Saturday, February 26, 2011
Coffee shop conversation: Apple, Steve Jobs, and tech innovations
From a reader:
....As another coffee drinker expressed an interest in my new iPad Touch and the manner in which I was using it to study Japanese, the conversation soon turned to other devices manufactured by Apple and grew to include the young woman who was herself using an Apple laptop and expressed an interest in the iPad.
She allowed however that she would hold off until Apple (as she speculated) would do away with the display technology they are using now in flavor of some souped-up version of a Kindle-like display.
When I pointed out that this was unlikely to happen as Apple had too much invested in their current technology the conversation took an interesting turn. She proposed that Apple would drop their current display technology no matter the cost because the other technology is better and they are innovators.
I pointed out that industrial capitalists, rather than innovate, will do all they can to stifle a new technology until they have wrung every last nickel from the old one. Her answer, "Not Steve Jobs, he doesn't care about profit."
Self, "His employees in China are killing themselves for the insurance money so they can feed their family, because they can't feed them on the pittance that Steve Jobs pays them."
She, "Touché-- but he has his problems too you know."
Self, "Preserve me from the problems of billionaires, I do so weep for them."
She was by the end of the exchange owning that the perspective I brought forward was better supported by the evidence.
....As another coffee drinker expressed an interest in my new iPad Touch and the manner in which I was using it to study Japanese, the conversation soon turned to other devices manufactured by Apple and grew to include the young woman who was herself using an Apple laptop and expressed an interest in the iPad.
She allowed however that she would hold off until Apple (as she speculated) would do away with the display technology they are using now in flavor of some souped-up version of a Kindle-like display.
When I pointed out that this was unlikely to happen as Apple had too much invested in their current technology the conversation took an interesting turn. She proposed that Apple would drop their current display technology no matter the cost because the other technology is better and they are innovators.
I pointed out that industrial capitalists, rather than innovate, will do all they can to stifle a new technology until they have wrung every last nickel from the old one. Her answer, "Not Steve Jobs, he doesn't care about profit."
Self, "His employees in China are killing themselves for the insurance money so they can feed their family, because they can't feed them on the pittance that Steve Jobs pays them."
She, "Touché-- but he has his problems too you know."
Self, "Preserve me from the problems of billionaires, I do so weep for them."
She was by the end of the exchange owning that the perspective I brought forward was better supported by the evidence.
Friday, February 25, 2011
It's more than just Maoism
Harry Powell
Maoism in Britain – Is this the End?
First Posted: On Thursday, July 30, 2009 on the “Democracy and Class Struggle” blogsite.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
It is nearly twenty years since there has been a Maoist political organisation in Britain. Even during the revival of interest in revolutionary politics back in the late sixties and early seventies there were never more than a few hundred Maoists in this country and their numbers rapidly diminished after the capitalist roader coup in China in 1976. During the late eighties there were a couple of short-lived Maoist groups but since then no explicitly Maoist political organisation has existed in Britain.
On a number of occasions since that time I have called meetings of some of the few remaining Maoists in Britain to propose that we form a Maoist political organisation with the eventual aim of forming a proper Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary party. On each occasion the response was negative with people giving no very definite reasons as to why we could not form an organisation other than vague assertions that the “objective conditions” were not favourable.
In the latter part of 2008 I was encouraged when three other Maoists invited me to join with them in convening a meeting to consider whether a MLM organisation could be formed in Britain. Since then there have been a number of meetings with a somewhat shifting range of people participating. At the last meeting I reluctantly reached the conclusion that practically all of these people had no real intention of trying to form a Maoist organisation. They don’t mind talking about the proposal in the abstract and discussing issues of the day such as the economic recession. But they are not going to take any effective political action about anything.
At first sight it seems strange that people who present themselves as Maoists – hardly a popular political affiliation – should hold back from getting organised and engaging in collective political action. An explanation of such perversity is required.
THE LONDON POLITICAL SCENE
Most of the remaining Maoists in Britain live in London, a large cosmopolitan capital city. Indeed the Maoists themselves are of an international composition, some of them being political refugees from their countries of origin. In London there is a continuous round of leftist political meetings, demonstrations and pickets. If one wants to, it is easy to spend all of one’s available time attending such occasions and this is what some of the Maoists do. A lot, but not all, of this political activity is focussed on events abroad such as developments in Nepal, India and Iran. To a far lesser degree are these occasions directly concerned with what is happening within British society. Of course, communists are internationalists and should necessarily see and conduct the struggle against capitalism on an international basis rather than a narrow national one. Even so, many of these people seem far more concerned and knowledgeable about political struggles thousands of miles away rather than on their own doorstep.
We should not forget that Lenin and Mao asserted that the best form of internationalism is to engage in and develop revolutionary struggle in whatever place one happens to be.
The effectiveness of many of these activities is questionable. For example, picketing the Indian High Commission or the Peruvian Embassy in support of imprisoned comrades in those countries almost certainly has no impact on their reactionary governments. Many of the “national demonstrations” which are held in London, to which the Maoists sometimes half-heartedly tag on, go unnoticed by the nation and the government. There is a large element of ritualism in this sort of behaviour. People do it simply because that is what they have always done. They do not reflect critically on whether these activities are achieving any worthwhile political objectives. (In this respect the Maoists are no different from most of the other leftists.)
This round of political activity in London is essentially inward-looking. On each occasion it is the same people from the same loose political network who are present. “You picket my embassy and I’ll picket yours.“ Usually there are few, if any, new faces present. Indeed, no serious efforts are made to reach out to and involve newcomers. The fact of the matter is that the great mass of the people, especially the working class, are oblivious of and untouched by such “political activity”. What is more, one gets the impression that most of the people who participate in these ritualised activities are quite content with this way of life. They like going along to a picket or “public meeting” (at which the public are not usually present). There is a large element of social activity here often involving having a chat and a drink with old friends and acquaintances. It passes the time.
Much of this political activity – if that is what it is – is poorly organised even in its most elementary aspects. It is quite typical to find that a room for a meeting has not been booked, that the event has not been properly publicised, that the speaker is late or does not turn up, that a leaflet has not been printed, that placards have not been made, etc. etc.. Most of the Maoists in Britain – with one or two notable exceptions – are organisationally incompetent even at the most basic level but they don’t seem to care.
In so far as any of the Maoists engage in any “mass work”, go out and try to reach the great mass of people, especially the working class, it takes the form of engaging in routine trade union work and participation in broad front campaigns such as the Stop the War Coalition. Obviously there are definite limitations from a Maoist point of view to these activities but most of the Maoists are not involved in them anyway. What they never do is to attempt their own initiatives in trying to stimulate class struggle. This is particularly obvious at present when the considerable weakening of bourgeois ideological presents good opportunities for interesting people in a revolutionary perspective on contemporary events.
There is one area in which the Maoists in Britain do get excited and exert a considerable amount of energy. This is in debating the correctness or otherwise of the political lines of Maoists engaged in class struggles in other countries. Much passion is aroused and much is spoken and written about the course of revolutionary struggle in Middle East countries such as Iran and in particular on the political trajectory of the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). Yes, it is correct for communists to assess and constructively criticise the actions of comrades in other countries. However the odd thing about the Maoists in Britain is that while they get very heated and split over these controversies they expend little energy on ideological-political struggle over how to handle the contradictions of capitalism in Britain. The reason for this is not difficult to discern. It is that the Maoists in Britain are not really interested in engaging in revolutionary struggle within the society in which they live.
MIND POLITICS
So what is going on here? What is the explanation for this odd behaviour? I have come to realise that what is important for most of the Maoists in Britain is not what is happening within the objective social reality around them but rather it is the state of their subjective consciousness which is most important for them. Their strongest desire is not to transform a world in turmoil but to feel that the political perspective they hold on it is in some sense correct. In philosophical terms these people are not materialists. Rather they are idealists because for them the most important thing is inner certainty. What is going on in the external world is entirely secondary. For them an internal ideological purity is their primary aim. That is why I call it mind politics. Indeed there is a certain latent religiosity at work here. (In my talk ’Against Religiosity in Politics’ I have discussed this quite widespread phenomenon whereby people use secular doctrines such as Marxism as substitute religions.) These people are going to do nothing except continue to pour forth a torrent of words on the internet.
IS THIS REALLY THE END?
The truth is that in Britain Marxism of any kind as a live political trend is in steady decline. The remaining revisionist and Trotskyist organisations are slowly dwindling away. People, especially young people, of radical inclinations are attracted towards anarchism and environmentalism (with all their obvious limitations) but not to Marxism. What is more, this is happening at a time when capitalism is embroiled in major economic difficulties and debilitating imperialist wars. The reason that Marxism in general, and Maoism in particular, is on the way out in Britain is because communists are failing to seriously address, both in theory and practice, the major issues of our time. These include the impact of new productive forces, changes in class structure, environmental degradation, the quality of life, etc. (See my talk ’The Death of Marxism?’ for more on these issues.)
I remain convinced of the essential correctness of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism but it is not a fixed formula set in tablets of stone. For MLM to be of any use in making the world a better place it needs to change and develop in intimate response to the contemporary world. In this part of the world this is not happening. My reluctant conclusion is that Maoism in Britain is finished.
Convince me that I am wrong.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
The "living and dead" in Hegel's thought
Hegel's hard work
Columnist: Todd Chretien
Marx looked to Hegel's original method for thinking about society's problems.
February 23, 2011
"IF THERE should ever be time for such a work again," said Marx to Engels amid a flurry of letters in January of 1858, "I should greatly like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printer's sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered but at the same time enveloped in mysticism." (From The Selected Correspondence of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: 1846-1895, New York: International Publishers, 1942, p. 102.)
Sadly for us, he never got around to it. However, even Marx's extra-ordinary intelligence may have had a hard time condensing Georg Friedrich Hegel into a couple pages. And as we will see, Hegel would have rejected the very notion that it could or should be tried.
I will attempt here to accomplish the more modest goals of addressing several important ideas credited to Hegel, explain why they mattered so profoundly to Marx as a student, and then point to some places to learn more for those who are bitten by the Hegel bug.
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Hegel's world
Hegel was born in 1770. That's important because it means he was 19 years old when the French Revolution broke out about 350 miles to the east in Paris. Democratic-minded European youth stood in awe of the power of the French and American Revolutions to sweep away monarchies.
Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is titled Ode to Joy, after a poem by Friedrich Schiller from the time, which sings, "Be embraced millions. This kiss to the entire world!" The English poet William Wordsworth penned the famous lines, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!" They were both born within months of Hegel.
In 1791, Hegel even joined fellow students in a May Pole dance, reciting Schiller's poem. All very subversive, according to the authorities in Berlin.
But the revolution did not come to Germany, and Hegel spent the next 15 frustrating years tutoring the children of aristocrats and working as unsalaried part-time lecturer. He struggled to master the greats of European philosophy and to write something that would make enough waves to land him a full-time job.
He finally hit pay dirt in 1806 when he published his groundbreaking Phenomenology of Spirit. The same day that he sent the proofs to the printers, French troops under Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, passed through Jena, the German city where Hegel was teaching, on their way to setting up a puppet regime in southwest Germany.
From his window, Hegel got a glimpse of Napoleon and was overcome with admiration. It seemed to him that the French Revolution was washing away the petty world of German princes. In fact, the French-backed government did enact important anti-feudal reforms over the decade or so it survived.
Hegel was well placed to take advantage of this opportunity. His new book celebrated radical philosophical and intellectual change and articulated a new way to understand history.
It also helped that the French supported liberals in the educational bureaucracy, assisting Hegel in wining appointment as the headmaster of a prestigious high school, then to a chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and finally the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he taught until his death in 1831.
To put it bluntly, Hegel owed his career to revolution...even if it was second-hand.
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Hegel's big ideas
Hegel is hard to read. Often really hard. In fact, sometimes nearly impossible. Especially if, like nearly everyone on the planet, you are not familiar with late 18th century German philosophy. Hegel's philosophical contemporaries developed a highly formalistic language (making up new meanings for common words, for example) and built an intellectual universe based on detailed references to each other's work.
To be clear, you do not need to read lots of Hegel to understand Marx; however, doing so (at least a little) can give you an insight into how Marx developed his own revolutionary theories and, I think, provides you with a richer appreciation for his views on social change.
In my last column, I suggested reading the first four paragraphs of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here we see that not only is Hegel unapologetic about his book's density, he explicitly justifies it, saying that it is "even inappropriate and misleading" to give a simple summary of his philosophy, because boiling it down to its essence "does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees simple disagreements."
Hegel is arguing that genuine knowledge can never be simply passed along from teacher to student as a finished product, as a passive gift (or even a burden as many students might feel). Real learning is a process that requires sustained effort that must get beyond the "mere beginnings of cognition." Simplifying ideas to the point of oft-repeated slogans only creates
an impression of hard work and serious commitment to the problem. For the real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, nor is the result the actual whole, but rather the result together with the process through which it came about.
If you stop and think about it, this is really interesting. Hegel is arguing that the journey is just as important as the destination--it is a necessary part of the whole. In fact, if you become fixed only on trying to remember where you're going, you'll never learn to get there. (In philosophical terms, Hegel believed he had discovered the solution to the object-subject divide that Kant stumbled over.) This view of knowledge as a process is one of the most important things that Marx took from Hegel.
In those same paragraphs, Hegel puts forward one of the best examples of what he would come to call dialectics. To begin with, the word itself originally (from the Greek) simply meant a dialogue between two people who were trying to arrive at a common understanding of the truth.
So every time you and a friend talk about what to eat for dinner, you are practicing dialectics. Chinese, no. Italian, no. Sushi, yes! Of course, Hegel gives a broader meaning to the term as he shows with this example from nature:
The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time, their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.
The basic ideas contained here make up the building blocks of Hegel's specific notion of dialectics: change through conflict (the fruit consumes the blossom); quantity changing into quality (incremental growth within the bud suddenly "bursts-forth" into something entirely new); and the importance of understanding the totality of a process and not simply partial stages ("moments of an organic unity").
Hegel then applies this insight over the course of nearly 500 pages to supposedly show how all of previous thought and culture, covering thousands of years, was really a process by which the "fruit" (something he called "Absolute Knowing," which seems very much like God) became self-aware...and how Hegel was the only one clever enough to realize it.
Here is why Marx said that Hegel's version of the dialectic is "enveloped in mysticism." For Hegel, all human ideas and history are only projections--"spirits"--of the various moments or stages in Absolute Knowing/God's quest for self-consciousness. (Phenomenology, p. 493)
Hegel continued to develop his unique perspective in several other imposing works, in which he traced the development of state (government and civil society) forms, the stages of history, economics, art and even the structure of thought itself.
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Hegel's theory and practice
UNFORTUNATELY, HEGEL the man was not nearly so revolutionary as Hegel the philosopher. Once ensconced in his well-paid chairs of philosophy, he made his peace with the German princes (or at least bit his tongue often enough to protect his position). Toward the end of his career, he pointedly argued that "what is rational is real and what is real is rational."
This was during the period when the authorities, especially the Prussian monarchy, were reasserting their power, purging liberal thinkers from the universities and clamping down on all forms of political dissent. Although Hegel himself spoke out against anti-Semitism and opposed a return to pre-Napoleonic royal despotism, he did make himself into a kind of (distant) intellectual advisor to the throne.
Hegel's ideas would soon inspire a generation of writers and political activists (who would salvage his emphasis on transformation, fluidity, conflict and change), but the great philosopher himself never attempted to engage in the struggle.
In his youth, he hoped that his new way of thinking was the intellectual forerunner, a natural reflection, of the revolution that Napoleon would bring to Germany. In his later years, he retreated to trying to make philosophical sense of the gap between the democratic ideals of his youth and the growing conservatism of German politics.
In the preface to his Philosophy of Right in 1820, he wrote:
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
For Hegel, Minerva (knowledge) always comes too late to change social conditions--it can only ever be written in hindsight. This belief provided the ideological justification for accepting the status quo because any attempt to change the present was necessarily made from a position of ignorance and was therefore futile...if not downright wrong-headed.
Yet if Hegel failed to find the solutions he sought along the long road between Wordsworth's "blissful dawn" and his own "grey dusk," Marx would soon appreciate the groundbreaking contribution he made in developing an original method for thinking about society's problems and attack them in ways Hegel never dreamed.
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FOR FURTHER reading on Hegel, find Introducing Hegel, written by Lloyd Spencer, with illustrations by Andrzej Krauze. And for more of Hegel himself, finish the preface to Phenomenology. It's about 45 pages long.
Next time, we'll take up the beginning of Marx's career as a revolutionary journalist. To get a jump on it, read "Debates on the Law on Theft of Wood" in the Rheinische Zeitung newspaper, October 25, 1842.
Saudi Arabia
Thousands of workers strike in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is now being rocked by strikes as the mood of resistance spreads across the region. A socialist in Saudi Arabia reports on how struggles in the Middle East are even spreading to the most vicious dictatorship, which is sponsored by the US
‘I went to my workplace on Thursday of last week, and I found out that there were over 3,000 workers demanding their rights before they called a general strike in the construction site in Saudi Binladin Group. The workers were very angry. Their workplace is one of the largest construction projects in the country, which is worth SR.100 billion.
However, they live in a terrible conditions. One of the workers told me, “I live in a room four metres by three metres with eight people, and for every ten people there is only one toilet.” Another Egyptian worker told me about the working conditions and the restriction of religious freedom: "They are Zionists, they don’t even allow me to pray on time!"
And another worker was speaking about the water at the site, which is infected and full of filth and insects: "The managers wouldn’t even wash their hands with it, but for us we have to drink it because it is the only drinking water at the site.” The others talked about the delayed salaries and the unpaid overtime: "Van you believe that some of the workers here are paid only 700 riyals a month, and I am paid 1,000 riyal. How would we survive?"
They couldn’t continue in the old way. They organised themselves and decided to do a demonstration at the site, to demand their rights immediately. It was the most interesting scene that I have witnessed in my life. When a group of coordinators and security guards tried to persuade them to go back to work the workers replied by smacking their hats on the walls and they shouted we demand “food, money, accommodation – we need to be respected”. All the managers, for the first time since the start of the project four years ago, took the workers seriously.
The police force couldn’t control the workers. When a police officer told the workers that they need to return to their accommodation and their issue will be solved later, the worker replied by throwing stones at him, and they managed to frighten all the police officers around him. The stones missed the police officer, but unfortunately it did not miss his car! It was the first time in my life I saw a police car smashed in Saudi Arabia.
When several coordinators, sent by the managers, tried to promise the workers change, I and several other socialists pushed for the occupation of the construction site, though that did not work. However, when one of coordinators said, "We will give you a new accommodation with a football pitch," one of the workers replied, “How would we play football after 13 hours of work with an unpaid overtime?" Then the coordinators promised that every worker will be paid after five days. Someone replied, "What would we do with today’s bread after five days, we need it now, we are sick of excuses, a billionaire cannot pay his workers today?"
In the end, the owner promised the workers that they will pay them on Saturday. The workers went back, and on Saturday they received an extra SR, 500 on top of their salary and the owners promised them that they will improve their accommodation and they will pay them 100 hours for their overtime each month.
The workers started to organised with a sister company, which belong to the same owners to start a new wave of strikes in different parts of the construction site. Through this week, there were several strike actions in King Fahad Library and in a construction sites in King Saud University.’
© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.
Zimbabwe
Zimbabweans face possible death sentence for discussing Egyptian Revolution
by Yuri Prasad
A group of socialists in Zimbabwe face a possible death sentence for watching a video about the Egyptian Revolution.
Some 52 activists were charged with treason and “subverting a constitutionally elected government” in a Harare court yesterday (Wednesday).
The attack is part of a general clampdown organised by the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in advance of possible elections later this year. He fears that the wave of uprisings in the Middle East and north Africa could spread south.
Police arrested the group on Saturday of last week following a raid on a meeting to discuss the implications of the Egyptian Revolution for Zimbabwe that was organised by the International Socialist Organization (ISO).
The accused were led into court on Wednesday hand cuffed and in leg irons.
Many had sustained injuries while in detention, and all—including those who are HIV positive—have been prevented from receiving medical attention and drugs.
One of those charged has only recently been discharged from hospital following brain surgery. Another detainee who broke her leg after being thrown down a two-storey stairwell during the raid is also being denied proper care.
State prosecutors allege that leading ISO activist and former opposition member of parliament, Munyaradzi Gwisai, and other participants at the video showing were planning to “organise, strategise and implement the removal of the consitutional government of Zimbabwe… the Egyptian way.”
Defence lawyer Alec Muchadehama said he has been denied access to the detainees since they were taken into custody.
Outrage at the arrests, torture and the charges is spreading across Africa and around the world.
Bongani Masuku of the 1.8 million-strong Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has pledged the support of his organisation.
He said, “It is no doubt that the Egyptian and Tunisian experiences have inspired many workers and poor people all over the world to stand up and demand an end to dictatorship, corruption and injustice of whatever kind.
“The Cosatu condemns the continued persecution of political activists in Zimbabwe and the never improving situation in that country.
“The detention of about 52 activists of the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) in Harare on baseless charges of plotting to topple the government indicates the state of insecurity in that country.”
The Commonwealth Policy Studies Institute yesterday added its name to calls for “unconditional release” of those who have been jailed.
With stakes this high, activists in Zimbabwe are urgently calling on for statements of protest to be rushed to the addresses, phone and fax numbers below:
"Every once in a while the curtain get pulled back and you get to see how things really work"
By Staff
Madison, WI - The struggle at the Wisconsin State Capitol to defeat the union-busting Budget Repair Bill held strong through its 9th day, Feb. 23. The state Capitol remained occupied and as early as 7:30 a.m. the chants of "Kill the bill" could be heard from all over. Over 50 Sheet Metal workers, many laid off, came marching up to the capitol at 8:00 a.m., chanting "Union Power!"
The State Assembly met today amidst loud protests and chants, discussing amendments to the bill.
Protesters in the hundreds followed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to the Monona Terrace today, a building a few blocks from the Capitol where Walker was to meet with the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce annual business day participants. Led by the Wisconsin Wave and Defend Wisconsin, the protest was a way of drawing attention to the corporate backers behind Scott Walker's anti-union agenda.
The high level of organization within the Capitol Building is one example of the protesters’ determination to continue with the occupation. The building is clean because a rotating team of volunteers mop and pick up trash. A food table on the third floor offers donated breads, cheeses, vegetables and drinks. Early risers this morning got a scoop of an egg scramble and a hot cup of coffee. A pharmacy exists around the corner, with donated vitamins, band aids and toothpaste. The second floor has an information station where students and visitors may check in to share events, fliers and events.
The entire building is coated with posters, banners and leaflets. At 3:00 a.m. one morning, patrolling police tore down all posters from the Capitol walls, but in the morning the protesters put them right back up.
In the early afternoon today, as people began to mobilize for larger rallies and marches, news arrived of a prank call to Gov. Scott Walker. A caller posing as a major contributor to Walker’s campaign recorded Scott Walker likening his union busting efforts to that of Ronald Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers in the early 1980s. Walker also revealed his consideration of sending in protest wreckers and a plan to trick the 14 State Senate Democrats who fled Wisconsin to come back to session in order to ram his union-busting bill through.
"Every once in a while the curtain get pulled back and you get to see how things really work," commented one protester after listening to the 20-minute prank call.
Day in day out, it becomes more apparent than ever that Gov. Walker's Budget Repair Bill is nothing more than a shameful attack on workers and their organizations.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The Capitalist Dictionary: "Just in Time"
- The following definition is quoted from:
- The Xsters Unabashed Dictionary of the Capitalist Language, by tov. X
- Just in Time (also as JIT)
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- Practice by which large industrial capitalists avoid the consequences of their bad decisions by foisting off those consequences on workers and small jobbing shops (a small “jobbing shop”, aka “subcontractor” is some guy with a lathe who perhaps employs 5 machinists who are desperate for work because he and those 5 machinists have been crowded off the shop floor and marginalized into this “small business” by the large industrial capitalist ).
- When specialized to inventory Just in Time refers to the alacrity with which the cheap chiselling capitalist absconds with all the profit while the poor bastard with the lathe (i.e., “subcontractor”) and his further exploited workers get squat. The aforementioned cheap chiseller had this in mind from the start and wrote it into his order to the subcontractor, “you must deliver 500 Left Whatsit units to me to within 30 seconds of the time that my workers are to bolt them to the Framistan Assembly. Don't call me. I'll call you.”
- Though most often specialized to inventory in the public ruminations of bourgeois “economists”, Just in Time generalizes to a host of such slippery manoeuvres covering the whole field of labour relations and commerce and is talked of in this way by capitalists as in, “I say Jeeves-- I dropped that hot potato Just in Time, what!” Said spud being perhaps the company that was left bankrupt Just in Time for the cheap chiseller that owned it to abscond with the cash on deposit that was to cover wages owed his workers, and for him to stay a step ahead of the banksters that backed his action.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Wisconsin
The Bail Out The People Movement website www.bailoutpeople.org has the latest tweets, articles, video, information on U.S. solidarity demos and an online petition in solidarity with the heroic worker and student occupation for union rights at the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison. Post and email this information widely and check this website regularly for more updates.
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JOIN A SOLIDARITY DEMONSTRATION NEAR YOU (SEE LISTING - www.bailoutpeople.org)
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SIGN THE ONLINE PETITION, sending a message to EVERY WISCONSIN LEGISLATOR as well as Governor Walker, the Wisconsin congressional delegation, the Obama administration and members of the media saying HANDS OFF THE WISCONSIN WORKERS AND STUDENTS! KILL THE WALKER BILL!
Sign online at bailoutpeople.org/wisconsinworkerspetition.shtml
After week one of Wisconsin Capitol takeover:
'We can't lose collective bargaining'
By Brian G. Pfeiffer
Madison, WI
Feb. 19 – The people's liberation of the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., is in full swing.
"Now is the time. We can't let this die because we are at ground zero and what happens here affects the rest of the world. We have to be strong. A united front," said Mahlon Mitchell of the Professional Firefighters of Wisconsin at the massive afternoon rally at the state Capitol Feb. 19. Mitchell became the first African-American president of the PFW on Jan. 12.
On Feb. 19 the biggest demonstration yet, with an estimated crowd of 100,000, filled the grounds outside the state Capitol and continued the sit-in. A massive roving picket line with all sectors of the working class -- union and non-union workers, the unemployed, students, people of color, immigrants, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer community -- marched on the streets for the entire day accompanied by drumming, chanting, dancing and singing.
The Tea Party hosted a counter-rally of about 2,000 on the Capitol steps in the early afternoon protected by more than 500 fully armed cops with riot gear. Tea Party members were bused in and left quickly after their rally. They were directly confronted by students and workers from such organizations as Students for a Democratic Society, Fight Imperialism, Stand Together, Bail Out the People Movement, Veterans for Peace, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Workers World Party and others with chants of "Hey, hey, ho, ho, racist Tea Party has to go," "Hands off workers: Make the banks pay," and "Kill the Bill." The racist, anti-worker Tea Party crowd was entirely surrounded by those opposing Walker's bill, which is an attack on the entire working class and oppressed internationally by the banks, corporations and the Pentagon. Some workers even waded into the Tea Party crowd and shouted at the main speakers. <
From a youth organizer in Madison:
‘Solidarity of workers and students cannot be broken’
By Ben Carroll
Madison, Wis.
Feb. 21 -- Inside the state Capitol building in Madison, Wis., the halls normally filled with politicians and corporate lobbyists are now occupied by thousands of people. Banners and posters with messages of solidarity and slogans denouncing Gov. Walker's attack on the public sector hang from every wall.
Chants of "power to the people" and drumming fill the building from the early hours of the morning until late at night. The energy in the building is absolutely electric and all who are participating in the occupation and mass demonstrations are determined to carry the struggle forward until the anti-union bill is defeated.
Young people and students are playing a decisive role in the historic struggle that is developing in Wisconsin. The occupation -- which is entering its second week now -- has been led by young workers, high school students, undergraduates and the graduate student unions. <
Bail Out the People Movement
Solidarity Center
55 W. 17th St. #5C
New York, NY 10011
212.633.6646
Email: bailoutpeople.org/cmnt.shtml
march4jobs@gmail.com
"The right to vote is naturally dependent on the right to a loaf of bread.”
Revolution is a cry of rage against injustice
by Anne Alexander
Leading activists in the Egyptian workers’ movement, representing tens of thousands of striking workers, met in Cairo last Saturday.
They agreed a common programme of demands and to co-ordinate further action.
“It is our opinion that if this revolution does not lead to the fair distribution of wealth it is not worth anything,” they said in a statement released after the meeting.
“Freedoms are not complete without social freedoms. The right to vote is naturally dependent on the right to a loaf of bread.”
The programme goes beyond even the most far-reaching demands raised in waves of strikes in the years before Hosni Mubarak’s fall.
In addition to calling for a rise in the national minimum wage, the workers demand that the maximum wage should be no more than 15 times the minimum wage.
Demand
The struggles of fixed-term workers are reflected in the programme, which calls for a complete end to temporary contracts, and job security for all manual and clerical workers, peasants and professionals.
A key demand is the dissolution of the state Egyptian Trade Union Federation, which was a central pillar of the old ruling party and Mubarak’s regime.
The programme also calls for:
- “Renationalisation of all privatised enterprises and a complete stop to the infamous privatisation programme.”
“Complete removal of corrupt managers who were imposed on companies in order to run them down and sell them off.”
“Curbing the employment of consultants who are past the age of retirement and who eat up three billion of the national income, in order to open up employment opportunities for the young.”
“Return to the enforcement of price controls on goods and services in order to keep prices down and not burden the poor.”
“The right of Egyptian workers to strike, organise sit-ins, and demonstrate peacefully, including those striking now against the remnants of the failed regime.”
Several of the signatories are members of unions that founded a new, independent trade union federation in Tahrir Square on 25 January.
Workers from the sugar refineries in Al-Fayyum and Hawamidiyya, public transport, Tura Cement Co, pharmaceutical workers, postal workers, employees in the Umar Effendi department store, and representatives of the Property Tax collectors were among the 40 representatives at the meeting.
This declaration is an important step, as it brings together a powerful group of trade union activists to assert their determination to achieve the revolution’s social goals.
Nothing approaching this level of co-ordination between strike leaders has been achieved in Egypt for decades, and their demands look far beyond the current capitalist system.
Suez: battles intensify
Suez experienced a taste of the struggles to come last Sunday, when an armoured vehicle belonging to the military police killed a woman as the authorities broke up a strike by port workers.
Striking workers were arrested, in the first attempt to enforce the military’s ban on strikes.
Police killed the woman as relatives and neighbours of the arrested workers gathered in protest.
The uprising in Suez was among the fiercest and most effective in Egypt, falling into the control of the demonstrators soon after 25 January.
The killing has sent shockwaves of anger through the country.
Florida activists demand halt to cops' collective punishment of Black community
Urgent Press Conference and Call to Action
PRESS CONFERENCE:
If you are in or near St. Petersburg, Uhuru Solidarity Movement calls on you to attend an Urgent Press Conference on the Recent Police Shooting and Subsequent Attack on the African Community.
When: Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011, 12:00 noon
Where: St. Petersburg Police Station, 1300 First Ave. South, St. Petersburg, FL
For more information: 727-683-9949, stpete@uhurusolidarity.org
CALL-TO-ACTION:
Wherever you are, participate in the following Call-In:
STOP THE COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT AGAINST THE BLACK COMMUNITY OF ST. PETERSBURG FLORIDA!
The South Side of St. Petersburg is currently under siege by police agencies from throughout the area. Under the pretext of searching for a “suspect”, the entire Black community is being subjected to a form of collective punishment, with the area being sealed off, and homes, vehicles, and individual pedestrians being stopped and searched.
We call upon all our members and supporters to immediately call in to the St. Petersburg Mayor’s office and the Police Department and demand a halt to this collective punishment, and to make them aware that we are all watching their actions.
St. Petersburg Mayor’s office:
727-893-7201
St. Petersburg Police Department:
727-893-7780
PLEASE FORWARD/ POST THIS MESSAGE TO ALL YOUR ONLINE LISTS AND SOCIAL NETWORKS.
Monday, February 21, 2011
2nd Amendment Solution Anthem
Artist: Lambert Miranda
Song: Time To Get A Gun
Album: Revolution
My neighbor’s car got stole last night right out of his driveway
We heard the dog ‘a barking, we never paid them any mind
And Mary says she’s gonna lock the door from now on when we go away
I’ve been walking around this farm wondering if it’s time
Time to get a gun, that’s what I been thinkin’
I could afford one if I did just a little less drinkin’
Time to put something between me and the sun
When the talking is over it’s time to get a gun
Last week a government man was there when I walked out of my back door
He said “I’m sorry to bother you ma’am” it don’t matter anymore
‘Cause even while we’re talking right here where we stand
They’re making plans for a four-lane highway and a big ole overpass
Time to get a gun, that’s what I been thinkin’
I could afford one if I did just a little less drinkin’
Time to put something between me and the sun
When the talking is over it’s time to get a gun
Mary says she’s worried about herself and her kids
She’s never known anybody had a gun and her daddy never did
Well I think it should be up to me ‘cause when it’s all said and done
Somebodys gotta walk into the crowd and I wanna be that one
Time to get a gun, that’s what I been thinkin’
I could afford one if I did just a little less drinkin’
Time to put something between me and the sun
When the talking is over it’s time to get a gun
When the party is over it’s time to get a gun
Saturday, February 19, 2011
The popes
The Idea of Communism
Book Review by Mark Harvey, February 2011
Edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, Verso, £14.99
A conference to discuss whether the idea of communism is still of relevance to the project of human emancipation was organised by London's Birkbeck College in March 2009. Interest and ticket uptake were so high that the planned location had to be moved three times, eventually to the Institute of Education. Those of us who might have attended but for the £100 ticket price can at least console ourselves with this collection of the 15 papers that were presented.
Whatever one may think of the contributions, the very fact that there are notable academics prepared to declare their continuing or renewed interest in a belief system we have been told from every quarter is discredited is important in itself.
Of course, there is still some distance to go. The initial promise of Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek's short but passionate introduction, which relates the importance of the communist idea to concrete issues facing the left today (such as the financial crisis, migration and the environment), is largely unfulfilled due to the abstractness and high wordiness to content ratios of the essays that follow. Academics often disguise their own confusion by means of wilful obscurity, and this collection is no exception.
For instance, in the first essay, despite references to Lenin's magisterial The State and Revolution, Alain Badiou manages to empty out any concrete analysis of the historically distinct features of the state under capitalism in favour of an amorphous, sprawling "state" understood as that agency which constrains political debate within the body of established "facts". The intent of Lenin's deliberately narrow description of the state as "special bodies of armed men" was to focus on the primary function of any state to use or threaten to use violence. This point gets lost among ideological concerns in the leaky conception of the state that beleaguers Badiou and other contributors.
Moreover, if part of the remit of the conference was to examine whether one could rescue communism from the distortions and crimes of Stalinism, what are we to make of the fact that there are over 20 references to Mao in this book, yet only three to Trotsky, only one of which actually discusses his theories? In contrast, variously vacuous or unhelpful pronouncements from Mao are quoted approvingly, and throughout there is an inordinate fascination with the Chinese so-called Cultural Revolution.
Thankfully, there are some solid contributions. For example, Douzinas writes on the Marxist critique of the language of rights and justice and Terry Eagleton's examination of productivity and abundance (through a discussion of Shakespeare's The Tempest and King Lear) is well worth a read.
Peter Hallward (recently suspended by Middlesex University after supporting the campaign against the closure of its philosophy department) accurately dissects the strengths and weaknesses of Badiou's and Žižek's positions. He speaks of the optimism of the will that might allow us to "make the way by walking it" without pretending we can invent the ground we cross.
Žižek offers a good summary of the arguments he has made at greater length elsewhere for the past few years. I am not convinced, though, by his central distinction between the "Included" and the "Excluded", when he feels he must "insist in a very precise Marxian sense: there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the �private' order of social hierarchy, stand directly for universality".
Actually, for Marx, it is the working class's central inclusion within the process of capitalist production, not its exclusion from enjoyment of its products, that is key to its potential to be a universal class. It is precisely this that endows it with a collective power that distinguishes it from other "Excluded" groups. Why does Žižek not appear to know this?
Though there is much to pull apart in Michael Hardt's contention that "immaterial production" (like services or cultural products) has now superseded "material production" of goods in factories in dominating the economy, his essay is the most focused of them on looking at current economic questions.
The tumultuous events of May 1968 in France were accompanied by an explosion of radical thought in the universities, much of which was naive or ultra-left, but all of which reflected and articulated the spirit of resistance. That this heritage has survived and is now speaking again with a renewed confidence fed by the spreading revolt against financial austerity, and attracting large audiences, is a good sign.
The relative comfort of the university can often cloister intellectuals away from a direct connection to the movement on the streets, but these thinkers are sincere in their hopes for a popular empowerment that could irreversibly transform our world for the better. We can hope that more clarity and urgency - not to mention lower ticket prices - will come later.
“Exhaustion of Alternatives to Revolutionary Leadership.”
Question of leadership in North Africa revolt
The following is an excerpt from the Socialist Workers Party draft resolution “Their Transformation and Ours,” which appears in New International no. 12. It was adopted by the national convention of the SWP in 2005. The section below is titled “Exhaustion of Alternatives to Revolutionary Leadership.” It is being reprinted to help our readers better understand the political dynamics of the battles being fought by workers, farmers, and young people in Egypt and across North Africa and the Middle East. Copyright © 2005 by New International. Reprinted by permission.
Underlying the absence of popular response to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in the Arab and Muslim world is the exhaustion of the bourgeois-nationalist leaderships that, over the span of some eighty years, came to power on the shoulders of anti-imperialist struggles involving hundreds of millions of workers, peasants, and youth across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Throughout much of the last century, these bourgeois currents filled a political vacuum left by political misleadership—if not outright betrayal—of worker and peasant battles and national liberation struggles by Moscow and its subordinate Stalinist parties in colonial countries themselves as well as the metropolitan centers of the respective imperialist overlords. If these bourgeois regimes in the oppressed nations toed the line sufficiently on matters of diplomatic importance to the Soviet bureaucracy, moreover, the caste in turn gave its tacit blessing to ruthless repression of workers, peasants, and national minorities, often including the local Communist parties themselves. In this way, governments such as that of Nasser in Egypt, Nkrumah in Ghana, or Sukarno in Indonesia gained some room for maneuver in conflicts with the imperialists and burnished their “radical” credentials for a time, both at home and through world forums such as the Movement of Nonaligned Nations.
With the end of the Cold War, even regimes that had still felt it in their interests in the closing decades of the century to retain some residual “anti-imperialist” verbiage found the cost-benefit equation abruptly altered to their disadvantage. Those in the state bureaucracy and officer corps hoping to “make it” as part of rising bourgeois layers were suddenly and involuntarily weaned from the largesse and privileges made possible by their former relations with Moscow. (The massive funds available through United Nations agencies and related “Non-Governmental Organizations” helped, but were nowhere near the scope of paradise lost.)
Too fearful of the revolutionary energy of the toiling masses, too desirous of siphoning to themselves crumbs from the table of the imperialist exploiters, too beholden to their former colonial masters, and now bereft of patrons in the former Soviet Union, these second-, third-, and fourth-generation bourgeois-nationalist layers are operating in different world conditions from those even a quarter of a century ago. For the bourgeois ruling classes in these countries, both the times and stakes have changed. They’re different from the ones amid which—under pressure from the toilers’ democratic and anti-imperialist aspirations and mobilizations—Nasser took back the Suez Canal from British and French finance capital in 1956, and other governments as recently as the late 1960s and early 1970s nationalized oil fields, refineries, and other natural resources owned by the propertied ruling families of U.S. and other imperialist powers.
A parallel and related exhaustion of revolutionary content marks the political evolution of petty-bourgeois and aspiring bourgeois leaderships of national liberation movements today: from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other Palestinian organizations such as Hamas, to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA).
These organizations arose (or re-arose) during the closing decades of the twentieth century on the basis of powerful opposition to national oppression among the Palestinian, Irish, and Basque peoples. Over the past four decades, however, the leaderships of these organizations have relied on spectacular armed actions, in combination (especially as such operations not only produced no gains but met intensified repression) with diplomatic and political maneuvers to reach a negotiated accommodation with the oppressors. Mobilizations organized by them were more and more used solely as pressure to better realize such an accommodation.
None of these leaderships ever proved capable of mobilizing and leading the workers and peasants as the backbone of a revolutionary democratic movement capable of fighting effectively for national liberation, freedom from imperialist domination, land to the tillers, the right to armed self-defense, and the organization of the working class to act in the interests of the producing classes. None developed a leadership of the revolutionary caliber and political capacity of the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army in Cuba, the National Liberation Front of Algeria, Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua, New Jewel Movement of Grenada, or the revolutionary movement in Burkina Faso.
Miseducated over decades by Stalinism, leaders of these organizations experienced repeated betrayals by Moscow and the world movement beholden to it. They were left high and dry when the regime of the Soviet caste and its European sisters collapsed at the opening of the 1990s. The military structure and internal methods of functioning they learned from Stalinist organizations, directly and indirectly, left them vulnerable to penetration by police agents and provocateurs. As the operations of the capitalist market have accelerated class differentiation within these oppressed nations (both bourgeoisification and proletarianization), the petty-bourgeois course of these leaderships has reached a political dead end. Frustration and demoralization are bearing fruit in intensified factionalism, including bloody internal score-settling.
These revolutionary national struggles themselves, the imperialist subjugation fueling them, and the self-sacrificing courage and determination of the toilers to fight are far from exhausted. The Palestinian people will continue to fight Israel because it occupies their land. Workers and farmers in northern Ireland and the Basque country will continue to resist oppression perpetuated by the ruling families of British and Spanish finance capital. But the political consequences of the crisis of leadership and its bourgeois corruption are posed more and more sharply.
What is often called “Islamism,” “Wahabism,” “jihad Islam,” “Salafism,” or “Islamic fundamentalism” (as distinct from the Islamic religion) has no revolutionary, let alone proletarian, content of any kind. Nor is it the wave of the future anywhere in the Muslim or Arab world. Its high point is behind us, not ahead.
September 11 marked a sensational blowoff, not a new beginning. These movements arose as a surrogate for revolutionary political leadership of the popular masses in face of the bankruptcy of Stalinist and bourgeois-nationalist forces.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a profound political and social upheaval, not a religious jihad. It became a deep-going, modern, popular social revolution in city and countryside, a revolution against the pro-imperialist monarchy of the shah and the brutal despotism of his hated SAVAK police agents. It opened space for workers and landless peasants, for women, for oppressed nationalities, for youth—for communists. It made possible the flowering of political space, debate, and culture that to this day are far from being taken away.
The weight of religious figures and institutions grew stronger and more repressive as part of a political counterrevolution, stifling in the name of Islam the rebellion of the most intransigent workers in the oil fields and factories, peasants on the land, Kurds and other oppressed nationalities, women fighting for equality, revolutionary-minded soldiers, students, and other youth, and the boldest communists. The power and depth of that revolution is registered in the fact that the clerical-dominated bourgeois regime has never been able to come close to imposing suffocating political and cultural conditions of the kind the Taliban inflicted on Afghanistan or the Wahabi monarchists on Saudi Arabia.
The high point of “Islamist” action came with the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in late 1979, the year the Iranian Revolution brought down the shah. But the political content was the opposite. The armed units that laid claim to the mosque did so in the name of ousting royal Saudi infidels defiling Islam’s holiest site. Over the subsequent two decades, this was followed up, among other actions, by the 1983 bombings of U.S. and French barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. marines and 58 French paratroopers; the 1993 bomb planted in the basement of the World Trade Center, killing 6 and wounding thousands; the 1996 truck bombing of the Khobar military complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. soldiers and injuring hundreds; the almost simultaneous 1998 bombings near U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding some 4,500 (few of them Americans); and the 2000 speedboat assault on the USS Cole in the Yemeni harbor of Aden, killing 17 U.S. sailors.
In terms of the scope of death and destruction inflicted, the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were the most sensational of these actions. And there will be others (such as the 2004 Madrid railroad bombings and attacks in Bali and elsewhere in Indonesia in 2002 and 2004), just as the kidnappings, assassinations, robberies, and bombings by anti-working-class groups such as the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof Gang, Black Liberation Army, and Weather Underground continued for years after the “armed struggle” ultraleftism of the 1960s had peaked and headed further into political eclipse.
The September 2001 attacks, however, were a registration of weakness, not growing social or political strength. Al Qaeda and other such organizations have become more politically isolated internationally, including among working people and the middle classes throughout Arab and Islamic countries. And the imperialist rulers learn from each of these attacks, making them more difficult to repeat.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
New political openings courtesy of capital's crisis
Free Market crisis-facing facts
So finally socialists don’t have to try and break through the propaganda barrier which is placed in front of the discussion on how we run our economic system in this country. The propaganda barrier has been steam rolled in to the ground by the current crisis and now we are left with only the facts for the people to take their opinions from. This propaganda barrier was placed there by the ruling class of this country in order to try and limit any debate around the free market system which Fianna Fail embraced when we gained independence. It is this free market system which keeps the profits of the super rich safe and they will do anything to protect that system from being subjected to alternative opinions and ideas.The propaganda barrier basically means the suppression of socialist ideas through lies and ridicule. Standing on top of their money mountain with economic prosperity, rising employment and a prosperous business sector propping them up, they were in a safe position to ridicule the ideas of socialism. From this privileged position, which a healthy economy gave them, they found it easier to, for instance, denounce the Russian revolution as a complete failure (even though that socialist revolution brought the economy of Russia from a third world position into a first world).They also found it easier to completely ignore the ideas of the poor third world country which was able to afford all of its citizens the right to a house because it used the socialist idea of a planned economy as apposed to the free market. This third world country is Cuba, a country which also has one of the best health systems in the world. Can you imagine a third world country which embraced the free market system, of which there are many in Africa, being able to afford all of its citizens a home and to have possibly the best health system in the world? Not likely.
There are many plain facts like these which have been easier to hide while our politicians where standing on top of this money mountain. But there has been a landslide and the free market politicians find themselves on the same level as us. And as we look them in the eyes we notice a look of guilt, the look from a person who has been up to no good. While they were out of view up on that money mountain they were up to all sorts, we couldn’t touch them. But now that their politically privileged position is gone from under their feet they have to deal with the workers of Ireland honestly, without the protection from the barrier of lies. What they held dear has crumbled around them, what excuses have they now to defend their greedy free market economy?
Socialists have always had facts to back up their claim that there is a better way to organise society and our economic system but before this crisis we had to spend most of our time trying to smash down the lies and half-truths which the ruling class placed in front of our facts. Anytime we made the argument that a better way does exist we were pointed towards the Celtic tiger and the rising employment in Modern Ireland. Why fix something that wasn’t broken they said, and from this argument they debased our position and swept it under the carpet. But unfortunately for them, the faults of their own position has made it impossible for them to debase any alternative opinion with the confidence they once did and they are faced with debating this issue armed with only the facts of both opinions.
However, the workers of the country are keener to hear alternative opinions and it is the job of the Irish left to put it to them clearly. The crisis in the left since Stalinism and the collapse of that system has been a propaganda crisis, a crisis between the battle of ideas. Stalinism and the fall of it was a propaganda nightmare. Free market politicians could point to the short comings of the Stalinist system while it was intact and also point to the fact that it did collapsed when debating with the left. The economic crisis that is happening right now gives us a platform from which to direct a new campaign of the battle of ideas. This is a battle which has crippled the left and one which is vital if we are to win support for a planned economy and a socialist revolution.
Working class parties in Ireland are today seen by the workers as merely pro-worker. The nationalising of the banks is a policy which I believe would have great popularity within the workers if it was relayed to them factually. But they very rarely hear of this policy directly from the workers parties. All they see from the workers parties is when they are at protest demonstrations giving out about this or that. Or when they are dealing with them in local issues. It’s just not good enough to say we are against such and such, we must offer an alternative. And although I know we do to a degree, my argument is that we are not doing it loud enough.
The workers parties put too much time and money into building their own party structure and creating posters to protest the latest imperialist war. The left in Ireland mustn’t take the working class seriously if they are more concerned with the strength of their own party than the strength of the organised working class. The strength of the working class is measured by its social consciousness and that consciousness rises when you make them aware of the social consequences of the anti-bin tax campaign or the organisation of workers into unions. It might sound like a trivial thing, but it seems to me that somewhere along the way the Irish left has forgot to tell the workers what our ultimate aims are.
It’s nothing to be ashamed of after all. We are the real democrats.. If our position was explained clearly to the workers you wouldn’t get much laughter from them. When was the last time the left had a national campaign for a planned economy? The only mention of it is hidden away on the small websites of the various small parties of the Irish left. If you don’t read these websites you won’t have heard of it, except from the mouth of a free market propagandist maybe. There are “public” meetings organised by certain left parties which celebrate Marxist ideas but the only member of the public who goes anywhere near these meetings is the man who has the keys to the front door of the hall. The public are in the dark when it comes to the alternatives to the free market. Even during this capitalist crisis I have not once read or heard of any section of the left dealing with anything but a singular piece of the pie. They seem very able to talk radical in relation to the privatisation of health but fail to open up the debate to take in the whole pie and discuss the need for a nationally planned economy. A nationalised health service is after all useless when not a part of the bigger picture that is a socialist planned economy.
It is odd that the Marxists of this country are failing to debate with the public in a Marxian dialectical way, a way that understands things to be interrelated and ever changing. Irish Marxists use the thought process of the conservatives (formal logic) when trying to convince the workers of a radical idea. The formal logic way of thinking is the polar extreme to the Marxian dialectical way of thinking and analysing society. They are basically using the conservative method of understanding the world to direct their radical opinions to the workers. Every time a Marxist is interviewed and discusses a social problem without using the dialectical way of thinking, without understanding and explaining that all things are related and ever changing and not static or isolated as the ruling class would have you believe they fail in representing the Socialist point of view.
This is our failure, we are not going to the workers as Marxists but as “lefties”. The “left”, or the reformists seem to be embracing conservative tactics and ways of thinking in their dealings with the public so it is up to the revolutionary Marxists to take the lead and stand up for the planned economy. We must use the same method that enabled us to understand society from a Marxist position when we are in discourse with the workers. We can’t use conservative thought processes to explain a revolutionary position. We have to be honest in our understanding of society and explain this clearly to the workers. We must look to be inspired from the behavour of Marxist giants like James Connolly. Who once upon a time stood on podiums in the middle of streets full of people, most of them hostile to his ideas,declaring loud and proud that he stood for working class revolution. Connolly's idea for a planned economy has been silenced through black propaganda from the ruling class and through our own failings. It's time to stick our heads above the parapet and unmask our revolutionary ideas.
Report from Egypt
FRONTLINE GOES INSIDE THE YOUTH MOVEMENT THAT IGNITED THE UPRISING IN EGYPT, AND INVESTIGATES THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
FRONTLINE Special Report from Egypt
Revolution in Cairo
Tuesday, February 22, 2011, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS
www.pbs.org/frontline/revolution-in-cairo
www.facebook.com/frontlinepbs
Twitter: @frontlinepbs
#RevolutionInCairo
As the protest movement in Egypt continues to send shock waves throughout the country—and the world—FRONTLINE dispatches teams to Cairo for this special report.
In Revolution in Cairo, airing Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE goes inside the group that ignited the uprising, following key leaders of the April 6 Youth Movement as they plot strategy, then head out into the Tahrir Square hoping to bring down President Hosni Mubarak. Also in this hour, veteran Middle East correspondent Charles Sennott of GlobalPost, reporting for FRONTLINE, lands in Cairo to take a hard look at Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood—the most well-organized and powerful of the country’s opposition groups—as a new fight for power in Egypt begins to takes shape.
“This is a story that no one could have predicted, and everyone now wants to know more about,” says FRONTLINE executive producer David Fanning. “We’re using our new monthly magazine to be able to respond quickly to timely events and help fill the need for added depth and insight on these important breaking stories.”
In this hour’s lead story, Revolution in Cairo, FRONTLINE gains unique access to the April 6 group, tracing the long road these young Egyptian activists took to Tahrir Square, as they’ve made increasingly bold use of the Internet in their underground resistance over the last few years. Through sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the members of April 6 and related groups helped organize a political movement that the secret police did not understand and could not stop, despite the arrest and torture of some of the movement’s key members.
For the second story, Inside the Muslim Brotherhood, GlobalPost’s Charles Sennott is on the ground in Cairo for FRONTLINE to investigate the Muslim Brotherhood, the controversial but poorly understood Islamist political movement that’s poised to play a key role in Egypt’s future. While the group was absent in Tahrir Square when young demonstrators first ignited Egypt’s revolt, the Brotherhood assumed a larger role over the course of the protests, taking frontline positions in rock-throwing battles with regime supporters and helping to run emergency medical clinics. Now that the Muslim Brotherhood stands to take a prominent place at the negotiating table, we examine what the group believes and how it may influence politics in the country and the region.
Leading up to the Feb. 22 broadcast, the website will feature dispatches, photos and audio from our team in Cairo as they report on this fast-moving story. In addition, FRONTLINE (@FrontlinePBS) will be live-tweeting (#RevolutionInCairo) during the broadcast, and hosting an open chat with producers on our website following the broadcast.
Revolution in Cairo is co-production with GlobalPost and is written and senior produced by Michael Kirk and Martin Smith. The special correspondent is Charles Sennott of GlobalPost. The series senior producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning.
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Wednesday, February 16, 2011
There is no alternative?
From Cairo to Dakar to Durban,
Another World Actually Is Possible!
Patrick Bond
Last week's World Social Forum (WSF) in Dakar, Senegal, ended up riotously happy thanks to the eviction of a universally-hated Egyptian Pharoah, after near-debilitating logistical disasters at the event's outset. Each year, in order to oppose the corporate agenda of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss town of Davos, tens of thousands of social activists gather to define why “Another World is Possible!” But it's impossibly good luck to combine this plea with an actual case of democratic revolution.
This year our hosts were Senegalese NGOs, though the WSF is usually held at the university complex and dockyards of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil. At some point within the next decade, Durbanites should get up the nerve and offer to host it, but probably not until a certain ruling party ends its hegemonising ways, a test of which will come during state-society conflicts at November's global climate summit.
Signs of Hope
To be sure, tough times lie ahead in that other portentous world constructed by civil society (not political parties or religious institutions) in Cairo's Tahrir Square over the past few weeks, in the wake of the Tunisian citizenry's red card against Ben Ali from Tunis. Algeria, Yemen and Palestine are also rumbling with hopeful bottom-up democratic instincts, as their pro-Western tyrannies shiver in fear.
But the revolutions are not yet consolidated, and on Sunday, ominous reports from Cairo's Higher Military Council – the new rulers – suggest a ban on worker meetings and prohibition of strikes is imminent. More of the protesting we saw 11 days ago by local trade unionists and Middle East solidarity activists at the Egyptian embassy in Pretoria will likely be needed.
And reversing disastrous macroeconomic policies made in Washington is another looming challenge which cannot be shirked. Though he could also have meant Egypt (or for that matter South Africa), Cairo-born, Dakar-based political economist Samir Amin remarked of Tunisia, “Economic and social factors were also influential in the uprising of the people. The country experiences rapidly escalating unemployment, particularly of youth, including educated young people. The standard of living of the majority of the population is decreasing.”
Still, with the booting of the Ali and Mubarak dictatorships, it does seem that the hardest part is over for millions who demonstrated so courageously, at the cost of hundreds of lives and thousands of injuries, especially when paramilitaries failed to evict Tahrir Square occupiers, confounding the regime's dogmatic supporters in Tel Aviv and Washington.
How foolish poor Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton must feel now, that their respective 2009 speeches about democracy (in Cairo!) and the need for internet freedoms are being taken so seriously by the masses. The backtracking by both – Obama vainly hoping Mubarak would stay until September to assure a pro-Israeli transition, and Clinton fruitlessly trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks (which assisted both uprisings) – are another useful pedagogical example of the USA's talk-left (democracy), walk-right (imperialism).
Our colleagues at the Arab-African Research Centre have been watching dissent brew for years, studying 1200 distinct Egyptian protest actions since 2009 alone. The centre's vice president Helmi Sharawy calls it a “popular youth revolution” whose legacy traces back three decades. What's new, he reported from Tahrir Square last week, are Facebook, Twitter and the internet as the “youth's last machinery of contact, as we are all suffering under Emergency Law since 1981.” Even though Mubarak pulled the internet plug, the social-networking ties were tight enough.
And not just in Cairo, says Sharawy: “Millions came out in Alexandria, Suez, Mansoura, Fayoum, Damietta. A big percentage of women and children among demonstrators, poor women are more than others. Middle-class youth were in the majority at the beginning but the poor came to it for protest, and then as revolution. The traditional political parties are in a critical position because they were conservative in the beginning.”
Dakar - Logistical Problems
Back in Dakar, though, the WSF suffered debilitating logistical messes, which must be recognized so they don't re-emerge in other such summits. Those who came long distances to hold specific panel discussions and learn from allies, present information, debate and take work forward in a formal setting were furious on the first two days at Diop University, the region's largest. The well-networked middle-class NGO professionals regrouped quickly but lowest-income African women didn't have cell phones and were most victimized.
The problem was that WSF organizers simply had not achieved political power sufficient to hold university officials accountable to earlier oral promises of adequate space. An invitation for participation by Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade – another pro-Western free-marketeer – was a non-sequitur given his hostility to WSF constituencies, especially thousands of angry local human rights and democracy activists.
Not having the leading institutions' political support meant the mass cancellation of the first round of panels and the time-consuming construction of alternative tent venues, as students descended into the scheduled classrooms during what should have been a holiday week in the university calendar. But a student strike against Wade's new cost-recovery policy pushed classes forward, into last week.
As an activist rightly demanded to WSF delegates just before the main environmental plenary on Thursday, “We are the youth of the country, we do not have the resources to enter. This is a public university. You are the international community. You have means to pressure. Until there is a solution we will continue to strike.”
President of Bolivia, Evo Morales speaking to World Social Forum attendees.
The WSF's leading star this year was, ironically, a political head of state, Bolivian President Evo Morales. In addition to very powerful language about halting climate change, he raised an issue many South Africans appreciated: “We are going to go to the UN to declare that water is a basic public need that must not be managed by private interests, but should be for all people, including people of rural areas.”
The next question is how to add and link up all the other struggles to have needs met, including jobs, the environment and liberation from patriarchy, homophobia, racism and so many other backward systems. If any gathering can attempt a broad-based ideological revival that takes democracy as a foundation and adds socio-economic justice, it is the WSF. But reticence to tackle this ambitious challenge remains.
A slightly smaller version of this agenda will appear here in November, as an alternative summit to the UN Conference of Polluters (COP17) hosts visiting climate justice activists. City Hall's reported widespread corruption and financial mismanagement, controversies over UKZN's hush-hush university review, and student protest against inadequate financial aid at the Durban University of Technology will have ebbed. But memories of masses of people arising under conditions previously considered highly unlikely, as in North Africa, will remain.
From the North African revolutions to the West African WSF, other region's civil societies might learn not only the pleasurable, drunken rhetoric of emancipation, but the patience not to get drunk on that rhetoric too fast, at least not before certain preconditions are achieved: democracy and the logistics that democracy demands. •
Patrick Bond is based at UKZN's Centre for Civil Society.