Sunday, May 15, 2005
Carnival of the Uncapitalists. posted by Richard Seymour
It's that time of the week again: the unruly mob of uncapitalist nay-sayers are beseiging the blog-o-sphere. There will, as the ILWU president told Seattle protesters, be no business as usual today. Throw on a hoodie and keffiyeh, because this is Carnival of the Uncapitalists .First, Bionic Octopus writes as an American Jew to demand that her 'right of return' to Israel be transferred to someone who actually wants it: a Palestinian. Then, Eli at Left I finds it curious that Cuba manages to look after its citizens' health better than the United States - not just that, it looks after the health of other nations with "more doctors serving abroad than the World Health Organisation". At Science and Politics , a Serbian Jewish atheist living in America demands bigger government, noting that conservatives have no problem with a big state, provided it is a guns-and-batons big state. Since we are all part of the government, Bora asks, hadn't we better start demanding better priorities from it?
Red Harvest gleans news of United Airlines cheating its 120,000 employees out of their pension entitlements, and the company is still trying to cut $75 million from wages and benefits. Meanwhile, Subversity has found corroborative evidence from an unlikely quarter that capitalists are evil. Political Calculations finds that modern cities in America are failing people, particularly families with children, by selling off public assets to the wealthiest buyers.
The socialist/situationist blog Fruits of our Labour remembers and celebrates the year 1871, "the fulcrum point of human history". The Paris Commune sent the bourgoisie scurrying into the arms of the reactionaries, and marked the point of cleavage between bourgeois democracy and working class democracy. Resist Oppression finds a curious aphasia strikes free-market economists when China intrudes on the scene: "where state control over capital allocation and rigid controls on currency exchange rates have produced a record rate of economic growth", thereby showing that the IMF-World Bank model of development is, mildly put, "a crock".
A free market anti-capitalist, The Mutualist objects to the government telling us we can't treat ourselves when we're sick. Come on, you know that's intriguing. Agitprop registers an impressive Swiftian disgust with the mainstream media, and urges leftists to "become the media", which is exactly what blogging should be about.
The man behind the uncapitalist curtain, Charles Norman Todd, has a nice piece at his regular blog Freiheit und Wissen about the Central American Free Trade Agreement and the infirmed Bush trade agenda. In particular, it seems that Cafta is meeting the opposition of the major farming industries as well as others, unlike Nafta whose primary opponent was labour, and is therefore likely to fail. Parenthetically, I would note that in a curious reversal of King Midas, everything Bush touches seems to turn to shit these days: social security, John Bolton, Iraq, Uzbekistan... He must be the most unlikely second-term President in history, returned only by the vacuity of the opposition.
Finally, in a late submission, To The Barricades records some extraordinary upheaval in Athens, with anarchists engaged in battle with armed police. Memories of November 17th are as vivid as ever. And, finally, my own contribution to this drunken riot is below . I'm not going to summarise it just to save you the effort of clicking on a link or scrolling down.
Next week, Carnival of the Uncapitalists is to be hosted by Agitprop . I have also been asked to remind carnival-goers that there is a new mailing list newsletter . If anyone wants to contribute to the Carnival in future, they should peruse the submission guidelines , and get in touch with Charles or Gretchen .