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Pax Silica represents a model of development that prioritizes the interests of global capital and geopolitical competition, over food sovereignty, democratic control over land and water, climate justice, and the rights and livelihoods of Filipino communities.
The post Philippines | Reject Pax Silica: Defend Food Sovereignty, Democratic Control over Land and Water, and Climate Justice appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
Responding to the large-scale Israeli military operation and mass displacement in Hebron in recent days, Oxfam’s Response Lead in the West Bank, Mustafa Tamaizeh, said:
"This is not only a humanitarian crisis but a deliberate assault on the economic foundations of Palestinian life, as families lose their homes and livelihoods. The destruction of factories, workshops, and business premises is wiping out years of investment and hard work. As movement restrictions tighten under Israel’s illegal occupation, workers cannot reach their jobs, farmers cannot access their land, and businesses are cut off from customers and supply chains.
“These illegal actions amount to collective punishment and are accelerating the forced displacement of Palestinian communities across the West Bank. They come during the olive harvest, one of the most important sources of income for Palestinian farming families. Israeli authorities, however, are creating conditions that make it increasingly difficult for Palestinians to remain on their land, with escalating state-backed settler violence and severe access restrictions preventing many from reaching their groves to harvest the crops that provide for them and their communities.
“The restrictions are also severely affecting humanitarian operations, limiting Oxfam's ability to reach affected communities and assess needs at a time when humanitarian access is most critical. All aspects of life are being impacted. Children and students, for example, cannot reach their places of study, and even those in need of medical care are being prevented from accessing health services.
“The economic damage being inflicted on Hebron is not incidental. It is part of a broader pattern of dispossession and ethnic cleansing that is deepening poverty, increasing dependency on humanitarian aid, and undermining any prospect for a just and dignified future.
“In recent days, high-ranking Israeli officials have openly acknowledged they are considering plans for the largest military operation in the West Bank since 1967, with calls for operations in the West Bank to be conducted like those in Gaza. Against this backdrop Oxfam is calling for urgent action by the international community to stop Israel’s campaign of mass forced displacement, demolitions and state-backed settler violence, which amount to a policy of ethnic cleansing.”
A "national interest" won by giving away people's right to survival and their food sovereignty is no national interest at all.
The post La Via Campesina stands with KPL and KWPA: Stop Korea’s accession to the CPTPP appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
The philosophy of Marxism during my student days was exceedingly straightforward – or rather, simplistic. It was marked by fierce denials: the repudiation of anything resembling spiritualism, the rejection of anything smacking of idealism, the refusal to grant the slightest value or efficacy to doctrines, beliefs, or sentiments.
Should the Rights of Man or immanent justice be invoked, Paul Lafargue{1}, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, would rise to sweep aside these ‘metaphysical charlatans’. And he would sharply rebuke Jaurès, the conciliator, for attempting to wrap idealism alongside materialism in the folds of his orator’s toga, for daring to invoke Plutarch or Michelet in the same breath as Karl Marx. Had Marx himself not peremptorily declared: ‘It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness’?[1] What grand constructs can be hatched from that egg!
Hence the necessity of seeking in the modes of production that sustain life the underlying reason not only for ways of governing or legislating, but for modes of thought: not only must law and religion be explained, but literature and philosophy must henceforth be accounted for, like material products, by the progress of industrial technology and conflicts of class interest.
Hold on tight: if the mathematical physicists of the 17th century rose to the notion of a natural law of absolute value, it was because of the progress achieved before their eyes by royal absolutism. As for the hypothesis of the unity of cosmic forces, it was supposedly a salon product – a product of those 17th-century salons where the idle bourgeoisie sought to dazzle one another with ingenious comparisons.
Such examples suffice. They serve as warning signs, signalling a grave danger: the peril one runs when attempting to account for the highest creations of the mind – religion, science, art – by a single concurrent force of the social milieu, by the productive forces of economic life alone. The disproportion between the single cause invoked and the value, complexity, and variety of the effects is blatantly obvious to all. And the interpreter, persisting in his reductionism, takes on the air of a clumsy Sisyphus.
From this stems a recoil before the abyss among Marxist philosophers, a step backwards. They reread their master and realise that his theses have indeed been abusively simplified. Marx himself never intended that.{2} Did he ever truly claim, at bottom, to exclude every kind of idealism from the philosophy of history? He too set himself an end, striving to replace the realm of necessity with that of freedom, and remained, as Saragat{3} puts it, a ‘humanist’. In any event, he would have concurred with Engels in affirming that the economic factor operates only ‘in the last instance’.[2]
Ultimately, we find ourselves before a Marxism that should be called not diluted, but enriched and made more flexible – ready to tolerate, welcome, and seek out nuanced explanations that would have sent a Paul Lafargue shuddering with horror in my student days.
What is most curious is that Russia itself – Soviet Russia – is collaborating in this intellectual enrichment and flexibilisation. Such, at least, is the impression that emerges from G. Friedmann’s{4} thoroughly informed and nuanced book, From Holy Russia to the USSR.
He recounts an anecdote attributed over there to Stalin. Questioning his son one day about the history of England, Stalin heard him speak of ‘merchant capital’ and ‘the third phase of struggle between the landed nobility and the urban bourgeoisie’ – yet the child did not even know the name of Cromwell. Let Russian children therefore be given a more concrete, living history, in which human beings are seen living and acting. And let there be a truce to the abuses of this ‘merchant capital’, which had become the stock-in-trade of Pokrovsky’s{5} early books.
Let there be a truce, too, to all the efforts expended to force and lock great writers into a single class, to declare them incapable of seeing anything beyond or above the economic interests of their group, of which they are treated as mere automaton mouthpieces.
Reading our new literature textbooks, Yermilov{6} declares in Pravda{7}, one would think that ‘the Russian classics were nothing more than zealots solely preoccupied with the material welfare of their social group’. It is high time to recognise that they were able more than once, through the vigour of their personal thought, to break free from this infernal circle to attain human values. It is high time to proclaim that the unionised worker of the USSR also has the right to seek intellectual and moral sustenance in more than one author from the era of Holy Russia.
Bravo. And thank you for this breath of ‘humanist’ fresh air. In France as well – and Georges Friedmann knows this better than anyone – it could usefully sweep away a few remnants of ‘vulgar sociology’.
[1] K. Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya, Progress Publishers, 1977, p. 21.
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Seemingly abandoned in favour of foreign doctrines, old French socialist thought nonetheless continued to shape the mindset of the working class and its activists. In recent years, we have seen it re-emerge, more or less consciously, but with unmistakable clarity.
It falls to the author of The Sociology of Proudhon[1] and of a forthcoming volume that will lead us Among the Socialist Prophets[2] to specify for the readers of New Europe[3] the signs by which this resurrection of the doctrines of ’48 may be recognised.
Anyone who combines a curiosity about present realities with some knowledge of the classical systems of social philosophy cannot help but seek a connection between these two domains. Among the doctrines constructed by our great socialist innovators, do not some correspond directly to the economic facts we are witnessing today? Could their resurrected ideas not serve as focal points for coordinating the many transformations spontaneously taking shape before our eyes? Principles capable of being revived to organise social life may, it seems, be found on the side of Saint-Simonism, and others on the side of Proudhonism – the one complementing or correcting the other.
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Charles Rist recently wrote in the Political Economy Review:[4] ‘What we need is neo-Saint-Simonism.’ Merely wishful thinking? There is something more in the words of the economist-historian. He knows that facts are preparing the resurgence he envisions: by the very force of things – by the necessities of war – there is already, now more than ever, Saint-Simonism in the air.
Indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of the present hour: the war, which they detested more than anything in the world, has dragged these great pacifists behind its chariot, reopening the paths to their programme.
They believed in peace – a peace rendered almost inevitable by the very progress of industry. They had not foreseen that a nation would arise to synthesise two elements that they regarded as irreducibly hostile to one another: militarism and industrialism. Through this unexpected synthesis, the stage was set for a formidable explosion, potent enough to shatter the faith of the Saint-Simonians.
Yet if they were profoundly mistaken on this point, how often were they the first to speak the language that is becoming commonplace today? Their industrialism stands opposed to what they called constitutionalism. And their socialism gives priority to the concern for production.
This means that two problems lose their primacy in their eyes: that of forms of government, and that of the arrangements of distribution. Many minds today, coming from very different horizons, would agree that we have allowed ourselves to be overly fixated on these two sets of problems. ‘Less politics’ – to embrace this watchword is to recall, in keeping with the Saint-Simonian tradition, that what matters above all is the development of the nation’s resources.
To carry this task through, to prepare what Herriot calls the economic reorganisation of the nation, it is essential to attach less importance to the doctrinal formulas that could still divide parties yesterday. In our struggle with nature, we must preserve something of the union sacrée that resistance to the enemy imposed upon us. Could we not, asked Audibert[5] recently, found a party above all parties – a productivist party?
Productivist – this new word designates less a birth than a rebirth: the rebirth of the mindset of the forefathers of productivism. Lysis[6] repeats to us in every key: ‘Intensify production: distribution will take care of itself. That is the true formula of the new democracy.’ And to establish his thesis, he gladly denounces what he calls the French error. He overlooks only one point: the idea he is taking up is a French idea formulated long ago. The ground he is rediscovering is venerable French soil.
To transform the nation into a vast workshop, and, so that man may be less exploited by man, to focus first on better exploiting the globe – that is indeed, in the eyes of the Saint-Simonians, the ideal that takes precedence over all else. Their thought would progress by stages from liberalism to socialism. Yet their socialism would always remain, as one of their finest historians, Élie Halévy, tells us, a socialism of production.
To achieve this ideal, several of the methods extolled by the Saint-Simonians coincide precisely with those imposed upon us by the necessities of war.
The State has had to intervene in almost everything, though not without changing its ways. To the delight of Maxime Leroy, a jurist eager to welcome new developments, administrative action has assumed unprecedented forms. Faced with dwindling imports and multiplying needs, it became necessary to purchase for the nation, to allocate foodstuffs among provinces and raw materials among factories.
These were immense and complex tasks that could not possibly be carried through without the collaboration of experienced practitioners. Thus industrialists, merchants, bankers, and engineers were brought into regional committees, interministerial offices, and government councils. This was what Maxime Leroy calls ‘the administrative ascent of the producers’. Yet is not this ascent precisely what the author of the Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva demanded? In the various ‘Chambers’ whose establishment he proposed in order to make politics truly industrial – chambers of invention, examination, and execution – he saw a means of securing political influence for those who had proven their economic competence. He carved out steps for the ascent of expertise.
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In the early morning hours on Monday, Oct 12, we destroyed a horizontal directional drill (HDD) that Enbridge had been using to build its reroute of the Line 5 pipeline on Anishinaabe land in northern Wisconsin. We painted a message — Water is Life — before dissapearing into the night.
In love and solidarity with all those fighting for the land, water, and future generations, we join the chorus of voices saying no more desecration of the sacred, no more pipelines on stolen land. Fuck Enbridge. Fuck ICE. Free Palestine. Hold each other close in the face of evil. Never give up the fight. xoxo
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