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Join the Socialist Contingent

September 28, 2010

http://socialistworker.org/2010/09/28/join-the-socialist-contingent

We March for Jobs, Peace, Justice and the Socialist Alternative That Can Win Them

Hundreds of thousands of Americans organized by labor and civil rights organizations will gather in Washington, D.C., on October 2 to demand a change in the direction that our nation is heading.

We are proud to join this march to demand jobs, to demand an end to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for a society that is fairer, more equal and more just. We believe it important to be in the capital on that date to help create a counterweight to Glenn Beck, the Tea Party and Republicans, their reactionary politics, ruthless economics and their racism.

We do not, however, share the goals of the AFL-CIO, the NAACP and other organizations which hope to achieve jobs and justice by supporting Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in the national elections on November 2.

We believe that it has become quite clear now that neither Democrats nor the Republicans are capable of solving the country’s three great crises–the economy, the environment and the wars–in a way that will be good for the American people. The goals of a full-employment economy, real environmental sustainability and peace cannot be achieved by our capitalist system and the corporations motivated only by profit. We need a new direction toward a new system.

What you can do

Join the Socialist Contingent at the One Nation rally. Meet up on Saturday, October 2, 2010, at 10 a.m. at 12th and Constitution (NW), Washington, D.C.

Contact organizers by e-mail to endorse the contingent.

Following the rally, join activists at a meeting on “Socialism for the 21st Century” featuring Dan La Botz, Keaanga-Yamahtta Taylor and others.

For information and updates about the contingent, go to the Socialist Contingent Web site or the Socialist Contingent Facebook page.

The two major parties have failed us. During the past two years, the Democrats and Republicans have failed to represent us, but they have done a fine job of representing the banks, insurance companies and corporations. They saved the banks for the bankers–not those whose homes are still threatened with foreclosure or collapsing value. They saved the auto industry for the auto CEOs–not for the workers whose plants have been closed, whose health insurance contributions have been raised and whose wages have been lowered. They have saved the health insurance companies by forcing millions of Americans to buy their policies, while denying us a single-payer plan and leaving prices remain uncontrolled. They have saved them, but they have not saved us.

We join the movement for this march, excited and enthused to see the labor unions, the African American and Latino populations, the women’s, gay and lesbian and environmental movements taking to the streets. But we know that change can only be brought about as it has been in every period of American history by independent social movements. And such independent movements must find political expression first in independent candidates and then in a party of working people and all in our society who suffer exploitation, discrimination and oppression.

The organizers of this march have called it “One Nation.” The truth is we are two nations. One nation of corporate CEOs and Bankers and their legions of high level executives, the very wealthy of our country, and another nation of working people, many of them now jobless. We are two nations: the corporations who run this country and the working people who make this country run. We will be marching with the working class to end a system dominated by corporations. We march because we believe that those working people who make the country run should run the country.

We know from American history and the history of the world that great and progressive changes come about only from below. We know that in modern times working people, who stand at the center of our economy and represent the majority of our population, represent the crucial force capable of making the changes we need. We also know that if we only organize movements and fail to create an independent political force, the Democrats will harvest all of our organizing. The fruits of our labor will be turned against us in Congress.

So we march. We march for jobs. We march for single-payer health care. We march for free public education from K to Ph.D. We march for an end to our racist and class-biased injustice system, and for equal justice for all. We march for women’s rights. We march for legalization of all the undocumented. We march for LGBT rights. We march for an end to the destruction of our environment. We march for an end to the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We march for an end to US support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine and blockade of Gaza. We march knowing that the things we march for can only be achieved by abolishing capitalism and creating a democratic socialist society. We invite you to march with us. Join the Socialist Contingent on October 2 in Washington, D.C.


ORGANIZATIONS:
Dan La Botz, Socialist Party campaign for U.S. Senate, Ohio
International Socialist Organization (ISO)
Solidarity: a democratic, revolutionary socialist, feminist, anti-racist organization
Socialist Alternative
Socialist Action
Socialist Party of New York City
Socialist Party of Central Virginia
Action for a Progressive Pakistan


PUBLICATIONS:
New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought


INDIVIDUALS (*Organizations listed for listed for identification purposes only):
Cindy Sheehan, “Peace Mom,” founder, Peace of the Action; Steve Early, author of Embedded With Organized Labor, National Writers Union/UAW member; Jerry Tucker, former member, UAW International Executive Board; Nativo Vigil Lopez, national president of the Mexican American Political Association; Fred Magdoff, author of The Great Financial Crisis and Professor Emeritus, University of Vermont; Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, Professor, Department of Creative Writing, U.C. Riverside; Camilo Mejía, Iraq war veteran and resister and member of IVAW; Naseer Aruri, author of Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return and Chancellor Professor of Political Science (Emeritus), University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Joanne Landy, New Politics; Victor Agosto, Afghanistan war resister and member of IVAW; Billy Wharton, co-chairperson, Socialist Party USA; Jason Schulman, New Politics, Democratic Socialists of America National Political Committee; Paul Street, author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power; Dave Zirin, sports editor of the Nation Magazine and author of A People’s History of Sports; David McReynolds, former chair of War Resisters International, Socialist Party USA presidential candidate in 1980 and 2000; Dahr Jamail, author Beyond the Green Zone, independent journalist; Anthony Arnove, author of Iraq Logic of Withdrawal, editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Michael Hirsch, New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought editorial board, member Democratic Socialists of America; Greg Albo, Socialist Project and York University; David McNally, professor of political science at York University; Sandy Boyer, co-host of WBAI’s Radio Free Eireann and campaigner to free Irish political prisoners, including the Guildford 4 and Birmingham 6; Sebastian Budgen, editorial board, Historical Materialism; Paul D’Amato, author of The Meaning of Marxism and managing editor of the International Socialist Review; Julie Fain, editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Sam Farber, retired professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College; Phil Gasper, editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Roadmap to History’s Most Important Political Document and editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Joel Geier, associate editor of the International Socialist Review; Thomas Harrison, New Politics; Ron Jacobs, author and library worker; Brian Jones, performer of Marx and Soho and editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Deepa Kumar, author of Outside the Box and member of AAUP-AFT, Rutgers*; Micah Landau, New Politics; Paul LeBlanc, antiwar activist and author of Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience; Jesse Lemisch, professor of History Emeritus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York; Tom Lewis, editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Traven Leyshon, president, Green Mountain Labor Council*; Alan Maass, editor, SocialistWorker.org; Scott McLemee, New Politics; Nagesh Rao, Ph.D., assistant professor of English, The College of New Jersey, AFT Local 2364*; Bill Roberts, editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Jennifer Roesch, editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Herman Rosenfeld, Socialist Project and Labour Studies, McMaster University.; Eric Ruder, journalist for SocialistWorker.org and editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Kristin Schall, National Committee member, Socialist Party USA; Michael Schwartz, author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context and professor of Sociology at State University of New York at Stony Brook; Helen Scott, editor of The Essential Rosa Luxemburg and editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Lance Selfa, author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Stephen R. Shalom, editorial board, New Politics; Ahmed Shawki, author of Black Liberation and Socialism and editor of the International Socialist Review; Ashley Smith, editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Sharon Smith, author of Subterranean Fire and Women and Socialism; Zelig Stern, labor commissioner, Socialist Party USA; Elizabeth Terzakis, editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Jeff Webber, author of From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia, professor of Political Science at the University of Regina; Lois Weiner, New Politics; Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism and adjunct professor of Chemistry and Physical Science, Pace University, NYC; Vice President, Union of Adjunct Faculty at Pace; NYSUT Local 37-960*; Sherry Wolf, author of Sexuality and Socialism and editorial board of the International Socialist Review; Julia Wrigley, New Politics; Annie Zirin, editorial board of the International Socialist Review

Categories
Communiqués

Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy: Middlesex

May 11, 2010

source: http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com/search/label/occupation

Enemy of doxa, corrupter of youth, promulgator of discomfiting intuitions. That philosophy is unpalatable to the powers that be: this is not news to Socrates and his comrades.

Today it is no philosopher in particular, but philosophy itself that is ordered to drink the hemlock, sentenced to death for corrupting the capacity of what used to be called “the University” to turn greater profits. Philosophy is convicted of impiety before capital.

The present situation at Middlesex University makes the stakes excruciatingly clear. Even “excellence”—the preferred contemporary replacement for such antiquities as learning, knowledge, or thinking—is no longer enough. Even the “ranking” of a program is no matter, nor is its contribution to the reputation of the institution. Nor does it suffice that a program should sustain itself financially, or generate revenue. The operative question is simply: could MORE revenue be generated through its elimination? Could one, for example, restructure enrollment so as to swell Work Based Learning programs that draw lucrative funding from corporate sponsors? Could one get away with simply reallocating external grant funding already secured by the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy (reportedly some £1 million through 2016) while eliminating the expense of actually running the Center? According to administrative logic, neither the international reputation of Middlesex Philosophy nor its financial solvency have any bearing upon the verdict that it makes “no measurable contribution” to the University. According to the calculus of greed and exploitation—the calculus of capital—philosophy at Middlesex, as Alex Williams rightly puts it, is worth more dead than alive.

What lessons are we to draw from this example? And what sort of a response might those lessons entail?

We might insist that philosophy is essential to the university—that only an institution which includes it answers to an acceptable vision of what the university should be. And we might then demand of wayward administrators the reversal of an “irrational” or “unethical” decision: the restoration of philosophy to its proper place at the core of any university worthy of the name. Or, on the other hand, we might find in the termination of philosophy the expression of an essential truth about the university’s role as a modern institution: to reproduce the relation between capital and labor—through the production of cultural capital when convenient, through the excision of cultural mediation when expedient.

The era of such expediency is everywhere upon us. Discussions of “The Crisis of the Humanities” proliferate at a dizzying pace. How can we proffer more compelling accounts of “what it is that we do” to administrators looking askance at abstruse investigations no longer even regarded as charming? Can we compete on a level playing field with the verifiable results of science and engineering by drawing up lists of our recent “discoveries”? Can we compete with the profit margins of private business schools embedded in public universities by insisting upon our invaluable contributions to civil society, our production of a thoughtful citizenry? How can we account for the worth of our teaching by metrics that calculate the value of programs according to higher, rather than lower, student/instructor ratios? How can we justify our existence, our form-of-life, in short, amid the unchecked reign of bureaucrats whose moral compass is neither the novel nor the Nicomachean Ethics but the consulting firm?

To its immeasurable credit, Middlesex Philosophy offers an alternative to both indignant pleading and professionalized handwringing: concrete resistance.

The students, staff, and faculty at Middlesex have opted to intervene in “the crisis of the humanities” by taking a common space of thought and practice with the determination to hold it. What inspires is the escalation of their radicalism in response to administrative obstinacy. First they occupied a boardroom to protest the cancellation of a meeting, seeking a proper explanation for the closure of their program. The next day they took the entire building, demanding a reversal of the decision. Today a red and black flag flies over the barricaded Mansion House at Middlesex, and thinkers from around the UK and continental Europe are travelling to the occupied Trent Park campus to participate in an open program of art, philosophy, and politics events called Transversal Space.

This sequence is a prolegomena to any future philosophy.

We cannot rely upon the goodwill of administrators and their consulting firms to uphold the grand tradition of the Academy, nor to offer wildlife preserves for modes of critical reflection that assuredly do not serve the interests of their species. We will not secure “the future of the humanities” by the authority of the better argument nor through appeals to a higher good than goods. If the very capacity for philosophical activity is to survive, then by any means necessary we will have to make it unprofitable to destroy the time and space of resolutely unproductive thought. What Middlesex augurs is that the 21st century is a time in which the material conditions of any possible thinking will have to be constructed, expropriated, and defended by common force.

Kant’s project, at the core of critical modernity, was to banish dogmatism by accounting for the conditions of any possible understanding. But now it is not critical reflection but rather the dogmatic operations of capital that pose the question, quid juris?, to philosophy. To subject Kant’s critical idealism to a materialist inversion, today, is to recognize that the conditions of any possible philosophical reflection—reflection upon conditions of possible understanding, or anything else—will depend upon material powers of resistance, the construction of times, spaces, and forms of life capable of holding their own against the vacuity of philosophy’s erasure.

“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The present crisis of the relation of philosophy to capital means that philosophers will have to change the world in order to interpret it. It is not that philosophy will be obviated by the real movement of history, the coming-into-being of communism, but rather that communization is now the pre-condition of any possible philosophy.

“In the sphere of this faculty you can determine either everything or nothing,” writes Kant in the preface to the Prolegomena. From California, to Puerto Rico, to London, to Zagreb, to Greece: We Want Everything.

Nathan Brown
English
University of California, Davis

Marija Cetini?
Comparative Literature
University of Southern California

Gopal Balakrishnan
History of Consciounsess
University of California, Santa Cruz

Aaron Benanav
History
University of California, Los Angeles

Jasper Bernes
English
University of California, Berkeley

Chris Chen
English
University of California, Berkeley

Joshua Clover
English
University of California, Davis

Maya Gonzalez
History of Consciousness
University of California, Santa Cruz

Timothy Kreiner
English
University of California, Davis

Laura Martin
History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Jason Smith
Art Center College of Design
Pasadena

Evan Calder Williams
Literature
University of California, Santa Cruz

Categories
Communiqués

September Occupation Statement: UCSC

September 25, 2009 / 7:46 am

source: http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/occupation-statement/

We are occupying this building at the University of California, Santa Cruz, because the current situation has become untenable. Across the state, people are losing their jobs and getting evicted, while social services are slashed. California’s leaders from state officials to university presidents have demonstrated how they will deal with this crisis: everything and everyone is subordinated to the budget. They insulate themselves from the consequences of their own fiscal mismanagement, while those who can least afford it are left shouldering the burden. Every solution on offer only accelerates the decay of the State of California. It remains for the people to seize what is theirs.

The current attack on public education – under the guise of a fiscal emergency – is merely the culmination of a long-term trend. California’s regressive tax structure has undermined the 1960 Master Plan for free education. In this climate, the quality of K-12 education and the performance of its students have declined by every metric. Due to cuts to classes in Community Colleges, over 50,000 California youth have been turned away from the doors of higher education. California State University will reduce its enrollment by 40,000 students system wide for 2010-2011. We stand in solidarity with students across the state because the same things are happening to us. At the University of California, the administration will raise student fees to an unprecedented $10,300, a 32 percent increase in one year. Graduate students and lecturers return from summer vacation to find that their jobs have been cut; faculty and staff are forced to take furloughs. Entire departments are being gutted. Classes for undergraduates and graduates are harder to get into while students pay more. The university is being run like a corporation.

Let’s be frank: the promise of a financially secure life at the end of a university education is fast becoming an illusion. The jobs we are working toward will be no better than the jobs we already have to pay our way through school. Close to three-quarters of students work, many full-time. Even with these jobs, student loan volume rose 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. There is a direct connection between these deteriorating conditions and those impacting workers and families throughout California. Two million people are now unemployed across the state. 1.5 million more are underemployed out of a workforce of twenty million. As formerly secure, middle-class workers lose their homes to foreclosure, Depression-era shantytowns are cropping up across the state. The crisis is severe and widespread, yet the proposed solutions – the governor and state assembly organizing a bake sale to close the budget gap – are completely absurd.

We must face the fact that the time for pointless negotiations is over. Appeals to the UC administration and Sacramento are futile; instead, we appeal to each other, to the people with whom we are struggling, and not to those whom we struggle against. A single day of action at the university is not enough because we cannot afford to return to business as usual. We seek to form a unified movement with the people of California. Time and again, factional demands are turned against us by our leaders and used to divide social workers against teachers, nurses against students, librarians against park rangers, in a competition for resources they tell us are increasingly scarce. This crisis is general, and the revolt must be generalized. Escalation is absolutely necessary. We have no other option.

Occupation is a tactic for escalating struggles, a tactic recently used at the Chicago Windows and Doors factory and at the New School in New York City. It can happen throughout California too. As undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff, we call on everyone at the UC to support this occupation by continuing the walkouts and strikes into tomorrow, the next day, and for the indefinite future. We call on the people of California to occupy and escalate.

Categories
Communiqués

Future of the Public School

A Class at The Public School (LA)

facilitated by Brian Holmes

The destiny of social movements is to change the structure of human relations — so be careful what you ask for! This class aims to look at the cultural roots of the current university crisis, and in that light, to explore the role that experiments like The Public School could play in re-imagining education. The class will be discussion based and can be expanded/completed/reoriented by other inputs. It will take place September 4-5.

Some deep reference points for the discussion are provided by the critical work by two UC professors, Christopher Newfield and Robert Samuels. Newfield develops an idealized historical figure of the public university as the cultural vehicle of an expanded, multi-ethnic middle class, and shows how its capacity to elaborate its own measures and values was strengthened by the social activism of the 1960s and 70s, before being eroded by the introduction of entrepreneurial conceptions of creativity and innovation in the 90s. He’s particularly good on identifying dominant business practices and showing how they came to overdetermine cultural values; to go further with that we could look into the work of management guru Peter Drucker on the knowledge economy, as well as Henry Chesbrough’s model of “open innovation.”

Samuels begins with the mediated experience of networked society and examines the ambiguous mix of autonomy and alienation characterizing the individualized, semi-automated environment of games, movies and social media (the expression of what he calls “automodernity”). He critiques a lot of “high theory” and develops his own take on the psychopathology of everyday experience in the digital age; plus he is far more critical of faculty self-interest than Newfield. Samuels is really asking how to create critical social movements under the social and psychic conditions of what I call “the flexible personality.”

Both these guys are active participants in the UC debate, and their arguments go a long way toward revealing what’s at stake, both culturally and economically, in the current transformation of public universities. We could read them from a very specific perspective, asking not only whether they get it right, but what relevance their portrayals of contemporary society and its institutions might have for people trying to invent their own self-managed processes of education. By assessing the state of society’s major institutions of higher learning we could ask which directions should be taken by vanguard experiments seeking a dialectical relation to the mainstream. In this way the class would feed back into the current campus movements while pointing toward further horizons.

Readings (to be completed by other proposals):

–Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class, esp. chapters 1-3, 5 and 8.

–Robert Samuels, New Media, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory after Postmodernism: Automodernity from Zizek to Laclau, esp. chaps 1, 5, 6, 8 and 9.

Link to class at The Public School website

Categories
Communiqués

Loren Goldner in LA & SF

Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay INSANE DIALECTICAL POSSE present:

WORLD CAPITALIST CRISIS & PROSPECTS FOR A RADICAL RESPONSE

Los Angeles event:

Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 7:00 p.m.

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park
4800 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027 (directions)

Presentation by Loren Goldner, to be followed by discussion:

That world capitalism is in a profound crisis is no secret, especially in hard-hit areas such as California. But a radical response requires an understanding of the deep, “epochal” causes of the crisis, beyond now-mainstream banter about financialization or sub-prime or Wall Street bailouts and bonuses. What has happened since 2008 is merely an acceleration of the “slow motion” crisis that has been with us in reality since the late 1960’s/early 1970’s. The crisis is global, and the response to it must ultimately be global.

Loren will give an overview of this decades-long crisis and its deepening in the past three years, and discuss what must be done to avoid the obvious capitalist “solutions” to it, which are much greater austerity and possibly a major war. He will talk about some attempts to organize against the crisis, such as in Greece or California or the recent strikes in China.

Quote:
Loren Goldner is a writer based in New York. He lived in South Korea from 2005 to 2009 working on a book on the Korean working class. He is an editor of the new on-line journal Insurgent Notes.

Much of his work is available on the Break Their Haughty Power web site

To have a more focused discussion, people attending might look at these recent articles by Goldner on the crisis:

Global Leveraged Buyout or the ‘Longest Boom in Capitalist History’

The Biggest October Surprise of All: A World Capitalist Collapse

Oakland event:

Tuesday, August 31, 2010, at 7:00 p.m.

Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Avenue (at 65th Street), Oakland
(510) 595-7417

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Monday, September 6 (Labor Day), 2010 at 6:00 p.m.

Loren Goldner will present on his book:

Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man. Race, Class and the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Renaissance Writer, (2006). ISBN 0-9700-308-2-7. 291 p.

In Europe, after 1848, bourgeois consciousness in revolt sought a new universal in the working class but soon found itself in the orbit of the state civil service; in America, bourgeois consciousness in revolt found a new universal in what Melville called “antemosaic” reality, Queequeg, embodied in the multiracial working class, the “anacharsis Cloots deputation,” in radical antithesis to the state. Through a series of scholarly, linked essays, Goldner examines the works of Melville, the dispossessed grand bourgeois, and his treatment of race and class. The 1848-1850 conjuncture in the Atlantic world witnessed the birth of communism (Marx), modern art (Courbet, Flaubert), the end of classical political economy, and the formulation of the entropy law, or Second Law of Thermodynamics. Their simultaneity was not accidental, and Melville’s work echoes each of them. Echoing the work of CLR James, this is a majestic, multidisciplinary sweep through history, culture, politics, philosophy and art.

Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Avenue (at 65th Street), Oakland
(510) 595-7417