scratch in the naïve mode #2

Japan has lost control of the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. Radio-activity has infected soil and waters in a wide radius. The government is unable to resolve the situation. The reactors will be shut down, but the damage is already done. In Libya, Gaddafi is in war with his people and NATO (under the UN banner) who spotted an opportunity for intervention and did not let it pass. Of course when the time comes the international (western) community will ask for a favour that will 'repay' the favour they are doing them now. I imagine Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron in a semi-dark room explaining to the Libyan representatives how this will work. Their words are similar to those uttered by Marlon Brando in the Godfather. Assad in Syria, does not seem willing to democratise his state, although there are already 60 dead people demanding it. And in Europe, the governments of the Eurozone have conferred in order to come up with solutions to the current crisis that sweeps the countries of the European periphery - the weakest links in the European chain. All they could come up with was a more advanced version of the dictatorship of the capital. The dictatorship of the bankers. The world is slowly becoming uninhabitable. And make no mistake, if the earth decides to get rid of our useless presence, she can do it in a split second. Whatever the advocates of social darwinism tell you, we are not the strongest species, and the fact that we have taken over the planet is simply wishful thinking, an illusion.

'There is history only as long as people REVOLT, RESIST, ACT' (P. Bourdieu)

the legal and the legitimate

Last Saturday’s events in London once again raised the question of the legal and the legitimate. The media coverage of the ‘March for the Alternative’ suggests that there were two kinds of protest in the streets of London: the first, including the majority of protesters was legitimate, while the second, actions of a ‘violent minority’, was illegitimate. The latter spoiled it for the former. The violence of the few tainted the peaceful protest of the many. That’s the image projected by bourgeois media.

It’s easier this way: media focus on the violent minority, at once undermining the demands of protesters and misleadingly distinguishing between practices by identifying the legal with the legitimate. What is legal is legitimate, said a Greek cabinet member a couple of years ago. He then had to step down from the government due to allegations of corruption. The division between legitimate and illegitimate protest is based on a technicality, the legal frame in which protest is supposed to occur. Protest can only occur in contained environments, it is a binding contract between the police and the organisers. Anything that falls outside it is technically illegal.

Legitimate protest is (for the media) that which is mediated by the police. however, this mediation in the citizen-state relationship sterilises protest. It renders it ineffective: if protest could be (or is) contained its value is only symbolic – civil society remains a symbolic demand, never a practical aim. Our practices (marching, holding banners and placards, shouting slogans etc.) remain in the realm of the symbolic. We act as if we have a political role. The symbolic and contained parade was the only legitimate ‘March for the Alternative’ last Saturday, according to the media.

But protest is unpredictable, it cannot be contained. Because it is in the streets that people show their anger for their government – it is in the public sphere that the definition of citizenship is negotiated. As Chantal Mouffe suggests, institutions and their function must be constantly renegotiated and redefined. What must always remain is a symbolic space where this negotiation can take place. Legitimate acts of citizenship are those that do not oppose the existence of the symbolic space. Protest, unless it denied the equal participation of all in the symbolic space of politics, cannot be illegitimate. It is an expression of the dialectics of history – a particular event that occurs in a particular place due to particular socio-political conditions. Containment of protest is a containment of democracy.

Last Saturday, UK Uncut protesters staged a protest in Fortnum & Mason’s. They entered the store shouted a few slogans and then wandered around talking to the workers explaining why they were there, etc. They were entirely peaceful (they even cleaned up before they left). Police told them that they had to stay in F&M for their own safety: a crowd had gathered outside and they didn’t want to be ‘wrapped up’ in something that was unrelated to their protest. They were told they would walk out to a ‘place of safety’ (there is footage of this here). When they got out they were arrested, all 150 of them, including a legal observer. They selected F&M to stage their protest because it is one of the major legal tax-dodgers in Britain. This case demonstrates the manipulation of the law in order to legitimise and delegitimize social practices.

All protest is potentially legal or illegal, this simply depends on who has written the laws. The legal does not prescribe the legitimate. And the legitimate does not always agree with the legal. The law is (in actuality) an expression of the ruling classes. Subversive acts can be illegal, but not necessarily illegitimate. But the question is not whether UK Uncut is legitimate or not. The question is why have the police arrested the F&M protesters and not its management. There are all sorts of questions to be asked in regard to last Saturday’s protest, but once again the media focus on the false division between legitimate and illegitimate political practices, without looking at the demand of this protest. The idiot looks at the finger pointing at the moon…

March in London (Part 2)

March in London (Part 1)

march 26 march

university of the common

This article was stimulated by things I've heard and read in recent events of the student movement in London.

Just as Marxian theory is not the only way to classify members of a population, revolution is a word that might exist in other contexts too. Etymologically, it relates to revolve, to roll back, from late Latin revolutio. Whatever that might mean, it is about movement – you cannot have revolution without movement.

Capital is a constantly revolutionising force. It changes the way we think about the world. And it is about movement. That is, capital, taken in the meaning of self-accumulating value, can only be achieved through movement. If revolution is also about movement and if we are participating in a movement, then what is it of capitalism that makes it stink like milk gone bad? Democracy is about movement too, right? Power is supposed to rotate between one group who 'represent' the people to another; the power to decide who this is going to be, comes back to the people in regular time-intervals. But these two movements are of different kinds. The myth of capital as producing democracy has now lost all its legitimacy: the only thing they are left with (and they have done really well in convincing a lot of people) is the dogma of no alternative. Even worse, for those who think that they don't buy the TINA mantra, the alternative is Keynes. This is why you have some places in the world (Germany, China) talking about growth, and others (e.g. the US after a brief prelude of light Keynesianism) imposing austerity. But this is besides the point.

We all more or less have wondered of the class content of the student movement. Classifying people is something we do all the time, but not necessarily through a Marxian frame. When Obama talks of the middle class, he does not necessarily imply Marx's Theories of Surplus Value. In simple terms, in every society, no matter when or where, there is a portion of the population who work; that is, a subgroup of society use their muscles and brain to transform nature in some way (through 'socially necessary labour') that produces the stuff we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we all live in, etc. There are other groups of people who live off the stuff produced by the group of people who work: children, the elderly, sick people, soldiers, students, doctors, teachers, etc. This means, that the group of people who work, (have to) produce more than that they themselves consume: this group is the (productive) working class and the extra they produce is the surplus. In this sense, it is impossible to abolish the working class – strictly speaking. So, when we try to figure out what's the class content of the student movement, let's bear in mind that whatever that is, it is not working class proper (in the sense that we participate as students or as teachers, even if one might also be a worker).

Of course there are millions of reasons of supporting non-working groups of people. But their role in society is different and falls outside the scope of strict analysis: doctors' or teachers' work is invaluable (contrary to the value that can be assigned to the products of labour) and the decision of what we do for them is always already made by society. Imagine a society that does not feed or clothe children. Hypothetically speaking: simply let them die on the street. This decision has been made – consciously or not. In some cases, not making a decision amounts to making one. Of course there are also groups of people who do work but not produce, in the sense of using their brain and muscles to transform nature and so on: these groups too live off (in the biological sense) from the surplus of the productive working class (cf. blue-collar/white-collar).

In education, a problem arises when assigning value to its products. The products of the work of students (exams, essays, etc.) on the one hand, and the Research Excellence Framework on the other. While we all know that education is a process; how can you measure the value of that? We all know that the National Student Survey is a futile attempt to measure aspects of higher education; this is not only so because of the consumerist model it implies (an ideological perversity in itself), but because of the underlying impossibility of measuring the transformation that takes place while studying, no matter how hard we try to time-structure and institutionalise the process.

Now, the problem is that the people who produce the surplus are not the same who decide how this is distributed. Some people produce the surplus, someone else gets it and decides where it goes to. This is the capitalist relationship strictly speaking. It doesn't matter whether this 'someone else' is the state or a corporation; in both cases a different group of people get the surplus. In the one case it is the state officials and in the other the board of directors. Capitalism was never about individuality. This is simply bourgeois ethics of the marketplace and can never been more than a marketing rhetoric. So, if capitalism is about movement and collective decision-making, were does our collective movement stand? David Harvey would say here that we need to learn from capital how to do it.

As David Graeber said in the recent Arts Against Cuts weekend, we tend to imagine capitalism as a giant monster and resistance to it as a gigantic force that will hopefully overthrow it. But in our everyday life we all behave as communists – and that's what we need to bring into collective consciousness. We share household work with our flatmates without exchange between us (economy: oikos + nomos = equal distribution of what relates to work done the house). It is only fair that the people who produce the surplus, also keep it and decide collectively, in a self-organised way, what to do with it. There's a double conclusion here: the problem of state intervention (how much, in which ways) is (ir)relevant to both capitalist and communist organisations; and that communist organisation is relevant to production, to work-related activities, both on the small scale and on the large. From this follows that, so long as there exist state organisations, the state is always necessarily a capitalist in relation to workers.

What do these mean for the university? Students who expect the university to provide education, are somehow expecting a return on their investment (fees, time, effort, etc). We need to bring into public consciousness that education in itself cannot be provided by anyone, except by the students and teachers as a collective. Professors are not simply providing knowledge. It doesn't work like that and this is not the work of the professor. The profession of the professor, as Derrida said, is not simply a constative speech-act. It is not a simple a discourse of pure knowledge. It is not an exchange of a fair amount of fees for a fair amount of knowledge and skills. To profess means to declare openly, to declare publicly; in some ways, it is a performative act of speech. This is what we need to bring into public attention. This is the aim of public interventions like the ones of the University for Strategic Optimism, the Really Free School, or student occupations. This is a time of questioning society what decision should be or is being made regarding the university. The university as a common, public space to address common problems.

David Harvey March 4, 2011, MIT, The Enigma of Capital

The talk lasts ca 47 mins and discussion follows. My favourite quotes:

""you should never let a good crisis go to waste""

"if you want to prolong a crisis because you have an agenda, you do"

"you can't solve the problem of global poverty without solving the problem of global wealth"

"you're dealing with a system that is incredibly fluid and flexible ... a constantly revolutionizing force ... we have to learn from capital how to do it"

e-petition to ensure short term visa exemption to Turkish tourists

A court in Munich ruled last month that Turkish Citizens do not require a visa to travel to Germany for short term stays (3 months). A similar decision was made by a court in the Netherlands some days later. Turkish citizens have been given the legal right to travel to travel to EU countries without a visa for touristic or business purposes (i.e. for 3 months) by two treaties signed between Turkey and the EU in 1964 and 1973. Nevertheless, this fact is being deliberately and unlawfully overlooked by European governments for the last 30 years. As a result, Turkish citizens wishing to travel to the EU are being forced to go through tiresome and humiliating, and sometimes even grotesque procedures in order to secure tourists visas. Even today, the German government is choosing to ignore and not implement the binding ruling made by the Munich court. There is an online petition aiming to bring this issue to the attention of the German parliament.

50,000 SIGNATURES MUST BE COLLECTED BY 13.04.2011 IN ORDER FOR THIS ISSUE TO BE DISCUSSED AND RESOLVED IN THE GERMAN BUNDESTAG.

ANYONE CAN SIGN THE PETITION; THERE IS NO REQUIREMENT TO BE A GERMAN CITIZEN OR TO LIVE IN GERMANY.

How to sign the petition:

Click on the link: https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/index.php?action=petition;sa=details;petition=16662

Unfortunately, this service provided by the parliament is only in German. Non-German speakers please follow these instructions. First you have to register; don’t worry your personal information is protected by the German data protection act. Your personal data may and will not be forwarded to or shared with any other persons or institutions. Click on registreiren which you will see above the password field. Your username will be assigned by the system. Fill in only the sections marked with bold*. From top to bottom these fields are e-mail (twice), password (twice), title (frau/ms or here/mr), surname, given name, street name and house number, postcode,city/town, country. Tick Ich bin einverstanden to declare that you agree to the German data protection act. Finally, type the colorful letters in the security box at the bottom and click on registreiren. You will then receive an e-mail containing your username. This will be the word following phrase “Ihr Benutzername lautet”. Usually it will be something like Nutzerxxxxxx (a number). There is also a link in the e-mail which you’ll have to click in order to activate your account. Once you log in, either find the petition number 16662 -Aufenthaltsrecht - Visumsfreiheit für türkische Touristen from the list or go back to the original link above. Once you’ve reached the petition page click on petition mitzeichen which is located below the Anzahl Mitzeichnungen

Congratulations, that was it! In order to sign out click on Ausloggen next your username at the top. You’ll receive a confirmation e-mail notifying you that you have signed the petition.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT.

PLEASE FORWARD

Some Thoughts

It seems obvious now, after the earthquake in Japan, that nature cannot be controlled (we knew it anyway, but Japan's earthquake confirmed it once again). What is particularly terrifying in Japan's earthquake, apart from the force with which it hit, the volume of the tsunami that followed and the number of their direct victims, is the impact on the area from the explosion in the nuclear reactor that is in the area. The explosion and the consequent leak of radio-active material in the atmosphere once again raises questions about the use of nuclear energy. Is it safe? I guess we all know the answer to this: no. Why isn't it safe, despite the safety measures taken by governments, corporations and other institutions? Because nature is by nature unpredictable. Because it is impossible to produce nuclear energy in a void. There is always the danger of the accident. And it happened: the Japanese government is evacuating the area around the nuclear reactors in a radius of 20 kilometres. It all seems too familiar. One is reminded of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. And other disasters before them; disasters we have heard of and disasters we only hear about in passing. And one has to wonder why do we still produce this extremely risky form of energy?

There are too ways to answer this question: the first is related to the profitability of nuclear energy. Nuclear reactors can produce huge amounts of energy. More people can be provided with energy, while the profits of those producing it rises. Therefore, what is presented as a way to provide better quality of life to more people is, according to one argument, a profit-driven strategy that simply chooses to ignore the nightmare of the nuclear holocaust. A question then rises: who is producing nuclear energy? And, more importantly, who controls those producing nuclear energy?

Which brings us to the second approach. The countries that produce nuclear energy are specific and it is them that decide who should be allowed to produce it. Therefore, some countries are to be trusted, while others are not. This pattern is nothing if not a pattern of power. The power-structures of the globalised world express themselves in the question of nuclear power. And they regulate the nuclear market according to their interests, while ensuring us that it is for our welfare. And we return to the initial question: given the unpredictability of the world around us, how can our welfare rely on such a precarious practice? And it is precarious not just for the human community, but for the entire planetary habitat.

The earthquake in Japan unearths these questions, once again in a painful way.

nhs day x

man of faith

Today the BBC published an interview with Tony Blair on his Faith Foundation, where "idealism becomes the new realism" in a mission to "counter extremism in all six leading religions". The interview starts with market talk. (It ends with the universities' role, but we would need to make a phone call to Derrida's spectre for this one, and I don't have enough credit at the moment).

"Gone are the days of ideological disputes between political systems.

"No one today disputes the power of capitalism - the only question anyone is asking is to what extent does government regulate otherwise free markets.”

Yeah, I guess it wasn't a question of government intervention when the financial sector collapsed in the autumn of 2008. The Bush administration, along with Obama, did not even debate this: the private financial sector messed up that badly, that already in October 2008, the US Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which authorized the Treasury Department to spend $700 billion in what was called Troubled Asset Relief Program. Love the titles: Trouble. Emergency: no time to question. Of course. Who does? The man is talking about faith here.

casino schizophrenia: some definitions

(taken from anonymous)

Repo: John has a 10-year Greek government bond purchased in 2008 and plans to use it as an education fund for his children. Mr Knowitall agrees with John to borrow his bond for a month and promises to return the bond, and compensate John for the trouble with a small pre-arranged amount of money (say 20 euros). John agrees and so the bond is in the hands of Knowitall who, for a month, can do whatever he wants with it, as long as he returns it at the end of the month, along with the pre-arranged amount . This is what we know as a repo.

Spread: Bonds, much like the term deposits, have an interest rate, determined at the time of issue. When we talk about a 5-year bond of 1000 euro with a 5% interest, it means that the one who will buy it will make 50 euros per year, for the next 5 years. The spread is the difference of the interest rates paid by a country in relation to the rate paid by another country which we consider as a basis. So, if Germany currently pays 3% for 5-year bond and Greece pays 5%, then the spread is 2% or 200 basis points.

The price of a(n) (old) bond falls as the current interest rate rises in the same class of bonds. In short, when spreads of the 5-year bonds go up, everyone who owns older bonds of the same class (ie 5 years), are the first to lose. The state is indirectly harmed in two ways: (a) By its reduced reliability (those who buy its bonds lose) and (b) When new bonds are issued, these bonds will have a higher rate.

Short Selling: Mr Knowitall, who has John’s borrowed bond, sells it in the market for 1000 Euros. He waits a few days, and the price of the bond falls. Then he buys a similar bond (10 year bond, issued in 2008) for just 900 Euros. So, Knowitall sold a borrowed bond for 1000 Euros , he bought the same bond a few days later for 900 euros, and now has a bond which is the same as the bond he borrowed, plus 100 euros (1000-900 = 100). At the end of month he returns the bond to John, and gives him the agreed 20 euros of the 100 that he won and keeps the 80 euros for himself.

From the above process, we understand that John, who still has the bond, gets the shaft and the Knowitall , who has profited by the bond’s price fall, makes a pretty penny.

Naked Short Selling: Because Knowitall is a greedy bastard and wants to make more than the 100 euros the above process helped him make, he does this next: While he has only borrowed from John one 10-year bond worth 1000 euros, he sells in the market 10 bonds worth 1000 euros each. In fact, 9 of these bonds sold there do not exist; they are bare (naked). This is a very dangerous practice of short selling, as there is no limit as to how much bare bonds can one sell. In the simple short selling, the limit is the bonds available in repo loans.

That way, one can create a virtual oversupply of bonds in the market, resulting in the bond prices sinking faster than the MS Estonia. Practically, the devaluation of the bonds becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and all the person who made the naked selling has to do – taking advantage of the panic he created – is to buy these 10 bonds back at significantly lower prices.

The Bank of Greece, after a TL;DR and deliberately cryptic letter acknowledged that the above practice (the naked short) was tolerated because of an existing loophole, and we will immediately elaborate.

When someone sells a bond in the market (Electronic Secondary Securities Market owned by the Bank of Greece), he is required to deliver it to the negotiators within 3 days so the bond reaches the hands of the buyer. This is known as T +3. So there is the possibility to sell a bond you don’t currently have. So you owe the negotiator a bond and you have to deliver it in 3 days. If you re-buy it after two days from the same negotiator, then the negotiator connives and practically cancels your debt (because you sold one bond, bought one, the sum in bonds is zero).

This is practically an act of naked short selling as at the time you sold the bond, you were not required to actually possess it (or to have borrowed it, as described in the repo).

Since 3 days is usually too short a timeframe for the bond prices to change, no one normally does naked short selling this way. For any naked short seller to profit from a situation like this, there has to be a ridiculously steep price drop in only 3 days.

The backdoor of the Bank of Greece

This is the normal procedure. But in this process there was a backdoor that the BoG had deliberately left open. And this loophole was failed orders. So, when someone sells a bond, he has to deliver it within 3 days. If he doesn’t, then the transaction is ‘failed’. Failure doesn’t mean that the transaction is void, because the sale has been made, and there is a buyer waiting for his bond. If the seller delays the process, it can go on for even 10 days. But if he carries it too far, then the negotiator has to buy a bond himself, give it to the buyer and send the bill to the seller. But this is unlikely to happen, because the seller knows what he can get away with.

In this manner, a Greek bond seller could keep his position open for 10 days, without possessing the bond he had sold. He could practically have a naked short order, with no one holding him accountable.

In October 2009, the Bank of Greece took a decision to further simplify this process by facilitating anyone who wanted to play this loophole. We explained above what a dangerous game and practically illegal naked short orders are. Combined with the backdoor opened by the Bank of Greece and the constant flow of “made-to-order” articles on the Greek crisis, it is clear that what we had here was a recipe that allowed anyone to run naked short orders for at least 10 consecutive days.

This went on for quite a while, until April 8, when things got out of hand. The committee that controls the Electronic Secondary Securities Market decided to close the loophole of failed orders with the following way: For every ‘sell’ order, the seller must provide a repo (a borrowed bond of one day) until he could provide an actual bond.