Tag: capitalism

The original title of this diary was to be “Toward a Leftist Program by the Working Class, for the Working Class”, an neat, academic-sounding title reflecting an admirable goal: how can we, whatever our class background or position on the left, understand the needs and goals of working people in the United States and help to catalyze the development of a political program that reflects those needs and goals, one ideally led by the working class itself?

Looking at the critical ingredients of such a program, the lack of one especially stands out to me: the paralyzing absence of any significant consciousness among American workers of themselves as a class apart, one locked in a harrowing and historic struggle with the ruling class for the control of their lives and futures. The purpose of this diary, then, is to consider this problem in general programmatic terms using the thoughts proffered below as a point of departure.

Before going further, I hasten to note that I am not an academic, theorist, or long-time activist, just a working class guy and ecumenical socialist who was lucky enough to get a broad education. I am intent on understanding how my own class, so numerous and possessing a proud history of action and achievement, can embrace and use its own enormous power and what, if anything, the serious left can do to catalyze revolutionary working class consciousness.

Most probably people have heard of the bizarre investigative journalism by The Mail on Sunday in an article which appeared on Easter Sunday (of all days in the year). The Mail on Sunday sent in a reporter, a wannabe Jimmy Olsen, to investigate provision of food by food-banks in Britain and that reporter literally took food out of the mouths of the hungry in order to prove some point. This provoked a backlash on social media that demonstrated that the neoliberal agenda seems to not have sunk too deeply in the hearts and minds of the British people. That is a relief and quite honestly more than I expected, given the constant barrage in the newspapers and on the news on telly that has never questioned the logic (forget the morality) of welfare caps and cuts to welfare benefits.

ht: my sister Mia for comments and editing on this piece

No one should be surprised these days when yet another company goes belly-up in these difficult financial times, especially in devastated economies such as Spain.  Yet the bankruptcy of Fagor, the flagship cooperative in the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) has shaken many anti-capitalists around the world as akin to witnessing the ending of Camelot. The fact that at least two of the other largest cooperatives in the Mondragon network, Caja Laboral (the bank and financial center of the corporation) and Eroski (a chain of retail stores throughout Europe)  are in dire financial straits has only added to the ominous threat.

Fagor, with its 5,600 workers, is a relatively small part of the whole. Even so, Trevino (Fagor’s CEO) warns that its fall “will have an uncontrollable domino effect on the rest of the group with major social implications.” He believes Fagor’s liquidation would create a €480m hole at Mondragon, including inter-group loans and payments the group’s insurance arm would have to make on Fagor workers’ unemployment policies.

Mondragon has promised to find new jobs or offer early-retirement terms for as many as it can of Fagor’s Spanish workers, but this is a tall order in a country with 27% unemployment. Besides their jobs, workers stand to lose the money they had invested in the co-op if it is liquidated.

Demystifying the Mondragon Myth

For the last 50 some years, the growth of what is now the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation has given many anarchists, socialists and other progressives in the cooperative movement the hope that yes, Virginia, there really is a viable alternative to Capitalism or, at the very least, an economic system that could provide a transition to socialism. Moreover, although many socialists won’t easily admit it, there is often the underlying hope that somehow this transition could occur “peacefully”, without a real class struggle ending in state ownership; that somehow, within the belly of the beast of capitalism, the cooperative model could “out compete” the capitalist multinationals at their own game and become the dominant economic paradigm.

Yet, as one blogger commented in Alternatives to Capitalism,

“There is no escaping the need to challenge Wall Street and the other big financial centers across the world for political and economic power which requires a well-organized and intense class struggle […] something the promoters of these cooperative schemes try to evade as they try to convince workers there are ways around bringing mines, mills and factories under public ownership which is going to require the nationalization of entire industries.”

Today we are fortunate to have a diary describing the current condition of domestic workers in Mexico. This is an issue which has received increasing attention in the last three years. A long-time activist in the Domestic Worker Movement, Irene Ortiz Rosen,  is the Co-Founder  and Director of Collectivo Atabal,  an organization of activists and  feminists formed to defend the rights, dignity and demands of domestic workers in Mexico City. She is also the Co-Author of “Así es, Pues” a socio-economic study of domestic workers in Cuernavaca. A recent emigrant from Mexico, she approaches the subject from a global perspective which emphasizes the class and anti-imperialist aspects of the struggle as well as its patriarchal nature.

In the world of labor, a large group of women whose work is the maintenance of the homes of others is largely ignored-domestic workers. According to the ILO, there are more than 52 million domestic workers in the world.

In almost all countries, domestic workers share the following characteristics:  1) invisibility; 2) migration; 3) low levels of education; 4) gender, ethnic and racial discrimination; and 5) the informality of their labor. These are all products of poverty.



Domestic workers make up an invisible workforce because their work is carried out in the private sphere, that is, the homes of their employers. Their contract is verbal, their work is isolated, and their mobility is common.

Generally they are migrants, usually, within their own countries. This is the case for indigenous women  and women who come from rural areas in Latin America.  And as the gap in inequality grows throughout the world, in the poorest countries the phenomenon of migration (usually without papers) is growing beyond borders.  That is how they arrive to United States and Canada, by informally working as House Cleaning Personnel, Nannies and Home Attendants. In New York alone, we are talking about more than 200 thousand people who are working under disadvantaged conditions due to their Undocumented status.



Their discrimination is shared with nearly all women, and its logic corresponds to the subordination of women in a patriarchal culture. Within the patriarchal view of the traditional role of women, their work is an extension of the reproductive role, which is considered natural for their gender.  

We should not forget that women in general, as housewives and mothers, perform domestic work without any pay whatever. Consequently, their work is not considered part of the national economy despite the fact that it makes up about 20% of the GDP. If a woman looks for waged work, she enters the labor market in a disadvantaged way; forty-five percent of women domestic workers receive salaries that are 10% lower than salaries received by men for the same work.

Global economic policies that have impoverished the majority of the world´s population have brought women in all countries into  the public sphere. The women working in the public sphere then need to hire a domestic worker to care for their children and home. However, because they, themselves, are not paid well, they are unable to pay a fair  wage, even if they value the services being performed by domestic help.

Commentary: Markets need morals and regulators need muscle

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) – “Is the entire stock market (and the system it supports) completely corrupted?”

When that question appeared in a recent MarketWatch poll, 76% of the nearly 1,400 respondents agreed with: “Yes, it’s legalized theft.”

Legalized theft? Like the bribes Mexican police demand or the taxes dictators seize to build villas? Investors think the stock market is theft?

http://www.marketwatch.com/sto…

And the answer given is that the investors are surely right in the headline article in a business site that obviously leans right.

Huh?

Kos and Ed [Schulze] and most anyone that has even a pretense to liberal credentials says we gotta go along with the most egregious corruption and a rightwing business source says that is wrong?

Has the world turned upside down again?

Of course it’s nonsensical to expect businesses in the hunt for money to place a high priority on morality except as a business tactic.  It is akin to asking coyotes to stop eating sheep.

The real problem is the like of Kos and Ed seeking love in all the wrong places and, in a different vein, the same could be said of Obama and Pelosi. Even the wingers are scandalized.

Best,  Terry

Adam Smith’s capitalism is as different from Mitt Romney’s as a robin is from a buzzard.

Understand please that humans throw around terminology that has dubious relation to reality but how might one not be able to distinguish a small greedy street peddler struggling for survival with a giant corporation raiding other giants for all their cash and readily salable assets, loading it up with debt to further enrich the plunderers and then shipping the pitiful remains to China or other poor countries where they may survive only through the use of even child or slave labor?

The latter tend to represent socialism (in its true sense) more than anything remotely resembling the theories of Adam Smith.  Europe’s prosperous northern tier of “socialist” countries are not socialist at all in any meaningful sense such as the kibbutzim of early Israel that produced wealth but weighed too heavily on the people to continue long.

It is hardly unknown for poisons to be utilized as medicine with beneficial effect.

As children we got into an old visiting doctor’s bag in a day when doctors made house calls.  I was startled even at a very tender age to find a container of strychnine used to poison coyotes by whipping up the heart beyond the limits of its ability.

The doctor explained that he was able to use the strychnine in what could be fatal doses for healthy people to sometimes revive a dying heart patient.

Vampire bat saliva has been used for strokes, proteins from the rabies virus may be more efficacious in smuggling drugs across the blood-brain barrier than Vitamin C.

Most all vaccines utilize a poison, an adjuvant, to alert and direct the immune system to vigorously attack a pathogen or even an internal enemy like cancer.

Prof. Yvonne Paterson spent decades experimenting with the often lethal Listeria bacterium as a vaccine adjuvant but Big Pharma shuddered in fright at the thought of giving deathly ill cancer patients (the primary target) with blasted immune systems a shot of Listeria, even in a weakened form.  Today they are far more interested in pushing conventional and junk branded medicine than in ultra-expensive risky research, let alone what Yvonne Patersonm had to offer.

Much smaller fry were not tempted either.

Then one courageous, daffy sort raised money from the most notorious of all financial predators with death spiral convertibles to run a Phase I trial and had blazing success IMO.  Of 13 patients, 2 had their widely metastasized cancers disappear without a trace.  

This was not the diabolical melanoma that seems capable of doing a disappearing act with most anything and then rapidly mutates and returns with a vengeance, meaner and more hurtful than ever.  It was cervical cancer that is easily cured in early stages but very aggressive and mostly impervious to any attack in later stages.

Then the company and the vaccine were dead again – a bled out corpse done in by the financial predator.

Then it was resuscitated with a ton of money and a mighty struggle by a tainted promoter and now it may well die again.  Angry shareholders who dreamed of a cornucopia of wealth quickly are mad, mad, mad and want to sue and want Big Pharma to buy what they didn’t want before and lawyers may be preparing for their favorite chase: ambulances.

This puny capitalist has pitched some pennies in the pot (literally pennies – I may be stupid but that doesn’t necessarily mean I am a fool).  I do love inventors and people doggedly pursuing their dreams and hate cancer.  

Maybe then after all, I am a fool as well.  I have seen Lazarus walk [not a dead Lazarus but a doomed Lazarus].  Probably would have been better had I not.

The very bad guys will probably win again Friday and Lazarus can remain safely in his grave.

Best,  Terry

Bhaskar Sunkara’s recent essay in The Nation, Letter to ‘The Nation’ From a Young Radical, argues persuasively that American liberalism is “practically ineffective and analytically inadequate” to the twin political tasks of mobilizing supporters and generating policy.  Sunkara blames the crisis of liberalism on the fact that, “Liberalism’s original sin lies in its lack of a dynamic theory of power,” which leads liberals–Sunkara specifically cites Obama–to treat

politics as a salon discussion between polite people with competing ideas. . . [in which] the best program … is assumed to prevail in the end…[and] political action is disconnected … from the bloody entanglement of interests and passions that mark our lived existence.

Admitting that liberalism is “a slippery term” Sunkara defines it in terms of the two dominant species of Washington Democratic insiders, which he defines as follows:

to the extent that we can assign coherence to the ideology, two main camps of modern American liberalism are identifiable: welfare liberals and technocratic liberals. The former, without the radicals they so often attacked marching at their left, have not adequately moored their efforts to the working class, while the latter naïvely disconnect policy from politics, often with frightening results.

Both sorts of liberalism, Sunkara argues, have failed analytically and politically, though in different ways and for different reasons. Nevertheless, Sankara has the same prescription: “the solution to liberalism’s impasse lies in the re-emergence of American radicalism.”  

What would that look like? The first task is that

Socialists must urgently show progressives how alien the technocratic liberal worldview is to the goals of welfare-state liberalism-goals held by the rank and file of the liberal movement. … Broad anti-austerity coalitions, particularly those centered at the state and municipal levels like last year’s Chicago Teachers Union strike, point the way toward new coalitions between leftists and liberals committed to defending social goods.

But anti-austerity is not, of course, the full program, but

just one example of the kind of class politics that has to be reconstituted in America today; surely there are many others. The Next Left’s anti-austerity struggles must be connected to the environmental movement, to the struggle of immigrants for labor and citizenship rights, and even, as unromantic as it sounds, to the needs of middle-class service recipients.

Although Sunkara’s essay, like his groundbreaking publication Jacobin Magazine, is an important attempt at creating bridges between liberals and radicals during a time of onslaught by the corporate Right, even as it demonstrates the analytical weakness of liberalism, it suffers from some of the very same analytical inadequacies of liberalism itself, especially its lack of a dynamic theory of power.

Specifically, Sunkara’s categories of analysis are rooted in politics and ideology, with no moorings in the social formation beyond a few statements about working class support for social welfare liberalism–statements which fail to recognize the accomplishments wrought via American working class and subaltern self-activity. In light of this, it is perhaps not surprising–though it ought to be–that a self-described “young radical” had no place in his analysis for a discussion of capitalism as an exploitative economic system whose nature is at the root of or contributes greatly to every one of the social problems liberals profess to care about.