Reacting to the economic crisis, both Bush's and Obama's administrations have allowed the state and local funding supports for public education to decline nationwide. Educational opportunities shrink as educational inequality rises. From coast to coast, most students' job, income, and life prospects fall ever further behind those of children of the rich. The US government's response to economic crisis might well be ironically renamed as "leave no banker behind." Yet a collapsing public education system threatens society's future no less than a collapsing credit market. A president who campaigned on a program of hope presides over its evaporation for most children.Read it here.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Rick Wolff on the Assault on Public Education
Excellent Joel Geier piece on the Crisis
Excerpt:
The capitalist state, not the market, produced stabilization, the end of the free-fall, and the start of a recovery. However, the fundamentals of the capitalist economy are so weak that there is no confidence that if the state were to withdraw stimulus that recovery could be sustained. The fear is that if the “free market” was left to its own solutions, and government stimulus sharply curtailed, demand would collapse, renewing recession. All of this has to be subtly presented so that faith in “free enterprise” is not excessively undermined.Read it here.
Monday, July 5, 2010
A Critique of the "Black Bloc"
From Louis Proyect's blog, here's an excerpt:
It should be clear that the actions of the black bloc reflect their politics. The actions in Toronto mirror those tactics used elsewhere. The tactics and politics regardless of their intent are inherently elitist and counter-productive. In fact they mirror the critique of reformism many on the left have. The NDP says vote for us and we’ll do it for you, the black bloc says in essence the same thing – we will make the revolution for you.At best the tactics of the black bloc are based on a mistaken idea that the attacks on property and the police will create a spark to encourage others to resist capitalism, at worst they are based on a rampant individualistic sense of rage and entitlement to express that rage regardless of the consequences to others. The anti-authoritarian politic they follow is imposed on others. Very rarely will you see a black bloc call its own rally, instead the tactic is to play hide and seek with the police under the cover of larger mobilizations.
Further as has been noted in many cases, the tactics and politics of the black bloc and some anarchists and some others on the left, leave them prone to being manipulated by the state. In almost every summit protest, police and others (in Genoa it was also fascists), infiltrate or form their own blocs to engage in provocations. The politics of secrecy and unannounced plans and a quasi-military (amateur at best) approach to demonstrations leave the door open to this.
The tactics also open the door for the justification of further police repression. This has been debated before, with some arguing that the state doesn’t need justification for repression. The idea that the state doesn’t need justification for further repression exposes the total lack of understanding of both the state and the consciousness of ordinary people.
Read the rest here.
I think this basically sums it up. Their politics are undialectical: they pretend as though the same tactics (smashing windows, etc.) are to be employed in every circumstance no matter the conditions or the consequences. This is fetishism of tactics, pure and simple, which cannot but be a mistake: tactics are always means to ends, not ends in themselves. The only way to know anything about tactics is to learn from history and experience and to assess the consequences and the conditions involved in a particular situation. None of this seems to figure into the provocations of the BB'ers.
Now I'm not convinced they've thought this far ahead, but if their view is that smashing windows and burning cars is the most effective way to win other people over to anti-capitalist politics, this just seems false.
Evidently, there are sophisticated defenses (I concede that these are secondhand- a thorough examination of the BB'ers would take a look at their own arguments) of Black Bloc-ism out there, e.g. that the BB makes clear what everyone else fails to see: that the state has a monopoly of violence with potent enforcement mechanisms. Then there's the argument that the BB exposes the implication of peaceful protesters with power by demonstrating how the former consent to co-exist with the latter. Both of the arguments fall flat. For starters, every school child knows that the state has a monopoly on violence. So the BB'ers are hardly showing anyone anything that they didn't already know. And what follows from realizing that the state has a monopoly on violence (it wouldn't be one if it didn't)? Does this help us to better understand power in contemporary capitalist societies? Not really. And since when was the point of recent protest efforts in the US supposed to be to challenge the state's monopoly on violence? Since when was this the goal of social movements on the ground? As far as I can tell, outside of genuine revolutionary situations, this is never the point of a protest. Were the massive 2006 MayDay mega-marches against xenophobia in the US directed toward breaking the state's monopoly of force? Were such protests therefore implicated in sustaining the legitimacy of the existing order of things?
The recent events at the G20 remind me of a similar situation at Hunter College in Manhattan a couple of months ago. Those jerks actually attacked other Left protesters fighting the budget cuts and they destroyed public property at CUNY!
I myself am not plugged into anarchist circles, but I would be curious to know what many of them, particularly the theoretically sophisticated and reasonably organized groups, think about the BB stuff. My sense is that it goes without saying that the diverse anarchist movement in the US alone is not necessarily on board with the provocateur tactics of the BB.
Finally, doesn't this whole Black Bloc thing reek of jock-strap machismo? I don't have anything else interesting to say about this, but it does seem to me that there's some testosterone-heavy stuff going on with the BB confrontations with Cops. There's certainly a gendered element to their uncompromising endorsement of violent provocations and the way in which they seem to like the "combat" with police for its own sake.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Exactamente
"Obama está más ciego que los ciegos, ve el problema y no lo quiere solucionar. Lo que queríamos era escuchar que impusiera una moratoria a las deportaciones. Le está echando la culpa a los republicanos y no asume la responsabilidad". -el reverendo José Landaverde (Hoy, 7.2.2010)
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Authorized Media: "Banks Dodged Bullet"
Read the BusinessWeek article here. Here's an excerpt:
"A deal reached by members of a House and Senate conference early this morning diluted provisions from the tougher Senate bill, limiting rather than prohibiting the ability of federally insured banks to trade derivatives and invest in hedge funds or private equity funds.Before we know it, election season will be upon us and we will be aswim in calls to support Democrat incumbents. Presumably, the Dems won't try to sell their (basically conservative) politics as "change" this time around. They'll sell their ticket as a bulwark against Tea-bagger reactionaries.Banks “dodged a bullet,” said Raj Date, executive director for Cambridge Winter Inc.’s center for financial institutions policy and a former Deutsche Bank AG executive. “This has to be a net positive.”
But what happened during the two years of massive Democrat House majorities, a supermajority in the Senate, and an initially popular young president who was talking about fundamental change?
We saw the reactivation of the US's Latin American military strong arm in 2008, escalation in Afghanistan, complete continuity with the Bush years in terms of treasury policy, quick surrender on the already compromised "public option", failure to repeal anti-union laws that prevent organization of workplaces, increased drone attacks on Pakistan, severe cuts to public services, spending freezes for everything except the defense budget, refusal to enact progressive reform on the GLBT-rights front, a U-turn on off-shore drilling and an embrace by Obama of "drill baby drill", deference to a for-profit oil company that has devastated the Gulf of Mexico, etc. Now we have, basically, a failure to even secure adequate window-dressing to cover the fact that serious regulatory reform will not be passed.
It is more clear to me than ever that all progressive and left-minded people in the US need to organize independently of the Democratic machine, build existing social movements, and start new ones. We need to follow the example of the Black freedom movement of the 1950s and 60s- and, as Sherry Wolf has recently put it, "make them do the right thing". Of course, the ultimate aim must be to eliminate a social system in which there is a "them" who need to be made to do what's in the interest of the vast majority of people.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Startling
"The top 225 individuals now possess wealth equal to the combined incomes of the bottom 47 percent of the world's population. (Roughly, the average wealth of each one of these individuals is equal to the combined incomes of ten million people earning the average income of the bottom half of humanity)... In the US, the upper 1 percent of the population owns more wealth than the bottom 95 percent". -from David Schweickart's After Capitalism.
Now, ask yourself the following questions.
- How did such inequalities come about?
- How is such a vastly unequal state of affairs reproduced and maintained?
- By what means are we (95% of the population of the US) made to tolerate such an arrangement?
- Why is the discussion of this matter absent from mainstream political discourse?
- What could we (collectively, as a society) do with the (socially produced) wealth held by the top 1% if it was put to uses other than the enrichment of a small elite?
- When so much human potential and talent is wasted by the destructive forces of poverty, oppression and exploitation, why should we allow such vast resources to be concentrated among a tiny clique of people for whom there is no such thing as enough wealth?
NLR Exchange on Zionism
In the most recent edition of New Left Review there was an exchange on the issue of zionism between Gabriel Piterberg and Zeev Sternhell. I must say that seeing Sternhell's piece, entitled "In Defenese of Israel", listed on the cover of the journal gave me a bit of a jolt (given that the journal has always been an excellent source of critical material on Israel and zionism). But I think the practice of inviting a non-critical scholar on some issue (e.g. Russian economic development (see Popov vs. Wood in an older edition), etc.) to exchange with an author of a more critical persuasion is a good one. It is smart for two reasons: first, it draws in more mainstream readership to Left-wing arguments and ideas, and secondly it makes a good case for critical ideas by juxtaposing them against (often less plausible) mainstream ones.
I found Sternhell's perspective interesting, given how little one hears from the Social Democratic or Labourite wing of zionism these days. Unlike most apologists for the regime, Sternhell is staunchly critical of the post-1967 occupation and the settlement projects in the Occupied Territories. (In 2008 an Israeli settler placed a bomb on his doorstep, which injured him considerably). Nonetheless, I didn't find his arguments compelling. At the end of the day, the main oversight of the Sternhell line is what Pitterberg makes so clear: zionism must be understood in terms of settler colonialism.
In his response to Sternhell, Pitterberg emphasizes a point he makes clear in his book, namely that there were alternative Jewish nationalisms in the late 19th and early 20th century that are often overlooked or forgotten today in the wake of a dominant Zionism. Importantly, many of these alternative forms of Jewish nationalism eschewed the religiously-charged Zionist project:
These modern Jewish nationalisms were truly secular, for they rejected the Old Testament as a religious text, in stark contrast to Zionism, whose secularity is limited to the rejection of rabbinical Judaism. As Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has put it, the logic of Zionist Israeli secularity is, ‘There is no God, but He promised us the Land.’The most important point of contention between Sternhell and Pitterberg is the "C word", but it is here that Pitterberg's argument is on much firmer ground. Pitterberg, and he is hardly alone in thinking this, holds that we must understand Zionism within a comparative framework in the context of settler-colonialism. As he puts it:
Inherent in these modern expressions of Jewish nationalism was the resolution to change the societies within which the Jews existed and to challenge the exclusiveness of the European nation-state. Equally central was the willingness to work with Jews as they actually were, even if this was accompanied by a modernizing confidence in collective and individual improvement. Zionism, by contrast, shared the hegemonic view of both anti-Semites and progressives like George Eliot that national societies were organic and homogeneous, and therefore the Jews—an extrinsic element in the national body within this logic—should emigrate, and replicate the same exclusive type of national society in a piece of land deemed ‘empty’ in the East; this is what Daniel Deronda and Mirah Lapidoth were presumably planning at the end of Eliot’s novel. Zionism, moreover, accepted that there was something irremediably wrong with Jews as they actually were—so long as they remained ‘in exile’. They needed to be territorialized in order to be normalized.
The achievements of the comparative study of settler colonialisms have been at once scholarly and political. Several of these colonies gave birth to powerful nation-states which have asserted their own hegemonic narratives, nationally and internationally. The comparative field not only questions these narratives, through countervailing evidence and interpretation; it also offers an alternative account of the social formations themselves. In the process, three fundamental features common to these hegemonic settler myths are undermined. The first of these is the putative uniqueness of each settler nation; the second, their privileging of the settlers’ intentions, as sovereign subjects, at the expense of the natives’ consciousness. Third, the supposed inconsequence of the natives to the form each settler society takes; in other words, the conflict with the natives is not denied, but the fundamental role that this conflict has played in shaping the identity of the settler nation is written out. It is within the typology of settler colonialisms that I place the Zionist colonization of Palestine and the state of Israel—a move which surely should have put to rest the tedious contention that Zionism could not be termed a colonial venture because it lacked the features of metropole colonialism; as if anyone were suggesting otherwise. What its apologists fail to confront is the settler-colonial paradigm.This seems to me to be exactly right. And it's clear why apologists for the regime are so keen to avoid the "C word". Their primary mode of argumentation is to simply avoid discussions of this kind entirely (i.e. discussions which critically examine the very foundations of the Zionist project) and focus attention on narratives about self-defense and so on. But any sober examination of the project reveals that it rests on thin air.
Forrest Hylton on the Colombian Elections
Watch it here. (embed?) For excellent background on the political situation in Colombia, see Hylton's excellent piece in NLR from a couple of years back that focused on Medellín.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Why "Boycott BP" is not a progressive slogan
Read about it here.
Many will recall the Enron scandal and the way that business media covered that event: "a couple of bad apples", a "rare event", a "lapse" in an otherwise streamlined economic system, etc, etc. Virtually nothing that was said about Enron in the consensus media indicated that it is perfectly rational to do what the Enron crooks did on the road to profit maximization. Nor did we read any mention of that fact that it is exactly this sort of instrumentalizing, rent-seeking behavior that our economic system encourages and cultivates.
The same is true, of course, of the massive environmental catastrophe in the Gulf.
This is not an anomaly. This is not a "rare event". This is not the fault of some particularly evil individuals working for just one firm. This is the truth of off shore drilling itself. This is the truth of for-profit resource exploitation.
It's easy to try to cover these truths in particularities about the present case by pointing fingers at BP, etc. But the problem is much deeper and systemic. Moreover- the problem also tracks the proliferation of built environments that force people to burn fossil fuels in order to leave their home.
To be clear: I'm not defending BP in the least. I think all of their assets should be seized and that the stock holders should be saddled with debt until this crisis is completely take care of. But let us not forget that the problem is with a system that ruthlessly exploits the natural environment and people for profit- not with a handful of "bad apples".
And let us not forget either that our wonderful "progressive" president still "strongly supports off-shore drilling". The only surprising thing about this is that some people on the left are surprised about Obama's position on this issue. There was an excellent Harper's piece on Obama a year before he ran for President detailing his close relationships with the Corn and Oil lobbies in IL. Is there any doubt that he played liberals for fools in the 2008 elections?
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Doug Henwood on Obama
The following is from his excellent letter to the editor in the Financial Times:
Financial Times – April 16, 2010
Republicans are in the White House
From Mr Doug Henwood.
Sir, Clive Crook’s call (April 12) for a revival of an old-style GOP opposition is a little strange, since Barack Obama himself is a liberal Republican. Or maybe not so liberal a Republican.
Consider the healthcare bill. The individual mandate has its origins in the Nixon administration’s response to Teddy Kennedy’s single-payer bill in the early 1970s. The insurance marketplace has its roots in the American Enterprise Institute’s response to Bill Clinton’s healthcare scheme. Speaking of Mr Clinton, wasn’t it he who said “we’re all Eisenhower Republicans here”? And he wasn’t too happy about it.
The not-so-liberal Republican part is most visible in education policy. President Obama has continued George W. Bush’s “No child left behind” emphasis on testing and charter schools, and has even taken up attacking teachers’ unions.
Arne Duncan, his education secretary, has declared in terms indistinguishable from Milton Friedman’s that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to the New Orleans school system because it furthered that quasi-privatisation agenda.
Who needs “moderate” Republicans in opposition when they’re already in power?
Doug Henwood,
Left Business Observer,
Brooklyn, NY, US
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
SW.org on Israel and the Gaza Freedom Floatilla
Read it here. It provides some important details of the attack and (as always at SW.org) brings the political analysis.
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