Aufheben #21-2012

Contents INTAKES: COMMUNITIES, COMMODITIES AND CLASS IN THE AUGUST 2011 RIOTS Although initially a ‘community riot’ in Tottenham, where the principal target was the police, the disturbances spread rapidly as ‘commodity riots’ across London and eventually many other major conurbations. Access to electronic devices servicing social media appeared to have accelerated the diffusion of disturbances in comparison to those in July 1981. The spatial restructuring of local shopping streets into more distant retail parks and shopping malls encouraged mobility and organisation amongst the ‘looters’. Failures of policing, though highlighted by the media, were a result of surprise, lack of trained personnel and logistical problems, rather than cop ‘conspiracy’. DRIVING THE NHS TO MARKET: PART 1 The establishment of the NHS in 1948 is widely seen as the jewel in the crown of the post-war class settlement in Britain. The Conservative Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley is committed to change this and wrenching the jewel from the fallen social democratic crown. The Health and Social Care Bill threatens to open the way for the breakup of the NHS and its replacement by a US-style private health care system. Yet this drive to the market in health care is not new. The basis for the proposed ‘reforms’ were put in place under New Labour. In this article, we place the current market ‘reforms’ in historical context. We shall see how the neoliberal attempts to re-commodify health care over the past thirty years have faced formidable problems, not only from the fact that NHS has remained popular, but also because the delivery of health through an integrated public service has proved to be highly cost effective. GOING UNDERGROUND Is there a future for traditional workplace-based organisation? How does the modern changing nature of work affect opportunities for workers to organise as workers – or even as revolutionaries? In this article, we review the Solidarity Federation pamphlet Workmates which looks at these questions in the context of the anti-privatisation struggles on the London Underground in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While the pamphlet poses many of these questions and offers insight into the process of workers resistance to management attacks, often the answers are left all too brief or unexplored.

2013-14 issue of Aufheben with 3 longer articles - After the Crisis - 5'000 years of debt? - Fracking Struggles

Contents: BREXIT MEANS… WHAT?HAPLESS IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCESA number of left groups and individuals campaigned for the UK to leave the European Union in the recent referendum. We argue that the Brexit campaign, and the referendum itself, its results and its implementation, have been one with a victory of the ruling class against us. The implementation of Brexit will negatively affect solidarity among workers and radical protesters, setting back our strength and potentials to overturn capitalism. Many people in the radical left were blinded by the ideological forms of our capitalist relations, the reification of our human interactions, to the point of accepting a victory of the far right with acquiescence, or even collaborating with it. THE RISE OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES:REIFICATION OF DEFEAT AS THE BASIS OF EXPLANATIONConspiracy theories have become more widespread in recent years. As populist explanations, they offer themselves as radical analyses of ‘the powerful’ – i.e., the operation of capital and its political expressions. One of the features that is interesting about such conspiracy theories therefore is that they reflect a critical impulse. We suggest that at least part of the reason for their upsurge (both in the past and in recent years) has to do with social conditions in which movements reflecting class struggles have declined or are seen to be defeated. We trace the rise of conspiracy theories historically and then focus on the most widespread such theory today – the idea that 9/11 was an inside job. We suggest that one factor in the sudden rise of 9/11 conspiracy theories was the failure and decline of the movement against the war in Iraq. CHINA: THE PERILS OF BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S SPECTACLESWe argue that the transition facing China is the shift from the export of commodities to export of capital. This transition would mark a major step in transforming China from what we have termed a mere epicentre in the global economy to its establishment as a distinct second pole of within the global accumulation capital – an emerging antipode to that of the US. The group Chuǎng argue that recent Aufheben analyses are ‘too optimistic’ concerning China’s ability to maintain economic growth rates and fuel global capital accumulation. We reproduce their article as an Intake. In our response, we contend Chuǎng are unable even to recognise what we are suggesting let alone argue against it. This is because in making their analysis of the current economic situation in China, they have borrowed the spectacles of neo-liberal economics. They have thereby inadvertently adopted a myopic and ideologically circumscribed perspective that contains crucial blind-spots.

Contents Return of the crisis part 2: The nature and significance of the crisis In the last issue, we gave an account of the immediately apparent causes and unfolding of the recent financial crisis, which began with the ‘credit crunch’ in the summer of 2007 and which culminated with near meltdown of the global financial system following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008. Here, in Part II of our article, we step back to consider the nature and significance of this crisis by looking at its deeper and longer term causes. In order to overcome the limitations of existing Marxist and radical theories of the crisis, we shall argue that it is necessary to consider far more closely the relation between the emergence and development of global banking and finance and the global restructuring of real capital accumulation that has occurred over the past thirty years. We argue that the emergence of global banking and finance has played a central role in the restructuring of global capital accumulation that brought about the long economic upswing between the early 1990s and 2007. We will then show how the continued economic restructuring of the real accumulation of capital over the past decade sowed the seeds for the crisis at the very heart of the global banking system. The renewed imposition of work in the era of austerity: Prospects for resistance Before the crisis of 2008, the New Labour government had launched renewed efforts to impose work with the ‘Welfare Reforms’ of 2007-9. These reforms were aimed at forcing the sick, lone parents, the elderly and the long-term unemployed to compete on the labour market. With the crisis and then the election of the new coalition government, these reforms have been intensified, with actual cuts to benefit rates as part of a larger austerity programme that is threatening mass job losses. These proposals have now triggered a substantial response from the left, and this article analyses the current situation and its contradictions. From here we consider the question of whether a mass movement against welfare cuts is possible. Earthquakes, crack-heads and utopias. Review article: A paradise built in hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disasters by Rebecca Solnit Can communities of resilience become communities of resistance? In this article we take John Holloway’s recent book Crack capitalism as the jumping off and landing point for a review of another, connected, book, Rebecca Solnit’s A paradise built in hell. Solnit’s six case studies of spontaneous communities of mutual aid arising from disasters – including the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, 9-11, and Hurricane Katrina – turn on its head the notion that emergencies and disasters are a case of ‘everyone for himself’. They each offer an inspirational glimpse of how life could be. Holloway appears to go further by describing these accidental communities as one example of the ‘cracks’ that could lead to social change. Disturbingly however, his idea of change can too often sound like co-existence within the interstices of capitalism. Solnit’s less grandiloquent account gives a partial explanation for why we should not see ‘communities in disaster’ as catalysts for worldwide revolution.

A new issue of Aufheben! Again with three large articles:  Obama's Pivot to China Workers on the Experience of Work Disaster Communism