AS I SEE IT:

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS:

The 104 year old Bell Hotel which closed in August 2007 was just one other downtown flophouse, but when it closed it forced 50 people living there to scramble and find other accommodation. Well the years have passed and 5.3 million dollars has flowed under the bridge. This "heritage" minded town has kept the external facade because, after all, frontage is more important than people.

So now the reopening is celebrated with much breaking of arms as various social service bureaucrats pat themselves furiously on the back. You can guess where I'm going with this can't you ? The upgraded premises now have a toilet for every room and, guess what, several social service outlets in the building. Not unexpected and neither is the self congratulation of the bureaucrats as they talk about opening space for 42 new tenants who will be housed whether they have substance abuse problems or not. Oh goody, goody, goody you're so liberal guys !

Let's have a little look at this wonderful gift to Winnipeg's down and out. In case some people are truly mathematically "challenged" it is hard to accept that it isn't obvious that 42 is smaller than 50. That's right. $5.3 million and three years have provided exactly eight fewer places for the poor than there were before. Look at another way. I have little doubt, having grown up without same, that a private indoor toilet is a very good thing , but each of the suites cost about $126,000 each. This in a city that recently spent a goodly amount of tax money hunting down "backyard huts" that otherwise homeless people rented to escape the unwanted "help" of social service bureaucrats. I don't think I'm out of line in saying that there are large numbers of abandoned properties in this town (a lot of which would cost nothing as they are long overdue for expropriation for non-payment of taxes)that could be upgraded far faster at a fraction of the cost. Ah, but palaces for social workers to pretend to work in wouldn't be part of such deals.

There is actually a local initiative that shows a totally different way of doing things. When the infamous Occidental Hotel was morphed into the 'Red Road Lodge' there was indeed government support for putting something else in place of the booze can. Somehow I don't think it was $5.3 million. The RRL also decided to make a go of it by renting out part of the premises to various other businesses and community groups, but no, no social workers (or booze). And the residents were not summarily evicted like they were at the Bell.

Let's look at in yet another way. It's true that this little "initiative" has managed to build accommodation of 42 people at $126,000 per person. Yet it has also managed to "dehouse" eight people at a cost of $664,000 per person. What an advance !

There is, of course, no silver lining for those displaced by this project. Neither is there any sense of accomplishment (whatever the propaganda says) for the taxpayer who has been forced to cough up the millions to do less than was being done before. Who actually benefits from this ? The answer was given in a recent Winnipeg Free Press article where it was stated that "tenants at the Bell must commit to staying in touch with social service agencies". Ah huh ! The big liberal/conservative argument was whether the tenants had to be "clean" before being housed. The answers were predictable. But one thing that both leftists and conservatives agree on in this society is that people have to be controlled.

The Bell Hotel fiasco is a prime example of how NOT to help the poor ie don't throw millions at a problem where there are bureaucracies that stand to benefit financially. And peoplke ask me why I'm an anarchist.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS; THE ARAB REVOLUTIONS:

THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF REVOLUTION:


I guess that one might consider me fortunate to have lived through three different eras of international revolutionary ferment. The first was the late 60s, early 70s. The next was the late 80s, early 90s with the fall of the Soviet bloc. Now there is the revolutionary wave sweeping the Arab world. In the first I was a full fledged participant. In the second I did my little bit of solidarity work. This time around, aside from signing petitions and going to the occasional demonstration I am very much only a spectator and commentator.


To be honest the first period left me with something of a sour taste in my mouth, but I responded quite differently than the majority of the so-called "new left" did. Behind all the bombastic rhetoric and grandiose fantasies there was far less of the reality of a revolution than the participants imagined. In the country where I live, Canada, most of the "flaming revolutionaries" became simple bureaucrats via either the NDP or even the Liberals. Others took a brief detour through the mindless maze of trying to recreate Leninist fantasy parties. Which, I suppose, just goes to show that they were not too bright in the first place. Myself I became an anarchist.


My own anarchism, however, became increasingly heterodox as I became familiar with not only the anarchist critique of class societies, both western and 'Marxist' but also with a wide range of other "left wing alternatives" and other economic literature that was basically unknown to the simplistic Marxists of that era. From Bernstein and Berle and Means to Max Nomad to Jan Machaijski , to Berle and Means to the transitional ideas of Burnham as he went from Trotskyism to conservatism, I read them all. As the "new left" circled the drain into the cesspool of Maoism and terrorism I became increasingly convinced that "revolution" was impossible in an advanced industrial society while also simultaneously believing that only in such a society could the sort of libertarian socialism I now favoured be built.



As to the "impossibility" of revolution in advanced countries I was wrong, and I guess I should have noticed this much earlier than I did. It's an old truism that, "if something can't go on forever it won't". This applies to countries and economic systems as well as to most other things. It took the revolutions against Communism to make me doubt my earlier doctrine about the "impossibility" of revolution. Especially as at least one of these revolutions occurred in a nuclear armed country with one of the largest if not most effective armies on Earth. No doubt revolution was "impossible" in the Soviet Union from a purely military perspective. Any revolt could very easily be crushed as previous attempts in eastern Europe had amply demonstrated. But what I ignored in my thoughts were some very important things about actual revolutions rather than the cartoonish Marxist ideas I was familiar with. My thinking changed. I also grew to understand that the earlier period of "revolution" ie the 60s/70s that I dismissed as simply grandstanding and third world nationalism was actually a real revolution, ie the completion of the "managerial revolution". Nothing to do with achieving a classless society of course, but definitely a re-division of the spoils amongst different segments of the ruling class.


As I came to understand that the "revolution of our times" was not a libertarian or even a socialist one I came to understand it as an expansion of the power of the managerial class into hitherto "unknown frontiers" of exercising power and "incidentally" making money. Yes, I am of a generation that understands and remembers how sick and how weird such things as the "grief industry" are ! The Third World revolutions of the late 60s/early 70s reproduced the usual Stalinoid bureaucracies, and when the Soviet bloc collapsed their "proletarian heroes" engaged in the same sort of looting that established a new class order in the ex-communist countries. This was one of the things that "sharpened" my own ideas about "revolution". Even in Poland where a large sector of the working class was attached, at least slightly, to the idea of "self-management" the resulting economic order contained no trace of such ideals. What went wrong ?


When all the dust had settled down I came to understand that it was not only that pretty well all modern revolutions served the interests of a managerial class. It was also that NO class system could exist in its pure form. Soviet society depended on the underground economy (capitalist ? but at least "free market") to continue its existence. The great mass of the economy of the modern world is similarly "mixed" having characteristics of both managerial/government control and a free market that is allowed to exist because of necessity. Is such a thing stable ? Personally I don't know having abandoned the religious precepts of Marxist dialectics many decades ago. There is no foreordained march of history, only possibilities and probabilities.


All that being said how do I view the 'Arab Revolutions' ? Unlike some I don't expect any great "libertarian upsurge" from them though I am sure that anarchist groups will be formed in the countries where the revolution has been "successful". The independent actions of the working class will be suppressed as they are today in Egypt.


The Arab revolutions have, however, shaken the forces of international imperialism. As such I personally support them even if I am sure that the resulting polity will be not even close to what I might want. THAT is the message that I would like to leave with people. Support what you can, but don't expect miracles. Revolutions are only possible in the modern world when certain conditions are met. These conditions simultaneously both make the revolution possible and also limit the amount of change that one can expect from such events. In the end I am just as firmly convinced that a libertarian society can only come about gradually, but I also feel that anarchists/libertarian socialists cannot divorce themselves from revolutionary events if they occur as some outcomes are infinitely better than others for a "slow march" to a free society to take place.



In previous posts on this blog I have mentioned how revolutions, being as they are essentially unpredictable movements of large segments of the population, cannot be "planned" or called into being by "revolutionary conspiracy". The efforts of Leninist groupuscles or so-called "insurrectionists" are nothing but magical thinking. The forces behind revolutionary moments are as far outside of the farcical plotting of such groups as is the movement of the planets. Even the "Model-T of Revolutions", the Russian Revolution was not produced by the Bolsheviks. What that party actually did was take advantage of a revolution already in process to achieve a coup-d'etat, and later they created their own managerial rule as the original revolution was defeated.


While revolutions cannot be conjured out of the ground there are, however, certain conditions that are necessary before any such event can occur. First of all there has to be mass disbelief in a given sociopolitical economic system. This doesn't necessarily mean that the majority of people suddenly join the revolutionaries, merely that the majority are more than content to at least "stand aside" in the conflict between the old order and the revolution, having no overwhelming loyalty to the regime. As a matter of fact it is quite rare (though not non-existent) that an actual majority join the revolution from day 1, except perhaps in restricted locales. The fact that revolutions rarely have the participation of a majority, only their passive acquiescence, is already a "snake in Eden" for the Revolution as the active minority must of necessity act boldly in order to avoid defeat, and they thereby act in a relationship of power vis-a-vis the inactive majority. Great dictatorships from many such little acts grow.


As unfavourable as such necessities may be for actually resulting in a truly more equal and free society the problem is not insurmountable. What is insurmountable is the fact that revolutions are inevitably pluralistic. All sorts of people come to oppose the dying regime because of all sorts of different reasons. This has sometimes included those such as Leninist groupuscles or Islamist ideologues in the Arab world who think this pluralism is a Very Bad Thing. Those to whom the whole idea of pluralism is anathema. Whether these people will be "compromisers" as the Egyptian Islamists appear to be or those who hope to advance their own cause by pushing the revolution as far ahead of the majority as possible depends upon circumstance. A lot depends upon the exact level of another condition for revolution...the ruling class must be divided. At least a large segment of this class must be willing to see the old order crumble and either stand passively by or actively help to tear it down. Lacking this the inevitable military realities that led me to first discount the possibility of revolution still hold true.


Revolutions are carried out, at least initially, by minorities. Military necessity requires this minority to carry out actions without any sanction from the majority. Revolutions are inevitably pluralistic and inevitably are open to the influence both of parts of the old ruling class and to would be ruling classes whose rule is often far worse than the old order. Where does this leave those who style themselves anarchists or libertarian socialists ? Many (almost all ?) of those who want to retain what I call the "romance of revolution" respond by imagining a non-pluralistic revolution, one more purely "anarchist". This is maintained by having, against all historical evidence, what may be unbounded faith in the "libertarian instincts of the masses". No doubt revolutions, by their very nature, develop instances of self-management. This is necessary if the revolution is to survive and grow. Or at least if the population is to fed. Yet even in the most fertile historical ground, Spain of the 1930s, the anarchists attracted the participation or approval of only 1/3rd of the population. The Spanish Revolution was inevitably pluralistic, and all appeals to greater militancy simply ignore this inevitable fact of both then and even more now.


This almost inevitable fact of pluralism sets natural limits as to what can be accomplished by a revolution. What this means in actuality is being demonstrated these days in both Tunisia and Egypt. Also in both cases what is usually a military necessity of a successful revolution ie the desertion of at least sizable chunks of the military and police hamstrings that revolution in terms of how far it can go. In other words all these factors together could be summed up as, "the conditions necessary for a revolution to succeed inevitably lead to restricting what it can achieve". Thermidor is the Siamese twin of revolutions, sharing the same vital organs.


How does all this affect what I think now ? I no longer think revolution in an advanced society is impossible, but I am even more convinced that it can never lead to any great gains that last. Such gains can only come about in a slow, patient and "non-heated" atmosphere where social experiments can be tried out for their viability without any "war necessity" looming over them. This doesn't mean that revolutions are a matter of indifference. Such events can hopefully be influenced to result in situations where such experimentation is more possible and easier. Doing this, however, requires a much "finer touch" than the usual libertarian response of "always push harder and harder". In some cases this might be just what is needed. In other cases, such as choosing the wrong allies and dealing with those that we have made, it can be disastrous.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS:

BUY NOTHING DAY AND BEYOND:

Today was Buy Nothing Day, originally a Canadian invention and now a worldwide "event", or non-event as the case may be. Molly was more or less true to the spirit of the day except that I felt compelled to go to the Liquor Commission to acquire more booze for the weekend. Actually it's pretty easy for me to observe such a day as the LC and the gas station account for pretty well over 90% of my purchases. I have to buy gas as a requirement to keep working. Maybe the booze is the same, along with the 222s for the arthritis and the occasional 50 cents for air for the slow leaking tire that the garage didn't manage to fix. Yeah a lot of places now charge for air if you can believe it or not. That seems like some sort of ultimate to me.

All that being said the idea of Buy Nothing Day seems to have gathered support outside of those who would rather spend their money on $15,000 "eco-tours" and naturopathic quackery. It has gathered the support of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) as the following article from them shows. Now a cynic might say that this merely speaks for a segment of the population that consume in different ways from the majority and would like said majority to follow their path, voluntarily or otherwise. And if they cannot afford to consume the "correct" way then too bad for them.

But does it have to be that way ? This year there is an alternative, at least in the Spanish speaking world. The 'Huelga De Consumo' promoted by the Spanish CGT bears a superficial resemblance to the Buy Nothing Day, but this event set for December 21 is another animal entirely. While it contains all of the feel-good ecoboo of BND it is expressly set forth as an instrument of class struggle, not as some new age correction of the presumed moral failings of the masses who do not share the social values (and privileges) of the 'new class'. It is meant as a 'trial balloon', following the September 29th general strike in Spain, to see if even more pressure can be put on the ruling class. It should be noted that the Spanish CGT with up to 100,000 members and representing up to 2 million Spanish workers in workplace elections is not an insignificant force.

Quite frankly I feel much more comfortable with this sort of thing than I do with the anglosphere idea of 'Buy Nothing Day' if for no other reason than the fact that the latter is merely something resembling a religious declaration of principle while a Consumers' Strike is something that may actually be a real weapon in a class war. I don't know how well the CGT's idea will lay out, but I will certainly translate further information about it here on this blog.

Until then, here is CUPE's statement on Buy Nothing Day. A very small step, but at least it is something.

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼

Buy Nothing Day – cut back on waste
Nov 25, 2010 01:10 PM


Friday, November 26, 2010 is Buy Nothing Day, a day set aside to shun our consumptive ways. The day was first recognized in Vancouver in 1992 and has since spread throughout the world.

The Friday after the American Thanksgiving was selected for Buy Nothing Day as this day traditionally in the United States signals the beginning of the Christmas shopping rush.

Buy Nothing Day is a time to examine over-consumption and its effects on the environment and our culture. Specifically, over-consumption is linked to excess waste generation, rising greenhouse gas emissions, negative effects on the air, water and soil quality, and other environmental issues.

Here are just a few waste facts to consider:

►According to the Recycling Council of Ontario, by the age of 6 months, the average Canadian has consumed the same amount of resources as the average person in the developing world consumes in a lifetime.

►The average Canadian produces 997 kilograms of waste per year, according to Statistics Canada.

►Environment Canada estimated that more than 140,000 tonnes of computer equipment, phones, televisions, stereos and small home appliances accumulate in Canadian landfill cites each year.

►The CUPE National Environment Committee urges members to stop and consider these impacts and refrain from buying anything on Friday November 26. Rather than celebrating consumerism by shopping, CUPE members are encouraged to celebrate the Earth.

ANARCHIST THEORY:

STATE AND CLASS:

I originally saw the following item on the Miami Autonomy and Solidarity site. The original source is an exciting new website Havana Times written from a progressive viewpoint but with none of the displaced mindless patriotism so typical of western leftists who worship foreign dictatorships.

I would certainly not characterize Havana Times as anarchist, but many of the items there are things that few anarchists could disagree with. I found the following interesting despite having my own disagreements with some of the author's opinions. Like many, perhaps most, anarchists the author characterizes state socialist regimes as being essentially "state capitalist". I disagree, and I think "managerial" is a better word just as it is for the societies in which most of us live ie so-called "capitalist" regimes. My reason is the overwhelming way in which prices are set and resources allocated in such regimes, a manner remote from the idealized "capitalism" of a century ago (though "capitalism" was always a mixed economy in any case) where they were supposed to be set by market competition. In the case of Marxist dictatorships the word is even less apt because the supposed labour market consisting of those free to sell their labour to the highest bidder is a total fantasy. The labour "market" under Marxism is closer to that of theocratic slave states or serfdom than it is to "capitalism".

I also disagree that a system of de jure government ownership and de facto self management would be anything resembling a stable arrangement. I admit its theoretical possibility and actual probability over a long term transition to real self management. With the proviso, of course, that the controllers of the state would continually try to expand their power at the expense of actual self managed socialism.

All that being said the following is a perceptive look at the difference between legal fictions of ownership and the actual realities of social power. Well worth reading.

SCSCSCSCSC
State Owned Doesn’t Mean Socialist
HAVANA TIMES, April 27 — Recently in Granma, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, an article appeared about the economic efficiency of “socialist government enterprises” in the armed forces (4/16/10).

In the spirit of helping to clarify certain concepts, I have attempted to provide a few, more precise, details here.

Apparently the comrades who wrote about the Military Agricultural Union “socialist government enterprise,” based themselves on the identification of state and socialist property by virtue of the fact that this property belongs to the Cuban state; they assume that all state property is, de jure, socialist. However, what gives a property its social character —be it socialist or capitalist— is the form of its operation and the appropriation of its output, not its legal form.
This confusion was introduced in socialist theory by those who mistook estatización (state ownership) for socialization. They thought that for property to be socialized, it was sufficient to place it under state ownership and then hold the state sacred above the rest of society.

The social character of a company is one thing and the legal structure of its ownership is something else. The social character of property is determined by the form in which it is put to use, by the way in which work is organized, the mode of production (based on slave, serf, wage or freely associated labor) and the way in which the surplus obtained is distributed. This is independent of the property’s legal structure, which can be state-owned, collective or privately owned. This said, the natural tendency is for the content (the social character) of property to determine its legal form (structure), not the other way around.

Certainly, a government enterprise that exploits wage labor can be efficient. There are many examples of this throughout the entire capitalist world , even in the USA, England and Japan.

However, though the legal form of such property is state-owned, those companies are not socialist. They are capitalist because they respond to the capitalist logic of obtaining profits through wage labor, which in this case is appropriated by the state. As a corollary, when that state seeks the “well being” of the workers, with fairer distribution, this is what characterizes social democracy.

So what if the state is in the hands of the workers?” the statists might ask.

The same thing would happen as what has occurred in every “worker’s state”: the workers would continue being paid a wage (which would not be determined by the level of production), they would have no ownership or usufruct relationship with the means of production, and they would not participate in the distribution of profits.


On behalf of socialism, all those tasks would be overseen by a bureaucratic stratum, which in the long run —as has always occurred— winds up as the bureau-bourgeoisie (“the accidental class,” as described by Russian academics) who appropriate the means of production and the surpluses, and plunge the working class into deeper misery.

That “working class,” harnessed to their new capitalists (the bureaucrats), would not bring new production relations with them, since these laborers still would not have understood their need to liquidate themselves as a working class and become a new class of freely associated workers…of cultured cooperativists, the new class that bears the new production relations.

The government enterprise that exploits wage labor, seeks profits and concentrates the surplus in a few hands is in fact a state capitalist company given its content…given its social character.

Its juridical state form doesn’t matter. This was what all the confusion was around concerning “state socialism,” which never transcended the limits of state monopoly capitalism. This clearly occurred in Russia but also in Cuba.

Wage labor is what characterizes the form of capitalist exploitation, while freely-associated, cooperative or autogestionario (self-managed) work is the generic form of organizing socialist labor.

For the social character of a company to be described as socialist (it doesn’t matter if the property legally belongs to the state or the collective of workers) it must be managed through socialist methods – not capitalists ones; this is to say, with cooperative and self-managerial forms of work and management by freely associated workers who are directed and managed in a collective and democratic way by the workers themselves.

This would even include the election of management, which should be revolving, and the equal distribution of part of the profits (after paying taxes and other expenses due to the state and leaving another part for the extended reproduction of the company, emergency funds and other reserves).

Even under capitalism there are properties that are legally collective, but that in and of itself doesn’t make them socialist. This is the case of the corporation, which legally belongs to its community of shareholders, a few or many of whom might work for that same company. However by organizing itself into a capitalist form of operation —that’s to say with wage labor, with hierarchical forms of management and control of the surplus by a group of owners who control most of the shares— it continues essentially as a capitalist company given its social character, even when it constitutes the first form of the decomposition of capital.

This is what they deceivingly refer to as “popular capitalism,” which capitalists sought to present as an alternative to cooperativist socialism.

Likewise, there exists property that is private by its legal form and socialist by its self-managerial social form of operation. This is the case of many small family-owned businesses, which manage the company democratically, distribute the profits equally and do not exploit wage labor.

Socialist government enterprises would be those where the state maintains the ownership of the means of production in a legal form, but where the social form of its operation is carried out in a socialist, self-managerial and cooperative manner. This would be the case of a type of company that is co-managed between the state and the workers.

By the same token, just as cooperatives are socialist firms in capitalist countries, it’s possible for there to exit in socialist countries reminiscences of capitalist companies (not in name, but because some day cooperative and self-management types of freely associated production relations will prevail), be they state, private or mixed ownership.

The interesting experience of Perfeccionamiento Empresarial (Managerial Improvement), originally conceived and applied in the Cuban armed forces (MINFAR), was a step forward in connection with the traditional statist wage-labor scheme, though still without breaking from it.

INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY:

DON'T TOUCH THAT PILL- THE GESTAPO WILL GET YOU:

Here's a sad tale from the USA via the Care2 site about one student;s experience with that part of the working class whose product is pretty much social control. to be sure I have yet to get to this on this blog ie how I see little difference between teachers and prison guards and policemen. Rest assured I will get to describing my view of how people whose main function is to keep a segment of the population in one place through a good part of the day are in the same category as prison guards. Until then here's a horror story about political correctness gone wild.

PCPCPCPCPCPCPCPCPCPC

Seventh Grader Suspended For Touching Pill
Judy Molland
It all happened on February 23 at River Valley Middle School in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Seventh grader Rachel Greer was in the locker room during fifth period gym class when a fellow student walked in with a bag of pills.

"She was talking to another girl and me about them and she put one in my hand and I was like, ‘I don't want this,' so I put it back in the bag and I went to gym class," said Rachel. The pills were the prescription ADHD drug, Adderall, and after years of training under the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, Rachel knew she had to "Just Say No.

"But that wasn't the end of it. During sixth period, an assistant principal came and took Rachel out of class. It turned out that the girl who originally had the pills and a few other students got caught. Then came the shocker: "We're suspending you for five days because it was in your hand," the administrator told Rachel. Apparently he told the girl that he was very sorry he had to do it, but the rules are the rules. District officials later said that if they're not strict about drug policies no one will take them seriously.

What lesson can Rachel learn here? Because she said NO to illegal drugs and told the complete truth about what happened in the locker room, she was punished. Presumably she would also have been punished if she had said YES, so maybe next time she'll choose that route.

What does it take for school administrators to use some common sense? A policy, zero tolerance or any other, is a guideline. Every situation is different, and school officials need to be able to approach each situation individually, and make an appropriate decision, based on the relevant facts.

After hearing the news, Patty Greer, Rachel's mother, went to school officials to complain. "That's not a good policy," Greer said. "We're teaching our kids if you say no to drugs you're going to get punished; it's not right."

District officials were not impressed. Martin Bell, COO of Greater Clark County Schools, replied that the girl should not have put out her hand. "Someone hands them a pill or a drug or something like that and they say well I said no I didn't participate. Well the act of saying no is not to be there, not to be involved in the handling the, you know, they didn't have to put their hand out." (In case you're wondering, I am quoting Mr. Bell verbatim here.)

According to Greater Clark County Schools district policy, even a touch equals drug possession and a one week suspension. Wanna get a five-day vacation from school? Just say no, and get yourself suspended!

And this just in: When Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, Michigan, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials suspended the 6-year-old until Friday, saying the behavior made other students uncomfortable. Really? Couldn't the school find any other way to teach Mason not to make a gun with his hand? When will this madness stop.

PCPCPCPCPCPCPCPCPCPC

What can I say ? Insofar as propaganda has any effect such liberal attempts at social engineering will have the definite effect of convincing young people that aggression is OK as long as it is mediated through authority . It will convince a subset of young people to become good Nazis. To another subset it will convince them that 'anything goes" provided they don't get caught. While I may disagree with the later possible effect it is better than aggression mediated through authority like what the social engineers want to "teach".

CANADIAN ECONOMICS/CANADIAN POLITICS:

ANOTHER CORPORATE RIP-OFF:

The following, from the Progressive Economics Forum, certainly is grist to the mill of my long held contention that we no longer live in a society that could be styled "capitalist" (whatever the title of the article). I have termed our present society as "managerial rule" for decades, and I have yet to see convincing evidence that the traditional use of the c-word gives any greater insight. Usually it obscures very important phenomena. In my view We live in a society far removed from the "free market" that should be a defining aspect of "capitalism". Yes, I know that there has been over a century of leftist modification to the crude theory that Marx first presented in the 1800s, but as the years drag on this seems more and more to be like the addition of epicycles to try and correct the failings of the Ptolemaic model of the universe.

Understanding that most of the economy is now and has been for years outside of the simple supply/demand situation that would define pure capitalism is essential to understanding things like what is described below. No doubt our economy still retains some elements of capitalism. Even the most tyrannical Stalinist command economy had to have such elements, even if only as in the black market, simply to survive and function. Yet, both the theoretical owners of corporations ie the stockholders and the public in general are obviously defrauded by practices like those described below. If the "state" is an institution that operates "on behalf of the ruling class" then what the problem described below shows is that the managers of the corporations are the ruling class.

But enough of my theorizing. Here's the article.

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Stock options, the buyback boondoggle and the crisis of capitalism
As if there weren’t already enough reasons to eliminate the egregious stock option tax loophole, a column by Eric Reguly in this month’s Report on Business magazine highlights yet another. This reason helps to explain why we had such a booming stock market up to 2008, but little growth in real investment and productivity. ( One of the chronic and perhaps growing problems of managerial society- Molly )

First of all, the stock option deduction, which allows those recipients of stock options to only pay half the statutory rate of income tax on their gains is:
#Expensive, costing Canada’s federal government an average of almost $1 billion a year in foregone tax revenues annually during the past five year, according to Finance Canada’s tax expenditure accounts.
#Unfair, with the benefits going overwhelming to those with the highest incomes, including CEOs, as Hugh Mackenzie has outlined in his annual CEO pay report for the CCPA. For example as I showed a few years ago, this tax loophole saved Robert Gratton, former CEO of Power Corp over $24 million in federal income taxes, just on one year’s income. This is a major reason why some of the highest paid people in our society pay tax at a lower rate than ordinary workers.
#Distortionary and destabilizing, creating the misaligned incentives and pay structures that reward short-term risk taking that Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney identified as one of the key reasons for turbulence in the financial markets in a speech he gave two years ago.

But there’s an even more devastating reason why the tax loophole for stock options should be eliminated: it has been very damaging for the economy.

Research by William Lazonick, director of the Centre for Industrial Competitiveness at the University of Massachusetts, shows that stock buybacks–using a company’s funds to buyback its own shares–has swallowed up an enormous amount of the income of major US companies. Canadian companies have also put increasing amounts of their income into stock buybacks and not into more productive investments, as I outlined a few years ago.

The stock buybacks have resulted in pretty blatant stock price manipulation, boosting stock price value for these companies, and paying off very handsomely for those who hold shares, which includes most CEOs and senior executives, especially since they only pay half the rate of tax on these gains. It’s been great for shareholders and other employees who also own shares, at least in the short-term. ( But they pay off most handsomely for those who can control and anticipate the movements ie management - Molly )

The problem is that in the long-term it has bled the economy of real investment in the economy. As Reguly writes:
Every dollar spent on buybacks means one less dollar spent elsewhere-on R&D, on training, on equipment, on creating employment, on innovation. Ultimately, competitiveness and economic growth suffer.

This issue is related to the broader discussion we’ve recently had on this blog about the ineffectiveness of corporate tax cuts.

Lazonick ties this to a broader crisis of US capitalism’s “New Economy business model”, says we should ban stock buybacks where they are used to manipulate prices, and writes that the:
The government also needs to enact legislation that drastically reins in top executive pay, which means placing restrictions on stock-based remuneration, especially stock options.

We will soon see in the federal Throne Speech and budget what Canada’s federal government has planned to revitalize Canada’s economy coming out of this recession.

But if it is just more faith in the same old simplistic laissez-faire Advantage Canada framework without fixing any of these problems, it will have very little success.

ANARCHIST THEORY:

ANARCHISM AND LEFTISM:

In the last few days Molly has been quoted on the London (Ontario) Indymedia site because of a post she put up here last June 28th on a ridiculous leftist project to "ban drive-thru restaurants" in London, Ontario. Yes good non-anarchist and non-leftist readers of this blog I shit you not. The righteous "green brigade", supported by the geriatric "commies without the guts to say so" of the Council of Canadians, in that southern Ontario city has the unmitigated arrogance to propose such a thing, and the simple mindlessness to imagine that such a thing is "serious". Molly has a better idea. To reduce carbon emissions ban health food stores that depend upon large transport intensive imports from the transnational corporations behind this scam. Oh horrors say the greenies ! Ban boutique stores that sell products for the "lefty uniform" that are produced by sweatshop labour. Oh horrors once more ! Ban the fashionable "yuppification" that kicks low income people out of cheap housing so the "enlightened" can have their "groovy neighbourhoods" and ban the useless renovations that eat energy and produce carbon so that the greenies can feel oh so superior. Oh, double horror !! Most importantly let's ban folk festivals. None of these schmucks 'walk" to such a thing. If they did, by some miracle, their bean heavy diet would create enough methane as "the caissons go farting along" to more than quadruple their carbon emisions by driving to same. By the way,let's ban beans fror that matter. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Let all vegetarians be subjected to "counselling" ie "political re-education. So on and so forth. Let's ban, ban, ban everything that creates carbon dioxide(and methane) that a certain subculture glories in.

But Molly doesn't intend to ban anything. She is also not under the illusion that any sensible city council would ever entertain such a proposal, and she is further well aware of the arrogant mindset that makes advocates of such an attack on the people that the leftists feel so superior to so blind to their own silliness and how they look to people outside of their charmed circles. I've wasted many an hour of my ill temper berating the so-called "post leftists", "primitivists" and other cultists that exist on the fringe of (especially) the North American anarchist movement for exactly the same thing. But, as I have said before, the "post-leftists" are no such thing. They have retained practically everything that was bad about the left that they feel they have "transcended" and nothing of the good. One of the most idiotic things that they have taken up from leftism is the attitude of a mutual admiration society and its attendant snotty superiority.

This attitude was bad enough in the classical left, but it attained truly malignant growth in the 'New Left', particularly as it spiralled downwards as it degenerated. As I have also said before I have been at this for pretty well 40 years now, and I have seen some remarkable stupidity coming out of "the left" over those years. I have to say, however, that the idea of petitioning a city council to "ban drive-thrus" is at least as arrogant, stupid, futile and ridiculous as the old Weatherman (Maoists at the time) idea of making their "cadre" sleep on the floor because "mattresses are white skin privilege". As the poet says, may we see ourselves as others see us.

The initiators of a project to futilely petition a city council to ban drive-thrus are probably aware of the ridiculous nature of their proposal. They know it won't happen. Back in my baby lefty days we used to call these "non-negotiable demands" ie present something that obviously can't be granted as a propaganda tactic to "radicalize" the wavering followers. Of course the end result was more often to convince the followers of the manipulative nature of their leaders.

International Trotskyism has formalized this tactic as the "Transitional Program" and this is a true monument to human arrogance as the Trots arrogantly proclaim the very deception that they attempt to carry out as part of their propaganda about how good their parties are. Most leftists adopt such attempts at sneakiness at one point or the other, but few have the honesty or intellectual coherence to admit-sometimes even to themselves- that they are doing what good old Leon advocated so many years ago. Mostly they chug on forwards under pure emotion, reinforced by the limited circles they live in.

Even if the leftists who advocate such things could be totally honest with both themselves, their purported audience and the general public (an unlikely thing) there is one thing they will never admit. They know, with perhaps with even more rock hard certainty than Molly does, that the average person will never listen to them. But this realization is a non-starter in their minds because they, also with rock hard certainty, look down their sub-cultural noses as the "great unwashed" of ordinary people. Why bother to try and influence people you have contempt for ? You, after all, have such great and superior "ecological consciousness"(substitute any leftist buzzword followed by "consciousness" here if you like) that you feel you can bypass the normal process of "convincing the inferiors" and go directly to those in positions of power that you, after all, have much more in common with than the proles who go to KFC. No matter that the more powerful members of your class will laugh at you even more than Molly might, while the proles are merely offended at your power grab.

This is what is known as "positive feedback". Leftists, ensconced in their tiny friendship groups, attempt to order about other people who they have contempt for. Ordinary people see such actions as reinforcing their (often correct) view of the "left". They resist. They respond with further contempt for the lefties. The lefties respond with further illusions of superiority and further attempts to coerce the ordinary person. The circle builds on itself. Very occasionally a nasty person such as Molly attempts to break the cycle. It is pretty well impossible to convince ordinary people to "make the first move" because the "left" will continue on with its authoritarian ways. What is possible is to reform the left so that it ceases its evil ways, inherited from its evil ancestors.

There is no reason other than arrogance that the left could not adopt a populist "to the people" attitude. Yes, it would not be as "flashy" as putting forward attacks on ordinary people while talking to(and through) your buddies on a city council. The "buddies", by the way, if they were foolish enough to initially support such a thing, would rapidly disavow it when they approached power. There are unlimited possibilities to advance "carbon reduction" by working slowly and patiently with ordinary people. No doubt such actions lack "pizazzz", and no doubt they involve working with people that you have contempt for. They might even involve abandoning your precious "identity" as a "superior" greenie, dressing like ordinary people dress, eating what they eat, listening to the music they listen to. Shudder, shudder, shudder.

The whole idea of "banning drive-thrus' is, of course, simply bizarre, and it is a tribute to the worst in leftism, and its self-destructive "loyalty" to even the most off-the-wall proposals, that the whole thing isn't simply laughed at as the insanity it is. But "leftism" means more than simple foolishness. Let's try and put Molly's relation to "the left" in a wider perspective than just dealing with "kooky greenies".

Regular readers of this blog may end up rather confused as to how I see "the left". The "anarcho-nuts" are able to slot me into the unfashionable and "boring" (to their need for stimulation-may I call it "self-stimulation") category of a "classical leftist". The ordinary reader, naive to the ins and outs of left wing politics-including those leftists who deny the label- would assume something similar because of the constant reiteration of traditional left wing themes on this blog. This whole impression is reinforced by the efforts of both left wing and right wing ideologues to try and pretend that there are only two ways of viewing the world. Anything that disagrees with any of the conglomeration of accepted opinions that each side holds to be true is automatically evidence that the dissident is part of "the enemy". In the case of the left this way of thinking has almost paleolithic antecedents. The intolerance of leftists towards any of their number who don't hold to the fashion of the moment reaches all the way back to Stalinism and the sobriquet of "objectively counter-revolutionary".

To say the least this sort of mindset is very conducive to building a cult, but it is counterproductive to the idea of building a movement. Here is where Molly has to put her relation to "the left" in a plain fashion. To misquote Ghandi , I think that leftism would be a very good idea. The "left" should be the repository of all that is good and democratic and liberatory in human culture. In some cases, particularly where an anarchist left has been powerful, this has been more or less true. In other cases, and I think our present situation in Canada is typical of western countries, the balance is equivocal. In other cases such as the USA "the left" is generally against equality, against democracy (as fools who want to connive a ban on drive-thrus by political manipulation are) and against liberty. Is there anything left besides the fashion that would describe such a subculture as valuable ? Do I dare to remind the reader that classical fascism originated as a "left-wing" movement, or would that merely provoke more screams from the historically illiterate ?

The "left" has always had a dual character. On the one hand it has been a vehicle to increase the values of equality, democracy and liberty that the American left (and those who imitate them) are so against today. It has been a movement of the lower classes to increase their power and influence in society and to better their condition. On the other hand "the left" has always been a vehicle whereby other classes, managers, either present or would-be, have struggled for power using the lower classes as pawns. This sort of power struggle was always obvious in the case of the communist parties-and with less bloodlust and more civilization the social democratic parties. In recent years even the pretense of "representing" the interests of the lower classes has, to a large extent, been dropped. In important left wing movements, such as the NDP or the Greens, the activities of the parties could be described as "the social workers in committee", to echo a leftism phrase from when leftism meant something. In the never-never world of leftist "activism" outside of the major paths to paying careers "the self-appointed superior in committee" would be more descriptive.

It's sad. It's really and truly sad. In the tradition of George Orwell I can best define myself as "a leftist who is disgusted by the left". The "left" should mean more than lying about a campaign ,which is-mercifully-hopeless, to restrict the life options of people who are of a lower class than the campaigners. What is different from Orwell's time and today is that the "managers" who were only in power in one country in the 1930s have pretty well completed their conquest of the world today. The absurdities that Orwell observed amongst the commies of his day have become pretty well universal amongst bothy the rulers and their presumed opposition. The silly things that sometimes come up from this swamp- like banning drive-thrus- are merely the froth of a much more serious day to day class rule that even corrupts its opposition.

CUBA;

CUBA AND GAY RIGHTS:

To say the least Molly hardly finds the following item "surprising". Managers may come to power in many ways, as they replace the capitalists as a ruling class. When they come to power via a "revolution", as what happened in Cuba, the new ruling class will generally be much more conservative than one that has come to power via a natural evolution. Thus the fact that the Cuban "peoples' dictatorship" (sic) is far more opposed to gay rights than other social democratic regimes that have recently come to power in South America. It's one of the unforeseen (to those who believe in "revolution") consequences of "revolution", whatever the ideology of the revolutionists. The following is a Molly translation of a recent item from a Spanish language item at the A-Infos website. What I can say is that, as the dictator lies dying piece by piece, like his fascist progenitor Franco did, that the people of Cuba will gradually attempt to expand their realm of freedom. Soon there will be no more communist dictatorship for our paleolithic leftists to "support". Look for them to find good things about the hereditary monarchy of North Korea.

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[Cuba] The government aborted gay march

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The demonstration was called by the Cuban Commission on Human Rights for sick people with HIV and Sexually Transmitted Diseases(A Molly interpretation) Eni, the Cuban League Against Aids Foundation "Elena Mederos," the Foundation LGTB (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) "Reynaldo Arenas, the Cuban Movement for Homosexual Liberation, Collective Transsexual Havana Cultural Center LGTB y. the Gay Political Organization Presidio "Reynaldo Arenas in Memorian ". The First Gay Pride Parade, as it was called by its organizers,was planned to take place since the Don Quixote Park, located at 23 and J streets in the El Vedado neighborhood in until the Ministry of Justice ,agreed to demands of the Cuban government.

Gay Universe: A detainee in Cuba in Gay Pride parade

Nearly 20 people(Molly Note-great social changes always begin with small numbers of courageous people) were gathered in Havana under the slogan "For the respect for sexual diversity ", without police repression. Due to the poor attendance, after waiting half an hour, they proceeded to disperse on their own initiative. However, a few hours later

the president of the Cuban League against AIDS, Ignacio Estrada,was arrested. He was, coincidentally, one of the most prominent conveners of the march(how communist of them-Molly).It is still not known whether he was released. According to statements via telephone by Fidel Valdes, a member of one of the groups participating, the small attendance at the demonstration was due to visits by selective Officers of the State Security Department to well-known figures of the local the gay scene. It was also known that a group of transvestites that travelled inland with the intention to participate in the so-called First Lesbian Gay Pride march, was detained at the terminal at the time of arrival at the capital; being released hours later.

Molly Note- the paleolithic leftists here in North America do major efforts in terms of lieing on behalf of the Cuban dictatorship. Sometimes their gymnastics can be amusing, as when Maoists, with a lack of any thuggish murderous regime to support, are reduced to supporting the Cuba that they formerly denounced as "revisionist" at the same time as it is more and more involved in capitalist partnerships(never say such a bad word). or when leftists here in NA continue to trumpet the "superiority" of the Cuban health care system while at the same time doing their little "solidarity bit" to gather expired !!! medical supplies to ship down to this "superior" system. I shit you not. That is what these people do and they have no idea of the contradiction in their efforts. May I say that the Cuban ruling class doesn't have to depend upon such charity. No expired materials for those managers. They get the same quality that managers of social control receive up here or that those rich people from here can buy from the Cuban ruling class while the average Cuban is denied. Love that "socialism".

VIETNAM:

ILLEGAL STRIKES IN VIETNAM:

The following item is from the LibCom website, a British anarchocommunist site. Over in Vietnam there has been a wave of illegal strikes, carried out unofficially by the workers themselves. Vietnam, like China, is a managerial society where the ruling class- the managers- are attempting to correct some of the irrationalities of their class rule by opening up parts of their economy to investment by other managerial corporations, in the vain hope that this will bring about the corrections of a "free market" to their country and lead to prosperity. A "free market", of course, has its own irrationalities, but the way that this pseudo-transition has been managed in countries such as Vietnam and China leads to some very unique tensions. One is that the loosening of the economy inevitably leads to organization on the part of the working class, the very class that the ruling managers mendaciously claim to represent. The managers are stuck between a desire to maximize their own well-being by "liberalization" and the need to keep a repressive hold on the consequences of such liberalization. Class struggle is often at its most brutal in such transition periods. The official bodies that the ruling class set up prove totally ineffective to protect workers' interests or to mollify rising working class demands.

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Vietnam: 330 illegal strikes in six months:

A total of 330 strikes have been recorded so far this year and all of them were illegal because they were not led by the trade unions and didn’t follow the law, reported the Vietnam National Confederation of Labour at a conference in Hanoi on June 16-17.

The confederation’s Vice Chairman, Mai Duc Chinh, said that under the current regulations, only grassroots trade unions have the right to organise strikes, but this regulation is unrealistic because there is no mechanism to protect trade union leaders and most employers don’t positively cooperate with trade unions.

Most leaders of grassroots trade unions assume many jobs so they don’t have much time for this job. Their skills as trade union leaders are also very poor, Chinh said.

He also said that the rules on compensating companies for losses caused by illegal strikes are unfeasible. For example, a company in HCM City lodged a case with the court but its petition was rejected because it was unable to define the major subject of the lawsuit among 10,000 workers participating in the strike.

Since the amended Labour Code took effect on July 1, 2007, illegal strikes have continued to increase in number.

Under the current law, labourers are not allowed to go on strike in conflicts of rights but must bring the conflict to court. They can go on strike if conflicts of interest are not solved by negotiations. Labourers must compensate their employers if the court finds that their strikes were illegal.

BLOGGING:

HERE AT MOLLY'S BLOG:

Every once in awhile it is necessary to pause and say what this blog is all about. Molly's Blog is basically an anarchist blog, but it can also expand at times to cover issues that are far removed from politics, anarchist or otherwise. The blog itself is named after a cat that I once owned, "Molly"-her of the "paw of doom". As to my own "anarchism" it can be summed up in the following:

1)I believe in an anarchism that is "gradualist" with all that implies, and I am not an advocate of "revolution" for many different reasons.

2)I believe that the "pathway towards anarchy" is being created every day by the struggles for freedom and justice on the part of ordinary people, and much of what I report here is concerned with such struggles. I believe that such struggles are anarchism in the modern world, and that ideological plans are secondary.

3)All that being said, I believe that "anarchism" is a philosophy that holds a set of moral criteria upon which various struggles should be judged. Does a given struggle advance justice and freedom or does it carry "unforeseen consequences" that would reduce the achievement of these goals if the struggle is successful ? The law of "unforeseen consequences" is pretty well universal in human history, but one has to judge any given event in terms of probabilities that are basically unpredictable in various degrees. Sometimes this is obvious. Political power for Maoists in say Nepal will lead inevitably to a worsening of living conditions for the Nepalese people unless "the Maoists can be corrupted". Sometimes it is less obvious. Is a social democratic/leftist government in Latin America and its actions opening a space for real popular power? In such situations I prefer to "err on the side of history" and my own anarchist comrades in such countries by criticizing the ruling class of such states.

4)Molly's anarchism is rather "catholic" in that it reports on and encourages all sorts of things that I am not necessarily in total agreement with. I do, however, draw a line. I do not encourage childish playacting at terrorism, from its most silly expression of minor vandalism to its grossest expression of "sympathy" with terrorists with goals that are totally opposed to the anarchist ideal. I, therefore, refuse to report items that are simply silly and childish(a lot of which come out of the USA), and I refuse to list links in this blog where such items are given equal priority with the real struggles of ordinary people. Thus, if you are looking for items about "green anarchy","insurrectionism", "post anarchism", "post leftism", "primitivism" or any other psychological cult I suggest you look elsewhere.

5)While my own anarchism may "seem" to be congruent with what has become referred to as "class struggle anarchism" there are differences. My own view of class structure in the modern world is considerably more complex than that held by most modern anarchists. Hence my reluctance to "sign up" with the best of modern class struggle anarchism. If I want to state it in its crudest form I believe that we no longer live under "capitalism". We presently live under managerial societies that have "some" capitalist" aspects. This opinion informs my own politics in many ways, not the least of which is my utter immunity to "third worldism" where a new ruling class struggles to attain power. This view of the world also informs some of my own attitudes to social questions here in the "developed world". Hence my opposition to that part of the working class whose product is "social control"- the social workers are the prime example. An anarchism that retains such enterprises is not worthy of the name "anarchist". Some of this may seem rather extreme. Most(almost all) people would be quite comfortable with a world without social workers. But few can imagine a world without the caste labelled as "teachers". The "anarchist project" also envisions a world where children are not jailed for 7 to 8 hours a day to facilitate work for the ruling class.

6)The languages of Molly's Blog are basically English and French. I do often translate items from Spanish, another language that I am quite familiar with. I believe that there there should be an "anarchist news aggregator" for Canada that would be totally(ie every post) bilingual in English and French. That is something for the future, and it is not the function of a site such as Molly's Blog. For myself I will continue with the format that I have devised. Items from Québec will be given in French first and then in English. Spanish items will be translated, and a reference to the Spanish original will be given. Regular readers of this board may realize that I have been long amiss over the "Enlaces en Espanol" section of my links. Please have patience as it will appear soon.

7)Before I close I would like to point out that Molly's Blog has the most extensive and complete links section of any site on the "anarcho-net" in terms of contacts. This is despite the efforts of some sites, where money is being made, to replicate a similar presentation .Yes, I'll make this claim here and now. I don't make a penny from what I do. What I have provided is much more complete than anything else on the internet, though I still have to put the Spanish language section on line. It very much focuses on Canada, but it is still much more complete than any American site in terms of their own country.

VENEZUELA:

CHAVEZISMO VERSUS THE WORKERS ONCE MORE:

The following essay is reprinted from the News section of the Libcom site. It was translated from the Spanish language Internacionismo, affiliated with the 'International Communist Current'. Molly has blogged briefly on the subject of "left-communism" before, and there is little doubt that I do not consider them as realistic in their tactics or accurate in their theory. If I wanted to sum them up I would say that they are the last real Marxists on Earth. Well over a century after all of Marx's theories were disproven (or , more often,contradicted by those who wished to call themselves "Marxists) they hold to the theories of Das Kapital in all their baroque and antique "glory". Yet, such fundamentalism has its virtues as well as its vices. These people put themselves into a position where they can have zero chance of ever affecting the world, but, just because they are in such a position they are thoroughly immune to the ill-disguised power worship of too much of the left. They may not recognize that the economic system mis-named as "socialism" is the tool whereby a new managerial ruling class claws its way to power, but they have the unfailing instinct to reject this lie, even if they give it the wrong name. Their instincts are true in that they recognize immediately that such leftist demagogues as Chavez are representatives of a ruling class rather than "liberators".But anyways, here is the article.

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Steel workers' strike in Venezuela attacked by Chavez' state
tags:

Steel workers in Venezuela have been attacked by the Chavez government following a series of strikes.
The following is a translation from Internacionalismo.
The Chávez government - with the support of the opposition and unions - has unleashed repression against the workers of the Steel Zone of Venezuela who are struggling for their most basic necessities. Here we see the real Senor Chávez and his "socialism of the 21st century".

After more than 13 months of discussion of their collective contract, the steel workers at Ternium-SIDOR have had enough. Indignant about the starvation wages they receive (near to the minimum salary, in one of the regions of Venezuela with the highest cost of living) and the deplorable working conditions that have lead to the deaths of 18 workers and left dozens ill from industrial illness over less than a decade, they have carried out several strikes against the firm's refusal to meet their demands about wages and working conditions.

Various parts of the media have echoed the firm's campaign of victimisation, claiming that their demands amount to more than the firm's annual sales. These lies form part of a "black out" of information, both from the opposition media and the official media, about the true causes of the metal workers' struggles. Since the 1990's these workers have been subjected to a policy of cuts in pay and working conditions, introduced through the programme of restructuring, that has led to their benefits being lower than other workers in the region. The metalworkers' struggle is about a decent level of living. They know that if they accept the company's terms and conditions [1] they will suffer more than two years of miserable increases in their wages and benefits, whilst the price of food and the cost of living increases by more than 30% annually, according to the none too reliable figures of the Central Bank of Venezuela. Another important demand of the movement is to make the contracted workers (who make up 75% of the workforce of 1,600) permanent, since this will give them better benefits. Thus, the struggle of the SIDOR workers is expressing the discontent and uncertainty that dominates the workers in the region and the whole country, faced with the endless increase in the price of food and cost of living generally, along with precarious working conditions.

Likewise, the metalworkers have had enough of the bickering between representatives of the company, government and unions. The latter in particular have progressively undermined the initial demands of the movement (the unions are now "demanding" 50 Bolivars a day, whereas at the beginning of negotiations it was 80). Having fulfilled all of the requirements for going on strike, they took part in the high level commission formed by the nefarious triumvirate. Whilst these gentlemen discussed behind the workers' backs, the workers themselves assembled at the steel work's doors and decided to carry out several stoppages, the most important of these being that of the 12th March for 80 hours which expressed the radicalisation of the movement. They did not have to wait long for the firm and the state to respond: on the 14th March the National Guard and police unleashed a furious repression, leaving more than 15 workers injured and 53 arrested. With this repressive action the Chávez government has unmasked itself in front of the workers: it cast aside its "workers" uniform and put on its true uniform, that of the defence of the interests of the national capital. It is not the first time that the "workers and socialist" state has attacked workers' struggle for their own demands: we only need to mention for example, the terrible repression meted out to oil workers last year who were struggling to improve their working conditions.

The SUTISS union is also part of the repression of the workers (despite union leaders suffering repression), since its role is to act as a fireman in the movement. It tries to put itself at the head of the movement whilst negotiating a reduction in the wage demand.
Referendum and nationalisation: new traps for the movement

Faced with the workers' intransigence, they have pulled another trick from up their sleeve: the holding of a referendum in order to consult each worker about their agreement or not with the firm's proposals. Promoted by the Chavist minister of Labour (a Trotskyist or ex-Trotskyist), the proposal has already received the agreement of the SUTISS, though with certain "conditions". Class instinct has led several workers to reject this trap, which is aimed at undermining the sovereign assemblies (where the real strength of the working class is expressed) by turning each worker into a "citizen", who will have to define himself for or against the firm and state in isolation by means of the ballot box!! Faced with this the workers need to affirm themselves through their sovereign assemblies.

Another trap used against the movement is the proposition by the unions and various "revolutionary" sectors of Chavism to renationalise SIDOR, which is mainly owned by Argentine capital (the Venezuelan state owns 20% of the shares). This campaign could be a disaster for the struggle, since the workers have no choice but to confront the capitalists, be they Argentine or Venezuelan state bureaucrats. Nationalisation does not mean the disappearance of exploitation; the state-boss, even with a "worker's" face, has no other option than to permanently try to attack workers' wages and working conditions. The left of capital presents the concentration of companies in the hands of the state as a quick way to "socialism", hiding one of the fundamental lessons of Marxism: the state is the representative of the interests of each national bourgeoisie, and therefore the enemy of the proletariat. The Chavist bourgeoisie today is the head of the state which is seeking to increase the amount of surplus value it can gain, and in the name of "Bolivarian socialism" massively increases the level of precariousness of work through the missions and jointly managed companies (as happened with the workers of Invepal or Inveval).

These "Bolivarian revolutionaries" try to make the workers forget that for many years SIDOR was a state firm, and that they have had to struggle at various ties against the high rank bureaucrats of the state who administered it and their forces of repression, struggling for their own demands but also against the unions (the allies of capital in the factories). At the beginning of the 70's during the first Caldera government, this included burning down part of the installations of the CTV in Caracas in response to its anti-worker actions.

The state has been in the hands of the Chavists since 1999, but has not magically lost its capitalist character. All that has changed are its clothes, which now have a "socialist" colouring; but it is still a fundamental organ in the defence of the interests of capital against those of labour. The fact that Chávez presents himself as a "Sidorist" or a "worker" when it suits him should not confuse us about the class character of the Chavist government, which capital put in place in order to defend its system of exploitation as it sinks deeper and deeper into crisis. The workers are not so stupid as to believe these "revolutionaries" who put forwards the panacea of "re-nationalisation", but who live like bourgeois, earning salaries 30 times or more than the official minimum wage.
The only way to win: real workers' solidarity and solidarity with the population

The only way that this movement can succeed is through looking for solidarity. Initially with the contract workers, where the demand to make them permanent is one of the principle expressions of solidarity; but it is no less important to win the solidarity of workers in other branches of industry, at the regional or national level, since whether we work in the state sector or the private sector, we are all being hit by the blows of the economic crisis. It is also necessary to express solidarity with the population of Guayana, where the unemployed are affected by the high cost of living, and by the problems that the state cannot resolve, such as delinquency, housing, etc. However, this solidarity cannot be carried out through the unions, since they are the main organs for controlling the struggle, creating divisions between different industries and sectors, and in the last instance, complementing state repression; neither can solidarity with the local population be left in the hands of the social organisations created by the state, such as the communal councils. Solidarity must be "generated" by the workers themselves, through assemblies open to other workers.

The struggle of the metalworkers is our struggle, because they are fighting for a decent life, for the benefit of the whole of the proletariat. But the best benefit, apart for the momentary increase in the level of wages, resides in the development of consciousness of the strength that the proletariat has in its own hands, outside of the unions and the other institutions invented by the state in order to control social discontent.

The national bourgeoisie know that the situation in Guyana is intensely dangerous to its interests. The concentration of workers in this region and their experience of past struggles makes it very explosive, since at the same time there is a wider accumulation of labour and social discontent which has existed for some time due to the attacks on employment and workers' living conditions. In this sense, the so-called Metal Zone has a potential for transforming itself into a focal point for the workers' struggle in the country, as happened in the 60's and 70's.

The SIDOR workers have taken the only road possible for confronting the attacks of capital, that of the struggle. Spreading the fight to other branches of regional and national production, whilst looking for solidarity from the population as a whole: this is the road that will enable the Venezuelan proletariat to become part of an international movement for the overthrow capital and the creation of a real socialist society.
Note

[1] An increase of 44 Bolivars divided up as follows: 20 initially, 10 more in 2009 and another 10 in 2010, with another 1.5% based on performance.