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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