• Why Finland might soon pay every citizen $850 per month
• Hamilton Spectator  

    By  Rick Noack 

       

   

    There certainly has been some frustration in recent months over reports claiming that Finland simply does everything better. "Stop the Scandimania: Nordic nations aren't the utopias they're made out to be," British journalist Michael Booth, for instance, wrote earlier this year in The Washington Post. 

   

    But some Finnish initiatives are worth noting anyway: For instance, Finland is considering a plan to give every citizen about $850 per month—no matter whether the money goes to someone who is unemployed, retired or has a job. The benefit would not be taxed and would replace all benefits currently paid by the country's social security system. 

   

    At first glimpse, the idea appears to be the easiest way to raise unemployment. But the Finnish government wants to achieve the opposite and thinks it has the right idea. Unemployment already is at a record high in the country—partly because those affected faced a harsh trade-off in the past: Unemployed people who accept a temporary job often receive less money, compared to their previous unemployment benefits. Considering an average wage of $3,600 per month, a basic income of $850 does not amount to a lot. 

• It's a problem Americans are unlikely to encounter in the foreseeable future. But in Finland, about 70 percent of the population favors the idea, which would come close to establishing a national basic income. At this stage, it remains uncertain whether the proposal—expected to be submitted next year—will ever become reality. However, leading politicians have embraced the concept. "For me, a basic income means simplifying the social security system," Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipilä was quoted as saying. 

   

    Indeed, Finland has missed out on more economic growth due to rising inequalities than any other developed country in recent years. In a report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) examining 21 wealthy countries, Finland was one of the surprising losers. 

   

    Although there have been similar demands for a national basic income in Switzerland, most other European countries remain opposed to the idea. Germany, for instance, has taken the opposite approach, which is often credited for the current economic boom in the country. 

   

    In his Agenda 2010, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder made it harder for unemployed people who were unwilling to accept job offers to receive benefits. After a certain deadline, payments are stopped. In Finland, it seems, politicians facing a similar problem think a different approach could be more successful. 

   

    

  Washington Post

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• Finland considers scrapping welfare payments in favour of universal basic income
• December 8, 2015

• IT’S already one of the happiest countries in the world, now Finland could become one of the wealthiest with a plan to pay citizens a universal income of more than $1100 a month.

  The universal basic income experiment is being explored by Kela — the Finnish Social Insurance Institute — as a way to empower people and make the social security system more in tune with the labour market.

• The plan to scrap welfare payments in favour of the $1180 (EUR800) monthly lump sum is also designed to reduce red-tape and streamline the complicated welfare system.

  Prime Minister Juha Sipilä is said to be in favour of the idea which is also backed by political parties.

  “For me, a basic income means simplifying the social security system,” said the man who earlier this year opened his home to refugees amid a housing crisis with the philosophy that “we should all take a look in the mirror and ask how we can help.”

  A study earlier this year found that nearly 70 per cent of the population were also supportive and Kela is now exploring the possibility in a project led by researchers from universities and think tanks representing entrepreneurs and innovators.

• A report will be presented in spring 2016 with the scheme potentially launched in 2017.

  Bloomberg estimates the plan will cost the country of nearly 5 million people around $77 billion (EUR52 billion) a year to run.

  The progressive Nordic country is also renowned for providing baby boxes to expectant mothers, which has been a tradition for 75 years, along with some of the world’s most generous welfare policies.

3 more annotations...

• 30 April 2014 Last updated at 09:53 ET     
   
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  'Africa's Che Guevara': Thomas Sankara's legacy

                 By Alex Duval Smith  BBC News, Ouagadougou

• The late president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara - an icon for many young Africans in the 1980s - remains to some a heroic "African Che Guevara", 27 years after his assassination at the age of 38.

   

  Be it through the red beret, worn by firebrand South African politician Julius Malema, or the household brooms being wielded at street demonstrations in Burkina Faso, there are signs that his legacy is enjoying a revival.

   

    Continue reading the main story

  “Start Quote

   

  His ministers drove small cars and travelled economy class, Thomas himself rode a bicycle”

   End Quote  Benewende Sankara  Lawyer and politician  

  Praised by supporters for his integrity and selflessness, the military captain and anti-imperialist revolutionary led Burkina Faso for four years from 1983.

   

  But he is seen by others as an autocrat who came to power through a coup and valued discipline above human rights.

   

  Sankara was a staunch defender of all things home-grown - such as cotton - and yet the African textile industry failed to make him a T-shirt icon.

   

  While Burkina Faso's former leader may not be the poster boy of

• revolution, like Argentine-born Che Guevara, many taxis across West Africa have a round sticker of him in his beret on their windscreens.

   

  His influence is still felt as far afield as South Africa, argues columnist Andile Mngxitama.

    'Common good' 

  "The elections in South Africa [next month] are about the memory of Thomas Sankara," says Mr Mngxitama, who is also the commissar for land and agrarian revolution for South Africa's new Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party.

   

  "They are about the ideal that political power can and must be used for the common good."

• The EFF was launched by Mr Malema, who supports the partial nationalisation of South Africa's mining and farming sectors, as "the new home for voiceless, indigenous poor South Africans" after he was expelled from the governing African National Congress (ANC).

   

    Continue reading the main story

  “Start Quote

   

  We carry brooms because we want to sweep out the president and his clique”

   End Quote  Samsk Le Jah  Le Balai Citoyen  

  Sankara's spirit is also behind a protest movement that began last year in his homeland of Burkina Faso, a former French colony.

   

  Called Le Balai Citoyen, meaning "the citizens' broom", it campaigns against moves by President Blaise Compaore to extend his hold on power beyond 2015.

   

  Once Sankara's deputy, Mr Compaore came to power after his friend was shot dead by a group of soldiers in October 1987.

   

  "We carry brooms because we want to sweep out the president and his clique," says 43-year-old musician Samsk Le Jah, the man behind Le Balai Citoyen.

   

  As a teenager he says he received his "political education" in Sankara's Pioneer youth movement.

   

  "The broom is also a tribute to Thomas Sankara, who organised weekly street-cleaning sessions," he says.

   

  "African leaders have so much to learn from Sankara about humility and public service."

   

  Benewende Sankara - no relation of the late socialist leader - agrees.
• "Sankara's spirit still floats over Burkina Faso," says the Sankarist politician, who is also the lawyer for the late president's family.
• At the moment the family is fighting a legal battle to win the right to open the tomb the government built in Sankara's honour and DNA test any remains found inside as there has been no real investigation into the exact circumstances of his death, which are still hazy.

• "He was ahead of his time. The values people agree on today - the need for good governance and reducing consumption - were what Sankara taught us," says the lawyer.

   

  "It was all about produce what you consume, be self-sufficient, be honest and live simply," he says.

   

  "His ministers drove small cars and travelled economy class, Thomas himself rode a bicycle.

   

  "Those are values that, if they are heard, appeal to the youth all over the world today."

   

  Sankara's revolutionary zeal is best remembered in West Africa.

    'Discipline' 

  But in neighbouring Ghana - whose former President Jerry Rawlings was a firm friend of Sankara - post-graduate law student David Guat, 50, sounds a note of caution when he talks to younger students.

   

  Sankara seized power not long after Flight Lieutenant Rawlings had led his second coup.

   

  "Sankara copied a lot of Rawlings' ideas. The two men were firm friends - to the extent that they wanted to merge their two countries.

• "In those days there was discipline. You went to work on time and you did not sit around reading The Graphic [newspaper]," remembers Mr Guat.

   

  "You actually worked. But people were not disciplined because they wanted to be; they were disciplined because they were being checked on.

   

  "Human rights were not respected. I have very mixed feelings about that period."

   

    Continue reading the main story

  “Start Quote

   

  He understood why women are so critical to Africa's transformation”

   End Quote  Shantha Bloemen, who called her son Sankara    

  Still, without achieving Che Guevara's fame, Sankara's legacy has spread far and wide.

   

  Eight years ago, when Australian communications specialist Shantha Bloemen had a son with a Zimbabwean human rights activist, Munyaradzi Gwisai, they named him Sankara.

   

  "I had read Sankara's essay on the rights of African women," she says.

   

  "He understood why women are so critical to Africa's transformation.

   

  Ms Bloemen, who works in China, says Sankara had ambitions for the whole African continent.

   

  "He wanted a fairer, proud, independent Africa that was equipped to tackle its challenges," she says.

   

  "I can think of no better role model for my son."

   

  For Serge Bambara, a co-founder of Le Balai Citoyen, it is this positive attitude that ensures his legacy.

   

  "It allowed us to be more proud to be African and to pull out of that inferiority complex, to realise we can accomplish things," he told the BBC.

   

  "[US President Barack] Obama was not the first to say, 'Yes we can.'"

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• How the Rest of the World Views the American Military

   

  <!-- /#content-header -->   

   

            

   

  —By Kevin Drum

  | Thu Aug. 29, 2013
• Paul Waldman lays out a list of significant U.S. military actions over the past 50 years, and it adds up to 15 separate episodes, ranging from full-scale wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) to smaller incursions (Grenada, Haiti, Panama). For those of you who are math challenged, this means we've launched a significant overseas assault every 40 months since 1963. Waldman explains what this means:
• Some of these operations worked out very well, others didn't. And just to be clear, this history doesn't tell us whether bombing Syria is a good idea or a bad idea. But if you're wondering why people all over the world view the United States as an arrogant bully, reserving for itself the right to rain down death from above on anyone it pleases whenever it pleases, well there you go. It doesn't matter whether you think some or even all of those actions were completely justified and morally defensible. From here, we tend to look at each of these engagements in isolation, asking whether there are good reasons to go in and whether we can accomplish important goals for ourselves and others. But when when a new American military campaign begins, people in the rest of the world see it in this broader historical context.
• This is a perspective that's sorely missing from most mainstream discourse. Too many Americans have a seriously blinkered view of our interventions overseas, viewing them as one-offs to be evaluated on their individual merits. But when these things happen once every three years, against a backdrop of almost continuous smaller-scale military action (drone attacks, the odd cruise missile here and there, sending "advisors" over to help an ally, etc.), the rest of the world just doesn't see it that way. They don't see a peaceful country that struggles mightily with its conscience and only occasionally makes a decision to drop a bunch of bombs. They see a country that views dropping bombs as its primary means of dealing with any country weaker than we are.

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• Blaming the U.S. Is Easy Propaganda

     

     

     

  J. Michael Waller is provost of the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of national security and international affairs in Washington, D.C. In the 1980s, he work with counterinsurgency forces in El Salvador and with insurgents in Nicaragua.

     

  Updated May 19, 2013

• The Rios Montt prosecution was less about justice and more about using the courts to wage political propaganda campaigns to settle old scores. Rios Montt’s real crime was not genocide, according to prevailing logic, but his political beliefs. His polar opposite contemporaries in Central America will never be prosecuted because they were fighting for “progressive ideals.”

    

  For the same reason, the United States does not bear responsibility for any excesses in the Guatemalan civil war.

• Let’s take away the political labels and look objectively at the crimes. If Rios Montt is to be found guilty in 2013, for murders committed in the 1980s, then the current Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, who led the dictatorial Sandinista junta during the bloody Nicaraguan civil war, and a contemporary of Rios Montt, should be tried on similar charges.

    

  And if the United States is considered complicit in any crimes in Central America, that same justice should extend to the former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and his brother and successor, Raul, who for decades ran the Cuban military. It was the Castro brothers, after all, who provided training and weapons for Ortega’s murderous rule, and helped spread the leftist insurgency throughout Central America, which Rios Montt used to legitimize his actions.
• Few had clean hands in the battle over Central America in the 1980s. Why say only one side was villainous?

• Likewise, shouldn’t former insurgents who committed war crimes in the 1980s also face justice?

    

  Guerrilla leaders in El Salvador ordered assassination and urban terrorism in the 1980s, but now participate in its government. Should they not be tried for war crimes, too?

    

  Ideally, yes. But what purpose would that serve, a generation after the fact? The success of El Salvador as a market economy and multiparty democracy rests on the very uncomfortable fact that, in exchange for peace and national reconciliation, a lot of bad guys had to go free.

    

  As imperfect as the U.S.-backed amnesty-for-peace deals in Nicaragua and El Salvador were, they worked. As rewarding as it would be to see Ortega or Sanchez Ceren or Fidel Castro or U.S. officials, share the fate of Rios Montt, it would not be in the interests of justice.

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• You've Got to Stop Voting - by Mark E. Smith

• (This article was edited and updated on April 8, 2012)

   

• The most common activist strategies, such as street demonstrations, protests, etc., rarely seem to bring about any change in government. There is only one nonviolent tactic that has been proven to work. Recently I asked the new president of a local activist group that had banned me from speaking, if I would be allowed to speak under the new leadership. I explained that I'm an election boycott advocate. The reply I got was:

   

   

   

  "So my question is - how does NOT voting change anything? I can see actually writing in someone you believe in - but not voting simply is giving up."

   

  I decided to answer the question as thoroughly as I could. Here's what I wrote, which I'm posting here with the person's name removed:
• South Africa endured many years of violence under the Apartheid regime. Many people and countries worldwide boycotted Apartheid, but the US government insisted on supporting the Apartheid regime, saying that while the US abhorred Apartheid, the regime was the legitimate government of South Africa. Then the Apartheid regime held another election. No more than 7% of South Africans voted. Suddenly everything changed. No longer could the US or anyone else say that the Apartheid regime had the consent of the governed. That was when the regime began to make concessions. Suddenly the ANC, formerly considered to be a terrorist group trying to overthrow a legitimate government, became freedom fighters against an illegitimate government. It made all the difference in the world, something that decades more of violence could never have done.
• In Cuba, when Fidel Castro's small, ragged, tired band were in the mountains, the dictator Batista held an election (at the suggestion of the US, by the way). Only 10% of the population voted. Realizing that he had lost the support of 90% of the country, Batista fled. Castro then, knowing that he had the support of 90% of the country, proceeded to bring about a true revolution.

   

     

   

    In Haiti, when the US and US-sponsored regimes removed the most popular party from the ballot, in many places only 3% voted. The US had to intervene militarily, kidnap Aristide, and withhold aid after the earthquake to continue to control Haiti, but nobody familiar with the situation thought that the US-backed Haitian government had the consent of the governed or was legitimate. 
• Boycotting elections alone will not oust the oligarchy, but it is the only proven non-violent way to delegitimize a government. 

   

     

   

    A lot of people here are complaining about the Citizens United decision. Some want to amend the Constitution because there is no appeal from a Supreme Court decision (their edicts have the same weight as the Divine Right of Kings), but getting enough states to ratify is a long drawn out and not always successful process, as I'm sure you recall from the ERA. But suppose that the corporations spent ten to fifteen billion dollars on an election (they spent at least five billion on the last midterms, so that's not unreasonable) and almost nobody voted. Do you think their boards of directors would let them do it again?

   

     

   

    Here are some of the most common canards that political party operatives use to argue against not voting:
• 1. Not voting is doing nothing. 

     

   

    If you're doing something wrong, or something that is self-destructive or hurting others, stopping might be a good idea. If delegating your power to people you can't hold accountable has resulted in the devastation of your economy, do you really want to keep doing it? If granting your authority to people you can't hold accountable has resulted in wars based on lies that have killed over a million innocent people, do you really want to keep doing it? If granting your consent of the governed to people you can't hold accountable has resulted in government operating on behalf of big corporations and the wealthy instead of on behalf of the people, do you really want to keep doing it? 
• 2. If we don't vote the bad guys will win.

   

     

   

    We've been voting. When did the good guys win? Besides, it is often hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Suppose Gore had won, and then died of a heart attack. Do you think the Democrats who voted for him would have been happy with Joe Lieberman as President? Besides, Gore actually did win the popular vote. The Supreme Court stopped the vote count and put Bush in office. So just because the good guys win doesn't mean that they get to take office. Kerry also won the popular vote, but before anyone could finish counting the votes, he had to break both his promises, that he wouldn't concede early and that he would ensure that every vote was counted, in order to get the bad guy back in office again. Our Constitution was written to ensure that those who owned the country would always rule it, so the popular vote can be overruled by the Electoral College, Congress, the Supreme Court, or by the winning candidate conceding, and is not the final say. Even if we had accurate, verifiable vote counts, and everyone who voted, voted for a good guy, it doesn't mean that good guy could take office unless the Electoral College, Congress, and the Supreme Court allowed it. Even then, the good guy might fear that the Security State might assassinate him they way they killed JFK, and either concede or stop being a good guy in order to survive. The Supreme Court, of course, has the Constitutional power to intervene on any pretext, and its decisions, no matter how unconstitutional, irrational, unprecedented, or even downright insane, can not be appealed, so they do have the final say. 
• 3. If you don't vote, you can't complain.

   

     

   

    What good does complaining do? When successive administrations of both parties tell you that they will not allow public opinion to influence policy decisions, you can complain all you want and it won't do you any good. But you don't need to vote to have the right to complain. The Declaration of Independence is a long list of complaints against a king by colonists who were not allowed to vote. The right to gripe is one of those unalienable rights that is not granted by governments or kings. If you're treated unjustly, you have the right to complain. A lot of people who voted for Obama are now angry with his policies and are complaining loudly. He couldn't care less.
• 4. It is a citizen's responsibility and civic duty to vote.

   

     

   

    Only if the government holding the election has secured your civil and human rights. If it has not, if it has instead become destructive of your civil and human rights, "...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." —Declaration of Independence
• 5. Your vote is your voice in government.

   

     

   

      In a democratic form of government it would be. In a democratic form of government, such as a direct or participatory democracy, people can vote on things like budgets, wars, and other important issues, and have a voice in government. In our "representative" government, people can only vote for representatives who may or may not listen to them or act in their interests, and who cannot be held accountable during their terms of office, which is the only time they hold power and are needed to represent the interests of their constituents. Waiting until somebody has killed a million people in a war based on lies, destroyed the economy, and taken away your civil rights, and then trying to elect somebody else, is much too late because by then much of the damage cannot be undone and your grandchildren will still be paying for it.
• 6. Just because things didn't work out the way we wanted last time, and the time before that, and the time before that, doesn't mean that they won't this time.

   

     

   

    Some say that Einstein defined insanity as repeating the same experiment over and over and expecting different results.

   
• 7. If we don't vote, the Tea Party, the Breivik-types, and all the lunatics will, and they'll run the country.

   

     

   

    They're a minority, no more than 10% at the very most. Of the approximately 50% of our electorate that votes, fewer than 10% vote for 3rd parties. The Apartheid regime in South Africa tried to seat the winning candidates after a successful election boycott where there was only a 7% turnout, but nobody thought they were legitimate or took them seriously.
• 8. You don't have the numbers to pull off an election boycott.

   

     

   

    There are already more people who don't vote, who either don't think our government is relevant to them, don't think their vote matters, or don't think that anyone on the ballot would represent them or could, since anyone who represented the people would be a small minority with no seniority in government, than there are registered Democrats or Republicans. We have greater numbers than either major party, but they haven't given up so why should we?
• 9. People who don't vote are apathetic.

   

     

   

  When you vote, you are granting your consent of the governed. That's what voting is all about. If you knowingly vote for people you can't hold accountable, it means that you don't really care what they do once they're in office. All you care about is your right to vote, not whether or not you will actually be represented or if the government will secure your rights. Prior to the '08 election, when Obama had already joined McCain in supporting the bailouts that most people opposed, and had expressed his intention to expand the war in Afghanistan, I begged every progressive peace activist I knew not to vote for bailouts and war. They didn't care and they voted for Obama anyway. That's apathy. But it's worse than that. Once I had learned how rigged our elections are, I started asking election integrity activists if they would still vote if the only federally approved voting mechanism was a flush toilet. About half just laughed and said that of course they wouldn't. But the other half got indignant and accused me of trying to take away their precious right to vote. When I finished asking everyone I could, I ran an online poll and got the same results. Half of all voters really are so apathetic that they don't care if their vote is flushed down a toilet, as long as they can vote. They really don't know the difference between a voice in government, and an uncounted or miscounted, unverifiable vote for somebody they can't hold accountable. They never bothered to find out what voting is supposed to be about and yet they think that they're not apathetic because they belong to a political party and vote.
• 10. If you don't vote, you're helping the other party.
   
    No, *you* are. By voting for an opposition party, a third party, an independent, or even writing in None of the Above, Nobody, Mickey Mouse, your own name, or yo mama, you are granting your consent of the governed to be governed by whoever wins, not by the candidate you voted for. If there is a 50% turnout, the winning candidate can claim that 50% of the electorate had enough faith in the system to consent to their governance.
• 11. If we don't vote, our votes will never be counted and we'll have no leverage.
   
    True, if we don't vote, our votes will never be counted. But how does hoping that our votes *might* *sometimes* be counted, provide leverage? The election just held in the UK had only a 32% turnout. Where people did vote at all, since UK votes actually have to be counted, they threw out major party candidates and voted for third parties (George Galloway's Respect Party for one, the Pirate Party for another) and in Edinburgh, a guy who ran dressed as a penguin, calling himself Professor Pongoo, got more votes than leading major party candidates. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/may/04/penguin-more-votes-lib-dems?newsfeed=true That's leverage, but it is only possible when the votes have to be counted and are verifiable. Those conditions do not apply in the US.
• 12. The choice is bullets or ballots, so it's a no-brainer.
   
    The Department of Homeland Security has just used the authority that you delegated to the government when you voted, to purchase 450 million rounds of hollow-point ammunition that cannot be used in combat by law and therefore can only be used against US citizens. Your ballots authorized those bullets. There is a third option: not voting, not fighting, but simply withholding our consent. That has the result of delegitimizing a government that doesn't represent us and demonstrating that it does not have the consent of the governed. It is a legal, nonviolent, effective option called noncompliance. Noncompliance can take other forms, such as not paying taxes or creating alternative systems, but these cannot delegitimize a government. Since governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," withholding our consent is the only way to nonviolently delegitimize a government that fails to represent us.

• 13. Evil people are spending millions of dollars on voter suppression to deny minorities the vote, and people have fought and died for the right to vote, so the vote must be valuable.

   

   

   

  Nobody fought and died for an uncounted vote. While corporations do spend millions of dollars pushing through Voter ID laws and other voter suppression legislation, they spend billions of dollars funding election campaigns to get out the vote for the major parties so that they can claim the consent of the governed for their wholly-owned political puppets. If they didn't want people to vote, those proportions would be reversed and they'd be spending more suppressing the vote than getting out the vote. Voter suppression efforts are aimed at trying to fool the ignorant into thinking that just because somebody is trying to take their vote away from them, their uncounted, unverifiable votes for oligarchs who won't represent them, must be valuable.
• --Mark 

   

     

   

    (Items #10, #11, and #12 were added on 5/5/2012, #13 on 5/8/2012, and were not sent with the original email)

   

     

   

   

   

   

    I waited a couple of days, and when I got no response, wrote to ask why. This was the answer:

   

     

   

    "I did not respond because I have nothing to add to your excellent feedback - one way or the other. All valid arguments for your case. But most of us, and I do admit to including myself, do not act on reason - we act on gut. That sort of makes you a lonely person? But courageous nonetheless. Keep speaking out."

   

     

   

    In other words, it is saying that I'm right, but since it makes people feel uncomfortable, I still won't be allowed to speak. I have been speaking out for six years, but since most organizations are in some way political party, candidate, or electoral issue related, they will not allow me a forum. In fact, most activist organizations are non-profit corporations themselves, so when they claim to be opposing corporate rule or specific corporate actions, it appears that they have an inherent conflict of interest.

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• Santiago Zabala

• Slavoj Zizek and the role of the philosopher 

          <!---->       

   

   

  Zizek "disrupts" ideological structures, the underside of acceptable philosophical, religious and political discourses.

   

    <!-- --> 

   

      Last Modified: 25 Dec 2012

• There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China.

   

  None is better than the others. All are simply different, pursue different philosophical traditions, write in different styles and, most of all, propose different interpretations. 

   

  While all these philosophers have become points of references within the philosophical community, few have managed to overcome its boundaries and become public intellectuals intensely engaged in our cultural and political life as did Hannah Arendt (with the Eichmann trial), Jean-Paul Sartre (in the protests of May 1968) and Michel Foucault (with the Iranian revolution). 

   

  These philosophers became public intellectuals not simply because of their original philosophical projects or the exceptional political events of their epochs, but rather because their thoughts were drawn by these events. But how can an intellectual respond to the events of his epoch in order to contribute in a productive manner? 

   

  In order to respond, as Edward Said once said, the intellectual has to be "an outsider, living in self-imposed exile, and on the margins of society", that is, free from academic, religious and political establishments; otherwise, he or she will simply submit to the inevitability of events.

• He exposes himself to criticism
  

   

  If Slavoj Zizek perfectly fits Said's description, it is not because he is unemployed, in exile, and at the margins of society, but rather because he writes as if he were. His theoretical books, political positions and public appearances are a disruption not only of the common academic style, but also of the idea of the philosopher or intellectual as someone to be idealised and deferred to. 
• A perfect example of this is presented in a scene from a documentary where the Slovenian philosopher brilliantly explains (while half-naked in his bed) that philosophy "is a very modest discipline, it asks different questions from science, for example, how does the philosopher approach the problem of freedom? The problem is not whether we are free or not; it asks simpler questions which we call hermeneutic questions, hence, what it means to be free... philosophy does not ask whether there is truth, no, the question is what do you mean when you say this is true". 

• The surprise from seeing a thinker offer such a clear definition of philosophy does not come from the casual setting; rather, we have become too accustomed to elegant intellectuals hiding behind complicated definitions of philosophy in their university offices. Zizek instead prefers to be honest and expose himself to criticism in order to state clearly and dogmatically his philosophical and political positions. 

   

  His ability to fuse together Martin Heidegger's "fundamental ontology", Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" and Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" in order to undermine our liberal and tolerant democratic structures is a practice few intellectuals are capable of. 

   

  While many believe that globalisation made the Slovenian philosopher more popular than John Dewey, Herbert Marcuse, or Jurgen Habermas, it was actually his ability to disrupt our neoliberal democratic surety through the same events that characterise it. 

   

  Zizek's disruptions begin as soon as we watch him deliver a lecture (which always draws large crowds) where he decomposes our sense of reality (using material as diverse as Hegel's dialectical materialism, Lacan's psychoanalysis and David Lynch's films) in order to reactualise the dialectical method in philosophy.

• For example, against the realist, who conceives truth as a permanent content that serves as an infallible corrective for all our thoughts and actions, the Slovenian philosopher indicates how this access to reality is only possible through what remains unthought, that is, symbolisation, the parallax gap, or the struggle for truth. The status of reality "is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: It is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other". 

   

  The aim of Zizek's philosophy (similar to hermeneutics) is to show that not only our understanding is dialectical but reality is as well: Every "field of 'reality' (every 'world') is always already enframed, seen through an invisible frame". This dialectical stance allows the Slovenian thinker to call for changes through ideological reversals; that is, he shows that in order to overcome capitalism it is first necessary to abandon "all forms of resistance which help the system reproduce itself by ensuring our participation in it". 

   

  This is why events like the Arab Spring, the OWS protests and the protests in Greece should not be read as "part of the continuum of past and present" but rather as "fragments of a utopian future that lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential". This future, according to Zizek, will be communist. 

• The thinker of our age
  

   

  Although Zizek has become a distinguished academic professor (in several European and American universities), the author of more than 70 books (such as The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Parallax View, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously), the editor of successful series (Insurrections, Sic, Short Circuits), a sharp cultural critic (in media articles and documentaries such as The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and The Pervert's Guide to Ideology) and a courageous political activist (in addition to having run for president in Slovenia's first democratic election in 1990 and also a supporter of Julian Assange's WikiLeaks organisation and the Palestinian cause), he is constantly criticised either for "endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision" or for releasing more books "than he can read". 

• Predictably, most of these criticisms are directed not against his theoretical project but his political views, that is, communism. After all, 1989 was not only the year the Soviet Union dissolved, but also when the Slovenian philosopher's first book in English appeared; in other words, in the year communism ended, Zizek (and many other philosophers) began to endorse it. 

   

  He still has not received an international prize, but not because he is not a serious or original philosopher, but rather because such prizes are given to the intellectuals who follow the predominant ideology, not those who disrupt it. 

• Today, whether we like him or not, Zizek is, as the Observer points out, "what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s", that is, the thinker of our age. While Derrida's intellectual operation focused on "deconstructing" our linguistic frames of reference, Zizek instead "disrupts" our ideological structures, the underside of acceptable philosophical, religious and political discourses. 

   

  Although it's impossible to cover all the Slovenian philosophers' meditations, which span from Schelling's idealism through Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and John Milbank's theology, it is worth venturing into the political disruptions he has created (which I will comment upon in a later post) in order to further understand how he has changed the role of the philosopher, a role, as he writes in his two latest books (Less Than Nothing and Mapping Ideology) that must "articulate the space for a revolt" independently because when a revolutionary movement is denounced as ideological, "one can be sure that its inversion is no less ideological". 

   

  Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. His books include The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (2008), The Remains of Being (2009), and, most recently, Hermeneutic Communism (2011, co-authored with G Vattimo), all published by Columbia University Press.

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• Published on Friday, September 21, 2012

• In Quebec It's Official: Mass Movement Leads to Victory for Students

   

  Naomi Klein: 'This is why radical movements are mercilessly mocked. They can win.'

   

    - Common Dreams staff

• After a year of revolt which became known as the "Maple Spring"—including massive street protests that received global attention—university students across Quebec were celebrating victory on Thursday night following the announcement from newly elected Premier Pauline Marois that the government was cancelling the proposed tuition hike that led to the student uprising and nullifying the contentious Bill 78 law which was introduced to curb the powerful protests.

  “It’s a total victory!” said Martine Desjardins, president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, which is the largest student association with about 125,000 students. “It’s a new era of collaboration instead of confrontation.”

   

  “Together we’ve written a chapter in the history of Quebec,” she added. “It’s a triumph of justice and equity.”

   

  Well-known Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein, responded to the news by tweeting:

   
   

   

          Naomi Klein 

       
  • ✔
     

    @NaomiAKlein            

    

     

  This is why radical movements are mercilessly mocked. They can win. "It’s official: Quebec tuition hikes are history" oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2012…

     

       

         

• And, “Bravo to the striking students,” tweeted Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a spokesperson for the Coalition large de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (CLASSE) during the most tumultous and pitched episodes of the student mobilization, in French:

   
   
   
          Gabriel NadeauDubois  @GNadeauDubois            
    
     
  Victoire étudiante! Bravo aux grévistes ! "@LP_LaPresse: La hausse des droits de scolarité annulée, la loi 12 abrogée bit.ly/SbBSse"
     
       
              20 Sep 12    
     
  • Reply
   
  • Retweet
   
  • Favorite
     
      
        
   
   

  Marois' announcement followed her very first cabinet meeting and was a fulfillment of promises she made during her recent campaign against the former premier, Jean Charest.  For his part, Charest became the prime target of ire for students during their fight against the tuition hikes and following the passage of Bill 78, which he signed. The most odious sections of Bill 78, which later became Law 12, will be nullified by decree, said Marois.

• The Montreal Gazette reports:

   

   

  Whichever side of the debate you were on, there was no denying the significance of the moment. Marois, who was criticized by the Liberals for wearing a symbolic red square in solidarity with students for much of the conflict, made a promise to cancel the tuition increase — and she moved quickly to fulfill that commitment.

   

  Students, who organized countless marches and clanged pots and never wavered from their goal of keeping education accessible with a tuition freeze, seemed at last to have triumphed definitively.

   

   

  The various student groups, which range from the more radical CLASSE to the less strident FEUQ, do not share all the same political goals or tactics, but it is unquestionable that their shared movement helped lead to the downfall of the Charest government, paved the path for Marois victory, and culminated in yesterday's victory.

• As CBC News reports:

   

   

  "It's certain that we were very present[...] during the election to make sure that Charest, who was elected with a weak majority vote in 2008, was not reelected," said Desjardins.

   

  Another more militant student association, CLASSE — the Coalition Large des Association pour une Solidarite Syndicale Étudiante — has as its central mandate a goal to keep fighting for free tuition. But Desjardins said FEUQ plans a calmer approach on pressure tactics.

   

  Desjardins said she does not believe CLASSE's campaign for free tuition will negatively impact the FEUQ's plans. She pointed out that both groups had clearly outlined their differences during the student crisis.

   

  The FEUQ president also said a consensus between the government and all student associations is possible.

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• Sep 2012

• Gifting Economies

    

  Modelling alternative economies at the grass roots

   

  By Patrick Jones
•  Until I became a permaculturalist and a keen student of traditional Aboriginal economics, I probably would have dismissed the sentiments expressed in the quote above as utopian wishfulness. In a highly urbanised and prosperous country with so many expressions of material entitlement life without money seems a flaky ideal. It is, however, little wonder that despite its Australian editors and focus Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman’s international anthology, which features strongly the Australian concept of permaculture, found a willing publisher in London. In the United Kingdom over the last decade numerous towns and cities have been modelling new socioeconomic alternatives, including new forms of currency (the Totnes pound is the most celebrated example) and non-monetary exchange. Having driven the industrial revolution full steam from the outset, ignoring Malthusian logic, that country now finds itself an economic basket case. Within just 300 years it has overextended and overpopulated its land base to such an extent that it is now dependent on global imports for almost every resource, most notably food, making the mastermind of industrialised countries extremely vulnerable to global economic and climate crises, especially in an era that marks the end of cheap fossil fuels.
• My household has been practising what Holmgren calls ‘voluntarily living within a depression economy’ for many years, reducing waste and spending, applying permaculture principles and living a form of creative frugality on less than a taxable income. I therefore find the main premise of Life Without Money―building fair and sustainable economies―not at all wishful in a pejorative sense, but manageable, achievable and critically necessary in preparing for the unavoidable and ensuing crises: economic contraction, climate change, energy descent, greater social division and aggregating ecological ‘overshoot’ and estrangement: in short, the results of hypertechnocivility, or progress-capitalism, peaking.
• Despite all the experimentation in the last forty years, permaculture is one of the few movements or concepts to come out of the 1970s that actively works towards creating non-polluting social systems by taking a generalist approach to life contiguous with Indigenous knowledges and patterns of experience.

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• 21st September, 2009

   

  Dr Kwame Nkrumah At A Glance

   

    By Our Correspondent

    

   

   

     

  Kwame Nkrumah with executives of the then Ghana Journalists Association
• Following a break from the United Gold Coast  
  Convention, Kwame Nkrumah led the formation of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) on 12th June, 1949 at Arena in Accra before a crowd of about 60,000. Nkrumah was made Chairman, with Komlah Gbedemah, as vice-chairman and Kojo Botsio as secretary.  
   
  Other members of the Central Committee include N. A. Welbeck, Kwesi Plange, Kofi Baako, Krobo Edusie, Dzenkle Dzewu and Ashie Nikoi. 
   
  * The CPP established branches in all towns and villages, each with its own branch executive. The Evening News became the party’s mouthpiece. 
   
  * The success of the Evening News encouraged Nkrumah to launch the Morning Telegraph in Sekondi and the Daily Mail in Cape Coast. 
   
  * The CPP accused the colonial government of delaying independence. The party stepped up political agitation through Positive Action, modelled on the non-violent protests of Mahatma Ghandi in India.
• * The CPP and the Trades Union Congress organised a mass gathering which became known as the “Ghana Representative Assembly.” The UGCC and the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society were invited but they turned it down. 
   
  * The assembly passed the following resolution. “That the people of the Gold Coast be granted immediate self-government by the British government, that is full dominion status within the British Commonwealth of Nations based on the statue of Westminister. That the assembly respectfully demands the immediate grant and sanction of full self-government for the chiefs and people of the Gold Coast.” 
   
  * Nkrumah warned the colonial authorities that if they continue to ignore the genuine grievances and concerns of the people, they would be responsible for any violence that would result. He sent a copy of the CPP’s manifesto to the Colonial Secretary and offered to discuss the party’s demands and to find a way to avert mass civil disobedience. 
   
  * After several meetings with colonial authorities, it became clear that no progress was being made on the central demand for a constituent assembly. On 8th January 1950, in front of a large CPP crowd at a public meeting in Accra, Nkrumah declared positive action. He travelled to Sekondi, Cape Coast and Takoradi to repeat the declaration.
• * The colonial government declared a state of emergency, effective 12th January 1950 and prohibited the holding of processions, imposed curfews, and disconnected public services in certain areas. 
   
  * CPP and TUC leaders were arrested. The Accra Evening News and the Cape Coast Daily Mail were banned and their editors arrested. 
   
  * On 19th January, at a meeting of the Legislative Council, the government passed three bills – the Sedition Bill, a newspaper registration bill, and a bill to allow the Governor-in-council to impose curfew in any part of the country without having to resort to legislation. 
   
  * On 21st January 1950, Kwame Nkrumah was arrested and tried for inciting an illegal strike and for sedition for an article in the Cape Coast Daily Mail. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment. 
   
  * Gbedemah kept the party running and was in constant touch with Nkrumah who was held in James Fort prison from where messages were smuggled out on toilet paper to the headquarters. 
   
  * In the 1950 municipal elections held in the major cities – Accra (April), Cape Coast (June) and Kumasi (November) – the CPP posted stunning victories. 
   
  * In the Kumasi municipal election the CPP won all seats. As a result of these victories, the colonial government began to revise its view of the CPP, they recognised that the CPP “was clearly more politically skilful than any mere hooligan element could have been”.
• But more importantly the CPP’s local organisational ability was proving useful to the government as it prepared the country for its first general election. The CPP assisted with the registration process and the political education campaigns “designed to apprise the population of their rights and the importance and significance of exercising those rights as voters”. 
   
  * As plans for the elections to the legislative assembly gathered pace, the CPP put up Kwame Nkrumah, who was still in jail, as the candidate for Accra Central – which now forms part of today’s Odododiodoo Constituency. This decision by the party generated enthusiasm throughout the country. 
   
  * The CPP once again achieved a stunning victory in the February 1951 elections. The party won the directly elected urban seats with ten times as many votes as those of the combined opposition, with Nkrumah polling a massive 22,780 of the available 23,122 votes in his Accra Central Constituency. 
   
  * In the 33 rural seats elected indirectly through electoral colleges, the CPP obtained 29 seats and the UGCC only three. In the two-member constituency of the Akim Abuakwa, Dr J. B. Danquah and William Ofori Atta barely won their seats: 95-85 votes and 87-83 votes, respectively. Dr K. A. Busia, on the other hand, lost his seat and secured his seat in the Legislative Assembly through one of the seats reserved for the Ashanti Confederacy Council. 
   
  * Soon after the elections the CPP wrote to the Governor asking for the release of Kwame Nkrumah.  
   
  So that he did not appear to have been forced, the Governor delayed the decision until after the Territorial

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• How to Occupy the World

   

  December 15th, 2011 § 1 Comment

    

   

  A Call for True Internationalism

   

  by Jason Hickel
• The leading tagline of the Occupy Wall Street movement reads: “Protest for World Revolution.”  This is an ambitious claim, to be sure. And in most respects it seems to ring quite true: the movement has successfully taken root not only in cities and towns throughout the United States but also in major urban centers around the world.  On October 15, Occupy Wall Street’s success inspired a broad wave of coordinated occupations across Europe.  I was a founding participant in the one that began in London.
• But the Occupy movement has been notably absent outside of North America and Europe.  Not for want of trying, of course: in southern Africa, where I am originally from, small groups of committed activists tried to instigate occupations in a few key regional cities, but without much success.  In South Africa, a society divided by violent inequalities that proceed directly from neoliberal policy, Occupy managed to attract only a few dozen souls – a poor showing for a country known for one of the highest protest rates in the world.
• What accounts for the failure of Occupy to capture the imagination of the global South, which comprises precisely the people whose lives have been most brutally affected by the recent global financial crisis?  And in what sense can Occupy claim to be a world revolution if it leaves out – and in some cases even alienates – the vast, non-white majority of humanity?

• Occupy is “international” at the moment only inasmuch as it exists in many different countries at the same time.  But each of the occupations is primarily concerned with particular local or national issues.  For instance, Occupy Wall Street is focused on corporate personhood, the Glass-Steagall Act, and collateralized debt obligations, while Occupy London is worried about tuition hikes, preserving the National Health Service, and reversing Thatcher’s 1986 financial deregulation bonanza.

   

  Yes, the occupations communicate, and yes, they stand in solidarity with one another. But they are not united around concerns that are recognizably global in scope.
• True, Occupy protestors and their sympathizers have helped sound the alarm on issues of international concern like fossil fuels and climate change, as we saw recently at the COP17 meetings in Durban.  But as it presently stands the Occupy agenda is rather provincial – even Eurocentric. Aside from its radical elements, most of the movement’s American and European supporters simply want to reclaim their rights to live decent, dignified, middle-class lives.

• Western Affluence and the Global System

   

  There’s nothing wrong with this aspiration, in and of itself.  But middle-class affluence in the West depends on a system of extraction that produces and perpetuates tremendous poverty in the global South. This was true under European colonialism, when the gap between the richest and poorest countries increased from 3:1 to 35:1, and it obtains even more so in this era of neoliberal capitalism, during which – according to the Human Development Report – that gap has reached an unprecedented 74:1.

   

  According to World Development Indicators, in 2005 the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population – a proportion that includes almost all of the Occupy protestors – accounted for 76.6 percent of total private consumption. The wealthy nations of Europe and North America have an inordinate degree of control over the world’s resources, which they command through international financial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization.
• Occupy Wall Street correctly criticizes the fact that an increasing proportion of these spoils has gone to the top 1 percent of U.S. society since the mid-1970s. But it is not enough to want to redistribute that wealth back to middle-class Americans. Even if the Occupy movement does manage to fix the financial sector, stabilize the economy, and redress social inequality in the West, the violent, imperialist modes of accumulation will still remain in place.
• The process of extraction from global “periphery” to global “core” is what sociologist Emmanuel Wallerstein has called “the world-system.” Since the 1980s, one way of facilitating extraction within the world-system has been through “structural adjustment” loans from Western governments to post-colonial countries. Debts from these loans are leveraged to forcibly liberalize markets, privatize resources, cut social services, and curb labor and environmental regulations to create business opportunities for multinational companies and facilitate the flow of wealth to the West.

• Western corporations realize huge profits by taking advantage of these policies. They, externalize the costs of production to the global South where they can get away without paying for the labor they exploit, the resources they extract, and the pollution they leave behind.

   

  Forced liberalization has plunged poor countries into economic collapse, slashing average per capita income growth in half after 1980 and leading in some cases to negative rates. Economists estimate that poor countries have lost $480 billion per year as a result of structural adjustment, while multinational corporations have stolen as much as $1.17 trillion (from Africa alone!) through loopholes created by market deregulation since 1970.  The upshot of this has been rising inequality, deepening poverty, and worsening health, mortality, and literacy rates in much of the global South.

• Finding the Right Targets

   

  Western affluence and the consumer lifestyles of the “99 percent” in the United States and Europe depend on the plunder of other places and other peoples.  This is one of the reasons that people in the global South tend to feel alienated by Occupy. First of all, they don’t see why they should support a movement of Westerners who want to regain levels of affluence that depend at least in part on the extraction of their countries’ labor and resources. What’s more, the locus of the economic decisions that affect them is not ultimately their national governments, but the institutions in Washington, DC and Geneva that determine economic policy from afar; it doesn’t make much sense to occupy locally when the power lies elsewhere.
• Occupy’s vision for world revolution will only catch on in the global South once the movement extends its purview to encompass these concerns and begins to challenge inequality between nations as much as within them.
• We cannot rely on “development” to accomplish this. Not only does development serve as a façade for the global extension of neoliberalism, it also rests on a purely absurd premise. The notion that everyone in the world should enjoy the equivalent of Western middle-class living standards ignores the fact that the planet simply does not contain enough resources for each person to consume as much as, say, the average American. Instead of “developing” the global South, we need to un-develop the West; we need to subvert and dismantle the flows of tribute that underpin Western affluence.

• Occupy must realize that even huge wins at home will not necessarily translate into changes in the world-system or even changes in the U.S. role in it. Given that neoliberal capitalism is organized on a global scale, any real change will require a movement that is global in scope. Never has there been a better time to challenge the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF’s policies on trade, debt, austerity, structural adjustment, resource extraction, and sweatshops.

   

  Targeting these institutions is crucial because they determine Western access to labor and resources in the global South. The United States controls the levers of this system, since voting power in the World Bank and the IMF is apportioned according to each nation’s level of financial ownership. With about 17 percent of the shares, the United States has enough to single-handedly block major decisions, which require 85 percent of the vote.

• At the WTO, market size determines bargaining power – so rich countries almost always get their way. On top of this, rich countries control key decisions by using exclusive “green room” meetings to circumvent the consensus process. If poor countries choose to disobey trade rules that hurt them, rich countries can retaliate by using the WTO’s courts to impose crushing sanctions.

   

  Change in the world-system can only happen once these institutions are democratized and de-corporatized. This will require building alliances with the global justice movement and anti-globalization campaigns in postcolonial countries that have been working on these issues for decades (such as La Via Campesina, an organization of 200 million peasants worldwide). Neoliberalism was crushing people there long before it hit white, Euro-American youth.

• Alliances with the Global South

   

  Another reason that Occupy has not caught on outside the West is that the leaderless, consensus-based horizontalism that has made the movement so popular in North America and Europe doesn’t work as well where most people can’t network through the Internet. Instead of fetishizing this tactic for its own sake, we need to be pragmatic about reaching out to established parties, unions, and other institutions – even if hierarchical – that actually have the ability to organize the rallies that an international movement needs.  We reject traditional tactics at our own peril.
• It’s easy enough to explain why the global South hasn’t joined Occupy.  But why should we care?  First, because the extractive processes that underpin Euro-American affluence cannot be fully understood from within the “core.” Our goals need to be informed by conversations and alliances with activists in the global South. Second, because challenging these powerful and deeply entrenched interests will require serious pressure from all corners of the world-system. If we want to bring about “World Revolution,” we have to be able to mobilize the world.

• Occupy might do well to glean a few lessons from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Like the world-system in microcosm, apartheid capitalism allowed a white minority to accumulate massive wealth by extracting cheap labor and resources from a non-white majority. A number of white people rejected this system and became key activists in the anti-apartheid movement. But their efforts would have come to naught without their African counterparts, who mobilized mass resistance by going door-to-door in the townships, building the capacity for the strikes and boycotts that brought the apartheid state to its knees.

   

  A truly global movement is not out of reach.  Indeed, it has never been more possible than it is today.  This is our opportunity to occupy the world.  We dare not miss it.

   

  Dr. Jason Hickel teaches at the London School of Economics‘ Department of Anthropology.

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• Vol. 29 No. 22 · 15 November 2007
   page 7 | 1730 words
• Vol. 29 No. 22 · 15 November 2007
   page 7 | 1730 words

• Resistance Is Surrender

   

  Slavoj Žižek

• One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

   

   

  Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).

• Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its ‘interstices’.

  Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us.’

  Or, it recognises the temporary futility of the struggle. In today’s triumph of global capitalism, the argument goes, true resistance is not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism.

  Or, it emphasises the fact that the problem is a more fundamental one, that global capitalism is ultimately an effect of the underlying principles of technology or ‘instrumental reason’.

• Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’; in this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse (the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).

  Or, it takes the ‘postmodern’ route, shifting the accent from anti-capitalist struggle to the multiple forms of politico-ideological struggle for hegemony, emphasising the importance of discursive re-articulation.

  Or, it wagers that one can repeat at the postmodern level the classical Marxist gesture of enacting the ‘determinate negation’ of capitalism: with today’s rise of ‘cognitive work’, the contradiction between social production and capitalist relations has become starker than ever, rendering possible for the first time ‘absolute democracy’ (this would be Hardt and Negri’s position).

• These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true’ radical Left politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack of such a position. This defeat of the Left is not the whole story of the last thirty years, however. There is another, no less surprising, lesson to be learned from the Chinese Communists’ presiding over arguably the most explosive development of capitalism in history, and from the growth of West European Third Way social democracy. It is, in short: we can do it better. In the UK, the Thatcher revolution was, at the time, chaotic and impulsive, marked by unpredictable contingencies. It was Tony Blair who was able to institutionalise it, or, in Hegel’s terms, to raise (what first appeared as) a contingency, a historical accident, into a necessity. Thatcher wasn’t a Thatcherite, she was merely herself; it was Blair (more than Major) who truly gave form to Thatcherism.

  The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left.

• Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect embodiment of this position.[*] For Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state hinges on the ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no state can heed this call, since its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its own reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc). ‘Of course,’ Critchley writes,

  history is habitually written by the people with the guns and sticks and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism eloquently shows, one is lost the moment one picks up the guns and sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.
• So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it? And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should ‘mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty’ one opposes? Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’? The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’?

• These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society. Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with this logic, the anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed principles.

  The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’
• It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.

• The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

     

     

     

   

  [*] Verso, 168 pp., £17.99, May, 978 1 84467 121 2.

• Letters

   

  Vol. 29 No. 24 · 13 December 2007

   

  From T.J. Clark

   

  Convinced, nay, chastened by Slavoj Žižek’s arguments for a new realism on the left, I shall be campaigning over the next months to dissuade those planning to ‘save their beautiful souls’ in street protests against the bombing of Iran from doing any such thing (LRB, 15 November). And I have written a letter to my congresswoman (she’s a bit of an anti-war firebrand, so Žižek will forgive me if my intervention fails to have immediate results), along the lines: ‘While respectfully recognising the US state’s representation of my interests, and its right and duty to protect them by force of arms, might I propose that you propose that the strike against Iranian facilities be limited to 50 bunker busters per nuclear installation, with a total TNT not exceeding, say, half the Hiroshima device per site? And could I put in a plea for restraint in the use of depleted uranium? I realise this may be intruding too far on the administration’s prerogatives, but would you perhaps suggest, to those in the know, double-checking of intelligence before the targets are finally decided on? Oh yes, collateral damage … Couldn’t we make a strictly between presidents offer of undercover medical help, Quds force to Quds force, in the unlikely event?’ These seem to me ‘strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands’. They’re sure to do the trick.

  T.J. Clark
   University of California, Berkeley

• From Chris Harman

   

  ‘Sit at home and watch the barbarity on television’ seems to be Slavoj Žižek’s new slogan for fighting capitalism. He writes of the million-strong demonstration against the war on Iraq: they ‘served to legitimise it.’ All that happened was that ‘the protesters saved their beautiful souls.’ Žižek’s brilliant dialectical insight allows us to see that all struggles that do not fully achieve their objectives sanctify the status quo. So the events of May 1968 in France must have legitimised the Gaullist regime, the Cuban revolution continued US domination of Latin America, the independence of India the British Empire, the revolutions of 1848 European reaction, the civil rights movement American racism. And if the US now attacks Iran we must at all costs not take to the streets against it. Perhaps the philosopher should go beyond interpreting the world in confusing ways and try to change it.

• Chris Harman
   International Socialism Journal, London E8

   

  From André Bénichou

   

  Reading Slavoj Žižek’s strangely giddy defence of Hugo Chávez, I was reminded of Woody Allen’s Bananas, in which Allen’s character, a product-tester named Fielding Melish, joins a group of guerrillas in the mountains of ‘San Marcos’, a right-wing Latin American military dictatorship. The guerrilla leader brandishes his gun, his revolutionary slogans and his Che beard with equal aplomb, and promises that the day of liberation is near. Once the guerrillas triumph, he changes the official language to Swedish and announces that everyone must wear their underpants outside their clothes. Venezuelans aren’t speaking Swedish yet, but Chávez’s drive to concentrate power in his own hands brings them one step closer. I prefer the Subcomediante Marcos.

  André Bénichou
   Nanterre, France

• Vol. 30 No. 1 · 3 January 2008

   

  From David Graeber

   

  Slavoj Žižek is a delightful provocateur and a gifted intellectual comedian (LRB, 15 November 2007). One day he’s denouncing do-gooder capitalists like George Soros by insisting that capitalism is an irredeemable system of structural violence; the next he’s informing the left that there’s no chance of ever overcoming it. One day he’s embracing Lenin as a man whose aim was to destroy all states for ever, the next he’s arguing that the state must be maintained as the only remaining bulwark against capitalism. If you ask Žižek to review a book your readers are unlikely to learn much about it. Thus he pays a good deal of attention to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding, but largely for his own purposes.
• Critchley is one of the few intellectuals who have taken seriously the possibility that those who are actively engaged in fighting capitalism might have something relevant to say. He has tried to understand what they are attempting and to work out how the tools at his disposal might be helpful. His book does not simply propound a Levinasian ethics, understood as an infinite responsibility to the other, but is itself an attempt to practise one. Žižek appears to object to this project on principle. When you shave away the posturing, his real message is that intellectuals have always been, and always must be, whores to power. He can’t quite come out and say this, so he conveys it in a series of rhetorical manoeuvres, mostly based on the use of the term ‘we’. ‘We’ are intellectuals, ‘we’ are the left (since the left apparently consists primarily of intellectuals), but ‘we’ also seem to include anyone from Tony Blair and the Democratic Party in the US to the current rulers of the People’s Republic of China. As a result ‘we’ obviously cannot stand opposed on principle to cruise missiles and interrogation chambers because our real brothers and sisters are not those being blown up by or strung up in them, but rather, those pushing the buttons and calculating stress positions.

• I’d offer two points readers might wish to consider. First, capitalism will not be around for ever. An engine of infinite expansion and accumulation cannot, by definition, continue for ever in a finite world. Now that India and China are buying in as full players, it seems reasonable to assume that within fifty years at most, the system will hit its physical limits. Whatever we end up with at that point, it will not be a system of infinite expansion. It will not be capitalism; it will be something else. However, there is no guarantee that this something will be better. It might be considerably worse. Might we not do well at least to consider what something better might be like? If nothing else it seems an odd moment to call off all speculation about alternatives. And if one does wish to think about alternatives to capitalism, how better to do this than to engage with those building such alternatives in the present?

  Why is Chávez the model? Why not, say, Evo Morales, who, unlike Chávez, really was placed in power by, and remains answerable to, genuine social movements? Could we imagine Žižek, even in his fantasies, patiently listening to the demands of the directly democratic assemblies of El Alto? Chávez may be a virtuoso performer but he is also a political comedian holding power with no real responsibility except to give his audience pleasure.

  David Graeber
   Goldsmiths, University of London

• Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008

   

  From Slavoj Žižek

   

  My critics make the following claims (Letters, 13 December 2007): 1. that my message to the left is that there is no chance of overcoming capitalism; all we can do is to ‘sit at home and watch the barbarity on television’; 2. that I advocate modest realistic demands rather than the pursuit of big impossible goals; 3. that in dismissing the Western democratic left, I support power-mad dictators like Chávez. That such mutually exclusive positions have been read into the same short text shows that I touched a nerve.

  It is truly weird that David Graeber thinks my ‘real message’ is that ‘intellectuals have always been, and always must be, whores to power.’ On the contrary, isn’t it the advocates of resistance from the interstices of power, such as Simon Critchley, who claim that direct engagement with power turns intellectuals into whores? In my view, the withdrawal to such a safe moralising position is the highest form of corruption.

• My opinion is that the left is not able to offer a true alternative to global capitalism. Yes, it is true that ‘capitalism will not be around for ever’ (it is the advocates of the new politics of resistance who think that capitalism and the democratic state are here to stay); it will not be able to cope with the antagonisms it produces. But there is a gap between this negative insight and a basic positive vision. I do not think that today’s candidates – the anti-globalisation movement etc – do the job.

  So what are we to do? Everything possible (and impossible), just with a proper dose of modesty, avoiding moralising self-satisfaction. I am aware that when the left builds a protest movement, one should not measure its success by the degree to which its specific demands are met: more important than achieving the immediate target is the raising of critical awareness and finding new ways to organise. However, I don’t think this holds for protests against the war in Iraq, which fitted all too smoothly the space allotted to ‘democratic protests’ by the hegemonic state and ideological order. Which is why they did not, even minimally, scare those in power. Afterwards, both government and protesters felt smug, as if each side had succeeded in making its point.

  Slavoj Žižek
   Birkbeck, University of London

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• • Issue 1
   
  • May 2011
   
  • London

• On Neoliberalism

   

  Sherry Ortner

     
  • The Shock Doctrine  by Naomi Klein 
  • A Brief History of Neoliberalism  by David Harvey 
  • Inside Job a film by Charles Ferguson
   
   

  Whatever happened to “Late Capitalism”? It became neo-liberalism.
   - Marshall Sahlins (2002:  59)

   

  I begin with Marshall Sahlins’s little koan because I remember being somewhat mystified myself by the shift in terminology around the year 2000, from “late capitalism” to “neoliberalism.”  Writing this brief review essay has given me the opportunity to think about this, and to suggest an answer.^[1] In addition I am interested in bringing together some of the grand narratives of neoliberalism on the one hand, and a range of ethnographic work on the other.  I apologize in advance for a certain U.S. bias in the discussion.
• From one point of view, there is no hard-and-fast distinction between late capitalism and neoliberalism, and in many ways neoliberalism is simply late capitalism made conscious, carried to extremes, and having more visible effects.  The real break is generally agreed to have been between the kind of capitalism in place in the U.S. from about the 1940s to the 1970s (there is no established term for this; Lash and Urry [1987] call it “organized capitalism”), and what came after (i.e., late capitalism or neoliberalism).  This break involves two somewhat interrelated shifts.  The first is a shift from a so-called Fordist to post-Fordist framework defining the relationship between capital and labor:  under Fordism there was a kind of truce between capital and labor, and (organized) labor did fairly well in terms of pay and job security; under post-Fordism, the truce is over, and labor has become dispensable, disposable, and replaceable.  The second is a shift from a Keynesian theory of the relationship between the government and the economy, to a post-Keynesian (“neoliberal”) theory:  under Keynesianism, the government was expected to play a role in regulating the economy and in sustaining social programs for the general well-being; under post-Keynesianism/neo-liberalism the government is supposed to do neither (key texts from this period were Mandel 1978, Harvey 1989, and Lash and Urry 1987).^[2]
• But if late capitalism and neoliberalism are two names for more or less the same set of changes in the capitalist system, the terminological shift from the first to the second signals – I suggest – a change in the story or narrative in which the changes in question are embedded.  The phrase “late capitalism,” which was the dominant term in the 1980s and 90s, was embedded in a narrative of “globalization,” a concept that had positive as well as negative aspects, while “neoliberalism,” which has become the dominant term since about 2000, is embedded in a much darker narrative, a story of a crusade powered by ideology and/or greed, to tilt the world political economy even more in favor of the dominant classes and nations.
• I want to make it clear that the economy known as “late capitalism” in the 80s and 90s was not really much more benign than the economy we now call “neoliberalism.” Either/both emerged from the dual turn from Fordism and Keynesianism, that is, from the metaphoric social contracts that had protected industrial labor as well as the citizenry in general from the worst excesses of capitalism.  But in the 80s and 90s, accounts of late capitalism were closely tied up with “globalization,” and while globalization was certainly understood to have its down sides (labor outsourcing, unemployment, and deindustrialization^[3] at the sending end; extreme labor exploitation at the receiving end, etc.), there was also a fairly influential set of arguments about the ways in which other aspects of globalization (flows of technology, information, media, etc.) could be seen as positive and liberating  (see especially Appadurai 1990).  Globalization remains real and indeed as multi-layered and multi-valent as ever (see Hannerz 1996; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Tsing 2005).  But neoliberalism is now embedded in a different, and more consistently dark, set of stories, to which we now turn.

• NEOLIBERALISM:  THE BIG PICTURE

   

  On the recommendation of a friend, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2008) in Heathrow Airport a year or so ago, and read it on the long flight back to Los Angeles.  The book gave me nightmares.
• Klein tells the story, in deep and extensive detail, of an ideologically driven and often quite intentional campaign of “erasing and remaking the world” (2008:3) on the part of a network of true-believer neoliberal economists and politicians.  The book reads like a John Le Carré novel, in which concealed nefarious forces seek world domination, and in fact Le Carré wrote a blurb for the cover.  The sober academic might feel the book has a certain paranoid tinge, especially since it starts with some mind-control experiments funded by the American government during the Cold War.  But keep reading.  When Klein gets into the well-researched and highly specific details of particular cases of economic “shock therapy” that have been imposed on many countries (and some cities) of the world, with mostly disastrous results for almost everyone but the very rich and the banks, the reader comes to know in his or her gut what “neoliberalism” is all about.
• By the phrase “disaster capitalism” in her title, Klein means not only the general ways in which extreme free-market capitalism is an economic disaster for many people and countries, but the more specific fact that real disasters (the debt crisis of New York City in the 70s, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Hurricane Katrina in 2005) are explicitly seen as the best breeding grounds and opportunities to transform old economic regimes into neoliberal ones.  A large part of “transforming old economic regimes” involves selling off state-operated properties, goods, and institutions to private buyers, and replacing those state operated entities with private, for-profit ones.  In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example, the city of New Orleans was persuaded to sell virtually the entire public school system to private, for-profit operators.   Discussing the New Orleans case as her opening example, Klein sets up the premise of the book:  “I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism’”(p. 6).
• If social or natural disasters do not offer themselves up, Klein shows convincingly that they will be manufactured, the war in Iraq being the latest case in point. Let us follow the Iraq war thread into David Harvey’s 2007 book, A Short History of Neo-Liberalism, where it is his opening example.   Like Klein, Harvey sees “the management and manipulation of crises” (p. 162), whether floods, wars, or financial melt-downs, as part and parcel of establishing the neoliberal agenda.  And like Klein, he provides abundant evidence to show that the war in Iraq was a crisis manufactured to “impose by main force on Iraq… a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation”(p. 7).
• Harvey offers a clear definition of neoliberalism as a system of “accumulation by dispossession,” which has four main pillars:  1) the “privatization and commodification” of public goods; 2) “financialization,” in which any kind of good (or bad) can be turned into an instrument of economic speculation; 3) the “management and manipulation of crises” (as above); and 4) “state redistribution,” in which the state becomes an agent of the upward redistribution of wealth (159-164 passim).
• Harvey places particular emphasis on the last point, the upward redistribution of wealth.  He takes issue with other writers who argue that the enormous growth of social inequality since the beginnings of neoliberalization in the 1970s is an unfortunate by-product of what is otherwise a sound economic theory.  Instead Harvey sees the vast enrichment of an upper class of capital owners and managers at the expense of everyone else as an intrinsic part of the neoliberal agenda:  “Redistributive effects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project.” (p. 16).
• I have heard Klein and Harvey dismissed as “conspiracy theorists,” and both books do have something of this quality, Klein’s somewhat more than Harvey’s.  In part the effect is created, I think, because both writers eschew a language of abstract social forces, and show that real individuals in real times and places expressed clear intent and understanding about what they were doing.  Harvey also shows a kind of massive patterning in the redistribution of wealth that he says cannot be understood in any way other than as part of a fairly intentional project.  I myself found the data very convincing but the reader will have to judge for him- or herself on this point.
• In any event one does not need to buy Klein’s and Harvey’s histories to see neoliberalism doing its work in both wealthy and poor nations of the world.  The polarization of wealth, including both the amassing of huge fortunes at the upper end of the class structure, and the increasing impoverishment of many people and countries at the lower end, is a fact.  We can see it in the statistics, which are apparently robust and indisputable.  We can also see it ethnographically, and here we return to the anthropology.

• NEOLIBERALISM ON THE GROUND: ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES

   

  Ethnography does many things that cannot be accomplished by overarching works like those just discussed.  Ethnographies – of course I don’t have to say this to anthropologists, but it is worth putting on the record anyway – provide depth, richness, complexity, humanity, even humor, to bring to life abstract accounts of “economic restructuring” and “polarization of wealth.” But most of all – as I reflect on various studies of people and places at the short end of the neoliberal stick – ethnographies remind us that people live in worlds of meaning as well as of material conditions.  I want to look briefly here at three different anthropological examples of what people make of their lives and of the world as they experience in various ways the massive dislocations of late capitalism/neoliberalism/globalization.
• James Ferguson writes of the people of the Copperbelt of Zambia (2002), where a nascent industrial economy has collapsed under “declining terms of trade, increasingly worked-out mines, and the crushing burden of a debt crisis” (p. 137).  The depleted mines are part of a local and specific environmental history, but the declining terms of trade and the debt crisis are clear effects of neoliberal restructuring.  Ferguson describes the economic hardships that have come about as a result of all this as “staggering” (p. 139), but he moves beyond that to try to understand the larger sense of profound loss people are experiencing.  He argues that, within the earlier discourse of “modernization,” people saw themselves and their nations as moving toward some kind of “modern” future, including a sense of joining a “world society” and connecting up with what Ferguson calls “the grid of modernity.”  Now however they feel themselves disconnected from the grid, both literally and metaphorically, and with a sense of abjection or “humiliating expulsion” from the global modern community (p. 140).
• Jean and John Comaroff show us another face of the ways in which people suffering under the effects of late capitalism/neoliberalism (2001) make sense of the new world in which they find themselves.  They use the phrase “millennial capitalism” to call to mind not only the real timing of the economic transformation in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, but also to capture the magical, supernatural, fearful overtones associated with the turn of the millennium.  Drawing on earlier ethnographic research by themselves and others, in South Africa and many other parts of the world, they call attention to the recent proliferation of “occult economies,” magical (by way of, say, wealth-sucking zombies) and quite practical (by way of, say, extravagant Ponzi schemes) ways of gaining great wealth without productive labor.  While cautioning that it is difficult to measure any real growth in the frequency with which such beliefs and practices are appearing, they argue nonetheless that these beliefs/practices have become part of the public discourse in ways that are new, and have taken on new meanings in an economic order in which speculative financialization – what has elsewhere been called “casino capitalism” – has become normalized.
• For a final example of how people try to make sense of the effects of neoliberalization of their lived world, we may look at Steven Gregory’s study of everyday life and local politics in the Dominican Republic.  Where Ferguson’s study conveys a sense of the profound wounding of identities and loss of faith in the future brought about by the collapse of the modernist project under neoliberalism; and where the Comaroffs’ discussion shows us what might be called the deep irrationalities, which nonetheless have a kind of rationality, triggered by an out-of-control economy; Gregory focuses on the ways in which the neoliberal order generates new forms of (state) power, and new points of friction between the more and less powerful, on the ground.  In this context, Gregory’s actors appear more political, more willing to take on the authorities under particular conditions, and more active in keeping specific injustices clear and well in view.  For example, when the state sold off the national electrical utility to a private company, and the company began imposing blackouts to get people to pay their bills, people took to the streets “in widespread, unrelenting protests throughout the country”(p. 14).
• For poor communities within rich nations, as well as for poor nations in an increasingly unbalanced world, it is likely that we see manifestations of all of these ways, and no doubt more, of making sense of the craziness and the gross injustices of the neoliberal world order.  A sense of humiliation and abjection, a great deal of magical and irrational thinking, as well as a certain clear-eyed sense of injustice and the necessity for standing up to it when it is not too dangerous to do so – all of these and many other ways of understanding/experiencing/reacting to/dealing with the pitilessness of neoliberal theories and practices can no doubt be found, in various mixtures, in most parts of the world.
• I confess it is easy to be pessimistic about the state of the world today, and very hard to see a way out.  But I take some small measure of heart from a recent story in the New York Times about the impact of a new documentary by critical filmmaker Charles Ferguson. Ferguson has a PhD in political science, made millions in Silicon Valley, cashed out and began making politically critical documentary films.  He first made a spectacular award-winning documentary on the Iraq war called No End in Sight (2007), and more recently made a documentary about the 2008 near-crash of Wall Street, Inside Job (2010).^[4] The latter is a powerful critique of the economists, bankers, and politicians who basically saw what was coming and proceeded with what they were doing anyway.  One of the story lines in the film concerns academic economists who sit on the boards of major banks and financial corporations but fail to disclose this in their C.V.’s, on their web sites, and presumably in their classrooms. There is a stunning moment in the film when Ferguson is interviewing the Dean of the Business School at Columbia University, and pressing him about his failure to reveal his potential and real conflicts of interest.  The dean suddenly realizes that he has been exposed on film, gets very angry, and calls a halt to the interview.  But the damage has been done.
• I saw the film when it came out in October.  Recently, I opened my morning New York Times and found the following story on page one of the business section:  “Academic Economists to Consider Ethics Code.”  The proposal for this code, according to the Times reporter, “is partly a response to ‘Inside Job,’ a documentary film … that excoriates leading academic economists for their ties to Wall Street as consultants, advisers or corporate directors.” The reporter goes on to say that “the film has rattled the [economics] profession,” and he quotes an M.I.T. professor who said about the proposal for the ethics code, “’You could call this the ‘Inside Job’ effect.”  (Chan 2010).  It’s important to note that the proposal for the code of ethics has not passed yet, and indeed may not pass.  Thus one must recognize the ways in which the Times reporter and his editors are adding value and impact to the film by giving the (possible) code of ethics story this kind of coverage.  The story itself is a political act.
• I find all of this encouraging on a number of counts.   I am encouraged that there are wealthy persons like Ferguson who have both a critical intelligence and a conscience, as well as the talent to make a powerful film.  I am encouraged that the film had the power to expose and shame an influential person, his field, and his institution, and possibly bring about some small but real change. I am encouraged that the Times covered, and indeed constructed, the story.  It will only be out of some complicated conjuncture of people and forces like this – between wealthy and powerful renegades like Ferguson, powerful media like the New York Times (and smart reporters like Sewell Chan), anthropologists and others writing and teaching about what is going on, and ordinary people themselves, in their infinite practical wisdom, in every part of the globe – that some kinds of solutions may emerge.

• REFERENCES CITED

   

  Appadurai, Arjun.  1990.  “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.”  Public Culture 2(2):1-24.

   

  Bell, Daniel.  1974.  The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.  New York:  Harper Colophon Books.

   

  Chan, Sewell.  2010.  “Academic Economists To Consider Ethics Code.”  New York Times, December 31: B1, 2.

   

  Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff, eds.  2001.  Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism.  Durham:  Duke University Press.

   

  Dudley, Kathryn Marie.  1994.  The End of the Line:  Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

• Ferguson, James.  2002.  “Global Disconnect:  Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism.”  In J.X. Inda and R. Rosaldo, eds., The Anthropology of Globalization, pp. 136-153.  Malden, MA:  Blackwell Publishing.

   

  Gregory, Steven.  2007.  The Devil Behind the Mirror:  Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic.  Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press.

   

  Hannerz, Ulf.  1996.  Transnational Connections:  Culture, People, Place.  London and New York:  Routledge.

   

  Harvey, David.  1989.  The Condition of Postmodernity.  Oxford:  Basic Blackwell.

• 2005.  A Brief History of Neoliberalism.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

   

  Inda, Jonathan Xavier and Renato Rosaldo, eds.  2002.  The Anthropology of Globalization.  Malden, MA:  Blackwell Publishing.

   

  Jameson, Fredric.  1984.  “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”  New Left Review 146, July-August, pp. 53-92.

   

  Klein, Naomi.  2008.  The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.  London:  Penguin Books.

• Lash, Scott and John Urry.  1987.  The End of Organized Capitalism.  Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press.

   

  Mandel, Ernst.  1978.  Late Capitalism.  Trans. J. De Bres.  New York:  Verson.

   

  Ortner, Sherry B.  n.d.  Not Hollywood:  Independent Film as Cultural Critique.  Manuscript.

   

  Sahlins, Marshall.  2002.  Waiting for Foucault, Still.  Chicago:  Prickly Pear Press.

   

  Taylor, Timothy D.  n.d.  “Music in the New Capitalism.” In A. Valdivia, ed., International Companions to Media Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

   

  Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt.  2005.  Friction:  An Ethnography of Global Connection.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.
• • See also Taylor n.d. for another sorting out of these and related terms.  I am grateful to Timothy Taylor for excellent comments and suggestions on this article. ↩
   
  • ^[2] The title of Harvey’s 1989 book, The Condition of Postmodernity, signals the connection between late capitalism and postmodernity, a major theme in the 80s literature (see also Jameson 1984).  I had hoped to include a discussion of postmodernity in this essay, but I have run out of time and space.  The connection between the two phenomena is central to my book on the independent film scene in the U.S. in the 1990s and 2000s.  See Ortner n.d. ↩
   
  • ^[3] “Deindustrialization” and the related “post –industrial society” are part of an earlier vocabulary of “late capitalism” (see Bell 1974, Dudley 1994). ↩
   
  • ^[4] Ferguson and his films play a significant role in Ortner n.d.

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• UN Treaty Would Recognize “Mother Earth’s” Rights

    

   

    By Samia Perkins  on Thu Apr 14th, 2011
• Bolivia, which has enacted its own “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth”, reflecting the beliefs of the indigenous people of that country, is seeking to bring those principles worldwide with a United Nations treaty. The treaty, in draft at this time, would give Mother Earth the same rights as humans, including rights to life, water and clean air, the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities, and the right to be free from pollution.

• Bolivia’s domestic law gives bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country the same rights as humans as well. The president, Evo Morales, enacted the law in January, and the general structure of the UN treaty is meant to mirror the Bolivian law. Bolivia is rich in natural resources like natural gas and lithium, and yet remains one of the poorest countries in South America. This new law likely poses further challenges for companies attempting to operate there.

   

  The treaty would establish a Ministry of Mother Earth, and would give the planet an ombudsman with the job of hearing nature’s complaints. These would be brought forward by activist groups, and other countries.

   

  Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN explains: “If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) who have rights are humans or companies, then how can you reach balance? But if you recognize that nature too has rights, and (if you provide) legal forms to protect and preserve those rights, then you can achieve balance.” Other countries have been supportive of the treaty, including Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda.

   

  Bolivia also issued a pamphlet in 2008 with 10 commandments to save the planet. Number one? End capitalism.

   

  Debate is set to begin on April 20th, two days before the UN’s recognition of the second International Mother Earth Day, which is another initiative led by Morales.

   

  I’m going to go out on a limb here, and predict that this treaty will not have wide acceptance.

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• maoism

   

  The Trickledown Revolution

   

  The answer lies not in the excesses of capitalism or communism. It could well spring from our subaltern depths.

   

    Arundhati Roy
• Jantar Mantar is the only place in Delhi where Section 144 is not enforced. People from all over the country, fed up with being ignored by the political establishment and the media, converge there, desperately hoping for a hearing. Some take long train journeys. Some, like the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, have walked for weeks, all the way to Delhi. Though they had to fight each other for the best spot on the burning (or freezing) pavement, until recently protesters were allowed to camp in Jantar Mantar for as long as they liked—weeks, months, even years. Under the malevolent gaze of the police and the Special Branch, they would put up their faded shamianas and banners. From here they declared their faith in democracy by issuing their memorandums, announcing their protest plans and staging their indefinite hunger strikes. From here they tried (but never succeeded) to march on Parliament. From here they hoped.
• Of  late, though, Democracy’s timings have been changed. It’s strictly office hours now, nine to five. No overtime. No sleepovers. No matter from how far people have come, no matter if they have no shelter in the city—if they don’t leave by 6 pm, they are forcibly dispersed, by the police if necessary, with batons and water cannons if things get out of hand. The new timings were ostensibly instituted to make sure that the 2010 Commonwealth Games that New Delhi is hosting go smoothly. But nobody’s expecting the old timings back any time soon. Maybe it’s in the fitness of things that what’s left of our democracy should be traded in for an event that was created to celebrate the British empire. Perhaps it’s only right that 4,00,000 people should have had their homes demolished and been driven out of the city overnight. Or that hundreds of thousands of roadside vendors should have had their livelihoods snatched away by order of the Supreme Court so city malls could take over their share of business. And that tens of thousands of beggars should have been shipped out of the city while more than a hundred thousand galley slaves were shipped in to build the flyovers, metro tunnels, Olympic-size swimming pools, warm-up stadiums and luxury housing for athletes. The Old Empire may not exist. But obviously our tradition of servility has become too profitable an enterprise to dismantle.
• I was at Jantar Mantar because a thousand pavement-dwellers from cities all over the country had come to demand a few fundamental rights: the right to shelter, to food (ration cards), to life (protection from police brutality, and criminal extortion by municipal officers).
• It was early spring, the sun was sharp, but still civilised. This is a terrible thing to have to say, but it’s true: you could smell the protest from a fair distance. It was the accumulated odour of a thousand human bodies that had been dehumanised, denied the basic necessities for human (or even animal) health and hygiene for years, if not a whole lifetime. Bodies that had been marinated in the refuse of our big cities, bodies that had no shelter from the harsh weather, no access to clean water, clean air, sanitation or medical care. No part of this great country, none of the supposedly progressive schemes, no single urban institution has been designed to accommodate them. Not the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, not any other slum development, employment guarantee or welfare scheme. Not even the sewage system—they shit on top of it. They are shadow people, who live in the cracks that run between schemes and institutions. They sleep on the streets, eat on the streets, make love on the streets, give birth on the streets, are raped on the streets, cut their vegetables, wash their clothes, raise their children, live and die on the streets.
• If the motion picture were an art form that involved the olfactory senses—in other words, if cinema smelled—then films like Slumdog Millionaire would not win Oscars. The stench of that kind of poverty wouldn’t blend with the aroma of warm popcorn.
• The people at the protest in Jantar Mantar that day were not even slum dogs, they were pavement-dwellers. Who were they? Where had they come from? They were the refugees of India’s shining, the people who are being sloshed around like toxic effluent in a manufacturing process that has gone berserk. The representatives of the more than sixty million people who have been displaced, by rural destitution, by slow starvation, by floods and drought (many of them man-made), by mines, steel factories and aluminium smelters, by highways and expressways, by the 3,300 big dams built since Independence and now by Special Economic Zones. They’re part of the 830 million people of India who live on less than twenty rupees a day, the ones who starve while millions of tonnes of foodgrain is either eaten by rats in government warehouses or burnt in bulk (because it is cheaper to burn food than to distribute it to poor people). They are the parents of the tens of millions of malnourished children in our country, of the two million who die every year before they reach the age of five. They are the millions who make up the chain-gangs that are transported from city to city to build the New India. Is this what is known as enjoying the “fruits of modern development”?
• What must they think, these people, about a government that sees fit to spend nine billion dollars of public money (2,000 per cent more than the initial estimate) for a two-week sports extravaganza which, for fear of terrorism, malaria, dengue and New Delhi’s new superbug, many international athletes have refused to attend? Which the Queen of England, titular head of the Commonwealth, would not consider presiding over, not even in her most irresponsible dreams. What must they think of the fact that most of those billions have been stolen and salted away by politicians and Games officials? Not much, I guess. Because for people who live on less than twenty rupees a day, money on that scale must seem like science fiction. It probably doesn’t occur to them that it’s their money. That’s why corrupt politicians in India never have a problem sweeping back into power, using the money they stole to buy elections. (Then, they feign outrage and ask, “Why don’t the Maoists stand for elections?”)
• Standing there, in that dim crowd on that bright day, I thought of all the struggles that are being waged by people in this country—against big dams in the Narmada Valley, Polavaram, Arunachal Pradesh; against mines in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand; against the police by the adivasis of Lalgarh; against the grabbing of their lands for industries and special economic zones all over the country. How many years (and in how many ways) people have fought to avoid just such a fate. I thought of Maase, Narmada, Roopi, Nity, Mangtu, Madhav, Saroja, Raju, Gudsa Usendi and Comrade Kamala (my young bodyguard during the time I spent with the Maoists in the jungle) with their guns slung over their shoulders. I thought of the great dignity of the forest I had so recently walked in and the rhythm of the adivasi drums at the Bhumkal celebration in Bastar, like the soundtrack of the quickening pulse of a furious nation.
• I thought of Padma with whom I travelled to Warangal. She is only in her 30s but when she walks up stairs, she has to hold the banister and drag her body behind her. She was arrested just a week after she had had an appendix operation. She was beaten until she had an internal haemorrhage and had to have several organs removed. When they cracked her knees, the police explained helpfully that it was to make sure “she would never walk in the jungle again”. She was released after serving an eight-year sentence. Now she runs the ‘Amarula Bhadhu Mitrula Committee’, the Committee of Relatives and Friends of Martyrs. It retrieves the bodies of people killed in fake encounters. Padma spends her time criss-crossing northern Andhra Pradesh, in whatever transport she can find, usually a tractor, transporting the corpses of people whose parents or spouses are too poor to make the journey to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones.
• The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary. Whether people are fighting to overthrow the Indian State, or fighting against Big Dams, or only fighting a particular steel plant or mine or SEZ, the bottomline is that they are fighting for their dignity, for the right to live and smell like human beings. They are fighting because, as far as they are concerned, “the fruits of modern development” stink like dead cattle on the highway.
• On the 64th anniversary of India’s Independence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh climbed into his bullet-proof soapbox in the Red Fort to deliver a passionless, bone-chillingly banal speech to the nation. Listening to him, who would have guessed that he was addressing a country that, despite having the second-highest economic growth rate in the world, has more poor people than 26 of Africa’s poorest countries put together? “All of you have contributed to India’s success,” he said, “the hard work of our workers, our artisans, our farmers has brought our country to where it stands today.... We are building a new India in which every citizen would have a stake, an India which would be prosperous and in which all citizens would be able to live a life of honour and dignity in an environment of peace and goodwill. An India in which all problems could be solved through democratic means. An India in which the basic rights of every citizen would be protected.” Some would call this graveyard humour. He might as well have been speaking to people in Finland, or Sweden.
• Ninety per cent of our labour force is employed by the unorganised sector.
• As for the fact that the per capita foodgrain availability has actually decreased over the last 20 years—which happens to be the period of our most rapid economic growth—believe me, that’s just a coincidence.
• our 100 richest people, millionaires and billionaires, hold assets worth a full 25 per cent of our GDP
• This is why we have deployed the Army, the Police, the Central Reserve Police Force, the Border Security Force, the Central Industrial Security Force, the Pradeshik Armed Constabulary, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, the Eastern Frontier Rifles—as well as the Scorpions, Greyhounds and Cobras—to crush the misguided insurrections that are erupting in our mineral-rich areas.
• “Our experiments with democracy began in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir. Kashmir, I need not reiterate, is an integral part of India. We have deployed more than half-a-million soldiers to bring democracy to the people there. The Kashmiri youth who have been risking their lives by defying curfew and throwing stones at the police for the last two months are Lashkar-e-Toiba militants who actually want employment, not azadi. Tragically, 60 of them have lost their lives before we could study their job applications. I have instructed the police from now on to shoot to maim rather than kill these misguided youths.”
• In his seven years in office, Manmohan Singh has allowed himself to be cast as Sonia Gandhi’s tentative, mild-mannered underling. It’s an excellent disguise for a man who, for the last 20 years, first as finance minister and then as prime minister, has powered through a regime of new economic policies that has brought India into the situation in which it finds itself now. This is not to suggest that Manmohan Singh is not an underling. Only that all his orders don’t come from Sonia Gandhi. In his autobiography (A Prattler’s Tale), Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West Bengal, tells his story of how Manmohan Singh rose to power. In 1991, when India’s foreign exchange reserves were dangerously low, the Narasimha Rao government approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for an emergency loan. The IMF agreed on two conditions. The first was Structural Adjustment and Economic Reform. The second was the appointment of a finance minister of its choice. That man, says Mitra, was Manmohan Singh.
• Over the years, he has stacked his cabinet and the bureaucracy with people who are evangelically committed to the corporate takeover of everything—water, electricity, minerals, agriculture, land, telecommunications, education, health—no matter what the consequences.
• Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling.
• (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was “a soldier for the tribal people”. He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite “giri”—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this “soldier for the tribal people” looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias—the “Rich India” and the “Poor India”—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence, including his own.)
• The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice. To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs—judges, bureaucrats and politicians. They in turn are run like prize race-horses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.
• In a lecture at Harvard, his old university, in October 2007, Chidambaram outlined that task. The lecture was called ‘Poor Rich Countries: The Challenges of Development’. He called the three decades after Independence “the lost years” and exulted about the GDP growth rate which rose from 6.9 per cent in 2002 to 9.4 per cent by 2007. What he said is important enough for me to inflict a chunk of his charmless prose on you:
• Allowing “market forces” to mine resources “quickly and efficiently” is what colonisers did to their colonies, what Spain and North America did to South America, what Europe did (and continues to do) in Africa. It’s what the Apartheid regime did in South Africa. What puppet dictators in small countries do to bleed their people. It’s a formula for growth and development, but for someone else. It’s an old, old, old, old story—must we really go over that ground again?
• Now that mining licences have been issued with the urgency you’d associate with a knockdown distress sale, and the scams that are emerging have run into billions of dollars, now that mining companies have polluted rivers, mined away state borders, wrecked ecosystems and unleashed civil war, the consequence of what the coven has set into motion is playing out. Like an ancient lament over ruined landscapes and the bodies of the poor.
• a cabinet minister surely knows that to compulsorily acquire tribal land (which is where most of the minerals are) and turn it over to private mining corporations is illegal and unconstitutional under the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act or PESA. Passed in 1996, PESA is an amendment that attempts to right some of the wrongs done to tribal people by the Indian Constitution when it was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It overrides all existing laws that may be in conflict with it. It is a law that acknowledges the deepening marginalisation of tribal communities and is meant to radically recast the balance of power. As a piece of legislation, it is unique because it makes the community—the collective—a legal entity and it confers on tribal societies who live in scheduled areas the right to self-governance. Under PESA, “compulsory acquisition” of tribal land cannot be justified on any count. So, ironically, those who are being called “Maoists” (which includes everyone who is resisting land acquisition) are actually fighting to uphold the Constitution. While the government is doing its best to vandalise it.
• Here it is then—not troublesome activists, not the Maoists, but a government report calling for the mining MoUs to be re-examined. What does the government do with this document? How does it respond? On April 24, 2010, at a formal ceremony, the prime minster released the report. Brave of him, you would think. Except, this chapter wasn’t in it. It was dropped.
• Half a century ago, just a year before he was killed, Che Guevara wrote: “When the oppressive forces maintain themselves in power against laws they themselves established, peace must be considered already broken.”
• Indeed it must. In 2009, Manmohan Singh said in Parliament, “If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected.” It was a furtive declaration of war.
• (Permit me a small digression here, a moment to tell a very short Tale of Two Sikhs. In his last petition to the Punjab governor, before he was hanged by the British government in 1931, Bhagat Singh, the celebrated Sikh revolutionary—and Marxist—said: “Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist so long as India’s toiling masses and the natural resources are being exploited by a handful of parasites. They may be purely British Capitalist or mixed British and Indian or even purely Indian.... All these things make no difference.”)
• During the Emergency era, grim as it was, people still allowed themselves to dream of bettering their lot, to dream of justice. When Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency on the midnight of June 25, 1975, she did it to crush an incipient revolution. The Naxalite uprising in Bengal had been more or less decimated. But then millions of people were rallying to Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for ‘Sampoorna Kranti’ (Total Revolution). At the heart of all the unrest was the demand for Land to the Tiller. (Even back then, it was no different—you needed a revolution to implement land redistribution, which is one of the directive principles of the Constitution.)
• Thirty-five years later, things have changed drastically. Justice, that grand, beautiful idea, has been whittled down to mean human rights. Equality is a utopian fantasy. The word has, more or less, been evicted from our vocabulary. The poor have been pushed to the wall. From fighting for land for the landless, revolutionary parties and resistance movements have had to lower their sights to fighting for people’s rights to hold on to what little land they have. The only kind of land redistribution that seems to be on the cards is land being grabbed from the poor and redistributed to the rich, for their landbanks which go by the name of SEZs. The landless (mostly Dalits), the jobless, the slum-dwellers and the urban working class are more or less out of the reckoning. In places like Lalgarh in West Bengal, people are only asking the police and the government to leave them alone. The adivasi organisation called the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (pcapa) began with one simple demand—that the Superintendent of Police visit Lalgarh and apologise to the people for the atrocities his men had committed on villagers. That was considered preposterous. (How could half-naked savages expect a government officer to apologise to them?) So people barricaded their villages and refused to let the police in. The police stepped up the violence. People responded with fury. Now, two years down the line, and many gruesome rapes, killings and fake encounters later, it’s all-out war. The pcapa has been banned and dubbed a Maoist outfit. Its leaders have been jailed or shot. (A similar fate has befallen the Chasi Mulya Adivasi Sangh in Narayanpatna in Orissa and the Visthappen Virodhi Ekta Manch in Potka in Jharkhand.)
• As war closes in, the armed forces have announced (in the way only they can), that they too are getting into the business of messing with our heads. In June 2010, they released two “operational doctrines”. One was a joint doctrine for air-land operations. The other was a doctrine on Military Psychological Operations which “constitutes a planned process of conveying a message to select target audience, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and behaviour, which affect the achievement of political and military objectives of the country.... The Doctrine also provides guidelines for activities related to perception management in sub-conventional operations, specially in an internal environment wherein misguided population may have to be brought into the mainstream”. The press release went on to say that “the doctrine on Military Psychological Operations is a policy, planning and implementation document that aims to create a conducive environment for the armed forces to operate by using the media available with the Services to their advantage”.
• A month later, at a meeting of chief ministers of Naxalite-affected states, a decision was taken to escalate the war. Thirty-six battalions of the India Reserve Force were added to the existing 105 battalions, and 16,000 Special Police Officers (civilians armed and contracted to function as police) were added to the existing 30,000. The home secretary promised to hire 1,75,000 policemen over the next five years. (It’s a good model for an employment guarantee scheme: hire half the population to shoot the other half. You can fool around with the ratios if you like.)
• Two days later, the army chief told his senior officers to be “mentally prepared to step into the fight against Naxalism.... It might be in six months or in a year or two, but if we have to maintain our relevance as a tool of the state, we will have to undertake things that the nation wants us to do”.
• By August, newspapers were reporting that the on-again-off-again option of using the air force was on again. “The Indian air force can fire in self-defence in anti-Maoist operations,” the Hindustan Times said. “The permission has been granted but with strict conditionalities. We cannot use rockets or the integral guns of the helicopters and we can retaliate only if fired upon.... To this end, we have side-mounted machine-guns on our choppers that are operated by our Garuds (IAF commandos).” That’s a relief. No integral guns, only side-mounted machine-guns.
• Maybe “six months or in a year or two” is about as long as it will take for the brigade headquarters in Bilaspur and the air base in Rajnandgaon to be ready. Maybe by then, in a great show of democratic spirit, the government will give in to popular anger and repeal AFSPA, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (which allows non-commissioned officers to kill on suspicion) in Manipur, Nagaland, Assam and Kashmir. Once the applause subsides and the celebration peters out, AFSPA will be recast, as the home minister has suggested, on the lines of the Jeevan Reddy report. (To sound more humane but to be more deadly.) Then it can be promulgated all over the country under a new name. Maybe that will give the armed forces the impunity they need to do what “the nation” wants them to do—to be deployed in the parts of India against the poorest of the poor who are fighting for their very survival.
• So here’s the Indian State, in all its democratic glory, willing to loot, starve, lay siege to, and now deploy the air force in “self-defence” against its poorest citizens.
• Is there anything they can be offered within the existing system that will deflect the Maoists from their stated goal of overthrowing the Indian State? The answer to that is, of course not. The Maoists do not believe that the present system can deliver justice. The thing is that an increasing number of people are beginning to agree with them. If we lived in a society with a genuinely democratic impulse, one in which ordinary people felt they could at least hope for justice, then the Maoists would be only be a small, marginalised group of militants with very little popular appeal.
• The other contention is that Maoists want a ceasefire to take the heat off themselves for a while so that they can use the time to regroup and consolidate their position. Azad, in an interview to The Hindu (April 14, 2010), was surprisingly candid about this: “It doesn’t need much of a common sense to understand that both sides will utilise the situation of a ceasefire to strengthen their respective sides.” He then went on to explain that a ceasefire, even a temporary one, would give respite to ordinary people who are caught in a war zone.

• The government, on the other hand, desperately needs this war. (Read the business papers to see how desperately.) The eyes of the international business community are boring holes into its back. It needs to deliver, and fast. To keep its mask from falling, it must continue to offer talks on the one hand, and undermine them on the other. The elimination of Azad was an important victory because it silenced a voice that had begun to sound dangerously reasonable. For the moment at least, peace talks have been successfully derailed.

   

  There is plenty to be cynical about in the discussion around peace talks. The thing to remember is that for us ordinary folks no peace talks means an escalating war.
• Over the last few months, the government has poured tens of thousands of heavily armed paramilitary troops into the forest. The Maoists responded with a series of aggressive attacks and ambushes. More than 200 policemen have been killed. The bodies keep coming out of the forest. Slain policemen wrapped in the national flag; slain Maoists, displayed like hunters’ trophies, their wrists and ankles lashed to bamboo poles; bullet-ridden bodies, bodies that don’t look human any more, mutilated in ambushes, beheadings and summary executions. Of the bodies being buried in the forest, we have no news. The theatre of war has been cordoned off, closed to activists and journalists. So there are no body counts.
• On April 6, 2010, in its biggest strike ever, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) ambushed a CRPF company in Dantewada and killed 76 policemen. The party issued a coldly triumphant statement. Television milked the tragedy for everything it was worth. The nation was called upon to condemn the killing. Many of us were not prepared to—not because we celebrate killing, nor because we are all Maoists, but because we have thorny, knotty views about Operation Green Hunt. For refusing to buy shares in the rapidly growing condemnation industry, we were branded “terrorist sympathisers” and had our photographs flashed repeatedly on TV like wanted criminals.
• Days after the ambush, I ran into two paramilitary commandos chatting to a bunch of drivers in a Delhi car park. They were waiting for their VIP to emerge from some restaurant or health club or hotel. Their view on what is going on involved neither grief nor patriotism. It was simple accounting. A balance-sheet. They were talking about how many lakhs of rupees in bribes it takes for a man to get a job in the paramilitary forces and how most families incur huge debts to pay that bribe. That debt can never be repaid by the pathetic wages paid to a jawan. The only way to repay it is to do what policemen in India do—blackmail and threaten people, run protection rackets, demand payoffs, do dirty deals. (In the case of Dantewada, loot villagers, steal cash and jewellery.) But if the man dies an untimely death, it leaves the families hugely in debt. The anger of the men in the car park was directed at the government and senior police officers who make fortunes from bribes and then so casually send young men to their death. They knew that the handsome compensation that was announced for the dead in the April 6 attack was just to blunt the impact of the scandal. It was never going to be standard practice for every policeman who dies in this sordid war.
• On May 17, 2010, in another major attack, the Maoists blew up a bus in Dantewada and killed about 44 people. Of them, 16 were Special Police Officers (SPOs), in other words, members of the dreaded government-sponsored people’s militia, the Salwa Judum. The rest of the dead were, shockingly, ordinary people, mostly adivasis. The Maoists expressed perfunctory regret for having killed civilians, but they came that much closer to mimicking the State’s “collateral damage” defence.
• Not many analysts and commentators who were pained by the Maoist killing of civilians in Dantewada noticed that at exactly the same time as the bus was blown up by the Maoists in Dantewada, the police had surrounded several villages in Kalinganagar in Orissa, and in Balitutha and Potko in Jharkhand, and had fired on thousands of protesters resisting the takeover of their lands by the Tatas, the Jindals and Posco. Even now, the siege continues. The wounded cannot be taken to hospital because of the police cordons. Videos uploaded on YouTube show armed riot police massing in the hundreds, confronted by ordinary villagers, some of whom are armed with bows and arrows.
• Operation Green Hunt isn’t a war against Maoists. It’s a war against the poor.
• Of all the various political formations involved in the current insurrection, none is more controversial than the CPI (Maoist). The most obvious reason is its unapologetic foregrounding of armed struggle as the only path to revolution. Sumanta Banerjee’s book In the Wake of Naxalbari is one of the most comprehensive accounts of the movement. It documents the early years, the almost harebrained manner in which the Naxalites tried to jumpstart the Indian Revolution by “annihilating the class enemy” and expecting the masses to rise up spontaneously. It describes the contortions it had to make in order to remain aligned with China’s foreign policy, how Naxalism spread from state to state and how it was mercilessly crushed.
• t’s hard to say who dislikes the Maoists more: the Indian State, its army of strategic experts and its instinctively right-wing middle class, or the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Marxist), usually called the CPI(M), and the several splinter groups that were part of the original Marxist-Leninists, or the liberal left. The argument begins with nomenclature. The more orthodox Communists do not believe that “Maoism” is an “ism” at all. (The Maoists, in turn, call the mainstream parliamentary Communists “social fascists” and accuse them of “economism”—basically, of gradually bargaining away the prospect of revolution.)
• Each faction believes itself to be the only genuinely revolutionary Marxist party, or political formation. Each believes the other has misinterpreted Communist theory and misunderstood history. Anyone who isn’t a card-carrying member of one or the other group will be able to see that none of them is entirely wrong or entirely right about what it says. But bitter splits, not unlike those in religious sects, are the natural corollary of the rigid conformity to the party line demanded by all Communist parties. So they dip into a pool of insults that dates back to the Russian and Chinese revolutions, to the great debates between Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, to Chairman Mao’s red book, and hurl them at each other. They accuse each other of the “incorrect application” of “Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought”, almost as though it’s an ointment that’s being rubbed in the wrong place. (My earlier essay Walking with the Comrades landed directly in the flight-path of this debate. It got its fair share of entertaining insults, which deserve a pamphlet of their own.)
• Other than the debate about whether or not to enter electoral politics, the major disagreement between the various strands of Communism in India centres around their reading of whether conditions in the country are ripe for revolution. Is the prairie ready for the fire, as Mao announced in China, or is it still too damp for the single spark to ignite it? The trouble is that India lives in several centuries simultaneously, so perhaps the “prairie”, that vast stretch of flat grassland, is the wrong analogy for India’s social and political landscape. Maybe a “warren” would be a better one. To arrive at a consensus about the timing of the revolution is probably impossible. So everybody marches to their own drumbeat. The CPI and the CPI(M) have more or less postponed the revolution to the afterlife. For Charu Majumdar, founder of the Naxalite movement, it was meant to have happened 30 years ago. According to Ganapathi, current chief of the Maoists, it’s about 50 years away.
• Today, 40 years after the Naxalbari uprising, the main charge against the Maoists by the parliamentary Left continues to be what it always was. They are accused of suffering from what Lenin called an “infantile disorder”, of substituting mass politics with militarism and of not having worked at building a genuinely revolutionary proletariat. They are seen as having contempt for the urban working class, of being an ideologically ossified force that can only function as a frog on the back of “innocent” (read primitive) jungle-dwelling tribal people who, according to orthodox Marxists, have no real revolutionary potential. (This is not the place perhaps to debate a vision that says people have to first become wage-earners, enslaved to a centralised industrial system, before they can be considered revolutionary.)
• The charge that the Maoists are irrelevant to urban working-class movements, to the Dalit movement, to the plight of farmers and agricultural workers outside the forests is true. There is no doubt that the Maoists’ militarised politics makes it almost impossible for it to function in places where there is no forest cover. However, it could equally be argued that the major Communist parties have managed to survive in the mainstream only by compromising their ideologies so drastically that it is impossible to tell the difference between them and other bourgeois political parties any more. It could be argued that the smaller factions that have remained relatively uncompromised have managed to do so because they do not pose a threat to anybody.
• Still, while listing a litany of their sins, it must be said that the demise of the mainstream Communist parties is not something to be celebrated. At least not unless it makes way for a new, more vital and genuinely Left movement in India.
• The Maoists (in their current as well as earlier avatars) have had a different political trajectory. The redistribution of land, by violent means if necessary, was always the centrepiece of their political activity. They have been completely unsuccessful in that endeavour. But their militant interventions, in which thousands of their cadre—as well as ordinary people—paid with their lives, shone a light on the deeply embedded structural injustice of Indian society. If nothing else, from the time of the Telangana movement, which in some ways was a precursor to the uprising in Naxalbari, the Naxalite movement, for all its faults, sparked an anger about being exploited and a desire for self-respect in some of the most oppressed communities. In West Bengal, it led to Operation Barga (a bargadar is a sharecropper), and to a far lesser extent in Andhra Pradesh, it shamed governments into carrying out some land reform. Even today, all the talk about “uneven development” and “exploitation” of tribal areas by the prime minister, the government’s plans to transfer Joint Forest Management funds from the forest department directly to the gram panchayats, the Planning Commission’s announcement that it will allocate Rs 14,000 crore for tribal development, has come as a strategy to defuse the Maoist “menace”. If those funds do end up benefiting the adivasi community, instead of being siphoned away by middlemen, then the “menace” surely ought to be given some credit. Though the Maoists have virtually no political presence outside forested areas, they do have a presence, an increasingly sympathetic one, in the popular imagination as a party that stands up for the poor against the intimidation and bullying of the State. If Operation Green Hunt eventually becomes an outright war instead of a “sub-conventional” one, if ordinary adivasis start dying in huge numbers, that sympathy could ignite in unexpected ways.
• Among the most serious charges levelled against the Maoists is that its leaders have a vested interest in keeping people poor and illiterate in order to retain their hold on them. Critics ask why, after working in areas like Dandakaranya for 30 years, they still do not run schools and clinics, why they don’t have check-dams and advanced agriculture, and why people were still dying of malaria and malnutrition. Good question. But it ignores the reality of what it means to be a banned organisation whose members—even if they are doctors or teachers—are liable to be shot on sight. It would be more useful to direct the same question to the Government of India that has none of these constraints. Why is it that in tribal areas that are not overrun by Maoists, there are no schools, no hospitals, no check-dams? Why do people in Chhattisgarh suffer from such acute malnutrition that doctors have begun to call it “nutritional aids” because of the effect it has on the human immune system?

• In their censored chapter in the ministry of panchayati raj report, Ajay Dandekar and Chitrangada Choudhury (no fans of the Maoists—they call the party ideology “brutal and cynical”) write:

   

   

  “So the Maoists today have a dual effect on the ground in PESA areas. By virtue of the gun they wield, they are able to evoke some fear in the administration at the village/block/district level. They consequently prevent the common villager’s powerlessness over the neglect or violation of protective laws like PESA, for example, warning a talati, who might be demanding bribes in return for fulfilling the duty mandated to him under the Forest Rights Act, a trader who might be paying an exploitative rate for forest produce, or a contractor who is violating the minimum wage. The party has also done an immense amount of rural development work, such as mobilising community labour for farm ponds, rainwater harvesting and land conservation works in the Dandakaranya region, which villagers testified had improved their crops and improved their food security situation.”

• In their recently published empirical analysis of the working of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) in 200 Maoist-affected districts in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, which appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, authors Kaustav Banerjee and Partha Saha say:

   

   

  “The field survey revealed that the charge that the Maoists have been blocking developmental schemes does not seem to hold much ground. In fact, Bastar seems to be doing much better in terms of NREGA than some other areas...on top of that, the wage struggles, the enforcement of minimum wages can be traced back to the wage struggles led by the Maoists in that area. A clear result that we came across is the doubling of the wage rates for tendu leaf collection in most Maoist areas.... Also, the Maoists have been encouraging the conduct [sic] of social audits since this helps in the creation of a new kind of democratic practice hitherto unseen in India.”
• People who live in situations like this do not simply take instructions from a handful of ideologues who appear out of nowhere waving guns. Their decisions of what strategies to employ take into account a whole host of considerations: the history of the struggle, the nature of the repression, the urgency of the situation and the landscape in which their struggle is taking place. The decision of whether to be a Gandhian or a Maoist, militant or peaceful, or a bit of both (like in Nandigram), is not always a moral or ideological one. Quite often, it’s a tactical one. Gandhian satyagraha, for example, is a kind of political theatre. In order for it to be effective, it needs a sympathetic audience which villagers deep in the forest do not have. When a posse of 800 policemen lay a cordon around a forest village at night and begin to burn houses and shoot people, will a hunger strike help? (Can starving people go on a hunger strike? And do hunger strikes work when they are not on TV?) Equally, guerrilla warfare is a strategy that villages in the plains, with no cover for tactical retreat, cannot afford. Fortunately, people are capable of breaking through ideological categories, and of being Gandhian in Jantar Mantar, militant in the plains and guerrilla fighters in the forest without necessarily suffering from a crisis of identity. The strength of the insurrection in India is its diversity, not uniformity.
• Since the government has expanded its definition of “Maoist” to include anybody who opposes it, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Maoists have moved to centrestage. However, their doctrinal inflexibility, their reputed inability to countenance dissent, to work with other political formations and, most of all, their single-minded, grim, military imagination makes them too small to fill the giant pair of boots that is currently on offer.
• Right now, the Maoists are the most militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements fighting an assault on adivasi homelands by a cartel of mining and infrastructure companies. To deduce from this that the CPI (Maoist) is in principle a party with a new way of thinking about “development” or the environment might be a little far-fetched. (The one reassuring sign is that it has cautiously said that it is against big dams. If it means what it says, that alone would automatically lead to a radically different development model.) For a political party that is widely seen as opposing the onslaught of corporate mining, the Maoists’ policy (and practice) on mining remains pretty woolly. In several places where people are fighting mining companies, there is a persistent view that the Maoists are not averse to allowing mining and mining-related infrastructure projects to go ahead as long as they are given protection money. From interviews and statements made by their senior leaders on the subject of mining, what emerges is just a sort of “we’ll do a better job” approach. They vaguely promise “environmentally sustainable” mining, higher royalties, better resettlement for the displaced and higher stakes for the “stakeholders”. (The present minister for mining and mineral resources too, thinking along the same lines, stood up in Parliament and promised that 26 per cent of the “profits” from mining would go into “tribal development”. What a feast that will be for the pigs at the trough!)
• Judging from what is happening in Russia and China and even Vietnam, eventually communist and capitalist societies have one thing in common—the dna of their dreams. After their revolutions, after building socialist societies that millions of workers and peasants paid for with their lives, both countries now have unbridled capitalist economies. For them too, the ability to consume has become the yardstick by which progress is measured. For this kind of “progress” you need industry. To feed the industry you need a steady supply of raw material. For that you need mines, dams, domination, colonies, war. Old powers are waning, new ones rising. Same story, different characters—rich countries plundering poor ones. Yesterday, it was Europe and America, today it’s India and China. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be Africa. Will there be a tomorrow? Perhaps it’s too late to ask, but hope has little to do with reason.
• Here in India, even in the midst of all the violence and greed, there is still immense hope. If anyone can do it, we can do it. We still have a population that has not yet been completely colonised by that consumerist dream. We have a living tradition of those who have struggled for Gandhi’s vision of sustainability and self-reliance, for socialist ideas of egalitarianism and social justice. We have Ambedkar’s vision, which challenges the Gandhians as well as the Socialists in serious ways. We have the most spectacular coalition of resistance movements with experience, understanding and vision.

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• COLONIALISM IS DOOMED

   

  by Che Guevara

   

    Speech delivered before the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 11, 1964 
   Havana, Ministry of External Relations, Information Department.  
   Official Cuban Government translation. 
• We also wish to convey our congratulations to the President of this assembly whose elevation to so high a post is of special significance since it reflects this new historic stage of resounding triumphs for the peoples of Africa, until recently subject to the colonial system of imperialism, and who, today, for the great part in the legitimate exercise of self-determination, have become citizens of sovereign states. The last hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin American rise to meet a new life, and assert their unrestricted right to self-determination and to the independent development of their nations.
• Imperialism wishes to convert this meeting into an aimless oratorical tournament, instead of using it to solve the grave problems of the world.
• that there cannot be peaceful coexistence only among the powerful if we are to ensure world peace
• As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not encompass coexistence between the exploiters and the exploited, the oppressor and the oppressed.

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• The man who saw the meltdown coming had another troubling insight: it will happen again
• By   Stephen Mihm       

      Globe Correspondent    /  September 13, 2009 
• Ivy League professors who had trumpeted the dawn of a new era of stability have scrambled to explain how, exactly, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression had ambushed their entire profession.
• a few more cerebral commentators started to speak about the arrival of a “Minsky moment,” and a growing number of insiders began to warn of a coming “Minsky meltdown.”
• Hyman Minsky, a hitherto obscure macroeconomist who died over a decade ago
• he has begun emerging as perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through
• He predicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.

• Modern finance, he

  argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.
• In other words, the one person who foresaw the crisis also believed that our whole financial system contains the seeds of its own destruction. “Instability,” he wrote, “is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism.”
• he believed it was possible to craft policies that could blunt the collateral damage caused by financial crises
• as economists re-embrace Minsky’s prophetic insights, it is far from clear that they’re ready to reckon with the full implications of what he saw.
• In an ideal world, a profession dedicated to the study of capitalism would be as freewheeling and innovative as its ostensible subject. But economics has often been subject to powerful orthodoxies, and never more so than when Minsky arrived on the scene.
• That orthodoxy, born in the years after World War II, was known as the neoclassical synthesis. The older belief in a self-regulating, self-stabilizing free market had selectively absorbed a few insights from John Maynard Keynes, the great economist of the 1930s who wrote extensively of the ways that capitalism might fail to maintain full employment. Most economists still believed that free-market capitalism was a fundamentally stable basis for an economy, though thanks to Keynes, some now acknowledged that government might under certain circumstances play a role in keeping the economy - and employment - on an even keel.
• Economists like Paul Samuelson became the public face of the new establishment; he and others at a handful of top universities became deeply influential in Washington
• Like Samuelson, he earned his doctorate in economics at Harvard University, where he studied with legendary Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, as well as future Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief.
• While most economists spent the 1950s and 1960s toiling over mathematical models, Minsky pursued research on poverty, hardly the hottest subfield of economics
• So while his colleagues from graduate school went on to win Nobel prizes and rise to the top of academia, Minsky languished. He drifted from Brown to Berkeley and eventually to Washington University. Indeed, many economists weren’t even aware of his work. One assessment of Minsky published in 1997 simply noted that his “work has not had a major influence in the macroeconomic discussions of the last thirty years.”
• Minsky argued that Keynes’s collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.
• This insight bore the stamp of his advisor Joseph Schumpeter, the noted Austrian economist now famous for documenting capitalism’s ceaseless process of “creative destruction.”
• Minsky spent more time thinking about destruction than creation. In doing so, he formulated an intriguing theory:
• not only was capitalism prone to collapse, he argued, it was precisely its periods of economic stability that would set the stage for monumental crises.
• “Financial Instability Hypothesis.”
• success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”
• As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers - what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further.
• dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit
• Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.
• Minsky spent the last years of his life, in the early 1990s, warning of the dangers of securitization and other forms of financial innovation, but few economists listened. Nor did they pay attention to consumers’ and companies’ growing dependence on debt, and the growing use of leverage within the financial system.
• “This wasn’t a Minsky moment,” explains Randall Wray. “It was a Minsky half-century.”
• As he once wryly observed, “There is nothing wrong with macroeconomics that another depression [won’t] cure.”
• But does Minsky’s work offer us any practical help? If capitalism is inherently self-destructive and unstable - never mind that it produces inequality and unemployment, as Keynes had observed - now what?
• To prevent the Minsky moment from becoming a national calamity, part of his solution (which was shared with other economists) was to have the Federal Reserve - what he liked to call the “Big Bank” - step into the breach and act as a lender of last resort to firms under siege
• Minsky’s other solution, however, was considerably more radical and less palatable politically
• Minsky, however, argued for a “bubble-up” approach, sending money to the poor and unskilled first. The government - or what he liked to call “Big Government” - should become the “employer of last resort,” he said, offering a job to anyone who wanted one at a set minimum wage. It would be paid to workers who would supply child care, clean streets, and provide services that would give taxpayers a visible return on their dollars. In being available to everyone, it would be even more ambitious than the New Deal, sharply reducing the welfare rolls by guaranteeing a job for anyone who was able to work. Such a program would not only help the poor and unskilled, he believed, but would put a floor beneath everyone else’s wages too, preventing salaries of more skilled workers from falling too precipitously, and sending benefits up the socioeconomic ladder.
• an expensive full-employment program would veer far too close to socialism for the comfort of politicians
• For his part, Wray thinks that the critics are apt to misunderstand Minsky. “He saw these ideas as perfectly consistent with capitalism,” says Wray. “They would make capitalism better.”
• But not perfect. Indeed, if there’s anything to be drawn from Minsky’s collected work, it’s that perfection, like stability and equilibrium, are mirages.
• “There is no simple answer to the problems of our capitalism,” wrote Minsky. “There is no solution that can be transformed into a catchy phrase and carried on banners.”
• “I think he would resist being domesticated,” says Galbraith. “He spent his career in professional isolation.”

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• PORLAMAR, Venezuela – Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi called for a NATO-like defense alliance for Africa and South America as leaders from the two continents agreed to link up to gain more clout as economic and political blocs.
• Gadhafi and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez led about 30 presidents in calling for stronger "South-South" ties at a two-day summit ending Sunday that was the Libyan ruler's first visit to Latin America.
• "We have to form a NATO for the south," Gadhafi said Saturday. "And that's not a terrorist action. We have a right."
• He denounced the U.N. Security Council as an elite club where nations such as Libya have no voice, and called for the two continents to unite to demand change.
• Chavez said Venezuela is looking into energy investments in Africa and called for joint mining projects, saying the two regions together have enormous potential.
• "There will no longer be a unipolar world," Chavez said, referring to U.S. dominance. "In the 21st century, the African Union and South America will be truly great powers."
• Seven South American leaders signed an agreement to create a regional development bank with $20 billion in startup capital, and Chavez offered to help create a "South-South bank" with African countries in the future.
• "We're 65 countries with more than 1 billion inhabitants who want to be heard," said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who agreed with Gadhafi that the Security Council has "lost relevance."
• Leaders called for U.N. reforms and agreed to deepen cooperation in energy, mining, finance, agriculture and other areas.
• "There is no better response to the crisis than integration," Silva told leaders on Saturday. "There is no global challenge that cannot be faced jointly by Africa and South America."
• The summit also gave Chavez an opportunity to increase his influence in Africa while criticizing U.S. and European influence in poorer nations.
• Chavez has built close ties with countries at odds with Washington such as Iran and Syria, and has defended Iran's nuclear program while saying Venezuela also plans to tap atomic energy — and it shouldn't concern world powers like the U.S.
• Gadhafi echoed Chavez's concerns about the world's top economic powers, saying through an interpreter, without naming countries, "They think the planet is divided into two parts — masters and slaves. The masters are in the north and in the south are the slaves."
• "South-South" cooperation was a buzzword at the summit, which brought together both the African Union and the South American bloc Unasur.
• African leaders included Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, South Africa's Jacob Zuma and Algeria's Abdelaziz Bouteflika met eight South American presidents from Ecuador's Rafael Correa to Chile's Michelle Bachelet.
• Bolivian President Evo Morales was one of several Chavez-allied leftists who called a socialist-oriented approach essential to confronting problems from poverty to global warming.
• "Who is responsible?" Morales asked leaders — referring to climate change, which is blamed for vanishing glaciers in Bolivia and throughout the Andes. "Capitalism is the enemy of humanity."

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