Inequality in the UK

UK is leading one global race: it is the only G7 country in which wealth inequality has increased steadily since 2000.

Seemingly unaffected by the financial crisis or subsequent recession, our recent report finds two trends posing a particular danger to the UK economy.

Household debt

After a period of retrenchment UK household borrowing is once more on the rise. Unsecured lending – such as credit card debt and payday loans – is now increasing at a rate of close to £1 billion a month. With real incomes falling for most, it is consumer debt that is helping sustain the UK’s economic recovery.

Secured lending is also on the rise. Although the record pre-crash levels of mortgage equity withdrawal – borrowing against the value of your home – have not returned, government-subsidy schemes such as Funding for Lending and Help to Buy are driving more and more people onto the property ladder, despite stagnating wages.

A steady increase in the size of new mortgages compared with borrower incomes suggests households are becoming more vulnerable to income and interest rate shocks. The Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have both warned that inflated property prices and related household indebtedness pose a real threat to UK financial stability.

While rising private debt has so far had only superficial impact on economic growth in the UK, its effects in compounding inequality are real. The financialisation of households through debt – as a compensation for a lack of pay growth – further burdens those at the poorest end of the income scale, while profits flow up to wealth owners.

Asset price rises

Because the value of property has a strong effect on consumer spending through rising wealth and confidence, much government activity since the crash has been focused on reflating prices. They have done this by subsidising mortgage credit through schemes such as Help to Buy. However, the UK’s housing shortage and its low rate of investment in housebuilding has seen this result in rapidly rising prices.

While the financial crash caused an immediate drop in property prices, the bubble did not fully burst and they soon began to rise once more. Two major mortgage lenders recently calculated prices were last year rising at the fastest rate since the crisis.

Since the crash the shape of the UK housing market has seen London and the South East soar ahead of other regions. The total value of housing stock in these regions has risen by £435 billion over the past five years, with a net loss of £206 billion across everywhere else.

Even in areas where property prices are rising it is not the mortgage-laden households that are the prime beneficiaries. Unaffordable housing has led to the rise of ‘generation rent’, and sharpened the appetite of institutional investors for the lucrative private rented sector. Analysts are forecasting that private renting is on its way to becoming a new major asset class in the UK. Private landlords, including increasing numbers of institutional investors, now own 19% of all residential property – up from 12% ten years ago.

Read our full report on the links between inequality and the growth in scale and influence of the financial sector.

Written by Alice Martin New Economics Foundation

Ecosocialism: Putting on the Brakes Before Going Over the Cliff by Michael Lowy

Ecosocialism is an attempt to provide a radical, civilizational alternative to capitalism, rooted in the basic arguments of the ecological movement, and in the Marxist critique of political economy. It opposes to capitalism’s destructive progress (Marx) an economic policy founded on non-monetary and extra-economic criteria: social needs and ecological equilibrium. This dialectical synthesis, attempted by a broad spectrum of authors, from James O’Connor to Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster, and from André Gorz (in his early writings) to Elmar Altvater, is at the same time a critique of “market ecology,” which does not challenge the capitalist system, as well as of “productivist socialism,” which ignores the issue of natural limits. 

Marx and Engels themselves were not unaware of the environmental-destructive consequences of the capitalist mode of production: there are several passages in Capital and other writings that point to this understanding.¹ Moreover, they believed that the aim of socialism was not to produce more and more commodities, but to give human beings free time to fully develop their potentialities. They have little in common with “productivism,” i.e. with the idea that the unlimited expansion of production is an aim in itself. 

However, there are some passages in their writings which seem to suggest that socialism will permit the development of productive forces beyond the limits imposed on them by the capitalist system. According to this approach, the socialist transformation concerns only the capitalist relations of production, which have become an obstacle—“chains” is the term often used—to the free development of the existing productive forces; socialism would mean above all the social appropriation of these productive capacities, putting them at the service of the workers. To quote a passage from Anti-Dühring, a canonical work for many generations of Marxists, under socialism “society takes possession openly and without detours of the productive forces that have become too large” for the existing system.²

The experience of the Soviet Union illustrates the problems that result from a collectivist appropriation of the capitalist productive apparatus: from the beginning, the thesis of the socialization of the existing productive forces predominated. It is true that during the first years after the October Revolution an ecological current was able to develop, and certain (limited) measures to protect the environment were taken by the Soviet authorities. However, with the process of Stalinist bureaucratization, the productivist tendencies, both in industry and agriculture, were imposed with totalitarian methods, while the ecologists were marginalized or eliminated. The catastrophe of Chernobyl is an extreme example of the disastrous consequences of this imitation of Western productive technologies. A change in the forms of property that is not accompanied by democratic management and a reorganization of the productive system can only lead to a dead end. 

Marxists can take their inspiration from Marx’ remarks on the Paris Commune: workers cannot take possession of the capitalist state apparatus and put it to function at their service. They have to “break it” and replace it by a radically different, democratic, and non-statist form of political power. 

The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the productive apparatus; by its nature, its structure, it is not neutral, but at the service of capital accumulation and the unlimited expansion of the market. It is in contradiction with the need to protect the environment and the health of the population. One must therefore “revolutionize” it through a process of radical transformation. This may mean, for certain branches of production, to discontinue them altogether: for instance, nuclear plants, certain methods of industrial fishing (already responsible for the extermination of several species in the seas), the destructive logging of tropical forests, and so on—the list is very long! In any case the productive forces, and not only the relations of production, have to be deeply changed to begin with, by a revolution in the energy system, with the replacement of the present sources—essentially fossil fuels—responsible for the pollution and poisoning of the environment, by renewable ones: water, wind, and sun. Of course, many scientific and technological achievements of modernity are precious, but the whole productive system must be transformed, and this can be done only by ecosocialist methods, i.e. through a democratic planning of the economy that takes into account the preservation of the ecological equilibrium. 

Society itself, and not a small oligarchy of property-owners—nor an elite of techno-bureaucrats—will be able to choose, democratically, which productive lines are to be privileged, and how much of the natural and social resources are to be invested in education, health, or culture. The prices of goods themselves would not be left to the “laws of supply and demand” but, to some extent, determined according to social and political options, as well as ecological criteria, leading to taxes on certain products and subsidized prices for others. Ideally, as the transition to socialism moves forward, more and more products and services would be distributed free of charge, according to the will of the citizens. Far from being by nature “despotic,” planning is the exercise by a whole society of its freedom: the freedom to make decisions. Democratic planning also means liberation from the alienated and reified “economic laws” of the capitalist system that determined the individuals’ lives and deaths and enclosed them in an economic “iron cage” (Max Weber). Planning and the reduction of labor time are the two decisive steps of humanity towards what Marx called “the kingdom of freedom.” A significant increase in free time is in fact a condition for the democratic participation of working people in democratic discussion and management of the economy and of society.

While under capitalism use-value is only a means—often a trick—at the service of exchange-value and profit—which explains, by the way, why so many products in the present society are substantially useless—in a planned socialist economy the use-value is the only criterion for the production of goods and services, with far reaching economic, social, and ecological consequences. 

As Joel Kovel observed, “The enhancement of use-values and the corresponding restructuring of needs becomes now the social regulator of technology rather than, as under capital, the conversion of time into surplus value and money.”³

Ecosocialist planning is based on the principle of a democratic and pluralist debate on all the levels where decisions are to be taken: different propositions are submitted to the concerned people by parties, platforms, or any other political movement, and delegates elected accordingly. Representative democracy, however, must be completed—and corrected—by direct democracy where people directly choose—at the local, national and, later, global level—between major social and ecological options. 

What guarantee is there that the people will make the correct ecological choices, even at the price of giving up some of their habits of consumption? There is no such “guarantee,” other than the wager on the rationality of democratic decisions, once the power of commodity fetishism is broken. Of course, with popular choices, errors will be committed, but who believes that the experts themselves do not make errors? One cannot imagine the establishment of such a new society without the majority of the population having achieved—through their struggles, their self-education, and their social experience—a high level of socialist and ecological consciousness, and this makes it reasonable to suppose that errors—including decisions that are inconsistent with environmental needs—will be corrected. In any case, are not the proposed alternatives—the blind market or an ecological dictatorship of “experts”—much more dangerous than the democratic process with all its contradictions? 

The passage from capitalist “destructive progress” to ecosocialism is an historical process, a permanent revolutionary transformation of society, culture, and mentalities. This transition would lead not only to a new mode of production and an egalitarian and democratic society, but also to an alternative mode of life, a new ecosocialist civilization, beyond the reign of money, beyond consumption habits artificially produced by advertising, and beyond the unlimited production of commodities that are useless or harmful to the environment. It is important to emphasize that such a process cannot begin without a revolutionary transformation of social and political structures, and the active support by the vast majority of the population of an ecosocialist program. The development of socialist consciousness and ecological awareness is a process where the decisive factor is peoples’ own collective experience of struggle, from local and partial confrontations to the radical change of society as a whole. 

This does not mean that conflicts will not arise, particularly during the transitional process, between the requirements of protecting the environment and social needs, between the ecological imperatives and the necessity of developing basic infra-structures, particularly in the poor countries, between popular consumer habits and the scarcity of resources. A classless society is not a society without contradictions and conflicts! These are inevitable: it will be the task of democratic planning in an ecosocialist perspective, liberated from the imperatives of capital and profit-making, to solve them, through a pluralist and open discussion, leading to decision-making by society itself. Such a grassroots and participative democracy is the only way, not to avoid errors, but to permit the self-correction by the social collectivity of its own mistakes. Is this Utopia? In its etymological sense—“something that exists nowhere”—certainly. But are not utopias, i.e. visions of an alternative future, wish-images of a different society, a necessary feature of any movement that wants to challenge the established order? As Daniel Singer explained in his literary and political testament, Whose Millenium?, in a powerful chapter entitled “Realistic Utopia,” 

If the establishment now looks so solid, despite the circumstances, and if the labor movement or the broader left are so crippled, so paralyzed, it is because of the failure to offer a radical alternative. (…) The basic principle of the game is that you question neither the fundamentals of the argument nor the foundations of society. Only a global alternative, breaking with these rules of resignation and surrender, can give the movement of emancipation genuine scope.⁴

The socialist and ecological utopia is only an objective possibility, not the inevitable result of the contradictions of capitalism or of the “iron laws of history.” One cannot predict the future, except in conditional terms: in the absence of an ecosocialist transformation, of a radical change in the civilizational paradigm, the logic of capitalism will lead the planet to dramatic ecological disasters, threatening the health and the life of billions of human beings, and perhaps even the survival of our species. 

To dream, and to struggle, for a new civilization does not mean that one does not fight for concrete and urgent reforms. Without any illusions in a “clean capitalism,” one must try to win time and to impose on the powers-that-be some elementary changes: the banning of the HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons) that are destroying the ozone layer, a general moratorium on genetically modified organisms, a drastic reduction in the emission of the greenhouse gases, the development of public transportation, the taxation of polluting cars, the progressive replacement of trucks by trains, a severe regulation of the fishing industry, as well as of the use of pesticides and chemicals in the agro-industrial production. These urgent eco-social demands can lead to a process of radicalization on the condition that one does not accept to limit one’s aims according to the requirements of “the [capitalist] market” or of “competition.” According to the logic of what Marxists call “a transitional program,” each small victory, each partial advance can immediately lead to a higher demand, to a more radical aim. These, and similar issues, are at the heart of the agenda of the Global Justice movement and the World Social Forums that have permitted the convergence of social and environmental movements in a common struggle against the system.

The another-world-is-possible movement is without a doubt the most important phenomenon of anti-systemic resistance of the beginning of the twenty-first century. One could say that this movement was born with the “Battle of Seattle” that took place at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. The most striking aspect of this movement was the surprising convergence between turtles and Teamsters, that is, ecologists dressed as turtles and the truck drivers and dock workers of the trucking industry. The ecological issue was present then at the beginning and at the center of the mobilizations against neo-liberal capitalist globalization. The movement’s slogan was “the world is not a commodity,” meaning, obviously, that the air, the water, the earth, in a word, the natural environment which has increasingly been subject to capital’s stranglehold. One can say that the another-world-is-possible movement is made up of three elements: 1) a radical protest against the existing order of things and its sinister institutions: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the G-8 group; 2) a number of concrete measures, of proposals that could be immediately implemented: a tax on finance capital, the suppression of the debt of the developing countries, an end to imperialist wars; 3) the utopia of “another possible world” founded on common values such as freedom, participatory democracy, social justice, the defense of the environment.

The ecological dimension is present in each of these three moments: it inspires both the revolt against a system that has led humanity to a tragic impasse and a collection of specific proposals—monitoring of genetically modified organisms, development of collective transportation—together with the utopia of a society living in harmony with the ecosystems, as sketched out in the documents of the movement.

This doesn’t mean that there are not contradictions resulting from the resistance of some sections of the labor union movement to ecological demands that are perceived as a threat to jobs as well as the limited nature and lack of social awareness of some ecological organizations. But one of the most positive features of the Social Forums, and of the another-world-is-possible movement as a whole, is the possibility of meetings, debate, dialogue, and of mutual education among the movements.

It is important to emphasize that the presence of ecology in the broader movements is not limited to ecological organizations—Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, among others. It becomes more and more a dimension to be taken into account—in action and reflection—in the different social movements of peasants, of the indigenous, of feminists, and of the religious (the Theology of Liberation).

A striking example of this “organic” integration of ecological questions by other social movements is the Movement of the Landless (MST) in Brazil, part of the Via Campesina network, both of which have been pillars of the World Social Movement and the another-world-is-possible movement. Since it was founded the MST has been hostile to capitalism and to its rural expression, agro-business; it has increasingly integrated an ecological dimension into its fight for a radical agrarian reform and for another model of agriculture. Since the twentieth anniversary celebration of the movement in Río de Janeiro (2005) the document of the organizers stated: our dream is “an egalitarian world that socializes the material and cultural wealth,” a new path for society “founded on equality between human beings and ecological principles.” This translates into action by the MST against the GMOs—action often on the margins of legality—which is at the same time a fight against the attempt of the multinationals such as Monsanto and Syngenta to completely control seeds and thus dominate farmers and peasants, as well as a struggle against the pollution and uncontrollable contamination of their fields. 

So, thanks to a “savage” occupation, in 2006 the MST won the expropriation of a transgenic corn and soy field grown from Syngenta Seeds in the State of Paraná which has since become the peasant camp “Free Land.” We should also mention their confrontations with multinational paper pulp mills that have multiplied, affecting hundreds of thousands of acres turning them into veritable “green deserts” comprised of forests of eucalyptus trees that suck up all sources of water and destroy biodiversity. For the MST leaders and activists, these various fights are inseparable from a radical, anti-capitalist perspective. 

Peasant and indigenous movements of Latin America are at the center of the struggle for the environment. This is true not only through their local actions in defense of rivers or forests against petroleum and mining multinationals, but also in that they propose an alternative way of life to that of neo-liberal globalized capitalism. Indigenous peoples in particular may be the ones undertaking these struggles, but they quite often do so in alliance with landless peasants, ecologists, socialists, and Christian base communities, with support from unions, left parties, the Pastoral Land Commission, and the Indigenous Pastoral Ministry. The dynamics of capital require the transformation of all commonly held goods into commodities, which sooner or later leads to destruction of the environment. The petroleum zones of Latin America, abandoned by the multinationals after years of exploitation, are poisoned and destroyed, leaving behind a dismal legacy of illness among the inhabitants. It is thus completely understandable that the populations that live in the most direct contact with the environment are the first victims of this ecocide and attempt to oppose the destructive expansion of capital, sometimes successfully. 

Resistance by indigenous peoples, then, has very concrete and immediate motivations—to save their forests or water resources—in their battle for survival. However, it also corresponds to a deep antagonism between the culture, the way of life, the spirituality and the values of these communities, and the “spirit of capitalism” as Max Weber defined it: the subjection of all activity to profit calculations, profitability as sole criterion and the quantification and reification, the Versachlichung, of all social relations. There is a sort of “negative affinity” between indigenous ethics and the spirit of capitalism—the converse of the elective affinity between the Protestant ethic and capitalism—, that is, a profound socio-cultural opposition. Certainly, there are indigenous or metis communities that adapt to the system and try to gain from it. Further, indigenous struggles involve extremely complex processes, including identity recomposition, transcoding of discourses, and political instrumentalizations, all of which deserve to be closely studied. Yet we can clearly see that a continuous series of conflicts characterizes the relations between indigenous populations and modern capitalist agricultural or mining corporations. This conflict has a long history. It is admirably described in one of the Mexican novels of the anarchist writer B. Traven, The White Rose (1929) which narrates how a large North American oil company seized the lands of an indigenous community after having murdered its leader.⁵ The conflict, however, has intensified during the last few decades because of both the intensity and extensiveness of capital’s exploitation of the environment, and also because of the rise of the another-world-is-possible movement—which took on this struggle—and the indigenous movements of the continent.

Such struggles around concrete issues are important, not only because partial victories are welcome in themselves, but also because they contribute to raising ecological and socialist consciousness, and because they promote activity and self-organization from below: both are decisive and necessary pre-conditions for a radical, i.e. revolutionary, transformation of the world. 

These, and similar issues, are at the heart of the agenda of the Global Justice movement and the World Social Forums that since Seattle 1999 have permitted the convergence of social and environmental movements in a common struggle against the system.

There is no reason for optimism: the entrenched ruling elites of the system are incredibly powerful, and the forces of radical opposition are still small. But they are the only hope that the catastrophic course of capitalist “growth” will be halted. Walter Benjamin defined revolutions as being not the locomotive of history, but rather humanity reaching for the emergency brake on the train before it goes over into the abyss…

Michael Löwy was born in Brazil and lives in Paris. He is the Emeritus Research Director of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His most recent book is On Changing the World. Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin published by Haymarket Press in 2012.

Footnotes

1. See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology. Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 

2. F. Engels, Anti-Dühring (Paris, Ed. Sociales, 1950), 318.

3. Joel Kovel, Enemy of Nature (London; New York: Zed Books, 2002), 215.

4. Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (New York:, Monthly Review Press, 1999) 259-260.

5. B. Traven, The White Rose (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1979).

First published at New Politics

Boris Johnson's London budget is a climate disaster

The Mayor’s policies are probably causing more greenhouse gas emissions than he is saving.

City Hall under both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson has rightly been praised for its climate change strategies. But under Boris, delivery has fallen back year after year, and the London Assembly has raised fears that his budget for the coming year will fall further still.

In July the Assembly’s Environment Committee gave the Mayor four out of 10 for his delivery in a damning report. The chair ended his foreword on a hopeful note: “let us see if the Mayor is prepared to take up the challenge again with less than two years left on his mandate from Londoners”.

The Mayor’s budget for the next financial year quashes that hope.
His programme to refurbish public sector buildings, called RE:FIT, has been a great success. But underfunded, it will only deliver 45 per cent of the carbon savings required by his climate change mitigation strategy over seven years from 2009-16.

His home refurbishment programme has been an abysmal failure due to a lack of funding from City Hall and local councils, and the disastrous national government policies. He only expects to deliver 24 per cent of the target over the same seven years.

His energy programmes have become worryingly modest. London has fallen from the heady heights of 2006, when Greenpeace and Ken issued a joint report calling for a decentralised energy revolution in London. Now he only expects to deliver 9 per cent of the target for low carbon energy between 2010 and 2021.

All of these come after years of worsening performance, leaving a growing gap between his ambitions and delivery and adds up to a huge shortfall for 2015-16.

But it gets worse. The Mayor’s other policies are probably causing far more greenhouse gas emissions than he is saving with these hobbled programmes.

London & Partners, his international promotion agency, has more or less avoided cuts and will get £11.4m in the next year. Using the Mayor’s estimates of the extra tourists they bring to London, I’ve estimated that their travel could create another 1,000,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year.

Even good programmes have impacts that we can’t ignore. We absolutely must build more social housing, but construction needs materials, transport and on-site machinery which all cause greenhouse gas emissions. His not-very-affordable housing programme will be responsible for around 800,000 tonnes per year.

These two combined will cause, in just one year, almost forty times the emissions that his climate change programmes will save.

Then there is his transport business plan, which includes spending £28 billion in the coming decades on increasing road capacity. After a decade of falling traffic levels – a startling success when the population and economy both grew – his policies saw traffic grow last year by 3 per cent, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and deadly air pollution.

The Mayor needs to radically change his budget and his priorities if he is to take the challenge of climate change seriously in his remaining years in office.

Jenny Jones is a member of the London Assembly for the Green Party

First published at Left Foot Forward

SYRIZA dismantles some myths surrounding the Greek economy

With a snap general election due January 25, a Greek economist close to SYRIZA dismantles some myths surrounding the Greek economy and believes victory for the left-wing opposition is increasingly likely.

After the announcement that on 25 January, Greece will return to the polls (due to the failed the third and decisive vote for the new President), the prospect of a victory of SYRIZA, the strength of the radical left led by Alexis Tsipras  that is topping the opinion polls, is becoming more concrete. And this is rocking the markets and the European establishment, which have already expressed their disappointment at the decision of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras to anticipate to this month the election of the President. The markets have sent the Athens Stock Exchange sliding and rates on government 10-year bonds skyrocketing; the euro-elite hoping, as voiced by the Commission President Juncker that the Greeks do not vote “the wrong way”. Tsipras, however, has no intention to take Greece out of the euro, and his plan to restructure the Greek debt will not hit private but rather official creditors: the European Union and in particularly Germany.

Of this and more Il Manifesto spoke with Yanis Varoufakis, an economist close to SYRIZA.

Il Manifesto Question: Greece, which now shows a rate of economic growth that is among the strongest in the EU, is presented by proponents of austerity as a demonstration of the effectiveness of fiscal consolidation and internal devaluation, which they argue makes the Greek economy more efficient and competitive. What do you think?

Yanis Varoufakis: I think it’s a perverse distortion of reality. Greece is in the middle of a Great Depression. Incomes and investment in the country have been in free fall for seven years now; this has led to a real humanitarian crisis. And now, on the basis of a quarter of real GDP growth, they are all celebrating the “end” of the recession! But if you look at the numbers carefully, you can see that we are still in recession, even according to official data. The explanation is quite simple: in the same period in which the real GDP grew by 0.7%, prices have fallen by an average of 1.9%. For the uninitiated, the real GDP is equal to the nominal GDP (ie calculated in euro) divided by the price index (the so-called GDP deflator). Since this index fell 1.9%, and real GDP increased by only 0.7%, this means that GDP measured in nominal terms, ie in euros, has dropped! So real GDP growth does not depend on the fact that the national income, in euros, has grown; it depends on the fact that it fell more slowly than prices. And now the political establishment, both European and national, is trying to sell to the Greeks this little accounting trick as the “end of the recession.” But it will not work.

GDP down 25%, unemployment at the highest level since the Second World War: do you think that these are just the side effects of “wrong” policies  or may be the result of a specific plan?

Neither, I think. These policies were the only ones that did not involve an admission that the architecture of the eurozone is basically dysfunctional, and that the crisis was systemic and not “Greek”. But above all, they were the only ones compatible with the main objective of the establishment: protect bankers from any attempt at expropriation by the European Union or its member states. And so a small but proud nation has been forced to implement a policy of fierce internal devaluation that has caused and is still causing great suffering to the population, as well as having increased the country’s private and public debt to unsustainable levels, and all this to maintain the illusion that the architecture of the eurozone was sustainable, and to download the colossal losses of private banks on the shoulders of ordinary citizens, workers and taxpayers. Having decided on the strategy, they then cloaked it in neoliberal propaganda to make it more palatable …
Why are the markets so afraid of SYRIZA, in your opinion?

What they fear is the outbreak of the two economic bubbles inflated by Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels in recent years, that of sovereign bonds and the bond market, which were intended to feed the illusion of “the Greek recovery.” But the fate of all bubbles is that they eventually burst. And the sooner the better, because it will force us to finally look reality in the face and get to work to improve the living conditions of all, both in Greece and in the rest of the eurozone.

Do you think that the victory of SYRIZA is possible? Or do you believe that the conservative forces of the Greek – and European – establishment are willing to do anything to block its way?

Both. There is no doubt that the forces of the establishment will do anything to stop SYRIZA, resorting to the most sinister forms of psychological terrorism against the Greek electorate. But it seems that this time this strategy, already successfully used in the past, is doomed to fail. A victory of SYRIZA currently seems increasingly likely.

What is your view of EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker call on the Greek not to vote “the wrong way”?

I would say that it shows a deep contempt for democracy, and a neo-colonial attitude that makes a mockery of the idea that the EU ought to respect the sovereignty of its member states. In theory, it is the European Commission that is held accountable for its choices by the citizens of the member states, and not the citizens who are held accountable for their choices vis-a-vis the Commission. And by definition, the Commission cannot make any judgment about the outcome of an election. It certainly cannot say what candidate is “right” and “wrong”. With this statement, Juncker has sunk the reputation of the Commission, already at historic lows, to new depths, and has further expanded the EU’s democratic deficit. His speech was one of the most anti-European moves imaginable, as it is succeeded in delegitimizing simultaneously the Commission and the EU.

Can you describe briefly the main points of SYRIZA’s program?

First, a government led by Syriza will do everything to ensure that Europe tackles the burning issues that so it has far refused to deal with: the dysfunctionality of the architecture of the eurozone, and the fact that so-called Troika “bailouts”  – which were anything but bailouts – have been very detrimental to both the peripheral countries and those in the EU’s centre, including Germany. Second, it will strive to rebuild and restart the social economy of Greece by means of a “New Deal for Europe” that aims to pull the entire periphery, and not only Greece, out of the doldrums. Finally, it will work to reform both the private and public sector in order to increase creativity and productivity, and to build a better society.

Does the return to normal hinge on a default on part of the public debt?

Yes, and this is not only true for Greece. Greece will certainly default at some point, but probably will not do it in a formal way, but through a cut in Greek debt owed to the rest of Europe. And, shortly after, it will be followed by Italy and then Spain and Portugal. In fact it will represent the first step towards a kind of fiscal union: when a state has borrowed from others and is not able to repay the agreed rate, it is a kind of fiscal union, but a terrible sort, the worst kind, a fiscal union by default.

Interview for Il Manifesto newspaper by Thomas Fazi

Translation by Revolting Europe

Joel Kovel - What is EcoSocialism & How Do We Get There?

A little Christmas treat for our readers. Joel Kovel explains the relationship between ecology and socialism from 2007.

Joel Kovel's book 'The Enemy of Nature' was really what turned me into an ecosocialist when I read it in 2005 I think. He is a great thinker and an inspiration, people say Kovel is to ecosocialism what Marx is to socialism.

Enjoy.

My Impressions of Rojava - by Janet Biehl

From December 1 to 9, I had the privilege of visiting Rojava as part of a delegation of academics from Austria, Germany, Norway, Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S. We assembled in Erbil, Iraq, on November 29 and spent the next day learning about the petrostate known as the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), with its oil politics, patronage politics, feuding parties (KDP and PUK), and apparent aspirations to emulate Dubai. We soon had enough and on Monday morning were relieved to drive to the Tigris, where crossed the border into Syria and entered Rojava, the majority-Kurdish autonomous region of northern Syria.

The Tigris river channel was narrow, but society of social and political revolution that we encountered on the far shore could not have been more different from the KRG. As we disembarked, we were greeted by the Asayis, or civilian security forces of revolution; the Asayis reject the label police, since police serve the state, whereas they serve the society. Over the next nine days, we would explore Rojava’s revolutionary self-government an old-fashioned state of total immersion (we had no Internet access to distract us). Our delegation’s two organizers—Dilar Dirik (a talented Ph.D. student at Cambridge University) and Devriş Çimen (head of Civaka Azad, the Kurdish Center for Public Information in Germany)—took us on an intensive tour of the various revolutionary institutions. Rojava consists of three geographically noncontiguous cantons; we would see only the easternmost one, Cizire, due to the ongoing war with the Islamic State, which rages to the west, especially in Kobane. But everywhere we were welcomed warmly.

At the outset, the deputy foreign minister, Amine Ossi, introduced us to the history of the revolution. The Baath regime, a system of one-party rule, had long insisted that all Syrians were Arabs and attempted to “Arabize” the country’s four million Kurds, suppressing their identity and stripping those who objected of citizenship. After Tunisian and Egyptian opposition groups mounted insurgencies in 2011’s Arab Spring, rebellious Syrians too rose up, initiating the civil war.  In the summer of 2012 regime authority collapsed in Rojava, where the Kurds had little trouble persuading its officials to depart nonviolently. Rojavans (I’ll call them by that name because while they are mostly Kurds, they are also Arabs, Assyrians, Chechens, and others) then faced a choice of aligning themselves either with the regime that had persecuted them, or with the mostly Islamic militant opposition groups.

Rojava’s Kurds being relatively secular, they refused both sides and decided instead to embark on a Third Way, based on the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned Kurdish leader who rethought he Kurdish issue, the nature of revolution, and an alternative modernity to the nation-state and capitalism. Initially, under his leadership, Kurds had fought for a state, but several decades ago, again under his leadership, their goal began to change:  they now reject the state as a source of oppression and instead strive for self-government, for popular democracy. Drawing eclectically from sources in history, philosophy, politics, and anthropology, Öcalan proposed Democratic Confederalism, as the name for the overarching program of bottom-up democracy, gender equality, ecology, and a cooperative economy. Te implementation of those principles, in institutions not only of democratic self-government but also of economics, education, health, and gender, is called Democratic Autonomy.

Under their Third Way, Rojava’s three cantons declared Democratic Autonomy and formally established it in a “social agreement” (the nonstatist term it uses instead of “constitution”). Under that program, they created a system of popular self-government, based in neighborhood commune assemblies (comprising several hundred households each), which anyone may attend, and with power rising from the bottom up through elected deputies to the city and cantonal levels.  When our delegation visited a Qamislo neighborhood, we attended a meeting of a local people’s council, where the electricity and matters relating to women, conflict resolution, and families of martyrs were discussed; men and women sat and participated together.  Elsewhere in Qamislo, we witnessed an assembly of women addressing problems particular to their gender.

Gender is of particular importance to this project in human emancipation. We quickly realized that the Rojava Revolution is fundamentally a women’s revolution. This part of the world is traditionally home to extreme patriarchal oppression: to be born female is to be at risk for violent abuse, childhood marriage, honor killings, polygamy, and more. But today the women of Rojava have shaken off that tradition and participate fully in public life: at every level of politics and society, institutional leadership consists not of one position but two, one male and one female official—for the sake of gender equality and also to keep power from concentrating into one person’s hands.

Representatives of Yekitiya Star, the umbrella organization for women’s groups, explained that women are essential to democracy—they even defined the antagonist of women’s freedom, strikingly, not as patriarchy but as the nation-state and capitalist modernity. The women’s revolution aims to free everyone. Women are to this revolution what the proletariat was to Marxist-Leninist revolutions of the past century. It has profoundly transformed not only women’s status but every aspect of society.

Even the traditionally male ones like the military.  The people’s protection units (YPG) have been joined by YPJ, women’s units, whose images by have now become world famous, are defending the society against the jihadist forces of ISIS and Al-Nusra with Kalashnikovs and, perhaps equally formidably, a fierce intellectual and emotional commitment not only to their community’s survival but to its political ideas and aspirations. When we visited a meeting of YPJ, we were told that the fighters’  education consists not only of training in practical matters like weapons but also in Democratic Autonomy. We are fighting for our ideas, they emphasized at every turn.  Two of the women who met with us had been injured in battle; one sat with an IV bag, another with a metal crutch; both were wincing in pain but had the fortitude and self-discipline to participate in our session.

Rojavans fight for the survival of their community but above all, as the YPJ told us, for their ideas. They even put the successful implementation of democracy above ethnicity. Their social agreement affirms the inclusion of ethnic minorities (Arabs, Chechens, Assyrians) and religions (Muslims, Christians, Yezidis), and Democratic Autonomy in practice seems to bend over backwards to include minorities, without imposing it on others against their will, leaving the door open to all.  When our delegation asked a group of Assyrians to tell us their challenges with Democratic Autonomy, they said they had none.  In nine days we could not possibly have scoured Rojava for all problems, and our interlocutors candidly admitted that Rojava is hardly above criticism, but as far as I could see, Rojava at the very least aspires to model tolerance and pluralism in a part of the world that has seen far too much fanaticism and repression—and to whatever extent it succeeds, it deserves commendation.

Rojava’s economic model “is the same as its political model,” an economics adviser in Derik told us: to  create a “community economy, “ building cooperatives in all sectors and educating the people in the idea. The adviser expressed satisfaction that even though 70 percent of Rojava’ s resources must go to the war effort, the economy still manages meet everyone’s basic needs. They strive for self-sufficiency, because they must: the crucial fact is that Rojava exists under an embargo.   It can neither export to nor import from its immediate neighbor to the north, Turkey, which would like to see the whole Kurdish project disappear.  Even the KRG, fellow Kurds but economically beholden to Turkey, observes the embargo, although more cross-border KRG-Rojava trade is occurring now, in the wake of political developments.  But the country still lacks resources.  That does not dampen their spirit: “If there is only bread, then we all have a share,” the adviser told us.

We visited an economics academy and economic cooperatives: a sewing cooperative in Derik, making uniforms for the defense forces; a cooperative greenhouse, growing cucumbers and tomatoes; a dairy cooperative in Rimelan, where a new shed was under construction.  The Kurdish areas are the most fertile parts of Syria, home its abundant wheat supply, but the Baath regime had deliberately kept the area pre-industrial, a source of raw materials. Hence wheat was cultivated but could not be milled into flour. We visited a mill, newly constructed since the revolution, improvised from local materials.  It now provides flour for the bread consumed Cizire, whose residents get three loaves a day.

Similarly, Cizire was Syria’s major source of petroleum, with several thousand oil rigs, mostly in the Rimelan area. But the Baath regime ensured that Rojava had no refineries, forcing the oil to be transported to refineries elsewhere in Syria.  But since the revolution, Rojavans have improvised two new oil refineries, which are used mainly to provide diesel for the generators that power the canton. The local oil industry, if such it can be called, produces only enough for local needs, nothing more.

The level of improvisation was striking throughout the canton. The more we traveled through Rojava, the more I marveled at the do-it-yourself nature of the revolution, its reliance on local ingenuity and the scarce materials at hand.  But it was not until we visited the various academies-- the women’s academy in Rimelan and the Mesopotamian Academy in Qamislo—that I realized that it is integral to the system as a whole.

The education system in Rojava is nontraditional, rejecting ideas of hierarchy, power, and hegemony. Instead of following a teacher-student hierarchy, students teach each other and learn from each other’s experience. Students learn what is useful, in practical matters; they “search for meaning,” as we were told, in intellectual matters.  They do not memorize; they learn to think for themselves and make decisions, to become the subjects of their own lives. They learn to be empowered and to participate in Democratic Autonomy.

Images of Abdullah Öcalan are everywhere, which to Western eyes might suggest something Orwellian: indoctrination, knee-jerk belief.  But to interpret those images that way would be to miss the situation entirely.  “No one will give you your rights,” someone quoted Öcalan to us—“you will have to struggle to obtain them.”  And to carry out that struggle, Rojavans know they must educate both themselves and society. Öcalan taught them Democratic Confederalism, as a set of principles; their role has been to figure out how to implement it, in Democratic Autonomy, and thereby empower themselves.

The Kurds have historically had few friends. They were ignored by the Treaty of Lausanne that divided up the Middle East after World War I. For most of the past century, they suffered as minorities in Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Their language and culture have been suppressed,  their identities denied, their human rights overruled. They are on the wrong side of NATO, where Turkey is permitted to call the shots on Kurdish matters. They have long been outsiders. That experience has been brutal, involving torture, exile, and war. But it has also given them strength and independence of mind.  Öcalan taught them how to reset the terms of their existence in a way that gave them dignity and self-respect.

This do-it-yourself revolution by an educated populace is embargoed by their neighbors and gets along by the skin of its teeth. It is nonetheless an endeavor that pushes the human prospect forward.  In the wake of the twentieth century, many people have come to the worst conclusions about human nature, but in the twenty-first, Rojavans are setting a new standard for what human beings are capable of; in a world fast losing hope, they shine as a beacon.

Anyone with a bit of faith in humanity should wish the Rojavans well with their revolution and do what they can to help it succeed. They should demand that their governments stop allowing Turkey to define a rejectionist international policy toward the Kurds and toward Democratic Autonomy. They should demand an end to the embargo against Rojava.

The members of the delegation in which I participated (even though I am not an academic) did their work well. Sympathetic to the revolution, they nonetheless asked challenging questions, about Rojava’s economic outlook, about the handling ethnicity and nationalism, and more.  The Rojavans we met, accustomed to grappling with hard questions, responded thoughtfully and even welcomed critique.  Readers interested in learning more about the Rojava Revolution may look forward to forthcoming writings by the other delegation members: Welat (Oktay) Ay, Rebecca Coles, Antonia Davidovic, Eirik Eiglad, David Graeber, Thomas Jeffrey Miley, Johanna Riha, Nazan Üstündag, and Christian Zimmer. As for me, I have much more to say than this short article allows and plan to write a further work, one that incorporates drawings I made during the trip.

 *Janet Biehl (1953—) is an author, copy editor, and graphic artist living in Burlington, Vermont. In the late 1980s she was heavily involved with the Burlington Greens and the Left Green Network, and for more than two decades was involved with popularizing and developing the theory and politics of social ecology.

From 1987 to 2000 she published and, together with Murray Bookchin, co-editedLeft Green Perspectives. She was on the first editorial board of our journalCommunalism. She has written on libertarian municipalism and a range of critiques of deep ecology, ecofeminism, and far-right tendencies. Biehl no longer considers herself part of the social ecology movement, but her writings remain a source of inspiration.

Her books include Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics <http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Our-Way-Rethinking-Eco-Feminist/dp/0921689780/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299486923&sr=8-2>  (1991) andThe Politics of Social Ecology <http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Social-Ecology-Libertarian-Municipalism/dp/1551641003/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299486923&sr=8-3> : Libertarian Municipalism (1997; on which a series of international conferences was based). She also editedThe Murray Bookchin Reader <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0304338745/sr=1-1/qid=1299487125/ref=sr_1_1_oe_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299487125&sr=1-1> (1997) and has written several articles on Bookchin’s life and thought for our publications. Biehl was Bookchin’s partner and collaborator and is currently working on his political biography.

The General Election Officially Starts Today

Today what is known as the ‘long campaign’ for the General Election begins. This means that political parties, candidates and their election agents are required to record campaign expenditure and keep within spending limits. The long campaign ends 25 days before polling day and the ‘short campaign’ begins, with different, lower spending limits.

It has not always been this way, but since the present coalition government introduced fixed term Parliaments of 5 years, we now know when general elections will be held for sure, well almost. Under the old system there was a 5 year limit on Parliaments but the Prime Minister could call a general election at any time of their choosing. If Parliament went a full term, then we would have a long and short campaign but of course with the date being possibly variable, only the short campaigns were definitely regulated.

Even now a Parliament might not last 5 years if the government loses a vote of confidence amongst MPs then a general election follows. One minor effect of all this is that candidates no longer have to call themselves ‘Prospective Parliamentary Candidates’ (PPC), to avoid incurring campaign expenditure, they can now be called ‘Parliamentary Candidate’, from anytime they become such.

In practice the campaign will begin in January after the holiday, and we will have 5 months of it, pretty solid in the media I expect. This forthcoming general election is incredibly difficult to predict, so for psephological anoraks like me, this is going to be fascinating, for the rest of the general public, not so fascinating I dare say, but it is an extremely important election for all kinds of reasons.

The opinion polls are all over the place at the moment, I have seen one poll putting Labour in a 5 point lead and another putting the Tories in a 4 point lead, just this week alone. One thing is clear though, the old two (and a half) party system has broken down and UKIP, SNP, PC and the Greens are all polling well at the expense of mainly the Lib Dems but Labour and Tory too. I think there is a very good chance that neither the Tories nor Labour will win 300 seats, let alone the 326 needed for an overall majority (perhaps less given that Sinn Fein MPs have not in the past taken up their Westminster seats).

One of the main arguments put forward in favour of our First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system is that it produces a clear winner and so stable government. But the last general election did not provide a clear winner and next year’s looks to be even more unlikely to produce a decisive result. If there is one positive to come out of the election, it must be a commitment to change the FPTP system in favour of a system that reflects the more diverse nature of electoral politics in the UK now. We shall see.

What about the Greens, how will we fare? Well, FPTP makes it very difficult for new parties to win representation but I’ve become increasing confident of us retaining Caroline Lucas’s seat in Brighton Pavilion. Tory pollster Lord Ashcroft gave her a 10 point lead in his most recent poll of the constituency.       

I think we may spring a surprise or two, particularly in the south west of England, and so I am hopeful we will win a handful seats, but maybe more importantly gain a goodly number of strong second place finishes, on which we can build for the 2020 general election, and who knows we may get a more favourable electoral system then too.

But it is not just about winning, it is what you do when you win that counts, (a win being the SNP, PC and Greens and any other progressives holding the balance of power) and my main hope for this election is that it is watershed election when everything changes, like 1979 (for the worse), and that is what is sorely needed. The result may be the beginning of the 35 years of neoliberalism being finally consigned to the dustbin of history. Let’s hope.