Freedom Under Capitalism Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

(RIGHT WING)Libertarians argue that capitalism is superior to socialism because in capitalism anyone is free to do anything — including start a worker cooperative. In truth, capitalism constrains our options, while socialism can liberate us to live as we please.

By Ben Burgis

May 1, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.



Oshawa is a small Canadian city on the shoreline of Lake Ontario. It was also the hometown of the late left-wing Canadian politician Ed Broadbent, who would go on to become the national chairman of the New Democratic Party, or NDP.

In Broadbent’s youth, a major employer in Oshawa was a glass manufacturer called Duplate, Ltd. When the Duplate plant closed in the 1960s, Broadbent was disturbed. Several decades later, in his book Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality, Broadbent recalled the way the incident influenced his thinking about workers’ rights:

As I recall, there were about 300 workers directly affected by the management’s decision to relocate their Oshawa plant to another part of the province — and when you included their family members and the impact on neighbouring companies, the number of people actually affected by the closure was around 1200 in total. . . . So here you had hundreds of workers, some of whom had invested 30 or 40 years of their lives in Duplate, being profoundly affected by a decision they had played absolutely no part in — and a profitable company that packed up and moved just to make higher profits. . . . Their human dignity was denied outright.

This kind of story is precisely what leads many of us to conclude that capitalism is a profoundly unjust system. Broadbent himself was a practical politician focused on devising progressive reforms within the existing system. But while more immediate reforms like Broadbent’s are good and important, our long-term horizons shouldn’t stop there.

Capitalism is a system under which the means of production can be bought and sold by private individuals, and anyone who can’t afford to start a business of their own has to submit themselves to the domination of those who can if they want to make a living. Workers spend eight out of every sixteen waking hours most days of the week in workplaces that are run like totalitarian dictatorships — and it’s only eight hours, and only most days of the week, because of victories won over generations of workers’ struggles.

If the comparison to totalitarian dictatorships seems hyperbolic, it shouldn’t. In fact, capitalists often regulate far more intimate aspects of workers’ behavior — especially for relatively “unskilled” workers without much bargaining power — than do the laws of a typical totalitarian dictatorship. Employers frequently tell workers, for example, when they have to smile, when they’re allowed to talk to each other, and when they’re allowed to go to the bathroom.

For many libertarians, none of this adds up to a legitimate complaint about capitalism or a reason to want to violate the property rights of big capitalists like Jeff Bezos — by, for example, nationalizing their businesses and putting them under the management of the workers themselves, representatives of the broader community, or some combination of the two. They argue instead that capitalism is already, in the words of the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, a “framework of utopias.”

In his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick argues that the laissez-faire version of capitalism is already the best kind of utopia — a “meta-utopia.” Want a socialist utopia where workers control their own workplaces? No problem, he says. The rules of even a radically deregulated form of capitalism already let you start one up!Libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan sums up Nozick’s point in his book Why Not Capitalism? this way:


There is an essential asymmetry in the capitalist and the socialist visions of utopia. Capitalists allow socialism, but socialists forbid capitalism.

Libertarians like Nozick think that this permissiveness is what makes capitalism better. Are they right?

A Framework of Utopias

When Nozick lays out this argument in the final chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he starts from the highly reasonable premise that “people are different.” Therefore no detailed prescription for how people should individually and collectively live their lives will provide the best kind of life for everyone.

That’s true. Different people have wildly varying attitudes toward religion, monogamy, work, play, and damn near everything else, and a good society should allow for wide-ranging pluralism about what people think is the best life and how they want to pursue it. Democratic socialists agree.

Nozick is also right that some utopian writers, such as St Thomas Moore or various pre-Marxist “utopian socialists,” erred in painting pictures of life in the future that didn’t allow for this kind of desirable pluralism. A good society should have room for single-family houses inhabited by big Catholic families who all get up together to go to early-morning mass and polyamorous Wiccan compounds.

But what exactly follows from this about workplaces and the distribution of economic resources?

In a short section of an earlier chapter (“Workers’ Control”), Nozick says that for socialists whose objection to capitalism is that workers have to follow the orders of bosses who aren’t democratically accountable to them, “an easy way to give workers access to the means of production” is for groups of workers to simply “buy machinery, rent space, and so on, just as a private entrepreneur does.” He suggests various means by which capital could be secured, such as through convincing unions to invest their pension funds.

If these businesses were as profitable or more profitable than traditional firms, he suggests, it should be no problem to secure such funding or even funding from more traditional private investors. If they were less profitable, perhaps socially conscious consumers could be induced to support them for political reasons. And if they don’t, Nozick thinks, the failure of a worker-owned sector to flourish can’t be a symptom of any sort of injustice.

Insinuating that this hasn’t happened because workers don’t actually want to democratically control their workplaces, Nozick muses that it’s “illuminating to consider why unions don’t start new businesses, and why workers don’t pool their resources to do so.”

Real Cooperatives and Collective Action Problems

We don’t have to speculate a priori to address the question of worker cooperatives. There are many thousands of them all over the world, and extensive research has been conducted on them. The worker-owned Mondragon Corporation, for example, was founded decades before Nozick wrote those lines, and today it’s the biggest business in the Basque region of Spain. So it’s very far from true that no groups of workers have had this idea.

But the germ of truth in Nozick’s speculation is that, in every actually existing capitalist economy, the worker-cooperative sector is microscopic. Mondragon’s eighty thousand worker-owners make it an imposing behemoth by the standards of other worker co-ops. Still, it’s a rounding error next to the tens of millions of Spaniards employed by traditional capitalist firms.

Many libertarians take this as evidence that workers simply don’t care about having a say in what goes on in their workplaces. If they did, they’d be leaving their current employers in droves to start new cooperatives or join old ones. The libertarian economist Gene Epstein, for example, made great hay of this argument in a series of debates he did with Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara, Marxist economist Richard Wolff, and me.

But it’s a strange argument in many ways. For starters, it’s not obvious that the path to establishing a cooperative economy should run through worker co-ops outcompeting capitalist firms. Instead, mechanisms like union organizing at the workplace and building socialist political parties can accomplish socialist objectives much more effectively by democratically conquering political power. These are arguably far smarter strategies for achieving socialist ends than trying to outcompete capitalists.

To grasp this point, consider that the wages of low-wage workers are more likely to be raised by putting a proposition on the ballot in your state to raise the minimum wage than by exhorting people to only buy from companies that pay their lowest-paid workers a good wage, even though voters and consumers are the same people. The former strategy often succeeds, even in red states. The latter has never succeeded and never will.

One of the things libertarians who push these arguments choose to ignore is the existence of collective action problems, especially under capitalism. There are often situations where Option A would benefit everyone in a group if they all opted for it, but where the dynamics of the situation will make it unlikely for everyone to do so individually, and so it might be in the best individual interests of every member of the group to go with Option B instead. A classic example is the Prisoners’ Dilemma, described here.

Our economic lives are governed by capitalist rules that allow for concentrated individual power. Consequently, anyone whose motive for starting a co-op would simply be to have a better life than they would have as an employee has every incentive to shoot the moon and try to become an employer. The infant mortality rate for businesses of all kinds is extremely high, and getting a new enterprise off the ground — whether collectively owned or otherwise — takes an enormous amount of work. Why all do that on the slim hope of having a somewhat better position at a worker co-op instead of holding out for the — perhaps even slimmer, but also much more enticing — hope of having a much better life by building a miniature economic kingdom where you get to be the king?

These problems alone mean that socialist ideologues are much more likely than workers primarily motivated by their own individual interests to be involved in attempts to start co-ops. And socialist ideologues are likely to make the entirely reasonable calculation that their time and effort would have more impact on the overall shape of society if they spent it doing things like organizing unions at large employers, or campaigning for socialist candidates, rather than working ten hours a day to get some local cooperative coffee shop up and running.

Added to these already considerable obstacles, though, there’s a problem with financing. Worker co-ops are by their nature typically going to be started by groups of people with relatively limited means. They can’t reward investors with ongoing ownership shares without, to whatever extent they do this, losing their character as worker co-ops. And groups of working-class people are often a risky bet for loan officers working for banks. There are of course those union pension funds Nozick calls our attention to, but even if they didn’t have a responsibility to look out primarily for good investments for their members’ retirements rather than prioritizing ideological goals, Nozick presumably wasn’t foolish enough to think union pension funds investing in co-ops would be sufficient to create an economy dominated by co-ops.

Worse yet, if you could somehow get an economy where worker-owned firms dominated (but the ground rules of capitalist markets were unchanged), the result wouldn’t automatically be a stable form of market socialism. Even if you asked a magical genie to instantaneously restructure every existing firm to put it under the collective ownership and democratic control of its workforce, without changing anything else about the structure of the economy, the result would be an arrangement that market forces would eventually course-correct back into something recognizable as regular old capitalism.

Whether capitalist or worker-owned, firms inevitably go out of business, and the people who once worked there need new jobs. Co-ops looking to expand operations and increase the income of existing members have an incentive to hire new workers as regular employees rather than co-owners, and people who have been out of work for a while have an incentive to accept this reduced status. And whole co-ops would often be incentivized to move toward reverting to regular capitalist firms by selling ownership stakes to other, more successful co-ops or particularly successful individuals.

This doesn’t mean a democratic form of socialism where workers’ control is the norm isn’t possible or superior. But it does mean that, to realize that vision, we need to use the state to scrap the rules of the capitalist market, where ownership of the means of production is up for sale to the highest bidder, and build new socialist institutions instead.

Lots of socialists have written about what that might look like. Sunkara, for example, lays out how such institutions might work in the first chapter of his book The Socialist Manifesto (“A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen”). Socialist economist Mike Beggs dug into the technical details in an article last year for Jacobin. And the three of us are working on a book about it (The Blueprint) for Verso.
The Deeper Problem

When people ask why socialists, if they want workers’ control, don’t just start worker-owned firms — as Epstein likes to say in debates, his voice dripping with derision, if that’s what you want, “go for it” — they’re really saying two things. And the superficial plausibility of their argument comes from the ambiguity.

Their first argument is that if people really wanted workplace democracy, they’d have long ago gotten it by starting worker co-ops and outcompeting capitalists within the rules of regular capitalist markets. But that makes no more sense than saying that if voters in a state that’s passed a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage really wanted it, they’d achieve it in libertarian-approved ways by only buying products from firms that paid high wages.

Their second argument is that starting worker-owned firms within capitalism and trying to outcompete capitalism is the only morally legitimate method of achieving workplace democracy. But why should we believe that?

You can say it’s morally wrong because people are entitled to whatever they can get in a free market, but as an argument against socialism that just begs the question. Socialists believe that what everyone is morally entitled to is a roughly equal share of society’s resources and a say in decisions that profoundly impact their lives.

If you still don’t see why “why don’t you just outcompete capitalists within capitalist markets” is a silly question, think about why abolitionists didn’t just buy up all the slaves and free them, or why small-r republicans in the eighteenth century didn’t just put all their efforts into convincing the heir to the throne to voluntarily give more power to parliament.

Part of the answer is that these wouldn’t have been very effective strategies. But another part of the answer is that early modern republicans didn’t just want more power for parliaments. They disputed kings’ right to rule. Abolitionists didn’t just want more people to be free. They rejected slave owners’ property rights. And socialists don’t just want workers to have power. We fundamentally object to the idea that the means of production should be for sale to whoever can afford them — and thus the power to fundamentally impact the lives of many other people, as in the decision to move the factory from Oshawa that so disturbed a young Ed Broadbent.

Nozick says that while it’s easy to see how worker-owned factories could appear under capitalism, it’s harder to see how “private enterprise” could get a toehold in a “state system” of democratic socialism. But this shouldn’t be hard for him to see. It should be easy. All it would take is convincing most voters to support privatizing a factory or two. It’s illuminating to wonder why Nozick found that prospect so terrifying.
Socialism Is the Real Framework for Utopias

Again, it’s absolutely true that people are different, and the best kind of life for one person isn’t the best kind of life for another. But that doesn’t mean that we need to privatize some large businesses for the sake of people who have a fetish for being told what to do by an oligarch.

Instead, to create a society with the most pluralism possible along the most dimensions possible in practice, we need to meet everyone’s material needs and give everyone a meaningful say over what happens in their workplaces and how revenue is distributed. This would enhance everyone’s practical capacity to live whatever kind of life they want.

It’s all well and good to say that people can live in single-family houses with white picket fences and take their ten children to mass with them every morning or they can live in polyamorous communes. But in a society where people are overworked, overstressed, and have trouble making rent in their cramped apartments — and having ten children is about as practical a possibility for them as buying their own factory — the fact that they aren’t legally prohibited from pursuing any of these visions of a good life doesn’t add up to a much of a framework for utopias.

Libertarianism and socialism both evolved historically from Enlightenment liberalism. The idea that pluralism is desirable and it’s good to let people experiment with whatever forms of life they’d like is in both philosophies’ DNA. The difference is that socialists are realistic enough to know what every graduate student in the sciences knows: that being given permission to run an experiment isn’t worth much if their laboratory isn’t funded.

May Day 2024: There’s No Democracy Without Trade Unions

 By Luc  Triangle

May 2, 2024

Source: Equal Times


Demonstrators take part in an International Workers’ Day rally in Surabaya, Indonesia on 1 May 2023. (Juni Kriswanto/AFP)


This year, in what has been dubbed a historical ‘super election year’, around four billion people will vote in more than 40 countries. But, if we look at the state of democracy around the world, and particularly trade union rights, we see that it is seriously ill and needs care. The world’s largest social movement is the global trade union movement, we are a fundamental part of good democratic systems, and we have the democratic values and experience to stand up ‘For Democracy’.

The deterioration of democracy is clear. It is contracting in every region of the world. Every year since 2018 more countries are experiencing net declines in democratic processes than improvements, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s 2023 Global State of Democracy report.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index gave the world a total score of 5.22 in 2023, down from 5.29 in 2022, as war and conflict worsen existing, negative, anti-democratic trends. It found that while 45.5 per cent of the world’s population live in a democracy of some sort, only 7.8 per cent of people, or fewer than one in ten, live in a “full democracy”, and 39.4 per cent live under authoritarian rule.

This anti-democratic trend corresponds with global attacks on trade union membership. In the 2023 Global Rights Index (GRI), compiled by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), violations of key measures reached new highs: 87 per cent of countries violated the right to strike, while 79 per cent violated the right to collective bargaining. The GRI has tracked the worsening of these figures over ten years.

This rise in violations of trade union rights has been matched by a parallel rise in economic inequality and insecurity. Where countries have high rates of trade union density and collective agreement coverage, wealth and power are distributed more equitably and citizens have more trust in democracy. In 2023, the V-Dem Institute identified Norway – where trade union density is 49 per cent and collective agreement coverage is 72.5 per cent – as the world’s most deliberative and egalitarian democracy. However, researchers have also found that “union density has declined throughout the developed world, and in most countries the union wage premium has fallen as well.”

The rise of new forms of fascism, nationalism, populism and xenophobia have been further fed by capitalism’s austerity policies. A 2022 study of 200 elections in Europe found that austerity policies had led to “a significant increase in the vote share of extreme parties, lower voter turnout and a rise in political fragmentation.” Instead of delivering stronger economies to support a more inclusive social state, profits have been privatised and costs socialised.

This amounts to a betrayal of the electorate’s trust. In history we see that working people inevitably search for alternatives that promise to address their needs and populists exploit this to win elections and then dismantle the elements of democracy that handed them power.

No region of the world remains untouched by this rise in anti-democratic forces, and this is happening as we witness a convergence of global crises. Armed conflict is increasing, the climate emergency is accelerating, the debt crisis can no longer be ignored, and the unregulated growth of technology poses enormous social risks.

It’s time to stand up ‘For Democracy’

To address these trends, we need a truly democratic movement that crosses borders, unites all social groups and has the power and accountability to change the balance of power in every workplace, country and global institution. We are that movement, because democracy is a worker’s project.

It is time that we trade unionists took up our role as the foremost practitioners and defenders of, and fighters for, the democratic values we exercise every day.

That is why the ITUC has launched the For Democracy campaign, to defend the foundations of democracy in three critical arenas: at work, at the national level and globally.

For Democracy at work: Because there is no democracy without trade unions, we assert our right to freedom of association, to organise unions and to strike. We demand collective bargaining and social dialogue, equal treatment for all workers, equal power in decisions that impact our health, safety, environment, and employment prospects, an end to workplace violence and harassment, and democracy and representation in our union structures.

For Democracy at the societal and national level: We assert the right to protest and free speech; a free press is key to this. This World Press Freedom Day, we must defend the role of journalists as part of strong democracies to expose injustices and raise awareness, free from fear of attacks and persecution. We demand true gender equality, just tax systems to fund universal social protection and a Just Transition that supports all workers. We resist the hate-filled, far-right ideologies and the corporate capture of national policy making.

For Democracy at the global level: We demand the reform of international economic structures to create inclusive systems that prioritise public welfare, human rights and labour standards over private profit. We demand the protection and advancement of representative democratic multilateralism, and equitable global cooperation to achieve universal peace and common security.

At the heart of the For Democracy campaign is a New Social Contract; a redesigned global economy centred on workers’ voices and built on the pillars of jobs, rights, wages, social protection, equality and inclusion, to address the convergence of global crises. Only a democratic, participatory approach that allows workers to shape their futures can deliver a New Social Contract, and only a New Social Contract can ensure that democracy is sustainably rebuilt.

This May Day we must remember what trade unions have done for democracy in the past, and harness the collective power of trade unions to defend and rebuild democracy now and in the future. The For Democracy campaign is a clarion call to workers, trade unions and allies worldwide to rally for democratic change. Democracy is not only a political ideal but a lived reality that working people are best equipped to define, defend and advance.


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Luc TriangleX (Twitter)

Luc Triangle is the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.

Activist Risk Taking, Then and Now

By Ted Glick

May 2, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Activists of all ages peacefully protesting the 2023 North American Gas Forum in Washington DC are surrounded by police. They continue chanting, playing music, and holding their banners in resistance. | Photo Courtesy of Extinction Rebellion DC

April 30 is a day I remember because it is my mom’s birthday. She died in 2005. But it’s also a day I remember because, on that day in 1971, while serving what turned out to be an 1l-month sentence in federal prison for my draft resistance activism against the Vietnam war, I was indicted with seven others by the Nixon Justice Department for a supposed conspiracy to destroy heating tunnels under DC and kidnap Henry Kissinger.

Those charges were bogus; when they finally got to a jury in conservative Harrisburg, Pa., they were hung 10-2 for acquittal, and that was the end of that particular “conspiracy” trial during the Vietnam War.

It is inspiring that on that April 30 day yesterday, several hundred people were arrested around the country, mainly students, as part of the massive worldwide movement to stop the Gaza genocide and end this war. And I saw an email just a couple hours ago from someone reminding people that on this same day in 1975, the United States military completely vacated Vietnam. This brought to an end the 30-year US effort to take over the colonizing and repressive role France had played for almost a century.

Here are some personal reflections on all of this:

-There is a level of intensity on the issue of the Gaza war that is very similar to the level of intensify many of us felt as young people during the Vietnam War, for good reason. When the daily body count is in the hundreds (Vietnam) and literal genocide—“ethnic cleansing” Bernie called it—is taking place in Gaza, intense and focused action is absolutely appropriate.

-Many of us who were students who took part in the Black Freedom and/or Anti-Vietnam War movements felt so deeply about these issues that some of us left school and we and others found a way to make a living while being a dedicated organizer for revolutionary change. Frankly, to have hope of success in our people’s movement for human and ecological survival and just and truly democratic societies, we need more young people to consciously take this step.

-It is clear that the overwhelming number of young people taking part in this spring justice uprising are doing so with a peaceful, if angry, spirit. Much of corporate media is spinning it very differently, painting the movement as violent and abusive. It is a responsibility of all of us to criticize these inaccurate characterizations and demand that the truth be reported.

-The dominant forces in the Democratic Party, and of course Republicans, really don’t like to have their policies criticized or their political power undercut by those of us willing to speak truth to power. Democrats respond one way when that happens, Republicans are much harsher. That’s been true for a very long time. As I wrote in my book Burglar for Peace, “The Nixon Administration that was in power 50-plus years ago was a repressive government, known for illegal wiretapping, inflammatory rhetoric, criminal prosecutions of peace and justice activists, and outright physical attacks, including killings, against Black Panther Party members. I had followed the Chicago 8 trial a year and a half before, a clear case of government repression against anti-war and Black Freedom activists, following the police riots during the Democratic National Convention in 1968.”

The years 1969 to 1974, when Nixon was President, were very rough for a lot of us, although most of us survived.

-The conditions for organizing are much more positive under Democrats than under Republicans. This would be particularly the case if Trump is elected this November. He and the Republicans have made clear that they have every intention of taking this country so far backward that the Biden Presidency would come to be seen as a very good four years. It’s not. Some things are good, yes, but some things aren’t, Gaza in particular right now. But compared to a Trump Presidency, it would be like night and day.

So as we keep fighting for a ceasefire and an end to the war and movement toward true Palestinian self-determination for that long-suffering people, let’s be sure to respond to the US electoral process accordingly. Trump and the MAGA Republicans must be defeated. Strong progressive candidates like The Squad need to be supported.

It’s all of one, multi-colored piece. Si, se puede.



Ted Glick has devoted his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973, he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August 1974 resignation. Since late 2003, Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a renewable energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May 2006, he began working with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and was CCAN National Campaign Coordinator until his retirement in October 2015. He is a co-founder (2014) and one of the leaders of the group Beyond Extreme Energy. He is President of the group 350NJ/Rockland, on the steering committee of the DivestNJ Coalition and on the leadership group of the Climate Reality Check network.

THE COUNTRY NOT THE STATE

Unrest in Georgia Over The “Foreign Influence Transparency Law”: “Whichever Way We Go Is a Step Back”

The outsized role that foreign-funded NGOs play in Georgia’s politics, policy-making, and public services has led the country into a chronic crisis of its democracy.

By Almut Rochowanski, Sopiko Japaridze 

May 4, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Police uses tear gas to disperse protestors in Tbilisi on May 1, 2024. Author’s photo.



There is a massive problem at the heart of Georgia’s peculiar political economy. It goes back a quarter of a century, predating the 2003 Rose Revolution. The late president Edvard Shevardnadze had given foreign aid agencies great leeway, so towards the end of his feckless and corrupt rule, NGOs were already a vocal presence in the country’s political discourse and maintained confident relationships with international donors. After years of turmoil and state collapse, Georgians with ideas and convictions had seized the moment to shape their society. It felt fresh, energetic, if driven more by social entrepreneurs than broad-based grassroots movements. After Shevardnadze’s former minister of justice, Mikheil Saakashvili, deposed him in the Rose Revolution, NGO professionals quickly filled senior government posts. The country’s policy space was thrown wide open to any and all foreign-led aid and reform experiments. The calculation behind this was that the net geopolitical and material benefits would far outweigh any drawbacks.

Consistently high foreign aid flows followed, and bilateral aid programs, the World Bank, UN agencies, international development aid groups small and large, and even private Western philanthropies opened well-staffed offices in Tbilisi. To spend all their money, implement their projects, and tick the box saying “consultation and collaboration with the community,” they all needed local NGOs. Demand creates supply, and today, more than 25,000 NGOs are registered in Georgia. According to Georgian authorities, 90% of their funding comes from abroad, but this average conceals that the vast majority of Georgian NGOs have no local funding at all. They would probably find the very notion of asking locals for money absurd, and if they gave it a try, in their current shape and form, they could hardly win fellow Georgians’ support.

Foreign aid agencies and their local NGO contractors have long colonized most areas of public policy and services—education, healthcare, court reform, rural development, infrastructure, etc.

In practice, this plays out something like this: a major development aid agency or international lender, for example, USAID, the European Commission, or World Bank, has come up with a new model for education reform, which it now plans to roll out not just in Georgia, but typically in a whole host of countries. To give it a veneer of community participation, the aid agency contracts Georgian NGOs to do the everyday footwork: introduce this or that new way of doing things to officials, schools, and teachers and train them in the new skills they supposedly need. No one at this or any other point asks teachers, parents, students, or, for that matter, the electorate at large, what they need and want and how they would improve things. People are left feeling unheard, ignored, patronized – and also inadequate when they fail to reach the benchmarks all this training was supposed to achieve.

The Georgian NGOs that are given grants to implement this work may be local, but they hold considerable power over the Georgian population. This power comes from their access to Western embassies and resources and the legitimacy this conveys rather than from grassroots support. In a functional democracy, the people elect lawmakers and the executive to serve them and represent their interests. In Georgia, unelected NGOs get their mandate from international bodies, which draw up and pay for to-do lists of policy reforms for Georgia. Local NGOs lack an incentive to consider the impact of the projects they implement because they are not accountable to the citizens in whose lives they play such an intrusive role.

This constellation has eroded Georgian citizens’ agency and the country’s sovereignty and democracy.

However, the draft law on “foreign influence transparency” tabled by the Georgian government for the second year in a row will not address this massive problem at the heart of Georgia’s political economy. It is not even intended to address this problem. The Georgian government doesn’t really care about Georgia’s sovereignty, and neither do the foreign donors and aid agencies nor the Georgian NGO elite.

Georgian Dream, the party that has been in power since 2012, has no intention to eradicate all foreign funding from the Georgian political economy. Quite the contrary, they are perfectly happy with the continued flow of foreign aid and how the donor-NGO-industrial complex churns out policies and (sort of) services. Georgia’s politics may be notoriously polarized, but Georgian Dream and most of the opposition parties are remarkably unanimous in their ideology: they all believe in technocratic, neoliberal, de-politicized governance, in which policies are designed by (foreign) experts drawing on supposedly objective data and technology. The more public services can be given over to the market, the better.

This is illustrated by the fate of the Liberty Act, landmark legislation that prohibits tax rate increases and progressive taxation and caps government spending at 30% of GDP. It was enacted by Saakashvili, has not been repealed in 12 years of the Georgian Dream rule, and Transparency International Georgia (the most implacable of the partisan NGOs leading the protests against the Georgian Dream) has campaigned to keep it. These political camps may fight tooth and nail over who gets to run the country, but then they all run it in the same way.

The continued outsourcing of policy-making, governance, and service provision to foreign aid donors, local NGOs, and the market suits the tastes of Georgian Dream’s leading cadres. Many of them studied in the West (typically law or public administration) on Western scholarships and started their careers in UN offices, bilateral aid agencies, and, yes, local NGOs. They are drawn from the NGO-professional-managerial industry, which functions as the largest social lift into the middle class (more accurately, the top 10%) in a country where academia, medicine, law, science, or entrepreneurship do not afford middle-class status or lifestyles. Georgian Dream’s leaders’ resumés are much the same as those of their fiercest opponents in the foreign-financed NGO sector.

In this ecosystem, it is rare to find someone who genuinely cares about people and their well-being. The local NGO landscape is a deeply competitive sector that incentivizes sharp elbows, self-promotion, and duplication rather than collaboration, let alone solidarity. For many industry professionals, working in an NGO is a fast track to high incomes, perks like foreign travel and embassy receptions, and being part of the elite.

If the Georgian Dream is all for technocratic, depoliticized, donor-driven Ersatz-governance and maintaining the large, foreign-funded NGO sector it requires, why would it risk protests at home and pressure from the EU and US to pass a so-called “foreign agent” law?

Because atop that massive problem at the heart of Georgia’s political economy sits another, much more limited problem, which is a major irritant to the Georgian Dream: a small but powerful clique of NGOs with annual budgets of up to millions of dollars/euros from foreign donors, some of them close to the previous government of Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement, who use their perch to engage in openly partisan politics. For some five years, they have been denying the government’s legitimacy and calling for its ouster, and not just by supporting the opposition in elections, which already crosses ethical red lines for non-governmental organizations (and even more so when they’re funded by foreign states). They agitate for a revolutionary change of power outside democratic, constitutional processes. Previously, they demanded to be put in power as a technical government, but since no one (certainly not the Georgian electorate) picked them up on that offer, they have been venturing into street protests and storming parliament and government buildings. For good measure, they lobby the EU and US to sanction Georgian Dream leaders or slap travel bans on them.

Georgia’s “foreign agent” law, first tabled in spring 2023 and in its 2.0 version renamed the “law on foreign influence,” aims squarely at this hyper-partisan cluster of well-funded NGOs. There are many theories, some more baroque than others, for why Georgian Dream tabled this draft bill again a year after the abandoned first attempt. One of them is that Georgian Dream expects to win at arm-twisting this time because they consider the opposition weak. Another reason, cited by the Georgian Dream itself, is that for the past year, the government tried to come to an agreement with Western embassies and grant-makers so that they would no longer fund these partisan NGOs or moderate their partisan conduct through self-regulation. But this was rebuffed, if not by all, then at least by some key grant-makers. Behind closed doors, Western diplomats admit that the conduct of the partisan NGOs they finance crosses many lines and that something ought to be done about it. But when pressed on what they will do about it, they get testy.

Where does this leave Georgian civil society? In a worse place, without any doubt. All NGOs receiving foreign funding would face increased scrutiny and suspicion and would have to perform additional administrative tasks. Worse, such as fines, could be in store. Those NGOs that steered well clear of partisan politics, tried to be mission-driven and not donor-driven, practiced genuine solidarity, and respected citizens’ agency will get caught up in a policy that wasn’t even aimed at them. Never mind that this law would impose financial transparency on NGOs while the corporate sector faces no such obligation. This law won’t restore Georgians’ sovereignty, not in any meaningful sense of re-empowering citizens and re-politicizing policy-making. And for all that trouble, it probably won’t deflate the partisan NGOs or moderate their conduct. It isn’t just a blunt tool but a bad tool.

The frenzied, faux-patriotic claims of both the government and the opposition belie how little both sides have to offer average Georgians in terms of true democratic empowerment or hope for improving their lives. When one author met with members of a nurses’ union, their mood was unperturbed by the violent rhetoric and sense of crisis. These women were preoccupied with their work, with conflicts with their bosses and the minister of health. They expressed worry about how local authorities were slowly destroying their clinic, one of the few public hospitals left.

They try to make sense of how international donors and lenders, in close cooperation with the government, transform their communities and livelihoods without informing them, let alone asking them for their expertise and what they would like to see done.

Why would the World Bank rehabilitate a wing of our hospital? Our hospital supposedly had the budget to do this on its own, but now we don’t know what became of that money. We are not told how the budgets are spent or how decisions are made. When they needed us during COVID, we were called irreplaceable. Now, we are disposable.

In the most recent meeting, union members showed little interest in the law on foreign influence, didn’t care much about it, and didn’t want the union to take a stand on it one way or another. They were glad to hear that union activists would join neither the protests against the law nor support its adoption. They had heard rumors that it was a Russian law and decided to look into that, finding to their relief that there was nothing to that. As of this writing, this crisis has gone violent. Riot police are using water cannons, pepper spray, and beatings against anti-government protesters in Tbilisi. Pictures of bruises and bloodshot eyes are flooding social media. Over the past weeks, the political climate and public discourse have sunk to new lows, and that is saying something. Georgia’s public square is swept up in lies, hysteria, and manipulation. This, too, only takes Georgia farther away from reclaiming democracy and building progressive politics. There is a sense, expressed by a thoughtful and heavy-hearted Georgian observer, that “whichever way we go is a step back.”

Frustrating and tedious as it may be, we are forced to cut through the lies and the manipulation that swirl around this situation so we can begin to restore a rational conversation. It is galling to see foreign grant-makers lecture the Georgian public with a straight face that there is no such thing as foreign influence tied to foreign money, that donors only want to support a “vibrant civil society” and would never, ever dream of telling NGOs what they should do. Anyone who is at all familiar with how NGOs apply and compete for grants knows that donors set highly specific rules for which types of organizations, which kind of work, and what sort of issue they will even consider for funding, and this is before the unwritten rules and hidden biases determine the selection of grantees.

Activists in Georgia know all too well what is expected of them and which behaviors are punished and rewarded: being critical of the government on Facebook will net you more grants than being out in the community helping people. A few short years ago, when Western donors considered the Georgian Dream a valuable ally, they would tell Georgian activists to stop criticizing them. Now, they want activists to speak out against Georgian Dream. Donors even monitor activists’ social media profiles, and there can be consequences for posting the wrong things.

The shrill use of the moniker “Russian law” is another cynical manipulation thrown around liberally by Georgian activists, opposition politicians, and also Western officials. We’re told the draft law is copied from the Kremlin’s (fact-check: it’s not) and that it will turn Georgia into Russia and/or off the path of European integration. But this law is a symptom of specifically and uniquely Georgian political realities. Georgia in 2024 is nothing like Russia in 2012, when the latter adopted its foreign agent law – not politically, not in terms of its international alliances, not in terms of democracy and the rule of law, and certainly not in terms of the role played by NGOs. The objectives of Russia’s “foreign agent” law were nothing like those of the Georgian draft bill.

Even more absurd are allegations that Georgian Dream and its founder, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, are Russian puppets, entirely in the Kremlin’s pocket, and that they tabled this law because Putin told them to. By the same logic, Putin must have also instructed Georgian Dream to pursue EU integration for over a decade, to enshrine Euro-Atlantic integration in the constitution, to score higher than other candidates on reform benchmarks, and to win EU candidate status. But this constant shrieking about a “Russian law” plays on the Georgian public’s fears and resentment as well as on Georgia’s Western partners’ geopolitical idée fixe.

The most cynical and dangerous game, however, is tying this law to Georgia’s EU accession process. Far-away Western observers get teary-eyed about Georgians’ standing up for their “vibrant civil society,” but on the ground, protesters say unprompted that they are not in the streets to defend NGOs and, indeed, do not much care about them. These vox pop impressions are backed up by years of polls showing Georgians’ low trust in NGOs. Instead, people take to the streets because they have been told that this is a make-or-break moment for Georgia’s future in the EU.

Georgia’s aspiration for EU membership is the rawest of all nerves in Georgian politics and culture. After three decades of post-Soviet impoverishment, of lives cut short, pain and trauma, chronic stress, insecurity, and humiliation, the idea of EU membership has become an eschatological project for many Georgians: it represents the promise of salvation after long and unjust suffering and sacrifice. The EU stands not just for dreams – of material well-being, safety, dignity, comfort – coming true, but for recognition of Georgians’ inherent “Europeanness,” their specialness, their cultural superiority compared to their “Asian” neighbors.

Then again, many Georgians out in the street with their EU flags have less metaphysical and rather earthier concerns: in recent surveys, Georgians rank the opportunity to emigrate as their number one reason for wanting to join the EU. Indeed, Georgians have been “voting with their feet”—in 2021 and 2022 alone, more than 5% of the population left, most of them into grim shadow labor markets in Europe.

But whether it is spiritual redemption or scarce material opportunities, the prospect of EU membership represents something existential for Georgians. This has allowed the opposition, its partisan NGO proxies, and their Western donors to manufacture the “foreign influence law” crisis into a desperate, epic battle for Georgians’ bright future. Worst and most irresponsibly, EU officials have joined in, repeating one after the other that such a law is incompatible with “EU norms and values.” “Norms and values” is conveniently vague, unlike actual EU laws, which do not prohibit regulation of NGO funding. Most recently, an EU spokesperson has stated that adoption of the law would go against the EU’s “values and expectations,” moving the goal posts into the evermore nebulous territory. The supposedly objective and meritocratic EU accession process has turned arbitrary and vexatious.

EU officials threatening to derail Georgia’s accession process feels like unseemly blackmail. Fundamentally, any government’s growing suspicion of foreign donors’ motives for funding hyper-partisan NGOs will only be fueled by forcing the government, via escalating threats, to continue letting such funding in. This is a game of chicken that could go very dark. In these circumstances, with the fronts hardened and people’s existential fears manipulated, a frank debate about the decades-old problems that led to this draft bill and about the law’s effectiveness and appropriateness is no longer possible.

 

Jeremy Corbyn & Stella Assange: The World Press Freedom Day Interview

Marking World Press Freedom Day, Jeremy Corbyn MP met with Stella Assange to discuss the political persecution of the publisher Julian Assange, his trial and its wider implications for journalism around the world.

By Stella Assange, Jeremy Corbyn 

May 4, 2024

Source: Project for Peace & Justice by Jeremy Corbyn

Singapore: Lawrence Wong to Lead Amid Economic and Political Challenge

BY PRANJAL PANDEY

 MAY 3, 2024Facebook

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Photograph Source: State Department – Public Domain

Singapore has announced that Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong will take over as the country’s next leader on May 15. Wong, 51, has garnered unanimous support from lawmakers within the People’s Action Party (PAP). He will succeed Lee Hsien Loong, who has held the top job for 20 years.

Wong, who earned praise for his management of the island’s pandemic response, has been regarded as Lee’s successor since April 2022. During this time, the ruling party selected him to lead the “4G” or fourth generation of leaders in Singapore’s political parlance—politicians the party aimed to have govern the country in the future.

Before that, Heng Swee Keat, a former central bank chief and education minister and choice for the post of Prime Minister, suddenly stepped aside in 2021, throwing the party’s succession plans into disarray.

The term “generation” suggests a significant transition rather than a complete overhaul of cabinets, as some ministers served under more than one prime minister. The first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, led the first generation of leadership from 1965 until 1990. He was succeeded by Goh Chok Tong, who held the premiership for the following 14 years until 2004 when Lee Hsien Loong assumed leadership.

Wong began his political career in 2011 and has since held various ministerial positions, including defense, education, finance, and national development. Following his successful leadership during Singapore’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wong was selected by his fellow cabinet ministers in early 2022 as a leader of the next generation through a selection process that excluded Lee and other senior ministers. Shortly thereafter, Lee appointed him as Deputy Prime Minister.

Singapore adheres to a parliamentary system, where general elections are conducted once every five years. Since gaining independence, Singapore has been characterized by a one-party dominant state led by the ruling PAP. Despite this, the opposition led by the Workers’ Party has made notable strides, securing seats and now overseeing two group representation constituencies, marking a substantial breakthrough in the electoral landscape.

Lawrence Wong confronts numerous challenges as he readies to assume office on May 15. Singapore is grappling with significant concerns regarding the escalating cost of living. The ruling party has also been shaken by a corruption scandal.

In February 2024, Singapore’s core inflation, which excludes private transport and accommodation costs to better reflect household expenses, surged to 3.6 percent year-on-year. This marked a significant uptick from January’s rate of 3.1 percent and surpassed market expectations of a 3.4 percent increase. It represented the highest reading for core inflation since July 2023.

The acceleration in inflation was primarily driven by elevated services and food inflation, partly attributed to seasonal effects linked to the Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year, also known as Lunar New Year or the Spring Festival, stands as one of the most significant and widely celebrated holidays in Singapore. During this period, there is typically an increase in consumer spending, leading to price hikes.

This year, overall inflation also rose to 3.4 percent in February from 2.9 percent in January.

The ruling party has also encountered an uncommon setback in recent years, which has tarnished its renowned clean image. This was an indictment on corruption charges of then-senior minister, S. Iswaran. He faces 35 charges (and more pending) linked to bribery annatd corruption. The prosecution alleges that he accepted various gifts from a Malaysian tycoon and developer, as well as from another contractor.

Singapore’s record on freedom of speech has been a subject of considerable concern. The 2021 People Power under Attack report by CIVICUS Monitor highlighted a decline in the country’s civic space rating from “obstructed” to “repressed.” This shift underscores a recurring pattern of infringements on civic rights, especially concerning freedom of speech. Throughout 2021, Singapore utilized restrictive laws such as the Public Order Act, the 2017 Administration of Justice (Protection) Act, the Protection Against Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), and defamation laws to target human rights advocates, journalists, and critics.

A significant event occurred when the government applied legal pressure on independent news platforms. In September, the police gave a “serious warning” to New Naratif and its managing editor, Thum Ping Tjin, for publishing unauthorized electoral advertisements in 2020. Furthermore, in October, the national media regulator canceled the license of the Online Citizen after the platform allegedly refused to reveal its sources of funding.

The introduction of the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act further threatened freedom of expression, allegedly in the name of preserving national sovereignty. These actions, ostensibly taken to uphold order and protect national interests, have raised substantial concerns about the diminishing of civil liberties and the silencing of dissent in Singapore.

But most importantly Singapore, once adept at harmonizing its economic ties with China alongside its security partnerships with the United States, now faces mounting difficulty in upholding this equilibrium, especially compared to the initial years of Lee’s premiership. The burgeoning economic sway of China in the vicinity has become markedly pronounced.

China’s assertiveness in regional waters has escalated. While the Philippines, led by Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., seems inclined towards siding with the United States on security matters despite China’s economic prowess, the remaining Southeast Asian nations (excluding Laos, Cambodia, and strife-torn Myanmar) continue to navigate a delicate balance among the dominant powers in the region.

Yet, even for a nation as affluent and diplomatically adept as Singapore, managing the delicate equilibrium between these two forces is becoming increasingly challenging. China’s efforts to extend its influence into the domestic affairs of every Southeast Asian nation are evident. Within Singapore, apprehensions regarding Chinese interference in domestic politics are mounting among senior officials, prompting the passage of stringent legislation to counter foreign intervention.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which strikes a chord with Singapore’s substantial Muslim minority, has negatively affected the reputation of the United States in the city-state.

In the lead-up to Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s impending leadership, Singapore finds itself at a critical juncture. The transition represents a continuation of the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) governance, yet it also exposes the party to challenges and criticisms. Wong’s ascent to power is not devoid of complexities; he steps into a role overshadowed by economic uncertainties and recent damage to the PAP’s once-pristine image due to a corruption scandal. He faces the delicate task of navigating these turbulent waters.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. 

Pranjal Pandey, a journalist and editor located in Delhi, has edited seven books covering a range of issues available at LeftWord. You can explore his journalistic contributions on NewsClick.in.