Daily Archives: August 4, 2017

This week is sandwiched between two celebrations of freedom: freedom of individual Jamaicans from chattel slavery (August 1) and freedom of the Jamaican State from colonial domination (August 6). If we want to take an optimistic view, we can say that both remain a work in progress, for we have not really achieved either.

If we want to be pessimistic (and maybe more realistic), we can say that all that has happened over the last two centuries is that we have swapped one master for another.

Jamaican slave owners gave up their valuable property under duress. Only children under six years old (who could not work) were emancipated immediately in 1834. The slave owners demanded six years more of free work from field slaves and four more years from house slaves (eventually reduced to four years for both) before they were to become fully free; and after decades of stolen forced labour, they also demanded to be financially compensated for the loss of their human property, as well as future labour.

The former slave owners still controlled the Jamaican colonial state through the Jamaica House of Assembly, and they did all they could to force their former slaves to work for low wages, ensuring they never became more than second-class citizens. Without the right to vote or to stand for election, and without reparations in terms of land and education, Jamaica became the land of their oppression under wage slavery.

The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and the 1938 riots and labour unrest had a lot in common with Sam Sharpe's 1831-1832 slave revolt, because Emancipation did not bring the freedom that had been expected. Even today - 183 years after Emancipation and 179 years after full freedom - and 73 years after being allowed to vote - the majority of the descendants of the enslaved still suffer high levels of illiteracy, educational underachievement, unemployment and underemployment. Somehow, the celebration of Emancipation by descendants of Jamaica's former slaves seems a little hollow.

I would have expected Jamaicans to celebrate our personal freedom, and to eschew anything resembling what Bob Marley (following Sidney Moxsy and Marcus Garvey) called "mental slavery". So many of us, though, misuse our freedom by choosing slavery to fad and fashion: like skin bleaching, tattooing, and body piercing, to name a few. Is using one's freedom to follow the crowd really freedom? Or is it a new kind of slavery?

We have misused our freedom - hard won by Sam Sharpe, Wilberforce and Knibb. Instead of choosing education and ethnic pride as the road to self-respect, many have chosen to ape their white oppressors, and to mutilate their bodies. Emancipation is very much a work in progress.

Jamaica could not prosper under colonialism. British policy demanded that nothing should be manufactured in Jamaica that could provide employment for British labour at home; if they could have shipped freshly cut sugar cane to Britain for processing by British labour, it would have been illegal to locally manufacture brown sugar and rum. Even today, we do not refine white sugar locally. Some countries that cannot grow cocoa are famous for their chocolate confections; and we, with some of the best cocoa in the world, can't make a success of manufacturing chocolates.

The spirit of colonialism is still with us! And this is because at Independence in 1962, all we did was change white colonial masters for brown local ones.

In 1962, the bad, bad British bequeathed us a national debt of zero pounds sterling, and in 50 years of independence, a series of PNP and JLP governments borrowed billions to bequeath to this generation of Jamaicans one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world.

Political Independence promised liberation from colonial oppression. It has led to garrison communities, political corruption, and the deepening of Jamaica's oppressive colour-class divisions through an apartheid education system.

'We're out to build a New Jamaica' might have been the slogan, but those who jockeyed to put themselves in charge of the Jamaica Independence Project have not delivered. We have ended up much the same, under a different rubric. The political freedoms gained through political Independence have been misused to enrich the political class and their cronies. Independence is very much still a work in progress.

We may celebrate freedom this week and next, but there are many of us who will mute our celebrations until we are a little farther along.

-Peter Espeut is a sociologist and rural development scientist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.

See more here:

Peter Espeut | Swapping one slave master for the next ... - Jamaica Gleaner

By Pedro Campos

A better world is possible, if it is Socialist. Foto: dakarparada.blogspot.com

HAVANA TIMES Recent events in Venezuela have served to expose this State-Stalinist Left which, entrenched in anti-US imperialism and its alleged attack on the revolutionary process in Venezuela, have turned their back on the struggle of the masses to uphold the democracy that was built under Chavezs government.

At the head of this movement, we find the Castro dictatorship, its followers and this whole group of communists and socialists who continue to, essentially, believe that socialism was built from the State in Latin America and Europe. A state led by an erudite elite who knows what needs to be done, starting off with nationalizing large, medium and small-sized companies, controlling the market, creating a new man and destroying the bourgeois state to build a new socialist one.

There have been two more significant features of these Communists ideas:

1- The concentration of property and State control of the economy, at the expense of free, private and associated modes of production and capitalist models.

2- The substitution of a democracy which they call bourgeois by another so-called dictatorship which is apparently proletarian, the only class within capitalism who has never held power and then has been kept under the chains of wage slavery, but for the State, in its name. Making a perfect base for the authoritarian system.

What does this have to do with collectivization, freedom and emanicipation, Socialisms great catchphrases?

This Left who sit in meeting rooms and drink capuccino coffees have never understood a single word of Marxism. They have never understood that for Socialism to exist, first you need a social-economic base where free, private or associates modes of production need to dominate, like Classic theorists have pointed at time and time again, which can be never replaced by paid work, nor can it ever be built from the top nor from outside the nation.

This Left has never read Marxs Capital, where it explains how in the previous capitalist system which was defined by wage labor as its mode of production, other forms of production are born, grow and develop, on the back of free work, especially associated work, which can be seen in cooperatives. How societies make up the first form of breaking down capitalism with their actions is exposed within this book.

These communists dont understand the fact that it is only via the greater democratization and freedoms which are possible within capitalism that a new post-capitalist, socialist, or whatever you want to call it society, can be born. And thats because full democracy and freedoms, especially the free market, are what allow the unobstructed progress of free and associated work, a phenomenon which has seen progress in high and medium developed capitalist countries.

In previous writings, I showed that the concept of the Left was intimately linked to the birth of democracy, of power being given to the people and their representatives, in the struggle against the King, during the French Revolution and then with what has always been linked to power and the wellbeing of the masses. Therefore, it is wrong to think that there can be Left-wing dictatorships. As a matter of principle, etymologically-speaking, all dictatorships are Right-wing.

Its simple: a government like Maduros can neither be considered Left-wing nor democratic, which is trying to ignore a large popular election in favor of a National Assembly, because its controlled by the opposition, which manipulates the election of a Supreme Court; which strangles the private economy financially-speaking; which puts power in the hands of a few bureaucrats; which violates the democratic Constitution voted in during Chavezs government; which is refusing to call for a referendum which is recognized by this Constitution and to hold elections for mayors and governors and, on top of this, wants to revoke this democratic constitution and impose another constitution in true Castro-Stalin style by fire and blood, violently repressing those who defend it.

Today, Venezuela is the showcase which defines who is and isnt the Left. Go there, put your credentials under it and you will be able to identify yourself. Good Luck.

The Left is always democratic or it isnt the Left.

Notes.

1-1- Capital, Volume 3 (Chapter XXVII The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production)

Read the original here:

The Left is Democratic Otherwise it isn't the Left - Havana Times

Hey, whatever you've gotta tell yourself to get through the day. Via PragerU/YouTube

If youve ever wondered what the anti-Streetfilm would look like, wonder no more.

Prager University ([we are] not a university and we do not offer degrees)is a non-profit founded by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager, whose mission is to spread Americanism.

PragerU, as its known, releases five-minute videos on a range of topics, featuring titles like, If There Is No God, Murder Isnt Wrong, There Is No Gender Wage Gap, Income Inequality Is Good, Just Say Merry Christmas, Was the Civil War About Slavery?, Build the Wall, and Where Are the Moderate Muslims?

Its latest video, released this week, is about another fundamental American value:driving big, gas-guzzling cars and not using other modes of transportation, becausefreedom.

The video is presented by Lauren Fix, a New York-based car coach who also hosts an automotive segment on Newsmax, the right-wing outlet.

In case youre not aware that cars are private vehicles used for point-to-point transportation, Fix lays it out for you. They allow us to go wherever we want, whenever we want, with whomever we want, she says. When you get behind the wheel, you are in control. You are free.

Got that, car drivers? You have now been informed that you are free. Yes, free to get stuck in traffic, or circle endlessly for a parking space, or make large monthly payments until youre on the verge of bankruptcy. This is pure American freedom.

Fix also has a message for everyone who cant afford a car, or is physically unable to drive, or just prefers to live life without being tethered to a big, expensive metal box whose value rapidly depreciates. The message is: Wake up! Dont you realize youve been brainwashed by regulators?

The very reason people love cars personal freedom is also why regulators cant stand them. Government at all levels craves control. And when it comes to your car, they want you off the road. So do the environmentalists, with whom theyve made common cause, she says.Urban planners are adding bike lanes, reducing parking spots, and pouring billions into more public transportation. And theyre putting up subliminal ads everywhere that say Obey.

Fix says nothing about the ubiquitous government mandates that force developers to spend billions on parking, orthe massive public subsidies that sustain auto sprawl, or the pervasive regulatory apparatus thats supposed to protect us from the danger of cars, but still cant prevent 40,000 traffic deaths in the U.S. each year.

Apparently, only a government bureaucrat would harp on this government excess, or something. Theres been a concerted push by government bureaucrats and environmentalists to transform car ownership from a source a pride to a source of guilt, she says.Americas car culture isnt dead yet. So as long as Americans want to live in the land of the free, Americas car culture will never die.

God bless you, Veronica Moss I mean, Lauren Fix and PragerU. And God bless Americanism.

Excerpt from:

This War on Cars Video Will Defend America From Transit-Riding Infidels - Streetsblog Denver (blog)