Famine without Free Press

Amartya Sen pointed out in his essay The Value of Democracy that "in the terrible history of famines in the world, no sustainable famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press."

Human Rights Watch was taking press rights seriously when it accepted this proposition and agreed that the best way to prevent famine today is secure the rights of a free press. They go on to say that free press can also prevent outbreaks of HIV/AIDS.

Except that press freedom entails a class system. In countries where the ability to publish is prevented by substantial economic barriers, important information may not get out from deep beneath the social strata. When Sen and HRW say press freedoms, then, we can assume they mean more broadly to secure the right to free expression and free information. Otherwise, while I think this analysis is interesting and thought provoking, a free press class is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to prevent famine or AIDS, whereas free information and expression are. Sen's work is entirely empirical.

One Reason I Don't Fit In With My Radical Friends

Because on this rare occasion I agree with Hollywood.

A Spectre Is Haunting The Internet

"...the spectre of free information!"

I put The Globalistik Informatik Manifesto onto Google Docs. As far as I'm concerned it should be open to editing. If you have information you think should go into it and want permissions, send me a message. By the way, I found a similar manifesto through WikiSource.org by the name "The dotCommunist Manifesto", written by a professor at Columbia University in 2003. His manifesto is very well-written and extends beyond the arguments in The GIM. He has 7 main points, and the Globalistik Informatik Manifesto is basically his point # 7.

Labor Solidarity for Maersk

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On Nov. 7th 2007 a picket line was called to push the administration of Maersk (headquarters in Tacoma, WA) to allow workers to join the union of their choice instead of the company union that managers have imposed on them.

An arbitrator called by the longshoremens' union (ILWU) and management decided whether the picket line Jobs With Justice staged was safe to cross. The arbitrator deemed it unsafe and required management to compensate the longshore workers for not crossing the line.

Jobs With Justice organized the picket, Tacoma SDS and other community members who heard word-of-mouth about the picket went to the port to show solidarity.

Maersk is the largest shipping company in the world, JwJ said. Its North American headquarters are located in Tacoma. The workers are not granted basic needs that other union workers are, such as a living wage. Workers are forced to join the company union which acts as an obstacle to them. Maersk has tried to convince workers that the company union is a good union, and that other unions are dangerous. The workers are not convinced. They voted to change the company union, and Maersk is unwilling to do that at this time.

Tacoma P.D. singled out Tacoma SDS members and asked for identification and phone numbers. There were no physical confrontations, but our group felt it was unfair that officers would single out SDS without any reasonable suspicion. We told them we would not consent to any of their questions or searches. Officer Darlington said the port has been the site of conspiracies to conduct terrorism. "People ride jetskis next to tankers and then they speed off in the other direction," he said. We were not convinced that this warranted suspicion towards Tacoma SDS.

Mark Jensen from UFPPC wrote,

Maersk began operations at the Port of Tacoma in 1985, and completed a major port extension in 2002, finishing the Port of Tacoma's largest terminal before the Iraq war. Maersk Line Ltd. contracts with the Department of Defense Military Sealift Command to operate and manage a number of military vessels, and has approximately double the volume of its business with the U.S. Government since Sept. 11, 2001, undertaking one third of the shipping of all U.S. military equipment to Iraq in preparation of the March 2003 invasion and earning more than $1 billion in sales through 2006, according to a CorpWatch (http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id =13196&printsafe=1) account.

***Earlier I published an account of this protest that we wish to clarify. The Jobs with Justice (JwJ) port protest was a community solidarity picket not a wildcat strike. JwJ is a community coalition that includes many community organizations as well as unions. Solidarity picketers did not include Port of Tacoma workers and JwJ did not call for and is not calling for a strike of any workers. Securitas is the contractor that Maersk hired to employ the Maersk Terminal guards who are organizing to form a union. The company union has a different name than Securitas. The arbitrator is an independent "neutral" selected jointly by management and union leaders and is not from the Longshoremens' union (ILWU).

The ‘Man From Mars’ and His View of Business Enterprise (part 2)

Thus once the industrial arts begun developing, it was easy to understand the plight of industry. Capitalism in its earlier form was concerned with serviceability value, that is, the conditions under which a product was considered useful. With the whole entourage of businessmen, advertisers and underwriters comes the concept of vendibility value.

The value created by the advertisers especially has only in unintentional cases any actual utility for the buyer; it only serves to increase the cost of production. “Its ubiquitous presence” in the realm of business enterprise is a “cost incurred with a view to vendibility, not with a view to serviceability of the goods for human use.” (BE p. 59)

All this marks a decisive change from the small-scale production and the individual owner-entrepreneur of early capitalism, which Veblen considered to be the beginning of “the decay at the top.” The center of attention of businessmen shifts progressively from the production of useful goods and services to the sale and manipulation of corporate securities which in turn represent essentially the capitalized earning power of the underlying firms. It is in this context that the effects of continuous technological advancements must be assessed.

As Veblen saw it, the primary effect of this was a continuous lowering of production costs. With new more efficient technologies, the result would be a steady undermining of existing capital, which would cause an incessant depressing effect on business enterprise in general. Here we may discern a basic similarity in the theories of Veblen and Marx: in the final analysis, both believed that the fate of capitalism would depend on the course and outcomes of the struggle between capital and labor.

But the tension Marx saw was found in the realm of class interest and labor-exploitation having been created by the capitalist class, whereas Veblen saw the tension as having been conditioned by the machine process itself. Industry and its instrumental values leads technicians and engineers to join institutions like trade unions; finance and pecuniary gain leads businessmen to oppose them. The opposition grows. However, Veblen did not purport that the machine process would inevitably lead to a socialist revolution, unlike Marx, since not only the workers but the business class would defend their interests too.

However, Marx offered a positive theory of action, whereas Veblen worked incessantly to curb any action taken under the guise of his theories. Various solutions were proffered to amend the Veblenian problem, all of which, in Veblen’s eyes, failed to do any justice. Educational institutions could not solve the plight of industry since it only existed to further the ideology of the business class. Neither could a free press solve the problem since it reinforces the consumer and cultural ideas under the guise of distributing information .

Using national politics as a way of replacing old leadership with new leadership was seen as futile since it could not address fundamental issues. Lastly, militaristic-imperialist adventures which were the solutions the Japanese and German governments used would keep the existing technology but simply devolve the institutions to earlier, more primitive, eras.

It is important to note that Veblen was not interested in policymaking, but rather mere observing and predicting. He did not want his observations to be taken by policymakers as gospel truths; he thought of himself not as a Marxist per se; not as a technocrat or technological-determinist, nor even a postmodernist. He was, as various writers saw it, something of a man from mars.