Cunning Hired Knaves

What is happening in Spain? - Various Authors

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 04:28:21 -0400

JORGE MORUNO

http://larevueltadelasneuronas.wordpress.com

“There is a Spaniard who wants to live and to live he begins, between one Spain that dies and another that yawns” Antonio Machado

Spain appears destined to be the European colony of capitalism 2.0. Casinos, parties, beaches, music festivals and all kind of activities designed to offer pleasure to the visitor and servitude to the person attending him. The lumpen-oligarchy that governs us believes that devaluing us as people is the main selling-point that will calm the markets.

Precarized labour, and precarity in access to transport and housing, are the compass guiding the madness that rules us. It marketises those spaces that had remained outside the market, such as health or education, and anything that sounds like it has to do with the public or a hard won right. They impose upon us a flexibility devoid of any security, subjugate us in the name of jobs that don’t exist, and inject us with fear so that we obey. They single out the unemployed person as a parasite and the person who works as privileged. Meanwhile big businesses are responsible for 71% of the €81 billion in evaded taxes and 63% of wage workers take home €1,000 or less each month.

We have not “lived beyond our means”, as they endlessly repeat to us. On the contrary, for them, the 1%, to live within their means, they have to live on top of us and moreover blame us for it. They subjugate and discipline the collective intellect in order to submit it to a labour market where there is no guarantee of work and where work guarantees you nothing. The disobedient multitudes are laying claim to their role of innovators, the true entrepreneur that builds in common for common ends, up against the surplus value of financial rent and the blackmail of debt. Marx said in his article Revolutionary Spain that ‘Insurrectionary risings are as old in Spain as that sway of court favorites against which they are usually directed.’ In Spain there was a Civil War, and not just a coup d’état, because people, those from below, decided to defend life against the sad passions of Francoism. Today we take up the mantle of past dignity in order to combat our worst enemy, the same one we share with the rest of the world: the fear and cynicism that leads us into neo-slavery, which is nothing less than being free so as to become serfs.

RAMÓN ESPINAR MERINO

@ramonespinar

In the economic sphere, the crisis that began in 2008, and the fundamental collapse of the financial and construction sectors, present a desolate panorama. After two decades of a supposed economic miracle, the Emperor has been conclusively left without any clothes, as in the story: the Spanish economy has the highest rates of unemployment in the EU, especially so when it comes to youth unemployment, and a structural incapacity to put in place productive structures to replace the vacuum left by the construction sector and the meltdown of the property speculation model, both for the public sector (especially for local authority funding) and the private sector.

The exponential growth in debt as a consequence, alongside the interference of misbegotten speculative interests which translate into the rise in the bond yield, in the mechanism that sets the price of debt, combined with the paralysis of European institutions incapable of doing anything, headed by the ECB, not only portrays a scene of stagnation, but also allows us to talk about the end of a cycle.

The debt crisis means the asphyxiation of the public sectors of countries whose only escape in the medium term is a growth in public investment to replace sectors of the economy that have crashed never to return. The snake eats its own tail, and causes the metastasis to spread to ever bigger countries in population size, with the consequent impossibility for institutions of generating ways out.

In the political sphere, the situation is characterised by various elements: the EU’s proven inability to find a way out of the Spanish situation has translated into a de facto bailout without a quid pro quo, in which the Troika dictates the conditions in which the country must be ruled behind the backs of the citizens, without paying a single euro in return; the inability of the PP and PSOE governments to stand up for the country’s interests against the Diktat; the strategy of the elites, in the heat of the crisis, to dismantle the public services and social protection which, whilst never excessively generous in the Spanish model, had consolidated the model of coexistence since the Constitution of 1978.

Thus the situation can be resumed in two elements: in economic terms, it is impossible for this model of managing the crisis to provide, by any means, a way for the Spanish economy to recover prior levels of growth and quality of life, based on cutting back rights and narrowing the economy; in the political sphere, the neoliberal solution to the crisis of neoliberalism had blown apart the cement that provided the political regime with social consensus, and they have smashed the foundations of the social pact that has, as we speak, been put in question by the permanent state of exception decreed by the economic elites.

In this scenario, the social movements that have arisen as of the 15th of May 2011 have drawn a road map to follow: the break with the current Regime and the move towards a process of recovering politics that allows, at least as a first step, for the citizens to take on the responsibility of ruling themselves at a moment in which their rulers have placed sovereignty in the hands of private capital and private interests.

JÓNATHAM F. MORICHE

http://jfmoriche.blogspot.com

“In January of 1980, in the salons of the Hotel Ritz in Madrid, the Spanish reform passes its exam in front of the Trilateral Commission”, intones the narrator of the documentary Después de (After), whilst the camera portrays the noblemen Pedrol, Osorio, Garrigues and Salat in animated conversation. “The dictatorship has been ended without changing the social system” continues the narration, and “the democracy born from above has been born with a mortgage” (and proof of this will be that although Franco had died in 1976 and there had been a Constitution that was formally democratic in operation since 1978, this extraordinary tape by siblings Cecilia and José Bartolomé would be kept locked away between 1981 and 1983).

Spanish democracy has never left behind its founding nature of administered democracy. For the Francoist bureaucratic and corporate elites (including the monarchy), the Transition did not so much constitute a real rupture with the dictatorship as the formalising of its adherence to the norms and customs of the advanced capitalism that surrounded it. Despite the anti-systemic mobilisiations of the most conscious and combative sectors of anti-Francoism, the new constitutional consensus swept away those who opposed it with a diabolical combination of seduction (institutional or commercial co-optation) and terror (police or para-police violence). The civic-military attempt at a putsch in 1981 would conclusively discipline a centre-left that won power in 1982 with a rigorously neo-liberal programme (incorporation to NATO, industrial reconversion, liberalisation of the labour market, financial reform). In exchange for the right wing giving up dictatorship, (a large part of) the left gave up politics.

For 35 years, this system, based on cohesion among the elites and the depoliticisation of the masses, seemed to have worked. It showed signs of exhaustion during the crazed second imperial legislature of the neocon Aznar, it experienced ephemeral reformist hopes with the first legislature of the social-liberal Rodríguez Zapatero, and sank with the second, in the face of the ferocious impact of the global crisis on the already insane indigenous economic model. Barely seven months after its precarious electoral victory (due to the opponent not turning up), Rajoy already seems a mere parenthesis until the forming of a government of bipartisan unity headed up by some technocrat, to apply the memorandum of the European Directorate without any fuss: the tragic twilight of a Regime of (as defined by Vicenç Navarro) “incomplete democracy and insufficient welfare”, now under transition towards some kind of debtocratic protectorate that is unashamedly authoritarian and squalid. With the streets boiling over in spontaneous and electrifying (albeit intermittent and problematic) activity since the spring of 2011, the behaviour of the multitudes is now the most decisive and unpredictable of the unknowns in the Spanish equation.

JUAN DOMINGO SÁNCHEZ ESTOP

http://iohannesmaurus.blogspot.com

By definition, it is not possible to build a democracy atop a landscape of mass graves and a past of terror. The situation of crisis puts an end to that illusion. In the crisis, a social whole of complex articulation can come undone: each of its elements has its own lifespan and effectiveness, and also its potential fault lines. Nothing guarantees that the crisis is the end, just as there are no guarantees that the old order will remain in place. The precariousness of the system’s balances are clear on numerous levels. First of all there is an erosion of the regime’s legitimacy. The recovery of historical memory, the deep disrepair of bipartisanism, widespread corruption (the symbol of which is a monarchy that simultaneously appears as the pinnacle of a system of plunder and the heir to Francoism), all mean that the population perceives the political system not as a democracy in which its voice is heard, but as a regime that rules beyond the reach of democracy and even against it.

This problem of legitimacy also affects the economic system which, in connivance with the political system, has dashed the expectations for the future of numerous sectors and various generations, particularly the youngest, by liquidating the already starved welfare state, imposing extravagant levels of unemployment, and attacking wages and pensions. Today even the agents of the State’s apparatuses of repression challenge the government’s measures in the streets. The illusion of living in a democracy escapes these days via the same drains as the hope of living in a system in which all can enjoy a general prosperity. Thus the neoliberal cycle closes in Spain as a political crisis and a social and economic crisis. Both crises are inseparable, since the Spanish regime of the Reform that now enters a grave crisis was the one that opened the doors to neoliberalism, not through immediate terror as with the dictatorship of Pinochet, but by retroactive recourse to the primitive accumulation of Francoist terror. The lack of a rupture with Francoism kept active the wellsprings of the regime’s “legitimacy”. At the hand of the new social expressions of labour that make up the social base of the 15-M and similar movements, this terror is starting to disappear. Is this how an end comes to the cycle that began on the 18th of July 1936?

PABLO BUSTINDUY

http://pourlafindutemps.com

Rule by debt is not a linear device, but instead functions by inducing catastrophes. Thus the exception becomes the norm: each crash allows for new modes of expropriation to be generated, each time at a greater order of magnitude. Spain is quickly moving towards another such moment of bifurcation. And though the political task is tremendous, there is no other alternative but to try and block this transition, to derail it towards a process of radical democratisation.

The draining of political legitimacy from the regime opens up a chink of opportunity. The multitude mobilised in the streets of the State has now put on record its growth and its density: its ability to act, and to produce truths beyond established grammar and institutionality, is ever greater. The bifurcation, however, is double: the resistance must also change gear. Its ability must be articulated urgently in a broad and popular front, that allows it to actively influence the process and to neutralise once and for all the risk of its colonisation, of an opportunist and reactionary capture of the discontent in the street.

The conclusive politicisation of debt and its non-payment ought to be at the centre of this articulation: the government must be prevented from committing suicide so as to regenerate itself as an even more ‘technical’ and dictatorial monster. When the government gets ready to sign the next memorandum, it has to find itself confronted by the demos mobilised in a clear and unambiguous form. I think that building that front with strategic intelligence, in the short time available, is the fundamental political task of these days.

JOSÉ LUÍS CARRETERO MIRAMAR

http://joseluiscarreteromiramar.blogspot.com

The heat beats down on the asphalt in the streets of Madrid, but this is not just one more torrid summer. The temperature is high, indeed, getting higher all the time, but this can’t simply be blamed on the Sky King. Now, in the middle of August, the streets also burn with the railworkers’ strike, the taxi drivers’ protests, the public servant demonstrations, the ever more explicit expressions of a multitude that has had its fill of betrayals and unanswered aggression.

The cutbacks, the intervention, the new adjustments, the next bailout…the memorandum that is never the last one and which is always followed by a new memorandum, whilst the mountain of external debt is indefinitely piled higher and higher thanks to the enormous (strictly speaking, incalculable) amounts of private debt, belonging to financial entities and big businesses, that are going to be socialised.

Class struggle is waking up angry in the same the same streets that, not so long ago, denied it through an arrogant glorification of consumerism. They are looting us. It is that simple. Working conditions, social services, health and education infrastructure, public goods..all is coercively transformed into money, the same money that registers on shiny computer screens so that it can be sent virtually to fill the unfathomable holes in the balance sheets of national and foreign financial entities.

We are witnessing a radical redistribution of wealth in favour of the enormously wealthy, carried out by a ruling class that yearns for the abyss that its own blindness makes ever more probable.

It is a torrid summer. We have said so already. But it is not just any torrid summer. Today the streets vibrate with the texture of a dignity revisited, of a creativity regained, of a beautiful and precarious solidarity that manifests itself despite the opaque glow of police shields.

The streets are full of people. People who, sooner rather than later, will demand their primordial right to a new type of abundance: that of a direct, real and deep democracy in a liveable future for the many.

JESÚS GÓMEZ GUTIÉRREZ

http://jesusgomez.lainsignia.org

We are not living through a crisis, but a systemic change, the final phase in the conservative revolution started by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. It involves destroying the social pact that came out of the Second World War to shape our circumstances to suit a new economy, in which labour as a factor is starting to be treated with contempt. This is the greatest error of European social democracy and a large part of the left: believing that with a little Keynes and a little welfarism, we can reverse the situation and turn back. There is no longer a back.

But it is also the moment for building alternatives, which by necessity will have to be internationalist, without the waffling of previous eras. And this moment had very special characteristics in Spain: in addition to the effects of the conservative revolution, which are global, there are the shortcomings of the regime that emerged from the dictatorship. The Spanish population is starting to understand that our political and economic framework has met its last, that we need a new one and that we will not conquer it by respecting the present framework.

The 15-M, which emerged as a cry, is evolving little by little towards a full blown regenerationist movement. Of course, it is not enough. Poverty and social fracture are moving ahead far more quickly than our efforts, but we are no longer just a principle, but rather a political fact that the system cannot look down upon. Even today, with millions of people unemployed and condemned to exclusion, we have much more than a year ago, when we occupied the squares: we have restored hope to people. We only need to learn to be ambitious; to go to the root of the problem.

LOLA MATAMALA

http://vamosacambiarelmundo.org

Translation note: the original Spanish language version of this text uses feminine pronouns throughout (e.g. ‘nosotras’ meaning ‘we’, or ‘vosotras’, meaning ‘you’ plural), designating the subjects being referred to as feminine. Since there is no direct translation for these in English, they are included in brackets. ‘Compañera’, for the same reason, has been left untranslated.

Over two years ago, while at work, I was listening to the radio. They were talking about how this country where I live was starting to bear the brunt of what had happened in the US with junk mortgages. The announcer (locutora) from one of your companies was warning us solemnly that we could go into recession. Nothing new for me, or for any of my compañeras in that badly paid, precarious and strenuous job: that thing called ‘recession’ had been living for some time in our purses. So faced with this extraordinary scoop that you supplied us with, I barely blinked.

Things, true enough, are getting worse. For us (nosotras), of course, the ones who pay for all your bailouts. But also for you (vosotras) too because from behind the smoke and noise of all this destruction, your perverse plan is coming to light, drawn up from the corridors of the European Central Bank, Standard and Poor’s, the Financial Times and any other of those clubs, guilds and unions where in your business lunches you decide on the shape of the world and for dessert you eat people tart.

A plan very similar to the one you drew up previously in the purses of the smart and the beautiful in America, Asia, or Africa. There are times these days when I cry, between amazement and rage, whenever I listen to you announcing the latest chunk of our lives you have decided to snatch from us. But I’ll stop complaining now. I’ll stop. If not, this text will only make you rub your avaricious hands together, thinking that my compañeras and I are worn out. Instead, I’m going to show you what I do to dodge the bullets you let fly from your shotgun mouths (Lagarde’s, Merkel’s and Ashton’s have lipstick on them!) : 1. As I share a bed, kisses and embraces without restraint; 2. I collect, and give away, books, records, plant pots, brushes and shirts; 3. I amuse myself by looking at fields in which to plant onions, garlic, and other desires; 4. I think about the crop of compañeras on both sides of the pond; 5. I find spaces that are free from your clutches, and there I oxygenate myself with all the colours you try to rob from us; and 6. I always raise a glass to those who (las que) deserve it.

After this display and with my cells brimming over with energy (in chaotic but productive connection with the cells of others (otras), with those whom I obstinately keep meeting up with and without your permission in the squares for more than a year now), I no longer listen to the hypnotic speaker from your company and, in succinct response to your menacing memorandum, I am passing you the list of a few things I am going to do alongside my compañeras: 1. we will awake the sleeping population (don’t get agitated (violentas), we can’t reveal what with!); 2. we will deliver a very severe up yours sign to your Debt; 3. we will gather your names, those of all of you who (las que) have signed the forms and approvals that got us this far, and we will communicate to you in writing, that you shall no longer count on us (nosotras), and we no longer count on you (vosotras); and 4. we will organise a witches’ sabbath for the coming hours. The bonfire will be fuelled with the package we had in our homes without us realising: The Transition in Spain or how to keep them fooled for nearly 37 years (it is a vast work, hundreds of thousands of pages re-written and re-edited daily by the major media groups, their house intellectuals and other courtesans of thought and word). We shall also burn the grey cushions of your dreams (your dream of “social peace”, your dream of “dutiful obedience”, your dream of “silent majority” and a few more besides). And no, we cannot yet reveal if we will also throw the euro onto the fire (but be assured that sooner or later, we will also take Berlin). To finalise, I remind you that our purses remain empty, but our mouths do not conceal bullets like yours do, but they do conceal tongues that conspire, sing and kiss.

Boiling A Frog At The Right Speed: The Irish Times On Social Solidarity

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:56:19 -0400

Reply left in response to the Irish Times leader column titled Austerity and solidarity, published Wednesday August 8th.

Why should social solidarity support the State and its institutions? Isn’t that getting things ass backwards?

Let’s do a quick run-down of how the State and its institutions have been operating of late:

a) tens of billions of euro funnelled away from vital public services and into the coffers of private bondholders;

b) the writing into law of the primacy of debt repayment, over and above any kind of public spending on vital services such as health, education and social welfare, achieved through the threat of catastrophe on the part of government officials in a campaign backed by local and international business elites ;

c) a commitment on the part of the government to privatise State assets, which is to say, hand them over to finance capitalists so that the latter can profit from them, in order to service debt repayments to the aforementioned finance capitalists;

d) a highly favourable taxation regime for corporations that goes untouched in successive budgets;

e) the elevation of executives in financial firms to the status of citizens of privilege, whereby executives of firms who come and work in Ireland enjoy lower taxation burdens than ordinary workers, getting special relief for sending their children to private schools with the blessing of the State;

f) threats, on the part of government officials, including the Taoiseach, to withdraw access to water –considered a human right in other jurisdictions but denied any such status here- should people not pay the charges imposed on them so that private banker debts can be repaid: a de facto privatisation.

Not much social solidarity going on there. And what this leader article is arguing is that if you cut spending on benefits too much, an agenda characterised by the kind of things listed above, and State institutions capable of implementing it, will be threatened.

If the opening sentence had read ‘AT A time of intense economic pressure, the State and its institutions are a vital component in providing support for social solidarity’, it might have expressed a laudable interest in ensuring the interests of the wider public were protected against pressure coming from powerful and unaccountable economic interests. Instead, it argues we should not boil the frog too quickly, lest it realise what’s going on and jump out of the pan.

The Baler Twine That Binds, and The Common Good: A Reply to Fintan O'Toole

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:53:26 -0400

(‘The common good? That sounds like communism!’)

A reply posted on an article written by Fintan O’Toole titled ‘Irish State means little to many of its citizens’, published August 7th.

I think Fintan O’Toole’s image of ‘almost feudal’ loyalties trumping the common good operating at the level of the State leaves out an important consideration: loyalties operating at the level of the State that trump the common good.

Take the matter of corporation tax. The ability of corporations to get away with paying low rates of taxation, as we have seen with the budgets of successive governments, trumps any notion of the common good. A low corporation tax is given totemic importance by all the main political parties, business groups (quelle surprise), and public and private media institutions.

In other words, the power of business owners relative to ordinary wage earners goes unquestioned, as does the loyalty of elected representatives to the needs of business owners. Meanwhile the public is relentlessly encouraged to demonstrate their loyalty to billionaire corporations, to refrain from doing that might ‘frighten the markets’.

Take the matter of health care too. Why would we expect people to show loyalty to the principle of equal access to health care for all when private health care –or health care provided as an act of charity, which is just as bad- is continuously exalted in the public sphere? Example one: the regular appearance of private healthcare executives as contributors to debate programmes on the public broadcaster, as though such people held more gravitas and auctoritas than other citizens. Example two: in an Irish Times article from today titled ‘When your income drops 70% you need to adjust fast’, one of the tips reads: ‘3 NEVER EVER GIVE UP OR DOWNGRADE YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE’.

We can say something similar about education. Why would we expect people to show loyalty to the principle of equal access to education for all when private education –which is to say, exclusive education in the service of a stratified society- is subsidised by the State, ‘grind’ schools are presented (without the scare quotes, I might add) as a perfectly natural tool for ensuring your child outperforms her classmates, and newspapers, such as this one, fete private schools for their achievements, via spurious exercises in consumer choice-oriented metrics?

Then there is ‘politics’, which is to say, representation. Why would you expect citizens to concern themselves with the common good when all that is required of them by way of political activity is that they absorb the opinions of the rich and powerful and to vote once every four years or so? I should point out here that the ideal of the passive and resigned citizen, who should only concern herself with serving the interests of capital, is actively promoted, relentlessly so, by media institutions such as this one. Example: in the article from today titled ‘When your income drops 70% you need to adjust fast’, is there any mention of collective political activity, by way of demonstrations of solidarity or resistance, in defence of the common good? Is there Fergus. What there is instead, and this is general across all media outlets, is atomised consumerism and depoliticised passivity.

None of the above has anything to do with quasi-feudal attachments or wearing bailer twine to hold your trousers up; indeed, people who believe in low corporation taxes, private health care, private education, representative democracy as the alpha and omega of political life, and keeping calm and carrying on, despite the fact that such things run altogether counter to the common good, are exactly the same people who will pour scorn on others who take to the streets in support of someone they (mistakenly) believe will ensure prosperity for their community, because they lack ‘loyalty to the State’, a concept whose supposed importance unites Fintan O’Toole the social democrat, Michael McDowell, the liberal who believes in inequality as a motor of economic progress, and a large number of big business figures who see the State as the guarantor of their activities of accumulation for the sake of accumulation.

Solidarity! A reply to the Irish Times

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:06:47 -0400

A reply I posted to the Irish Times leader column published on Friday 3rd August titled ‘Frankfurt finds a better way.

Pardon me, but what can the Irish Times possibly mean when it says that solidarity between states provides the road out of the present mess?

It seems to be saying, unless my comprehension skills have deserted me once and for all, that the strict ‘conditionality’ and supervision demanded by the ECB is some sort of expression of mutual aid based on mutual concern.

If so, it’s a very strange form of solidarity indeed: governments agreeing among themselves to dismantle welfare state provisions, drive down wages, cut benefits, subject welfare recipients to a regime of surveillance and stigmatisation, privatise public assets, attack working conditions, contine to bail out financial institutions; and for what?

Who benefits from such, er, solidarity?

As far as I can see, it sure as hell isn’t the vast majority of any of the different peoples living in Europe, who are already being told to kiss goodbye to any sort of secure and dignified existence as envisaged by the postwar settlement in Europe, since the markets demand that they live otherwise.

Unless, of course, we’re talking instead about that privileged section of society often referred to nowadays as the 1%, and which embraces as its own the likes of former Goldman Sachs executives such as Mario Draghi of the ECB, and many other policymakers at a European level who are acquainted with a revolving door between supposedly public institutions and the institutions of an increasingly parasitical and predatory financial sector.

Indeed, it does seem odd, from the old fashioned democratic point of view, don’t you think, that Draghi should be sending out signals about solidarity when only a few months back he was proclaiming in a Wall Street Journal interview about how Europe’s social model had already gone? What concept of solidarity is he talking about?

Say! Hang on a second. Do you think..nah..but then again…Irish Times, I have a question for you. This ‘solidarity between states’ thing you’re talking about. Could it be, given the stark right-wing outlook of institutions such as the ECB, and their operation in the interests of finance capital first and foremost, that it’s not the nature of the solidarity we should be worried about here, but rather the nature of the states?

Because, and pardon me if I’m saying something darn foolish here, but you know what members of the public can be like: if European states are being stripped their obligations to ensure the health and welfare of their citizens, as Mario Draghi claims, and at the same time formalising their obligations to ensure the health and welfare of financial institutions and to keep the markets happy, as Mario Draghi demands…do you reckon it’s because the states are no longer social or democratic?

After all, it’s not as if Mario Draghi or any of the ECB Governing Council, or Barroso at the European Commission, or Van Rompuy at the European Council, or Lagarde at the IMF, or Goldman Sachs, or ‘the markets’ were ever given a popular mandate to decide on the economic policy of member states, and yet they do, with devastating effects for the populations of those states.

You know, if I didn’t know you better, why, I’d be tempted to interpret your mention of ‘solidarity between states’ as meaning ‘obedience and acquiescence of member state national governments in implementing the policies called for by European level institutions in the service of major financial institutions, and in so doing recognising the common interest and need for solidarity among the ruling elites of each member state, faced with the looming spectre of widespread revolt and social strife. And that means you too, Fine Gael, Labour, and IBEC’.

And to tell the truth, until you set me straight on this, I’m going to be more inclined to think of the states you’re talking about -such as this one- not as guarantors of social and democratic rights, but something else…something more like an organ of repression and dispossession on behalf of the so-called 1%.

Here’s hoping for a 500-part daily feature on the matter beginning this Monday coming, assuming there aren’t any more articles to publish about how public discourse is being destroyed be rude people on the Internet. Toodle pip, Himmlische, Dein Heiligtum, and so on and so forth.

Quinn Fragments

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:23:01 -0400

Normal 0 false false false EN-IE X-NONE X-NONE

This post is mostly a cobbling together of interactions on Facebook over the last week or so, concerning the Sean Quinn affair in the main. I am publishing it here after it occurred to me that I had written more than 1,500 words on the Quinn affair, scattered across various Facebook threads: a telling example of how Facebook appropriates your labour for its own ends without you even realising it, and then as good as scatters it unto the four winds by rendering it untraceable.

Reading Balzac, Knocking Back Pharmaceuticals Paid For By Private Health Insurance

“Behind every great fortune there is a great crime” said Balzac, at the start of The Godfather. I don’t care much for the Quinns at all, in fact the sycophancy surrounding them always made me want to blow chunks. However I think this spectacle -Anglo Irish Bank, now State-owned, trying to recover the money loaned to Quinn amid courtroom drama and tales of pan-European scrambles with shady property deals way out east- serves to obscure the far greater crime, which is to say, the wholesale robbery of the working class in Ireland that takes the form of the bank bailout and associated public policies, conducted not through criminality but through legality, and via the same machinery that is now deployed against Quinn. In this way, the Quinn trial functions as a moral fig leaf for naked kleptocracy.

Sean Quinn Goes To The Olympics

Whatever one’s reservations on the whole about the Olympic Games opening ceremony, the idea of a national health service being the object of national celebration in Ireland seems as far removed a prospect as interplanetary space travel. What there is, however, is 5000 people taking to the streets support of a former billionaire who was one of the major investors in Irish private health care before he blew most of the wealth others had produced for him by speculating on complex financial transactions.

The Cavan Zuckerburg

It occurred to me that there is a similarity in people’s attitudes to Facebook and certain people’s attitudes to Sean Quinn. There is no content in Facebook worth looking at or reading that is not the product of the labour of incalculable numbers of people but discussions always seem to depart from the standpoint of what Facebook allows (or does not allow) you to do, as if it were impossible for a better, more useful, productive and creative tool or set of tools to exist (read: means and relations of production in Cavan/Fermanagh area), and as if in light of the impossibility -or extremely remote likelihood- of such tools coming into existence, we have to rely on the ones assembled by right-wing billionaire Mark Zuckerburg (read: Sean Quinn) who, for all the problems we might have with the principle of it, does at the very least lay on this kind of service (read: at the very least he creates jobs), brings good quality jobs to the area and contributes a lot of money to good causes (read: brings good quality jobs to the area and contributes a lot of money to good causes). What this illustrates, I think, is that D4 and Teemore have a lot more in common, ideologically speaking, than either might care to admit. And against those who see some mere pre-modern, bog-based aspect to people mobilising in support of the Quinn group, the Ballyconnell protest is oddly reminiscent of those mostly young people who took to the streets of Dublin protesting Sean Sherlock’s SOPA legislation on the grounds that it would alienate companies such as Facebook and Google (though of course this was not the reason all of them took to the streets).

Quinn Goes To Swan River, West Australia

During his interview with Vincent Browne, Quinn claimed, according to Twitter at least, that he had been a wealth creator since he was born. It is not just Quinn who believes in the sustaining capitalist myth of the individual wealth creator: this is the primary justification offered for all sorts of regressive economic policies under liberal capitalism. There is a natural propensity to truck and barter, as Adam Smith would put it, and hence those able to put that propensity to best use are the best among us, and deserve to be handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Rationalisations of this kind have a strong hold over people’s economic and political imagination when their lives are bound up with the liberal capitalist system. Who else bar Quinn, asked Cavan man Tom McEnaney in the Daily Mail, could have turned £100 and a hole in the ground into one of the most successful cement companies in the country?

Well, lots of people. The notion of Quinn’s individual genius makes no sense if wrenched from its setting in a given moment in history, under given legal frameworks and political arrangements, in a particular area with certain resources available to meet particular economic demands. What would happen if Sean Quinn had decided to take 300 of Fermanagh’s finest off to some other part of the world with different political institutions, social relations and so on? Karl Marx in his Economic Manuscripts offers a clue:

Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!

Thus the defence of Sean Quinn is not simply the defence of his person, but the defence of a particular mode of production and the cultural glue needed to sustain it, now in crisis. That is why there is so much talk of the family man, the ostentatious displays of patriarchal rectitude, and even captioned photos circulating online of Quinn’s wife, presenting her as a mater dolorosa. That is also why the media prosecution of Sean Quinn focuses on his individual deeds, how his claims measure up against the established facts, his personal moral outlook, and so on. The legitimacy of someone making billions of euro off the labour of others and then blowing it all speculatively as he sees fit is never in question: what is at stake in this frame is merely whether Quinn did so within the bounds of legality and what his obligations are as a result.

Morbid Morality

I notice some of the impeccably neo-liberal voices on my news feeds were throwing up their hands in despair at the spectacle of the thousands of people taking to the streets to support Sean Quinn.

Whilst I do not take claims of D4 nefariousness in the Quinn case all that seriously -as though a person described by Fintan O’Toole in Ship of Fools as ‘the canniest businessman in Ireland’ had been simply taken for a ride by a nest of rich Dublin vipers due to his own naivety- there is certainly a morbid interest, on the part of the media and political establishment, in producing yet another spectacle that hinges on the idea of a morally bankrupt population that deserves to have its house put in order by an upstanding ‘technical’ firm hand.

In this spectacle, Quinn and his followers are held up as an example of pervasive moral laxity and a persuasive case for the introduction of yet another round of ‘reforms’ -which always translates into the withdrawal of rights and the intensification of cutbacks and privatisations, as though the Irish State, which on account of its protection of the interests of banks and financial institutions brought about a drop in income of the poorest households by 18% in the last year and a rise in the incomes of the richest households by 4%, were an entity that deserved loyalty and fidelity.

That such a programme of dispossession and impoverishment, entailing extortion of ordinary people to sate the appetites of ‘the markets’, is supported by the main political parties (who will say anything to prolong their own political shelf-life) and the media (who stand squarely behind the interests of a capitalist class that until relatively recently treated Quinn as a hero), is the chief moral obscenity, and we shouldn’t lose sight of it during the relentless coverage of the Quinn case.

The Border’s Benevolent Feudal Lord? As for the rally itself, Irish nationalism of the 32 county variety is worth considering, both from the standpoint of understanding why the rally took place, but also why it has received so much coverage when so many other protests, rallies and public gatherings and the issues they relate to have been studiously ignored, unless there was some irruption of violence that allowed the assembled to be represented as a dangerous mob.

The Quinns are from Fermanagh, Jarlath Burns and Joe Kernan from Armagh and Mickey Harte from Tyrone were all prominent attendees. Quinn has been a major backer of the GAA -and of course his brother was GAA president at one point. I doubt very much that all those who turned out this past weekend did so mainly with a view to defend the right of billionaires to gamble away the wealth created for them by wage labourers; at least some will have turned out in defence of what they see is a vital ingredient in any chance of future prosperity for the region, that is, a local businessman whose investments are driven not by the sort of icy cold calculation that keeps capitalism on the go but a kind of benevolent feudalism.

But the nationalist dimension is worth pondering too: the degree of cross-border circulation -or behaving for the most part as if the border did not exist- is something that many people from Dublin don’t get sight of or experience all that much. Quinn’s rise in the 1990s, and the increased prosperity in the places he operated, took place alongside a reduction in tension in border counties with the end of the armed conflict. And since then the GAA in Ulster –as a cross-border organisation- has thrived. I would not underestimate just how much GAA sporting life is part of the fabric of everyday life there. That is something to bear in mind in terms of the politics of this: when Jarlath Burns spoke about the ‘GAA community’ supporting Quinn: he was not talking about a group of people living within the Irish State and bound by its laws but a community that sees itself in the final instance as living beyond the constraints or definition of either jurisdiction in Ireland.

This takes on particular piquancy in the case of Peter Darragh Quinn, who has decided not to bother returning to the Republic of Ireland to face jail time. He might well argue since the border is illegitimate, neither jurisdiction called into being by that border is legitimate (though taken to its logical conclusion that doesn’t augur well for Quinn Jr’s property interests).

We’ll have none of your class conflict around here: this is a local Empire, for local people It’s striking how the language of empire rolls so easily off the tongue when it comes to Quinn’s supporters. When people call for Quinn to rebuild his empire, they forget that any emperor has as his corollary imperial subjects (to say nothing of slaves).

People are right to boil it down to a conflict between rich and poor, and in the final analysis it is quite clear which side Sean Quinn would prefer to be on. Nonetheless people still took to the streets in support of Quinn, when it seems unimaginable that they would do so in support of, say, the poorest in those regions who were being driven into desperation from seeing their incomes dropping by 20% over the last year. This means that ‘we look after our own’ claims from GAA figures who took part –and let’s not forget that a few of them have had substantial and not entirely successful endeavours as participants in the property speculation industry- ought to ring hollow. One only has to go to a county GAA match to see that there are class distinctions in operation there too: for instance, in the choice of pub, or the mode of transport, among other things.

But since everyone wearing the same colours is out supporting the same county, there is a sense of fraternity forged –genuinely felt by some, less so by others- that serves to gloss over disparities in wealth and power, so the likes of Quinn, and it is not just Quinn, but any local potentate, appear on the scene as merely one of the boys (a way in which the GAA resembles the Orange Order a lot more than it would care to admit). So far, so normal. That is pretty much the way domination has operated in many rural areas of Ireland for a long time. And another part of the sympathy for Quinn can be put down to the way the prominent local businessman is viewed an important community figure not just on account of the businesses he owns but because the owning of those businesses confers him with a certain standing that entails other civic duties. There can be bonds of trust established that appear strange and even ridiculous to people on the outside looking in, but a natural part of life to those who live according to them. And in a border area those things can seem a hell of a lot more important than whatever jurisdiction people are supposed to be living in, since the sense of community transcends the border anyway.

Quinn: Cementing Hegemony

And in such a context, it is Quinn’s earthly localness that provides the cement (no pun intended) for hegemony. The idea that Liberty Insurance or Anglo Irish Bank or whoever it is that takes charge of whatever Quinn concern- should decide to up sticks and move elsewhere, or cut its workforce, or wages and working conditions, appears as an operation conducted by capitalists in the icy water of egotistical calculation, whereas Sean Quinn, operating according to precisely the same rules, is seen, on account of his local connections, as supporting the community (Marx might have described such a viewpoint as philistine sentimentalism).

But Which Caesar? As we have seen in media coverage, not only in relation to the Quinn case, but also concerning Denis O’Brien and the household charge, the question of loyalty to the State is coming to the fore. This is to be expected, given that public confidence in Ireland’s constitutional claim to be a democratic state is continually undermined, not only by unelected and anti-democratic bodies such as the ECB, the IMF and the European Commission setting the boundaries of what is permissible, but also by ruling politicians, who simultaneously justify the measures demanded by those bodies as good sense whilst freely admitting that Ireland has lost its sovereignty.

This is where the matter of the border –and rending unto Caesar- really comes into play. For many of those who turned out last weekend, and very many more who would be sympathetic to Sean Quinn, their official status as citizens of the actually existing Irish Republic is little more than a formal nicety, since they live on that side of the border where they are not represented in the Irish parliament nor can they vote in referenda or in Irish presidential elections. Therefore many of them view the Irish State and its claims to dispense justice with a fair degree of ambivalence -and with some justification, I might add. Did the Irish Caesar ever do anything for its citizens north of the border, in terms of the social and economic policies it enacted, for instance on the question of natural resources, in keeping its claims to be a democratic state for the common good of the Irish nation? It never did, and it never has done. It is no surprise then, that the political and media establishment south of the Border treat any kind of political demand made by such people, or sympathy with them, with deep suspicion. Post Good Friday Agreement, the political and media establishment have a particular conception of citizenship to shore up, and people who incarnate a blurring of formal boundaries, occupying a kind of political no man’s land, are instinctively treated as a sort of threat to stability.

There is no turning back

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:24:24 -0400

From Evernote:

There is no turning back

Translation of an article by Samuel at the Quilombo blog, originally published 29th July. With particular focus on the Spanish state, a compelling political diagnosis of the shape of things already upon us in those countries subjected to EU adjustment plans, and an outline of where we might go from here. I have left in the links to the Spanish language articles cited in the original.

There is no turning back

“It’s not a crisis, it’s a con”.

Actually, we are faced with both a crisis and also a con. It’s a crisis because we are at a historic crossroads, a moment of systemic chaos in which, after the failure of the neoliberal governance model, “competition and conflicts escalate beyond the regulatory capacity of existing structures” (G. Arrighi). This occurs on a global scale, but with special intensity in the complex and segmented European subsystem. It’s a con because the efforts to curb the disorder, to take advantage of it, and to institutionalise new relations of production and government, are carried out by extorting those from below.

In Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece this translates into a deepening of the economic depression. This is nothing that could not have been predicted when said depression is brought about through shock therapies that seek to undertake looting that could not have been approved otherwise. What is happening in Spain is neither new nor unusual, even if the situation is more serious because of the power held by conservative forces. Staying within recent history, since Mexico suspended payments in 1982 debt crises have multiplied, with greater intensity and frequency than in preceding decades: 2.6 banking crises a year (compared with 0.1 per year in the period 1948-1972); 3.7 monetary crises per year (compared with 1.7 in the same period); 1.3 governments per year suspending payments (compared to 0.7). The consequences of the adjustment policies that accompanied these crises are widely known, so there should be no cause for surprise. What is new –remaining in the frame of recent history- is that these dynamics of debt-adjustment-looting are no longer occurring in Latin America, in Eastern Europe or in Africa, but in a zone that benefitted from the former: Western Europe. The relations of subordination are reproduced in this case within the same political framework, that of the European Union, thereby destabilising it.

What got off to a gradual and wavering start under the previous PSOE government, and what has been intensified, with even fewer scruples by the (State and autonomous community) governments of the PP (and CiU), are thus deliberate policies, in the knowledge that they will cause suffering and transfers of wealth to European business elites. It is true that there is strong pressure on the part of British, French and German financial groups to prevent a devaluation of their assets and take an even bigger cut, and that the European Central Bank and the German government use a very big stick and a very small carrot on the peripheral countries so that they accelerate the cuts, privatise public assets and reform their labour markets. But it never occurs to any of the political parties “of government” to break with this logic. All they do is argue clumsily about timeframes, the odds for debt rollover, the possible offsetting through “growth policies” (which they identify with large infrastructure projects) and only because they see their own political shelf-life in danger.

* * *

By this point, then, it ought to be clear to everyone what future is offered to us by the current political regime, Spanish and European: cuts to public spending budgets that affect the welfare of the population; dismantling of public services and their reconfiguration along the lines of debt relations (health re-payment [the reference here is to what is known in Spain as copago, or co-payment, a concept familiar to users of the Irish health system - R] student loans, etc.), widespread impoverishment through a deliberate wage reduction policy (internal devaluation); onerous tax burdens for impoverished wage labourers, the precarious and unemployed; diversion of public funds to keep private or privatised financial institutions afloat; repression of protest through the criminalisation of activities previously allowed for (relatively speaking) in rights of demonstration and association; the stigmatisation of certain social groups, etc. More looting and more con-jobs.

(Austerity! Austerity! they haughtily demanded from the palaces)

All of these are polítical decisions, not necessities imposed by a fictitious scarcity. Nor is there an obedience due to Brussels or Berlin that might exempt our rulers from responsibility. But the existing institutional mechanisms do not allow the articulation of any democratic alternative from within the national State. Less still with the “bound and tied” [In the original, ‘atado y bien atado’: the reference here is to the famous words of Franco, referring to the future longevity of his regime after his death - R] constitutional lockdown agreed by the PSOE and the PP in 2011, and the numerous reforms that limit political representation (electoral law, city councils, the forthcoming ‘vote for exiles’ in Euskadi). The PP’s absolute majority, derived from a considerable (declining) support in society but above all from the socialist meltdown, forces minority groups that oppose the adjustment to practise politics more outside the Congress than inside, if they do not wish to fall into irrelevance. Though the new parliamentary division ought to be between those parties who support the adjustment policies called for by the bailout referendum and those who reject them, what happens in the street is key. Votes received in elections during the blackmail of the crisis in no way legitimise government actions that violate the rights of the people and are based on lies and fraud.

The coming to power of a particular party will not in itself allow a process of change to begin. History shows the opposite is true, and I include here the electoral rise of a force such as Syriza in Greece. First of all it is the multitudes who change the correlation of forces in the street, since it is they who produce wealth, knowledge, and new ways of thinking and acting. This is what can then allow for an electoral defeat of the ruling parties even when the game is rigged. Those who attack the 15-M from the outside with a ferocity they do not use against the system itself, without making the effort to bring forward their own ideas on the inside, are unable to see this. Movements include explicit social mobilisations, organised to a greater or lesser degree, assemblies that might prove tedious, but also –and this is not reflected in the media- implicit changes in attitude, less visible repertoires of political experimentation, the gestation of new narratives, diverse practices of exodus. Not even an election victory will be enough, especially if it only serves in turn to politically disarm the citizens. The electoral game should at any rate be contemplated as a tactic subordinate to broader strategies.

And what we are witnessing in the Spanish state is a destituent process. An accelerated process of political delegitimisation not just of the government, but of the very power constituted during the transition. Especially for the generation that was born afterwards. The PP’s absolute majority, and the control it exercises over the majority of autonomous region governments, far from entailing a guarantee of stability, exacerbates, through its authoritarian intransigence, the rebellion against authorities that a growing number of people view as parasitical. This is the main fear of investors and international bodies and the main reason for the ‘technical’ interventions that accompany the so-called ‘bailouts’. The political conclusion is obvious. If we want to short-circuit this drift we have to stop seeing the aforementioned delegitimisation as a danger, and work seriously on the democratic opportunities opening up. Work towards the unpredictable.

* * *

It is not a simple task. Feelings such as indifference, resignation, fear, guilt and cynicism continue to dominate a large part of society in the sphere of the political. Property-owning individualism promoted by neoliberal utopianism has left its imprint in our subjectivities. This makes it difficult for a democratic alternative to be formed from and for the common, and explains in part the ease with which the new right-wing forces sell anti-democratic alternatives. The discourse of “against all politicians”, and the lack of interest in politics, feed off the crisis of representation, but if it is not grounded in the pro-common it ends up contributing to the attack against what is public (lo público) and ultimately against democracy.

Thus, I meet public healthcare workers who believe the cuts are on account of “abuses of the health system”. Council public servants who justify the cuts because of past wastefulness. Self-employed who maintain that if the economic situation is bad it is because those who have a job do little work (it is always other people, of course) and the rest do what they can in order not to work. People with mortgages who blame those who got into debt in order to gain access to a home without having enough economic means. Unemployed people who give off stink about other unemployed people. There is no shortage of people who add that immigrants get too much assistance. Amid blatant lies and many half-truths, they take on board a particular story about the “crisis”, the one that confuses symptoms with causes and reasons, or simply doles out blame. And in the game of recriminations, deep down they feel they are entitled to something. How can the wheat be separated from the chaff, when they always conceived of housing, political parties, and social relations, as investments?

They cannot stop seeing themselves as middle class, that virtuous term midway between offensive wealth and ignominious poverty, but which gradually moves away from the former and draws closer to the latter. They have spent their adult lives in the Transition’s framework of social consensus, they hang on to their jobs, they fill the terraces and continue paying their mortgages and their taxes, once the corresponding deductions have been made. It is surprising how naturally they take on board the ‘need’ for the cuts, the loss of purchasing power, the deterioration of public services, the rise in university fees. As if it were a matter of a storm that they hope will pass at some stage for normality to be resumed.

***

But there is no normality to go back to when the state of exception becomes permanent. There is no turning back. Unless we consider as normal and acceptable the trajectory that has left us with the economic, social and ecological consequences we see today. If we do not, we cannot confine ourselves to reacting against each new outrage; to imploring a lesser suffering, like the left in Andalusia does; to meeting with our own (those of our class, union or professional organisation) and only when we see some degradation of our social status as imminent. It makes no sense to go on requesting the restoration of what has been altered from someone who makes clear, time and again, that they will act by decree without listening to us, without consulting us, without obeying us. In this way we are destined to lose, and we may end up becoming reactionaries ourselves.

There is no turning back. Not to a partitocracy whose democratic deficit was already obvious prior to the economic crisis, nor to a welfare state in which the coverage for risks that one confronts throughout one’s life depends on waged employment that is ever more scarce and precarious. And which Capital does not hesitate to dismantle as soon as the profit rate falls. These risks ought to be covered collectively, but in a way that is universal and unconditional. And labour must no longer be identified with employment. There is no turning back, but looking ahead the game is wide open.

It will be better for us to demand and build together a new political framework, a different economy that is not based on the fiction of unlimited growth. This is the debate that I believe must be promoted. Hence the healthiest, most creative and most innovative thing we can see in Spanish politics is the program set forth by the movements and the inclusive communication they deploy. It is good for us to meet up with others, with our peers though they might not resemble us, in the way that miners, public servants, the unemployed and the precarious did in Madrid, to understand that what government propaganda calls ‘privileges’ are in reality the material conditions necessary for a real democracy: in particular, the need to avail of an adequate and stable income that covers vital necessities. The fairest way of preventing these material conditions from being the privilege of a few consists of extending them to everyone.

The family is often cited as the institution in Spain that, along with the informal economy, shores up the decomposition of what is public and the rise in unemployment. Beyond the hierarchical and patriarchal relations that still pervade it, I wish to point out that the family is a sphere where the majority of people find it natural to act with criteria not of the market but of co-operation, of giving, of care and of affection. Something similar happens with the closest of friendships. When cooperation transcends these narrow circles it becomes the main source of innovation, before it has a value placed on it and is captured by Capital. Let us draw the logical conclusions from this, both economic and political, before it is too late. It is not money that makes society.

Trust, Cynicism and Begrudgery: A Reply

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:02:18 -0400

This is a reply I posted on the Irish Times website to an article titled Despite our cynicism of power, we must trust public representatives by Canon Stephen Neill.

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There is something piquant about the fact that the author of this piece, calling on us to put our trust in public officials once again, should be the person who established Barack Obama’s connection to Moneygall, and that it is Obama he quotes to diagnose the problem with Irish politics. In fact, no contemporary figure illustrates better why cynicism with politics is so widespread.

If we look beyond the popular appeal of Obama’s polished and resonant rhetoric about hope, block out the empty accolades from his admirers, and observe his record in office, we see a man who presides over an imperial machine that subjugates and kills indiscriminately abroad, and who serves the interests of a financial oligarchy at home, refusing to prosecute the crimes of Wall Street.

People shouldn’t be too surprised at this, mind: the carefully cultivated image was a professional PR exercise, and the financial backing he received from Wall Street institutions explains his appointment of Wall Street insiders –people who serve the financial oligarchy- to key positions in his administration.

What the case of Barack Obama illustrates, then, is that the reason people cannot trust politicians is not because they are untrustworthy people –in a personal capacity, they are probably as trustworthy as any group- but because the political system is subordinate to the interests of wealth and power, not the interests of ordinary people, and within this system, the politicians who flourish represent the former, not the latter. Therefore the latter is indeed entitled to some degree of cynicism.

Moreover, it ought to be borne in mind that our political life is heavily mediated, and dominant media institutions, such as this one, present the interests of the owning class as if they were the interests of the population as a whole. As a consequence, the practice of holding politicians responsible for everything, and focusing on the minutiae of their activities, is a handy and often publicly subsidised alternative to casting light on who really holds power in society, and what the effect is of that power on the lives of ordinary working people: the sort of thing you would expect journalism in the service of democracy to deal with.

Another effect of such a heavily mediated political life is the notion, widely held, and indeed expressed in this article, that representation is the alpha and omega of politics. According to such a notion, citizens are not active political subjects whose participation in political life is continuous and decisive, but occasional voters who, having read the newspapers and listened to the radio programmes of the rich, transfer their powers of agency to an elected representative for the duration of an election term.

As a result, politics is professionalised, the citizens are disempowered, and a fetish develops –as illustrated once again by Barack Obama- for a political nobility -‘people of integrity’- as the author calls them, to come to the aid of the citizens.

But it is precisely this fetish for ‘a few good people’ –often combined with impotent warblings about reform- that serves to foment the cynicism that the author laments. And it stands to reason that such cynicism serves the interests of wealth and power, because it means a disengagement of the citizens from politics, which means more loot for the rich–as is the case at the moment, illustrated by the scandalous funnelling of tens of billions of public money, which could pay for hospitals, schools and vital social services, to private bondholders. The latter, and the politicians who serve them, are no doubt delighted with outbreaks of cynicism and impotent gnashing of teeth.

The problem, however, is that unless people start talking not only in terms of the specific political system, but also –crucially- the specific economic system that allows such robbery to take place, all we will have to talk about, apart from an economic and social death spiral, is more hand-wringing generalities about trust, cynicism, begrudgery, and so on.

The Waves of Disobedience

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 04:59:58 -0400

Translation of an article by Jorge Moruno, originally published 18 July 2012 on his blog La Revuelta de Las Neuronas.

The waves of disobedience

Speaking the other day with Political Science lecturer Raimundo Viejo, I mentioned to him that the evolution of mobilisations was as if layers of an onion kept forming on top of one another. He developed this further, by saying that rather than layers of an onion, it seemed more to him like waves of the sea, where each one from its starting point gives shape to the beach due to the sand it leaves behind. The latest to join the range of students and precarious workers protesting are public servants, who observe the way they are turned into the scapegoat for the frustrations and impotence of others who call them privileged, when they would never say such a thing about the powerful.

Climates of mobilisation form, in a distinct and discontinuous way, but with a shared direction. There is no central “single moment”, but rather a flow, a variability. Just when some thought that with the miners march a kind of final struggle would reach its peak, suddenly the stage was completely redesigned and public servants appeared, cutting off streets using a movement repertoire. Many might say that these are merely corporatist protests, for their pay and nothing more. The same might be said of those who laughed about the property bubble until the day came that they were being evicted. Like the worker protagonist of the film ‘The Working Class Goes to Heaven’ who mocks protesters and calls them lazy, until one day he cuts his finger off and his employer gives him no support, and then he radicalises, mutates in his being.

When someone who works in public functions cannot find a minimum of dignity at work, this brings negative repercussions for the service provided to the public, that is, the majority of the population. But I think many of these people are very clear that their predicament has a collective dimension, just as its solution does.

At any rate this is a matter of a long process, a long distance race, where immersion in struggles undermines entrenched assumptions, conservative perspectives and thoughts, and individualist visions. Only in this sense of being in it with everyone else can our lives take that turn, reaching that higher level that Gramsci spoke about, referring to the relation between spontaneity and conscious direction. This consciousness does not pass through the filter of the party, in any case the reverse is true, the party must submit itself to the filter of the movement. The conscious direction depends more on the orientation taken by the collective brain in movement; connected via network, decentralised, something that can be co-ordinated but difficult to dominate.

Capitalism, just like a snake, is accelerating its change of skin. To go on maintaining the extraction of wealth, to maintain profit rates, to plunder, in the final instance, it needs to destroy everything that at any given moment was useful to it for that same objective. It is for this reason that it attacks all that is known, all that has been assimilated even by people who are conservative, and it seeks to replace it with a Mad Max-style desert. The much vaunted switch to a new era and the undebated adaptation, called for constantly by the government, does not seek this objective of change towards something more advanced. Here it has been decided that our shedding of skin shall be the radical deepening of what has been known until now; and that’s if we are lucky. Music festivals, sun, casinos, construction and the full range of productive activities aimed at practising servitude to those with money.

We are a colony of capitalism 2.0, the darkest side of the digital economy. Any adaptation of exploitation in keeping with the preparedness of the labour force is cast aside, in its place we are condemned to accept being anchored down en masse by a market beneath our abilities. We are not headed for a precarity model of the German mini-job type, that model is precarity for countries on top; in our case we are headed more for a return to feudalism without the protection of the lord, you are free to rot in the street: Neoslavery.

We have to insist on opening up cracks, to act upon them, to support disobedience, even by those who cause us scepticism and antipathy. They will have to impose fear in the streets and it is always better that there are not many prepared to get involved, which means not having to hold on to one another. Open up hopes, guide public opinion, so that at the sensitive juncture when remaining condemned to debt becomes worse than declaring it odious debt, the rupture successfully overcomes reactionary and totalitarian danger. The more waves that break on the beach, the more people who defended their servitude because they thought of the salvation of their master as their own will stop doing so. And then we really will be at the point of the change of mentality that the lumpen-oligarchy is always asking for; but in the opposite direction: wealth, knowledge, innovation, technology, in the service of people and not of private profit.

Kleptocracy: This Was The Second Transition

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 04:25:29 -0400

Image celebrating the contributions of numerous businesspeople, including billionaire Digicel owner and Irish media magnate Denis O’Brien, disgraced Anglo Irish boss Sean Fitzpatrick, disgraced Nationwide Irish boss Michael Fingleton, and major property developers (McKillen, Mulryan, taken from Vatican Museums Report Winter 2009.

Translation of an article by Raimundo Viejo Viñas, originally published on Diagonal, nº 179, pág. 33 (19.07-29.08.2012)

Kleptocracy: This Was The Second Transition

‘The cutbacks announced by Rajoy will deepen the recession until 2013’: thus read the El País headline on the package of measures that starts off the imperial economic protectorate of the EU and the markets. The headline, however, could have been another one no less consistent or resounding: “It’s not a crisis! It’s a scam!”. After all, we are witnessing the worst extortion operation we have ever known.

Extortion, let us recall, is an ‘offence that consists of forcing –through violence or intimidation- the commission or omission of an act or commercially motivated legal transaction with a view to making money and with the intention of causing material loss to the victim or a third party’. In this case, the intimidation is that exercised by the markets, and the act or commercially motivated legal transaction is the measures approved in Las Cortes with the goal of ruining the lives of the 99% to the benefit of the 1%.

But is there really a crisis?

The explicit awareness that the measures not only do not remedy, but prolong and deepen the crisis reveals something far more worrying, if this were possible, than the obvious irresponsibility of misrule. Namely, that 1) the national State is no longer the centre of modern sovereign power, 2) liberal democracy and representative government have failed institutionally to reconcile capital and labour; 3) the command that rules us today operates somewhere midway between supranational institutions like the EU and financial institutions like ratings agencies (to cite two obvious examples of a far more complex network.

With things this way, what kind of (mis)government is it that is based on continuing to deliberately aggravate the suffering of the citizens? An illegitimate government no doubt. It is also, as we have pointed out, a government that is nothing of the sort, but instead the transmission belt of decision-making bodies no less illegitimate, given that they evade all democratic control. But above all, it is a (mis)government that responds to a logic that must be diagnosed in its functioning, denounced in its effects and fought with an effective strategy.

Kleptocracy

The logic of (mis)government can be identified with a type of regime that is established with each measure that gets approved: kleptocracy. From the Greek kleptēs or theft and kratos or rule, it can be defined as “government of those who steal”. Given that we are speaking of an illegitimate robbery, one can say, straight out, the “government of thieves”. It is a matter of a kind of regime that consists not of governing from, by and for the demos (as in democracy), but in the service of the logic of the priva(tisa)tion of resources that were once public.

A simple example: if university fees go up and only a minority can pay them, but we all fund public universities with our taxes equally, where is the redistribution of wealth? Where is the equality of opportunities? Where are the principles of the welfare State? Where is the Constitution? This, however, is how kleptocracy works: it subtracts from the 99% to give to the 1%.

Debt is the mechanism that makes legalised robbery possible: the private debt which through illegitimate means is converted into public debt; the debt which, like a deus ex machina condemns us to poverty. Debt today consumes the future and, equally, reduces people’s existence to its merely vegetative dimension. This is why stopping the payments is an imperative in the defence of a decent life. Faced with a rule that appears before us as a financial automatism, it is today urgent to move forward along the route of disobedience, in autonomous empowerment, towards the political regime of the commons.

Stabilising an appalling situation: A reply to Stephen Collins

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:43:00 -0400

A reply to Stephen Collins’s article published Saturday 21 July, headed ‘Impossible to protect public pay and welfare budgets’

I can only agree with Stephen Collins’ assertion that the Coalition parties can ‘take credit for stabilising an appalling situation’. Indeed, appalling is the new stable, with 15% unemployment and ever greater swathes of the population sinking into poverty and misery, whilst disposable income for the richest in society grows. What is more, it is hard to disagree with him pointing to ‘wasteful public spending programmes’.

However, he neglects to name the most wasteful public spending programme of them all: the constant flow of billions of euro in public money –which could be used for spending on education, health, social welfare, investment programmes and so on- into the coffers of private bondholders. Indeed, the Bondwatch site helpfully points out that for July alone, such payments will total €1.2 billion, which is roughly the same amount as what was paid out in June, allowing for a definition of ‘rough’ to encompass a hundred million euro of public money here or there.

How could a political correspondent concerned with wastefulness overlook such grave misuse of public funds –and the consequences for democratic politics in the State? To compound things, Collins claims that the purpose of the IMF is to check up –in the manner of an avuncular medic, perhaps- on Ireland’s ‘progress towards economic health’. He seems to be unaware that the whole reason the IMF is exercising such a tight rein on Irish economic policy is on account of the tens of billions in public funds that the State channelled towards the wealthy owners of private banks.

In reality, the sole criterion that the IMF has for ‘economic health’ at the moment is whether or not Ireland will continue to pay back the money it got loaned. If this can be achieved by slashing social spending, so be it. Indeed, we can say that the IMF –and not just the IMF but any institution that prioritises the needs of finance capital over the needs of a population- sees a healthy population as a threat to the health of bank balance sheets. But what about the health of journalism? Shouldn’t we be expecting a political correspondent to be telling us about what the political function of the IMF really is, instead of painting it as some kind of purveyor of impartial expertise?

Moreover, when Collins writes of ‘vested interest groups’ ‘wading in to defend the status quo’, how come he doesn’t appear to include banks and their bondholders –whose only trouble with the status quo is that they haven’t raided the public purse enough yet- or those employer groups who have a vested interest in seeing to it that growing numbers of the population are driven into greater precarity and misery? And when you think about it, isn’t there something a bit odd about a political correspondent referring to the framing of next year’s budget as though political correspondents such as he did not play a significant role in how that framing takes place?

After all, politics in these articles is presented as an activity you have to be ‘inside’, as the name of these columns suggests. This implies the exclusion of the wider public from the political decision making process, confining the much ballyhooed ‘economic sovereignty’ mentioned here to the decisions taken by a professionalised political caste. And when such a presentation of politics also omits any consideration of how the interests of finance capital continue to take precedence over the interests over the population, well, when it comes to talking about the budget in these terms, isn’t that framing too? In summary, whilst modesty might forbid him from doing so, I think Stephen Collins should take some of the credit for stabilising an appalling situation too.

The name of the thing

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 20:03:19 -0400

From Evernote:

The name of the thing

(Image via)

Translation of an article by Guillem Martínez, published in El País, 13th of July. Readers in Ireland may wish to bear in mind, while reading this article, the wording of what was voted for in the Fiscal Treaty referendum:

‘No provision of this Constitution invalidates laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the State that are necessitated by the obligations of the State under that Treaty or prevents laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by bodies competent under that Treaty from having the force of law in the State.’

That is, no rights in the Constitution can be appealed to when the government undertakes to enact laws or adopt measures in order to meet the Procrustean requirements of the European powers that entail, as Mario Draghi admitted, the end of the European social model.

The name of the thing.

Guillem Martínez

The metaphor for what is happening is the one about the old women. The one about the old women: as of June, women over the age of 65, widows registered on the health medical of their husbands, go to the doctor and, bang, they find out that they don’t exist. They have been deleted from Social Security by the State and its pal, the Comunidad Autónoma (CA, autonomous region) of Catalonia. This fact requires various considerations. The first, in any case, is to give it a name. The act of making an old woman disappear is called a cutback by the State/CA. But the State and the CA, for a couple of years now, have been short on inspiration for stage names.

We have left behind that golden era in which the State could slip past, through a culture specialised in creating cohesion and ruling in its favour, using any alias. Let’s recall the Transition culture (CT) catchphrases “unity of all democrats”, “non-nationalism”, “seamless constitutionalism” with which the State could settle any argument and, simultaneously, close down newspapers, prohibit political parties, implement extreme policies and avoid having to give explanations. As of this morning, first thing, the governments of the mainland can’t make any of their neologisms slip past. Phrases like “express constitutional reform”, “credit under favourable conditions”, “fiscal pact”, “hazte bankero*” or “cutbacks” have not been able to prevent being replaced in a flash by, respectively, “bailout”, “yep, a bailout”, “nothing”, “crime of fraud”, and “end of the welfare State”. Given this, what is the one about the old women really called?

It is important to put a name on things. The one about the old women, and and other exclusions from universal health care, represent a breach of articles 9.3, 10, 13, 18.4, 43.1, 43.2, 86.1 of the Constitution, and an attack on the autonomy statutes of Andalucía, Aragón, Catalonia and the Basque Country (source: United Nations Association of Spain. The one about the old women, the one about health care, the one about the unemployed, the one about schools, the one about the labour law is, moreover, a contravention of article one of the Constitution. The one that goes and says that the State is ‘social and democratic State, subject to the rule of law’. ‘And’ -not ‘or’—; such that if the State ceases to be social, it also ceases to be democratic and subject to the rule of law. It entails the omission of article 9.2, one of the few gems in this rather unsexy Constitution, an article copied directly from the German Basic Law and the Italian Constitution of 1945, and which signifies the imbrication of welfare to the State. Welfare, thus, is not an economic surplus. It is a citizen right and a duty of the State. It is a conquest that has entailed more than 100 years of struggle in Europe, inducing which an agreement was reached that life is a biological fact, that you only live once and that there are fragile stages of life -childhood, old age and whenever a rainy day comes- that must be protected, that chance cannot be the only law, that we are not animals, nor is this the law of the jungle.

Since 2008 we have been bailing out the banking sector. Through money that is extracted from welfare, and via bailouts that will be paid for in welfare. The measures of the government do not seem to be orientated towards the resolution of any crisis, but rather to bring about, via the crisis, a major structural change. The one about the old women, the one about health, about education, about the unemployed, about workers…all the State counter-reforms conducted against the Constitution that we have been beaten over the head with for the past four decades, all these things have a name. Society ought to start to consider if the end of welfare we are experiencing is- and this is a potential name of the thing- a coup d’État. A violent change to the existing legal order. A crime. And, as such, something that renders the people and the governments carrying it out liable to be put on trial.

*’hazte bankero’: reference to advertising campaign for Bankia, the bank whose operations are at the centre of the current bailout proceedings. ‘Banquero’ in Spanish means banker. Thus ‘hazte bankero’ was an invitation to become a Bankia customer, but also a play on words: ‘become a banker’. Like below:

'They have no plan for the country beyond their own survival': Letter to Partido Popular voters

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 13:05:34 -0400

A translation of a letter written by the Madrilonia collective, addressed to Partido Popular voters, published 13^th July.

Six months on: Letter to PP voters

When Rajoy won the elections, we wrote you a letter that began by saying: ‘We realise you have placed your trust in the PP because you think that they will get us out of the crisis and, above all, because you suppose it will create jobs. Last Tuesday, Mariano Rajoy, the president of the government, declared in the Congress that we will continue in recession and that he could not create jobs.

The president has recognised that we are not free to choose our future. Democracy is at stake.

Six months have passed since the Rajoy government took office and not only have the lives of the majority failed to improve, but they get worse every day. Reforms that were not in the electoral programme and that will worsen what Zapatero’s bad government had already done. Bankia has been nationalised to protect a swindle now under investigation and the government continues to protect those responsible. Evictions take place whilst thousands of homes lie empty. There are no policies for job creation, nor is tax fraud being tackled. Sacrifice falls upon ordinary people who see their wellbeing vanish in exchange for nothing.

The government has lied to the citizens, and, especially, it has lied to you, by approving measures that it promised it would not implement, such as the increase in VAT, co-payment for pharmaceuticals and signing up to a bailout. None of what was promised has been delivered. The Partido Popular’s political project does not exist. Controlled remotely by the Troika and the European Central Bank, it merely carries out the orders that they send it to guarantee a bailout that, once again, will not go to the citizens, but to the banks.

All of these measures affect you the same as anyone else. We know that the vast majority of you are part time workers, unemployed or trying to keep small businesses afloat; or your children are in this situation (if they haven’t emigrated). Whatever confidence you might have in the government has to be at a minimum.

Perhaps there are those among you who feel that those responsable for all this are the ones who protest against cutbacks or who occupy the squares in order to demand more democracy. If this is so, we can only say that none of these beliefs is going to give you back your job, your income, your home, your school or your health centre. No doubt there are many others among you who know that the media campaign that seeks to create divisions between people is mere propaganda so that we refrain from thinking about all that they are taking away from us, and the way this might be resolved among us all.

Fear is normal in light of all that is happening; but fear, anguish and rage ought not prevent people from realising something as simple as the fact that there is no difference between the policies of the PP and the PSOE. Both parties have benefitted the 1% against the rest. They have no plan for the country beyond their own survival. None of them has tackled the problem of corruption. The politicking that sets the two big parties against one another is of no use, it merely serves to let the political caste justify its existence.

We said it six months ago and we say it again now. You have the responsibility as citizens to express your opinion about what is happening. If you are prepared to chant ‘they don’t represent us’ you will be recovering your sovereignty against those austerity policies that will not take us out of the crisis, but only impoverish us. If Rajoy does not govern since he merely follows orders from the undemocratic European institutions, he should resign immediately? Will whoever comes after be different? Who trusts politicians? Perhaps we need a new constitution, with new norms that return power to the citizens.

We have not lived beyond our means; they loaned us poisoned money on credit whilst wages lost purchasing power. When the crisis came they sacked us or we had to close our small business because no-one came to rescue us as they did with the banks. We are not responsible for this crisis; it was others who got rich speculating on the stock exchange or through the property bubble. We all want the guilty (politicians and bankers) to be prosecuted and condemned. We all want the greatest well-being for ourselves and the people around us. We all want democracy to be returned to its legitimate owners.

No-one is going to ask anyone what party they voted for, we are all needed to recover what belongs to everyone.

'They have no plan for the country beyond their own survival': Letter to Partido Popular voters

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 13:03:56 -0400

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A translation of a letter written by the Madrilonia collective, addressed to Partido Popular voters, published 13^th July.

Six months on: Letter to PP voters

The president has recognised that we are not free to choose our future. Democracy is at stake.

No-one is going to ask anyone what party they voted for, we are all needed to recover what belongs to everyone.

IMF: MUST WE FLING THIS FILTH AT OUR POP KIDS?

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 05:51:03 -0400

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Let’s not blow out of proportion the suggestion, made by the IMF, that child benefit ought to be means-tested, and that unemployment benefits ought to be cut. For one, the suggestion about child benefit ought to be means-tested has already found favour with public representatives in the Labour party. And no doubt the former is an option favoured by the great majority of representatives in the Dáil, as well as the IBECariat, of course, though calculations about the likely fallout in the next elections might weigh on the brains of plenty of TDs of a right wing inclination.

It was also advocated by Will Hutton back in 2010 at a talk convened by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. Asked by current Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton about the need for the preservation of universal provisions in the social welfare system, Hutton basically said, no, get rid of them.

However, the fact that it is the IMF making the suggestion is given particular importance, and there are some who see it as a special affront, given that it is unelected. And it is true that the IMF has no right to lecture anyone on economic policy: on account of the disasters it has wrought on so many countries, its status as finance capital’s bailiff, the fat pensions its economists are entitled to, and so on.

Nonetheless, we should be wise to the interplay between the different agencies who are imposing economic policies on the population of Ireland. As I noted above, what the IMF advocate is no different than what other political figures, the IBECariat, and the media, have been demanding for some time. But when the IMF makes such a call, and when it is reported and discussed throughout the media, it is treated as some sort of irresistible decree delivered by the gods.

That this should happen –without there being any questioning either of the right or authority of the IMF to make such a declaration, or of the consequenes for democracy that it should be in a position to do so, or an examination of the common ground between the IMF and the main political parties and the business class on this matter- is an illustration of how the political and media establishments are the willing servants of finance capital.

Another illustration is when the IMF makes statements in one of its analyses –which are largely performed for cosmetic purposes so as to obscure that organisation’s role as the facilitator of all-out robbery- that mortgage relief appears to have worked in some country or other, or that there must be an equal sharing of some burden of bank debt or other, and these statements are treated as headline news by the public broadcaster. Again, without any questioning of its right or authority to do so.

More important, however, is the drip-drip form in which these announcements, suggestions and declarations are made, largely uncontested, without there being any attempt to join up the dots about the broader vision for Irish society.

In the particular case of means-testing child benefit, there is a move away from mutual, collective responsibility to atomised individualised responsibility for the welfare of children. This move is given legitimacy through a kind of phoney communism: where well-off voices on TV and radio flagellate themselves with silk scarves and emote that their cup runneth over whilst that of the deserving poor is held aloft, empty.

What this charade serves to obscure it that the bank bailout –for all the straining and groaning fakery by the government- has been paid for, and will continue to be paid for, through robbery of the working class –through cuts in salaries, benefits, public services, jobs, job security, labour rights, among many other things.

And as long as this goes on, as long, the intention, on the part of those advocating stripping away whatever kind of universality there is, is that Ireland moves ever further toward the type of society in the image of its would-be owners: a society characterised by Hobbesian competition of all against all, stark and misanthropic, riddled with resentment, suspicion and naked exploitation.

OK, we support the miners, but... public servants?

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 04:50:20 -0400

From Evernote:

OK, we support the miners, but… public servants?

Translation of an article by Isaac Rosa, published in Zona Crítica, 18th July.

OK, we support the miners, but… public servants?

(‘Burnt workers’ - ‘quemado’ also means to be at the end of one’s tether (via.))

Last week there were many of us chanting “I am a miner” to be part of the struggle of those who were marching to Madrid from the mining regions. This week many of us are supporting the protest of the public servants. Perhaps we are not so great in number as those of us who applauded the participants in the ‘black march’, and this would not come as a surprise, since whereas for the miners it is admiration and affection accumulated over centuries, it is, in equal measure in the case of the public servants, vilification and caricature, also over centuries. If in the popular imagination miners are the heroes of the working class, in that same imagination public servants tend to appear as a lazy, parasitic and privileged grouping, providing joke material in abundance and an easy dartboard for the resentment of the most exploited workers.

( Workers cut off C/Serrano, one of the main thoroughfares in Madrid, for the fifth day running. via.)As you will understand, I am not going to waste a minute in debunking this negative image.

I will not do it for various reasons: because we have the whole year to point out shortcomings and propose changes in the public service, and to do it in the moment when they are under attack is to pander to those doing the attacking. And because regardless of what I.say, there will always be someone prepared to reject most of it and recount a long list of fouls that he has witnessed committed by public servants. That among public servants there are indolent, disloyal and self-seeking attitudes, no doubt: as there are in any corner of a country like this, where the ex-president of the employers’ organisation goes around hiding money in Switzerland after driving numerous businesses to ruin. And I might add: it would be natural for indolent, disloyal and self-seeking behaviours to become widespread, since you can hardly expect much dedication, commitment and effort from those who get abused time and again

(via)

The important thing, despite the fact that these anti-public servant stereotypes are so deeply rooted in the popular imagination, is that currently there is great solidarity with public workers. No doubt greater than might have been expected by the Government, who perhaps were counting on the cuts imposed on the “privileged” public servants being accepted and even applauded by those who are having the hardest time of it, but that is not how it is turning out.Once again, as happened with the miners, the street becomes a reclaimed space where intense encounters and re-encounters take place, marked by gestures of collective emotion: once again we see embraced, spontaneous shows of support, beeping of horns accompanying the blocking of traffic, and even police who let slip signs of sympathy, public servants themselves at the end of the day. On social networks too the extraordinary messages and campaigns multiply, such as the “thank you public servants” that is so widespread, and which at a different time would have sounded like a joke to plenty of those who now display it.

That we should greet the miners with embraces makes sense, it surprises no-one, because of that heroic status they have maintained for centuries. But that we should show affection for public servants is something else, the Government must think. They were trusting that in times of scarcity we would not be moved by the the axe being taken to those who enjoy so many privileges: job security, discretionary days, longevity pay, social assistance, decent working hours and on the whole less abusive conditions than in the private sector..That is, legitimate labour rights to which all of us ought to aspire, and which in the new language of these times are turned into privileges that must be eliminated in order to drive us all equally downward. I can imagine the discomfort of the president and his ministers: “If the unemployed, the precarious, the adjusted and the dispossessed are supporting the privileged, we are done for”.Yesterday we were all miners, today we are all public servants, in the same way that we are unemployed people (whom the Government cruelly uses to enrage), we are all carers for dependants (whose hopeful “right of dependancy” has vanished as soon as the good times began to end), and tomorrow if needed we will all be pensioners (since pensions are not safe from the next round of cuts). Join up the dots and you will find the common denominator of all those groups affected by the crisis and the policies of anti-crisis: it is not that of being citzens, since neither the crisis nor the policies of cutbacks affect all citizens equally (there are banker citizens, executive citizens, and citizens with great wealth). What unites all those groups being sacrificed is that they are workers. We can understand it better this way: mine workers, public workers, unemployed workers, workers who care for dependants, retired workers.

It may seem obvious at this stage, but miners and public servants take the streets and remind us of it once again: that the so-called crisis is a looting of workers on a historic scale : a pillaging of our labour, our salaries, our rights, our public services, a transfer of wealth from the emptying pockets of the working class to the armour-plated accounts of the champions of the crisis, those who pay no price for their mistakes and suffer no cutbacks.That is what the so-called crisis consists of, and only when we are fully aware that it is not only a matter of outraged citizens but of workers in struggle, will we be able to put a stop to this looting.

I Am A Miner

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 20:12:09 -0400

From Evernote:

I Am A Miner

Translation of an article by Isaac Rosa, published on Zona Crítica, 11th July.

I am a miner

That it should be the miners, in these hypertechnologised times, who should be the ones to show the rest of the workers the way, gives pause for thought. That in the era of flexible enterprises, information society, global economy, virtual wealth and displaced and de-ideologised workers, it should have to be the old miners, with their tough tools, their calloused hands and their strong collective consciousness, to be the ones to come out into the light and start walking so that we follow them, ought to make us think about what has happened to workers in recent years, what it is we have done and what we have allowed to be done to us.

Some will say that the miners’ leadership these days is entirely fitting: if the crisis and the anti-crisis policies mean a leap back in time for workers, a rough return to the 19th century, who better than the miners at the head of the demonstration, who so resoundingly incarnate those early days of the labour movement. But we are not faced with a matter of historical fittingness, but much more.

The moving scenes lived out in every village through which the miners have passed on their march toward Madrid, the welcome, the words of encouragement, the assistance received, the solidarity extended throughout the entire country, in the streets and on social networks, and finally the reception in the capital and the accompaniment in their protest by so many workers, ought to be a turning point, a point of inflection in the construction of collective resistances. The miners have broken something, they have awakened something that was asleep inside us, they have pushed us.

I know that there is no small component of sympathy that stays clear of the reasons for their protest. There is something of historic justice, of memory, of working class sentimentality if you will, in the affection that the miners receive these days, and I say affection deliberately, because at times it has more to do with affection than with an understanding of their demands. The figure of the miner with his helmet, his lamp and his blackened face has been strongly rooted in the working class imaginary for centuries, and hence the usual discourse, about those who are ‘privileged’, which some people in right-wing media try to use to cancel them out, does not work (for that reason, and because mining has always represented what is most tough and dangerous about the world of work, their fatigue, injuries, illnesses and accidents do not fit well with any privilege). For of all this, for their popular status as heroes of the working class (demonstrated, elsewhere, in so many episodes of heroic struggle indeed over centuries), it seems natural that the miners should meet with so much warmth while on their way through the villages. I do not think a march on foot, of let’s say, waiters, builders, journalists or civil servants, would get so much support, so much affection, so many welcomes, homages and approvals, however just their demands might be.

But beyond this emotional component, the moment in which this exit from the mines has come about is important. In a moment of economic terror such as this one, when we workers feel cornered, hopeless, and our resistance is limited to guessing where the next blow will come from, the appearance of the miners on the scene can be the little light at the end of the tunnel (the tunnel in which we workers wander lost, not the stereotypical tunnel of exit from the crisis where the only light in sight is that of the oncoming train up ahead), the signal we were waiting for. The miners are giving us a lesson that we ought not let pass us by, and which goes beyond their demands, just as these may be.

And they are. The miners in their struggle have right on their side, and I am not going to go on at length on why they are right, They are right for all the reasons you will have already heard and read about these days, but even if they did not have those motives, they would still have right on their side, because of an elementary question of historic justice. We owe them, them and the generations of miners who go before them, and that is enough to oblige us to respect their way of life and their territories, to offer them decent ways out and not begrudge them a sum of money that is small change compared to the financial bailouts. But I insist: what interests me today is not so much their particular struggle (which I support), but that lesson of dignity, solidarity and resistance that they give to all other workers. We have all felt called forth these days by the miners’ struggle, in two directions: because in their demand for a decent future there is a place for all of us who equally lack that future; and because the forcefulness of their struggle makes the poverty of our reaction to the attacks we have suffered all the more obvious.

Regarding the former, the miners’ demand extends to all of us. In the miners we see our past, our class consciousness that at some moment we lost or had taken away from us, the possibilities for collective struggle that today we cannot find. But above all, we see in them our future: in their cry not to be abandoned, not to disappear, not to see their villages and their lands devastated by unemployment and inactivity, a glimpse opens up of the future that awaits us all, converted into workers abandoned to our fate, headed for a long time of scarcity, of misery: at the mercy of a wind that leaves nothing standing; with millions of jobs under extinction, and the whole of Spain turned into a huge mining region threatened by desolation and a lack of a way out.

With regard to the latter, the classic toughness with which the miners resist, the violence with which they respond to violence, enjoins us to look for another word to name what the rest of us do, that which we often exaggerate in calling it resistance. Whilst we ‘set ablaze’ social networks, miners set real fire to barricades on the motorways. Whilst we call a strike every two years, with no great conviction and above all without continuity, the miners opt, inflexible, for an indefinite strike lasting weeks. Whilst we write posts and tweets denouncing the cutbacks (and I am the first to do so), they lock themselves into the pits, paralyse the traffic, put entire regions onto a war footing, and finally start walking along the highway. Whilst we paint ingenious posters and compose nice couplets to shout out at the demonstration, they go up against the Guardia Civil. Whilst we retweet and hit thousands of ‘Likes’ to support the demands of those collectives that are being punished the most, they go from village to village giving and receiving hugs, sharing food and shelter. Whilst we await the next anniversary to go back and take the squares, they set down in the Puerta del Sol after having made the squares of all those towns they passed through their own.

The lesson is clear: faced with the all-out attack against workers, these are not times for hashtags, but for barricades. Faced with the ephemeral solidarity of the social network and inoffensive outrage, these are times for walking along together, for sharing lock-ins and marches, for meeting one another in the streets, for embracing each other as we had no longer embraced, as in these days the miners would embrace those who awaited them at the entrance to each village.

Because of all this, the government cannot allow the miners to win this contest: because if they triumph, they will be giving a bad example to the rest of the workers, because we might take note, to learn the lesson, to follow their example so as to be listened to, not trampled on, so as not to keep on losing: to struggle, to resist, to build networks of solidarity, to hold firm, to hang on until the last, to take to the street, and to take it back. Hence the immense police repression against the miners and their criminalisation in the media.

For the same reasons, we workers need the miners to win this contest: because their victory will clear the way for us, and on the other hand their defeat will make it more difficult for us to raise resistance. That is why today we are all miners, and we have to be there with them. For justice, for history, for memory, because they deserve it. But also for us, because if they fear for their future, ours is blacker than black, black coal.

From liberal democracy to liberal kleptocracy

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 11:17:07 -0400

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This is a translation of a post by Raimundo Viejo Viñas, originally published on his blog On the Wobbly’s Road on the 29th June, which prompted me with some of the ideas contained in this post here.

The grizzled figure below, the present Minister for Health in the Irish government, is a millionaire who lives in a stately home and consorts with wealthy lawyers and businessmen to build nursing homes so that he himself can make a profit from privatised health services: an area for plump profits to be made by the same financial vultures who speculate against sovereign debt, suffocate the state of its ability to fund public services. Then, when the Minister and his cronies decide that having to pay back an associated debt didn’t suit their financial priorities, they figure it would be best not to pay it at all.

Thus the current will-he-won’t-he rumours circulating about his resignation, and the media treatment of this affair, provide an excellent starting point for considering the author’s contention that kleptocracy entails a ‘fight for institutional power resources in the service of networks that pressurise for privatisation’.

From liberal democracy to liberal kleptocracy

I am pleased to read in today’s papers about a pair of kleptocrats who have found themselves obliged to resign. They have done so exactly the way they normally do: purely on account of the imminent uncovering of criminal liability. It is a positive piece of news, no doubt; but not in the liberal reading if it, which never goes far enough.

In keeping with liberal argumentation, the regime we live in operates in a satisfactory manner. Perhaps it throws up certain problems (corruption cases, slowness in the justice system etc.), but these always take place, at any rate, within the guarantees conferred upon the regime in force (so called liberal democracy) by virtue of being the least bad of all actually existing regimes and even of those known throughout history.

However, as is usually the case with the authoritarianism of any hegemony headed for its own implosion, the tendency to confuse what it is with all that it can be ends up imposing itself liberal ideology. This defect, by the way, is reinforced by liberal epistemology itself (from Popper onward) and the well-known and fallacious argument by subterfuge about the impossibility of verification deduced from falsificationism. And thus liberal democracy, as is known, ends up more liberal than democratic; more marketising than democratising; a notion that presents itself through an inexhaustible source of paradoxes.

Ultimately, the extended liberal axiom that assumes democracy and market to be compatible is nothing more than a ‘vital lie’ (Lebenslüge). Or if one prefers, a cock and bull story that is told under democracy in order to survive and not be obliged to recognised the concessions liberalism has had to make to democratisation.

Isolated cases?

Though the mass media might present it as such, it is not true that behind each kleptocrat is merely an individual case of corruption. And if political science has any purpose for democratic society, its obligation ought precisely to be to go beyond accepting indicators such as corruption as merely anecdotes about greater or lesser delinquents who ‘conveniently’ take advantage of what is public (lo público). It should come as no surprise, at this point, that liberalism ends up finding the perfect excuse for continuing with its liquidation of what is public at the hands of market forces. This is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy and is nothing more than another form of superstition that political science would do well to eradicate.

If the resignation of the kleptocrat is presented in the society of the spectacle as an isolated case of corruption, this is precisely so that no-one may reflect on what is really happening behind the oxymoron of ‘liberal democracy’ in which it takes place. The ultimate media endgame is that the public at large (and also the smaller and more informed university publics) lacks the possibility of understanding the functioning of the entire regime of power that the (neo)liberals are gradually establishing.

Functional Corruption

The matter of corruption and the function it serves to liberal democracy is not, however, difficult to understand. It is something very similar to what happens with fascism, which is part and parcel of the regime (of liberal kleptocracy) that is being established.

Indeed, presented in the media in an isolated manner, the victims of far right organisations are merely isolated cases (today a migrant, tomorrow a gay man, the following day a young activist…always matters for the pages reporting events that never make their way across the prophylactic border with ‘high politics’). However, considered as a whole, we can observe a broad countermovement that is scarcely spoken of in the media, but which for all that does not diminish its spine-chilling weight. If each right-wing crime is presented to us in such a way, this is not by coincidence, or out of ignorance, but because there exists an inherently autocratic biopolitical conception of governance at the heart of liberalism, which reveals itself time and again to be incompatible with democracy.

The same thing happens with corruption. The way in which it is treated in the media (and this includes liberal political science which takes part in the spectacle with its auctoritas) does not seek to put an end to it, but to place it in the service of the power regime that rules us. Media treatment of corruption is, in itself, corrupt. Not legally, of course, but in political terms of a logic alien to democracy (though consistent with liberalism).

Deconstituent process versus constituent process

Kleptocracy is a regime of power that has been under gradual establishment for some time now; sometimes with greater impunity, other times less so; on some occasions transgressing legal limits, on others simply by raising bills for electricity, education, medicine, etc. Kleptocracy is a regime and its agency is made up, in an exclusive and excluding manner, by luminaries and parties. The former by fighting for institutional power resources in the service of networks that pressurise for privatisation, that is, to deprive some (the 99%) of what is given to others (the 1%). After all, its own signifier indicates it: priva(tiza)r [‘Privatizar’ is the Spanish for the verb to privatize. Privar means to deprive. Thus the writer is highlighting the fact that both words have the same action in common]

Against the gradual establishing of kleptocracy, the multitude has rebelled, demanding real democracy. It could not do otherwise, bearing in mind that its regime is absolute democracy and engulfing the frame of liberal democracy, in the manner of the 15-M, is inevitable for it. Hence whoever thinks that this tendency can be reversed by promoting promoting certain luminaries via a left wing party with a view to conquering power within the frame of liberal democracy ought to study the question more seriously and ask if the problem is rather in his or her own fidelity to the party idea and to the kleptocratic regime of which this type of organisation is today, among us, its main agency.

The tawdry example of Izquierda Unida in Andalucía (with the obscene placement of family members in key institutional positions on the part of the luminaries in power) illustrates how not to do things these days. It is a crass error to believe that voting on access of an elite to power is a mode of democratic participation. As always, this will only be possible on the horizon of the politics of movement, in its radical exclusion of every form of corruption, in its destruction of the kleptocracy that they are now seeking to impose.

Democracy in Europe vs. the Fourth Reich

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 10:08:01 -0400

Translation of an article by the Madrilonia collective, published on their website 6^th July.

Democracy in Europe vs. the Fourth Reich

Do you get up in the mornings and look in the mirror and a Guten Morgen comes out? Do you look at your fellow citizens and feel like calling them wasters? Do your neighbours seem to be getting pig-faced? Worry not, you are being possessed by the spirit of the German government.

In Germany and other countries in the north of Europe, there is an account of the crisis, repeated tiresomely, which puts the blame on ‘wasteful’ countries and confers Germany with a superiority that legitimates its veto power over the future of the European Union. A key figure in Angela Merkel’s party, the CDU, laid it out clearly: “Suddenly Europe is speaking German” (especially in Majorca and the institutions of the EU). The new debtor status held by the ‘bailed out’ countries is placed before democracy in Europe: there are no equal European citizens deciding on the construction of Europe, but rather hierarchical relations between different nationalities. Europe’s ghosts are coming back. Debtocracy is a political relation that imposes legislative and budgetary changes on us against our will and prevents us from making proposals about the design of the Union.

Is this debt legitimate? Are the German elites right and we are nothing more than PIIGS? Is strangling the economies of the south a good solution? How then will there be an exit from the crisis? Eurobonds or the purchase of bonds on the part of the European Central Bank from 2008 would have diminished or rendered unnecessary (by eliminating uncertainty and speculation and as such, the consequent rise in national risk premiums) the bailing out of Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. We would have saved hundreds of billions of euros for the EU and for the ‘bailed out’ countries that would have been able to invest in saving the citizens and not the banks. Bailouts are a hijacking, because they impose adjustment conditions that lead nowhere. They are also a swindle: if the bailouts had been provided at 1%, which is the rate at which the ECB lends to European Banks (including Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank) it would reduce the debt of the bailed out countries enormously. The German government supposedly ought to know that there is a point of no return with debt, which keeps growing until the countries are not able to pay it back, and that the German banks are up to their necks in Greek, Irish and Spanish debt. The question that any European ought to ask is as follows: “What the fuck is Germany winning?” [Translator’s note: this question appeared in English in the original]

1. A national-populist account of the crisis.

When Germany says it’s ‘the Southern countries’ fault’, on the one hand it is hiding the economic interrelation of the European Union and the despotic rule of finance capital; and, on the other, it is legitimating the elimination of social and labour rights that has been in process in Germany since 2003, first by chancellor Schröder with Agenda 2010, and later with Merkel.

To present oneself as an example of austerity and rigour (in contradiction to the facts) legitimates the policies of the German elites, who are always prepared to exercise an iron control over the labour force, both national and immigrant. By defending austerity in Europe, they defend the removal of rights in Germany. Let us remember that the minimum wage does not exist there, jobs are subsidised with public money (mini-jobs), real wages have been in decline for many years, and inequality is on the rise along with the number of poor workers. Imposing these neoliberal measures in Europe seems to act as a consolation for rights lost in Germany itself: “we did it before and it was the correct thing to do”.

But, furthermore, one has to understand that if the German State can continue funding social policies and strategies for corporations and unions that austerity policies prohibit in half of Europe, it is because it is directly driving the peripheral countries to ruin. Many funds take refuge in the German bond, which means that Germany funds itself at rates close to 0% and drives up the risk premiums of the PIIGS, which are calculated in relation to the German bond. Let us recall that risk premiums are a relational matter, the more they go up for Greece and Spain, the more they go down for Germany. It is that simple, arbitrary and unjust. Naturally, any plan for debt mutualisation, such as Eurobonds or the purchase of PIIG debt on the part of the ECB in order to ease the risk premium, is rejected by Germany. At the end of the day, the German government avoids its internal crisis at the cost of the peripheral countries.

2. PIIGS?

Elsewhere, if the fault is that of the Southern countries, where did they got the money, in the case of the Spanish miracle, for a gigantic property bubble? Did capital not arrive from the rest of Europe? Did they not invest this capital, as they have been doing since Francoism, in bricks and mortar on the coast? The German banks fed inflated prices and financed suicidal banking operations. These loans moreover raised the purchasing power of Spanish, Greek and Irish people and in turn, German exports to the rest of the continent (nearly 72% of German exports stay on European soil). The (scarcely democratic) construction of the European Union has entailed the establishment of regional specialisations which have brought with them a transformation in the productive structures of each country. The elimination of farming and ranching areas was a condition for Spain’s entry to the EU. The obligation to remove the vast majority of the industrial apparatus so as not to affect the core countries led to a dismantling of industry in the majority of regions in Spain, not a conversion of production. It is thoroughly unjust for the EU to criticise productive specialisation in tourism and construction when it has been promoted by successive treaties and cohesion funds.

Lastly, to say that the fault is that of the PIIGS and to reactivate all the racist stereotypes (lazy, wasters, irresponsible) is to give a makeover to the European policies that have deregulated the financial system, and all those who have got rich on the back of it and who continue to do so with the sovereign debt crisis. The indebtedness of countries is a business and, right now, many European banks, including German banks, continue to obtain profits by expensive lending to states with cheap money they get from the ECB. Since 2008 the ECB has injected month on month figures that oscillate between €600bn (the GDP of Holland) and €350bn (the GDP of Greece) into the major European financial agencies in a continuous attempt to save their liquidity shortfall (in reality their insolvency). Hence we say that this is bailout in disguise for the European banking sector, at the cost of the populations. The European Union, led by Germany on behalf of the financial powers, is playing at the old tactic of using national borders as containers of the crisis and lines for offloading the costs.

3. Deustchland über alles

“Europe is speaking German” and a little bit of French. Undoubtedly, Germany and France have always been the decision-making centre of the European Union. Since 2008, and more still with the sovereign debt crisis, this leading role has grown exponentially. Now, from the least democratic institutions of the European Union (the ECB, the Commission, the Eurogroup and other technocrats in unknown posts), referendums are prohibited, policies are dictated and presidents are installed. Nonetheless, it remains surprising that the German parliament should decide upon what the timelines and arrangements for payment of this illegitimate debt brought about by the bailouts. Meanwhile, citizens of the bailed out countries have absolutely nothing to say about the issue. Are we Germany’s backyard? Are we slaves of the banking disaster? Are our politicians mere middlemen who take advantage of being so?

What is evident is that the sovereignty of European nation states no longer exists. The decisions are taken in the Eurogroup and certain opinions are worth more than others. There is no democracy in Europe. And without democracy in Europe, the elites will keep on blaming the populations for their own populations for their own financial excesses and extracting resources from everyone through the mechanism of debt. How does one confront the power of the financial elites with a majority in the Reichstag? The governments of Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy and Ireland are the weakest links in the European chain of command. If there are shifts in the balance in these countries, there is no doubt that the Banking Reich will be forced to adopt a different tack. How might the chain be broken in the weakest links? On the one hand, pressure from the markets and the European Union brings about cuts and deepens governments’ loss of legitimacy. On the other, mobilisations must play a central role in the democratisation of Europe. In Greece they nearly managed to see off bipartisan rule and force a change in European policies without an exit from the euro. In Spain, it still has not been possible to stop the cuts, or to achieve a real democracy, despite the rise of the 15M movement and the huge mobilisations in education and health. Let us not despair, a good attack is the best form of defence.

The Last Mohicans

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 10:52:42 -0400

This is a translation of a piece published by Jorge Moruno, published 9th July in Público, on the miners’ march - #marchanegra - descending on Madrid today.

The Last Mohicans

(image via)

I can recall stories that my father told me during my childhood, about the times my grandfather would come back crying from the mine, because there had been an explosion and some comrade had been injured or at times even killed. It was not in Asturias or León, but in Peñarroya, Andalucía, where today not a trace remains of those coalmines. Between 1931 and 1930, with exceptions, real consumption of coal in Spain never rose above 5 million tonnes. England already produced and consumed that amount in 1750 and France, a century behind, consumed it in 1840 and produced it by 1850.
Spain, by comparison with those countries, has never reached such a high volume of mining production, but that did not mean it was not a central sector. Iron and coal, key materials for driving a process of industrialisation, were by no means lacking in the Spanish economy, but thanks to the Mining Law of 1869, which liberalised the exploitation of deposits, and subsequent modifications, their development was limited.
International companies, founded on mixed capital –domestic and foreign- concerned themselves with exploiting and exporting minerals to industrialised countries at very low cost. Of the minerals most in demand –from all the ranges in existence – zinc, copper, iron etc…- 90% to 100% of total production was exported. This was the case until the nascent steel and metallurgical industries, installed in Euskadi in particular, began to incorporate it towards the end of the 19^th century.
We can draw a parallel with something similar happening to us today. Only we no longer export cheap coal and iron; today, by contrast, we do it with the talent and knowledge of young people trained with public money, who prove extremely cheap to the countries that receive them. As the urbanist Jordi Borja points out, the emigrant is manna for whoever receives her and an affliction for whoever loses her. Different elements, but functioning according to the same predatory logic: yesterday minerals, today knowledge of every kind.
In 1893, 300,000 English miners went on indefinite strike for 4 months against the reduction of their wages by 25%, imposed by the owners of the mines. With their stoppage they managed to endanger the supply of combustibles, holding out thanks to their excellent organisation and resistance funds that held several million roubles, the fruit of solidarity. Women, far from being a passive subject in the struggle, maintained the backbone of the community; that shared cultural feeling of autonomy that drives struggle on. Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist leader said of them that, with their steadfastness, “they shouted out proclaiming that they would sooner kill their children than allow their husbands and children to go back to work and accept the pittance they were offered.”

Sheffield miners on strike in 1893 via.

The spirit of the Leonese and Asturian miners has not changed since then; their ardour and clamour in the struggle for the community remains the same. But their conjuncture and situation in the economy and labour of the 21^st Century have been completely displaced, and this is why they are coming out from the coalfields. The miners stand before our eyes today as the last Mohicans of an era that even precedes the one we are leaving behind today. They go back to times where assembly line production, mass transport and consumption still had not been developed, nor had that now decaying system of social regulation through wages, known as the Welfare State.
We are entering a world where products are not so much sold for their utility, as for the idea and the imaginary with which they are associated. A real time economy, which needs a fragmented and precarious labour market to attend to the changing demands in the new sites of consumption. A market that needs labour power immersed in a schizophrenic situation: under permanent training, versatile whilst submissive, fearful, and enthusiastic in equal parts.
But also flexible, proactive, entrepreneurial, cooperating and individualist, within a tangle of informal relations and dependencies. Now that working class cultures, which had served as a dyke against the tempests of capitalism, have been broken down, the elites seek to replace them with a desert. We are all our own entrepreneurial property, but on account of our precariousness; free agents, they call it. With no working class tradition, those in precarity who now recognise themselves as such can see in the miners an older sibling who must be listened to so that they can come to understand their own present.
The miners have an allure because they have the strength of being able to play the trump card that many others would wish for. The miners are also held in contempt because they have the strength of being able to play that same trump card, which many others do not even wish for and even oppose. The philosopher Spinoza observed these different forms of human sensibility by declaring that ‘the former, I say, aims at living for its own ends, the latter is forced to belong to the conqueror; and so we say that the former is free, but but the latter is a slave’.
Those of us among the former are learning with the miners that their reality and ours is not the same, nor does it have to be, but the reasons that bring them to Madrid are the same as those that subjugate us to debt and absolute precarity. We operate like a stereogram, that is, like an optical illusion that captures images from different points of view. It is only in this way that struggles can be woven and co-ordinated strategies can be built and co-ordinated collectively at different levels. Basic income can be one of these demands.

The Chair in State Theory Antonio Negri claimed years ago that the history of continuity in revolutionary movements is their rupture and discontinuity. “The revolutionary working class movement is continually being reborn from a virgin mother”. Different but with a same spirit, precarians and miners must search together for Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach: it is only through revolutionary practice that human activity can coincide with the changing of circumstances. The government delegate in Madrid, Cristina Cifuentes, is well aware of this and insists on preventing any symbolic connection between the 15-M and the miners from being established. She warns that she will not allow any acampada in the Puerta del Sol, and comes forward to announce that the miners will be finally offered a place to spend the night.

This coming 10th of July the #marchanegra will arrive in Madrid. They will be received as they deserve, as what they are, children of the same mother. On their journey they leave behind a trail of dignity in every town they set foot in, and hence they receive the warmth and the applause of its inhabitants. Offering a town or a city so that it is theirs too. Those below declare to the travellers that wherever their feet touch the ground, that is their country, -Ubi pedes, ibi patria-; the feet of the Republic of the 99% against the dictatorship of the financial rentiers of the 1%.

The Great Theft Movement: Ireland as Kleptocracy

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 10:42:37 -0400

From Evernote:

The Great Theft Movement: Ireland as Kleptocracy

Distraction Burglary

Some burglars will try to trick their way into your home. A distraction burglary is where a bogus caller to your home gains entry on a pretext / lie or creates a diversion so that an accomplice can sneak in separately.

- Personal Safety Security for the Older Person, An Garda Síochána Crime Prevention Information Sheet

What does it feel like to live in a kleptocracy? How would you know if you lived in one? Here are a few pointers.

A kleptocrat, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a ruler who uses their power to steal their country’s resources’. It is true that no dictionary definition of anything is ever truly definitive. Nonetheless it is worth dwelling on the fact that the definition of a kleptocrat says nothing about what kind of ruler a kleptocrat is. There’s nothing specified about the institutional role afforded to the ruler, or whether the ruler is legitimated by popular authority, or the number of rulers that make up a kleptocracy.

Therefore the ruler need not mean an individual who holds a position in government, or any other official position of State power. The ruler may simply be a rich person who can make the power of the State bend to his will. And a ruler who, for example, makes the power of the State bend to his will in order to steal from other people is known as a kleptocrat. However, it is of course true that a public official or representative can also be a kleptocrat.

There is nothing in the definition about the number of rulers that make up a kleptocracy, or how power among their number differs in degree. Therefore a ruling class may also be a kleptocratic class: it may use its power -over political institutions, over wage labourers, over slaves, over public perceptions and reflexes- to expropriate the resources of a country -its wealth, its land, its natural resources, its labour power- for its own ends and edification. and it may do so through violence, the threat of violence, manipulation, swindle: whatever is needed to carry off the heist.

As befits a class that sustains itself through stealing, its members will cut each other’s throats when expedient, but collaborate when it is in their mutual interest.

There is nothing in the definition about the kind of legal order in which kleptocracy operates. Therefore the stealing -of what is public- may be considered illegal, but conversely it may also be perfectly legal. It depends.

In modern societies characterised by a legal order in which public ownership is to the fore, kleptocrats will resort to legal means to steal a country’s resources, often having used their power beforehand to define what is legal in this regard. Sometimes, this takes the form of what is known as privatisation.

The word private and the word deprive have the same etymology: from the Latin privare: to deprive. That is, when a public good or service is privatised -for example, telecommunications, water, oil, gas, education, health- this means that the public is deprived of access to it, pending the decision of the new designated owners, who will name their price as they see fit. Therefore privatisation can be doubly kleptocratic: first, through the stealing of the public resource itself. Second, through the imposition of high prices designed to maximise profitability, thereby transferring the wealth held by the public into private hands.

Kleptocracy need not simply entail stealing the resource directly. It may just mean that the loss of access to public goods is the price that the public have to pay for the accumulation of profits. So if the construction of fracked gas pipelines, for instance, built through the power of the extraction lobby over state institutions, and through the control of dominant media institutions over public opinion, results in the loss of access to potable water, or farmable land, that too is characteristic of kleptocratic rule.

Ireland is a kleptocracy. It would take a long time to dig deep to trace its roots that spread thick and wide, and its numerous manifestations, such as the transfer of gas and oil resources to private corporations, or the presence of a major onshore tax haven. But here is one salient example: the power of the financial sector over State institutions, used to force the public to shoulder massive debt burdens. Debt is not often thought of as a form of stealing. And yet when it is a debt burden imposed without consent on the public, it clearly is. After all, if I go into your house and see €500 on your mantlepiece, and I say “give me that €500 or I will hit you with this iron bar”, few people would argue that this is a form of stealing. And most people will recognise that it would also be stealing if I go round to your house and the conversation goes something like this. “You owe me €500.” “No I don’t.” “Yes you do, and if you don’t give me €500, I’ll hit you over the head with this iron bar.”

***************************************************************************************************

Some will keep you talking at the front door while their accomplice sneaks in the back door.

- Personal Safety Security for the Older Person, An Garda Síochána Crime Prevention Information Sheet

The imposition of the debt burden on the public, then, and the consequent slashing of welfare payments, cutbacks in public services, purposely high unemployment rates, wage depression, regressive tax measures and the handing over of public assets to private firms at knockdown prices is a form of stealing. But why don’t we see manage to it that way? Why don’t we recognise it as stealing -imposed on the threat of starvation, deprivation (that word again), unemployment and misery- just as we might recognise it if someone arrived at the door with an iron bar and says “you owe me €500”?

One reason is that the police might come to your aid in the aftermath of an attack on your home. Another, related, is the sanctification of the home as a form of private property to be religiously protected. Another still, perhaps more important, is the imposition of the debt burden is thought to be legal, arising out of a sequence of perfectly legal actions. Legality and legitimacy are regularly presented successfully as the same thing in a liberal democratic regime. Partly because of the conviction that the market is the optimal means of allocating resources and distributing wealth and therefore identifiable with justice, and partly because the imposition was approved and consented to by public representatives.

In a liberal democratic regime, what is decided by public representatives is considered as carrying out the will of the people ipso facto. This happens even though the vast majority of people take no part in any discussions, negotiations or formulation of legislation during the decision-making process (see, for example this: ‘Mr Kenny insisted that the Cabinet had not settled down to discuss the Budget and that it would not be drafted in public’). It happens even though the information the people have available to them is filtered, censored and sanitised by media institutions owned by kleptocrats, and by other media institutions that rely on the patronage of kleptocratic interests in order to sustain themselves.

Moreover, to call into question the legitimacy of this ‘will of the people’ -which, in Ireland, is currently indistinguishable from the will of the IMF, the will of the ECB and the will of the European Commission, all of whom execute the will of that supreme unelected sovereign, ‘the markets’- is to be treated, by these same institutions, as a threat to democracy.

Conventional wisdom. relentlessly reproduced via dominant media institutions, holds that ‘democracy’ -which is to say, bourgeois representative democracy- is the only form of government worth having; hence the decisions taken by its representatives, regardless of how destructive they are of public welfare, regardless of how much wealth they transfer into private hands, regardless of how the reality of their decisions is obscured from public view, are legitimate and unimpeachable.

Recall the mating call of the liberal authoritarian - Churchill’s famous quote that democracy (i.e. bourgeois representative democracy) is the ‘worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’. In short, if the public is burdened with massive debts on account of a crisis caused by private banks, it is the public’s own fault for failing to vote for representatives who might have forestalled such an occurrence. And if the government decides to impose taxes to ensure that these debts are paid off, then the people must obey, or face the consequences.

An excellent example of such liberal authoritarianism is displayed in today’s Irish Times editorial. Writing on the campaign against the household tax, it calls for ‘discipline’ to deal with ‘political resistance’ and ‘disregard for democratic institutions’. It claims the use of Dáil expenses, by TDs Joe Higgins, Clare Daly and Joan Collins, to offset travelling expenses outside Dublin whilst participating in the household tax campaign, is an ‘abuse of Dáil funds’.

Whilst the Irish Times does not deign to offer any justification for this claim, the likely reasoning behind it is that the TDs are elected to Dublin constituencies, and therefore travel related to constituency affairs must only take place within some kind of Dublin-specific boundary (The Red Cow roundabout? The Julianstown exit on the M1?). Never mind the fact that if people elected any of the aforementioned TDs it was out of an expectation that they would use their seat, in line with their duties as a representative, to help organise mass popular protest.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a single voter for any of these politicians who might have thought that by receiving their vote, they were binding themselves to speak only to people within the bounds of Dublin West, or Dublin North, or Dublin South Central, and the road to the Dáil. Furthermore, if a TD were to have claimed expenses for traveling back and forth to the offices of banks, property developers, employer organisations, real estate agents and so on, we can be sure there would be no issue, but a TD engaging in democratic activity -resisting kleptocratic rule- is cause for scandal and outrage on the part of the political and media establishment.

Moreover, for all its crocodile tears about the shortfall in funds for the provision of local services that the non-payment of the household charge will supposedly generate (as if the total amount of funding made available for local services were not determined by political considerations such as giving priority to the repayment of unsecured private bondholder debt, and other measures intended to keep the financial sector sated), and its stern demands for discipline, the Irish Times has rarely had anything so righteously robust to say about imposing such a thing on the main culprits for the current crisis: financial institutions.

Thus the decision of Michael Noonan to rule out the implementation of a Europe-wide financial transaction tax, was passed over in relative silence, even though the tax revenues lost and the decisive social power accumulated by finance capital as a result of the current arrangement is deeply corrosive of democratic influence over public institutions, and even though there is a several orders-of-magnitude difference between the revenues lost on account of non-payment of a household charge, and those lost through tax avoidance arrangements facilitated by the ‘democratic institutions’ of the Irish State.

Of bourgeois democracy, Raymond Williams wrote the following in the 1980s: ‘The description has been sloganized, but it has a precise meaning: it is the coexistence of political representation and participation with an economic system which admits no such rights, procedures or claims (emphasis mine)’. What is passed off as Irish democracy, however, goes further than this, in that it is not simply coexistence, but the gradual devouring of the latter by the former.

Consider this image:

When it appeared in circulation, attention focused -at least in those newspapers and radio stations that do not belong to telecoms magnate, media oligarch and tax ‘exile’ Denis O’Brien- on the appearance of the Taoiseach Enda Kenny alongside a man -Denis O’Brien- whom the Moriarty Tribunal had found to have made a payment of £500k and a loan of £420k to Michael Lowry, the erstwhile Fine Gael Minister for Telecommunications, who had held the position when O’Brien bid for and successfully won the second mobile phone licence.

The photo, and the appearance it documented, was cited -albeit fleeetingly and certainly not universally- as evidence of the dangerously close relationship between the Fine Gael ruling party and O’Brien, whose ownership of radio stations Newstalk and Today FM and control over Independent News and Media, among other interests, give him an immense influence over public life in Ireland.

Joan Burton, the current Minister for Social Protection (a Newspeak job title if ever one existed) warned, with some justification, to be sure, of the danger of ‘a Berlusconi-style, media-political complex with its attendant codes of omertà undermining the principles of transparent democracy’.

Fine. But is there nothing else wrong with picture? What would we have seen if O’Brien had not appeared? Let’s try an experiment.

With O’Brien now removed from the photograph, we can glimpse what the photo opportunity was really intended to convey: the idea that Ireland is not a country at all, but a commodity to be traded on stock exchanges, and that the ‘head of the Government, the central co-ordinator of the work of the Ministers and their Departments of State, the person who sets ‘broad Government policy’ (source) is not a public servant at all, but in fact a Chief Executive Officer, beholden to the will of shareholders, that is, of Capital.

How to make sense of this?

Media obsession with corruption, or misappropriation of public funds, is selective and self-serving, since a focus on singular corrupt individuals functions as an alibi for the operation of a kleptocratic system.
Kleptocratic control over public institutions is strengthened when the venality of elected representatives is revealed. Since democracy -bourgeois lberal representative democracy, that is- is the ‘worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’, stories about expense claims, high salaries, perks and so on, help to perpetuate the idea that politics is both a professional activity and largely irredeemable. With regard to the expense claims of TDs taking part in the campaign against the household tax (an anti-kleptocratic activity), this is intended as part of the same spectacle of corrupt individuals making off with public funds for their own purposes.
Thus the intended message, as regards the TDs is: Beware! Politics is an activity for self-serving professionals, and anyone who gets involved in a mass campaign that also involves such individuals is likely to be made a means to their end.
And since any other form of rule would be intolerable, there is no alternative to democracy (kleptocracy). Thus there is no alternative to the economic system which admits of no political rights, procedures or claims, to use Williams’s description, must be kept free of political interference.

In this way, we are kept talking at the front door, by the political and media establishments, about individual cases of corruption and supposed threats to the democratic system, whilst round the back, their accomplices in kleptocracy are looting us of everything we have.