Sabotage

Starting with the Luddites, the 19th Century machine breakers, sabotage was one way workers resisted exploitation on the job, by stopping the machines that made them work harder. In the 21st Century the new sabotage is to resist work, especially 'team work' and all the management participation programs by becoming disengaged from the work you do, in other words, by marking time on the job, taking sick time, stress leave, and when you are working doing as little as possible.

a recent Gallup survey of 47,000 workers around the world which showed that that Australian workers are among the most dissatisfied in the world with only 18 percent of Australian respondents saying they are fully engaged in their work.“Compounding these results,” writes John Belchamber, “is the finding that almost two thirds of Australian employees are emotionally detached from their employer and only do the minimum amount of work to avoid getting dismissed. 20% of dissatisfied respondents describe themselves as ”actively disengaged” – disliking their organisation, hating their boss and being indifferent to their job. But rather than leaving their jobs, they’re spending their time spreading their negativity amongst others in their team’s.” At the bottom of the table: Singapore and China. A staggering 98 per cent of employees in those two countries admit they’re disengaged with their work, preferring to be doing something else somewhere else. Twenty-three per cent of the British and Kiwis are engaged, one in five Canadians are happy with their work, and in the US, surprisingly, 28 per cent of workers experience high rates of job satisfaction. Overall, the global average is 27 per cent.The problem of employee disengagement is now widely recognized. Its cost to the bottom line has been demonstrated. Actively disengaged employees erode an organization’s bottom line, while
breaking the spirits of colleagues in the process. Within the U.S. workforce, Gallup estimates this cost to the bottom line to be more than $300 billion in lost productivity alone.

Rather than making work productive perhaps it is time we abolished work, wage slavery that is, replacing it with another concept; play. Making work not about production but about our pleasure and happiness, rather than the drudgery we face day in day out, no matter how many happy managers we have telling us to be happy. The work we do is not satisfying our emotional and human needs, it is not playful or fulfilling, it is simply a way of paying the bills.

Or as Herr Doctor Marx once said communism means there is no contradiction between play and work since “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes . . . to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (The German Ideology, Tucker, 160).

It’s not so much what you do, or the money you make, but the level of satisfaction you have with your work and yourself that is of ultimate importance. Your level of job satisfaction carries into all other areas of your life, consciously or subconsciously.

But because most people’s mindset is “how can I work less and play more”, they live for the weekends, obsess about vacations, and dream of the day they retire. (I can’t tell you how many friends and family members I’ve seen fall into a major depression within months of retiring due to the shock that it doesn’t really fulfill their life’s dream) Their sole motivation for work is to not have to work anymore.

Work is work - whether you love it or not. A job is still a job and at it’s core it’s about making money for survival. And while I love what I do, if money was no object, I’d much rather be traveling with my wife, playing with my dog, or dominating 12 year olds in Call of Duty.

According to Frost and Klein (1979), play and work probably lie on a continuum.
However, play can be differentiated from work by defining their unique characteristics.

What makes play "play" and work "work"? Play has at least four fundamental qualities that distinguish it from work; it is designed primarily for its own enjoyment, it is controlled by the child, it has a dose of fantasy, and it is internally motivated.

Play is designed primarily for its own enjoyment. Typically, the process of play
is what is important, not the product. However, work is designed for a product. Work is engaged in for what may be gained as a result (Lefrancios, 1986).
The quality and quantity of play is controlled by the child (McKee, Play working
partner of growth, 1986). When the child decides that he or she no longer wants to play, all the adult encouragement cannot recover the play. However, work is controlled by others. In fact, if a child is required to continue to play even when he doesn't want to, it turns into work.

Work is typically designed for a product, controlled externally, based on reality,
and externally motivated. When a person is required to work, a product is usually
expected to stem from the work. Furthermore, this product is often judged by some
criteria as reflecting "good" work or "poor" work. The judging criteria is determined by some external "correct" model. Good work is reinforced, poor work is usually reprimanded.

Because work entails a product and a judgment, people can easily determine
whether change has taken place in the person’s behavior. Thus, if the product comes closer with the model, or the person produces more (i.e., quality and/or quantity increases) one can say behavior has changed or learning has taken place.
The influences of work is not always with a product. Work is also associated with
stress, ulcers, suicide, feigned illness, etc. It is interesting to note that as our schools have instituted more product oriented teaching, there has been an increase in the incidence of stress and other problems with children.

Has the time come to abandon the Protestant work ethic? As technology advances and the structure of work changes, Pat Kane suggests a different, more creative philosophy to suit the new era

DOES the devil necessarily make work for idle hands? The most momentous changes in the structure of employment are upon us: it is time we looked anew at our oldest prejudices. With the information age transforming all social co-ordinates, we should think about a replacement for the work ethic - in a world where work, as we know it, is evaporating before our eyes. I bid for the play ethic.

The objection to this is simple: how can you sustain a work ethic, when work itself is deconstructing before our very eyes? The massive shifts towards short-term contracts, part-time work, self-employment and manufacturing-to-services are well enough documented. Their causes - new technology, global competition, individualism - are recognised and accepted by most of us. And it is a standby of current social thought that the relentless automation of labour - mental and manual - is laying in store an unemployment problem of massive proportions.

Around 75% of the labour force in any industrial nation is doing little more than simple repetitive tasks, and is thus potentially automatable: less than 5% of companies round the world have begun to use new technologies fully in their workplace (an excerpt from Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work).

Intellectually at least, the case can be made for play's virtues. Psychologist DW Winnicott cited play as the "creation of personality" - that exciting sharing of self and world that make new ideas possible. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga has called us Homo Ludens: in that exhaustive book, he states that "pure play is one of the main bases of civilisation". And in the sciences of complexity, play is regarded as the central process that brings order to the chaos of natural creation - in the words of biologist Brian Goodwin, "our creativity is essentially similar to the creativity that is the stuff of evolution".

Of course there can be a downside to ending the work play divide.

According to Prensky, for Digital Natives "play is work and work is increasingly seen in terms of games and game play".²¹ This ethos has not gone unnoticed by some larger organizations, such as the American Army. The army has changed their approach to recruit instruction. Since the majority of the American army's recruits are between the ages of 18 and 22 and require wide- ranging training, the army has developed "an extensive array of gaming simulations"²² to help teach their recruits with great results.

But let's leave the last word to someone who understood the work play dialectic well, Mark Twain;

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it–namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Take This Job And Shove It



SEE:

tick-tock-we-live-by-clock

The End Of The Leisure Society

Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

Take Time From the Boss

Work Sucks

Time For The Four Hour Day

Goof Off Day

The Right To Be Greedy

Capitalism Needs Public Spending

As the United States and UK pull back on government spending they are cutting their noses to spite their face. Austerity measures caused by bank and corporate bail outs as a result of the financial crisis of 2008 are not going to create jobs, nor are they going to increase productivity.

They are counter productive. Modern capitalism requires government to spend on infrastructure in order to function as this analysis by Michael Hudson points out.

The logic of public investment is to upgrade economies and make them more competitive

Nations that today have the highest incomes recognize that rising productivity should enable costs and prices to fall – and that public investment is needed for this to occur. U.S. development strategy was based explicitly on public infrastructure investment and education. The aim was not to make a profit or use its natural monopoly position to extract economic rent like a private company would do. It was to subsidize the cost of living and doing business – to make the economy more efficient, lower-cost and ultimately more fulfilling to live and work in.

At issue is the idea that capital investment is inherently private in character. The national income and product accounts do not recognize government investment even in infrastructure, to say nothing of subsidies for the research and development that led to much space and aeronautics technology, information-processing and the internet, pharmaceuticals, DNA biology and other sectors that enabled private companies to make hundreds of billions of dollars.

Simon Patten, the first professor of economics at the nation’s first business school – the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania – explained that the return to public investment should not take the form of maximizing user fees. The aim was not to make a profit, but just the reverse: Unlike military levies (a pure burden to taxpayers), “in an industrial society the object of taxation is to increase industrial prosperity”[7] by lowering the cost of doing business, thus making the economy more competitive. Market transactions meanwhile would be regulated to keep prices in line with actual production costs so as to prevent financial operators from extracting “fictitious” watered costs – what the classical economists defined as unearned income (“economic rent”).

The U.S. Government increased prosperity by infrastructure investment in canals and railroads, a postal service and public education as a “fourth” factor of production alongside labor, land and capital. Taxes would be “burdenless,” Patten explained, if invested in public investment in internal improvements, headed by transportation infrastructure.

“The Erie Canal keeps down railroad rates, and takes from local producers in the East their rent of situation. Notice, for example, the fall in the price of [upstate New York] farms through western competition” making low-priced crops available from the West.[8] Likewise, public urban transport would minimize property prices (and hence economic rents) in the center of cities relative to their outlying periphery.

Under a regime of “burdenless taxation” the return on public investment would aim at lowering the economy’s overall price structure to “promote general prosperity.” This meant that governments should operate natural monopolies directly, or at least regulate them. “Parks, sewers and schools improve the health and intelligence of all classes of producers, and thus enable them to produce more cheaply, and to compete more successfully in other markets.” Patten concluded: “If the courts, post office, parks, gas and water works, street, river and harbor improvements, and other public works do not increase the prosperity of society they should not be conducted by the State. Like all private enterprises they should yield a surplus” for the overall economy, but not be treated as what today is called a profit center (loc. cit.).

Public infrastructure represents the largest capital expenditure in almost every country, yet little trace of its economic role appears in today’s national income and product accounts. Free market ideology treats public spending as deadweight, and counts infrastructure spending as part of the deficit, not as productive capital investment. The only returns recognized are user fees, not what is saved from private operators incurring interest charges, dividends, other financial fees, as well as high executive salaries.

As Patten showed, the relatively narrow scope of “free market” marginal productivity models applies only to private-sector industrial investment, not to public investment. (What would the “product” be?) The virtue of this line of analysis is to point out that the alternative is to promote a rentier “tollbooth” economy enabling private owners of infrastructure or other monopolies to charge more than the “marginal product” actually costs. Stock and bond markets increasingly aim at extracting economic rent rather than earning profits by investing in tangible capital formation to employ labor to increase output, not to speak of rising living standards.

In the United States, Alaska and Wyoming pay their residents a “citizens’ dividend” out of their resource rent receipts. Alaska’s Senators Stevens and Murkowski, as well as its Governor Sarah Palin, did not believe that it is proper for government to upgrade, educate and provide the population with social services. So Alaska has used its oil revenue to pay each resident a few thousand dollars – and to abolish property taxes. This policy leaves Alaska among the lowest-ranking states in terms of literacy, education, support for the arts and technology, while avoiding progressive taxation.

The state’s neoliberal anti-tax, anti-government ideology condemns its residents to send their children out to work rather than educating them and investing in their improvement.

It is a bankers’-eye view of the world, not that by which Britain, France, Germany and the United States built themselves up to global leadership positions. The focus is on financial returns, not on lowering the cost of living and production or upgrading the quality of work. It views government spending as a deadweight cost, not as productive investment.

Class War-ren Buffet

The Labour movement in the United States responded to the attacks on public sector workers union rights in Wisconsin with a limp defeatist campaign entitled Stop the War on Workers....at least Warren Buffet, America's folksy Billionaire, got it right....it's Class War!

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, t

he rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." –

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett,

quoted in the New York Times, November 2006

“I believe we are in the midst of an irrepressible labor conflict that has pitted the haves versus the have-nots,” said University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, history professor Andrew Kersten at the conference. “As Warren Buffett has said recently, ‘There is a class war, alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s waging it, and we’re winning.’ It’s not merely the money or the political power they crave, they seek to transform the way we think and act on a daily basis.”

Warren Buffett created a stir in the billionaires' club when he told a New York Times reporter that America is in the midst of class warfare and that the rich are winning. Buffett made this comment as deregulation in the banking industry, tax cuts for the rich and runaway spending on Middle Eastern wars were setting the world up for a global recession. The predictable economic collapse which was made inevitable by tax cuts, wars and deregulation is now being deepened by political leaders who insist that the way out of this disaster is -- and please try to resist sticking a sharp stick in your eye when you read this -- by tax cuts for the wealthy, further deregulation and doubling down in our war in Afghanistan.

All in all there is a class warfare currently going on, under the covers, which even the great Warren Buffet has admitted to in an interview in 2005 with CNN's Lou Dobbs, wherein they said: "DOBBS: ... In 1983, Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, he had a very simple idea: raise taxes. That's what you're saying here. BUFFETT: Sure. But I wouldn't raise the 12-point and a fraction payroll tax, I would raise the taxable base to above $90,000. DOBBS: That's a progressive idea. In other words, the rich people would pay more? BUFFETT: Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good. DOBBS: What a radical idea. BUFFETT: It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be..."

Money Talks.

But, oh no, we can't raise marginal tax rates a lousy 4.6 percent on incomes above $250,000. Perish the thought. Never mind that the past 30 years have seen the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans increase their share of the national wealth from 7 percent to approximately 23 percent. Nor that, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, corporate CEOs who made 24 times more than a typical worker in 1965 now earn about 275 times more than the guys in the shop. Assuming the shop hasn't closed down and moved to Thailand, that is.

• Continue reading

But heaven forbid we bring back Clinton-era tax rates. Instead, let's stimulate the economy by putting a few hundred thousand federal employees on the street. That'll work.

"There's class warfare, all right," Warren Buffett, the multibillionaire investor told the New York Times in 2006, "but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a brand-new Republican governor largely financed by the infamous Koch brothers, the Scrooge McDuck type of billionaire, has identified even more sinister enemies of the common man: schoolteachers, nurses and the guys who drive snowplows.

Gov. Scott Walker, an Eagle Scout and career politician, came into office spouting the usual Tea Party humbug: lower taxes, fiscal restraint. Then he pulled a bait and switch worthy of the cheesiest kind of used car dealer. First, he persuaded the Republican-controlled Legislature to pass $140 million in corporate tax cuts. Then he announced a $137 million budget deficit that could only be closed by making public employees pay a substantially higher share -- as much as 12 percent of their salaries -- for their healthcare and pensions.

As events in Egypt showed, you never know what will set off mass protest.

Here at home, over-reaching by a novice Republican governor of Wisconsin has finally triggered the protest marches that have been eerily missing during the more than three years of an economic crisis that has savaged the middle and bottom and rewarded the top.

It's not as if we lack a politics of class. As mega-investor Warren Buffett famously said, there is plenty of class warfare in America, but the billionaire class is winning.

This economic crisis, after all, was brought on by excesses on Wall Street. Yet with the rest of the economy still mired in high unemployment and fiscal crises of public services, Wall Street was first to be bailed out, the first to return to exorbitant profitability, and the last to be held accountable.

Month after month, progressives have been asking each other, where are the mass protests?

You might expect popular indignation to be focused on the banks. Instead, the economic unease of ordinary people has been substantially captured by the Tea Party right and directed against government, while Beltway politicians of both parties are outdoing one another to vie for the role of more austere deficit hawk, which will hardly win back popular support for the public sector.

Then the newly energized Republicans made a couple of big mistakes. One was trying to cut too deep, on the heels of a massive tax cut for the rich. But the other miscalculation was to declare war on the one bastion of organized economic representation of regular people -- the labor movement.

With new legislative majorities in 18 states, several freshman Republican governors are hoping to withdraw collective bargaining rights from public employees and to otherwise demonize nurses, teachers, fire-fighters, cops, sanitation workers and others who have managed to hang on to decent pensions and health coverage.

This looked to be a cakewalk. Public workers, seemingly, are an easy target. After all, they still have jobs and benefits. Instead of demanding to know why our own pension and health coverage is so lousy, the rest of us are supposed to resent middle income workers in the public sector for having health and pension benefits better than ours. It is a carefully cultivated politics of division and resentment.

But this time, Republicans overreached, and the long smoldering economic unease has finally sparked mass demonstrations. Rather than following the script and resenting public employees as a privileged "other," the citizens of Madison increasingly view teachers, nurses, cops, firefighters, and other public workers as their violated neighbors.

One recent poll showed that two-thirds of Wisconsin citizens polled (none from public employee families) felt that Walker had gone too far. Even citizens who wanted public workers to pay more of the costs of their benefits concluded that his scheme was excessive. Another poll, sponsored by an Illinois Manufacturers Association, found a similar result.

Now, mass protest has broken out in other states where Republican governors are attacking unions, tens of thousands of other citizens are joining their union brothers and sisters, and even the mainstream press is taking sympathetic notice. In a fine piece in Saturday's Times, Michael Cooper and Kit Seelye asked: "Is Wisconsin the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights?"

Maybe it is. And not just of collective bargaining rights.

At long last, resentment against the economic crisis is beginning to find its natural home, where it always belonged -- against financial elites, their privileges and Republican allies. It is dawning on ordinary voters that something is wrong when hedge fund billionaires and investment bankers are making more than ever, while public workers (average Wisconsin pay: $48,000) are being made the scapegoats.

Workers of the World Unite...

The analysis of Karl Marx, believed archaic and irrelevant only a few short years ago, have again become highly relevant. Our social and economic conditions, for all the bluster and noise of the 20th century, are fundamentally unchanged from where they were in the 1800s.

The 20th century was a time of optimism. The American dream was validated. The radicalism of the previous century was forgotten after World War 2. Radicals like Karl Marx were proven to be wrong. Since 2008 however, the jury has reconvened. And in that jury box we come cannot help but be impressed. Consider, for an example, these two quotes from the Communist Manifesto, written 1848:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarians, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

And...

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.

If Marx were alive today, if he were witness to the struggles through Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and America he would not be surprised. He saw it coming. He saw it coming because he understood the nature of capitalism.

While we may not want to run out and join our local band of communists, we may want to reconsider many of the observations that were relevant in the 19th century not only from Marx, but from others. Strangely enough, for all the progress we have made over the past century, we seem to be back, more or less, where we started from.

We now live in a time of ruthless, predatory capitalism.It takes no prisoners and when it does, it tortures them. Since the 1980s workers have faced stark choices. Threats to move manufacturing abroad have actually been promises. Unions have become crippled and powerless.

The two pillars of working class strength, strong unions and public spending, have been reduced to ineffective shadows of their former selves. The social democratic response is limited to asking for more, for a larger piece of the pie. That is because the fundamental ideology of social democratic movements and parties are reformist. The aim is to reform capitalism; to redistribute wealth. In the past this objective has been met in some places more so than in others. And if we learn anything from history, we know that you don't 'ask' the billionaire class for anything. You demand and you are prepared to back your demands, or stay home.

Today, unions are powerless because the bosses have become radical and right wing to the extreme. The only principles they adhere to beyond cold pragmaticism are cold and calculating neo liberal policies, policies that boldly proclaim, it's every man for himself. Sink or swim. They would rather ship jobs away or close shop than negotiate. Social democratic political parties merely parrot the wishes and policies of the private sector. If social democrats want to strengthen the safety net, a powerful assault from the right, from bond rating agencies and even the IMF will efficiently put them down.

Wage Increases = Economic Growth

Found this on the web and thought I would share it with ya' all. While Capitalist governments around the world attempt to reduce workers wages with austerity measures, union busting, and government reductions in public sector employment, lets remember who keeps capitalism functioning, the workers who produce the goods and buy them. And as Marx pointed out the declining rate of profit, which is key to the continuing cyclical crisis nature of capitalism results from overcapacity. Take the auto industry as an example.

Development Through Wage-Led Growth

By
Henry C.K. Liu



Part I: Stagnant Worker Wage Income Leads to Overcapacity

This article appeared in AToL on November 24, 2010


In the economics of development, there is an iron-clad rule that “income is all”. The rule states that the effectiveness of developmental policies, programs and measures should be evaluated by their effect on raising the wage income of workers; and that a low-wage economy is an underdeveloped economy because it keeps aggregate consumer demand below its optimum level, thus causing overcapacity in the economy that needs to be absorbed by export.

Workers income is the key factor in generating national wealth in a country. Export through low-wage production is merely shipping under-priced national wealth outside the national border without adequate compensation, by under-pricing labor within the nation. During the age of industrial imperialism, export of manufactured goods was promoted by high-wage economies to the low-wage colonies in return for gold-back money, so that more investment could be made to provide more jobs for high-wage workers at home. In post-industrial finance economies, cross-border wage arbitrage in unregulated global trade exploits workers in low-wage economies to produce for consumers in higher wage economies to earn fiat crrency in the form of the dollar that cannot be spent in the exporting economy.

Globalization of Trade Preempts Domestic Development in All Countries

This “income is all” rule has been mostly obscured in recent decades during which globalized foreign trade promoted by neoliberals has pre-empted domestic development as the engine of economic growth in all market economies around the world. In today’s game of globalized international trade, the new operative rule is that “profit is all” and that high profit in competitive export trade requires low domestic wages, even if low local wages retard domestic economic development by reducing aggregate purchasing power in the domestic market to cause overcapacity that rely on export. As workers wages are not sufficient to buy the goods they produce, domestic markets fall into underdevelopment and export to high-wage economies is needed to produce profit for companies.

Excessive Corporate Profit From Low Wages Leads to Overcapacity

This new rule of globalized trade is designed to produce short-term maximization of corporate profit for an export sector. But in the post industrial finance economy, the export sectors in low-wage economies are largely owned or financed by cross-border international capital. This type of international trade incurs inevitable long-term stagnation in the domestic economies of all trading nations because the low wages paid by international capital lead to insufficient aggregate domestic consumer demand. Stagnant wages everywhere in turn reduce aggregate global purchasing power needed for the expansion of international trade. It is a clear case of imbalanced economic sub-optimization.

Foreign Capital Invested in International Trade Has No Incentive to Raise Local Wages

The export sector of foreign trade in any economy naturally does not consider the purchasing power of local workers as being of any consequence because the goods produced and services provided by local workers in the export sector are sold in higher-wage foreign markets for profit denominated in the reserve currency generally accepted in international trade, which since the end of World War II has been the US dollar.

As a result, the import sector in foreign trade in all economies also underperforms because of insufficient domestic purchasing power for both domestic products and needed imports. This is true in varying degrees for all economies that participate in international trade. The only exception is the US economy whose gold-backed currency had been generally accepted as the reserve currency for international trade since the end of World War II. But the dollar has been a fiat currency since 1971 when it was detached from gold.

In the advanced financial economies, consumer debt is used to overcome stagnant consumer purchasing power caused by low wages. Low wages have been the fundamental cause of recurring debt bubbles in advanced economies. Even for the US, cross-border wage arbitrage has also kept US wages stagnant, which US policy makers compensated with a policy of high consumer debt that was unsustainable by stagnant wages. The biggest item in consumer debt is home mortgage. This excessive debt in relation to wage income has been the real cause behind the current global financial crisis.

The Rich Get Richer

While the rest of us are told we must suffer roll backs, wage freezes, and other austerity measures the result of the capitalist state bailing out Wall Street and Big Business......

Executive compensation

The $1,700,000,000 golden handshake

Inside the best deal Frank Stronach ever made.

Bank of Montreal CEO pay jumps 28 percent to C$9.5 million

Average annual pay of a top Canadian CEO: $7 million

The total average compensation for Canada’s 100 best-paid CEOs was $6.64 million in 2009, compared to the average Canadian income of $42,988 and the average minimum wage worker’s income of $19,877.

The biggest pay package went to Aaron Regent at Barrick Gold Corp., who made $24.2 million in 2009, according to Mackenzie’s calculations. In second place was Hunter Harrison at Canadian National Railway Co., at $17.3 million, followed by Gerald Schwartz at Onex Corp., at $16.7 million.

A Globe and Mail review of pay for CEOs at Canada’s 100 largest public companies in 2009 shows top executives across Canada received, The cash portion of pay packages – salary and cash bonuses – did show substantial growth, with a combined median increase of 7.6 per cent. (Medians reflect the experience of the middle-of-the-pack CEO, while averages can be skewed by CEOs with particularly large or small compensation amounts.)

A list of the Top 50 Canadian CEOs and their astronomical take-home pay increases

In the past 12 years, there’s been a 444 per cent salary increase for Canada’s top CEOs. The top 10 earners collected a total of $60.7 million in 1995—by 2007, that number had jumped to $330.3 million. For example, Paul Desmarais, CEO of Power Corp, made more than $5 million in 1995; in 2007, his take-home was more than $29 million.

Canada’s richest CEOs pocket the average Canadian wage of $40,237 by 9:04 a.m. January 2nd – before most Canadians have booted up their computer for another year of work,” says Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Research Associate Hugh Mackenzie.

The CCPA released a report on January 2, 2009 showing that the 100 highest paid CEO's at publicly traded corporations in Canada earned an average of $10.4 million in total compensation in 2007, which was an average increase of 22%, from its $8.5 million average in 2006.

This compared with an average pay hike of only 3.2% to $40,237 for the average Canadian worker during 2007.
"Compared with ordinary Canadians, whose wages have been stagnant for 30 years, Canada's economic downturn promises to hit the masses far harder than the best paid 100 CEOs," Mackenzie said. "They have enjoyed a decade of record pay hikes and will land on a softer cushion if they stumble from their lofty heights in the New Year."

The wage gap between the average Canadian worker and CEOs has been growing steadily over the past decade. In 2007, Canada's top 50 CEOs earned 398 times more than the average worker, compared with 85 times in 1995.

MacKenzie said that between 1998 and 2007 the average compensation of top CEOs increased by 147%, adjusted for inflation. This compared with a 3% decline in inflation-adjusted weekly wages for average Canadians and a 6% rise for those on the minimum wage.

The New National Stock Exchange

Should the Toronto and London Stock Exchanges merge? Of course they should, since the marketplace is global and other borses (exchanges) are merging in this era of global capitalism. And it fits in well with the Feds argument for one national exchange. The irony is that while business sees this as a favorable idea the right wing politicians don't.

But reaction from CEOs and chief financial officers suggests that executives at many of Canada’s largest public companies do not want politicians to step in. Corporate leaders are optimistic that a merger will benefit both traders, and firms seeking capital. Many executives added that it would be pointless to fight against the forces that are spurring consolidation in the exchange business globally.

Business case

Caldwell insisted there will be a net benefit to Canada in this deal.

Here are some of his arguments in favour of a TSX-LSE merger:

* "The listings, the fundraising, the corporate finance will still be done in Toronto." * If it gives "easier access to Canadian companies, easier access to European and Middle East funding via the London Stock Exchange, that would be a tremendous economic boom." * "The LSE does not have a derivatives platform, that is options, and Montreal does. So they're going to be using the Montreal system and staff to build their products in Europe." * "Quebec may actually get jobs out of this" * "We are going to have a greater selection of investments quite possibly, and greater access to capital."

Once again the nationalist protectionist impulses of the Federal and provincial governments (regardless of the ideology of the party in power) misses the point...

Hudak shares Liberal doubts about value of TMX-LSE merger for Ontario

....capital is global and no matter how you regulate it nationally, or provincially, until those regulations are internationalized then you have failed to address the real nature of the new global capital markets.

David Weild, a former Chairman at Nasdaq, says that might not be the case, as the exchange companies—now publicly traded—don’t adhere to the same principals they did in the past when they were private.

“They used to be quasi public utilities that had to look out for the public good by building better economies, they looked out for the entire ecosystem that included dealers, institutional and retails investors and issuers,” he tells BNN.

“They have taken their eyes off of the plight of the small cap company, which is the one that generates jobs and innovation and regenerates economic growth for the world’s economy.”

The very markets that led to the recession and financial collapse of 2008. Denying these mergers does not address the real issue; how to regulate them.

A number of executives across various sectors said it would be difficult for them to argue that Canada should block any deal, given that they are expanding into other countries themselves.

“We at Canaccord believe that Canada should be open to foreign investment,” said Canaccord chief executive officer Paul Reynolds.

And quite a few business leaders took the argument a step further, saying flat out that Ottawa has no business weighing into this deal. “If the Canadian government subscribes to and practises free trade and open market economics, it should leave it alone,” said Ed Miu, chief financial officer of Eldorado Gold Corp.

“Who cares?” said Bill Holland, chief executive officer of CI Financial Corp., adding that exchanges are now “nothing more than a bunch of servers and a name.

“The bigger the better,” he said. “All you’re trying to do is get the most liquidity at the best prices. Is it something that is vital to Canadian interests? Not at all. It’s a non-issue.”

And this weekends G20 Finance Ministers meeting did nothing to address the need for global regulations, leaving each national capitalist regime to come up with its own policies.

This then is the anarchy of capitalism, best reflected by the unregulated Canadian stock market that allows provinces to regulate their own marketplaces.

Right wing provincial governments oppose a single national regulator, claiming their constitutional right to have their own regulations and stock markets. Mind you in the case of Alberta and B.C. both Stock Markets have been home to many a ponzi scheme, Bre-X to just mention one.

Scandal in the Alberta Stock Exchange

Pro Sports and Criminal Capitalism the Skalbania Pocklington story

They may have a 'constitutional' right to having provincial Stock Markets but that constitution was written in 1867 when the Canadian borse but was a mote in gods eye. The City of London (the Stock exchange) still dominated the markets in Canada until the great depression.

Initial Corporate Ownership Structures
As the stock market deepened, widely held industrial firms also appeared. The Hudson’s Bay Company generally had no single dominant shareholder, though its Chief Factor often seemed to rule the company and its shares did not trade on exchange. But Canada now had numerous small, widely held mining companies and two widely held giants. Canadian Pacific was widely held from its inception; and by 1900, Bell Canada too was widely held.
However, many large Canadian firms now belonged to pyramidal corporate groups – structures in which a family or closely held apex firm controls other listed firms, each of which control yet other listed firms, and do on. The first such group, that of the Cox family, established in 1899, served as a model.
Still, Canadian pyramidal groups were usually not terribly complicated, at least relative to their modern descendents. Most had only a few tiers and a handful of firms. The economic motivations of their builders are also fairly straightforward.
Prior to the big push period, and early into it, old money families and railroad tycoons diversified their wealth by venturing into different industries. As the stock market developed, and public
shareholders became a significant source of capital, selling minority interests in these ventures to small investors became increasingly common. Listing its controlled subsidiaries lets a wealthy family leverage their retained earnings into control over much larger pools of capital than their own wealth, yet retain
complete control. It also let them diversify more extensively while operating on a larger scale in each industry. Thus, began the first corporate groups.
Larger corporate groups were often the result of takeover waves. From 1909 until 1912, when the economy abruptly slowed, 275 of Canada’s largest firms coalesced into 58 in half a billion dollars worth of M&A transactions. The most active corporate acquisitor of this period was Max Aitken, who assembled Canada’s largest pyramidal group. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he rose through the
ranks of Royal Securities, ultimately running the firm for its controlling shareholder, John Stairs, heir to the old Nova Scotia merchant family. In 1906, he used his earnings to buy Montréal Trust, and then used that firm to take over Royal Securities. Aitken issued debt in London on a huge scale and used the
proceeds to buy steel mills, cement companies, power companies, and other firms all over Canada. In this way, he built the Steel Company of Canada from Montréal Rolling Mills, Hamilton Steel and Iron, Canada Screw, Canada Bolt and many other smaller firms. Aitken also formed Canada Cement out of twelve of the country’s thirteen Portland cement makers. At the end of the big push years, Aitken, always a passionate imperialist, bought the title Lord Beaverbrook and retired to London.

Vampire Capitalism

With the crash and resuscitation of finance capitalism and its fordist counterpart (auto and other manufacturers) by the state and with the popularity of vampires in consumer culture I thought I would add some links on vampiric capitalism and the vampire state in light of my 2005 article; Gothic Capitalism, which I would like to point out has been published in Slovinian by anarchist comrades in Serbia.

Marx of course was writing in the era of the popular vampire novels while Dr. Polidori first published a vampire novel, and Sheridan Le Fanu published his vampire short story, it was Dracula, that had a larger popular impact with mass publication of the book and its follow up as a stage play.

Marx identifies capital as dead labour living off the life force of the working class a class it created for its own ends (thus the later zombie motif that has also increased in popularity in mass culture during this captialist crisis, see my Gothic Capitalism for more on this)

The notion of vampire as symbol of capitalist oppression is certainly not original
to Stoker, who was doubtlessly influenced by or at least aware of the works of Karl Marx and other socialists who considered the vampire something of a patron saint to capitalists.
Discussing Marx, critic Andrew Smith says his “rhetorical fulcrum in this respect relies on an imaginative juxtaposition with images drawn from the pre-capitalist world. Hence, it is no coincidence that he keeps coming back to these occult pictures”. Or as Ken Gilder writes in his book Reading the Vampire, “modern capitalism here is by its very nature excessive, driven by‘irresistible force’ to consume and accumulate. Marx draws on the metaphor of the vampire timeand again to describe its processes”.
Critic Steve Shaviro gives us an even more detailed view of Marx’s use of the vampire motif, More generally, vampires and zombies are vital (if that is the right word) to the functioning of capitalist society. Traditional Marxist theory, of course, focuses onvampires. Marx himself famously describes capital as ‘dead labor which, vampirelike,lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks’ .

In the nineteenth century the Gothic Revival also found itself central to
political and cultural debates. In Victorian England, the gothic suburban villa
empowered the middle classes and the building of Houses of Parliament made a
statement about ‘making a nation’ and creating a national identity. John Ruskin
attacked Marx and Engel’s ideology through his writings about the Gothic and
William Morris championed the Arts and crafts movements while attacking the great Gothic Revival perpetuated by practitioners such as George Gilbert Scott as bringing about capitalism.

Karl Marx

Capital Volume One
Chapter Ten: The Working-Day

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

Constant capital, the means of production, considered from the standpoint of the creation of surplus-value, only exist to absorb labour, and with every drop of labour a proportional quantity of surplus-labour. While they fail to do this, their mere existence causes a relative loss to the capitalist, for they represent during the time they lie fallow, a useless advance of capital. And this loss becomes positive and absolute as soon as the intermission of their employment necessitates additional outlay at the recommencement of work. The prolongation of the working-day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. To appropriate labour during all the 24 hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production.

It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity “labour-power” face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no “free agent,” that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.”

The Grundrisse

Capital posits the permanence of value (to a certain degree) by incarnating itself in fleeting commodities and taking on their form, but at the same time changing them just as constantly; alternates between its eternal form in money and its passing form in commodities; permanence is posited as the only thing it can be, a passing passage — process — life. But capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labour as its soul, vampire-like.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Chapter 7

But in the course of the nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the feudal one, the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation, bourgeois capital replaced aristocratic landed property. The peasant's small holding is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits, interest, and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the agriculturist himself to see to it how he can extract his wages.

The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist's caldron of capital.

Capitalism originates in Gothic Culture and the fact that it now has reached its historic epoch, it's tendrils now encapsulate the entire globe, unlike any other time in history. Its commidification of our lives is now complete, hence the growth of the mass culture of consumption that is mirrored in the popularity of vampires and zombies as cultural motifs are the visions of ourselves alienated from our humanity, they are the ultimate consumers.

Robert Park, later sociology chair at the University of Chicago, took a more global
perspective on the phenomenon of “vampiric capitalism,” in his journalistic critiques of western exploitation within Africa, both of its peoples and resources (Lyman, 1992). American sociology, after the 1920s, would reject the use of both journalistic and philosophical analyses of evil for a more thoroughly scientific methodology (Greek, 1992). However, the discipline then was left with great difficulties in discussing evil (now referred to as deviance) without transvaluing it as sickness (Menninger, 1973) or as sign of social malaise or anomie (Orru,1987), leaving treatises on the nature of evil to more ethnographically inspired writings such as criminal biographies, novels, plays, and ultimately screenplays.

Popular culture now has labeled the latest capitalist crisis as a problem of both vampire banks and zombie banks. How fitting. America no longer manufactures goods for the world, that capitalist role is now being played out by China. Under Reagan America became a consumer of credit and goods, and thus has a zombie economy.

Zombies reproduce through consumption of the living, which serves as a nearly endless supply of brother and sister Zombies. Consider earth’s current human population explosion as a metaphoric never-ending supply of both brains and new Zombies. As one character in the original Dawn says when warning survivors of the process: "It gets up and kills. The people it kill get up and kill." It’s a never-ending supply of both consumables and consumers (a capitalist dream). But, of course, the perishable items (bread and bullets) in the mall run out. And when they do, survivors need to make very difficult choices. Where’s the next mall? What place do we pillage next? An island, perhaps?

As today and in the Zombie world, sustainability and survival are interchangeable. When the resources for survival run out and the malls have been picked clean, then we will reach for sustainability as a final solution. Or we will eat brains.

Simply put Capitalism, zombie or vampire, sucks!

Check out this fun blog;Vampire Capitalism

Socialism or Barbarism

It is obvious to all of us that capitalism is once again in crisis, a crisis it created but failed to predict. While it was historically predictable and inevitable, it is the nature of capitalism.
And so the only solution is not band aid bail outs but for us, the proletriat to take over capitalism, which cannot exist without our labour, and which has produced an artifical boom of credit which we as proletarians were sold as consumers. Crediting the working class and the those who had no equity so that capital could continue to make record profits is what had kept America and its NAFTA allies going.
The public secret that is known to all of us, including capital, the state and the unions is that we the workers create real capital, production of goods which need to be consumed. All other capital, investments, the stock market, bonds, hedge funds, private equity, is all surplus value created by workers producing real value. The current crisis of capitalism is that finance, fictious capital, that produces no real value that is real objects we can consume, is now dominating the productive market. We the workers are not consuming the value we create.
And we now spiral into the real historic crisis of capitalism which is over production. And the solution to this crisis historically has been either war or revolution.
Unfortunately for the Trade Unions and the Social Democratic left the latter is not on their agenda. But for capital the former is a solution they are willing to use, by enabling counter revolutionary nationalism; fascism.
We live in interesting times once again. The phoney stability of consumer capitalism has its facade ripped away daily as its chief clowns; the politicians try to assure us all is fine with capitalism and there is no alternative, when they know full well the alternative is the historic reality of socialism or barbarism.

In 1848 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels argued in the Communist Manifestothat the historic fight between the oppressor and oppressed ended 'either ina revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin ofthe contending classes'. Engels said that 'bourgeois society stands at thecrossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism'.Later Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish revolutionary working in Germany at the endof the First World War, raised the slogan: 'Socialism or Barbarism'!

The fact is that the elephant in the room is another form of barbarism, that which could result from the climate crisis created by mass industrialization. Instead of looking at the decline in production as an opportunity to create an ecological socialist society, the same old cries of more work, more jobs, more consumption is echoed by the capitalists, the unions and the social democrats. It's not that 'There Is No Alternative', rather the alternative is as clear as the nose on their faces, they just don't want to face it. Their political solutions are as bankrupt as the system they are trying to bail out.


Drought means workers hungry in U.S. produce capital
By TRACIE CONE Associated Press Writer
Posted: Dec. 12, 2008
MENDOTA, Calif. — Idled farm workers are searching for food in the nation's most prolific agricultural region, where a double blow of drought and a court-ordered cutback of water supplies has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
This bedraggled town is struggling with an unemployment rate that city officials say is 40 percent and rising. This month, 600 farm families depleted the cupboards of the local food bank, which turned away families - more than 100 of them - for the first time.
"We're supposed to supply the world," said Mendota Mayor Robert Silva, "and people are starving."
The state's most dire water shortage in three decades is expected to erase more than 55,000 jobs across the fertile San Joaquin Valley by summer and drive up food prices across the nation, university economists predict.
"People being thrown out of work are the ones who can least afford it," said Richard Howitt, a professor of agriculture economics at the University of California-Davis, who estimates that $1.6 billion in agriculture-related wages across the valley will be lost in the coming months because of dwindling water.

SEE:
There Is An Alternative To Capitalism


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:Marx, protectionism, socialiism, libertarian socialism, Engels, U.S. economy, Great Depression, market crash, free trade, capitalism, recession, communism,capitalist crisis, bourgeoisie,

Consumption=Death

Today is Buy Nothing Day....yesterday was Black Friday....and it lived up to its name as frenzied American consumers like rogue elephants stomped to death a worker in order to get in on the discount prices. Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death

Like the rush to make a quick buck off the housing boom, this rush to consume is part and parcel of the psychopathology of capitalism. It is the current variation of the emotional plaque; whereby the world is going to hell in a handbasket, so lets consume ourselves to death.

At least one writer suggests that the alternative to these two faces of the same coin(Buy Nothing Day/Black Friday), is to actually produce something, to make your own toys or at least consume locally made goods.

The great myth of the middle class was a social construction of post WWII capitalist economies, especially the growing service based economy, is that we are not producers/workers but consumers. After 9/11 George Bush told America to consume, it is this consumption that results not only in the death of workers in shopping frenzies but the mass exctinction of species on the planet and the climate crisis.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about: shopping, boom, bust, boomers, consumers, debt, personal debt, debt, Black Friday, mass extinction, buy nothing day, death,

There Is An Alternative To Capitalism

While the defenders of capitalism attempt to pose the solution to the crisis of their beloved capitalist system in terms of increasing Free Trade, opposing government regulations, transparency, social responsibility, but still promote the public bail out of private captial with no strings attached, the reality is that there is a spectre haunting capitalism today; the zietgiest of Marx.

The solution is not reforming capitalism, or creating statist capitalism, but worker self management the socialization of capital by the community in other words real authentic socialism.

Here are some recent commentaries on the return of spectre of Marx to haunt 21st Century Capitalism.

Friedman looks enviously and longingly at the public transport system in Europe, which helps in the reduced use of private vehicles and consequently in the reduction of carbon fumes, though on the other hand he favours free enterprise. The paradox seemingly stares the reader in the eye, though the recent collapse of capitalism has triggered the re-examination of a free market obsession, leaving no doubt that rampant privatisation is not the answer to global prosperity. And the spectre of Karl Marx returns to haunt the world again.

There will be one prominent gatecrasher at the G20 summit in Washington today: Karl Marx will be much in evidence, gleefully dancing on the grave of capitalism. With major American and European belly-up banks turning to their governments for rescue, capitalism does seem to have self-destructed in fulfilment of Marxian prophecy. The question facing the G20 meet is: What new geo-economics do we evolve, not only to tide over the current panic but to ensure that such crises of confidence do not recur? Conventional experience teaches us that competition makes for a better delivery system of goods and services than a monopoly, whether it is state-controlled or otherwise . Monopolies, by and large, don't work; competition, by and large, does. So what went wrong in the current scenario? One obvious answer is lack of transparency in the banking and financial sectors. Free market competition assumes free choice, which in turn presupposes access to reliable information on which to make that choice. If information is concealed, or falsified, as it was in the current case (where hugely leveraged trade in 'exotic derivatives'
created a soap bubble that burst), the 'free' goes out of the free market and the system collapses, requiring a bailout. Constant vigilance (caveat emptor) is the price we pay for a free market. So, far from being dead, capitalism needs to be more wide-awake than ever before. Instead of getting less competitive it needs to get more competitive, i.e. anti-monopoly. For far too long, the US has enjoyed a monopoly raj over the global economy thanks to its dollar which forms the basis of all international trade. Maybe it's time to think of a new unit of global exchange, based on a basket of currencies.

Business to hang itself on loan plan
Terence Corcoran, Financial Post Published: Wednesday, November 05, 2008
If we have learned anything about business and economics over the centuries, it is that we cannot look to business for our free market economic principles. Whether individually or in groups, known affectionately as associations and coalitions, we can be certain that the people who run business will always and everywhere pursue economic ideas that first suit their interests; all else is conveniently disposable ideological baggage. When the going gets tough, business gets weak on the core ideas that make business possible.
Adam Smith recognized the essential moral flabbiness of the individual business person or corporation. "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Karl Marx had a wittier take on the nature of the beast: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

Government by market gods or for the people?
Over the past 20 years of economic rationalist (neo-liberal) economic policies, western governments and third world governments (under duress from the International Monetary Fund) have pursued financial and economic deregulation, privatisation, unrestricted foreign investment and free trade policies. They have wound back the role — and with it the sovereignty — of governments, effectively leaving critical policy matters to the so-called free markets. This process has involved a significant transfer of power from elected governments to monopoly capital.Decisions regarding currency, interest rates, production, trade, provision of services, price of services, etc have been handed over to the markets. Every piece of deregulation hands over more power. But who or what are these markets? Who controls them? Where is this power being transferred to?It is being passed to the largest, most powerful transnational corporations and financial institutions. The most powerful of these monopolies are the financial conglomerates. They manipulate markets, they stand over and dictate to governments, they sit on the boards of central banks, they allocate credit, and so on, and in the case of the US, own the Federal Reserve.The investment banks, insurance companies, managed, hedge and other funds have gone in pursuit of fast and big profits, speculating on high risk products. They gamble on movements in prices on the stock exchange, they trade in debt, bet on profit results, and a myriad of other "products". They relied on ever expanding markets and endless growth, on bubbles that one day had to burst.Their empires were built on debt and much of the money they risked was not their own, but drawn from superannuation, retirement and other funds. In the process, the billions of dollars that they gambled with were withdrawn from the real economy. They were withdrawn from human needs, from social development, basic services, infrastructure, and from food production.Every dollar directed to speculation was a dollar less spent on consumption, reducing demand for the goods and services being produced. This massive withdrawal of money from circulation in the real economy of production, distribution and exchange exacerbates an already developing crisis of over production and recession.These crises are endemic to capitalism. They arise out of the exploitation of workers who are not paid the full value of the work they put in producing goods and providing services. The gap between the value of their labour and what they are paid is what Karl Marx called surplus value — profit. Employers never let up in their struggle to reduce the cost of labour by such means increasing output per worker, lower wages, and so on to increase their profits.

Politics keeps Left
WESTERN governments are nationalising industry to bail out the economy but you won't catch them calling it socialism.
Did Karl Marx get it right? Many will argue yes, especially in the wake of the most severe global financial crisis in seven decades, and after last week's Washington G20 summit at which governments pledged a greater interventionist role in economic affairs.
The Hard Left of politics, including in Australia, will say Marx – the 19th-century German political economist and father of modern communism – correctly predicted the failure of the capitalist free market.
After all, as Canadian publisher Martin Masse notes, Marx's fifth proposal in his 1848 Communist Manifesto calls for the centralisation of credit in the banks of the state.
Importantly, G20 has resolved to undertake further stimulatory spending to stabilise the financial system, and the reform of the IMF and World Bank as global financial instruments. And while the free-trade mantra was repeated, there's already talk in the US and elsewhere of a return to the most trenchant trade barriers since the 1970s.
All of this follows record government bailouts of banks and industry in the US, Britain, Germany, France and elsewhere that has been, for want of a better term, covert nationalisation. In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has provided his government's own bank guarantee, and propped up ABC Learning and the car industry with yet more taxpayer dollars.
Some have quipped that Western capitalist leaders have done more for socialism in the past few weeks than communist parties have done in a century. That's probably hyperbole, but the free market, small government orthodoxy that has dominated Western politics for the past three decades, does appear to be over. At least for now, until the cycle again turns, and the stifling effects of big government again produce stagflation. The calls will then be for a return to the free market.
In that sense, Marx didn't get it right. But the global financial crisis inevitably will see a sharpening of the traditional Left-Right ideological divide, one blurred in recent decades as the old class politics gave way to the new politics of culture and environment.

Revenge of the Left across the world
No matter that statist policies were responsible for this global crisis in the first place. It was Western governments that set interest rates too low for too long, encouraging us all to abuse credit.
It was Eastern governments that held down their currencies to pursue mercantilist trade advantage, thereby accumulating vast foreign reserves that had to be recycled. Hence the bond bubble. This is the deformed creature known as Bretton Woods II. Protectionist Democrats are right to complain that the game is rigged. Free trade? Laugh on.
But at this point I have given up hoping that we will draw the right conclusions from this crisis. The universal verdict is that capitalism has run amok.
In any case the damage caused as credit retrenchment squeezes real industry is likely to be so great that Barack Obama may have to pursue unthinkable policies, just as Franklin Roosevelt had to ditch campaign orthodoxies and go truly radical after his landslide victory in 1932. Indeed, Mr Obama – if he wins – may have to start by nationalizing the US car industry.
For those who missed it, I recommend Edward Stourton's BBC interview with Eric Hobsbawm, the doyen of Marxist history.
"This is the dramatic equivalent of the collapse of the Soviet Union: we now know that an era has ended," said Mr Hobsbawm, still lucid at 91.
"It is certainly greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s. As Marx and Schumpeter foresaw, globalization not only destroys heritage, but is incredibly unstable. It operates through a series of crises.
"There'll be a much greater role for the state, one way or another. We've already got the state as lender of last resort, we might well return to idea of the state as employer of last resort, which is what it was under FDR. It'll be something which orients, and even directs the private economy," he said.
Dismiss this as the wishful thinking of an old Marxist if you want, but I suspect his views may be closer to the truth than the complacent assumptions so prevalent in the City.

How to save the economy
Marx, Joseph Schumpeter and Keynes shared one insight at odds with until-recent modern orthodoxy.
They all knew that capitalism is inherently unstable, that it soars and collapses – a mixture of "mania and panic" as we all now know too. There have been at least half a dozen such shocks in the past 25 years – the Thatcher-Reagan era, you might say – though this is the big one, as Vulcanologists might put it.

Global financial crisis is the “end of the era” for capitalism
Eric Hobsbawm, the 91-year-old Marxist historian, author and academic, told MSN Money the past two decades of unfettered capitalism had been as damaging as Soviet economic totalitarianism.

In his responses to MSN Money's questions, Hobsbawm predicted that far from being a hiccup or correction of the markets, "the present crisis is certainly the end of the era in the development of the global capitalist economy."
Hobsbawm's views on the present crisis present a radical counterpoint to mainstream financial journalism and uncover potential causes and repercussions that have not received much coverage.
The media and economic analysts have given many explanations of why the crash happened and who is to blame. Few have blamed free market capitalism itself as the cause of its own inevitable demise. Many point instead to elements within the system that could have been controlled better.
The New York Times, for instance, argued that Alan Greenspan's support for derivatives while Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006 "helped enable an ambitious American experiment in letting market forces run free. Now, the nation is confronting the consequences." It said that if Greenspan had acted differently "the current crisis might have been averted or muted."
Hobsbawm in contrast told MSN Money that he believed a "free market theology," a sort of blind faith in capitalism, was the root cause.
In the e-mail interview, Hobsbawm said that running global economies on an "effectively unregulated basis" is as doomed to failure as "the project of a totally state-run planned economy in the Soviet systems." He said he welcomed state intervention as a "return to common sense".
We might be entering a period when traditionally socialist principles hold sway, and if this means that the traditional aims of socialism - to create conditions for a good life for all people equally and to subordinate profit to human values - are adhered to, then so much the better for Hobsbawm.


Do recent events herald a fundamental change in the way markets are regulated and economies are structured or will they prove to be blips in the inevitable march of market capitalism? How do you think the world will remember the economic events of 2008 in years to come?


The present crisis is certainly the end of the era in the development of the global capitalist economy which began around 1973. While globalisation continues in most aspects of life except politics, it was always an error to suppose that it inevitably took the extreme, indeed pathological, form indicated by the free market theologians. I expect its rate to slow down somewhat in the next few years. However, forecasting is not the business of historians. The way markets are regulated and economies structured has too many unpredictabilities. I imagine it will take many years before a new pattern of the world economy will fully emerge. When it does it will probably be relatively stable for several decades until the next crisis of the economy. Nothing is forever in history.


In your collection of essays, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism you write that "Since 1997-8 we have been living in a crisis of the capitalist world economy," and of how America's economic problems might mean an end to their "foreign military adventures". Are recent events the most obvious signs yet of a shift in the world order away from US hegemony?


The United States remains, and will remain, a major world power. It is, after all, single handed the most populous country in the world after China and India and the present crisis shows that it remains the fulcrum of the world economy. However, the shift of economic power away from it and towards south and east Asia is clear and will not be reversed. It no longer dominates the world economy or is able to impose its own rules and conventions on world business and other governments' policies. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have demonstrated that its overwhelming high tech military power is incapable of imposing its political solutions even on weak countries. The brief era when it thought it could exercise a single-handed hegemony over the globe is over, but it will remain an essential and important element in a more pluralist world order.

FREE TRADE DEPRESSION
In toto, what we are witnessing is no less that the greatest, involuntary, transfer of wealth and power in the history of the world – all due to a trade regime within which we are forced to trade with the greater slave, regardless of consequence or end result. In the corporate media, no one is asking trade with whom, on what terms, and to what end? In addition, no dismal result is ever ascribed to “free” trade - much like the Fed is never blamed for the Great Depression and the Smoot-Hawley bogeyman is touted as cause one. Indeed, it is Free Trade Uber Alles today, and for free traders their imagined ends justify their fascist, undemocratic, means which, as a result, mean endless social and economic cost. All in all, these “free” policies mean a demise resulting in the most expensive trade possible in which both economic benefit and social power are privatized to the few while all the immense costs are socialized upon the many. Current trade policies are neither intelligent economy nor the result of majority rule but, rather, reflect a religious-like absolutism - a naïve and perfidious faith in the service of Capital alone. Despite ever-growing trade deficits, job losses, dependency upon imports, phony export statistics, doctored employment statistics, and willingness to undermine our currency "in order to compete," free traders go on pretending there is nothing wrong with our mounting deficits, loss of capacity, and all the myriad social costs on this paved road to depression. Indeed, free traders have no answers to growing deficits or the potential loss of nearly every industry, only a blind and irresponsible faith in a centuries-old English, imperial, dogma unfit for a still very disparate and dangerous world – i.e., one in which capital now moves at the speed of light. Even US intelligence agencies are now warning that globalization has become a serious threat to US security due to its unwanted, negative, effects on economies around the world. In other words, “free trade” and globalization are breeding global dissent, terrorism, oligopoly and oligarchy. Firstly, for trade to be truly free you have to be free not to trade, otherwise it is forced trade. Worse, no morality, freedom, justice, human rights, child labor, or ecological impacts are considered or calculated – meaning the regime is a clear recipe for universal loss. Under capital’s GATT/NAFTA, even our energy–efficiency standards are a crime, as are recycling laws, attempts to protect family farmers, and virtually any Buy-American effort or legislation. In short, in a still very disparate and dangerous world - wherein huge magnitudes of differences in wages, standards and human rights exist - to have virtually no incentives working to improve rather than reward the greater slave and their worse conditions, is simply to reward the criminal, the dictator, the terrorist, the Red Chinese generals, all the greater exploiters of mankind and the environment, and punish the free, democratic, and ecologically responsible. It is utter perversity to give away entry into our G7 markets and get nothing in return – except the promise of evermore lob loss, lower currency values, corporate hegemony, and endless rewards for the greater-slavemaster. Yet this is capital’s criminal nonsense, which is guaranteed to end in riot, revolution, and new pogroms against the rich… as Karl Marx predicted. To avoid depression, the concept of "comparative advantage" (i.e., a 250 year old amoral theory once appropriate for agricultural products in a world where capital was relatively stationary) must be re-mediated by truly free, democratic, and ecologically responsible countries and policies. Otherwise, neo-slavery, child labor, ecological ruin, and currency destruction are "advantages" which cannot be lost by economies forcibly turned into export machines - only to generate huge overcapacity, dependency, local and global ruin, and our complete capture and enclosure by capital. In my book Cap-Com, The Economics Of Balance, I propose a re-writing of GATT/NAFTA to give nations, and the great majority of wage-earning people, the freedom to define their 'free markets’ - as opposed to Capital having all the power to define the terms, dictate the legislation, and then extort the wage-earning majorities of every country. This despicable, undemocratic, regime is guaranteed to pervert economy, ecology, freedom, and lead to riot and revolution as the backlash to forced globalization gathers steam.



'Capitalism is Obsolete-Mao and Marx Will Soon Be Back'

Sitting on the shady patio of a seaside hotel in Colaba, Samir Amin speaks in fluent English with a French accent . It's difficult to imagine a more global citizen than this disarming economist. Born in Egypt, to Egyptian and French parents, and educated at the Sorbonne, Amin has worked in several African countries , and is now director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. He is best known as co-founder of the "World Systems' ' school of thought, which produced landmark critiques of global capitalism

The latest financial collapse is symptomatic of a deeper crisis in the capitalist global structure, Amin said. "Capitalism is obsolete because it was patently superfluous. It believed in plundering natural resources and perpetuating a system which vested in a handful the authority to take political and economic decisions for mankind," he added.
A social system must integrate the common will and aspirations of the people , he said, adding, "If it fails to respond to the people, then it has to be changed, because it has turned obsolete... Marx and Mao will soon be back."
Amin warned that the superpowers would do everything to restore the financial system, to maintain their profits and continue the exploitation of cheap labour and natural resources. He said a constant journey to democratisation alone would strengthen developing countries . "Democratisation should mean social progress... upholding the right to food, education, shelter and health care." Trade, he added, should not be equalised with free trade. Responding to a question , Amin said the choice was not between socialism and capitalism, but between socialism and barbarism.

Liberal capitalism, Amin said, is as much an ideology as dogmatic Marxism. The conviction that markets are self-regulatory "should make anybody laugh today ," Amin said.

Building a Better World: A Dialectical Approach
That the world is sick is beyond doubt. But how sick is it? Moderately sick, as the champions of the Neo-Liberal Globalisation (NLG) proclaim? Or incurably, terminally, sick, as some extreme critics maintain? Or very sick, but probably not beyond saving, as I believe, based on the work that I have done in the last three years or so on this subject. So, in other words, that Human ‘Civilisation’ faces the most serious crisis in its ten to twelve thousand years History (since the invention of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia) is beyond doubt.
The risk that It could be destroyed, in large part or even completely, is quite substantial; moreover, the Planet on which It sits could suffer catastrophic damage that may take several centuries (if not millennia) to repair. Therefore, assuming (a fair assumption) that we are at a critical stage of our History, and that the appropriate question to ask is no longer ‘If’ disastrous events will occur, but ‘When’, Humanity’s most urgent task appears to be what to do to ‘deal with’ these inevitable disastrous events. Most experts agree that it is not too late to significantly diminish, if not entirely eliminate, the terrible consequences of these catastrophic events. They may be wrong. But we must hope – even if sometimes against hope -- that they are right, and roll up our sleeves, and put up the best fight we can to build a better and sustainable world.
What Can Be Done? -- What Should Be Done? I have come to believe, based on the work that I have done (and trusting my intuitive intelligence)[1] that a Dialectical Approach is the best one. Thus, the Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis that follow this Introduction. In the Thesis, I will be presenting the arguments of the proponents of the Reformist ‘Solution’; in the Antithesis, those of the Radical (or Revolutionary) ‘Solution’; and in the Synthesis, my final thoughts and opinions.
The proponents of the Reformist ‘Solution’ believe that Globalisation is basically Good, and that whatever problems it may have, can be ‘fixed’ or corrected. The advocates of the Radical ‘Solution’ try to demonstrate that NLG is basically Bad, because its problems are of a structural and institutional nature and cannot be ‘fixed’, or corrected; which means that NLG must be scrapped, and replaced. I will try to show that the correct solution, inevitably, must incorporate aspects of both. Moreover, we need a pragmatic solution which makes it necessary for the two sides to make concessions and compromises. That said, I must also underline that I believe the correct solution is much closer to the Radical one, than it is to the Reformist one.
Globally speaking, there are four Major Players: the Governments of the Rich and Powerful Countries (GRPCs);[2] the Large Multinational Corporations (LMNCs); the International Organisations (IOs); and the Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). The GRPCs and LMNCs are the proponents of the Reformist Solution; the CSOs, of the Radical Solution; and the IOs have positioned themselves between the two, trying to find constructive solutions and thus bring them together. The main difference, I believe, between the IOs and my solutions, is that the IOs’ solutions have a bigger Technocratic content, whereas I think that the Spiritual Dimension is essential.
The main problems are (not necessarily in that order; the following order reflects my personal sensibilities): the Persistence of Extreme Poverty; the (rapidly growing) Wealth and Power Gap between the rich and the poor; Global Warming and its catastrophic consequences, due to unlimited economic growth and unbelievable waste (especially in the United States); the sizeable risk of a Third (or fourth) World War, owing to the competition for scarce resources getting out hand; Nuclear Proliferation; International Terrorism; and Human Migration out of control.

The road away from Serfdom

In a world where Liberal usually means right of centre, non-Americans are astonished to hear "Liberal' launched as a cuss-word by people who believe that the world was created in seven days and that dinosaurs and humans once walked the earth at the same time.
A few days ago it was announced that Volkswagen had overtaken Exxon-Mobil as the world's most highly valued company. In a world where 'socialism' is an even more outrageous insult than 'liberal', it is startling to contemplate the fact that Volkswagen is a product of the post-war British Army of the Rhine directed by the 1945 British government of Clement Atlee- a bunch of socialist commissars who reinvented Hitler's 'People's Car' and put it on the road.
It was these same socialists who were responsible for civilising industrial relations in Germany by inventing the idea of Co-Determination, a system where the worker participates at every executive level of the German corporation and worker directors sit on corporate boards.
Co-Determination is an idea which has been so successful that it has transformed European social relations and flowered into the adoption of an EU social agenda - aimed at full employment and a more inclusive, participatory society. On December 9, 1989, the member states, with the historically ironic exception of the United Kingdom, adopted a declaration constituting the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers.
Among the areas regulated in this charter are such matters as employment and remuneration, improvement of living and working conditions, social protection, freedom of association, collective bargaining, equal treatment of men and women, industrial health, the protection of children, elderly and disabled persons; and information, consultation and participation of workers in decision-making. Most of these principles are still, in the United States, subjects of bitter dispute.
A couple of weeks ago, President Bush, in a piteous appeal for a return to the wild, begged his fellow world leaders not to abandon the principles of laissez-faire when they come to remake the world in the aftermath of the current economic meltdown and the almost inevitable social catastrophe to follow.
The next president of the United States will need to come to terms with a world which no longer works according to American principles and rules. Free trade, globalisation, and the ideas behind the multilateral agreement on investment are obsolete.
This time, as in every crisis of capitalism, the pundits are dashing to the Internet and the libraries to reread Karl Marx. Marx was not a sentimentalist. He hated neither capitalism nor capitalists. They were objective realities and functioned according to certain principles. Capitalism was doomed to fail because of its fundamental internal contradictions - not because of the greed of its practitioners.
These contradictions include the antagonism between the social, collective nature of production on the one hand, and private ownership of the means of production on the other; and the antagonism between the world market and the limitations of the nation state. Capitalism is based on production for profit and not for social need. The working class creates new value but receives only a portion of that new value back as wages.
The capitalists take the rest - the surplus. As a result, the working class collectively cannot afford to buy back all the goods it produces. Capitalism destroys its own markets by pauperising its workers and by over-production. Marx predicted globalisation and the worldwide effects we now experience.
The opponents of socialism, the proponents of laissez-faire, tend to believe like Margaret Thatcher that "There is no such thing as society" and like Ronald Reagan that "Government is not the answer, Government is the problem." The ultra-capitalists and globalisers abhor what they call "the Nanny State" - the welfare state that attempts to guarantee a basic level of civilised existence for all.
In FA Hayek's "Road to Serfdom?" the problem is stated: "In place of individual liberty, socialism offers security. It promises protection from personal economic necessities and restraints, and an equality of economic well-being." Hayek was not a socialist.
The main architect of the latest disaster, Alan Greenspan, has proclaimed himself confounded by the turn of events. He had a set of rules which he says had always worked. Until now! He cannot understand the disaster over which he presided.
Greenspan is a disciple of Ayn Rand, one of recent history's most eminent false prophets. Rand's theory - so-called 'Objectivism' - holds that human beings must rationally be selfish, putting individual self-interest first. She therefore rejects the ethical doctrine of altruism - a moral obligation to live not only for one's self but for the sake of others. Since Rand took millions of words to define her philosophy, any summary of it is perforce crude. I do not think, however, that I have misrepresented her, or Hayek, or Greenspan, or Thatcher or Reagan or the millions of others to whom freedom is a purely personal attribute and life is every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.
Some others of us think that none of us is free if any of us is unfree. The fascists believe that any sense of duty outside of self is a fetter, restricting real freedom. We believe that only by our mutual recognition of all our humanity are we human, and that our civilisation and survival depend on that. We are all in the same boat and on the same journey.
Individual liberty clearly means different things to different people. The International Republican Institute, headed by John McCain, no doubt believes that the people of Haiti are free, and free to starve to death, while the people of Cuba are enslaved by socialism, free education and the best health services in the world.
The IRI was one of the prime movers in usurping Haitian sovereignty to get rid of Jean Bertrand Aristide whom they consider a serious threat to real democracy as he was intent on building another socialist/welfare state alongside Cuba.

Now that the capitalists have established that the state - that is, us, we, the people - are the benefactors of last resort, it is time that we too discovered that truth. The billions we are spending to rescue banks and capitalists would be more efficiently and cost-effectively spent on rescuing our communities. If Obama becomes president, that is a discovery his constituents are likely to make sooner rather than later. In fact, some are already making it, demanding fundamental change and a new economic order.
The decay of imperial capitalism is bound to produce unforeseen byproducts, some beneficial, some toxic. Those who will survive need to be able to quickly choose between them.


Financial Crisis - Turning From Capitalism to Socialism
But both recent and historical experience shows an undeniable association between capital mobility and crises, especially when domestic institutions are weak and the harmonization of capital account liberalization and other policy reforms is inadequate.
In spite of the US government's bid to take more measures in order to prevent a total paralysis of the international economy, much of globalization and concomitant increases, in flows of capita and trade have led to high volatility in international financial markets.
Some of these have erupted into crises, in the form of runs and banks-both national and multinational-as well as attacks on currencies. The resultant effects have included the significant increase in contagion and the collapse of both venerable private banks as well as national institutions.
The public sector ( US government) therefore, had no choice but to work on a bailout plan of these institutions worth 700bn dollars, and recaptured state control of these institutions to keep the economy from the blink of collapse-one can be justified to call it nationalization in the face of capitalism failure.
Isn't this Socialism? The greatest socialist ideology of all times, KARL MARX had envisaged this trend of events in his communist manifesto on the chapter entitled "Historical Materialism", where the invisible hand as foretold by ADAM SMITH an architect of free market forces (Non-government intervention in the economy), had argued that the economy was self-regulating and self-sustaining.
That there was essentially nothing like market failure since the economy would correct itself. He says that law maintained that, "supply created its own demand". Therefore, there can never be a crisis in the real market.
All these people had it wrong; the current trend has demystified them and vindicated the great Karl Marx. I wish he could be present to witness his prophesy coming true.
Marx had prophesied that capitalism must eventually pave way to socialism as a matter of fact, due to the inevitable social forces of production because of surplus production (indicating exploitation of the proletariats by the bourgeoisie).
The gains from trade and economic reforms have to be lost now; it's a painful process to the monetary consensus (commonly referred to as the Washington consensus). Most predictions have been that, socialism is the end process of development.
The very reason why now governments are taking over the banking institutions is to recover from this mess of laissez faire ordinarily, government control (regulation) of the economy is a preserve of the socialist economies (in fact a major characteristic of socialist economies is government ownership of means of production).
The structural adjustment programs and the neo-liberal economic policies, no longer hold as we talk because they are based on the very market model of deregulation (what some called man eat man society), where market participants behave as if they are in a jungle paving way for survival for the fittest-Darwin's theory in retrospect.
We are beginning to see a shift in capitalist architects moving towards the left (embracing government control of the economy) due to the worst economic crisis since 1930's. The new world order ushered in after world war two may be heading for u-turn.

What remains from the Communist Manifesto in 2008, one hundred and sixty years after its publication? As David Harvey observes in his brilliant preface to this edition, the present financial crisis corresponds in an astonishing way to the predictions of Marx and Engels: “ the society of the ‘too much’, of ‘overproduction’ and excessive speculation, has plainly broken down and reverted, as it always does’ to a ‘state of momentary barbarism”.

In many respects, the Manifesto is not only current, but more current today than 160 years ago. Let’s take for example its diagnosis of capitalist globalisation. Capitalism, say the two young authors, is in the process of forging a process of economic and cultural unification of the world under its leadership: “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. (...) In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production.”
It is not only about expansion but also domination: the bourgeoisie “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image." Indeed, in 1848 that constituted much more an anticipation of future tendencies than a simple description of contemporary reality. It is an analysis which is much truer today, in the epoch of “globalisation", than 160 years ago, at the time of the editing of the Manifesto.
In fact, capital has never succeeded as it has in the 21st century in exerting a power so complete, absolute, integral, universal and unlimited over the entire world. Never in the past was it able, as today, to impose its rules, its policies, its dogmas and its interests on all the nations of the globe. International financial capital and multinational companies have never so much escaped the control of the states and peoples concerned. Never before has there been such a dense network of international institutions - like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation - devoted to controlling, governing and administering the life of humanity according to the strict rules of the capitalist free market and of capitalist free profit. Finally, never at any time prior to today, have all spheres of human life – social relations, culture, art, politics, sexuality, health, education, sport, entertainment - been so completely subjected to capital and so profoundly plunged into the " in the icy water of egotistical calculation".
Add to this that the Manifesto is much more than a diagnosis - now prophetic, now marked by the limits of its time – of the global power of capitalism : it is also and above all an urgent appeal for international combat against this domination. Marx and Engels had perfectly understood that capital, as a world system, can only be vanquished by the world historical action of its victims, the proletariat and its allies.

The return of the prophet
In decades past, a crisis on this scale would have presented an immediate opportunity for the 'left'; but the 'left' as it is- defeated, tamed and fragmented- is in no position, as yet, to rise to the occasion. As Paul Gillespie observed:
Note that most of these leaders are from the centre right, not the centre left. Centrism is resurrected from the wreckage of radical right-wing deregulation, more than is the left. The argument is about re-regulation rather than redistribution, the public rather than the private interest, transnational against national sovereignty.So far, that is. The traditional left has had little operational purchase on the crisis other than I-told-you-so utterances about their inherently cyclical nature. Confronted with this international convulsion, "the Left" is for the most part as weak and tame as it certainly is in Ireland. Popular anger here and in the US, for example, is far more radical, but not expressed in such vocabularies. This is a real challenge and also an opportunity for the left - just as it was for Marx and Engels 150 years ago.But does the left refer to traditional social democracy, which accepts market capitalism but seeks to equalise it; to the "third way" variety popularised by Blair and Brown; or to the "democratic socialism" of post-Stalinist parties? What of more recent green socialism? How to classify the rump of traditional Stalinist parties in Europe, India and elsewhere? Should Chinese and Vietnamese one-state authoritarian capitalisms led by such communist parties be included? Where do the left of South Africa's ANC and the burgeoning variety of Latin American left-wing movements fit in? Is the US Democratic Party part of that family? How do all of these relate to the growing radical or far-left tendencies and social movements drawing on previous bottom-up revolutionary traditions such as Trotskyism and anarchism?
It is despite this present weakness and incoherence of the left that Gillespie makes a remarkable suggestion, implicit in which is the notion- fully supported by recent events- that the ideas of the 'free-market' right wing have been bankrupted by the capitalist crisis; hence the key ideological struggle of the near future will be between, on the one hand, socialists who utilise the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and on the other hand, 'social democratic' supporters of a 'refounded', moderated version of capitalism, utilising the ideas of various other 'big names'. The Irish Times article concludes:
Big events revive these debates, but they need to be reinvented for new times. Conventional sociological post-industrialism accounts rendering left ideologies and movements redundant badly need revision in the light of falling living standards and growing inequalities. So does Fukuyama's notion of the end of ideology and the triumph of market capitalism - as he now admits. Big names too: Keynes, Polanyi, Kondratieff, Galbraith and now Paul Krugman are deployed by social democrats against those who want to resurrect Marx and Engels.
If it is true that the new main battle of ideas is to be fought between the social democrats (who wish to ressurect a moderated capitalism in order to save capitalism) and the Marxists (who wish to abolish capitalism), then the ideological success of the former will in large part depend on their practical ability to, in Gillespie's words, "create a 'refounded capitalism' more capable of withstanding such cyclical shocks by better global regulation"; as we shall see, not only better global regulation would be required in order for such a new-model capitalism to be better at withstanding 'cyclical shocks', but a reversal of the "falling living standards and growing inequalities" which characterise the contemorary model of capitalism would also be required if future crises on a similar scale to our current ongoing crisis- or even worse- are to be avoided.If such a radically different 're-founded capitalism' cannot be achieved, the Marx-inspired socialists will begin to make serious headway.So, is it possible that a new-model capitalism can arise in the course of, or subsequent to, the efforts of governments to cope with the current crisis? This is a matter on which a consideration of 20th Century history, and of the underlying causes of the present crisis, can both offer some guidance.Changing spotsFor proof that it could be possible to re-found capitalism on a different basis, we can look to the period following the catastrophic slump of the 1930s, particularly after World War Two, in the developed capitalist countries. For an extended period, the gap between rich and poor was steadily narrowed, the living standards and economic security of of working class people vastly improved, and cyclical shocks were minimised.
Marx had not predicted that such a development would be possible without the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system; and it seemed that the prediction of the non-Marxist social democrats, that capitalism could be reformed so thoroughly as to provide a much better and improving life for the majority of people, was vindicated.Then in the 1970s, a major economic crisis did occur; but it did not appear to resemble the 19th Century crises so vividly described by Marx, or indeed the crises of the early 20th Century, which broadly followed the same pattern. The main economic symptom of the crisis of the 1970s, as identified by the establishment experts of that time, was rising inflation (caused to some extent by rapidly increasing wages); and in order to defeat inflation (involving of course the defeat of the trade unions which had succeeded in raising wages faster than the increase in industrial productivity), the Western governments deliberately caused a rise in unemployment. That explanation of the economic disturbances of the time was far closer to the reality, which anyone could observe, than anything which could be found in the pages of Capital.Thus orthodox Marxism in the developed capitalist countries was already in ideological retreat, even before the events of 1989 to 1991. Since when, enthused by the defeat of inflation, the defeat of the trade unions and- that crown of glory- the defeat of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR; capitalism has returned, by leaps of privatisation, bounds of ending progressive taxation, and accelerating global deregulation- to a modernised, turbo-charged version of its former self.So, along comes the immense and frightening crisis; the basic nature of which- as anyone, even a president or a finance minister, can observe- can be understood with the help of volumes 1 to 3 of Capital. Indeed, Marx's dissections of the crises of the old-model capitalism of the 19th Century show remarkable similarities to the processes of our current debacle. Consider this, for example:
In a system of production, where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur — a tremendous rush for means of payment — when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity. At first glance, therefore, the whole crisis seems to be merely a credit and money crisis. And in fact it is only a question of the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. But the majority of these bills represent actual sales and purchases, whose extension far beyond the needs of society is, after all, the basis of the whole crisis. At the same time, an enormous quantity of these bills of exchange represents plain swindle, which now reaches the light of day and collapses; furthermore, unsuccessful speculation with the capital of other people; finally, commodity-capital which has depreciated or is completely unsaleable, or returns that can never more be realised again. The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the reproduction process cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England, give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values. Incidentally, everything here appears distorted, since in this paper world, the real price and its real basis appear nowhere, but only bullion, metal coin, notes, bills of exchange, securities. Particularly in centres where the entire money business of the country is concentrated, like London, does this distortion become apparent; the entire process becomes incomprehensible; it is less so in centres of production.
On the political effect of capitalist crises, Marx noted:
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells [...] It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly.
Among the many very pertinent aspects of Karl Marx's work is his insistence that all value is created in the productive sectors of the economy- the sectors which, since the start of this present crisis, the commentators have begun to call the 'real economy'- and that the wealth which is supposedly 'created' in the stock exchange and the financial sector is a combination of: (a) value which is transferred into that sector from the 'real economy' (in Vols. 2 and 3 of Capital, Marx goes into some detail about the mechanisms by which this takes place), and (b) fictitious value, resulting from speculation, the illusory nature of which is suddenly exposed when the inevitable crisis ensues.
On 21st October, Chris Dillow, a columnist for the Investors Chronicle, was sufficiently emboldened by his passing aquaintance with the works of Karl Marx, and no doubt also by his equal knowledge of the backgound of our current crisis, to write a blog article on which sought to refute the applicability of Marx's analysis to the present debacle. The article, entitled 'Marx: less relevant' was duly promoted in the electronic editions of the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph.Dillow conceded that:
On many things, Marx was right. He was right to show that capitalism was a force for great growth and great instability; right to show that profits arose from exploitation; right to stress that technical progress determines social conditions; right on alienation and primitive accumulation.
But, he claimed:
To Marx, crises originated in the real economy [...]Instead, this crisis originates in the financial system. To Marx, however, finance was not so much a cause of capitalist crises - and for that matter of capitalist growth as well - but a mere accelerant of them. It’s the petrol, not the spark. Credit, he wrote (vol III, p572), “accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises…” Accelerate, note, not cause.
It is important to evaluate this claim. If the current crisis is purely or mainly the creation of the financial system, and the devastating effects on the 'real economy' are merely the fallout from the financial crisis, then one can at least envisage that a 'refounded capitalism', by enforcing stricter regulation on the financial sector, by repressing speculation and fraudulent dealings, could thereby- and without addressing the issues of 'real economy' production and the living standards of the masses- prevent the emergence, in future, of such major crises.So let's put to one side (only for a moment) what has been taking place in the financial sector, and look at what has been taking place in global 'real economy' production, and in the incomes of the masses of the people, in the period leading up to our current crisis, in terms of Marx's insistence that: "the ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit".What do we find? We find that globally, the production of goods for sale has been increasing, while the incomes of the majority of the people have been held down. How has that gap been bridged? It was bridged by the phenomenon of rising debt. Two great countries appear as opposite poles of the modern process of globalisation: so let us take them as our examples- China and the USA.China, the world's biggest country by population but a poor country by its per-capita income, has for almost three decades, by means of foriegn investment and the import of technology, been increasing its manufacturing production at a rate of between 10% and 15% annually. In a typical period, the five years from 1998 to 2003, China's output of manufactured products rose by 91%. The average incomes of people in China have also been rising- but by a significantly lower rate. Advanced on the one hand by the country's huge trade union movement, depressed on the other hand by the influx of workers from the countryside, real wages in China have been rising at around 8% annually. In any case, too rapid a growth in wages would have made China a much less attractive destination for foreign investment, and would have undermined China's price advantage in selling its products abroad. During the nine years from 1997 to 2006, taking urban and rural incomes as a whole, the mean average household income in China rose by 72%- a very respectable figure, but far less than the increase in manufacturing output.Thus the vastly rising volume of goods made in China could not possibly be purchased by the Chinese; but this was not a problem, because a high proportion of the Chinese-made products were created in order to be sold abroad, to much richer countries. The biggest destination for China's exports was the world's most lucrative consumer market, and still, despite China's relative rise, the world's biggest producer of goods by dollar value, the United States of America. In 2007, approximately 20% of exports from China went to the USA.Now, the majority of people in the US can hardly be described as poor, or as suffering from restricted consumption, when considered against global average living standards. Yet, due to the decline in trade union power and various other factors including the re-location of industrial production by US corporations to other countries where the labour costs are much lower (China, for instance), the real hourly wage rate of the median average worker in the USA has been held down to such an extent that it is no higher now than it was in the mid 1970s. Yet production in the USA, despite the transfer of industry abroad, continued to increase with the introduction of new technology. In the non-financial corporate sector, productivity has been increasing by an average of between 2% and 4% annually, resulting in a cumulative increase of 45% in hourly production per worker in the United States between 1992 and 2005. During this time, production processes have of course become increasingly globalised, and not everything made in the USA has to be consumed in the USA- but it has to be consumed somewhere. To take for example the fastest growing sector of US industry, the computer and electronics sector: a high proportion of its products are components, which require for their manufacture very advanced levels of production technology and skill; these are sent to low-wage countries such as China, where they are assembled, combined with other components which require lower levels of skill and production technology- and the resultant finished products are then sent to the USA and other developed countries to be sold to the final consumers.And, despite the stagnation in their hourly pay, the masses in the United States have until very recently kept on increasing their spending, thus squaring the gap between production and consumption.
For a while, two means were available to achieve this. The first was by increasing the number of working hours per family: men began to have a longer average working week, there was a big increase in the number of women in the workforce, and it became common for people to hold two or even three jobs. But this, of course, raises the amount of material products and services which need to be sold. Also, in the end, there are physical and social limits to the average number of working hours per household. By the start of the 21st Century, the increase in working hours had come to a halt; and the continuing rise in mass consumption was facilitated exclusively by the second available means of increasing spending: rising debt. As Edward Luce noted in the Financial Times:
Between 2000 and 2006, the US economy expanded by 18 per cent, whereas real income for the median working household dropped by 1.1 per cent in real terms, or about $2,000 (£1,280, €1,600). Meanwhile, the top tenth saw an improvement of 32 per cent in their incomes, the top 1 per cent a rise of 203 per cent and the top 0.1 per cent a gain of 425 per cent.
Edward Luce added:
According to Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley, the distribution of income today almost exactly matches that of 1928 on the eve of the Wall Street crash. In 1928, the top 1 per cent of Americans took in 24 per cent of national income, compared with 23 per cent today. Between 1940 and 1984 their share never exceeded 15 per cent and it was in single digits for most of the 1960s and 1970s.
However, the big rise in incomes at the top could not compensate for the stagnation or decline in incomes at the middle and the bottom; because, unlike nearly everybody in the lower social strata, the richer people do not spend all their money: they invest much of their income; and that investment goes either into the 'real economy' locally or abroad (thus further increasing production) or into the various kinds of financial speculation.The debt bubbleIn an article entitled 'The Household Debt Bubble', published in the May 2006 issue of Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster observed:
...for households in the bottom 60 percent of the income distribution in the United States, average personal consumption expenditures equaled or exceeded average pre-tax income in 2003; while the fifth of the population just above them used up five-sixths of their pre-tax income (most of the rest no doubt taken up by taxes) on consumption. In contrast, those high up on the income pyramid—the capitalist class and their relatively well-to-do hangers-on—spend a much smaller percentage of their income on personal consumption. The overwhelming proportion of the income of capitalists (which at this level has to be extended to include unrealized capital gains) is devoted to investment. It follows that increasing inequality in income and wealth can be expected to create the age-old conundrum of capitalism: an accumulation (savings-and-investment) process that depends on keeping wages down while ultimately relying on wage-based consumption to support economic growth and investment.Under these circumstances, in which consumption and ultimately investment are heavily dependent on the spending of those at the bottom of the income stream, one would naturally suppose that a stagnation or decline in real wages would generate crisis-tendencies for the economy by constraining overall consumption expenditures.
But, even after the 'dot.com' stockmarket crash in 2000, that 'age-old conundrum of capitalism' did not manifest itself in a major crisis; following that stockmarket crash, the US government cut interest rates, after which, as John Bellamy Foster noted in 2006:
...overall consumption has continued to climb. Indeed, U.S. economic growth is ever more dependent on what appears at first glance to be unstoppable increases in consumption.
This was made possible by a huge increase in personal debt- some on credit cards, but the largest part through the mortgaging and re-mortgaging of houses; a seeming safe bet, given the steep rise in house prices (fuelled in large part by the low interest rates), and which also appeared to be unstoppable. Average outstanding consumer debt, which had crept up from 62% of consumer disposable income in 1975 to 96.8% in 2000, splurged to 127.2% of disposable income in 2005.It has been made clear to all, since the credit first began to crunch in the summer of 2007, that the US government, by reducing interest rates, relaxing controls on lending, and allowing the financial sector to 'regulate' itself, had thereby facilitated the production of both the 'raw material' and the 'tools' by which an enormous volume of debt-based speculation was created in the financial sector. Less attention has been paid to the other main effect of these debt-inducing measures: that of delaying the onset of the crisis.We have taken the USA as our developed country example; and although it is the biggest and richest of the developed countries, it might be argued that it is an extreme example, given that hourly wages in the USA have been held flat for more than thirty years. However, a not dissimilar phenomenon has occurred in the other main rich countries. The average annual real wage increase in 13 OECD countries (as shown in figure 1.2 in Andrew Glyn's book 'Capitalism Unleashed') which had been running at between 3% and 5% through the 1960s and mid-1970s, fell by the 1980s to between 1% and 2% and has remained at those low levels; and the burden of personal debt in Britain, Germany, Japan and the other major developed countries has been rising inexorably.The jitters in the financial markets first appeared in August 2007, as the revenue streams which supported the values of the various debt-based financial instruments, in which the banks and hedge funds had invested trillions of dollars, began to be revealed as less reliable than had previously been surmised. And whence was this revenue supposed to stream? From the incomes of the increasingly indebted mortgage and credit card holders, particularly those in the USA- incomes which were stagnant or even declining, while their burden of debt, and the payments due on that debt, were rising steeply.
At the time it had been little reported in the mainstream press, especially outside the United States; but already by the spring of 2007, mortgage defaults in the USA, especially in the sub-prime sector, were increasing to an alarming scale. The enormous inevitable crash was beginning to emerge.And where could this crisis lead? On 28th October, one respected analyst, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, speculated on the possible medium-term consequences if further radical measures are not taken immediately to address the financial meltdown:
...the idea that a quick recession would purge the world of past excesses is ludicrous. The danger is, instead, of a slump, as a mountain of private debt – in the US, equal to three times GDP – topples over into mass bankruptcy. The downward spiral would begin with further decay of financial systems and proceed via pervasive mistrust, the vanishing of credit, closure of vast numbers of businesses, soaring unemployment, tumbling commodity prices, cascading declines in asset prices and soaring repossessions. Globalisation would spread the catastrophe everywhere.Many of the victims would be innocent of past excesses, while many of the most guilty would retain their ill-gotten gains. This would be a recipe not for a revival of 19th-century laisser faire, but for xenophobia, nationalism and revolution. As it is, such outcomes are conceivable.
Western governments, argues Martin Wolf, must- without delay- slash interest rates, increase state debt, insist that the banks lend money to those businesses which some chance of survival, provide financial assistance to the 'emerging economies' of the poorer countries, and pressurise countries in 'strong financial positions' to 'expand domestic demand'. He concluded with a swipe not only at those who do not endorse such immediate measures, but also at those who are already considering the lines of a new and improved global capitalist order:
Decisions made over the next few months may well shape the world for a generation. At stake could be the legitimacy of the open market economy itself. Those who view liquidation of past excesses as the solution fail to understand the risks. The same is true of those dreaming of new global orders. Let us first get through the crisis. The danger remains huge and time is short.
This is incorrect in terms of political tactics. The people are now witnessing the consequences of the current global order, and, even if the programme which Martin Wolf proposes is implemented in full, we will now undergo a period of seriously increased suffering. If the 'open market economy' (ie, capitalism) is not to lose further legitimacy, then the prospect must be held out of a 'refounded capitalism' which would be able to minimise and withstand economic 'cyclic shocks'.

And now for some refreshing Revolutionary Anarcho-Leftism
Hope in Common
by David Graeber
We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction -- even of “progressives” -- is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like?
Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself.
The spirals of financialization and endless string of economic bubbles we’ve been experience are a direct result of this apparatus. It’s no coincidence that the United States has become both the world’s major military (”security”) power and the major promoter of bogus securities. This apparatus exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy any possibility of envisioning alternative futures. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is more and more money, and debt spirals entirely out of control. What is debt, after all, but imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future: future profits, the proceeds of the exploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in turn is the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits; and once one assumes that capitalism itself will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one everyone is equally free to invest in the market -- to grab their own piece in the game of buying and selling imaginary future profits, even if these profits are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.
And since the bubble had built on the destruction of futures, once it collapsed there appeared to be -- at least for the moment -- simply nothing left.
We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” -- which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring -- as on production lines -- that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.
Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism -- and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each others’ throats.
All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism: it has a notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone -- and most of all the technical people, the doctors and teachers and surveyors and insurance claims adjustors -- that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like the original form. This despite the fact that most of those who will end up doing the work of rebuilding the system don’t even like it very much, and all have at least the vague suspicion, rooted in their own innumerable experiences of everyday communism, that it really ought to be possible to create a system at least a little less stupid and unfair.
This is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any plausible-seeming alternative -- even one so dubious as the Soviet Union in the 1930s -- can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble political crisis.
Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter experience, that we cannot place our faith in states. The last decade has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent communities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters, neighborhood alliances, that spring up pretty much anywhere that where state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the other’s existence, but all are marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. And in many places, they are beginning to combine. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least eighty different countries. We are at the point where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine insurgent civilization.
Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form -- this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that’s not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.

SEE
His Masters Voice
Auto Solution II
Stiglitz On Market Fundamentalism
FDR and the origins of State Capitalism
Business Unionism Offers No Solution To Capitalist Crisis
No Austrians In Foxholes



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