Archive for the 'International' Category

Uncommon sense on Israel/Palestine from an interesting source

Published
by
Paul Norton
1 week, 2 days ago
in Activism, International, Middle East, Palestine, Politics, Religion and Terrorism
. 49 Comments

Yesterday, prompted by a link Paul Burns provided on my One day that shook the world thread, I did a Google search for reviews of Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky. Not surprisingly, many such reviews were on Trotskyist websites and all the Trotskyist reviews were scathing of Service’s book, including one on the Workers’ Liberty site.

However, what I also found is that the Workers’ Liberty group has broken with what it terms the “absolute anti-Zionist” orthodoxy in which much of the far left is mired, campaigns on the Israel/Palestine issue under the slogan “Israel-Palestine: Two Nations Two States!”, and displays some refreshingly clear and principled thinking about how the Left can best show practical solidarity with the Palestinian national struggle and with progressive and democratic Israelis. Their arguments against calls for a boycott of Israel make particularly interesting reading.

I don’t with to be seen to be endorsing the Workers’ Liberty line on Israel/Palestine chapter and verse. However, those on the Left, and particularly the revolutionary Left, who consider themselves anti-Zionists and may not have found my arguments from 2006 convincing, could do worse than to read and reflect on what Workers’ Liberty has to say.

One day that shook the world

Published
by
Paul Norton
1 week, 3 days ago
in Europe, History, International and Politics
. 57 Comments

Twenty-five years ago today, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by a unanimous vote of the CPSU Politburo. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive chronicle and analysis of Gorbachev’s time as leader, reformer and unintentional dissolver of the Soviet Union, I’d like to take this occasion to offer some reflections on the remarkable period in history which began on 11 March 1985.

One of the things which made this period so remarkable is that when Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary, nobody could have foreseen the sequence of events over the subsequent six and a half years which ended the Cold War and saw the Soviet Union reformed out of existence. Of course, the question of how a totalitarian Stalinist regime such as that of the USSR might be transformed, and what it might be transformed into, had occupied many of the best minds across the political spectrum for decades. Some, such as the East German dissident and subsequent Green Party activist Rudolph Bahro, anticipated the possibility of the Soviet Union experiencing a process of reform similar to the Prague Spring of 1968, with the difference that such a Soviet Spring would not be cut short by the tanks and guns of a much bigger neighbour before it could usher in a democratic socialist “third way” between capitalism and communism. The Trotskyist Left put their hopes in some kind of “workers political revolution aganst the bureaucracy” to bring about socialist democracy. Communist regimes in different countries experimented with limited political and intellectual liberalisation, economic reforms including limited restoration of market elements and enterprise autonomy, workers’ participation in enterprise decision-making, campaigns against corrupt and incompetent officialdom and poor work discipline, and other minor reforms.

The fact remained, however, that in the Soviet Union and all countries where what historian Robert Service calls the “Soviet compound” had been established, neither agitation from below nor reform from above had fundamentally challenged its basic ingredients – in Service’s words, “a one-party state, dictatorship, administrative hyper-centralism, a state-dominated economy, restricted national self-expression, legal nihilism and a monopolistic ideology.” The Prague Spring, for all its undoubted promise, was not allowed to transcend the limits of the compound before the Warsaw Pact tanks arrived. Poland’s Solidarnosc movement had been repressed by the regime in December 1981 and, when Gorbachev took office, survived as an underground movement. In the Soviet Union itself, the complete crushing of civil society by Stalin and the grip retained on political life by his successors meant that nothing resembling Solidarnosc could have existed in 1985.
Continue reading ‘One day that shook the world’

The Hukou system

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 week, 6 days ago
in China
. 6 Comments

Until I visited China in 2008, I’d never heard of the Hukou system. But it’s a massive deal in China, with hundreds of millions of migrant workers in the larger cities treated as second-class citizens, with little access to basic government services like schooling and health care. In terms of the sheer number of people it effects, it’s probably the single biggest human rights issue in that country.

So it’s a massive deal if the Hukou system is to be reformed; something that has been predicted for some time but hasn’t seemed to go anywhere. But Kam Wing Chan has a post at the East Asia Forum suggesting that there may be some gradual change in the wings:

Yes it’s true – hukou (household registration) reform is again back in vogue in China’s ‘post-crisis’ conversations. Premier Wen Jiabao has been talking about it and, unusually the catch phrase has also been placed in the first ‘Central Document’ of 2010. Following the lead of these two sources, hundreds of newspaper articles and commentaries have opined on it in the last few weeks. On March 1, 13 big-city newspapers from 11 provinces in China also made a rare joint appeal for accelerating reform of the hukou system in a co-signed editorial. In sum, the issue is firmly in the spotlight, and hopes have been raised for some real hukou reform.

I’m no expert, but it seems straightforward to me that substantial reform of the Hukou system will result in massive social expenditures for the Chinese government (which is obviously a good thing for those currently not receiving such basic services); funding this, without reducing the incomes of Chinese city elites, is going to require continued economic growth. It does tend to explain some of the Chinese reluctance to commit to any kind of emissions reduction that might restrict economic growth, even as their cities choke on their own pollution.

John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 2 days ago
in Activism, Culture, Feminism, History, International, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 30 Comments

There’s been a bit of word play on another thread about John Quiggin’s discussion of the coinage of the term ‘Agnatology’ to describe “the study of the manufacture of ignorance”. There are resonances between his diagnosis of the political right and Geoffrey Barker’s take on “bogan politics”, discussed on LP early in the week. What hasn’t attracted so much comment is Quiggin’s view on ideology.

The long struggle of left and centre-left parties to maintain their relevance in the face of the resurgent market liberalism of the late 20th century gradually eroded any belief in the possibility of a fundamental transformation of capitalism, to the point where such ideas no longer receive even lip-service, let alone serious and sustained attention. Instead, these parties have found themselves lumbered with the task of managing the mixture of social democratic and market institutions that emerged from the conflicts of the 20th century, tweaking them sometimes with market-oriented reforms and sometimes with marginal new interventions. This is broadly consistent with the ‘end of ideology’ story.

[Incidentally, I think there's an interesting story to be told about the right's turn to the manufacture of ignorance, and its new-found populism - having to do with, among other things, profound social changes - but that's a tale for another time.]

I recently read Donald Sassoon’s magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism. Sassoon tracks the history of the European left, and while there’s much to take away from his discussion, one conclusion to be drawn is that the project of social democracy lost its transformative edge because of its reluctance to make institutional changes – both in governance and in the broad field of political economy. Where such changes were made, and where there was a hegemonic cultural space for social democracy, as in some of the Nordic democracies, social democracy, even at the height of neo-liberal reaction, retained a strategic capacity to think long term about the shift to a different form of society.

It’s sometimes argued that the left won on the terrain of culture, and lost on the terrain of economics. There’s some truth to this, but not much comfort can be taken from it, because the social shifts towards a greater liberty to choose one’s style of life largely bubbled up from below, rather than being intended by left parties (in which there’s always been an authoritarian stream matching that of conservatives). And the post-materialist politics of liberation has shown a remarkable capacity for co-optation into consumerist capitalism, mistaking civic for collective action, as Nina Power has recently remarked.

It’s also somewhat questionable that Australian Labor has ever really had a strategic and transformative dimension. There’s good reason for the ideological distinction between labourism and social democracy.

Quiggin concludes his post: Continue reading ‘John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology’

It would give people something to talk about on Twitter?

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 2 days ago
in Politics and USA
. 28 Comments

Years ago, many political scientists in the US used to critique their rather free flowing party system for not offering voters a definite programmatic contest. In post-war normative democratic theory, parties were seen as able to organise and coalesce a range of interests and measures into a competing platforms which would enable citizens to make a rational choice in voting.

Of course, now that one of the two parties has started to act much more like the disciplined parliamentary caucuses found in Westminster democracies, not everyone is so enamoured of this notion.

But it’s interesting to see a bit of momentum building for a Question Time in the US, which would represent a distinctly different relation between the executive and legislature.

I wonder, though, whether many of its proponents have taken the time to watch Australia’s Question Time, or Britain’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

Teach for Queensland

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 5 days ago
in Education, Politics, Queensland and USA
. 113 Comments

The Queensland government is pondering the introduction of the ‘Teach for Australia‘ model into state schools. The idea, trialled in Victoria and inspired by an American programme, is to fast track graduates with Bachelor’s degrees in any discipline into classrooms after six weeks’ training, with subsequent training delivered while they’re in the workforce.

I’ve been teaching at tertiary level for over a decade, I’ve taught Education students, and I’ve got family and friends who are or have been teachers. I don’t think I’d feel at all confident about going into a classroom after six weeks with a PhD as well as a few other degrees! – I’d be very well aware that I know little about child psychology and development, or classroom and behaviour management, let alone bearing the very weighty responsibilities for students’ well being and health and safety. I doubt all that could be taught in six weeks, and I doubt that you can learn it effectively through some sort of apprenticeship model, no matter how many ‘guides’ and ‘mentors’ you have.

University faculties, to my certain knowledge, already have great difficulty placing students on prac because of the additional workload on their classroom teachers, and stories about the difficulties involved are legion from teachers, academic supervisors and education students.

I believe there’s been no evaluation of the Victorian programme yet, and it’s not hard to see this as a simplistic twist on the movie fantasy of idealistic teacher saves poor kids’ lives script. The reality is that, no matter how idealistic, beginning graduate teachers have a high propensity to leave the profession in their initial years, because they’re already not adequately supported. Similarly, what disadvantaged schools need is stability, experience and professional skills in the workforce, and the fact that’s hard to secure is probably the real justification for Anna Bligh’s consideration of this policy.

How this all meshes in with Bligh’s overall goal of more rigorous teacher registration and qualifications is also a question still to be answered.

As well as insulting the professionalism of teachers, this also cynically cheapens the idealism of those who might be attracted to the programme in the cause of saving Bligh’s electoral skin. It’s particularly depressing because her earlier contribution to school education in Queensland, though susceptible to a range of legitimate criticisms, was the outstanding contribution she’d made as a Minister.

Stuff white people do; or when flying a plane into a building isn’t terrorism

Published
by
Kim
3 weeks, 6 days ago
in Disasters, Language, Media, Politics, Terrorism and USA
. 83 Comments

So the Unabomber of the Obama era (or should that be the Tea Party era?), Joe Stack, flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. And there’s a rant on the intertubes to justify his deed.

But, it’s not terrorism, apparently.

raving black lunatic asks a series of questions, including but not limited to this one:

How can you fly a plane into a building out of spite, and have folks call it “suicide by plane?” That’s like calling it “suicide by portable chest bomb.”

Though for a truly bizarre discussion, you might want to consult Australia’s own Catallaxy Files.

International climate change policy after Copenhagen

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in International, Media, Politics and Polls
. 43 Comments

Last night on Lateline, Ross Garnaut pointed out to an apparently taken aback Tony Jones that 57% support for the ETS – as a major reform – was actually extremely impressive. Today in New Matilda, Ben Eltham rightly says that “the Government is not in nearly as much trouble as many believe. It leads in the polls on nearly every issue that matters, including preferred prime minister.”

The clear implication is that this isn’t the impression people would form if they went by the coverage and commentary in the Australian media.

Similarly, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Copenhagen spelt doom for any concerted international action on climate change (despite the fact that the Coalition’s policy is still tied into setting emissions targets, no matter how ineffectual it would be; and that it also provides Liberal moderates some leverage if the Abbott truck hits an electoral blackspot). There’s been nary a word published about the targets that states agreed to submit post-Copenhagen. It’s as if the event’s only significance was its ramifications for Australian domestic politics.

The Economist links to The Sustainability Institute’s interactive Climate Score Card, which enables a picture to be drawn of the probable impacts on average temperature of the various nations’ commitments. The paper also points out that:

countries can express their intentions in different ways, and that many have provided two or more levels of commitment: a low one that they say they will pursue regardless, and one or more higher ones that they will try for if enough other countries are also going high.

For those whose horizon is wider than the prism of the Australian partisan debate, the whole thing, as they say, is worth reading.

The politics of risk and uncertainty in an election year

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Economics, Europe, Federal Elections, International, Markets, Politics and Sociology
. 36 Comments

Writing in Crikey yesterday, Guy Rundle described the Greek imbroglio as the second wave of the Global Financial Crisis:

So let’s try and make it as clear as possible — the second wave of the 2008 GFC has begun, and Greece is where it started from. The first wave was prompted by the collapse of a series of private investment banks, starting with Lehman Brothers. The second is starting with the deep problems occasioned by the indebtedness of sovereign nations using the broad security of the euro, to be entrepreneurial with their budgets. That’s entrepreneurial in a political sense — thus Greece’s centre-right New Democrats left the nation’s finances unreformed as a way of giving the illusion that the wave of post euro-entry prosperity was solidly backed. Instead the country has simply wildly over-borrowed from its future.

That much is Greece’s problem primarily, and Europe’s secondarily. It becomes a global matter when the degree of exposure of the global banking system becomes clear — hot on the heels of the last crunch, and with nothing resembling a real recovery in-between.

Writing in Crikey today, Bernard Keane concluded that things may not be as rosy as we’d thought in Australia:

The euphoria that Australia has avoided a recession is now giving way to the realisation that as the Government’s stimulus withdraws, there are real questions about just how strong the private-sector growth needed to replace it is.

And the threat from overseas, and particularly the impact of sovereign debt and sluggish economic growth on financial and currency markets, has placed a big question mark over external demand.

Continue reading ‘The politics of risk and uncertainty in an election year’

“He can’t tell a kiwi from a kangaroo”

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Economics, International and Politics
. 22 Comments

Tony Abbott’s been claiming again that New Zealand is an object lesson in why we don’t need the level of economic stimulus delivered by the Rudd government. Abbott, who said in an interview in 2003 that he found economics a “bore”, first made this claim on the 7.30 Report back in January. Peter Martin was quick to point out that New Zealand had gone through a recession in five consecutive quarters.

In a withering column, Peter Hartcher asks:

Tony Abbott is trying to restrain Barnaby Joyce from blurting nonsense, but who will restrain Tony Abbott?

Is Abbott deliberately mendacious, or just ill-informed and sloppy with the truth?

Palin’s primary path

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Foreign Elections and USA
. 38 Comments

If you like stats and maps, you should have a look at Nate Silver’s post on Sarah Palin’s chances in the primaries in 2012.

Silver doesn’t mention this explicitly, but what jumps out at me is the sheer irrationality of the primary process – so much depends on the order in which states vote and the nature of the vote (ie closed or open primary, caucus). Then there’s the unrepresentativeness of some of the states which are most important in the primaries by size and demographics, not to mention the fact that primaries tend to privilege an electorate which is closer to the ideological extreme than those voters who will actually decide the general election. All of that applies to the Democrats too, of course, but it’s unlikely they’ll have competitive Presidential primaries in 2012.

Tony Blair at the Chilcot Inquiry

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in International, Iraq, Middle East, Politics and War
. 111 Comments

There’s been some talk about Tony Blair’s testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq War on the open thread, so it might be best to have a dedicated post to focus comments.

A good starting point for discussion is the Guardian’s comprehensive coverage.

Limits to growth?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Consumerism, Economics, Energy, International, Policy, Politics and Sociology
. 51 Comments

The New Economics Foundation in the UK has released a major report – Growth Isn’t Possible. The Foundation, whose motto is ‘economics as if people and the planet mattered’, questions whether exponential economic growth is possible in the face of the disjunction between its imperatives and the limits of the planet’s biocapacity. The authors, Andrew Simms and Victoria Johnson, observe that the language of orthodoxy and heresy is a significant one in economic discourse; among other things, I’d add, the political imperative to focus on redistribution rather than the justice of distribution (and thus the inequality inherent in capitalist society) itself constrains questioning. Yet the thesis that growth has its limits is the pure province of neither 70s faddism or heterodox Marxists. John Stuart Mill proposed in 1848:

… the increase in wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state.

The NEF report is summarised in this blog post by its co-author and the Foundation’s policy director, Andrew Simms. The report itself is clearly and well written, and marshals an impressive range of evidence and argument about the economics and politics of energy usage. It’s not a quick read, but I’d strongly urge a perusal of, at least, the introductory and concluding chapters. Many won’t want to have the debate it foresees about limits to growth, but it’s one I am sure will not go away.

Obama’s real world economic experiment

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Economics, International, Markets and USA
. 71 Comments

Responding to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachussetts Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown, Barack Obama is set to announce a three year discretionary spending freeze. (Note that military spending is apparently compulsory not discretionary.)

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.Com thinks that the move is, politically speaking, a “brain freeze”. He also queries “the wisdom of curtailing government spending in the middle of a massive consumption deficit”.

Obama’s move will placate ‘Blue Dog Democrats’, including champion deficit hawk Evan Bayh of Indiana, whose seat is looking shaky. In a broader sense, it’s further evidence of the triumph of politics over economics, albeit in a somewhat different register; a return to a sort of pre-Keynesian mindset, or Maggie Thatcher’s petit bourgeois rhetoric of ‘household budgets’ without the monetarism.

David Dayen:

Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he’ll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs.

Andrew Leonard at How The World Works:

If ever there was a time to pull out the old Karl Marx chestnut, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” that moment is now. Prominent members of Obama’s own administration have warned against repeating the errors of 1937, namely, Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to cut spending and balance the budget too quickly, thus strangling a nascent recovery from the Great Depression. But with the U.S. economy far from healthy, the president has decided, once again, to bow to the political winds and make the deficit priority number one.

It’s also the effective decoupling of the US from the G20 stimulus agenda, and further proof that America is mired in the politics of domestic decline. What happens to a globalised economy when the globalisers opt out?

Incidentally, this is additionally the sort of policy u-turn the Coalition in Australia have long been advocating. If further sclerotic growth, or even a double dip recession in America, is the result, it won’t be without its ramifications for the political debate here.

Update: Robert Reich on how Obama’s political panic could ruin the economy.

Update: Michael Lind.

Update: Brad DeLong: This is such a disaster in the making.

Update: Krugman: Obama Liquidates Himself.

Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 15 Comments

A number of US financial blogs are reporting that Ben Bernanke faces a chance of failure to be confirmed by the American Senate for a second term in office.

James Bianco at The Big Picture has all the details, and there’s also coverage at Naked Capitalism.

What’s the big picture here?

On the short term political front, Scott Brown’s win in Massachussetts exemplifies the frustration felt by many with politics as usual. Whether it’s expressed as concern over deficits (and that’s a much more salient touch point with Indendent voters on health care than the rhetoric of the wingnuts), or just as disgust with the jobless recovery’s disjunction with business as usual on Wall Street, there’s no doubt that an election year is starting to focus minds on the politics of financial decision making.

… and that brings us to the bigger picture. Continue reading ‘Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt’