Monday, February 28, 2005
Prol-Position News
I've just started to read a good new newsletter called Prol-Position News. As the opening editorial states, this newsletter contains articles "reporting on different spheres of exploitation and proletarian struggle around the world." It also contains some radical analysis with which I mostly agree. For instance, I knew that I would want to read a lot more of what these people had to say as soon as I read the following (also from the opening editorial):
Unions and other forms of workers’ representation clearly remain an obstacle for further development of struggles. By narrowly focusing on the interests of single companies, professions, nationalities etc., unions can do nothing but widen the divisions within the class. They need to stick to forms of representation and delegation to negotiate, and therefore have to suppress tendencies towards self-organisation and autonomy within the struggles. They do this, for instance, by retaining and manipulating information or by releasing reports merely glorifying struggles (whether lost or won). There is also growing potential for links between the so-called social movements, the new forms of organizing they develop and the direct action of proletarian struggles. Some of these trends we could see within the so-called antiglobalization movement. We want to circulate reports about experiences of self-organisation within these conflicts, understand their material conditions, and acknowledge their potentials and difficulties.
Unions and other forms of workers’ representation clearly remain an obstacle for further development of struggles. By narrowly focusing on the interests of single companies, professions, nationalities etc., unions can do nothing but widen the divisions within the class. They need to stick to forms of representation and delegation to negotiate, and therefore have to suppress tendencies towards self-organisation and autonomy within the struggles. They do this, for instance, by retaining and manipulating information or by releasing reports merely glorifying struggles (whether lost or won). There is also growing potential for links between the so-called social movements, the new forms of organizing they develop and the direct action of proletarian struggles. Some of these trends we could see within the so-called antiglobalization movement. We want to circulate reports about experiences of self-organisation within these conflicts, understand their material conditions, and acknowledge their potentials and difficulties.
Friday, February 25, 2005
Enemy of the State Talking about the War on the Poor
It's ten days late, but I've been meaning to mention a good post at Enemy of the State, in which Ductapefatwa talks a little about the war on the poor. I like these lines in particular:
With traditional slavery technically outlawed, the US has been obliged to develop creative workarounds over the last century and a half, and they have done a yeoman's job. From usurious credit card companies to ghettos, social programs that do more to help politicians' cousins get jobs as bureaucrats or construction contracts than they do to actually reduce the number of poor, to the concerted effort to keep medical treatment a commercial product, which is quite effective in reducing the number of poor, quite literally, to laws that permit companies to fire the worker who earns $60 an hour and hire someone in India to do his job for $8 an hour, to the creation of an under-underclass of (mostly Latin American) underserfs, who toil for nearly nothing for the privilege of sending a sack of beans home to feed children who would otherwise starve, and on and on....
No one knows exactly how many Americans, every day, reluctantly accept the fact that they can no longer afford housing. The luckier ones move in with friends or family, others simply wander the streets, acclimating themselves to their new life, or something like it, long before it came to this, they were already The Enemy....
They may not like it, they may prefer to "frame" it in all kinds of elegant and attractive ways, but the affluent know, they cannot escape the undeniable if unlovely truth: the common Enemy is the Poor.
With traditional slavery technically outlawed, the US has been obliged to develop creative workarounds over the last century and a half, and they have done a yeoman's job. From usurious credit card companies to ghettos, social programs that do more to help politicians' cousins get jobs as bureaucrats or construction contracts than they do to actually reduce the number of poor, to the concerted effort to keep medical treatment a commercial product, which is quite effective in reducing the number of poor, quite literally, to laws that permit companies to fire the worker who earns $60 an hour and hire someone in India to do his job for $8 an hour, to the creation of an under-underclass of (mostly Latin American) underserfs, who toil for nearly nothing for the privilege of sending a sack of beans home to feed children who would otherwise starve, and on and on....
No one knows exactly how many Americans, every day, reluctantly accept the fact that they can no longer afford housing. The luckier ones move in with friends or family, others simply wander the streets, acclimating themselves to their new life, or something like it, long before it came to this, they were already The Enemy....
They may not like it, they may prefer to "frame" it in all kinds of elegant and attractive ways, but the affluent know, they cannot escape the undeniable if unlovely truth: the common Enemy is the Poor.
Monday, February 21, 2005
Forty Years Ago Today
This is from an article by John J. Simon, in the current issue of Monthly Review:
Malcolm X was gunned down in the early afternoon of a chilly February 21, 1965, as he addressed a meeting in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. The circumstances of Malcolm’s assassination remain murky to this day. There have long been suspicions of some government involvement. At the time of the shooting there were about forty NYPD officers at the scene, ostensibly to prevent any violent attack (there had been many threats to Malcolm’s life in the weeks leading up to the "hit"). Inexplicably though, the police were instructed to stand down at the moment of the shootings, complicating both the investigation of the crime and the capture of the assailants. Ultimately three men were indicted and served jail time. Two, from the Nation of Islam’s paramilitary unit, Fruit of Islam, were convicted for shooting Malcolm. The third, one of Malcolm’s bodyguards, was found guilty of illegally (but perhaps wisely) carrying a pistol into the ballroom.
Malcolm X’s legacy is ongoing. Schools, colleges, and streets have been named for him. He has inspired millions here and abroad. But with Malcolm "safely dead," some have tried to dilute him into a kind of vague, nonthreatening, and distant icon. But for those of us who have a radical vision of a world transformed by a humanely engaged struggle for social justice - for socialism - one place we can surely start is that part of his legacy to be found in his own transformation, his own "conversion," and what it can tell us in very bleak times about human possibility.
Malcolm X was gunned down in the early afternoon of a chilly February 21, 1965, as he addressed a meeting in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. The circumstances of Malcolm’s assassination remain murky to this day. There have long been suspicions of some government involvement. At the time of the shooting there were about forty NYPD officers at the scene, ostensibly to prevent any violent attack (there had been many threats to Malcolm’s life in the weeks leading up to the "hit"). Inexplicably though, the police were instructed to stand down at the moment of the shootings, complicating both the investigation of the crime and the capture of the assailants. Ultimately three men were indicted and served jail time. Two, from the Nation of Islam’s paramilitary unit, Fruit of Islam, were convicted for shooting Malcolm. The third, one of Malcolm’s bodyguards, was found guilty of illegally (but perhaps wisely) carrying a pistol into the ballroom.
Malcolm X’s legacy is ongoing. Schools, colleges, and streets have been named for him. He has inspired millions here and abroad. But with Malcolm "safely dead," some have tried to dilute him into a kind of vague, nonthreatening, and distant icon. But for those of us who have a radical vision of a world transformed by a humanely engaged struggle for social justice - for socialism - one place we can surely start is that part of his legacy to be found in his own transformation, his own "conversion," and what it can tell us in very bleak times about human possibility.
Slum World
Thank you to Mixin'jam for letting me know about Mike Davis' new book, Planet of Slums. This book explores the present condition and possible future of urban slums, which are the home to a billion people around the world. Judging by a couple of paragraphs from the Verso Books description, this looks to be an interesting document exploring a very bleak phenomenon:
From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neo-liberal theory.
Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz.
Doing a search, I found that Davis, himself, had given us a sort of preview (I assume) in the March-April 2004 issue of New Left Review. Actually, the article written by Davis looks more pessimistic than Verso's description of the book, at least in terms of providing hope that this phenomenon might yield anything close to the kind of proletarian revolt that rational leftists might desire (which means that it's not a pretty picture to me, either):
Struggles of informal workers, as John Walton emphasizes in a recent review of research on social movements in poor cities, have tended, above all, to be episodic and discontinuous. They are also usually focused on immediate consumption issues: land invasions in search of affordable housing and riots against rising food or utility prices. In the past, at least, "urban problems in developing societies have been more typically mediated by patron–client relations than by popular activism." Since the debt crisis of the 1980s, neopopulist leaders in Latin America have had dramatic success in exploiting the desperate desire of the urban poor for more stable, predictable structures of daily life. Although Walton doesn’t make the point explicitly, the urban informal sector has been ideologically promiscuous in its endorsement of populist saviours: in Peru rallying to Fujimori, but in Venezuela embracing Chávez. In Africa and South Asia, on the other hand, urban clientelism too often equates with the dominance of ethno-religious bigots and their nightmare ambitions of ethnic cleansing. Notorious examples include the anti-Muslim militias of the Oodua People’s Congress in Lagos and the semi-fascist Shiv Sena movement in Bombay.
Will such "eighteenth-century" sociologies of protest persist into the middle twenty-first century? The past is probably a poor guide to the future. History is not uniformitarian. The new urban world is evolving with extraordinary speed and often in unpredictable directions. Everywhere the continuous accumulation of poverty undermines existential security and poses even more extraordinary challenges to the economic ingenuity of the poor. Perhaps there is a tipping point at which the pollution, congestion, greed and violence of everyday urban life finally overwhelm the ad hoc civilities and survival networks of the slum. Certainly in the old rural world there were thresholds, often calibrated by famine, that passed directly to social eruption. But no one yet knows the social temperature at which the new cities of poverty spontaneously combust...
Today...populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity (and in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous to that of early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism. In Morocco, for instance, where half a million rural emigrants are absorbed into the teeming cities every year, and where half the population is under 25, Islamicist movements like "Justice and Welfare," founded by Sheik Abdessalam Yassin, have become the real governments of the slums: organizing night schools, providing legal aid to victims of state abuse, buying medicine for the sick, subsidizing pilgrimages and paying for funerals. As Prime Minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi, the Socialist leader who was once exiled by the monarchy, recently admitted to Ignacio Ramonet, "We [the Left] have become embourgeoisified. We have cut ourselves off from the people. We need to reconquer the popular quarters. The Islamicists have seduced our natural electorate. They promise them heaven on earth."
An article at AlterNet discusses Davis' book along with another one, Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. This article, written by James Wescott, introduces both books with the essential question:
With the apparent collapse of the anti-globalization carnival and the impotence of the anti-war movement, could the left be on to something, at last, with squatters – not the anarchists in developed cities who do it as a lifestyle choice, but the billion ex-peasants, entrepreneurs and derelicts who are starting to numerically dominate every city in the world outside of the northern and western hemispheres?
Unfortunately, the Neuwirth book, at least as described here, doesn't seem to give a very hopeful answer on that front, either.
The most interesting section of Shadow Cities isn't the reportage, which is often robotic and impatient, like a 30-second TV news piece. It's the chapter on "Proper Squatters, Improper Property," where Neuwirth discusses political scientists Hernando de Soto and Peter Marcuse's views on squatters, which represent the difficulties of grappling with the phenomenon of squatting in traditional ideological terms. De Soto, a free marketeer, wants to release the "dead capital" that squatters' property and entrepreneurship represents by immediately granting legal title deeds. Then the credit cards and consumerism will come. Marcuse, looking from the left, surprisingly seems to have rather less hope for squatters. As a result of their selfish pursuit of their own betterment, Marcuse says that squatters' communities – if they can be called that – are disorganized and inefficient, no model for a radical urban future.
Ultimately, I'm thinking that both books together might make for a depressing read - not just because of the miserable picture created by the slums themselves (with the corresponding mass suffering), but because both books seem to mention some possibilities for a "radical [left] urban future," only to tell us, resoundingly, not to count on it.
From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neo-liberal theory.
Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz.
Doing a search, I found that Davis, himself, had given us a sort of preview (I assume) in the March-April 2004 issue of New Left Review. Actually, the article written by Davis looks more pessimistic than Verso's description of the book, at least in terms of providing hope that this phenomenon might yield anything close to the kind of proletarian revolt that rational leftists might desire (which means that it's not a pretty picture to me, either):
Struggles of informal workers, as John Walton emphasizes in a recent review of research on social movements in poor cities, have tended, above all, to be episodic and discontinuous. They are also usually focused on immediate consumption issues: land invasions in search of affordable housing and riots against rising food or utility prices. In the past, at least, "urban problems in developing societies have been more typically mediated by patron–client relations than by popular activism." Since the debt crisis of the 1980s, neopopulist leaders in Latin America have had dramatic success in exploiting the desperate desire of the urban poor for more stable, predictable structures of daily life. Although Walton doesn’t make the point explicitly, the urban informal sector has been ideologically promiscuous in its endorsement of populist saviours: in Peru rallying to Fujimori, but in Venezuela embracing Chávez. In Africa and South Asia, on the other hand, urban clientelism too often equates with the dominance of ethno-religious bigots and their nightmare ambitions of ethnic cleansing. Notorious examples include the anti-Muslim militias of the Oodua People’s Congress in Lagos and the semi-fascist Shiv Sena movement in Bombay.
Will such "eighteenth-century" sociologies of protest persist into the middle twenty-first century? The past is probably a poor guide to the future. History is not uniformitarian. The new urban world is evolving with extraordinary speed and often in unpredictable directions. Everywhere the continuous accumulation of poverty undermines existential security and poses even more extraordinary challenges to the economic ingenuity of the poor. Perhaps there is a tipping point at which the pollution, congestion, greed and violence of everyday urban life finally overwhelm the ad hoc civilities and survival networks of the slum. Certainly in the old rural world there were thresholds, often calibrated by famine, that passed directly to social eruption. But no one yet knows the social temperature at which the new cities of poverty spontaneously combust...
Today...populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity (and in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous to that of early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism. In Morocco, for instance, where half a million rural emigrants are absorbed into the teeming cities every year, and where half the population is under 25, Islamicist movements like "Justice and Welfare," founded by Sheik Abdessalam Yassin, have become the real governments of the slums: organizing night schools, providing legal aid to victims of state abuse, buying medicine for the sick, subsidizing pilgrimages and paying for funerals. As Prime Minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi, the Socialist leader who was once exiled by the monarchy, recently admitted to Ignacio Ramonet, "We [the Left] have become embourgeoisified. We have cut ourselves off from the people. We need to reconquer the popular quarters. The Islamicists have seduced our natural electorate. They promise them heaven on earth."
An article at AlterNet discusses Davis' book along with another one, Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. This article, written by James Wescott, introduces both books with the essential question:
With the apparent collapse of the anti-globalization carnival and the impotence of the anti-war movement, could the left be on to something, at last, with squatters – not the anarchists in developed cities who do it as a lifestyle choice, but the billion ex-peasants, entrepreneurs and derelicts who are starting to numerically dominate every city in the world outside of the northern and western hemispheres?
Unfortunately, the Neuwirth book, at least as described here, doesn't seem to give a very hopeful answer on that front, either.
The most interesting section of Shadow Cities isn't the reportage, which is often robotic and impatient, like a 30-second TV news piece. It's the chapter on "Proper Squatters, Improper Property," where Neuwirth discusses political scientists Hernando de Soto and Peter Marcuse's views on squatters, which represent the difficulties of grappling with the phenomenon of squatting in traditional ideological terms. De Soto, a free marketeer, wants to release the "dead capital" that squatters' property and entrepreneurship represents by immediately granting legal title deeds. Then the credit cards and consumerism will come. Marcuse, looking from the left, surprisingly seems to have rather less hope for squatters. As a result of their selfish pursuit of their own betterment, Marcuse says that squatters' communities – if they can be called that – are disorganized and inefficient, no model for a radical urban future.
Ultimately, I'm thinking that both books together might make for a depressing read - not just because of the miserable picture created by the slums themselves (with the corresponding mass suffering), but because both books seem to mention some possibilities for a "radical [left] urban future," only to tell us, resoundingly, not to count on it.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Landlords Will be Landlords (Most of the Time)
Kristen Anderberg makes some excellent points in an article at Infoshop, Mortgages Versus Rent. I especially like the following point:
I hear people trying to gain sympathy for owing mortgage payments, as if that is somehow equal to a person struggling to pay rent to avoid homelessness. No, one is about holding on to property ownership, the other is about buying property for someone else. You cannot become homeless with equity in a house.
Moreover, I can certainly relate to Anderberg’s words when she tells us:
I have yet to meet a landlord who does not regard himself as an unwilling victim of his renters, who feels he must be as a vigilante regarding rent, tuning out all human needs to guarantee his class privilege at the cost of his own humanity.
I am very tempted to say a lot about my own recent experiences with landlords, but I feel a need to refrain from doing so, because some of the landlords whom I might discuss actually aren't strangers to the radical left community, and I’d hate to begin some battle of slander within this small circle (again). Nonetheless, I will say that I was disappointed to encounter certain seemingly contradictory behaviors (not very different from what Anderberg describes) from people who espoused political beliefs very close to my own. But I have found time and again that when people enter into a class relationship, or even any kind of a power relationship, the role that they assume in that relationship usually takes precedence, in terms of determining their behavior, over any desired or professed ideology. I’m not saying that this is always the case (for instance, I’m thinking and hoping that some people reading this post who are landlords are not so obnoxious to their tenants), but it so often is...
I do think that Anderberg sometimes stretches things a bit, maybe makes these dynamics seem a little more blunt and less complicated than they often are. But at this point, I think I much prefer her attitude to the attitude of the people who tell me that I should have more pity for the plight of the boss or landlord, put myself in their shoes.
I, myself, have always been the tenant and not the landlord (as were my parents while I was growing up). Moreover, I have had to deal with a lot of petty landlords (petty in more than one way) in small places, where the legal protections are minimal. Add to that the fact that I've often had to go without a lease - since many landlords feel no need to sign a lease when renting to people who are obviously badly (if not desperately) in need of housing - and you can see that I've had almost no protection against (always implicit) eviction most of the time.
Anderberg is someone who's dealt a lot with being poor, so she must know all too well what it's like to be the disadvantaged party in these situations. She's also apparently quite aware of the games that are played to try to disguise the true nature of the economic relationships. But I can recognize those games pretty clearly, too, and I know how ridiculous they can be. Maybe that's why the following sentences simply caused me to laugh out loud:
It is interesting that both bosses and landlords try to play for pity from their workers and renters, or those they rip off, as if they are victims. It is a manipulative move, and due to the power inequity in renting and being a worker, there is an implied obligation to pat these idiot gluttons on the back, consoling them, as a slave would a slave owner, out of fear and the necessity for survival, not out of true concern or compassion.
I hear people trying to gain sympathy for owing mortgage payments, as if that is somehow equal to a person struggling to pay rent to avoid homelessness. No, one is about holding on to property ownership, the other is about buying property for someone else. You cannot become homeless with equity in a house.
Moreover, I can certainly relate to Anderberg’s words when she tells us:
I have yet to meet a landlord who does not regard himself as an unwilling victim of his renters, who feels he must be as a vigilante regarding rent, tuning out all human needs to guarantee his class privilege at the cost of his own humanity.
I am very tempted to say a lot about my own recent experiences with landlords, but I feel a need to refrain from doing so, because some of the landlords whom I might discuss actually aren't strangers to the radical left community, and I’d hate to begin some battle of slander within this small circle (again). Nonetheless, I will say that I was disappointed to encounter certain seemingly contradictory behaviors (not very different from what Anderberg describes) from people who espoused political beliefs very close to my own. But I have found time and again that when people enter into a class relationship, or even any kind of a power relationship, the role that they assume in that relationship usually takes precedence, in terms of determining their behavior, over any desired or professed ideology. I’m not saying that this is always the case (for instance, I’m thinking and hoping that some people reading this post who are landlords are not so obnoxious to their tenants), but it so often is...
I do think that Anderberg sometimes stretches things a bit, maybe makes these dynamics seem a little more blunt and less complicated than they often are. But at this point, I think I much prefer her attitude to the attitude of the people who tell me that I should have more pity for the plight of the boss or landlord, put myself in their shoes.
I, myself, have always been the tenant and not the landlord (as were my parents while I was growing up). Moreover, I have had to deal with a lot of petty landlords (petty in more than one way) in small places, where the legal protections are minimal. Add to that the fact that I've often had to go without a lease - since many landlords feel no need to sign a lease when renting to people who are obviously badly (if not desperately) in need of housing - and you can see that I've had almost no protection against (always implicit) eviction most of the time.
Anderberg is someone who's dealt a lot with being poor, so she must know all too well what it's like to be the disadvantaged party in these situations. She's also apparently quite aware of the games that are played to try to disguise the true nature of the economic relationships. But I can recognize those games pretty clearly, too, and I know how ridiculous they can be. Maybe that's why the following sentences simply caused me to laugh out loud:
It is interesting that both bosses and landlords try to play for pity from their workers and renters, or those they rip off, as if they are victims. It is a manipulative move, and due to the power inequity in renting and being a worker, there is an implied obligation to pat these idiot gluttons on the back, consoling them, as a slave would a slave owner, out of fear and the necessity for survival, not out of true concern or compassion.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Bush's Budget Is "Economic War on the People" -- and Then Some
Axis of Logic provides an excellent summary of Bush's budget in its aptly titled article, The Bush Regime Launches Its Second Term Economic War on the People. Actually, it goes into more awful detail than most other articles that I've seen over the past couple of days, but it contains two good paragraphs of concise summary, one at the beginning:
In what the Bush regime cynically calls A Blueprint for New Beginnings, the most wealthy of U.S. citizens will launch an unprecedented attack on the poor and working class in the United States. The Bush regime has presented a 2006 budget that will cut domestic programs to seniors, veterans, children, and the poor by $20 billion dollars next year. It amounts to an assault on the nation’s most needy citizens, robbing funds for education, food stamps, and healthcare for the most vulnerable who will pay for his $1.6 trillion dollar tax cuts enjoyed primarily by the wealthiest of U.S. citizens. Meanwhile the new Bush-budget will boost military spending and extend tax cuts for the rich. But make no mistake, this attack is not only on the minorities and the poor. It is now being waged on those who still think of themselves as the "middle class" in the United States.
...And one at the end:
Conclusion: The bottom line of the 2006 Bush-Budget is that more and more money will be taken away from the deperately poor, the elderly, people with disabilities and children and will set new record-highs for deficit-spending and the national debt. It will also rob all U.S. citizens of health care, education, social betterment and national, state and local infrastructure for which we pay taxes. You lose and the wealthiest U.S. citizens, corporations, the military, the military-industrial complex and our new, oppressive police-state will again reap the benefits. It is all packaged in the lie that this nation is under threat of a military attack. If U.S. citizens question the credibility of that threat, the regime in Washington can always raise it from yellow to red.
The World Socialist Web Site also sums up the problem pretty well in their article, US budget slashes social spending to pay for war and repression:
The priorities of the Bush administration are clear. There are substantial increases in spending on the military, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence and diplomatic services: all the institutions of violence and propaganda on behalf of American imperialism. Those federal agencies charged with responsibility for health, education, environmental protection and social welfare face across-the-board cuts.
Of course, it's not as though there are any surprises here...
In what the Bush regime cynically calls A Blueprint for New Beginnings, the most wealthy of U.S. citizens will launch an unprecedented attack on the poor and working class in the United States. The Bush regime has presented a 2006 budget that will cut domestic programs to seniors, veterans, children, and the poor by $20 billion dollars next year. It amounts to an assault on the nation’s most needy citizens, robbing funds for education, food stamps, and healthcare for the most vulnerable who will pay for his $1.6 trillion dollar tax cuts enjoyed primarily by the wealthiest of U.S. citizens. Meanwhile the new Bush-budget will boost military spending and extend tax cuts for the rich. But make no mistake, this attack is not only on the minorities and the poor. It is now being waged on those who still think of themselves as the "middle class" in the United States.
...And one at the end:
Conclusion: The bottom line of the 2006 Bush-Budget is that more and more money will be taken away from the deperately poor, the elderly, people with disabilities and children and will set new record-highs for deficit-spending and the national debt. It will also rob all U.S. citizens of health care, education, social betterment and national, state and local infrastructure for which we pay taxes. You lose and the wealthiest U.S. citizens, corporations, the military, the military-industrial complex and our new, oppressive police-state will again reap the benefits. It is all packaged in the lie that this nation is under threat of a military attack. If U.S. citizens question the credibility of that threat, the regime in Washington can always raise it from yellow to red.
The World Socialist Web Site also sums up the problem pretty well in their article, US budget slashes social spending to pay for war and repression:
The priorities of the Bush administration are clear. There are substantial increases in spending on the military, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence and diplomatic services: all the institutions of violence and propaganda on behalf of American imperialism. Those federal agencies charged with responsibility for health, education, environmental protection and social welfare face across-the-board cuts.
Of course, it's not as though there are any surprises here...
Monday, February 07, 2005
"Marx and Makhno Meet McDonald's" (and other articles at Break Their Haughty Power)
This week, I've been researching and downloading a couple of hundred pages' worth of artlcles from Break Their Haughty Power, an outstanding Web site from Loren Goldner. The newest article there also has the catchiest title of the year (so far): Marx and Makhno Meet McDonald's. The article discusses an active and effective workers' solidarity group that formed in France in the mid 1990s. As Goldner describes it:
Over the last several years, a revolving network of militants in Paris, France, have developed a strategy and tactics for winning strikes by marginal, low-paid, outsourced and immigrant workers against international chains, in situations where the strikers are often ignored by unions to which they nominally belong, or are actually obstructed by them. While some of these methods benefit from aspects of French labor law that are more favorable to strikers than one finds in the backward U.S. of A, the overall strategy can certainly find its uses in other countries.
The group, which calls itself simply Collectif de Solidarite (Solidarity Collective) slowly emerged as a network from the ferment and upswing in struggle following the 1995 near-general strike in France over pension "reform." Their composition ranges from casualized workers to people with steady jobs, people who want to fight and who see no perspective for doing so within a traditional union framework. Experience taught them that initially isolated strikes of marginal workers employed by big chains, in the worst possible conditions, can win if they are turned into city-wide actions by militants from "outside" the workplace (but hardly "outside" the increasingly downsized and outsourced work force), and - equally important - militants who are not members of vanguard groups coming mainly to fish in troubled waters for their own recruitment. The strategy could not be farther from the timid "corporate campaigns" as developed by the likes of Ray Rogers, politely asking stockholders to sympathize with workers, but instead involve direct action to shut down businesses with a mixture of legal and "extra-legal" (in the grey area between legality and illegality) tactics.
Goldner is very good at reporting these developments in contemporary class struggle and related issues such as The Remaking of the American Working Class and The Dollar Crisis. But right now I am most eagerly perusing his well informed discussions of books on or from libertarian Marxists, such as his review of a book on the general history of the ultra-left and his fascinating comments on the famous Johnson Tendency-related book, Facing Reality. And, of course, I appreciate his description and short history of Kamunist Kranti.
So, needless to say, I highly recommend this site, which I've added to the subtly ever-changing links list on the right side of this page.
Over the last several years, a revolving network of militants in Paris, France, have developed a strategy and tactics for winning strikes by marginal, low-paid, outsourced and immigrant workers against international chains, in situations where the strikers are often ignored by unions to which they nominally belong, or are actually obstructed by them. While some of these methods benefit from aspects of French labor law that are more favorable to strikers than one finds in the backward U.S. of A, the overall strategy can certainly find its uses in other countries.
The group, which calls itself simply Collectif de Solidarite (Solidarity Collective) slowly emerged as a network from the ferment and upswing in struggle following the 1995 near-general strike in France over pension "reform." Their composition ranges from casualized workers to people with steady jobs, people who want to fight and who see no perspective for doing so within a traditional union framework. Experience taught them that initially isolated strikes of marginal workers employed by big chains, in the worst possible conditions, can win if they are turned into city-wide actions by militants from "outside" the workplace (but hardly "outside" the increasingly downsized and outsourced work force), and - equally important - militants who are not members of vanguard groups coming mainly to fish in troubled waters for their own recruitment. The strategy could not be farther from the timid "corporate campaigns" as developed by the likes of Ray Rogers, politely asking stockholders to sympathize with workers, but instead involve direct action to shut down businesses with a mixture of legal and "extra-legal" (in the grey area between legality and illegality) tactics.
Goldner is very good at reporting these developments in contemporary class struggle and related issues such as The Remaking of the American Working Class and The Dollar Crisis. But right now I am most eagerly perusing his well informed discussions of books on or from libertarian Marxists, such as his review of a book on the general history of the ultra-left and his fascinating comments on the famous Johnson Tendency-related book, Facing Reality. And, of course, I appreciate his description and short history of Kamunist Kranti.
So, needless to say, I highly recommend this site, which I've added to the subtly ever-changing links list on the right side of this page.
Friday, February 04, 2005
Are Bush and Company Acting In Fear of A "Senior Revolution"?
At CounterPunch, Dave Lindorff offers an interesting perspective regarding the motives behind Bush's attack on Social Security. Starting off with the assertion (which I would agree with) that "There is no Social Security crisis," he goes on to offer the "real reason for this urgency":
In a few years then, we can expect to see an unprecedentedly large senior lobby that knows how to organize politically, that knows how to do take it to the street, and that has demonstrated its ability to fight hard when its own interests are at stake (remember those struggles for the vote and against the draft and the Indochina War?). And once they near retirement, this powerful voting bloc will be seeing Social Security and Medicare as their number one political issue. If Social Security is already the "third rail" of electoral politics, not to be touched, in a few years, it will become the Molotov cocktail, exploding the political status quo.
Corporate America knows this. The people in the boardrooms and the conservative think tanks aren't worried about 2042. They don't think that long-term. (If they did, they wouldn't be so cavalier about the destruction of the environment and about global warming.) They're worried about 2010, because this new senior revolution is just around the corner....
In other words, Lindorff asserts, Bush and Company are hoping that Social Security dies before THEIR generation gets old:
That's why there is an increasingly panicky aspect to the efforts to destroy Social Security before the Baby Boomer population realizes where its real political interests lie. Social Security's opponents know if the program is effectively killed off before it becomes a core Boomer issue, it will be much harder to re-establish it.
If this is the case, then maybe we will have a Revolt of the Elderly after all.
But I'm not so sure that the Baby Boom generation really holds within it such a special and unique ability to revolt. The greatest thing going for it in this area is its numbers. However, this is not a generation that consistently showed its ability to be politically active and, especially, to resist or change the powers ruling over it, at least not after the early-mid 1970s (at least not in the U.S.). Subsequent to their glory days, many in this generation actually showed a resistance to revolt. Many dismissed the revolt of their younger years as simply being a symptom of youth and/or appropriate to a particular moment in history.
Having been born in October of 1961, I, personally, had the unfortunate experience of encountering too many older Baby Boomers who reacted to my own rebellious or (later) revolutionary inclinations as something that sort of embarrassed them, because it belonged to their youth and they had left it all behind. (Technically, by the way, I was born at the beginning of Generation X, at least according to the original book on the matter. Also, I fit in more with the latter generation because I came of age with declining economic expectations, punk rock and hip-hop - all of which trends hit places like New York City a bit earlier than the rest of the nation. But that's a discussion for another post.)
Meanwhile, even to this day, people in the U.S. (of any generation) can't seem to get over the idea that rebellion and militant street protest are things most appropriate to adolescents and 20-somethings. In fact, the most recent radical activist movement - that is, the one that came of age in 1999, in Seattle - couldn't have been more youth oriented.
So, if we're talking about a real revolt, the question remains whether we could actually reach a point in this country, or this society, where we might have a large movement of elderly people taking militant action in the streets. But that's not to say that I think it's impossible, either - we could possibly have a development similar to the pensioners' actions that have happened in Russia and different parts of Europe, or even something more dramatic and effective. And, as I think I implied before, I would love to see that!
But all of this speculation might not be completely relevant to what Lindorff is saying, since Lindorff is speaking somewhat in hyperbole. What he's talking about most is not militant action but a powerful lobbying and voting block. There is the possibility that Baby Boomers will be able to bond together in great numbers in the political arena when they see obvious threats to their own personal interests. But they can also expect to encounter a very tough, politically savvy, and highly undemocratic group of bosses and leaders, many of whom will be the same age.
In a few years then, we can expect to see an unprecedentedly large senior lobby that knows how to organize politically, that knows how to do take it to the street, and that has demonstrated its ability to fight hard when its own interests are at stake (remember those struggles for the vote and against the draft and the Indochina War?). And once they near retirement, this powerful voting bloc will be seeing Social Security and Medicare as their number one political issue. If Social Security is already the "third rail" of electoral politics, not to be touched, in a few years, it will become the Molotov cocktail, exploding the political status quo.
Corporate America knows this. The people in the boardrooms and the conservative think tanks aren't worried about 2042. They don't think that long-term. (If they did, they wouldn't be so cavalier about the destruction of the environment and about global warming.) They're worried about 2010, because this new senior revolution is just around the corner....
In other words, Lindorff asserts, Bush and Company are hoping that Social Security dies before THEIR generation gets old:
That's why there is an increasingly panicky aspect to the efforts to destroy Social Security before the Baby Boomer population realizes where its real political interests lie. Social Security's opponents know if the program is effectively killed off before it becomes a core Boomer issue, it will be much harder to re-establish it.
If this is the case, then maybe we will have a Revolt of the Elderly after all.
But I'm not so sure that the Baby Boom generation really holds within it such a special and unique ability to revolt. The greatest thing going for it in this area is its numbers. However, this is not a generation that consistently showed its ability to be politically active and, especially, to resist or change the powers ruling over it, at least not after the early-mid 1970s (at least not in the U.S.). Subsequent to their glory days, many in this generation actually showed a resistance to revolt. Many dismissed the revolt of their younger years as simply being a symptom of youth and/or appropriate to a particular moment in history.
Having been born in October of 1961, I, personally, had the unfortunate experience of encountering too many older Baby Boomers who reacted to my own rebellious or (later) revolutionary inclinations as something that sort of embarrassed them, because it belonged to their youth and they had left it all behind. (Technically, by the way, I was born at the beginning of Generation X, at least according to the original book on the matter. Also, I fit in more with the latter generation because I came of age with declining economic expectations, punk rock and hip-hop - all of which trends hit places like New York City a bit earlier than the rest of the nation. But that's a discussion for another post.)
Meanwhile, even to this day, people in the U.S. (of any generation) can't seem to get over the idea that rebellion and militant street protest are things most appropriate to adolescents and 20-somethings. In fact, the most recent radical activist movement - that is, the one that came of age in 1999, in Seattle - couldn't have been more youth oriented.
So, if we're talking about a real revolt, the question remains whether we could actually reach a point in this country, or this society, where we might have a large movement of elderly people taking militant action in the streets. But that's not to say that I think it's impossible, either - we could possibly have a development similar to the pensioners' actions that have happened in Russia and different parts of Europe, or even something more dramatic and effective. And, as I think I implied before, I would love to see that!
But all of this speculation might not be completely relevant to what Lindorff is saying, since Lindorff is speaking somewhat in hyperbole. What he's talking about most is not militant action but a powerful lobbying and voting block. There is the possibility that Baby Boomers will be able to bond together in great numbers in the political arena when they see obvious threats to their own personal interests. But they can also expect to encounter a very tough, politically savvy, and highly undemocratic group of bosses and leaders, many of whom will be the same age.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
I Don't Think Ward Churchill Has Been Completely Right, Either. (However, ...)
A few days ago, before the controversy around Ward Churchill's remarks made big headlines, I commented on this matter in a thread at Where We're Bound. The thread started off with this statement:
...Susan at Res Publica is obviously upset by Ward Churchill's comments about the innocence of the victims of 9/11: "True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break." Evidently, the day after the attacks Churchill wrote an article entitled Some people push back. I have not read that article but apparently he suggested that those working in the buildings were not innocent.
To which I responded:
From what I see in the post above, it seems to me that people like Ward Churchill are repeating the mistake of claiming that all of us are connected (collectively and equally?) to the actions of "our country," meaning the government and businesses that rule over us, and should accept collective responsibility or even punishment for their actions. I don't buy that. I've fought against some of the atrocious policies of our government. I've demonstrated and written against the international policies of our financial institutions. I've also suffered some consequences because of that. Meanwhile, I need to earn money to survive (which I do very minimally, precariously, and not very well). I very well could have been working a temp job the morning that the WTC was hit. Would I have deserved to be killed or maimed as punishment for the actions of "our" government and "our" financial institutions after having acted to oppose them? How about the janitors, cooks, other working people who were killed by the planes? Some of these were people who never in any way supported the actions of "our" government and financial institutions. Some of them might have, like some of us, acted to oppose many of those actions. If so, what was the crime that they were guilty of, for which they were killed? Was it the crime of being coerced into wage slavery because they needed to eat, to keep a roof over their heads, support their families and/or keep the heat and lights on in their homes?
Meanwhile, what does Ward Churchill know about them/us? Who is Ward Churchill? He's some kind of professor who blows a lot of hot air. Would he have to do office temp work or cook or clean the floors in the WTC in order to survive?
Does Churchill consider that during all these acts of collective violence, whether committed by Bush or Bin Laden, it's inevitably working people and/or the poor and/or the relatively powerless who suffer the most because of the games of "our" government and financial "leaders," and that the class you belong to and/or your own actions in response to your situation are usually a lot more relevant to who you are and how you should be judged (assuming you should be judged) than which country you are said to belong to and which government is "legally" allowed to rule over you? Churchill is supposed to be an anarchist, so he should be able to see that.
This was before I read this additional piece of information over at Infoshop:
He went on to describe the World Trade Center victims as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who organized Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's plan to exterminate Europe's Jews.
...Which kind of got me a little more riled up (as it did for a lot of other people). Consequently, I wrote an earlier version of tonight's post in which I really railed into Churchill, but then I read excerpts from his rebuttal that were posted at
Words Matter, in which he stated:
What I said was that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies....
It should be emphasized that I applied the "little Eichmanns" characterization only to those described as "technicians." Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack.
...So now I'm not going to rail into Churchill for the "Little Eichmanns" comment so much. But I am still a little unsatisfied with the way Churchill seems to have thought about this matter. The question that comes to my mind now is, when he wrote that essay (and/or book), was he even thinking of the "children, janitors, food service workers, firemen..."? More to the point, was he even thinking about the fact that the vast majority of the people working in those buildings were doing so not because they were designers of (or "technocrats" for) the "Empire," but because the "Empire" (or perhaps its parent, capital) coerced them into working - at all different kinds of jobs - for their survival? I might add, also, that this was not the first time that this thought occurred to me regarding someone's comments about 9-11, because this was not the first time that I had seen someone on the "radical left" make these sorts of comments, with the same curious omissions in thinking.
I get the feeling that Churchill thinks an awful lot about people's connection to their government and what responsibilities (and power?) they supposedly have because of the nation or regional tribe in which they were born or reside, and he just doesn't think enough about class. Thus, while I'm not going to harp on the "Eichmanns" comment, I stand by the complaint that I originally posted to Where We're Bound.
I also have to admit that I'm having a problem with Churchill's reaction to all of this. Rather than admitting in his rebuttal that he might have been a little thoughtless (toward the workers in the WTC, their families, etc.), he simply goes on to boast about his book and all the awards that he's won and urges people to buy the book to find out more about what he really said. (And, by the way, AK Press does the same thing, in another part of this post.) And then Churchill concludes that, "The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country." But, much as I dislike some of these right-wingers who criticized him, I'm not completely convinced that every criticism that people made of the things Churchill said, or the way he said them, was simply a matter of "gross distortions." (There were some actual, direct quotes after all, to start with.)
After reading Churchill's rebuttal, I can't help wondering if someone shouldn't ask him the same kind of question I remember someone once asking George W. Bush: Isn't there anything that you think you could have done differently?
All that having been said, of course, I don't think he should be dismissed from, or should resign from, any positions. Lots of professors and chairmen of this or that occasionally say things that annoy or offend people - which they're entitled to do, at least theoretically, if we have freedom of speech in this country.
___________________
P.S. Regarding Churchill's comment that "German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies...." I think that's a little vague and maybe doesn't provide the entire picture. Here is a passage from an article by Mike Davis, "Berlin's Skeleton in Utah's Closet" (in the collection, Dead Cities), which discusses some of the people whom the Allies targeted:
...For example, a case might have been made for singling out the mansions of the Nazi political and industrial elites for aerial punishment. But this risked retaliation against Burke's Peerage [British aristocracy] and was excluded by [Lord] Cherwell from the outset. "The bombing must be directed essentially against working class houses...."
"It has been decided," read the official order to air crews in February 1942, "that the primary objective of your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers."
...Susan at Res Publica is obviously upset by Ward Churchill's comments about the innocence of the victims of 9/11: "True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break." Evidently, the day after the attacks Churchill wrote an article entitled Some people push back. I have not read that article but apparently he suggested that those working in the buildings were not innocent.
To which I responded:
From what I see in the post above, it seems to me that people like Ward Churchill are repeating the mistake of claiming that all of us are connected (collectively and equally?) to the actions of "our country," meaning the government and businesses that rule over us, and should accept collective responsibility or even punishment for their actions. I don't buy that. I've fought against some of the atrocious policies of our government. I've demonstrated and written against the international policies of our financial institutions. I've also suffered some consequences because of that. Meanwhile, I need to earn money to survive (which I do very minimally, precariously, and not very well). I very well could have been working a temp job the morning that the WTC was hit. Would I have deserved to be killed or maimed as punishment for the actions of "our" government and "our" financial institutions after having acted to oppose them? How about the janitors, cooks, other working people who were killed by the planes? Some of these were people who never in any way supported the actions of "our" government and financial institutions. Some of them might have, like some of us, acted to oppose many of those actions. If so, what was the crime that they were guilty of, for which they were killed? Was it the crime of being coerced into wage slavery because they needed to eat, to keep a roof over their heads, support their families and/or keep the heat and lights on in their homes?
Meanwhile, what does Ward Churchill know about them/us? Who is Ward Churchill? He's some kind of professor who blows a lot of hot air. Would he have to do office temp work or cook or clean the floors in the WTC in order to survive?
Does Churchill consider that during all these acts of collective violence, whether committed by Bush or Bin Laden, it's inevitably working people and/or the poor and/or the relatively powerless who suffer the most because of the games of "our" government and financial "leaders," and that the class you belong to and/or your own actions in response to your situation are usually a lot more relevant to who you are and how you should be judged (assuming you should be judged) than which country you are said to belong to and which government is "legally" allowed to rule over you? Churchill is supposed to be an anarchist, so he should be able to see that.
This was before I read this additional piece of information over at Infoshop:
He went on to describe the World Trade Center victims as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who organized Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's plan to exterminate Europe's Jews.
...Which kind of got me a little more riled up (as it did for a lot of other people). Consequently, I wrote an earlier version of tonight's post in which I really railed into Churchill, but then I read excerpts from his rebuttal that were posted at
Words Matter, in which he stated:
What I said was that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies....
It should be emphasized that I applied the "little Eichmanns" characterization only to those described as "technicians." Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack.
...So now I'm not going to rail into Churchill for the "Little Eichmanns" comment so much. But I am still a little unsatisfied with the way Churchill seems to have thought about this matter. The question that comes to my mind now is, when he wrote that essay (and/or book), was he even thinking of the "children, janitors, food service workers, firemen..."? More to the point, was he even thinking about the fact that the vast majority of the people working in those buildings were doing so not because they were designers of (or "technocrats" for) the "Empire," but because the "Empire" (or perhaps its parent, capital) coerced them into working - at all different kinds of jobs - for their survival? I might add, also, that this was not the first time that this thought occurred to me regarding someone's comments about 9-11, because this was not the first time that I had seen someone on the "radical left" make these sorts of comments, with the same curious omissions in thinking.
I get the feeling that Churchill thinks an awful lot about people's connection to their government and what responsibilities (and power?) they supposedly have because of the nation or regional tribe in which they were born or reside, and he just doesn't think enough about class. Thus, while I'm not going to harp on the "Eichmanns" comment, I stand by the complaint that I originally posted to Where We're Bound.
I also have to admit that I'm having a problem with Churchill's reaction to all of this. Rather than admitting in his rebuttal that he might have been a little thoughtless (toward the workers in the WTC, their families, etc.), he simply goes on to boast about his book and all the awards that he's won and urges people to buy the book to find out more about what he really said. (And, by the way, AK Press does the same thing, in another part of this post.) And then Churchill concludes that, "The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country." But, much as I dislike some of these right-wingers who criticized him, I'm not completely convinced that every criticism that people made of the things Churchill said, or the way he said them, was simply a matter of "gross distortions." (There were some actual, direct quotes after all, to start with.)
After reading Churchill's rebuttal, I can't help wondering if someone shouldn't ask him the same kind of question I remember someone once asking George W. Bush: Isn't there anything that you think you could have done differently?
All that having been said, of course, I don't think he should be dismissed from, or should resign from, any positions. Lots of professors and chairmen of this or that occasionally say things that annoy or offend people - which they're entitled to do, at least theoretically, if we have freedom of speech in this country.
___________________
P.S. Regarding Churchill's comment that "German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies...." I think that's a little vague and maybe doesn't provide the entire picture. Here is a passage from an article by Mike Davis, "Berlin's Skeleton in Utah's Closet" (in the collection, Dead Cities), which discusses some of the people whom the Allies targeted:
...For example, a case might have been made for singling out the mansions of the Nazi political and industrial elites for aerial punishment. But this risked retaliation against Burke's Peerage [British aristocracy] and was excluded by [Lord] Cherwell from the outset. "The bombing must be directed essentially against working class houses...."
"It has been decided," read the official order to air crews in February 1942, "that the primary objective of your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers."
