Antistatist think tank on Jeremy Corbyn

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How should left-wing antistatists and anarchists see Jeremy Corbyn, current Leader of the Opposition in the UK, who is considered "hard-left" in the media?

Looking at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) for commentary on Corbyn, you'll find only three articles mentioning his name right now. This is understandable, considering that Corbyn is a fairly new political animal for most people in the information media since his rise to leadership of the Labour Party.

Views at the the think tank, however, vary between quite enthusiastic support and expectations of severe disappointment to come if Corbyn doesn't turn out to be as radical as his supporters and detractors both claim him to be. The character of Jeremy Corbyn as someone who continually maintains his principles and fights for the public good against all the odds is not questioned, however, by either of these two competing viewpoints.

C4SS commentators Derek Wall and Kevin Carson both concurred that Jeremy Corbyn's success was a sign of progress. On 4 October, International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales Derek Wall, who knows Jeremy Corbyn, wrote at C4SS that he was "amazed" by Corbyn's success, pointing out that Corbyn was far from a mainstream figure and was "more popular with Greens than his own party".

Also mentioning Corbyn in his response to Wall - which was not directly concerned with Jeremy Corbyn but with points of political theory - Carson gave the following commentary:

I see a great deal of promise in Corbyn’s distinction between state and social ownership — perhaps even some hope of a partial move back towards Colin Ward’s vision of public services organized around mutuals and friendly societies instead of government and corporate bureaucracies.

An earlier article published at C4SS, however, quotes another anarchist blog at length, questioning whether Corbyn will really change anything in Britain's political landscape. Blogger Pete James from Whatever-ism had predicted that Jeremy Corbyn would disappoint his supporters in the way Syriza had disappointed the Greek people after promising to defeat austerity.

The above skepticism mirrors a similar view advanced by leading American social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, stating that elections have little impact on the world-system. Wallerstein also weighed in on the inherent weakness of national governments in challenging a historical social system like capitalism, which is ultimately how Greece was defeated by the interests of European and international bankers.

However, with the UK being a major financial player in the world-economy and linked integrally to the US, the threat from a Corbyn-ruled Britain to the capitalist historical system would be much more severe than anything from a peripheral European country like Greece. Wallerstein himself also described Corbyn's success as part of a global revival of the political left.

#America's evil regime won't stop threatening everyone and talking its mumbo jumbo ideology. http://t.co/l8aUfhVmyS pic.twitter.com/Bb8RfM6lbI

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) October 18, 2015

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Greece: long vs short-term poverty?

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Explaining the dilemma facing Greece on whether to continue austerity to pay off debts, or to fight for "debt forgiveness", Immanuel Wallerstein offered the following commentary.

In order to put things in perspective, Wallerstein gives the following breakdown of the two sets of political actors and their arguments dueling over Greece's economic future:

The "reform" camp (i.e. the EU)

• "Greece’s difficulties are self-created because successive Greek governments and Greek citizens have spent recklessly money they didn’t have in order to sustain a collective life style beyond their level of collective income."
• Greece must cut "collective expenditures in order for it to repay its extensive loans."
• "Over time Greece will emerge stronger."
• Reform camp's "most vocal and uncompromising spokesperson has been Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. He has been making two main arguments: Greece should leave the Eurozone “temporarily” and Greece should be held to the strict payment of all outstanding debts."
• Greece's problems started "essentially when the military dictatorship was overthrown in 1974 and a left party, PASOK, led by Andreas Papandreou, emerged as a major force on the scene. This date puts the blame solidly on Greece itself for adopting the social-democratic policies of successive governments."

Anti-austerity camp (i.e. Syriza's supporters)

• “Austerity” is "cruel and heartless, forcing an ever-growing part of the Greek population into abject poverty." 
• "A regime of austerity will not, cannot lead to an end to the present acute depression in Greece."
• "Each successive loan has increased, not decreased, the rate of unemployment and has made it less possible to achieve its ostensible goal of restoring Greece’s “competitivity” in the world market."
• "Call instead for substantial debt forgiveness and a reversal of the demands of creditors that Greece make cuts in pensions and other parts of the social security net."
• Debt forgiveness has "increasing support from prominent economists like Joseph Stiglitz and from Christine Lagarde, the president of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)."
• Greece's problems started "earlier, somewhere in the 1930s, when the West European governments, and particularly Germany, imposed a subordinate quasi-colonial system in Greece. This puts the blame squarely on capitalist and imperial forces."

Once it came to power in 2015, the (formerly) radical left party Syriza "had to face up to the dilemmas of being the government, which does not allow the easy positions of being a radical opposition movement".

Syriza betrays the Greek people?

• Syriza promised voters it would not deal with the troika (IMF, The European Central Bank, and the European Union). However, Varoufakis found that no one would talk with him if he didn’t talk with the troika, and had no choice but to break this promise
• Referendum ended in victory for no (OXI) vote against the terms of further austerity
• Greek government committee voted down Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis' "Plan B" or "Grexit on Greece's terms" prompting Varoufakis to resign, despite that he had promised he would resign if the aforementioned vote resulted in a Yes, when in fact it resulted in a No (this confused many people)
• Many now see Syriza leader Tsipras as a "traitor" for agreeing to even harsher reforms than Greece had faced at the beginning of the negotiations

According to Wallerstein, Syriza has proven to disappoint the Greek people through no fault of its own but because of the constraints on any national government that come from the world-system. Any national government has to behave a certain way within the international community and Greece is no exception to this.

Syriza never envisaged any alternative plan than seeking state power, and now that it is in government, it has found that it has almost no options at all. Of the options that do exist, all appear to be bad for Syriza and are likely to result in resentment and a sense of betrayal among Greeks.

The choice facing Greeks can now be narrowed down to the long-term poverty imposed by the terms of loans that Greeks feel they will never be able to repay, and the short-term poverty of leaving the Eurozone. Leaving the Eurozone will have disastrous effects on the standard of living within Greece but will free Greece from the chains of debt. According to Wallerstein, that is the choice facing the Greek people at this juncture.

An alternative economy for the #Greek people and for the whole oppressed world http://t.co/UGE1yG7jZp pic.twitter.com/zMkiCDgwd9

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) July 22, 2015

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Greece (and humanity's) alternatives

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The antistatist think tank C4SS has an explanation for the betrayal inflicted on the Greek people in their government's recent surrender to European (and US) financial power.

According to an open letter from C4SS social theorist Kevin Carson, the fault for the betrayal of the Greek people rests not with any person but with a misguided plan by left-wing politicians to achieve state power and revise government and corporate policies in order to accommodate the wishes of the people. History has proven that these actions lead to betrayal of the people, as the state's will can be bent by powerful institutions such as banks and corporations, as well as supranational oligarchy and foreign powers. Ultimately, any people who attempt to vote their way to a more humane and compassionate future using the dead end of the capitalist state will end up betrayed.

Syriza's failure to defy the European Union as intended by the Greek people who voted them into power is the triumph of institutions over people: a result that invariably results when one tries to play by the institution's rulebook. The C4SS think tank has an alternative view: Greeks should turn away from the state and focus instead on the development of their own alternative economy, stimulated by a climate of changing technology and increasing individual power. This result is inevitable, but foresight and proactive futurist approaches to Greece's economic oppression could prove to create a real exit for the Greek people from their collective economic misery.

As Carson writes, "hierarchical institutions like states and corporations are becoming obsolete", with piracy, encrypted currencies and the growth of micromanufacturing being the strongest evidence of this trend. Rather than seeing the state, courts, corporations and other monolithic institutions as possible allies, the body politic should instead focus more on circumventing them and ultimately destroying them. The institutions ruling Greece today are thoroughly corrupt, as is any politician who attempts to reform or even negotiate with them. Rather than being respected as authorities, these institutions directing Greece's economy should be regarded as backward or even obscene, and one should invest all effort into eliminating them rather than legitimizing them by trying to co-opt such institutions by starting at the ballot box.

In the conclusion of the C4SS open letter to the Greek people, an alternative economy for the Greek people and for the whole oppressed world is advocated in the following provocative, futurist-inspired paragraphs authored by Kevin Carson:

New, open-source production technologies like micromanufacturing are making high-tech craft tools affordable for individual workers and small cooperative groups — essentially a reversal of the technological shift from individually affordable craft tools to expensive large-scale machinery that led to the factory system. Raised bed, intensive horticulture can produce many times the ouput per hectare of corporate agribusiness. P2P networks with desktop technology can run circles around the old corporate information industries. 

The old corporate dinosaurs and the rentier classes’ large piles of investment capital rely entirely on state-enforced monopolies to stay relevant, attempting to enclose the new technologies of freedom and empowerment within their obsolete corporate framework. Fortunately, the same production technologies that render their capital and institutions superfluous — like file-sharing and encryption — are also rendering their monopolies unenforceable. 

These weapons for building a new society beyond capitalist control are freely available to you right now. And the Central Banks, the IMF and Angela Merkel are powerless to stop you because, unlike the government in Athens, you are not embodied in an official institution over which they can exert leverage. They are fighting a ghost.

Wallerstein: Lat America creeps right: The BlogThe Latin American left may be in a state of self-destruction, ... http://t.co/2vt4hjLngp

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) July 7, 2015

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