#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ARGENTINE #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Argentine, FORA Organizacion-Obrera #95: January / February 2023 - Content + EDITORIAL (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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EDITORIAL - BREAD AND CIRCUS
HISTORY - 100 years after the refoundation of the First International
UNIONS - Looking towards the sunlight: Possible futures of Nursing
INTERNATIONAL - Multiply the loaves: Cooperativism in Northeast Syria
OPINIONS:
Right to well-being
abolish the heroic
our subordination
The crux is capitalism
REVIEWS - The origins of the Argentine union model. Leonardo Elgorriaga.

EDITORIAL

BREAD AND CIRCUS
Not only of bread the man lives. We are accustomed to claiming the right to
bread, and perhaps not so much to claiming leisure. It is a reliable fact that
the pernicious use that companies and governments make of the show is contrary to
popular benefit, but that does not imply that we should give up leisure, in the
same way that we firmly refuse to give up bread.

In World Cup times, public communication is violently restricted to the
transmission of a single show on hypertechnological screens. All attention is
focused on a ball game. It would perhaps be tempting to censor this fascination
and accuse the powerful men behind the curtains of setting up a circus to
stultify the people, but we would be forgetting that popular passions cannot be
explained solely by thinking of the benefits they produce for the owners of
everything.

Something similar will happen shortly, when the screens are captured by the
electoral spectacle in which everything becomes infinitely important for a while
to be absolutely inconsequential a few moments later. But, unlike elections,
football matters, one way or another, to a lot of people.

Soccer is a popular passion, whoever likes it likes it and whoever protests
protests. It is part of the culture of a people that has fun and is excited by
the sporting spectacle, and that reaches the point of mobilizing identifications
with it that can even become pathologically violent. Soccer is the space for
friendship and hatred, for family celebrations and organized crime, for fraternal
embraces and the most bestial intestinal rage: for those hopes that seem for a
moment to lift a people out of the crisis and promise them a magical moment of
victory With football you hate and love each other, heroism is evoked, misery is
shown and at times everything is played for nothing. The only thing that soccer
as a sport lacks is rationality, an important distinction so that the celebration
does not make us forget that soccer is a political-economic meeting arena in
which while some have fun, others do millionaire businesses and others both: have
fun and do business

Whether as a sport or a show, judging football is up to everyone. But when an
event is embodied in popular culture, and it does so especially in the chest of
passions, manipulation appears as an incomparable temptation for those who lead
the political and economic destinies of the peoples of the world. After all, and
beyond the electoral spectacle, soccer is the most widespread economic-cultural
institution on the planet, and it has the capacity to bring all the states and
all the companies in the world to an agreement. In this it surpasses monarchies
and democracies, and all the creeds of any church. FIFA regularly accumulates an
economic volume similar to that of some countries, and manages a popular show of
planetary dimension whose name is written in all languages. Nothing was ever so
close to a universal religion as the football business.

In this sense, all the fascination that occurs every four years, both in favor of
football and against football, ends up being the same, and forms part of the same
ritual. Like psychedelic dancers orbiting around a fire, everyone talks and tells
around the drifts of the world game. Quite a show. But as usually happens with
the holidays, after the outburst and the bustle everything returns to normal in a
world that continues until the next ritual of a month, every four years.

Stadiums and buildings will be built again on the backs of dead workers,
luxuriously obscene cars will multiply in front of economically disadvantaged
populations, and injustices and contradictions will be denounced once again.
Shouting publications about the immorality of inequalities, about the fraternity
of nations, about the irrationality that moves passion, about the rules of the
game. What then is the circus? The one of world football or the one of the
inconsequential complaint? What is the show that we like to see the most?

The workers killed in the stadiums in Qatar were talked about much more than the
workers killed on any other construction site anywhere in the world are talked
about on a daily basis.

It is normal for workers to die from occupational causes without even having
permanent statistics. According to the WHO, approximately two million workers die
each year globally[1], a figure that would be seriously multiplied if the victims
of informal work were counted.

In Arab countries, the institution of Kafala[2], or sponsorship, is a common
modern slavery system that was put on display around the Qatari headquarters, but
that is traditional in the region and will continue to be past the World Cup
outrage , as indeed are the innumerable practices of savage exploitation that are
reproduced regularly throughout the world[3]. Businesses abroad and also in the
pampas where access to water is a silent and still hidden war for the
metropolitan inhabitants.

Precariousness, negligence and structural inequality in which we work on a daily
basis deserve not the distant indignation of once every four years, but a
permanent and sustained reaction in each region of the planet, with an
internationalist spirit and with sufficiently radical objectives so that
rebellion does not become a ritual.

The same will happen in a few months when the candidacies are put into
circulation and everyone counts the points for the assembly of the fixture until
they reach the ballotage. Suspension of disbelief will make the illusion of
political representation seem real for a while, until then, sooner rather than
later and with the float turned into a pumpkin, we return to the harsh reality of
a world that depends much more on us than on us. of the heroism of the athletes
and the personality of the executioners.

Being horrified by the political use of soccer is inconsequential because that
use is permanent: with soccer and with everything else. Getting indignant with
the political marketing in the electoral fanfare is more of the same. Frightened
by the bestiality of the concentration of wealth worldwide produced at the behest
of the world, is also making an exception of the usual. It is the organization
and not the indignation that is the key that opens the door to a different
destiny. Not by getting outraged from time to time something will change, and it
will not be by dint of denouncing guilty parties that injustice will end.

The 95th edition of Organización Obrera is an invitation to think beyond the
complaint, exploring ways of organizing in remote places, electoral lies and
resources for popular subordination with a view to avoiding the plaintiffs
falling into conformism and then returning to more of the same,

In a territory with poverty figures of 43.1% (18 million inhabitants)[4]it is
clear that the issue is structural and that, therefore, the solution will not
come from vernacular electoralism but from the organization of workers with
perspectives transformation radicals; organization that guarantees historical
claims without forgetting the urgent ones, essential for survival: water, food,
housing and territory. Organization that invites you to look at the sun and
advance without fear in the construction of different worlds, taking power away
from its foundations in its own search.

The path to transformation is the organization and activism that manage to open a
gap so that not everything that happens is more of the same. The rest is pure show.

[1]https://www.who.int/es/news/item/16-09-2021-who-ilo-almost-2-million-people-die-from-work-related-causes-each-year
[2]https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/2022/03/07/el-sistema-kafala-un-pasaporte-a-la-esclavitud/
[3]Among the various negotiations that took place during the World Cup is the
multi-million dollar contract of the captain of the Argentine team with Saudi
Arabia, a dictatorship responsible for atrocious violations of human rights,
including its responsibility in the crisis of Yemen. Another fact worth
mentioning is the illegal wiring by Qatari businessmen in the access to the high
peaks of the northwest of Río Negro. Site where there are very important
watercourses for life in the region (Chubut and Quemquemtreu rivers).
[4]https://www.ambito.com/economia/pobreza/segun-la-uca-la-alcanzo-al-431-y-afecta-mas-18-millones-argentinos-n5600442


https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/
https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/2023/01/09/pan-y-circo/
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