I cite

Leon de Mattis, "What is communisation?" -- annotated

Components of the communisation thesis (emphasis added). These are annotated as notes for a future essay. Most of my disagreement is with the insurrectionism, the romantic sense of violence and destruction in a death match wherein everyone spontaneously, that is, without mediation, destroys value, wage, state, etc and in the course of this spontaneous, global destruction, achieves unity. It's communism as organism. Not surprisingly: 'the situation decides.' 

Consider this in comparison with Schmitt on the sovereign as the one who decides the exception. It's an inversion, one of total, global determination. The effect is completely messianistic: what sort of situation could decide globally, particularly in the context of a death match? 

1.    Critique of a politics that reinforces the proletariat when the goal of communism is the abolition of the proletariat. 

During the period preceding the crisis of the 1970s and the restructuring, the proletariat’s struggle had a double meaning, no doubt contradictory but ultimately based nonetheless on the same premise. On the one hand, the struggle could pursue immediate objectives, such as an improvement of working conditions, an increase in wages, and social justice. On the other hand, the struggle also had as a result, and sometimes as an objective, the reinforcement of the class of labour relatively to the class of capital, and even, tendentially, the overturning of the bourgeoisie. These two aspects were conflictual, and the antagonisms between the proponents of ‘reform’ and the proponents of ‘revolution’ were permanent. Ultimately, however, the struggle as such could mean either of them. The struggle for immediate advantages and the struggle for future communism were articulated together around the idea that victory could only come through a reinforcement of the working class and its combativity. Needless to say, the debates cutting across the working class were as many divisions between proponents of revolution or reform, of parties, unions or workers’ councils, etc. – that is to say, between leninists, leftists, anarchists, etc. But they shared an experience of struggle where the proletarian class, without being unanimous or even united (which it never has been), was nonetheless a visible social reality in which all workers could easily recognise themselves and with which they could identify themselves.

2.    Analysis of collapse of form of subjective existence of working class in pulverization of the workers' movement.

 What about now? If the debate between ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ has simply disappeared since thirty years, it is because the social basis that gave it meaning has been pulverised. The form which gave a subjective existence to the working class for a century and a half – i.e. the workers’ movement – has collapsed. Parties, unions and left-wing associations are now ‘citizen’ or ‘democratic’ parties, etc., with an ideology borrowed from the French Revolution, that is from the period preceding the workers’ movement. It is however obvious that neither the proletariat nor capitalism have disappeared. So what is missing?

3.    Specification of loss of "possible sense of victory" in context of partial victories secured by institutionalized unions.

At first sight we could of course say that it is the possible sense of victory which has been modified. Without at all idealising previous periods, nor under-estimating retreats, we could say that since the beginning of capitalism, the working class has staged struggles that have translated into real transformations in its relation to capital: on the one hand, through what was concretely achieved – regulation of the working day, wages, etc. – and, on the other hand, through the very organisation of the workers’ movement into parties and unions. Any struggle and any partial victory could take the form of the reinforcement of the proletariat, whereas every defeat could appear as a temporary retreat before the next offensive. It is true that this reinforcement was at the same time a weakening. Partial victories and the institutionalisation of the unions’ role were factors tending to make the communist perspective increasingly more distant. As years went by, this perspective became evermore remote and hypothetical.⁶ Yet the general framework of struggles – notwithstanding all their limits – was the reinforcement of workers against employers.

Eighty people at new encampment by Department of Justice

Over eighty homeowners facing eviction occupied the front lawn of the Department of Justice on Monday, May 20. 

Earlier in the day, heavily armed police blocked the roads. Approximately seventeen people were arrested and there were reports of police tazing activists. 

This evening the atmosphere at the encampment is calm. Following a call distributed through social media, pizza donated by multiple supporters was provided to the occupiers. 

Jail support actions are planned for Tuesday.

Occupy Our Homes: 17 arrested

Homeowners v. banks

Occupy Our Homes at the Department of Justice

Mark Fisher: Suffering With a Smile | The Occupied Times

The good old days of exploitation, where the boss was interested in the worker only to the extent that they produced a commodity which could be sold at a profit, are long gone.  Work then meant the annihilation of subjectivity, your reduction to an impersonal machine-part; it was the price that you paid for time away from work. Now, there is no time away from work, and work is not opposed to subjectivity. All time is entrepreneurial time because we are the commodities, so that any time not spent selling ourselves is wasted time. Hence, like the characters in the film Limitless, we’re always seeking ways to increase the time available to us – via intoxicants, cutting back on sleep, working while we commute … The unemployed do not escape this condition – the simulation tasks that they are now induced to perform in order to qualify for benefit are more than preparations for the futility of paid work, they are already work (for what is so much ‘real’ work if not an act of simulation? You don’t just have to work, you have to be seen working, even when there’s no ‘work’ to do …)

Being exploited is no longer enough. The nature of labour now is such that almost anyone, no matter how menial their position, is required to be seen (over)investing in their work. What we are forced into is not merely work, in the old sense of undertaking an activity we don’t want to perform; no, now we are forced to act as if we want to work. Even if we want to work in a burger franchise, we have to prove that, like reality TV contestants, we really want it. The notorious shift towards affective labour in the Global North means that it is no longer possible to just turn up at work and be miserable. Your misery has to be concealed – who wants to listen to a depressed call centre worker, to be served by a sad waiter, or be taught by an unhappy lecturer?

Yet that’s not quite right. The subjugatory libidinal forces that draw enjoyment from the current cult of work don’t want us to entirely conceal our misery. For what enjoyment is there to be had from exploiting a worker who actually delights in their work? In his sequel to Blade Runner, The Edge of Human, K W Jeter provides an insight into the libidinal economics of work and suffering. One of the novel’s characters answers the question of why, in Blade Runner‘s future world, the Tyrell Corporation bothered developing replicants (androids constructed so that only experts can distinguish them from humans). “Why should the off-world colonists want troublesome, humanlike slaves rather than nice, efficient machines? It’s simple. Machines don’t suffer. They aren’t capable of it.  A machine doesn’t know when it’s being raped. There’s no power relationship between you and a machine. … For the replicant to suffer, to give its owners that whole master-slave energy, it has to have emotions. … . The replicant’s emotions aren’t a design flaw. The Tyrell Corporation put them there. Because that’s what our customers wanted.”

via theoccupiedtimes.org

Detroit’s emergency manager outlines slash and burn “restructuring” plan - World Socialist Web Site

The report begins with a lie, claiming that measures about to be unleashed in Detroit are aimed at improving the “governmental services essential to the public health, safety and welfare of its citizens.” In fact, the aim is to extract every penny possible from the working class to pay back an estimated $9.4 billion in debt, which currently costs the city $246 million to service, or 19.3 percent of the General Fund budget.

Orr’s former law firm, Jones Day, represents some of the same Wall Street banks—including Bank of America and UBS—that have profited from its financial misery.

In the report, Orr paints a dire picture of the financial state of Detroit. Unemployment has tripled since 2000 and is now officially at 18.3 percent. State revenue sharing has fallen by $160 million, or nearly 50 percent from its peak of $334 million in 2002. There has been a 40 percent decline in income tax since 2000, with a loss of $145 million.

These conditions are an indictment of the capitalist system. They point in particular to the devastating impact of the financial crash of 2008, which led to hemorrhaging of the auto industry, a wave of foreclosures and sharp cuts in federal and state aid. But nowhere is there any suggestion that the corporate and financial elite should be made to pay for the catastrophe they wrought. As a hatchet man for the banks, Orr, like Obama and the Republicans in Washington, is seeking to exploit this crisis to further enrich the financial criminals at the top.

According to Orr his plan has three principles. The first is “improving public safety and promoting reinvestment in the city.” These are code words for ridding the city of “undesirable” elements, including large numbers of unemployed and impoverished workers, and making way for the redevelopment plans of multi-billionaires like Little Caesars owner Mike Ilitch and Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert. Already hundreds of low-income and elderly tenants are being evicted from apartments in the downtown area targeted for the development of upscale housing and shopping.

The second principle, according to Orr, is “evaluating and restructuring the City’s long term liabilities.” This means slashing the pensions and medical benefits of tens of thousands of retired city workers and their families. In his report, Orr complains that there are now more retirees, 18,500, collecting benefits, compared to 10,000 active city workers. The emergency manager, he states, plans to “reduce or eliminate certain healthcare costs for both active and retired employees” and “suggest modifications to the [pension] plans…”

The third principle is “evaluating and streamlining the City’s operations,” which entails an acceleration of the plans by Democratic mayor David Bing to downsize the city by eliminating services in areas deemed too poor or under-populated.

The city, Orr writes, has already developed strategies to address what he calls the “surplus land” issue, using three neighborhood categories (steady, transitional and distressed) to determine whether services in these areas will continue. This strategy, which would be incorporated into the comprehensive plan, would include a “coordinated program of foreclosures, demolition, public/private partnerships and targeted investment.”

In a press conference Monday, Orr said that the privatization of trash collection, transportation and other services were “all on the table.” He pointed to nearby Pontiac, Michigan as a model for his plan.

In that city, as the New York Times recently noted, the EM “overhauled labor contracts, sold off city assets and privatized nearly every service Pontiac once provided to citizens…Its Fire Department belongs to a nearby township. The city’s payroll, once numbering more than 600 workers, now amounts to about 50 public employees. Even parking meters have been sold.

via www.wsws.org

California hospital workers vote overwhelmingly to strike - World Socialist Web Site

Last week, 13,000 patient care workers at five University of California (UC) Medical Centers voted by a 97 percent margin in favor of a strike against terms of a new austerity contract. On May 10, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) filed a 10-day strike notice to the UC Office of the President.

via www.wsws.org

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - Salon.com

You talk early in “Who Owns the Future?” about Kodak — about thousand of jobs being destroyed, and Instagram picking up the slack — but with almost no jobs produced. So give us a sense of how that happens and what the result is. It seems like the seed of your book in a way.

Right. Well, I think what’s been happening is a shift from the formal to the informal economy for most people. So that’s to say if you use Instagram to show pictures to your friends and relatives, or whatever service it is, there are a couple of things that are still the same as they were in the times of Kodak. One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same. Instagram wouldn’t work if there weren’t many millions of people using it. And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable. People have to, there’s a constant tending that’s done on a volunteer basis so that people can find each other and whatnot.

So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.

So instead of somebody paying money to get their photo developed, and somebody getting a part of a job, a little fragment of a job, at least, and retirement and all the other things that we’re accustomed to, it works informally now, and intangibly.

Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He’s a friend so I don’t want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.

And you know, that’s all kind of true when you’re young and if you’re not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you’re a person in the West, in the developed world. And then meanwhile this loss, or this shift in the line from what’s formal to what’s informal, doesn’t mean that we’re abandoning what’s formal. I mean, if it was uniform, and we were all entering a socialist utopia or something, that would be one thing, but the formal benefits are accruing at this fantastic rate, at this global record rate to the people who own the biggest computer that’s connecting all the people.

So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.

Right, and also I think part of what you’re saying too is that it’s still in most ways a formal economy in that the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can’t pay his rent with cultural capital that’s replaced it.

Yeah, well, people will say you can find a place to crash. People who tour right now will find a couch to crash on. But, you know, this is the difference … I’m not saying that there aren’t ever benefits, like yeah, sometimes you can find a couch. But as I put it in the book, you have to sing fo

via www.salon.com

Mind the Masses: A Hobart and William Smith Student Collaboration

Very proud of the students in my seminar on crowd theory. They've compiled their research papers into a book. The chapters span from critical discussions of early crowd theory, investigations into contemporary networked crowds, crowds and urban space, crowd theory and affect theory, and the continuing importance of concepts from crowd theory. 

You can Download Mind the Masses_eBook .

Is Capitalism Dying? - Forbes

Big corporations now wield unprecedented political and economic power. A few have ridden the shift toward online commerce to superpower status. Many more have profited by replacing expensive US labor with cheaper overseas workers and software. The end result is that the inequality of wealth and income has grown dramatically not just among households but also across the divide separating large corporations from small businesses.

Studies have shown that inequality saps growth. Combine an unequal playing field with political control over the institutions meant to level it and you get a stagnant, sclerotic economy that wastes potential and allows select politically connected participants to extract unjustified rents. And the thing is, we got here almost unnoticeably, by the natural accretion of small competitive advantages over time.

So now we have the most powerful and cohesive organizations on Earth devoted to the pursuit of profit above all else and frequently at the expense of public interest. And their unprecedented wealth threatens to neuter democratic checks on their behavior. In theory, corporations are still responsible to their shareholders. In practice, they’re beholden to no one but boards of directors handpicked by senior managers.

Free markets respond to supply and demand, and in the US the ready alternatives to domestic labor have placed it in an especially poor bargaining position relative to capital. It’s possible the trend will slow as outsourcing wanes. In 14th century Europe, the bubonic plague temporarily boosted wages and reduced agricultural rents. Barring a similar game-changer, it’s hard to be optimistic about the spending power of workers who double as consumers.

So how can we wonder if the economic system is dying when its standard-bearers have never been stronger? Because the system depends on level, transparent markets to work well, whereas the growing power and wealth disparities it is generating pretty much guarantee the opposite.

Which leads us back to those other countries where the economic system doesn’t seem headed for the same existential crisis.

One thing they all have in common is that their income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is well below that of the US. In fact, the Scandinavian and German-speaking countries that consistently score well on a variety of business and quality-of-life surveys have some of the lowest inequality scores among developed nations. Not coincidentally, social mobility in those economies has clearly surpassed that in the US, so that the Danish Dream and the German Dream are now much more credible than what’s on offer in America.

via www.forbes.com

Wed 5.01.13 | May Day Meanings | Against the Grain: A Program about Politics, Society and Ideas

Listen to this Program:

Download program audio (mp3, 48.32 Mbytes)

What do you think of when May Day comes around? Aziz Choudry, Jodi Dean, Chris Dixon, Max Haiven, and Richard Peet weigh in with their reflections. Also featured are clips from a Pacifica Radio Archives documentary that explores the origins of International Workers' Day and the labor firebrands and struggles the day commemorates. It includes archival May Day reports from Vietnam, Africa, and elsewhere.

via www.againstthegrain.org

Huey Newton: the correct handling of a revolution (1967)

The Black masses are handling the resistance incorrectly. When the 
brothers in East Oakland, having learned their resistance fighting 
from Watts, amassed the people in the streets, threw bricks and 
Molotov cocktails to destroy property and create disruption, they were 
herded into a small area by the gestapo police and immediately con­
tained by the brutal violence of the oppressor's storm troops. Although 
this manner of resistance is sporadic, short-lived, and costly, it has been 
transmitted across the country to all the ghettos of the Black nation. 

The identity of the first man who threw a Molotov cocktail is not 
known by the masses, yet they respect and imitate his action. In the 
same way, the actions of the party will be imitated by the people-if 
the people respect these activities. 

The primary job of the party is to provide leadership for the peo­
ple. It must teach by words and action the correct strategic methods 
of prolonged resistance. When the people learn that it is no longer 
advantageous for them to resist by going into the streets in large num­
bers, and when they see the advantage in the activities of the guerrilla 
warfare method, they will quickly follow this example. 

But first, they must respect the party which is transmitting this mes­
sage. When the vanguard group destroys the machinery of the oppres­
sor by dealing with him in small groups of three and four, and then 
escapes the might of the oppressor, the masses will be impressed and 
more likely to adhere to this correct strategy.

...

The main function of the party is to awaken the people and teach 
them the strategic method of resisting a power structure which is pre­
pared not only to combat with massive brutality the people's resistance 
but to annihilate totally the Black population. If it is learned by the 
power structure that Black people have "X" number of guns in their 
possession, that information will not stimulate the power structure to 
prepare itself with guns; it is already prepared. 
The end result of this revolutionary education will be positive for 
Black people in their resistance, and negative for the power structure 
in its oppression because the party always exemplifies revolutionary 
defiance. If the party does not make the people aware of the tools and 
methods of liberation, there will be no means by which the people 
can mobilize.
The relationship between the vanguard party and the masses is a 
secondary relationship. The relationship among the members of the 
vanguard party is a primary relationship. If the party machinery is 
to be effective it is important that the members of the party group 
maintain a face-to-face relationship with each other. It is impossi­
ble to put together functional party machinery or programs without 
this direct relationship. To minimize the danger of Uncle Tom in­
formers and opportunists the members of the vanguard group should 
be tested revolutionaries. 

The main purpose of the vanguard group should be to raise the con­
sciousness of the masses through educational programs and other activ­
ities.

The Ghetto Is Public Policy - Atlantic Mobile

I spent the last week interviewing men and women, and the children of men and women, who bought their homes on contract in Chicago during the 1950s. Contract buying sprang up in Chicago after the federal government effectively refused to insure mortgages for the vast majority of black homeowners, even as it was insuring the mortgages of white homeowners, and encouraged banks to redline black and integrated neighborhoods. The import of mid-20th century housing policy -- along with private actions (riots, block-busting, contract lending, covenants) -- has been devastating for African Americans. 

Buying on contract meant that you made a down-payment to a speculator. The speculator kept the deed and only turned it over to you after you'd paid the full value of the house -- a value determined by the speculator. In the meantime, you were responsible for monthly payments, keeping the house up, and taking care of any problems springing from inspection. If you missed one payment, the speculator could move to evict you and keep all the payments you'd made. Building up equity was impossible, unless -- through some Herculean effort -- you managed to pay off the entire contract. Very few people did this. The system was set up to keep them from doing it, and allow speculators to get rich through a cycle of evicting and flipping.

I spent some time talking to a 90-year-old man who'd come up from Mississippi. His family had been reduced to sharecropping after the county government took their land. "In Mississippi, there was no law," he told me. There was no law in Chicago either. The gentleman purchased his home for $26,000. He later found out that the deed-holder had purchased the same home -- only weeks before -- for $9,000. 

Above is a picture I took of a chart showing how the scheme could work. The chart was produced by activist lawyers in the late 60s trying to demonstrate the effects of contract buying. There are four columns "Documented Price Paid By Speculator," "Documented Price Change To Negro Buyer," "Markup," "Approximate Additional Interest," and "Total Additional Charges." In that chart you can literally see black wealth leaving one neighborhood and migrating to another. It was not just legal. It was the whole point.

Jim Crow -- Northern or Southern -- is usually rendered to us as an archaic system in which people irrationally decide to separate from each other just based on skin color. There's a reason that so many of us remember Martin Luther King's line about little white boys and little black boys holding hands. It's comforting to us. Less comforting is that fact that Jim Crow amounted to the legal pilfering of resources from the black communities to advantage white people across generations. In Mississippi, it meant the right to reduce someone to sharecropping, or to benefit politically from their census numbers while not giving them any representation, or to tax them for services they did not enjoy equal access to. In Chicago, it meant the legalized theft of black wealth by white agents. 

It is very hard to accept this -- the wealth gap is not a mistake. It is the logical outcome of policy and democratic will. From the streets of Cicero on up, the point was to imprison black people in the black belt and then exploit them. The goal was pursued through public policy, private action, and open terrorism. The goal was accomplished.

If you want to know more, see the reading list here, specifically Beryl Sa

via m.theatlantic.com

The failure of capitalism - World Socialist Web Site

Spain now has a Depression-level unemployment rate of 27 percent, with youth unemployment at 57 percent. More than six million Spanish workers are unemployed. In France the total number of job seekers who had not worked at all in the previous month rose to a record 3.2 million. Across the European Union 26 million people, representing 12 percent of the workforce, are unemployed.

In Britain, economic growth in the last quarter was just 0.3 percent. While this prompted a sigh of relief in official circles because Britain had escaped a “triple dip” recession, the fact remains that the British economy is still 2.6 percent smaller than when the crisis began.

Britain has experienced its deepest and most prolonged fall in gross domestic product in a century. In comparison, at the same stage—some 51 months into the crisis—economic growth had begun to recover during the Great Depression, the downturn in the 1970s and the recession of the early 1990s.

What is more, the European economic outlook is worsening. In a speech delivered last week, International Monetary Fund deputy managing director David Lipton warned that Europe faced the risk of a “stagnation scenario”. “Investment is declining and unemployment continues to rise [and] financial markets remain fragmented.”

The European situation, however, is only the starkest expression of the state of global capitalism as a whole. Growth in the US economy is an anaemic 2.5 percent, while unemployment remains at near-Depression levels, amid rising poverty and widening social inequality. While the Federal Reserve pours money into the financial markets, boosting corporate profits, real incomes for the mass of the population continue to fall.

For the bourgeois media and its talking heads and pundits, the ever-worsening social position of the broad mass of the population is just another expression of the “new normal.” None of them ever feels the need to explain why, amid the greatest scientific and technological advances in history, growing portions of the population are being impoverished.

But the significance of such a development was elaborated by Karl Marx more than 160 years ago. Such a phenomenon, he explained, shows that “the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law.”

At a recent forum in London, organised by the Bank of England, IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard outlined what he called the lessons from the crisis. It was a confession of intellectual and political bankruptcy.

Blanchard admitted to being completely blindsided by the eruption of the financial crisis in 2008, believing such things would no longer take place. He had failed to understand the “plumbing” of the financial system and did not take into account the interconnectedness of the world economy, which led to a collapse of global trade in 2009.

Furthermore, after admitting that “the traditional monetary and fiscal tools are just not good enough to deal with the very specific problems in the financial system,” he said he was unsure about whether so-called macro prudential tools to regulate the financial system could actually work.

Blanchard is certainly not alone. Last September, in the wake of the US Federal Reserve’s decision to expand its policy of quantitative easing, Richard Fisher, a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, admitted that “nobody really knows what will work to get the economy back on course” and that no central bank “has the experience of successfully navigating a return home from the place where we now find ourselves.”

The same bewilderment was on display at a meeting of top-level economists convened by the IMF after its spring meeting in Washington last month. Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof likened the economic crisis to a cat that had climbed a tree, did not know how to come down, and was now about to fall. Another economist chimed in that after five years it perhaps was time to get the cat out of the tree, while Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz explained: “There is no good economic theory that explains why the cat is still up in the tree.”

The bankruptcy of medieval scholasticism and of the feudal social order that underlay it was expressed in the discussions over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

If the modern day theologians of capitalism and their discussions of cats up trees appear just as ridiculous, it is not a result of their personal failings. In the final analysis, they are unable to offer any explanation for the deepest crisis in three quarters of a century because the socio-economic order they defend has become antagonistic to any further historical progress.

While the ideologists of the ruling class seized upon the collapse of the USSR to proclaim the end of socialism, the economists and media pundits say nothing about the failure of capitalism.

However, just under the surface of their bewilderment lies the growing fear that this economic breakdown will produce a tremendous upsurge in social and class struggles. Recently a major article in Time magazine noted that Marx had theorized that “the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the world’s masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few causing economic crises … A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right.”

via www.wsws.org

Union Membership Drops Despite Job Growth - NYTimes.com

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the total number of union members fell by 400,000 last year, to 14.3 million, even though the nation’s overall employment rose by 2.4 million. The percentage of workers in unions fell to 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2011, the bureau found in its annual report on union membership. That brought unionization to its lowest level since 1916, when it was 11.2 percent, according to a study by two Rutgers economists, Leo Troy and Neil Sheflin.

Labor specialists cited several reasons for the steep one-year decline in union membership. Among the factors were new laws that rolled back the power of unions in Wisconsin, Indiana and other states, the continued expansion by manufacturers like Boeing and Volkswagen in nonunion states and the growth of sectors like retail and restaurants, where unions have little presence.

“These numbers are very discouraging for labor unions,” said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “It’s a time for unions to stop being clever about excuses for why membership is declining, and it’s time to figure out how to devise appeals to the workers out there.”

Labor unions have boasted of their political successes in helping re-elect President Obama and in helping Democrats pick up seats in Congress.

But the figures announced by the bureau point to grave problems for the future of organized labor. The portion of private sector workers in unions fell to just 6.6 percent last year, from 6.9 percent in 2011, causing some labor specialists to question whether private sector unions were sinking toward irrelevance. Private sector union membership peaked at around 35 percent in the 1950s.

The report showed particular drops in union membership in two groups where unions have long been strong: local government employees and manufacturing workers.

Union membership showed sharp drops in Wisconsin, which passed a law in 2011 curbing the collective bargaining rights of many public employees, and in Indiana, which enacted a right-to-work law last February that may have prompted many workers to drop their union membership.

Such laws prohibit requiring employees at unionized workplaces to pay union dues or fees. The bureau’s report showed that union membership fell by 13 percent last year in Wisconsin and by 18 percent in Indiana — both unusually large numbers for a single year.

via www.nytimes.com

New report finds increase in social inequality during US “recovery” - World Socialist Web Site

Basing itself on US Census data, the Pew report found that the poorest 93 percent of US households saw, on average, a four percent decline in their net worth during these two years of stock market boom, while the wealthiest seven percent saw their net worth increase by an average of 28 percent.

The data give the lie to the administration’s claim that the rise in stock prices since the 2007 financial meltdown is part of an economic recovery. In fact, it merely gives expression to a vast transfer of wealth from the working class to the financial elite.

Household wealth is measured by adding all assets—such as homes, cars, real estate, retirement accounts, stocks and other financial holdings—and subtracting from this all debts—such as home mortgages, car loans, medical debt, credit card debt and student loans.

The upper 7 percent of households saw their aggregate share of overall national wealth increase to 63 percent in 2011, up from 56 percent in 2009. Put in another way, the mean wealth of households in this more affluent group was almost 24 times that of other households in 2011, whereas in 2009 it was only 18 times more.

Breaking down the figures for those in the bottom 93 percent, the poll finds that:

• A shocking 18 percent of the population has a net worth of zero or less (with debts meeting or exceeding all assets). The mean wealth of this group declined from −$34,777 in 2009 to −35,472 in 2011.

• The biggest percentage decline was in the 9 percent of households who have a net worth of between $1 and $4,999. They saw their mean net worth decline from $2,016 to $1,899, a fall of 6 percent.

• There was a generally constant average decline of between four and five percent for all households with net worths between $5,000 and $499,999.

Even among high-net-worth households there was a stratification, with more of the increase in net worth during the so-called recovery accruing to the wealthier half of this group. This is revealed in the fact that the median net worth of the top bracket actually fell—to $836,033 in 2011 from $889,275 in 2009, even though the mean increased.

The Pew report comments: “The median refers to the midpoint of a group—in this case, households at the 93.25 percentile of wealth (halfway between the 86.5th percentile and the 100th percentile). A simultaneous rise in the mean and decline in the median implies that aggregate net worth increased only among households above the median—that is, the 8 million households with net worth of $836,033 or more in 2011.”

The Pew report argues that the main factor in the polarization of wealth in this period is the divergence of stocks and other financial instruments—buoyed with the full force of the Federal Reserve and government bailouts—and the values of homes. For most US households, the most valuable asset is the home itself. Millions of families saw the value of this asset collapse during the housing crisis, with little if any recovery since.

Wealthier households own far more financial assets, including stocks, bonds and mutual funds. In households with a net worth over $500,000, 65 percent of their wealth comes from financial holdings and 17 percent comes from their home. In contrast, in households with net worth of less than $500,000, just 33 percent of their wealth comes from financial assets and 50 percent comes from their home.

The 2008 crash led to an even further concentration of financial assets in the hands of the wealthy. Only 13 percent of households with net worth below $500,000 owned stocks and mutual fund shares in 2011, down from 16 percent in 2009.

via www.wsws.org

The left we are. The left we need.

I came across the following passage in a Slate piece about the failure of gun control legislation to pass the Senate. The question was whether it was Obama's fault, his failure to lead, or whether it was the fault of partisan politics. 

In fact, the type of president who could work or cajole the Senate in this political environment would probably never have been elected in the first place. 

The passage made me think about dilemmas on the left. The kind of left that we need for successful communist struggle today is the kind that can't appear. The conditions that make it necessary are the conditions that make it impossible.

If leaders emerge, they are slapped down. If they don't emerge we are stagnant. When some try to unify our struggles, they are treated with suspicion, resisted and rejected -- even as the multiplicity of singular struggles fail to make any substantial headway. The automatic reflex in the face of any appeals to unity is to criticize:  there isn't a strong working class movement, so there is no ground for unity; any unity is or will be exclusionary; any success will only result in another form of domination. 

It also seems as if people don't know how to follow.  Instead, we are enjoined to have our own opinions, be independent, be winners. Among intellectuals this is a particular hazard -- especially for academics who are paid to judge, evaluate, and grade, who function in reputation economies that value criticism, pedantry, and iconoclasm, who construe disagreement as the sine qua non of independent thinking, especially when it is accompanied by an injunction to historicize and compare. It's odd, this way of thinking that considers itself so willing take risks even as it criticizes ideas and suggestions because they risk X, Y, or whatever.

The only ideas that seem to escape unscathed are those that conform to the expectations of communicative capitalism:  do it yourself, rely on technology, go local (small is beautiful), smash and hack (as if nobody learned that the capitalist economy can eliminate trillions of dollars of wealth and still keep going).

I'm looking forward to Historical Materialism (and Left Forum) because it seems like we may be building the critical mass necessary to break free of this deadening individualism and figure out what pulling together will entail and how to go about it. I'm going to listen for organizing ideas (not because I am an organizer, I am not, but because I would like to be able to do my part in building support for them). 

After talking to a friend who spent a lot of time with the Sandanistas, I started wondering about what it would look like to organize young women, single mothers in communist struggle. What would that look like? It seems a good place for unifying with teachers and nurses (who have been highly visible in their organized struggles). It would probably make health care, nutrition, education, and housing into core issues (and so look for protest opportunities on these fronts). And it could suggest the development of a communist infrastructure of clinics, farms, schools, and anti-eviction alliances/public housing/rent controlled apartments. A cool advantage here is that recognizing that women's politics are about a lot more than sex (birth control, abortion, etc) can attract and radicalize a lot of women who are considered so narrowly in mainstream Democratic politics. 

Detroit emergency manager proclaims power to end collective bargaining - World Socialist Web Site

Just last week, Orr declared a new contract would be imposed on 900 firefighters effective July 1. Although no specifics were released about the contract, Orr intends to impose deep cuts on both the employees of the city and the population as a whole in order to pay off the wealthy bondholders and banks that hold Detroit’s debt and derivative contracts.

While the unions have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to impose concessions on their members, Orr and the political establishment are well aware of workers’ anger and opposition to additional cuts.

The significance of the latest communication to MERC is to preempt any legal appeals by the unions. It is in line with the notice sent by Mayor Dave Bing earlier in the month to the same agency demanding the revocation of the authority of state arbitration panels to hold hearings or issue rulings on appeals made by Detroit police unions and those of emergency medical technicians.

Outlining his contempt for state laws, Orr declared that because Detroit is in receivership, he is not subject to Michigan’s Public Employment Relations Act, a 1947 law that legalized collective bargaining between unions and local governments and school districts. He claimed that the city under his management is “authorized to advance this position and seek...any and all relief available by law.” This reference to the law is specifically to the emergency manager law, which he claims to supersede any other laws in existence.

This EM law, Public Act (PA) 436, was pushed through by the Republican-controlled state legislature after voters defeated a similar measure in November. The law—which received bipartisan support from state treasurer Andy Dillon—is being used by Wall Street to run roughshod over any state laws or city charters, which in any way present an obstacle to gutting pensions, privatization and selling off of public assets.

The installation of an emergency manager in Detroit is a thoroughly reactionary measure, which is incompatible with any democratic norms. The same dictatorial measures are being imposed by the global banks in Greece, where the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank are seeking to abolish the right to public education, which is currently enshrined in the Greek constitution.

The measures to be taken under Orr’s authority include the slashing of budgets, reopening of labor agreements to unilaterally impose concessions and shutting down or privatizing city departments and services. They have one purpose: to enhance and enrich the wealthy speculators and bondholders. The financial elite has already made hundreds of millions from the crushing level of debt the city incurred as a result of decades of industrial downsizing, federal and state cuts and the loss of tax revenue following the crash of 2008.

The systematic assault on collective bargaining is part of a deeply antidemocratic program carried out by the ruling oligarchy, but it could never have come close to the measure of success it has had without the profound degeneration of the unions themselves. Organizations like the United Auto Workers, the Detroit Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees have become incorporated into the fabric of capitalist society. Instead of defending the interests of its membership, union officials have a vested interest in ensuring the success of the employers against the workers. These organizations have become so discredited in the minds of workers that they are seen as just as much on the other side as their bosses.

via www.wsws.org

Fellow Travelers | Jacobin

The prospect for left regroupment was one of my main motivations for founding Jacobin. Yet the watchwords of this project have seldom appeared in our pages. It’s finally time to make a call for joint action on the Left with an eye towards the unification of the many socialist organizations with similar political orientations into one larger body. This idea has been trotted out for generations, but new agents and desperate necessity can finally make it a reality.

If it comes to fruition we’d see the convergence of American socialists committed to non-sectarian organizing under the auspices of an overarching democratic structure. This in itself may not seem like a significant undertaking — we’re only talking about a few groups and a few thousand people — but we shouldn’t let those humble beginnings obscure the potential that a fresh start for the organized left holds.

For one, a larger, more centralized organization would offer a powerful pole of attraction for both the newly politicized and those who have spent years on the Left’s margins. By allowing open factions, such an outlet could incorporate activists from different strands of the socialist tradition and foster a pluralistic culture in which comradely debate and open disagreement, far from crippling action, helps build a political program.

There would be less glamorous benefits, too. A well-run administrative apparatus could consist of dozens of paid staffers and organizers committed to work across the nation. New technology will connect activists who live close to each other and immediately put them to work in local struggles, as well as educational and cultural outreach, all under the same banner.

The strength of the Left is in organization — with it, we could one day contend for power. Without it, Left Forum might as well be Comic Con. An internal restart seems like the only good starting point for radicals looking to making an impact on American political life. I hope to contribute to that process more substantively in time. For now, the quality of our young activists should leave us confident about the future.

We can also take comfort in the memory that small groups of organized militants have made a difference before, paving the way for mass action and sweeping structural change. In the short-term, a new organization would focus on anti-austerity and work hand-in-hand with liberal allies who want to see the welfare state rebuilt. But socialists will not merely be anonymous members of a future liberal-left coalition; they’ll seek to push those struggles beyond liberalism’s limits. This means identifying capitalism as a social system that benefits a minority, and openly organizing in civil society to challenge it. It means building its own institutions and organs of class power and presenting real alternatives.

via jacobinmag.com