by
Catalyst
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Labor demand for export crops was driven both by territorial expansion and by the steadily rising yields from productivity-enhancing inputs. Whereas cattle ranching had low labor requirements, the new plantations were extremely labor-intensive, particularly during peak times of the production cycle, Again, cotton best illustrates the exponential growth of seasonal wage employment in Central America. Until the mid-1950s, cotton cultivation in the region required less than 100,000 pickers come harvest. Ten years later, the number of cotton-harvesting jobs surpassed 350,000. A decade after that, cotton plantations employed nearly half a million pickers.35 In addition, limited processing segments such as ginning, baling, sugar refining, and meatpacking created tens of thousands of permanent jobs. Many of these, along with employment in the modest manufacturing in wage goods tied to market agriculture, were taken by the growing numbers of displaced peasants forced to migrate to capital cities and other towns. The most precarious of those in the sprouting slums also supplied large portions of the seasonal labor. In Nicaragua, for instance, a third of cotton pickers came from large urban areas. Most harvesting, however, was done by the growing rural population languishing on the peasant margins.
Throughout the region, the very communities that were squeezed by export farming and ranching sent hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to earn cash at harvest time. The more modern agriculture encroached on their lands, the more rural communities relied on seasonal wage labor. Unable to survive on the diminishing returns of subsistence farming, seasonal wages became indispensable. Not only did these communities supply major shares of harvesters on coastal plantations, but the proportion of their populations making the yearly trips down to the coast also grew. In El Salvador, up to 70 percent of beleaguered peasant communities in the north migrated annually in search of wages. In Guatemala, whereas between 10 and 15 percent of cotton-harvest workers were from the capital during the 1960s, far more descended yearly from peripheral highland provinces: by the end of the decade, over three-fifths of seasonal migrants came from two western highland Mayan provinces, and most of the working population from Kiché and Huehuetenango were harvesters.36
Abu Manneh argues that the response of many Palestinians to the nakba, the catastrophe of dispossession by the Israelis in 1948, was to articulate a revolutionary optimism in the potential of collective action to win back freedom and self-determination. Liberty was to be regained through armed struggle but also through cultural renaissance. There was recognition that, to an extent, the catastrophe laid bare divisions and social problems within Arab society itself, particularly the inequality and subordination of the working-class poor and of women. Freedom, crucially, had to encompass wider emancipatory aims than territorial reclamation; it had to embrace the rights and needs of all peoples. For this reason, the Palestinian struggle in its early years was understood by those involved not as nationalistic, but as a universal liberation movement.
[...] The Palestinian novel arises out of conditions quite specific to the Palestinian conflict in its various stages from 1948 to the present. How do these geographical and historical specifities inform and, to an extent, determine novelist practice? What is the relationship between fictional words and actuality? Can imaginative accounts offer forms of knowledge unavailable to other kinds of writing? And how do these artistic practices by Palestinian novelists speak to literary and political concerns within a wider geographical context?
Powerful narratives do not give us static pictures of life; they are not true or accurate in any one-to-one mapping of the world. What they do, at their most imaginatively incisive, is foreground aspects of reality that go unnoticed, that are so familiar that we overlook them. More politically, they "redistribute the perceptible" as Jacques Ranciere says, bringing to light what is hidden in full view. They dislocate a sense of what is just "natural," unchangeable. In this way, they provide a dissensus, a dismantling of the consensual way of ordering how we perceive the world and how we evaluate it. [...]
At the heart of finding a way to manifest social property is the tension between planning and markets. In this section we insist that that this is not a matter of planning versus markets but of discovering creative institutional mechanisms that structure the proper place of planning and markets. Marx rightly argued that praising the voluntary and efficient nature of markets apart from the underlying social relations in which they’re embedded fetishizes markets. But markets are also fetishized when they are rejected as an absolute and treated as having a life of their own independent of those underlying relations. The place of markets under socialism is a matter of both principle and practicality — and dealing creatively with the contradictions between the two. Some markets will be banished under socialism, some welcomed, and some reluctantly accepted but with constraints on their centrifugal antisocial tendencies.
markets to plan for things that are not essential i guess? for goods that are rival and excludable?
tbh im having a hard time seeing why that would be better than a more planned or publicly-funded system. a voucher system would be better than a market in most places, even though the mechanism is similar, purely because markets reify inequality
Markets will be necessary under socialism. But certain kinds of markets must be unequivocally rejected. This is especially so for commodified labor markets. The argument runs as follows. Planning — the ability to conceive what is about to be constructed — is a universal characteristic of human labor: “What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” A core critique of capitalism is that the commodification of labor power robs workers of that human capacity. Individual capitalists plan, capitalist states plan, and workers as consumers also plan. Yet in selling their labor power to get the means to live, workers as producers surrender their planning capacities and human potential to create. This original sin of capitalism is the foundation for the broader social and political degradations of the working class under capitalism.
Yet the question of reallocating labor remains and, if workers are to have the right to accept or reject where to work, this implies a labor market of sorts. But this would be a labor market of a very particular, limited, and decommodified kind. Based on the need to attract workers to new sectors or regions, the central planning board would set higher wages (or more favorable housing and social amenities), adjusting them as needed if the workforce falls short. Within the wage framework set by the central plan, the sector councils could likewise raise wages to allocate workers across workplaces or into new ones. Workers could not, however, be fired nor lose work through competitive closures of workplaces and should there be a general shortage of demand relative to supply, demand could be stimulated or worktime reduced as the alternative to the creation of a reserve army to discipline workers.
i like the model in the dispossessed better, but ofc that assumes a workforce that has been trained to be socially responsible even at individual cost
On the other hand, who can imagine a socialism without a marketplace of coffee shops and bakeries, small restaurants and varieties of pubs, clothing stores, craft shops, and music stores? If the underlying conditions of equality are established so these markets are about personal preferences not expressions of power, there is no reason to be defensive about welcoming them. It is when we turn to the commercial activities of workplace collectives that the role of markets takes on their greatest, and most controversial, significance.
Closing the performance gap between workplace collectives would especially be reinforced by significantly centralizing research and development (though some might still be workplace specific) and sharing the knowledge across the sector rather than seeing it as a private asset and source of privilege. As well, regular sectoral production conferences would take place to share techniques and innovations, cross-workplace exchanges would be facilitated to learn best practices, and teams of “fixers,” including both engineers and workers, would be on call to troubleshoot particular problems and bottlenecks in workplaces and among suppliers.
yes!!
- Guaranteeing full employment, universal access to necessities, and a living income.
- Setting the relationship between present and future consumption through determining the share of GDP to be allocated to investment and growth.
- Allocating investment to sectors and regions, which they in turn reallocate within their respective jurisdictions.
- Generating the revenue for its activities.
- Curbing impediments to society’s solidarity and equality goals not only across individuals/households but across workplace collectives, sectors, and regions.
- The constant development, through educational institutions and at work, of popular functional skills and democratic and cultural capacities.
- Governing the pace of decommodification through the distribution of expenditures between collective and individual consumption.
- Regulating the production-leisure trade-off by influencing the share of productivity that goes to producing more vs producing the same with fewer hours of work.
- Enforcing the stringent adherence to environmental standards, with the state ownership and pricing of resources, as well as allocation of investment, being critical here.
- Navigating the relationship with what will likely still be a predominantly capitalist global economy.
Followers of von Mises similarly foreclosed the possibility that entrepreneurship could take place in a variety of institutional settings. Yet even under capitalism, the history of technological breakthroughs was always about more than a series of isolated thinkers suddenly seeing lightbulbs flash above their heads. As Mariana Mazzucato has shown in her detailed study of some of the most important American innovations, it is the state that is in fact “willing to take the risks that businesses won’t” and “has proved transformative, creating entirely new markets and sectors, including the internet, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and clean energy.”
This is not to imply that a socialist state will inevitably be as innovative as the American state has been, but rather that greed need not be the only driver of innovation. Dynamic efficiency can also come from socially concerned scientists and engineers given the resources and opportunity to address society’s needs, as well as from mutual cooperation within worker collectives and the interactions of workplace committees with their suppliers and clients. Even more important, socialism can introduce a flourishing and far broader social entrepreneurship focused on innovations in how we live and govern ourselves at every level of society.
yes!!!!