The Need For More Leaderless Action.

      What is happening in France should be of tremendous interest to all those who wish to change society away from this corporate/state plutocracy to a system controlled by the people. This not a protest organised by some trade union or political party, this is a spontaneous uprising by people across a wide spectrum and not following the dictates of some ideology. Here we see people who didn't wait for the "leaders" to tell them to take to the streets, it grew among the people and spread across the country. Union leaders, bureaucrats, academics, party leaders, and academics stand confused, and I would think a little afraid as they can't get control of this phenomenon.  

     I have often said that nobody knows the spark that will start the fire. This particular fire that is raging across France started with a few disgruntled truck drivers who voiced their views on social media. That was the spark that ignited the underlying anger and discontent that rumbles under the surface in every corporate/state plutocracy that controls and exploits the lives of millions. All I can say is keep creating those sparks, the tinder is there, one spark is all it takes.
Two opinions of democracy:

 Photos by Abdulmonam Eassa

      There is an excellent article on the events in France by Jerome Roos, in Roar magazine. Here are a couple of extracts:

        What began four weeks ago as a nationwide response to a widely-disseminated Facebook call by two angry truck drivers to block local roads and highway toll stations in protest against a new “ecological” fuel tax introduced by Macron’s government has now spiraled out into a full-blown popular revolt against the banker president and the wealthy corporate elite he so openly represents.

And how various groups can gel:

       In recent days, the political crisis has been aggravated by what appears to be a veritable convergence of social struggles. On December 1, ambulance drivers joined the fray, demonstrating in front of the presidential palace with screaming sirens. On Monday, December 3, French students radicalized their ongoing struggle by blocking access to over 200 high schools; the following Thursday an estimated 100,000 of them participated in a nationwide walkout against Macron’s changes to university admission procedures and a rise in administrative fees. Shocking footage of several dozen students being placed in stress positions by riot police for an extended period of time soon went viral and served to further inflame the tensions and anti-police sentiment among the gilets jaunes. Then, last Saturday, thousands of environmentalists at a pre-scheduled climate demonstration in Paris donned yellow vests in solidarity. Meanwhile, the main unions for French farmers, truck drivers and public transport workers have all announced their intention to go on strike.

The need to ignore the old avenues of dialogue and compromise:

      Four weeks in, the uprising also continues to confound mainstream journalists and experts. “The gilets jaunes have blown up the old political categories,” one French media activist told ROAR on Saturday night, after a long day of riots in the capital. “They reject all political leaders, all political parties and any form of political mediation. No one really knows how to confront or deal with this movement — not the media, not the government, nor anyone else. What we are witnessing is unprecedented in French history.” While the outcome of these dramatic developments remains uncertain, it is clear that France is currently living through a rupture of historic proportions, taking the country onto uncharted terrain. For the left, the emerging scenario presents both exciting opportunities, but also a number of significant political risks. How are radical and autonomous social forces to insert themselves into this unfamiliar and uncertain situation without losing sight of the dangers that lie ahead?

Read the full article HERE: 

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

Imperialism's New Debt Colonies.

       What is the difference between a bag full of money and a gunboat? None, they are both weapons of imperialism. Capitalism shapes itself according to its needs, the gunboat was replaced by the more subtle bag of money, but when that fails it has no hesitation in going back to the gunboat. Though nowadays the gunboat is much larger and more powerful, as the Middle East has found out in recent times. Modern capitalism still uses blood, death and destruction to further its ends, but in recent years it has swung behind the bag of money model to dominate and subjugate nations, Greece obviously springs to mind as a country beaten into submission by the bag of money, in the form of debt.

        

           This is an excerpt published by ROAR Magazine from Jerome Roos’ essay, “The New Debt Colonies”, well worth a read, Marxist or not.

          Today we are witnessing the resurgence of an old phenomenon: the debt colony. A decade after the collapse the U.S. housing bubble and the onset of the worst capitalist crisis in living memory, governments around the world continue to bear the burden of historically unprecedented public debt loads. In some cases, most spectacularly in the peripheral countries of the Eurozone but also in a number of emerging markets, these mounting financial obligations have led to crippling sovereign debt crises – which have in turn impelled the dominant creditor powers to intervene aggressively on foreign bondholders’ behalf, imposing highly intrusive regimes of international financial supervision on distressed borrowers in order to ensure continued debt servicing. The fiscal autonomy of Greece and Puerto Rico, in particular, has now been abolished in all but name, although similar processes have long been afoot elsewhere as well.

        This contemporary experience in turn carries strong historical echoes. A century and a half ago, Karl Marx already observed how the emergence of the national debt in early-modern Europe constituted one of the “most powerful levers of primitive accumulation,” leading to the “alienation of the state” by private financiers and “giving rise to stock exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.” These dynamics intensified during the Age of Imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the export of European and U.S. capital to the newly independent countries of Latin America and the Mediterranean added an international dimension to this long-standing process of dispossession through debt. During this period, the dominant creditor powers regularly subjected distressed sovereign borrowers to external financial control – often under force of arms. The British invasion of Egypt in 1882, the German push to establish an International Financial Commission in Greece in 1898, and the appearance of European gunboats on the Venezuelan coast in 1902 are but some of the most prominent cases in point.

       Today, such long-standing processes of financial subjugation continue in a new form – through what has euphemistically come to be known as “international crisis management.” Ever since the Mexican debt crisis of 1982, banks and bondholders in the wealthy creditor countries have increasingly come to rely on their own governments and international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank to impose painful structural adjustment programs on crisis-stricken debtor countries in the developing world. Over the course of two decades, international creditors – private and official alike – went on to plunder the immense wealth of the Global South, from Argentina to Zaire, aggressively opening up local economies to foreign capital and restructuring them in line with the neoliberal prerogatives of the Washington Consensus. The result has been a vast flow of capital “upstream,” from public hands in the global periphery to private hands in the advanced capitalist core, with developing countries transferring an estimated $4.2 trillion in interest payments to their creditors in Europe and North America since 1982, far outstripping the official-sector development aid these countries received during the same period.¹

           In the wake of the global financial crisis, these same methods have now come to be applied on a massive scale in the capitalist heartland itself. The result has not just been a new wave of “accumulation by dispossession,” but in some cases also the effective abolition of national sovereignty. When Greece’s fledgling Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was forced into a humiliating capitulation to his European creditors in the summer of 2015, for instance, an anonymous diplomat from a Germany-allied country candidly described the terms of surrender as “akin to turning Greece into an economic protectorate.”² In his memoirs of his brief tenure as finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis repeatedly denounces the creditors’ financial intimidation tactics as an example of “latter-day gunboat diplomacy.” When Poland’s foreign minister was asked for the reason behind his country’s refusal to join the euro, all he had to do was point south: “Greece is de facto a colony,” he explained, “We don’t want to repeat this scenario.”

        These ongoing developments raise a number of important questions about the relationship between contemporary patterns in international crisis management and Europe and America’s long-standing history of financial imperialism. How different is our contemporary era really from the “era of gunboat diplomacy” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the dominant creditor powers also regularly intervened in the debtors’ sovereign affairs to defend bondholder interests? What are the continuities and discontinuities between the two periods? And can the hotly debated and polemical notion of imperialism still serve as a useful analytical tool to help us make sense of the current conjuncture? If so, how far can the classical Marxist theories of the phenomenon take us in elucidating the asymmetric power relations at the heart of the contemporary global political economy – and what, if anything, can be done to revamp existing theoretical frameworks to better reflect the enduring relevance of imperialism in our time?

           In what follows, I will argue that imperialism clearly remains an important factor in the early 21st century – even if the original Marxist accounts require extensive revision in light of the recent transformations of global capitalism. The lasting contribution of the classical theorists was to anchor their critiques of imperialism within a broader critique of political economy, highlighting the central role of finance in driving imperialist relations of domination. This, I argue, should remain the starting point for any contemporary analysis of imperialism. At the same time, however, the classical theories also suffered from a number of important limitations. Most consequentially, perhaps, they tended to emphasize the more overt manifestations of imperialist power (territorial conquest and military intervention) at the expense of its more subtle, structural dynamics (operating through the global financial system), which ended up blinding them to some of the underlying dependencies that later kept the asymmetric power relations between debtors and creditors in place even in the absence of territorial conquest or military intervention.

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

Vive Le Commune!!

       Overthrown, but not conquered, the Commune in our days is born again. It is no longer a dream of the vanquished, caressing in imagination the lovely mirage of hope. No! the ‘commune’ of today is becoming the visible and definite aim of the revolution rumbling beneath our feet.” Kropotkin on the Paris Commune.

       Another interesting article by Jerome Roos from Roar Mag. Well worth reading the full article. 

What Is the Commune?

----------- Historically speaking, communal ways of organizing social life long precede the development of the modern state, and humanity on the whole has spent far more time living communally than it has under capitalism.

        To an extent, historical experience therefore lends credence to the proposition that, in the long run, the commune-form might secure a far more stable social order than the state-form, whose contradictory unity with crisis-prone finance capital renders it increasingly vulnerable to social conflict and systemic chaos, not to mention ecological catastrophe. On this point, indigenous communities and peasant communes may hold some important clues for the identification of alternative developmental pathways—which helps explain why theorists like Marx and Kropotkin spent many years studying such pre-capitalist societies.

         Nevertheless, there are clearly important differences between these ancient communal forms and the type of revolutionary commune of which we are speaking here, not least in terms of the latter’s emancipatory, future-oriented and internationalist horizon. Crucially, the modern commune fully embraces the expansiveness and universality of the socialist ideal. To paraphrase Subcomandante Marcos, whose Zapatista movement has formed its own indigenous communes in southern Mexico, the revolutionary commune is “not a dream from the past [or] something that came from our ancestors. It comes to us from the future; it is the next step that we have to take.”-------

       We count on the present generation to bring about the social revolution within the commune, to put an end to the ignoble system of bourgeois exploitation, to rid the people of the tutelage of the state, to inaugurate a new era of liberty, equality, solidarity in the evolution of the human race.”

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Towards An Anti-capitalist Politics.

       Sometimes you read an article that draws together some of your thoughts in to a clearer understanding, it says some things better than you could yourself. Though I don't embrace every word in this particle article, I certainly think it is well worth reading in full.

    Three excerpts from Jerome Roos's article, Towards an Anti-capitalist Politics, in ROAR MAG:

     Faced with the overwhelming power of capital and the escalating violence of the state, stuck between the institutional inertia of the old left and the ephemeral spontaneity of the new, the opposition remains impotent and confused. Evidently, it is not the “historical inevitability” of the capitalist law of value, but the left’s own lack of internal coherence and the conspicuous absence of visionary post-capitalist perspectives that keeps it stuck in an endlessly repeating present.

    As the future collapses in on itself and the left’s revolutionary aspirations wither on the vine, it is the weakness of our clenched fist and the paucity of our collective imagination, far more than the “natural laws” of their invisible hand, that now makes the end of the world appear more likely than the end of capitalism. It has become painfully clear that, if the left is to truly to chart a way out of capitalist barbarity, it will have to first reinvent itself.

Let the dead bury their dead

    What could such a “reinvented left” look like? Clearly, it will not come falling out of the sky, nor can it be conceived on paper by the high priests of radical theory. Rather, its political imaginary, organizational forms and strategic orientations will all have to be constructed through collective processes of political agitation and firmly rooted in the structural contradictions and periodic crises of contemporary capitalism; in the material conditions and lived experience of ordinary working people, oppressed minorities and marginalized communities; and in the concrete materiality and revolutionary potential of actually existing struggles.

A little further on, on the rise of Corbynism:

      Democratic socialism, by contrast, appears to have been staging a cautious comeback in recent years, especially in its various left-populist forms. Buoyed by the collapse of social democracy and the constituent impulse of recent mobilizations against neoliberalism and austerity, a raft of leftist forces has been on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic—ranging from the progressive governments of the Latin American Pink Tide to the radical left parties in Greece and Spain, on to the self-declared “socialist” candidacies of Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom.

    But while the emergence of electoral alternatives to neoliberal cynicism certainly marks an advance compared to the shallow theatrics of electoral politics prior to the crisis, the defeat (and subsequent cooptation) of the radical left in Greece and the gradual receding of the Pink Tide in Latin America clearly reveal the limits of the once-vaunted model of “21st century socialism”, whose dependence on global capital and international financial institutions remains woefully undiminished.

Closing with a wee look to the future:

        Yet it often seems that the future remains trapped between the internecine squabbles of two seemingly irreconcilable “lefts”: an old one centered narrowly on taking power, and a new one still struggling to come to terms with its own potential. Beyond the haughty impotence of the former and the apparent perplexity of the latter, the theory and practice of building power offers fertile and expanding political ground for a new anti-capitalist politics. We must now explode the tensions between them into a common project that can begin to give a concrete and democratic organizational form to the restive constituent potential that is craving to assert itself from below.

       As we gather force and move along the process of construction, we will gradually notice the horizons of possibility expanding: the higher we rise, the farther we see; until, one day, all that meets the eye is the glorious sight of rebel cities everywhere rising up against the common enemy, humanity resolving at last to “throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales.” Until then, you will find us in the streets: preparing the ground, laying the foundations—building power.

      Rather than exploding the tensions between the "old left" and the "new left", I believe the "old left" has to abandon its tried and failed ideology, and throw its lot in with the anti-parliamentarian  left of the streets, there's where success for the people starts and eventually culminates in success.  

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk