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The news that Detroit has declared bankruptcy, the largest North American city to do so thus far, foreshadows an extension of the social crisis currently afflicting the centers of capitalism. 

As some observers have noted, Detroit is just the tip of the iceberg in what is sure to be a procession of indebted municipalities looking to discharge debt through bankruptcy.  The invariable result will be an extension of the undeclared campaign of austerity already forced upon the masses of North American workers.

The particular drama unfolding in Detroit has brought the questions of pension funds and race to the forefront.  In the media, a disingenuous and pernicious ideological offensive is being carried out in which public pensions are being presented as a major contributing factor in the indebtedness of cities like Detroit.  The implication is that the approximately 20,000 retired municipal employees, mostly police and firemen, somehow caused the bankruptcy of a city that from the 1930s until the mid-seventies maintained a population of over 1.5 million. 

A simultaneous campaign rooted in racism is being waged to justify the lack of public policy response to the crisis.  What the media outlets will never admit is that the decline of Detroit is rooted in the particular form of capitalist growth, which manifests itself as a dynamic juxtaposition of development and underdevelopment at the international level as well as within a given country.  Under capitalism, the creation of wealth is always accompanied by impoverishment while the economic growth of particular sectors as well as geographic areas, once beyond a certain point, invariably transforms into decay.

The enormous accumulation of capital in the automobile industry during the better part of the 20th century resulted in the much-heralded emergence of Detroit as the center of production for US auto companies.  However, it was the very same massive investment in factories, machines, new technologies, etc. by automakers in pursuit of profits that under conditions of increased international competition during the 60s and 70s invariably resulted in a concomitant profit squeeze for these same companies.  As a result, US automakers pursued the only set of survival strategies possible under conditions of generalized commodity production: shift productive investment to lower-wage areas while simultaneously attempting to increase the exploitation of the labor that remained; reorganize factories for efficiency primarily through the introduction of technological innovations; and extract subsidies from the state.  These strategies, though key to the recent reemergence of US automakers, were never intended to safeguard the interest of Detroit's residents.  Indeed, the history of Detroit's auto industry over the past hundred years is a case study of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall so masterfully explained by Marx in Volume 3 of Capital with all of the accompanying negative social consequences for the residents of the "Motor City."...(Click title for more)

Wealth Gap Spurs on Socialist in Seattle

When was the last time a Seattle City Council candidate argued there was nothing extraordinary about herself? Or volunteered details about her recent arrest? Or freely admitted she expects her opponent to raise more money - by tens of thousands of dollars?

It's been awhile, if ever, is the safe bet, which is also the answer to yet another question about the curious campaign of Kshama Sawant: When was the last time a socialist advanced to the city's general-election ballot?

Sawant - who last week did just that by winning more than a third of the vote in a three-candidate primary field for the Position 2 council seat - is not your conventional candidate. And that's exactly what she's aiming for.

"There are some things that really set us apart from your-business-as-usual, corporate election campaigns," said the 40-year-old Seattle Central Community College economics instructor and latest challenger to four-term incumbent Richard Conlin.

"Those campaigns revolve around the single-minded goal of advancing the political career of an individual. Everything else - including the needs of the people - is sacrificed."

In a recent interview, Sawant largely deflected questions about herself, the individual, to instead focus squarely on the collective - or what she describes as her party's primary goals: "fighting for social and economic justice."

"There's nothing unique about me," she added. "I don't want the main ideas of what we're fighting for to be distracted by my stuff."

What Sawant did offer, begrudgingly, about her own background were some generalities from an immigrant's life that helped shape her into the activist she is today.

Born in Pune, India, Sawant largely grew up in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, India's most populous city now with some 20 million residents.

"I grew up in an apolitical family full of doctors and engineers and mathematicians," she said. "I wasn't exposed to any particular ideology."

She earned a graduate degree in computer science. But rather than seeking a well-paid career, Sawant sought answers to deeper social questions that resonated during her formative years, and became more pronounced after she came to America.

"Coming from India, what was striking is that you expect that in the wealthiest country in the history of humanity, there shouldn't be any poverty; there shouldn't be any homelessness," Sawant said. " ... But when I came here, I found it was exactly the opposite."

The gap between rich and poor - and the social and political constructs that created it - fascinated and appalled her, Sawant said. After obtaining a Ph.D. in economics from North Carolina State University, in 2006 she moved to Seattle, where the social divide became even more stark.

"The vast majority of Seattle people are facing a city that is becoming increasingly unaffordable for them," she said.

Sawant became active in immigrant-rights causes and with other progressive movements, before finding what would become her political party in 2008.

Formed in Europe in the mid-1980s, Social Alternative is an independent political organization that came to America with the working-class immigrants who supported it. In the 1990s, the group took root in cities with strong labor unions, including New York, Philadelphia and Seattle.

Now active in at least 15 major U.S. cities, the group denounces Republicans and Democrats as the puppets of big business. Its website declares it's "fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day."

In 2011, Socialist Alternative caught fire behind the "Occupy" movement, which articulated the frustrations among the politically and economically disenfranchised who blame corporate America for society's failures.

Sawant became a key political organizer in Occupy Seattle.

"Our decision to run a candidate in 2012 came out of that experience and the prominence that Kshama played in the whole Occupy movement," said Philip Locker, Sawant's political director....(Click title for more)

TomDispatch

August 8, 2013 - When it comes to energy and economics in the climate-change era, nothing is what it seems.  Most of us believe (or want to believe) that the second carbon era, the Age of Oil, will soon be superseded by the Age of Renewables, just as oil had long since superseded the Age of Coal.  President Obama offered exactly this vision in a much-praised June address on climate change.  True, fossil fuels will be needed a little bit longer, he indicated, but soon enough they will be overtaken by renewable forms of energy.

Many other experts share this view, assuring us that increased reliance on "clean" natural gas combined with expanded investments in wind and solar power will permit a smooth transition to a green energy future in which humanity will no longer be pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  All this sounds promising indeed.  There is only one fly in the ointment: it is not, in fact, the path we are presently headed down.  The energy industry is not investing in any significant way in renewables.  Instead, it is pouring its historic profits into new fossil-fuel projects, mainly involving the exploitation of what are called "unconventional" oil and gas reserves.

The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables.  Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas.

That we are embarking on a new carbon era is increasingly evident and should unnerve us all. Hydro-fracking -- the use of high-pressure water columns to shatter underground shale formations and liberate the oil and natural gas supplies trapped within them -- is being undertaken in ever more regions of the United States and in a growing number of foreign countries.  In the meantime, the exploitation of carbon-dirty heavy oil and tar sands formations is accelerating in Canada, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

It's true that ever more wind farms and solar arrays are being built, but here's the kicker: investment in unconventional fossil-fuel extraction and distribution is now expected to outpace spending on renewables by a ratio of at least three-to-one in the decades ahead.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an inter-governmental research organization based in Paris, cumulative worldwide investment in new fossil-fuel extraction and processing will total an estimated $22.87 trillion between 2012 and 2035, while investment in renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy will amount to only $7.32 trillion. In these years, investment in oil alone, at an estimated $10.32 trillion, is expected to exceed spending on wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, hydro, nuclear, and every other form of renewable energy combined.

In addition, as the IEA explains, an ever-increasing share of that staggering investment in fossil fuels will be devoted to unconventional forms of oil and gas: Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy crude, shale oil and gas, Arctic and deep-offshore energy deposits, and other hydrocarbons derived from previously inaccessible reserves of energy.  The explanation for this is simple enough.  The world's supply of conventional oil and gas -- fuels derived from easily accessible reservoirs and requiring a minimum of processing -- is rapidly disappearing.  With global demand for fossil fuels expected to rise by 26% between now and 2035, more and more of the world's energy supply will have to be provided by unconventional fuels.

In such a world, one thing is guaranteed: global carbon emissions will soar far beyond our current worst-case assumptions, meaning intense heat waves will become commonplace and our few remaining wilderness areas will be eviscerated. Planet Earth will be a far -- possibly unimaginably -- harsher and more blistering place. In that light, it's worth exploring in greater depth just how we ended up in such a predicament, one carbon age at a time.

The first carbon era began in the late 1800s, with the introduction of coal-powered steam engines and their widespread application to all manner of industrial enterprises. Initially used to power textile mills and industrial plants, coal was also employed in transportation (steam-powered ships and railroads), mining, and the large-scale production of iron.  Indeed, what we now call the Industrial Revolution was largely comprised of the widening application of coal and steam power to productive activities.  Eventually, coal would also be used to generate electricity, a field in which it remains dominant today....(Click title for more)

On the campus of Beijing Normal University, professors say they've noticed a trend that worries them: students embracing radical leftism. They advocate a return to the socialist state that Communist Party founder Mao Zedong favored and that Chinese leaders for the last generation have tried to put behind them.

The students wear pins with pictures of Mao and carry bags with the former Communist leader's famous quotations, such as "serve the people."

Some deny the atrocities of Mao's Great Leap Forward, which killed 30 million people, and Cultural Revolution, when millions of China's elites and intellectuals were persecuted and urban youth were forced to live with peasants in the countryside. Others acknowledge the atrocities of the Mao era, but they're anti-capitalism and critical of the West, and they think that Maoist values need to be strengthened in modern China.

"Their basic logic is that since the post-Mao era is not good, then the Mao era should be better," said Zhang Lifan, a Beijing-based historian.

How big a movement the new left represents is unknown, but in a country where political thought is strictly controlled, social inequality and government corruption are epidemic and the job market for recent college graduates is considered poor, academics who are closest to the phenomenon admit to fears that it represents a dangerous split in society.

"They are either extreme leftists or extreme rightists," one professor at the university said of her students, requesting anonymity out of concern that speaking about politics might result in retribution from the government. "When they have differences, there is no dialogue between them. This is a worrisome phenomenon and also some reflection of the split in society."

"In general, there are more rightists than leftists," she said, "but the leftists are very left."

"There is widespread discontent among students with inequality and corruption, plus frustrations in their own lives," said Yang Dali, the faculty director at the University of Chicago's Beijing center. "It is highly understandable that there would be a leftist sentiment."

The rise of a new left comes against a backdrop of decades of China's ruling class allowing more economic freedom. But advocates of the new left say that 30 years of an export-oriented economy that's brought hundreds of millions of people from rural areas to cities to fill low-wage jobs in assembly plants has led to extreme inequality and corruption.

"We emphasize that reform and opening to the outside world does not benefit the common people," said Cui Zhiyuan, a professor at Tsinghua University's school of public policy and management who's known as one of the founders of China's new left movement.

The movement has had a tenuous relationship with the government. The ouster last year of Bo Xilai, the party boss in Chongqing, whose government had instituted policies to support the city's poor, an audacious anti-corruption campaign and the resurrection of the singing of Mao-era "red songs" in public squares, was seen as a blow to leftists, who considered Bo a champion for their cause. Today, leftist websites - such as Utopia, which strongly supports Bo - remain shuttered.

After Bo's removal from his post and subsequent expulsion from the party, Chinese media launched a full-scale campaign demonizing his Chongqing model, with some newspapers saying his removal guaranteed that China would never have another Cultural Revolution. His trial, likely this month, on charges of bribery, corruption and abuse of power almost certainly will end in his conviction. His wife, Gu Kailai, was convicted last year of murdering a British businessman.

But that government denunciation has taken a different cast since China's new president, Xi Jinping, took office in March. Recognizing, perhaps, what the University of Chicago's Yang calls Bo's "wellspring of public support," the government has taken steps that the left embraces.

Universities have received government orders to ban classroom discussion of seven topics, including human rights and past mistakes of the Communist Party, while increasing ideological education and political training for professors. Top officials, including President Xi, have said Western values must be eradicated and that Mao's legacy should be strengthened.

Yang said the government was hoping that by adopting Bo's rhetoric it would "inherit some of that support" he enjoyed. "It is ironic, but of course this is a great strategy," Yang said.

On social media, there's an increase of pro-Maoist commentary as well as vitriolic criticism of liberal scholars who advocate further market-oriented reforms, democracy, free speech and human rights. Last autumn, during anti-Japanese protests that erupted over a territorial dispute between the countries, many young people carried portraits of Mao.

"The new leftists and the neo-liberals, they hate each other," said Lu Xinyu, a left-leaning professor in Fudan University's journalism school. "There are a lot of lies told by neo-liberals. A very significant characteristic of them is to always see America as a kind of utopia and that China should meet that standard, but America is facing a serious crisis." ...(Click title for more)

It is 40 years since a 'back to school jam' in New York's west Bronx kickstarted a movement and spawned a whole culture. BBC Culture's Rebecca Laurence looks back on a party that changed the world.

On a hot August night in 1973, Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, and his sister Cindy put on a 'back to school jam' in the recreation room of their apartment block at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the west Bronx. Entrance cost 25c for 'ladies' and 50c for 'fellas'.

The party wasn't special for its size - the rec room could only hold a few hundred people. Its venue and location weren't particularly auspicious. Yet it marked a turning point - a spark which would ignite an international movement that is still with us today. As Kool Herc said in a recent statement: "This first hip-hop party would change the world."

The legend is a simple one - but the factors leading to the creation of a hip hop culture were a fusion of social, musical and political influences as diverse and complex as the sound itself.

In his award-winning book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, the journalist and academic Jeff Chang locates the foundations of hip hop in the social policies of 'urban renewal' pioneered by Robert Moses and the 'benign neglect' of Nixon's administration. The building of New York's Cross Bronx Expressway razed through many of the city's ethnic neighbourhoods, destroying homes and jobs and displacing poor black and Hispanic communities in veritable wastelands like east Brooklyn and the South Bronx, while the government turned a blind eye to those affected.

"Hip hop did not start as a political movement," Chang tells BBC Culture. "There was no manifesto. The kids who started it were simply trying to find ways to pass the time, they were trying to have fun. But they grew up under the politics of abandonment and because of this, their pastimes contained the seeds for a kind of mass cultural renewal."

Break with the past

Hip hop signaled a profound shift at the beginning of the 1970s, following the FBI's suppression of late '60s radical black groups and the waning of gang wars. Rather than taking political action, a new generation expressed itself through DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling (breakdancing), and graffiti, the 'four elements' of hip hop. Artist Fab 5 Freddy, who coined this term, argued that the looping interactivity of the 'four elements' proved hip hop went beyond a purely musical or artistic movement - it was an entire culture.

Marcyliena Morgan is Professor of African American Studies and director of the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard University. She asserts the importance of celebrating the positive narratives generated by the hip hop generation.

"Hip hoppers literally mapped onto the consciousness of the world a place and an identity for themselves as the originators of an exciting new art form" she tells BBC Culture. "They created value out of races and places that had seemed to offer only devastation."...(Click title for more)

 Film: 'The Butler' Is a Flawed
Yet Rewarding Journey

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