catastrophes and apertures. or something like that.
i seem to be trying to get back in the LJ swing of things.
this one is all about the economy.
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first of all, have you heard about this (this)? y'should. chicago workers occupying their factory against a Bank of America-driven mass firing. hopefully the first of many.
the question is this, though:
will these workers (mainly, by the few names i've seen, latin@s) and the union which represents them (the UE, with its long history of opposition to AFL-CIO business unionism and red-baiting) demand more than the severance pay which was the spark for the action? will they foreclose on their bosses and start operating the factory themselves? they certainly seem to have the community support to do so, and i can't imagine the company's customers would be anything but pleased to actually have their orders filled...
-----
last night i went to hear richard wolff talk at the brecht forum. he's a UMass professor, and a marxist political economist of a rather practical bent - you can find a fair amount of his recent writings on the Origins of the Present Crisis and so on at the Monthly Review website.
a few things he said struck me as particularly interesting.
1) this crisis is not a crisis of the financial system. it's a result of the end of the 150-year period from ~1820 to ~1970 in which average real wages rose steadily in the u.s., the shifts (first to more hours of work, then to borrowing) folks have made since then to try to keep that accustomed pace of increasing income, and the resulting amazing situation in which capitalists get more of the surplus that's produced ('profits' rising as opposed to wages) and then lend workers the difference at interest, and the structuring of all forms of business around a small board of directors whose decisions will (of course) serve their interests rather than those of workers or communities or even at times the companies themselves...
2) there's no way out through 'fiscal policy'. small-scale, large-scale, whatever. all basically a sideshow to the actual structural problem.
3) the intriguing re-appearance of 'socialism' in public discourse - thanks, comrade palin! now please get back to the equitable redistribution of alaskan oil-industry profits... - is an opportunity that we desperately need to take advantage of. which means actually thinking about what we mean when we say "socialism" - and probably having the arguments with each other that will sharpen that thinking and perhaps even lead to some agreement...
his proposal for the short version is in some ways a very old answer to the question: the extension of democratic principles to the workplace. in other words: everyone should be directly involved in making the decisions which affect the 40+ hours a week we spend at work, just as everyone agrees (in principle at least) we should in the other parts of our lives. it's one part 'communism is 20th century americanism', one part IWW shopfloor syndicalism, one part zapatismo, and one part argentine autonomism. which sounds like a pretty decent cocktail, and one that as a minimum statement might be able to bring together a pretty wide range of socialist positions, from (non-primitivist) anarchists to (non-hierarchical) communists to (non-'3rd way') social democrats. folks committed to leninist notions of centralism are likely to have some problems with it, but i really can't say i mind that.
aside from "democracy's good, right?", and "this is the most likely way for you to 'be your own boss' in your lifetime", wolff's suggested selling points for this definition include pointing out that every year hundreds to thousands of engineers and techies leave corporations to found small collectively-run businesses (those famous 'garage start-ups'), because they find them more productive as well as pleasant workplaces... (he doesn't deal with the question of why these have invariably ceased to be in any real way collective as soon as the founders hire a new person or two...)
wolff is nothing if not a pragmatist, though, so this comes with a concrete suggestion, too. make the price of bailouts the elimination of boards of directors and their replacement by the workforce of the company. not by representatives of the workplace, which would recreate the structural problem (as we know from the leninist model of the 1920s USSR), but by the workers as a group. who would then make all the decisions about production, wages & benefits, distribution of profits, &c that boards currently make. wolff suggests this could be done by setting fridays aside for 'management' work. this model is itself a proposed answer to the 'transition question' as well - such organizations could exist in a mixed economy, wolff insists, and would likely expand, since they'd be pretty desirable workplaces.
the biggest gap, to me, in this is the question it begs about production as such. if these collectivized businesses are going to operate in a capitalist context, they're bound to the logic of ever-increasing production. which is emphatically not a desirable thing in most parts of the economy. wolff doesn't seem to have considered this at all - either its implications for the ability of these organizations to survive if they refuse that logic, or the value of collectivized businesses which operate within it - much less the broader question of accountability to something beyond profit which it raises. a collectivized business could easily make exactly the same decisions as a capitalist one about waste, consumption, and so on (though probably not ones about workplace safety & health and local pollution), for exactly the same reasons: maximizing income to the 'stakeholders'.
4) (briefly, because i'm running out of time) we should be very worried about an exclusive progressive focus on universal healthcare. while it'd certainly be a good thing, wolff persuasively argues that it's the obvious issue to be used to divert attention from these structural questions. it benefits bosses at least as much as the rest of us; it can be blow up into a hard fight and satisfying victory that take up a huge amount of progressive energy, or used explicitly as a bargaining chip and concession to forestall other changes; it can be structured to be expensive enough to implement for there to be 'nothing left' for other issues... think of it as the guantanamo of domestic issues - shutting it down would be a great win, but a tight focus on that can also be a damn effective way of making it easier to slip by with permanent bases in iraq and another decade of occupation in afghanistan. just to make it explicit: that analogy was specifically chosen because it shows the way that this has been the incoming president's basic political strategy when dealing with the left. we can expect a lot more of the same.
this one is all about the economy.
-----
first of all, have you heard about this (this)? y'should. chicago workers occupying their factory against a Bank of America-driven mass firing. hopefully the first of many.
the question is this, though:
will these workers (mainly, by the few names i've seen, latin@s) and the union which represents them (the UE, with its long history of opposition to AFL-CIO business unionism and red-baiting) demand more than the severance pay which was the spark for the action? will they foreclose on their bosses and start operating the factory themselves? they certainly seem to have the community support to do so, and i can't imagine the company's customers would be anything but pleased to actually have their orders filled...
-----
last night i went to hear richard wolff talk at the brecht forum. he's a UMass professor, and a marxist political economist of a rather practical bent - you can find a fair amount of his recent writings on the Origins of the Present Crisis and so on at the Monthly Review website.
a few things he said struck me as particularly interesting.
1) this crisis is not a crisis of the financial system. it's a result of the end of the 150-year period from ~1820 to ~1970 in which average real wages rose steadily in the u.s., the shifts (first to more hours of work, then to borrowing) folks have made since then to try to keep that accustomed pace of increasing income, and the resulting amazing situation in which capitalists get more of the surplus that's produced ('profits' rising as opposed to wages) and then lend workers the difference at interest, and the structuring of all forms of business around a small board of directors whose decisions will (of course) serve their interests rather than those of workers or communities or even at times the companies themselves...
2) there's no way out through 'fiscal policy'. small-scale, large-scale, whatever. all basically a sideshow to the actual structural problem.
3) the intriguing re-appearance of 'socialism' in public discourse - thanks, comrade palin! now please get back to the equitable redistribution of alaskan oil-industry profits... - is an opportunity that we desperately need to take advantage of. which means actually thinking about what we mean when we say "socialism" - and probably having the arguments with each other that will sharpen that thinking and perhaps even lead to some agreement...
his proposal for the short version is in some ways a very old answer to the question: the extension of democratic principles to the workplace. in other words: everyone should be directly involved in making the decisions which affect the 40+ hours a week we spend at work, just as everyone agrees (in principle at least) we should in the other parts of our lives. it's one part 'communism is 20th century americanism', one part IWW shopfloor syndicalism, one part zapatismo, and one part argentine autonomism. which sounds like a pretty decent cocktail, and one that as a minimum statement might be able to bring together a pretty wide range of socialist positions, from (non-primitivist) anarchists to (non-hierarchical) communists to (non-'3rd way') social democrats. folks committed to leninist notions of centralism are likely to have some problems with it, but i really can't say i mind that.
aside from "democracy's good, right?", and "this is the most likely way for you to 'be your own boss' in your lifetime", wolff's suggested selling points for this definition include pointing out that every year hundreds to thousands of engineers and techies leave corporations to found small collectively-run businesses (those famous 'garage start-ups'), because they find them more productive as well as pleasant workplaces... (he doesn't deal with the question of why these have invariably ceased to be in any real way collective as soon as the founders hire a new person or two...)
wolff is nothing if not a pragmatist, though, so this comes with a concrete suggestion, too. make the price of bailouts the elimination of boards of directors and their replacement by the workforce of the company. not by representatives of the workplace, which would recreate the structural problem (as we know from the leninist model of the 1920s USSR), but by the workers as a group. who would then make all the decisions about production, wages & benefits, distribution of profits, &c that boards currently make. wolff suggests this could be done by setting fridays aside for 'management' work. this model is itself a proposed answer to the 'transition question' as well - such organizations could exist in a mixed economy, wolff insists, and would likely expand, since they'd be pretty desirable workplaces.
the biggest gap, to me, in this is the question it begs about production as such. if these collectivized businesses are going to operate in a capitalist context, they're bound to the logic of ever-increasing production. which is emphatically not a desirable thing in most parts of the economy. wolff doesn't seem to have considered this at all - either its implications for the ability of these organizations to survive if they refuse that logic, or the value of collectivized businesses which operate within it - much less the broader question of accountability to something beyond profit which it raises. a collectivized business could easily make exactly the same decisions as a capitalist one about waste, consumption, and so on (though probably not ones about workplace safety & health and local pollution), for exactly the same reasons: maximizing income to the 'stakeholders'.
4) (briefly, because i'm running out of time) we should be very worried about an exclusive progressive focus on universal healthcare. while it'd certainly be a good thing, wolff persuasively argues that it's the obvious issue to be used to divert attention from these structural questions. it benefits bosses at least as much as the rest of us; it can be blow up into a hard fight and satisfying victory that take up a huge amount of progressive energy, or used explicitly as a bargaining chip and concession to forestall other changes; it can be structured to be expensive enough to implement for there to be 'nothing left' for other issues... think of it as the guantanamo of domestic issues - shutting it down would be a great win, but a tight focus on that can also be a damn effective way of making it easier to slip by with permanent bases in iraq and another decade of occupation in afghanistan. just to make it explicit: that analogy was specifically chosen because it shows the way that this has been the incoming president's basic political strategy when dealing with the left. we can expect a lot more of the same.