A M E R I C A
IS AMERICA IN SOCIAL COLLAPSE?
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Jan/Feb 2013 Vol.21 No.1 Display until February 12, 2013
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Johu nca, n’t avoid it.
yo It’s a choice all of us have to make sooner
or later . . .
What Choice?
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. . . between singularity and nightfall John
What the f!$*%
does that
mean?
It means a
struggle
for the imagination of the world . . .
a daring escape from capitalism . . .
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You must be
delirious . . .
capitalismy operating is the onl
system we go t
and it’s not gonna get
an update
anytime soon.
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Don’t bet on it John
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MEME
OF T HE
Y EA R
ON T HE DAY T HE WOR LD EN DS WOMEN WA LK T HROUGH F IELDS UN DER T HEIR U M BR ELL A S, A DRUN K A R D GROWS SLEEPY AT T HE ED GE OF A L AW N, V EGETA BLE PEDDLER S SHOU T IN T HE ST R EET A ND A Y ELL OW- SA ILED BOAT COME S N E A R ER T HE ISL A N D, T H E VOICE OF A V IOLIN L A ST S IN T HE A IR A ND LE A DS IN T O A STA R RY NIGH T. A N D T HOSE W HO EX PECT ED LIGH T NING A N D T H UN DER A R E DISA PPOIN T ED, A N D T HOSE W HO EX PECT ED SIGNS A N D A RCH A NGEL S’ T RU MPS DO NO T BELIEV E I T IS H A PPENING NOW. A S L ONG A S T HE SUN A N D MO ON A R E A BOV E , A S L ONG A S T HE BU M BLEBEE V ISI T S A ROSE , A S L ONG A S ROSY IN FA N T S A R E BOR N NO ONE BELIEV E S I T IS H A PPENING NOW. -Czeslaw Milosz
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Did you feel it...
during the dog-days of last summer when this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth suddenly teetered over the brink... rupturing the eco-psycho-financial barriers that hold our sanity in check... descending toward Nightfall?
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Scott Elmquist/Style Weekly
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an earthquake or a hurricane, a terrorist attack or a war – new reports about which chemicals and which products are now known to cause cancer, what factories are to be closed and which workers to be laid off, what bank bailout and excessive corporate bonuses are to be paid from the public purse, what new spate of home foreclosures is enforced, what new genetic experiment is finding its way into our food supply, what new last vestige of ancient forest is to be cut, what species gone extinct, what river polluted by the latest oil spill from a ruptured pipeline, what gulf filling with clouds of petroleum as its last large fish die in drift nets …
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And at each new announcement of the destruction of individuals, communities, and ecologies – the sudden intervention of an exciting and slick new gadget that will make our lives so much easier and richer, a new celebrity scandal, a blockbuster movie, a new drug or product that will keep us balanced on the knife edge of health and dependence, a new mega-project to deliver jobs and prosperity to communities and economies on the edge of collapse. It’s as though these two moments – of despair and hope, of impending doom and instant mind- and soulnumbing gratification – were artfully planned for us, carefully coordinated or scripted, like a film taking us through emotional highs, lows, and highs again as it progresses through its three acts, our hearts in the director’s hands throughout.
12-10-19 4:13 PM
We want, above all else, to change. To be different and to make a difference. To be better. Healthier. Smarter. Richer. More beautiful. More loving and loved. If only we tried a little harder, worked a little harder, we seem to think. Change – a new self, a new world – is always just there, dangling tantalizingly in front of us, just out of reach. A new, more creative, more connected, more fulfilling life. A new health regimen. A world saved for art and beauty. We think, it’s just a matter of our purchasing power. The corporations tell us they are ready to help: growth is the answer; buy their products and you change the world. They are “innovators,” after all – change makers. They can help unveil the new you. They can in fact help you be a new and better you. At least, every advertisement is there to tell us this is so, to lull, soothe, calm, coerce, and cajole us between the shock and awe of “news” and “entertainment,” every day harder to distinguish. We push on. We strive – using ourselves up, year after year. Socioeconomic prospects diminish, and our personal and national debt rises. Struggling, we console ourselves with the many available distractions. Alcohol and drugs. Food and sex. Money. Sporting events. TV. The Internet. Facebook and Twitter swallow us up into a monetized simulacrum of “the social.” We forget the horrors, and the hours slip by … But the world of frights comes back again when the distractions wear thin. Unemployment. Austerity. Environmental calamity. A seemingly unresponsive, arrogant, and inadequate judicial and political system. Something nefarious, coercive, must be at work,
stacking the deck and tilting the playing field. It all seems too large and complex for any one of us to “change,” despite how much we would like to change ourselves and the suffering world around us. And then the fields of distraction are there again, beckoning. We could eat. We could shop. We could go online, check our friends’ status updates, their amusing and ironic posts. Anger is available, too, and there are those who readily distract us by telling us where to channel our anger, at which group, who to exclude, whose inhuman fault all this is … Of course, the consequences of this society – environmental destruction, chemical and electromagnetic poisoning of our bodies and minds, alienation, wasted time and lives, poverty and marginalization, violence and outright exploitation – are more than overlooked: they are depended upon, the very method of turning a profit and keeping the machinery going. Of course, that the judicial and political system only really serves the interests of capital accumulation and the 1% who run and benefit from this accumulation is simply apropos. What can you – the coerced and complacent 99% – possibly do about this all-pervasive system? Just do your job and enjoy your entertainment. Leave the big questions to the rich and powerful, the experts, and the “leaders.”
Stephen Collis is a poet, occupier and social critic. This essay is adapted from his latest book, Dispatches from the Occupation. Simon teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University in British Colubmia, Canada.
nnea st rid. se Let it Flow. Li Li nnea St rid,
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Capitalist domination is sustained by the peristence of mental cages that are structured by the dogmas of growth, competition and rent. The epistemological dictatorship of this model – its grip on the different spheres of human knowledge – is the very ground of power. -Franco Bifo Berardi
Armani Junior Ad, New York Times, September 10, 2012
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for Eilidh
I loved your age of wonder: your third and fourth and fifth years spent astonished, widening your eyes at each new trick of the world – and me standing there, solemnly explaining how it was done. The moon and stars, rainbows, photographs, gravity, the birds in the air, the difference between blood and water. In true life? you would say, looking up and I would nod, like some broken-hearted sage, knowing there would be no answers soon to all the big questions that were left, to cruelty and fear, to age and grief and death, and no words either. And you, like me, will sit and shake your head. In true life? Yes, my sweet, strong daughter, I’m afraid there is all this as well, and this is it: true life.
– Robin Robertson is a Scottish poet and a recipient of the EM Forster Award. “Keys to the Doors” first appeared in the New York Review of Books.
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ages nded by Western im In a society surrou for a ws male, the veil allo of the sexualized fe ty. If cie ative, a post-face so post-modern altern lizes bo ve that the veil sym we are truly to belie lieve , what are we to be submission to men is that im cla y M ? mbolizes sy g in th clo rn te es W rd conceptions of “thi contrary to Western ation er lib of veil is a motif world women,” the d an e al m between the fe for some, a barrier ediam of from the pressure exploitation. Away an m ction, the veiled wo ized ideals of perfe r own body, can create he overcomes her own ore d is respected as m ideals of beauty, an that y. This is not to say than a physical entit ality, s a suppressed sexu ha an m wo d ile ve e th s her is funneled toward ity al xu se is th at th but believe me. Is it so hard to marriage – in the ho antily sc g consider dressin that Muslim women g up rin ve e choice, and co in public a repressiv aunt fl it, nce? “If you’ve got a liberating experie IS EVEN MEAN? it.” WHAT DOES TH g of the – Sylvia Lucas, “Unveilin
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. ted by the pressure Each morning. Haun . Cold ck ne ew Cr . n. V-neck I dread the decisio et ck. Crew neck. Clos sweats. Pacing. V-ne ew Cr . ck ne s no help. Vstares blankly. Offer en at re th d to minutes an neck. Seconds turn on e in az ew neck. Mag the hour. V-neck. Cr hly silent. Man or un the end table is deat . an. Man or mouse man. Man or not-m
12-10-19 4:18 PM
SEXAND SIMULATION
Romance – the last frontier of automatization – has been taken over by the world of computers. Not pheromones, but algorithms, now orchestrate our love lives. When I first heard of this – that the world of romance was now ruled by high-tech dating technologies and matchmaking software programs that chart patterns in our personal data, seeking the binary code for compatibility – I was repulsed. What have we come to when we can’t bump into each other in the street, meet eyes and actually feel the magic of chemistry running through our veins? The transcription of our flesh-and-blood selves into digital avatars seemed to me like an eerie process of progressive disembodiment. The exodus of more and more life activities from physical into digital felt not like “progress,” but rather as if a dystopic sci-fi plot was taking over the world in real time.
But I endured being labeled anachronistic and romantic. I was committed to my stance that something was deeply amiss … and that matchmaking software was the final straw in the rampant virtualization of everything, celebrated under false pretenses in the name of “efficiency.” But then I moved… from a decently sized city to the sprawling metropolis of New York City. I guess I met some okay people at work, and at school. I had a roommate. But within months I realized that all these regular encounters were just touch-and-go, rarely adding up to real relationships. See in New York City, everyone is too goddamn busy with their careers and their part-time jobs and their status and their turbo workouts – yes, even the starving artists, vagabonds and rogue Brooklyn hippies – that no one has “time” to unplug from the robotic rat race to casually “hang out.”
“What are you, a Luddite? Don’t be so nostalgic!” That’s what everyone said to me.
John
yo u’re spending way too much time
staring at screen s . . . watching porn With Big Data we can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and are no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire – it could be used for good or for ill, and so Big Data brings us to interesting times. We’re going to end up reinventing what it means to have a human society. -theedge.org
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That’s when I found myself desiring to do exactly what I forbade myself from doing: registering for an OKCupid account. I had no interest in dating at the time; I was just hoping to find someone who wanted to hang out. As months in New York City went on, I met some sharp intellectual-types who urged me to correct what they perceived as my “philosophically naïve perception of the nature of technology and virtual reality.” They schooled me in Baudrillard, Heidegger and Stiegler. They showed me how I was creating a false binary between what’s “natural” and what’s “unnatural.” As they cited the myth of Prometheus – with fire as the first technology, which man acquired as a stolen gift from the Gods – they proved to me that “technological innovation” was something “natural” and endemic to the human condition. The only
sound philosophical stances would be, as I was told, either: everything is “natural” or everything is “unnatural.” Still, I began to sense something eerie about the popularity of online matchmaking platforms. I felt that they offered a premonition of our future as a species whose mission on earth, hithertofor, has been to sexually reproduce itself and multiply. Technosexuals (those who prefer robots or automatons sexually instead of humans) seem to be exceptional cases now, but just wait a few more years … robot love is on the horizon … “Hot” and “sexy” fembots are now used in an advertisement for vodka that’s unusually prolific across NYC, men masturbate to photos of women that are entirely digitally constructed and the popularity of “RealDolls”
(the world’s finest “adult” love doll) spreads from Japan across the globe … Though my intellectual mentors and experiences in NYC altered my evaluation of all of this, nothing can assuage the overwhelming, surreal and disorienting feeling of the uncanny … it’s like a miasma in my brain that thickens each day as we are immersed, more and more, into an entirely virtual and hyperreality … as permanent fault lines cut jarringly into the real … are we not increasingly unable to distinguish the “real” from simulation, that is, to be philosophically correct, if there ever was …
Stefanie Krasnow
eb W e h t f r u S s e iv How Depre ss
m e th e y o w m u c h ti . T h o se h go online re ss io n u se a n d d ep . Accordin g sp e n t e r e t h e m o s t w d o an h h w hand in at the y w er e a ls o BY E ric Sa nd re se a rc h e rs si ty o f w eb - sa v v w h o in d ic at to r u yo d iv er es sp en H o w d o yo uDo you check M is so u ri U nTe ch nology, th e o n ptom s of menta l m d ? sy an ne li e ed on nc e ie ki n g tim mpu lsively? Sc ec t li n k b edow n . So st ri you r emai l co o f v id e o s? there is a d ir ay s p eo p le bre ak co rr el at io n th at St re a m to n su e n tl y fr o m tw ee n th e wn e a n d d e - is th e olog ists ca n make psych Sw it ch fr e q ap p li ca ti o n b eh av e o n li ders. d ia gn o si s or et is d rn e an ac cu ra te n b a se d te iv in ss e re n p o es m ga io ss m fr o o f d e p re one to an o th er – ad s to ch at fo u n d th at o n web b eh av io r al n g lo y n d w u o st d r le ei fi h ti T to g ee in m go er t ev ll e ge a m o n gs t co th e ri sk o f w it h o uie nt. ro om s? at s, p n e a th ic er m p eople now A epre ssion is Wit h a bil lion k , n o b o d y developing d to how they o al o ropor tion o n Fa c e b e w eb a n d owle dge the p wants to ackne room – web n av ig at ed th th elephant in
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After years of hand sanitizer, hotel suites and shimmering porcelain, releasing anywhere other than a hand-crafted Italian basin seemed rude, disrespectful, inhuman. Growing up I’d been taught that the essence of humanity was about shedding this animal skin. And though no one ever said it out loud, I knew from a very young age that there was something blasphemous about my piss. Over time I learned to push the disturbing biological reminders farther and farther from my consciousness. I ran the tap to hide the sound. I stopped looking into the bowl to see if it was yellow or clear. I outfitted the house with the best fans. I insisted on calling them restrooms. I excused myself to the restroom quietly in social occasions, eventually dropping the restroom altogether and just went with “excuse me.” I sat down to piss. Then I met these men from the suburbs. Friends of friends. They joined me at an upscale lakeside retreat. Soft roughing it I called it – the elements of the wild with the amenities of home. The restrooms were the best I’d ever experienced. Spaces as large as bedrooms. Basins like small baths. Exquisite.
Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men sifts through the rubble of blue-collar American manhood – the de-industrialization of the American economy, she says, is also responsible for the ruin of the traditional family and traditional gender roles. Rosin’s book will set the teeth of feminists and befuddled Men’s Rights Movementers on edge alike – and for that, it’s probably worth a read.
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Almost artistic. Complete and total disguises. But these friends of friends didn’t share the same appreciation. In fact they barely noticed the restroom except to comment on the power of the basin’s flush. They preferred to pull out their dicks in the middle of the gravel driveway and piss. They often did this in mid-sentence while talking to each other – without even so much as a pause. Imagine it. Holding their dicks. Laughing. Making eye contact. Shaking the last droplets out of the end. They would zip their trousers in stride as they returned to whatever it was they were doing. It wasn’t long before they stopped using the toilets to piss altogether. Even in the dark of night, they’d stumble across the room banging their knees, tripping over haphazardly strewn shoes and clothing, to unlatch the front door so they could release barefoot under the night sky. Sometimes they’d dribble on their own feet, smiling as the warm urine cut through the damp lakeside air on their skin. I watched from the kitchen one evening as they chuckled to themselves, rubbing the tops of their wet feet on the back of their trousers. God I wanted that. One day, instead of discretely turning my head and moving to the side, I stood beside them as they pissed together on the driveway. “How come you never piss outside?” one of them asked. I stared blankly at the streams of urine flowing from the large dark puddles of piss. It didn’t seem to matter to them either way. They carried on with their conversation. Maybe it was just an idle curiosity. And I couldn’t answer because I didn’t know why.
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Get a grip
on yourself
Jo h n
Estelle Hanania
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To stop global warming, we must first stop the fever in our brains.
Josh Bassett, Dirty Dishes
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After the crash of 1929, most of the natural wealth of the planet was still intact: the salmon runs came in on time; cod fish swarmed in the Atlantic; old growth forests stood tall all over the world… and oil flowed out of the ground as if from an infinite source. Though the financial markets reeled, jobs were scarce and people suffered mightily for many years, we were able to fall back on our planet’s natural wealth, pull ourselves out of the slump, and get the economy – and our lives – moving again. Today most of the fish, the forests and the oil is gone. For the better part of a century we’ve been violating one of the core principles of basic economics: we’ve been selling off our planet’s natural capital and calling it income. The global economy grew 50-fold over the past 100 years, with not even a hint of slowing down. Now we’re finally seeing clearly… for 100 years the global economy was an elaborate Ponzi scheme in which living generations ripped off whatever they could from generations yet unborn. Now the externalities are starting to swamp us… dead seas, melting ice caps, polluting aquifers, bleached soils, expanding desserts, lost cultures, fractured communities, emptier lives… we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, and all the derivatives, credit swaps and financial pyrotechnics of neoclassical economics won’t save us this time around. These escalating externalities are the X-factor that will trigger a global crash bigger, longer and more traumatic than anything we’ve ever seen before. To avert catastrophe, we need a new language of the liquidity of fresh water, the leverage of rising seas, the stimulus of intact forests, the stability of global temperatures… hey, ask your professors to explain why the BP oil spill made the GDP go up and how they measure economic progress. With capitalism’s negligence of ecology, which currently borders on a totalizing death warrant, only an economic paradigm shift can help us revitalize the crucial lifeline that runs through economics and ecology (eco=oikos=home). Only a total paradigm shift in the theoretical foundations of economic science can save us now. — Kalle Lasn and Stefanie Krasnow
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Saddled up… Brazilians riding through São Paulo to mark World Car Free Day.
Moncler Ad, New York Times Style Magazine, August 19, 2012
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Ethan Cox
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A sum begets an action, which begets a reaction, which begets a sum, which begets an action, which begets a sum, which begets a reaction, which begets a sum. Before you know it, in less time than it takes to blink an eye, a billion equations have flashed across your stock floor computer screen. You blink your eye again and the global economy, its products and the livelihoods of millions of people are in free-fall. Pension funds, retirement savings, college trusts, union investments, commodity gains, all wiped away by an out-of-control computer equation. The spark? A lone wolf billionaire or hedge fund manager dumping millions of units into a trading algorithm. Or maybe a faceless entity looking for quick kills in the shadow economy of Dark Pools and High Frequency Trading (HFT) – assets held for only millionths of a second before they’re traded again. Ever since the Flash Crash of 2010, when an out-of-control financial algorithm cost the Dow nine percent of its worth in the span of a few hours, regulators across the world have been debating if, and how, they can rein HFT in. This has proven to be a difficult task. While this type of hyper-trading can go rogue beyond human control, it is also incredibly popular, accounting for an estimated 65 percent of all market transactions. In the highly networked financial world, mathematical functions trigger exponential waves of buying and selling on a daily basis. This relinquishing of control to programs has ushered in an entire new realm of speculation, adding even greater layers of chaos to an already temperamental system. The appearance of ghost algorithms, “algos,” like the one that snaked through the US stock market in October 2012, making up 4 percent of all trades in one day, have left even experienced traders perplexed. They can’t tell if the algo is human-controlled, automatic, or one of a plethora of equations like “news-algos” that surf the web and translate headlines into stock probability within nanoseconds.
In Europe and Canada, small proposals have been made to combat the unpredictable dark side of HFT, like slowing the necessary time of asset ownership from a millionth of a second to five hundredths of a second, or placing small levies on mass trading of financial units. Some have even proposed a “kill switch,” a big red Off button that can be pushed when doomsday algorithms run wild, buying, selling and erasing mass quantities of human wealth and labor. What these kinds of suggestions have in common is that they do nothing to address the problem. When the fundamental premise of trading is profit at any cost, when the rules are set up in such a way that the trader with the biggest super computer wins, it goes without saying that some aspect of basic human morality has been lost. Within the context of global financial anarchy, regulations in territories like Canada and the EU will only serve to drive HFT into greater concentration in unregulated markets in the US and Australia, and deeper into Dark Pools which, according to recent estimates, account for nearly 15 percent of global GDP – money with no identity buying and selling assets with no name. Real change will come when the basic premise of HFT is combatted head-on. What the world needs isn’t another speed limit measured in abstracted nanoseconds. It needs speeds measured in human time, hours and days. A 24hour stock ownershop rule, the only sure thing able to stop the algos-gone-wild culture, is a good place to start, followed by a Robin Hood tax on all speculative financial transactions. What holds these reforms back is not the cost, not the understanding, not the sense of it, but a global culture of sheepishness. A basic lack of confidence. A culture that thinks it’s too stupid to understand the market. A culture that sees economists as scientists beyond reproof rather than as salesmen responsible for the products they sell. We need to turn off and tune out the paid-for financial pundits who say there is only one way to be. We need to uproot the internalized neoliberal, real estate agent and growth economist thinking embedded in the subconscious of our democracies. In 2011 the global imagination erupted in a frenzy of possibility. Has it been so quickly sung back to sleep?
Darren Fleet
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It’s
simple John ,
just play
Ariel Cabrera Foix/AriCaFoix
Albert Ian RP
killcap
Indignados 29M general strike in Barcelona, Spain, March 2012
Thousands of people took part in a general strike in Spain on March 29, 2012.
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Ariel Cabrera Foix/AriCaFoix
Albert Ian RP
– Franco “Bifo” Berardi speaks with David Hugill and Elise Thorburn of the Berkeley Planning Journal.
Student uprising in Santiago, Chile, August 2012
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My generation entered politics as a very small force in the universities and colleges when there was a near complete hegemony of neoliberalism, when economic growth rates were huge but at the same time abstract and when the examples of the good life were those of super-consumerism. Now we are in a different reality. Today, in Greece, half of young people between 24 and 35 have no job. They are condemning that generation to live a lot worse than their parents. They are condemning them to live without dreams. What we can give and say to this generation is that in its consciousness it has to recover hope within struggle. In order to rebuild those destroyed lives, a better future has to be built. There is no other way. Social justice and dignity are two very important things for a generation that wants to win its future back.
Nikolas Giakoumidis/AP PHOTOS
— Alexis Tsipras, the leader of SYRIZA, a radical left coalition in Greece, in conversation with the Argentinian newspaper Página/12.
Police brutality protest in Thessaloniki, Greece, December 2011
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Nikolas Giakoumidis/AP PHOTOS
— Franco “Bifo” Berardi in conversation with Hugill and Thorburn.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi is a maverick political philosopher who cut his teeth during the Autonomista movement in Italy. Since then, and especially following the rise of the Indignados, Berardi has emerged as one of the most unique intellectuals alive today. I was first drawn to him when some of the world’s greatest leftist philosophers were asked to create a reading list for occupiers. Everyone else came back with the same usual boring suspects that no one will read, except for Berardi. Here were his recommendations: Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz, Insatiability by Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson, Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, and No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s newest book, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, is out now.
-Micah White
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Adam Ragusea
Harvard students walk out of Professor Gregory Mankiw’s Ec 10 class in November 2011. Mankiw, who claims that mainstream economics teaching has no ideological bias, is the author of the most influential introductory economics textbook in the world.
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Hey all you students out there, you are entering university at a critical juncture. Capitalism is in crisis and the crisis is growing ever deeper. The inability of economists to incorporate externalities into their models and to account for phenomena such as species extinction, resource depletion and climate change – not to mention the 2008 financial meltdown that blindsided them all – has turned the profession into a target for derision and ridicule. And it’s not just some academic joke – today even ordinary people look down their noses at the ineptitude of economics. And yet as you delve into your textbooks, listen to the sensible, ordered tone of lectures and come to associate your professors with the accolades that hang on their walls, you may get the sense that economics is a science: a rigorous discipline with its own immutable laws, proven theories and crop of Nobel laureates. Far from it. You may be temporarily fooled by this façade, but you need only look beneath the surface to discover that economics is a highly contested field… a profession whose axioms and credibility are being questioned like never before. The prevailing neoclassical paradigm is crumbling and a new, more chaotic, more biologically and behaviorally based paradigm is struggling to emerge.
Adam Ragusea
But your department, like most others around the world, is still marching in lockstep with the old guard. That’s because generations of tenured professors have marginalized dissenters and eliminated competition. Your economics department operates very much like a police state… not a free marketplace of ideas in which innovation is
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acknowledged and rewarded. But outside your department, a vigorous heterodox economics thrives‌ there are social economists, feminist economists, interdisciplinary economists, behavioral economists, ecological economists and hundreds of intellectuals and maverick professors who are openly critical of the neoclassical regime and fighting to overthrow it. So there are really two ways for you to approach your studies over the next few years: you can ignore all of the screaming inconsistencies and accept the status quo. You can cross your fingers and hope the old paradigm has a generation or two left in it, enough for you to carve out a career. Or you can align yourself from the getgo with the mavericks. You can be an agitator, a provocateur, a meme warrior, an occupier, one of the students on campus who posts dissenting messages up on notice boards and openly challenges professors in class. You can bet your future on a paradigm shift. All of us here at Adbusters hope this book fires up your imagination and inspires you to take the riskier, more exciting path. Kalle Lasn, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics
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When the 2008 financial crisis hit, economists were left shaking their heads in disbelief. Headlines around the country read “How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?” and “Will Economists Escape a Whipping?” Yet despite the devastating blow to its credibility, the discipline of economics has not changed a bit.
Meme Wars, the latest book by Kalle Lasn and Adbusters, lays out the next steps in rebuilding our world with a sane economic paradigm. It is an engaging full-color textbook for the next generation of economics students that features essays by leading thinkers in ecological economics, degrowth theory, psychonomics and other genres of economic heresy… think of Meme Wars as a brick in the hands of tomorrow’s post-neoclassical economists: the mavericks who will finally chase the old goats out of power and pull our civilization back from the brink. Professors, students, occupiers and cognitarians alike are going to want to read and debate this one...
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ECONOMICS Earth as a subsystem of the human economy
PLANET SOCIETY ECONOMY
FINANCE
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BIONOMICS
Human economy as a subset of the Earth’s bioeconomy
FINANCE ECONOMY SOCIETY
PLANET
Five hundred years ago astronomers following Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe were tearing their hair out trying to make sense of all their calculations of the sun, moon and stars moving around above us in the sky. It was only when Copernicus pointed out that we are not the center of the universe – the sun does not revolve around the Earth but rather the other way around – that all their convoluted calculations fell magically into place. Today something eerily similar is happening in the science of economics: economists and laypeople alike are realizing that our human money economy is a subset of the Earth’s larger bioeconomy and not the other way around. This shift in perspective changes everything… it invites us to see the world with new eyes… to value things differently… to rethink growth… to redefine progress and how it is measured. Above all, it opens the door to a whole new mix of exciting policy alternatives for nations, businesses and individuals to pursue.
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pin this poster to your professor’s door
Elicia di Fonzo, Mohsen Mahbob
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kickitover.org
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12-10-23 10:15 AM
In November 2011, hundreds of students set up tents in Harvard Yard. Their occupation of America’s bastion of elitism caused a media stir and sparked many would-be occupiers to action.
At critical moments throughout history, university students have catalyzed massive protests, called their professors and political leaders on their lies and thrust their nations in brave new directions. It happened in the 1960s on hundreds of campuses around the world, and more recently in South Korea, China, Indonesia, Greece, Spain, Egypt, Quebec and Argentina.
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y
Now in the wake of the 2008 financial debacle with climate tipping points looming prophetically on the horizon, we have reached another one of those critical moments when students are called upon to trigger an overhaul of the political ideology and theoretical framework that has ruled the world since World War II. from Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics Axel Corjon, creaktif.com
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... how
well
H W
do you know
your history
John?
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Ashraf Amra/AP PHOTOS
HOW HAMAS WASBORN The second political path taken after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was inspired by Wahabism, which aims to uproot and expel the interests and influence of “infidels” in Muslim lands. Many of the muftis and mullahs (and even Shi’a ayatollahs) – all former state functionaries who originally embraced European innovations in commerce, technology, education and government – turned against what they (often rightly) perceived as neocolonial attempts to dominate implementation of those innovations in Islamic lands for mostly European, rather than Arab or Muslim, benefit. They rejected the “trickledown” theory of modernization. In 1928 Egypt’s Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Musulmiyah). Through extensive charitable and educational operations, it sought to enroll people into a major political opposition group. With strong ties to Wahabism but also
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to Sufi mysticism, the Brotherhood campaigned against political and social injustice and British imperial rule, while painting a picture of Islam that restored the broken links of tradition by connecting them to modernity. By the end of the 1940s, the Brotherhood numbered one million members. It flexibly organized itself into paramilitary cells that could hide and disperse when stronger forces prevailed, but which could unite when conditions permitted political opposition. The cell structure itself was thoroughly modern, inspired by the success of fascist and communist cell organizations in Europe. This enabled the Brotherhood to survive the assassination of its founder and to spread throughout the Middle East and beyond. It still commands large and even growing support ( judging from recent elections in Egypt) despite numerous crackdowns over the years by various Middle Eastern governments.
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A “purist” (salafi) extension of this second path to Muslim power, more virulent and violent, categorically rejects the Brotherhood’s willingness to compromise with other political organizations and the state. The mission of the friends and admirers of Al Qaeda is to usher in universal justice by purging Muslim society of “deviant and impure” elements, such as Shi’ism and Sufism, which had supposedly violated the spirit and letter of the sacred texts (sunna) and helped to bring ruination to Islamic Arab civilization. But to accomplish this task against “the near enemy” within, the Islamic community must first fight “the far enemy,” who gives life support to corrupt governments that continue to crush the aspirations of all pure Muslims and prevent others from finding the true and righteous path. This far enemy, primarily the United States and its allies, are the “New Mongols.” Most people in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world reject this most radical and violent political path. But its rise on the world scene will likely continue to strongly influence hearts and minds and events for some time to come.
Scott Atran is an anthropologist at the University of Michigan who writes about political conflict and violence. This excerpt comes from his book Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values and What it Means to Be Human (HarperCollins), in which Atran asserts that “people don’t simply kill for a cause,” but rather, “they kill for each other.”
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Abbas/MAGNUM PHOTOS
The Palestinian Hamas is basically a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, formed by joining part of the Jordanian Brotherhood (in the West Bank) with part of the Egyptian Brotherhood (in Gaza) after these parts had become separated from their parent organizations by the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War.
WHAT CIADID In 1890, an itinerant Muslim activist called Jamal al-din al-Afghani was in Iran when its then-ruler, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, granted a tobacco concession to a British businessman called G.F. Talbot, effectively granting him a monopoly on its purchase, sale and export. Al-Afghani pointed out, to a chorus of approval from secular-minded intellectuals as well as conservative merchants, that tobacco growers would now be at the mercy of infidels, and the livelihoods of small dealers destroyed. He set up pressure groups in Tehran – a political innovation in the country – which sent anonymous letters to officials and distributed leaflets and placards calling on Iranians to revolt. Angry protests erupted in major cities the following spring. Helped by the recently introduced telegraph, the mass demonstrations of the Tobacco Protest, as it came to be called, were as carefully co-ordinated as they would be in Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution a hundred years later, when cassette tapes played a similar role and women participated in large numbers.
Al-Afghani also wrote to Ayatollah Mirza Hassan Shirazi in Najaf, giving the greatly influential but apolitical Shiite cleric an early lesson in the “structural adjustments” that Western financiers would come to enforce in poor countries: “What shall cause thee to understand what is the Bank?” he asked. “It means the complete handing over of the reins of government to the enemy of Islam, the enslaving of the people to that enemy, the surrendering of them and of all dominion and authority into the hands of the foreign foe.” Al-Afghani may have been exaggerating. But he knew from his experiences in India and Egypt how quickly the West’s seemingly innocuous traders and bankers could turn into diplomats and soldiers. The feckless shah had already compromised Iran’s relative immunity to Europe’s informal imperialists. In 1872, with the country starved of capital and suffering from a massive budget deficit, he had granted a monopoly in the construction of railways, roads, factories, dams and mines to another British citizen, Baron Reuter (founder of the news agency). Even Lord Curzon was appalled
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Abbas/MAGNUM PHOTOS
Protestors carry a portrait of Muhammed Mossadegh through the streets of Tehran during the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
the INIRAN twenty years later when he was told the terms, describing it as “the most complete surrender of the entire resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has ever been dreamed of much less accomplished in history.” Protests by Russia, Iran’s neighbour and Britain’s great rival in the region, sank this particular arrangement; Reuter had other irons in the fire anyway. Coming only eight years after the British occupation of Egypt, the award of the tobacco concession struck al-Afghani as ominous. Expelled from Iran by the shah, he kept up a barrage of letters to leading Shiite clerics in the shrine cities of Mesopotamia, asking them to rouse themselves out of their apathy and move against the shah. A few months later, Shirazi wrote his first ever letter to the shah on a political subject, denouncing foreign banks and their growing power over the Muslim population as well as the commercial concessions given to Europeans. The shah, desperate to keep the ulema (council of scholars) on his side, sent intermediaries to plead with Shirazi. Far from relenting, the cleric issued a fatwa effectively making it
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un-Islamic to smoke until the monopoly was withdrawn. He was astonishingly successful – even the shah’s palace became a smoke-free zone. Finally, the shah capitulated to an alliance between intellectuals, clergy and native merchants and, in January 1892, cancelled the tobacco concession. Both liberal and radical Iranians could cite instances of the country’s humiliation by the West in the 19th century, when it had been dominated by the British and the Russians. The events of the early 20th century further undermined its political autonomy at a time when its political institutions were being liberalized (a parliament had been established as a result of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-7). In the First World War, Britain and Russia first occupied and then divided the country in order to keep the OttomanGerman armies at bay. The end of the war brought no respite. The Red Army threatened from the north and Britain, already parcelling out the Ottoman Empire’s territories, saw an opportunity to annex Iran. Lord Curzon, Britain’s foreign secretary who was convinced, as Harold Nicolson put it, that
“God had personally selected the British upper class as an instrument of the Divine Will,” drew up an Anglo-Persian agreement which was almost entirely destructive of Iranian sovereignty. As it turned out, Curzon, never an accurate reader of the native pulse, had misjudged the Iranian mood. The agreement was denounced; pro-British members of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, were physically attacked. Facing such opposition, Curzon grew more obdurate: “These people have got to be taught at whatever cost to them that they cannot get on without us. I don’t at all mind their noses being rubbed in the dust.” Despite Curzon’s stubbornness, Iranian revulsion finally sank the Anglo-Persian agreement. But another inequitable arrangement already bound Iran to Britain. Presciently buying government shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) in 1913, Winston Churchill had managed to ensure that 84 percent of its profits came to Britain. In 1933, Reza Khan, a self-educated soldier who had made use of the postwar chaos to grab power and found a new ruling dynasty, negotiated a new agreement
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with APOC, which turned out to be remarkably like the old one. During the Second World War, British and Russian troops again occupied the country, and the British replaced the rashly pro- German shah with his son Muhammad Reza. APOC, renamed the AngloIranian Oil Company in 1935, grossed profits of $3 billion between 1913 and 1951, but only $624 million of that remained in Iran. In 1947, the British government earned £15 million in tax on the company’s profits alone, while the Iranian government received only half that sum in royalties. Growing anti-British sentiment finally forced Reza to appoint Muhammad Mossadegh as prime minister early in 1951. The country’s nationalists by now included secularists as well as religious parties and the communist as well as non-communist left. Mossadegh, who, de Bellaigue writes, “was the first and only Iranian statesman to command all nationalist strains,” moved quickly to nationalize the oil industry. Tens of thousands lined the streets to cheer the officials sent from Tehran to take over the British oil facilities in Abadan, kissing the dust-caked cars – one of which belonged to Mehdi Bazargan, who would later become the first prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mossadegh felt himself to be carried along on the wings of history. “Hundreds of millions of Asian people, after centuries of colonial exploitation, have now gained their independence and freedom,” he said at the UN in October 1951: Europeans had acknowledged Indian, Indonesian and Pakistani claims to sovereignty and national dignity – why did they continue to ignore Iran? He was supported by a broad coalition of new Asian countries. But the British, enraged by Mossadegh’s impertinence and desperately needing the revenues from what was Britain’s biggest single overseas investment, wouldn’t listen. Britain could no longer afford its empire. Still believing it “had done the Iranians a huge favor by finding and extracting oil,” Britain rejected a proposal, backed by the US, that the profits should be shared equally, and launched a devastatingly effective blockade of the Iranian economy. “If we bow to Tehran, we bow to Baghdad later,” as the Express put it with Curzonian logic. “There was disquiet across the white world,” de Bellaigue writes, at Mossadegh’s “show of Oriental bad form.” The British Foreign Office started a campaign to persuade the American public of the rightness of the British cause and the US press duly fell in with it. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal
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compared Mossadegh to Hitler, even though his occasionally authoritarian populism had to contend with a fractious parliament, and a growing internal opposition composed of merchants, landowners, royalists, the military and right-wing clerics (some of these would give the adventurers of the CIA and MI6 their opening). In The US Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference (1988) William Dorman and Mansour Farhang show that no major American newspaper had ever spelled out Iran’s grievances against the AIOC. Rather, the Washington Post claimed that the people of Iran were not capable of being “grateful.” Drawing on Persian sources, de Bellaigue gives an authoritative account of Operation Ajax, the CIA/MI6 coup that toppled Mossadegh’s government and established Shah Reza Pahlavi as Iran’s unchallenged ruler in August 1953. The story of the AngloAmerican destruction of Iran’s hopes of establishing a liberal modern state has been told many times, but the cautionary message of 1953 is still far from being absorbed. As early as 1964, Richard Cottam, a political officer in the US embassy in the 1950s and later an Iran scholar, warned that the press and academic “distortions” of the Mossadegh era bordered on the “grotesque, and until that era is seen in truer perspective there can be little hope for a sophisticated US foreign policy concerning Iran.” (Or the whole Middle East, Cottam could have added.) The New York Times summed up the new imperial mood immediately after the coup: “Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism.” American companies had been given a 40 percent share of oil production after Mossadegh’s overthrow. Not surprisingly, Iranian hostility to the US grew, as the CIA did business with the executioners and torturers of the shah’s secret police. Finally erupting in 1979, it shocked American policymakers and opinionformers who sought to find an interpretation of current events through readings in “Islam,” as they would after 9/11. They were in no position to understand that, as with the Tobacco Protest of 1891 and the nationalist upsurge behind Mossadegh, a broad Iranian coalition had ranged itself against the shah and his foreign allies. Indeed, in the early days of the revolution, Mossadeghists like Bazargan looked just as strong as their socialist and Islamist allies. It was Jimmy Carter’s offer of asylum to the shah in 1979, and the retaliatory storming
of the American Embassy in Tehran, that tipped the balance in favour of the Islamist revolutionaries. Saddam Hussein’s brutal eight-year-long assault on Iran, cynically assisted by the US, entrenched the Islamic Republicans while burnishing the popular image of the Great Satan. Always under pressure, the liberalizing reformers around Mohammad Khatami were further weakened by George W. Bush’s abrupt inclusion of Iran in his “axis of evil.” Since then, America’s invasions and occupations of Iran’s neighbours have confirmed Iran’s perception of the West as clumsily inept as well as guilty of what Khomeini called istikbar i jahani (global arrogance). War between Iran and the United States has never seemed more likely than in recent months, as American politicians and journalists dutifully endorse Benjamin Netanyahu’s bluster. And there is little sign in the mainstream press here or in the US that anyone is paying attention to de Bellaigue or any other knowledgable writers on Iran. At the same time, liberal opinion ignores the effects that sanctions have on ordinary citizens, just as they did in the 1950s, and governments choose not to see that they offer a lifeline to a semidiscredited regime by radically shrinking the possibilities for any political or economic change – which is why the Green Movement strongly opposes them. The Iranian clerics may now linger on, like the Cuban revolutionaries, kept going by an American embargo. But Iranians can see more vividly the hypocrisy of America’s mollycoddling of Israel, the one country in the Middle East that is armed with nuclear weapons. They know, too, that the US made a nuclear deal with India as recently as 2005. Support for Iran’s right to pursue its nuclear programme cuts across the country’s political divisions. Aspiring regime-changers in the West remain blind to the undiminished potency of Iranian nationalism. More bizarrely and dangerously, they ignore the hardening attitudes of the country’s ruling class after a century of humiliation by the West. “We are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the CIA can snuff out,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now Iran’s supreme leader, warned during the hostage crisis in 1979. So far he has been proved right. Pankaj Mishra is an acclaimed novelist and political essayist. This article is abridged from his review of Christopher de Bellaigue’s Patriot of Persia, “Why weren’t they grateful?” which appeared in the June 2012 London Review of Books. Mishra’s current book is From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia.
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WHy
wE
torture Canadian teenager Omar Khadr interrogated in Guantanamo Bay.
The last several years have found us in the midst of more catastrophes than we could ever, in our worst nightmares, have dreamed of. We could never have envisaged that the history of the new century would encompass the destruction and distortion of fundamental Anglo-American legal and political constitutional principles in place since the 17th century. Habeas corpus has been abandoned for the outcasts of the new order in both the US and the UK, secret courts have been created to hear secret evidence, guilt has been inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified (in the UK our government’s lawyers continue to argue positively for the right to use the product of both) and vital international conventions consolidated in the aftermath of the Second World War – the Geneva Convention, the Refugee Convention, the Torture Convention – have been deliberately avoided or ignored. It is the bitterest of ironies that John Lilburne, the most important organizer of the rights we in this country and the United States claim and on which our respective
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constitutions, written and unwritten, were built, achieved this in large part as a consequence of his having been himself subjected to torture, to accusations based on secret evidence and heard by a secret court, to being shackled and held in extremes of isolation which exposed him nevertheless to public humiliation and condemnation. The worst excesses of the last ten years, which destroyed the certainties of those hardwon rights, should have sounded loud alarms, not least because of that precise historical parallel; one key in attempting to hang on to legal and moral concepts under attack is to remember their origin. Lilburne, an intractable young Puritan, with a strong sense of his rights as a freeborn Englishman and a smattering of law, in 1637 was summoned before the Court of Star Chamber – a court comprising nothing more than a small committee of the Privy Council, without a jury, empowered to investigate. Lilburne had recently been in Holland and was charged, on the basis of information from an informant, with sending loosely defined “fatuous and scandalous”
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religious books to England. His defence was straightforward: “I am clear I have sent none.” Thereafter he refused to answer questions based on allegations kept secret from him as to his association with others suspected of involvement in the sending of the books: “I think by the law of the land that I may stand upon my just defence, and that my accusers ought to be brought face to face to justify what they accuse me of.” For his refusal, he was fined 500 pounds, a fortune for an apprentice, and was lashed to a cart and whipped thought the streets of London from Fleet to Westminster. He was locked in a pillory in an unbearable posture (in today’s terminology a “stress position”), but yet exhorted all who would listen to resist the tyranny of the bishops, repeating biblical texts to the crowd applicable to the wrongs done to him and their rights. On being required to incriminate himself: “No man should be compelled to be his own executioner.” He survived two and a half years in Fleet prison, gagged and kept in solitary confinement, shackled and starving. The first act of the Long Parliament in November 1642 was to set him free, to abolish the Court of Star Chamber and to adopt a resolution that its sentence was “illegal and against the liberty of the subject, and also bloody, cruel, wicked, barbarous and tyrannical.” Lilburne’s principled and public stance and the extraordinary political movement of which he was part, the Levellers, produced far more than a brief reaction of abhorrence to the use of torture and arbitrary imprisonment. By the end of the 17th century, there had crystallized the foundation of the concepts upon which we draw now (and which we constantly choose to forget or ignore) – most importantly the concept of inalienable rights that pertain to the individual and not to the state. The Levellers insisted that the inalienable rights were possessed by the people and were conferred on them not by Parliament, but by God; no justification by the state could therefore ever justify their violation. For the preservation of these and the limitation of parliamentary power, the Levellers formulated a written constitution; never adopted in England, in the new world it became a political reality. In both countries, due process – the legal concept that gives effect to the idea of fairness – was born from these ideas. Once evidence of any country’s willingness to resort to torture is exposed, reactions of decency and humanity can be invoked without the necessity of legal explanation. Less likely is any instinctive reaction to evidence in
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the destruction of concepts of procedural fairness. Yet, in the imprecision and breadth of accusations, leading in turn to the banning of books and the criminalization of ideas and religious thought, and in the wrong committed by secret courts hearing secret evidence, the lessons of John Lilburne and Star Chamber have been in the last ten years deliberately abandoned and sustained battles have still to be fought to reclaim the majority. The shocking, reckless and ruthless disregard of all of these concepts seen in recent years is neither new nor unique to this country or to the US. The history of regions other than our own shows how fragile are the laws and their applications that we assume protect us when faced with a government determined to follow a contrary path. Repeatedly, historically, even nations which have recently emerged from the fires of hell remember the experience as it relates to themselves, but yet consign others to the same fate. Fewer than ten years after then end of WWII, and only eight years from the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the first reports of the use of torture by the French against the Algerians fighting their war of independence began to emerge, with justifications that today appear very familiar. (The first official reports in 1955 admitted some violence had been done to prisoners suspected of being connected to the FLN, but that this was “not quite torture”; “The water and the electricity methods, provided they are properly used, are said to produce a shock which is more psychological than physical and therefore do not constitute excessive cruelty.”) Sartre articulated the shock of realizing that torture had reappeared and was being justified so soon after it had been categorized as an aberration found only among psychotic and degenerate governments willing to violate all universally understood and recognized principles of justice: “In 1943 in the Rue Lauriston, Frenchmen were screaming in agony and pain; all France could hear them. In those days the outcome of the war was uncertain and we did not want to think about the future. Only one thing seemed impossible in any circumstances: that one day men should be made to scream by those acting in our name.”
month, with Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed, he struggled to prepare a report, illustrated by sketches in the absence of any photographs, of what had been done to them. Soon thereafter, the legal challenge his family had initiated when he was first reported to be in Guantanamo (Rasul v. Bush) was decided by the US Supreme Court in favor of Shafiq Rasul. What argument was won? That the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay should have access to legal remedies and to lawyers who could, most importantly of all, for the first time go in and, bit by bit, bring out reports, not just of the physical and mental horrors inflicted by or on behalf of Americans, but of the complicity of this country (at every level) in their unlawful captivity. We were never meant to know any of this. The still-unanswered question of burning relevance, however, remains: once we know, what do we then do?
Gareth Peirce is a British lawyer who represents individuals who have been the subject of rendition and torture, or held in captivity on the basis of secret evidence. This excerpt is from her new book, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice (Verso).
The illustration on the cover my book Dispatches From the Dark Side is of Shafiq Rasul, a young Englishman from Tipton in the West Midlands, who within hours of returning from unlawful captivity in Guantanamo Bay understood the need to put on record the reality of imprisonment there. For the next
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Colin Crowley/Save the Children/PA
WHERE TOFIND THEBEST GENOCIDES
Nairobi is a good place to be an international correspondent. There are regular flights to the nearest genocide, and there are green lawns, tennis courts, good fawning service. You can get pork belly, and you can hire an OK pastry chef called Elijah (surname forgotten) to work in your kitchen for $300 a month. If you work for one of the major newspapers, or television and radio services, chances are you live in Nairobi or Johannesburg. To make your work easier, you need, in your phone, the numbers of the country directors of every European aid agency: Oxfam, Save the Children. To find these numbers is not difficult: chances are these guys are your neighbours, your tennis partners. If your spouse has arrived in Kenya and does not have a job, soon he or she will be fully networked and earning lots of pounds/euros/dollars, making sure the babies of Africa are safe, making sure the animals of Africa are kept safely away from Africans, making sure the African woman is kept wellshielded from the African man, making sure the genitals of Africans are swabbed, rubbered and raised into a place called awareness. Because you are a good person, who believes in multiculturalism, and that politicians are evil. You are a child of the human rights age. A post-Cold War child. In this age, which has no ideology, brown and black places are flat issues: how far from gay freedom is (fill in African country)? In this age, all local knowledge is carried
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by aid organisations. These organisations speak human rights, and because they do so, we know that they are good, objective and truthful. So, if a foreign correspondent needs to know what exactly is going on in Sudan, their weekly lunch with the Oxfamy guy will identify the most urgent issues. Since, in your world, big history died with the Berlin wall, there is only little history left to report on Africa. Little history is full of many small flares of wonderfulness and many small flares of utter horribleness that occasionally rise in a flat and benign world: a little boy in Malawi made his own radio. An actual radio. He has a good smile. Osama bin Laden or one of his peeps bombed trains, planes and innocents – and you slept safe that night, all of the flat world slept safe that night. There are five or six places that have not been fully pacified inside the vision of the world as run by the victors of the cold war: North Korea, Gaddafi (that has been dealt with), Somalia, Afghanistan, the women of Africa and the poor poor people of China, slaving away under the most terrible conditions doing confusing things like refusing to evolve into Europe. Big places where history is still alive – like Russia, China, the Middle East – are to be feared and demonized. Why can’t the Egyptians vote for a nice, safe, Britishtrained economist who once worked for the World Bank? In the 80s, your newspaper probably had correspondents in many African countries. Now there are two: west Africa and east Africa (Horn). Or one: Africa, based in Johannesburg. In the 80s, the world’s future was not secure. Some African countries were on one side of power, some on the other side of power. They could not be ignored. As nobody had won, the big powers had to fight for the hearts, minds and minerals of all. All an African president needed to do was suggest that he was crossing over and he’d have love and Smarties dropped over his house by NATO planes. Margaret Thatcher visited Zimbabwe. Robert loved her.
who squirm happily in white saviours’ hands because they were saved from an African war. My favourites are clitoraid.com and Knickers 4 Africa – which collects used panties for African women; 3) The rest. Let’s call this the “vast grassroots.” This part of Africa is run by nameless warlords. When the warlords fall, these places are run by grassroots organisations that are funded by the EU and provide a good place to send gap year kids to help and see giraffes at the same time. Grassroots Africa is good for backpacking because it is the real Africa (no AK47s to bother you, no German package tourists). The vast grassroots exist to sit and wait for agents of sustainability (Europeans) to come and empower them. But what cannot be said is that history came surging to the present. Market capitalism is shaking, and all of a sudden the vast grassroots has oil and copper, and willing, driven and ambitious hands. The continent is ripe for new partnerships, new capital – new strong handshakes. China is no angel – but we are, for them, an essential part of the way the world will be. They are in it for their future, not ours; we are in with them for our future. We are real to them, and we have a platform to talk. It is not a surprise that, in these days, there is a vast and growing new middle class across the continent: the British, American and European media houses have lost us. Our own are booming, and we are finding deals with CCTV (China) and al-Jazeera. We fly Emirates and Kenya Airways. We make deals with those who see a common and vibrant future being a platform for engagement. Binyavanga Wainaina is the Director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College, and the founding editor of the leading African literary magazine, Kwani?. He won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing, and has written for Vanity Fair, Granta, and The New York Times, among other publications. His memoir of growing up in Kenya, One Day I Will Write About This Place, was a New York Times Notable Book and one of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Books of 2011. This column first appeared on the Guardian.co.uk.
In 1991, Africa ceased to exist. The world was safe, and the winners could now concentrate on being caring, speaking in aid language bullet points. If there was a new map, Africa would be divided into three: 1) Tiny flares of horribleness – Mugabe, undemocratic, war, Somalia, Congo; 2) Tiny flares of wonderfulness – Mandela, World Cup, safari. Baby4Africa! A little NGO that does amazing things with black babies
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Stuart Griffiths
WILL THE GLOBAL REVOLUTION START IN LONDON?
“You will be distracted, you will grow tired, we will wait you out, we are patient, we are the 1%,” reads a poster produced in the midst of the Occupy zeal and euphoria. The sardonically prophetic statement was too close to the truth for comfort. Despite the problems in the economy and political system in the UK, the country’s elite didn’t have to wait very long for the movement to die.
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In the UK, the 1% lurch from crisis to crisis. From the MPs expenses scandal, to the economic crash, to the phone-hacking inquiry. The establishment and the system are being shaken to their very core, yet at the same time they seem as immovable as ever. The left, without a party or a coherent mass movement, appear unable to capitalize on the situation. The student movement disappeared as quickly as it arrived. UK Uncut captured the public imagination but has since disappeared from public gaze and Occupy kept an alternative economic vision on the agenda for a while before it too vanished into the ether. The traditional left has been equally ineffective. The Labour party hasn’t been an instrument for social change for some time and the unions are hamstrung by archaic labor laws and their own imagination. While parliament, the mother of all democracies, is dying if not dead. While America and France claim to have ignited the torch of modern democracy, its real roots are here in the UK, in 1215 and 1649, with the Magna Carta and the first ever parliamentary democracy – historical singularities that awoke the slumbering ideals of economic power and individualism from a political cocoon. The recent past that’s sold to us, however, is a revisionist lie. Our present is fractured. Our future is looking like a return to a type of feudalism, the rule of a capitalist aristocracy. Our elected officials are the product of private school systems and our elites re-create themselves like clones in a sci-fi movie. How unsurprising is it then that in these streets, modern democracy’s bricks and mortar begin to crumble with age and neglect. A recent study by the group Democratic Audit warns that British Democracy is in “terminal decline.” They report that public faith in democratic institutions is “decaying”; that there is a widening gap in the participation rates of different social classes of voters; and an “unprecedented” growth in corporate power, which the study’s authors warn, “threatens to undermine some of the most basic principles of democratic decision-making.” The right send out contradictory messages. Cameron talks about a “broken Britain,” but a Britain that we should be proud of all the same. But what exactly is there to be proud of in the UK? Our imperial past? The Olympic legacy? He’s right, we’ve lost our character,
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but not in the way he thinks. It’s our proud revolutionary character that’s vanished. Where are the descendents of the republicans that beheaded the king, of the Levellers, the Chartists, the Diggers? Of the first radical trade unions, of Thomas Paine and the Panckhursts? All our heroes are dead. Few give a shit anymore. Most spend time away from their office cubicles sitting in clubs, bars and coffee shops drinking and K-holing their imaginations away, with an unhealthy fear of this reality and any alternate ones. Even fewer bother to act and those that do are largely directionless, often isolated and sometimes misdirected. The Sex Pistols generation’s punk movement was all but a harmless fashion indulgence. Today’s “dub step revolutionaries” have yet to prove they have anything more to offer. Today, rebellion is distracted, disorganized and heavily policed. You need an attention span longer than a gnat’s to make a real impact; the Facebook generation have yet to learn this. So what happens without an outlet? In August last year, riots started in London and quickly spread across the country. The situation can be seen as a conflation of, and reaction to, all of the above: mirroring what we see in the City of London and the MPs expenses scandal, looters engaged in a violent consumerism fuelled by rampant individualism and materialism. It was the violence of the system writ large on the streets of London. A year has passed and on the surface things couldn’t appear more different. A summer of flag-waving pageantry replaced the burning cars. The Queen’s Jubilee followed by the militarized tax haven that was the Olympic Games gave some a welcome distraction from the country’s woes, but the realities of 21st century Britain were never far away. They were realities that Occupy, the latest leftist fad, had failed to seriously challenge. The hundred or so tents just yards from the stock exchange certainly made a big media impact but here in the UK only 1% of the 99% were ever really represented. Far from emulating the Egyptian model, where grassroots activists joined with labor rights groups and unions, the grassroots Occupy group was detached from working people and did not enjoy support from established left institutions.
a social silence of a scale matched only by that of our deplorable imperial past. However, despite the media-refracted noise, it failed to gain the mass support needed to effect real change and like the student movement a year before the camps quickly fizzled out. As predicted the city waited them out. So what are we left with other than the Julian Assange circus? People are trying in small ways to make changes. Since January 2012 the Move Your Money campaign estimates that 500,000 people have switched their current accounts to ethical alternatives such as cooperatives and mutuals. At least it puts pay to the myth of an apathetic populace. But this type of highly individualized action, successful as it is becoming, can only take us so far. There are countless other small demonstrations happening in towns and cities across the country, a type of anti-austerity NIMBYism backed by the trade unions but lacking any real revolutionary zeal. Keynes is the only alternative in town as far as the unions are concerned. Progressively radical visions are the pre-occupation of a secluded minority. In Greece a true left party, Syriza, has at least forced the agenda. Here we have none. Britain reels from a lack of a creative left. We need some hope, some inspiration, something that shakes us out of a dismally predictable downward spiral. But what’ll next year bring? Further cuts, definitely. A continuing crisis, certainly. More riots, possibly. And while a divided and disconnected left find a post-Occupy cause célèbre, the lumpen masses will pay more attention to the X-Factor TV show than a specter, that if they cared to look, still haunts Europe.
Tim Hunt is a Commissioning Editor with Red Pepper magazine and writer and researcher with the Ethical Consumer Research Association.
For a while the numerous London sites (and others across the country) burnt bright, igniting debate and illuminating the ills of the City of London which for so long had enjoyed
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Reuters
FROM WHERE WILLFOODANDfREEDOM COME? A few friends sat around a table in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, and started to get to grips with the oncoming whirlwind. “I’ll be frank,” moaned the climate change correspondent, rattling a bunch of academic papers, “we’re fucked.” Most agreed. As the world is hell-bent on building fossil-fuelled power stations over the next five years, it will be impossible to hold global warming to safe levels. The last chance of combating dangerous climate will be “lost forever.” End of story. Well, not quite.
Every nation has its dark and dangerous secrets, and Australia is no exception. It is a more confident and transparent country now than it was at the dawn of the sixties, when Baby Boomers took to the streets and rattled the establishment, chanting praise for Ho Chi Min. Remember him? I didn’t think so. Half a century later, millions of Aussies seem quite pleased with themselves. We’ve got laptops, Pirate Bay, The Opera House, iPhones, non-stop TV, brilliant beaches, writers’ festivals, gay parades and food, fabulous food, choking up garbage bins, accelerating obesity. But who are we really? Something doesn’t sit right. There’s too much we don’t know, and our minds drift to sport, booze and having fun. Why not?
A handful of geo-engineers, including the 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, suggest sulphur could be inserted into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays and slow global warming. It sounds like futile wizardry, but Flannery maintains it’s “the last resort we Half the Great Barrier Reef’s coral has dishave – cutting emissions is not enough.” The appeared in the past 27 years and less than a quarter could be left within a decade unless sulphur would change the color of the sky. action is taken. Our huge mining industry exIt seems the possibility of outwitting cli- erts its power over Australia’s environmenmate change is slipping through our fin- tal policy, and their sweeping plans are rarely gers. Yesterday’s big ideas made sense: tax refused. UNESCO has advised that the Great the polluters, reduce human-generated gas Barrier Reef could be listed as endangered if emissions and keep the global average tem- current extraction projects proceed. Our minperature below two degrees Celsius. Now sci- eral barons praise the work ethic of African entists, scholars and environmental activists laborers who toil the land for two dollars per openly discuss the urgent need to prepare for day. They dream of a trickle-down utopia the dramas ahead – wars, food shortages and where the rich who inherit their wealth do the likely displacement of millions of humans as they please and the poor get what they as sea levels soar. deserve.
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Because of our extensive use of fossil fuels, Australia has been the highest per capita emitter in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for most of the two decades since the first UN Earth Summit at Rio. We talked the talk, drank the wine and signed the bullshit. Now we are heading the wrong way on virtually all indicators. Since then the number of listed threatened fauna has risen by 249 and the number of threatened plants by 417, leading to a total of almost 1700. A host of other species is in steep decline. Many things about the future and the natural world that we’ve been rambling on about since my student days are coming to pass. Lean across a dinner table to nab a cutlet, and someone says that an iceberg the size of Manhattan has dropped into the sea. Inevitably, the imminence of a food famine is raised. Then someone cracks a joke about Earth burning up like the sun. We seem to be approaching that terrible point where climate change skeptics have ceased being skeptical. Huge ethical dilemmas face every continent and some academics in the fields of climate science and futurism are whispering hints of an apocalypse. Back home on an Australian mountain range, I can see the distant city of Sydney right on the horizon, the size of a toy town. Dark thoughts. What hope is there? And then a sense of relief… Hey – the next generation… let them worry about this. Time for me to slow down and learn how to compost and shut up with the ranting. Let the young ones knock sense into the corporate elite, the bankers, the masters of war and the planet fuckers. The catastrophe is a long time coming. Fifty years ago the Situationists suggested the project of capitalism was the annihilation of nature, but no one believed them. No one in Australian politics is up for the challenge, apart from the Greens, who are outnumbered. Australian scholar Richard A. Slaughter rightly says we’re facing “the biggest wake up call in history,” though many of us are focused on Facebook, YouTube and Doggie Diets. In its plodding way the Julia Gillard government makes a stab at reducing emissions, while being hounded by the mining magnates, and blow-torched by Rupert Murdoch’s media. Among high-profile eco warriors, as Jorgen Randers and Paul Gilding describe, two conversations often take place simultaneously. The public position is: “we face serious risks, potentially catastrophic, if we don’t act
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urgently and strongly.” In private, often late at night, as they wonder if the battle is lost, they discuss “geopolitical breakdown, mass starvation and what Earth would be like with a few hundred million people.” On an unconscious level, this double talk may also apply to younger Australians, who want to have fun, get pissed, travel and chill out. Come midnight among friends and similar truth telling emerges. “We’re fucked.” Many Australians can sense a planetary emergency, but they also want nights off. Over a billion people in 100 countries face a bleak future. In the nations most vulnerable to climate change, resilience is already eroded by entrenched poverty and degraded environments. Frequent natural disasters will tip communities over the edge into chronic famine and forced migration. Yet these are the counties that have contributed least to climate change. If the Greenland ice cap melts, most of Bangladesh disappears. Australian politicians on both sides of the House are likely in for a shock, judging from grim reports raining down from climate change experts. We could be headed for irreversible climate change in just five years, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which warns, “It will be impossible to hold global warming to safe levels.” Carbon emissions have risen a record amount, despite the worst recession for 80 years. The IEA’s data is widely regarded by many as the “gold standard in emissions and energy.” Five years! Are we learning to live with an unimaginable absurdity? Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said the latest evidence shows that models have underestimated the speed at which the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets will start to shrink. It had been expected that island nations would have several decades to adapt to rising sea levels, but evacuation may now be their only option. The Pacific islands, which are only 4.6 meters above sea level at their highest point, are facing the imminent prospect of flooding, with saltwater infusion destroying water supplies. “Thousands of years of culture are at risk of disappearing as the populations of vulnerable island states have no place to go.” Well they do, actually, so long as rich nations lend a helping hand. Will Australia rise to the task?
a distressed fishing vessel in international waters to enter the country. During the dispute, Australian Special Forces boarded the ship. The government of Norway accused Australia of failing to meet obligations to distressed mariners under international law. Later, another maritime controversy arose in the lead up to the federal elections, in which Howard’s ministers claimed that seafaring asylum seekers had thrown children overboard in a presumed ploy to secure rescue and passage to Australia. Stricter border protections were authorized and the Prime Minister was re-elected. Surprise, surprise: it turned out that not a single child had been thrown overboard. Try to imagine yourself fleeing from your cultural roots, your sinking island, and forced to cross international borders, where you are classified stateless, dumped in a facility – perhaps an offshore island that isn’t yet sinking – where you have to start again from scratch. And why? Because the major players on the planet, the corporations, the climate deniers, the politicians, the bankers and most of all the VOTERS had turned a blind eye to repeated warnings of imminent tragedy. What’s needed now are battalions of eco warriors with science degrees, gardening skills and the capacity to create zones of survival. We need to move beyond the world of the possible, and the maybe, and prepare for what may soon be urgent and imminent. Are we preparing “safe passage” documents for climate change refugees? Are the tents being tested and the food kitchens assembled? If not, why? From where will food and freedom come?
Richard Neville is an Australian writer and troublemaker.
In August 2001, the Howard government of Australia refused permission for a Norwegian freighter carrying 438 rescued refugees from
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canada still stand for something? does
If Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire hadn’t been so screwed up from the UNAMIR mission in Rwanda, he could have run for Prime Minister of Canada and won. In 1994, as Canada’s UN peacekeeping mandate entered its twilight, he was the poster boy for what was still possible within the politics of humanitarian altruism, and by extension what was possible in Canada. He was the archetypal soldier of conscience. Heading a small band of renegade blue berets in Kigali, he defied orders and stayed in Rwanda, saving who he could, pleading for global intervention, witnessing the most efficient genocide in known history – 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus murdered in 100 days. Returning home to Montreal he struggled to reintegrate into Canadian society. He attempted suicide. Was gripped by post-traumatic stress disorder. Spent drunken nights distraught wandering the streets. Guzzled anti-depressants only to find he was wholly unable to process the nightmare he’d
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been sent to fight. In 2003 he finally penned one of Canada’s most celebrated memoirs, Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. The title came from a sublime spiritual revelation. Dallaire said he knew God existed because he had met the devil, strolling nonchalantly door-to-door with a machete blade in Kigali. The government honored him with the highest state recognition possible, the Order of Canada, and made him a Senator – a lifetime position. In 2004, Nick Nolte portrayed him in the acclaimed Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda, one of Canada’s first on-screen heroes.
A short decade ago, Dallaire still represented everything Canadians imagined they wanted to be. The embodiment of a maturing 400year continental identity striving to achieve something unique from its over-powering and culturally suffocating southern neighbor. A soldier. A patriot. A humanist. An adventurer.
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Jhayne Holmes
Canadians are chomping atthebit todosome damage.
Vancouver Canucks hockey riot, June 2011
And a French-Canadian to boot, helping soothe the narrative of French and English unity. Sitting above all this, Dallaire’s greatest appeal was his tragic fallibility – an honest and emotional nature that touched us all. His faults. His questioning of direct orders. His struggles. His feeling embodied how we liked to think of ourselves. As citizens of a powerful Western capitalist democracy, pride in our identity can sometimes be hard. It comes with an acknowledgment, conscious or not, that freedom has an existential cost. Our greatest achievements come with an asterisk. And that asterisk contains everything from colonialism, pillage and exploitation, to consumerism, war-mongering and apathy in the face of genocide. But on better days we can also look upon our greater selves with unqualified pride, our Romeo Dallaires, those who showed that it’s possible to wield power altruistically. Heroes like Dallaire were in short supply in the 90s and early 2000s. This was a time when a macho group of Canadian soldiers were convicted of torturing, killing and mutilating a teenager in Somalia. It was also a time when Canadian officers were accused of turning the other cheek a little too often in war-torn
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Bosnia and Herzegovina. And if national role models were hard to find then, they’re even tougher now. Today, the closest thing to a national hero is a guy who was beaten by a mob in Vancouver when he attempted to protect a Hudson Bay Company storefront during a drunken hockey riot in 2011. Not to demean his courage – which came from a true place – but the chivalry was notably misplaced: protecting a company that usurped millions of acres of native land and was the primary tool of imperial expansion in early Canada. Canadians across the country scorned his attackers and praised his valor, but few recognized the cultural shift at the riot’s core. In Dallaire’s time, channeling heroic impulse was our foreign policy. It was called peacekeeping. Today it’s no longer. Canada has almost completely withdrawn from the global peacekeeping experiment in altruism. According to the latest UN numbers in The Globe and Mail, 33 Canadians are on the ground in blue berets, a far cry from being the world leader two decades ago. Today’s citizen of purpose has the impulse of the rioter. Libya. Iran. Syria. Afghanistan. Tar sands. Arctic sovereignty. Northern development. Economic expansion.
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1
Canadians are chomping at the bit to do some damage, to reap the bounty of strength. Today the heroic impulse is growth, oil and war. Old school frontier toughness is the face of the changing shape of Canada. And it is this changing shape that makes it difficult for those who didn’t vote for Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper to hear him speak. Composed. Confident. Intelligent. Sure. Smart. Calculated. Cold. And though the opposition tries desperately to believe this man is duping Canadians, as more election victories pile up for his Conservative party they’re faced with a dark and discomforting truth, a truth that is becoming harder to ignore. Maybe Harper is the true voice of Canada? Maybe his detractors have given his leadership qualities too much credit? Maybe Canada has changed. To his distraught opposition, Harper speaks about a Canada they don’t recognize, a country running on an emptiness that can only be filled with bloodthirsty consumption and growth, a country cherry-picking history, without values, without a culture beyond the dogma of allies and economic power. A country that now believes it’s destined for the petroleum stardom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain. A country that believes its true calling is to be an arbiter of global destiny and violence, a harbinger of environmental doom. Canadians have been slow to catch the drift. But the rest of the world hasn’t. A recent article in The Guardian said it all: “Maple Leaf Ragged. What Ails?” The feature touched on the key points of the new Canada – war,
energy, immigration reform, deregulation, climate change denial. Al-Jazeera tells a similar story in its coverage. What happened to the peace loving, socially progressive, environmentalist Canada? It’s taken a few years, but Harper’s Canada has finally reached the shores of Europe and the world beyond. The old Canada, the Canada that organized the Montreal Protocol in 1987 banning CFC’s (the key agent in ozone layer depletion), the Canada that spearheaded the 1995 Kyoto Protocol, the Canada that brought peacekeeping to the world in 1957, winning its thenPM Lester B. Pearson the Nobel Peace Prize (ushering the idea of soft power into the global diplomatic lexicon), the Canada that preferred diplomacy to war, is gone. In its place is a new regime. One that gags ecological researchers, labels any organization that dares to question tar sands development as “foreign funded radicals,” including Greenpeace (founded in Vancouver in 1971) and puts in an order for ten billion dollars worth of fighter jets in an era of austerity. Maybe what we’re seeing right now is the endgame of American cultural imperialism in Canada. Who were we to think that our nation, a tenth the population of America, could assert its identity when faced with the economic might of the world’s largest economy and the influence of its massive cultural industries? Perhaps it was always just a matter of time before the elephant in the bed, as Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau once described America, suffocated us for good. In 2008, more Canadians would have rather voted in
the American elections than the Canadian one. Perhaps that’s why Americans ended up with (the US version of ) a progressive and Canadians ended up with a right-wing conservative. 9/11 fused our cultures closer than any event in our parallel history. Canada got swept up in a storm of security rhetoric, inspired along the way by America’s Patriot Act, Department of Homeland Security initiatives and the revitalized clash of civilizations myth. While our leaders kept Canada out of Iraq in 2003, it came at the backroom cost of taking a greater role in Afghanistan. Canada’s PM at that time, Liberal Jean Chretien, couldn’t sell an imperialist war in “liberal” minded Canada. He could, however, sell an ongoing war with a humanitarian premise: Afghanistan. Throughout the 2000s Canadians were fed a steady drip of a burqah-clad Afghan woman executed on a soccer field by the Taliban, the falling Twin Towers and government promises that our soldiers would build schools for little girls. Progressives shook their heads and wept with pride that Canada wasn’t part of America’s Coalition of the Willing in Iraq, but deep down in the heart of our national identity, people were getting agitated. The culture was shifting. Harper sensed it. He gave a speech in 2003 saying Canada “lacks the courage” to put boots on the ground in Baghdad. It seems that underneath its veneer of civility, the majority of Canada wanted to go to war, they just didn’t have the power to express it yet.
MUST-SEEDOCUMENTARY Four Days in Guantanamo was cobbled together by filmmakers Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez using recorded interrogation footage of a teenage Canadian citizen and Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr. Khadr was captured after a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan; he was accused of killing US special ops Sergeant Christopher Speer. At first relieved to see Canadian faces, Khadr breaks down and cries for hours when he realizes Canadian officials aren’t there to help extradite him, but rather to collect information. Despite the fact that Khadr and his lawyer complained that he was tortured by his American interrogators, the Canadian government left him to languish in Guantanamo for a decade, never sought his extradition, and only reluctantly repatriated him when the US decided they’d had enough of toying with their little mouse of war in 2012.
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resistance beginswith remembering whoweare.
In 2010, Lt.-Gen Romeo Dallaire published a second book, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, only this time, unlike his national fête in 2003, his words didn’t have the same cultural force. The book was an impassioned plea to bring an end to international child soldiering. But since Canada was allowing the US to detain and torture an accused child soldier of its own, Omar Khadr, the book came at an awkward time. Khadr was 15 years old when captured by American forces in Kabul in 2002, severely wounded with two bullet holes in his back. He would spend almost a decade in Guantanamo, without so much as a peep from his government other than to aid the Americans with the interrogations. In 2010, Khadr pled guilty to five charges in a US military tribunal and was sentenced to an additional eight years of confinement. He is now serving out his term in a Canadian maximum security prison. Many Canadians were, and still are, outraged that Canada is the first Western nation since World War II to take part in the trying of a child soldier for war crimes. A precedent made all the more embarrassing by the fact that Canada is signatory to UN conventions on the elimination of child soldiering. Even more Canadians, however, are satisfied that the government did the right thing, that Harper’s Conservatives and the Liberals before him took a terrorist threat off the streets. The lasting effect of 9/11 in North America may just be the near total alignment of American and Canadian foreign policy. Now there isn’t a war out there that seems unappealing to Canada – unless of course there’s no
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oil or strategic interest. When Canadian Lt.Gen. Charles Bouchard took the helm in the NATO air campaign to oust Gaddafi in Libya, Canadians didn’t even bat an eye. Our government awarded Bouchard the Order of Canada for “strengthening Canadian-American ties.” The same award they gave to Dallaire for his heroics in the face of insurmountable odds in Rwanda – a mission the current Canada wouldn’t remotely consider. The event that signified the formal transition of Canadian political culture occurred in 2011. That year a lingering philosopher of the old Canada, Michael Ignatieff, made a run for Prime Minister. Lt.-Gen. Dallaire put his star power behind “Iggy.” It was an ill-fated choice. Few political pundits really understood just how doomed Ignatieff and his philosopherking soldier-of-conscience coalition was. A historian, professor and former director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, Ignatieff led the Liberal party, which until then had ruled Canada for nearly two thirds of our history, to its worst showing at the polls … ever. An ass-kicking from which they may never recover. A national depression with spikes of Conservative exuberance followed. Even the winners couldn’t contain their shock. Top Conservatives celebrated the “death of the Liberal brand” and with it the passing of what was once Canada. The cultural message in the fallout was profound. The days of a deep-thinking philosophical nation were over. And this leaves Canadians with a stark choice. The culture has moved and with it the historic political division of the center and left have dissolved. Defined by a return to a resource extraction economy, hard power in international politics and the rise of a neo-frontier myth, the stakes have never been higher. The bittersweet lining of Canada’s newfound machismo is the unprecedented electoral gains of the mainstream left wing New Democratic Party and the election of North America’s first ever national Green Party representative. All is not lost for stalwarts of a heroic humanism. Solving the Conservative riddle and the rise of Canada’s own “silent majority” will begin with a new paradigm of electoral resistance, the amalgamation of the greater side of Canadian character. It will begin when Canadians stand up for who they really are, if they can remember. Darren Fleet
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We, the people of Planet Ear th, hereby launch the World Pirate Par ty, a global are horizontal people’s par ty for all those who blue-greenready to stand up for and fight for our black platform: n – stands Blue – the color of intellect and imaginatio ty’s commitment for mental environmentalism and our par oned by the to the vision of internet democracy champi Pirate Par ties of Europe. – stands Green – the hue of Ear th and immortality ement against for the four-decade-strong resistance mov t win for a sane, environmental deg radation which we mus sustainable future. – stands Black – the tenor of struggle and justice ate for our par ty’s promise to abolish corpor ld wor al personhood and institute a new glob order in which corporations bow to the will of the people.
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Well
John,
what do you think?
were we
born to
play?
were we born to
have fun?
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Hardt & NEGRI
ITBEGINS WITH REFUSAL… We won’t pay your debt. We refuse to be evicted from our houses. We will not submit to austerity measures. Instead we want to appropriate your – or, really, our – wealth. In certain periods, for instance when the crisis strikes with its hardest blows, and individuals are left to stand alone, the will to resist arises with extreme and desperate force. Where does it come from? Many philosophers locate the origin of the will in lack, as if in order to want or act one must be focused on what is missing. But that’s not true. The will is born positively from the impulse to affirm a plenitude not a lack, the urge to develop a desire. The will not to pay debts means not only seeking what we don’t have, what has been lost, but also and more importantly affirming and developing what we desire, what is better and more beautiful: the sociality and the fullness of social relationships. The refusal of debt, therefore, does not mean breaking social ties and legal relationships to create an empty, individualized, fragmented terrain. We flee those bonds and those debts in order to give new meaning to the terms bond and debt, and to discover new social relationships. Marx was being realistic when he spoke about money as the primary social connection in capitalist society. “The individual,” he wrote, “carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.” The refusal of debt aims to destroy the power of money and the bonds it creates and simultaneously to construct new bonds and new forms of debt. We
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become increasingly indebted to one another, linked not by financial bonds but by social bonds.
Make the Truth When we refuse to be mediatized, we have not only to stop allowing ourselves to be fooled, believing everything we read in the papers, and simply digesting the truths we are fed, but also we need to break our attention away from the media. It sometimes seems that we are enthralled by video screens and can’t take our eyes off them. How often have you seen people walking (and even driving!) on city streets with their heads down while texting, bumping into each other as if hypnotized? Break the spell and discover a new way to communicate! It is not only or even primarily that we need different information or different technologies. Yes, we need to discover the truth, but also, and more important, we need to make new truths, which can be created only by singularities in networks communicating and being together. Political projects that focus on providing information, although certainly important, can easily lead to disappointment and disillusionment. If only the people of the United States knew what their government is doing and the crimes it has committed, one might think, they would rise up and change it. But, in fact, even if they were to read all the books by Noam Chomsky and all the material released by WikiLeaks, they could still vote the same politicians back in power and, ultimately, reproduce the same
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society. Information alone is not enough. The same is true of practices of ideology critique, more generally: revealing the truth about power does not stop people from striving for their servitude as if it were their liberation. And neither is it enough to open a space for communicative action in the public sphere. The mediatized is not a figure of false consciousness but rather one caught in the web, attentive, enthralled. Before you can actively communicate in networks, you must become a singularity. The old cultural projects against alienation wanted you to return to yourself. They battled the ways in which capitalist society and ideology have separated us from ourselves, broken us in two, and thus sought a form of wholeness and authenticity, most often in individual terms. When you become a singularity, instead, you will never be a whole self. Singularities are defined by being multiple internally and finding themselves externally only in relation to others. The communication and expression of singularities in networks, then, is not individual but choral, and it is always operative, linked to a doing, making ourselves while being together. When we become unmediatized we don’t cease to interact with media – indeed the movements of 2011 are known for their employment of social media such as Facebook and Twitter – but our relationship to media changes. First, as singularities we gain a free mobility in networks. We swarm like insects, follow new pathways, and come together in new patterns and constellations. The form of political organization is central here: a decentralized multitude of singularities communicates horizontally (and social media are useful to them because they correspond to their organizational form). Demonstrations and political actions are born today not from a central committee that gives the word but rather from the coming together of and the discussion among numerous small groups. After the demonstration, similarly, messages spread virally through the neighborhoods and a variety of metropolitan circuits.
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Second, media become tools for our collective self-production. We are able to create new truths only when we cease to be individual and constitute ourselves in our relationships to others, opening ourselves to a common language. Making the truth is a collective linguistic act of creativity. Sometimes the creation and diffusion of political slogans in demonstrations constitute an act of truth-making. The discourse of the 99% versus the 1% that emerged from the Occupy movements, for example, illuminated the reality of social inequality and dramatically shifted the terms of public debate. A more complex example is the truth created by the 2001 Argentine slogan, “Que se vayan todos” (“Throw them all out”). The slogan expressed in condensed form not only the corruption of politicians, political parties, and the constitutional system itself, but also the potential for a new, participatory democracy. Such productions of truth also involve the creation of political affects by negotiating the terms of our being together in relation to each other. Expressing these political affects in being together embodies a new truth.
Break Free Of all the ways that people refuse the security regime today, the most significant are modalities of flight. You can’t beat the prison, and you can’t fight the army. All you can do is flee. Break your chains and run. Most often, flight involves not coming out into the open but rather becoming invisible. Since security functions so often by making you visible, you have to escape by refusing to be seen. Becoming invisible, too, is a kind of flight. The fugitive, the deserter, and the invisible are the real heroes (or antiheroes) of the struggle of the securitized to be free. But when you run, think of George Jackson and grab a weapon as you go. It might come in handy down the road. You are only able really to refuse and flee, though, when you recognize your power. Those living under the weight of a security regime tend to think of themselves as powerless,
dwarfed by its overarching might. Those in a prison society think of themselves as living in the belly of a Leviathan, consumed by its power. How can we possibly match its firepower, how can we escape its all-seeing eyes and its allknowing information systems? To find a way out all you have to do is remember the basic recognition of the nature of power explained by Foucault and, before him, Niccolò Machiavelli: power is not a thing but a relation. No matter how mighty and arrogant seems that power standing above you, know that it depends on you, feeds on your fear, and survives only because of your willingness to participate in the relationship. Look for an escape door. One is always there. Desertion and disobedience are reliable weapons against voluntary servitude. Sometimes flight takes unusual forms. The Marranos in fifteenth-century Spain, for instance, were forced to convert to Christianity but continued to practice Judaism in secret. They led a double life: obeying when the forces of power were watching and subverting that power in hidden spaces. They conducted a kind of secret flight while staying still.
Constitute Yourself You don’t represent me! ¡Que se vayan todos! Such refusals of representation and representative governmental structures have been pronounced by millions during the crisis of neoliberalism at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. One novelty of these protests and these refusals consists of the fact that they immediately make clear that the crisis is not only economic, social, and political, but also constitutional. Representative structures and liberal governance regimes are all thrown into question. The audacious conceptual leap made by the theory and practice of parliamentary representation (from the “will of all” to the “general will”) has finally proven to be fatal, and even the new forms of governance pulled out as a safety net to catch the falling acrobat have proven too weak and frayed. It’s increasingly hard for anyone to believe in the resurrection and
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Calvin Klein Ad, New York Times, September 30, 2012
Revealingthetruthaboutpower doesnotstoppeoplefromstriving fortheirservitudeasifitwere theirliberation.
Calvin Klein Ad, New York Times, September 30, 2012
We occupy ide of it. We ins ge lar the emptiness and become ow till we split open the grow like a tumor or a shad us hostage for so long. skin that has been holding has draped us in its finery. Capital, like another skin, r , our wants and needs. Ou It has shaped our desires e must tear till the corps friendships and loves. We st spread the shadow till lies hollow and still, we mu the utter quiet we will it kills the sun. And then in find a kind of freedom. ed Anti-Politics of Despair publish Fragment #8 from Disgust: The . info ary. libr anonymously at zine
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Chanel Ad, New York Times, September 30, 2012
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Weswarmlikeinsects,follownew pathways,andcometogetherin newpatternsandconstellations. redemption of the constitution. Ancien regime was once the name for the rule of those in powdered wigs, but now instead the representative machine is an ancien regime! The republican constitutions have had their time, more than two centuries. Isn’t that enough? Political and constitutional debate has to be reopened. And the radical change demanded today is not only about content (from the private and the public to the common) but also about form. How can people associate closely together in the common and participate directly in democratic decision-making? How can the multitude become prince of the institutions of the common in a way that reinvents and realizes democracy? This is the task of a constituent process. When financial debts have been transformed into social bonds, when singularities interact in productive networks, and when the desire for security is freed from fear, then, from the inversion of these three figures, subjectivities capable of democratic action will begin to emerge. In the bourgeois societies of the industrial era, the available avenues for political action were primarily corporatist and individualist; in postindustrial, neoliberal societies, the possibilities are even more meager, and the represented is allowed only a passive and generic political role. The movement from the bourgeois citizen to the represented was universalizing in its juridical form and yet gradually emptied of any content. Now new figures of political subjectivity can instead discover forms of participation that overflow corporatist and individualist divisions, and that give substance and content to the generic and abstract forms of political activity. The mechanisms of the production of rules can be constructed only in singular form according to common modalities. From now on constituent powers must function and be continually renewed from below. But why, some friends ask us, are we still talking about constitutions? Why can’t we free ourselves from all normative structures and institutions? Every revolution needs a constituent power – not to bring the revolution to an end
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but to continue it, guarantee its achievements, and keep it open to further innovations. A constituent power is necessary to organize social production and social life in accordance with our principles of freedom, equality, and solidarity. Constituent processes constantly revise political structures and institutions to be more adequate to the social fabric and material foundation of social conflicts, needs, and desires. Said more philosophically, constituent processes are dispositifs of the production of subjectivity. But why, our friends repeat, must subjectivities be produced? Why can’t we just be ourselves? Because even if there were some original or primordial human nature to be expressed, there is no reason to believe it would foster free, equal, and democratic social and political relations. Political organization always requires the production of subjectivities. We must create a multitude capable of democratic political action and the self-management of the common. An example can help clarify one aspect of this proposition. When the Spanish indignados, who had occupied the squares in the spring of 2011, refused to participate in the fall 2011 national elections, they were strongly criticized. Their detractors called them impotent anarchists and called their refusal to engage with state institutions and electoral politics ideological and hysterical. They were breaking apart the Left!
The indignados, of course, are not anarchists, and they are not responsible for fragmenting the Left. Instead they have created a rare opportunity for reforming and relaunching a new and different Left. A few years earlier many of them were the same activists who, when rightwing politicians publicly attributed the tragic bombing at Madrid’s Atocha train station to Basque militants, immediately proclaimed the truth through an extraordinary relay on cellphones and other media – pasalo, they wrote, “pass it on” – and their actions effectively ushered the socialists and Zapatero to a surprise electoral victory. The indignados did not participate in the 2011 elections, then, in part because they refused to reward a socialist party that had continued neoliberal policies and betrayed them during its years in office, but also and more importantly because they now have larger battles to fight, in particular one aimed at the structures of representation and the constitutional order itself – a fight whose Spanish roots reach back to the tradition of antifascist struggles and throw a new and critical light on the so-called transition to democracy that followed the end of the Franco regime. The indignados think of this as a destituent rather than a constituent process, a kind of exodus from the existing political structures, but it is necessary to prepare the basis for a new constituent power.
“First, we sit down at a table together and make outlines. Often that goes on for a long time, very detailed outlines. Then we split up and make first drafts of specific parts. He writes in Italian and I write in English. Then we switch and rewrite each other's things. I translate into English when I rewrite his Italian. Since he still works on a manual typewriter, he cuts up my pieces, adds them in the middle. Finally it ends up in English, but in the end we generally can't tell who wrote what, or even who had
which idea. There's a back and forth...," explains Michael Hardt when asked about his unique twenty year collaboration with Antonio Negri. Since 1994, Hardt and Negri have written five books together including the trilogy Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009), which together form an important critique of late capitalism and globalization. Declaration, their latest book and most approachable work to date, is a revolutionary pamphlet inspired by Occupy.
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Dear Adbusters:
Hi Adbusters! American around the corner for us With Thanksgiving just ut my abo w kno you let wanted to culture jammers, I just ending how dep , nal itio trad er sup (or family’s non-traditional coming from ing dinner. Our turkey is you look at it) Thanksgiv e, and will hom our a few miles from a sustainable farm just free. We’re ne mo hor lly tota range and have been raised free friends (whose al vineyard run by family buying wine from a loc ans we picked pec t!), making pie out of grapes I helped har ves of veggies out hes dis s making variou from our own yard, and last time I felt . I can’t remember the from my sister’s garden new family giving, and I suspect a so excited about Thanks with other this g. I hope you’ll share tradition is in the makin ate a local, ebr cel to d y can be inspire culture jammers so the meal. sustainable Thanksgiving Viva La Revolución! Katherine Adkins
ilbox. en you show up in my ma I’m always so excited wh t. fas ts n bea Sometimes my heart eve work and pursue inspired to create and As I turn your pages, I’m n to write. dow sit n r last page, I ofte my dreams. As I turn you be able to I’ll n, alig rs sta enough and the Someday, if I live long por t my family e, write full-time, and sup exit the corporate rat rac by doing what I love. r, the troughs the crash that comes late But I’m stricken also by see that the and s new ch or read the bet ween the swells. I wat seem to ses los the t tha ed, n revers changes wrought are ofte ns sig in my k down the block at the out weigh the wins. I loo no green, no is re see blue and red. The neighbors’ yards and I pite the strife des t, tha see k at myself and black, no rainbow. I loo as I always have. rt, I live much the same and struggle in my hea . I have I live in fearful frustration wife, ed abl dis ly a child, a par tial erly eld an and r, the mo an elderly on end dep o wh -law r-in mothe ge and me to make a good wa en and Wh d. keep our bills pai should en, wh t tes pro to how am I tured on cap n eve or d ste arre I be job would television, my corporate es I etim Som y? be stripped awa e hop e fals me r offe you fear that k thin I . you and I become angry at to one ne fi a at times that you’re de out of talk – after all, you’re ma to lose. g hin not e hav paper and the mail And then you come in I have to again, and my spirits lift. w me sho you ask a favor. Could f who sel my like se tho the faces of the tell you uld Co ? ped are trap caregivers stories of parents and scream, and who long to march l in the yel to , ght fi to resist and – the nts tyra of t fee the at street to fight in desperate ones who stra but who don’t? Mitch
merist campaign that an idea for an anti-consu w I am trying to sharpen a is to have people gro italist mentality. The ide aims to change our cap themselves. things and make things in the neighborhood ody buys what people In my home village, nob ess fruit, vegetables, ver someone has any exc e produce, because whene ghborhood giving som they go around the nei eggs, or any thing else, ody does this. away to everyone. Everyb ws for himself is much lity of the food one gro You can bet that the qua le. So everyone eats ed on an industrial sca better than that produc the minimum cost for the with that are worse off, better, especially those sharing all round. feeling of generosity and community and with a gs for your own fficiency, of creating thin The practice of self-su le to all nonring, is something suitab consumption and for sha s communities, and form nts. It gives character, metropolitan environme ct of globalization. t the homogenizing effe eventually stands agains Michalis Paterakis, Gre
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ece
ion to nominate Thank you for your invitat Great Ideas of 2013. Simon Critchley blew me Infinitely Demanding by ding his short (but ver y away. I read it after rea ic ent Adbusters. His bas powerful) article in a rec ays alw will us on s and l dem argument is that ethica ought to we and m, the et me to exceed our capacity of humour. meet this with a sense e’s is The Invisible Committe Also not to be overlooked of the e iqu crit l ica rad its with The Coming Insurrection ings. o-make -money-to -buy-th g-t rkin wo of a ide ole wh The to take a good look at Finally, I think we need is not ge ssa st Bloch. Its me Principle of Hope by Ern basic s ch’ Blo t. van n more rele new, but has never bee king. thin n” pia uto ic list “rea in idea is that our hope lies Joe Parchelo, Ottawa there.) (It’s not my fault. I just live
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“Utopias aren’t chimeras, they are the most noble dreams that people have” —Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo With his gap-toothed smile, colorful kaffiyeh and oversized straw hat, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo cuts an adorable figure. Especially so, when you’ve read the headlines hailing him as Spain’s very own “Robin Hood mayor,” and then you catch a glimpse of his child-like smirk, which stretches across his face after another successful grocery store raid. The purpose of his mischievous and illegal actions: to give away food to the hungry and poor. These now-notorious supermarket raids are intended to highlight how it is in fact the rich who are stealing from the poor, but on a systemic level. “This is the biggest rip-off in the history of capitalism,” remarks Sánchez Gordillo. “The banks created huge amounts of private debt which went toxic. Now they are using public money, taken from the poor, to rescue them. This is what the cuts to health and education are about.” Unemployment in Spain is 25 percent overall; it’s 35 percent in the Andalusia region, and reaches a shocking high of 50 percent in the most affected regions. Sánchez Gordillo’s actions have caused great embarrassment for the Spanish government, signaling victory in his plan to draw attention to the real human suffering that occurs within Spain’s skyrocketing poverty rates and overall economic mess.
Seven others were arrested for participating in these raids alongside their mayor. With his positions as regional lawmaker, elected member of Andalusia’s regional parliament, and mayor of Marinaleda, Sánchez Gordillo has a fair share of political insulation. In defiance of this, he announces that he would happily renounce his titles and be arrested himself. Of the critical situation the rest of his country faces, Sánchez Gordillo believes that the system cannot resolve the people’s problems, nor can it fill anyone’s empty belly. His effort to single-handedly take on capitalism is audacious, yet inspiring. Surely in this age of widespread systemic corruption, Sánchez Gordillo’s actions are a tantalizing example of defiant and effective direct action, but they also signal something darker and more troubling. There is something perturbing in the widespread applause for Sánchez Gordillo. Are these one-off actions of apparent valor indicative of heroism, or of dire urgency? Many of us have not yet tasted true austerity. If economies all over continue to crumble, this could be happening in your town – raids and riots over fistfuls of carrots, cans of chickpeas, cartons of milk. If the crisis of capitalism continues on its crash course, what lengths will wet go to when we are motivated not by ideals, but by hunger?
Stefanie Krasnow
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b n x
Mohsen Mahbob
buy nothing xmas For generations, Christmas has been hijacked by commercial forces… this year, culture jammers in over 60 countries are coming to the rescue of this cherished holiday by celebrating a 24-hour consumer fast at home with friends and family, or by staging whirly-marts, zombie walks and credit card cut-ups in malls and squares, in towns and cities everywhere. From Buy Nothing Day (on November 23 in North America, and November 24 in Europe) through to New Year’s Day, the only time we’ll step into a mall is to jam it!
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Igor Novakovic
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More honest than joining a commune, more feasible than “abolishing money,” and yet still wholly radical, is the idea of local currencies – a practical response to the great task we face of rethinking money, what it is and how it works. The Bristol pound, launched in 2012, is a local currency and alternative to the British pound. It’s a jubilant Take that! to global trade, multinationals and banking mega-corps, which leech money out of communities everywhere. More than 350 Bristol businesses so far have traded their pounds for local currency, making the Bristol pound the largest local currency in the UK. Imagine: instead of deified figureheads embossed on coin… if money had symbols of beauty and empowerment etched into it. On the Bristol pound £B5, a tiger scrawls graffiti on a wall. It reads, “O Liberty!” The image on the £B1 below beckons us to nature with an intimate pastoral scene. In either case, that symbols
are pressed onto coins and bills reminds us of money’s occult power over individuals, societies and civilizations… but even more so, that something meaningful happens when we give and receive. When giving and receiving remains local, vital relationships are built and thriving communities emerge. By keeping money circulating inside a community, we can witness directly how everyone is intertwined, supporting each other and contributing to one another’s success, rather than watching money spent at a chain store turn into an abstraction and fly off somewhere into the capitalismo nethersphere. Ciaran Mundy, co-founder of the Bristol Pound, explains that local currency is about “tapping into a different set of values about money.” Given that money is essentially a system of social agreements, it is within our power to institute different systems that embody different values. The existing monetary system is not the only possibility – let the cultural experiments begin! Stefanie Krasnow
Jethro Brice
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Manu Brabo/AP PHOTOS
Thousands gather in Tahrir Square in June 2012 to protest the acquittal of former police chiefs who were accused of killing more than 850 protestors during the uprisings that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.
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Manu Brabo/AP PHOTOS
Hengki Koentjoro 500px.com/hengki24
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Jordi Huisman
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Philosophical Leap Of The Year
Can a tsunami be a revolutionary activist? Should stones have a say in the way we live in the next century? Do trees have standing? After two thousand years of uncontested anthropocentrism – the belief that humanity is the center of existence – an insurgency is underway within Western philosophy. At stake is whether objects might also be subjects worthy of rights. “My hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption,” writes Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. “It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.” Inspired by panpsychists like Freya Williams and Matthew Hall, Michel Serres’ call for a “natural contract” between humans and nonhuman beings, Ecuador’s extension of rights to nature, and new theories of “objectoriented ontology” developed by Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and Timothy Morton, this battle of ideas is eerily reminiscent of the 16th century Copernican Revolution that overthrew geocentrism and displaced the Earth and humanity from the center of the universe… except this time around the political implications could be far more profound. Just imagine a global Parliament of Things where the rights of stones, foxes and arctic ice are equally balanced against, and sometimes even take precedence over, those of humans… and where we vehemently debate: what is oil’s one demand? In demanding a vote for objects, new materialists represent a countertrend to the prefigurative and anti-representational politics espoused by occupiers in the fall of 2011. Rather than repudiating the concept of representational government, new materialists transform it by pushing political representation to the limits of intelligibility.
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But to a skeptic, the new materialists’ conviction that things matter is only a belated intellectualization of the facts on the ground established long ago by advertisers. To a New York adman, the idea that objects call to us is a basic working assumption. It is his job to shape, articulate and amplify that call, to mobilize the “nonhuman powers” of the objects around us and to translate it into dollars spent. From this perspective, what is “new” in new materialism is not that objects speak, but a broadening of what sorts of objects speak and an expansion of who can speak for them. Rocks, gutter trash, sheep tracks, bottle caps and bacteria – these scholars seek to animate the detritus and the uncounted objects of capitalism, the items never or no longer enchanted by the advertising machine. The key democratic thrust of objectoriented philosophy is to extend the right to speak to objects not backed by corporate sponsors: to open the democracy of objects to include the very poor. This is the real magic depicted in Miranda July’s book It Chooses You, where random objects in the local PennySaver become the guideposts of a sort of vision quest. With new allies to channel the expression of their powers, objects can say more than just “buy me.” The world imagined by the new materialists is, quite simply, an enchanted world, one in which every item and atom has a voice, a power, a spell. And the question they raise is not only “what is oil’s one demand, what does oil say?” but also, “who will have the right to speak for oil?” Until now, the giant media companies have jealously guarded the skill of ventriloquizing objects’ voices and defining their desires. New materialism, at bottom, is a political call for each of us to be the interpreter and the champion of mute things – for each of us to speak for the political re-enchantment of the globe.
Micah White and Chiara Ricciardone
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Raul Arboleda /AFP IMAGES
Venus passes between the earth and the sun.
NASA
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Raul Arboleda /AFP IMAGES NASA
Foremost among the great mysteries is whether or not there are other Gaias out there. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, in pondering the question, left us a paradox. It involves the simple question of why, despite the antiquity of the heavens and the vast number of stars and planets we know exist, have we not yet detected intelligent life? There are 250 billion stars in the Milky Way alone, so surely some of those
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should have spawned Earth-like planets, and some of those should have developed life. Fermi assumed that it’s a characteristic of life to colonize suitable habitats, its spread thereby making it more likely to be visible to us. If a civilization used even the slow kind of interstellar travel almost within our grasp today,
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NASA
it would have taken only five million to fifty million years to colonize our galaxy. And that is just the blink of an eye in the fourteen-billion-year history of our universe. Fermi’s paradox would be resolved if infantile Gaias rarely, if ever, survive. If this is the explanation, then perhaps the Medea hypothesis is correct after all: intelligent global superorganisms may carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction, and so begin to extinguish themselves at the moment of birth. But there is another possibility. Perhaps Fermi’s paradox tells us that we really are alone in the universe, simply because we are the first global superorganism to ever exist. After all, it’s taken all of time – from the Big Bang to the present – to make the stardust that forms all life, and to forge that stardust, through evolution by natural selection, into us and our living
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Wellcome images
A massive solar flare extends 800,000 km (63 times the diameter of the earth) into space.
NASA
Wellcome images
The human egg is 0.12 mm in diameter.
planet. If we really are the first intelligent superorganism, then perhaps we are destined to populate all of existence, and in so doing fulfill Alfred Russel Wallace’s vision of perfecting the human spirit in the vastness of the universe. If we ever achieve that, then Gaia will have reached puberty, for she will have then become reproductive, nurturing the spark of life on one dead sphere after another. From our present vantage point we cannot know such things. But I am certain of one thing: if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further human progress is possible here on Earth. Tim Flannery is the Chair of Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University. He was named Australian of the Year in 2007. This excerpt is from Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet (HarperCollins, 2011).
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NASA (G1) Wildest Notion•a.indd 2
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NASA
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out into countless flickering solar systems, there was once a star on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and most untruthful minute of “world history”; but still only a minute. When nature had drawn a few breaths the star solidified and the clever animals died. It was time, too: for although they prided themselves on knowing a lot, they had finally discovered, to their great annoyance, that they knew everything wrongly. They died and as they died they cursed truth. That was the way of those desperate creatures.
One could invent such a fable, but one would still not have sufficiently illustrated how pathetic, how shadowy and volatile, how useless and arbitrary the human intellect seems within nature. There were eternities in which it did not exist; and when it is gone nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission leading beyond human life. It is human, and only its owner and creator treats it as solemnly as if the hinges of the world turned on it. – Friedrich Nietzsche
The Mars Curiosity Rover crawls along the dust and rocks of the red planet on its journey towards Mount Sharp.
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Charles Negre, charlesnegre.com (G1) Wildest Notion•a.indd 4
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Charles Negre, charlesnegre.com (G1) Wildest Notion•a.indd 5
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JUCO
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The Cult
God died. The seas of metaphysics were limitless again. A new horizon of possibility opened for all beliefs and ideals. Values were re-evaluated, remolded, re-constructed – and each new value was made in the image of its creator: the individual self. We were “freed” to think whatever we want, say whatever we want and believe whatever we want – more or less, that is. What we got: apparent freedom, inalienable “individual” rights and in America, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Later came the prevalent I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude – with all its cool and edgy indifference. But I-don’t-give-a-fuck really means I-don’t-give-a-fuckbecause-it-doesn’t-affect-me – this is the prevalent attitude of non-judgmentalism meets moral relativism. Sociologist Charles Smith found, after interviewing 230 young Americans, that the common response to standard moral questions (about rape, murder, theft) was one of bafflement. Young people lacked anything substantial to say about even extremely generic ethical questions. The default attitude was that moral choices are a matter of individual taste, where one’s morality is just a small piece of a carefully crafted individual self that one fashions at whim. “It’s personal,” many interviewees responded: “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say? Who am I to judge?” When beliefs, aesthetic preferences and moral proclivities are all left to personal style, we have the hipster mentality, where nonchalant nihilism is cool. Indeed, the word “moral” itself is a dirty word amongst anyone outside the realm of conservatism. But the cult of individualism transcends politics: we are all in the cult. We’ve all had its invisible lens pulled over our eyes such that we perceive the world through a warped and myopic tunnel vision. Aiming to find and remove this lens is as futile as trying to bite your own teeth – for it is built into us. The great myth of our time is the heroic pullyourself-up-by-your-bootstraps tale of His Majesty the Autonomous Self (and how convenient is it that this selfsame trope is the foundational myth capitalism needs most for its continued political survival). But this myth needs no creeds to perpetuate its dominance, for it is woven into the very fiber of our being. We were all inculcated into the cult of individualism – by our families, who tell us we are special; by the vision of the American Dream; by schools, who demand that we specify fields; by advertising which compels us to carve out who we are by consuming certain commodities; by capitalism which teaches us that to succeed is to win in a competition of yourself against all others; and by the ever-growing
o
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new-age and pop psychology œuvre which tells us to create our own realities… But if everyone were to believe themselves as the center of their own universe in which they create their own world, values and all meaning – civilization would quickly deteriorate into solipsism, narcissism, megalomania and/or collective insanity. So it comes as no surprise that “we” are in decline – for what is really wrong with the united “us”? There is no “we,” no “us,” just me, myself and I. This nation is not a unified whole but a cacophony of atoms, each spinning alone to their own idiosyncratic rhythm – and frequently colliding. The Declaration’s axioms are relinquishing their sacred aura, for the glue that holds us together is… well, it isn’t there. The marriage of this egoism to rationality – the hubris that comes with our self-awarded status as the sole “rational animal” – this may be the fatal flaw of Western civilization, we just don’t know it yet… or do we? With discoveries in neuroscience that expose us as primarily social beings, the ecological crisis which demands global cooperation in spite of differences, and amidst the peril of capitalism, which reveals the limits of a “survival of the fittest” social philosophy – the fabric of who-we-thought-wewere is being unravelled. It is like waking up from a long hallucination… disorienting, frightening, yet epiphanic… for what we are facing is nothing other than an identity crisis, one that forces us to create a new account of what it is to be human. It’s uncomfortable to go against the grain of a totalizing and pervasive culture that reinforces a dog-eat-dog conception of human nature. It’s frightening to reconsider who you are in the midst of realizing that what you were taught all along was a lie – a myth exposed as a myth. But this is just what Buddhists have been saying for thousands of years, that the notion of a “separate self” is an illusion, and a dangerous one against which we must constantly exercise vigilance in order to correct this misperception and not forfeit our potential as beings capable of empathy and conscience. Our concept of the individual self was born in the context of the 18th Century, at least, and it is reaching the end of its course. What is the new paradigm of human nature that is emerging in response to the world as it is in 2012 and 2013? Should we continue to carry the curse of unchecked individualism, it will be our undoing.
Stefanie Krasnow
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Stuart Griffiths’ book Pigs Disco is about his time serving in the British Army during the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and the early 90s Chemical Generation. www.dittopress.co.uk
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École de la Montagne Rouge
Brigitte Niedermair
École de la Montagne Rouge
Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and the early 90s Chemical Generation. www.dittopress.co.uk
Underneath everything we see, everything we know, even beyond what we can currently imagine, there lies another reality, one uniting all hitherto ununited aspects of reality, all hitherto ununited social movements. It’s a realm, a revolutionary Higgs Boson, attainable only through experimentation, through trial and error, through conceptualization and activation, through thinking and acting, through dialogue and debate, through struggle. -Andy Merrifield
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Jose Manuel Ribeiro/REUTERS (G1) Wildest Notion•a.indd 10
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Train to Pokipse
nothing inside but a soft scratching. What are you without a body? I don’t know, I thought, looking at the large ad with its smiling picturesque faces telling me to “GET TESTED!” I don’t know what you are without a body, but I do know that without a soul you’re just another television show. There was a plague that had frightened humankind into an acute awareness of their bodies. They named it AIDS. Twenty years later, a new AIDS stalks us: an AIDS of the soul. BERGEN ST., CARROLL ST. I am falling.
An ad caught my eyes. Two smiling cardboard representations meant to be human beings looked directly at me. Everyone on the train was just a colored shadow; but these two faces were so clear, like they were the only real things left. Behind them white letters announced, “GET TESTED! AIDS is on the rise.” AIDS. I reflected on the acronym just as I had once reflected on the word POKIPSE. “What are you without your body?” I overheard some yuppie say philosophically as I was bringing her another glass of pinot noir during my waiter days. “Thank you. Nothing. Our bodies are all we have.”
Jose Manuel Ribeiro/REUTERS
There was a plague that had frightened humanity into an acute awareness of their bodies. It exposed the frailties and the realities of a physical existence. What started as a fight for survival has altered into a myopic view of existence where your body is the primary concern, and the results of banishing the mind and exiling the soul for the autocracy of the body have begun to poison their way out into our fair American paradise. I thought about everyone my age and saw their faces filled with struggle and a sense of impotence. I thought about my most educated generation, handed a crippling amount of promissory debt for diplomas; then placed behind a counter to pour the miracle martini or by a café table to take an order for no-bean-vegan-cassoulet, Rimbaud’s refrains and Plato’s musings now only pricking the failure of our role in the American dream, ever harsher, ever further in. The plague that haunts this generation is another form of AIDS. This disease is the devouring and weakening of the soul. What are you without a body? Well, what are you without a soul? A healthy body, flawless and perfect in its curves with clean skin that’s been smoothed by beauty products, and yet there is
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I am falling. The light breaks through the perfect sky like an avalanche of hail-fire in a storm, revealing graffiti as we OPEN rise YOUR and rise EYES! and rise – and then the panoramic glory that the G train provides NO MORE CORPORATE BULLSHIT! as it heads in a curve FUK WALL ST. to Smith-9th Street station, Brooklyn below us low, Manhattan above us high, the water of the Gowanus Canal filled with stilled indifference underneath. In the light, it seems so dead. This beautiful morning light heightens how much America has fallen. It shines without its promise across a land of the fatigued who are dreaming of another time and spirit. That time and that spirit are dead; their memory now haunts the dreams of kids my age with that nostalgia for something we never had. For New York. For San Francisco. For America. The morning light revealed, the darkness of death. We are the first generation of Americans who are not American. America rests on no values. It defines itself on no precepts. America is and always was dependent on its definition by its frontiers – those dark zones yet to be explored. That’s what’s always made America a land of possibility – the promise of somewhere else, some wilderness still, where a person can go and make themself anew; the ability to imagine such a place, to imagine it so much that it actually becomes real. I had learned about these frontiers in my high school history class. Most of us learned about these frontiers – that Wild West – conquered and subdued by the twenties, in the boring rooms of high school history class. Yet even without a Wild West, America lived on. It even flourished, with all the chaotic elements that come with a real flourishing, a real becoming. It lived on because the frontiers had not died, they had just moved. After the Wild West was won, the places of possi-
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bility moved to America’s cities. There a person could go and begin a new life, just as they could once have done in the Wild West. America is no more because its cities are no more. It is gentrification that killed America’s cities. It is the gentrification of the mind that has killed America for my generation. Those dreams set forth by Ronald Reagan in his second inaugural address when he promised to reinstate our values of faith, family, work and neighborhood have been realized. A new America has been created – an America without frontiers. The results of that creation are best seen in my generation – a generation of flatliners, a generation of Columbines, a Generation Nothing. We are the first generation of Americans who are not American. We began somewhere; and though we ended up nowhere, we will always strive to get back to where we should have been – back to our own promised lands. America has raised a slaughtered generation, and we are that slaughtered generation. We are crippled children trying to find our way back home. It was a beautiful morning. The platform at Smith-9th St. was mostly empty. When the F train came, I knew that I must go home. I used to think that home was an end, a place you go when the day is done; but home, like America,
like Love, like God, is a journey of striving toward humanity. It was a beautiful morning with a clear blue sky. The platform at Smith-9th St. was mostly empty. Someone asked for the time. “9:03,” someone replied. And… David and I were on the L train going into the city. And… There was a boy. And… There was a dream. And… There was a city. And… I was standing on the edge … And I heard the clattering, the thunder and the clash of the train, and I saw two light beams approaching, and then I looked at it. A shadow city. A shadow America. A shadow dream. And I took out a bag of coke and opened it, but the wind dispersed it into a snowfall, and somewhere in my life the snow is falling, and watching it I realized we are separate snowflakes. We are no longer part of the storm. I stepped off the platform. Somewhere in my life, the snow is falling; and it is the snowfall of everything I’ve been and everyone I’ve known uniting into a storm. I am falling, I am falling, The tracks approach, the street below, 9:03, morning horror, the metal thunder and the metal crash. I am falling. I am falling. No one can understand how robbed we felt who is not one of us. I am falling. I am falling. Once upon a time, in a place far away, we were children. I am falling. I am falling. I am falling home.
Rami Shamir is a Zuccotti occupier and novelist whose work was previously published in Adbusters #103. This story is adapted from his independently published novel Train to Pokipse.
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Well John
what do you think…
can we stumble
towards singularity …
avoid nightfall …
win this meme war for the fate of
humanity?
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e b y a M ! baby
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William Hundley
12-10-19 4:59 PM
WELCOMING IN THE YEAR OF THE SNAKE In Chinese Astrology, the snake represents a deep, sensual philosopher…one who is graceful, mystical and dark all at the same time. 2013 will bring in the year of the “water snake”, signifying that you should save you pennies to fuel your greatest vision, mind your own business, meditate, be a bit weird, and indulge fully in your true hearts desire. Be inspired by the deeply auspicious Snake who is willing to sacrifice all his possessions…who is capable of shedding the past - all burdens - in one full swoop, as it does with its skin… The Snake is the most intuitive, intelligent, refined, and wise of all archetypes. Sharp, aware, cunning, yet capable of vanity and viciousness: be wary of the weaknesses that come with this energy…a proclivity towards materialism could be the snake’s only downfall. . .
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Avoid hectic schedules and noisy atmospheres without forfeiting a taste for culture and elegance. Take excessive doses of calm and quiet, else, you will suffer during this time.
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#PIRATEPARTYUSA (H1) Back Cover US.indd 2
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