28 August 2015

Destroy and remake education?

The Blog


A recent open response to an email posted by Center for a Stateless Society writer Kevin Carson advocates that rather than guaranteed access to education, there should be a more radical act of destroying present institutions to build an alternative model for education.


Carson argues that the values present in current educational institutions and state-supplied education are wrong, putting corporations and the state above individuals. Education should instead serve the interests of the individual, and new technology, new media and ultimately a radical departure from old values governing education and educational reform would enable this shift of values.

Describing corporations (rather than students) as the real customers of current educational institutions, Carson advocated:
Our anarchistic vision involves not simply abolishing the educational system as we know it, but also abolishing all the institutional customers for that system’s product. One thing I constantly emphasize is that, in an economy of self-managed cooperative production, self-employment, and direct production for use in the informal/household sector, the kind of education being demanded for employment wouldn’t be driven mainly by the needs of corporate Human Resources departments. They’d be set by the actual recipients of education, which in turn would be set on an ad hoc basis by individual workers negotiating as equals with small, self-organized production groups.
This type of advocacy fits with Carson's broader recommendation of shifting power away from institutions to individuals, as is increasingly current in some intense political battles such as that of information media and entertainment, as a result of the Internet. Carson sees the world's peoples, creativity and resources being eventually freed from the stifling "radical monopolies" of powerful corporations and the states they govern through lobbying and corruption.


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China caused new Wall Street crash?

The Blog


Most media coverage has portrayed China as the center of new stock market difficulties, but a recent analysis at Counterpunch says otherwise.


An op-ed authored by Mike Whitney and published on 24 August explained that the economic woes haunting the stock market as a systemic problem with the world economy. The cliched reaction of seeing this as an exclusively Chinese-caused problem only diverts attention away from the fragile situation of western economies, Whitney implied. From his conclusion:
Whether the troubles started with China or the credit markets, probably doesn’t matter. What matters is that the system about to be put-to-the-test once again because the appropriate safeguards haven’t been put in place, because bubbles are unwinding, and because the policymakers who were supposed to monitor and regulate the system decided that they were more interested in shifting  wealth to their voracious colleagues on Wall Street than building a strong foundation for a healthy economy. That’s why a simple correction could turn into something much worse.
Whitney believes that what is being dismissed a temporary hiccup on the stock market and an exclusively Chinese problem is the start of something more like the 2008 financial crisis. At the heart of it all, he sees a system of greed, fraud and debt-shifting based at Wall Street as the offender, rather than China or its Central Bank.


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25 August 2015

US-corporate global dispossession

The Blog


Kevin Carson, antistatist writer at the Center for a Stateless Society, pointed out in a post that the US government has not only supported the dispossession of indigenous peoples in its history but continues to do so in current events.


The US, whose colonial state was founded on the dispossession of Native Americans whose land it stole, is still involved in dispossessing indigenous people to this day. Accusing western civil society entities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of involvement in the same practice, Carson wrote:
some 130 million hectares of land (or 500,000 square miles) in the developing world has been bought by foreign investors over the past fifteen years, most of it to produce cash crops for export and a great deal of it involving the dispossession of people previously cultivating it to feed themselves. For example, the Prosavala land grab in Mozambique will evict 500,000 people.
The post concluded that these works, often labelled as a "model investment project", rely on a state enforcing the will of corporations, and that the best solution would be to "smash the state, and with it the parasitic capitalists it serves".


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