SolidarityEconomy.net

Can the revolution outlive its leader?

Late one Friday afternoon in March, a crowd gathered for a rally in downtown Havana to denounce an incident that had occurred the previous evening in San Juan, Puerto Rico. During a game between Cuba and the Netherlands in the first international Baseball Classic, a spectator held up a sign to the television cameras which said “Abajo Fidel”—“Down with Fidel”—and shouted similar sentiments to the Cubans on the field. Among them was Antonio Castro, an orthopedic surgeon, who is the Cuban team’s doctor and one of Fidel Castro’s sons. A Cuban official angrily confronted the protester, whereupon Puerto Rican policemen detained him. He was released after receiving a lecture about freedom of speech. Cuba won, 11–2, but the following day, in a tone of high umbrage, Cuba’s official Communist Party newspaper, Granma, decried the “cynical counter-revolutionary provocations” of U.S. and Puerto Rican officials.

(more…)

The science is clear, the technology is available. To meet the challenge of ‘the most serious threat to humanity since the invention of nuclear weapons,’ climate-change campaigners now need to win the political argument, says Tom Burke of E3G.

The public argument on climate change has been transformed by a series of recent interventions by scientists. First, James E Hansen, the global doyen of climate scientists, announced that the world has only ten years in which to take decisive action on the climate. ‘I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change … no longer than a decade, at the most,’ he told the Climate Change Research Conference in Sacramento, California.Second, John P Holdren, the incoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in his inaugural address that the world is already experiencing dangerous climate change.

(more…)

What are we to make of the “Parecon” phenomenon? Michael Albert’s book made it to number thirteen on Amazon.com a few days after some on-line promotion.[1] Eight of the twelve Amazon.com reviewers (when I last checked) had given the book five stars. It has been, or is being, translated into Arabic, Bengali, Telagu, Croatian, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.[2] The book has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, who says it “merits close attention, debate and action,” by Arundhati Roy, who calls it “a brave argument for a much needed alternative economic vision,” by Ben Bagdikian, who finds it “a compelling book for our times,” and by Howard Zinn, who sees it as “a thoughtful, profound meditation on what a good society can be like.”[3] Yet it is a terrible book.

To be sure, there are lots of terrible books on politics and economics being written for popular audiences these days, but these are usually right-wing harangues beating up on liberals.

They are not endorsed by the likes of the above, who are all very left and very smart. Albert himself is a smart guy. He has incredible energy. Z-Net, Z Magazine and South End Press, all of which he was instrumental in bringing into being, have been important to radical activists and intellectuals over the years, now more than ever. Many of his debates and discussions are insightful. I don’t always agree with him, but his arguments are often subtle, not easy to counter, well worth pondering. Parecon is a different matter altogether.

(more…)

Ford Motor Company’s new restructuring plan, calling for layoffs of 30,000 workers, once again reminds us of America’s economic conundrum. Put simply, the United States confronts the ‘one-price law.’

Whenever identical items sell for different prices, the one-price law tells us that people will buy in the low-priced market and sell in the high-priced one until prices converge at a single point for the two markets.

Since our workers receive relatively high wages compared with much of the rest of the world, this rule implies that America can preserve its wages only if it has better goods and better workers, or protects itself with market barriers such as tariffs.

If, in our zeal to maintain competitiveness, we rely primarily upon market forces, we will surely hasten economic decline for the two-thirds of our workers who have become the visible manifestation of the one-price rule in global labor markets.

(more…)

First published on Alternet August 9, 2006

With Israel waging an all-out war against the forces of Hezbollah, and the death toll in terms of civilian casualties mounting on a daily basis, the question of a diplomatic resolution to the crisis takes on an urgency that is being felt around the world.

Everywhere, it seems, except in Israel and the United States. One should not be fooled by the “false” diplomacy being waged by the United States, fronted by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.

(more…)

It is now accepted by most experts and, according to the latest polls, 60 percent of Americans, that the decision to invade Iraq has increased the threat of terrorism. Five years after the twin towers crumbled in a horrifying spectacle, our government’s foreign policy has done more to recruit terrorists and sympathizers than anything that Osama Bin Laden could have imagined.

The United States today faces no real security threat from any country. Russia and China have nuclear missiles that could reach the United States, and theoretically they could use them. But so, too, could Britain or France. For now, at least, none of these countries have any significant probability of attacking the United States.

Countries deemed as hostile by our government, such as Iran, Syria, or North Korea, do not even have the capability to threaten the United States. The trick that our political leaders have played on us is to confuse the real threat from certain individuals – e.g. Al Qaeda and its sympathizers or ideological allies - with an imaginary threat from selected countries. This gives them a (more…)

I am waiting to board the train in San Diego when I notice the Border Patrol agent making his way down our line. He stops by each person who looks ‘Latino’ and asks them to present their legal documents. As the people standing next to me rummage for their identity papers, I stand by, angry, embarrassed and ashamed. In that moment, I don’t know what to say or do to protest.

My mind suddenly travels back in time. I ‘remember’ what it must have been like during slavery for Black people who made it to the North. If they had no papers, they were doomed to live each day in fear. If they were ‘legalized’ by free papers, they still always needed these documents, no matter who they were or how old they were or how long they had lived in their community. These papers were all that stood between them and being ‘deported’ and returned to their slave status.

(more…)

Two forms of accumulation characterize the current world capitalism system; the old nation-centric Fordist model, and the emerging transnational system of production. This is a historically determined and dialectical process filled with tension and politically represented by different hegemonic blocs. (see Harris, “Science & Society,” Vol. 67, #1).

In brief, the nation-centric system is characterized by: guarding home markets for national capital, export competition, bi-lateral trade agreements, state-directed and protected economic development, expanding the national job base while incorporating large sections of the working class into a social contract, and using the state to advance the position of national monopolies while securing their access to international resources and markets.

The transnational mode of accumulation is characterized by: cross border mergers and acquisitions, FDI, rapid speculative cross border flows of capital, global production chains, foreign affiliates, outsourcing labor, global best practices, multilateral trade agreements, a common global regulatory structure for finance, trade and investment, and use of the state to rearrange national structures to serve global practices.

(more…)

This article is from the July/August 2006 issue of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice. Original available here

Can thousands of diverse, locally-rooted, grassroots economic projects form the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism? It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, community currencies, urban gardens, fair trade organizations, intentional communities, and neighborhood self-help associations could hold a candle to the pervasive and seemingly all-powerful capitalist economy. These “islands of alternatives in a capitalist sea” are often small in scale, low in resources, and sparsely networked. They are rarely able to connect with each other, much less to link their work with larger, coherent structural visions of an alternative economy.

(more…)

AN ACTIVIST GUIDE TO ENDING THE WAR IN IRAQ: THE PRESSURE OF PEOPLE POWER AGAINST THE PILLARS OF POLICY.

This is a strategy for sustaining the anti-war movement through the ups and downs of the long war in Iraq. I do not believe the war can be ended just by a moral escalation of protest. Nor is resistance likely to “drive” the Bush Administration out of office. For those who want to end the Iraq War, not just witness against it or resist it, I offer this strategy:

It will be ended by enough people power pressure against the pillars of the policy.

The Iraq War rests on certain “pillars”:

1. the pillar of public opinion, above all;
(more…)

SolidarityEconomy.net’s Carl Davidson debates Mark Solomon, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy & Socialism on the left, the movement to defeat the right and the future of socialism

Mark Solomon - A Progressive Majority: What it is and How to Build It

At the Jack London Museum in the Sonoma foothills, there’s a large poster on display from around 1907 advertising a talk by Jack London on “The Coming Crisis.” If ever there was an always timely, all-purpose and perennially relevant topic, that’s it.

When we tote up outrages like an administration that abets environmental disaster, a budget resolution that shreds the last vestiges of decent social payments, worsening carnage in Iraq, insane threats to nuke Iran; a White House knee-deep in corruption, chicanery and contempt for the Constitution; a House bill that criminalizes millions of undocumented workers and those who help them; festering brutality, torture illegal rendition and denial of human rights to prisoners held across the world; near-genocidal widespread joblessness and incarceration among African American males; aggressive campaigns to undermine reproductive choice, gay marriage and other personal decisions - the crisis isn’t just coming. It’s here.

But crisis always provokes response - the most visible at the moment, the awakening of undocumented immigrants and (more…)

Waving the banner of “global competitiveness,” corporate and government policymakers are running the U.S. economy into the ground. We are becoming a nation of Scrooge-Marts and outsourcers - with an increasingly low-wage workforce instead of a growing middle class.

We are living the American Dream in reverse.

The minimum wage buys less today than it did when Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton opened his first Walton’s 5 & 10 in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1951.

It would take more than $9 in 2006 to match the federal minimum wage peak reached in 1968, adjusting for inflation. At today’s $5.15 an hour, it takes nearly two minimum wage workers to earn what one made 38 years ago.

The minimum wage sets the wage floor. When the minimum wage is stuck in quicksand, it drags down wages for workers up the pay scale as well. Hourly wages for average workers are 11 percent lower than they were in 1973, despite rising worker productivity.

(more…)

JH: One of the debates on globalization is whether or not it’s a new era of capitalism. One argument is that digital technology has revolutionizing the means of production creating important changes throughout the system. Historically globalization has become to information capitalism what imperialism was to industrial capitalism. Others say that nothing has essentially changed. That to emphasize the newer aspects blinds us to the principals necessary to understand world capitalism. How do you see this debate?

WB: I think what characterizes the period of globalization is that national economies are being disarticulated by the processes of global capital and rearticulated mainly as production sites and financial nexus (more…)

“Let’s try to imagine what Karl Marx would be doing today.”

It was Sunday, May 21st, and my host posing the question was Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly. It was Alarcon’s 69th birthday, and I was having difficulty understanding why he had pressed me to fly down for a visit. The purpose was nothing more than “two old guys talking,” according to his daughter Maggie, a thirty-something single mom and formidable interpreter of Cuba to many North Americans.

Looking back today, I don’t know whether or not Alarcon already knew that his longtime comrade Fidel was diagnosed as needing serious surgery. The question would become a “state secret,” at Castro’s wish. Alarcon is third in line to succeed Fidel after Raul Castro, although it is more likely Alarcon will blend into a collective transitional team.

The prospect of three days’ conversation with Ricardo Alarcon reflecting on his long revolutionary experience was too important to put off, and our interviews may be of greater value during the current rampant and reckless speculation over Fidel’s status. Few individuals alive have the range of Alarcon’s experience, from being a Havana student leader during the (more…)

SACRAMENTO, California - A leading U.S. climate researcher said on Wednesday the world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert a weather catastrophe.

NASA scientist James Hansen, widely considered the doyen of American climate researchers, said governments must adopt an alternative scenario to keep carbon dioxide emission growth in check and limit the increase in global temperatures to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

‘I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change … no longer than a decade, at the most,’ Hansen said at the Climate Change Research Conference in California’s state capital.

(more…)