CA/Continuations/Discussion Group

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{{#customtitle:Anti-Austerity Study Group}} <section begin=intro />

“ Neoliberalism has gone beyond the ‘boorish’ phase...[1] It has become so entrenched and comfortable in its place at the head of the table that neoliberalism has now turned abusive. ”
 

The Anti-Austerity Discussion Group is a series of discussions about how people locally and around the world are resisting austerity and building strong coalitions to protect access to public services, education, and a basic social safety net. Our goals are to educate ourselves, strengthen our relationships, and develop a shared analysis of austerity and a shared orientation to strategies that work.<section end=intro />

Upcoming Study Group Event: Student & Teacher Strikes

Facebook Invite Page: Anti-Austerity Study Group Session #4
When: Saturday, November 17, 2012
Time: 11:00am
Where: New Meeting Place: Sally & Bernie's House - 34th Ave. & SE Clinton.
Address: 2715 SE 34th Ave. Just south of Clinton, first house on right. (map) | TriMet #4
Topic: Worker-Owned Cooperatives & The Cooperative Movement
Don't Forget: This is a potluck event. Bring food!

This study topic is a repeat of our Student & Teacher Strikes from last July. Please see our notes from that study session for assigned articles and other material.

Upcoming Topic Proposals

Previous Topics

Notes of previous discussions located on our Discussion Group Archive page.

Previous discussions listed in reverse order.

Postponed Study Group Event: Worker-Owned Cooperatives & The Cooperative Movement

“ Any workplace can undergo a profound change in meaning if it shifts from being primarily a mechanism for the generation of profit over which one has no control, to being a community of relationships with an inherent worth of its own. This is perhaps the quintessential difference between the co-operative and the capitalist firm. In one, the enterprise is a means to the human fulfillment of all through the creation of community. In the other, the enterprise is a means for the fulfillment of some through the subordination of others. It is strange how such a simple and self-evident truth seems so foreign in our culture. ”
 

Facebook Invite Page: TBA
When: TBA
Time: TBA
Where: TBA
Topic: Worker-Owned Cooperatives & The Cooperative Movement
Don't Forget: This is a potluck event. Bring food!

Join us for the fourth in a series of discussions about how people locally and around the world are fighting elite-imposed austerity and building political and economic democracy from the grassroots.

Our goals are to educate ourselves, strengthen our relationships, and develop a shared analysis of austerity and strategies to fight back against economic tyranny.

Our fourth meetup topic will focus on how Worker-Owned Cooperatives are building alternatives to workplace tyranny by constructing democratically controlled economic enterprises.

We'll post links to reading material as our study group assignments become available. Have a suggestion? Please post it to our Facebook page or under the Suggested Articles header shown below.

We will start out with a potluck brunch and spend time getting to know each other. We'll have some discussion in the large group and then break into small groups for more in-depth conversations using the discussion questions provided as a starting point.

Assignments

Coming soon.

Discussion Questions

Coming soon.

Suggested Reading, Video, Audio

Think of an article, book, report or video you'd like to suggest? Post a link to it here or on our Facebook page.

Books
Values at Work is an analysis of organizational dynamics with wide-ranging implications in an age of market globalization. It looks at the challenges businesses face to maintain people-oriented work systems while remaining successful in the larger economy. George Cheney revisits the famous Mondragón worker-owned-and-governed cooperatives in the Basque Country of Spain to examine how that collection of innovative and democratic businesses is responding to the broad trend of "marketization." The Mondragón cooperatives are changing in important ways as a direct result of both external pressures to be more competitive and the rise of consumerism, as well as through the modification of internal policies toward greater efficiency. One of the most remarkable aspects of the changes is that some of the same business slogans now heard around the globe are being adopted in this set of organizations renowned for its strongly held internal values, such as participatory democracy, solidarity, and equality. Instead of emphasizing the special or unique qualities of the Mondragón experience, this book demonstrates the case's relevance to trends in all sectors and across the industrialized world.
Humanizing the Economy shows how co-operative models for economic and social development can create a more equitable, just, and humane future. With over 800 million members in 85 countries and a long history linking economics to social values, the co-operative movement is the most powerful grassroots movement in the world. Its future as an alternative to corporate capitalism is explored through a wide range of real-world examples.
(One copy available at the Multnomah County Library.)
“Imagine a country where the majority of the population reaps the majority of the benefits for their hard work, creative ingenuity, and collaborative efforts. Imagine a country where corporate losses aren't socialized, while gains are captured by an exclusive minority. Imagine a country run as a democracy, from the bottom up, not a plutocracy from the top down. Richard Wolff not only imagines it, but in his compelling, captivating and stunningly reasoned new book, Democracy at Work, he details how we get there from here - and why we absolutely must.”

- Nomi Prins, Author of It Takes a Pillage and Black Tuesday

Video
Wolff discusses some of the material found in his book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism.

Extra Credit

The Worker-Owned Cooperatives page on this wiki contains a number of useful resources about what worker-owned cooperatives are, how they work, where they are currently operating and more.

Austerity Basics

Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey, which defines the neoliberal capitalist policies in many western nations, from the 1970s and to the present day, as resulting in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public of their wealth or land. These neoliberal policies are guided mainly by four practices: privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions.

European Austerity Crisis

We are looking at pushback against elite-imposed austerity in the countries listed below, either one country at a time, or in small groups of countries. We started with Spain:
France
Greece
Lessons for the U.S.: “In fact we were struck by the contrast between SYRIZA, with its base in popular movements and its radical possibilities, and the Democratic Party in the U.S., which year after year corrals progressive movements into a party dominated by corporate interests incapable of fighting for progressive goals. In our country there has been plenty of direct action in the streets, in the public squares, on campuses, in workplaces. But unlike Greece, this has not been accompanied by direct action at the ballot box through a political party that is not beholden to big business and is clearly a party of the left. We think that the millions of Americans who are outraged by the ruthless pillaging of their society by arrogant elites desperately need an electoral movement like SYRIZA that is rooted in popular struggles and committed to winning and using political power to achieve progressive change.”
Iceland
Iceland’s approach was the polar opposite of the U.S. and Europe, which rescued their banks and did little to aid indebted homeowners.
As retold by the President of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson.
Iceland was the first place to suffer the fallout from over-zealous (male) bankers. Now the country is back on its feet. Why? Because women took over.
The people of Iceland forced their corrupt government to resign. A public assembly was created to rewrite the constitution. The banks were nationalized, it was decided not to pay the debt that PRIVATE banks created. All of this in a peaceful way... What would happen if the rest of the world took this as an example?
Ireland
Italy
Portugal
Spain
(See our archive page for the research and links compiled for our August 11th discussion on Spain.)

More About European Austerity Crisis

Lots of good material focused on anti-austerity fightback.
Why would the Catalans or the Basques elect to continue to be a part of Spain, when the government in Madrid has nothing to offer but empty coffers? Why would they let others decide for them when that brings them no economic advantages? Any charismatic leader might convince them that they would be better off as a separate unit. And that leader might be right...[2]
Political Fallout
"Incumbency plus austerity equals political death."
Global Political Awakening
1) Invest in people, don't hobble them with austerity: The stubborn attachment of European leaders to the bankrupt austerity mania is doing more to undermine security, stability and peace than just about anything else in Europe right now.
Elites attempting to implement austerity measures and other unpopular budget programs will need to “deliver a convincing story about the sharing of burdens,” for if they do not, it would “guarantee that a bad situation gets very ugly, very fast.”[3]
For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.

Language Barriers: How does the 1% think and how should we interpret it?

“ Like Greece, Spain has an economy that is not competitive. It is burdened by industry restrictions and labor laws that tend to retard growth. It faces a long restructuring process of its social services and its business markets that will test the fortitude of its people. The real estate collapse has led to thousands of jobless construction workers who must be retrained[4] before the economy can recover. One problem is that countries like Italy and Greece already have what are generally considered to be bloated government agencies that burden business with paperwork and regulations and impede job creation. ”
 
— Excerpts from “The Euro Zone Crisis: A Primer”
Trudy's Translations

Owellian business and economic language--terms, "competitive," "restructuring," "labor flexibility," "public-private partnerships," "creativity", etc.--tends to obscure what's actually going on. Let's decipher a few of the phrases used in the article quoted above from sterile economic and business "code" and put it into ordinary language.

“not competitive”

TT: Even though we elites were the cause of the economic collapse, we can easily blame the victims--those who lost their jobs, were tossed out of their homes, etc.--for their lack of competitiveness.

“burdened by industry restrictions and labor laws”

TT: This is a terrific opportunity to shift not only the blame, but the costs too, by removing all burdensome private sector regulations and job-killing labor protections. (BwwaaahhhaaaahaaaahaaaHah!)

“long restructuring process”

TT: More austerity measures will gut public assets to the degree that we can snap them up at a bargain basement price and at the same time crush the will of the now surplus labor force, who will "happily" work for shit wages.

“bloated government agencies that burden business”

TT: Once we own everything that the middle class used to own collectively, and once all labor protections are rolled back, we’ll be even freer than we are now to outsource labor and hire locals on contract, with no benefits. Yay, we win again!"

Links & Info

“ Above all, the austerity agenda attacks women, the poor, people of colour, working people, and public services. It blames the most oppressed for the crimes of the most privileged. The global capitalist austerity agenda has attacked working people from Sudan to Britain, France to Canada, Latvia to the United States. The shock doctrine of IMF structural adjustment programs previously suffered by people of the Global South has, in the austerity agenda, been turned on the Global North. The last bastions of organized labour in the industrialized world are falling to austerity shock doctrine, and it is up to working people to create new kinds of solidarity, new forms of struggle, new understandings of the Leviathan called capitalism that is now killing everything on this planet.[5] ”
Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity examines the ideological roots of the "austerity" agenda and proposes revolutionary paths out of the current crisis. The film features original interviews with Chris Hedges, Derrick Jensen, Michael Hardt, Peter Gelderloos, Leo Panitch, David McNally, Richard J.F. Day, Imre Szeman, Wayne Price, and many more!

Discussion Notes

Related Events

See Also

References

  1. ↑ The Shock Doctrine: a discussion
  2. ↑ (Tae Page)
  3. ↑ The world teeters on the brink of a new age of rage - Financial Times (Requires registration.)
  4. ↑ 1 Job for Every 3.4 Jobless Workers—Skills Shortage Isn't the Problem - “By far the main cause of today’s persistent high unemployment is a broad-based lack of demand for workers—and not, as is often claimed, available workers lacking the skills needed for the sectors with job openings.”
  5. ↑ Michael Truscello, Director, Capitalism Is The Crisis
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