Every day more people realize the current global system is unsustainable: cheap energy is over; climate change, pollution and loss of habitat are wiping out many species; and while resources are being stretched to the limit, billions still live in poverty, and the gap between global rich and poor continues to grow. Even in the industrialized world life is increasingly difficult, more stressful with less meaning.
But in the major media, while problems of energy, global warming, poverty and disease get covered, the success many people are having in living more sustainably are rarely mentioned. And even those who agree with the need for change are left to think that the current global model of industrial production and consumption, however flawed, is the only way there is. This emphasis on problems without solutions is a recipe for despair and inaction.
(more...)Archive for October, 2006
Finding Solutions: A New Documentary Series
Every day more people realize the current global system is unsustainable: cheap energy is over; climate change, pollution and loss of habitat are wiping out many species; and while resources are being stretched to the limit, billions still live in poverty, and the gap between global rich and poor continues to grow. Even in the industrialized world life is increasingly difficult, more stressful with less meaning.
But in the major media, while problems of energy, global warming, poverty and disease get covered, the success many people are having in living more sustainably are rarely mentioned. And even those who agree with the need for change are left to think that the current global model of industrial production and consumption, however flawed, is the only way there is. This emphasis on problems without solutions is a recipe for despair and inaction.
(more...)Global Notes #1
.High Road Takes a Hit An internal United Nations study uncovers that corporations reporting on their environmental impact and labor practices remains a “niche practice†with a “very limited†role in promoting sustainable development. It predicts that by 2020 only 11 percent of transnationals will provide social and environmental data. (more...)This is the first of Jerry Harris' new "Global Notes" column, providing readers with a review of recent globalization-related news and analysis. The column will appear exclusively on SolidarityEconomy.net [eds.]
Chavez Calls for Democracy at Work
The heat and the noise are almost unbearable in the casting room of Line 3 at Alcasa. This is one of two big aluminium plants in the south-eastern city of Puerto Ordaz, where most of Venezuela's basic industries are concentrated.
It is also the test bed for a new experiment in co-management, which President Hugo Chavez says is a key step towards a "socialism of the twenty-first century".
Alcides Rivero, who works here as a maintenance electrician, says co-management means that for the first time in this company's 37 years of existence, the workforce has control.
"It's us, the workers", he says, "who decide on questions of production and technology, and it's us who elect who will be our managers."
(more...)The Corrosive Impact of the 60s Left on the Movement Today
Recently, correspondent “Wormbin†(an interesting nom de guerre) raised an important point regarding the continued and
powerful influence of the “old school†veterans of the 60s’ and the overwhelmingly dominant approach that reduces organizing to around the terms of redistribution of our society’s wealth—more jobs, more benefits, better working conditions and cedes to capital the major decisions and initiative in organizing the power of the market and deciding on what to produce, how to produce it, management, technology, the terms of finance, etc.
Much of the left and activist movement is finally only comfortable with the mechanisms of the state as the defender of public and economic interests. Not that all the aspects of redistribution aren’t important—they must remain a key foundation of our efforts. They are required but insufficient as I argue in my earlier article on markets.
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powerful influence of the “old school†veterans of the 60s’ and the overwhelmingly dominant approach that reduces organizing to around the terms of redistribution of our society’s wealth—more jobs, more benefits, better working conditions and cedes to capital the major decisions and initiative in organizing the power of the market and deciding on what to produce, how to produce it, management, technology, the terms of finance, etc.
Much of the left and activist movement is finally only comfortable with the mechanisms of the state as the defender of public and economic interests. Not that all the aspects of redistribution aren’t important—they must remain a key foundation of our efforts. They are required but insufficient as I argue in my earlier article on markets.
(more...)A Theory of Global Capitalism
William Robinson has made a name with key writings on democratic struggles in Latin America, on the propagation of electoral democracy as a tool of US contemporary foreign policy and, more recently, with a range of articles on the transnational capitalist class. In A Theory of Global Capitalism he presents his core argument on the process of globalisation of class and state in the contemporary period. The book is set up with a didactic purpose, ‘in a manner accessible to the student of globalization and to concerned members of the lay public’ (p. xiii). In this aim the author succeeds admirably, for the book is a model of accessibility and clarity, a pleasure to read. Robinson develops his argument in three steps. First, it is not ideas, or politico-military factors which underlie globalisation, but the rise of a global economy (p. 10). Second, ‘transnational capital has become the dominant, or hegemonic, fraction of capital on a world scale’ (p. 21). Third, this entails the formation of what Robinson terms the transnational state. States in his view are not actors as such. ‘It is classes and groups acting in and out of states [that] do things as collective historical agents.’ ‘State apparatuses are those (more...)Kees Van Der Pijl reviews Willian I. Robinson's A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World
The People Vs. The Developers
A group aligned with tenants of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village submitted a $4.5 billion bid yesterday to buy the 110 apartment buildings overlooking the East River in the hope of retaining the complexes as middle-income housing. Their offer was neither the highest nor the lowest in one of the biggest real estate auctions of all time. Metropolitan Life, the company that built Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town in 1947 for returning veterans, got roughly a dozen offers by its 3 p.m. deadline yesterday, ranging from $4.3 billion to slightly more than $5 billion, according to real estate executives. (more...)Tenants’ Bid Among a Dozen for Complexes (original title)
Bush’s Failed Policy of Kill, Kill, Kill
3 1/2 years ago and only 10 days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq – I solicited assessments from a few trusted military analysts and wrote that “whatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has ‘lost’ the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world.†The article, entitled “Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down,†argued that one of Bush’s most egregious miscalculations was his assumption that the Iraqis wouldn’t fight a foreign invader. Like the wishful thinking in the Bay of Pigs disaster (Cuba, 1961), U.S. policymakers assumed an invasion would be welcomed, not opposed. (more...)[While Parry's 'phased withdrawal' formulation in this article is problematic at best, his overall account offers considerable insight into the depth of the crisis Bush and the NeoCons have created. the Editors, SolidarityEconomy.net]
To Be Or Not To Be: The Nation Centric World Order Under Globalization
The major dialectic in the present period is the contradiction between the nation/state system and the transnational world order. This conflict between nationalism and globalization contains the main economic, political and social divisions in today’s world. It is manifested in both internal class conflicts and as a struggle between classes. Underneath this dialectic there are further contradictions within nationalism and within globalization. But to interpret the deep structural moment of today one must grasp the central transformation around which all else revolves, the universalization of capitalism to a globalized system of accumulation based on a revolutionary transformation of the means of production.
Most schools of thought, whether Marxists or mainstream, still define the international system as one centered around nation/state competition based on the struggle for supremacy among (more...)Economic Democracy Vs. Parecon: Debating Life After Capitalism
Critique Without Comprehension Responding to David Schweickart Regarding Parecon by Michael Albert; February 24, 2006 This essay replies to Schweickart: Nonsense On Stilts Parecon Phenomenon 1: Serious Thought Or Manipulated Irrationality? In David Schweickart's view, my book Parecon: Life After Capitalism is not just nonsense…but nonsense on stilts. Strangely, Schweickart, though a philosopher, largely ignores the historical and social evidence and argument and (more...)What follows is a debate between David Schweickart, author of After Capitalism and SolidarityEconomy.net editor, and Michael Albert, author of Parecon and founder of Z Magazine. The debate was sparked by Schweickart's critique of Parecon, "Nonsense on Stilits."
Nuclear Energy: Still a Bad Idea
Suddenly, nuclear power is in vogue. At the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin announced a far-reaching agreement to cooperate in the rapid expansion of nuclear energy worldwide and called on other countries to join them. It was the latest in a series of high-profile initiatives by the White House to promote nuclear power. Bush argues that the future energy security of the United States and the world will depend on increasing reliance on nuclear energy. A technology that for years suffered ignominiously in scientific purgatory has been resurrected. Its virtues have been heralded by the likes of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the famed scientist Sir (more...)Solar power is a better investment than a dated technology that's too expensive and dangerous.
Revolt of the Generals
A revolt is brewing among our retired Army and Marine generals. This rebellion--quiet and nonconfrontational, but remarkable nonetheless--comes not because their beloved forces are bearing the brunt of ground combat in Iraq but because the retirees see the US adventure in Mesopotamia as another Vietnam-like, strategically failed war, and they blame the errant, arrogant civilian leadership at the Pentagon. The dissenters include two generals who led combat troops in Iraq: Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First Infantry Division (the "Big Red One"). These men recently sacrificed their careers by retiring and joining the public protest.
In late September Batiste, along with two other retired senior officers, spoke out about these failures at a Washington Democratic policy hearing, with Batiste saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was "not a competent wartime leader" who made "dismal strategic decisions" that "resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies and the good people of Iraq." Rumsfeld, he said, "dismissed honest dissent" and "did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war."
This kind of protest among senior military retirees during wartime is unprecedented in American history--and it is also deeply worrisome. The retired officers opposing the war and demanding Rumsfeld's ouster represent a new political force, (more...)The Ascent of Wind Power
KHORI, India — Dilip Pantosh Patil uses an ox-drawn wooden plow to till the same land as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. But now he has a new neighbor: a shiny white wind turbine taller than a 20-story building, generating electricity at the edge of his bean field.
Wind power may still have an image as something of a plaything of environmentalists more concerned with clean energy than saving money. But it is quickly emerging as a serious alternative not just in affluent areas of the world but in fast-growing countries like India and China that are avidly seeking new energy sources. And leading the charge here in west-central India and elsewhere is an unlikely champion, Suzlon Energy, a homegrown Indian company.
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