gonzodave:

Post Anarchism

David Graeber

Bursting capitalism’s bubble.

David Graeber , 22 Aug 2011

There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist – most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn’t seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction – even from those who call themselves “progressives” – is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last 30 years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world – in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s – with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police; various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world, an idle fantasy.

Maintaining this apparatus seems more important to exponents of the “free market” than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union? One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around. This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, the apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down – along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with. Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. When speculation did go berserk, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

David Graeber, an anarchist direct action activist, has been called “the best anthropological theorist of his generation.” The above essay is adapted from his latest book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

(via gonzodave)

A SIX FOOT security fence will go up around Sheffield City Hall next month as part of a police operation surrounding the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference.

Police leave is being cancelled and neighbouring forces drafted in as commanders plan for all contingencies over the weekend of March 11 to 13 when demonstrations are expected in Deputy Prime Minister’s home city.

Up to 1,000 officers will be on call on what is expected to be the busiest day, the Saturday.

Estimates of the cost are currently around £500,000, but it is acknowledged that this could rise to more like £2m depending on how the South Yorkshire force assesses the required scope of the operation over the next two weeks. It is liaising with protest groups.

Supt Martin Scothern, who is leading the operation, said: “We are aware of the intention of some groups to protest during the conference.

“However, at this time, we have no specific information that suggests that the protest will be anything other than peaceful.”

At the same time, police say they are preparing to respond to any situation. They will have officers on motorcycles, bicycles and horses as well as on foot. As roads are closed and a fence goes up for the weekend and the days before, they say they aim to keep disruption to a minimum while protecting the right of democratic protest.

The conference will attract between 1,500 and 1,800 delegates, although the number of visitors will go much higher when other people such as guests and media are take into account.

Virtually all hotel beds will be taken, demand heightened by the world short track ice skating championships at the Arena the same weekend.

Against the huge logistical exercise surrounding the conference, the council was emphasising this week the benefits to Sheffield’s economy – an estimated £2.5m spending on hotels, shops, restaurants and other activities – and its profile as a major city and a conference destination

Source: http://www.sheffieldtelegraph.co.uk/news/local/ring_of_steel_1_3115224

David Cameron calls civil servants ‘enemies of enterprise’ - Does that mean they are Klingons? http://bit.ly/fgNxvS

Political unrest and violence in the Mideast are unsettling to American interests in the region in the short term. Credit: Kevin Frayer/The Associated Press

Analysis: U.S. Interests at Risk in the Mideast Nations

by Barbara Slavin

http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2972/

“Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them — and then, the opportunity to choose.”

C Wright Mills

“I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.”

Noam Chomsky

Prospects for the Left in the United States are far better than they seem to most observers across the political spectrum (excepting those who fantasize imminent revolutionary uprisings spear-headed by 79-year-old sociology professors). The economic crisis has bitten hard and deep. Millions of people have been impacted by high unemployment and home foreclosures, by decreased job benefits and job security, and by the realization that none of these afflictions will end soon. A sense of betrayal is settling into the popular consciousness. People are coming to believe that despite their hard work and “playing by the rules,” a long-term decline is placing the American Dream increasingly out of their reach. And neither the major parties nor the resurgent far right (the Tea Party movement) offers anything like an adequate response to or program for offsetting that betrayal.

The economic crisis activated, intensely and very publicly, the hegemonic alliance among big business, the richest 5 percent of citizens, and the state. Business and the rich insisted on (and the federal government complied with) corporate bailouts costing huge sums of public money. The state borrowed that money rather than taxing big business and the richest 5 percent of citizens. Indeed, it borrowed a good deal of the money from big business and the rich who had funds to lend because 1) those funds had not been taxed, and 2) the depressed global economy offered less attractive alternatives for those funds.

This three-way hegemonic alliance is now proceeding to utilize the suddenly and vastly increased state debt to shift the cost of the crisis onto the mass of people. First, its members depict enlarged state debt as costing too much in state outlays for interest and repayment (threatening what the state can do for people in the future). Second, they insist that therefore “there is no choice but to” cut public payrolls and services and raise taxes (in combinations depending on what voter constituencies will allow). In Europe this hegemonic maneuver is called “austerity” and is operated by national governments. In the United States it is so far more a task of states and municipalities whose preferred words are “budget crisis” and “fiscal responsibility,” although the federal version is coming in the form of social security and Medicare reductions.

We are in the early years of what already is and will likely continue to be an exceptionally long-lived capitalist crisis. The mass of Americans still mostly watch in stunned shock as the capitalism that they so long celebrated as “delivering the goods” instead delivers one bad after another. Many keep hoping this downturn will pass and prosperity will resume, or that they individually will escape. Some do that very American thing and blame politicians and the state, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the unemployed were laid off by private enterprises, the vast majority of homeowners were foreclosed on by private banks, and the vast majority of the still employed have had their benefits and job security reduced by private employers. A crucial part of the hegemonic alliance among big business, the richest 5 percent, and the state is the role of the state as the socially acceptable object of anger, protest, and rage deflected from the economic power and privileges of its hegemonic partners. Then, too, the United States masses no longer have the labor union, socialist, and communist organizations that in Europe informed and mobilized historically unprecedented mass opposition to austerity all last year.

As a result, the Tea Partiers are so far the only systematically organized expression in the United States of mass opposition to the crisis and its social effects. However, they do not see the state’s policies as reflecting complicity with its hegemonic partners’ determination to emerge from the crisis unchecked in their activities and richer than before. Tea Party activists are, after all, specialists in demonizing the state as the root of all social problems. For them the crisis and its effects are all reducible to the government, that evil “other” whom they personify in an African American president. They function to deflect popular opposition and upset away from the capitalist economy and onto the government (as if the latter were an independent social actor and no hegemonic alliance linked them). Many of the Tea Party movement’s feeder organizations — John Birchers, Moral Majoritarians, etc. — maintained networks over recent decades that were reactivated and reconfigured to produce the Tea Party movement’s base. This paralleled on the right what the trade unions, socialist groups, and communist (and sometimes Green) organizations did for the European “anti-austerity movement” on the left. Moreover, that European movement on the left proved far, far larger and more socially influential than any current European movement on the right.

As often happens, the usefulness of the Tea Party movement to the hegemonic alliance is partial and temporary. Once the deflection of the masses’ upset seems secure and likewise the shifting of the crisis’s costs onto mass austerity, the hegemons have no further use for the Tea Partiers. Worse, the Tea Party movement’s demonization of the state risks disrupting the hegemonic partnership. The latter does not want or need to cut the defense budget, or cripple the many other (and likewise costly) ways the state subsidizes and favors business and the richest citizens. It does not want to provoke a mass backlash against reduced state services, because that might rediscover the most obvious alternative to austerity, namely taxing business and the rich to avoid deficits and thereby obviate austerity. When the Tea Party movement pursues what the hegemons see as excessive government-cutting agendas, the temporary allies will find themselves on a collision course. Since the hegemonic alliance is both more powerful than — and its members include significant financiers of — the Tea Party movement, the latter’s prospects in the United States now looks decidedly poor. It may well disassemble and shrink back into its more socially marginalized feeder organizations.

For different reasons and from a different history, the U.S. Left also leans toward anti-government pronouncements. Embarrassed by its long association with a USSR vilified as statism gone mad, angry at being a perennial target for state/police observation and harassment, and particularly sensitive to the imperialism of the U.S. government’s foreign policies, the U.S. Left focuses much of its ire and activity against the state and state policies. Anarchist is the preferred self-description of many on the U.S. left today: a way to distance their leftism from its socialist predecessors on the U.S. left and also to express a very broadly American distaste and rejection of government per se.

However, the crucial point is that the U.S. Left has no taboo against focusing its activism also against big business and the richest 5 percent. It is open to that perspective and broadly sympathetic to it as well. It has no significant financial dependence on big business. Moreover the crisis has revived and renewed those voices on the U.S. left that stress its nature as systemic, a crisis of the economic system that does not originate in or reduce to government policies. What is most striking is the speed and extent to which public discourse in the United States has rediscovered and opened up to those voices. Debates over capitalism itself are reviving and probing its adequacy, its alternatives, and its human costs. The ideological grounds and roots for a left resurgence are developing in the consciousness of masses of American citizens

The voices of those increasingly challenging capitalism are now assembling, refining, and ever more successfully disseminating powerful critiques: their take on the current global crisis is that capitalism is what hit the fan. Their solutions are not restricted to re-regulation or punishment of corrupt speculators. They affirm but also go beyond massive public employment programs and other economic stimulants paid for not by borrowing (and socially burdensome deficits) but rather by taxing corporations and the richest citizens. Their solutions increasingly include transformation of enterprises such that workers collectively, cooperatively, and democratically owning and operating enterprises would become a growing business sector. These would compete — on an economic playing field leveled by government support — with the older, hierarchical, capitalist enterprises where a few major shareholders select a top management that makes all the basic decisions about what, how, and where to produce, and what to do with the profits.

With the mass addition of democratically worker-run enterprises, U.S. workers could finally enjoy freedom of choice between work lives in the two alternative work organizations: capitalist or collectively worker-operated. Consumers could vote for whichever they prefer by buying its outputs. In short, the U.S. Left is working its way to a comprehensive alternative program to exit the crisis, one taxing the corporations and the richest 5 percent — those who contributed most to the crisis, who are the most able to pay for resolving it, and who have received the most state aid so far and therefore “recovered” the most.

The U.S. Left is constructing analyses and programs that have large and growing audiences and constituencies in the country. It will have to rebuild old or build new organizations to be able systematically to inform and mobilize that constituency. To do that, it will need to overcome its antipathies to organization per se. It will have to conceptualize democracy as the preferred structure of organization rather than the opposite of organization. However, the prospects for succeeding in new organizations of the Left are not bad given the ongoing crisis, the growing recognition of its severity and longevity by ever more Americans, and the likely fading of the Tea Party movement as the only other mode of expressing protest and demand for alternative social development.

Those sympathetic to the Left have their work to do, but the prospects for success suggest excitement and energy and no longer the demoralization that afflicted them for so long. In contrast, the Tea Partiers’ proposals for shrinking government offer immediate pain and suffering to the mass of Americans, while also fraying their connections to the hegemonic alliance in the United States. Tea Party prospects are not good. A resurgent U.S. Left can steal from the Tea Party movement those of its supporters who can identify business and the rich as adversaries, who harbor anti-capitalist impulses. That would leave the Tea Party movement with its fundamentalist social values and the burdens of a strained connection to an increasingly unpopular hegemony symbolized and championed especially by the Republican Party. The political terrain in the United States has shifted and the U.S. Left now has major opportunities.

Graphic and text by Professor Richard D. Wolff  http://rdwolff.com/

“Text Reprinted from Tikkun: A Quarterly Interfaith Critique of Politics, Culture, & Society.”