Autonomy: an idea whose time has come

Working Class Movement Must Be Independent

A new chapter in the history of the South African working class was opened in Soweto on 21-22 July 2018, when representatives from over 147 South African working-class formations represented by 1000 delegates assembled to unite workplace and community struggles.

It made huge strides forward to lay the foundations for building a new, independent, democratic and militant mass working-class movement to turn the tide against the attacks on jobs and living standards which are pushing more and more South Africans into poverty and despair.

This assembly of the working class, rural poor, the downtrodden and marginalized brought together formations that have never met under the same roof before. It was historic and unprecedented that 147 formations of the working class would meet as equals with mutual respect of one another and in search of a common ground.

This Working Class Summit (WCS) was characterized by a commitment to unite working class formations, the employed and unemployed workers, those in the informal sector and in more secure work, the students and the landless, the homeless and those fighting against the water crisis and the scourge of violence against women and children, into mass campaigns to struggle for a truly free, just, democratic and equal society.

As SAFTU President Mac Chavalala said in his rousing keynote speech:

“As the working class we have been on a junk status for far too long. We are not here to moan but to announce a radical and revolutionary programme that will unite ourselves behind common demands and mass programme of mobilization.

“Our warning to all those who seek to keep the status quo is simple – the holiday is over! From now going forward, we will engage you in the streets and the boardrooms.”

Capitalism is the Common Cause of Our Misery

The Working Class Summit not only endorsed the binding principles around which it will unite such as anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-patriarchy and anti-xenophobia, but unanimously agreed that capitalism is the common cause of the misery experienced by the majority.

There was unanimous agreement that the working class movement must be independent and adopt a bottom up approach to democracy. In that regard the Working Class Summit agreed to build the working class power in every workplace, in every community and society in general to defeat the logic of capitalist accumulation that has not only pauperized workers across the continent but it has caused the widest inequality and deepest poverty ever recorded in the history of humankind.

It was resolved to convene working class assemblies across the country, in cities and towns, factories and farms, townships and informal settlements to deliberate on how to unite struggles of the poor. South Africa is the protest capital of the world but these struggles have tended to remain localized and movements fragmented. A special appeal was made for trade unionists to become active in these struggles because they are members of communities before they are unionists. In this way, the foundations of the all-important unity of the working class can be established....

No Future: From Punk to Zapatismo and Connected Multitudes

Amador Fernández-Savater speaks to Catalan-Mexican writer and activist Guiomar Rovira about collective action, technologies, the online, “off-life” divide and more.

quote:

Amador Fernández-Savater: “Activist networks” is how you characterize the first historical period described in your book. One of its fundamental ingredients was punk, something that you personally experienced while living in Barcelona during the eighties. How did punk influence the creation of these networks?

Guiomar Rovira: I like it that you want to start there. “No future” is one of the most important messages in punk. In a way, contemplating that “there is no future” opens up a new politics, a much more prefigurative politics. It’s no longer a question of waiting and dreaming of utopias, but of doing what we need to do here and now, and in the ways we can and want to. We’re not waiting for further instructions or permissions to get started. We will take ownership of music and spaces. In punk, anyone can pick up a guitar while someone else starts singing, speaking, doing. This is where we find the DIY spirit, with whatever you have at hand. The cultural becomes political: it is a way to exit the defined boundaries of the system that constantly procrastinates and sacrifices in service to the promise of a non-existent future.In that sense, from fanzines to squatting, punk is very rich. There is no future, so we have to live. Now. There is no housing, so we have to squat buildings. It’s a movement that also becomes transnational, not embedded in state or national structures but in the spaces in the cities, in the creation of networks. An extended sense-making community. A global movement with its local appropriations, one that needs not ask permission to build a politics and ways of making culture and communicating. A movement where anyone can say what they want to say.

In that sense, from fanzines to squatting, punk is very rich. There is no future, so we have to live. Now. There is no housing, so we have to squat buildings. It’s a movement that also becomes transnational, not embedded in state or national structures but in the spaces in the cities, in the creation of networks. An extended sense-making community. A global movement with its local appropriations, one that needs not ask permission to build a politics and ways of making culture and communicating. A movement where anyone can say what they want to say.

In a way, punk prefigures the hacker mentality. At that time, I was part of a magazine called Lletra A. We made it by cutting and pasting the whole thing manually. We also had a very important network for occupying houses in Barcelona. We opened our modest self-organised social center, el Anti. The idea was, “there is no future, let’s build our lives now”. It wasn’t limited to counter-information, it was about creating a distinct ecosystem....

Building the Future

Around the world, new municipal movements are transforming the way we provide – and think about – housing. From campaigning against evictions to innovative forms of public housing to requisitioning empty properties and engaging many more people in decisions about how and where we live, municipal projects are responding to the global housing crisis, locally.

In Hungary, A Varos Mindenkie (The City is For All), an action group of people who have experienced homelessness and their allies, has been campaigning for an end to evictions and housing rights. In Romania, Căși Sociale ACUM! (Social Housing NOW!) campaigns for housing justice.

In the US, the Richmond Progressive Alliance has introduced rent controls and measures to protect tenants from eviction. The alliance’s housing action team is transforming abandoned properties into affordable housing, pushing the local school district to complete a housing project for teachers, and exploring ways to encourage homeowners to take advantage of new laws designed to make it easier for people to build accessory dwelling units (often known as ‘granny flats’ in the UK), one of the cheapest ways to provide affordable homes.

The path to rent control wasn’t smooth – early attempts to impose rent controls were blocked by the California Landlord Association. It became a key issue in the 2016 municipal elections, and with pro bono legal help and support from the Service Employees Union as well as other community organisations, Richmond became one of the first cities in California to pass rent control in 30 years. The town’s February 2018 State of the City report showed the impact: average rents were down 11 per cent from September 2016, the first rent control board was operating, and funds for affordable housing were being spent on new public housing. Now the alliance is working to appeal Costa-Hawkins, a 1995 California law allowing landlords who rent single-family houses to raise rents without limits, exempting them from rent-control laws that now apply to flats....

..2.5 min video

New Municipalism

Stir to Action has worked in partnership with the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University in Leicester to produce a new video resource for the municipalist movement. The video was inspired by CURA’s Municipal Socialism in the 21st Century even in June 2018, and highlights the latest concepts in the movement, summarising why it is growing, and explains some of its main concerns.

We have created this resource for all of us to use, to help others understand the key thinking behind this transformative politics. We actively encourage you to use it yourselves and share it with others. We hope you find it useful in lectures, at conferences, on educational programmes, on your website, in your news stories, or simply to share over your social media.

LA Voters to Consider Creating Nation’s First Municipal Public Bank

A charter amendment that will go before Los Angeles voters on November 6 could put LA on track to create the nation’s first municipal public bank. If created, the bank would put public dollars, that’s things like tax dollars and electric bills, into the hands of public officials. Proponents of the historic measure say that unlike for profit banks, which finance things like weapons manufacturers and fossil fuel extraction, the public bank would make loans to LA for things like public education and transit and invest in solutions to issues like homelessness and climate change.

quote:

DHARNA NOOR: Yeah. Here in Baltimore we’re intimately familiar with some of the dangers of big banks like Wells Fargo operating with near impunity. Baltimore is the birthplace of the subprime mortgage crisis. In 2012, they agreed to pay a one hundred seventy five million dollar settlement because they steered mostly Black people into subprime loans. But if this amendment passes, if Charter Amendment B passes, what exactly would it do? What would the path to the creation of a public bank look like?

PHOENIX GOODMAN: That’s a good question. The Charter Amendment B is actually pretty simple and a really low hanging fruit towards a much longer process for the ultimate success. All it does is it removes a single barrier in the amendment to allow this discussion to begin. Right now, the city cannot engage in commercial enterprises, as the charter currently states, and it would simply amend that to create an exception for a public bank. Once that’s created or passed, assuming it passes, there’s going to be a whole slew of steps ahead; creating a business plan, creating a new type of charter at the state level and other details like that that will have to unfold over the next few years until the bank is actually created. But Charter Amendment B is the very first step in beginning that process.

quote:

And it’s one of those rare cases where we can have our cake and eat it too, because unlike other social programs which require increased taxes and spending in order to get funds, because this would be a public sector bank that would produce profits, all the interest that we currently pay to Wells Fargo – which by the way, in Los Angeles, it’s 1.1 billion dollars a year to the various Wall Street firms, including Wells Fargo, that we pay for infrastructure or on interest – that would be recaptured by the public bank. And instead of going to their quarterly profits, which end up getting either sent to offshore tax havens or reinvested it into weapons and private prisons and all the other things that they invest in, or their bonuses that are unearned, that would be recaptured by the city, and then can be used to reinvest.

..more

quote:

In Rosario, Argentina, the movement-party Ciudad Futura had around ten years of experience in developing social infrastructure — such as secondary schools, farms, food cooperatives and construction cooperatives — when they successfully stood a number of councilors in the 2013 elections. Last year, one of their councilors suggested that:

when social movements start to contest the institutional arena, we don’t want to appropriate or monopolize these constructs or these experiences in any way, as the state would usually do. Rather, we want to do the opposite, to develop and expand the diverse social management that exists from within the state apparatus.

The demand to simply “scale up” municipalism, which tends to be based on a vision where the local state is considered an instrument or tool to be wielded differently on behalf of the working class, is in significant danger of misinterpreting what many within these initiatives are looking to achieve. If we instead view the local state as a set of processes and relationships, the emphasis of politics thus becomes — at least in part — to attempt to substitute the old ways of how we relate to one another (as service users, as managers, as decision makers, as representatives, as voters, and so on), with new processes and relationships that are more horizontal, open, deliberative and in touch with ordinary people.

In this sense, the municipalism of the international Fearless Cities network is quite different from simply winning locally and doing the same that parties would traditionally do, but just better. More than simply implementing more innovative leftist policies locally, they are aiming to change how to do politics to begin with. They recognize that one cannot keep on trying the same recipes and waiting for something different to happen. But this is also why the municipalist movements are works in progress: there are no roadmaps or blueprints to work with.

As many as 5 socialists could join City Council after election successes Tuesday

If their success on Tuesday carries over to the April runoff election, as many as five members of the Democratic Socialists of America could be on the Chicago City Council — the most in more than a century.

Two won aldermanic seats outright. Three others made the runoffs.

“The oligarchs are shaking in their boots tonight,” Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) told supporters Tuesday at Puebla Restaurant celebrating his re-election over challenger Amanda Yu Dieterich. “Our continued organizing and movement-building over the last four years is paying dividends. And it appears to be a total transformation of political power at City Hall from the bottom up.”

Rosa is one of the two members of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America who got the majority vote needed to win without a runoff. The other, Daniel La Spata, upset Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno in the Near Northwest Side’s 1st Ward.

quote:

“Chicago had a way of doing politics, and I feel like that died tonight,” Rodríguez-Sánchez said. “I’m very very confident that I’m going to win” in April.

Byron Sigcho-Lopez, who heads the Pilsen Alliance, credited the socialist organization — which says it’s not a party but instead a “political and activist organization” — with helping him in the race for the seat vacated by retiring Ald. Danny Solis (25th). Sigcho-Lopez will face Alex Acevedo in the runoff.

“DSA members were instrumental, and I’m thankful to the volunteers who spent hundreds — thousands — of hours campaigning,” Sigcho-Lopez said. “We’ve had a rubber-stamp City Council beholden to corporate interests, and that’s why the DSA candidates resonated with people.”

Chicago Makes Herstory: First African-American Woman and Gay Chicago Mayor Wins in Landslide

quote:

MAYOR-ELECT LORI LIGHTFOOT:

Out there tonight, a lot of little girls and boys are watching. They’re watching us. And they’re seeing the beginning of something, well, a little bit different. They’re seeing a city reborn, a city where it doesn’t matter what color you are, and where it surely doesn’t matter how tall you are, where it doesn’t matter who you love, just as long as you love—let me say that again: where it doesn’t matter who you love, just as long as you love with all your heart. In the Chicago we will build together, we will celebrate our differences, we will embrace our uniqueness, and we will make certain that all have every opportunity to succeed. Thank you.

quote:

BARBARA RANSBY: Yes. Thanks for having me, Amy. You know, there’s significance on two levels. I mean, I would be, as a historian, the last to deny the significance of having an openly gay African-American woman as the mayor of the third-largest city, because the way that racism has worked in this city and in this country in the past is through exclusion, right? So, the fact that we have overcome that hurdle in terms of representation is significant.

But what’s more significant is the way in which this generation of activists, particularly young black activists, have transcended narrow identity politics and have really insisted that politicians like Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle and others adhere to a set of progressive demands and issues that have defined this campaign. So I think, you know, on another level, the real victory is that movement organizers, young black and Latinx organizers, have put critical issues on the table and that the two contenders both had to present themselves and make promises around a progressive agenda. The question now is: Will they keep that agenda?

I should also say, in all fairness, that there were critiques of both candidates. And I think that reflects a level of political savvy and sophistication, that it wasn’t enough to say we’re going of a black woman mayor, that many young black queer activists, for example, were very critical of Lori Lightfoot’s role on the police board and didn’t feel that she really fought hard enough to hold police accountable, to punish police for police crimes and so forth. So, they weren’t timid about doing that simply because she was an African-American woman and an out gay black woman.

So, the twofold victory is that, in some ways, the white-led machine in Chicago politics has been wounded, if not defeated, but it’s also a challenge that, you know, a whole ecosystem of black and Latinx and anti-racist white activists in Chicago have shaped the debate around this campaign and will continue to push after the inauguration in May.

Feminist assembly at Madygraf.

..agreed! txs mm.

The role of planning in the ecosocialist transition – a contribution to the debate

Introduction

The semiannual French review Les Possibles, a publication of Attac France, in its most recent issue (23) features a number of articles on planning for the ecological and social transition. Most are addressed to the issue of socialist planning vs. capitalist markets that was prominent in the debates of 20th century socialism. The contribution by Michael Löwy puts this debate in the ecosocialist framework that has emerged in this century. My translation of it is published below.

Michael Löwy is a Franco-Brazilian philosopher and sociologist, and emeritus research director at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is the author of numerous books, including The War of the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America and Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” He is also a leading member of the Global Ecosocialist Network.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Ecological and social planning and transition

By Michael Löwy

April 3, 2020

The need for economic planning in any serious and radical process of socio-ecological transition is winning greater acceptance, in contrast to the traditional positions of the Green parties, favorable to an ecological variant of “market economy,” that is, “green capitalism.”

In her latest book, Naomi Klein observes that any serious reaction to the climate threat “involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning.” This includes, in her view, industrial planning, land use planning, agricultural planning, employment planning for workers whose occupations are made obsolescent by the transition, etc. “This means bringing back the idea of planning our economies based on collective priorities rather than profitability….”[1]

Democratic planning

The socio-ecological transition — towards an ecosocialist alternative — implies public control of the principal means of production and democratic planning. Decisions concerning investment and technological change must be taken away from the banks and capitalist businesses, if we want them to serve the common good of society and respect for the environment.

Who should make these decisions? Socialists often responded: “the workers.” In Volume III of Capital, Marx defines socialism as a society of “the associated producers rationally regulating their interchange (Stoffwechsel) with Nature.” However, in Volume I of Capital, we find a broader approach: socialism is conceived as “an association of free men, working with the means of production (gemeinschaftlichen) held in common.” This is a much more appropriate concept: production and consumption must be organized rationally not only by the “producers” but also by consumers and, in fact, the whole of society, the productive or “unproductive” population: students, youth, women (and men) homemakers, retired persons, etc.

In this sense, society as a whole will be free to democratically choose the productive lines to be promoted and the level of resources that should be invested in education, health or culture. The prices of goods themselves would no longer respond to the law of supply and demand, but would be determined as much as possible according to social, political and ecological criteria.

Far from being “despotic” in itself, democratic planning is the exercise of the free decision-making of the whole of society — a necessary exercise to free ourselves from the alienating and reified “economic laws” and “iron cages” within capitalist and bureaucratic structures. Democratic planning associated with a reduction of working time would be a considerable step forward by humanity towards what Marx called “the realm of freedom”: the increase in free time is in fact a condition for the participation of workers in democratic discussion and management of the economy and society.

Advocates of the free market tirelessly use the failure of Soviet planning to justify their categorical opposition to any form of organized economy. We know, without getting into a discussion on the successes and failures of the Soviet experience, that it was obviously a form of “dictatorship over needs,” to quote the expression used by György Markus and his colleagues from the Budapest School: an undemocratic and authoritarian system which gave a monopoly over decisions to a small oligarchy of techno-bureaucrats. It was not planning that led to the dictatorship. It was the growing limitation of democracy within the Soviet state and the establishment of totalitarian bureaucratic power after Lenin’s death that gave rise to an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic planning system. If socialism is to be defined as control of production processes by workers and the general population, the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors fell far short of this definition.

The failure of the USSR illustrates the limits and contradictions of bureaucratic planning with its flagrant ineffectiveness and arbitrariness: it cannot serve as an argument against the application of genuinely democratic planning. The socialist conception of planning is nothing other than the radical democratization of the economy: if political decisions should not be made by a small elite of leaders, why not apply the same principle to economic decisions? The question of the balance between market and planning mechanisms is undoubtedly a complex issue: during the first phases of the new society, markets will certainly still occupy a significant place, but as the transition to socialism progresses, planning will become increasingly important.

In the capitalist system use value is only a means — and often a device — subordinated to exchange value and profitability (this in fact explains why there are so many products in our society without any utility). In a planned socialist economy, the production of goods and services responds only to the criterion of use value, which entails spectacular economic, social and ecological consequences.

Of course, democratic planning concerns the major economic choices and not the administration of local restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, small shops, craft businesses or services. Likewise, it is important to emphasize that planning does not contradict the self-management of workers in their production units. Whereas the decision to convert, for example, an automobile factory to bus or rail vehicle production would be up to society as a whole; the internal organization and operation of the factory would be managed democratically by the workers themselves. There has been much debate over the “centralized” or “decentralized” nature of planning, but the important thing remains democratic control of the plan at all levels — local, regional, national, continental and, hopefully, global — since ecological issues such as climate warming are global and can only be addressed at that level. This proposal could be called “comprehensive democratic planning.” Even at this level, it is planning which contrasts with what is often described as “central planning” because economic and social decisions are not taken by any “center” but democratically determined by the populations concerned.

There would, of course, be tensions and contradictions between self-governing institutions and local democratic administrations and other larger social groups. Negotiating mechanisms can help resolve many such conflicts, but in the final analysis, it will be up to the larger groups involved, and only if they are in the majority, to exercise their right to impose their opinions. To give an example: a self-managed factory decides to dump its toxic waste in a river. The population of an entire region is threatened by this pollution. It may then, following a democratic debate, decide that the production of this unit must be stopped until a satisfactory solution to control its waste is found. Ideally, in an ecosocialist society, the factory workers themselves will have sufficient ecological awareness to avoid making decisions that are dangerous for the environment and the health of the local population. However, the fact of introducing methods to guarantee the decision-making power of the population to defend the most general interests, as in the previous example, does not mean that questions concerning internal management should not be submitted to the citizens at the level of the factory, school, neighborhood, hospital or village.

Ecosocialist planning must be based on a democratic and pluralist debate, at each level of decision. Organized in the form of parties, platforms or any other political movement, the delegates of the planning bodies are elected and the various proposals are presented to everyone they concern. In other words, representative democracy must be enriched — and improved — by direct democracy which allows people to choose directly — locally, nationally and, ultimately, internationally — between different proposals. The whole population would then make decisions on free public transit, on a special tax paid by car owners to subsidize public transport, on the subsidization of solar energy to make it competitive with fossil energy, on the reduction of the hours of work to 30, 25 hours a week or less, even if this entails a reduction in production.....

..more from the above piece

quote:

AMNA AKBAR: Thanks, Juan. So, we are about a decade into sustained social movement activity in the United States. If you think back to Occupy, Occupy focused our attention on capitalism and income inequality through an exercise of prefigurative politics through the encampments that we saw all around the world. And then, through Ferguson and Baltimore, Black Lives Matter and more, all of those kind of protest moments made us confront the long history of anti-Black violence in the United States. Standing Rock made center stage Indigenous struggle and how the state and powerful corporations work together to take, take, take from the land in blatant violation of treaty rights, connecting Indigenous resistance to environmental justice, and environmental degradation to capitalism. And now with defund police, we have a new call, kind of a new moment, where left social movements, young people of color are calling for these various modes of reforms that are designed to imagine and start to build a different kind of world.

And now — you know, and then the moments I just named are kind of the spectacular headline moments, the moments of the whirlwind, and all the while, long before and long after, you have the slow work of organizing. So you have base building, political education, toolkits, campaigns, coalition building and canvassing. And so, in the last decade, we have built our power and our analysis, expanded our collective muscle for a wide array of strategies and tactics, and built all sorts of institutions, organizations, coalitions, magazines, podcasts, bail funds, mutual aid networks and more. And so, while there are certainly differences in analysis and theories of change across the left and working-class organizing, there’s also a growing overlap with more and more people understanding why the status quo can’t stand, how the status quo is a product of a global and local history, and the need to come together to build alternatives.

And so, whether this is a more powerful formation or powerful moment than any other one across the — you know, in the history of the United States or around the world, that I don’t know. But I do know that over the course of my life, this is certainly the strongest the left and working-class movements have been. And I feel hopeful about where we are. And, of course, I feel apprehensive, because our opponents are not going to pack up and go home, as Rachel Herzing put it the other day when I was talking to her. We are going to see, and we are seeing, state repression all over the country, whether it’s federal prosecutions of protesters or all sorts of local and state prosecutions, not to mention the ongoing criminalization and prosecution of working-class people for their survival. And so, the odds against us are long, but we are also stronger than we have been over the last few decades.

..pdf file

The Combahee River Collective Statement

quote:

2. What We Believe Above all else,

Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, Indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.....

..lastly 

quote:

More than a fifth of Black women live below the poverty line, but their lives are largely invisible. Instead, popular culture and mainstream media outlets are fixated on Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé Knowles, and Michelle Obama, to whom they turn for insights into the experiences of Black women. Much of what is meant by identity politics in its contemporary idiom is simply representation—the presence of Black, queer, gendered, and classed bodies with almost no attention paid to their political commitments. But the radicality of Black women’s politics was based on their position at the bottom. The view is decidedly different from the top. The C.R.C. gave us the political tools to understand the difference between bottom-up and top-down politics, and their distorted manifestation in the identity politics of today.

Take This Job And Love It

In the six years that Michael Ugwu has worked as an Uber driver in New York City, he’s seen a growing share of his earnings diverted into venture capitalists’ pockets. Uber and Lyft require workers to assume a myriad of expenses that can quickly trap drivers like Ugwu into debt and poverty.

“Currently, they’re taking out between 35 to 40 percent, when you add up all the deductions,” Ugwu says. “You end up not having enough to pay rent, maintain the car, pay the car loan, and buy gas. They’re continuously ripping us off.”

quote:

In May 2021, Ugwu and 2,500 other drivers launched the Drivers Cooperative, a ridesharing company that lets them keep 85 percent of their fares and share in any annual profits. It has no investor shareholders or executive compensation. By comparison, Uber’s chief executive earned $64 million in 2019-2020, hundreds of times more than a typical driver’s salary of about $30,000 per year, according to an independent analysis

By July, more than 30,000 people had installed the Drivers Cooperative’s app, Co-op Ride, which can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play and works just like other rideshare apps. “Co-op Ride is a conscious choice that you can take,” Drivers Cooperative co-founder Ken Lewis tells The Progressive.

The Drivers Cooperative surpassed 3,500 active drivers in July, making it the largest worker co-op in the United States. But it is just one piece in a much larger movement. The National Center for Employee Ownership estimates that fourteen million people participate in employee stock ownership plans that give ownership but not management rights to workers.

A much smaller number of people, around 10,000, are employed at worker owned and run co-ops, according to Mo Manklang, policy director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. The majority, she says, are people of color or immigrants. These workers are emerging in new sectors like the rideshare industry, food delivery, and even video streaming. They are taking on billion-dollar firms by raising capital from the communities they serve.

“The Drivers Cooperative means everything to me now, because I see it as my own business,” Ugwu says. “I will do anything that I possibly can to see that we succeed.”.....

Degrowth and Revolutionary Organizing

quote:

II. Abolishing the Growth Industrial Complex

The process of growth is, and has always been, concretely violent. Today, the US is able to significantly grow and expand its hegemony through its exploitation of prison labor—a legacy of slavery.[17] This intertwined nature of economic growth and the industry of enslaved labor should warrant a broad interrogation into the role of mass incarceration by the degrowth movement, but we can count on one hand the number of degrowth assessments of prisons.[18] Our intention is to highlight this coil of corruption through the case of mass incarceration in Central Valley, California, as well as the flow of monopoly finance capital that facilitates this industry among others in the growth-industrial complex. Finally, we wish to impart as a major task to the degrowth movement the objective of joining prison abolitionists in this cause.

The end of World War II marked the era of the rivalry between imperialist nations, and the US consolidated its singular position as the world’s superpower.[19] Consequently, the state of California in particular invested in a burgeoning military-industrial complex, relying on substantial amounts of Department of Defense (DOD) contracts to increase federal investment and fuel their economic growth.[20] However, as the twenty year-long Vietnam War caused federal deficits, the US dramatically reduced its military spending, which surged the unemployment rate in California to 11.1 percent, higher than the nationwide rate at the time.[21] Thus, prisons were proposed as the all-encompassing solution to the stagnating or shrinking local economies in the Central Valley.

Between 1982 and 2000, the prison population in California grew by 500 percent.[22] The “biggest prison construction program in the world,” dating back to 1983, offered a lucrative investment opportunity, a politically efficient method of diverting public attention away from state-driven economic inequality, and a means of exploiting the surplus labor and land available.[23] Once in Kings County, CA, “local officials traded more than 20 years of future tobacco settlement payments meant for health care for $18 million in cash from the bond market to build a new jail.”[24] Rural areas in the Central Valley like Avenal especially solicited the construction of prisons in order to boost their economies and create new jobs.[25]

Today, some California prisons operate as e-waste recycling sites. At the US Penitentiary in Atwater, California, which occupies part of the former Castle Air Force Base that was “contaminated by fuels, oils, solvents, cleaners, and paints used to operate and maintain aircraft for national defense,” incarcerated workers run one of Federal Prison Industries’ largest e-waste recycling stations.[26] Daily, they are exposed to toxic metals from the facility’s processing of cathode ray tubes found in computer monitors and television sets.[27] Under such conditions, the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy could not be just.

This is not an argument against renewable energy; rather, one for the production and use of renewable energy in consideration of ecological limits as well as global racial equity. Samir Amin referred to “catching up”, or the “use of methods analogous to those of capitalism” in formerly colonized nations, to describe their “passive adjustment to the so-called objective requirements of capitalist development.”[28] Despite gaining independence, the formerly colonized nations are condemned by “the colonial power through its immense resources of coercion.”[29] The investments into renewable energy, too, are tied to this capitalist development in its stage of monopoly finance capital.

quote:

III. Against Idleness, Towards Organization

“Between theory and practice there is organization. Organization is what bridges theory and practice. These three concepts are essential to each other. You can’t just have theory and practice, you gotta have an organization.”

Vijay Prashad

Degrowth intellectual Serge Latouche put forth eight interdependent principles of degrowth in his book Farewell to Growth. They are:

1. Re-evaluate what matters;
2. Reconceptualize key notions such as wealth, poverty, value, scarcity and abundance;
3. Restructure the productive apparatus and social relations to fit these new values;
4. Redistribute wealth and access to natural resources between North and South and between classes, generations and individuals;
5. Relocalize savings, financing, production and consumption;
6. Reduce production and consumptions, especially for goods and services with little use value but high environmental impact;
7. Re-use products;
8. and Recycle waste.[39]

Furthermore, political economist Hubert Buch-Hansen outlined four “prerequisites for socio-economic paradigm shifts: deep crisis, an alternative political project, a comprehensive coalition of social forces promoting the project in political struggles, and broad-based consent.”[40] Inherent in both of these propositions is a coordinated plan of action to transform structures, shift paradigms, and mobilize people to reconstruct the world in which we live. The first step to achieving any of this is committing to an organization. If we do not successfully build a degrowth organization, how can we be expected to build a degrowth city, state, world?

Organization is where we “can be continuously re-evaluating [our] theory and practice and continuously transforming [ourselves] so as to be better able to live up to the historic tasks for which [we] have accepted responsibility.”[41] James and Grace Lee Boggs write that we “should be consciously aimed at transforming those who have come together on the basis of commitment to a collectivity, with a powerful sense of their developing and continuing collective identity and purpose.” In its initial period, degrowth organizations should focus on internal programs. Without a strong foundation of theory, and consistent practice in advancing that theory, the organization remains susceptible to false degrowth paths. At the first meeting of DegrowNYC—a collective of degrowth advocates of color in New York City—all attendees shared their capacity to participate in the organization, their comprehension level of degrowth, and their ideas and hopes for shaping this nascent organization. That conversation then determined the curriculum for the first few months of our internal political education.

During this initial stage, degrowth organizations should set their principles of unity, which helps identify not only what the organization is against, but exactly what it is for.[42] This can look like a list of points, a mission statement, a set of guiding questions,[43] but they should exist to hold all members and the work of the organization accountable to each other and to their values. Such a document serves as an ideological anchor for the organization so that we may carefully correct our behaviors resulting from the “hundreds of years of steadily centralizing capitalism and in some areas, after thousands of years of hierarchy.”[44] In DegrowNYC, we dedicated two thirds of our first year to internal political education before drafting our organizational mission statement through a participatory process. It reads:

DegrowNYC is a collective of organizers of color based in occupied Lenapehoking who view degrowth as a form of ecological reparations. We organize ourselves and our priorities around the principles of care, sufficiency, and autonomy to challenge and unlearn the dominant ideology of infinite growth. Through developing resources and hosting educational events, we empower activists and organizers to implement degrowth values and practices in their organizations and campaigns.

Writing this required an ideological unity among members on the purpose of this collective, and its role and position within the existing movement. We could not have achieved this without an investment into the internal programs during our initial period.

The principles of unity must remain open to revisions, allowing the organization to measure its progress, its success and failures, and adjust its movements accordingly. In setting these standards of conduct, we practice the principles of care for ourselves and one another, and work to build communities with ecological limits in mind. Correct ideas come from practice[45]—when we attempt degrowth collectively, correct our ways as we go, and build the degrowth world ourselves. Questions like “Are we working to satisfy collective needs as opposed to individual needs? Does our work reject imperialism and resource extraction everywhere?” should be expected to be answered in the affirmative, at all phases of the work, regardless of what it is or who is involved.

A degrowth organization must also learn to distinguish itself by understanding that no member will have the identical capacity, schedule, or even modes of interacting with, and within, the organization. As revolutionary theory argues, “equal right, an application of the same measure to different people who, in fact, are not the same and are not equal to one another, presupposes inequality.”[46] Degrowth organizations must switch from the concept of rights to the concept of roles, where different people based on their abilities, age, experiences, and so forth, will have different roles within an organization working towards a unified goal. Perhaps the most accessible trait an organization can inhabit is its fluid, unfinished nature—that one is welcomed at any time, for the work is ongoing and shared. By working together based on the foundation of commitment to revolutionary change, we contribute what we can, when we can, however we can, and still rest assured that the work will always continue.

James and Grace Lee Boggs also note that “great care should be taken to make the process of recruitment a selective one, aimed at slow and qualitative growth, rather than rapid expansion, taking care not to judge the growth of the organization by the numbers of its members, rather than by their commitment to the ideology and programs of the organization.”[47] Organizing takes time and patience, as will constructing a degrowth world. “Judging the revolutionary content of a group by its militancy or by the excitement and relief which it offers from boredom and frustration,” takes away from the “development of collective struggle.”[48] Degrowth organizations must create routines in their efforts, involving regular meetings and clear roles, “in full consciousness of the group’s responsibility to advance the evolution of humankind.”[49] DegrowNYC for example meets every other week, and members routinely share additional opportunities for collective movement ranging anywhere from educational courses, eviction defense, tabling for community programs, attending rallies, to simply enjoying each other’s company at local public spaces. By being in an organization, we internalize the meaning of commitment and care. We make degrowth attitudes and behaviors a part of our unconscious nature, by learning to partake in it within our organizations.

Additionally, degrowth organizations should eventually implement the revolutionary method of “criticism and self-criticism,” to practice collective self-limitations inherent in the degrowth principle of autonomy, where we “limit our footprint upon the non-human world” for the well-being of all of us.[50] In Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, James and Grace Lee Boggs explain the importance of criticism and self-criticism within a revolutionary organization:

“First, the need to prevent mistakes (through the most thorough discussion and preparation of all involved); second, the need to recognize, admit, and correct (rather than cover up) mistakes; third, the need to pin down exact responsibility for mistakes. This is not for the purpose of placing blame on an individual but to enable the individual and others to learn the appropriate lessons from the mistake and thus avoid repetition.”

Degrowth organizations should remain a dialectical space wherein its members’ participation informs its programs and practice, and vice versa. Wherever we are, to build towards degrowth is to be in an organization that practices degrowth values and advances degrowth ideals in its community. Mistakes in our thinking and our actions are bound to occur, but revolutionary work is first and foremost in believing that people are capable of change, and in recognizing and correcting, to eventually prevent altogether, those mistakes. Degrowth will be a “protracted period required for the cultural revolutionizing of the masses,” a time for all to become accustomed to the habits of degrowth, to institutionalize degrowth values for future generations, until we no longer have to degrow.....

BEAUTIFUL RISING:
A Global Story

Beginning in 2014, Beautiful Trouble partnered with ActionAid International and frontline social movement activists across the Global South to develop a toolkit of social movement resources by and for global changemakers.

The lessons, innovations, insights and stories that emerged from that process were published in the 2017 book Beautiful Rising: Creative Resistance from the Global South, and formed the backbone for the 2018-2021 overhaul of the online Beautiful Trouble toolkit as it now stands. Beautiful Rising has inspired many other compilations throughout the Global South, from the new Beautiful Trouble Pan-Afrika Edition to a Myanmar coup response edition compiled using the My Tools feature of this site. 

Below is our account of that process and the ways in which it continues to infuse our work, drawing from the introduction to the Beautiful Rising book.

Beautiful Rising is an innovative partnership between ActionAid and Beautiful Trouble, funded by the Danish International Development Agency. ActionAid is an international organization based in Johannesburg that works with over 15 million people in 45 countries for a world free from poverty and injustice.....

The Commune is the Supreme Expression of Participatory Democracy

In this interview, VA talks with a member of the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force, an organization based in the 23 de Enero barrio in Caracas that has worked to build one of Venezuela’s flagship urban communes.

The Alexis Vive Patriotic Force, which has deep roots in Caracas’ 23 de Enero barrio, began planning a commune years before Chavez even proposed the communal path toward socialism. Yet when Chavez announced the plan to join communal councils into a higher form of organization, Alexis Vive wholeheartedly embraced the initiative and has since then built a highly successful commune called El Panal Commune[1] involving some 13,000 people. We spoke with a key cadre of El Panal about this project that is both economic and political to find out how it is coping with the crisis escalated by US aggressions.

The commune is usually thought of as a space of construction – for the political and economic reorganization of society –, but it is also a space of resistance. Let’s talk about the commune today, in a period where Venezuela is under attack by imperialism. 

quote:

There is a confrontation of models, a clash of two paradigms not only in Venezuela and in Latin America, but also worldwide. One of the questions in the debate is: who is the historical subject? For us, that is the question of who is it that activates, who lights up the field, who pushes changes forward. And when we reflect on this issue, which means thinking about our own practice, we guide our interpretation by the proposal that developed with Comandante Chavez.

Chavez developed a hypothesis after a process of maturing, after a rigorous analysis of the Venezuelan and continental realities, and after a reflection on the revolutionary potential under our feet (based also on a commitment to justice for the poor that was there from the start). His hypothesis was: The commune is the historical subject, the commune and its people, the comuneros, that is where the revolution really begins. So we made this proposal ours, we committed to it.

We were aware that the proposal and our embracing it was going to be attacked from its onset, at its genesis. When Chavez first raised the banner of socialism in 2006, when he said that the Bolivarian Revolution must be socialist, when he said that a vote for him is a vote for socialism, he committed himself and the people to a collective project of rupture. Well, that is where we find the seed of the commune. Self-government and economic emancipation go hand-in-hand with socialism, with a people in power. So that is where we find the initial seeds for the commune: in [Chavez’s 2006] proposal to build a socialist “patria.”

It became clear to us then that there was going to be a new level of confrontation. We knew that the path towards socialism was going to be demonized, that contradictions would pop up everywhere, inside and outside. So we can say that the communes hadn’t even been born yet, and we were already in resistance! But the truth is that we have been in resistance for more than five hundred years.

Today, we are not only resisting imperialism. We are also resisting old forms of production and their diverse forms of domination: from the organization of education and affects, to the organization of the formal political sphere and the economy.

Why is there conflict? We are making a counter-hegemonic proposal to a system that is powerful, a system that seems part and parcel of what the human being is. In the face of this system, the communal subject stands tall and says: Hey, this doesn’t have to be so, this is not the only option. The communal subject is the one that affirms that capitalism is not a natural occurrence, it is an imposition.

The communes are counter-hegemonic spaces with a vocation for hegemony. From our commune, we aim to show that another organization of society is possible, that power must be reorganized, and that power should be in the hands of the people. That means combining new economic relations with an exercise of power in the commune’s territory.....

..still more.

quote:

Let’s come back to the situation today: the imperialist aggression. In the past couple of months, we have witnessed a new form of war with the electrical blackout and the attacks on the electric grid. Tell us about how you have organized resistance in the commune in this context.

We are the daughters and sons of Chavez. We listened to his words and we learned. As a result of that, we understood that when you go up against capital and against imperialism, there is only one option: to prepare. If we are going to tell imperialism that we are no longer its backyard – that we have chosen the path to full independence and on top of that we are transitioning towards socialism –, then we must understand that we are going to be in a war with a military superpower.

A new phase of aggression against our country has begun. They try to restrict our access to food and they have implemented a financial blockade and, more recently, an oil embargo. They also attack us culturally. They try to inspire fear in us. Most recently, they attacked our electrical system, which is fundamental for modern life.

We were aware that this was coming, so we prepared for a war economy, through organization and work. We also prepared through research and [by paying attention to] popular creativity. A contingency plan was in place. So when this new phase of the aggression began, we were ready for it with the necessary resources.

Our planning allowed us to build – in the midst of the blackout – a diesel-powered electrical grid for our collective spaces. In fact, the commune acts as a kind of state or government in everyday life, and it does so also when faced with a contingency or aggression. Obviously, that [alternative power supply] made for a less hostile environment during the blackout.

Many people do not know about the spontaneous forms of solidarity that emerged during the blackout. I witnessed beautiful gestures during those days, especially among my neighbors, both Chavistas and opposition. What happened here in 23 de Enero?

It was an all-out exercise of violence against our lives! But when faced with ugly, catastrophic situations, popular kindness, solidarity and sisterhood blooms! This is not just discourse: people were brave and noble. We don’t believe that the human being is selfish by nature. Humans are formed in society; the human being is part of a whole, of a collective. The genesis of humanity is in the commons, in working together towards shared ends, and those collective instincts flourish when people face a war-like situation.

I can give you an example from our experience. We organize weekly fairs where fruits and vegetables are sold at very low prices through the “Pueblo a Pueblo” initiative [direct coordination with campesinos]. During the blackout, we sold on credit [since the electronic payment infrastructure was offline], and the neighbours came through. One by one, they came back and paid their debts when the blackout was over. One can see there that the response from the people was not selfish. People didn’t take advantage of the situation, even though they could have. Instead, those days were characterized by collective consciousness.....

..my last post on it though there is much more to be had. 

quote:

Is it fair to say, however, that the commune is not in the forefront of the government’s political discourse now?

Absolutely. Look, when Chavez became a public figure, many from the left didn’t understand that they had to change course, that the only way forward was with Chavez. Likewise, many within Nicolas Maduro’s government maintain the old conception of the state and don’t understand that the commune is the goal.

However, that is what the Bolivarian Revolution is: a combination of very diverse currents. Within the Revolution there is a latent debate about the commune. Our role is to show that the commune is indeed the historical subject. We show this through our example, and, in doing so, we hope to make a rupture with the old ways and become hegemonic.

Our contribution to this big debate is through our practice, through work. Our constructive criticism can be found in our concrete example. Building a commune brings forth a new culture, a new form of doing politics, and new economic relations... Against the logic of representative democracy, we propose participatory and protagonic democracy, and the commune is the supreme expression of the latter.....

El Panal communards and members of the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force in a march against fascism and corruption. Caracas, April 2016. (Comuna El Panal)

..txs laine. i enjoyed reading/posting it as well.

..wasn't sure what protagonic democracy (from #146) meant so i did a search and found this.

Participative Democracy under Siege: A Conversation with Luis Britto García

quote:

The Bolivarian Process has been characterized by a conception of democracy which, without abandoning the principles of western (or so-called “liberal”) democracy, also goes beyond them. Can you tell us about Hugo Chávez’s efforts to expand popular democracy?

Chávez made democracy “participative” and “protagonic.” I think I can summarize this idea by saying that the concept of popular participation is not limited to electing officials or representatives every so often. Instead, democracy is expanded so that institutions such as referendums, social movements, communal organizations, and the right to demonstrate can influence the decision-making by those in power.

When Chávez was kidnapped during the [2002] coup, people filled the streets and brought him back to power. That is a good example of protagonic participation. Here is another example: some years ago I campaigned against a law that would have allowed rivers, lakes, and lagoons to be privatized. Chávez vetoed that law. In that case, the work of a single citizen contributed to rolling back a decisive project.....