#truth out

We brought together representatives from three campaigns across the U.S. to share their experiences and lessons from taking on data centers and AI infrastructure in their areas.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/solutions/want-to-resist-a-data-center-these-organizers-share-how-they-did-it

With the Democratic Socialists of America now counting 48,000 people within its membership and socialist candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushing for free universities and Medicare for All, Americans are once again discussing capitalism versus socialism. Fortunately, they are not doing so in the old Cold War manner of uncritically celebrating one while demonizing the other. Rather, it’s a debate over the choice Americans must make now between keeping capitalism or changing the system to some form of socialism. As debates often do, this debate awakens us to problems and differences in how we understand its basic terms. For clarity and to make progress in this important debate, we need to stop conflating “capitalism” with the market. This is done far too often and on all sides of the debate.

Markets are a means of distributing resources and products, goods and services. Quid pro quo exchange defines markets: one person offers to sell to another who offers to buy at a mutually agreed ratio that may or may not be mediated by money. To say that a market exists means that such an exchange system is what accomplishes distribution. To say that a market exists says nothing about how production is accomplished or how resources are converted into products. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a description of how the production of goods and services is organized, and how the participants relate to one another in the process of production. Thus conflating “capitalism” with “the market system” loses sight of the fact that markets can exist in relation to different systems of production.

We can get at this in other words. Markets were mechanisms of distribution in societies with very different production systems. For example, in economies based on the enslavement of people, resulting in a production system involving masters and slaves, “inputs” and “outputs” — including enslaved people — were often bought and sold in markets. We might then speak of slave markets: when a slave production system coexisted with a market distribution system.

If productive enterprises remain structured around the employer-employee relationship, they remain capitalist with or without a coexisting market system.

To take another example, feudal manors were production systems that juxtaposed lords and serfs. Since serfs were not slaves, no market in serfs existed. They were distributed via other, non-market systems. However, their non-human inputs and outputs could be distributed via markets, and in European feudalism often were distributed via market exchanges. Capitalist production systems – organized around the employer-employee (rather than the master-slave or lord-serf) relationship – could likewise coexist with market systems of distribution. Under capitalism, non-human inputs, labor power (the capacity to do labor), and outputs are all often distributed via market exchanges.

Thus it is confused to refer to capitalism as a “market system.” Market distribution systems vary in their specific qualities according to the different production systems and systems of exploitation with which they co-exist. Capitalist markets differ from slave markets, and both differ from feudal markets, but they are all markets. Moreover, markets usually coexist and interact with state apparatuses. Those interactions are marked with greater or lesser degrees of state interventions: from rigid regulation of exchanges all the way over to “free” trade or markets where regulation is minimized or absent. The state apparatus can also abolish the market system and replace it with an alternative system of distribution.

In that event, however, capitalism is not abolished because the market has been abolished. If productive enterprises remain structured around the employer-employee relationship, they remain capitalist with or without a coexisting market system. For the state to replace markets with some administrative (e.g., planned) system of distribution says nothing about the production system. The resources and products of a capitalist system of production can be distributed via more or less state-regulated markets or via non-market distribution systems. The same applies to the resources and products of slave and feudal production systems.

Why does it matter to differentiate markets and other distribution systems from production systems? The answer emerges from the recognition that most economic systems combine one or more production systems with one or more distribution systems. For a long time, the observers of such combinations – both celebrants and critics – have tended to conflate the two systems combined, as if they were one. Indeed, defining capitalism as “the market” or the “free market” system is precisely such a conflation.

The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Louisiana’s congressional map creating two Black-majority districts continues to remind us of how much the U.S. has backpedaled away from the so-called racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/government-corruption/black-disenfranchisement-has-not-been-this-intense-since-jim-crow

Together we can free ourselves from the powerlessness that comes with living in a fragmented, cronyist society and exercise our right to envision and build the world we want to live in.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/solutions/what-do-authoritarians-fear-most-people-who-stick-up-for-each-other

April 4 marks the historic 50th anniversary since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. At this time, it is vital to highlight the fact that King understood the depth of state violence, noting the violent effects of government policy in many spheres.

As King said a year before his death, "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government."

King was indicting the very logic of racial capitalism that continues to devalue some lives over others.

It is easy to focus on "lone gunmen" or "rogue cops" as individual perpetrators of violence, and of course on one level, that is true. People pull the triggers of guns. But the problem runs deeper than that. Police have enormous power and privilege in leveraging deadly force against civilians who they see as a threat or whose lives they don't value. The state gives them permission to use this force and condones racist violence by allowing wanton shootings to occur with impunity.

King's anniversary will be marked in many ways around the country. In Chicago, where we live, the 16-month-old Resist, Reimagine, Rebuild (R3) Coalition and affiliated activist groups will hold a rally at the city's Daley Center to highlight the radical legacy of King and those who fought alongside him.

We will link King's legacy to the ways in which we can resist the rampant anti-Black state violence being perpetrated today. In Chicago and the larger Chicago area, from Zion to Elgin to the South and West Sides, we have seen numerous cases of unchecked police violence against Black people. For example, the tragic case of Decynthia Clements, who was shot by police on a freeway while inside a burning car and thought to be suicidal. There is the lingering case of Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier, both shot the morning after Christmas in 2015 after LeGrier, a 19-year-old student home on vacation, called 911 for help. Chicago's police chief does not think the officer who killed the two neighbors deserves to be fired.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana there will be no charges against the two officers that pinned Alton Sterling to the ground and shot him in the chest, all of it captured on video. Sterling was selling CDs out of the back of his car. No one will be held accountable. Many people and groups are implicated in this injustice: Individuals pulled the trigger in these cases, but they are then protected by the policies and practices of city officials, police unions, lawyers and judges.

What is needed is a broad-based coalitional effort to combat not only street violence, school violence and sexual violence -- all of which are absolutely concerns of our communities -- but also state violence.

Most recently there is the case in Sacramento of Stephon Clark, which hits us very close to home here in Chicago. It sounds all too familiar. In March 2018, 20 shots killed 23-year-old Clark in his grandmother's backyard. In October 2014, 16 shots ended the young life of Laquan McDonald on a dark street in Chicago -- and for a long while, no one in power cared, until activists made them at least pretend to "care."  Both of these men were young and from poor and working-class communities. This point is significant in terms of Dr. King's legacy.

Medicare for All has quickly become a principal rallying cry for many progressives and leftists alike. Organizations ranging from Our Revolution, National Nurses United and certain branches of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have done much of the day-to-day work to bring single-payer health care to the forefront of political debate. Their efforts have helped push Medicare for All to the floors of the United States Senate and House. Currently, there are 16 senators and 120 Congress people cosponsoring Rep. John Conyers' (D-Michigan) Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act.

With greater congressional backing of Conyers' bill and the grassroots surge in democratic socialist politics, questions have moved from the desirability to the viability of programs like Medicare for All. Partisans and opponents of social democracy alike are wondering, "Single-payer health care sounds great, but how can we pay for it? How can we pay for any universalistic program without going bankrupt?" If democratic socialists see social democracy as one of the key stepping stones towards a truly egalitarian society, the issue of how we can sustainably finance such programs is of the utmost importance.

An economic doctrine named Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is surging in popularity and offering answers. MMT is debunking popular narratives about the harsh necessity of austerity and belt-tightening. It is showing that money is not a finite abstraction, but a limitless public utility that can be used to meet human needs. More than this, however, MMT and its heterodox economic cousins offer a framework to build directly democratic, egalitarian political structures, and thus reimagine and recalibrate the viability of democratic socialism.

What Is MMT? Understanding Neo-Chartalism

One of the theoretical forerunners and bases of MMT is chartalism, an economic theory which argues that money is a creature of the state designed to direct economic activity. The theory has recently been popularized by David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a wide-ranging work that touches upon issues ranging from gift economies, the linkage between quantification and violence, and the relationship between debt and conceptions of sin. In charting out the history of money, Graeber notes that, despite anthropological evidence to the contrary, economists have long clung to the myth of barter.

However, money does not emerge from barter-based economic activities, but rather from the sovereign's desire to organize economic activity. The state issues currency and then imposes taxes. Because citizens are forced to use the state's currency to pay their taxes, they can trust that the currency will carry value in day-to-day economic activities. Governments with their own currency and a floating exchange rate (sovereign currency issuers like the United States) do not have to borrow from "bond vigilantes" to spend. They themselves first spend the money into existence and then collect it through taxation to enforce its usage. The state can spend unlimited amounts of money. It is only constrained by biophysical resources, and if the state spends beyond the availability of resources, the result is inflation, which can be mitigated by taxation.

These simple facts carry radical policy implications. Taxes are not being used to fund spending, but rather to control inflation and redistribute income (and Trump's tax plan is certainly continuing the redistribution of income upward). Thus, we can make the case for progressive taxation from a moral standpoint concerned with social justice: We should tax rich people because their wealth is the product of exploitation and an affront to any truly democratic society, not because our transitional political program depends upon it. Congress can simply authorize the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to spend the money necessary for single-payer health care.

If we apply MMT to Medicare for All, the aforementioned "viability" debate and ungrounded fears about "printing money" fades into the background. Rather, our concerns shift toward examining our available resources and thinking about how to best provision them in such a way to as to advance social justice. This means training doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners. And it also means medical facilities being supplied with the necessary instruments, tools and technologies to provide care and treatment to patients and their communities.

This carries implications for policymaking beyond Medicare for All. If money belongs to the public, then questions about who and what the public is will arise. By extension, money, financing and investment should be subject to popular control through directly democratic participatory processes. To operationalize policies, however, requires further insights from heterodox thinkers close to MMT like lawyer Adolph Berle and economists Gardiner Means and Alfred Eichner.