[P2P-F] Fwd: invitation to sign multi author programmatic initiative

Sat Apr 2 19:46:13 CEST 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Albert <sysop at zmag.org>
Date: Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 8:52 PM
Subject: invitation to sign multi author programmatic initiative
To: Vijay Prashad <possiblehistory at gmail.com>, Leslie Cagan <
lesliecagan at igc.org>, Laura Flanders <flanders.laura at gmail.com>, Michel
Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>, Pauolo
Hi,

Don't you want to sign on to the collective programmatic document we have
offered before it goes public? We have not heard your response... perhaps
you never received your invitation? Or maybe we missed your reply? If so,
there was an error and our apologies for that.

At any rate, the document, included below, is hopefully self explanatory.
It seeks to inspire and assist a wide effort to arrive at shared left
program. It offers various ideas for possible program, culled from practice
and diverse sources, but it mainly seeks participation in a far reaching
discussion, debate, and exploration, that will hopefully refine, augment,
and interweave lasting multi issue, multi constituency, program for the
future.

Please let us know by return email if you would like to add your name to
the effort. If so, please also indicate any affiliation you would like
listed.

The current signers of the document are:

Michael Albert, Z Communications / U.S.
Greg Albo, Centre for Social Justice / Canada
Gar Alperovitz, The Next System / U.S.
Bridget Anderson, COMPAS / UK
Kehinde Andrews, Organization of Black Unity / UK
Gordon Asher, Scholar Activist / Scotland
Walden Bello, Focus on the Global South / Philippines
Peter Bohmer, Economics for Everyone / U.S.
Noam Chomsky, Internationalist / U.S.
Savvina Chowdhury, Rachel Corrie Foundation  / U.S.
Marjorie Cohn, Scholar Activist / U.S.
Ben Dangl, Journalist/Editor / U.S.
Heather Day, CAGJ, / U.S.
Cindy Domingo, Electoral Activist / U.S.
Steve Early, Labor organizer / U.S.
Joe Emersberger, UNIFOR / Canada
Barbara Epstein, Scholar Activist / U.S.
Mark Evans, What About Classism / UK
Vincent Emanuele, IVAW / U.S.
Bill Fletcher, Talk Show Host / U.S.
Bill Gallegos, Environmental Justice Trainer / U.S.
Irene Gendzier, Scholar Activist / U.S.
Andrej Grubacic, Global Commons / U.S./Balkans
Thomas Herndon, Univ. of Mass. / U.S.
Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence / U.S.
Matt Lester, Economics for Everyone,  / U.S.
Joris Leverink, ROAR / Netherlands/Turkey
Rodolfo Leyva, Middlesex University / UK
Auset Marian Lewis, Journalist / U.S.
Mandisi Majavu, Activist/Negritude / South Africa
David Marty, Scholar Activist / Spain
Robert W. McChesney, Univ Illinois / U.S.
Suren Moodliar, Global Action / U.S.
Larry Mosqueda, Movement for Justice & Peace / U.S.
John Narayan, University of Warwick / UK
Immanuel Ness, CUNY / U.S.
Eugene Nulman, Critical Social Research / UK
Paul Ortiz, University of Florida / U.S.
Garry Owens, Kindle the Flame / U.S.
Leo Panitch, Socialist Register / Canada
Cynthia Peters, World Education / U.S.
Justin Podur, Activist/Scholar / Canada
Nikos Raptis, Scholar Activist, Greece
Jack Rasmus, St Marys College / U.S.
Jerome Roos, ROAR Magazine / The Netherlands
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Internationalist / Portugal
Lydia Sargent, Z Communications / U.S.
Stephen Shalom, New Politics / U.S.
Marina Sitrin, Lawyer/Author / U.S.
Norman Solomon, RootsAction / U.S.
Sarah Stockholm. Showing Up for Racial Justice  / U.S.
Paul Street, Journalist/Author / U.S.
Verena Stresing, Scholar Activist, France/Germany
David Swanson, WarIsACrime / U.S.
Fernando Vegas, Retired Supreme Court Judge / Venezuela
Tom Vouloumanos, NDP / Canada
Greg Wilpert, Real News / Ecuador/U.S.
Florian Zollmann, Scholar Activist / UK/Germany

And here is the document…

*Some Possible Ideas for Going Forward*

Around the world powerful and diverse possibilities are in struggle. We the
signers of "Some Possible Ideas for Going Forward" think one high priority
for progress is activists developing, discussing, and settling on
priorities around which to organize multi issue activism in coming months
and years. We hope this document can help inspire more conversations within
groups and movements that, over time, come to some synthesis. We do this in
the spirit of self organization - and as a rejection of preformed
inflexible programs and agendas imposed on activists from above. We believe
only program that comes from below and is fully understood and owned by
grassroots participants can win lasting change.

To try to help, we have assembled some familiar programmatic ideas rooted
in diverse movements and projects. We signers do not each individually
necessarily support every single programmatic suggestion given here.
Indeed, perhaps none of us supports every single suggestion much less all
the specific wording. Instead, we all support having a widespread
discussion of these worthy ideas and of other ideas that emerge from the
process, to arrive at widely supported program for left activists.

*Some Possible Economic Programmatic Ideas*

A left agenda might, for example, pursue four central economic goals -
better quality of daily economic experience, more fairness, better
production priorities, and increased mutual compassion.

For example, new economic program might seek: (1) a law forbidding capital
export and relocation without community and worker agreement, and (2) a law
delineating punishments for employers who impede nationally mandated
economic reforms. Likewise, it could seek controls on work day and work
week length - for example seeking 30 hours of work for 40 hours pay. It
might demand that the maximum penalty for owners violating the spirit and
intent of such laws would be nationalization of their businesses under the
management of currently employed workers.

Similarly, new economic program might propose: (1) reducing inequality, (2)
reorienting productive potentials to meet social needs, and (3) enlarging
economic democracy.

For example, new economic program might propose sharply progressive
property, asset, and income taxes, with no loopholes, as well as a
dramatically-increased minimum wage, say $20 an hour, and perhaps a
guaranteed income for all, coupled with a new profit tax that would be
proportional to inequities in each firm’s pay scale. The more oppressive
the pay scale, the higher the profit tax.

Due to a new minimum wage law, minimum pay would rise dramatically. Due to
a new pay equity tax, industries with a more equitable pay scale would have
more after-tax resources. Not only could more equitably structured firms
use these extra funds to further improve work conditions and increase their
social contribution, they could generally out-compete less socially
responsible firms. New property and asset taxes would dramatically diminish
differences in wealth.

New economic program might usefully label all these innovations
redistributive and repeatedly explain why redistribution from the rich to
the poor is both morally justified and socially essential. Perhaps this
part of a new program could be called “reclamation of stolen riches.”

New economic program could seek a comprehensive full employment policy
arising from campaigns to rebuild infrastructure and, in particular, to
attain sustainable energy policies, as well as via the shift to a shorter
work week. It could include comprehensive adult education and job training,
and a comprehensive social support system for those unable to work,
whatever the reason.

Moreover, beyond material equity, new economic program could also advocate
that workers should all have work conditions and responsibilities suitable
to their personal development and to their responsibility to contribute to
society’s well being. Why should some people endure boring, dangerous,
subordinate, and rote conditions, a new movement might ask, while other
people enjoy challenging, fulfilling, empowering, and varied conditions?
New program could reveal that fairness is not only attaining equity of
wealth and pay, but also equity of conditions of work and life.

Using this principle as a long term touchstone, new program could seek to
build and support workers’ councils empowered to conceive, demand, and work
to implement job redefinition as well as to win increasing say over the
pace, goal, and organization of work for the workers who do it. Such a
program could emphasize that work can and should be a demanding but
rewarding part of people’s lives, rather than an alienating, debilitating,
energy and dignity sapping affront to people’s life potentials.

Regarding investment priorities, new economic program could propose tax
incentives for socially useful production and tax disincentives and indeed,
legal prosecution, for wasteful and socially harmful production. This would
help foster production to meet real needs and potentials. Indeed, such a
new program could indicate precisely how to successfully regulate, punish,
and even nationalize under workers control any business or industry deemed
by an independent citizens bureau and public plebiscite to be destructive
of the public good. While this might initially point at Walmart scale
businesses, in time, of course, it would get at capitalist institutions per
se.

Of course, major change in economic priorities that a new program could
emphasize could include a massive cut in military spending. Further, new
program could propose that existing military bases be converted to centers
for ecological clean-up, to new schools for local communities, to
workplaces for developing low income housing, or to new centers of clean
transportation or energy production. Funding for the new centers of social
creativity could persist simply being the old military funding now put to
desirable ends and similarly resident GIs or others seeking new employment
could be retrained on site, to work in the converted bases.

Regarding economic democracy and participation, new program could work for
the formation of consumer and worker organizations to watchdog product
quality, guard against excessive pricing, advise about product
redefinition, and participate in plant, industry, and community collective
consumption decisions with open books and full investigative rights. Beyond
these first steps, new program could clarify that the ultimate goal is the
full democratization of economic decision making and the initiation of a
national public project to develop new institutions for work, consumption,
and allocation.

In short, new economic program could: (1) ratify the public’s suspicion
that the basic problem with our economy is that capitalist institutions
make capitalists prefer war production, persistent unemployment, and
homelessness to a working class able to demand a bigger piece of the pie
and control over what kind of pie is baked; and, (2) propose uncompromising
changes that redress existing grievances, create conditions more just and
humane, and establish a new balance of power conducive to winning more
fundamental changes, including new defining institutions in the future.

*Some Possible Education Programmatic Ideas*

A new education program could note that existing schools create subservient
and exploitable future workers by providing most students minimal literacy,
virtually no dignity or sense of self worth, plus maximum training in
enduring boredom and obeying orders.

New education program could explain that schools accomplish all this
destruction and distortion by incorporating differences in teacher-student
ratios, in resources per student, and in teacher expectations and
training—all on top of different conditions of home life, community
relations, access to information and comfortable learning conditions, that
simply multiply the injustice.

To foster educational change new program could highlight the need to
overcome corporate agendas and existing institutional pressures with our
own alternatives. It could reveal that to have good education for all we
must have a society promising full employment at jobs that require and
utilize people’s full capabilities, including facility at decision-making,
ample knowledge about society, and expectations of success and
participation.

New education program could also pressure for specific pedagogic changes in
how schools and classes are conducted both during school hours, and also
for surrounding communities in off hours. To enumerate these changes, new
program could advocate a national debate about curriculum reform, improved
teaching methods and enriched teacher-student relations, improved resources
for schools, and increased community involvement and benefit.

New education program could also seek specific goals for education. For
example, to reduce class size to a maximum of 20 students per teacher in
all schools and to equalize resources per student across all schools,
including architecture, computers, books, and food, and, of course, to
guarantee free education (through college) for anyone who wants it.

New education program could seek specific funds to staff all schools at
night for community meetings and remedial and adult education. Space to
meet, to engage with others, is a huge factor in successful community
organizing, and perhaps public schools, at night, could become that space.
And finally, new program could seek that funding for education comes from
corporate profit taxes and from private progressive taxes collected at the
national level to guarantee that regions attain educational parity.

*Some Possible Race Programmatic Ideas*

New program addressing the pivotal problem of race in the U.S. and
societies around the world could seek to ensure that people can freely have
multiple cultural and social backgrounds and commitments, including
providing the space and resources necessary for people to positively
express their views, celebrations, languages, and values.

New program addressing race could explicitly recognize that rights and
values exist regardless of race, religion, or cultural allegiances, so that
while society protects all people’s right to affiliate freely, its core
values are universal for every community.

New program addressing race could guarantee free entry and exit to and from
all cultural communities in society including affirming that communities
that do have free entry and exit can be under the complete self
determination of their members, so long as their policies and actions don't
conflict with society's broader norms of equity and justice. This could
include amnesty for immigrants and open borders for all refugees.

But, mainly, new program addressing race could prioritize directly
redressing violations of race equity and justice. For example, new program
could emphasize confronting the institutions of racist and national
oppression, seek community control of police, end mass incarceration, and
could seek to reverse the legacies of these same phenomena by way of
reparations for Black and Native American communities. New program might
categorically reject the notion that "...a rising tide raises all boats..."
and the notion that broad and progressive economic reforms such as those
supported elsewhere in this call ipso facto resolve racist and national
oppression.

New Program addressing race could therefore go beyond universal aims to
highlight specific measures needed to repair the damage of hundreds of
years of oppression to racial and cultural communities. This would
necessitate examining all areas of life including the economy, education,
healthcare, politics and law enforcement, in each case seeking to determine
innovations required beyond those that are universal for all, precisely to
avoid bias that leaves racial communities with less than universally
acclaimed and sought benefits.

*Some Possible Gender/Kinship Programmatic Ideas*

New program addressing the pivotal problems of gender and kinship could
emphasize the need to not privilege certain types of family formation and
sexuality over others but instead to actively support all types of families
and lifestyles consistent with society’s other broad equitable norms and
practices.

It could promote children’s well-being and affirm society’s responsibility
for all its children, including affirming the right of diverse types of
families to have children and to provide them with love and a sense of
rootedness and belonging. It could minimize or eliminate age-based
permissions, preferring non-arbitrary means for determining when an
individual is old or young enough to participate in economic, political or
other activities, or to receive benefits/privileges.

It could respect marriage and other lasting relations among adults as
religious, cultural, or social practices, but reject marriage as a way to
gain financial benefits or social status.

It could respect care giving as a valuable function including making care
giving a part of every citizen’s social responsibilities, or pursue other
worthy means to ensure equitable burdens and benefits.

It could affirm diverse expressions of sexual pleasure, personal identity,
and mutual intimacy while ensuring that each person honors the autonomy,
humanity, and rights of others.

It could seek to provide diverse, empowering sex education, including legal
prohibitions against all non-consensual sex.

And mainly, given the world we now live in, new program addressing gender
and kinship could fight to reverse decades of discrimination’s residual
effects and persistent elements, including protecting the rights of women
to control their own bodies on the one hand, and to enjoy equal benefits
and responsibilities throughout all parts of society, thus seeking abortion
rights, day care opportunities, and equal payment requirements.

*Some Possible International Relations Programmatic Ideas *

Today's policy makers view foreign policy as a way to maintain a flow of
riches and wealth out of other countries into one’s own, while ensuring
fealty and obedience, and curtailing efforts at establishing new relations
of true national independence much less social renovation anywhere in the
world to avoid their having a showcase effect. In contrast, a proper
foreign policy for any country would respect the integrity of other nations
and simultaneously seek a human-serving society at home. New foreign policy
program could emphasize:

• Cessation of all arms shipments abroad.

• Cessation of any aid abroad intended for the hands of police or other
potentially repressive agencies, such as occupying armies.

• Elimination of all U.S. or other nations's overseas military bases with
half the funds saved from such closings returned to the Home country for
solving domestic problems and half applied to aid to poor countries in the
form of no-strings attached infrastructure improvements, job and skills
training, equipment grants, food aid, and privileged buyer status for many
goods on the international market.

• An end to the use of military force as an instrument of national policy.

• Use of aid and trade, and foreign policy in general, to demonstrate and
provide solidarity with struggles for social justice, democracy, and self
determination everywhere in the world to benefit all parties, but mostly
those who are weaker and poorer.

*Some Possible Health Programmatic Ideas*

A new health program could emphasize that civilized health care and
conditions for our society must involve three main components: prevention,
universal care for the ill, and cost cutting. At a minimum a new health
program might seek:

• Improved preventive medicine, including increased public education about
health-care risks and prevention, a massive campaign around diet, laws
against and penalties for corporate activity that subverts health in
employees, consumers or neighbors, and provision for community centers for
exercise and public health education.

• Universal health care for the ill, including a single-payer system with
the government providing comprehensive and equally fine coverage for all
citizens.

• Reassessment of training programs for doctors and nurses to expand the
number of qualified health workers and to better utilize the talents of
those already trained rather than simply aggrandize those at the top of the
pyramid of all involved.

• And, as well, civilian review over drug company policies including price
controls and severe penalties for profit seeking at the expense of public
health up to and including nationalization under civilian control and
workers self management, plus similar attention to the medical impact of
all institutions in society—for example, the health effects of work
conditions and product definitions and components.

Such a campaign could point out that the single-payer system would save
tens of billions on billing, collection, and bureaucracy, but, perhaps even
more important, would improve the quality of care for all and move us
toward a caring and mutual aid conception of life, rather than me firsts.
It could also advocate saving billions more, to be allotted to preventive
medicine and treatment, by establishing limits on the incomes of health
professionals and the profits pharmaceutical and other medical companies
could earn. If additional funding was required, it could come from punitive
taxes on unhealthful products such as cigarettes, alcohol, and unsafe
automobiles, etc.

The overall guideline for health program would be that illness should be
reduced as much as possible, the quality of health care should be raised as
much as possible, and the costs of these improvements should be paid by
those who have gotten rich at others’ expense.

*Some Possible Ecology Programmatic Ideas *

A new ecological program could establish a department of ecological balance
to develop a list of necessary clean-up steps, energy innovations, and
steps to reduce global warming and mitigate its impact, and, in general,
policy to preserve the ecology.

Beyond this, new ecology program could argue that clean-up funds should
come from a reparations tax on current polluters and prior beneficiaries of
unclean industrial operations.

The critical innovation in a new program’s approach to ecological sanity,
however, could be to open a national public debate about the relation
between our basic economic and social institutions and the environment. For
example, new program could begin the process of clarifying that we need
institutions attuned to ecological costs and benefits and that we must
experiment with non-market approaches to allocation, rather than trying to
police the inevitable ecological ill-effects that markets routinely
produce.

And, of course, new ecology program that was sane, much less highly worthy,
would have to formulate a truly massive campaign to turn the tide against
global warming, water depletion, and other life threatening trends.

*Conclusion*

Obviously the above list of programmatic possibilities, culled from
projects and endeavors around the world, could be enlarged to include, for
example, immigration program, drug program, infrastructure program,
diversity program, arts and culture program, science program, and so on. In
addition, the programs should be refined, improved, and altered as
grassroots experiences require.

Recent progressive electoral efforts and mass campaigns around the world
have revealed a huge reservoir of desire and of creative willingness on the
parts of large sectors of populations, and very especially young people, to
seek change. Many of those newly participating in progressive activity are
already within reach of supporting these and additional programmatic ideas
as they would be refined and augmented by a wide intervention of grassroots
voices.

Ultimately attaining worthy new program will entail thinking outside the
box, as many emerging struggles around the world have urged, noting that
the box is capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism. The box is
the imposed mental straitjacket of thoughts and practices typical of all
too many countries' political life.

As current prominent examples, why couldn’t the energy generated during
Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn's victory
as opposition party leader in the UK, or Podemos' electoral attempts in
Spain come over to sustained, militant commitment to the suitably refined
and improved kinds of programmatic ideas we propose in this document?

Campaigns need money, often a serious stumbling block, but Sanders, for
example in the U.S. case, has reached 5 million donors giving an average of
over $25 each. Why couldn’t a program like that offered above, but adapted
and improved, attract all those 5 million people and many more, and do
comparably well elsewhere in the world, attracting aroused constituencies
to contribute creatively to plans for on-going mass activism?

Similarly, in the U.S., as the current prominent case, Sanders has suffered
immeasurably at the hands of what he calls rigged elections, as have others
here and elsewhere, but another general problem, beyond the structure of
elections, is the corporately organized, profit seeking, and horribly
motivated media that operates in country after country. Why couldn’t a
prominent campaign built around new program include taking back
communications in countries around the world, which is certainly a
desirable aim in its own right, and also a bedrock step on the path to
larger programmatic successes?

Despite current progressive electoral energy and, in some places, major
movement gains, there is a long way to go to win lasting fundamental
change. Partly this is because vile institutions at the core of our society
manipulatively and coercively twist our motives and awareness. Partly it is
because a right wing surge is also occurring. And partly it is because the
public has still not thrown off cynicism and a trembling fear of enduring
even worse outcomes if we try to seek better. However, it is not impossible
for people to take that crucial step. And the massive support many popular
projects have lately revealed could become a foundation upon which to go
further in the coming period.

We offer the many programmatic thoughts in this document hoping to
encourage a movement-wide discussion of where we go and what we stand for
as we all attempt to counter the forces of darkness and irrationality with
light, hope, and vision.

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
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#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
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