Archive for the 'Socialism' Category

Why Worker Factory Takeovers Are Good for Us

by Editors @ Saturday, November 13th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Labor Movement, Socialism

Worker-Run Factories in Argentina Continue to Thrive,

Boosting the Economy and Influencing Workers in Other Countries


By Marcela Valente

SolidarityEconomy.net

viaIPS News, Nov. 12, 2010

After the late 2001 financial and political meltdown in Argentina, thousands of companies were abandoned by their owners in a sea of debt. But some of them were taken over and reopened by their employees. Today, as the economy continues to grow, these worker-run factories are still going strong.

There are now 205 "recovered" companies, with a total of 9,362 workers -- up from 161 companies with 6,900 workers in 2004, according to a study published in October.

"How has a phenomenon that emerged as a kind of life raft after the 2001 economic collapse grown rather than faded away during a period of economic boom?" asks the lead author of the study, Andrés Ruggeri.

"The workers learned that running a company by themselves is a viable alternative, to keep a company operating," he tells IPS. "That was unthinkable before."

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SACP Interview with Cuba’s Oscar Martinez on Economic Reforms

by Editors @ Thursday, November 4th, 2010. Filed under Cuba, Economic Democracy, Socialism

 

Making Socialism Work in Cuba

The South African Communist Party's Yunus Carrim interview with Cuba’s Oscar Martinez

Red Alert: Cuba's economic reforms are based on socialist principles

An SACP delegation recently visited Cuba a part of our ongoing political interaction between South Africa and Cuba in our quest to build Socialism and strengthen ties between the two Communist parties.

Cde Yunus Carrim, Editor of "Umsebenzi" interviewed Cde Oscar Martinez, the Deputy Head of the International Relations Department of the Cuban Communist Party during the SACP visit to Cuba this month. We publish below the full interview for the purposes of our members and the nation broadly to appreciate the developments undertaken by the Cuban Communist Party firstly, and secondly to clarify the distortions that the City Press intended to create with the bias editing and sensational headlines they ran with this interview.

Socialism is the Future!!! Build it Now!!

 

What is the nature of the economic problems Cuba is currently experiencing?

In the context of our other problems, the US economic and financial blockade is hurting our economy more now. The blockade has been the main obstacle to our social and economic development over 48 years. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, we lost our main trading partners.

It was a severe blow from which we have not yet recovered. The 2008 global economic crisis also hit us hard. The price of nickel, a major export earner, has gone down. And we have had huge losses with the hurricanes. But also our productivity is too low.

We need greater efficiency and more saving to ensure economic growth. We are a small country with limited resources. We need better organize our production, improve discipline, and update our economic model. We are importing far too much, especially food, and need to be more self-sufficient. We need to focus far more on agriculture. Food production has now become an issue of national security.

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China’s Peaceful Rise: Looking Backward, Looking Forward

by Editors @ Sunday, September 5th, 2010. Filed under China, Globalization, Socialism

Poster: 1989, Only Socialism Can Save and Develop China

 

Information and Analysis:

Towards a world for people not profit

How China Rises

by Noah Tucker

Nov 4th 2007

SolidarityEconomy.net via 21st Century Socialism

What lessons can be drawn from China's spectacular and sustained economic growth?

As Hu Jintau remarked at the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the period since the previous Congress five years ago has been extraordinary. China's economic achievements have been arousing not only astonishment and admiration but also some anxiety.
In the past twelve months alone, The People's Republic of China (PRC) has overtaken Canada as the biggest source of imports to the USA, and overtaken the USA as the biggest source of imports to the European Union. Concern about the low level of investment in Africa has been displaced by concern about the effects of the high level of Chinese investment in Africa; there is now even anxiety about the effects of investment by Chinese state-owned firms into the Western economies.

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Good News, Bad News Dept: Growing Numbers Favoring Socialism

by Editors @ Sunday, August 1st, 2010. Filed under Socialism, The Right

[Note from CarlD: Of course, Fox News notwithstanding, we socialists know very well that the current measures from the top have little to do with a workable socialism for the 21st century, or even a full-throated social democracy, and are more in tune with the cartoon below. Still, it's heartening to know, even with the limitations of this kind of polling, that the outer limits of those open to our militant minority is 30 percent, and even higher in key demographics. For those who are interested in studying what could be a 21st century socialism, I highly recommend David Schweickart's 'After Capitalism,' not to be confused with his longer and more technical 'Against Capitalism.' If you just want to see and hear him speak on the topic, just search on his name in YouTube. There's some older debates, plus a new 10-part series from a long talk by him given in Sweden, but in English.]


Seven in ten Americans think US transition

from capitalism to socialism bad move

 

2010-08-01 - About 7 in 10 American voters (69 percent) think that a transition from capitalism to socialism in United States would be a bad thing, according to a Fox News/ Opinion Dynamics Corporation poll.

Eighty-eight percent Republicans with household incomes of 100,000 dollars or more and 70 percent of those aged 55 and over are among those most likely to think it would be a bad move.

Smaller majorities of those living in lower-income households (59 percent), young people (57 percent), as well as just under half of Democrats (49 percent) agree.

34-56 percent voters think that the country is currently moving away from capitalism to socialism. Far fewer voters, however, approve.

Less than one in five voters (18 percent) think that it would be a good thing for the country to move away from capitalism and toward socialism.

Twenty eight percent of voters whose household incomes are under 30,000 dollars favour this option. Thirty one percent of them who are under thirty years and 32 percent Democrats approve this change. (ANI)



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Workers Discuss ‘Workers Control’ and the Socialist Path in Venezuela

by Editors @ Thursday, July 15th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Labor Movement, Latin America, Socialism

from Venezuela Analysis

Workers’ Control and the

Contradictions of the Bolivarian Process

Interview with Gustavo Martínez

By Susan Spronk, Jeffery R. Webber

On June 10, 2010 we caught up with Gustavo Martinez, a union leader in the worker-controlled nationalized coffee company, Fama de América, in Caracas, Venezuela. The company has 350 workers at the national level, with two separate plants – one in Caracas and one in Valencia. We sat down with Martínez to discuss the centrality of workers’ control in the ongoing struggle to transition toward socialism and some of the most pressing contradictions of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela today.

To start off, can you tell us your name, how long you’ve worked in this coffee company, your job in the company, and your role in the union?

My name is Gustavo Martínez. I’m a union leader in Fama de América. I’ve worked here for nine years. I started in 2001. As you would expect, when I started there, Fama de América was a private enterprise, characterized by exploitation of the workers and rampant corruption. The owners of the enterprise, as capitalists, were only interested in extracting surplus; they didn’t care about the conditions of the workers. All of these characteristics we already know about capitalism.

There was a union at the time, first established in 1978, that was controlled by the [centre-right] party, Acción Democrática(Democratic Action, AD). Logically, as people on the left we were opposed to the union. I was one of those on the left. My parents are Colombian, and my father was a militant in the Communist Party in that country. He was pushed out of Colombia, displaced economically and politically, and therefore moved the family to Venezuela. He worked for a transnational and faced death threats for his political organizing in the workplace.

So I found myself here in Venezuela, working at the company, and there were others with a revolutionary background working here too.

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21st Century Socialism: Angry Philosophers and the Making of History

by Editors @ Thursday, July 8th, 2010. Filed under Marxism, New Left, Socialism

Sartre, Camus and a

Marxism for the 21st Century

By David Schweickart

SolidarityEconomy.net

Ever since Marx, philosophy must lead to action. Otherwise it is irrelevant. . . . Philosophers must be angry, and, in this world, stay angry.

--Jean Paul Sartre (1972)[1]

I. The Quarrel

In 1952 in the August issue of Les Temps Modernes, its editor, Jean Paul Sartre, responded to a letter to the editor:

My dear Camus,

Our friendship has not been easy, but I shall miss it. If today you break it off, doubtless that means it would inevitably have ended some day. Many things brought us together, few separated us. But those few were still too many: friendship, too, tends to become totalitarian; there has to be agreement on everything or a quarrel, and those who don't belong to any party themselves behave like members of imaginary parties. I shall not carp at this: it is as it must be. But, for just this reason, I would have preferred our current disagreement to be over matters of substance and that there should not be a whiff of wounded vanity mingled with it. . . . I did not want to reply to you. Who would I be convincing? Your enemies, certainly, and perhaps my friends. And you--who do you think you are convincing? Your friends and my enemies. To our common enemies, who are legion, we shall both give much cause for laughter. That much is certain.

Unfortunately, you attacked me so deliberately and in such an unpleasant tone that I cannot remain silent without losing face. I shall, therefore, reply: without anger, but, for the first time since I've known you, without mincing my words. A mix of melancholy, conceit and vulnerability on your part has always deterred people from telling you unvarnished truths. The result is that you have fallen prey to a gloomy immoderation that conceals your inner difficulties and which you refer to, I believe, as Mediterranean moderation. Sooner or later, someone would have told you this, so it might as well be me.[2]

Sartre’s response did end the friendship. The two men never spoke to one another again.[3]

Camus’s letter was in response to a harshly critical review, by Francis Jeanson, of Camus’s The Rebel. Camus’s letter was not addressed to Jeanson, a junior member of the Les Temps Moderne editorial board, but to “M. Le Directeur,” i.e. to Sartre--thus provoking Sartre's reply.

What was the substance of this celebrated “quarrel”? Jeanson himself was a Marxist. Sartre, at that time, did not so self-identify, although he had been moving in that direction. Some months earlier, disgusted by the arrest of the head of the French Communist Party, Jacques Duclos, on the pretext that he had been using carrier pigeons to coordinate the demonstrators in Paris protesting the visit of General Matthew Ridgeway, Sartre had become convinced: An anti-Communist is a dog. Later, recalling that moment, he explains:

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A Road Not Taken – Cybernetic Socialism in the USSR

by Editors @ Saturday, July 3rd, 2010. Filed under Marxism, Russia, Socialism

 

Book Review:

Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

 

By Paul Cockshott
21st Century Socialism

This is a marvelous and unusual book. It sits in a remarkable way in between science popularisation, social history and fiction. The author describes it variously as a novel whose hero is an idea and a fairytale. The hero idea is that of optimal planning. The idea of running a planned economy in just such a way as to ensure that resources are optimally used in order to deliver the ’red plenty’ of the title.

Combining real and imagined characters, politicians like Khrushchev, mathematicians and economists like Kantorovich and Nemchinov with fictionalised minor characters, it gives a gripping and apparently realistic picture of life in the USSR during the 50s and 60s. It is not a single narrative as one expects from historical fiction. Instead it gives us a series of snapshots from the lives of individuals, separated by years. The common link is the project of the Cybernetic economic reformers, and the ambitions of Khrushchev to attain communist plenty.

The author shows real skill as a science populariser, explaining such diverse topics as how the Pentode valve logic of the early BESM computers worked, to the molecular mechanics of the carcinogenesis mechanism that eventually killed its designer. He vividly portrays the enthusiasm and self confidence of the USSR in the late 50s when Khrushchev’s boasts that they would overtake the USA by 1980 and achieve communism seemed plausible. He gives a good didactic account both of the basic mechanisms of the Soviet Economy, and, through the lives of incidental characters paints a picture of its real operation that is more detailed and convincing than any academic history. (more...)



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Socialism, Public Criticism and the Democratic Path

by Editors @ Tuesday, April 6th, 2010. Filed under Latin America, Socialism

Marta Harnecker: `Socialism is a Search for a Fully Democratic Society'

Bolivians mobilise. ``If our government officials are to be wise, they must be pushed by popular initiatives so that the people can feel they are doing it themselves. The state's paternalism, in building socialism, may help at first, but we must create popular protagonism.'' Photo by Ben Dangl.

Marta Harnecker

interviewed by

Edwin Herrera Salinas

 

For the Bolivian newspaper La Razón. Translation by MRZine's Yoshie Furuhashi.
Posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission

March 28, 2010


Edwin Herrera Salinas: What is the characteristic of the Latin American left today?


Marta Harnecker: Twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell, there was no revolution foreseeable on the horizon. However, it didn't take long before a process began to emerge in Latin America with Hugo Chávez. We have gone on to form governments with anti-neoliberal programs, though not all of them are putting an anti-neoliberal economics in practice.


We have created a new left. A majority of victories are not due to political parties, except in the case of Brazil with the Workers' Party. In general, it has been due to either charismatic figures who reflect the popular sentiment that rejects the system or, in many cases, social movements that have emerged from resistance to neoliberalism and that have been the base of these new governments.


The governments that have done most to guarantee that there be a real process of change to an alternative society are the ones that are supported by organised peoples, for the correlation of forces is not idyllic. We have a very important enemy who is far from dead. It is preoccupied by the war in Iraq, but the power of the empire is very strong and is seeking to hold back this seemingly unstoppable process.


And what is happening to political thought?


What's happening is a renovation of left-wing thought. The ideas of revolutions that we used to defend in the 1970s and 1980s, in practice, have not materialised. So, left-wing thought has had to open itself up to new realities and search for new interpretations. It has had to develop more flexibility in order to understand that revolutionary processes, for example, can begin by simply winning administrative power.
The transitions that we are making are not classical ones, where revolutionaries seize state power and make and unmake everything from there. Today we are first conquering the administration and making advances from there.
Would you say that we are riding a revolutionary wave?


I believe that, yes, we are in a process of that kind. That there will be ebbs and flows, too, is true. It's interesting to look at the situation in Chile. Here we lost, but it was one of the least advanced processes.  Chile always privileged its relation with the United States; the socialist left was not capable of understanding the necessary links that we have to have in this region and betted on bilateral treaties.


During the era of [dictator] Augusto Pinochet national industry was dismantled, and the left didn't know how to work with people. The left went about getting itself into the leadership, political spaces, the political class, while the right went to work among people.

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Prosperity in Italy Spurred by One Region’s Coops

by Editors @ Monday, March 8th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Organizing, Socialism

Poster: Italy's Federation of Consumer Coops

The Emilia-Romagna Coops:

A Market Without Capitalists

 

By Frances Moore Lappe
Alternet.com
A market economy and capitalism are synonymous --- or at least joined at the hip. That's what most Americans grow up assuming. But it is not necessarily so. Capitalism -- control by those supplying the capital in order to return wealth to shareholders -- is only one way to drive a market.


Granted, it is hard to imagine another possibility for how an economy could work in the abstract. It helps to have a real-life example.


And now I do.

In May I spent five days in Emilia Romagna, a region of four million people in northern central Italy. There, over the last 150 years, a network of consumer, farmer and worker-driven cooperatives has come to generate 30 percent to 40 percent of the region's GDP. Two of every three people in Emilia Romagna are members of co-ops.


The region, whose hub city is Bologna, is home to 8,000 co-ops, producing everything from ceramics to fashion to specialty cheese. Their industriousness is woven into networks based on what cooperative leaders like to call "reciprocity." All co-ops return 3 percent of profits to a national fund for cooperative development, and the movement supports centers providing help in finance, marketing, research and technical expertise.
The presumption is that by aiding each other, all gain. And they have. Per person income is 50 percent higher in Emilia Romagna than the national average.

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Who Is To Be Master? What Happens When Workers Occupy Factories

by Editors @ Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Socialism, Trade Unions

Photo: Flasko workers in Brazil

[Note from CarlD: Following are two articles on what debates break out when workers occupy or take ownership of factories. The first is from a single case in Brazil, the second from an earlier regionwide meeting on the topic in Venezuela. I think these are examples of the unity and tension in what Gramsci called 'wars of position' and 'wars on maneuver'. The solidarity economy concept is both supported and contested.]

Workers from Occupied

'Flasko' Factory Repond

to Brazil's President Lula

 

On 12/01/2010 President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva said publicly in his weekly column "The President replies”, a question of journalism student (Camila Delmondes) on the struggle of the workers occupied the factory Flaskô.
The response given (which can be read http://imprensa.planalto.gov.br/download/Informe_da_Hora/PRR120110.doc) believe it is essential that the workers' management of Flaskô respond to Squid and the entire working class which was said the President. First of all, it is worth noting that since 12 June 2003 when we occupied the factory and resumed production to ensure our jobs, we await a response from the President. During these seven years almost non stop fighting for the maintenance of Flaskô open under the control of workers and always demanded that the federal government.

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Cooperative ‘Payment Solidarity’ Means a Prevailing Wage or Better

by Editors @ Sunday, February 28th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Socialism

Payment Solidarity:

Looking Deeper at the

Mondragon Principles

 

By John McNamara

The Mondragon Co-operatives maintain the concept of wage solidarity. From the beginning, the ratio of the highest paid position (manager) and the lowest paid (new worker) was locked at 3:1. In the 80’s this changed and today there are some positions that earn a 6:1 ratio and one (the CEO of the International MCC) who receives 9:1. Even with the tripling of the upper end of the ratio, it is still a far cry from the 150 or even 300:1 ratios that modern stock corporations tend to employ.

What interests me about this principle (and I think that it should be in the Identity Statement as well), is that Mondragon expresses the co-operative value of solidarity. It puts solidarity into the operations of the co-operative.

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Venezuela: Epicenter of Counter-Hegemonic Bloc

by Editors @ Monday, February 8th, 2010. Filed under Global Justice, Latin-American, Socialism

Interview with William I. Robinson:

The challenges facing 21st century socialism in Venezuela

``In Venezuela the biggest threat to the revolution does not come from the right-wing political opposition but from the so-called `endogenous' or `Chavista' right wing, in that chunks of the revolutionary bloc, including state elites and party officials, will develop a deeper stake in defending global capitalism over socialist transformation''' -- William I. Robinson

Interview with William I. Robinson, professor of sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara, by Chronis Polychroniou, editor of the Greek daily newspaper Eleftherotypia

February 1, 2010 -- ZNet

Chronis Polychroniou: There are scare stories coming from Venezuela. The border is heating up, infiltration is taking place, a new Colombian military base near the border, US access to several new bases on Colombia and constant subversion. Is the regime concerned about a possible invasion? If yes, who is going to intervene?

William I. Robinson: The Venezuelan government is concerned about a possible US invasion and certainly an outright invasion cannot be ruled out. However I think the US is pursuing a more sophisticated strategy of intervention that we could call a war of attrition.

We have seen this strategy in other countries, such as in Nicaragua in the 1980s, or even Chile under Allende. It is what in CIA lexicon is known as destabilisation, and in the Pentagon's language is called political warfare -- which does not mean there is not a military component. This is a counterrevolutionary strategy that combines military threats and hostilities with psychological operations, disinformation campaigns, black propaganda, economic sabotage, diplomatic pressures, the mobilisation of political opposition forces inside the country, carrying out provocations and sparking violent confrontations in the cities, manipulation of disaffected sectors and the exploitation of legitimate grievances among the population.

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Reject the Old Patterns – China’s 21st Century Path

by Editors @ Sunday, February 7th, 2010. Filed under China, Global Justice, Socialism

Poster: Oppose hegemonism, uphold world peace - maintain a foreign policy of independence and own initiative, 1983

'Three Strategies'

to Tackle the

'Three Challenges'

 

By Zheng Bijian

It is far from easy for a country of 1.3 billion population to achieve peaceful rise. During the first half of the 21st century, in particular, China faces a period of both "golden opportunity for development" and "standing out contradictions". The latter, in the field of economic and social progress, can be boiled down to "three major challenges".

The first challenge comes from resources, particularly energies. China lags behind the world in terms of per capita hold of resources; meanwhile, due to a fast developing speed yet low technical level, China's manufacturing industry is among the most energy-consuming ones in the world. The huge consumption is intensified by a large-scale shift of manufacturing bases to China. As a result resources, including energies, have been in tight supply.

The second challenge is from ecological environment. A spoiled environment caused by serious pollution, worsened ecological conditions, huge consumption of resources, and low reclamation has become a bottleneck in the sustainable development of the Chinese economy.

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Needed: Self-Management and Workplace Democracy

by Editors @ Tuesday, January 26th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Socialism

Participatory Management:

Looking Deeper at the

Mondragon Principles

 

By John McNamara

The next principle from Mondragon is that of Participatory Management. This seems like a no-brainer for worker co-operatives. What is the point of going through all the work of setting up a worker co-op if the workers don’t actually have a say in how the place is run? They would be better off in a unionized Employee Stock Ownership Program.

I’ll get more into this in a second. First, I want to share the language of the principle from Mondragon (translated, as they all are, of course):

“The Mondragon Cooperative Experience believes that the democratic character of the Cooperative is not limited to membership aspects, but that it also implies the progressive development of self-management and consequently of the participation of members in the sphere of business management which, in turn, requires:

a) The development of suitable mechanisms and channels for participation.

b) Freedom of information concerning the development of the basic management variables of the Cooperative.

c) The practice of methods of consultation and negotiation with worker-members and their social representatives in economic, organisational and labour decisions which concern or affect them.

d) The systematic application of social and professional training plans for members.

e) The establishment of internal promotion as the basic means of covering posts with greater professional responsibility.”

(source: The Mondragon Cooperative Experience, by José María Ormaechea, 2000)

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Gramsci and the Need to Learn Strategy in Depth

by Editors @ Wednesday, January 20th, 2010. Filed under Organizing, Socialism

The Relevance of

Gramsci’s Theory

for Today

By Peter Latham

January 3, 2010 -- I first read Gramsci in English over 40 years ago. Moreover, my thesis on Theories of the Labour Movement—a Marxist critique of non-Marxist theories of industrial relations—used Gramsci’s concept of the “organic” working class intellectual to explain twentieth century rank and file movements in the British building industry.[1] This paper is based on the Gramsci section in my forthcoming book on The State and Local Government.[2]

Roger Simon—the co-author with Noreen Branson of The British State published in 1958 at the height of the Cold War when they used the pseudonyms James Harvey and Katherine Hood[3]—subsequently revised his approach to take into account what he saw as Gramsci’s modification of classical Marxism, including Leninism. The latter, according to Simon, saw power as concentrated in the state and under the exclusive control of the capitalist class (or part of it) and took the view that the construction of socialism could only begin after the working class took power—as did Harvey and Hood.[4] Conversely, for Simon, Gramsci’s concept of the integral state—“political society plus civil society, in other words, hegemony protected by the armour of coercion”[5]—implied that the working class could only achieve state power after it had won a substantial measure of hegemony in civil society.[6] Simon still rejected the social-democratic theory of state neutrality: but he also rejected Gramsci’s view that factory councils should replace parliamentary democracy.[7] Hence, as well as the democratisation of parliament, Simon advocated direct democracy in the local community and workplace plus broad alliances based on the left and other social movements.[8]

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