Political Economy

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Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation
Robin Hahnel
New York: Routledge, 2005

ROBIN HAHNEL HAS WRITTEN an important book that will be of real value to all libertarian socialists (a term he uses very broadly to cover anyone who wants to replace capitalism with a system characterized by the direct control of workers and consumers over their own economic activities).

The book is divided into four sections. In the first section, Hahnel examines the concepts of economic justice and economic democracy in an effort to get the Left to have a clearer sense of what its aims ought to be. He also tries to dispel various myths that, he argues, have debilitated movements for economic justice and democracy in the past. Part two is a critique of capitalism, of Communism (using the term as popularly understood: the single-party states with centrally-planned economies, exemplified by the Soviet Union), and of social democracy, as well as an analysis of where libertarian socialism went wrong.

In part three, Hahnel examines democratic postcapitalist visions. He analyzes market socialism and community- based economics and finds them both lacking. He summarizes the vision that he favors, participatory economics, describing and defending its main features and adding two new aspects to the model that he and Michael Albert have elaborated in many other writings. In the fourth and final section, Hahnel proposes a general strategy for the Left -- a way to reach the goal of a society of "equitable cooperation." His strategy combines working for reforms -- though in a particular way -- with constructing and being part of experiments in equitable cooperation within capitalism.
http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue40/Shalom40.htm
Stephen R. Shalom
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Although he looks old and tired today, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney was once hailed as a dynamic reformer, with a sharp eye for new talent. One of the first things he did, after getting elected in 1995, was appoint former Sixties' radicals to be federation field reps and department heads. In Washington, D.C. and around the country, Sweeney's "New Voice" administration quickly filled up with energetic ex-staffers of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), his own union. Among them were veterans of campus and community organizing, the civil rights and black power movements, feminism, and Vietnam-era anti-war activity. On the labor left, no single personnel decision by Sweeney raised higher hopes and expectations than Bill Fletcher being named education director (a job he had held, under Sweeney, at SEIU previously).

Bay Area labor journalist David Bacon was still in awe of Fletcher's "key decision maker" role as Sweeney's assistant when he interviewed him for The Progressive in 2000. Bacon recounted Fletcher's background as an African-American activist and "self-described socialist," with ties to the Black Radical Congress and Marxist journal Monthly Review. Drawing on his own history as "a left-wing organizer," Bacon recalled the political hostility of AFL-CIO operatives during the era of George Meany and Lane Kirkland, Sweeney's conservative predecessors. "With Fletcher," he wrote," I felt as though I was talking to someone from the same movement and history I've lived myself." Concluded Bacon: "Times have changed."

Not long after this interview appeared, times changed again. Fletcher was purged from his post and exiled to Silver Spring, Maryland, where he toiled briefly at the AFL's George Meany Center. Then, he left organized labor altogether, for half a decade, to replace anti-apartheid campaigner Randall Robinson as president of TransAfrica Forum. After that, Fletcher taught labor studies in New York City and began work with co-author Fernando Gapasin, a well-known West Coast Chicano labor activist, on a critique of organized labor during the Sweeney era and earlier periods, which has now been published by University of California Press. Their collaborative effort — Solidarity Divided — is quite unlike the usual "tell-all" tome by a presidential appointee who has quit the White House staff or been dropped from the Cabinet. In fact, we never do learn what personal falling out with Sweeney — or political conflicts with his real inner circle — led Fletcher to be pushed out the door of the "House of Labor." (In 2007, he was finally able to return, as a headquarters staffer for the American Federation of Government Employees.) Instead, we get a thoughtful, analytical overview of recent developments in American labor, and much of its earlier history as well. But, as a practical "guide for those seeking to reconstitute [a labor-based] Left and build a globally conscious social justice unionism in the U.S," the book contains many curious omissions. In fact, Solidarity Divided is far more detached (and lacking in specificity) than one might expect from authors long engaged in day-to-day trade union work and left-wing politics.
Steve Early
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While socialist opposition to bigotry, discrimination and violence is necessary, these scourges have not been solved, and cannot be solved by democratically assimilating, and thereby "disappearing" their victims into their corresponding systems of domination. Mere assimilation does not solve the problem of racism, based on white supremacy, of homophobia, based on heterosexism, of sexism, based on male supremacy, or of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, based as they are on Christianism and white European imperialist supremacy.

"White" Euro-American imperial domination still frames "the Jewish Question" internationally and in Israel/Palestine, and as a Jewish feminist Marxist I consider it imperative that we turn the question around. As I said in my original review, we need a strategy to cleanse these dominant cultures of their Superiority Complexes. Just as anti-racists have turned around what used to be called "the Negro Question" to analyzing White Supremacy, and feminists have made clear that the problem is not "the Woman Question," but male supremacy, so the answer to "the Jewish Question" is destroying and dismantling all systems and ideologies of racial and religio-ethnic domination, and supplanting them with a culture and practice of real and substantive equality.

Sherry Gorelick
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If Obama or McCain really were a solution, then why have they personally stood by while innocent people have been tortured and habeas corpus was abrogated? Since when has morality and justice depended upon whether you have the votes to stop a horrid bill? That’s what a filibuster is for. Had either Obama or McCain done anything to stop any of the White House’s crimes for the last eight years, would there be a need for the change that Obama and McCain say we should vote for them to carry out?

If Obama really were a solution, then why should we expect him to have an awakening upon taking office if he’s been slumbering, morally and legally, all of these years?

If Obama really were a solution, and did have such an awakening in the White House, why would the same system and same individuals who cooperated all these years with the monsters running our country let Obama do an about-face in the White House?

If elections really were a solution, then why hasn’t the Democratic majority in Congress, ended the war, the torture, and the massive, warrantless surveillance over all of us and impeached the sorry excuses for human beings in the White House? Pelosi and Reid claim that they haven’t had the votes to stop the war. Nancy and Harry: that’s what your leadership posts are for. You don’t need the votes. All you have to do is block the funding bills from coming out of committee. If you don’t like the telecommunications amnesty bill or the spy-on-all-Americans bills, then all you have to do is keep the bills from coming up for a vote. You can kill these bills in the same way you’ve been killing the impeachment resolutions against Cheney and Bush. But then, Nancy and Harry already know this.

If elections really were a solution to these towering, world-historic crimes, how can it be so simple to fix these horrors as pushing a button and electing a new president and vice-president?

Dennis Loo

Republican presidential nominee John McCain said that the Supreme Court decision protecting habeas corpus “is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

The four Supreme Court justices (Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas) who voted for tyranny in America are all Republicans. They all came out of the Federalist Society, a highly subversive group of right-wing lawyers who are determined to elevate the powers of the executive branch above Congress and the Supreme Court.

The Republican Party has morphed into a Brownshirt Party. The party worships “energy in the executive.” If the Brownshirt Republicans are reelected, they only need one more Supreme Court appointment in order to destroy American liberty.
Paul Craig Roberts
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You are so correct..

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

Turkish singer tried over dissent
One of Turkey's best known singers, Bulent Ersoy, has gone on trial charged with attempting to turn the public against military service.

The charges were brought after she suggested it was not worth sacrificing soldiers' lives in Turkey's conflict with the Kurdish separatist PKK group.

The transsexual singer made her comments on television last February.

The army was conducting a major operation against the PKK in northern Iraq at the time.

Some 40,000 people have died since the conflict with the PKK began in 1984.

Ms Ersoy did not show up in court, saying she had to attend a concert, so the trial has been postponed until September, when she will be obliged to attend.

Ms Ersoy has already said she will stand by her comments.

But she faces up to four-and-a-half years in prison if she is convicted.

Criticism risky

Hakkan Ozgur, one of those who submitted an official complaint against her, was in court for the start of the trial.

"The Turkish military is fighting a war on terror," he said.

Some suggest that behind closed doors, many Turks share Bulent Ersoy's exasperation

"I believe making propaganda against this is illegal. It creates doubts in people over whether to go to the military. It sows doubt in the minds of those whose children are already serving."

"The lives of our soldiers are at stake."

Ms Ersoy is Turkey's best known diva, adored across the country, says the BBC's Sarah Rainsford in Istanbul.

She was already one of the country's most popular male singers, when in 1981 she underwent a sex-change operation.

But questioning the Turkish military can be a risky business, our correspondent says.

Article 318 of the penal code - dissuading people from military service - is frequently used by the military against its critics.

Meanwhile critics say a separate article, making it a crime to insult the Turkish nation and its institutions, is used to stifle free speech.

Ms Ersoy's trial may well scare many others into silence, our correspondent says.

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The unwillingness of the nation’s news media to seriously consider the need for Congress to respond to and challenge the president’s clear abuses of power—even as they themselves condemn of those abuses of power—is a blot on the journalistic profession perhaps worse, and of more lasting consequence, than their failure to act as watchdogs and critics during the run-up to the Iraq War, when they acted more as patriotic cheerleaders than as news organizations.

As impeachment advocates, including Rep. Kucinich, have pointed out, unless this president and vice president are impeached by the current Congress, any—and probably every—future president will feel empowered by unchallenged precedent to ignore laws passed by the Congress, to go to war without Congressional approval, to spy on Americans in violation of the law, to ignore court orders, to abrogate international treaties, and to lie to Congress and the American people. Unless Congress asserts its rights under Article I, it will no longer even be a co-equal branch of government, but instead will have been reduced to nothing more than a debating society.

Editorialists, while refusing to honestly report on this Constitutional crisis, have been parroting the claim of gutless and calculating Democratic Party leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in saying that with the nation at war and with a critical election approaching, there are “more pressing” matters to consider than impeachment, and that impeachment would be a “diversion.”
DAVE LINDORFF
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