Archive for August, 2008
Cop Tactics at DNC Protests
Posted by illvox collective in General on August 26, 2008
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Images from DNC Protests
Posted by illvox collective in General on August 26, 2008
Anarchism Articulated: Who We Are, What We Want, What We Do
Posted by illvox collective in A Starting Place: Anarchism Explained on August 26, 2008
By m(A)tt
Introduction
Every election year, and this one in particular, I feel the urgency of articulating an alternative narrative and different ideas about how to make sense of the increasingly-chaotic world around us. With so many of my friends and comrades jumping on the Obama bandwagon, with admirable hope and ambition, I feel at the same time both great sympathy as well as great concern.
Looking at history, I walk away with the unshakeable belief that electoral work does more to stunt the growth of popular upsurges for change than it does to serve them. As I will argue at length, the political system we live under is not set up to be a vehicle for change. It is an investment, or more accurately, a gamble, and because the house makes the rules, ultimately the house always wins. So when a movement of regular people, with scarce resources and energy gets behind an electoral campaign, it is reminiscent of a working class parent with a gambling problem. What I believe is that change is a process that is forced upon the system from the outside, harnessing the greatest strengths we have: our numbers and our creativity.
Anarchism is a global political movement with its roots in the labor struggles of over a hundred years past, and has profoundly influenced many progressive movements since. We have led strikes, revolutions, street actions, and festivals. In that period of time, it would be impossible to capture every idea expressed by all the anarchist thinkers and groups in this small pamphlet; this is merely a snapshot of the thoughts of this one contemporary anarchist activist. The purpose of this is to familiarize a new generation of advocates for change with our politics, not solely to proselytize, but to create a common understanding for mutual cooperation, and dispel any myths or disinformation that may exist.
Who we are
“If you have come here to help me then you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine then let us work together.” – Lila Watson, aboriginal activist
I identify not only with anarchism, but also a very selective interpretation of all the various schools of anarchist thought and radical social theory. I tend to take bits and pieces from each tendency, recognizing that each one brings something unique to the table, but generally I fall within the category of “social anarchism.” I also draw from radical feminism, critical race theory, social ecology, Marxist economics, youth liberation, radical queer and trans praxis, among other things, for the purpose of understanding all the intersections and overlapping of the oppressions that we find in reality. The priority is not to decide who is the most oppressed, but to look at oppressive dynamics and systems objectively, to tailor our methods and processes appropriately, and make strategic interventions where it makes most sense.
This can be done not only at key points of societal tension, but within our own movement as well. Simply adopting the label of “anarchist,” or “revolutionary,” or what have you, does not mean you are suddenly free from all the oppressive and submissive behavioral tendencies we’ve all been socialized with. When we are conscious of these tendencies, we can alter our group process and level the playing field a bit, to ensure that all of the people we are struggling alongside are enfranchised and respected members of the movement, regardless of their age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability or whatever their identity might be. This is done with the recognition that we all carry a part of the answer to the problems we are grappling with. When we can all contribute as free individuals, our collective knowledge thus gives us a more complete picture of the world as it is, as it should be, and how to get there.
So, for example, during meetings we pay attention to who is speaking, for how long, who is not speaking, if they are being prevented from speaking, why, and what can be done to make sure everyone is heard. If men are speaking over women, if whites are being dismissive of the concerns of people of color, if sexist or homophobic language is being used, then clearly we have a space where some are inclined to speak their mind, and others will most likely remain silent or leave. What about the people who can’t make it to meetings? What about working people and/or parents with major time constraints? If meetings drag on without productivity, someone whose free hours are an extremely precious commodity can be very disinclined to participate.
Do we write off these concerns as petty and unavoidable? Or do we work out a process that limits the amount of time a person can speak, prioritize who should be heard first, mandate that timely decisions be made, and even go so far as to provide childcare for parents? If we really want a social revolution, isn’t it reasonable to say that maybe we need to revolutionize our basic interactions with one another? In a society where we are all cut off from one another-arguably by design in order to divide and conquer-we need to start demolishing walls with everything in our arsenal.
But even these accommodations are only a part of the equation. Yes, our process must be all-inclusive, within the context of our agreed-upon politics. But then it only follows that this process must be reflected in our political work. Let’s say for example, we are engaged in a campaign to win union recognition from an employer. Usually the demands center on wages, hours and safety. But if a significant number of the workers are upset about racist or sexist behavior from management, do we brush that aside as divisive or as not a union-related issue? If we do, what are the consequences? Will these workers take the union seriously? Will other workers resent them for not showing enough support for the campaign? It would be impossible to give a blanket solution to all such problems, but I think the best approach is to spend energy on building bridges rather than to repress the concerns of people with whom you share a common cause. While this may seem like simplistic reasoning, in the end, regardless of which way you go there is always a chance of losing the battle; the important thing to remember is that we are at war, and the only thing that will allow us to win is building solidarity over the long haul. As much as anything, anarchism is about building a common bond between all regular people. If the best we can do is to build up institutions, such as unions, based upon the domination of one group or another, then all we are doing is reproducing the very oppressive systems we are seeking to dismantle; such cynicism will surely smother our liberatory impulses.
Like most anarchists, I see nothing particularly enlightened or progressive about representative democracy, and like most anti-capitalists, recognize the social and ecological destruction that is inherent under free market capitalism. Realistically, the government we live under is far better to its subjects than many, if not most other states around the world. However, with a sober appraisal of the history of the United States, not to mention the way it has conducted itself internationally, it is clear that its seemingly-benevolent face has more to do with defusing social upheaval and protecting the status quo (”the state of things”) rather than some kind of altruistic desire to improve the lot of the masses.(1)
I believe strongly in an “us-and-them” dichotomy between those who govern and those who are governed (as has always been the case). There is an entire class of people who exclusively wield the political machinery of this society, at the behest of the wealthy elite. They are generally called politicians, but could also be described as managers, supervisors, school administrators, bureaucrats, academics, small business owners, et cetera. They are sometimes generalized by the term, “middle class,” while some of us call them the “coordinator class.” These are essentially working class people who made enough sacrifices and are granted the privilege of managing others (instead of being saddled with actual productive labor) with the promise that they will uphold the status quo. The faces comprising this class change over time, but the ruling class, directly above them, always controls who takes their place, and whose interests they will serve. Many working people are convinced they are “middle class,” because they may have picked up some skills or accumulated some privileges. But the important distinction to make is that real coordinators don’t actually produce anything, they merely manage labor and wealth. Under bad economic conditions, a working class person can be one job termination away from poverty or homelessness. Coordinators seem to have the uncanny ability to find employment no matter how many times they are fired.
The ruling class owns vast properties, finance political campaigns, and exclusively sit on the boards of the world’s most influential institutions. They own capital, which is wealth and property that they do not personally need or use. They accumulate capital for the sole purpose of wielding it against anyone who would try to take it from them; this is demonstrated by the state’s slavish devotion to upholding property rights, long before it ever considers the human rights of regular people without wealth. Their primary interest is to indefinitely accumulate more wealth and power; wars, trade, and elections all essentially have the same goal in mind, by different means. Working class people, on the other hand, have a tendency to be concerned mainly with raising themselves out of a precarious, miserable existence, second only to subsistence.
In short, you will find that anarchists tend to oppose most of society’s institutions, or at least, believe a radical restructuring is necessary. To me, anarchism means that all authority must justify itself in order to exist, and if it cannot, it should be abolished to make way for new institutions that serve the people, which means they must be accountable to the people they are serving.
What we want
It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute. – Buenaventura Durruti, Iberian Anarchist Federation and Anti-Fascist.
Without an alternative, a critique would be nothing more than an exercise in cynicism and depression. Lots of people would probably agree with what I have to say about the state of the world, but tend not to think too much about it because of the overwhelming enormity of it all. The reason why this critique is so all-encompassing is because anarchists are also unique in what we advocate. Fundamentally, we believe in the human potential for self-governance. Drawing on the various schools of thought described above, we must understand that our potential is something that is squandered and battered down from the time we are children, right up until the day we die. Society’s notions of education, history, gender roles, work habits, the value we attach to one another, discipline and structure are all completely backwards, geared solely toward making good workers, “professionals,” or inmates out of us; with a liberatory approach, our full potential can be reached, and all of these things can be radically altered to foster new generations of free-thinking, self-directed revolutionaries.(2)
A common criticism of anarchism is that it’s unworkable, on the basis that a strict division and hierarchy of labor are necessary in order to make society function. But in reality, there is almost no task or job in the economy that is so specialized that anyone else could not be taught to do it. With an equal opportunity to direct one’s own learning and development, all the academic disciplines, trades and the coordinator class are rendered completely impotent and useless, and the entire argument for a hierarchical division of labor collapses like a house of cards.(3) Why would we have specialists when we can do things ourselves? In essence, this is what is considered to be socialism through an anarchist lens. Now clearly there needs to be some level of specialization, what with things such as surgery, but my point is that with equal access to real education, there is almost no basis for exclusion from any job, and therefore, there is no real basis whatsoever for labor shortages or scarcity of any kind. And as I will elaborate on further, management is a task that can easily be carried out by those who are doing the actual productive labor, via election and/or rotation.(4)
Unlike most Marxists, anarchists see nothing potentially liberatory about any state apparatus, whether it’s a socialist government, or a hierarchical political party that would like to control the government. Even in the short-term, we generally consider any orientation toward capturing control of the state to be backwards; it is an institution created by and for the ruling class, for very specific ends; that is, the protection of privilege and controlling property. There is nothing neutral about it, and we believe that the repressive nature of the socialist state reflects that reality.(5) Subjugating popular movements-be it feminist or labor-to the “be-all/end-all” pursuit of state power is not only shortsighted, it is also detrimental to their immediate strength and versatility. To win elections, you must make concessions to the coordinator class. Ultimately, it is the ruling class who determines who enters or leaves power, and this particular government has survived for 219 years by selectively bringing potential rebels to the table, and isolating those in rebellion. In fact, it has built a global empire on this basis.
As an alternative process by which society could function, social anarchists believe in and practice a radical form of democratic process; the core concept is that people should have a direct say in the decisions that affect them, proportionate to how they are affected. Therefore, we consider most hierarchical decision-making bodies to be inherently anti-democratic, regardless of whether or not it was elected, appointed, or imposed itself upon the people. While I am not categorically opposed to electing people to an office in some future society, or even in one of our own organizations, a fundamental principle is that of accountability. If office-holders can unilaterally make decisions, without necessarily having to consult her or his constituents (as in representative democracy) then that would be considered unaccountable and likely to become entrenched power. Case in point, the US political system has an incumbency rate well over 90%.(6) Our preference, where possible, is to appoint recallable, rotating delegates to decision-making bodies; these delegates have varyingly specific mandates, and there may be a number of checks and balances to ensure her or his actions reflect the will of the constituency. It is in this process that we break down the dichotomy between coordinators and the rest, and put the tools of governance into as many hands as possible.
Overall, our alternative is an economically self-managed society that integrates the liberation of women, people of color, youth, queer and gender non-conforming people, sustainable ecology, and strives to understand the entire spectrum of liberatory and oppressive social dynamics, for a self-directed culture. This is not entirely utopian; not only do we practice these principles in our organizations and projects, there are also people all over the world carving out space for a new world in the shell of the old, today, and fighting with all their might to preserve it. While anarchists are constantly experimenting with process and building new institutions that reflect our ideals, indigenous communities frequently share our principles in their centuries-old traditions, and anarchists are often entering into alliances with them.(7)
What we do
While ultimately I believe in revolution, my day-to-day work is not some strange fixation upon armed struggle in the immediate future, nor am I part of a millenarian cult that wants your devotion. My co-thinkers and I are activists involved in a variety of struggles, from different backgrounds and experiences, looking to foster and intervene in movements that can increase the autonomous power of oppressed people everywhere. When we talk about autonomy, it’s not meant that we should be isolated from each other. Rather, that our power and freedom should be derived from the unity of people who recognize the things they have in common with one another, and directed by our own collective values, needs and desires. To depend upon a state, or a party, or any other hierarchical institution primarily concerned with preserving its own dominance, is to cede the agency and autonomy from our struggles for self-determination. Anarchists emphasize the consistency of ends and means. Sometimes called “pre-figurative politics,” we recognize that the methods and models we use today have a direct bearing upon the new world we seek to create, as well as movements we are building to make that world a reality. This is less a moralistic view than a practical one; how, after all, are we to create a world so radically different from this one if we don’t get in some practice before the revolution?
In practice, most of our work doesn’t look so different from conventional political groups, particularly compared to youth organizations. In other ways, we have stark differences. While organizations like the Young Democrats of America groom their members for a career in political maneuvering and power consolidation, our projects tend to equip participants with the tools to effectively resist the status quo wherever they go in life. The practice of “pre-figurative politics,” then, is not limited to anarchists (and feminists), though we are fairly unique in our grasp of its importance. Marxists and other leftists tend to ignore the concept entirely, believing that the instrument of mass violence known as the state can be used to make progress; and unlike most leftists, we take the conventional wisdom of the political mainstream (resembling social Darwinism, or maybe more aptly termed, political Darwinism) and flip it on its head with a process that engenders camaraderie and cooperation.
We organize around issues that are immediately important: US military aggression in Iraq and elsewhere; repression on immigrant communities; harassment against women, people of color, trans and queer folk, or anyone else that is seen as, “undesirable,” by dominant opinion. And while oppositional political activity is a time-consuming but necessary use of our energy, we do manage to do productive work as well. Anarchists have historically made great cultural contributions and today are involved in countless musical, theatrical and artistic projects that embody our ideas and create space for popular participation. We tend to organize wherever we find ourselves; if we get a job, we might organize a union; if we’re students, we organize on campus; if we live in an area where there’s a sense of community, we’ll organize with our neighbors. The landscape may change, but the basic ideas are the same. Ultimately, a social anarchist strategy relies upon the long-term building of popular power in industries and communities of oppressed peoples, and this requires more focus than jumping from issue to issue in the hopes of siphoning off new recruits to our cause.
The decision-making process tends toward building consensus and unanimity, coupled with an understanding that in order to be relevant, we need to be active. When we pursue our objectives in the public sphere, we do so as directly and confrontationally as possible. Recognizing that we have nothing to gain from collaboration with entrenched hierarchies, we focus on direct action and disruptiveness as a way to avoid being ignored.
There is substantial evidence that the fear of domestic disruption has inhibited murderous plans. One documented case concerns Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recognized the need that ‘sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control.’ If they sent troops to Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, and Pentagon officials feared that escalation might lead to massive civil disobedience, in view of the large-scale popular opposition to the war, running the risk of ‘provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions.’ A review of the internal documents released in the Pentagon Papers shows that considerations of cost were the sole factor inhibiting planners, a fact that should be noted by citizens concerned to restrain the violence of the state. In such cases as these, and many others, popular demonstrations and civil disobedience may, under appropriate circumstances, encourage others to undertake a broader range of conventional action by extending the range of the thinkable, and where there is real popular understanding of the legitimacy of direct action to confront institutional violence, may serve as a catalyst to constructive organization and action that will pave the way to more fundamental change. – Noam Chomsky, anarchist scholar of politics and linguistics.
In a society where power is very centralized into the hands of a few, our everyday, relative social peace depends upon the masses’ general tolerance of the status quo. Our job, then, is to make it possible for all the various groups of oppressed peoples to express their needs and desires in a way that brings them into a direct (un-armed) conflict with the state. One way of looking at our politics is to contrast the terms, “social peace,” with “social anarchism;” we’re not against a peaceful social order, but you might say that our emphasis is on a just one, and therefore we incite and engage in social conflict. We do this with the recognition that capitalism can never be peaceful; the fact that it is a system which necessitates social hierarchy and unfulfilled basic needs means that it will always ultimately rely upon force or the threat thereof to maintain the current order. So regardless of whether or not we choose to fight back, we are being assaulted on a daily basis. So long as capitalism and hierarchy exist, this will be our reality, which is why they must ultimately be abolished through social revolution. What form it takes is another question altogether, but an old pamphlet from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or the “Wobblies” gives us a hint at an ideal situation:
The answer is that, as the I.W.W. conceives of the General Strike, it would be so perfectly organized by workers and technicians and effectually used that the feeding, supplying and transportation of [counter-revolutionary] armed mercenaries would be practically impossible. The strikes at Seattle and Winnipeg gave some indication of the ability of strikers to organize, picket and police their strike and, at the same time arrange for the adequate distribution of food stuffs to the population. As for machine guns, tanks, airplanes and bombs of asphyxiating or incendiary character, it is well to remember that such things are only available when they are manufactured and transported by labor… – Ralph Chaplin, “The General Strike,” 1933.
In other words, the better organized you are, the less violence is necessary or possible.
The best-known example of anarchist resistance to the status quo was the 1999 mobilization against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, WA. While a number of anarchists engaged in targeted property destruction, the main emphasis was on shutting down the entire downtown area where the WTO was holding its meetings. The latter of these tactics included street blockades, with approaches including both non-violent civil disobedience, as well as fighting back against police repression, and were carried out very much along anarchist or “anti-authoritarian” organizational models, as described above. As tens of thousands of people from all walks of life poured into the city-workers, students, poor farmers, queers, people of color, environmentalists and more-the state quickly realized that it was going to lose the “Battle of Seattle,” as it became known, which it finally did when the WTO meetings collapsed due to corporate delegates’ inability to do so much as move from one building to another, because the people were in control of the streets. Eventually, the National Guard was called in at the infuriated demands of then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Attorney General Janet Reno, martial law was declared, and the world looked on in wonder as the most powerful government on the planet was reduced to declaring war on its own people. While many were injured and/or jailed, no one was killed and no one was convicted on serious charges, due to the creativity and solidarity of the people on the street and behind the scenes.(8) Whether it’s in the streets or at work or in your neighborhood, direct action is a way to get things done without going through official channels that are otherwise corrupt, or at best, inefficient. Not only is it practical, but it is also through direct action that we begin to recognize the unstable, weak position of the current power structures, and on the flip side, our own strength and potential.
Understanding our role in fomenting militant social movements as a path to revolution, the specific form my anarchism takes has to do with how best to interact with the rest of the world, specifically people who are struggling to improve their lives. It is through involvement in these struggles that we can become relevant to people outside our circles, and more importantly, to the people who will ultimately be the only ones who can make our vision for a better world a reality. Unlike many liberal and Marxist groups, the goal is not to become the center of the movement, or to force it in any one direction or the other. I do, however, very much make my views known, argue for them in discussions about strategy, and open up space for radical thought and militant action where there is none already. And again, radical democratic process is at the center of our orientation, and so this is something I push for in all activist work.
In the course of creating a new social order, there are inevitably people of other persuasions who want to see things move in a different direction. Some have very different ideas about what is and is not principled behavior, and sometimes, said parties are not as well-meaning as others. Therefore, I believe the final role of social anarchists is to minimize the influence of a minority over the majority; specifically fascists, liberal politicians, and some Marxist-Leninists of authoritarian persuasions on a case-by-case basis. It is my conviction that the inability of anarchists and similar revolutionaries to stem the influence of these factions has been the downfall of almost every modern revolution in history. On the other hand, we should be very careful not to exert undue influence over social movements beyond what has been described above.
With these tasks in mind, the question for social anarchists then is how to best organize ourselves, specifically as a grouping of anarchists involved in larger struggles that generally do not define themselves as “anarchist.” The inclination of many anarchists, even those who are very close to my thinking, is to form a grouping as loose as possible, while neglecting efficiency, self-discipline and unity. So on the one hand, I prioritize having a well-defined process and division of tasks (on a rotating basis) but on the other, I know that our ideas are constantly evolving, and to ensure that the group continues to exist as a force for good, we must cooperatively shape our understanding of the world around us. While independent thought and creativity need to be encouraged, we also must constantly discuss all the different political and theoretical questions concerning us in order to maintain our unity in action. Otherwise, we may wake up one day and find we have little in common, and no basis for collective activity.
Conclusion
I wanted a roof for every family, bread for every mouth, education for every heart, light for every intellect. I am convinced that the human history has not yet begun–that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric. I see with the eyes of my soul how the sky is diffused with rays of the new millennium. – Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchist executed by the State of Massachusetts.
To be a revolutionary in the United States today, means that your history is constantly bearing down upon you, and the future is always coming at you too fast. As a result, we tend to be awfully… anxious much of the time. At the very least I know I am. But the most important part of this to grasp is recognizing your own power and agency. The dominant narrative says that we are all subjects of history, tossed about by forces beyond our control, or at best, some of us may rise to lead the nation to greatness by standing on the shoulders of the unwashed masses. In my mind, we are all potential agents for change, and the whole “Great Men of History” narrative is complete fallacy, be it Left, Right or Center. We can be agents of change in society, yes, but perhaps most importantly, change in the people around us. Societal change takes decades, but the up-close changes you see in the people you struggle alongside, that is something that is a testament to human potential, which is what this is really all about.
Notes
1. Fresia, Jerry. Toward an American Revolution. Cambridge, Ma.: South End Press, 1988.
2. Mercogliano, Chris. Making It Up as We Go Along: The Story of the Albany Free School. Portsmouth, NH.: Heinemann, 1998.
3. Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. New York.: Verso, 2003.
4. Anonymous. “Common Sense Reasons for Worker Self-Management.” zinelibrary.info
5. Goldman, Emma. My Disillusionment in Russia. New York. : Crowell, 1970.
6. Malbin, Michael J. Life After Reform: When the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act Meets Politics. Lanham, Md.: Rowland & Littlefield, 2003.
7. Andalusia. “Bolivian Anarchism and Indigenous Resistance.” www.leftturn.org October 14, 2007
8. Starhawk. “How We Really Shut Down the WTO.” www.starhawk.org December, 1999
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Dead Prez @ DNC
Posted by illvox collective in General on August 25, 2008
APOC stuff trickling through now from DNC protests. Dead Prez put it down Sunday at the Recreate 68 anti-occupation rally in Denver, introduced by Rosa Clemente (now Green Party VP candidate)
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Cards for Bashir Hameed
Posted by illvox collective in General on August 25, 2008
Bashir Hameed was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and is currently set to undergo chemotherapy treatment. People wishing to send cards to Bashir can do so by sending them to the address below:
Bashir Hameed (J. YORK)
#82-A-6313
Great Meadows Correctional Facility
P.O. Box 51
Comstock, New York 12821
Bashir Hameed was born and raised in New Jersey. In 1968, Bashir Hameed joined the Black Panther Party while residing in Oakland CA. Once he returned to New Jersey, he became Deputy Chairman of the New Jersey Chapter of BPP. FBI documents obtained during the 70’s reveal that during this time Bashir became a COINTELPRO target. He was charged and convicted of the murder and the attempted murder of two police officers in April 1981. This conviction came as a direct result of his political activity. Bashir Hameed and his co-defendant, Abdul Majid were tried three times. There first trial ended in a hung jury divided along racial lines, The second trial was declared a mistrial by the judge immediately after the jur> rendered a decision that acquitted Bashir on the murder charge. At a third trial, they were eventually convicted for murder. Bashir is currently serving a sentence of 25 years to life.
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Class Struggle, Not the Market, to Save the Planet
Posted by illvox collective in Uncategorized on August 25, 2008
A political economist and activist who directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, Patrick Bond was a featured guest speaker at the Green Left Weekly Social Change — Climate Change conference held in Sydney in April.
Author of a range of books, including Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society, Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation, and Walk left, Talk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms, Bond is a long-time advocate for radical solutions to the climate and social catastrophe wraught by global capitalism.
Lauren Carroll Harris spoke to Bond at the conference about responses to climate change.
@question = What has been the response of the market to the crisis of climate change and what role does carbon trading play?
Multinational corporations are trying to commodify the air, really, and the pollution in the air. They want the right to do that, and they want to codify it with the legal language of contracts and put a price on it and get credit for having already polluted.
And in a sense they’re going to get, as the European carbon trading system grants them, further rights to keep polluting. And that’s cold, hard cash. They can sell those rights, so that it’s not “the polluter pays” principle, it’s “the polluter earns”.
With the European trading system, so many critiques have emerged from within the financial sector about what a crazed market it is. It is a kind of market that you get by creating all sorts of fictional goods, like an apparent reduction in emissions. Well, who’s really to judge whether this reduction did really occur in the way that is was argued? You need a very complex regulatory process to find out if that in fact is the case, and whether emissions that would have taken place have been avoided and they should be given credit for it.
It must be determined whether additional emissions have really been mitigated, and what the value of that should be. So it’s so hard to measure, and its chaotic to police.
Mainstream environmentalists have such a hang-up about thinking outside their box — because they want to be relevant and maintain ties to the governments and to the UN system — that they’re becoming more of a barrier to progress.
It is critical to call some groups on their support for carbon trading as a supposed solution, as it is putting money into the hands of some of the worst polluters and the financiers and hedge funds rather than actually getting the resources we need for a just transition.
@question = Can the UN play a useful role in the campaign to stop runaway climate change?
Fifteen to twenty thousand people protested at the World Conference Against Racism [WCAR in Durban, South Africa, 2001] and over 30,000 at the Summit on Sustainable Development [SSD in Johannesburg, 2001]. Protesters basically said to the UN: “You are now doing more harm than good, when you leave out addressing Zionism, leave out reparations for addressing the impacts of colonialism and Apartheid from the WCAR, and when you infuse the SSD with so much private-public partnership rhetoric that it puts up the world for sale and does nothing for poverty.”
The balance of forces on a global scale is so adverse to any progressive change, with neoliberals still dominant and neo-conservatives still being deployed by US President George Bush, like World Bank head Robert Zoellick. There is a neo-con/neo-lib fusion, and a basic acceptance by the global elites that the US can occupy Iraq, for instance.
And that means that, I fear, at the stage we’re at of human history, global-scale solutions to reforming these multi-lateral institutions is an enormous waste of time and energy and a distraction from real activism.
I would say that the changes we need are so dramatic, that laziness and sloth you find in the UN prevents us from getting there. And the US’s braking role in this is so powerful, and wouldn’t change necessarily with a President Barack Obama.
So we really should be doing much more direct action, and local and international solidarity between groups that take serious campaigning issues such as “Keep the oil in the soil”, “Keep the coal in the hole” and “Keep resources in the ground”. That way, we really will build a movement, a movement of victims of climate change.
@question = Environmental concerns are often pitted against workers’ jobs by governments and the mainstream media. Do you think there is a convergence between workers’ rights and environmental sustainability?
There are possibilities to take grievances that are overlapping and interlocking. We need to make the arguments for a just transition away from the really energy-intensive jobs with low pay and high danger, towards a job-safe alternative that could retrain these workers to put together
solar hot water heaters.
Sustainable alternatives could receive huge subsidies and be organised in a way that would meet all people’s needs. It would require of course big infusions of money, but at least not big infusions of very scarce energy resources.
We have a situation where BHP Billiton has over a thousand workers in its major production cycle, and those workers may be threatened if we succeed in saying the smelters that BHP Billiton runs should be closed.
The reason people are calling for this is because the smelters take 10% of the electricity of the country and only give half a percent of GDP and have not created many jobs. The question is whether we can get a just transition arrangement that would allow those metal workers to instead be making hot water heaters with solar technologies and putting them together in millions of homes.
Those kind of job creation possibilities would be immense compared to the losses we would have if we shut down that supply of electricity.
If the labour movement says “we want to keep our jobs in the coal mines and in the smelters”, we have to have a really frank talk and say “Comrades, couldn’t you find an alternative plan, with us, that gives you more jobs with better pay in the renewables sector, for example, in getting solar hot water heaters to be constructed en masse?”.
Right now, it costs about A$1000 for one of these heaters in South Africa. It would really have a big, big impact on people’s electricity bills. And to get hot water, for a whole lot of people it would be their first time. Providing solar hot water heaters would be a wonderful new challenge that can unite community and labour if we do it properly.
When we really get the trade unions to think through with us how to protect their workers’ jobs and move even more jobs into this sector. That’s a formidable potential coalition.
@question = Can you explain the current struggle to de-commodify water and electricity in South Africa?
All of life is a class struggle. The class struggle over who pays what for water and electricity is acute.
Suez, a big company from Paris, introduced really diabolical systems for controlling poor people’s water in South Africa. The new “buyer politics” involving prepaid meters and low-quality sanitation systems were introduced to control low-income people and limit their access to water. And the same was going on with electricity.
So the resistance has raised slogans like “Destroy the meters, enjoy the water”, or else just going to bypasses and reconnecting people who’ve been disconnected.
Women in the impoverished Johannesburg township of Soweto are unable to pay [for electricity], community groups come round, rip out the electricity meter and they do a bypass with the local electrician working for free, helping to get the electricity free.
That’s really a great step forward for advancing people’s confidence in fighting for reforms and making the system react. They won some free, basic electricity.
And then the big challenge is to say, how much further change do we have to make? Getting free electricity is important, because people have to be allowed to survive, but really the strategy is not just to make an individual act. Because then success hinges upon whether the electricity company and the sheriff can come in and find the disconnected meter and the electricity still on and do something about it. The task is to find the policy to actually sustain free basic electricity.
Campaigners are saying, “when you hit the hedonistic levels of consumption of water and electricity, then you should really be paying a luxury consumption tax”. That would redistribute resources in the system so that poor people would get it.
So in that way you’d decommodify it by providing it to people for free at the low consumption side, and high consumers get nailed with the luxury tax to also encourage conservation — so we don’t build more coal-fired power plants or huge dams.
Hopefully, we get both red and green in that struggle and raise the spectre of socialism as a broader way to address these problems.
@question = Some environmentalists promote a user-pays response to climate change, which seeks to charge ordinary people more for basic services to encourage energy efficiency.
This is what divides the eco-socialist movement from the environmentalists who can only see rising prices as a disincentive to consume without any care for the impact that this has on poor people.
Low income automobile users stuck out in the suburbs in British Colombia, Canada, are being hit by the same petrol tax — a carbon tax that applies to petrol. And through no fault of their own — the crazy housing market with all of its capitalist speculation has lead to housing being organised in this way — and through low-paying jobs, they’re having to live further away. This makes them more addicted to their cars and they’re more vulnerable to this tax.
So taking the class struggle into the climate campaign is so crucial. Not just for equity but to really have the right tactics.
A low-income person is still going to have to drive because public transport doesn’t get out to those areas. If you really want to make the gains and raise the idea of actually building a public transport system, its going to require a much bigger luxury consumption tax on the rich who can afford it, and probably won’t even really notice for a while that their prices are going up. We need to get to the point where they do notice and they do stop their hedonistic consumption.
In that case, what is needed to confront climate change?
Well, it’s so interesting that even Al Gore can say he’s not sure why we haven’t seen more direct action at coal-fired electricity generators or coal mines. So if you kind of have a mandate from a major politician to go and do disruptions then it’s about time — we all need to do a lot more.
If you think about the high profile autonomous projects around the world that have been considered successful — and stealing water and electricity in South Africa has been widely celebrated by autonomists — you have to say, well, that works for a little while.
But we really do need a longer term plan that will make the gains we’ve taken, on the streets and in the communities and in the shop floor, actually real. How can they be turned into good public policy?
There’s always a huge danger that, when you fight as a socialist for a reform, that it ends up as a “reformist” reform — it strengthens the system and legitimises it.
And obviously, no one wants to legitimise capitalism by just adding a bit of free water on top, but the kind of reforms that socialist activists have in mind are instead “non-reformist” reforms, because they allow more space to struggle and allow you to live another day to make a bigger demand and they give the movement more momentum.
And that the logic that you’ve built into a reform, like free basic water and free basic electricity, counteracts the internal dynamics and laws of motion of the capitalist system. So such reforms are not about strengthening the system, they’re weakening its internal dynamics.
So I think anytime there’s a struggle of the working class that establishes very strategic reforms with great muscle, with many members, with many coalition and alliance partners, then we’re talking about the possibility of challenging the capitalist system in very serious ways.
And a serious challenge to the capitalist system is what we need now to save the planet. An organised socialist planet is going to be required.
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Starvation Politics: From Ancient Egypt to the Present
Posted by illvox collective in Uncategorized on August 24, 2008
By George Caffentzis
‘Food riots’ in response to huge food price hikes have hit numerous countries around the world this year. George Caffentzis explores the current food crisis, its causes and implications.
Food prices are rising so much and so fast that millions are now on the verge of starvation. Between May 2007 and May 2008, corn prices increased by 46%, wheat prices by 80%, and soybeans by 72%; while rice increased by 75% in 2008 over its average 2007 price.
People in many cities throughout the world have responded to the explosion of staple food prices in the last few months by demanding that their national governments reduce them immediately. From Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Cairo, Egypt, the demonstrations often turned into riots, shutting down these cities for days. Millions are now calculating that unless they obstruct the ‘normal’ circuit of capitalist reproduction by taking to the streets they will face starvation.
Indeed, the scenes from these places are no less dramatic in the suffering and anguish they suggest than those coming from Burma after the cyclone. The price hikes themselves have taken on the character of a natural disaster. They are treated by many commentators as a sort of ‘perfect storm,’ to use the deceptive jargon of our day. According to Steve Hamm, a Business Week journalist, a multiplicity of unrelated factors from the drought in Australia, to the “richer diets” in China and India, to “the soaring cost of oil” and “the increased use of corn for ethanol” have come together to make food unaffordable for a substantial part of the world’s population.
This explanation, however, is far from convincing. It does not explain why these millions of people are exposed to international markets and hence at risk from the ‘perfect storm’. The apparently unrelated factors listed by Hamm would not lead to widespread starvation if people were not dependent on world grain markets in a way that they were not a few decades ago.
In reality, the latest grain price hikes are the last act in a long process that started in the mid-1980s with the implementation in much of the world of the World Bank’s and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), whose first task was to privatise agricultural lands and totally commodify food production and distribution.
If we look at the policies that governments across the world, but especially in the South, were forced to adopt in the name of the ‘debt crisis’ or ‘economic development’ we see that each of the recommended policies was geared to raise people’s dependence on the world market for access to food:
• government subsidies for agricultural inputs (from fertilisers to seeds) were eliminated, as were price control and marketing boards;
• land privatisation was instituted with drives to titling and registration;
• large amounts of acreage were removed from local food production and devoted to mining, oil extraction, or the production non-edible or export crops;
• most important, violating a long tradition, the World Bank and IMF insisted that governments in the South dismantle their food reserves and put them on the market, arguing they were no longer needed in a global economy.
Not surprisingly, countries that in the past had always been self-sufficient as far as food production was concerned were by the end of the millennium net food importers. A good example of this dynamic is the case of Mexico and corn. Millions of corn-growing peasant farmers have been driven from their ejidos(inalienable land held in common or by families) over the last decade due to their inability to compete with US corn exported to Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a model neoliberal trade treaty. As a result, Mexicans are now dependent on corn imports from the US for the provision of their basic staple food at a moment when corn prices are soaring.
Once this history is understood, no one can see the price hikes as in any way caused by a surprising conjuncture of unrelated factors. For the crucial question to be posed both logically and politically is: Why is it that billions of people are now dependent on an international grain market that literally condemns them to death? For if they were not so dependent, then the storm in the international grain exchanges, however perfect, would have passed by without hurting many. Far from being natural, this dependence has been constructed step-by-step, policy-by-policy despite a long series of oppositional demonstrations, general strikes, and rebellions throughout the world, and the criticism of anti-globalisation scholars.
Capitalist planners’ obstinate attachment to this strategy is not hard to decipher, for it is at the heart of the neoliberal agenda that strives to:
• establish international capital’s ever tighter control of all natural resources, especially staple food stocks, which constitute a formidable weapon, already used throughout history to impose discipline over recalcitrant workers and reward compliant governments;
• eliminate populations not considered productive;
• reduce the real wage everywhere.
In sum, these price hikes are the dénouement of a long war on the people of the planet to eliminate the most elementary right: the right to eat to live.
This is not a new strategy discovered by geniuses like Larry Summers on H Street in Washington. In fact, as the novelist Sol Yurick writes in his forthcoming autobiography, Revenge, the biblical Joseph was the archetype for the IMF/World Bank officials of today. Joseph, as financial advisor to the Pharaoh, recognised a cycle of seven “good years” and seven “lean years.” He cornered the market by hoarding the grain in the good years and was able to use the stored grain in the lean years both to sell at an exorbitant price and to buy the peasants’ land cheaply in the face of their imminent starvation. What is important to note about this story is that Joseph and the Pharaoh were not ‘middlemen’ interested in the money they made in selling the hoarded grain; they were using their control of grain to enslave Egyptian workers and to appropriate their land.
What is to be done to prevent a repetition of this ancient tale? Across the world people are rioting in desperation, as they often did in response to the introduction of SAPs. The pace of these riots and rebellions will increase, since for most people the affordability of food is a question of life and death. These uprisings might bring some restraint in the grain markets and cause governments to bend the neoliberal rules by providing more subsidies.
However, a reversal of the trend towards increasing dependence of people on the world grain market for accessing their staple food will require the strengthening of the already existing long-term international movement of both farmers and city dwellers committed to restoring land to the people producing food for their localities. The hunger generated by the food price hikes on the world market, which was meant to breed docility, will give this movement a tremendous impetus.
Via Turbulence
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Why?
Posted by illvox collective in Ideas on August 24, 2008
“It seems that, as an excuse for rejecting things African, many of our people pretend that they can’t connect with continental Africa and Africans because, ‘Africans sold us into slavery.’ Without going into the psychosis of self-hatred for those clinging to this excuse, I pose this question: ‘Why did Europeans have to kill so many Africans, have wars with Africans, and always arrive in Africa armed to the teeth?’ If Africans were simply ‘for sale,’ then it seems likely that the European would have only needed to back his ship up to the African coast, pay the African ’slave merchants’ a few pounds, load up the slaves, and sail off to the Americas. Why kill anyone?”
E. Jerome Johnson
7 Steps Toward Black Reemergence
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Semtex Interviews Dead Prez
Posted by illvox collective in Uncategorized on August 24, 2008
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Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad
Posted by illvox collective in Uncategorized on August 23, 2008
By Betsy Hartmann
The greening of hate – blaming environmental degradation on poor populations of color – is once again on the rise, both in the U.S. and overseas. In the U.S., its illogic runs like this: immigrants are the main cause of overpopulation, and overpopulation in turn causes urban sprawl, the destruction of wilderness, pollution, and so forth.
Internationally, it draws on narratives that blame expanding populations of peasants and herders for encroaching on pristine nature.
In the first instance, the main policy `solution’ is immigration restriction; in the second it is coercive conservation, the violent exclusion of local communities from nature preserves. Both varieties of the greening of hate are about policing borders. By stressing the negative role of population growth, both target poor women’s fertility as the fundamental root of environmental evil.
In the U.S. the first big greening of hate wave occurred in the mid-1990s when conservative anti-immigrant forces began mobilizing within the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest membership-based environmental organization, to pass a ballot initiative supporting a “reduction of net immigration” as a component of a “comprehensive population policy for the United States.” An opposing coalition of environmental justice, immigrant rights, and reproductive rights advocates successfully challenged the initiative, and it was voted down in 1998.
Anti-immigrant forces kept on organizing, however. Today, three out of fifteen members of the Sierra Club Board of Directors are key players in the anti-immigrant lobby which is pushing for another ballot initiative in 2005. They are Ben Zuckerman, a UCLA astronomy professor, board member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and a leader of the 1998 ballot initiative; Captain Paul Watson, a founding member of the Greenpeace Foundation and Sea Shepherd; and Doug LaFollette, Wisconsin Secretary of State and board member of Friends of the Earth. All three are conservationists – but what exactly do they want to conserve?
One does not have to scratch very far beneath the surface to find the links between the green wing of the anti-immigration movement and nativism and white supremacy. The summer 2002 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) investigative magazine Intelligence Report documented these connections, focusing in particular on John Tanton, the main organizer and funder of the anti-immigrant movement, who has close ties to a number of racist hate groups.
Ben Zuckerman has described Tanton as “a great environmentalist.” Concerned about growing anti-immigration momentum in the Sierra Club, Mark Potok of the SPLC wrote the Club’s President in October warning of “a hostile takeover attempt by forces allied with Tanton and a variety of right-wing extremists.” At this point, one of the main right-wing strategies is to get anti-immigration activists to join the Club en masse.
Meanwhile, overseas certain international conservation agencies, notably Conservation International (CI) (see ZNet commentary by Aziz Choudry, 10/16/2003), are greening hate through supporting the militarization of nature preservation. Coercive conservation measures, of course, are nothing new. From colonial times onwards, wildlife conservation efforts have often involved the violent exclusion of local people from their land by game rangers drawn from the ranks of the police, military and prison guards. To legitimize this exclusion, government officials, conservation agencies and aid donors have frequently invoked narratives of expanding human populations destroying pristine landscapes, obscuring the role of resource extraction by state and corporate interests.
Today, one of the most well-known cases of coercive conservation is CI’s involvement in the Lacandon Forest in Chiapas, Mexico. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, CI’s Chiapas director blamed deforestation there on overpopulation: “It’s obvious that the main problem is overpopulation. The children of the farmers don’t have any land. They can’t all be peasants.”
With USAID assistance, CI and the World Wildlife Fund are promoting a conservation campaign in the region focused on identifying illegal settlements — often Zapatista communities — which are then forcibly removed by the Mexican army. These efforts are complemented by the government’s aggressive female sterilization campaign in the region. CI’s close ties to bio-prospecting corporations raise questions of just who the forest is being preserved for.
Increasingly, international conservation agencies like CI are embarking on what are called “joint population-environment projects” which involve collaborations between family planning and conservation NGOs. Despite a professed commitment to communities identifying their own health and environmental needs, the main priority of many such projects is to reduce population growth through increased uptake of contraception. Ideologically, the projects also reinforce the message that it is population growth and the practices of the local people themselves that cause environmental degradation.
Population-environment projects often use population monitoring systems, not only to register births, but to track migration. Potentially, such tracking could be of use to defense and intelligence interests, especially in areas of political conflict. A proposed monitoring system for the World Wildlife Fund in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, where many refugees from Chiapas have settled in recent years, would select key informant households in “sentinel” communities to track in-migration. Recruiting households as informants raises disturbing concerns about the impact and intent of such monitoring.
Indeed, coercive conservation provides an important means by which militaries can expand their reach. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) now has biodiversity and conservation projects in 15 countries in Africa. In Malawi, for example, it has facilitated the equipping of park guards with semi-automatic weapons. In Central America, the DOD and Southern Command are working to involve national militaries in the MesoAmerican Biological Corridor project, and in the Philippines U.S. environmental aid is a component of current anti-terrorism efforts. Within the U.S., meanwhile, the DOD is now billing itself as the preserver of biodiversity through its `stewardship’ of vast tracks of land it controls for military testing and training. “Biodiversity helps us achieve military readiness in harmony with nature,” claims DOD environmental security official Sherri W. Goodman.
The greening of hate has been able to take root in U.S. environmentalism because it draws on widely shared popular beliefs regarding the relationship between population, conservation and the environment. These are the myths of man versus nature, the wilderness ethic, the degradation narrative, and scarcity.
Man versus nature: Because Americans live in such a rapacious and parochial capitalist society, many assume that people are de facto bad for the environment. There is little understanding of the ways in which human agency can shape the environment in positive ways and even improve biodiversity. There is a big difference, for example, between a corporate corn farm in the Midwest which uses massive applications of pesticides and a peasant corn plot in Mexico where new seed varieties are constantly evolving over time and other species of plants and animals can thrive in the non-polluted environment.
Similarly, there is a big difference between a city with a strong zoning department, environmental regulations and a well-developed public transport system and one in which business prerogatives and an unregulated real estate market shape development and encourage urban sprawl. Political and technological choices, not levels of immigration, explain the difference between the ecologically healthy city and the unhealthy one.
The man vs. nature myth is rooted in a problematic tradition of conservation biology which views human populations as behaving in the same way as exponentially growing pondweed or bacteria in a petri dish. In the U.S. major environmental figures like Paul Ehrlich of population bomb fame and Garrett Hardin, who advocates pushing the poor off the lifeboat, come from this tradition. It not only ignores the capacity of humans for rational thought and action, but history, politics, economics, and demography.
It is a particularly insidious ideological trap because it leads to an acceptance of wars and diseases like AIDS as `natural’ checks on human population growth. The website of the anti-immigrant group, Support a Comprehensive Sierra Club Population Policy (SUSPS), currently features two stories about “My Bacteria Neighbors” and the “Lily Pond Parable.” Use your imagination to fill in the blanks.
The Wilderness Ethic: William Cronin has described the unique place the idea of wilderness holds in the American psyche, both as a romantic, sublime, quasi-religious force and a vehicle for frontier nostalgia. The ways in which wilderness is constructed have a number of problematic outcomes. The ahistorical myth of wilderness as “virgin” land obscures the systematic forced migration and genocide of its original Native American inhabitants.
By locating nature in the far-off wild, it allows people to evade responsibility for environmental protection closer to their homes. And it is geographically parochial, blinding many Americans to the complex ways in which people relate to the land in other countries and cultures. Critiquing the wilderness ethic does not mean one is opposed to national parks and nature protection – rather, it calls for equitable and democratic processes to ensure local communities are not pushed off their lands and robbed of their livelihoods.
The degradation narrative: This is the belief that population pressure-induced poverty makes Third World peasants degrade their environments by over-farming marginal lands. The ensuing soil depletion and desertification then lead them to migrate elsewhere as “environmental refugees,” either to ecologically vulnerable rural areas where the vicious cycle is once again set in motion or to cities where they become a primary source of political instability.
The degradation narrative has proved particularly popular in Western policy circles because it kills a number of birds with one stone: it blames poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive industries; and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat. It is a way of homogenizing all rural people in the Global South into one big destructive force, reinforcing simplistic Us vs. Them, West vs. the Rest dichotomies.
Last but not least is the myth of scarcity – the belief, common in the U.S., that there are not enough resources to go around and the human population is close to overshooting the carrying capacity of the earth. There is a certain irony in the fact that the country with the most profligate waste and consumption levels is the most obsessed with planetary resource limits (and the least willing to do anything about them).
Andrew Ross makes the point that fears about scarcities of natural resources parallel the manufacturing of social scarcities by competitive capitalist regimes. In the public consciousness, imposed limits to growth in social welfare expenditures become intertwined with the notion of environmental limits. Missing from the picture, of course, is the role of the rich in gobbling up both economic and natural resources at an ever expanding rate, undermining effective environmental protection, and refusing to invest in new, non-polluting energy sources.
Challenging these myths is no easy matter, but challenge them we must if we are going to effectively resist the greening of hate and the conservation of racism.
– Betsy Hartmann is the director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College and a member of the steering committee of the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs and the novel The Truth about Fire.
Via Mostly Water
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Residential Schools Apology: An Anarchist View
Posted by illvox collective in Uncategorized on August 23, 2008
by Rev, from Linchpin #5
On June 11th 2008, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, claimed to apologize for residential schools and the government’s plan to destroy the cultures of Indigenous peoples in Canada. This apology came after a similar apology was given to indigenous people in Australia. Residential or boarding schools were part of colonial policy in New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Canada. Harper’s apology talked about the abuses and cultural assimilation of Indigenous peoples in Canada by the Canadian government, especially the forced removal of children from their families. However, there is so much that Harper did not say. What he left out was that the residential schools were just one aspect of colonization.
Residential schools were run by churches, led by the Department of Indian Affairs for most of their existence. They focused on a total approach to assimilation: physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. The Indigenous children stolen from their families were to be made into Canadians by force. The curriculum was created to allow the destruction of Indigenous ways of living on the land. The idea of “killing the Indian and saving the man,” was really about making way for capitalist ways of living on the land. In essence, residential schools aimed at handing over Indigenous land to corporations and turning Indigenous people into workers. Since Canadian society was based on private property while most Indigenous communities held the land in common, residential schools taught skills for private property ownership and taught the values of a capitalist society to the children. In the mind of the churches and the government, the Indigenous person was to become a settler and worker for the ruling class.
The residential schools were first called Manual Labour or Industrial schools and this says a lot about their actual purpose. The schools spent a half day teaching lessons in the classroom, the other half was spent learning trades or housework. The schools aimed to produce workers that were able to be exploited for wages or for their crops. The students were taught to be hard working and obedient like all good white Christian workers. Or in other words, to respect the authority of the church, state and the capitalist bosses. This is the same idea as the workhouse or poorhouse in Europe, to discipline and create the working class.
Authority and fear were central to the goals and methods of the residential schools. Indigenous societies were very free and equal. European society on the other hand used discipline and power to control people. Residential schools used power and violence to train Indigenous peoples to submit to settler society and the figures of authority in it. Indigenous peoples were taught to behave like white people or face punishment, just like all settler children are taught to behave or face punishment. Those who ran residential schools argued that Indigenous parents did not exercise proper authority over their children.
The residential school curriculum tried to destroy Indigenous languages in order to remove the people from the land. Indigenous languages often name an object by what you can use it for. For instance, Cecilia Jeffries Indian Residential School, Kenora, Ontario Picture courtesy of Nishnawbe Aski Nation Residential Schools Project, www.nan.on.ca, The Shingwauk Project plants are often named after what healing properties they offer. The elimination of this knowledge through the teaching of English imposed settler ways of living, because the necessary knowledge to live Indigenous was lost.
Residential Schools also taught sexism and the rule of men over women (patriarchy). Girls were taught to be domestic and remain in the home, while very often Indigenous women had more freedom and could do many jobs outside the home. Women were taught that Christian marriage was right rather than be brought up in a clan system where women’s solidarity and collective power protected women from male oppression. Women were taught to be inferior and this destroyed the backbone of the gender equality in Indigenous societies. This inequality was essential to the development of the working class in all European societies. The production of the Christian nuclear family is the linchpin of capitalist society.
To wrap up, residential schools were a project to spread capitalism. Residential schools were meant to turn Indigenous peoples into settlers and make them workers and peasants for the capitalist system. Harper will never apologize for the real goals of the residential schools. Many Indigenous peoples, such as the Assembly of First Nations, are even scared to admit how colonized they remain. Really discussing decolonization will require the unsettling of capitalism. Recognizing that colonization and capitalism are the same process, shows us that the struggle for Indigenous freedom from the authority of bosses and the government is a natural ally with the anarchist struggle for freedom.
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Smashing the Conventions: Disrupting the Spectacle of Law and Order
Posted by illvox collective in Uncategorized on August 23, 2008
By Ian Alan Paul of the Friendly Fire Collective
This article is meant to develop an analysis of the spectacular nature of the upcoming confrontations at the DNC/RNC, and contemplates how the North American anti-authoritarian movement can relate to this specific type of summit protest. Will the movement be successful in breaking down the spectacle of ‘law and order’, or will we continue to be marginalized by its message?
Setting the Stage for Confrontation
With the Democratic and Republican national conventions just over the horizon, it has become time to think both tactically and strategically about how we can best direct our collective power in the streets of Denver and St. Paul. While some of our past manifestations of resistance have focused on disruption as both the means and the ends, particularly during economic summits (WTO, World Bank, EU, IMF, etc), what makes mobilizing against the DNC/RNC fundamentally different is that these events are not defined by decision making processes, but are instead defined by theatre. At one point in American history, the conventions actually served as a battleground within each party to nominate their respective candidates. However, conventions in recent times have become spectacles put on for the partisan bourgeois in an attempt to turn out votes in November and to garner support for the American electoral system. The latter function of the conventions seems to be even more pressing now than in recent history, as the faith in this electoral system seems to be corroding. With the failure to successfully occupy Iraq, a depressed economy throwing members of the middle class out of their homes, and unprecedented environmental devastation, the disasters caused by the current system are no longer contained to foreign countries and their peoples, but are instead being experienced by the working class within the belly of the beast. The spectacle put forth by the ruling class, that the government is serving public interests and that the population must be protected from terrorists at any cost, is being questioned by the public on the largest scale since September 11th.
When we as a movement decide to dedicate our efforts to disrupting events like the DNC/RNC, we must be aware that what we are disrupting is not the literal functioning of government or representative democracy, but rather the functioning of political spectacle. While it seems as though the street tactics that will be used in both mobilizations has already been determined by the movement in some sense (through the transparent organization of blockades, black blocs, etc), there still seems to be a gap in understanding as to how we as an antiauthoritarian movement relate to the spectacle of democracy and terrorism. It is essential that we develop praxis centered on how we hope to most effectively utilize our voice in relation to these ideas and effectively seize this opportunity to crack the foundations of faith in representative democracy and capitalism. If we want to maintain agency and have a voice outside of the confines of our own movement, we need to have a strategy for not only confronting this spectacle, but we must also be able to open dialogue about the complexity and beauty of our actions, politics and ideas.
The Theatre of Terror
While we hope to disrupt their spectacle of law an order, it is important for us to realize our role in the current global theatre of symbols and meaning manufactured by those in power under the current structure. Since the events of September 2001, the ruling class has created a new dominant narrative for a post 9/11 world. The people that occupy this new theatre of terror have been forcibly split into two distinct and opposite groups. On one side of the spectacle are the agents of order and security, the guardians of the status quo, and on the other side is an omnipresent network of anarchic terrorists bent on ending the modern world. Through the production and proliferation of this worldview (or spectacle), governments and corporations have had free reign to implement their policies of police-state-ism and exploitative neoliberal economics, justifying these policies as our last option to combat the ‘new enemy’ and protect democracy.
The military-entertainment complex, or the synergy between the police state, the terror spectacle, and capital, has successfully caused this binary worldview (us versus them, democracy versus terrorism) to become the dominant paradigm soon after the towers fell. According to this narrative, the American public has never faced an enemy so menacing, inhuman, chaotic and undefeatable until now. It seems that they would like you to forget about the threat of communism, which was portrayed remarkably like the terrorist networks of today and was used to implement very similar policies. This terror spectacle has given us such enlightening phrases as “freedom isn’t free”, and has allowed for unprecedented repression against radicals of all tendencies in the name of “law and order”. If we are to be successful in stopping more than just the buses carrying delegates at the DNC/RNC, we must be able to disrupt their spectacle and tear down the facades of the capitalist theatre as well. The most successful way to do this, I would argue, is not to create a counter-spectacle containing an opposite worldview, but rather pose the questions which inherently destabilize power and decenter the production of meaning in our society.
I think it is important to emphasize that the power of our movement lies not in the answers that we may imagine laying in a future utopian society, as this line of thinking has only produced authoritarian groups unwilling to challenge power structures and instead seek to only supplement who is in power. Instead, I am suggesting that we must find the power of our movement in questions: in the questioning of power, in the questioning of violence, and in the questioning of the status quo. It is through this radical gesture that we can hope to create room for new meanings and new social formations to exist in our cultural geography. So long as the people in power in our society continue to successfully control the definitions and boundaries of whom a terrorist is, and what type of response is appropriate to enact upon ‘them’, our movement will be marginalized and controlled by this modern spectacle. Similarly, as long as the state is able to define what violence is justified and what violence is not, our movement will be pushed to the fringes of society. One of our central objectives when confronting power at these sites of struggle must be to destabilize the ideas that support these institutions. Through the deliberate creation of cognitive dissonance, dissonance between their spectacle of law and order and our actions in the streets, we can profoundly alter the nature of discourse and thought in our society and not allow the theatre of terror to progress any further.
Breaking the Spell
When we begin to see a trend of European style ‘Summit Hopping’ as one of the defining qualities of the antiauthoritarian movement, we must question ourselves as to why it’s important to confront power at such sites in the first place. Rarely have we been successful at actually stopping the functioning of summits and conventions, and even if we accomplished such a disruption we would not achieve the nonhierarchical society we are fighting for. I believe that the answer lies not in our explicit tactical goals (in the case of the RNC/DNC blockading the streets), but rather in the long-term strategies for the movement beyond the conventions. The spectacle/reality that is being manufactured by both parties in the electoral system is becoming more and more of a farce in the eyes of the general public as the ruling class’ policies and military operations begin to self-destruct all around them. One of the functions of our manifestations is to cause a break in this narrative, essentially shifting the focus from their plans to deregulate the economy and ‘democratize’ the Middle East to our plans to transform North American society.
In the now infamous WTO protests in Seattle, windows were smashed, streets were blockaded and teargas hung low over the business district for days, but we failed as a movement to physically stop enough representatives to disrupt the decision-making process of the multitude of nation-states. Yet, it is important to note that despite our tactical failure to stop the meetings, Seattle is still remembered as one of North America’s greatest manifestations of resistance and continues to inspire new generations of radicals. The power of our movement blossomed not in the physical blockades of downtown or in the bricks thrown through “Nike Town” storefront windows, but rather in the images and symbolic significance of these events being propagated into the imaginations of the global radical Left. What this has meant on a very base level is that the current formations of power (in this case corporations and neoliberal governments) were vulnerable to attack. This new narrative that was created in the streets of Seattle showed that there were people resisting and forcing history in a new direction, very much away from the future desired by the heads of the WTO member-states. This particular effect has been described by people participating in the demonstrations as “breaking the spell”; which essentially was a strategy aimed at snapping people out of the spectacle of law and order. From the streets of Seattle, the WTO began its long decent towards impotency and summit protests began to blossom all around the world in what is now known as the anti-globalization movement.
Similarly, the mobilization against the G8 summit in the fields of Heiligendamm, Germany failed to stop the leaders of the world from holding their meetings, but that isn’t what was important about holding the demonstrations in the first place. Why the demonstrations were largely hailed as a success was not due to the fact that the roads were successfully blockaded, or that we witnessed the return of widespread militant tactics from the European Autonomen, but rather that a mass international manifestation of resistance confronted the global power-structures in the German countryside. In essence, it was the profound collective refusal of the current society that made the resistance to the G8 so significant to the global Left.
Occupying the Other Factory
In the coming month, the spectacle of representative democracy will be confronted head-on by the reality of our resistance, and the old capitalist society will be forced to stare into the eyes of our resistance. This is significant not because of the physical confrontations in the coming weeks but rather because the current structures’ spectacle of “law and order” will be challenged by our militant denial of the status quo. The only question that remains to be resolved is whether our collective refusal will speak louder and clearer than their conventions singing the praises of the American political system. While on one hand we must seriously consider which tactics are best suited to disrupt the functioning of the convention and to evade/fight the police, at the same time we must have the creativity and vision to act in ways which inspire and attack the current system on the level of spectacle and of ideas. Surely, if we spend so much time attacking and deconstructing the current formations of power, we must at the same time be able to articulate our envisioned alternatives to hierarchy and domination.
The events of September 11th did a great deal to immobilize the radical Left in North America, largely due to the theatre of terror echoed by every media outlet in the country. American society has been dominated by the current spectacle of “law and order”, and the Left has been unable to create narratives that effectively challenge the dominant spectacle. The ‘other factories’, the sites where these spectacles are manufactured and replicated, have been incredibly centralized in our society and have allowed for a massive concentration of power and wealth in very little time. Having strategies to occupy these “other factories”, the factories of spectacle and of theatre, should be as much of a part of our movement strategy as street tactics have been in the past.
It is absurd to suggest that in order to be successful we need to collectively consense on ‘our’ message during these summits – by doing so we would only silence one of the most powerful parts of our movement. It is precisely our plurality and our diversity that have led us to success in the past, and it is in these traits that we can find the vocal chords needed for future confrontations. Rather than speak and act using the stale voice of a vanguard (the authoritarian voice), we instead can choose to yell with the gravity of all of our voices. With the multitude of our critiques, poems, actions and ideas we can disrupt the spectacle at both conventions by exterminating the notion of national consensus and uniformity. We must be able to ask the questions that do not allow for simple answers, questions that are able to demolish assumptions and change the way the world is perceived. If we are to gain power as a movement, we must be able to move away from the spectacle of terror and towards a world of diversity, beauty and complexity. Our collective manifestation has to transcend marginalization and become more than the sum of our street actions – it must strive to create the vocabulary and poetry of a new society outside of the walls and categories of the old one.
Ian Alan Paul is an artist and writer currently living in San Francisco and is a member of the Friendly Fire Collective.
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What is the Free Market?
Posted by illvox collective in General on August 22, 2008
Translated lecture by Peter Decker
1. Free-market economy – a false name for the thing
The subject sounds at first glance like the most natural thing in the world: Our economic system is called the free-market economy. Actually, however, the word free-market economy is already an entire ideological program. Free-market economy is a twisted name for the thing that it designates and already contains a whole interpretation.
Other modes of production that once existed, or still exist, are designated differently, e.g. after their purpose. The mode of production, for example, which depended on obtaining a surplus in trade is called the mercantile system. A second example, in which the purpose of what is produced appears in the name, is the subsistence economy, which occupies large parts of the population in the third world. Also, relations of production can give different names for economies, so that workers or bosses give their name to the mode of production, e.g. the slave economy or the feudal mode of production.
On the contrary, our mode of production, the free-market economy, is differentiated from other modes of production neither by a purpose nor by a characteristic position of the bosses or the workers, but only by a method of circulation. Our mode of production is to be characterized by the fact that the market is the means to mediate the many thousands of economic subjects. Funny – has this mode of production no purpose then? Does it have no characteristic position of those who do the work and those who are the bosses? No, it allegedly differs from others only by the fact that in it the market organizes the division of labor.
2. Free-market economy – particularly because it was born in the comparison of systems
It is of course no big mystery where this name comes from: It has its historic reason in the comparison of systems that determined economic science for fifty years in Europe and the whole world, as well as political thought. With this comparison of the western with the eastern social mode (the Soviet Union and its satellites) the planned economy should be exposed as evil and the free-market economy (which should suddenly no longer be called capitalism) appear in a good light. The ideologists of the planned economy certainly once intended the reverse. But they could only weakly say: in capitalism there are many who are rich, that is a fine thing, but against it stands the socialist economy, and it shows that the poor are better off in it. The old system comparison went in such a way -– absurdly — that the two modes of production mutually compared themselves as better methods for the same thing. In addition, one must say: So it is now, if one makes a comparison. If two compare themselves, then they differ according to a common standard. Comparisons maintain a commonality because without a commonality one cannot compare at all. Who can compare beets and music? Where there is nothing in common there are also no differences.
If now two modes of production enter into a competition debate and open a comparison to decide which is better — the west clearly invented it with the intention of proving that ours is better -– then both assume a common characteristic or the comparison assumes a common characteristic of both. And if one says: e.g. the western free-market economy is more efficient,then one supposes — without talking about it — efficiency is the common criteria. Only: efficient in what respect? The socialists would never have denied to the apologists of the free-market economy that capitalism is more efficient at exploiting. Of course, the supporters of the free-market economy did not mean that. None of them wanted to say: we deplete people better, we get more out of them than in the east. That would not have been a particularly good system comparison to advertise.
With this system comparison between the socialist economy, which should be sinister, and the capitalist, which wanted to prove that it is better, the purpose of the two modes of production is not compared, but they are measured as alternative methods for the same thing. Now capitalism no longer stands against socialism, but free-market economy against planned economy. And what is now the common denominator? What is the postulated common criterion against which they both mutually measure themselves? In every economics lecture one hears immediately and always: it is the goods supply of a population. However, it is very much the question whether there actually is this purpose in our economy -– but nobody questions this. The system comparison simply postulates that there is this purpose and compares along these lines. Both systems are there in principle to carry out the same purpose and, besides, are only different in efficiency.
3. The market as “the best method of distribution”
I read now a quote from Paul Samuelson, a highly prestigious American economics teacher who today belongs to the classical authors (1970 Nobel Prize for Economics); he says:
The order of competition [thus the market mechanism - note PD] is an artful mechanism, which deduces with the help of a structure of markets and prices unintentionally and coordinates the knowledge and actions of millions of different economic subjects. Without a thinking and steering central brain this economic system solves one of the most difficult arithmetical tasks: A system which covers several thousands of unknown variables and equations. (Paul Samuelson, Political Economy 1)
Here it is said that the free-market economy is a genial invention, the market coordinates millions of economic participants into a division of labor and coordinates their behavior and needs so that the best possible combination of production and need satisfaction, the best possible efficiency, results from production.
Furthermore, Samuelson nearly explicitly makes the comparison with the planned economy, which has this “steering central brain,” but, as one constantly hears, carries out nothing. The sentence with the steering central brain is a beautiful confession. Samuelson is reminded of it when he says that what the market allegedly carries out is actually done by nobody: Nobody coordinates, no one worries about the needs of others. He says, then, we know that it is completely clear that market subjects have other concerns.
In another place, the economics professor Henrichsmeyer says:
Although the entrepreneurs act out of “egoistic” motives and not in order to improve the goods supply of the population, the entire goods production depends nevertheless in the long run on the desires of the consumers. (W. Henrichsmeyer, Introduction to Political Economy)
What strange service is attributed to the market here? A service that, one must say at once, does not exist at all in the free-market economy. Nobody coordinates. Nevertheless, it is fine that everyone offers something on the market and the whole coordination consists of whether the salesman has success or not. If the salesman has success, he has success; if not, then he takes his unsold things home again and cannot sell them. Where is there any coordination service? One hits on a solvent need and by chance has success, another hits none and has failure, possibly even becomes poor due to his failed production and sales attempt. Only: Who has coordinated what there? Nothing at all is coordinated there! In truth, the alleged service of coordination does not take place because needs are actually not respected at all. A seller looks for a solvent demand; needs that do not dispose of money do not count as needs and therefore are not met. The market does not coordinate existing needs and production, but in the market the salesman sees which solvent need can be useful. And also, conversely, the need of the buyer in itself did not guide his purchase decision, but what he actually gets from the excursion is the commodity he can afford in keeping with his wallet. Whether he buys those things that he then buys because he perhaps can’t afford better, so that instead of the quality product he buys trash, or whether his need went completely neglected -– nevertheless, this is very much the question. With the whole coordination, on one side stands production, which never wants to adapt to needs, and on the other, there stands not needs, but purchasing power.
4. The “market equilibrium” is a pure tautology
The idea that the market is a big coordinator between needs and production, that it does this much better than a plan ever could, this idea is in truth a pure tautology. It asserts as a service nothing more than the fact that all goods that are sold find a buyer. Again, to make clear the thought: If the great coordination service of the market is that only those needs that are backed by money enter into the magnificent coordination service, and those which have no real money or not enough money count for nothing; and if on the other side of the coordination service, the products are only those that are marketable, that are saleable products, thus that find a buyer, and everything that has bad quality or too high a price or has been produced in too high an amount so that it could not be sold at the market equilibrium, then the famous market equilibrium is a pure tautology: Everything has been sold that also found a buyer, for every commodity that was sold, a buyer appeared — yes, that is probably correct…. But here the whole scam is to act as if this is a service. This tautology always applies. It applies in the largest economic crisis just like in the biggest famine and it applies in a boom.
The free-market economy maintains there is a problem to solve that it actually does not take care of at all, i.e. the co-ordination of needs and production. And it maintains that it solves this problem better than the planned economy, which does not have this problem at all. Anyone who thinks that production and needs must be coordinated imagines both sides to be separate and functioning according to autonomous principles. But is this correct? Think of one’s own home: Does one have to coordinate the need to have rinsed off tableware and the production of washing dishes? Yes, there one notices that this is somehow unreasonable. Production is the means to produce what one determined beforehand to be needed. Here there is no problem at all of coordinating two independent quantities and bringing them into relation to an extent that prevents the threatened failure of both or the threatened divergence of both.
Thus it becomes clear: An idealistic construction is made that every economic system requires a mechanism to coordinate production and needs, and this coordination can be satisfied in different ways because one economic method (free-market economy) accomplishes this not at all like we see, but solves this “problem” better than the other, namely the planned economy which plans for this explicitly and, besides, always fails, allegedly. Thus, a really fictional service is attributed to the market, and if one looks exactly wherein this service exists then the tautology emerges: what was sold has also found a buyer, if something was sold then obviously there was a need. Without doubt — only is it really brought about like in the assertion, that existent needs and the existent production were brought into relation, were coordinated?
5. The praise of the market for successful combination of freedom and constraint
In the praise for the market there are three further arguments, which are something like sub-points to the coordination service, which take other directions of attack.
One reads: the market deserves praise because it is a successful combination of freedom and constraint. Anyone who ever talked in political economy about the system comparison, or about the advantages of the free-market economy, has also been confronted with the alternative: free consumer choice or planned needs! And there one knows exactly what the reproach to the planned need should be: no central authority in capitalism tells people what they need, as if they themselves don’t know that much better, or prescribes to them what they may get and what not. The market is much better because people can freely decide what they want to have.
Within both statements a small assumption is contained that is not expressed. The reproach is made of the socialist method of production that it withholds from the people and dictates to them needs that they do not have at all. And the free market economy is certified with the praise that in it one can chose everything freely. But what can one chose for oneself really freely? Anyone who gives the market credit that free consumer choice takes place, that people with their purse can freely decide on “optimal utility,” who talks about the advantage of the free-market economy in this way, holds that the sacrifice or exclusion of need satisfaction in the free-market economy is only regulated by the size of one’s wallet. Yes, ability to consume in the free-market economy is limited -– they think -– just like in the planned economy, but the good of the free-market economy is that everyone gets to decide for themselves what they access and what they deny themselves (because they have already spent their money). The good of the free-market economy is not the satisfaction of needs, but the freedom of the individual to decide which needs remain unsatisfied. And the planned economy is so terrible because a) needs may not be satisfied and b) one may not even decide which needs remain unsatisfied.
6. The market as an artful means for limiting excessive needs
If free market economists think about methods of access to the means of need satisfaction, they think about methods for limiting access to the means of need satisfaction. On this basis they then compare the western with the eastern economic mode. The premise is thereby scarcity, which, however, is not at all debated. The premise is: of course one must limit people when satisfying needs, what would the world come to if people should be able to get everything that they need? This is a basic dogma of political economy! Needs are much bigger than the amount of goods, needs cannot be satisfied in principle, ever.
Thus the conclusion of economics is that the rational method of production is the one that organizes the limitation of need satisfaction. And only now do the differences in their ideas of the market and the planned economy come up for discussion. But it is not at all considered that the planned economy could perhaps be something other than an unfree method of need restriction. In the thought, how should the Politburo know what is good for the people, it is always as if needs are a mystery and, secondly, can’t be satisfied in principle. However, there is in every existing society a definitely fixed and well-known amount of existent needs. One knows, for example, how many liters of beer were poured in Germany last year, one knows how much one must produce to reach at least the conditions of last year again. One also knows how many potatoes were eaten, how many live in the country, how many dwellings are needed if one wants to give XY square meters to each person. These are not mysteries. To act as if needs are a difficult matter to find out is already the whole ideology.
Question: But is it not true that needs are quite unlimited, everyone wants to live in a larger than a smaller house, does not everyone want a more comfortable than a less well furnished place, etc.?
Yes, a common objection. What is to be said to it? First of all, it is a document of the fact that there is a considerable degree of unsatisfied needs. It is expressed in the fact that these needs should be satisfied. But nobody wants to hear it this way. Everyone wants to regard this objection as proof of the fact that it cannot be done. The argument should lead to the insight: Yes, that is correct, if everyone did not want to live so restrained, it can’t work, that is clear, therefore one must find a method of limitation. This conclusion happens so quickly, and it happens always this way and everywhere. But first I plead: then nevertheless build such dwellings and in a number so that all people live decently, and then so that 5 people do not have to live on 30 square meters, but on every 75 square meters. Now it is of course clear what comes next against it, with the intention of proving that needs are never satisfied. He will ask: Why not every 130 square meters? Why not a mansion for everyone?! Of course this can be continued arbitrarily until there can actually be no more increasable number of goods: What if everyone wants landed property so extensively that there would be no more room for the 80 million inhabitants of Germany any more? Then one finally has some kind of proof from nature for the necessary limitation.
What does this objection submit? The attractiveness of the whole procedure consists of the fact that one intentionally abstracts from the needs that are there, which the people really have. And only for the principle one takes this to extremes, which seems to prove that one always finds a need that is larger than the possibilities for its satisfaction. Then at the conclusion one ends up with such things: Persian carpets hand-woven by children, sports cars made from scratch … Here one must agree: fancy cars that are put together by hand and devour from each individual as much labor time as a person needs for a whole year for their living — one certainly cannot make those for everybody, they would starve in the meantime. If at this point those who want to prove that needs are greater than the possibilities for their satisfaction seize on objects that are really directly products of exploitation, one must say: They can be made only if one excludes other people from their need satisfaction. If one presumes from such evidence, then that pleases me, because that is already nearly the proof that I want to have.
Question: But are there not also rational barriers regarding the efficiency of a national economy? Can one simply produce, for example, twice as much wheat beer as now? Are those not also questions that should be treated with this topic?
On the one hand, I find the example useless. Nobody in the world would deny that one could produce twice as much wheat beer. On the other hand, it is to be asked: ok, how much production of a certain item is actually possible. Then, however, leaping from this consideration, the justification of the free-market economy by its advocates says at this point: The restriction of needs must be good if the restriction is produced by money, because then everyone can select for himself how he would like to economize. There is, however, an assumption there, i.e. that there must be restriction.
The whole consideration that this “does not allow for a solution” pleases me because it is done in such a way as if the whole world looked for possibilities to better satisfy needs — and then there is no solution for it. The thought wants something else completely, it wants to say: A complaint against our economic system is forbidden because it is the optimal way of reconciling the possibility of need satisfaction with limited resources.
Again, two assumptions are made. On the one hand, the assumption is that needs are unlimited. But needs are not limitless; each need has its measure. Example: It is accepted imbecility that the need for beer would be boundless; maybe that someone wants to have 12 wheat beers per evening, but then he just lies under the table and does not want to pour another. This applies also in principle to all other needs; there are certainly many that are unsatisfied, but every one is not boundless, but has its limit.
The second side is: Production has its means and is measured in the conditions of productivity and the available labor. But this free market “argument” wants to ask neither how large the productive possibilities are, it does not ask that at all, nor does it ask what needs are really there so that one can then satisfy them. It is completely different. It says the current state is a quite optimal coordination of these two fundamentals which can’t be brought to cover their domensions. This is the attraction and also the ideologically fraud: That it is not stated at all that needs nevertheless exist. The assertion is rather: needs do not exist in the best possible way, anything more is not possible.
Question: Again in regard to technical circumstances, it is said that each economy comes with a given state of technology, productivity and available resources that conflicts with needs that cannot be satisfied at the same time; soif on a given land surface used for agriculture, one cultivates more potatoes, then one must accept in turn less wheat.
Yes, the problem that you raise is a variant of the equation needs are not equal to goods. And the point is no good. For the following reason: an individual or a society must exert the necessary expenditure to then satisfy the needs that it wants to fulfill. If one wants more, one must expend more. If the working day is longer, one can also manufacture more. If one wants more spare time, then one must be content with less. That applies to the individual just like the society. In this respect, the assertion is: one has more and more needs than one can satisfy. One must be ready to apply the necessary expenditure for what one plans. And in the effort one has perhaps also a measure for the importance of the need!
Question: Yes, for the goods/needs, of which you speak, o.k. But then take raw materials, which can actually be limited…
Yes, correct, one must get around these limitations. It is merely necessary to recognize the difference to the assertion of the economists that says: I always have more needs than I can satisfy and I am fine if I experience my self-restraint in the market. Again: If every need has its measure in itself, then they are not at all endless, and with the other half of the sample of these objections, one ends up dreaming: One deliberately looks for examples so far out of reach that everyone notices immediately that there is now an example of non-feasibility, so that one can then say, see, you don’t have time for it. Well, if one does not have the time for it, then one should not plan for it! Thus: A planned economy consists in the fact that one plans for the needs that one wants to satisfy, which are to be satisfied collectively, and then organizes the expenditure necessary for it. A planned economy does not consist of finding a method for how to begin condensing more needs than one can satisfy, and then reaching it with the optimal deficient method. The latter is however the picture that the free-market economy wants to have of itself.
7. The market as preventor of the monopoly power of the producers
New point: there is the praise of the market for combining constraint with freedom on the side of production. Turned around, there is a discrediting name for the planned economy: Command economy. With this designation everyone hears immediately that this must be something very bad, something which makes one think of barracks or the like. How is our free-market economy different? In the first instance, it is a free economy. In the free-market economy everyone is free to produce what he pleases with whatever resources he judges worthwhile to spend on it. However, this is only the first half. The freedom is hardly praised before a praise of constraint is added to it: thank God we have the constraint of the market to protect us from a producer dictatorship! In the command economy the Politburo forced poor production. In the next thought a free producer is introduced in the free-market economy who one thinks could rule over the society. Then the market is introduced as a fine remedy against it because it prevents the producer from ruling dictatorially over the consumer.
Again there is an assumption here, with both economic systems, the command economy just like the producer dictatorship. The assumption insists on assuming that the people who are integrated into one useful division of labor want to do something totally different than produce for the satisfaction of the needs of those for whom they produce. It is feared that without constraints the producers would do something other than produce useful things for needs. The thought also orients itself by the image of an unfree economy, the command economy, which is then branded as an injustice, i.e. that a center prescribes to the producer what he has to do. Here a conflict of interest is assumed on both sides, but is not explained.
Why is it then that the producers do not produce what the people need? Also, why must one thank the market for forcing a need-equitable production? Why does one have to thank the market that it forces the producers to efficiency? As if it would be so clear that producers who are not forced would never make a contribution to the division of labor. But in reverse: producers who are forced by a center are subjugated. Thus: the producers must be forced, but if from a center — that would be an injustice!
Again, the other way around: Think of a division of labor, a division of the necessary work, i.e. one person makes this, another that, so that in the end a large amount of products results and appropriately satisfies a large amount of needs. If there is a center that says: you make boots, and you make sandals, what injustice is done to these producers? They did not in return make bad sandals or boots or … There the thought of the oppression of the producer by a Politburo functions like the reverse of the thought that one must force the producers to make sandals. Yes, what should they make otherwise, except sandals. Do you notice the trick? Remember the assumption of the private sector that the seller of a commodity produces the cheapest trash but cashes in millions. Long ago this meant the interest conflict of the private sector, but this is not talked about because if one talked about it a criticism of the free-market economy would follow. Now the interest conflict of the private sector is assumed, which applies to any form of division of labor like a natural law, in order to then introduce the constraint of the market as the beneficial cure against the bad person who as a producer screws the consumer and as a consumer takes advantage of the producer.
8. Obligation to efficiency and reconciliation of the interests of consumers and producers
Completely without command, the market -– thank God we have that and not a producer dictatorship! -– allegedly forces efficiency, reasonable production, quality. Is this true? To what end does the market really serve? Now, production that is successful on the market, and in terms of the purpose that is the point of the free-market economy. The market really coerces. Each seller stands in competition with all other sellers and he must assert his share of the market against the other sellers, otherwise he is expropriated, otherwise he quickly possesses nothing. But what is it, for what he is forced there? He is forced, firstly, to earn money for himself, i.e. to make money in the market, and secondly to do it out of necessity. And that actually has nothing at all to do with efficiency, with quality or with production meeting needs. It has to do with efficiency in making money. Now what is efficiency called? This is by the way an important point: One is often intellectually bamboozled if efficiency is talked about, because with efficiency one must always specify what the criterion is whereby efficiency is to be reached. Efficiency in itself is actually defined as an activity performed appropriately to its goal, made well for its purpose. But according to what purpose is no longer mentioned. Everyone nowadays joins the choir of those who say that everything must run as efficiently as possible. But the question whereby one should be efficient does not occur as well. This is also correct: of course free market producers must produce efficiently. But efficient in what sense? In the sense that their costs must be small so that the selling price contains a profit. Is there another criterion for efficiency in the free-market economy? That is very much the question. I will show later that efficiency in our society is something completely different than working appropriately. One can also express it differently: The market does not demand efficiency, but the market defines what efficiency is in this society.
Take, for example, the subject of quality. Does the market demand quality production? It does like shit! The market coerces production that corresponds to the demand that is suitable for pulling money from the purses of the citizens. And trash is exactly correct if it fits the poverty of the customers — it is thus not true that the market forces quality! Our country is currently preoccupied with the subject of Mad Cow Disease -– yes, here the market functioned perfectly yet again. All involved swore that it was the market that forced them to their actions. The media looked for guilty parties and soon found: the farmers are the culprits because they fed their animals the wrong things; the animal flour producers are the culprits because they mixed poisonous animal flour in the fodder; the European Union is the malefactor because it lowered the import prices for beef so terribly, etc., and in the end even the consumers are responsible because they always wanted cheap meat. That is funny. Now the farmer says but he only did what is rational according to the free market, he only looked to produce cattle as economically as he could to offer it at a reasonable price which would sell on the European market, and besides, he has become ever more efficient. That is true, he had to put ever fewer costs into a kilo of beef. Well, then, out comes crap like Mad Cow Disease. Also the consumer behaved perfectly according to the free market, they compared the prices and then took the more economical, that is their task. Now they get to hear it as a reproach for always wanting only the cheapest meat. Here we have a marvelous case that in the free-market economy the falsification of a use value is naturally a means of acquisition! In an economy where there is only conflict of interest between producer and consumer. But that is not in nature, it is not in any method of production in world history, but only in one where production is private. And only if the buyers of the constantly attempted falsification of the use value notice something, they must then decide whether to buy the cheap crap because they cannot afford any better, or whether to put down more money in order to buy a better quality grade. But that there are 100 levels of quality and price for every product in our developed society so that an offer always exists for the poor, even if a bad one, provides evidence for the fact that production is perfectly adapted to real market conditions. For every purse a seller specializes. There are the luxury sellers, for meat too, and there are also the customers who buy luxury meat, which just depends on their purse and how much money they have.
The assertion that the market provides for quality is one of the most beautiful fairy tales about the free-market economy. The market demands only two different kinds of sale: Firstly, to a comparable seller and, secondly, one conforming to the poverty or wealth of the customers. Turned around: the desire for acquisition encourages producers to make continuing experiments in poor quality, to try to constantly lower the quality without the buyers noticing it. If the buyers notice it, it is price-damaging, but the reduction in quality is only one work of art, e.g. food falsification, existing for hundreds of years and with us just taking the quite modern form of mad cow disease. Next year then perhaps a salmonella scandal, or in the form that chickens are fed with sewage, or … or … — it does not stop. And all that is the free-market economy, because all involved behaved perfectly according to real market conditions.
The market forces efficiency, but not efficiency in the concrete work of producing goods, but forces efficiency in the question of costs, it forces with a given retail price ever less expenses. And whether this is a rational way to produce, I doubt very much.
9. The market as spontaneous and self-regulating organization of production
There is another opposition between market economy and planned economy. There the planned and therefore inflexible division of labor of the planned economy stands against the spontaneous and self-regulating division of labor of the free-market economy. This also belongs to the basic views of economics, which everyone who has concerned themselves a little bit with has heard in principle once already. The assertion is: In the east there was a planned division of labor in which a political authority decided how large the steel sector must be, the automobile industry must be so large, etc… All departments of national production were politically regulated in quality and quantity. On the contrary, the free-market economy regulates itself, always much better than it would if it were planned, because the center cannot know everything that is needed in the society, it cannot react fast and flexibly if the needs change.
Two different things can be said to this statement. A while ago I said part of it under the heading, “because of the coordination service.” The unplanned, self-regulating division of labor of the free-market economy that is so praised is nothing other than thousands of people trying to find a niche in the division of labor in which they can make money. And some make it and others ruin themselves, work half their lives and then find out that they are broke. Everybody tries to find a niche in the division of labor, and if that is the rational, spontaneously self-regulating division of labor, then it is remarkable: the human victims in this division of labor are simply not counted.
The other half is: It also becomes clear that the society does not divide the work in a free-market economy. It is not at all that we say we need this much from him and this much from her, but every possible applicant tries to find a buyer for themselves, frequently enough edging out somebody else. And one then calls what results the division of labor, although the labor was never divided. The cooperation that should actually be meant by the term division of labor, i.e. the coordination of qualitatively and quantitatively determined departments of production in a society, actually never happens at all in the free-market economy. The whole is rather the result of a fight in which there are winners and losers.
There is still a comic aspect to the assertion that one cannot plan production: As if the market replaces the entrepreneurs’ knowledge of the specific division of labor. It is not so that the entrepreneur stumbles blindly into the market, looking for what he gets. Someone who produces a car knows from experience how many prefabricated plastic parts he needs, how much wire he needs, how much sheet steel he needs, etc., and all this he definitely knows qualitatively and quantitatively. And not only that. He also knows whether his supplier is able to take part in an expansion of demand or whether he must look for still another. Planning in the free-market economy takes place everywhere! But for another purpose. In the factory minutiae is planned, an assembly-line is a total planning of labor, and if instead there is group work and no more assembly-lines, then that only means one plans even more; “just in time,” a thoroughly timed process, does not lack planning. But not only in the factory. Also between the factories and the suppliers a huge amount of planning takes place as electronic linkages between different producers. And they even plan for what cannot be planned for at all in our society: They try to study the market and thereby plan their profit! You read today how many cars Mercedes, Honda, or Ford will sell next year. And then they say: Planning does not work!
The comparison of the two production systems, free market economy and planned economy, already served its purpose. Now still another version of the inversion comes: Planned economy specifies much less than socialism; that a national economy is centrally planned is still far from socialism. It depends on what purpose it is planned for. Every wartime economy is a planned economy. The emperor and Hitler also drew up planned economies, partly at least. That an economy is planned, that is not enough. And there are still many more viewpoints for what is worthwhile than only producing as large an output as possible; e.g. how the work is experienced, whether one is spared a little bit, whether a person is not completely leached out after work, but still has a life apart from work, etc. There are also all these sides of being worthwhile. And free-market economy, on the other hand, specifies much more than a method of co-ordination. There is an unexpressed but very definite purpose to the free-market economy — the whole way of production.
10. The market – not a place, but the circulation of capital
Discussion: the market as the most efficient answer to human stupidity
Free-market economy – what do they say now about production and its purpose? The market is not a place (market place), but the market is the circumstance that all products are made economically meaningful for the producer only by the fact that he finds a buyer who gives him money for it. That is the market. In this respect, a form of division of labor is assumed with the free-market economy: without everyone producing something for someone else, there would be no free-market economy. The famous subsistence economy does not need a market — they simply provide for themselves and have nothing to do with one another. In the free-market economy everyone produces for the others, but the satisfaction of the needs of the others is not the purpose. This is a very strange form of division of labor: Everyone produces for the need of the other and only for oneself. The need of the other is necessary, but it is not the purpose of production. It is not that one produces the shoes that another needs so that he then has shoes, but: the need of the other is a weakness. That the consumer needs my commodity is my lever to pull money from his wallet. And everyone with a commodity to sell (and many only have themselves and their labor time to sell) needs to make as much money as possible. And now one must recall the statements of the economists who state that the purpose of every economy is the production of useful goods… The very first and most abstract discovery about our economic mode is: the production of useful goods is not the purpose but the means. For each member of the exchange relationship, the production of useful goods is not the purpose but the acquisition of money; the goods are only a means for it. And what is money in the first place? Money is command over the commodity world, the means with which I can get access to the products of all the others for myself.
Question: The free-market economy is so successful because it comes from the bad nature of humans, or…?
Look at the substance of this point. Much is written to the effect that other economic modes, and particularly the planned economy, overrated human reason. The first counterargument is: What is here called successful? The real comparison between the free-market economy and really existing socialism was no economic efficiency comparison free of force, but force was always in play, for which the cold war is the symbol. There are even those who ask the question about the “better” economic system, then refer to this force comparison: yes, and who built the better weapons? Who could prepare more deaths? Thus capitalism is the better system! The second one is the following: You get an answer with the last question, which goes during such debates, and this is the argument: I know, humans are bad. This is, by the way, also the case with the other social sciences. At the conclusion of every debate it is held: that is not sensible, but humans are unfortunately senseless, and under this premise it must just be. Main counterargument: From where do you know that humans are so senseless and so bad as that? From where do you know the nature of humans? This counter-question aims at the following point: No, you know it from the society that you have here in front of you, from which you want to know otherwise. In the immediate society, people are actually hostile and forced to opposing interests. Anyone who is a private owner and wants to have market success — and it does not at all depend on his character or his imagination, on what he wishes and thinks -– then he must assert himself against other sellers. That is not a question of desires but of necessities.
I grant that one should not say a person is hostile only because of the system. The thought makes a circular procedure I would not like to repeat, i.e.: from the view of this society and the conflicts that there are here, simply explaining the conflicts of people from their nature or the exercise of their nature. And the still stronger argument against the assertion that humans by nature are necessarily bad was already suggested: this statement actually has an immanent contradiction. If someone says, humans are stupid, then I always want to ask in response: this applies to you also? You are stupid? And if you are then, then you do not refrain from stupidities? But in our bourgeois worldview, that people are held to be idiots but also know better (!), at the same time maintains the belief that they cannot change it. And that is a stupidity that does not have to be. Everyone says, people are stupid but I know better, otherwise they would not say it.
With this worldview there is also frequently this contradictory pair of ideas: egoism/altruism. In capitalism all people would be egoists and if they would be altruists, then they would go for socialism. This is what these alternatives always mean. My reproach, however, is not that people are egoists and that they should stop being egoists and become altruists instead. One can hear this sermon in every church. My argument is: people are bad egoists, they do not organize the appropriate care of themselves appropriately, therefore they must work much more than they have to, therefore they get much less than they could.
11. Success at the market is directed against the source of income of those who must live off the sale of their work
So far we have held: The free-market economy is not a method, but in it a substantial amount of the economic mode is already defined. It is an economic mode that concerns money acquisition, in which the production of goods is not a purpose but a means of money acquisition. At this point a transition is still missing. If it is about money acquisition, then producing and selling would be a bad way to gain money because one would always have to put back to work what one just extracted from the market as money. And so that is not it then. A much better way to acquire money is to buy people and to invest, to organize others’ work and sell the products. If one can take away from the market only as much money as one put into it by individual work, then no great wealth results. Great wealth results if one invests in other people whose products one sells. And then the efficiency of this production process gets a completely different quality than commonly imagined if one talks so loosely about efficiency. Efficiency is to be increased, in the sense of the purpose, perhaps by higher productivity, by buying better machines. For what is that efficient? In order to save on paid labor. Is that beneficial? For the entrepreneur it is; for the employee it is dismissal. Then his source of income is lost. Efficiency in our society is directed against the source of income of those who must sell their labor. However, efficiency in production can be achieved just as well if one does not increase productivity, but if one simply pays the people less. If by “efficiency” is meant capital efficiency and capital productivity, then it can be accomplished just as well by paying worse and working faster as by investing in more productive machines. Everything is the same. At this point one may not join the praise of those who consider efficiency — something insane – reasonable. Efficiency in our society consists of the fact that market success is greater the less the wage laborers get from their work. One notices: If it does not concern the efficiency of the concrete work, thus the appropriate production directed toward useful goods, a completely different criteria of efficiency suddenly comes into play.
12. The theory of the “invisible hand” – the metaphysic of economists and its use for a waterproof praise of capitalism
Now, I still want to make a point. If one sits in on an economics seminar at the university and tells the lecturer the criticisms I have here -– does he then say that its all rubbish, the world is not as I maintained? No, he will not do that. They say: but it is the joke of the free-market economy that egoistic interests are at play, everyone thinks only of himself and the success of one limits the success of another, frequently enough the failure of the other because they are competitors. And then they quote Adam Smith: There is this general egoism, but the “largest general prosperity develops” thanks to the “invisible hand” of the market. The economists criticize the early political economists (Marx the same as Ricardo or John Stuart Mill) because they talked about value, not only the left but also the right, which is the basis for the regulating laws of exchange and competition. The economists cannot recognize this and reproach the early economists, calling them metaphysical because they talked with value about something behind the facts. I do not want to ask here whether it is justified or not, I only want to judge the criteria. About something that is behind the facts, one may not talk about that, but what is it then with the “invisible hand”? It is actually a demand to regard market events not on the level on which they happen, in which the success of one is the damage of the other, but to step back a bit and show from another level that behind the fact of the egoists against each other there is this larger general prosperity. That is the challenge to the metaphysic, the challenge to analyze things not like they are but to add an opinion about it, e.g. the opinion that the market is the great coordinator.
At this point the following is important: The praise of the market (the great coordinator, bringing the largest general prosperity) is not identical to the assertion that everything is for the best, e.g. the goods supply situation. This methodical idea of the free-market economy, that this social economics has an insane mechanism, this thought frees itself from the assertion that it is all for the best, one must not deny that there are in the midst of the most wonderful market economy glaring symptoms of deficiency. The assertion of this insane mechanism is rather a method for how one can react to critical objections without giving up the thought of the larger general prosperity. Example: Housing shortage. Would the presence of a housing shortage be a proof for the fact that the market does not function well? What say the economists about this? They say that it is not due to the market but the market participants are responsible. The market participants did not behave in conformity to market trends by being ready to pay the appropriate prices for housing. Consequently, less housing is made available. If then rents rise because of the scarcity of housing, this is a completely natural reaction of the market. The small promise is then provided that thereby the basis is laid for the number of dwellings to (soon) rise again, because with high rents the investments in house building will increase again. Whether that actually happens, is undecided.
Another example: Unemployment. What do those who always uphold the coordination service say about that? Again they say it is not the market’s fault, the workers are too expensive and if they would be cheaper, then a market evacuation of their product would take place. In this respect, the theory is funny. It does not state who gains from it, but is a theory of the distribution of responsibility for everything that could possibly be found bad. If something does not work, if any nationally recognized disgrace appears, then the free-market economy ideologists say it cannot be different if one does not behave in conformity with the market. This is a funny thought because the first half was: people are stupid, it’s a good thing that there is the market to coordinate and introduce objective reason because humans are so weakly subjective. Read how criticism of any possible thing is formulated. If there is a housing shortage, if it is Mad Cow Disease or environmental pollution, the message always reads: Yes, big subjects, which do not behave in conformity with the market. Nevertheless, the market is supposed to be the aid for the weakness and stupidity of people, now suddenly people must ensure that the market functions reasonably. The market should be the aid for the weakness and stupidity of humans, but now suddenly humans must ensure that the market functions reasonably. And every time there is a reason to criticize the damages done to the people they say: you have offended against the market. And thus the theory is finally immune. No fact can be suitable to prove that the market is bad because every recognized evil is automatically a proof that the people offended against the market. That is already funny: In the end nobody states any more that everything is well coordinated, but the free market economists say: everything would be good if people would not continuously offend the market.
Via Mostly Water
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Apologies for Slavery Should Acknowledge Privilege
Posted by illvox collective in Uncategorized on August 22, 2008
By Michel Martin
So the House apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. An interesting move coming as it does 140 years after the end of slavery and many years after apologies for the atrocities committed against Native Americans and the internment of the Japanese — events that occurred before, during, and after slavery. On one level it’s just interesting if you’re interested in politics, as I am: Why this and why now? How did this come about?
Not so interesting to me were some of the objections. So predictable: I didn’t own any slaves, my family were immigrants and they didn’t own any so why should I apologize, and blah, blah, blah. As Katrina Browne, a descendent of this country’s most successful family of slave traders, said on this program last week: “If you wore cotton or put sugar in your tea, at some point you benefited from the slave trade.”
But let’s set that aside and focus on what is “not” being talked about — the other part of the apology— the apology for Jim Crow, the system of legally imposed, culturally sanctioned and violently enforced discrimination that lasted well into this century. The legal framework of Jim Crow was dismantled only a generation ago, which means that the people who lived with, suffered from and benefited from Jim Crow are very much with us today.
Just last month for example, Virginia unveiled a monument to the students who walked out of their all-black high school in Prince Edward County, Virginia to protest inferior conditions there — a case that later became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that was decided in 1959. But the monument also serves to remind us about what happened after Brown. Prince Edward actually closed the schools for five years rather than educate black and white kids together. Of course all-white private academies, funded by state and local tax credits, quickly sprang up for the white kids. But most black kids were left to fend for themselves until 1964, hardly ancient history. If that doesn’t merit an apology, well I don’t know what does.
Can I just tell you? What I think this debate is really about is acknowledging privilege.
In this country, we hate to acknowledge that any of us gets any sort of leg up at all. In fact, the more privileged you are, it seems the less likely you are to admit it. At tax time we complain about having to pay up but those of us who benefit rarely acknowledge the breaks we get as homeowners that renters don’t, or that married heterosexuals get that singles and same-sex couples do not. At college admission time people grouse about race preferences and conveniently forget all about legacies. And how about all those SAT prep courses, private tutoring, or the simple leg up that a stable, functional household gives you? The more you have of it, the more invisible privilege becomes — and then that becomes the entitlement of forgetting, as if it never happened at all.
I noticed this when — through the miracle of frequent flyer miles — I recently got a chance to take a trip in first class with my husband and kids. What an amazing experience. On my own, in coach, I was just another butt in a seat. But in the front cabin with the nice husband and two adorable tykes no less — why I was upholding Western civilization. There was none of this having to stand in a long line to check our bags, no begging for a jacket to be hung up, for a drink to be refreshed. Oh no, it was smooth sailing all the way. So this is how it is.
“This is how it is?,” I said to my husband, who frequents that part of the plane far more than I do. He looked at me puzzled and asked, “What’s the big deal?”
Exactly!
Via NPR
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