Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, published an article on October 29, 2013 in the New Statesman, ?How science is telling us all to revolt.?
The article mostly discusses a presentation given by a complex systems researcher, Brad Werner, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Werner’s presentation, ?Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism,? was considered to be the ?hit? of the affair. To be fair I think the first part of the title, ?Is Earth F**ked?? was the attention grabber that got the rears in the seats.
But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that ?earth-human systems? are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the ?are we f**ked? question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, ?More or less.?
To put another spin on Mr. Werner’s observations look at the chart above. If we were to break the known/assumed time of earth’s existence and evolutionary development into a clock, humankind has been here for about TWO MINUTES. In ONE MINUTE we have cut down half of all the forests and driven countless species into extinction.? So what Mr. Werner is telling us is that there is a highly probable chance that the next species driven to an extinction level event by humans are: Humans.
Mr. Werner offered a ray of hope:
Werner termed it ?resistance? ? movements of ?people or groups of people? who ?adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture?. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes ?environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.”
To put THIS into perspective, he did not call for politicians to take action, or for ?corporate leaders? to take responsibility, or even for ?science to save us,? as so many of us have hoped they might. No. The hope he sees is in ?resistance.? Another word for what he suggests is REVOLUTION.
Before I join the call for revolution I would like to say that there are rare moments of hope. Hope when former politicians, turned corporate hundred millionaires, call for reform. Al Gore, estimated net worth 1.7 million dollars in 1999 and north of 200 million dollars today, much of that from Apple stock options (no idea if Gore donated any of those proceeds to the thousands of unionized workers who lost manufacturing jobs when Apple switched to using slave labor) and his sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera (who makes their money from the sale of the carbon based fuels Gore now publicly speaks out against.) It’s all very confusing as to who ?the good guys? are.? Gore speaks out about ?income inequality? even as he collects his massive paychecks for being a ?man of the people.?
An excerpt from Gore’s speech at the Center for American Progress:
?Now we have, on the books of the large, public multinational energy companies, $7 trillion of subprime carbon assets. Their valuation is based on an assumption that is even more ridiculous and absurd than the assumption that these people that couldn’t make a down payment or monthly payments were good risks for home mortgages. The assumption is that those $7 trillion can be sold and burned. They will not be sold and burned. They cannot be sold and burned.
While I admire Vice President Gore for speaking some economic truth, that it is bad policy to allow Exxon and others to base their company valuations on the price of oil and gas still in the ground. That admiration is tempered by the sly way he slips in the old canard that sub-prime mortgages were the cause of the world wide banking crisis. ?They were not. It was the corruption involved in creating derivatives on those mortgages, on bundling those mortgages into AAA labeled investment securities WHILE also betting against those same investments the banks were peddling. Corruption caused the crisis.
So even though we may like Mr. Gore personally, I think it is fairly clear that change, nor change that happens quickly enough, is going to come from a man flying around the world in private jets collecting large checks from the very people destroying the planet he is calling upon us to save.
Which brings us back to revolution.
Chris Hedges in an article on Truthdig recently:
?As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.
Mr. Hedges correctly reminds us that revolution without a purpose generally leads to the same people being in power at the end as at the beginning. He doesn’t mention Egypt in his piece but it does come to mind. Those who consider themselves anarchists and ?true? no-government libertarians should remember the advice of the despicable Milton Friedman, ?In a time of crisis people tend to use whatever ideas are lying around. If those ideas are yours that is what gets used.? I have paraphrased but the spirit is accurate.? Just pulling down the old system without having some ?ideas lying around? in the public sphere is a recipe for misery and disaster.
Naomi Klein reports on scientists calling for radical change, Chris Hedges calls on us to change, even Al Gore points out that the current system isn’t going to work for much longer, and articles in The Guardian, point out that current thinking in economics no longer applies to reality. Aditya Chakrabortty in his piece on the 28th of October joins the call for rebellion and one of the most telling sentences in the piece where he is describing what he perceives to be true in the UK also describes our situation here in the US:
?One of the central facts of post-crash Britain is that the elites still hold power, but no longer command the credibility to wield it.
This only reinforces Chris Hedges position that we are in a totalitarian state, which only supports the position of Brad Werner that neither government nor industry shall save us, which supports this simple, but revolutionary, statement by Mr. Chakraortty.
The real problem that none of them come right out and addresses is that the elites in our society continually want a return to an economic style that can only be described as, ?the right of kings,? or ?laissez-faire,? or ?free market,? or some style of ?libertarianism.?? John Maynard Keynes thought he had buried this failed, racist, misogynistic, and most important to an economist, INEFFICIENT economic theory in the 1920?s. But Keynes is dead and here we are again fighting the ?right of kings? for our very survival.
The President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, just happens to be a classically trained economist. In a recent interview he went beyond calling the current system unfair or unequal or simply discussing income inequality. He declared the current system ?immoral.?
President Correa said in this interview:
They sacrifice their people for the sake of their Central Bank, which they look up to when making political decisions and defining their economic policies. The capital is trying to lay the whole burden on the shoulders of the ordinary citizens and get away with it.
Left-wing movements have been opposing imperialism for decades. But what is the imperialism of the 21st century exactly? It is loads of weapons, bombs, and guns and so on? No! Imperialism today is loads of dollars and all sorts of structures working towards subduing our countries. Among these structures are the arbitration courts. Through them, any transnational corporation can challenge any sovereign state, and these courts always serve the capital. How can we protect our nations from such abuse?
The USA itself is controlled by the transnational corporations. The level and scope of injustice that is going on today is such that it is simply impossible to understand how the mankind is letting it all happen. I believe that the main goal of the 21st century is to find a way to establish people’s control over the capital.
So we have the President of a Latin American country, who happens to also be an economist who is waving the flag and saying the system doesn’t work. All we need now in our fame obsessed society is some A/B level celebrity to pitch in with their opinion and we may have a real movement! Enter Russell Brand.
Russell Brand is an English comedian and actor that I’ve never really understood or found funny. He’s most famous here in the US for being married to Katy Perry for fourteen months. He’s also done voice work in the Despicable Me movies and did a remake of Arthur that was so bad Helen Mirren was forced to retire from acting and her twin sister Ellen has since taken all of her roles. That isn’t true but it was a horrible movie.
Mr. Brand recently was asked to edit an issue of New Statesman, a political magazine in England, and chose the subject of revolution. His editorial asking people not to vote and instead to rebel is one of the best written pieces of advice that I don’t agree with in years. But his logic and his reasoning are brilliant.
Brand says what Hedges is saying, that revolution is now our only hope to change a system where our elected leaders are completely apathetic to the needs and wants of those who elect them. We have a system where the three hundred richest people get to make all the rules and then everyone is surprised when the system turns out NOT to work. Basically, we would have similar problems if we took the three hundred poorest and asked them to make our laws. A society cannot function when it is led by those who do not consider themselves members of that society. The fact that our ?leaders? ignore what should be common sense is reason enough to justify the calls for revolution.
This is where those of us in the Western world find ourselves today, marketed to by corporations and political schools of thought ALL intent on maintaining the status quo. We are told to lust after the EXPENSIVE iPhone, the ?next? PlayStation, the latest style of jeans, to throw out the ?smoky eye? make-up of last season for the ?natural? shade of this one.
Our society and culture has collapsed while we have filled our houses with worthless possessions that will only become more worthless as time goes by. We are asked, in this country, by DEMOCRATS to give up more and more pieces of the ?social contract? to negotiate a ?grand bargain? that will guarantee poverty and misery for MOST of the country, while maintaining a powerful elite who consider us disposable, dispensable and powerless. To call for revolution when our local police forces are armed better and more powerfully than any of our soldiers in either of the World Wars is difficult.
Chris Hedges specifically has called for peaceful reform. The scientists that Klein interviewed repeatedly called for changes that WOULDN?T have been revolutionary if they had been done twenty or ten years ago but consider that now ONLY radical change can possibly save us. Al Gore has sold out but he still admits enough truth that should frighten those of us who don’t have his resources; which brings us up to the voice talent from HOP, Mr. Brand, calling for a true revolution.
In less than a week several different writers, scientists, politicians, and a comedian ALL called for revolutionary change. For those of you who know the story of the ?frog in the pot? let me be clear: The frog is in the pot, the water is boiling, and it is time to decide to jump into the unknown and see what happens or resign us to becoming soup.
Don’t be soup. Be revolting!
Edited by SS
