David Harvey
Explaining the crisis
Interview with the author of The Enigma of Capital
....From a Marxist perspective, equilibrium is an unusual condition. There are always forces taking us away that are internal to the dynamics of the system. So the Marxian framework would look at it in a very different way. But, again, I go back to this—you always have to be careful from a Marxist perspective not to say, “Here is the next crisis and it’s the final crisis.” What I try to do for instance in The Enigma of Capital, is to talk very specifically about what the nature of the internal contradictions of capitalism are and why the resolution of the crisis of the 1970s created a configuration that was likely to produce the sort of crisis we’ve finally seen erupting around us over the last two or three years. That then leads to the big question: What kind of adjustments are likely to occur within the capitalist dynamic to create the foundations for a new crisis further down the way?....
Mu
Saturday, October 2, 2010
A hero for our time: go thou and do likewise
Protesting for Bradley Manning
| September 22, 2010
SEATTLE--As part of a national day of action in support of Pfc. Bradley Manning, 50 members and supporters of Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War picketed outside the gates of Fort Lewis, 40 miles south of Seattle, on September 18.
Manning is accused of leaking military video and other documents on the U.S. war against Afghanistan to the muckraking Web site WikiLeaks. Manning is currently in a military prison in Quantico, Va., charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of classified information. If convicted, he faces up to 52 years in prison.
Veterans for Peace feels that whoever leaked this information is a hero, since exposing the truth about the U.S. military's role in Afghanistan could help build even more opposition to a disastrous war--and ultimately save many lives.
To emphasize their support for whistleblowers, protesters blew whistles, waved to motorists and passed out leaflets in support of Manning and all whistleblowers. The response from motorists on the freeway below the rally was mostly very positive--in line with polls that show public opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In spite of attacks from the U.S. government and especially the Pentagon, support for Manning is growing around the U.S. and the world. The military brass say that the WikiLeaks report will endanger the lives of U.S. troops and supporters of the U.S. in Afghanistan. But what's really killing the troops and civilians in Afghanistan is the U.S. war itself.
For more information, visit the Bradley Manning Support Network Web site.
Friday, October 1, 2010
We have fed you all for a thousand years
[A song of the Industrial Workers of the World]
We have fed you all for a thousand years
And you hail us still unfed,
Though there's never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the workers' dead.
We have yielded our best to give you rest
And you lie on crimson wool.
Then if blood be the price of all your wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in full!
There is never a mine blown skyward now
But we're buried alive for you.
There's never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But we are its ghastly crew.
Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in!
We have fed you all for a thousand years-
For that was our doom, you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike a week ago.
You have taken our lives, and our babies and wives,
And we're told it's your legal share,
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth,
Good God! We bought it fair!
[Note: This song, patterned by an unnknown writer
after verses by Rudyard Kipling —about the British
Navy — was printed at the beginning opf the last
centuary in both the Bulletin of the IWW,
and in the Chicago-based journal,
The International Socialist Review]
Where is Britain going?
Comrade Cable? I don't think so
Vince Cable is no Marxist. In pushing for greater competition in business he fails to see that it isn't the cure – it's the disease
Vince Cable's assault on "spivs and gamblers" in the City may have won him a standing ovation at the Lib Dem conference, but it has caused outrage at the Daily Mail and in the Confederation of British Industry. Is it time for Marxists to welcome Comrade Cable to our ranks?
I don't think so – and not just because he is so lacking in doctrinal savvy as to call Bob Crow a "Trotskyite". His speech falls into a long tradition of politicians trying to distance themselves from what Ted Heath denounced in 1973 as the "unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism".
Cable invokes the authority of Adam Smith, and, though he denounces capitalism, his real beef is with capitalists. It is they, Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776), who distort the workings of capitalism by rigging markets and fixing prices. Cable's remedy, like Smith's, is more market, more competition. "Competition is central to my pro-market, pro-business, agenda," he says.
But there's a problem with this recipe. The New Labour government, about whose economic policies Cable is so scathing, extended the deregulation of the City in the name of promoting greater competition. It was the increasingly desperate struggle among banks and shadow banks to squeeze out every dime they could by flogging subprime mortgages that precipitated the present economic and financial crisis.
So competition isn't the cure – it's the disease. We live under an economic system that is driven by a blind process of competition in which firms and even states look only to their own advantage. These rivalries produce not only terrible economic crises but also the increasing destruction of the natural world that threatens planetary disaster.
It's true that the bank bailouts have left the financial sector both here and in the United States dominated by a few giants. Had Cable bothered to read The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx's critique of fantasies of a purified market economy, he might have learned that "monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists … monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition."
Cable signals his agreement with the Bank of England's Mervyn King, who argues that banks that are "too big to fail" should be broken up. But there is no chance of George Osborne, who won the Whitehall battle with Cable over who should control the coalition's banking policy, allowing this to happen.
This is the ultimate contradiction around which Cable squirms in his speech. He may reject laissez-faire and unrestrained capitalism, but he is in coalition with a Tory party whose leaders are, in economics, unreconstructed Thatcherites. Osborne, with David Cameron's backing, has seized on the budget deficit drastically to shrink the size of the state.
Fiscal austerity will have devastating effects on the fabric of social life. As the International Monetary Fund recently warned, it may also kill off the economic recovery. With firms and households still short of money, cutting public spending will kick away the main prop holding up the economy.
So Cable's membership application will have to wait. While he is an honoured guest at the Tory conference in Birmingham, I will be outside on 3 October, demonstrating with the Fight for the Right to Work campaign.
College debt and finance capital
College education for the majority is promoted for the same reason home ownership is: to generate loans and debt to fuel the speculative bubbles. Speed-up, union-busting, credit card debt, mortgage debt, student loan debt. Public schools are being gutted and we are being presented with charter schools for k-12 as the "race to the top" remedy; and soon parents will be getting student loans to send their kids to charter schools just like they do to send them to get their associates degree now.
Cops: the same all over
By Patrick Larsen
Dramatic events unfolded in Ecuador yesterday, when a sizeable group of the country's police forces tried to overthrow the left-wing government of Rafael Correa. The official reason for the rebellion of the police forces was a law passed by Congress on Wednesday that would end the practice of giving members of Ecuador's military and police medals and bonuses with each promotion.
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