by
Jacobin
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[...] We can’t count on the Democrats to put up a fight; the fight must come from the Left.
[...] the Left needs a vision, not a defensive posture. We must organize around a positive, forward-looking program for real change — a program that gives people
something to fight for, not just something to fight against.
The real enemy of all of us who want to make a better world is not capitalism or conservatism, but cynicism — our own feeling that no one cares about this shit, that nothing will ever change, so what’s the point? [...]
on the song "A Sense of Belonging" by Television Personalities
[...] Shoppers can donate their bag credits — the five-cent rebate they receive by forgoing plastic bags — to a microfinance fund.
Combining this with traditional donations, Whole Foods hopes to raise $5 million to fund 40,000 small loans to “impoverished entrepreneurs” around the globe. They say that these direct financial transfers, unmediated by government agencies, can “empower the poor and the communities around them.”
a couple of things
kinda obvious, but: Whole Foods does NOT need shoppers to "donate" anything; they are perfectly capable of donating excess profits on their own if they so choose to, without involving the consumer at all. this is just so blatantly PR-focused that i wanna vomit. reminds me of when BA makes its flight attendants collect donations for some children's charity
why on earth would anyone believe that direct financial transfers (which require repayment) from shareholder-beholden corporations are a way of EMPOWERING the poor, compared to governments that are at least theoretically accountable to the people? surely the govt is always the right org for the job here, and if it's not, the solution should be to fix that problem first of all? whence does this libertarian belief that an institution NOT beholden to the people it's trying to serve is the best way to serve those people come from??? i am dying
If community programs have consistently floundered, both in the past and today, what’s left? A return to the rule of experts? Bigger dams and better seeds? If faced with two approaches — that of the development expert, asking “What can we do for the poor?” and that of the community developer, asking “What can we do with them?” — then the grassroots approach seems at least less condescending.
Yet there is a third question that inhabitants of the Global North might ask, one that would be far more productive. “What have we been doing to them?”
That question implies a different framework, one that proponents of participatory development rarely consider. It raises the possibility that there might be some causal relationship between government policies in the Global North and the continued poverty of the Global South. Rather than focusing merely on poor people in poor places, it zooms out, capturing the North and South together through a wide-angle lens.
^^^^^
Cap and trade doesn't disciple capital; it coddles it. It does alarmingly little to force a sharp break from fossil fuel dependence. In fact, it actually establishes barriers to the comprehensive zero-carbon transition we need by giving big emitters an easy out. Instead of making the big, risky investments necessary to ditch carbon-intensive technologies outright, they can simply purchase cheap offset credits from other countries, deferring the vital work of building a carbon-free future.
"discipline" I think
The original Luddites are similarly misunderstood. As Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in a 1952 article, machine breaking was a common tactic of labor resistance during the Industrial Revolution. Rather than directing their anger at technology per se, workers broke machines “as a means of coercing their employers into granting them concessions with regard to wages and other matters.” Such sabotage “was directed not only against machines, but also against raw material, finished goods, and even the private property of employers.”
The modern figure of the Luddite is valuable to capitalists and their ideologues for primarily rhetorical reasons: if workers can be portrayed as hostile to some method or device that has manifestly positive qualities, they can be dismissed as selfish or irrational. Never mind that in many cases, the problem is that useful and potentially emancipatory technologies are trapped within a capitalist integument, optimized to maximize private profit rather than social wealth.
[...] Winning a share of the fruits of automation for the rest of us requires victory at the level of the state rather than the individual workplace.
This could be done through a universal basic income, a minimum payment guaranteed to all citizens completely independent of work. If pushed by progressive forces, the UBI would be a non-reformist reform that would also quicken automation by making machines more competitive against workers better positioned to reject low wages. It would also facilitate labor organization by acting as a kind of strike fund and cushion against the threat of joblessness.
A universal basic income could defend workers and realize the potential of a highly developed, post-scarcity economy; it could break the false choice between well-paid workers or labor-saving machines, strong unions or technological advancement.
not sure how I feel about this ... seems like it could easily lead to a local maximum (suboptimal equilibrium)
With respect to the relations of the Soviet Union to the Communist Parties in the West, a discussion seems to be taking place in Russia regarding what advantage the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties can make of the so-called crisis of capitalism. They can’t agree. Their press indicates this. Also there is a doctrinal difference on whether they should accept alliances with left-wing parties. This too came out in their specialized press.
quoting Francois de Laboulaye, French political director. just fascinating