Post Cool

Carving up the new frontier of style.

by
Ted Gioia

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Post Cool

Cool’s original power had derived from its formative role in forging a modern personality type, a style of engagement – indirect, ironic, flexible, infused with humor, sometimes flippant – that was adopted with success by a growing percentage of the population.

But the relentless mass marketing of cool has tainted this style of behavior and made it seem inauthentic or contrived to a growing number of individuals. It is almost inconceivable that anything could happen, at this late stage, that would restore to cool the freshness and vitality it possessed in the fifties and sixties.

Of course, the old-school cool ethos will not disappear completely. Even when some color or fabric is passé, it still finds its way into our wardrobe. But cool now lacks conviction and energy. Above all, its economic force is diminishing. And this, more than anything, will accelerate its decline. One busy cash register is worth more than a thousand pundits. The arbiters of taste – at record labels, in films and TV, in consumer marketing, in media – will respond to these economic shifts rather than lead them. But follow they must, or disappear from the scene. Their successors will not make the same mistakes. Over time, this will transform even the last institutional bastions of cool into promoters of the postcool worldview.

One of the most interesting spectacles of postcool society will involve the dominant forces of the old paradigm scrambling to co-opt the new one. Packaged and slick and phony will attempt to become down-home and natural and authentic. We can see this playing out in many arenas – from music to clothing, politics to daily news. But let us take one sector of our economy and show how this works.

In consumer food products the postcool celebration of the natural and authentic is spelled out in the recent dramatic growth in the sale of organic fruits and vegetables, vitamin supplements, antibiotic-and-hormone-free beef, and other products that previously existed only on the fringes of the food industry. Of course this trend spells trouble for packaged-food multinationals, who are the real losers here. How do they respond? In the postcool society, representatives of the old paradigm imitate the new one. So we have the Naked Juice company, with its line of 100 percent natural, unsweetened beverages … but it’s owned by Pepsi.

The registered slogan of this company is “Nothing to Hide” – but one thing is clearly hidden in its marketing campaigns: its connection with PepsiCo Inc. Visit the Naked Juice website, and see if you can find the name of the parent company anywhere. Goodluck! Then again, Naked Juice needs to deal with its competitor Odwalla, a leader in all-natural juices … owned by Coca-Cola.

Next stop on your itinerary, please visit the website for Dagoba, a company committed to the highest quality organic chocolate, and see if you can find any mention of parent company Hershey. But Mars Inc., maker of M&M’s and Snickers, has gone even further, acquiring Seeds of Change, which sells more than six hundred types of 100 percent organically grown seeds. And we have the Back to Nature brand of cereal and granola … but it is now owned by Kraft foods, makers of Cheez Whiz and Velveeta. Heinz, through its minority position in Hain Celestial, has an equity share in dozens of natural brands. I could cite countless other examples. In fact, almost every major purveyor of packaged, processed food loaded with preservatives and various chemicals is trying to position itself as a champion of healthy, natural eating.

But the fascinating angle here is how well hidden these relationships are. In the old days, Hershey would make sure everyone knew they were involved when they sold chocolate. After all, what could be a better endorsement for confections than the Hershey brand name? Or Coca-Cola’s for beverages? Or Pepsi’s? These companies have invested billions of dollars in building and enhancing the value of their brand names. Pepsi alone has purchased celebrity endorsements at untold cost from Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, P!nk, Christina Aguilera, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, David Beckham, David Bowie, Shakira, Jackie Chan, Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, Tina Turner, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce Knowles, Mary J. Blige, the Spice Girls, Ray Charles, and many, many others. Yet now this company needs to conceal its involvement in the fastest-growing segments of the beverage market? What gives? We see the same old shift in field after field – music, media, consumer products, retailing, politics, fashion, academia, the internet, almost everywhere you look. Organizations that have spent decades investing in their image, their brand, their logo, now admit that it’s best to junk all that and start with a clean sheet of paper.

This paradox will become part of the day-to-day life in postcool society. Even if postcool celebrates the real and authentic, the simple and down to earth, it doesn’t mean that these attributes will actually dominate public life. Instead we will find a grand charade of phony pretending to be authentic, of contrived acting as though it is real, the intricately planned putting on the mask of the simple and unaffected. In many instances, postcool will just be the same folks who brought you cool, hiding behind a mask.

But this faux postcool will increasingly be forced to compete with the real thing. Grassroots movements will be built around the core postcool values of simplicity, authenticity, naturalness and earnestness. These will flourish outside the market place, in public and private discourse, shaping attitudes and interpersonal relations. True, they will have an economic impact, but their significance will not be reducible to dollars and cents. Postcool will inhabit people’s psyches long before it takes control of their wallets.

This core distinction will be our chief guide in distinguishing the phony corporate maneuverings from the real grassroots changes that will drive postcool society. The former will always inhabit a product or service. And if the cool was a friend to business, seeing its own destiny in accessories and gadgets, the postcool will have a more ambivalent relationship with the prevailing economic interests. The new ethos does not require expensive new accessories and often will take positive delight in downscaling lifestyles and paring back on unneeded extras.

Simplicity, authenticity, naturalness and earnestness … I mentioned these as though they were parts of a product positioning exercise. But in fact they will be in the foundations of the postcool personality type. Just as the cool was at its best when internalized as a way people acted and not just trumpeted as a marketing message, so will postcool have its greatest impact as a way people instinctively deal with situations and circumstances. In a book such as this, the examples gathered inevitably come from things that can be seen, heard, touched, measured – in short, what we call empirical evidence. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that these are the primary signs of the new postcool era. Many of the most salient changes will be those that we can grasp only indirectly and will not be measurable with any exactitude by statisticians and pollsters.

For the same reason, postcool will be less fickle and changeable than cool. Postcool is not just another style, another trend. It is the antithesis of style, of trendiness. And because it reflects an emerging personality type and not a passing fashion, postcool will probably be around for quite a while. Many merchants of cool will be tempted to dismiss or misinterpret postcool, seeing its key elements as a new, marketable lifestyle, as just one more way of being cool. We can already see many examples of this shortsighted behavior. But ultimately the attempt to treat postcool as just another variant on cool will fail.

For 50 years, the prevailing tone has been focused outward. Cool was in the eyes of the beholder, and those who lived by its principles needed constantly to be attuned to what others were thinking and doing. As trends and fashions and languages changed, the cool cats had to changes as well … or risk being left behind. And even though good guys are expected to finish last, according to the adage, cool cats are not allowed to bring up the rear. The cool was a demanding deity, requiring its adherents to keep up with the times, to maintain a retinue of admirers. But postcool, by nature inward focused and self-directed, will not be so easily budged. From now on, the game will be played by different rules.

Postcool will be more intense than cool. Higher strung. More determined and less easily deflected and distracted. For this reason, many parties will strive to win the allegiance of this rapidly growing constituency. Political candidates will build their campaigns to appeal to the new psyche. Marketers will position products to maximize their perceived value to this demographic. Social movements and churches and media will all try to attract them. Who wouldn’t want these assertive, strong-willed folks in their camp? But the challenges involved in securing their support should not be minimized. The postcool person is not a belonger, not a follower. As Arnold Mitchell discovered when he first identified this group in the seventies – when it was just a tiny subset of the American public, maybe one or two percent by his measure – these individuals are the hardest to market to … because by their nature they are suspicious of marketing and resistant to its methods.

As a result, the postcool society will be full of surprises. The scene will be marked by unexpected grassroots activities that come to the fore despite the best-laid plans of politicians and corporate execs. Exciting? Perhaps. Dangerous and volatile? Certainly at times.

Of course, even postcool may sow the seeds of its own eventual decline. A new personality type lasts longer than a passing fashion, but even deep-seated character patterns and emotional styles can outlive their usefulness. Just as the cool personality became less effective over time, postcool could find itself replaced by some yet-to-be defined paradigm. We can already see postcool’s vulnerability in its unstable reliance on bluntness and aggression, its susceptibility to anger and confrontation. When so much irritability and adversarial posturing permeate our national and local lives, won’t this breed another reaction in time, a new cooling down of the temperature and the emergence of consensus building and a softer, gentler emotional style in public and private life?

But old-school cool will not come back. The cool is dead … at least as we knew it back in the second half of the 20th century. If aspects of it still hold center stage from time to time, they will do so because they have adapted to the new state of affairs. As with all passing movements, the age of cool will inspire nostalgia and retain a few adherents, those folks who always look back dreamily at the past, lamenting the loss of the good ol’ days. But the future belongs to a different personality type and hard-nosed assertiveness. It’s like everything Mom and Dad told you is finally coming true … only now you will be hearing it from your own children.

Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and contemporary culture. He is the author of eight books, including The History of Jazz, Delta Blues and The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

Simon Critchley: What Is Normal?

The surprising power of the political imagination.

by
Simon Critchley

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Nick Whalen

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

We are living through a dramatic and ever-widening separation between normal state politics and power. Many citizens still believe that state politics has power. They believe that governments, elected through a parliamentary system, represent the interests of those who elect them and that governments have the power to create effective, progressive change. But they don’t and they can’t.

We do not live in democracies. We inhabit plutocracies: government by the rich. The corporate elites have overwhelming economic power with no political accountability. In the past decades, with the complicity and connivance of the political class, the Western world has become a kind of college of corporations linked together by money and serving only the interests of their business leaders and shareholders.

This situation has led to the disgusting and ever-growing gulf that separates the superrich from the rest of us. State politics in the West in the past four decades has become a machine for the creation of gross inequality whose patina is an ideology of ever-more vapid narcissism. As the Eurozone crisis eloquently shows, state politics in the West simply exists to serve the interests of capital in the form of international finance, which exerts a human cost that Marx could never have imagined in his wildest dreams. No matter how much people suffer and protest in the street, it is said, we must not upset the bankers. Who knows, our credit rating might drop.

It is time to take politics back from the political class through confrontation with the power of finance capital. What is so inspiring about the various social movements that we all too glibly call the Arab Spring, is their courageous determination to reclaim autonomy and political self-determination. The demands of the protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere are actually very classical: they refuse to live in authoritarian dictatorships propped up to serve the interests of Western capital, corporations and corrupt local elites. They want to reclaim ownership of the means of production, for example through the nationalization of major state industries.

The various movements in North Africa and the Middle East – and one is simply full of admiration for their individual and collective courage and peaceful persistence – aim at one thing: autonomy. They demand collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks and plays. Let’s be clear: it is not just democracy that is being demanded all across the Arab world; it is socialism. And the tactics that have been developed to bring it about are anarchist.

There is a deeply patronizing view of these protests – common among Western politicians and their intellectual epigones – namely that they want what we have: the liberal democracy and neoliberal economics of our fine regimes. On the contrary, the movements in North Africa and the Middle East should be held up as a shining example for European and North American societies of what suddenly seems not only possible, but increasingly probable: that another way of conceiving and practicing social relations is not just possible, it is practicable.

Politicians in the West should be scared, very scared. The clock is running down. What we see emerging across our societies with increasing boldness, coherence and clarity are movements that refuse the separation of politics and power and who want to take power back through the invention of new forms of political activism.

It is in this spirit that I’d like to celebrate and congratulate the protesters in the Wall Street occupations and their followers all around the world.

We should not predict the future, but I think we are entering into a period of increasingly massive social dislocations and disorder which harbors within it countless risks, dialectical inversions, defeats, dangers, false dawns and fake defeats. But I think we are all coming to the powerful and simple realization that human beings acting peacefully together in concert can do anything – and nothing can stop them.

Something is happening. Something is shifting in the relations between politics and power. We don’t know where it will lead, but the four-decade ideological consensus that has simply allowed the creation of grotesque inequality has broken down, and anything and everything is suddenly possible. What we require now is solidarity, persistence and the endlessly surprising power of the political imagination.

Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He has authored over a dozen books including the celebrated Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance in which he argues for an ethically committed political anarchism.

La ecologia de la mente

El nacimiento de un movimiento.

by
Kalle Lasn and Micah White

From Adbusters #90: Whole Brain Catalog


Jörg Klaus

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Durante muchas generaciones los humanos han crecido en la naturaleza. Nuestros maestros eran la flora y la fauna y nuestros libros de texto eran las tormentas y el cielo nocturno. A nuestras mentes les gustaba los bosques, los oasis y los deltas alrededor de los cuales nuestras culturas germinaban: caóticas, salvajes y fecundas.

Pero en las ultimas generaciones, hemos abandonado el mundo natural, inmersos en nuestras mismas realidades virtuales. Hoy, el medio ambiente sintético rival de la naturaleza conduce con fuerza nuestras vidas, y el medio ambiente mental ha llegado a ser el terreno donde nuestro destino como humanos está por decidir. Por emigrar de la naturaleza tenemos que hacer algo que nos devuelva a nuestro lugar-tenemos fundamentemente alterado el contexto en el cual viven nuestras vidas.

A lo largo de esta transición a una realidad psicológica diferente, hemos visto como estamos sufriendo enfermedades mentales. Globalmente, humanamente es ahora cuando nos movemos en una epidemia de ansiedad incontrolable, desordenes de la conducta y depresión. Las naciones unidas predicen que la enfermedad mental será mayor que la dolencia de corazón para el 2020.

Porqué está esto pasando? Porqué estamos mentalmente decayendo?

Si preguntas por el incremento general de psicopatologias en el ser humano a los psicologos ellos te harán una lista de muchas cosas; el derribo de la comunidad, la inseguridad de los roles sociales, el estress de la modenidad y la globalizacion y quizá también la química que hay en el aire , el agua y la comida que afecta en nuestro cerebro sin saberlo. Otras culpas que anidan en nuestros cerebros son la agresividad, los mensajes eróticos que nos absorben cada día comercialmente. Y aún otras cosas como el uso continuo de Internet que nos crea adicción y depresión y la revolución digital que quizá se esta reescribiendo en nuestras mentes. Nadie lo sabe seguramente.

Pero esto es adivinar.

Lo que seguimos es precisamente comenzar con una introducción sobre los contaminantes mentales, sobre los virus de información y los shocks sicológicos que nos roban cada día. Unas supervivencia de nuestra “ecologia de la mente”

RUIDO

Durante muchas generaciones el ruido ambiental era la lluvia y el viento y el paso de la gente. Ahora la banda sonora es total espectral, irreconocible. Desde el fuerte ruido en las máximas horas de tráfico, al constante sonido del frigorífico y el zumbido de tu monitor, varios tipos de ruidos(azul, blanco, rosa, negro) son continuamente repetidos en tu cerebro. Y el volumen llega a ser una locura. Dos, quizá tres generaciones han llegado ya a tener una adicción a la estimulación .No podemos trabajar sin la música de fondo. No podemos correr sin auriculares. No podemos dormir sin un iphone metido en los oidos. La esencia de nuestra era postmodernista llega a encontrarse en este tipo incesante de zumbidos en el cerebro. Intentando hacer sensible al mundo sobre el alboroto libre en el que están viviendo.- tu lo conseguirás, pero a un nivel disminuido de atención y bienestar

Tranquilo te sentirás extraño, pero es la tranquilidad lo que necesitas. Un silencio que llega a ser la salud mental, que llega a limpiar el aire, el agua y sea la salud de tu cuerpo. La tranquilidad del medio ambiente es la que llegará a limpiar lo mental y así llegues a encontrar un humor calmado y liberarte de la depresión

INFOTOXICOS E INFOVIRUS

Desde el momento en el que el despertador suena por la mañana a primera hora de TV, publicidades de contaminación comercial vuelan en tu cerebro en un radio de 3000 mensajes de marketing por dia.Cada día, son estimados unos 12 billlones de visualizaciones, más de tres millones de radios comerciales, más de 200000 televisiones comerciales y un sinfin de números de línea más y spam de emails son introducidos dentro de la mente colectiva. Las corporaciones advierten que es el único experimento mas largo psicológico que llevar fuera de la carrera humana. Aun el impacto en nosotros permanece no estudiado y largamente desconocido.

LA EROSION EMPATICA

La primera vez que vimos a un niño hambriento en la televisión nos quedamos horrorizados. Quizá hasta enviamos monedas. Pero como esas imágenes llegaron a sernos familiares, nuestra compasión diminuyó. Eventualmente esas imágenes empiezan a fastidiarnos, a molestarnos. Y ahora no sentimos nada cuando vemos a otros niños hambrientos.

La agencia del norte America es testigo de media docenas de actos de violencia ( asesinatos, disparos, asaltos, persecuciones de coches, violaciones) por hora desde primera hora en television Con respecto al sexo en los medios de comunicación y al porno en Internet, Todos sabemos que nos atrapan nuestra atención y que la para desde el zapping : pucheros, labios,cancer de mama, jóvenes superfuertes. Creciendo en una violencia, eroticamente comunicacion medios cambian nuestras psiques según niveles de cimientos. Esta distorsion de nuestra sexualidad-el camino que sientes entonces alguien de repente coloca una mano en tus hombros o o te abraza o coquetea contigo-como nosotros tenemos que pensar sobre nosotros mismos y nuestro ser. Y la constante subida del comercio escrita, violencia encajada, seudo sexo que nos hace mas voyeuristas, insaciable y agresiva. Entonces, algun lugar através de las lineas, nada- no siempre violaciones, tortura, genocidicos, o Guerra pornografica-nos impacta

El comercio de los medios de comunicación son para el medio ambiente mental lo que las fábricas son para el medio ambiente psíquico una fábrica de vertederos contaminados en el agua y aire porque eso es el camino más eficiente para producir plástico o madera o acero. Una estación de televisión o pagina web contamina el medio ambiente cultural porque eso es el camino más eficiente para producir audiencia. Es pagar la corrupción. La lluvia radiactiva psíquica es justo el coste de tiro al hoyo de el show

PERDIDA DE LA INFODIVERSIDAD

La información que consumimos es cada vez más difícil de allanar y homogeneizar. Diseñada para alcanzar a millones, es a menudo por la carencia de un matiz, complexión y contexto. Leyendo las mismas cosas en Wikipedia y viendo el mismo video vírico en youtube, nuestra experiencia es allanar la cultura.

La homogeneización cultural tiene graves consecuencias en las culturas, estas tienen lo mismo, el mismo peinado, las mismas frases de modas, las mismas travesuras de héroe y los mismos video clips que difunden hasta el cansancio alrededor del mundo. En todos estos sistemas, la homogenización es veneno. La falta de diversidad pesa a la ineficiencia y al fracaso. La infodiversidad es como critica para la supervivencia a largo plazo y para la biodiversidad. Las dos son cimiento para al existencia humana.

LA FRAGMENTACION DE TU PSIQUE (SINDROME CEREBRAL NERVIOSO)

Al principio toda la informacion era maravillosa. Sentias como si la adiccion de alto el conocimiento era solo un hipereslabon, y nosotros saltamos felizmente bajo el infotrail, enviando emails a nuestros amigos, haciendonos adictos a los marcadores de paginas y comprando de sitio a sitio retrasandonos en la noche. Pero como el inicial brillo se iba apagando, fuimos dejándonos en el estado del aturdimiento digital; incapacidad de concentración, sentir flojera, ansiedad y fatiga.

Para muchos de nosotros, lo que fue una excitante carrera se fue convirtiendo en una compulsión diaria. Nuestos smart phones, netbooks y los ordenadores ahora nos mantienen constantemente en linea. Mientras estamos en el supermercado nos sirve de de entretenimiento estar en linea, mientras leemos un libro o estamos esperando turno en un concierto. Nos mantenemos junto a nuestros amigos recibiendo quick de actualizacion de Twitter. Nos mantenemos al final del riachuelo de la conectividad. Y las futuras generaciones quizá esten más enganchas. Un centro de investigación de estudios encontró que los jóvenes americanos envian 50 o mas mensajes de texto al dia y de uno a 3 envian mas de 100 al dia. Otro estudio de la fundacion de la familia Kaiser reporta que los niños americanos entre edades de 8 a 18 años están mas de 7 horas y medio al dia usando algun tema electronico.

Nuestras vidas conectadas quiza ahora son imparables nuestra habilidad para buscar un sostenido continuo de la linea de pensamiento, es pensar profundamente sobre algunas cosas y quiza siempre buscar “la altura de extasis y la pofundidad de la tragedia” en nuestra vida creativa. Quizá debamos estar sufriendo la infoenfermedad de la que nicholas carr fue diagnosticado por el mismo “sobre el pasado de pocos años”el escribó.

“fui teniendo un incomodo sentido de algo , o alguien, era siendo un cerebro de hojalara, reparando los circuitos neuronales, reprogramando la memoria,… lo que la misma red esta siendo esta astillando mi capacidad de concentración y la contemplaxion. Mu mente ahora esta espera llevar el camino de la información a las redes distribuyendola; en un movimiento radiro de tormenta de particular. Una vez más fui un submarinista en el mar de las palabras.Ahora cierro a través de la superciede un tipo de avion

CORRIENDO FUERA DE LA CULTURA

En la carrera por al expansión economica estamos empobreciendo las reservas de petróleo, desforestando los bosques antiguos y hasta secando los surtidores de agua. Estamos empobreciendo la “gran vieja cultura” – secando la historia, mitologia, musica, arte y las ideas que greneraciones anteriores nos dejaron de herencia. Todos nuestro pasado esta siendo escogido aquí, reciclado, regularizado y reutilizado

Jaron Lanier, el padre de la realidad virtual, es quizá el más respetado y sobresaliente tecnologista al identificar unos problemas deficientes de nuestra salud cultural. En Tu no eres un artículo:un manifiesto, Lanier escribe que nuestra cultura esta llegando a ser una vuelta nostálgica donde la autentica “primera orden expresión” es picada y mascada en un pieza derivativa de “segunda orden de expresión” y aunque lanieres timidamente desde la proposición de un método infalible para distinguirlo entre los dos, el sugiere que se distinga que la primera orden de expresión es la que algo contribuye” genuinamente ahora el mundo ” donde las palabras se reciclan, repiten y falla la innovación.

El resultado es una sociedad que trata nuestra herencia cultural como un recurso de explotación. .En vez de producir nuevas palabras de arte genuino que reponga nuestro medio, nosotros celebramos al amateur de quien hace mucho pero no contribuye en nada de valor a la conversación cultural. Esta situación llega a ser especialmente alarmante en cuanto consideramos la finita cantidad de nutrientes en nuestra tierra., donde la finita cantidad de creatividad es el pasado que puede ceder. El gran arte es raro, y solo quiza podemos desatar después el poder original de que una creación realmente artistica está perdida. Y sin la producción de la autentica cultura, nuestra salud mental es un peligro que llega a ser una limpieza corte parámo, sobre la agricultura y agotado.

En palabras de lanier “nuestra cara a esta situación es efectivamente la de personas que están comiendo la reservas de semillas”

EL MOVIMIENTO MEDIO AMBIENTAL DE LA MENTE

Estamos al borde de una catastrophe sinergica. Financialmente ecologicamente y se avecina un colapso etico en el horizonte a un ritmo de enfermar continuamente.El mundo está literalmente demente.

Pero como muchas personas dan señal de su ansiedad. Disordenes de humor y depresiones vuelven al toxico de nuestro mundo mental, los primeros murmullos de inserrecion pueden apenas oirse. Desde . From la deformante cartelera a separarse para intentar frenar a las provocaciones revolucionarias en los estados caidos, somos testigos del origen del remordimiento que es la quinta esencia del levantamiento en el siglo 21. Lo que llegarña a ser uan vuelta a los salvaje de nuestra alma, un disturbio contra la producion de las corporaciones de im

— Kalle Lasn y Micah White

Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

As pessoas estão despertando

Portuguese translation of “The People Are Waking Up.”

by
Tim Hjersted

From Adbusters #91: The Revolution Issue


Nylon, March 2009

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Elas estão loucas para se envolver, e elas estão se envolvendo. A vontade delas de mudar o mundo está passando de um pensamento ocasional numa manhã de segunda-feira para ações concretas. Elas estão começando a ver o ativismo não como algo feito em reuniões beneficentes e protestos, mas como um meio de vida, uma escolha pessoal e espiritual. Basicamente, é a decisão de rejeitar a passagem de nossa cultura para o narcisismo. É uma visão que rejeita a filosofia do consumidor moderno de que a verdadeira felicidade vem do acúmulo material pessoal e do interesse próprio. É a percepção de que a alegria de se conectar à natureza vence a alegria de se comprar desenfreadamente.

Somos animais sociais; temos desejo de conexão e de comunidade; temos desejo de uma identidade ampla e abrangente que nos conecte com toda a humanidade – não somente com nossos amigos e família, não somente com nossa cidade, nosso país, nossa espécie – mas com cada ser vivo na Terra, seja planta, animal ou humano.

É uma nova filosofia – e talvez uma muito antiga. Ela leva ao mais profundo e significativo tipo de felicidade que alguém poderia sentir. Ela adota a felicidade de outros como a sua própria… e também partilha do sofrimento dos outros.

Você não consegue comprar esse tipo de felicidade em uma loja. Você não consegue obtê-la vencendo o último nível de um vídeo game. Ela não vem na ponta de um cachimbo ou do fundo de uma garrafa. Ela não vem de assistir esportes. Ela não vem de como você se veste ou de que tipo de carro você dirige. Ela não vem de obter um diploma na faculdade ou de um salário mais gordo. Ela vem diretamente da percepção profunda e definitiva de que não há ilhas isoladas do “eu” e do “outro”. Estamos entrelaçados em tudo. Somos o todo.

Tim Hjersted é diretor e cofundador de Films For Action.

Trad: translatorbrigades@gmail.com

Negociando o fin dos tempos

Por favor avísenme. Achéganse os playoffs.

by
Darren Fleet

From Adbusters #95: The Philosophy Issue


Camille Seaman, Stranded Iceberg, Cape Bird, Antarctica 2006

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Cada xeración ten a súa apocalipse. Pode ou non ser real, pero se algunha vez invadiuche a sensación de que nada vai evitar que a túa sociedade caia no abismo dalgún tipo de destrución, é probable que che atopes no medio dun.

Xesús de Nazaret aseguraba estar vivindo no fin dos tempos, e que o anticristo camiñaba ao seu lado. Houbo cidades medievais enteiras arrepentíndose dos seus pecados cando a peste bubónica matou un terzo da poboación europea, porque a xente estaba convencida de que chegara o xuízo final. A primeira guerra mundial, a Guerra que terminaría con todas as guerras, plantou as sementes dunha aínda peor. Durante os conflitos que se deron logo da Gran Guerra entre a Unión Soviética e Estados Unidos, o mundo estaba tomado polo terror ante o prospecto de que un bufón nun traxe puidese mandar ao mundo directo á Mega-Morte. En 2011 hai aínda máis apocalipse de onde escoller, unha cornucopia de posibilidades para o fin dos tempos: meteoritos, profecías antigas, ventos solares, calendarios Maias, magnetismo terrestre revertido, cambio climático, extinción das especies, e así. Ti escolle. Para ter certa perspectiva sobre todas estas opcións, podes preguntarche, que teñen en común o anticristo, o inverno solar, o fin da guerra, e o fin do mundo?

Que nunca pasaron.

Talvez agora estaste preguntado porqué.

Hai tantas razóns para este augafestas catastrófico como hai xeitos de cruzar o punto de non-regreso, pero talvez ningunha é tan importante como a idea de que un boleto de primeira fila para o Armagedón é a viaxe de ego máis grande que pode haber, e que, pois, aos humanos gústanos sentirnos especiais. Non hai moitas cousas que poidan substituír a importancia única que un pode sentir ao estar vivindo o fin dos tempos. Talvez por iso o fin sempre está sobre nós.

A pesar de diagnósticos que apuntan ao contrario, no século XXI os humanos poden aguantar máis que nunca antes. En realidade, a humanidade nunca afrouxou o paso desde que deixou o Gran Val do Rift e liquidou aos Neandertales. Hoxe, como os compañeiros de Cromañón, case todo o que non é humano estase morrendo. Isto é motivo para reflexionar sobre a urxencia da nosa época, talvez ata razón suficiente para considerar un mesmo argumento para a situación do século XXI. No pasado, o gran medo da humanidade era a morte da humanidade. Agora, con todo, é a morte pola humanidade — unha morte lenta cada vez que alguén prende a calefacción, cada vez que lle pon un cueiro de usar e tirar a un neno, cada vez que alguén lle pon carburante ao seu coche, cada vez que alguén vai a un concerto. Talvez toda esa mitoloxía grega de matricidio e parricidio é profética no canto de alegórica. Talvez o fin só está nas nosas cabezas.

Detrás do vapor do meu café quente (orgánico, crecido na sombra, de intercambio ético, eco-amigable, que protexe aos paxaros, que axuda ás comunidades que o cultivan, de salario xusto, producido en cooperativa, en igualdade de xénero, prol-sindicato) podo ver o novo complexo residencial Verde. Pregúntome, cal debería ser a miña actitude cara a isto? Máis xente, buscando usar menos recursos, intentando, paradoxalmente, consumir ata saír do Ciclo. Cada torre está marcada cun slogan como Val da Natureza, Cañada Primavera, Vista Alpina, Vida en Comunidade, Campo na Cidade. As miñas rúas teñen ata vertedoiros que din “Mantén bonito Vancouver”. A intención non é irónica.

Paseime semanas buscando algo inspirador que dicir sobre o ecocidio, pero terminei nun sitio de estatísticas de hockey, interiorizando a historia dun equipo débil canadense que intenta chegar aos playoffs. Os resultados destes últimos polo menos daban a impresión de estar facendo algo.

Cando BP logra beneficios en menos dun ano, despois do máis grande desastre ambiental na historia de EU –e non hai ninguén no cárcere– dáste conta de que o marco legal vixente respecto ao medio ambiente non está funcionando. Cando os sistemas tradicionais de propiedade de terras –os últimos vestixios de Comunidade– están sendo erosionados en favor da privatización e a utilidade, o paradigma vixente está errado.

É posible que eventualmente a humanidade poña o ecocidio e o xenocidio no mesmo nivel? É posible que o paradigma cambie e eu diga “esta terra é parte de min”? Recentemente, o Ecuador recoñeceu dereitos de Lei Salvaxe* na súa constitución, leis que din que un arroio ten o dereito de fluír.

Leis que poderían rehabilitar o concepto de simbiose, limpándoo de asociacións co parasitismo — se é que “parasitismo” é unha palabra. Dos dereitos vén a imposición, e da imposición vén a criminalidade. Polo menos a grandes liñas. O que Ecuador fixo ao recoñecer os dereitos da Pachamama, a nai terra, pode ser ou o principio dun novo mundo que rexeita o antropomorfismo na Lei, ou unha progresión na espiral do lavado verde do vello mundo. Que Ecuador nin sequera poida protexer aos seus cidadáns de Chevron, faime inclinarme pola primeira.

Pero podo ver algo máis alá dos xardíns comunitarios nas azoteas dos novos edificios do meu barrio. Pasou fai case tres anos. En setembro de 2008, seis activistas do medio ambiente foron declarados inocentes nunha corte londiniense por dano a unha planta eléctrica de carbón. O xurado aceptou o argumento de “escusa lexítima”. É o principio legal segundo o cal unha persoa pode danar propiedade se isto é para evitar dano maior a outras propiedades. Os activistas argumentaron que a fábrica facía máis dano ao medio ambiente que o que o graffiti fíxolle á planta. O xurado estivo de acordo.

Os titulares dixeron: “LUZ VERDE Á ANARQUÍA”

Pasaron tres anos e nada desde entón.

Por favor avísenme. Achéganse os playoffs.

—Darren Fleet

Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

Eine Einordnung von „Occupy“

Lektionen aus der revolutionären Vergangenheit.

by
David Graeber

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Thomas Good / Next Left Notes

Der wahrscheinlich größte noch lebende Philosoph Immanuel Wallerstein behauptet, dass alle großen Revolutionen seit 1789 tatsächlich Weltrevolutionen waren.

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Die Französische Revolution hat vordergründig nur in einem Land stattgefunden, hat aber in Wirklichkeit die gesamte nordatlantische Welt so tiefgreifend verändert, dass gerade einmal 20 Jahre später Ideen, die vorher als verrückt und grenzwertig galten?–?dass sozialer Wandel gut ist, dass Regierungen den sozialen Wandel bewältigen sollen, dass Regierungen ihre Legimitation aus einer Einheit namens “Volk” beziehen – so tief im Gemeinsinn verwurzelt waren, dass selbst der schwerfälligste Konservative Lippenbekenntnisse dazu ablegen musste. 1848 brachen beinahe gleichzeitig Revolutionen in 50 verschiedenen Ländern aus, von der Walachei bis nach Brasilien. In keinem Land übernahmen die Revolutionäre die Macht, jedoch entstanden hinterher fast überall von der Französischen Revolution inspirierte Institutionen?–?z.B. allgemein zugängliche Bildungssysteme.

Dieses Muster tauchte im 20. Jahrhundert erneut auf. Die “zehn Tage, die die Welt erschütterten” 1917 fanden in Russland statt, und dort gelang es Revolutionären, die Macht im Staat zu übernehmen. Was Wallerstein als die “Weltrevolution 1968” bezeichnet, war jedoch mehr als 1848: die Welle breitete sich von China über die damalige Tschecheslowakei nach Frankreich und Mexiko aus, nirgendwo wurde die Macht übernommen, aber trotzdem begann ein tiefgehendes Umdenken im Hinblick darauf, was eine Revolution bedeuten könnte.

Dennoch war diese Sequenz im 20. Jahrhundert neuartig, da 1968 die Errungenschaften von 1917 nicht festigte?–?de facto war 1968 der erste wichtige Schritt in die andere Richtung. Die russische Revolution bedeutete selbstverständlich die ultimative Verherrlichung des jakobinischen Ideals der Veränderung der Gesellschaft von oben her. Die Weltrevolution von 1968 war im Geiste anarchistischer. Das ist ein seltsamer Widerspruch, da Anarchismus in den späten 60er Jahren als soziale Massenbewegung größtenteils verschwunden war. Dennoch durchdrang sein Geist alles: die Revolte gegen bürokratischen Systemzwang, die Ablehnung von Parteipolitik, das Engagement für die Schaffung einer neuen, befreienden Kultur, die echte individuelle Selbstverwirklichung ermöglichen sollte.

Das wichtigste und nachhaltigste Vermächtnis der Weltrevolution 1968 war der moderne Feminismus. Nur durch die vom radikalen Feminismus eingeführten Richtlinien und sensiblen Ideen wie die hierarchiefreien bewusstseinserweckenden Diskussionszirkel, die Entwicklung eines Prozesses zur Konsensfindung, die Wichtigkeit der Abschaffung jeglicher Form von Ungleichheit, egal wie tief sie im Alltag verwurzelt war, konnte der Anarchismus als soziale Bewegung erneut Form annehmen.

In den letzten Jahren haben wir eine Art Abfolge kleiner 68er Revolutionen erlebt. Die Aufstände gegen sozialistische Staaten, angefangen auf dem Platz des Himmlischen Friedens bis hin zum Höhepunkt des Zusammenbruchs des Sowjetreiches, begannen so, obwohl sie rasch umgelenkt wurden und in einer kapitalistischen Rückgewinnung des Geistes der 60er-Rebellionen gipfelten, die heute als “Neoliberalismus” bekannt ist. Nachdem die Weltrevolution der mexikanischen Zapatisten – genannt der vierte Weltkrieg – 1994 begonnen hatte, kam es in einer solchen Dichte und Schnelligkeit zu kleinen 1968s, dass sich der Prozess beinahe institutionalisiert zu haben schien. Seattle, Genua, Cancun, Québec, Hong Kong … Und er wurde in der Tat durch von den Zapatisten mitbegründete Netzwerke institutionalisiert, auf Basis einer Art Mini-Anarchismus, beruhend auf den Prinzipien der dezentralen direkten Demokratie und des unmittelbaren Handelns. Die Aussicht auf eine echte globale Demokratiebewegung scheint vor allem die US-Behörden nun so in Angst versetzt zu haben, dass sie in einen richtigen Panikmodus verfielen. Natürlich gibt es ein traditionelles Gegenmittel bei einer Bedrohung durch Massenmobilisierung von unten. Man fängt einen Krieg an, egal gegen wen. Es geht nur darum, einen möglichst umfassenden Krieg zu führen. In diesem Falle hatte die US-Regierung den außergewöhnlichen Vorteil eines triftigen Grundes – ein Gesindel bisher wirkungsloser Islamisten vom rechten Flügel, die, einmalig in der Geschichte, einen wilden, ambitionierten Terrorplan ausgeheckt hatte und ihn tatsächlich ausgeführt hatte. Anstatt nun einfach die Verantwortlichen aufzuspüren, begannen die USA, Waffen im Wert von Milliarden auf alles Erdenkliche zu werfen. Zehn Jahre später scheint die daraus folgende Verkrampfung wegen der imperialen Überansprüche die Basis des amerikanischen Imperiums untergraben zu haben. Jetzt erleben wir den Prozess des Zusammenbruchs dieses Imperiums.

So ergibt es Sinn, dass die Weltrevolution 2011 als Rebellion gegen Satellitenstaaten der USA begann, so wie die Revolution, die die Sowjetmacht zu Fall bringen sollte, in Staaten wie Polen und der Tschecheslowakei ihren Anfang nahm. Die Welle der Rebellion in Nordafrika schwappte bald über das Mittelmeer nach Südeuropa, und dann, anfangs noch eher zögerlich, über den Atlantik nach New York. Sobald dies geschehen war, war sie innerhalb von Wochen überall angekommen und ausgebrochen. Momentan ist es sehr schwer, vorherzusagen, wie weit all dies am Ende gehen wird. Wirklich historische Ereignisse bestehen schließlich genau aus diesen Momenten, die man nicht vorhersagen hätte können. Könnten wir gerade einem fundamentalen Umbruch wie 1789 beiwohnen – nicht nur ein Umbruch der globalen Machtverhältnisse, sondern ein Umbruch in unserem allgemein grundlegenden politischen Denken? Das zu behaupten ist unmöglich, aber es gibt Gründe, optimistisch zu sein.

Lassen sie mich diesen Artikel durch die Aufzählung dreier dieser Gründe beenden.

Erstens befand sich in keiner Weltrevolution zuvor das Zentrum der Mobilisierung im Zentrum des Imperiums selbst. Großbritannien, die große imperiale Macht des 19. Jahrhunderts, war von den Aufständen 1789 und 1848 kaum betroffen. Gleichermaßen blieben die USA unberührt von den großen revolutionären Momenten des 20. Jahrhunderts. Entscheidende Straßenschlachten spielen sich üblicherweise nicht im Zentrum des Imperiums ab, auch nicht in den ausgebeuteten Randgebieten, sondern in den Gebieten, die man als zweite Ebene bezeichnen kann: nicht London, sondern Paris, nicht Berlin, aber St. Petersburg. Die Revolution 2011 begann nach diesem bekannten Muster, hat sich aber tatsächlich ins Zentrum des Imperiums selbst ausgebreitet. Wenn das so weitergeht, ist es noch nie zuvor so geschehen.

Zweitens können die Machteliten diesmal keinen Krieg beginnen. Das haben sie schon versucht. Was das angeht, können sie hier keine Karte mehr ausspielen. Das ist ein großer Unterschied.

Schließlich hat die Verbreitung feministischer und anarchistischer Gedanken die Möglichkeit eines tiefgreifenden kulturellen Umbruchs eröffnet. Nun die wichtigste Frage: können wir eine wirklich demokratische Kultur schaffen? Können wir unsere grundlegenden Konzepte, wie Politik gezwungenermaßen sein muss, ändern? Weiße Anzugträgern mittleren Alters an Orten wie Denver oder Minneapolis, die geduldig den Konsensprozess von heidnischen Priesterinnen oder Mitgliedern von Gruppen wie den “Anarchistischen Farbigen” lernen, um an ihrer örtlichen Generalversammlung teilnehmen zu können (das gibt es wirklich… es ist wahr! Man hat es mir erzählt) ist für mich wahrscheinlich das bisher dramatischste Bild, das die Occupy-Bewegung hervorgebracht hat.

Natürlich könnte dies auch nur der erste Moment einer weiteren Runde von Regeneration und Niederlagen sein. Sollten wir jedoch die Entstehung eines neuen 1789 beobachten – einen Moment, an dem sich unsere grundlegenden Vorstellungen von Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft ändern werden – dann sollte es genau so anfangen.

David Graeber, Professor und anarchistischer Aktivist, wir als der “beste anthropologische Theoretiker seiner Generation” bezeichnet. Er ist Mitorganisator von #OCCUPYWALLSTREET vor Ort in New York. Sein neues Buch heißt: Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Übersetzt von: Translator Brigades (translatorbrigades@gmail.com)

Realismo Ecológico

La ciencia, nos prometieron, resolvería todos nuestros problemas ecológicos.

by
André Gorz

From Adbusters #93: The Big Ideas of 2011


Armando Alvarez

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El crecimiento económico, del cual se suponía que era capaz de garantizar la prosperidad y el bienestar de todo el mundo, ha creado necesidades más rápido de lo que podía satisfacerlas, y nos ha metido en una serie de callejones sin salida que no son de carácter meramente económico. El crecimiento capitalista está en crisis pero no sólo porque es capitalista sino porque se está topando con límites físicos. Es imposible imaginar paliativos para cualquiera de los problemas que han originado la crisis actual. Pero lo que la hace diferente es que será inevitablemente agravada por cada una de las sucesivas y parciales soluciones aparentes a dichos problemas. 

Aunque posee todas las características de las clásicas crisis de sobreproducción, la crisis actual posee además un número de nuevas dimensiones que los marxistas, salvo raras excepciones, no preveyeron y que lo que hasta ahora se ha entendido por "socialismo" no resuelve adecuadamente. Es una crisis de la relación entre la esfera individual y la económica como tales; una crisis en el carácter del trabajo; una crisis en nuestras relaciones con la naturaleza, con nuestros cuerpos, con nuestra sexualidad, con la sociedad, con las generaciones futuras, con la historia; una crisis de la vida urbana, del hábitat, de la práctica médica, de la educación, de la ciencia. 

Sabemos que nuestro actual modo de vida no tiene futuro; que los niños que traeremos al mundo no usarán durante su vida adulta ni petróleo ni un número de metales que hoy nos son familiares; que si los actuales programas nucleares son implementados, las reservas de uranio habrán sido agotadas para entonces. Sabemos que nuestro mundo se está acabando; que si seguimos como antes, los océanos y los ríos serán estériles, la tierra infecunda, el aire irrespirable en las ciudades y la vida un privilegio reservado para los especímenes seleccionados de una nueva raza humana, adaptada por el condicionamiento químico y la programación genética para sobrevivir en el nuevo nicho ecológico, forjados y sostenidos por la ingeniería biológica.

Sabemos que durante ciento cincuenta años la sociedad industrial se ha desarrollado a través de un acelerado saqueo de las reservas naturales cuya creación requirió decenas de millones de años y que hasta hace muy poco los economistas, tanto clásicos como marxistas, han rechazado como irrelevantes o "reaccionarias" las cuestiones relativas al futuro a largo plazo – tanto del planeta como de la biosfera y de la civilización. "A largo plazo todos estaremos muertos" dijo Keynes, afirmando sarcásticamente que el horizonte de un economista no debería exceder de los 10 o 20 años. La "ciencia", nos aseguraron, encontrará nuevos caminos; la ingeniería descubrirá nuevos procesos que hoy no podemos ni tan siquiera soñar. 

Pero la ciencia y la tecnología han acabado por hacer este descubrimiento central: toda la actividad productiva depende de tomar prestados los recursos finitos del planeta y de organizar una serie de intercambios con el frágil sistema de equilibrios múltiples.

El objetivo no es deificar la naturaleza o "volver" a ella, sino tener en cuenta un simple hecho: la actividad humana encuentra sus límites en el mundo natural. Ignorar estos límites desencadena una violenta reacción cuyos efectos ya estamos sufriendo en formas concretas  si bien generalmente incomprendidas: nuevas enfermedades y formas de mal-estar, niños inadaptados (¿pero inadaptados a qué?), decreciente esperanza de vida, decrecientes rendimientos físicos y resultados económicos y una decreciente calidad de vida a pesar del aumento de los niveles de consumo material. La respuesta de los economistas hasta ahora ha consistido esencialmente en tachar de "utópicos" e "irresponsables" a quienes han centrado su atención en los síntomas de la crisis en nuestra relacíon fundamental con el mundo natural, una relación en la cual se basa toda actividad económica. El concepto más atrevido que la moderna economía política se atrevió a concebir fue el de "crecimiento cero" en el consumo físico. Solo un economista, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, ha tenido el sentido común de señalar que, incluso con crecimiento cero, el consumo contínuo de recursos escasos resultará inevitablemente en su completo agotamiento. El objetivo no es abstenerse de consumir más y más, sino consumir menos y menos – no hay otra forma de conservar las reservas disponibles para las generaciones futuras. En esto consiste el realismo ecológico. 

La objección estandar es que cualquier esfuerzo para poner freno al proceso de crecimiento o para reservarlo perpetuará o incluso empeorará las desigualdades existentes y provocará un deterioro en las condiciones materiales de vida de quienes ya son pobres. Pero la idea de que el crecimiento reduce la desigualdad es incorrecta – las estadísticas demuestran, por el contrario, que lo opuesto es cierto. Se objetará que estas estadísticas se aplican sólo a los países capitalistas y que el socialismo produciría una mayor justicia social; ¿pero por qué debería ser necesario entonces producir más cosas? ¿No sería más racional mejorar las condiciones de vida y su calidad haciendo un uso más eficiente de los recursos; produciendo cosas diferentes de forma diferente; eliminando resíduos; y negándonos a producir socialmente aquellos bienes que son tan caros que nunca podrán estar al alcance de todos o que son tan engorrosos y contaminantes que sus costes superan sus beneficios así se hagan disponibles para la mayoría?

Los radicales que se niegan a examinar la cuestión de la igualdad sin crecimiento meramente demuestran que el "socialismo" para ellos no es nada más que la continuación del capitalismo por otros medios – la extensión de los valores, estilo de vida y patrones sociales de la clase media que los miembros más ilustrados de esa clase, bajo la presíon de sus hijos y hijas, ya han comenzado a rechazar.

Hoy la falta de realismo no consiste en abogar por un mayor bienestar a través de la inversión del crecimiento y la subversión del estilo de vida imperante. La falta de realismo consiste en imaginar que el crecimiento económico aún pueda provocar mayor bienestar humano – y que de hecho eso sea siquiera físicamente posible. 

André Gorz, en Economía como Política. Filósofo y periodista francés, rehusó oponerse al despliegue de misiles de EE.UU. en Alemania del Oeste en 1983, como reproche a los movimientos pacifistas con los que anteriormente se había alineado.

Traducido por las Translator Brigades – translatorbrigades@gmail.com – ¡Ayúdanos a traducir Adbusters! / Help us in translating Adbusters!

Post-Anarchy

Capitalism burns all around us.

by
Saul Newman

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Post-Anarchy

Keystone US/Zuma/Rex Features

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

Capitalism burns all around us, leaving behind the debris of a bankrupt financial and political system. The illusion of limitless economic growth and the endless utopia of consumption have been forever shattered. Now governments have only austerity and hard times to offer us. Yet their assurances are wearing thin. Our political and economic masters know that people no longer believe in them, and behind the calm visage of power there is fear, fear of the specter of insurrection, the old fear that has haunted the imagination of every regime. Doesn’t everything – from the statements of politicians to the market predictions of economic gurus, to celebrity reality shows – now have a slight air of desperation, as if the entire spectacular-capitalist system (a system which in any case no longer even believes in itself and probably never did) is terrified lest it reveal the nihilism behind its facade?

This is a year of insurrections, from the streets of Cairo, Tunis and Benghazi, to the squares of Athens, Madrid and Wall Street. Miraculously, ordinary people gathered in public places – reclaiming these as public spaces – without authorization and without official representation. In some cases, they brought down governments, and in others they exerted a new kind of mass pressure on obsolete political systems that no longer even pretended to represent them. Revealed in the autonomous zones of Tahrir and Syntagma squares was the absolute abyss between people and the formal mechanisms of state power. In the people’s gesture of refusal, a new political space opened up, one whose consequences no one could determine in advance. The significance of these movements and occupations lay not so much in their achievement of concrete goals, but in their embodiment of a new collective political life, a form of politics that rejected representation through the tired old channels of political parties. The cry of the indignados in Spain was “You do not represent us!” – which can be understood both as a complaint against the lack of representation and as the desire to break with representation altogether and to act for themselves.

One of the lessons from these insurrections – and there are many – is that there is now no longer any difference between formal democracy and dictatorship; it’s simply a matter of degrees of repression. The power of the police, whose ghostly presence in the life of democratic states Walter Benjamin saw as devastating, is felt everywhere. What is the difference between Mubarak’s or Assad’s attempts to shut down social networking sites in Egypt and Syria, and Cameron’s threat to do the same in the UK?

And what is democracy in any case but a system that encourages a mass contentment with powerlessness, a collective voluntary servitude legitimated by the purely symbolic ritual of voting? The recent insurrections should be seen as being more than just about democracy, which in any case is now such an ambiguous term. Rather they were a collective form of voluntary inservitude. They were the realization that every system of power is ultimately fragile and dependent on the alienation and relinquishment of our power.

I talk of insurrection but not revolution. The revolution overthrows one regime of power only to replace it with another; the insurrection suspends power altogether, resisting its own institutionalization. Perhaps Max Stirner put it best: “It [the insurrection] is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established.”

A working forth of ourselves out of the established is the necessary threshold that any radical politics must pass through. It is the micro-political terrain upon which the insurrection takes place, at once ethical, psychological and spiritual, at once individual and collective. It involves an interrogation of one’s desires and attachments to power, as well as a transformation of one’s relation to others.

What made the recent riots in the UK seem different from the insurrections elsewhere was that they lacked this ethical (as well as political) dimension and were characterized by the worst kinds of incivility. I am not talking here about the defilement of the idols of property, which we should have no respect for. But what strikes us about the rioters was not their disrespect for the commodity but their absolute reverence for it – all that rebellious energy squandered on the desire for some silly designer label! What better example of what Stirner calls possessedness – where one becomes possessed by the thing, the object one desires to possess? The riots and looting were the ultimate expression of the fetishistic excesses of consumer society, and were thus thoroughly internal to it – as well as being internal to the binary of law-and-order/criminality. The problem with the riots was not that they were too transgressive but that they were not transgressive enough – they did not signify any kind of break with the religion of consumerism.

In the wake of the riots, the old bogeyman of anarchy loomed up again, authorizing a further intensification of police power. But anarchism – as a mode of politics and an expression of a free, ethical life – has little in common with this sort of quasi-religious spectacle of violence. Rather, anarchism involves a certain ethical discipline. Yet this is a self-imposed discipline of indiscipline, or what Foucault calls willful indocility. Obedience, as La Boëtie recognized long ago, comes easily to us – it is habitual. And so we must become disciplined into becoming undisciplined; we must become the ascetics of freedom. We must acquire, as Georges Sorel put it, “habits of liberty.”

Anarchism, or as I prefer to call it, postanarchism, is more than a political ideology. It is the ethico-political horizon today of all radical politics. The desire for an autonomy that can only be realized associatively and the emergence of movements that do not so much protest against the misery of our lives but joyously affirm the possibility of a radically different life are the unmistakable signs of the deepening of this horizon.

Saul Newman is a political philosopher and Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Newman is known for coining the term “postanarchism.” His latest book is The Politics of Post Anarchism.

Good Times on Campus

Fight for your mind in 2012.

by
Darren Fleet

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Students at the University of North Carolina get down and boogie with the SuperTarget mascot at a midnight shopping spree officially endorsed by the school’s top brass.

Teddy bears, booty shorts, sandals, cut off jeans, hand claps, crunking, shopping carts … welcome to the school where learning doesn’t have to be just about books.

This year’s welcome week at the University of North Carolina was outsourced to a host of consumer companies, including the mass wholesaler SuperTarget. The box store giant organized a fleet of buses to take freshmen on a midnight shopping frenzy in their store as the week’s grand finale. The entire event was officially chaperoned by the vice chancellor of the university, who also acted as Target’s tour guide for the evening. The New York Times also reported that American Eagle Outfitters hired popular sophomores on the same campus, ideally those with significant online social network presences (500+ friends), to be brand ambassadors. Their job during the week was to recruit their friends into volunteer moving squads, all wearing gift AE swag, to help new students carry their belongings into their dorms and to give a warm welcome on behalf of American Eagle.

On a more optimistic day, I would tell you that the students involved in this fiasco are able to identify the not-so-subtle-manipulation at work, and that if a party isn’t in the school budget, then why not let SuperTarget or Walmart or Nike throw a bash; or that free duds from a company desperate for market share is a fair trade for a poor students’ time. On a more realistic day, I would tell you that this cohort is the same one that American sociologists are pointing to as the empty-headed Icarus generation now beginning to fly.

Christian Smith and his colleagues at Notre Dame University recently produced a study Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood which revealed that the majority of America’s young adults on campus navigate ethical propositions based only on time, feeling, benefit and desire. Principles such as honor, valor, virtue, morality, God, chivalry, familial piety, ideas that dominated the Western mindset well into the 20th century, were non-factors. Most surprising to them the Times writes is that participants in the study were not at all bothered by “rabid consumerism” and lacked even the basic language to formulate ethical queries about consumerism. To them the market was a benign and neutral reality.

The implications of this objective ethical free-fall are contested and the debate flounders between pragmatic optimism and cautious realism. It isn’t that bad to have finally chased superstition, pre-judgment, and patriarchal precepts to the ends of the earth. On the downside, the trend points to the emergence of ethical silo’s where moral considerations – like should I care about the environment or should I help a stranger or should I buy this product – are nudged to the periphery of the soul in the same way that religion and philosophy have been pushed over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, out of sight, out of mind.

—Darren Fleet

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

What to expect in 2012.

by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

What to expect in 2012.

blulaces

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

Some of the most inspiring social struggles of 2011 have placed democracy at the top of the agenda.

Although they emerge from very different conditions, these movements – from the insurrections of the Arab Spring to the union battles in Wisconsin, from the student protests in Chile to those in the US and Europe, from the UK riots to the occupations of the Spanish indignados and the Greeks in Syntagma Square, and from Occupy Wall Street to the innumerable local forms of refusal across the world – share, first of all, a negative demand: Enough with the structures of neoliberalism! This common cry is not only an economic protest but also immediately a political one, against the false claims of representation. Neither Mubarak and Ben Ali nor Wall Street bankers, neither media elites nor even presidents, governors, members of parliament, and other elected officials – none of them represent us. The extraordinary force of refusal is very important, of course, but we should be careful not to lose track in the din of the demonstrations and conflicts of a central element that goes beyond protest and resistance. These movements also share the aspiration for a new kind of democracy, expressed in tentative and uncertain voices in some cases but explicitly and forcefully in others. The development of this aspiration is one of the threads we are most anxious to follow in 2012.

One source of antagonism that all of these movements will have to confront, even those that have just toppled dictators, is the insufficiency of modern democratic constitutions, particularly their regimes of labor, property, and representation. In these constitutions, first of all, waged labor is key to having access to income and the basic rights of citizenship, a relationship that has long functioned poorly for those outside the regular labor market, including the poor, the unemployed, unwaged female workers, immigrants, and others, but today all forms of labor are ever more precarious and insecure. Labor continues to be the source of wealth in capitalist society, of course, but increasingly outside the relationship with capital and often outside the stable wage relation. As a result, our social constitution continues to require waged labor for full rights and access in a society where such labor is less and less available.

Private property is a second fundamental pillar of the democratic constitutions, and social movements today contest not only national and global regimes of neoliberal governance but also the rule of property more generally. Property not only maintains social divisions and hierarchies but also generates some of the most powerful bonds (often perverse connections) that we share with each other and our societies. And yet contemporary social and economic production has an increasingly common character, which defies and exceeds the bounds of property. Capital’s ability to generate profit is declining since it is losing its entrepreneurial capacity and its power to administer social discipline and cooperation. Instead capital increasingly accumulates wealth primarily via forms of rent, most often organized through financial instruments, through which it captures value that is produced socially and relatively independent of its power. But every instance of private accumulation reduces the power and productivity of the common. Private property is thus becoming ever more not only a parasite but also an obstacle to social production and social welfare.

Finally, a third pillar of democratic constitutions, and object of increasing antagonism, as we said earlier, rests on the systems of representation and their false claims to establish democratic governance. Putting an end to the power of professional political representatives is one of the few slogans from the socialist tradition that we can affirm wholeheartedly in our contemporary condition. Professional politicians, along with corporate leaders and the media elite, operate only the weakest sort of representative function. The problem is not so much that politicians are corrupt (although in many cases this is also true) but rather that the constitutional structure isolates the mechanisms of political decision-making from the powers and desires of the multitude. Any real process of democratization in our societies has to attack the lack of representation and the false pretenses of representation at the core of the constitution.

Recognizing the rationality and necessity of revolt along these three axes and many others, which animate many struggles today, is, however, really only the first step, the point of departure. The heat of indignation and the spontaneity of revolt have to be organized in order to last over time and to construct new forms of life, alternative social formations.

The secrets to this next step are as rare as they are precious.

On the economic terrain we need to discover new social technologies for freely producing in common and for equitably distributing shared wealth. How can our productive energies and desires be engaged and increased in an economy not founded on private property? How can welfare and basic social resources be provided to all in a social structure not regulated and dominated by state property? We must construct the relations of production and exchange as well as the structures of social welfare that are composed of and adequate to the common.

The challenges on the political terrain are equally thorny. Some of the most inspiring and innovative events and revolts in the last decade have radicalized democratic thinking and practice by occupying and organizing a space, such as a public square, with open, participatory structures or assemblies, maintaining these new democratic forms for weeks or months. Indeed the internal organization of the movements themselves has been constantly subjected to processes of democratization, striving to create horizontal participatory network structures. The revolts against the dominant political system, its professional politicians, and its illegitimate structures of representation are thus not aimed at restoring some imagined legitimate representational system of the past but rather at experimenting with new democratic forms of expression: democracia real ya. How can we transform indignation and rebellion into a lasting constituent process? How can experiments in democracy become a constituent power, not only democratizing a public square or a neighborhood but also inventing an alternative society that is really democratic?

To confront these issues, we, along with many others, have proposed possible initial steps, such as establishing a guaranteed income, the right to global citizenship, and a process of the democratic reappropriation of the common. But we are under no illusion that we have all the answers. Instead we are encouraged by the fact that we are not alone asking the questions. We are confident, in fact, that those who are dissatisfied with the life offered by our contemporary neoliberal society, indignant about its injustices, rebellious against its powers of command and exploitation, and yearning for an alternative democratic form of life based on the common wealth we share – they, by posing these questions and pursuing their desires, will invent new solutions we cannot yet even imagine. Those are some of our best wishes for 2012.

Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist philosopher. In the late 1970s Negri was accused of being the mastermind behind the left-wing terrorist group the Red Brigades. Negri emigrated to France where he taught in Paris along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Hardt and Negri have published four important critiques of late capitalism and globalization: Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (1994), Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). These four works have been highly praised by contemporary activists. Empire, for example, has been hailed as “nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time” by the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

Vivir Sin Tiempo Muerto

¿Qué significa para tí?

by
Micah M. White

From Adbusters #97: Post Anarchism – #OCCUPYWALLSTREET


Charles Peterson

This article is available in:

Vivir sin tiempo puerto implica encarnar un gran rechazo, encontrar placer en la lucha, transformar cada momento de la existencia en un repudio a la pesadilla consumista y una afirmación de la posibilidad revolucionaria. Un semestre, un año, una década sin Big Macs, Frappucinos y World of Warcraft, pero desbordantes de aventuras a media noche y vallas publicitarias saboteadas, de agricultura de guerrilla y espectaculares movilizaciones de batallas de memes sincronizadas a nivel global. Imagina un gran número de nosotros empezando a vivir de esta manera, transformando la vida diaria en una forma de resistencia que reencante la ciudad y haga renacer la promesa de la insurrección popular. El camino a seguir es a través de este tipo de juego radical.

¿Hacia donde podemos ir desde aquí? ¿Es #OCCUPYWALLSTREET el primer paso para este nuevo estilo de vida radical?

Micah White

Translated by Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

?wiat post-ideowy

Polish translation of “Post Idea World.”

by
Kalle Lasn and Micah White

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Selingkuh Tak Sampai – 2004 – Agus Suwage

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Od wieków cywilizacja ludzka stala pod znakiem wielkich zmian, idei, paradygmatów. Modernistyczny heglowski duch subiektywny, nietzscheanska smierc Boga i heideggerianskie bycie-w-swiecie ustapily w postmodernizmie foucoultowskiemu dispositif, koncu swiata Fukuyamy, derridowskiej dekonstrukcji i klaczom Deleuze i Guattariego.

A jednak, podczas gdy wiekszosc z nas, przyzwyczajona do wielkich idei i pomyslów oczekiwala pojawiania sie nowych z co najmniej ta sama predkoscia, w ostatnich kilku latach wydaje sie, ze poklady inspiracji zaczely sie wyczerpywac. Staje sie jasne jak slonce ze prawdziwie nowatorskie, kreatywne pomysly i idee raptem przestaly naplywac. Nikt nie wie dlaczego.

Konceptualna susza nie moglaby nastapic, zdawaloby sie, w czasie bardziej nieodpowiednim. Siedem miliardów nas zmaga sie z najbardziej powaznym ekologicznym, finansowym, politycznym i spirytualnym kryzysem w naszej historii. Tym razem katastrofa, której stawiamy czola, nie dotyka jedynie pojedynczej nacji, regionu czy kontynentu… Jest to tym bardziej przerazajace, ze jest to katastrofa globalna i równoczesna. Szanse sa ze jesli nie uda nam sie wygrzebac z tego regresu, prawdopodobnie zstapimy w przerazajacy tysiac lat ciemnych wieków … era ziemi wypalonej autorytarnym kapitalizmem, brutalizmem i chaosem które sprawia, ze ludobójstwa i holokaust poprzedniego wieku beda sie wydawac jak gra wstepna. Nie tylko koncza nam sie pomysly; konczy nam sie czas. Teraz bardziej niz kiedykolwiek potrzebujemy kreatywnych przelomów i burzy mózgów inspirowanych z zewnatrz, które przemieszcza tereny mysli, otworza nowe mozliwosci, potencjonalnie ratujac nas wszystkich.

Potrzeba nam odwaznych radykalów mediów niezaleznych, którzy przyczynia sie do upadku komercjalnego wirusa infekujacego nasz strumien informacji. Potrzeba nam nowego grona studentów ekonomii gotowych stawic czola swoim profesorom, gotowych obalic neoklasyczny paradygmat a w jego miejsce zainicjowac nowy, prawdziwy model finansowy. Potrzeba nam nowych sposobów na rozmontowanie wladzy korporacji i usmiercenie idei korporacyjnej tozsamosci. Ale najwiekszym ze wszystkich wyzwaniem jest: w jaki sposób rozniecic rewolucje, insurekcje dnia powszedniego, która rozprzestrzeni sie po swiecie na czas aby uniknac ostatecznej katastrofy?

Byc moze nasze porzucenie swiata naturalnego i masowa migracja w cyberprzestrzen bezpowrotnie odciely nasze korzenie i zmacily nasze neurony. Byc moze jestesmy po srodku nieodwracalnego rozpadu moralnego rasy ludzkiej, który odzwierciedla nieodwolalny upadek ekosystemu naszej planety. Ta eko-psychiczna spirala moze nas wykonczyc. Moze juz jest za pózno?

Ale wydanie #99 Adbusters nie jest o rozpaczy; jest o nadziei, rewolucji i zyciu bez martwego czasu … Jest o próbowaniu czegos nowego i szacowaniu, czy potrafimy zebrac wystarczajaco duzo energii umyslowej na wszechmocna odmiane.

Dla dzikich,
Kalle Lasn i Micah White

Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

Cu?c s?ng c?a chúng ta ch? là nh?ng ?o giác

Không d?a trên th?c t? mà là nh?ng ?o t??ng.

by
Hudson Spivey

From Adbusters #91: The Revolution Issue


? Trung Qu?c, ng??i dân th??ng t? t?p ? nh?ng góc công viên cùng nhau t?p th? d?c. Nh?ng câu chuy?n ngoài s? sách c?a M? không ph?i là nh?ng con ng??i thô l? hay nh?ng anh hùng hy sinh b?n thân ?? theo ?u?i gi?c m?. Nó là câu chuy?n v? n?n dân ch? b? tr?ch ???ng, v? tinh th?n cách m?ng b? ?àn áp và v? ni?m t? hào v? th?i mà s? kiêu ng?o nh??ng ch? cho s? quy ph?c.
?nh: Ryan Pile (l) và Martin Parr (r)

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Chúng ta th??ng quên m?t r?ng cu?c s?ng c?a chúng ta ch? là nh?ng h? c?u, mà trong ?ó cu?c s?ng c?a con ng??i ch? là nh?ng cái tr?u t??ng – nó không d?a trên th?c t?, mà trên nh?ng v? kich, ?o t??ng. Cu?c s?ng c?a chúng ta th?c s? không khác gì nh?ng gi?c m?, nó ch? s? r?i rác m? nh?t t? b?a ?n này sang b?a ?n khác, t? ?o?n h?i tho?i này sang ?o?n h?i tho?i khác, nh? m?t r?p hát, môt trung tâm mua s?m, hay nh? m?t c?c cà phê, m?t c?c bia, m?t v?t trôi d?t không ng?ng t? c?m giác này sang c?m giác khác, hay là s? th?a mãn không ng?ng các mong mu?n c? b?n.

Chúng ta ???c trong t?o nên ? trong “th?c t?” ?y b?i v?y m?i di?n bi?n c?a nó ??u vô hình ??i v?i ta. Chúng ta có th? nh?n th?y t?ng kho?nh kh?c nh?ng không th?y ???c toàn b? v?n ?? – s? chuy?n nh??ng c?a con ng??i t? t? nhiên, ch?ng b?nh c?a s? thu?n hóa, s? ph? thu?c c?a con ng??i vào nh?ng công ngh? máy móc ch?t ?? t?n t?i và th? h? tr? n?m quy?n s? h?u hành tinh này ?ang ngày càng b?t l?c h?n trong vi?c k?t nói v?i nó. Chúng ta ?ang d?n m?t ?i kh? n?ng ?? tr?i nghi?m nh?ng ?i?u v? ??i ???c tìm ra sau nh?ng giây phút tr?ng ??i. Ta bám l?y nh?ng th?a mãn t?m th??ng nh? k? ngã xu?ng c? bám vào nh?ng hòn ?á. C?ng nh? vi?c ta không dám ngh? ??n m?t cu?c s?ng thi?u pizza, kem, lò vi sóng, ph??ng ti?n giao thông, nh?ng s? ti?n l?i, tho?i mái, nhàn h?.

Th? k? 21 này cho ??n nay ?ã quá nhân t? ??i v?i chúng ta. Nó m? ra m?t chân tr?i m?i cho chúng ta –nh?ng k? vi?n vông, nh?ng ?? l?i là th?m h?a. ?ó chính là nh?ng cu?c chi?n, nh?ng tr?n ??i Chi?n, chúng v??t qua m?i gi?i h?n, lôi kéo t?t c? vào tr?n xung ??t c?a nó: cu?c chi?n ng?m ?òi phá b? nh?ng ?i?u t?ng b? c?m ?oán, m? cánh c?a ng?n cách gi?a ph? n? và ?àn ông ?? ???c t? do chuy?n trò, phá b? rào c?n gi?a tâm trí và c? th?, gi?a xác th?t và tâm h?n. S? có nh?ng ng??i ?àn ông trong b? qu?n áo ng? ch?y nh? ?iên trên ???ng ph? cùng v?i chai r??u. N?u ?ó không ph?i là s? ?iên lo?n thì c?ng s? là máu, dòng sông máu ?êm x?i x? ?iên cuông nh? con sông Mississippi ch?y trên kh?p các th? tr??ng th? gi?i, ??p lên nh?ng k? y?u, h? b? nh?ng k? ?ã t?ng m?t th?i thành công, ??a t?t c? b?n h? lên ??u ng?n sóng kh?ng khi?p c?a nó…

—Hudson Spivey

Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

Ng? ??c v?n hóa

Lý thuy?t chung v? s? ô nhi?m tinh th?n.

by
Micah M. White

From Adbusters #96: Apocalyptic Boredom

This article is available in:

Làm cách nào ?? ch?ng l?i s? lan tràn c?a các bi?u t??ng, các hang hàng hóa, kh?u hi?u và c? nh?ng l?i giao m?i trên kh?p các con ph?, xâm nh?p vào t?n nhà b?n và ngay c? trên màn hình c?a b?n?

Có th? chúng ta s? ch?ng l?i chúng b?ng vi?c: lên án c? th? t?ng qu?ng cáo khi nó v??t qua gi?i h?n cho phép, có bi?u hi?n không ?úng v?i s? th?t và tr? nên b?o l?c ho?c quá g?i c?m. Tuy nhiên bi?n pháp này ch? nh? vi?c c? g?ng dung kh?n ?n ?? lau s?ch v?t d?u m?. Nh? th? chúng ta không th? gi?i quy?t ???c nh?ng nguy hi?m th?t s? ti?m tàng c?a chúng – Nh?ng cái mà không ch? b?i cá bi?t t?ng qu?ng cáo gây nên mà còn do kh?i l??ng tràn ng?p c?a nó.

B??c ??u tiên ?? ch?ng l?i nh?ng qu?ng cáo nh? th? này là d?ng vi?c coi chúng nh? nh?ng qu?ng cáo th??ng m?i mà xem nó nh? m?t lo?i c?a s? gây ô nhi?m. Ví d? nh? hãy ngh? ??n h?u qu? lâu dài v? tinh th?n c?a vi?c nhìn th?y Nike hàng tá l?n m?t ngày t? khi sinh ra ??n khi ch?t ?i, ho?c ti?p xúc l?p ?i l?p l?i hình ?nh c?a Apparel’s patriarchal có th? s? làm h?ng tinh th?n c?a b?n. Nh?ng câu h?i nh? th? ???c ??t ra khi xem m?i qu?ng cáo và khi?n ta ph?i ngh? ??n vi?c c?n ph?i b?o v? môi tr??ng tinh th?n c?a chúng ta.

M?i quan tâm v? nh?ng ?nh h??ng tâm lý xã h?i do m?i qu?ng cáo mang l?i c?ng ???c quan tâm ??n t? lâu. Ti?u thuy?t gia ng??i Pháp Emile Zola có th? nói là ng??i ??u tiên vi?t v? môi tr??ng tâm th?n trong cu?n sách c?a mình, Ch?t vì Qu?ng Cáo, n?m 1866. Ông ?ã tr? l?i v?i ch? ?? này vào n?m m?t 1883 v?i các cu?n ti?u thuy?t n?i ti?ng Au Bonheur des Dames, v?i cái nhìn sâu h?n vào vai trò c?a qu?ng cáo trong vi?c gây ra m?t suy ngh? tiêu th?. Hàng tr?m n?m ti?p theo, nh?ng ý ki?n c?a nh?ng ng??i b?o v? môi tr??ng tinh th?n c?ng ?ã b?t ng? ???c nêu lên, ví d? nh? ? bài lu?n c?a Susan Sontag n?m 1977, “Thu?t nhi?p ?nh” trong ?ó cô ?ã vi?t “xã h?i công nghi?p ?ã h??ng ng??i dân ??n nh?ng hình ?nh l?n x?n; ?ó là m?t d?ng khó c??ng l?i nh?t c?a s? ô nhi?m tinh th?n.”

M?c dù còn r?i rác, nh?ng t? nh?ng Adbusters1989: m?c Nh?t ký c?a B?o v? môi tr??ng tinh th?n ?ã có v? trí nh? m?t ph?n c?a trung tâm, nó t?p trung nhi?u nh?ng tài li?u quan tr?ng v? v?n ?? b?o v? môi tr??ng tâm th?n. Bài vi?t c?a Bill McKibben trên Adbusters s? 38 n?m 2011 là m?t xây d?ng quan tr?ng trong v?n ?? này. Trong ?ó ông gi?i thích cách th?c mà trong ?ó b?o v? môi tr??ng tâm th?n có th? là m?t ?i?m quan tr?ng ?áng chú ý c?a th? k? m?i này.” Tuy nhiên ?i?u ?ó c?ng ?ã t?ng ???c ?? c?p ??n trong b?n tuyên ngôn S? khu?y ??ng v?n hóa c?a Kalle Lasn n?m1999. Bài vi?t không nh?ng nêu ra nh?ng phê bình m?t cách ??y ?? mà còn ???c nâng cao, ??a vào trong ?ó cách ti?n hành cu?c cách m?ng thay ??i xã h?i. “Chúng ta ph?i khu?y ??ng ho?t ??ng thông th??ng c?a nh?ng ng??i bán hàng và t? ?ó gây nên s? ?ình tr? b?t ng? cho h?,” Lasn công khai. “Trên cái v? cao su c?a n?n v?n hóa c? chúng ta s? xây d?ng m?t cái m?i v?i tinh th?n phi th??ng m?i.”

T? Zola, tuy nhiên, thuy?t b?o v? môi tr??ng tinh th?n ?ã và ?ang b? v??ng vào v?ng l?y tri?t h?c. ?? th?a nh?n m?t cách ?n d? r?ng qu?ng cáo là th? gây ô nhi?m tinh th?n c?n có m?t ?i?u, ?y là bác b? m?t cách d? dàng l?i nói hoa m?. ?? nói r?ng qu?ng cáo ?úng là m?t lo?i ô nhi?m và nh?ng qu?ng cáo truy?n hình, bi?n qu?ng cáo trên ???ng cao t?c thì g?n nh? là rác th?i ??c h?i. Và khi nh?ng nhà b?o v? môi tr??ng tinh th?n luôn c? ra ??a ra lu?n ?i?m c?a mình, thì h? th??ng b? ép rút lui v? th? ban ??u. ?âu là b?ng ch?ng khi nói r?ng qu?ng cáo là m?t lo?i ô nhi?m? Không ph?i ?ã rõ ràng l?m sao khi nh?ng kh?u hi?u c?a các công ty không là gì khác ngoài s? tô ?i?m cho chính h?, m?t bài di?n thuy?t mang tính th??ng m?i?

Câu h?i khó này ?ã ???c m?t nhà tri?t h?c v? ??i ?? tâm ??n, m?t con ng??i ??c bi?t ngài Michel Serres, ng??i ?ã vi?t nên công trình tri?t h?c m? ??u cho phong trào tri?t h?c tâm th?n

Hành ??ng phi pháp: Tr? nên phù h?p hóa quá trình ô nhi?m? là m?t s? tái nh?n th?c c?n b?n c?a quá trình ô nhi?m ?ã g?n li?n m?i quan h? ch? y?u c?a nó v?i qu?ng cáo.

Quan ?i?m chính c?a quy?n sách này ?ó là: ??ng v?t, bao g?m c? con ng??i ?ã dùng s? ô nhi?m ?? ch? ra, th?a nh?n và h?p th?c hóa lãnh th? c?a mình b?ng cách làm b?n nó, và theo th?i gian hành ??ng này ???c h?p th?c hóa này m? ra s? ô nhi?m ban ??u t? ch?t th?i nh? n??c ti?u, r?i ??n “ô nhi?m c?ng”, nh? công nghi?p hóa ch?t và cu?i cùng là “ô nhi?m m?m”, s? qu?ng cáo d??i nhi?u hình th?c.

“?? chúng tôi ??nh ngh?a cho b?n hai ?i?u và phân bi?t chúng v?i nhau m?t cách rõ ràng,” Michel Seres vi?t,”??u tiên là cái c?ng [ch?t th?i], và th? hai là cái m?m. V?i c?m t? ??u tiên tôi có ý r?ng m?t m?t nó là ph? li?u r?n, ch?t ga l?ng, chúng phát ra trong b?u khí quy?n t? nh?ng nhà máy công nghi?p l?n ho?c nh?ng bãi rác kh?ng l?, d?u hi?u ?áng h? th?n c?a nh?ng thành ph? l?n. C?m t? th? hai, ch? nh?ng ký hi?u, hình ?nh và kh?u hi?u qu?ng cáo tràn ng?p kh?p n?i. M?c dù nó có s? khác nhau v? n?ng l??ng, ch?t th?i và bi?u hi?n tuy nhiên chúng ??u là k?t qu? c?a nh?ng hành ??ng làm ô nhi?m gi?ng nhau, t? cùng m?c ?ích ?? h?p th?c hóa, và là b?n ch?t c?a ??ng v?t.

Michel Serres là ng??i ??u tiên ??t n?n t?ng m?t cách tri?t h?c b?o v? môi tr??ng tâm th?n d? trên s? ?úc k?t nh?ng lý thuy?t c?a s? ô nhi?m ?? gi?i thích qu?ng cáo th?c s? là m?t s?n ph?m c?a ch?t th?i công nghi?p. Thi?u ?i?u này, nh?ng nhà b?o v? môi tr??ng tâm th?n v?n còn quanh qu?n bên ngoài b?n ch?t c?a v?n ?? b?i ?nh h??ng lu?n ?i?m c?a Zola cho r?ng qu?ng cáo ?áng b? ?? l?i b?i ?ã khi?n chúng ta tr? thành nh?ng ng??i tiêu th?. Kalle Lasn và tôi ?ã vi?t trong Adbusters s? 90 nh? sau” Qu?ng cáo th??ng m?i ?ánh vào môi tr??ng tinh th?n con ng??i, nh?ng nhà máy ?ánh vào môi tr??ng th? ch?t.” Ch?t th?i công nghi?p ???c th?i vào n??c ho?c không khí b?i ?ó là cách hi?u qu? nh?t ?? ch? t?o nh?a, b?t gi?y, ho?c thép. Ch??ng trình vô tuy?n ho?c nh?ng trang web làm ô nhi?m môi tr??ng v?n hóa b?i ??y là cách hi?u qu? nh?t ?? t?o ra khán gi?.” Khi mà lu?n ?i?m c?a Zola ???c cho là ?úng ? th?i c?a ông và t?n t?i ??n t?n bây gi? – Và Serres c?ng ?ã có ý t??ng t? nh? th? trong sách c?a ông – Serres ?ã hoàn thành m?t s? ?i?u th?m chí còn sâu s?c h?n. Ông ?ã cho th?y t?i sao m?t ng??i không th? là m?t nhà b?o v? môi tr??ng n?u không ??ng th?i là m?t ng??i m?t nhà b?o v? môi tr??ng tinh th?n. B?ng vi?c thu h?p kho?ng cách c?a s? ??u ??c trong th? ch?t và tinh th?n, Serres ?ã thu h?p ???c kho?ng cách gi?a h? sinh thái th? ch?t và tinh th?n.

Chúng ta hãy cùng xem xét xem b?ng cách nào, l?i trích d?n sau c?a Serres, trong bài phê bình v? s? gây ch?n ??ng c?a qu?ng cáo khi mà m?i quan h? gi?a qu?ng cáo và ch?t th?i không ch? là ?n d?. “Nh?ng lãnh ??o làm s?ch rác th?i ? vùng bi?n, không bao gi? nhìn th?y, ho?c ngay c? cho phép nh?ng vô s? n? c??i c?a th??ng ?? bi?n m?t; ?i?u ?ó có th? là quá ?òi h?i, ho?c th?m chí là hoang t??ng. Rác r??i có trên kh?p th? gi?i, li?u ?ã t?ng có bao gi? ôh? nhìn th?y v? ??p c?a nó tr??c ?ây? Li?u ông ?ã t?ng bao gi? nhìn th?y v? ??p c?a riêng mình? Và vì v?y, h? làm b?n không gian v?i nh?ng b?ng qu?ng cáo ??y nh?ng bi?u ng? và hình ?nh, che ?i t?m nhìn vào c?nh quang xung quanh, có th? nói h? gi?t ch?t nh?ng c?m nh?n, và phá h?ng nó b?ng s? tr?m c?p không gian này. ??u tiên là phong c?nh sau ?ó là toàn b? th? gi?i.”

Trái ??t ?ang b? yêu sách b?i nh?ng t?p ?oàn. Chính b?ng s? chi?m h?u ??i d??ng b?ng vi?c tràn d?u ho?c chi?m không gian công c?ng b?ng nh?ng qu?ng cáo c?a h?, nh?ng t?p ?oàn ?ó dùng c? ch?t th?i c?ng và m?m ?? c??p ?i nh?ng gì là c?a chúng ta. D??i ánh sáng này, cu?c chi?n ??u ch?ng l?i qu?ng cáo chính là cu?c ??u tranh c?a chúng ta trong th?i ??i này, s? th?ng nh?t c?a nh?ng xung ??t c?ng chính là ?? ng?n ch?n nh?ng quy ph?m pháp lu?t kh?i s? l?n chi?m c?a nh?ng thông l? c?a con ng??i. Nguy c? là r?t cao. N?m v?ng ???c t?m nghiêm tr?ng c?a v?n ??, Serres thúc ??y chúng ta ti?n ??n hành ??ng, ??y nhanh cu?c cách m?ng xã h?i d?a trên con ???ng c?a nh?ng nhà b?o v? môi tr??ng tinh th?n.

“ ?i?u ?ó khi?n tôi không th? dung th? ???c và tôi c?n ph?i nh?c ?i nh?c l?i và công b? nó ? m?i n?i; chúng ta làm sao có th? không thét lên trong n?i kinh hoàng và c?m ph?n tr??c s? tàn phá nh?ng con ???ng vào thành ph? c?a ng??i nông dân Pháp? Nhi?u công ty ?ã che l?p không gian b?ng nh?ng bi?n qu?ng cáo ngu ng?c c?a h?, ti?n hành nh?ng cu?c chi?n ?iên lo?n nh? nh?ng loài thú c?t ?? bi?n n?i công c?ng thành c?a mình v?i nh?ng hình ?nh và bi?u ng?; c?ng nh? ??ng v?t v?i ti?ng rú và n??c ti?u c?a chúng. Ngo?i tr? nh?ng vùng ngo?i ô, tôi ?ã không còn s?ng ? ?ó n?a, n?i mà ng??i dân b? ám ?nh b?i nh?ng k? n?m quy?n l?c luôn chà ??p, ?ô h? h?. Châu Âu, t?ng l?p cai tr? d?t nát nào ?ang gi?t d?n các b?n?”

Micah White ch? bút c?a Adbusters

Micah White ch? bút c?a Adbusters

Translated by Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

Signs of Revolutionary Spring in Europe

Will the people’s rebellion go continental?

by
Micah M. White

From Adbusters #94: Post Normal

The energy is in Europe now
Gareth Fuller / AP Images

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

In the United Kingdom, an increasingly lenient judiciary is emboldening climate change protesters. Two recent cases have shown that judges are now receptive to the “lawful excuse,” also known as the “necessity defense” in the US, the legal argument that it is not a crime to act illegally if it is done to prevent a larger harm such as global warming. At a recent sentencing, one judge even praised protesters who had intended to shut down a coal power plant as “decent men and women with a genuine concern for others” and said, “I have no doubt that each of you acted with the highest possible motives.” Activists are now planning even bolder actions.

In France, the last few years have seen the publication of major anticapitalist works. Alain Badiou, in his The Communist Hypothesis, argues that the only path forward is to reembrace the principle of radical egalitarianism underlying the abstract concept of communism. Also worth mentioning is Badiou’s ongoing intellectual collaboration with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, whose most recent books, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and Living in the End Times, represent a compelling outline for radical politics based on an “eschatological apocalyptism” that strives to “interrupt” the contemporary course of history. Then there is the anonymously authored The Coming Insurrection, an anarchist manifesto that calls for the formation of autonomous communes from which to launch sabotage campaigns: “Jam everything – this will be the first reflex of all those who rebel against the present order … to block circulation is to block production as well.” Stéphane Hessel’s Indignez-vous! (Cry out!) is the most recent barometer of popular rage. In it Hessel, a 93-year-old veteran of the World War II Resistance against Nazism, exhorts today’s youth to wage a war of resistance against capitalism in the same way clandestine networks fought the fascists. The pamphlet has sold 600,000 copies so far.

And the entire continent has seen a cascade of passionate protests. In October, the prime minister of Iceland was pelted with eggs; a man drove a cement truck into the gates of the Irish Parliament to protest bank bailouts; and three million people in France participated in eight days of rebellion, blockading oil refineries and fuel depots until gas stations ran dry. In the following months, students in London smashed up the headquarters of Britain’s Conservative Party, and Greece was shut down by its seventh general strike of the year as protesters carried signs that read, “Let us not live as slaves!”

Now, inspired by the Arab people’s revolutionary spring, there are signs that the European continent is set to erupt. On May 15, tens of thousands of precarious workers, students and the unemployed marched in fifty cities in Spain before occupying Puerta del Sol, the central square in Madrid. The lesson of Tahrir was clearly on the minds of protestors. One organizer promised that if police try to “remove us we will sit down, everything will be peaceful, and if we are eventually dispersed we will come back tomorrow.”

—Micah White

Beijing

The cutting edge of capitalist nihilism.

by
Charles Humphrey

From Adbusters #95: The Philosophy Issue

Wang Ningde/Galerie Paris-Beijing

Wang Ningde/Galerie Paris-Beijing

An impenetrable gray haze so thick that the sun is but a dull red glow, a candle in the mist. Gas and electric motorcycles jerry-rigged with steel tubes and plastic film to shield would-be passengers from the wind and cold. Garbage strewn about the streets by daytime, gathered into piles and then lit for warmth at night. Street urchins with blank faces, shredded clothes and tattered shoes, eyes empty from drugs, despair and malnutrition. Women available for rock-bottom prices, bored faces on couches, watching television and smoking Zhongnanhai cigarettes under pink lights. They file their nails and prattle on in a scene that verges on the domestic, a far cry from the titillating theatrics of an Amsterdam alleyway and somehow more perverse for it. Signs and billboards promising breast implants, liposuction and abortions vastly outnumber those pushing soda pop and shaving cream. A radically altered vision of the mundane. Constant construction and deconstruction, rubble and rebar and empty plastic paint cans. Construction and reconstruction and deconstruction and renovation and antiquation occurring again and again at an ever-faster pace with no discernible beginning or end. The various “uctions” and “ations” creating such a conceptual blur that their distinctions collapse into mere “work.” The resulting disorder constantly reshaping the landscape of one’s experience, day in day out new fences are erected and penetrated, walls of corrugated steel painted blue prevent access to favorite shops, sidewalks are torn up and brick walls are built, destroyed and rebuilt in a matter of days with no apparent functional motive. A complete loss of any context or meaning, nothing but a frantic motion to create the illusion of movement, to hide the glaring truth that nothing is happening.

This is Beijing, 2010. Where have I seen this before? The sights are like some dream that I’ve had since childhood, an experience of the uncanny, a recollection at once comforting and terrifying. Where have I seen these street vendors, the umbrellas, the steam rising, the wrappers tossed in the rain-slick streets, the fluorescent lights reflected on them? Where have I felt the fear of official power, where even the university gate-guard dressed up and playing policeman, king of his anthill, is an enemy I am always trying to placate? When have I felt that anxiety that the fire inspector might be looking to turn a profit from his “safety inspection” of my concrete-block apartment? Why is this all so familiar?

And then it hit me. This is the end of the world. Beijing is ground zero. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real wrote that Americans were gripped by the sight of the twin towers collapsing because it was the real manifestation of something they’d experienced in their virtual lives countless times before. The action movie sequence of the plane and the explosion, the smoke and screams, the heroism and the mourning, they’d been experienced much the same in hundreds of variations. And now it dawns on me that what draws me to Beijing is the way the real crashes through, connecting with a virtual experience I’ve had time and time again. Beijing is the apocalypse I’ve seen in films like Children of Men, Blade Runner, Mad Max and others. Not an apocalypse of asteroids, lava and melting ice caps, no explosions and tremors but a psychic apocalypse, a collapse of order and reason driven by the very social logic meant to bring it about. An apocalypse that leaves a skeleton of social order intact and hives off individuals into their own private hell. This is the edge of the Capitalist Apocalypse, the final realization of the nightmares of modernity. Beijing is run by the logic of Reflective Reason warned against by Kierkegaard, an Orwellian nightmare populated by Nietzschean Last Men who can no longer even dare to dream of a Marxist, Leninist or, in the ultimate irony, even a Maoist social utopia. This fact is captured tragically in the story of a young boy who 30 years ago asked his mother, “Mom, when is Communism coming?” only to be slapped and scolded for asking such stupid (and politically dangerous) questions. Recently, the man, now over forty years of old, was comforting his dying mother, who on her deathbed in an overcrowded and poorly staffed public hospital, broke down in tears of despair at the scene she was witnessing as she left the world and asked, “Son, when is Communism coming?” China is often portrayed as a backward country that seeks to “catch up” to the West. The sad truth is, China is already far ahead of the curve in one major way – the Chinese have internalized the horrifying truth of basing social organization on a linear economic model of capitalist growth – there is no Messiah in global capitalism. There is no end, no hope, no dream, no purpose, just ever-greater motion without movement in any discernible direction. Development without progress, change without context, work without purpose. This is the end of our psychic world, the death of our stories, and Beijing is ground zero.

One can see the signs of the disintegration of categories of meaning on the streets and in daily life. The loss of distinction between development and regression, between growth and decay that is so clearly revealed in the unceasing construction and demolition and the rubble it produces, is replicated in every sphere of social life. The result is that as all conceptual categories collapse in on themselves, all meaning is lost and navigation through the waters of life becomes nigh impossible. What is crime when it is indistinguishable from the daily activities of businessmen, governmental officials and law enforcement? How can one maintain the criminal/law-abiding dichotomy when it is generally accepted that the logic of growth and profit dictate that everyone from the smallest shop-owner to the highest government official has an interest in stepping outside the rules in order to “develop the economy”? How can one maintain the distinction between sound parenting and child abuse when in the interest of pushing a child to greater academic success one enforces control over their every movement and decision through acts of physical and emotional violence? What is health and sickness when doctors gleefully respond to the slightest illness by carpet-bombing the system with every drug they can possibly sell to their patient?

The physical and social evidence of the collapse of meaning in Beijing are written on the psyches of anyone who has been working long enough to shed their childish illusions. Young minds are inseminated with state-crafted illusions from the Communist past, designed to temporarily insulate children from this reality, a psychic scaffolding to protect their integrity until the necessary programming is complete. Words like “harmony” and “the people” are sprinkled on every public statement to hide the decay at the heart of society. Despair is the default mode for most young professionals and university students today. A despair that is frequently expressed by my students who mentally check out of their classes, and by young, well-educated professional friends who must struggle fiercely to survive, while frequently breaking down and asking whoever will listen, often at a price, “What am I living for?” Students are forced into majors based on their parents’ whims and the offerings of their universities, submitted to rote learning 30 or more hours a week. Young professionals work to the point of exhaustion for less than a thousand dollars a month, living in tiny apartments run by quasi-criminal cartels of real-estate agencies with an oligopoly in the completely unregulated rental market. They pay five hundred dollars a month for rent, which is paid at least four months ahead, with no option to sublet, with one-month finders fees as well as a host of random fees the rental agency will try to trick and brow beat them into accepting. Most struggle to make ends meet while supporting aging parents. Their only hope is to learn the tricks of the trade, to cheat, swindle, extort and bribe their way to the top in order to attain some quality of life. It is the modern information economy version of the scene in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis where young Freder watches the masses of workers being fed into the jaws of the mechanical Moloch. A generation of young people that, if given a chance to breathe, might have provided positive influences in their communities, developed new ideas, been good parents or contributed to a better society, are being consumed ruthlessly and left as burned out, disease-wracked shells by their forties, more often than not reenacting their own psychic traumas upon the single child they are permitted. It is only going to get worse.

We in the West like to criticize China for these facts, to liken cities like Beijing to ant farms and Chinese people to inhuman robots. We like to accuse the Chinese government of withholding the rule of law, to blame them for the impoverishment of the Chinese spirit and eradication of five thousand years of Chinese culture. The reality is that the Chinese are merely very fast learners. Western societies have developed and imposed a model of social organization on the world that is devoid of the conceptual distinctions that are central to creating meaningful social and psychic content. A simple binary equation, a series of numerical pluses or minuses has been adopted as our central determinant of value, stability and meaning. We in the West have been fortunate enough to have amassed sufficient power and wealth in the past century to allow us until recently to largely insulate ourselves from the psychic impoverishment we have imposed on others. The Chinese, without this luxury, understood the true nature of our New World Order faster and better than any other nation. This is how China has become the site of the End of the World. This is not an “end” in the sense of termination or finishing point, but in the sense of realization, revelation, purpose. It is the manifestation of the unconscious dream of a capitalist system of social organization based entirely on the binary logic of financial growth. This is the World we have created, and this is its End, at once the termination of the old world of meaning and community and the anti-end, the beginning of a new world devoid of the stories and distinctions that provide the individual and collective life with meaning. Beijing is the End of the World, it is our vacuous purpose, it is the nightmare we have collectively embraced. Throughout the 20th century we dreamed of a future composed of ones and zeros, where man and machine could be one. Beijing is the End of the World not because China is the future, but because in the future we have chosen to pursue, we will all be Chinese.

Charles Humphrey is a 25-year-old Canadian living in Beijing, where he lectures, writes, studies Chinese and feeds an incurable addiction to Chinese martial arts.

Tactical Briefing

We have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it is coming apart at the seams. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance is scattered and incoherent. The global justice movement is a shadow of its former self. For the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain perpetual growth on a finite planet, it’s possible that in a generation or so capitalism will no longer exist. Faced with this prospect, people’s knee-jerk reaction is often fear. They cling to capitalism because they can’t imagine a better alternative.

How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine a better world?

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. To understand this situation, we have to realize that the last 30 years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus that creates and maintains hopelessness. At the root of this machine is global leaders’ obsession with ensuring that social movements do not appear to grow or flourish, that those who challenge existing power arrangements are never perceived to win. Maintaining this illusion requires armies, prisons, police and private security firms to create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity and despair. All these guns, surveillance cameras and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and produce nothing – they’re economic deadweights that are dragging the entire capitalist system down.

This hopelessness-generating apparatus is responsible for our recent financial freefalls and endless strings of bursting economic bubbles. It exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy our ability to envision an alternative future. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is money, and debt spirals out of control. What is debt? It’s imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future. Finance capital is, in turn, the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits. Once one assumes that capitalism will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one in which everyone is equally free to invest in the market. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.

Since the economic bubble was built on the future, its collapse made it seem like there was nothing left. This effect, however, is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice movement tells us anything, it is that the moment there appears to be any sort of opening the imagination springs forth. This is what effectively happened in the late ’90s when it looked for a moment like we might be moving toward a world at peace. The same thing has happened for the last 50 years in the US whenever it seems like peace might break out: a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatory democracy emerges. In the late ’50s it was the civil rights movement. In the late ’70s it was the anti-nuclear movement. More recently it happened on a planetary scale and challenged capitalism head-on. But when we were organizing the protests in Seattle in 1999 or at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings in DC in 2000, none of us dreamed that within a mere three or four years the World Trade Organization (WTO) process would collapse, “free trade” ideologies would be almost entirely discredited and new trade pacts like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would be defeated. The World Bank was hobbled and the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population was effectively destroyed.

But of course there’s another reason for all this. Nothing terrifies leaders, especially American leaders, as much as grassroots democracy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge, particularly one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action, the reaction is the same: the government makes immediate concessions (fine, you can have voting rights) and then starts revving up military tensions abroad. The movement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement, which is often far less democratically organized. The civil rights movement was followed by Vietnam, the anti-nuclear movement by proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the global justice movement by the War on Terror. We can now see the latter “war” for what it was: a declining power’s doomed effort to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative financial capitalism into a permanent global condition.

We are clearly on the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that our perceptions have been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda and we are no longer able to see them. Consider the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy. History has shown us that this impossible utopian dream simply “doesn’t work.” Thus capitalism, however unpleasant, is the only remaining option.

In fact, communism really just means any situation where people act according to this principle: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. This is, in fact, the way pretty much everyone acts if they are working together. If, for example, two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say “and what do I get for it?” This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply the principles of communism because they’re the only ones that really work. This is also the reason entire cities and countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters or economic collapse – markets and hierarchical chains of command become luxuries they can’t afford. The more creativity is required and the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be. That’s why even Republican computer engineers trying to develop new software ideas tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring (think production lines) that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are internally organized according to communist principles.

Communism is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism. It has become increasingly clear that it’s a rather disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better alternative, preferably one that does not systematically set us all at each others’ throats.

All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism, it also periodically falls apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again.

Those wishing to subvert the system have learned from bitter experience that we cannot place our faith in states. Instead, the last decade has seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid associations. They range from tiny cooperatives to vast anti-capitalist experiments, from occupied factories in Paraguay and Argentina to self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, from autonomous institutes in Korea to insurgent communities in Chiapas and Bolivia. These associations of landless peasants, urban squatters and neighborhood alliances spring up pretty much anywhere where state power and global capital seem to be temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity, many are not even aware of the others’ existence, but they are all marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least 80 different countries. We are at the point where we can begin to conceive of these cooperatives knitting together on a global level and creating a genuine insurgent civilization.

Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability that the system must be patched together in its pre-collapse form – this is why it became such an imperative on behalf of global governance to stamp them out (or at least ensure that no one knows about them). Becoming aware of alternatives allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. We realize we’re already communists when working on common projects, already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, already revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.

One might object: a revolution cannot confine itself to this. That’s true. In this respect, the great strategic debates are really just beginning. I’ll offer one suggestion though. For at least 5,000 years, before capitalism even existed, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to make relations fundamentally based on violence and inequality seem morally upright. When this trick no longer works everything explodes, as it is now. Debt has revealed itself as the greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of control. But debt also allows endless opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtors’ strike or debtors’ cartel. Perhaps so, but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions. Neighborhood by neighborhood we can pledge to support each other if we are driven from our homes. This power does not solely challenge regimes of debt, it challenges the moral foundation of capitalism. This power creates a new regime. After all, a debt is only a promise and the world abounds in broken promises. Think of the promise made to us by the state: if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs we will be provided with basic life security. Think of the promise made by capitalism: we can live like kings if we are willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another directly, without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking what sorts of promises do free men and women make one another and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

David Graeber is the author of Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire and Direct Action: An Ethnography.

Wake Up Temacans

Wake up Temacans. If you don’t act now your great-grandparents are going to rise from the dead and pull your feet at night.”

So says Alfonso, a man in his 70s who was born in Temacapulín, a tiny village in the highlands of Jalisco, Mexico. Lovingly called Temaca by its residents, the village is sheltered by a remarkable system of hills and ravines, which protect it from the region’s harsh weather. The yearly episodes of frost and hail that devastate neighboring harvests leave Temacan crops untouched. The locals say this is because of the good grace of the Virgin of the Remedies, their town patron, and the Cristo de la Peñita, a local rock formation that resembles Christ on the cross. Religion is at the center of peoples’ lives. Faith keeps them going above all else.

To the outside world the Temacan way of life may seem underdeveloped. The village doesn’t have paved roads, a supermarket, a movie theater, a drug store, a gas station or even cell phone reception. But Temacans do have spacious homes, patches of land to grow their own vegetables and corn, a school, a sporting field, a 250-year-old basilica and perhaps the cleanest tree-lined cobblestone streets in Mexico. The Rio Verde borders the town, providing families with an idyllic place to swim and fish.

This proximity to the river has made the utopian village a target.

If the National Water Commission (NWC) and the federal and state governments have their way, Temaca will no longer exist in 2013. It will be flooded, creating a reservoir to transfer water to the neighboring state of Guanajuato. The reservoir has been in the works for years, but it was only revealed in 2007 that three towns would be flooded: Acasico, Palamarejo and Temaca. The government initially told the residents that if the majority of them agreed to it, they would be relocated and compensated for their homes and property. When the townspeople said no, the government’s tone changed. They said that if the people did not go willingly, their land and homes would be expropriated and they would receive nothing. In Acasico and Palmarejo, fear turned into submission and most people agreed to leave. Temaca, however, is a different story.

The town’s opposition to the reservoir first became visible on its walls. A couple of years ago graffiti was foreign to Temaca, but suddenly the phrase, “no a la presa,” (no to the dam) appeared on every street corner and lamppost. Soon complicated signs were designed, printed and posted on every surface. Religious images appeared alongside with defiant messages, reflecting the Temacans’ strong belief that a higher power accompanies their fight.

We feel a grief so deep it is like constantly mourning a loved one,” says Isaura, one of the town matriarchs. She is 90 years old and doesn’t like to drive, but she got in her truck and went to eight neighboring towns to ask their mayors to sign a petition in opposition to the reservoir. She was successful in every instance. Isaura also filed the first successful appeal against the reservoir on the grounds of unconstitutionality. While her win is no guarantee, it will delay the building process. Attorneys working pro bono on the case plan to file 500 appeals, one for each Temacan.

The Temacans’ concern goes far beyond their individual homes; they see a heritage that needs to be preserved. The idea of flooding their basilica and their revered Christon the rock is nothing short of sacrilege. They are trying to get both declared National Cultural Heritage sites, which would offer them some legal protection. Archeologists have also found vestiges of human settlements in Temaca dating back to the 6th century and the villagers are trying to get support from universities to stop the loss of valuable historic artifacts.

Women are at the forefront of the fight. They spend the night before each protest preparing meals to share the next day. Every time government prospectors come to town to measure homes and calculate their value, a group of widows quietly lets the air out of their tires and writes “go away” on their windshields. Martha, a young mother of three, has simple reasons for wanting to save her town, “If I’m here in Temaca and I have no money, I can go to the store and get a kilo of tortillas on credit and my children will be fed. If I have to move to the city and go through difficult times, nobody will help me out.” She understands that by flooding their town the government will not only be taking away their property but their community and safety net – things that take generations to build and may prove irrevocable.

Reservoirs and dams are the largest public works projects in Mexico. What is really at stake for the government is not the lives of over one thousand people but access to the 800 million dollars allocated for the construction of the reservoir that would flood Temaca.

Far from resigning themselves to a devastating fate, Temacans continue to believe in their village and they show it by investing in the upkeep of their homes, opening new businesses and trying to attract tourists and weekend residents. The more threats they receive, the more encouraged they feel. The town with no internet access now has two websites to inform people of their impending annihilation. Young Temacan men who had been living in bigger cities for many years have come back to the town to join their families in the struggle. One of them, Gabriel, comfortingly tells his mother, “Don’t forget we have a plan Z. We will build a dike around the town if we have to.” Faith, hope and this unbreakable spirit just might save Temacans from the water.

  

Monica Lopez is the Editor-in-Chief of Mexico Design magazine.

  

Israel is the Opium of the People and Other Taboos

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“Why aren’t you as an Arab lady writing about Gaza?”
“Where are your columns about Gaza?”
“Say the Israelis are wrong!”

The messages started to arrive soon after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza killed close to 300 Palestinians. Implicit was the pressure to toe the party line, Hamas is good, Israel is bad. Say it, say it! Or else you’re not Arab enough, you’re not Muslim enough, you’re not enough.

But what to say about a conflict that for more than 60 years now has fed Arab and Israeli senses of victimhood and their respective demands to stop everything else we’re doing and pay attention to their fights because what’s the slaughter of anyone else – be they in Darfur, Congo or anywhere else – compared to their often avoidable bloodletting?

Hasn’t it all been said before? Has nothing been learned?

And then the suicide cyclist in Iraq made me snap and I had to write, not to take sides but to lament the moral bankruptcy that is born from the amnesia rife in the Middle East.

On Sunday, a man on a bicycle blew himself up in the middle of an anti-Israel demonstration in the Iraqi city of Mosul. The technique legitimized and blessed by clerics throughout the Arab world as a weapon against Israel had gone haywire and was used against Arabs protesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

That twisted and morbid full circle completed on the streets of Mosul can be captured only by paraphrasing Karl Marx – Israel is the opium of the people.

What else explains the collective amnesia on display this weekend in the Middle East?

Has Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni forgotten already that just last year she was close to ousting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for his handling of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon launched under very similar circumstances to those that preceded the bombardment of Gaza? And yet there she was making the rounds of U.S. Sunday news shows to explain why Israel had to act against the Muslim militant Hamas movement in power in Gaza.

Does Israel want to make heroes of Hamas in the way it did Hizbollah? What has been achieved from the blockade of Gaza except for suffering of civilians whose leaders care for them as little as Israel does?

Talking about Hizbollah and unwise leaders, has Hassan Nasrallah forgotten that while he rails against Egypt for aiding the blockade of Gaza that he lives in a country, Lebanon, keeps generations of Palestinian refugees in camps that serve as virtual jails?

And the demonstrators in Jordan and Lebanon? Who reminds them that in 1970, Jordan killed tens of thousands as it tried to control Palestinian groups based there, forcing the Palestine Liberation Army into Lebanon where in 1982, the Phalangists, Christian Lebanese militiamen, slaughtered 3,000 Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camp?

Not a single Phalangist has been held accountable for that massacre. An Israeli state inquiry in 1983 found Ariel Sharon, then defense minister, indirectly responsible for the killings at the refugee camps during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. But don’t hold your breath for an Arab inquiry. It is Israel that gives sense to our victimhood. The horrors we visit upon each other are irrelevant.

It is difficult to criticize Palestinians when so many have died this weekend but the Hamas rulers of Gaza are just the latest of their leaders to fail them. For those of us who long to separate religion from politics, Hamas has given the truth to the fear that Islamists care more about facing down Israel than taking care of their people. The Palestinians of Gaza are victims equally of Hamas and Israel.

Where was the anger when two Palestinian schoolgirls were killed in Gaza when Hamas rockets meant for Israel misfired, just a day before Israel’s bombardment?

As for my country of birth, Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak, in power for more than 27 years, has presided over a disastrous policy that on the one hand maintains a 1979 peace treaty his predecessor Anwar Sadat signed with Israel and on the other unleashes state-owned media fury at Israel that has fanned a near-hysterical hatred for the country among ordinary Egyptians.

Yes, Israel’s occupation of Arab land angers Egyptians but there is absolutely no space in Egyptian media, culture or intellectual circles for discussing Israel as anything but an enemy. And neither is there an attempt to forge it.

And now Mubarak, old, tired and out of new ideas, is reaping a policy that plays all sides against each other in an attempt to make his regime indispensable.

But my question to Egyptians and others across the region incensed at Israel is where is their anger at the human rights violations, torture, and oppression in their respective countries? If such large crowds turned out onto Arab capitals every week, they could’ve toppled their dictators years ago!

It is the ultimate dishonor to the memory of Palestinians killed this weekend to call for more violence. It has failed to deliver for 60 years.

We honor the dead by smashing through the region’s amnesia until we break through to the taboos and continue to smash. Talking to Hamas? Israel should do it if it will end the violence. Focusing on internal issues in each Arab country and ignoring the opium that is Israel? Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians et al should do it before their respective states fail for the sake of Palestine.

Palestinians still have no state. What a shame it would be for one Arab state after the other to fail in the name of Palestine.

_Mona Eltahawy is a columnist for Egypt’s Al Masry Al Youm and Qatar’s Al Arab. She is based in New York City.

www.monaeltahawy.com | www.monaeltahawy.com/blog

Finding Freedom

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After realizing that being a freedom fighter with the Karen National Union may not be the best way to bring peace to his country, a Burmese man explores the many facets of revolutionarynbsp;action.
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iFrom Adbusters #81/i