class war – Page 3 – Ashley Dawson

Teaching American Studies in Torino, as I am for the next two weeks, is an eye-opening experience. I feel a bit as if I am a native informant, who has to try to undermine the inaccurate views of my students about the United States. One of the foremost of these is the myth that the U.S. is the land of opportunity.

My first class this week will focus on The Monster, Michael W. Hudson’s encyclopedic account of the depredations of the subprime mortgage industry in the U.S. over the last two decades. The industry that, in cahoots with Wall Street banks like Lehman Brothers and using arcane financial instruments like Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) invented in order to profit from the subprime mortgage market, wrecked the global economy.

The sordidness of the subprime mortgage industry is impossible to overestimate. It was run by completely unscrupulous capitalist bosses who purposely targeted working class people of color, people who had finally managed to build up a bit of equity through government-backed mortgage schemes in the decades after the New Deal and the Second World War. Equity, mind you, that was radically less than what the average white suburban family was able to build up in the same period. Here’s an excellent video that gives a sense of the unequal (racialized) landscape of housing in the U.S.:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW764dXEI_8]

The subprime mortgage industry targeted working class people of color, siphoning their hard-earned housing equity into an insane Ponzi scheme built on virtually impossible to penetrate financial instruments like CDOs and Credit Default Swaps. The result was a complete crash of the global economy. Here’s a video that very nicely explains how all of these arcane financial instruments worked?

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/3261363]

Underlying this crisis of credit reminds us that, of course, the assault on working- and middle-class wages begun by global financial elites in the mid- to late-1970s, led, particularly, by Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. As elites clawed back more and more of the wage gains and other social benefits win during the period since the Great Depression and the Second World War, life for the average person became more and more difficult.

What this led to was the financialization of everyday life. The 99%, in the Occupy parlance, were forced to live more and more off credit (and women had to enter the workforce in order to maintain middle class standards of living). Slowly, people came to think of life itself in financial terms, as a kind of risky investment.

One area in which this shift is particularly apparent is higher education, which went from being seen as a right that was provided to the people free of charge through public higher education systems like the City University of New York and the University of California systems, to being seen as an investment that people had to pay for through tuition charges. This was a Faustian deal, though, since it only made sense – if it ever made sense – when the economy was doing well and this “investment” could be payed down quickly after snagging a well-paying job. Now that unemployment is high for young people, high tuition rates in universities (including public ones) seems more like a scam than a just exchange.

There was a good article in the New York Times today about a couple of French economists who have shown that inequality in the US is nearly as bad as it was during the Great Depression. This is no news break to Occupy activists, but one suspects that the American Dream myth is keeping most people in the U.S. in the dark about this fact, not to mention many people around the world, who continue to think of the U.S. as the land of milk and honey. Here are some amazing charts from the article that demonstrate spiraling income inequality:

It will take tremendous push-back in order to turn this horrible situation around. We’re just at the beginning of such efforts, but the Occupy movement has already initiated some very creative and brave responses to the economic crash. Here is a video of folks from Occupy Foreclosures who block house auction proceedings with choral singing:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9CmCKYlNYQ]

The pranksters at Occupy also recently produced a beautiful video that, in Situationalist terminology, “detourn”s West Side Story to cover many of the issues I’ve touched on in this post:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wGZRJG4ZJE]

Lebanon is a country with a long history of sectarian strife. The remnants of the civil war, which pitted Christians against various Muslim groups (Shiite and Sunni are both represented in the country), with groups like the Druze additionally complicating the fray, are still evident here in Beirut, despite the relative civil harmony in the country today. But then it was precisely such splits that the Arab spring challenged, so it’s a very exciting time to be here in Beirut.

Given the tectonic shifts the entire region is undergoing, it should not be so surprising that the politics underlying the conference organized by the American University of Beirut’s Center for American Studies and Research, a conference which I recently attended, should be a little muddled. In fact, the conference theme – Shifting Borders – reflects the huge changes the region is currently undergoing, and the resulting complexity and confusion among political and cultural analysts about the future.

That said, some of the presentations at the conference reflect pitfalls that the Left really needs to avoid if it is going to contribute significantly to the democratizing currents that have been sweeping through North Africa and the Middle East over the last year.

For example, the conference began with the keynote address by Rani Khouri of the American University of Beirut. Professor Khouri argued that we are currently living through one of the most significant changes in modern Middle Eastern history. The significance of the mass uprisings were sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor, on 4 January one year ago is to introduce the first process of citizen-based self-determination, leading nations in the region towards a genuine politics of sovereignty.

For Khouri, the mass uprisings and the movements for democracy they unleashed redress grievances felt since the anti-colonial nationalist movements of the 1950s and 1960s liberated the region from colonial control, but then introduced different varieties of authoritarian military rule. Often, these dictatorial regimes were tied to foreign powers, including, of course, the US. As a result, they lacked popular legitimacy on a variety of levels.

These uprisings were generated, Khouri argued, by a combination of material grievances – based on declining incomes across the region – and popular demands for the meaningful recognition of their citizenship, constitutional changes to enshrine democratic processes, and social justice.

Khouri’s major intervention was to challenge the Islamophobic discourses so often heard in the Western media. He explained that Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are reaping electoral gains from the revolutions of the last year precisely because they have been so effective in articulating popular discontent with the status quo across the region in recent decades. They have, he argued, consistently expressed popular anti-imperialist sentiments, argued for popular empowerment, provided a sense of transnational unity, and have delivered basic service to people in the increasing absence of the state (or of any aspect of the state other than its police-military face).

In order to question Euro-American Islamophobia, Khouri compared Islamist groups to the Civil Rights movement in the US. Both, he argued, were driven by assertions of social justice and human dignity. As a result, such groups gave people a sense of human and a belief in their ability to change history. This link between the US Civil Rights movement – which often had a religious underpinning – and Islamist movements in the Middle East is an interesting and original comparison.

Khouri argued that the electoral victory of these movements would have the same impact as the triumph of the Civil Rights movement in the US: the religious grounding of these groups will become less evident as they take over the state and become engaged in basic issues of effective service provision that are necessary in order to retain their popular mandate.

This argument seems questionable to me. To what extent are currents of fundamentalism in Islamism more comparable to Christian evangelical groups in the US than to the Civil Rights movement? Moreover, to what extent will such groups move towards secularism as they are confronted with the increasingly intractable political-economic woes of neoliberal capitalism? Moreover, given the likely intensification of climate change in coming years, can we assume that these movements will settle easily into the liberal democratic capitalist trajectory that Khouri seemed to assume – drawing on the US model – is the universal norm and goal?

The central problem in Khouri’s argument, in other words, is its liberalism. As far as I could tell, there was no analysis of the anti-capitalist element in the revolutions of the last year. Nor was there any acknowledgement of the problems such movements will face as a result of increasingly grim global crises of capitalism. Because of the liberal framework of Khouri’s analysis, he ironically ended up retaining a neo-colonial sense that the US is the telos or goal towards which the societies of North Africa and the Middle East must aspire. Given the current political-economic crises in the US and EU, such an argument seems harder to sustain and more self-defeating than ever.

Juxtaposed with this liberalism at the keynote, organizers of the conference had also invited a number of Iranians to present their work, including the head of American Studies at Tehran University. A professor in such a position could only be complicit on one level or another with the increasingly authoritarian regime in the country. Sure enough, during his presentation, this professor proceeded to argue that Iran is one of the major victors in the region as a result of the revolutions of 2011. Although this Iranian was quick to denounce US imperialism, he ducked questions about the ungoing repression in Syria and of course had little to say about the violent suppression of the Green Movement – which can, in many ways, be seen as one of the antecedents of the Arab Spring – in his own country.

The fact that CASAR organizers gave public platforms to both liberals such as Khouri and the Iranian contingent suggests the extent of the muddle about what a progressive politics in the Middle East might look like. How hard it is to forge a coherent anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal and anti-homophobic front. This is what democracy must look like, after all, in the Middle East and elsewhere. If the Left does not stand up for all these values, it will be on the wrong side of history.

During the colonial era, Africa was represented as the land that time left behind. European colonial powers justified their rule over many parts of the globe, and over Africa above all, by arguing that other parts of the planet were evolutionary backwaters. Europe was held to be the most evolved culture on the planet, the model to which all other cultures were supposed to aspire.

This temporal narrative was sutured onto space. To travel from Europe to Africa was thus not just to travel away from the center of global culture, technology, and civilization in general, it was also to travel backward in time. These racist notions were incredibly pervasive in European colonial culture, shaping the ideas even of critics of imperial brutality such as Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness retains many of the tropes of Africa as a prehistorical space.

The whole framework of development during the postcolonial era was predicated on retaining these temporal tropes. Africa and other parts of the world that succeeded in liberating themselves from colonial oppression were nevertheless expected to “develop” or catch up to the West by integrating themselves into the global economy. This meant accepting the capitalist rule book, including elements such as intensive fossil-fuel driven agriculture. As we know now, these notions of development, along with the loans that accompanied them, did not in fact help most African nations “catch up” to the West. Instead, they saddled most of these nations with forms of exorbitant debt that shattered their infrastructure and consigned them to a form of permanent indentured labor for the global economy.

Nonetheless, today Africa is no longer seen as a space that lags in temporal terms. Quite the contrary. Africa is now seen as the future the rest of the planet will one day catch up to. Its extreme inequalities, mass surplus population, tremendous pools of informal labor, immiserated millions in mega-cities like Lagos and Nairobi – all of these components make critics of both the Right and the Left, from Mike Davis to Robert Kaplan, see Africa as a bell-wether.

South Africa is perhaps the most extreme case of such extremes. It offers nearly unparalleled wealth cheek by jowl with stark poverty. Walking around the affluent neighborhoods near the university where I’ve been staying during COP17, the architectural implications of this polarized society are highly evident.

At night, the streets are totally abandoned, except for the occasional prostitute. The affluent suburbanites of this area – the vast majority of whom are white – don’t even leave their cars on the street for fear of burglary, so the streets are almost as blank as those of a traditional Arab medina.

During the day, the multifarious architecture of security is discretely apparent. Here are some images I snapped while walking the streets (the only white man on foot, of course). High walls, razor wire, ferocious dogs, private armed response units, and, above all, ubiquitous electrified wire (rather hard to see in some of these photos because it’s so thin and hence discrete). The temptation to touch some of this wire to see how much of a jolt one would get was strong, particularly since it was so delicate, but I refrained since I suppose there must be enough juice in there to kill a man.

[slideshow]

All of this offers a powerful metaphor for the world of climate apartheid created by elites over the last two weeks here in Durban. It’s not so surprising that people see Africa as prefigurative.

I think today must go down in history as the moment when humanity collectively failed to secure its own future. It also has to be seen as one of the greatest crimes of the rich and powerful of the world against the vast majority of humanity that has ever been committed.

Although I won’t hear the full skinny on final negotiations inside the COP17 conference until later in the day, it’s already clear that the news is not going to be good.

Here’s what former Bolivian ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon had to say in a hasty email sent out while negotiators sprinted towards the finish line last night:

A few moments ago we found out the decisions that they have been cooking behind the scenes. In Durban they won’t approve a second period of commitments of the Kyoto Protocol. This will happen at the end of next year: in COP18. In Durban they will only take note of the draft amendments and the “intention” of rich countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol will lose its heart. The promises of reductions by rich countries will be incredibly low until 2020 and will lead to a temperature increase of more than 4 degrees C. The Kyoto Protocol will turn into a Zombie without a global figure for reduction of emissions by industrialised countries, and will carry on walking until 2020 just so that carbon markets don’t disappear. In 2020 it will enter into effect in “a new legal framework appliable to everyone”. By everyone, they mean diluting the difference between developed and developing countries, between countries responsible for climate change and those who victims. The US managed to eliminate any mention of a “binding” agreement. That means the “new legal framework” will be an empty gesture without any effect. This will become known as the lost decade of the fight against climate change. Genocide and ecocide will reach proportions that we have not yet seen. The Great Escape by the Rich has turned into the Great Swindle.

Solon does not toss around terms like genocide and ecocide carelessly. The failure to agree to a just and binding replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, the only climate agreement that humanity has ever reached that had any real teeth, signals the inability of humanity in general, and the rich nations in particular, to agree on a course of action that goes beyond competitive, short term interests. We’re essentially looking at a world in which inter-imperial tensions are being ratcheted up, leaving the rulers of powerful nations thinking only about their defensive interests. The killing irony is that this behavior will only ensure greater hostility and competition.

If one looks at the geologic record, it’s clear that human beings have enjoyed a period of extraordinary environmental stability over the last 10,000 years. It is likely that this stability would have ended one way or another at some point, but, with the failure of negotiations at COP17 to achieve any of the goals that the climate justice movement has been pushing for, we have ourselves ensured that this window of stability will close quickly and ferociously.

It’s hard not to think that we’re not all that different from other primates. Despite our vaunted claims to self-consciousness, historical awareness, and collective rationality, at the end of the day we seem to be ruled by the basest of our passions.

Today we have ensured that we will be unable to take our fate into our own hands. And it is the poor and weak, people like the rural farm women I’ve met over the last two weeks during my stay in South Africa, who will be the first to be devoured by the holocaust we are unleashing.

This is the final session in a two-day workshop organized by the Transnational Institute, a group that bills itself as “a worldwide fellowship of scholar activists.” The overarching theme of the workshop was Defying Dystopia: Struggle Against Climate Change, Security States, and Disaster Industries.

Hilary Wainwright, “Climate Justice, Climate Capitalism, and Social Movements”

This paper is inspired by the work of Ruth First, an exemplary scholar-activist and committed journalist.

All the social movements are challenging the logic of capital today, but there’s something specific about labor in that confrontation. This paper explores the emergence of networks of solidarity between labor and environmental activists, focusing in particular on the million climate jobs campaign. What I and Jacky are interested in exploring is the associative power of labor. We’re interested in a reclaiming of the social after decades of neoliberal appropriation of the ideas of individualism that emerged from social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We’re interested in reclaiming the social, including social individualism, to establish a notion of collectivity which isn’t the collective over and above the individual, but of networks of solidarity between people.

We’re thinking of a notion of labor in the broadest possible, feminist sense, understanding labor in terms of self-employment, domestic labor (outside the waged economy) and unemployed labor, which plays such a key role in the capitalist economy. We’re also thinking of free labor, such as that involved in the open software movement, and the labor involved in consumption.

The one million climate jobs campaign is a response to the convergence of climate change and unemployment, particularly in South Africa, where 3 million young people, 40% of the population, are unemployed. The aim of this campaign is to organize in the townships and to forge alliances between trade unions and environmental groups. And then there’s also the building of organization among self-employed groups such as the Waste Pickers. They’re interesting because they’re not organizing simply to improve the price of their labor, but organizing to gain control over the waste management systems in order to use their knowledge of waste to push for genuine recycling, such as compost. So they’re directly hitting at the logic of capital.

Traditional unions in high carbon industries are also beginning to think about how they can use their knowledge and power to convert their industries to more sustainable footing. I remember in the late 1970s, there were massive rationalizations of industries in the UK. Lucas Aerospace workers were top level designers of latest destructive technologies of the time; they realized that they didn’t want to just organize for better wages, but wanted to do something else that didn’t involve the military-industrial complex (many of them were involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). They had sense that their skills could be producing totally different things, including environmental machines. They produced an alternative plan for their firm and for the UK, a model which had a significant influence on radical politics in that period.

Some contemporary industries need a planned decline – mining, for example. But some, such as the automotive industry, for example, have tremendous potential for transitioning to sustainable production. NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa), whom I met recently, has set up worker teams in each area that can be converted into new alternative industries.

In all these spheres, there’s a sense that the financial crisis and the crisis of neoliberalism has begun to have an impact on how labor is organizing. It’s important, in other words, not to think – oh hell, now there’s the climate crisis, what do we do? – but rather to think about what existing forms of organization we can use.

Admittedly, we have to recognize how difficult things are, how precarious all the positive things I’m pointing to are. There’s a trend towards autonomist politics that’s influencing the labor movement. Yesterday I was with an organizer of Streetnet, an international organization of street vendors that developed when street vendors were faced with being banned from public space during the run-up to the World Cup, and when municipal workers refused to “clean them up.”

In most countries, the labor movement abrogated politics to social democratic parties and saw themselves simply as fighting for narrow wage issues. But as the parties have given up on oppositional politics, trade unions have sometimes developed into vibrant political organizations. So this paper is about realistic things that can be done to stop climate change.

I’d like to try to systematize discussion of different sectors:

One area, like mining, needs to be shut down
Then there are others that need to be converted, like car manufacturing and waste processing
Finally, there are unions moving into new green technologies
new jobs, including in the public sector and the solidarity economy

NUMSA teams are working with communities to see what technologies are useful to people, and then using their bargaining power to push for production in these areas. This might be a way of occupying the claim of green capitalism.

The one million jobs campaign doesn’t just focus on jobs, but also on exposing the inequalities behind climate change and structural economic inequalities.

Throughout the whole neoliberal period, we’ve seen a weakening of democracy and a hollowing out of the legitimacy of the whole political system. This is one of the driving factors behind criminalization; democracy was a legitimizing process. That’s been breaking down, and a gap opening up between the political class and the people. But the other side is the search for meaningful alternatives. That’s the significance of the Occupy movement, and why it won’t go away. It’s now clear that the political system is not worth entering.

These political spaces are not formed yet. In developing a green economy, we’ve got to refine our understanding of capitalism. We need to understand the anti-market character of capitalism. The spaces created by the Occupy movement are growing. That’s why we’re going to see new convergences around new forms of political power.

Susan George, “People’s Security on a Protected Planet”

What are people already doing about military-industrial-security complex? I don’t really see what people can do outside what Hilary has just described happenign in the labor movement. That is, broadening alliances, making networks, etc. I see no hope other than these strategies in the face of the groups we’re confronted with, who are really deciding who is going to be allowed to live and who will be left to die.

Who is this book for and who is it against? We can’t use academic jargon or we’ll put people off immediately. But we’ve also got to be subtle and factual. Some of the papers given in this workshop would be accessible enough, but some aren’t.

I’m also troubled by our basic premise. Are we really going to say that there’s no hope left of reducing and stopping climate change. I don’t use this line with audiences. I say, yes, change your behavior. But don’t think that this is going to be enough to change the world. It’s not the right scale and scope, even if you can be an example. But we can’t give the impression that we’re giving up, that we’re going to the 4 degree, which will become the 9 degree, world. I’ve got four grandchildren and I’m just not really willing to go there.

We want to convey success stories – you could be part of something really big, the biggest social movement in history. But we don’t want to sugarcoat things since we need to convey the odds we’re up against.

So we want to talk about the major actors. One is clearly the military-industrial-security complex. Should we be happy when the Navy starts running jets on vegetable oil, should we be happy? No, clearly we shouldn’t. In a way, the European military are worse than the Pentagon in this context. We need to define these actors more systematically and explain their impacts. But also, what are the strengths and weaknesses in these actors? What are their Achilles heels?

Second actor: business, in a general way. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development is here. They invented corporate self-regulation in the area of sustainable development. The business lobbies are really eating away at individual security, particularly everywhere where there’s an austerity program. In this area, the neoliberals have won. In 2008, we might have thought that everyone would see how bankrupt the system was, but now they’ve won: they feel much freer to take us back to the 19th century. The Indignados and the Occupiers are great, but they’re not at the same level of command and control. If you have a chance, look at the FT issue of the 500 largest companies. The top 10 are all oil and banks, followed by mining, arms companies. Its the same in the UK, US, and China. It really is like the 19th century, which continues to spew out carbon.

Another ambiguity: finance. There’s a report from 260 odd corporations that manage other people’s funds which together control $15 trillion. They are saying to the US government that they want guidelines for investing in green technology and industry. But they don’t invest because they don’t get guidelines from the US. Should we support those people? I don’t want to give venture capitalists a longer lease on life, but I don’t want the planet to become Venus. What do we do?

Other actors: governments. Land grabs, geoengineering, competitivity, all this is government. Can we change these governments and make them take better positions?

The intergovernmental organizations, like the WTO, which continues to fuel fossil fuels, and supports patent laws.

The UN. Should we all go to Qatar to influence the next UN meeting? The IPCC – shouldn’t we have a closer relation with them? Couldn’t they benefit from learning about some of the topics we’ve discussed in this workshop?

The planet itself: the biological systems of the Earth. Nature is striking back. Despite the technophilia of other actors, Nature always wins. IF you try to fight biophysical systems, you lose. “Exceptional events” like storms, droughts, etc already killed 350,000 people last year, according to estimates. Everyone now agrees because of IPCC special report that the intensity of these phenomena are going to increase. Even earthquakes, we now know, are caused by climate change. So Nature is striking back.

Final actor: the people. Here we have the numbers, and we have the ideas. We’re developing the language to talk about these issues, we’re developing the language. If we want to develop alliances today, we need to keep in mind that knowledge and politics are interconnected.

We need to give the poor – who know what’s wrong with their lives – better knowledge of their enemies, the rich.

We also need to do more study of organizational techniques. Hilary has given good examples of what labor can do, but there are many cases in which labor does not consider women’s work, informal work, etc as part of their remit. There are lots of other allies: the environmental movements, the social movements, pensioners, etc. We have to work hard on who might be the potential allies and then go to talk to them. The peace movement, for example, doesn’t seem to be a part of this movement. That’s one big area of people who are good-hearted but don’t have the detailed knowledge that we do of these issues. We need to organize them into the kind of coalition that Johan Galtung has done.

My last point: let’s use democracy, or what we’ve got left of it, while we still can. We can still use freedom of information acts, for example, and we should.

Discussion:

We’re facing the question of two main paths in relation to labor: one is to provide more green services, the other is degrowth. The latter is very promising, but difficult for the unions to accept.

We’re seeing a rising movement that has more systemic analyses, but these movements – Arab Spring, Indignados – aren’t associated in the public mind with environmentalism. This is an issue we have to tackle.

What happened to the Climate Justice Movement? It was something cobbled together from a bit of the global justice movement, the peace movement, etc. But that seemed fine for Copenhagen because there was a huge crescendo of public expectation, with the notion that we wanted a fair and binding treaty. Once we began to get into the details, there was a fragmentation: would India and China just get to keep developing along capitalist lines? Elites get to maintain their hegemony simply by doing nothing, leaving us always responding to their agenda. The challenge we have is on alliances; how can we find common ground between labor movement and green capitalists.

The people’s movements in the global South and North are creating so many vibrant forms and are so filled with good ideas. We really need to include some of these positive developments so that the book that comes out of these workshops isn’t too depressing and negative.

This panel was hosted by RIGAS, the Italian Network for Environmental and Social Justice. They believe that there is a real need for discussion among the various different social networks in order to work together to get out of the present crisis.

Three speakers will present: Ivonne Yanez of Acción Ecológica; Lea; Trevor Ngwane, founder of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee; Guiseppe de Riga of A Sud (Italy); Rafael Quispe ; Nnimo Basi.

Initial questions: how can we build a new theory bringing together social and enviornmental justice with the objective of creating a new society; how can we build a social movement capable of having impact on the present crisis.

Trevor Ngwane spoke first. He began by explaining that we can only win through solidarity as the only way forward. In this sense, the Occupy Wall Street slogan “We are the 99% resonates.” The anti-apartheid struggle was won through unity of COSATU, the union movement, with UDF, the united democratic front. But more than that, the anti-apartheid movement was an international movement. In the liberated South Africa, we find we face many of the same problems of the apartheid era: the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. In Soweto, after independence, we faced the problem of the commodification of electricity, with the government increasing prices and cutting people off in order to enforce payment. So we acted collectively, but we also engaged in direct action – we reconnected ourselves when they cut us off. There was a similar struggle with water, with the government installing pre-payment meters before we can get access to water. The response was to remove these meters and let the water flow.

We then generalized this under the slogan, “Free basic services for all.” This makes sense to us since many people are unemployed in South Africa. Many of those who work don’t get a living wage because of casualization of labor. Even this university is cleaned by outsourced workers, many of whom will lose their jobs at the end of this month because their contract is ending.

In many other townships in South Africa, you have “service delivery protests.” Township residents burn tires in the road, burn the major’s car and house. These same protests are happening all over South Africa, but the problem is that they are happening in isolation. People’s protests are intended to make them the first ones to receive services. These acts ARE radical, but they also eat away the foundations of solidarity. We also have big strike waves, and particularly in 2010, with the biggest public strikes in our nation’s history. But the tendency is for isolated struggle rather than solidarity. The violence in the strikes compensates for a weakness in solidarity.

We realize, though, that while we call for basic services for all, we don’t want that at the cost of Mother Earth. So we want a shift away from electricity delivered from coal-fired power plants. We therefore feel like we want to link up with environmental movements. We are the reds, and we want to link up with the greens. We also realize that we have to work with the trade unions because we need help to build houses and deliver services for other people.

We were once part of the anti-privatization forum, but it died. The movements that last longest are those with a broad rather than a narrow vision. This is because sometimes the government will buy you off. For example, the government in Johannesburg attempted to stop us by putting a moratorium on cut-offs; luckily we were able to broaden our vision to other issues like education.

Ivonne Yanez was up next. She began by saying that in order to think about the present moment we need to look over our history. In the global North, for example, struggles over land have been important. The struggle over the Tar Sands is partly about land, for example. Another example could be the struggle over labor. In the global South, struggles have been a bit different. Most of all, they have centered on attempts to preserve collective rights. In addition, they have also hinged on anti-imperialism.

Despite a history of misunderstandings, we have found ways to link up movements between global North and South. For example, Accíon Ecológica left Friends of the Earth in 2003 because we felt our struggle was different. But conditions seem different now. We see a huge concentration of power in the 1%. New hegemonies, including the rise of China and Brazil and the other BRIC countries.

What is the context in Latin America? We have socialist governments that are supposedly leaving “the long night of neoliberalism.” But these are still capitalist governments in basic ways. In addition, these countries are more or less continuing to perpetuate continuing degradation of the environment.

We’re also seeing novel social movements emerge, such as the Spanish indignados. In South Africa, the social movements are very strong, but are not articulated to one another and therefore are fighting alone.

So the main point is that we have to find common basic points in order to build an international movement. I don’t believe that climate change should be the thing that is going to unite us. I think that water will unite us. Struggles against shale gas in the US are fundamentally about water, just as struggles for pure water are fundamentally what is at stake in Ecuador. We need to make sure that progress in one area of the world doesn’t come at the expense of people in other parts of the world.

Another common issue is energy. Many of us are fighting to gain access to energy and prevent it remaining in a few hands. Fossil fuels could be a basis for common struggle. For example, I recently received an email from someone in the Occupy Wall Street movement asking about the Yasunization of the world.

Another issue is “climate jobs.” What is a climate job? A South African building solar panels with technology from South Africa and materials from China for a family in Denmark. We need to think this through carefully.

Finally, I want to finish with the notion of the Rights of Nature. As an Ecuadorian, I’m extremely proud that this right is recognized in our constitution. But is it a good idea to have a global coalition around such rights? Perhaps jumping layers could destroy a good cause. The notion of Rights of Nature is one of the most radical concepts of the last 500 years, but if we don’t understand in our communities what these rights are, we may end up in competition rather than solidarity. We need to use this concept to confront capitalism, to confront “ecosystem services,” to confront the Clean Development Mechanism. Only then will we be able to have an international network, one that will be protected by local communities.

Maybe one other platform could be criminalization. All over the world, more and more people who are struggling against economic and ecological harms are being criminalized.

Finally, it seems to me that our struggle needs to be based on compromise and mutual respect.

Leah Temper of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who works on ecological economics. Arguing for a more activist science. We coordinate EJOLT, a science and society program funded by the EU. What can ecological economics provide to the struggle for environmental justice. Need to put political issues back inside political economy by situating struggles over environmental issues into relation with broader social struggles. Challenging, for example, the argument that in the North we are decoupling development from environmental degradation. This is totally false: exploitation of resources is simply being displaced to other countries. We analyze material energy flows in order to challenge new governance structures associated with new carbon flows. So we look at human appropriation of primary production in order to understand how biofuel directives in the EU are linked to land grabbing in the global South.

What kind of global movement can we create? At AUB, we argue for a degrowth economy. What we want to degrow are the material and energy throughputs of the economy. This involves rethinking work and returning to the commons, a re-commoning of many resources, both on the side of production and consumption. This isn’t about individual consumption decisions, but rather structural transformation of the economy. Our biggest allies are the environmental justice movements taking place in the South. Our biggest challenge is how to make links with these movements. Key here is fighting enclosures taking place in the South because of our consumption in the North.

Guiseppe de Riga of A Sud. The first thing we need to do to build a new social movement is to meditate on the crisis we face. This is a truly unique structural crisis that encompasses all aspects of the system: energy, food, economy, politics. We are not going to overcome this crisis with empty slogans or old simplistic nostrums. In order to build a new international movement we mustn’t separate radical or reformist movement, but rather engage with our specific struggles. There are three major issues to confront: the system of production, means of subsistence, and the patterns of consumption. All over the world we are facing these three issues: environmental crimes, environmental refugees, etc. What we’re saying is that we need to develop a new model of human liberation. It’s not an issue of climate justice or social justice but democracy – that’s the main core issue of it.

Here’s an example of how democracy is at stake in this issue. We’ve all witnessed the failure of global governance in face of climate change. In Italy, we won a major victory in a referendum against the privatization of water services. We were not supported by any political parties, but rather used constitutional tools to stop the privatization of water. But it didn’t turn out this way. The results of the referendum were never applied. So what should we do now that we see that democracy doesn’t work? What is the point of all this? So the point of all this is how we can create a form of democracy that can involve all citizens. After all, are we here in Durban just as witnesses, or are we going to change the relations of power?

This means that participatory democracy needs to be part of our daily practice. This will allow us to build new languages, new forms of political practice. We also need to transform the energy system and the production system, which means its essential to talk to workers. This process may produce contradictions, but we cannot be dissuaded by such difficulties. We need to have unity in diversity.

To close, many European newspapers stress that productive forces need to hurry up because we don’t have any time. But we also have no time because we live in a society in which everything happens at the speed of light.

Nnimmo Bassey of the International Oil Watch Movement. Good evening. I’ve been yelling “leave the oil in the soil, etc.” all day, and when I got out of the cab, the driver told me to “leave the change in the cab.” We have leaders here in Durban who are nothing more than carbon speculators. So we have all these false solutions receiving the attention of global leaders (or non-leaders). So this critical issue of wealth creation without production, and continuing dispossession of workers, is fundamental for us. It means we need to challenge power frontally. As Bob Marley said, a hungry man is an angry man. Most of the people who go to bed hungry are farmers. Most of these farmers are women. They are forced to sell whatever they produce to pay for other things. So the farmers are organizing to challenge the fat cats who are gaining from farming.

What are we going to do? The Climate Justice Movement must expand its scope. We need to bring all sectors of labor into the movement, because labor will be able to challenge industry. Labor is now really ready to push for a transition away from dirty energy. This is an opportunity we have to make a shift to a new planet.

Raffael Quispe, a Bolivian indigenous leader with CONAMAQ was next, talked about President Evo Morales’s plan to construct a highway through the Amazonian rainforest. There’s a global economic and ecological crisis, a structural crisis of the capitalist model. Today it’s the emerging economies that are the new pro-capitalists, where the new extractive economy is taking hold. Before it was the big oil companies that were extracting oil from our territories, but now it’s quasi-governmental companies that are doing this. The way forward is to create a new global alliance between social movements and social groups. I’ve been to all the COPs – they’re just a distraction. The only thing being talked about there is commodification and how the elites can make money off environmental destruction. The same thing will happen here. There will be no binding agreements for emissions reductions. So civil society and the social movements need to join together and fight to change the system.

Vilma Mazza of Ya Basta! We’re living through a time of systemic crisis of capitalism. It’s a different phase, as the near total collapse of the Euro suggests. The dictatorship of finance capital is stronger than ever. People wake up to listen to the radio not to get news about the weather but about the market, which is more unstable than the weather. This suggests that we mustn’t just adjust the system but rather transform it. All the mediations that capital put into place before – welfare etc – has been dismantled. All that’s left is the violence of capital. So we need to build a sweeping alternative. We can’t keep carrying on in the same way.

The session ended with a series of Questions and Answers that explored the limits to contemporary trannsformative movements.

Leah Temper mentioned that she has a movie dealing with degrowth. Here it is:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/10871269]

Today the Democratic Left Front, a new formation in South African politics, organized a conference on Ecosocialism.

The conference began with a youth delegation arriving on the wings of rousing anti-apartheid choral singing:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrsnAPnnTCI&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL]

There was some difficulty getting the conference going because the singers kept their kinetic chants wheeling round. Makes sense. To sit down and listen is to give up a kind of agency, often to speakers who are older, wealthier, and whiter than they. Sitting here at the beginning of this program, I wonder to what extent the organizers have erred in not including more space for these young people in the conference. But perhaps there will be opportunity for dialogue of some kind during Q&A.

Michelle Maynard of the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance began the day by talking about the links between human beings and all of the natural systems on the planet. She went on to contrast this with the reified view of the Earth promoted by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Maynard then continued to talk about how this worldview underlies current attitudes towards the commodification of the planet.

Next up, Vishwas Satgar spoke about the need to have this conference in order to arm the comrades against neoliberalism. This kind of capitalism is about chaos, since it is driven by unstable financial speculation. What we’ve seen in past decades in global South and what we’re seeing now in heartlands of capitalism today is global instability of neoliberalism. But capitalism is not surrendering. The current financial crash doesn’t mean that capitalism is dead. In the end, the squeeze is on all of us. We have to pay the price of paying the debts of capitalism, just as nature gets squeezed. Other legs of systemic crisis: food crisis resulting from systemic control of food by capitalist corporations, leading to major hunger crises around world; resource peaks, including oil, and the scramble for what’s left, as two most populous countries of the world – China and India – scramble for more scarce resources; climate change, and resulting political chaos, leading us into increasingly dangerous period politically; securitization of political life.

What’s at the heart of all of this is inability of a civilization to reproduce itself. In this context, what are the ruling classes offering us? What are they putting on the table? They’ve been talking about addressing the climate crisis through markets. Clean development mechanisms, green markets, Kyoto Protocol, etc. – all these solutions embed the market as center piece. These are all master concepts of green neoliberalism today. All of these solutions are still married to juggernaut of growth and industrialization. But we’re at the point where crisis is total. We can’t fix the crisis through piecemeal solutions such as decarbonization using markets. We need a total solution. Marketization is also about competitive strategies: taking crisis and turning it into an opportunity for more accumulation. We know that commodification creates enclosures. Green economy does not address the deeper systemic crisis.

In response to this civilizational crisis, we need resistance. We’ve been living through upswing of resistance over past two decades. Chiapas, Egypt, Occupy Wall Street. But this resistance has to go further. It has to be civilizational resistance. We also need to transnationalize alternatives. The dominant view is that we’re an irrational mob. But we have answers and alternatives, and we need to put them forward on transnational level. COP17 isn’t going to solve the problem. The battle is in particular national contexts. We need to take the battle forward on this level.

Jacklyn Cock, Professor at University of Witwatersrand, then spoke about how capitalism is responding to the current crisis. Capitalism is responding by saying that it doesn’t have to change. It can adapt through three key techniques: new technology, like carbon capture & storage and GMO crops, which have not been adequately tested; expanding markets, particularly through carbon trading; greenwashing.

Using time to make two key points. South African government policy is contradictory, and what links it all together is commitment to green capitalism. Government’s recent white paper which pretends to be a green paper. It is based on expanding markets and commodification. We know about this in South Africa because of the history of commodification of water.

Pablo Solon, former Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, spoke next. He began be talking about the distinction between living for more and living better. Bolivian environmentalists have emphasized the latter, because natural resources are limited. This is why we helped create the Declaration of the Rights of Earth. We have been treating the Earth as if it has no rights, the way we used to treat slaves. Today there is an apartheid against Nature. Need to reject the approach towards the commodification of nature that characterizes contemporary global elites.

Answering some of the questions raised during the teach-in last night, Solon emphasized the absolute need to take power in order to reverse the trend towards commodification of the environment.

This session of the conference ended with a series of heartfelt questions from members of the audience about how climate change is going to effect their health and their livelihoods as rural people.

While putting together this report, I came across a couple of interesting sites:

Just came from an amazing event of the South African rural women’s movements. There were nominal speakers, but the real focus of the event were the groups of women who trooped in, dressed in traditional clothing, singing and dancing songs from the anti-apartheid struggle. After reading about and watching films of these struggles for so many years, it was really spine chilling to have these women standing right in front of me chanting. So much electric energy and passion. If only these women could get into the COP proceedings, they could totally shut it down.

After this, I went back up the hill to the University of Kwazulu-Natal where the People’s Space is located to hear a teach-in organized by Patrick Bond. As I walked in, Joel Kovel was talking about how capitalism began with enclosure of the commons and separation of the producers from the means of production. The Occupy Movement, Kovel argues, is an attempt to reassert the control over the collective means of production that were taken away from folks. Wall Street is so named because it was the site of one of the first capitalist enclosures in North America, and also of one of the first slave markets.

We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can vote capitalism out of power. Our only hope is to create alternative or autonomous zones within the capitalist world, which, if extended far enough, will transform our society. These are zones of eco-socialist transformation, a point of recaptured commons. These should consist of freely associated labor and anti-capitalist intention. We also need to have an eco-centric ethis: a conscious intention to heal the Earth.

Patrick Bond mentioned that one of the central aspects of debates about eco-socialism hinges on ideas of catastrophe (between David Harvey and Foster, and between Neil Smith and Joel Kovel). Joel replies that he thinks we ARE headed towards an environmental catastrophe, but that this is no different from the confrontation with mortality that all human beings have confronted. What this requires is a transvaluation of our humanity, a deeper comprehension of what it’s been like to be human. It’s a clarion call to think much more deeply about our history and our relation to nature.

To simply deny the gravity of our current crisis is just plain stupid, Kovel argues. Once you get engaged, things become very exciting. It’s the worst of times, but also the best of times. Who else has been able to rethink the entire structure of human civilization the way we need to do.

Roger asks a question about Kovel’s strategy. Not to throw classical Marxism at you, but what’s your relation to the state? In France there’s been a big debate with Badiou about how to proceed in relation to the state. Kovel replies that the state has a two-fold function: legitimation and accumulation. The latter always comes first. Social movements need to keep a cold eye on the state and make sure it doesn’t get away with anything. So this means to disengage?, Roger asks. Yes, that’s right, Joel replies.

Audience question about the SACP. Kovel talks about how the SACP is beholden to a long tradition of productivism: the idea that communism will just perfect the capitalist system. Kruzchev’s “we’ll bury you” statement as typical of this. But there are signs of a more progressive tradition in South Africa. Kovel says that he was very heartened by a recent statement of COSATU that is basically eco-socialist.

I asked a question about the turn towards fascism as a far more immediate result of climate chaos, in other words towards the securitization of the environment. Isn’t it likely that this is more likely outcome than autonomous eco-socialist collectives? Isn’t there a kind of teleology in your argument that autonomous eco-socialist groups will link up and form a new order? Kovel replies that history is still to be written and nothing can be assumed. We have a lot of work to do.

Next up, Michael Dorsey (Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College) presented on why these debates matter. The main point he makes is that climate change is WAY ahead of schedule. He shows lots of charts and graphs to illustrate this. Dorsey has been working with Artic Ice Institute near Darmouth, which has released a lot of information about ice thinning.

Dorsey then goes on to talk about vulnerability to climate change being concentrated in the global South, while those in the North are less vulnerable. Maplecroft Climate Change Risk Report shows that those who are getting most badly screwed by climate change are in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Andes, and the Himalayas.

Official solution is one of enclosures, either through cap and trade market approach or offset exchange approach. Both are characterized by market approaches. The capitalist is saved by doing this: Ken Newcombe (carbon marketer and World Bank Prototype Carbon Market): “carbon trading’s objective is to reduce the costs of emissions reductions for industrialized countries.”

Carbon markets are a failure: the EU Emissions Trading System has failed on a third attempt (Carbon Trade Watch, 2011).

But we also need to be worried about the devil: the money form. The Euro has fallen by by a third in recent years. UBS predicts a 70% collapse in EU CO2 prices on Nov. 19, 2011.

So, what next? What are our alternatives? California social movements rejecting market alternatives, and then WE ACT picks up this approach and takes it to a national plane. Now there’s a whole wave of legal movements growing in California. These legal strategies have been connecting up with global strategies, such as those articulated in the Cochabamba Declaration.

Climate Justice Now! Network Principles are based on eco-socialist principles.

Q: Do we continue to move from conference to conference?

A: It’s not that hard to jam events like COP. We should be kicking up much more of a ruckus. We should be using our energy to shut this shit down not to try to make carbon markets work more efficiently. I think this is a kind of Stockholm syndrome: people like the kidnapper. Those who are inside are there to whistle blow, not to have some kind of impact. What you have to remember is that it’s 1% at COP. There’s little difference between Wall Street and UNFCCC at this point. There is a revolving door between these characters: 1/3rd are totally in cahoots with capital, and another 1/3rd are close enough and willing to do consulting in order to make money. So 2/3rds are undermining progress, and there’s confusion in the ranks.

Roger: But we do have allies, even among traditionally tepid social actors. Example of International Trades Union Commission’s report on a Just Transition.

Michael: The poor DO care about the environment. They do more and expect more. We need to speak to them.

The last month or so has been incredibly heady and hectic. I’ve been working with a sub-committee of the Occupy Wall Street movement; this group has been focusing on student debt, which is set to top off this year at around $1 trillion, more than cumulative credit card debt. It’s been exhilarating working with the Occupy Student Debt Campaign. In literally a matter of weeks, our small group of students, ex-students, and faculty members drafted a series of pledges of debt refusal using the incredibly creative techniques of horizontal organizing pioneered by the Occupy movement.

These pledges focus on four related demands: forgiveness for current student debtors; free federally funded public higher education; fiscal transparency for private universities; and interest-free student loans.

Taken together, these demands amount to a structural transformation of American higher education, a change that would no doubt also have a strong impact globally given the prominence of the U.S. model of higher education today.

In addition to the debtors’ pledge, there is also a faculty pledge of support for debtors, and a pledge of ex-debtors to support current debtors. The former is particularly important, in my opinion, since the spiraling cost of the institutions at which faculty members like myself teach is linked to the student debt racket (although I should add that faculty members see little of this increasing tuition in their paychecks since most of this money has gone to adding administrators).

Last Monday, we launched the Occupy Student Debt Campaign at Zuccotti Park. Although the park is a depressing place in comparison to the vibrant spot it was before city authorities cracked down on OWS, our launch nonetheless brought a large group of protesters to the site and suggested that the Occupy movement is capable of transforming itself in vibrant ways despite the clamp-down on specific sites.

Andrew Ross, who has been a key figure in the group, explained the rationale behind the campaign, talking about how banks, backstopped by the U.S. government, make exorbitant profits from student debt, and how students and ex-students get caught in a trap from which there literally is no exit – since student debtors cannot escape their debt by declaring bankruptcy, since their debt follows them for life, and since their extended families can often inherit their debt if they die before paying it off. Then a student debtor named Pam Brown read the debtors’ pledge of refusal. I then read the faculty pledge of support. This was followed by some wonderful guerrilla theater, with a group of graduates being given huge debt burdens at graduation, followed by the arrival of a large check from the federal government offering free public higher education, after which the graduates throw off the chains of debt that were weighing them down.

Our campaign has now topped 1,000 signatures, a nice milestone but only .5% of the audience we hope to reach. I hope you’ll go to the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and sign one of the pledges, and that you’ll also help spread news of the campaign through your various social networks.

Today there was a totally unnerving interview on Democracy Now today with former evangelical Christian heavyweight Frank Schaeffer. Schaeffer is the son of Francis Schaeffer, one of the nation’s foremost evangelical leaders in the 1970s and 1980s and a key proponent of Dominionism: a movement which aims to return the U.S. to governance according to the Bible.

This is, Schaeffer argues literally the equivalent of revolutionary Iran’s attempt to establish Shar’iah law, or rule according to the Koran. As Schaeffer points out, what the Dominionists are engaged in is an attempt to return the country to a neolithic system of laws that advocate complete subservience of women to their husbands, the stoning to adulterers, and the killing of homosexuals.

Pretty insane, right? But, as the segment on Democracy Now details, one of the top Republican candidates for president, Michele Bachmann, is actually a firm believer in Dominionism, In fact, in a recent profile in The New Yorker magazine, Bachmann states that she entered politics after watching Francis Schaeffer’s film, “How Should We Then Live?”, which was directed by his son Frank.

It’s really shocking that such extreme and flagrantly bigoted views could now be so close to the mainstream of U.S. politics. Most Americans of course have little idea that the ideological zealotry of the Tea Party is directly linked to Dominionist positions that go back to before the Cold War, to the Great Depression, when the economic crash was seen as divine punishment for a sinfully secular nation and when the New Deal and, indeed, all forms of federal government, including progressive taxation, were seen as creeping Communist attempts to destroy Christianity.

Centrist leaders of today like President Obama just don’t get it: they’re dealing with people who believe that the federal government must be abolished in order to preserve the Christian way of life. This is why groups like the Tea Party can continue to act like an oppressed minority while simultaneously holding the entire nation to ransom over otherwise trivial agreements such as raising the debt ceiling.

Given the transformation of the U.S. over the last forty years by an increasingly powerful Christian evangelical insurgency bent on obliterating two hundred years of struggles for gender, racial, and class equality, maybe it’s time to consider a practical step. Maybe we should start taxing religious organizations.

Right now the U.S. is the only democracy in the Western world which allows religious institutions to be completely tax free. In addition, individuals can make whatever donations they want to such institutions and have these donations be tax deductible. This of course is a huge drain on the federal coffers at a time when everyone seems worried about our national debt. But, even more importantly, it’s a massive clandestine subsidy for increasingly extreme religious forces in the U.S.

Aside from these contemporary economic considerations, this state of affairs is also a direct contravention of the Constitution. The first sentence of the Bill of Rights reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Establishing religious organizations as tax-free institutions is a direct contravention of this directive since it facilitates the establishment of religion in the most direct manner possible.

Unlike other non-profit institutions, religious institutions in the U.S are not subject to I.R.S. audit and public scrutiny. Since the “faith-based initiatives” of the George W. Bush administration, more and more public money is siphoned through religious organizations that are not answerable to the public in general, but rather intent on making converts to their own narrow view of the world.

The U.S. is degenerating more and more into a theocracy. Isn’t it about time that we stopped this appalling slide?