobilization of labor with very extensive circuites of capital, trade, and production chains, providing a combination of intensive and extensive power and normally also of authoritative and diffused power. (V3, 8)

Military Power. Since writing my previous volumes, I have tightened up the definition of military power to "the social organization of concentrated and lethal violence." (V3, 10)

Political Power is the centralized and territorial regulation of social life. The basic function of government is the provision of order over this realm. (V3, 12)

In Marxist terms, economic power would refer to the control of the means of production. The state would encompass both military and political power. While the superstructure would include both the state and institutions of ideological power such as organised relgion, educational institutions, and the mass media.

The superstructure acts to protect the economic power of the ruling class. The material basis for these manisfestations of power is in the control of the means of production.

It is the division of society in classes that drives history. Mann is working at the edges, not at the centre which is class warfare.

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Gays and Lesbians: Sucked in by the Far Right

Ted Rall writes that Gays and Lesbians: Sucked in by the Far Right.

Rall opines that:

The sad truth is that the LGBT movement has abandoned its progressive roots. It has become a conservative movement.

Italics in original

Rall further argues that the LGBT used to challenge marriage, the nuclear family, and militarism:

Back in the 1970s, Michael Warner reminds us in his 1999 book “The Trouble with Normal,” gays weren’t trying to assimilate into the toxic “mainstream” cultures of monogamism and empire. Instead, they were pointing the way toward other ways of life.

The Socialist Alliance's policy on LGBTI says that:

We live in a society which attempts to dictate sexual preference and gender identity through promoting the gender stereotypes and homophobic attitudes which underpin the heterosexual nuclear family, and by promoting marriage and the nuclear family as the only legitimate model for relationships. Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, trans people and intersex people suffer oppression because their lives are a challenge to the nuclear family which is an economic cornerstone of capitalism.

The policy on Marriage and Civil Unions says that:

In other countries civil unions have been offered to the LGBTI community to placate the movement for equal marriage rights. This is not the situation in Australia, where even civil unions have been suppressed by the federal government because they “mimic marriage”. It is for this reason that the Socialist Alliance supports civil unions but will continue the campaign for marriage . Civil unions are not a substitute for marriage rights.

Because of the opposition, gay marriage is a progressive issue in Australia. However, as the opposition disappears, and monogamy for LGBTI becomes acceptable, then Rall's arguments about moving the progressive focus back to issues of the mainstream becomes important. It is strange to think that the USA is more progressive than Australia on this issue.

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My Van, My Tardis, My Home

Trevor Brown writes about My Van, My Tardis, My Home (pp.18-19) in The Big Issue #428 (22-28 March 2103).

In this article, Brown laments the detrimental effects of the Occupy Movement on the homeless:

Ripples that spread out from various ‘Occupy’ movements over the past couple of years increased pressure on many of us on the streets. We came under increased attention from law-enforcement personnel who seemed intent on making sure we weren't an advanced guard for groups hoping to take up residence in the middle of cities. The homeless were found ‘guilty by association’; we were caught in the open ground between authorities and Occupiers. The pressure increased: I came under verbal attack by members of the public for the first time. Sadly, activities by the group only disenfranchised the very people they were trying to promote as worthy of help and support.

Emphasis Mine

The backlash against the Occupy Movement has rebounded on the homeless. It has drawn them into a political battle they do not want to be part of. They just want to be able to rejoin society.

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Studying entrepreneurship without doing it

Seth Godin takes a dim view of Studying entrepreneurship without doing it.

Likewise, it is impossible to be a revolutionary without facing the fear and discomfit of belonging to a revolutionary party.

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Why Does No One Speak of America’s Oligarchs?

Yves Smith asks Why Does No One Speak of America’s Oligarchs?

The current narrative about Cyprus portrays the country as a tax-havern for the Russian oligarchs. Smith challenges this narrative.

Smith asks:

…But see another implicit part of the story: that Russia’s oligarchs and “dirty money” are a distinctive national creation. Do you ever hear Carlos Slim or Rupert Murdoch or the Koch Brothers described as oligarchs? To dial the clock back a bit, how about Harold Geneen of ITT, which was widely known to conduct assassinations in Latin America if it couldn’t get its way by less thuggish means? (This is not mere rumor, I’ve had it confirmed by a former ITT executive).

Smith makes the point that the oligarchs in the USA are called elites instead. She writes that Simon Johnson clearly described in his important 2009 Atlantic article, The Quiet Coup, that American was in the hands of oligarchs:

Now Johnson carefully laid the bread crumbs, but so as not to violate the rules of power player discourse, pointedly switched from the banana republic term “oligarch” to the more genteel and encompassing label “elites” when talking about the US (“elites” goes beyond the controlling interests themselves to include their operatives as well as any independent opinion influencers). Yet despite his depiction of extensive parallels between the role played by oligarchs in emerging economies and the overwhelming influence of the financial elite in the US, there’s been a peculiar sanctimonious reluctance to apply the word oligarch to the members of America’s ruling class. Some of that is that we Americans idolize our rich, and the richer the better. No one looks too hard at the fact many of our billionaires started out with a leg up, parlaying a moderate family fortune (for instance, in the case of Donald Trump) into a bigger one, or having one’s success depend on other forms of family help (Bill Gates’ mother having the connection to an IBM executive that enabled Gates to license MS-DOS to them).

Smith concludes:

Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom was learning to call things by their proper names. The time is long past to kid ourselves about the nature of the ruling class in America and start describing it accurately, as an oligarchy.

But the question remains: how does an oligarchy arise from Capitalism?

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What is "critical" about critical realism?

Dan Little asks What is "critical" about critical realism?

Little lists three (3) elements of "critical" philosophy:

1. Critical thinking as emancipatory: This meaning is reflected in Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. "The philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it."
2. Critique as illusion-destroying: Another dimension of the idea of criticism in the Marxist tradition is the idea of "critique" -- focused intellectual effort to uncover the implicit (and misleading) assumptions of various schemes of thought and policy.
3. Critique as self-creation: This involves the feature of "reflexiveness" that obtains in the social world. We constitute the social world, for better or worse. And the forms of knowing that we gain through the social sciences also give rise to forms of creating of new social forms -- again, for better or worse.

The third point is really a really a realisation of the maxim that the subjective influences the objective, and the objective influences the subjective.

In essence, we are to use critical realism to uncover the reality behind the scenes and change that reality for the betterment of humankind.

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Inequality, Evolution, & Complexity

Mark Thoma excerpts from Chris Dillow's post about 'Inequality, Evolution, & Complexity'.

The key question is:

Why has mainstream neoclassical economics traditionally had little to say about the causes and effects of inequality?

The real answer is that you don't bite the hand that feeds you. As Lenin says:

The task of a bourgeois professor is not to lay bare the entire mechanism, or to expose all the machinations of the bank monopolists, but rather to present them in a favourable light.

Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism (p.52)

Anyway, the bourgeois professors think the problem is:

…that the blindness is inherent in the very structure of the discipline. If you think of representative agents maximizing utility in a competitive environment, inequality has nowhere to come from unless you impose it ad hoc…

Nice one, Capitalism! You have created a superstructure so effective that the wrong answers cannot be found as the question does not arise.

But no fast, the bourgeois professors think that by reverting to the original political use of the theory of evolution, they can come up with an answer:

…If we think of the economy as a complex (pdf) adaptive system…then inequality becomes a central feature. This is partly because such evolutionary processes inherently generate winners and losers, and partly because they ditch representative agents and so introduce lumpy granularity.

Emphasis Mine

So we are back where we were 150 years ago, the theory of evolution is being used to justify inequality.

But then, this leaves the Capitalists in a quandry: which system do they choose to build the superstructure on? Are they going with Creationism or with Evolution? Or are they going to reconcile the two?

I think reconciliation is out of the question because of the ongoing civil war within the Capitalist class for which the battle between Creationism and Evolution is a proxy.

Communists will have to side with Evolution because it is scientificly based, and leads to more progressive outcomes than does Creationism.

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Men Who Kick Down Doors: Tyrants at Home and Abroad

Ann Jones posts about Men Who Kick Down Doors: Tyrants at Home and Abroad.

Jones connects the dots between domestic violence and war-mongering:

It was John Stuart Mill, writing in the nineteenth century, who connected the dots between “domestic” and international violence. But he didn’t use our absurdly gender-neutral, pale gray term “domestic violence.” He called it “wife torture” or “atrocity,” and he recognized that torture and atrocity are much the same, no matter where they take place -- whether today in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Wardak Province, Afghanistan, or a bedroom or basement in Ohio. Arguing in 1869 against the subjection of women, Mill wrote that the Englishman’s habit of household tyranny and “wife torture” established the pattern and practice for his foreign policy. The tyrant at home becomes the tyrant at war. Home is the training ground for the big games played overseas.

The violence engender by the system is all-pervasise. You cannot eliminate the violence within the domestic sphere without eliminating the violence inherent in the system. The only way to eliminate inherent violence is to replace the system.

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John Pilger: The new propaganda is 'liberal'

John Pilger: The new propaganda is 'liberal'.

Of the world of blogging, tweeting, and social media, Pilger writes:

Edward Said described this wired state in Culture and Imperialism as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.

Today's “message” of grotesque inequality, social injustice and war is the propaganda of liberal democracies. By any measure of human behavior, this is extremism.

The conservatives are correct when they say that the mainstream media is liberal. But they misunderstand what the word 'liberal' means. They are led to believe that it means progressive and radical, whereas the meaning imparted by the capitalists is freedom for them to exploit others while hiding this exploitation.

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Us vs, us

Seth Gogin asks who wins in a game of Us vs. us.

For Communism to suceed, we need to raise our consciousness from the individualism that Capitalism that moulded us into, to a higher level:

When we steal or disrupt or game the system of a community we care about, we hurt everyone we say we're connected to, and thus hurt ourselves.

Communism requires a permanent revolutionary mindset:

Online communities are quick to form, but they're just as quick to fade, to become less open and to become less trusting because sometimes we have a cultural orientation toward taking, not giving. We forget to feed the network first, to take care of those we care about.

We have to throw away the profit motive for evaluating which choices to make:

Here's a possible standard: is it open, fair and good for others? If it's not, the community asks that you take your selfish antics somewhere else.

Godin concludes with:

Call me naive, but I think it's possible (and likely) that the digital tribes we're forming are going to actually change things for the better. But not until we embrace the fact that we are us.

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Mechanisms of racial disparities

Dan Little describes some Mechanisms of racial disparities.

Little's conclusion is:

In short, there seem to be a great number of mechanisms of racial differentiation that are at work in American society that don't generally presuppose explicit racial antagonism, but that work to channel black individuals into worse outcomes than their white counterparts. These are structural factors that the population faces, not personal factors; and they have pronounced effects when it comes to generating racial disparities in a number of crucial social dimensions.

These mechanisms include:

• The provision of essential social services, like education, health care, and public transport, by local government.
• The access to health care is also tied to employment.

• Actual racial prejudice in hiring practices

Since local governments are heavily depenendent on the local tax base in US society, the quality of public services varies greatly depending on the locale. Racial differentiation leads to economic differentiation which leads to differentiation in the provision of these public services.

The lack of public transport means people are trapped within their locale. Thus, they have limited chances of employment, and therefore access to health care.

Poor public services means poor education which, in turns, leads to reduced job oppportunities.

Even if they manage to overcome all of this, they still face discrimination during the hiring process.

So, racism has a structural basis in tying public services to local government and health care to jobs. But, there is still racial prejudice to stop anyone escaping those traps.

As Malcolm X said, "You cannot have Capitalism without Racism!"

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Communication is a path, not an event

Seth Godin says that Communication is a path, not an event.

Communication for revolutionaries occurs at many levels:

• Propaganda
• Slogans
• Agitation
• Mass rallies

Propaganda is what Godin would say is a waste of time if it is used wrongly. It is unidirectional communication, but the purpose should be:

Don't sell us anything but the burning desire to follow up. The point of his talk wasn't to get a new customer (impossible), nor was it to get through the talk and get it over with (silly and selfish). No, the point of the talk should have been to open the door to have a better, individual conversation soon.

This individual communication is what is known as agitation. It is the dialogue between the cadre and the public on at the personal level. It is at this level that recruitment into the party takes place.

The slogans are short, precise communications that allow the party to quickly get feedback about the public is prepared to mobilise around. The effect of these slogans is measured directly at the mass rallies.

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Remembering Rachel Corrie, 10 Years Later

Juan Cole Remembering Rachel Corrie, 10 Years Later.

Supporters of Greater Israel succeeded in having the performance of a play based on her life cancelled in New York, but it has gone on to play elsewhere, and she and her legacy have not been erased, as the extreme nationalists would have liked. In some ways the controversy over the play led to the founding of the influential blog Mondoweiss, which has done much to create spaces in which hard line Jewish nationalism can be critiqued.

Emphasis in original

To remember is to resist.

Meminisse resistere.

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Oz the Great and Powerful

The movie, "Oz the Great and Powerful", is a propaganda film that extols:

• The usual Disney myth of the correlation between beauty and goodness;
• The capitalist hero myth;

The younger sister, Theodora, prefers to keep her ugliness as a manifestation of the hate she feels inside.

The eldest sister, Evanora, does not have a political program to explain her rule. Why did she overthrow her father? Why did she think she was a better ruler of Oz than her father.

Her political program of control is profess the myth of a liberator, while portraying herself as the defender of Oz.

She has the caste of flying monkeys to terrorise the countryside. She has an official enemy to blame all of the acts of terror on. Thus, she would justify her rule as protector against the terror she creates in the chaos after the death of her father.

I would have to assume that she wanted power and wealth for herself. Terror is a means to an end.

The younger sister believes the propaganda. It is only when Oz betrays her that is converted to the dark side, as it were.

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Bankistan Vanquishes America

Barry Ritholtz watches as Bankistan Vanquishes America and issues a call to arms to liberate America. Wolverines!.

Ritholtz still has not caught with Lenin's idea that Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. Of particular interest, chapter 3 "Finance Capital and Financial Oligarchy" has the quotes:

It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier, who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions.

(Kindle Location 929-932)

And, the big four (4) countries were, prior to the First World War, Great Britain, United States, France, and Germany.

Together, these four countries own 479,000,000,000 francs, that is, nearly 80 per cent of the world’s finance capital. Thus, in one way or another, nearly the whole world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these four international banker countries, the four ‘pillars’ of world finance capital.

(Kindle Location 954-956)

One hundred years later, the only thing that has changed is the ordering at the top. Lenin wrote:

Thus, the beginning of the twentieth century marks the turning point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.

(Kindle Location 707-709)

Does Ritholtz really think that financial capitalism is a recent innovation? If he does, then the ideological state apparatus has been extraordinarially effective. Lenin writes that:

The task of a bourgeois professor is not to lay bare the entire mechanism, or to expose all the machinations of the bank monopolists, but rather to present them in a favourable light.

(p.52)

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