Saturday, October 26, 2019
The latest from openDemocracy
Stories of change from four continents this week. I'll start with the quietest: to hold back climate change we must learn to stop throwing so much stuff away. Janet Gunter, writing for ourEconomy, explains why we need a Right to Repair to reduce the West's 'consumption emissions' – and I was delighted to learn that there is a word for 'shame of buying new' (it's Swedish, of course).
Having to wean yourself off throwaway culture is about the best example of a first-world problem that I can think of. Radha Davar and Manguben have rather different concerns: they are villagers in rural India who are getting a regular basic income as part of a trial scheme. It's made radical changes in their lives, as they tell our Beyond Trafficking and Slavery section. They've been able to buy water to irrigate a farm, open a small shop and allow a daughter to continue her education. For these women it all means freedom: not just economic breathing room but freedom to meet new people, to travel, to talk to government officials on equal terms.
It's election day tomorrow in Argentina and Uruguay, and we've joined forces with feminist journalists from the region to explore the numbers, track records and views of conservative candidates. It's timely work: "Never before has abortion been such a high-profile campaign issue [in both countries], while new and explicitly ‘anti-gender’ parties have also emerged," says the team.
This week we've also looked at the one change we're all certain to encounter. In the Transformation section, Cynthia Greenlee introduces us to the 'death doulas' who "provide non-medical support to help ease the final transition for the terminally ill. But it’s not merely about 'The End'. They help the dying and their loved ones navigate death with all its 'before and afters' - including sickness, acceptance, finding resources for all the legal housekeeping, funeral planning and bereavement."
A noisier kind of change is happening in Lebanon right now. In our North Africa, West Asia section, Rima Majed, an assistant professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut, describes the extraordinary scale and unprecedented tactics of the widespread protests. She also has strong views on what must happen now if the 'October Revolution' is to deserve its name.
In Algeria, meanwhile, the Hirak protest movement has been on the streets for 35 straight weeks. Latefa Guemar, Adel Chiheb and Jessica Northey – also in North Africa, West Asia – say: "Algerians have truly broken the wall of fear... Whilst challenges are significant, there remains huge hope on the streets." The Hirak has already made a difference through "beautiful moments" of reconciliation and the reclaiming of public space for art and music. Think of that if politics elsewhere seems bleak.
Julian Richards
Julian Richards
Managing Editor
Caroline Lucas and Yanis Varoufakis discuss democracy
The Green Party MP and the MeRA25 leader journey from democracy's inception through the tumultuous Brexit period and through to the year 2035
There’s chaos on the streets of Westminster as the activists of Extinction Rebellion bring traffic to a standstill to highlight the urgency of action on the climate crisis. If the old democracy is not working, perhaps new ways of making ourselves heard are required.
As the only Green Party MP in Westminster, Caroline Lucas knows all about this struggle, while economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis is fighting for new ways of doing economics and politics in Greece and beyond, especially since MeRA25, the progressive pan-European party he founded, entered Parliament in July. Here’s what happened when the two came together to talk democracy – from its inception right through to the year 2035.
Caroline Lucas: So how are you?
Yanis Varoufakis: I’m OK. It is not just Brexit destroying the soul. But we are now in Parliament, so it is very liberating to have our own party and not depend on unreliable comrades. There are nine of us and today we have a sitting that will continue until after midnight. You know how it is…
CL: You have got the bad habits from Britain. But I am so jealous of there being nine of you. I would give anything for eight colleagues. So this issue is dedicated to the subject of democracy…
YV: Let’s start!
CL: Your country is seen as the birthplace of democracy. In your opinion has there ever been a really good democracy we can look at and say, ‘That was when it was working well’?
YV: Democracy is always unfinished business. It is imperfect by design, especially in societies with vested interests vying for domination. But the merits of studying ancient Athenian democracy, which only lasted a few decades, is that it was the first and last time the poor controlled the government. Which is, interestingly, Aristotle’s definition of democracy. It was a remarkably radical idea that control over the instruments of the state should be independent of wealth.
CL: How did it work?
YV: Back in the times of the grand debates at the Pnyx, which was the parliamentary space in ancient Athens, there were two opposing parties: the Aristocrats and the Democrats. The Aristocrats hated democracy with a passion – but all the great philosophers we now eulogise like Aristotle and Plato were on the side of the Aristocrats. Nevertheless, the Aristocrats, who hated democracy, supported elections. And the Democrats did not.
CL: That sounds very paradoxical.
YV: The argument was that the Aristocrats could afford to buy influence in an election, so elections were an enemy of democracy. Democrats supported a lottery – sortition, as it is called today. Every official position in Athenian democracy was elected by lottery, including judges. Their terms were confined to six months. The only posts not sorted by lottery were the general, who had to know how to conduct a war, and bankers. The officials responsible for minting the money and for quality control of products like wine were slaves. Why? Because citizens had the right not to be beaten. Slaves did not. The idea was that bankers had to fear that they would be beaten up if they messed up the finances of the city. I think this is a splendid proposal for the City of London!
CL: That would certainly shake things up! And it’s so interesting. In terms of learning from that for today, are powerful corporations the new aristocracy?
YV: The corporations, the media moguls who effectively control public opinion, the equity and pension funds that own the corporations – that is the grid of aristocratic power. And the pertinence of the Athenian idea is evident when we look at ways progressives are thinking about breaking the stranglehold over power by these groups. At DiEM25 [Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 , founded in 2016 in Berlin, with Caroline’s participation] we have been talking about citizens’ assemblies – not to replace Parliament, but to function side by side with it. In Ireland with the abortion issue this process broke that deadlock and allowed Parliament to free itself from years of impasse. The Brexit process is never going to go away. The only way to unite the country is through citizens’ assemblies becoming part of national politics, local politics and party structures. In DiEM25, we have a coordinating committee but when decisions are controversial, a validating council of 50 men and 50 women chosen as a jury at random from our members have the final word. So many disputes have been resolved that way. It frees up the coordinating committee when we know there is this backstop of randomly chosen democratic opinion. Parliament needs that.
CL: If someone said, ‘Doesn’t that undermine the influence of Parliament?’ – would you just say that is the point, you need to check its power?
YV: I would make a more radical claim. I think it enhances the legitimacy of Parliament. A citizens’ assembly offering checks and balances means Parliament’s importance in expressing the views of the British people is enhanced. The British Parliament has never been less sovereign than today.
CL: Very true. On the issue of Brexit – to what extent would you describe it as a reflection of a crisis in democracy? To my mind, the vote revealed, in the anger it engendered, that there was already a crisis before that vote.
YV: It was a crisis created by neo-liberalism and a crisis of neo-liberalism. There was always a Eurosceptic streak in Britain, with good reason. From an economic point of view, the British capitalist model has always been different from the continental model. In Britain, capitalism spontaneously emerged in opposition to the aristocracy – and the aristocracy decided if you can’t beat them, join them. In Germany, capitalism came later and was a state enterprise. The rest of Europe followed the German model so they were always at odds. But Brexit won in 2016 because the referendum gave an opportunity to express anger at being disenfranchised by Thatcherism as well as the Brussels establishment’s evident dislike of democracy. If the question was ‘Do you like the idea of pink pavements as opposed to grey pavements?’, they would have voted for pink pavements if they thought that would upset David Cameron, Tony Blair, the Treasury, the IMF, et cetera.
CL: I agree. It felt as if the unfair, unrepresentative, first-past-the-post electoral system we have in this country did not allow the anger about the hollowing out of the economy to be expressed before. A referendum, where people’s votes count in a much more direct way, in a sense took the lid off that boiling pot. People were so angry that successive governments could ignore the vast majority of people.
YV: I agree. When you have a society torn apart by austerity and the globalisers treating the majority of people as cattle whose price has tanked – who they don’t care about or fear – there is going to be a backlash, just like in the 1930s where it favoured fascists, xenophobes and racists. But even if you didn’t have the referendum I think you would have similar problems. Look at Trump’s America. Even though Jeremy [Corbyn] and John [McDonnell] are our great friends, we keep saying it is preposterous for Labour to remain committed to first past the post. If a government is granted an absolute majority when they only received 30 per cent of the vote, you end up with a complete disconnect between public opinion and the House.
CL: I could not agree more. At the last election 68 per cent of votes didn’t make any impact on the outcome – they just stacked up in constituencies where sufficient votes had already been cast to get the winner over the line. It turns people off the idea of even voting – why bother when the system feels so stacked against you? One of DiEM’s straplines is that Europe will be democratised or it will disintegrate. Will the Brexit convulsions spread across the EU as anger spreads against a top-down Europe not responding to people’s needs?
YV: It is more nuanced. Brexit is the most obvious form of disintegration. But if you fly to Rome and drive up to Munich, at the border between Italy and Austria you probably wait for an hour. There is a border where there wasn’t one a few years ago. To cross into Germany you will get stuck in another queue. That is disintegration. At Schengen, we celebrated doing away with all the borders – and now they are back. That is a major event that nobody talks about. My fear is not that others will leave – they will probably learn the lesson from this dog’s Brexit and stay. But if we keep allowing the EU to fragment, at some point it will make no difference if you are in or out.
CL: You are working on a new book called The Shaken Superflux. One question is, what on earth is that? The second is that it imagines our future in 2035 – what does it look like?
YV: I have changed the title. It was too snobbish, too Shakespearian! Now it is called Another Now: Dispatches From An Alternative Present. My previous book was Talking To My Daughter about the Economy, which was my analysis for my daughter.
CL: It was brilliant. It was your analysis for me as well, so thank you.
YV: This is a sequel. One criticism that really struck is that I was explaining why capitalism sucks, but what is the alternative? This is the nightmare question progressives try to avoid. I am pushing 60 and decided I can’t avoid it any more. So it is my attempt to describe how, not in a Star Trek world, but with today’s technology, we could have an alternative system. It is a mind-boggling exercise. So I use a narrative strategy: I tell the story from the perspective of 2035 and the author – not me – is recounting events. By the way, it all happens in Brighton. I wanted a seaside location.
CL: Can I have a cameo role please?!
YV: Ha! The idea is that the financial crisis in 2008 was so earth-shattering that the timeline bifurcated. It split up. You and I today live in one trajectory, but there was another one. And a socialist technologist in San Francisco gains access to the other trajectory. So he finds out that instead of the silly Occupy Wall Street movement, in 2009 there was a very serious techno-ecological rebellion around the world that harnessed the anger about the events of 2008 and changed corporate law, changed democracy, changed citizenship and so on.
CL: Anything we haven’t covered?
YV: I make a distinction between optimism and hope. I am not optimistic. I see no evidence of anything good happening. But I am latching on to hope without optimism. The way youngsters are taking it upon themselves to strike and protest is wonderful. But to prevent this energy from fizzling out, like the World Social Forum and the anti-globalisation movements did, we need programmatic converge and we need to activate citizens’ assemblies everywhere – that is where I am putting all my efforts.
Conversation recorded by Adrian Lobb
Original BIG ISSUE site here
From Chile to Lebanon: Working class offensive sweeps the globe
25 October 2019
The past week has seen a new stage in the eruption of the global class struggle, with mass protests bringing two seemingly disparate countries to a halt over what are undeniably similar grievances that are rooted in the historic and systemic crisis of the global capitalist system.
In Chile, the announcement by the right-wing government of President Sebastián Piñera of a 4 percent rise in mass transit fares ignited an uncontrollable wave of mass protests that have created a crisis of capitalist rule. The government’s response, reflecting the fears of the Chilean bourgeoisie, has been to impose a state of emergency and curfew, deploying 20,000 troops in the streets of Santiago and thousands more across the country. According to official figures, 18 people have been killed since the protests began, hundreds wounded and at least 5,000 arrested. The criminal methods of the US-backed Pinochet dictatorship have been resurrected, with reports of disappearances, torture of prisoners and sexual assaults against women detained in the protests.
This naked repression has only succeeded in swelling the protests. According to figures from the Chilean Interior Ministry, 424,000 people participated in 68 separate marches and demonstrations across the country Wednesday. Undoubtedly, the real figure is far higher. A general strike continued into its second day on Thursday, with hundreds of thousands more taking to the streets.
Meanwhile, Lebanon has also been rocked by mass protests over the past week, bringing an estimated one quarter of the country’s 6 million people into the streets. The immediate trigger was the government’s attempt to impose yet another gouging austerity measure aimed at making the country’s working class pay for its deep economic crisis—a $6-a-month tax on WhatsApp messages. As in Chile, attempts to use the army to break up protests have only inflamed popular anger.
Both Piñera in Chile and his Lebanese counterparts, Prime Minister Saad Hariri and President Michel Aoun, attempted to allay the popular upheavals with statements of contrition and offers of minimal economic relief measures. In both countries, the masses in the streets dismissed these cynical gestures as too little, too late, and are demanding the downfall of the regimes.
In both countries, the driving force behind the mass protests is the ceaseless and malignant growth of social inequality. The richest 1 percent monopolize 58 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 50 percent own less than 1 percent, in Lebanon, long-considered the region’s “free enterprise” haven for capitalist investment. In Chile, recently touted by Piñera as a regional “oasis” for finance capital, the richest 1 percent gobble up 33 percent of national income, according to World Bank data from 2017.
The New York Times, a principal voice of the US ruling elite, has taken note of the eruption of mass protests in Chile, Lebanon and other countries, commenting in a front-page article that “experts discern a pattern: a louder-than-usual howl against elites in countries where democracy is a source of disappointment, corruption is seen as brazen, and a tiny political class lives large while the younger generation struggles to get by.”
Strangely missing from this review of what the article’s headline describes as “popular fury across the globe” is what is happening in the United States itself. It quotes one of the “experts”, Vali Nasr, who recently left his post as dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, as commenting: “In countries where elections are decisive, like the United States and Britain, skepticism about the old political order has produced populist, nationalist and anti-immigrant results at the polls. In other countries, where people don’t have a voice, you have massive protests erupting.”
Are the Times editors genuinely oblivious to what is happening in the US, or are they just whistling past the graveyard? They publish this as 48,000 autoworkers have been on strike against General Motors for 40 days and 32,000 teachers and school workers in Chicago are entering the second week of a walkout that has shut down the country’s third-largest school district. The number of workers in the US on strike last year—over half a million—was the highest in more than three decades.
All the conditions that the Times describes in other countries—profound social inequality, corruption and a political system that is utterly indifferent to the interests of masses of working people—find stark expression in the US, the center of world capitalism, where the top 1 percent hoards roughly 40 percent of total wealth, and a social explosion is also on the agenda.
Thursday’s Times also carried an editorial titled “Chile Learns the Price of Economic Inequality”. Noting that Chile’s “protesters’ rage is born of the frustrations of everyday life,” it goes on to state: “Chileans live in a society of extraordinary economic disparities ... Santiago’s prosperity is undeniable. Viewed from the top of the tallest building in South America, which stands in the middle of a financial district called ‘Sanhattan,’ neighborhoods with luxury apartments, private hospitals and private schools stretch as far as the eye can see.
“But Santiago’s poverty also is striking: crumbling public hospitals, overcrowded schools, shantytowns that sit on the outskirts of the metropolis.
“And farther from Santiago are cities untouched by the recent boom.”
Substitute United States for Chile, and Manhattan for “Sanhattan” and little of this depiction of a country dominated by social inequality would need to be changed.
The Gini coefficient, the most commonly used statistical measure of income inequality, places the United States, at 41.5 barely less unequal than Chile, at 47.7.
The Times editorial attributes Chile’s crisis to the government’s “unsustainably narrow conception of its obligations to its citizens,” which it in turn blames upon the Pinochet dictatorship, which ruled the country from 1973 to 1990, for dictating policies based upon “free-market competition”. What it neglects to mention is that these policies were drafted by the so-called “Chicago Boys”, bourgeois economists trained by the University of Chicago’s “free market” godfather, Milton Friedman.
The same essential policies have been introduced by successive US governments—Democratic and Republican alike—depriving millions of essential social services ranging from health care to food stamps and retirement income, while leaving 40 million people living below the absurdly low official poverty rate of $25,000 for a family of four.
A striking feature of the protests in both Chile and Lebanon are the statements by demonstrators in both countries that the latest austerity measures are merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that they are fighting against an unequal social order that has been built up over the past 30 years. In Chile, these three decades began with the end of the military dictatorship, and in Lebanon, with the end of the civil war.
This also is an expression of a global shift. The social relations created over the past 30 years, began with the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. They have been based upon the suppression of the class struggle, the uninterrupted growth of social inequality and financial parasitism and the vast transfer of wealth from masses of working people the world over to a tiny wealthy elite. Today, this social order is rapidly unraveling under the weight of a resurgence of struggle by the international working class.
Objective events are exposing the complete political bankruptcy of the pseudo-left organizations and so-called “left” academics who wrote off the working class and the struggle for socialism. Nothing in their perspective, based on nationalism and identity politics, foresaw the emerging global eruption of class struggle.
These events, however, were substantially anticipated by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International in both their theoretical analysis and practice.
In its 1988 perspectives document “The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” the ICFI explained why the class struggle would inevitably assume a global character, based upon the “massive development of transnational corporations and the resulting global integration of capitalist production have produced an unprecedented uniformity in the conditions confronting the workers of the world.”
The document stated: “It has long been an elementary proposition of Marxism that the class struggle is national only as to form, but that it is, in essence, an international struggle. However, given the new features of capitalist development, even the form of the class struggle must assume an international character. Even the most elemental struggles of the working class pose the necessity of coordinating its actions on an international scale.”
This now becomes the most urgent and concrete political question. The current mass social protests and strikes are the initial expression of a growing revolutionary struggle of the international working class to put an end to capitalism and reorganize the world economy to meet social needs, not private profit.
Bill Van Auken
IMF austerity questioned as Latin American intervention looms
RANVIR S. NAYAR. Arab News. October 21, 2019
After weeks of often violent protests, which saw thousands of indigenous Ecuadorians descend on the capital Quito and paralyze the city, President Lenin Moreno last week restored the subsidy on fuel that he had canceled last month as part of an austerity drive that saw diesel prices more than double overnight. Moreno has been raising taxes and cutting public spending in order to get emergency financing of $4 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
A similar scene played out on the southern tip of the same continent this weekend, when thousands of protesters, mainly students, blocked the streets of Chilean capital Santiago in protest at a hike in metro prices as part of another austerity drive. In neighboring Argentina, President Mauricio Macri is almost certain to lose his bid for re-election when voting takes place next week. Macri was trounced in a primary election in August, reflecting the amount of anger against his severe austerity drive as part of a $50 billion bailout package devised by the IMF. Protests have since continued in Buenos Aires, forcing Macri to backtrack on several of his promises, especially as he stepped on to the campaign trail.
The situation in Peru turned almost Kafkaesque in early October, when embattled President Martin Vizcarra dissolved the opposition-controlled Congress following a prolonged conflict between the two institutions. The Congress in turn stripped Vizcarra of his post and named the vice president as the acting president, but within hours he had resigned and asked Vizcarra to hold early elections. The standoff has continued, as the matter has been referred to the country’s Supreme Court. Peru has been rocked by instability since Vizcarra’s predecessor, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, resigned over a massive corruption scandal that has spread from Brazil to several other countries in the region.
The various crises in Latin America may seem to be unconnected and the local factors behind them distinct and often unrelated. However, Latin American nations have benefited or suffered from the “contagion” effect. Thus, most of the region’s countries recently experienced almost a decade of rather remarkable progress and extremely strong economies, with a sustained burst of growth that saw significant expansion of the middle classes across the continent. Today, the middle class accounts for almost a third of the total population and living standards have risen accordingly, along with the emergence of several strong democracies in a part of the world that had been infamous for its military dictatorships and coups d’etats, as well as civil wars between governments and Marxist rebels.
However, for the past few years, the economies of several regional countries have slowed down, mainly due to a decline in the prices of various commodities, not least the oil that is the primary export of many Latin American nations. And, as economies in the region were weakening, a series of corruption scandals broke out involving many leaders, especially the one involving Odebrecht, a Brazilian infrastructure firm with a presence in several nations. A combination of weak economies and the eruption of corruption scandals led to a wave of protests against leaderships across the continent.
The fiscal situation of many nations deteriorated sharply, forcing governments to turn to overseas lenders, notably the IMF, seeking a bailout — as was the case with Argentina’s Macri and Ecuador’s Moreno. However, as has become standard practice for the IMF, it forced the countries to swallow the bitter pill of mounting an extreme austerity drive, slashing public spending and subsidies. However, many economists have turned against the IMF’s methods, saying that austerity hits the poorest sections of society the hardest, often reducing them to destitution. They point to various examples of IMF bailouts that have actually worsened the situation rather than helped the receiving country. For instance, when, during the Asian financial meltdown of the 1990s, the IMF forced South Korea to adopt austerity measures, its unemployment rate skyrocketed from 3 percent to 10 percent and the austerity drive also saw a sharp rise in the number of suicides, leading to the term “IMF suicides.” Similarly, Indonesia saw its gross domestic product (GDP) crash by 13 percent in a year.
More recently, a sustained and forced austerity drive in Greece saw its GDP fall by 27 percent between 2008 and 2015. Now, as the Athens government continues to struggle to keep public spending down in order to meet the rather atrocious target of reaching a primary budgetary surplus of 3.5 percent of GDP, the costs to the Greek people and society have been unprecedented. A study by Lancet says that the mortality rate in Greece has jumped significantly, from 944.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 1,174.9 in 2016, with most of the rise coming in the period after the austerity measures began in 2010.
In contrast, back in the 1990s, Malaysia was a rare Asian country to slam its doors on IMF assistance. Instead of putting its people through forced austerity, it imposed capital controls and curbed speculation on its currency. As a result, the Malays not only escaped the worst of austerity, but also saw their economy revive the quickest. The IMF did belatedly admit in 2002 that the Malaysian experiment had indeed worked.
However, nearly two decades later, there seems to be an urgent need to remind the IMF that, for economies in trouble, there are other, more palatable solutions than a severe austerity drive. The more recent Greek case study should serve as a lesson that even the most serious and urgent rebalancing of a budget needs to be done with a human face and by first taking into account the human cost of any such exercise, rather than just the economic cost. The IMF would do well to remember this as it prepares to intervene in Latin America once again.
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