Hasta La Creative!

Pitágoras nació alrededor del 570 a.C. Pasó su juventud viajando a Egipto, Siria y Babilonia donde se empapó de las enseñanzas místicas del este. Alrededor de los 40, estableció su propio culto cuasi religioso en Crotona, en el sur de Italia. Sus enseñanzas atrajeron a cientos de seguidores, algunos de ellos sufrieron severas privaciones – incluyendo un voto de silencio de cinco años – para pertenecer a su círculo más cercano, conocidos como los mathematikoi.

La filosofía de este culto estaba basada en la razón y el número. Para los pitagóricos, el número era todo. Cada número tenía un significado especial, casi mágico. La mónada, la unidad, representaba la unidad original del universo creado, y estaba asociado con la divina inteligencia. La díada, el dos, representaba la división de esta unidad en la dualidad. (Los números pares, que contuviesen el número dos, eran vistos, por tanto, como la representación de la debilidad y la mutabilidad.) El tres representaba todas las cosas con un principio, un desarrollo y un final. El cuatro representaba la consecución – como las cuatro estaciones.

El número perfecto era la década, el diez. La suma de uno, dos, tres y cuatro representaba la totalidad de fuerzas que constituyen el universo. En referencia a la década, los pitagóricos hicieron una lista de diez principios opuestos, que dividía los fenómenos en dos clases:

bueno – malo

limitado – ilimitado

impar – par

derecha – izquierda

masculino – femenino

en descanso – en movimiento

recto – curvo

luz – oscuridad

cuadrado – oblongo

Al alinearse con las cualidades de la primera columna, los pitagóricas creían que podrían lograr la pureza y acercarse a los dioses.

Las razones por las que eligieron diez pares han desconcertado a los académicos desde Aristóteles, pero algo se puede intuir. En la filosofía de Pitágoras, por ejemplo, el universo estaba formado por dos componentes: lo limitado, que significaba orden, y lo ilimitado, que representaba caos y pluralidad. Lo primero estaba asociado con la mónada y los números impares, los segundos con la díada y los números pares. El biógrafo de Pitágoras, Jámblico, escribe: “A la mano derecha él la llamaba el principio del número impar, y es divina, pero la mano izquierda es el símbolo del número para y de lo que es disoluto.” La mano derecha está controlada por el lado derecho del cerebro, que nosotros asociamos al razonamiento lineal, lógico, el tipo de razonamiento perseguido por los pitagóricos. Esta preferencia por la mano derecha ha persistido a través del lenguaje – la palabra “siniestra” viene del Latín sinestra, izquierda.

¿Qué tiene que ver todo este misticismo antiguo con la dura fría lógica de la economía neoclásica – que ve a la humanidad como un mero agregado de actores racionales y egoístas? El modelo económico ha sido durante mucho tiempo Newtoniano, relacionado con la física mecánica, que está, finalmente, basado explícitamente en el pensamiento Pitagórico. Así pues, esta lista de pares son los filamentos complementarios del ADN de la economía. Considerando que la economía neoclásica:

• está basada en la idea de escasez y enfatiza en los recursos limitados como el petróleo a expensas de los recursos ilimitados como el viento;
• desecha la incertidumbre y la dualidad (simbolizadas por los pitagóricos como la paridad);
• está basada en la primacía del individuo (uno) frente a la sociedad (pluralidad);
• valora la lógica de la mano derecha, ignorando las emociones y el pensamiento de la mano izquierda;
• está basado en el ejemplo masculino que infravalora cosas como los niños;
• ve la economía como un sistema estático, en reposo por la acción de la invisible mano del capitalismo;
• usa una aproximación simplista, lineal (recta) a un modelo complejo, no lineal (curvo) de fenómenos;
• intenta hacer brillar la luz de la razón y la observación sobre la economía, desechando la indeterminación (oscuridad) de los sistemas humanos;
• reduce un sistema complejo y a menudo fuertemente orientado a lo social y político a la simple simetría (cuadrado) de las matemáticas.

Los economistas neoclásicos son pitagóricos. Siguen pensando que el número lo es todo. Y siguen intentando encontrar el bien y alcanzar la Utopía al alinearse con la primera columna de esta antigua lista.

Desde los 60, un número de nuevas ciencias han emergido del desafío directo del paradigma pitagórico. Lógica difusa, fractales, teoría de redes y dinámicas no lineales que tratan con sistemas indeterminados, curvas, plurales y cambiantes. Feministas y ecologistas han señalado los defectos de sistema neoclásico. Al incorporar estas voces y desarrollos como economistas, nos acercaremos a una economía que no solo es post-autista, sino también post-pitagórica.

David Orrell es un matemático y un autor cuyo trabajo han aparecido en “New Scientist”, “The Financial Times”, “BBC Radio” y “CBC TV”. Es el autor de “Apollo’s Arrow: The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything and The Other Side of the Coin: The Emerging Vision of Economics and Our Place in the World”.

Translated by the Translator Brigades – translatorbrigades@gmail.com

Esta mañana estaba arrancando una hiedra venenosa; parecía que me enfrentaba a la descorazonadora perspectiva de arrancar más de cien plantas, pero descubrí que, si hundía el dedo enguantado hasta la raíz y tiraba con cuidado, podía llegar hasta otras raíces y tallos que había en mi jardín abandonado, para luego quitar de golpe partes enteras con bastante facilidad. Sin tirar de una sola de las plantas, al arrancar la raíz salían todas las que estaban a la vista y muchas otras que no había visto con la maleza. Cuando era adolescente me moría por viajar a Estados Unidos para ver “cómo viven otros”. Ahora la verdad es que ya se puede ver cómo viven con independencia de dónde se esté, ya que la misma publicidad, las mismas cadenas y la misma televisión, radio y conglomerados de empresas de los medios impresos han en su mayor parte sustituido a los EE.UU. por los mismos centros comerciales de carretera, de costa a costa. A todo el mundo le estalla la cabeza con las mismas canciones y los jóvenes “se sienten identificados con” el mismo puñado de logos de empresas y de personajes que salen en los medios. Las “noticias”empresariales informan de cómo a personas reales que interpretan a personajes de ficción les va su reproducción y rehabilitación. Mientras limpiaba mi jardín estadounidense de plagas tóxicas, la cabeza se me fue a la imagen de las cadenas de tiendas dispuestas a lo largo de la autopista; cada centro comercial un manojo de hojas, conectados por una cable invisible de raíz. Me imaginé que iba conduciendo a través del país en una gran autopista interestatal arrancando cadenas de tiendas a mi paso, ayudando a liberar una tierra que se ahoga en una sucesión de uniformidad.

Las sociedades mercantiles modernas (corporations) eran básicamente ilegales cuando se fundaron los Estados Unidos (a los colonos ya les había llegado con las sociedades británicas). En el nuevo país, se podían formar, reunir capital público y repartir los beneficios con los accionistas sólo para actividades específicas que beneficiasen al público, como construir carreteras o canales; las licencias empresariales eran temporales y las sociedades tenían prohibido intentar influir en las elecciones, en la legislación, en las políticas públicas o en la vida civil. Imagínenselo.

Pero desde un principio, los hombres de mentalidad empresarial ansiaban el poder, llevando a Thomas Jefferson a escribir en 1816, “Espero que… acabemos ya en su nacimiento con la aristocracia de nuestras sociedades adineradas, que ya se atreven a retar al gobierno a una prueba de fuerza y desafían las leyes del país”.

Durante el siglo inmediatamente sucesivo a la Revolución Estadounidense, los legisladores mantuvieron el control del proceso de aprobación de las escrituras de constitución de las sociedades, pero básicamente lo perdieron a medida que una serie de decisiones judiciales establecieron los “derechos” y la “personalidad” de las mismas. Esas leyes han sido catastróficas para la democracia, con implicaciones planetarias.

A la globalización empresarial se le ha denominado “el rediseño más esencial de las disposiciones sociales, económicas y políticas que ha tenido lugar desde la Revolución Industrial”. Las sociedades han puesto fin a cualquier poder real económico o político de los gobiernos. De los cien países más ricos y sociedades listados conjuntamente, más de la mitad son sociedades. ExxonMobil es más rica que 180 países: y sólo hay unos 195 países. Sin las responsabilidades o los gastos de una nación, las sociedades pueden innovar y producir con una rapidez y a una escala sin precedentes, pero también pueden llevar a cabo actos de enorme destrucción medioambiental y declarar beneficios.

Su comportamiento se debe a su gran libertad de acción y a su responsabilidad limitada por el daño causado. Lo que es más, los accionistas “son titulares” y se benefician de la sociedad, pero su “responsabilidad limitada” implica que los accionistas no pueden perder más dinero del invertido; no se les responsabiliza de nada de lo que la empresa hace. Si así fuera, sabrían de qué empresas “son titulares” y por qué, y puede que exigieran responsabilidad empresarial e invirtieran con más cuidado. Pero como no lo son, no lo hacen.

Lo que es más, si una sociedad puede beneficiarse más arruinando a una comunidad, la ley dice que debe hacerlo. Puede que el caso más famoso de la legislación en materia de sociedades lo decidiera el Tribunal Supremo de Michigan en 1919, cuando los hermanos Dodge (sí, esos hermanos Dodge) demandaron a Henry Ford. Ford quería que los beneficios revirtieran en la empresa y los empleados. “Mi ambición es dar empleo todavía a más hombres”, el New York Times citó a Ford diciendo, “extender los beneficios de este sistema industrial al mayor número posible de personas, para ayudarlas a crearse una vida y una casa. Para hacerlo, estamos reinvirtiendo la mayor parte de nuestros beneficios en el negocio”. Los jueces plantearon una breve pregunta: ¿Para qué sirve una sociedad? Se respondieron a sí mismos diciendo que eran “en primera instancia para el beneficio de los accionistas”, no para el beneficio de los empleados o de la comunidad. Los gestores de las sociedades -con independencia de sus escrúpulos personales o de su deseo de “hacer el bien”- están obligados a anteponer siempre los beneficios.

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El imperativo de maximización de los beneficios crea una presión continua para tirar los residuos en la propiedad común y trasladar los costes resultantes al público a través de subsidios, limpieza de la contaminación a costa del contribuyente y actuaciones semejantes. En donde tirar los residuos es ilegal, a las sociedades se les puede multar por violaciones. Estas multas a menudo pasan a ser “el precio de hacer negocios”, cuando los accionistas saben que a las sociedad nunca se las manda a la cárcel y que algunas son “demasiado grandes (para que se les permita) caer”. Y siempre que los controles gubernamentales se vuelvan molestos, los deseos empresariales también acaban con ellos, apoyando y colocando a funcionarios escogidos por las cooperativas y luego forzando la eliminación de “barreras” reguladoras (las antes conocidas como: “protecciones públicas”).

Sin embargo, podemos imaginarnos cómo un gobierno con una mentalidad más orientada hacia el público habría lidiado con las sociedades propensas a los riesgos. En la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el gobierno estadounidense se hizo con el control de algunas empresas alemanas en los Estados Unidos. Evidentemente, no tendría sentido tener plantas químicas alemanas en suelo estadounidense mientras nos sumíamos en una guerra con Alemania. No se destruyeron las empresas, sólo las controló el gobierno durante un tiempo; algunas todavía existen. Cuando los fabricantes de automóviles se metieron en graves problemas y se declararon en bancarrota en 2009, el gobierno federal intervino para controlar la gestión durante una temporada. No es que se llevaran a cabo medidas punitivas, pero podemos hacernos una idea de las medidas con las que las sociedades que actúan como malos ciudadanos tendrán que convivir durante un tiempo, pongamos por caso, con sus activos congelados -tal vez sin comercio- mientras el gobierno del pueblo se dedica a darles una capacitación insignificante a los directivos.

En la vida real tal y como la conocemos, el imperativo de maximización de beneficios implica que una empresa que intente actuar de forma responsable incurre en una desventaja competitiva. Las implicaciones son por lo general un aluvión de catástrofes, porque básicamente todo el dinero del mundo está por tanto bajo presión para actuar de manera irresponsable. Cualquier otro impulso debe resistir a esa corriente.

El principio de fe fundamental de las sociedades, su objeto de adoración, su grial y su sustento: el crecimiento. Un crecimiento impulsado sin cesar por nuevos recursos acabados de desenterrar y mano de obra barata, un crecimiento alimentado por un número en aumento de consumidores con un peso también en aumento. El crecimiento se ha producido a lo largo de la historia como resultado del progreso tecnológico y de una población creciente, y se volvió una de las aspiraciones de las políticas gubernamentales sobre todo después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Pero el planeta Tierra no puede crecer. No a un ritmo superior al que acumula encanto, en cualquier caso. Si la economía “crece” mientras se agotan recursos como el agua, los bosques y los caladeros, no es crecimiento: sólo es hacer más burbujas. Sin embargo, puesto que nuestro sistema económico muestra un amor incondicional por el crecimiento, no cunde la alarma por algunas burbujas, pero cuenten con esto: cuanto más grande sea esta, peor será la explosión.

El primer siglo empresarial, el siglo XX, fue un periodo de crecimiento explosivo. A pesar de que hasta 150 millones de seres humanos murieron en enfrentamientos bélicos entre 1900 y Y2K, la población mundial se cuadruplicó. El uso de la energía aumentó en dieciséis veces. La pesca -que alcanzó su punto máximo a finales de los ochenta- aumentó en treinta veces. La enorme cantidad de cosas que se usan anualmente circulan con tal número de ceros que resulta pasmosa: 275?000?000 toneladas de carne, 370?000?000 toneladas de productos de papel, etcétera. Lo que es increíble, de todos los materiales de la Tierra que las manos de los seres humanos han transformado alguna vez, la mitad al completo de esa transformación de materiales ha tenido lugar a partir de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

“Es imposible que la economía mundial salga de la pobreza y del deterioro medioambiental mediante el crecimiento”, escribe el economista Herman Daly, preocupado por los recursos, porque la economía es un “subsistema del ecosistema terrestre, que es finito, no va a más y tiene un abastecimiento material limitado”.

¿Y los economistas creen que la solución a los problemas que tenemos es más crecimiento? Hemos estado equivocados por completo. Sin embargo, más desarrollo: esa sí es una propuesta diferente. “Crecimiento” quiere decir aumentar de tamaño añadiendo; “desarrollo” quiere decir desarrollar potenciales, mejorar.

Dado que el mundo ya está bastante explotado, ahora el crecimiento pone en peligro el desarrollo. En un mundo que hubiera superado el crecimiento, mediríamos cosas como la comunidad y la satisfacción, sustituiríamos esta dinámica desenfrenada de la pescadilla que se muerde la cola de lo material, con la vida, la libertad y la búsqueda de la felicidad que se derivan del desarrollo, no del crecimiento. No los confundamos.

Cuando las condiciones oceánicas son difíciles, algunas medusas “de-crecen”. No sólo pierden grasa o adelgazan; sino que sí que pierden células y simplifican algunas de sus estructuras. Cuando las condiciones mejoran, vuelven a crecer. Dado que añaden células nuevas y les vuelven a crecer estructuras (no sólo vuelven a engordar), lo que en verdad sucede es que rejuvenecen: son más jóvenes de lo que eran. En el extremo opuesto, Edward Abbey observó hace ya mucho tiempo que el crecimiento por el crecimiento continuo es la estrategia del cáncer. Sabiendo lo que sabemos hoy en día, parece que el mundo no puede producir lo suficiente para salir de la pobreza a base de crecer, pero podríamos, sin lugar a dudas, salir de ella a base de reducir.

Carl Safina ha recibido la beca MacArthur y ha sido invitado en el programa de televisión de la PBS “Saving the Ocean” (“Salvar el océano”). Este ensayo figuró por primera vez en el libro “The View From Lazy Point“

Translated by the Translator Brigades – translatorbrigades@gmail.com

Mientras #OWS engloba una multiplicidad de tácticas, opiniones y grados de radicalismo político, es claro y evidente que el alma de Occupy es anticapitalista, y el deseo de un sistema diferente es un deseo de un movimiento de protesta cuyo alcance en nuestras vidas es más holístico. Ya se han hecho trabajos estimulantes para organizarse en diferentes comunidades y uno puede imaginarse la emergencia de una red dispersa, no sólo de asambleas generales pero también de comunas y cooperativas.

Cargamos con el viejo pesimismo teórico, diciéndonos que cualquier forma desarrollada y continuada de organización comunitaria sólo puede existir como un bolsillo autónomo que no supone ninguna amenaza al capitalismo. Pero apoyar formas autónomas y comunitarias de cuidado no es desmarcarse de las formas de acción directas y activas. Los aspectos positivos y negativos de la lucha contra el capitalismo deben trabajar conjuntamente los unos con los otros para reforzarse mutuamente. Las comunas, cooperativas y otras estructuras de apoyo social proporcionan una red de seguridad material que facilita la acción radical, permitiendo a las personas desprenderse del trabajo y de las deudas contraídas con la seguridad de que sus necesidades materiales van a estar cubiertas cuando así lo hagan.

Además, tales formas de organización pueden dar comienzo al proceso increíblemente difícil de crear confianza entre personas con pasados y experiencias radicalmente distintos, procurando apoyo para quienes lo necesitan, especialmente aquellos que han sufrido el colapso económico. Estas formas de organización enervarán al status-quo sustrayendo el tiempo y la energía de los participantes de sus roles como trabajadores asalariados y consumidores. Claro que #OWS ya ha empezado a hacer esto; muchos de nosotros que no disfrutamos del lujo de tener empleos altamente flexibles (es decir precarios) o quienes no se han dedicado todavía a la ocupación a tiempo completo (y ahora duermen en iglesias, sinagogas y viviendas privadas ofrecidas generosamente- y organizándose durante el día) ya dedicamos nuestras horas en la oficina leyendo clandestinamente los emails de los grupos de trabajo o artículos relacionados con occupy. Nuestro objetivo es conseguir un modo de vida menos esquizofrénico en el cual el efecto totalizador de Occupy en nuestros pensamientos se refleje en el grado en el que predomine en nuestras acciones, un modo de vida en el que nuestra política esté en concordancia con la manera en la que nos sustentamos. Para aquellos que están en contra del capitalismo esto significará evaluar nuestra audacia y examinar nuestra propia percepción del futuro. Tal y como observó Daniel Marcus: “No puede haber movimiento de comunas si la protesta es meramente una actividad extracurricular de los asalariados: los trabajadores tendrán que elegir si están con las comunas o con los jefes o administradores.”

La necesidad de nuevas estructuras de cuidado es tanto emocional como material. Muchos de nosotros estamos empezando a darnos cuenta de la amplitud de nuestra propia insatisfacción. Pasamos tiempo con amigos y amantes pero estos encuentros son contrapuntos transitorios a la anomia inducida por una cultura del individualismo. Trabajamos hacia el éxito, pero lo que constituye el éxito parece cada vez más vacío. Quizás sea anticuado hablar de “alienación”, quizás sea naïf afirmar qué formas de trabajo o qué actividades puedan comenzar a vencerla; quizás sea utópico creer en que podríamos crear una sociedad en la que una vida mejor sea posible. Ya vemos la posibilidad de estas cosas en el futuro cercano de este movimiento y ya estamos empezando a construir la infraestructura necesaria.

El afecto no sólo es un efecto, sino una herramienta decisiva de la revolución. Así como la catársis de la resistencia que experimentamos en otoño reforzó el espíritu de comunidad y nos alentó a ir más lejos, habrá plasmaciones holísticas de Occupy, más comunitarias, auto-suficientes que afianzarán y reforzarán aún más al movimiento. Somos más fuertes cuando nuestra resistencia se inspira en nuestra indignación pero cuando también aprovecha nuestras fuerzas vitales, extendiéndose a la base material y psicológica de nuestras vidas.

En primavera debemos redescubrir que hay tipos militantes de comunidad y formas de cuidado insurrecionarias.

Nicole Demby es escritora y crítica y vive en Brooklyn. Es miembro del Arts & Labor group (Grupo de Trabajo de Arte y Trabajo de Occupy Wall Street).

Translated by the Translator Brigades – translatorbrigades@gmail.com

We are insurgent because we have risen up from nowhere and are everywhere. Because ideas can be ignored but not suppressed and an insurrection of the imagination is irresistible. Because whenever we fall over we rise up again and again and again, knowing that nothing is lost for history, that nothing is final. Because history doesn’t move in straight lines but surges like water, sometimes swirling, sometimes dripping, flowing, flooding–always unknowable, unexpected, uncertain. Because the key to insurgency is brilliant improvisation, not perfect blueprints.

We are rebels because we love life and happiness more than ‘revolution.’ Because no revolution is ever complete and rebellions continues forever. Because we will dismantle the ghost-machine of abstraction with means that are indistinguishable from ends. Because we don’t want to change ‘the’ world, but ‘our’ world. Because we will always desert and disobey those who abuse and accumulate power. Because rebels transform everything–the way they live, create, love, eat, laugh, play, learn, trade, listen, think and most of all the way they rebel.

We are an army because we live on a planet in permanent war–a war of money against life, of profit against dignity, of progress against the future. Because a war that gorges itself on death and blood and shits money and toxins, deserves an obscene body of deviant soldiers. Because only an army can declare absurd war on absurd war. Because combat requires solidarity, discipline and commitment. Because alone clowns are pathetic figures, but in groups and gaggles, brigades and battalions, they are extremely dangerous. We are an army because we are angry and where bombs fail we might succeed with mocking laughter. And laughter needs an echo.

We are approximate and ambivalent, in the most powerful of all places, the place in-between order and chaos.

Adapted from the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army manifesto.

This morning I was pulling poison ivy. It looked like I was up against the withering prospect of pulling more than a hundred individual plants. But I found that if I dug my gloved finger to the root and gently tugged, I could trace it through other roots and stems in my neglected garden, then fairly easily zip out whole tracts of the stuff. Without pulling a single individual plant, tugging up the root dislodged all the ones I could see and a lot that I hadn’t seen in the tangle of vegetation. When I was a teen I yearned to travel America to see “how other people live.” Now, basically, you can see how they live from wherever you happen to be. The same advertising, the same chain stores, and the same TV, radio and print conglomerates have largely replaced America with the same repeating road-stop strip mall, from sea to shining sea. Everyone’s head throbs with the same songs, and young people “relate to” the same handful of company logos and media characters. Corporate “news” reports on how the actual people who play fictional characters are faring in their reproduction and rehab. As I was freeing my American garden from toxic infestations, my mind drifted to the image of the chain stores along a highway, each strip mall a sprig of leaves, connected by an unseen cable of root. I imagined that I was driving cross-country on a big interstate highway, pulling up chain stores as I went along, helping free up a land strangling in a rash of sameness.

Modern corporations were essentially illegal at the founding of the United States (the colonists had had enough of British corporations). In the new country, corporations could form, raise public capital, and share profits with stockholders only for specified activities that benefited the public, such as constructing roads or canals. Corporate licenses were temporary. Corporations were forbidden from attempting to influence elections, lawmaking, public policy, or civil life. Imagine.

But from the beginning, corporate-minded men chafed for power, prompting Thomas Jefferson to write in 1816, “I hope we shall … crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

For the first century after the American Revolution, legislators maintained control of the corporate chartering process. Then they essentially lost it as a series of court decisions established corporate “rights” and corporate “personhood.” These laws have been catastrophic for democracy, with planetary implications.

Corporate globalization has been called “the most fundamental redesign of social, economic, and political arrangements since the Industrial Revolution.” Corporations have swept real economic and political power away from governments. Of the hundred wealthiest countries and corporations listed together, more than half are corporations. ExxonMobil is richer than 180 countries – and there are only about 195 countries. Without the responsibilities or costs of nationhood, corporations can innovate and produce at unprecedented speed and scale. Yet they can also undertake acts of enormous environmental destruction and report a profit.

The behavior of corporations arises from their wide freedom of action and their limited liability for harms caused. Further, shareholders “own” and profit by the corporation, but “limited liability” means shareholders can lose no more than the money invested; they aren’t held responsible for anything the corporation does. If they were, stockholders might know what companies they “own” and why. They might demand corporate responsibility. They might invest more carefully. But because they’re not, they don’t.

Further, if a corporation can make a larger profit by wrecking a community, the law says it must. Perhaps the most famous case in corporate law was decided in the Supreme Court of Michigan in 1919 when Henry Ford got sued by the Dodge brothers (yes, those Dodge brothers). Ford wanted to plow profits back into the company and its employees. “My ambition is to employ still more men,” the New York Times quoted Ford as saying, “to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.” The judges posed a short question: What is a corporation for? The judges answered themselves by saying corporations are “primarily for the profit of the stockholders.” Not for the benefit of employees or community. Corporate managers – regardless of personal scruples or desire to “do good” – are forced to always put profits first.

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The profit-maximization imperative creates continuous pressure to dump waste in the public commons and to shift the resulting costs to the public through subsidies, tax-funded pollution cleanups, and such. Where dumping waste is illegal, corporations may be fined for violations. Such fines often become “a cost of doing business,” while shareholders know that corporations never get sent to jail, and that some are “too big (to be allowed) to fail.” To the extent that governmental regulations get annoying, corporate appetites engulf those too, backing and basically installing cooperative elected officials, then coercing the removal of regulatory “barriers” (formerly: “public protections”).

However, we can envision how a more public-minded government might deal with risk-prone corporations. In Wold War II, the US government seized control of certain German companies inside the United States. Obviously, it wouldn’t do to have German chemical plants on American soil while we were engulfed in war with Germany. The companies were not destroyed, just controlled by the government for a while; some still exist. When U.S. automakers got into serious trouble and went into bankruptcy in 2009, the federal government stepped in to control management for a while. These weren’t punitive moves exactly, but one can imagine ways in which corporations acting as bad citizens might have to do some time with, say, their stocks frozen – no trading, maybe – while a government of the people does a little potty training with the executives.

In real life as we know it, the profit-maximization imperative means that any company seeking to act responsibly incurs a competitive disadvantage. The implications are generally a cascade of catastrophes because essentially all the money in the world is thus under pressure to act irresponsibly. Any other impulse must buck that tide.

The corporations’ central tenet of faith, their object of worship, their grail and their gruel: growth. Growth fueled by continually unearthing new resources and cheaper labor. Growth fed by raising and fattening new consumers. Growth had historically resulted from technical progress and growing population. It became a central pursuit of government policy mainly after World War II.

But Planet Earth cannot grow. Not any faster than it accumulates stardust, anyway. If the economy “grows” while resources like water, forest, and fish are being depleted, it’s not growth: it’s just blowing more bubbles. Yet because our economic system shows unconditional love for growth, it doesn’t ring alarm bells over bubbles. But count on this: the bigger the bubble, the worse the burst.

The first corporate century, the 20th, was a period of explosive growth. Despite as many as 150 million human beings killed in warfare between 1900 and Y2K, the world population quadrupled. Energy use increased sixteen-fold. The fish catch – which peaked in the late 1980s – increased thirty-fold. The sheer amount of stuff used annually flies in flocks of zeros that defy comprehension: 275,000,000 tons of meat, 370,000,000 tons of paper product, et cetera. Incredibly, of all the earthly materials that human hands have ever transformed, fully half of that material transformation has occurred since World War II.

“It is impossible for the world economy to grow its way out of poverty and environmental degradation,” writes the resource-minded economist Herman Daly, because the economy is a “subsystem of the earth ecosystem, which is finite, non-growing and materially closed.”

And economists think the solution to our problems is more growth? We’ve been terribly misled. But more development – that’s a different proposition. “Grow” means to increase in size by adding. "Develop" means to realize potentials, to make better.

Because the world is pretty much fully tapped, growth now threatens development. In a postgrowth world, we’d measure things like community and satisfaction. We’d replace the feverish tail chase of the material with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those come from development, not from growth. Let’s not confuse the two.

During challenging ocean conditions, certain sea jellies “de-grow.” They don’t just lose fat or slim down; they actually lose cells and simplify structures. When times are good, they regrow. Because they are adding new cells and regrowing structures (not just replumping), they are actually rejuvenated – younger than they were. On the other end of the scale, Edward Abbey long ago observed that growth for the sake of continuous growth is the strategy of cancer. Knowing what we now know, it appears that the world can’t produce enough to grow our way out of poverty. But we could certainly shrink our way out.

Carl Safina is a MacArthur fellow and host of the PBS television show Saving the Ocean. This essay originally appeared in his book The View From Lazy Point.

Who are the patrons of contemporary art today? The ARTnews 200 Top Collectors list is an obvious place to start. Near the top of the alphabetical list is Roman Abramovich, estimated by Forbes to be worth $13.4 billion.

He has admitted to paying billions in bribes for control of Russian oil and aluminum assets. Bernard Arnault, listed by Forbes as the fourth richest man in the world with $41 billion, controls the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, which, despite the debt crisis, reported a sales growth of 13 percent in the first half of 2011. Hedge fund manager John Arnold, who got his start at Enron–where he received an $8 million bonus just before it collapsed–recently gave $150,000 to an organization seeking to limit public pensions. MoMA, MoCA and LACMA trustee Eli Broad is worth $5.8 billion and was a board member and major shareholder of the now notorious AIG. Steven A. Cohen, estimated to be worth $8 billion, is the founder of SAC Capital Advisors, which is under investigation for insider trading. Guggenheim trustee Dimitris Daskalopoulos, who is also chairman of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises, recently called for a “modern private initiative” to save the failing Greek economy from a “bloated and parasitic” “patronage-ridden state.” Another Guggenheim trustee, David Ganek, recently shut down his $4 billion Level Global hedge fund after an FBI raid.

$399.95

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Soccer Ball, 2003
TAKASHI MURAKAMI

Noam Gottesman and former partner Pierre Lagrange (also on the ARTnews list) earned £400 million each on the sale of their hedge fund GLG in 2007, making them “among the world’s biggest winners from the credit crunch,” according to the Sunday Times. Hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin supported Obama in 2008 but recently gave $500,000 to a political action committee created by former Bush adviser Karl Rove and was also seen at a meeting of the right-wing-populist Koch Network. Andrew Hill’s $100 million in compensation in 2009 led Citigroup to sell its Philbro division, where he was the top trader, after pressures from regulators to curtail his pay on the heels of Citigroup’s receipt of $45 billion in US federal bailout funds (he subsequently moved the company offshore). Damien Hirst, estimated by the Sunday Times to be worth £215 million, is one of a handful of artists who have now made rich-lists alongside their patrons. Peter Kraus collected $25 million for just three months’ work when his exit package was triggered by Merrill Lynch’s sale to Bank of America with the help of US federal funds. Henry Kravis’s income in 2007 was reported to be $1.3 million a day. His wife, economist Marie-Josée Kravis, who is MoMA’s president and a fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, recently defended “Anglo-Saxon capitalism” against “Europe’s ‘social capitalist politics’” in Forbes.com. Daniel S. Loeb, a MoCA trustee and founder of the $7.8 billion hedge fund Third Point, sent a letter to investors attacking Obama for “insisting that the only solution to the nation’s problems … lies in the redistribution of wealth.” Dimitri Mavrommatis, the “Swiss-based” Greek asset manager, paid £18 million for a Picasso at Christie’s on June 21, 2011, while Greeks were rioting against austerity measures. And of course, there is Charles Saatchi, who helped elect Margaret Thatcher. The firm of MoMA chairman Jerry Speyer defaulted on a major real estate investment in 2010, losing $500 million for the California State Pension Fund and up to $2 billion in debt secured by US federal agencies. Reinhold Würth, worth $5.7 billion, has been fined for tax evasion in Germany and compared taxation to torture. He recently acquired Virgin of Mercy by Hans Holbein the Younger, paying the highest price ever for an artwork in Germany and outbidding the Städelsche Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt/Main, where the painting had been on display since 2003.

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Untitled, 1990
ROBERT GOBER

In the midst of an economic crisis, the art world is experiencing an ongoing market boom which has been widely linked to the rise of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) and Ultra-HNWIs (people worth over $1 million or $30 million respectively), particularly from the financial industry. A recent report by Art+Auction even celebrated indicators that these groups were rebounding from their 2008 dip to precrisis wealth. Until recently, however, there has been very little discussion of the obvious link between the art world’s global expansion and rising income disparity. A quick look the Gini index, a measure of income inequality, shows that the countries with the most significant art booms of the past two decades have also experienced the steepest rise in inequality: the United States, Britain, China and India. Further, recent economic research has established a direct connection between skyrocketing art prices and income inequality, showing that “a one percentage point increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1% triggers an increase in art prices of about 14 percent.” It is now painfully obvious that what has been extraordinarily good for the art world over the past decades has been disastrous for the rest of the world.

In the United States it is difficult to imagine any arts organization or practice that can escape the economic structures and policies that have produced this inequality. The private nonprofit model–which almost all US museums as well as alternative art organizations exist within–is dependent on wealthy donors and has its origins in the same ideology that led to the current global economic crisis: that private initiatives are better suited to fulfill social needs than the public sector and that wealth is best administered by the wealthy. Even outside of institutions, artists engaged in community-based and social practices that aim to provide public benefit in a time of austerity simply may be enacting what George H. W. Bush called for when he envisioned volunteers and community organizations spreading like “a thousand points of lights’ in the wake of his rollback in public spending.

Progressive artists, critics and curators face an existential crisis: how can we continue to justify our involvement in this art economy? At minimum, if our only choice is to participate or to abandon the art field entirely, we can stop rationalizing that participation in the name of critical or political art practices or–adding insult to injury–social justice. Any claim that we represent a progressive social force while our activities are directly subsidized by, and benefit from, the engines of inequality can only contribute to the justification of that inequality. The only true “alternative” today is to recognize our participation in this economy and confront it in an open, direct and immediate way in all of our institutions, including museums and galleries and publications. Despite the radical political rhetoric that abounds in the art world, censorship and self-censorship reign when it comes to confronting our economic conditions, except in marginalized (often self-marginalized) arenas where there is nothing to lose–and little to gain–in speaking truth to power.

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The most expensive photograph in the world
Larmes tears, 1932
MAN RAY

Indeed the duplicity of progressive claims in art may contribute to the suspicion that progressive politics is just a ruse of educated elites to preserve their privilege. In our case, this may be true. Increasingly it seems that politics in the art world is largely a politics of envy and guilt, or of self-interest generalized in the name of a narrowly conceived and privileged form of autonomy, and that artistic “critique” most often serves not to reveal but to distance these economic conditions and our investment in them. As such, it is a politics that functions to defend against contradictions that might otherwise make our continued participation in the art field, and access to its considerable rewards–which have ensconced many of us comfortably among the 10 percent, if not the 1 percent or even the 0.1 percent–unbearable.

A broad-based shift in art discourse may help precipitate a long overdue splitting off of the market-dominated subfield of galleries, auction houses, and art fairs. If a turn away from the art market means that public museums contract and ultra-wealthy collectors create their own privately controlled institutions, so be it. Let these private institutions be the treasure vaults, theme-park spectacles and economic freak shows that many already are. Let the market-dominated art world become the luxury goods business it already basically is, with what circulates there having as little to do with true art as yachts, jets, and watches. It is time we began evaluating whether artworks fulfill, or fail to fulfill, political or critical claims at the level of their social and economic conditions. We must insist that what art works are economically determines what they mean socially and also artistically.

If we, as curators, critics, art historians and artists, withdraw our cultural capital from these markets, we have the potential to create a new art field where radical forms of autonomy can develop: not as secessionist “alternatives’ that exist only in the grandiose enactments and magical thinking of artists and theorists, but as fully institutionalized structures, which, with the “properly social magic of institutions,’ will be able to produce, reproduce and reward noncommercial values.

Andrea Fraser is an artist and professor in the art department at the University of California–Los Angeles. This is a revised version of an essay originally published in Texte zur Kunst, Issue no. 83, September 2011.

The philosophical and spiritual problems of our age are so great that what our time calls for are new manifestos of knowledge and being. We need a kind of spiritual change that exceeds the political. Unfortunately most of us in the Westernized world spend more time trying to escape from ourselves (sex, shopping, addiction, fashion, entertainment, success), than we ever spend reflecting on the state of our existence, our heart or our soul. We are people driven by our desires: desires which destroy our hearts and any ability to have a connection to the greater spiritual realities that are all around us. As the Qur’an says, “God does not change the condition of a people, until they change their own condition.”

In the classic decolonial manifesto, Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire described Western life as a poison infecting the planet. Césaire wrote that to understand our existence, “First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.” For Césaire, “a gangrene has set in … a center of infection has begun to spread …” The poison Cesaire warned of is a philosophical and spiritual poison that infects each of us today.

In the American Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr’s final book, The World We Used to Live In, he writes: “The secularity of the society in which we live must share considerable blame in the erosion of spiritual powers of all traditions, since our society has become a parody of social interaction lacking even an aspect of civility. Believing in nothing, we have preempted the role of the higher spiritual forces by acknowledging no greater good than what we can feel and touch.” The de-sacralization of the self and our lifeworlds is leaving our spiritual hearts dead.

To save ourselves, to avert catastrophe, we need to make what Walter Mignolo calls an “epistemic geopolitical move.” That demands a form of critique that is deeply engaged in what is known in Arabic as muhasabah, or self-examination, on three levels: examination of the self and one’s spiritual state; an examination of the dominant hierarchies that we all interact with such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and religious domination; and finally an examination of one’s local knowledge and the place from which critique is emanating. In recentering on the sacred in this process of self-examination, we can learn from Chicana feminists and the emerging idea of “decolonial love.”

Laura Pérez, UC Berkeley Professor of Ethnic Studies, connects “decolonial love” to the Mayan principle of In’Laketch: tu eres mi otro yo (you are my other me). Pérez explains that “not only are we interwoven, we are one. I am you and you are me. To harm another is thus to literally harm one’s own being. This is a basic spiritual law in numerous traditions.” This shift in the geopolitics of knowledge involves a turn away from Descartes and Western modernity’s centering of human consciousness in the mind, to a recentering of consciousness in the spiritual heart (qalb). This idea of a heart centered knowledge is central to many spiritual traditions including Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, and is echoed by Subcommandate Marcos and the Zapatista adage to center politics below and to the left, where the heart is in Aztec and Mayan cosmology.

Similar to Gloria Anzaldua’s concept La Facultad, a form of inner knowledge, is the Islamic concept of Al Basira, the eye of the heart, which is the center of spiritual perception if properly developed. As the great Mystic philosopher Al-Ghazali put it in his masterwork of the inner sciences of Islam, Ihya’ ulum al-din, “Creation refers to the external, and character to the internal, form. Now, the human is composed of a body which perceives with ocular vision (basar) and a spirit (ruh) and a soul (nafs) which perceive with inner sight (basira). Each of these things has an aspect and a form which is either ugly or beautiful. Furthermore, the soul which perceives with inner sight (basira) is of greater worth than the body which sees with ocular vision.” In seeing with the eye of our heart we can begin to differentiate between form and meaning, as the outward forms of things are not always their internal and spiritual reality.

The vision of our hearts has become blinded by the poison of base materialism. In the verse poetry of the early female Sufi saint, Rabi’a al-Adawiyya: “O children of Nothing! Truth can’t come in through your eyes, Nor can speech go out through your mouth to find [God], Hearing leads the speaker down the road to anxiety, And if you follow your hands and feet you will arrive at confusion. The real work is in the Heart: Wake up your Heart! Because when the Heart is completely awake, Then it needs no Friend.”

To break from the chains of modernity, we must learn both from philosophers of decoloniality and the spiritual sciences. Ultimately, we must walk down the path of love, to see each other in the divine light we were born into. As the great mystic philosopher Ibn Arabi said, “I believe in the religion of love, whatever direction its caravans may take, for love is my religion and my faith.”

Dustin Craun is a writer, educator and community organizer who lives in Berkeley, California. This essay is excerpted from his forthcoming book titled Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World.

What if society can no longer resist the destructive effects of unbounded capitalism? What if society can no longer resist the devastating power of financial accumulation?

We have to disentangle autonomy from resistance. And if we want to do that, we have to disentangle desire from energy. The prevailing focus of modern capitalism has been energy: the ability to produce, to compete, to dominate. A sort of energolatria, a cult of energy, has dominated the cultural sense of the West from Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing availability of energy has been its dogma. Now we know that energy isn’t boundless. In the social psyche of the West, energy is fading. I think we should reframe the concept and practice of autonomy from this point of view. The social body is unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild assertiveness of capital because the pursuit of rights can never be dissociated from the exercise of force.

When workers were strong in the 1960s and 1970s, they did not restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful demonstrations of their will. They acted in solidarity, refusing to work, redistributing wealth, sharing things, services, and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do not merely ask or demonstrate, they do not simply declare their wish: they enact it. They make things happen; they invest, disinvest, displace; they destroy and they build. Only force makes autonomy possible in the relation between capital and society. But what is force? What is force nowadays?

The identification of desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and 1980s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is falling, but desire has to be saved. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafias?

Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power. And actually suicide has become decisive in contemporary history. The dark side of the multitude meets here the loneliness of death. Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of resentment. Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends that capitalism has inscribed in the history of society does not mean renouncing it. On the contrary, we have today a new cultural task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation, of desertion from the scene of the economy, of nonparticipation in the fake show of politics. The crucial focus of social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force.

When we think of the ecological catastrophe, of geopolitical threats, of economic collapse provoked by the financial politics of neoliberalism, it’s hard to dispel the feeling that irreversible trends are already at work within the world machine. Political will seems paralyzed in the face of the economic power of the criminal class.

The age of modem social civilization seems on the brink of dissolution, and it’s hard to imagine how society will be able to react. Modern civilization was based on the convergence and integration of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the political regulation of social conflict. The regulator state, the heir of the Enlightenment and socialism, has been the guarantor of human rights and the negotiator of social equilibrium. When, at the end of a ferocious class struggle between labor and capital – and within the capitalist class itself – the financial class has seized power by destroying legal regulation and transforming social composition, the entire edifice of modern civilization has begun to crumble.

I anticipate that scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we should not expect much from them. They’ll be unable to touch the real centers of power because of the militarization of metropolitan space, and they will not be able to gain much in terms of material wealth or political power. Just as the long wave of counterglobalization’s moral protests could not destroy neoliberal power, so the insurrections will not find a solution, not unless a new consciousness and sensibility surfaces and spreads, changing everyday life and creating Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones rooted in the culture and consciousness of the global network.

The proliferation of singularities (the withdrawal and building of Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones) will be a peaceful process, but the conformist majority will react violently, and this is already happening. The conformist majority is frightened by the fleeing away of intelligent energy and simultaneously is attacking the expression of intelligent activity. The situation can be described as a fight between the mass ignorance produced by media totalitarianism and the shared intelligence of the general intellect.

We cannot predict what the outcome of this process will be. Our task is to extend and protect the field of autonomy and to avoid as much as possible any violent contact with the field of aggressive mass ignorance. This strategy of nonconfrontational withdrawal will not always succeed. Sometimes confrontation will be made inevitable by racism and fascism. It’s impossible to predict what should be done in the case of unwanted conflict. A nonviolent response is obviously the best choice, but it will not always be possible. The identification of well-being with private property is so deeply rooted that a barbarization of the human environment cannot be completely ruled out. But the task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance, experimenting with autonomous forms of production using high-tech low-energy methods – while avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population.

Politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming years. People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicky because they are unable to deal with the post-growth economy, and because they will miss their dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be attending to those people and taking care of their insanity, showing them the way to a happy adaptation. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion. The development of autonomy is not totalizing or intended to destroy and abolish the past. Like psychoanalytic therapy it should be considered an unending process.

Franco Bifo Berardi is a revolutionary Italian philosopher and activist. This essay originally appeared in his newly translated book, After the Future.