|
Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2021 21:40:13 GMT
Why I’m a Feminist — and a Socialist BY NICOLE ASCHOFF The feminism I fight for does not snuggle comfortably in the lap of capitalism. It is rooted in the understanding that capitalism is the problem, and that a feminism rooted in democratic, egalitarian, anticapitalist principles is the solution. www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/feminism-socialism-anti-capitalism-working-classFeminism and capitalism are both in crisis. Not a crisis in the sense that the constellation of norms, ideas, and practices that undergird capitalism or feminism is in danger of collapse, but rather a crisis in the sense that we have reached an inflection point. The variant of capitalism dubbed neoliberalism has, in the eyes of many, lost legitimacy. There is widespread disgust with the institutions and flag bearers of the status quo. The centrist voices that have shaped common sense for the past few decades — and today insist, in the face of yawning inequality and catastrophic climate change, that the only way forward is to preserve the core elements of neoliberalism — are being forced to share the airwaves with populists on both the Left and the Right who think otherwise. Feminism for its part is being decried as simultaneously ineffective and blinkered. What for decades women in wealthy countries have been told are the core goals of feminism — wage parity, equal representation in political and economic life, the right to a legal, safe abortion — have either not been achieved or are under threat. Moreover, for a growing number of women, particularly poor and working-class women and women living in the Global South, these goals feel insufficient or not attuned to the realities of everyday life. For many, mainstream feminism seems like a project shaped around the needs and desires of privileged women. Crisis means opportunity, however. Right now, in this moment of political uncertainty, there is an opening — a remapping of the possible. People are looking for new ideas and asking hard questions about the nature and direction of the horizon we seek. What is the horizon of feminism? Can capitalism and feminism coexist?
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2021 21:52:52 GMT
Coming Out Against Imperialism By James Greig Omar Shweiki In the 1970s, pioneering gay activists in the US and Britain saw the fight against homophobia as part of a much broader struggle – one which linked Pride to the cause of liberating the world's oppressed peoples. tribunemag.co.uk/2021/06/how-the-gay-liberation-movement-fought-colonialism-and-imperialism‘Gay Liberation is for the homosexual who stands up, and fights back.’ In 1970, the year after the Stonewall riots, fliers for the first Christopher Street Liberation Day captured the theory, practice and spirit of a new generation driven to action. The origins of this new movement and its principles of popular mobilisation, however, can be found as much in the struggles for freedom fought in Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine as Manhattan’s West Village or Islington’s Highbury Fields. Stonewall wasn’t the first time queer people in the US had revolted against police repression, but its importance reflects a revolutionary moment in the history of LGBTQ+ struggle. The riots signalled a new unity forged between the established, largely white homosexual rights campaigns and an insurgent movement of people of colour – and the integration of the new gay liberation movement into revolutionary political fronts across the world. By the mid-1960s, riots against police violence exploded across the US, largely led by Black youth. The people who confronted the police at Stonewall belonged to the most criminalised sections of society: Black, Latinx, homeless, sex workers and gender non-conforming people. A large number of participants were seasoned activists already involved in a wide range of struggles, a fact that is elided by the contemporary understanding of Stonewall as a purely spontaneous eruption.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 3, 2021 20:00:01 GMT
The Theory and Practice of Marxism in Japan AN INTERVIEW WITH GAVIN WALKER From the ’60s New Left to the persistence of a mass-membership Communist Party today, Marxism has had a huge impact on Japanese politics and culture. Japanese Marxism is a highly creative tradition that deserves to be better known and understood outside Japan. jacobinmag.com/2021/07/the-theory-and-practice-of-marxism-in-japan/For many years, Japan has been one of the leading players in global capitalism. With the world’s third-largest economy and some of its most renowned manufacturing firms, Japan is one of the few countries to have bridged the infamous gap between “the West and the rest.” However, alongside the development of capitalism in Japan, a powerful socialist tradition has also taken shape in Japanese political and intellectual life. Marxism has exercised an extraordinary influence in Japanese academic culture, while the Japanese Communist Party remains a mass-membership party with unapologetic roots in the communist tradition. Gavin Walker teaches history at McGill University in Canada. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan and the editor of The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68. This is an edited transcript from an episode of Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here. DF You’ve written about the importance of Marxism in Japan, both as a political movement — with more than one organizational form — and as an intellectual tradition. You’ve also noted that it hasn’t received the same attention as Marxist political organizations and theoretical work in countries where European languages are spoken — for obvious reasons, perhaps. Before going into the story of Japanese Marxism and socialism in detail, could you us give a bird’s-eye view of its most striking features, for someone who may not be familiar with Japanese politics or intellectual life?
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 3, 2021 20:55:48 GMT
The Soviets Who Wanted Fashion for All BY CHRIS RANDLE In the years after the revolution, Russian designers rethought style. Among them was Varvara Stepanova, who aimed to take fashion out of the realm of luxury and make it accessible to all. jacobinmag.com/2021/05/soviet-accessible-fashion-clothing-russian-revolution-liubov-popova-varvara-stepanovaIn the autumn of 1923, as Vladimir Lenin shadowed the newly formed Soviet Union from his deathbed, one of Moscow’s largest factories became the domain of two artists determined to seize style for the people. The experiment had a trace of desperation. After Russia’s imperial regime collapsed at the climax of World War I, its political factions started fighting each other instead, until the Red Army finally defeated an unlovely collection of monarchists, landowners, and generals auditioning for Supreme Leader. Millions of Russians were killed or starved; industrial output fell to a fraction of its prewar level. Few things could still go wrong at the First State Cotton-Printing Factory, to use its postrevolutionary title. But the facility’s director did not invite Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, a wealthy painter and a working-class one, to come there shrugging haplessly. He believed in their movement, which argued that Soviet artists had to reimagine the commodities of everyday life — to collectivize the economy of desire. The workers deserved both bread and satin.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 4, 2021 8:21:54 GMT
Democratic Socialism Must Be Internationalist BY MATT MCMANUS At the heart of socialism is the simple idea that everyone, no matter where they’re born, is worthy of a dignified life — and that the fate of workers everywhere is linked together. Turning our back on that idea by dropping our internationalism would be a grave mistake. jacobinmag.com/2021/04/john-judis-the-socialist-awakening-review-socialist-left-internationalism-nationalismWhen I was growing up in the 1990s, people’s attitudes toward socialism tended to range from quaint bemusement to direct hostility. Socialists were either peddling a nice-sounding but ultimately unrealistic doctrine or they were apologists for one of the twentieth century’s most murderous ideologies. Socialism has since enjoyed a Phoenix-like rebirth in many countries — including in the United States, of all places — with a large and growing number of people under forty identifying with or expressing positive views about socialism. The ideology’s resurgent popularity has brought with it the ghost of doctrinal conflicts past, as even self-identified socialists struggle to define what they mean by the label and how it aligns with other movements across the political spectrum. For some hard-liners, any socialism that doesn’t unapologetically defend the Soviet Union isn’t worth the name. For others, socialism is just another word for the Nordic states. Democratic socialists like myself support many of the political rights guaranteed in liberal democracies (freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc.), but feel they need to be complemented by economic rights, some form of social ownership, and workplace democracy. John Judis’s The Socialist Awakening: What’s Different Now About the Left discusses these big transitions and situates them in their historical context. It’s a readable introduction, covering a lot of ground in a short amount of time. But his conclusion that socialists today should abandon internationalism and commit themselves to a more patriotic and even nationalistic approach is terribly wrongheaded. While there’s good reasons to be contextual, not to mention mindful of symbols that matter to people on the ground, a socialism that isn’t internationalist is no socialism at all. A Brief History of the (Socialist) Left Socialism, like liberalism and conservatism, means a lot of things to a lot of people. It has been used to advocate everything from brutal despotism to worker control and the four-day workweek. Its roots can be traced back to traditions as varied as Stoicism (which insisted on universal human equality) and Christian humanism. But socialism proper emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which proclaimed a politics of liberty, equality, and solidarity. Early socialists like Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon were impressed by the energy and imagination unleashed by the Revolution and, like plenty of others, at once awed by capitalism’s productive potential and appalled by its inequalities. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, socialist movements labored to turn their ideas into reality, winning major political and social change. With success came controversy and factionalism. Judis distinguishes between several varieties of socialism — utopian socialism, Christian or ethical socialism, orthodox Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, democratic socialism, and social democracy — which differed on issues as fundamental as whether capitalism should be abolished through revolutionary uprising or reformed through the participation of socialist and social-democratic political parties competing in the electoral sphere. In the aftermath of the Cold War, most people in advanced capitalist countries considered these merely theoretical debates, since it seemed like the specter of socialism no longer haunted the globe. All that changed with the 2008 Recession, when a generation of young people, having never endured the heat of the Cold War, found themselves at the wrong end of a global crisis of capitalism. Socialism came back into the spotlight as an answer to their woes. But with newfound popularity came many of the old doctrinal problems. Judis writes: The young people who have taken a positive view of socialism don’t necessarily have a fully worked out theory of socialism or socialist politics. In the United States, they often identify socialism with Scandinavian countries, and with public control of healthcare, education, and energy. They condemn the growing inequality of wealth and power and want a society based on cooperation rather than on cutthroat competition and on sexual and racial equality. They don’t envisage the government owning Apple or Microsoft. Judis’s taxonomy is true as far as it goes. While the average Jacobin writer has something more radical in mind, many young people who say they favor socialism don’t necessarily want to socialize the means of production. Where Judis goes wrong is in recommending that socialists drop their internationalism. Naysaying the Nation Judis argues that contemporary socialists have made a big political mistake by embracing an “anti-patriotic” internationalism. He insists that young members of the Democratic Socialists of America and the British Labour Party see issues like open borders, “identity politics,” and resistance to economic nationalism as almost a matter of course. Many of Judis’s arguments fall flat here. For instance, it isn’t clear why we should regard demands for racial justice as sucking up oxygen from structural economic reform rather than complementary struggles to secure dignity and well-being for all, regardless of race or gender. But rather than focusing on these issues, which aren’t addressed at much length in the book, I want to address Judis’s primary beef: the Left’s anti-nationalism. From the beginning, his argument goes off the rails. According to Judis, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn initially rejected internationalism and focused their appeals on improving the lot of domestic workers. It is true that both Sanders and Corbyn lobbed plenty of criticisms at neoliberal internationalism and global capital. But framing their rhetoric as nationalistic glosses over Sanders and (especially) Corbyn’s lengthy histories of activism on global issues ranging from the Israel-Palestine conflict to the “war on terror” to the environment. Sanders has long been a critic of neoliberal internationalism, fighting for the rights of migrant workers and advocating for more humane immigration policies. Before becoming Labour leader, Corbyn famously protested against apartheid, the Iraq War, and nearly every other atrocity of imperialism in the last few decades. Both Sanders and Corbyn recognized that we need to think globally if leftist reform is to be viable in the twenty-first century. Judis argues that Corbyn missed a golden opportunity to outflank the divided Conservatives by demanding a firm Brexit from the neoliberal European Union and coupling it with an ambitious renewal of public ownership and high state spending. Corbyn was in part pushed to this position, he writes, because the party abandoned industrial working-class constituencies in the North for the hip new leftism of London urbanites. This triggered the electoral disaster of 2019, as those same working-class voters switched in droves to the Tories, which campaigned on “getting Brexit done.” Turning to the United States, Judis argues the cosmopolitanism of young Democratic Socialists of America members turns off many Americans, who may want more state involvement in the economy and robust public services, but want the beneficiaries to be people like them. He argues that this is an inevitable problem that contemporary socialists have failed to recognize, since if they want Scandinavian-style redistribution and welfarism, it will inevitably require drawing firm national lines. In the course of laying out his case for a progressive economic nationalism, Judis makes the occasional fair point. The perception that Corbyn’s position on Brexit was wishy-washy hurt him with traditional working-class constituencies. What is popular with the young activist left in the United States isn’t always the basis for a mass left-wing politics. If socialism is to be a movement and not just a doctrine, it must win millions of people to its cause rather than just speaking to those already on the Left. But Judis is dead wrong to argue that socialists should limit their ambitions to reclaiming economic nationalism and patriotism. The first reason is practical: there simply is no way to produce a viable socialism that speaks to our needs today within the narrow confines of the nation. Any effective socialism has to be cosmopolitan. There are two clear examples: combatting neoliberalism and securing a livable planet. Starting in the 1940s, neoliberals responded to the success of social-democratic parties by building networks across borders and rethinking classical liberalism for the modern age. As Jessica Whyte highlights in her excellent book The Morals of the Market, figures like F. A. Hayek recognized that for capitalism to be safe in the long run, capitalist countries would need to think globally. And they succeeded. Neoliberal capitalism took over the world. The response by progressives like Judis is to wax nostalgic for the pre-neoliberal era. But the postwar compromise was vulnerable to neoliberal globalization in no small part because mainstream social democrats accommodated themselves to the rules of the international economic and political order. They gave up reining in capital and hitched their wagon to the American imperial project, both economically and militarily. When the crisis of the 1970s came and the old Keynesian tricks no longer worked to restore profitability, social-democratic parties embraced neoliberalism — often just as heartily as their conservative counterparts. The solution today isn’t to wall ourselves off from other countries, but to create cross-national institutions that can actively raise the standards of low-wage countries and support the democratic struggles of workers and movements in the Global South. Ultra-exploitative labor conditions will always be a magnet for capital, and if a single state takes steps to improve workers’ lot, firms can always threaten to leave for “friendlier” shores. This race to the bottom is precisely why a socialist politics must fight for working people everywhere — not, as the US-led global order has so often done, oppose or even violently stamp out left movements in the Global South. Another practical issue is the impossibility of dealing with environmental decay at the national level. Certainly, there is a lot that big industrial states like the United States or China can do to improve the situation, and socialists should be doing what they can to pressure their governments to undertake bolder action. But there is no resolution for the environmental crisis that just involves piecemeal measures. The earth is a global commons, and climate doesn’t recognize borders. Likewise, climate refugees won’t be well served by a resurgent nationalism, even if it comes in ostensibly left-wing garb. Shockingly, Judis never addresses this issue beyond offering snide jabs at UK activists for demanding a carbon-free Britain by 2030. Yet it is precisely the global scope of the environmental catastrophe, and capitalism’s culpability in bringing it about, that has inspired so many people to give socialism a second look. The Moral Case for Cosmopolitan Socialism In his great book Against the Web, the late Michael Brooks made a moral plea for what he called “cosmopolitan socialism.” He drew inspiration from figures like Amartya Sen and Cornel West, who “[explored] the echoes between Anton Chekhov and the blues with no interest in drawing artificial lines between cultures.” Brooks enjoined us to recognize the universal and humanistic impulse at the center of the socialist project: the dream of creating a world where the dignity of all is respected and opportunities are not denied to billions on the basis of class, race, gender, or sexual identity. Socialism doesn’t draw arbitrary boundaries — national or otherwise — between who is worthy of moral respect and who is not. “A socialist,” Terry Eagleton once wrote, “is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.” So long as there are people in the world living lives of “wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil,” socialism has a mission. This is not the cramped nationalist vision of Judis, who whitewashes, for example, the often odious foreign policy of mainstream social democrats in the supposed golden age — including enlisting themselves in America’s Cold War and at times opposing anti-colonial struggles (as with French socialist Guy Mollet’s prosecution of the war against Algerian independence). More recently, there was Labour leader Tony Blair’s disastrous decision to support the illegal Iraq War. Needless to say, combining nationalism and democratic socialism hasn’t worked particularly well. This doesn’t mean we should be pushing a flag-burning ultraleftism. But it does mean building a socialist politics that recognizes the interests of workers in the Global North are linked to those of workers in the Global South — and that our commitment to humanity as a whole is unshakeable. In this respect, the nation-state socialism Judis argues for cannot be the way of the future; indeed, it doesn’t even make for a very inspiring past.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 4, 2021 10:43:06 GMT
Poll Finds Socialism Increasingly Seen as 'Badge of Pride' in US Two-thirds of U.S. adults want the federal government to implement policies to reduce the worsening gap between rich and poor. www.commondreams.org/news/2021/06/25/poll-finds-socialism-increasingly-seen-badge-pride-usWhile a majority of U.S. adults still have more positive than negative perceptions of capitalism, less than half of the country's 18 to 34-year-olds view the profit-maximizing market system favorably, and the attractiveness of socialism continues to increase among people over 35, according to a new poll released Friday.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 5, 2021 7:55:40 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 5, 2021 10:09:17 GMT
CHINA PULLS ITSELF OUT OF POVERTY 100 YEARS INTO ITS REVOLUTION By Vijay Prashad and John Ross, Counterpunch. July 4, 2021 | EDUCATE! Above Photo: Hou Bo – Public Domain. popularresistance.org/china-pulls-itself-out-of-poverty-100-years-into-its-revolution/On February 25, 2021, China’s President Xi Jinping announced that his country of 1.4 billion people had pulled its people out of poverty as it is defined internationally. Since 1981, 853 million Chinese people have lifted themselves out of poverty thanks to large-scale interventions from both the Chinese state and the Communist Party of China (CPC); according to the data of the World Bank, three out of four people worldwide who were lifted out of poverty live in China. “No country has been able to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in such a short time,” Xi said. When UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited China in September 2019, he gushed over this accomplishment, calling it the “greatest anti-poverty achievement in history.” “You reduced infant and maternal mortality rates, improved nutrition, reduced stunting and halved the proportion of the population without access to safe drinking water and sanitation,” Secretary Guterres said. In 1949, at the time of the Chinese Revolution, the infant mortality rate in China was 200 per 1,000 live births; this declined to fewer than 50 by 1980. A World Bank study from 1988 noted, “Much of China’s success in improving the health of its people can be attributed to the health policies and the national health service delivery system.” This is the historical context for Secretary Guterres’ 2019 comment; in other words, the Chinese state institutions—products of the revolution led by the CPC—improved the social conditions of life. Before The Revolution In 1949, China was one of the world’s poorest countries. Only 10 countries had a lower per capita GDP than China. Chairman Mao Zedong’s famous words at the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China—“The Chinese people have stood up”—is a reflection of a century of humiliations that produced terrible poverty in the country. The degree of this national suffering may be seen in the fact that between 1840 and 1949 almost 100 million Chinese people died in wars, which directly resulted from foreign intervention, or were victims of civil wars and famines related to those interventions. China had suffered the longest Second World War, from 1937 to 1945 (with a civil war following that lasted until 1949); the death toll was at least 14 million (as documented by Rana Mitter in his book Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945). From the Opium Wars beginning in 1839 to the Japanese invasion in 1931, China struggled to establish its sovereignty and its future. It was the terrible burden of this past that brought together a range of radicals to establish the CPC in July 1921 in Shanghai. The small group of 13—including Mao—met in Shanghai’s French Concession and then on a tourist boat on Nanhu Lake after the foreign police came for them on the information of a spy. The principal task of the CPC was to organize and guide the working class. By May Day 1924, 100,000 workers marched in Shanghai, while 200,000 workers marched in Canton. “The time is past when workers are only cannon fodder for the bosses,” the workers wrote in a leaflet. The CPC threw itself into these struggles, growing through setbacks—including the Shanghai Massacre of 1927; leadership by the CPC in the protracted, anti-imperialist war against Japan led it to eventual victory in 1949. Phases Of Socialist Construction The Chinese Revolution had to confront a broken state, a destroyed economy, and a society in deep turmoil. In 1949, China’s people livedthree years less than the world average. They were less well-educated and deeply unhealthy. By 1978, they lived five years longer than the world average. Literacy rates had risen, and health care data showed a marked improvement. As China in 1978 was 22 percent of the world’s population, never in human history had such an immense step forward taken place. From 1978, with the introduction of “reform and opening up,” China achieved the fastest economic growth ever calculated by a major country in recorded history. From 1978 to 2020, China’s annual average GDP growth was 9.2 percent. Since 1978, China’s household consumption has increased by 1,800 percent, twice that of any major country. This means that everyday life has improved markedly in China. China’s literacy rate is now 97.33 percent, up from 95.92 percent in 2010, far above the literacy rate of 20 percent in 1949. By 2025, China will become a “high-income” economy by World Bank international standards, according to Justin Lin Yifu (a standing committee member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee, and dean and professor at the Institute of New Structural Economics of Peking University). That is, in about 75 years, a single lifetime, China will have gone from almost the world’s poorest country to a high-income economy—with all the enormous improvement in human living standards, life expectancy, education, culture, and numerous other dimensions of human welfare this results in. With the foundation of the CPC 100 years ago by a handful of people, the Chinese people found a leadership that could deliver them from a struggle that dates back to 1839; now, the CPC will play a decisive role in deciding the fate not only of China but of the world. This historical context is too often lost when Western media and politicians play down China’s socioeconomic victories or imply they came out of nowhere. China’s people have fought for this outcome for centuries.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 5, 2021 12:11:58 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 6, 2021 20:46:34 GMT
There’s Nothing Feminist About Imperialism BY DEAN SPADE SARAH LAZARE Women now shape the American war machine at its highest levels. That’s nothing to celebrate. jacobinmag.com/2019/01/feminism-military-industrial-complex-pentagonMajor media outlets are fawning over the fact that women are taking over top positions in the country’s largest weapons companies and in US defense and intelligence agencies. From MSNBC to Politico to NowThis, a number of prominent publications are framing this ascent as an indicator of overall progress for women — and of increased equity in the organizations they are now leading. Women are now the CEOs of four out of the country’s five biggest military contractors, writes Politico reporter David Brown, noting that, “across the negotiating table, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and the chief overseer of the nation’s nuclear stockpile now join other women in some of the most influential national security posts.” Brown hails the developments as a “watershed” moment, citing Kathleen Hicks, senior vice-president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank whose top corporate funders are weapons contractors, as asserting that “the national security community” is more of a meritocracy than other fields. Throughout the article, the women leading these organizations proclaim that women can make it to the top if they believe in themselves. They call on well-worn gender stereotypes to assert that women have something special to offer because of their unique talent at negotiating, their fierce protectiveness as mothers, and their “different perspective” on problem solving. The article even includes patronizing praise of how women’s leadership in the military can result in innovative solutions like wrapping sensitive equipment in pantyhose to keep out sand. Yet, feminists should not view this “rise” of women as a win. Feminism, as the most recent wave of imperial-feminist articles shows, is increasingly being co-opted to promote and sell the US military-industrial complex: a profoundly violent institution that will never bring liberation to women — whether they are within its own ranks or in the countries bearing the greatest brunt of its brutality. As Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University, put it in an interview with In These Times, women’s inclusion in US military institutions “makes the system subjugating us stronger and more difficult to fight. Our historical exclusion makes it [appear] desirable to achieve [inclusion] but that’s a lack of imagination. Our historical exclusion should push us to imagine a better system and another world that’s possible.” This pro-military media spin is no accident: Weapons contractors are working hard to sell a progressive, pro-women brand to the public. Raytheon and other firms spend millions on public relations painting themselves as noble empowerers of women and girls in the sciences. Raytheon champions its partnership with Girl Scouts of the USA. “Through a multiyear commitment from Raytheon, Girl Scouts will launch its first national computer science program and Cyber Challenge for middle and high school girls,” states a promotional page. A high-dollar promotional video quotes Rebecca Rhoads, president of Raytheon’s global business services, as stating, “Raytheon’s vision about making the world a safer place and the girl scouts’ vision of making the world a better place couldn’t be more well-suited as partners.” Such a claim is particularly brazen, coming from a company that supplies a steady stream of bombs for the US-Saudi war in Yemen, which has unleashed a famine that has killed an estimated 85,000 Yemeni children under the age of five. Lockheed Martin, by far the biggest arms producer in the world with $44.9 billion in arms sales in 2017, manufactured the 500-pound laser-guided MK 82 bomb that struck a Yemeni school bus last August, killing fifty-four people (forty-four of them children). But that doesn’t stop the company from presenting itself as a progressive organization that recruits — and supports — women scientists. A page on its website quotes the Langston Hughes poem, “A Dream Deferred,” to make the case that the company helps girls achieve their dreams. “This poem was one of my favorites from my high school English class, but, now, as I consider my Community Service and Engagement with the Lockheed Martin community, I personally know what can happen to a dream deferred, when many say no, but I say, ‘Yes you can,’” the page states. In her speech at the 2015 World Assembly for Women in Tokyo, the company’s chairperson, president and CEO Marillyn A. Hewson said that “it is just as important to support women as they work to lift themselves up and raise up each other. Because taking responsibility for our own careers is empowering in and of itself.” Faux-feminist PR is not just for private corporations — it is also being used to sell woman-led CIA torture. Gina Haspel, who once oversaw torture at a black site in Thailand, now runs the CIA, and the Trump administration defended her from critics of torture by pointing out the fact that she is a woman. “Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite,” said Press Sec. Sarah Sanders on Twitter. Yet, Erakat asks, “How are you going to celebrate women in high military ranks as an achievement when all they do is fulfill an agenda that was never created through a feminist framework? Haspel was an architect of our torture regime. Why would I celebrate her?” Meanwhile, the war criminals of yesteryear are being rehabilitated by this “girl-power” coverage. Last April, the Washington Post ran a story with the eyebrow-raising headline, “‘The kids, they love Madeleine Albright’: How a veteran diplomat got turned into a girl-power icon.” In 1996, Albright, the then-US ambassador to the United Nations, told 60 Minutes that the half-million Iraqi children killed by the US sanctions regime were “worth” it. “It’s a very white, imperialist, liberal understanding of feminism to think that the promotion of women at the top of militarization and militarism is advancing women,” says Kara Ellerby, author of No Shortcut to Change, who derides what she calls the “add-women-and-stir” approach. “Sure, it’s great that you have a woman at the head of Raytheon, but what about the women who those bombs are being dropped on?” Ellerby emphasizes to In These Times. “From a global perspective, putting women in charge of US military dominance is not remotely feminist: It’s imperialist.” Feminist scholar and author Cynthia Enloe echoes this concern, suggesting that women’s leadership in these organizations does not change what the organizations do to the rest of the world. “There is no evidence that I’ve seen — of the CIA, defense department, or other institutions where only a few women are rising to the top — that they challenge the mission of the company or the organization,” she tells In These Times. The Military-Industrial Complex Is Not Good for Women US military intervention is particularly bad for women: It remains deeply interconnected to sexual and gender violence, for people in the military, for military spouses, and for people living in or near the estimated 1,000 US military bases around the world or where US military actions occur. From Japan to the Philippines, local populations have long protested the presence of the US military — and the environmental destruction and sexual violence it brings. The impacts of war — such as reduction in basic services, electricity, and access to food and water, loss of family members, and increased rates of illness and disability — all increase women’s vulnerability to assault and worsen the conditions of women’s labor. Women are predominantly responsible for caring for sick and disabled people, children, and elders — and the conditions for doing that work worsen severely in war conditions. The US military is also the largest polluter in the world. It is difficult to argue that its activities are “good for women” when it contributes to climate change and the poisoning of air, water, and land that endangers all people. The US military is also profoundly violent towards women within its own ranks. According to Veterans Affairs records, 1,307,781outpatient visits took place at the VA for Military Sexual Trauma (MST)-related care in 2015. Approximately 38 percent of female and 4 percent of male military personnel and veterans have experienced Military Sexual Trauma — a euphemism for rape or sexual assault. Research reveals that 40 percent of women homeless veterans have experienced sexual assault in the military. (Far less is known or publicly reported about the US military’s sexual violence against occupied peoples.) Service members are punished for speaking out. A report from the Department of Defense finds 58 percent of women and 60 percent of men who report sexual assault face retaliation. And 77 percent of retaliation reports alleged that retaliators were in the reporter’s chain of command. A third of victims are discharged after reporting, typically within seven months of making a report. A report from Harvard Law School’s Veterans’ clinic finds sexual assault victims receive harsher discharges from the military, with 24 percent separated under less than fully honorable conditions, compared to 15 percent of all service members. Women who drop out of the military because they have been sexually assaulted cannot rise through the ranks. The media portrayal of the women who have climbed to the top of the military and intelligence apparatuses, however, relies on bootstrap tough-it-up narratives that implicitly victim-shame women, often framing failure to achieve what they did in terms of women’s lack of confidence that creates obstacles to their success. Lynn Dugle, CEO of Englity and former CEO of Raytheon, tells Politico, “One of my biggest challenges has been resisting the temptation to tell myself I couldn’t do something. I didn’t think I was ready to be president of a multibillion-dollar business at Raytheon when I was offered the role. I continually remind myself to have courage and confidence.” These narratives about “progress” through inclusion of underrepresented groups in dominant institutions (in this case women), actually follow a well-worn pattern in US politics. Whether it is police departments championing “diversity” while perpetuating targeted harm against marginalized populations, or oil companies portraying themselves as “green,” the drive to be associated with a (watered-down) progressivism or inclusivity is one of the most common PR strategies at work for the world’s most harmful institutions. Wars to Save Women? The idea that the US military-industrial complex can be pro-women is not just an internal rebranding exercise: It is used to justify disastrous US military interventions around the world. In his book Ideal Illusions, historian James Peck shows how this is part of a larger trend that developed during the Cold War when, as an anticommunist strategy, the United States revamped its image as the human rights protector of the world to justify its military empire. The US claim that it uniquely protects women’s rights was part of this larger picture. The George W. Bush administration famously justified the war in Afghanistan by arguing that it would rescue women from the Taliban. On Nov. 17, 2001, Laura Bush gave the president’s weekly radio address, proclaiming, “Afghan women know, through hard experience, what the rest of the world is discovering: the brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists.” Media outlets dutifully followed suit: In 2010, Time ran a cover showing “Bibi Aisha” with her nose cut off, with the headline, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” Of course, the protracted US occupation has only further entrenched the Taliban, which now controls more territory than at any point in the past seventeen years. Meanwhile, civilian deaths are climbing. Yet none of the politicians or pundits who popularized the rhetoric of “saving women” are forced to answer to how this war has actually harmed — and killed — women in Afghanistan. The 2011 bombing of Libya was cheered as the first US war led by women, as noted by the Daily Beast, which reported that “[t]he Libyan airstrikes mark the first time in U.S. history that a female-dominated diplomatic team has urged military action.” The fact that command of the Libya air strategy was given to a woman officer was also celebrated in the Guardian as “a boost to women in the US military who complain daily about discrimination.” Are these celebrated woman architects of war required to answer to today’s nightmarish conditions in Libya where black people are now bought and sold in open-air slave markets? Do cheerleaders of the intervention actually examine whether US military intervention in Libya, or anywhere, leads to improved conditions for women? Narratives about saving women are also prevalent in the US war on ISIS. While there is no doubt that women face horrific treatment at the hands of ISIS, rape, enslavement, and abuse has been used to justify a brutal US bombing campaign that has caused 2,780 civilian casualty incidents in Syria and Iraq and relaxed standards for killing civilians in both countries — opening the door to more civilian deaths. Meanwhile, atrocities against women perpetrated by US ally Saudi Arabia go unpunished, revealing that the need to protect women is contingent on US geopolitical interests. These tropes are not new. They come from the playbook of US and Western European colonization, in which colonizers argue that their presence helps women, and their exit would do them grave harm. In just one example, Lord Cromer, who was the British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, cited the veil — and women’s well-being — to argue Egyptians should be forcibly civilized. “The position of women in Egypt, and Mohammedan countries generally, is, therefore a fatal obstacle to the attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation,” he once declared. Yet, as feminist scholar Leila Ahmed has pointed out, at the same time Cromer was railing against the veil, he was agitating in favor of the subordination of women in England, as a leader of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. In her work, “A vocabulary for feminist praxis: on war and radical critique,” feminist, activist, writer, and scholar Angela Davis articulates a bold vision for feminism. “This more radical feminism is a feminism that does not capitulate to possessive individualism,” she writes, “a feminism that does not assume that democracy requires capitalism, a feminism that is bold and willing to take risks, a feminism that fights for women’s rights while simultaneously recognizing the pitfalls of the formal ‘rights’ structure of capitalist democracy.” According to Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ, a global network of women mobilizing to end the Korean War, “Celebrating the rise of women in these institutions of domination, whether Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin or the CIA (which has been responsible for secret torture programs and covert overthrows of democratic regimes worldwide), distracts from the point at hand, which is that we need to be minimizing the power and reach of these institutions.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 6, 2021 21:06:49 GMT
Class Struggle Built the Welfare State BY ASBJØRN WAHL The welfare state wasn’t created by enlightened dialogue or “sensible” moderate politics. It was a concession won by workers against bosses through decades of struggle. jacobinmag.com/2021/05/welfare-state-class-struggle-confrontation-compromise-labor-union-movementThe welfare state, in its different versions, has been celebrated as one of the greatest achievements of the labor movement in Western Europe. And it’s no surprise: the welfare state represented great progress in people’s general living and working conditions. Health, life expectancy, and social security developed enormously in a relatively short period as the welfare state emerged during the twentieth century. Over the last few decades, however, welfare institutions and services have come under increased pressure. The question now is whether the welfare state will survive the present right-wing political project — the neoliberal offensive. Here views differ considerably, within as well as outside the labor movement. Some argue that the main institutions of the welfare state are intact, and the deregulations and adjustments that have been carried out since about 1980 have basically been necessary in order to equip the welfare state for a new age. Others, including myself, hold the view that the welfare state has been put under immense pressure and attacks from strong economic and political forces. Important political regulatory measures have been dismantled, public pensions have been weakened, access to public welfare institutions has been narrowed, universal schemes have been replaced by means-testing, user contributions have increased in size and scope, and private economic interests have invaded key areas. In other words, the welfare state’s very existence is under threat. Discussions around the crisis of the welfare state, however, are often a bit simplistic. The entire concept of a welfare state is often discussed regardless of its social and historical origins and the power relations which made it possible in the first place. If we really want to get to grips with the potential and the perspective of the welfare state, a deeper investigation of this particular social model is crucial. It is essential to clarify an understanding and analysis of the welfare state. The Rise of Labor Let’s be clear: the quality and level of welfare services is a question of economic, social, and political power. The emergence of the trade union movement, in alliance with other popular movements, and their struggle over decades against capital and business interests, created new power relations through market regulations, public ownership, and democratic control of basic infrastructure. This gave us universal, high-quality social protection and public services. The welfare state, however, was also the result of a very specific historical development which ended with an institutionalized class compromise. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dominated by social confrontations in the industrializing capitalist countries. There were general strikes and lockouts, and the use of police and military force against workers was common. People were wounded and killed in these confrontations — this was prominently the case in Scandinavia, which is widely considered to be the most socially peaceful part of the world today.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 7, 2021 11:38:31 GMT
What happens when your work is no longer of strategic importance to the government? What happens when your communities’ cultural and social activity, tied to that employment, is lost? The strategic decision of the British state to orientate away from manufacturing and towards financialisation changed so much. These are the long roots of the 2016 and 2019 votes. Laura Pidcock reviews The Shadow of the Mine by Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, for Red Pepper. Review – The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain Laura Pidcock, former MP for North West Durham, reviews the new book by Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson in the shadow of Brexit and deindustrialisation July 6, 2021 · 6 min read www.redpepper.org.uk/review-the-shadow-of-the-mine-coal-brexit-durham-industry-labour/
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 7, 2021 15:28:47 GMT
How Sweden’s Left Party Stopped the Social Democrats’ Undermining the Welfare State BY JOHN HÖRNQUIST Sweden's Social-Democratic prime minister Stefan Löfven has just been voted back into office — now having dropped proposals to abandon collective bargaining over rents. The change was thanks to pressure from the Left Party. jacobinmag.com/2021/07/sweden-left-party-social-democrats-welfare-state-rent-lofven-dadgostarAt the end of June, a long game of chicken over the deregulation of Sweden’s rental sector culminated in the fall of the government — and in an increasingly popular and confident Left Party. A new “Red-Green” minority government has taken form, having dropped the proposed marketization of rents under pressure from the Left. What remains to be seen is how long such an administration can survive. The neoliberal Center Party, which was previously decisive to keeping the Social-Democrats in office, refuses to cooperate with the government if the Left Party is given any further influence — despite the risk that such a stance could lead to a right-wing takeover with far-right support. On June 21, the day of the no-confidence vote against the government, Social-Democratic prime minister Stefan Löfven had accused the Left Party itself of playing with such a risk. He said it had “united with the right-wing conservative parties in a no-confidence vote against the government, forming a temporary majority. To prevent this, the government and its partners proposed a way forward in line with the Left Party’s own proposal. I regret that the Left Party turned this down. I too, like the Left Party, reject market-based rents.” Yet, Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar painted a much darker picture of the government’s direction: The government has made it clear that it intends to implement a proposal of market-based rents. This would be a seismic change in Swedish housing policy. But if Stefan Löfven and Annie Lööf want to implement the system of market rents, it will not be on my watch, nor that of the Left Party. What we are about to do today has not come lightly. We have done everything in our power to reach a solution. But since no one else has been open to negotiations, we are here today—and we will keep our promises.
To understand the two contradictory claims, the downfall of Sweden’s once stable social-democratic hegemony, and the Left Party’s attempts to fill that void, we need to step back in time a little.
Rising Sweden Democrats The Social Democratic Party has become successively weaker following its neoliberal turn around 1990. Further, ever since the far-right Sweden Democrats entered the Swedish parliament (Riksdag) in 2010, there has been a consistent right-wing majority of 55-60 percent, for the first time since the early 1900s.
At that point, no party in the Riksdag was willing to form majorities with the far right. But when the Red-Green block remained marginally stronger (thanks to a growing Left Party) in the 2018 election, while the Sweden Democrats surged to 17.5 percent, the Moderates (neoliberal conservatives) and the Christian Democrats gave in to the temptation of seeking power with far-right support.
The rest of the Riksdag moved to block this — resulting in the Social Democrats and the Greens forming a new minority government, but only after four months of negotiations, and on two very contradictory conditions. Given its lack of a parliamentary majority the government had to negotiate its future budgets with the two liberal parties: the Center Party (the most neoliberal but also the least conservative right-wing party) and the Liberal Party. They also agreed on an extensive seventy-three-point program called the January Agreement. This included some moderately progressive proposals, but also radical neoliberal reforms like privatization of large parts of the state employment service, weakened labor protection laws and a deregulation of negotiated rents. As a result, the Red-Green government was tied to a neoliberal “Ulysses pact.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 7, 2021 16:43:20 GMT
How a Luton Council Estate Is Taking Control of Its Future By Taj Ali After years of institutional neglect, residents of Marsh Farm in Luton have come together to build a bottom-up model of regeneration – one which puts the community's interest before private profit. tribunemag.co.uk/2021/07/lutons-marsh-farm-estate-shows-how-working-class-communities-can-take-back-controlThe Marsh Farm housing estate in Luton was built in the 1960s, and now has a population of around 10,000. Like many social housing estates, in the years since its development, it has endured an institutional neglect which has seen its levels of unemployment and deprivation rise to more than double the Luton average. In the absence of adequate government support, members of the community set up a self-help collective known as the Exodus Collective, which embarked on an ambitious plan to radically transform the estate. Many former members of the collective are now part of Marsh Farm Outreach, a grassroots community development organisation that has actively facilitated estate-based community wealth-building – and proven the power of bottom-up community regeneration. The 1995 Riots The Marsh Farm estate made headlines in 1995 after several years of tensions between police and groups of local youths erupted into three nights of running battles, which saw riot officers deployed from the Met. Glenn Jenkins, a member of the Exodus Collective at the time, says the 1995 riots were a pivotal moment in the estate’s history, made so by the unprecedented police response. ‘What started as a burning car and kids protesting against their mate being beat up and arrested had all of a sudden led to what genuinely looked like a military incursion, and I mean military,’ he tells Tribune. ‘I’m talking hundreds of police in columns and police helicopters too. We’d never seen a helicopter in ’95.’ A small spark with a few kids was quickly turned into a mass disturbance, drawing thousands from all over Marsh Farm and Luton. ‘It felt like the estate had been invaded,’ says Glenn, adding that the petrol on the road was the years of antagonism between the kids and the police. ‘Police were like a gang downtown. They’d drive through and stare up the kids. There was constant harassment.’
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 8, 2021 18:19:42 GMT
|
|