No false “Pax Mediterranea”
The ancient Roman term for the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, literally means “Our Sea”. Today, the Eastern Mediterranean is rapidly turning into a maelstrom of naval alerts, as military forces across the globe sail into this contested space.
Sudden rises in military spending, notwithstanding a pandemic and economic volatility, add fuel to the increasingly bellicose tone between leaders, governments and people across the region. In a Pompeo-led initiative, the U.S. recently suspended its decades-old arms embargo against Cyprus thereby compromising historic international efforts to sedate Greco-Turkish tensions over the island. The US military has more recently announced that it might relocate the 50 nuclear warheads kept on the İncirlik base in Turkey to Cyprus, or to a Greek island in response to the threats coming from Ankara. Meanwhile, Turkey has announced its schedule for Russian live-fire naval exercises in the eastern Mediterranean.
French President Macron’s tweet, calling for “Pax Mediterranea”, formalises France’s haphazard efforts towards reigniting the grandeur of imperialist projects.
The public pronouncement, posted after the 7th Summit of the Southern EU countries, underscores the outcomes of the MED7 summit. Macron’s lobbying to endow the Greek side in this brewing conflict, seeks retaliation against Turkey’s challenging French ambitions in the Libyan conflict. The transnational investment in Libya’s strife had already revived Great Power rivalries in the Mediterranean just before and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Macron’s convoluted call for diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean, accompanied by flying the nuclear aircraft carrier named after de Gaulle, serves as a reminder that war continues to have the highest priority for those at the zenith of power.
We acknowledge the intricacy of tensions that historically plagued the Mediterranean. But it remains clear how gross wealth inequality, fractious relations, anachronistic competition over perceived ‘rich’ resources and a profusion of armaments have heightened nationalistic positions.
Macron, elected on a ticket of countering the toxic ethnonationalism of Marine LePen in 2017, now wants to encourage countries in the Eastern Mediterranean to that same poison of nationalist sabre-rattling and megalomania. The power games of the Libyan war threaten to move Eastwards, onto the Aegean, largely thanks to a disunited EU foreign policy. We must first identify the connections in order to sever these.
There cannot be true transformation and peace in Europe if other parts of the world live in misery, conflict, and war.
There will be no peace as state actors increasingly resort to militarized and surveillance tools in order to maintain the neoliberal status quo. Violating their own guidelines, EU States have ramped up conventional weapons’ exports to countries embroiled in conflicts and large-scale crimes against humanity. European countries must put an end to spreading violence abroad and must abstain from hiding behind the counter-terrorism and national security narratives.
Partly, European inaction on this conflict owes to a convoluted and self-harming North Atlantic conformity to the White House’s impulses, and its agenda on resource-wars with Russia. Since Pompeo’s visits, a Greek government firmly supported by local oligarchies has offered to make its debut as a prospective US-partnered salesman of natural gas to the EU, in the attempt to displace the Russian-Turkish energy alliance after Turkey’s deals with Russia over gas pipelines. Far from these waters, the US risks less than Europeans do, when picking sides between the nationalist governments and investors who currently jockey for maritime power and hydrocarbon-mining in this contested space.
DiEM25’s position on the Aegean and Mediterranean stays the same — we want a peaceful sea, cooperation and Shared Green Prosperity, decided upon by all Mediterranean countries whether they meet the Mare Nostrum on the European, African or West Asian coastline.
Today we seek Euro-Afro-Asian dialogue, liberated of imperial intermediation and freed of a profit incentive willing to risk large-scale war. Let us divert the billions poured on war preparations towards dealing with the human catastrophes we are witnessing in the Mare Nostrum. The upcoming Special European Council meeting marks one opportunity to change the course of confrontation. Prosperity, through cooperation, can reverse the tide on forces that promote escalation. While analysing the interests at work, we can envision a strategy towards calm in the region that birthed civilisational riches to the world and belongs to the common heritage of humankind.
This new vision should be democratically constructed by the people of the region, a task that DiEM25 invites citizens to imagine how to establish peace, along with political, economic and social unity of European countries from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains.
We invite you to join us on this voyage and as a first step, to complete our International Policy questionnaire.
The DSC acknowledges the valuable contributions by Arturo Desimone and Amir Kiyaei. Arturo Desimone and Amir Kiyaei are both members of DiEM25 and its thematic DSC Peace and international Policy.
Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The existential threat facing humanity, and how we can fight back
Returning to the major crises we face at this historic moment, all are international, and two internationals are forming to confront them. One is opening today: the Progressive International. The other has been taking shape under the leadership of Trump’s White House, a Reactionary International comprising the world’s most reactionary states.
We are meeting at a remarkable moment, a moment that is, in fact, unique in human history, a moment both ominous in portent and bright with hopes for a better future. The Progressive International has a crucial role to play in determining which course history will follow.
We are meeting at a moment of confluence of crises of extraordinary severity, with the fate of the human experiment quite literally at stake.
The issues are coming to a head in the next few weeks in the two great imperial powers of the modern era.
Fading Britain, having publicly declared that it rejects international law, is on the verge of a sharp break from Europe, on the path to becoming even more of a US satellite that it already is. But of course what is of the greatest significance for the future is what happens in the global hegemon, diminished by Trump’s wrecking ball, but still with overwhelming power and incomparable advantages. Its fate, and with it the fate of the world, may well be determined in November.
Not surprisingly, the rest of the world is concerned, if not appalled. It would be difficult to find a more sober and respected commentator than Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times. He writes that the West is facing a serious crisis, and if Trump is re-elected, “this will be terminal.” Strong words, and he is not even referring to the major crises humanity faces.
Wolf is referring to the global order, a critical matter though not on the scale of the crises that threaten vastly more serious consequences, the crises that are driving the hands of the famous Doomsday Clock towards midnight – towards termination.
Wolf’s concept “terminal” is not a new entry into public discourse. We have been living under its shadow for 75 years, ever since we learned, on an unforgettable August day, that human intelligence had devised the means that would soon yield the capacity for terminal destruction. That was shattering enough, but there was more. It was not then understood that humanity was entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which human activities are despoiling the environment in a manner that is now also approaching terminal destruction.
The hands of the Doomsday Clock were first set shortly after atomic bombs were used in a paroxysm of needless slaughter. The hands have oscillated since, as global circumstances have evolved.
Every year that Trump has been in office, the hands have been moved closer to midnight. Two years ago they reached the closest they had ever been. Last January, the analysts abandoned minutes, turning to seconds: 100 seconds to midnight. They cited the same crises as before: the growing threats of nuclear war and of environmental catastrophe, and the deterioration of democracy.
The last might at first seem out of place, but it is not. Declining democracy is a fitting member of the grim trio. The only hope of escaping the two threats of termination is vibrant democracy in which concerned and informed citizens are fully engaged in deliberation, policy formation, and direct action.
That was last January. Since then, President Trump has amplified all three threats, not a mean accomplishment. He has continued his demolition of the arms control regime that has offered some protection against the threat of nuclear war, while also pursuing development of new and even more dangerous weapons, much to the delight of military industry. In his dedicated commitment to destroy the environment that sustains life, Trump has opened up vast new areas for drilling, including the last great nature reserve. Meanwhile, his minions are systematically dismantling the regulatory system that somewhat mitigates the destructive impact of fossil fuel use, and that protects the population from toxic chemicals and from pollution, a curse that is now doubly murderous in the course of a severe respiratory epidemic.
Trump has also carried forward his campaign to undermine democracy. By law, presidential appointments are subject to Senate confirmation. Trump avoids this inconvenience by leaving the positions open and filling the offices with “temporary appointments” who answer to his will – and if they do not do so with sufficient fealty to the lord, are fired. He has purged the executive of any independent voice. Only sycophants remain. Congress had long ago established Inspectors General to monitor the performance of the executive branch. They began to look into the swamp of corruption that Trump has created in Washington. He took care of that quickly by firing them. There was scarcely a peep from the Republican Senate, firmly in Trump’s pocket, with hardly a flicker of integrity remaining, terrified by the popular base Trump has mobilized.
This onslaught against democracy is only the bare beginning.
Trump’s latest step is to warn that he may not leave office if he is not satisfied with the outcome of the November election. The threat is taken very seriously in high places. To mention just a few examples, two highly respected retired senior military commanders released an open letter to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, reviewing his constitutional responsibility to send the army to remove by force a “lawless president” who refuses to leave office after electoral defeat, summoning in his defense the kinds of paramilitary units he dispatched to Portland Oregon to terrorize the population over the strong objection of elected officials.
Many establishment figures regard the warning as realistic, among them the high-level Transition Integrity Project, which has just reported the results of the “war gaming” it has been conducting on possible outcomes of the November election. The project members are “some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around,” the Project co-director explains, including prominent figures in both Parties. Under any plausible scenario apart from a clear Trump victory, the games led to something like civil war, with Trump choosing to end “the American experiment.”
Again, strong words, never before heard from sober mainstream voices. The very fact that such thoughts arise is ominous enough. They are not alone. And given incomparable US power, far more than the “American experiment” is at risk.
Nothing like this has happened in the often troubled history of parliamentary democracy. Keeping to recent years, Richard Nixon – not the most delightful person in presidential history – had good reason to believe that he had lost the 1960 election only because of criminal manipulation by Democratic operatives. He did not contest the results, putting the welfare of the country ahead of personal ambition. Albert Gore did the same in 2000. Not today.
Forging new paths in contempt for the welfare of the country does not suffice for the megalomaniac who dominates the world. Trump has also announced once again that he may disregard the Constitution and “negotiate” for a third term if he decides he is entitled to it.
Some choose to laugh all this off as the playfulness of a buffoon. To their peril, as history shows.
The survival of liberty is not guaranteed by “parchment barriers,” James Madison warned. Words on paper are not enough. It is founded on the expectation of good faith and common decency. That has been torn to shreds by Trump along with his co-conspirator Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has turned the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” as it calls itself, into a pathetic joke. McConnell’s Senate refuses even to consider legislative proposals. Its concern is largesse to the rich and stacking the judiciary, top to bottom with far right young lawyers who should be able to safeguard the reactionary Trump-McConnell agenda for a generation, whatever the public wants, whatever the world needs for survival.
The abject service to the rich of the Trump-McConnell Republican party is quite remarkable, even by the neoliberal standards of exaltation of greed. One illustration is provided by the leading specialists on tax policy, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. They show that in 2018, following the tax scam that was the one legislative Trump-McConnell achievement, “for the first time in the last hundred years, billionaires have paid less [in taxes] than steel workers, school teachers, and retirees,” erasing “a century of fiscal history.” “In 2018, for the first time in the modern history of the United States, capital has been taxed less than labor” — a truly impressive victory of class war, called “liberty” in hegemonic doctrine.
The Doomsday Clock was set last January before the scale of the pandemic was understood. Humanity will sooner or later recover from the pandemic, at terrible cost. It is needless cost. We see that clearly from the experience of countries that took decisive action when China provided the world with the relevant information about the virus on January 10. Primary among them were East-Southeast Asia and Oceania, with others trailing along, and bringing up the rear a few utter disasters, notably the US, followed by Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Modi’s India.
Despite the malfeasance or indifference of some political leaders, there will ultimately be some kind of recovery from the pandemic. We will not, however, recover from the melting of the polar icecaps, or the exploding rate of arctic fires that are releasing enormous amounts of greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere, or other steps on our march to catastrophe.
When the most prominent climate scientists warn us to “Panic Now,” they are not being alarmist. There is no time to waste. Few are doing enough, and even worse, the world is cursed by leaders who are not only refusing to take sufficient action but are deliberately accelerating the race to disaster. The malignancy in the White House is far in the lead in this monstrous criminality.
It is not only governments. The same is true of fossil fuel industries, the big banks that finance them, and other industries that profit from actions that put the “survival of humanity” at serious risk, in the words of a leaked internal memo of America’s largest bank.
Humanity will not long survive this institutional malignancy. The means to manage the crisis are available. But not for long. One primary task of the Progressive International is to ensure that we all panic now — and act accordingly.
The crises we face in this unique moment of human history are of course international. Environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, and the pandemic have no borders. And in a less transparent way, the same is true of the third of the demons that stalk the earth and drive the second hand of the Doomsday clock towards midnight: the deterioration of democracy. The international character of this plague becomes evident when we examine its origins.
Circumstances vary, but there are some common roots. Much of the malignancy traces back to the neoliberal assault on the world’s population launched in force 40 years ago.
The basic character of the assault was captured in the opening pronouncements of its most prominent figures. Ronald Reagan declared in his inaugural address that government is the problem, not the solution — meaning that decisions should be removed from governments, which are at least partially under public control, to private power, which is completely unaccountable to the public, and whose sole responsibility is self-enrichment, as chief economist Milton Friedman proclaimed. The other was Margaret Thatcher, who instructed us that there is no society, only a market in which people are cast to survive as best they can, with no organizations that enable them to defend themselves against its ravages.
Unwittingly no doubt, Thatcher was paraphrasing Marx, who condemned the autocratic rulers of his day for turning the population into a “sack of potatoes,” defenseless against concentrated power.
With admirable consistency, the Reagan and Thatcher administrations moved at once to destroy the labor movement, the primary impediment to harsh class rule by the masters of the economy. In doing so, they were adopting the leading principles of neoliberalism from its early days in interwar Vienna, where the founder and patron saint of the movement, Ludwig von Mises, could scarcely control his joy when the proto-fascist government violently destroyed Austria’s vibrant social democracy and the despicable trade unions that were interfering with sound economics by defending the rights of working people. As von Mises explained in his 1927 neoliberal classic Liberalism, five years after Mussolini initiated his brutal rule, “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history” — though it will be only temporary, he assured us. The Blackshirts will go home after having accomplished their good work.
The same principles inspired enthusiastic neoliberal support for the hideous Pinochet dictatorship. A few years later, they were put into operation in a different form in the global arena under the leadership of the US and UK.
The consequences were predictable. One was sharp concentration of wealth alongside of stagnation for much of the population, reflected in the political realm by undermining of democracy. The impact in the United States brings out very clearly what one would expect when business rule is virtually uncontested. After 40 years, 0.1% of the population have 20% of the wealth, twice what they had when Reagan was elected. CEO remuneration has skyrocketed, drawing general management wealth along with it. Real wages for non-supervisory male workers have declined. A majority of the population survives from paycheck to paycheck, with almost no reserves. Financial institutions, largely predatory, have exploded in scale. There have been repeated crashes, increasing in severity, the perpetrators bailed out by the friendly taxpayer, though that is the least of the implicit state subsidy they receive. “Free markets” led to monopolization, with reduced competition and innovation, as the strong swallowed the weak. Neoliberal globalization has deindustrialized the country within the framework of the investor rights agreements mislabeled as “free trade pacts. ”Adopting the neoliberal doctrine that “taxation is robbery,” Reagan opened the door to tax havens and shell companies — previously banned and barred by effective enforcement. That led at once to a huge tax evasion industry to expedite massive robbery of the general population by the very rich and the corporate sector. No small change. The scale is estimated in tens of trillions of dollars.
And so it continues as neoliberal doctrine took hold.
As the assault was just beginning to take shape, in 1978, the president of the United Auto Workers, Doug Fraser, resigned from a labor-management committee that was set up by the Carter Administration, expressing his shock that business leaders had “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country — a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society,” and had “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress” — during the period of class collaboration under regimented capitalism.
His recognition of how the world works was somewhat belated, in fact too late to fend off the bitter class war launched by business leaders who were soon granted free rein by compliant governments. The consequences over much of the world come as little surprise: widespread anger, resentment, contempt for political institutions while the primary economic ones are hidden from view by effective propaganda. All of this provides fertile territory for demagogues who can pretend to be your savior while stabbing you in the back, meanwhile deflecting the blame for your conditions to scapegoats: immigrants, blacks, China, whoever fits long-standing prejudices.
Panel Moderator Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, in conversation with Noam Chomsky
Returning to the major crises we face at this historic moment, all are international, and two internationals are forming to confront them.
One is opening today: the Progressive International. The other has been taking shape under the leadership of Trump’s White House, a Reactionary International comprising the world’s most reactionary states.
In the Western Hemisphere, the International includes Bolsonaro’s Brazil and a few others. In the Middle East, prime members are the family dictatorships of the Gulf; al-Sisi’s Egyptian dictatorship, perhaps the harshest in Egypt’s bitter history; and Israel, which long ago discarded its social democratic origins and shifted far to the right, the predicted effect of the prolonged and brutal occupation. The current agreements between Israel and Arab dictatorships, formalizing long-standing tacit relations, are a significant step towards solidifying the Middle East base of the Reactionary International. The Palestinians are kicked in the face, the proper fate of those who lack power and do not grovel properly at the feet of the natural masters.
To the East, a natural candidate is India, where Prime Minister Modi is destroying India’s secular democracy and turning the country into a racist Hindu nationalist state, while crushing Kashmir. The European contingent includes Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary and similar elements elsewhere. The International also has powerful backing in the dominant global economic institutions.
The two internationals comprise a good part of the world, one at the level of states, the other popular movements. Each is a prominent representative of much broader social forces, which have sharply contending images of the world that should emerge from the current pandemic. One force is working relentlessly to construct a harsher version of the neoliberal global system from which they have greatly benefited, with more intensive surveillance and control. The other looks forward to a world of justice and peace, with energies and resources directed to serving human needs rather than the demands of a tiny minority. It is a kind of class struggle on a global scale, with many complex facets and interactions.
It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the human experiment depends on the outcome of this struggle.
This is a Keynote speech from the Progressive International Inaugural Summit, on 18 September 2020.
Find out more about the Progressive International. Follow the Progressive International on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
Noam Chomsky is a PI Council member as well as being on DiEM25’s Advisory Board. He is considered the founder of modern linguistics. He has received numerous awards, including the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal and the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. Chomsky joined the UA in fall 2017, coming from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked since 1955 and was Institute Professor, later Institute Professor emeritus.
Here’s to you, Julian Assange!
“This is the message we all must deliver to those who held [Assange]: if you kill a man, you create a myth which will continue to mobilize thousands.”
There is an old joke, from the time of the World War I, about the exchange of telegrams between the German army headquarter and the Austrian-Hungarian one: from Berlin to Vienna, the message is “The situation on our part of the front is serious, but not catastrophic,” and the reply from Vienna is: “With us, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.”
The reply from Vienna seems to offer a model for how we tend to react to crises today, from Covid-19 pandemic to forest fires (not only) in the West of the US: yeah, we know a catastrophe is pending, media warn us all the time, but somehow we are not ready to take the situation quite seriously…
A similar case is dragging on for years: the fate of Julian Assange.
It’s a legal and moral catastrophe — just recall how he is treated in prison, unable to see his children and their mother, unable to communicate regularly with his lawyers, a victim of psychological torture so that his survival itself is under threat. They are for certain killing him softly, as the song goes. But very few seem to take his situation seriously, with an awareness that our own fate is at stake in his case.
The forces which violate his rights are the forces which prevent the effective battle against global warming and the pandemic. They are the forces because of which the pandemic makes the rich even richer and hits the hardest the poor. They are the forces which ruthlessly exploit the pandemic to assert their control over our social and digital space, regulating and censoring it at our expense — the forces which protect us, but also from our own freedom.
Assange fought for the public transparency of the digital space, and there is a cruel irony in the fact that the pandemic is used as a pretext to isolate him from his family and his defense. We are always ready to protest the limitation of basic human freedoms imposed on Hong Kong by China — should we not turn the gaze back on ourselves? Today one should remember Max Horkheimer’s old saying from late 1930s: “Those who don’t want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep silent about Fascism.” Our version is: those who don’t want to talk about the injustice done to Assange should also keep silent about the violation of human rights in Hong Kong and Belarus.
Assange’s well-planned and well-executed character assassination is one of the reasons why his defense never grew into a wide movement like Black Lives Matter or Extinction Rebellion.
Now that Assange’s very survival is at stake, only such a movement can (perhaps) save him. Remember the lyrics (written by Joan Baez to Ennio Morricone’s music) of “Here’s to you,” the title song of the movie Sacco and Vanzetti:
“Here’s to you, Nicola and Bart / Rest forever here in our hearts / The last and final moment is yours / That agony is your triumph.”
There were mass gatherings all around the world in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti — and the same is needed now in defense of Assange, although in a different form. Assange cannot die — even if he dies (or disappears in a US prison cell like a living dead), that agony will be his triumph, he will die in order to live in all of us. This is the message we all must deliver to those who held him: if you kill a man, you create a myth which will continue to mobilize thousands.
The message to us of those who are after Assange is clear: everything is permitted (to us). Why only to them? What they are doing to Assange is radically changing the political weather, so perhaps we need new Weathermen.
Photo: drawing of Julian Assange by Daniel Fooks.
Photo Source: Daniel Fooks on Twitter.
The Denier of Love, Capitalism!
DiEM25 reiterates on the International day of Peace the call for a global ceasefire initiated by the United Nations.
Capitalism can be surmised as ‘Profit or Perish’, in a sense that an entity has to do whatever it can to maintain its profits on the backs of nature and other entities. More generally, the rule of the few, regardless of the ideology they adopt, creates a singular structure that rejects everyone that is different and tries to protect itself by dehumanising the other. The waging of endless conflicts — to maintain profit — has reached unprecedented levels, pushing military and security spending through the roof while imposing austerity.
Dehumanisation is the absence of Love and Compassion!
Radical love and compassion is urgently needed to face the two imminent threats as noted by Noam Chomsky; those being nuclear annihilation and the ongoing environmental catastrophe. We acknowledge that this is not an easy task — especially when one’s life is reduced to a daily grind. However, once each one of us manages to remove the filters implanted by fear mongering private institutions that seek profit, such as the mainstream media, we are able to see the ‘other’ as a living being having the same needs, rights and dreams of a common utopia.
Let us be clear, this is a moral quest, a moral quest to transcend the suffering and trauma each of us carries within due to oppression. Equally, it is paramount to acknowledge the interconnectedness of life whether on the environmental, societal, or economical levels. Accordingly, each individual’s mode of thought is the outcome of accumulated knowledge, acquired experiences, and the dialectical interaction with the world. Irrespective of personal philosophy, the Buddha illustrates the need to transform mono-dimensional thinking to a multi-dimensional one; to
“Contemplate the nature of interconnected arising during every moment… The one contains the many and the many contain the one, without the one there cannot be the many and without the many there cannot be the one.”
DiEM25’s Green New Deal for Europe takes into consideration the interconnectedness of all forms of life, and is the first step towards a sustainable life.
This calls us to create the world that we, and our future generations, want to live in. This can happen — must happen — by first reattaining our freedom to dream, to dream a better future where justice and dignity for all life is respected. This freedom that was taken from us by the “live in the moment and forget about the struggle” motto of consumerism and conformity.
Currently, new initiatives, such as the Progressive International (PI), are reimagining the ancient notions of interconnectedness of life as illustrated by Buddha’s quote. The PI is a materialisation of the PANIC NOW mindset that is needed to face our global struggles collectively. In that regard, DiEM25 reiterates on the International day of Peace the call to global ceasefire that was initiated by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
Your involvement is urgently needed to change the status quo. Join us on the first step by completing our International Policy questionnaire.
Image: The Struggle for Emancipation by David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Image Source: Wikiart.
Why we need a Progressive International that must plan for today and for beyond capitalism
Our era will be remembered for the triumphant march of a Twin Authoritarianism in whose wake the vast majority of humanity experience unnecessary hardship and the planet’s ecosystem suffers avoidable climate destruction.
For a brief period, that Eric Hobsbawm described as the short 20th Century, Establishment forces were united in dealing with challenges to their authority. It was a rare period, in the grander scheme of human history, in that the Establishment had to face varieties of progressives aiming at changing the world ranging from the original social democrats, who sought to redistribute power between capital and labour within capitalism, to the Soviet-linked regimes that experimented with non-capitalist but centralised modes of production; to Yugoslavia, trying its hand at self-management; to the national liberation movements in Africa and Asia; even the original radical Green movement in places like W. Germany.
Back then, the Establishment was united against all those progressive challengers. I grew up in a right-wing fascist dictatorship that was instigated by the United States during the Lyndon Johnson administration — one of the most progressive administrations when it came to domestic politics which, nonetheless, did not hesitate to prop up fascists in Greece or to carpet-bomb Vietnam. I mention the LBJ administration in the 1960s as a reminder of the historic fact that what we now call the Liberal Establishment used fascists and local despots liberally to prop up the so-called Western Way of Life. The fear and loathing of right-wing populism that can be found today plastered on every page of the New York Times was simply absent back then. Back then, the New York Times and other organs of the Liberal Establishment portrayed the progressives as enemies of freedom and democracy — never the Papadopoulos or the Pinochet monsters.
Things changed after 2008, the year the western financial system imploded. Following twenty-five years of financialisation, under the ideological cloak of neoliberalism, global capitalism had a 1929-like spasm that nearly brought it to its knees. The immediate reaction was to use the central banks’ printing presses, but also to transfer bank losses to the working and middle classes (via bailout loans), so as to re-float financial institutions and markets. This combination of socialism for the financialised few and stringent austerity for the masses did two things.
First, it depressed real investment globally (as firms could see that the masses had little to spend on new goods and services), thus creating a gigantic gap between (a) real investment and (b) available cash and savings (boosted massively by government money printing). The result was discontent amongst the many and stupendous riches for the very few.
Secondly, it gave rise initially to progressive uprisings (from the Indignados in Spain and the Aganaktismeni in Greece to the Occupy Wall Street movement and various left-wing forces in Latin America) who were, however, efficiently dealt with either by the Establishment directly (e.g. the crushing of the Greek Spring in 2015) or indirectly by the stagnation of global capitalism (e.g. the fading of leftist Latin American governments as Chinese demand for their exports collapsed due to the imbalance between global savings and global investment).
As progressive causes were snuffed out one by one, the discontent of the masses had to find a political expression. It was then that phenomena not seen since the mid-war period were observed. Mimicking the rise of Mussolini, who promised to look after the weakest and to make them feel proud to be Italian again, we witnessed the Rise of the Nationalist International. The rightist expression of Brexit (“We want our country back, plus more money for the National Health Service”), Donald Trump (“I shall look after the ones the Wall Street and the Liberal Establishment left behind”), Bolsonaro, Modi, Le Pen, Salvini, Orban etc.
It is thus that, for the first time since the Second World War, the great political clash was not between the Establishment and assorted Progressives but between different parts of the Establishment: One part appearing as the stalwarts of Liberal Democracy, the other as the representatives of Illiberal Democracy.
Of course, this clash between the Liberal Establishment and the Nationalist International was utterly illusory. Mr Macron needed Le Pen, without whom he would never be President. And Ms Le Pen needed Macron and the Liberal Establishment’s austerity policies that generated the discontent that fed her campaigns.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Liberal Establishment and the Nationalist International were, in reality, accomplices does not mean that the cultural and personal clash between them is not authentic. The authenticity of their clash, despite the lack of any real policy difference between them (e.g. the Trump administration used the same Wall Street personnel to deliver the type of tax cuts George W. Bush and even Hillary Clinton supported), made it next to impossible for Progressives to be heard over the cacophony caused by the clashing variants of Authoritarianism (the Liberal Establishment and the Nationalist International).
This is why we need a Progressive International: Because the fake opposition between the two variants of the Twin Authoritarianism — the Liberal Establishment and the Nationalist International – threaten humanity by trapping us in a business-as-usual agenda that destroys life prospects and wastes opportunities to end climate change.
How can we break the stranglehold of the Twin Authoritarianism darkening our souls and mortgaging our youth’s future? Look at our defeats in Greece in July 2015, when a promising progressive rebellion against austerity-for-the-people and bailouts-for-the-oligarchy took place. Or the successful undermining of Jeremy Corbyn and of Bernie Sanders within their own parties. Look at the way in which popular progressive leaders in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador were driven out of the political contest. Look at the way a veil of silence is drawn over the courageous struggles for self-determination by countless communities in Africa or India. Look carefully at this multitude of defeats and I think you will agree that only one thing could prevent them: A Progressive International to counter the Davos International (of the Liberal Establishment) and the Nationalist International (of the recalcitrant xenophobic Right).
Has the time not come, friends, for Progressives to emulate the bankers and the fascists who have proven time and again their remarkable capacity for internationalism? Is it not time to follow their example to unite across borders behind a common agenda, to create a common narrative, to press our capacities into the service of the same agenda in favour of the many deploying a joint investment plan into saving the planet?
I think that this time has come. Now is the moment when we either form an effective, successful Progressive International, or we share the burden of blame for humanity’s failure to serve people and planet.
Common Program, Uncommon Collective Action Plan
“But, what does a PI entail?”, I hear many of you ask. “What does it mean in practice?” While such a grand project cannot be based on anyone’s blueprint, and must be constructed organically and via crowdsourcing of ideas, one thing is clear — at least to me: The PI cannot succeed if it simply emulates efforts like the World Social Forum or the brilliantly open discussion format in the squares where we used to gather a decade ago in Spain, in Athens, in London, in NYC. We need something that these earlier attempts at bringing progressives together lacked: A Common Program and a Collective Action Plan.
I have already spoken in favour of confronting the internationalism of the bankers and the fascists with a progressive internationalism. The fascists and the bankers, lest we forget, have a common program. Whether you speak to a banker in Chile or to a banker in Switzerland, you will hear the same story: How financial engineering provides the capital necessary to invest in everything we need, why privatisation is a must that only fools dispute, the need to offer investors certainty against local legislatures and courts etc. Similarly, every time you speak to a member of the Nationalist International, you will hear the same story: Why electrified border fences are essential for sovereign democracies, the threat to our culture and to our social welfare system from migrant labour as well as from international Jewry/Islamists, the importance of looking after the natives while making the life of those deemed less-than-loyal or worthy citizens harder etc. My point is: Progressives also need a common program. We must also speak with one humanist voice across the world.
Talk, of course, is cheap if not backed by action. The Liberal Establishment do not have this problem. They are in government almost everywhere and, even if not in actual government, they are certainly in power. Their politicians, bureaucrats and bankers act upon the world every minute of the day, always and consistently in a manner that promotes their Common Program. The Nationalist International also act upon the world. Whether through violence on the streets of Portland or Piraeus, or through the policies of Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi, they are never short of a series of acts in total harmony with their misanthropic, xenophobic, reactionary Common Agenda. We need to emulate them in this regard too: We need to plan and carry our Collective Actions in defence of local communities as part of a global, well-planned, mobilisation.
In summary, the PI needs two things that we never developed in the past: A Common Program and an Uncommon Collective Action Plan allowing for local interventions that are part and parcel of a global campaign.
Toward an Effective Global Solidarity
What Collective Action Plan should we envisage?
Do you remember Chris Smalls, the Amazon employee who dared organise a walkout from the company’s Staten Island facility in protest at working conditions during the pandemic? He shot momentarily to fame when it was revealed that, having fired him, Amazon’s ultra-rich and uber-powerful directors spent a long teleconference planning his character assassination to undermine his cause. Even though a considerable number of public figures spoke out in Chris’s defence, the furore had no effect. Amazon emerged from the 2020 lockdown richer, stronger and more influential than ever. As for Chris, once his five minutes of fame faded, he remained fired and vilified.
What would it take for the PI to make a difference and to defend Chris in a way that angry letters to the NYT did not? Suppose the PI were active then and we could call upon people far and wide to participate in a Day of Inaction — a particular day when we just do not even visit Amazon’s website in support of Chris Smalls. Not visiting a website for a day costs people — even heavy Amazon users — next to nothing but can translate into large costs for corporations like Amazon.
This could be a start: Identifying multinational companies that abuse workers locally and targeting them globally, utilising the great disparity between the cost to participants and the costs of the targeted firms. Then, in a second phase, we could combine these consumer Days of Inaction with trades union Days of Action at the local level, aimed at the company and its affiliates.
The prospect of such Global Action in Support of Local Workers or Communities has, I trust, immense scope. With some clever communication and planning, they can become a popular way people around the world can embrace to get a feeling they are helping make the world a freer, fairer place.
What should our Common Plan look like?
Toward a Common Program – an International Green New Deal
The good news is that we have many different Green New Deal proposals to draw upon. However, while each contains useful ideas, they need to be synthesised into an overarching coherent, internationally coordinated plan that can be supported locally and implemented everywhere. To gain such traction, the plan must answer three questions: What must be done? How will we pay for it? Who will do it?
We know what we must do. Power generation must shift massively from fossil fuels to renewables, wind and solar primarily. Land transport must be electrified while air transport and shipping must turn to new zero-carbon fuels (e.g. hydrogen). Meat production needs to diminish substantially, with greater emphasis on organic plant crops. Strict limits on physical growth (from toxins to cement) are of the essence.
We also know that all this will cost at least $8 trillion annually. Additionally, we need to create from scratch institutions that will coordinate the various works and distribute the costs and the benefits between the global North and the global South. The task seems enormous. In a world where even the modest Paris Agreement lies in tatters, it is terribly easy to surrender to despair.
This is precisely why we need a New Deal narrative at a planetary scale. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original New Deal succeeded because it came at a time when the grapes of wrath were filling and “growing heavy for the vintage”. Its singular achievement was to address people who had given up and to inspire in them the hope that, astonishingly, there is an alternative. That there are ways of pressing idle resources into public service. The New Deal’s success was to present a plan that made sense to the disheartened and offered opportunity to the entrepreneurial; a plan that changed the frame from which a majority of people assessed their circumstances.
The key questions of funding and distribution can also be answered through this new frame. The $8 trillion we need annually will have to be financed both from public and private sources. Public finance, just like in the original New Deal, must involve transnational bond instruments and revenue-neutral carbon taxes — so that the money raised from taxing diesel can be returned to the poorest of citizens relying on diesel cars, in order to strengthen them generally and also allow them to buy an electric car.
Meanwhile, tax evasion will only be dealt a major blow if we introduce a global minimum effective corporate-tax rate on multinational corporations of, say, 25%, that is then redistributed on the basis of a simple formula taking into account the geographical distribution of sales.
To plough these resources into green investments, we could propose a new Organisation for Emergency Environmental Cooperation, or OEEC — the namesake of the original OEEC which, seventy-five years ago, administered the works funded by the Marshall Plan in Europe. One main difference from the 1950s is that today’s task is not simply to rebuild but to develop new zero-emissions technologies. No country alone can fund the requisite research and development. The OEEC would, thus, pool the brainpower of the international scientific community into something like a Green Manhattan Project — only one that aims, instead of mass murder, at ending extinction.
Even more ambitiously, the PI can propose an International Monetary Clearing Union, of the type John Maynard Keynes suggested during the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, including well-designed restrictions on capital movements. By rebalancing wages, trade and finance at a planetary scale, both involuntary migration and involuntary unemployment will recede, thus ending the moral panic over the human right to move freely about the planet.
Organisation
The need for a Common Agenda and a Common Collective Action Plan means that the PI needs to feature an international organisation. The great question for us all is: How can we create this essential organisation without falling prey to the usual organisational pitfalls; e.g. bureaucracy, exclusion, power games?
This is a difficult question that members of the PI Council must address — one that I have no answer for. However, not having an answer at this point is a good thing, since this is an answer we must discover together.
The one point I want to make at this juncture is that the difficulty in answering this question, and setting up an effective organisation, is no excuse for not proceeding. The bankers and the fascists have found answers. Granted that it is harder to find answers to this question as progressives who reject hierarchies, bureaucracies and the encroachments of paternalism, we have a duty to find them nevertheless.
An International Green New Deal is necessary but not sufficient: The PI must look beyond capitalism
Friends, Some say that the time for a Green New Deal has come and gone. That it is now too late. That capitalism cannot be civilised, tamed or rendered compatible with humanity’s survival. I have to admit that I tend to agree with them, in part at least. An International Green New Deal is necessary, on this I have no doubt. But I don’t believe it is sufficient.
Consider what happened on 12 August 2020, the day the news broke that the British economy had suffered its greatest slump ever. The London Stock Exchange jumped by more than 2%! Nothing comparable had ever occurred. Similar developments unfolded in Wall Street, in the United States. My interpretation is that, when COVID-19 met the gargantuan bubble with which governments and central banks have been zombifying corporations and financial institutions since 2008, financial markets finally decoupled from the underlying capitalist economy causing capitalism to evolve surreptitiously into a horrid postcapitalism — not, of course, the postcapitalism that convinced socialists once envisioned.
Our PI needs seriously to take into account the possibility that capitalism is not only worth terminating but, more pressingly, that capitalism has already undermined itself. If I am right on this, even members of the PI who entertain hopes of reforming, or civilising, capitalism, must consider the possibility that the PI has a duty to look beyond capitalism – indeed, to plan for a postcapitalist civilisation.
Glimpses of postcapitalism
While this is neither the moment nor the place to plan for postcapitalism, it is useful to imagine what a postcapitalist world might be like. Without a capacity for such contemplation, mixed in with our realistic International Green New Deal, our PI will fail to inspire either us oldies in need of a boost of hope or the generation of youngsters seeking a vision worth fighting for.
In a book that came out just this week, called Another Now, I try to imagine that my generation had not missed every pivotal moment history presented us with. What if we had seized the 2008 moment to stage a peaceful high-tech revolution that led to a postcapitalist economic democracy? What would it be like?
To be desirable, it would feature markets for goods and services since the alternative — a Soviet-type rationing system that vests arbitrary power in the ugliest of bureaucrats — is too dreary for words. But to be crisis-proof, there is one market that market socialism cannot afford to feature: The labour market. Why? Because, once labour time has a rental price, the market mechanism inexorably pushes it down while commodifying every aspect of work (and, in the Age of Facebook, of our leisure even). The greater the system’s success in doing this, the less the exchange value of each unit of output it generates, the lower the average profit rate and, ultimately, the nearer the next systemic crisis.
Can an advanced economy function without labour markets? Of course it can. Consider the principle of one-employee-one-share-one-vote. Amending corporate law so as to turn every employee into an equal (though not equally remunerated) partner, via granting them a non-tradeable one-person-one-share-one-vote, is as unimaginably radical today as universal suffrage used to be in the 19th Century.
By granting employee-partners the right to vote in the corporation’s general assemblies, an idea proposed by the early anarcho-syndicalists, the distinction between wages and profits is terminated and democracy, at last, enters the workplace — with the new digital collaborative tools standing by to remove all inefficiencies that would otherwise hamper the prospects of a democratically-run corpo-syndicalist firm. Besides the democratisation of firms, it would bring the demise of share markets and terminate the need for gargantuan debt to fund mergers and acquisitions.
Already, some Central Banks are thinking of providing every adult with a free bank account. If this goes ahead in a society without share markets, why would you want an account with a private bank? Once debt leverage linked to share markets and personal banking disappear, so does commercial banking. Goldman Sachs and the like become extinct — without even the need to ban them.
What if we were to take this idea further, proposing that the Central Bank also credits each such account with a fixed monthly stipend (a universal basic dividend). As everyone would use their central bank account to make domestic payments, most of the money minted by the central bank will be transferred within its ledger. Additionally, the central bank can grant all newborns a trust fund, to be used when they grow up.
Thus, persons would receive two types of income: The dividends credited into their central bank account. And earnings from working in a corpo-syndicalist company. Neither need be taxed – the end of income and sales taxes (VAT). Instead, three types of taxes fund this type of government: A 5% tax on the raw revenues of the corpo-syndicalist firms. A carbon tax. And proceeds from leasing land (which belongs in its entirety to the community) for private, time-limited, use.
Once this principle is embraced, a market-socialist blueprint almost writes itself. Freed from corporate power, unshackled from the indignity imposed upon the needy by the welfare state, and liberated from the tyranny of the profits-wages tug-of-war, persons and communities can begin to imagine new ways of deploying their talents and creativity.
Conclusion
Friends, I tried to outline the reasons a Progressive International is essential at our present moment in history.
Faced with the onerous task of fighting against the Twin Authoritarianisms wrecking the future, we need: A common plan of what needs to be done worldwide. A common campaigning framework for energising progressives around the world to implement our common plan. A common international organisation to coordinate our campaigns. And last, but not least, a common will to envision postcapitalism – together. Our Progressive International is a unique opportunity to meet this challenge. Across the world. Together!
This is a Keynote speech from the Progressive International Inaugural Summit, on 18 September 2020.
Find out more about the Progressive International. Follow the Progressive International on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
Demand the right to citizenship for immigrants in Italy on 3 October!
We will take to the streets for a law respecting the constitutional rights of immigrants. The date of 3 October has been chosen because it is the day of remembrance for migrant deaths.
The Coordinating Collective of DiEM25 decided, at its meeting on 10 September, to approve the proposal of the Italian NC to join the national event that is being organised in Italy in favour of a citizenship law. Join us!
Ursula Von der Leyen, in her first speech on the state of the Union, stated that the Dublin Regulation will be abolished, but the transition from enunciations to new rules will be long and bumpy. That is why we have to shake up a Europe that has so far turned the other way in front of the fallen at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and has remained inert in the face of the inhuman conditions of migrants in Lesbos, where the largest detention camp in Europe has been burnt down. From day to day, racism and social disintegration is growing. That is why we need to join forces in favour of an Internationalist Europe that treats non-European people as citizens and an Open Europe that takes into account all ideas, people and inspirations and conceives borders as signs of weakness as our Manifesto says.
We therefore invite the Italian activists to take part in the event to be held in Piazza Apostoli in Rome on 3 October at 3.30 p.m. and the foreign comrades of the DSC and the National Collectives of DiEM25 outside Italy to support the initiative, to replicate it elsewhere.
An excerpt from the Press Release on the event:
The reform of citizenship is a subject on which politics does not find the courage to take a decisive step. Yesterday the debate on ius soli failed and ended with an attempt to vote. Today the debate on ius culturae is standstill in the Senate, undermined by other priorities that we too consider necessary, but it can no longer wait. Children are asking us to do so because they lack a fundamental guarantee: to be recognised as Italian and Italian, to all intents and purposes.
Article 3 of the Constitution speaks clearly:
“All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinions, personal and social conditions.”
Those who live in this territory are part of the country and contribute to its development are Italians by training, Italians by culture. Those who live in this territory, those who were trained here, those who are part of the country and contribute to its development and culture are entitled to full inclusion in the political community.
We are taking to the streets because we do not want to continue to have a ‘rented’ citizenship; we want to be owners of a membership that cannot be denied to us. We want a flag that includes, recognises and values our common history as that of the Italian-Somali black partisan Giorgio Marincola, to whom the C metro stop in Rome is now named. Let’s take to the streets to break the binomial immigration-security, to ask for the repeal of the Security decrees that have worsened the condition of the latter, regardless of their origin. It is a question of civilisation, social equity and justice that unites all and all generations.
We take to the streets on 3 October, the national day in memory of the victims of immigration established after the tragic shipwreck on 3 October 2013 off Lampedusa, for those who have not given up hope but have not found the right landing place in the middle of the sea. This is why we will reiterate that humanitarian corridors and the cancellation of the agreements with Libya are needed. We fight for equality and the abolition of the discriminatory system. We stand in solidarity with the last, the invisible without distinction of class, sexual orientation or ethnic origin.
The event is promoted by:
NIBI (Neri Italiani – Black Italians), Black Lives Matter Roma, CoNNGI, Baobab Experience, 6000 Sardines, Mamme per la Pelle, Libera, Cinecittà bene comune, Eritrea Democratica, Baobab Experience, African Community of Cassino, Italian-Somali Community, Haitian Fraternity, Sons of the Republic, Young Green Europeanists, Europa Verde, USB, Resistant Artists, the writer Matteo Petracci, the actor Thamisanqa Molepo, the lawyer Hillary Sedu, the former candidate for Mayor of Florence and city councilor Antonella Bundu, the writer Lorenzo Teodonio and Antar Marincola, nephew of Giorgio, the first black partisan who is the image of the event, and the page Prima gli esseri umani.
In addition to the promoters, dozens of associations, movements and politicians have joined.
To give a concrete sign of our support we can make small donations here!
We must reimagine the relationship between individuals and community
Economic democratisation is not a utopian ideal, as the Mondragon Corporation in Spain and citizen owned energy schemes in Germany demonstrate.
Economic democratisation refers to a process of changing the ownership structure of our economy so the average citizen plays a greater role. There are three pillars of economic democratisation.
Workplace democracy is the first pillar of economic democratisation.
This includes any measures which allow people meaningful control over their workplaces. Those who work somewhere should be the ones making decisions about its future. The concept applies both to administrative control and ownership. Indeed, those that have a true stake in their workplace would be more inclined to invest their time, money and effort.
What does the concept of workplace democracy look like in practice?
The case of the Mondragon Corporation (MC) in the Basque region of Spain is the largest and one of the most successful cases of the concept in action. The MC is a federation of hundreds of cooperatives, currently employing over 80,000 people and with a global turnover of €12 billion worldwide. The corporation works in four areas: finance, industry, distribution and knowledge. Several features distinguish the MC from other corporations. Firstly, there are wage caps in which the general managers and executives earn no more than 9 times as much as the lowest paid workers, which stands in stark contrast to the average large corporation where the CEO may earn hundreds of times more than the lowest paid worker. Secondly, those who work at the MC have real power to make and influence decisions, with the existence of a General Assembly where each worker has a vote, regardless of how rich or poor the individual is. Workers therefore go from passive observers to active participants. Thirdly, the core focus of the model is the maximisation of employment.
Spain suffered tremendously in the 2008 financial crisis and in the following years countless corporations reduced their workforce. The MC, however, voted to lower wages for everyone and therefore retained more workers even if they were being paid less than before. A lower paying job is better than no job at all. The example of the MC demonstrates a clear alternative to our current order of things.
The second pillar of economic democratisation is citizen owned energy.
This is distinct from the state ownership of industries as existed from the post 1945 era until the 1980’s. Community ownership means the residents own or have a stake in energy companies in their respective areas. The importance of energy is two fold. Firstly, energy is universal and therefore crucial to all our current and future considerations. Secondly, how we meet our energy needs in a sustainable way is one of the principal questions of the 21st century.
DiEM25’s Green New Deal for Europe (GNDE) campaign is a key step forward aimed at uniting communities across Europe to democratise the energy sector and ensure long term environmental sustainability. This will entail including people who are most affected by changes in energy consumption, whether it’s issues of pricing or the type of renewable energy chosen. The process will involve a range of unions, political parties, organisations and activists but the final goal will be the same: sustainable energy ensured by and for a democratic Europe.
Germany provides a fascinating case study. 42.5% of all renewable energy generation is community owned. This consists of various schemes including wind farms, bioenergy schemes and solar parks. The nature of ownership and involvement varies from case to case but the essence of the idea is that the average citizen and community own energy installations involving them in decision making while also benefiting them financially. Individual citizens have installed solar panels on their roofs, with the subsequent electricity serving for personal use or channeled back into the grid. The entire enterprise allows greater freedom of action for people, more money in their pockets and represents a concerted effort to meet our needs in a sustainable manner.
The final pillar is energy security and independence.
One example is the UK, which from 2004 onwards has been a net energy importer meaning it relies on other countries, including unstable and undemocratic ones, for its energy supply. In 2015, 36% of the UK’s crude oil imports came from the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) countries and most of the country’s coal is imported from Russia. The dangers of this are not to be understated, with the OPEC countries embargoing the West during the Arab-Israeli War in 1973, causing an energy crisis.
More recently, Russia has used energy as a foreign policy tool against the EU. Considering 30.3% of the EU’s crude oil import comes from Russia this is a tool worth worrying about. An absence of energy diversification creates an energy dependency. Democratising the sector, however, will help to diversify our sources of energy by encouraging greater domestic production thereby ensuring energy security for the future.
Finally, placing control in the hands of ordinary citizens will mean heading towards the ‘Internationalist Europe that treats non-Europeans as ends-in-themselves’ as outlined in the DiEM25 Manifesto, whereby we choose to support democratic governments and entities around the world rather than supporting authoritarian, undemocratic regimes hostile to these values.
Economic democratisation is the next stage of economic development.
It reimagines the relationship between the individual and their community. It is a system that seems to produce greater satisfaction among workers, greater income parity and an alternative to polluting our environment.
As the 21st century progresses we will face newer and stranger challenges such as our relationship with data. Will our rights in this sphere be subject to governmental restriction or monopolised by corporations or will they be determined by us? The concept of technological sovereignty, a cornerstone campaign of DiEM25, puts citizens at the heart of technological change, to benefit from it, rather than to be subjected to it.
Economic disaster in the last decade, rising economic inequality and the recent effects of COVID-19 make our need for economic democratisation greater than ever and provides what is often demanded by many — a true alternative.
Photo: Mondragon employee.
Photo Source: TU Lankide on Flickr.
Yanis Varoufakis and Russell Brand: “A Chance for Another Now”
Russell Brand interviews Yanis Varoufakis on his Podcast ‘Under the Skin’.
He talks to Yanis Varoufakis about how we can ever hope to unify the fragments of the left, whether there is hope of an alternative future, how technology could be incorporated into a new Utopia, and how we can conceive of a true internationalism.
An excerpt from their discussion.
“I would like a world in which there are restrictions in capital movements and no restrictions on human beings moving around. That for me is the end of globalisation, and the beginning of internationalism. I personally consider borders to be a scar on the face of the earth, and this is the price we have to pay — the more these borders are getting taller, more electrified and more impenetrable, the more capital and commodities are free to move around. We need international solidarity, we need an international movement.
Some of us are putting together what we call the Progressive International. On the 18th of September we have an inaugural meeting and that includes my friend Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, the prime minister of Iceland Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the Bernie Sanders team are part of that, we have people from Nigeria and Japan and so on — because we need to start moving along those lines.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
Listen to the podcast on Luminary.
Register Now for the Progressive International Inaugural Summit ‘Internationalism or Extinction’!
Julian Assange’s trial is part of an increasing encroachment on democracy
The trial against the free press continues.
The trial in the United Kingdom seeking to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States was postponed last week due to a member of the prosecution (representing the US government) reportedly experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.
While the trial against Assange resumed on Monday, complications — including press access — continued to plague those providing court updates about the fate of the Wikileaks founder and the free press.
DiEM25 provides a roundup of the charges against Assange, updates from the trial, and why supporters of a free press should not let the war on whistleblowers continue.
The extradition case against Julian Assange: an overview.
Julian Assange was arrested in 2019 after London police physically removed the Wikileaks founder from the Ecuadorian embassy — the first time in history a government allowed a foreign law enforcement agency to enter its sovereign territory and arrest one of its citizens.
Assange received asylum from Ecuador in 2012 after then-Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa believed the Wikileaks founder faced “political persecuted and prospect of an unfair trial” in the United States.
Since arrest, Assange has been jailed in the United Kingdom’s Belmarsh prison, once dubbed “Britain’s Guantanamo.”
The original US case against Assange accused the WikiLeaks founder of “conspiring” with Chelsea Manning (then Bradley) in 2010 to commit ‘intrusion’ (hacking) of a government computer. US charges grew in May 2019 to 18 counts (from 2) under the Espionage Act, which targets Assange as a publisher of classified government documents.
Charges under the Espionage Act prove the most dangerous to a free press, as they criminalize what most journalists do every day: publish leaked material from sources. For this reason, the Obama administration declined to indict Assange, despite charging more leakers under the Espionage Act than all predecessors combined.
If extradited to the United States and convicted on all charges, Assange faces up to 175 years in prison.
Courtroom updates from the Old Bailey.
As the extradition trial in London’s Old Bailey resumed over video conference on Monday, connectivity problems again plagued those covering the hearing.
Journalist Stefania Maurizi noted “terrible” audio quality hearing witness US lawyer Eric Lewis, who was speaking on behalf of Assange. Maurizi noted even Judge Vanessa Baraitser “had trouble” hearing Assange witness Lewis. Journalist Tristan Kirk corroborated Maurizi, sharing that Lewis spent ten minutes asking if Barasiter could “hear him”, even “waving” to confirm the judge’s attention.
NGOs, including Amnesty International, are continually denied access to a video link of the trial.
Connecting with the outside world has not been limited to technology problems for Assange. The Wikileaks founder has reportedly not been able to access his lawyers for “six months”. Requests to delay the trial by the defense — in order to prepare for new charges by the US which led to Assange’s “rearrest” last week — have been denied by judge Vanessa Baraitser.
Monday’s hearing concluded after technical issues prevented the court from re-establishing a connection with Lewis. When court resumed Tuesday, US attorney Thomas Durkin, speaking on behalf of Assange, noted the “draconian” sentencing threatened against the Wikileaks founder and the prospect of an unfair trial in the United States.
“Kafkaesque” is the way whistleblower Edward Snowden characterised the case so far.
How to silence Whistleblowers.
As shared by professor Noam Chomsky and novelist Alice Walker, the Assange case has become more about the personality of the founder of Wikileaks than what the whistleblower organization has exposed — government misconduct. Assange’s lawyer Antoine Vey has noted that this is ‘no longer a legal case, but a political one’ — and at the center of the trial rests a debate on the existence of the rule of law itself.
This appears undoubtedly true, as a yearslong smear campaign against Assange, such as the story that he placed his own feces on Ecuadorian embassy walls, has pit the Right and Left against the Wikileaks founder and obscured details of the trial.
The Right has hated Assange since Wikileaks exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, further discrediting the War on Terror led by Republican president George W. Bush. Some even called for his execution, including Donald Trump. Assange become a persona non grata on the Left due to those who believe Wikileaks ushered Donald Trump into the White House. The irony appears lost, on the Left and those on the Right who hate the Trump administration, that convicting Assange in a US court threatens the free press which has encouraged such dissent since the 2016 election.
Even for those who may not like Assange, the case itself should raise concern. Along with lack of access to his lawyers, Assange was repeatedly spied on in the Ecuadorian embassy during meetings with lawyers, a scheme conducted by Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson.
There’s also the physical and mental strain put on Assange, described as torture by the UN and a team of physicians at The Lancet, which makes clear the intent of the US case: discouraging future whistleblowing against corruption.
LIVE: #AssangeCase – Day 6 – End of day statements #FreeAssange
https://t.co/QdrS2WExvw— Don't Extradite Assange (@DEAcampaign) September 15, 2020
At DiEM25, we do not see Julian’s fight as an individual’s struggle.
Rather, we stand in defense of a movement that is pro-whistleblower, pro-transparency, and anti-secrecy. Whether it’s in Australia, where whistleblowers are being prosecuted in closed trials, or Turkey where public prosecutors are being targeted with anti-terrorism laws, we must support those who have the courage to speak out.
Photo: Julian Assange’s father John Shipton speaks to the press. Photo Source: Don’t Extradite Assange.