D4net Netwerk voor Dromers, Denkers, Durvers en Doeners

door Jan Blommaert
"Ons politiek systeem verliest aan een sneltreinvaart z’n democratische
legitimiteit." Professor Jan Blommaert overschouwt het slagveld na de
staking in de openbare diensten en stelt dat er weinig reden is tot
optimisme.
Het is een oud beginsel van een democratie dat wanneer een overheid
manifest onrechtvaardige of ondemocratische wetten uitvaardigt – wetten
die de democratie beknotten of afbreken – het volk daar tegen in opstand
mag komen. Meer nog, burgers in een democratie hebben de plicht om
hiertegen in opstand te komen, want de fundamentele beginselen van een
democratie zijn belangrijker dan de structuren en instellingen die ze
moeten bewaken en realiseren.

Franco B erardi,  August 19, 2011
 
At the end of 2010, I finished writing a book about the cultural collapse of the most important mythology of capitalist modernity: that of “the future” and its associated myths of energy, expansion, a  nd growth.¹ While I was writing, I sensed a possibility that the economic crisis could be deepening. But what actually happened in the summer of 2011—the extraordinary crash of global financial capitalism and the beginning of the European insurrection that exploded in London, Athens, and Rome in December 2010 and then grew massive in England during the four nights of rage in August, and which I expect to spread everywhere in the coming months—this has pushed me to write something more. Alas, writing about the present is a dangerous thing when circumstances change so quickly. But I cannot deny the thrill of running alongside the disaster.

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Een veel besproken artikel van Naomi Klein uit The Nation 28 nov 2011

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low

taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.”)

This culture-war intensity is the worst news of all, because when you challenge a person’s position on an issue core to his or her identity, facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily deflected.

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Now one of the trends that had actually been going on, rather unnoticed for at least the last 15 years or so, was that one of the biggest fields of expansion for multinational companies has actually been the public sector.

I think the left, certainly the British left, has very much focused on seeing the financial crisis as something to do with banks and something to do with financialisation and the finance economy. All the political action that we've seen recently - including the Occupy movement, whom I support absolutely – is all focused on how the banks are the baddies, how to change the banking system, how to make it responsible etc, etc. There has been very little focus on what's been happening in what one might call the 'real economy'. That's a complicated phrase to use: people used to talk about finance capital and industrial capital, as if they were two quite distinct things, which they probably were 100 years ago, but the reality is that industrial capital behaves more and more like finance capital. We've got transnational companies with parent companies in tax havens, creating an internal global space around which they move their profits, not paying any tax whatsoever, and behaving increasingly like banks.

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Silvia Federici discusses the Occupy Movement and the struggles of social reproduction to challenge capital.

Occupations and the Struggle over Reproduction

Silvia Federici is a veteran activist and writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Born and raised in Italy, Federici has taught in Italy, Nigeria, and the United States, where she has been involved in many movements, including feminist, education, and anti-death penalty struggles. Her influential 2004 book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation,built on decades of research and activism, offers an account of the relationship between the European witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rise of capitalism. Federici's work is rooted in a feminist and Marxist tradition that stresses the centrality of people's struggle against exploitation as the driving force of historical and global change. With other members of the Wages for Housework campaign, like Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and with feminist authors like Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Federici has been instrumental in developing the idea of “reproduction” as a key way to understand global and local power relations. Reproduction, in this sense, doesn’t only mean how humans reproduce biologically, it is a broad concept that encompasses how we care for one anothe

r, how we reproduce our physical bodies depending on our access to food and shelter, how culture and ideology are reproduced, how communities are built and rebuilt, and how resistance and struggle can be sustained and expanded. In the contest of a capitalist society reproduction also refers to the process by which “labor power” (i.e. our capacity to work, and the labor force in general), is reproduced, both on a day to day basis and inter-generationally. It was one of the main contributions of the theorists of the Wages For Housework Movement to Marxist feminist theory to have redefined reproductive work in this manner. In this interview, an extended version of which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Politics and Culture, Federici reflects on the #Occupy movements, their precedents and their potentials.

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THE PALESTINIANS: “We already have a one-state solution”

Q. Let’s talk about the Palestinians. Why has the Arab Spring passed them by? And do you think the two-state solution is still possible? Your detractors say that you would not be unhappy about such a development

A. Anyone who is an advocate of the two state solution has to tell me how a forty plus year old process can be reversed. That process, even since Meron Benvenisti starting talking about it in the late eighties, hasn’t changed one bit. No Israeli government has ever stopped it. I mean Rabin did a little bit, but that’s it. It’s inexorable – the bulldozers never stop

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The drive to stop foreclosures and squat bank property marks a radical shift from the occupation of public space to the public repossession of private property.

The Occupy movement is ratcheting up the resistance. Inspired by the Spanish indignados, this Tuesday activists all over the United States will be taking the struggle indoors: to the homes of poor families who are under threat of being evicted by large and powerful Wall Street banks. The move from occupying public space to reclaiming private property marks a radical escalation of civil disobedience, striking the capitalist system right at its institutional  heart.

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