Large new cooperative opens in Havana. The official view is that cooperatives are a more social form of production that private businesses and therefore will receive preferential treatment with respect to taxes and other fees. The government also is making credits available to cooperatives, credits denied private business owners.
The time appears to be ripe for a new wave of urban reform. Both socialists like Seattle’s Sawant and progressives like New York’s de Blasio have a chance to popularize “left wing of the possible” ideas that seem bold but not preposterous. But as their socialist and progressive counterparts over the past century recognized, good ideas don’t become policy without social movements behind them.
The Left wants to give people the chance to do something with their lives, by giving them time and space away from the market.
Mondragón has been justly cited as a leading example of what can be done through cooperative organization. But it recently announced that its most important unit, Fagor, was filing for bankruptcy. This raises important larger questions about the market, and longer-term strategies for moving beyond the failings of corporate capitalism and traditional socialism.
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The Chilean Song Movement had become so identified with Popular Unity, it had been such a strong factor, emotional, cohesive, inspiring, that the military authorities found it necessary to declare `subversive' even the indigenous instruments, whose beautiful sound had become so full of meaning and inspiration. Together with prohibiting even the mention of Victor's name, they banned all his music and the music of all the artists of the New Chilean Song Movement.
"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."-Aldous Huxley. University of Georgia student Courtney Parker shares impressions of her recent trip to Cuba - one of the legal educational tour programs allowing U.S. citizens to visit neighboring Cuba. Additional post on background of Cuban Travel Ban, and resources on how you can go to Cuba - today, and legally.
Efforts to achieve such unity is possible if we maintain an atmosphere of tolerance and eschew subjective responses to past encounters and disputes. This effort should involve not only members of existing socialist groups and publications but the many unorganized left activists in the struggle for economic and social justice, democracy and peace.
Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd have blueprints for an `America beyond capitalism.' Both imagine a new America that would evolve through painstaking process in which the virtues of democratic socialism would be prefigured. They offer a component of the answer to what a new New Left must do. Democracy and egalitarianism animates both visions, but neither fully imagines how the Left might gain and use state power or how to change the national or global economic rules.
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