Dismantle Civilisation

by Chuck Burr, on his blog Culture Quake.

Wealth is a system of concentration

Wealth is not what we are taught. Wealth is a verb, not a noun. Wealth is not stuff; it is a fiercely protected system of concentration. It is the act of the hoarding, and is a pillar of our culture.

The Agricultural Revolution, The “Dominion Revolution”

This system was invented by one tribe in the fertile crescent 10,000 years ago during an event called the Agricultural Revolution.

This historical event has been grossly misnamed. It should be called the Dominion Revolution. The change had nothing to do with farming. People were farming and eating way before then. It had everything to do with a complete reversal of the story we live by from, “we belong to the earth,” to “the world belongs to man.”

This is the point where our modern Taker culture was born. Until the Agricultural Revolution all of humanity were indigenous Leaver peoples. We were just one of thirty million species — we were simply part of the fire of life. One universal shared animist spirituality shared across thousands of cultures.

Once we saw the world as our own, and that we can take from and apart regardless of the consequences, a whole new set of possibilities opened up. It started with denying our competitors access to food and privatizing the land. If the world belonged to man, not only things but all life including people can be possessed or at least exploited. Every social justice problem directly stems the dominion story that perpetuates our modern mono-culture or civilization.

War, Privatization, and Fear—The End of Nature’s Peace Keeping Law of Limited Competition

Once you extended the logic of dominion all the way out, you were now allowed to wage war. A lion only takes one gazelle, and the rest of the gazelles go back to grazing because they know the lion follows the peace keeping law of nature or law of limited competition: only take what you need to survive, no more. However, since the world belongs to man, he may take all of the gazelles, or trees; he may wage war on the forest or even his fellow man. He may start to accumulate beyond his needs.

Since it is too disruptive to wage war all of the time to get what you want, a lower level system of violence needed to be invented to get what you wanted. The solution was privatization and locking up the food so everyone had to work within the hierarchical, consumptive, Taker system to survive. If you did not work or at least behave within the system you did not get fed.

Forcing everyone to work within the system and enabling concentration of wealth yields a system of incentives to create a desired social behavior that self-perpetuates the system itself. From top to bottom, everyone has the incentive to work to merely survive or accumulate wealth. Once you crawl your way to the top, you ignore all of the people, places, and species that you stepped on the way, and actually believe you deserve to be there and then start fiercely defending your position.

The incentives are the chance that you will get security and even promoted in our culture if you play by the rules. The other incentive is fear; fear is the fuel of our culture or civilization. This includes the obvious fear of not being fed or given a place to live, and down to the fear of enforcement upon you of rules we have written called laws.

Economics is the science of rationalizing the wrong moves for the wrong reasons. Fear is the universal enforcer of narrow vision and blind momentum. — Tom Ward

These incentives are ingrained in us since the moment we are born by almost everyone, every process, story, and cultural item we see. We become attached to things and also become fearful that we could lose our things. By living in this culture, we live in a constant state of subliminal fear and are motivated almost solely by it.

We live in a world without limits. Not limits of what we can achieve, progress is actually not necessarily good. We live in a world without limits of what we will do to keep our place, and our things. Our Taker culture has suspended nature’s peace keeping law of limited competition.

Culture is not our food, clothing, or language. Culture is what system we use to make a living. In our culture you do not need a conspiracy theory planning how to maintain the hierarchy. You just need a uniform set of incentives motivating everyone’s behavior to self perpetuate the system of consumption, accumulation, or wealth.

Hierarchies Accentuate Concentration

By having everyone living within the hierarchy, you can have dozens or — with technology — thousands of people doing the concentrating for you. The way to get rich is to direct your way part of the concentrating flow from as large a network as possible.

That is why our system embraces large corporations — they enable the largest concentration network possible. We don’t need a transnational corporation to flip hamburgers, but with 31,000 restaurants, you can concentrate $23.5 billion a year. Wealth is not the $23.5 billion, it is the system that allows something that does not really exist, a corporation, to operate a chain of 31,000 restaurants exploiting 1.5 million employees world wide.

Protection of Hierarchies

Our modern Taker system is fiercely protected. You can’t end private property by taking the property of the wealthy. Hierarchies maintain great defenses from attacks from below. McDonald’s grows where McDonald-Douglas goes, now Boeing.

Government especially exists to enforce the system of private property and wealth, along with the infrastructure and markets that enable concentration. Make no mistake about it: government is not here to feed you, as most naively believe. The regulations, laws, zoning, finances, markets, inspectors, police, and military are here to make sure no one messes with private property or the market.

Markets are especially important to keep running because they are the levers used to extract and concentrate resources as fast as possible. Markets and money also useful to filter out externalities such as pollution or social injustices. Money and markets are blind.

Further, if we want another country’s natural resources, first we send in the corporations, then the jackals if necessary, and, if they didn’t succeed, the military. No ifs, ands, or buts. They system will try to continue and expand at any cost. This meme is taught to us since childhood by “father culture” that civilization is the end of history and must progress at any cost.

This system of protection of the hierarchy is far more than overt force. It includes deep stratification of education, social cliques, and access to capital. Before my awakening I had all three and played within the system. I interned for President Reagan and had seen the inside of several Fortune 100 companies all by the time I was 35. With a little luck, it worked.

Now I am trying to give it all back through one of the country’s few really sustainable models and education. Restoration Farm builds topsoil, biodiversity, community, and offers permaculture education. Show me a list of companies that do that.

The Consumption of Population

The ultimate expression of dominion is expansion of your population. The story that Adam chose Eve is misunderstood because the word Eve is mistranslated. Eve means life, it does not mean a person or a woman. Adam, choosing unrestrained life, means he is choosing abandoning Nature’s peacekeeping law of limited competition, and accepting unlimited procreating supported by totalitarian agriculture.

Taker peoples have always been able to overwhelm Leaver peoples because they had more people from a greater food supply. Again, we return to the misunderstanding of the Agricultural Revolution: Because the Takers decided to take all of the land for human food production and uses, they simultaneously denied their fellow species’ access to food, and so built their human population. They made the choice to consume the world, start the food-population race, and literally convert the natural world to human flesh.

This all stems from the choice of dominion or taking, which birthed our system of concentration and wealth. When you see wealth of any level, see it for what it is, our culture’s fiercely protected system of concentration through domination.

We Need a New Story

After being on the inside, and through traveling, I know how it works for the very few, and does not work for everyone else — human and our non-human relations. I also know now that you cannot reverse the system from within the system. You have to get far enough from it to develop a new story. There in lies the solution.

More and more of us want a new story, a new way to live. We want to make a living that does not end in insecurity, a life of bad food, not thinking for oneself, poor health, wage slavery, no retirement, and a death detached from your family. What are those things but civilization?

Tribal Solution to Making a Living

A tribe or a smaller band is a group of people who want to make a living together. A “community” today may be no more than a grouping of Yuppies in close proximity. These are two very different things. More tribe-like or band-like is a circus — literally. In a small circus, everyone has decided to throw in their lot, and make a living together. No one is higher or lower. Being the “boss” is still just a job that someone may have to do, but comes with no privileges. Decisions are made by consensus.

A tribe is group of people who are land locked and combine what they have, be it land, tools, or skills, and then make a living together. A tribe also has a sense of place in their watershed or bioregion. That is important, but is not the focus of this discussion.

The trick is to carve out enough space to be able to detach ourselves from the modern Taker world. The Amish call this avoiding entanglements with our culture. That is why the old order of Amish drive wagons with wood-steel wheels that they can build and maintain instead of rubber wheels they can’t. The point of creating some level of autonomy as a group is to gain the freedom to live your own culture and stories such as, “humanity belongs to the earth.” If you are married to modern culture you can’t live a new story or imagine a new vision.

Now, the Amish do and do not live tribally. They live in a grey area in between. Each family still owns its own land, but work together cooperatively in another sense.

We have to end private property and hierarchical government, and replace the failed story of dominion. Concentration, wealth, poverty, every global crisis, and social injustice are the end result of the story we tell ourselves about the nature of the world we live in, “the world belongs to man.”

We will lose a lot of cool stuff in this new world or “earth culture” as I call it, but peak oil is going to do that for us anyway.

Natural Wealth and Permaculture

Real wealth is the resilience of nature and her ecosystems measured by biodiversity, topsoil, and cooperative connections. Ecosystems cooperate and have synergies that are not about competition.

Going back to the lion, the lion is most secure when the ecosystem is most healthy, diverse, and intact allowing for the most food to eat. This can only happen when the lion’s population and rate of consumption follow nature’s peace keeping law of limited competition.

Real human wealth is your community, education, and the cradle-to-grave security that results. Real wealth results from giving security to get security; it does not come from making things to get things.

If you are not taught to think outside the box, it’s hard to think outside of our culture. At Restoration Farm we teach people in my local community, students, and interns from around he world to see with whole-system eyes. I am finding a huge divide in the education level between lay people and those who have studied permaculture. Permaculture helps you see holistically, something we are not taught in school. In in our educational system, each department is separated, very little is taught as a whole system. Your typical economics course does not tell you that for every dollar made, the planet is trashed somewhere, and people and species are exploited along the way. It is far more important to learn how a whole ecosystem works, than it is to split atoms.

The point is, recognize wealth, and our Taker culture for what it really is.

1 Comment »

Always one to find ways of speeding the demise of industrial civilization, I was really taken by this article in New Scientist about the remarkably destructive effect of roads in the Amazon rainforest. For many years ELF (Earth Liberation Front) has resorted to blocking logging roads as one of a range of methods to slow the advance of industrial logging; and it works, for if the machinery that depends on the roads cannot reach the intended location then the ecocide cannot take place. Simple.

What is less understood are the myriad other negative effects that roads have, from spreading disease to indigenous tribes, to encouraging further planned and ad hoc “development” (destruction), and even raising the share price of a company that is planning to exploit resources in the newly opened up area. From the article below, it appears that by preventing new roads, new damage can also be prevented and — by extension — by blocking, flooding, digging up and otherwise making impassible, existing roads, destruction that is already taking place can also be halted.

This should undoubtedly be one of the key activities of those people currently fighting to protect forest ecosystems and cultures. Fuck “right of access”; it’s time to close down what should never have been opened up in the first place.

“THE best thing you could do for the Amazon is to bomb all the roads.” That might sound like an eco-terrorist’s threat, but they’re actually the words of Eneas Salati, one of Brazil’s most respected scientists. Thomas Lovejoy, a leading American biologist, is equally emphatic: “Roads are the seeds of tropical forest destruction.”

They are quite right. Roads are rainforest killers. Without rampant road expansion, tropical forests around the world would not be vanishing at a rate of 50 football fields a minute, an assault that imperils myriad species and spews billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. We will never devise effective strategies to slow rainforest destruction unless we confront this reality.

In our increasingly globalised world, roads are running riot. Brazil has just punched a 1200-kilometre highway (the BR-163) into the heart of the Amazon and is in the process of building another 900-kilometre road (the BR-319) through largely pristine forest. Three new highways are slicing across the Andes, from the Amazon to the Pacific. Road networks in Sumatra are opening up some of the island’s last forests to loggers and hunters. A study published in Science found that 52,000 kilometres of logging roads had appeared in the Congo basin between 1976 and 2003 (vol 316, p 1451).

As my colleagues and I reveal in a forthcoming article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, these are just a small sample of the many new road projects slicing through tropical frontiers.

Why are roads so bad for rainforests? Tropical forests have a uniquely complex structure and humid, dark microclimate that sustain a huge number of endemic species. Many of these avoid altered habitats near roads and cannot traverse even narrow road clearings. Others run the risk of being hit by vehicles or killed by people hunting near roads. This can result in diminished or fragmented wildlife populations, and can lead to local extinctions.

In remote frontier areas, where law enforcement is often weak, new roads can open a Pandora’s box of other problems, such as illegal logging, colonisation and land speculation. In Brazilian Amazonia, 95 per cent of deforestation and fires occur within 50 kilometres of roads. In Suriname, most illegal gold mines are located near roads. In tropical Africa, hunting is significantly more intensive near roads.

Environmental disasters often begin as a narrow slice into the forest. Rainforests are found mostly in developing nations where there are strong economic incentives to provide access to logging, oil and mineral operations and agribusiness. Once the way is open, waves of legal and illegal road expansion follow. For instance, the Belém-Brasília highway, completed in the 1970s, has developed into a 400-kilometre-wide swathe of forest destruction across the eastern Amazon.

Beyond the forest itself, frontier roads imperil many indigenous peoples, especially those trying to live with limited contact with outsiders. As I write, indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon are stridently protesting the proliferation of new oil, gas and logging roads into their traditional territories. The roads bring loggers, gold miners and ranchers who often subjugate the indigenous people. Even worse, the invaders can bring in deadly new diseases.

Throughout the tropics, infections such as malaria, dengue fever, enteric pathogens and HIV have all been shown to rise sharply after new roads are built. Some indigenous groups, such as the Surui tribe of Brazilian Amazonia, have been driven to the edge of extinction by roads and the invading loggers, colonists and diseases they bring.

What can we do to slow the onslaught? First, we must vastly improve environmental impact assessments for planned roads. In many developing nations, EIAs focus solely on the roads themselves, completely ignoring the knock-on effects. In Brazil, for instance, EIAs for Amazonian highways focus only on a narrow swathe along the route, often recommending only paltry mitigation measures, such as helping animals to relocate before building begins. EIAs for certain mines, hydroelectric dams and other large developments focus only on the project itself while ignoring the impact of the roads it will invariably spawn. New roads will continue to drive rainforest destruction so long as the EIA process is so fundamentally flawed.

The second thing we have to do is fight to keep the most destructive roads from being built – the ones that penetrate pristine frontier areas. There is no shortage of battles to wage. A proposed highway between Colombia and Panama, for example, would expose one of the world’s most biologically important areas, the Chocó-Darién wilderness, to rampant destruction. Likewise, Brazil’s BR-319 highway is threatening to open up the central Amazon like a zipper.

Finally, we need to pressure those promoting these frontier roads. These include timber corporations like Asia Pulp & Paper and Rimbunan Hijau, international lenders such as the Asian, African and Inter-American Development Banks, and massive infrastructure schemes such as Brazil’s Programme to Accelerate Growth. In their scramble for tropical timber, minerals, oil and agricultural products, China and its corporations have become perhaps the biggest drivers of destructive road expansion.

Restricting frontier roads is by far the most realistic and cost-effective approach to conserving rainforests and their amazing biodiversity and climate-stabilising capacity. As Pandora quickly learned, it is far harder to thrust the evils of the world back into the box than to simply keep it closed in the first place.

(By William Laurance, taken from http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327236.700-roads-to-rainforest-ruin.html)

No Comments »

(NaturalNews) As the anticipated July release date for Baxter’s A/H1N1
flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist
is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of
humanity is underway. Jane Burgermeister has recently filed criminal
charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization (WHO), the
United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and
corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit
mass murder.

She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination which
is being filed in America. These actions follow her charges filed in
April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria
for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a
deliberate act to cause and profit from a pandemic.

Summary of claims and allegations filed with FBI in Austria on June
10, 2009:

In her charges, Burgermeister presents evidence of acts of
bioterrorism that is in violation of U.S. law by a group operating
within the U.S. under the direction of international bankers who
control the Federal Reserve, as well as WHO, UN and NATO. This
bioterrorism is for the purpose of carrying out a mass genocide
against the U.S. population by use of a genetically engineered flu
pandemic virus with the intent of causing death. This group has
annexed high government offices in the U.S.

Specifically, evidence is presented that the defendants, Barack Obama,
President of the U.S, David Nabarro, UN System Coordinator for
Influenza, Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, Kathleen Sibelius,
Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services, Janet
Napolitano, Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, David de
Rotschild, banker, David Rockefeller, banker, George Soros, banker,
Werner Faymann, Chancellor of Austria, and Alois Stoger, Austrian
Health Minister, among others, are part of this international
corporate criminal syndicate which has developed, produced, stockpiled
and employed biological weapons to eliminate the population of the
U.S. and other countries for financial and political gain.

The charges contend that these defendants conspired with each other
and others to devise, fund and participate in the final phase of the
implementation of a covert international bioweapons program involving
the pharmaceutical companies Baxter and Novartis. They did this by
bioengineering and then releasing lethal biological agents,
specifically the “bird flu” virus and the “swine flu virus” in order
to have a pretext to implement a forced mass vaccination program which
would be the means of administering a toxic biological agent to cause
death and injury to the people of the U.S. This action is in direct
violation of the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act.

Burgermeister’s charges include evidence that Baxter AG, Austrian
subsidiary of Baxter International, deliberately sent out 72 kilos of
live bird flu virus, supplied by the WHO in the winter of 2009 to 16
laboratories in four counties. She claims this evidence offers clear
proof that the pharmaceutical companies and international government
agencies themselves are actively engaged in producing, developing,
manufacturing and distributing biological agents classified as the
most deadly bioweapons on earth in order to trigger a pandemic and
cause mass death.

In her April charges, she noted that Baxter’s lab in Austria, one of
the supposedly most secure biosecurity labs in the world, did not
adhere to the most basic and essential steps to keep 72 kilos of a
pathogen classified as a bioweapon secure and separate from all other
substances under stringent biosecurity level regulations, but it
allowed it to be mixed with the ordinary human flu virus and sent from
its facilities in Orth in the Donau.

In February, when a staff member at BioTest in the Czech Republic
tested the material meant for candidate vaccines on ferrets, the
ferrets died. This incident was not followed up by any investigation
from the WHO, EU, or Austrian health authorities. There was no
investigation of the content of the virus material, and there is no
data on the genetic sequence of the virus released.

In answer to parliamentary questions on May 20th, the Austrian Health
Minister, Alois Stoger, revealed that the incident had been handled
not as a biosecurity lapse, as it should have been, but as an offence
against the veterinary code. A veterinary doctor was sent to the lab
for a brief inspection.

Burgermeister’s dossier reveals that the release of the virus was to
be an essential step for triggering a pandemic that would allow the
WHO to declare a Level 6 Pandemic. She lists the laws and decrees that
would allow the UN and WHO to take over the United States in the event
of pandemic. In addition, legislation requiring compliance with
mandatory vaccinations would be put into force in the U.S. under
conditions of pandemic declaration.

She charges that the entire “swine flu” pandemic business is premised
on a massive lie that there is no natural virus out there that poses a
threat to the population. She presents evidence leading to the belief
that the bird flu and swine flu viruses have, in fact, been
bioengineered in laboratories using funding supplied by the WHO and
other government agencies, among others. This “swine flu” is a hybrid
of part swine flu, part human flu and part bird flu, something that
can only come from laboratories according to many experts.

WHO’s claim that this “swine flu” is spreading and a pandemic must be
declared ignores the fundamental causes. The viruses that were
released were created and released with the help of WHO, and WHO is
overwhelmingly responsible for the pandemic in the first place. In
addition, the symptoms of the supposed “swine flu” are
indistinguishable from regular flu or from the common cold. The “swine
flu” does not cause death anymore often than the regular flu causes
death.

Burgermeister notes that the figures for deaths reported for the
“swine flu” are inconsistent and there is no clarity as to how the
number of “deaths” has been documented.

There is no pandemic potential unless mass vaccinations are carried
out to weaponize the flu under the guise of protecting the population.
There are reasonable grounds for believing that the mandatory vaccines
will be purposely contaminated with diseases that are specifically
designed to cause death.

Reference is made to a licensed Novartis bird flu vaccine that killed
21 homeless people in Poland in the summer of 2008 and had as its
“primary outcome measure” an “adverse events rate”, thereby meeting
the U.S. government’s own definition of a bioweapon (a biological
agent designed to cause an adverse events rate, i.e death or injury)
with a delivery system (injection).

She alleges that the same complex of international pharmaceutical
companies and international government agencies that have developed
and released pandemic material have positioned themselves to profit
from triggering the pandemic with contracts to supply vaccines. Media
controlled by the group that is engineering the “swine flu” agenda is
spreading misinformation to lull the people of the U.S. into taking
the dangerous vaccine.

The people of the U.S. will suffer substantial and irreparable harm
and injury if they are forced to take this unproven vaccine without
their consent in accordance with the Model State Emergency Health
Powers Act, National Emergency Act, National Security Presidential
Directive/NSPD 51, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20,
and the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza.

In the U.S. since 2008, Burgermeister charges that those named in her
allegations have implemented new and/or accelerated the implementation
of laws and regulations designed to strip the citizens of the U.S. of
their lawful constitutional rights to refuse an injection. These
people have created or allowed provisions to remain in place that make
it a criminal act to refuse to take an injection against pandemic
viruses. They have imposed other excessive and cruel penalties such as
imprisonment and/or quarantine in FEMA camps while barring the
citizens of the U.S. from claiming compensation from injury or death
from the forced injections. This is in violation of the laws governing
federal corruption and the abuse of office as well as of the
Constitution and Bill of Rights. Through these actions, the named
defendants have laid the groundwork for mass genocide.

Using the “swine flu” as a pretext, the defendants have preplanned the
mass murder of the U.S. population by means of forced vaccination.
They have installed an extensive network of FEMA concentration camps
and identified mass grave sites, and they have been involved in
devising and implementing a scheme to hand power over the U.S. to an
international crime syndicate that uses the UN and WHO as a front for
illegal racketeering influenced organized crime activities, in
violation of the laws that govern treason.

She further charges that the complex of pharmaceutical companies
consisting of Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi Aventis are part of a
foreign-based dual purpose bioweapons program, financed by this
international criminal syndicate and designed to implement mass murder
to reduce the world’s population by more than 5 billion people in the
next ten years. Their plan is to spread terror to justify forcing
people to give up their rights, and to force mass quarantine in FEMA
camps. The houses, companies and farms and lands of those who are
killed will be up for grabs by this syndicate.

By eliminating the population of North America, the international
elite gain access to the region’s natural resources such as water and
undeveloped oil lands. And by eliminating the U.S.. and its democratic
constitution by subsuming it under a North American Union, the
international crime group will have total control over North America.

2 Comments »

Here is an interesting article discussing an anticapitalist perspective on climate change, climate camps and the antiglobalisation movement, and how to move against the growing tide of greenwashed capitalism.

There’s a new big story: climate change. Tadzio Müller suggests a way for anticapitalists to deal with the issue’s urgency without falling into catastrophism or quietism.

R.I.P., or: the death of a movement

The movement’s dead! More precisely: the alterglobalisation movement as a common place for movements and ‘activists’ to meet and to become-other, together, linking their struggles under and against the common referent of neoliberal globalisation, is dead. Not that the particular struggles are dead. Nor have we seen the end of countersummit mobilisations: as I’m writing this, preparations for engaging the G8 in Japan are in full swing, and at every gathering of the radical and not-so-radical left, plans are busily being made to shut down one summit or another: the G8 in Italy in 2009; NATO’s 60-year birthday bash in France; and so on and so forth: countersummits-r-us?

But somehow these mobilisations don’t pack the same punch as they used to: how many last hurrahs have there been, how many times have people mobilised and thought “if it fails this time, we’ll stop doing this”? Even the comparatively powerful German movement could do little more at the G8 in Heiligendamm than to realise that it’s one thing to bring tens of thousands onto the street, but quite another for their actions to resonate beyond the immediate circle of participants.

Don’t get me wrong: the movement didn’t die the ignominious death of the defeated. In many ways, it also won. And for movements, who must move to survive, their victories are also often their deaths, for they live and breathe antagonism, they need an enemy. So what of our enemy? Let’s ask Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ chief ideologue, an eloquent and considered spokesman for the neoliberal offensive. Talking about the day when the US Central Bank bailed out a huge bank to prevent the financial crisis from spreading, he wrote: “Remember Friday March 14 2008: it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died.” So neoliberalism is dead (in some ways), as is (again: in some ways) the movement against it, of which the explicitly anticapitalist current from within which this text is written was only ever one part. It seems to have lost precisely that which can forge a movement out of an irreducible multiplicity of struggles, that which can counter the decomposition of resistance that capital and the state constantly seek to impose on us. We need a story, a hope, a hook to move: and at this point, the alterglobalist movement is clearly a movement without a hook, without an enemy, without a goal.

The new ‘big one’?

But as much as there’s a movement without a story, there’s also a story without a movement: climate change. An increasing number of policies (even many that have hardly anything to do with the subject) are being justified in terms of their relation to ‘the climate’. And ever since being outmanoeuvred by the G8 and especially chancellor Merkel at Heiligendamm, the European movements have realised that they must develop a position and a practice around climate change or risk irrelevance in this brave new world of green issues. The most advanced fractions of capital and government apparatuses have spotted a great way to create political support for a new ‘green fix’ to both the crisis of overaccumulation (the problem of too much money chasing too few profitable investment opportunities) that has given us the current financial chaos, and to the legitimation crisis that global authority has been suffering since the power of the story of ‘global terrorism’ began to wane. In a way, the fact that everybody is now talking about this issue is a massive victory for the green movement – but at the same time it’s meant the final nail in that movement’s coffin: every single large green NGO is involved up to its neck in the negotiations about the Kyoto follow-up treaty, and thus unlikely to articulate a political position that would diverge significantly from the dominant agendas in the field.

So there’s a movement without a story, and a story without a movement – which means that, as it stands right now, there is little hope that climate change will be dealt with in ways that don’t simply further the interests of states and whatever happens to be the dominant fraction of capital. And since the default anticapitalist position on climate change is that there is a fundamental contradiction between the requirements of the continued accumulation of capital (i.e. economic growth) on the one hand, and the requirements of dealing with climate change on the other, this would seem to constitute the perfect opening for a reenergised anticapitalist politics that can manage to connect to people’s widespread worries about climate change, and the impression that what is being done (Kyoto, Bali, emissions trading, etc.) is far too little, far too late. These are precisely the situations where radical social movements have the greatest capacity to act and ‘make history’, when the usual problem-solving approaches (these days: create a market around it, or repress it) don’t seem to provide any believable way of dealing with something that is widely perceived as a problem. It’s precisely when it seems impossible to find any solutions that openings exist for social movements to expand the limits of the possible. On the face of it, the perfect storm…

The politics of pointlessness

… or so it seems. In reality, if the practical difficulties faced by most really existing attempts to contribute to the emergence of an effective anticapitalist movement around the climate change issue are any guide, things seem a lot more difficult. Looking at it from the perspective of the global North, there are definitely attempts to develop an anticapitalist climate change politics, but each of them is facing a mounting set of difficulties. Seen from here, it all begins in the UK in 2006, with a ‘climate action camp’ that aimed to “shut down for a day” a coal-fired power station in northern England, but more importantly, to provide a space for developing new ideas and practices for an anticapitalist climate change politics. The idea of organising similar ‘climate action camps’ has since then inspired people in Germany, Sweden, the US, Chile, Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere, and currently this seems to be the main ‘weapon’ in the emerging climate movement’s repertoire of action (somewhat ironically, the initial idea for the camp also arose out of the lessons learnt about the shortcomings of one-off summit protests).

I really don’t want to talk down the importance of these camps – after all, inspiring so many people in so many different countries is no mean feat – but from the many critiques of the climate camps, one thread stuck out: the question of whether these camps were in fact doing much good beyond satisfying a desire to do something? It feels good to hang out and camp with your mates and comrades, but there’s that nagging question: what do we want? What can we achieve? And does this whole camping-business, trying to shut down power plants one at a time, while at the same time constantly fighting not to be drowned out by the more powerful voices that crowd this political field, stand in any relation to the magnitude of the challenge of climate change? That’s the kind of question that’s likely to leave people pretty frustrated.

To be clear: this is not to say that people shouldn’t organise climate camps – only that these camps need to be part of a wider project that gives them some political meaning beyond their highly localised intervention. We could of course hope that this wider meaning, a certain kind of political globality, would emerge from the links being formed between the various climate camps happening this year, but this kind of coordination has been limited to non-existing. No common ‘demands’ (other than that of being ‘against climate change’, which is about as politically useful and distinguishing as being against clubbing baby seals), no common story, no ‘shut down the WTO’, not even a vague compromise like ‘fix it or nix it’: no ‘another world is possible’!

So if the UK-movement’s way of dealing with the challenge of climate change comes across as somewhat limited in its political scope, at the other end of the spectrum there’s the way the issue has been approached in Germany. Attempts to kick-start a climate camp-process here have not only been beset by the usual leftist bickering and infighting, and there has even already been a split in the process, it has also come up against another political problem: here, the radical left is so academic and steeped in the tradition of ‘critical theory’ and ‘deconstruction’ that the main response to the challenge posed by climate change is to engage in a ‘critique’ of the ‘dominant climate change discourse’ and the ‘hegemonic role of scientific knowledge’ in constructing climate change as a crisis. Sure, it’s important to remember that the reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) come from a deeply conservative institution, and to critically reflect on how recourses to ‘scientific knowledge’ are often used to shut ‘non-experts’ out of political debates, but Diskurskritik can’t be the only response to the climate change issue. It feels a bit like throwing copies of Adorno and Foucault at a coming flood and hoping that it’ll just go away.

From timelessness to effectiveness

But let’s be honest: the anticapitalist left in the global North should be pretty used to being politically ineffective and marginal, small outbursts of transformative power in particular moments of excess notwithstanding. What does one ‘social centre’ in Hackney, Kreuzberg or Las Ramblas really contribute to the struggle against gentrification? Does an anti-war-demo in San Francisco really, as a film made on the occasion claims, ‘interrupt this Empire’? Does shoplifting, even conducted en masse, significantly disrupt processes of capitalist commodity circulation? To be honest, I don’t know, and I think very few people who engage in these practices have a clear idea either. But, and this is the important point, when talking about ‘capitalism’, anticapitalists feel they don’t really have to have an answer to that question. One way of dealing with that is to point to the non-linear dynamics of change in complex (social) systems, meaning that we can’t know what effects our actions of today will have tomorrow (think butterfly in Bali and hurricane in Haiti). Or, by referring to an argument that’s achieved nearly dogmatic status in anticapitalist discussions: ‘look, capitalism hasn’t been around forever, it began in some place at some point, so it’ll also end at some point’ – much the same could be said about the universe! I could go on enumerating the various intellectual tricks that exist to rationalise our relative political irrelevance, but hope the point is made: that anticapitalist politics in the global North exist in a sort of timelessness because we either can’t or don’t dare to think their effects in the future. Ostriches come to mind. As does the graffiti sprayed on the wall of a school in Gothenburg that had been stormed by the cops: “But in the end, we will win!”

And this is where we get back to why it seems so hard for the anticapitalist movement to develop a politics around climate change: whatever rationalisation makes it possible to think that ‘in the end we will win’ against capital, it’s pretty impossible to think that in relation to climate change. Against the usual timelessness of anticapitalist politics, climate change poses the issue of urgency. And the problem then becomes how to deal with that urgency. Both positions described above (the overly ‘activisty’ as well as the overly ‘critical’ one) are attempts to do so, and both are pretty unsatisfying. The first takes this urgency far too seriously, and jumps head over heels into a political field dominated by much stronger players. The second position recognises that the construction of urgency and the resulting politics of fear are often strategies of domination – but then contents itself with criticising that construction, rather than engaging with the urgency of the issue behind the discourse. And this urgency emerges precisely from a conflict of times, of temporalities, between the exponential temporality of capital (where capital perpetually speeds up social life and production) and the temporality of complex eco-social-systems, which are of course not static, and can adapt to new circumstances, but generally not at the speed required by capital – if change is too fast, that’s when the by now infamous ‘tipping points’ are reached, where changes to particular eco-systems become irreversible and catastrophic (the infamous ‘switching off’ of the Gulf Stream being one such example, the melting of polar ice caps another).

So how do we deal with this problem of urgency? First, by admitting that it’s unlikely, actually impossible, that the politically marginal radical left will be able to effectively slow down the production of greenhouse gases such as CO2, in a world where the accumulation of capital is inseparable from the burning of fossil fuels (someone called this ‘fossilistic capitalism’). Neither are we able to somehow force the faster adaptation of ecological systems to the speed of capital. But we can intervene into the temporality of politics, of governmental ‘climate change politics’, whose role it is to insulate the speed-up effected by capital from social criticism by creating the illusion that the continued accumulation of capital is compatible with socio-ecological stability: that, in other words, we just need to make a few (preferably market-based) adjustments, and can otherwise continue more or less as we were. The result of this insulation is that the potentially explosive force of the increasingly widespread realisation of this antagonism between capital and a humanity that exists embedded in complex ecological systems is contained, even captured. Captured so as to provide support for a new round of accumulation (think: ‘green capitalism’) and the further extension of political regulations ever deeper into our lives.

Forget Kyoto!

So again: the anticapitalist left in the global North can’t ‘stop’ or even significantly mitigate climate change. To assume that we could would necessarily leave us trapped in our timelessness, because we could only ever hope to achieve our goal at some point far, far in the future – out of real time, as pie in the sky. But we can, with our limited strength and resources intervene into the insulation of capital’s time from the ‘slowness’ of genuine democracy. If we once again leave the depressed certainty of our own decomposition and timelessness, if we remember that as movements we have the capacity to be faster than the state, then we can escape from and intervene into their capture and internalisation of antagonistic energies.

And how do we do that? How do we keep open the political space created by the increasingly widespread concern about climate change, which has the potential to produce new ideas and solutions, new possibilities, that might in turn promise to go beyond capitalism? How can there be an intervention into the powerful pressures towards the constitution of a new ‘green capitalism’, towards an ‘eco-Empire’, a global authoritarian eco-Keynesianism? If urgency forces us to think in terms of effectiveness and, what’s more, efficiency, how can our small, resource-poor wing of the movement effectively deploy our limited strengths to achieve a maximum outcome with respect to the goal of creating and/or maintaining space for the development of multiple, bottom-up, non-capitalist solutions to the climate crisis?

The answer to this question begins with two further questions, and then takes us back to the beginning of the whole argument. First question: what is probably the single most important process by which the governments of the world are trying to insulate capital from public criticism in relation to climate change? Answer: almost certainly the Kyoto/Bali-processes, where the world is treated to the dramas of international high politics, but which in the end produce little or nothing that would actually protect the climate (just as an aside: since the signing of the Kyoto-accords, global CO2-emissions have exceeded even the worst-case scenarios projected by the IPCC), and where a tiny bit of emissions reductions legitimate a huge pile of continued production of greenhouse gases – not to speak of the creation of a whole new market in emissions credits (expected to value about US$2 trillion by 2020), much to the delight of global capital. The follow-up process to Kyoto, which began in Bali in December 2007, is supposed to be signed at an international summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Second question: where do the strengths of the radical global movements lie both in comparison to our enemies and to our more moderate allies? Answer: in the organisation of large-scale, disruptive summit mobilisations. It is precisely in summit mobilisations that we have developed something that could be called ‘best practice’, where we have before achieved a substantial political effect. In Seattle, we not only managed to shut down the conference by being on the streets, we also exacerbated the multiple conflicts that existed ‘on the inside’ between the negotiating governments. If we manage to do the same thing again, and to build a political coalition around and momentum behind the demand to ‘Forget Kyoto’, we would both be able to keep open the political space to discuss potential ‘solutions’ to climate change that go beyond the reigning, market-driven agenda, and also provide a focal point and common demand for the emerging global climate movement to rally around. Forget Kyoto – Shut down Copenhagen 2009!

But why suggest organising yet another big summit protest after arguing that countersummits have become a lot less effective than they used to be? Because the politics of climate change in 2008 look very different from the politics of neoliberal globalisation in 2008 – in fact, they look more like the politics of globalisation did before the WTO summit in Seattle was shut down. Back then, during the decade of the ‘end of history’, many knew that neoliberal capitalism wasn’t flawless, but there was no recognition, not even on ‘the left’, of a movement, or maybe even a ‘movement of movements’ that could oppose it. Seattle created the possibility of seeing the commonality in many different struggles, of seeing them as all fighting the same enemy. Of a ‘movement’ in the first place, which is where the argument comes full circle: the alterglobalist cycle of struggles may have ended, but its lessons have not gone away, like the importance of avoiding the ‘one-week-a-year’ movement problem of focusing only on big events. The emerging climate movement must be rooted in sustainable and everyday practices of resistance and transformation at all levels, not just global, but also regional, national or local. But before ‘it’ can even see itself as ‘a movement’, something is needed to make a mark, show that there is a position on climate change that’s more radical than simply asking for more and better emissions trading. That there are those who don’t just focus on climate change, but also on the cause of climate change: capitalism. And for that to happen, we might just need what some people once called a ‘moment of excess’, where time speeds up, and changes become possible that were impossible before. A countersummit can do it. So in that sense: the movement is dead – long live the movement!

1 Comment »

Here’s the Unsuitablog’s response to another farce going on this Saturday – WWF’s ‘Earth Hour‘:

Apparently, on March 28, millions of people will be turning off their lights for an hour, for Earth Hour. Yes, a whole hour when all sorts of really green places, like Las Vegas, New York and San Francisco, will be flicking off the lights in symbolic venues and, an hour later, turning them all on again, just to show that Industrial Civilization doesn’t really give a f*** about the planet, but likes a good joke: like the joke of Alanis Morrisette flicking her toenails in the tumbler of her fellow airline passenger.

Like the joke that you can be an airline passenger and, at the same time, talk about saving energy.

Like the joke that trivial, symbolic activities, such as Earth Hour do anything other than make people think they have done something worthwhile.

Stop messing about with trivia and do something real.

Much like the pointless Earth Day, this event will serve no real benefit to the planet.  The few kilos of carbon potentially saved from entering the atmosphere will be more than made up for as civilisation continues to plunder the planet and economic growth outstrips any carbon saving.   This is meant to raise awareness about the environment, yet will in fact only reinforce the idea that all that needs to be done to solve this crisis is some simple conservation and efficiency measures, whilst continuing with business as usual.  And all this for one pitiful hour!  Doesn’t the earth deserve more than just one hour, or even one day?  Isn’t it always earth time anyway, or are we meant to only get away with being aware of our life support system for an hour a year?  If you want to show the world you really care about is future, take part in the dismantling of the systems that are threatening it – help bring down the growth system and dismantle civilisation.  Every hour is Earth Hour, and every day is Earth Day!

1 Comment »

Peakmoment video.

In his book, The Long Descent, John Michael Greer observes that our culture has two primary stories: “Infinite Progress” or “Catastrophe”. On the contrary, he sees history as cyclic: civilizations rise and fall. Like others, ours is exhausting its resource base. Cheap energy is over. Decline is here, but the descent will be a long one. It’s too late to maintain the status quo by swapping energy sources. How to deal with this predicament? He lays out practical ideas, possibilities, and potentials, including reconnecting with natural and human capacities pushed aside by industrial life.

[www.thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com]

No Comments »

A Club Orlov post, by Dmitry Orlov.

Congratulations, everyone, we have a new president: a fresh new face, a capable, optimistic, inspiring figure, ushering in a new era of responsibility, ready to confront the many serious challenges that face the nation; in short, we have us a Gorbachev. I don’t know about you, but I find the parallel rather obvious.

Obama wishes to save the economy, and to inspire us with words such as “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” [Inauguration speech] At the same time, he cautions us that “We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense” — an echo of Dick Cheney’s “The American way of life is non-negotiable.” And so we descend from the nonexistent but wonderfully evocative “clean coal” to the more pedestrian “Put a little dirt in your gas tank!”

But these are all euphemisms: the reality is that it is either fossil fuels, which are running out while simultaneously destabilizing the planet’s climate and poisoning the biosphere, or the end of industrial civilization, or (most likely) both, happening in that order. According to the latest International Energy Agency projections, the half-life of industrial civilization can be capped at about 17 years: it’s all downhill from here. All industrial countries will be forced to rapidly deindustrialize on this time scale, but the one that has spent the last century building an infrastructure that has no future — based on little houses interconnected by cars, with all of its associated moribund, unmaintainable systems — is virtually guaranteed to fall the hardest. An American’s two greatest enemies are his house and his car. But try telling that to most Americans, and you will get ridicule, consternation, and disbelief. Thus, the problem has no political solution. Tragically, Obama happens to be a politician.

“Whenever we confront a problem for which no political solution exists, the inevitable result is an uncomfortable impasse filled with awkward, self-censored chatter. During the Soviet establishment’s fast slide toward dissolution, Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign unleashed a torrent of words. In a sort of nation-wide talking cure, many previously taboo subjects could be broached in public, and many important problems could suddenly be discussed. An important caveat still applied: the problems always had to be cast as “specific difficulties,” or “singular problems” and never as a small piece within the larger mosaic of obvious system-wide failure. The spell was really only broken by Yeltsin, when, in the aftermath of the failed putsch, he forcefully affixed the prefix “former” to the term “Soviet Union.” At that point, old, pro-Soviet, now irrelevant standards of patriotic thought and behavior suddenly became ridiculous — the domain of half-crazed, destitute pensioners, parading with portraits of Lenin and Stalin. By then, fear of political reprisals had already faded into history, but old habits die hard, and it took years for people’s thinking to catch up with the new, post-imperial reality. It was not an easy transition, and many remained embittered for life.

“In today’s America, it is also quite possible to talk about separate difficulties and singular problems, provided they are kept separate and singular and served up under a patriotic sauce with a dash of optimism on top. It is quite possible to refer to depressed areas, to the growing underclass and even to human rights abuses. It is, however, not allowable to refer to America as a chronically depressed country, an increasingly lower-class and impoverished country or a country that fails to take care of its citizens and often abuses them. Yes, there are prisons where heroin addicts are strapped to a chair while they go through withdrawal, a treatment so effective that some of them have to be carried out in body bags later, but that, you see, is a specific difficulty, a singular problem, if you will. But, no no no, we are a decent, freedom-loving country in spite of such little problems. We just have a slight problem with the way we all treat each other… and others. We did recently invade a country that had posed no threat to us and caused about a half a million civilian deaths there, but no no no, we are a freedom-loving country! That is just a specific difficulty with our foreign policy, not a true reflection of our national character (which is to squirm when presented with unpleasant facts and to roll our eyes when someone draws general conclusions from them based on a preponderance of evidence).

“When it comes to collapse mitigation, there is no one who will undertake an organized effort to make the collapse survivable, to save what can be saved and to avert the catastrophes that can still be averted. We will all do our best to delay or avert the collapse, possibly bringing it on sooner and making it worse. Constitutionally incapable of conceiving of a future that does not include the system that sustains our public personae, we will prattle on about a bright future for the country for as long as there is enough electricity to power the video camera that is pointed at us. Gorbachev’s perestroika is an example of just such an effort at self-delusion: he gave speeches that ran to several hours, devoted to mystical entities such as the “socialist marketplace.” He only paused to drink water — copious amounts of it, it seemed — causing people to wonder whether there was a chamber pot inside his podium.

“There are few grounds for optimism when it comes to organizing a timely and successful effort at collapse mitigation. Nevertheless, miracles do happen. For instance, in spite of inadequate preparation, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, none of the high-grade nuclear fissile material has ended up in the hands of terrorists, and although there were a few reports of radiation leaks, nothing happened that approached the scale of the Chernobyl catastrophe. In other ways, the miserable experience had by all was mitigated by the very nature of the Soviet system, as I described in Chapter 3. No such automatic windfalls are due the United States; here, collapse preparation, if any, is likely to be the result of an overdue, haphazardly organized and hasty effort.” [Reinventing Collapse, pp. 108-110]

I sincerely hope that Obama manages to do better for himself than Gorbachev. History can be mean to do-gooders. On that fateful day when Gorbachev lost his job, his wife suffered a stroke, and he, since that day, hasn’t been able to wipe that deer-in-the-headlights look off his face. Trying to solve problems that have no solution is a fine thing to try to do. Even if it is utterly futile, it makes for great drama. But I hope, for his sake, that Obama doesn’t give up any of his hobbies. should he still have any.

No Comments »

Parts 1and 2 of capitalism at the expense of all life  are posted on dismantle civilization here.

by Juan Santos

This is the Day of Reckoning. This is the Time of Purification. This is the end of the “world”, the end of the city-state, the end of city life, of “Civilization.” The early Christians called it the “apocalypse,” the unveiling. Now, at last, the truth of what we have been presents itself unclothed. There is nowhere to hide. It is upon us. Like a cancer, capitalism, industrialism- truly the most advanced stage of civilization – “advanced” the way that a cancer is called “advanced” – has ravaged the body of the Earth. Life on Earth is disappearing. Nothing that can be done- or that will be done – under the system of global death called capitalism will save Life on Earth. The capitalist, as Karl Marx rightly noted, is “the soul of capital personified.” – a soul unable to see beyond the limits of its own immediate perception of “gain.” The capitalists as a whole – as a white imperial world-ruling class – understand the depth of the emerging crisis as well as we do. But they advance nothing more than schemes to sustain markets and profits, while life itself is allowed to perish in a holocaust in the making, one whose end is as certain as a nuclear winter.

There are no words to convey the depth of criminal horror and illness of the rulers of a system that would create the conditions not only for genocide on an unimaginable, all but limitless scale, but that would commit the murder of all life – ecocide, biocide and geocide – in order to shield themselves from change and protect and maintain their ability to produce “profit.”

But the holocaust we are entering is not made of a single criminal act – it is not the pushing of a button by a lone madman in a fit of religious mania or suicidal despair, it is, rather, the accumulation of a billion little deaths, the reaching of a critical threshold of death, until death itself boils over, the way that water, when it reaches its threshold of heat, roils over the edges of a pot, waging war on the fire that feeds it. It is the final explosion, the river of blood from the slaughterhouse spilling over its banks, no longer to be contained. It is the millions of children beaten, molested, raped, enslaved and “schooled.” It is the billions who live on less than a dollar a day. It is the slow soul murder of television and of going to “work.” It is a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is the homeless and the mad left hungry and frozen in the street. In the US, it is the millions of red, black and brown men locked behind prison bars, the mass terror of a racist system whose aim is to brutally reduce whole peoples to a state of utter subjugation, degradation isolation and immobility. Like the Nazi holocaust or the conquest of the Americas and Africa, it is not a single event, it is an historical process and an all – permeating “way of ‘life.’” It is the “supreme” way of life; the “non-negotiable” way, as GW Bush put it; the “American Way.” The capitalist way.

Marx and Engels had this much wrong. Civilization, slavery-based economies and more efficient forms of production like industrialist capitalism and socialism have not led to “progress,” unless “progress” can be counted as progress toward mass death and destruction, toward the enslavement and grave endangerment of human beings – all of us- and of every living plant, animal, fish and insect. Fundamentally, Marx and Engels believed in “profit” at the expense of the living Earth as much as any industrial capitalist – they just wanted to share the profit more broadly in a different money-system. The fundamental alienation of people from their connection with all life – and the most fundamental exploitation of life – would ultimately remain intact.

The Marxist project has failed, just as capitalism has failed. The state didn’t gradually “wither away” over a protracted period of change called “socialism.” Under the conditions prescribed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, the state can’t wither away. The state and the city are a single dialectical identity, a unity of opposites – they’re two faces of a single process, and the state can’t “wither away” unless the fundamental process of domination, control, exploitation, ecocide and genocide called the city – “civilization” – also withers away. The city necessitated the state and the state enabled the city. The city and the state arose together and they will die together. No one has remained free anywhere the city-state has arisen or in any area it’s conquered. No one has been free. Not the rulers. Not the ruled.

But that’s all over.

There’s a capitalist maxim: “Grow or die.” The maxim holds true within the limited sphere of the circulation of money and the accumulation of capital in a particular economic system; each individual capitalist project must compete – grow – or be swallowed by other capitalist ventures; in other words, it must “die.”

The system’s true believers never thought they’d reach the limits of growth, but that is just what has happened. They’ve reached the limits of their “resource” base – the ecological and geological limits of what can be destroyed to produce more profit. The game is over. They broke the bank. They were warned. They didn’t listen. They’re still not listening. For them, and for most of us who’ve not shaken our entrainment in the ways of seeing the world they stewed us in as children, we have come to an unimaginable passage. Call it the end of the world as we know it. That’s the deal. The inescapable deal. It’s over. One way or another. Either this
“non-negotiable” way of “life” ends, or the capacity of Earth to sustain life ends. This is not to say that some solutions can’t be found. It is, rather, to say that any “solution” that doesn’t undo the fundamental theft and imbalance inherent in the system of profit is not really a solution at all. The problem is global – total. The magnitude of the solution must equate with the magnitude of the problem. The system of theft and imbalance called profit is simply not sustainable, not on the whole, not in part. Life that can’t be sustained dies. The capitalist equation is now turned right-side up: “Stop ‘growth’ or die.” And it’s not just the capitalist mode of exploitation that must end. We’ve got to eradicate the cancer at its root, and, of course, capitalism, and modern industrialism more broadly, are built on the foundations of earlier, less “efficient” systems of exploitation and destruction. That’s where the roots of modern industrial systems of death lie.

While the psychological and biological functions or dysfunctions – the emotional splits and repressions that lie at the very core of the origins of our cultural dysfunction – have yet to be fully articulated and formulated into a coherent picture that explains their intersections with cultural suppression, economic exploitation, and political oppression, this much is clear. The first and fundamental practical expression of these dynamics in terms of their impact on the life of the Earth lies in this: The acquisition of land title by force and the enshrinement of “property” as social law.

That’s how “civilization” started: a city cannot exist without seizing the land around it. A city is all-but by definition a concentration of people too large to be supported by the land within its own boundaries – it must seize control of nearby lands or its population will starve.

The seizure of land by force – both for agricultural and herding purposes and for mineral extraction – continues as a key link in the survival and expansion of a global human population whose numbers are rapidly outstripping the capacities of the territories it already dominates to sustain any further population increase. The result is the rapidly escalating destruction of the world’s forests (and the concomitant eradication of a huge and increasing number of plant and animal species), along with the bottom trawling of the oceans for fish to feed the spiraling human numbers, with the concomitant eradication of 90% of the world’s large fish populations. Other clear examples include the seizure of the territory of the nation of Iraq for its oil and the seizure of a significant portion of Navajo Nation land and the forced removal of its population for access to the 18 billion tons of coal that lie beneath its surface – basically the same thing that is happening to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region as their land is seized for farming, ranching and oil interests. “Growth” means an increase in exploitable “resources,” whether those resources are oil, coal, the fertility of the soil itself, or the “resources” for a “green” economy, like the ores to make the steel to build “environmentally friendly” hybrid cars (auto production creates, to cite just one example, 7 billion pounds of un-recycled scrap and waste annually.) The end result of this orientation toward economic “growth” is death for the land base, for the indigenous cultures that care for it, and for the life the land and native peoples support. It is a cancerous growth. Same as it ever was.

A capitalist – or socialist – “green” economy is little more than another step in the evolution of a millennia long series of more “efficient” systems of exploitation and destruction. The fundamental premise behind the concept of a “green” economy and “green” growth is that the exploitation and destruction of life is somehow ultimately sustainable. “He is blind,” as one Hopi elder put it, “So he destroys himself when he tries to save himself.”

“Green” Growth is a mutually exclusive contradiction in terms.

No matter what we call the mode of production and destruction, and no matter how we distribute the “profit” – the “wealth” extorted from life and living systems – continued growth in production and destruction for the sake of human consumption can lead to only one end. Sooner or later – really sooner than later – we are going to crash full bore into the limits of growth – into the absolute limits of the “carrying capacity” of the Earth – the end of its ability to feed one more human, the end of the capacity of ecosystems to endure the disappearance of one more species without a complete and perhaps irreversible collapse.

There is, if we are honest with ourselves about it, only one possible result that offers hope. It’s not, I am sorry to say, social revolution. Nor is it the process of “bringing down civilization” advocated by some anarchist greens and anarcho-primitivists. The simple fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever that revolutionary movements aimed at an overthrow of the state or at the literal, immediate, physical dismantling of the machinery of death can be developed on a sufficient scale with a sufficient understanding to undo what must be undone – nor could the seizure and wielding of state power do the trick. Not only is the state itself based on the seizure and maintenance of land title by force, but the existence of the state requires the existence of the city – it requires that the fundamental dynamics of empire, “resource” exploitation and “profit” remain intact.

Marx’s postulation notwithstanding, for the state to “wither away” the City must also “wither away”.

It is only the accumulation of wealth at the expense of other forms of life that makes the concentration of power in a state apparatus possible. Only an increasingly radical imbalance in the energy flows of the planet, an imbalance skewed toward humans at the expense of all life, makes for such an accumulation, and the imbalance must grow in concert with the human population’s growth until it reaches the very crossroads we have reached today. The seizing of state power in no way changes the fundamental equation. An ecologist might say that the equations of the solar budget are the only equations – the only bottom lines – that count.

The only way out – which is to say the natural way out – is a population crash. No human-invented scheme can overrule the way – the natural consequences or “laws” – of nature. And what happens to any and every population in overshoot in nature is a population crash. It’s nature’s way.

It can’t be improved upon. It can’t be subverted. It can’t be avoided, although, perhaps, the severity of the collapse can be softened. Blame is irrelevant, except to the extent that in identifying causes, we are able to learn and avoid their repetition. But, a human population crash will do nothing more than delay even worse results – like utter extinction – unless it is accompanied by a profound process of identifying and learning from what went awry in what has gone before.

Under the best of circumstances the global economy and the global system of dominance that rests on it will run into limits it cannot transform – so that it cannot continue until the point that the global ecosystem – life itself – collapses all around us and within us. In the best case scenario, peak oil will prove just such a limit, a limit that sinks the system of production and destruction to such a degree that it prevents it from resurrecting itself.

This formulation can, of course, be denounced as Malthusian. It can also be denounced by revolutionaries of all kinds. But here’s the simple fact. All we can do is hope, and to the best of our ability, align ourselves spiritually and strategically with the forces of life. Yes, as Derrick Jensen suggests, hope is what you do when you have no agency, no power, no control. But then, it is precisely our drive to control and reorder nature that has brought us to this point, and it is that drive for control, and the pain that drives it, that must be healed, transformed and left behind. But, while we may not be able to control outcomes, make a revolution or “bring down” civilization, we can align ourselves spiritually and strategically with the forces of Life.

By the same token and the same logic, the key tasks before us lie not in saving the global economy, not in creating a “green” economy, not in inventing new ways to exploit new energies in order to continue to mine the life of the Earth, nor in any other activity that would seek to preserve this system in any form whatsoever.

The key task before conscious people today is the forging of a profound understanding of what has gone wrong – a sweeping and utter re-evaluation of all values that will be tantamount to a new renaissance, a conscious re-creation and co-creation of culture. Much of that work began to be undertaken in the 1960s, and has borne important fruit, like William Kotke’s work, The Final Empire. It is ours to forge an authentically sustainable culture, even in the midst of this civilization’s fast approaching end – by relying on and integrating the deepest, clearest and most coherent teachings of traditional indigenous cultures, of students of the ecology, and of the multivalent healing practices of both indigenous cultures and of the new therapies that have arisen in the last 50 years. Such a movement – one that is intent on restoring the Earth and fostering social justice and renewing our cultures by incorporating the values and vision of indigenous peoples – is already underway on a global scale. Paul Hawkens, in his important book Blessed Unrest, calls it an “unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another.” His research shows that it is the largest movement in human history, involving some 2-3 million organizations worldwide and some 200 – 300 million people whose cultural, ethical, political and ecological creativity are already impacting billions. That the processes of renewal – of healing, rectifying and relearning – will best be fostered among those in living in direct contact with, and in a caretaking relationship with the Earth and other, non- human living beings should, I hope, be self evident.

Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays can be found at The Fourth World. He can be reached at: JuanSantos (at) Mexica.net.

No Comments »

Christmas time has come again, and as per usual the yearly carnival of consumerism has returned. It was suggested that the credit crunch might have perhaps thrown some water on the consumerist fire this year, but judging from the increase in spending reported for last month, and indeed my own observations of an incredibly packed Oxford Street in London (a serious contender for the capital of unbridled consumerism) the effect seems to be little. It seems that many businesses live for this time of year, waiting for the hordes to spend their money and keep their businesses out of the red for another year. But how did it come to this? How did a purely religious festival come to be hijacked by one of the most destructive forces of modern civilisation?

There has been a Mid-Winter festival across the world for millennia. The point at which the days cease to get shorter and instead start to get longer again, the Winter Solstice, has been marked by many cultures as a time to celebrate the rebirth of the sun and a celebration of life in general. Despite the cold, harsh conditions in many parts of the northern hemisphere, people have feasted on the produce of the previous summer and have come together as communities for this festival. Even when Christianity imposed their own version of the festival upon the conquest of many pagan areas, the feasting and community aspects of the festival have been maintained, with direct parallels of the birth of Christ in the Christian version and the theme of life and rebirth in the Pagan version helping to amalgamate the two together. Giving and receiving gifts served to strengthen communities, often portrayed through the imagery of St. Nicholas (eventually becoming Santa Claus in popular culture).

However, as civilisation began to consolidate its grip on humanity ever further since the industrial revolution, the festival of life has become poisoned. The giving of presents to consolidate community proved to be the weak-point – people began to use the opportunity to attempt to illustrate their wealth by giving the biggest and best presents. This was the precursor to consumerism, the updated form of this tendency in which people define theirselves not by the content of their character but what they can buy and own. The increasing amount of cheap credit helped to spread this ideology from the upper through to the middle and finally working classes, allowing nearly anyone to buy former luxuries en masse.

The advertising and PR industries soon came to realise that this ideology could be tapped to create a spending frenzy at Christmas time. People could be convinced to judge themselves on the quantity and quality of the presents they could give – not only could they base their personalities on their possessions but also on their ability to outspend each other at Christmas. Thus an advertising/propaganda campaign was undertaken that encouraged people to spend as much as possible – and the result has been a runaway success, with the millions spent at Christmas often making the difference on the balance sheets for many companies, and many families acquire huge debts on credit cards simply to keep up with the demand. Communities continue to be broken apart, with another major period of community-building destroyed in the name of profit.

And so, it has come to the point now where the festival of life has become a festival of consumerism. As consumerism promotes the unlimited and growing creation and purchase of largely unnecessary goods, it plays a major role in the destruction of earth’s ecosystem, helping to push billions of organisms into extinction. Thus, the festival of life has now become a festival of death, but of course with advertising to tell us that it’s all still ‘in the spirit of Christmas’.

So what’s the alternative? We need to reclaim this time of year for a festival that celebrates life, communities and the earth. The focus needs to return to community-building and fun, with feasting and gifts returned to this purpose. Keeping things homemade can cut out the insidious effects of consumerism, forcing out the monetisation of the festival and instead welcoming honest and heart-felt exchange. Spending time outdoors with nature is also crucial, to remind us of not only our links with each other but our links with the earth and its ecosystem, especially on the Solstice day itself. Lastly, as a time of rebirth, it is a good time to plan for the coming year and how we intend to rebuild community and the earth in that time. Set down specific actions such as growing more of your own food, joining local groups, getting to know your community, learning about Permaculture and other new practical skills or planning local currencies and economies. There is no time to lose in building a new, better alternative to civilisation, and we can transform Christmas and the Mid-Winter Festival to help and not hinder us in this great project.

1 Comment »

A recent series of Channel 4 comedy documentaries called ‘Silly Money’ by Bremner, Bird and Fortune has explored the ongoing economic crisis, but goes deeper than most of the media in revealing some of its true roots – all whilst still being very funny and good watching!  Check it out here.

No Comments »