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by bardobailey » Thu Oct 10, 2013 2:56 am
by Carol Newquist » Thu Oct 10, 2013 7:28 am
by Carol Newquist » Thu Oct 10, 2013 12:21 pm
Rob@thepubliclibrary Says:
October 9th, 2013 at 7:07 am
John Constantino’s family says he long suffered from mental illness and his self-immolation on the National Mall was not political. They said he was a loving father and husband.
As to it being non-political, I don’t find that opinion very credible. Most suicides I’ve known have been private, efficient and relatively pain-free. Those I’ve shared confidence with in their own private despair have planned the same. Going to the National Mall and setting yourself on fire is a statement. Being mentally ill does not preclude one from making political statements.
This is Resistance. John Constantino’s death is a very loud statement, yet, few will hear it.
Now, the 30 people suffering in that Russian jail (for climbing an oil rig platform in the Arctic Sea) are finding out what real Resistance feels like – they are suffering and I’m sure some of them wish they had set themselves on fire on that rig – and burn the rig down with them – might have made a bigger statement. And, I’m sure some of them are wishing they had never gotten on the boat…
As stated by Bill McKibben, the fossil fuel industries are “Public Enemy Number One.” Oil is particularly vilified as evidenced by high-profile campaigns to stop pipelines, drilling, tankers, oil sands, and anything else to do with producing or transporting oil. Oil is responsible for 36% of global energy and is therefore the most important source of energy to support our civilization.
If it is the aim of environmentalists to stop fossil fuel production and use, then they are promoting a policy that would have disastrous consequences for human civilization and the environment. If we stopped using fossil fuel today, or by 2020 as Al Gore proposes, at least half the human population would perish (probably more, a lot more) in a very ugly sequence of events – war, famine, pestilence. The Solution, therefore, is damn near as bad as the disease. However, crashing industrial civilization and then having a majority of the humans die is the only chance Every Living Thing on Earth has – and that is what the fight is now about. The biggest problem logistically is having most humans die soon – because they leave behind this giant toxic infrastructure that, if left unattended, will become more and more toxic. So, the real question is: How do we get the humans to die AND get the toxic infrastructure safely dismantled. That should be our focus.
Job number one should be to decommission all nuclear power plants and safely store their hazardous materials. Job number two is to dismantle all nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, etc., and safely store their hazardous materials. Job number three is to dismantle chemical plants, refineries, military installations, etc.
John Constantino is a casualty of Industrial Civilization.
Robin Datta Says:
October 9th, 2013 at 7:25 pm
As stated by Bill McKibben, the fossil fuel industries are “Public Enemy Number One.”
In that case the real Public Enemy Number One is the global human population in excess of the population at the beginning of the Coal Age, around the 1820s – all the people in excess of one billion, who are the driving force behind today’s extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. No consumers: no demand – no profits.
Apparently jelly fish will survive:
And with good reason, too. They are the most advanced of the non-bilateria.
The bilateria /ˌbaɪləˈtɪəriə/ are all animals having a bilateral symmetry, i.e. they have a front and a back end, as well as an upside and downside. In contrast, radially symmetrical animals like jellyfish have a topside and downside, but no front and back. The bilateria are a subregnum (a major group) of animals, including the majority of phyla but not sponges, cnidarians, placozoans and ctenophores.
Some other non-bilateria such as sponges (Porifera = “pore-bearers”) have no differentiation of cellular lineages into different germinal layers; jellyfish have two germinal lineages, the ectoderm and the endoderm.
Humans have three layers:
Ectoderm: the skin and its appendages (hair follicles, sebaceous and sweat glands, the mammary glands), the arrectotes pilotum (the muscles of the hairs which make them stand on end), the central and peripheral nervous systems (including the retina and the posterior pituitary), the cornea, the lens, the smooth muscle of the iris, the ciliary body, the enamel of the teeth, the neural crest derivatives including cells of ganglia and Schwann cells (that produce myelin) of the peripheral nervous system, the pigment cells of the dermis; the muscles, connective tissue and bone of the branchial arches; suprarenal medulla and meninges, the nerve plexuses of the gut (myenteric – Auerbach’s – and submucous – Miessner’s – plexuses), lining of outer part of both ends of gut (anus and mouth linings, the proctodaeum and the stomodaeum) and the derivative of the latter, the anterior pituitary.
Mesoderm: produces the rest of the connective tissue and its derivatives, the musculoskeletal system, the bone marrow and blood-forming tissues and the formed elements of the blood. Part is segmented (the somites) that produce the vertebral column and the muscles and dermis innervated by the segmental nerves of the spinal cord. Most does not retain its segmented morphology and is referred to as the lateral plate mesoderm. It consists of two layers, the outer layer, the somatopleure, which separates from the inner layer, the splanchnopleure. The former forms the musculoskeletal and connective tissues of the limbs and trunk, while the latter forms the muscle and connective tissue of the visceral organs, and also the heart. The zone of separation becomes the coelom, which in humans (and mammals, but not all animals) separates into the pleural, pericardial, and peritoneal cavities and – in males – the cavity of the tunica vaginalis testis.
Another part, the intermediate mesoderm, forms the kidneys, ureters, bladder and the gonads.
Entoderm: Eustachian tubes, thymus, thyroid, parathyroid, epithelium of the tonsils, epithelium and glandular elements from the oesophagus to the rectum, the liver and the pancreas.
In the case of jellyfish, there are not only just two germinal layers, but the extreme degree of specialisation as above does not occur. Most cells can be moved from one place to another even from one layer to the other, and will change their form an function appropriately for their new location. This resilience (adaptability – redundancy in function) combined with (enough specialisation to permit) efficiency bodes well when times are a’changing.
by Carol Newquist » Thu Oct 10, 2013 1:23 pm
The biggest problem logistically is having most humans die soon – because they leave behind this giant toxic infrastructure that, if left unattended, will become more and more toxic. So, the real question is: How do we get the humans to die AND get the toxic infrastructure safely dismantled. That should be our focus.
In that case the real Public Enemy Number One is the global human population in excess of the population at the beginning of the Coal Age, around the 1820s – all the people in excess of one billion, who are the driving force behind today’s extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. No consumers: no demand – no profits.
by Carol Newquist » Sun Oct 13, 2013 10:51 am
It's not capitalism that demands centralization (nice as it may be for capitalism), it's technocracy. Technocracy is its own end, and just by its nature, it constantly strives for crystalline rational perfection -- a never-ending aim which can only be achieved efficiently through central management (or in capitalism's case, from the top?).
For human beings, this ultimately sucks. For rational perfection it's the only way.
by Truth4Youth » Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:42 am
by Carol Newquist » Mon Oct 14, 2013 8:12 am
But calling them sociopaths and implying they're crypto-fascists doesn't really contribute to a worthwhile criticism, imo.
by Carol Newquist » Mon Oct 14, 2013 11:38 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Mon Oct 14, 2013 11:49 am
Isn’t ‘Carol Newquist’ a pseudonym for the person who also goes under very many other pseudonyms, and who has trolled this blog on many occasions, usually known here as ‘morocco bama’ ?
by American Dream » Mon Oct 14, 2013 11:54 am
The future can only be a disaster, whether from the standpoint of the worker or that of the planet; yet the Left has been slow to adapt to this realization, instead gripping the wreckage of its past like a life preserver, pining for a future no different from what has already come and gone. For the liberal Left, as epitomized in the figure of Paul Krugman, the solution to the crisis is a debt-financed New Deal, reinstating the spending programs of the Roosevelt era along with the redistributive policies proffered by Ford and Keynes. The implicit platform of Krugmanism could have been borrowed from any other moment in the history of social democracy; it would be something like “Economic justice without revolution,” or “Capitalism with a human face.” For the labor-oriented Left, the solution is a revitalized union movement; this camp hopes to channel populist anger over austerity, finacialization, and offshoring (three sides of the same coin) into a renewed assault on U.S. employers, with the aim of reversing the decades-long stagnation of wages and social benefits. Both of these futures converge in their rosy estimation of the past; indeed, both would seem to converge on the same past, that of the 1930s, when, in the aftermath of the Crash, the New Deal emerged more or less simultaneously with Popular Front movements, defending and expanding the proletariat’s share of the economic pie.
Against the backdrop of many decades of neoliberal backlash, a bolstered welfare state, coupled with a united front of labor, would seem to offer an obvious starting-point for a renewed movement on the Left. Yet both groups of pro-welfare partisans presuppose a stable, unchanging economic system; that is, both the Krugmanites and the Popular Frontists hew to a cyclical, rather than a dynamic, model of capitalist development, according to which control over the system vacillates between two political camps, the Left and the Right, whose policies make the present either jubilant or miserable, either progressive or regressive. This is a worldview no art historian worth her salt could willingly endorse.
Anyone who has spent time poring over the material remains of past societies, including our own, knows that change is fundamental, not superficial; change is history. There is no artwork that does not cast its shadow on the one made immediately thereafter; likewise, there is no region of human invention that does not bear the imprint of its moment. For historians of art, Marx’s dictum, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” is a basic, implicit credo. Artists are forever imitating the past—indeed, imitation is the core of art—but form and content are never seamlessly transmitted. There is always a difference. One cannot simply do the past again.
History doesn’t unfold as a homeostatic cycle; neither does capitalism. The central insight of Marx’s Capital still obtains today: relations of production are internally dynamic, not static; the system propels itself from glory to crisis not because it is broken, but because this is the only way it is able to operate. The economy is founded upon, and cannot possibly function apart from, a fundamental, systemic contradiction: between capital’s requirement of human workers, whose surplus labor-time is the source of all profit, and, simultaneously, its requirement that the cost of this human element be diminished as much as possible in order to maintain a constant rate of profit relative to other firms. More simply put, capitalism functions by yoking an abstract thing, money, to a living thing, people, making the growth of the former a function of the latter. Profits are one expression of this moving contradiction; crisis is another, as when the over-accumulation of productive capacity leads the system into a downward spiral of declining profitability—or, what amounts to the same thing, when workers revolt, demanding better pay and working conditions. By the same token, the system is bound to reformat itself in response to its crises—or at least to try to reorganize itself, by moving the means of production from one place to another, changing the conditions under which goods are distributed and sold, and under which people are compelled to work; finding new ways of spurring consumption, devising new technologies to facilitate the exchange of money and information; altering the rules of international commerce and taxation; and all of this in an attempt to reignite the fires of growth. For if money does not move, it does not grow, and if it does not grow, then everything falls to shit.
The history of the Left is also part of this moving contradiction as well. Take social welfare, for example: although born of the Depression, the American welfare state in its current form was forged in the heat of the post-1945 economic boom, when explosive growth in the productivity of labor made profit-sharing schemes between workers and capitalists not only desirable, as a way of demobilizing powerful working-class insurrections, but also hugely profitable. By reinvesting a portion of its return in the reproduction of the workforce (increasing wages and benefits, providing unemployment insurance, pensions, education, subsidized home loans, and so on), capital was able to ensure a higher rate of compliance on the shop floor; this was the postwar bargain now heralded by socialists and liberals alike, a time when unions and employers walked happily hand in hand.
Between 1945 and 1970, or thereabouts, Keynesianism was the fundament of U.S. economic policy: by routing social welfare through the state apparatus, capital was able to infiltrate and restructure the “hidden abode” of the proletarian household, organizing families according to the needs of capital, such that each white male worker would come equipped with a home and a housewife, the basic elements of the nuclear family. But the prosperity of this suburb-dwelling proletariat was never built to last, much less to become generalized. Housing policy, especially the GI Bill, played a key role in this phase of the growth of the welfare state, which built up the American suburbs on the basis of government-subsidized mortgages—yet suburban housing was categorically denied to black workers, who were shunted en masse into a secondary market controlled by speculators and loan sharks. Race was one limit of the welfare state; gender was another: Soon after the end of the Second World War, factories began shedding female workers in droves, forcing single women back into the grip of the patriarchal system, with marriage and low-waged, ultra-precarious service work as the only viable options means for survival. The same applied to black workers, whose jobs in industry were always considered expandable, even by organized labor. For black women, the conditions of work and life have been most onerous of all, defined by rock-bottom wages and restricted to the most immiserating, least edifying sectors of the workforce. Only from the perspective of white men was the postwar boom a halcyon of high wages and redistributive generosity: whereas white breadwinners enjoyed nearly full employment during the Keynesian heyday, in black communities, unemployment was, and remains, intolerably high, often by a factor of two to one. Indeed, it would be little exaggeration to say that black Americans have only ever known austerity, the worst periods of unemployment for white workers (8-9%) equaling the best among black workers (currently, the unemployment rate for blacks is estimated at 13.8%, although the actual figure is likely higher).
Under the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, industrial policy pivoted to confront a mounting economic and social crisis, the result of a hard shift from labor-intensive to machine-intensive production, and, concomitantly, an upsurge of worker militancy in the factories and revolutionary activity in the slums. Unemployment and inflation were on the rise, and the factory rank-and-file were demanding not only better pay, but also, above all, a better life, free of the drudgery of the assembly line. The social fabric of the affluent society was fraying at the seams, revealing an impoverished, and increasingly desperate, underside. Veiled in the rhetoric of progressivism, the welfare policies of the 1960s did little more than to expand on the legislative platform of the New Deal, the nation’s previous crisis policy, providing income transfers, food stamps, and modest housing subsidies to a growing surplus population of the chronically poor. Yet it was not altruism or progress that legitimated the welfare programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but rather the fear of insurrection: for the ruling class, it was better that the U.S. government should be the agent of social welfare than the Black Panther Party and other such militant organizations. By the same token, the Great Society lasted only as long as there were credible challengers to capitalist rule; its decline tracked the rise of zero-tolerance policing and mass incarceration, surer solutions to the mounting unemployment crisis in the eyes of the nation’s elites. No longer requiring—and no longer willing to afford—highly-paid industrial workers and their stay-at-home wives, capital cheered on the dismantling of state-operated institutions of social reproduction, broadening the category of “welfare queen” to include all recipients of social entitlements, from public-sector employees to university students.
Even if we wanted to—and I hope to have shown, at least in a thumbnail view, why we should not want to—we could not relive the social-democratic past, nor could we have corrected its imbalances, broadening its benefit pool to include the proletariat in its entirety, from women and minorities to the homeless and terminally unemployed. Welfare was never a right, it was merely a concession, and the force that won it, the labor movement, has since exited the historical stage. Austerity is here to stay, not because the Left failed to parry the thrust from the Right, but because it was structurally unable to do so; the back of the organized labor was broken the moment capital decided to relocate labor-intensive production offshore; from that point forward, it was no longer necessary to appease striking workers or ghetto rebels, since production could simply be shifted elsewhere—even the threat of relocation was sufficient to demobilize the unions. The legion of jobs that vanished from American shores, reappearing at larger scale in the newly urbanized eastern coast of central and southeast Asia, first in Hong Kong and Taiwan, later in mainland China, and now Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and potentially even Burma—these jobs will never return to their point of origin. Like austerity, offshoring is the rule, not the exception.
From this survey of the recent past, we can expect that the future will resemble what preceded it, only it will suck even more, and we will like it even less. At present, the percentage of the world’s human population required as labor-power is declining in tandem with the state’s investment in human reproduction; in other words, firms are less and less willing to invest in public, as opposed to private, social infrastructure, from healthcare and schools to telecommunications networks and mass transit—the very infrastructure which makes the reproduction of a healthy, socialized workforce possible. At the same time, growing populations of terminally jobless workers, especially young workers, are already pushing the limits of governability; it is no accident that the security, prison, and private defense industries are expanding as the rest of the economy stagnates. Riots are inevitable. Governments will wobble, though probably not in the centers of capitalist accumulation. All the action seems to be on the periphery, from the ongoing conflagrations of the Arab Spring to the rise of Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-Nazi party. For those of us dwelling in the capitalist heartlands, our access to the public sector is likely to shrink even further; increasingly, we will be forced to reproduce ourselves privately, organizing our own means of existence on a makeshift, pay-as-you-go model—scraping together the cost of a cell phone and rent through a mixture of odd jobs, loans, and other ad-hoc schemes. Meanwhile, our cities will become more and more the provinces of a Bloomberg elite, whose Instagrammable decor stands in appalling contrast to the capital-poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods beyond the pale. Against this backdrop, participation will increasingly be raised as the central demand of social movements and urban struggles; people feel disenfranchised; they don’t care about this or that policy, they want to be recognized, to have a stake in the decision-making process. They want to matter, to be taken seriously, to be listened to in earnest. Already, the system has proven unable to disguise its indifference to the majority of its subjects. Yet indifference is not the same thing as carte blanche: capital may be unwilling to fund infrastructural improvements to the world’s slums and shantytowns, but it has no intention of letting these populations devolve into a viable counter-power. In collusion with the culture industry, police violence holds peripheral communities in a state of living death: by flooding the ghetto with personal electronics and bottom-dollar entertainment, capital imprints its human remainder with the mark of its own redundancy, making it impossible to forget how little one’s life counts in the eyes of the powerful. If working-class culture was woven from bonds of unconditional solidarity, the culture of austerity is characterized by the opposite: unmotivated cruelty.
This is a gloomy picture indeed; but then, what use is optimism if there is no darkness? To say that crisis is a permanent, ineradicable condition of capitalism is merely to observe the obvious: that things are getting worse, not better, for the vast majority of the world’s population. But what would betterment look like, were it not a redux of the welfare state, or a second coming of the Popular Front? What would the Left look like “with no future,” as T.J. Clark recently put it—and also, we might add, with no past?
For a long time, it was impossible to speak of communism except in the future tense, as a state of classless society to be installed after the full course of socialist revolution had been run. But today, the conditions under which workers are compelled to struggle have changed considerably; increasingly, social movements have replaced the traditional organs of the Left, replacing the Fordist model of Party or trade-union bureaucracy with the autonomist model of the self-organizing collective. In all the major social movements of the past decade, the pursuit of autonomy from any and all political mediators has been a constitutive feature; the Argentine slogan, “Que se vayan todos,” or “They all have to go,” deployed during the riots of December 2001, captures this spirit well. In the past two years alone, a spate of doggedly autonomous movements has arisen around the world in response to austerity, privatization, and neoliberalism: the Spanish “movement of the squares,” the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and now the Turkish summer, all share a fundamental disgust with establishment politics, including the establishment Left. Though these movements are often faulted for failing to propose specific policies or demands, this should be seen as an index of their strength; for they have learned what many on the Left are loath to admit, that capital cannot be fought piecemeal, issue by issue, petition by petition, one rotten election after the other. Everything would have to change for anything to change. Communism is another name for this conundrum: everything has to change, but unless we remove capital from the equation, nothing can change; there will still be accumulation, exploitation, classes, crisis, the security state, privatization, unemployment, ghettoization, financialization, environmental disaster, violence in the street and in the home—all the sotted miseries of a system that is misery.
Is this an argument for autonomy? Autonomy sounds like a great idea: We don’t need the politicians, we can run things ourselves; all we need are cellphones, email, Facebook, Twitter, and a bit of luck. Autonomy was once the goal of rebels, from wildcat strikers to counter-cultural deviants; to refuse the political and cultural mediations proffered by the establishment parties and the entertainment industry was once tantamount to self-imposed social exile. Since the outbreak of economic crisis in the early 1970s, however, autonomous culture, like autonomist politics, has moved to the center; now, everyone purports to do their own thing—to curate their own playlists, to self-manage their own version of the news, to be their own person (aided by a few algorithms, we might add). Herein lies the problem: we seek autonomy in a system that continues to dominate even those for whom it has no use. Autonomy means little when living still means laboring, and when the value of things is still correlated to the standard of labor-time. So long as capital continues to exist, we will only be able to get away with the alternatives it permits us; every attempt at creating an alternative economy alongside capital will ultimately hit the wall of the possible; time-banking, urban farming, bank-to-the-land communitarianism, these are well and good, but they are merelyprojects, not movements, and must therefore obey the same rules governing all other forms of economic activity.
I promised to discuss two things in this talk, “communism,” and how to get there. Here is the answer: Scale matters when you’re trying to bring down an economic order; changing everything means gathering together many, many people. This is another reason why social movements like Occupy should not be taken lightly; more than anything else, they’ve proved capable of rallying many thousands together in the streets. But the point cannot be to force revolution on these movements as a content; in other words, it matters little whether protesters say they want revolution, the question is always whether they are doing revolution, whether the measures they take in the heat of the moment aid or abet the ruling order. For example: Does a movement support or negate the laws of property and private ownership? Does it accept or refuse the money economy? Does it propose labor as the solution or the problem? Does it fraternize with or antagonize the forces of order, i.e. the police and the army? Does it admit or repulse the homeless and jobless and infirm? Is the movement led by men? Is the movement white? Is it straight? Is it reproduced by the unremunerated labor of women, or is its reproduction public and collective? Does it treat the issue of its own reproduction, its own continued existence as a movement, as a private matter or as a political matter? If the latter, does it respect the sanctity of the family, the de facto sphere of private reproduction, or does it inveigh against patriarchy, abolishing private reproduction and expropriating private wealth? Does it respect the sanctity of capitalistownership, including factories, farms, warehouses, mills, docks, sweatshops, hospitals, apartment complexes, and on and on—and if not, in what manner does it call workers and tenants to its side? Does it offer slogans only, or does it rush in bearing bread and wine and song? Does it leave the infrastructure of the city intact or does it dismantle the machinery of urban capital, tearing up and ripping down whatever is contrary to the needs of the movement? Does it attack or defend the political and administrative systems of the city, region, or nation? Is the revolution content with the veneer of autonomy, or does it smash the seat of enemy power? Does the revolution arm itself?
by Carol Newquist » Mon Oct 14, 2013 2:15 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Mon Oct 14, 2013 11:49 am wrote:Looking forward to some fucking baffling sociology, then.
Via: http://guymcpherson.com/2013/10/present ... ent-100655Isn’t ‘Carol Newquist’ a pseudonym for the person who also goes under very many other pseudonyms, and who has trolled this blog on many occasions, usually known here as ‘morocco bama’ ?
ulvfugl Says:
October 14th, 2013 at 5:31 am
@ bradhp
Some might be interested in forum exchange starting about here:
Isn’t ‘Carol Newquist’ a pseudonym for the person who also goes under very many other pseudonyms, and who has trolled this blog on many occasions, usually known here as ‘morocco bama’ ?
How Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness
by Carol Newquist » Mon Oct 14, 2013 3:38 pm
The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, “This is jessamine, this violet, this rose.”
But at last Dahoum drew me: “Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all,” and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it appeared to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. “This,” they told me, “is the best; it has no taste.” My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and god would move upon the face of those waters. On such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell in Damascus. The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness time the sea shall be raised once more.
by Carol Newquist » Mon Oct 14, 2013 4:46 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:39 pm
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