Spaces of Hope

The Social Lie

2008-06-11T22:27:00.001+01:00

(An interview with Kenneth Rexroth)

“Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.”

This is the Social Lie, according to Kenneth Rexroth.

“There is an unending series of sayings which are taught at your mother’s knee and in school, and they simply are not true. And all sensible men know this, of course.”

Does the rejection of the social lie imply a rejection of the idea of a “social contract”?

“This,” says Rexroth, “is the old deliberate confusion between society and the state, culture and civilization and so forth and so on. There was once a man by the name of Oppenheimer who was very popular in anarchist circles. He said the state was going to wither away in a sort of utopia of bureaucrats who serve the state. And you are always being told that your taxes go to provide you with services. This is what they teach in school as social studies. There is nothing contractual about it. There is an organic relationship which has endured from the time that man became a group animal and is as essential a part of his biology as his fingernails. That other thing, the state, is fraudulent. The state does not tax you to provide you with services. The state taxes you to kill you. The services are something which it has kidnapped from you in your organic relations with your fellow man, to justify its police and war-making powers. It provides no services at all. There is no such thing as a social contract. This is just an eighteenth-century piece of verbalism.”

And what of services like sanitation, water and, in some communities, also public utilities like gas and electricity?

“These are not functions of the state at all. These are normal functions of the community which have been invaded by the state, which are used by the state to mask its own actual activities, like the mask that the burglar wears. Conceivably a burglar could wear a mask of Kim Novak but this doesn’t mean he is Kim Novak, he is still a burglar. The state has invaded and taken over the normal community relations of men. Now, it is true that if the state was suddenly to give this up today, people would probably go out and chop down all the trees in the national forests and kill all the bears in the national parks, catch all the fish in the rivers and so forth and so on. But this is due to six thousand years of exploitation and corruption by the state, not due to anything inherent in the community of man.”

In rejecting the social lie, what is the disaffiliate disaffiliating himself from?

“He isn’t disaffiliated from society, he is disaffiliated from the social order, from the state and the capitalist system. There is nothing unusual about this. It’s just that in America there is an immense myth which is promulgated by the horrors of Madison Avenue and Morningside Heights, by the professors and the advertising men (the two are now practically indistinguishable), that intellectual achievement lies within the social order and that you can be a great poet as an advertising man, a great thinker as a professor, and of course this isn’t true. There happens to be a peculiar situation in literature due to the fact that literature — and this is true of Russia too — that literature is the thing that sells the ideology. After all, just as the scribe knew in ancient Egypt, writing and handling words is the thing that sells the ruling class to the ruled. So departments of English are particularly whorish. On the other hand, a philosopher like Pitirim Sorokin can say at a meeting of a philosophical association, ‘of course we are operating on the assumption that politics attracts only the lowest criminal types’ — he happened to be speaking of the president of the United States. The entire pressure of the social order is always to turn literature into advertising. This is what they shoot people for in Russia, because they are bad advertising men.”

What is it, then, that holds the natural community of men together?

“The organic community of men is a community of love. This doesn’t mean that it’s all a great gang fuck. In fact, it doesn’t have anything to do with that at all. It means that what holds a natural society together is an all-pervading Eros which is an extension and reflection, a multiple reflection, of the satisfactions which are eventually traced to the actual lover and beloved. Out of the union of the lover and the lover as the basic unit of society flares this whole community of love. Curiously enough, this is Hegelianism, particularly the neo-Hegelians who are the only people who ever envisaged a multiple absolute which was a community of love. It is unfortunate that the Judeo-Christian wrath of Marx and the Prussianism of Engels has so transformed us that we forget that this is what lay back of the whole notion of the Hegelian absolute. But, irrespective of the metaphysical meanings, this is what makes a primitive society work. The reason that the Zunis all get along together is that they are bound together by rays which are emitted from one lamp and reflected from one lamp to another and these rays are ultimately traced back to their sources in each lamp in the act of the lover and the beloved. So the whole community is a community of lovers. This sounds very romantic but it is actually quite anthropological.”

To counter this cohesive social force the state employs the social lie.

“The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it’s done. Nobody is going to read any advertising copy if he is what the Reichians call orgastically potent. This is a principle of the advertising copy writer, that he must stir up discontent in the family. Modern American advertising is aimed at the woman, who is, if not always the buyer at least the pesterer, and it is designed to create sexual discontent. Children are effected too — there is a deliberate appeal to them — you see, children have very primitive emotional possibilities which do not normally function except in the nightmares of Freudians. Television is designed to arouse the most perverse, sadistic, acquisitive drives. I mean, a child’s television program is a real vision of hell, and it’s only because we are so used to these things that we pass them over. If any of the people who have had visions of hell, like Virgil or Dante or Homer, were to see these things it would scare them into fits. But with the adult, the young married couple, which is the object of almost all advertising, the copy is pitched to stir up insatiable sexual discontent. It provides pictures of women who never existed. A guy gets in bed with his wife and she isn’t like that and so he is discontented all the time and is therefore fit material for exploitation.”

Interview with Kenneth Rexroth, from Lawrence Lipton’s The Holy Barbarians (Messner, 1959).

http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/sociallie.htm

Nabbing Nepal

2008-05-22T02:07:00.002+01:00

This piece from our comrades at Libcom is an update on an area little noted in the news of late. I wish it was more original, but it certainly rings true, probably because of its familiar, all too familiar, tale of Leninist, et al, gangsterism:

Nepal; a nice little earner for the Maoist ruling class - in Lenin's footsteps

tags:

May 12th, 2008 by Ret Marut

Nepal's Maoist Party has won around 220 seats in the recent Constituent Assembly (CA) election, about one-third of the total. Though the largest party, they don't have an overall majority; they have stated their wish to lead a coalition government.

But as the result became clear Maoist leader Prachanda told journalists “I will be declared the acting President of this country very soon…which will be followed by occupying the post of the all powerful President of New Nepal…this is the peoples’ mandate…no force on earth can disobey this mandate”. (Telegraphnepal.com 26/4/2008); the man who has long talked of his wish to 'abolish royal autocracy' now speaks of his "all powerful" role.

Recent news reports reveal the wages and expenses of the newly elected members of the Assembly. While they spend an indefinite period drawing up a new national Constitution they will be paid - by Nepali standards - enormous wages;
each CA member will receive net salaries of 23 thousand one hundred rupees per month [£176/$345/Eur224]. On top of this they'll get expenses for drinking water, electricity, telephone, rent, newspapers & "miscellaneous". These expense allowances bring the total income of a CA member to 45 thousand 98 rupees [£345/$674/Eur437] each per month.

The CA President (probably Maoist Party boss Prachanda) will have a monthly salary/expenses income of 60,600 rupees [£463/$905/Eur588] - plus a petrol allowance of 24,500 rupees [£187/$366/Eur237]. The vice president will scrape by on a few thousand less.

So the ruling class, led by the Maoist 'proletarian vanguard', feather their nest. These salaries must be compared with the Nepali average wage of just $200 a year [£102/Eur129]; Nepal is the poorest country in Asia. Around 10% of the population takes 50% of the wealth, the bottom 40% takes 10%. 85% of Nepalese people don’t have access to health care. So the monthly income of a CA politician is well over three times the annual national average wage! Jobs within the CA are already being allocated by all the various member parties to their friends and family.

In a public appearance last week Maoist leader Prachanda said, “I had the opportunity to play the role of Lenin itself in Nepal”. With his fat salary and perks he is certainly following in Bolshevik footsteps; Lenin travelled in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, as did other government officials. "Autocracy’s main enemy, Vladimir Lenin, had no reservations about inheriting the hated old regime’s automobile collection. Lenin used the Tsar’s Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost to drive around town while his colleagues divided up the rest of the collection among them. But two revolutions and a civil war had taken their toll on the cars, and in 1919 [during a time of famine and extreme hardships for the poor] the Council of People’s Commissars had to order 70 more from London." (Aeroflot site). Lenin moved into a dacha (country house) previously owned by a millionaire, while much of the other Bolshevik leadership took occupation of the luxurious Lux hotel in Petrograd,dining on preferential food rations.[1] Then and now, for those who inherit the State, its perks and luxuries are clearly irresistable and seen as just reward for their conquest and devotion to power. And so the new Nepalese republic is born - the furniture and faces at the top have been shifted around a little, and that is all.

There's another interpretation (though less likely) of the reference to Lenin - as a coded pointer towards a historical precedent; that Prachanda's long-term plan is for the Constituent Assembly in Nepal to share the same fate as it did in Russia. When the Bolsheviks were ready to seize sole power for themselves, a revolutionary guard (led by Anatoli Zhelezniakov[2], an anarchist sailor[3]) dismissed the CA, dominated as it was by indecisive bourgeois moderate politicians. The Bolsheviks saw its dissolution as a decisive step in the progress from a bourgeois to a proletarian revolution (though the fact that, unlike Nepal's Maoists, the Bolsheviks did not emerge victorious from the CA elections may have influenced their choices too). The Maoists might, ideally, like to achieve a neat Leninist orthodoxy by replicating this state of affairs, but they know the necessities of 'realpolitik'. External geo-political pressures and economic realities mean that - for the moment, at least - they need to play the democratic game in order to attract foreign investment, so as to try and build up a sound politico-economic base. A strong and stable State power is always a class relation based on efficient exploitation and its rewards.

=========

NOTES

[1] "Ante Ciliga described what he called the state capitalists' 'morals on the morrow of the October revolution' as follows:

From the first days of the October revolution, the Communist [sic] leaders had shown a great lack of shame in these matters. Having occupied the building, they furnished it with the best furniture from shops that had been nationalized. From the same source their wives had procured themselves fur coats, each taking two or three at a time. All the rest was in keeping. (Ciliga, 1979, p. 121)

Far from the emergence of the privileged consumption enjoyed by the state capitalist class coinciding with Stalin's rise to power, some of the state capitalists of Stalin's day looked back with nostalgia to the comfortable life they had experienced during the early years of Bolshevik rule:

During the winter of 1930 fuel ran short and we had to do without hot water for a few days. The wife of a high official who lived at the Party House was full of indignation. `What a disaster to have this man Kirov! True, Zinoviev is guilty 'fractionism' but in his day central heating always functioned properly and we were never short of hot water. Even in 1920, when they had to stop the factories in Leningrad for lack of coal, we could always have our hot baths with the greatest comfort.' (Ibid., pp. 121-2)

Another illustration that Stalin was not personally responsible for establishing state capitalist privilege in Russia is that during the period 1923-5, when Stalin had only an old car at his disposal 'Kamenev had already appropriated a magnificent Rolls' (Medvedev - 1979, p. 33)."

( State Capitalism - the wages system under new management, Buick & Crump.)

[2] On Zhelezniakov, see; http://libcom.org/library/zhelezniakov-biography-avrich-1917

[3] The Ukrainian anarchist "Makhno defended that action and explained that Zhelezniakov, a Black Sea sailor and delegate to Kronstadt, had played one of the most active roles in 1917. Makhno merely expressed regret that the fiery sailor, who enjoyed great prestige among his colleagues, had not simultaneously seen fit to dismiss Lenin and his "Soviet of People's Commissars" which "would have been historically vital and would have helped unmask the stranglers of the revolution in good time." "
http://libcom.org/library/makhno-bibliographical-afterword-skirda

http://libcom.org/news/nepal-a-nice-little-earner-maoist-ruling-class-lenins-footsteps-12052008

Ecosocialist Manifesto - 2nd Draft

2008-04-24T19:09:00.001+01:00

A draft of the second 'Ecosocialist Manifesto' has just been posted on the Green Left blog (Green Left are a radical, ecosocialist current within the Green Party in England and Wales).

From the draft:

Capitalist attempts to solve the ecological crisis have failed: only a profound change in the very nature of civilization can save humanity from the catastrophic consequences of climate change.

The ecosocialist movement aims to stop and reverse this disastrous process. We will fight to impose every possible limit on capitalist ecocide, and to build a movement that can replace capitalism with a society in which common ownership of the means of production replaces capitalist ownership, and in which the preservation and restoration of ecosystems will be a fundamental part of all human activity.
In other words, ecosocialism is an attempt to provide a radical civilizational alternative to the capitalist/industrial system, through an economic policy founded on non-monetary criteria: social needs and ecological equilibrium. It combines a critique of both “market ecology,” which does not challenge capitalism, and of “productivist socialism,” which ignores the earth’s natural limits.

Have to say I'm very impressed. More here (and comments welcome):

http://greenleftblog.blogspot.com/

JP

Capitalism Chinese-style

2008-03-31T18:46:00.002+01:00

from the Socialist Standard, February 2008

The 17th Congress of the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party was held back in October. It was five years since the previous one, so this is clearly not a decision-making body that determines how the party — and therefore the country — should be run. Rather it’s a rubber-stamp gathering that endorses what the CCP’s power-holders have already decided. The Central Committee is ‘elected’, but even that meets less than once a year, and it is the political bureau and its standing committee (nine men in dark suits) who really run things.

The CCP has changed over the years. It now has over 70 million members, and another 20 million applicants for membership. The growth of private capitalism in China has led many of the wealthiest people in the country to join the party. In the Hongdou textile group, which has assets of over a billion yuan (around £60 million), all the high-level managers are party members. Another capitalist, Liang Wengen, who has a fortune of three billion yuan (£190 million), was a delegate to the congress. If private entrepreneurs can join the party, he said, it “helps to enhance the brand recognition of our company.” Western companies may promote their brands by sponsoring football teams, while in China they do so by joining the ‘Communist’ Party!

A new party constitution was adopted at the congress. This talks about building ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, which includes a supposed socialist market economy, i.e. “optimizing resource allocation while giving play to market forces”. As the balance shifts towards private rather than state capitalism and state-owned enterprises are increasingly listed on the stock market, all pretence at any connection to Marxism has long since been dropped.

Instead, the rich are getting much much richer. According to some reports there are over a hundred billionaires in China, while the average income is less than $1000 a year. No wonder many Chinese workers, especially in the south, are prey to the ‘snakeheads’ who promise good jobs and decent wages in return for a huge fee for smuggling people out of China and across to Europe. The jobs and pay are never quite what is promised, of course, but the prospect is better for many than the grinding poverty of life in China. Within China there are 120 million migrant workers who have moved to the cities to find work and yet fail to escape poverty and exploitation.

In December, the China Labour Bulletin published a report on the workers’ movement in China 2005-6 (see http://www.clb.org.hk/en/files/File/research_reports/Worker_Movement_Report_final.pdf). It begins as follows:

“After working repeated overtime shifts for an entire month, Hu Xinyu, a 25-year-old employee at the Huawei factory in Shenzhen, collapsed and died from multiple organ failure on May 28, 2006. Two days later, Gan Hongying, a 35-year-old woman employed in a clothing factory in the Haizhu district of Guangzhou, died after working a total of 54 hours and 25 minutes (22 hours overtime) in the previous four days. A few weeks later, a senior union official publicly admitted that China’s official trade union was virtually powerless to prevent forced overtime in factories across the country.”

So workers endure forced overtime in dangerous conditions while the bosses count their ill-gotten gains and flaunt their membership of the ‘Communist’ Party. It’s still capitalism, and becoming less and less different in any way from the kind found in the West.

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/feb08/text/index.html

China Betters Its Image --Through Public Relations

2008-03-21T13:42:00.000Z

from THE PEOPLE MARCH-APRIL 2008 VOL. 117 NO. 6

By Diane Secor and Donna Bills

Hosting the upcoming 2008 summer Olympics has put a little pressure on China's ruling Communist Party. In addition to constructing the venues and infrastructure necessary for the games, the Chinese government has had to construct a better image of itself while leaving intact its repressive rule. That is no easy task to be sure, but with the help of world-renowned public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, headquartered in New York, they are succeeding.

How is this being accomplished? By boosting what it calls "cultural soft power"-a turning away from the government's usual control tactics of militarism and rigid diplomacy and toward culture and sports. This year, for example, Chinese New Year was extravagantly celebrated at Beijing's Olympic Museum with several days of cultural festivities that included speeches by the International Olympic Committee director general and the Chinese ambassador to Switzerland. The purpose of all this was to emphasize and honor the richness of Chinese culture and to give an appearance of decency to the Chinese government. That the celebration was held at the Olympic Museum with the IOC and Chinese government representatives rubbing elbows provided an air of acceptance that is much needed by the Chinese Communist Party.

For its part, Hill & Knowlton announced in January 2007 "the launch of its arts and culture sponsorship service in China." According to its press release at the time, the company proclaimed that "In China specifically, an in-depth understanding of the government's agenda can turn a sponsorship investment into a highly influential communications campaign." In other words, Hill & Knowlton will ease the way for investing in China. Kodak, McDonald's, Coca Cola and Visa are some of the big sponsors of the Beijing Olympics that stand to reap large profits such sponsorship promises. And, under capitalism, what's good for the Beijing Olympic sponsors is good for how the world perceives China. Hill & Knowlton is there to ensure that both happen.

Public relations is defined by the AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY as "The methods and activities employed to promote a favorable relationship with the public." The Chinese Communist Party in partnership with Hill & Knowlton is perfecting the practice.

Comment is Free - The Evolution of Sexuality

2008-02-19T10:32:00.001Z

Say what you want about The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' but it does, occasionally, generate the kind of 'public' debate that I've always thought justifies the potential of the internet/blogosphere as a new democratic public space.

Check out Peter Tatchell's recent commentary on the evolution of sexuality and how we may eventually see the 'withering away' of both heterosexuality and homosexuality as distinctive identities. As with all Tatchell's work its a thought-provoking piece drawing on some, admittedly dated, evidence, and despite the occasional 'comment deleted by moderator' and wind-up merchant (which to be fair you'd expect given the subject matter) there are some equally thought-provoking readers' comments. It also, for me, raises a crucially important question - can we envisage a completely non-homophobic culture within capitalism, or will "straight supremicism" only truly disappear in a post-capitalist society? Tatchell seems to be suggesting at least the possibility of the former.

Mum's the Word

2008-02-02T09:27:00.001Z

Thanks to local activist Tony Hillier for this from our local paper:

War without guns: Brigadier Roger Mortlock
A SWINDON company is backing a film telling the story of a brigadier who ended a civil war - and mum's the word.

Brigadier Roger Mortlock led a New Zealand peacekeeping force that ended 10 years of civil war on the island of Bougainville. Now ODS Business Services, based in the old Renault factory in West Swindon, is helping Kiwi film director Will Watson drum up support for his documentary, War With No Guns, based on this awe-inspiring story. Brig Mortlock came up with the idea of sending in unarmed troops to try to end the decade-long civil war which had ravaged Bougainville.

He explained that the small island, 300 km off Papua New Guinea, had been almost destroyed by civil war.
"We found a situation where 20 per cent of the population were dead and 14 peace agreements had already failed.
"I have never seen a country where the infrastructure was so completely destroyed.
"These people had nothing - electricity, roads, healthcare - you name it, they didn't have it.
"But what struck me most about them was their intelligence. These people, who had nothing, were still very well educated."

Brig Mortlock knew from his time in Vietnam where, he said, he "learned how to lose a war", that traditional peace methods would not work.
He explained that his philosophy was quite simple - talk to the mums.

"Mothers are incredibly important in all cultures, and I think that's under-valued," he said.
"Even a tough-as-nails general listens to his mum's opinion, so we empowered the women again."

The troops appealed to the matriarchs, who persuaded the warlord husbands and their sons to lay down their guns so peace talks could begin properly. Even at this point negotiations were highly unusual, with disarmament not enforced and no escape strategy outlined.

Brig Mortlock said: "We didn't have an exit plan because we couldn't entertain the possibility of failing.
"It would have been a terrible thing to fail because people taking risks would pay with their lives."

ODS Business Services is helping Will Watson to raise the £200,000 required to complete filming in time for this summer's major festivals.
Brig Mortlock believes that ODS commercial director Franky Marulanda has a unique understanding of the issues behind the film.

"Franky is from Colombia and so really understands the nature of civil war," he said. "He has said that there is a moment when war becomes a business and you can't stop it."

Brig Mortlock was quick to point out that they were just in time to prevent it reaching that point in Bougainville.

A trailer for War With No Guns can be found online at www.swindonweb.com

Saving Earth or Saving Profits / Survival Is the Issue...

2008-01-19T19:41:00.000Z

Here are two recent pieces from groups in our sector addressing one of the paramount (can there really be *more* than one paramount?) issues of our day, both making solidly many of the points which our professional ruling class refuses to face up to, endangering all of us as well as themselves. While there may be differences within our sector as to the details upon particular fields of action, the class to which we all appeal is who will make the final determination and is the only one which can save us all from extermination, if it acts in time.

The environment is not under threat from industrial production as such, but from this in the service of profit-seeking.

All forms of vegetable and animal life are part of a network of relations called an "ecosystem" in ecology. Normally this system is self-regulating to the extent that, if an imbalance develops, this is rectified spontaneously, either by the restoration of the previous balance or by the establishment of a new balance.

The problem is that there's been the industrial revolution: the pollution of water and the ground due to the massive disposal of toxic or non-recyclable wastes and to the use in intensive agriculture of chemical fertilisers, nitrates and pesticides; the pollution of the oceans due to the increase of maritime traffic, the flow from polluted rivers, the shipwreck of oil tankers (70 alone in 1996!), the discharge of toxic, chemical and radioactive waste, desludging at sea, etc; overfishing; the pollution of the air due to the massive use of fossil fuels, the development of the individual motor car, and the clearance by fire of forests (despite these being the lungs of the planet!); industrial accidents (Seveso (1996), Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), Toulouse (2001)); the emission of greenhouse gases (CO2) by petrol vehicles and factories, deforestation, leading to global warming and its consequences (rise in the sea level due to the melting of the icepack and of polar and continental glaciers, floods, desertification, storms); acid rain; extinction of living species; introduction of GM organisms; storage of nuclear waste; expansion of towns (where now more than half the world's population live).

And for a good reason! No State is going to implement legislation which would penalise the competitiveness of its national enterprises in the face of foreign competition. States only take into account environmental questions if they can find an agreement at international level which will disadvantage none of them. But that's the snag because competition for the appropriation of world profits is one of the bases of the present system. Attempts at international cooperation have already been made: the League of Nations, then the UN, for example, were set up to "maintain" peace. But the 20th century saw the most devastating and murderous wars in history!

No agreement to limit the activities of the multinationals in their relentless quest for profits is possible. Measures in favour of the environment (and the far-reaching transformation of the productive apparatus and transport system these imply) come up against the interests of enterprises (and their shareholders!) because by increasing costs they decrease profits.

Humans are capable, whatever the form of production, of integrating themselves into a stable ecosystem. That was the case of many "primitive" societies which coexisted in complete harmony with the rest of nature, and there is nothing whatsoever that prevents this being possible today on the basis of industrial technology and methods of production, all the more so that renewable energies exist (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, waves, biomass, etc) but, for the capitalists, these are a "cost" which penalises them in face of international competition.

So it's not production as such (i. e., the fashioning of nature to meet human needs) which is incompatible with a stable balance of nature, but the application of certain productive methods which disregard natural balances or which involve changes that are too rapid to allow a natural balance to develop.

The preservation of the environment is a social problem which requires humanity to establish a viable and stable relationship with the rest of nature. In practice this implies a society which uses, as far as possible, renewable energy and raw material resources and which practises the recycling of non-renewable resources; a society which, once an appropriate balance with nature has been formed, will tend towards a stable level of production, indeed towards "zero growth". This does not mean that changes are to be excluded on principle, but that any change will have to respect the environment by taking place at a pace to which nature can adapt. But the employment by capitalism of destructive methods of production has, over two centuries, upset the balance of nature.

Whether it is called "the market economy", "economic liberalism", "free enterprise" or any other euphemism, the social system under which we live is capitalism. Under this system the means of the production and distribution of social wealth – the means of society's existence – are the exclusive property of a dominant parasitic minority – the holders of capital, or capitalist class – for whose benefit they are inevitably managed.

As a system governed by economic laws which impose themselves as external constraints on human productive activities, and in which enterprises are in competition with each other to obtain short-term economic gains, capitalism pushes economic decision-makers to adopt productive methods which serve profitability rather than concern for the future.

So it is not "Man" but the capitalist economic system itself which is responsible for ecological problems. In fact, not only have workers no influence over the decisions taken by enterprises but those who do have the power to decide - the capitalists - are themselves subject to the laws of profit and competition.

Of course capitalism has sooner or later to face up to the ecological problems caused by the search for profit, but only afterwards, after the damage has been done. But the ecologists, so critical of "liberal" capitalism, accept, like all the other varieties of reformism, the economic dictatorship of the owning minority since they don't understand the link that exists between the destruction of the environment and the private ownership of the means of production. That is why the Greens were forced to make concessions when, from 1997-2002, they were part of the Jospin government: over the authorisations given by this government of the "plural" Left, in November 1997 and July 1998, for transgenetic maize, over nuclear questions and other matters, not to mention their complicity over "social" questions such as the suppression of 3100 jobs with the closure of the Renault factory at Vilvord or the repression of the occupation of employment offices by the unemployed in 1997, the closure of the naval shipyards in Le Havre in 1998, the calling into question of retirement at age 60 with a full pension, or the suppression of 10,000 hospital beds in the Ile de France in 1999, etc.

Because by definition capitalism can only function in the interest of the capitalists, no palliative, no rearrangement, no measure, no reform can (nor ever will be able to) subordinate capitalist private property to the general interest. For this reason only the threat of a socialist movement setting down as the only realistic and immediate aim the establishment of social property (hence the name socialism) of society's means of existence so as to ensure their management by (and so in the interest of) the whole community, would be able to force the capitalists to concede reforms favourable to the workers for fear of losing the whole cake.

So it is for building such a movement that we launch an appeal to all workers who understand the opposition and incompatibility of their interests with those of the capitalists, to all those who, concerned about the ceaseless attacks of which we are the victims and of the dangers to which the capitalists are exposing our planet, want not to patch up but to end existing society. Our numerical superiority allows all hope.

It is only after having placed the means of society's existence under the control of the community that we will be able to at last ensure their management, no longer in the selfish interest of their present owners, but this time really in the general interest.

Only then will we be in a position to achieve a world in which the present system of rival States will be replaced by a world community without frontiers, the rationing of money and the wages system by free access to the wealth produced, competition by cooperation, and class antagonism by social equality.

We can only "cure the planet" by establishing a society without private productive property or profit where humans will be freed from the uncontrollable economic laws of the pursuit of profit and the accumulation of capital. In short, only a world socialist society, based on the common ownership and democratic control of natural resources, is compatible with production that respects the natural environment.

Translated from a leaflet distributed by socialists in France. Printed in the latest Socialist Standard.


	WORKERS MUST RESPOND TO GLOBAL WARMING CATACLYSM In November the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) submitted its fourth report on global warming (GW) to the United Nations. It reported unequivocal and dramatic evidence that global warming is a human-made effect that will drastically alter environments worldwide, and affect economic and political systems for the entire human race. The report documents the rates at which GW is taking place and the devastation it is causing, and offers scenarios for mitigation of GW based on future productions of greenhouse gases. The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, used the IPC report as a resource in working towards new accords on global warming. But still with the urgency of dealing with the potential catastrophic implications of this report, the process is painfully slow and retarded by the need to protect capitalist profits and economic growth. A key conclusion of the report states: "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level." It continues: "Eleven of the last 12 years (1995-2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850)....The temperature increase is widespread over the globe, and is greater at higher northern latitudes. Land regions have warmed faster than the oceans....Rising sea level is consistent with warming....Observed decreases in snow and ice extent are also consistent with warming....average Arctic sea ice extent has shrunk....Mountain glaciers and snow cover on average have declined in both hemispheres." The cause: "Changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and aerosols, land-cover and solar radiation alter the energy balance of the climate system. Global GHG emissions due to human activities have grown since preindustrial times, with an increase of 70 percent between 1970 and 2004." "Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important anthropogenic GHG. Its annual emissions grew by about 80 percent between 1970 and 2004....Global atmospheric concentrations of CO2, methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed preindustrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years." [Note: From 1958 to 2005, CO2 levels, as measured directly by the late Dr. Charles David Keeling, a world authority on greenhouse gases, went from 315 ppm (parts per million) to 378 ppm, an increase of 20 percent. (BBC News, Dec. 3)] Further the report notes: "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is VERY LIKELY due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations." Countering claims by antiglobal warming critics that solar radiance changes account for warming, the report notes that "During the past 50 years, the sum of solar and volcanic forcings would LIKELY have produced cooling [rather than heating]. Observed patterns of warming and their changes are simulated only by models that include anthropogenic forcings." But what about the future? Here the report offers predictions based on a variety of approaches. It appears likely that in the current political situation, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow for several decades. And the report declares, "Continued GHG emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would VERY LIKELY be larger than those observed during the 20th century." A particularly ominous situation is one in which warming or increased ocean acidity decreases the solubility of CO2 and releases it rather than taking it up. The report delineated impacts of GW on water supplies, ecosystems, food, coasts and health, and broke down effects by geographic regions throughout the world. It also tabulated examples of expected extreme weather events along with their human impacts. For the long term, the report notes that GW and sea level rise would continue for centuries, even after greenhouse gas levels are stabilized. And some impacts could be abrupt and irreversible. Lastly, the report looked at mitigation of GW and its effects. These examined various strategies for reducing GHG emissions and mitigating the economic, political and social problems that are being caused by GW. Not surprisingly, poor countries are most at risk. Andrew Revkin observes (THE NEW YORK TIMES, Nov. 28) that the report "offers a more detailed view of how poverty, particularly in areas near the equator, creates zones of extreme vulnerability to water shortages, droughts, flooding, rains and severe storms--all of which are projected to be more frequent or intense if concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to build." It also "rebukes rich countries for failing to deliver on commitments for helping poor countries increase resilience to climate hazards under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which dates from 1992 and has been ratified by nearly all the world's nations." The IPCC report was intended as a resource for the U.N. Climate Change Conference that took place in Bali, Indonesia, in December. The conference was meant to start a two-year negotiation process working towards a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. From the beginning, the Bush administration has done its best to undermine the talks--and show its contempt for the United Nations--by scheduling its own meetings, one in late September with 16 major carbon-emitting nations, and another in January in Hawaii. At the Bali conference differences between richer and poorer nations were evident as "developing countries demanded the United States agree that the eventual pact not only measure poorer countries' steps, but also the effectiveness of financial aid and technological assistance from wealthier ones." (Thomas Fuller, Andrew C. Revkin, THE NEW YORK TIMES, Dec. 15) U.S. recalcitrance on this issue led delegates to boo and hiss U.S. delegates. Eventually the United States capitulated on this issue. The United States, as had been the case with Kyoto, still refused to be held to fixed targets for emissions, but allowed them to appear in a nonbinding preamble to the agreement, giving the appearance of compliance with the accord produced by the conference. But for all the urgency represented by the report and the conference, rolling back greenhouse gas production will depend upon capitalist schemes like "cap and trade" that allow some companies to profit from reducing emissions while polluters pay for "carbon credits" and a variety of other reforms like limits on gas mileage. These merely slow the increase in greenhouse gas production. However, there is no time to delay. Scientists estimate that to reverse the existing buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the world will need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 70 percent by the end of this century. Such changes will require restructuring the world's energy and transportation systems. They require massive investment and represent a threat to existing capitalist industries, their growth and profits. Capitalism requires profit and economic growth to survive. Capitalists want their profits now. The future has little meaning in a profit-driven society. Environmental reforms are not the answer. Capitalism has eroded those feeble efforts of the past whenever it is expedient to do so. International agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol are not the answer, either. Similar agreements on disarmament, on peace, on torture litter history, as do the bleached bones and broken bodies of tens of millions whose fate proved just what such agreements are worth. If the future is not to be plagued with the floods, droughts and other catastrophes predicted related to global warming, the political and economic system of capitalism must end, not just in the United States but also throughout the world. The urgency expressed in the Bali conference demonstrates the international nature of this crisis. And as workers throughout the world are exploited, so will they be the first victims of worldwide ecological collapse. In a socialist society of production for use rather than profit, we could divert the intellectual and productive capabilities of society toward seeking the technical solutions to global warming and producing them. The Socialist Labor Party urges workers to organize to abolish capitalism and institute socialist production for use. Workers must realize their latent economic and political power as operators of the industries and services and begin forming industrywide unions integrated into one movement with the goal of building a new society with completely different motives for production--human needs and wants instead of profit--and to organize their own political party to challenge the political power of the capitalists, express their mandate for change at the ballot box and dismantle the state altogether. The new society they must aim for must be one in which society itself, not a wealthy few, would own the industries and services, and the workers themselves would control them democratically through their own organizations based in the workplaces. In such a society, the workers themselves would make decisions governing the economy, electing representatives to industrial councils and to a workers' congress representing all the industries that would administer the economy. Such a society--a socialist industrial democracy--is what is needed to solve the environmental crisis. By placing the economic decision-making power of the nation in the hands of the workers, by eliminating capitalist control and the profit motive in favor of a system in which workers produce to meet their own needs and wants, the necessary resources and labor could be devoted to halting global warming, employing the renewable resources we now have available and develop new ones, and clean up the damage already done. --Bruce Cozzini The People January-February 2008 VOL. 117 NO. 5

WORKERS MUST RESPOND TO GLOBAL WARMING CATACLYSM

In November the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) submitted its fourth report on global warming (GW) to the United Nations. It reported unequivocal and dramatic evidence that global warming is a human-made effect that will drastically alter environments worldwide, and affect economic and political systems for the entire human race. The report documents the rates at which GW is taking place and the devastation it is causing, and offers scenarios for mitigation of GW based on future productions of greenhouse gases. The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, used the IPC report as a resource in working towards new accords on global warming. But still with the urgency of dealing with the potential catastrophic implications of this report, the process is painfully slow and retarded by the need to protect capitalist profits and economic growth.

A key conclusion of the report states: "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level." It continues: "Eleven of the last 12 years (1995-2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850)....The temperature increase is widespread over the globe, and is greater at higher northern latitudes. Land regions have warmed faster than the oceans....Rising sea level is consistent with warming....Observed decreases in snow and ice extent are also consistent with warming....average Arctic sea ice extent has shrunk....Mountain glaciers and snow cover on average have declined in both hemispheres."

The cause: "Changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and aerosols, land-cover and solar radiation alter the energy balance of the climate system. Global GHG emissions due to human activities have grown since preindustrial times, with an increase of 70 percent between 1970 and 2004."

"Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important anthropogenic GHG. Its annual emissions grew by about 80 percent between 1970 and 2004....Global atmospheric concentrations of CO2, methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed preindustrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years." [Note: From 1958 to 2005, CO2 levels, as measured directly by the late Dr. Charles David Keeling, a world authority on greenhouse gases, went from 315 ppm (parts per million) to 378 ppm, an increase of 20 percent. (BBC News, Dec. 3)] Further the report notes: "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is VERY LIKELY due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations."

Countering claims by antiglobal warming critics that solar radiance changes account for warming, the report notes that "During the past 50 years, the sum of solar and volcanic forcings would LIKELY have produced cooling [rather than heating]. Observed patterns of warming and their changes are simulated only by models that include anthropogenic forcings."

But what about the future? Here the report offers predictions based on a variety of approaches. It appears likely that in the current political situation, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow for several decades. And the report declares, "Continued GHG emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would VERY LIKELY be larger than those observed during the 20th century." A particularly ominous situation is one in which warming or increased ocean acidity decreases the solubility of CO2 and releases it rather than taking it up.

The report delineated impacts of GW on water supplies, ecosystems, food, coasts and health, and broke down effects by geographic regions throughout the world. It also tabulated examples of expected extreme weather events along with their human impacts.

For the long term, the report notes that GW and sea level rise would continue for centuries, even after greenhouse gas levels are stabilized. And some impacts could be abrupt and irreversible.

Lastly, the report looked at mitigation of GW and its effects. These examined various strategies for reducing GHG emissions and mitigating the economic, political and social problems that are being caused by GW.

Not surprisingly, poor countries are most at risk. Andrew Revkin observes (THE NEW YORK TIMES, Nov. 28) that the report "offers a more detailed view of how poverty, particularly in areas near the equator, creates zones of extreme vulnerability to water shortages, droughts, flooding, rains and severe storms--all of which are projected to be more frequent or intense if concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to build." It also "rebukes rich countries for failing to deliver on commitments for helping poor countries increase resilience to climate hazards under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which dates from 1992 and has been ratified by nearly all the world's nations."

The IPCC report was intended as a resource for the U.N. Climate Change Conference that took place in Bali, Indonesia, in December. The conference was meant to start a two-year negotiation process working towards a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

From the beginning, the Bush administration has done its best to undermine the talks--and show its contempt for the United Nations--by scheduling its own meetings, one in late September with 16 major carbon-emitting nations, and another in January in Hawaii.

At the Bali conference differences between richer and poorer nations were evident as "developing countries demanded the United States agree that the eventual pact not only measure poorer countries' steps, but also the effectiveness of financial aid and technological assistance from wealthier ones." (Thomas Fuller, Andrew C. Revkin, THE NEW YORK TIMES, Dec. 15) U.S. recalcitrance on this issue led delegates to boo and hiss U.S. delegates. Eventually the United States capitulated on this issue. The United States, as had been the case with Kyoto, still refused to be held to fixed targets for emissions, but allowed them to appear in a nonbinding preamble to the agreement, giving the appearance of compliance with the accord produced by the conference.

But for all the urgency represented by the report and the conference, rolling back greenhouse gas production will depend upon capitalist schemes like "cap and trade" that allow some companies to profit from reducing emissions while polluters pay for "carbon credits" and a variety of other reforms like limits on gas mileage. These merely slow the increase in greenhouse gas production.

However, there is no time to delay. Scientists estimate that to reverse the existing buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the world will need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 70 percent by the end of this century. Such changes will require restructuring the world's energy and transportation systems. They require massive investment and represent a threat to existing capitalist industries, their growth and profits. Capitalism requires profit and economic growth to survive. Capitalists want their profits now. The future has little meaning in a profit-driven society.

Environmental reforms are not the answer. Capitalism has eroded those feeble efforts of the past whenever it is expedient to do so. International agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol are not the answer, either. Similar agreements on disarmament, on peace, on torture litter history, as do the bleached bones and broken bodies of tens of millions whose fate proved just what such agreements are worth. If the future is not to be plagued with the floods, droughts and other catastrophes predicted related to global warming, the political and economic system of capitalism must end, not just in the United States but also throughout the world. The urgency expressed in the Bali conference demonstrates the international nature of this crisis. And as workers throughout the world are exploited, so will they be the first victims of worldwide ecological collapse. In a socialist society of production for use rather than profit, we could divert the intellectual and productive capabilities of
society toward seeking the technical solutions to global warming and producing
them.

The Socialist Labor Party urges workers to organize to abolish capitalism and institute socialist production for use. Workers must realize their latent economic and political power as operators of the industries and services and begin forming industrywide unions integrated into one movement with the goal of building a new society with completely different motives for production--human needs and wants instead of profit--and to organize their own political party to challenge the political power of the capitalists, express their mandate for change at the ballot box and dismantle the state altogether. The new society they must aim for must be one in which society itself, not a wealthy few, would own the industries and services, and the workers themselves would control them democratically through their own organizations based in the workplaces. In such a society, the workers themselves would make decisions governing the economy, electing representatives to industrial councils and
to a workers' congress representing all the industries that would administer the economy. Such a society--a socialist industrial democracy--is what is needed to solve the environmental crisis. By placing the economic decision-making power of the nation in the hands of the workers, by eliminating capitalist control and the profit motive in favor of a system in which workers produce to meet their own needs and wants, the necessary resources and labor could be devoted to halting global warming, employing the renewable resources we now have available and develop new ones, and clean up the damage already
done.

--Bruce Cozzini
The People January-February 2008
VOL. 117 NO. 5

Radical anthropology revisited

2007-12-02T17:55:00.000Z

In a posting here about another subject (the Zapatistas’ call for a Third Intergalactica), I made a brief reference to a negative impression I had formed of ‘radical anthropology’, due to a lecture I attended at the Anarchist Bookfair. To some extent that has been resolved in a private email exchange, so it seems appropriate to try to clear that up on this blog site, with my apologies for spoiling a good post by juxtaposing two topics, and for causing annoyance or upset to anyone.

First of all, having now taken a good look at the material on the Radical Anthropology Group website, including Issue 1 of the new journal (http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/journal_01.pdf), I think RAG is putting across great ideas, and I wish it well, and I’ve put a link to it on my own web site.

The root of the misunderstanding comes back to the knowledge I’ve had all my life that human beings have been communist almost all the time we’ve been in existence. The ten thousand years since the main shift to settled agriculture to the present has been a tiny blip against a million years of hunting and gathering. I have also known that ‘primitive’ in ‘primitive communist’ only meant first, not savage or crude, since early human communities were culturally very varied and highly sophisticated, the people were clever with their hands, and knowledgeable about natural resources such as plants and their uses, and lived in cooperative social groups. That knowledge has always been the foundation of my hope that we will eventually return to being communist (but I doubt that coming to that via capitalism has been helpful, since we have lost most of the basic skills we shall need).

The negative impression I got from the lecture at the Anarchist Bookfair, was about the genetic differences between men and women, due to the way the earliest of these communist human societies evolved from our primate ancestors. The lecturer seemed to be saying that women are genetically altruistic and cooperative, helping each other with raising the shared children, hence ‘communist’ in our terms, whereas the earliest men developed very high testosterone levels in order to be persuaded by the women to hunt for meat, and also larger size and physical strength and endurance needed for hunting expeditions. Obviously, ‘nurture’ as well as ‘nature’ affect how men and women behave in society, but there are situations when cultural constraints are removed. When there were settled tribal or village societies, men’s behaviour was no doubt constrained by cultural norms and roles most of the time. But now there are frequent examples of large scale and persistent disruption, fuelled by the global arms trade and capitalist imperialism, and so more and more situations where social constraints have gone, and hence examples of savage group male behaviour.

THAT was what I found so devastating. Having believed for the whole of my life that people as a whole are naturally communists, I gathered from that lecture that only women are reliably and naturally so, men have an animal nature that breaks out all too easily. Plus, of course, patriarchy became dominant from settled society onwards, women have been suppressed and owned by men, so men tend to assume the right to power. So what is going to happen when capitalism is either overthrown or crashes? I don’t feel I can assume as I once did (perhaps naively) that future, post-capitalist society will be cooperative, peaceful and communist.

In the email exchange which reassured me to some extent, I was told this:

‘Women only had to “initiate” this (i.e. men going hunting in return for sex) since from a Darwinian point of view men have the same interest in getting their genes into the future. The model only looks anti male at first glance but in reality men had an interest in participating accordingly and bringing home the (extra) bacon. So if this strategy worked at all – it will have worked for men as well.
‘It is also worth pointing out that women would have shown solidarity with their male kin (who would in turn been the sex partners to another group of women) – so the same man at different times is showing solidarity with female kin, whilst in another being “made” to go off to hunt.’

I don’t pretend to understand this kind of argument fully, but I do see that the picture I formed from the lecture was simplistic, and only related to the very earliest human groups, after which cultural behaviours would have overlaid biology.

I hope this helps clear up misunderstandings, and I do urge people to visit the RAG site, read the journal, the books, go to discussions, attend courses, whatever else.

Chris

One for Darren

2007-11-19T09:24:00.001Z

From yesterday's Scotsman

26. CRISTIANO LUCARELLI

He may only warm the bench on Saturday for Italy, but if it's controversy you're after, look no further than Lucarelli. The Shakhtar Donetsk striker recently left his club, Livorno, after a falling-out with the chairman. Arguably, he was just too passionate.

Two years ago, he paid the transport home for scores of Livorno fans who had been arrested at an away game, and along with as AS Livorno logo tattoo, favours number 99 on his jersey, a homage to the ultras group, Brigate Autonome Livornesi.

Like Paolo Di Canio, his skill is often undermined by his rash behaviour. But whereas the former Celtic player favoured right-wing politics, Lucarelli is an avid communist and an admirer of Che Guevara - his mobile phone ringtone is the tune of The Red Flag.

Third Intergalactica

2007-11-17T14:50:00.000Z

An interesting paper about the Zapatistas calling for a ‘Third Intergalactica’ has been put around various discussion forums: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/mexico/2007/0920zapagringo.html
saying that everyone should read it. It is a superb summary of the present situation in terms of global power relations and the global movements of struggle and resistance, so in case it disappears I parked it on my website: http://www.des4rev.org.uk/intergalactica.htm.

A concern though that I have about the event proposed is: ‘Is it really a good idea to be flying the «from below and to the left» activists from all round the world to one place?’ There is discussion in the paper about preliminary regional gatherings, but wouldn’t it be better to think in terms of having a number of regional gatherings (for those who can get to whichever one by surface public transport) simultaneously, bringing them together electronically in various ways? This could be a model for future communications from grassroots communities to each other, for whatever practical and democratic decision-making purposes. Technology must already be available for this, when you think of video conferencing, global ‘Live Aid’-type events, big sporting events broadcast around the world, virtual reality devices readily available (like these Wii things that everyone’s gagging for), and visuals like the enhanced Beowulf.

This positive stuff seems just the thing to discuss on World in Common’s ‘Spaces of Hope’ blog, [rather than depressing ‘radical anthropology’ theories about how men (sic) are naturally sexually rapacious, violent, competitive and irresponsible – reverting, as we see, to such behaviours whenever social constraints: police, army and tyrannical rulers, are removed.]

Chris

Respect and Left-wing Parties: A different perspective

2007-11-17T13:21:00.001Z

If the comments on Socialist Unity are anything to go by it seems that the sides in the dispute over the split in Respect seem to have largely polarised into two factions (the pro-SWP Respect and 'Respect Renewal'). Its refreshing, then, to see the odd dissenting voice given the somewhat surprising lack of analysis of the situation by libertarian socialists/anarchists. Kevin Williamson may be right that progressive politics is becoming more decentralised and less dependent on the traditional parties of the left but the lessons of the Respect split and the various power games yet to play themselves out will be just as important for libertarian socialists.

THE WELCOME DEMISE OF TRADITIONAL LEFTWING PARTIES

(Written in response to this article by Mark Steel) [Ed: available here]

It's interesting to read all the comments here from an outsider's perspective. And by an outsider I mean someone who is not a member of any left-wing political party and who has no intention of joining one.

I wonder how long it will take for those who still operate inside left-wing political parties to realise that the majority of working people in Scotland, England and Wales are no longer interested in traditional left-wing political parties, "reformist" or "revolutionary" or otherwise.

Use any criteria you want and the above statement will stand up to scrutiny: membership of political parties, applications of people to join political parties, numbers of people voting, sales of political parties newspapers, etc.

Progressive politics in the 21st century is moving beyond traditional left-wing political parties into less rigid, less centralised, and more fluid forms of organisation and activism.

It would be wishful thinking to believe that an upturn in strikes, class struggle, or a new war, or any other factor that leads to heightened political awareness is going to reverse that process.

In Argentina, in December 2001 and in its aftermath, we saw a harbinger of the future in the radicalisation that followed the economic meltdown caused by the failures of IMF-induced neo-liberalism. A rebellion by workers and communities exploded which by-passed leftist political parties, mainly because the people had ingeniously created more effective ways to organise in their workplaces and in their communities.

Political parties were even banned from some of the workers councils and community councils that were formed, not out of any sectarian ideological intent, but because they were seen (correctly IMO) as counter-productive negative forces who sought to control movements, lead movements, and bring fractious organisational conflict into what were horizontal co-operative forms of organisation.

The many forms of struggle will always vary according to time and place, this is self-evident, but here in Scotland, like England, the left are flogging dead horses trying to unite the old left into new leftist political parties.

If the left could stop for a moment and study the history of political parties - as a social phenomena - they may realise that they came into being at certain juncture of history, and for a specific purpose, namely in the fight of the bourgeoisie to topple the old feudal order.

Political parties, especially those that followed the French Jacobins - in purpose, ideology and philosophy - I'm thinking of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in particular - were thoroughly bourgeois in structure, outlook and internalised psychology: i.e. centralised (and therefore) elitist organisations with essentially middle-class educated leaders hoping to use the broad mass of working people as a social battering ram to propel themselves into power. Just as the Jacobins used the sans-culottes for their own ends, the Bolsheviks used the workers and peasants.

Even the terms left and right originate from the struggle between bourgeoisie and the old feudal powers and have little to do with the aspirations and self-organisation of working people.

The idea of political parties has little overlap with Karl Marx's fundamental liberationist premise that the task of the liberation of working people is that of the working people alone. Which is why the SWP and all the other leftist political parties - ALL of them led by middle-class intellectuals - are a social phenomena whose time has now passed.

That's not to say that all progressive or leftist political parties will take an elitist or middle class form. It's possible, likely, and maybe even desirable, that new political formations will arise out of necessity; organised horizontally rather than vertically, that seek not to lead working people but to work selflessly to facilitate the self-organisation and creative activity of working people OUTSIDE the ranks of political parties. This may seem a contradiction in itself, and that is correct, for it is the necessary contradictory synthesis of thesis and antithesis.

Democracy is the greatest of all creative arts. It is unfinished business. Traditional leftist political parties impede that creativity.

Kevin Williamson
16 Nov 2007

Witch burnings - a war on women

2007-11-14T23:39:00.000Z

At the back of my mind I have always wondered what could have been behind the witch burnings, which suddenly started happening towards the end of the Middle Ages, and then, seemingly just as suddenly, stopped happening.

The decades of the greatest number of executions, all over Europe, were from the 1550’s to the 1630’s. Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” was written in this period. I remember vague explanations about a superstitious population and the aftermath of the Inquisition started by the Catholic Church. But surely people had been superstitious before this time, and they did not burn witches? What benefit could the religious institutions get from executing mostly old, mostly marginal and always poor women? We are talking about hundreds of thousands of women who were tortured and put to death in the cruellest ways imaginable.

It all starts to make sense if the event is seen as being a state instigated war on women, aided and abetted by the Catholic Church as well as the Reformation, using physical terror with the aim of causing psychological terror and a resulting obedience to the new world order. This is what Silvia Federici claims in her book, “Caliban and the Witch”.

The backdrop to these terrible acts is a “world turned upside down”, a paradigm shift, with the decline of feudalism, the privatisation of land (enclosures), the rise of the capitalist class, labour shortages for the capitalist class as a result of the black death and the peasants class’s tendency under feudalism to limit their numbers to the availability of land.

Women needed to be cowed, to ensure they were procured to the production of much needed labour power. No more would they be allowed to limit their families, to consult wise old women who would know about contraception, herbs and potions to induce early abortions. Women at the time were the guardians of centuries of knowledge about folk medicine and always acted as midwives; men were excluded from assisting at births at the time. This was to change. Women also needed to get to know their new role in life; this was to be the unwaged dependents on a waged husband. In the Middle Ages they had been able to engage in trade and could depend on the Commons for subsistence.

This was a war on the old world order, waged through unimaginable cruelty inflicted on women. Witch burnings were public affairs, men women and children were obliged to attend, including the children of the witch and especially any daughters. The daughters were often flogged in front of the bonfires as they watched their mothers burn to death.

Individual men, husbands, sons and brothers of the condemned women would occasionally try to save their relatives, but only one concerted effort by a group of men to come to the assistance of their condemned womenfolk has been recorded. This was a group of Basque fishermen who had been at sea fishing for cod when they heard that numbers of their female kin had been burned as witches. When they got back on shore, they armed themselves with clubs and went to liberate a group of women still awaiting execution.

The onslaught on women that took place at this time, in literature and law as well as on and around the bonfires, was another example of the application of “divide and rule” by a ruling class; this time a schism was driven between men and women and the concerted anti-female propaganda of the time reverberates to this day.

Federici pours scorn on many of the “great men of reason” of these “enlightened” times for either sitting on the fence as regards this terror (Descartes), or for actively supporting it (Thomas Hobbes).

This is an excellent book which fills in missing pages in the history of the European working class and of women within it.

David Cameron and Rape

2007-11-14T21:53:00.000Z

Our shadow Prime Minister, David Cameron, is pitching for the female vote with promises of tougher sentences for rape and for schools to teach boys that “no means no”. (Evening Standard, 12/11/2007.)

According to Tory research, just 5% of rape cases reported to the police lead to a guilty verdict, down from 33% 30 years ago. (This compares with 20% in the Netherlands, 10% in Italy and 12% in Ireland.) It is also reported that 75% of rape victims do not report the crime. Now, this is a curious figure. How on earth do they know how many women (and men) do not report this act – if they don’t report it?

I am also curious about under what circumstances these instances of rape are committed. Is it the usual case of, maybe, date rape, or the stranger leaping out from behind bushes? I am willing to bet that by far the greatest number of rapes happen in marriage or long term relationships – where the bulk of all violence to and murder of women take place. Did David Cameron’s Tory researchers go around asking married women how many times they had been raped by their husbands? I somehow think not. This is, after all, the party who is also campaigning under the banner of “family values” and strong marriages.

A strange thing, rape – its importance is exaggerated and underrated at the same time. It is exaggerated when women are led to believe that if they have been raped, they have somehow been defiled and commit suicide as a result. It is underrated when considering how widespread and swept under the carpet it must be in marriage – where two people are locked together in financial serfdom due to mortgages, debts and children, often with few escape routes as a result.

Dead Man Hanging

2007-11-14T16:07:00.001Z

I hadn't realised that John B's old 'A Revolutionary Act' blog has now morphed into 'Class Warfare' containing, as before, "musings, articles and sundry postings of a Geordie class warrior, adhering to the Orwellian maxim: During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act".

Coming across as a milder Ian Bone (and better for it IMO) Class Warfare contains a brilliant mix of detourned images and bottom-up working-class political commentary that is well worth a read.

A recent post examines the case of miner Wil Jobling, the last man in England (along with James Cook) to be 'gibbeted' in 1832. Now Jarrow Community Area Forum has won the right to create a memorial to Jobling who many think was made a scapegoat and wrongly accused of the murder of a local magistrate. The description of his and Cook's tarring, hanging and subsequent public display of their bodies reminds me of the brilliant passage in Foucault's Discipline and Punish describing a public execution in France which, to this day, I still use in my Sociology classes to illustrate how punishment has changed over time.

People just like us

2007-09-29T22:15:00.000+01:00

There were some pictures published in a national newspaper recently, about staff at one of the German concentration camps during WWII enjoying their leisure time; all very normal, putting up Christmas lights, playing the accordion, playing with the dog, etc. At the same time they were running camps where the inmates suffered on a scale described in a quote from Banksy's book "Wall and Piece" below. This should serve as a reminder when people start defining others as the "out" group, be they immigrants or whatever - this is where this cancer can take us:

"Extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett DSO who was amongst the first British soldiers to arrive at the Nazi death camp Bergen-Belsen. It was liberated in April 1945 close to the end of the second World War.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen.

It took a long time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had had to eat works to live and now could scarcely tell the difference.

Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere relieving themselves of their dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of a genious, sheer unadulterated brilliance. Women lay in bed with no sheet and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Ecosocialist International - Further Details

2007-09-25T22:48:00.001+01:00

(from Ecosocialism.org)

Purpose:
This meeting is a very preliminary first step: we will get to know each other, establish a provisional organizing committee for an Ecosocialist International Network, and begin discussions of projects and activities. Our main goal will be to set a time, place and preliminary agenda for a larger meeting in 2008, at which we hope there will be broad participation from green-left activists around the world.

It will not be an educational event or an academic conference. It is an organizing meeting for people who want to improve communication and coordination among ecosocialist activists around the world.

Dates:
Please Note: To ensure that there is sufficient time for discussion and networking, we have arranged for the meeting to carry over to a second day.

The meeting will be held during the day on Sunday October 7, 2007, and in the morning of Monday October 8, 2007. We plan to begin at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday.

Place:
The meeting will convene Sunday morning in salle Franklin, 60 rue Franklin, Métro mairie de Montreuil. (That’s the Town Hall of Montreuil, which is on the eastern edge of Paris.)

The Monday morning session will be held in the National Assembly building in Paris.

Agenda:
The following is a provisional agenda, subject to amendment by the participants:

• Introduction and Welcome by members of the Convening Committee.

• Self-introduction of participants.

• Discussion of common initiatives for the coming year, including communications, creation of a multilingual ecosocialist website, use of existing journals, etc.

• Discussion of a Second Ecosocialist Manifesto. Selection of a subcommittee to write a draft for international circulation and discussion.

• Discussion of objectives, date and location for a larger Ecosocialist conference in 2008.

• Election of a coordinating secretariat whose main task will be to organize the next Conference.

Who Can Attend:
The meeting is open to anyone who wants to contribute to the work of improving communication and coordination among ecosocialist activists around the world. If you plan to attend, please let us know as soon as possible. Email ecosocialism[at]gmail[dot]com

Fees:
There is no registration or admission fee. We may ask for voluntary contributions to defray some costs.

Population Growth

2007-09-17T19:56:00.000+01:00

I come from a political background where population growth always seemed to be put on the back burner - "if we get socialism tomorrow, we are in a position to satisfy he basic needs on everyone on this plant".
Maybe so -but beyond that - in order to have a pleasant world to live in, do we now have to start thinking about enouraging people to limit their families (China is an extreme example of state imposed family planning) - or is this something that is lkely to "sort itself out"?
I am just looking for some views on this.

The world's first communist car?

2007-07-05T20:18:00.001+01:00

Ok so I'm pushing the boat out a little by equating communism with 'open source' (then again I wouldn't be the first - see here). C,mm,n (pronounced 'common') is a zero-emission car co-designed by three universities and the Netherlands Foundation for Nature and Environment. All technical details and blueprints are freely available online and everyone is encouraged to contribute to improving the design and the car's sustainability - kind of like a Wikipedia for cars, people freely collaborating and sharing their knowledge. Capitalism being what it is, however, I can't see these being made freely available for people to take from the common store. I'll also wager a bet that Jeremy Clarkson doesn't like it. More details here.

Last of the council communists

2007-07-05T19:44:00.001+01:00

Let me just add a final word: It has always been my point of view that workers themselves know better than anybody else or any sort of group or organisation what's good for them and what their interests are. I don't write or speak for them, neither am I (or have I ever been) inclined to act as vanguard groups always do, namely: to tell them from the height of some ivory tower what's "wrong" with their action and ideas, what they should do to win, or that sort of absurd chatter. I have never sold leaflets or papers on a picketline or to sit-down strikers because I know too well that struggling workers have more important things to do than read an outsider's comment upon what they should do or what they keep forgetting to do. I never gave any worker any advice how to act. I never taught or preached and I always tried to learn from workers. And this, my dear Sir, is the big difference between someone like me and any trade union official.

Cajo Brendel (in a letter to Dave Douglass here) who died yesterday in his 90s.

Tip of the hat to arminius on the World in Common forum.

Morris Matters!

2007-06-26T10:38:00.001+01:00

As I blogged recently the William Morris gallery in Walthamstow, London, is being threatened with job cuts to its curatorial staff and reduced opening hours. The Victorian Society have just announced a 'Save the William Morris gallery' lecture series to take place in October and November 2007. Speakers include Morris's biographer Fiona MacCarthy and Dr. Jan Marsh President of the William Morris Society, and the lecture series takes place at the Art Workers Guild, Queen Square, London WC1. More details here.

Irish Greens and Climate Change

2007-06-26T09:59:00.001+01:00

From a letter in the Irish Times (context: (a) much of the UK and Ireland is currently experiencing floods; (b) the Irish Greens have recently entered into a coalition with the ruling Fianna Fail party):

Irish Times, Sat, 23 June 2007.

Letters to the editor:

Madam - Until the Greens arrived in government, we suffered dreadfully from weeks of blazing sun, with barely a drop of rain. But they promised to act on global warming, and they have kept their word. However, I wonder if they can ease up on the good work for a while, to give me time to build an ark? Yours, etc,

Michael O'Malley, Lucan, Co Dublin.

Hat tip - Joseph Healey from Green Left.

Dietzgen, God and the Totality of Existence

2007-06-25T08:03:00.001+01:00

An excellent post by Larry Gambone over on his Porcupine blog (also published at the Carnival of Anarchy).

Believers and Non-Believers.

"Neither God nor Master!" is an old anarchist slogan first stated by Bakunin, and a mighty fine one. But how does this jibe with the many anarchists, like Leo Tolstoy and Dorothy Day who were believers? Then again, how about the anarcho-pagans and their Goddess? How can such two widely divergent viewpoints be reconciled? Or can they be reconciled?

I say they can be reconciled to a degree. First off, what does one exactly mean by "God" ? For Bakunin, God was a vengeful authoritarian monster, a purely imaginary and human creation modeled upon earthy despots – a tyrant of infinite dimensions – one that had to be overthrown to liberate humanity. As long as people were beholden to such a horrible fantasy, they were in mental and spiritual chains and thus incapable of liberating themselves from their human masters.

This cruel monster is the God of religious "fundamentalists" everywhere, and to this extent Bakunin was absolutely right. But talk to the anarcho-believers, and this is definitely not how they see God. For them the Divine is benevolent, agree with Bakunin that the Monster is a human creation and reject it. Tangentially, many proto-anarchist Gnostics saw the Old Testament God - the one who creates, murders, curses and destroys seemingly in fits of psychopathic or infantile folly, not as God, but as Satan.

Fine, we now have an evil God and a kind one, and the anarcho-believers follow the latter. Such a God is not a "master" anymore than the eco-system is a "master". It just is and one goes with it, or one does not. If you don't go with it, you are "punished" by your own foolish behavior and not by some Super Cop In The Sky, in the same way we are being "punished" by Global Warming for the stupidity of polluting the atmosphere.

Neither Evil, nor Master, but surely the God concept is still irrational and a purely human invention? Maybe our believer comrades have a screw loose somewhere in wanting to believe in this fiction?

To answer this query we have to turn to the German American libertarian socialist philosopher Joseph Dietzgen, (1) who discovered the underlying materialist aspect of the God concept. A dialectical philosopher, he sought the rational kernel within all thought and belief. For Dietzgen, the basis of all rational thought was the interconnectedness and unity of all existence, also known by philosophers as the Absolute, the Universe or the Totality. It is this unity of existence that is the materialist basis of the God concept, or as he put it, ...the all-perfect Being, with the conception of God, with the Substance of Spinoza, with the "thing in itself" of Kant, and with the Absolute of Hegel, has its good reason in the fact that the sober conception of the Universe as the All-One with nothing above or outside or alongside of it, is the first postulate of a skilled and consistent mode of thinking... (2)

When you think about it, the Totality of Existence or the Universe does have the classic attributions of God – it is infinite, it is greater than anything else, and since everything is interconnected and every action ultimately effects every aspect, one can even stretch the notion to include a degree of omniscience. The basic idea is not wrong, it is what people do with it. The reification and anthropomorphication of the Totality creates the God that atheists deny...the infinite, eternal, is not personal, but objective. (3) [my emphasis]

The Totality is not too far removed from the Tao, or for that matter, (even though they have become reified) Dharma, Karma and Rita of Hinduism and Buddhism. And is not The Great Spirit of the First Nations more of a Creative Force-Totality than the personal God of the Abrahamic religions?

Now, I agree that the folks who desire a personal God, let alone those who crave a Celestial Monster to bully them, will not find the Totality satisfying, and this problem I cannot even begin to resolve. But what it ought to do, is make non-believers more sympathetic to believer comrades and to realize that both of us share a certain spiritual-philosophical common ground.

1. The Joseph Dietzgen Page http://www.geocities.com/vcmtalk/jodietzgen.html
2. Joseph Dietzgen, Some of the Philosophical Essays, p. 274
3. Joseph Dietzgen, Popular Outcome of Philosophy, p. 437
This has been published in the Carnival of Anarchy http://carnival-of-anarchy.blogspot.com/

Left Atomics

2007-06-25T07:50:00.001+01:00

Left Atomics is according to its blurb "a left-wing pro-nuclear energy perspective, fighting for a safe, clean and sustainable energy future where generation is for human needs and not for profit." It represents a group of socialists, progressives and Marxists keen to counter what it perceives to be a "knee-jerk opposition to nuclear energy by the left."
Expect the usual equating of socialism with the nationalisation of industry, nevertheless, its 'Left Manifesto for Nuclear Energy' is worth a gander for libertarian socialists too.

Rebelling against our genetic make-up

2007-06-21T07:33:00.001+01:00

I am re-reading "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins at the moment. It is a "new edition", in which there are some end notes where he answers criticism put by readers of the first issue.

In one end note he counters criticism put by Rose, Kamin and Lewontin in "Not in Our Genes" as follows (I though this might be relevant to recent contributions on altruism):

"But - and here I presume to speak for Professor Wilson as well as for myself - it is only in the eyes of Rose and his colleagues that we are 'genetic determinists'. What they don't understand (apparently, though it is hard to credit)is that it is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behaviour while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed by other influences. Genes must exert a statistical influence on any behaviour pattern that evolves by natural selection. Presumably Rose and his colleagues agree that human sexual desire has evolved by natural selection, in the same sense as anything ever evolves by natural selection. They therefore must agree that there have been genes influencing sexual desire - in the same sense as genes ever influence anything. Yet they presumably have no trouble with curbing their sexual desires when it is socially necessary to do so, What is dualist about that? Obviously nothing. And no more is it dualist for me to advocate rebelling 'against the tyranny of the selfish replicators'. We, that is, our brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them. As already noted, we do so in a small way every time we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way, too."

Dawkins' view is that genes could only "get here" by grabbing any and all opportunities to replicate (his use of the word "selfish" does not mean selfish in the way we normally use the word - genes are blind and unconscious entities) - therefore their "survival machines", plants and animals, must be expected to watch out for themselves, or their genes would have gone extinct.

But, having said that, Dawkins' hope is that we have now developed brains that can rebel against our genes, brains with "conscious foresight" that can see that certain actions involving co-operation and altruism are in all our interests in the long run.

He also makes a case for this based on the "Prisoners' Dilemma" situation and a computer game based on it developed by Axelrod and Hamilton, where various mainly (but not necessarily totally) "nice, altruistic" game plays were pitted against "nasty" ways of playing the game. After several iterations on the computer where the various strategies were pitted against each other, all the top performing ones * were in the "nice" category! Food for thought.

* "Performance" can be measured in money, points - or number of surviving offspring!

Posted by Torgun on the World in Common Forum.