an anti-capitalist primer

the devil's saucepan:
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/the_devil%2526%2523039%3Bs_saucepan
Warming is not the poisoned fruit of “human activity” in general, or of “technology” in general, but of capitalist activity and of capitalist technology (that the bureaucratic regimes of the former Soviet bloc essentially only mimicked). It is the product of a system which “increasingly resembles its concept”, according to Michel Husson’s fine expression(8).
(...) Consequently, in this generalised mode of production of commodities, “production for production’s sake” inevitably leads to “consumption for consumption’s sake”(11).
(...) Indeed, the underlying law here is well known: to compensate for the tendential fall in the rate of profit, capitalism must conquer constantly new regions, create new needs, new markets.
(...) What this discussion reveals is that the objective and subjective difficulties in the rescue of the climate are indissolubly linked : we cannot resolve one without resolving the other. To save the climate in social justice, with a world population of 6 billion human beings, implies bringing the average emissions down to around 0.4-0.5 tonnes of carbon per person and per year. An American or an Australian emit nearly six tonnes, a Belgian or a Dane three tonnes, a Mexican one tonne, a Chinese a little less, and an Indian… 0.4 tonnes. The only “durable” logic worthy of the name consists in making the demi-tonne of carbon per person and per year the quota of annual emission to be reached in each country at a certain date. A rational world strategy must then have four combined aspects: 1°) to reduce radically the primary demand for fossil energy sources of the developed countries (divide it by four, six or eight – according to the country); 2°) replace systematically fossil sources by renewable sources, beginning with these countries; 3°) constitute a world fund for adaptation financed uniquely according to the needs of the most threatened countries; 4°) transfer massively clean technologies towards the countries of the South, so that their development does not bring about a new destabilisation of the climate. If we want these four aspects to have the necessary breadth, be realised in the time limits necessary and be applied in social justice and equality, then the solution cannot simply flow from market mechanisms like the distribution of exchangeable rights, or the progressive and spontaneous lowering of the cost of renewables in a context of competition(27).
(...) It is necessary that the four aspects above are missions of public service, confided to public enterprises, realised independently of cost. According to specifications drawn up on the basis of real needs, and considering natural resources as the collective property of humanity. A radical redistribution of wealth (abolition of the debt of the countries of the South, an exceptional tax on wealth on a world scale, a tax bite on the profits of the oil companies, suppression of arms expenditure) and a radical deepening of democratic rights are then indispensable. Global rationality needs an anti-capitalist perspective.
(...) What is the way out? Social mobilisation. Instead of privileging lobbying (as do so many environmental associations trapped in the apparatus of governance), this means building a relationship of forces. Instead of wasting efforts attempting to convince employers and governments, it means putting our energies into a work of rank and file consciousness raising. Instead of vainly seeking the chimerical recipe of salvaging the climate by exchanges of rights and other complicated market mechanisms it means propagating the simple idea that the climate should be saved in justice and equality, independently of cost, by taking the money from where it is. Instead of bringing everything down to sole individual responsibility, it means creating in action the social emancipator link which alone can generate a new individual and collective responsibility of humanity in its metabolism with nature.
(...) Climate or development ? Climate or well-being? It is not the first time that capitalism has confronted humanity with a choice between plague and cholera. But the frenzy of accumulation carries the infernal dilemma to a global level, without precedent. This situation threatens barbaric solutions of a terrible breadth, affecting tens of millions, indeed hundreds of millions of people. “Il diavolo fa le pentole ma no i coperchi” (“The devil makes the saucepans, but not the lids”), says an Italian proverb. It is time to extinguish the diabolical fire of accumulation : the capitalist has no lid, and humanity risks being burnt.

an agricultural crime against humanity:
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/an_agricultural_crime_against_humanity
This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”(3). Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel(4): the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels – made from wood or straw or waste – become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.
(...) This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”(6). Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.
(...) A paper published in Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels(13). Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%(14). That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.
(...) Yes, it can grow on poor land and be cultivated by smallholders. But it can also grow on fertile land and be cultivated by largeholders. If there is one blindingly obvious fact about biofuel it’s that it is not a smallholder crop. It is an internationally-traded commodity which travels well and can be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce. Already the Indian government is planning 14m hectares of jatropha plantations(20). In August the first riots took place among the peasant farmers being driven off the land to make way for them(21).
(...) If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong.

the neoliberal stich-up:
For the first time, the United Kingdom’s consumer debt now exceeds our gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion(1). Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi(2). Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings(3). As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.
(...) Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state.
(...) as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top one percent, but to the top tenth of the top one per cent(4). In the United States, for example, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s(5). The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of state – minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions – just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim.

"we are all neo-liberals now"
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/%2526quot%3Bwe_are_all_neo-liberals_now%21%2526quot%3B
The financial consultant Grant Thornton is forecasting that gross domestic product (GDP) will hit £1.33 trillion this year. Fractionally less than the £1.35trn that was outstanding on mortgages, credit cards and personal loans in June.
(...) This symbolic overtaking is the first time that the country’s 60 million people owe more to the banks than the value of everything made by every office and factory in the country. Debt on personal loans and credit cards totals £214bn. Overall, individuals owe the staggering sum of £1,344,721,000,000. Responding to the latest figures, the Bank of England predicted debts would remain a “social” rather than an “economic” problem, indicating it believes indebtedness will be contained to individuals rather than threaten businesses.

transnational capitalism:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=12582
The pattern is a polarization between 20 percent of the population that is advancing, on the one hand, and 80 percent that is falling behind, on the other. There are new transnational class inequalities that cannot be understood within the North-South divide. The global South is increasingly dispersed across the planet so too is the global North. India now has 200 million middle class consumers who participate in the global market, as does China, even while majorities in those countries sink into destitution. Global social polarization is cutting across national lines in new ways.

small farmers and free trade, walden bello
http://www.countercurrents.org/bello300407.htm
while the economy has been growing at 8-10% a year, peasant income has stagnated, so that urban dwellers now have, on average, six times the income of peasants. True indeed is the observation of the rural advocates Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao that the urban industrial economy has been built “on the shoulders of peasants.”
(...) But at least trade policies at the time helped to mitigate the pain by barring agricultural imports that were even cheaper than local commodities. Practically all Asian countries with agricultural sectors tightly controlled imports via quotas and high tariffs. This protective shield, however, was severely eroded when countries signed the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and began joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) starting in 1995.
(...) While unsubsidized smallholders in the developing world had to survive on less than $400 a year, American and European farmers were receiving, respectively, an average of $21,000 and $16,000 a year in subsidies.
(...) Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has described the calamity as “a collapse in rural livelihoods and incomes” owing to the steep fall in the prices of farm products. Along with this has come a rapid decline in consumption of food grains, with the average Indian family of four consuming 76 kg less in 2003 compared to 1998 and 88 kg less than a decade earlier. The state of Andra Pradesh, which has become a byword for agrarian distress owing to trade liberalization, saw a catastrophic rise in farmers' suicides from 233 in 1998 to over 2,600 in 2002. One estimate is that some 100,000 farmers in India have taken their lives owing to collapsing prices stemming from rising imports.
(...) n China, what the Ministry of Public Security calls “mass group incidents” -- in other words, protest actions -- increased from 8,700 in 1993 to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size, from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004. Not surprisingly, the current leadership increasingly sees the countryside as a powder keg that needs to be defused.
(...) Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”

http://www.monthlyreview.org/nfte0807.htm
Real global growth averaged 4.9 percent a year during the Golden Age of national Keynesianism (1950–1973). It was 3.4 percent between 1974 and 1979; 3.3 percent in the 1980s; and only 2.3 percent in the 1990s, the decade with the slowest growth since World War II.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/600amin.htm
the wealthiest 20 percent of humanity increased their share of the global product from 60 to 80 percent in the last two decades of this century.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/1003amin.htm
(...) One can imagine that the food brought to market by today’s three billion peasants, after they ensure their own subsistences, would instead be produced by twenty million new modern farmers. The conditions for the success of such an alternative would include: (1) the transfer of important pieces of good land to the new capitalist farmers (and these lands would have to be taken out of the hands of present peasant populations); (2) capital (to buy supplies and equipment); and (3) access to the consumer markets. Such farmers would indeed compete successfully with the billions of present peasants. But what would happen to those billions of people? Under the circumstances, agreeing to the general principle of competition for agricultural products and foodstuffs, as imposed by WTO, means accepting the elimination of billions of noncompetitive producers within the short historic time of a few decades. What will become of these billions of humans beings, the majority of whom are already poor among the poor, who feed themselves with great difficulty. In fifty years’ time, industrial development, even in the fanciful hypothesis of a continued growth rate of 7 percent annually, could not absorb even one-third of this reserve.
(...) At the national level it implies macro policies protecting peasant food production from the unequal competition of modernized farmers and agribusiness corporations—local and international. This will help guarantee acceptable internal food prices—disconnected from international market prices, which are additionally biased by the agricultural subsidies of the wealthy North.
(...) The main social transformation that characterizes the second half of the twentieth century can be summarized in a single statistic: the proportion of the precarious popular classes rose from less than one-quarter to more than one-half of the global urban population, and this phenomenon of pauperization has reappeared on a significant scale in the developed centers themselves. This destabilized urban population has increased in a half-century from less than a quarter of a billion to more than a billion-and-a-half individuals, registering a growth rate which surpasses those that characterize economic expansion, population growth, or the process of urbanization itself.

questions that might determine history:
Since the war began in 2003 (actually, for a long time before that, but for the sake of maintaining focus), there has been an element in the antiwar movement that understands the fundamentally imperialist nature of the US war and occupation. In response, this element has organized its opposition to the debacle in anti-imperialist terms. The anti-imperialists’ politics range from libertarian to anarchist with most of them considering themselves leftists. I have had a running conversation with Ashley Smith — one of those organizers with the International Socialist Organization — since well before March 2003. Recently, we decided to exchange thoughts regarding the need for a re-energized antiwar movement whose fundamental understanding is that the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) is imperialist and that opposition to that war should be anti-imperialist.
(...) For most people opposed to the war on Iraq, the problem is the Bush Administration or this or that wing of corporate America, say the oil companies. This administration or the oil industry has corrupted what is essentially, whatever its pock marks, a fine system. The aim of the movement therefore should be to pressure the government, isolate a regressive wing of corporate America, elect a liberal Democrat, and then implement a sane foreign policy through the existing government. Imperialism is therefore a problem of policy, not the of the system itself. In 2004, this led the mainstream anti-war movement to entirely subordinate grassroots struggle to the project of electing John Kerry, who was an ardent supporter of the Iraq War and merely claimed that he would more effectively run the war. The anti-war movement thus collapsed. Understanding the actual roots and nature of imperialism is therefore pivotal for building an effective movement that can end this occupation and develop a radical movement for overthrowing imperialism.
(...) The US has thus far more at stake in Iraq than it had in Vietnam and will take an ever more powerful movement to drive it out of Iraq and the region. During the Vietnam War, which was a brainchild of Cold War Democrats Kennedy and Johnson, it took a mass domestic anti-war movement, a rebellion of US troops in Vietnam, and a heroic resistance by the Vietnamese people to defeat the US. Congress never lifted a finger. We should learn that lesson well and organize an independent mass movement of mass protests and sit-ins, help build a new Vet and GI resistance through Iraq Veterans against the War, and also support the legitimate resistance of the Iraqi people against occupation. Only the combination of all those forces has the social power to drive the US out of Iraq.
(...) The New York Times had a piece on the Democratic candidates’ true Iraq/Afghan war stances and none of the three major candidates’ plans include anything even approaching an immediate and unconditional withdrawal. This isn’t a surprise to us, but you gotta’ wonder how many antiwar citizens think that Edwards, Obama or Clinton are going to end the war. Just like the 2006 Congressional elections, the Democrats are lying about their true intentions, yet you can bet that there will be some of their supporters at every antiwar rally between now and the 2008 elections. This is our biggest task: get the movement past these liars.
(...) The Democrats are really a challenge for social movements and the Left. Just a glance at the main funders of the party reveals the problem; they get the bulk of their money from corporate America. As a result, however much they appeal to the movements of workers and the oppressed, they are tied to a class that does not share our interests and as a result betray their promises to us. Nowhere is that more clear than the war in Iraq. Save for a handful of exceptions, they voted for the war; they refuse to cut the funding; they oppose immediate withdrawal; and won’t even impeach the war criminals in the White House. Some of them are actually more hawkish on Iran than Bush is!
(...) The key historical precedent we have to turn to is how we, not the Democrats, ended the Vietnam War. We ended it through the dynamic interaction between a truly mass domestic anti-war movement, a rebellion among the US troops and Veterans documented in David Cortright’s brilliant book Soldiers in Revolt, and the national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people.