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"Der Nullpunkt des systemischen Kollapses '

Hier ist eine große Artikel von Chris Hedges, die viel von dem, was wir denken, hier spiegelt, ist es auch lesenswert:

Wir stehen an der Schwelle zu einem der gefährlichsten Momente der Menschheit.

Aleksandr Herzen, Sprechen vor einem Jahrhundert zu einer Gruppe von Anarchisten, wie man den Zaren zu stürzen, erinnerte seine Zuhörer, es sei nicht ihre Aufgabe, ein sterbendes System zu retten, sondern um sie zu ersetzen: "Wir denken, wir sind die Ärzte. Wir sind der Krankheit. "All Widerstand muss erkennen, dass die politischen Körpers und der globale Kapitalismus tot sind. Wir sollten aufhören, Energie zu verschwenden versucht, zu reformieren oder appellieren an sie. Dies bedeutet nicht das Ende des Widerstandes, aber es funktioniert sehr unterschiedliche Formen des Widerstands bedeuten. Es bedeutet, Drehen unsere Energien auf den Aufbau nachhaltiger Gemeinschaften, um die kommende Krise zu überstehen, da wir nicht in der Lage sein wird, um zu überleben und ohne eine gemeinsame Anstrengung widerstehen.

Diese Gemeinschaften, wenn sie in eine reine Überlebenskünstler Modus zurück, ohne sich an die Verknüpfung von konzentrischen Kreisen von der größeren Gemeinschaft, dem Staat und dem Planeten, wird als moralisch und spirituell bankrott wie die Corporate Kräfte gegen uns aufgereiht. Alle Infrastrukturen bauen wir, wie die Klöster im Mittelalter, sollten versuchen, am Leben zu erhalten, die intellektuellen und künstlerischen Traditionen, die eine Zivilgesellschaft, des Humanismus und des Gemeinwohls möglich zu machen. Der Zugang zu landwirtschaftlicher Parzellen wird an erster Stelle stehen. Wir müssen begreifen, wie die mittelalterlichen Mönche taten, dass wir keinen Einfluss auf die größere Kultur um uns herum, zumindest kurzfristig, aber vielleicht können wir die moralischen Codes und Kultur für Generationen über uns behalten. Widerstand wird auf kleinen, oft unmerklichen Trotzreaktionen reduziert werden, da diejenigen, die ihre Integrität beibehalten entdeckt in der langen Nacht des 20. Jahrhunderts Faschismus und Kommunismus.

Wir stehen an der Schwelle zu einer der düstersten Perioden in der Geschichte der Menschheit, wenn die hellen Lichter der Zivilisation heraus zu blinken, und wir werden seit Jahrzehnten sinken, wenn nicht Jahrhunderte, in die Barbarei. Die Eliten haben sich erfolgreich überzeugt, dass wir uns nicht mehr die Fähigkeit haben, die offenbarten Wahrheiten vor uns vorgestellt verstehen oder sich zu wehren gegen das Chaos, das durch wirtschaftliche und ökologische Katastrophe verursacht. Solange die Masse der Menschen verwirrt und verängstigt, gefüttert Bilder, die sie ständig halluzinieren erlauben, in diesem Zustand der Barbarei existieren, können sie schlagen in regelmäßigen Abständen mit einem blinden Wut gegen erhöhte staatliche Repression, weit verbreitete Armut und Lebensmittelknappheit. Aber sie werden nicht über die Fähigkeit und das Selbstvertrauen, um in großen und kleinen Wegen die Strukturen der Kontrolle herauszufordern. Die Phantasie von der weit verbreiteten Revolten und Massenbewegungen zu brechen, die Hegemonie des Ständestaates ist genau das - eine Phantasie.

Meine Analyse kommt nah an die Analyse von vielen Anarchisten. Aber es gibt einen entscheidenden Unterschied. Die Anarchisten nicht verstehen, die Natur der Gewalt. Sie begreifen das Ausmaß der Fäulnis in unserer kulturellen und politischen Institutionen, sie wissen, sie müssen den Tentakeln des Konsumismus zu trennen, aber sie glauben naiv, dass sie mit körperlichen Formen des Widerstands und Gewalttaten begegnet werden kann. Es gibt Debatten innerhalb der anarchistischen Bewegung - wie jene auf der Zerstörung von Eigentum - aber sobald Sie anfangen, mit Plastiksprengstoff, bekommen unschuldige Menschen getötet. Und als anarchische Gewalt, um die Mechanismen des Regierens zu stören beginnt, wird die Machtelite verwenden diese Taten, egal wie gering, als Vorwand, um unverhältnismäßige und rücksichtslose Mengen von Gewalt gegen echte und vermeintliche Rührwerke eingesetzt werden, nur schüren die Wut der Enteigneten.

Ich bin kein Pazifist. Ich weiß, es gibt Zeiten, und sogar zugeben, dass dies schließlich einer von ihnen, wenn Menschen gezwungen sind, auf Montage Repression mit Gewalt reagieren. Ich war in Sarajevo während des Krieges in Bosnien. Wir wussten genau, was die serbischen Truppen die Stadt klingeln würde, um uns zu tun, wenn sie durch die Verteidigung und Graben-System rund um die belagerte Stadt brach. Wir hatten die Beispiele des Drina-Tal oder die Stadt Vukovar, wo etwa ein Drittel der moslemischen Einwohner getötet worden waren und der Rest zusammengepfercht in Flüchtlingslagern oder Flüchtling. Es gibt Zeiten, wenn die einzige Wahl gelassen abholen eine Waffe, um Ihre Familie, Nachbarschaft und Stadt zu verteidigen ist. Aber diejenigen, die am geschicktesten bei der Verteidigung erwies sich ausnahmslos Sarajevo kam von der kriminellen Klasse. Wenn sie nicht schießen serbische Soldaten wurden sie plünderten die Wohnungen von ethnischen Serben in Sarajevo und oft auch deren Ausführung, sowie terrorisieren ihre Glaubensbrüder. Wenn Sie das Gift der Gewalt einzunehmen, auch in einer gerechten Sache, es verdirbt, verformt und verdreht dir. Gewalt ist ein Medikament, ja, es ist der stärkste Betäubungsmittel der Menschheit bekannt ist. Diejenigen, die meisten süchtig nach Gewalt sind diejenigen, die Zugang zu Waffen und eine Vorliebe für Gewalt zu haben. Und diese Mörder auf der Oberfläche von jedem bewaffneten Bewegung zu erheben und verunreinigen sie mit dem berauschenden und verführerische Kraft, die mit der Fähigkeit zu zerstören kommt. Ich habe es in den Krieg nach dem Krieg gesehen. Wenn du runter gehst diesen Weg Sie am Ende messen Sie Ihre Monster gegen ihren Monstern. Und die empfindlichen, die humane und die sanfte, sind diejenigen, die eine Neigung zu nähren und zu schützen Leben haben, marginalisiert und oft getötet. Die romantische Vision von Krieg und Gewalt ist so weit verbreitet unter den Anarchisten und linken hart wie es in der Mainstream-Kultur ist. Diejenigen, die mit Gewalt widerstehen wird in keinem Fall die Ständestaat oder aufrechtzuerhalten, die kulturellen Werte, die nachhaltig, wenn wir eine lebenswerte Zukunft haben werden muss. Von meinen vielen Jahren als Kriegsberichterstatter in El Salvador, Guatemala, im Gazastreifen und Bosnien habe ich gesehen, dass die bewaffneten Widerstandsbewegungen immer sind Mutationen der Gewalt, die sie hervorgebracht. Ich bin nicht so naiv zu glauben, ich könnte diese bewaffneten Bewegungen vermieden werden können, hatte ich ein landlosen Bauern in Guatemala oder El Salvador, ein Palästinenser im Gaza-Streifen oder ein Muslim in Sarajevo gewesen, aber diese gewaltsame Reaktion auf Repression ist und immer sein wird tragisch. Es muss vermieden werden, die aber nicht auf Kosten der unser eigenes Überleben.

Die Demokratie ist ein System ideal ausgelegt, um den Status Quo zu ändern, wurde beschädigt und gezähmt zu sklavisch dienen, den Status quo. Wir haben erlebt, wie John Ralston Saul schreibt, ein Staatsstreich in Zeitlupe. Und der Coup ist vorbei. Sie gewannen. Wir haben verloren. Das völlige Versagen von Aktivisten zu Unternehmens-, Industrie-Staaten in Richtung der schweren Umweltkriminalität Reform zu drücken, um imperiale Abenteurertum zu vereiteln oder um eine humane Politik gegenüber den Massen der Armen der Welt stammt aus einer Unfähigkeit, die neuen Realitäten der Macht erkennen zu bauen. Das Paradigma der Macht hat sich unwiderruflich verändert und so muss das Paradigma der Widerstand verändern.

Es gab eine Menge von TALK im vergangenen Jahr rund WIE Barack Obama wäre eine "transformative" PRESIDENT werden - aber echte Transformation, es stellt sich heraus, erfordert eine Menge MEHR ALS EINE USWAHL telegen LEADER. TATSÄCHLICH Drehen dieses Land um IS GOING TO Jahre der Belagerung Kriegsführung gegen tief verwurzelte Interessen richten, die Verteidigung eine zutiefst dysfunktionalen politischen SYSTEM.

Paul Krugman, "Fehlende Richard Nixon," THE NEW YORK TIMES, 30. August 2009

Zu viele Widerstandsbewegungen weiterhin in die Fassade durch Wahlen legitimierte Politik, Parlamente, Verfassungen, bills of rights, Lobbying und dem Auftreten einer rationalen Wirtschaft zu kaufen. Die Hebel der Macht sind mittlerweile so verseucht, dass die Bedürfnisse und die Stimmen der Bürger irrelevant geworden sind. Die Wahl von Barack Obama war ein weiterer Triumph der Propaganda über Substanz und eine geschickte Manipulation und Betrug an der Öffentlichkeit durch die Massenmedien. Wir verwechselten Stil und Ethnizität - eine Werbe-Taktik erstmals von den United Colors of Benetton und Calvin Klein - für eine progressive Politik und echte Veränderungen. Wir verwechseln, wie wir gemacht wurden, um mit Wissen zu fühlen. Aber das Ziel, wie bei allen Marken, war es, passive Konsumenten Versehen eine Marke für ein Erlebnis. Obama, nun eine globale Berühmtheit, ist eine Marke. Er hatte fast keine Erfahrung neben zwei Jahre in den Senat, fehlte jegliche moralischen Kern und wurde wie alle Dinge für alle Menschen verkauft. Die Obama-Kampagne erhielt den Namen Advertising Age 's Marketer of the Year für das Jahr 2008 und verdrängt Zweitplatzierten Apple und Zappos.com. Lass es dir von den Profis. Marke Obama ist der Traum jedes Werbeprofis. Präsident Obama tut eine Sache und Marke Obama bringt Sie in ein anderes zu glauben. Dies ist die Essenz erfolgreicher Werbung. Sie kaufen oder zu tun, was die Anzeigenkunden wollen, weil, wie sie sich fühlen Sie sich.

Wir leben in einer Kultur von dem, was Benjamin DeMott genannte "Junk-Politik." Junk-Politik nicht fordern Gerechtigkeit oder die Wiedergutmachung von Rechten aus. Es ist immer personalisiert Probleme, anstatt sie zu klären. Sie meidet echte Debatte zu hergestellten Skandale, Promi-Klatsch und Brille. Es Trompeten ewigen Optimismus, endlos lobt unsere moralische Stärke und Charakter, und kommuniziert in einem Wohlfühl-your-Schmerz Sprache. Das Ergebnis der Junk-Politik ist, dass sich nichts ändert ", das heißt Null Unterbrechung in den Prozessen und Praktiken, die bestehenden, Stellwerke von sozio-ökonomischen Vorteil zu stärken."

Die kulturelle Überzeugung, dass wir die Dinge durch Denken geschehen, durch die Visualisierung, die von ihnen wollen, indem Sie in unsere innere Kraft oder durch Verständnis, dass wir wirklich außergewöhnlich sind, ist magisches Denken. Wir können immer mehr Geld verdienen, lernen Sie neue Quoten, mehr zu konsumieren Produkte und zur Förderung unserer Karriere, wenn wir genug Glauben haben. Diese magische Denken, predigte uns quer durch das politische Spektrum von Oprah-, Sport-Stars, Hollywood, Selbsthilfe-Gurus und christlichen Demagogen, ist weitgehend verantwortlich für unsere wirtschaftliche und ökologische Kollaps, da jede Kassandra, der es kommen sah als "negativ entlassen wurde. "Dieser Glaube, der Männer und Frauen sich zu verhalten und zu handeln wie die kleinen Kinder erlaubt, diskreditiert berechtigten Sorgen und Ängste. Er verschlimmert Verzweiflung und Passivität. Sie fördert einen Zustand der Selbsttäuschung. Der Zweck, die Struktur und die Ziele des Ständestaates sind nie ernsthaft in Frage gestellt. Zu hinterfragen, um in Kritik an der Corporate kollektiven engagieren, ist sein obstruktiven und negativ. Und es hat pervertiert, wie wir sehen uns, unsere Nation und die Welt der Natur. Das neue Paradigma der Macht, mit seinen bizarren Ideologie des grenzenlosen Fortschritt und Glück unmöglich gekoppelt ist, hat ganze Nationen wandte, einschließlich den Vereinigten Staaten, zu Monstern.

Wir können in Kopenhagen marschieren. Wir können an Bill McKibben weltweiten Tag des Klimas Proteste. Wir können Kompost in unseren Hinterhöfen und hängen unsere Wäsche zum Trocknen. Wir können Briefe an unsere gewählten Beamten zu schreiben und für Barack Obama stimmen, aber die Macht-Elite ist unempfindlich gegen die Farce der demokratischen Partizipation. Power ist in den Händen der moralischen und intellektuellen Trolle, die rücksichtslos schaffen sind ein System von Neo-Feudalismus und das Töten des Ökosystems, das die menschliche Spezies trägt. Und Appellen an ihre bessere Natur oder mit dem Ziel, die internen Hebel der Macht zu beeinflussen, wird nicht mehr funktionieren.

Wir werden uns nicht, vor allem in den Vereinigten Staaten, unsere Götterdämmerung vermeiden. Obama, wie Kanadas Premierminister Stephen Harper und den anderen Leitern der Industrienationen hat sich als feige ein Werkzeug des Ständestaates als George W. Bush unter Beweis gestellt. Unser demokratisches System hat sich in das, was der politische Philosoph Sheldon Wolin beschriftet invertierten Totalitarismus verwandelt. Inverted Totalitarismus, im Gegensatz zu klassischen Totalitarismus, nicht um einen Demagogen oder charismatischen Führer zu drehen. Es findet seinen Ausdruck in der Anonymität des Ständestaates. Es gibt vor, die Demokratie, Patriotismus, eine freie Presse, parlamentarische Systeme und Verfassungen hegen, während manipulieren und korrumpieren internen Hebel zu unterlaufen und zu vereiteln demokratischen Institutionen. Politische Kandidaten werden in Volksabstimmungen von den Bürgern gewählt, sondern von einem Heer von Lobbyisten in Washington, Ottawa oder anderen Landeshauptstädten der Autor die Gesetzgebung und nutzen Sie die Gesetzgeber, es weiterzugeben regiert. A Corporate Media steuert fast alles, was wir lesen, sehen oder hören und stellt eine einheitliche Auffassung fad. Massenkultur, Besitz und Verbreitung von Kapitalgesellschaften, lenkt uns mit Kleinigkeiten, Brillen und Promi-Klatsch. In der klassischen totalitären Regimen, wie Nazi-Faschismus oder der sowjetische Kommunismus, war Ökonomie der Politik untergeordnet. "Unter invertierten Totalitarismus das Gegenteil der Fall ist", schreibt Wolin. "Wirtschaft die Politik beherrscht - und mit dieser Herrschaft stammt verschiedenen Formen von Rücksichtslosigkeit."

Inverted Totalitarismus schwingt Gesamtleistung ohne Rückgriff auf gröbere Formen der Kontrolle, wie Gulags, Konzentrationslager oder Massenterrors. Es nutzt Wissenschaft und Technik für ihre dunklen Zwecke. Es erzwingt die ideologische Gleichförmigkeit mit Masse Kommunikationssystemen zu verschwenderischen Konsum als eine innere Zwang zu vermitteln und unsere Illusionen über uns selbst für die Wirklichkeit zu ersetzen. Es ist nicht gewaltsam zu unterdrücken, Dissidenten, solange diese Dissidenten wirkungslos bleiben. Und wie es uns lenkt es demontiert Produktionsstandorte, Gemeinden verwüstet, entfesselt Wellen des menschlichen Elends und Schiffe Arbeitsplätze in Länder, wo Faschisten und Kommunisten wissen, wie man Arbeiter in Schach zu halten. Er tut all das, während die Fahne schwenkte und mouthing patriotischen Parolen. "Die Vereinigten Staaten hat sich zum Vorzeigeprojekt dafür, wie Demokratie kann ohne zu scheinen, unterdrückt werden, verwaltet werden", schreibt Wolin.

Die Praxis und die Psychologie der Werbung, die Herrschaft der "Marktkräfte" in vielen Arenen andere als Märkte, die kontinuierliche technologische Fortschritte, die kunstvollen Fantasien (Computerspiele, virtuelle Avatare, Raumfahrt) zu fördern, der Sättigung durch Massenmedien und Propaganda von jedem Haushalt und die Übernahme der Universitäten haben die meisten von uns Geiseln gemacht. Die Fäulnis des Imperialismus, die immer als unvereinbar mit Demokratie, gesehen hat, die militärischen und Waffenhersteller monopolisieren 1000000000000 $ pro Jahr in der Abwehr-Ausgaben in den USA sogar als die Nation wirtschaftlichen Kollaps steht. Der Imperialismus immer militarisiert Innenpolitik. Und diese Militarisierung, wie Wolin Noten, kombiniert mit den kulturellen Fantasien der Heldenverehrung und Geschichten von einzelnen Fähigkeiten, ewige Jugendlichkeit, Schönheit durch Operation, Aktion in Nanosekunden gemessen und einem Traum-beladenen Kultur der ständig wachsenden Kontrolle und die Möglichkeit, riesige Flächen trennen der Bevölkerung von der Realität. Diejenigen, die die Bilder steuern uns. Und während wir von den Zelluloid Schatten an den Wänden von Platos Höhle, diese Corporate Kräfte, pries die Vorteile der Privatisierung, haben effektiv die Institutionen der sozialen Demokratie (soziale Sicherheit, Gewerkschaften, Wohlfahrts-, öffentlichen Gesundheitswesens und des sozialen Wohnungsbaus) abgebaut worden hingerissen und wälzte den sozialen und politischen Ideale des New Deal. Die Befürworter der Globalisierung und unregulierten Kapitalismus verschwenden keine Zeit mit der Analyse anderer Ideologien. Sie haben eine Ideologie, oder eher einen Aktionsplan, der von einer Ideologie verteidigt wird, und sklavisch folgen. Wir auf der linken Seite haben Dutzende von Analysen der konkurrierenden Ideologien ohne schlüssiges Konzept von unseren eigenen. Dies hat uns zappeln, während Corporate Kräfte rücksichtslos zu demontieren Zivilgesellschaft.

Wir sind durch eine der großen zivilisatorischen seismische Umkehrungen leben. Die Ideologie der Globalisierung, wie alle "unvermeidlich" utopischen Visionen, wird als Betrüger entlarvt. Die Machtelite, ratlos und verwirrt, klammert sich an den katastrophalen Prinzipien der Globalisierung und ihrer veralteten Sprache, um die sich abzeichnende politische und wirtschaftliche Vakuum zu überdecken. Die absurde Vorstellung, dass der Markt allein soll die wirtschaftliche und politische Konstrukte zu bestimmen führte Industrienationen auf andere Bereiche des menschlichen Bedeutung zu opfern - von der Arbeitsbedingungen, der Besteuerung, Kinderarbeit, Hunger, Gesundheit und Umweltverschmutzung - auf dem Altar des Freihandels. Er verließ die Armen der Welt schlechter geht und die Vereinigten Staaten mit den größten Defiziten - die nie zurückgezahlt werden können - in der menschlichen Geschichte. Die massiven Rettungsaktionen, Konjunkturpakete, Giveaways und kurzfristigen Schulden, zusammen mit imperialen Kriege, die wir nicht mehr leisten kann, verlässt die USA kämpfen, um fast $ 5 Billionen Schulden zu finanzieren in diesem Jahr. Dies erfordert Washington zu versteigern über 96000000000 $ in Schulden in der Woche. Einmal China und die ölreichen Staaten zu Fuß entfernt von unserer Schuld, die eines Tages zu geschehen hat, wird die Federal Reserve die Käufer der letzten Instanz geworden. Die Fed hat vielleicht so viel wie 2000 Milliarden neue Dollar in den letzten zwei Jahren gedruckt, und den Kauf dieses viel neue Schulden wird es sehen, in Kraft, Druck Billionen mehr. Dies ist, wenn die Inflation, Hyperinflation und höchstwahrscheinlich wird der Dollar in Junk drehen. Und an diesem Punkt das gesamte System zusammenbricht.

IMAGINE Führende Ökonomen verbrachte ein wenig Zeit in der Wildnis. VIELLEICHT Der Vorsitzende der Federal Reserve Ein Nachmittag STANDING an der Mündung des Tsiu DER FLUSS verbringen wenig erforschten LOST CENTRAL Alaskas Küste, wie Die schlanken Körpern von Silver Salmon ÜBERALL schwoll UPSTREAM PUSHING gegen ihn.

EF Schumacher Society, SMALLISBEAUTIFUL.ORG

Alle traditionellen Normen und Überzeugungen sind in einer schweren Wirtschaftskrise erschüttert. Die sittliche Ordnung auf den Kopf gestellt. Die ehrlich und fleißig werden, während die Gangster, Schieber und Spekulanten gehen weg mit Millionen abgewischt. Die Elite wird sich zurückziehen, wie Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine geschrieben hat, in gated communities, wo sie Zugang zu Dienstleistungen, Essen, Unterkunft und Sicherheit verweigert, um den Rest von uns haben wird. Wir beginnen eine Periode in der Geschichte der Menschheit, wenn es nur Herren und Knechte sein wird. Die Corporate-Kräfte, die versuchen, ein Bündnis mit den radikalen christlichen Rechten und andere Extremisten machen wird, wird mit Angst, Chaos, die Wut auf die herrschenden Eliten und das Gespenst der Linken Dissens und des Terrorismus zu verhängen drakonische Kontrollen rücksichtslos auszulöschen Opposition Bewegungen. Und während sie es tun, werden sie schwenkten die amerikanische Flagge und skandierten Parolen patriotischen und verspricht Recht und Ordnung und umklammert das christliche Kreuz. Der Totalitarismus, George Orwell wies darauf hin, ist nicht so sehr ein Zeitalter des Glaubens, sondern eine Zeit der Schizophrenie. "Eine Gesellschaft wird totalitär, wenn seine Struktur wird schamlos künstlichen", schrieb Orwell. "Das ist, wenn seine herrschende Klasse hat ihre Funktion verloren, doch gelingt es, Festhalten an Macht durch Gewalt oder Betrug." Unsere Eliten haben Betrug verwendet. Die Gewalt ist alles, was sie hinterlassen haben.

Unsere mittelmäßigen und bankrotten Eliten versucht verzweifelt, ein System, das nicht gerettet werden können sparen. Noch wichtiger ist, versuchen sie, sich selbst zu retten. Alle Versuche, innerhalb dieses verfallene System zu arbeiten und diese Klasse von Power-Broker wird als nutzlos erweisen. Und Widerstand muss mit der rauen neuen Realität einer globalen, kapitalistischen Ordnung, die an die Macht durch immer Bauformen von brutalen und offene Repression wird klammern zu reagieren. Sobald Kredit austrocknet für den durchschnittlichen Bürger, schafft einmal massiven Arbeitslosigkeit eine dauerhafte und wütend Unterschicht und die billigen Industriegütern, die die Opiate unserer Ware sind Kultur verschwinden, werden wir wahrscheinlich in einem System, das mehr ähnelt klassischen Totalitarismus zu entwickeln. Roher, gewalttätiger Formen der Repression müssen als die weicheren Mechanismen der Kontrolle von invertierten Totalitarismus brechen bevorzugt eingesetzt werden.

Es ist kein Zufall, dass die Wirtschaftskrise wird mit der ökologischen Krise konvergieren. In seinem Buch The Great Transformation (1944), legte Karl Polanyi heraus die verheerenden Folgen - die Vertiefungen, Kriegen und Totalitarismus -, die wachsen aus einem so genannten selbst-regulierten freien Marktes. Er begriff, dass "Faschismus, wie der Sozialismus, wurde in einer Marktgesellschaft, die zu funktionieren weigerte verwurzelt ist." Er warnte, dass ein Finanzsystem immer zufällt, ohne schwere staatliche Kontrolle, in eine Mafia-Kapitalismus - und ein politisches System Mafia - das ist eine gute Beschreibung unserer finanzielle und politische Struktur. Ein sich selbst regulierenden Markt, Polanyi schrieb, dreht den Menschen und die natürliche Umwelt in Waren, eine Situation, die die Zerstörung der Gesellschaft und der natürlichen Umwelt sorgt. Der freie Markt die Annahme, dass Natur und Mensch Objekte, deren Wert durch den Markt bestimmt sind, erlaubt es jedem, für Profit oder bis zur Erschöpfung Zusammenbruch ausgeschöpft werden. Eine Gesellschaft, die nicht mehr erkennt, dass Natur und des menschlichen Lebens eine sakrale Dimension, ein Eigenwert jenseits Geldwert haben begeht kollektiven Selbstmord. Solche Gesellschaften kannibalisieren sich selbst, bis sie sterben. Dies ist, was wir durchlaufen.

Wenn wir in sich geschlossene Strukturen, diejenigen, die so wenig Schaden wie möglich für die Umwelt tun zu bauen, können wir überstehen den kommenden Zusammenbruch. Diese Aufgabe durch die Existenz von kleinen, körperlichen Enklaven, die Zugriff auf eine nachhaltige Landwirtschaft haben wird erreicht werden, sind in der Lage, sich so weit wie möglich zu trennen von der kommerziellen Kultur und kann weitgehend autark. Diese Gemeinden müssen Wände gegen elektronische Propaganda und Angst, die über den Äther gepumpt wird zu bauen. Kanada wird wahrscheinlich ein gastfreundlicher Ort, um dies als die Vereinigten Staaten tun, was angesichts der starken Unterströmung Amerikas von Gewalt sein. Aber in keinem Land werden diejenigen, die überleben müssen isolierte Flächen sowie Entfernung von städtischen Gebieten, welche die Nahrung Wüsten in den Innenstädten werden sehen, wie auch wilde Gewalt, ausgelaugt durch die urbane Landschaft als Erzeugnisse und Waren werden unerschwinglich teuer und staatliche Repression wird härter und härter.

Die zunehmend offene Nutzung der Kraft von den Eliten die Kontrolle zu behalten darf nicht enden Akte des Widerstands. Akte des Widerstands sind moralische Handlungen. Sie beginnen, weil Menschen mit Gewissen, den moralischen Imperativ zu verstehen, um Systeme von Missbrauch und Willkür herauszufordern. Sie sollten durchgeführt werden, nicht weil sie effektiv sind, sondern weil sie haben recht. Diejenigen, die diese Handlungen beginnen, sind immer nur wenige geben und entlassen diejenigen, die ihre Feigheit hinter ihren Zynismus zu verstecken. Aber der Widerstand jedoch marginal, weiterhin das Leben in einer Welt, überflutet Tod zu bejahen. Es ist der höchste Akt des Glaubens, die höchste Form der Spiritualität und allein macht Hoffnung möglich. Diejenigen, die durchgeführt großen Taten des Widerstands oft opferten ihre Sicherheit und Komfort, oft verbrachte Zeit im Gefängnis und in einigen Fällen getötet wurden. Sie verstanden, dass, um im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes zu leben, als freie und unabhängige Menschen existieren, auch unter der dunkelsten Nacht der staatlichen Repression, gemeint zu trotzen Ungerechtigkeit.

Wenn der Dissident lutherischer Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer aus seiner Zelle wurde in einem Nazi-Gefängnis zum Galgen führte, waren seine letzten Worte: "Das ist für mich das Ende, sondern auch der Anfang." Bonhoeffer wusste, dass die meisten Bürger in seiner Nation waren durch ihr Schweigen mitschuldig machen in einem riesigen Unternehmen des Todes. Doch so aussichtslos schien es in dem Moment, bekräftigte er, was müssen wir alle bestätigen. Er hat den Tod nicht vermeiden. Er wusste nicht, als eigenständige Person, zu überleben. Aber er verstand, dass sein Widerstand und sogar seinen Tod Taten der Liebe waren. Er kämpfte und starb für die Heiligkeit des Lebens. Er gab auch zu denen, die ihm nicht beigetreten sind, eine andere Erzählung, seinen Trotz und letztlich seine Henker verurteilt.

We must continue to resist, but do so now with the discomforting realization that significant change will probably never occur in our lifetime. This makes resistance harder. It shifts resistance from the tangible and the immediate to the amorphous and the indeterminate. But to give up acts of resistance is spiritual and intellectual death. It is to surrender to the dehumanizing ideology of totalitarian capitalism. Acts of resistance keep alive another narrative, sustain our integrity and empower others, who we may never meet, to stand up and carry the flame we pass to them. No act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a corporate charter, holding global internet votes or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order. But we will have to resist and then find the faith that resistance is worthwhile, for we will not immediately alter the awful configuration of power. And in this long, long war a community to sustain us, emotionally and materially, will be the key to a life of defiance.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that the exclusive preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group is what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible: “ The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.

The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion. We will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door. Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive. And for now this is the only victory possible.

Aktie

'Sumac Kawsay' – Good Living

Here's an interesting article, exploring the native american term 'Sumac Kawsay', or 'Buen Vivir':

(Portuguese to Spanish Translation by Blanca Diego.
Spanish to English Translation by Christopher Reid (Decolonial Translation Group)

NOTE: The original article “Sumac Kawsay” was published on the Web site of Foro Social Mundial on 6 February 2009. The Spanish translation by Blanca Diego, “Buen Vivir,” was published on the same site on the same day. English translation by Christopher Reid. The French translation by Angélica Montes, “'Bien Vivre', un concept de la pensée décoloniale indigène en Amérique latine,” is available at the Web site of le Mouvement des indigènes de la république (MIR). )

Perhaps because I am a Brazilian, the first time I heard the expression buen vivir I immediately thought of “buena vida (2),” a term which in our country is used pejoratively to refer to an easy and unconcerned life, one filled with little work, plenty of evening strolls and other luxuries, and zero political consciousness.

I was completely mistaken. Buen vivir means nothing of the sort. On the contrary, according to the indigenous peoples of the Andean region, and the Aymara people in particular (3), buen vivir is a solid principle which means life in harmony and equilibrium between men and women, between different communities and, above all, between human beings and the natural environment of which they are part. In practice, this concept implies knowing how to live in community with others while achieving a minimum degree of equality. It means eliminating prejudice and exploitation between people as well as respecting nature and preserving its equilibrium.

According to this definition, the culture in which we are submerged is utterly devoid of buen vivir. We are in complete disequilibrium with ourselves and with nature when we buy more than we actually need; when, without remorse, we exploit the land, water and even other human beings themselves; when we search for exorbitant profits which, the majority of the time, only benefit one person or a very small group of people.

Technologies continue to improve and every day the comforts and conveniences which these offer are increasing, but only for a few people. Meanwhile, for the majority of people what are increasing are poverty, exploitation, prejudice, competition and individualism. This is the logic of the system in which we live. There can be no doubt that we are not practicing buen vivir.

On the other hand, we hear in the news all the time about the spread of the world financial crisis, the dollar's falling value, the risk associated with dwindling water resources….In sum, they are continuously reminding us of the failure of the system.

In the face of all of this, it seems ironic to hear indigenous people referred to as 'savages' whose way of life is backwards and primitive. How can this be, given that they have always known how to live in community with one another, to produce what is necessary for their survival and to live in harmony with nature and with other living beings; to nourish themselves on fruits, legumes and other vegetables, and to understand better than anyone else the secrets of nature and of natural medicine? Furthermore, they have lived in the Americas for thousands of years in a sustainable manner – though they may not have used precisely this same term – long before the so-called “discovery” of America. Is this really what a savage is?

Recently, at the ninth meeting of the World Social Forum which was held in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, in the city of Belém do Pará, a defense of the concept of buen vivir was presented. For those who were there at the Forum, the participation of indigenous peoples was quite significant, and not just because of the rituals and music which they performed, or for the tattoos on their bodies or their colorful clothing. It was also significant because of the consistency of their discourse and the courage they demonstrated in defending what they believe in: 'good living' and 'living well'.

Sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, is a concept which has already been incorporated into the debates of the Ecuadorean Constituent Assembly. Having recently been approved by voters in a popular referendum, buen vivir is guaranteed in Bolivia's new constitution. Buen vivir was the hallmark of this World Social Forum. Perhaps it will also be the beginning of a possible new world.

ENDNOTES

1) TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The literal English translation is “good living,” but it is important to observe that buen vivir is itself an imperfect Spanish approximation of the (indigenous Ecuadorean) Kichwa term, sumak kawsay. Meanwhile, in Bolivia, a similar concept stemming from the Aymara Indian cosmovision and language – suma qamaña – is customarily translated into Spanish as vivir bien, or “living well.” The author, a Brazilian thinking and writing in Portuguese, has opted to utilize the Ecuadorean Kichwa/Spanish terms throughout her article rather than attempt a concrete Portuguese translation of the concept.

2) TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Literally, “(the) good life.”

3) TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Again, to avoid confusion on the part of the lay reader it must be emphasized that sumak kawsay and buen vivir are specifically Ecuadorean Kichwa and Spanish terms, respectively; they are not the actual terms used by the Aymara and Spanish speakers of Bolivia (see translator's note 1).

Sumac Kawsay is what we believe is key to building a new society, one which is built on interdependence and communities rather than hyperindividualism, one which views ourselves as part of nature rather then seperate, and one which strives for equality and not for individual power and selfishness. Dismantling Civilisation is about building our lives and comminites around Sumac Kawsay as our central story, and not around the Civilisation's story of greed, conquest and expansion.

Aktie

The Real Crisis we face

Die Klimaverhandlungen in Kopenhagen - der 15. Konferenz aller Parteien des UNFCCC - haben nun zu einem Ende gekommen. Die Hoffnung war, dass die versammelten Staatschefs und Politiker wäre ein rechtlich bindendes Abkommen, das sehen die globalen Emissionen von Treibhausgasen drastisch sinken, wie die Wissenschaft gefordert, Begrenzung des Ausmaßes des Klimawandels bereits über uns gekommen wäre geschaffen haben.

Aber das ist, was es war - eine Hoffnung. Das Kopenhagener Abkommen lediglich zum Ausdruck, dass die Führer der Welt zu akzeptieren, dass der Klimawandel zu sollte unter 2 Grad Celsius begrenzt werden, liefert aber keine Aktion oder die Verpflichtung dazu. 20 Jahre präsentiert die Wissenschaft an die Politik, 2 Jahre darauf hingearbeitet dieser Konferenz, 2 Wochen Verhandlungen über den Text, und alles, was erreicht wurde ist eine umstrittene Stück Papier behauptet, dass unsere Führer möchten Klimachaos begrenzt zu sehen, aber nicht genug, um tatsächlich Gegenstände auf der Linie. Währenddessen werden weiterhin Apathie greift die Mehrheit der nicht vorhat, die Staats-und Regierungschefs für den Wandel, und Konsumgesellschaft und die industrielle Zivilisation, ihren Weg der Zerstörung unvermindert anrichten. Despite the best efforts of the environmental and social justice movements, we seem to be the closest we've ever been to the brink of defeat. Warum?

For years the strategy of those in the movement has been that if we can convince the public, sceptics and politicians of the great destruction being wrought on people and planet, then they'll automatically support action to stop it. But even with the majority believing that global warming is anthropogenic, knowing about the suffering and poverty of the third world and all the injustices present in our society, this has not happened. After years of campaigning, of laying out the facts and science, of presenting the unfolding tragedy of climate change, we've finally reached the core of the crisis. Most people now know and accept the science. They know what the future holds if they don't act. They know the suffering that grips and will tighten its grip on humanity. And they don't care. It can be shrugged off, ignored and forgotten about. All they really care about is themselves, and they reckon they'll be fine. Compassion for those suffering and being destroyed in their name is suppressed. They simply don't care.

And that's the problem. This is why the emerging crisis has occurred, this is why the environment has continually been trashed, this is why injustice continues and grows at an ever increasing pace. It's because society as a whole doesn't care. The environmental and social crises enveloping humanity is a crisis of compassion, not of some specific technologies, countries or policies. There is no doubt these are factors in the crisis, contributing to and accelerating it, but the true source is psychological. Climate chaos, social injustice, tyranny and oppression are merely symptoms of a deeper psychological crisis at the heart of civilisation.

Das soll nicht heißen, dass jeder einzelne in sich herzlos oder ein Monster ist, und dass es ihre Schuld, sie sind so. Viele Menschen sind in der Lage große Taten der Barmherzigkeit, Selbstlosigkeit und Großzügigkeit. Aber jede und jeder von uns wurde gelehrt und erfüllt mit den kollektiven Werten der Gesellschaft und der Zivilisation, und dass die kollektive Geschichte ist eine basierend auf Angst, Egoismus und Gier. Konsum markiert die Perfektion dieses gesellschaftliche Ideal, aber es hat so lange existiert wie die Zivilisation selbst, ja es die notwendigen Voraussetzungen, die die ersten Imperien zu in erster Linie wachsen erlaubt war. Jeder von uns hat sich indirekt vermittelt und indoktriniert zu akzeptieren, dass das Glück uns selbst eine Primzahl ist, dass wir alle getrennte und voneinander verschieden und alles andere, und zu zeigen, dass Mitgefühl und Güte ist es, sein schwach sind. Aber es ist dieser Egoismus und dieser Mangel an Mitgefühl, die unsere kollektive Fähigkeit, in der Lage sein, die Perpetuierung von ökologischen und sozialen Ungerechtigkeit zulassen treibt, und führte zu ihrer Entstehung in der ersten Platzes. Es ist keine Untertreibung zu sagen, dass diese zentrale Geschichte unserer Gesellschaft und der Zivilisation letztlich zur Zerstörung der Menschheit und ihre Heimat führen, Versandlandes Milliarden, um chronische Leiden in den Prozess.

Sobald wir sehen und begreifen dies, ist es unerlässlich, zu handeln. Es nützt nichts, die Schuld bei uns selbst für das Halten dieses unausgesprochene Vereinbarung - es war nicht unsere Schuld, unsere Eltern oder Fehler, die einzige Version der Realität präsentiert und uns gelehrt zu akzeptieren. Verzeihen Sie sich selbst von der Vergangenheit. Aber sobald wir erkennen, was geschieht, wir tragen die Verantwortung für die Folgen unseres impliziten Unterstützung dieser Vereinbarung. Und wenn wir diese Konsequenzen zu sehen, als nicht akzeptabel, müssen wir uns entscheiden, als ein Ergebnis zu handeln. Aber was tun? Wir suchen die großen, effektiven und scheinbar magische Lösungen und Silber-Kugeln. Aber es gibt keinen Weg, um irgendwie damit sich jeder nehmen eine gesellschaftliche Fundament jetzt und machen alle spontan mitfühlender, brechen Jahrtausende der zivilisierten Dogma in der kurzen Zeit zur Verfügung zu stellen. Das einzige, was wir auf jeden Fall ändern kann, ist uns selbst und wie wir interagieren mit Menschen um uns herum. Wir müssen handeln und mit Mitgefühl zu kultivieren Selbstlosigkeit in unserem eigenen Leben, mit der alten Praxis der Achtsamkeit zum Beispiel, um zu helfen, ändern Sie die Voreinstellung der Angst und der Selbstsucht und Wirkung alle, die wie wir mit in unser Leben mit dieser neuen Geschichte. Wir müssen eine neue zentrale Geschichte für unsere Gesellschaft, das bis Selbstlosigkeit, Mitgefühl und Harmonie über unsere Unterschiede.

Aber viele werden sagen, das ist nicht annähernd genug, dass dies eine so kleine Aktion als zu unbedeutend sein, und dass wir nicht genug Zeit, um das etablierte Dogma zu ändern ist. Und ich sage zu ihnen - was können wir tun? Haben wir nur kämpfen und tun, was richtig ist, wenn wir sicher sein können, zu gewinnen? Haben wir nicht tun es trotzdem, auch wenn unser Untergang versichert zu sein scheint? Oder müssen wir tun es trotzdem als einziger verantwortlich, edel und mitfühlenden Weg zur Verfügung, auch wenn Niederlage starrt uns ins Gesicht? Ich entscheide mich für die Gerechtigkeit kämpfen sowieso, bewaffnet mit den Samen von Mitgefühl und Gerechtigkeit.

And we do not only just create this new story for society and act accordingly; we also create the practical foundations for this new more responsible society too. There are already many activists creating and helping local community groups, building community gardens informed by the principles of Permaculture, starting urban allotments, supporting community supported agriculture projects in the country, creating their own renewable (and thus independent) energy supplies, using local wild food and foraging, building local stable-state economies and currencies, working in workers co-ops, buying food through food co-ops, encouraging local and freely accessible culture and improving their neighbourhoods, for example. Once enough of these local projects exist and begin to overlap, a network of alternatives to mainstream society can be created, building local resilience and allowing people to live more independently of civilisation and thus lay the foundations of this new society. Combined with the new societal story, this network of local activism can become a phoenix to emerge from the decaying edifice of the old society. This is nothing less than mass cultural civil disobedience, a cultural insurrection against consumerism, globalisation and industrial civilisation. There are no leaders of this movement, no governing bodies or organisations to guide it; disorganisation is our strength, preventing the corruption and inaction that all bureaucracies breed.

I do not wish to issue a list of 'things you should do' or a specific prescription for your own actions, but I find a simple collection of ideas can help to confirm that I'm heading in the right direction:

  • Reconnect with nature and our local landscape
  • Reconnect with our skills and practical potential
  • Reconnect with our selves, our true values and our compassion
  • Reconnect with our local community
  • Help others Reconnect by undermining the tools of disconnection that keep us disconnected (see Keith Farnish's excellent work on this)

Under these titles the actions needed to create this new society and dismantle civilisation can be found. Occasionally when I despair at the state of the world and how little I feel I can do in response, I often return to this list and see what I'm doing that work towards these goals, and this can help reconfirm the power and potential of what we're doing.

And what will we be working against? With the failure of efforts to curb climate change, the nation-states of the world will begin to put themselves first, begin to fortify their borders and increase internal policing to cope with the chaos from food shortages, refugees and disasters. Tensions will grow between countries over ever scarcer resources such as water, leading to inevitable armed strife. At home, governments will become more oppressive in order to cope, racism and nationalism will surge and extremists will begin to agitate. Eventually, the traditional nation-state itself will break down, but in the meantime it will fight on to the death. So we're not just moving against the selfishness and greed that created the crises facing us, we're also up against the trashing death throes of civilisation and the fascism and chaos it will spawn. We must be the torchbearers of a better way of doing things through dark times.

So the call is simple. You've seen the politicians fail. You've seen the campaigners fail. You've seen industrial civilisation fail. So now it's up to us. Reconnect with nature, your practical potential, your self, your community and help others reconnect; practice compassion and mindfulness, assist or start in any project that can help achieve these aims, and do it now. The time for hope in the existing system is over – it and its flawed story has proved itself to be broken. The severity of the crisis demands we act now, and that we abandon the politicians and leaders who promised so much yet delivered so little. Together we can create the compassionate, responsible and just society we've been seeking for so long. The call is simple – do it yourself – it's the only sane and compassionate thing left to do.

Aktie

'The inadaquecy of hope'

Here's an interesting article about hope and Copenhagen (it was written at the start of the conference, so doesn't cover anything that's happened since), by Paul from The Dark Mountain Project :

Writing about the Copenhagen summit – indeed, writing about climate change in general – is starting to make me feel like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Or, if I wanted to be more of a cultural nationalist (even one who finds Dickens annoying), like Scrooge. I've been watching the buildup to the summit with a kind of cranky, disinterested fascination.

Watching the endless plugging of the Guardian's earnest '10:10′ campaign , for example, whose launch at Tate Modern told you everything you needed to know about the class makeup of its worthy and doomed attempt to push the nation out of its collective rut, made me feel that 'bah humbug' is the only appropriate response. Similarly, when tens of thousands of nice people took to the streets of London on Saturday dressed like Smurfs (or whatever) in order to – you guessed it – 'send a message to our leaders', 'humbug' seemed inappropriate only because it was far too mild a response.

Now we're going to have to read, and watch, and listen to, acres of drivel as Copenhagen builds up ('liveblog from the summit venue!' etc) to a conclusion which will sell itself as a great leap forward in order to make the various world leaders who have turned up look like they're doing something, and will then quickly unravel. It's the season of goodwill, and maybe I should really be making more of an effort to connect with that all-important 'hope' we are all supposed to be feeling. But I can't. Humbug, I say, to it all.

Why do I say this? I've spelled it out before , and we spelled it out in more detail in the Dark Mountain manifesto – but for now, the world 'hope' is worth focusing on. Since beginning the Dark Mountain Project I have been regularly accused by some green friends of 'giving up', or of not having adequate reservoirs of 'hope', and the use of this word has been, I think, telling. Forty years or more of green politics has come down to – what? Hope. Desire. Belief. Faith. And not a faith in anything likely or even realistically possible. A faith like any other: blind, desperate, resting ultimately on despair.

'Hope' on its own is a meaningless driver of any kind of change. Worse than that – it is pernicious. It is blind faith in the impossible. It is a lie. Remember the crazy 'hope' encouraged by Obama and his followers prior to his election? It wasn't long ago. They're a bit quiet now, those excitable young hopers. As quiet as those New Labour voters were from about 1998 onwards, I seem to remember. And I remember because I was one of them. I remember that hope we placed in young, fresh-faced Tony and his team. I remember its audacity turning very quickly into inadequacy. I remember the comedown.

Therefore we should all despair, right? After all, despair is the opposite of hope, and if we don't feel one, we must feel the other. This is the accusation thrown at those of us who can't abide this Diana-like fervour, but it's nonsense. Hope itself is not a bad thing; but it has to be a hope built on a firm foundation.

Ich könnte ein paar Bohnen in meinem Garten zu pflanzen, zum Beispiel, und hoffe, sie kommen. If I plant them at the right time of year, if the seed is good quality, and if I water and feed them at the right times, they will probably germinate. They might not, of course; something could go wrong – blight, an unusually rainy spring, wily rats or pigeons – but the chances are that I'll get lucky with at least some of them. That's a pretty sound thing, in other words, to be hoping for. It's good hope.

On the other hand, I might go into the newsagent and buy a scratchcard and hope to win a million pounds. Strictly speaking, I might do; it's a faint possibility. But it's so faint – the odds are stacked so high against me – that it's effectively a false hope. It might be worth doing for fun, but it's not something I'd want to stake my future on, unless I was very dumb indeed. It's bad hope.

Hoping for world leaders to sort out climate change is bad hope. It's foolish and naive and hugely unlikely. When we look at what we 'hope' for from a summit like Copenhagen, we can start to see why.

We hope that vast and deeply entrenched vested interests – fossil-fuel conglomerates; loggers; automobile corporations; the 'military-industrial complex'; political parties; unions; all the wide and winding alleys of a global economy built on cheap fossil energy – can be somehow overcome in a very short time. We hope that an economy built on the need for constant growth can somehow be reattuned, also in a very short time, into some kind of fluffy, harmless, 'steady state' system. We hope that this is possible in a world with a rapidly-expanding human population with rapidly-expanding appetites; appetites which need to keep expanding in order to keep that economy on the rails.

We hope that the 'consumers' of the rich world – that's us – will be prepared to make radical changes to their lifestyles; either through personal choice (see 10:10 and a billion other such attempts) or because their governments will force them to. This requires us also to hope that democracies, which are predicated on giving their voters what they want, and promising more of it, will suddenly be able to turn around and tell them they must have less of everything without democracy itself shuddering into serious trouble.

Failing all of this, we turn to the 'supply side': we hope, in the best tradition of post-Enlightenment Rational Man, that our technology will save us. We hope we can build enough windfarms quickly enough and that they will work. We hope we can invent a 'carbon capture' system to allow us to keep burning coal. We hope we can cover the Sahara with mirrors and get a 'supergrid' up and running. We hope that electric cars will work, or hydrogen fuel cells or decentralised energy systems. We hope we can stop the Canadians digging up and selling their tar sands and persuade the Saudis to keep the rest of their oil in the ground. We hope that we can get all of this done against the interests of those who run the fossil-fuel economy and the inert and inadequate political systems that supposedly govern it, and against the competitive nature of people and nations. Failing that, we hope we can work out some way to start pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and under the sea, or to send it into space or to create cloud cover that blocks the sun's rays, or to whack space mirrors up into the blackness to reflect the light back again.

Hope Hope Hoffnung. It could be you. You might get lucky. It's worth a flutter. After all, the alternative is global apocalypse, right? So let's paint ourselves blue and get hoping.

We are set up to fail at this, and hoping otherwise will not lead to joy; it will lead to despair. Better, surely, to get real. Better to be honest with 'the public' instead of lying to them (they know you're lying anyway). Better to look the future in the face and understand what it is likely to bring. This is not, please note, the same as 'giving up'. Stopping the burning of fossil fuels, for example, is hugely important: however far we've gone, we could go further, so we should row back as quickly as we can. Living lightly is good too. All such things are good; but they are not going to keep our show on the road and if that's why you're doing them, you are going to end up feeling very let down. To say this is not to give up: it is to face up.

We have overshot, and like any civilisation that overshoots, we are starting to pay the price. We need to be honest about this. We also need to be honest about our own role in it as individuals. I like the laptop on which I am writing this. It's a great machine. It is also part of the problem, and so am I. We are all part of the problem, and there is not going to be a 'solution' of the kind presented at Copenhagen: simple, top-down, focused, technological, everything-will-be-OK, nothing-to-do-with-us.

Dealing with the fallout of this comes down to us and our kids and theirs too. I strongly believe that the first stage in coping with that reality is accepting that it is a reality. The first stage of kicking the bottle, for an alcoholic, is admitting that he has a problem. We have a problem, it is not going away, and Mr Obama is not going to solve it for us. We are going to have to live with it for a long, long time. We could get something good out of it, at least, by asking ourselves how it came about, and what lies we told ourselves to make to possible. Telling ourselves more of them instead will not make us feel better, at least when the morning comes.

We agree – the hope being touted by the environmental movement and cynical advertising campaigns such as 'Hopenhagen' is not going to help solve anything, it is more likely in fact to inhibit action and understanding of what needs to be done. As tempting as it is to ask and hope for our powerful leaders to do something, as hopeless as it seems to work independently of them and start small and local, we must move beyond these 'hopeful' actions and start really acting effectively. We need to disconnect from civilisation, and instead build the alternative within the wreckage of the old society to which to reconnect to. So stop hoping that our leaders will solve the crisis, stop hoping the current system will reform, stop hoping industrial civilisation can become sustainable, and instead start acting yourself to dismantle it and create the alternative instead.

Aktie

'The Unacknowledged Test'

Here's an interesting article from Micah White of adbusters :

E Xperts stimmen zu, dass wir erleben gefährlichen Klimawandels, die das Schicksal unseres Experiments ruft in der Zivilisation in Frage. Als Unwetter trifft ein geheimnisvoller Kontinent und sterben-offs treten in eine andere, wächst das Röcheln der natürlichen Umwelt lauter. "Wo sind all die Glühwürmchen weg?" Fragen wir uns, und dann die Wissenschaftler bestätigen, dass sie ihre Abwesenheit bemerkt auch. Nachdem die so genannten Experten Schritt in die Medienlandschaft und das versichert uns, dass abnorme Dinge sind tatsächlich passiert, unterdrücken wir unsere Alarm-und wieder Schlafwandeln durch ironische Verbrauch. Ist das die einzige Art, wie wir den Klimawandel erleben können?

"Experience" ist ein Wort, das wir jeden Tag benutzen, also sollte es leicht zu definieren, was es bedeutet. Einige würden argumentieren, dass an den Klimawandel erleben, ist, seine Existenz anzuerkennen. Sie sehen als lebendige Erfahrung durch ein Ereignis, und sie hoffen, überstehen, was sie erwartet durch die Beibehaltung des Lebensstils, der uns brachte diese historische, ökologische Moment. Diejenigen, die eine Erfahrung als etwas überlebt zu sehen den Klimawandel als etwas, das mit mit den Werkzeugen der fortschrittlichen Technologie, die internationale Diplomatie und öffentliche Aufklärungskampagnen behandelt werden kann zu behandeln. "Wir können durch diese bekommen", könnte ihr Motto sein bewundernswert und die meisten unserer Gesellschaft könnte als ihre Anhänger gezählt werden.

Aber "Erfahrung" eine andere Bedeutung hat, wir sollten überlegen. Das Wort "Experiment", "Experte" und "Erfahrung" sind miteinander verbunden: ein Experte ist oft jemand, der Erfahrungen durch Experimente gewinnt. Der Sachverständige muss kein Wissenschaftler sein, wir haben auch Erfahrungen sammeln durch die Vorlage selbst zum Leben-Experimente wie Outdoor-Abenteuer, riskant oder gefährlich Aktivismus Denken. Nach einem dieser Erfahrungen haben wir uns verwandelt und kommen näher an unser volles Potenzial auszuschöpfen. Erleben Sie, wie es scheint, etwas zu tun hat, um einen Test, der uns selbst in Frage stellt.

Es kann nicht überraschen zu erfahren, dass die gemeinsame Wurzel, die "Experten", "Experiment" und "Erfahrung, um auf die Probe gestellt." In der Tat "teilen sich das lateinische Wort experiri, was bedeutet, ist" sein, können wir einen Schritt weiter gehen und sagen, dass jede Erfahrung ein gefährlicher Test ist. Ich sage das nicht ohne Grund, sondern bin wieder Bezug auf die lateinische Wurzel experiri, die von Bedeutung periculum Test, Versuch, Risiko, Gefahr oder, wie es gewöhnlich übersetzt wird: Gefahr. Die andere Bedeutung des Wortes Erfahrung ist es daher, in Gefahr sein.

Diejenigen, die Erfahrung zu verstehen in diesem zweiten Sinn wird der Klimawandel als eine gefährliche existentiellen und zivilisatorischen Prozess zu begreifen. Natur, über den Klimawandel, aufgeladen wird uns mit Umweltzerstörung und wir müssen reagieren, wenn wir die Todesstrafe vermeiden wollen. Es ist keine Verteidigung, zum Leben zu klammern, wie es vorher war heute in der Hoffnung, zu überleben, das Wetter von morgen -, die nur blinde Ablehnung der Verhandlung stattfindet.

Stattdessen müssen wir setzen uns selbst, unseren Geist, unsere Seele und unsere Art zu leben Berichtsjahr. Wir können auf die Anschuldigungen gegen uns nur durch den Verzicht auf die Industrie-, Konsum-Weltsicht, die uns an diesen Punkt gebracht hat katastrophale reagieren. Um den Klimawandel zu erleben, ist aufgerufen, an einem Experiment nach dem die Welt wie wir sie kennen für immer verändert wird, Rechnung zu tragen.

Micah White ist ein Redakteur bei Adbusters und ein unabhängiger Aktivist. Er schreibt ein Buch über die Zukunft des Aktivismus. www.micahmwhite.com oder Micha (at) adbusters.org

We agree – it's no use just acknowledging the crisis facing us and continuing with business as usual, we have to experience it by creating a new paradigm better than that of industrial civilisation. We're being given a warning to change our ways, but time is short and we can't afford to remain passive spectators.

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'On Resistance' – The benefits of working in a Disorganisation

Here's the first of a series of 3 articles at Survival Acres blog (which now seems to be closing for compelling reasons as shown in the most recent post) on how to practically resist the system we find ourselves in.

The majority of points raised and the suggestions are excellent, although the occasional focus on individualist-style libertarianism tends to ignore the successes of the ancestral clan and tribe based systems where society consists of small units of interdependent individuals dependent on a land-base/the earth, as opposed to the current society of independent and homogenised individuals seemingly independent of the any land base. As Part 1 describes in the section 'the limits of disorganisation', these small units can exist as small organisations as long as these units don't organise between themselves, they remain disorganised with no leader. We propose the same – a disorganisation of local communities.

We also feel that what we are resisting is not just fascism or the creeping authoritarian state, but the entire system of civilisation (which can never be made to be ethical or just, just as it cannot be made to be sustainable) from which these problems come forth from. Otherwise, these articles propose very useful actions for resistance!:

The following is a reprint from an article on disorganized resistance. As far as I am concerned, it is a primer (basic) level of understanding that needs to be absorbed before considering anything else. In Part II and beyond, I will cover more specifics.

The Virtues of a Disorganized Resistance – by Denis Jones

American opposition movements have always focused on the notion of organization. It has always been their goal to organize the people. Their hope has been to wield the collective power of the disaffected, downtrodden, and exploited as a single unit against the concentrated power of the ruling class. While their hope has been noble, their methods have been foolish. Organized resistance has many drawbacks. These drawbacks have seldom been discussed by the opposition. I believe that the only effective resistance is a completely disorganized, decentralized, and leaderless opposition.

While, on the face of it, this claim may impress you as absurd. Of course it seems absurd! It is counterintuitive. Never the less, it is the ONLY method of resistance that will work within American society. I will explain why organized resistance has never worked in the United States. In addition, I will promulgate a new formula for effective resistance.

Why has organized resistance failed in the USA?There are many reasons for the failure of organized resistance. The two primary causes of failure are intimately connected to the culture of the United States and the political system laid down by our nation's founding fathers.

The Cultural Cause

Americans, culturally, are anarchists. Few Americans realize this. Most Americans have a false understanding of the term “anarchism.” However, upon examining the beliefs of your average American, you will find that most Americans:

  • do not trust leaders
  • do not trust government
  • wish to be left alone
  • value their privacy
  • think of themselves as independent from society
  • do not believe that there is a systemic solution to their problems
  • believe that others should be free to do what they choose, provided they do so in private and do not harm others
  • While it is undeniable that political culture in the United States often speaks to the opposite of the above list, it is also undeniable that most Americans register as neither Democrat or Republican and most Americans do not vote. Thus, despite the political culture, most Americans choose not to participate in it. This is not only due to their belief that the American political system is hopeless, but also is due to the cultural clash between the wider culture and the political culture.

    Any attempt to organize large numbers of Americans into a single political movement will fail. Any attempt to create an organization led by a strong group of leaders will fail. Americans reject submersion into the collective. In a sense, Americans are anti-collectivists.

    The Political Cause

    American political culture is not ideological. Politicians attempt to draw ideological distinctions between the two major parties, but these distinctions are a matter of splitting hairs. The only significant difference between the two political parties is the degree of compassion represented by the rhetoric of the two parties. Compassion is not a political concept. Compassion is an attitude. Thus, the two parties differ, primarily, in attitude and not ideology.

    Despite this, there remain two political parties. One is prompted to ask “why?” If each party is basically the same, with respect to ideology, why do they not merge into one party? The answer to this question is best found in viewing each political party according to its true nature. American political parties are, for all intents and purposes, organized crime units. American political parties have more in common with the Mafia than they have with their counterparts in more democratic societies. Like Mafia, each political party competes for control of territory in order to maximize the benefit to their business constituency. Like Mafia, the political parties attempt to mold the system to maintain their positions and access to resources. Like Mafia, the political parties force the average citizen to pay “protection” under the threat of violence (taxes). Like Mafia each political party uses the “protection” money collected for its own advantage.

    By defining our political system in terms of the “majority” and the “opposition,” our Constitution enshrines this two mafia system into law. Each Mafia passes laws to exclude new comers from the game while focusing the rest of its energy in destroying the other Mafia.

    Thus, any resistance movement that chooses to become an organization is in competition with these Mafiosi. The deck is stacked and the power of the state, wielded by these organized crime units known as the Democratic and Republican parties, will waste the time and resources of any newcomer. A newcomer can only succeed by rejecting the political system, draining its resources, and undermining the rule of the state.

    How is disorganized resistance superior?

    In some societies, dissidents become heroes. In American society dissidents are systematically slandered, libeled, harassed, and villainized . If they become successful, they are murdered (eg Martin Luther King, Malcolm X). In the American experience, movements that look to leaders are decapitated. Leaders are a liability, not an asset.

    Organizations can be (and are) infiltrated. Organizations can be taxed. Organizations have legal responsibility. Organizations have membership lists and lists are wonderful tools for the oppressor. Organizations take on a life of their own. They struggle to exist and their continued existence takes priority over their mission. Organizations attract opportunists, power mongers, and attention seekers. Organizations tend to exploit their rank and file for the benefit of their inner circle. Disorganizations share none of these defects.

    Bureaucracy cannot comprehend disorganization. Disorganization is invisible. The asymmetry of the relationship between organization and disorganization favors disorganization. Organization depends upon planning. Planning requires predictability. Disorganization cannot be predicted. This leaves organization at a disadvantage.

    Organization requires a supply chain. Supply chains can be disrupted. Disorganization depends only upon the resources of its members. Supply chains that do not exist cannot be eliminated.

    Disorganized movements rely upon swarming. Swarms are difficult to defend against. If you cut a swarm in half, you have two swarms. If you eliminate one of the resulting swarms, you still have a swarm. Disorganization breeds. Organization grows. The many and dispersed are a more difficult target than the large and concentrated.

    Organizations takes their steps by design. If the design is flawed, the organization fails. Disorganization relies not upon design but upon evolution. The motivating notions of disorganization are memes. Memes evolve and memes compete. This process improves the motivating notions of disorganization. This process produces multiple courses of action. While some may fail, others are likely to succeed. Taken as a whole, disorganization is more likely to succeed.

    The important thing to remember is that it is easier to destroy than to create that which is designed. Thus, the cost to those who lose the manifestation of their design outweighs by leaps and bounds the cost it takes to destroy it. That which evolves is cheap and when an effort is created to destroy the evolved entity, it merely mutates and evolves again, adjusting to the new conditions. As a process that fosters evolution, a movement based on disorganization will continue to survive, evolve, and expand without cost. The resource constraints placed upon the designed (eg government and corporate) and those absent from the evolved (a decentralized and disorganized opposition movement), favor the later.

    The limits of disorganization

    I do not propose a complete absence of organization. Instead I propose a disorganization of units. Units can be as small as a single individual, or as complex as cell of individuals working together. Cells may be internally organized, but they should not be statically organized cell to cell. The movement should have no commander. It should have no central committee or governing body. No global plans should be made. The modus operandi of each unit should be to think globally and act locally. Ideas, strategies, and tactics should float freely and compete as memes within the medium of the collective conscious.

    Schlussfolgerungen

    We need to construct a disorganized movement. You need not apply to join. In fact, it might be better if you did not contact me, or anyone except those with whom you wish to form a unit. Your ideas, strategies, tactics, and lessons learned should be spread anonymously or by word of mouth. When you act, should you decide to act in resistance, attribute your actions to “the Resistance.” The growing din of disorganized disruption will be felt as an earthquake. There will be trembles. There will be pre-shocks. The tension will mount and, in time, there will be an earthquake. When that earthquake strikes, the organized edifice of the oppressor will fall like a house of cards.

    See also Part 2 and Part 3 (part 3 is especially useful in summarising the topic)

    Aktie

    Temporary Recession or The End of Growth?

    An essay by Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute posted on The Oil Drum on how the current recession and economic troubles could be a symptom of a deeper crisis that will ultimately end economic growth forever:

    This is a guest post by Richard Heinberg. Richard is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and author of five books on resource depletion and societal responses to the energy problem. He can be found on the web at www.richardheinberg.com and www.postcarbon.org.

    Everyone agrees: our economy is sick. The inescapable symptoms include declines in consumer spending and consumer confidence, together with a contraction of international trade and available credit. Add a collapse in real estate values and carnage in the automotive and airline industries and the picture looks grim indeed.

    But why are both the US economy and the larger global economy ailing? Among the mainstream media, world leaders, and America's economists-in-chief (Treasury Secretary Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke) there is near-unanimity of opinion: these recent troubles are primarily due to a combination of bad real estate loans and poor regulation of financial derivatives.

    This is the Conventional Diagnosis. If it is correct, then the treatment for our economic malady might logically include heavy doses of bailout money for beleaguered financial institutions, mortgage lenders, and car companies; better regulation of derivatives and futures markets; and stimulus programs to jumpstart consumer spending.

    But what if this diagnosis is fundamentally flawed? The metaphor needs no belaboring: we all know that tragedy can result from a doctor's misreading of symptoms, mistaking one disease for another.

    Something similar holds for our national and global economic infirmity. If we don't understand why the world's industrial and financial metabolism is seizing up, we are unlikely to apply the right medicine and could end up making matters much worse than they would otherwise be.

    To be sure: the Conventional Diagnosis is clearly at least partly right. The causal connections between subprime mortgage loans and the crises at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers have been thoroughly explored and are well known. Clearly, over the past few years, speculative bubbles in real estate and the financial industry were blown up to colossal dimensions, and their bursting was inevitable. It is hard to disagree with the words of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in his July 25 essay in the Sydney Morning Herald: “The roots of the crisis lie in the preceding decade of excess. In it the world enjoyed an extraordinary boom…. However, as we later learnt, the global boom was built in large part on a … house of cards. First, in many Western countries the boom was created on a pile of debt held by consumers, corporations and some governments. As the global financier George Soros put it: 'For 25 years [the West] has been consuming more than we have been producing … living beyond our means.'” (1)

    But is this as far as we need look to get to the root of the continuing global economic meltdown?
    A case can be made that dire events having to do with real estate, the derivatives markets, and the auto and airline industries were themselves merely symptoms of an even deeper, systemic dysfunction that spells the end of economic growth as we have known it.

    In short, I am suggesting an Alternative Diagnosis. This explanation for the economic crisis is not for the faint of heart because, if correct, it implies that the patient is far sicker than even the most pessimistic economists are telling us. But if it is correct, then by ignoring it we risk even greater peril.

    Economic Growth, The Financial Crisis, and Peak Oil

    For several years, a swelling subculture of commentators (which includes the present author) has been forecasting a financial crash, basing this prognosis on the assessment that global oil production was about to peak. (2) Our reasoning went like this:

    Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet. This is an axiomatic observation with which everyone familiar with the mathematics of compounded arithmetic growth must agree, even if they hedge their agreement with vague references to “substitutability” and “demographic transitions.” (3)

    This axiomatic limit to growth means that the rapid expansion in both population and per-capita consumption of resources that has occurred over the past century or two must cease at some particular time. But when is this likely to occur?

    The unfairly maligned Limits to Growth studies, published first in 1972 with periodic updates since, have attempted to answer the question with analysis of resource availability and depletion, and multiple scenarios for future population growth and consumption rates. The most pessimistic scenario in 1972 suggested an end of world economic growth around 2015. (4)

    But there may be a simpler way of forecasting growth's demise.

    Energy is the ultimate enabler of growth (again, this is axiomatic: physics and biology both tell us that without energy nothing happens). Industrial expansion throughout the past two centuries has in every instance been based on increased energy consumption. (5) More specifically, industrialism has been inextricably tied to the availability and consumption of cheap energy from coal and oil (and more recently, natural gas). However, fossil fuels are by their very nature depleting, non-renewable resources. Therefore (according to the Peak Oil thesis), the eventual inability to continue increasing supplies of cheap fossil energy will likely lead to a cessation of economic growth in general , unless alternative energy sources and efficiency of energy use can be deployed rapidly and to a sufficient degree. (6)

    Of the three conventional fossil fuels, oil is arguably the most economically vital, since it supplies 95 percent of all transport energy. Further, petroleum is the fuel with which we are likely to encounter supply problems soonest, because global petroleum discoveries have been declining for decades, and most oil producing countries are already seeing production declines. (7)

    So, by this logic, the end of economic growth (as conventionally defined) is inevitable, and Peak Oil is the likely trigger.

    Why would Peak Oil lead not just to problems for the transport industry, but a more general economic and financial crisis? During the past century growth has become institutionalized in the very sinews of our economic system. Every city and business wants to grow. This is understandable merely in terms of human nature: nearly everyone wants a competitive advantage over someone else, and growth provides the opportunity to achieve it. But there is also a financial survival motive at work: without growth, businesses and governments are unable to service their debt. And debt has become endemic to the industrial system. During the past couple of decades, the financial services industry has grown faster than any other sector of the American economy, even outpacing the rise in health care expenditures, accounting for a third of all growth in the US economy. From 1990 to the present, the ratio of debt-to-GDP expanded from 165 percent to over 350 percent. In essence, the present welfare of the economy rests on debt, and the collateral for that debt consists of a wager that next year's levels of production and consumption will be higher than this year's.
    Given that growth cannot continue on a finite planet, this wager, and its embodiment in the institutions of finance, can be said to constitute history's greatest Ponzi scheme. We have justified present borrowing with the irrational belief that perpetual growth is possible, necessary, and inevitable. In effect we have borrowed from future generations so that we could gamble away their capital today.

    Until recently, the Peak Oil argument has been framed as a forecast: the inevitable decline in world petroleum production, whenever it occurs, will kill growth. But here is where forecast becomes diagnosis: during the period from 2005 to 2008, energy stopped growing and oil prices rose to record levels. By July of 2008, the price of a barrel of oil was nudging close to $150—half again higher than any previous petroleum price in inflation-adjusted terms—and the global economy was beginning to topple. The auto and airline industries shuddered; ordinary consumers had trouble for buying gasoline for their commute to work while still paying their mortgages. Consumer spending began to decline. By September the economic crisis was also a financial crisis, as banks trembled and imploded. (8)

    Given how much is at stake, it is important to evaluate the two diagnoses on the basis of facts, not preconceptions.

    It is unnecessary to examine evidence supporting or refuting the Conventional Diagnosis, because its validity is not in doubt—as a partial explanation for what is occurring. The question is whether it is a sufficient explanation, and hence an adequate basis for designing a successful response.

    What's the evidence favoring the Alternative? A good place to begin is with a recent paper by economist James Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego, titled “Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08,” which discusses oil prices and economic impacts with clarity, logic, and numbers, explaining how and why the economic crash is related to the oil price shock of 2008. (9)

    Hamilton starts by citing previous studies showing a tight correlation between oil price spikes and recessions. On the basis of this correlation, every attentive economist should have forecast a steep recession for 2008. “Indeed,” writes Hamilton, “the relation could account for the entire downturn of 2007-08…. If one could have known in advance what happened to oil prices during 2007-08, and if one had used the historically estimated relation [between price rise and economic impact]… one would have been able to predict the level of real GDP for both of 2008:Q3 and 2008:Q4 quite accurately.”

    Again, this is not to ignore the role of the financial and real estate sectors in the ongoing global economic meltdown. But in the Alternative Diagnosis the collapse of the housing and derivatives markets is seen as amplifying a signal ultimately emanating from a failure to increase the rate of supply of depleting resources. Hamilton again: “At a minimum it is clear that something other than housing deteriorated to turn slow growth into a recession. That something, in my mind, includes the collapse in automobile purchases, slowdown in overall consumption spending, and deteriorating consumer sentiment, in which the oil shock was indisputably a contributing factor.”

    Moreover, Hamilton notes that there was “an interaction effect between the oil shock and the problems in housing.” That is, in many metropolitan areas, house prices in 2007 were still rising in the zip codes closest to urban centers but already falling fast in zip codes where commutes were long. (10)

    Why Did the Oil Price Spike?

    Those who espouse the Conventional Diagnosis for our ongoing economic collapse might agree that there was some element of causal correlation between the oil price spike and the recession, but they would deny that the price spike itself had anything to do with resource limits, because (they say) it was caused mostly by speculation in the oil futures market, and had little to do with fundamentals of supply and demand.

    In this, the Conventional Diagnosis once again has some basis in reality. Speculation in oil futures during the period in question almost certainly helped drive oil prices higher than was justified by fundamentals. But why were investors buying oil futures? Was the mania for oil contracts just another bubble, like the dot.com stock frenzy of the late '90s or the real estate boom of 2003 to 2006?

    During the period from 2005 to mid-2008, demand for oil was growing, especially in China (which went from being self-sufficient in oil in 1995 to being the world's second-foremost importer, after the US, by 2006). But the global supply of oil was essentially stagnant: monthly production figures for crude oil bounced around within a fairly narrow band between 72 and 75 million barrels per day. As prices rose, production figures barely budged in response. There was every indication that all oil producers were pumping flat-out: even the Saudis appeared to be rushing to capitalize on the price bonanza.

    Thus a good argument can be made that speculation in oil futures was merely magnifying price moves that were inevitable on the basis of the fundamentals of supply and demand. James Hamilton (in his publication previously cited) puts it this way: “With hindsight, it is hard to deny that the price rose too high in July 2008, and that this miscalculation was influenced in part by the flow of investment dollars into commodity futures contracts. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the two key ingredients needed to make such a story coherent—a low price elasticity of demand, and the failure of physical production to increase—are the same key elements of a fundamentals-based explanation of the same phenomenon. I therefore conclude that these two factors, rather than speculation per se, should be construed as the primary cause of the oil shock of 2007-08.”

    Aftermath of the Peak

    There is also controversy over to what degree troubles in the automobile, trucking, and airline industries should be attributed to the oil price spike or the economic crash. Of course, if the Alternative Diagnosis is correct, the latter two events are causally related in any case. However, it may be helpful to review the situation.

    Everyone knows that GM and Chrysler went bankrupt this year because US car sales cratered. The current forecast is for sales of about 10.3 million vehicles in the US for 2009, down from last year's 13.2 million and 16.1 million in 2007. US car sales have not been this low since the 1970s. Sales of light trucks, the most profitable vehicles, took the biggest hit during 2008, as fuel prices soared and car buyers avoided gas-guzzlers. It was at this point that the auto companies really began feeling the pain.

    The airline industry's ills are summarized in a recent GAO document: “After 2 years of profits, the US passenger airline industry lost $4.3 billion in the first 3 quarters of 2008 [as jet fuel prices climbed]. Collectively, US airlines reduced domestic capacity, as measured by the number of seats flown, by about 9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008…. To reduce capacity, airlines reduced the overall number of active aircraft in their fleets by 18 percent…. Airlines also collectively reduced their workforces by about 28,000, or nearly 7 percent, from the end of 2007 to the end of 2008…. The contraction of the US airline industry in 2008 reduced airport revenues, passengers' access to the national aviation system, and revenues for the Trust Fund.” (11)

    For the trucking industry, fuel accounts for nearly 40 percent of total operational costs. In 2007, as diesel prices rose, carriers began losing money and added fuel price surcharges; meanwhile the volume of freight began falling. After July 2008, as oil prices crashed, tonnage continued to decline. Overall, the cumulative decrease in loads for flatbed, tanker, and dry vans ranged between 15 percent and 20 percent just in the period from June to December 2008. (12)

    This last set of statistics raises a couple of questions crucial to understanding the Alternative Diagnosis: Why, if global oil production had just peaked, did petroleum prices fall in the last five months of 2008? And, if oil prices were a major factor in the economic crisis, why didn't the economy begin to turn around after the prices softened?

    Why Did Oil Prices Fall? And Why Didn't Lower Oil Prices Lead to a Quick Recovery?

    The Peak Oil thesis predicts that, as world oil production reaches its maximum level and begins to decline, the price of oil will rise dramatically. But it also forecasts a dramatic increase in the volatility of prices .

    The argument goes as follows. As oil becomes scarce, its price will rise until it begins to undermine economic activity in general. Economic contraction will then result in substantially reduced demand for oil, which will in turn cause its price to fall temporarily. Then one of two things will happen: either (a) the economy will begin to recover, stoking renewed oil demand, leading again to high prices which will again undermine economic activity; or (b), if the economy does not quickly recover, petroleum production will gradually fall due to depletion until spare production capacity (created by lower demand) is wiped out, leading again to higher prices and even more economic contraction. In both cases, oil prices remain volatile and the economy contracts. (13)

    This scenario corresponds very closely with the reality that is unfolding, though it remains to be seen whether situation (a) or (b) will ensue.

    Over the past three years, oil prices rose and fell more dramatically than would have been the case if it had not been for widespread speculation in oil futures. Nevertheless, the general direction of prices—way up, then way down, then part-way back up—is entirely consistent with the Peak Oil thesis and the Alternative Diagnosis.

    Why has the economy not quickly recovered, given that oil prices are now only half what they were in July 2008? Again, Peak Oil is not the only cause of the current economic crisis. Enormous bubbles in the real estate and finance sectors constituted accidents waiting to happen, and the implosion of those bubbles has created a serious credit crisis (as well as solvency and looming currency crises) that will likely take several years to resolve even if energy supplies don't pose a problem.

    But now the potential for renewed high oil prices acts as a ceiling for economic recovery. Whenever the economy does appear to show renewed signs of life (as has happened in May-July this year, with stock values rebounding and the general pace of economic contraction slowing somewhat), oil prices will take off again as oil speculators anticipate a recovery of demand. Indeed, oil prices have rebounded from $30 in January to nearly $70 currently, provoking widespread concern that high energy prices could nip recovery in the bud. (14)

    A barrel of oil from newly developed sources costs in the neighborhood of $60 to produce, now that all of the cheaper prospects have been exploited: finding new oilfields today usually means drilling under miles of ocean water, or in politically unstable nations where equipment and personnel are at high risk. (15) So as soon as consumers demand more oil, the price will have to stay noticeably above that figure in order to provide the incentive for producers to drill.

    Volatile oil prices hurt on the upside, but they also hurt on the downside. The oil price collapse of August-December 2008, plus the worsening credit crisis, caused a dramatic contraction in oil industry investment, leading to the cancellation of about $150 billion worth of new oil production projects—whose potential productive capacity will be required to offset declines in existing oilfields if world oil production is to remain stable. (16) This means that even if demand remains low, production capacity will almost certainly decline to meet those demand levels, causing oil prices to rise again in real terms at some point, perhaps two or three years from now. Volatile petroleum prices also hurt the development of alternative energy, as was shown during the past few months when falling oil prices led to financial troubles for ethanol manufacturers. (17)

    One way or another, growth will be highly problematic if not unachievable.

    Big Picture Diagnosis: Continuing the Trail of Logic

    At this point in the discussion many readers will be wondering why alternative energy sources and efficiency measures cannot be deployed to solve the Peak Oil crisis. After all, as petroleum becomes more expensive, ethanol, biodiesel, and electric cars all start to look more attractive both to producers and consumers. Won't the magic of the market intervene to render oil shortages irrelevant to future growth?

    It is impossible in the context of this discussion to provide a detailed explanation of why the market probably cannot solve the Peak Oil problem. Such an explanation requires a discussion of energy evaluation criteria, and an analysis of many individual energy alternatives on the basis of those criteria. I have offered brief overviews of this subject previously and a much longer one is in press. (18)

    My summary conclusions in this regard are as follows.

    About 85 percent of our current energy is derived from three primary sources—oil, natural gas, and coal—that are non-renewable, whose price is likely to trend sharply higher over the next years and decades leading to severe shortages, and whose environmental impacts are unacceptable. While these sources historically have had very high economic value, we cannot rely on them in the future; indeed, the longer the transition to alternative energy sources is delayed, the more difficult that transition will be unless some practical mix of alternative energy systems can be identified that will have superior economic and environmental characteristics.

    But identifying such a mix is harder than one might initially think. Each energy source has highly specific characteristics. In fact, it has been the characteristics of our present energy sources (principally oil, coal, and natural gas) that have enabled the building of an urbanized society with high mobility, large population, and high economic growth rates. Surveying the available alternative energy sources for criteria such as energy density, environmental impacts, reliance on depleting raw materials, intermittency versus constancy of supply, and the percentage of energy returned on the energy invested in energy production, none currently appears capable of perpetuating this kind of society.

    Moreover, national energy systems are expensive and slow to develop. Energy efficiency likewise requires investment, and further incremental investments in efficiency tend to yield diminishing returns over time, since it is impossible to perform work with zero energy input. Where is there the will or ability to muster sufficient investment capital for deployment of alternative energy sources and efficiency measures on the scale needed?

    While there are many successful alternative energy production installations around the world (ranging from small home-scale photovoltaic systems to large “farms” of three-megawatt wind turbines), there are very few modern industrial nations that now get the bulk of their energy from sources other than oil, coal, and natural gas. One example is Sweden, which obtains most of its energy from nuclear and hydropower. Another is Iceland, which benefits from unusually large domestic geothermal resources not found in most other countries. Even for these two nations, the situation is complex: the construction of the infrastructure for their power plants mostly relied on fossil fuels for the mining of the ores and raw materials, for materials processing, for transportation, for the manufacturing of components, for the mining of uranium, for construction energy, and so on. Thus a meaningful energy transition away from fossil fuels is still a matter of theory and wishful thinking, not reality.

    My conclusion from a careful survey of energy alternatives, then, is that there is little likelihood that either conventional fossil fuels or alternative energy sources can be counted on to provide the amount and quality of energy that will be needed to sustain economic growth—or even current levels of economic activity—during the remainder of this century. (19)

    But the problem extends beyond oil and other fossil fuels: the world's fresh water resources are strained to the point that billions of people may soon find themselves with only precarious access to water for drinking and irrigation. Biodiversity is declining rapidly. We are losing 24 billion tons of topsoil each year to erosion. And many economically significant minerals—from antimony to zinc—are depleting quickly, requiring the mining of ever lower-grade ores in ever more remote locations. Thus the Peak Oil crisis is really just the leading edge of a broader Peak Everything dilemma.

    In essence, humanity faces an entirely predictable peril: our population has been growing dramatically for the past 200 years (expanding from under one billion to nearly seven billion), while our per-capita consumption of resources has also grown. For any species, this is virtually the definition of biological success. And yet all of this has taken place in the context of a finite planet with fixed stores of non-renewable resources (fossil fuels and minerals), a limited ability to regenerate renewable resources (forests, fish, fresh water, and topsoil), and a limited ability to absorb industrial wastes (including carbon dioxide). If we step back and look at the industrial period from a broad historical perspective that is informed by an appreciation of ecological limits, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are today living at the end of a relatively brief pulse—a 200-year rapid expansionary phase enabled by a temporary energy subsidy (in the form of cheap fossil fuels) that will inevitably be followed by an even more rapid and dramatic contraction as those fuels deplete.

    The winding down of this historic growth-contraction pulse doesn't necessarily mean the end of the world, but it does mean the end of a certain kind of economy. One way or another, humanity must return to a more normal pattern of existence characterized by reliance on immediate solar income (via crops, wind, or the direct conversion of sunlight to electricity) rather than stored ancient sunlight.

    This is not to say that the remainder of the 21st century must consist of a collapse of industrialism, a die-off of most of the human population, and a return by the survivors to a way of life essentially identical to that of 16th century peasants or indigenous hunter-gatherers. It is possible instead to imagine acceptable and even inviting ways in which humanity could adapt to ecological limits while further developing cultural richness, scientific understanding, and quality of life (more of this below).

    But however it is negotiated, the transition will spell an end to economic growth in the conventional sense. And that transition appears to have begun.

    How Do We Know Which Diagnosis Is Correct?

    If the patient is an individual human and the cause of distress is uncertain, more diagnostic tests can be prescribed. But to what sorts of blood tests, x-rays, and CAT scans can we subject the national or global economy?

    In a sense, the tests have already been done. During the past few decades thousands of scientific surveys of natural resources, biodiversity, and ecosystems have showed increasing rates of depletion and decline. (20) The continuing increase in human population, pollution, and consumption are likewise well documented. This information formed the basis for the Limits to Growth studies, previously mentioned, which use computer modeling to show how current trends are likely to play out—and most resulting scenarios show them leading to an end of economic growth and a collapse of industrial output some time in the early 21st century.

    Why are the results of such diagnostic tests not universally accepted as a challenge to expectations of continued growth? Primarily because their conclusion runs counter to the beliefs and proclamations of most economists, who maintain that there are no practical limits to growth. They deny that resource constraints provide an eventual cap on production and consumption. And so their diagnostic efforts tend to ignore environmental factors in favor of easily measured internal features of the human economy such as money supply, consumer confidence, interest rates, and price indices.

    Ecologist Charles Hall, among many others, has argued that the discipline of economics, as currently practiced, does not constitute a science, since it proceeds primarily on the basis of correlative logic rather than through the building of knowledge by a continuous, rigorous process of proposing and testing hypotheses. (21) While economics uses complex terminology and mathematics, as science does, its basic assertions about the world—such as the principle of infinite substitutability, which holds that for any resource that becomes scarce, the market will find a substitute—are not subjected to careful experimental examination. (It is worth noting that Hall and others have made the effort to lay the conceptual foundations for a new economics based on scientific principles and methods, which they call “biophysical economics.” (22)

    Moreover, mainstream economists failed on the whole to foresee the current crash. There was no consistent or concerted effort on the part of Secretaries of the Treasury, Federal Reserve Chairmen, or “Nobel” prize-winning economists to warn policy makers or the general public that, sometime in the early 21st century, the global economy would begin to come apart at the seams. (23) One might think that this predictive failure—the inability to foresee so historically significant an event as the rapid contraction of nearly the entire global economy, entailing the failure of some of the world's largest banks and manufacturing companies—would cause mainstream economists to stop and re-examine their fundamental premises. But there is little evidence to suggest that this is occurring.

    At the risk of repetition: physical scientists from several disciplines have indeed foreseen an end to economic growth in the early 21st century, and have warned policy makers and the general public on many occasions.

    Whom should we believe?

    The specifics of the Alternative Diagnosis are falsifiable. If economic activity were to rebound above 2007 levels, or if oil production were to rise above the July 2008 high-water mark, then the attribution of the current economic crisis to resource-tied limits to growth may be considered at least partly disproven. However, even if these things were to occur, the underlying reasoning behind the Alternative Diagnosis might still be correct. If the world oil production peak is delayed until, let us say, 2015 or 2020, and if another—this time bottomless—global economic crash results then, the ultimate outcome will be essentially the same. But if, meanwhile, the Alternative Diagnosis were to be taken seriously and acted upon, the consequences of doing so would be beneficial: a decade would have been spent preparing for the event.

    Could the Alternative Diagnosis be altogether wrong? That is, might conventional economists be right in thinking that growth can continue forever? It is often said that anything is possible, but some things are clearly much more possible than others. The perpetual growth of human population and consumption within the confines of a finite planet seems like a very long shot indeed, especially since warning signs are everywhere apparent that ecological limits are already being reached and surpassed. (24)

    What Not to Do: Prescribe Punishingly Expensive Placebos

    If the physical scientists who warn about limits to growth are right, confronting the global economic meltdown implies far more than merely getting the banks and mortgage lenders back on their feet. Indeed, in that case we face a fundamental change in our economy as significant as the advent of the industrial revolution. We are at a historic inflection point—the ending of decades of expansion and the beginning of an inevitable period of contraction that will continue until humanity is once again living within the limits of Earth's regenerative systems.

    But there are few signs that policy makers understand any of this. Their thinking appears to be shaped primarily by mainstream economists' assurances that growth can and must continue into the indefinite future, and that the economic contraction the world is currently experiencing is only temporary–a problem that can and must be solved.

    Still, the problem is not a minor one in the eyes of economists and policy makers. Consider the gargantuan size of the Treasury and Federal Reserve bailouts and stimulus packages that have been deployed in the possibly futile attempt to end contraction and restart growth. According to the special inspector general of the US government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), in remarks submitted to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 21, $23.7 trillion have been committed in “total potential federal government support.” This is expensive medicine indeed. It takes a moment to even begin to comprehend the enormity of the figure. It represents about half of annual world GDP, and is over three times the total amount spent by the US government, in inflation-adjusted dollars, on all wars combined, from 1776 to the present. It is nearly fifty times the cost of the New Deal.

    Other nations, including Britain, China, and Germany have committed to paying for stimulus packages and bailouts that, while much smaller in absolute terms, represent an impressive (or should we say frightful?) share of national GDP.

    If the Alternative Diagnosis is valid, none of this will work in the end, because existing financial institutions—with their basis in debt and interest and their requirements for constant expansion—cannot be made to function in a context where energy and resource constraints impose effective caps on manufacturing and transport.

    Are the bailouts and stimulus packages working? Much evidence suggests that they are not, except in limited ways. In the US, unemployment continues to increase, while real estate values continue to fall. And most of the reputed “green shoots” in the economy so far sighted amount merely to an arguably temporary decline in the rate of contraction. For example, the home price index released July 28 of this year showed that in May, seasonally adjusted prices fell just 0.16 percent from the previous month. That represents an annual rate of decline of a little under 2 percent, which is a substantial improvement over the annualized rate of more than 20 percent that prevailed from September 2008 through March of 2009. Many commentators seized upon this news as a sign of an imminent turnaround. Nevertheless, new home sales are down from 1.4 million per year in 2005 to 350,000 per year today, and house prices are down 50 percent from the bubble peak and still declining in most places. Moreover, manufacturing is still shrinking, small businesses are in trouble, there are still significant danger signs on the horizon, including a new round of mortgage resets, a likely dive in commercial real estate values, and the looming reality that toxic assets at the center of the banking crisis have yet to be dealt with. (25)

    President Obama has made the argument that bailouts are justified to stabilize the system long enough so that leaders can make fundamental changes to institutions and regulations, enabling the economy to then go forward healthier and more immune to similar crises in the future. But there is little to suggest that the kinds of systemic changes that are actually needed (ones that would enable the economy to function during a prolonged period of contraction) are under way or even contemplated. Meanwhile, as growth-based institutions are temporarily propped up, the ultimate scale of the damage is likely only to increase: when the inevitable collapse of those institutions does come, the consequences will likely be even worse because so much capital will have been squandered in attempting to salvage them.

    In using up non-renewable resources like metals, minerals, and fossil fuels, we have stolen from future generations. Now in effect we are stealing from those generations the financial wherewithal that could have been used to build a bridge to a sustainable economy. The construction of a renewable energy infrastructure (including not only generating capacity, but distribution and storage systems, as well as post-petroleum transport and agriculture systems) will require enormous investments and decades of work. Where will the investment capital come from if governments are already buried in debt? If we have committed nearly $24 trillion to propping up an old economy with no real survival prospects, what's left with which to finance the new one?

    If the current prescription for our economic malady is wrong-headed, the same is true of many proposed cures for our energy problems. According to the Conventional Diagnosis, today's high oil prices are due to speculation; the cure must therefore lie in the tighter regulation of oil futures trading (which may be a good idea, though it doesn't get to the heart of the problem), while providing more opportunities to oil companies to explore for domestic oil (even though the likely production rates from currently off-limits reserves would be relatively paltry, and would have a negligible effect on oil prices). In fact, though, investing further in fossil fuel energy systems (including “clean coal” technology) will yield declining returns, given that the highest quality resources have already been used up; meanwhile, doing so takes investment capital away from the development of renewable energy, which we will have to rely on increasingly as fossil fuels deplete. (26)

    What is required but is still utterly lacking is a fundamental recognition that circumstances have changed: what worked decades ago will not work now.

    What To Do: Adapt to the New Reality

    If the Alternative Diagnosis is correct, there will be no easy fix for the current economic breakdown. Some illnesses are not curable; they require that we simply adapt and make the best of our new situation.

    If humanity has indeed embarked upon the contraction phase of the industrial pulse, we should assume that ahead of us lie much lower average income levels (for nearly everyone in the wealthy nations, and for high wage earners in poorer nations); different employment opportunities (fewer jobs in sales, marketing, and finance; more in basic production); and more costly energy, transport, and food. Further, we should assume that key aspects of our economic system that are inextricably tied to the need for future growth will cease to work in this new context.

    What can we do to adapt most rapidly and successfully?

    Rather than attempting to prop up banks and insurance companies with trillions in bailouts, it would probably be better simply to let them fail, however nasty the short-term consequences, since they will fail anyway sooner or later. The sooner they are replaced with institutions that serve essential functions within a contracting economy, the better off we will all be. (27)

    Meanwhile the thought-leaders in society, especially the President, must begin breaking the news—in understandable and measured ways—that growth isn't returning and that the world has entered a new and unprecedented economic phase, but that we can all survive and thrive in this challenging transitional period if we apply ourselves and work together. At the heart of this general re-education must be a public and institutional acknowledgment of three basic rules of sustainability: growth in population cannot be sustained; the ongoing extraction of non-renewable resources cannot be sustained; and the use of renewable resources is sustainable only if it proceeds at rates below those of natural replenishment.

    Without cheap energy, global trade cannot increase. This doesn't mean that trade will disappear, only that economic incentives will inexorably shift as transport costs rise, favoring local production for local consumption. But this may be a nice way of putting it: if and when fuel shortages arise, fragile globe-spanning systems of provisioning could be disrupted, with dire effects for consumers cut off from sources of necessary products. Thus a high priority must be placed on the building of community resilience through the preferential local sourcing of necessities and the maintenance of larger regional inventories—especially of food and fuel. (28)

    It currently takes an average of 8.5 calories of energy from oil and natural gas to produce each calorie of food energy. Without cheap fuel for agriculture, farm production will plummet and farmers will go bankrupt—unless proactive efforts are undertaken to reform agriculture to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. (29)

    Obviously, alternative energy sources and energy efficiency strategies must be high priorities, and must be subjects of intensive research using a carefully chosen spectrum of criteria. The best candidates will have to be funded robustly even while fossil fuels are still relatively cheap: the build-out time for the renewable energy infrastructure will inevitably be measured in decades and so we must begin the process now rather than waiting for market forces to lead the way.

    In the face of credit and (potential) currency crises, new ways of financing such projects will be needed. Given that our current monetary and financial systems are founded on the need for growth, we will require new ways of creating money and new ways of issuing credit. Considerable thought has gone into finding solutions to this problem, and some communities are already experimenting with local capital co-ops, alternative currencies, and no-interest banks. (30)

    With oil becoming increasingly expensive in real terms, we will need more efficient ways of getting people and goods around. Our first priority in this regard must be to reduce the need for transport with better urban planning and re-localized production systems. But where transport is needed, rail and light rail will probably be preferable to cars and trucks. (31)

    We will also need a revolution in the built environment to minimize the requirement for heating, cooling, and artificial lighting in all our homes and public buildings. This revolution is already under way, but is currently moving far too slowly due to the inertia of established interests in the construction industry. (32)

    These projects will need more than local credit and money; they will also require skilled workers. There will be a call not just for installers of solar panels and home insulation: millions of new food producers and builders of low-energy infrastructure will be needed as well. A broad range of new opportunities could open up to replace vanishing jobs in marketing and finance—if there is cheap training available at local community colleges.

    It is worth noting that the $23.7 trillion recently committed for US bailouts and loan guarantees represents about $80,000 for each man, woman, and child in America. A level of investment even a substantial fraction that size could pay for all needed job training while ensuring universal provision of basic necessities during the transition. What would we be getting for our money? A collective sense that, in a time of crisis, no one is being left behind. Without the feeling of cooperative buy-in that such a safety net would help engender, similar to what was achieved with the New Deal but on an even larger scale, economic contraction could devolve into a horrific fight over the scraps of the waning industrial period.

    However contentious, the population question must be addressed. All problems that have to do with resources are harder to solve when there are more people needing those resources. The US must encourage smaller families and must establish an immigration policy consistent with a no-growth population target. This has foreign policy implications: we must help other nations succeed with their own economic transitions so that their citizens do not have to emigrate to survive. (33)
    If economic growth ceases to be an achievable goal, society will have to find better ways of measuring success. Economists must shift from assessing well-being with the blunt instrument of GDP, and begin paying more attention to indices of human and social capital in areas such as education, health, and cultural achievements. This redefinition of growth and progress has already begun in some quarters, but for the most part has yet to be taken up by governments. (34)

    A case can be made that after all this is done the end result will be a more satisfying way of life for the vast majority of citizens—offering more of a sense of community, more of a connection with the natural world, more satisfying work, and a healthier environment. Studies have repeatedly shown that higher levels of consumption do not translate to elevated levels of satisfaction with life. (35) This means that if “progress” can be thought of in terms of happiness, rather than a constantly accelerating process of extracting raw materials and turning them into products that themselves quickly become waste, then progress can certainly continue. In any case, “selling” this enormous and unprecedented project to the general public will require emphasizing its benefits. Several organizations are already exploring the messaging and public relations aspects of the transition. (36) But those in charge need to understand that looking on the bright side doesn't mean promising what can't be delivered—such as a return to the days of growth and thoughtless consumption.

    Can We? Will We?

    It is important to state the implications of all this as plainly as possible. If the Alternative Diagnosis is correct, there will be no full economic “recovery”—not this year, or the next, or five or ten years from now. There may be temporary rebounds that take us back to some fraction of peak economic activity, but these will be only brief respites.

    We have entered a new economic era in which the former rules no longer apply. Low interest rates and government spending no longer translate to incentives for borrowing and job production. Cheap energy won't appear just because there is demand for it. Substitutes for essential resources will in most cases not be found. Over all, the economy will continue to shrink in fits and starts until it can be maintained by the energy and material resources that Earth can supply on ongoing basis.

    This is of course very difficult news. It is analogous to being told by your physician that you have contracted a systemic, potentially fatal disease that cannot be cured, but only managed; and managing it means you must make profound lifestyle changes.

    Some readers may note that climate change has not figured prominently in this discussion. It is clearly, after all, the worst environmental catastrophe in human history. Indeed, its consequences could be far worse than the mere destruction of national economies: hundreds of millions of people and millions of other species could be imperiled. The reason for the relatively limited discussion of climate here is that (assuming the Alternative Diagnosis is correct) it is not climate change that has proven to be the most immediate limit to economic growth, but resource depletion. However, while there is not as yet general agreement on the point, climate change itself and the needed steps to minimize it both constitute limits to growth, just as resource depletion does. Moreover, if we fail to successfully manage the inevitable process of economic contraction that will characterize the coming decades, there will be no hope of mounting an organized and coherent response to climate change—a response consisting of efforts both to reduce climate impacts and to adapt to them . It is important to note, though, that the measures advocated here (including the development of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency, a rapid reduction of reliance on fossil fuels in transport and agriculture, and the stabilization of population levels) are among the steps that will help most to reduce carbon emissions.

    Is this essay likely to change the thinking and actions of policy makers? Unfortunately, that is unlikely. Their belief in the possibility and necessity of continued growth is pervasive, and the notion that growth may no longer be possible is unthinkable. But the Alternative Diagnosis must be a matter of record. This essay, composed by a mere journalist, in many ways represents the thinking of thousands of physical scientists working over the past several decades on issues having to do with population, resources, pollution, and biodiversity. Ignoring the diagnosis itself—whether as articulated here or as implied in tens of thousands of scientific papers—may waste our last chance to avert a complete collapse, not just of the economy, but of civility and organized human existence. It may risk a historic discontinuity with qualitative antecedents in the fall of the Roman and Mayan civilizations. (37) But there is no true precedent for what may be in store, because those earlier examples of collapse affected geographically bounded societies whose influence on their environments was also bounded. Today's civilization is global, and its fate, Earth's fate, and humanity's fate are inextricably tied.

    But even if policy makers continue to ignore warnings such as this, individuals and communities can take heed and begin the process of building resilience, and of detaching themselves from reliance on fossil fuels and institutions that are inextricably tied to the perpetual growth machine. We cannot sit passively by as world leaders squander opportunites to awaken and adapt to growth limits. We can make changes in our own lives, and we can join with our neighbors. And we can let policy makers know we disapprove of their allegiance to the status quo, but that there are other options.

    Is it too late to begin a managed transition to a post-fossil fuel society? Perhaps. But we will not know unless we try. And if we are to make that effort, we must begin by acknowledging one simple, stark reality: growth as we have known it can no longer be our goal.

    Infinite Economic Growth on a Finite planet is impossible, and the economic and social systems built upon this assumption are doomed to fail. No more time should be wasted in supporting this system, and instead the creation of local resilient communities should be our primary focus. If anything, Richard does not go far enough – his expressed hope in an alternative energy economy is unrealistic in the face of the huge embodied energy costs required to build and maintain the infrastructure needed for renewable energy to provide even a fraction of today's decadence. Any attempts to create a 'green' civilisation are misplaced, although the suggestion of community resilience as a key component of what we can do is shared here. We need to disconnect from the perpetual growth system and instead reconnect to the earth and form the stable community-based systems that can run in harmony within the earth-system. Let's seize the opportunities this recession is bringing and make this vision a reality!


    Aktie

    'Sustainability and Wildness'

    An interesting piece on wildness contrasted with sustainability, from the new going feral blog:

    Wildness

    Everything on this earth is inherently wild – if it lives and dies, it is part of the wildness that is life. Our word 'will' is rooted in the word wild; the will of a creature – the will of the land, is it's wildness. In a culture dedicated to denying this truth, we tend to think of wildness as an exception – as something that exists in isolated pockets of wilderness here and there. Wildness is the rule, not the exception. If it exists, it is either living unhindered in a wild state or it is the victim of domestication. The keyboard I type this on comes from different parts of this wild earth – tortured and mangled together into the image of a keyboard. Everthing has will; a desire for how it want's to exist and express itself – everything is inherantly wild.

    domestication

    Domestication is what we are surrounded by – and it is something that has happened to us, so it's not surprising that we don't notice it. It is a pretty polite word for a violent process – it might be better called 'killing the wildness' – since that's what it means. A domesticated creature is one that lives according to it's human master's will, not it's own. The more that creature (or plant, land, river etc.) can be helped to forget it's own will the easier for it's master to maintain control. If the cows forget that there had ever been anything other than the feedlot, they won't feel confined. How is it a violent process? A living thing's wildness is something potent - it's strength lies in every cell of the body. Nothing was born to live in captivity, to be droned, subdued, submissive; and nothing goes into such a role without being forced. In order for a feild of wheat to grow, every other living thing in that space must be eradicated. The feild is tilled, loosening up the soil (so that it can wash away), chemical fertilizer is applied, irrigation, pesticides, all to keep the field from remembering how it wants to live. Year after year, the feild is plowed planted and sprayed, consuming enormous amounts of energy, because year after year it wants to go wild, to remember, to heal - and must be beaten into submission.

    The final dream of domestication - total control. Soy monoculture in the wake of one of the most biodiverse environments to have ever existed; the rainforests of Brazil. The final dream of domestication – total control. Soy monoculture in the wake of one of the most biodiverse environments to have ever existed; the rainforests of Brazil.

    Once human societies start domesticating each other and their landbases, it seems to become obsessive, it feeds itself. A look around should prove the point. It may be that humans began domesticating and developing agricultural societies with beautiful intentions, but once the process of taking wild space and turning it into a human designed 'production' begins, things get out of control. Humans are capable of taking forests - home to countless species of plant, animal, bird, insect, mycelium - and after killing their wildness, turning it all into a production space for human food. The possibilities of expansion are limited only by how much earth there is to exploit. The final dream of civilization is that everything will be controlled, organized, categorized; all wildness and spontaneity will be eradicated. Fish will live in fish farms. Trees will grow on forest farms. Animals of utility will live in feedlots. Humans will live in cities completely isolated from any other creatures (except cute pets), isolated from anything that might remind them. The earth will be remodeled in the name of production. Any spontaneous, uncontrolled expression of life will be crushed. Of course, it isn't really the future I am describing…..

    sustainability

    How does this relate to sustainability? Is domestication unsustainable? I would say yes, but that isn't the issue I want to talk about here. There is alot of buzz in mainstream society right now about who's 'going green!', about how industrial society is voluntarily making the transition to green energy and thus becoming sustainable. Look at the picture above – the brazilian rainforest is cleared to make way for vast plantations of soybeans. What if those tractors were powered by biodeisel? What if they were powered by methane trapped from composting human shit, which was then used to fertilize the feild? Imagine that picture as an example of sustainability – vegan food being farmed using green fuel and human compost. Why would anyone want to sustain that?

    The popular concept of sustainability paints a picture something like this: Humans are burning too much fossil fuel. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with how we live, or how we interact with this earth, there are just some glitches in the system. Acidifying oceans, ozone holes, and most importantly global warming. If we can only make a few simple changes - switch to green energy, organic farming, cloth bags instead of plastic, phase out fossil fuels – the earth won't burn and industrial civilization will be able to continue indefinately. I don't want to argue too much here over the issue that it is impossible for this culture to become sustainable – I think it is more important that we consider if it is even desireable! In the sustainability movement, there is no discussion on what it is we want to make sustainable , or even what has been sustainable in the past. A culture of hunter gatherers lived sustainably in the brazilian rainforest for thousands of years, now eradicated and subdued into producing soybeans (pictured above) for the eco-conscious north american. Can a domesticated, modern human have any concept of what is sustainable, being so removed from any real point of reference? Remember, one of the most important parts of being domesticated is forgetting, or having your memories erased - your wild nature – who you are and what you need, erased.

    The only proven models we have for existing sustainably as humans (the only way humans have ever actually existed sustainably) are hunter-gatherer societies, who did cultivate their landbases in many subtle ways, the important difference from agricultural socety being that they directly depended/depend on the health of their wild landbase – where agricultural society depends on fighting/destroying the health of it's wild landbase. One way preserves the land, one way rapidly destroys it. Hunter-gatherers are tied to a limited resource base; a culture that kills too many Bison will soon after starve. This gives incentive to not get too big or too greedy. If an agricultural society gets too big or greedy, however, it just clears mor land to plant more grain – and so on, and so on, untill…. it becomes sustainable!

    Future plans for Gothenburg, Sweden, transitioning to become a sustainable city. Future plans for Gothenburg, Sweden, transitioning to become a sustainable city.

    what do we want to make sustainable?

    This is a very important question. Do we want to be able to continue abusing all life on this planet – conforming it to our twisted visions of what is needed? Do we want to have a sustainable human engineered earth, completely ordered and controlled to maximize efficiency? A sustainable world where everyone and everything is tagged, drugged, kept submissive, orderly, tame? Or do we want to give up on the project of controlling all life on earth? Becoming sustainable does not mean allowing the wildness of living things to flourish; letting blackberries and dandelions grow through the concrete, turning the pavement into soil (and food!). It doesn't mean healing our relationship with the land, or ourselves. Infact, the popular concept of sustainability, if enacted, would simply mean making the war against wildness perpetual. Domestication is the root of the giant chasm between humans and the non-human world, it is the engine that propels us towards killing the planet. Yet, somehow, it has completely snuck under the radar of the ongoing discussion on 'going green', probably because it is a much more ancient and deeply rooted problem than burning fossil fuels. It makes the solution much more complex.

    The ancient civilization of what is now called Iraq successfully deforested rainforests of giant cedars, planted them with wheat, and turned them into desert in just a few centuries using primitive stone, bone and wood tools, as well as farming organically. Phasing out fossil fuels isn't enough. Going back to a pre-industrial level of technology isn't enough. There is a darkness at the heart of this culture, something very powerful and destructive that we need to see. We need to enter into a conversation with the land we take from in order to live; allow ourselves to hear it's screams. We need to have relationships that aren't manipulative and abusive, with one another and the earth. 'Sustainability' is not primary, it might even be a destructive goal - that wild aliveness flourish is what matters.

    the only war that matters

    is the war against wildness

    all other wars are subsumed by it

    We agree – the sustainiability proposed by many green organisations and commentators will perpetuate the system which has destroyed the earth in the first place. Why should we perpetuate this destructive and suicidal system any further? True sustainability lies in undomesticating people, rewilding our economies and communities and promoting wildness as opposed to civilisation. Whenever you see the term sustainability used, look beneath the surface greenwash and see the real message – is it perpetuating civilisation or is it rewilding and dismantling civilisation?

    Aktie

    Beyond Copenhagen

    It has become obvious from recent press releases, campaigns and actions that the environmental movement has started to focus on the upcoming Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009 (COP15). The rallying cry is that this is the last opportunity world governments will have to agree to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions and cut these massively over the next few decades – beyond this, they say, governments and nations have little chance of accomplishing the cuts necessary to avoid disastrous tipping points in the earth's warming climate system. So all hopes have been pinned on politicians and governments at this conference for saving the earth on our behalf. But there are several dangers in pursuing this logic that could ultimately lead to the very thing the movement is trying to prevent.

    The first danger is that despite the outcome of the talks, whether positive, neutral or negative, it is likely there will be a 'demobilisation' across the environmental movement. An article at The Change Agency elaborates on the results of an apparent failure:

    If the second or third post COP 'Outcome' outlined above come to pass, the Australian (this article focuses on the Australian movement, but is applicable globally) climate movement's may find itself in what could be called a 'Perception of Failure' stage. This is often cited as a 'Stage 5' following a movement 'take-off' period' and often seen to be preceding a period of mainstream acceptance of movement goals.[4]

    According to Moyer, the characteristics inherent in this stage include: the widely held belief amongst movement activists that its goals remain un-achieved and power-holders remain unchallenged. Numbers are down at demonstrations as people feel that repetitive and formulaic actions are ineffective. Despair, hopelessness, burnout, dropout are common, membership, particularity active membership of groups declines. Numbers of 'negative rebels', those activists willing to take high risk actions without movement support emerge and garner negative public attention, which further alienates concerned people.

    Paradoxically, the results of an apparent 'success' are also undesirable:

    Deliberate movement co-option and demobilisation may not be the intention of the Copenhagen Conference of Parties and the climate negotiations process in itself. But the dynamic is what the movement needs to be aware of and respond to. Elites are practised in providing outwardly impressive policy statements with little substance or which hide covert practises. Elite groups also have the advantage of influence over powerful communication channels. Many, if not all, national delegations at Copenhagen will be seeking the most politically profitable outcome at the conference and the appeasement of their domestic climate movements will be a part of their considerations. Whilst it is likely that experienced climate activists and lobbyists, already well versed in climate negotiation politics will be able to perceive duplicity in the COP outcomes, less engaged activists and the concerned public will be more likely to adopt the predominate messaging received via mainstream media.

    ...
    If COP results in something like Outcome 1 described above, even dedicated climate activists who already regularly attend movement events may find themselves wondering if all the effort is worth it now that the US, alongside the rest of the world have come on board and started to turn things around. Surely the thing now is to sit back and see how the international targets are met? Those people, who are looking for a reason not to come to the next rally, may well find one after COP.

    The result either way, whether or not serious cuts are agreed on a sensible time scale, will likely results in large-scale demobilisation of the environmental movements. By setting such a definitive deadline, either they will feel so successful that they've done the job and need do no more for the earth, or so defeated and depressed that further action seems pointless. Either way, the total focus on the results of this conference could torpedo future efforts in preventing climate chaos.

    The second danger of the Copenhagen logic is the growing reliance on high-up elites to solve the climate crisis for us. As the timings of these talks has been identified as so crucial by the various organisations and groups of the environmental movement, there has been a massive shift to the line of thinking that only #they# can make the difference needed – the politicians, leaders and elites. However, as it is these people's jobs to maintain the status quo, to keep our modern industrial economies running as smoothly and profitably as possible and to facilitate the liquidation of the earth's natural capital to finance these economies, it is inevitable that even with a 'positive' outcome of serious cuts that these promises will contain extensive loopholes, flexibility and wriggle room covered up by dense greenwash language. I have no doubt that communiques from the gathered politicians, that have been pored over by PR reps in order to maximise greenwash, will claim a victory nonetheless, whether or not their promised cuts will make a difference or not. Indeed, to expect anything more from these talks is naive. Minor progress may well be made, but enough to finally turn around the battle against impending climate chaos? Unlikely.

    This potential 'perception of success' poses differing challenges to the current climate movement. In a similar way to the movement's downturn in the months following the election of the Rudd government and the symbolic signing of the Kyoto Pact, people, lobbyists and NGO leadership groups, can be deceived by an apparent successful political compromise. The belief that politicians hold the strings of capital and can make the structural shifts actually necessary to halt runaway climate change is mainstream and ubiquitous. This feeds directly into the commonly held belief that elites are essentially powerful and popular movements (and their activities) are not.

    What will happen is that the cultural concept of dependence on the leaders, politicians and elites to take action for us and look after us for our best good will become further entrenched. The existing system will fail to be challenged by those who run it and depend on it for wealth and power, and so will continue to wreak havoc and create climate chaos. The push for changing our destructive western lifestyles will fall by the wayside, and attempts to overthrow the destructive culture behind it will falter.

    As long as we believe it's their job to fix this, all will be lost. But as soon as we accept that our leaders and elites are incapable of doing enough to stop climate chaos, then there is a chance. If we instead focus on overthrowing the destructive culture they and we are embedded into, abandoning consumerist lifestyles and stopping infinite economic growth, we have a hugely better chance of stopping the juggernaught of industrial economy before it breaks the 2C tipping point. Through local economies, local currencies, local food production, extensive permaculture, stronger communities and cultural subversion we can make a difference. We have to see beyond Copenhagen and its result either way – it's time to focus on the real action each of us can achieve that's infinitely more valuable than the greenwashed communiques of Copenhagen.

    Aktie

    'The movement is dead, long live the movement!'

    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.

    RIP, 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 (ie 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!


    Aktie
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