Reporting from Turkey: TEKEL Workers’ Resistance and the Re-Awakening of the Proletariat
By Erinc Yeldan, Bilkent University. February 7 2010.
“A specter is haunting Turkey, the specter of the proletariat…” these are the words singing from ear to ear in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, since December 15 2009.
Since that day, despite the severe cold, poor conditions of the street-life, and brutal assaults of the ruling AKP government and its leader Tayyip Erdogan, the workers’ of TEKEL (the recently privatized public enterprise producing cigarettes, tobacco, alcohol and spirits) had taken the streets of the main district of Ankara as the center of resistance. The workers have been taking turns in shifts in their tents of resistance day and night, and receive tremendous support from all over Turkey –ordinary citizens, University students, workers from all other unions. National support for their cause has now spread out over international borders and is assuming non-traditional displays of solidarity such as exhibit of supporting banners in the European football stadiums during the games over the weekend of January 30-31.
Ending Africa’s Hunger
By Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck. The Nation, September 2009.
More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.
A new trend: Industrialized nations lease fertile land in Africa to meet food demands
By Paul Vallely. August 10 2009, The Independent
This article discusses a new breed of colonialism rampaging across the world - rich nations buying up fertile land in developing countries that can ill afford to sell. In the case of Madagascar, for example, Daewoo has bought half the arable land of the country to grow food for South Korea. The article proposes certain solutions, following the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute - solutions which fall within the category of “negotiating mutually benefitial terms”, such as regulations binding promised jobs and wages in the poor country, or “compulsory sharing of benefits, so that schools and hospitals get built and those living in areas around landgrabs get properly fed”. What is unsaid is that such relief packages have historically been part and parcel of neoliberal onslaught - their purpose is to provide a modicum of policy legitimacy to such deals. The logic of capital, and class interests of local governments and multinationals with whom they negotiate, make sure that there is no “compulsory sharing of benefits” - necessitating resistance politics on the ground rather than ameliorative smokescreens. The myth of job and infrastructure creation in Singur (fertile land grab by national capital) is a useful reference. - Ed.
A basic orientation in the US healthcare debate
By Dipankar Basu, Sanhati
There is a wide spectrum of positions in the current debate over health care reform in the US. On one end, the right end of the political spectrum, are those who argue for a “for-profit system” (something like that currently in place in the US), where health care is provided and financed through the market by the private medical-industrial complex (comprising of private health insurance corporations, pharmaceutical companies, private hospitals, and doctors); in this system health care is provided to the citizens by the medical-industrial complex as a by-product of its attempts to create and maintain profits for itself. On the other end of the spectrum, the left end of the political spectrum, are those who argue for a “single-payer system” (something like that currently in place in most other advanced capitalist countries including, UK, Canada, etc.), where health care is financed by a government or quasi-government body but provided largely by private economic agents (hospitals, etc.).
Hungary: “Where we went wrong” - An interview of GM Tamás
GM Tamás, a prominent Hungarian dissident and now professor of philosophy in Budapest, speaks to Chris Harman about developments in Eastern Europe since the fall of Stalinism. International Socialism, June 24 2009.
Venezuela: “A process of nationalisations” after the referendum
By Federico Fuentes, GreenLeft. May 30, 2009.
Addressing the 400-strong May 21 workshop with workers from the industrial heartland of Guayana, dedicated to the “socialist transformation of basic industry”, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez noted with satisfaction the outcomes of discussions: “I can see, sense and feel the roar of the working class.”
Brazil’s economy and the end of the decoupling myth
By Renaud Lambert, Counterpunch. June 14, 2009
In May 2008 the US economy had begun its decline, but in Brazil things still looked fine. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reckoned that his country was experiencing a “magic moment”: after a 5.67 per cent rise in GDP in 2007, government morale was high. What was going on elsewhere didn’t matter; growth would continue “at its present rate for the next 15 to 20 years”.
Peru: Blood Flows in the Amazon
By James Petras. June 10, 2009.
In early June, Peruvian President Alan García, an ally of US President Barack Obama, ordered armored personnel carriers, helicopter gun-ships and hundreds of heavily armed troops to assault and disperse a peaceful, legal protest organized by members of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous communities protesting the entry of foreign multinational mining companies on their traditional homelands. Dozens of Indians were killed or are missing, scores have been injured and arrested and a number of Peruvian police, held hostage by the indigenous protestors were killed in the assault. President García declared martial law in the region in order to enforce his unilateral and unconstitutional fiat granting of mining exploitation rights to foreign companies, which infringed on the integrity of traditional Amazonian indigenous communal lands.
EU elections: The decline of social democracy
By Peter Schwarz, World Socialist Website. June 10, 2009.
The most notable result of the European elections held last weekend is the dramatic decline of social democracy.
On average across Europe, social democratic parties received only 22 percent of the vote, six percent less than in the previous European election in 2004. With a turnout of just 43 percent, this means that less than one in ten of the electorate voted for these parties.
Blood at the Blockade: Peru’s Indigenous Uprising
June 13, 2009
Dozens of people are estimated to have been killed in clashes between police and indigenous activists protesting oil and mining projects in the northern Peruvian Amazonian province of Bagua. Peruvian authorities have declared a military curfew, and troops are patrolling towns in the Amazon jungle. Authorities say up to twenty-two policemen have been killed, and two remain missing. The indigenous community says at least forty people, including three children, were killed by the police this weekend.
McCarthyism on US campuses
By Dana Cloud, MRZine. April 2009
The noxious weeds of the new McCarthyism have begun to bear bitter fruit around the country. Reports are coming in, not just about the better-known cases of harassment and firing of Norman Finkelstein (denied tenure at DePaul and banned from a speaking engagement at Clark College) or Joel Kovel (recently fired from his position as the Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies at Bard College). Many readers will know the horrific case of Sami al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor jailed for five years without basis or charges for the suspicion of ties to terrorism.
Sri Lanka: A Besieged Society
By S Sivasegaram. RadicalNotes, 24 February 2009
Sri Lanka is in deep crisis on many fronts, and its politics is almost a total mess. Yet, its President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, elected by a whisker in November 2005, thanks to the boycott of the election by the Tamils in the North-East, after a last-minute call by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), is the only Sri Lankan head of government to have grown in popularity since election. He owes this immense popularity among the majority Sinhalese to his rejection of the peace process and the success of the armed forces in regaining, at a very high but unknown cost in men and material, all but 200 sq. km of the vast territory held by the LTTE.
Europe’s growing swing to the Left
By Neil Clark, New Statesman. December 2008.
If socialism signifies a political and economic system in which the government controls a large part of the economy and redistributes wealth to produce social equality, then I think it is safe to say the likelihood of its making a comeback any time in the next generation is close to zero - Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, in Time magazine in 2000.
He should take a trip around Europe today. Make no mistake, socialism - pure, unadulterated socialism, an ideology that was taken for dead by liberal capitalists - is making a strong comeback. Across the continent, there is a definite trend in which long-established parties of the centre left that bought in to globalisation and neoliberalism are seeing their electoral dominance challenged by unequivocally socialist parties which have not.
21st century land grab - rich countries snap up land in Africa and elsewhere
By Debora Mackenzie, Newscientist. Dec 2008.
History may be repeating itself. Until the mid-20th century, many European countries grew rich on the resources of their colonies. Now, countries including China, Kuwait and Sweden are snapping up vast tracts of agricultural land in poorer nations, especially in Africa, to grow biofuels and food for themselves.
Perspectives on the U.S. financial crisis
The U.S. financial crisis: some views from Monthly Review
The Greed Fallacy: By Arthur MacEwan, Dollars and Sense
Hard Truths About the Bailout
Free market ideology is far from finished: By Naomi Klein
Crisis of Capitalism and the Left: By Emir Sader
A Big Devil in the Jondolos: The Politics of Shack Fires
This report from South Africa was prepared at the request of Abahlali BaseMonjo over July and August 2008. It looks at the problem of fire for people living in shacks. Shack fires are not acts of God. They are the result of political choices, often at municipal level. There is not enough affordable housing for everyone and low cost housing is rarely built close to the city centre. For this reason transport costs make even low-cost housing unaffordable for many people. Growing shack settlements are the result.
Click here to read the report [.doc, English] »
Politics at stake: reflections on civil society; a note on stakeholder analysis
By Mark Butler and David Ntseng, South Africa. Guest contribution, July 2008.
In South Africa one of the biggest barriers to the ability of grassroots political society to contest directly with state and capital is the spongy wall of civil society around both. This is very seldom recognised by the middle class left, most of whom are located in that civil society in NGOs or the academy. In that context this article by Mark Butler and David Ntseng is quite important as there are very few critiques of civil society around in South Africa. - Contextual introduction by Richard Pithouse
Inflation and the Spectre of World Revolution
By James Petras, Guest Contributor.
Inflation and all of its repercussions for wage and salaried workers, fixed income middle classes, as well as manufacturers and transport industries is splashed all over the financial pages of the major newspapers throughout the world. Inflation is the great solvent that dissolves paternalistic ties between employers and workers, landowners and peasants, clientele-patronage regimes and the urban poor and sets in motion violent protests against private property and previously popularly elected regimes. Historical religious, clan, party, ethnic, tribal, caste and other differences are temporarily suspended, as Hindus and Moslems in India, Communists and Christians in the Philippines, peasants and workers in China, industrial workers and public employees in Egypt, blacks and mulattos in Haiti…join together in sustained mass protests against inflation which profoundly and visibly erodes their living standards from week to week, in some cases from one day to another.
Class Struggle and Resistance in Zimbabwe
1. Revolutionaries, resistance and crisis in Zimbabwe – Munyaradzi Gwisai
2. His Excellency Comrade Robert: How Mugabe’s ZANU clique rose to power – Stephen O’Brien
3. No to a government of national unity! Only united mass action will defeat Mugabe! – International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe
Click here to read Class Struggle & Resistance in Zimbabwe [PDF, 400 KB] »
The May 2008 Pogroms: xenophobia, evictions, liberalism, and democratic grassroots militancy in South Africa
By Richard Pithouse, Guest Contributor. Durban, 16 June 2008.
This essay examines the issues of xenophobia in present-day South Africa, in the light of the riots of May 2008. It starts by looking at eviction in the Harry Gwala settlement and the role of various poor people’s movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo, Anti-Eviction Campaign, and the Landless People’s Movement. It then looks at the riots, making the point that most areas under the control of militant organisations of the poor that have been in serious conflict with the state had no violence. The essay evaluates the ideas of Michael Neocosmos in theorizing xenophobia, coming to the conclusion that “For Neocosmos xenophobia and authoritarianism are a continuation of apartheid oppression that are, in the end, a product of liberalism. He proposes, against the state centric politics of liberalism, a recovery of popular emancipatory politics…[it] is the practical politics that was able to defend and shelter people targeted in the May pogroms, and has previously, although covertly, offered the same protection from the state…”
Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism
By James Petras
An analysis of Venezuela’s political scenario, covering the following points: (1) The advances and limitations of economic policy (2) Politics: the chavistas strike back (3) Social and cultural advances and contradictions (4) Cultural contradictions and challenges (5) The struggle of popular social movements versus the reactionary middle class movements (6) US-Venezuelan relations (7) Imperial-Vassal Three Part ‘Soft Power’: Drugs, Human Rights and Terrorism (8) The Hard Power Campaign - Three Part Strategy: Economic Boycotts, Low Intensity Warfare and the Colombia Card (9) Diplomatic and Economic Confrontation: Chavez Versus Bush (10) Vulnerability, Opportunities and Challenges (11) The National Security Threats (12) Conclusion: Advantages and Opportunities for Socialist Transformation
Neoliberalism, the U.S. economic crisis, and the phases of capitalism
Neoliberal Globalization Is Not the Problem - By Rick Wolff
2008: The Demise of Neoliberal Globalization - By Immanuel Wallerstein
Putting the U.S. Economic Crisis in Perspective - By Leo Panitch
Gap Jeans and Indian child labour in the globalized economy - Caveat emptor!
Indian ’slave’ children found making low-cost clothes destined for Gap - Guardian article, October 28, 2007 by Dan McDougall
Child sweatshop shame threatens Gap’s ethical image - Guardian, October 28, 2007 by Dan McDougall
Third death in a year at Indian factory that supplies Gap - Guardian Article, October 15, 2007 by Karen McVeigh
The struggle against water privatisation in Nepal
By Sushovan Dhar
As the country and its people after a strong political movement against the monarchy - the culmination of which was the ‘Jan Andolan-II’ (peoples’ movement) in April 2006 - are progressing towards a new constitution and the abolition of monarchy, Nepal has come under the grips of a different kind of ‘monarchy’. This is a monarchy which has advanced the interests of the mega corporations or the big capital of the advanced industrialised countries of North America and Europe in collaboration with the local elite and the ruling class since the end of the Second World War through its financial leverage and primarily through debt. The phenomenon of plunder and deprivation of the masses is further advanced by the imperatives of neo-liberal globalisation which champions the commodification of all our resources, an unbridled market mechanism and the privatisation of our existing ‘public’ possessions. The recent controversy surrounding the water privatisation in Nepal under the dictates of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is another illustration of how this apparatus works.
Neoliberalism - How Did We Get Into This Mess?
by George Monbiot - Znet
For the first time, the United Kingdom’s consumer debt now exceeds our gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion(1). Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi(2). Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings(3). As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.
These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common. They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our contemporary crises.
From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks
A speech by Naomi Klein, at the American Sociological Association’s meeting themed “Is Another World Possible?”
…you basically had two streams: you had democracy, which you can use to vote for your leaders, and then you had a single economic model. Now, the catch was that you couldn’t use your vote, you couldn’t use your democracy to reshape your economy, because all of the economic decisions had already been decided. There was only — it was the final endpoint of ideological evolution. So you could have democracy, but you couldn’t use it to change the basics of life, you couldn’t use it to change the economy. This moment was held up as a celebration of victory for democracy, but that idea, that democracy cannot affect the economy, is and remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.
Era of the bourgeois romantic: the biotech industry & those that buy into it
By Jessica Long
Development programs continue to exploit the famished and impoverished countries of developing countries by coercing them to perform actions against their will: the acceptance of “aid” that counteracts the sustainable development process. Once GM food crosses the borders, developing countries will be unable to escape the financial power of corporate imperialism on their agricultural economy. Africa, is one example, in which a collective group of developing nations stand united in its opposition to the biotech industry and its exploitation of struggling nations. Catherine Bernini, Executive Director of the WFP exemplified the capitalist ideal when she said, “Food is power. We use it to change behavior. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologize.” Meanwhile, the rest of us sit at home- complacent with the idea that our tax dollars are doing what we cannot- assisting those that really truly need it.
Censorship or Democratization? - Venezuela, Chavez, and Freedom of Speech
Open for comments.
As far as world public opinion is concerned, as reflected in the international media, the pronouncements of freedom of expression groups, and of miscellaneous governments, Venezuela has finally taken the ultimate step to prove its opposition right: that Venezuela is heading towards a dictatorship. Judging by these pronouncements, freedom of speech is becoming ever more restricted in Venezuela as a result of the non-renewal of the broadcast license of the oppositional TV network RCTV. With RCTV going off the air at midnight of May 27th, the country’s most powerful opposition voice has supposedly been silenced.
Gregory Wilpert contests this view, reporting on the landscape of Venezuelan media, its composition then and now, the nature of RCTV and its role in the coup of 2002. Also included is an appeal of support from Michael Lebowitz and other intellectuals.
World Poverty and Human Rights
By Thomas Pogge
Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to life-long severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. The annual death toll from poverty- related causes is around 18 million, or one-third of all human deaths, which adds up to approximately 270 million deaths since the end of the Cold War.
This problem is hardly unsolvable, in spite of its magnitude. Though constituting 44% of the world’s population, the 2,735 million people the World Bank counts as below its more generous $2 per day international poverty line consume only 1.3% of the global product, and would need just 1% more to escape poverty so defined.
Click to read article [PDF, 7 pgs] »
Development as Poison - Rethinking the Western Model of Modernity
By Stephen A. Marglin, Walter S. Barker Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
At the beginning of Annie Hall, Woody Allen tells a story about two women returning from a vacation in New York’s Catskill Mountains. They meet a friend and immediately start complaining: “The food was terrible,” the first woman says, “I think they were trying to poison us.” The second adds, “Yes, and the portions were so small.” That is my take on development: the portions are small, and they are poisonous. This is not to make light of the very real gains that have come with development. In the past three decades, infant and child mortality have fallen by 66 percent in Indonesia and Peru, by 75 percent in Iran and Turkey, and by 80 percent in Arab oil-producing states. In most parts of the world, children not only have a greater probability of surviving into adulthood, they also have more to eat than their parents did—not to mention better access to schools and doctors and a prospect of work lives of considerably less drudgery.
What is Neoliberalism? A Brief Definition for Activists
Source : Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
“Neo-liberalism” is a set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 25 years or so. Although the word is rarely heard in the United States, you can clearly see the effects of neo-liberalism here as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.
“Liberalism” can refer to political, economic, or even religious ideas. In the U.S. political liberalism has been a strategy to prevent social conflict. It is presented to poor and working people as progressive compared to conservative or Rightwing. Economic liberalism is different.
Conservative politicians who say they hate “liberals” — meaning the political type — have no real problem with economic liberalism, including neoliberalism.
Six Myths About the Benefits of Foreign Investment - The Pretensions of Neoliberalism
Myth #1 - Foreign Investment (FI) creates new enterprises, gains or expands markets and stimulates new research and development of local technological ‘know-how’.
Chile - The laboratory of neoliberalism
By Greg Gandin
Starting in the 1950s, Latin America, particularly the southern cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, had become a laboratory for developmentalist economics. Setting aside the struggles surrounding religion, race, and sexuality that give American politics its unique edge, it was in Chile where the New Right first executed its agenda of defining democracy in terms of economic freedom and restoring the power of the executive branch.
What’s at Stake in Venezuela - An Interview with Tariq Ali
By CLAUDIA JARDIM and JONAH GINDIN
How do you explain the explosion in social movements against neoliberalism in Latin America?
I think the reason for this is that Latin America was used as a laboratory by the United States for a long, long time. Everything the US wanted was experimented in Latin America first.
The Chinese Face of Neoliberalism
Source : PETER KWONG
On the average, the yearly income of a Chinese peasant in 2003 was $317. The monthly wages of factory workers ranged between $62 and $100. On the other side of the social spectrum is the increasingly wealthy urban middle class that is emerging on the coattails of the coterie of the super-rich. In 2006 Shanghai held a “millionaire fair,” featuring displays of luxury sedans, yachts, a piece of jewelry priced at $25 million, and a diamond-studded dog leash valued at $61,000.
The neoliberal (counter)revolution
By Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy
Neoliberalism is often described as the ideology of the market and private interests as opposed to state intervention. Although it is true that neoliberalism conveys an ideology and a propaganda of its own, it is fundamentally a new social order in which the power and income of the upper fractions of ruling classes—the wealthiest persons—was reestablished in the wake of a set back.
Click here to read article [PDF] »
Globalization and the Myth of Free Trade
By Anwar Shaikh, New School University, New York
So, if global trade liberalization has not lived up to its theoretical claims, where does the basic problem lie? In this paper I will argue that the deficiency lies within the theory of free trade itself, in the very principle of comparative cost upon which it is founded.
Click here to read article [PDF] »
The Economic Mythology of Neoliberalism
By Anwar Shaikh, February 2004
We live in a world characterized by enormous wealth and widespread poverty. The richest countries have an annual GDP per capita greater than $30,000, while the poorest countries have one less than $1,000. And even that appalling lower level is misleadingly high, because great inequality within countries means that the poor live on far less than the average. More than 1.2 billion people, one in every five people on this Earth, are forced to live on less than $1 a day.
Click here to read article [PDF] »
Neoliberalism in Africa
David Moore
The notion of primitive accumulation is the theoretical lens through which the Zimbabwean crisis is viewed. The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is analysed through the prism of nation-state construction. South Africa, the most ‘developed’ (albeit particularly unevenly ‘developed’) society under study here will be examined through the framework of ‘democratisation’.
