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	Lula says Capitalism is Broken by AP / Bloomberg & agencies Dakar, Senegal   Feb 2011   Brazil"s first working class president says that the global financial crisis proves capitalism is broken. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva says it was time for affluent countries to begin paying attention to nations like Senegal, ranked as one of the world"s poorest.   "For too long, rich countries saw us as peripheral, problematic, even dangerous," said Silva, who stepped down last year with one of the highest approval ratings in his country"s history, "Today we are an essential, undeniable part of the solution to the biggest crisis of the last decade - a crisis that was not created by us, but that emerged from the great centers of world capitalism."   His speech marked the second day of the World Social Forum, an annual counter weight to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. While the latter draws CEOs who sleep in four-star hotels, the participants in the World Social Forum are happy to sleep with locals in order to take part in the yearly gathering.   African countries should pursue a “green revolution” to protect the world’s poorest continent from rising global food prices, said Lula da Silva.   “There can be no sovereignty without food sovereignty,” he told a meeting of the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal. “I am convinced that Africa has all the conditions necessary to follow the path trailed by Brazil, with the promotion of a green revolution.”   An index of 55 food commodities climbed 3.4 percent to a record 231 points in January from a month earlier, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization. Prices rose 25 percent in 2010, sparking concern of a return to high costs that hindered economies and caused riots in 2008.   Lula urged African countries to unite politically and distance themselves from “the major world powers” by forging ties with other developing nations. “Those who give us lessons on how to manage our own economies were not able to avoid the crisis that overtook their own countries and from there, all of humanity,” he said.   The former leader, who said he visited 29 African countries during his eight-year term, said the continent “has more relevance than ever” to other developing nations like Brazil.   Bolivian President Evo Morales told the assembled crowd that capitalism was in trouble.   "We can see it with the global financial crisis. We can see it with climate change and global warming," said Morales, who in 2005 became the first leader to be elected from Bolivia"s indigenous majority. "The capitalism of today is a capitalism that no longer produces but just consumes."   The Bolivian President urged African leaders to back a proposed United Nations declaration that would block the sale of public water services to private companies.   “We are going to go the UN to declare that water is a basic public need that must not be managed by private interests, but should be for all people, including people of rural areas,” Morales said. Half of Africa’s rural population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water, the UN estimates.   Morales also provocatively called for the nationalization of Africa’s mineral and petroleum wealth, which he said would boost state revenue, increase rural employment and reduce environmental degradation.   “All of Africa’s resources should be declared resources of the state and managed by the nation,” he said. “Our experience in Bolivia shows that when you take control of natural resources for the people of the town and village, major world change is possible.”   Four of the twelve members of the Organization of the Petrol Exporting Countries are in Africa, including Nigeria, where rebels have staged attacks on oil-industry infrastructure since 1992.   The weeklong conference, which has drawn some 30,000 participants from 123 countries, aims to create "open space" for debate on global issues. Many participants pointed out that the event is also taking place at a same time of change in Africa.   "If you look across the democratization struggle in Egypt and Tunisia and the challenges in Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe, it is very important for people to express their views and indicate that there is a ruling elite, a very small group of people who are holding us hostage," said Zimbabwean journalist and participant Thomas Deves.   Nilza Iraci, a member of the forum"s international organizing committee, says that in the early years, the forum attempted to bridge the gap with Davos. They held a teleconference with members of the Davos conference in an attempt to exchange ideas. Iraci says the event is not meant to effect change, but rather to create a space to network and to share ideas for a new world.   The opening march included a delegation of women from Senegal"s provinces who had made their way to Dakar to try to lobby for land rights. In the oceanlike crowd, they ran into Liv Sovik, a communications professor at a school in Rio de Janeiro. She helped the women connect with a leader of the land rights movement that was also at the march, she said. "It"s like a trade fair. You meet to make connections," said Sovik. Visit the related web page
	Tagore and the Idea of Cooperation by Ananya Mukherjee-Reed The Hindu India   “Today, economic power has been captured by a small minority. But it has acquired this power only by accumulating the productive power of others. Their capital is simply the accumulated labor of a millions of working people, in a monetized form. It is this productive power that is the real capital, and it is this power that latently resides in every worker ...” — Samabayaniti/The Co-operative Principles, 1928.   In a compelling set of essays written between 1915 and 1940, Rabindranath Tagore articulated a social vision where exploitation would give way to a just, humane, collectively owned economy.   At the core of his thought was the cooperative principle. This is an idea worth revisiting on the International Day of Cooperatives, and even more so during the lead-up to 2012, which is the United Nations International Year of Cooperatives.   Why cooperatives again? Have they not been tried — and have failed? Well, so have some of the biggest banks and large corporations. Yet they continue undiminished. The reason they do so with such impunity is that alternatives are hard to come by. With the recent financial crisis, the need to identify alternative forms of ownership is greater than ever before.   In India, the experience with the century-old cooperative movement has been mixed. There are some stunning successes: Amul, for one. There are others, too, where cooperatives have proved transformational for the marginalized. The problems are also well-known: abuse, politicization, excessive dependence on the state, and so on. But these are mere symptoms. The real disease lies elsewhere. There is little understanding, much less acceptance, of the cooperative principle and its potential. It is yet to enter the core of our social vision, leave alone public policy.   Those spaces are dominated, ever more aggressively, by the competitive principle, the scepter of "efficiency" and private gain. This is why India can emerge as one of the top wealth-generators even as 93 per cent of its working citizens toil in the informal sector. That 93 per cent contributes almost half of India"s fast-growing GDP. But it has no say over the way that growth is generated — or any voice to claim a fairer distribution of the wealth it produces. The same goes for the majority that survives on the agrarian economy.   Written some eight decades ago, Tagore"s thoughts stemmed from these concerns: the growing concentration of economic power and the destruction of rural India. He wrote: “Today our villages are half-dead. If we imagine we can just/ continue to live, that would be a mistake. The dying can pull/ the living only towards death.” (from The Neglected Villages, 1934).   He was deeply skeptical about the solutions proposed by the elite — such as charity or moral enlightenment of the wealthy. These were like putting out “a raging fire by blowing at it,” he wrote. Instead, he sought an ethical model of production.   What would that entail? Tagore"s vision went far beyond notions like ‘social responsibility that are in vogue today. To him, ethical production required that resources (such as land and capital) are collectively owned by producers themselves. This would ensure that the produce is also collectively owned, and that all producers have a say in determining their share of value in the product of their work.   The typical small farmer, indebted and impoverished, was much in need of such a structure. “Imagine if all of our small farmers farmed their land collectively, stored their produce in a common facility and sold them through a common mechanism...” Only then can we prevent profiteering; only then can the farmer recoup the legitimate value of her labor, wrote Tagore.   Without such mechanisms, the farmer would never be able to effectively exercise the right to his land, even if he held the title. Structural conditions would make him powerless. Under these circumstances, giving the small farmer the legal right to land was no more than giving him ‘the right to commit suicide.   Indeed, in the cooperative principle, Tagore saw the possibility of challenging power, of altering power relations. Ordinary people, whose work constituted what was "the real capital," could only do so if they collectively owned that "capital." Many economists may well reject this as the misplaced idealism of an ill-informed poet. But it will resonate readily with the struggles for producer-ownership in the world today, such as Via Campesina. As the clout of agri-business grows, food inflation rises, and informal work becomes the norm, challenging dominant structures of ownership. And power is the central challenge of these movements.   In India, no amount of tinkering can make growth "inclusive," unless people have a say in how that growth is driven. Take the case of cotton textiles, a boom sector that has seen much growth. But has it really benefited those who have produced that growth? The cotton growers, for instance — the largest single group within the 200,000 farmers who have taken their own lives in the past decade? Or the millions of women who work the long shifts in export factories? Even worse, the drive for profits constantly pits the growers and workers against one another.   When, at the peak of the cotton crisis, cotton farmers received price support from the government, export sector workers were threatened with job losses because cotton had become "too expensive." (Ironically, the worst off among the cotton growers did not even benefit from price support.) As long as prices are globally determined, we are told, not much can be done to save those at the bottom. Yet, the past few months have seen global prices hit a big high — and the government sharply restricted cotton exports to favor the textile lobby. This crippled the growers.   This brings us right back to the question of ownership. When global prices fluctuate, who decides how the gains and losses are to be shared? Certainly not the majority of workers and small farmers. But more important, global prices do not operate by magic. They reflect the same concentration of ownership and economic power. Indeed, several movements today urge consumers to use their purchasing power to counter such power. But consumer movements cannot succeed unless the productive economy is differently organized, differently owned.   Can that happen? Yes, if several conditions are in place. First, the competitive principle must be properly applied. Every institution, from schools to universities to hospitals, is increasingly being judged according to that principle, and forced to forgo its social priorities. At the same time, banks and corporations remain blatantly non-competitive, operating like cabals with little discipline or accountability. Second, among the main points of criticism of cooperatives in India has been their need for state resources. But our corporations have been also been heavily subsidized by state resources. While they flourish, cooperatives flounder.   Why? Corporations enjoy state support with no interference; cooperatives do not. State support has come with levels of bureaucratic control that are incompatible with a truly autonomous, member-driven movement. Third, cooperatives cannot survive in isolated sectors. Systematic linkages between sectors and across countries are necessary if we are to harness the full political, social, economic power of the cooperative principle.   Here is a story from Peru. From its mountains comes a special brand of coffee called Cafe Femenino, produced by cooperatives of very poor indigenous women. It grew out of the women"s struggle to claim their share of the value they produce. As growers of organic Fair Trade coffee they earn a premium over and above the market price. Before Cafe Femenino, the women had no access to this premium, no say in its use. Now they use it to educate their daughters who would otherwise not go to school; more than that they raise awareness against the tremendous gender violence in their communities.   There is more. In Canada, Cafe Femenino is distributed also by a workers cooperative, creating as a result an entire coffee chain of cooperatives. Finally, as a mark of recognition of the global character of gender violence, Cafe Femenino is distributed free to shelters for abused women in Canada. The Femenino experiment has spread to six countries in Latin America and grows by the day. In India too, various experiments with women"s collective enterprises have long been under way, but do not receive the attention they deserve.   As Tagore had foreseen it, the cooperative principle enables the most marginalized people to mobilize their most abundant resource: their productive power and their solidarity for their shared prosperity and well-being.   * Ananya Mukherjee-Reed is Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto. Visit the related web page
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