Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition

Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition
David Harvey
CUNY Graduate Center, New York.
The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. Three percent compound growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy. If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is no alternative to socialism or communism. Since the late 1990s, the World Social Forum became the center for articulating the theme “another world is possible.” It must now take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these alternatives are to be accomplished. The current crisis offers a window of opportunity to reflect on what might be involved.
The current crisis originated in the steps taken to resolve the crisis of the 1970s. These steps included:
(a) the successful assault upon organized labor and its political institutions while mobilizing global labor surpluses, instituting labor-saving technological changes and heightening competition. The result has been global wage repressions (a declining share of wages in total GDP almost everywhere) and the creation of an even vaster disposable labor reserve living under marginal conditions.
(b) undermining previous structures of monopoly power and displacing the previous stage of (nation state) monopoly capitalism by opening up capitalism to far fiercer international competition. Intensifying global competition translated into lower non-financial corporate profits. Uneven geographical development and inter-territorial competition became key features in capitalist development, opening the way towards the beginnings of a hegemonic shift of power particularly but not exclusively towards East Asia.
(c) utilizing and empowering the most fluid and highly mobile form of capital – money capital – to reallocate capital resources globally (eventually through electronic markets) thus sparking deindustrialization in traditional core regions and new forms of (ultra-oppressive) industrialization and natural resource and agricultural raw material extractions in emergent markets. The corollary was to enhance the profitability of financial corporations and to find new ways to globalize and supposedly absorb risks through the creation of fictitious capital markets.
(d) At the other end of the social scale, this meant heightened reliance on “accumulation by dispossession” as a means to augment capitalist class power. The new rounds of primitive accumulation against indigenous and peasant populations were augmented by asset losses of the lower classes in the core economies (as witnessed by the sub-prime housing market in the US which foisted a huge asset loss particularly upon African American populations.
(e) The augmentation of otherwise sagging effective demand by pushing the debt economy (governmental, corporate and household) to its limits (particularly in the USA and the UK but also in many other countries from Latvia to Dubai).
(f) Compensating for anemic rates of return in production by the construction of whole series of asset market bubbles, all of which had a Ponzi character, culminating in the property bubble that burst in 2007-8. These asset bubbles drew upon finance capital and were facilitated by extensive financial innovations such as derivatives and collateralized debt obligations.
The political forces that coalesced and mobilized behind these transitions had a distinctive class character and clothed themselves in the vestments of a distinctive ideology called neoliberal. The ideology rested upon the idea that free markets, free trade, personal initiative and entrepreneurialism were the best guarantors of individual liberty and freedom and that the “nanny state” should be dismantled for the benefit of all. But the practice entailed that the state must stand behind the integrity of financial institutions, thus introducing (beginning with the Mexican and developing countries debt crisis of 1982) “moral hazard” big time into the financial system. The state (local and national) also became increasingly committed to providing a “good business climate” to attract investments in a highly competitive environment. The interests of the people were secondary to the interests of capital and in the event of a conflict between them, the interests of the people had to be sacrificed (as became standard practice in IMF structural adjustments programs from the early 1980s onwards). The system that has been created amounts to a veritable form of communism for the capitalist class.
These conditions varied considerably, of course, depending upon what part of the world one inhabited, the class relations prevailing there, the political and cultural traditions and how the balance of political-economic power was shifting.
So how can the left negotiate the dynamics of this crisis? At times of crisis, the irrationality of capitalism becomes plain for all to see. Surplus capital and surplus labor exist side-by side with seemingly no way to put them back together in the midst of immense human suffering and unmet needs. In midsummer of 2009, one third of the capital equipment in the United States stood idle, while some 17 per cent of the workforce were either unemployed, enforced part-timers or “discouraged” workers. What could be more irrational than that!
Can capitalism survive the present trauma? Yes. But at what cost? This question masks another. Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in the face of the raft of economic, social, political and geopolitical and environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding “yes.” But the mass of the people will have to surrender the fruits of their labour to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights), and to suffer environmental degradations galore to say nothing of serial reductions in their living standards which means starvation for many of those already struggling to survive at rock bottom. Class inequalities will increase (as we already see happening). All of that may require more than a little political repression, police violence and militarized state control to stifle unrest.
Since much of this is unpredictable and since the spaces of the global economy are so variable, then uncertainties as to outcomes are heightened at times of crisis. All manner of localized possibilities arise for either nascent capitalists in some new space to seize opportunities to challenge older class and territorial hegemonies (as when Silicon Valley replaced Detroit from the mid-1970s onwards in the United States) or for radical movements to challenge the reproduction of an already destabilized class power. To say that the capitalist class and capitalism can survive is not to say that they are predestined to do so nor does it say that their future character is given. Crises are moments of paradox and possibilities.
So what will happen this time around? If we are to get back to three percent growth, then this means finding new and profitable global investment opportunities for $1.6 trillion in 2010 rising to closer to $3 trillion by 2030. This contrasts with the $0.15 trillion new investment needed in 1950 and the $0.42 trillion needed in 1973 (the dollar figures are inflation adjusted). Real problems of finding adequate outlets for surplus capital began to emerge after 1980, even with the opening up of China and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The difficulties were in part resolved by creation of fictitious markets where speculation in asset values could take off unhindered. Where will all this investment go now?
Leaving aside the undisputable constraints in the relation to nature (with global warming of paramount importance), the other potential barriers of effective demand in the market place, of technologies and of geographical/ geopolitical distributions are likely to be profound, even supposing, which is unlikely, that no serious active oppositions to continuous capital accumulation and further consolidation of class power materialize. What spaces are left in the global economy for new spatial fixes for capital surplus absorption? China and the ex-Soviet bloc have already been integrated. South and SouthEast Asia is filling up fast. Africa is not yet fully integrated but there is nowhere else with the capacity to absorb all this surplus capital. What new lines of production can be opened up to absorb growth? There may be no effective long-run capitalist solutions (apart from reversion to fictitious capital manipulations) to this crisis of capitalism. At some point quantitative changes lead to qualitative shifts and we need to take seriously the idea that we may be at exactly such an inflexion point in the history of capitalism. Questioning the future of capitalism itself as an adequate social system ought, therefore, to be in the forefront of current debate.
Yet there appears to be little appetite for such discussion, even among the left. Instead we continue to hear the usual conventional mantras regarding the perfectibility of humanity with the help of free markets and free trade, private property and personal responsibility, low taxes and minimalist state involvement in social provision, even though this all sounds increasingly hollow. A crisis of legitimacy looms. But legitimation crises typically unfold at a different pace and rhythm to that of stock markets. It took, for example, three or four years before the stock market crash of 1929 produced the massive social movements (both progressive and fascistic) after 1932 or so. The intensity of the current pursuit by political power of ways to exit the present crisis may have something to do with the political fear of looming illegitimacy.
The last thirty years, however, has seen the emergence of systems of governance that seem immune to legitimacy problems and unconcerned even with the creation of consent. The mix of authoritarianism, monetary corruption of representative democracy, surveillance, policing and militarization (particularly through the war on terror), media control and spin suggests a world in which the control of discontent through disinformation, fragmentations of oppositions and the shaping of oppositional cultures through the promotion of NGOs tends to prevail with plenty of coercive force to back it up if necessary.
The idea that the crisis had systemic origins is scarcely mooted in the mainstream media (even as a few mainstream economists like Stiglitz, Krugman and even Jeffrey Sachs attempt to steal some of the left’s historical thunder by confessing to an epiphany or two). Most of the governmental moves to contain the crisis in North America and Europe amount to the perpetuation of business as usual which translates into support for the capitalist class. The “moral hazard” that was the immediate trigger for the financial failures is being taken to new heights in the bank bail-outs. The actual practices of neoliberalism (as opposed to its utopian theory) always entailed blatant support for finance capital and capitalist elites (usually on the grounds that financial institutions must be protected at all costs and that it is the duty of state power to create a good business climate for solid profiteering). This has not fundamentally changed. Such practices are justified by appeal to the dubious proposition that a “rising tide” of capitalist endeavor will “lift all boats” or that the benefits of compound growth will magically “trickle down” (which it never does except in the form of a few crumbs from the rich folks’ table).
So how will the capitalist class exit the current crisis and how swift will the exit be? The rebound in stock market values from Shanghai and Tokyo to Frankfurt, London and New York is a good sign we are told even as unemployment pretty much everywhere continues to rise. But notice the class bias in that measure. We are enjoined to rejoice in the rebound in stock values for the capitalists because it always precedes, it is said, a rebound in the “real economy” where jobs for the workers are created and incomes earned. The fact that the last stock rebound in the United States after 2002 turned out to be a “jobless recovery” appears to have been forgotten already. The Anglo-Saxon public in particular appears to be seriously afflicted with amnesia. It too easily forgets and forgives the transgressions of the capitalist class and the periodic disasters its actions precipitate. The capitalist media are happy to promote such amnesia.
China and India are still growing, the former by leaps and bounds. But in China’s case, the cost is a huge expansion of bank lending on risky projects (the Chinese banks were not caught up in the global speculative frenzy but now are continuing it). The overaccumulation of productive capacity proceeds a-pace and long-term infrastructural investments whose productivity will not be known for several years, are booming (even in urban property markets). And China’s burgeoning demand is entraining those economies supplying raw materials, like Australia and Chile. The likelihood of a subsequent crash in China cannot be dismissed but it may take time to discern (a long-term version of Dubai). Meanwhile the global epicenter of capitalism accelerates its shift parimarily towards East Asia.
In the older financial centers, the young financial sharks have taken their bonuses of yesteryear, collectively started boutique financial institutions to circle Wall Street and the City of London to sift through the detritus of yesterdays financial giants to snaffle up the juicy bits and start all over again. The investment banks that remain in the US – Goldman Sachs and J.P.Morgan – though reincarnated as bank holding companies have gained exemption (thanks to the Federal Reserve) from regulatory requirements and are making huge profits (and setting aside moneys for huge bonuses to match) out of speculating dangerously using tax-payers money in unregulated and still booming derivative markets. The leveraging that got us into the crisis has resumed big time as if nothing has happened. Innovations in finance are on the march as new ways to package and sell fictitious capital debts are being pioneered and offered to institutions (such as pension funds) desperate to find new outlets for surplus capital. The fictions (as well as the bonuses) are back!
Consortia are buying up foreclosed properties, either waiting for the market to turn before making a killing or banking high value land for a future moment of active redevelopment. The regular banks are stashing away cash, much of it garnered from the public coffers, also with an eye to resuming bonus payments consistent with a former lifestyle while a whole host of entrepreneurs hover in the wings waiting to seize this moment of creative destruction backed by a flood of public moneys.
Meanwhile raw money power wielded by the few undermines all semblances of democratic governance. The pharmaceutical, health insurance and hospital lobbies, for example, spent more than $133 million in the first three months of 2009 to make sure they got their way on health care reform in the United States. Max Baucus, head of the key Senate finance committee that shaped the health care bill received $1.5 million for a bill that delivers a vast number of new clients to the insurance companies with few protections against ruthless exploitation and profiteering (Wall Street is delighted). Another electoral cycle, legally corrupted by immense money power, will soon be upon us. In the United States, the parties of “K Street” and of Wall Street will be duly re-elected as working Americans are exhorted to work their way out of the mess that the ruling class has created. We have been in such dire straits before, we are reminded, and each time working Americans have rolled up their sleeves, tightened their belts, and saved the system from some mysterious mechanics of auto-destruction for which the ruling class denies all responsibility. Personal responsibility is, after all, for the workers and not for the capitalists.
If this is the outline of the exit strategy then almost certainly we will be in another mess within five years. The faster we come out of this crisis and the less excess capital is destroyed now, the less room there will be for the revival of long-term active growth. The loss of asset values at this conjuncture (mid 2009) is, we are told by the IMF, at least $55 trillion, which is equivalent to almost exactly one year’s global output of goods and services. Already we are back to the output levels of 1989. We may be looking at losses of $400 trillion or more before we are through. Indeed, in a recent startling calculation, it was suggested that the US state alone was on the hook to guarantee more than $200 trillion in asset values. The likelihood that all of those assets would go bad is very minimal, but the thought that many of them could is sobering in the extreme. Just to take a concrete example: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now taken over by the US Government, own or guarantee more than $5 trillion in home loans many of which are in deep trouble (losses of more than $150 billion were recorded in 2008 alone). So what, then, are the alternatives?
It has long been the dream of many in the world, that an alternative to capitalist (ir)rationality can be defined and rationally arrived at through the mobilization of human passions in the collective search for a better life for all. These alternatives – historically called socialism or communism – have, in various times and places been tried. In former times, such as the 1930s, the vision of one or other of them operated as a beacon of hope. But in recent times they have both lost their luster, been dismissed as wanting, not only because of the failure of historical experiments with communism to make good on their promises and the penchant for communist regimes to cover over their mistakes by repression, but also because of their supposedly flawed presuppositions concerning human nature and the potential perfectibility of the human personality and of human institutions.
The difference between socialism and communism is worth noting. Socialism aims to democratically manage and regulate capitalism in ways that calm its excesses and redistribute its benefits for the common good. It is about spreading the wealth around through progressive taxation arrangements while basic needs – such as education, health care and even housing – are provided by the state out of reach of market forces. Many of the key achievements of redistributive socialism in the period after 1945, not only in Europe but beyond, have become so socially embedded as to be immune from neoliberal assault. Even in the United States, Social Security and Medicare are extremely popular programs that right wing forces find it almost impossible to dislodge. The Thatcherites in Britain could not touch national health care except at the margins. Social provision in Scandinavia and most of Western Europe seems to be an unshakable bed-rock of the social order.
Communism, on the other hand, seeks to displace capitalism by creating an entirely different mode of both production and distribution of goods and services. In the history of actually existing communism, social control over production, exchange and distribution meant state control and systematic state planning. In the long-run this proved to be unsuccessful though, interestingly, its conversion in China (and its earlier adoption in places like Singapore) has proven far more successful than the pure neoliberal model in generating capitalist growth for reasons that cannot be elaborated upon here. Contemporary attempts to revive the communist hypothesis typically abjure state control and look to other forms of collective social organization to displace market forces and capital accumulation as the basis for organizing production and distribution. Horizontally networked as opposed to hierarchically commanded systems of coordination between autonomously organized and self-governing collectives of producers and consumers are envisaged as lying at the core of a new form of communism. Contemporary technologies of communication make such a system seem feasible. All manner of small-scale experiments around the world can be found in which such economic and political forms are being constructed. In this there is a convergence of some sort between the Marxist and anarchist traditions that harks back to the broadly collaborative situation between them in the 1860s in Europe.
While nothing is certain, it could be that 2009 marks the beginning of a prolonged shake out in which the question of grand and far-reaching alternatives to capitalism will step-by-step bubble up to the surface in one part of the world or another. The longer the uncertainty and the misery is prolonged, the more the legitimacy of the existing way of doing business will be questioned and the more the demand to build something different will escalate. Radical as opposed to band-aid reforms to patch up the financial system may seem more necessary.
The uneven development of capitalist practices throughout the world has produced, moreover, anti-capitalist movements all over the place. The state-centric economies of much of East Asia generate different discontents (as in Japan and China) compared to the churning anti-neoliberal struggles occurring throughout much of Latin America where the Bolivarian revolutionary movement of popular power exists in a peculiar relationship to capitalist class interests that have yet to be truly confronted. Differences over tactics and policies in response to the crisis among the states that make up the European Union are increasing even as a second attempt to come up with a unified EU constitution is under way. Revolutionary and resolutely anti-capitalist movements are also to be found, though not all of them are of a progressive sort, in many of the marginal zones of capitalism. Spaces have been opened up within which something radically different in terms of dominant social relations, ways of life, productive capacities and mental conceptions of the world can flourish. This applies as much to the Taliban and to communist rule in Nepal as to the Zapatistas in Chiapas and indigenous movements in Bolivia, the Maoist movements in rural India, even as they are world’s apart in objectives, strategies and tactics.
The central problem is that in aggregate there is no resolute and sufficiently unified anti-capitalist movement that can adequately challenge the reproduction of the capitalist class and the perpetuation of its power on the world stage. Neither is there any obvious way to attack the bastions of privilege for capitalist elites or to curb their inordinate money power and military might. While openings exist towards some alternative social order, no one really knows where or what it is. But just because there is no political force capable of articulating let alone mounting such a program, this is no reason to hold back on outlining alternatives.
Lenin’s famous question “what is to be done?” cannot be answered, to be sure, without some sense of who it is might do it where. But a global anti-capitalist movement is unlikely to emerge without some animating vision of what is to be done and why. A double blockage exists: the lack of an alternative vision prevents the formation of an oppositional movement, while the absence of such a movement precludes the articulation of an alternative. How, then, can this blockage be transcended? The relation between the vision of what is to be done and why, and the formation of a political movement across particular places to do it has to be turned into a spiral. Each has to reinforce the other if anything is actually to get done. Otherwise potential opposition will be forever locked down into a closed circle that frustrates all prospects for constructive change, leaving us vulnerable to perpetual future crises of capitalism with increasingly deadly results. Lenin’s question demands an answer.
The central problem to be addressed is clear enough. Compound growth for ever is not possible and the troubles that have beset the world these last thirty years signal that a limit is looming to continuous capital accumulation that cannot be transcended except by creating fictions that cannot last. Add to this the facts that so many people in the world live in conditions of abject poverty, that environmental degradations are spiraling out of control, that human dignities are everywhere being offended even as the rich are piling up more and more wealth (the number of billionaires in India doubled last year from 27 to 52) under their command and that the levers of political, institutional, judicial, military and media power are under such tight but dogmatic political control as to be incapable of doing much more than perpetuating the status quo and frustrating discontent.
A revolutionary politics that can grasp the nettle of endless compound capital accumulation and eventually shut it down as the prime motor of human history, requires a sophisticated understanding of how social change occurs. The failings of past endeavors to build a lasting socialism and communism have to be avoided and lessons from that immensely complicated history must be learned. Yet the absolute necessity for a coherent anti-capitalist revolutionary movement must also be recognized. The fundamental aim of that movement is to assume social command over both the production and distribution of surpluses.
We urgently need an explicit revolutionary theory suited to our times. I propose a “co-revolutionary theory” derived from an understanding of Marx’s account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism. Social change arises through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven moments within the body politic of capitalism viewed as an ensemble or assemblage of activities and practices:
a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption
b) relations to nature
c) social relations between people
d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs
e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects
f ) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements
g) the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.
Each one of these moments is internally dynamic and internally marked by tensions and contradictions (just think of mental conceptions of the world) but all of them are co-dependent and co-evolve in relation to each other. The transition to capitalism entailed a mutually supporting movement across all seven moments. New technologies could not be identified and practices without new mental conceptions of the world (including that of the relation to nature and social relations). Social theorists have the habit of taking just one of the these moments and viewing it as the “silver bullet” that causes all change. We have technological determinists (Tom Friedman), environmental determinists (Jarad Diamond), daily life determinists (Paul Hawkin), labor process determinists (the autonomistas), institutionalists, and so on and so forth. They are all wrong. It is the dialectical motion across all of these moments that really counts even as there is uneven development in that motion.
When capitalism itself undergoes one of its phases of renewal, it does so precisely by co-evolving all moments, obviously not without tensions, struggles, fights and contradictions. But consider how these seven moments were configured around 1970 before the neoliberal surge and consider how they look now and you will see they have all changed in ways that re-define the operative characteristics of capitalism viewed as a non-Hegelian totality.
An anti-capitalist political movement can start anywhere (in labor processes, around mental conceptions, in the relation to nature, in social relations, in the design of revolutionary technologies and organizational forms, out of daily life or through attempts to reform institutional and administrative structures including the reconfiguration of state powers). The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one moment to another in mutually reinforcing ways. This was how capitalism arose out of feudalism and this is how something radically different called communism, socialism or whatever must arise out of capitalism. Previous attempts to create a communist or socialist alternative fatally failed to keep the dialectic between the different moments in motion and failed to embrace the unpredictabilities and uncertainties in the dialectical movement between them. Capitalism has survived precisely by keeping the dialectical movement between the moments going and constructively embracing the inevitable tensions, including crises, that result.
Change arises, of course, out of an existing state of affairs and it has to harness the possibilities immanent within an existing situation. Since the existing situation varies enormously from Nepal, to the Pacific regions of Bolivia, to the deindustrializing cities of Michigan and the still booming cities of Mumbai and Shanghai and the shaken but by no means destroyed financial centers of New York and London, so all manner of experiments in social change in different places and at different geographical scales are both likely and potentially illuminating as ways to make (or not make) another world possible. And in each instance it may seem as if one or other aspect of the existing situation holds the key to a different political future. But the first rule for a global anti-capitalist movement must be: never rely on the unfolding dynamics of one moment without carefully calibrating how relations with all the others are adapting and reverberating.
Feasible future possibilities arise out of the existing state of relations between the different moments. Strategic political interventions within and across the spheres can gradually move the social order onto a different developmental path. This is what wise leaders and forward looking institutions do all the time in local situations, so there is no reason to think there is anything particularly fantastic or utopian about acting in this way. The left has to look to build alliances between and across those working in the distinctive spheres. An anti-capitalist movement has to be far broader than groups mobilizing around social relations or over questions of daily life in themselves. Traditional hostilities between, for example, those with technical, scientific and administrative expertise and those animating social movements on the ground have to be addressed and overcome. We now have to hand, in the example of the climate change movement, a significant example of how such alliances can begin to work.
In this instance the relation to nature is the beginning point, but everyone realizes that something has to give on all the other moments and while there is a wishful politics that wants to see the solution as purely technological, it becomes clearer by the day that daily life, mental conceptions, institutional arrangements, production processes and social relations have to be involved. And all of that means a movement to restructure capitalist society as a whole and to confront the growth logic that underlies the problem in the first place.
There have, however, to be, some loosely agreed upon common objectives in any transitional movement. Some general guiding norms can be set down. These might include (and I just float these norms here for discussion) respect for nature, radical egalitarianism in social relations, institutional arrangements based in some sense of common interests and common property, democratic administrative procedures (as opposed to the monetized shams that now exist), labor processes organized by the direct producers, daily life as the free exploration of new kinds of social relations and living arrangements, mental conceptions that focus on self-realization in service to others and technological and organizational innovations oriented to the pursuit of the common good rather than to supporting militarized power, surveillance and corporate greed. These could be the co-revolutionary points around which social action could converge and rotate. Of course this is utopian! But so what! We cannot afford not to be.
Let me detail one particular aspect of the problem which arise in the place where I work. Ideas have consequences and false ideas can have devastating consequences. Policy failures based on erroneous economic thinking played a crucial role in both the run-up to the debacle of the 1930s and in the seeming inability to find an adequate way out. Though there is no agreement among historians and economists as to exactly what policies failed, it is agreed that the knowledge structure through which the crisis was understood needed to be revolutionized. Keynes and his colleagues accomplished that task. But by the mid-1970s, it became clear that the Keynesian policy tools were no longer working at least in the way they were being applied and it was in this context that monetarism, supply-side theory and the (beautiful) mathematical modelling of micro-economic market behaviors supplanted broad-brush macro-economic Keynesian thinking. The monetarist and narrower neoliberal theoretical frame that dominated after 1980 is now in question. In fact it has disastrously failed.
We need new mental conceptions to understand the world. What might these be and who will produce them, given both the sociological and intellectual malaise that hangs over knowledge production and (equally important) dissemination more generally? The deeply entrenched mental conceptions associated with neoliberal theories and the neoliberalization and corporatization of the universities and the media has played more than a trivial role in the production of the present crisis. For example, the whole question of what to do about the financial system, the banking sector, the state-finance nexus and the power of private property rights, cannot be broached without going outside of the box of conventional thinking. For this to happen will require a revolution in thinking, in places as diverse as the universities, the media and government as well as within the financial institutions themselves.
Karl Marx, while not in any way inclined to embrace philosophical idealism, held that ideas are a material force in history. Mental conceptions constitute, after all, one of the seven moments in his general theory of co-revolutionary change. Autonomous developments and inner conflicts over what mental conceptions shall become hegemonic therefore have an important historical role to play. It was for this reason that Marx (along with Engels) wrote The Communist Manifesto, Capital and innumerable other works. These works provide a systematic critique, albeit incomplete, of capitalism and its crisis tendencies. But as Marx also insisted, it was only when these critical ideas carried over into the fields of institutional arrangements, organizational forms, production systems, daily life, social relations, technologies and relations to nature that the world would truly change.
Since Marx’s goal was to change the world and not merely to understand it, ideas had to be formulated with a certain revolutionary intent. This inevitably meant a conflict with modes of thought more convivial to and useful for the ruling class. The fact that Marx’s oppositional ideas, particularly in recent years, have been the target of repeated repressions and exclusions (to say nothing of bowdlerizations and misrepresentations galore) suggests that his ideas may be too dangerous for the ruling classes to tolerate. While Keynes repeatedly avowed that he had never read Marx, he was surrounded and influenced in the 1930s by many people (like his economist colleague Joan Robinson) who had. While many of them objected vociferously to Marx’s foundational concepts and his dialectical mode of reasoning, they were acutely aware of and deeply affected by some of his more prescient conclusions. It is fair to say, I think, that the Keynesian theory revolution could not have been accomplished without the subversive presence of Marx lurking in the wings.
The trouble in these times is that most people have no idea who Keynes was and what he really stood for while the knowledge of Marx is negligible. The repression of critical and radical currents of thought, or to be more exact the corralling of radicalism within the bounds of multiculturalism, identity politics and cultural choice, creates a lamentable situation within the academy and beyond, no different in principle to having to ask the bankers who made the mess to clean it up with exactly the same tools as they used to get into it. Broad adhesion to post-modern and post-structuralist ideas which celebrate the particular at the expense of big-picture thinking does not help. To be sure, the local and the particular are vitally important and theories that cannot embrace, for example, geographical difference, are worse than useless. But when that fact is used to exclude anything larger than parish politics then the betrayal of the intellectuals and abrogation of their traditional role become complete.
The current populations of academicians, intellectuals and experts in the social sciences and humanities are by and large ill-equipped to undertake the collective task of revolutionizing our knowledge structures. They have, in fact, been deeply implicated in the construction of the new systems of neoliberal governmentality that evade questions of legitimacy and democracy and foster a technocratic authoritarian politics. Few seem predisposed to engage in self-critical reflection. Universities continue to promote the same useless courses on neo classical economic or rational choice political theory as if nothing has happened and the vaunted business schools simply add a course or two on business ethics or how to make money out of other people’s bankruptcies. After all, the crisis arose out of human greed and there is nothing that can be done about that!
The current knowledge structure is clearly dysfunctional and equally clearly illegitimate. The only hope is that a new generation of perceptive students (in the broad sense of all those who seek to know the world) will clearly see it so and insist upon changing it. This happened in the 1960s. At various other critical points in history student inspired movements, recognizing the disjunction between what is happening in the world and what they are being taught and fed by the media, were prepared to do something about it. There are signs, from Tehran to Athens and onto many European university campuses of such a movement. How the new generation of students in China will act must surely be of deep concern in the corridors of political power in Beijing.
A student-led and youthful revolutionary movement, with all of its evident uncertainties and problems, is a necessary but not sufficient condition to produce that revolution in mental conceptions that can lead us to a more rational solution to the current problems of endless growth.
What, more broadly, would happen if an anti-capitalist movement were constituted out of a broad alliance of the alienated, the discontented, the deprived and the dispossessed? The image of all such people everywhere rising up and demanding and achieving their proper place in economic, social and political life, is stirring indeed. It also helps focus on the question of what it is they might demand and what it is that needs to be done.
Revolutionary transformations cannot be accomplished without at the very minimum changing our ideas, abandoning cherished beliefs and prejudices, giving up various daily comforts and rights, submitting to some new daily life regimen, changing our social and political roles, reassigning our rights, duties and responsibilities and altering our behaviors to better conform to collective needs and a common will. The world around us – our geographies – must be radically re-shaped as must our social relations, the relation to nature and all of the other moments in the co-revolutionary process. It is understandable, to some degree, that many prefer a politics of denial to a politics of active confrontation with all of this.
It would also be comforting to think that all of this could be accomplished pacifically and voluntarily, that we would dispossess ourselves, strip ourselves bare, as it were, of all that we now possess that stands in the way of the creation of a more socially just, steady-state social order. But it would be disingenuous to imagine that this could be so, that no active struggle will be involved, including some degree of violence. Capitalism came into the world, as Marx once put it, bathed in blood and fire. Although it might be possible to do a better job of getting out from under it than getting into it, the odds are heavily against any purely pacific passage to the promised land.
There are various broad fractious currents of thought on the left as to how to address the problems that now confront us. There is, first of all, the usual sectarianism stemming from the history of radical action and the articulations of left political theory. Curiously, the one place where amnesia is not so prevalent is within the left (the splits between anarchists and Marxists that occurred back in the 1870s, between Trotskyists, Maoists and orthodox Communists, between the centralizers who want to command the state and the anti-statist autonomists and anarchists). The arguments are so bitter and so fractious, as to sometimes make one think that more amnesia might be a good thing. But beyond these traditional revolutionary sects and political factions, the whole field of political action has undergone a radical transformation since the mid-1970s. The terrain of political struggle and of political possibilities has shifted, both geographically and organizationally.
There are now vast numbers of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) that play a political role that was scarcely visible before the mid-1970s. Funded by both state and private interests, populated often by idealist thinkers and organizers (they constitute a vast employment program), and for the most part dedicated to single-issue questions (environment, poverty, women’s rights, anti-slavery and trafficking work, etc) they refrain from straight anti-capitalist politics even as they espouse progressive ideas and causes. In some instances, however, they are actively neoliberal, engaging in privatization of state welfare functions or fostering institutional reforms to facilitate market integration of marginalized populations (microcredit and microfinance schemes for low income populations are a classic example of this).
While there are many radical and dedicated practitioners in this NGO world, their work is at best ameliorative. Collectively, they have a spotty record of progressive achievements, although in certain arenas, such as women’s rights, health care and environmental preservation, they can reasonably claim to have made major contributions to human betterment. But revolutionary change by NGO is impossible. They are too constrained by the political and policy stances of their donors. So even though, in supporting local empowerment, they help open up spaces where anti-capitalist alternatives become possible and even support experimentation with such alternatives, they do nothing to prevent the re-absorption of these alternatives into the dominant capitalist practice: they even encourage it. The collective power of NGOs in these times is reflected in the dominant role they play in the World Social Forum, where attempts to forge a global justice movement, a global alternative to neoliberalism, have been concentrated over the last ten years.
The second broad wing of opposition arises out of anarchist, autonomist and grass roots organizations (GROs) which refuse outside funding even as some of them do rely upon some alternative institutional base (such as the Catholic Church with its “base community” initiatives in Latin America or broader church sponsorship of political mobilization in the inner cities of the United States). This group is far from homogeneous (indeed there are bitter disputes among them pitting, for example, social anarchists against those they scathingly refer to as mere “lifestyle” anarchists). There is, however, a common antipathy to negotiation with state power and an emphasis upon civil society as the sphere where change can be accomplished.. The self-organizing powers of people in the daily situations in which they live has to be the basis for any anti-capitalist alternative. Horizontal networking is their preferred organizing model. So-called “solidarity economies” based on bartering, collectives and local production systems is their preferred political economic form. They typically oppose the idea that any central direction might be necessary and reject hierarchical social relations or hierarchical political power structures along with conventional political parties. Organizations of this sort can be found everywhere and in some places have achieved a high degree of political prominence. Some of them are radically anti-capitalist in their stance and espouse revolutionary objectives and in some instances are prepared to advocate sabotage and other forms of disruption (shades of the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader Meinhoff in Germany and the Weather Underground in the United States in the 1970s). But the effectiveness of all these movements (leaving aside their more violent fringes) is limited by their reluctance and inability to scale up their activism into large-scale organizational forms capable of confronting global problems. The presumption that local action is the only meaningful level of change and that anything that smacks of hierarchy is anti-revolutionary is self-defeating when it comes to larger questions. Yet these movements are unquestionably providing a widespread base for experimentation with anti-capitalist politics.
The third broad trend is given by the transformation that has been occurring in traditional labor organizing and left political parties, varying from social democratic traditions to more radical Trotskyist and Communist forms of political party organization. This trend is not hostile to the conquest of state power or hierarchical forms of organization. Indeed, it regards the latter as necessary to the integration of political organization across a variety of political scales. In the years when social democracy was hegemonic in Europe and even influential in the United States, state control over the distribution of the surplus became a crucial tool to diminish inequalities. The failure to take social control over the production of surpluses and thereby really challenge the power of the capitalist class was the Achilles heel of this political system, but we should not forget the advances that it made even if it is now clearly insufficient to go back to such a political model with its social welfarism and Keynesian economics. The Bolivarian movement in Latin America and the ascent to state power of progressive social democratic governments is one of the most hopeful signs of a resuscitation of a new form of left statism.
Both organized labor and left political parties have taken some hard hits in the advanced capitalist world over the last thirty years. Both have either been convinced or coerced into broad support for neoliberalization, albeit with a somewhat more human face. One way to look upon neoliberalism, as was earlier noted, is as a grand and quite revolutionary movement (led by that self-proclaimed revolutionary figure, Margaret Thatcher) to privatize the surpluses or at least prevent their further socialization.
While there are some signs of recovery of both labor organizing and left politics (as opposed to the “third way” celebrated by New Labor in Britain under Tony Blair and disastrously copied by many social democratic parties in Europe) along with signs of the emergence of more radical political parties in different parts of the world, the exclusive reliance upon a vanguard of workers is now in question as is the ability of those leftist parties that gain some access to political power to have a substantive impact upon the development of capitalism and to cope with the troubled dynamics of crisis-prone accumulation. The performance of the German Green Party in power has hardly been stellar relative to their political stance out of power and social democratic parties have lost their way entirely as a true political force. But left political parties and labor unions are significant still and their takeover of aspects of state power, as with the workers party in Brazil or the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela has had a clear impact on left thinking, not only in Latin America. The complicated problem of how to interpret the role of the Communist Party in China, with its exclusive control over political power, and what its future policies might be about is not easily resolved either.
The co-revolutionary theory earlier laid out would suggest that there is no way that an anti-capitalist social order can be constructed without seizing state power, radically transforming it and re-working the constitutional and institutional framework that currently supports private property, the market system and endless capital accumulation. Inter-state competition and geoconomic and geopolitical struggles over everything from trade and money to questions of hegemony are also far too significant to be left to local social movements or cast aside as too big to contemplate. How the architecture of the state-finance nexus is to be re-worked along with the pressing question of the common measure of value given by money cannot be ignored in the quest to construct alternatives to capitalist political economy. To ignore the state and the dynamics of the inter-state system is therefore a ridiculous idea for any anti-capitalist revolutionary movement to accept.
The fourth broad trend is constituted by all the social movements that are not so much guided by any particular political philosophy or leanings but by the pragmatic need to resist displacement and dispossession (through gentrification, industrial development, dam construction, water privatization, the dismantling of social services and public educational opportunities, or whatever). In this instance the focus on daily life in the city, town, village or wherever provides a material base for political organizing against the threats that state policies and capitalist interests invariably pose to vulnerable populations. These forms of protest politics are massive.
Again, there is a vast array of social movements of this sort, some of which can become radicalized over time as they more and more realize that the problems are systemic rather than particular and local. The bringing together of such social movements into alliances on the land (like the Via Campesina, the landless peasant movement in Brazil or peasants mobilizing against land and resource grabs by capitalist corporations in India) or in urban contexts (the right to the city and take back the land movements in Brazil and now the United States) suggest the way may be open to create broader alliances to discuss and confront the systemic forces that underpin the particularities of gentrification, dam construction, privatization or whatever. More pragmatic rather than driven by ideological preconceptions, these movements nevertheless can arrive at systemic understandings out of their own experience. To the degree that many of them exist in the same space, such as within the metropolis, they can (as supposedly happened with the factory workers in the early stages of the industrial revolution) make common cause and begin to forge, on the basis of their own experience, a consciousness of how capitalism works and what it is that might collectively be done. This is the terrain where the figure of the “organic intellectual” leader, made so much of in Antonio Gramsci’s work, the autodidact who comes to understand the world first hand through bitter experiences, but shapes his or her understanding of capitalism more generally, has a great deal to say. To listen to peasant leaders of the MST in Brazil or the leaders of the anti-corporate land grab movement in India is a privileged education. In this instance the task of the educated alienated and discontented is to magnify the subaltern voice so that attention can be paid to the circumstances of exploitation and repression and the answers that can be shaped into an anti-capitalist program.
The fifth epicenter for social change lies with the emancipatory movements around questions of identity – women, children, gays, racial, ethnic and religious minorities all demand an equal place in the sun – along with the vast array of environmental movements that are not explicitly anti-capitalist. The movements claiming emancipation on each of these issues are geographically uneven and often geographically divided in terms of needs and aspirations. But global conferences on women’s rights (Nairobi in 1985 that led to the Beijing declaration of 1995) and anti-racism (the far more contentious conference in Durban in 2009) are attempting to find common ground, as is true also of the environmental conferences, and there is no question that social relations are changing along all of these dimensions at least in some parts of the world. When cast in narrow essentialist terms, these movements can appear to be antagonistic to class struggle. Certainly within much of the academy they have taken priority of place at the expense of class analysis and political economy. But the feminization of the global labor force, the feminization of poverty almost everywhere and the use of gender disparities as a means of labor control make the emancipation and eventual liberation of women from their repressions a necessary condition for class struggle to sharpen its focus. The same observation applies to all the other identity forms where discrimination or outright repression can be found. Racism and the oppression of women and children were foundational in the rise of capitalism. But capitalism as currently constituted can in principle survive without these forms of discrimination and oppression, though its political ability to do so will be severely curtailed if not mortally wounded in the face of a more unified class force. The modest embrace of multiculturalism and women’s rights within the corporate world, particularly in the United States, provides some evidence of capitalism’s accommodation to these dimensions of social change (including the environment), even as it re-emphasizes the salience of class divisions as the principle dimension for political action.
These five broad tendencies are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive of organizational templates for political action. Some organizations neatly combine aspects of all five tendencies. But there is a lot of work to be done to coalesce these various tendencies around the underlying question: can the world change materially, socially, mentally and politically in such a way as to confront not only the dire state of social and natural relations in so many parts of the world, but also the perpetuation of endless compound growth? This is the question that the alienated and discontented must insist upon asking, again and again, even as they learn from those who experience the pain directly and who are so adept at organizing resistances to the dire consequences of compound growth on the ground.
Communists, Marx and Engels averred in their original conception laid out in The Communist Manifesto, have no political party. They simply constitute themselves at all times and in all places as those who understand the limits, failings and destructive tendencies of the capitalist order as well as the innumerable ideological masks and false legitimations that capitalists and their apologists (particularly in the media) produce in order to perpetuate their singular class power. Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends. This is an interesting definition. While traditional institutionalized communism is as good as dead and buried, there are by this definition millions of de facto communists active among us, willing to act upon their understandings, ready to creatively pursue anti-capitalist imperatives. If, as the alternative globalization movement of the late 1990s declared, ‘another world is possible’ then why not also say ‘another communism is possible’? The current circumstances of capitalist development demand something of this sort, if fundamental change is to be achieved.
These notes draw heavily on my forthcoming book, The Enigma of Capital, to be published by Profile Books in April 2010.

Larry Wilkerson on Obama's Choice to send people to die in Afganistan

Unemployment #4

Unemployment #3

Unemployment #2

Unemployment #1

Anatomy of Casino Capitalism w/Jane D'Arista

Incipient Facism? Frank Schaeffer

Why Afganistan? Pipeline? Oil?

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4368

Very interesting conversation about Uzbekistan. Who is going to profit from Uzbekistan's oil and gas?

An answer to Capitalist Crises - see part 2 at site

Is Being a Woman a Pre-existing Condition?

What you are up against!

Public Option

Bethany Morton : Great Bargain-God and Walmart

http://www.singlepayeraction.org/index.php

Neo-liberalism as water balloon - written by Ady Cousins

Neoliberalism As Water Balloon from Tim McCaskell on Vimeo.

Is there a Left? "I want to be sedated" Can't I just give some money, anonymously?

Information that came with video below.

Back in June a NYT/CBS News poll found that the majority of Americans support a public option, a government run insurance plan to compete with private insurers. More than 500,000 doctors support a public option. It hardly seems controversial. But many fear, and with good reason, that it won't be part of whatever kind of bill ends up on the president's desk. So where does the public option stand? Maggie Mahar, author of Money-Driven Medicine and a Fellow at The Century Foundation, Lester Feder, a contributor to the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk, and Dr. Manisha Sharma, Director of Media Relations at the National Physicians Alliance in NY on the Baucus bill and whether it will be improved.

What's left of Public Opinion

It is sounding like a Country run by stupid incompetent people!

Cigna Health Insurance

Feeling like a foreigner at home, in the USA.

Following was posted on Mother Jones, Glenn Beck watch. It is a response to the hysterical dialouge happening around Obama.

So why do you care so much now?
Submitted by FreeThinker on September 13, 2009 - 12:12am.

Anonymous, you care so much about the honesty and integrity of administration people - where were you when the most corrupt and autocratic admin in history was in for the past 8 years? We've probably never come so close to seeing the loss of liberty (such as it is anyway in this Corporatocracy which owns the media & most of the "elelcted" officials) in the US as during that time. Lies, lies and more lies and coming in with a big surplus (after another Conservative, Reagan, nearly spent the country into bandruptcy) and leaving with $1trillion debt, all to enrich (w/o competetive bidding) the Robber Barons/War Profiteers who are the real employers of the Bush Gang - Haliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Blackwater, The Carlyle Group. And you talk about doing the research? Google PNAC - Project for a New American Century. The invasion and occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan, in fact the whole Middle East eventually, was planned in advance by the Conservatives. They just had to find a way to make it happen - 9/11, how convenient! Follow the money....

The most corrupt administrations in the past 100 years have all been Conservative - Harding (who even overtly placed organized crime bosses in his admin), Nixon, Reagan, Old Bush and Bush the Idiot. So much for talk - we've seen the walk.

I used to be a Repug and nothing in my whole life brings me more shame than that. What a brainwashed dork I was - and you too. They are the biggest puppets of the Corporatocracy which owns the "news" media and has brainwashed us all for years about "Socialism". What a crock. Socialism is a powerful political/social movement in Europe that was the force behind democracy (as opposed to the Conservatives who backed the aristocracy and sneered at the unwashed masses). Socialism is the reason Europe is more advanced than the US, has healthcare for all, has only military for defense (so has the money to spend for the people like healthcare and parks and highspeed trains, for ex), has a lower crime rate, lower poverty rate, smaller gap between the rich and poor, almost no trailer houses & much lower infant mortality etc. I am now a European and wouldn't go back to the US for anything - what a hick place.

The Socialized countries of Europe are the most advanced in the world - and the happiest, with the happiest country in the world as Socialist Denmark, along with Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain (my own new homeland where our Socialist government has given full & complete Human/Civil rights to LGBT people, something that won't happen in my lifetime in puritanical, fundamentalist USAmerica) et al.

You have been brainwashed into equating Socialism with the Soviet Union, which was not, but that is like equating Democracy with the "Democratic" Republic of Zimbabwe or True Christianity with the Catholic Inquisition or Focus on the Family.

Do you oppose all the other "Socialist" benefits in US society: the police, the fire dept., the army, the navy, the coast guard, the air force, public libraries, street sweeping, public parks, schools, unemployment insurance, social security, workmens' compensaton insurance, 5 day work week, the end of child labor, the 40 hour work week (it's lower in most Socialist EU countries), paid vacations, minimum wage or medicare/medicaid, to mention a few? Most of these last 9 or 10 civilized benefits were opposed just as bitterly by you Conservatives/Repugs as is universal health care is now. Hopefully, history will show you and your selfishness will fail here too.

Beck smears and raises fear in people. He doesn't challenge or question issues with clear, intelligent, civilized logic, facts and reason. He and the rest of the Conservative Shock Jocks spread hate, fear and confusion - not a good thing to have in a civilized republic. We'd all be far better off with reasoned, calm, respectful debate, don't you think? I supported Nader, not Obama, but Obama has handled himself like a President, a statesman, and has not stooped to the third grade antics of the Conservative Shock Jocks or members of congress like Wilson. He's certainly more capable, knowledable and dignified than that Dubya Jackass and his evil coven. He was left with the highest debt and the most ruined economy with crumbling infrastructure and 2 immoral/illegal wars by the Conservatives/Repugs and he's gotten down to work in an amazing way with the Conservatives/Repugs opposing everything he's tried to do and he's tried to do things as bipartisanly as possible (something Conservatives never do). Do the reading and research yourself and not just on rightwingnut sites, you're way out of the reality zone.

Time to split the Blue States from the Red as should have been allowed to do at the time of the Civil War and saved a lot of bloodshed. What a difference that would have made - the Union would have been such a much more advanced country than it is now and the Red States would be aligned with the developing world and military dictatorships which much of it would be if independent countries (Mississippi, Lousiana, Idaho et al). Of course, then the Union would have an illegal immigration problem with people trying to escape to a more advanced and civilized place from the Confederacy. Oh well, so be it.

* recommend this (2)

Who is Stephen Hemsley?

More Privatization

From "In These Times"
We’re Public … No, We’re Private
Charter school corporations take on public school teacher unions.

By MICHAEL KLONSKY


On April 23, parents learn whether their children have been admitted to the Harlem Success Academy charter school system in New York. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Under the Bush administration, charter management organizations with deep pockets and powerful supporters overpowered the small, independent teacher-run charter schools.
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What began as an attempt by small groups of urban charter school teachers in Chicago and New York to win collective bargaining rights has exploded into a national battle between teachers’ unions and operators of large charter “chain schools.”

In Chicago, a successful drive to organize three schools run by the city’s largest operator, Chicago International Charter Schools (CICS), and its for-profit subcontractor, Civitas, was temporarily stalled when Civitas management argued that as a private employer it is not covered under rules set down by the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB).

Since its founding in 2004—with a $4-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—Civitas has touted itself as a “public school,” especially when asking for state funding. But in April 2009, when a majority of Civitas teachers at the three Chicago schools signed union cards and the IELRB approved the Chicago Alliance of Charter School Teachers (ACTS) as their representative, Civitas changed its tune. Now the corporation claims that charters are essentially private schools and, as such, the IELRB has no power to recognize any union as the official bargaining unit for charter school teachers. Rather, Civitas insists the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) should decide whether or not to recognize union representation only after a secret-ballot vote. On June 2, the NLRB issued a narrow ruling upholding Civitas’ claim that it is a private entity and that its teachers are private employees.

“What the decision demonstrates is that charter management organizations are private,” Simon Hess, chief executive officer of Civitas, told the Chi-Town Daily News. “That’s part of the entrepreneurial spirit that has come to the public school system.”

The union views it differently, according to ACTS spokeswoman Gail Purkey: “We accepted the ruling as a tactical compromise, only so we could quickly proceed with the election process, which we knew we could win.”

Union meets charter

Charter schools have grown exponentially in the past decade. Today, more than 4,600 charters employ more than 50,000 teachers nationally, and simmering discontent (and even open revolt among a significant group of young, activist teachers) has opened the field to new organizing campaigns by the teachers’ unions.

Union leaders have begun organizing more aggressively, recognizing that charter schools are not going away and keeping a wary eye on potentially competing unions like Service Employees International Union. They’ve also been nudged into this expanding field by recently elected American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. As leader of New York’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT), Weingarten partnered with Green Dot Charter Schools operator Steve Barr to create two of New York City’s new unionized charter schools.

Barr, considered a maverick among charter management organizations (CMOs), started his original Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, taking over several large, dysfunctional inner-city high schools and converting them into smaller and, by some accounts, more successful charters. Green Dot accommodates union teachers with a short and concise contract to protect them from arbitrary firings and untenable working conditions. Its schools are intentionally smaller than L.A.’s traditional high schools, which are among the largest in the nation, with many exceeding 4,000 students. All Green Dot schools are locally managed and rely heavily on teacher autonomy, heavy parent participation and infusions of foundation dollars for their success.

When Barr met resistance from both the L.A. School Board and teachers’ union chief John Duffy, a majority of tenured teachers at Locke High School in Watts voted to leave United Teachers of Los Angeles and signed on with the California Teachers Association, the largest union in the state.

Weingarten and Barr’s current partnership in New York is at least partially responsible for encouraging recent organizing efforts at two New York City charters run by Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the largest chain of CMO-run schools in the nation with 66 schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

In Brooklyn, the KIPP-AMP (Always Mentally Prepared) School has pushed back frantically, targeting pro-union teachers for firing and harassment, according to Leo Casey, the UFT’s vice president in charge of charter schools. The final outcome isn’t assured, as the union and KIPP negotiators struggle over a proposed 25-page contract modeled on Green Dot’s. According to Casey, the KIPP-AMP contract will place a limit on class size and teacher loads. It will give teachers greater say and put them on decision-making committees. There is also a strong “just cause” standard, making it difficult to fire teachers without due process.

The charter school vision

Early school reformers and visionaries who created the first charter schools nearly 20 years ago saw charters as incubators of public school innovation, experimental pilot schools and teacher-led learning communities. These were progressives and education activists—hardly the hard-line, anti-union types who dominate charter school associations today. One of the most outspoken charter advocates at the time was none other than then AFT President Albert Shanker. The goal of early charter school advocates was school autonomy.

In 1991, Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota and a critic of the charter operators’ union-busting tactics, helped write the nation’s first state charter law. “In the Minnesota charter law,” Nathan says, “it is explicit that charter schools are public … there’s nothing inconsistent with our teachers being union teachers.” Nathan adds that moves to declare charters as private or efforts to block unionization are “inconsistent with the charter ideal or good public policy.”

He points out that unionization wasn’t an issue back then because most charter teachers were already union members and felt ownership of the schools they had helped create. Often they constituted their own small boards along with parents and community members.

The idea was to create a decentralized space within the big, bureaucratic system. The trade-off was autonomy for accountability, meaning that if the new, small schools weren’t meeting the expectations laid out in the charter, the schools could lose their charters and be closed.

All of that began to change under the Bush administration’s ownership society and “No Child Left Behind” policies. CMOs with deep pockets and support from conservative think tanks and foundations—as well as from Bush’s Department of Education—overpowered the small, teacher-run charters, not unlike the way large food chains have replaced mom-and-pop grocery stores.

The rise of the CMOs brought with it a top-down efficiency model and an aggressive management style. It also brought at-will firings of unprotected teachers and principals, 16-hour work days, pre-packaged curricula and abnormally high teacher attrition rates. In this new vision, charters were seen as business-model schools, complete with quotas for rapid Starbucks-like economies of scale.

President Barack Obama has broken with much of the ownership society legacy—especially in terms of support for school vouchers—though he and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are both big fans of charter schools. Duncan has used his bully pulpit to pump the charter cause and has even threatened states with loss of stimulus funds if they fail to increase the numbers of charter schools in their districts. One big difference from the previous eight years is that the AFT and the National Education Association (NEA) are now at the table pushing for collective bargaining rights for charter school teachers and other accountability measures for charter operators.

At a recent gathering of the nation’s governors, Duncan called on them to “break through the dynamic that positions charters against unions.” After invoking Shanker’s name, he pointed out that “the AFT represents something like 70 charters and the NEA represents another 40. So we should stop fighting over charter caps and unite behind charter accountability.”

Only in the past two years has the leadership of the AFT and NEA come to accept charter schools as a permanent reality. The questions of whether they indeed are public or private and whether their teachers can win the same collective bargaining rights are now being hotly debated, negotiated and litigated.

“Charter teachers are saying they want a voice in their workplace,” UTF’s Casey says. Meanwhile, labor movement and public education eyes would do well to keep a close watch on the coming charter school battles, especially in large urban districts like New York and Chicago.

UPDATE, 8/3/09: Teachers at the three Civitas schools voted 73-49 to unionize in late June, joining the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers & Staff (Chicago ACTS), an affiliate of the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) and AFT. They are currently negotiating their contracts with Civitas Schools.

GET INVOLVED:

Alliance of Charter School Teachers and Staff
Green Dot

Physicians for a National Health Program

Why not let the so-called "Free Market" work?

Why we don't let the free market work is because it cannot work on it's own without guidance. But let them try. Let AIG and J.P.Morgan and Bank of America fail, and all the rest of them fail. Copyright laws are government interference as well, let's get rid of them.
Total anarchy in the market! Or should we just hide behind the fear of socialism? The laws that allow people to be evicted from their home are a form of government interference.
How far should we shape the language and laws around those who have most of the power and money?
They are ready to kill you, destroy your life, so they can stay in power. You let them define the rules they shape against you.

Next they want to put you in the position of being totally powerless. So that you cannot rise against them. They know that sooner or later you will wake from liberal dream enough to see what they are actually doing to your life. They are hoping that it will be too late for you to know what to do.

Worker id cards for everyone!

BIG SCHUMER IS WATCHING YOU – New York senator wants to force every American worker to carry an electronic federal ID card
Posted in Uncategorized by gangbox on the June 16, 2009
from the LOS ANGELES TIMES:

Worker ID cards expected to stir up immigration debate

Paul J. Richards / AFP-Getty Images
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y) will lead the effort to craft the Senate’s comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation.
Sen. Charles Schumer supports a worker ID card for all Americans. Business groups warm up to the idea, but labor activists and the ACLU have concerns.
By Teresa Watanabe

June 16, 2009

As the immigration reform debate begins to heat up again, some observers expect that one of the biggest and most controversial new elements will be a proposed national worker identification card for all Americans.

A “forgery-proof” worker ID card, secured with biometric data such as fingerprints, is an idea favored by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y), the new chairman of the immigration subcommittee. Schumer, who will lead the effort to craft the Senate’s comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation, called the card the best way to ensure that all workers were authorized.

“The ID will make it easy for employers to avoid undocumented workers, which will allow for tough sanctions against employers who break the law, which will lead to no jobs being available for illegal immigrants, which will stop illegal immigration,” Schumer wrote in his 2007 book, “Positively American.”

“Once Americans are convinced that we will permanently staunch the flow of illegal immigration, they will be more willing to accept constructing a path toward earned citizenship for those who are already here.”

A Schumer aide said last week that the senator would probably present the worker ID card idea at a hearing this summer on employee verification systems. The senator previously held a hearing on border enforcement and plans to hold three more this summer — on future immigrant flows, legalization of illegal immigrants and worker verification — before introducing a comprehensive bill in the fall, the aide said.

The idea of a worker ID card is embraced by some business and community organizations. But it has touched off fears among some labor activists and the American Civil Liberties Union about civil rights violations and a “big brother” intrusion into private lives.

In his book, Schumer proposed requiring every American worker, citizen and noncitizen, to apply for an identity card.

Some activists worry that any ID card proposal could divide the immigrant rights community between those opposed to its perceived dangers and those willing to accept it as part of a compromise that would legalize many of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

“The bottom line is that this would be really expensive, really invasive and people will hate it,” said Chris Calabrese, counsel for the ACLU’s technology and liberty project.

Maria Elena Durazo, who heads the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, said she would not want employers to control any worker verification system because they could selectively use it to punish people advocating labor rights or union organization.

Immigration lawyer Peter Schey said it would be nearly impossible to monitor the nation’s 26 million employers for compliance with a worker verification system. As a result, he and others argue, the best way to discourage illegal immigration is by strict enforcement of wage and hour laws, and by serious penalties on employers who violate them.

Business leaders say they want to be sure they will not be saddled with high costs or liability for any new verification system.

Some business groups have opposed the idea of making mandatory the system known as E-Verify. The online system allows employers to check the citizenship status and work eligibility of new employees.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce spokesman Angelo Amador said employers never knew whether the passports, driver’s licenses or Social Security cards being presented were genuine. But he said anyone presenting a worker ID card would be assumed legal, subject to confirmation by checking on a national database.

“It takes away the burden on employers of being ID experts,” Amador said.

Most activists say they are waiting for details before weighing in. But some say they may ultimately have to compromise.

“At the end of the day, if we’re going to achieve legalization of a major share of the undocumented, we realize there will have to be some give and take over worker verification,” said Mike Garcia, president of the Service Employees International Union Local 1877 in Los Angeles. “We’re not against it necessarily if all of the other pieces of immigration reform fall into place.”

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

We need a competition movement!

Senate passes anti-trust measure
By Aurea Calica Updated June 03, 2009 12:00 AM

MANILA, Philippines - The Senate has passed on third and final reading the anti-trust bill that prohibits and penalizes business cartels and monopolies to protect consumers from abuse.

Senate Bill No. 3197 or the Competition Act of 2009 will discipline the country’s market system to avoid unfair trade and anti-competitive practices.

The bill authored by Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, Senators Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Antonio Trillanes IV, Manuel Roxas II and Edgardo Angara defined and imposed penalties for business cartels, monopolies, monopoly power or abuse of market power through price fixing and price discrimination, bid rigging, limitation and control of markets, agreement to limit and or control markets, and tie-in arrangements.

Enrile said the anti-trust bill would cover not only oil companies but also pharmaceutical, cement, food products and other industries where there is possible collusion among traders.

Enrile said that the proposed law is patterned after anti-trust laws in the United States and in some European countries, the purpose of which is to foster sound business ethics that would protect the ordinary consumers.

Cartelization includes the following agreements: Fix selling price of goods or other terms of sale; limit supply or output; divide the market, whether by volume of sales or purchase or by territory, by type of goods sold, by customers or sellers, or by any other means; exclude or limit dealings with particular suppliers or sellers from supplying or selling goods, or customers from acquiring of buying goods; applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage; and making the transactions in particular goods dependent upon other conditions which have no connection with subject of the transaction.

The penalties that can be imposed for every violation cover a fine of not less than P10 million and not exceeding P50 million for a person; P250 million to P750 million if a firm and imprisonment not exceeding 10 years or both at the discretion of the court.

“In the alternative, a fine shall be imposed in the amount double the gross proceeds gained by the violator or double the gross loss suffered by the plaintiffs,” the bill read.

The Senate President explained that despite the existence of laws aiming to foster competition in the industries, they proved to be inadequate to stop the detriments of anti-competitive structures and behavior in the market. “Moreover, while there are special laws which have provisions that encourage competition, it is a fact that not one corporation was ever prosecuted for anti-trust acts,” he said.

“We need to enact an anti-trust measure. In fact, the adoption of a competition policy has been included in the Medium-Term Development Plan for 2004 — 2010 to create a competitive environment not only to ensure efficiency among big business firms and corporations,” Enrile further said. 

“More importantly, we need to foster an environment that is conducive for the development of micro, small and medium enterprises, he said.

Remember Anti-Trust? It's time to find some balance

New Mood in Antitrust May Target Google
By STEVE LOHR and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: May 17, 2009
For decades, the nation’s biggest antitrust cases have centered on technology companies. And they have all been efforts by the government to deal with powerful companies with far-reaching influence, like AT&T, the telephone monopoly; I.B.M., the mainframe computer giant; and Microsoft, the powerhouse of personal computer software.

Related
Times Topics: Google Inc.
Last week, the Obama administration declared a sharp break with the Bush years, vowing to toughen antitrust enforcement, especially for dominant companies. The approach is closer to that of the European Union, where regulators last week fined Intel $1.45 billion for abusing its power in the chip market.
In this new climate, the stakes appear to be highest for Google, the rising power of the Internet economy.
The new antitrust leadership, legal experts say, is likely to scrutinize networks — technology platforms that become so dominant that everyone feels the need to plug into them. The advantages to the companies that control such networks snowball as they attract more users, advertisers or software developers.
Internet search and search advertising, like personal computer operating software, is one example, said Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert at the University of Iowa law school. “Google is a dominant network, as is Microsoft,” Mr. Hovenkamp said. “Networks become competitive only if everyone has the same chance.”
Google’s corporate behavior is already being closely monitored. Last year, Google abandoned a planned search advertising partnership with Yahoo after the Justice Department said it intended to file suit to block the agreement on antitrust grounds. Google has 64 percent of the Web search market in America, while Yahoo has 21 percent and Microsoft 8 percent, according to comScore, a research firm.
In recent weeks, antitrust officials have opened two inquiries. The Justice Department is looking into Google’s settlement with authors and publishers for its book-search service to see if it violates antitrust laws. And the Federal Trade Commission is examining whether Google’s sharing two board members with Apple reduces competition, because both companies offer Web browsers and phone operating systems.
Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said this month that the close scrutiny was not surprising. “Information is incredibly important, and we should expect governments around the world to pay attention to what we do,” he said.
Google’s power is a cause of worry in many industries — media, advertising, telecommunications and software. Yet being large, successful and ambitious is not an antitrust violation. “You’ve got to be big, and you have to be bad,” observed Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. “You have to be both.”
In the Microsoft case, the software giant’s monopoly in personal computer operating systems was not an antitrust problem. It was its corporate actions, including using contracts and bullying tactics to stifle competition, that broke the law, the federal courts ruled. Such strong-arm practices, legal experts say, have not been part of the Google story.
Unless Google is shown to engage in a pattern of anticompetitive conduct, the company is likely to face constant scrutiny, but not a major federal suit, antitrust experts say. Even with misconduct, they say, complex antitrust cases like the one against Microsoft take years to come to fruition. “There will be a lot of agonizing about Google, and it will raise concerns, but I don’t see a big Google case in the offing,” said Michael Katz, an economist at the Stern School of Business of New York University.
Instead, Google is likely to be watched step by step. One area to observe, antitrust experts say, is whether Google uses its search engine to give it a leg up in new businesses.
Last month, the company announced that Google Profiles, a service that gives people a page to publish their name, photo and other personal information, would be featured below Google’s search results when someone typed in a name. That could give Google Profiles an edge over profiles from Facebook and other social networks, which have to earn their search result rankings.
Google, said Randal C. Picker, an antitrust expert at the University of Chicago law school, is using its search engine to “leverage” another Google service. Such tactics, he said, echo Microsoft’s linking of its Windows operating system to its Web browser. “It is the kind of thing that is likely to get antitrust attention,” Mr. Picker said.
The company says Google Profiles is an effort to improve Web search, and comes in response to users’ requests for greater control over their online identities. Google also says its software scans other social networks, and those results typically appear near the top of a search for a person’s name. “We designed Profiles to encourage user choice, not limit it,” said Adam Kovacevich, a Google spokesman.
In her speech last week, Christine A. Varney, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said the touchstone of antitrust policy should be “the protection of consumer welfare.”
By that standard, Google seems an elusive target for antitrust enforcers, since most of its services are free. And in the new markets it is entering, including cellphone software and online alternatives to desktop programs, Google is an insurgent going up against large, well-heeled rivals, notably Microsoft.
“If what Google really has is an enormous scale advantage in Internet search and advertising — and it is not engaged in exclusionary or other bad behavior — I would be very reluctant to step in,” said Mr. Hovenkamp of the University of Iowa.

Get a Union Starbucks

Privatizing Local Gov't in six easy steps

Here are two papers supporting privatization. At their site, there are many more.




Posted: May. 15, 1999
Six Steps to Privatizing Local Government Services

If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. In the case of privatization, not doing it right could be worse than not doing it at all. Poorly privatized municipal services not only give privatization a bad name, they can cost more than leaving inefficient government services in place. Local officials considering privatization should keep their eyes on the goal: to reinforce and enhance their ability to govern and increase the level and quality of services for their constituents.
Privatization Manual

Reason Foundation/Mackinac Center for Public Policy "how-to" manual, Designing Comprehensive Privatization Programs for Cities, is available from the Mackinac Center for $10.00 postpaid. Call (989) 631-0900.

The nuts and bolts of a comprehensive privatization program should include the following:

Choosing the Privatization Team. Local officials should choose carefully a highly qualified team to design and implement the privatization program.

Team members should understand that for privatization to be successful, vendors and investors must realize a certain level of economic return. They must be able to develop alternative plans that balance a government’s constraints and opportunities with the often rigorous requirements of private investors and the capital market. They should know and have access to vendors for contracting. They should be able to conduct exhaustive financial analyses and develop alternative deal structures from the perspectives of both the government and the private sector. Finally, they should be particularly sensitive and responsive to the participating public, special interests, media, and voters.

Privatization Techniques. Most governments using privatization to generate new revenue or reduce costs typically use only one or two types of privatization. The most common types of privatization are contracting out public services to the private sector and selling off government-owned enterprises in their entirety.

Identifying Privatization Opportunities. There are typically many more opportunities for privatization than local officials realize for solving problems involving government-owned assets, facility operations, services, debt structure, and other facilities and infrastructure. Identifying these involves assembling and organizing data, establishing criteria to qualify each privatization opportunity for implementation, and applying privatization techniques to the fullest possible range of government services and facilities.

Another technique, made famous by Indianapolis, Indiana, Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, is called "competing-out" contracts. Goldsmith allows his public-sector employees to bid on contracts in competition with private vendors. One Indianapolis union local has actually been able to increase its membership by winning the lion’s share of contracts on which it bids.

By applying one or more privatization techniques to the wide range of government assets, facilities, infrastructure, subsidized agencies, and other government activities, a city-wide privatization program could yield 100-200 opportunities.

Evaluating Privatization Opportunities. Once privatization opportunities are identified, they must be evaluated in detail to determine whether they should proceed to implementation. Each privatization opportunity is put through exhaustive financial feasibility, legal review and cost/benefit analyses. These analyses will require additional data. Moreover, each privatization opportunity should be tested against the evaluation criteria established earlier.

Developing Implementation Plans. Plans should be drawn for the privatization opportunities that receive a high ranking. These plans should outline the specific steps required to complete the transaction. They typically include detailed financial analyses and implementation schedules; clearly assign the responsibilities of each party; outline the bid solicitation process; evaluate the bids; specify how negotiation with winning bidder should be conducted; and explain how the required contractual arrangement should be prepared.

Overcoming Obstacles to Privatization. Privatization efforts face many obstacles, including existing legislation and regulations, public employee resistance, misperceptions about privatization, and a general resistance by governments to change. Privatization programs, if they are to be successful, must incorporate innovative strategies to overcome obstacles to privatization early in the program. You can improve your chances of a successful privatization effort by a) doing your homework; b) ensuring that you maintain the desired level of control over the service being bid; c) clearly explaining the performance standards you expect; d) keeping all parties to the transaction informed during the process; and e) establishing and adhering to a strict monitoring process.

Conclusion. Traditional methods of solving budget crises such as tax increases, deep service cuts, or issuing short-term debt have significant economic or political pitfalls. Comprehensive privatization programs offer city governments a way to maximize revenue, cut costs and make greater use of private capital for public services and facilities.

Comprehensive programs offer three main advantages over traditional governing strategies. First, they afford governments greater flexibility by allowing officials to choose between a variety of privatization techniques for solving each problem.

Second, the cumulative economic impact of implementing all, or some portion of, the menu of privatization opportunities is potentially much greater and longer lasting than short-term fixes such as tax increases or bond offerings.

Lastly, if governments properly manage the privatization process and carefully monitor the implemented privatization projects, government spending can be held in check and high quality can be achieved.
Publication: Michigan Privatization Report
Next page: Is There Gold in Garbage?
This text is part of the larger publication:
Privatizationville: Privatization at the Local Level


Is There Gold in Garbage?
By Mr. Michael D. LaFaive / Posted: May. 15, 1999
Landfill Graph

In Flint's 1995 Fiscal Year the appropriations made for the city's sanitary landfill and refuse collection dropped by 31% from the previous Fiscal Year. Since then city spending on the sanitary landfill and refuse collection have increased faster than the rate of inflation.

City mayors are often scrounging around in their budgets, looking for that gold nugget of savings that will make the city richer. Sometimes that nugget even shows up in the garbage. That was the story in Flint in the early months of 1994.

Flint’s mayor, Woodrow Stanley, had long been frustrated by the cost of collecting garbage in his city. In the hope of driving these costs down, Stanley solicited bids from five private companies. The bid numbers returned to him confirmed his suspicion: Privatization could cut the city’s total cost by a whopping $2 million.

Flint’s city employee unions knew the mayor was serious, and to their credit, worked with him to develop a plan that would shave about $1.4 million from the budget. Specifics of the proposal included offers to: a) increase the number of stops on each route from 665 to 775; b) reduce the number of shifts from two to one; 3) cut the sanitation staff from 47 to 35; 4) pick up bulk items along with regular garbage instead of doing that on overtime; and 5) require workers to work a full eight-hour day instead of going home early as they often had done in the past.

These concessions were enough to convince the mayor to keep the service in-house. It has now been five years since the mayor decided to retain the work of city employees for refuse hauling, instead of opening up the process to private companies. How much have things changed?

The results have been mixed. In 1995, the year the reforms took effect, total spending for waste collection alone dropped by 31% from the previous year, from $3,491,000 to $2,399,000. The cost of maintaining the sanitary landfill dropped by 30%, from $1.3 million to just over $970,000. Bulk waste, which had cost the city nearly $400,000 in 1994, was eliminated as a separate line item in the budget. Such collections are now made during regular waste pick-up hours and factored into waste collection spending. After five years, the city of Flint still is operating its refuse collection and landfill service for less than it was in 1994.

The bad news is that the proposed Fiscal Year 2000 budget signals a five-year climb in operational expenses for refuse collection and sanitary landfill operations of 17% and 34%, respectively. If present trends continue, the total growth in Flint’s refuse budget (collection and landfill) will have outpaced inflation of 15.7% since 1995. In addition, these figures do not include the cost of employee fringe benefits. Health, vision, and dental costs alone may run as high as $7,039.08 per employee per year.

The increased costs come as Flint loses population. The 1990 U. S. Census indicated that Flint had 140,761 citizens. By 1993 that number had dropped to 137,901 and by 1996 stood at 134,881. From 1993-1996 the city lost an average of 755 residents per year. If those trends continue, by the end of 1999 the city will have 4,227 fewer citizens than it did when Mayor Stanley collected bids on refuse hauling. That is 4,227 people from whom it no longer needs to collect refuse. Fewer people should mean less garbage. Less garbage should mean fewer workers. Does it?

In 1995, the city of Flint maintained a full-time sanitation staff of 35 and a part-time complement of 10. By 1998, that figure had risen to 40 full-time and 6 part-time staff. By the year 2000 the city of Flint estimates that it will require 40 full-time employees and 10 part-time employees to handle its sanitation work.

The mayor should consider another look at privatization. It has been five years since the mayor solicited bids from private contractors for refuse collection. The mayor should again ask for bids from firms to do the collection work of city employees. This time the lowest bidder who can meet the city’s standards should win outright.

Another idea is to shed the responsibility of garbage collection and landfill work altogether and eliminate the city tax on property (currently 3 mills) that is used for those purposes. Flint citizens could hire their own garbage collectors, just as it is been done in Traverse City for businesses and people since 1986 and 1990, respectively.

While this idea may sound bold to some, the fact of the matter is that different neighborhoods have different requirements for garbage collection, just as they do for other services. One-size-fits-all programs are notoriously inefficient, and once the various neighborhoods had their own garbage collection programs in place, citizens would probably be amazed at how much better their services are. And the city would be amazed that it held on to this headache for so long.

Mayor Stanley should consider mining Flint’s balance sheet for savings. The last time he went digging Flint shaved a $1.4 million gold nugget from its refuse collection tab. Issuing another bid for proposals from private-sector firms wouldn’t take much effort, and the returns to the city from privatization would be impressive.
Publication: Michigan Privatization Report
Next page: Local Economic Development: Public or Private?
This text is part of the larger publication:
Privatizationville: Privatization at the Local Level