Wednesday, May 2, 2018
Чапаев / Chapaev (1934) фильм смотреть онлайн
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmjJ7YaSpYc&feature=youtu.be
Sunday, April 29, 2018
Communism and democracy – a living legacy
DAVID PURDY 27
April 2018
Political actors must always
reckon with natural limits, structural bias, institutional inertia, vested
interests and the actions of their opponents, not to mention irreducible
uncertainty about the future. Book review.
Mike Makin-Waite seconded the
motion to dissolve the Communist Party of Great Britain as a delegate to its
final Congress in 1991. He was then active in the CPGB’s successor
organisation, Democratic Left, and remains involved in networks concerned with
the history of the left.
In this book, Communism and
Democracy: History, Debates, Potentials(Lawrence and Wishart, 2017), he
offers a fresh and unflinching overview of the history of communism from its
roots in the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the collapse
of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR, the demise of the
international communist movement and the emergence of a global capitalist
system from which the “spectre” of communism has been banished.
His central concern is the
troubled relationship between communism and democracy.
Those of us who still aspire
to replace neo-liberal capitalism by a fairer, greener, happier, more
democratic and less divided world cannot avoid looking backward if we are to
move forward. For one thing, whenever even modest proposals are mooted to re-regulate
markets, increase spending on public services or make the tax system less
regressive, our opponents are quick to invoke the ghosts of Marx, Lenin and
Stalin.
More importantly, as the
author notes (p 4), the eclipse of communism has impoverished the western
imagination, undermining belief in the very “possibility of ever shaping the
world in line with the democratically agreed outcomes of reasoned
consideration, with the aim of meeting human needs.”
30 years since the fall of the
Berlin wall
Now, almost thirty years since
the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a good time to take stock of the strengths,
achievements, illusions, follies and crimes of communism.
The financial crash of 2007-8
triggered a deep slump and decade-long slowdown from which the world has barely
recovered and which has shaken public confidence in global capitalism and
neo-liberal policies. Yet the left has made scant progress in articulating and
winning support for a credible alternative.
On both sides of the Atlantic,
populist leaders and movements have emerged to challenge political elites, but
more from the illiberal, nationalist right than the liberal, cosmopolitan left,
whose commitment to open borders holds little appeal for the victims of global
economic restructuring. As yet, there is little sign of the intellectual
renewal, political realignment and institutional reform that history suggests
are the pre-requisites for resolving an organic crisis of capitalism.
Compare the past decade with
the Great Depression of the 1930s. Ten years after the Wall Street crash of
1929, the world was at war for the second time in a generation. But ideas and
plans for a managed and socialised form of capitalism had gained traction among
the intelligentsia and were about to be put to the test in running a war
economy.
Similarly, the formation of
anti-fascist popular fronts in the late 1930s and of resistance movements
during the war prefigured the national-popular governments that presided over
progressive social settlements after the war.
The short communist century
1917-89
Given the appalling human
rights record of the USSR and the quasi-military character of the Leninist
vanguard party, one might suppose that a book about communism and democracy
would be rather short.
But democracy is a complex,
shifting and contested concept. According to classical Marxism, liberal or
“bourgeois” democracy is an instrument of class rule that serves to protect
private property and to preserve the capitalist system. To create a social democracy,
capitalists and landlords would have to be expropriated. In countries with
parliamentary systems and universal suffrage, it might be possible to achieve
this goal with a sufficiently emphatic electoral mandate, though even in this
case force might be needed to quell a “slaveholders’ revolt”. Elsewhere, the
first priority of socialists was to establish democratic institutions.
Under the impact of the First
World War and the Bolshevik revolution, the international socialist movement
split into two hostile camps, henceforth known as social democrats and
communists, the former committed to electoral-legislative politics within the
framework of liberal democracy, the latter dedicated to defending the Soviet
Union and promoting world revolution.
Yet while the two sides
disagreed about the strategy for achieving socialism, both still aimed to break
the power of the propertied classes by taking the principal means of production
into public ownership. Once this was done and the government had decided on its
policy priorities, a system of central planning would replace the “invisible”
hand of the market as the primary mechanism of economic co-ordination,
allocating resources among the various branches of production and distributing
the social product among the members of society.
The advent of socialism, or
“lower” stage of communism, would, it was believed, usher in a superior, more
ample form of democracy, encompassing civil society as well as the state and
putting the satisfaction of human needs above the pursuit of private profit.
Major advances were
confidently expected to ensue: inequalities of income, wealth and status would
decline; the periodic crises to which capitalism was incorrigibly prone would
disappear; and rapid progress would be made towards the material abundance
required to sustain the “higher” stage of communism.
En route, socialist citizens
would acquire both the ability and the desire to participate in the management
of productive units and community organisations, as well as enjoying social
entitlements over and above the political rights and civil liberties that
marked the limit of citizenship status in the “bourgeois” democracies, at any
rate prior to the development of welfare states after 1945.
The promise of modernity
Makin-Waite describes this
prospectus as “the promise of modernity”. In the first part of the book, he
traces its genesis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the
second, he explains why the promise failed to materialise. At the heart of his
account is the Soviet experience. Having seized power hoping to bring about a
socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks found themselves driven, step-by-step, to
launch an industrial revolution, with an authoritarian one-party state
presiding over a bureaucratic command economy.
This is a familiar story. It
is, nevertheless, worth retelling. The author’s decision to focus on the
relationship between communism and democracy provides a strong narrative thread
through the twists and turns of communist history, highlighting, in particular,
the various periods and episodes when communists came to appreciate that
liberal democracy is a historic achievement to be cherished, nurtured and
defended: the pre-war popular fronts and wartime resistance movements; the
Prague Spring of 1968 and the military coup against Chile’s Popular Unity
government in 1973 – searing experiences both, which sparked the rise and
shaped the politics of Eurocommunism in the 1970s; and Gorbachev’s efforts in
the 1980s to bring the Cold War to an end while seeking to promote perestroika (reconstruction)
and glasnost (openness) in the USSR.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony
– winning hearts and minds
Presiding over the argument is
the stoical, yet resolute spirit of Antonio Gramsci, a founding member of the
Italian Communist Party (PCI), who briefly became its leader before being
arrested and imprisoned by Mussolini.
Gramsci was primarily a
theorist of defeat. In his Prison Notebooks, he sought to explain why the
Russian revolution had not, as the Bolsheviks confidently anticipated at the
time, sparked off similar revolutions in the West. How had the ruling classes
in the heartlands of capitalism managed to see off the communist threat? Why
was there such a contrast between the collapse of Tsarist autocracy and the
resilience of “bourgeois” democracy?
In seeking answers to these
questions, Gramsci was obliged to rethink Marxist theory and communist
strategy. In particular, invoking the familiar distinction between the use of
coercion and government by consent, he gave a whole new meaning to the concept
of hegemony, the Greek word for leadership or supremacy.
His argument, in a nutshell,
was that while the state’s legal monopoly of the means of violence is always a
factor in any situation, by far the most effective and least risky way for
rulers to secure the allegiance, or least compliance, of their subordinates is
not to beat or cow them into submission, but to win their hearts and minds.
Thus, in the advanced
capitalist democracies, winning and retaining power, whether to preserve the
status quo or to pursue a radical alternative, depends primarily on providing
the moral and intellectual leadership required to resolve, or at least cope
with, society’s main problems.
Coping with a post-communist
world
The third part of the book,
“Routes for Radicals”, surveys the vestiges of the communist movement in China,
North Korea, Cuba and South Africa, together with the various intellectual and
political trends which have emerged since the 1990s and which retain some
affinity, however loose, with the communist tradition.
These include efforts to
combine perspectives and themes from Marxist and ecological thought into a new
red-green synthesis; the renewal of the left in Latin America (which now seems
to have stalled); the anti-globalisation and anti-austerity movements in Europe
and North America; the work of the so-called “New Communists” such as Alain
Badiou and Slavoj Zizek; the formation of new parties of the left such as Die
Linke in Germany, Syriza in Greece and Podemos in
Spain; and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and his followers in the British Labour
Party.
The most intellectually
innovative and impressive of these post-communist initiatives is the red-green
dialogue, a serious attempt to rethink the relationship between capitalism,
society and nature. It is, however, still a work in progress and has made
little impact on organised politics.
The other developments
surveyed offer little more than old ideas in new guises. The “New Communists”,
for example, reject democratic norms and see contemporary struggles for
emancipation as struggles against (liberal) democracy. Thus, Zizek (quoted on p
258) declares that, “… what today prevents radical questioning of capitalism is
precisely the belief in democratic forms of struggle against capitalism.” It is
unclear whether Zizek really means this or is simply being provocative. He
claims to be an unreconstructed Leninist, but this may be a pose. Either way,
his apparent disdain for representative government is shared by those advocates
of direct democracy who repudiate the state-centred politics of the traditional
left in favour of direct action in “local spaces.”
Of course, the “propaganda of
the deed” is an old anarchist enthusiasm and can be a potent form of protest as
long as it remains non-violent. But action on the “horizontal” plane of
politics can never change the world unless it links up with action on the
“vertical” plane as part of a hegemonic project aimed at transforming the
state.
Irreducible uncertainty
Can the communist-shaped hole
in our politics be filled by forming a new party or breathing fresh vigour and
purpose into an old one? It depends what we hope and expect to achieve by such
endeavours. There is no harm in dreaming of a post-capitalist world or in
speculating about what it might look like. Dreaming revitalises the brain and
utopian thought feeds into ongoing debate about what kind of life is best for
humans and what kind of society would best sustain it.
But we should bear in mind
that the word “utopia”, coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More, is a play on the
Greek words eu (good or well), ou (no or not) and topos (place).
Thus, utopia is a good, but non-existent place. It lies outside time and space:
“somewhere over the rainbow”, in the words of the song. Political projects, on
the other hand, are time-bound and operate in a resistant medium. Political
actors must always reckon with natural limits, structural bias, institutional
inertia, vested interests and the actions of their opponents, not to mention
irreducible uncertainty about the future.
The neo-liberal revolution and
the demise of communism have, between them, driven the possibility of a
post-capitalist world over the edge of political space into the realms of
utopian space. But while neo-liberal ideas and policies have reached every
corner of the world, their impact has not been uniform and there are still
different types of capitalism in different countries: China is
governed by a strong authoritarian state; Sweden remains a high-tax, high
public spending state; Germany retains its social market economy; Britain’s
capital city still hosts the world’s largest financial and trading hub; and so
on.
Equally, just as globalisation
has not eliminated institutional and cultural variety from the world, so there
is no reason to suppose that the neo-liberal form of capitalism will be the
last. There is every reason to do what we can to replace it by a better form,
not just by working for regime change at the national level, but by heading off
the current slide into international anarchy and rebuilding a rules-based
global order.
Brexit Failure Looks More Likely Every Day
Too many things are lining up
against the U.K. leaving the EU.
Barry Ritholtz
April 27, 2018, 1:18 PM CDT
Today, I will violate one of
my favorite
principles, and hereby make this prediction: No Brexit! In other words, the
U.K. will not exit the European Union. By 2023, we will look back at the entire
ridiculous affair as if it were a rediscovered lost episode of “Fawlty Towers.”
Soon after the referendum in which Brits unwisely
voted to leave the EU, I suggested there was a 33 percent chance that Brexit
wouldn’t occur. Now, I raise that to 75 percent, and with each passing day of
incompetence shown by Prime Minister Theresa May’s administration, the
probabilities move higher.
With that disclosure out of
the way, I’d like to explain the thinking behind this not-so-bold
forecast.
From the very beginning, I
have been a skeptic that a full Brexit would occur.
The concept was simply so foolish and self-destructive that the reasonable
expectation was cooler heads would prevail. But that was a modest assumption
and didn’t anticipate the feckless May government making a bad situation even
worse.
There seem to be several ways
this can, and probably will, fall apart. In order of likelihood (recognizing a
combination of any and all of these is possible):
Doing nothing
Snap parliamentary election
leading to a May loss
New referendum
Ireland/Scotland make it too
complicated
Europe makes it impossible
Let’s take a quick look at
each.
Doing nothing: Article 50 of the European Union agreement has
specific rules for how members can voluntarily exit the EU. The U.K. will lose
the membership in both the common union and its customs agreement; a negotiated
set of replacement treaties and rules would be proposed, which then would
require ratification by both the EU and the U.K. The key economic aspect
is that all of the advantages of the EU treaties covering trade relations among
members would be replaced by less-favorable covenants. How much of a
disadvantage this amounts to is the subject of debate between all concerned.
The bottom line it that whether the Brits get a full withdrawal agreement, or
only a temporary transitional agreement, it is likely to be much less friendly
to the U.K. economy then staying in the EU.
Snap election: What else could
derail Brexit? How about more cabinet memberssupporting staying? Then there is the issue of May’s popularity: a year ago she was
considered a dead woman walking. Her support is recovering among her fellow Tories, but her polling is
still underwater and an electoral loss would amount to a repudiation of
whatever it is she thinks she’s accomplishing.
New referendum: The British
public has learned much since the initial vote. About half
of Brexit voters have been supportive of a second referendum (you can guess which half), amid a chorus
of calls for another vote on Brexit. A steady drumbeat of
media reports revealed how much misinformation and outright disinformation U.K. voters were subjected to. Robert Mercer, the right-wing
billionaire formerly of giant hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and backer
of political data firm Cambridge Analytica, wanted to bring the same level
of mass discontent to the U.K. he helped foment in the
U.S. The Guardian called it a “hijacking of the British democracy.”
Ireland/Scotland complications:
Back in 2014, Scotland voted against independence from the U.K. by 55 percent
to 45 percent. The Brexit vote was a shocker to the Scots, who also voted to
remain in the EU. Further complicating matters are reports that Northern Irelandwould be granted permission to stay in the single market. Resolving
these issues makes the entire enterprise highly problematic for England.
Europe makes leaving
impossible: I don’t see any reason why the EU would do anything other than make
this as uncomfortable for Britain as possible. Basic game theory suggests that
the EU’s interests lie in the exact opposite direction, to make exiting as
difficult as possible in order to discourage others from departing.
There is no reason to expect
the EU to reverse course.
Michael Bloomberg, owner of
Bloomberg LP which publishes Bloomberg View, referred to the choice of accepting a bad deal, or
admitting Brexit was a mistake in the first place. The only conclusion one can
draw from all of this is that the U.K.’s leaders need to make the responsible
decision and stay.
Hawaii Takes Historic First Step Toward Creating ‘Utility of the Future’ Now
In landmark news, a new law
directs Hawaiian utilities to change their business model and reward attributes
such as customer satisfaction and ease of renewable interconnection.
April 26, 2018
Chief Editor
In what could be the beginning
of the new way forward to utilities, on Tuesday, Hawaiian Gov. David Ige signed
the Ratepayer Protection Act, a new law that directs utilities in Hawaii to
change their business models and fully decouple revenue and capital
expenditures.
“This is the first
jurisdiction that is doing this. It's a concept that's been discussed at some
length among scholars and experts in the field but no one has actually
implemented this so this was definitely a moonshot bill,” said State Sen.
Stanley Chang in an interview.
“Instead of charging what the
market can bear or letting utilities charge on a cost-plus basis to recoup
their costs, for the first time they are going to charge based on factors
including affordability, reliability, transparency, renewable energy integration,
efficiency,” he added.
“That's a total change to the
business model of these utilities.”
How it Works Now
Today, one of the only ways
that utilities all across the world can generate revenue is by rate-basing
capital expenditures. What that means in plain English is that the more
utilities spend on infrastructure, such as upgrading transmission and distribution
equipment (and building new generation plants in some territories), the more
money they make because they are allowed to add those capital expenditures to
their electric rates plus a healthy margin and recover their costs through
ratepayer dollars.
As of July 1, 2020, this model
will cease to exist in Hawaii.
Under the new law Hawaiian
utilities and the public utility commission (PUC) will need to come up with “performance
incentives and penalty mechanisms that directly tie an electric utility
revenues to that utility's achievement on performance metrics and break the
direct link between allowed revenues and investment levels,” according to
the new law.
The law was driven partly out
of necessity. As costs for solar and
storage increase, and utilities lower their net-metering compensation rates,
increase fees and wait times for renewable energy interconnections and
otherwise make using the grid more onerous for homes and businesses that
install solar and energy storage, it simply becomes easier and ultimately could
become more cost-effective for homeowners that want to go solar and use storage
to cut the cord and go off-grid.
“Just going off the grid
entirely is not the easiest thing in the world but it is true that, especially
with advances in battery technology the reduction in costs of batteries and
solar, that that is not just a theoretical threat at this point,” said Chang.
And once there is mass grid
defection, the entire utility ecosystem is turned on its head.
Because a third of all
residences in Hawaii have solar and the state seeks to get 100 percent of its
energy from renewable sources by 2045, the need for a completely new way of for
utilities to exist was born.
How It Will Work in the Future
The new bill establishes
performance metrics that the PUC will consider while establishing performance
incentives and penalty mechanisms. They include: affordability of electric
rates and customer electric bills; service reliability; customer engagement and
satisfaction, including customer options for managing electricity costs; access
to utility system information; rapid integration of renewable energy sources;
timely execution of competitive procurement.
Chang acknowledges that it’s
not going to be easy for the three public utility commissioners to figure this
out. He said they opened a docket last week to begin to study the issue.
“These are really tough
questions that they are going to have to answer without the benefit of
precedent from basically anywhere else,” he said.
“This is uncharted territory.”
Hawaii Paving the Way for All
Others
If Hawaii can figure out a way
to transform its utilities into customer-serving entities that are rewarded for
performance, it could have a global impact.
“At the end of the day the
utility of the future has to be one that is performing all of these different
metrics. That is the one that is going to survive,” he said. “Otherwise the
death spiral thing is a real thing.”
Chang said that he is
receiving positive feedback from colleagues all over the world, including China
where even though all utilities are state-owned “it’s still hard for them to
adopt performance-based rate-making or other innovations like we have,” he
explained.
“I think this is the wave of the
future, and I think we will see a lot more of this around this country and
around the world,” he said.
Utilities have until July 1,
2020, to develop new rates.
For Further Reading:
Jennifer Runyon is Chief
Editor of Renewable Energy World, coordinating, writing and/or editing columns,
features, news stories, blogs and videos for the digital magazine and website.
She also serves as Renewable Energy conference chair of Power Gen
International, the largest conference and expo for the traditional power
generation industry. She is also Chair of the Women in Power Committee. Formerly,
she was the managing editor of Innovate F...
The Federal Job Guarantee Is Not Just “Better” Than a Universal Basic Income. It’s the Only Reasonable Option. Universal Basic Income Is Sinister
Posted on April
28, 2018 by Yves
Smith
FJG > UBI
No. That’s not right. The
Federal Job Guarantee is not just better than Universal Basic Income, it’s the
only good option. The UBI is a Trojan Horse for the reduction and
elimination of wages and safety net programs for the powerless. UBI is sinister.
Universal Basic Income:
UBI adds money to the economy
without increasing production or output. This is how you cause inflation: The
creation of money without consideration of the real resources available to you.
(Sure, everyone can have a pony, but not tomorrow!)
If the government is now
paying your salary, even if you are performing poorly, even if you are not
working:
This incentivizes private
industry to further reduce wages, which logically extends to the reduction – or
elimination – of minimum wage laws.
Then what’s the point of
social safety net programs such as welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing,
Medicaid, Social Security, etc.? These programs would necessarilybe
eliminated.
Then what’s the point of
fighting so hard for free healthcare and free tuition and lower prescription
drug costs and so on? Now people can, at least somewhat, at least temporarily,
afford the private industry alternatives. The fights for these progressive
programs would just…end.
Now, all of the sudden, everyone can
afford shit. All at the same time. Competing with everyone for the same stuff,
with no increase in productive capacity. UBI is therefore, by its very
definition, inflationary. This governmental salary, this “negative tax” for
those at the bottom, is instantly devalued. At best, income and wealth inequality is not reduced.
Would this increase or
decrease the incentive to get or keep a job? At least at first…
Here’s the true sinister plot
behind UBI: Picture a future and less-friendly Congress, after all these safety
nets have been reduced or eliminated. They come in and eliminate or
dramatically reduce the UBI program because “these deadbeats want everything
for free?!” Our nation is instantly plunged into a private corporation slave-wage
hellscape. No wage or workplace protections, no safety net programs at all.
UBI risks putting the United
States into a much much worse position than it already is today…. Well, that
is, if you care about the powerless.
The Federal Job
Guarantee:
FJG adds money to the
economy by increasing productivity and output. This is how you avoid,
or greatly reduce the severity of, inflation. It forces private industry and
the military to up their game, in order to be competitive with the FJG: better
than bare-minimum living wage, benefits, and working conditions. It takes away
the excuse of “I’m not hiring you… You’ve been unemployed. Ewww.”
If a future, less-friendly
Congress were to come in and eliminate or reduce the FJG program, then those
FJG job people would indeed once again be unemployed. But everyone else would
still have those better jobs with better wages, benefits, and working
conditions. Yes, without the “public option” FJG to compete with private
industry, these things will start to degrade. But we would revert back to a
position still substantially betterthan we are today.
Two Final Points: Busywork and
Robots
If the FJG creates “busywork”
pointless jobs, it is not a problem of the FJG itself, but rather a reflection of
poor implementation of the FJG at the local level. There are basically an
infinite number of genuinely useful things to be done at the local level,
throughout the country.
The fear of automation is
nonsense. We should embrace automation. Robots can cook our cheeseburgers, wash
our cars, and accept and dispense cash better and faster than humans. But
robots cannot take care of our children or seniors, they cannot entertain us,
create works of art, write our books, or be our primary care physicians or
psychologists. Leave the more physically taxing and repetitive drudgery work to the
robots. Leave the infinite number of more satisfying and productive jobs for us
humans.
I love this#JobGuarantee pic.twitter.com/oOs8GUvvbb
And this is really key. #UBI acts as a wage subsidy
so that employers can reduce wages, leading to further inequality. which is why
the right likes it.
A #JobGuarantee does the opposite. It forces employers to up their game.
A #JobGuarantee does the opposite. It forces employers to up their game.
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