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Arabica Robusta

Herman Rosenfeld and Carlo Fanelli, "A New Type of Political Organization?  T... - 0 views

mrzine.monthlyreview.org/...rf050810.html

social movements labor globalization canada

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Our approach was motivated by the inability of the labour and social justice movements, as well as opposition political parties, to develop an effective response to ongoing attacks against working-class living standards.  It was evident that a fresh organizational approach based on new strategies, new alignments, and new objectives was needed -- an approach that came to be dubbed Workers Assemblies.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 07 Aug 10
       
      A new approach to labor organizing.
  • The trade unions were, and still are, mired in concessions, wage freezes, and other kinds of compromises with employers, and a politics of tailing after the social democratic NDP, which was going nowhere -- hence the lack of a real fight-back against the crisis.
  • A June 2010 article by Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster discusses the weak state of progressive forces in the United States and their inability to translate significant support for their political positions into commensurate political influence.
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  •  From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in social services, in an openly anti-union political climate, it is now being demanded that the working class pay for a crisis which it did not create.  
  • The consulta process, then, sought to actively build and develop our capacities together.  This meant attracting new people to an exciting project with new possibilities: conveying to progressive individuals in union locals that this process carries hope; discovering more strength through political 'mappings' of communities and corresponding exchanges among groups; learning how to work collectively and democratically among diverse sectors of the working class; rejuvenating already existing movements; and overcoming the fatalism that saps the mobilizing energy of activists.
  • The painful experiences of repression, aptly termed 'Torontanamo Bay' by some, may unfortunately provide a glimpse into the future, given that struggles over austerity and social services are likely to be the flashpoints of political confrontation in the coming years.7
  • Developing Working-Class Capacities.  As mentioned earlier, the objective of the Assembly is to sustain a process, not to launch a ready-made organization.  The focus, in our view, is on developing working-class capacities based upon recognizing differences and an understanding of our social interdependence through collective movement-building.
  •  Organizing the various fragments of the working class, as Engels reminded some time ago, is a necessary project, since capitalists are always organized: "they need no formal unions, rules or officers."8
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 07 Aug 10
       
      It is not enough to say that "capitalists" (I suggest the term "corporate capitalists") are always organized.  How are they organized?  Through what sustaining mechanisms?
  • The cost of not having such organizational capacities has become dreadfully clear during the ongoing global economic crisis.  Despite sporadic and localized battles here and there, the working class really wasn't able to take advantage of this historic moment, since our capacities just weren't there.  In fact, capitalism (including neoliberalism) seems to be emerging more powerful and consolidated than ever.  With our weakness so exposed, there is good reason to expect the Right to exploit the situation to its fullest potential.
  • networks and coalitions
  • networks and coalitions
  • networks and coalitions
Arabica Robusta

Capitalism, the Absurd System - Monthly Review - 0 views

monthlyreview.org/100601mcchesney-foster.php

globalization labor movements resistance social workers

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The question of how a socialist society would operate raised a horrible, dystopian image in this student’s mind. Such libertarian fears of a totalitarian state imposing socialism by force, even to the point of annihilation, on an unwilling people, who are presumed to be capitalist by nature, are all too common. This brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s comment: “Someone once said that it is easier [for most people in today’s society] to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”2
  • This prohibition on critically assessing capitalism begins in the economics departments and business schools of our universities where, with but a few exceptions, it is easier to find an advocate of the immediate colonization of Mars than it is to find a scholar engaged in genuine radical criticism of capitalism. This critical dearth extends to our news media, which have a documented track record of promoting the profit system, and a keen distaste for those that advocate radical change. It reaches all of us in one form or another. Anyone who wishes to participate in civic life quickly grasps that being tagged as anti-free market (or socialist) is a near-certain way to guarantee one’s status as a political outcast. To criticize the system is to criticize the nation and “democracy.”
  • n John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, an enraged Okie tenant farmer, a victim of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, wants to know, as he is being removed from his farm by the bank, whom he can shoot. The tractor driver who comes to demolish his house says it would do no good for the farmer to shoot him, since he’s just an ordinary working stiff doing his job and would be quickly replaced by another. When the farmer counters that he will then shoot the person who gave the order, the tractor driver replies that this too would be useless, since that individual is simply a bank employee. “Well, there’s a president of the bank,” continues the farmer. “There’s a board of directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank.” The driver said, “Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, ‘Make the land show profit or we’ll close up.’” “But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.” “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all. Maybe, like you said, the property’s doing it. Anyway I told you my orders.” “I got to figure,” the tenant said. “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.” The tenant sat in his doorway, and the driver thundered his engine and started off….The iron guard rail bit into the house-corner, crumbled the wall, and wrenched the little house from its foundation so that it fell sideways crushed like a bug….The tractor cut a straight line on, and the air and the ground vibrated with its thunder. The tenant man stared after it, his rifle in his hand. His wife was beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor.3
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  • We come to believe that, as individuals, we are unconstrained in our day-to-day activities, since we remain at liberty, except when the state intrudes on our lives. Everything around us seems to function via Adam Smith’s invisible hand. What we lose sight of is the reality of an alienated, commodified existence with its innumerable chains forged by class and property relations
  • Worker productivity is much greater than it was back in 1975, but very little of this increased wealth actually goes to workers themselves. As Chart Two demonstrates, the wages of U.S. manufacturing workers have fallen rapidly during the last three and a half decades as a share of value added in U.S. manufacturing. The median wage of all nonagricultural workers has stagnated over the same period.
  • The “greed is good,” “shop ‘til you drop,” “whoever dies with the most toys wins” ethos that marks free market capitalism is not conducive to genuine human happiness. What it generates in ever-increasing levels—even among its more successful strata—is stress, heart disease, loneliness, depression, and the waste of human potential. “This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism,” Albert Einstein wrote in “Why Socialism?” in volume 1, number 1 of Monthly Review (May 1949).
  • The United States has fully lived up to John Kenneth Galbraith’s observation half a century ago that modern U.S. capitalism generates “private wealth” and “public squalor.”8
  • We face the situation in the next generation of the continued development of tremendous labor-saving technologies, many that are revolutionary in impact. Yet, instead of leading to a higher quality of life for all or most people, these new productive technologies will be deployed primarily to maximize the profits of those atop the system. They will appear, in some respects, to be the enemy of the workers and communities they help to displace. Likewise, in the coming generation, large swaths of our countryside will likely be torn up and developed for tacky residential projects and gated communities, while a good part of our cities and inner-ring suburbs rot. All of this, we are told, is basically unavoidable, the price we pay for having the privilege of living in a free society.
  • The manner in which, during the current Great Recession, the dominant institutions and investors were able to coalesce and demand hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars in public money as a blank check to the largest banks—and then shamelessly disperse multimillion-dollar bonuses to individuals at the apex of those very same corporations now on the public dole—was a striking reminder of the limits of self-government in our political economy. When the Masters of the Universe, as those atop the economic system have been called, need money, when they need bail-outs, when they need the full power of the state, there is no time for debate or inquiry or deliberation. There is no time for the setting of conditions. There is only time to give them exactly what they want. Or else! Egged on by the news media, all responsible people fall in line or face ostracism. As for education and the social services that mark the good society, well, they have to wait in line and hope something is left after the capitalist master is fed. In stagnant times, it is a long wait.
  • Science tells us that, with a continuation of “business as usual,” extermination of humans as well as innumerable other species is the most probable result—and in an extremely short historical period. The absurd thing is that we can’t seem to alter business as usual, even under these dire conditions. Why? Because business as usual is capitalism, which has made the world prey to its own self-expansion. As Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath: “The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die….When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.”14
  • Mere state ownership of key productive forces is not enough to create a socialist society; the people must exercise a sovereign rule over these productive forces and society as a whole, and the society must be organized to promote collective needs.15
  • Sweden under Palme was not a socialist society, in our terms, but rather a corporatist, social democratic one, in which the impossible of impossibles seemed to occur for a short time under fortuitous circumstances: the irreconcilables of capital and labor were apparently reconciled.
  • the main lesson to be learned from the Sweden of left-liberal and social democratic dreams is not that capitalism can be reformed and therefore need not be fundamentally challenged. Instead, the main lesson is that those progressives who aspire to radical social reforms can only hope to have sufficient leverage to win these reforms if the threat of socialism is looming on the horizon. In Sweden’s case: the Soviet Union across the Baltic. The left can expect to achieve most in every respect when the threat it represents is one to be taken seriously.
  • Of course part of the liberal-left’s weakness in U.S. politics is due to the news media, unfavorable election laws, and a number of other factors with which progressives are all too familiar. But a more significant reason for that weakness is that nobody in power fears the liberal-left—and no one should. The liberal-left tends to trip over itself as it establishes its pro-market bona fides for decision makers. “Take us seriously, pretty please; we are not really radicals and certainly not socialists, we want to make your free market system work better, and don’t we have some jolly-good ideas,” they seem to say.
  • From the birth of democracy in antiquity, it has been true that those with property will only concede fundamental rights to those without property when they fear for the very survival of their own privileges. “If there is no struggle,” as Frederick Douglass said in 1857, “there is no progress….Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will….If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”17 People arrive at more radical, revolutionary positions through concrete struggle
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