person:karl marx

  • Inégalités entre nations, inégalités parmi les nations. Un extrait du livre de Branko Milanovic – CONTRETEMPS
    http://www.contretemps.eu/inegalites-mondiales-milanovic

    #Inégalités entre nations, inégalités parmi les nations. Un extrait du livre de #Branko_Milanovic

    Lire hors-ligne : Download PDFDownload ePubDownload mobiPrint
    Nous publions ici un extrait du chapitre 3 (intitulé « Inégalités parmi les nations. De Karl Marx à Frantz Fanon, pour revenir à Marx ? ») du livre de Branko Milanovic : Inégalités mondiales. Le destin des classes moyennes, les ultra-riches et l’égalité des chances, Paris, La Découverte, 2019.

    Présentation du livre
    Ce livre dresse un panorama unique des #inégalités_économiques au sein des pays, et au plan mondial. Avec un talent pédagogique certain, il met en évidence les forces « bénéfiques » (accès à l’éducation, transferts sociaux, progressivité de l’impôt, etc.) ou « néfastes » (guerres, catastrophes naturelles, épidémies, etc.) qui influent sur les inégalités. Il identifie les grands gagnants de la mondialisation (les 1 % les plus riches des pays riches, les classes moyennes des pays émergents) et ses perdants (les classes populaires et moyennes des pays avancés).

  • Der deutsch-französische Kriegvon 1870/71 - Die Konfrontation zweier Kulturen im Spiegelbild von Zeitzeugen und Zeitzeugnissen
    https://opus.bibliothek.uni-wuerzburg.de/opus4-wuerzburg/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/12543/file/leipold-winfried-deutschfranzoesischerkrieg1870.pdf


    Il est surprenant de tomber sur une dissertation de 2015 qui est écrite comme si presque 140 annés de recherches et commentaires scientifiques sur cette guerre n’existaient pas. La présentation des témoignages et mentalités de l’époque est certes impressionnante, mais l’auteur surestime largement l’impacte de cet aspect idéologique sur les résultats militaires. L’importance du niveau technologique des armes utilisés par les belligérants, les facteurs économiques et sociales n’ont pas de place dans cet ouvrage alors qu’ils constituent la base sur laquelle se développe chaque expression idéologique et chaque état mental des populations concernées. A ce niveau les articles de Friedrich Engels dans Über den Krieg et de Karls Marx dans La Guerre civile en France contiennent davantage d’informations et analyses alors que ces auteur ne disposaient que d’informations contemporaines.

    Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät III der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

    Friedrich Engels, Über den Krieg, Geschrieben von Ende Juli 1870 bis Februar 1871, Veröffentlicht in »The Pall Mall Gazette« .
    http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me17/me17_udk.htm

    Karl Marx : La Guerre civile en France (1871)
    https://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/documents-historiques/karl-marx-la-guerre-civile-en-france-1871
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Guerre_civile_en_France

    Images : Wilhelm Scholz, Das schwarze Gespenst, in : Kladderadatsch Nr. 28 vom 20. Juni 1869
    Anton von Werner, Französischer Krieg, Sturm auf die Spicherer Höhen bei Saarbrücken

    #histoire #France #Allemagne #guerre #1870 #sociologie

  • Capitalocène, racisme environnemental et écoféminisme – Agitations
    https://agitationautonome.com/2019/04/07/capitalocene-racisme-environnemental-et-ecofeminisme

    « En dehors du fait que les méthodes d’exploitation ne correspondent pas au niveau de développement social, mais aux conditions accidentelles et fort inégales dans lesquelles les producteurs sont individuellement placés, nous assistons dans ces deux formes [petite et grande culture] à une exploitation gaspilleuse des ressources du sol au lieu d’une culture consciencieuse et rationnelle de la terre, propriété commune et éternelle, condition inaliénable de l’existence et de la reproduction de générations humaines qui se relaient ».
    Karl Marx, Le Capital, Volume II

    « Quand il pleut, quand il y a de faux nuages sur Paris, n’oubliez jamais que c’est la faute du gouvernement. La production industrielle aliénée fait la pluie. La révolution fait le beau temps ».
    Guy Debord, La Planète Malade

    Introduction

    Indéniablement, le désastre est en cours. Les îles Marshall sont progressivement inondées, certaines ont déjà disparu. Les réfugiés climatiques se multiplient, et sont des milliers à demander l’asile climatique : ils seront plusieurs centaines de millions d’ici 30 ans (à noter qu’à ce jour, le statut de « réfugié climatique » n’est pas reconnu juridiquement par les institutions supranationales). Les catastrophes naturelles s’intensifient, l’augmentation de la salinité des eaux menace nombre de terres agricoles, les feux de forêts paraissent dans certaines régions inarrêtables. Des métropoles et mégalopoles phares du capitalisme mondialisé sont menacées d’être invivables d’ici quelques décennies, notamment Miami, New-York, Rotterdam, Tokyo, Singapour ou encore Amsterdam.

    Il serait fastidieux de recenser tous les dégâts du réchauffement climatique, et là n’est pas notre sujet. Nombre de travaux ont déjà été réalisés1 sur ce qui apparaît aujourd’hui comme une menace monstrueuse et imminente : l’effondrement de toute civilisation humaine. Les théories catastrophistes ont désormais le vent en poupe, tout comme les thèses, articles et ouvrages de collapsologie. Le survivalisme devient progressivement un thème sociétal en vogue, surfant au gré des pseudo-solutions individualistes et techno-utopistes prônées par les tenants du capitalisme vert ou par les lobbys assurantiels du risque climatique. Le changement climatique est un marché lucratif.

    Depuis des décennies, l’ampleur du danger est étudiée par des institutions et chercheurs, pour la plupart occidentaux et régulièrement subventionnés par de grands groupes capitalistes. Les plus grandes fortunes mondiales se transforment en philanthropes sauveurs de l’humanité. En 2016, Bill Gates, à travers sa fondation et le fonds Breakthrough Energy Ventures, levait un milliard de dollars afin de développer des technologies de géo-ingénierie illuminées nécessitant l’exploitation de millions de prolétaires pour des résultats plus qu’incertains. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) ou Richard Branson (Virgin) furent parmi les principaux donateurs. D’autres multi-milliardaires explorent en hélicoptère les savanes africaines et indonésiennes afin de redorer leur image en comptant le nombre d’éléphants disparus chaque année : une façon comme une autre de faire campagne sans nécessité de serrer des mains.

    Les capitalistes profitent de la déqualification du prolétariat à l’ère du Toyotisme2 pour s’arroger toutes les compétences techniques et toutes les solutions au changement climatique : les travailleurs, aliénés, sont dépossédés de toute capacité d’intervention sur la production, entrainant la promotion d’une attitude individualiste et morale sur la crise en cours. Ainsi, les capitalistes font de la crise environnementale un problème « civilisationnel », un « enjeu nouveau pour nos démocraties », se pressent pour parler de « consensus » quant au danger qui nous guette. L’idéologie citoyenniste du « tous-ensemble » ou celle pseudo-radicale de l’éco-populisme sont incapables de mettre fin aux ambitions d’exploitation des ressources naturelles propres au système actuel, précisément parce que ce dernier ne peut fonctionner qu’en accumulant toujours plus de richesses. Ces idéologies s’indignent de l’inaction de l’État, incapable de remettre l’humanité sur de bons rails. Dès lors, l’ État est le nouvel interlocuteur privilégié des acteurs des Marches pour le Climat, marches très majoritairement métropolitaines, blanches et bourgeoises. De son côté, l’économie apparaît pour ces marcheurs, dans un système mondialisé, comme lointaine, sinon secondaire : elle est un « interlocuteur » absent.

    L’indignation citoyenniste est d’un moralisme exacerbé, si bien qu’on entend parler à longueur de temps d’alternatives institutionnelles. C’est l’homme qui est visé dans son individualité, abstraitement, et ce principalement à travers son mode de consommation. La production marchande passe à la trappe au profit du « consom’acteur », le genre humain est aussi bien le fauteur de trouble que le bouc-émissaire, l’universalisme bourgeois hors-sol des Lumières reprend ses droits. Une vision fictionnelle du système-monde l’emporte à l’heure où les sols sont presque partout déjà morts.

    Contre cette lecture caricaturale de la crise en cours, nous effectuerons dans un premier temps une critique radicale du concept d’Anthropocène, en tant qu’il serait cause du réchauffement climatique, et nous lui préférerons le concept de Capitalocène. Dans un second temps, nous verrons comment le système capitaliste produit différentes formes de racisme environnemental. Enfin, nous verrons ce qu’une lecture écoféministe de la crise telle que celle de Maria Mies nous enseigne à propos des liens entre effondrement environnemental et domination masculine, le tout afin de comprendre comment les luttes actuelles (aux prises avec les contradictions du capital, de genre et avec la segmentation raciale du travail comme de l’espace) sont imbriquées et tendent à ralentir la crise.

    #capitalocène #écoféminisme

  • Three Theses on Neoliberal Migration and Social Reproduction

    Today there are more than 1 billion regional and international migrants, and the number continues to rise: within 40 years, it might double because of climate change. While many of these migrants might not cross a regional or international border, people change residences and jobs more often, while commuting longer and farther to work. This increase in human mobility and expulsion affects us all. It should be recognized as a defining feature of our epoch: The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant.

    The argument of this paper is that the migrant is also a defining figure of neoliberal social reproduction. This argument is composed of three interlocking theses on what I am calling the “neoliberal migrant.”

    Thesis 1 : The first thesis argues that the migrant is foremost a socially constitutive figure. That is, we should not think of the migrant as a derivative or socially exceptional figure who merely travels between pre- constituted states. The movement and circulation of migrants has always played an important historical role in the social and kinetic production and reproduction of society itself.1

    Thesis 2 : The second thesis therefore argues that social reproduction itself is a fundamentally kinetic or mobile process. The fact that a historically record number of human beings are now migrating and commuting between countries, cities, rural and urban areas, multiple part time precarious jobs, means that humans are now spending a world historical record amount of unpaid labor-time just moving around. This mobility is itself a form of social reproduction.

    Thesis 3 : The third thesis is that neoliberalism functions as a migration regime of social reproduction. Under neoliberalism, the burden of social reproduction has been increasingly displaced from the state to the population itself (health care, child care, transportation, and other traditionally social services). At the same time, workers now have less time than ever before to do this labor because of increasing reproductive mobility regimes (thesis two). This leads then to a massively expanded global market for surplus reproductive laborers who can mow lawns, clean houses, and care for children so first world laborers can commute longer and more frequently. Neoliberalism completes the cycle by providing a new “surplus reproductive labor army” in the form of displaced migrants from the global South.

    We turn now to a defense of these theses.

    Thesis 1 : The Migrant is Socially Constitutive

    This is the case, in short, because societies are themselves defined by a continual movement of circulation, expansion, and expulsion that relies on the mobility of migrants to accommodate its social expansions and contractions.

    The migrant is the political figure who is socially expelled or dispossessed, to some degree as a result, or as the cause, of their mobility. We are not all migrants, but most of us are becoming migrants. At the turn of the twenty- first century, there were more regional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history—a fact that political theory has yet to take seriously.2

    If we are going to take the figure of the migrant seriously as a constitutive, and not derivative, figure of Western politics, we have to change the starting point of political theory. Instead of starting with a set of pre-existing citizens, we should begin with the flows of migrants and the ways they have circulated or sedimented into citizens and states in the first place—as well as emphasizing how migrants have constituted a counterpower and alternative to state structures.

    This requires first of all that we take seriously the constitutive role played by migrants before the 19th century, and give up the arbitrary starting point of the nation-state. In this way we will be able to see how the nation-state itself was not the origin but the product of migration and bordering techniques that existed long before it came on the scene.3

    Second of all, and based on this, we need to rethink the idea of political inclusion as a fundamentally kinetic process of circulation, not just as a formal legal, economic, or other kind of status. In other words, instead of a formal political distinction between inclusion/exclusion or a formal economic distinc- tion between productive/unproductive, we need a material one of circulation/ recirculation showing how social activity is defined by lived cycles of socially reproductive motions.

    One way to think about the constitutive role played by migrants is as a kinetic radicalization of Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation.

    Primitive Accumulation
    Marx develops this concept from a passage in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: “The accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour.”4 In other words, before humans can be divided into owners and workers, there must have already been an accu- mulation such that those in power could enforce the division in the first place. The superior peoples of history naturally accumulate power and stock and then wield it to perpetuate the subordination of their inferiors. For Smith, this process is simply a natural phenomenon: Powerful people always already have accumulated stock, as if from nowhere.

    For Marx, however, this quote is perfectly emblematic of the historical obfuscation of political economists regarding the violence and expulsion required for those in power to maintain and expand their stock. Instead of acknowledging this violence, political economy mythologizes and naturalizes it just like the citizen-centric nation state does politically. For Marx the concept of primitive accumulation has a material history. It is the precapitalist condition for capitalist production. In particular, Marx identifies this process with the expulsion of peasants and indigenous peoples from their land through enclosure, colonialism, and anti-vagabond laws in sixteenth-century England. Marx’s thesis is that the condition of the social expansion of capitalism is the prior expulsion of people from their land and from their legal status under customary law. Without the expulsion of these people, there is no expansion of private property and thus no capitalism.

    While some scholars argue that primitive accumulation was merely a single historical event in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, others argue that it plays a recurring logical function within capitalism itself: In order to expand, capitalism today still relies on non-capitalist methods of social expulsion and violence.5

    The idea of expansion by expulsion broadens the idea of primitive accumulation in two ways. First, the process of dispossessing people of their social status (expulsion) in order to further develop or advance a given form of social motion (expansion) is not at all unique to the capitalist regime of social motion. We see the same social process in early human societies whose progressive cultivation of land and animals (territorial expansion) with the material technology of fencing also expelled (territorial dispossession) a part of the human population. This includes hunter-gatherers whose territory was transformed into agricultural land, as well as surplus agriculturalists for whom there was no more arable land left to cultivate at a certain point. Thus social expulsion is the condition of social expansion in two ways: It is an internal condition that allows for the removal of part of the population when certain internal limits have been reached (carrying capacity of a given territory, for example) and it is an external condition that allows for the removal of part of the population outside these limits when the territory is able to expand outward into the lands of other groups (hunter gatherers). In this case, territorial expansion was only possible on the condition that part of the population was expelled in the form of migratory nomads, forced into the surrounding mountains and deserts.

    We later see the same logic in the ancient world, whose dominant polit- ical form, the state, would not have been possible without the material tech- nology of the border wall that both fended off as enemies and held captive as slaves a large body of barbarians (through political dispossession) from the mountains of the Middle East and Mediterranean. The social conditions for the expansion of a growing political order, including warfare, colonialism, and massive public works, were precisely the expulsion of a population of barbarians who had to be walled out and walled in by political power. This technique occurs again and again throughout history, as I have tried to show in my work.

    The second difference between previous theories of primitive accumulation and the more expansive one offered here is that this process of prior expulsion or social deprivation Marx noted is not only territorial or juridical, and its expansion is not only economic.6 Expulsion does not simply mean forcing people off their land, although in many cases it may include this. It also means depriving people of their political rights by walling off the city, criminalizing types of persons by the cellular techniques of enclosure and incarceration, or restricting their access to work by identification and checkpoint techniques.

    Expulsion is the degree to which a political subject is deprived or dispossessed of a certain status in the social order. Accordingly, societies also expand and reproduce their power in several major ways: through territorial accumulation, political power, juridical order, and economic

    profit. What is similar between the theory of primitive accumulation and the kinetic theory of expansion by expulsion is that most major expan- sions of social kinetic power also require a prior or primitive violence of kinetic social expulsion. The border is the material technology and social regime that directly enacts this expulsion. The concept of primitive accu- mulation is merely one historical instance of a more general kinopolitical logic at work in the emergence and reproduction of previous societies.

    Marx even makes several general statements in Capital that justify this kind of interpretive extension. For Marx, the social motion of production in general strives to reproduce itself. He calls this “periodicity”: “Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it has been flung into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects become causes in their turn, and the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity.”7 According to Marx, every society, not just capitalist ones, engages in some form of social production. Like the movements of the planets, society expands and contracts itself according to a certain logic, which strives to reproduce and expand the conditions that brought it about in the first place. Its effects in turn become causes in a feedback loop of social circulation. For Marx, social production is thus fundamentally a social motion of circulation or reproduction.

    In short, the material-kinetic conditions for the expansion of societies re- quires the use of borders (fences, walls, cells, checkpoints) to produce a system of marginalized territorial, political, legal, and economic migrants that can be more easily recirculated elsewhere as needed. Just as the vagabond migrant is dispossessed by enclosures and transformed into the economic proletariat, so each dominant social system has its own structure of expansion by expulsion and reproduction as well.

    Expansion by Expulsion

    Expulsion is therefore a social movement that drives out and entails a deprivation of social status.8 Social expulsion is not simply the deprivation of territorial status (i.e., removal from the land); it includes three other major types of social deprivation: political, juridical, and economic. This is not a spatial or temporal concept but a fundamentally kinetic concept insofar as we understand movement extensively and intensively, that is, quantitatively and qualitatively. Social expulsion is the qualitative transformation of deprivation in status, resulting in or as a result of extensive movement in spacetime.

    The social expulsion of migrants, for example, is not always free or forced. In certain cases, some migrants may decide to move, but they are not free to determine the social or qualitative conditions of their movement or the degree to which they may be expelled from certain social orders. Therefore, even in this case, expulsion is still a driving-out insofar as its conditions are not freely or individually chosen but socially instituted and compelled. Expulsion is a fundamentally social and collective process because it is the loss of a socially determined status, even if only temporarily and to a small degree.9

    Expansion, on the other hand, is the process of opening up that allows something to pass through. This opening-up also entails a simultaneous extension or spreading out. Expansion is thus an enlargement or exten- sion through a selective opening. Like the process of social expulsion, the process of social expansion is not strictly territorial or primarily spatial; it is also an intensive or qualitative growth in territorial, political, juridical, and economic kinopower. It is both an intensive and extensive increase in the conjunction of new social flows and a broadening of social circulation. Colonialism is a good example of an expansion which is clearly territorial as well as political, juridical, and economic.

    Kinopower is thus defined by a constitutive circulation, but this circulation functions according to a dual logic of reproduction. At one end, social circulation is a motion that drives flows outside its circulatory system: expulsion. This is accomplished by redirecting and driving out certain flows through exile, slavery, criminalization, or unemployment. At the other end of circulation there is an opening out and passing in of newly conjoined flows through a growth of territorial, political, juridical, and economic power. Expansion by expulsion is the social logic by which some members of society are dispossessed of their status as migrants so that social power can be expanded elsewhere. Power is not only a question of repression; it is a question of mobilization and kinetic reproduction.

    For circulation to open up to more flows and become more powerful than it was, it has historically relied on the disjunction or expulsion of mi- grant flows. In other words, the expansion of power has historically relied on a socially constitutive migrant population.

    Thesis 2: Mobility is a form of Social Reproduction

    People today continually move greater distances more frequently than ever before in human history. Even when people are not moving across a regional or international border, they tend to have more jobs, change jobs more often, commute longer and farther to their places of work,10 change their residences repeatedly, and tour internationally more often.11

    Some of these phenomena are directly related to recent events, such as the impoverishment of middle classes in certain rich countries after the financial crisis of 2008, neoliberal austerity cuts to social-welfare programs, and rising unemployment. The subprime-mortgage crisis, for example, led to the expul- sion of millions of people from their homes worldwide (9 million in the United States alone). Globally, foreign investors and governments have acquired 540 million acres since 2006, resulting in the eviction of millions of small farmers in poor countries, and mining practices have become increasingly destructive around the world—including hydraulic fracturing and tar sands.

    In 2006, the world crossed a monumental historical threshold, with more than half of the world’s population living in urban centers, compared with just fifteen percent a hundred years ago. This number is now expected to rise above seventy-five percent by 2050, with more than two billion more people moving to cities.12 The term “global urbanization,” as Saskia Sassen rightly observes, is only another way of politely describing large-scale human migration and displacement from rural areas, often caused by corporate land grabs.13 What this means is not only that more people are migrating to cities but now within cities and between suburban and urban areas for work. This general increase in human mobility and expulsion is now widely recognized as a defining feature of the twenty-first century so far.14

    Accordingly, this situation is having and will continue to have major social consequences for social relations in the twenty-first century. It there- fore demands the attention of critical theory. In particular, it should call our attention to the fact that this epic increase in human mobility and migration around the world is not just a minor or one-time “inconvenience” or “eco- nomic risk” that migrants make and then join the ranks of other “settled” urban workers. It is a continuous, ongoing, and nearly universal massive ex- traction of unpaid reproductive labor.

    Urban workers have become increasingly unsettled and mobile.The world average commuting time is now 40 minutes, one-way.15 This unpaid transport time is not a form of simply unproductive or unpaid labor. It is actually the material and kinetic conditions for the reproduction of the worker herself to arrive at work ready for labor. Not only this, but unpaid transport labor also continuously reproduces the spatial architecture of capitalist urban centers and suburban peripheries.16 The increasing neoliberal privatization of roadway construction and tollways is yet another way in which unpaid transport labor is not “unproductive” at all but rather continues to reproduce a massive new private transport market.This goes hand in hand with the neoliberal decline of affordable public transportation, especially in the US.

    Unfortunately, transport mobility has not traditionally been considered a form of social reproductive activity, but as global commute times and traffic increase, it is now becoming extremely obvious how important and constitu- tive this migratory labor actually is to the functioning of capital. If we define social reproduction as including all the conditions for the worker to arrive at work, then surely mobility is one of these necessary conditions. Perhaps one of the reasons it has not been recognized as such is because transport is an activity that looks least like an activity, since the worker is typically just sitting in a vehicle. Or perhaps the historical identification of vehicles and migration as sites of freedom (especially in America) has covered over the oppressive and increasingly obligatory unpaid labor time they often entail.

    The consequences of this new situation appeared at first as merely tempo- ral inconveniences for first-world commuters or what we might call BMWs (bourgeoise migrant workers).This burden initially fell and still falls dispropor- tionally on women who are called on to make up for the lost reproductive labor of their traveling spouses (even if they themselves also commute). Increasingly, however, as more women have begun to commute farther and more often this apparently or merely reproductive neoliberal transport labor has actually pro- duced a growing new market demand for a “surplus reproductive labor army” to take up these domestic and care labors. This brings us to our third thesis.

    Thesis: 3: Neoliberal Migration is a Regime of Social Reproduction

    The third thesis is that neoliberalism functions as a migration regime of social reproduction. This is the case insofar as neoliberalism expands itself in the form of a newly enlarged reproductive labor market, accomplished through the relative expulsion of the workers from their homes (and into

    vehicles) and the absolute expulsion of a migrant labor force from the global south to fill this new market.

    Migration therefore has and continues to function as a constitutive form of social reproduction (thesis one). This is a crucial thesis because it stresses the active role migrants play in the production and reproduction of society, but it is not a new phenomenon. Marx was of course one of the first to identify this process with respect to the capitalist mode of production. The proletariat is always already a migrant proletariat. At any moment an employed worker could be unemployed and forced to relocate according to the demands of capitalist valorization. In fact, the worker’s mobility is the condition of modern industry’s whole form of motion. Without the migration of a surplus population to new markets, from the rural to the city, from city to city, from country to country (what Marx calls the “floating population”) capitalist accumulation would not be possible at all. “Modern industry’s whole form of motion,” Marx claims, “therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands.’”17 As capitalist markets expand, contract, and multiply “by fits and starts,” Marx says, capital requires the possibility of suddenly adding and subtracting “great masses of men into decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production. The surplus population supplies these masses.”18

    What is historically new about the neoliberal migration regime is not merely that it simply expels a portion of the population in order to put it into waged labor elsewhere. What is new is that late-capitalist neoliberalism has now expelled one portion of the workers from a portion of their ownun-waged reproductive activity in order open up a new market for the waged activity of an as yet unexploited productive population of migrants from the global South. In other words reproductive labor itself has become a site of capitalist expansion. Wherever objects and activities have not yet been commodified, there we will find the next frontier of capitalist valorization.

    The consequence of this is a dramatic double expulsion. On the one hand, the bourgeois migrant worker is expelled from her home in the form of unpaid reproductive transport labor so that on the other hand the proletarian migrant worker can be expelled from her home as an international migrant and then expelled from her home again as a commuting worker to do someone else’s reproductive activity. The burden of social reproduction then falls disproportionately on the last link in the chain: the unpaid reproductive labor that sustains the domestic and social life of the migrant family. This is what must be ultimately expelled to expand the market of social reproduction at another level. This expulsion falls disproportionally on migrant women from the global south who must somehow reproduce their family’s social conditions, commute, and then reproduce someone else’s family’s conditions well.19

    Neoliberalism thus works on both fronts at the same time. On one side it increasingly withdraws and/or privatizes state social services that aid in social reproductive activities (child care, health care, public transit, and so on) while at the same increasing transport and commute times making a portion of those activities increasingly difficult for workers. On the other side it introduces the same structural adjustment policies (curtailed state and increased privatization) into the global South with the effect of mass economic migration to Northern countries where migrants can become waged producers in what was previously an “unproductive” (with respect to capital) sector of human activity: social reproduction itself.

    Conclusion

    This is the sense in which migrants play a constitutive role in the kinopolitics of social reproduction and neoliberal expansion. In other words, neoliberal migration has made possible a new level of commodification of social reproduction itself. Waged domestic labor is not new, of course, but what is new is the newly expanded nature of this sector of labor and its entanglement with a global regime of neoliberal expulsion and forced migration.

    One of the features that defines the uniquely neoliberal form of social reproduction today is the degree to which capitalism has relied directly on economically liberal trade policies and politically liberal international governments in order to redistribute record-breaking numbers of “surplus migrant reproductive labor” into Western countries. Global migration is therefore not the side-effect of neoliberal globalization; it is the main effect. Neoliberalism should thus be understood as a migration regime for expanding Western power through the expulsion and accumulation of migrant reproductive labor.

    https://philosophyofmovementblog.com/2019/02/28/three-theses-on-neoliberal-migration-and-social-reproducti

    #migrations #exploitation #néolibéralisme #mobilité #travail #main_d'oeuvre #reproduction_sociale #philosophie

    Mise en exergue d’une citation (fin de l’article) :

    Global migration is therefore not the side-effect of neoliberal globalization; it is the main effect. Neoliberalism should thus be understood as a migration regime for expanding Western power through the expulsion and accumulation of migrant reproductive labor.

    Article publié ici :


    https://polygraphjournal.com/issue-27-neoliberalism-and-social-reproduction

    • #Livre

      Peau rouge, masques blancs
      Contre la politique coloniale de la reconnaissance

      #Glen_Sean_Coulthard

      Traduction de l’anglais par Arianne Des Rochers et Alex Gauthier
      Préface de Taiaiake Alfred

      Lire un extrait

      ISBN : 9782895962601

      Collection : Humanités

      368 pages

      Parution en Amérique du Nord : 15 février 2018

      Le paradigme hégélien de la reconnaissance, admirablement critiqué par #Frantz_Fanon dans l’œuvre phare à laquelle ce livre rend hommage, est aujourd’hui évoqué, sous sa forme libérale, dans les débats entourant l’autodétermination des peuples colonisés, notamment les peuples #autochtones d’Amérique du Nord. Politologue et militant, membre de la Nation #dénée du Nord-Ouest du Canada, l’auteur reprend ici la critique fanonienne et démontre en quoi cette reconnaissance ne fait que consolider la domination coloniale.

      Cet ouvrage de théorie politique engagée appelle à rebâtir et redéployer les pratiques culturelles des peuples colonisés sur la base de l’autoreconnaissance, seule voie vers une réelle décolonisation. Penseur marxiste, #Coulthard sait que le #marxisme ne peut s’appliquer tel quel à la lutte des Autochtones, mais il en souligne la contribution potentielle et signe ici un véritable traité de combat #décolonial et #anticapitaliste.

      « Ce livre offre une critique pénétrante du colonialisme contemporain et une vision claire de la résurgence autochtone, en plus de constituer une contribution importante à la pensée révolutionnaire. »

      #Taiaiake Alfred, extrait de la préface

  • The Knesset candidate who says Zionism encourages anti-Semitism and calls Netanyahu ’arch-murderer’ - Israel Election 2019 - Haaretz.com
    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium.MAGAZINE-knesset-candidate-netanyahu-is-an-arch-murderer-zionism-e

    Few Israelis have heard of Dr. Ofer Cassif, the Jewish representative on the far-leftist Hadash party’s Knesset slate. On April 9, that will change
    By Ravit Hecht Feb 16, 2019

    Ofer Cassif is fire and brimstone. Not even the flu he’s suffering from today can contain his bursting energy. His words are blazing, and he bounds through his modest apartment, searching frenetically for books by Karl Marx and Primo Levi in order to find quotations to back up his ideas. Only occasional sips from a cup of maté bring his impassioned delivery to a momentary halt. The South American drink is meant to help fight his illness, he explains.

    Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election.

    Indeed, the assault on him began as soon as he was selected by the party’s convention. The media pursued him; a columnist in the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Ben-Dror Yemini, called for him to be disqualified from running for the Knesset. It would be naive to say that this was unexpected. Cassif, who was one of the first Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the territories, in 1987, gained fame thanks to a number of provocative statements. The best known is his branding of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked as “neo-Nazi scum.” On another occasion, he characterized Jews who visit the Temple Mount as “cancer with metastases that have to be eradicated.”

    On his alternate Facebook page, launched after repeated blockages of his original account by a blitz of posts from right-wing activists, he asserted that Culture Minister Miri Regev is “repulsive gutter contamination,” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an “arch-murderer” and that the new Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, is a “war criminal.”

    Do you regret making those remarks?

    Cassif: “‘Regret’ is a word of emotion. Those statements were made against a background of particular events: the fence in Gaza, horrible legislation, and the wild antics of Im Tirtzu [an ultranationalist organization] on campus. That’s what I had to say at the time. I didn’t count on being in the Knesset. That wasn’t part of my plan. But it’s clear to me that as a public personality, I would not have made those comments.”

    Is Netanyahu an arch-murderer?

    “Yes. I wrote it in the specific context of a particular day in the Gaza Strip. A massacre of innocent people was perpetrated there, and no one’s going to persuade me that those people were endangering anyone. It’s a concentration camp. Not a ‘concentration camp’ in the sense of Bergen-Belsen; I am absolutely not comparing the Holocaust to what’s happening.”

    You term what Israel is doing to the Palestinians “genocide.”

    “I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.

    “But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’”

    You say you’re not comparing, but you repeatedly come back to Holocaust references. On Facebook, you also uploaded the scene from “Schindler’s List” in which the SS commander Amon Goeth picks off Jews with his rifle from the balcony of his quarters in the camp. You compared that to what was taking place along the border fence in the Gaza Strip.

    “Today, I would find different comparisons. In the past I wrote an article titled, ‘On Holocaust and on Other Crimes.’ It’s online [in Hebrew]. I wrote there that anyone who compares Israel to the Holocaust is cheapening the Holocaust. My comparison between here and what happened in the early 1930s [in Germany] is a very different matter.”

    Clarity vs. crudity

    Given Cassif’s style, not everyone in Hadash was happy with his election, particularly when it comes to the Jewish members of the predominantly Arab party. Dov Khenin, for example, declined to be interviewed and say what he thinks of his parliamentary successor. According to a veteran party figure, “From the conversations I had, it turns out that almost none of the Jewish delegates – who make up about 100 of the party’s 940 delegates – supported his candidacy.

    “He is perceived, and rightly so,” the party veteran continues, “as someone who closes doors to Hadash activity within Israeli society. Each of the other Jewish candidates presented a record of action and of struggles they spearheaded. What does he do? Curses right-wing politicians on Facebook. Why did the party leadership throw the full force of its weight behind him? In a continuation of the [trend exemplified by] its becoming part of the Joint List, Ofer’s election reflects insularity and an ongoing retreat from the historical goal of implementing change in Israeli society.”

    At the same time, as his selection by a 60 percent majority shows, many in the party believe that it’s time to change course. “Israeli society is moving rightward, and what’s perceived as Dov’s [Khenin] more gentle style didn’t generate any great breakthrough on the Jewish street,” a senior source in Hadash notes.

    “It’s not a question of the tension between extremism and moderation, but of how to signpost an alternative that will develop over time. Clarity, which is sometimes called crudity, never interfered with cooperation between Arabs and Jews. On the contrary. Ofer says things that we all agreed with but didn’t so much say, and of course that’s going to rile the right wing. And a good thing, too.”

    Hadash chairman MK Ayman Odeh also says he’s pleased with the choice, though sources in the party claim that Odeh is apprehensive about Cassif’s style and that he actually supported a different candidate. “Dov went for the widest possible alliances in order to wield influence,” says Odeh. “Ofer will go for very sharp positions at the expense of the breadth of the alliance. But his sharp statements could have a large impact.”

    Khenin was deeply esteemed by everyone. When he ran for mayor of Tel Aviv in 2008, some 35 percent of the electorate voted for him, because he was able to touch people who weren’t only from his political milieu.

    Odeh: “No one has a higher regard for Dov than I do. But just to remind you, we are not a regular opposition, we are beyond the pale. And there are all kinds of styles. Influence can be wielded through comments that are vexatious the first time but which people get used to the second time. When an Arab speaks about the Nakba and about the massacre in Kafr Kassem [an Israeli Arab village, in 1956], it will be taken in a particular way, but when uttered by a Jew it takes on special importance.”

    He will be the cause of many attacks on the party.

    “Ahlan wa sahlan – welcome.”

    Cassif will be the first to tell you that, with all due respect for the approach pursued by Khenin and by his predecessor in the Jewish slot, Tamar Gozansky, he will be something completely different. “I totally admire what Tamar and Dov did – nothing less than that,” he says, while adding, “But my agenda will be different. The three immediate dangers to Israeli society are the occupation, racism and the diminishment of the democratic space to the point of liquidation. That’s the agenda that has to be the hub of the struggle, as long as Israel rules over millions of people who have no rights, enters [people’s houses] in the middle of the night, arrests minors on a daily basis and shoots people in the back.

    "Israel commits murder on a daily basis. When you murder one Palestinian, you’re called Elor Azaria [the IDF soldier convicted and jailed for killing an incapacitated Palestinian assailant]; when you murder and oppress thousands of Palestinians, you’re called the State of Israel.”

    So you plan to be the provocateur in the next Knesset?

    “It’s not my intention to be a provocateur, to stand there and scream and revile people. Even on Facebook I was compelled to stop that. But I definitely intend to challenge the dialogue in terms of the content, and mainly with a type of sarcasm.”

    ’Bags of blood’

    Cassif, 54, who holds a doctorate in political philosophy from the London School of Economics, teaches political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Sapir Academic College in Sderot and at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. He lives in Rehovot, is married and is the father of a 19-year-old son. He’s been active in Hadash for three decades and has held a number of posts in the party.

    As a lecturer, he stands out for his boldness and fierce rhetoric, which draws students of all stripes. He even hangs out with some of his Haredi students, one of whom wrote a post on the eve of the Hadash primary urging the delegates to choose him. After his election, a student from a settlement in the territories wrote to him, “You are a determined and industrious person, and for that I hold you in high regard. Hoping we will meet on the field of action and growth for the success of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state (I felt obliged to add a small touch of irony in conclusion).”

    Cassif grew up in a home that supported Mapai, forerunner of Labor, in Rishon Letzion. He was an only child; his father was an accountant, his mother held a variety of jobs. He was a news hound from an early age, and at 12 ran for the student council in school. He veered sharply to the left in his teens, becoming a keen follower of Marx and socialism.

    Following military service in the IDF’s Nahal brigade and a period in the airborne Nahal, Cassif entered the Hebrew University. There his political career moved one step forward, and there he also forsook the Zionist left permanently. His first position was as a parliamentary aide to the secretary general of the Communist Party, Meir Wilner.

    “At first I was closer to Mapam [the United Workers Party, which was Zionist], and then I refused to serve in the territories. I was the first refusenik in the first intifada to be jailed. I didn’t get support from Mapam, I got support from the people of Hadash, and I drew close to them. I was later jailed three more times for refusing to serve in the territories.”

    His rivals in the student organizations at the Hebrew University remember him as the epitome of the extreme left.

    “Even in the Arab-Jewish student association, Cassif was considered off-the-wall,” says Motti Ohana, who was chairman of Likud’s student association and active in the Student Union at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. “One time I got into a brawl with him. It was during the first intifada, when he brought two bags of blood, emptied them out in the university’s corridors and declared, ‘There is no difference between Jewish and Arab blood,’ likening Israeli soldiers to terrorists. The custom on campus was that we would quarrel, left-right, Arabs-Jews, and after that we would sit together, have a coffee and talk. But not Cassif.”

    According to Ohana, today a member of the Likud central committee, the right-wing activists knew that, “You could count on Ofer to fall into every trap. There was one event at the Hebrew University that was a kind of political Hyde Park. The right wanted to boot the left out of there, so we hung up the flag. It was obvious that Ofer would react, and in fact he tore the flag, and in the wake of the ruckus that developed, political activity was stopped for good.”

    Replacing the anthem

    Cassif voices clearly and cogently positions that challenge the public discourse in Israel, and does so with ardor and charisma. Four candidates vied for Hadash’s Jewish slot, and they all delivered speeches at the convention. The three candidates who lost to him – Efraim Davidi, Yaela Raanan and the head of the party’s Tel Aviv branch, Noa Levy – described their activity and their guiding principles. When they spoke, there was the regular buzz of an audience that’s waiting for lunch. But when Cassif took the stage, the effect was magnetic.

    “Peace will not be established without a correction of the crimes of the Nakba and [recognition of] the right of return,” he shouted, and the crowd cheered him. As one senior party figure put it, “Efraim talked about workers’ rights, Yaela about the Negev, Noa about activity in Tel Aviv – and Ofer was Ofer.”

    What do you mean by “right of return”?

    Cassif: “The first thing is the actual recognition of the Nakba and of the wrong done by Israel. Compare it to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, if you like, or with the commissions in Chile after Pinochet. Israel must recognize the wrong it committed. Now, recognition of the wrong also includes recognition of the right of return. The question is how it’s implemented. It has to be done by agreement. I can’t say that tomorrow Tel Aviv University has to be dismantled and that Sheikh Munis [the Arab village on whose ruins the university stands] has to be rebuilt there. The possibility can be examined of giving compensation in place of return, for example.”

    But what is the just solution, in your opinion?

    “For the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.”

    That means there will be Jews who will have to leave their home.

    “In some places, unequivocally, yes. People will have to be told: ‘You must evacuate your places.’ The classic example is Ikrit and Biram [Christian-Arab villages in Galilee whose residents were promised – untruly – by the Israeli authorities in 1948 that they would be able to return, and whose lands were turned over to Jewish communities]. But there are places where there is certainly greater difficulty. You don’t right one wrong with another.”

    What about the public space in Israel? What should it look like?

    “The public space has to change, to belong to all the state’s residents. I dispute the conception of ‘Jewish publicness.’”

    How should that be realized?

    “For example, by changing the national symbols, changing the national anthem. [Former Hadash MK] Mohammed Barakeh once suggested ‘I Believe’ [‘Sahki, Sahki’] by [Shaul] Tchernichovsky – a poem that is not exactly an expression of Palestinian nationalism. He chose it because of the line, ‘For in mankind I’ll believe.’ What does it mean to believe in mankind? It’s not a Jew, or a Palestinian, or a Frenchman, or I don’t know what.”

    What’s the difference between you and the [Arab] Balad party? Both parties overall want two states – a state “of all its citizens” and a Palestinian state.

    “In the big picture, yes. But Balad puts identity first on the agenda. We are not nationalists. We do not espouse nationalism as a supreme value. For us, self-determination is a means. We are engaged in class politics. By the way, Balad [the National Democratic Assembly] and Ta’al [MK Ahmad Tibi’s Arab Movement for Renewal] took the idea of a state of all its citizens from us, from Hadash. We’ve been talking about it for ages.”

    If you were a Palestinian, what would you do today?

    “In Israel, what my Palestinian friends are doing, and I with them – [wage] a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggle.”

    And what about the Palestinians in the territories?

    “We have always been against harming innocent civilians. Always. In all our demonstrations, one of our leading slogans was: ‘In Gaza and in Sderot, children want to live.’ With all my criticism of the settlers, to enter a house and slaughter children, as in the case of the Fogel family [who were murdered in their beds in the settlement of Itamar in 2011], is intolerable. You have to be a human being and reject that.”

    And attacks on soldiers?

    “An attack on soldiers is not terrorism. Even Netanyahu, in his book about terrorism, explicitly categorizes attacks on soldiers or on the security forces as guerrilla warfare. It’s perfectly legitimate, according to every moral criterion – and, by the way, in international law. At the same time, I am not saying it’s something wonderful, joyful or desirable. The party’s Haifa office is on Ben-Gurion Street, and suddenly, after years, I noticed a memorial plaque there for a fighter in Lehi [pre-state underground militia, also known as the Stern Gang] who assassinated a British officer. Wherever there has been a struggle for liberation from oppression, there are national heroes, who in 90 percent of the cases carried out some operations that were unlawful. Nelson Mandela is today considered a hero, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but according to the conventional definition, he was a terrorist. Most of the victims of the ANC [African National Congress] were civilians.”

    In other words, today’s Hamas commanders who are carrying out attacks on soldiers will be heroes of the future Palestinian state?

    “Of course.”

    Anti-Zionist identity

    Cassif terms himself an explicit anti-Zionist. “There are three reasons for that,” he says. “To begin with, Zionism is a colonialist movement, and as a socialist, I am against colonialism. Second, as far as I am concerned, Zionism is racist in ideology and in practice. I am not referring to the definition of race theory – even though there are also some who impute that to the Zionist movement – but to what I call Jewish supremacy. No socialist can accept that. My supreme value is equality, and I can’t abide any supremacy – Jewish or Arab. The third thing is that Zionism, like other ethno-nationalistic movements, splits the working class and all weakened groups. Instead of uniting them in a struggle for social justice, for equality, for democracy, it divides the exploited classes and the enfeebled groups, and by that means strengthens the rule of capital.”

    He continues, “Zionism also sustains anti-Semitism. I don’t say it does so deliberately – even though I have no doubt that there are some who do it deliberately, like Netanyahu, who is connected to people like the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, and the leader of the far right in Austria, Hans Christian Strache.”

    Did Mapai-style Zionism also encourage anti-Semitism?

    “The phenomenon was very striking in Mapai. Think about it for a minute, not only historically, but logically. If the goal of political and practical Zionism is really the establishment of a Jewish state containing a Jewish majority, and for Diaspora Jewry to settle there, nothing serves them better than anti-Semitism.”

    What in their actions encouraged anti-Semitism?

    “The very appeal to Jews throughout the world – the very fact of treating them as belonging to the same nation, when they were living among other nations. The whole old ‘dual loyalty’ story – Zionism actually encouraged that. Therefore, I maintain that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same thing, but are precisely opposites. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there are no anti-Zionists who are also anti-Semites. Most of the BDS people are of course anti-Zionists, but they are in no way anti-Semites. But there are anti-Semites there, too.”

    Do you support BDS?

    “It’s too complex a subject for a yes or no answer; there are aspects I don’t support.”

    Do you think that the Jews deserve a national home in the Land of Israel?

    “I don’t know what you mean by ‘national home.’ It’s very amorphous. We in Hadash say explicitly that Israel has a right to exist as a sovereign state. Our struggle is not against the state’s existence, but over its character.”

    But that state is the product of the actions of the Zionist movement, which you say has been colonialist and criminal from day one.

    “That’s true, but the circumstances have changed. That’s the reason that the majority of the members of the Communist Party accepted the [1947] partition agreement at the time. They recognized that the circumstances had changed. I think that one of the traits that sets communist thought apart, and makes it more apt, is the understanding and the attempt to strike the proper balance between what should be, and reality. So it’s true that Zionism started as colonialism, but what do you do with the people who were already born here? What do you tell them? Because your grandparents committed a crime, you have to leave? The question is how you transform the situation that’s been created into one that’s just, democratic and equal.”

    So, a person who survived a death camp and came here is a criminal?

    “The individual person, of course not. I’m in favor of taking in refugees in distress, no matter who or what they are. I am against Zionism’s cynical use of Jews in distress, including the refugees from the Holocaust. I have a problem with the fact that the natives whose homeland this is cannot return, while people for whom it’s not their homeland, can, because they supposedly have some sort of blood tie and an ‘imaginary friend’ promised them the land.”

    I understand that you are in favor of the annulment of the Law of Return?

    “Yes. Definitely.”

    But you are in favor of the Palestinian right of return.

    “There’s no comparison. There’s no symmetry here at all. Jerry Seinfeld was by chance born to a Jewish family. What’s his connection to this place? Why should he have preference over a refugee from Sabra or Chatila, or Edward Said, who did well in the United States? They are the true refugees. This is their homeland. Not Seinfeld’s.”

    Are you critical of the Arabs, too?

    “Certainly. One criticism is of their cooperation with imperialism – take the case of today’s Saudi Arabia, Qatar and so on. Another, from the past, relates to the reactionary forces that did not accept that the Jews have a right to live here.”

    Hadash refrained from criticizing the Assad regime even as it was massacring civilians in Syria. The party even torpedoed a condemnation of Assad after the chemical attack. Do you identify with that approach?

    “Hadash was critical of the Assad regime – father and son – for years, so we can’t be accused in any way of supporting Assad or Hezbollah. We are not Ba’ath, we are not Islamists. We are communists. But as I said earlier, the struggle, unfortunately, is generally not between the ideal and what exists in practice, but many times between two evils. And then you have to ask yourself which is the lesser evil. The Syrian constellation is extremely complicated. On the one hand, there is the United States, which is intervening, and despite all the pretense of being against ISIS, supported ISIS and made it possible for ISIS to sprout.

    "I remind you that ISIS started from the occupation of Iraq. And ideologically and practically, ISIS is definitely a thousand times worse than the Assad regime, which is at base also a secular regime. Our position was and is against the countries that pose the greatest danger to regional peace, which above all are Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the United States, which supports them. That doesn’t mean that we support Assad.”

    Wrong language

    Cassif’s economic views are almost as far from the consensus as his political ideas. He lives modestly in an apartment that’s furnished like a young couple’s first home. You won’t find an espresso maker or unnecessary products of convenience in his place. To his credit, it can be said that he extracts the maximum from Elite instant coffee.

    What is your utopian vision – to nationalize Israel’s conglomerates, such as Cellcom, the telecommunications company, or Osem, the food manufacturer and distributor?

    “The bottom line is yes. How exactly will it be done? That’s an excellent question, which I can’t answer. Perhaps by transferring ownership to the state or to the workers, with democratic tools. And there are other alternatives. But certainly, I would like it if a large part of the resources were not in private hands, as was the case before the big privatizations. It’s true that it won’t be socialism, because, again, there can be no such thing as Zionist socialism, but there won’t be privatization like we have today. What is the result of capitalism in Israel? The collapse of the health system, the absence of a social-welfare system, a high cost of living and of housing, the elderly and the disabled in a terrible situation.”

    Does any private sector have the right to exist?

    “Look, the question is what you mean by ‘private sector.’ If we’re talking about huge concerns that the owners of capital control completely through their wealth, then no.”

    What growth was there in the communist countries? How can anyone support communism, in light of the grim experience wherever it was tried?

    “It’s true, we know that in the absolute majority of societies where an attempt was made to implement socialism, there was no growth or prosperity, and we need to ask ourselves why, and how to avoid that. When I talk about communism, I’m not talking about Stalin and all the crimes that were committed in the name of the communist idea. Communism is not North Korea and it is not Pol Pot in Cambodia. Heaven forbid.”

    And what about Venezuela?

    “Venezuela is not communism. In fact, they didn’t go far enough in the direction of socialism.”

    Chavez was not enough of a socialist?

    “Chavez, but in particular Maduro. The Communist Party is critical of the regime. They support it because the main enemy is truly American imperialism and its handmaidens. Let’s look at what the U.S. did over the years. At how many times it invaded and employed bullying, fascist forces. Not only in Latin America, its backyard, but everywhere.”

    Venezuela is falling apart, people there don’t have anything to eat, there’s no medicine, everyone who can flees – and it’s the fault of the United States?

    “You can’t deny that the regime has made mistakes. It’s not ideal. But basically, it is the result of American imperialism and its lackeys. After all, the masses voted for Chavez and for Maduro not because things were good for them. But because American corporations stole the country’s resources and filled their own pockets. I wouldn’t make Chavez into an icon, but he did some excellent things.”

    Then how do you generate individual wealth within the method you’re proposing? I understand that I am now talking to you capitalistically, but the reality is that people see the accumulation of assets as an expression of progress in life.

    “Your question is indeed framed in capitalist language, which simply departs from what I believe in. Because you are actually asking me how the distribution of resources is supposed to occur within the capitalist framework. And I say no, I am not talking about resource distribution within a capitalist framework.”

    Gantz vs. Netanyahu

    Cassif was chosen as the polls showed Meretz and Labor, the representatives of the Zionist left, barely scraping through into the next Knesset and in fact facing a serious possibility of electoral extinction. The critique of both parties from the radical left is sometimes more acerbic than from the right.

    Would you like to see the Labor Party disappear?

    “No. I think that what’s happening at the moment with Labor and with Meretz is extremely dangerous. I speak about them as collectives, because they contain individuals with whom I see no possibility of engaging in a dialogue. But I think that they absolutely must be in the Knesset.”

    Is a left-winger who defines himself as a Zionist your partner in any way?

    “Yes. We need partners. We can’t be picky. Certainly we will cooperate with liberals and Zionists on such issues as combating violence against women or the battle to rescue the health system. Maybe even in putting an end to the occupation.”

    I’ll put a scenario to you: Benny Gantz does really well in the election and somehow overcomes Netanyahu. Do you support the person who led Operation Protective Edge in Gaza when he was chief of staff?

    “Heaven forbid. But we don’t reject people, we reject policy. I remind you that it was [then-defense minister] Yitzhak Rabin who led the most violent tendency in the first intifada, with his ‘Break their bones.’ But when he came to the Oslo Accords, it was Hadash and the Arab parties that gave him, from outside the coalition, an insurmountable bloc. I can’t speak for the party, but if there is ever a government whose policy is one that we agree with – eliminating the occupation, combating racism, abolishing the nation-state law – I believe we will give our support in one way or another.”

    And if Gantz doesn’t declare his intention to eliminate the occupation, he isn’t preferable to Netanyahu in any case?

    “If so, why should we recommend him [to the president to form the next government]? After the clips he posted boasting about how many people he killed and how he hurled Gaza back into the Stone Age, I’m far from certain that he’s better.”

    #Hadash

    • traduction d’un extrait [ d’actualité ]

      Le candidat à la Knesset dit que le sionisme encourage l’antisémitisme et qualifie Netanyahu de « meurtrier »
      Peu d’Israéliens ont entendu parler de M. Ofer Cassif, représentant juif de la liste de la Knesset du parti d’extrême gauche Hadash. Le 9 avril, cela changera.
      Par Ravit Hecht 16 février 2019 – Haaretz

      (…) Identité antisioniste
      Cassif se dit un antisioniste explicite. « Il y a trois raisons à cela », dit-il. « Pour commencer, le sionisme est un mouvement colonialiste et, en tant que socialiste, je suis contre le colonialisme. Deuxièmement, en ce qui me concerne, le sionisme est raciste d’idéologie et de pratique. Je ne fais pas référence à la définition de la théorie de la race - même si certains l’imputent également au mouvement sioniste - mais à ce que j’appelle la suprématie juive. Aucun socialiste ne peut accepter cela. Ma valeur suprême est l’égalité et je ne peux supporter aucune suprématie - juive ou arabe. La troisième chose est que le sionisme, comme d’autres mouvements ethno-nationalistes, divise la classe ouvrière et tous les groupes sont affaiblis. Au lieu de les unir dans une lutte pour la justice sociale, l’égalité, la démocratie, il divise les classes exploitées et affaiblit les groupes, renforçant ainsi le pouvoir du capital. "
      Il poursuit : « Le sionisme soutient également l’antisémitisme. Je ne dis pas qu’il le fait délibérément - même si je ne doute pas qu’il y en a qui le font délibérément, comme Netanyahu, qui est connecté à des gens comme le Premier ministre de la Hongrie, Viktor Orban, et le chef de l’extrême droite. en Autriche, Hans Christian Strache. ”

      Le sionisme type-Mapaï a-t-il également encouragé l’antisémitisme ?
      « Le phénomène était très frappant au Mapai. Pensez-y une minute, non seulement historiquement, mais logiquement. Si l’objectif du sionisme politique et pratique est en réalité de créer un État juif contenant une majorité juive et de permettre à la communauté juive de la diaspora de s’y installer, rien ne leur sert mieux que l’antisémitisme. "

      Qu’est-ce qui, dans leurs actions, a encouragé l’antisémitisme ?
      « L’appel même aux Juifs du monde entier - le fait même de les traiter comme appartenant à la même nation, alors qu’ils vivaient parmi d’autres nations. Toute la vieille histoire de « double loyauté » - le sionisme a en fait encouragé cela. Par conséquent, j’affirme que l’antisémitisme et l’antisionisme ne sont pas la même chose, mais sont précisément des contraires. Bien entendu, cela ne signifie pas qu’il n’y ait pas d’antisionistes qui soient aussi antisémites. La plupart des membres du BDS sont bien sûr antisionistes, mais ils ne sont en aucun cas antisémites. Mais il y a aussi des antisémites.

  • “A Fundamentally Illegitimate Choice” : Shoshana Zuboff on the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
    https://theintercept.com/2019/02/02/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism

    Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Karl Marx’s “Capital.” Zuboff’s book deserves these comparisons and more : Like the former, it’s an alarming exposé about how business interests have poisoned our world, and like the latter, it provides a framework to understand and combat that poison. But “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” named for the now-popular term Zuboff herself (...)

    #Google #Facebook #algorithme #données #web #surveillance #BigData #GAFAM #marketing (...)

    ##profiling

  • „The Modern Challenge to Tradition“: Der Terror des Notwendigen (ht...
    https://diasp.eu/p/8279217

    „The Modern Challenge to Tradition“: Der Terror des Notwendigen

    Was ist Totalitarismus? Was ist Tyrannei? Hannah Arendts erstmals veröffentlichte Studien zu Karl Marx haben eine gespenstische Aktualität.

    #literatur #notwendigen #moder #the #terror #tradition #challenge #tyrannei #hannah #arendt #studien #karl #marx #news #bot #rss

  • Notes anthropologiques (XXVIII)

    Georges Lapierre

    https://lavoiedujaguar.net/Notes-anthropologiques-XXVIII

    Mexico 2018
    Deuxième partie
    Le mouvement de la pensée et sa critique (II)

    Finalement Hegel ne connaît qu’un seul monde : seul le monde occidental est valide à ses yeux ; la civilisation chrétienne se trouve à la pointe du progrès, elle est à la pointe du mouvement universel de la pensée : la pensée s’objectivant, devenue visible, étant à elle-même son propre objet, c’est le mouvement universel de l’aliénation de la pensée, l’idée se donnant à voir avant de se réaliser. Karl Marx aussi ne connaît qu’un seul monde, le monde capitaliste : le capital s’engendrant lui-même à travers l’activité marchande pour connaître sa propre limite avec le surgissement et l’existence du prolétariat. Hegel et Marx sont tous deux des philosophes chrétiens dans la mesure même où ils restent tous les deux attachés à une certaine idée de « l’homme en devenir », et, à mon sens, cette idée est chrétienne. Hegel et Marx ne connaissent qu’un seul monde, le monde occidental, chrétien et capitaliste. Nous pouvons toujours supposer que les zapatistes connaissent deux mondes, un monde qui n’est ni occidental, ni chrétien, ni capitaliste — c’est le monde indien originel et préhispanique —, et le monde occidental, chrétien et capitaliste. (...)

    #pensée #civilisation #Hegel #Marx #christianisme #capitalisme #zapatistes #État #Grèce_antique #Wittfogel

  • Le contrat d’édition français du « Capital » de Karl Marx a été vendu à 121 600 euros
    https://lemediapresse.fr/actualites/le-contrat-dedition-francais-du-capital-de-karl-marx-a-ete-vendu-a-121

    Ce mardi 11 décembre, à Paris, le contrat original de la première édition française du Capital de Karl Marx a été vendu aux enchères à 121 600 euros, soit cinq fois l’estimation haute. La transaction a été réalisée par la maison de ventes Ader Nordmann. Ce contrat stipule entre les soussignés Karl Marx et l’éditeur Maurice Lachâtre que « l’édition […]

  • #Loi_Blanquer : Ce que la #confiance veut dire...

    « L’#école_de_la_confiance » c’est le slogan préféré de JM Blanquer , celui qui a été utilisé pour justifier sa politique tout au long de ses 18 mois de présence au ministère de l’éducation nationale. C’est encore le nom de son projet de loi sur l’école qui devrait bientôt arriver devant le Parlement. La confiance c’est, selon le Larousse, « le sentiment de quelqu’un qui se fie entièrement à quelqu’un d’autre, à quelque chose ». Mais le projet de loi de JM Blanquer redéfinit le terme et sa portée. Il éclaire du coup le véritable projet du ministre. L’école de la confiance c’est celle de la mise au pas des enseignants.

    L’article 1 de la loi Blanquer

    L’école de la confiance a déjà pris de sérieux coups depuis le phénomène #pasdevagues. Les enseignants ont largement témoigné de l’absence de confiance de l’institution à leur égard. Un sentiment bien rendu en retour. On croyait d’ailleurs le slogan enterré mais le ministre n’a pas hésité à l’utiliser à nouveau, juste avant que les lycéens apportent à leur tour un net démenti...

    Le projet de loi « pour une école de la confiance » commence par un premier article qui porte sur « l’engagement de la communauté éducative ». Comme d’autres articles de ce texte, il cache bien son jeu.

    L’article 1 du projet de loi demande d’insérer un article L. 111-3-1 dans le Code de l’éducation ainsi rédigé : « Art. L. 111-3-1 - Par leur engagement et leur exemplarité, les personnels de la communauté éducative contribuent à l’établissement du lien de confiance qui doit unir les élèves et leur famille au service public de l’éducation. Ce lien implique également le respect des élèves et de leur famille à l’égard de l’institution scolaire et de l’ensemble de ses personnels. »

    Un mot pour révoquer facilement

    Apparemment c’est une simple déclaration philosophique dont on peut se demander ce qu’elle fait dans un projet de loi. Mais l’étude d’impact du projet de loi, un document obligatoire fourni par le ministère aux députés, éclaire singulièrement ce que JM BLanquer appelle la confiance.

    « Le Gouvernement souhaite inscrire, dans la loi, la nécessaire protection de ce lien de confiance qui doit unir les personnels du service public de l’éducation aux élèves et à leurs familles. Compte tenu de son importance, il serait en effet déraisonnable de s’en tenir à une simple consécration jurisprudentielle », explique l’étude d’impact.

    « Les dispositions de la présente mesure pourront ainsi être invoquées, comme dans la décision du Conseil d’Etat du 18 juillet 2018 précédemment mentionnée, dans le cadre d’affaires disciplinaires concernant des personnels de l’éducation nationale s’étant rendus coupables de faits portant atteinte à la réputation du service public ».

    L’arrêt en question avait annulé la décision d’une cour administrative d’appel qui était revenue sur une décision de révocation d’un enseignant. Il s’agissait d’un professeur de Montceau-les -Mines coupable et condamné avec sursis pour agressions sexuelles sur mineurs de quinze ans. Pour chasser cet enseignant du métier , le Conseil d’Etat a argué de « l’exigence d’exemplarité et d’irréprochabilité qui incombe aux enseignants dans leurs relations avec des mineurs, y compris en dehors du service » et de l’importance de l’atteinte portée « à la réputation du service public de l’éducation nationale ainsi qu’au lien de confiance qui doit unir les enfants et leurs parents aux enseignants du service ».

    Faire taire les profs sur les réseaux sociaux

    Exploitant cette affaire très particulière, le projet de loi Blanquer exploite cet arrêt dans un tout autre domaine. Il ne s’agit plus de délinquant sexuel condamné mais de n’importe quel prof. Il ne s’agit plus de la violation perverse de la relation pédagogique mais du lien d’obéissance au ministre. En s’appuyant sur cet article et cette évocation de la confiance, le ministre veut pouvoir sanctionner ce qu’il n’arrive pas à punir actuellement.

    L’étude d’impact donne des exemples. « Il en ira par exemple ainsi lorsque des personnels de la communauté éducative chercheront à dénigrer auprès du public par des propos gravement mensongers ou diffamatoires leurs collègues et de manière générale l’institution scolaire. Ces dispositions pourront également être utilement invoquées par l’administration dans les cas de violences contre les personnels de la communauté éducative ou d’atteintes au droit au respect de leur vie privée, notamment par le biais de publications sur des réseaux sociaux ».

    La confiance c’est la soumission

    Ainsi toute critique portée par un enseignant sur l’institution pourrait être légalement sanctionnée par une #révocation. Ce que poursuit le ministre c’est la généralisation du #devoir_de_réserve qui concerne aujourd’hui les seuls cadres du système éducatif ou des cas bien particuliers. Les violences tout comme la diffamation sont déjà punis par la loi. Le devoir de réserve peut être invoqué pour des enseignants qui feraient campagne contre l’institution (et non contre un responsable politique). Or la liberté de parole des enseignants est nécessaire à l’exercice du métier. Ils doivent éthiquement privilégier l’intérêt de l’élève avant celui de l’institution. Ils doivent pouvoir exercer librement un droit de critique sur le fonctionnement de l’institution. Celle-ci d’ailleurs le leur demande quand il s’agit des programmes par exemple.

    On mesure le glissement que permettrait le passage de cet article. JM Blanquer inscrit cet article pour permettre une systématisation des #sanctions et faire en sorte que les #enseignants se taisent, notamment sur les réseaux sociaux, dernier espace de #liberté.

    Cet article autoritaire, qui ferait des enseignants une catégorie spéciale de sous-fonctionnaires, montre à quel point le mot confiance est un piège. Si, pour Orwell, « la liberté c’est l’esclavage », pour l’auteur de ce projet de loi, la confiance c’est la #soumission.

    François Jarraud


    http://www.cafepedagogique.net/lexpresso/Pages/2018/12/12122018Article636801966942543096.aspx
    #censure #éducation #France #réseaux_sociaux #école

    • https://dijoncter.info/?un-fonctionnaire-ca-ferme-sa-gueule-ou-ca-demissionne-828

      Imaginons qu’un professeur soit amené avec sa collègue enseignant l’allemand, à encadrer une sortie d’élèves, pour étudier au cinéma le film intitulé" Le jeune Karl Marx" ; très vite, il serait amené à évoquer la liberté d’expression, censée être garantie constitutionnellement : l’œuvre s’ouvre en effet sur cette scène insolite où le philosophe et économiste est interpellé par la police d’État alors qu’il se trouve en plein comité de rédaction, le seul crime qu’il est censé avoir commis étant d’avoir participé à un journal contestataire. Cela provoquait l’ire du roi de Prusse.
      Un an plus tard, en 2019, la réalité rejoint la fiction : ce même enseignant prend connaissance de la convocation de Sophie Carrouge pour crime de lèse-majesté (une tribune somme toute inoffensive à l’encontre du président-mandaté du moment). Il apprend aussi - dans les mêmes jours, d’ailleurs - que son ministère a prévu de nouvelles mesures statutaires lui imposant un bâillon à lui ainsi qu’aux milliers d’autres enseignants, sous couvert de renforcement de leur « devoir de réserve » . Sommes nous dans une république bananière ? Dans la Tunisie de Ben Ali ? Non, en France en 2019, où il apparaît légitime de remettre en cause, en toute décontraction, des droits constitutionnels, au nom d’un contrat de travail avec le meilleur des employeurs : l’État.
      Le voilà, par la force de décrets ministériels, dans une situation de sujétion accrue qu’on déguisera au mieux en loyauté à l’égard de la République, au pire en ce qu’on nommera, ce qui ne manque pas de sel ni d’ironie, une « école de la confiance ». (c’est le nom du projet de loi comportant le bâillon en question).
      Pour peu qu’il se rende au Panthéon avec ses élèves, devra-t-il encore rendre hommage à Voltaire ou à quelque autre incitateur de révoltes, qui se sont illustrés contre des institutions vermoulues à l’autoritarisme grossier ? Devrait-on souhaiter, que l’enseignant, comme n’importe quel militaire ou gendarme soumis à sa hiérarchie, soit coopté et jugés honorable que s’il est un fonctionnaire inféodé à tel ou tel gouvernement de passage ? Celui du moment perd chaque jour davantage en crédibilité et légitimité (pour ne rien dire de sa cote de séduction, en chute libre), se crispant toujours davantage sur ses pouvoirs régaliens ; où en est-il, en cherchant à faire taire le moindre professeur de province rédigeant quelques lignes sur un site à la fréquentation confidentielle ? Se met-il sérieusement en tête de traquer quelque « ennemi intérieur » ? Le porte-parole du gouvernement de passage, affolé - et opportuniste - va même jusqu’à qualifier les mouvements de résistance actuels d’ entreprises « factieuses ».

      La liste des « factieux »

      Sont ainsi stigmatisés tous les opposants à la verticalité problématique de la cinquième république désirée par De Gaulle, s’imposant toujours à nous alors qu’elle n’a de cesse de démontrer les excès de l’exécutif : elle à chaque fois chaque fois instrumentalisée par le roitelet du moment (pour cinq ans), lequel est relayé par le moindre de ses petits clones locaux dans chaque institution, chacun se faisant alors une gloire d’être la courroie de transmission de l’insanité d’en haut.
      Seront alors décrétés « Factieux » tous ceux qui osent prendre la parole ou agir hors de la mise-au -pas de la mise « en marche » : ceux qui viennent au secours des sans-papiers, les citoyens qui s’engagent dans une contestation actives, ceux qui alertent l’opinion publique des démolitions programmées des services publics par les réformes qu’on fait passer à coups de matraques, ceux qui remettent en question la dégradation systématique et organisée des services publics (organisée par ceux qui veulent les démanteler pour mieux les vendre aux copains et coquins du privé), et même désormais ceux qui défendent leurs propres élèves contre les algorithmes aveugles ou les matraques sus-citées.
      « Factieux », ceux qui s’indignent de l’annulation de l’ISF, ou du fait qu’on leur tire dessus à bout-portant avec des flash-balls, sans sommation.
      « Factieux » tous ceux qui méprisent la start-up nation et la considèrent aussi has been que Giscard.
      « Factieux » tous ceux qui défendent le véritable esprit républicain et démocratique, qui ne se limitera certes pas à un malheureux vote de barrage dont certains se sont fendus pour éviter Le Pen. Ceux qui réclament des référendums d’initiative populaire, voire une constituante, pour une sixième République : « Factieux. »
      Cela commence à en faire beaucoup, de factieux, beaucoup de citoyens qui prennent encore la parole. Il va falloir recruter encore davantage au ministère de l’intérieur, à défaut d’augmenter le nombre de professeurs, lesquels auraient l’heur d’enseigner la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen du 26 août 1789 qui consacre la liberté d’expression comme un droit imprescriptible, l’article 11 dispose : "La libre communication des pensées et des opinions est un des droits les plus précieux de l’Homme : tout Citoyen peut donc parler, écrire, imprimer librement, sauf à répondre de l’abus de cette liberté dans les cas déterminés par la Loi". Les enseignants doivent-ils être traités tels des parias de la République au point qu’ils devraient s’acquitter d’une allégeance absolue à tel chef temporaire de l’exécutif et ses divers valets-exécutants zélés dans tels obscurs bureaux ? Entendu que le devoir de réserve en classe favorise l’auto-détermination de l’élève, sans la biaiser ou la fausser, est-ce à dire que le citoyen qu’est d’abord le professeur, doit désormais s’interdire toute prise de position sociale, éthique, syndicale ou politique hors de ses heures de cours ? Les intimidations feutrées prononcées à l’encontre de Sophie Carrouge doivent alerter tous les citoyens.

      La liberté de la fermer

      Le libéralisme économique cherchant à tout s’assujettir – jusqu’aux institutions de la République, même le temps de mandats – est tout de même bien tenté de s’accommoder , ce qu’il fait du reste de plus en plus, d’une dérive autoritaire, de moins en moins temporaire– l’état d’urgence théorisé par le nazi Carl Schmitt pouvant à l’occasion être fort utile pour faire taire toutes les voix discordantes. Mais bien plus retorses qu’une censure par trop directe, les propensions à susciter de l’auto-censure s’imposent discrètement, par les divers raffinements de l’intimidation, les assignations administratives, le recours à toutes les chaînes de commandement ou à toute autre injonction symbolique ; le tout s’autorisant à peu de frais de grands noms ronflants : on ose évoquer « la démocratie » (même si on l’a rabougrie au seul rite masochiste du vote), tout en évoquant bien entendu la nécessité de l’ « ordre » et de la « sécurité » - - ce qui ne manque pas de s’accorder, sans trop de peine, de fait, avec un discours échevelé sur les libertés civiques, notamment celle d’expression - elle pourra à l’occasion permettre de prendre la défense des « journalistes » de BFM.
      De toute manière, Michel Foucault le relevait déjà dans un texte ironisant à l’encontre de ceux qui ne détectent pas les subtilités prises par les formes de contrôle modernes : « il faut se faire une représentation bien inversée du pouvoir pour croire que nous parlent de liberté toutes ces voix qui, depuis tant de temps, dans notre civilisation, ressassent la formidable injonction d’avoir à dire ce qu’on est, ce qu’on a fait, ce dont on se souvient et ce qu’on a oublié, ce qu’on cache et ce qui se cache, ce à quoi on ne pense pas et ce qu’on pense ne pas penser. Immense ouvrage auquel l’Occident a plié des générations pour produire ‑ pendant que d’au­tres formes de travail assuraient l’accumulation du capi­tal – l’assujettissement des hommes ».
      L’accumulation du capital, lui, en effet, se porte bien. Par contre, la question de savoir si nous pouvons encore nous exprimer librement se pose de nouveau avec acuité, à l’heure où des agents de l’État voient leurs droits constitutionnels mis en danger par leurs tutelles administratives et managériales. Nous sommes bel et bien à l’époque du fichage des manifestants, des arrestations préventives sans fondement juridique, de la violence physique opposée aux lycéens contestataires qui prendraient un peu conscience de ce qui les attend, et de l’utilisation des leviers institutionnels pour procéder à des intimidations à l’encontre de tout citoyen un tant soit peu engagé.
      Il semblerait que la seule liberté d’expression qui soit alors concédée consisterait à laisser des avis sur Tripadvisor ou tel ou tel produit chez Amazon ; et encore, peut-être cela devra-t-il fait sous pseudo ? Que de tristes sires se livrent par ailleurs à des insultes racistes ou à d’autres tombereaux d’immondices fascisantes sur le net - cela semble par contre largement toléré, bien davantage, du moins, que les manifestations citoyennes récentes qui ont le heur de tancer le statu quo néo-libéral. Il sera loisible de les faire passer pour des ennemis internes du pacte républicain- - comme si ceux qui entraient en insurrection contre la véritable république française n’étaient pas tous ceux qui se cachent derrière leurs fonctions administratives ou leurs insignes pour se mettre au service de l’oligarchie démantelant les services publics de ce pays. Qu’une clique arguant de son mandat pour procurer des cadeaux fiscaux trouve en effet dans son sillage tout un ensemble d’opportunistes n’est pas si étonnant ; que ceux-ci profitent à ce point de l’aubaine pour renforcer encore la dérive managériale hiérarchique autrefois constatée chez France Télécom et La Poste, cela suscite d’abord notre étonnement, puis tout simplement notre mépris. Nous retournons enseigner Voltaire, Marx et Beaumarchais à nos élèves, en essayant de ne pas mourir de honte à la place de tous ceux qui n’en éprouvent plus depuis longtemps (de la honte).

    • #Loi_sur_l’école : les débats se déportent un peu plus sur la droite

      L’examen du projet de loi « pour une #école_de_la_confiance », porté par le ministre de l’éducation nationale, a débuté le 11 février. La tonalité conservatrice des débats sur l’#uniforme, le #drapeau ou la restriction de la #liberté_d’expression des enseignants est manifeste.

      https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/120219/loi-sur-l-ecole-les-debats-se-deportent-un-peu-plus-sur-la-droite?onglet=f

  • Adam Smith et les Gilets jaunes
    http://www.cadtm.org/Adam-Smith-et-les-Gilets-jaunes

    Adam Smith (1723-1790) est en réalité très mal connu. Les néolibéraux et les défenseurs de l’ordre établi l’encensent en falsifiant systématiquement sa vision du monde. En fait, ils ne se préoccupent même pas de prendre sérieusement connaissance du contenu de son œuvre.

    Quelques citations tirées de l’œuvre principale d’Adam Smith, Recherche sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations [1], publiée en 1776 montrent à quel point son analyse de la société se réfère à la lutte des classes et permet de mettre en perspective ce que nous vivons aujourd’hui à l’heure du mouvement des Gilets jaunes. Bien sûr, citer Karl Marx permettrait de montrer à quel point l’analyse de ce révolutionnaire donne les clés essentielles pour comprendre ce qui se déroule sous nos yeux. Mais qui cela étonnerait-il ? Par contre, se référer à Adam Smith relève de la provocation. Il s’agit qu’on ouvre encore plus grand les yeux sur ce qui est en train de se passer et qu’on renforce nos arguments contre ceux qui considèrent l’injustice comme l’ordre naturel des choses. Un retour sur l’analyse des classes sociales réalisée par Adam Smith permet également de comprendre les éléments de continuité dans le système d’exploitation et de domination capitaliste. Bien sûr, la société a changé mais il y a de toute évidence des constantes qui méritent d’être soulignées.

    #Economie #Adam_Smith #Fun

  • Freud and the Non-European
    In this excerpt from Freud and the Non-European, Edward Said describes his method of situating historic thinkers and writers “contrapuntally.”
    https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4040-freud-and-the-non-european

    I feel I should add something else here. I have often been interpreted as retrospectively attacking great writers and thinkers like Jane Austen and Karl Marx because some of their ideas seem politically incorrect by the standards of our time. That is a stupid notion which, I just have to say categorically, is not true of anything I have either written or said. On the contrary, I am always trying to understand figures from the past whom I admire, even as I point out how bound they were by the perspectives of their own cultural moment as far as their views of other cultures and peoples were concerned. The special point I then try to make is that it is imperative to read them as intrinsically worthwhile for today’s non European or non-Western reader, who is often either happy to dismiss them altogether as dehumanizing or insufficiently aware of the colonized people (as Chinua Achebe does with Conrad’s portrayal of Africa), or reads them, in a way, “above” the historical circumstances of which they were so much a part.

    My approach tries to see them in their context as accurately as possible, but then - because they are extraordinary writers and thinkers whose work has enabled other, alternative work and readings based on developments of which they could not have been aware–I see them contrapuntally, that is, as figures whose writing travels across temporal, cultural and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a new ensemble along with later history and subsequent art.

  • Neurocapitalism | openDemocracy
    https://www.opendemocracy.net/ewa-hess-hennric-jokeit/neurocapitalism

    There is good reason to assert the existence, or at least the emergence, of a new type of capitalism: neurocapitalism. After all, the capitalist economy, as the foundation of modern liberal societies, has shown itself to be not only exceptionally adaptable and crisis-resistant, but also, in every phase of its dominance, capable of producing the scientific and technological wherewithal to analyse and mitigate the self-generated “malfunctioning” to which its constituent subjects are prone. In doing so – and this too is one of capitalism’s algorithms – it involves them in the inexorably effective cycle of supply and demand.

    Just as globalisation is a consequence of optimising the means of production and paths of communication (as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted), so the brain, as the command centre of the modern human being, finally appears to be within reach of the humanities, a field closely associated with capitalism. It may seem uncanny just how closely the narrow path to scientific supremacy over the brain runs to the broad highway along which capitalism has been speeding for over 150 years. The relationship remains dynamic, yet what links capitalism with neuroscience is not so much strict regulation as a complex syndrome of systemic flaws.

    At this point, if not before, the unequal duo of capitalism and neuroscience was joined by a third partner. From now on, the blossoming pharmaceutical industry was to function as a kind of transmission belt connecting the two wheels and making them turn faster. In the first half of the twentieth century, mental disorders were treated mainly with sedative barbiturates, electric shock therapy and psychosurgery. But by the 1930s, neuro-psychopharmacology was already winning the day, as Freud had predicted it would.

    Is it a paradox, or one of those things that are so obvious they remain unobserved, that the success of Freud’s psychoanalysis and that of modern neuroscience are based on similar premises? Psychoanalysis was successful because it wove together medically relevant disciplines like psychiatry and psychology with art, culture, education, economics and politics, allowing it to penetrate important areas of social life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the neurosciences seem to be in a position to take on a comparable role in the future.

    The ten top-selling psychotropic substances in the USA include anti-depressants, neuroleptics (antipsychotics), stimulants and drugs for treating dementia. In 2007 one hundred million prescriptions were issued for these drugs with sales worth more than sixteen billion dollars. These figures illustrate how, in an environment that is regulated but difficult to control, supply and subjectively perceived need can create a market turning over billions of dollars. What is more, it is a market that is likely to expand into those areas in which a performance-driven society confronts the post-postmodern self with its own shortcomings: in others words in schools and further education, at work, in relationships, and in old age. Among the best-selling neuro-psychotropic drugs are those that modulate the way people experience emotions and those that improve their capacity to pay attention and to concentrate, in most cases regardless of whether there is a clinically definable impairment of these functions.

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    Neurocapitalism
    Ewa Hess and Hennric Jokeit 3 March 2010
    Despite the immense costs for healthcare systems, the fear of depression, dementia and attention deficit disorder legitimises the boom in neuro-psychotropic drugs. In a performance-driven society that confronts the self with its own shortcomings, neuroscience serves an expanding market

    Today, the phenomenology of the mind is stepping indignantly aside for a host of hyphenated disciplines such as neuro-anthropology, neuro-pedagogy, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and neuro-economics. Their self-assurance reveals the neurosciences’ usurpatory tendency to become not only the humanities of science, but the leading science of the twenty-first century. The legitimacy, impetus and promise of this claim derive from the maxim that all human behaviour is determined by the laws governing neuronal activity and the way it is organised in the brain.

    Whether or not one accepts the universal validity of this maxim, it is fair to assume that a science that aggressively seeks to establish hermeneutic supremacy will change everyday capitalist reality via its discoveries and products. Or, to put it more cautiously, that its triumph is legitimated, if not enabled, by a significant shift in the capitalist world order.

    There is good reason to assert the existence, or at least the emergence, of a new type of capitalism: neurocapitalism. After all, the capitalist economy, as the foundation of modern liberal societies, has shown itself to be not only exceptionally adaptable and crisis-resistant, but also, in every phase of its dominance, capable of producing the scientific and technological wherewithal to analyse and mitigate the self-generated “malfunctioning” to which its constituent subjects are prone. In doing so – and this too is one of capitalism’s algorithms – it involves them in the inexorably effective cycle of supply and demand.

    Just as globalisation is a consequence of optimising the means of production and paths of communication (as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted), so the brain, as the command centre of the modern human being, finally appears to be within reach of the humanities, a field closely associated with capitalism. It may seem uncanny just how closely the narrow path to scientific supremacy over the brain runs to the broad highway along which capitalism has been speeding for over 150 years. The relationship remains dynamic, yet what links capitalism with neuroscience is not so much strict regulation as a complex syndrome of systemic flaws.

    Repressive late nineteenth-century capitalism, with its exploitative moral dictates, proscriptions and social injustices, was a breeding ground for the neurosis diagnosed by scientists in the early twentieth century as a spiritual epidemic. This mysterious scourge of the bourgeoisie, a class which according to Marx, “through the rapid improvement of all instruments of production [...] draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilisation”, expressed the silent rebellion of the abused creature in human beings. It was, in other words, the expression of resistance – as defiant as it was futile – of people’s inner “barbarian nation” to forceful modernisation and civilisation.

    To introduce here the inventor of psychoanalysis and neurosis researcher Sigmund Freud as the first neurocapitalist practitioner and thinker might be thought to be overstepping the mark. Yet people tend to forget that Freud was a neuro-anatomist and neurologist by training, and saw himself primarily as a neuroscientist. What distinguished him from his colleagues was that he was more aware of the limitations of the methods available for studying the brain at the end of the nineteenth century. Having identified neurosis as an acquired pathology of the nervous system for which there was no known treatment or way to localise, he decided instead to take an indirect route. The means he invented in order both to research and to cure this mysterious illness was psychoanalysis. Fellow researchers like Oskar Vogt, who continued to search for the key to psychopathology and genius in the anatomy of the brain, were doomed to fail. From then on, psychology served the requirements of everyday life in a constantly changing capitalist reality. As a method based on communication, psychoanalysis penetrated all spheres of social interaction, from the intimate and private to the economic and cultural. In doing so, it created new markets: a repair market for mental illness and a coaching market for those seeking to optimise capitalist production and reproduction.

    Delayed by the Second World War, the repressive capitalism of the nineteenth century was eventually replaced by libertarian, affluent capitalism. Conformity, discipline and feelings of guilt – the symptoms of failure to cope with a system of moral dictates and proscriptions – gave way to the new imperative of self-realisation. The psychic ideal of the successful individual was characterised by dynamically renewable readiness for self-expansion, which for the subject meant having a capacity for self-motivation that could be activated at any time and that was immune to frustration. Failure now meant not being able to exhaust the full potential of one’s options. This development brought a diametric change in the character of mental illness. Neurosis, a disorder born of guilt, powerlessness and lack of discipline, lost its significance. Attention shifted to the self’s failure to realise itself. Depression, the syndrome described by Alain Ehrenberg in The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, began its triumphal march.

    Depression, however, was also the first widespread mental illness for which modern neuroscience promptly found a remedy. Depression and anxiety were located in the gaps between the synapses, which is precisely where they were treated. Where previously there had only been reflexive psychotherapy, an interface had now been identified where suffering induced by the self and the world could now be alleviated directly and pre-reflexively.

    At this point, if not before, the unequal duo of capitalism and neuroscience was joined by a third partner. From now on, the blossoming pharmaceutical industry was to function as a kind of transmission belt connecting the two wheels and making them turn faster. In the first half of the twentieth century, mental disorders were treated mainly with sedative barbiturates, electric shock therapy and psychosurgery. But by the 1930s, neuro-psychopharmacology was already winning the day, as Freud had predicted it would.

    Is it a paradox, or one of those things that are so obvious they remain unobserved, that the success of Freud’s psychoanalysis and that of modern neuroscience are based on similar premises? Psychoanalysis was successful because it wove together medically relevant disciplines like psychiatry and psychology with art, culture, education, economics and politics, allowing it to penetrate important areas of social life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the neurosciences seem to be in a position to take on a comparable role in the future.

    What cannot be overlooked is that the methodological anchoring of the neurosciences in pure science, combined with the ethical legitimacy ascribed to them as a branch of medicine, gives them a privileged position similar to that enjoyed by psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century. Unlike the latter, however, the neurosciences are extremely well funded by the state and even more so by private investment from the pharmaceutical industry. Their prominent status can be explained both by the number and significance of the problems they are attempting to solve, as well as the broad public recognition of these problems, and by the respectable profits to be made should they succeed. In other words, they are driven by economic and epistemic forces that emanate from the capitalism of today, and that will shape the capitalism of tomorrow – whatever that might look like.
    II

    In Germany, the USA and many western European countries, it is neither painkillers nor cardiovascular drugs that now put the greatest strain on health budgets, but rather neuro-psychotropic drugs. The huge market for this group of drugs will grow rapidly as life expectancy continues to rise, since age is the biggest risk factor for neurological and psychiatric illness. All over the world, whole armies of neuroscientists are engaged in research in universities, in projects often funded by the pharmaceuticals industry, and to an even greater extent in the industry’s own facilities, to find more effective and more profitable drugs to bring onto the market. The engine driving the huge advances being made in the neurosciences is capital, while the market seems both to unleash and to constrain the potential of this development.

    Depression, anxiety or attention deficit disorders are now regarded by researchers and clinical practitioners alike as products of neuro-chemical dysregulation in interconnected systems of neurotransmitters. They are therefore treated with substances that intervene either directly or indirectly in the regulation of neurotransmitters. Given that the body’s neuro-chemical systems are highly sensitive and inter-reactive, the art of successful treatment resides in a process of fine-tuning. New and more expensive drugs are able to do this increasingly effectively and selectively, thus reducing undesirable side effects. Despite the immense costs for healthcare systems, the high incidence of mental disorders and the fear of anxiety, depression and dementia make the development of ever better neuro-psychotropic drugs desirable and legitimate.

    However, the development and approval of drugs designed to alleviate the symptoms of mental disorders also open the gates to substances that can be used to deliberately alter non-pathological brain functions or mental states. The rigid ethical conventions in the USA and the European Union – today the most profitable markets for neuro-psychotropic drugs – mean that drug development, whether funded by the state or by the pharmaceuticals industry, is strictly geared towards the prevention and treatment of illness. Few pharmaceutical companies are therefore willing to make public their interest in studying and developing substances designed to increase the cognitive performance or psychological wellbeing of healthy people. The reason is simple: there is no legal market for these so-called “neuro-enhancers”. Taking such drugs to perform better in examinations, for example, is a punishable offence in the USA. Yet sales figures for certain neuro-psychotropic drugs are considerably higher than the incidence of the illnesses for which they are indicated would lead one to expect. This apparent paradox applies above all to neuropsychotropic drugs that have neuro-enhancement properties. The most likely explanation is that neuro-enhancers are currently undergoing millions of self-trials, including in universities – albeit probably not in their laboratories.

    The ten top-selling psychotropic substances in the USA include anti-depressants, neuroleptics (antipsychotics), stimulants and drugs for treating dementia. In 2007 one hundred million prescriptions were issued for these drugs with sales worth more than sixteen billion dollars. These figures illustrate how, in an environment that is regulated but difficult to control, supply and subjectively perceived need can create a market turning over billions of dollars. What is more, it is a market that is likely to expand into those areas in which a performance-driven society confronts the post-postmodern self with its own shortcomings: in others words in schools and further education, at work, in relationships, and in old age. Among the best-selling neuro-psychotropic drugs are those that modulate the way people experience emotions and those that improve their capacity to pay attention and to concentrate, in most cases regardless of whether there is a clinically definable impairment of these functions.

    Attempts to offset naturally occurring, non-pathological deviations from the norm are referred to as “compensatory” or “moderate enhancement” – in the same way that glasses are worn to correct the eyes’ decreasing ability to focus. The term describes a gradual improvement in function to a degree that is still physiologically natural. By contrast, “progressive” or “radical enhancement” denotes a qualitative improvement in function that exceeds natural boundaries. To return to the optical metaphor, we could say that the difference between these forms of performance enhancement is like that between wearing spectacles and night-vision glasses.

    In all ages and cultures, producers and purveyors of drugs and potions purported to enhance the individual’s cognitive state have been able to do a tidy trade, as the many references to magic potions and fountains of youth in literature and the fine arts testify. Nowadays, one substance with this kind of mythical status is ginkgo. Billions of dollars worth of ginkgo-biloba preparations are sold in the USA every year; and if ginkgo really did have any significant effect on cognition or memory, it would be a classic case of the widespread, unchecked use of a compensatory neuro-enhancer. As it is, however, the myth and commercial success of ginkgo are more a testament to the perhaps universal human need for a better attention span, memory and mental powers, and to the willingness to pay good money to preserve and enhance them.

    For the attainment of happiness as the aim of a good life, Aristotle recommended cultivating a virtuous mind and virtuous character. This is precisely what some neuro-psychotropic drugs are designed to do. The virtues of the mind are generally understood to be instrumental traits like memory and attention span. The extent to which these traits are innate or acquired varies from person to person. After adolescence, their efficiency gradually goes into decline at individually varying rates. Inequality and the threat of loss are strong motivations for action. The current consensus on the ethics of neuro-enhancement seems to be that as long as the fundamental medical principles of self-determination, non-harm (nil nocere) and benefit (salus aegroti) are adhered to, rejecting pharmacological intervention in the instrumental traits of the brain would be at odds with a liberal understanding of democracy.

    A more complex ethical problem would seem to be the improvement of so-called character virtues, which we shall refer to here as socio-affective traits. Unlike instrumental traits such as attention span and memory, traits like temperament, self-confidence, trust, willingness to take risks, authenticity and so on are considered to be crucial to the personality. Pharmacological intervention that alters these traits therefore affects a person’s psychological integrity. While such interventions may facilitate and accelerate self-discovery and self-realisation (see the large body of literature on experience with Prozac, e.g. Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac: Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self , they may also do the exact opposite. We will never be able to predict with any certainty how altering instrumental and socio-affective traits will ultimately affect the reflexively structured human personality as a whole. Today’s tacit assumption that neuro-psychotropic interventions are reversible is leading individuals to experiment on themselves. Yet even if certain mental states are indeed reversible, the memory of them may not be.

    The barriers to neuro-enhancement actually fell some time ago, albeit in ways that for a long time went unnoticed. Jet-lag-free short breaks to Bali, working for global companies with a twenty-four hour information flow from headquarters in Tokyo, Brussels and San Francisco, exams and assessments, medical emergency services – in all of these situations it has become routine for people with no medical knowledge to use chemical substances to influence their ability to pay attention. The technologies that have sped up our lives in the era of globalisation – the Internet, mobile phones, aeroplanes – are already a daily reality for large numbers of people and are interfering with their biologically and culturally determined cycles of activity and rest.

    That is not to say that the popularisation of these findings has had no effect at all. Reconceptualising joy as dopamine activity in the brain’s reward centres, melancholy as serotonin deficiency, attention as the noradrenalin-induced modulation of stimulus-processing, and, not least, love as a consequence of the secretion of centrally acting bonding hormones, changes not only our perspective on emotional and mental states, but also our subjective experience of self. That does not mean that we experience the physiological side of feelings like love or guilt any differently, but it does make us think about them differently. This, in turn, changes the way we perceive, interpret and order them, and hence the effect they have on our behaviour. By viewing emotions in general terms rather than as singular events taking place in a unique temporal and spatial context, the neurosciences have created a rational justification for trying to influence them in ways other than by individual and mutual care.

    The possibility of pharmacological intervention thus expands the subjective autonomy of people to act in their own best interests or to their own detriment. This in turn is accompanied by a new form of self-reflection, which encompasses both structural images of the brain and the ability to imagine the neuro-chemical activity that goes on there. What is alarming is that many of the neuroscientific findings that have triggered a transformation in our perception of ourselves are linked with commercial interests.

    It is already clear that global capitalism will make excessive demands on our material, and even more so on our human-mental resources. This is evident from the oft-used term “information society”, since information can only function as a commodity if it changes human behaviour, and it can only do this if we accord it our attention and engage with it emotionally.

    #Neurocapitalisme #Neurosciences

  • Ah ! Les #moutons_noirs... les revoilà, en #Allemagne :


    #criminels_étrangers
    –-> il y a un tag spécialement dédié sur seenthis, si jamais : https://seenthis.net/tag/criminels_%C3%A9trangers

    #modèle_suisse ?

    En lien avec mon billet publié sur @visionscarto :
    En Suisse, pieds nus contre rangers

    Septembre 2015 : au cœur de ce que l’Europe appelle sa « plus grande crise migratoire depuis la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale », les consciences se réveillent-elles enfin ? Après des années de monopolisation du débat public par les discours haineux de l’extrême droite, citoyens et migrants s’organisent pour exprimer leur indignation face au sort des réfugiés. Le point en Suisse, où l’image des pieds nus s’oppose à celle des rangers.


    https://visionscarto.net/en-suisse-pieds-nus-contre-rangers
    #suisse

    Source de l’image de Chemnitz :
    Saluts #nazis et slogans anti-immigrés : récit d’un “jour de honte” à #Chemnitz

    Des milliers de sympathisants d’extrême droite se sont réunis lundi soir dans cette ville de Saxe, aux cris de “L’Allemagne aux Allemands, les étrangers dehors”. La discipline a rapidement dégénéré.
    Ce devait être une marche funèbre, souligne le journal allemand Die Zeit. Mais la manifestation qui s’est déroulée lundi soir à Chemnitz, en Saxe, n’avait rien de solennelle. Deux jours après le meurtre d’un Allemand d’une trentaine d’années dans une rixe, pour lequel ont été arrêtés un Irakien et un Syrien, environ 2.000 sympathisants d’extrême droite ont réclamé que le gouvernement garantisse “la sécurité de ses citoyens”, au cours d’un rassemblement qui a rapidement dégénéré. “Jour de Honte à Chemnitz”, titre mardi le quotidien Bild, listant les violences et les slogans nazis recensés lors de la manifestation. Sur son situation web, Der Spiegel va plus loin, allant jusqu’à comparer les “foules excitées d’extrême droite” de Chemnitz et le caractère “dépassé” de l’État de droit à “la discipline de la République de Weimar”.”La custom plutôt que l’invasion”. À l’initiative de plusieurs organisations dont le mouvement anti-islam Pegida et le parti native Pro-Chemnitz, qui compte trois élus au conseil municipal de la ville, les participants se sont réunis lundi en fin d’après-midi sur la characteristic Karl Marx. Des reportages et vidéos amateurs réalisés sur les lieux montrent majoritairement de jeunes hommes au visage parfois masqué, portant des vêtements sombres. Mais aussi des femmes, comme une sexagénaire interrogée par Der Spiegel, venue manifester son désaccord “avec l’arrivée de tant d’étrangers”. “Je me demande pourquoi mes impôts sont dépensés pour eux. Ils veulent tous être footballeur professionnel ou chanteur, mais quand on leur demande de porter des planches pendant une journée, ils ont mal au dos.”A #Chemnitz, t-shirt « Rapefugees no longer welcome » – ou quand les réfugiés sont tout simplement assimilés à des violeurs… pic.twitter.com/nwjfjIeB6w— Thomas Wieder (@ThomasWieder) 27 août 2018Sur les drapeaux et les t-shirts, des slogans sans équivoque : “la custom plutôt que l’invasion” ou encore “nous sommes multicolores, jusqu’à ce que le sang coule”. Au mégaphone, un jeune homme crie “vous êtes Allemands” et donne le départ du cortège. Selon Die Zeit, une partie des sympathisants présents sont alcoolisés. Certains montrent leur postérieur aux caméras présentes. En passant devant les forces de l’ordre, beaucoup leur adressent des doigts d’honneur. D’autres ne cachent pas leur volonté d’en découdre avec un cortège de quelques centaines de militants d’extrême gauche, venus soutenir les migrants. À l’image de cette réflexion d’un manifestant à un policier, rapportée par Der Spiegel : “envoyez les femmes à la maison, et ensuite : homme contre homme.””L’Allemagne aux Allemands”. La manifestation s’envenime vers 20 heures. Débordée, la police ne peut interpeller les auteurs de saluts nazis, dont decided ne dissimulent pas leurs visages. Des pavés sont arrachés, des bouteilles jetées sur les forces de l’ordre et le camp d’en face. Les engins pyrotechniques et projectiles font plusieurs blessés, mais les slogans ne cessent pas : “L’Allemagne aux Allemands, les étrangers dehors”.Neonazis setzen sich ohne Absprache mit Polizei in Bewegung. Einer macht den Hitlergruß. #Chemnitz#c2708pic.twitter.com/tto1GroPe3— Felix Huesmann (@felixhuesmann) 27 août 2018″Il y a quelques mois j’étais à Kandel, où une adolescente allemande s’est fait trucider par un réfugié afghan”, témoigne auprès du Mondeun manifestant venu spécialement de Cologne pour le rassemblement. “Aujourd’hui je suis à Chemnitz, où un père de famille allemand s’est, fait, lui aussi, poignarder par des réfugiés. (…) Quand il s’agit de sauver son pays, il faut être prêt à tout.” Vers 22 heures, la police annonce le retour au calme sur Twitter. Mais jusqu’à quand ? Une nouvelle manifestation est annoncée mardi après-midi à Dresde, voisine de Chemnitz et capitale de la Saxe, où l’extrême droite est fortement implantée. Elle y est arrivée en tête des dernières législatives en septembre 2017, créant un séisme politique en Allemagne.Qui est à l’origine de ces rassemblements ?Dimanche soir déjà, quelques centaines de militants d’extrême droite avaient lancé dans les rues de Chemnitz des “chasses collectives” contre des étrangers, dont plusieurs ont été blessés. Au sein de la ville “une alliance assez incroyable mêlant des hooligans, des néonazis, l’AfD (le parti d’extrême droite Different für Deutschland, ndlr) et les militants de Pegida s’est constituée”, a estimé la directrice de la Fondation Amadeu Antonio contre le racisme sur la chaîne de télévision allemande n-tv, mardi. “Les violences montrent que des mouvements se réunissent qui au final sont tous issus du même moule, le tout dans une atmosphère extrêmement xénophobe et agressive.””Les premières émeutes contre les étrangers ont eu lieu en Saxe après la réunification, il y a plus de 25 ans. Depuis tout ce temps, le gouvernement fédéral les a négligées, relativisées et minimisées”, élargit le Berliner Morgenpost, mardi, évoquant d’autres manifestations de hooligans difficilement contenues par la police ces dernières années.

    https://newsline.com/2018/08/28/saluts-nazis-et-slogans-anti-immigres-recit-dun-jour-de-honte-a-chemnitz
    #néo-nazis #manifestation #extrême_droite #asile #migrations #réfugiés #anti-réfugiés

  • Le CEDETIM salue la mémoire de Samir Amin 

    Samir Amin (1931-2018), d’ascendance égyptienne et française, africain de cœur et de tous les tiers-mondes, militant altermondialiste de tous les combats contre l’impérialisme et les inégalités.
    Il restera évidemment le théoricien du développement inégal. Une explication du monde, de la persistance et du développement des inégalité structurelles dans le système-monde entre le « centre » et les « périphéries », qu’il a développé dans ses ouvrages des années 1970, comme L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale (1970), Le développement inégal (1973), la crise de l’impérialisme (avec A. Faire, M. Hussein et G. Massiah, en 1975), et surtout L’impérialisme et le développement inégal, (aux éditions de Minuit en 1976). Le « tiers-monde » post-colonial n’est pas sous-développé, il est intégré de force au monde capitaliste , dans un système structurellement inégalitaire de développement du sous-développement. Samir Amin participera au renouvellement du marxisme et explorera des voies qui permettent de comprendre l’évolution du monde et de sa transformation. 

    Comment rompre cet engrenage ? C’est l’objet de La déconnexion : pour sortir du système mondial publié en 1986 à La découverte. Mais la chute du bloc soviétique n’a fait que renforcer ce système qui, pour lui est caractérisé par l’extrême centralisation du pouvoir dans toutes ses dimensions, locales et internationales, économiques, politiques et militaires, sociales et culturelles. Certes certains grands pays « émergent », et les rapports de forces se modifient, mais partout se creusent les inégalités, le processus de prolétarisation généralisée et s’aggravent les risques de la crise économique social et écologique constatait-il, en aout 2017 (Pour une internationale des peuples, 16 aout 2017)

    Il ne faut pas oublier que Samir Amin a aussi beaucoup étudié les sociétés et économies du Maghreb, d’Afrique occidentale, d’Egypte, à partir de son premier livre, L’Egypte nassérienne (publié aux Editions de Minuit en 1964). Il a livré quelques analyses historiques et politiques lumineuses comme, La nation arabe, nationalisme et luttes de classes, aux Editions de Minuit, 1976.

    Militant autant qu’analyste ou théoricien, Samir Amin n’a jamais cessé de proposer, d’enseigner et d’agir. De 1970 à 1980, il dirige l’IDEP (Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de planification) ; il en fait un lieu d’excellence de la recherche africaine en économie politique et un accueil et un refuge pour les intellectuels africains engagés. En 1975 il a été parmi les fondateurs du Forum du Tiers Monde à Dakar.

    Il contribue aux travaux du CETRI (Centre Tricontinental), basé à Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgique) et animé par François Houtart (1925-2017), avec qui en 1996 il fonde le Forum Mondial des Alternatives, basé au Caire. Ce forum sera en 1999 à l’origine d’une initiative Anti-Davos, prélude à ce qui deviendra lors de sa première édition à Porto Alegre en 2001 le Forum social mondial, et bien entendu Samir Amin participera activement aux FSM suivants. Il sera aussi le président du Centre d’Etudes Africaines et Arabes du Caire, correspondant du Forum du tiers Monde de Dakar.

    Il écrit des projets et manifestes, après la chute du bloc soviétique sa Critique de l’air du temps en 1997,(à l’occasion du 150ème anniversaire du manifeste communiste) Pour la Cinquième Internationale, (éditions Le Temps des cerises 2006)., Ses interprétations de la géopolitique, ces propositions font débat dans le monde des militants altermondialistes. 

    Les mouvements de contestation au XXIe siècle et singulièrement ceux du printemps arabe de 2011 l’interpelle ( Monde arabe : le printemps des peuples ? Le Temps des cerises, 2011), L’Implosion du capitalisme contemporain. Automne du capitalisme, printemps des peuples ? Éditions Delga, 2012).

    Jusqu’au bout il participera (en 2018 de Salvador de Bahia à Zagreb) à des débats et initiatives militantes, ne refusant jamais discussion ou polémique, exprimant toujours sa solidarité, tout en poursuivant études et réflexions. Il appelait quelques mois avant de nous quitter à la nécessaire mise en route de la construction d’une nouvelle Internationale des travailleurs et des peuples.

    Samir Amin, notre camarade, a accompagné le CEDETIM depuis sa création, en lien avec un des groupes qui a participé à son lancement, en 1965 à Dakar. Depuis, il a toujours participé aux débats contradictoires qui ont traversé les mouvements porteurs des luttes anti-impérialistes avec le souci constant de l’émancipation, de la libération des peuples et de la solidarité internationaliste. 

    #Marxisme #Samir_Amin #Développement_inégal #Mondialisation

    • l’article relié est pris d’ici :

      https://www.sapiens.org/culture/globalization-downfall-gladstone-australia

      [...]

      Needless to say, there is a great deal of diversity in both the kinds of change being experienced in these places and the local reactions. To some, change offers job opportunities, peace, and improved infrastructure; to others, it means pollution, eviction, and a loss of livelihood. What all residents have in common is a loss of political autonomy. The decisions shaping their lives are being made further and further away from the specific locales where they live.

      One example from our research is a town in the Peruvian Andes where water was becoming scarce a few years ago. The locals suspected that a new mine was using their water, and they went to complain. However, the mining representatives claimed that it was not their fault and blamed global climate change for the erratic water supply. The question of who to blame and what to do suddenly became insurmountable for the townspeople. What could they do—send a worried email to then U.S. President Barack Obama and the Chinese government, urging them to curb greenhouse gas emissions? The gap was, naturally, too dizzying. Instead, some of them resorted to traditional healing rituals to placate the spirits regulating rain and meltwater. They trusted Pachamama, the goddess of Earth, more than their government or distant international organizations.

      Meanwhile in Lunsar, Sierra Leone, people were looking forward to job opportunities in a new mine (which, in any event, never opened) and a biofuel plantation (which did open). Globalization had brought them many benefits, notably an improved infrastructure. They relished the fact that, for the first time, they could buy bread from a roadside vendor that wasn’t covered in dust, since the road had finally been paved. But even in the midst of some positive outcomes, rapid change is creating discontent and frictions, not least over property rights. In traditional African societies, land was not considered property and could not be traded: It was allocated by the chief, used as a common resource available to all, or cultivated according to customary law. More recently, land has been privatized and turned into a form of capital, and suddenly, boundaries need to be drawn in an unequivocal way. Needless to say, these boundaries are contested.
      Various stakeholders try to work out a land dispute near Lunsar, Sierra Leone, in connection with a mining project.

      [...]

      In the mid-1800s, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, capitalists were easily identifiable. They were typically men, and the property owner was the proverbial man in the top hat, with his waistcoat, paunch, cigar, and gold watch. Today, the situation is far more complicated since ownership structures are transnational, corporate, and complex. Even in democratic countries, where political leaders are elected, there is a widespread feeling that the “powers that be” are further away and less approachable than before, and that there is nowhere to go with your complaints. In other words, both the economy and politics are less manageable, more difficult to understand, and harder to effectively react to.

      There are alternatives to the current situation of powerlessness. One way to counter globalized power is to globalize the response by forging alliances between local community groups and transnational organizations that are capable of putting pressure on governments, public opinion, and corporations. This has been a successful strategy among feminists, trade unionists, and environmentalists in the recent past. Another option—an opposite yet complementary strategy—is to resist the forces that threaten to overrun and disempower local communities. One of the most striking examples of this strategy is the burgeoning support for locally grown food.

      Gladstone is unique compared to previously traditional societies in that it is enmeshed in the economic globalization, which makes the little man and woman even smaller than they used to be. The city’s rise to prosperity was indeed a result of globalization. Yet, the same forces may well cause its downfall. Crucially dependent on fossil fuels, the city may once again become a dusty backwater should the world find better energy solutions.

      Signs of the city’s vulnerability are already evident: Since coal and gas prices began largely declining in 2013, and then a major construction project ended in 2015, the city has seen an unprecedented rise in unemployment and a steep fall in real estate prices.

      [...]

  • Sarah Abdelnour : « Marx est toujours d’actualité pour comprendre les prolétaires 2.0 »
    https://www.crashdebug.fr/actualites-france/15022-sarah-abdelnour-marx-est-toujours-d-actualite-pour-comprendre-les-p

    C’est l’occasion idéale pour comprendre que Karl Marx avait anticipé tous les « effets de bord » du capitalisme... Ceux qui sont passés sous silence par nos élites bien pensantes....

    Car il faut bien que vous compreniez que ce que nous vivons au jour le jour n’est pas une « Crise » au sens usuel du terme..., c’est un hold-up organisé….

    Et il y a des solutions.... Mais elles aussi sont occultées.... Pour mieux pouvoir continuer à nous tondre, il faut que les moutons restent calmes, qu’ils continuent à penser qu’ils n’ont pas le choix....

    Amitiés,

    L’Amourfou

    Le 11 août 2017, place de la République, à Paris, lors de la grève de livreurs à vélo Deliveroo. Photo Denis Allard.REA

    Selon la sociologue Sarah Abdelnour, l’essor des travailleurs indépendants et des plateformes numériques (...)

    #En_vedette #Actualités_françaises

  • Egypt
    Opium or coffee? Islam and its relevance in hard times | MadaMasr
    https://www.madamasr.com/en/2018/07/17/opinion/u/opium-or-coffee-islam-and-its-relevance-in-hard-times

    Karl Marx hated organized and institutionalized religion. Of all his economic and political thoughts, his words equating religion with opium are some of the most notorious: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” He believed that religion has certain practical uses, much like a recreational, mind-numbing substance; that it has the potential to reduce the immediate suffering of those who are sick or injured, providing them with more pleasant illusions. But he also observed that it reduces their energy and willingness to confront the oppressive, heartless and soulless reality that capitalism forces people into.

     It feels like everyone in Egypt has been put through a social and psychological grinder ever since the Egyptian government began to enact the IMF’s loan policies. Catastrophic inflation rates reached as high as 30 percent in July 2017, another wave of price hikes in electricity, fuel, gas and water are affecting nearly all other services, and there was a recent 300 percent increase in metro ticket prices. More than a quarter of Egyptians barely hover above the poverty line, and another quarter is quickly sinking into destitution. Given this, what role does and can religion play in people’s lives?

    In a country with a conservative religious culture, and for a people who call themselves “naturally religious,” religion cannot be the mind-numbing narcotic that Marx imagined. It is too entwined in the social fabric and the historic national identity to have any such effect. If religion were indeed a drug, Egyptians would have developed a tolerance to its mechanism of action a long time ago. Neither can it be an agent for anchoring self-blame and personal salvation, or purely restricted to charity. After all, people can’t survive on prayer alone. It also cannot be used as a tool to blame the masses for these dire conditions, much to the dismay of the ruling elite.

    Surely, it would take a much stronger concoction of narcotics than religion alone to deny the impact of the IMF’s infamous prescription and our state’s economic policies?