Web 2.0

COSATU President Willie Madisha, 2nd Deputy President Violet Seboni, General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, and National Treasurer Alina Rantsolase plus leaders of COSATU affiliates are in Vienna, Austria, to take part in the historic launch of the new International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). This is a merger between the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the World Confederation of Labour (WCL). It will create the most representative and united international trade union organisation in history, a global workers’ challenge to the worldwide problem of globalisation. See the linked article from the London Financial Times, below. Meanwhile Mr George W Bush (a.k.a. “Mr Danger”) is trying in his mind to go even further than Imperialist globalisation, and right out into space. Why didn’t President Thabo Mbeki think of that? asks Rehana Rossouw in the linked article below, from the Weekender. Peter Bruce’s article on Saving Capitalism set off alarm bells concerning the political basis of apparently “innovative” but actually quite ancient “Social Credit”-type ideas, all of them designed to do precisely as Bruce’s apt headline suggests, in other words to rescue capitalism from its crisis. The last ditch of capitalism is of course fascism. The link between social credit and fascism is not necessarily obvious to the happy-go-lucky Bruces of this world (although the ethnic nature of the scheme he describes is a give-away) but to students of political history the link is quite well known and clear. Dr Derek Wall is a British green socialist who writes a regular blog called “another green world” and is the author of a book on anti-capitalism called “Babylon and Beyond”, published by Pluto Press. Dr Wall has kindly lent us an extract of his 2003 article “Ecosocialism of Fools” (linked below) which nicely pulls apart the actually very nasty fantasies of the pre-war Social Credit guru Major Douglas, as well as his modern successors. Never mind the names - follow the political argument. Wall’s title is adapted from August Bebel’s remark that “Anti-semitism is the socialism of fools”. See the link below for an example of how to place, and then deal with, the wackier side of “liberal” politics. The crisis of capitalism is not so much one of over-production or under-consumption, and is certainly not just a monetary fiddle. It is rather a crisis of imagination. The bourgeois mind, facing an open road to a freer future, collapses into a frantic fit of petty utilitarianism. Hence Peter Bruce’s phrase about “a slightly better life”, meaning a very marginal increase in the availability of the current categories of perceived good, and nothing more than that. South Africa has been an extreme example of this kind of philistine bourgeois reaction during the nearly thirteen years since the 1994 election. Another kind of reaction awaits those who try to introduce new ways of working into existing institutions. It turns out that what the outlaw Communist University, outside established institutions, has been doing has a name in “IT” circles: “Web 2.0”. Do click on that link and read the other definitions on that page of the latest jargon, such as “mash-up”. Shamus McGillicuddy and Carol Hildebrand, two specialist writers published by the US journal “SearchCIO” (CIO stands for Chief Information Officer”) write of the subversion of corporate “governance” brought about by the increasingly communistic nature of the Internet. This produces more-or-less acute anxiety among specialists about the attribution and credit for work that is now shared and mutually edited, and among managers about control and possession. At root it is a question of agency, where agency is slipping out of the hands of the owners of property, and into the collective imagination that is materialised as the Internet. Socialist Group, Keep Left and Socialism from Below are holding a Marxism Day from 10h00 to 17h00 on 25th November at Careers Center, Soweto (Old Potch road, past Bara taxi rank, behind BP Garage at Immink Drive) on eight bullet-pointed topics. Contact Claire Ceruti, czerwoni@gmail.com . Click on these links: Global realities demand new unionism, Ryder and Thys, ICFTU-WCL (777 words) Star-spangled banner over space, Rehana Rossouw, Weekender (458 words) Social Credit, Ecosocialism of Fools, Derek Wall, Capitalism Nature Socialism (6744 words) IT execs eager to exploit Web 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, SearchCIO (1252 words) Is Web 2 just another technology?, Carol Hildebrand, SearchCIO (1012 words)