Degrowthers Challenge Supremacy of Economic Growth

Mark Hand 

The widespread embrace of economic growth and development, even among environmental activists, is the primary cause of the current socio-ecological crisis facing the world, according to a new book that espouses the philosophy of “degrowth” and whose editors believe more comprehensive “counter-hegemonic narratives” are necessary to create new forms of living that are not dependent on equating growth with progress.

The degrowth philosophy has attracted a relatively large following in Europe, especially in France where it is known as décroissance. Its advocates view degrowth as the hypothesis that humans can achieve prosperity without economic growth. The philosophy has struggled to gain similar traction on this side of the Atlantic, although many radical thinkers, including the late American anarchist theoretician Murray Bookchin, have promoted similar ideas over the past 50 years.

The vast majority of people who call themselves environmentalists or climate activists believe global ecological health can be sufficiently addressed without distancing themselves from the ideology of economic growth. One prominent climate scientist, Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann, recently optimistically cited data showing that the U.S. economy grew in 2014 while carbon dioxide emissions remained flat. This “is a very hopeful sign that we can indeed grow the economy and lower carbon emissions at the same time,” Mann remarked.

In “Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era,”  the book’s editors — Federico Demaria, Giorgos Kallis and Giacomo D’Alisa — aim to demonstrate to Mann and other true believers in the economic growth paradigm that there are realistic alternatives to capitalism and that economic growth should be abolished as a social objective.

“Environmentalists should be the first ones to realize that economic growth is not good for the environment,” Demaria said in an interview with CounterPunch. Extensive research has shown that economic growth is not sustainable from an ecological perspective, he emphasized, adding, “We should look for other ways to satisfy our needs.”

Beyond debates over the logic of embracing never-ending growth on a finite planet, the global economic crisis of the last seven years has shown that capitalism’s inherent growth imperative could be entering a self-destructive phase. Even the International Monetary Fund, whose primary goal is to manage economic growth and the international flow of capital, concluded in a new report that slower growth in both developed and emerging economies could be the new reality.

One of the countries hardest-hit by the seven-year-old economic crisis, Greece, has become a hotbed for degrowth thinking. In February, a degrowth forum in Athens titled “Prosperity Without Growth” attracted more than 500 people. “Most of the presentations and the proposals were of very high quality, a fact which can upscale the seriousness and the influence of degrowth within Greek society,” according to a summary of the forum.

Demaria, a researcher in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a member of the academic association Research & Degrowth, touted the success of the Athens forum as an indication that the degrowth movement is gaining momentum. Another noteworthy development, according to Demaria, is that degrowth’s proponents are becoming ideologically diverse and are not limited to the left side of the political spectrum.

Santi Vila, the minister of planning and sustainability for the government of Catalonia in Spain and a member of centrist political party Democratic Convergence of Catalonia, has spoken in favor of degrowth and welcomed research done on the topic at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Vila has stated that societies need to revise the model of progress and reduce consumption, while at the same time addressing inequality.

The minister plans to support the translation of “Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era” into Catalan and launch it at a public event in Barcelona, Demaria said. The editors of the book also are expected to be invited in July to explain degrowth to the Catalonia parliamentary commission on sustainability.

While degrowth has a champion in Catalonia, one of the movement’s top theorists — Federico Demaria — will have a platform in Brussels. Demaria said he recently accepted an invitation to serve as an adviser for crafting the electoral program of the European Union Greens, a coalition of EU Green parties.

Generally, though, political support for degrowth among most mainstream political parties remains weak. For the past 70 years, public debate has been “colonized” by the idioms of growth-related economics like inflation and quantitative easing, the book’s editors contend. Public intellectuals and policymakers prefer not to take into consideration how people are actually feeling and human relationships with nature.

Escape from the Pursuit of Economic Growth

In the book, its editors emphasize that degrowth signifies a desired direction, one in which societies use fewer natural resources and organize and live differently than today. Degrowth does not call for doing less of the same. The objective is not to make an elephant leaner, but to turn an elephant into a snail, they write.

Like-minded colleagues often question the value of using a negation — degrowth — for a positive project. In the book, the editors respond that they aim precisely to decolonize a mode of thinking that is dominated by a future consisting only of growth. Highlighting resources limits was the focus of many projects in the 1970s, while in the early 2000s, with the emergence of today’s degrowth movement, the focus was applying criticism to the idea of sustainable development, a term many have labeled an oxymoron.
Degrowth’s proponents purposefully used the term as a “missile word” to re-politicize environmentalism and end the depoliticizing consensus on sustainable development. Sustainable development “renders environmental problems technical, promising win-win solutions and the (impossible) goal of perpetuating development without harming the environment,” the editors write.

Degrowth calls for the politicization of science and technology against the increasing “technocratization” of politics. Even so-called socialist economies ended up resembling state capitalism because they remained trapped in the pursuit of growth and development.
In the book’s epilogue, the editors zero in on the theory of dépense, or the collective consumption of “surplus” in a society. Social dépense can be a genuinely collective expenditure, the spending in a collective feast, the decision to subsidize a class of spirituals to talk about philosophy, or to leave a forest idle. Dépense is an expenditure that in a strictly economic sense is unproductive, but in a degrowth society will be brought back to the public sphere.

While the editors promote a collective dépense, they also push for “personal sobriety,” not in the fashion of a Protestant call for austerity, but based on the premise that finding the meaning of life individually is an “anthropological illusion.”

Finding meaning alone through the accumulation of things “is an illusion that leads to ecologically harmful and socially unjust outcomes since it cannot be sustained for everyone,” they write. “People should take themselves less seriously, so to say, and enjoy living free from the unbearable weight of limitless choice.”

Language also is important to degrowth’s proponents. “We prefer to use the words such as ‘flourishing’ when we talk about health or education, rather than growing or developing. The desired change is qualitative, like in the flourishing of the arts. It is not quantitative, like in the growth of industrial output,” the editors write.

France Leads Degrowth Movement

The French degrowth movement eventually spread to other countries, entering Italy as decrescita and Spain as decrecimiento. In the U.S., there is not a degrowth movement per se, but there are similar traditions, like the social ecology of Bookchin and more recently the work of the Post Carbon Institute. In his writings and social analysis, Bookchin believed technology and forms of production could be used for freedom and abundance and could allow people to have more time to be human toward each other if they have power over the technology, not technology having power over people.

If human societies want more leisure time, as proponents of degrowth advocate, Bookchin wanted to figure out how that would be structured. Bookchin was picking up on Marx who also speculated on what people’s days should look like.

“The central feature of modernity has affected many strains of Marxism too, which pushed the dream of collective emancipation to the extreme by means of a life of material abundance for everyone,” the editors write in the epilogue.

The book is filled with 51 short chapters written primarily by academics from Europe and the Americas. The editors explain that the academics contributing to the book were instructed to write as simply as possible with the general public as the target audience. “They do not demand previous knowledge of the debates or the terminology. Still, they are framed and composed with the desirable rigor and expertise of academic book chapters,” they write in the preface.

In one of the early chapters, Arturo Escobar, a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, explains that the concept of development did not exist in its current connotation until the late 1940s, when “economic development” paved the way for the duplication of conditions characterizing industrialized nations in “under-developed areas,” namely industrial agriculture, urbanization and the adoption of modern values.

After two decades of rapid growth, especially in the Global North, the Club of Rome commissioned a study that was turned into the 1972 book “The Limits to Growth.” At the same time, the president of the European Commission, Sicco Mansholt, was talking about degrowth, or “below zero growth.” By the late 1970s, however, the neoliberal agenda had gained supremacy, putting degrowth on the backburner.

In the early 2000s, the degrowth movement began to regain momentum. Its proponents expressed the belief that hospitality, love, public duty, nature conservation and spiritual contemplation traditionally do not obey the logic of personal profit. “Above a certain level, growth does not increase happiness. … This is because once basic material needs are satisfied, extra incomes are devoted increasingly to positional goods (e.g., a house bigger than the neighbor’s),” the editors write. “Growth can never satisfy positional competition; it can only make it worse. Growth there will never produce ‘enough’ for everyone.”

In the book’s epilogue, the editors also stress that “degrowthers are not afraid of idleness,” citing French political writer and revolutionary Paul Lafargue’s essay “The Right to be Lazy” as one of their inspirations. A society that has developed so many resources surely can extend the right to idleness from the new rich to everyone, Lafargue wrote in his 1880 essay.

The editors also emphasize they are not afraid of the “idleness of capital” and in fact desire it. “Degrowth involves slowing capital down,” they say.

“Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era” is the first English language book to comprehensively cover the burgeoning literature on degrowth. French economist Serge Latouche’s “Farewell to Growth” was published in English, but it did not tackle the issue of degrowth as directly as “Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era.”

The ideas presented in the book also are similar to some of the proposals in Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” released in the fall of 2014. “The policy proposals are very close. The only thing that is different is on the slogan that we use. Klein is not so convinced about degrowth as a slogan,” Demaria said. “But what she means by saying ‘this changes everything’ is that it changes everything in the social and economic systems. So that’s exactly what we mean.”

Klein and the editors also agree on the definition of degrowth, “in the sense that what we need is not just less — less use of energy, less use of materials and so on — but you need a different use of energy and materials,” Demaria said.

Is Economic Growth a Panacea for Poverty?

Many mainstream pundits today are using the plight of the developing world as a weapon against calls for greater ecological awareness. They accuse environmentalists and climate activists of pushing policies that will deprive poverty-stricken people around the world from ever getting access to electricity and other modern amenities that people in the developed world take for granted.

The editors acknowledge that a frequent criticism of the degrowth proposal is that it is applicable only to the “overdeveloped” economies of the Global North. “The poorer countries of the Global South still need to grow to satisfy basic needs,” they write in the introduction. “Degrowth in the North will reduce the demand for, and the prices of, natural resources and industrial goods, making them more accessible to the developing South.”

But in the South, they do not need to follow the same growth trajectory of the North to live easier lives. There are many alternative visions such as Buen Vivir in Latin America, Ubuntu in South Africa and the Gandhian Economy of Permanence in India. “These visions express alternatives to development, alternative trajectories of socio-economic system,” they write.

Nations and societies should pursue policies that address specific problems instead of adopting a policy of general economic growth, according to Demaria. China is a clear example of the perils of economic growth. “The reason why they are facing a problem with air pollution is exactly because of economic growth. So it is problematic to say that you need more economic growth to come out of air pollution,” he said.

In his new book “Fusion Economics: How Pragmatism Is Changing the World,” Laurence Brahm noted that China is facing a “catastrophic crisis,” as 60% of all surface water is so toxic that it is unfit for human contact, while 70% of underground water is already undrinkable.

One of the primary causes of this environmental devastation, according to Brahm, was a “blind fixation” with high growth that began in the 1990s. The drivers of the high growth were fixed asset investments and polluting industries that were fossil fuel-based. “China’s leadership for the past decade has judged everything based on GDP,” he writes.

Degrowth’s proponents question the common assumptions that people need economic growth to come out of poverty. “What we are saying is that what is called economic growth and development has not solved inequality, has not solved poverty, has not solved climate change and it has not solved the major problems that we have,” Demaria said.

The Sin And The Error

Ravi Sinha

…it takes an error to father a sin.
─ J. Robert Oppenheimer[1]

Future historians of India may well describe the past year as a year of political sin. This was the year in which the man who had earlier presided over the Gujarat Carnage was awarded the ultimate prize. The year saw an election that touched a new low marked by shallowness, vulgarities and lies – in no small measure by the labors of the man himself. Equally appalling have been the exertions of a large class of literati and glitterati to portray philistinism and inanities spouted by the most powerful mouth as wisdom of a visionary leader.

An entire country seems to have gone blind – unable to see that the emperor has no clothes. In this age of incessant television it should be obvious to anyone that the supreme leader does not carry conviction even when enunciating relatively higher banalities. He is at his natural best only when he mocks someone as a shehzada or slanders and vilifies an entire community through phrases such as ame paanch, amara pachees. It is an irony of history that the republic which had Nehru as its first prime minister has one now for whom even common mythology is too cerebral. He must vulgarize Pushpak Viman and Ganesha and reduce them to quackeries of aviation and surgery.

Misfortune of the nation goes beyond the man. Forces of the diabolic housed in the hydra-headed Parivaar can now accomplish the impossible. They can now occupy the political center stage without leaving off the lunatic fringe. They can adopt Gandhi without renouncing Godse; erect world’s tallest statue of a leader who had punished their forefathers for assassinating Gandhi; even co-opt Bhagat Singh without batting an eyelid about what he stood for and what he had to say about ideologies like theirs. They can further refine the art of doublespeak. Their “statesmen” can pave the way for corporate plunder and call it sab ka vikas (development for all). Their “ideologues” can advocate sab ka saath (inclusion of all) by exhorting Hindu women to give birth to a minimum of four children each, lest Hindus are reduced to a minority “in their own country”.

All second comings are farcical but none more so than the ones in which caricatures come alive. It would be a cliché to invoke Hitler’s example while describing the megalomania of the current prime minister. But it would not be entirely wrong. He is larger than life because no one else – whether in the government or in the party – is allowed to be visible even as a pygmy. The Cabinet of Ministers seems to have been demoted lower than the back-room boys who formulate policies, write speeches and take sartorial decisions for the supreme leader. Even those stalwarts of yesterday, who brought the party to the center stage by unleashing havocs such as the Ram Janma Bhoomi Movement, have been consigned to the political dustbin. But, rather than a second coming of Hitler, this sordid episode appears more like Chaplin’s Great Dictator coming to life. The prime minister’s relentless globe-trotting and hobnobbing with the rulers of the world without any significant diplomatic achievement or concrete gain for India so far – except, perhaps, getting the United Nations to declare June 21st as the International Day of Yoga – evokes memories of a scene in Chaplin’s movie where the dictator plays around with an inflated globe.

The prime minister’s telling the Japanese corporate honchos that he has money in his blood, his frequent recounting of uncountable things that India’s ancient wisdom can teach to the world, his recent observation that Indian grandmother’s recipes are enough to save humanity from environmental disasters and this makes India worthy of leading the global endeavor to save the planet, and other such gems that he scatters regularly across the globe, also bring to mind one of Kurosawa’s later movies, Kagemusha. In the movie a political decoy was deployed to impersonate a dying warlord who had kept his enemies in awe for long. The impersonator manages to get over his many temptations and actually learns to act like the warlord within the royal house as well as on the battle field.

That day may yet be far in this case. The body-language of the prime minister – while posing with a world leader or posing conspicuously to the camera when all other statesmen and diplomats around the table are busy with their papers – betrays the countenance of an imposter, even if anointed to the throne through a process every bit constitutional and politically legitimate. The acts and demeanor of the prime minister are constant reminders that Indian people have been tricked into committing a political sin. And the irony is that they have committed it against themselves.

One can go on and on with the sin part. But one must resist the temptation. After all, those who agree with what is being said do not get any wiser by descriptions of the obvious, and those who do not agree are unlikely to see it as anything but unwarranted provocation. It would be far more fruitful to move on to the error part. Experience shows that even those who may readily agree to the characterization of the previous year as the year of sin, would argue vehemently about the error that may have gone into fathering it.

Actually it has taken more than one error – indeed a whole bunch of them. One could start with the Congress Party. It gave an impression as if it was doing its best to rout itself and offer victory to the opponent on a platter. But I am not interested in Congress even if it was the fattest among the errors. Lessons which this party may or may not draw from its near decimation are unlikely to be of much use to those committed to transformative politics. Instead it may trigger a wholly unhelpful discussion about whether it was part of the error or part of the sin.

The Left Front too has been on a path of self-destruction. Its precipitous decline has been a major cause behind the troubling emergence of the current political scenario. One can safely ignore claims of its constituents about being a communist party of one kind or another. Whether they truly have revolution lodged deeply in their hearts or only pay occasional lip service to it, is not relevant for analyzing their role in the recent political developments. Their role needs to be evaluated principally on the criterion of being a force for the good within the arena of bourgeois parliamentary politics. And they have failed miserably on this count.

Roots of this failure are not easy to unearth. It has become all too common for all shades of political commentators to heap ridicule on the Left. Post-leftists and other varieties of ex-leftists are especially vituperative in this regard. As if they know better. It takes a reflective attitude and a certain sense of history to realize that Left’s woes do not arise solely from its own mistakes. At a deeper level they arise from a tectonic shift underneath the surface of history. Existing Left is a product of the early twentieth century. Someone said – past is a foreign country. But it depends. For someone made by the past and caught in it, present may be a foreign country. This predicament is not peculiar to Left alone. Every major political force passes through it at one time or another, although different forces pass through it at different times.

In any case, these comments are not meant to explore the subterranean. At the surface level of day-to-day politics, Left Front committed a historic blunder when it walked out of the UPA-1 citing Indo-US Nuclear Deal as the main reason. Arguably this one was far more damaging than the previous one (disallowing Jyoti Basu to become the Prime Minister) in the pecking order of Left’s historic blunders. It was disastrous as a political judgment and ridiculous as an ideological argument. There are times in politics when one misstep can lead to an avalanche. This is what Left Front has suffered and it does not yet know how to recover. More importantly, the entire political scenario would have been very different if Left had managed to avoid this blunder.

The third component of the error leading to the sin has been far more spectacular. Like a rapidly burning comet it suddenly lit up the Indian political sky filling innumerable hearts and minds with awe, admiration, hope and confusion. It started with the anti-corruption movement spearheaded by India against Corruption and currently it is passing through a phase where it is visible more through the internal fireworks of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). This phenomenon has played a much larger role in conjuring the current political scenario than its actual size and scope would indicate. Despite its sensational victory in the Delhi assembly elections, its actual impact cannot be measured by electoral arithmetic. It mystified the people on a far wider scale and helped generate a political mood that ultimately helped BJP and the Sangh Parivaar in their anti-Congress crusade. If one looks at all that has happened in the political arena during the last decade or so, the significance of Left’s blunder pales in comparison to the damage done by the sudden rise of the AAP.

There are many reasons why such a reading of the situation remains counter-intuitive, if not totally unacceptable, for a large number of people. It may be fruitful to engage with two broad ones among them applicable respectively to two different sets of people. One set comprises of activists, politicians and ideologues which some of these ideologues themselves describe as post-ideological. The other set is of those who remain committed to the transformative and emancipatory politics of the good old days but are desperately looking for new movements which this politics can ride.

The first set would like to believe that it has rescued populism from the netherworld of dictators and demagogues and elevated it to a lofty principle. There is a priesthood of high theory that can read bird-signs in the post-ideological political sky. In each little movement – if it is spontaneous, has no well-defined goal, espouses no ideology and has no organized leadership – it hears intimations of the much awaited deluge of insurrections by little men. Bird-signs, however, are never a reliable tool for forging political strategies. The Laclaus, the Negris, and all the tenured radicals of exalted academies cannot put together the shattered high hopes that were raised by World Social Forums, Occupy Movements, or even the Arab Spring. Prophets of the plebian irruptions would be hard put to explain why such a movement either results in the rise of a new dictator, a new demagogue, a religious-fascist regime, or a military junta, or else it simply fizzles out leaving a residuum of a few professors along with fewer students pouring over pamphlets in Zuccoti Park and occasionally walking around the park with placards to the amusement of indifferent bystanders.

Such questions unfailingly invite the wrath of the post-ideological ideologue which appears in the form of launching yet another attack on the Left. The assumption is that such questions can be asked only by an incorrigibly dogmatic and sectarian leftist. The lethal weapons used in this attack are rather well known – announce to the imagined adversary that Berlin Wall has fallen, Soviet Union has collapsed, China has gone capitalist and CPM has lost West Bengal. Remind him that Marxism is beyond its date of expiry and socialism exists only as a daydream of the die-hard. Curiously, such ideologues are ever so convinced that Left is a spent force and yet the loftiest historical task they can assign themselves is to continue flogging it. When they declare 1989 as the biggest watershed in history and do not tire of celebrating the fall of the Wall, they do not care to cast a side glance at the rest of the festive assembly and take notice of who the other revelers are.

And yet questions must be asked and prophets of populism must be challenged. It is important for actual politics on ground, more so in the prevailing political atmosphere. One could have safely ignored the matter had it been confined to esoteric discourses on Populist Reason. It should also not be assumed that these questions arise necessarily from dogmatism and sectarianism. Contrary to the stereotypical image, mourning the Wall or the Soviet Union does not define a leftist. To redefine a leftist when times have changed is no disgrace but that would take us to another discussion.

For the issue at hand it may be necessary to point to the obvious yet again. The kind of movement much admired by the post-ideological types and joined in mass by naïve idealists and other undiscriminating worshippers of mass movements has once again given rise to a narcissistic and dictatorial demagogue. It is remarkable how indulgent certain ideologues and many practitioners have been regarding such an outcome that they would have decried in every other instance. It is understandable if political careerists and power-hungry opportunists hang on to the coattails of Kejriwal because only he, not Yadavs and Bhushans, can win elections. But it is a sin without pleasure when ideologues deploy their scholarly flourish and theoretical playfulness in praise of the new megalomaniac on the block.

Indians do not need theory to be convinced about charms of populism. In their love for demagogues they can be surpassed by none, except, perhaps, by the Non-Resident Indians. (Remember the rock-star reception of Modi at Madison Square Garden in New York when thousands of New Jersey Indians lapped up every indelicacy that came out of his mouth, but also do not forget the euphoria that Kejriwal has created across a wide spectrum of NRIs.) If popular support were to be taken as sole proof of good politics then Modi would be far more saintly a politician than Kejriwal. Popular acceptability is a must for good politics to come alive and become effective, but that does not mean the former defines the latter.

Modi’s politics is well-defined in its own right. It is crafted with interwoven threads of Hindu supremacist fascism and servitude to the corporate capital. The fact that it has wide popular support does not make it any less anti-people. As simple a truth as this one is forgotten when Kejriwal’s politics is evaluated by many who might have in their hearts noble desires of shaking up systems and cleansing politics. Stating a goal that is incurably nebulous and which can be interpreted conveniently and variously by a wide spectrum of political forces hardly suffices when it comes to defining one’s politics. The legendary Hindi poet, Muktibodh, used to ask, “What is your politics, partner?” This question would never be old-fashioned nor would it ever be outdated.

Kejriwal says that he is neither left nor right and he is beyond ideology (an assertion that gladdens the hearts of the post-ideologists). He goes to FICCI and CII to put on display his credentials for good governance and to play Maggie Thatcher to them (“it is not the business of the government to do business”). To the Aam Aadmi he promises Bijli, Paani and Swaraj, and puts on their table his charisma, honesty and a no-nonsense authoritarianism as a guarantee for achieving these objectives. His concrete plans for eradicating corruption finally come down to people being ready with their mobile phones for sting operations. And he never forgets to remind them of the sacrifices he has made, such as resigning from a government job or sitting on a hunger strike or going to jail for a few days. Facts are such that merely counting them may make one appear sarcastic, but that is not the aim here. The real point is that all this adds up to a politics of mass depoliticization. And, in the end, this kind of politics invariably serves the rightwing.

The other set of people who thought they had found in AAP that long sought vehicle which emancipatory and transformative politics could ride, had their own reasons to consider any criticism of the phenomenon unacceptable. Chief among them was an assessment that such a criticism comes from a purist and elitist version of radicalism that has no chance of gaining popular support. In the aftermath of a messy split in the Party they may not be as dismissive of such criticisms. But there are no significant indications that they are learning the right lessons from this expected debacle. They continue to mouth the same platitudes about shaking up the system and cleansing the politics without adding one bit of clarity or detail about how indeed are they going to accomplish that.

The fact that they can now see Kejriwal in his true colors can hardly be a solace. He is gone as far as they are concerned, but more importantly he has taken much of the popular support with him. The desperate revolutionaries, who are in a hurry to notch a few victories in political arena by any means, are unlikely to win elections on the basis of their purer hearts, better educated minds, and nobler goals. They have lost that very vehicle for which they brought their revolutionary politics down to the level of populism. If they manage to have any significant level of electoral success, they will discover that they have done so by turning themselves into clones of Kejriwal.

The trouble with seeing things as they are is that the description may at times read like the song of the cynic. This is because one is describing only a part of the entire political arena. It is a misfortune that in the present times this is the larger part. But it does not mean that other processes are not at play and other political actors are altogether absent. Telling the story of the sin and the error does not mean that virtue has altogether disappeared and there is no one left to do the right thing. That account, however, will have to be kept for another time.

Change The Money And Change The World

Mark Kirkwood Callingham

There are plenty of reasons why The System needs to be and shall be changed.

As it stands today this inevitable transformation will not be on our terms. It doesn’t matter if you’re aware of ancient or modern solutions offering better ways to exist as a species because you don’t run the show; left or right you’re just another runner in a rigged race. As far as I know this here proposal is the only rational means we have of amending our ways in a big way before it’s all game over.

The answer to numerous problems on the planet can be found in the root of most problems. Money.

What would happen if a lot of us walked away from their plans; stopped entrusting our worth to financial schemes drawn behind closed doors? What if we went ahead with a better arrangement?

Picture a new form of currency: one that was bound by morals, liberty and common sense.

Project for a New Economic Century (PNEC) offers a practical way to change direction and choose our own course.

Essentially the strategy is to craft a monetary system with a code of ethics that is owned by the people. A people’s currency co-developed by a wide range of individuals representing vast amounts of knowledge & experiences.

Let’s take a good, honest look at what we are doing. Let us discuss the best that humanity has to offer and choose the greatest options out there for a fairer, more reasonable economic model that serves mankind and every other living being on Earth in the twenty first century. Let’s aim to be around in the twenty second.

The harsh realities of our nature, fortune and planetary change would be handled as intelligently and humanely as possible using this new money. Superior solutions would be soundly invested in the future with this pioneering cash. Monetary acts that most of us decided are just not worth supporting would no longer be funded by this people’s currency. Taxes included.

Money has always created and destroyed. This time we choose what that means.

PNEC proposes the development of a democratic currency be done by three groups with the general public having a voice and vote in all matters through a trustworthy social media site. Polls, surveys and other media sources would certainly be taken into consideration.

The three common ground committees responsible for the realization of this new digital + hard currency would be made up of:

1. well respected people from all walks of life from the same multicultural region.

2. international musicians and artists who care about more than themselves.

3. grassroots workers from the global south plus experts in a wide range of fields; everything from the economy, ecology and theology to physics, permaculture, programming, writing, etcetera.

These three groups together with the deliberation and backing of a good part of the population could very well bring about a new way of living better on a global level. Creating a healthier economic system with goals and virtues (including joy) for a responsible race that wants to stick around this magnificent place.

“A people’s currency that strongly invests in sensible, worthy deeds and limits or ends selfish, illogical financial activities the vast majority of us no longer desired or required.”

This might not be the best idea out there but listen, it is the only non-violent and encompassing method we have that can change just about everything man-made within a decade. The Project offers a concrete and peaceful way to bring about real revolution

Shall we?

7 Ways Saudi Arabia Is Silencing People Online

Ben Beaumont

Amnesty International

Raif Badawi is serving a 10-year prison sentence in Saudi Arabia, mainly for setting up a website. We talk to another local blogger – who has to remain anonymous for their own safety – about different tactics the authorities use to silence people online.

1. Gagging anyone with an independent opinion

“Overall, the situation in Saudi Arabia is very bad, particularly from the point of view of people with independent opinions who go against the grain. Recently, there have been investigations, arrests and short-term detentions of journalists, athletes, poets, bloggers, activists and tweeters.”

2. Blaming everything on terrorism

“The authorities are fragile. They seek to gag and stifle dissent using various means, including the shameful Terrorism Law that has become a sword waved in the faces of people with opinions. Courts issue prison sentences of 10 years or more as a result of a single tweet. Atheists and people who contact human rights organizations are attacked as ‘terrorists'.”

3. Personal attacks on bloggers

“I have been harassed in many ways. The authorities approached the internet providers hosting my personal website and asked them to block it and delete all the content. They also dispatched security officers to tell me to stop what I was doing in my own and my family's best interests. I was later officially banned from blogging and threatened with arrest if I continued. I succumbed and stopped in order to protect my family.”

4. Bans, false accusations and being fired from your job

“There are many cases of bloggers being restricted or banned. Some of them – whom I know – are still being investigated about blogs they wrote in 2008, even though they aren't involved in blogging anymore. Saudi bloggers can also be fired from their jobs and prevented from making a living. Many face false allegations that they are ‘atheists' or ‘demented'. Restrictions are imposed on almost every aspect of the blogger's life.”

5. Far-reaching online surveillance and censorship

“Censorship is at its maximum, especially after passing the Terrorism Law. A poet was arrested as a result of a single tweet which indirectly criticized King Abdullah using symbolic language. With millions of web users in Saudi Arabia, this means the authorities are keeping an eye on everything that's being written. We have also received reports through international newspapers that Saudi Arabia uses surveillance to hack and monitor activists' accounts.”

6. Deploying an electronic army

“The authorities have powerful cyber armies which give a false impression of the situation in Saudi Arabia to deceive people overseas. They launch websites, YouTube channels and blogs to target activists and opponents, and depict them as atheists, infidels and agents who promote disobedience of the Ruler. By contrast, these websites, channels and blogs often praise the state and its efforts. I have personally been the victim of such state orchestrated campaigns that harmed my reputation.”

7. Brutal punishments

“Raif Badawi's case further demonstrates the brutality of a state that still rules through punishments from the Middle Ages, like flogging, hefty fines and exaggerated prison terms. The Saudi government needs to know that it doesn't own the world and that it can't silence the world's voice with its money.”

This blog first appeared as an article in the November-December 2014 edition of Wire, Amnesty's global magazine.

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Cymbeline: Michael Almereyda returns to Shakespeare

David Walsh

A decade and a half ago, Michael Almereyda, the American filmmaker, directed a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Ethan Hawke in the lead role. We wrote that “Almereyda…has seen the play as the tragedy of idealistic youth caught up and destroyed by official greed and corruption.” Hawke’s Hamlet, we commented, “is not a tour de force performance, but an element of a calm, serious approach to the play.”

Cymbeline

Almereyda (born 1959), who has had an uneven filmmaking career, perhaps not all his fault, has now returned to Shakespeare, but to one of his lesser known and less frequently performed plays, Cymbeline. The work is not a complete success, but it has an urgency and seriousness that are unusual in American movies at present, and is certainly worth viewing (it is available online).

The original play is set in ancient Britain. The British king Cymbeline (a historical figure who lived around the time of Christ, although much of the play is based on legends and literary sources, or was simply invented by Shakespeare) has stopped paying tribute to the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus. War threatens. Complicating matters, Cymbeline’s daughter Imogen has secretly married a man raised in her father’s court, Posthumus Leonatus, infuriating the monarch, who wants her to marry Cloten, the brutish son of his second (and treacherous) wife.

Posthumus is banished. In Rome, he encounters the sinister Iachimo. The latter bets Posthumus that he can seduce Imogen and bring Posthumus evidence of his triumph.

When Iachimo later pays Imogen a visit at the British court, she angrily rejects his advances. Nonetheless, he manages to produce sufficient fraudulent “proofs” of her infidelity back in Rome to convince Posthumus. In a letter, he instructs his servant, Pisanio, to kill Imogen after luring her to Milford Haven, on the west coast of Wales. However, in the course of their trip there, Pisanio shows Imogen the fateful message and urges her to carry on to the Haven dressed as a boy.

Cymbeline

Meanwhile, Cymbeline’s other two sons, believed to be dead twenty years previously, were actually kidnapped by an unfairly disgraced nobleman, Belarius, and live a relatively idyllic existence in the Welsh mountains. Their real sister, Imogen, calling herself Fidele (“the faithful one”) now stumbles on Belarius and the two youths in their lair and is welcomed as a member of their household. Cloten, having been unceremoniously rejected by Imogen, sets out after her with bloody, sadistic revenge on his mind.

Ultimately, a battle takes place between the invading Romans and the native forces, which goes badly for the Britons until Posthumus, Belarius and the king’s two sons (although they are still ignorant of their royal birth) make a stand. Everything unravels and unfolds in a lengthy final scene, with relatively benign results. Forgiveness and reconciliation are the order of the day. In fact, it is one of Shakespeare’s few plays about “tumultuous broils” that end on a harmonious note, so much so that even King Cymbeline seems surprised: “Never was a war did cease…with such a peace.”

Almereyda has transposed the action to contemporary America. Cymbeline (Ed Harris) is the head of a motorcycle gang at odds with corrupt police, i.e., the Romans. Posthumus (Penn Badgley) is a somewhat unlikely, skateboarding member of the gang hopelessly but immaturely smitten with Imogen (Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and grand-daughter of Tippi Hedren). The scheming Iachimo (Hawke) shows Posthumus apparently compromising photos of Imogen on his iPad. And so forth.

Cymbeline

The director has retained the general outlines of the play, although the national-patriotic British element is obviously downplayed. The language is still Shakespeare’s, but Almereyda has edited it down perhaps by half and also re-arranged portions of it.

Like all such modernizing attempts perhaps, this Cymbeline has its ups and downs. The greatest strengths of the film, as they were of Almereyda’s Hamlet, are its simplicity and directness. The filmmaker does without special effects, bombast or much effort to explain his choices. The film simply begins near a baseball diamond at night, with Imogen’s lines to Posthumus from Act I, Scene II, or a slightly amended version of them: “Look here, love; / This diamond was my mother’s: take it, heart; / But keep it till you woo another wife, / When Imogen is dead,” and proceeds from there.

The scene between Iachimo and Imogen in which he attempts to seduce her, by slandering Posthumus, and then changes tack, pretending that his effort was merely a test of her loyalty to her husband, is well done. Johnson is not always up the challenge, but her sincerity in playing Imogen—one of Shakespeare’s great female characters—wins one over, here and in other sequences. She is effective and moving when she tells Iachimo early on in the scene: “You do seem to know / Something of me, or what concerns me: pray you, — / Since doubting things go ill often hurts more / Than to be sure they do; for certainties / Either are past remedies, or, timely knowing, / The remedy then born—discover to me / What both you spur and stop.”

Milla Jovovich, who has generally been stuck in stupid films, is a revelation as the scheming queen, a would-be Lady Macbeth. Her version of Bob Dylan’s “Dark Eyes” is also memorable. Delroy Lindo as Belarius stands out, as do Vondie Curtis-Hall, as Caius Lucius, the leader of the Romans, Peter Gerety as the doctor, and Kevin Corrigan, in a small part, as the hangman. The others are generally adequate or better.

Almereyda told an interviewer: “I’m very grateful to actors who will work for low budgets because that shows true commitment. So everyone who was involved in this movie was working because they wanted to collaborate with William Shakespeare.”

The imagery is relatively creative and thoughtful, the score is disturbing, melancholy. This is a film without a wide range of emotions, they remain mostly on the somber side, but those explored are seriously explored. The overall mood is one of sympathy for the young, the marginalized, the rebellious.

And one has Shakespeare, which is an advantage. There are beautiful and powerful lines in the play that Almereyda has kept. Imogen, in agony over her separation from Posthumus, laments: “O, that husband! / My supreme crown of grief!” Iachimo, perhaps laying the basis for his eventual change of heart, tells Imogen that “the Gods have made you unlike all others,” and after sneaking into her bedroom at night and snatching compromising images of her while she sleeps, exclaims to himself and about himself, “Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here.” When Imogen imagines that the decapitated Cloten is her beloved Posthumus, she cries: “O Posthumus! alas, / Where is thy head? where’s that? / … And left this [her own] head on.” And in the final moments, when a happy Posthumus lifts Imogen off her feet and holds her in mid-air, he tells her lovingly: “Hang there like a fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die!” And Cymbeline, finally: “Pardon’s the word to all.”

Almereyda has limited himself to relatively elementary ideas about the play’s content. He told an interviewer that the movie is “about a family and broken trust. It’s a kind of a blighted love story, and almost every man in the story has some imbalanced relationship with a woman. And that intrigued me. It seemed, in some ways, a very modern set of relationships.”

Nonetheless, as noted above, his imagery suggests something more critical about the wider, contemporary world, and more threatening, in the spirit of the play itself. Harold C. Goddard, in his well-known The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), writes that while “Shakespeare was no Jacobin,” the play paints a picture of “The Power of the English throne wedded to Corruption, who is slowly poisoning it.”

Goddard, writing of the queen’s vicious son, observes: “Nor does Cloten stand alone. He is merely the dark consummate flower of a nobility and court society that is rotten to the core. The Queen is villainous, the King pusillanimous, the British lords cowardly and panicky in battle.” Shakespeare’s Cymbeline provided an intensity that the director had sufficient intellectual wherewithal and integrity to have absorbed and passed along to his audience.

Canada: Conservatives fast-tracking Bill C-51 into law

Roger Jordan

Canada’s Conservative government is determined to quickly ram into law Bill C-5—legislation that in the name of fighting terrorism attacks core democratic rights and legal principles and will vastly strengthen the powers of the national-security apparatus.

Bill C-51 has been sharply criticized by the Canadian Bar Association, numerous civil rights’ advocates, and much of the corporate media. Yet the House of Commons’ Public Safety Committee approved it last week after introducing only four minor, government-authored amendments.

This approval in hand, the government now intends to push for Bill C-51 to be rapidly passed into law, likely before the end of this month.

The vast majority of the 49 witnesses heard by the Public Safety Committee spoke out against various aspects of the bill’s draconian measures. Holding a majority on the committee, as they do in parliament, the Conservatives responded with parliamentary maneuvers to restrict debate and by repeatedly accusing the bill’s opponents of being apologists for terrorism.

Under Bill C-51, Canada’s premier spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), will be granted the power to disrupt activity, including by illegal means, that it deems endangers Canada’s national security, economic stability, territorial integrity, diplomatic interests or constitutional order. The legislation creates a new criminal offense of encouraging terrorism “in general,” gives the police expanded powers of preventive arrest and detention without charge, vastly widens provisions for the sharing of private data between government departments, and provides for no additional oversight of the police and intelligence agencies.

The first government-authored amendment struck the word “lawful” out of a clause referring to activities that cannot be disrupted by CSIS. The impact of this change is that “protests” as opposed to “lawful protests” are now excluded from disruption by the intelligence services.

Some commentators cited this as a significant improvement, since it is now clear that even protests outside of the law, i.e. acts of civil disobedience, should not be interfered with by the intelligence agencies.

The reality is that the change will have almost no practical impact on the scope of the new CSIS power. The bill continues to provide for disruption powers to be employed by CSIS to deal with activity deemed to be a threat to Canada’s national security, a sweeping formulation that encompasses much anti-government or anti-corporate political activity.

The Harper government has repeatedly denounced strikes and other protest actions, such as the 2010 anti-G 20 protest in Toronto, as threats to Canada’s economic stability or national security. On numerous occasions it has illegalized or threatened to criminalize strikes on the grounds they were threatening “economic stability.” As recently as February, striking CP Rail workers were the targets of such action.

CSIS is already working closely with the government to track protests across the country and make plans for how to deal with them. The latest evidence of this came in a secret memo obtained via a freedom of information request revealing that CSIS was involved in consultations with the government on how to deal with protests last summer against the construction of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline in British Columbia.

The Conservatives’ second amendment restricts the government from distributing personal information on persons involved in national security investigations beyond federal agencies. Originally the bill allowed the government to share details with absolutely anyone it chose.

This amendment will do nothing to change the fact that Bill C-51 guts Canadians’ privacy rights, by authorizing the sharing of personal information between seventeen government departments and agencies with a national security role.

Moreover, as a leaked document revealed last weekend, CSIS is already going much further than was previously realized in sharing intelligence with allied spy agencies around the world. While the close ties between CSIS, Canada’s electronic spy service (the Communications Security Establishment), and its partners in the “five eyes”—the intelligence services in the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand—are well known, the report revealed that intelligence has been regularly passed to other countries referred to as “trusted partners” of CSIS.

The document, obtained by the Canadian Press, was heavily censored and did not indicate which countries are considered “trusted partners.” But the despicable role of Canadian intelligence in providing detailed information to some of the most brutal regimes in the Middle East, in what amounted to Canada’s own rendition program, has been well documented. The most notorious example of this was the case of Maher Arar, where CSIS supplied Syrian security forces with information to be used in his year-long torture and interrogation on bogus terrorist charges.

The amendments proposed by all of the opposition parties illustrated their lack of concern with the broad assault on democratic rights being carried out in the name of the struggle against terrorism. While the New Democrats (NDP) and Greens voted against the bill at committee stage, the Liberals are backing it.

Liberal public safety spokesman Wayne Easter sought to secure an amendment that would provide for limited parliamentary oversight for CSIS, while defending the expanded powers Bill C-51 would give the agency. Easter’s committee would have been comprised of six members from the House of Commons and three senators—all of them carefully vetted and sworn to secrecy.

Even this was too much for the Conservatives, who have ruled out any parliamentary oversight of CSIS’s activities or any additional oversight of any part of Canada’s national-security apparatus.

In so doing, the government has drawn criticism from significant sections of the ruling elite. Such mechanisms exist in the US, Britain, and Canada’s other “five eyes” allies and they have done nothing to prevent these countries from establishing vast intelligence-gathering apparatuses which spy on millions.

The criticism of the government’s refusal to bow to calls for greater oversight is part of wider concerns within important sections of Canada’s ruling elite about the extent to which Bill C-51 breaks with traditional bourgeois-democratic norms and the political consequences of such a break. Under conditions where class tensions are rapidly reaching the boiling point, with mounting opposition to the Conservatives’ assault on public services and pensions and other social rights at home and aggressive militarism abroad, layers within the bourgeoisie worry that such an authoritarian turn could seriously undermine the popular legitimacy of parliament and the other state institutions they depend upon to uphold their class rule.

This is above all what is motivating the stance taken by the NDP and Greens, who have sought numerous changes to the bill while refusing to reject its fundamentals. Green Party leader Elizabeth May, for example, proposed an alteration to the new criminal offence of promoting terrorism “in general” so as to explicitly exclude private speech. Even if implemented, this would leave otherwise untouched a new, undefined “speech crime” that will give the government a means to silence critics of both its foreign and domestic policy. As it stands, the provision does not require any link to an actual terrorist attack or even a plan for such an attack and makes use of an all-embracing definition of terrorism such that someone who even expresses support or sympathy for a group like Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by Canada’s government, could potentially be charged with promoting terrorism and liable to a five-year prison term.

The NDP, which waited nearly a month after Bill C-51’s release before announcing its opposition, tabled around 40 amendments to the bill. NDP public safety spokesman Randal Garrison emphasized the party’s demand for some of the bill’s provisions to be subject to “sunset clauses,” i.e. regular parliamentary re-approval to remain in force.

In a statement meant to underline the NDP’s support for a dramatic strengthening of the coercive powers of the state, party leader Thomas Mulcair has stated that if the NDP forms the government after the coming federal election it will not repeal Bill C-51, only amend it.

The NDP has also hailed the signing of a letter by four former Canadian Prime Ministers opposing the bill. The signatories include Jean Chretien, who was Liberal Prime Minister in 2001 when the first anti-terrorism law was adopted in the wake of 9/11, and his successor Paul Martin. The law was a major assault on democratic rights, introducing into the criminal code a broad definition of terrorism and handing unprecedented powers of preventive detention to the police.

The NDP’s hailing of such figures’ limited opposition to Bill C-51 exposes the utterly fraudulent character of its claim to be an indefatigable defender of Canadians’ democratic rights.

Massive fire at Chinese chemical factory

Ben McGrath

An explosion at a chemical factory in China on Monday evening caused a large scale fire and a number of injuries. Industrial accidents in China are a regular occurrence amid the drive by corporations, with government backing, to boost profits at the expense of occupational safety, health and environmental standards.

The explosion occurred at a paraxylene (PX) chemical plant in the city of Zhangzhou in Fujian province. Paraxylene is a highly flammable chemical used in making polyethylene terephthalate (PET) polyesters that can be formed into a variety of items including water bottles and clothing fabrics. Paraxylene is also found in small amounts in airplane fuel and gasoline. It causes dizziness and nausea if ingested and can damage the central nervous system.

Monday’s explosion is thought to have been caused by leaking xylene, ignited by a spark. After the initial explosion, three oil tanks also caught fire, intensifying the blaze. At the time of the fire, the plant was not in operation, having been shut down for maintenance.

The fire raged into Tuesday and required more than 800 firefighters to extinguish. Nineteen people, including four firefighters, were injured and treated in hospital. Two oil storage tanks caught fire again on Wednesday but have since been put out.

The blast from the plant was reportedly felt 50 kilometers away. The government claims that the surrounding area has not been contaminated by chemicals from the plant. However, 29,096 residents who live near the plant have been evacuated, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. This is the second explosion at the Zhangzhou plant in two years.

The first explosion occurred in July 2013, just days before the plant was first scheduled to begin production. A hydrogen pipeline ruptured during testing, delaying the opening of the plant by a week. No injuries were reported at the time. However, the fact that a second explosion has occurred in a relatively short time indicates that safety standards are being ignored.

The plant is operated by Dragon Aromatics, a branch of the Taiwanese petrochemical company Xianglu Group. Dragon Aromatics is one of China’s largest independent petrochemical producers. It produces liquefied petroleum gas and naphtha (a product similar to gasoline) working in collaboration with the Chinese military-linked company Zhuhai Zhenrong.

The public is highly suspicious of PX plants. The planned construction of another PX plant was the focus of protests by thousands of people in March and April last year in Maoming, located in neighboring Guangdong Province. Police broke up the protests with tear gas and batons, leading to injuries among the demonstrators.

One Maoming resident summed up the attitude of the government and plant management: “Maoming has always been a chemical industrial city. Sometimes walking on the streets, you can’t even escape from the awful smell discharged from the chemical plants.” Residents living near the Zhangzhou plant also complained of chemical smells.

Protests in 2007 against the original plans to build a PX plant in the wealthier neighborhood of Xiamen succeeded in blocking its construction and having it moved to Zhangzhou where it was built in the poorer area of Gulei.

Public opposition has also halted plans to construct other PX plants, including in the cities of Dalian, Ningbo and Kunming.

The explosion became a hot topic on Weibo, a Chinese web site similar to Twitter. Many people expressed their opposition to PX plants, stating that past protests had been correct to take a stand against the factories. Frustrated by the government’s claims that the plants are safe, one user commented, “Only when the city officials and their families live near a PX plant will their assurances be convincing.”

Ma Jun, a Chinese environmentalist, stated: “[Monday’s explosion] will refocus the debate on the quality of decision making as well as the management of the chemicals industry.” However, nothing of the sort will occur. The routine official response to industrial accidents is to make phony promises to improve safety to placate public anger and remove a few local government officials, making them the scapegoat for the systematic lack of industrial safety.

Many accidents go underreported or escape notice altogether. For example, it was revealed at the end of December that an explosion at an auto parts factory in Kunshan, Jiangsu province in August, that was thought to have caused 75 deaths, actually killed 146 people. The August explosion was the worst in 2014, but not the only one. Another blast killed 17 workers and injured 20 at an auto parts factory in Foshan, Guangdong province on December 31, just hours after the government acknowledged the larger death toll at Kunshan.

Last year, according to the government’s National Bureau of Statistics, there were 68,061 workplace deaths in China. This huge death toll number makes a mockery of claims by big business and its defenders in the Beijing bureaucracy that there will be a greater focus on safety in the future.

Sri Lankan government postpones constitutional amendment

Pani Wijesiriwardena

The minority United National Party (UNP)-led government in Sri Lanka has been thrown into crisis after being forced to put off the parliamentary debate over its proposed 19th amendment to the constitution. Debate was due to take place on Thursday and Friday.

The postponement was a result of infighting between ruling and opposition parties and compounded by the Supreme Court’s determination that some clauses should be referred to a referendum. The amendment has already been changed several times in a bid to get the backing of parliamentary opposition parties.

The main proposal was to abolish the executive presidency and transfer most powers to a prime minister and cabinet responsible to the parliament. The president would remain as head of the state, but acting under the advice of the prime minister, and would retain the post of commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Abolition of the executive presidency was one of the chief planks of the program of Maithripala Sirisena who, with the backing of the UNP, ousted Mahinda Rajapakse in the January presidential election. Sirisena, who had been part of Rajapakse’s cabinet until the election was called, hypocritically denounced the former president’s corruption and dictatorial rule.

The election took on the character of a regime-change operation backed by the US, which was hostile to Rajapakse’s close ties with China. Sirisena capitalised on the widespread public opposition to the previous government’s anti-democratic methods and attacks on social rights. The proposed constitutional amendment, however, is not aimed at restoring democracy, but at fashioning new forms of autocratic rule to impose its austerity agenda on workers and the poor.

Altogether 19 petitions were presented to the Supreme Court by different political parties, civil groups and individuals—most of them opposed to granting more powers to the prime minister.

Parliamentary speaker Chamal Rajapakse read the Supreme Court’s opinion to parliament on Thursday. It stated that the clauses delegating the executive powers of the president to the prime minister required a two-thirds majority in parliament and a referendum thus effectively blocking the move. Similar approval was also needed to appoint a competent authority to monitor state and private television to prevent violations of the election commissioner’s rules during an election.

The Supreme Court determination was hailed in the media as proof that it was now impartial under the new government. In fact, the court’s opinion simply reflects the fact that sections of the political establishment want to retain a strong presidency amid a worsening economic and social crisis.

In a bid to broaden parliamentary support for the amendment, Sirisena included members of his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in the UNP-led government. However, most SLFP parliamentarians are still sitting in the opposition and are accusing the UNP of seeking to put autocratic powers in the hands of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

The SLFP is in turmoil after the election—sections of the party continue to support Rajapakse while others back Sirisena, who retained his membership even though he defected to the opposition. On Tuesday, SLFP members voted down a proposal to issue treasury bills amounting to 400 billion rupees ($US3 billion) creating a new crisis for the government.

There is sharp opposition to the constitutional amendment even among those parties backing the government. The Sinhala extremist Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), which is part of the ruling coalition, filed a petition in the Supreme Court against the constitutional changes and accused Wickremesinghe of seeking to usurp presidential powers.

On Thursday, Wickremesinghe told the parliament that the government would change some clauses of the amendment and put it for the vote later this month. In a bid to head off criticism, he also said the amendment would not take effect until the next presidential term—some six years away. In other words, the executive presidency would not end immediately as promised.

Posturing as a champion of democracy, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) has vocally backed the proposed amendment. JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake declared: “We think the new amendment is the right choice for democracy. It gives public servants the necessary legal frame to work independently.”

Likewise, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the main Tamil bourgeois party, has declared that it views the proposal as a step towards democracy. The TNA is backing the government hoping for a compromise with the Colombo ruling elites that would strengthen its position through the devolution of powers at the provincial level.

Rajapakse, however, is seeking to exploit the government’s growing political crisis to make a come-back. He has told the media that some presidential powers, but not all, should be reduced. He is being promoted by sections of the SLFP and former coalition partners, including the Sinhala chauvinist parties—the National Freedom Front and Mahajana Eksath Peramuna as well as the opportunist Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Stalinist Communist Party.

Rajapakse is operating from a leading Buddhist temple in Colombo and organising meetings at temples. The Sunday Times reported he was planning a march of 5,000 monks that will mobilise reactionary Sinhala-Buddhist forces to back his bid to return to power.

None of the parties—those backing or not backing the executive presidential system—has the slightest concern for democratic rights of working people. Sirisena’s SLFP and the UNP are notorious for attacks on democratic rights including the waging of a brutal communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

In 1978, the UNP government of former President J. R. Jayawardene rewrote the constitution, crowning it with the executive presidential system with broad autocratic powers. Jayawardene boasted that the “only thing the president cannot do is to change a man into a woman and vice versa.”

The 1978 constitution was the preparation for implementing pro-market policies that savagely attacked the living standards of the working class in order to turn the island into a cheap labour platform. Jayawardene sacked 100,000 public sector employees to crush a general strike in order to impose his attacks on jobs and conditions. The UNP government was responsible for the 1983 island-wide anti-Tamil pogrom that precipitated the plunge into civil war.

In opposition, every party—the SLFP and UNP alike—has postured as an opponent of the executive presidency only to abandon their promises when in office and further strengthen the presidency. Rajapakse pushed through the 18th amendment that removed the two-term limit on the presidency and strengthened his powers to directly appoint top judges and state officials.

Rajapakse’s autocratic methods of rule were not simply a personal weakness or a product of his regime’s corruption and nepotism. Rather his resort to police state methods was above all directed at suppressing any resistance by workers and the poor to his government’s attacks on living standards.

The new UNP-led government is preparing to do the same.