26 Comments

1. Dean Melton:

   Count me in.

   31 July 2006, 10:17 pm

2. Skol:

   I’d sign it.
   You have no clue (maybe you do–Actually, I suspect you do) how much hope and sanity you and your site (and others in this underground blogosphere) could bring to millions of Americans. Like me, they’re the intermediate, as you say. Maybe they’re too busy scanning buzzflash and The Daily Show, or whatever. I’m just a kid (I don’t mean that pretentiously, just maybe it’s a helpful perspective), but the cognitive dissonance and angst is palpable, nevertheless, among certain elements of Gen Y.
   “Something is amiss”, and we’re feeling it. Seems odd to me how the education is all out there, and not enough people have simply accessed these channels, when so many would agree - fundamentally - with these ideas. The best I’ve done for the world, imho, is just read what’s going on here. That’s not much, but the knowledge is soo important. yada yada yada.

   I like this “meme-warfare”, something I’m starting to get a hang of, and I’m wondering how much of it can be done simply over the internet. Good resource might be here for starters. Seems like such a good ground for culture jamming. Long, legitimate forum posts ending with go here for more info sort of thing. That’s tangential, and I’m prone to that sort of impractical romanticism (is that redundant?), but whatever. (And I’d never do that href, what with server difficulties, etc.) Might as well make the best use of the internet as we can.
   ah, dreams.

   31 July 2006, 11:10 pm

3. peggy:

   That’s cool. I’ll sign. Dibs on I-71 where it crosses Mockingbird Valley Road. It must be on the way from somewhere to D.C.

   31 July 2006, 11:18 pm

4. Lenny Lyons:

   Count me in.

   1 August 2006, 1:01 am

5. peggy:

   On a more somber note: way back when we were living in a beautiful country spot, trying to do the homesteading thing, but mostly just appreciating the beauty of the place, there was a nationwide protest against nuclear weaponry, which some of the readers here may remember, and there were local protests all around, and I joined in one of them and wrote a sign which I carried, and took my young son. It must have been in the early 1980s. And when we got home, my son asked for a clarification of what this was all about, and I explained to him about it, how the whole world could be destroyed by these weapons.

   And my son looked at me in distress and anger, and said, “But that ruins it all! It makes all of this pointless!” What he meant by “all of this” was our choosing to live in a beautiful place, which he also had come to love. He was about four or five. By allowing him to love the ephemeral beauty of the natural world, we had betrayed him.

   1 August 2006, 2:11 am

6. peggy:

   Just one more thing. Look up Jonathan Schell. He is still writing. What he wrote back then ignited the nationwide protest against nuclear weaponry.

   1 August 2006, 3:21 am

7. peggy:

   Sorry - still one more thing. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. In the sixties, the idea was that only the current big powers, who already had nuclear weapons, should have them. India and Pakistan signed, and then violated, the treaty.

   But should only the big powers have nuclear weaponry? Should even the big powers have them? Are not the big powers the ones who can do the most harm?

   Back then, we were thinking, what if some madman from some little country got his finger on the button? Don’t want that.

   But now, we have - maybe not a madman, but a dumb guy under the control of madmen - president of the richest country in the world, and also the country with the third largest population (after China and India) with his finger on that very button. Are the current leaders of India and China less responsible than the President of the United States? NO - They are more responsible. India, for all its faults, is the most democratic big country that ever was or ever could be. China at least seems to have its act together. Its leaders seem to behave reasonably, if not always how we would want them to behave, given the vast populations they have to somehow manage.

   Do we want the current world system to break down? Yes. Do we want as much as possible decentralization of power? I do. Do we want every Joe Blow Warlord in the world to be able to develop and deploy nuclear weaponry? Hard to answer that one …

   1 August 2006, 3:56 am

8. Mark:

   The NPT, which has the obvious flaw of encouraging nuclear power development, actually also says the following.

   “The States concluding this Treaty..

   Declaring their intention to achieve at the earliest possible date the cessation of the nuclear arms race and to undertake effective measures in the direction of nuclear disarmament,

   Urging the cooperation of all States in the attainment of this objective,

   Recalling the determination expressed by the Parties to the 1963 Treaty banning nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water in its Preamble to seek to achieve the discontinuance of all test explosions of nuclear weapons for all time and to continue negotiations to this end,

   Desiring to further the easing of international tension and the strengthening of trust between States in order to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery pursuant to a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control,”

   As much as this is put forth by nuclear powers like the U.S. as a treaty to keep the nuke have-nots from becoming haves it is also a clear declaration of the intention of those countries that have nuclear weapons to take serious steps toward entirely eliminating their stockpiles. Of course no such thing has ever been done but that doesn’t stop this country’s government from trying to selectively enforce the parts of the NPT it likes.

   1 August 2006, 10:23 am

9. Monplaisir:

   Bonjour Stan ,
   là je ne vous suis pas complètement : je n’arrive pas à faire de hiérarchie entre être coupé en morceaux vivant par des éclats , brûlé vif par un lance-flammes , enterré vivant - j’en passe et des meilleures - et être vitrifié par une bombe atomique .
   Les arguments opposables à ce que je viens de dire sont rebattus mais ils ne m’ont jamais convaincu .
   Cela étant , enough is enough .
   Pierre

   1 August 2006, 12:30 pm

10. DeAnander:

    I’ll attempt a translation for the nonFrancophones among us:

    Hello Stan

    here I’m not quite with you: I can’t manage to establish a hierarchy [of badness] among [ways of dying such as] being chopped alive into little bits by explosions, burned alive by [flamethowers? some kind of incendiary weapons], buried alive — I’ll skip even better options — and being vitrified by an atomic bomb. there are many arguments in opposition to what I just said but they have never convinced me. that being so, enough is enough.

    I think what Pierre says, if my poor French is up to the task, is that murdering people horribly isn’t any less criminal or painful or loathesome if is done nonradioactively, so why would we reserve our anger and action especially for a nuke strike?

    one possible answer is that the nuclear industry is foul from inception to delivery — it causes death and destruction from the mine to the processing plant to the intended victims. I can kill someone horribly with a baseball bat or a screwdriver, but the process of making baseball bats or screwdrivers is not quite so inherently foul, secretive, dishonest and stupid.

    another possible answer is the enduring legacy of toxicity and genetic damage that nuclear contamination “offers” — a way to poison the genomic well for decades to come, to afflict families with the birth of deformed and/or nonviable children, to afflict (primarily women) with the additional burden of a high cancer rate among all age ranges. from even a massacre a nation or culture may spring back to life, grieving and angry but vital; but nuclear pollution offers an insidious, lasting poison to weaken the polity, burden the household and the economy, and drag down the heart and soul of the people.

    of course this effect can be achieved w/o actually exploding nuke warheads and making showy mushroom clouds. just using DU munitions releases enough alpha-emitters in aerosol form to poison a generation. the US has *already* used nuclear weapons in Iraq (and in the Balkans earlier).

    and of course fossil-based industry is poisoning the genetic well already — contaminating the planet’s flora with vandalised genetic markers, and its fauna with POPs, heavy metals, chlorine compounds, lead, cholinesterase inhibitors, estrogen mimics, tailored bacteria, etc etc. the extent to which we are making ourselves sick in the process (since we are part of the planet’s fauna, like it or not) is obfuscated by industry and poorly-understood by science thanks to the nearly total absence of a control group or any adequate funding for epidemiology… it may be that in the end, the fossil and chemical industrial age will have done as much long-term genetic and macro-health damage as a single — or even multiple — A-bomb strike.

    but we respond with greater outrage to single short-term events and simply attributable fault than to long processes with diffuse responsibility…

    1 August 2006, 5:17 pm

11. Stan:

    De and Monplaisir make a good point. It really is a question of whether a single attributable act of such monumentally horrible proportions will sitmulate a response from Ye Olde Metropole. I run this shit up the flagpole to get some idea… IS there anything that would lead this decadent society to rebel? They do this already in places like Bolivia, but has a peculiar reverse Darwinism so cowed Amerika with air conditioning, strip malls, and entertainment that we have crossed over some existential boundary mapped onto our deeply indoctrinated collective consciousness and passed the point of return to engage in a real politics of resistance? Is resistance, as the pomos might suggest, now simply a performance? Has the character of our existence inside the imperial hyper-state now set up a transient system of survival of the unfittest?

    I used to promote 3-D: delegitimation, disobedience, disruption. We’ve probably taken phase one about as far as it’s going to go, when CNN can still defend Israel while it plays pictures of dead children being dragged out of the rubble of Qana. Time for phase two, those who are up for it.

    If we have to traipse up to DC this year, fercrissake let’s encamp there with no end date, shit on their lawn until we get either a set of handcuffs or a change.

    Carrying placards and participating in the election follies is okay, but it’s not enough.

    Bonus March.

    1 August 2006, 6:03 pm

12. Legume Sam:

    Nuclear weapons, used anywhere, increase global cancer rates everywhere. There’s a reason to protest.

    1 August 2006, 11:24 pm

13. James M:

    De’s point about long-term toxicity in the environment, radioactive and otherwise, is one I think about a lot.

    I took note of the enthusiasm, which I share, expressed in other posts about the potential for new communities / temporary autonomous zones / etc. to spring up in the “voids” left by capital flight. We saw one of those on the big march, at Bayou Liberty, and I’ve seen them here in Oakland in places like the homeless encampment atop the old dump near the Marina.

    The problem is, a large part of the reason for these areas’ abandonment is that they have been so highly toxified. I remember reading on Bayou Liberty’s website that after we left, they discovered that the water they’d been showering with, that I showered with, contains dangerous levels of mercury. At the homeless encampment in Oakland, unhealthful levels of methane were found seeping out of the ground, a big part of the reason the city eventually evicted its residents.

    There’s an anarchic artists’ / survivalists’ movement here in Oakland that to aims live off the grid and to reclaim industrial refuse & transform it into things like furniture, works of art, musical instruments, etc. There’s even sort of a standard-bearing musical group for this movement called Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, who build their own instruments from scraps, who sing songs about Ted Kaczynski, and who recently eschewed amplification & went acoustic in preparation for industrial collapse. I think these are the kinds of people who, due to their mental and physical preparation, will be the most likely to survive and build new communities in the aftermath of “climate distortion, resource depletion, and global economic catastrophe” (as FTW puts it.)

    But what kind of land will they inherit? I for one am getting out of Oaktown. I don’t feel a place saturated with every kind of carcinogen, mutagen, & poison you can name is one in which to start a new community.

    I guess, though, at this stage, we can only speak in terms of degrees of toxicity. One facet of any post-collapse movement, I think, will have to consist of minds dedicated to mitigating or eliminating toxins in the environment, so you can do things like decontaminate soil to grow food in, or decontaminate water so you can bathe in and drink it.

    I don’t know what the possibilities are. I know a lot about optimizing amplified sound, and pushing pixels around on a screen — things which may possibly be obsolete in the kind of environment envisioned by apocalyptic thinkers like my survivalist acquaintances — so I hope someone else is thinking about these things, and has some ideas.

    I’m curious to know what you think, De.

    2 August 2006, 12:27 am

14. Dhane Blue:

    You’re right — each individual needs to draw his own line in the sand — the place beyond where he or she is not willing to go. I admire your suggestion but am unsure whether or not it would be effective. There are forces ready to provoke a revolution in the U.S.A. — whether it be socialist/totalitarian/fascist or one that genuinely recreates the U.S.A. with a second revolution — this time against the government we have now. I’ve read some on the net about the U.S. still being a British colony — we’re still just resources to the original imperialist interests that colonized us in the first place. I would take your suggestion one step further — I have also read a lot about Americans who have simply walked off stage left, so to speak. There is a growing community of expat Americans who are focused on growing into an international community that condemns what our government does in our name. While the sheeple continue to bleat mindlessly at home, I don’t condemn them for this if they consciously choose to stay that way — it’s fine with me. They’re making their own bed — let them lie in it. I would offer up the suggestion of renouncing American citizenship itself. I am not so sure it would be any more effective of a solution unless millions of us did it en masse and had arranged refugee/immigrant status elsewhere where American imperialism hasn’t brainwashed the local populace into the same mindset we’re suffering at home. However, as a personal choice, it appears to be the path I’m walking on with that goal in mind. Keep up the writing — good words!

    2 August 2006, 1:16 am

15. Stan:

    Here is where I bump into my own interpretation of what socialist ethics look like. Despite my above bout of mis-US-thropy, when I say “living off the grid,” while this is important, there is a dangerous fork in the road here. One direction can lead us into the realm of survivalists, which is apocolypticist and eschews the political struggle. But I have to think about the people who this route presumably leaves behind: millions and millions of them. And I also have to consider the responsiblity to fight for political power at the same time we work toward adequate self-sufficiency to empower ourselves and others. Just one example from my earlier days fighting with CP&L nuke plant. We have 104 licensed nuclear reactors in the US, each producing immense quantities of spent fuel that contains very nasty and persistent things like Cesium-137. These subsances imply some form of custodial responsibility for around 10,000 years. If we manage to get them decommissioned, are any of us trained to package this stuff after the reactor is turned off. They ignite without a steady supply of mobile cooling water. What about hospitals and nursing homes? Kids with medical issues?

    To me, at least, the sector that most urgently needs to come off the grid — RIGHT WHERE THEY PHYSICALLY ARE — is living in the suburbs. They are, because of their vulnerability to a grid breakdown and their position as an imperial middle class, and their access to resources like guns, and their me-first job environments, the most dangerous sector in society in any severe crisis (which WILL be economic first and foremost).

    If I run off the the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to live on spruce hens, blueberries, and speckled trout, like some latter-day Allee Oop, all I’ve accomplished is to withdraw.

    The difference in how Haitians handle their severe crisis (which is deeply ecological, as well as socio-economic) and how the Cubans dealt with their post-Soviet crisis (warm wishes for a speedy recovery to Comrade Fidel) is… state power. Political will that can direct the full resources of the state toward what was a kind of Permaculture Manhattan Project.

    All the various tracks we have been on, knocked repeatedly apart by the financial and ideologicial impositon of issue “pluralism”, are bound to become contradictory and competitive (as the IRS non-profit system is designed to do). The sectarianism on the left is a consequence of a “contracted market” of membership. Each of these issue-advocacy histories and each of these struggle traditions had weaknesses (inhering in our divisions, but also our myopia), but they also have strengths.

    The deep ecologists have very good science, but they haven’t gottent politics. The left has had a good grasp of pollitics, but they were wedded to developmentalism and radical technolgical optimism. Rad-Feminists… well, they were Marxists for the most part, who were expelled from that tradition when the ruthlessly applied its philosophic logic to gender; and Marxists to this day remain significantly immune to the rad-fem critique (embracing such glaringly liberal shit as so-called “sex-positivism”… meaning desire as a social phenomenon is off limits to inspection, or it might endanger boys’ privileges). The white radicals are quick to embrace environmentalism when they see a dead bear, but less likely to see a dead Black child as a consequence that will mobilize them politically.

    These are the fissures that have to be overcome.

    The reason we can’t see past our own standpoints is not merely self-interest. There is an epistemologal source: the fragmented, sub-divided, atomized, analytical (as opposed to synthetic) bias that permeates the way we are socialized to know. An either-or bias. A bias that divides university courses into departments. And there is a powerful, all-pervasive, network of systems within the larger system that is a product and reproductive agent of this bias… and it is one that is predicated on the differentiation of the practical from the intellectual, and the subsequent sub-division of the intellectual. it entraps formal intellectuals in systems that reward ethereal irrelevance in a single field as a way of butressing against the dangers of holism and synthesis.

    That is one of the reasons THIS medium, the internet, with its every more democratic reach into the sectors of society that we need to contest for, is also a medium where the “feral” intellectuals, who are not constrained by the obligaton to flesh out their CV’s with increasingly arcane studies, can move laterally, obliquely, fore and aft, up and down… making connections, violating power-preservation conventions, and establishing the basis of a new episteme.

    I was on the phone with Kriti Sharma yesterday, and she recommended a book called “Square Foot Gardening“, by Mel Bartholomew. It’s a book on how to garden in the ‘burbs. This is a book with the kinds of insights that needs to be made available along WITH those that explain the world system, the cancerous nature of capitalism. Feral intellectuals don’t simply break down the artifical boundaries between Psychology and Economics and Sociology; they break down the artifical boundaries between theory and practice, beween local and international, between rural and urban… and make all the connections that were rendered inaccessible in the old episteme.

    I believe in political cadres, and in the capture of state power as an absolute necessity. There would be no Permaculture Manhattan Project in Cuba without it; no resistance to imperialism arming itself as we speak in Venezuela; no nationalizaton of assets in Bolivia.

    But the cadres that will be required to work within the awesome complexity of the US, and against the awesome Panopticon power of that state, have to be differetn, because this is a different society. We have a harder job to do.

    In a reply to De on email the other day, on the question of how long it would take to repair the biosphere, I went into a coffee-driven rant:

    “Long time. That’s why I like the Cuban guy’s remark about ‘rehabilitating’ the soil, and the Cuban woman’n statement that it was an act of pure political will.

    “The historical irony of this is that our generation — the one that has in many ways been most individually debilitated by consumer culture — is now standing before a Goliath-like political responsibility for the future of humanity. The odds seem such, on broad examination, that hope itself can only serve as half-assed faith, because faith, of the Kierkegardian variety — a leap into the abyss — is all that undergirds the kind of existential decision that will lead us to fight with our eyes open. When Che talked about the “new man” (person), he was envisioning the re-orientation of the human personality for socialism — a transtional period of a century. Looking back and ahead now, the new revolutionary makes Che’s great vision look child-like in its simplicity. Any cadre that is built now has to be much more than a group agreed upon somone’s line. It has to consist of people who look into that abyss every moment of every day until they learn a contempt for fear; and at the same time people with love and humor. People who can fight their enemies wihtout dehumanizing them.

    “I see these bored, middle-class kids into Extreme everything, displaying their reckless physical courage as a way of feeling real. We shall need people who have that same compulsion, but who are focused and disciplined, and who can display psychic courage, as well as a single-minded cunning combined with free-wheeling mental and tactical agility, who have their eye on this impossible prize, or any scrap of what’s left of it, and who learn to live to participate in the struggle, no matter the outcome. People who learn to live beneath the superificality, intellectual without being solopsistic, psychic subterraneans who create a culture of struggle for a reward they have already determined they will never see… who live for the forgiveness and esteem of future generations.”

    2 August 2006, 9:22 am

16. DeAnander:

    I have a feeling that industrial anomic [?] capitalism is synergistic — that car culture creates carburbs which are ideally suited to gated community formation and class segregation, and also creates overpaving and misuse of land and degradation of ag land and species diversity reduction (didja know that the leading threat to most of the larger US species is being killed by cars?)… it also created the fast food industry with its accelerating, insane distortion of agricultural markets and production methods… and the land speculation made possible by the car culture spawned the huge capital surpluses which then get channelled into crazy second-order speculative booms, and concentrated into fewer hands.. and the flight to the carburbs cores out the cities which were once multi-class, multi-race centres of political and intellectual activity… and it creates the viability of the Mall Culture and Big Box stores which plays into the hands of the renascent monopolists… and it exacerbates the fossil fuel dependency which distorts the economy and foreign policy…

    what I mean is, you can’t say that cars for example “cause” all these things, because versions of all these problems could be pointed to in environments before cars or with fewer cars than N Am. but I think you can say that the car culture is an element in a powerful synergy that warps behaviours and expectations and social norms in a certain direction or directions, and those directions at present are towards greater inequity and less democracy and more destructiveness. and that changing transportation infrastructure would change public attitudes and the social mood; there is a fairly strong cross correlation between lack of public transit infrastructure and political rightwing tendencies in communities, and it’s a chicken/egg feedback loop. the lack of public transit tends to reinforce socially autistic car culture, and the socially autistic car culture reinforces rightwing memes like Rugged Individualism aka F**k-You-Jack-I’m-All-Rightism, which immunise the population against “communist” ideas like public transit! the car dependent culture also insulates people from anyone “different”, keeps the classes and races neatly segregated, and diverts so much tax money to highway and auto infrastructure that it’s hard to fund social programs w/o high tax rates which the Rugged Individualistas will never accept, blah blah blah. similarly, public transit as the dominant infrastructure encourages dense multilevel, multifamily housing development along established rail or bus lines, and in that environment the private auto becomes very expensive to own because of the high value of land and therefore the high cost of storage space, and terminally dysfunctional to own if more than a tiny proportion of the urban dwellers try to own one (the average speed of an automobile driver crossing NYC is approximately the same as that of a mule cart crossing the same town 150 years ago, but the BTUs invested in vehicle and fuel are enormously higher).

    the technologies of food, housing, and transit tend to shape our ideologies as well as responding to them. and many of these tendencies are self-reinforcing or amplifying — hence, I think, the grotesque caricature of suburban life now being demonstrated by the affluent class in the US — 100 mile commutes in 4+-ton SUVs to and from ersatz “country homes” of 5,000-plus square foot built on what were once productive farms. the model has accelerated into an insane cartoon of itself, and there seems to be no limit to the distortion other than the cost and availability of the enabling elements: cheap fossil fuel and open land. the Chinese affluent class is now starting to emulate the same insane pattern, with an even steeper onset and amplification envelope.

    so where I am going with this is that I think suburban and urban farming for example — as a project, as a programme — is likely to have all kinds of spinoff effects that are synergistic and lead in new political and social directions. for example, if the cheapest and most convenient place to get food is your own back yard or the local parking-lot market where the local growers sell their stuff 2 days a week, then that (a) puts people far more in touch with their neighbours, creates a zocolo where people who are truly local and familiar encounter each other repeatedly, with continuity, (b) reduces the alienating long car drives to super markets and supermalls, hence reducing the fossil fuel consumption, road danger, pollution, etc. (c) changes the diet towards fresh foods and away from hyperprocessed corporate food laden with corn syrup, salt, and various industrial chemicals, (d) changes land use away from lawns (with the attendant curses of herbicides and mowers)… anyway, I think we might well see that social change is a result of changing land use and food production patterns, as well as a precondition for such change.

    what we eat and how we make our food; what we do for a living and how we get there; how we generate our power and what it costs us; what structures we inhabit and how they are arranged; all these things shape our politics as well as being shaped by them. I don’t think it was any coincidence at all that it took a Peak Oil shock in Cuba to undermine the insanity of huge factory monocrop farming; it was the collapse of the cheap oil supply that forced the land reform that broke down the huge state farms into usufruct-lease small farms run by individuals and families organised by village and region. that productivity and morale gain, and the resulting improvement in the food quality and food self-sufficiency of the island, could have been realised at any time — but the “institutional culture” could not move in that direction. the ideology of Soviet-style Marxism was absolutely wedded to gigantism, industrialism, Taylorism. it took a forced change of method to produce a pragmatic change in ideology. fossil fuel, as a distorting “magic bullet” or deus ex machina, enables distorted ideologies and false economies to go on like terminal patients on extreme life support — grotesque thermodynamic and procedural inefficiencies being papered over by pouring more and more megabarrels of crude over the problem to make it “go away.” but if you take away the cheap energy then those inefficiencies can no longer be papered over; the stupidity of industrial monocrop farming and totalised central ag planning become blazingly clear, the validity of peasant-scale farming becomes self-evident, and either the society commits collective suicide or it modifies its ideology in order to go on eating.

    the modifications needed to go on eating then create a new social norm, a new reality which makes — or could make — a new politics possible.

    a friend of mine who happens to be a farmer has a favourite saying which she uses as a signature on her emails. It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting. I think the Food Not Lawns movement — the re-agrarianising of suburbia — may have enormous potential to create new ideological, cultural, ideational spaces for major changes in politics and social ethics. I am not known for dippy optimism so this may be some kind of mental decay setting in as I get older — or I may really be onto something

    to the book list on surburban collective survivalism (not the kind with lots of guns and MREs) I recommend This Organic Life, Extreme Simplicity (Homesteading in the City), and the project of the Dervaes family in Pasadena — who are realising yields from 50 to over 100 times what is normal for factory farmed ag land, from their diverse perma/annual-culture plantation on half of a suburban lot. I’ll try to dig up some more refs (just need to do the footwork) on similar projects in less privileged n’hoods, such as inner city farms and permaculture plantations using abandoned lots in the Rust Belt cities, green roof projects in Canada and Euroland, etc.

    2 August 2006, 2:29 pm

17. Stan:

    Just a note…Kriti did her field work with uran gardening for her enviro-bio degree. One of the things she saidd happened was that thsoe who were growinig the food took such pride in it that they enjoyed giving the food away.

    The film The End of Suburbia documents how the auto industry actually politiced to destroy public transit infrastructure.

    De, your friend’s quote is updated historical materialism:

    “It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting.”

    Marx would have said that consciousness is a reflection of lived experience… not the opposite.

    I’m loving this thread. Food, water, and energy security. If we can provide that, the rest will self-organize.

    2 August 2006, 2:59 pm

18. DeAnander:

    to James M — I also know a lot about pixels and amplified sound and I share your sinking feeling that I will not be able to earn my bowl of rice and beans in the imminent future by these, er, “effete” [snark] skills.

    there is much speculation in the Peak Oil alarmist camp (of which, to make full disclosure, I am pretty much a paid-up card-carrying member, though *please* do not assume this means I agree with all the ravings of that maddening mostly-white-male demographic, argh) as to what skills will be valuable/viable post-Peak. much discussion of this at RunningOnEmpty and various other Post-Carbon sites.

    a vivid example of this line of thought is found in Orlov’s essay on lessons from the collapse of the FSU
    Part 1
    Part 2
    Part 3
    in which he speculates about the viability of various personality types and skill sets in a post-peak world, what the effects of devolution and contraction/convergence are likely to be on government and society, etc. he lived through the Soviet collapse so his perspective is more informed than that of many armchair Peak Oil theorists.

    very few people are really coming to grips with the enormous burden of planetary repair we’re facing — the degree to which the fossil fuel spree has not only distorted our expectations and ethics with a century of “living like kings on credit”, but has devastated the biotic infrastructure we need in order to live any other way, to recover a sane way of life. the obvious metaphorical parallels of drug/alcohol addiction spring to mind, of course… anyway, rehabilitating soil that has been killed by corporate/fossil farming practise takes about 4 to 6 years (you can read about this in any literature on organic certification). rehabilitating soil that has been contaminated by industrial pollutants from chemical factories, oil refineries, etc. is a far more daunting process (note that NOLA post-flood is one big toxic waste dump, and no one has a clue how to clean it up). some folks are doing research on the use of “lower” life forms to digest and break down toxic compounds. there’s some evidence that the fungus family has a lot to offer in the way of filtering toxins out of the soil and water; and some larvae and worms can do quite a bit along these lines; thermophilic composting with suitable bacterial populations has shown encouraging results in reducing contaminants in biomass. radioactivity is a really tough one; results from the Chernobyl area are encouraging on the one hand (vegetation and short-lived animals are flourishing) and discouraging in others (human residents are still showing elevated morbidity).

    I think there are regions — Lake Baikal, Hanford and possibly the entire watershed downstream of it, Los Alamos and certain other “black” sites, most of our nuke plants and a thirty-mile radius around them — that may be no-go zones for centuries to come. there are ways of neutralising radioactive materials but most of them involve insane amounts of energy — particle bombardment of various kinds — which we simply won’t have (barring a miracle). this is one reason why I remain adamantly opposed to expanding nuclear power generation, despite the industry’s opportunistic leap onto the Peak Oil and Climate Change bandwagons; I don’t think we have the energy resources to maintain custody of the nuke waste we now possess, let alone a vastly expanded pile of the stuff.

    in short, from where I sit it doesn’t look good for industrial civilisation.

    in terms of individual survival, I’d say we all know the skills that will be needed: general handyperson and fixit skills, basic hand crafts like welding, brazing, carpentry, tinsmithing, glazing, pot-throwing, pot-mending, sewing, metalwork…. what troubles me is the potential disappearance of all the miracle substances we’ve come to take for granted, like waterproof nylon fabrics, the enormous panoply of adhesives and paints (especially rust preventers), lubricants and degreasers, cheap tools etc.

    my own personal future plan has for many years involved retiring early and living aboard a boat. this is kind of a personal Peak Oil experience, since living aboard is a dreadfully complicated chore-filled drag if you have too much technology on board. I’m trying to simplify everything down to near-third-world levels except where it’s worth it to me — i.e. cell phone Yes, but microwave oven No, laptop Yes, but refrigeration No. solar panels Yes, gasoline generator No. and so on. I’ve already lived without a gasoline car for over 12 years, and without any car at all for over 6 years; I lived with a composting sawdust toilet for a year and a half to see how that worked, and it worked quite well actually. every decision I make about tools, clothing, etc. is now tied to “how will it work aboard the boat,” which is almost the same as “how will it work after Peak Oil.” I’m restoring a 1950’s sewing machine and converting it to a hand crank mechanism, stockpiling nylon thread for sail repair, etc. and I still feel totally underprepared and incapable of imagining the post-peak world.

    it is humbling to realise how stupid I am compared to my great-grandparents, who knew how to do all kinds of basic life-support things that I have to look up in books.

    I think that one of the most important skills in the post-peak world will be fixing things — fixing the soil and water, fixing bicycles, fixing clothing and houses, fixing trucks and buses, adapting old technology to new uses (on Bougainville during the blockade, the people figured out how to use alternators off trucks and cars as electric generators using mini mill wheels in the local mountain streams; they figured out how to run old cars and trucks on neat ethanol distilled from local crops). all over the third world you can find native bricoleurs — fixit guys — who can weld and wire and finagle most any mechanism back to life, and I think we’ll see an enormous demand for this kind of ingenuity in future.

    welcome to the era of Baling Wire and String.

    2 August 2006, 3:07 pm

19. c.:

    Stan and folks:

    Just wanted to iterate my appreciation for the following line:

    “(Any cadre that is built now) has to consist of people who look into that abyss every moment of every day until they learn a contempt for fear; and at the same time people with love and humor. People who can fight their enemies wihtout dehumanizing them.”

    Although my recent trip to Egypt was fully a vacation in almost every sense in the word, it was not a complete escape, and I came back with a sense of this courage that so many in the Middle East (even North Africa, where conflict and struggle are at a relative ebb) in the face of regiona; destruction and, more directly, their fairly consistent acknowledgement that I was most definitely in the enemy camp. Through some of the intense political discussions I had (or was witness to, as my Arabic was shoddy and often relied on translation) with Egyptian taxi drivers and hotel managers and Sudanese and Somalian refugees, it was clear that we made a connection that surpassed our nationality while still acknowledging the battles that are yet to come. And I made it clear who I would be battling. The general conclusion was that fear - of each other, of state terrorism and retaliation and resistance to state terrorism, of the insane traffic of Cairo - was not useful, welcome or a part of our dialogue and connection. And that love and humor absolutely had to be.

    While part of my reason for leaving the States was to give myself a good, unrelated and distant break before beginning a career in public schools, I came back ready to begin this work imbued with a revolutionary spirit that I haven’t felt in some time. It is a difficult time to feel this, with Qana and Gaza and the incessant bad news, but optimism is essential in these times. Here’s to spreading some revolutionary optimism…

    2 August 2006, 5:32 pm

20. Robin Hering:

    Re: “I’m loving this thread. Food, water, and energy security. If we can provide that, the rest will self-organize.”

    Not only will there be self-organization out of necessity, which is what I take this to mean – forgive me if I’m not reading right – but gardening requires everyone to think about things, priorities, and even that wrong-turn we took way back at “survival of the fittest”.

    “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation of and perfection of human beings.”
    “Get rid of the aspects of inside and outside. Farmers everywhere in the world are at the root the same farmers. Let us say that the key to peace lies close to the earth.”

    - Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution

    Anticipating some cross-over point, after a critical mass is reached (and the mid-point of a natural general strike), somewhere along the road it would be nice to already have police and soldier gardens, so there’s no enforcement behind the bill-collectors and bull-dozer drivers.

    3 August 2006, 12:13 am

21. Stan:

    In the Meltdown post (following thisone), Kolko doesn’t say it explicitly, but economic meltdown ultimately results in deflation. In the shortest short term, this means prices fall and money has far more buying power, but as time goes one the fact of a very short money supply begins to bite very hard as mass unemployment.

    The greatest exposure people have to a deflationary crisis is debt. In relative terms, post-deflationary debt becomes a massively increased burden in terms of buying power. The greater the debt, the greater the exposure, and part of every deflationary crisis is massive foreclosure.

    One political demand that must be in the program of any radical transformation after the capture of state power absolutely MUST be the simultaneous nationalization of the entire banking system and the cancellation of all debts for housing. This not only removes the banks from market exposure and turns them into non-profit credit generators under the control of a sovereign people, it appeals to a huge section of the middle class populaiton that is relieved of its mortgage and discouraged from wandering all over the planet instead of refitting the ‘burbs for long term survival.

    Pharmaceuticals and insurance are on deck for nationalization.

    3 August 2006, 8:02 am

22. Brandon:

    Everyone does have to draw a line. the war on iraq was that point for me, especially the part about phosperous weapons. Death by phospherous is as outrageous as by nukes.

    the question is now that the line has been drawn now what.

    “If I run off the the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to live on spruce hens, blueberries, and speckled trout, like some latter-day Allee Oop, all I’ve accomplished is to withdraw.”

    my parents went back to the land in 1978, off the grid, grow your own food, guerrilla agriculture, ie don’t pay taxes.

    28 years later, their respone to the strucutural crisis of late capitalism seems enitirely inadequite. The problem with off the grid, is it seems that you have to be so highly capitalized to make it work… and the price of falling short is so high.
    Most of the people I know that live in Mendocino county or other parts of northern california do not grow their own food or have the resources to actually do off the grid right. So what happens in practice, is people drive 4wd trucks 2hr, a large part of which is on dirt roads (which make you run through transmissions and gas fast) just to get a gallon of milk.
    all they have acomplished is withdrawal. and unfortunaltely when you look at the race and class background of the back to the land, homesteading movt, it doesn’t look all that different from suburbanization, simply withdrawing from the dirty cities to somewhere where the air is a little cleaner and there is a little more personal space.

    So that didn’t work. so what is my generation to do. My parents think I’m crazy because i live in the city, in the “heart of babylon…” But it seems we have to retake the cities.

    “I believe in political cadres, and in the capture of state power as an absolute necessity.”

    I believe this too. But how do we do it? we need military commanders with understandings of revoltionary strategy and tactical agility.

    how do we do it? I like some of the ex-pat ideas posted above. i like the idea of allying with the Chaveses, Fidels and Nasrallahs (yes Nasrallah, some of us marxists need to overcome our prejudice against working with religous leaders. Nasrallah is on the front line, defending those in most in need of defense, those most exposed. his synthesis of deemands for social justice and vernacular knowledge is quite revolutionary, and quite effective at both a military and social welfare level).
    I’m ready to fight, ready to take risks, but we need a plan, a strategy. one organically rooted in the needs of those most exposed, one that is agile, and above all one that is effective. one that abandons the fetish of control. no stalinist centralization.

    At what level of soveriegnty do we make our break? If we say: fuck you we’re not paying taxes anymore, we’re not using your currency any more, we’re generating our own food, water and energy, at what level do we make this break? local, regional, national, global? were do we get the resouces to build a parrallel infrastructure and defend the regime?
    do we have to wait for the post peak collapse, and then try to pick up the pieces?

    4 August 2006, 3:39 am

23. Elki:

    I’d sign it too stan, but i dont think id need to react violently, id just go about getting wide audience to get a large consumer vigilanty group going - one that boycotts by choosing what we eat, watch, hear, smell, and see around us…if we all chose not to watch tv, that would have a great impact on the world i think.

    4 August 2006, 6:41 am

24. Stan:

    Both Brandon and Elki hit some of the key points related to the dilemma that faces many activists: the separation of the urgency we see and feel from mass consciounsness.

    The current American persnality — if one can abstract that after recognizing that it is fused to structural power for bourgeois, white, and male — has been systematically formed. And it has been accomplished through a very inteintional, expensive, and Herculean effort over decades. The amazing thing is that while white and male identity has been its target, the vast majority of those who have fallen for it have NOT been bourgeois (I use the Marxist definition here, meaning employers of wage labor, the ruling class).

    So let’s file that for further down: personality formation from above.

    That personality, which affects more than white, male, and bourgeois, is inseparable from belief systems, which do more than form a set of ideas. Belief systems give us permission and encouragement to behave in certain ways — one belief system encourages scepticism, another obedience, etc. etc. etc.

    Taking a political account requires a kind of “fearless inventory” of what lefties call “objective conditions” (but which reflects Cartesian thinking, and should more accurately be called equilibrating social conditions that currently resist intervention… okay, maybe that’s why we need a shorthand).

    In that account, mass consciousness is a very important factor. It is important for a lot of reasons related to the efficacy of any strategy or tactic (these are different ,btw). The reason I call it a “fearless” inventory, is that what we find in the world, so to speak, if we are brutally honest, may not match what we THINK needs to be done. Many of us have been conditioned to confuse our psychic reality with the one we live in, which sets us up for a lot of unnecessary drama (but I digress).

    No matter how good a tactic might be in our psychic evaluation, its efficacy will ultimately be determined by developments that are not permeable to our psychic incantations. Mass consciousness has MUCH to do with this.

    Tactics and Strategies are aimed at targets, for lack of a better metaphor. One tactic might be aimed at a particular political formation or individual, a Congressperson, for example, or a school board member. Another might be aimed at the masses… to change consciousness. Any tactic that is undertaken solely from conviction, without attending to the “conditions”, risks either being self-marginalizing or provoking the antipathy of the masses (as well as the authorties).

    There is a recursive relationship between personality and culture. Think about it for a few seconds, and this is obvious.

    The Civil Rights Movement led by MLK and others, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott, adopted a strategy of non-violence, which led some very deep reforms in the system. But it was the mass consciousness of America, conditioned at that time by the Cold War, that could not sustain the myth of its moral superiority to the German racial regime just defeated in WWII, or to the imagined World Communist Conspiracy, with the festering sore of lynch-law segregation. And politically, the US was in a competition with the Soviet Bloc for influence in places like Africa, where they were losing on account of American Apartheid. The tactics alone were not responsible for the successes; they succeeded because they were chosen at the right time and place, and under the right conditions. The same tactics, employed at the turn of the 19/20 century would have resulted in massacres and lynchings, and there would have been hardly a ripple of concern from white America.

    If we engage in the most provocative of tactics today, we have to ask ourselves, when the authorities react, will this spark a “V is for Vendetta” uprising from the masses, or will they just switch the channel and go to the mall? If the latter is the case, a good political movement doesn’t throw away its political cadre like that. It would amount to self-indulgent posturing… not because of the tactic, but the conditons.

    So when we consider tactics, we have to attempt to predict some likely outcomes… which is a whole ‘nuther debate, because different tempraments influence the character of predicitons and the willingness to take on risks. Ah, politics!

    Within the masses, even once we have settled on a strategy or a tactic, there are layers of latent response, again multiply-determined. There are always the “advanced” (for lack of a better term) who show up; but then again the zanies always show up, too. Then there are those who are never to the front ranks, but who will go once they see the momentum building. And then there are those who are only confortable in a crowd. And, of course, there will be opposition of various stripes. (BTW, my own experience is that American activists generally, for all their bluster, have a tendency to over-estimate active resistance… a kind of conformist nervous disorder [sorry, De, couldn’t resist]).

    But the absolute boundary, at any given time, to the efficacy of any mass mobilization or movement, is not established by the boldness of the tactics we might be willing to select (beware masculinist recklessness — “adventurism” in lefty lexicon). If that boundary was ours to establish, we would have already won. That boundary resides in the mass consciousness.. in this abstractly characterized (here) collective personality, WHICH HAS BEEN FORMED FROM ABOVE.

    People will not support that which they do not understand. People will not understand anything that their own socializaton has rendered invisible, inaccessible, or unavailable. (The issues of visibility, accessibility, and availability have not been adequately studied by movements… psychology matters, and epistemology is the bridge between the world and the psyche.) We do not have a genetic defect that makes things invisible, inaccessible, or unavailable. If we did, how is it that we are having this conversation? Are we superior beings? I think not. (Tho this assumption underlies much of what is called petit-bourgeois radicalism, where said assumption — while unrecognized — operates with a vengeance.)

    The Right got this big time. Immediately after Goldwater got shellacked in the 1964 elections by Johnson, they sat down and took their own fearless inventory, and they inaugurated a plan that paid off by the capture of political power and shifting the psychic and political center of gravity for a whole society. The latter preceded the former, btw, and this is my whole point.

    Politics, the struggle over social power, which we can no more escape than Camus’ “Stranger”, is NOT the same as showing how right and how smart we are. One can be simultaneously 100% correct on the facts and implications and 100% ineffective at doing a damn thing about it.

    So, taking for the sake of argument my premises that (1) the boundaries of a politics of resistance are mapped onto the collective consciousness of a society, and (2) that the bridge between reality and perception is epistemology, and (3) that the Right systematically developed the intellectual and communicatons infrastructure in the 60s that was capable of building an American personality that is reflexively what it is (make our own list, but the goal was to [generally] discredit and undermine the collective consciousness of the New Deal)… then what might we conclude?

    My own conclusions (provisional ones to be sure… that’s why I throw these discussion out there), while numerous, include one big one… and that is that we have to engage — as the Right did — in a systematic, protracted ideological struggle, which includes the kind of meme-warfare that De references… and that means a community of activist-intellectuals (formal and feral) who share some basic values and beliefs about our conjuncture and who are leaning forward to resist (this is a temprament question, but a very important one), who can collaborate in ways analogous to the Right’s think-tanks and communicatons media, albeit with the resources available to US, to begin the process of, instead of lamenting the mass consciousness for its failure to evolve the way we’d like, shifting it. If it can be done, it can be undone.

    But it is a harder task for us right now, because of the recursive relation between this mass consciounsess and the daily experience of life in this society, which are mutually reinforcing.

    Running headlong into that phenom could give us a concussion and not even chip the paint. Again, the question of when and where and how is vitally important.

    The point of engagement with sectors of society needs to be at precisely those spatio-temporal and intellectual locations where there is a failure or crisis of the system, the belief-system, or both. What do we really know about “middle class” anomie, for instance? Can we communicate with that? Why did Common Ground connect so quickly and effectively in the Gulf? They entered the scene with hamers and nails, while others were trying to figure out the correct political line.

    Timing. Matching the message to the need (or void).

    If the bridge is to be built, then one of the anchor points is on either side. That’s now we get there from here.

    4 August 2006, 9:35 am

25. Brandon:

    Dear Stan,

    as always, thanks for your insightful comentary.
    This is genius:

    “So, taking for the sake of argument my premises that (1) the boundaries of a politics of resistance are mapped onto the collective consciousness of a society, and (2) that the bridge between reality and perception is epistemology, and (3) that the Right systematically developed the intellectual and communicatons infrastructure in the 60s that was capable of building an American personality that is reflexively what it is (make our own list, but the goal was to [generally] discredit and undermine the collective consciousness of the New Deal)… then what might we conclude?”

    I also like what you said about the distinction between tactics and stategy.

    I am quite a bit younger than you, and sometimes I get impatient with the long-term, step by step strategy of ideological combat, and become suduced by Che style “foco-adventurism.” But in more sober moments i recognize that tactics must match the needs of a particual time-place, and there is no sense in wasting our cadre if it is not even going to “chip the paint as you say.”

    Pardon me if i be old fashioned for a moment, and say that we need to capture the “ideological apparatuses of the state.” For it is the ISAs that “build personalites.” I think this is what you are saying the Right did.

    I think the Universities are a key strategic location. Though, well defended, I think their capture is worth the effort of an alliance of formal and feral scholars.

    6 August 2006, 7:17 pm

26. Brandon:

    PS, I also really like what you say about “middle class” anomie. I spend a lot of time on the campus of a particually bourgesoise university, and from what i can see it is intense, there is a pretty concerted effort to compensate with frat parties, football games and the like. But these measures are a bandaid on an arterial would.

    6 August 2006, 7:34 pm

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