capitalism | ukwatch.net

Not the death of capitalism, but the birth of a new order

JamieSW — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:51:44 +0000

As the dust of the credit crash clears and the real world recession kicks in, the ideologues of capitalism are scaring themselves with spectres. “He’s back,” the Times warned its readers on Tuesday over a portrait of Karl Marx. Not only are sales of his masterwork Das Kapital booming, but the virus of the newly fashionable revolutionary has, it seems, spread to the heart of the capitalist camp: the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has had himself photographed leafing through its pages while Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hailed by everyone from the German finance minister to the Pope.

In the US, John McCain has been lashing out at Barack Obama for his supposed “socialism”, the High Tory writer Simon Heffer excitedly dubbed the state bail-out of the banks “neo-sovietisation”, and the BBC broadcast a prime-time debate last week on whether the crisis signalled the “death of capitalism”. Meanwhile the Economist, the Pravda of the neoliberal ascendancy, has been trying to mobilise true believers for a fightback: “Economic liberty is under attack”, its current issue thunders. “Capitalism is at bay, but those who believe in it must fight for it.”

Of course, they are running ahead of themselves in a panic. If Marx’s central ideas about class and exploitation were really taking hold across the western world, you can be sure the mainstream media wouldn’t be running quirky, cartoonish pieces and debates about them, but something much more ferocious and alarming.

It’s certainly true that the events of the past few weeks have exposed deregulated capitalism as bankrupt and its ruling elites as greedy and inept. But it is the free-market model, not capitalism, that is dying. That is reflected in public opinion: a Financial Times-Harris poll conducted across the advanced capitalist world this month found large majorities believe the financial crisis has been caused by “abuses of capitalism”, rather than the “failure of capitalism itself” – only in Germany did the proportion blaming capitalism as a system rise to 30%.

As Sarkozy has pronounced: “Laissez-faire is finished.” It is not Marx who has really been rehabilitated in short order, but John Maynard Keynes, out of dire necessity. In the wake of the largest-scale acts of state economic intervention in capitalist history, politicians are now having to make a virtue of it. “Much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense,” the chancellor Alistair Darling declared at the weekend, as he announced plans to bring forward large capital projects and the prime minister defended higher borrowing to counter falling demand.

The symbolic significance of this official return to Keynesianism shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s 32 years since the then Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan bowed the knee to monetarism, nearly three years before Margaret Thatcher came to power, and announced to his party conference: “We used to believe that we could spend our way out of a crisis, but I tell you … it is no longer possible.” Faced with financial collapse and the threat of a full-scale economic depression, such fancies have now had to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

But claims that the current crisis signals the end of capitalism or the birth of a new socialism simply set up a straw man and divert attention from what is in fact at stake. If we’re talking about socialism as a systemic alternative, that is clearly not currently on the agenda in the heartlands of capitalism – or elsewhere, with the arguable exception of Latin America. And both its post-communist collapse of confidence and the weakening of the working class as a social and political force make it difficult for the left to take full advantage of capitalism’s stark failures.

That has led some, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm, to conclude that the main beneficiaries of the crisis will be the right, as in the 1930s. There’s certainly a danger of growing support for rightwing populism on the back of mass unemployment; but if the new enthusiasm for Keynesian intervention and public ownership can be channelled to protect those most vulnerable to the crash – rather than make them pay the price for it, as now seems more likely – that need not be the case.

What the crisis is bound to do is increase the demand for alternatives both within capitalism and beyond it. It has already discredited the economic model that has dominated the world for a generation at a cost of endemic instability, rampant inequality and environmental devastation. In its defence of free-market capitalism this week, the Economist argued that, in the past 25 years of market liberalisation, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of absolute poverty and speculated that this decade may see the fastest growth of income per head in history.

But most of that growth and poverty reduction has been in China’s state-directed and still heavily publicly-owned economy, while India’s lesser capitalist success story is so grotesquely unequally distributed that the proportion of its children who are malnourished – at 47% a global leader – has remained almost unchanged for a decade. For the rest of the world, growth was faster and far more equally shared in the postwar decades of Keynesianism and socialism.

An opportunity has now opened up for those political leaders prepared to use this meltdown to reshape the economic system, from Obama to Hugo Chávez. It’s often said that the left has no alternative model after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy. But in reality no economic and social model, left or right, has ever come pre-cooked: all of them – from Soviet power to the Keynesian welfare state and Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism – have grown out of ideologically driven improvisation in particular historical circumstances. Marx himself famously offered no blueprint.

Instead, the pressure to respond to economic need – as in the New Deal or postwar Europe – will shape the way the new economic order develops. Already, the forms of intervention have been sharply different from past crises, with bank nationalisations offering a potentially powerful new economic lever. We are no doubt heading into a new kind of capitalism as well as a period of growing support for more far-reaching social alternatives. But what form it takes will be decided by pressure, from above and below.

The day the music died

Ellie Keen — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:26:54 +0000

And we all know the real song
but we won’t sing along
‘cause our boyfriends and girlfriends
and parents will say
Don’t be a square, grow your hair and be happy
It’s not god that made you this way –

So lift up your top
Lift up your top
Lift up your top, got to use what you’ve got
Try not to see anything but the fee
It’s all tongue in cheek anyway!

‘Our Daughters Will Never Be Free,’ The Indelicates, 2008

We have a very short window in which to start asking some crucial questions about wealth and gender. We have a short window, whilst the FTSE and the Dow and the Nikkei buckle and collapse, to commit blasphemy. To say that the very nature of financial markets, of patriarchal capitalism itself, engenders ideological violence against women – and by association, men – everywhere.

Fact: markets will seek to maximise profits. Fact: sexism sells. The image of the cackling city boy stuffing his bonus into a hooker’s disembodied garter – just the leg showing, never the face – has become one of the icons of hypercapitalist success. However you wrangle the incentives, an economic model spawned and nurtured in an atmosphere of male privilege will seek to make money by selling women’s bodies back to them, by selling them to other men, by exploiting women’s work and by hijacking femininity as a saleable commodity and nothing more.

I remember the first time I met Ginger Spice. It was four years ago, and I was standing at the reception desk in the acute anorexia wing of a London mental hospital. I was there because there was nobody but my receptionist to watch me and make sure I took my meds and kept my meal supplements down, wearing a floppy hat and a tracksuit that flapped on the bent coat hanger of my body, drawing slogans to keep me occupied. And Geri Halliwell walked by.

She was there to see the girl in the next room from mine, a friend and a fan. And my first thought was how very, very tiny she was – barely five feet three in massive heels, dwarfed by shopping bags and a bunch of violent pink crepe-wrapped roses. Tiny and fragile-looking, all desperate smile and thin hair bleached back to its natural pale strawberry-blonde, Geri Halliwell had been in the press all year, and still is, thanks to a much-touted recovery! from anorexia, bulima and other lapses in celeb inscrutability. Through the haze of numb, sour fear that dogged those hospital days I remember thinking: that’s Ginger Spice. That pale, frantic creature is the same girl whose posters I had on my walls, whose feisty, pumped-up pop smashes were the first singles I ever bought with my pocket money. That’s Girl Power, right there. There it goes.

How sad, and how empty it all seems now. In 1996, we were told that anything was possible. Girls were powerful! Girls were sexy! Girls were marketable! You could be anything you wannabeed! Fast forward twelve years and the record is scratched and broken, the Spice Girls themselves bleached by years of pap-dashes into wasted, desperate husks of the energetic, ballsy girls we once thought we knew. We made ourselves into products again the instant empowerment was wrenched away from the feminist movement and assaulted with price-tags, we were consumed; we consumed ourselves. Femininity was for sale, and too much of it made us sick. Sick of ourselves, sick of our lives, sick of looking forward to another twenty years of hard sell until we could no longer pretend that we were young and available and found ourselves consigned to the scrap-heap with the computer shells, splitting bin-bags and acid-leaking fridges.

The year I started eating again – really eating, not just subsisting on crackers and tea – the sub-prime mortgages broke and the markets began to deflate like a balloon at the end of a long party. Right now, a loaf of bread costs more as a percentage of the average wage than it ever has. Groceries are getting harder for everyone to afford. We can no longer stuff ourselves with impunity, but right now, right this second, I feel something I spent my whole life missing. I feel something girlishly blasphemous and slightly obscene. I feel full.

Shopping, preening, starving, serving, fucking. Five key activities for my generation of young women under capitalism. We were born in the shadow of Thatcher and taught to prepare ourselves not for productivity, but for producthood. We do not remember living through anything but boomtimes, but for us, money is still something we will not win without the trappings of servility; we came to learn that nothing sells better, or faster, than our bodies, and the better and faster we could cash in, the happier and worthier our lives would be –

There’s no better example of the pitfalls of unregulated capitalism than the strange case of the 22-year-old woman, known by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, who is selling her virginity in hopes of financing her college education. She wants to be a marriage and family therapist. This transaction is “capitalism at its best,” according to the manager of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Nevada, which is brokering the deal. He made the point on a TV show last week on which we both appeared as guests. I argued this is capitalism at its worst. You’ve got a desperate woman (she was allegedly defrauded out of a hunk of cash by her no-good dad); virtually no safety net if you’re poor; gargantuan college fees, thanks to little government assistance or regulation; and the perfect storm of circumstances that makes a young woman think it’s OK to sell her body. Scary? Yeah. Does it have to be this way? No. It’s about the morality of the market.

Marian Meed-Ward, Kingston Whig-Standard, Ontario 25.09.2008

Maybe I’m a little biased, being accustomed to a student lifestyle and still having no job to lose- but I say let it all come down. Let the markets crash, and let the ugly arrogance of a society rent by the gashes of commodified gender come tumbling with them. So what if the glittering future that was promised to us as long as we behaved ourselves like good little girls has vanished? We may have been trained as hyper-consumers, but we don’t have to live that way.

Let it all come down. Let’s see the arrogance of the testosterone-stinking trading floors thwarted and the altars of deregulated markets toppled: we don’t need the old gods and their archaic laws any more. Now that governments have intervened with basic financial packages to has save us from utter disaster, we can breathe a little easier – but the ideology of Western capitalism will never be the same again, and its discourses of gender are open to decimation. Bring it all down.

It's the end of the world as we know it... or is it?

Ellie Keen — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:16:17 +0000

I somehow knew that REM’s song had an air of inevitability about it particularly in relation to global economic markets and political change. Where once confident right-wing economists and politicians denounced Marx for getting capitalism woefully wrong, it’s time to eat that humble pie, or at least a portion of it. Sowing the seeds of one’s own destruction is an inherently nihilistic activity and the de-regulated financial market has done exactly that almost to a Marxist script. It’s perhaps ironic to think that perhaps if they’d only listened more attentively to Marx and many other writers on the left of such inevitability they may have just saved their own skins, but when a moth detects a light they just can’t help themselves can they?

You know something is afoot when such middle-of-the-road institutions such as the BBC begin to mention the word that they so often dare not mention … capitalism! For instance Newsnight (Wednesday, September 17th 2008) mentioned it on more than one occasion and even invited Naomi Klein, author of The Rise of Disaster Capitalism to engage in debate with frequent visitor to Newsnight Irwin Steltzer, who apparently is a bit of an authority on economic matters and a major source of information for Newsnight, which roughly translates into trustworthy. The debate took part under the title of ‘Does Capitalism Still Work?’ and poor old Steltzer looked quite deflated and the presenter of Newsnight Jeremy Paxman appeared to have lost all confidence in him as a voice of authority, due to the volatility of the market; how things change! Unfortunately Naomi Klein was totally lost for an answer when Paxman asked what alternative system would Klein like to see replace capitalism. Klein, so authoritative on reeling out statistics on the immoral earnings of high-end earners looked flummoxed. You see there is no point in complaining if you don’t have a clear vision of what socialism entails.

Not so a representative from the Marxist Socialist Party who was interviewed on the Jeremy Vine BBC radio two show the very next day (Thursday, September 18th). To be honest I thought I misheard Vine when he introduced Hannah Sell from the Socialist Party and on the BBC! Like Paxman, Vine mentioned the word capitalism also on more than one occasion and to be fair made some valid points regarding its inherent destructive nature when the market is deregulated, but I couldn’t help but wonder if we were experiencing some bizarre form of media moral panic, after all, even though the banking system has been shaken to its foundations, cool, rational analysis is required to assess the outcomes and what impact they may have on society.

It’s interesting to note that the US administration so often associated with its vehement rhetoric against state control in Cuba and social reforming policies in Europe, particularly in health, are now having to turn to nationalisation in order to bail out the now internationally known Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, plus the buying-up of housing stock. In Britain it’s called ‘Council Housing’; a decent provision for providing housing to people without having to take out a mortgage, although Thatcher, another cavalier of the free market, gave people the right to buy, thus limiting the state housing stock. It’s again perhaps ironic that market forces, and here it’s used as a euphemism for greed, not ideology is responsible for nationalisation. In the UK, the Northern Rock bank is already nationalised but the Chancellor of the Labour Government, Alistair Darling, suspended the competition laws to allow Lloyds TSB to buy out HBOS (Halifax and the Bank of Scotland). Lloyds by the way are cock-a-hoop about this because they have been trying to acquire a fair sized financial holding for some considerable time but were unable to do so because anti-competition laws, there in the public interest, stopped them from acquiring a monopoly position in the market. What Darling was faced with is what we call in media ethics and in legal circles, a conflict of interest: public interest versus monopoly. Darling, and the Labour government has sided with monopoly capitalism which automatically negates competition, but one can’t help but think of the great Woody Allen quote ‘you can’t stave off the inevitable’.

In the Conservative Daily Telegraph, article titled ‘Who’s next after the Lehman brothers’ (Tuesday, September 16th 2008) Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote ‘While the appearances of free market discipline have been upheld, the reality of the weekend events is a further lurch towards socialism, or state capitalism if you prefer’. Well not quite socialism yet perhaps and rather than the introduction of state capitalism as Evans-Pritchard suggests it’s simply the intensification of it, particularly in the USA and Britain with others to follow no doubt. The problem with Evans-Pritchard’s assessment is the delusion that a real free market actually exists, but the reality is that nation states actively promote an economic system that is inherently unfair, limited in free and fair competition and regulates through a system of legal provisions. In fact many socialists would agree with Evans-Pritchard of the horrors of state capitalism, it’s just the assessment of where it exists differs. The fact that many chief executives of banks have accrued huge financial gains because of a de-regulated sector is curiously a central element of state tolerance. The ill-fated Tony Blair in an interview with Jeremy Paxman once argued against capping the wealth of the well-off ‘what good would that achieve’ or words to that effect Blair famously said indicating that the gulf between rich and poor remains an integral part of state ideology irrespective of what government rules. So is capitalism slowly burning itself out, well open-democracy is certainly suggesting it is, but I don’t think so, not yet at least!

Newsnight debate featuring Klein and Steltzer here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/video/7623288.stm

Debts the way to do it

Ellie Keen — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 14:44:13 +0000

AS SCHNEWS RASHLY TAKES ON THE CREDIT CRUNCH AND THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM

“Whoever is to blame for this week’s scenes on world stockmarkets, only the most churlish anarchist would welcome them.” – the Guardian, 1st October 2008

Blimey… you spend 15 years struggling against global capitalism and then the bloody thing collapses of its own accord. Building societies, banks and all manner of financial institutions are going to the wall.. City wide-boys, hands bloody from their ruthless assault on the world’s poor, are flinging themselves in front of trains – and nobody’s had to lift a finger – let alone throw a Molotov.

Since our report on the welfare state for business (SchNEWS 647) western governments have continued throwing infeasibly large amounts of money at the free-falling financial markets.

‘Meltdown Monday’ was only the start (Traumatic Tuesday, Woeful Wednesday etc) as here in the UK, Bradford and Bungly went belly up and had to be nationalised – well it’s massive debts did anyway with Spanish bank Santender, already owners of Abbey, encouraged to pick up the best bits of B&B for a song. Halifax nearly collapsed and had to be sold to Lloyd’s bank – forget the monopoly issues just keep the sinking ships afloat!

Over in the States, Bush and his cronies are desperately trying to get through a whopping $700 billion bail out bill to shore up confidence in a financial system teetering on the edge. They failed initially, leading to further market plummets before persuading Congress to approve a revised deal this week (being voted on by the House of Representatives today).

The nattily named credit crunch appears to be getting more and more bite, so what’s it really all about?

The explanation tossed around by most mainstream media tells us that it’s due a rash ‘sub-prime’ mortgage lending – OK, but if you want to understood why it’s knock on effects are so threatening to the system it’s actually a little more complicated.

The comparative economic boom (ridden with such self-congratulation by the ‘golden’ chancellor at the time…er, a Mr G. Brown) since the last recession in the early 90’s has been based on massively increasing levels of debt. Not just individual consumers spending their way to prosperity on credit cards, but banks, all the other types of financial institutions, corporations and governments.

Household debt has increased from 50% of GDP in 1980 to 100% in 2007. Financial sector borrowing has gone from 21% to 116% of assets in the same period. In fact, a chief cheerleader of the brave new financial world was the former boss of now bust Goldman Sachs – one Henry Paulson. He took them from $20 billion in debts in 1999 to $100 billion when he left. Having helped cause the crisis, and getting rich off it, he’s now the man putting forward the bail out plan as US Treasury Secretary. Despite self-imposed limits, Governments have also ramped up their debt levels – achieved by privatising everything in sight and putting all the deals ‘off balance sheet’ (thanks, Gordon!)

So lenders now routinely now lend out more than the total assets of the company. It was all made possible by massive deregulation, the completion of the project started in the Thatcher / Reagan free market era, as big business and their lobbies finally succeeding in getting politicians completely in their pocket, and indeed direct pay. Light touch regulation gave way to feather light.

The confidence of banks to throw ever more cash around was underpinned by the invention of the Credit Default Swap (CDS) market. This allows organisations exposing themselves by loaning out money to buy a kind of insurance against a default on that loan. In return for paying small regular premiums, priced depending on the perceived risk of default, that organisation could think of itself as no longer exposed to any risk, able to reduce any provisions put aside in case of default (so called ‘bad debt’) – and therefore free to lend out even more cash.

A culture of risky, unsound lending was thus created. To make things worse, all these debt contracts are traded, and indeed speculated on. They change hands multiple times as different people estimate their current value and risk differently. A tasty profit opportunity for canny get-rich-quick investors, but difficult for buyers removed from the original business to assess what they’d really bought.

In effect this all meant that many billions of debt could be considered assumed by people only having to put up in hard cash a tiny percentage of that figure. No problem as long as house prices, shares, bond prices etc all kept rising and more debt could be given out cheaply and easily to anyone who might otherwise be close to default. A debt mountain was gradually accumulated. In 2008, the amount of debt in the CDS market is estimated to be more than $50 trillion. That’s over twice the value of the entire US stock market.

Confidence started to collapse as the risks of sub-prime default got reassessed and foreclosure and bankruptcy rates started to climb. Banks panicked and realised they were caught in a kind of pyramid scheme. If people started defaulting in numbers nobody would have enough cash to pay out. The availability of cheap CDS contracts dried up and banks refused to lend to each other, wary that anyone of them could go under at any time. The cost of servicing the CDS exposures lept up, to the point where banks like Goldman Sachs and Bradford & Bingly couldn’t afford them and, unable to just borrow more to cover it, went swiftly bust. As credit availability goes down, the levels of debt exposure now threaten to bring down all types of companies, wrecking the economy from all sides at once.

Facing meltdown, governments have been forced to step in to avert complete collapse of the system. But it won’t work in the long term as they’re effectively giving a blood transfusion to a badly haemorrhaging patient. The bail outs may buy some more time – gambling taxpayers money for years to come on a high risk strategy financed through yet more debt (China and India have been helping by buying up US govt bonds, leading some to wonder whether this will see a further shift in the balance of economic power, but it’s all interconnected baby!) – but the fundamental flaws of capitalism will remain and bleed everyone dry in the end. In fact, the hand outs will just ensure that it’s the same old elite who will get richer as the system creaks on to it’s inevitable demise – it’s just a question of how long (end of the world in 2012 anyone?).

BACK IN THE REAL WORLD

In the meantime, what will it all mean for the average SchNEWS reader in the street? What’s gonna happen next?! If you’re poor, lacking large debts, a mortgage, share portfolio and high paying job, you might even enjoy the ride.

If the credit crunch triggers a full-blown recession we’re going to see a surge in repossessions of houses. Squatters paradise! The number of endless yuppie flat developments and ego-driven showpiece towers will plummet. Less 4×4s, less sports cars. The consumer slowdown will be good for the environment – economic collapse is the only realistic way of reaching those carbon emission targets! On the down side there’ll be less food available for looting from skips as bargain hunting shoppers clear out the aisles, but local food production will have to increase.

As the job queues swell, access to social services will become less punitive. When you’re one of three million as opposed to one of 300,000, there’s only so much hassle at the dole office to go round.

The wave of depression should throw up new political opportunities. For a long time in the developed west, the majority of the opposition to capitalism was essentially moral. Fair trade and charity was thought good enough to stave off the guilt of being disproportionately wealthy. But as the spoils of globalisation become increasingly only available to a smaller and smaller elite, interest in alternative ways of doing things should also increase.

Recent events have shown capitalism is a hothouse flower – it has to exist swaddled in a life-support system of regulations and laws protecting private property, allowing corporations to exist . Most importantly it requires the state to be a lender of last resort.

Despite the endless free market rhetoric we’ve been forced to swallow since the Thatcher era – the government has always functioned as a welfare state for the rich. This life support system has been filtering the real wealth upwards in society for years but now it’s all out on the open as the bankers stretch out their begging bowls.

It’s now been demonstrated to all and sundry (who’d previously not been reading SchNEWS) that the ‘free’ market is no such thing. Pundits might spew about ‘irresponsible’ lending and try to pin the blame on a few bad apples but in fact all the markets were doing is what markets are supposed to do – chase after the largest amount of profit in a single-minded ruthless way – and human beings are just a minor obstacle in that pursuit.

Perhaps as times get tougher, people might finally get it together to demand more fundamental changes – and not leave the super rich in charge of it.

Lost in Transition

Ellie Keen — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:12:16 +0000

SCHNEWS fails to understand the logic of climate group

As global capitalism and its failing markets threaten to fall around our ears, it must be worth imagining what a different way of doing things might look like. And working towards it.

That’s what the Transition Towns (TT) supporters want to do. TT’s are a ‘think global act local’ strategy for fighting climate change first put forward by an permaculture academic, Rob Hopkins, in 2005/6 in Kinsale, Ireland. It was first exported to the UK in Totnes, Devon – and converts have been eagerly promoting the idea ever since.

And the message seems to be getting through. In the past couple of years the concept (and the leafleting) has been spreading around the country, nay, the world, with over a 100 communities signed up from all over the UK as well as Australia, New Zealand, Chile, the US and most recently, Japan.

The movement has also been hitting the headlines here in the UK recently, with just the other week a small town a few miles down the road from SchNEWS towers, Lewes, proudly launching it’s own currency to much media fanfare.

With such an emergent new force for social change, you’d think we might have mentioned it in SchNEWS before – it’s obviously long overdue for us to put the boot in, er we mean, provide an unbiased and dispassionate rational analysis of the whole shebang.

So what’s the big idea? Transition Towns (TT) make a good case for the need to change. They recognise the pressing threats of climate change and peak oil (OK, well, the end of super-abundant cheap oil we can agree on, at least – see SchNEWS 644). This means that the globalised, air-mile, oil-driven nonsense needs to stop and more locally based, lower carbon living solutions are needed. The question is, how are we going to get there? But they are not calling for major reform or revolution – the clue is in the name, folks! – they are looking for an ordered gradual switch over – a transition. The way they propose this should come about is a somewhat tortuous affair, with the resultant danger that the eco-system or global economic system (or both) may collapse in the meantime.

To start the process of your whole town, or city, being designated a ‘TT’, all that is needed is a small group of well-meaning committed do-gooders, usually PR friendly middle-class types, to form a Transition Group. This group then works on publicising themselves, arranging film showings, printing leaflets and networking.

Once momentum has been sufficiently built, the group can then hold a great ‘public unleashing’ where the plan goes ‘live’. As well as a wave of talks, trades and skills workshops and green-inspired local projects such as tree planting and small permaculture schemes, the main plank of the plan involves gradually formulating a Local Energy Descent Plan’ (LEDP), to map out how the local community might one day become more self sufficient, less oil dependant and much greener. If enough local businesses, people and councillors go along with it, or palatable parts of it, the town can officially adopt the mantle of a ‘Transition Town’ and brand itself accordingly.

Measures suggested include the laudable aims of reducing the reliance on multinational corporations for food and goods production, improving energy use and efficiency, increasing recycling, reducing car dependency and a host of other lefty-green objectives. It’s a ‘big tent’ which allows it to scoop up the efforts of a range of social change groups under one large banner.

So what’s the problem? Whilst it’s hard to be too disparaging – these are all people with the best intentions, attempting to actually take some sort of action as opposed to sitting idly by and waiting for the big collapse – and some change for the good is obviously better than none, there are some flaws in the thinking.

Firstly, TT acknowledge that they have no desire to do away with all the trappings of capitalist society – merely reduce local dependence on it, gradually. They avoid taking on the political roots of all the problems and concentrate on symptoms. A key aim is to get the local council on board. Which many have been surprisingly willing to do…up to a point. Local government itself is charged by central government with working out how to roll out various greenish initiatives, such as to minimise energy needs and increase recycling levels for example, and the LEDP overlaps to some degree with many of their own blueprints for the future – as long as it’s controlled and the results leave the status quo as little changed as possible, with power flowing upwards, private money still in charge of all those recycling facilities and a capitalistic model still underpinning the local economy.

So the council can now use the TT brand wagon to increase uptake of these plans on a wave of public enthusiasm, whilst simultaneously seeming uber green and championing the local over the national. Put this way, its easy to see why many a town hall bigwig are talking up the scheme.

Which explains why Lewes council are so behind the latest big venture in the TT vision of the future – launching local currencies. As people previously used to get hanged for such impertinence as starting yer own money, there must be a catch. And there is.

The Lewes Pound (LP) was unveiled last week with a windfall of media coverage. As global financial markets have been taking a beating, perhaps this was a model for the brave new world? Er, not really. Because it isn’t actually a currency at all. It’s actually an ingenious scheme using existing book token legislation. It involves effectively buying a certain amount of sterling (in Lewes’ case, £10,000) and then issuing vouchers to the equivalent value, accepted in local shops signing up the scheme.

Which many local shops in Lewes were of course only too happy to do – a welcome free boost to trade as consumers voluntarily pledge to spend their cash with them. Who wouldn’t? The idea is that the LP will increase interest in spending more cash locally, which in theory keeps more of the profit generated circulating locally, as opposed to being syphoned out of the community and into the pockets of global institutions (like Tesco, for example) and their shareholders.

Which is great, surely. Well yes, except that the vouchers are redeemable back into cash any time you, or a business-owner wishes – presumably for going shopping at Tesco or making more import deals with third-world tat suppliers.

And one of the stated aims of the year long test project is to get national chains accepting them – which seems a rather strange measure of success and contradicts the whole stated purpose.
Money already spent in local shops will continue circulating with little effect on the outside world. While OK for PR and raising public awareness of the explotation by global corporations, it’s not achieving more than affecting a few better-off people’s spending habits.

In any event, in Lewes, the big launch has not really gone as planned. Whilst there was massive interest and local flag-waving parochial support for the LP, the well-meaning urging of the TT organisers to keep circulating the vouchers and not change them back into cash has not exactly been heeded.

All the LP notes ‘sold out’ in hours… only to be hoarded and swiftly offered on Ebay for up to £40 for one Lewes Pound as the local populace immediately capitalised on the opportunity to indulge in some rampant currency speculation!

They reasoned that as there is a limited supply of individually numbered LP’s, they will in the future be highly collectable – and there have been no shortage of over-the-odds buyers, leaving the whole scheme looking somewhat farcical.

The TT group – having considered but eventually rejected the idea of selling LPs itself for £10 each in order to lesson the black marketeering, have now pledged to print up some more stock – although whether they’ll ever be able to afford to devalue the LP enough to out-bankroll the speculators remains to be seen!

As does the overall effect of the Transition Towns movement itself. Whilst we broadly support many of its stated objectives, we cannot see how failing to plan for the much more radical reform of society needs will really work. Attempting to push the existing power structures into implementing some of the required measures will only ever lead to partial change and speaks mainly to people who want things more or less as they are, only slightly greener.

...But we could be wrong! To judge for yourself (and don’t let us put you off working for more localisation and all things green!), see www.transitiontowns.org

The Trapese collective’s in depth critique of the Transition Movement is available at www.sparror.cubecinema.com/stuffit/trapese

The end of capitalism, and other questions

JamieSW — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:40:12 +0000

“So, we should be really, really wary of this claim that we’re hearing that free market ideology is dead, that this marks the end of, you know, of capitalism. You know, I’m sorry, that is not the case. It may be going dormant for a little while to rationalize these massive bailouts, but it will come roaring back, and the crisis that is being deepened right now through these bailouts will be invoked for even more radical deregulation, privatization, tax cuts and so on. ” – Naomi Klein

As the Anglo-American banking system goes into meltdown, all sorts of unlikely people are beginning to ask, ‘is this the end of capitalism?’ A couple of weeks ago it would have been ideological treason to so much as think such a beastly thing. Now, with ancient financial institutions keeling over everywhere you look, the question is cropping up all over the corporate media.

So what’s the answer? Well the answer’s ‘no’. Or if you want me to flesh that out a bit, the answer’s ‘no, now get a grip’. But really, the problem lies with the question. There are other questions we should be asking, but I’ll come on to that later. For now, lets look at what’s wrong with asking ‘is this the end of capitalism?’

What do we mean, or what do most people understand, by the term ‘capitalism’? Practically every economy you can think of is one where commercial activity occurs, where there are goods and resources which are privately owned and that are bought and sold for profit. Alongside this private sector sits a public sector where, in democratic countries, resources are owned by the public as a whole and distributed according to decisions made by their elected government. Pure capitalism, and pure socialism, remain purely theoretical.

Across the world, what you invariably have are mixed public-private economies where the debate is about which sector of the economy is responsible for the distribution of which resources, and how those responsibilities will be discharged (e.g, to what extent should the private sector play a role in the provision of education and healthcare?). That’s by no means an insignificant debate, but we should be clear on what that debate is about. It is not about whether or not we have the buying and selling of private property or whether or not we have capitalism. The debate is about what kind of capitalism we have in a democracy: which version of capitalism and what mixture of public and private economic activity will produce the end results valued and desired by a society organised on democratic principles.

Different countries strike the balance in different ways. As I’ve noted previously, the Nordic model has been far more successful than the Anglo-American neoliberal model in maximising the well-being of the population. The crisis of the last few weeks was born of the deregulated financial markets characteristic of neoliberal economies, wherein unrestrained greed drove debt to be managed in an increasingly reckless way – one which was proven conclusively to be unsustainable as the last of the pure investment banks on Wall St disappeared.

This is a serious malfunction of one version, not any and all versions, of capitalism. The collapse of institutions like Lehmann Brothers and the dangers of sub-prime mortgage lending don’t necessarily say very much about the forms of capitalism practiced in other countries. Neoliberals like to talk about their version of economics as though it is synonymous with capitalism itself, hence the talk of capitalism failing, but pretending there are no alternatives is just a neat way of sidestepping debates about what kind of capitalism societies should opt for.

Not only is the end of capitalism itself not occurring, it is not even being called for, at least not in any meaningful way. Only an infinitesimal minority on the left advocate the total abolition of all private property and commercial transactions. I hesitate to use the word ‘advocate’ because advocacy involves setting out serious proposals, and I’ve yet to see any serious proposal that explains how a non-capitalist society is going to be brought about. By that I mean a plan that describes in all the necessary fine detail how we get from here to there, dealing effectively with all the obstacles in the way. A plan that explains how we persuade the public to accept our proposed non-capitalist society, bring to power a government willing to effect the plan, and then enact the massive transformative program needed to entirely eradicate commercial activity and introduce a vast array of new social structures, habits and forms of interaction. Even if a workable plan of this kind, with a desirable end product, was formulated (I don’t completely rule that out) it would take many, many decades to implement. Such a plan does not exist, as far as I’m aware, even amongst those whose opposition to capitalism is the strongest.

No one, therefore, is proposing the end of capitalism itself in any serious way. For the most part, what’s called ‘socialism’ is just a take on how mixed public-private economies should be organised, rather than a total rejection of capitalism itself. Even the Venezuelan government, as it proclaims its mission to pioneer “21st Century Socialism”, allowed the private sector of the economy to grow relative to the public sector during its first decade in office.

Similarly, even the most swivel-eyed free-market extremists don’t advocate, in any serious way, the total abolition of the public sector and its replacement with pure capitalism. In fact, even in the neo-liberal citadels of Britain and America, the rigours of the free market are often quietly avoided and the state called upon for assistance. Think no-bid contracts for Halliburton in Iraq. Think of the UK arms industry’s incestuous links with government, where ministers on overseas trips (including the Prime Minister) practically act as salesmen for the likes of British Aerospace. Think of how the US economy boomed in the post war era, in no small part due to government defence budgets socialising research costs for technologies that were subsequently turned over to the private sector for profit; like aeronautics, computers and even the internet. Those who say they advocate the free market have very little to say about the nanny state when its nursemaiding the rich. Only when it attends to the needs of the public are objections raised.

The debate that occurs between left and right on economics is not between absolute socialism or absolute capitalism but between democracy and private power. The left does not oppose globalisation [.pdf], or even capitalism for the most part. What it takes issue with is a particular form of global economic integration that privileges the demands of private power and undermines the role of the democratic public sphere. The right does not object (aside from in rhetoric) to a role for the state within the economy, provided that role is to serve the needs of elites rather than those of the population.

So the real question, in the midst of the Anglo-American banking crisis of 2007-2008, is how our version of capitalism is now going to be reformed, and specifically where the power will lie. We need not expect, as Naomi Klein points out here, that neoliberalism will automatically be replaced by some benevolent form of social democracy. On the contrary, state-corporate elites are already moving to exploit the political conditions created by the crisis to extend the same neoliberal model that caused the financial collapse.

In her recent book “The Shock Doctrine”, Klein describes how the neoliberalisation of economies (privatisation, deregulation, stripping away of public programmes etc) has often been rammed through the legislative process in times of crisis. This is because while the public often opposes these measures, crisis situations offer policymakers brief moments when democracy can be suspended or circumvented while people are disorientated by shock and briefly willing to acquiesce to “firm leadership”.

Klein points out that this is exactly what is happening now in the US, in respect of the emergency economic measures formulated by the Bush administration. What is being not so much proposed as demanded is a 0.7 trillion dollar buy-up, by the US taxpayer, of all the toxic and often worthless securities that have caused the current financial meltdown. It is demanded that no democratic, administrative or judicial oversight be applied to this process. It is demanded that legislators approach this in a “bipartisan” fashion and pass the measures quickly (that’s political language for not arguing and doing what the President tells you – now). The measures are being drawn up and will be enacted by people like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson who, as head of Goldman Sachs, did so much to promote the reckless practices that caused the ‘Nightmare on Wall St’. In summary, the same people who wrecked the US economy are now demanding that the traumatised and fearful taxpayer gives them 0.7 trillion dollars to clean up the mess they made and hold them harmless from the consequences of their actions, no arguments and no questions asked.

You could call it crawling to the nanny state and begging for a hand-out. Klein, with perhaps a little more accuracy, calls it a “stick-up”. Either way, its not the free market, but it is very neoliberal.

Klein also warns that this is just the first stage. The US is already deeply in debt, and this bailout will make matters much worse if passed in its proposed form. The usual corporate lobbyists, think tanks and Friedmanite academics will then take that opportunity to demand that the books be balanced. This might involve chipping away at unnecessary public programmes like healthcare, education, public housing etc etc, while the essentials, like Washington’s gargantuan military (which costs more than the rest of the planet’s military spending combined) go entirely untouched. It might involve tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. It will certainly involve exploiting the situation to push measures that serve the interests of the most powerful sections of society which, rather than theoretical “free markets”, is what neoliberalism is really about.

The scenario in the UK is only slightly different. Social democratic instincts still flicker in some corners of the political class. But despite Gordon Brown’s recent rhetorical tilt towards the left, New Labour remains a classic party of neoliberalism, and the Conservative party likely to succeed them in government by 2010 is even more so. In spite of current events, neoliberals could well dominate the policy debate on how to deal with the economic crisis on this side of the Atlantic.

Klein quotes neoliberal don Milton Friedman describing in candid terms how his disciples should use the Shock Doctrine to push forward their policies. “Only a crisis, actual or perceived,” he says, ”produces real change. And when the crisis occurs, the change depends on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to keep the ideas ready until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable”. An example is Chile in the 1970s, where Friedman had to wait until after a military coup had taken place to find a government willing to enact his policy prescriptions, which had been overwhelmingly rejected in earlier democratic elections.

The collapse of Western financial markets, whose devastating effects are only beginning to be felt, does not mark the end of capitalism, and may perversely only mark the acceleration of neoliberism out from the ashes of its own bonfire of the vanities into new and yet more dangerous territory. That depends entirely on who wins the current debate on what emergency measures should be taken and how the system should be reformed long-term. The neoliberals, led by Secretary Paulson, are keen to avoid that debate. Those who oppose them should note this, because it betrays the neoliberals’ fear, even expectation, that this is an argument they would lose. Our task is to ensure that the shock of the past few weeks is not exploited by its authors, but instead that its lessons are learnt and that failed economic models are replaced by something more just and sustainable. In formulating our own proposals, for the immediate and the longer term, we can begin by pointing to the more successful capitalist systems in place in other countries, and take things from there.

The red archbishop?

Alex Doherty — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:13:58 +0000

Rowan Williams’ attack on global capitalism makes great headlines – “‘Marx was right’ says Archbishop” – but it also reveals one of his deepest convictions. He really thinks modern globalised capitalism is something evil. Of course he is not a great one for rhetoric of this kind; but his recent book on Dostoevsky, and especially his treatment of Dostoevsky’s great novel of nihilism, The Devils, suggests very powerfully that he thinks Dostoevsky would have seen modern capitalism as a work of the devil, and that he thinks Dostoevsky was right.

He hates the consumerist ideology of limitless choice because he thinks it tears us way from our real and limited wants; and he sees it prefigured in some of Dostoevsky’s villains, for whom “Everything depends on choice, and what is chosen today need have no relation to what is chosen tomorrow or what is chosen by anyone else”. Reading these words detached from their context, it’s obvious that they are also the perfect description of the workings of an untrammelled market, which may go up, down, or merely sideways depending entirely on the free choices of participants today. For Williams such a market is dehumanising and by extension diabolical:

What is depicted as The Devils moves towards its conclusion is the process by which the elevation of choice increasingly produces an evacuation of desire.

Bruce Springsteen put it in rather fewer words: “57 channels and nothing on”.

You get the impression that the archbishop believes that hell is a place which shows American television everywhere and all the time. That’s not in the shallow sense that hell is meant to be a place of torment, and it would be very horrible to watch cheap TV all the time, but in the much deeper sense that television destroys any idea of the sacred, or the truly important: the villains in the The Devils are “radically incapable of recognising any authority or significance in the images they literally and figuratively deface. They will make an obscene or belittling joke of suffering, of suicide … they mock the bereavement of people … they seek to inhabit a world in which nothing is serious, in which nothing, that is to say, signifies, opens unexpected horizons, or suggests a narrative larger than that of themselves as rootless individuals”.

This, he would say, is sinful in the precise sense that it draws us away from the sight or experience of God: that is also his interpretation of the famous phrase that “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”. He doesn’t think that this is about the consequences if one less thing (God) is shown to exist; nor even that no punishment for evil can be trusted without God to enforce it in the afterlife. No – his argument is that if God does not exist “we are no longer able to see violence against others as somehow blasphemous, an offence against an eternal order [and] there is nothing definably insane about taking one’s own life”.

Williams’s real objection to the market is that it turns its participants into things to one another – and that, he believes, is a blasphemy because we are not things, but, in some sense, images of God. Money allows us to treat other as impersonal means to an end, and this offends both his reactionary and his socialist instincts profoundly. In 19th-century Russian literature, it is almost always nobler to be a serf than a wage-slave. Though the relationship between a serf and his master is based ultimately on violence, it is personal violence, not the impersonal and invisible transaction of the market, and so it has more room for virtue, and for growth.

That’s a real difference from Marx, who had no doubt that we could treat slaves as things just as easily as wage-slaves.

On the other hand, Williams can sound entirely Marxist when he attacks the introduction of markets into the NHS as he does towards the end of the book. To turn nurses into “producers” of health care for “customers” is to remove the culture of nursing from the activity altogether, he says. It stops being a gesture of selflessness, carried out in response to an ethical imperative, and becomes instead a set of negotiations for advantage, and if neither side sees any advantage in it, then there’s no reason to nurse anyone at all: “When such contracts cease to be satisfactory, there is no relation left; the other has ceased to be properly instrumental to my will and can be safely discarded”.

There’s a great deal that could be said about Williams’s particular critique of the markets: although he’s a very clever man, I don’t suppose he knows any more about economics than all the other very clever people currently bewildered by the question “What should we do?”; and to know that the archbishop supports a ban on short-selling doesn’t make it much clearer that this ban is a good thing.

But the one thing you can’t say is that this is a knee-jerk response, or a piece of publicity seeking. The belief that capitalism tends towards evil is one of his deepest convictions.

Madness of the market

tim — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 15:51:18 +0000

Once again, capitalism has shown its cuddly, people-friendly face with the collapse of holiday giant XL Leisure Group.

Around 85,000 people stranded abroad, several hundred thousand advance bookings dishonoured, staff finding out that they didn’t have a job in mid-flight, over 1,700 jobs potentially vanishing and the Unite union not even being informed by the company that it was in trouble with its refinancing arrangements after a major bank pulled out on August 14.

And yet, in the full knowledge that it was, indeed, in trouble and desperately trying to arrange a bail-out, the companies in the group continued to take people’s cash and make bookings that there was precious little chance that they could honour.

Not that this implies any dishonesty or deliberately dodgy dealing by the companies. Far from it – at least in the terms of the market economy.

The logic of capitalism meant that they had to continue trying to trade their way out of trouble and that same market-oriented logic said that they could not allow any hint of trouble to become public knowledge because people would obviously then cease to book with the companies, thereby sealing their fate.

Indeed, as late as August 31, a company spokesman was saying that “the XL Leisure Group is experiencing strong trading, with bookings for 2009 already outperforming last year.”

But, as for the long-suffering passengers, they inevitably get the sticky end of the deal and, the less well off that they are, the stickier it becomes.

Granted, customers well off enough to book full package deals through travel agencies are covered by the CAA air travel organisers’ licensing scheme and will be offered repatriation flights or their money back if they have an advance booking.

And, if they booked by credit card, their card insurance should cover them.

But people not having credit cards to book with, or booking a flight only, because they could not afford the full package, will face an extra fee to get home.

And it’s not only the passengers. The staff have an even worse situation to deal with.

No jobs and an industry that is contracting by the day, with airlines such as Alitalia and Zoom either collapsing or in terminal decline and a resulting glut of unemployed staff on the jobs market.

So, who is to blame for this situation?

In 2004, the Times reported that a major British bank “is poised to become the largest oil trader in the City of London as banks rush to profit from the soaring oil price and booming oil speculation market.”

In 2008, that same bank pulled the rug out from under XL because of financing associated with fuel. In other words, a major oil speculator shuts XL because the company can’t pay the price for fuel that the speculators have driven up.

And the bank’s partner in financing XL – a major Icelandic bank – acquired the still-profitable French and German XL subsidiaries on Friday morning after the rug-pulling exercise, in what can only be described as a perfect example of asset-stripping, although it would probably claim that it was saving what could be rescued from the stricken company.

But the fact remains that, if the company was stricken, it was the banks that did the striking.

Talk about having your cake and eating it.

It is difficult to imagine a better example of the amoral chaos of market capitalism or, for that matter, a better reason for social ownership of banks and big businesses generally.

Anarchy, State, Utopia, and Climate Change

Tim Holmes — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:30:24 +0000

Ewa Jasiewicz: Time for a revolution

There can be no state solutions to climate change, argues Ewa Jasiewicz: governments won’t give up the powers that lead to environmental ruin.

There was a joke going round the in the last days. As well as the “wellbeing tent”, which dealt with mildly traumatised activists on the receiving end of 5am police batons, someone proposed a “wellmeaning” tent. It would accommodate those who’d like to include state and capitalism-based solutions in the movement to reverse climate change. The camp’s outer fence would curve into the wellmeaning tent to create a round-table for stakeholders including the police (successfully kept out of the site after days of stand-offs), E.ON UK and other energy industry representatives – tea and hand-wringing optional.

The joke was prompted by a controversial presentation by George Monbiot, in which he endorsed the use of the state as a partner in resolving the climate crisis. Monbiot held the audience rapt as he explained the fundamental incompatibility of economic growth with the emission cuts needed to avert catastrophic climate change. Yet he confessed not knowing where to turn next to solve the issues of how to generate the changes necessary to shift our sources of energy, production and consumption, and where the state and capitalism fit in. He ended by endorsing the use of the state: “By God, let’s use it”. Amid the applause, some were appalled. Let me explain why.

Many of the organisers of the climate camps honed their skills in the anti-roads movement of the mid-1990s. Some came from the traveller, squatter and free party communities, an alliance of resistance built up to counter the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which criminalised travellers and activists reclaiming land and buildings for social, cooperative use. These activists came from a culture of anti-authoritarian anti-capitalism – rejecting the property ladder and the commodification of living space, and embracing collective enjoyment, dance and music.

The continuum of this culture of resistance, of a struggle for a commons, for control over one’s own and one’s family’s life, for non-alienated labour and social interaction, stretches back to the Diggers, Levellers and the Luddites – English radicals struggling against the monarchy, taxes, land enclosure and austerity measures designed to empower a new industrial class, funded by a feudal and colonial land-grab and slavery.

This historical memory, and these beliefs in a global commons, in leaderless, participative organising and grassroots anti-state and anti-capitalist action run deep through the camps. They’re also informed by a culture of direct action and a refusal to accept top-down solutions and a system of parliamentary democracy that reduces participation in politics to 16 “X“s in a box in an average lifetime.

But did Scargill and Monbiot really “get” the camp and its cultures of resistance? The latest edition of the NUM’s newsletter criticised the camp for being too middle-class, anti-miner, and alienated from “real”, genuine working class “realities”. Are these representations fair? Many participants in the camp could be defined as the “precariat” – neoliberalism’s answer to the proletariat. No longer an urbanised worker in a regular job in for a majority of their working life, the precariat lives and works in a precarious state, at the mercy of a deregulated labour market. Work is dominated by casualisation, flexible and migrant labour, zero-hour contracts, temping, seasonal work, home working, self-employment and unemployment. Many at the camp form a part of this working class, no more in the control of the means of production than energy industry workers here or China or Poland.

State solutions to the climate crisis were presented to us 10 years ago through the Kyoto protocol – what were they? To privatise the air we breathe and turn carbon emissions into commodities, to buy and sell atmospheric poison, to create a new market of trading in the means of ecological destruction. It’s no wonder many at the camp reject state solutions to climate change.

Entertaining as the two-minutes-in-a-room-full-of-poison standoff between Monbiot and Scargill is, this gesture politics isn’t getting to the heart of the fight. The question is, who and under what conditions, controls decision-making, and has climate-changing power? Who will pay the price of exile from family and common land, water and food insecurity, as land and rivers become polluted or diverted into the energy industry’s use, for bauxite, uranium, coal, and iron-ore to build new infrastructure, power nuclear energy, expand the global coal market and concomitant infrastructure to perpetuate the whole process?

How do we bring about a transformation which empowers us all? Grassroots organising in cooperative, low-impact, sustainable ways, glimpsed at the Climate Camp, and practised daily by millions, is one way towards this. Another is to live at the sharpest end of climate chaos today.

So how about this for a challenge, George and Arthur? Spend two months, not two minutes, (together!) living in Matlu Camp in Jharsuguda, in Orissa province, India. One of the poorest states on earth, here in the heart of India’s coal belt, are families displaced by mining, living in a polluted form of captivity. Where our very own Department for International Development has been restructuring governance, reinforcing the mining industries, and guiding land reforms allowing for the felling of pristine forest, more tribal resettlement and more environmental destruction.

Changing our sources of energy without changing our sources of economic and political power will not make a difference. Neither coal nor nuclear are the “solution”, we need a revolution.

George Monbiot: Climate change is not anarchy’s football

In seeking to put politics ahead of action, writes George Monbiot, Ewa Jasiewicz is engaging in magical thinking of the most desperate kind.

If you want a glimpse of how the movement against climate change could crumble faster than a summer snowflake, read Ewa Jasiewicz’s article, published yesterday on Comment is free. It is a fine example of the identity politics that plagued direct action movements during the 1990s, and from which the new generation of activists has so far been mercifully free.

Jasiewicz rightly celebrates the leaderless, autonomous model of organising that has made this movement so effective. The two climate camps I have attended – this year and last – were among the most inspiring events I’ve ever witnessed. I am awed by the people who organised them, who managed to create, under extraordinary pressure, safe, functioning, delightful spaces in which we could debate the issues and plan the actions which thrust Heathrow and Kingsnorth into the public eye. Climate camp is a tribute to the anarchist politics that Jasiewicz supports.

But in seeking to extrapolate from this experience to a wider social plan, she makes two grave errors. The first is to confuse ends and means. She claims to want to stop global warming, but she makes that task 100 times harder by rejecting all state and corporate solutions. It seems to me that what she really wants to do is to create an anarchist utopia, and to use climate change as an excuse to engineer it.

Stopping runaway climate change must take precedence over every other aim. Everyone in this movement knows that there is very little time: the window of opportunity in which we can prevent two degrees of warming is closing fast. We have to use all the resources we can lay hands on, and these must include both governments and corporations. Or perhaps she intends to build the installations required to turn the energy economy around – wind farms, wave machines, solar thermal plants in the Sahara, new grid connections and public transport systems – herself?

Her article is a terrifying example of the ability some people have to put politics first and facts second when confronting the greatest challenge humanity now faces. The facts are as follows. Runaway climate change is bearing down on us fast. We require a massive political and economic response to prevent it. Governments and corporations, whether we like it or not, currently control both money and power. Unless we manage to mobilise them, we stand a snowball’s chance in climate hell of stopping the collapse of the biosphere. Jasiewicz would ignore all these inconvenient truths because they conflict with her politics.

“Changing our sources of energy without changing our sources of economic and political power”, she asserts, “will not make a difference. Neither coal nor nuclear are the ‘solution’, we need a revolution.” So before we are allowed to begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions, we must first overthrow all governments and corporations and replace them with autonomous communities of happy campers. All this must take place within a couple of months, as there is so little time in which we could prevent two degrees of warming. This is magical thinking of the most desperate kind. If I were an executive of E.ON or Exxon, I would be delighted by this political posturing, as it provides a marvellous distraction from our real aims.

To support her argument, Jasiewicz misrepresents what I said at climate camp. She claims that I “confessed not knowing where to turn next to solve the issues of how to generate the changes necessary to shift our sources of energy, production and consumption”. I confessed nothing of the kind. In my book Heat, I spell out what is required to bring about a 90% cut in emissions by 2030. Instead I confessed that I don’t know how to solve the problem of capitalism without resorting to totalitarianism.

The issue is that capitalism involves lending money at interest. If you lend at 5%, then one of two things must happen. Either the money supply must increase by 5%, or the velocity of circulation must increase by 5%. In either case, if this growth is not met by a concomitant increase in the supply of goods and services, it becomes inflationary and the system collapses. But a perpetual increase in the supply of goods and services will eventually destroy the biosphere. So how do we stall this process? Even when usurers were put to death and condemned to perpetual damnation, the practice couldn’t be stamped out. Only the communist states managed it, through the extreme use of the state control Jasiewicz professes to hate. I don’t yet have an answer to this conundrum. Does she?

Yes, let us fight both corporate power and the undemocratic tendencies of the state. Yes, let us try to crack the problem of capitalism and then fight for a different system. But let us not confuse this task with the immediate need to stop two degrees of warming, or allow it to interfere with the carbon cuts that have to begin now.

Jasiewicz’s second grave error is to imagine that society could be turned into a giant climate camp. Anarchism is a great means of organising a self-elected community of like-minded people. It is a disastrous means of organising a planet. Most anarchists envisage their system as the means by which the oppressed can free themselves from persecution. But if everyone is to be free from the coercive power of the state, this must apply to the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The richest and most powerful communities on earth – be they geographical communities or communities of interest – will be as unrestrained by external forces as the poorest and weakest. As a friend of mine put it, “when the anarchist utopia arrives, the first thing that will happen is that every Daily Mail reader in the country will pick up a gun and go and kill the nearest hippy”.

This is why, though both sides furiously deny it, the outcome of both market fundamentalism and anarchism, if applied universally, is identical. The anarchists’ associate with the oppressed, the market fundamentalists with the oppressors. But by eliminating the state, both remove such restraints as prevent the strong from crushing the weak. Ours is not a choice between government and no government. It is a choice between government and the mafia.

Over the past year I have been working with groups of climate protesters who have changed my view of what could be achieved. Most of them are under 30, and they bring to this issue a clear-headedness and pragmatism that I have never encountered in direct action movements before. They are prepared to take extraordinary risks to try to defend the biosphere from the corporations, governments and social trends which threaten to make it uninhabitable. They do so for one reason only: that they love the world and fear for its future. It would be a tragedy if, through the efforts of people like Jasiewicz, they were to be diverted from this urgent task into the identity politics that have wrecked so many movements.

The unsurprising casualties of capitalism

Ellie Keen — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:01:29 +0000

Fatherhood is back in the political ring. In the right corner, David Cameron’s comments about black fathers revive the Conservative instinct for a scapegoat. In the left corner, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s Working Better initiative has joined with Mumsnet.com and Dad Info to launch ‘Home Front: What do mums and dads need to make life work?’ For the right, paternal responsibility is the bedrock of patriarchal social order. For the left, paternal responsibility is about a new kind of democratic settlement between men and women.

Fatherhood today is measured against the model of the man as family provider, the breadwinner supporting wife and children. This is a modern invention of the middle classes and only became the norm in the 1950s. In the past paternity was never enough to qualify men for fatherhood. Patriarchy was limited to propertied men. Colonialism ensured it was further restricted to white men.

There were plenty of biological fathers who lived without families. This was not about men’s moral failings, but a structural problem. Since the 1950s historic changes in the economy and in gender relations have returned us to this age. Paternity no longer means fatherhood.

In the 1980s, mass unemployment and the closure of manufacturing industries destroyed many men’s role as family breadwinner. Capitalism restructured around a low-wage, flexible labour market. Men’s ‘family wage’ and job for life disappeared and large numbers of women were drawn into the workforce. As men’s incomes stagnated or fell, women took on a double shift of paid work and unpaid domestic labour. Working class survival and middle class lifestyle once managed on a man’s single income now require two incomes, and often multiple part-time jobs. The role of family breadwinner is now unattainable for the majority of fathers in Britain.

For many young working-class people, marriage and setting up a family home has become a distant dream. Low wages and a lack of affordable housing makes it increasingly difficult for many young men to create an independent life of their own. The traditional rites of passage into adulthood – leaving home, entering employment, establishing a family, and taking on legal obligations and rights – have disappeared.

Research by the centre right think tank Civitas suggests that the higher rates of single parenthood and cohabitation in low income areas are not about feckless fathers or an anti-marraige trend but to do with the structural problems of poverty and a low wage economy.

Debates about fatherhood in recent years have all failed to recognise the structural changes within which men and women are forced to make choices and take decisions. Politicians of all parties go along with tabloid explanations of ‘deadbeat dads’. The Right wants to rewind 200 years and reimpose the patriarchal roles of mothers and fathers. Labour, despite the best efforts of feminism, is silent and evasive about both masculinity and fatherhood.

The growing popularity of Cameron’s Conservatives has emboldened them to revive the old right wing ‘responsibility agenda’. Chris Grayling, the Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions has made a number of eloquent speeches on the subject: “We have a growing generation of young men, alienated and drifting without a purpose in life; They are causing trouble; Welfare programmes don’t work and the criminal justice system is too soft; Many have grown up without fathers and many are becoming ‘fathers in name but not in action’; The lack of fathers is a huge problem for all of us.”

Grayling is good at describing the problem, but pointing the finger of blame at individual behaviour does not confront the bigger problem. He has no solutions. Nor, for that matter, does Labour. The fact is that the kind of democratic fatherhood society aspires to is not compatible with our economic and class system which leaves men with either too little or too much work. Only one in five men takes advantage of the new paternity leave provision of two weeks off, paid at £117 a week. Because of financial pressures 40 per cent don’t take up the right. As the EHRC’s NIcola Brewer has argued, “The central issue is that the economic penalty for fatherhood is too high.”

The crisis fuels discontent

JamieSW — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:12:53 +0000

Where did it all go wrong for Gordon Brown? Was it his failure to call a general election last October? Was it the attempt to impose a pay freeze? Was it the vote in parliament to extend detention without trial to 42 days? Just one year into Brown’s premiership a recent Gallup poll showed Labour’s popularity at its lowest ebb of support since Gallup first asked people to declare their voting intention in 1943. The government is in a crisis that appears out of control and the central issue that is derailing Brown is the economic crisis.

This crisis is not confined to the boardrooms of big companies and the financial markets. This is a crisis that affects every single household in Britain. Rocketing price increases have become the topic of conversation on every bus, in every workplace and college. When basic foods go up by 12 or 14 percent everyone but the very rich feels it. One Daily Mirror front page stated: “Cost of living up 11.6 percent… Mirror index shock increase: food up 15 percent; transport up 16 percent; utilities up 13 percent.”

The housing market, which once fuelled the boom, is now helping to precipitate the crisis. Repossessions have doubled in the last year, house prices are falling but at the same time people’s mortgage payments are actually rising as fixed payment deals expire and interest rates rise. The Guardian financial pages reported that there has been a 60 percent fall in people buying new build houses in the last year.

Rising fuel, food and transport prices are causing misery for millions. But how has the government got into this mess? Only a few years ago Brown was boasting that his economic policies had got rid of the boom and slump cycle.

This is not an economic crisis confined to Britain: it is a world economic crisis creating instability across the globe. Capitalist crisis links the teaching assistant in Bradford who can’t pay her gas bill with the woman who joins food riots in Senegal. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation states that the world’s poorest countries could see their annual food import basket cost four times as much as it did in 2000. According to the World Bank, food riots have already hit more than 30 countries in the past year.

There have been major strikes and protests across the world, including South Korea, Egypt, Spain and France. Last year right wing ideologue Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidential election. He was being hailed as the new Margaret Thatcher, but one year later his plans to break the French unions and privatise industries lie in tatters as strikes and protests have shaken his government. The rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland is further evidence of increasing resistance to the political establishment and its neoliberal priorities.

This crisis and the resistance to it are not only creating a crisis of political legitimacy for mainstream parties but also creating the conditions in which many people begin to question the very nature of capitalism.

It is important to understand that Britain is not immune to this process. The struggle may not be as bitter and deep as some countries, but nonetheless it is growing and creating massive problems for the government. Many media pundits are already warning of a “summer of discontent”. The detonator for this panic was the victory of tanker drivers employed indirectly by Shell. This small group of workers organised a militant strike that forced the bosses to concede a 14 percent pay rise over two years. The strike showed the willingness of private sector workers both to join the pay revolt and to give solidarity, even if it meant breaking the law.

This victory is also being used as a benchmark for other workers. In fact, the Financial Times expressed the growing concern of bosses that so many inflation busting deals are part of two and three year deals linked to the Retail Price Index, which a year or two ago employers clearly believed was a safe bet to stay low. But it reported that four out of five deals over 4 percent were not linked to the RPI and so have been won by unions. “Mr Darling and John Hutton, the business secretary, argued last week that the Shell settlement was a one-off. But other recent deals include Drax Power, which in April agreed a 7 percent pay rise for 600 workers [plus a £1,500 lump sum], forming the second year of a two year deal. Babcock Engineering recently agreed a 7.6 per cent increase with 500 workers. Barclays has implemented a 5 per cent pay increase for 55,000 workers at the bank, as the first leg of a three year RPI-linked deal”.

This wage fight is continuing to escalate. As Socialist Review went to press half a million local government workers in Unison voted to strike over their pay. The action planned for July has the potential to intensify the wage fight, and unlike previous strikes this involves a Labour affiliated union. This will take place alongside action by other unions.

The PCS civil service workers’ union passed a motion that is likely to lead to a national ballot over pay and other issues in September. The NUT teachers’ union conference backed a ballot for further strikes as a follow up to the stunningly successful multi-union strikes on 24 April, which drew new layers of militant workers into the movement.

Pay cuts

The CWU postal conference supported a strike ballot over pensions, mail centre closures and defence of the post office network – and the leadership responded positively to calls for a mass demonstration at the Labour Party conference.

The fury over pay cuts – and the fact that those cuts are driven centrally by Gordon Brown – combines with a wider disillusion with Labour to produce an unprecedented questioning of the unions’ links with the party. At almost every conference the issue of whether (or at least to what extent) to continue supporting Labour was raised openly.

The firefighters’ FBU union broke from Labour in 2004 after the government had behaved so aggressively against the union during its national strike. At last year’s conference some delegates called for renewed affiliation to Labour. This time there were only a handful of votes against the decision to remain separate from the party.

The GMB union voted overwhelmingly to remove funding from up to 35 Labour MPs who had not measured up to a union assessment of their “value for money”. GMB leader Paul Kenny dryly remarked, “We’ve examined the records of MPs both at local level and national level and many are doing a fantastic job, but there are a number who seem at times to be embarrassed by their relationship with the union. We don’t want to embarrass them by giving them union money.”

Kenny also told the conference, “We are going to consider our affiliation levels to ensure they represent the realistic level of support within the union for the party.”

At the CWU, motions to disaffiliate from Labour or to democratise the political fund were defeated heavily. But this was largely because the leadership had supported an emergency motion which said that unless the government had sharply changed its policies towards privatisation and the running of Royal Mail by March 2009 “then the CWU membership will be balloted on whether they believe the union should fund the Labour Party at the next general election”.

Speaker after speaker (including several Labour members) spoke to underline that this was the party’s “last chance”. Setting this deadline defeated those who wanted an immediate change in the relationship with Labour. But it is now a ticking time bomb that could explode and cause serious damage to the party.

Even at Unison, where the leadership worked hard to prevent a discussion about Labour, the issue was forced on to the agenda. Towards the end of the conference the delegates have a chance to vote for motions they think should be shunted up the order paper. This year every region of the union decided that the priority was a motion on having a review of the union’s political fund and support for Labour. In the event it was defeated, but only very narrowly.

Earlier, Unison general secretary Dave Prentis had to declare that the pay deal in the NHS (which the union leadership had pushed) would have to be renegotiated if inflation continues to rise. He warned Brown, “It’s time for the government to raise our people up, or our people will bring Gordon down.”

The background to the conferences is a collapse in support for Labour among its core supporters and a widening sense of opposition to the system – challenging neoliberalism is now common currency among trade unionists. For example, the NUT and UCU conferences both agreed to campaign against military recruitment in schools and colleges, and the question of how best to build opposition to the fascist BNP was discussed at every conference.

The bitterness about Labour was underlined by an opinion poll commissioned by Unison just before its conference which showed Labour’s traditional supporters deserting the party in their droves. Almost half of those who have regularly voted Labour at past elections now say they are less likely to vote Labour than they were in 2005. In addition, 51 percent of the general public say they are less likely to vote Labour than they were at the last general election compared to 4 percent who say they are more likely.

Who could have believed that the man who replaced Tony Blair would have managed to drive Labour support down so far and so quickly, by his handling of the economic crisis? Bank of England governor Mervyn King made it clear that things are only going to get worse when he said, “Rising fuel, gas, electricity and food prices mean that average real take-home pay will stagnate this year. It will not be an easy time, and I know that some families will find it particularly difficult.” A new study by accountants Grant Thornton reported that official figures show that income inequality under Labour so far is already higher on average than it was under Thatcher.

One thing is certain. As with any economic crisis in history the government and bosses want workers to pay the price. This has sometimes been successful in the past. Attacks on conditions and financial hardship in times of crisis can have the effect of subduing class struggle. But such attacks can also lead to people questioning the system and fighting back. Such periods of instability polarise society, as we are seeing now. But polarisation does not necessarily mean that people move to the left. The election results for the BNP and the rise in anti-immigration sentiments are proof of this, and a warning. Polarisation is exactly what the word means – a move away from the centre of politics.

The government is on the rocks. Millions of workers want to see a serious battle to defend living standards, to take action for affordable housing, to halt the spread of privatisation and to defend secure jobs. What socialists do and how they react to events will make a difference. The left has already played a major role in shaping the pay revolt as it has developed. The anger felt by ordinary members in unions like the PCS, NUT and UCU found expression in the lead given from the unions’ leading bodies.

This in turn has increased the pressure on Labour affiliated unions like Unison to move. The left has won an argument over the idea of joint action and turned it into a reality. Socialists have to continue to place themselves at the centre of the moves for action and unity across the unions. That means pushing for joint action where we can and supporting initiatives like Public Services Not Private Profit, Organising for Fighting Unions and the National Shop Stewards Network that attempt to build unity between trade unionists nationally and in the localities.

The left also needs to be able to raise a political as well as an industrial response to the crisis. We need to popularise a set of demands that activists from different political backgrounds, or none, can rally round. And we have to continue to raise the urgent need for political alternatives to New Labour, no matter how difficult they are to construct. This year’s union conferences with the increasing attacks by New Labour make this project more important than ever.

G8 summit marked by impotence and division

Ellie Keen — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Facing what is arguably its most serious crisis since the end of the Second World War, the global capitalist economy has never been in greater need of co-ordinated policies from the world’s major national governments.

But unity and collaboration in the face of the mounting problems posed by climate change, oil and food price hikes and the ever-present threat of recession, have been conspicuously absent from the meeting of the G8 major industrial nations being held in Hokkaido, Japan, this week.

Nowhere were the divisions more apparent than in yesterday’s statement on climate change. After much behind the scenes negotiations, the G8 meeting finally agreed to a communiqué in which the major industrial powers agreed to a “vision” of “achieving at least 50 percent reduction of global emissions by 2050.” However, in order to secure agreement from US President George Bush, who has refused to name any target in the absence of commitments from India and China, the statement added a rider “recognising that this global challenge can only be met by a global response, in particular, by the contributions from all major economies.”

The statement was dismissed by scientists as lagging far behind what was needed to arrest global climate change.

“They could have made progress here by being more specific on the near-term commitments that industrialised countries were willing to make to reduce their own emissions, but they don’t have agreement on that,” Aiden Meyer, a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said.

“They could have been more specific on reductions by 2050 from what base year, but they don’t have agreement on that.”

James Hansen, a leading climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said it was “a pretence that [industrialised nations] understand the problem. In reality, they are taking actions that guarantee that we deliver to our children climate catastrophes that are out of their control.”

The G8 statement failed to make any commitment on emission reductions over the next decade, action that is regarded as vital. The chairman of the UN’s panel of climate scientists, Rajendra Pachauri, said “very vital details” were missing from the statement. “The sooner we start reducing emissions, the greater the likelihood of avoiding some of the more serious impacts and temperature increases that are going to take place a decade or so down the road,” he said.

The statement was met with immediate criticism from the G5 group of so-called developing countries—Brazil, China, India, South Africa and Mexico—that are scheduled to meet with G8 today.

“Responsibility shouldn’t fall on developing countries for what is an unavoidable responsibility of developed nations,” said Mexican president Felipe Calderon.

South Africa’s environment minister Marthinaus van Schalkwyk called the G8 statement an “empty slogan without substance.”

“While the statement may appear as a movement forward, we are concerned that it may, in effect, be a regression from what is required to make a meaningful contribution to meeting the challenges of climate change. To be meaningful and credible, a long-term goal must have a base year. It must be underpinned by ambitious mid-term targets and actions,” he said.

In any case, even if such commitments were made, they would not prove any more substantial than those made on world poverty. Three years ago, amid great fanfare at the Gleneagles meeting in Scotland, the G8 leaders agreed to increase aid to Africa by $25 billion by the year 2010. As the Hokkaido meeting was being convened it was revealed that a mere 14 percent of the target had been met.

World economy

The G8’s commitments on the world economy were no more specific than those on climate change. The organisation was set up in 1975 to develop co-ordinated action to meet the problems posed by recession and the financial turmoil resulting from the oil price shock of 1973-74. Three and a half decades on, with the world economy facing what the International Monetary Fund has designated as the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression, such action would seem to be in order.

But the G8 statement contained no concrete measures. After noting that the world economy is facing “uncertainty” as “downside risks persist” and expressing “strong concern about elevated commodity prices, especially oil and food,” the statement went on to assert that “we are determined to continuously take appropriate actions, individually and collectively to ensure stability and growth in our economies and globally.”

It contained a veiled call to the Chinese government to allow an upward movement in the exchange rate of the yuan in order to alleviate global imbalances.

“In some emerging economies with large and growing current account surpluses,” the statement declared, “it is crucial that their effective exchange rates move so that necessary adjustment will occur.” The inclusion of the word “some” marked a change from the communiqué last year, which simply referred to “emerging economies” in general.

The exchange rate issue is only a symptom of more deep-seated problems. A spokesman for Bush declared at the outset of the meeting that the president was in favour a “strong dollar”. However, that would necessitate a rise in US interest rates, a move that would almost certainly set off a new financial crisis in the US and globally. On the other hand, an increase in the value of the dollar would require a lowering of interest rates in other regions, especially in the eurozone. But rather than cutting rates the European Central Bank is maintaining a relatively tight monetary policy in order to combat global inflationary pressures.

The impotence of the G8 is not a product of the individual leaders and governments but the expression of vast changes in the world economy. As the Financial Times noted in a comment published on Monday, the G8 is not master of its own destiny but is being buffeted by “forces and policies from elsewhere.”

“While the G8 accounts for almost half the world’s economic output, developing and emerging economies produce 70 percent of economic growth. Their dynamism outweighs the G8’s size. And by dint of its 10 percent growth rates, China alone contributes as much to the world’s economic growth every year as the US.”

The slippage of the “leading industrial nations,” as the members of the G8 like to designate themselves, is illustrated by the economic decline of the United States. As a comment published last Thursday by Bloomberg News noted: “The dollar’s 41 percent drop against the euro during Bush’s term writes the economic epitaph of an administration that set out to restore American pre-eminence.”

An even more scathing comment, authored by the well-known British historian and journalist Max Hastings, was published in the Guardian on Monday.

The gathering in Hokkaido, he began, conjured up images of a political accident and emergency ward on a Saturday night.

“President Bush, leader of the greatest nation on earth, is discredited and almost time-expired. Gordon Brown leads a government most of whose own members want him to disappear into a hole. Silvio Berlusconi presides over a gangster culture that renders it impossible for Italy to present a serious face to world. Nicolas Sarkozy should enjoy the prestige of a French president secure in office until 2012, but he has grievously injured his own power base by his first-year antics. Russia’s new president Dmitry Medvedev, may well add up to nothing, in the absence of Vladmir Putin to tell him what to think.”

Hastings’ concern over the state of the world’s political leadership was prompted by the fact that the G8 was charged with addressing the “gravest issues of modern times”, including the “shocking evidence on climate change”, world poverty and the economic slowdown in the wake of soaring energy and food prices.

However, it was becoming more difficult to “mobilise an international quorum in support of any objective, however worthy and important.” This was a reflection not only of the loss of authority by the US but was also a consequence of “globalism, which makes it ever harder for any nation to forge a consensus in support of decisive action”.

Things had been much easier for capitalist societies in the Cold War era “when it was perceived as essential to follow strong US leadership”. Hastings forecast that the “global predicament” would have to get a “great deal worse” before the members of bodies such as the G8 “acknowledge that common action against shared perils must transcend the familiar, disastrously outdated pursuit of national interests.”

Hastings’ hope that global events will alert world leaders to the dangers of the unfettered pursuit of national interest—rather in the manner of an English schoolmaster knocking sense into a class of rowdy students—is completely misplaced. As the current G8 meeting demonstrates, far from bringing greater international unity and co-operation, the global economic and environmental problems will bring greater national divergence and conflict among the capitalist powers.

This is because the divisions are not the product of individual politicians or the result of lack of knowledge or understanding but are rooted in the very nation-state structure of the world capitalist order.