http://www.clnews.org/forums A portal connecting community and labor in solidarity using direct action for working class goals, i.e., decentralization and anarchism, a horizontal network of self-organized communities, internationalism, cross border networks, nonviolence. en Thu, 17 May 2012 20:52:27 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.clnews.org/forums/images/clnews/misc/rss.jpg http://www.clnews.org/forums http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26010&goto=newpost Thu, 17 May 2012 09:13:57 GMT Their goal is not only to reduce state expenditures or to increase tax revenue. It is also a matter of reducing wage levels in the private sector... Their goal is not only to reduce state expenditures or to increase tax revenue. It is also a matter of reducing wage levels in the private sector and of increasing working hours, in short, of increasing the overall exploitation of labor. Austerity policies don't resolve the crisis, but they help to realize traditional demands of capitalists that up to now had not been achievable due to the relation of forces. Austerity measures serve not only the bank rescues (which could also be carried out by the ECB buying out the banks' government bonds), but serve above all industrial capital, in particular export-oriented industrial capital, whose profitability can be increased in this way. To add to this: it is not just about defending the euro but, above all, its international role. The common currency functions not only as a means of circulation and payment within the Eurozone, but also has a global function, even if as an international reserve currency it takes second place behind the American dollar. The importance and prominence of the euro would be endangered if international investors lost confidence in the government bonds of Eurozone countries and withdrew their capital. The euro would hence lose value against the currencies of other capitalist centers. It is precisely in the competition between currencies that the stability of the euro -- as a measure of value and as a means of circulation and payment, as well as a medium of accumulation -- is of importance. Internationally active banks and transnational corporations, which are based in the Eurozone, profit in particular when they can offer credit in their own currency and when their business partners can pay in euros. This reduces their currency risks. In this regard it is of interest to these banks and corporations the extent to which actors outside of the Eurozone are prepared to use the euro as a currency. This becomes of even greater importance the more financial linkages with actors outside of the Eurozone increase. For Germany, exports to nations outside of the Eurozone in recent years increased faster than exports to those within the Eurozone. The defense of the euro through policies of austerity is not simply the result of the European strategies of German capital but above all of its globalization strategies. Nevertheless, the German government does not the play the role of Europe's disciplinarian solely in the interests of German capital but also in the interests of dominant fractions of capital in other Eurozone countries. Only this convergence of interests can explain why Sarkozy largely swung into line behind Merkel and why the Greek government under no circumstances considered exiting the Eurozone although austerity policies were and are wrecking the internal market and are damaging the fraction of capital dependent on this market.

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26010 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26009&goto=newpost Tue, 15 May 2012 23:08:21 GMT The good news: the Christian Democratic Union of Angela Merkel took a real whipping in the election in North Rhine-Westphalia (usually abbreviated to... The good news: the Christian Democratic Union of Angela Merkel took a real whipping in the election in North Rhine-Westphalia (usually abbreviated to NRW), the largest German state in terms of population. . . . But alas, there was a far more serious bad news item, though all too few realized its significance. The aforementioned election in NRW, which scratched Merkel, seriously wounded its other main loser, the Left Party. It was no surprise in view of recent polls, but a shock all the same! It not only failed to reach the five percent needed to keep any of its seats in the state legislature (it won 11 in the last election) but lost severely, getting only about 2.5 percent! This was the second West German state in a week, after Schleswig-Holstein, where it lost its representation by missing the hurdle, and this state, due to its size, is especially important. It is hard hit by an economic crisis worsened by constant shutdowns of coal mines and steelworks in its Ruhr Valley, a real German Rust Belt. Why did these troubles, with severe cutbacks in the budgets of nearly all towns and cities, not work to the advantage of the Left? And why is this important, even to people in other countries?

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26009 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26008&goto=newpost Mon, 14 May 2012 17:25:14 GMT "What were the reasons for this revolution if not for us to have a voice, to establish our worth, our dignity, to feel like we're humans, with the right to say yes or no?"

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26008 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26007&goto=newpost Sun, 13 May 2012 03:18:49 GMT "What were the reasons for this revolution if not for us to have a voice, to establish our worth, our dignity, to feel like we're humans, with the right to say yes or no?"

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26007 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26006&goto=newpost Fri, 11 May 2012 06:24:18 GMT The Bolivarian government sends its most heartfelt condolences to the brave Syrian people, particularly the families and friends of the victims of... The Bolivarian government sends its most heartfelt condolences to the brave Syrian people, particularly the families and friends of the victims of this crime, at the same time reiterating its denunciation of the policy of interference and destabilization aimed to thwart the initiatives for dialogue and negotiated solution to the conflict that have been promoted by the government of the Syrian Arab Republic.

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26006 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26005&goto=newpost Thu, 10 May 2012 18:59:38 GMT "People sometimes ask us to work on their farms, and we do for a few months. But then we are taken back to the detention centre," Hassan, an Egyptian migrant told IRIN. "I was taken to work as an agricultural labourer for about 300 dinars a month ($240). If we go out to work, why can't we just be released? Why do we have to come back here again to the centre?" A Somali migrant, Abdul Mahmoud, also said he had been taken out to work on a construction site and then brought back to the centre. Another said he had worked on a farm and was paid 200 dinars a month ($160). "We are certainly concerned about labour exploitation, and abuse," said [Samuel] Cheung [Senior Protection Officer for UNHCR]. "There are some unconfirmed reports of migrants not receiving their wages, or their wages used for the upkeep of the centre. But then at times, detention centres also do release people to work and give them the chance to get regularized."

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26005 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26004&goto=newpost Thu, 10 May 2012 17:31:41 GMT "People sometimes ask us to work on their farms, and we do for a few months. But then we are taken back to the detention centre," Hassan, an Egyptian migrant told IRIN. "I was taken to work as an agricultural labourer for about 300 dinars a month ($240). If we go out to work, why can't we just be released? Why do we have to come back here again to the centre?" A Somali migrant, Abdul Mahmoud, also said he had been taken out to work on a construction site and then brought back to the centre. Another said he had worked on a farm and was paid 200 dinars a month ($160). "We are certainly concerned about labour exploitation, and abuse," said [Samuel] Cheung [Senior Protection Officer for UNHCR]. "There are some unconfirmed reports of migrants not receiving their wages, or their wages used for the upkeep of the centre. But then at times, detention centres also do release people to work and give them the chance to get regularized."

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26004 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26003&goto=newpost Wed, 09 May 2012 12:16:27 GMT Maryam al-Khawaja: Bahrain had the largest protests in the so-called Arab Spring. According to the opposition, the largest protest in Bahrain was... Maryam al-Khawaja: Bahrain had the largest protests in the so-called Arab Spring. According to the opposition, the largest protest in Bahrain was around 400,000 people. Bahrain's population [migrant workers excluded] is around 600-700,000 people. That would be like 40 million Egyptians turning out to protest on the same day and at the same place! That hasn't happened in any other country. Also, if you look at the numbers per capita, around 80 people have been killed in Bahrain since the beginning of the protests. If Bahrain had the same population as Egypt, today we would have more than 11,000 people killed in Bahrain. . . . The West in general was not the issue. The issue was obtaining their rights from the government. However, because of the way the West has reacted to the situation so far, people are becoming a lot more anti-West. The fact that the West has not done anything about it, that there have been absolutely no international consequences for the Bahraini royal family, is why human rights abuses continue. They have absolutely no incentive to stop human rights violations. This makes the West to a certain extent complicit in what is going on in Bahrain -- especially since they are still selling arms! I think if this situation goes on this way, we will get to a situation in which people are going to say very openly and very strongly: "Once the decision is ours, we will not want the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain."

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26003 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26002&goto=newpost Mon, 07 May 2012 19:41:08 GMT In The Invisible Handcuffs, I tried to show how economists tried to frame capitalism as a system of voluntary transactions, as I mentioned in my... In The Invisible Handcuffs, I tried to show how economists tried to frame capitalism as a system of voluntary transactions, as I mentioned in my previous answer. One can understand how the economists could have gotten away with this evasion of reality in a world when literacy was limited and communications, expensive. In a modern world, to be able to get away with such nonsense is an audacious act of genius. Economic theory also abstracts from virtually anything having to do with time. For example, business is assumed to invest efficiently when it purchases durable equipment. How is that possible when business has no knowledge about future demand conditions, technology, or competition? Considerations of such matters would make mathematical models impossible. How is it possible to efficiently value the existing stock of resource, such as petroleum, when nobody knows precisely how much petroleum there is, or whether alternative sources of energy will appear, or whether creating even more carbon dioxide would be too dangerous to contemplate? What economics does do very well is to create an effective ideological system that pretends to prove that whatever business wants to do is good. Within this framework of voluntary transactions, workers agree to a wage bargain in which they give up their leisure time in return for wages, which more than compensate for their lost leisure. No thought is given to the context in which the transaction is made. From this perspective, the conditions of workers who accept the lethal consequences of accepting a job at the Fukushima nuclear plant are no different from a high-priced athlete playing an enjoyable game. Also missing from this picture is anything having to do with work, workers, and working conditions. The only relevant action is the wage bargain. Just as an individual consumer tries to buy commodities at the cheapest possible price, employers want to buy their workers for as little as they can. Unions become framed as a monopoly that interferes with the transactions. At the same time, in this transaction-based perspective, neither employers nor society have any reason to nurture the skills or the creativity of the working class. Why not break the unions and defund education? Not surprisingly, productivity suffers.

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26002 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26001&goto=newpost Mon, 07 May 2012 02:58:05 GMT In The Invisible Handcuffs, I tried to show how economists tried to frame capitalism as a system of voluntary transactions, as I mentioned in my... In The Invisible Handcuffs, I tried to show how economists tried to frame capitalism as a system of voluntary transactions, as I mentioned in my previous answer. One can understand how the economists could have gotten away with this evasion of reality in a world when literacy was limited and communications, expensive. In a modern world, to be able to get away with such nonsense is an audacious act of genius. Economic theory also abstracts from virtually anything having to do with time. For example, business is assumed to invest efficiently when it purchases durable equipment. How is that possible when business has no knowledge about future demand conditions, technology, or competition? Considerations of such matters would make mathematical models impossible. How is it possible to efficiently value the existing stock of resource, such as petroleum, when nobody knows precisely how much petroleum there is, or whether alternative sources of energy will appear, or whether creating even more carbon dioxide would be too dangerous to contemplate? What economics does do very well is to create an effective ideological system that pretends to prove that whatever business wants to do is good. Within this framework of voluntary transactions, workers agree to a wage bargain in which they give up their leisure time in return for wages, which more than compensate for their lost leisure. No thought is given to the context in which the transaction is made. From this perspective, the conditions of workers who accept the lethal consequences of accepting a job at the Fukushima nuclear plant are no different from a high-priced athlete playing an enjoyable game. Also missing from this picture is anything having to do with work, workers, and working conditions. The only relevant action is the wage bargain. Just as an individual consumer tries to buy commodities at the cheapest possible price, employers want to buy their workers for as little as they can. Unions become framed as a monopoly that interferes with the transactions. At the same time, in this transaction-based perspective, neither employers nor society have any reason to nurture the skills or the creativity of the working class. Why not break the unions and defund education? Not surprisingly, productivity suffers.

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26001 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26000&goto=newpost Sun, 06 May 2012 05:16:30 GMT In The Invisible Handcuffs, I tried to show how economists tried to frame capitalism as a system of voluntary transactions, as I mentioned in my... In The Invisible Handcuffs, I tried to show how economists tried to frame capitalism as a system of voluntary transactions, as I mentioned in my previous answer. One can understand how the economists could have gotten away with this evasion of reality in a world when literacy was limited and communications, expensive. In a modern world, to be able to get away with such nonsense is an audacious act of genius. Economic theory also abstracts from virtually anything having to do with time. For example, business is assumed to invest efficiently when it purchases durable equipment. How is that possible when business has no knowledge about future demand conditions, technology, or competition? Considerations of such matters would make mathematical models impossible. How is it possible to efficiently value the existing stock of resource, such as petroleum, when nobody knows precisely how much petroleum there is, or whether alternative sources of energy will appear, or whether creating even more carbon dioxide would be too dangerous to contemplate? What economics does do very well is to create an effective ideological system that pretends to prove that whatever business wants to do is good. Within this framework of voluntary transactions, workers agree to a wage bargain in which they give up their leisure time in return for wages, which more than compensate for their lost leisure. No thought is given to the context in which the transaction is made. From this perspective, the conditions of workers who accept the lethal consequences of accepting a job at the Fukushima nuclear plant are no different from a high-priced athlete playing an enjoyable game. Also missing from this picture is anything having to do with work, workers, and working conditions. The only relevant action is the wage bargain. Just as an individual consumer tries to buy commodities at the cheapest possible price, employers want to buy their workers for as little as they can. Unions become framed as a monopoly that interferes with the transactions. At the same time, in this transaction-based perspective, neither employers nor society have any reason to nurture the skills or the creativity of the working class. Why not break the unions and defund education? Not surprisingly, productivity suffers.

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26000 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25999&goto=newpost Sat, 05 May 2012 15:27:25 GMT Thus, as a matter of accounting, we could look at real GDP growth for 2002-2010 and ask, how much of this real (inflation-adjusted) growth is due to... Thus, as a matter of accounting, we could look at real GDP growth for 2002-2010 and ask, how much of this real (inflation-adjusted) growth is due to exports of commodities? It turns out that only 12 percent of Argentina's real GDP growth during this period was due to any kind of exports at all. And just a fraction of this 12 percent was due to commodity exports, including soybeans. So Argentina's economic growth from 2002-2010 wasn't an export-led growth experience, by any stretch of the imagination; still less a "commodities boom." . . . The value of agricultural exports (including of course soybeans) as a percent of Argentina's GDP didn't rise during the expansion. It was about 5 percent of GDP when the economy started growing in 2002, and 3.7 percent of GDP in 2010. In other words, there's no plausible story that anyone can tell from the data to support the idea that Argentina's growth over the past nine years was driven by a "commodities boom." Why does this matter?

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25999 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25998&goto=newpost Fri, 04 May 2012 18:02:43 GMT In our current Punishment Culture, institutional white America is sending assault after assault against communities of color, on as many fronts as... In our current Punishment Culture, institutional white America is sending assault after assault against communities of color, on as many fronts as there are communities. In different times, this might be a flexing of racial muscle, an exercise in power, the Great White Father knowing best. But in a time of a global economic instability that at least wobbles the nominally lone superpower, of a rising class consciousness awakened at least partly by the Occupy movement, of severe cuts to services such as education that even working-class whites have come to regard as rights rather than privileges, and especially of demographics changing surely enough to assert that whites will themselves become a racial minority in only three decades -- in such times as these, the Punishment Culture seems like overstretch, even like paranoid desperation. Lest this claim itself seem like overstretch, consider the message that Punishment Culture sends to the punished . . . .

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25998 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25997&goto=newpost Thu, 03 May 2012 07:02:24 GMT Max Ajl: Why was the occupation so difficult to raise at the protests? Matan Kaminer: I think precisely because what you had there was people rising... Max Ajl: Why was the occupation so difficult to raise at the protests? Matan Kaminer: I think precisely because what you had there was people rising up for themselves. This is very easy to sneeze at, particularly because the "activist" point of view always equates between the oppressed and the (racialized) "other." But last summer people who had always seen themselves as the "salt of the earth," that is, the ones who own the system and whom it was built for, began seeing themselves as oppressed. This is a very important moment. For me too: for many years I have theoretically understood the importance of seeing my problems as social and not individual. But I never actually did it until last summer: I never conceptualized myself as oppressed. Even telling you this I feel a resistance -- what, upper-middle-class, educated me, on my way to a doctorate and (God willing) a living in academia -- oppressed? Exploited? But indeed I am, as all 99% of us are, and last summer was the moment when we realized this. Of course this is not the whole story. People are racist, and most people definitely do not identify with the Palestinians or understand the necessity of making common cause with them. So raising the occupation at protests was something that would marginalize you, and most people don't enjoy that. Nevertheless there were some attempts, the most important of which was "Tent #1948" at the Rothschild encampment, where Palestinian activists raised consciousness about the issue. There was a telling incident there: they had a Palestinian flag flying, and someone came and took it down. One of the activists talked to him, and when he realized she was Palestinian he apologized and put it back. It wasn't legitimate for a "leftist" to put it up, but it was for her, because it was her own oppression she was protesting, not somebody else's. I think you see where I'm going with this.

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25997 http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25996&goto=newpost Wed, 02 May 2012 07:21:06 GMT Well, what I try to do in The Faith of the Faithless, what I try and show, is the way in which the logic of contemporary insurrectionism feeds off... Well, what I try to do in The Faith of the Faithless, what I try and show, is the way in which the logic of contemporary insurrectionism feeds off deeper traditions of heresy, deeper traditions of secession. It seems to me that the Invisible Committee have a completely Catharistic idea of the world or a gnostical idea of the world: the world is a wicked, corrupt, poisoned place. And while they're not planning to go off in a spaceship and make a new civilization, there's a side to it that is like that; there's the twin prongs of sabotage and secession. We need to withdraw from a civilization that's falling off a cliff, that is no longer credible, and then sabotage it. So what you have with them is a deeply aestheticized critique of society that isn't really even Marxist in the way in which the Situationists were. It's more the idea that the world is a concentration camp, the world is a dark place, and we need to get off. It's a powerful temptation because it makes intuitive sense. I've just written a piece on Philip K. Dick's new book, Exegesis, which is his magnum opus, eight thousand pages of scribblings, the ravings of a mad man, a work of genius for some, it's viewed in different ways, but the core vision is a gnostical one. The world is a dark place, it's a place of illusion run by corporations and secretive powers, and we need to break through that matrix and see it for what it is, take the red pill as it were, and then the scales will fall from our eyes and we'll begin to be able to resist it. There is some of that fantasy at work in the work of some of the contemporary insurrectionist groups, and I understand it and I applaud it up to a point, but I guess I've always been keener on less dramatic, local, more modest forms of political engagement. I like the anarchist tradition because it's about urban gardens, and allotments, and free schools, and little local medical clinics. Whereas the ski-masked, black-clad insurrectionist I think is a boring figure of a virile politics that we need to leave behind. I think that was one of the things that was playing out in the Occupy movement, a tension between those different aspects. . . . Gramsci, for example, is hugely important for me, the way in which debates after Lenin were transformed by Gramsci. He places such an emphasis on politics, ideology, and what he called a historical bloc; given that the revolution is not going to happen through the contradictions of capitalism, we need therefore to form a front, form a collective will, what he called the activity of hegemony. It seems to me that that is a much more realistic understanding of politics than many others on the Left where there is either this ridiculous, quasi-religious eschatology that ends in revolution or in the utter resignation that you find in the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Horkheimer.

More... ]]> Monthly Review Webzine CL Admin http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25996