“The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers can alone move these limits come continually into conflict with the methods of production employed by capital for its purposes, which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productivity of labour. The means unconditional development of the productive forces of society comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production. “
Category Archives: Economy
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Rouge Forum Update: Sky Falling and More!
[Illustration from Z Magazine]
Dear Friends,
The sky is falling. The good thing, and the bad thing, is we were right about that.
Below is a short synopsis of our current context and reasons why you should plan to be at the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan, May 15 to 17. Bring friends and submit a proposal.
The core issues remain inequality on the one hand and organized resistance on the other hand.
Inequality booms world-wide. In the US productivity went up on a near 90 degree vertical line. But wages remained stagnant, creating classic forms of overproduction (in sum, workers unable to buy products their class produces). Simultaneously, finance capital came to dominate and almost split away from productive capital, allowing the working class to maintain a standard of living by offering endless debt and falsely inflated home values. This is the video, Capitalism Hits the Fan.
Finance companies began to buy on margin inside a massive Ponzi scheme of mortgage securities. Fraud leaped in: Maddoff. Finance capital, became a barrier to itself, as Marx wrote years ago, and now we have real stagnation, banks awash in capital they will not loan, huge companies unable to sell goods, and workers losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands; a downward spiral that appears to have no bottom. GM just announced another 47,000 layoffs; demanded–with Chrysler–a total of about $39 billion from US taxpayers.
The aged millionaire Lady Astor complained bitterly about how finance capital operated. She commented on her 100th birthday, “Everyone became obsessed with money in the 1990’s and went higgledy-piggledy scampering after their fortunes,” she said. “People with money used to often care about the people who had no money. Not always, but often. Now, it is rare to find people with money who care at all about people with no money” (New York Times, March 30, 2002).
We witness the corporate state coming into being, the merger of government, business, and the military. Nearly $3 trillion will go to the banks, another $1-2 trillion to the military soon.
This is, as Foster and Magdoff make clear in their recent Monthly Review book, the Great Financial Crisis, a predicament that cannot be solved for working people within the system of capital. If reforms are to be won, they can only be won by linking immediate reform to profound social change. Every reform will be unsustainable.
Containing populations suffering from inequality will become the prime project of ruling classes everywhere, in schools and out. We have seen massive demonstrations and strikes in Europe already, often initiated by students and teachers.
The large existing organizations that claim to defend working people and students, like the unions, are absolutely unprepared and unfit to meet this crisis. The UAW agreed to the 47,000 layoffs (having already lost a million members) and more concessions still–when concessions never save jobs, other than bosses’ jobs.
In schools, we can foresee a sharpened effort to eliminate freedom, to sharpen the regimentation of curricula, to impose more sophisticated testing, and more militarization as well (perpetual war is real).
Here is AFT’s President Randy Weingarten demanding more national education standards which will invariably tied to high-stakes exams and married to the Obama project of privatized charters.
Criticism of the anti- war coalition United For Peace and Justice continues to flash around the net. Here is one of the latest if not the most troubling, attacking UFPJ’s leadership for abandoning the fight to prosecute war crimes:
Here are two pieces from Rouge Forum members regarding UFPJ:
http://www.richgibson.com/wheremovement.htm
http://www.richgibson.com/icing.htm
The latest Obama Bailout remains mostly a mystery, a secret. But here is a the simple rough outline that we have seen so far, though it makes little sense as a jobs or people stimulus.
And the quick upshot: White recession, black depression.
It is no stretch to see that we are watching the emergence of fascism, which has never solved the problems it claims to solve. Here is Chris Hedges on Inverted Totalitarianism.
Only the Rouge Forum in the US has, in organized fashion, taken up these issues for a decade and translated research into action. We also forged a culture of friendship and mutual respect, among many differing viewpoints, that many people see as the highlight of the conference. Join us!
And for a moment’s relief—Calvin and Hobbes got it a long time ago.
Thanks to Faith, Wayne, Amber, Wendy, Victoria, Tommie, Bob, Gina, Adam, Candace, Sharon Ag…., Della, Kathy Young, Bill, Greg, Emily, Don A., Jim B, Dave S, Gil G, Peter M, Vanessa, Molly, Dave S, SL, Bonnie Macintosh, Nancy S, Steve R and Ricky C, Kelly, Beau, and the Old Mole.
All the best and good luck to us, every one.
R
Student Protests Sweep Italy
While Americans waste their time discussing what position they’ll be in as they continued to get screwed by the bank bailouts and/or tweaking the reactionary education reform mess of No Child Left Behind students in Italy are saying “NO” to the Berlusconi government’s plan to impose business models on public services such as schools and universities that will see the disappearance of nearly 100,000 teaching positions in the next three years:
This “euthanasia of the universities”, as Gaetano Azzariti, professor of constitutional law at Rome university, calls it, was a political decision, sacrificing teaching and research to sectors of the economy. It means that for a university to hire a new lecturer now, two others have to leave its payroll. And it means more private sector funding in universities and higher tuition fees, leading to increased levels of debt for the poorest students. And on August 28, education minister Mariastella Gelmini presented another executive order, setting out budget cuts and plans to return to single teachers in primary schools (each class is normally taught by several different teachers), meaning a shorter school day for children (and reducing parents’ ability to go out to work). Other measures aimed to revive old practices, such as marks for behavior up to secondary level.
Since the start of the school year in September 2008, a national movement of parents, teachers and students resisting the neoliberal reforms of the Berlusconi government formed under the banner of “Non rubateci il futuro” (Don’t steal our future) and have spawned huge demonstrations and university occupations and general strikes.
“What’s developing is the self-organization of university students and casual workers,” explained Aliocha, a literature student at La Sapienza university who is also a casual in a bank. “Some people combine being casual workers and students or researchers, others are just casual workers. Together with the rank and file unions, we started the October 17 strike, and organized it in workplaces where job insecurity is an everyday reality.”
See Serge Quadruppani’s article at CounterPunch.
War means work
Petition directed toward the Obama administration to authorize the continued production of the F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft.
The Obamagoge and Capital vs The People
The Obamagoge and Capital vs The People
By Rich Gibson
19 million US homes stand vacant today. 600,000 people lost jobs in December, 2 million in all of 2008. The layoff rate only accelerates. Soon, public services will founder and homes will be re-valued, taxes unpaid. Every bit of this is coded with the sharpest end of many sticks aimed at those who were born with the least–but encompassing everyone who must work to live. It’s a whirlwind that is not going to end soon. In schools, we will see more and more kids homeless or moved by foreclosures, more hungry, sleepy kids, more incoherent delinquency, made reasonable only by a grasp of social circumstances.
The One who I named The Obamagogue seeks to use Keynesian measures to solve the waterfall of economic collapse and lost wars. Keynes was an elitist and an active racist who despised working people, who thought only the most favored should rule, but he sought to save capitalism. The myth is that he did.
He didn’t. Henry Morganthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury recognized that in the late thirties when he wrote that all that Keynesian spending had done little or nothing.
What ended the Great Depression was WW 2. Capitalism loves outright destruction. Thrives on that kind of chaos, and as an utterly fickle system, goes off and lets who ever wins at a given moment ride it.
What The Obamgogue’s spending will do is to bring out the lowest forms of opportunism in every sector of society which will, in effect, be saying, “what about ME!” That is why we see, right now, the AFL-CIO backing the most reactionary of the bailout measures, US protectionism.
It is also why we see the California Teachers Association leadership demanding a 1% sales tax hike, the most regressive of all taxes which will hit poor people hard, abandoning school workers’ most valuable allies, parents of children who need those educators the most.
So far, depending on which source one likes, maybe a trillion dollars has been doled out or will be doled out to the banksters by their procurers, the politicians.
That number will double, and another one or two trillion will go to the wars, which the US is going to lose (Afghans drove 300,000 Soviet troops out of their country, with help from the US—are we to think the Russians and Chinese don’t remember?).
There is, as Chalmers Johnson (author of Nemesis) insists, a relationship between imperialist expenditures and the economic collapse, something that few economists are willing to recognize, just as few Obamagogueites in education are not willing to admit that schools and capitalism exist in a relationship.
Arne Duncan is no mistake. He will intensify the three pronged project of most schooling: more curricula regimentation to regulate what is taught and how it is taught, to use high stakes tests to sort kids, and to deepen the militarization of schools. Where privatization is serviceable, Duncan will back privatization. Where he can get the working class to pay, through their taxes, for the mis-education of our children, he will do that. Arne Duncan leads, not public schools, but capitalist schools. Those who did not foresee this before The Obamagogue came to power should see it now, and say so.
Those who now claim The Obamagogue “betrayed them,” after a year of supporting his demagogic campaign and contributing to what only can be called national hysteria, should own up to the fact that their entire method of analysis was wrong, that they betrayed hundreds, maybe thousands of people themselves, and issue a self criticism about exactly why they got things completely wrong.
Is it not odd that nobody in power suggests that the way to halt foreclosures and keep the economy afloat is to just direct-pay people’s mortgages for a time certain, if they can prove they cannot pay?
But that is not how capitalist democracy, which is not democracy but an executive committee of the rich ruling behind populist rhetoric, bearing the same connection to democracy that the Pope does to, “do unto others,” works. Such a mortgage program would send up howls about “personal responsibility,” “welfare queens,” “socialism,” that were not sent up when the banksters began the robbery that continues today behind capital’s new sword and shield: The Obamagogue.
In education, a similar ploy might work. If we are to measure kids’ worth by test scores, and thus the wealth and health of the nation, why not just give the kids the test on the first day of school and simply work on it the rest of the year until everyone passes? But that would be cheating, eh?
But, beyond tongue in cheek measures, what is needed is a mass movement of resistance, rank and filers throwing off the bogus mis-leaders who steer struggle away from direct action, real resistors promoting test boycotts and freedom schools, and driving the Empire’s recruiters from campuses; in communities moving families right back into homes they are evicted from, at work places—no concessions, none, not one step back, in fact we want MORE and we will fight to get it, seizing plants, schools and properties; in the military, simply standing down, walking away from the wars for oil and profits; in sum, against the system of capital itself as it has obviously failed miserably everywhere in the world.
If we do not fight back, we will only see sharpened depression and war. Indeed the depth of that will be determined by the amount of resistance. Besides, the only way to be a truly whole person today, to be more than a loyal servant of Empire, is to protest and to join with like-minded people who, organized, can form a movement to win.
The Rouge Forum Conference is May 14 to 17 in Ypsilanti Michigan, Eastern Michigan U. You are welcome to submit a proposal or just come and join us.
You won’t buy our shitty cars so…
Karl Marx: did he get it all right?
The Times: Karl Marx: did he get it all right?
As financial markets crash, the reputation of Karl Marx soars. So has his time come at last? Our writer examines the evidence, while other commentators from the Left discuss his validity
Marx on the credit crisis
FromCapital (Volume 3, Chapter 30):
[The words “New York” and “Federal Reserve” added]
In a system of production, where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur — a tremendous rush for means of payment — when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity. At first glance, therefore, the whole crisis seems to be merely a credit and money crisis. And in fact it is only a question of the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. But the majority of these bills represent actual sales and purchases, whose extension far beyond the needs of society is, after all, the basis of the whole crisis. At the same time, an enormous quantity of these bills of exchange represents plain swindle, which now reaches the light of day and collapses; furthermore, unsuccessful speculation with the capital of other people; finally, commodity-capital which has depreciated or is completely unsaleable, or returns that can never more be realised again. The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the reproduction process [economy] cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England [Federal Reserve], give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values. Incidentally, everything here appears distorted, since in this paper world, the real price and its real basis appear nowhere, but only bullion, metal coin, notes, bills of exchange, securities. Particularly in centres where the entire money business of the country is concentrated, like London [New York], does this distortion become apparent; the entire process becomes incomprehensible; it is less so in centres of production.
Time to rewrite the social bargain with the rich
Here‘s a good column by the Boston’s Globe’s Derrick Z. Jackson.
Jackson argues that ‘no bailout should happen without recreating the nation’s social bargain with the rich. The nation can no longer afford the disparity where the average American CEO makes 344 times the pay of the average worker, according to the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. The CEOs and their boards should pay toward the bailout before a penny of that possible $2,333 comes out of the pockets of Americans. There is more than enough money among the financial elites to pay for the bailout.”
For example:
- The Institute for Policy Studies last week calculated that a securities transaction tax of a penny for every $4 invested would add $100 billion a year to the treasury. Had such a tax been in place after the 2001 Enron scandal, it would have added up to the current cost of the bailout.
- A wealth surcharge of no more than 3 percent on households worth more than $10 million would add another $300 billion. In response to the news this year that two-thirds of American corporations paid no income tax between 1998 and 2005, a corporate minimum income tax could add another $60 billion.
- The institute said a 50 percent tax on salaries of $5 million or more and 70 percent on salaries of $10 million or more – until the bailout is over – would add another $105 billion. Killing overseas tax shelters, loopholes for excessive CEO pay and the sale of mansions, and creating a progressive inheritance tax would add another nearly $300 billion.
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Education
CounterPunch: Quoting Friedman All the Way …
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Education
By TODD ALAN PRICE
We live in dubious times when staunch deregulators howl for vigorous and immediate regulation.
Lessons from the past
In 1983, the release by the Reagan administration of the report A Nation at Risk, launched over two decades of attacks on public education by right wing foundations and corporate pundits. Teachers and students were ill equipped to defend against the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute, just a few of the many shock troops aiming their sights on the public schools.