Crosspost — Chris Hedges (“Why I am a socialist”)
Why I Am a Socialist
By Chris Hedges
The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism—one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars—or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state.
The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote, “that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.
There is a political shift in Europe toward an open confrontation with the corporate state. Germany has seen a surge of support for Die Linke (The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by the veteran socialist “Red” Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his career on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public opinion polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke’s platform. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge…
Stan:
What does “unite” mean?
This question is the chink in the whole socialist project. A new future project. Phrasemongers, myself included, have been throwing this prescription around for a long time. Unite for a new future. When the unity happens, it always happens in the ways of which we disapprove. Like Obama-mania, or elections in general, or American Idol (there’s a term for the theologically inclined!).
If one continues to interrogate this “future” (I am reminded again that Illich said, “To hell with the future. It’s a man-eating idol.”), then one encounters a series of rationalizations for action. The descriptions of the situation — as in Brother Hedges’ article — are not rationalizations, but generally accurate descriptions, as far as they go. The rationalizations happen in the articulation of action steps. What is to be done?
When Lenin answered this question, in practice, we saw civil war, repression, and backsliding on programs… followed by the rule of Stalin’s administrative dictatorship, followed by the bloodiest conflagration in history (not saying the communists started it, but that the revolution in Russia was an essential ingredient in that particular future.
Even in this article, that quotes Wendell Berry — a “new agrarian” decentralist — the implication is that unity must happen in some struggle for state power. Why doesn’t that work?
Next rationalization please: The people are bewildered by ruling class propaganda (never by male propaganda, or by industrialization propaganda, or by Enlightenment propaganda, or by eurocentric propaganda). So, since the people are too bewildered to unify; and since we have no clue about how to overcome the bewilderment of hundreds of millions via mass media, schools, et al; and since (shhh) only a fraction of a percent of the masses listens to us; we jump over this inconvenient truth with… drumroll please… an ideolgoically-framed policy program. We got one above. The Program. Once people truly understand our program (let’s not discuss the how of creating “understanding”), and once the “conditions” are right (whatever that means), we will evolve tactics that cause the masses to flock to our banner, and The Future will arrive. Or at least, we can begin to “build” socialism.
The People’s Republic of China once declared war on flies. They made a huge campaign of killing flies, even offering bounties iirc. In short order, eagles started dying off. It was a complex chain of events, but a great cautionary tale. The moral of the story, however, was not to do better research and planning. The moral of the story is that people who can’t predict the future should quit trying to plan it. We are all people who can’t predict the future. Follow the syllogism the rest of the way.
Is unity what we really need? Just asking, because I am losing the thread on this unity-thang. And I wonder that so many self-proclaimed socialists — a tradition that taught us the difference between material conditions and epi-phenomena (like political campaigns) — still talk about unity as if it were an ideological process. Talk to us about practical unity, and not just in the arena of campaigning for a Program, and I’m all ears. People work and manage their overly-busy lives. The vast majority doesn’t campaign. Give us a means for joining with the masses in a practical way — in conjunction with all that work and lives-management — that is not episodic and crisis-driven. That would be unity.
The reason I harp on this is that the left’s unmasking is very effective. If we look at the predictive value of the intellecutal work done by the left over the last century — and not state socialist agitprop specialists — the left has proven more prescient than any of the accepted scholars and anlaysts. But then we make that leap… if we understand what is happening now, you should follow our Program as the Way Out. And we are discredited. Because we are acting as if we can predict and control the future.
I am overwhelmed with this article — which quotes relocalizers — being utterly oblivious to the problems of scale and administration (there’s Dunbar again).
In the preceding post, we brought up Illich, who said (roughly paraphrsing here) the organic boundaries of human activities haven’t been catalogued, estimated, named, and translated into political limits. The distopia we are now living in is a consequence of that failure (Illich started critiquing this stuff in earnest in the 70s). In addition to runaway captialism (M-C-M+), technology itself is inhered with the tendency to go “runaway.” Hornborg again, machine fetishism.
Socialists who center their programs on things like “health care” and “schools” are loathe to critique the existence of “health care professionals” or “schooling,” as Illich and others have. They are too Quixotically busy trying to guarantee that more people can “access” these “rights.” So there is a double delusion: that these are Good Things, and that oppressivley evolved “tools” can leap free of their oppressive character by decree.
Instead of creating counterfoil research and collaborations, they fight against utterly impossible odds to get control of the existing institutions. Just because an occasional bee can get into a bonnet doesn’t change the fact that it’s still merely a bee in a bonnet. We got no game.
5 January 2009, 9:52 amBuddhalovesPaine:
Stan,
Your 5th paragraph made me laugh because pointing out how factionalized human beings are is so true.
But I am a little bit confused by your ending. It may be because I have not read Illich but as of right now I have no interest in reading Illich.
I think a concrete example could clarify what you are getting at. I think that concrete example could be Venezuela. (Or perhaps South Africa) Here despite all the odds the left took power of the institutions of the state. So what would you have them do now? We can not reliably predict or control the future. You know that. I know that, but but Hugo Chavez still needs to make a decision(s). What would you advise him to do?
Socialist ideas may be discredited in the eyes of many people, but so a free market solutions, and many people hold both socialist and free market ideas as discredited. Some people try to say that there is a 3rd way. Yet combining two discredited ideas just mixes up two systems that do not work very well.
But the need to make a decision does not go away just because all of the options look bad. Now some people have tried to pull a fast one and say that there is a 3rd way that is not just a combination of the other two ways but everyone that i have seen is really just a combination. Centralized or decentralized socialism does not in the end change things much. What I mean by that is if GM or the whole auto industry were owned by the workers would much have changed other than the blue collar workers would have gotten more pay and benifits and the white collar workers less and stock holders would have not exsisted but GM or the whole industry would have likely been trying to receive the highest wages for themselves that they could have. And within the company or industry each department would have been fighting for a bigger share of the pie.
Still I and I think We need to have faith that something will work. I choose to put my faith in something called participitory economics or Parecon for short. Perhaps other social changes need to take place for something else to work but decisions need to be made before those social changes which may take decades or centuries take root. So what should Hugo Chavez do in the mean time?
5 January 2009, 12:43 pmStan:
Hugo Chavez is far more qualified than I am to decide what Hugo Chavez is going to do. He’s running a government. I would point out, however, that regardless of how many times anyone says “socialism,” he came to power in a popular movement whose grievances were far less general, having to do with insecurity, racism, and the perception (accurate in my view) that their country was behaving like a vassal state to the US. Even more importantly, Venezuela is Venezuela. There are no solutions to anything there that can be mapped directly onto any other place or time. That’s why this program fetish never amounts to anything so much as create the terms for abstract disputes.
Programs do not operate, as they used to say, where the rubber meets the road. They are based on the illusion of control. Control is for Big Power, because they have the resources to operate strategically. We organize a million people for a march on Washington. We go. They have cocktails, go to bed, and ignore us.
We are the weak ones, those of us who call ourselves the left (I do.). That’s a really important fact. It has a really important implication. We can’t mount strategies; and if they handed the keys to the city over today, we couldn’t administer it. We are weak, and the weak do not rely on strategy; they rely on tactics. And some people get that. But as soon as we say that, a bigger question comes up? Are the tactics principled? Are the tactics ethical? Are the tactics morally defensible?
I think it’s a bigger question, because the left makes a fundamental claim (and I think we mean it) that what unites us is care. Otherwise, what’s the point? “I got mine, and fuck all the rest of y’all.”
The ethical contradictions arising from tactics are massivley determined and complicated by the abstraction of relationships, by the reification of institutions, and by a concommitant requirement for “management” and-or “administration.”
I’m glad you bring up GM, because it’s a case in point of the contradiction. We are arguing about whether workers or bosses will get more bailout money; but the more discerning question — and an embarrassment to the left — is whether we should be making cars at all. Leftists will argue that this question is not on the table yet, because they are pursuing a “strategy” that involves the working class being the motive force for the next New Future.
There is no evidence to support this idea; in fact, there is ample evidence to the contrary. But we have a strategy and a program. What we don’t have are actual communities… and the reason we don’t is that our programs weed about 99% of the population out one way or another; so we just hang out with ourselves, self-referentially working out strategies. One of the most obvious characteristics of community is that the members of a community live and work near one another… geographically. Proximity is a little too material a condition for most programs.
Post us a link or two on the parecon, btw. Thanks.
addendum… just thinking, for no reason I know of, about anatomy and physiology (a course I took in a school in another life). The categories are only separate as analytical categories. They are mutually determining. Practice is like that, social practice that is, in relation to structures. It occurs to me — and this is not well thought out — that every structure contains within it certain defaults that apply to practice. Historical materialism 101, I know. But we have come to the point where we see “structure” as how we build policy-making bodies. The real structures are roads and cars and vinyl siding and sewer lines and computers and barbie-doll factories and McDonalds and gravel crushers, et al. New practices flower only when they are outside the prevailing structures. That’s why I don’t see the working class ever being the agent of historical transformation. If abruptly uprooted by history — as the author also warns — they no longer function as a working class, but as a pissed-off mass of television-medicated, deracinated people. The so-called “middle class” scares me a lot more on that account, but that’s another thread. For now, the workingclass, in the US in particular, is so utterly dependent (on an impenetrable matrix of financial, agricultural, legal, electrified, computerized, power-tooled, automobilized, washered-and-driered grids) that it can’t imagine itself as having any social or political agency. That is an accurate perception, even if it is theoretically self-fulfilling. Even old Charlie Marx said it… there wasn’t going to be a social transformation led by the working class unless that class (however narrowly defined) imagines itself into existence. Becomes a class-for-itself instead of class-in-itself. The experience of being working class is nothing like that of being a poltical cadre. Nothing like it, and less so every day. Union density in my state is like 12%, and most of them are bureaucratic and conservative unions. We just had a big unoin victory at the largest hog-slaughtering plant in the universe to my knowledge; but again, we really don’t need to raise 13 million (or whatever the number is these days) swine in a tiny band of NC land between I-95 and the Atlantic Ocean.
5 January 2009, 2:02 pm(Boer) Tom:
As for South Africa, the tripartite alliance that gained power in 1994 (South African Communist Party, African National Congress and Congress of South African Trade Unions), the ANC & SACP have been pro-neoliberal since at least 1996 (some say since 1992), and the economic situation is worse for blacks overall since the fall of apartheid. See my comment at the bottom of this link…
As to the question of unity (vs efficacy) who needs the ministrations of the left the most, the little Sadducean leftist grouplets, or George Bush? (Failing that, at least one’s conservative neighbors… I think that the reason the left is so involved with itself is that many leftists lack the social skills to engage non-sympathetic people) – if your neighbor holds consciously racist views and motivations, but is sympathetic to relocalization (e.g.) do you reject him, pander to him, or encourage relocalization while engaging and/or subverting his racism? Being an Afrikaner gives me a somewhat different view, what with family and friends… Though how many leftists have ever done a successful social experiment?
Here’s one for many leftists: Try having a sincere discussion with a conservative neighbor (not a professional polemicist). Read some conservative literature first (OK, another training program), to find out what concerns the conservative movement seeks to address (some of what one finds is surprising). First time, don’t even make issues of what you disagree with neighbor about – if pressed, state your own views non-aggressively – sometimes it is OK to agree to disagree – aggression isn’t going to change your neighbor (at least not for the better). Ask yourself afterwards how you are addressing his/her concerns; how do you convey more complex ideas, e.g. on security, to said neighbor? Building new relationships is achievable, and more valuable for achieving (specific, local) changes than any (frankly cultish) unity; if socialism is to be scientific, surely its advocates must adopt experimental methods (grin)…
5 January 2009, 10:03 pmSatan:
Is this the same Chris t. hedges that says he doesn’t believe in Atheists? The religious tenor of this site is making me ill.
grumble grumble…
I know you don’t like to post my comments (the upper-echelon left has always been a bit doctrinaire and latently fascistic) but I bought your books (all of ‘em), and gave 10 or 20 bucks (i forget) to this site (or the other one– with Derrick Jensen), and read it from time to time– so I have SOME right to complain, yes? [admin: "no"]
I just cannot stand al this ontological nonsense. There is no god– and there’s certainly ZERO proof of it– no serious person believes in this nonsense! A talking snake? Really? A virgin birth? An omnipotent god who decides to let the world be run by evil fucks anyway? This is your god?
I had a dream a few weeks ago and Stan brother, i was literally sobbing in it over you and this religion nonsense. WTF? What if Chomksy turned out to be Christian too? Or if Nader decided to believe in elves? lol. I can’t stand it.
It’s retrograde and counter-revolutionary to go backwards in the philosophic and dialectical process. Religion is backwards. Lock & load… (don’t get me started on your pacifism… jesus)
Whoever is not with me is against me. Lokc and load, lock and load, lock and load.
Ok, I’m finished. Thanks for letting me vent. I’m gonna go make a Mojito…
5 January 2009, 11:58 pmStan Moore:
I have not looked into these subjects deeply, but that does not stop me from throwing out a couple of observations
First, I think of a truism that I believe is always relevant:
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.”
I believe this is true even among people who start out with great and altruistic motives, and even more so of people who start with greed and selfish motives. I think Che Guevarra died a lonely death wanting to free his fellow human beings, but learning in the process that unity of thought and action becomes much more difficult as scale of an endeavor progresses.
That being said, it seems to me that human well-being is best approached at smaller scales of organization rather than larger ones. Tribalism tends to be more likely to address human needs than nationalism because of issues of scale.
I think the Biblical injunction against congregating into cities is instructive: God dispersed the builders of the Tower of Babel because of the likely harm (my interpretation) caused by men seeking to stretch limits and assume power on large scales of endeavor and population.
I think humans evolved with the desire to propagate and expand, but humanity’s intrinsic self-interest is in self-limitation. This contradiction is a fundamental paradox that repeatedly has resulted in self-induced disaster, conflict, dangerous competition and eventual large-scale failure.
I don’t see much prospect of resolution of this paradox and I think Jay Hanson has rightly concluded that human evolution into an industrial and high tech paradigm is the ultimate formula for human self-extinction.
It took thousands of years for humanity to reach the limits of the biosphere and then to exceed them. Disasters of the past were local. Now we have exceeded sustainability thresholds and even good people are unable to resolve the conflicts between survival, individualism, mutualism, and prosperity. Humans in large numbers simply cannot live together for long because we are hard wired not to.
Stan Moore
6 January 2009, 12:09 amBuddhalovesPaine:
The place that I first learned about Parecon was at Zmag.org. You can also Google Parecon or participitory economics.
6 January 2009, 7:34 amMichael Anderson:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0812/S00437.htm
Witnessing the Decay of Western Hegemony and the Role of the Organic Intellectual
By Pablo Ouziel
Abstract: While the military might of the world’s leading nations continues to expand, it has become apparent that western colonialism is abruptly coming to an end, yet the consequences are still not clear to any of the pundits traditionally involved in the discourse which has helped to build it. For many decades in the west, we have thrived on imperial expansion led by the United States of America and its allies, and legitimized by international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund, The World Bank and the United Nations. Today, this oligopoly of world domination is rapidly deteriorating and what only a few months ago seemed like the only option for humanity is today being severely put to the test. The organic intellectual must face these challenging times by offering viable alternatives to society so that a new world order can emerge out of the rubble left behind by liberal democratic capitalism.
Introduction
Antonio Gramsci differentiated organic intellectuals from traditional intellectuals, by emphasizing the role of the former in cultivating roots within their communities to help develop a self-inspired organic consciousness. Accepting their position within the dominant ideology, according to Gramsci, organic intellectuals will ultimately support the working-class in developing an alternative hegemony within civil society.
For many decades, society has been indoctrinated with the belief that liberal democratic capitalism was the benevolent solution to all world problems. Through this model of society, hunger was going to be eradicated, wars would come to an end, the environment would be saved, and justice would be distributed equally amongst all members of the human species. Entering the new century, western society celebrated the new millennium with the euphoria of success, once and for all; we had entered the final face of existence, the one, which would bring upon the earth the mythical wonders of the Kingdom of Heaven. However, without having witnessed the passing of the first decade of the 21st century, this dogma has been broken and as many across the globe struggle for survival and society is marred by the continuous threat of revolving crisis, the time for the revolutionary transformation of the western ideal is upon us. Yet, the fundamental questions remain to be answered, how can we act? What can we do?
It is the role of the organic intellectual to answer these questions. If there are any left who have not yet awaken from their slumber, the time has come for them to abandon the petit bourgeois existence of the petty professor attending wine tasting events, the government bureaucrat justifying the wonders of his mind while working on the golf swing at the local country club, or the 1960s hippie, that after a stint in the Berkeley student movements went on to become a prosperous businessman. In today’s holistic global crisis, one which threatens every single aspect of our existence – from the food we eat, to the air we breath, and to the way we interact between each other – those who in their youth considered themselves conscious individuals fighting towards change, can no longer hide behind the mask of the liberal democratic ideal of a capitalist society striving towards justice, peace and prosperity. All of these having remained ideals, while a reality of extreme misery for the majority, coexists today with the growing prosperity of a shrinking minority capitalizing on the growing pains of humanity.
In today’s crisis, we will all perish together or we will overcome it together, and as professor Chomsky often states, “so much depends on will and choice”. Yet, the choice at this point is between prolonged misery, constant crisis, environmental deterioration and continual war, or the possibility of working together in unison to overcome the hurdles, which we are facing. If we are to honestly look at what is happening in society, on any given day we can observe that the interests of the majority are not being respected and instead, the elites benefiting themselves, pitch to society the benefits of their choices by attributing everything to the trickledown effect – a warped inversion of reality which supports investing on those at the top in order to protect people at the bottom. I often wonder when I hear such discourse bombarded by government officials and experts through the traditional channels of propaganda, whether the rest of society is awake and paying attention, or simply asleep and indifferent. I can never be quite sure, because if indeed society is awake and paying attention, then we live in a world of fools, yet, if the indifference is attributable to being asleep, the task of waking up is a daunting one. One, which can only be carried out by the organic intellectual committed to revolutionary social transformation.
6 January 2009, 7:36 amBuddhalovesPaine:
Yes the left is weak. So I can think of nothing better to do than tactical activities until the winds of history change. Since we (the left) are so weak I do not think that it is necessary that we know exactly what will we will do if we were suddenly able to make decisions that count. I once made fun of America’s WWII generals because once they approached the borders of Germany they began to fire division, brigade, and battalion commanders because they were not able to breech the West Wall. It was the fault of higher level officers that the lower levels were not successful because they had no plan for breaching the West Wall once they got there. Yet my criticism was slightly misplaced because how could they have made a plan when they knew so little about it. When it came to the defenses at Normandy there were many French people eager to tell the US and UK everything that they knew about those defenses. But since the West Wall was in Germany the allied Generals knew much less about what or how many forces were there. The left is kind of in the same situation. Only I wonder if even the millionaire and billionaire decision makers that we hope to replace really understand the system that has been created and how everything fits together.
6 January 2009, 8:07 amNow on a small point you just said that the thing that makes a person a leftist is that they care. But there are also many principled conservatives and many libertarians who care. They may be a menace to society. But, we should not accuse them in general of not carrying about others.
Stan Moore:
I am not even sure that the “Left” is morally superior to the “Right” any more in several significant ways. In a political sense in the U.S., both Democrats AND Republicans are pro-corporation, favor Zionist terrorism and want to solve global climate change by a “cap and trade” system designed to sell pollution rights to the highest bidder. It is all nonsense from a moral and even an environmental perspective.
The entire business paradigm is contrary to natural law and blatantly corrupt and unsustainable and working relentlessly against the common good. Think natural cycles such as nutrient recyclying compared to business philosophy of skimming profits and minimizing reinvesting in natural capital. Greed underlies all of our failures on every level. Capitalism is all about greed and the left has not rejected capitalism one whit.
Obama used to worry about wars of aggression, but has subsequently qualified his opposition to opposing “dumb” wars of aggression. I can easily see Obama increasing, rather than decreasing levels of brutality if it makes imperialism more efficient and cost-effective. And Obama is an imperialist, a capitalist, a believer in American exceptionalism and a leaner towards the right, but both wings of the eagle are on a capitalist, imperialist predator.
The masses of Americans are duped and amoral and have no real moral concept other than what makes them feel prosperous at the moment. There is no real American empathy based on principle, only on emotion. Even the veterans against the war did not see the principles they eventually claimed to espouse until they personally suffered or witnessed suffering, and the solution of stopping war for its own sake completely overlooks the fact that wars are fought for resources and there is no meaningful discussion by these veterans (and certainly not by politicians) about a societal revolution in which competition for resources gives way to resource sharing, equitable international distribution of wealth and resources, and an end to capitalism, greed, consumerism, militarism, nationalism and all the isms that divide men and provoke conflict.
And I see none of the sort on the horizon.
But, with all this in mind, it is still better to do what is right, work for what is right, and fight for what is right than to buckle under and ride the flow to oblivion with no effort to go against the stream, in my view.
Stan Moore
6 January 2009, 9:13 amBuddhalovesPaine:
Satan,
6 January 2009, 12:09 pmI was under the impression that one of the characteristics of an enlightened person is that they were tolerant of beliefs different than their own. But maybe I am mistaken. After all if one can not have tolerance of quasi Socialist Christians who can one have tolerance for. I say this knowing full well that there have to be limits to what one can and should tolerate. For example I can not tolerate a person who says that all Marxists in positions of power should be killed because they are a threat to humanity. But I can tolerate those who say all Nazis in positions of power should be killed because they represent a threat to humanity. Isn’t that funny? When we try to define things to clearly the definitions seem to slip between our fingers. It is even more funny when I realize that I would even tolerate someone saying that some Marxists in positions of power should be killed because they represent a threat to humanity. But if someone were to try to say that outsiders should help some Iranians help topple the Iranian government because the Iranian government is a threat to humanity today I would find that argument so obnoxious that if I were a DA I would have such a person arrested for conspiracy to commit murder or some such thing. Yet one hundred or two hundred years from now I may find such arguments very wrong but just plausible enough that the person making them should not be arrested.
Jorge:
Chavez had–and has–enormous popular support, and the army backed him.
Now if we could just get the Pentagon to back some progressive initiatives…and if we could just get CNN behind it…
6 January 2009, 12:33 pmcharles:
When the unity happens, it always happens in the ways of which we disapprove. Like Obama-mania,
^^^^
6 January 2009, 4:13 pmSpeak for yourself. The unity for Obama was good from a politically correct perspective, hardly a mania.
charles:
(not saying the communists started it, but that the revolution in Russia was an essential ingredient in that particular future.
^^^
6 January 2009, 4:15 pmWorld War I had millions of casualties. Imperialism was perfectly capable of industrially concentrated slaughter without the existence of a socialist nation.
Stan:
In fact, what differentiates this approach is that when you explain what is happening in the world, the response is, “I don’t care… because it’s their own fault for not rising through the same meritocracy I did (or something similar).”
**
The Democratic Party is not the left. Not even close.
**
And the antiwar veterans I know are tireless fighters for justice.
6 January 2009, 8:33 pmGlenn Lewis:
I enjoyed the article by Chris Hedges, but whoops, there’s that metaphore for accommodation again.
Chris writes, “The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies.”
You, Stan, admonished me not to use this word but made no comment to its inappropriate use in the article. I was even accused of cruelty by one of the bloggers. Does it stop being insensitive at some point?
Is not using this word a principle on this site, or is that just a rule for some of us?
STAN: I have been rushing in and out, and apologize for not being even-handed. I do hate that metaphor, and partly because its use is always dripping with bile… the extra helping of acid that is in that analog has cultural woman-hatred (and male dominance) as its main ingredient. Aimed primarily at males (the way “bitch” is an especially provocative address to a male rival), it says, you are like a woman — a nasty woman that is good only for males to use and then despise. When we think of this metapohr, we ought to be thinking about how women who are actually prostitutes would react if they were in the room hearing us say it. Then we might think about the lives of actual prostitutes, about the social power arrangements to which they are subject, about the consistent histories of child abuse, rape, poverty, and addiciton that show up in their bios. Then we’d quit using them as examples of moral failure, and perhaps recognize that this metaphor is as offensive as a racial epithet… and for all the same reasons.
6 January 2009, 11:08 pmBuddhalovesPaine:
Stan,
Yes I am sure that we have all met some conservatives and libertarians who have the outlook that you mention. But there are also some conservatives and libertarians who have this idea that power is more decentralized in a non socialist economy and therefore we are safer from the power of government officials. Such people have a blind spot in their brain that prevents them from seeing the how power becomes concentrated in a non socialist system.
If they see and agree that power has become concentrated in the current US system they usually believe that by tinkering with the system this problem can be corrected.
I think that the only solution to the desire of men to get ahead, way ahead of other men, is to make it impossible. I do not have in mind an exact leveling. That could never be achieved and even if it could people would never be able to agree how to measure it. I think two characteristics that a society would have in which it was impossible to get ahead is that there would be no private ownership of property which is used to produce goods or services, and the wages that people were paid for their work would be much less variable, something like the US government GS scale. A person could for example use his own car to provide taxi service. But, a person could not buy a 2nd car to hire someone to provide taxi service. A person could use his own lawn mower to provide a lawn mowing service but he could not own a 2nd lawnmower to hire someone to provide a lawn mowing service. A more in depth explanation can be found at Zmag.org.
I have not scrutinized Parecon theory with a fine tooth comb because I figure if I find to many flaws in it then I will be plunged in to despair because I will not have any hope that there is any program or system which can be designed that has any hope of lifting mankind out of the cycle of injustice that it lives in.
One thing that does seem very obvious to me however is if high achievers can not put their money in to the stock market they will want to put it to real estate. A scientist married to an air traffic controller for example could have a flat in Manhattan, a ville in Vail, a house in Palm Springs and a hobby farm in New Hampshire. Technically non of these properties would be a profit making enterprise. The couple could say that this was not exsessive because the living space of all 4 properties is only 10,000 square feet and some people have one home with 12,000 square feet of living space. Or other people have a home with 8,000 square feet and a yacht and a speed boat or a large camper. Leftist may accuse such people of being greedy but they may respond that they give a higher percent of their income to charity than those accusing them of being greedy. They will say that they are high achievers, not ashamed of it, and want to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Greed like pornography is hard to define.
* * *
STAN: It’s easy to describe… on both counts. Hornborg describes greed as outcomes within structures using thermodynamics, and just because there is a diversity of rationalizations out there doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as greed. Or pornography. This kind of legalistic language is rationalization.
Here’s what Illich (and Polanyi, described by Ceyley) had to say about levelling and history:
7 January 2009, 4:31 amBuddhalovesPaine:
Of course extreme greed or pornography is easy to identify. Or should I say there are plenty of examples in which 95% of people questioned would agree the example they have been given is an example of greed or pornography. If you thought that I meant that there is no such thing as greed or pornography then you were projecting ideas in to my comments that I did not intend.
So, when you say that Hornborg shows us how greed can be clearly defined does this mean that Hornborg would not recognize many examples that are in a gray area for example 30% of respondents saying this is an example of greed, 30% saying that it is not an example of greed and 40% unsure. I do not ever remember reading anything by Hornborg so his ideas would be new to me. To say the least I would not expect to find knowledge that clarifies an ethical question by using principles of thermodynamics. But that is one of the interesting things about life when someone can connect two seemingly unrelated fields and show how they effect or relate to one another.
I think the bottom line of your response is that you believe it is necessary for a society to set a limit on how much real estate a person can own. I agree. The real fun part will be when an attempt to do it is made it will be really funny to see how many devious ways people will come up with to circumvent the spirit of the law. Oh if we were just all type B personalities content to sit on a hammock and read, after of course extreme poverty and injustice have been overcome, things would be so easy to manage,or regulate. Unfortunately those type personalities go and do all kinds of silly things that have consequences that we can not foresee. The gifts that they create for us turn of only to be curses in disguise until they come up with some new gadget that solves the problems the first gadget created and creates a new set of problems. The Gods want to make sure that we do not get bored or complacent.
If I am correct about your what the ultimate point was, how much farmland should one family in Iowa be allowed to own? What about a farm family in Oklahoma, or New Jersey? Do not misinterpret what I am saying. Limits need to be set. But if forces who are willing to face this question could ever come to power it is not going to be easy to set any limits. It will be very messy because there will be a million and one reasons why each person affected should be granted a least a small exemption and probably 200,000 of these reasons will sound quite reasonable to person passing through.
When people are properly educated and see how everything fits together they might be more reasonable. They may calculate that long term gains out weigh short term losses. But such an understanding takes many years for many people to achieve. Can mankind afford to obtain overwhelming consent before placing limits on how much people own and consume? Can who ever attempts to implement such limits succeed without overwhelming consent? Who ever tries is going to have to be very clever? This is a job for Steuben, Stauffenberg and Associates. Or is it a job for Superman. Oh well time to get back to my comic books. (Jedd Hüber told me that I should say that.)
7 January 2009, 10:37 amStan:
I again apologize to all for my overly-fast readings, and rush-off replies. I usually write these things while I’m making breakfast and getting ready for work.
The bottom line of my response is not about law, or policy, or elections, or social engineering fantasies for some New Future (and the right, who accuses the left of social engineering has a lot of gall… look around). It’s about scale, about ethics, and about communication. It’s about limitations. These liberal lenses are welded to our faces, I sometimes think.
Greed is not the word I would choose; but rather, self-centeredness and concupsicience. These are ethical terms, not scientific ones.
What Hornborg demonstrates is that the consequences can be measured, even if the motivations are slippery. And what he shows, on the macroeconomic scale, is that “negentropy” — which is the basis upon which life flourishes — exists in human environments (he is sometimes called a human ecologist) in an inverse ratio with what economists call “growth.” More profit equals more entropy… and thermodynamic entropy has a direct and material connection to social entropy. So he chooses the simpler standard on a world scale and shows that industrial development itself creates a designed technomass (machines) that are inherently entropic, but that concentrations of technomass like New York or Tokyo have to be “fed” with negentropic inputs, that these technomasses are inherently “carcinocenic” in their growth patterns, and that as they import high-negentropy and convert it to high-entropy, they also export that high-entropy. An easy example is oil… map the flows from point of extraction to point of use… here is a link to Spatial Patterns of Capital. Some good maps in there.
Polanyi can connect this colonizing (core-periphery dynamic) tendency of highly-entropic machines to a social phenomenon that he calls embeddedness… or — as we see more each day — disembeddedness.
Dunbar says that the individual human brain is incapable of handling more than about 150 signficant relationships at a time.
So we go back now to consupiscience — unlimited striving for self, without accountability to some community.
What modernism set up, and what capitalism accomplished with political and ideological hegemony, is the transformation of a rationalization into a mass ideology (ideology being a set of ideas that simultaneously reproduce and conceal power) the very idea of consupiscience. Selfishness is good, it says, because the new god — the market — ensures it. The reified “market” then conceals (as ideology does) the fact that actual market relations are forms of communication. Local markets characterized by actors who know each other operate very differently — and with a higher degree of peronal and moral accountability — than the disembedded markets of greater scale.
Illich points out that there are “watersheds” beyond which any tool or practice become iatrogenic (the cure is worse than the disease). The advantages of market communication cannot be contained or restrained except where there is a high level of embeddedness. Embedded communities are collections of people who personally know each other.
The problem, imo, is not that we haven’t uncovered the right kind of management. Management is the problem. Management and administration are responses to overscale, the inability of a community to maintain stabilty organically, via those intimate relations implied in Dunbar’s little number. As scale increases, so does management and administration, which create a phenomenon that De named dogwaggery… the tail begins wagging the dog. We have all seen this when we try to negotiate the labyrinth of rules and regulations of bureaucracy — rules created to ensure the smooth operation of management, as opposed to the things that were to be managed. More and more resources flow into the administrative functions, taking resources away from the practices of actual social production/reproduction, and abstracting the “community” into something else — something cosmopolitan and impersonal.
This depersonlization tht accompanies delocalization is also politically disempowering, shifting power to ever-concentrating centers, and at the same time, breaking the personal ties of community that form the basis for effective resistance, and placing resistance itself on a foundation of abstraction and the search for the perfect administration.
Another Illich bit (from Cayley again) that seems apropos:
Gotta run again.
8 January 2009, 6:53 amcharles:
Ok I asked this before, but, if the 2nd law of thermodynamics is that there is a tendency to increasing entropy ( in a closed system, is it ?), isn’t it a very “uphill struggle” to go against a law of nature ?
On the other hand, neganthropy as what life needs, as used here and by the famous physicist seems to be the notion that Life is sort of defined as, well, processes that go against the 2nd Law of Thermohynamics ( Leslie White too; “energy capture”).
Entropy means, roughly, disorganized, no ? Life is in the form of organisms.
STAN: The “unwinding” process that is characterized by entropy is time, an arrow that only goes one way. As far as anyone knows, even life processes do not change the net entropic process. This is arcane territory, but Mae-Wan Ho’s book, The Rainbow and the Worm, while heavy sailing for non-scientists like me, does make this almost intelligible. The 2nd Law just states, as De likes to put it, you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game. Wiki also has a good account of the 2nd Law. Negentropy is local, at the point where living systems interface with the environment. As to laws of nature, a peculiar mapping of legal thinking onto the universe, it is my understanding that no one and nothing can violate these “laws.” The point people are trying to make with regard to world systems theory and the 2nd Law is that the apparent order in the core always corresponds to an export of disorder to the periphery. The technomass of a modern metropolitan city may look orderly, but the price is being paid — naturally and socially — somewhere else. Ownership does not mitigate this; and that’s the reason socialist industrialization ends up being just as destrcutive as capitalist industrialization. The “machines” (technomass) themselves have this entropic/negentropic dynamic. Of course, historically, capitalism created the impetus for industrial expansion. But just changing owners does not change this intrinsic character of the machines themselves. Thinking so is the fetishization of machines.
15 January 2009, 5:50 pmcharles:
As to laws of nature, a peculiar mapping of legal thinking onto the universe, it is my understanding that no one and nothing can violate these “laws.
^^^
Exactly. I don’t know why you say it is peculiar, but Western Natural science chose jurisprudence as its basic metaphor. I pointed this out several years ago on Marxism Thaxis. So, the original model for natural science is… social science, i.e. law.
Of course, as you mention, one difference. Natural laws are not violated, jurisprudential or state enforced laws are violated, but most of the time, most people do follow them. They create social tendencies.
20 January 2009, 4:43 pmcharles:
The point people are trying to make with regard to world systems theory and the 2nd Law is that the apparent order in the core always corresponds to an export of disorder to the periphery.
^^^
20 January 2009, 4:44 pmThis seems to be using the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics metaphorically, rather than literally for colonial relations ? Or do I miss something.
charles:
The technomass of a modern metropolitan city may look orderly, but the price is being paid — naturally and socially — somewhere else.
^^^
I’m not quite sure it looks so orderly in the cities either, nor that a big price is not being paid naturally and socially in the cities as well as in the country and neo-colonies.
Take a look at Detroit, for example. Of course “Detroit is Haiti” , unforgiveably Black.
^^^^
Ownership does not mitigate this
^^^
20 January 2009, 4:54 pmChange in the type of ownership system(not the personnel of owners) from private property to social property is likely to mitigate the _social_ cost. But, given global warming , et al. , it looks like it will take a fundamental shift away from fossil fuels to mitigate the biological cost for humans.
Stan:
Yes, I think so. The connection is quite material. This is the mysterious reality rendered mysterious precisely by “the fetishization of the machine.” There is a material relation between entropic disorder and social disorder.
21 January 2009, 11:13 amcharles:
Fetishization of machines is an expression of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics ? Well , it is true that the physics of thermodynamics in Europe (Boyle, Charles, Newton) was favored by the bourgeoisie because they were figuring out how to make machines. Newton wrote in the science of mechanics , “mechanics” being a form of the word “machine”. Boyle , Charles and others developed the laws of thermodynamics. The understaning of the action of steam and the heat of it in the machines of the Industrial Revolution was organized as thermodynamics. So, the 2nd Law was discovered in the course of making machines for the Industrial Revolution.
22 January 2009, 12:20 pmcharles:
[edit] Applications to living systems
Main article: Entropy and life
The second law of thermodynamics has been proven mathematically for thermodynamic systems, where entropy is defined in terms of heat divided by the absolute temperature. The second law is often applied to other situations, such as the complexity of life, or orderliness. [8] However it is incorrect to apply the closed-system expression of the second law of thermodynamics to any one sub-system connected by mass-energy flows to another (“open system”). In sciences such as biology and biochemistry the application of thermodynamics is well-established, e.g. biological thermodynamics. The general viewpoint on this subject is summarized well by biological thermodynamicist Donald Haynie; as he states: “Any theory claiming to describe how organisms originate and continue to exist by natural causes must be compatible with the first and second laws of thermodynamics.”[9]
This is very different, however, from the claim made by many creationists that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. Evidence indicates that biological systems and evolution of those systems conform to the second law, since although biological systems may become more ordered, the net change in entropy for the entire universe is still positive as a result of evolution.[10] Additionally, the process of natural selection responsible for such local increase in order may be mathematically derived from the expression of the second law equation for non-equilibrium connected open systems,[11] arguably making the Theory of Evolution itself an expression of the Second Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
22 January 2009, 12:27 pmStan:
A structured environment of modern buildings, infrastructure, transportation, et al — all the stuff that facilitates the appropriation of time and space — requires exponentially increasing inputs of materials and fuels, which are increasingly and necessarily taken from an expanding periphery. Think through the production of concrete, eg. More disorder is created in the periphery, “exported” there by the same dynamic that imports negentropy to the center/core.
The labor theory of value adds “value” to the structures that increase this disordering dynamic in an inverse ratio. The greater non-normative value of counter-etnropic processes is destroyed to the exact extent that economic value is added.
23 January 2009, 12:43 amcharles:
Thinking out loud about what you say, European, capitalist colonialism and slavery over the last five hundred years: took energy from the colonialized peoples in Asia, Africa, America and Oceania in the form of the labor power of slaves and colonial workers; took energy resources and other raw materials as natural resources from the same. Took and occupied land from the peoples of especially the Americas ( genocidal usurpation of the Western Hemisphere). This has significantly destroyed the indigenous lives, cultures and societies of many peoples, created much social disorder, pain and suffering , and self-destruction against non-white peoples, and trashed their environments significantly. See, for example, _The World and Africa_ by W.E.B. Dubois; “Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet” by Wm.S. Willis; chapter on “The So-called Primitive Accumulation” in _Capital_; _How Europe Underdeveloped Africa_ by Walter Rodney.
European colonialism has been global since,you know, Columbus and Capitain Cook, et al. So, the periphery has been at its territorial max for a long time. The biggest setback to this expansion came in the late 40′s, 1950′s and 60′s with a significant worldwide anti-colonialist liberation struggle, backed up by the Soviet Union.
Exploited and oppressed labor was involved from the beginning, slavery being heavy duty labor.
I’d say the Marxist version of the labor _theory_ of value ( Smith and Ricardo had forms of a labor theory of value) doesn’t add anything to the actual activities, theory being only ideas, not practices. It is a way of analyzing how capitalists exploit the labor of wage-laborers and other laborers to accumulate wealth in the form of money capital. Labor is exploited from workers in both the core (imperial centers) and the periphery (colonies). Though the disorder visited on the periphery is greater, there is significant environmental and social disorder accumulating in the core. As far as things like industrial and nuclear waste, I believe there may be more in the “core”. Detroit probably has more industrial waste than any place in the periphery. You know the 4th Law of Thermodynamics: What goes around comes around (smile)
23 January 2009, 5:19 pmld:
Stan, please accept my apologies for hijacking this thread, but because this blog has lapsed into near-dormancy, I thought the only way to solicit your valued opinion would be to intercede here.
I am more or less familiar with your anarcho-communist turn (if it can be called that, labels don’t really matter) of the last few years, and I agree for a variety of reasons that it is the only viable way forward. But the prevailing political atmosphere these last few months, in the wake of Obama’s election and now his taking office, convince me that the already utopian goal of local self-sufficiency/radical democracy/et al is further away than ever. The utter passivity of progressive forces, waiting for the messiah to deliver us to a better place, has been nothing short of astonishing. And the utter passivity includes left-wing people and movements who
self-consciously understand that power accedes nothing without demands, so to speak.
Somehow I get the impression that an invisible threshhold has been crossed these last few years and we’ve reached new levels of consumerist stupefaction. It’s hard to even imagine the anti-globalist mobilizations of 1999-2001 or the anti-war demos of 2003 (limited as those beasts were) taking place today. Oh, the squandered possibilities! Even a chimerical DLC centrist like Obama could be forced to do a few good things (“transitional” for the next stage of the struggle, as it were) if people were organized and in motion. For example, some kind of campaign involving popular education and civil disobedience could force Obama and the DP majority to devote a relatively tiny but nonetheless substantive chunk of stimulus package money to supporting community-based agriculture. Foreclosed residential property could be turned into organic gardens and the unemployed could be put to work, learning farming skills, earning needed income, and growing healthy food for otherwise underserved communities. One can even envision ensuing competition between careerists and leftists to take over ground-level administration and participation in this sort of endeavor, such as happened with some of the War on Poverty programs. (A radicalizing experience for many New Leftists and grassroots people of color!) But this (or anything like it) isn’t even close to happening. It (or anything like it) is not even on the radar screen, as far as I know. All the usual suspect NGO’s and pressure groups have been thoroughly coopted (as with Clinton in early 1993) and those fragmented masses outside the loop are either mesmerized by the media spectacle, too busy with surviving in the near-depression conditions, or cynically withdrawn (or more likely some combination of the three). Maybe I am horribly misreading what is going on and what is not going on, but in some respects I’m more dismayed than I’ve been in a long time.
24 January 2009, 12:21 amAn opportunity for human beings to take a small step toward making their own history lost. I’ll leave it at this for now…
Stan:
Not sure that this is true at all. A “setback” would imply something far more linear than what happened, and some telos within capitalist “development” (or a telos within socialist development… but industrialization has been the only thing that served as that pull-point). In fact, by any account, every one of those places is far worse off, and far more vulnerable now than they were even under colonial rule… not because of the beneficience of the colonizers, but because the neoliberal adaptation of capitalist accumulation, combined with the left’s devotion to industrial development and the “green revolution” as “progress,” has undermined subsistence and left these places far more dependent on a far less stable international economic regime.
The disorder exported to these peripheries is not simply the theft of item 1 (energy), item 2 (labor), et al. Poverty itself — when defined, for example, as having no money — is not intrinsically disordered. Subsistence ag societies, left to themselves, have been remarkable well self-organized, and have evolved perfectly viable ideas and practices to maintain social equilibrium. The “disorder” is far deeper than simply scarcity in the wake of theft. It is a constant disruption of a people’s natural propensity to self-organize, created by a constant disruption of all three aspects of existence: ecology, culture, and the personhood that corresponds to them.
The “green revolution,” hailed on right and left, has been far more damaging and destructive of social organizations than the primitive imperialism of direct conquest and occupation, and the collapse of the financialized global economy is about to expose just how thoroughgoing that crippling dependency has become.
24 January 2009, 8:00 amR. Burke:
Population control, the “ultimate taboo” , as posted at the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/roundtables/population-and-climate-change is really why the “green revolution” is happening. E.O. Wilson, on PBS, Paul Ehrlich, Jonas Salk…BIOLOGISTS…
“uniting against the common ememy–overpopulation”—the work of a mother/father is done only for her/his benefit–basic survival of the genes—but, only the educated can grasp: Stop propagating !
I don’t have a flair for writing as many here do, off topic-but the finance breakdown lately,has stopped a lot of 20 somethings having kids!
I used to be a big fan of “Omni” Magazine–May ‘82 J. Salk “To evolve, not merely survive..eliminate the need for war…be both conservative and liberal…be adaptive…emphasis on concensus…the matter too important to be left to politicians..groups of scientists and physicians…etc. etc. etc.
Maybe the developed world will destroy itself…but population will reestablish itself in unaffected regions of the planet? probably NOT likely…..the problem is GENETIC SELFISHNESS…THAT TO ME is not SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST! Only Andy Borowitz has written on the subject in popular journalism, in his satires! Not even here at feral scholar has the subject been addressed!??
25 January 2009, 6:12 pmld:
Stan, I’m sorry the predicaments of your life are keeping you from participating on your list to the extent you’d prefer. I was really hoping to gain your valuable insights on the “what is to be done” riff I posted above, one imbued with a highly sympathetic ecological Marxist/anarcho- communist perspective. That someone can wantonly wander on to the FS blog and post a reactionary Malthusian screed, not having the slightest clue as to why that would not go over well here, shows just how theoretically impoverished and in fact clueless is the US “environmental” movement… and illustrative of how unfortunate it is that you’re not able to regularly attend to your electronic neighborhood, also. Be well…
STAN: I’ve been writing all day, on another thing, but my brain cells are burnt. Perhaps you or someone else can respond to what I agree is an idiotic — and at the end of the day, imperial-racist — malthusian screed.
26 January 2009, 6:42 pmCharles:
But this (or anything like it) isn’t even close to happening.
^^^^
30 January 2009, 3:11 pmCB: The Detroit City Council has passed a Food Policy Resolution authored by Maleek Yakini, who has been organizing urban organic gardening for years. It is false to say that we aren’t even close to using Stimulus money for this project. We very well might. YES WE CAN !
Charles:
Not sure that this is true at all. A “setback” would imply something far more linear than what happened, and some telos within capitalist “development” (or a telos within socialist development… but industrialization has been the only thing that served as that pull-point).
^^^
Of course, I am not quite sure an absolute rejection of the concept of progress (“linearity”)is correct at all. Ending racism, imperialism and colonialism _is_ progress, an advance for humanity, our species. It doesn’t occur in a straight-line (strictly “linear”), but rather a zig-zag, i.e. one step forward, two step backwards,sometimes.
Industrialization was not all that socialism “did”. As I say here, it was the bulwark for major gains against the European colonialist system.
^^^^
In fact, by any account,
^^^
CB: _Any_ account ? I’m not sure that the former colonial victims’ accounts agree with yours. What do the Chinese say on this ? Vietnamese ? Cubans ? Indians ? Ghanans ? Nigerians ? Venezuelans ? Bolivians ? Egyptians ? Many former Soviet Republics in Asia ? Iranians ? Libyans ? South Africans ?
Namibians ? Angolans ?
^^^
every one of those places is far worse off, and far more vulnerable now than they were even under colonial rule… not because of the beneficience of the colonizers, but because the neoliberal adaptation of capitalist accumulation, combined with the left’s devotion to industrial development and the “green revolution” as “progress,” has undermined subsistence and left these places far more dependent on a far less stable international economic regime.
^^^
CB: It is not at all clear that European colonialism and slavery of the 450 years before the last 60 was far better and far less vulnerable than life under neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism. You would have to do a lot more to prove this claim. You might have a very difficult time getting the former victims of colonialism who won national liberation struggles in the period I mentioned to agree with your claim, or wanting to return to the days of paleo-colonialism from whatever problems they have today. There is a certain neo-paternalist radicalism in claiming that these national liberation struggles have worsened the circumstances of the liberated nations.
^^^^^
The disorder exported to these peripheries is not simply the theft of item 1 (energy), item 2 (labor), et al. Poverty itself — when defined, for example, as having no money — is not intrinsically disordered. Subsistence ag societies, left to themselves, have been remarkable well self-organized, and have evolved perfectly viable ideas and practices to maintain social equilibrium.
^^^
CB: Yes, I know. See , for example, _Pigs for the Ancestors_ by Roy Rappaport, on Papua New Guinea’s Tsimbaga. And then our whole species lived like that for the first 190,000 (or more) years of our existence. Agriculture (production of surpluses) was only invented 5000 years ago (See _People of the Earth_ by Brian Fagan; archeology textbook).
Energy, natural resources and labor are not just “items”. They are essential necessities for all human life. To refer to their theft as “simple” is to not understand how humans go about living fundamentally.
^^^^
The “disorder” is far deeper than simply scarcity in the wake of theft. It is a constant disruption of a people’s natural propensity to self-organize, created by a constant disruption of all three aspects of existence: ecology, culture, and the personhood that corresponds to them.
^^^^
CB: Yes, the far deeper details of what you refer to as disruption are in the several books I listed earlier. “Colonialism and slavery” refer to a system of genocide. Maybe the word “genocide” will convey to you that what I said in the earlier post is far, _far_ deeper than “simply scarcity in the wake of theft.” Maybe I’ll bring some quotes from the sources I mentioned. Do you recall I referred to the _genocidal_ usurpation of the Western Hemisphere ? I don’t think you are telling me something deeper than what I said to you.
^^^^
The “green revolution,” hailed on right and left, has been far more damaging and destructive of social organizations than the primitive imperialism of direct conquest and occupation, and the collapse of the financialized global economy is about to expose just how thoroughgoing that crippling dependency has become.
^^^
CB: You’ll have to do a lot more than just assert the first claim. China, India, Persia, Mexico, Peru, Southeast Asia, Egypt, West Africa, et al had more than subsistence agriculture before the invasions of the Europeans,for starters. The Green Revolution is not what wrecked their social organization. Check out Parts IV and V in _People of the Earth_ on “Old World Civilizations” and “Native American Civilizations” on the social organization around the first “green revolutions” starting from 4 and 5 thousand years ago.
As to what will happen as a result of the financial crash, I’m not so sure it’s bad for the neo-colonies.
30 January 2009, 4:07 pmCharles:
Somehow , I think what I said earlier bears repeating:
This has significantly destroyed the indigenous lives, cultures and societies of many peoples, created much social disorder, pain and suffering , and self-destruction against non-white peoples, and trashed their environments significantly.
30 January 2009, 4:21 pmKevin Bart:
Stan, I wonder what you’d say to someone who believes the Democrats already are socialists. For example, how would you deconstruct this point of view:
[quote]
No, the Democrats are a far left party in that they are for the redistribution of wealth. That is to say they are for forcibly taking money out of my paycheck and putting it in the pocket of somone else who did not earn it, and to whom I would not give money if I had any choice in the matter.
So are the republicans. They want to put it in the pocket of a smaller group of people who already have more in their pocket than I do. That is what our liberal media, education, and other establishments would call right wing. From my perspective there isn’t much of a difference. We still have less money at the end of the month even though we work just as hard as we did before. It doesn’t matter if it is ending up with a thousand poor people, or one rich corporation. It still is given to other people and does not benifit us at all. In short, both parties are pushing a form of colectivism that is absolutly counter to what this country was founded on, and what it should be.
It is much more accurate to say that we have no real right than no real left. A real right wing movement advocates a government that keeps it’s hands off your earnings, your personal rights, your property rights, and just runs the country. I do not see such a movement anywhere these days.
If we don’t have a “real” left, in this country that is a good thing. We don’t need one. What we need is to keep what we earn, let mismanaged corporations fail when they naturally would and be replaced by new better ones, and to let people know that the government is not there to “take care” of them, but to maintain an environment where they can take care of themselves.
[/quote]
Would you approach this anthropologically – that it presumes people are self-contained little billiard balls that exist merely to bump into one another in their rational, self-interested transactions?
There are tens of millions of Americans who endorse just such a view. How would you reach them?
STAN: Do something with one of them. Then the relationship shifts from an abstract conversation about things not immediate to cooperative communication.
7 February 2009, 8:09 pmKevin Bart:
Here’s my attempt at a response to the above viewpoint:
[quote]
Well, it sounds as though you’re firmly committed to the belief that property rights are pretty absolute, and that taking property from someone by force is absolutely wrong. Would you say that that’s what you mean when you refer to “what this country was founded upon?”
In that case, I need to know: do you believe it would be right for us to abandon this continent and return it to the Native Americans who were here before us, and who forfeited their property to us only by means of our superior force?
Because if you say “no,” then it turns out that you don’t really believe that it’s always wrong to take property from others by force. And in that case you open the door to host of other instances where such might be the case.
There’s no third way. This continent was stolen, taken, and conquered by bloody force. It was an orgy of force, theft, and fraud. That’s what this country was founded upon, not the Libertarian fairy tale of a free-trading utopia that you seem to believe in.
If you’re against the taking of property against the will of the rightful owners, in all instances (as you seem to imply), then we’ve got to give the whole blasted continent back. It’s the fruit of the poisoned tree, as they say.
Somehow, I don’t think you’ll go along with that. In which case, your take on what constitutes property rights is, on some level, arbitrary. Once that’s conceded — and it has to be conceded here — your objection to “redistribution” becomes a matter of taste or personal preference, not the absolute matter of justice that you make it out to be.
There are a number of other presuppositions here, a number of other unexamined premises that could be overturned as well.[/quote]
Stan, what do you think?
***
STAN: I think your logic is faulty here.
You set your argument up with BELIEF as your premise, but then you load the premise with an appeal to moral superiority to intimidate your opponent. The question is set up as a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife cross, circumscribing your opponent’s answer in advance by limiting her/his options to reply to your false dichotomy (the demand for a yes or no answer to a question that is unsuited for it). Then you answer yourself (assuming the answer you have already presumed), and imply a linear causal progression from the IF (“if you say no”) to the THEN (“then it turns out yada yada yada”). The categorical claim after the THEN of course does not follow anything from the IF that is actually causative (a non sequitur… does not follow). You might be saying no because the changes in the world since the expropriation of that land have so evolved that there is no practicable way to have 300,000,000 peoplel “abandon a continent.” Then you wind up with the old fallacy that says every scratch turns to gangrene, camel’s nose in the tent, slippery slope…. etc etc etc etc etc. I also think you have a conclusion buried in your premise that is an uncritical assumption, yet that idea is the target of critical engagement here: What is property? Let’s hear about the history of “property,” because it is actually a strange and relatively new idea, and one that is not nearly as unidimensional as we might think.
7 February 2009, 8:52 pm