movement politics

By Arthur J Miller - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, November 17, 2015

Casting a stare of confusion out to the cosmos Why do things just get worse no matter how hard we work to make them better? We still labor to produce all needs and we can't even produce our own needs within this system of all possible wealth going to a few at the expense of the many. Food workers who produce the simple most important production of all (if we can't eat, nothing else matters) and yet they are the poorest paid workers around. Makes a lot of sense don't it?
Think about it, those who do the work to provide the needs of society only receive in payment as small of a return that the corporate system can get away with paying them.

This dirty rotten system, I call corporate fascism. It is 100% controlled by the corporations. They control the greatest part of the wealth produced directly. In order to advance their wealth and control, they created an institutionalization of policies that benefit them. Such policies as racism, sexism, nationalism, and so on, all benefit the rich, not the poor and cannot be reformed. How do you reform racism?, may I please ask?

We live under a military dictatorship. We are forced to fight other poor folks in wars that only benefit the rich. In these wars of conquest we defeat other poor people, we are then used to oppress those poor folks into submission to the compute state. How do you reform corporate wars? You can't. The dirty rotten system is meant to be just that, the dirty rotten system that steals from us all and that it uses us poor folks as their collateral damage in industry, in wars and political posturing.

The system uses tactics to get us thinking we have a say in things that we don't. Like the political parties. Both corporate political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, are equally the institutionalization of corporate fascism. They work hand in hand to deceive us into thinking we have a chose to choose from. Then we are told to pick the lesser of the two evils. And there you have it, the dirty rotten system cannot be reform to be anything other than what it is, an evil. You cannot reform that which is created to be evil. And when the liberals come up with the next new White Rich Savor to be that lesser evil that others should follow, we need to reject them outright.

When we understand that the system cannot be reform, then we must look at changing the social system ourselves. We can trust no one else to do it for us.

In my view Syndicalism is the most effective means of true social change and it has the most rank and file control that is possible. Part of this is that it came out of work place resistance and organization thus it was always organizing at the source of the problems. That meant those in control were that same as those with the need. That is the only way to get real working class unions. No so-called reform is possible in capitalism, the state or statist institutions they control like the business unions and political parties. Simple, we can let others from the outside organize us and tell us what to do. Or we can organize ourselves at the source of the problem by those in need and are most effected.

Fact is undeniable that the mayor cause of our problems comes directly out of industry. Given that, industry must change. And thus Syndicalism would say that we need to change at the point of production by those who do the work. We know how to make the changes but it has been these outside people who pay no attention to us. Simple example, after a major tanker oil spill, folks were meeting about what to do.

Many answers based upon outside ideas. I tried to explain what would make tankers much safer based upon my experience working on tankers.

That had no place in their discussion. Even when I advocate something so damn simple as to ask the question: Why don't tankers carry no oil spill equipment? Two small power boats and enough booms for two containment circles? Booming a ship is easy, I have done it a number of times. Rather when a spill happens everyone just sits around waiting for some oil spill ship to come in from some far away port.

Nearly every social struggle that starts from the people at the source comes into conflict with those. on the outside. Thus you have the basic Syndicalist organization at the point of production. This Syndicalists have been doing long before the term Syndicalism was ever used.

It has become much more than just about one expression of organization, but rather stands as an example for nearly all working class struggle. My class analysis is very simple. There are two classes, the rich and the poor. Between them is an area that gets rather foggy as some have a little money identify with the interests of the rich and thus should be seen as on that rich side. There are those that identify with the interests of the poor and are on our side. The rich try to exploit everything that can be exploited for profit and suppress those that resist. That includes develop social projects against about every one except what we think we are. Thus such issues as racism, sexism, and so on are based in the industrialized of class in the dirt rotten system. In my view we must organize around the complete oppress of poor folks and their needs, if for no other reason there are always connections to them in industry and must be changed.

By Tadzio Müller - Rosa Luxenbourg Stiftung , November 11, 2015

The UN climate summit in Paris is certainly important. But an agreement in Paris is unlikely to include a number of urgently needed policies, and may instead constitute a shift in a disastrous direction. What can we realistically expect from the Paris Agreement, and what would the Summit actually need to achieve?

On Saturday, 24 October 2015, two media reports were published that perfectly summarise the challenges we face from climate change:

The first report - "Yesterday, the final meeting in the run-up to the Paris Climate Change Conference took place in Bonn". After months of optimism ("This time we'll make it work - not like in Copenhagen", "We've learned from our mistakes", "This time it will be different"), our hopes were dashed when the report ended by stating, "Climate talks fail to break deadlock". But what is blocking the negotiations? The participants can't still be haggling over emission reductions, because this issue has already been settled (through voluntary commitments) and it's not even on the agenda. So what's the problem? As always, it's about the struggle over global resources. But it's not natural resources that are the focus here, because fossil fuels are not discussed at climate summits. The deadlock is not even about the climate as such. It's about the Northern states finally coughing up the agreed financial resources, despite numerous declarations of intent; financial resources that were to be made available to assist the South in adapting and mitigating the problems caused by climate change; financial resources that would help the North do justice to its historical responsibility for climate change.

The second report - This one reached us from Mexico; it's simple, clear and direct: "'Worst hurricane of all time' sweeps across Mexico". The President of Mexico, Peña Nieto, tweeted that this had been the most severe hurricane that had "ever occurred on the planet". More than 60,000 people had to be brought into safety. Fortunately, the hurricane weakened before striking the Mexican mainland, but it clearly demonstrates what we are up against. What would happen if the international community were to respond properly to the challenges demonstrated by these media reports? What would happen at the UN climate summit in December and what kind of resolutions would it pass?

By Brian Tokar - Common Dreams, November 11, 2015

The last time this much public attention was focused on the climate talks was in the lead-up to the Copenhagen conference in 2009. We should not forget how that turned out. (Image: via PabloSolon.com)

From the end of this month through early December, much of the world’s attention will be focused on Paris, the site of the upcoming round of UN climate negotiations. This is the twenty-first time diplomats and heads of state will gather under the umbrella of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a document first put forward at the landmark 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro – the same global conference where the elder George Bush told the world that the “American way of life is not negotiable.” The UNFCCC process has had its ups and downs over the years, including the approval of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the first international agreement to mandate specific reductions in climate-disrupting greenhouse gases.

As this year’s conference approaches, people around the world are suffering the consequences of some of the most extreme patterns of storms, droughts, wildfires and floods ever experienced. Western wildfires last summer reached as far north as the Olympic rainforest, and unprecedented mudslides earlier this fall in a corner of drought-baked southern California nearly buried vehicles caught on the route from Tehachapi to Bakersfield. Central Mexico recently experienced the most severe hurricane to ever reach landfall, and the role of persistent regional droughts in sparking the social upheaval that has brought nearly a million Middle Eastern refugees to central Europe is increasingly apparent. It is virtually certain that 2015 will be the warmest year ever recorded, with several months having surpassed previous records by a full degree or more. While we are always cautioned that it is difficult to blame the climate for specific incidents of extreme weather, scientists in fact are increasingly able to measure the climate contribution of various events, and rising temperatures also heighten the effects of phenomena such as the California drought, which may not have global warming as their primary underlying cause.

The last time this much public attention was focused on the climate talks was in the lead-up to the Copenhagen conference in 2009. At that time, the first “commitment period” of the Kyoto Protocol was about to expire shortly, and Copenhagen was seen as a make-or-break opportunity to move the process forward. Even as close observers decried the increasing corporate influence over the preparations for the 15th Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN climate convention, most observers held onto a shred of hope that something meaningful and significant would emerge from the negotiations. There was a huge public lobbying effort by Greenpeace and other groups urging President Obama to attend, and China put forward its first public commitment to reduce the rate of increase in their greenhouse gas emissions. While the Kyoto Protocol’s primary implementation mechanisms – tradable emissions allowances and questionable “carbon offset” projects in remote areas of the world – had proven inadequate at best, the Copenhagen meeting was seen as the key to sustaining Kyoto’s legacy of legally binding emissions reductions. Perhaps, activists hoped, the negotiators would agree on a meaningful plan to prevent increasingly uncontrollable disruptions of the climate. It soon became clear, however, that Copenhagen instead set the stage for a massive derailment of the ongoing negotiation process, and unleashed a new set of elite strategies that now render the Paris talks as virtually designed to fail.

Officials in Copenhagen were determined to spin the conference as a success, no matter what the outcome. Still, even before the conference began, they began to proclaim the advantages of a non-binding “political” or “operational” agreement as an incremental step toward reducing worldwide emissions. As described in my book, Toward Climate Justice (New Compass Press, 2014), the assembled delegates from nearly all the world’s nations failed to accomplish even that. COP 15 produced only a five-page “Copenhagen Accord,” with no new binding obligations on countries, corporations, or any other actors, and the document was not even approved – only “taken note of” – by the conference as a whole. The accord essentially urged countries to put forward voluntary pledges to reduce their climate-disrupting emissions, and to informally “assess” their progress after five years. Every substantive issue was hedged with loopholes and contradictions, setting the stage for most of the global North outside of Europe to simply withdraw from their countries’ obligations under Kyoto as the 2012 renewal deadline approached. Still, all but three countries – Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua – went along with this scheme; one main reason was that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had promised skeptics that the US would raise $100 billion a year in funds to assist with climate stabilizing measures, a promise that is still to be realized in the halls of Paris.

By Arun Gupta - Telesurtv.net, November 5, 2015

Far from fizzling, the movement has a contested legacy that continues to shape the political landscape One of the more puzzling aspects about Occupy Wall Street is not that there was a moment when millions of people hoped or feared it might overthrow the rule of the banks, but that so little is said about it four years on.

Its anniversaries come and go without comment: Occupy’s founding on September 17, 2011, the high-water mark of the Oakland general strike on November 2, the eviction of of the New York camp on November 15, the creation of Occupy Sandy after the superstorm walloped the Northeast on October 29, 2012.

Occupy lost its luster because most people concluded it was a failure. It failed to articulate demands, failed to create a lasting impact, failed to spark a revolution. The haters dismiss Occupy as the “Frenzy that Fizzled.” True believers maintain Occupy triumphed for shifting the conversation from economic austerity to inequality, while ignoring the lack of infrastructure to carry its work and ideas forward. Many who joined or were inspired by it would up feeling confused, bitter, or disappointed at losing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to upend the status quo. Others blame Occupy’s dissolution on police forces that aggressively swept out all the major encampments. But it’s defeatist to say Occupy was vanquished “by a concerted government effort to undo it.” State violence is a given, and some radical movements still succeed.

Occupiers tried repeatedly to resurrect the movement after the main bastions in Oakland and New York City were evicted in November 2011. But it never regained its footing despite the national May Day general strike, protests against a NATO summit in Chicago, the Occupy Our Homes anti-foreclosure movement, Occupy Sandy, and attempted re-occupations of parks, plazas, and buildings across the country.

No, Occupy Wall Street did not fizzle or fail. Its outsized ambitions were destined to crash as there are no left forces strong enough in the United States to keep a mass movement flying high. Occupy is as relevant as ever; the difficulty in coming to terms with it is because of its mixed legacy. When radicals lost the initiative against a bankrupt political system, liberals stepped in to divert energy back into the system.

By Stephanie McMillan - Skewed News, October 15, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

About 20 years ago, in a conversation with a Bangladeshi organizer, the topic of NGOs* came up. He spat in disgust: “I hate NGOs.” At the time, I didn’t really get why he was so vehement about it. I knew NGOs had negative aspects, like siphoning off some revolutionary energy from the masses, but I also still half-believed their claims that their work was more helpful than not. Didn’t you have to be kind of a dogmatic asshole to denounce free health care and anti-poverty programs? But I didn’t yet fully appreciate how terrible they really are.

Since that conversation, NGOs have proliferated like mushrooms all over the world. First deployed in social formations dominated by imperialism, they’ve now taken over the political scene in capital’s base countries as well. They’ve become the hot new form of capital accumulation, with global reach and billions in revenue. So while ostensibly “non-profit,” they serve as a pretty sweet income stream for those at the top, while fattening up large layers of the petite bourgeoisie and draping them like a warm wet blanket over the working class, muffling their demands.

After much observation and experience both direct and indirect, I now understand and share that long-ago organizer’s hatred of NGOs. Just how terrible are they? Let us count the ways: