Marxism 2009

Here is the final timetable for Marxism 2009 with full details of speakers and meetings.

If you are looking to attend some of these workshops and meetings here is some useful information.

Coup in Honduras: Military Ousts President Manuel Zelaya, Supporters Defy Curfew and Take to the Streets

In the first military coup in Central America in a quarter of a century, the Honduran military has ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. Former Parliamentary speaker Roberto Micheletti, who was sworn in as Zelaya’s replacement on Sunday, has imposed a two-day nationwide curfew. But hundreds of Zelaya supporters remain on the streets, and shots were fired at protesters near the presidential palace early Monday morning.

See latest from Democracy Now

Britain Today: Solidarity proves crucial as sacked workers achieve Total victory

Total workers have won a stunning victory to beat back bosses’ attacks on their unions.

Cuba50

CUBA 50 is a hub for any event, large or small that aims to celebrate and showcase the best of Cuban culture and talent in 2009.

From world class touring music and dance to national and regional theatres, galleries and exhibitions, Cuba 50 will be out there offering something for everyone, from live performances and film festivals to schools workshops and seminars.

Alongside sporting links to the Olympiad and Sustainable Living initiatives, this will be the biggest ever celebration of Cuban culture, of art, music, education, dance, film, photography and theatre.

From a country renowned for its vibrant cultural mix, events will be taking place across the UK throughout 2009 and culminating with the Cuba 50 highlight, a major London festival in Summer 2009.

From the rhythms of salsa and the cha cha cha, to the beauty of Afro Cuban dance to the precision of formal ballet; theatre, in a specially commissioned series of readings and performances of Cuban drama; seminars and talks from leading cultural commentators; art and photography exhibitions in some of London’s leading galleries; Cuban film festivals around the country; and the fantastic Barbican Cuba50 festival, featuring some of the world’s best musicians.

People across the world have come to love Cuba through seeing and experiencing the island’s culture, born of hundreds of years of history and a rich mix of cultures.

This is a unique festival and the biggest mix of performances and events to celebrate Cuban culture in Europe – Cuba 50!

Check out the Cuba50 website for more info.

Britain Today: London Postal Workers’ Strike June 2009

London postal workers are out on a one day strike in protest of the governments plans to part-privatise Royal Mail. Interview with Mark Dolan, Area Delivery Rep.

http://socialist.net/

Britain Today: Lindsey is a battleground for the future of the unions

by Simon Basketter in Lincolnshire

There is a war going on in the construction industry, and its outcome will affect us all.

Britain Today: A Look At The Recent Factory Occupations in London

April 2009

Hundreds of workers occupy three Visteon car manufacturing factories in Britain after the management closed them down, laying off the entire workforce with no notice, violating their contracts. This is reminiscent of the factory occupations of the 1970s.

Read full article here:
http://www.socialist.net/visteon-work…

Intellectualism Is For Everyone

By Tamara Pearson

Tamara Pearson’s ZSpace Page

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[Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications]

(Venezuela) — Karl Marx lay down on the couch, poured some cheap sherry into a glass jar, and balanced it carefully on his bare chest. A Nigerian oil worker sipped on palm wine as President Yar’Adua spoke of nationalism and country as though blowing through a straw. A young Swiss housewife poured herself a shot of whiskey. A Venezuelan writer and community council representative walked into The Widow, and asked for a beer and pastel. And then they all wondered. Really, really, is it possible to collectively and democratically make a new kind of world?

~

The first essay I wrote at university started off with dialogue. My teacher, an ex communist party member, gave me a distinction for the “thorough research” but told me to refer to the university first year student guide about how to write an essay. Essays do not contain dialogue or narrative. They are clearly structured arguments with a beginning that summarises the …blah blah. I did not put dialogue into an essay again. To do so, was to lose marks. To lose marks was to possibly fail a course and increase the debt I still owe the Australian government.

~

During high school and university, I worked in supermarkets. I wore a big black jumper in winter. I liked big jumpers, and black and white was the “checkout chick” uniform. One day the manager told me I was sloppy, and if I did not professionalise myself, I would lose my job.

~

Capitalism is very limited. It tells us that more money is more happiness and that career paths are the only paths to success and a fulfilling life. Schools train us to be workers, not to think, or explore, discover, to love learning. They also teach us to be competitive, not to work together, in preparation for the future career life. We learn quickly to stay inside the square. To dress how we’re told, to write resumes like this, poetry like that, to wear make up at job interviews if we are women, to get married, to get a mortgage, to work then go home and watch TV. And to write boring essays.

~

If we can’t think outside the squares, how can we think beyond capitalism?

For a creative revolution freed from formal non fiction and speeches

Where capitalism puts fences around us, guiding where we walk and how, as revolutionaries seeking to create the opposite world, we should not limit ourselves to non fiction and speech oriented forums as our main tools for arguing against capitalism and for revolution. We shouldn’t worship these methods as the most serious, legitimate, disciplined ones and as the highest expression of what we are striving for.

These tools are important and I would never argue that they should not be used, but rather we need to also see poetry, song, art, novels, dance, and so on as equally legitimate and strive more to use them. Where capitalism is boringly restrained in its ideas of beauty, life, and humanity, communication, and thought, we need to be more creative.

Intellectualism is for everyone

Intellectualism, that is- thinking and theorising and understanding the world and society, is for everyone. Currently the left ‘first world’ intellectual world is dominated by, frankly, white, mature aged, university educated men. That is, people who in this unequal world, feel that they have a right to write, a right to be listened to. A right that a lot of blue collar workers, many women, youth, the uneducated, immigrants, and so on, do not feel they have and do not assert, despite their life experience being education enough to have a voice in this future world that we want to construct.

Capitalist education institutions and so on create and perpetuate this disparity. From an early age we are taught that politics is academic, that it is done by the Napoleans and Politicians of the world and that it is not for everyday people. It is an abstract theory to write essays about not something lived in our houses and workplaces. They make politics exclusive and most people feel hostile towards and unwelcome to participate in the academic world.

The disparity between those who write and comment on politics is equally present between those who read that writing. Therefore, in order to increase participation in revolutionary thought, and to also reach more people, we need to embrace more creative methods with which people feel more comfortable.

Australian Aboriginals, to generalise a little, told their history and the history of their land with oral stories and cave drawings. Diego Rivera painted murals depicting Mexico’s history, its 1910 revolution and its society. He painted his first one in a school in Mexico city armed with a pistol, to defend himself against right wing students. Mafalda, an Argentinian comic series about a 6 year old girl who criticises the world with an acuteness rendered all the more shattering because it is a child saying it, is read by millions still, forty years after its creation. Here I have even seen a version of the Communist Manifesto, written in comic form. Its argument however is still exactly the same.

Rather than being abstract, politics is felt, lived, real, and personal. It’s in our psychology, our relationships, our self esteem, our worry, stress, depression, happiness, our daily routine, our expectations. Novels, therefore, are one good medium for making politics real and making the link between the reader’s own personal struggles and the larger historic class struggles. A link the dominant capitalist ideology would rather we didn’t notice. There have been a lot of good novels written about struggles- Marge Piercy’s novel on the early women’s movement, Sembene Ousmane’s novel about the Senegal train strikes, Frank Hardy’s novels about the Australian communist party… These novels bring those battles to life and enable a reader far away by distance or time, to connect to those struggles in a way the BBC news for example, really doesn’t (Those poor bombed people in Iraq, but that has nothing to do with me..).

I went to a small art exhibition in the culture centre, on the 3^rd floor. The rooms were empty, an attendant slept in a corner. The paintings talked to no one. In the long term, I think we’d like a world where everyone feels comfortable walking into art galleries and talking with people about the messages of the paintings. In the short term, let’s take those paintings down from the 3^rd floor and put them in the street.

Let’s destroy the old conception of intellectualism which sees thinking, ideas, theories, stuck in dry day long lectures in stale white halls away from the places where people are meeting and venting and working and struggling.

Revolution should be a democratic, mass discussion, not centred on individuals

According to the largely accepted history, Napoleon did this, Bolivar did that, and Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia. The way history is told reflects the history teller’s values and perpetuates them, as history is used to justify what is done in the present. History is talked about (in the classroom, in most published books, and in newspapers) in terms of single person actors, who are also generally men and people of power. Even history that ventures to recognise that there were strikes and movements, likes to pick out one or two special leaders, who are also 90% of the time, men. And in Australian history, they are usually not immigrants, Aboriginals, or gay people. Likewise, the writers of history – the famous quoted ones, are mostly the same sort of people, and rarely those who were actually involved in the strikes, the movements, affected by the depression or whatever. Imagine the psychological impact this has on working class people or on women or non white people etc. How are we supposed to value ourselves as actors in society if we are not written about as such? And doesn’t all this apply to the way we talk about and do politics as well?

History and politics should be ‘written’ by the actors as well as the outside observers.  Besides, the single-actor point of view really obscures the economic classes. Even capitalism doesn’t have single actors- George Bush was more a spokesperson for a whole class rather than an actor on his own, and of course a direct puppet for a range of US business and political interests.

Likewise, when (some people) quote Alan Woods as though he is the only person with any ideas, or when we organise forums and one person talks for two hours and then there are 15 minutes for questions (questions, not comments mind you), or when only a small percentage of us (revolutionaries) are writing articles that influence what we do and how we view the current political situation, aren’t we just perpetuating their message that history and politics have a few key actors and that’s it. That isn’t to say that there are not leaders and there are not people with great ideas. But there are some things we can do better and differently. We can make forums more participatory and less passive. We can encourage the most repressed and exploited people to argue in ways that they are comfortable with, and respect those ways.

Participatory educational forums, discussions, and meetings simply require the implementation of basic progressive teaching techniques. Minimal Teacher Talking Time (even in a classroom situation where the teacher supposedly knows everything and the students nothing- such as second language teaching) means students are actively participating more and learning more.

A student listening for an hour learns a few things. A student somewhat active, by taking notes, learns a little more. A student participating in pair work, group work, standing up and doing interviews and going around a class room asking others what they think, with the teacher quietly organising the discussion, learns the most. Pair and small group discussion before larger group discussion also gives participants a chance to think about what they want to say and bounce it off over people, to organise and develop their ideas, and to get into ‘talking mode’ (as opposed to the passive listening mode we fall into during long lectures), and they are then more likely to contribute to the all in larger group discussion, no matter how much more ‘educated’ or experienced the leading talker or facilitator is. They are also more likely to listen to what the lead speaker has to say. We need to start using such methodology in our forums, making them less ‘teacher’, one-person-knows-all centric, and more participatory.

~

It was a community day in Los Curos, a town climbing the slopes of the Andes of Venezuela. Children made kites in the newly restored park, others danced in the tennis courts, doctors gave out vaccinations, poetry writers handed out their books and discussed them, artists sold their sculptures, and on the side of the tennis court community members painted a mural. There was a really old man, there were two roughly 19 year old, rather gorgeous young men, there were kids about 12 – and they all painted together. Art, dance, story telling and so on have the advantage that they can be the work and expression and argument of a collective of people, not just one person.

~

Or there is that mural in Bellas Artes in Caracas, if you haven’t seen it, I wish you could. It tells Venezuela’s history in colour and virtually without words. We stopped there for half an hour one day, walking slowing along the wall- starting at the fruit poured into the sea, ending at the man watching Disney, I think it was, on TV.  It was history in colour, in its beauty and injustice, with nameless crowds of people being repressed, and rebelling. They (the dominant class) would have history be black and white, numbers, dates, names, and dryness. They’d have our history of struggle be dusty and forgotten and misunderstood.

People communicate and learn in different ways

Related to education, we also need to acknowledge that a lot of people do not learn by reading large volumes of non fiction. This is not just related to the points mentioned about ‘the right to read’ and so on, but it is also a scientific fact that some people are usually either visual, audio, or movement-based learners and communicators.

Education under socialism, and our methods for arguing for socialism in the struggle for that society, should cater for the different ways people learn and shouldn’t elevate reading large volumes as the most serious, some people simply do not learn that way, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Remember making spelling lists in primary school? Writing the words over and over again.  Or I think of my comrade BR, who had a brain seizure (sorry I forget the medical term) and she had to learn to read all over again. Or deaf people. Or people who don’t speak the local language. Or people who for whatever reason, have short attention spans. The world we’re fighting for is a more inclusive world, lets see that reflected in the ways we argue for that world.

Creative methods of communication are powerful and rebellious

That song ‘I was only 19′ about the Vietnam war and how…”The ANZAC legend

neglected to mention

the mud

the fear

the blood

the tears

the tension…”

… gives me throat lumps even though I wasn’t born yet when the Vietnam war happened. It makes me hate imperialism and nationalism and see that soldiers are nothing but unprepared tools in Their war.

~

The new military government in Chile in 1973 understood the powerfulness of song and art. They tortured and killed Victor Jara. They banned many traditional Andean instruments. Jara himself said:

US imperialism understands very well the magic of communication through music and persists in filling our young people with all sorts of commercial tripe. With professional expertise they have taken certain measures: first, the commercialization of the so-called ‘protest music’; second, the creation of ‘idols’ of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints as the other idols of the consumer music industry – they last a little while and then disappear. Meanwhile they are useful in neutralizing the innate spirit of rebellion of young people. The term ‘protest song’ is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term ‘revolutionary song’.

~

The innate spirit of rebellion of young people.

Funnelled into university

Essays

Funnelled into suit jobs

Assembly line jobs

House mortgages

Or

Into street art, rock revolution, history rap, rhythmic rebellion, general strikes, and a whole new world..

~

Powerful. Threatening. I’m talking about the Subversive songs of the South African anti-apartheid movement. The poetry of Pakistani women who are not even listened to by other revolutionaries, let alone seen in the street.  The bible or the Koran or the Torah, one long creative and poetic novel you might say, which combined with that organised and powerful institution of religion, has been extremely powerful. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, that argued for socialism but is remembered for the disgust it caused over meat industry practices, and at least saw reform in that area. Catcher in the Rye was banned from schools for a while in the US, for the influence it was having on children and teenagers. But noone’s banning our academic journals. (At least not now). Because that’s just theory (apparently).

Creative forms bring us together and negate the borders and alienation of capitalism

My boyfriend is a young Venezuelan with dark black eyes who does not speak English. We argue about Cuba and Denmark and the role of the individual in revolution and if there is a managerial class and if parties and power are inevitably bad. He says yes, I say no.

~

We sat on warm but wet university grass, him and I, and he read out poetry by a local Meridenian, about the earth and global warming, about beauty.  And I melted.  We were born on opposite sides of the world, we are different colours, different genders, and from different revolutionary backgrounds. But poetry brings us together.

~

Poetry reminds us that we want the same thing, despite all that.

A new blue world.

~

After we won the referendum in February this year, people spontaneously gathered in the main plaza to celebrate. There were red flags everywhere. Some young guys played drums to the rhythm of Caribbean passion. People danced. Strangers danced to strangers’ music, danced together.

~

Capitalism makes us strangers. Art helps negate that. Together with solidarity in long struggle.

And creative forms are humanising

There are statistics about the number of homeless people in the United States. There are photos, of tents, and of grey people in grey clothing, expressionless. Then, police and bored youth beat up homeless people and get away with it. They are following a similar psychology to that which sustains racism and maltreatment of others. The one that says Iraqis are evil, are not human, are all the same. That homeless people are evil, are not human, are all the same. 1 billion starving people are starved, thinned black people with long faces, are all the same, are not us, are not our problem.

And then there was a youtube video. A homeless man, an ex prisoner, sang a song and played his guitar.

There was a drawing, of more expressionalistic value than any high priced gallery-ed art: An Iraqi child had drawn fences around his house and his family broken on the lawn.

An African woman wrote a novel about lesbianism and love.

And suddenly that kind of dehumanizing ideology that turns Capitalism’s victims into a powerless insignificant mass, is broken.

We are intelligent, we are creative, we are hurting and human and varied.

We are worth fighting for.

~

We pick up pen or paintbrush or puppets and we unravel the tangle and we start to understand what is going on and we tell other people about it. Our revolution should be done with reason and humanity. With emotion, passion, and seriousness and commitment. Creativity can express that.

Creativity is the ability to imagine that this world is wrong, despite the propaganda. And it is the ability to imagine that another world is possible.

~

We are responsible for this delicate world

for its midnight migraines, its thrashing fevers, its fallen trees,

its fallen masses of thirdworld,

their voices stolen and put in a box somewhere,

One day that box will explode and a rainbow of confettied sounds will pour out and paint the planet a different colour,

a colour we don’t know yet.

~

We all know it takes a good argument to convince people that socialism is possible. The historical arguments, the class and materialist arguments. But to really know that socialism is possible and to dedicate our lives to fighting for it, we must be able to imagine it- like any goal, we need to know its real and reachable.

Struggles and systems like those in Cuba, Venezuela, Nepal, etc- show us that. They make it all concrete. Solidarity in the workplace, or multitudes marching, show us that. But so does art, in all its forms. Marge Piercy’s ‘Woman on the edge of time’ enabled me to really imagine a new world. A photo of happy, young, female doctors in Cuba, enabled me to imagine that.

~

Art is full of questions. And questioning, we stop seeing capitalism as natural.

And because it’s a war of ideas and against our cultural domination

Zafra Miriam is teaching dance in a few of the steep hillside barrios of Caracas. She told me,

“Up in Los Frailes there’s this girl. She’s about 12 I think but she looks 15. She dresses hot. Of course she has no idea what she’s doing, she’s just following industry standards. Anyway, the community up there is quite organised and they were putting something together for Mothers’ Day. She does this dance with a couple of girls, one who was 8- don’t get me started…It was pure child porn to the worst possible regaeton… and I talked to the girl. I said, “Dance is a form of communication, you know that. What is it you’re trying to say?” No answer. “What is it you want them to say back to you?” No answer. I told her to think about it, told her she has so much more to offer the world than ass wiggling.”

Zafra said, “it’s about treating them with respect, about supporting street art, not being a slave to the industry produced stuff…any learning situation where people confront a challenge in a supportive group is a form of community building…and we’re exploring music that’s not reggaeton, it’s a kind of cultural revolution.”

Fidel Castro said, ‘Lies affect knowledge, conditioned reflection affects the capacity to think’.

~

Capitalism’s hegemony affects our spirituality- not religion, I mean our heart, our desire to struggle, our humanity, our attitude towards our fellow beings, our curiosity.

~

On the capitalist assembly line of human beings there are a few key machines: Education, Media, and the Need to Survive. This assembly line makes human beings who *want* to work for rich, who *want* to buy their products, who look up to them and aspire to be like them. Who basically want to be exploited over and over again in so many different ways.

Our education of ourselves is one of our biggest weapons against one of their biggest weapons. They have a whole set of machinery set up to convince us to have THEIR values. We have to fight that machine with all the weapons we’ve got. Bring it on.

~

“Have you read my latest book of poetry?” Endes asks me in the artists’ plaza where there is cheap coffee and people painting portraits. Another time, watching a pre-election car parade I saw Omar. “Ah Tamara, good to see you, how are you? What have you been doing?” Etc. And he left me with a copy of his book of short stories.

Thanks to the government’s publishing program the number of *out and proud* local poets has multiplied massively. Then there are all the murals, the free books (children’s books, history, theory, classic novels) handed out from the backs of trucks, at fairs, at protests, at youth camps and from tents in the plaza. There are the children in the barrios learning to play the violin. There is dance, theatre, choir, poetry reading in the plaza and in the pub, TV and filming collectives and Community radio. Not to mention the literacy programs and the Bolivarian University.

I think there is a lot of room for improvement in the cultural revolution here (for want of a better phrase), but now I think people here are better armed with their own real history, with tools to communicate, with the ability to express themselves and to be creative. And like that, they will be harder to repress.

It will be harder to convince them that work is not exploitation and that buying is liberating and that the world is free when it is not.

~

Let’s rap against imperialism standing on milk crates in pedestrian tunnels. Let’s put struggle poetry on stickers and put those stickers on ATMS, in public toilets, on vending machines and parking meters. Let’s print more stories, write more novels, paint more murals, put comics in our newspapers and dance at our social events. Our arguments, our messages belong in meetings, in schools, in protests, in the memories of warn out repressed people about to sleep. In late night pub conversations, in park and plaza conversations, as shared conversations between strangers watching a play. Let’s take the war of classes, of media, of ideas, into what ever spaces we can, involving more and more people. Take the abstraction out of politics and put it into the street and the living world.

This is a call for the left and for revolutionaries to break with old paradigms of education and argument and to take art, or culture, seriously. To use it to wake people up, to communicate, to argue, to show people how beautiful that other world we are proposing, is.

Source: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21749

Chavez may end patents on medicine in Venezuela

CARACAS, June 21 (Reuters) – President Hugo Chavez has vowed to shake up the rules governing intellectual property rights on medicines and other products in Venezuela, the socialist’s latest move against the private sector.

“A song is intellectual property, but an invention or a scientific discovery should be knowledge for the world, especially medicine,” Chavez said late on Saturday.

“That a laboratory does not allow us to make a medicine because they have the patent, no, no, no,” Chavez said.

Chavez, who has nationalized many Venezuela industries and is critical of the private sector, ordered his trade minister to analyze the patent rules in the OPEC nation.

“Patents have become a barrier to production, and we cannot allow them to be barriers to medicine, to life, to agriculture,” said the minister, Eduardo Saman, who previously headed Venezuela’s patent agency.

“We are revising all the doctrines and laws related to patents, which should be compatible with the international treaties that we have signed and respect and honor.”

Chavez recently criticized Swedish packaging maker Tetra Pak, saying its patents on cartons were limiting production in Venezuela.

(Reporting by Frank Jack Daniel, editing by Vicki Allen)

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN2148323120090621?rpc=401&

21st Century Socialism: What If Workers Managed Themselves?

“Initially we never had in mind workers control, we were just struggling for our jobs. We spent two years picketing at the gates before we decided to take it over. Through this process we developed political maturity very fast, not just through our own personal struggle, but the broader political struggles of the constituent assembly and the recall referendum” – Marino Mora, worker at self managed Venezuelan Factory

Worker self-management (or autogestion) is a form of workplace decision-making in which the workers themselves agree on choices (for issues like customer care, general production methods, scheduling, division of labour etc.) instead of an owner or traditional supervisor telling workers what to do, how to do it and where to do it. Examples of such self-management include the Spanish Revolution during the Spanish Civil War, Titoist Yugoslavia, the “recovered factories” movement in Argentina (in Spanish, fábrica recuperada), the LIP factory in France in the 1970s, the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation which is the Basque Country’s largest corporation, AK Press in the United States, etc.

In Argentina’s recovered factories movement, workers took over control of the factories in which they had worked, commonly after bankruptcy, or after a factory occupation to circumvent a lock out. The Spanish verb recuperar means not only “to get back”, “to take back” or “to reclaim” but also “to put back into good condition”. Although initially referring to industrial facilities, the term may also apply to businesses other than factories (i.e. Hotel Bauen in Buenos Aires).

English-language discussions of this phenomenon may employ several different translations of the original Spanish expression other than recovered factory. For example, recuperated factory/business, reclaimed factory, and worker-run factory have been noted. The phenomenon is also known as “autogestion,” which comes from the French word for self-management (applied to factories, popular education systems, and other uses).

Workers’ self-management is often the decision-making model used in co-operative economic arrangements such as worker cooperatives, workers’ councils, in participatory economics, and similar arrangements where the workplace operates without a boss.

Critics argue that this would necessitate consulting all employees for every tiny issue and so be time-consuming, inefficient and thus ineffective. However, as seen in real world examples, only large-scale decisions are made by all employees during council meetings and small decisions are made by those implementing them while coordinating with the rest and following more general agreements.

Theory

Autogestion was first theorized by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon during the first part of the 19th century. It then became a primary component of some trade union organizations, in particular revolutionary syndicalism which was introduced in late 19th century France and guild socialism in early 20th century Britain, although both movements collapsed in the early 1920s. French trade-union CFDT (“Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail”) included worker self-management in its 1970 program, before later abandoning it. The philosophy of workers’ self-management has been promoted by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) since its founding in the United States in 1905.

History

One significant experiment with workers’ self-management took place during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939).

In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, Titoist Yugoslavia advocated a socialist version of autogestion, leading to a break with Moscow, which practiced central planning and state ownership of industry. The economy of Yugoslavia was organized according to the theories of Tito and – more directly – Edvard Kardelj. Croatian scientist Branko Horvat also made a significant contribution to the theory of socialism (radničko samoupravljanje) as practiced in Yugoslavia. With the exception of a recession in the mid-1960s, the country’s economy prospered under Titoist Socialism. Unemployment was low, the education level of the work force steadily increased. The life expectancy (which was about 72 years) and living standards of Yugoslav citizens was nearly equal to the life expectancy and living standards of citizens of “western” capitalist countries such as the United States. Due to Yugoslavia’s neutrality and its leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslav companies exported to both Western and Eastern markets. Yugoslav companies carried out construction of numerous major infrastructural and industrial projects in Africa, Europe and Asia.

After May 68 in France, Lip factory, a clockwork factory based in Besançon, became self-managed starting in 1973, after the management’s decision to liquidate it. The LIP experience was an emblematic social conflict of post-68 in France. CFDT (the CCT as it was referred to in Northern Spain), trade-unionist Charles Piaget led the strike in which workers claimed the means of production. The Unified Socialist Party (PSU), which included former Radical Pierre Mendès-France, was in favour of autogestion or self-management.

In the 1970s, the Spanish Legitimist Carlist movement split among the supporters of Don Carlos Hugo’s new Carlist Party, confederalist and autogestionary, and his brother Sixto Enrique de Borbón’s Traditionalist Communion, extreme-right.

South America

In October 2005 the first Encuentro Latinoamericano de Empresas Recuperadas (”Latin American Encounter of Recovered Companies”) took place in Caracas, Venezuela, with representatives of 263 such companies from different countries living through similar economical and social situations. The meeting had, as its main outcome, the Compromiso de Caracas (Caracas’ Commitment); a vindicating text of the movement.

Throughout the 1990s in Argentina’s southern province of Neuquén, drastic economic and political events occurred where the citizens ultimately rose up. Although the first shift occurred in a single factory, bosses were progressively fired throughout the province so that by 2005 the workers of the province controlled most of the factories.

In the wake of the 2001 economic crisis, about 200 Argentine companies were “recovered” by their workers and turned into co-operatives. Prominent examples include the Brukman factory, the Hotel Bauen and FaSinPat (formerly known as Zanon). As of 2005, about 15,000 Argentine workers run recovered factories^[1].

The phenomenon of fabricas recuperadas (”recovered factories”) is not new in Argentina. Rather, such social movements were completely dismantled during the so-called “Dirty War” in the 1970s. Thus, during Héctor Cámpora’s first months of government (May-July 1973), a rather moderate and left-wing Peronist, approximately 600 social conflicts, strikes and factory occupations had taken place.^[2]

Many recovered factories are run co-operatively and all workers receive the same wage. Important management decisions are taken democratically by an assembly of all workers, rather than by professional managers.

The proliferation of these “recoveries” has led to the formation of a recovered factory movement, which has ties to a diverse political network including Peronists, anarchists and communists. Organizationally, this includes two major federations of recovered factories, the larger Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (or National Movement of Recuperated Businesses, or MNER) on the left and the smaller Movimiento Nacional de Fabricas Recuperadas (National Movement of Recuperated Factories or MNFR) on the right^[3]. Some labor unions, unemployed protestors (known as piqueteros), traditional worker cooperatives and a range of political groups have also provided support for these take-overs. In March 2003, with the help of the MNER, former employees of the luxury Hotel Bauen occupied the building and took control of it.

One of the highest difficulties such a movement faces is its relation towards the classic economic system, as most classically managed firms refused, for various reasons (among which ideological hostility to the very principle of autogestion) to work and deal with recovered factories. Thus, isolated recovered factories find it easier to work together in building an alternative economic system and thus manage to reach a critical size and power which enables it to negotiate with the ordinary capitalistic firms.

Source: Wikipedia

See also Socialism in a nutshell

What is Exploitation?

For examples of self managed factories watch the following documentary

http://balafria.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/what-would-a-socialist-alternative-to-capitalism-look-like/

See also http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/solidarity_sanitarios_maracay.htm

It’s Time To Create A Socialist Alternative

An open letter to the left from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)

Dear comrade,

Labour’s vote collapsed to a historic low in last week’s elections as the right made gains. The Tories under David Cameron are now set to win the next general election.

The British National Party (BNP) secured two seats in the European parliament. Never before have fascists achieved such a success in Britain.

The result has sent a shockwave across the labour and anti-fascist movements, and the left.

The meltdown of the Labour vote and the civil war engulfing the party poses a question – where do we go from here?

The fascists pose a threat to working class organisations, black, Asian and other residents of this country – who BNP führer Nick Griffin dubs “alien” – our civil liberties and much else.

History teaches us that fascism can be fought and stopped, but only if we unite to resist it.

The SWP firmly believes that the first priority is to build even greater unity and resistance to the fascists over the coming months and years.

The BNP believes it has created the momentum for it to achieve a breakthrough. We have to break its momentum.

The success of the anti-Nazi festival in Stoke and the numbers of people who joined in anti-fascist campaigning shows the basis is there for a powerful movement against the Nazis.

The Nazis’ success will encourage those within the BNP urging a “return to the streets”.

This would mean marches targeting multiracial areas and increased racist attacks. We need to be ready to mobilise to stop that occurring.

Griffin predicted a “perfect storm” would secure the BNP’s success. The first part of that storm he identified was the impact of the recession.

The BNP’s policies of scapegoating migrants, black and Asian people will divide working people and make it easier to drive through sackings, and attacks on services and pensions.

Unity is not a luxury. It is a necessity. If we do not stand together we will pay the price for a crisis we did not cause.

The second lesson from the European elections is that we need a united fightback to save jobs and services.

If Cameron is elected he will attempt to drive through policies of austerity at the expense of the vast majority of the British people.

But the Tories’ vote fell last week and they are nervous about pushing through attacks.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne told business leaders, “After three months in power we will be the most unpopular government since the war.”

We need to prepare for battle.

But there is a third and vital issue facing the left and the wider working class. The crisis that has engulfed Westminster benefited the BNP.

The revelations of corruption, which cabinet members were involved in, were too much for many Labour voters, who could not bring themselves to vote for the party.

One answer to the problem is to say that we should swallow everything New Labour has done and back it to keep David Cameron, and the BNP, out.

Yet it would take a miracle for Gordon Brown to be elected back into Downing Street.

The danger is that by simply clinging on we would be pulled down with the wreckage of New Labour.

Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS civil service workers’ union, has asked how, come the general election, can we ask working people to cast a ballot for ministers like Pat McFadden.

McFadden is pushing through the privatisation of the post office.

Serwotka proposes that trade unions should stand candidates.

Those who campaigned against the BNP in the elections know that when they said to people, “Don’t vote Nazi” they were often then asked who people should vote for.

The fact that there is no single, united left alternative to Labour means there was no clear answer available.

The European election results demonstrate that the left of Labour vote was small, fragmented and dispersed.

The Greens did not make significant gains either. The mass of Labour voters simply did not vote. We cannot afford a repeat of that.

The SWP is all too aware of the differences and difficulties involved in constructing such an alternative.

We do not believe we have all the answers or a perfect prescription for a left wing alternative.

But we do believe we have to urgently start a debate and begin planning to come together to offer such an alternative at the next election, with the awareness that Gordon Brown might not survive his full term.

One simple step would be to convene a conference of all those committed to presenting candidates representing working class interests at the next election.

The SWP is prepared to help initiate such a gathering and to commit its forces to such a project.

We look forward to your response.

Yours fraternally.

Socialist Workers Party

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The following should be read alongside this article:

» Time to fight back together

For more information or to show your support email openletter@swp.org.uk

See also:

Open Letter to the left responses: How we can join together

What Would A Socialist Alternative To Capitalism Look Like?

What would a socialist alternative to capitalism be like?

The following documentary on the social change taking place in Venezuela gives us an insight into the type of changes that would follow if a socialist government were ever to be elected.

Venezuelan News Round Up

Chavez: Venezuela progressing towards food independence

CARACAS, June 14 (Xinhua) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday that the government has set targets for exporting food to neighbor countries and is progressing towards food independence.

During his weekly radio and television broadcast “Alo Presidente,” Chavez said Venezuela’s cattle herd now topped 12 million heads and is estimated to rise to 14 million by 2012.

Chavez hosted Sunday’s show from the La Bandera farm in southwestern state Tachira, a model socialist dairy farm set up on land seized from drug traffickers.

The Venezuelan government has seized 50 farms from traffickers, equivalent to 12,000 hectares suitable for livestock.

La Bandera now has 1,985 heads of cattle, up from 1,300 18 months ago; and produces 38 percent more milk, the Venezuelan president said.

Source: http://www.chinaview.cn

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Venezuela takes on Tetra Pak

Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has threatened to ignore international patents and manufacture Tetra Paks to help reduce the need for imports.

Chávez told the audience of his weekly Aló Presidente show that patents were “universal knowledge” and Venezuela had the materials to produce the cartons itself. “We don’t have to be subject to capitalist laws,” he said.

Importing Tetra Pak materials is said to have cost the South American country $63m (£38.5m) in May alone. Tetra Pak was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.

Chávez targeted overseas packaging in March when he seized 1,500 hectares of eucalyptus forest belonging to Irish packaging giant Smurfit Kappa that he said should be destined for food rather than cardboard.

In yesterday’s broadcast, Chávez said the government would have to seize packaging firms that did not deal with national food companies, although did not provide further information.

Aló Presidente is now in its tenth year and runs on Sundays on state TV. It starts at 11am and has been known to run for five hours.

The segment of the show on Tetra Pak and patents can be viewed in Spanish via the YouTube website by clicking here.

Source: http://www.packagingnews.co.uk/RSS/News/913111/Venezuela-takes-Tetra-Pak/

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Wrong type of passenger prompts Venezuela to redirect metro line

Plan for two stations in Caracas put on hold because it would have benefited ‘oligarchs’

Venezuela has redirected a new metro line away from a chic part of Caracas, one of Latin America’s most congested capitals, because it would have benefited “oligarchs”.

Authorities cancelled plans for two metro stations at Las Mercedes, a district of malls and restaurants, because it would serve the wrong type of passenger in a country undergoing a socialist revolution.

“That is a line which benefits the oligarchy,” said Claudio Farias, president of the state-owned company Metro Caracas. “We are redesigning it because we think this line makes no sense. Everybody goes to restaurants in Las Mercedes in their cars.”

Under redesigned plans five stations will be dropped from line five, which is intended to carry about 300,000 passengers daily from the central Zona Rental to low-income areas in the south-east.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/15/venezuela-metro-redirected

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Venezuela Orders End to Coca-Cola Zero Production

On Wednesday the Venezuelan Ministry for Health ordered the Coca-Cola Company to remove its product Coca-Cola Zero from sale for containing a cancerous ingredient, sodium cyclamate, an ingredient not included in the US version of the drink.

Jesus Mantilla, the health minister, said, “The product should stop circulating in order to protect the health of Venezuelans.” He said the product contains sodium cyclamate, which in large amounts can be harmful, and then announced that the product should be recalled, destroyed, and not produced anymore.

Divis Antunez, director of sanitary control for the Health Ministry, said the ingredient wasn’t in the company’s application that it made in 2007 and that was approved by the Ministry. Later, in a random test conducted by the National Institute for Hygiene Rafael Rangel, sodium cyclamate was found and the Health Ministry started a legal process for non-compliance with the Health Registry.

Antunez said that the recommended amount of sodium cyclamate for human consumption is 11 mg per kilo, whereas the new Coca-Cola Zero has 18-22mg per 10 mils, exceeding the amount approved by the Venezuelan Commission of Industrial Norms (COVENIN).

Yesterday Coca-Cola said in a press release, “The Coca-Cola Company and its bottler Coca-Cola Femsa Venezuela responsibly declare that Coca-Cola Zero doesn’t contain any ingredient that could be harmful to the health.” However, Coca-Cola said that until the government concludes its administrative proceedings it will suspend production in Venezuela and recall the drink.

Coca-Cola Zero is a drink without any calories (or an amount small enough to be rounded down to zero) and is marketed to young males who are self conscious of their weight but see Diet Coke as being for women. The diet and zero versions in the US, England, and Canada both contain non-calorie sweeteners aspartame (E951) and acesulfame K (E950), but in slightly different proportions and they therefore have slightly different tastes.

However the versions produced in Venezuela (as well as in Chile and some other Central American countries) have sodium cyclamate (E952) in larger proportions than aspartame. Whilst aspartame is cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), sodium cyclamate has been prohibited since 1969 when it was proved to cause cancerous tumours and congenital malformations.

Sodium cyclamate, when combined with other chemicals, has the capacity to sweeten up to 600 times more than sugar. According to Aporrea.org, it is also much cheaper than aspartame at $10/kilo compared to $152/kilo for aspartame.

In Mexico in August 2007, El Universal-Mexico reported that Coca-Cola was also putting sodium cyclamate in the coca-cola zero drink there. The article said that the drink contained 25mg of the ingredient for every 100g in a can of 355ml. Pro-U.S president Vicente Fox authorized the ingredient for the government’s list of permitted food additives in July 2006.

In February 2008 Mexican feminist news Cimanoticias reported that consumers had “triumphed” and that the ingredient had been removed from the drink.

Source: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4516

Avila TV Venezuela: Revolutionizing Television

Avila TV Mural

By Lainie Cassel

In Venezuela they are a key force in the country’s ongoing media-war. Armed with video cameras, they are a team of some 380  young people working for Caracas television station, Avila TV. Started as an experiment just three years ago, according to one study it is now the third most watched station in the city. Funded completely by the government, they consider themselves a voice of President Hugo Chavez’s “socialist revolution.”

Love Music Hate Racism

What would our record shops look like if the racists got their way? The fascist British National Party wants to see an “all white Britain” and wants to eliminate black and Asian people from this country. Here’s a glimpse of the sort of life the Nazis are trying to force on us. Use your vote to stop the BNP on 4 June — and get involved with the Love Music Hate Racism campaign at http://www.lovemusichateracism.com

Screen Addiction: Does the overuse of screens alter our perceptions of reality?

Deconstructionist philosopher Avital Ronell teaches that a few generations ago European travelers in the Swiss Alps found the sight of the mountain peaks so overwhelming that they equipped their carriages with special screens to block their view. They looked through tinted glasses to mediate the experience of raw nature. Today, standing in the Alps or outside our home, we no longer rely on colored glasses. Instead, we use digital cameras, cell phones and movie players to filter our experience. And we have become so accustomed to the view that we prefer pixels to sublime reality … we are addicted to the screens we use to dampen the rawness of life.

We are a society in the grips of a widespread screen addiction. Many of us spend upwards of eight hours a day staring at a screen. We carry video capable iPods, Internet savvy BlackBerrys and graphically stunning portable game machines. We steal glances at these little screens throughout the day and then tuck them back into our pockets and return our gaze to the big screens sitting on our desks. In order to relax, we plop ourselves in front of a widescreen TV. We spend more time making eye contact with our screens than with our neighbors.

The screen is, by design, the ultimate distraction. Even when we try to avoid looking at screens, our eyes are naturally drawn to their flickering lights. The dazzling special effects of our iPhones and our video games stimulate our brains more powerfully than reality. Given the option of looking at the slow pace of nature unfold or the frenetic speed of a big budget movie playing on a tiny screen, we often choose the screen. But training our brains to expect constant visual stimulation has troubling consequences.

Neuroscientists are beginning to address the long-term consequences of visual addiction. Books such as iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind argue that the increase in screen use has rewired our brains and led to a decrease in our empathy and our ability to read facial language. The authors of iBrain ultimately propose a policy of moderating screen time, I wonder if this goes far enough. As visual technologies advance and a greater proportion of our working lives are spent online, there isn’t one, individual-based, solution.

Society is addicted to screens. What we need, therefore, is not a policy of personal moderation but a cultural revolution. Our visual addiction is masking our fear of feeling existence to its fullest. Our task is to build a movement to unwire our social relationships, to unlink our workplace communications and to accept the slow pace of life in order to directly confront the existential dilemmas that we face.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on anti-screen activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

Source: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot_blog/screen_addiction.html

See also http://www.screentime.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Screen addiction ‘bad for kids’ health’

Hugo Chávez: the most popular leader in the Middle East

The results of the new survey of ‘Arab opinion’ conducted by Zogby International show that Barack Obama has a much more favourable rating than did his predecessor as US president. But when asked to name the world leaders whom they most admire, the participants put the President of Venezuela at the top of the poll.

The survey, which was conducted in April and May 2009, sampled the views of 4,087 people in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. According to the respected Zogby polling organisation, the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.6%. One of the questions put to the participants was “which two world leaders (outside your own country) do you admire most?” The most frequently named leader is Hugo Chavez, at 36%. Following Chavez in order of admiration are Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and former President of France Jacques Chirac (both at 18%), Osama bin Laden (16%), Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi (15%) and the current French president Nicolas Sarkozy (14%).

What Would Socialist Democracy Look Like?

by Ian Birchall

Most politicians and journalists talk as though the only possible sort of democracy is parliament, so all we can do is patch up a decrepit system. The history of the socialist movement shows that there is a different tradition of democracy.

Democratic deficit: parliament and democracy

As the crisis surrounding MPs’ expenses exposes the level of blatant fraud in Britain’s parliamentary system Simon Basketter looks at why capitalist democracy fails us

Corruption Goes Right To The Heart Of The System

There is a range of different ways of making money out of parliamentary expenses – and our politicians have milked them all.

Many of the recent revelations in the expenses scandal are centred around claims relating to housing.

Shahid Malik, the justice minister, resigned last week pending an inquiry into the unusually low level of rent he was paying to a landlord in his constituency in West Yorkshire while claiming £66,000 in allowances for his London home.

Elliot Morley, a senior backbencher, was stripped of the Labour whip after “forgetting” that he had paid off his mortgage and improperly claimed more than £16,000.

David Chaytor, a backbencher, was suspended from the parliamentary Labour party after admitting an “unforgivable error” in claiming £13,000 for a mortgage he had already repaid.

Plasma TV

Most people are outraged at the extravagance of many of the claims – such as those of Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman who claimed £1,851 for a rug imported from a New York antiques centre and had tried to claim £8,865 for a plasma TV.

But to claim expenses for mortgages that don’t exist takes corruption to a new low.