Pirate Caucus

Democrats For Change - the short version (Brian)

2009-06-01T06:40:00.006-04:00

Tomorrow (June 2, 2009), empowered citizens of New Brunswick, under the name Democrats for Change, will seek to bypass and in fact directly challenge machine gatekepers by gaining seats within the Democratic power structure of Middlesex County, New Jersey. At first glance, it is easy for many on the "left" to ask, "How is this revolutionary? Seeking to be part of the system? Let alone through being part of a major party?" In reality, this campaign is a living, breathing example of revolutionary democracy's goals in the simplest sense - (do what is necessary, including infiltrating constituted, entrenched, "system" power to) increase democracy, build dual power (not to mention the campaign itself has been organized and conducted in the most democratic of ways, and includes a clearly people-power preliminary "platform").

I commend these citizen candidates and wish them success on this important day. I look forward to longer, more reflective analyses of the campaign on this blog from those who fortune has made more than the mere cheerleader I am.

Reverse Cassandras

2009-05-05T12:53:00.004-04:00

For those of you who haven't read your Greek mythology, Cassandra was a prophet who is said to have lived during the Trojan war. The gods gave her the ability to predict the future, but doomed her to be ignored by everyone and made powerless to change anything.

Today we're faced with a glut of Reverse Cassandras.

What's a Reverse Cassandra? A Reverse Cassandra is somebody with the power to change things and who everybody listens to and heeds, but really this person doesn't have a clue and is promoting an innaccurate, rosy view of the future.

Emissaries from the global ruling classes have been telling us that we've hit the bottom of the economic downward slide. Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said as much yesterday, President Obama has been talking for weeks about "glimmers of hope", the EU says we're no longer in freefall - the latter even going so far as to send the French minister of finance to that red-white-and-blue bastion of mainstream American liberalism, The Daily Show, to tell us that, indeed, we may have reached the bottom. Even the usually dour (neo)liberal talking-head Paul Krugman is seeing the "green shoots" of new growth!

But on what basis are they making these claims?

Now, I'm no trained economist, and I certainly don't have Cassandra's prescience, but I'd like to explain my reasons for thinking that these people are wrong.

Firstly, these people are career liars whose sole purpose is to mislead and keep down the working class.

That's an opinion, of course, but it's an opinion based on evidence. These folks bought into the neoliberal lie -- hook, line and sinker. In 2002, Bernanke said thanks to the guiding influence of that godfather of free-market fundamentalism, Milton Friedman, we would "never again" have another Depression-like economic crisis. As for Krugman, who is portrayed in the media as the far-left alternative to the status quo, you should remember that this was the same guy who thought that US monetary policy would solve all employment problems, and that folks who thought the financial and economic problems of the 1930s would repeat themselves were not "sensible people". [1]

From a more evidential perspective, having gone through the reports these bodies have published -- looking with all my little heart of hearts for the glimmers of hope -- I've found very few positive signs.

For example, the EU had to revise their predictions this month, because economic contraction has been shown to be twice as bad as they had expected. However, measures like consumer confidence are high. Well that's just great! Unfortunately, confidence has little to do with reality -- wages are likely to continue declining, meaning less purchasing power for workers, meaning even lower demand, etc. The only good news these days seems to be coming out of China, which even before the crisis was producing massive surpluses (literature on China is extensive, but David Harvey has the best analysis out there for my money).

So while the Reverse Cassandras tell us the sky is not, in fact, falling, the situation continues to get more and more dire.

If I haven't already made this clear, the existing ruling class in the US is incapable of getting us out of this mess. They're already preparing us for permanent, mass unemployment, as remarks by former Fed Reserve Chairman and current Chairman of the President's Economic Recovery Board Paul Volker indicate. According to Volker, the new, "natural" rate of unemployment will be much higher. If this indeed does come to pass, this will mean a jobless recovery which is even worse than those we've experienced before.

I'd like to end on a somber note. I'm currently reading Jeffry A. Frieden's Global Capitalism: Its Fall & Rise in the Twentieth Century, which is a flawed but comprehensive overview of global economic history from the late nineteenth century til 2000. I'm getting to the part right now where World War I has just ended, and the new postwar economic order is coming into being. This proves to be disastrous, and a young John Maynard Keynes goes on to write a best-selling polemic outlining its failures. The important thing here is this: the ruling classes of Europe failed miserably. They led their societies into a maelstrom of destruction and horror which lasted almost forty years, leading from world war to hyperinflation, to depression and world war all over again.

I leave it to the reader to draw any contemporary parallels.

After all, the only thing worse than a Reverse Cassandra is the genunine article.

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[1] The reason I'm so adamant about pushing socialism to the forefront of the public debate, is that there needs to be another set of alternatives in the discussion about our collective futures. Our current range of options leave us with little room to maneuver -- from the psuedo-Keynesianism of Paul Krugman on the "left", to the "centrist" policies of the Geithner-Summers banking elite - fully backed by the administration of Barack Obama (policies which amount to a massive robbery of public coffers to pay off the bad investments of the financial class), and on the right, the Alice In Wonderland/living-in-a-fantasy world economics of the Tea Baggers and the Republican Party.

"An angry army to give the government back to those who have always been the champions of special privilege" (Brian)

2009-04-21T09:00:00.005-04:00

The contemporary recruitment of which could have been started at the "tea parties"??

J'Accuse! (Aug. 19, 1939) Sen. Claude Pepper (who himself later became a Cold Warrior), from The Progressive:

Democracy on the march: Gay Marriage in Iowa (X.)

2009-04-03T11:18:00.005-04:00

If gays start getting married in Iowa within a few weeks, it will truly mark the beginning of the end for the religious right as a dominant force in the US. The so-called "culture" wars are slowly fading into irrelevance for all generations transitioning into the 21st century. We should expect other struggles to rise to prominence, especially economic ones. We better get ready. But for today, let's celebrate yet another victory for justice and equality... long overdue for all our GBLT sisters & brothers!

Harvey Milk lives!!!

From the AP.

Iowa court says gay marriage ban unconstitutional

By AMY LORENTZEN, Associated Press Writer

DES MOINES, Iowa – The Iowa Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling Friday finding that the state's same-sex marriage ban violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples, making Iowa the third state where gay marriage is legal.
In its decision, the court upheld a 2007 district court judge's ruling that the law violates the state constitution. It strikes the language from Iowa code limiting marriage to only between a man a woman.
"The court reaffirmed that a statute inconsistent with the Iowa constitution must be declared void even though it may be supported by strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion," said a summary of the ruling issued by the court.
The ruling set off celebration among the state's gay-marriage proponents.
"Iowa is about justice, and that's what happened here today," said Laura Fefchak, who was hosting a verdict party in the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale with partner of 13 years, Nancy Robinson.
Robinson added: "To tell the truth, I didn't think I'd see this day."
Richard Socarides, an attorney and former senior adviser on gay rights to President Clinton, said the ruling carries extra significance coming from Iowa.
"It's a big win because, coming from Iowa, it represents the mainstreaming of gay marriage. And it shows that despite attempts stop gay marriage through right wing ballot initiatives, like in California, the courts will continue to support the case for equal rights for gays," he said.
Court rules dictate that the decision will take about 21 days to be considered final, and a request for a rehearing could be filed within that period. That means it will be at least several weeks before gay and lesbian couples can seek marriage licenses.
But Polk County Attorney John Sarcone said the county attorney's office will not ask for a rehearing, meaning the court's decision should take effect after that three-week period.
"Our Supreme Court has decided it, and they make the decision as to what the law is and we follow Supreme Court decisions," Sarcone said. "This is not a personal thing. We have an obligation to the law to defend the recorder, and that's what we do."
The case had been working its way through Iowa's court system since 2005 when Lambda Legal, a New York-based gay rights organization, filed a lawsuit on behalf of six gay and lesbian Iowa couples who were denied marriage licenses. Some of their children are also listed as plaintiffs.
The suit named then-Polk County recorder and registrar Timothy Brien.
The state Supreme Court's ruling upheld an August 2007 decision by Polk County District Court Judge Robert Hanson, who found that a state law allowing marriage only between a man and a woman violates the state's constitutional rights of equal protection.
The Polk County attorney's office, arguing on behalf of Brien, claimed that Hanson's ruling violates the separation of powers and said the issue should be left to the Legislature.
Lambda Legal scheduled a news conference for early Friday to comment on the ruling. A request for comment from the Polk County attorney's office wasn't immediately returned.
Around the nation, only Massachusetts and Connecticut permit same-sex marriage. California, which briefly allowed gay marriage before a voter initiative in November repealed it, allows domestic partnerships.
New Jersey, New Hampshire and Vermont also offer civil unions, which provide many of the same rights that come with marriage. New York recognizes same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, and legislators there and in New Jersey are weighing whether to offer marriage. A bill that would legalize same-sex marriage in Vermont has cleared the Legislature but may be vetoed by the governor.
The ruling in Iowa's same-sex marriage case came more quickly than many observers had anticipated, with some speculating after oral arguments that it could take a year or more for a decision.

Hit & Run 1: Campus Movement vs. Student Movement (X.)

2009-03-30T12:39:00.005-04:00

A massive increase in organizing activity in New Brunswick and at Rutgers is keeping most of us too busy to post regularly (more on the new campaigns soon). But this new organizing intensity provides a lot of insight that needs to be discussed! So I'll be logging in some quick notes (a Hit & Run series) on a few topics to get conversations started.

CAMPUS MOVEMENT vs STUDENT MOVEMENT

The ongoing campaign for ward-based elections in New Brunswick was initiated by the Tent State University movement at Rutgers and led to the formation of the growing and vibrant off-campus grassroots movement Empower Our Neighborhoods (check out empowernb.com).

What made a significant difference in the building of the emerging citywide coalition of neighborhoods for democracy was that the students approached other communities in New Brunswick as part of a longstanding campus movement rather than a newly-founded student movement. The campus movement at Rutgers today (Tent State) has a history and -more importantly- a memory of organizing both on- and off-campus (even if most of the student organizers from previous generations have moved on). It has allies and contacts in various off-campus neighborhoods as well as on campus among faculty, staff, unions, even administrators. It benefits from an extraordinary new generation of student organizers that inherited the movement's past experience and knowledge. The Tent State students are now taking organizing to a whole new level, working hand-in-hand with revolutionary democratic alumni that organized at Rutgers up to twenty years before they did. Above all, this campus movement is fully conscious of itself as a permanent social, political, cultural and economic power base in New Brunswick. Today, brand new student organizers rapidly learn that although many individual students move on (after graduation), the student community, its interests and its role as an agent of change remain.

Back in the early 90's, the student movement at Rutgers was spontaneous, relatively naive and totally unaware of its place in relation to other class forces at the university and in the city (like most student movements across the US today). The Rutgers-based campus movement of the new millenium daily grows more aware of its origins, its potential, its friends and enemies and its shared goals with other communities in New Brunswick that will unite around Revolutionary Democracy (the great majority of Afro-Americans, Latinos, women, creative class professionals, intellectuals, artists, new economy workers, immigrants, etc). The campus movement is becoming a movement for-itself, grown from a student movement that was at first just a movement in-itself. This difference is the key to understanding the unprecedented organizing successes of the past two years, both in terms of the campus movement's ability to run its own campaigns and in terms of its ability to build strong, long-lasting bonds with allies on- and off-campus.

That the maturing of the Rutgers campus movement coincides with the advent of the Obama Movement is in fact... not a coincidence. The same economic, political, social and cultural forces that made the Obama Movement possible shaped the opportunities to build a campus movement in New Brunswick over the past two decades. Which tells us what incredible potential lies out there to build a nationwide network of revolutionary democratic coalitions in university towns and cities. More on that soon...

PS: See Marx on class struggle for the reference to the class in-itself vs. the class for-itself. You can start with this wikipedia entry.

Reverse Robin Hood (Posted by Keith)

2009-03-26T14:01:00.002-04:00

Thi

This piece by Jeffrey Sachs is good explaination of the latest bank plan.

Obama’s bank plan could rob the taxpayer

By Jeffrey Sachs

Published: March 25 2009 23:14 | Last updated: March 25 2009 23:14

The Geithner-Summers plan, officially called the public/private investment programme, is a thinly veiled attempt to transfer up to hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayer funds to the commercial banks, by buying toxic assets from the banks at far above their market value. It is dressed up as a market transaction but that is a fig-leaf, since the government will put in 90 per cent or more of the funds and the “price discovery” process is not genuine. It is no surprise that stock market capitalisation of the banks has risen about 50 per cent from the lows of two weeks ago. Taxpayers are the losers, even as they stand on the sidelines cheering the rise of the stock market. It is their money fuelling the rally, yet the banks are the beneficiaries.

The plan’s essence is to use government off-budget money to overpay for banks’ toxic assets, perhaps by a factor of two or more. This is done by creating a one-way bet for private-sector bidders for the toxic assets, then cynically calling it “private sector price discovery”. Consider a simple example: a toxic asset with face value of $1m pays off fully with probability of 20 per cent and pays off $200,000 with probability of 80 per cent. A risk-neutral investor would pay $360,000 for this asset.

Along comes the government and says it will finance 90 per cent of the investor’s purchase and, moreover, do so as a non-recourse loan. Non-recourse means the government’s loan is backed only by the collateral value of the toxic asset itself. If the pay-out is low, the loan is defaulted and the government ends up with the low pay-out rather than full repayment of the loan.

Now the investor is prepared to bid $714,000 (with rounding) for the same asset. The investor uses $71,000 of his/her own money and $643,000 of the government loan. If the asset pays off in full, the investor repays the loan, with a profit of $357,000. This happens 20 per cent of the time, so brings an expected profit of $71,000. The other 80 per cent of the time the investor defaults on the loan, and the government ends up with $200,000. The investor just breaks even by bidding $714,000, as we would expect in a competitive auction.

Of course, the investor has systematically overpaid by $354,000 (the bid price of $714,000 minus the market value of $360,000), reflecting the investor’s right to default on the loan in the event of a poor pay-out of the toxic asset. The overpayment equals the expected loss of the government loan. After all, 80 per cent of the time (in this example) the government loses $443,000 (the $643,000 loan minus the $200,000 repayment). The expected loss is 80 per cent of $443,000, equal to $354,000.

The idea of “private sector price discovery” is therefore flim-flam. There would be price discovery if the government’s loan had to be repaid whether or not the asset paid off in full. In that case, the investor would bid $360,000. But under the Geithner-Summers plan the loan is precisely designed to be a one-way bet, for the purpose of overpricing the toxic asset in order to bail out the bank’s shareholders at hidden cost to the taxpayers.

The banks could be saved without saving their shareholders – a better deal for taxpayers and without the moral hazard of rescuing shareholders from the banks’ bad bets. Most simply, the government could provide loans to buy the toxic assets on a recourse basis,therefore without the hidden subsidy. Alternatively, the plan could give the taxpayers an equity stake in the banks in return for cleaning their balance sheets. In cases of insolvency, the government could take over the bank, the much dreaded nationalisation, albeit temporary. At the end of the Bush administration, Congress voted for the $700bn (€517bn, £479bn) troubled asset relief programme (Tarp) on the assurance the taxpayer would get fair value for money (for example, by taking equity stakes in the rescued banks). The new plan does not offer that.

Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, and Lawrence Summers, director of the White House national economic council, suspect that they cannot go back to Congress to fund their plan and so are raiding the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the remaining Tarp funds, hoping that there will be little public understanding and little or no congressional scrutiny. This is an inappropriate institutional use of the Fed, the FDIC and the Tarp. Mr Geithner and Mr Summers should at the very least explain the true risks of large losses by the government under their plan. Then, a properly informed Congress and public could decide whether to adopt this plan or some better alternative.

Jeffrey Sachs is director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University

Class Struggle Heats Up, Bankers on the Ropes, Geithner Must Resign (Keith)

2009-03-21T16:01:00.006-04:00

Today's Financial Times has the banner headline "Banker fury over tax 'witch-hunt." The article has quotes from dismayed bankers:

"Introducing this 90 per cent tax is like taking the the fiannce industry out the back and shooting it." --London Bank Exedcutive

"The tax measures will send the U.S. back to the stone age."

-Frankfurt Banker

"It is like a McCarthy witch-hunt"

Wall St. banker (who deosn't know much about history)

"The is the most profoundly anti-American thing I have ever seen."

-Wall St. Banker

the quotes show Financial Capital is starting to swaet and they are taking a lot of punishment, we must make sure that Obama doesn't lose the will to take the fight to the end. Geithner must be our target, he is financial capital's the weak link.

Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs exec, and sturdy ally of financial capital is under increasing pressure to resign. The Financial Times and the Financial Capitalist class for which they speak have been defending Geithner (last week the FT wrote an editorial defending Geithner and today McCain came out asking the country to give Geithner a chance).

We should go all out against Geithner but we must combine the demand that he resign with the demand that his successor not have a history in the finacial sector, -- someone like Eliot Spitzer (As Client #9 Spitzer is out but we need someone like him) or Paul Krugman.

Galbraith: "No Return to Normal" - Forget the Banks, Bring on the New Deal (X.)

2009-03-19T13:54:00.008-04:00

The prominent liberal economist James K Galbraith just published an essay titled No Return to Normal in the Washington Monthly in which he unambiguously argues that the scale of the current financial crisis will radically transform the capitalist economic system for the foreseeable future. Galbraith argues that the banking system, no matter how much cash it is handed over by the Feds, cannot and will not provide consumer credit since consumers are already mired in debt that they cannot repay with their current level of income.

Galbraith, a Keynesian capitalist (i.e. he believes that capitalism is the best available economic system but that it requires strong government intervention to remain "stable") of course does not consider either of the two principal revolutionary democratic proposals to address that fundamental problem: 1) Forgive the debt (which revolutionaries can help bring about by building a nationwide debtors' union) and increase workers' share of the wealth they produce at the expense of the capitalists (which revolutionaries can help bring about by encouraging workers to struggle for democratic governance and a share of the profits at their companies, or even better, developing cooperative businesses jointly-owned and operated by the workers). Like the conservative economists crying "let them eat bread", Galbraith only considers the possibility of people massively reducing their consumption and increasing their savings. As a liberal Keynesian economist, he worries about people's welfare however and thus recommends a fairly radical New Deal plan that should give us a sense of how far we can push the Obama administration to provide resources that could be channeled to build dual power. Check out this excerpt:

"That being so, what must now be done? The first thing we need, in the wake of the recovery bill, is more recovery bills. The next efforts should be larger, reflecting the true scale of the emergency. There should be open-ended support for state and local governments, public utilities, transit authorities, public hospitals, schools, and universities for the duration, and generous support for public capital investment in the short and long term. To the extent possible, all the resources being released from the private residential and commercial construction industries should be absorbed into public building projects. There should be comprehensive foreclosure relief, through a moratorium followed by restructuring or by conversion-to-rental, except in cases of speculative investment and borrower fraud. The president’s foreclosure-prevention plan is a useful step to relieve mortgage burdens on at-risk households, but it will not stop the downward spiral of home prices and correct the chronic oversupply of housing that is the cause of that.

Second, we should offset the violent drop in the wealth of the elderly population as a whole. The squeeze on the elderly has been little noted so far, but it hits in three separate ways: through the fall in the stock market; through the collapse of home values; and through the drop in interest rates, which reduces interest income on accumulated cash. For an increasing number of the elderly, Social Security and Medicare wealth are all they have.

That means that the entitlement reformers have it backward: instead of cutting Social Security benefits, we should increase them, especially for those at the bottom of the benefit scale. Indeed, in this crisis, precisely because it is universal and efficient, Social Security is an economic recovery ace in the hole. Increasing benefits is a simple, direct, progressive, and highly efficient way to prevent poverty and sustain purchasing power for this vulnerable population. I would also argue for lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to (say) fifty-five, to permit workers to retire earlier and to free firms from the burden of managing health plans for older workers.

This suggestion is meant, in part, to call attention to the madness of talk about Social Security and Medicare cuts. The prospect of future cuts in this modest but vital source of retirement security can only prompt worried prime-age workers to spend less and save more today. And that will make the present economic crisis deeper. In reality, there is no Social Security "financing problem" at all. There is a health care problem, but that can be dealt with only by deciding what health services to provide, and how to pay for them, for the whole population. It cannot be dealt with, responsibly or ethically, by cutting care for the old.

Third, we will soon need a jobs program to put the unemployed to work quickly. Infrastructure spending can help, but major building projects can take years to gear up, and they can, for the most part, provide jobs only for those who have the requisite skills. So the federal government should sponsor projects that employ people to do what they do best, including art, letters, drama, dance, music, scientific research, teaching, conservation, and the nonprofit sector, including community organizing—why not?

Finally, a payroll tax holiday would help restore the purchasing power of working families, as well as make it easier for employers to keep them on the payroll. This is a particularly potent suggestion, because it is large and immediate. And if growth resumes rapidly, it can also be scaled back. There is no error in doing too much that cannot easily be repaired, by doing a bit less."

The whole article is worth reading, find it here.

Class Struggle and AIG (Posted by Keith)

2009-03-18T10:21:00.004-04:00

Eliot Spitzer, the “disgraced” former Governor of New York (he was caught with an expensive prostitute but he was “caught” as a part of the class struggle—he had been going after financial capitalist before it became a congressional past time, and they brought him down in a scandal) published this essay in Slate.com this week. Although he speaks about “insiders” rather than the financial capitalist he points out the relationship between AIG and Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is basically merged with the U.S. state and have their tentacles all over Obama’s administration. An immediate task is to defeat the financial class within the Obama administration. Jim wrote a nice essay about some of the class struggles within the Obama administration.

Here is the Spitzer article:

The Real AIG Scandal

It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.

By Eliot Spitzer

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.

It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

So here are several questions that should be answered, in public, under oath, to clear the air:

What was the precise conversation among Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, and Blankfein that preceded the initial $80 billion grant?
Was it already known who the counterparties were and what the exposure was for each of the counterparties?
What did Goldman, and all the other counterparties, know about AIG's financial condition at the time they executed the swaps or other contracts? Had they done adequate due diligence to see whether they were buying real protection? And why shouldn't they bear a percentage of the risk of failure of their own counterparty?
What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.
Why weren't the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?

Failure to answer these questions will feed the populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly. And it will raise basic questions about the competence of those who are supposedly guiding this economic policy.

Thug Life (Tim)

2009-03-17T13:46:00.002-04:00

One possible scenario as to what the future will look like in the coming years (which is gaining increasing popularity) comes from Russian blogger Dmitry Orlov. I would highly recommend anybody interested in the future of this country read some of his essays, for example, his "Social Collapse Best Practices". Essentially, Orlov's thesis is simple. In fact, it's almost facile in nature and lacks a solid theoretical basis. [1] At the same time, it offers to me a much more persuasive vision of what sorts of situations the course of events than I've seen from any mainstream media sources, who still stubbornly refuse to imagine a world in which an advanced capitalist economy ceases to function. For this reason alone, it merits attention. [2]

Orlov's premise is that the United States as a superpower (he seems to shy away from using the term "imperialism") is in a place analogous to Russia in the late 80s and early 90s. He enumerates some of the similarities: "a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil, a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt", etc.

Right now I have neither the time nor the energy to fully dig into this article. Read it for yourself. The resurgence of interest in post-collapse societies (obviously previsaged by a revivified horde of new zombie movies) is very real: Fallout 3, anyone? [3] The questions which surround social collapse are serious questions and deserve more lengthy analysis and exegesis.

One aspect of social collapse which I'll finish this post talking about is the rise of organized crime.

As the protective power of the state recedes, the functions which were once handled by the state (waste disposal, physical protection, etc.) either get done by somebody else, or they don't get done at all. Into this power vaccuum steps anybody who is organized. In Berlin of the 1920s and 30s, the Communists provided services such as housing to people. However, it's rare that organizations spring up with a fully-formed political agenda. Usually political awareness is one of the later stages of organizational development. More likely are enterprises that organize around a more primitive (in the orthodox sense) forms of organization -- such as the feudalism of the crime "family".

The great socialist literary critic Frederic Jameson has written extensively that the fascination with the crime film genre has at its root a way of understanding and fantasizing about "primitive accumulation" i.e. the first stage of capitalism. [4] Anyone who's seen movies like the Godfather or Scarface (or played Grand Theft Auto) can tell you the basic narrative: young punk rises to the top of the cartel (capitalist enterprise) by brutally killing off rivals, taking over other people's businesses and turf, then living the high life at the top (until, presumably, they themselves are taken out by a young upstart). Myself, I have found it interesting how the gangster fantasy has been appropriated and remixed, so to speak, for a younger generation. The new film Gomorra, which looks at mob activities in Naples, has a sequence where these kids are acting out their fantasy of being Tony Montana. One could look at the appropriation of this imagery in hardcore hip hop for an analagous example.

What Jameson pointed out was that the supposedly reprehensible criminal enterprises such as gangs and the mafia were in fact capitalist enterprises no different than the robber barons of the 19th century. For example, in 1868, when American financer "Jay Gould was fighting Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railroad, Gould and his men were forced to flee across the Hudson River in a rowboat, and barricaded themselves in a New Jersey hotel". Jay Gould would later bring the United States and Canada to the bring of war. That is to say, capitalist enterprises are just criminal enterprises writ large.

Even though the state marks certain areas as off-limits to capitalist enterprises (e.g. prostitution, drugs, etc.), enterprising capitalists get involved anyway -- if there is a profit to be made. The logic of capitalist development goes like this: after a phase of primitive accumulation (see above), there need to be some kind of game rules in order to prevent a cycle of continued violence. Thus, when the state begins to referee and regulate these enterprises, it cuts down on the level of competitive violence between corporate entities (crime "families", syndicates, etc.).

But if the state refuses to step in and regulate an industry for the capitalists, it becomes stuck in a repetitive pattern of primitive accumulation. This was (is?) something of the case in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ordinary business ventures became dangerous because the state had completely stepped back (or was rendered powerless) from many of its traditional roles.

If we are likely to witness a further tidal withdrawal of the state (as has already been forced with the attack on and diminution of the welfare state since the 1980s) in the coming months or years, we are also likely to see a correlative rise in criminal activity and specifically organized criminal activity.

Sure enough, Alternet reports that collusion of "illegitimate" criminal enterprises and "legal" business enterprises is increasing. Business owners are increasingly looking to organized crime to fill in the credit gap. A Mexican drug lord made the Forbes list of the world's richest human beings, while our southern neighbors face continued violence which threatens to both consume their government and spill over into US territory. The Mexican Economy Secretary even went so far as to speculate that if the government loses the current battle, "the next president of the republic would be a drug dealer"!

There are a whole bunch of other examples of this, but I don't have the time to list them all. Hopefully I can take on the issue of social provision in a blog post sometime in the near future; as I feel that leftwing organizations have a moral duty and a political imperative to begin setting up alternative economies of social provision to aid people in this period of economic contraction.

--------------------------------------------------------------

[1] I find a systemic, materialist analysis to be the most persuasive method of interpreting history. However, one should always be on guard against orthodoxy. I grew up around religious fundamentalists, and I have come to find that fundamentalist tendencies (e.g. the need to "go back" to the "original" texts or figures in a movement) cut across ideological boundaries. One should approach with great caution those who insist we ascribe to "what Marx said" or some other such nonsense.

[2] As a caveat, the progressive left-leaning techno-utopian James J. Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, writes of the need for healthy awareness of and skepticism toward the millennialist tendencies which arise when contemplating the future, and apocalyptic threats such as global climate change or social collapse. His essay is without a doubt the best short piece on millenialism and utopianism (and I should know, having read many of the studies he cites). We should take seriously his warning that when thinking about and discussing the future, we are prone to couldn't agree more, having witnessed firsthand the folks who stocked up on guns and bibles, thinking that Y2K was going to end civilization as we know it, as well as the folks on the other end of the spectrum who thought that casino capitalism would last forever.

[3] Regarding zombie-related puns, I will say only: *groooooan*

[4] These stages are not necessarily chronological. Long story. Read something like David Harvey's Limits to Capital.

Leftist Declares Victory In El Salvador Election (Posted by Keith)

2009-03-16T09:41:00.004-04:00

This is an article fromn the Washington post about the electoral victory of the FMNL in El Salvador.... what they couldn't win as guerrilla's they won in elections...

By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 16, 2009; A11

MIAMI, March 16 -- Mauricio Funes, a former TV newsman who was recruited to run for president, declared himself the winner of El Salvador's presidential contest Sunday night, bringing into power a leftist party built by former guerrillas and ending two decades of conservative rule.

Funes, a dynamic speaker and political outsider who compares himself to President Obama and pledged to be an agent of change in the small Central American nation, was leading the polls late Sunday night with 51.2 percent of the vote and more than 90 percent of the ballots counted. Turnout was high and election day was mostly calm.

If the lead holds, Funes and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) will take control of a nation struggling with an economic crisis and a murder rate that is among the highest in the world. The country has also suffered through 12 years of civil war, which left more than 70,000 people dead.

Funes's opponent, former National Police chief Rodrigo Ávila, who represented the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), was trailing with 48.7 percent of the vote. Ávila conceded defeat, telling supporters, "We will be a constructive opposition."

During a rough campaign season, Ávila insisted that a win for Funes and the FMLN would transform El Salvador into a hard-left satellite state of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Ávila further warned that Funes would turn El Salvador away from the United States. The two countries have traditionally shared close relations. More than 2 million El Salvadorans live in the United States, and thousands traveled home to vote in the elections.

Funes promised to create a broad government composed of FMLN members and outsiders like himself. He said he sought a close working relationship with the United States and vowed to champion the cause of El Salvador's poor. "This is the happiest night of my life, and I want it to be the night of El Salvador's greatest hope," he said. "I want to thank all the people who voted for me and chose that path of hope and change."

Zizek against protest mode (Posted by Keith)

2009-03-16T00:31:00.005-04:00

Here is Zizek critiquing protest mode. He doesn't use the term protest mode. The interview is a few years old but he makes the point well. Of course he doesn't put forth a strategy or any tactics for a struggle for power either.

More From the Credit Card Front (Brian)

2009-03-15T16:35:00.006-04:00

I know - it seems like I'm obsessed with their chicanery, tomfoolery, and shenanigans...well, at least the tomfoolery - so I'll make this a quickie (I'm doing lesson planning on the Lowell mills anyway)

This piece describes what represents a new low...figuratively and perhaps literally...

Basically, you could wake up tomorrow with your credit limit very close to or below your actual current balance... yikes!

Van Jones on the first Green President (Posted by Keith)

2009-03-15T13:52:00.005-04:00

Obama Drafts Van Jones as Green Jobs Adviser

March 10, 2009 12:36 PM ET | | Maura Judkis
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/fresh-greens/2009/3/10/obama-drafts-van-jones-as-green-jobs-adviser.html

Author, activist and think tank fellow Van Jones will be joining the Obama administration next week as a special adviser on green jobs, reported the White House Council on Environmental Quality today. Jones will work with agencies and departments to advance the administration's climate and energy initiatives, with a special focus on improving vulnerable communities, according to a White House statement. Jones is the founder of "Green For All," an environmental group dedicated to bringing green jobs to the disadvantaged, and the author of "The Green Collar Economy." Environmental groups are, of course, thrilled with the decision - in their opinion, no one knows green jobs like Van Jones.

But there are a few questions raised - first, about the role of Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor. A proponent of green jobs, it was thought that the responsibility would fall to her, but Climate Progress (a blog run by Jones' think tank, the Center for American Progress) assures us that, yes, both positions are necessary. "The Labor Secretary can’t tell any other Cabinet officer or agency what to do — so if you want to coordinate a crosscutting initiative that affects so many different departments, including energy, EPA, Commerce, and so on — you need to do this out of the White House." His title, by the way, does not contain the word 'Czar' - another issue raised by the Wall Street Journal regarding 'Czar fatigue.'

Jones has long been a proponent of environmental justice. He, along with other advocates like Majora Carter, try to raise awareness of the fact that the communities most hurt by unsustainable practices are often the poorest. Jones told Mother Jones Magazine last year:

"The only reason that we have the unsustainable accounting that we have right now is because incinerators, dumping grounds, and sacrifice zones were put where poor people live. It would never have been allowed if you had to put all the incinerators and nasty stuff in rich people's neighborhoods; we'd have had a sustainable economy a long time ago... We don't want to be first and worst with all the toxins and all the negative effects of global warming, and then benefit last and least from all the breakthroughs in solar, wind energy, organic food, all the positives. We want an equal share, an equitable share, of the work wealth and the benefits of the transition to a green economy."

Another two favorite quotes from Jones come from his speech at the Power Shift weekend last month:

"We could power the country with clean coal, or we could have unicorns pull our cars for us."

"If women are making 75 cents to a dollar in our green economy, something is wrong with it."

GM Looking Into the Past? (Chloe)

2009-03-12T11:00:00.005-04:00

Last night, for the first time I saw the documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? It is an enjoyable movie and I highly recommend it. It seems though that I watched this movie at a rather ironic time.

GM has developed a new electric car, the Chevy Volt, as its argument for government bail out money. President Obama's task force visited GM on Monday and test drove the new car. The task force is charged with figuring out if GM is still an economically viable company and if it deserves bail out money.

It seems ironic though that GM is going back to a car, the EV1, that it developed in the late 90's and later took off the market because it wasn't deemed profitable. The new economic shift is forcing GM to revive the old idea in search of a way to revive their company. The Chevy Volt is expected to be available in 2010. If you would like to follow the Volt, check out this blog or if you are just a bit bored CHECK out some other electic cars like Aptera 2e which will be available in Cali in October!

The future of human beings is what matters (by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva)

2009-03-10T13:52:00.003-04:00

This essay by the Brazilian presidnet was published today in the Financial Times.

For me, capitalism has never been an abstract concept. It is a real, concrete part of everyday life. When I was a boy, my family left the rural misery of Brazil’s north-east and set off for São Paulo. My mother, an extraordinary woman of great courage, uprooted herself and her children and moved to the industrial centre of Brazil in search of a better life. My childhood was no different from that of many boys from poor families: informal jobs; very little formal education. My only diploma was as a machine lathe operator, from a course at the National Service for Industry.

I began to experience the reality of factory life, which awoke in me my vocation as a union leader. I became a member of the Metalworkers’ Union of São Bernardo, in the outskirts of São Paulo. I became the union’s president and, as such, led the strikes of 1978-1980 that changed the face of the Brazilian labour movement and played a big role in returning democracy to the country, then under military dictatorship.

The impact of the union movement on Brazilian society led us to create the Workers’ party, which brought together urban and rural workers, intellectuals and militants from civil society. Brazilian capitalism, at that time, was not only a matter of low salaries, insalubrious working conditions and repression of the union movement. It was also expressed in economic policy and in the whole set of the government’s public policies, as well as in the restrictions it placed on civil liberties. Together with millions of other workers, I discovered it was not enough merely to demand better salaries and working conditions. It was fundamental that we should fight for citizenship and for a profound reorganisation of economic and social life.

I fought and lost four elections before being elected president of the republic in 2002. In opposition, I came to know my country intimately. In discussions with intellectuals I thrashed out the alternatives for our society, living out on the periphery of the world a drama of stagnation and profound social inequality. But my greatest understanding of Brazil came from direct contact with its people through the “caravans of citizenship” that took me across tens of thousands of kilometres.

When I arrived in the presidency, I found myself faced not only by serious structural problems but, above all, by an inheritance of ingrained inequalities. Most of our governors, even those that enacted reforms in the past, had governed for the few. They concerned themselves with a Brazil in which only a third of the population mattered.

The situation I inherited was one not only of material difficulties but also of deep-rooted prejudices that threatened to paralyse our government and lead us into stagnation. We could not grow, it was said, without threatening economic stability – much less grow and distribute wealth. We would have to choose between the internal market and the external. Either we accepted the unforgiving imperatives of the globalised economy or we would be condemned to fatal isolation.

Over the past six years, we have destroyed those myths. We have grown and enjoyed economic stability. Our growth has been accompanied by the inclusion of tens of millions of Brazilian people in the consumer market. We have distributed wealth to more than 40m who lived below the poverty line. We have ensured that the national minimum wage has risen always above the rate of inflation. We have democratised access to credit. We have created more than 10m jobs. We have pushed forward with land reform. The expansion of our domestic market has not happened at the expense of exports – they have tripled in six years. We have attracted enormous volumes of foreign investment with no loss of sovereignty.

All this has enabled us to accumulate $207bn (€164bn, £150bn) in foreign reserves and thereby protect ourselves from the worst effects of a financial crisis that, born at the centre of capitalism, threatens the entire structure of the global economy.

Nobody dares to predict today what will be the future of capitalism.

As the governor of a great economy described as “emerging”, what I can say is what sort of society I hope will emerge from this crisis. It will reward production and not speculation. The function of the financial sector will be to stimulate productive activity – and it will be the object of rigorous controls, both national and international, by means of serious and representative organisations. International trade will be free of the protectionism that shows dangerous signs of intensifying. The reformed multilateral organisations will operate programmes to support poor and emerging economies with the aim of reducing the imbalances that scar the world today. There will be a new and democratic system of global governance. New energy policies, reform of systems of production and of patterns of consumption will ensure the survival of a planet threatened today by global warming.

But, above all, I hope for a world free of the economic dogmas that invaded the thinking of many and were presented as absolute truths. Anti-cyclical policies must not be adopted only when a crisis is under way. Applied in advance – as they have been in Brazil – they can be the guarantors of a more just and democratic society.

As I said at the outset, I do not give much importance to abstract concepts.

I am not worried about the name to be given to the economic and social order that will come after the crisis, so long as its central concern is with human beings.

The writer is president of Brazil. Join the debate at www.ft.com/capitalismblog

China, and What to Do With All Those Factories (Rob)

2009-03-09T05:32:00.007-04:00

In an effort to review the underling conditions and causes of the present crisis, it seems that the following converging factors are true:

Real wages have been stagnant or declining vs. inflation for three decades and have reached a critical point of stress.

Neoliberal foreign policy has deteriorated domestic industry, transferring instead to developing nations.

Excessive military spending has starved the U.S. budget from maintaining domestic necessities like healthcare and education.

Like in 1991, oil interests, responding to aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East, drove up oil prices, causing domestic strife and a slowdown in global trade.

Deregulation of financial markets allowed and caused the market collapse that tipped the hand on the diseased domestic and global economy.

The world financial system was so heavily invested in the SP Mortgage schemes that no country will escape this depression.

The above points have been expounded upon by various interests and spatter a significant portion of even the lauded pages distributed by the New York Post. Here on these pages, views have come from unexpected sources, traffic has increased dramatically, and new perspectives come from brothers and sisters far away, working on their own causes. This brings us to a certain level of understanding, an even footing from which new conclusions may be approached.

A good deal of attention has been paid to the role of information technology in this crisis and the future of democracy. This is important work, since a more informed understanding of the next few years forms a structure upon which achievable plans can be erected and sculpted into reality. Is it possible, however, that technology is not yet the most powerful force in society?

There has been much said about debtor resistance to financial capital. Again, a truly massive democratic movement can not sustain itself without achievable, universal goals to rally the people. Here, there is a good deal of work left to do, especially at the ground level. Can those strategies ever mean anything more than temporary solutions to a transitory economic state?

Stand on those questions for a time. Be assured they will remain while something else takes the stage. What has been said above all comes from an informed conception of the present world. Unreality has always been a much more attractive way to look at this world, however. It might even prove elucidating to take an unwarranted perspective on weighty issues. Science Fiction has served a role in this type of analysis since its first development under the weight of a rapidly nationalizing, ceaselessly industrializing community of intellectuals. Through their visions of electric life, and mechanical wonders, these first futurists were expanding upon the ethics of their own time. The steam powered future was a safe place to explore human values, politics, and dangers without upsetting a paranoid ruling class.

With that in mind, the trends in contemporary science fiction prove useful in highlighting the present situation that is not simple enough to understand as a whole. Is it any wonder that cyberpunk enthralled readers and speculators alike in the midst of the neoliberal revolution? From Blade Runner, to 5th Element, to Firefly, deeply sensitive humanists extrapolated a world where corporate power could not be restrained from its inexorable rise to primacy. The Star Trek crew battled Russians in space, where The Next Generation brought down the wall. Enterprise instead related how the small minded creatures with a never quit attitude learned to walk the stars as humans aught to.

Cyberpunk heralded a world where humanity was lost somewhere between the net, machine implants, and corporate greed. This period of fiction predated the mystical optimism of the singularists, so machine parts on a human frame meant a sort of death of the soul and the internet was just one more tool of global control. One more consistent trait to the genre was that it was universally a Japanese world. Decades of stellar growth and a conversely floundering American business community prompted an undeniable pattern forming around a preeminent Japan, or rather, her corporation’s eventual dissolution of state power. When Japan’s economy collapsed, however, the prophecies of a world that lived under its dominance ceased to be published or even thought about.

Futurist fiction drifted to other things for a time, without quite finding a center. In fact, despite several market fads, a new school of science fiction can’t truly be pinned down just yet. It seems Vernor Vinge’s singularity is an insurmountable wall past which authors feel unqualified to climb. In the absence of a discernable future to extrapolate, steampunk and fantasy literature has experienced a remarkable rise.

A few die hard writers haven’t given up their rockets and hyper drives just yet. While no new themes have emerged, one striking consistency has emerged, the primacy of China. Joss Whedon's Firefly universe stands as the most popular image of this as a network series where all the characters regularly blurt un-translated mandarin and are surrounded by Chinese culture and writing. If China has replaced Japan as the default post-American power of choice, what does that say about what is happening now?

China is expected to post 8% growth to GDP for 2008 - once again, the largest gain out of all countries. In the wake of Neoliberal trade agreements, western heavy industry has coalesced there and in other Asian countries. The jobless recovery of the previous recession is slated to repeat on a wider scale during this depression due to the continued emigration of industry and service jobs. If it is true that domestic recovery will depend upon a return to manufacturing and infrastructure, and we folded that hand long ago, which player is going to win the pot?

Watching the Asian markets will be essential to understanding the world on the other side of this depression. China is presently investing their $600 billion stimulus package into retooling and modernizing their factories on a massive scale. While they can’t help but be carried along in the wake of the crisis, they stand a good chance of staying afloat in general. Since they presently hold $2 trillion in US currency, they also find themselves well funded to outlast the deeply indebted western nations.

There are some trials to overcome, however. The region’s inflation driven economy survives on a significant trade surplus which is drying up. China’s present plan is to readjust their target markets to developing nations, for instance, by producing low cost clothing lines that could supply African and South American states’ rapidly growing urban populations. More peripheral, but not insignificant countries like Brazil are already recovering from the crisis and this play could be a winner.

The Asian markets are holding the cards, the developed, maintained, and growing infrastructure to produce their way out of recession. The West, however, will be forced to rebuild and radically modernize what they have ignored or sold off. It is difficult to pierce the veil over Chinese politics, but with their recent adoption of the 3G wireless standard, internet access will continue to expand, a process that will result in more connection and communication. Coupled with a consistently rising standard of living and real wages, it is time to watch China for a return to democratization and inclusive reform.

Now, place this along current discussions surrounding technology and debtor resistance. Are we prepared to enter the world of tomorrow, when we lack the tools today? Resisting oppressive debt will free potential revolutionaries from burdens no person should bear, forced on the people by powers that have less and less basis in material reality. Technology and the careful adoption of new practices will ensure that these oppressed today are active and connected tomorrow, because networking is a better lever to pull on society's hinges. Put all this in context with a world balance of power that may just be shifting to another sphere. In a world past capitalism, there shouldn't be spheres of power, and we'll get there if we live long enough to get anywhere at all. A refocus of power to the Asian markets, however, could radically change to path to change.

Reimagining Socialism (by Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr.)

2009-03-08T12:23:00.006-04:00

This essay on Socialism by Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr. appeared in the Nation this week.

If you haven't heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn't just because there aren't enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism--its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last three recessions.

But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of "stimulus" are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral where rising unemployment leads to reduced consumption and hence to greater unemployment. Any schadenfreude we might be tempted to feel as executives lose their corporate jets and the erstwhile Masters of the Universe wipe egg from their faces is quickly dashed by the ever more vivid suffering around us. Food pantries and shelters can no longer keep up with the demand; millions face old age without pensions and with their savings gutted; we personally are consumed with anxiety about the future that awaits our children and grandchildren.

Besides, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. There was supposed to be a revolution, remember? The socialist idea, prediction, faith or whatever was that capitalism would fall when people got tired of trying to live on the crumbs that fall from the chins of the rich and rose up in some fashion--preferably inclusively, democratically and nonviolently--and seized the wealth for themselves. Such a seizure would have looked nothing like "nationalization" as currently discussed, in which public wealth flows into the private sector with little or no change in the elites that control it or in the way the control is exercised. Our expectation as socialists was that the huge amount of organizing required for revolutionary change would create an infrastructure for governance, built out of--among other puzzle pieces--unions, community organizations, advocacy groups and new organizations of the unemployed and nouveau poor.

It was also supposed to be a simple matter for the masses to take over or "seize" the physical infrastructure of industrial capitalism--the "means of production"--and start putting it to work for the common good. But much of the means of production has fled overseas--to China, for example, that bastion of authoritarian capitalism. When we look around our increasingly shuttered landscape and survey the ruins of finance capitalism, we see bank upon bank, realty and mortgage companies, title companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies and call centers, but not enough enterprises making anything we could actually use, like food or pharmaceuticals. In recent years, capitalism has become increasingly and almost mystically abstract. Outside manufacturing and the service sector, fewer and fewer people could explain to their children what they did for a living. The brightest students went into finance, not physics. The biggest urban buildings housed cubicles and computer screens, not assembly lines, laboratories, studios or classrooms. Even our flagship industry, manufacturing autos, would require major retooling to make something we could use--not more cars, let alone more SUVs, but more windmills, buses and trains.

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism--with some help from industrial communism--has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don't have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what's next on the agenda.

In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?

Let's just put it right out on the table: we don't. At least we don't have some blueprint on how to organize society ready to whip out of our pockets. Lest this sound negligent on our part, we should explain that socialism was an idea about how to rearrange ownership and distribution and, to an extent, governance. It assumed that there was a lot worth owning and distributing; it did not imagine having to come up with an entirely new and environmentally sustainable way of life. Furthermore, the history of socialism has been disfigured by too many cadres who had a perfect plan, if only they could win the next debate, carry out a coup or get enough people to fall into line behind them.

But we do understand--and this is one of the things that make us "socialists"--that the absence of a plan, or at least some sort of deliberative process for figuring out what to do, is no longer an option. The great promise of capitalism, as first suggested by Adam Smith and recently enshrined in "market fundamentalism," was that we didn't have to figure anything out, because the market would take care of everything for us. Instead of promoting self-reliance, this version of free enterprise fostered passivity in the face of that inscrutable deity, the Market. Deregulate, let wages fall to their "natural" level, turn what remains of government into an endless source of bounty for contractors--whee! Well, that hasn't worked, and the core idea of socialism still stands: that people can get together and figure out how to solve their problems, or at least a lot of their problems, collectively. That we--not the market or the capitalists or some elite group of über-planners--have to control our own destiny.

We admit: we don't even have a plan for the deliberative process that we know has to replace the anarchic madness of capitalism. Yes, we have some notion of how it should work, based on our experiences with the civil rights movement, the women's movement and the labor movement, as well as with countless cooperative enterprises. This notion centers on what we still call "participatory democracy," in which all voices are heard and all people equally respected. But we have no precise models of participatory democracy on the scale that is currently called for, involving hundreds of millions, and potentially billions, of participants at a time.

What might this look like? There are some intriguing models to study, like the Brazilian Workers Party's famous experiments in developing a participatory budget in Porto Alegre. Z Magazine founder Michael Albert developed a detailed approach to mass-based planning that he calls participatory economics, or "parecon," and one of us (Fletcher, in his book Solidarity Divided, written with Fernando Gapasin) has proposed a locally based network of people's assemblies. But all this is experimental, and we realize that any system for mass democratic planning will be messy. It will stumble; it will be wrong sometimes; and there will be a lot of running back to the drawing board.

But as socialists we know the spirit in which this great project of collective salvation must be undertaken, and that spirit is solidarity. An antique notion until very recently, it flickered into life again in the symbolism and energy of the Obama campaign. The Yes We Can! chant was the slogan of the United Farm Workers movement and went on to be adopted by various unions and community-based organizations to emphasize what large numbers of people can accomplish through collective action. Even Obama's relatively anodyne calls for a new commitment to volunteerism and community service seem to have inspired a spirit of "giving back." If the idea of democratic planning, of controlling our destiny, is the intellectual content of socialism, then solidarity is its emotional energy source--the moral understanding and the searing conviction that, however overwhelming the challenges, we are in this together.

Solidarity, though, is an empty sentiment without organization--ways of thinking and working together, and of connecting the social movements that are battling injustice every day. We see a tremendous opportunity in the bleak fact that millions of Americans have been rendered redundant by the capitalist economy and are free to dedicate their considerable talents to creating a more just and sustainable alternative. But if we are serious about collective survival in the face of our multiple crises, we have to build organizations, including explicitly socialist ones, that can mobilize this talent, develop leadership and advance local struggles. And we have to be serious, because the capitalist elites who have run things so far have forfeited all trust or even respect, and we--progressives of all stripes--are now the only grown-ups around.

Crisis in the Real Economy (Posted by Asher)

2009-03-06T08:46:00.007-05:00

This is an analysis of economic data published in the Financial Times last weekend by friends at Radical Perspectives on the Economic Crisis.

Evualuating the Numbers

The Financial Times produced some shocking numbers this weekend. Japanese exports have collapsed by an astounding 45.7%, the largest such decline since 1957. Stock Markets have collapsed to new low for this crisis--so low that markets are at their 1997 levels. The budget deficit in the US is expected to reach $1,750 bn, the highest it has been since the Second World War.

Japan's stunning 'free-fall' is indicative of a broader phenomenon, the rapid decline in global trade and demand for finished goods. Japan's banking system, having been relatively insulated from the toxic assets and exotic debt instruments that poisoned so many western banks, is still afloat. The crisis in the world's second largest economy is further proof of a crisis of the economy proper; i.e., not a crisis of finance. For those economists, journalists and politicians who believed this crisis to be essentially financial (there really are very few left) Japan's erosion should provide good reason to stop calling it the financial crisis and start calling it what it is: an economic crisis.

A few notes on the implications of the data on Japanese exports:

The Yen has been appreciating rapidly since the crisis began. Investors pulling money out of other markets poured their financial wealth into the seemingly safe Japanese currency (this was accompanied by a similar but less extreme process forcing appreciation of the dollar). Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the higher the level of fear in the markets¹, the higher the Yen. This relationship has broken down of late due to fears that the Yen is now grossly over-valued and fears associated with export and industrial output data. We can expect depreciation of the Yen. This will likely lighten the gloomy data on exports but the extent to which any relative recovery in exports takes place will be a good indicator on the strength and prospects of the global economy. Positive change in exports is unlikely although a reduction in the rate of decline should be expected. It is looking grim.

Accordingly, this gloomy economic outlook combined with the seemingly divided and insufficient global response to the crisis has sent stock markets to new lows. Commentators spoke of a possible rally given the low prices of stocks. Others opined about a theoretical floor for stock prices. The floor has fallen out from under the prices and waiting for a rally seems a fools errand. The corporate sector will be subjected to serious stress because of the mounting uncertainty in markets which has made it very difficult to attract investors. Markets are telling us that we should not hold our breath for a fast and painless recovery.

In other news, the world's savings is still pouring into the US market. Our public deficit will reach $1,750 bn this year. Leaving aside the debate about whether the stimulus/bailout will be enough to pull the US out of recession and prevent employment from plummeting, the budget defect will have an enormous effect on overall private investment in the US. Orthodox economics talks about a phenomenon called 'crowding out.' That is when an entity, in this case the state, is sucking up so much of the world's liquidity that there is very little left to lend to other actors. Lets clarify this phenomenon. US public debt (what the Gov borrows) is considered to be risk-free. Put simply, this is because investors assume that as long as the US exists, debts will be repaid. Because US national debt is risk-free it is also very cheep. Riskier borrowers must offer higher interest rates to lenders to attract liquidity. With the US asking for so much money from the private sector and from abroad, other more risky borrowers will find that there is less money floating around to be loaned to them and thus will be obligated to compete against other borrowers by raising interest rates. Some will get loans some won't. What's more is that a firm can only offer an interest rate as high the expected returns on their investments; i.e., profits must be sufficient to service (make payments on) that loan. That means firms will be forced out of the private debt market. Access to state financing will become very important. The final bit to mention about crowding out is that it is not only private sector firms that are crowded out of the market. Small states can be crowded out of the market as well. Look forward to more desperate demands for sovereign loans out of the developing world².

Deficits and the global imbalances:

In the Financial Times on Jan. 2, it was revealed that US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson sees "global imbalances" as the root cause of the present crisis. That is to say, the blame for this crisis was neither dishonesty or poor regulation but rather the underlying instability resulting from international trade--the massive inequality in rates of accumulation between exporting nations (China, Germany, Japan, Gulf States etc...) and debtor nations (US, UK, Spain etc...). The mechanisms that helped to propel the growth of such enormous bubbles in commodities and housing lie in the huge savings of the surplus nations. Those savings needed a place to go so they were put into financial markets in search of high rates of return (relative to the perceived risk of said investments). Those savings found their way into the pockets and homes of Americans and other OECDers. Savings also flowed, in a speculative fashion into commodities driving prices up³.
    The planned stimulus to the US economy will exacerbate the current global imbalances. Unless the result of the stimulus is to depreciate the dollar and boost exports (a short term boost in exports is unlikely given the state of the global economy...) there will be little long-term economic benefits. To the extent that a large part of the stimulus could go to public goods (unemployment benefits, health care, infrastructure and education) the stimulus should be welcomed on basic human grounds but lets not be too optimistic about some sort of 'jump-start' to the economy as that is highly unlikely.
    We should look out for international outcry about American spending and borrowing. In the long run we might expect the American policy to be a measured devaluation of the dollar. This might be the only way out of the crisis but it would spell one of the most monumental shifts in the post-war world and would thus be accompanied by major institutional and structural changes in the political-economic landscape⁴.

Footnotes:

1. Corresponding to VIX. A common measure of market volatility.

2. There is a strong historical relationship between private sector investment, employment and growth in capitalist economies.

3. This is not the whole story of the crisis. It is simply one level of it. A deeper understanding of the crisis must examine structural changes in production and exchange that gave rise to the imbalances but that is beyond the scope of my morning/afternoon.

4. What might be the fate Sino-American relations after a devaluation given the mass of dollars they have willingly accumulated? Could the dollar maintain its place as the worlds reserve currency?

The Post-Scarcity Economy (Posted by Jim)

2009-03-05T15:49:00.003-05:00

There's a fascinating article in the Spring 2009 issues of h+ Magazine (link takes you to the online version—the article starts on page 37).

The author, Jason Stoddard, claims the current financial crisis is the first step on the way toward a post-scarcity economy in which our notion of value is overturned.

But what if advances in manufacturing efficiencies make it possible to live well, simply by interacting with friends and going about your life? What if below-replacement-level birth rates and advances in biotechnology meant you could check out of the system by claiming a piece of unused desert and planting a house? This surveillance economy might be a very easy place to live.

Stoddard is raising a possibility I raised in my earlier post on automation and capitalism, namely that advances in our current social networking technologies, combined with the seamless interface between computing and reality that will come with the internet of things (listen to this talk for more information), will revolutionize the way we both produce and distribute surplus-value. This will happen before we reach a post-scarcity economy.

The possibilities once we reach a post-scarcity economy (through nanotechnology or something else) are almost limitless. What few people are saying—Stoddard stops short of saying this, too—is that capitalism is unintelligible under such circumstances. If necessary labor consists in—to put it bluntly—screwing around with your friends and having a good time, if that's the way we acquire our means of subsistence, then there effectively is no barrier between ourselves and social wealth. If one can take the current emerging paradigm of decentralization emerging now and extrapolate it a decade or two into the future, a paradigm of radical democracy and effortless participation takes shape. It would be a self-sustaining, self-growing, undirected, democratic and organic communist system.

Obama's agenda and the conservative response (posted by Keith)

2009-03-04T16:25:00.004-05:00

This was in todays Financial Times.

An epic battle looms over Obama's big push

By Roger Altman

Published: March 4 2009 02:00 | Last updated: March 4 2009 02:00

If leadership is measured by seizing big opportunities that others do not see, then Barack Obama is already proving himself a leader. His 2007 decision to run for president was audacious but shrewd. He saw the opening. Now, he has judged that the severe economic crisis, his own soaring popularity and Republican disarray provide a rare chance to revolutionise US domestic policy. And he is going for it right now.

His new budget calls for breathtaking change in one big step. In the modern era, only Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and Ronald Reagan in 1981 have sought and achieved comparable change. Johnson's Great Society sharply expanded the government's role. Reagan rolled that back. Now, Mr Obama is proposing a new era of progressive government, centred on expanded federal roles in energy, health and education.

This level of federal activism is anathema to Republicans. It attacks their core principles of lower taxes and limited government. If implemented, the new progressivism may rule indefinitely. The era of Reagan conservatism lasted nearly 30 years. Republicans, as Newt Gingrich, former House speaker, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, have urged, have no choice but to wage all-out war against it. We are about to witness an epic congressional fight - the political equivalent of the Battle of Antietam in the American Civil War.

The key fight will not occur over the spending amounts in the budget. Republicans cannot defeat those. Congressional roles require only a simple majority to approve budgets, and the ample Democratic majorities will prevail. Budgets also just allocate amounts and sources of financing for programmes. The latter must be voted on separately and later. This is where the battle will focus - on the expansion of the government role in energy, healthcare and education.

First, on energy conservation, Mr Obama's cap-and-trade proposal represents a sharp expansion of regulation and an indirect and large tax increase on industry. Caps on permissible emissions would apply to all polluting industries and tighten gradually. Those unable to comply would buy emissions credits and incur the associated costs. These credits would be auctioned by the government, raising $65bn a year. Some would finance alternative energy but most would pay for tax cuts on middle-income Americans. In other words, industry would underwrite the shift to a more progressive tax system.

Second, on healthcare the goal is universal health insurance for all Americans. The methods are likely to involve a federal requirement that all adults receive coverage from their employers or buy it for themselves. The budget projects $1,000bn of additional federal costs over 10 years to deliver universal coverage. To finance this partially, it will begin raising a $630bn "reserve fund" from tax rises on higher earners and limiting Medicare reimbursements to healthcare providers.

Finally, responsibility for financing education has always resided at the state and local level in the US. Mr Obama has proposed to double the federal role in early childhood education. Further, he has proposed expanding the grant for low-income college tuition assistance and converting it into an entitlement - the first in decades.

These proposals would dramatically expand the federal role. Moreover, the financing for this would create a substantially more progressive tax system. This is why Republican and conservative opposition will be so fierce.

The risk for Mr Obama does not lie in these proposals, but in the growing possibility that the recovery is much weaker than envisioned in his budget. It forecasts real gross domestic product growth rebounding 3.2 per cent in 2010 and over 4 per cent for the subsequent three years. On that basis, the deficit still approximates $1,000bn through 2011. But this is a rare balance-sheet recession. The asset bubble collapse caused US households to lose 25 per cent of their net worth and financial sector balance sheets to collapse. It is practically impossible for these damaged balance sheets to support a return to normal consumer spending (72 per cent of GDP) and financial lending for three to four years. The recovery, therefore, will be subnormal. This not only means even bigger deficits than the scary ones projected, but it also could weaken public support for these sweeping policy changes.

Can Mr Obama implement this audacious agenda? His current momentum and extraordinary gifts suggest that he can. We may see a generation of change telescoped into one year.

The writer is chairman of Evercore Partners and was deputy Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton

Timeline for Accelerating Political/Social Change (Jim)

2009-03-03T13:35:00.005-05:00

It's a lot of fun reading timelines for things like the technological singularity or even just the implementation of robots in our economy. But have you ever wondered what a political/economic/social timeline would look like? I decided to put a short one together, just for fun.

2010 - We show signs of emerging from the recession we're currently in, but the rate of job growth is less than what it was at the beginning of the recession, i.e., another "jobless recovery".

2013 - We begin to enter another recession, deeper and longer than the one we're currently in. Tremendous job loss forces the federal government to take larger role in ensuring people have necessities, though relative weakness of the government compared with social democracies makes this difficult and somewhat inefficient. Still, we get by.

2017 - Again we recover from the recession, but recovery is again less than it was last time. This is owing to the vast number of jobs that have been automated. New jobs in the information technology sector are not sufficient to make up for it.

2019 - The economy enters recession again. Unprecedented job losses seizing the entire world. Unprecedented interventions from world governments manage to keep the economy going, though they are incredibly inefficient compared with the market forces they are attempting to replace.

2020 - Period of perpetual economic crisis begins. Permanent recession. Internet 3.0, the "internet of things", is ubiquitous. Production processes increasingly automated but also democratized through the next generation of social/material networking technologies.

Mid 20s - Capitalism is in severe crisis. It can't prop itself up anymore by means of market forces alone. The state can no longer prop it up in a way that is profitable. This is not localized either but is global. Growing demand for the basic necessities of life, but a smaller and smaller role left for the state. Needs are increasingly met through an organized though decentralized process which takes place over the "internet".

2025-2030 - Drastic fall in the cost of means of subsistence. Large portions of the means of subsistence are removed from the value-form all together. By the 30s food, housing, and medicine are free due to the ease with which they're produced by automated labor. Due to exponential increases in information technology and robot design, work becomes obsolete. "Unemployment" nearing 85% of the global population makes the category almost meaningless.

2030 - Though there are perhaps isolated markets, capitalism as a world system no longer exists. Neither markets nor state control of production even approached the efficiency with which the fully automated, open source economy operates. The state still exists, though it is more and more restricted to policing information, protecting against identity theft, etc.

2040 and beyond - There is no longer any state or economy as we understand them now. Society is fully "online", though the distinction between the internet and the world (and indeed machine and person) no longer exists. Flow of information and personal identity completely impossible to protect or regulate from the outside. World intelligence system totally self-regulating and communistic.

Obviously I'm just making this up—even Marshall Brain doesn't think we'd have that much automation that early. But I really haven't seen a lot of timelines like this alongside the technological ones. People seem to assume that capitalism will coexist indefinitely with this kind of explosion, and that just seems preposterous to me. But I think this is something we need to start thinking about. We need to extrapolate political, social, and economic change into the future just like we do with technology.

What's your timeline look like? Post it here.

Student Debt & The Obama Budget (Chloe)

2009-03-03T11:08:00.003-05:00

For many of us that are still students, we are semi-isolated from the financial crisis. We are though very familiar with the financial aid process that causes major head aches around this time of the year. Obama's new budget may change that.

The president is proposing an overhaul of the financial aid program, including nationalizing the lending process. Not surprisingly this will have a negative impact on lending institutions like Sallie Mae, but the plan is estimated to save the federal government 4 billion dollars. Along with saving the federal government money, the president is increasing the number of grants available to low income students and expanding eligibility to the federal loan program.

This though is a small step in terms of getting affordable education and many students will still be left with mounds of debt. It though signifies greater federal government involvement in higher education, letting us hope that free higher education will someday be a reality in the United States.

Automation and the End of Capitalism (Jim)

2009-03-03T11:01:00.014-05:00

I wanted to write a quick addendum to Rob's post on Marshall Brain's talk about robotics and employment.

At the end of his talk Brain says the only logical plan of action given the inevitability of the massive unemployment (50 million people) and concentration of wealth that will result from full automation of labor in the next decade is to "restructure the economy" or "redesign society". Brain summarizes the way we should redesign society in four points:

Spread the benefits of productivity increases to everyone

Break the concentration of wealth

Increase pay

Reduce the work week

Brain doesn't provide a lot of details for what these actions would involve, though of the last one, reducing the work week, he says we should reduce it from 40 hrs to 30 hrs to three days to two days—until we are all "perpetually on vacation".

To put the point bluntly, Brain describes communism. Notwithstanding some of the particularities given by various thinkers—Marx even remarks at one point that we will enjoy work under communism—communism has always involved two things: (1) the distribution of labor and the distribution of the product of labor is planned and not determined by the market, and (2) we are freed of the compulsory aspect of labor. The struggle against capitalism is a struggle against the imposition of labor. It is in most cases a struggle to get more use-values for less exchange-value or to get use-values without any exchange-value attached to them.

Same thing without the jargon: communism means everyone gets as much as possible by working as little as possible.

Clearly this was impossible under conditions of scarcity. Yet technologists, engineers, scientists, and inventors all seem to agree that we are fast approaching the point where scarcity will end—if we're not there already. The question is whether the scarcity we experience now and will experience in the future is the result of nature or whether it is the result of the unplanned system we live in. Brain argues that if we continue down the current path—letting market forces stand in for conscious decisions—this technology will hurt humanity, not benefit it. But if we make conscious, rational choices about how society as a whole ought to proceed with the implementation of this technology, it can benefit everyone. In fact, it is the only way it can benefit everyone and not hurt them. That is the first way in which Brain's solution negates the fundamentals of capitalism: he says we ought to bypass the market and make conscious, direct choices about the distribution of labor and the distribution of the fruits of labor in our society.

What he does not mention—and what I would emphasize—is that the ubiquity and growth of social networking technologies lays the foundation for total, conscious, decentralized, and democratic planning of the production process and the democratic distribution of the surplus-product. Communist planning in a technologically advanced world will neither resemble "administered", Soviet-style economies, nor will it reflect market forces. The current trajectory of the development of the productive forces makes this both possible and necessary.

The second way in which he bypasses capitalism is by raising the demand that we be "perpetually on vacation". He claims the only solution to the looming crisis—a crisis which we see now only in miniature—is to demand an end to the condition of forced labor. While it may appear as though capitalism is a system in which workers individually and voluntarily contract out their labor in exchange for a wage, the fact of the matter is that the working class as a whole is enslaved by the capitalist class as a whole. Every product of labor takes the commodity form. Unlike past civilizations, we do not even keep the means of subsistence. Therefore, in order to acquire access to the means of subsistence, we must work in exchange for a wage, and we exchange that wage for the means of subsistence. Money stands as the barrier between us and what we create. It is an indirect, abstract form of slavery, but it is a form of slavery nevertheless. We are not enslaved to any one particular individual; however, we are enslaved to the value-form itself. We cannot live except by working for another person, and our share of the product of labor is determined by unconscious, unplanned market forces.

But the demand for communism is the demand that we workers as a whole, rather than having to access the product of our labor only to the extent that the non-workers want us to, instead collectively have direct control over the product of our labor. This means that, as a society, we give of ourselves what we consent to give, and we take what it is reasonable to take. Given the inevitable conditions of superabundance of products approaching, the extent to which we can take approaches infinity. Given the inevitable, exponential rise in the productivity of labor, the amount of our labor we can consent to give approaches a value of zero.

We are fast approaching the point where if we do not meet anti-capitalist demands, the vast part of humanity will sink into misery. Brain demonstrates this in his talk. Yet we are approaching a point—just behind the first point—where the conditions that make capitalism possible will no longer exist. Moreover, we are creating the point where access to social wealth is necessarily decoupled from exertion. We are making necessary a transition from a liberal democratic society to a revolutionary democratic one.

How the Crash will Reshape America (Chloe)

2009-03-02T16:19:00.004-05:00

I've been neglecting to post this and during that time the Daily Kos picked up the article.

The original article can be found here. Definately worth a read if you are interested in how the economic crash will reshape the economic geography of the United States.

I will post some thoughts from Rob L in the comments.

Banks to Card Debtors: Pay up now!!...Please??? (Brian)

2009-03-02T16:17:00.006-05:00

The credit card biz used to love people with "a taste for credit" -- folks who kept high balances and more often than not paid barely above the minimum. But alas, the party is over. As the economy circles the toilet, credit card banks are reversing course -- offering incentives to pay off balances quickly so your debt balance is off their books like so many other "toxic assets." It's an interesting reversal of a long-standing policy that your balance was a good thing (I wrote about that policy a bit more indirectly here on this blog).

So why do we care? Well, they're in a panic. The banks don't know which way is up. A few weeks ago, the message was, "Buy stuff!!" Now it's, "OK - How can we make you go away?" It is times like these that a re-orientation of our relationship to debt and banks, like a debtors' union or a "bank strike," becomes more viable. The "cultural space" for (the popularization of) resistance is growing, if you will.

PS - By the way, as you might have figured out, "You are not your credit score!" rings truer because you can't even trust the accuracy of that score to begin with.

Thanks, capitalism - enjoy retirement.

Partial Peace, Looming War (By Tom Hayden)

2009-03-02T14:57:00.007-05:00

This essay by Tom Hayden was published in The Nation this week. His analysis of Obama's relationship to the military establishment is interesing. I ahev soem thoughts about what he says about the anti-war movement that I posted as a comment.

========================

Partial Peace, Looming War.

By Tom Hayden

President Obama has surprised the national security establishment, and not a few in the peace movement, with his Friday commitment to pull all American troops out of Iraq by 2011.
The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks predicted in his recent authoritative history, The Gamble, that Obama would keep 25,000 to 50,000 troops in Iraq as a "residual" force indefinitely. Ricks reports that generals like David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno were expecting at least that many troops, and predicts that the fighting will continue for decades. Obama's announced new policy must shock Ricks and the military leaders he extensively interviewed. Obama's official stance comes after many months of appearing to support the notion of residual forces, which many in the peace movement correctly believed could lead to low-visibility counterinsurgency and a permanent military occupation. Obama said nothing to dissuade the critics until Friday's speech at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
In debates within the Obama camp, only John Podesta, transition adviser and head of the Center for American Progress (CAP) was publicly advocating that all troops, including trainers and advisers, be withdrawn within one year.
Ricks' book is wrong on another related matter, the role of the antiwar movement in this process. Ricks celebrates Petraeus for having pacified Iraq in the face of considerable Democratic doubt, and for winning the political war at home in 2007-2008. Petraeus's stated goal was to speed up the Iraqi clock (the surge) while slowing down the American one (the electoral calendar). Ricks says he pulled it off. After Petraeus's appearance before Congress in September 2007, Rick says, domestic criticism faded away. News coverage of Iraq sharply declined, as networks began to withdraw from Iraq. The March 2008 antiwar demonstrations were "tiny," he writes, with fewer than 1,000 in Washington and 500 in San Francisco.
Ricks is partly right. Democratic party leaders and big donors pulled back from the issue of Iraq after Petraeus's testimony, and after a MoveOn advertisement accusing the general of betrayal. The resulting crisis in the DC hub of antiwar advocates was never resolved, but the grassroots peace bloc in the Democratic primaries mushroomed anyway, giving Obama a needed edge in Iowa and a string of wins against Hillary Clinton.
When there was a choice between supporting Barack Obama and attending rallies organized by various Maoists, Trotskyists and neo-anarchists opposed to Obama and electoral politics, the grassroots peace movement headed for the precincts by the thousands. What appeared to Ricks to be a failed antiwar rally in Washington was only evidence that the movement was moving on, becoming a voting force in and around the Obama campaign.
That turned out to be the right strategy for the peace movement when John McCain was defeated in November, but many continued to wonder--with good reason--whether Obama was promising nothing more than partial peace under a new form of military occupation. Now it is clear that somewhere along the way Obama became persuaded that it made little sense to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq when the Pentagon couldn't win with 150,000, the American economy was collapsing and his hands were full in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In Iraq the situation remains unpredictable. A brutal nationalist and authoritarian state, with sectarian police and thousands of detainees, looms as the result of a seven-year war. Under Odierno's command, according to Ricks, tens of thousands of military-aged Sunni males (called MAMs) were held in preventive detention. Bob Woodward's recent book goes further, crediting a top-secret US program of extrajudicial killings for imposing a peace of the dead in Baghdad. The Sunni insurgency decided in 2007 that an alliance with the Americans would thwart their Al Qaeda rivals while providing protection against the Shi'a majority. They were right, and 100,000 of the so-called Sons of Iraq were paid $20 million per month not to shoot at Americans. On the other hand, the Shi'a who already were installed in power by the Americans had no reason to fight their sponsors, especially when even the militias loyal to Moktada al-Sadr chose to take a political path to power, at least for the moment. The Iranians will be pleased to see the US troops depart on any schedule, and enjoy good relations with whichever Shi'a party prevails in Iraq. The festering Kurdish crisis could boil over, but is localized. Things could change, but most Iraqis have an interest in seeing the Americans implement the "withdrawal agreement." Who knows, they may even throw flowers to the retreating troops instead of shoes.
The greater danger from Iraq for Obama may lie at home politically if Republicans and the generals, echoed by the mainstream media, protest Obama's withdrawal plan as naïve or worse. In Ricks's analysis, Obama would not want to risk a confrontation with the military early in his presidency:
"Like Clinton, Obama would also face the prospect of a de facto alliance between the military and congressional Republicans to stop him from making any major changes. "
Since Ricks was wrong about Obama's fortitude, he may be wrong on the danger of a backlash as well. The American people are in no mood for a "forever war" in Iraq, whatever the malcontents believe in Washington think tanks.
That leaves Afghanistan and Pakistan, both in flames. In those places, the politics are reversed, with Obama having promised to defeat Al Qaeda by using Predators in Pakistan and more ground troops in Afghanistan. So far he is keeping his campaign pledges, while still proceeding cautiously in developing an overall plan. Neither the neoconservatives nor the generals are fully happy with Obama's early approach, which they see as pointed towards a diplomatic settlement instead of "winning" militarily. On this point, Secretary Gates seems to have the president's back, repeatedly warning that no military solution is possible.
Nevertheless, Obama is beginning an escalation with 17,000 troops bringing the American total in Afghanistan to over 50,000. Except for its political rationale, this is a puzzling military gesture. By comparison:
• In South Vietnam, the US deployed 500,000 troops on a battlefield of 67,000 square miles containing 19 million people
•n Iraq, we deployed 160,000 troops on a battlefield of 168,745 square miles, with 26 million people
•n Afghanistan, Obama plans to deploy some 60,000 US troops on a battlefield of 250,001 sqare miles with 30 million people
• And in Pakistan he has 100 special ops on the ground, with $400 million allocated for 85,000 tribal paramilitaries.
The geography and demographics are staggering. Obama cannot possibly be considering a military solution while deploying fewer American troops on larger and larger battlefields. It is hard to imagine that he plans a Vietnam-style escalation either. At the current rate of Afghanistan spending, the costs will reach over $1 trillion by the end of Obama's first term, while he risks his presidency on economic recovery.
Until a brave few in Congress begin to catch up, the critics of Afghanistan policy will have to launch a passionate and substantive debate over the "long war" ahead, oppose the 17,000 new troops as simply 17,000 more targets for the Taliban, sketch in the content of a diplomatic settlement and propose an exit strategy. The first arena for debate, recalling the 1965 Vietnam teach-ins on campuses, will be the blogosphere. The second will be Congressional hearings, with critics at the table. And the third phase is likely to be direct dialogue and engagement in the 2010 elections, district by district. At this point, however, the movement will have to engage MoveOn and many liberal Democrats who are mired in the lingering belief that Afghanistan is the "good war." (We might ask, what does that make Pakistan?)
There are still more battlefields in the long war. Obama will have to be persuaded to say no to an Israeli strike on Iran while he tries to engage Tehran on stability in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ultimately, Obama will also find ways to increase support for Palestinian aspirations, as the most effective approach to lessening Arab and Islamic support for jihad. It's a long way down the road, but his choices of George Mitchell as an envoy along with Charles Freeman to a high intelligence post are the most progressive and independent Middle East appointments in a generation.

Technological Change and the Revolutionary Process (Keith)

2009-02-28T13:06:00.007-05:00

The work of the inventor and futurist Ray Kurweil was a part of our discussion in a study group in New Brunswick. (We hope to stream our study groups on line soon so that comrades outside of town can particpate too). Here is a talk that Kurweil gave on "technology's acceralating power."

On this blog and in our practical work we have been developing the theory of revolutionary democray in a way we think is unusual among the left, we eagerly look to the future, instead of the past. We are not critics of counsmer culture and consumption so much as we are fighting for better as well as more opportunities for consumption. We are more interetsed in productive process that have a future rather than preserving the past.

In previos posts I argued that What is revolutionay about the working class is that workers are best able to bring down the system and today these workers are in high tech sectors of the economy. We have also argued that the most advanced communications technology provides the scaffolding of revolutionary democratic orgainzation and enhanbces its possibilities. Understanding technological change and its social effects is crucial for develping revolutionary democratic stratgey and tactics.

This talk by Kurzweil raises a number of questions which it would be worth investigating further. Here are the ones that jumped out at me:

Kurzweil early in the talk says "humanity is a technology creating animal" and throughout the talk he erradicates the distinction between natural history and social history.

Is there no difference between political/social/cultural history and natural history (evolution)?

Kurzweil says: "price performance” improve continuously. In other words the price of technology continously declines. This is pretty easily explained by Marx's value theory. But it is impossible to explain with modern bouregois economic theory which argues prices are determined by individual subjective preferences.

How does bourgeosie or neoclassical economics (the less deragatory term), and Kurzweil understand improved "price performance"? (Also what he calls the 40-50% defaltion rate-- which is price deflation. He also inadvertently mentions teh radical increase in teh rate of exploitation. Worker productivity in the U.S.rose from $30 per/hour to $150 per/hour)

Is Kurweil aware of the incapablity of his theory with theories of price formation in neoclassical economics? How are the conradictions resolved ideologically? Are there openings to create division between the technocratic classes and neocalssical economics here?

Kurzweil speaks about the laws of technological evolution. What are these laws? How are they enforced? Kurzweil mentions competition (it is not clear if the laws are enforced by competition in this talk. If so, that would be Marx's basic view, but it is only under capitalist social relations that competition is orgianzed and universalized). Kurzweil seems to argue that technologival change is a given rather than a social product.

Kurzweil use the trem "research pressure." Where does this pressure come from?

In our study group we also discussed some of the questions raised by rapid technological change in the context of Marx's theory of tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Simply stated: the amount of human labor in each commodity is reduced by technological innovations which develop labors productivity. This causes the price of the commodity to fall and th3 rate of profit to decline. Here is a paragraph from the Grundrisse where Max talks about technological changed and the end of capitalism.

"To the degree that labour time -- the mere quantity of labour -- is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production -- of the creation of use values -- and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side -- a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production."

So I would also ask what are the barriers that capitalist social relationships pose to the development technology and labors' productive power and how can we find ways to explain the obstacles posed by capitalism?

It would be great if we can begin a discussion here, and do further research, discuss it at study group, write it up notes from the discussion as a blog post for those who can't make it to study cirle.

Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution (George Ciccariello-Maher))

2009-02-27T12:45:00.014-05:00

This essay was originally published on Monthly Reviews website. It was alos published on the Maoist site Kasama (where I first saw it).

by George Ciccariello-Maher

Too often, the Bolivarian Revolution currently underway in Venezuela is dismissed by its critics—on the right and left—as a fundamentally statist enterprise. We are told it is, at best, a continuation of the corrupt, bureaucratic status quo or, at worst, a personalistic consolidation of state power in the hands of a single individual at the expense of those “checks and balances” traditionally associated with western liberal democracies. These perspectives are erroneous, since they cannot account for what have emerged as the central planks of the revolutionary process. I will focus on the most significant of these planks: the explosion of communal power.

By viewing the process through the Leninist concept of “dual power”—that is, the construction of an autonomous, alternative power capable of challenging the existing state structure—we can see that the establishment of communal councils in Venezuela is clearly a positive step toward the development of fuller and deeper democracy, which is encouraging in and of itself. But the councils’ significance goes beyond that. The consolidation of communal power says much about the role of the state in the Venezuelan Revolution. Specifically, what is unique about the Venezuelan situation is the fact that sectors of the state are working actively to dismantle and dissolve the old state apparatus by devolving power to local organs capable of constituting a dual power. Transcending the simplistic debate between taking or opposing state power, a focus on dual power allows us to concentrate on what really matters in Venezuela and elsewhere: the revolutionary transformation of existing repressive structures.

‘An Entirely Different Kind of Power’

Lenin—standing at what he felt to be an unprecedented and unforeseeable political crossroads—spoke of the emergence of “an entirely different kind of power,” one fundamentally distinct from that of prevailing bourgeois democracies.1 Alongside the Provisional Government of Kerensky, an alternative government of Workers’ Soviets had emerged, a dual power—or dvoevlastie—standing outside and against the existing state structure. This still “weak and incipient” alternative structure Lenin describes as “a revolutionary dictatorship, i.e., a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below, andnot on a law enacted by a centralized state power.”

What was it that made this power “entirely different”? According to Lenin, this dual power was defined above all by its unique political content, for which the clearest historical reference point was the 1871 Paris Commune.2

The fundamental characteristics of this type are:
(1) the source of power is not a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament, but the direct initiative of the people from below, in their local areas—direct “seizure,” to use a current expression;
(2) the replacement of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed workers and peasants themselves, by the armed peoplethemselves;
(3) officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either similarly replaced by the direct rule of the people themselves or at least placed under special control; they not only become elected officials, but are also subject to recall at the people’s first demand; they are reduced to the position of simple agents; from a privileged group holding “jobs” remunerated on a high, bourgeois scale, they become workers of a special “arm of the service,” whose remuneration does not exceedthe ordinary pay of a competent worker.

As we will see, this concept can clearly be applied to Venezuela, but to do so entails a double movement: it reveals some of the limitations of the concept itself as originally formulated, and also alerts us to some of the dangers confronting the revolutionary process in Venezuela. By speaking in terms of dual power, the hope is that we might enrich our understanding both of the concept itself and of the Bolivarian Revolution.

The Explosion of Communal Power

In the aftermath of Chávez’s landslide electoral victory in December 2006, the Bolivarian Revolution has taken a radical turn. The enemies of the process soundly defeated, the way has been cleared for the deepening and radicalization of the process. Moreover, with six years of leadership ahead of him, Chávez now enjoys a brief respite from the demands of his “allies,” one which has allowed him to take serious steps against those corrupt bureaucrats within the Chavista ranks who would halt the revolutionary process. The program for this radicalization has been described in terms of the “five motors” driving the revolution, the fifth and most substantial of which is “the explosion of communal power.” This refers to the expansion of local communal councils and their authority throughout Venezuela, a process which began with the 2006 Law on Communal Councils and which has taken off in recent weeks and months.3 At present, there are an estimated 18,320 organized communal councils, and some 50,000 are expected by the end of the year.4

The committee that authored the Law on Communal Councils was chaired by Communist Party member David Velásquez—recently named Minister of Participation and Social Development—who sees the councils as the basis for the revolutionary transformation of the state, arguing that: “what is sought is to transfer power and democracy to organized communities to such a degree that the State apparatus would eventually be reduced to levels that it becomes unnecessary.”5 But as we will see below, this view also differs from Lenin’s understanding of dual power in that it has operated in part through the legal system and the state apparatus. This difference can be explained by the fact that Velásquez’s vision draws directly upon Antonio Negri’s distinction between “constituent” and “constituted” powers, a distinction which Chávez himself has cited on several occasions and which emphasizes the constant need for the intervention by the “constituent” masses in opposition to the sterility of legality and the adherence to already-constituted structures.6 This distinction—which does not dismiss constituted, institutional, or legal power from the outset, but instead subjects that power to revocation by the people—is much more useful for a discussion of dual power than a homogeneous view of the state structure, and has arguably contributed significantly (partly through Velásquez’s own intervention) to the construction of a serious dual power in Venezuela whose ethical-legal foundation is the constituent intervention of the masses.7

Considering the popularity of constituent power in Venezuela, it shouldn’t surprise us to find that the role of law in contemporary Venezuela is peculiar to say the least. The situation is what one might call a “revolutionary reverence” for the law: not an a priori respect for the law but rather an admiration derived from the experience of revolutionary legislation imposed from below, and specifically the organized defense of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution (a defense which gave rise to the revolutionary base organizations known as Bolivarian Circles). As the spokesperson for a communal council in the Naguanagua sector of Valencia recently told me—Communal Council Law in hand—“we can’t read the law like a reactionary lawyer, but instead, without violating it, we need to make it fit our social reality in order to restore the true protagonism to the people.” This radical view of the law is, in fact, a manifestation of the Venezuelan emphasis on constituent power: while it is necessary to make use of existing constituted power (in this case, the law), one must never forget that this constituted power relies fundamentally upon the constituent power that enacted it.

According to Article 2 of the 2006 law, communal councils are “instances of participation, articulation, and integration between various community organizations, social groups, and citizens,” the goal of which is to “permit the organized people directly to manage public policy and projects oriented toward responding to the needs and aspirations of communities in the construction of a society of equity and social justice.” These councils, moreover, are required to operate according to criteria which include “mutual responsibility, cooperation, solidarity, transparency, accountability, honesty, efficacy, efficiency, social responsibility, social control, equity, and social and gender equality” (Article 3), and are broadly empowered to “adopt those decisions essential to life in the community” (Article 6). According to the law, councils are to be governed by way of committees whose spokespersons are elected for a tenure of two years (Article 12), and as with elections at other levels, mandates are revocable (Article 6).

The fiscal autonomy of the communal councils is significant, despite the fact that most funding comes—somewhat unavoidably in an oil-rich nation—via the central government. Chávez has announced on several occasions that in the future, a full 50 percent of the profits derived from the state-owned petroleum company PDVSA—profits totaling more than $6 billion during the first half of 2006—will be transferred directly to communal councils. These funds had been previously directed toward state governors and mayors, but will now be managed directly on the communal level. Toward this end, 590 billion bolívares ($274 million) had already been earmarked for 2,500 communal projects by February 15, 2007, and that figure has only been increasing since.8 So, too, has the breadth of their specified competencies: in response to the recent controversy over meat shortages caused by hoarding, a law was passed giving power to the government to take over businesses engaged in hoarding, and this law gives the same authority to communal councils. While these remain but hints as to the future importance of the councils, they are nevertheless encouraging ones. But what is the relation between the nascent communal councils and the concept of dual power outlined above?

Against Bureaucracy

To take Lenin’s criteria in reverse order, it should be pointed out that the explicit purpose of the councils is to subject the official bureaucracy to the will of the people expressed through direct participation on the local level. While some tentative and insufficient steps have been taken to attack corruption and bureaucracy within the central government, the councils can be seen as taking this fight to another level, both in the “social oversight” authority they are granted over the central government and in the transparent and egalitarian norms which govern their internal operations. In terms of Lenin’s two criteria—revocable leadership and the elimination of wage differentials—it is worth noting that revocable mandates have been a central plank of the Bolivarian Revolution from the beginning, and are enshrined in the 1999 Constitution.9 In terms of wages, the Venezuelan government has begun to take steps to impose ceilings on public sector wages: in January, the National Assembly—citing the fact that some high court judges earn more than twenty-eight million bolívares ($13,000) a month—began work on a law that would limit salaries for government officials to six million bolívares ($2,800) monthly.10

The capacity of the councils to attack bureaucracy and corruption begins with their capacity to supervise other levels of government: every council elects a five-person committee for “social oversight [contraloría]” which in the words of Lenin, places bureaucrats “under special control.” These committees are empowered to oversee “programs and projects for public investment budgeted and executed by the national, regional, or municipal government” (Article 11). This authority represents a powerful weapon against the corrupt bureaucracies that exist on the state and local level, and against those governors and mayors whom many hope the councils will eventually replace entirely. But this is far from certain, as Fernando—an organizer with the Simón Bolívar Cultural Foundation in the historically revolutionary 23 de Enero neighborhood and official promoter of Chávez’s nascent United Socialist Party (PSUV)—expresses a common concern at this stage of the formation of communal councils: “most mayors are playing too big a role in the creation of communal councils, trying to control them. The role of state officials should only be to provide information and facilitate the councils.”

There is also the hope that, in bypassing these various levels of government bureaucracy, the councils will be able to avoid or at least minimize the corruption that comes with the transfer of funds from the national to the local level. “If a local organization wants to request funding from the government,” Fernando explains, “that money needs to pass through so many hands [e.g. ministries, governors, and mayors] that corruption is inevitable. We hope that the councils will eliminate or at least minimize the possibility of corruption by establishing a direct link between funding and the communities.” While he doubts that fiscal reliance on the state as a whole will be eliminated in the near future—“How else,” he asks, “can petroleum money reach the communities?”—his hope is that the councils will reduce the possibility that the institutions involved remain alienated from the people.

On the local level, moreover, we find the second key element to the councils’ attack on bureaucracy and corruption: direct democracy on the local level. Turning again to Lenin’s emphasis on revocable mandates and limited wages, committee members in communal councils are elected through the direct participation of the community, for short terms (two years), and can be revoked much easier than elected officials at higher levels. When we get to the communal councils, moreover, remuneration has disappeared entirely, and all elected posts are explicitly “ad honorem” (Article 12). Whereas in the capacity of overseeing the central government, the councils serve as a counterweight to the higher levels of power. The directly democratic nature of participation in the councils coupled with the non-remuneration of their elected leadership militate against the corruption and bureaucratization of the councils themselves, thereby making them a more stable and self-sufficient reservoir of dual power. These are structures which simultaneously prefigure a future participatory society while tentatively building forces to attack those elements of the existing state which oppose that transformation.

But the ability of the councils to live up to this hope is far from guaranteed, and up the street at the council election, Carlos Rodríguez—younger brother of one of 23 de Enero’s most famous martyrs—while optimistic, insists that “only time will tell whether the councils will be able to fulfill their function.”

An Armed Populace

Lenin’s second criterion for dual power—that of a directly armed populace—is a more complicated question, since the communal councils are not armed in any official sense. Rather, they must be considered in a broader context, and the history of armed organizations outside and against the state runs deep in Venezuela. Decades of rural and urban guerrilla struggle in the pre-Chávez years have given way not to a pacification and disarmament after his election, but rather to the proliferation of networks of armed, local self-defense units concentrated in the poorest parts of Venezuela. As merely one example, we could mention the various groups concentrated in the 23 de Enero sector of western Caracas, where decades of urban insurgency gave birth to the Coordinadora Simón Bolívar (CSB), the Revolutionary Tupamaro Movement, the Revolutionary Carapaica Movement–Néstor Zerpa Cartollini Combat Unit, and the Colectivo Alexis Vive, just to name a few. Similar organizations exist in the other large barrios of Caracas—Petare, La Vega, El Valle, etc.—and throughout the country as a whole, to which we could add the mysterious activities of the decentralized Bolivarian Liberation Front which operates in rural areas.

These groups have even on several occasions received logistical support from national and local government (especially current Metropolitan Mayor Juan Barreto), though this support has not included arms as the opposition has often claimed. This, moreover, has been a reciprocal relationship: when Chávez was briefly overthrown in April 2002, several of his ministers were offered safe haven in barrios like 23 de Enero and La Vega. So while the space for armed self-defense on the local level has certainly expanded and been encouraged as elected Chavistas have taken over the various levels of the state apparatus, we should bear in mind that this has been a slow and uneven process, both because Chavista hegemony is only now becoming consolidated, but more importantly because, as a revolutionary organizer who is currently working to facilitate local preparations for asymmetrical warfare in the event of aggression against Venezuela by the United States tells me: “Despite Chávez’s pronouncements on the need for a citizens’ militia, many of those within the structure still believe in the state’s need to maintain the monopoly of violence.”

As was the case with the attack on bureaucracy and corruption, this tension emerges on two levels: both withinformal military structures (between the Armed Forces and the reserves) and more importantly between those military (and police) structures and local armed organizations. As to the first, I spoke recently with a member of the National Reserve, who weighed in on the current controversy over what relation the reserves should have to the official Armed Forces. While the current inclusion of the reserves within the Armed Forces might be interpreted as a recognition of the democratic counter-power of militia organization, it is better interpreted as an effort at co-optation and subordination. “The reserves shouldn’t be part of the Armed Forces,” Victor tells me, “we should be invisible, anonymous, waiting and ready to attack any aggressor without being identified.”

This view is echoed by former commander of the reserves and recently named Defense Minister Gustavo Rangel Briceño, who argues that “the reserves should not be a component of the Armed Forces” since they lack the rigid structure of the latter and “should adopt the characteristics of a popular organization.”11 This force he currently estimates at 880,000, with the long-term objective of 15 million reservists (i.e. more than half the population). Rangel Briceño hopes that Chávez will reform the 2005 reserve law to provide the force with full autonomy, in which case the Venezuelan reserve might more closely approximate Lenin’s notion of “the direct arming of the whole people” than any force in recent history. This, at least, is Chávez’s own self-professed objective: “The military reserve must be linked to popular organization...the goal isn’t to have only reserve troops in the battalions, no, it’s the people as a whole.”12

But no matter how popular and autonomous, a centralized reserve structure would nevertheless maintain a degree of alienation from local organs of dual power, and in this sense the communal councils reside in a space between the reserves and local self-defense organizations which rupture the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence.13 Even prior to the establishment of the councils and in the absence of armed self-defense organizations, a widely held distrust of the police led many communities to take measures to ensure local safety and security. While the communal councils are not in any sense armed revolutionary cadres (as was arguably the case with some of the Bolivarian Circles), the call to decentralize power to the bases has extended to questions of local self-defense and the establishment of local security and defense committees. These “integral security committees” are enshrined in the 2006 Communal Council Law (Article 9), but their existence was largely theoretical until after the December 2006 election. In late February of this year, reserve commander Rangel Briceño—also a member of the presidential council for communal power—announced that the government would be emphasizing the need to establish security and defense committees in the communal councils, adding notably that, “these will be oriented not only toward defense from external military aggression, but as a point ofinternal security, in the carrying out of our daily tasks.”14

This internal security situation in the barrios was explained to me by Rigoberto, who I met at around noon on the day of the communal council elections for block five of 23 de Enero, at which point he was already drinking cold Polar Negra and shots of rum. Given that he was running for the security committee, perhaps it was lucky that he was not elected (he came in fourth place, but insisted that he had actually come in second). Despite his intoxicated state, Rigoberto explained to me how security worked in the zone even prior to the existence of the community council or security committee. “If we catch someone dealing drugs in our neighborhood,” he tells me, “first they get a warning. If they show up again, they get a beating. And if they show up a third time....” He trails off, indicating with a hand gesture that the outcome will not be pleasant. He also recounts a recent situation in which members of the community caught a local malandro, or criminal, robbing the Cuban doctor in the local Barrio Adentro health module: an unarmed crowd of neighbors seized the man, beat him, stripped him naked, and sent him on his way. While this sort of autonomous, local self-management of security matters may seem insignificant, it is a fundamental precondition for the deepening of dual power in Venezuela, and while it didn’t begin with the councils their empowerment in the area of security and defense promises to contribute to it.

However important reserves may be as a “direct arming of the whole people” in Lenin’s terms, we should recall that the reason that Lenin advocated the “replacement of the police and the army” is that these are “institutions divorced from the people and set against the people.” While an autonomous militia might reduce this alienation of security forces—and in this sense is certainly a positive step—the true replacement of the army and the police requires a more substantial break with the “monopoly of violence,” a decentralization of coercive force that is more firmly rooted in local structures. Such decentralized control over security matters has a long history in Venezuela—from guerrilla armies to urban Tupamaros (a Maoist-type self-defense organization)—and the communal councils have the potential to continue and build upon this history.

‘We Created Him’

Given the central role of Chávez in the Venezuelan process, any discussion of the Bolivarian Revolution in terms of dual power clearly requires an adjustment of prevailing categories to account for Chávez’s peculiar role as, in his own words, “a subversive in power.”15 This need to adjust our concepts to accommodate Venezuelan reality is perhaps best put by Oswaldo, a veteran of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle (himself no friend of constituted power). While agreeing that the concept of dual power has much to contribute to an understanding of the Venezuelan process, he nevertheless cautions that “we wouldn’t want to compare Chávez to Kerensky.” This is more than mere piety toward a leader: it demarcates the particular twist that the Venezuelan experience introduces into the dual power framework.

This tension between concept and reality becomes most acute when we turn to Lenin’s third criterion: that dual power is not legislated, but rather directly seized from below. While opposing dual power—the “direct initiative of the people from below”—to “a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament” might at first glance seem to objectively exclude the experience of Venezuela’s communal councils (these were, after all, a legislative creation), the reality is not so simple. This is because from the beginning, the Bolivarian Revolution has been fundamentally driven from below, and not in the pedestrian, electoral sense.16 For example, Chávez’s 1992 attempted coup—although unsuccessful—was in many ways a direct result of the 1989 Caracazo riot, a massive and spontaneous week-long popular rebellion which spread across the entire country in response to neoliberal structural adjustment. As Juan Contreras, head of the revolutionary Coordinadora Simón Bolívar, puts it: “Chávez didn’t create the movements, we created him.”

The importance of base-level organization, moreover, did not dissipate after Chávez was elected in 1998. In the run-up to the 1999 referendum approving the new Constitution, spontaneous reading groups formed with the goal of studying, understanding, and later defending their new Magna Carta. These reading groups would become the Bolivarian Circles, revolutionary neighborhood organizations (and arguable predecessors to the communal councils) which while fervently supporting Chávez and the revolution have consistently resisted all efforts at formal institutionalization. During the 2002 coup against Chávez, these same Bolivarian Circles as well as other base organizations proved their revolutionary dual power credentials as clearly as they had during the Caracazo: first on April 11 on Llaguno Bridge, where armed Chavistas and members of Bolivarian Circles battled the opposition-controlled Metropolitan Police, holding them at bay for hours to protect unarmed crowds, and later on April 13 when millions of Chavistas swarmed around Miraflores Palace, Fort Tiuna in Caracas, and the Parachute Regiment in Maracay, playing a key part in the military effort to oust the illegitimate interim government and return Chávez to power.

Such events are crucial moments in the history of Venezuelan dual power, demonstrating the capacity of the populace to, in Lenin’s terms, directly seize power from below. But this is not all they show: the relationship between the 1989 Caracazo and the failed 1992 Chávez coup, and between the April 11, 2002, opposition coup against Chávez and the April 13 popular insurgency that returned him to power also indicate a complex top-bottom dialectic between Chávez and the bases which has been a defining feature of the Venezuelan experience. As a result, we find ourselves in the peculiar situation in which even the most radically anti-state and anti-institutional segments of popular base organizations recognize Chávez’s importance for the process of building dual power.

This is perhaps clearest in the Tupamaros, one of the most important dual power forces active in Venezuela. In a 2003 manifesto, the Tupamaros attack those corrupt party politicians who would “re-institutionalize the country,” thereby maintaining the traditional structures of the bourgeois state.17 For the Tupamaros, the revolutionary path is an explicitly anti-institutional one: “The state and its networks, woven through years of domination, do not allow reformist solutions.” Their goal is instead “to encourage dual power by strengthening popular participation, to link, organize, and multiply autonomous social forces.” To this end, they propose communal councils composed of workers and peasants which would represent a “local power that through popular assemblies, without the institutional influence of any sort, would be able to plan, orient, and execute the social force capable of demystifying constituted power.” Here we see the Tupamaros linking the building of dual power directly to communal councils, and doing so precisely through a distinction between constituent and constituted power.

This anti-institutionalist vision—emphasizing as it does the harnessing of constituent power to build a viable dual power alternative—does not exclude participation by those within the state apparatus: for the Tupamaros, the line dividing revolutionaries from reformists cuts across the state structure itself. Specifically, the National Assembly (circa 2003) was seen as a reformist talking-shop, the spearhead of the bourgeois offensive against the revolution. Chávez, in contrast, falls on the side of the revolutionary forces as a result of his “historical role,” that of “a statesman dedicated to the voice of the people.” Despite being surrounded by opportunists, the Tupamaros credit Chávez with “having awakened the abandoned from their lethargy to put the people on the offensive,” that is, Chávez is seen as having activated constituent power toward the construction of dual power. In order to counteract efforts by some sectors of Chavismo to demobilize the population and thereby halt the revolution, the Tupamaros even advocated that the president invoke constitutional powers to dissolve the Assembly.

This seemingly paradoxical effort to construct dual power in alliance with certain segments of the state has also entered into Tupamaro strategy. In 2004 the electoral wing of the Tupamaro movement supported Chavista mayoral candidate Alexis Toledo in the state of Vargas, and upon being elected, Toledo named Tupamaro leader José Pinto police chief of Vargas. To put this development in perspective, we might compare it to Huey P. Newton being put in charge of the Oakland Police Department, and while some Tupamaros have expressed concern about entering into electoral politics, few could argue that to have an anti-state revolutionary in charge of the police represents a step backward in terms of the construction of dual power in Venezuela.

Roland Denis has expressed a similar vision of dual power animated by the intervention of the constituent masses. Contemporary revolutionary movements, Denis tells us, “now focus their attention on cultivating and extending popular power through the permanent reanimation of the constituent power of the people. The old slogan of ‘dual power’ (bourgeois and working-class) valid for the summit of the revolutionary movement today becomes a permanent strategy in accord with the need for the organization of a socialized and non-state power.”18

He proposes “governments of resistance” to carry out local administration tasks, and in fact Denis claims that the councils themselves resulted from a series of meetings held with popular organizations during his short-lived stint as vice-minister of planning and development following the 2002 coup.19 For Denis as for the Tupamaros, the communal councils are central to a dual power strategy informed by constituent power, and perhaps the best evidence of applying the concept of dual power to the Venezuelan context lies in the fact that this proponent of “non-state power” heads up an organization deemed the “April 13th Movement,” named for the day that the Venezuelan masses showed their true dual power credentials, invoking their authority as a constituent power to return Chávez to his position within the structure of constituted power.

In an attempt to clarify Chávez’s peculiar role in the construction of dual power in Venezuela, former Vice President José Vicente Rangel puts it bluntly: “Chávez is anti-power; Chávez is the one that moves things, within power and outside power. Why? Because Chávez is a man who has decontextualized power, demystified it, brought it closer to the people, managed to connect it with the common and everyday citizen.”20

Rangel also refers to this role as that of a “counterpower...exercised outside of constituted power” and against that established structure.21 This, of course, is insufficient: Chávez is neither anti-power nor counter-power. It is only the revolutionary base movements and the nascent communal councils that merit such a title. But against many of Chávez’s critics, we must recognize that the Venezuelan leader has indeed contributed to this anti-power or counter-power—in short, to the construction of dual power—in a significant and decisive manner.

Dual Power and the State

In most contemporary debates regarding the Venezuelan Revolution, both sides have remained mesmerized and thereby blinkered by an overly simplistic view of the state as a homogeneous unit. The resulting debate has been less than useful: must we change the world without taking power, or is itonly by taking power that we can indeed change the world?22 By concentrating on the construction of dual power in Venezuela, we can avoid this naïve debate by focusing on the more constructive question: that of distinguishing between those forces working within-and-for the perpetuation of the traditional state structure and those working within-and-against that same structure, toward its dissolution.

Dual power situations are by definition unstable and ridden with threats. Given the role that some sectors of the state apparatus have played in fostering the construction of dual power in Venezuela, these threats are all the more complex and difficult to discern. What is clear is that the most fundamental of these threats is that the communal councils will never manage to assert their autonomy from the state. This will be all the more difficult given their current reliance on oil income, and so the long-term process of endogenous local economic development and the transition away from an oil-based economy is of the utmost importance to the strengthening of communal power. But since any significant transformation in the structure of the Venezuelan economy is unlikely in the short term, what is more likely is that Venezuelan revolutionary movements will continue to operate as they have for decades: strategically, advancing where the enemy retreats, gradually consolidating the communal councils as a viable dual power force capable of competing with and radically transforming the existing state structure.

Notes
1.   This and subsequent references are drawn from V. I. Lenin, “The Dual Power,” Pravda, n. 28 (April 9, 1917), http://www.marx.org.
2.   Of course, Lenin also speaks of the class content of the Soviets, but this is not a criterion of any dual power per se. Rather, it explains the Soviets’ antagonistic relation to the bourgeois Provisional Government. It is a basic premise of my argument that dual power can be constituted in geographical—and not necessarily class—terms (although class is never absent, and often explains why certain sectors oppose the existing state). For an insightful discussion of Zapatista dual power which turns the concept explicitly toward autonomous municipalities, see Christopher Day, “Dual Power in the Selva Lacandon,” in R. San Filippo, ed., A New World in Our Hearts(Oakland: AK Press, 2003), 17–31.
3.   República Bolivariana de Venezuela, Asamblea Nacional, “Ley de los Consejos Comunales” (April 7, 2006).
4.   “Consejos comunales han sido una experiencia exitosa,”Últimas Noticias (April 7, 2007).
5.   El Nacional, January 12, 2007.
6.   Antonio Negri, Insurgencies, trans. M. Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 268–292. Here, Lenin appears as the high point in thinking about constituent power in the Western tradition. See alsoUnderstanding the Venezuelan Revolution, trans. C. Boudin (New York: Monthly Review, 2005), 41, where Chávez recalls reading Negri while in prison following the failed 1992 coup.
7.   Despite being derived in some sense from Negri’s philosophy, in what follows I will be more interested in how the concept of constituent power is used in Venezuela than what it means for Negri. In fact, once placed in its context, the Venezuelan understanding of constituent power is arguably closer to Enrique Dussel’s formulation of potentia againstpotestas, which resists exaggerating the opposition between these two terms, instead emphasizing the need to work toward a disalienation of institutional structures and representation. See his 20 tesis de la política (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2006), forthcoming in English as 20 Theses on Politics, trans. G. Ciccariello-Maher.
8.   Asociación Bolivariana de Noticias, “Ejecutivo asignará más de Bs. 590 millardos para consejos comunales” (February 15, 2007).
9.   For Dussel, revocable mandates are the key to the radical nature of the Venezuelan Revolution. See Articles 6, 70, and 72 of the Bolivarian Constitution, as well as Dussel, 20 tesis, 147–49. Later this year, some 208 elected officials—from state governors to municipal mayors—could be subject to recall, depending on the capacity of their opponents to collect the requisite number signatures.
10. “No más de 6 millones para altos funcionarios,” Panorama Digital (January 12, 2007).
11. Últimas Noticias (April 17, 2007).
12. Hugo Chávez Frías, ¡Aló Presidente! no. 216 (March 20, 2005).
13. In this sense, I disagree with Christopher Day’s conclusions in his discussion of Zapatista dual power (“Dual Power in the Selva Lacandon”). While Day can be credited with emphasizing the tensions that emerge when military strategy is at issue, he seems to welcome the monopoly of violence too readily.
14. Asociación Bolivariana de Noticias, “Consejos comunales se incorporarán a comités de Seguridad y Defensa” (February 28, 2007).
15. Interview on José Vicente Hoy (March 4, 2007).
16. For a similar if less assertive argument, see Steve Ellner, “Las estrategias ‘desde arriba’ y ‘desde abajo’ del movimiento de Hugo Chávez,” Cuadernos del CENDES 23, no. 62 (May–August 2006), 73–93.
17. This and subsequent quotations drawn from Movimiento Revolucionario Tupamaro, “Manifiesto del Movimiento Revolucionario Tupamaro al Pueblo en General,” July 19, 2003.
18. Roland Denis, “Revolución vs. Gobierno (III): De la Izquierda Social a la Izquierda Política,” Proyecto Nuestramérica-Movimiento 13 de Abril (August 11, 2006).
19. Mónica Bergos, “Es necesario ir más allá de la vigente Constitución bolivariana,” Periódico Diagonal 42 (November 23–December 4, 2007). Denis claims that his eventual removal from the ministry was the result of a powerful reaction by conservative sectors of the Venezuelan state and Chavista movement.
20. Eleazar Díaz Rangel, “José Vicente Rangel: ‘Chavéz es el antipoder,’” Últimas Noticias (February 11, 2007), 40–41.
21. José Vicente Rangel, “Contrapoder,” Últimas Noticias (April 16, 2007), 26.
22. See for example the recent “debate on power,” including thinkers such as John Holloway, Hilary Wainwright, Tariq Ali, and Phil Hearse, http://marxsite.com

Notes on an Orientation to Obama's Presidency (Linda Burnham)

2009-02-26T00:11:00.005-05:00

by Linda Burnham

The election of Obama, while enthusiastically embraced by most of the left, has also occasioned some disorientation and confusion.

Some have become so used to confronting the dismal electoral choice between the lesser of two evils that they couldn’t figure out how to relate to a political figure who held out the possibility of substantive change in a positive direction.

Others are so used to all-out, full-throated opposition to every administration that they wonder whether and how to alter their stance.

Still others sat out the election, for a variety of political and organizational reasons, and were taken by surprise at how wide and deep ran the current for change.

Now there’s an active conversation on the left about what can be expected of an Obama administration and what the orientation of the left should be towards it. There are two conflicting views on this:

First, that Obama represents a substantial, principally positive political shift and that, while the left should criticize and resist policies that pull away from the interests of working people, its main orientation should be to actively engage with the political motion that’s underway.

Second, that Obama is, in essence, just another steward of capitalism, more attractive than most, but not an agent of fundamental change. He should be regarded with caution and is bound to disappoint. The basic orientation is to criticize every move the administration makes and to remain disengaged from mainstream politics.

It is possible to grant that Obama is a steward of capitalism while also maintaining that his election has opened up the potential for substantive reform in the interests of working people and that his election to office is a democratic win worthy of being fiercely defended.

Obama is clear – and we should be too – about what he was elected to do. The bottom line of his job description has become increasingly evident as the economic crisis deepens. Obama’s job is to salvage and stabilize the U.S. capitalist system and to perform whatever triage is necessary to restore the core institutions of finance and industry to profitability.

Obama’s second bottom line is also clear to him – and should also be to us: to salvage the reputation of the U.S. in the world; repair the international ties shredded by eight years of cowboy unilateralism; and adjust U.S. positioning on the world stage on the basis of a rational assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the changed and changing centers of global political, economic and military power – rather than on the basis of a simple-minded ideological commitment to unchallenged world dominance.

Obama has been on the job for only a month but has not wasted a moment in going after his double bottom line with gusto, panache and high intelligence. In point of fact, the capitalists of the world – or at least the U.S. branch – ought to be building altars to the man and lighting candles. They have chosen an uncommonly steady hand to pull their sizzling fat from the fire.

For some on the left this is the beginning and the end of the story. Having established conclusively that Obama’s fundamental task is to govern in the interests of capital, there’s no point in adjusting one’s stance, regardless of how skillful and popular he may be. For the anti-capitalist left that is grounded in Trotskyism, anarcho-horizontalism, or various forms of third-party-as-a-point-of-principleism, the only change worthy of the name is change that hits directly at the kneecaps of capitalism and cripples it decisively. All else is trifling with minor reforms or, even worse, capitulating to the power elite. From this point of view the stance towards Obama is self-evident: criticize relentlessly, disabuse others of their presidential infatuation, and denounce anything that remotely smacks of mainstream politics. Though this may seem an extreme and marginal point of view, it has a surprising degree of currency in many quarters.

The effective-steward-of-capitalism is only one part of the Obama story. Obama did what the center would not do and what a fragmented and debilitated left could not do. He broke the death grip of the reactionary right by inspiring and mobilizing millions as agents of change. If Obama doesn’t manage to do even one more progressive thing over the course of the next four years, he has already opened up

far more promising political terrain. His campaign

· Revealed the contours, composition and potential of a broad democratic coalition, demographically grounded in the (overlapping) constituencies of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, youth across the racial groups, LGBT voters, unionized workers, urban professionals, and women of color and single white women, and in the sectors of organized labor, peace, civil rights, civil liberties, feminism, and environmentalism. Obama did not create this broadly democratic electoral coalition single-handedly or out of whole cloth, but he did move it from latency to potency and from dispirited, amorphous and unorganized to goal oriented, enthusiastic and organized;

· Busted up the Republican’s southern strategy, the foundation of their rule for most of the last forty years, and the Democrat’s ignominious concession to this legacy of slavery;

· Wrenched the Democratic Party out of the clammy grip of Clintonian centrism. (Although he himself often leads from the center, Obama’s center is a couple of notches to theeft of the Clinton administration’s triangulation strategies); and

· Rescued political dialogue from its monopolization by hate-filled, xenophobic, ultra-nationalistic ideologues.

This is not change of the anti-capitalist variety, but certainly it is change of major consequence.

If the criterion is that the only change to be supported is that which strikes a decisive blow at capital, then the gap between where we are now and the realignment it would take to strike such a blow is completely and perpetually unbridgeable.

A better set of criteria, in light of the weakness of the left and the decades of hyper-conservatism we are only now exiting, is change that: creates substantially better conditions for working people; broadens the scope of democratic rights for sectors of the population whose rights have been abrogated; limits the prerogatives of capital; constrains runaway militarism and perpetual war; takes seriously the prospect of environmental collapse; and creates better conditions for struggle. This is the potential for change that Obama’s presidency has generated. This is the democratic opening. It is potential that will only be realized and maximized if the left and progressives step up and stay engaged.

These are also the criteria to keep in mind as the Obama presidency unfolds, rather than flipping out over every appointment and policy move he makes. Far better to de-link from the 24-hour news cycle that feeds on micro-maneuvers, stop making definitive judgments based on parsing the language of every pronouncement, and keep our eyes on the broader contours of change.

Besides the sectors of the anti-capitalist left that are stranded on Dogma Beach, there are those who see the tide running high but are still watching from the safety of the shore, hesitant to get in the water. There are those who have been so long alienated from mainstream political processes and so disgusted with both political parties and all branches of government that their default response is instinctive distrust. They view Obama’s presidency through the lens of anticipatory disillusionment. Their basic orientation is to analyze the administration’s every move with the goal of concluding, “See, we told you so. Obama’s gonna burn you. You’re gonna be disappointed.” This is a mindset for jilted lovers, not political activists. Let us grant without argument that, from the vantage point of the left, there are many disappointments in store. This is easy enough to predict based not only on Obama’s own politics but also on the alignment of forces and institutions in which he is embedded. And so what? We can survive disappointment over this or that policy or concession as long as we are making headway on the broader criteria above.

There are also those who stayed on the shoreline during the campaign because they are wedded to localism as a matter of preference, principle or habit. Others were lodged in organizational forms that, for structural, political or legal reasons, could not articulate with the motion and structures of the presidential campaign. These are complicated issues, bound up as they are with questions of resources and patterns of philanthropy. But for those who missed interacting with the motion of millions against the right, against the white racial monopoly on the executive branch, and for substantive change, their absence should, at the very least, prompt a serious examination of political orientation and organizational form.

Finally, there are those who are struggling to negotiate the existential shoals of a commitment to anti-capitalist politics in a period when the system is manifestly dying but not nearly at death’s door (and there have been all too many chronicles of that death foretold); major alternative systems have only recently collapsed or capitulated; and the vision, values and program that might bind together an anti-capitalist left and win broad support are still frustratingly obscure. There’s no remedy for this dilemma except to live in the times we’re in meeting the challenges we’ve been given and making the most of every opportunity, rather than anticipating capital’s demise or pining for a past beyond recovery.

In this period, then, the left has three tasks.

Our first job is to defend the democratic opening. This is a job we share with broader progressive forces and with centrists. Obama won big and retains the favorable regard of a sizeable majority. And meanwhile the Republican Party is in glorious disarray. But in no way should we take this situation for granted. The new administration faces daunting challenges and outright crises on every front. And while the right is disoriented and weakened, it has not and will not leave the playing field. The principal players and institutions of the right are, at this very moment, plotting how to undermine the administration, challenge every initiative that moves in the direction of democracy, progress and peace, and regroup to seize control, once again, of the state apparatus.

Defense of the democratic opening means many things and ought to be the subject for discussion and strategizing on the left. But in practical terms, first and foremost, it means consolidating and extending the electoral alliance that made the opening possible. Any work that strengthens and broadens the voter engagement of the constituencies and sectors that secured Obama’s election is work that defends the democratic opening. This kind of voter education, registration and mobilization work can be done in conjunction with an extremely broad range of local campaigns and initiatives. And anything that hastens the demise of the southern strategy, builds on the wins in Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia (along with the significant southwestern shifts in New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada), and challenges structural barriers to voter participation (e.g., felony disfranchisement, voter ID laws) is critical. All this is another way of saying that the electoral arena is an essential site of struggle for left and progressive forces in a way it has not been in at least 20 years. And this work, in which we have unity of purpose with the centrists, is vital to widening the Democratic majority in the 2010 congressional races, winning a filibuster-proof Senate majority, ensuring the successful re-election of Obama in 2012, and shaping both the parameters of viable Democratic candidates in 2016 and the outcome of that election.

Our second job is to contribute to building more united, effective, combative and influential progressive popular movements. This places the highest premium on strengthening and extending our ties with broader progressive forces, both inside and outside the Democratic Party, with an eye towards building long-term relationships and alliances among individuals, organizations and sectors. Anything that thickens and enriches the relationships among left and progressive actors in labor, religious institutions, policy think tanks, grassroots organizations, academia etc. is to be supported in the interests of strengthening the capacity of the left-progressive alliance to influence policy, to encourage and shore up whatever progressive inclinations might emerge from within the administration, and to resist administration tendencies to accommodation and capitulation to center-right forces. At this early stage of Obama’s tenure it is already evident what some of the most vital left-progressive alliance building ought to focus on. In foreign policy, on war and militarism in general and on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, Iran and non-proliferation in particular. In domestic policy, on health care and on solutions to the economic crisis that hold the financial sector accountable for reckless and predatory practices while addressing the particular vulnerabilities of working people, the poor, women, immigrants and communities of color. And, at the intersection of global and domestic policy, on oil dependency and global warming. All that enhances our capacity to constructively engage in debating and influencing policy on these issues is to the good. All that obstructs or distracts is highly problematic.

We’ve exited a period of collective psychic depression only to enter one of global economic depression. Each day, as the institutions of finance capital collapse, the corruption, greed and mismanagement of the nation’s economic system are further revealed. Broad sectors of the population have been shocked into a more skeptical and critical stance towards capitalism, and the need for some measure of structural change wins near-universal acceptance. The clash of rising expectations (encouraged by the hope and change themes of the Obama campaign) and a sinking economy will likely spark new levels and forms of popular resistance. In this political environment, alliance building will be complicated, messy and filled with political tensions and tactical differences. It is imperative nonetheless.

Our third job, and perhaps the trickiest, is to build the left. First let it be said that unless we are able to demonstrate a genuine commitment and growing capacity to take on the first two jobs, the third is a non-starter, and a prescription for political isolation. In other words, defending the democratic opening in conjunction with the center and building long-term relationships between the anti-capitalist left and broad progressive sectors in the context of the struggle over administration policy must be understood as critical tasks in their own right, not simply as arenas in which to advance an independent left line or to recruit new adherents to an anti-capitalist perspective. Realizing the progressive potential of the Obama win requires the most committed involvement with the twists and turns of politics on the most pressing issues on the administration’s agenda. This same engagement is critical to rebuilding the left, a long-term process that can be advanced significantly in the context of Obama’s presidency if, and only if, the left can skillfully manage the relationship and distinction between its own interests, dynamics and challenges and those of broader political forces. Why is this the case? On the tell no lies front, the left is more isolated and fragmented than it has been in forty years. Truly fine work is being done by leftists in every region of the country and on every social issue. But the left qua left is barely breathing. This is not the place to go into the historical (world historical and U.S. historical), ideological, theoretical and organizational reasons why this is so. But let us, at the very least, frankly acknowledge that it is so. The current political alignment provides an opportunity to break out of isolation, marginalization and the habits of self-marginalization accumulated during the neo-conservative ascendancy. It provides the opportunity to initiate and/or strengthen substantive relationships with political actors in government, in the Democratic Party, and in independent sectors, as well as within the left itself – relationships to be built upon long after the Obama presidency has come to an end. It provides the opportunity to accumulate lessons about political actors, alignments and centers of power likewise relevant well beyond this administration. And it provides the opportunity for the immersion of the leaders, members and constituencies of left formations in a highly accelerated, real world poli-sci class.

In these circumstances, among our biggest challenges is how to attend to building the capacity of the left without succumbing to the siren songs of dogma, the old addictions of premature platform erection, or the self-limiting pleasures of building parties in miniature. For the anti-capitalist left, this is a period of experimentation. There is no roadmap; there are no recipes. Those organizational forms and initiatives that enable us to synthesize experience, share lessons and develop broad orientations and approaches to seriously undertaking our first two tasks should be encouraged. Those that would entrap us in the hermetic enclosures of doctrinal belief should be avoided at all cost.

The Obama presidency is a rare confluence of individuals and events. There is no way to predict how things will unfold over the next 4-8 years. But this much we can foresee: if the opportunity at hand is mangled or missed, the takeaway for the left will be deepened isolation and fragmentation. If, on the other hand, the left engages with this political opening skillfully and creatively, it will emerge as a broader, more vibrant force on the U.S. political spectrum, better able to confront whatever the post-Obama world will bring.

This goes out to all the Individual Responsibility trolls (Sam)

2009-02-25T19:16:00.007-05:00

Here's a decent article from a HuffPo blogger and ex-financial regulator breaking down in general terms who bears the brunt of the ahem "responsibility" for defrauding the entire lending system. And...SURPRISE, any financial analyst with half-a-brain knew all this mortgage fraud and wholesale robbery of the banks by their owners was taking place, but were either knocked on the head by their greedy superiors or had their red flags ignored by, double-surprise, people in the Bush administration whose job was to police the industry.

In place of any common-sense regulation and denial of credit to people with bad credit histories, the banks were essentially given free-license to gouge non-prime lendees with higher fees and interest rates and package those nuggets of toxic fantasy wealth into resellable debt. Turnover was apparently so quick that even the loan files for these transactions seem to have been lost in the shuffle.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/the-two-documents-everyon_b_169813.html

The time is past due. These banks and institutions require a stake through the heart. Our incremental overdependence on indebtedness to these vampires just for the right to live has to come to an end. I don't give a fuck if the gov grows; our new administration has to stop handing out welfare to the demon-gods of banking and start using that money to hire people to advance our infrastructure, science, health, education, and culture. It's time to start building REAL wealth in this country again, and for the first time in our history, give everyone a real shot at living quality lives.

Robots for Hire (Rob)

2009-02-25T13:08:00.005-05:00

While running through some research, this short talk jumped out from the Singularity Summit in 2008 on robotics and the coming economic shift pre-singularity. Marshall Brain (what a name for an AI researcher, just wow) relies mostly on labor statistics that are all fairly common knowledge to us. Using this data, however, he makes some interesting points about the 2000 - 04 recession, maintaining that IT replaced many jobs such as grocery clerks (a personal threat to yours truly), call desks, and travel agents. The resulting productive obsolescence of simple service jobs is a reduced exponential growth in global jobs contained within the economy. That trend continued ended up hobbling the uncharacteristically short recovery after 2004. In just a few years we hit another recession, where we sit now at the tip of the downswing.

Based on this, I feel it is important to consider that our present problems, while largely caused by debt, are concurrent with a deconstruction of our industrial economy and its transition into an information economy. This deconstruction has been long to build, itself an exponential process, but we are now past the knee of the curve. Is it possible then that the declining rate of profit is itself an exponential phenomenon?

The service sector which was touted to replace manufacturing and heavy industry is itself disappearing. This isn't all terrible, since these jobs are mostly held at below subsistence wages anyway. That is about as positive a spin you can wrap this in once it is also accepted just how broad sweeping these job losses will be.

The convergence of these forces, debt and obsolescence, among other factors, will result in a deep and long depression while the world economy adapts to the next paradigm. Brain's panic scenario hinges around the likelihood that nearly all service, transportation, and education jobs will be replaced by sufficiently functional robotics, resulting in 50 million jobs lost over the next 15 years. These people, Wallmart workers up to Fed-Ex drivers, are already at or just above poverty. They have little access and even less support for the education and loans necessary to enter the creative class. While 50 million may be excessive, even a significantly smaller percentage would be catastrophic to existing economic structures.

At the same time, the rest of the world is catching up to our productivity, i. e., "the world is flat/spiky". IT is transforming Africa, South America, and the rest of the world at an amazing yet welcomed rate. The potential here is the realization of our dream. Massive efficiency in production can allow for a fractional work week, material equality, etc. But without major preparation and the incentive, political or otherwise, to assist the poor in their own transition, this dream seems improbable.

However the transition is navigated, exponential learning continues. We run smack into the singularity just as we recover our footing, if we do at all. I postulate that we must be standing as equals in at that moment, or we will fail to singularize as a species. The dynamic between rich and poor will mutate into a new dynamic between smart and left behind.

Suprising news from VA? (Chloe)

2009-02-25T11:32:00.005-05:00

Virginia has attracted a lot of attention as of late. The recent transition of the state from red to blue, showed that it is no longer a strong hold for the republican party. The shift though is not coming from whole state. In reality, it can be traced to the two urban center, Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. This rise not only shifted the role that Virginia played in Presidential politics but also in state wide elections. The past two governors from Virginia are democrats as are the senators.
Terry McAuliffe, a well known party player and former chair of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign,is slated to win the democratic nomination for Governor.

With that said, this article, out of Northern Virginia, should not come as a surprise to anyone. I hope others follow this example. Congrats Ryan!

Paul Volcker: Capitalism will survive, but not all of it (Jim)

2009-02-24T13:14:00.002-05:00

Sean Penn "You Commie Homo Lovin' Sons of Guns" (Keith)

2009-02-23T13:09:00.006-05:00

Sean Penn took the fight for equal rights to the Oscars last night. The highlight of the evening. "Those who voted for the ban on gay marriage should reflect on their great shame..."

BankStrike (Keith)

2009-02-22T15:22:00.004-05:00

Some comrades in Vermont have started a site called "BankStrike." Their idea seems close to what we are talking about. The site is well put togther. I sent them an e-mail hopefuly we can connect. Check it out.

Pirate Bay Piracy Trial (Keith)

2009-02-20T16:24:00.004-05:00

This is a press release from: The Bureau for Piracy and The Pirate Bay via the internets.

The trial against The Pirate Bay that started three days ago in Stockholm, Sweden is one of the most important issues of our time. Our adversaries basically wants to close down internets and remodel it into something similar of a sodamachine serving entertainment. During the trial, the prosecutor together with a coterie of representatives for a disabled business model will put up a tacky theater by telling stories designed to convince the court that The Pirate Bay infact is a menace to society.

What differs this trial from most earlier trials is that everything in and surrounding it will whirl round and round in diverse channels of communication; to be discussed, reinterpreted, copied and critizised. Every crack in their appeal will be penetrated by the gaze of thousands upon thousands of eyes on the internets, in all the channels covering the trial. Old cliches from the antipiracy lobby wont stick. You won’t be able to say stuff like, ”you can’t compete with free” or ”filesharing is theft” without a thousand voices making fun of you.

We will create numerous scenes where quite different plays will take place. In local channels like spectrial.bloggy.se where the immediate physical surroundings of the court are being discussed. ”Which cafés nearby will give us connection?” ”How can we get electricity to the bus?” But also in international channels like Twitter, where right now the torrent of information is being translated into fifteen different languages. Translations and coverage being made by ordinary users of internets. Volunteers sign up to make trial-tourist guides to the surroundings, drive the bus or hook up audio. People fly in from far away countries to cover the trial and tell the world their video story of the Sweden they see.

Here all participants are potential actors in the Spectrial. Our channels form a meltingpot of reporting and engagement.

Our communication around the spectacle aims in no way towards an objective report on an external chain of events. Rather, the trial is a hub around which a whole new network of actors is instigated. Neither is the spectacle a question of old media against digital, social medias. Our social medias include a paper fanzine and a 32 year old bus, connecting us and others physically.

It’s not about the protocols nor the technology. It’s about using these to create new congregations, where anyone is invited and anyone can find their role, build new scenes and make their own performances.

The future is built by us. Us who participate in conversations. The future is built by us who explore how information and performativity is coming together. To refuse a debate and still expect to be able to charge consumers is since long a closed door. To also try and outlaw certain types of conversations is downright disgraceful.

The coverage of the trial is not unique in these qualities. More and more areas see the creation of conversations on and the exploration of new stances on culture and cultural economy. A gigantic collective exploration has set sails. Every route differs from the other. But they have one thing in common: The industry interests that the state is representing are never present in these conversations. This is why they wont be part in building the future.

maintain hardline kopimi

They're Here to Help (Brian)

2009-02-19T21:33:00.001-05:00

Really. Just ask. They're here for you.

On that possible "reproducibility of hip hop" (Brian)

2009-02-19T21:19:00.006-05:00

Yes. Michael Steele is keepin' it real. Well, trying to get real? Ugh...

More here.

Reply to the David Graeber article Brian posted (Jim)

2009-02-18T10:12:00.006-05:00

I thought Graeber made an interesting point in the article Brian posted yesterday:

For at least 5,000 years, before capitalism even existed, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to make relations fundamentally based on violence and inequality seem morally upright. When this trick no longer works everything explodes, as it is now. Debt has revealed itself as the greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of control. But debt also allows endless opportunities for organizing.

This is absolutely right. The trick with debt is that it’s made to appear as a function of personal responsibility. Those who are responsible don’t get into debt they can’t pay back. If you’re in debt now and can’t pay it back, that’s your problem. You shouldn’t have borrowed the money in the first place.

The problem with this appeal to personal responsibility is twofold. First, if it’s an individual problem, they how can the problem be so general? According to this article “There were 145,000 home foreclosures last year -- a 21 percent increase from 2007 and a 108 percent increase from 2006. Another 11,000 families lost their homes in January alone.” The problem isn’t one of personal responsibility. It’s a systemic problem. Something went wrong beyond people’s personal choices. Choices don't exist in a vacuum. Holes are dug, and people are pushed toward them.

That brings us to the second problem: even if this couldn’t have happened without individuals making bad personal choices about their own money, it’s definitely a general, societal problem now when you consider how things have spiraled out of control as a result of it. The point has already long past where we can sanctify debt. What we need now is for companies like Countrywide to be forced by the government to get off of people’s backs and let them keep their homes. And if the government won’t force them to do it, we need to form a debtors’ union and collectively negate our debts.

Graeber sounds lukewarm on this proposal though. See what he says next:

Some speak of a debtors’ strike or debtors’ cartel. Perhaps so, but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions. Neighborhood by neighborhood we can pledge to support each other if we are driven from our homes. This power does not solely challenge regimes of debt, it challenges the moral foundation of capitalism.This power creates a new regime.

I mean, I guess. To respond to the idea of government intervention in the debt crisis or worse, to respond to the idea of a debtors’ union with a “perhaps”, in favor of a “moral” challenge to capital seems hopelessly perfectionistic and idealistic to me. While I'm not intimately familiar with Graeber's line, I suspect it comes from this general view that the only institutions that have the moral right to challenge capital are those that reflect the will of the people in a direct, almost mystically immediate way. A lot of leftists are skeptical of a debtors' union because they're skeptical of unions in general. They’re skeptical of the “traditional” organs of working class struggle, the ones that don’t really end up representing the people, after all.

Surely we need both. We need to turn around the moral logic of personal responsibility and constantly point out the ways in which capitalism is a system of slavery and theft, even in the relatively affluent United States. We need to mediate so-called personal problems with general categories and concepts, showing how what appears to be personal in fact exemplifies class antagonisms fundamental to the capitalist mode of production. But we also need to take a practical point of view with regard to these criticisms, and that means utilizing to the greatest degree possible all the institutions and organizing technologies at our disposal, not just the sexy, radically decentered ones. Our orientation should not just be moral or practical. It should be political. That means creating new institutions that adequately express working class power, but it also means seizing power from the hands of our masters, taking over their institutions, and wielding that power against them with impunity.

"Busted" Approach? (Brian)

2009-02-17T19:54:00.003-05:00

So I used to read a lot of Adbusters back in the day. It got kind of stale and repetetive. It still has some very informative and interesting pieces (and I learned the word "meme" from them before pundits now used it), but I mentally associate it more with an anarchist/black block kind of vibe or a subversive-art vibe (I don't have an artisitic bone in my body, so there's only so much accessibility there, ya know??). I still get email updates from their "culture jammer" communiques.

Issue #82 is out - Endgame Strategies. In the email highlighting the issue's features, I noticed this:

Revolutionary Potential: Editor-in-Chief, Kalle Lasn, probes the latent potential for a replay of 60s-style insurrection in the streets of North America. Will Generation O rise to the challenge of the times?

They just don't get it, do they? Why do we need to look backwards? (I don't want to start a thread of comments about the 60s - I think this blog and the movement have done a good job parsing out what to take from the 60s and what to leave behind or make anew) Why do we need some "insurrection"? I mean, my rage mojo is trigger-happy these days - some days I wanna take to the streets and throw Molotov cocktails all over...but does that create one more shred of democracy?? And I love a good march, but they need to be productive, not just polemical. Not to mention, street actions and many other 60s products were made for photojournalism and, to a greater degree, television. We now live in, for lack of a less-hackneyed phrase, the "digital age." No offense to Mr. Lasn, whom I respect, but I think "rising to the challenge" encompasses a lot more useful activities than getting turned back at the Pentagon or bustin' up some more Starbucks...

However, in the one piece released online thus far, David Graeber takes a less Adbusters-as-usual approach. It's a decent read. He plays with some terms more loosely than some pirates here might, and the stroke is broad -- but I'd like to hear what you guys think about his column. The intro paragraph, to whet your appetities:

We have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it is coming apart at the seams. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance is scattered and incoherent. The global justice movement is a shadow of its former self. For the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain perpetual growth on a finite planet, it’s possible that in a generation or so capitalism will no longer exist. Faced with this prospect, people’s knee-jerk reaction is often fear. They cling to capitalism because they can’t imagine a better alternative.

Pirate Bay, Copyright, and the End of the Market (Keith)

2009-02-17T10:57:00.003-05:00

Today’s Financial Times reports the opening of the trial of the Pirate Bay website in Stockholm. The Financial Times calls the comrades who run the site, “the most notorious and defiant individuals in the world of file sharing.” Not only is the site accused of hosting bit torrent tracker files that allow peer to peer file sharing, the site is often used as a platform to, in the words of the FT, “campaign against copyright, advocating that media industries should create new business models rather than try to prevent copying. “

This is a crucial issue for revolutionary democracy because it touches on cultural production, and knowledge production two crucial arenas for the development of working class power, organization, and consciousness.

The first thing to notice is the way that capitalist social relations impede on the further development of the “productive forces.” (The “productive forces” were a shorthand way that Marx used to talk about the productive power of social labor; are ability to produce a certain amount of wealth in a certain amount of time). The market has become a completely useless way to distribute these various forms of information (music, software, scientific research). The market does not facilitate the distribution or production of this information but instead impedes it, and the attempts to keep labor’s productive powers within the confines of market relations and bourgeois property relations is a significant fetter on further development.

The market acts as a rationing mechanism (only those with the ability to pay have access to goods and services distributed by a market) but p2p technology means that there is no longer a need for this rationing mechanism because the information doesn’t need to be rationed, there is no scarcity, there is only abundance.

The only real question facing revolutionary democracy, which should take its stand clearly on the side the of p2p and free information is how to financially support the artists, scientists, and workers who actually create these various forms of information.

the banks are made of marble/with a guard at every door...(Brian)

2009-02-16T13:50:00.006-05:00

...and their vaults are stuffed with silver/that the [teachers] sweated for...

upon Keith's suggestion, and in the spirit of collecting these stories as we build toward more analysis and the debtors' union, below is the text of an email I sent some fellow-travelling victims of profit motive:

So I needed to open up a "summer savings" account. Watchung did it for me at a bank that had no minimum balance (I guess they had a deal w/the bank). Montclair is so big, ya gotta do it yourself - they can't run accounts for all the employees who'd want one. Problem is, I need an account w/a low mandatory minimum balance - I clear the sucker out pretty much by late August and can't do penalties. So me and Jones go to Chase today - they were open on Presidents' Day and are in walking distance, so they got our buisness. Basically, all we wanted was a "tuck my money away so I don't spend it" account for when the summer comes. As we discussed not being able to handle the $300 minimum balance - honestly, I can't see that happening by late August - and having no need for another checking account (they like to "package" accounts), you could smell the poverty, and the conversation had this awkward, talk-in-circles, stunted kind of vibe....I thought we'd leave in search of a better po' folks' bank...

So the guy says in passing that if I had an existing relationship with Chase, he might have other things I could do. I have a credit card with Chase - I could go on for hours about cards and debt, but suffice it to say I did some dumb things in my desperate youth and I rarely use the thing now and make payments barely above the minimum - just what they love - the business calls it "a taste for credit" - they call people who pay balances "deadbeats"... Well, this guy takes one look at my roughly $17,000 card balance and says, in unison with his partner , "That changes everything." Yeah, you're telling me - it's been changing things for me for a long time....So basically, I can bundle accounts together that have an average total daily balance of $5000 (we held off on the $15,000 in case I get some windfall and pay off two grand of debt)...that's right - for those of us with little cash flow, we can keep basically nothing in both the checking and savings account, as long as we keep the card balance above $5000 - it's a disincentive to get out of debt. I wasn't shocked, but I have to admit there are few days that debt can ever be spun into something positive. Incidentally, the checking-savings connection is good to have because the feds have electronic transaction limits on savings accounts - a deterrant to using savings like a checking account - i.e. an incentive to keep your damn money in the banks and open up more accounts.

And one more - picture this: Chase Bank, the only bank in town open on a holiday, with a sign out front giving away $100 if you open a checking account w/$100 (that goes untouched for 30 days) today only...how long until these guys are working Sundays with carnival barkers outside???

I feel good - I did my part to help save capitalism today... B

PS - not to seem overly simplistic in one's analysis, but it seems to me the ____s that caused this mess need to be giving us the keys to the place, not some $100 bait...

PPS - from a race/gender/class perspective: as I watched the execs get ummm... "grilled" (ha!) by Congress, I thought to myself I'm lucky (i.e. I have the privilege) no one judges the conduct of all white males based on these guys' actions...could you imagine if a small group of say, black women, were responsible for this crisis??

PPPS - I have a relative in financial - he says these guys are DESPERATE and at least partial nationalization is pretty much a done deal before the end of 2009 (he also says he'd get his own branch from Chase if they used HIS card balance as the guide, but that's another story...)

Hip Hop is Dead, Long Live Hip Hop (Keith)

2009-02-13T19:07:00.004-05:00

Humor can be a excellent source of critical power. The Saturday Night Live/ T-Pain sketch "I'm on a Boat" reveals a number of developments. A certain form of hip hop has been completely exhausted so that it is now just an easily reproduced shell that can carry any content... that is why the SNL video is so funny, it takes what was once a very advanced and difficult to reproduce cultural form and uses it to deliver absurd content. The video also reveals new developments in US racial constructs-- the video intensely mocks standard mainstream hip hop tropes without being racist.

The shell of the hip hop form exploited in the snl/t-pain sketch also reveals something about how the capitalist production process develops in general and around the arts and culture in particular. Marx explains that the capitalist production process has two major phases of development. The first he calls the "formal subsumption of labor to capital" and the second he calls "the real subsumption of labor to capital."

Take the example of shoe making. Shoe making begins as an artisan craft. Individuals make shoes-- there is no division of labor: a shoe maker produces the whole shoe by themselves. Under the formal subsumption the capitalist gathers all the shoe makers together and puts them under one roof. The shoe makers continue working as before, each worker makes the shoe from beginning to end, only now the capitalist takes the completed shoes and sells them. Sometimes this is called "commodification." Commosification is not really the problem in terms of art. The real problem is the real subsumption of labor to capital.

The real subsumption of labor comes next, in this phase the capitalist takes control of the production process itself. The capitalist watches how the shoes are made and then institutes a division of labor. The division of labor de-skills the workers, so that each one is only responsible for a limited aspect of the overall process. The division of labor is the first step in mechanization and this allows the capitalist to start to replace workers with machines.

The same thing happens with cultural production. Most cultural production begins with individual artists creating their work. Capital may then commodify the product and sell it. Take an extreme example. Bob Dylan developed his craft for years playing coffee houses and practicing. Capital only sells his music but they do not control the way it is produced. Sometime this is called "artistic control." But take someone like Tiffany or Britney Spears, they are not individually talented they are not even artists they are just a cog in the machine. They labor under the real subsumption of labor to capital and the capitalist controls the production process. Their music is not artistic production it is capitalist production.

You can usually tell when an artist has been really subsumed because their music sucks and odd things happen like orchestras appearing on country records. Duke Elington famously commmented that there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. The difference is often in how that music is created and produced.

The SNL sketch shows that mainstream hip hop has been subsumed by capital. The song "I'm on a boat" just takes a song template for the capitalist production process and exposes it by inserting absurd lyrics. SNL has done serious artists a favor by striking a blow against the legitimacy of that template and they have opened a door for serious hip-hop artists to enter.

Bank of America - Class Action Lawsuit (Jim)

2009-02-13T12:25:00.004-05:00

Bank of America has settled a class action lawsuit over its dirty overdraft trick: things like approving transactions that generate overdraft fees, for example, or clearing transactions in high-to-low order to increase the number of overdrafts. If you're a former customer of BoA, Fleet, LaSalle Bank or United Trust Company, you can claim your part of the settlement fund.

Here's a direct link to the lawsuit website where you can register. If the class action lawsuit is approved over the summer, you could receive $78.

Folks, we take too much of the shitty treatment of these institutions for granted. It's bad enough that we're forced to work for the capitalist class in order to acquire the money to purchase the means of subsistence. It's bad enough that they steal wealth from us left and right. And on top of this, they also charge us to use our own money and utilize every sneaky, underhanded practice they can to steal from us in addition to that.

Overdraft fees are not a punishment for irresponsible consumption. They are a hole the finance capitalist class digs for us and toward which they push us. It's not the principal way they make their money. It's just a gratuitous way they can laugh in our faces while they keep their feet on our throats.

We need not only to demand they end these degrading, humiliating practices. We need to demand these people, this class, no longer exist. They produce nothing. They only take. They get bailed out at our expense. They have no right to exist. They should not only not be bailed out. They should be eliminated. They infuriate me. I hate them.

P.S. - If you have an account with them, you get to go to museums for free the first weekend of every month. Milk em for it. But what we really need is a Museum of the Past, a museum where children and adults can go and look at dioramas of bank lobbies, where they can press buttons and hear recordings of frustrating phone conversations between patients and HMOs, and where they can look in glass cases and see greasy samples of the worthless pieces of metal and paper that once stood as a barrier between whole of humanity and the product of its blood and sweat.

Settling the Debt: Business Week Starts to Point Out the Obvious (X.)

2009-02-13T09:50:00.006-05:00

Check out the Business Week article below that lays the blame and responsibility for the massive debt crisis at the feet of the banks and real estate speculators. That the corporate interests that run Business Week decided to run an article that advocates massive debt write-offs at the banks' expense is a significant development. There is dissension in the ranks of capital. Big business wants this crisis to come to a resolution because it is losing untold billions. Some of the big capitalists are losing their patience with the banking industry's stalling tactics and spelling it out: Take your medicine. What is lacking here is bold mass revolutionary democratic organization of the debtors to force the banks to eat ALL of their debt (rather than passing most of it off to the taxpayers) and to use all available means to force a resolution of the looming consumer debt crisis in favor of the producers of wealth (you know, the workers).

This is the kind of information needed on a website hub in a campaign to build Keith's proposed debtors' union, along with articles on available means of resistance to the banks and credit card companies, stories of successful dual power organizing to stop evictions, company closures, etc. and exposures of the sickening decadence of the rich in the midst of this crisis (using government bailout funds to pay for exotic holidays and to give million dollar bonuses to execs).

Here are the first graphs of the Business Week article:

"The bad mortgages that got the current financial crisis started have produced a terrifying wave of home foreclosures. Unless the foreclosure surge eases, even the most extravagant federal stimulus spending won't spur an economic recovery."

"The Obama Administration is expected within the next few weeks to announce an initiative of $50 billion or more to help strapped homeowners. But with 1 million residences having fallen into foreclosure since 2006, and an additional 5.9 million expected over the next four years, the Obama plan -- whatever its details -- can't possibly do the job by itself. Lenders and investors will have to acknowledge huge losses and figure out how to keep recession-wracked borrowers making at least some monthly payments."

"So far the industry hasn't shown that kind of foresight. One reason foreclosures are so rampant is that banks and their advocates in Washington have delayed, diluted, and obstructed attempts to address the problem. Industry lobbyists are still at it today, working overtime to whittle down legislation backed by President Obama that would give bankruptcy courts the authority to shrink mortgage debt. Lobbyists say they will fight to restrict the types of loans the bankruptcy proposal covers and new powers granted to judges."

"The industry strategy all along has been to buy time and thwart regulation, financial-services lobbyists tell BusinessWeek . "We were like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike," says one business advocate who, like several colleagues, insists on anonymity, fearing career damage. Some admit that, in retrospect, their clients, which include Bank of America (NYSE:BAC - News), Citigroup (NYSE:C - News), and JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM - News), would have been better off had they agreed two years ago to address foreclosures systematically rather than pin their hopes on an unlikely housing rebound".

Read the whole article here.

PS: Where is the traditional US Left on this question? In the wilderness of irrelevant protest or pathetic lobbying as always...

Settling the Debt: Who's fighting Over What and What We Can Do About It (X.)

2009-02-12T12:43:00.039-05:00

Picture yourself sitting at a huge table of diners in a restaurant. A small group of bankers, big stockholders and corporate execs feasted on champaign and caviar all night. The rest of us got anything from half a sandwich to a couple of peas. Now here comes the check and it's a huge one. The bankers and their stock-holding buddies owe most of the bill. But they don't want to pay up. And since they know the owner, they're trying to work out a deal under which they go home while the rest of us go wash dishes in the kitchen... for the next 10 years.

As Keith points out in his bold proposal to build a debtors' union, the resolution of the current global economic crisis requires that someone take a big loss. And since no one wants to take a big loss, all the economic players in the game (classes) are doing all they can to avoid paying up. The frenzied speculation that set off the financial collapse created fictitious value for years (e.g. houses that were worth $300,000 were valued and sold at $500,000 because speculators counted on house prices to keep going up forever). Now banks, hedge funds, mutual funds, etc. are sitting on a lot of IOUs that will never be paid back (e.g. impossibly high mortgages that broke homeowners cannot repay).

The rest of big business can't get loans from the collapsing banking system to finance their upcoming projects (big business always finances future projects with borrowed money since sitting on huge sums of money is not profitable). As the crisis deepens these businesses can't get new orders for whatever they're producing (whether goods like machinery, cars, etc. or services like entertainment, health care, etc.) and start to cut down production to remain profitable, which means laying off masses of workers. The workers -the rest of us- are on average buried in personal debt that we accumulated when we borrowed from the banks (credit cards, loans) to make up for our declining real wages which the big stockholders slashed over the past decades in their desperate attempt to maintain huge profit margins (see the instructive posts by Keith and Jim for their take on Marx's explanation of the declining rate of profit).

As the economic crisis continues to deepen, the following questions become more urgent every day:

-Who will get stuck with how much of the bill?
-How much worse will the ongoing depression get before the debt question is settled?

What the traditional media pundits won't discuss is that the answers to these two questions depend on two other questions:

-Who are the economic players (classes) in the 21st century economy and how are they being impacted by the current crisis?
-Which of these economic players (classes) will successfully unite to safeguard their interests at the expense of the others?

For Revolutionary Democracy, the key is to figure out how to unite as many of the progressive economic players (classes) around a concrete plan of action to force the banking and corporate players to assume responsibility for the debt caused by the capitalist system (of which they are the greatest beneficiaries and defenders).

Keith's proposal to build a debtors' union provides us with much-needed dual power strategic direction. A united front of the working classes (from the factory to the office) and small business allies capable of launching a general debt strike could force the financial and corporate powers-that-be to renegotiate consumer debt on a mass scale (a modern Jubilee as Keith points out, which we need to evangelize among progressive Christians!). A massive consumer debt settlement in turn would jump-start the economy by returning to the workers the buying power they are due (e.g. when you get your check, you can actually spend some of it and save some of it, rather than giving a huge chunk of it to the banks for your credit card bills, mortgage, etc.)

The task at hand is to flesh out the debtors' union strategic proposal (which classes would unite most readily and why) and to develop a tactical project plan (how do we go about uniting these classes in a debtors' union). Specifically, we need to:

-Analyze the current economic situation more thoroughly with the express purpose of identifying each economic player, its relationship to the 21st century economy production process and how it is currently being impacted by the crisis. For example, what is the difference between struggling old economy capitalists (auto, steel, textiles, etc.) and new economy capitalists (internet, green energy, etc.). Which ones will come out of the current crisis stronger, which ones weaker? Also, who owes how much? What is the debt burden of the average student? blue-collar family? white-collar family? Etc.

-Develop concrete action proposals with achievable short-term goals that can help people grasp the revolutionary potential of a debtors' union. While we must broadcast the debtors' union and general debt strike idea in its full boldness, we must recognize it as a long-term goal (which could become relevant sooner than later should the economic situation deteriorate quickly). In the meantime, we could start researching and broadcasting all tactics available to people to resist the banks when facing foreclosure, rising interest rates, etc. We could also document and promote all instances of collective, organized resistance such as the recent Chicago sit-down strike, reviving the old Unemployment Committees of the 30's that prevented evictions in their neighborhoods, etc. A website fully dedicated to this task -updated frequently and radically open to mass participation- could serve as an early organizing hub that progressively demonstrates what a debtors' union could do in the real world.

Sounds like a good project for an ambitious Rev Dem study circle to take up at this point in time...

What is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? (Jim)

2009-02-12T11:45:00.009-05:00

There's been some mention on this blog and on the list of the "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" over the past few months. For those who lack of the benefit of a comprehensive grasp of Marx's critique of political economy, I thought I would provide a brief, easy-to-understand explanation of this phenomenon and the argument Marx gives for it.

The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall concerns the rate of profit, so that's the first thing we need to define. Marx defines the rate of profit as:

s /(c + v)

"s" is defined as the value of surplus-labor, "c" is defined as the value of constant capital, and "v" is defined as the value of variable capital. Your work day is divided into labor you're compensated for in the form of a wage and labor you're not compensated for but which you perform gratis for the capitalist. Marx calls the value of the labor you're compensated for "variable capital" (represented by "v" in the equation). Marx calls the value of the labor you perform for free "surplus-value" or "s". The value of constant capital - "c" - is the value laid out for the means of production: things like heavy machinery and the building the labor takes place in, but also computers and whatever other labor-saving techniques the capitalist can use.

Imagine the capitalist starts with a lump sum of money, say, $100, and he spends $20 of that on labor and $80 on means of production. The $20 represents the value of labor, or "v", and the $80 represents the value of the means of production, or "c". Whatever the capitalist gets out of the production process over and above what he lays out is his profit, represented here by "s". So you can see the rate of profit is nothing other than the ratio of the value of his profit to the value of what he starts with.

An increase in productivity lowers v toward 0. This is because an increase in productivity (via scientific labor management techniques, introduction of machinery, etc.) makes the worker generate more value in less time, so a fortiori he produces his means of subsistence in less time. This means necessary labor is finished in less time. Variable capital is what is paid out as the equivalent of necessary labor. Therefore, increased productivity lowers v toward 0.

Consider the ratio of surplus-value ("profit") to variable capital ("wages"), or s/v. If v goes toward zero, the value represented by s/v goes toward infinity. (You divide a given quantity, s, by an infinitely shrinking quantity, v.) But even if this is the case, there is still a limit on how high s can rise, since s is still determined by things like the number of workers you have, the length of the working day (which can't approach 24 hours), and the upper limit on the intensity of physical and mental endurance. So in fact, even if you increase the number of workers, the length of the working day, and the intensity of work, the rate of profit
(s/(c+v)) tends not toward infinity but rather to s*/(c+v), where s* is the upper limit determined by the number of workers you can have, the length of the work day (limited to less than 24 hrs), and the intensity a human can possibly stand even with the aid of machines or computers. This is the case even as v approaches zero.

What raises the productivity of the worker, thus reducing v, is the "relative surplus strategy": introduction of machinery, increasing the intensity of work, utilizing scientific management of labor, etc. This raises what Marx calls the "organic composition of capital", which is nothing but the ratio of the means of production utilized and the labor power utilized in any operation. Increasing the organic composition of a particular capital means you use more machinery, more computers, more technology, more "dead labor" for each living, present worker you employ. But there is no theoretical limit to the rise in the organic composition of capital the way there is a limit to the other things. Therefore, in s*/c, the c (the value of the means of production you can employ) can rise continually. s* is in fact limited, but c is not, so the value s*/c will fall, i.e., its value
will diminish.

The tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise means that it becomes harder and harder to extract surplus-value. As you use more machinery and make the worker more productive, you need to invest larger and larger sums of money to get the same profit back.

Does that make sense?

Marx believes the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a cause of crisis. It is inherent in the process of capitalist accumulation, and it leads one part of that process—namely, the production process—to "seize up".

However, you should note that the accumulation process is more than the production process. It also includes the process of purchasing labor-power and the means of production on the market. It also includes selling the product of labor. According to Marx, each step of the accumulation process is fraught with the potential for crisis, because capitalism is an unplanned system of production and circulation of the product of labor. While the tendency of the rate of profit to fall explains crisis arising from the labor process, it does not explain crises in other portions of the accumulation process. In order to explain those potentials for crises, Marx utilizes theories of overproduction and underconsumption.

You can read a short, accessible account of these theories in Robert Tucker's (ed) The Marx-Engels Reader. The essay is called "Crisis Theory (from Theories of Surplus-Value)".

Futurism and the End of Capitalism (Keith)

2009-02-12T11:16:00.001-05:00

The Financial Times has published a number of commentaries on Ray Kurzweil and the “singularity”. The FT columnist takes a standard conservative view of radical change but it is interesting that the FT is covering these developments with such regularity. This relatively intense coverage is because Kurzweil research is a part of the central contradiction of capitalism: rising productivity of labor manifests in a falling rate of profit. In other words the systems development brings about its demise. At a moment of intense crisis like now, the need to dramatically increase the productive power of labor is felt along with the danger of that increase.

For a very long time socialists, radicals, and Marxists asserted that the main contradiction of capitalism is between private ownership and socialized production. The idea here is that workers work together to produce the wealth of the whole society but ownership of the means of production and therefore the power to appropriate that wealth lies with a private few. The problem with this old view is that there is nothing specific to capitalism about this contradiction (so it isn’t a part of capitalism’s essence), slavery and feudalism also had private appropriation of socialized production.
.
The central contradiction of capitalism is expressed in the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. The contradiction was expressed by Marx this way: “The rising productivity of labor is manifest in a falling rate of profit.” That is why Marx says the only insurmountable barrier to capital accumulation is capital itself.

In Marx’s mature work the falling rate of profit is the essence of his crisis theory. The falling rate of profit is an expression of labor’s productive power outstripping capitalist social relations and a falling rate of profit crisis can only be solved through socialist revolution or destruction on a mass scale (like world war), in other words the falling rate of profit expresses the limits to capital. There is no solution to this kind of crisis within the exiting social relationships.

So on the one hand rising labor productivity undermines capitalist social relationships and on the other hand rising labor productivity is the essence of capitalist social development, capitalist compete with each other and at the heart of that competition is technological and organizational innovations that increase the productive power of labor (more social wealth –use values—are produced with less human labor), but paradoxically this results in the long run in a falling rate of profit.

Kurzweil’s new university will function within capitalist social relationships and for a time any successes towards dramatic technological innovations can be utilized by capitals to increase their competitive advantages. But in the long run these social relationships will become increasingly felt as fetters to further development and the barrier of these social relationships will compel more and more people to the camp of revolutionary democracy. One of our mid term tasks is to develop the our understanding of this contradiction and our ability to popularize it so that people working in other fields (like Kurweil himself) can understand it.

Legacy of communism: MOAR COMMUNISM?? (Jim)

2009-02-11T13:13:00.001-05:00

Meanwhile, the collapse of communism may turn out to have been an essential contributor to the collapse of the world capitalist system:

The world capitalist economy is collapsing. The rightist pro-capitalist regimes that have been ruling these countries since the early 1990s are imposing severe cuts on the remaining social safety-net programs. As a result, workers are rising up in protest.

And workers are occupying factories in Ukraine:

Workers have occupied an engineering plant in Ukraine demanding payment of owed wages, nationalisation of the plant, and production of socially useful machinery. Today at 9.30am more than 300 workers occupied the administrative building of Kherson Engineering Plant. The workers are demanding payment of wages, nationalization of the plant without compensation to its owner and have declared their intention to occupy the building until their demands are fulfilled in full.

Factory guards did not resist seriously, and no workers were hurt. A council of workers elected the previous day is in charge of the building.

Obama on Nationalization (Jim)

2009-02-11T09:52:00.012-05:00

Looks like Treasury overpaid last fall when buying up troubled assets under TARP.

Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bailout funds, told the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday that Treasury in 2008 paid $254 billion and received assets worth about $176 billion.

This is bad, but what's worse is that the bad banks plan will probably repeat the mistake.

A lot of people hoped Obama would be a super-star coming right in, and there'd be quick, correct, decisive action that would produce real results. Unfortunately the reality is that there's a learning curve—a collective learning curve that involves shifting the political-economic paradigm in the United States step by step, out of necessity. You can think of it as a Bildungsroman with your retirement, livelihood, and, uhhh, food and water supply playing a supporting role.

The question right now is, how long until nationalization? Roubini, as quoted on Calculated Risk, says:

So, the current strategy – Plan A - may not work and the Plan B (or better Plan N for nationalization) may end up the way to go later this year. Wasting another 6-12 months to do the right thing may be a mistake but the political constrains facing the new administration – and the remaining small probability that the current strategy may by some miracle or luck work – suggest that Plan A should be first exhausted before there is a move to Plan N. Wasting another 6-12 months may risk turning a U-shaped recession into an L-shaped near depression but currently Plan N is not yet politically feasible.

This basically fits with my understanding of what's going on right now. There are political barriers right now—barriers reinforced by the "culture" in America—but necessity is going to remove them. And very shortly.

ETA: Roubini and Taleb discuss the crisis:

I think what Roubini and Taleb are saying represents the next "stage" in the development of the mainstream's attitude toward the crisis. It's the logical continuation of the outrage at the mismanagement and greed, coupled with the inability of the current managers of finance capital to do their jobs. There's a general feeling that we need to move away from the debt-centered economy to something more "robust", and Taleb reflects that attitude here. Of course it's going to turn out that "robust" means moving toward a system the sole focus of which is not the valorization of value but rather the delivery of the means of subsistence to people in general. That may seem modest, but it will in fact require a massive overhaul—a revolution—of the current way we organize and carry out the production of our lives.

Class struggle developing in the White House? (Jim)

2009-02-10T12:21:00.006-05:00

Article in the New York Times today: Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout. And over whom has Geithner prevailed? Dissenting voices in his own administration:

In the end, Mr. Geithner largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, according to administration and Congressional officials.

Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.

He resisted those who wanted to dictate how banks would spend their rescue money. And he prevailed over top administration aides who wanted to replace bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism is calling the Geithner plan a fiasco:

In other words, Geithner followed the Paulson script of pushing hard to make the bailout industry friendly, to the extent of compromising the effort to get the plan fleshed out in adequate detail.

Smith is probably right that the plan won’t be much better than the one we got last fall from Paulson, though I think her general pessimism is misplaced. Geithner’s plan prevailed over countervailing opposition from David Axelrod and others within the Obama administration pushing for far more radical control over the banks we’re bailing out. It makes sense that the Obama administration would divide internally over how to deal with this problem and many others. Obama wasn’t elected by the left on a platform of social-democracy. He was elected by a coalition of students, white collar workers, blacks, and disaffected Republicans. The economy is the issue where mainstream American politicians tend to be the most conservative. The fact that the Obama administration is governing from the center and even from the same position as Bush on these issues at the moment shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Nevertheless, due to the severity of the situation we’re facing—the worst economic disaster of a generation, possibly a century—I expect the tone coming out of the White House to change rapidly. If this banking bill doesn’t sufficiently turn things around, it’s going to strengthen voices of opposition within the Obama administration, and we can expect even a drastic push to the left: not just caps on executive pay but also greater control over what institutions can do with bailout money. Geithner could easily be gone in a year.

The problem with Smith’s analysis and the analysis of those who take a “screw the Democrats” line isn’t that their criticisms of the plan are flawed but rather that they don’t take a nuanced-enough attitude toward politics in general. The Obama administration is hardly a homogenous body—to say nothing of the Democratic Party as a whole. The diverse interests present in the administration reflect the diverse class interests that brought Obama to power. While the interests present in the Bush Administration were uniform by comparison—representing a Dukes of Hazard mentality toward the world—one can begin to see the rudiments of actual class struggle playing out in the White House. I say “rudiments”, because there is hardly an open struggle right now between the interests of the people and the interests of the bourgeoisie. But it’s going to be impossible for Obama to continue to govern in the interests of a portion of his constituency which is growing in power while at the same time catering to the received wisdom of the financial markets that got us where we are. People are really fed up not just with the greed but with the seeming arbitrariness of the whole system, they want substantive change, and they’re not going to be able to get it so long as the Obama administration keeps one foot in the policies of the Bush administration. The class conflict we see playing out in the open is going to push him further to the left.

Debtors Union (Keith)

2009-02-04T12:35:00.006-05:00

A Debtors Union: Main Street’s Solution to the Financial Crisis

The economic crisis is in essence a debt crisis. For all the economic complexity involved in the details it basically easy to understand. There are way too many pieces of paper that supposedly entitle their holders to social wealth and there is not enough of that wealth to meet all those claims. Debt is just a promise to pay in the future what one does not have today. There are simply way too many of these promises and no way that they can all be paid.

In order for our society to get out of this crisis much of this debt has to be “forgiven.” In other words the creditors who lent the money have to accept that they are not going to be paid back and they will have to take the loss. This is no sin nor is it a crime. It is a part of the risk which lenders take and which, according to their economic theories, entitles them to profit. It also entitles them to lose. That is what “risk” means. The crisis continues because they won’t accept that they lost.

Once they take the loss the economy will start to move forward again. The crisis is continuing because the banks who loaned the money don’t want to accept the loss.

The bailouts are designed so that the banks do not have to accept the loss. Instead of the banks taking the hit, the government will borrow money to be paid back by our future tax dollars and they will give this money to the banks to make up for the losses they should have taken. That is a solution to the crisis but not the only one.

Instead of asking Washington to bailout people instead of banks, or asking the government to help Main St, instead of Wall St. we should just help ourselves, and solve this crisis by forming a union of debtors.

A debtors union is open to all who are indebted—credit cards, car loans, mortgages, student loans, medical bills etc. and once we organize ourselves we can refuse to pay and organize a mass default and force the debt to be written off, or we could decide to renegotiate the debt at a steep discount maybe twenty cents on the dollar. That will be for the union members to decide for themselves. In any event, we can take our destiny into our hands --Let’s “bailout” ourselves, lets “recapitalize” ourselves, lets get out of debt!

Artificial Intelligence and the revolutionary process (Keith)

2009-02-04T11:44:00.002-05:00

The Financial Times reported on Feb 3rd that the futurist Ray Kurzweil will be opening a research institution with backing form Google and Nasa (private/public partnership). Kurzweil is pointing out, perhaps unwittingly and among other things, that in the foreseeable future, human labor will be so productive (with the aid of machines) that it will be possible to produce, with little to no environmental damage, an abundance of social wealth. The interesting thing politically is that as society approaches what Kurweil calls the “singularity” capitalism will enter into deeper and deeper crisis because the capitalist social relations will be in increasing conflicts with these developments. The rapidly increasing productivity of labor has the effect of driving down the costs of commodities and in circuitously this development causes profit rates to fall. Profit is the reason for capitalist production and so without profits the system will grind to a halt. Capitalist social relationships will have to be completely abolished before “new era of civilization” envisioned by Kurweil can come into existence. Here is the article:

Google and Nasa back new school for futurists
By David Gelles in San Francisco
Published: February 3 2009 05:02 | Last updated: February 3 2009 05:02
Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.
The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.
Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.
To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.
The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.
Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.
Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.
Mr Kurzweil said the university was launching now because many technologies were approaching a moment of radical advancement. “We’re getting to the steep part of the curve,” said Mr Kurzweil. “It’s not just electronics and computers. It’s any technology where we can measure the information content, like genetics.”
The school is backed by Larry Page, Google co-founder, and Peter Diamandis, chief executive of X-Prize, an organisation which provides grants to support technological change.
“We are anchoring the university in what is in the lab today, with an understanding of what’s in the realm of possibility in the future,” said Mr Diamandis, who will be vice-chancellor. “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”
Despite its title, the school will not be an accredited university. Instead, it will be modelled on the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, the interdisciplinary, multi-cultural school that Mr Diamandis helped establish in 1987

1969 Promo Clip on the Future "Internet" (Posted by X.)

2009-01-29T09:19:00.005-05:00

From our brother Sean:

"Here's a similar one, claiming to be from 1969. The sexism certainly seems to be authentic..."

1969 Promo Clip on the coming Internet

***

Wow. What a find! The creepy voiceover and bizarre sexist conception of technology implementation in this presentation gives it even more of a Twilight Zone vibe.

What's so fascinating is that this 1969 film cannot grasp the transformative possibilities of the internet as a many-to-many communications platform, it merely presents it as an automated version of existing one-way commercial services... really an uninspired capitalist outlook with frozen social relations (note how the kids are monitored on camera but not allowed anywhere near the computers!).

1981 TV News Report on the Intertubes (X.)

2009-01-28T23:53:00.005-05:00

If you want to grasp the full impact of the technological revolution that is the internet, enjoy this classic clip.

Yes, there was life before the internet. And yes, it now looks like an episode from the Twilight Zone ("What if we lived in a disconnected world where people struggled to get information?").

"Obama and the Left" - what "progressives" are saying... (Brian)

2009-01-22T21:56:00.007-05:00

I still subscribe to The Progressive. It has some good nuggets once in awhile (good toilet reading), and I appreciate its century-old roots...

This month, Ruth Coniff and John Nichols each have an interesting piece on how to "push" Obama "from the left." While they represent largely the advocacy model, it is worth a look, as these are the types of analyses many Obama supporters are using when determining how to engage his administration (in an environment in which these "progressives" are ostensibly "in power" and no longer working with "strategies of the opposition").

A nugget from the Coniff piece:

"We're not so much in protest mode and more in expectations and if-we-build-it-it-will-happen mode," she [Medea Benjamin] says. "Who knows how long we can stay in this mode?"

and from Nichols:

"Obama was nominated and elected in 2008 by progressives, both younger tech-savvy activists who made his candidacy an early favorite of the blogosphere and old-school liberal precinct walkers who saw in his candidacy an extension of the frustrating work of opposing all that was Bush and Cheney. The Senator won the Democratic nomination because he was the only first-tier contender who could say that he had opposed authorizing Bush to take the country to war with Iraq....

These activists formed a base within the campaign and the Democratic Party, centered on but not limited to the Obama team's quasi-open website and blog, www.MyBarackObama.com, which did not always cheerlead for the candidate. In June, when Obama broke with Feingold and other Senate progressives to support Bush's rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Senator felt enough heat from his own and independent netroots sites that he was compelled to explain himself, making what Obama described as a "firm pledge" that he would revisit the issue as President to shore up privacy protections....

activists cannot wait for Obama to define the playing field. They must assume that he knows what they know. And this requires a radically different approach than the left took to Southern centrist Democratic Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. The way to influence Obama and his Administration is to speak not so much to him as to America. Get out ahead of the new President, and of his spin-drive communications team.... Don't expect Obama or his aides to do the left thing. Indeed, take a lesson from rightwing pressure groups...."

"Franklin Roosevelt's example is useful here. After his election in 1932, FDR met with Sidney Hillman and other labor leaders, many of them active Socialists with whom he had worked over the past decade or more. Hillman and his allies arrived with plans they wanted the new President to implement. Roosevelt told them: 'I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.'

It is reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama agrees with them on many fundamental issues. He has said as much.

It is equally reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama wants to do the right thing. But it is necessary for progressives to understand that, as with Roosevelt, they will have to make Obama do it."

So...how do these ideas compare or contrast with recent discussions (on this blog and elsewhere) using a revolutionary democratic lens to examine the question, "What now?" What can we take, and what can we leave on the table? What are the real life implications, now that Obama is in office, of finding allies among these circles with whom we can build dual power? And what are some of the possible unfortuante exigencies or possible obsatcles?

SOLIDARITY OR BUST (Dave)

2009-01-22T13:50:00.004-05:00

I wrote this essay a couple of years ago and found it going through some of my old work that's rotting in the musty corners of the Internet. While I don't agree with every single sentence, I still agree with the vast majority of it. I think that the main point of my essay - that it's important to focus on building and maintaining unity within our growing revolutionary movement, and that part of unity means respecting diversity of tactics and strategy - is more relevant than ever to us today as organizers, and it is in this light that I post this essay here.

A look at what's been done, and what we can do differently

In the past century alone, there have been dozens of socialist revolutions, hundreds of socialist (both anarchist and communist) uprisings - many of them on-going - and tens of thousands, if not millions, of confrontations between groups and individuals struggling for a socialist society against the powers that be. We, the movement as a whole, have seen many successes and many more failures, set-backs, and even full reverses of our successes. We have fought the fascists, the police, the military, each other, in the streets. We have hid from them, from each other, from ourselves in secret compartments, under false names, in foreign nations. But the majority, the glorious majority of our work has not been seen in their court rooms, our Party's, or our collectives; but in the gains as well as the losses that we've incited in the greater humanity. The 8-hour work day, universal suffrage, racial integration, and many other concrete advances that were and are to the direct benefit of the huge mass of oppressed people struggling to survive.

And yet today, the vast burgeoning mass of humanity still lives oppressed, mired in social struggles with the state, with the bosses, with the bigots, with the hateful and willfully ignorant. Indeed, many of our own ranks have (perhaps unwittingly) found themselves among these enemies of the oppressed, even as they themselves struggle for justice. The racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism so readily identified in the greater society is also mirrored in our own movements. And so it is with the great mass of humanity in most of the world. Chicago, Caracas, Melbourne, London, Beijing, Pretoria, Rome, Moscow: all of these cities, and all the rest of them, and indeed most of the world still stumbles under the back-breaking weight of hatred, exploitation, ignorance and abuse.

All that is to say this: that, quite obviously, the struggle has not ended. For every victory, there have been ten defeats. For every freed heart and mind, there have been ten that have given up, that have been arrested, that have been murdered. Many of us in our respective movements were filled with unrelenting, reinvigorating joy when we heard the news of this revolution or that uprising - or took part in them ourselves, with our ideas held firm in the grip of our barricades, weapons, monkey wrenches. And yet, after over a century of struggle (in which it seemed at many points, as Fighting For Our Lives puts it, "we could almost taste the new world coming through the tear gas"), we have failed to create a single, lasting revolution that was not crushed or did not degenerate.

Why? With our endless debates, analyses, propaganda, marches, sit-ins, strikes, demands and armed confrontations and so on, why is it that the revolution has not occurred: that point-of-no-return, that first, invincible domino? Why, with our endless barrage of books, speeches, papers, posters, fliers does not everyone now know of socialism, of communism, of anarchism - of a better life without the state or class?

Of course, there are many reasons that have been presented. The capitalists' monopoly on mass media, the recuperation of unions into capitalism - indeed many of our legislative victories can be said to have drained the movements of their vitality. The so oft-discussed Spanish Civil War, the parallel anarchist revolution, these were crushed by Fascism, perhaps by Stalinism, but absolutely in-fighting, by lack of organization, by lack of preparation - not by a lack of understanding, but by a lack of implementation of understanding: a lacking of strategy that accounted for these real threats. For how serious can "scientific socialism" really be if its' own strategies do not account for its' own threats? And this is not to say that our movements haven't done this, that our movements haven't learned from the past - from our comrades' as well as our own mistakes - but that this has not been comprehensive and inclusive.

Take anarchist syndicalism as one example. This is interesting because there is a large emphasis on tactics and thus it implies a greater, over-all strategy. The workers will form unions (or, rather, a union) and this union will become powerful and develop its' efficiency through direct struggle with the capitalists and one day the union will call a general strike and that will be the revolution - that unstoppable, irreversible first step toward socialism, toward communism, toward anarchy. But what about the consumers? What about the petty bourgeoisie? The peasantry? Government workers? The police, even? Syndicalism speaks little or nothing on this issue (though not to its' discredit), and so for this we must turn to anarchist communism, for regional federations of locals of the union. For the exact way in which resources will be distributed, we must turn to parecon. For the exact form of the union locals, we must turn to council communism. For the defense of the revolution against the defenders of capital - hermetically sealed imperialist war machines - we must turn to Spain's militias or Trotsky's Red Army. For the struggle against the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in the third world we must turn to Che, Makhno, Mao.

And of course many of my readers will disagree with many or all of my assertions here, and this is just as well, but I hope my point is demonstrated: that a coherent strategy, a coherent set of tactics, and a coherent analysis do not exist anywhere in any of our movements. Nor, I suspect, will one ever, as ideas compete and evolve. But the trend has always been to do this, although usually not consciously, but perhaps merely evolutionarily through defense or assault of this or that meme in this or that ideology. Strangely, although dogmatism and the emphasis on respect for different tactics (as with "anarchy without adjectives") appear to be on opposite ends of our movements, they each exist for different though compatible reasons: the former, with the purpose of unity; the latter, with the purpose of recognizing different tactics as effective to different degrees and in different ways. But these are different sides of the same coin: effectiveness. Our differences, after all, are primarily on how to struggle, rarely why: we all have the same or extremely similar goals, we only differ in how we feel we can implement them.

So, though there has been a wide variety of tactics, and much dogmatism and sectarianism, there has been lacking one thing: an over-riding spirit of cooperation. And this does not mean a passive acceptance of those you disagree with, nor cooperation with those you feel dilute or sabotage the movements, but the opposite: a virulent, passionate constructive criticism of those you disagree with, grounded in our common goals; a serious, dedicated criticism and refusal to compromise goals with those who detract from our goals as revolutionaries. This doesn't mean "agreeing to disagree", but making a continued and earnest attempt at empathy and empowerment.

So, for example, you are very heavy in union organizing, wading through lists of actions and planned meetings and jail cell numbers, and some comrades in a nearby area are struggling with something you just can't concern yourself with right now, say saving a piece of ancient forested land from a column of fellerbunchers. What good can come from saying, forget the land, the workers are hungry! What good can come from saying, forget the workers, they cannot eat without the land! Nothing but competition for activists, funds, signatures - whatever your group, your movement suffers from a lack of. But we all know that competition is the bane of society and what has brought us here in the first place. Instead, if you cannot offer a hand, offer a word! Declare solidarity, practice solidarity. This does not mean surrendering one person or group or movement to the will of another, but coordinating them together.

But what exactly do I mean by constructive criticism, and what exactly does cooperation and solidarity entail, if the former does not mean sectarianism and dogma and the latter does not mean co-optation and subjugation? Let me show you just exactly what I mean.

Constructive criticism: serious, informed analysis made with the intent to - as much as is possible - develop and empower others that share your goals but not you specific ideas about tactics.

Solidarity: the concrete attempt to defend, reinforce, and advance the movements of those with goals similar or identical to your own, while continuing on in the specific struggle you are involved in at the time.

These two things, when implemented seriously, are exactly what lead to things like the First International, and their opposites - destructive criticism and sectarianism - are what lead to the above examples' demise. I chose the First International specifically because I feel that this is perhaps the most fantastic and prevalent example in our movements: the disagreement over the usefulness of the state. What could have been a boon to the movement, an embrace of both direct and indirect tactics in a cooperative strategy, became a source of mutual disrespect and hatred. This is absurd. If there are apples near the top of a tree, and a group of people is divided into different ways about how to get the apples, do they ridicule, insult, and sabotage each other, draining energy from their own efforts as well as others and thus doubly reducing the effectiveness of the group as a whole? Or do they each try the way they feel is best, borrow ideas and techniques from each other, and help each other in their pursuits? Obviously the latter is the more rational and effective way to go about getting apples, but the question is obscured when the context is changed from obtaining apples to revolutionary socialism.

For example, I personally see an electoral approach as a very ineffective way to achieve revolutionary socialism. This does not mean that I sabotage the efforts of my comrades, but that I try both to more fully understand their position and better explain and understand my own. While this discussion is ongoing and indefinite, it does not make sense to try to stop the action of one group or another, since no group can possibly know for sure who is the most correct. It only follows then that the action of each group should be encouraged by each other group, but only on the condition that each group listen and seriously try to apply criticisms in a way that will make their approach more effective. So, obviously, a socialist party obviously cannot and will not apply an anarchist criticism that undermines their whole approach by labeling it as useless and counter-productive; but it obviously can and must apply an anarchist criticism that highlights, for example, patriarchy or sexism in the party.

Likewise, the anarchist must support the socialist politicians (if they are honest, of course) in their struggles for socialist legislation; and the socialist politicians must support the anarchists in their struggles for immediate material gain - even as the anarchists break laws, even as the socialists make them! For as movements, as a movement, with the same, shared ultimate goal, we do not do what we do because we believe in laws or their absence, but because we believe in human rights - because we believe in a society where all can be free to live as they wish and share in the bounty that is withheld from us.

So, comrades, will we continue to spite each other, to sabotage all our dreams in the petty struggle over who is more or less right about this or that tactic? Or will we unite (like we so often have, beneath the turbulent surface of history, in pool halls and chat rooms; behind barricades and prison bars) and offer mutual reinforcement of each of our movements, the coordination of our tactics, the defense of our collective integrity and the push to develop a flexible, comprehensive strategy to achieve socialism, communism, anarchy - a free and equal society?

It's solidarity or bust.

See you at the picket, the barricade, the poll, the sit-in, the march...

Marx To Lincoln Revisited on the Occassion of Obama's Inauguration (Keith)

2009-01-20T10:13:00.003-05:00

To celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first Afro-American President in the United States I thought it would be fun to post the congratulatory message written by Karl Marx and sent by the First International to Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of his second inauguration.

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America

Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:
Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;
George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

Green Economy Organizing (Posted by Keith)

2009-01-06T13:30:00.004-05:00

This essay, featuring Van Jones and "Green Jobs for the Ghetto" was published in this week's New Yorker Magazine. Although he is very caught up in advocacy politics there are some interesting ideas here about vision and organizing.

Greening the Ghetto
by Elizabeth Kolbert
A few months ago, Van Jones, the founder and president of a group called Green for All, went to visit New Bedford, Massachusetts. His first stop of the day was the public library, where someone had assembled an audience of about thirty high-school dropouts. They leaned back in their chairs, hands in the pockets of their oversized sweatshirts. A few appeared to be stoned.

Jones, who is forty, is tall and imposing, with a shaved head and a patchy goatee. He wears rimless glasses and favors dark clothing. On this particular day, he was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, black boots, and a charcoal jacket. He was introduced by a community organizer and aspiring rapper, who described him as “a leader with answers,” a “genius from the hood, similar to our own,” and a youthful version of Barack Obama. When it was his turn to speak, Jones rejected the lectern that had been set up for him, saying that it reminded him too much of college.

“I love Barack Obama,” he said. “I’d pay money just to shine the brother’s shoes. But I’ll tell you this. Do you hear me? One man is not going to save us. I don’t care who that man is. He’s not going to save us. And, in fact, if you want to be real about this—can y’all take it? I’m going to be real with y’all. Not only is Barack Obama not going to be able to save you—you are going to have to save Barack Obama.”
Read the rest here.

Tom Hayden: "Can Podesta Craft a Transition to a New Progressive Era?" (Posted by Keith)

2008-12-31T12:04:00.009-05:00

Tom Hayden wrote an interesting article over at HuffingtonPost.com on John Podesta, the chief of the transition team for the incoming Obama administration. It's worth a read. Here's an excerpt:

"Leaders of presidential transition teams are expected to be discreet, tight-lipped, button-down,
servants of power, but not quite so in the case of John Podesta. The senior member of the team setting up the new administration, Podesta also heads a progressive think tank and has authored his own book on progressive politics, which includes a draft inaugural speech.

Podesta's 2008 book The Power of Progress will be scanned by pundits seeking clues to the new administration's thinking, but that could be a false trail. Podesta has expressed specific views distinctly different from Obama's, especially on Iraq, where he has long favored a one-year pullout of all American troops. The value of Podesta's book is as a guide to where a progressive master of politics -- Podesta was chief of staff under Bill Clinton -- wants to see American policies evolve in the future.

Podesta is more than a technician of power. It should be of interest on the Left and Right that he grounds himself in the tradition of social movements, many of them radical in their time, which produced the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the civil rights revolution. He is well-read in these histories, and is a direct Chicago descendant of the white immigrant [Italian] working class that benefited so greatly from labor and social legislation. In addition, he has an intense awareness of the racist legacies that left so many blacks and Latinos excluded from the gains of those eras, "an important lesson that should chasten progressives to this day," he writes. It was during the populist and progressive eras, for example, that African-Americans were massively disenfranchised in the South, while white women were on the path to suffrage."

Read the rest here.

Obama Won! What's Next? - Part 3: A genuine crisis of capitalism (X.)

2008-12-19T13:58:00.005-05:00

While the Obama campaign developed a brilliant electoral strategy which it executed almost flawlessly, it benefitted in the last month from a massive shift among “middle of the road” voters shaken out of complacency by the sudden collapse of the US economy (for a good primer on the causes and implications of the crisis, check out Keith’s latest article here). The ongoing economic crisis -the most severe the US has faced since the Great Depression- increases both dangers and opportunities in the years to come: Opportunities to grow the revolutionary democratic movement rapidly and make it possible for people to build and seize power (political, economic, cultural, social) as capitalist institutions fail to deliver (governmental administrations, businesses, undemocratic NGOs, etc.). Dangers such as counter-revolutionary attempts by neo-fascist forces behind the Cheney/Bush regime to reverse the verdict of the 2008 elections by taking advantage of a panic (among both the population and the capitalist class as a whole), plunging the world into more war and destruction. Which way the future tilts will largely depend on the role played by progressives and revolutionaries in the Obama Movement: Specifically, will we succeed in empowering the Obama Movement to consolidate itself and evolve from a largely spontaneous 21st century progressive class alliance tied to the Obama campaign to a permanent and independent revolutionary democratic coalition?

Obama Won! What's Next? - Part 2: A provisional government (X.)

2008-12-18T09:31:00.005-05:00

The Obama administration will be the first government led by new economy capital representatives (think Obama) in a power-sharing arrangement with some of the less backward old economy capital representatives (think the Clintons) and, to a much lesser extent, representatives of various sections of the 21st century progressive class alliance that makes up the Obama Movement. To a much lesser extent because the classes and groups that made Obama’s victory possible through their organizing prowess (students, creative class workers, the Afro-American & Latino communities, expanding unions, etc.) have yet to consolidate our movement and develop capable, independent leadership. In other words: we (students and workers) don’t have a seat at the table in the Obama government because we don’t have the independent power to lift someone into one of those seats. And even if we did have such power, we don’t have anyone ready to sit there yet! Consider: the progressive and revolutionary US Left still can’t win a single election on its own; it still can’t run one local government administration that empowers people to transform a single major city in the US. Since the power-sharing arrangement shaping up in the Obama administration is brand new and follows the overthrow of an opposite power-sharing arrangement, the Obama White House is best understood as a provisional government: untested, subject to change, conflicted over ambitious goals and tentative approaches. From what we learned during the Obama campaign however, we can expect deliberative and effective leadership at the top in terms of achieving the goals of the various players in the power-sharing arrangement. We would do well to get quite clear on exactly what financial and political factions dominate the Obama government and what we can expect and not expect from them (in terms of support for a new New Deal, withdrawing troops from Iraq, national healthcare, etc.).

Obama Won! What's Next? - Part 1: A dictatorship overthrown (X.)

2008-12-17T18:03:00.007-05:00

In the November elections, the more progressive section of new economy capital (think Google and its financial backers) united with the Obama campaign and the Obama Movement to overthrow the dictatorship of the most backwards section of old economy capital (think Halliburton and its financial backers), represented by the Cheney/Bush regime. No, this does not mean capitalism was overthrown. But Republican neo-fascism (built on white supremacy) was overthrown. On election night, the Obama Movement celebrated this tremendous victory in US cities large and small in scenes mildly reminiscent of Portugal during the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the fascist Estado Novo in 1974.

Obama Won! What's Next? - Intro (X.)

2008-12-17T17:57:00.005-05:00

Even as we marched with hundreds through the streets of New Brunswick on election night chanting “Yes, we can!”, “O-ba-ma!” and “No more Bush!”, even as city residents cheered from their porches and windows -some irresistibly pulled into the spontaneous celebration rally- even as the police helplessly watched the marchers disregard their every attempt to direct the demonstration back to the campus and away from the center of the city, even as we marveled at the immediate goodwill and organic teamwork in our newfound coalition of natural 21st century allies (students, creative class and union workers, grassroots community and antiwar organizers – white, Black, Latino & Asian, women & men, gay & straight), even as we walked yet another mile through the student ghetto at 1AM, giddy with excitement, relief and exhaustion (we’d been up since 5AM the morning before to turn up the vote throughout the city), even then… we couldn’t help but think about what’s next, about the changed world we would wake up in, about the need to adapt to the new circumstances quickly...

Where to start? There is so much to write about and as always so little time… (a problem that I’ll address in an upcoming post). The first and most important step is to get the key concepts out and then address them one at a time over the coming weeks. I started to work on another opus of an article and then realized I really ought to start using this blog as a blog(!) with regular (daily?) updates and not as a repository for infrequent dissertations. So here goes, expect shorter but much more frequent updates in the week to come.

Discussion on the meaning of Revolution in our movement (Erik, X., Steve)

2008-12-08T15:42:00.008-05:00

This is a conversation started by Erik one late night in which he discusses the framing of using the word REVOLUTION and what it means to our Revolutionary Democratic Movement. The latter messages are responses.

-So I had this long conversation with my mom about how I view the world. What we are trying to accomplish, what Rev Dem is.. etc. etc. It was fun but she kept being focused on how to her the word revolution had a negative connotation, and blah blah, I tried to talk it out with her, but it only went so far, but at the end she said hey, "why don't you call it...... instead.(if you want to know what she suggested, you must read along!)

Revolutionary Democracy- So it's a little late in the game to mess with a brand that's been working. But I been thinking about it, I say we really have something going with this whole "Not Left, Not Right, but Forward" and the whole EON "millennium" vibe. It's slick my mom will give to an org like that. Also they played around with a bunch of names for my generation including the "zips" "zeroes" "nothings" but in all the election coverage of the "youth vote" we were referred to as the "millennials".

SO I also think a theme we push with great success is the differentiating ourselves from the traditional left. I say we keep on with that motif. I think that the more we demarcate ourselves as something new, original, and based on a wide variety of influences, some from the left, some from corporate, some from our experience at New Brunswick, the more we have a chance of getting people really excited about what we're doing. The fact is the world Revolution is not a good one, I mean don't get me wrong to those of us who are in a place to understand this word in an unfettered context I will always consider myself a "Revolutionary", but to be honest I've always had a problem with the word "Revolution."

When I was at the first TSU retreat and we were in some abstract discussion about Revolution and Mark Pruce said something and he said, "remember what the word revolution means" it means to go in a circle. And he seemed to think this was a good thing, but I distinctly remember thinking, "Wow it does mean go in a circle, that's kind of lame". Now I know if you throw in the concept of a dialectic Revolution actually means progression of some kind, but the fact is that the average person is never going to want to deal with dialectics at 8am in the morning if you know what I mean.

SOOOO, My point is this. X we've talked more often about how with the law of accelerated returns that things are going to happen quickly society is going to shift quickly and what really matters isn't forcing that future to have the identity we choose, but to ensure that it is determined democratically.

Soooooo my mom said "why don't you call it" Evolutionary instead. And I thought about it, and I said, "Mom ya know if we do change the brand I promise you'll get quite flattered." I really think that these are a real viable way to go, and I think it is a really important decision. I know we say not to argue over words, but I'm making the case that I think as much as we ground what we do in a firm understanding of the past. We need to be bold, Keith, you always have that poem at the bottom of your emails, about how we can't take our poetry from the past but have to come up with our own images. I really think we need to complete the break with whole conception of 19th century storm the barricades. Especially in these economic times. It's the complete wrong sort of idea. Unless there are food riots in America, people are not going to seize the state by force, and I cannot imagine any scenario where we do seize the state by force in the foreseeable, ending positively for us, or the rest of the world. So let's break with the idea.

The truth is think about it, and i want to offer Two options.

Evolutionary Democracy
rEvolutionary Democracy

They suggest what we are doing which is allowing more efficient systems to take over in society, and to give people control over how their society changes evolves and where it's going.

We'll talk more about this some other time,

Red Erik

X's response

Time is just too short these days...Anyways...

I use the word revolution because it is accurate. From dictionary.com:

-An overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.

I would add, most importantly, economic. And social, cultural, etc.

Democracy, when allowed its full revolutionary swing, will mean a complete repudiation of capitalism as people build a completely different world. The capitalist system will be as alien to the future denizens of Revolutionary Democracy as the Middle-Ages are alien to us two hundred years after the bourgeois revolutions (we can barely imagine what it was like to live under the despotic rule of king and church). Whether it ever involves barricades to resist martial law or mass street mobilization to prevent the overthrow of the emerging revolutionary democratic rule (as with the attempted coup in Venezuela) is irrelevant. The scope of the transformation (and thus the essence and sharpness of the struggle for and against it) will be revolutionary. I would feel dishonest calling it anything else.

But we don't need to "convert" everyone to the idea that democracy requires revolution! We just need to organize people to practice democracy. Hence, EON should not require that its members adhere to "revolutionary democracy" (anymore than Tent State should, even as it is freely discussed). We don't need to come up with a single brand and a single formula to satisfy everyone's comfort level (that always fails, including in corporate advertising). We should work with all our allies to develop ideas, projects and organizations that accurately represent the many different sections of the 21st century progressive class alliance. In the case of your Mom, who has been a great supporter of the movement for years, I would recommend asking her what she would like to see in terms of ideas, projects and organizations rather than trying to ask her to join the Pirate Caucus...

One love,

-X.

A Pirate Response

I agree with both of you. We have to show "outsiders" or people not in the movement,what we are really about. Now it is not easy to get what we are about in one paper or one meeting, for most of us, it took months becoming organizers to conceptualize the work we are doing and the big picture. I know my own parents have had some misconceptions from " Now all of a sudden, you're a communist!?" to "Why do you spend so much time with this, they will not care about what happens to you after you graduate!"

It is so hard to slap together something catchy and slick, to a movement that has become an extended family and a new culture to counter the "American" culture and "counter-culture." There is nothing wrong with playing with ideas like pirates and the Matrix, if it works. YAR!!

Maybe the economic crisis is just the atmosphere to get ideas out there to people, offering them new and "revolutionary" ideas. I think we have already broken away with the idea of "waiting for the revolution," we are making sure that Revolution happens without capitalism knowing it, that its "legs being cut from underneath," to use a figurative metaphor. The "revolution is happening" is more our thinking, slowly, but surely.

We can't get caught up in words because they are easily turn against us. A lot of use the WORD "revolution" a lot because it means different things to different people, even jokingly. The MOVEMENT knows what we mean because it is almost like an inside joke. So is it so hard to open ourselves to "outsiders," or are "outsiders" open enough to accept new possibilities?

This idea of "THE MOVEMENT" could be emphasized, its' really up to us. Erik, your parents have been nothing but supportive and so have mine. It's up to us to keep them connected to the movement (plugged in). Look at that used "movement" in a sentence without realizing it. It was because of people like Mrs. Straub and others who challenge us to not get "comfortable" with being the "new left," but going beyond that, despite what simple minded reactionaries say, right or left.

Let's take some time in the retreat to seriously consider where we are going and how we are getting there. The movement's at the 7 inning stretch of a decade of organizing. It's time we show the rest of the world was going down in the Bruns.

TAKE EVERYTHING YOU CAN, GIVE NOTHING BACK,
Steve the Pirate

Please tell us what you think!

Four Causes of the Economic Crisis (Keith)

2008-10-09T20:54:00.001-04:00

This is a preliminary analysis of the current crisis. It requires more research but I put it forward as an attempt to start a serious discussion about the nature of the crisis and how revolutionary democracy should organize in it.

The Four Causes of the Economic Crisis

There are four main causes of the economic crisis: 1. the war in Iraq, 2. the Bush tax cuts, 3. the falling rate of profit in the “real economy” (or, in other words, the productive sector of the economy), and 4. the flow of foreign and domestic investment capital into the financial markets.

In what follows we will look at these four causes individually and then, since capitalism is a dynamic system, try to look at all of these issues interacting simultaneously. “In the final analysis,” as they used to say, capitalism is the cause of the crisis. And to understand the crisis and how revolutionary democracy can organize economically, socially, culturally, and politically to solve the crisis we will have to deepen our understanding of capitalism’s laws of motion.

1. Falling rate of Profit

U.S. auto maker General Motors along with Ford Motors has been on the verge of bankruptcy since the 1990s. They are one example of a general and well known trend--the loss of manufacturing jobs to outsourcing and technological innovation. During the 1990’s lower profit rates in manufacturing sector of the economy meant that capital started to move to other sectors of the economy in search of higher profits. Capital always goes to where the profits are the highest. The greed is a function of the way the system works. If you were a capitalist and you didn’t seek higher profits you would lose your capital.

During the 1990’s there was tremendous investment in the new economy – especially Information Technology. Stock prices of companies like Amazon.com rose dramatically although they had yet to make a profit. The flow of capital into the new economy created a “bubble.” A bubble just means that the price of some asset, in this case IT stocks, rises above what it is really worth (how to figure out what something is “really worth” is a long story). The dotcom bubble, as it was known, burst. Lots of capital was lost. But the remaining capital needed to find a profitable place for investment. Because the productive sectors of the economy -- traditional manufacturing and the new high tech sector -- were experiencing declining profit rates capital began moving to the financial sector.

The flow of investment capital into the financial sector instead of the productive sector is the heart of the problem. New value is created in the productive sector. When a financial capital loans money to productive capital part of the new value created by the productive capital goes to the financial capitalist as interest (or dividends). But if the productive sector is under resourced then new value is not created in the necessary quantities to meet all of the interest claims. This is the heart of the problem.

After the dotcom bubble capital popped capital flowed out of the productive sector and into the financial sector in search of higher profits. The financial sector responded to this lack of profitable places to put capital in the productive sector (or as it is sometimes called: the real economy) by creating new “financial instruments” – like mortgaged backed securities, credit default swaps, and derivatives. The banks and other financial institutions looked for creative ways to lend money – sub-prime mortgages, interest only mortgages, adjustable rate mortgages, car loans, and consumer credit. . Instead of the productive sector producing new wealth, the financial sector was busy creating new claims on old wealth. Capital was not invested productively it was invested to speculate, to gamble on the production of future wealth.

2. Bush’s tax cuts
The dotcom bubble burst soon after Bush took control of the white house at time when the Federal government was running budget surpluses. These surpluses could have been used to do the work that private investment capital in search of the highest profits could not do: re-building infrastructure—like crumbling bridges and tunnels, arcane public transit systems, universal broad band access, researching alternative fuels, repairing the environment etc.

Instead Bush cut taxes for the wealthiest people in the country arguing that by giving money back to private capital they would in turn invest it in the economy. They did. As investors they sought the highest rate of return. The financial sector had the highest rates of return and now even more capital flowed into the financial sector. All of the problems and imbalances that were created by falling profit rates in the productive sector were exacerbated by the new flood of capital entering the financial markets as a result of the tax cuts. To maintain profit rates new financial instruments must be developed, more risks must be taken. The result more risky bets, more complex financial products and a starving of the productive sectors of the economy where real wealth is produced. Bush, by pushing the tax rate to artificially low levels, in effect subsidized the financial sector at a time when it needed the exact opposite medicine -- a heavy tax that could redirect capital into the productive sector.

3. Foreign Capital
With Bush’s tax cuts effectively subsidizing the financial sector foreign capital in search of higher profits floods in. China, Europe, and the Middle East capitals are buying U.S. debt and investing in the financial sector, again exasperating all of the problems mentioned earlier. More risky loans, more bets, bets on top of bets, insured bets on top of bets on top of bets.

The profit rate in the financial sector is booming. CEO’s of financial institutions are paid inconceivable salaries 20 to 70 million dollars a year in bonuses alone. These flows of foreign capital exacerbate the distortions in the economy between the financial and productive sector, and between foreign and domestic production and exchange process. The artificially high rates of profit undermined the “real economy” making it impossible to do things like: re-building infrastructure, researching alternative fuels or climate change.

4. The War in Iraq
The center-left economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates the war in Iraq will cost the U.S. 3 trillion dollars (or 3,000 billion, a little more than four bailouts). Financing the war is an immense burden on U.S. workers. Wars are not productive expenditures; they waste tremendous resources. The war is so expensive its costs outstrips the productivity of U.S. workers and paying for it requires heavy borrowing by the U.S. government primarily from foreign capital. This creates immense debts to foreign capital.

Governments often borrow money to spend on projects in the expectation that the investment will produce some economic benefit that will make it possible to repay the loan. The architects of the war in Iraq calculated that by opening the Iraqi market to U.S. capital and gaining access to Iraqi oil the costs of the war would be offset. The main problem with their calculations is the time frame. They expected the war to be over and the benefits to be flowing. Instead the war is increasingly costly. Even worse it is clear enough that the U.S. has been defeated in the war. The financial crisis is one more signal that the war in Iraq is lost. The question of the war deserves it own treatment. But it is a significant cause of the current meltdown.

5. Putting it all together

The crisis appears to be a financial crisis -- a crisis in the financial markets, and if you listen to politicians and other commentators they raise the concern that the crisis will spread to the “real economy.” The problem with their analysis is that the crisis originated in the real economy, in the lack of profitable opportunities for investment in the productive sectors of the economy. Unless the crisis in the real economy is addressed the crisis will continue. In a minute I will try to show why only revolutionary democracy can solve the crisis in the real economy. But first let’s try to understand the exact nature of this crisis now that we have determined its causes.

What is this crisis about? The Great Depression of the 1930’s was an over-production/under-consumption crisis. Remember in the Grapes of Wrath, the capitalist farmers burn the peaches that have been picked by the migrant workers in order to get the prices up. There is too much supply and no demand (no demand backed by the ability to pay). When there is supply but no demand then prices fall. This is a crisis for a system that is based on the exploitation of labor and the realization of profits based on that exploitation. If profits cannot be made than the system does not work. It is important to remember that this is a social problem. The workers and their tools still exist and can be used to make things people need but they lie idle because profits cannot be made. The problem is with the way that work is organized.
This current crisis is different then the Great Depression. It is the exact opposite: the great depression was under-consumption/over-production, but this crisis is under-production/over-consumption. Let’s think about how it works. The flood of capital into the financial sector of the economy created a credit bubble that is bursting. In a useful work, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles R. Morris, writes,

"Here is a crude gauge of the credit bubble. Not long ago, the sum of all financial assets-- stocks, bonds, loans, mortgages, and the like, which are claims on real things--were about equal to global GDP. Now they are approaching four times global GDP. Financial Derivatives have a notional value of 10 times global GDP."

What does that mean? Stocks, bonds, loans, mortgages, etc, are “claims.” If I have a stock or bond I have a piece of paper that entitles me to something “real.” GDP is a rough measurement of the value of all goods and services produced. When the claims --i.e., stocks, bonds, loans, etc, -- are roughly equal to GDP the system is in balance. The situation described by Morris in the above shows the system is out of balance. There are more claims then real wealth. There are about four claims for every single real unit of wealth. So, three out of four claims are worthless!!! That is the crisis. Whose claim is good and whose claim is worthless is the question that Federal Reserve and the Treasury are trying to answer. But they cannot pose the question right, and even if they could the problem is deeper.

The claims are “bundled” together. So the paper that represents the claim doesn’t represent just one claim that can be devalued, it represents many different claims and ties them together so if one goes down the toilet then they all go. In addition, those pieces of paper have been insured so if they are devalued that triggers a new claim, and on top of it people have bet on the value of the claim. So all of those claims are deeply intertwined and entangled. The whole financial system is going to go down. It is possible that a few banks will be able to absorb the losses and buy up the smaller banks but it is unlikely.

The bailout and other measures taken by the Fed and the Treasury continue to exacerbate the problem (which is why they are not working). The bailout and lowering interest rates just continues the same dynamic of pushing capital into the financial sector when what needs to happen is capital must be removed from the financial sector and put into the productive sector so that real value can be produced and we can literally work our way out of the crisis by producing real value. Only revolutionary democratic control over financial institutions can make that happen, and simultaneously transform they way we work and organize that work.

6. Conclusion
This is essentially a crisis about the way that production is organized by private investment acting according to market signals (looking for high profits). We must continue to struggle for revolutionary democratic control over every aspect of the society. If this crisis continues to worsen the tempo of the struggle will increase rapidly. Lenin remarked that at times history moves very slowly and at others ten years can pass in a few days. In other posts we have discussed the need for workers to take over boards of directors and to struggle locally for political power as a part of a long term revolutionary process. The crisis highlights an additional arena of struggle. We must struggle for control over investment. The first step is to nationalize the banks, insurance companies (especially health insurers), and other financial institutions, and to put them under democratic control.

Nationalizing the banks is not enough as they will just fall under the control of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. We must create revolutionary democratic institutions to oversee investment and we must develop the analysis to make investment effective in doing two things simultaneously: 1. developing the productive power of labor (by allying with progressive capital in the new economy against the forces of the old economy and reaction) 2. We must develop the productive forces in ways that transform exploitative and oppressive social relations. This may mean things like prioritizing investment in the Afro-American nation or creating special investment funds over-seen by democratically elected representatives of oppressed peoples in the U.S. We will want to fund productive capitalists and worker co-operatives in things like the research and development of alternative energies and green technologies, rebuilding infrastructure and public transportation. We will have to build the revolutionary democratic organization necessary to decide these issues. What this crisis makes clear is that the market cannot organize investment effectively and if it is not decided by the market it must be decided democratically or else we will be walking down roads that lead to fascism.

An Obama victory is among the most pressing tasks at hand. Four more years of Bush policies will exacerbate this crisis in unforeseeable ways and most likely produce an open fascism. An Obama victory will make possible a “new” new deal which will open up many possibilities for revolutionary democracy to transform and revolutionize the society. Crisis are combinations of dangers and opportunities. The opportunities for revolutionary democracy are immense. Let’s make the most of them.