black cat ★ red cat

Águas de Março - Tom Jobim & Elis Regina

Meshugga Beach Party - Hava Nagila / Misirlou

Nobodies

According to the BBC: 

Ernest Mandel: A Revolutionary Life

OCAP Crashes Liberal Fundraiser

Nonviolent Resistance is Not a New Discovery

(This article was written by my good friend Aws Albarghouthi and is reprinted here with his permission.)

Recently, in the mainstream media, stories of the nonviolent weekly protests of Palestinian villages against the Israeli occupation and expropriation of their lands started to appear.

Such articles and news reports hail these protests’ nonviolent nature as the right way forward. But that’s not the problem. The problem is in the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the origins and causes of such nonviolent acts of resistance and why they are now showing up in mainstream western media.

These increasingly popular, isolated, yet somehow synchronized, protests are portrayed by the media as the Palestinians’ new found weapon. As if the Palestinian – at least in the West Bank – has just decided to exchange the gun for an olive branch.

The use of nonviolent resistance by the Palestinians is not new. In fact, unlike their Israeli counterparts, the average Palestinian has never touched a gun. The first intifada, which was almost entirely nonviolent, is the biggest example. Large parts of the second intifada were nonviolent – although this facet of the second intifada was eclipsed by the rise in suicide bombings which gave the Israeli occupation forces the cover to violently put an end to any form of civil disobedience. The list does not end with the first and second intifadas and is not constrained to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but also includes Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“Israel’s biggest fear is nonviolent resistance,” you hear in the media a journalist surprised by the power of this new weapon. This is probably true, and I might agree, but I don’t like the tone. I don’t like how it sounds like a game changing revelation. We know that, we’ve known that forever. In the first intifada, Sari Nusseibeh, one of the unsung heros and behind the scenes protest organizers, was considered by Israeli intelligence as “the most dangerous Palestinian.” See, even Israel knew that. The main problem that stood in the way of such protests, especially in the second intifada, was the presence of violent resistance that stole the light and seemed more effective against F-16s. Simple.

After the second intifada died down and Hamas took over Gaza, a sense of calm (calm, not peace) spread through the West Bank. This gave the protests, especially in villages like Bil’in and Nil’in on the path of the apartheid wall, a clear space to be heard. Moreover, the continuous stream of international and Israeli activists has given these protests more attention and definitely a different flavour.

These protests, along with the unified grassroots Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, and the the rise in international activism, particularly with international events like Israeli Apartheid Week that have a clearly defined message (BDS), have together worked miraculously to lift nonviolent resistance in Palestine to the centre stage of the Palestinian struggle, and subsequently reshape the Palestinian struggle in eyes of the western observer.

Yes, these protests are gaining more and more (mainly positive except if you’re the NYT) attention. Yes they are well organized, well supported, and increasingly popular. But no, Palestinians didn’t discover nonviolent resistance yesterday.

So praise nonviolent resistance, but don’t talk about it like it’s the latest discovery.

Ernest Mandel: Why Keynes Isn't the Answer

I just came across this amazingly prophetic article by Ernest Mandel. Written in 1992, I think that it more or less foresaw the current financial crisis. More interestingly from a European perspective, in criticizing the Maastricht treaty, it pointed out exactly the dangers of tighter economic/financial integration within a neo-liberal European Union, and therefore also foresaw the current Greek version of the crisis. I reprint it here from MIA.

Why Keynes Isn’t the Answer. The Twilight of Monetarism.

As the disastrous consequences of super-free market policies become apparent, voices are being raised in capitalist and social democratic circles demanding state intervention to revive the economy. But is it really an alternative; and would a new round of state economic intervention and debt-financing of growth have beneficial effects for working people? Here ERNEST MANDEL argues that traditional Keynesian reflationary policies must be distinguished from the budget deficit policies of Thatcher and Reagan; and that capitalist reflation only brings short-term advantages for the working class, and inevitably ends up in a new recession. 

(Socialist Outlook, No.29, October 10, 1992, p.7.)

The fundamental idea of Keynesianism is that state spending, a national budget deficit, can be used to combat economic crisis and recession.

From a theoretical point of view, raising overall demand in a given country will facilitate a recovery insofar as there is disposable productive capacity (unemployed workers, stocks of raw materials, machines working below capacity). These unused resources are mobilized by the additional purchasing power created by the budget deficit. Only when these reserves are exhausted do you get the fatal onset of inflation.

But there is a snag. In order for the budget deficit not to fuel inflation before full employment is reached, direct taxes must increase in the same proportion as income.

Given that the bourgeoisie prefers to buy state bonds rather than pay taxes, and that tax evasion by the bourgeoisie is endemic, the higher tax burden implied by Keynesian policies falls on the workers.

As the public debt grows, servicing this debt eats up a growing part of public spending, so there is a tendency for the budget deficit to grow without any corresponding beneficial effects on employment.

So in the end Keynesian expansion tends to undermine itself through growing inflation and diminishing returns from the initial budget deficit-driven “push;” a new recession is the result. And the growing tax burden tends to redistribute income towards the bourgeoisie.

The historical balance sheet of Keynesian policy is clear. The most extensive experiment, Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States during the 1930s, ended in failure.

Despite the rise in public spending, it ended in the crisis of 1938 when unemployment reached 10 million. It was the massive rearmament thanks to the war which reduced mass unemployment.

There is something bizarre in the way in which neo-liberal dogmatists contrast their ‘supply-side’ policies to those based on creating demand through budget deficits. Never, in fact, have budget deficits been higher than under the neo-liberals’ champion Ronald Reagan.

The same is true to a large extent of the reign of Mrs. Thatcher. They implemented record-breaking neo-Keynesian programmes while all the time professing quite the opposite faith. The real debate was not about the size of the budget deficit but what it was to be used for.

The facts speak for themselves. Reagan/Thatcher neo-Keynesianism has brutally reinforced the austerity offensive everywhere. Social spending and spending on infrastructure have been cut; arms expenditure has expanded massively in the USA and Britain and to a lesser extent in Japan and Germany.

Subsidies to private enterprise have increased. Unemployment and widening social inequalities have been stimulated. In the last 20 years the number of unemployed in the OECD countries has risen fourfold.

The overall social effect has been disastrous. You can learn in any college course on economic development that the most productive long-term investments are those in education, public health and infrastructure.

However, the neo-liberal dogmatists overlook this elementary truth when they approach problems from the point of view of an ‘equilibrium’ which must be re-established at any cost. Their favourite targets for cuts are precisely education, health care, social security and infrastructure, with the inevitable harmful effects, including on productivity.

Does this mean that socialists prefer traditional Keynesianism and the welfare state to the poisonous cocktail of monetarism and neo-Keynesianism currently on offer? If our answer is positive, it must be heavily qualified.

Traditional Keynesianism implies various forms of the exercise and division of power within the framework of bourgeois society. This leads to various forms of social contract and consensus with those who currently hold economic power, on their terms.

This is a purely one-way consensus and it runs counter to the interests of the working class. Traditional Keynesianism is only the lesser evil in that compared to a deflationary policy insofar as it promotes an immediate and rapid fall in unemployment.

However, in present conditions neo-Keynesianism is leading to an increase in unemployment and marginalization of growing sections of the population, with all sorts of reactionary consequences.

Furthermore, advocates of traditional Keynesian policies have to deal with a fundamental awkward fact; the effectiveness of their approach is being greatly reduced by the growth in the power of the multinational corporations. While of course it is ridiculous to say that state intervention today is powerless, it is of course much less powerful than during the 1930s and 1950s.

Faced with the growth of transnational enterprises, the national state is no longer an adequate economic instrument for the dominant factions of the bourgeoisie. Thus, an effort is being consistently made to substitute supranational institutions for it, the classic case being the various institutions of the European Community.

But many obstacles have to be overcome if supranational institutions are to take on the characteristics of a real supranational state, for example in Europe.

European unification remains suspended between a vague confederation of sovereign states and a European federation with some of the characteristics of a state, with a single currency, a central bank, a common industrial and agricultural policy, joint army and police forces and, finally, a central government authority.

In the process of European capitalist unification there is a time bomb, which is beginning to explode in the strikes in Italy and Greece. It is the simple fact that the ‘budgetary stabilisation’ required for monetary union will have an enormous deflationary and austerity effect. This in itself should be cause enough for the workers’ movement to reject the Maastricht treaty.

Maastricht offers nothing more than an excuse for a continuation and toughening of austerity policies. It is more vital than ever to continue the fight against it.

The 4th International on the Cochabamba gathering

Make the Cochabamba gathering a new stage in the fight for an anticapitalist response to climate change

The 16th World Congress of the Fourth International

• Denounces the caricature of an agreement that 25 major polluting countries reached on the sidelines of the Copenhagen climate summit; the agreement sets aside the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. They seek to impose this agreement on the peoples of the world; it is tailor made for the interests of big capital and capitalist appropriation of resources. It represents a grave threat for the workers of the world, for the poor, for peasants, women and indigenous peoples, as well as for ecosystems;
• Celebrates the initiative taken by Bolivian president Evo Morales to hold a peoples’ summit on climate and the rights of Mother Earth in order to make the voices of indigenous peoples heard; and to develop a common response to the imperialist policy of dividing up the world and the atmosphere between the big powers. We call on all political and social forces in struggle against exploitation and oppression to support the Cochabamba gathering and participate as far as possible;
• Salutes those communities who defend the ecosystems they developed and struggle for their rights, way of life, and methods of collective appropriation that respect the environment. In so doing, they have become a driving force in the climate movement and oppose the capitalist logic of neoliberal commodification of resources. They are a source of inspiration for the creation of a new relationship between society and nature;
• Calls on revolutionary Marxists to ensure that the Cochabamba gathering paves the way for a broadening and deepening of the international mobilization of social movements – above and beyond specific cultural references — for an anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist response to climate change.

27th February 2010

Messianic Manifesto for Binationalism

In a moment of elation, I thought to myself: If I had to write a manifesto, cleansed of any apology, filled with passion, unafraid of pathos, and free of ironic parentheses and quotation marks, what I would have written – 

THE MESSIANIC MANIFESTO FOR BI-NATIONALISM 

This communication is written from the Jewish side of the barrier that stands between us and our neighbor, with the hope that, on the day of victory, the wall will be converted into an ascending ladder, and we will breathe together the air of peaks. 

We, persons of the great hope, understand that this moment in the history of Israel/Palestine requires a radical change in the consciousness and the thinking structures of the two nations, and so to bring about redemption to the place and its inhabitants. Rather than decry the central historical role of the Jewish as well as the Palestinian liberation movements, we must revitalize the emancipatory forces that had once animated them. 

We believe that as long as a solution appears as a weak power, i.e., settlement, and as long as the resistance to solution appears as a strong power, i.e., faith, the political solution is meaningless -- because the closer we come to it, the stronger the resistant cells will grow. In this equation for power, the coefficient for resistance will always be higher than the coefficient for solution, ad infinitum. Therefore, the sense of the settlement to come in the near-future is nothing but a sign for the becoming of a disaster. 

Filled with faith, we must act toward our aim. 

The brand of Zionism which surprisingly appeared in Israel/Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century was not merely a colonial movement as the anti-Zionist claims. Nor was it merely an emancipatory movement as the dogmatic Zionist claims. It was a movement built alongside ideas of Messianic liberation and colonialist ideology. The post-Zionist is the sober Israeli who confronts the inherent conflict in the Zionist position. The post-Zionist acts, or, more precisely, does not act, from a nihilistic stance, or, at least, a skeptical one. He derides the Messianic element that has inspired Zionism from the start, and views the Messianic force as the root of the trouble. 

We believe that this is not a time for nihilism. We must suspend doubt, even if it is integral to Truth, or, alternatively, allow doubt the benefit of a truth worth fighting for. 

We call on all inhabitants to recognize Zionism as the Law of the Father who was allegedly murdered by the New Israeli, still nurtured by longing, guilt, and admiration for the slain father. Any attempt to resist the Law of the Father as violent Zionist extremism only strengthens him. The repeated slaying of the father only endows him with new life, thereby succumbing to his Law. Therefore, we must not admire his Law, and yet, at the same time, we must try to restrain ourselves from our attempt to destroy it. Rather, we must change our attitude and our perception of it, and by that, transform it into something else. We must strengthen its Eros, its positive power, and castrate the elements of its death drive. In other words, we must strengthen its power and destroy its aggression. 

We call for the expansion of the emancipatory element in Zionism, which came to release the Jew of his chains, and apply it to all inhabitants; in other words, we call to unify these two great national movements, the Jewish and the Palestinian, into one liberating force that will call upon all Jews and Palestinians of the world to come together and build a model society. 

We must liberate the local discourse from the ethnic dichotomy that rules it. We must restore the faith in the Revolution that began a hundred years ago, as we are repairing it. We must cleanse Zionism of its nationalistic elements without relinquishing its Messianic fervor for liberty, freedom, and equality. 

We must address the religious settler, who fiercely loves his land and feels attached to his home of thirty years, and we must trust his fundamentalist love. We must encourage him to go beyond his own love for the land in order to empathize with the love of the native for his soil, the native who was robbed of it and who was expelled to a refugee camp after three hundred years or more, during which his fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers worked the land with infinite love and dedication. We must call on the religious of both peoples to make use of the faith in the Koran and the Torah, and to share their faith in whoever is made in the image of God, i.e., human, whoever is human. 

Filled with faith, we must undertake the transformation of our spiritual geology. Mountains must be moved, and Syrian-African fault lines created anew. 

If we are proven wrong and a political solution is soon achieved, we will stand under its flag as one. But for the moment, we will continue to move towards our new place with the perseverance and dedication of diligent builders, and this in order to prevent the collapse of a structure that was built on weak and shaky foundations. 

With the help of speech, act, and speech-act, we have to release and strengthen the enjoyment and life-affirming elements from revolutions past, and we must reject the insatiable jouissance of arrogance and covetousness, which is the death drive of past revolutions. The two national liberation movements must come together to create a new place that will cross national boundaries and be a model for the Arab and Western worlds alike. 

Together, let us carve an opening in time and space for the Messiah to enter 

We’ll recruit him to our cause 

And we'll say Amen

Imagine...

Forget everything else.