Today's Topics:
1. Finland, Solidarity with arrested Belarussian anarchists
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. France, Alternative Libertaire AL #270 - Film: "At Home"
(fr, it, pt) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. wsm.ie: Three futures: Barbarism, UBI Warehousing or
Anarchism (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. France, Alternative Libertaire AL #270 - Economy: Universal
income: a measure of the left? (fr, it, pt) [machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
5. Greese, ESE Support MESSAGE TO THE EMPLOYEES OF AGR-Clarin
(Argentina) (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
6. ias romania: WORK, Community, Politics, War [machine
translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
22 of March in Helsinki in front of embassy of Belarus anarchists made a solidartiy action
with comrades in Belarus and all people arrested during protests of last weeks. In Belarus
movement against new unemployment law (so "law about parasites" which oblige people who
doesnt have job to pay special taxes for the state) turned into wide protests against
politic of government in general. Many people was arrested at the streets, including
numerous anarchists. We demand freedom for all political prisoners of Belarus, as well as
resign of belarusian government
------------------------------
Message: 2
The exit, in the middle of the presidential campaign, of the film by Lucas Belvaux, makes
it possible to provoke debates, by the reaction of some and certain activists of the Front
national who denounced the film before its release ... ---- The film Chez nous by Lucas
Belvaux takes place in "Hénard", in the Pas-de-Calais. The heroine of the film is a home
nurse who is spotted by a militant doctor in a far right party. Municipal elections are
approaching and the "National Party", whose leader is a blonde woman who strangely
resembles Marine Le Pen wants to settle in this city. Completely disinterested, then
undecided, the nurse will be convinced to be a candidate after seeing the leader at a
meeting. ---- The speech takes again the clichés of the leaders of the National Front:
national preference, Muslim invasion ... Above all, it proposes a policy "for the
people"!! The reunion of the heroine with a former lover of the high school age, become a
fascist nervi, lifts the veil on this nationalist environment that mates the migrants, and
whose "National Party" seeks to dissociate itself ...
Now comes the moment when the heroine will inform her family, her friends, her patients of
her commitment. The majority of his friends and patients are happy with this news. Only
her father, a communist militant, and one of her friends disapproved. This friend is also
going to point her finger at the approach of this extremist party. He made her dye her
hair ... Blond ... And above all, he did not allow her to develop the program for the city
she will have to administer ... she is "only a head of gondola" ... Ira-t To the end of
its commitment?
This film really sticks to reality, this "National Party", like the National Front, claims
to be the party of the people, for the people, with people's candidates. He does not talk
about his program and only carries nationalist and protectionist slogans. Racist, fascist,
machoist remarks are not spoken and yet the film shows that the identity groups the party
pretends to deny are there to protect their leaders and carry out racist attacks against
foreign migrants.
The film shows that the Communists do not become partisans of this party, thus breaking
the opposite stereotype. It also shows that notables, a doctor in the film, adhere to the
ideas of this party, because it defends its class, the class of leaders and the rich. The
poor are therefore deceived by these policies and it is no coincidence that the National
Front is the first party where their newly elected militants tear their cards from the
same party.
François (AL Gard)
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Film-Chez-nous
------------------------------
Message: 3
Our global society is broken. Donald Trump & Brexit are symptoms along with the rise of
the far right elsewhere in Europe. In an old pattern, fundamental economic crisis often
results in society becoming very much more brutal for most people. In the age of nuclear
weapons this current crisis could be our last. And with a somewhat longer countdown to
disaster we are also facing climate catastrophe. ---- The crisis is fundamental rather
than temporary because there are two underlying factors that are irreversible. The first
is the end of the era where the environmental costs of growth could be mostly discounted
in the belief that dilution would neutralise pollution. For much of the industrial
revolution the poisonous effluent dumped into the ecosystem had only local severe effects
with the vast oceans and atmosphere diluting the pollutants enough that global effects
were minor. This is no longer the case with climate change being the most talked about of
several examples where the pollution generated by growth can no longer be absorbed without
serious global consequences.
[As this is a long read we have also made
the entire piece available on audio,
listen as you are doing the dishes
or you can download a PDF version]
Capitalism depends on constant growth and constant growth generates pollution. The stock
market boom following Trump taking power is a direct effect of him tearing up
environmental protection legislation, profits will increase because business will have to
cover less of the environmental cost. Our children will pay the bill for this short lived
boom for shareholders.
The Abolition of Work, or Employment?
The second fundamental aspect is automation. For much of human history the amount that
could be produced was very closely related to human effort. In a given set of conditions
the only way to produce more was to spend more human hours in production. At times of
empire building this drove incredible cruelty as expansion was dependent on conquest,
robbery and enslavement of populations who were then worked so hard that their death rate
greatly exceeded the reproduction rate.
The wealth that the European powers built the industrial revolution on was generated in
precisely this way, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people around the
planet as overwork and underfeeding left them vulnerable to disease and starvation. But
the industrial revolution also changed what had been a simple relationship between the
amount produced and the amount of human labour required. New machines started to allow a
single worker to do the work that once would have required 5, 10, 50 or 100. This process
was not independent of the environmental problem above but rather a cause of it as fossil
fuels provided almost all of the replacement muscle that drove the machines.
In today's networked age we are seeing a change that will have a bigger impact than the
industrial revolution on human society. As machines have become smarter the need to have
a worker guiding their actions has shrunk and shrunk. We have reached the stage where
very complex operations like driving a car on a busy road - that humans can only legally
do after a period of intense study - can now be done far better by computers. It will
take a while for production and the legal system to catch up but essentially we are
already at the point where taxi drivers, bus drivers and lorry drivers are hanging on to
those jobs by their fingernails. Retail stores including fast food restaurants are
replacing check out workers with machines. Banks and insurance companies are removing the
ability of customers to call into branches or talk to a humans on the phone, again people
being replaced by machines.
Trump & Brexit were driven by the false idea that it was migrants who were ‘taking jobs.'
Actually it is robots and realistically as smart automation escalates there are very few
jobs that will not be replaced. A tiny number of new jobs will be created but the low and
unskilled workers most affected by automation are locked out of those jobs by lack of
access to education.
Resisting the Machines?
In the early period of the industrial revolution we saw a very, very much weaker version
of this as textile workers found that a machine like the ‘Spinning Jenny' allowed a single
relatively low paid unskilled worker to replace dozens of skilled spinners. They
resisted, with some initial success. There are several lessons from that period.
Perhaps most importantly is that although the replacement workers operating the Spinning
Jenny replaced dozens they were considerably worse off than any worker they replaced. The
combination of deskilling and lack of ownership by the worker of the machines that
produced allowed the extreme ruthlessness of early capitalism that saw children working 12
hour days for pennies in extremely unhealthy conditions that killed many of them. The
capitalist got rich, the replacement worker was poorer than any of the 10 or 20 they
replaced. In fact that's how the capitalist got rich, suddenly they had the same amount
of goods from the labour of one worker that they previously had to pay 20 for.
Secondly skilled workers were aware of exactly what was happening and not only managed to
organise against this but put up a really strong fight. Under the brutal dictatorship
that existed at the time that executed and transported those that resisted they had to be
very secretive. This means we don't know the fine detail of how they organised that
resistance. But we do know that well organised, armed and large groups of workers who we
know as the ‘luddites' mobilised over relatively long periods of time to rise up and smash
the machines. And that it took the deployment of considerable military force over a period
of years to put them down.
This happened in Britain during the Napoleonic wars. Historian Eric Hobsbawm has pointed
out that although that war was a life and death struggle for the British ruling class at
one point they had more troops deployed putting down the luddites than fighting Napoleon.
The luddite movement smashed thousands of machines and was successful in slowing down the
rate at which their wages and conditions were destroyed but over a couple of decades the
employers imposed the new machines and with them the new and brutal working conditions and
low wages.
Machines replaced some skilled workers in Britain bit by bit over decades,the luddite
resistance of the 1810's was followed 20 years later by the Captain Swing riots against
the introduction of agricultural threshing machines. Todays automation is affecting a
very, very much larger percentage of the planet's population over a very much shorter span
of time. Left to ‘market forces' and state repression we can expect something very much
more severe but also involving far more people.
The Crisis is Already with Us
There is in fact a strong argument this is already in progress, the Arab spring of 2011,
Occupy and other moments of resistance are driven in part by mass youth unemployment.
Occupy is a well documented response to the capitalist crisis, in the case of the Arab
Spring Cairo based Dorothea Schmidt of the International Labour Organization looked at the
forces "that brought these mostly young people onto the streets. An extremely high youth
unemployment rate of 23.4 per cent in 2010, is one major but not the only cause for these
popular uprisings" Rising food prices related to the impact of climate change on
production was also key in the Arab spring. The uprisings that started the revolution in
Algeria and Tunisia were directly caused by rising food prices and riots in response,
elsewhere they were an often mentioned backdrop.
Drought, in part from climate change, was a significant factor in the forces leading to
the Syrian revolution and extremely brutal Civil War that still rages on. Satellite
measurements show that the Tigris-Euphrates basin is losing groundwater at a faster rate
than anywhere else in the world, except Northern India, due to poor rainfall and over
extraction in particular by Turkey which has reduced water flow to Iraq by 80% and Syria
by 40%.
From 2006 the drought in Syria was causing tens of thousands of farmers to abandon their
land and move to the cities, adding to youth unemployment. One academic study concluded
that this water crisis in Syria "contributed to the displacement of large populations from
rural to urban centers, food insecurity for more than a million people, and increased
unemployment-with subsequent effects on political stability. "
This causal factor has also been mentioned in studies of activists from the region. In
Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War the authors say "The situation was made
worse by the severe drought plaguing much of the country since 2006. Rural areas such as
the Jazeera (in the east) and the Hawran (in the south) were particularly hard-hit. By
2010 the drought had pushed between two and three million Syrians into extreme poverty,
destroying the livelihoods of around 800,000 farmers and herders". The also noted other
familiar causes "neo-liberal reforms were accompanied by the dismantling - by cutting
subsidies - of the economic safety net for the poor. Inequality grew, until 50 per cent of
the country's wealth was concentrated in the hands of 5 per cent of the population. High
unemployment, underemployment and low wages made it harder and harder to make ends meet.
In 2004, just over 30 per cent of the population (5.3 million people) lived in poverty,
rising to 62 per cent in rural areas ... Youth unemployment stood at a staggering 48 per
cent, with young women four times more likely to be unemployed than young men"
Revolution in Rojava, which often takes a sharply different perspective on the Syrian
conflict to Burning Country, also talks about the same causal factors pointing out that
"In 2012-13, long-predicted water shortages became a reality" and points to the difficulty
supplying water now presents to the revolution. "Wheat and cotton are Serekaniye's main
crops. Water for irrigation must be pumped from 200-500 meters below the surface, and the
pumps need to be powered by electricity, which has been cut off"
The World Has Changed
When you are in world changing historic events it's often hard to see that is the case.
Instead things appear disconnected and driven by individuals, group and ideology. Taking
a step back for a moment and we begin to see how climate change and unemployment although
driven from Silicon valley, the Ruhr and Shanghai has first disrupted regions which are
comparatively economically marginal like Syria, Egypt and Iraq. We can see how the tumult
that has spread out from there has then precisely shaped conditions in Silicon valley and
the Ruhr as ‘refugee panic' politics started to shape domestic politics. True the
automation that is most visible in those regions is the automatic mass killing of the
helicopter gunship and the remotely operated or autonomous drone, again linking us back to
the US. The political shocks are not separate but part of the same crisis and can only
get much worse as the crisis escalates.
There is no going back. We can delay things by smashing the machines as the taxi drivers
of Paris have fought Uber. The experience of the Luddites (and indeed of print workers
and dockers last century) tell us such a fight is not futile. In the short term it can
protect wages and conditions, allowing that generation to raise their children in relative
comfort but those children don't inherit those well paid jobs.
History tells us that the market driven quest for profit will create replacement machines
and will station soldiers to guard them. And today we are at the edge of that moment when
those soldiers will no longer be humans whom we can call on to revolt but will be machines
themselves. The forces the US has deployed over much of the planet still require infantry
but most of the ongoing killing is already being carried out by human-machine hybrids that
were science fiction two decades ago.
Wealth Gap
There is a third factor worth mentioning, this one isn't irreversible or new but rather a
pattern of history. Thomas Piketty's ‘Capital in the 21st Century' may have been too
technical to be completed by many of its readers but it provided a clear illustration that
the wealth gap was rapidly increasing. And more importantly a warning that at a certain
point the effects of that gap on society made it almost impossible to reverse without
major warfare.
One measure of the escalating wealth gap is how many of the super rich hold the same
wealth as the poorest half of the planet's population. A decade back you could fit them
in a big jet plane like a 737, there were about 350 of them. A few years back that number
had shrunk to about 50, a coach-load. A couple of years ago it had shrunk to a small
bus-load. The latest Oxfam figure is that it is now a single car load, if you cram the 8
of them into a SUV. Half of American adults have seen no increase in real wealth since
1980, for the top 1% wealth tripled in the same period and the increase was much greater
for the top 0.1 and 0.01%.
There are already examples in Mexico and Johannesburg and elsewhere of what happens when
the incredibly rich and the incredibly poor are crammed into the same urban landscapes.
It's an urban landscape of mansions surrounded by high walls, razor wire, CCTV cameras,
attack dogs and ‘shoot to kill' security. Those inside live in constant fear of those
starving outside and as a consequence increasingly brutal regimes of repression and murder
become normalised.
The Corporate Tech Overlords
Apple is now the largest corporation on the planet, a corporation whose business model is
built on removing elements of choice and control from their users in the belief that the
CEOs know best. For an increasing number of us, access to news and communications is
overwhelming filtered through Facebook algorithms. In the last decades a psychological
science of manipulation has developed where the goal has been to influence our unconscious
minds against both rational thought and better instinct.
Trump's idiotic neuro-linguistic programming where everything is fantastic, bad or
fakenews seems to have been enough to reach into the fear centres of a sizeable minority
of the population. The Economist reported that the best single predictor for a Trump
voter was poor health, indeed what other than sickness makes us vulnerable to hucksters
preying on our fears? Increasing insecurity in the workplace and subjecting welfare
payments to various tests adds to creating a constant situation of stress in many people's
lives that makes them vulnerable to the politics of fear and scapegoating.
The tech elite form a tiny, tiny percentage of the world's population but now hold in
their hands an enormous percentage of the world's wealth. The 8 people who own as much
wealth as half the world include Bill Gates (1), Carlos Slim (4), Jeff Bezos(5), Mark
Zuckerberg (6) and Larry Ellison (7). Those five are all rich from the technological
revolution of the last decades.
Gates, the richest of them, has become a sort of benevolent dictator. Having made an
enormous fortune he is now claims to be distributing that pile to those he considers to be
the most deserving poor. This has made him personally responsible for the life and death
of millions of people on the planet, in particular the children he has chosen to save
though funding inoculation programs. The stated goal is to prevent 11 million deaths by 2020.
We can be grateful with regard to Bill that a lucky dice roll meant that this Pharaoh has
chosen a benevolent old age - no doubt with an eye to how he is remembered - but history
is littered with examples of the rich and powerful who were not. How long do we want to
gamble on that dice roll. Larry Ellison for instance spent 130 million on his latest
super yacht and 500 million on buying the island of Lanai.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was named the world's worst boss by the International Trade Union
Confederation in 2014 as representing the "inhumanity of employers who are promoting the
American corporate model" There have been several exposés of the terrible conditions of
poorly paid Amazon warehouse workers, one reminder of the costs of automation, but as a
New York Times article showed conditions for White Collar workers are also terrible in
Amazon's ‘race to the bottom'
A lot of scientists are aware of these crisis. Stephen Hawking for instance has warned
several times of the consequences of automation and the futures which lie before us. But
is there a way out? Are we doomed?
Our methods of political discussion and decision making remain trapped in technologies
that are hundreds of years old because the limits that imposes suits those who have wealth
and power. That is illustrated by the complete ease with which complex cross border
financial transactions can be instantly completed. Yet the parliamentary system alongside
them is still at the equivalent point as when those transactions involved meetings in
particular dockside coffee shops to decide how the risk would be divided on ship voyages
that would take two years to return. The parliamentary system remains as is because a
process that involves the selection of a few to represent the views of millions without
being subject to mandate or recall is a system where those few can be bought.[Read more]
There are Three Futures.
The first future is the default one, what happens if we do nothing and just allow the
invisible hand of the market to rule. It's the process of the last 40 years, unleashed by
the neoliberal bloodletting that started literally with the dictator Pinochet in Chile and
developed under Reagan and Thatcher. Under this future the wealth gap becomes even more
extreme, the powerful become even more fearful of the rest of us and we increasingly fight
each other for the reduced resources that are allowed to trickle down to the jobless
majority. At best we hope for benevolent pharaohs like Gates rather than self obsessed
ones like Bezos or Zuckerberg so that we are at least allowed to survive rather than
starve or die in the resource civil wars. But perhaps there is no hope at all if the worst
climate change models play out and a positive feedback loop results in run-away warming.
Second Future
The second is the one that an increasing number of the elite are turning to because they
also aren't that keen about the world of fear and helicopter gunships that also lies in
their future. Economist Mark Blyth has a nice line on this that "the Hamptons are not a
defensible position". The Hamptons being the super rich zone on the beaches above New York
where billionaire New Yorkers have their weekend mansions. Perhaps in recognition of the
indefensible nature of this strip of land an hour from the millions in New York it has
recently emerged that several tech billionaires have bought large landholdings in New
Zealand where they are building luxury bunkers. New Zealand being sparsely populated and
a long way from anywhere else being judged to be the safest available bolt hole if the
shit really hits the fan as a result of the future they are building.
The New Yorker published a long read on these super wealthy ‘preppers' in which they quote
LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman. What he had to say deserves a lengthy extract he
"recalls telling a friend that he was thinking of visiting New Zealand.
"Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?" the friend asked.
"I'm, like, Huh?" Hoffman told me.
New Zealand, he discovered, is a favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm. Hoffman said,
"Saying you're ‘buying a house in New Zealand' is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once
you've done the Masonic handshake, they'll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who
sells old ICBM silos, and they're nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would
be interesting to live in.' "
Hoffman then estimates half of his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some
sort of "apocalypse insurance," hideaway in the U.S. or abroad saying "The fears vary, but
many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will
be a backlash against Silicon Valley". "I've heard this theme from a bunch of people,"
Hoffman said. "Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn
against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?"
It would be a pretty miserable world to live in even if you were one of the wealthy few
gazing out at the chaos from behind electric fences. Evan Osnos, the author of the New
Yorker piece, visited the Survival Condo Project, a fifteen-story luxury apartment
complex built in an underground nuclear missile silo in Kansas and was told ""It's true
relaxation for the ultra-wealthy," he said. "They can come out here, they know there are
armed guards outside. The kids can run around." The apartments, all of which have been
sold, cost 3 million dollars for a full one and come with the assurance that in a crisis
you will be picked up anywhere within 400 miles by an armoured truck to be brought to the
silo. The truck has a heavy machine gun mounted on it just in case the mob gets in the
way. There are also armed guards and a sniper tower protecting the compound although the
view from deep underground has to be provided by LED screens acting as windows that show a
live view of the Prairie above or if the owner prefers a pine forest or even a busy New
York street scene!
That gun-toting fear ridden underground existence sounds a little bit miserable, something
many of the super rich recognise. And how certainly safe is flight anyway? The same New
Yorker piece talked to a ex investment banker Robert H. Dugger who reported on a dinner
party conversation of one such group of billionaire preppers where on hearing of plans to
fly to safety in the event of a mass rebellion a guest asked ‘Are you taking your pilot's
family, too? And what about the maintenance guys? If revolutionaries are kicking in doors,
how many of the people in your life will you have to take with you?' The questioning
continued. In the end, most agreed they couldn't run."
Finally the super rich also have to again consider that Climate Change is such a global
threat that sooner or later it might even get them and their descendants. Of course the
poor will die in their droves first, indeed they already are, but there is a danger of
hitting a positive feedback tipping point where the Earth ends up like Venus, so hot no
one survives.
So it's perhaps not surprising that a section of the super wealthy elite favour reducing
the problem created by the escalating wealth divide, as Dugger says "It's a reason most of
them give money to good causes". This future is the warehousing strategy of introducing a
Universal Basic Income (UBI) for those lucky enough to be born in the already
industrialised zones where most of the super rich live. When the need for our labour ends
rather than leaving us to starve (and perhaps rob them if not revolt) the elite want to
give us enough of an income to survive on. UBI would involve every citizen or resident
(and that distinction is important) being given a regular unconditional sum of money in
addition to any income received from elsewhere. In most forms of UBI this is enough money
to look after essential needs including housing and healthcare.
This warehousing may appear more attractive to some of us but it also moves us inside the
borders of fear. It inevitably involves escalating the slamming of the door on those
trapped outside because of where they happened to be born. Thousands of people have died
trying to cross the EU borders this year without the magic of the right passport. Even as
I type this I've received a new notification that dozens of bodies of the drowned have
just been found along the coast of Libya, another ship must have gone down.
UBI would also do little against the other looming disasters related to growth and
pollution, in particular climate change. It would have some impact as the super wealthy
would be slightly less powerful so environmental protection laws would be stronger but
capitalism and its need for incessant growth would survive and continue to deepen that
crisis. UBI has also become a cover in many countries for the final abolition of the
welfare state as parties say they will fund it by abolishing entitlement to services which
people will then have to buy.
In countries like Ireland where a welfare system exists mainstream parties have started to
talk about UBI as a way of eliminating bureaucracy and introducing market competition. In
practise that translated into eliminating yet more jobs - in the public sector - and
replacing only some of them with what would be much more insecure private sector jobs. UBI
was even favourably put forward - as ‘negative taxation' - by Milton Friedman, the chief
economist promoting neoliberalism who also advised Pinochet on the post-coup destruction
of workers' gains in Chile.
Third Future
The third future requires a leap in social organisation that is at least as big as the
leap that was made between the absolute monarchies of the 1600s and the republican
democracies that spread from the 1780s. That is at a planet wide level we abolish
inequality of access to resources and inequality of power. There will no longer be some
people who own super yachts and entire islands while others watch their children die of
starvation. The full environmental costs of growth will have to be factored into every
new development because we will no longer havr a system where some can use their wealth to
evade the consequences while others are forced to live in the filth generated.
That future has been glimpsed as long as humans have been around. Arguably we spent our
first couple of hundred thousand years in something quite like it. Gather Hunter
societies didn't have a surplus that could be hoarded and that lack of wealth meant there
wasn't much opportunity for power. Biology placed limitations that today we can escape,
for instance child birth often killed women, but in many respects they were quite equal
societies.
It was only with the creation of agriculture that large surpluses of food could be
produced and hoarded. And that meant that humans could fight each other to get control of
the hoard, and perhaps quite quickly that translated into those with control paying a
segment of the stronger and more violent section of the population to keep the rest in
check. We spent the last 10,000 years developing that system to the absolute monarchies
and it's only in the last 200 years we have begun to limit the power of the hoarders
through politics. The danger is that military automation means they are about to escape
those limitations we imposed through mass organisation.
That third future is now more possible than ever before. We can produce enough to ensure
all our needs, globally, are fulfilled and automation rather than being a threat can mean
that we can end work. From the agricultural revolution on most of us have had to work
long hours for the hoarders to survive and perhaps had little control over that work.
Automation could mean that the hard graft of paid work vanishes to be replaced by work for
pleasure. The difference between back breaking work in a field 10 hours a day harvesting
potatoes and spending a few hours a week pottering around in your garden.
Discussion and decision making have also become vastly simpler. Only 40 years ago there
was no way for masses of people to communicate with each other over distances. Discussion
was one-to-many only, via radio and TV or in print media. Today a vast host of online
tools allow such many to many discussions. Issue based voting has also become very much
simpler, even if its major use now is click bait polling by online news sites. And
electronic tallying means that complex polling is now very straightforward, there is no
need to limit decisions to simple yes/no choices when the full range of options can be
polled and counted instantaneously.
The third future is one without the division into order giver and order taker or the
related one into rich and poor. These would not simply be huge economic and political
transformation, the effect of them would also would transform in a very deep way what it
means to be human. Our interactions would no longer be governed by fear and power, our
potential to live fully would be released. The mental and physical labour we performed
would be to enrich all those around us rather than a question of performing repetitive
tasks because that alienation from our own labour is the only way of keeping a roof above
our heads.
We are so close that we can almost reach out and touch the world which earlier people
could only imagine. But the window of opportunity to bring it into being may be short,
indeed for the reasons outlined above it is already closing, We know from history how we
can win: through collective organisation. And today that is easier to do than ever before
in many respects, in particular the access almost all of us have to global mass
communication. The question is are you willing to take the step and start organising with
others to make this dream the future we will step into?
Words: Andrew Flood
http://www.wsm.ie/c/three-futures
------------------------------
Message: 4
Universal income was put at the heart of the "left" primary by Benoît Hamon. But what
exactly is this measure put forward by so many politicians claiming the left as the right?
---- Universal income has emerged in the primary campaign of the "Beautiful Popular
Alliance", defended by Benoît Hamon as a left-wing idea, guaranteeing each and everyone
the means to live in a society where full employment has become inaccessible. Yet, the
idea of universal income is historically rather a liberal idea. ---- Thus, one of the
first attempts to achieve universal income occurred in the 1970s in the United States.
Defended by John Kenneth Galbraith and 1,200 Keynesian and Liberal economists, he is then
called the Demogrant, and is shaped by James Tobin (a theoretician of the capital move tax
that bears his name) and included in The program of Democrat George McGovern, beaten in
the 1972 presidential election by Richard Nixon.
A scam to break Safely
This type of universal income would be a minimum parachute that would allow us to live,
albeit very poorly, by remaining below the poverty line, like the "decent income" of
Manuel Valls.
In France, the RMI, which has since become RSA, is a basic income of this type, although
it is increasingly accompanied by workfare- type constraints , that is, an obligation to
seek employment, Unpaid "volunteer" work, for example the departmental council of
Haut-Rhin, which succeeded in imposing it illegally in February.
We note that it cohabits with social security, unemployment and pensions, but that it is
far below the poverty line: an RSA alone is at 463 euros, an RSA + APL (housing
assistance) has a ceiling of 690 Euros, while the poverty threshold is 950 euros in France ...
In truth, the liberal universal income is simply a scam to break Social Security and
unemployment. It would no longer be worthwhile to have unemployment benefits if everyone
has a low income that keeps him just below the poverty line. This would also make huge
savings for employers, and would ultimately undermine the social gains ...
This is not the case with the left-wing version of the universal income, moreover, taken
up by Benoît Hamon. It comes in two versions.
The former sees universal income as a wage supplement, but at a decent standard of living
in contrast to liberal universal income or the RSA. Basically, the idea is that when you
work you are paid by a normal salary, and when you do not work, whether you have
contributed or not, you get a guaranteed income that is more or less equal to your salary.
It is defended by the disciples of André Gorz, and it has sometimes been put forward
during assemblies of intermittent and precarious: everyone could work three days, unemploy
eight, and so on and have indemnities Which would be a great improvement over existing
arrangements.
Nevertheless, what seems most important is the idea that the generalization of this system
leads to enormous flexibility and precariousness.
Basically, it would allow employers in general to hire people, to put them in the closet
temporarily when activity is lower and to rehire them when there is much more activity.
This would mean outsourcing wages to the state and the community. The employee does not
lose money, but is at the disposal of the employer. For the boss, he is obliged to pay
wages only when he really needs them. Even more need to pay leave as income is guaranteed
... It also pushes to split, fragmented, etc. forms of employment.
The second method of the guaranteed income would be more "revolutionary": the guaranteed
income would replace the wage backed by employment. People would or would not be working,
and they would receive an income in monetary form from the state.
Among his followers are the followers of André Gorz, in the 1990s and 2000s, members of
Cargo (Collective Agitation for an optimal Guaranteed Income), who will go to AC! (Working
together against unemployment!).
Wealth and Work
This change would be based on a rather smoky mutation of capitalism: it would no longer be
labor that would produce value. Indeed, for most liberal but also Marxist economists, what
produces wealth is labor. For Marxists, it is the fact that labor power is a commodity
that allows the capitalist to extract surplus value. This is called exploitation: workers
produce wealth, but only receive a portion of this wealth in the form of wages, the rest
going to the exploiter.
For Gorz but also for Cargo holders, value no longer comes from work. For Gorz, cognitive
capitalism means that work is no longer really necessary and that it is a relatively
autonomous sphere, and that the work of industry no longer creates value, and it is the
whole of society in Out of work that would produce wealth.
On the basis of this conception of value, since wealth is no longer based on material but
on the intangible, it would be enough to set up a guaranteed income system that would
somehow abolish capitalism since productive labor No longer exists.
Proponents of basic income or guaranteed income say one simple thing: "There is money in
the boss's fund, just tax". Nevertheless it is not known how much it would be necessary,
nor if the bosses would really accept. For us, these conceptions, especially that which
sees the guaranteed income replace wage-earners, are an imaginary reformism, coming from a
left who dreams of a return to the Glorious Trent with great blows of a magic wand rather
than an abolition of the capitalism. A whole series of thinkers and economists have a
series of measures that propose to come back politically and economically ...
Matt (AL Montpellier)
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Economie-Le-revenu-universel-une
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Message: 5
The Libertarian Syndicalist Union (ESE Athens) sends support and solidarity greeting to
the employees of the printing of AGR-Clarin newspaper in Argentina that are in multi-day
struggle (occupation of the workplace), asking to revoke their colleagues layoffs. ---- We
denounce the strikebreaking tactic of the employer, which in order to break the
mobilization, he prints the Sunday edition of the newspaper in the neighboring country of
Chile. The business committee of the AGR-Clarin workers sent a letter to the Chilean
unions and in the union of Argentine truckers, asking for their solidarity: not to print
or transfer the scabs form. ---- The struggle of the workers in the printing facilities of
Clarin is part of the general struggle of the Argentine labor movement against the
government's austerity measures Macri, as well as against the anti-working-class choices
of the bosses. The Macri government attacks on workers' achievements and tries to remove
rights and freedoms conquered through struggle. The attempt to repress and dismantle the
self-managed Bauen Hotel in Buenos Aires, it's one more example of the anti-labor aggression.
We are so far away from Argentina, but yet so close to the Argentinean workers' struggles.
We call every labor collective to stand in solidarity with the printing workers, by
sending messages of support to Clarin.
SOLIDARITY IS THE WEAPON OF LABOR PEOPLE
WAR TO THE BOSSES
WORKERS UNITED - NEVER DEFEATED
Libertarian Syndicalist Union (ESE Athens)
Libertarian Syndicalist Union (ESE) - International Relations
------------------------------
Message: 6
"All are required opinion on each aspect to be prevented from having an opinion about the
whole." - Raoul Vaneigem ---- We look around us and see a world beyond our control. ----
Our struggle daily for survival takes place against a background huge and ever-changing
... ---- ... passing from natural disasters to terrorist attacks ... the new diets to new
period of famine ... from sex scandals celebrity scandals of political corruption ... from
religious wars to economic miracles ... from commercials tantalizing us in stereotypes on
TV who complains about the government ... of suggestions on how to become intimate partner
ideally suggestions about preventing fans of sports teams to produce riots ... from us
police violent episodes in our health problems ...
The same process works everywhere ...
... in democratic and in totalitarian governments ... in corporations and family
businesses .. in cheeseburgers and in tofu ... in opera, in country music and in hip hop
... in every country and in every language ... in prisons, schools, hospitals, factories,
office buildings, in war zones and in food ...
Something feeds on our lives and then to spit in the face of their images.
That something is the product of our labor ... of our lives everyday sold hour after hour,
week after week, generation after generation.
We do not have property or business from which to make money, so we are forced to sell our
time and energy to someone else. We are the modern working class - Proliant.
WORK
"Capital is dead labor, which, vampire like, lives only if sucking living labor, and lives
the more, the more suck hard work." - Karl Marx
Not work because we want to do that. We work because we do not how else to get money. We
sell our time and energy to a boss that we buy the things we need to survive.
We put together with other workers / it and we assigned different tasks. We specialize in
different aspects of the work and repeat these tasks again. Our time spent at work is not
really part of our lives. It is dead time controlled by our bosses and managers. During
his time at work doing things that our bosses can sell. These things are objects like
cotton shirts, computers and skyscrapers or qualities like clean floors and healthy
patients or services like that bus that can take you where you want, or a waiter who I
assume command, or the person who is calling you home to convince you to buy things you do
not need. The work we do for what occurs. We do it to get paid, and the boss pays us so
they can get a return.
At the end of the day heads reinvest the money they produce for themselves and expand
their businesses. Our work is stored in the things our bosses own and sell them - capital.
They are looking for new ways to store our activity in things, new markets in which to
sell them then we people who have nothing to sell except their time and energy to work for
them. After work we get enough money to pay rent, food, clothes and beer - enough to cause
us not to give up work.
When we are at work we spend time traveling to and from work, preparing for work, resting
us because we're exhausted from work or getting drunk to forget our work. The only thing
worse than work is the lack of a job. Then waste our weeks looking for work without being
paid for it. If available some form of social assistance is a hassle getting it and never
amount awarded is equal to that received from work. Constant threat of unemployment is
what makes us go back to work every day. And our work is based on that company. A power
that our bosses get from it increases each time work. This is the dominant force in every
country on the planet.
At work we are under the control of our bosses and the markets in which they sell. But an
invisible hand imposes a discipline and a lack of meaning as those at work and on the rest
of our lives. His life as a show you watch from the outside, but on which we have no
control. All kinds of activities tend to become as alienating, boring and stressful as
work: housework, homework, free time. This is capitalism.
ANTI-LABOR
"Of course capitalists are very satisfied with the capitalist system. Why not? Get rich
from it. "- Alexander Berkman
Work is a very different experience depending on which side to place yourself. For our
bosses work is how they get their money to make more money. For us, work is a miserable
way by which we can survive. The more we pay less, we earn less. The put us to work
faster, the more we have to work. Our interests are opposed, and there is a constant
struggle between bosses and workers at work - and the rest of society based on work. The
more we pay in rent or bus pass, so we have to work more to pay our rent or subscription.
The current level of wages, rights, hours and working conditions, and that of politics,
art and technology are a result of the current state of this class struggle. Simple action
to defend our interests in this struggle is the starting point of undermining capitalism.
COMMUNITY
"Well, it's about time that every rebel wakes up to the reality that the" people "and the
working class have nothing in common." - Joe Hill
Civilization is deeply divided. Most of us spend most of their time working and are mostly
poor, while the owners, who are mostly rich, manage and profit from our work. All
communities and institutions of society are built around this basic division. There is
division and community on racial, cultural, and language. There is division and community
around gender and age. There nation community and citizenship, as well as the division
between nations and those with and without citizenship. We are divided and united around
religion and ideology. We are brought together to buy and sell on the market. Some of
these identities there for thousands of years. Others are a direct result of the way we
work today. But now all are organized around capital. All are used to help our bosses
accumulate an increasing amount of our dead time stored in things and prevent fundamental
division of society from destroying it. Poor people from one country can be made to
identify with their bosses from the same country as such to fight against other poor
people in other countries. Workers / Makita harder organize a strike with workers / Does
that look different and speak a different language, especially if a group is considered
better than the other. These divisions and communities are reflected in the work and
reflects diziunea themselves.
While these divisions and exclusive communities are imposed on us from one side, on the
other hand we sell the image of a human community encompassing. This community is just as
imaginary and false. She rejects the fundamental divisions in society. Business owners
lead the governments and media, schools and prisons, welfare and police services. Our
lives are led by them. Newspapers and television shows their world view. Schools teach
about the great (or unfortunate) history of their society and produce a spectrum of
graduates and rejected suitable for different types of work. Governments provide services
to keep them in a state society running smoothly. And when things do not work, they are
available to the police, prisons and the army.
This is not our community.
ANTI-COMMUNITY
"The power of the type which the bourgeoisie still possesses in this time finds its source
in the absence of autonomy and independence of spirit in the ranks of the proletariat." -
Anton Pannekoek
They organize us against each other, but we can hold against them.
The whole idea behind the discussion about class and "proliferating" is to insist on the
fundamental mode in which people from different "communities" have essentially similar
experiences, and to show that people of the same "comuntitati" should actually hate . This
is the starting point in fighting the existing communities. When we begin to fight for our
own interests we see that others do the same. Prejudices disappear, and our anger is
directed where it belongs. We are not weak because we are divided. We are divided because
we are weak.
Existing communities become irrelevant as they are attacked and are attacked as they
become irrelevant. Racism and sexism no attraction when different colors workers and
working arm in arm struggle against class enemies. And that fight becomes more effective
as involving people from different "communities". It will not need a symbol for anything
can be bought or sold - money - when there will be no need to measure work time is stored
in those things. This could only happen if we make and produce things that really need not
to share with them. There will be no need for a government to manage society when society
is no longer divided between management and workforce - when people can manage their own
lives. To create these conditions must fight the existing conditions today.
This tendency to create community by fighting against the conditions of our lives - and
therefore against work, money, trade, borders, nations, governments, police, religion, and
race - was sometimes called "communism".
POLICY
"The more we are governed, the less we are free." - The Alarm (anarchist newspaper from
Chicago in the 1880s)
Governments are the model for political activity. Politicians representing countries,
regions, or "communities" different fight each other. We are encouraged / s to support
leaders with whom we disagree the least, and we're never really surprised / s when
advantage on us. All workers and radical ideas background of a politician become worthless
when it begins to govern. Whoever they are in the government, they have their own logic.
The fact that this society is divided between classes with opposing interests means that
there is always the risk of self-destruction. Government is there to ensure that this does
not happen. (In fact the government is there to ensure that one class do not destroy each
other and with the class society; n. Tr.) Whether the government is a dictatorship or a
democracy, it holds all the guns and will use them against its own people to ensure that
we go further work.
Not long ago a very unstable situation in a particular country could be defused through
nationalization of all industries in the country by creating a police state and by
appointment "communism". This kind of capitalism proved to be less effective and flexible
than free market capitalism old-fashioned. With the fall of the Soviet Union no longer a
Red Army to march and stabilize countries in this way, and Communist parties around the
world turns into mere social democratic parties.
A political party of the working class is a contradiction in terms - not because the
members of a particular party can not be mostly working class, but the maximum you can get
for the working class is to offer a voice policy. It allows our representatives to express
ideas on how our bosses should run this society - how to make money and keep us under
control. Whether support nationalization or privatization, more social expenditure or more
police (or both), the programs of political parties are different strategies for managing
capitalism.
Unfortunately Polt exist outside governments. Community leaders, professional activists
and unions want to place themselves between workers and bosses and be the mediators,
negotiators, media representatives, and finally peacekeepers. They fight to keep this
position. To do this you have to mobilize the working class in a controlled manner so as
to put pressure on politicians more oriented towards capitalists, and at the same time to
offer companies a workforce ready to work. That means we must scatter when we begin to
actively struggle. Sometimes I do this by negotiating concessions, sometimes betray us.
Politicians always ask us to vote, to stand back and allow them to negotiate organizers,
follow our leaders and specialists in a kind of passive participation. These
non-governmental politicians offer the government a way to maintain the status quo
peacefully, and in return receive job that we manage pain.
Political groups are bureaucratic. They tend to mirror the structures of work where
activity is controlled from the outside. Production specialists in politics. They are
built on a division between leaders and led, between representatives and represented,
between organizers and organized. This is not a wrong choice which create organizations
that can be remedied with a large dose of participatory democracy. It is a direct result
of working in groups and activities on politics trying to do - to manage a part of capitalism.
The only thing we are interested in the politics is its destruction.
ANTI-POLITICS
"Anarchism is not a beautiful utopia, nor an abstract philosophical idea, it is a social
movement of the working masses." - Dielo Truda Group
When we begin to fight against the conditions of our lives, there is a completely
different activity. Cease to expect a politician to come and change things for us. We do
it ourselves with other people in the working class.
Whenever breaks this resistance of the working class, politicians try to extinguish a wave
of petitions, lobbying and election campaigns forms. But when we fight for ourselves, our
work looks completely different from theirs. We take property from landlords and use it
for ourselves. We use militant tactics against our bosses and get to fight with the
police. We form groups that participate in each activity, and there is a division between
rulers and subjects. We do not fight for our leaders, for our bosses or for our country.
We fight for ourselves. This is not the ultimate form of democracy. We impose our needs on
society without any debate - needs that are directly contrary to the interests and wishes
of rich people everywhere. For us there is no way to talk on equal terms with this
society. This trend struggles of the working class go outside governments and policy and
opposes them, create new forms of organization that we place trust in nothing but in our
own abilities, was sometimes called "anarchism".
WAR
"To devastate the avenues where the wealthy live." - Lucy Parsons
So we are in a war - a class war.
There is no set of ideas, proposals, and organizational strategies that bring us victory.
There is no other solution but to win this war.
How long they will remain separate initiative and passive. Our response to the conditions
in which we live our lives remains an individual one: we quit, we move into neighborhoods
with smaller rent, join some subcultures and gangs, commit suicide, buying lottery
tickets, drug abuse and alcohol, go to church. Their world seems the only possibility. Any
hope for change is lived on an imaginary level - separated from our everyday lives. Things
they see from their gait, seizures and destruction of all involved.
When we go on the offensive we begin to recognize each other and fight in a collective
way. We use the ways that society depends on us to subvert it. We strike, sabotage,
revolt, deserted rebel and take over the property. Create organizations to amplify and
coordinate our activities. All sorts of new possibilities. Become more daring and more
aggressive in pursuing our class interests. They do not consist of a new government, or
reach new head. Our interests consist of destroying our own lifestyle - and therefore the
society that is built on account of this lifestyle.
We are the working class that we want to abolish work and class. We are the community of
people that we want the destruction of existing community. Our political program is to
destroy politics. To do this we must develop subversive trends currently existing to the
point where we have reshaped society everywhere. This was sometimes called "revolution."
the prole.info
/iasromania.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/munca-comunitate-politica-razboi/
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