This is a reply I posted on the Irish Times website to an article titled Despite our cynicism of power, we must trust public representatives by Canon Stephen Neill.

There is something piquant about the fact that the author of this piece, calling on us to put our trust in public officials once again, should be the person who established Barack Obama’s connection to Moneygall, and that it is Obama he quotes to diagnose the problem with Irish politics. In fact, no contemporary figure illustrates better why cynicism with politics is so widespread.

If we look beyond the popular appeal of Obama’s polished and resonant rhetoric about hope, block out the empty accolades from his admirers, and observe his record in office, we see a man who presides over an imperial machine that subjugates and kills indiscriminately abroad, and who serves the interests of a financial oligarchy at home, refusing to prosecute the crimes of Wall Street.

People shouldn’t be too surprised at this, mind: the carefully cultivated image was a professional PR exercise, and the financial backing he received from Wall Street institutions explains his appointment of Wall Street insiders –people who serve the financial oligarchy- to key positions in his administration.

What the case of Barack Obama illustrates, then, is that the reason people cannot trust politicians is not because they are untrustworthy people –in a personal capacity, they are probably as trustworthy as any group- but because the political system is subordinate to the interests of wealth and power, not the interests of ordinary people, and within this system, the politicians who flourish represent the former, not the latter. Therefore the latter is indeed entitled to some degree of cynicism.

Moreover, it ought to be borne in mind that our political life is heavily mediated, and dominant media institutions, such as this one, present the interests of the owning class as if they were the interests of the population as a whole. As a consequence, the practice of holding politicians responsible for everything, and focusing on the minutiae of their activities, is a handy and often publicly subsidised alternative to casting light on who really holds power in society, and what the effect is of that power on the lives of ordinary working people: the sort of thing you would expect journalism in the service of democracy to deal with.

Another effect of such a heavily mediated political life is the notion, widely held, and indeed expressed in this article, that representation is the alpha and omega of politics. According to such a notion, citizens are not active political subjects whose participation in political life is continuous and decisive, but occasional voters who, having read the newspapers and listened to the radio programmes of the rich, transfer their powers of agency to an elected representative for the duration of an election term.

As a result, politics is professionalised, the citizens are disempowered, and a fetish develops –as illustrated once again by Barack Obama- for a political nobility -‘people of integrity’- as the author calls them, to come to the aid of the citizens.

But it is precisely this fetish for ‘a few good people’ –often combined with impotent warblings about reform- that serves to foment the cynicism that the author laments. And it stands to reason that such cynicism serves the interests of wealth and power, because it means a disengagement of the citizens from politics, which means more loot for the rich–as is the case at the moment, illustrated by the scandalous funnelling of tens of billions of public money, which could pay for hospitals, schools and vital social services, to private bondholders. The latter, and the politicians who serve them, are no doubt delighted with outbreaks of cynicism and impotent gnashing of teeth.

The problem, however, is that unless people start talking not only in terms of the specific political system, but also –crucially- the specific economic system that allows such robbery to take place, all we will have to talk about, apart from an economic and social death spiral, is more hand-wringing generalities about trust, cynicism, begrudgery, and so on.

Translation of an article by Jorge Moruno, originally published 18 July 2012 on his blog La Revuelta de Las Neuronas.

The waves of disobedience

Speaking the other day with Political Science lecturer Raimundo Viejo, I mentioned to him that the evolution of mobilisations was as if layers of an onion kept forming on top of one another. He developed this further, by saying that rather than layers of an onion, it seemed more to him like waves of the sea, where each one from its starting point gives shape to the beach due to the sand it leaves behind. The latest to join the range of students and precarious workers protesting are public servants, who observe the way they are turned into the scapegoat for the frustrations and impotence of others who call them privileged, when they would never say such a thing about the powerful.  

Climates of mobilisation form, in a distinct and discontinuous way, but with a shared direction. There is no central “single moment”, but rather a flow, a variability. Just when some thought that with the miners march a kind of final struggle would reach its peak, suddenly the stage was completely redesigned and public servants appeared, cutting off streets using a movement repertoire. Many might say that these are merely corporatist protests, for their pay and nothing more. The same might be said of those who laughed about the property bubble until the day came that they were being evicted. Like the worker protagonist of the film ‘The Working Class Goes to Heaven’ who mocks protesters and calls them lazy, until one day he cuts his finger off and his employer gives him no support, and then he radicalises, mutates in his being.

When someone who works in public functions cannot find a minimum of dignity at work, this brings negative repercussions for the service provided to the public, that is, the majority of the population. But I think many of these people are very clear that their predicament has a collective dimension, just as its solution does.

At any rate this is a matter of a long process, a long distance race, where immersion in struggles undermines entrenched assumptions, conservative perspectives and thoughts, and individualist visions. Only in this sense of being in it with everyone else can our lives take that turn, reaching that higher level that Gramsci spoke about, referring to the relation between spontaneity and conscious direction. This consciousness does not pass through the filter of the party, in any case the reverse is true, the party must submit itself to the filter of the movement. The conscious direction depends more on the orientation taken by the collective brain in movement; connected via network, decentralised, something that can be co-ordinated but difficult to dominate.

Capitalism, just like a snake, is accelerating its change of skin. To go on maintaining the extraction of wealth, to maintain profit rates, to plunder, in the final instance, it needs to destroy everything that at any given moment was useful to it for that same objective. It is for this reason that it attacks all that is known, all that has been assimilated even by people who are conservative, and it seeks to replace it with a Mad Max-style desert. The much vaunted switch to a new era and the undebated adaptation, called for constantly by the government, does not seek this objective of change towards something more advanced. Here it has been decided that our shedding of skin shall be the radical deepening of what has been known until now; and that’s if we are lucky. Music festivals, sun, casinos, construction and the full range of productive activities aimed at practising servitude to those with money.

We are a colony of capitalism 2.0, the darkest side of the digital economy. Any adaptation of exploitation in keeping with the preparedness of the labour force is cast aside, in its place we are condemned to accept being anchored down en masse by a market beneath our abilities. We are not headed for a precarity model of the German mini-job type, that is precarity for the countries on top; in our case we are headed more for a return to feudalism without the protection of the lord, you are free to rot in the street: Neoslavery.  

We have to insist on opening up cracks, to act upon them, to support disobedience, even by those who cause us scepticism and antipathy. They will have to impose fear in the streets and it is always better that there are not many prepared to get involved, which means not having to hold on to one another. Open up hopes, guide public opinion, so that at the sensitive juncture when remaining condemned to debt becomes worse than declaring it odious debt, the rupture successfully overcomes reactionary and totalitarian danger. The more waves that break on the beach, the more people who defended their servitude because they thought of the salvation of their master as their own will stop doing so. And then we really will be at the point of the change of mentality that the lumpen-oligarchy is always asking for; but in the opposite direction: wealth, knowledge, innovation, technology, in the service of people and not of private profit.

Image celebrating the contributions of numerous businesspeople, including billionaire Digicel owner and Irish media magnate Denis O’Brien, disgraced Anglo Irish boss Sean Fitzpatrick, disgraced Nationwide Irish boss Michael Fingleton, and major property developers (McKillen, Mulryan, Quinlan, Ronan) taken from Vatican Museums Report Winter 2009.

Translation of an article by Raimundo Viejo Viñas, originally published on Diagonal, nº 179, pág. 33 (19.07-29.08.2012)

Kleptocracy: This Was The Second Transition

‘The cutbacks announced by Rajoy will deepen the recession until 2013’: thus read the El País headline on the package of measures that starts off the imperial economic protectorate of the EU and the markets. The headline, however, could have been another one no less consistent or resounding: “It’s not a crisis! It’s a scam!”. After all, we are witnessing the worst extortion operation we have ever known.

Extortion, let us recall, is an ‘offence that consists of forcing –through violence or intimidation- the commission or omission of an act or commercially motivated legal transaction with a view to making money and with the intention of causing material loss to the victim or a third party’. In this case, the intimidation is that exercised by the markets, and the act or commercially motivated legal transaction is the measures approved in Las Cortes with the goal of ruining the lives of the 99% to the benefit of the 1%.

But is there really a crisis?

The explicit awareness that the measures not only do not remedy, but prolong and deepen the crisis reveals something far more worrying, if this were possible, than the obvious irresponsibility of misrule. Namely, that 1) the national State is no longer the centre of modern sovereign power, 2) liberal democracy and representative government have failed institutionally to reconcile capital and labour; 3) the command that rules us today operates somewhere midway between supranational institutions like the EU and financial institutions like ratings agencies (to cite two obvious examples of a far more complex network.

With things this way, what kind of (mis)government is it that is based on continuing to deliberately aggravate the suffering of the citizens? An illegitimate government no doubt.    It is also, as we have pointed out, a government that is nothing of the sort, but instead the transmission belt of decision-making bodies no less illegitimate, given that they evade all democratic control. But above all, it is a (mis)government that responds to a logic that must be diagnosed in its functioning, denounced in its effects and fought with an effective strategy.

Kleptocracy

The logic of (mis)government can be identified with a type of regime that is established with each measure that gets approved: kleptocracy. From the Greek kleptēs or theft and kratos or rule, it can be defined as “government of those who steal”. Given that we are speaking of an illegitimate robbery, one can say, straight out, the “government of thieves”. It is a matter of a kind of regime that consists not of governing from, by and for the demos (as in democracy), but in the service of the logic of the priva(tisa)tion of resources that were once public.

A simple example: if university fees go up and only a minority can pay them, but we all fund public universities with our taxes equally, where is the redistribution of wealth? Where is the equality of opportunities? Where are the principles of the welfare State? Where is the Constitution? This, however, is how kleptocracy works: it subtracts from the 99% to give to the 1%.

Debt is the mechanism that makes legalised robbery possible: the private debt which through illegitimate means is converted into public debt; the debt which, like a deus ex machina condemns us to poverty. Debt today consumes the future and, equally, reduces people’s existence to its merely vegetative dimension. This is why stopping the payments is an imperative in the defence of a decent life. Faced with a rule that appears before us as a financial automatism, it is today urgent to move forward along the route of disobedience, in autonomous empowerment, towards the political regime of the commons.

A reply to Stephen Collins’s article published Saturday 21 July, headed ‘Impossible to protect public pay and welfare budgets‘

I can only agree with Stephen Collins’ assertion that the Coalition parties can ‘take credit for stabilising an appalling situation’. Indeed, appalling is the new stable, with 15% unemployment and ever greater swathes of the population sinking into poverty and misery, whilst disposable income for the richest in society grows. What is more, it is hard to disagree with him pointing to ‘wasteful public spending programmes’.

However, he neglects to name the most wasteful public spending programme of them all: the constant flow of billions of euro in public money –which could be used for spending on education, health, social welfare, investment programmes and so on- into the coffers of private bondholders. Indeed, the Bondwatch site helpfully points out that for July alone, such payments will total €1.2 billion, which is roughly the same amount as what was paid out in June, allowing for a definition of ‘rough’ to encompass a hundred million euro of public money here or there.

How could a political correspondent concerned with wastefulness overlook such grave misuse of public funds –and the consequences for democratic politics in the State?

To compound things, Collins claims that the purpose of the IMF is to check up –in the manner of an avuncular medic, perhaps- on Ireland’s ‘progress towards economic health’. He seems to be unaware that the whole reason the IMF is exercising such a tight rein on Irish economic policy is on account of the tens of billions in public funds that the State channelled towards the wealthy owners of private banks.

In reality, the sole criterion that the IMF has for ‘economic health’ at the moment is whether or not Ireland will continue to pay back the money it got loaned. If this can be achieved by slashing social spending, so be it. Indeed, we can say that the IMF –and not just the IMF but any institution that prioritises the needs of finance capital over the needs of a population- sees a healthy population as a threat to the health of bank balance sheets.

But what about the health of journalism? Shouldn’t we be expecting a political correspondent to be telling us about what the political function of the IMF really is, instead of painting it as some kind of purveyor of impartial expertise?

Moreover, when Collins writes of ‘vested interest groups’ ‘wading in to defend the status quo’, how come he doesn’t appear to include banks and their bondholders –whose only trouble with the status quo is that they haven’t raided the public purse enough yet- or those employer groups who have a vested interest in seeing to it that growing numbers of the population are driven into greater precarity and misery?

And when you think about it, isn’t there something a bit odd about a political correspondent referring to the framing of next year’s budget as though political correspondents such as he did not play a significant role in how that framing takes place?

After all, politics in these articles is presented as an activity you have to be ‘inside’, as the name of these columns suggests. This implies the exclusion of the wider public from the political decision making process, confining the much ballyhooed ‘economic sovereignty’ mentioned here to the decisions taken by a professionalised political caste. And when such a presentation of politics also omits any consideration of how the interests of finance capital continue to take precedence over the interests over the population, well, when it comes to talking about the budget in these terms, isn’t that framing too?

In summary, whilst modesty might forbid him from doing so, I think Stephen Collins should take some of the credit for stabilising an appalling situation too.

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A translation of a letter written by the Madrilonia collective, addressed to Partido Popular voters, published 13^th July.

Six months on: Letter to PP voters

When Rajoy won the elections, we wrote you a letter that began by saying: ‘We realise you have placed your trust in the PP because you think that they will get us out of the crisis and, above all, because you suppose it will create jobs. Last Tuesday, Mariano Rajoy, the president of the government, declared in the Congress that we will continue in recession and that he could not create jobs.

The president has recognised that we are not free to choose our future. Democracy is at stake.

Six months have passed since the Rajoy government took office and not only have the lives of the majority failed to improve, but they get worse every day. Reforms that were not in the electoral programme and that will worsen what Zapatero’s bad government had already done. Bankia has been nationalised to protect a swindle now under investigation and the government continues to protect those responsible. Evictions take place whilst thousands of homes lie empty. There are no policies for job creation, nor is tax fraud being tackled. Sacrifice falls upon ordinary people who see their wellbeing vanish in exchange for nothing.

The government has lied to the citizens, and, especially, it has lied to you, by approving measures that it promised it would not implement, such as the increase in VAT, co-payment for pharmaceuticals and signing up to a bailout. None of what was promised has been delivered. The Partido Popular’s political project does not exist. Controlled remotely by the Troika and the European Central Bank, it merely carries out the orders that they send it to guarantee a bailout that, once again, will not go to the citizens, but to the banks.

All of these measures affect you the same as anyone else. We know that the vast majority of you are part time workers, unemployed or trying to keep small businesses afloat; or your children are in this situation (if they haven’t emigrated). Whatever confidence you might have in the government has to be at a minimum.

Perhaps there are those among you who feel that those responsable for all this are the ones who protest against cutbacks or who occupy the squares in order to demand more democracy. If this is so, we can only say that none of these beliefs is going to give you back your job, your income, your home, your school or your health centre. No doubt there are many others among you who know that the media campaign that seeks to create divisions between people is mere propaganda so that we refrain from thinking about all that they are taking away from us, and the way this might be resolved among us all.

Fear is normal in light of all that is happening; but fear, anguish and rage ought not prevent people from realising something as simple as the fact that there is no difference between the policies of the PP and the PSOE. Both parties have benefitted the 1% against the rest. They have no plan for the country beyond their own survival. None of them has tackled the problem of corruption. The politicking that sets the two big parties against one another is of no use, it merely serves to let the political caste justify its existence.

We said it six months ago and we say it again now. You have the responsibility as citizens to express your opinion about what is happening. If you are prepared to chant ‘they don’t represent us’ you will be recovering your sovereignty against those austerity policies that will not take us out of the crisis, but only impoverish us. If Rajoy does not govern since he merely follows orders from the undemocratic European institutions, he should resign immediately? Will whoever comes after be different? Who trusts politicians? Perhaps we need a new constitution, with new norms that return power to the citizens.

We have not lived beyond our means; they loaned us poisoned money on credit whilst wages lost purchasing power. When the crisis came they sacked us or we had to close our small business because no-one came to rescue us as they did with the banks. We are not responsible for this crisis; it was others who got rich speculating on the stock exchange or through the property bubble. We all want the guilty (politicians and bankers) to be prosecuted and condemned. We all want the greatest well-being for ourselves and the people around us. We all want democracy to be returned to its legitimate owners.

No-one is going to ask anyone what party they voted for, we are all needed to recover what belongs to everyone.

Let’s not blow out of proportion the suggestion, made by the IMF, that child benefit ought to be means-tested, and that unemployment benefits ought to be cut. For one, the suggestion about child benefit ought to be means-tested has already found favour with public representatives in the Labour party. And no doubt the former is an option favoured by the great majority of representatives in the Dáil, as well as the IBECariat, of course, though calculations about the likely fallout in the next elections might weigh on the brains of plenty of TDs of a right wing inclination.

It was also advocated by Will Hutton back in 2010 at a talk convened by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. Asked by current Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton about the need for the preservation of universal provisions in the social welfare system, Hutton basically said, no, get rid of them.

However, the fact that it is the IMF making the suggestion is given particular importance, and there are some who see it as a special affront, given that it is unelected. And it is true that the IMF has no right to lecture anyone on economic policy: on account of the disasters it has wrought on so many countries, its status as finance capital’s bailiff, the fat pensions its economists are entitled to, and so on.  

Nonetheless, we should be wise to the interplay between the different agencies who are imposing economic policies on the population of Ireland. As I noted above, what the IMF advocate is no different from what other political figures, the IBECariat, and the media, have been demanding for some time. But when the IMF makes such a call, and when it is reported and discussed throughout the media, it is treated as some sort of irresistible decree delivered by the gods.

That this should happen –without there being any questioning either of the right or authority of the IMF to make such a declaration, or of the consequenes for democracy that it should be in a position to do so, or an examination of the common ground between the IMF and the main political parties and the business class on this matter- is an illustration of how the political and media establishments are the willing servants of finance capital.

Another illustration is when the IMF makes statements in one of its analyses –which are largely performed for cosmetic purposes so as to obscure that organisation’s role as the facilitator of all-out robbery- that mortgage relief appears to have worked in some country or other, or that there must be an equal sharing of some burden of bank debt or other, and these statements are treated as headline news by the public broadcaster. Again, without any questioning of its right or authority to do so.

More important, however, is the drip-drip form in which these announcements, suggestions and declarations are made, largely uncontested, without there being any attempt to join up the dots about the broader vision for Irish society.

In the particular case of means-testing child benefit, there is a move away from mutual, collective responsibility to atomised individualised responsibility for the welfare of children. This move is given legitimacy through a kind of phoney communism: where well-off voices on TV and radio flagellate themselves with silk scarves and emote that their cup runneth over whilst that of the deserving poor is held aloft, empty.

What this charade serves to obscure is that the bank bailout –for all the straining and groaning fakery by the government- has been paid for, and will continue to be paid for, through robbery of the working class –through cuts in salaries, benefits, public services, jobs, job security, labour rights, among many other things.

And as long as this goes on, as long, the intention, on the part of those advocating stripping away whatever kind of universality there is, is that Ireland moves ever further toward the type of society in the image of its would-be owners: a society characterised by Hobbesian competition of all against all, stark and misanthropic, riddled with resentment, suspicion and naked exploitation.