SOCIALIZE THE DATA CENTRES!, Evgeny Morozov, New Left Review 91, January-February 2015
►https://newleftreview.org/II/91/evgeny-morozov-socialize-the-data-centres
If current economic, social and political trends continue, we could conceivably end up with data-driven automation for the poor—so that all their time can be spent working—while the rich enjoy cultivating their senses, learning languages, getting to know art, studying. That’s what I fear.
La Histadrout, ce bien étrange syndicat, toujours pas exclu de la Confédération Syndicale Internationale
Pour la Palestine, le 1er mai 2018
▻http://www.pourlapalestine.be/la-histadrout-bien-etrange-syndicat-toujours-pas-exclu-de-la-csi
Quel meilleur moment que le 1er mai pour un petit (pas si petit que ça, en fait !) rappel de la réalité syndicale en Israël, et de la nature de ce curieux “syndicat” appelé Histadrout, contre lequel en 2010 le Congrès de la FGTB a exigé des sanctions. Si la Histadrout ne se distanciait pas “clairement de la politique menée par le gouvernement israélien” avait voté le Congrès de la FGTB, “cela devrait entraîner sa mise à l’écart de la CSI (Confédération Syndicale Internationale), pour non respect de la déontologie syndicale”. Depuis, hélas, on n’en a plus beaucoup entendu parler…
La Histadrout a escroqué des centaines de milliers de travailleurs palestiniens qui ont cotisé, quand ils ont été employés en Israël, et n’ont rien touché en retour après leur licenciement.
La Histadrout ne s’adresse pas aux précaires qui ont remplacé les Palestiniens dans l’économie israélienne : Philippins, Thaïlandais, “sans papiers” venus du Soudan ou d’Érythrée,…
Dans la Confédération Syndicale Internationale (CSI), où elle est malheureusement admise, le représentant de la Histadrout n’a qu’une seule activité : lutter contre toute velléité de boycott syndical.
La Histadrout est infréquentable, concluait Pierre Stambul, coprésident de l’UJFP (Union Juive Française pour la Paix).
#Palestine #Syndicats #Histadrout #CSI #Apartheid #Colonies #Racisme #Escroquerie #Boycott #BDS
Nocturnal private cares: Identity, Negation and Violence (by #Edward_Said, 1988)
▻http://nocturnalprivatecares.blogspot.com/2015/10/identity-negation-and-violence-by.html
(New Left Review)
Wolfgang Streeck: The Return of the Repressed. New Left Review 104, March-April 2017.
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/104/wolfgang-streeck-the-return-of-the-repressed
Lies, even blatant lies, have always existed in politics. We need think only of Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the United Nations Security Council, with his aerial photographs proving the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. As to Germany, one still remembers a defence minister, greatly revered up to this time as a social democrat of the old school, who claimed that the German troops sent into Afghanistan at the urging of the US were defending, ‘at the Hindu Kush’, the security of Germany. However, with the neoliberal revolution and the transition to ‘post-democracy’ [8] associated with it, a new sort of political deceit was born, the expert lie. It began with the Laffer Curve, which was used to prove scientifically that reductions in taxation lead to higher tax receipts. [9] It was followed, inter alia, by the European Commission’s ‘Cecchini Report’ (1988), which, as a reward for the ‘completion of the internal market’ planned for 1992, promised the citizens of Europe an increase in prosperity of the order of 5 per cent of the European Union’s GDP, an average 6 per cent reduction in the price of consumer goods, as well as millions of new jobs and an improvement in public finances of 2.2 per cent of GDP. In the US, meanwhile, financial experts such as Bernanke, Greenspan and Summers agreed that the precautions taken by rational investors in their own interest and on their own account to stabilize ever ‘freer’ and ever more global financial markets were enough; government agencies had no need to take action to prevent the growth of bubbles, partly because they had now learned how to painlessly eliminate the consequences if bubbles were to burst.
At the same time, the ‘#narratives’ [10] disseminated by mainstream parties, governments and PR specialists, and the decisions and non-decisions associated with them, became ever more absurd. The penetration of the machinery of government by previous and future Goldman Sachs managers continued apace, in recognition of their indispensable expertise, as if nothing had changed. After several years during which not a single one of the bank managers who had shared responsibility for the crash of 2008 had been brought to justice, Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder returned to the New York law firm from which he had come, which specializes in representing financial companies under government investigation—and to a princely million-dollar salary. And Hillary Clinton, who together with her husband and daughter had amassed a fortune in the hundreds of millions in the sixteen years since leaving the White House—from Goldman Sachs speaking fees among other things, far above the earnings even of a Larry Summers—entered the election campaign as the self-designated representative of the ‘hardworking middle class’, a class that in reality had long since been reduced by capitalist progress to the status of a surplus population.
Wolfgang Streeck: Why the Euro Divides Europe. New Left Review 95, September-October 2015.
▻http://newleftreview.org/II/95/wolfgang-streeck-why-the-euro-divides-europe
Anyone wishing to understand how an institution such as the single currency can wreak such havoc needs a concept of money that goes beyond that of the liberal economic tradition and the sociological theory informed by it. The conflicts in the Eurozone can only be decoded with the aid of an economic theory that can conceive of money not merely as a system of signs that symbolize claims and contractual obligations, but also, in tune with Weber’s view, as the product of a ruling organization, and hence as a contentious and contested institution with distributive consequences full of potential for conflict.
Zion’s Rebel Daughter
Gabriel Piterberg, New Left Review
▻http://newleftreview.org/II/48/gabriel-piterberg-zion-s-rebel-daughter#_ednref15
In another major paper at the time of the 1948 War, Arendt denounced the massacre of Deir Yassin and the killings in Jaffa and Haifa as deliberate measures of terror by the Revisionist wing of Zionism to drive the Arab populations out of Palestine. The building of a separate Jewish economy by the mainstream labour wing of Zionism—which had been its pride—she saw as the curse that made possible the expulsion of the Arabs (‘ almost 50 per cent of the country’s population ’) without loss to the Jews. In the Middle East, surrounded by a vastly larger Arab population, the result could only be a continual inner insecurity. ‘ A home that my neighbour does not recognize and respect is not a home. ’ The newly created state of Israel would be a land ‘ quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist’—an armed and introverted society, in which ‘political thought would centre around military strategy ’, degenerating into ‘ one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta ’, leaving the Arabs ‘ homeless exiles ’, and the Arab problem as ‘ the only real moral and political issue of Israeli politics ’.
The Critical Net Critic - New Left Review n° 77 (Rob Lucas)
▻http://newleftreview.org/II/77/rob-lucas-the-critical-net-critic
Four decades on from the origin of the Internet, and more than twenty years from the birth of the Web, discussions of these technologies retain a strong mystical odour. Prophecies about a coming ‘information society’, or of new technological ruptures comparable to the Industrial Revolution, have long served to conceal any realistic sense of what they most immediately are; the computer can still be portrayed as a thing of magic, a portal onto some other plane of Being; the Net even more so. Mainstream technology pundits have typically played a propaganda role for American hi-tech industries: ‘we have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology in the world’, Wired magazine ‘Chief Maverick’ Kevin Kelly once declared, while Stewart Brand—founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue and a pioneer of the libertarian Californian tech culture with which the Net has been associated since the start—has come out as an advocate for biotech and nuclear energy. At the same time such figures have been central in making a literary genre of the Web’s mystification.