Carnival of the Uncapitalists, Homage to Catalonia Edition

Well, it's that time again--the fifteenth installment of Carnival of the Uncapitalists. But this time you need click no further, because I'm the host. Since Tuesday is the anniversary of the 1936 Spanish workers' uprising, the theme for this edition is workers' autonomy, worker control of the production process, the bargaining power of labor, and suchlike.

To start off, we've got a new contributor, Dmytri Kleiner, with a post at Interactivist about his intriguing idea for venture communes. The idea of venture communism is to enable labor to mobilize its own land and capital, use them more efficiently than the corporate capitalists, and watch the massive amounts of land and capital currently in the hands of capitalists become near-worthless when they're starved for labor to work them.

Richard Chappell of Philosophy, Etc., has an interesting discussion of negative versus substantive freedom, and the effect of a guaranteed income on the bargaining power of labor.

The title of Kathy Naumann's post, at Communicate or Die, is self-explanatory: Can Advanced Technology Save Labor's Problems? She brings her own considerable experience as an organizer to bear on the subject of information technology as an aid to labor activists.

Nathan Newman has a good post up at TPM Cafe scrutinizing the much-ballyhooed "moderate" credentials of Sandra Day O'Connor when it comes to workers' rights.

Last but not least, Charles Todd of Freiheit und Wissen--the guy who got this uncapitalist thing going--exposes the thuggery of the so-called "free trade" neoliberals, and the jackboot to the face that workers in Haiti are getting.

One thing that many good, honest people do not understand: the majority of rhetoric about “free markets” is baloney. You can tell it is baloney because there is a gap between what the preachers of “free market” ideology tell you and what they actually do.

This is a very simple principle. If someone always tells you that you ought to do x and then always does y instead, they have a credibility gap...

For example, “free market” ideology will tell you about the ability of free markets to set the cost of labor. I hear this thing all the time from Republicans and Democrats alike. Governments shouldn’t intervene, the market knows best, etc. etc. Yet despite this high praise for the power of the market to establish wages, governments and corporations continually intervene by force and intimidation to artificially suppress wages.

Haiti is just one particular example where the use of force and intimidation helps keep wages low so U.S. business interests can keep profits high.

Oh, yeah--I almost forgot. I did a post of my own for the occasion: On the Superior Efficiency of Small-Scale Organization.


This Just In. Bill has a great post on Workers' Control in Venezuela at Reasons to be Impossible.