But than that’s the mailing list I got this link from: The Making of a Party? The International Socialists 1965-1976 which is a short history of the English International Socialists, later the much loved-to-hate scourge of the pseudoleft, the Socialist Workers Party.
I must confess I do have a eakness for the sort of Peoples Front of Judea/Judea Peoples Front history/gossip that makes up much of the British left’s history. Anybody having any good links for me?
Mitch Wagner has a post up about mothers being indicted for “neglecting” their children when they come to harm. He mentions two cases. In the first, a mother was arrested and now faces 16 years in prison because when she left her children aged 1 and 9 at home to go to work at McDonalds, an arsonist burned her appartement down and killed them. Both children suffered from sickle cell anemia, which is only mentioned in the context of why the mother is supposedly guilty of neglect. Me, I wonder why there was no support to help her cope with two handicapped children.
In the second case, the mother of a 12 year old bully victim who committed suicide was actually convicted on one felony count of having put her child at risk by creating a home environment that was unhealthy and unsafe. It seems their home was filthy and disgusting: “witnesses during the trial testified that the conditions inside the house were a nightmare of dirty clothes, dishes and debris.” Which may be because the mother worked two jobs to make ends meet and the kid’s father was in prison. The kid frequently soiled himself to have an excuse to not go to school and escape the bullying and slept in a closet surrounded by knives to create a sense of safeness. Nobody but his mother was there for him, nobody cared else cared if he lived or died and yet, after the mother sued the school over the death of her son, she was the one arrested. It’s a fucking disgrace.
Mitch wonders why it’s only the mother who is blamed for these incidents, when in both cases the primary guilt for the childrens death lies with others. Where for example was the father of the first two children? Why did the school in the second case not stop the bullying? What is going on here?
Something that goes beyond just lousy luck, goes beyond being in a singular bad situation. Both these cases are just symptoms, logical outcomes of a rotten system. Dad’s away or in jail, mother has to work two jobs to make a living and has not support whatsoever to help her raise her children, because there are no support systems for her in place. She must work to feed her children but we also expect her to be “a good mother”. In the meantime, the socalled professionals in the school and social services systems neglect their duty, to the point of not just allowing but actually encouraging bullying in the case of the boy who committed suicide.
These women, like millions of other working class mothers in America actually have no choice. They do not have the luxury of childcare available to them and they certainly cannot afford to put their children above their jobs: if they did, they wouldn’t have a job anymore.
What you got here is an interlocking tangle of class, race and gender issues, all excaberating the situation these women got themselves in. First, despite several decades of emancipation, there’s still the default assumption that a mother is solely responsible for her children and the only one to blame if something goes wrong with them, a convenient scapegoat that lets others of the hook. Whatever choice these women made, it would’ve been wrong. If they don’t work they and their children don’t eat, if they do work they’re not taking care of their children.
Second, there is the class issue. If they’d been nice middle class women they would’ve had so many more options, so much more support systems to fall back upon and more importantly, they’d also had had the education to make use of them. It’s an automatic assumption in this sort of discussion that everybody knows how to claim their rights, deal with the city council/school system and make themselves heard. This is not the case. Quite often to claim even the minimum support you’re entitled to you have to make a nuisance of yourself, be persistent and know who to speak to. It helps if you also have a nice middle class accent, as I found out in my partner’s (who does have a nice middle class accent) dealings with the English social security system.
Finally, at least in the arson case there’s race. In spite of the happy “coulour blindness” of those who never have to worry about racism themselves, this does still play a role in how you are treated. Like your class, your race is either an automatic handicap or a unearned advantage. Especially when dealing with state bureaucracy.
All of which isn’t helped by cynical politicians making hay of family values, while refusing to actual help those families and in fact punish those single mothers who put their children above work. Welfare mothers being the lowest of the low, after all. What also doesn’t help is not educating people, especially not educating people about birth control.
This is not an easy problem to solve, partially so because there are large vested interests who don’t want an answer to this problem. The US economy and increasingly every other western economy needs a large, docile working class of disposable workers. Keeping single mothers working long weeks just to survive fits in nicely with this. After all, paying them enough to survive on just a regular job would cut too much into shareholders’ profits… Worse, an educated working class with some job security may turn out awfully militant.
It’s easy for me to say what needs to be doing. There needs to be money and resources available for single mothers so that they don’t have to make the choice between taking care of their children and working. Everybody should be able to earn a living wage for themselves and their children and not have to work eighty hours a week just to pay the rent. Everybody should be taught the skills to be able to deal with government bureaucracy, to survive in a modern society. Birth control should be freely available.
Easy to say, less easy to put into practise. But it can be done. There is no western society that doesn’t have the resources to put this into practise, if it wants to, But first it needs to want it. If you feel about this the same way as I do, get involved. Fight for a living wage, a decent social safety net and education. It’s worth it.
Or, one man’s journey into sectarianism:
We’ve all been there, it’s a wet Saturday morning, you drag yourself into the city centre to part with some of your meagre funds, fighting your way through the throngs of shoppers, teenagers, stressed out parents, and there they stand, the radical lefties. Thrusting their ‘radical’ left wing politics at you, asking for your name on their petition, stopping you with loaded questions such as ‘Do you think the National Health Service needs more funds?’ or ‘Do you agree with the governments policy on immigration’ and then pulling you into a debate they are quite sure they are going to wipe the floor with you in. You are finally presented with the party paper to purchase for your greater advancement at the measly sum of ٠.50, or another such price which at the time seems just a bit too much for a piece of paper packed with political headbanging, which you will glance at idly one afternoon and then use to line the cats litter box, or mop up a spilt cup of tea. Who are these people, why do they spend their Saturdays doing this? Well, opening the dusty closet door of my murky past I can now reveal some insights, for, yes, shame of shame, I WAS ONE OF THEM!!
The Revolutionairy Communist Party of which he talks no longer exists; they’re now the people behind Spiked Online, just as weird, but “left-libertarian”.
Found via Pedantry, an article by Naomi Klein in the Guardian talking about worker occupations of factories in Argentina:
Here in Buenos Aires, every week brings news of a new occupation: a four-star hotel now run by its cleaning staff, a supermarket taken by its clerks, a regional airline about to be turned into a cooperative by the pilots and attendants. In small Trotskyist journals around the world, Argentina’s occupied factories, where the workers have seized the means of production, are giddily hailed as the dawn of a socialist utopia. In large business magazines like the Economist, they are ominously described as a threat to the sacred principle of private property. The truth lies somewhere in between.
[…]
But isn’t it simple theft? After all, these workers didn’t buy the machines, the owners did – if they want to sell them or move them to another country, surely that’s their right. As the federal judge wrote in Brukman’s eviction order: “Life and physical integrity have no supremacy over economic interests.”
Perhaps unintentionally, he has summed up the naked logic of deregulated globalisation: capital must be free to seek out the lowest wages and most generous incentives, regardless of the toll that process takes on people and communities. The workers in Argentina’s occupied factories have a different vision. Their lawyers argue that the owners of these factories have already violated basic market principles by failing to pay their employees and their creditors, even while collecting huge subsidies from the state. Why can’t the state now insist that the indebted companies’ remaining assets continue to serve the public with steady
jobs?Dozens of workers’ cooperatives have already been awarded legal expropriation. Brukman is still fighting. Come to think of it, the Luddites made a similar argument in 1812. The new textile mills put profits for a few before an entire way of life. Those textile workers tried to fight that destructive logic by smashing the machines. The Brukman workers have a much better plan: they want to protect the machines and smash the logic.
Also via Pedantry, a collection of articles on the Argentine crisis and the factory occupations available at the Workers Power Global site. Take the propaganda for their own groups with a grain of salt, but their reporting is sound.
I was vaguely aware of what has been happening in Argentina, indeed mainly through “small Trotskyist journals”, but this is the first mainstream report I’ve seen of it. Glad to see some positive news for a change, especially from a country which in all accounts seemed destined to descent into anarchy. Guess we underestimated the Argentine people…
As Naomi Klein alluded to, what is happening in Argentina really is the purest form of socialism: workers taking control of the means of production, not because some glorious vanguard led them to it, but of their own accord democratically and from bottom up, because capitalism failed them. Though it’s unlikely a socialist utopia will come from this, this is highly encouraging. We’re not helpless victims of neoliberalism, of an uncontrollable and unpredictable global market we just have to put our trust in and hope for the best. We can actually do something, instead of staying victims.
The main question now is whether this can be sustained, if those companies which are now in the hands of their workers, will stay that way, if these can survive in what is still a market-capitalist economy. (Also, whether people actually want to continue this way, or whether they’d rather go back to the old situation and not have to worry about anything but their own job. The biggest mistake you could make in evaluating the Argentinian situation is assuming the former is the case.) An important step has already been made with the establishment of
national meetings of workers and other groups.
I’m going to keep an eye on this. Here’s a link to Google News Argentina stories. Finally, for those who think those workers are little more than thieves: what’s more important, the “theft” of unused factories or these people’s livelyhoods?
Set your agendas: according to the next G8 summit will be “early June 2003”, in Evian-les- Bains, France. According to the article, the most likely dates the conference will be held on are 1-3 June.
Evian-les- Bains, a tourist town best know for its mineral water, is somewhat easier to reach then where this year’s G8 summit was held, Kananaskis, Albert, but still less so then Genoa. It’s a small town, with approximately 7,500 inhabitants. Our socalled leaders are still trying to keep the riffraff out.
If elitism is not your thing, remember that there’s an alternative, the European Social Forum:
It is an an open meeting space designed for in-depth reflection, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and planning of effective action among entities and movements of civil society that are engaged in building a planetary society centered on the human being.