I cite

Venezuela: 'Capitalism is no longer an option' | Green Left Weekly

In Venezuela's October 7 presidential elections, the candidate leading the polls — President Hugo Chavez — is standing on a platform of pushing a socialist transformation.

Leaked documents show his main opponent, Henri Capriles Radonski, has a neoliberal agenda. But publicly he presents himself as a social democrat who supports pro-poor policies such as the Chavez government's health and education social programs.

Luis Hernandez Navarro wrote in the September 23 Guardian: “In Venezuela, to be a rightist is out of fashion.”

“As is shown in several opinion polls,” he writes, “Venezuela has given birth to a new political culture where the socialist ideal is widely accepted. Half the population agrees with the idea of building a socialist country, against 29% who oppose it.”

Hernandez Navarro pointed out: “The strength of this new political culture, and of the strides towards social inclusion made by the Bolivarian government, make things quite difficult for Capriles … He can't oppose this ideal in public without damaging his chances of victory.”

On the other side, Chavez is standing for a drastic deepening of the process of change — in a context where, despite the changes, huge sections of the economy and state remain under the control of big business.

via www.greenleft.org.au

Video from my talk at Trent University -- The Communist Horizon

 

Spanish Police Crack Down on Protesters Surrounding the Parliament

Anti-austerity rage intensified in Madrid, as protesters surrounded the parliament Tuesday night in a sign of mounting frustration towards the right-wing government. Their demands included the resignation of top officials with new elections, the halt to austerity measures, and the rewriting of the Spanish Constitution. The protesters charged the government with theft and criminal activity for implementing harsh austerity measures, hiking taxes, record unemployment and allowing mass evictions of unemployed families on a daily basis.

As thousands converged outside the gates of parliament, hundreds of police clashed with protesters, detaining and beating many. Organizers of the action were harassed and intimidated by the police weeks before September 25th. Activists were detained, assembly meetings broken up and a cultural center was raided and shut down.

The Spanish government, with help of the mainstream media, hyped the event as a possible coup d'etate. Nearly 2,000 police officers were deployed to prevent the protesters from reaching the parliament. Despite the main unions withdrawing their support, it's estimated close to 10,000 people attended. The call to surround the congress brought out Spaniards from all walks of life despite police repression to prevent activists from mobilizing.

On numerous occasions, the police pushed and shoved us as we tried to film. Other journalists were beaten and injured by rubber bullets.

via therealnews.com

The ‘democratization of the stock market’ that never happened | Economic Policy Institute

The wealthiest 1 percent of households has never held less than one-third of all stock wealth. Since 1989, the top fifth of households consistently held about 90 percent of stock wealth, leaving approximately 10 percent for the bottom four-fifths of households. This figure shows that the vast “democratization of the stock market” since the 1980s—wherein the masses gained significant shares of the market through investment vehicles such as mutual funds, IRAs, and 401(k)s—never actually happened.

via www.epi.org

Thousands Surround Spanish Parliament in Bid to "Occupy Congress" and Stop Austerity

MARIA CARRION: Well, as you, as your viewers and listeners have been able to see, it’s a very serious situation here in Spain. This is just the latest of many, many protests that we have been having here in Spain, in the last year, especially, and there will be many more coming. People have lost faith in government. People have lost faith in the main institutions. And we are facing 27 billion euros in social spending cuts. Every week, the government unveils a series of new measures that affect primarily education and health and salaries and the welfare of Spanish people. And as we saw at the top of the hour, Greece is really an example of what’s coming our way, and that’s why I think people are so enraged and so worried, because they see that none of the measures imposed on Greece on in Portugal or in Ireland are having any sort of effect on the economy, on people’s welfare, on employment. And so, I think people are saying we do not want to head in that same direction.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Maria Carrion, you’ve spoken also about some of the effects on people already with the austerity measures in place, quite apart from what might happen tomorrow. Can you talk in particular about housing and food?

MARIA CARRION: Housing is a big issue because a lot of Spaniards ended up buying houses or homes back during the main housing boom. And what has happened since then is that, first of all, they bought these houses at very inflated prices, as happened in many other places. But here we have over 25 percent of unemployment, so as people began to lose their jobs and as the housing payments went up, the mortgages went up, more and more people lost their homes. There has been a repossession of many, many, many homes. And in Spain, there’s something very unique to our system, which is that even once your—the bank repossesses your home, and even when you’re evicted from your home and you lose your home, you still are liable for the entire debt, which means that not only are people on the street or having to, you know, find alternative housing and pay for it, but they also owe hundreds of thousands to the banks. This is aggravated also by the fact that most of these banks are being bailed out right now to the tune of 100 million euros, which is about $130 million—I’m sorry, 130 billion euros, which is $130 billion, because of their irresponsible lending practices.

So, on the one hand, you have all these repossessions and a social movement born out of this that is trying to stop these evictions and these repossessions and negotiate debt with the banks in the name of the families; and on the other hand, you also have a tremendous amount of poverty and hunger. Now we have 22 percent of Spanish households live in poverty, but about 11.5 million people are at risk of poverty. This means that a lot of people are having to go to food banks, where they never had to go for help. A lot of these people are very embarrassed. And, in fact, food banks have had to change the way they look, so that people are not seen to be going in and out by their neighbors. They’ve removed a lot of the signs saying "food bank," and people know where they are. But they look more like supermarkets to sort of normalize the situation. So, there’s a lot of hunger now, as well, and a lot of people at risk for, you know, homelessness. And then you have—you know, education has gone up, and you have the undocumented immigrants who no longer have any rights to healthcare. So, you have just a situation of poverty, increased poverty in Spain, increasing poverty. You’re seeing that that’s the way that Portugal and Greece have gone, as well.

And then, on the other hand, you have the loss in faith—of faith in the institutions. Our finance minister, Luis de Gu

via www.democracynow.org

Liza Featherstone in Dissent Magazine - "Empowerment" Against Democracy: Tinseltown and the Teachers' Unions -

Won’t Back Down is liberal Hollywood’s second blast of gas on what was once a bugbear of the Right: the badness of public schools and teachers’ unions, and the magic bullet of hope offered by privatization. The first was Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for Superman. Barnz’s movie, featuring great actresses Viola Davis and Gyllenhall, is far more watchable than Guggenheim’s, but the fantasy world it inhabits is exactly the same. Its release, just on the heels of the Chicago teachers’ strike, feels eerily timely, as its anti-union talking points are just the same as those of Rahm Emanuel and the monied interests of Chicago.

The film’s presentation of the social context is heartbreakingly accurate—poor kids like Jamie’s daughter, Malia, don’t get the education they deserve. But otherwise, the movie presents a Mad Tea Party view of urban education, and of social change itself. In Won’t Back Down, and in the bipartisan neoliberal fairytale that passes for education reform, teachers and parents are good, but the institutions that represent them—unions, the state—are bad. “Empowerment” is desirable, even ecstatic—“Be the change you want to see!” Jamie crows to a throng of cheering parents—but democracy is the enemy. Getting rid of representative government and calling in a private entity to handle things, in our current Opposite Day political moment, represents a glorious triumph of people power. The “parent trigger” invites parents to use their vote to give up their vote—that is, to be enormously powerful for one short moment of direct democracy, which they will use to dispose, in the long run, with the “public” part of public school, and thus with any actual power over their children’s education.

Jamie leads the fictional takeover because her daughter, who is dyslexic, can’t read. Yet not a word is said in the movie about the need for more services and teachers for special needs kids. The school is depicted as depressing and shabby—what about the need for more resources? What about all the extra support poor children need? We see kids acting out and falling asleep in class—where are the social workers to help those kids?

Never mind those wonky details. The problem, we’re repeatedly led to believe, is the teachers’ union. But if unions were to blame for failing schools, wouldn’t unionized public schools in Princeton or Scarsdale also suck?

Hollywood hasn’t been known to let logic get in the way of a good story, and neither do education reformers. Facts are similarly irrelevant. In the movie, Malia’s teacher—a repellent timeserver who locks the little girl in a closet as punishment—can’t be fired because of the union. There are more than a few problems with this scenario. Outside of Tinseltown and the corporate reform imaginary, union members do get fired. In fact, according to data from National Center for Education Statistics, there is no correlation between teacher dismissal rates and union membership. In Massachusetts, where almost all public school teachers belong to a union, the firing rate for experienced teachers is nearly twice that in North Carolina, where just 2.3 percent of the teaching force is unionized.

via dissentmagazine.org

Interview with ‘Bifo’: Reactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times | Critical Legal Thinking

In my view, ima­gin­a­tion is the cent­ral field of social trans­form­a­tion in the age of semiocapital.[2] Capitalist dom­in­a­tion is sus­tained by the per­sist­ence of men­tal cages that are struc­tured by the dog­mas of growth, com­pet­i­tion and rent. The epi­stem­o­lo­gical dic­tat­or­ship of this model – its grip on the dif­fer­ent spheres of human know­ledge – is the very ground of power.  So the task of trans­form­a­tion requires us to ima­gine and make sens­ible a dif­fer­ent con­cat­en­a­tion of social forms, know­ledge, and tech­no­logy. Of course, ima­gin­a­tion will never be enough on its own.  We need to build forms of social solid­ar­ity that are cap­able of re-​​activating the social body after the long period of its isol­a­tion and sub­jug­a­tion to com­pet­it­ive aggress­ive­ness.  Solid­ar­ity – in con­trast to this aggress­ive­ness – is based on empathy, on the bod­ily per­cep­tion of the pres­ence of the other.

This word, solid­ar­ity, is a cru­cial word in the lan­guage of our move­ments but it needs to be bet­ter under­stood.  What does solid­ar­ity mean, exactly? In gen­eral, we use the word in an eth­ical or polit­ical sense but this does not allow us to grasp its inner mean­ing. Solid­ar­ity, in my view, has to do with psychic and emo­tional rela­tion­ships between liv­ing bod­ies.  When we see that solid­ar­ity has broken down in our daily lives , the form that it takes is usu­ally not polit­ical. Rather, it is an exper­i­ence of dis-​​conjunction, a break­ing down of empath­etic bonds between liv­ing beings.  The vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion of com­mu­nic­a­tion, the pre­car­iz­a­tion of work, and a range of other con­tem­por­ary phe­nom­ena, have dis­con­nec­ted our capa­city to feel empathy towards each other. In my opin­ion, this is the main prob­lem of our time.  Build­ing and sus­tain­ing solid­ar­ity has to be much more than a polit­ical pro­ject. It is about react­iv­at­ing the sen­tience of the social body much more than it is about polit­ical organ­iz­a­tion. Do you see what I mean? Ulti­mately, what we have is a prob­lem of ther­apy, which, in my par­lance, does not imply a pro­cess of re-​​connecting, or redu­cing lan­guage, beha­vior, or feel­ings to estab­lished norms. For me, therapy implies a pro­cess of re-​​activating empathy between liv­ing organ­isms. This empathy is the found­a­tion of the solid­ar­ity we need today.

via criticallegalthinking.com

Astra Taylor on OWS. Beyond The Choir:: Infinitely More Than Nothing

That doesn't mean I've repressed my critical faculties where Occupy in concerned: I still disagree with many movement shibboleths, from the unwavering faith in consensus to the general antagonism towards the state (I'm not an anarchist). I'm unconvinced that open, amorphous, demandless organizing is the way to go and I would not cry if I never got to "twinkle" my fingers again. But my criticisms are rooted in hours of meetings and phone calls and endless email chains—and, ultimately, in astonished admiration that people all over the country have given up so much of themselves, of their finite time and energy, to such a thankless project.

In the process, Occupy has stripped me of the self-righteousness and surety that comes with being a spectator. The comforting certainty of staying on the sidelines is gone. Standing at a remove, it's easy to believe you can see everything that is wrong with Occupy and make grand proclamations about what it should be doing. At a distance it all seems crystal clear, but as you move nearer to what is actually happening the limits of a remote perspective come into focus. From afar, it's tempting to treat the movement as a monolith (Occupy should advocate for full-employment or focus on overturning Citizens United, people like to advise). Up close, what you see is a bunch of individuals spending precious nights and weekends trying to call attention to and organize against economic injustice with the limited tools and skills at their disposal. They are just regular people—young old, unemployed and overworked, students and teachers—who are fed up enough to take the risk of trying to bring about something new. They are not some special category of human beings who have a duty to save the world, nor are they professionals who are paid to advocate for reform. They are us. Any demands or condemnations directed at Occupy are, ultimately, demands and condemnations we should be directing at ourselves.

In my experience, those who criticize Occupy most vociferously from the sideline are ostensibly sympathetic. In conversation, in print, or on their Facebook walls they chastise the movement for a million reasons, but above all for being too utopian. They dismiss the emphasis on direct democracy and the anarchist desire to build a better society in the here and now. And they are full of advice: Don't we know our analysis of A, B, and C is wrong for X, Y, and Z reasons? That we need to clarify our message and appeal to the middleclass and crib moves from the Tea Party? More and more, I'm convinced these critics are the real romantics, waiting for the utopia of a perfect movement, free of rough edges, impeccable in its analysis, and guaranteed of success, to sweep them off their feet. In contrast, people who take the leap into Occupy are the realists; anarchists, despite their reputation to the contrary, tend to be pragmatic. They take an honest look at what actually exists around them and make the most of it, accepting the fact that people are complicated,  that the way to achieve profound political change is not clear, but that we must move forward nonetheless, adapting our thinking and our strategy along the way. It would be wonderful to be united around a single message, to reach the middle class, and be promised success in overturning Citizens United or eliminating joblessness, but the left is so battered and broken at the moment that you may as well be waiting for the Republicans to disavow electoral politics or the arctic ice to spontaneously refreeze. Better to begin where we are than not begin at all.

via www.beyondthechoir.org

The Way CEOs Get Paid Is a Crock

It's not as if a CEO is not paid "enough" will simply jump ship to another company that will pay him more, because the skills of CEOs tend to be company-specific. The whole threat is a canard designed to justify higher pay. Research shows that CEOs promoted from inside companies tend to do better than those brought in from outside. That means that there is even less justification for worrying about constant musical chairs of CEOs, all chasing higher salaries. They simply wouldn't do well. Add in the inherent uncertainties about how much CEO performance affects the company's bottom line, and it all makes for a pretty fucking compelling argument that CEOs should be paid a lot more like regular (albeit high-ranking) employees, rather than as mystical magical poobahs who must be coddled and swaddled in thick layers of bank notes, lest they take their irreplaceable management abilities off to another firm. The reality is that the CEO probably needs the company more than the company needs him. The company can always promote new managers from within, but the CEO's skills won't necessarily apply to another company, so his golden goose would die if he left. And don't worry too much if a competitor lures your CEO away with a higher paycheck—there's a name for that.

via gawker.com

China in Revolt | Jacobin

Today, the Chinese working class is fighting. More than thirty years into the Communist Party’s project of market reform, China is undeniably the epicenter of global labor unrest. While there are no official statistics, it is certain that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of strikes take place each year. All of them are wildcat strikes – there is no such thing as a legal strike in China. So on a typical day anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen strikes are likely taking place.

More importantly, workers are winning, with many strikers capturing large wage increases above and beyond any legal requirements. Worker resistance has been a serious problem for the Chinese state and capital and, as in the United States in the 1930s, the central government has found itself forced to pass a raft of labor legislation. Minimum wages are going up by double digits in cities around the country and many workers are receiving social insurance payments for the first time.

Labor unrest has been growing for two decades, and the past two years a-lone have brought a qualitative advance in the character of worker struggles.

But if there are lessons for the Northern left in the experience of Chinese workers, finding them requires an examination of the unique conditions those workers face – conditions which, today, are cause for both great optimism and great pessimism.

via jacobinmag.com