An Open Letter to US Activists from the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in South Africa April 7, 2009 To: All poor Americans and their communities in resistance The privatization of land–a public resource for all that has now become a false commodity–was the original sin, the original cause of this financial crisis. With the privatization of land comes the dispossession of people from their land which was held in common by communities. With the privatization of land comes the privatization of everything else, because once land can be bought and sold, almost anything else can eventually be bought and sold. As the poor of South Africa, we know this because we live it. Colonialism and apartheid dispossessed us of our land and gave it to whites to be bought and sold for profit. When apartheid as a systematic racial instrument ended in 1994, we did not get our land back. Some blacks are now able to own land as long as they have the money to do so. But as the poor living in council homes, renting flats or living in the shacks, we became even more vulnerable to the property market.

From Precarity to Unemployment: the Great Recession and EuroMayDay Alex Foti Neoliberalism and monetarism have ended up ruining the world, like the antiglobalization movement always said they would: like two mad scientists, they proved socially, environmentally, and economically unsustainable. And so they fucked up majorly and have produced the worst economic crisis since the times of Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler. Problem is that it's hard to cheer because the vast majority of those laissez-faire bankers and deregulating economists are still in charge, still dictating the terms of the game. Those who precipitated the crisis with their foolish policies of banking deregulation, welfare privatization, trade liberalization, labor deunionization are still at their desks! They tell us we should be quiet, accept layoffs and wage cuts, take some fiscal stimulus if we are lucky, and after 2010 we will again live happily under capitalism ever after. BULLSHIT! And they are throwing trillions at the banks who have made the riskiest of bets on real estate, paid off millions in bonuses to assehole CEOs and let the economy hang dry when the debts were called in. Trillions for bankers, cuts for people. This is the European equation. Not only this is scandalously immoral, it's economically counterproductive. Banks are hoarding liquidity for fear of going bust and don't supply new credit. As Keynes and Kalecki first showed, during great depressions monetary policy doesn't work, since it falls into a liquidity trap. Only social spending, public investment and redistribution away from profits and rents toward wages and transfers is gonna do the trick. For three decades, as they were happily pocketing the quantum leap in social productivity afforded by the information revolution, the élites said there was no public money for services, schools and the precarious many, while hedge funds and private equity funds were siphoning off zillions for the super-ritzy few. They said wages had to stay low, because global competitiveness demanded it, until income distribution became as absurdly unequal as it had gotten on the eve of the Great Depression. No wonder another major depression has ensued. This crisis is no random phenomenon, it was caused by the venality and stupidity of the financial and political elites.

The Financial Crisis and the Fourth World War Shawn Hattingh For the last three decades a vicious war, the Fourth World War, has been waged on the people of the world by the global political and corporate elite[1]. They have unleashed a whole array of economic weapons, from trade liberalisation to privatisation to financial liberalisation, to enrich themselves at the expense of the vast majority of people. As part of this onslaught, welfare systems have been attacked, workers rights have been undermined, and environmental legislation has been savaged. The aim of all of these measures was to spread capitalism into every aspect of people’s lives. Everything, including culture, social relations, the environment, water and even air were turned into commodities to be bought and sold. While the richest 400 people on Earth used this system to amass vast amounts of money (more money than the poorest 3 billion people combined), over 18 million people died every year for the last 20 years because of poverty[2]. When people protested that all of this inequality and deprivation were unfair – and demanded that people should be provided with quality education, quality healthcare, food, and clean water; they were told by the elite not to be ridiculous. In fact, people were simply told that no-one had the money to provide such ‘luxuries’ as food, quality healthcare and quality education. Yet, when some of the largest companies got into trouble in the last 20 years, states have rushed to bail them out. For instance, when the savings & loan debacle erupted during the Bush Snr years, the US government spent at least $ 200 billion in public money bailing out some of the corporations involved[3]. At very the same time, Bush Snr and then Clinton were working hard to attack the poor through cutting welfare. Such is the world we have come to live in. It is a world where profits have been privatised for the rich, while losses and misery have been socialized for the poor - a world of the Fourth World War.

The Nights of Labor Revisited Jacques Ranciere Preface to the Hindi edition of The Nights of Labor: the workers’ dream in 19th century France. Trans. Abhay Dube. English Trans. Rana Dasgupta . To be published by Sarai The Indian reader who opens this book in 2009 will no doubt think it is a strange thing. How can these stories of nineteenth-century French lockmakers, tailors, cobblers and typesetters be relevant to the information revolution, the reign of immaterial production or the global market? This question, it should be said, was already present for the French reader who opened this book twenty-seven years ago. We did not speak yet of globalization, nor of the end of the proletariat, of history or of utopia. Quite the contrary: France had recently elected a combined socialist and communist government, which proudly laid claim to the traditions of Marxism and of working class politics. And it is in this context that the book seemed to run counter to its own time, and became difficult to classify. The author was a professional philosopher who had struck his first blows, in the 1960s, by participating in the theoretical enterprise of Louis Althusser, who wished to rebuild Marxist theory. Now, instead of offering philosophical theses, he was telling stories about the French working class of the nineteenth century. And he offered nothing by way of Marxism – no analysis of the forms of industrial production, of capitalist exploitation, of social theories or of class struggles or worker movements. His workers, moreover, were not “real” workers; they were artisans from olden times, dreamers who dabbled in poetry and philosophy, who got together in the evening to found ephemeral newspapers, who became intoxicated by socialist and communist utopias but for the most part avoided doing anything about them. And the book seemed to lose itself in the aimless wanderings of these people, following the dreams of one, or the little stories others recounted in their diaries; the letters they wrote about their Sunday walks in the Paris suburbs, or the everyday concerns of those who had left for the United States to try out their dream of fraternal communalism. What on earth were readers to do with these stories in 1980? The question is not, therefore, one of geographical or temporal distance. This book may seem untimely in an era that proclaims the disappearance of the proletariat, but it also seemed so in the previous era, which claimed to represent the class that had been united by the condition of the factory and the science of capitalist production. Let me put it simply: this book is out of place in a postmodern vision for the same reasons that it was already out of place in a classical modernist vision. It runs counter to the belief, shared by modernism and postmodernism alike, in a straight line of history where cracks in the path of time are thought to be the work of time itself – the outcome of a global temporal process that both creates and destroys forms of life, consciousness and action. This book rejects this because, despite its apparent objectivity, such an idea of time always places a hierarchy upon beings and objects. The belief in historical evolution, said Walter Benjamin, legitimizes the victors. For me, this belief legitimizes the knowledge that decrees what is important and what is not, what makes or does not make history. It is thus that the social sciences have declared that these little stories of workers taking an afternoon walk, or straying far from the solid realities of the factory and the organized struggle, have no historical importance. In doing so they confirm the social order, which has always been built on the simple idea that the vocation of workers is to work – and to struggle – good progressive souls add – and that they have no time to lose in wandering, writing or thinking.