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Post by Admin on Nov 17, 2021 22:06:01 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 18, 2021 20:10:43 GMT
Henryk Grossman Works, Volume 3 The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crises Series: Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume: 233 Author: Henryk Grossman Editor: Rick Kuhn Translators: Jairus Banaji and Rick Kuhn Long awaited, the first full translation of Henryk Grossman’s The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crisis has been published in English. It was the most important, influential and yet most denounced of Grossman's works and recovers not only Marx’s primary explanation of capitalism’s economic crises and breakdown tendency but also his method in Capital. Copyright Year: 2021 E-Book (PDF) Availability: Published ISBN: 978-90-04-44997-8 Publication Date: 01 Nov 2021 Hardback Availability: Published ISBN: 978-90-04-35197-4 Publication Date: 04 Nov 2021 Henryk Grossman en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_GrossmanHenryk Grossman (alternative spelling: Henryk Grossmann; 14 April 1881 – 24 November 1950) was a Polish economist, historian, and Marxist revolutionary active in both Poland and Germany. Grossman's key contribution to political-economic theory was his book, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, a study in Marxian crisis theory. It was published in Leipzig months before the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
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Post by Admin on Nov 19, 2021 14:31:38 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 24, 2021 18:07:35 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 24, 2021 18:08:22 GMT
‘THIS IS COINTELPRO 2021’ The recent release of longtime political prisoners David Gilbert and Russell Maroon Shoatz is cause for celebration, but the state apparatus that imprisons radicals and squashes political dissent is alive and well. BY EDDIE CONWAY NOVEMBER 22, 2021 therealnews.com/this-is-cointelpro-2021
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Post by Admin on Dec 9, 2021 19:24:00 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 3, 2022 19:05:18 GMT
Joseph Schumpeter and the Economics of Imperialism BY JOHN E. KING The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter believed that the triumph of socialism was inevitable, but he rejected the Marxist view of how capitalism works. His ideas are a stimulating challenge for those seeking an alternative to capitalism today. jacobinmag.com/2022/01/joseph-schumpeter-economics-imperialism-marxism/Joseph Alois Schumpeter was one of the most prominent political economists during the first half of the twentieth century. He published prolifically in both German and English on questions of economic theory, economic sociology, economic and social policy, and the history of ideas. A phrase Schumpeter coined to describe the essence of capitalism as he understood it, “creative destruction,” has become one of the most familiar terms in the economic lexicon. In politics, Schumpeter was a liberal conservative — or perhaps a conservative liberal — but he was also deeply influenced by his Marxian contemporaries. As a student at the University of Vienna, Schumpeter was a member of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s legendary graduate seminar, along with three leading Austro-Marxists — Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, and Emil Lederer — and the free-market liberal Ludwig von Mises. This experience no doubt encouraged Schumpeter to explore many of the same questions that his Marxist contemporaries had posed, although the answers that he formulated differed sharply from theirs. He disagreed with the Marxist view of capitalism’s inner contradictions while believing that the ultimate victory of socialism was inevitable anyway. For Schumpeter, the drive toward imperialism and war that was so evident in his own time stemmed from precapitalist social forces that were still at work in European society rather than the logic of capitalism itself. Life and Work Schumpeter was born into a prosperous middle-class family in the Moravian town of Triesch on February 8, 1883, a month before the death of Karl Marx. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 7, 1950. Schumpeter’s father, a merchant, had died in 1887, and his mother soon remarried. His new stepfather was a general in the Austro-Hungarian army, so the young Joseph grew up in a distinctly upper-class environment. He was educated in Vienna at the prestigious Theresianum Academy of Knights of Vienna. Schumpeter went on to spend five years at the University of Vienna between 1901 and 1906, where he studied law, mathematics, and philosophy in addition to economics. His first publication came in 1906, when he was only twenty-three years of age. From 1909 to 1911, Schumpeter was professor of economics at the University of Czernowitz, moving first to the University of Graz (1911–1921) and then to the University of Bonn (1925–1932). In addition to these academic posts, he worked as a lawyer and a financial speculator — not to mention a brief stint as minister of finance in the new post-Habsburg Austrian republic between March and October 1919 — and spent some time in Britain and the United States. Schumpeter spent the last eighteen years of his life at Harvard University, where he was president of the Econometric Society (in 1942) and the American Economic Association (in 1948). Were it not for his unexpected death, Schumpeter would also have served as the founding president of the International Economic Association in 1950. Although there is a substantial literature on Schumpeter’s life and work, no comprehensive edition of his works has yet been published, whether in English or in German. Richard Sturn suggests that this may reflect the absence of a specific “Schumpeter school” of economics. Probably best known today as a historian of economic thought, Schumpeter was the author of two hundred journal articles and several influential books, two of which ran to more than a thousand pages: the two-volume Business Cycles and the posthumously published History of Economic Analysis. However, those interested in Schumpeter’s thinking, especially from the left, will probably turn first to his most celebrated work, 1942’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which is a mere 425 pages in length. The book consists of five parts, respectively titled “The Marxian doctrine,” “Can capitalism survive?” “Can socialism work?” “Socialism and democracy,” and “A historical sketch of socialist parties.” It would be impossible in the space of a short article to give a satisfactory account of this complex, scholarly, and highly opinionated work. I will concentrate instead on Schumpeter’s analysis of the economics of imperialism, which provides an entry point into his broader approach to the capitalist mode of production, its history, and its prospects. Explaining Imperialism Twenty-three years before the appearance of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter published a lengthy article on “The Sociology of Imperialism” in a German-language academic journal, which did not appear in English until just after his death. In the version that I have consulted, there are ninety-six pages of text, amounting to perhaps 35,000 words. Schumpeter began with a brief introductory section outlining the nature of the problem, in which he argued that aggressive attitudes on the part of states need not be a simple reflection of the population’s concrete economic interests. Indeed, in the case of imperialism, we might say that nations and classes seek “expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, victory for the sake of winning, dominion for the sake of ruling.” In this spirit, he defined imperialism as “the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion.” The author did acknowledge that “neo-Marxist theory” had attempted to provide an economic explanation for imperialism, reducing it to “the economic class interests of the age in question” (emphasis in original, and hereafter). Although he conceded that the Marxist view was “by far the most serious contribution” that had been made to the analysis of imperialism and agreed that there was “much truth in it,” Schumpeter proceeded to criticize it at some length. He began by describing the strongly anti-imperialist sentiments that had prevailed in mid-nineteenth-century Britain in a section with the strange title “Imperialism as a catchphrase.” After a lengthy account of the way imperialism had operated in ancient times, the medieval period, and the age of absolute monarchy, Schumpeter devoted the final third of the essay to discussing the relationship between imperialism and capitalism. At the start of this concluding section, Schumpeter returned to the prevalence of “non-rational and irrational, purely instinctual inclinations towards war and conquest.” He believed that many — and perhaps most — wars throughout history had been waged without any adequate reason. According to Schumpeter, this in turn was strong evidence that “psychological dispositions and social structures acquired in the dim past . . . tend to maintain themselves and to continue in effect long after they have lost their meaning and their life-preserving function.” On the strength of this analysis, Schumpeter rejected the argument of Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist thinkers that there was a necessary link between imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism was in fact “atavistic in character” and stemmed from “the living conditions, not of the present but of the past — put in terms of the economic interpretation of history, from past rather than present relations of production.” In political terms, we should see imperialism as the product not of capitalist democracy but rather of the earlier stage of “absolute autocracy.” Schumpeter insisted that under capitalism, there was “much less excess energy to be vented in war and conquest than in any pre-capitalist society.” In a capitalist society, the pursuit of profit absorbed the energies of the population, with wars of conquest rightly seen as “troublesome distractions, destructive of life’s meaning, a diversion from the accustomed and therefore ‘true’ task.” The economist cited what he considered to be strong evidence of the powerful anti-imperialist tendencies at work in capitalist society. Those tendencies included deep opposition to militarism, military expenditure, and war, which were most powerful among industrial workers but also manifested in large sections of the capitalist class. It was no accident, he suggested, that of all the capitalist nations, the United States was the one least inclined toward imperialist adventures and also “the least burdened with pre-capitalist elements, survivals, reminiscences, and powerful factors.” We should look upon the imperialist tendencies that could indeed be found within capitalism as “alien elements, carried into the world of capitalism from the outside, supported by non-capitalist factors in modern life.” Capitalism and Monopoly Schumpeter then directly addressed the neo-Marxist claim that imperialism was the product of a new, dangerous stage of monopoly capitalism. He acknowledged that some sections of the capitalist class do indeed benefit from imperialism — most obviously entrepreneurs in the war industries. However, Schumpeter argued, “where free trade prevails no class has an interest in forcible expansion as such.” In a lengthy discussion of the economic effects of tariffs and the broader political implications of protectionism, Schumpeter cited Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding favorably, crediting them with having been the first to recognize and describe the importance of what was happening in this field. He also praised Hilferding for having taken his distance from a pessimistic view about the prospects of capitalism that he found in the work of Marx: It is not true that the capitalist system as such must collapse from imminent necessity, that it necessarily makes its continued existence impossible by its own growth and development. Marx’s line of reasoning on this point shows serious defects, and when these are corrected the proof vanishes. It is to the great credit of Hilferding that he abandoned this thesis of Marxist theory. A footnote to this passage anticipated one of the most striking arguments that Schumpeter later made in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: Capitalism is its own undoing but in a sense different from that implied by Marx. Society is bound to grow beyond capitalism, but this will be because the achievements of capitalism are likely to make it superfluous, not because its internal contradictions are likely to make its continuance impossible. Schumpeter was much closer to the neo-Marxist position on the role of financial capital in the growth of monopoly. He drew an interesting distinction between (financial) capitalists and (industrial) entrepreneurs: “Although the relation between capitalists and entrepreneurs is one of the typical and fundamental conflicts of the capitalist economy, monopoly capitalism has virtually fused the big banks and cartels into one.” This process had created “a social group that carries great political weight,” and which possessed a strong, undeniable, economic interest in such things as productive tariffs, cartels, monopoly prices, forced exports (dumping), an aggressive economic policy, an aggressive foreign policy generally, and war, including wars of expansion with a typically imperialist character. He also identified further motives for this group to support imperialism, including “an interest in the conquest of lands producing raw materials and foodstuffs, with a view to facilitating self-sufficient warfare,” and the profits to be derived from rising wartime consumption. While unorganized capitalists would “at best reap a trifling profit” from these activities, “organized capital is sure to profit hugely.” And yet, Schumpeter warned, “the final word in any presentation of this aspect of modern economic life must be one of warning against over-estimating it.” The only capitalists with a real material interest in what he termed “export monopolism” were “the entrepreneurs and their ally, high finance.” Small producers and workers had nothing to gain. His conclusion was that “export monopolism,” contrary to the arguments of Marxist thinkers, did not arise “from the inherent laws of capitalist development.” Capitalism remained intensely competitive, and it was “a basic fallacy to describe imperialism as a necessary phase of capitalism, or even to speak of the development of capitalism into imperialism.” rest in link
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Post by Admin on Jan 4, 2022 15:07:13 GMT
2022: Year Three of the pandemic and the emerging global class struggle Joseph Kishore, David North www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/01/04/pers-j04.html1. As the New Year begins, the COVID-19 pandemic has entered its most dangerous and deadly phase. The Omicron variant, first identified in late November 2021, is now the dominant strain globally. It is spreading with extraordinary speed throughout Europe and the United States, propelling daily new cases to their highest levels on record. In the last week of 2021, average daily infections in the United States were approaching 500,000. 2. The global pandemic is a catastrophe of historic dimensions. It is also a crime, because the disastrous impact of the pandemic is the result of decisions made by capitalist governments—first and foremost, in the United States and Western Europe—to deliberately prioritize profits over lives, to reject the implementation of public health measures required to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 and, instead, to adopt policies that allow the virus to spread wildly throughout the global population. 3. Throughout 2020 and well into 2021, governments and the media maintained the pretense that the fight against the pandemic could be successfully conducted on a business-friendly basis, through a combination of vaccinations and an eclectic assortment of mitigation measures. This approach, they claimed, would allow schools to safely reopen and workers to remain on their jobs. These claims were, from the start, based on a deliberate suppression of science, which had established that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted primarily through aerosols, small particles which linger in the air for hours. Indoor spaces lacking proper filtration and ventilation, including the vast majority of schools and workplaces, have thus been the primary centers of viral transmission. An even more fundamental lie was that the pandemic could be suppressed on the basis of national initiatives, thus legitimizing the absence of a global strategy and effective programs to make vaccines freely available to all countries. But all the lies and false strategies have been totally exploded by the eruption of the Omicron variant. 4. The response to Omicron has been the complete collapse of the pretense that the governments are focused on ending the pandemic. Spearheaded by the United States and Western Europe, the strategy being openly pursued by most governments throughout the world is that of “herd immunity.” The underlying conception of this criminal policy is that at some point, as yet unknown, so many people will have been infected that the virus will exhaust the available pool of easily accessible victims. As the Financial Times editorialized on January 3, “it is reasonable to conclude that the interaction between virus and the human immune system means that the more people acquire some protection against severe Covid symptoms through vaccination or infection, the better the outlook.” 5. It should be especially noted that the FT does not even consider the possibility of eliminating the disease. “Whatever slim chance we might have had at the beginning of 2020 to eliminate Covid-19 has long gone,” it asserts. “Efforts to control the pandemic have been justified so far as in the context of a global health emergency but they cannot continue indefinitely. The collateral damage—to mental health and well-being, social cohesion and the global economy—would be too great.” 6. The import of this statement is clear: SARS-CoV-2 will persist for years, even decades, as an endemic illness. What will be the consequence in suffering and human lives? The corporate-financial oligarchies and the governments they control could not care less. An abhorrent anti-social mindset is deeply rooted within the capitalist class. It is focused not on the death toll but on share market valuation. 7. Charles Dickens famously described the years before the French Revolution as the “best of times” and the “worst of times.” How well these words apply to the present reality. For the capitalist class, the years of the pandemic have been nothing less than a blessing. The market valuation of Apple has risen 125 percent to more than $3.0 trillion. That of Microsoft has risen 110 percent to $2.5 trillion. Alphabet’s market valuation is up 108 percent to $1.9 trillion. The share value of Tesla, controlled by the sociopath Elon Musk, has risen 1,311 percent to $1.1 trillion. The collective wealth of the richest 5 percent and the most affluent sections of the middle class has soared. 8. But the overwhelming mass of society has been living in the “worst of times.” In the two years since the pandemic began, official statistics record that 5.5 million people have died. This includes more than 840,000 in the United States alone. The real death toll, however, measured by “excess deaths” over what would have been expected without the pandemic, is estimated at more than 18 million. Thus, total deaths from the pandemic in just two years since January 2020 rival the approximately 20 million military and civilian deaths during the four years of World War I (1914-1918). 9. The death toll, as terrible as it is, is an inadequate measure of the devastating impact of the pandemic. A large percentage of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 grapple with prolonged symptoms known as Long COVID, which affects multiple organ systems and produces a wide range of debilitating, physically painful, and emotionally scarring effects. According to a report posted on-line by EClinicalMedicine in July 2021, a majority of respondents to its study required more than 35 weeks (almost nine months) to recover from Long COVID. 10. This outcome was not inevitable. The experience in China, with a population of 1.4 billion people, demonstrates that a “Zero COVID” policy is both viable and extremely effective. By implementing this policy China has succeeded in limiting deaths to under 5,000, with only two deaths since May 2020. 11. Having rejected the option of eliminating the virus, the media in the United States and Europe portray China’s policy as a brutal and even bizarre response to the disease. China’s government is certainly “authoritarian.” But the term is applied maliciously to discredit a correct response, which has broad-based public support, to the pandemic. In fact, China has thus far been able to contain the virus by utilizing basic public health measures developed over centuries—including targeted lockdowns, mass testing and contact tracing, and the isolation of infected individuals. 12. The use of quarantine to stop infections, for example, is a method of disease prevention that dates to the era of the Black Death in 14th century Venice. Of course, the modern means employed to quarantine the ill are vastly more sophisticated and humane than was possible in the primitive conditions that prevailed 800 years ago. But even in Medieval Europe, death was viewed as the worst outcome of a disease, to be prevented if at all possible. Why is it that in the 21st century, countries with the most advanced technologies at their disposal decide as a matter of policy to view the loss of life as preferable to the loss of money? The blunt force “herd immunity” response adopted by existing capitalist governments—deliberately rejecting measures that could stop the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and end the pandemic—represents a horrifying social and moral regression. 13. Trotsky once observed that necessity in history “is realized through the natural selection of accidents.” That a particular bat virus infected humans at a Wuhan wet market was an accident. But the possibility of such an incident—rooted in a complex interaction of social, economic and environmental conditions—had been foreseen. In this historical sense, the zoonotic transfer of the virus was “an accident waiting to happen.” Similarly, the absence of serious preparation for such an incident by the major capitalist countries and the disastrous series of decisions that followed were determined by the historically obsolete structures of global capitalism and the reactionary social and economic interests of its ruling class.
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Post by Admin on Jan 18, 2022 21:54:48 GMT
“Democratic Socialism Is About Building a Just Society” AN INTERVIEW WITH JESSICA MASON Jessica Mason is a Navy veteran and socialist running for Congress in Texas. In an interview with Jacobin, she discusses the importance of unions, her time in the military, and why both parties “demonize democratic socialism because they are scared of it.” jacobinmag.com/2022/01/democratic-socialism-jessica-mason-texas-state-congressSince Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run democratic socialists have seen tremendous gains in the electoral terrain at a local, state, and national level. Chicago elected six socialist aldermen in 2019, New York now has elected six socialist representatives in the state legislature, and four US Congress members belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Jessica Mason, running in Texas’s thirtieth congressional district, is trying to become the fifth. Growing up in the Hamilton Village apartments in South Dallas, Mason’s family struggled to keep the lights on and eventually faced eviction, forcing her to move in with distant relatives as she finished school. She says she saw firsthand how economic security leads to instability — including a lack of access to affordable health care, good schooling, and secure housing. Mason is a Navy veteran, housing activist, and democratic socialist running for congress in one of the bluest districts in the country. She sat down with Jacobin contributor Peter Lucas to discuss her insurgent campaign in a district that’s been dominated by the establishment. PL What inspired you to run for Congress? JM I know that my district deserves better. I grew up here experiencing poverty, food and housing insecurity, and the nightmare that is this country’s medical system since the age of seven. My community was set up to fail by design. When you have someone in office that has had the privilege to not have to campaign, to not have to see her neighbor suffer, it builds an enormous gap between our elected officials and the reality that the people in our community are facing. I am running because my story is the story of so many children and people in Texas-30. And that’s the cycle that I’m trying to break. PL Tell us a little bit about where your campaign is at right now. JM We announced at the end of January and were the first to do so. The incumbent, Eddie Bernice Johnson, is retiring and has already endorsed Texas House representative Jasmine Crockett. Jane Hamilton, a corporate Democrat who is a former lobbyist and the state lead for the Biden campaign in Texas is also running. I’m going to be the only progressive, the only democratic socialist in this race.
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Post by Admin on Jan 18, 2022 21:57:54 GMT
Please Join This Movement Hi Everyone...Thank you for joining #SUM The Fighting front for Militant left Wing Socialists... We need your help.. We need your membership... We need your Consummate Solidarity... Without it - Then we are going nowhere.. To the many splendid people, who have become partners in this Movement, then I truly, applaud them, for indeed they have acquired the vision, and the knowledge, to realize, that Strength in numbers means everything... If we do not achieve that strength, then we will fail... It's as simple as that.. I don't just mean individual membership strength, I also mean collective membership strength, in the form of Groups and Organisations etc.... These are the strengths, which this Movement needs... Without it, - the Movement will simply fail. It will fail because of lack of strength. The strength, to be able to take our fight to those who exploit our good will... That strength can only be achieved, from the Membership of thousands of Individuals, and the Partnership of hundreds of Organisations. If you are reading this, and you haven't yet joined, then I ask you to please consider the question, why not? Surely, none of us wish to spend the rest of our life, under the evil control of thieving wicked Neoliberals... Capitalists, - with no thought, other than, how much they can fill their bank accounts. Whilst ensuring that those who work and toil for them, do so, under austerity, impoverishment, and scurrilous exploitation, for little, or no reward. #SocialistUnityMovement is not a Page, or a Site or a Group. It is purely a Movement, of many other Sites, Pages, and Groups. It simply gives purpose, direction, and meaning, to all of these individual organisations…The Author has two of these such groups, and is aware that, of the many hundreds of groups which set up before, and after, the advent of Jeremy Corbyn, as Labour Party Leader, they established for a reason. That reason was to lend support to J.C. and it took the politics in Britain by storm… Then, when he gave up his position, all of those groups who followed him, fell to pieces, and ended up with nowhere to go and even less to do.. The reason then, for #SUM, is to set all of these organisations back on the track of movement in the same direction, under the auspices of a Unified Socialist Movement of many Autonomous organisations pushing in the same direction, under the watchful eye of a Steering Committee of representatives from all of these other Groups etc. At the moment, none of these groups have either direction, or goal. If for instance J.C. was to start a new party or anyone was to start a party of Pure Socialism, then we, as a unified unit of Thousands, would in all likelihood be a ready made force to help support any new relevant socialist party endeavour.. There is nothing sinister about #SocialistUnity Movement, and, it is a Movement, which, right across the whole of the political spectrum, anywhere on Earth, is totally unique in its operation. J.D and Admin.
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Post by Admin on Feb 1, 2022 20:55:54 GMT
Social Democracy Is Good. But Not Good Enough. BY JOSEPH M. SCHWARTZ BHASKAR SUNKARA We need a socialism that goes beyond capitalism. And not just for moral reasons. www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/democratic-socialism-judis-new-republic-social-democracy-capitalismJohn Judis has all the right intentions. He’s looking at the resurgence of openly democratic socialist currents in the United States with a mix of excitement and trepidation. Excitement, because he knows how desperately the country’s workers need social reforms. Trepidation, because he worries that the new left might fall into the familiar traps of insularity and sectarianism. But while Judis wants us to change society for the better, his response to the failures of twentieth-century state socialism would lead us into the dead end of twentieth-century social democracy. In his New Republic essay “The Socialism America Needs Now,” Judis makes a passionate plea for the rebuilding of a social-democratic movement — or what he calls “liberal socialism.” He contends that the welfare state and democratic regulation of a capitalist economy should be the end goal for socialists, as past efforts at top-down nationalization and planning yielded the repressive societies and stagnant economies of the Soviet bloc. In contrast, Judis argues, the Scandinavian states are dynamic capitalist economies that are still far more equitable and humane than the United States. For him, socialism — democratic control over workplaces and the economy — consists of “old nostrums” whose days have past. Of course, we urgently need the reforms that Judis and the movement around Bernie Sanders advocate for. No democratic socialist could oppose efforts to guarantee public provision of basic needs and take key aspects of economic and social life like education, health care, and housing out of the market. It would, as Judis writes, “bring immeasurable benefit to ordinary Americans.” But we have moral reasons to demand something more. After all, we can’t have real political democracy without economic democracy. Corporations are “private governments” that exercise tyrannical power over workers and society writ large. The corporate hierarchy decides how we produce, what we produce, and what we do with the profits that workers collectively make. To embrace radical democracy is to believe that any decision that has a binding effect on its members — say, the power to hire or fire or control over one’s work hours — should be made by all those affected by it. What touches all, should be determined by all. At minimum, we should demand an economy in which various forms of ownership (worker-owned firms, as well as state-owned natural monopolies and financial institutions) are coordinated by a regulated market — an economy that enables society to be governed democratically. In an undemocratic capitalist economy, managers hire and fire workers; in a democratic socialist economy, workers would hire those managers deemed necessary to build a content and productive firm. They Won’t Let Us Keep Nice Things This, however, isn’t a debate about the contours of the world we would like to see. While Judis rejects the desire of socialists (and the historic goal of social democracy itself) to create a radical democracy after capitalism, he does so largely on pragmatic grounds. The old vision, for him, is “not remotely viable.” Yet history shows us that achieving a stable welfare state while leaving capital’s power over the economy largely intact is itself far from viable. Even if we wanted to stop at socialism within capitalism, it’s not clear that we could. Since the early 1970s, the height of Western social democracy, corporate elites have abandoned the postwar “class compromise” and sought to radically restrict the scope of economic regulation. What capitalists grudgingly accepted during an exceptional period of postwar growth and rising profits, they would no longer. The past forty years have witnessed an ideological and political war against once-powerful labor movements and the welfare states they helped build. This bipartisan class war advocated for the four “d”s of neoliberalism: deregulating the economy, decreasing progressive taxation; decreasing the scope of public goods; and decreasing the power of organized labor. Corporations also moved their investment in production to newly industrializing nations or lower-wage regions and automated much of the higher-skilled manufacturing that remained. The focus of corporate profitability shifted to the FIRE economy (finance, insurance, and real estate), an economy based heavily on speculation and a low-wage service economy that mostly serves the richest earners. So did it have to end this way? Could the old welfare state not only have survived but been expanded? Yes, but that would have required pushing back against capital’s power to withhold investment. Simply put, that would have required a more radical socialism. Many of the last generation’s social democrats knew that capital would disinvest from societies that enjoyed strong social rights. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s there were important attempts to gain greater control over capital to prevent just that. Left social democrats in the Swedish labor federation advanced the Meidner Plan, which would have taxed corporate profits over a twenty-five-year period to achieve social ownership of major Swedish corporations. The Socialist-led and Communist-supported government in France under François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1983 nationalized 25 percent of French industry overnight and radically expanded labor rights (mandating collective bargaining in firms of fifty workers or more). Of course, these attempts and others were defeated. France faced a real capital strike, whereas the Swedish Social Democrats pulled back from adopting the Meidner Plan out of fears of such a strike. The lag in corporate investment created a recession in France that led to a major conservative victory in the 1985 parliamentary elections. Mitterrand had to denationalize firms and adopt budgetary austerity. Judis mentions in passing social democracy’s rightward lurch over the past thirty years. But he fails to mention the extent of its neoliberalization or the historical lesson we must draw: when capital goes on the offensive, either labor must do the same or it will be forced to retreat. In short, Judis writes out of history the conscious corporate offensive against constraints on its power. To sustain even the modest reforms he sees as the horizon of socialism, we need to legitimate a greater role for democratic and state regulation of capital. Private capital simply refuses to invest in those goods needed to overcome radical inequality: affordable housing, mass transit, alternative energy, and job retraining. Capital is often reluctant to risk heavy investment in natural monopolies that almost inevitably come under state regulation or ownership (no company would invest in a competing alternative energy grid). Judis does not speak of the climate crisis, yet there is no road to solving it short of massive public investment and control over utilities. Of course, the United States is the place where “social democracy in one country” would be the most economically viable. Our domestic market is as large as the European Union’s, and we control our own global currency. We are a wealthy society that could easily afford universal health, elder, and child care, as well as high quality education for all. But on the road to achieving those nice things, corporations would resist and deploy their most powerful tactic: the capital strike. Social democrats like Judis refuse to grapple with this, causing them at key moments to sound the retreat and accommodate capitalist forces, eroding the very reforms they hope to preserve. To chart a different course, we would need a militant labor movement and a mass socialist presence strengthened by accumulated victories, looking to not merely tame but overcome capitalism. A socialism that refuses to deal with the “old nostrums about ownership and control of the means of production” will not only fall short of our democratic expectations of what a just society would look like — it will doom us to failure.
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Post by Admin on Feb 3, 2022 14:14:55 GMT
An Impromptu Experiment in Social Democracy Pamela Druckerman I hadn’t planned on joining my mother’s Icelandic excursion. But when she broke her hip and I had to, I thought we might both learn from the public health-care experience. February 1, 2022 www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/02/01/an-americans-experiment-in-european-style-social-democracy/Less than a month before the pandemic began, on the morning of February 17, 2020, my brother called me from New York. He said that our mother had fallen while on vacation in Iceland and was at that moment in an ambulance headed to a local hospital in Reykjavik. Because I was living in Paris—closer to Iceland than he was—could I fly there as soon as possible to help her? So I bid goodbye to my husband and children, packed my laptop and my warmest clothes, and boarded a flight. It was my first trip to Iceland, so as my plane headed north, I summoned the few facts I knew about the country: it had had a banking crisis, grew hydroponic lettuce, and (for reasons I couldn’t remember) had miniature trees and horses. I’ll admit, as well, that I felt a bit of relief. I was the selfish daughter who had—for no good reason except that I’d wanted to—left my aging parents behind in America, to make a life in Europe. My mother had long ago stopped trying to persuade me to move back home. This was my chance to swoop in and do something, if not heroic then at least dutiful. Yet I also couldn’t help thinking “I told you so.” My divorcée mother had spent her retirement elaborately planning, and then taking, a series of foreign trips, usually with her younger boyfriend or with her sorority of close friends (this visit to Iceland was a rare journey without them). Some years earlier, for her seventieth birthday, I’d written a musical tribute in which the character who plays her sings: Kids you’ve got no inheritance, here are the reasons, I used it to pay my bills at the Four Seasons.
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Post by Admin on Feb 9, 2022 13:10:42 GMT
Progressive Yearbook 2022 www.feps-europe.eu/resources/publications/841-progressive-yearbook-2022.html> Foreword. Left turn of the tide? LOOKING BACK > European Chronology 2021 > Commission at half-time - by László ANDOR PROGRESS IN EUROPE > ‘Impossible’ is a matter of opinion - by Ania SKRZYPEK > Poverty in the EU: the Pillar of Social Rights as change- maker? - by Bea CANTILLON > Progressive Person of the Year - László ANDOR interviews Roberto GUALTIERI IN MEMORIAM > One of our fines. In memory of Michael Hoppe - by Udo BULLMANN BIG ISSUES > Is Europe shaping the digital transformation? A new programmatic and political challenge for Progressives - by Maria João RODRIGUES > Europe’s authoritarian cancer: diagnoses, prognosis, and treatment - by R. Daniel KELEMEN > Ten years on: a new roadmap for reforming the European economic governance framework - by Shahin VALLÉE > EU vaccines – a success story on the way to forging a real Health Union - by Sara CERDAS > Young people already know how a post-Covid world should look like - by François BALATE > Why saving enlargement to the Western Balkans could help overcome the EU crisis - by Luisa CHIODI, Francesco MARTINO and Serena EPIS > European strategic autonomy between ambitions and pragmatism - by Alessandro MARRONE NATIONAL FOCUS > Bulgaria 2022 – a new beginning? - by Georgi PIRINSKI > Does it take a moderate right-winger to defeat Orbán? Hungary's political year in the light of the upcoming elections - by Anikó GREGOR GLOBAL FOCUS > In the shadow of the Kremlin. Russia-generated political threats to eastern and central European states, and to the interests of the West in Europe - by Maciej RAŚ > Afghan fallout - by Tomáš PETŘÍČEK PREDICTIONS 2022 > Let’s design a European state - by Ulrike GUÉROT > A green “whatever it takes” moment - by Mathieu BLONDEEL > Cautious optimism for EU economic governance and democracy in 2022 - by Vivien A. SCHMIDT > Technological strategic sovereignty living alongside science diplomacy - by Teresa RIERA MADURELL > The next chapter of EU-UK relations - by Tom KIBASI > The Western Balkans in 2022 - by Daša ŠAŠIĆ ŠILOVIĆ > Dynamics of progressive policies - by Conny REUTER > Contradictory developments in the 2020s. Progressive learning vs the increasingly likely possibility of a global military catastrophe - by Heikki PATOMÄKI > Youth and Covidkratia - by Bruno GONÇALVES
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Post by Admin on Feb 9, 2022 19:26:37 GMT
The Internet Platforms We All Use Should Be Publicly Owned and Democratically Controlled AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES MULDOON Web3 show how our online lives are increasingly being monetized. It’s time to take democratic control of the Internet — turning the platforms we all use into free public services. jacobinmag.com/2022/02/web3-social-media-google-utility-worker-coops/The rise of social media has caused many doom-laden predictions about civilizational decline. Films like The Social Dilemma express a liberal “techlash” that blames our overreliance on sites like Facebook for everything from Donald Trump to the mental health crisis. But nostalgic complaints about the pre-internet age rarely ask how we this technology might be run differently. Working, socializing, and accessing services online is already an integral part of everyday life. That doesn’t mean we have to accept that our online existence should be constantly monetized, any more than we’d accept this “in real life.” James Muldoon is author of Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech, a manifesto for digital technology run on noncapitalist lines. He spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the power of the tech giants and how we could remold our online lives on more democratic bases. DB Some might argue that companies like Google and Facebook have created something new that people want and need. You don’t necessarily have to pay to use them, and you could choose not to do so. In what sense are they like other things we think of as “public services,” or even basic necessities of life? Are there signs that using them is becoming more compulsory? JM There is a strong argument that certain digital services like a search engine or social network are now essential for living in most societies. Liberal reformers have made the case that because these companies operate in marketplaces with tendencies toward natural monopolies, we should extend the idea of public utilities from infrastructure to software in order to redress power imbalances arising from private control of these services. In the past, the concept of public utility was used to justify a range of different remedies from increased state regulation to outright public ownership. With the case of digital infrastructure, the debate has been framed largely in terms of national regulations, which limits the options available and leaves questions of workplace democracy and user control over platforms largely unaddressed. It’s a very technocratic approach that enables a small group of American politicians and lawyers to dictate the terms for how global services are used by billions around the world. Socialists should want communities to exercise greater control over the design and governance of these services and not leave them in the hands of billionaire shareholders and institutional investors. We should also not limit our imagination to essential services that could be argued to fall within a new class of digital utilities. There is a case for social ownership over a wider range of services in the digital economy to ensure more widespread democratization. Why stop at search engines without addressing short-term rentals, food delivery, and e-commerce platforms, for example? DB Your book defends the value of socialists contributing to visions of the future while also drawing on present trends. Vladimir Lenin cited the German post office as an example of the centralized organization that could be taken over by a truly “social management,” a theme also present in The People’s Republic of Walmart. So, could we say something similar of online platforms today — and could the spread of algorithmic technology be a good thing? JM Some platforms can be incredibly useful for connecting people, reducing search time, and solving problems of trust through verification systems. Who would want to live in a world without social networks, search engines, and online encyclopedias? But technology is not neutral, and many of these systems have been designed to serve particular interests, so it’s not going to be a matter of flicking a switch and suddenly the whole machine will be working for the public good. At the same time as we discuss questions of ownership and governance, we should also be reconsidering how the services are run and what we would like to change. What I don’t think we should do is abandon the field and leave technology to the libertarian right. We need to liberate technology from capitalism and show that platforms and other digital services can be an important part of our emancipatory future. It’s not enough to criticize the latest round of tech innovations from Silicon Valley. We should have our own vision of 2030 that shows how we believe technology could make our lives richer and more meaningful. How we do this in practice is unlikely to follow a single centralized or decentralized model applicable to every platform. In the book, I set out how a diverse ecosystem of alternative ownership models could be deployed from the local to the global level. The principal of subsidiarity is important here. Democracy often works best at a more local level, and platforms should be owned and operated by communities at the most local level to maintain efficiency and sustainability. We could imagine many digital services functioning at a municipal or city level by workers’ cooperatives and municipally owned services. This could include courier services, household and domestic services, and food delivery. However, in the case of other platforms like social networks, it would only make sense for larger publics at a national and international level to govern them. DB What is the difference between a nationalized platform that has some sort of quango regulatory body (in the manner of say, the BBC) and the kind of democratic alternative that you suggest? How would you apply a cooperative model to a structure where the number of people directly involved in running it is tiny compared to the user base? JM We should look to the function the platform performs and its community of users to determine the best path forward for how users can be given ownership and governance over the platform. Part of the excitement behind Web3 today is from legitimate criticisms people have concerning the lack of transparency of big platforms and how disempowered users are. There is a genuine desire for people to have more of a say in how online services and communities function. There is a genuine desire for people to have more of a say in how online services and communities function. The democratic alternatives I mention in the book are generally prototypes and models where communities have more participatory rights in determining the rules of the game. It’s not just about national public funding. Communities should be able to participate in some forms of decision-making and play a role in agenda setting for the organization. There is always going to be some element of democratic leadership, but ordinary users need to be empowered to have their voices heard on issues where it counts. As you mention, platforms bring together very diverse groups of people, some of whom may have different interests or different stakes in the organization. Some platform cooperatives are experimenting with varieties of multistakeholder governance that give different groups a share in the governance of the organization that is weighted based on their type of involvement. Workers for the platform might get more of a say with work schedules and issues that directly affect them, for example. You might also want something like a 20/40/40 split in governance rights between workers/customers/sellers on a streaming or e-commerce platform. This kind of setup can be determined by those who are using the platform and further debated as circumstances change. DB You cite Erik Olin Wright talking about “present utopias.” Certainly, some uncommodified and collaborative platforms have a wide use, for instance Wikipedia, which has blown its private competition out the water, and you suggest it points to how something like Google might work. What would that look like — and why do you think it hasn’t happened already? Is it to do with the nature of the product itself? JM I don’t think access to humanity’s collective knowledge should be controlled by a for-profit company. If we had sufficient public funding, we could offer a search engine that was free to use and didn’t involve a surveillance and advertising business integrated into the software. It hasn’t happened yet because it would be so expensive and Google has been very effective at maintaining a monopoly over the search market. The Wikimedia Foundation only needs to rent webspace and so has relatively low operating costs at around $100 million per year. But a search engine requires a much larger database and more sophisticated software, increasing the costs of storage and computational capacity. It’s going to be a thousand times more expensive, and it’s not something that you can have volunteers sign up for to edit a few pages. So, there are added challenges there. But the biggest hurdle is generating the political will. It would require a broad consensus that it was in the public interest to have a digital tool free from corporate control and funded by some kind of public body. If we had a truly public search engine, we could begin asking important questions about how ranking algorithms should operate. Currently, they are a trade secret, which means we have no say over the algorithms that organize so much of what we see online. There is no way of avoiding some process of sorting and ranking, and this is necessarily going to involve difficult political questions. But it’s a debate we need to have. We should develop the institutions and processes to discuss these issues and for people to be made more aware about how such algorithms function. The way we rank websites as authoritative and influential reflect important social values that should be transparent and open to debate. DB Much platform-related labor organizing has centered on recognition that, e.g., Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders are, in fact, employees. But with platforms like Fiverr or Mechanical Turk, the technology itself seems to allow a dismantling of job roles and the creation of a more fragmentary and ephemeral relationship to work, which doesn’t seem conducive to unionization. Do these trends create new bases for organizing as workers — or is the necessary response more directly political and institutional? JM There are so many factors that make it difficult for microworkers on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk to organize through traditional methods. They are dispersed throughout the world, work irregular hours in private locations, and have few direct means of communication with other workers. Furthermore, in most jurisdictions, they are classified as self-employed and have no employment rights. Phil Jones’s excellent book on this topic, Work Without the Worker, ends on a slightly grim note when the reader is confronted with just how difficult it will be for workers in this industry to organize. There are online forums where microworkers discuss issues and band together to raise funds for fellow workers. There are also initiatives like Turkopticon, which is a browser plug-in that overlays a worker’s screen on the platforms and allows them to write reviews about requesters, reversing the usual practices of the platform. This model could be generalized to other platforms. But as important as these efforts are, they aren’t the same as collectively organizing for power. If this model of work continues to grow and spreads to a range of industries, it’s difficult to see this as anything but capital reasserting its dominance over labor. One possible response is to rethink the legal framework of who receives employment rights. At the Autonomy think tank, we are working on a new report about universal workers’ rights that would grant all individuals engaged in work a set of basic rights. This would cover those typically denied them on zero-hour contracts or who are classified as independent contractors or self-employed. The aim is to reconfigure employment law to keep up with the realities of modern work so that those in the gig economy would not be left without any protections under the law. Such a scheme could have employers paying into a state fund that all workers could apply to for sick pay, holiday pay, childcare, and other benefits. DB In your portrait of one possible future for 2042, you imagine a kind of TripAdvisor for employment called “WorkIt,” generalizing the ratings systems that exist already on Care.com or Uber. Do you think there is any prospect of resisting such developments and their possible expansion in the creation of more integrated “social credit” systems? JM Many workers are already forced to work under such ratings systems, as they are ubiquitous on most platforms. It opens workers up to further surveillance and arbitrary behavior from clients and customers. We already have so much monitoring and surveillance in our financial institutions, workplaces, and social networks, it seems we are already approaching something resembling a universal ratings system in everything but name. When I was a graduate student at the University of Warwick, the university tried to create a subsidiary company that would employ students on casual contracts via new software that would include a ratings system. The idea was that every graduate student who could teach for the university would be available in a flexible labor pool with their experience and ratings accessible to all university departments. They would be constantly rated by students and their professors, and the ratings would be stored on the system. The university wanted to pilot this software at Warwick and then sell it to other universities across the country. Students organized against this scheme and threatened to boycott all teaching if the university went forward with the idea. After several tense meetings and attempts to reach a compromise, the university was forced to shelve the plans due to widespread opposition. These kinds of systems are not inevitable. The problem is they are introduced promising a range of benefits or are even seen as an inevitable development that can’t be resisted. Even with the dispute at Warwick, it was introduced alongside the possibility of a small pay raise to help sweeten the deal. One of the points of the book was to show us that there are different ways of developing this technology and that we should continue exploring alternatives to the current generation of corporate platforms. The book opens with a quote from Ernst Bloch, which I find very relevant to our tech future: “The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.”
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Post by Admin on Feb 11, 2022 21:30:14 GMT
Janet Biehl The Politics of Social Ecology Libertarian Municipalism theanarchistlibrary.org/library/janet-biehl-the-politics-of-social-ecologyAuthor’s Note 1. Politics versus Statecraft Politics as Direct Democracy The Recreation of Politics 2. The Historical City The Social Realm The Rise of the City The Emergence of the Political Realm 3. Municipal Democracy: Ancient and Medieval The Athenian Polis The Medieval Commune 4. Municipal Democracy: Colonial and Revolutionary The New England Town Meeting The Parisian Sections 5. The State and Urbanization The Rise of the Nation-State Resistance to State Encroachment Urbanization The Civic Response 6. The Municipality Decentralization Democratization Decision-Making Processes 7. Building a Movement Public Education Suburbia Large Cities 8. Elections The Campaign as Public Education Electoral Failure Libertarian Anti-electoralism Extralegal Assemblies 9. The Formation of Citizenship Citizenship Paideia Citizenship Today 10. Localism and Interdependence Localism and Decentralism 11. Confederalism Confederations in History Confederal Organization Policy-making versus Administration Confederal Referenda Assembly Supremacy 12. A Municipalized Economy Cooperatives Public Ownership The Municipalization of the Economy 13. Dual Power Dual Power Fostering the Tension Campaigns for State Office Campaigns for Mayor 14. A Rational Society A Moral Economy 15. Today’s Agenda Interview with Murray Bookchin Today’s Harsh Social Realities Identity and Universals The Nature of the Movement The New Society Appendix: 1989 Electoral Program of the Burlington Greens Who Are the Burlington Greens? I. Ecology and Growth II. A Moral Economy III. Grassroots Democracy IV. Social Justice Appendix: For Further Reading Works on Libertarian Municipalism by Murray Bookchin Ancient Greek Democracy Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe New England Town Meeting The Parisian Sectional Assemblies in the French Revolution Cities and Confederations in the Twentieth Century Note on Author
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