Prewhat?
========
"Precarious literally means unsure, uncertain, difficult,
delicate. As a political term it refers to living and working
conditions without any guarantees: for example the precarious
residential status of migrants and refugees, or the precariousness
of everyday life for single mothers. [...] Precariat, an allusion to
proletariat, meanwhile is used as a combative self-description in
order to emphasise the subjective and utopian moments of
precarisation." -- Frassanito Network. "Precarious, Precarisation,
Precariat?" In: Seymour, Benedict (ed.). Mute Volume II. #0:
Precarious Reader. London: Mute Publishing Ltd, 2005.
Topics
======
Our intention is to drop in questions, and generate a debate, rather
than a clear opinion about what is precarity and why are we using this
expression. We are not affiliated with the Euromayday network either.
- Why is Precarity?
Developing and discussing precarity as an analysis of contemporary
capitalism and the role of work through a cross-cutting issue.
Historically, precarity has been the rule rather than the
exception. It doesn't grasp all factors involved, but perhaps it
can be used as a strategic focus term for political work in the
present situation. However, for that we have to be aware of what
it means for different people in different places in geopolitical
space and on the social hierarchy. How can the multiplicity of
realities and the unity of political thrust converge?
- State of the Euromayday
What is the Euromayday network and where is it going? Focusing on
outreach to peripherial groups and strenghtening activity between
Euromayday parades. Possibilities for action, collaboration and
cooperation.
- Talking about Flexicurity
How to move beyond reformism? Precarity movement is simply
reformist if it just has 'demands' for the European Union or the
national governments! What is the vision and practice of
flexicurity? Precarity movement is simply conservative and
backward looking if it seeks a return to the wellfare state!
But what is the alternative vision and the best practices that
guide us towards a good life?
Background
==========
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarity
- Euromayday.org
- Mute Magazine Precarious Reader issue
- Republicart Precariat issue
- Chainworders.org
- Franco "Bifo" Berardi: Art and Immaterial Labour at the Radical
Philosophy Conference London
- Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of
Human Feeling. London: University of California Press, 1983.
- Precarious Bourdieu, Pierre. Job insecurity is everywhere now. In: Firing
back: against the tyranny of the market 2. London & New York:
Verso, 2003.
- Boltanski, Luc & Chiapello, Eve. The new spirit of
capitalism. London & New York: Verso Books, 2005.
- Gorz, André. Les Métamorphoses du travail. Paris:
Gallimard-Jeunesse, 1999.
maxigas@anargeek.net, Militant Research Group Budapest
Δευτέρα 28 Ιουλίου 2008
Δευτέρα 21 Ιουλίου 2008
new book addresses PGA
One of the chapters deals with structure and process in the European PGA network based on my work with the Movement for Global Resistance (MRG) in Barcelona in 2001-2002. I hope this might be relevant to current debates.
Here's a description:
Networking Futures provides an ethnographic account of the cultural practice and politics of transnational networking among anti-corporate globalization activists based in Barcelona with a particular focus on the links between digital technologies, new forms of organization, and emerging political imaginaries. It also explores network organizing, performative protest, and violence during mass direct actions.
For more information or to order the book, see below and/or go to:
www.networkingfutures.com
The book can also be ordered from www.dukeupress.edu or www.amazon.com.
Blurb from the Publisher:
Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA)— including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process.
In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the
Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization. In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, he explains how activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation but also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.
Praise for the Book:
“Networking Futures is one of the very first books to map in detail the multiple networks that are challenging corporate globalization. Taking as a point of departure an exemplary case—the Catalan anti–globalization movements of the past decade—Jeffrey S. Juris moves on to chronicle the collective struggles to construct not only an alternative vision of possible worlds but the means to bring them about.
Networking Futures is a compelling portrait of the spirit of innovation that lies behind an array of progressive mobilizations, from anarchist movements and street protests to the World Social Forum. Based on a well-developed notion of collaborative ethnography, it is also a wonderful example of engaged scholarship: a much-needed alternative to academic work as usual.”
-Arturo Escobar, author of Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes
“Jeffrey S. Juris gives us an illuminating model for how to study networks from below using the tools of ethnography. And in the process he reveals the extraordinary power (as well as the challenges) of network organizing for social movements today.”
-Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude
“Networking Futures is a terrific, deeply informed ethnographic account of the origins and activities of the anti–corporate globalization movement. Jeffrey S. Juris’s identity is as much that of an activist who happens to be doing first-rate anthropology as vice versa, and there is much for anthropologists to reflect on in the way that this work is set up and narrated through these dual identities.”
-George E. Marcus, co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary
About the Author:
Jeffrey S. Juris is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. He is a co-author of Global Democracy and the World Social Forums and has published numerous articles in both scholarly journals and activist research forums. He also serves on the Editorial Board of Resistance Studies Magazine and has taken part in numerous direct action-oriented groups and networks, including the Movement for Global Resistance in
Barcelona. His new fieldwork explores the relationship between grassroots media activism and autonomy in Mexico City.
Here's a description:
Networking Futures provides an ethnographic account of the cultural practice and politics of transnational networking among anti-corporate globalization activists based in Barcelona with a particular focus on the links between digital technologies, new forms of organization, and emerging political imaginaries. It also explores network organizing, performative protest, and violence during mass direct actions.
For more information or to order the book, see below and/or go to:
www.networkingfutures.com
The book can also be ordered from www.dukeupress.edu or www.amazon.com.
Blurb from the Publisher:
Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA)— including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process.
In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the
Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization. In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, he explains how activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation but also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.
Praise for the Book:
“Networking Futures is one of the very first books to map in detail the multiple networks that are challenging corporate globalization. Taking as a point of departure an exemplary case—the Catalan anti–globalization movements of the past decade—Jeffrey S. Juris moves on to chronicle the collective struggles to construct not only an alternative vision of possible worlds but the means to bring them about.
Networking Futures is a compelling portrait of the spirit of innovation that lies behind an array of progressive mobilizations, from anarchist movements and street protests to the World Social Forum. Based on a well-developed notion of collaborative ethnography, it is also a wonderful example of engaged scholarship: a much-needed alternative to academic work as usual.”
-Arturo Escobar, author of Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes
“Jeffrey S. Juris gives us an illuminating model for how to study networks from below using the tools of ethnography. And in the process he reveals the extraordinary power (as well as the challenges) of network organizing for social movements today.”
-Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude
“Networking Futures is a terrific, deeply informed ethnographic account of the origins and activities of the anti–corporate globalization movement. Jeffrey S. Juris’s identity is as much that of an activist who happens to be doing first-rate anthropology as vice versa, and there is much for anthropologists to reflect on in the way that this work is set up and narrated through these dual identities.”
-George E. Marcus, co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary
About the Author:
Jeffrey S. Juris is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. He is a co-author of Global Democracy and the World Social Forums and has published numerous articles in both scholarly journals and activist research forums. He also serves on the Editorial Board of Resistance Studies Magazine and has taken part in numerous direct action-oriented groups and networks, including the Movement for Global Resistance in
Barcelona. His new fieldwork explores the relationship between grassroots media activism and autonomy in Mexico City.
Πέμπτη 10 Ιουλίου 2008
12 JULY/G8: International call for solidarity actions against G8 repressions
International call for solidarity actions against G8 repressions
http://japan.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4617/index.php
public domain This work is in the public domain.
Free Arrests! Protest against police state & capitalist summit!
Take simultaneous actions on Saturday 12th July.
watch a video record:
rootless.org/noG8/Declare_Independence.m4v
3 of our friends unjustly arrested at the demonstration against G8
summit on 5th July. One of the arrested is actually an indymedia
activist who is organizing sound actions and a member of G8 Media
Network which is organized by non-profit and non-govermental various
grassroots media. The exerciser of overwhelming violence was the police.
For instance, they stopped the track forcely, broke the window with
policeman’s club etc, and dragged out the driver while hanging him. This
situation was exposed as Japanese police brutality again, reported by
independent media.
While most of Japanese media coverage focusing around the summit, one of
homeless activists in Osaka had quietly, unfairly arrested on 4th.
Alleged that his mobile phone ownership and user was different in name.
Even though his group from Osaka had been planned to come and join the
poverty & labour unit of couter G8 Action Network but they cannot in
order to resucue him just after the liberation of another one who was
also arrested by tiny bureaucratic mistake last month. All of them are
unreasonably trivial things. Suppression of dissent, obviously.
We denounce suppression to the sound demonstration and homeless
activists by the police, and demand immediate releasing of all. On 12th
July, simultaneous protest actions will be taken 3pm in Sapporo, Tokyo,
Osaka, etc. against police capitalism. Call for international
solidarity! Take actions simultaneously! Protest against unjust arrests,
police violence and capitalist summit.
July5th Relief Association for Sapporo Sound Demonstration
in solidarity with indymedia japan.
j5solidarity (at) riseup.net
j5solidarity.blog116.fc2.com/
tv.g8medianetwork.org/
japan.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4602/
japan.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4604/
Related
* http://j5solidarity.blog116.fc2.com/
* http://tv.g8medianetwork.org/?q=ja/node/301
News :: G8 Summit, FTA
Final statement by international activists
public domainThis work is in the public domain.
[Media G8way]
Press Release July 9th 2008
* Hundreds join Ainu march
* International Activists Call for Support for Japanese Prisoners
* Final statement by international activists
Today, in the concluding event of ten days of G8 protests, hundreds of
activists from three protest camps marched in a demonstration organized
by the Ainu, a disenfranchised indigenous population of Hokkaido, the
island where the G8 summit is being held. The march was surrounded by
several rows of police the entire time. Protesters were holding signs in
English and Japanese saying "No G8", and "Japan is a police state".
"The Japanese government's policies towards the Ainu are symbolic of the
G8's policies of dominance and oppression throughout the world", said
Japanese organizers.
"At some point, my friend and I, frustrated with the police, went across
the street where there was a sign welcoming participants to the G8
summit. We started breaking and tearing it," says Jone, a US activist.
"Police held us and tried to arrest us, but other demonstrators came to
help and manged to take us away from the police."
At 16:00, the following statement, made by international activists from
Toyoura camp, was made public in a press conference:
„Three of our friends were arrested on July 5th and have been in state
custody
for four days. The Japanese criminal justice system allows for inhumane
treatment of prisoners. Those detained can be held for 23 days without
prosecution, and their families harassed. Furthermore, the Japanese
legal system imposes collective punishment; organizers can be punished
for activities that others did. Within jail, prisoners` physical
movements are greatly restricted: they must ask permission to lie down,
sit up, etc. In many other countries, this treatment would be considered
torture.
The only way for the eight heads of state to maintain their undemocratic
and unaccountable control over the world`s six billion people is through
force. The oppressive policies of the Japanese state clearly illustrate
this.
We call on people around the world to show solidarity with the three
anti-G8 Japanese prisoners. Demonstrate in front of your Japanese
embassies. Help fund legal suppport for the prisoners. Come next year to
protest the G8 in Italy, to make sure oppression does not silence our
voices“.
--
Media G8way is an international press service for individuals, groups,
networks and (dis)organizations who understand themselves to be part of
an independent radical left/@ movement against the G8. Media G8way does
not claim responsibility for the content of the statements it
distributes on behalf of the groups or individuals who use its service.
See
* www.gipfelsoli.org/Home/MediaG8way_Hokkaido
* www.gipfelsoli.org/Home/MediaG8way_Heiligendamm
http://japan.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4617/index.php
public domain This work is in the public domain.
Free Arrests! Protest against police state & capitalist summit!
Take simultaneous actions on Saturday 12th July.
watch a video record:
rootless.org/noG8/Declare_Independence.m4v
3 of our friends unjustly arrested at the demonstration against G8
summit on 5th July. One of the arrested is actually an indymedia
activist who is organizing sound actions and a member of G8 Media
Network which is organized by non-profit and non-govermental various
grassroots media. The exerciser of overwhelming violence was the police.
For instance, they stopped the track forcely, broke the window with
policeman’s club etc, and dragged out the driver while hanging him. This
situation was exposed as Japanese police brutality again, reported by
independent media.
While most of Japanese media coverage focusing around the summit, one of
homeless activists in Osaka had quietly, unfairly arrested on 4th.
Alleged that his mobile phone ownership and user was different in name.
Even though his group from Osaka had been planned to come and join the
poverty & labour unit of couter G8 Action Network but they cannot in
order to resucue him just after the liberation of another one who was
also arrested by tiny bureaucratic mistake last month. All of them are
unreasonably trivial things. Suppression of dissent, obviously.
We denounce suppression to the sound demonstration and homeless
activists by the police, and demand immediate releasing of all. On 12th
July, simultaneous protest actions will be taken 3pm in Sapporo, Tokyo,
Osaka, etc. against police capitalism. Call for international
solidarity! Take actions simultaneously! Protest against unjust arrests,
police violence and capitalist summit.
July5th Relief Association for Sapporo Sound Demonstration
in solidarity with indymedia japan.
j5solidarity (at) riseup.net
j5solidarity.blog116.fc2.com/
tv.g8medianetwork.org/
japan.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4602/
japan.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4604/
Related
* http://j5solidarity.blog116.fc2.com/
* http://tv.g8medianetwork.org/?q=ja/node/301
News :: G8 Summit, FTA
Final statement by international activists
public domainThis work is in the public domain.
[Media G8way]
Press Release July 9th 2008
* Hundreds join Ainu march
* International Activists Call for Support for Japanese Prisoners
* Final statement by international activists
Today, in the concluding event of ten days of G8 protests, hundreds of
activists from three protest camps marched in a demonstration organized
by the Ainu, a disenfranchised indigenous population of Hokkaido, the
island where the G8 summit is being held. The march was surrounded by
several rows of police the entire time. Protesters were holding signs in
English and Japanese saying "No G8", and "Japan is a police state".
"The Japanese government's policies towards the Ainu are symbolic of the
G8's policies of dominance and oppression throughout the world", said
Japanese organizers.
"At some point, my friend and I, frustrated with the police, went across
the street where there was a sign welcoming participants to the G8
summit. We started breaking and tearing it," says Jone, a US activist.
"Police held us and tried to arrest us, but other demonstrators came to
help and manged to take us away from the police."
At 16:00, the following statement, made by international activists from
Toyoura camp, was made public in a press conference:
„Three of our friends were arrested on July 5th and have been in state
custody
for four days. The Japanese criminal justice system allows for inhumane
treatment of prisoners. Those detained can be held for 23 days without
prosecution, and their families harassed. Furthermore, the Japanese
legal system imposes collective punishment; organizers can be punished
for activities that others did. Within jail, prisoners` physical
movements are greatly restricted: they must ask permission to lie down,
sit up, etc. In many other countries, this treatment would be considered
torture.
The only way for the eight heads of state to maintain their undemocratic
and unaccountable control over the world`s six billion people is through
force. The oppressive policies of the Japanese state clearly illustrate
this.
We call on people around the world to show solidarity with the three
anti-G8 Japanese prisoners. Demonstrate in front of your Japanese
embassies. Help fund legal suppport for the prisoners. Come next year to
protest the G8 in Italy, to make sure oppression does not silence our
voices“.
--
Media G8way is an international press service for individuals, groups,
networks and (dis)organizations who understand themselves to be part of
an independent radical left/@ movement against the G8. Media G8way does
not claim responsibility for the content of the statements it
distributes on behalf of the groups or individuals who use its service.
See
* www.gipfelsoli.org/Home/MediaG8way_Hokkaido
* www.gipfelsoli.org/Home/MediaG8way_Heiligendamm
Τρίτη 24 Ιουνίου 2008
Autonomous Actiondays 29.7.-2.8. 2008 Helsinki
Squatters of Helsinki invite you to Helsinki for five days lasting
actiondays for autonomous freespaces, culture and freedom.
Althrough the whole last year the city has been shaked with an unseen
chain of occupations of empty spaces to build an autonomous social
centre, there is still no permanent autonomous freespace in Helsinki.
The city has tried to convince us that they are looking for proper space
before the short-term lease-contract for Social centre Rajatila expires
in august. Still, it seems that the city has none or is not willing to
offer anything.
The situation from the squatters point of view is very clear: either the
city gives us the space or we will take it.
*We invite you to take the struggle back to the streets with us!*
during the five days we are going to bring forth different sides of
autonomous activity. These days will be filled with concerts, workshops,
discussions and also
demonstrations and direct action. It is time for the city of helsinki to
understand that the struggle for autonomous spaces is not going to end.
Year 2008 has brought great victories for the movement for freespaces,
when the ungeren in Copenhagen finally got new spaces after Ungdomshuset
was evicted and demolished, and the struggle for Köpi in Berlin achieved
30 more years for the house. We want to give our own add for the
international struggle for autonomous spaces. We wish for your help and
potential in this battle that we want to bring forth during the actiondays.
The passed year has shown that united we are unbeatable! No more
evictions! For radical autonomous freespaces!
If youre coming to Helsinki for the actiondays, please inform us how
many people are coming. We are able to accommodate people in the
Autonomous Social Center Rajatila and we attempt to offer at least one
warm meal in a day. We are also going to arrange a conversation between
foreign and finnish squatters, so if you want to brief about your own
experiences, we would really appreciate that and be happy if you could
contact us beforehand. You can announce yourself by sending an email to
actiondays@riseup.
*Introductive schedule for actiondays:*
28.7.General Info @ Rajatila
29.7. Autonomous Actiondays begin!
Streetparty for autonomous cultural activity, concert.
30.7. Workshops: Banderoll-painting, law-support, police tactics, street
medic, conversation occasion with the visitors
31.7 Demostration for Radical freespaces - Social center NOW! Concert at
the evening.
1.8. Workshops: police tactics, conversation occasion with the visitors
2.8. The end of actiondays: Reclaim the city, party in the evening
There will also be surprises for every day. We hope that you are able to
join the info at 28.7.
More info will be found from our websites www.valtaus.org
as the actiondays approach.
The struggle continues!
____________________
actiondays for autonomous freespaces, culture and freedom.
Althrough the whole last year the city has been shaked with an unseen
chain of occupations of empty spaces to build an autonomous social
centre, there is still no permanent autonomous freespace in Helsinki.
The city has tried to convince us that they are looking for proper space
before the short-term lease-contract for Social centre Rajatila expires
in august. Still, it seems that the city has none or is not willing to
offer anything.
The situation from the squatters point of view is very clear: either the
city gives us the space or we will take it.
*We invite you to take the struggle back to the streets with us!*
during the five days we are going to bring forth different sides of
autonomous activity. These days will be filled with concerts, workshops,
discussions and also
demonstrations and direct action. It is time for the city of helsinki to
understand that the struggle for autonomous spaces is not going to end.
Year 2008 has brought great victories for the movement for freespaces,
when the ungeren in Copenhagen finally got new spaces after Ungdomshuset
was evicted and demolished, and the struggle for Köpi in Berlin achieved
30 more years for the house. We want to give our own add for the
international struggle for autonomous spaces. We wish for your help and
potential in this battle that we want to bring forth during the actiondays.
The passed year has shown that united we are unbeatable! No more
evictions! For radical autonomous freespaces!
If youre coming to Helsinki for the actiondays, please inform us how
many people are coming. We are able to accommodate people in the
Autonomous Social Center Rajatila and we attempt to offer at least one
warm meal in a day. We are also going to arrange a conversation between
foreign and finnish squatters, so if you want to brief about your own
experiences, we would really appreciate that and be happy if you could
contact us beforehand. You can announce yourself by sending an email to
actiondays@riseup.
*Introductive schedule for actiondays:*
28.7.General Info @ Rajatila
29.7. Autonomous Actiondays begin!
Streetparty for autonomous cultural activity, concert.
30.7. Workshops: Banderoll-painting, law-support, police tactics, street
medic, conversation occasion with the visitors
31.7 Demostration for Radical freespaces - Social center NOW! Concert at
the evening.
1.8. Workshops: police tactics, conversation occasion with the visitors
2.8. The end of actiondays: Reclaim the city, party in the evening
There will also be surprises for every day. We hope that you are able to
join the info at 28.7.
More info will be found from our websites www.valtaus.org
The struggle continues!
____________________
Παρασκευή 20 Ιουνίου 2008
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
Hello comrades,
This is a translation of the document publicly distributed here in Greece
by members and ex-members of the athens IMC plenum. Despite the fact that
the distribution of the proclamation has only just started, it has already
aroused a large, wide and public dialog in the political community of
Athens.
This dialog as you might imagine, concerns the current state of the athens
imc collective
We are sending you this proclamation in order to inform the wider IMC
community about the events that took place within the athens imc
administration team and led to the publication of this text. We strongly
feel that everyone should be informed on what is going on inside the
collective for the last 2 years and why people have left or were forced to
leave the athens imc collective as these are problems that perhaps other
indymedia centers around the globe have already faced, or will face in the
future.
We think that it�s not just an internal conflict but something much more
political and important as the current administration team of the Athens
IMC strongly promotes censorship and political discrimination on the
published material at the site of athens imc, thus endangering the very
existence of the indymedia center.
In brief, Athens indymedia collective has turned into a really small group
of persons who have very little to do with the indymedia culture. For
example just this small group has managed to throw out of the assembly the
majority of the collective using petty methods and violence (physical and
psychological). The so called open assembly of the Athens indymedia
collective has ceased to function following the golden rule of the
consensus in the decision making process and is gradually turning into a
small Stalinist group that doesn't follow the Principles of Unity of the
indymedia network. So under these circumstances it was easy for some
persons to discard more than the half of the Athens indymedia collective.
Nevertheless we won't give up. We have already made a first big step with
the publication of the following reclamation and solutions and
propositions have already begun to emerge, with the support of the
Athenian political community. For the first time in quite a few years now
the subject of IMC is reentering the political agenda and a lot of people
are expressing their opinions on what is happening here.
We will keep you posted.
The text that follows is the reclamation that is distributed in Athens.
�The exiled part of the Athens IMC plenum�
=============================================
What is Athens Indymedia? Τhis may be a wrong question to begin
with. Without it being able to be defined clearly, since each one can
have his own point of view on it and since it's not something static,
but it changes like the movement itself does, we could say that Athens
Indymedia is not a specific thing which purposes to a specific goal.
It grants our need for information in a totally different way than how
the mass media do. It is an electronic tool, open to everybody and not
only to �specialists�. Communication and information becomes
bidirectional, not one-way, and every post is open to further
commenting. Surely, besides its informing complexion, Athens Indymedia
is also a space for exchanging ideas and experiences, since many times
on the occasion of an article, long debates have began, in which
everyone can participate.
In other words, we try for Athens Indymedia to be a space with
anti-hierarchical and direct-democratic structure, with an anti-regime
role and in its fields (information, discussion) to materialize these
characteristics, premising the principle of consensus. For these
characteristics to be safeguarded, an editorial guideline is being
used as the common minimum political agreement, whereby the published
material is being �rated� from the administration team and the users,
and the basic principles of every IMC worldwide are being adopted.
There must be an administration team (A.T.) which cares for this
project's good functionality and its evolution, so that it stays
alive. Obviously, for these characteristics to be preserved, the A.T.
must function according to these and each individual who participates
in the A.T. must uphold such structures and purposes.
But, our experience from our participation in the administration team of
Athens Indymedia, showed us a completely different situation. Specific
people systematically manipulate the team's meetings and they attain this
by any way could serve their purposes, which we will hereby mention.
At first, as an external consequence of these people's behaviour over
the medium, the Athens IMC is getting further and further from what it
claims to be: a medium for non-mediating information, a weapon of the
people who fight and form the radical, revolutionary, antagonistic (or
name it as you wish) movement. How could it be something like that,
when the administration of the posts is prejudiced? When personal
sympathies are of higher priority than the editorial guideline? When
the site users are treated as people who don't need any answer or
discussion and not as political individuals. When criteria for editing
and posting features are based on "what we like"? When discussions are
being administrated in favor of one or another aspect, without any
compunction, because some of the administrators support one or another
side? How can a tool like Athens Indymedia be anti-hierarchical, when
administrators and users have been constantly separated? And finally,
how can it be any of what it claims, when terror, slander, physical
and psychological violence prevail within the A.T.? After all, how are
we going to reclaim the media, if its administration is being more and
more condensed, ideologically closed, detached from us?
Results of all these things mentioned above, happening in Athens IMC,
are obvious to a lot of people, affected by those. They are not just a
consequence of random occasions or natural large-scale changes within
the movement; instead, they come as a result of very specific
manipulations by very specific people, in the administration team, who
have been committed in expropriating the administration of the medium
at any cost.
At second we would focus on the internal consequences of some people's
behaviour towards the plenary of the Athens IMC. We saw, that because
of these people and because of the ones who didn't react to the
authoritative behaviour of the former, the plenary cannot bear the
principles mentioned above (anti-hierarchy, direct-democracy,
consensus), since it has to deal with personal attacks, threats,
violence and expulsions. There is an unofficial central committee
which doesn't report to anybody (not even to the ones who react) while
requiring from the "workers" to obey their decisions; blocking with a
veto new people that they don't like; mercilessly insulting,
threatening, provoking and defaming members of the group; even making
fractionising efforts, in order to exclude the arguers, the "annoying"
ones. We would need plenty of pages to even summarize what has
happened and been spoken in and beyond the plenary of the AT; and
there is definitely, no space for the documents that we have in prove.
Some cases are indicative:
*
4 incidents of violence against members of the Administration Team
by the same person (while the plenary was taking place, even once
against a young female comrade)
*
Expulsion of people from the collective
*
Unjustified disqualification of A.T. members from internal digital
tools (removing access, dropping accounts etc).
*
Members of the A.T. (some of them were forced to leave) have been
defamed for being dangerous, traitors, unreliable, indy.gr* agents,
agent provocators sent by political organisations, non-political,
tech-freaks, sexists etc...
*
Personal threats like "I will find you and I will ..."
*
Blocking the return of an ex-member with a veto, and turning the
plenary into a trial including a full bill of indictment.
*
Dispersing the Technical Team of Athens IMC.
*
Putting limitations on the operation of a radical website hosted on
athens imc server, maintained by another collective
*
Re-occurring deletion of internal discussion posts and widespread
censorship on the opinions of the A.T. members.
Of course, the text you have been reading is not the first reaction
against what has been happening beyond the Athens IMC operation. We
have found ourselves in a dead end, facing such practices, and the
alternatives we had to choose from, either led to no results, or we
didn't follow them for preserving our political principles. The tactic
of trying to give small battles, based on argumentation and a right
attitude according to what Indymedia is supposed to represent, was
meant to fail: the arguments were unfortunately weaker than the
expulsions, the vetos and the politician tricks. The option of
applying the "talion law" required us to be immoral, which is not
allowed by our political culture. Fascism cannot be fought with
fascism, nor can hierarchy be fought with applying authoritarianism.
The end does not justify the means. Staying inactive and distant,
would lead us into being guilty due to our silence. Quitting would not
be a solution either; not after so much contribution to the medium and
since we have both personal and collective opinion for what should
function in another way.
Due to the vain authoritarianism of some people, the current state of
the Athens IMC administration is described by a totalitarianism, an
increasing distance from the spaces and the movement ideas and by a
widespread sense of decay. All these make us believe that there is a
movement's need to re-define from scratch the role, the character and
mainly the organisational structure of Athens Indymedia.
We don't quit, we denounce. We won't remain silent in front of the
authoritative practices we face. Time has come for a wider discussion
to be opened, among the medium's users, on how to reclaim it.
The exiled part of the Athens IMC plenum
Animix - DevNull - dpdt1 - fourier - LA - matafanas -
mathousalix - T@kis - tespa - vevek � giorgos - Thodoris M.
This is a translation of the document publicly distributed here in Greece
by members and ex-members of the athens IMC plenum. Despite the fact that
the distribution of the proclamation has only just started, it has already
aroused a large, wide and public dialog in the political community of
Athens.
This dialog as you might imagine, concerns the current state of the athens
imc collective
We are sending you this proclamation in order to inform the wider IMC
community about the events that took place within the athens imc
administration team and led to the publication of this text. We strongly
feel that everyone should be informed on what is going on inside the
collective for the last 2 years and why people have left or were forced to
leave the athens imc collective as these are problems that perhaps other
indymedia centers around the globe have already faced, or will face in the
future.
We think that it�s not just an internal conflict but something much more
political and important as the current administration team of the Athens
IMC strongly promotes censorship and political discrimination on the
published material at the site of athens imc, thus endangering the very
existence of the indymedia center.
In brief, Athens indymedia collective has turned into a really small group
of persons who have very little to do with the indymedia culture. For
example just this small group has managed to throw out of the assembly the
majority of the collective using petty methods and violence (physical and
psychological). The so called open assembly of the Athens indymedia
collective has ceased to function following the golden rule of the
consensus in the decision making process and is gradually turning into a
small Stalinist group that doesn't follow the Principles of Unity of the
indymedia network. So under these circumstances it was easy for some
persons to discard more than the half of the Athens indymedia collective.
Nevertheless we won't give up. We have already made a first big step with
the publication of the following reclamation and solutions and
propositions have already begun to emerge, with the support of the
Athenian political community. For the first time in quite a few years now
the subject of IMC is reentering the political agenda and a lot of people
are expressing their opinions on what is happening here.
We will keep you posted.
The text that follows is the reclamation that is distributed in Athens.
�The exiled part of the Athens IMC plenum�
=============================================
What is Athens Indymedia? Τhis may be a wrong question to begin
with. Without it being able to be defined clearly, since each one can
have his own point of view on it and since it's not something static,
but it changes like the movement itself does, we could say that Athens
Indymedia is not a specific thing which purposes to a specific goal.
It grants our need for information in a totally different way than how
the mass media do. It is an electronic tool, open to everybody and not
only to �specialists�. Communication and information becomes
bidirectional, not one-way, and every post is open to further
commenting. Surely, besides its informing complexion, Athens Indymedia
is also a space for exchanging ideas and experiences, since many times
on the occasion of an article, long debates have began, in which
everyone can participate.
In other words, we try for Athens Indymedia to be a space with
anti-hierarchical and direct-democratic structure, with an anti-regime
role and in its fields (information, discussion) to materialize these
characteristics, premising the principle of consensus. For these
characteristics to be safeguarded, an editorial guideline is being
used as the common minimum political agreement, whereby the published
material is being �rated� from the administration team and the users,
and the basic principles of every IMC worldwide are being adopted.
There must be an administration team (A.T.) which cares for this
project's good functionality and its evolution, so that it stays
alive. Obviously, for these characteristics to be preserved, the A.T.
must function according to these and each individual who participates
in the A.T. must uphold such structures and purposes.
But, our experience from our participation in the administration team of
Athens Indymedia, showed us a completely different situation. Specific
people systematically manipulate the team's meetings and they attain this
by any way could serve their purposes, which we will hereby mention.
At first, as an external consequence of these people's behaviour over
the medium, the Athens IMC is getting further and further from what it
claims to be: a medium for non-mediating information, a weapon of the
people who fight and form the radical, revolutionary, antagonistic (or
name it as you wish) movement. How could it be something like that,
when the administration of the posts is prejudiced? When personal
sympathies are of higher priority than the editorial guideline? When
the site users are treated as people who don't need any answer or
discussion and not as political individuals. When criteria for editing
and posting features are based on "what we like"? When discussions are
being administrated in favor of one or another aspect, without any
compunction, because some of the administrators support one or another
side? How can a tool like Athens Indymedia be anti-hierarchical, when
administrators and users have been constantly separated? And finally,
how can it be any of what it claims, when terror, slander, physical
and psychological violence prevail within the A.T.? After all, how are
we going to reclaim the media, if its administration is being more and
more condensed, ideologically closed, detached from us?
Results of all these things mentioned above, happening in Athens IMC,
are obvious to a lot of people, affected by those. They are not just a
consequence of random occasions or natural large-scale changes within
the movement; instead, they come as a result of very specific
manipulations by very specific people, in the administration team, who
have been committed in expropriating the administration of the medium
at any cost.
At second we would focus on the internal consequences of some people's
behaviour towards the plenary of the Athens IMC. We saw, that because
of these people and because of the ones who didn't react to the
authoritative behaviour of the former, the plenary cannot bear the
principles mentioned above (anti-hierarchy, direct-democracy,
consensus), since it has to deal with personal attacks, threats,
violence and expulsions. There is an unofficial central committee
which doesn't report to anybody (not even to the ones who react) while
requiring from the "workers" to obey their decisions; blocking with a
veto new people that they don't like; mercilessly insulting,
threatening, provoking and defaming members of the group; even making
fractionising efforts, in order to exclude the arguers, the "annoying"
ones. We would need plenty of pages to even summarize what has
happened and been spoken in and beyond the plenary of the AT; and
there is definitely, no space for the documents that we have in prove.
Some cases are indicative:
*
4 incidents of violence against members of the Administration Team
by the same person (while the plenary was taking place, even once
against a young female comrade)
*
Expulsion of people from the collective
*
Unjustified disqualification of A.T. members from internal digital
tools (removing access, dropping accounts etc).
*
Members of the A.T. (some of them were forced to leave) have been
defamed for being dangerous, traitors, unreliable, indy.gr* agents,
agent provocators sent by political organisations, non-political,
tech-freaks, sexists etc...
*
Personal threats like "I will find you and I will ..."
*
Blocking the return of an ex-member with a veto, and turning the
plenary into a trial including a full bill of indictment.
*
Dispersing the Technical Team of Athens IMC.
*
Putting limitations on the operation of a radical website hosted on
athens imc server, maintained by another collective
*
Re-occurring deletion of internal discussion posts and widespread
censorship on the opinions of the A.T. members.
Of course, the text you have been reading is not the first reaction
against what has been happening beyond the Athens IMC operation. We
have found ourselves in a dead end, facing such practices, and the
alternatives we had to choose from, either led to no results, or we
didn't follow them for preserving our political principles. The tactic
of trying to give small battles, based on argumentation and a right
attitude according to what Indymedia is supposed to represent, was
meant to fail: the arguments were unfortunately weaker than the
expulsions, the vetos and the politician tricks. The option of
applying the "talion law" required us to be immoral, which is not
allowed by our political culture. Fascism cannot be fought with
fascism, nor can hierarchy be fought with applying authoritarianism.
The end does not justify the means. Staying inactive and distant,
would lead us into being guilty due to our silence. Quitting would not
be a solution either; not after so much contribution to the medium and
since we have both personal and collective opinion for what should
function in another way.
Due to the vain authoritarianism of some people, the current state of
the Athens IMC administration is described by a totalitarianism, an
increasing distance from the spaces and the movement ideas and by a
widespread sense of decay. All these make us believe that there is a
movement's need to re-define from scratch the role, the character and
mainly the organisational structure of Athens Indymedia.
We don't quit, we denounce. We won't remain silent in front of the
authoritative practices we face. Time has come for a wider discussion
to be opened, among the medium's users, on how to reclaim it.
The exiled part of the Athens IMC plenum
Animix - DevNull - dpdt1 - fourier - LA - matafanas -
mathousalix - T@kis - tespa - vevek � giorgos - Thodoris M.
Τρίτη 17 Ιουνίου 2008
Turning reality on its head
Financier, philanthropist and would-be philosopher George Soros puts the global financial crisis down to policy mistakes and wrong thinking. Gerry Gold thinks he is wrong.
George Soros is a complex and contradictory individual. His character, attitude to life and motivation have been shaped by direct experience – surviving the Nazi occupation of Hungary, escaping the Stalinist occupation, studying in England, and in 1956, moving to the US to become one of the world’s most successful speculative investors, setting up and running one of the first hedge funds. In 1970, in order to bypass regulations, he and a partner set up the private investment company that evolved into the Quantum Fund. In the following ten years its value enlarged by more than 40% every year, more than 3000% in ten years.
But if, like me, you open Soros’ latest book expecting to find a deep and detailed analysis of the causes and consequences of the global financial and economic crisis, and a well-developed and mature programme for solving it, you will be disappointed. The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means is, however, fascinating in other ways. So persevere.
Soros traces his own struggle for a way of thinking and acting in the search for a better understanding of reality which will enable us to improve the human condition. Over the years his operations in the world’s financial markets have made billions for Soros and for those who have worked with him. He attributes his success, at least in part to “reflexivity” – an analysis of the relationship between thinking and reality, which he began to develop whilst a student of philosopher Karl Popper at the London School of Economics in the 1950s.
In the post-war 1950s, the search was on for an economic and political philosophy to oppose to the fascist dictatorship and Stalinist bureaucratic despotism which had dominated the previous period. Many of those who falsely equated Stalinism with Marxism flocked to Popper. He claimed that his insistence on “falsifiability” as the basis for scientific method invalidated Marx’s claim to have provided a scientific analysis of law-governed social development.
In searching for an explanation of the behaviour of markets, Soros found himself pushing Popper’s Enlightenment-suffused method for the acquisition of knowledge to its limits and beyond. Soros rejects Popper’s insistence on the unity of scientific method. Where Popper argued that, in the search for ultimately unattainable truth, the same methods and criteria must apply to the study of social affairs as to the study of natural phenomena, Soros argues that the participants in social affairs act on the basis of fallible understanding. This fallibility introduces an element of uncertainty, and hence unpredictability into social affairs which is not present in the natural sciences.
Soros’ account picks apart his struggle to break from the limits of Popper’s one-sided view of scientists as observers. Soros explains how his theory of “reflexivity” introduces a two-way relation between people, the subjective part of reality, and the objective part which the human mind seeks to comprehend and change. Soros, however, limits his view of reality to financial markets. The narrowness of this view gives rise to a fatal weakness in his explanation of the current crisis, and a mistaken confidence that financial authorities can take effective measures to avert a disaster.
Soros is clear – and correct – that the crisis arising from the bursting of the US sub-prime mortgage bubble “is not like the others which have occurred in recent history” but was the trigger which pushed “a much larger boom-bust sequence” beyond its “inflection, or crossover, point.” He writes: “We are in the midst of a financial crisis the likes of which has not been since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”
But he assures us that “the banking system will not be allowed to collapse as it did in 1932 exactly because its collapse caused the Great Depression.” This confidence appears to be based on the belief that the credit genie can be put back in the bottle. “Ever since the Great Depression, the authorities have been remarkably successful in avoiding any major breakdown in the international financial system.” It is almost as if he is using the inductive logic – because the sun has risen everyday, it will always do so – that his mentor Popper rejected.
Soros identifies three trends which are combined within the super-bubble: the long-term trend towards credit expansion, the globalisation of financial markets, and the progressive removal of financial regulations together with the accelerating pace of financial innovations. The first of these, credit expansion, “is the result of the counter-cyclical policies developed in response to the Great Depression. Every time the banking system is endangered, or a recession looms, the financial authorities intervene, bailing out the endangered institutions and stimulating the economy.” This is as far as Soros goes in looking beyond the financial sector to the world of production. And that is the source of the weakness of his analysis.
What Soros sees as policy mistakes – the victory of the neo-conservative, free-market liberals – are seen as the source of the now inevitable recession. Blinded both by the narrowness of his view, and by his own success in exploiting market movements, he tries to persuade us that the situation can and will be remedied by correcting the errors and returning to regulation.
But this explanation turns reality on its head. As we have shown in A House of Cards, credit expansion, eradication of regulation, and the globalisation of financial markets were necessary consequences of the inner drive for the expansion of capital – in a word growth. It was the objective necessity for the growth of capitalist commodity production taking the form of transnational corporations that found its reflection and subjective expression in the rise of neo-liberals led by Milton Friedman, not the other way round. Of course the neo-liberals became the primary formulators of policy worldwide. But they were the spokespeople of capital. And today, no matter how loudly the proponents of Keynesian re-regulation shout, the logic and the practice is for the destruction of surplus productive capacity, as can be seen in industry after industry.
Soros has spent part of the profits from his speculative investments on a broad spectrum of philanthropic and political campaigns. His interventions here too are guided by his theory. His Open Society Institute works in a wide range of areas to advance human rights. It provides or at least attempted to provide support for the victims of the cyclone in Burma, gives grant aid to Reliance, an NGO campaigning on violence against women in Chechnya and the surrounding regions and has recently launched a global drugs policy program to focus on improving the rights of drug users. A collaborative campaign launched in April this year will advance human rights for people with disabilities. These and many more are commendable in their own right.
These interventions take their direction from Soros’s critique of Popper’s concept of open society and the subsequent experience of America influenced by post-modern philosophies. As an antidote to the totalitarianism of fascism and what he termed ‘communism’ Popper proposed that democratic society can provide freedom of thought and expression for the citizen who engages in critical thinking, and the cultural and legal institutions that can facilitate this.
However, in recent years, reality has blown Popper’s concepts apart. Since 2004 in particular, Soros has found himself at odds with post-modernism and its expression in the Bush administration, particularly in Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove. The US administration uses a method which openly seeks not to seek the truth, but to manipulate it. The “War on Terror” is the consequence of this. Soros quotes an interview with a presidential aide believed to be Rove, published in the New York Times to illustrate the point:
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
In the introduction to his 1998 book The Crisis of Global Capitalism. Soros told us about the motivation, which then lay behind his life’s work: "I want to make it clear that I do not want to abolish capitalism. In spite of its shortcomings, it is better than the alternatives. Instead, I want to prevent the global capitalist system from destroying itself.”
In reworking his theory of “reflexivity” at the end of what he has described as a 60-year credit-induced boom, Soros may be hoping that, like Popper before him, he too will be recognised as a saviour of the capitalist way of life. The theory takes up around a third of the 160-page book, and Soros says in conclusion: ‘My main purpose in writing this book is to demonstrate the validity and importance of reflexivity. The moment is auspicious. Not only has the prevailing paradigm – equilibrium theory, and its political derivative, market fundamentalism – proven itself incapable of explaining the current state of affairs, it can be held responsible for landing us in the mess we are in. We badly need a new paradigm.”
He is right about that.
But the policy proposals he puts forward are all directed towards restoring capitalism to health, bringing speculative activity under control as part of the regulatory framework needed to prevent the crises he sees as the inevitable consequence of the operation of free market. His latest philanthropic intervention is in the housing market. His foundation is co-ordinating a package of measures to “increase and co-ordinate foreclosure prevention advocacy, including counselling and referral services, legal assistance, loan remediation, and preventive outreach and education. Its primary mission is to keep borrowers in their homes.”
Admirable. Or is it? Dig a little deeper and you discover that the real intent is to attempt to prevent the collapse of the property market, to keep people tied to making interest payments, and where they can’t, to throw them onto the streets and replace them with someone who can. “Even with sweeping reforms,” he says “many homeowners will be unable to afford to stay in their homes.” What should be done? With local governments facing “the daunting prospect of huge inventories of distressed properties being dumped on the market … the trick here will be to ensure that those properties do not fall vacant or into the hands of absent owners, but rather are quickly transferred to responsible buyers who occupy and maintain their properties.”
Trick indeed. The capitalist leopard hasn’t changed his spots after all!
George Soros is a complex and contradictory individual. His character, attitude to life and motivation have been shaped by direct experience – surviving the Nazi occupation of Hungary, escaping the Stalinist occupation, studying in England, and in 1956, moving to the US to become one of the world’s most successful speculative investors, setting up and running one of the first hedge funds. In 1970, in order to bypass regulations, he and a partner set up the private investment company that evolved into the Quantum Fund. In the following ten years its value enlarged by more than 40% every year, more than 3000% in ten years.
But if, like me, you open Soros’ latest book expecting to find a deep and detailed analysis of the causes and consequences of the global financial and economic crisis, and a well-developed and mature programme for solving it, you will be disappointed. The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means is, however, fascinating in other ways. So persevere.
Soros traces his own struggle for a way of thinking and acting in the search for a better understanding of reality which will enable us to improve the human condition. Over the years his operations in the world’s financial markets have made billions for Soros and for those who have worked with him. He attributes his success, at least in part to “reflexivity” – an analysis of the relationship between thinking and reality, which he began to develop whilst a student of philosopher Karl Popper at the London School of Economics in the 1950s.
In the post-war 1950s, the search was on for an economic and political philosophy to oppose to the fascist dictatorship and Stalinist bureaucratic despotism which had dominated the previous period. Many of those who falsely equated Stalinism with Marxism flocked to Popper. He claimed that his insistence on “falsifiability” as the basis for scientific method invalidated Marx’s claim to have provided a scientific analysis of law-governed social development.
In searching for an explanation of the behaviour of markets, Soros found himself pushing Popper’s Enlightenment-suffused method for the acquisition of knowledge to its limits and beyond. Soros rejects Popper’s insistence on the unity of scientific method. Where Popper argued that, in the search for ultimately unattainable truth, the same methods and criteria must apply to the study of social affairs as to the study of natural phenomena, Soros argues that the participants in social affairs act on the basis of fallible understanding. This fallibility introduces an element of uncertainty, and hence unpredictability into social affairs which is not present in the natural sciences.
Soros’ account picks apart his struggle to break from the limits of Popper’s one-sided view of scientists as observers. Soros explains how his theory of “reflexivity” introduces a two-way relation between people, the subjective part of reality, and the objective part which the human mind seeks to comprehend and change. Soros, however, limits his view of reality to financial markets. The narrowness of this view gives rise to a fatal weakness in his explanation of the current crisis, and a mistaken confidence that financial authorities can take effective measures to avert a disaster.
Soros is clear – and correct – that the crisis arising from the bursting of the US sub-prime mortgage bubble “is not like the others which have occurred in recent history” but was the trigger which pushed “a much larger boom-bust sequence” beyond its “inflection, or crossover, point.” He writes: “We are in the midst of a financial crisis the likes of which has not been since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”
But he assures us that “the banking system will not be allowed to collapse as it did in 1932 exactly because its collapse caused the Great Depression.” This confidence appears to be based on the belief that the credit genie can be put back in the bottle. “Ever since the Great Depression, the authorities have been remarkably successful in avoiding any major breakdown in the international financial system.” It is almost as if he is using the inductive logic – because the sun has risen everyday, it will always do so – that his mentor Popper rejected.
Soros identifies three trends which are combined within the super-bubble: the long-term trend towards credit expansion, the globalisation of financial markets, and the progressive removal of financial regulations together with the accelerating pace of financial innovations. The first of these, credit expansion, “is the result of the counter-cyclical policies developed in response to the Great Depression. Every time the banking system is endangered, or a recession looms, the financial authorities intervene, bailing out the endangered institutions and stimulating the economy.” This is as far as Soros goes in looking beyond the financial sector to the world of production. And that is the source of the weakness of his analysis.
What Soros sees as policy mistakes – the victory of the neo-conservative, free-market liberals – are seen as the source of the now inevitable recession. Blinded both by the narrowness of his view, and by his own success in exploiting market movements, he tries to persuade us that the situation can and will be remedied by correcting the errors and returning to regulation.
But this explanation turns reality on its head. As we have shown in A House of Cards, credit expansion, eradication of regulation, and the globalisation of financial markets were necessary consequences of the inner drive for the expansion of capital – in a word growth. It was the objective necessity for the growth of capitalist commodity production taking the form of transnational corporations that found its reflection and subjective expression in the rise of neo-liberals led by Milton Friedman, not the other way round. Of course the neo-liberals became the primary formulators of policy worldwide. But they were the spokespeople of capital. And today, no matter how loudly the proponents of Keynesian re-regulation shout, the logic and the practice is for the destruction of surplus productive capacity, as can be seen in industry after industry.
Soros has spent part of the profits from his speculative investments on a broad spectrum of philanthropic and political campaigns. His interventions here too are guided by his theory. His Open Society Institute works in a wide range of areas to advance human rights. It provides or at least attempted to provide support for the victims of the cyclone in Burma, gives grant aid to Reliance, an NGO campaigning on violence against women in Chechnya and the surrounding regions and has recently launched a global drugs policy program to focus on improving the rights of drug users. A collaborative campaign launched in April this year will advance human rights for people with disabilities. These and many more are commendable in their own right.
These interventions take their direction from Soros’s critique of Popper’s concept of open society and the subsequent experience of America influenced by post-modern philosophies. As an antidote to the totalitarianism of fascism and what he termed ‘communism’ Popper proposed that democratic society can provide freedom of thought and expression for the citizen who engages in critical thinking, and the cultural and legal institutions that can facilitate this.
However, in recent years, reality has blown Popper’s concepts apart. Since 2004 in particular, Soros has found himself at odds with post-modernism and its expression in the Bush administration, particularly in Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove. The US administration uses a method which openly seeks not to seek the truth, but to manipulate it. The “War on Terror” is the consequence of this. Soros quotes an interview with a presidential aide believed to be Rove, published in the New York Times to illustrate the point:
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
In the introduction to his 1998 book The Crisis of Global Capitalism. Soros told us about the motivation, which then lay behind his life’s work: "I want to make it clear that I do not want to abolish capitalism. In spite of its shortcomings, it is better than the alternatives. Instead, I want to prevent the global capitalist system from destroying itself.”
In reworking his theory of “reflexivity” at the end of what he has described as a 60-year credit-induced boom, Soros may be hoping that, like Popper before him, he too will be recognised as a saviour of the capitalist way of life. The theory takes up around a third of the 160-page book, and Soros says in conclusion: ‘My main purpose in writing this book is to demonstrate the validity and importance of reflexivity. The moment is auspicious. Not only has the prevailing paradigm – equilibrium theory, and its political derivative, market fundamentalism – proven itself incapable of explaining the current state of affairs, it can be held responsible for landing us in the mess we are in. We badly need a new paradigm.”
He is right about that.
But the policy proposals he puts forward are all directed towards restoring capitalism to health, bringing speculative activity under control as part of the regulatory framework needed to prevent the crises he sees as the inevitable consequence of the operation of free market. His latest philanthropic intervention is in the housing market. His foundation is co-ordinating a package of measures to “increase and co-ordinate foreclosure prevention advocacy, including counselling and referral services, legal assistance, loan remediation, and preventive outreach and education. Its primary mission is to keep borrowers in their homes.”
Admirable. Or is it? Dig a little deeper and you discover that the real intent is to attempt to prevent the collapse of the property market, to keep people tied to making interest payments, and where they can’t, to throw them onto the streets and replace them with someone who can. “Even with sweeping reforms,” he says “many homeowners will be unable to afford to stay in their homes.” What should be done? With local governments facing “the daunting prospect of huge inventories of distressed properties being dumped on the market … the trick here will be to ensure that those properties do not fall vacant or into the hands of absent owners, but rather are quickly transferred to responsible buyers who occupy and maintain their properties.”
Trick indeed. The capitalist leopard hasn’t changed his spots after all!
Πέμπτη 12 Ιουνίου 2008
poster about nationalism and the macedonian issue
We made a poster against nationalism concerning more specifically the
macedonian issue. This poster has been printed in a large 70*100 format
and is being placed in Thessaloniki these days.
anarchist occupied factory FABRIKA YFANET in Thessaloniki
In this city
That in 1920 lost its muslims
That in 1940 lost its jews
That thereafter the greek patriots eliminated the lost’s traces and made out of it a rampart of greek nationalism, conservatism and populism
That was flooded by people in 1992 in the rallies for the construction
of national consent under the irreconcilable nationalistic motto « macedonia is greek»
That today observes a rational management of the issue in a style of
streamlined nationalism that is based on “economic infiltration” and the ideal of a “powerful Greece ”
In this country
That sobs at the opening ceremony of the olympic games That becomes emotional when the national music hit wins a respective contest
That Greek sports fans lynch the one that will never become Greek That anti-imperialism and anti-americanism of the left goes hand in hand with the nationalistic rhetorics
That the veto in national organizations is celebrated as an act of might and a political step up to the club of the powerful
That the name Macedonia has been identified with the symbolical structure of the powerful Greece to such an extent that recognition of the historical inhomogeneity of the greek population constitutes fear of a crack in the national core
In this region
That the primary objective of the national states has been to annex by arms and propaganda a bastard population par excellence
That the composition of powerful nation states is the lever to unhindered capitalist development
That the liberalization of the market bestows on the capital a homeland, the population of which it pauperizes
That offers to every willing Greek cheap sex and affluent delights at privileged prices, affirming with brutality and cynicism his national superiority
There are some people that are bastards with a memory Because the dilemmas concerning the naming are without meaning Because we do not feel macedonian since we do not fit any national identity, greek or macedonian
Because our enemies are not the national ones
Because we are inspired by examples such as the history of Federacionin Thessaloniki , the Bulgarian anarchists, the thousands of Slav deserters, the defenders of a multinational Sarajevo , which transcend the national identity Βecause if a society without states and homelands seems far away today, then our only duty is to fight so that it becomes a reality tomorrow
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