Group items tagged

In Europe, students have joined the rank of demonstrators against the attempt to mortgage their future. Worker–student alliances in France and in England are intensifying the struggle against the capitalists. In particular, British students exposed the activities of the Vodafone companies that avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes. The students have been at the forefront of using new tools of education to bypass the mainstream media to alert workers

Even a capitalist such as Warren Buffet has called on other capitalists to pay their fair share of taxes. Buffet said that the US government should tax the rich more, saying ‘people at the high end, people like myself should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.’

The crisis of capitalism is not simply a question of taxes. Restructuring taxation is only one manifestation of the systematic change to the economic, political and ideological structures that came into being as a result of financialisation. This financialisation hollowed out the real production economy in the US and elsewhere. And in Ireland, the bankers from Frankfurt, London and New York descended on the Irish workers to sweep out the real economy that had been built by the Irish working people.

Africans must pay close attention to the capitalist events surrounding the economic depression because the same IMF and World Bank are going into African societies promoting fianancialisation and the destruction of trade unions. This is especially the case in countries such as South Africa, Ghana, Angola, Nigeria and Kenya, where the efforts are geared towards scooping up surpluses in the real economy in order to consolidate the neoliberal stranglehold. The same alliance between African workers and African intellectuals which delegitimised the IMF must be strengthened to undermine the alliance between African capitalists and Western capitalists who are bent on introducing the speculative economy. All over Africa, there have been bank bailouts to save capitalists in the face of reductions in spending on health, education and other social services.

These cracks can be spatial (places where other social relations are generated), temporal (“Here, in this event, for the time that we are together, we are going to do things differently. We are going to open windows onto another world.”), or related to particular activities or resources (for example, cooperatives or activities that pursue a non-market logic with regard to water, software, education, etc.). The world, and each one of us, is full of these cracks.

At a certain point, bottom-up movements stall, they enter a crisis or an impasse, or they vanish. Would you say that the politics of cracks has intrinsic limits in terms of enduring and expanding?

The movements you mention are enormously important beacons of hope, but capital continues to exist and it’s getting worse and worse; it progressively entails more misery and destruction. We cannot confine ourselves to singing the praises of movements. That’s not enough.

Any government of this kind entails channeling aspirations and struggles into institutional conduits that, by necessity, force one to seek a conciliation between the anger that these movements express and the reproduction of capital. Because the existence of any government involves promoting the reproduction of capital (by attracting foreign investment, or through some other means), there is no way around it. This inevitably means taking part in the aggression that is capital. It’s what has already happened in Bolivia and Venezuela, and it will also be the problem in Greece or Spain.

This sabotage takes economic forms as well. Another way of stating my argument about oil companies is to say that these were not companies set up to produce oil, they were companies set up to produce a return on investment. We should think of Exxon, BP, Shell etc. as financial machines, not energy companies. While it may seem like economic life today is dominated by the power of financial firms, the truth is that the history of energy has always been a history of finance.

Once you realize an oil company functions not to deliver oil but to structure the future as a system of financial flows, then the points of sabotage shift a little bit. This is why I think projects like Carbon Tracker’s “Unburnable Carbon” are really important. Carbon Tracker shows that the share price of fossil fuel companies is a bubble, since it is based on a projected use of energy that is incompatible with keeping the planet livable. This campaign works precisely at the point at which the corporation understood as a set of financial flows is vulnerable—the calculability of future revenue.

Practices like yoga and meditation were woven throughout Occupy, and were integral to its endurance and impact; they were not a sideshow.

Meditation and yoga, however, do not automatically nurture an anti-racist and egalitarian ethos. If they did, Western practice communities would be sanctuaries from what bell hooks calls “imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.” As hooks has noted, based on her experience as a Buddhist and a woman of color, exclusions along multiple axes of oppression — such as race and class — continue to shape the dissemination of meditation and yoga in the West.

During conversations with Occupy activists, I learned that, while short meditations like moments of silence were used by assembly facilitators in the early days of the camp, the practice became more common as the occupation continued, and challenges intensified.

“As decision-making processes began breaking down,” facilitator Marisa Holmes explained to me, “with more disruption coming from within the camp, from the state, from all angles, we used these practices more and more.”

While grounding exercises helped ease aggression and facilitate communication among Occupiers, they could not stop the violent eviction executed by the New York Police Department in November 2011. They were also unable to transform debilitating internal conflicts that weakened the occupation. At the root of these conflicts, many activists believed, was the fundamental disagreement over whether and how Occupiers should engage with structures of power, including more established institutions on the left, like unions.

“I think a lot of mistakes resulted from the inability to engage with power, interact with it and build strategies around how to shift it,” said journalist Nathan Schneider, who is an editor-at-large for Waging Nonviolence and the author of “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.”

Many of the participants in Occupy Manifest became leaders in the Occupy Sandy relief effort after the superstorm hit New York on Oct. 29, 2012. Occupy Sandy was tremendously successful in its response, using social media to quickly raise over $1 million and mobilize 60,000 volunteers — four times the number of volunteers engaged by the Red Cross. A key element of Occupy Sandy’s success was participants’ willingness to work across political differences, coordinating activities with churches, FEMA and other relief organizations that didn’t necessarily share Occupy’s values and horizontalist style of organizing.

During their dialogue, Jon Kabat-Zinn noted his original skepticism towards Davis’s radical stance on prison abolition. “But then you gave me your book, ‘Are Prisons Obsolete,’ and I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s a fantastic idea.”Mindfulness alone will not spark a political revolution, but when joined by actual revolutionaries, it might expand all of our possibilities for freedom.

Reflecting a growing perception that the labor unions are standing by doing nothing while the government presses ahead with labor market reforms that make it easier for businesses to sack employees, on May 1, 15-M set up an initiative to protect the interests of people who are having to work on short-term contracts, grants, bogus training schemes or on a self-employed basis to save their employers from having to pay their social security. The idea is to encourage more people to work together through cooperatives, as well as to use social networks and other media to report companies that are taking advantage of high unemployment to impose abusive working conditions.

Last week it emerged that a police unit normally assigned to monitoring terrorist groups has been given instructions to put some of the higher-profile 15-M leaders under surveillance. "Putting these kinds of stories about is clearly an attempt to use the media to create a climate of fear," says Aitor, who belongs to the Real Democracy Now (DRY) organization, which spawned the 15-M movement. "They want to convert what we are doing into a public order issue." He blames the Popular Party administration at the central and regional level of trying to prevent people from using public spaces to protest.

Aware that 15-M was not left wing, but made up of a cross-section of society that was sick and tired of the current political system, one dominated by two large parties that were increasingly seen as out of touch with the people, the founders of Podemos and the groups related to it joined in the protests enthusiastically, trying to lead them and to channel their energy, but at no time trying to appropriate them.

For Iglesias, there was little to celebrate in having almost doubled its vote from 969,000 in the 2008 elections to 1.7 million in 2011, and instead the party’s celebration of its achievement was further proof of just how out of touch it was with reality. Amid the worst economic crisis in more than four decades, what was so great about garnering seven percent of the vote, when the Socialists had seen their share fall from 43 to 28 percent?

But the leaders of the Communist Party, argued Iglesias, “have become a regime, people who are happy to be awarded a bronze medal, and never think in terms of actually winning elections because all they are interested in really is being seen to be on the left, to be authentic, and to not win.” In short, the communists had become conservative, argued Iglesias, because they had failed to see that the only way to win was by changing the rules.

We highlight how fields, hegemony and institutions approaches to elites in transnational policy networks focus on different aspects of elite replication and policy influence; including where elite’s influence on policy comes from; how it can be identified; and its overall out c om e s.

Second, elites affect transnational policy networks in institutionally complex ways. Transnational policy networks include actors from intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank, OECD, and others, but are not reducible to them. The library of work on intergovernmental organizations illuminates how public authorities are designed by states seeking to cooperate with or dominate each other, and how they have internal conflicts over political and technocratic interests (Kentikelenis and Seabrooke 2017).

In general, elites are actors who have disproportionately high levels of influence on their social structure.

Elites in transnational policy networks are those who have disproportionate influence over policy design and implementation on issues of global importance. This includes influence on agenda-setting, decisionmaking, and policy content. Policy includes explicit reform programmes, scripts for best practices, as well as regulatory norms and standards.

The first generation of this scholarship centred on moving ‘beyond reified entities (‘the State’) to analyse the role of elites, networks and agents’ at the transnational level (Cohen 2013: 103), including the formation of ‘transnational guilds’ (Bigo 2016).

A further complication in studying elites is identifying how they articulate power. Elite power is exercised through individual as well as organizational action that springs from micro- and meso-level processes (Scott 2008). T

Harrington and Seabrooke 2020), as well as how organizations, such as global accounting firms, replicate professional practices (Spence and Carter 2014; Spence et al. 2016).

Most recently, field-theoretic scholars have started paying attention to ‘transnational power elites’ that have created some autonomy from national states through meta-institutions such as the European Union (Kauppi and Madsen 2013, 2014), as well as organization beyond the control of the state such as international commercial arbitration (Grisel 2017).

more computational methods to trace its subjects of analysis, including the mapping of social networks to assist the identification of fields (Larsen and Ellersgaard 2017) as well as content analysis to distinguish positions within fields (Ban and Patenaude 2018).

Van der Pijl (1984) and Cox (1987: 271) were among the first scholars to talk about what became known as a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC) (Carroll 2013).

Sklair also identified four intersecting fractions of the transnational capitalist class (1) TNC executives; (2) globalizing bureaucrats; (3) globalizing politicians and professionals; (4) consumerist elites (merchants and media).

The role of networks has been addressed in more contemporary research. Carroll and Carson (2003) located five top transnational policy-planning groups in the ‘larger structure of corporate power that is constituted through interlocking directorates among the world’s largest corporations.’ They found that the network was tied together by a few select ‘cosmopolitan managers’ that, via policy groups, ‘pull the directorates of the world’s major corporations together, and collaterally integrate the lifeworld of the global corporate elite’ to promote neoliberalism (Carroll and Carson 2003: 29).

The institutions approach to elites in transnational policy networks draws from a Weberian premise: that actors seek to propel their political and economic interests through institutions and organizations

This includes: World Polity models of how world cultural norms spread through rationalization processes; recursive theories of how organizations interact to produce transnational policy scripts; and theories on how professionals exert influence through networks. In all cases elites are treated as important for decision-making processes. Elites typically refers to political elites within organizations and governments or, more commonly, policy elites who are regarded as the expert authority on policy issues.

Melinda Janki

In your important intervention you speak of increasing authoritarianism as a current condition. Should we not be as concerned about newly empowered transnational corporations, debt-driving inter-governmental organizations and hollowed-out states?

Is there a recorded inflation rate for gold currency in the interior?  How is gold exchange value determined.

How might we revisit Fonlon's instruction and the focus on Aristotle, Plato and other imperial, or imperialized, philosophers?

recalling the danger of firing squads that have been frequently used against political opponents (note to reader: remember the end of the Grenadian Revolution in 1983).

The fundamentals of our differences come down to, how does one understand the question of the internationalism of the oppressed? In order to answer this, there are two basic principles we start with: (1)a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, and (2)the law and nature of contradictions. We will attempt to apply both in our reply.

During this period, the so-called Cold War, where the USSR, China and several other countries were frequently identified with the cause of socialism and where, in many cases, workers and oppressed classes had succeeded in overthrowing formal capitalism and foreign domination, much of the Left fell into the fateful habit of deciding upon what stand to take on international matters not based on a substantive analysis but based largely on which countries fell on which sides of particular issues.

Baraka is absolutely correct in emphasizing that there is a long and ignominious history of social chauvinism by much of the organized Left in the global North, to which I would add a history of social chauvinism by numerous otherwise progressive movements—beyond the Left—in the global North. The infection of imperial consciousness became clear even in the international Communist movement by the 1930s when many revolutionaries in the global South felt betrayed by the approach of communist parties in the global North (and by the USSR) when too many of those latter parties abandoned the struggle against colonialism in the name of building anti-fascist fronts against the Germans, Italians and, later, the Japanese. This sense of betrayal led to splits in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America and, in some cases, the creation of new revolutionary formations (with often complicated politics).

The elimination of the Soviet bloc and the victory of neoliberal hegemony created challenges for countries in the global South which were following what the late Egyptian Marxist theorist Samir Amin would call “national populist projects.” By “national populist projects” Amin was referencing those regimes that had emerged out of anti-imperialist struggles but were not committed—in any serious/consistent way—to a socialist path, sometimes asserting themselves as non-aligned between the two superpowers, e.g., Egypt under Nasser. Many such regimes were able to survive through playing one superpower off again another, though this did not always succeed.

the national populist projects which were already in crisis due to internal contradictions—including class struggle, women’s movements, ethnic contradictions, democratic governance challenges—fractured.

With the collapse of the second superpower and the rise of neoliberal globalization,  the national populist projects which were already in crisis due to internal contradictions—including class struggle, women’s movements, ethnic contradictions, democratic governance challenges—fractured

The legitimacy crisis was not simply a public relations challenge. Struggle was breaking out within these states against the regimes. Sometimes led by forces to the left of the regime; other times by forces to the right of the regime (and sometimes both), these struggles were asserting that the regimes were abandoning their base; abandoning the people. One example of the ramifications of the legitimacy crisis unfolded in what came to be known as the Arab democratic uprisings or the “Arab Spring.” These insurrections, all beginning peacefully, were a challenge not only to pro-Western regimes, e.g., Egypt, but also to regimes that had emerged from the national populist projects, e.g., Syria.

Silence. There is no reply other than to challenge the authenticity of those of us on the Left who argue for an anti-imperialist AND anti-dictatorial politics of emancipation.

The question of solidarity of the globally oppressed must begin with a focus on the oppressed themselves. Baraka focuses on the struggle between governments. I start from a different standpoint: the question of the people. It is flowing from the question of the people that one can situate the larger context. In looking at Syria, for instance, what were the nature of the demands of the mass movement? Why was it that the response of the Assad regime was bloody repression? What does that response represent?

This is highlighted because many in the US Left have abandoned the demands for any action by the USA government on the basis that there is nothing that the USA government can or should do (or worse, that we, on the Left, should demand nothing of the USA government other than to cease and desist). The irony here is that during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the US Left was actively in favor of the USA, Britain and France providing direct, military assistance to the Spanish government against the fascists. It is important to remember that even with the danger of fascism, a threat to humankind, the demand for US assistance to the Spanish government came while the USA was still perpetrating crimes against the people of Latin America. A demand for a change in USA policy vis a vis Spain was not inconsistent with opposing the USA role in Latin America.

The main divide among anti-imperialists during the Cold War was rather caused by the attitude towards the USSR, which Communist Parties and their close allies regarded as the “fatherland of socialism”; they determined much of their own political positions by aligning with Moscow and the “socialist camp”—an attitude that was described as “campism.” This was facilitated by Moscow’s support for most struggles against Western imperialism in its global rivalry with Washington. As for Moscow’s intervention against workers’ and peoples’ revolts in its own European sphere of domination, the campists stood with the Kremlin, denigrating these revolts under the pretext that they were fomented by Washington.Those who believed that the defense of democratic rights is the paramount principle of the left supported the struggles against Western imperialism as well as popular revolts in Soviet-dominated countries against local dictatorial rule and Moscow’s hegemony. A third category was formed by the Maoists, who, starting from the 1960s, labeled the USSR “social-fascist,” describing it as worse than US imperialism and going so far to side with Washington in some instances, such as Beijing’s stance in Southern Africa.

Benghazi’s population implored the world for protection, while emphasizing that they wanted no foreign boots on the ground. The League of Arab States supported this request. Accordingly, the UNSC adopted a resolution authorizing “the imposition of a NFZ” over Libya as well as “all necessary measures…to protect civilians…while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” Neither Moscow nor Beijing vetoed this resolution: Both abstained, unwilling to assume the responsibility for a massacre foretold.

As the Western left has become more aligned with their imperialist bourgeoisie in the destabilization of the Global South, the radical Black tradition provides a clear approach to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism."

The contradictory nature of that relationship has sharpened as a result of the current crisis of global capitalism and the U.S. led Western imperialist project fueled by two interconnected elements: the devastating social-economic conditions that workers and the laboring classes now face as result of monopoly capital’s neoliberal turn over the last forty years in both the imperialist center and global South; and the intensifying challenge to neoliberalism from states and social movements in the global South, with the corresponding response from U.S. and European capital that has ranged from economic sanctions meant to punish whole populations to direct and indirect political subversion and military interventions, all illegal and morally indefensible.

While U.S. and Western innocence was always a component of the propaganda to justify colonialist aggression, the ideas of humanitarian intervention and its corollary, the responsibility to protect, emerged in the 1990s as one of the most innovative ideological weapons ever produced since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945.

Of course, as I have said on many occasions, the reality is much more complex, with neoliberalism actually representing a more dangerous threat to colonized and working-class peoples in the U.S. and globally. This is because within the context of the U.S., Democrats have been successful in perpetuating the myth that they represent “progressivism.” This perception usually leads to substantial demobilization and actual liberal – left alignment with neoliberalism objectively when Democrats occupy the Executive Branch.

Restoring the historic alliance between the U.S. and Europe was announced by Biden as a major objective of his administration. His “America is Back” slogan was supposed to signify that the U.S. was ready to reassume its leadership of the Western alliance. Biden proudly identified himself as an “Atlanticist,” and indeed a number of the members of his foreign policy team were plunked from the “Atlantic Council.” Similar to the Council on foreign Affairs (CFA), the Atlantic Council is a neoliberal think tank that is funded by a cross-section of the ruling class but significantly by neoliberals associated with the democrat party.

The Atlantic Council was a severe critic of the Trump administration, not because of any concerns about its “racism” but because the Council opposed Trump’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy and his dangerous ideas like pulling out of NATO, a desire to draw down U.S. troops and his insufficient hostility to Russia. Plus, the Council and the neoliberal ruling class never forgave Trump for his scuttling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership because it pulled the rug out from under the Trans-Atlantic Investment Partnership that was supposed to be the next agreement after TPP and would have solidified the hegemony of U.S. capital in Europe for next few decades.Biden and the Council believed that unity among the G-7 nations during the current global capitalist crisis was imperative. Consequently, Biden’s aggressive stance toward Russia, Venezuela, blind support for Israel and general hostility toward the progressive governments in Latin America signaled that belligerent U.S. policy would continue, but with an Obama-like smile.What has been response from the U.S. and Western left to Bourgeois Destabilization in Global South? Bolivian President, Evo Morales, faced a right-wing coup and instead of unrestrained mobilization the left engaged in a debate about the Bolivian process. In Europe, the liberal-left parliamentarians in the European Union awarded their Sakharav human rights prize to the Venezuelan right-wing opposition, an opposition known for burning alive dark-skinned Venezuelans assumed to be “Chavistas.” Bernie Sanders declares Hugo Chavez a “dead communist dictator” and most respectable liberal-left elements in the U.S. would not get caught dead at a pro-Venezuela demo as long as the new “authoritarian dictator,” Nicholas Maduro, is in power. Gaddafi deserved to die, Assad is a bloodthirsty tyrant, China is capitalist, and a human rights violator, and Haiti is a S…hole country that does not merit much thought or energy, let alone mobilization for.

The anti-anti-imperialism of a Eurocentric armchair commentator like Gilbert Achcar neatly captures the inanity of this approach, dressed-up as nuanced and sophisticated analysis. Grounded in Western chauvinism and completely suspended from the contradictory structures and class forces in the specific, concrete realities of this historical moment, it condemns the left projects that don’t correspond to the imagery of Western leftists who see revolutionary change as some pristine project. These leftists do not seem to notice or don’t care that they are usually on the same side of an international issue as the international bourgeoisie.

To counter the collaborationism and opportunism of the U.S. and Western left, Black revolutionaries must re-center the anti-colonial struggle that addresses the dialectics of the national and class issues produced by the colonial/capitalist system. This re-centering of anti-colonial struggle is not new. It has been the broad theoretical framework for African/Black radical tradition for decades — from Black socialists in Harlem like Hubert Harrison and the African Blood Brotherhood in the teens and the 1920’s to the revolutionary Pan African tradition. It was also reflected in the articulations of Lenin on the “National Question” and the assemblies of colonial peoples leading to the 1928 declaration on the right to self-determination on the part of colonized peoples and the declaration that Africans in the U.S. constituted an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination.The radical Black tradition provides an invaluable approach for how a left should address its bourgeoisie.  We say that concretely it means that authentic Western leftists must join us to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism.” Specifically for African revolutionaries in the U.S. we must build bottom-up organic black unity and an anti-colonial, pro-socialist movement anchored in the Black working class that must assert leadership of this movement and to the broader radical movement in the U.S.Biden and the neoliberal, neo-fascists are committed to countering the movements for national liberation and socialism by any means, including destroying the planet to maintain European imperialist power.The Western social-imperialist left that is still addicted to its material privileges and illusions of being a part of something called the “West” has a choice that it must make: either you abandon privilege and whiteness and join as class combatants against your bourgeoisie, or you will be considered part of the enemy.

we had not one conversation about how we economists induce harm and what ethical obligations follow from that fact.

That is, one cannot do any positive work with the concept, such as determining whether harm has occurred or measuring its extent, without the careful moral reasoning that defining harm requires.