Category: class war

At the conclusion of my last blog on the British riots/uprisings, I warned that determined organizing would be necessary in order to avoid the imposition of yet another round of popular authoritarianism. Unfortunately, this comment turned out to be even more prescient than I expected.

In the wake of the disturbances, PM David Cameron has gone on the offensive against what he represents as a “slow-motion moral collapse” across Britain in recent generations. Rather than speaking about the moral collapse represented by the greedy bankers of the financial crisis of 2008 or the sleazy corrupt politicians of the Murdoch phone hacking scandal, of course, Cameron is talking about what the Daily Mail called the “nihilistic and feral teenagers” who shocked Britain last week.

In a brilliant response to this hypocritical moralism, David Harvey points out that such language has deep roots, having been applied by property owners to the members of the Paris Commune in the nineteenth century. Living, as we do, in a “political economy of mass dispossession,” what is there, Harvey asks, to distinguish the rioters from the robbers and pirates who occupy the seats of power except the relatively humble scale of their looting?

What we’re seeing in shockingly sweeping pronouncements such as those of David Cameron’s about “some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged, sometimes even incentivized, by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralized” is a struggle over signification. Cameron and his allies must frame the looters as hooligans in order to impose a fresh round of popular authoritarianism in Britain.

Such authoritarianism is already being implemented on the ground. Crowd control measures proposed by Cameron’s government include the use of water cannons, the deployment of the military, and the hiring of American supercops to crack down on unrest. Even more troubling is the use of round-the-clock courts to impose harsh jail terms on rioters and plans to evict rioters from public housing and to end their state benefits. Steps to implement the latter policy have already been taken by local housing authorities, with the families of young men who have not yet been convicted of rioting being served with eviction notices.

This new round of popular authoritarianism hasn’t come out of nowhere. Last weekend I saw Attack the Block, Joe Cornish’s film about a group of teenage boys in a housing estate in South London that is under attack by space aliens. The timing of the film’s release in the U.S. was uncanny. As the film stills attacked to this blog suggest, Attack the Block conjures up precisely the fears of urban mayhem and gang violence that are central elements in the current popular authoritarian backlash unfolding in Britain today, but then dismantles and inverts them in a brilliantly anti-racist manner.

The film begins with a gang of multi-racial kids led by an apparently thuggish lad named Moses mugging a young white woman named Sam. While the mugging is taking place, a nearby car explodes into flames. Turns out an alien has just crash landed. Moses investigates and ends up getting into a fight with the alien. True to (stereotypical) form, he smashes its head in. Of course, this alien is a female, and her carcass ends up attracting a horde of far more lethal male aliens. Moses and his mates spend the rest of the film battling these feral monsters, struggling to defend themselves and the other residents of the apartment block from the marauding aliens.

Much of Attack the Block is standard thriller fare of roller coaster style scares and fight scenes. But the film does take the predicament of Moses and his mates seriously. It shows them as genuinely lost, abandoned or, worse still, manipulated by the few adults they encounter and starved for meaningful role models. They are shown to genuinely think of themselves as local defenders, picking only on those they recognize as outsiders and trying to defend their turf and the people they care about against all odds. In one particularly poignant moment, Moses speculates that the government has sent the aliens. First they sent drugs, he says, then they sent guns, now they’re sending aliens to kill us. We’re not killing one another fast enough, so they want to speed up the process, Moses comments.

Despite its many flaws – it almost totally ignores the perspective of young women living in council estates in Britain, for example – Attack the Block does a far better job of imaging what life must feel like to young men growing up at the end of thirty years of neo-liberal austerity in Britain than any of the pronouncements of political leaders today. Whether or not one agrees with its anti-racist celebration of Moses and his friends, the film gives the lie to ideas that the summer riots of 2011 came out of nowhere. Attack the Block shows that these disturbances emerged out of and in response to festering conditions of deprivation that were an open secret in Britain long before the riots/uprisings.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD0gm7dHKKc]

From August 20th to September 3rd, a massive demonstration will take place in Washington, D.C. to protest the planned Keystone XL Pipeline, which is slated to bring tar sands oil all the way from Canada to the refineries along the TX gulf coast.  Bill McKibben has described this as an action to defuse the largest carbon bomb in North America.

Looks like fall is going to be a season of discontent.  A series of powerful videos have recently been posted by activists who plan to attend a demonstration in October 2011 to protest our current state of militarized austerity, which of course also has an incredibly destructive effect on the environment.  Journalist Chris Hedges’ explanation of why he plans to attend this event and engage in civil disobedience is particularly powerful, and also serves as a useful explanation for why one might protest the Keystone XL pipeline later this month.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaCufTW9ID4&feature=player_embedded]

Hedges’ video is one of many powerful pieces that articulate the need for nonviolent direct action at this crucial moment in the struggle for climate justice.  It’s a hard-hitting critique of capitalism’s insatiable need to expand, and, in doing so, to consume the planet.  This is scary stuff, and Hedges delivers his indictment in a pretty dour manner.

Perhaps, in addition to such searing indictments, what the Climate Justice Movement also needs is a bit of humor.  After all, we need to win hearts and minds as well as engage in uncompromising analysis.  In this vein, it might be useful to juxtapose Robert Newman’s brilliant and funny History of Oil with Hedges’s video:

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5267640865741878159#docid=-7287292702670162157]

The conflagration currently consuming London and other cities in the English Midlands is generating much heated debate. Little of this commentary demonstrates much of a sense of history.

Authorities such as Prime Minister David Cameron and London mayor Boris Johnson have, for example, been quick to condemn what they and significant segments of the mainstream British media represent as the wanton lawlessness of the ‘rioters.’ Metropolitan Police commander Adrian Hanstock condemned the riots as “absolutely unacceptable” on August 7, saying that a peaceful demonstration had been hijacked by a small number of “criminal elements” using it for their own gain. Racial and class stereotypes about the character of the rioters are not so carefully hidden behind these denunciations.

In the face of these stereotypes, it’s worth remembering that the riots began on Saturday following a nonviolent community demonstration outside a Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) station in the North London neighborhood of Tottenham. This demonstration was organized to demand justice following the death of Mark Duggan, a young Black Briton shot by the police during a planned operation. The London police initially reported that Duggan had fired on them, but subsequent reports by the Independent Police Complaints Commission have revealed that a bullet lodged in a police radio was in fact issued by the Metropolitan Police Service.

The killing of Duggan took place within the context of Operation Trident, a special arm of the MPS established in 1998 to investigate gun crime in London’s black communities. More recently, the MPS launched Operation Razorback in order to crack down on “troublemakers” planning to attend this year’s carnival in Notting Hill. As British activist Darcus Howe explained in a recent interview, these police operations come on top of a broader transformation in police-community relations facilitated by the war on terror that has allowed the police to engage in unimpeded stop, search, and arrest operations in Britain’s Black communities.

Despite the fact that most British police do not carry guns, being arrested in the UK is no joke. As Caroline Davies reported in an article earlier this year, 333 people have died in or following police custody in the UK over the last eleven years; not a single member of the police has been convicted for any of these deaths.

This pattern of police dragnets in Black communities has deep historical roots. As I discuss in my book Mongrel Nation, Black communities were targeted during the 1970s and 1980s by very similar special operations. In 1981, for example, Operation Swamp deployed huge numbers of police into the predominantly Black neighborhood of Brixton in South London. Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government oversaw the revival of Victorian “sus” laws that allowed police to detain anyone who they suspected might be either breaking or about to break the law. Not surprisingly, young Black men were disproportionately targeted, and a significant number of deaths in police custody ensued. In 1981, riots broke out in Brixton and quickly spread to Black, Asian, and white working class neighborhoods of cities such as Birmingham and Manchester.

Exactly the same pattern is repeating itself today. Given this fact, it’s worth remembering how these uprisings were framed at the time. The most trenchant account of urban unrest of the time, Policing the Crisis, suggested that urban “criminality” needed to be placed in the context of the organic crisis of the British state and society. For Stuart Hall and his fellow contributors, public fears about “mugging” (which anticipated and legitimated draconian tactics such as Operation Swamp that sparked the Brixton riots) were a moral panic that condensed much broader fears and redirected those fears onto the scapegoated figure of the “immigrant.” For the contributors to Policing the Crisis, that is, fears about crime helped authorities contain a much broader crisis in Britain.

What was the nature of this crisis? By the 1970s, the economic boom of the post-World War II years had played itself out. Rates of profit were sagging in the industrialized economies of North America and Western Europe. In addition, the 1960s had seen broad criticism of the hollow materialism of the “affluent society” constructed during the consumer-driven boom of preceding decades. The result was what Hall and his colleagues, drawing on the theories of Antonio Gramsci, called an organic crisis: a breakdown that cut across all segments of society, from the economic “base” to the cultural “superstructure.”

In response to these interwoven economic and ideological crises, elites in Britain, the United States, and other developed countries gradually cobbled together the hegemonic project we now know as neo-liberalism. The lineaments of neo-liberalism of course included smashing institutions of working class power, shrinking and/or privatizing the redistributive arm of the state, and beefing up the state’s security apparatus. Hall and his colleagues called this approach popular authoritarianism.

A key element of popular authoritarianism, according to Policing the Crisis, was pinning the cause of the organic crisis on the figure of Black immigrant. Black communities had of course been hyper-exploited and, in tandem, economically marginalized for decades in Britain. Nevertheless, the underground economies that developed as a result were taken out of context and classified as criminal in a process that tended to pathologize entire communities and to treat criminality as a purely racial issue. Policing the Crisis elaborates a theory of Britain’s Black communities as part of an international surplus labor population whose outsider status allowed them to be demonized by British authorities in order to explain away their inability to establish a socially and economically just society. Both the Tories and the Labour Party cooperated in this scapegoating of Britain’s Black population, as a survey of the increasingly racialized elements of immigration legislation demonstrates. This sordid history of caving in to the extreme racial posturing of the Right makes much of the hand-wringing in Europe following the recent murderous rampage of Norwegian racialist Anders Breivik hypocritical at best.

Policing the Crisis remains relevant today. As Operation Trident and Razorback suggest, Black communities in Britain are still subject to heavy, racially targeted policing tactics. Despite the admission of institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police Service in the wake of the investigation of the killing of Stephen Lawrence in 1999, police still operate with total impunity. Finally, authority figures continue to discuss criminality without any reference to the context of austerity and draconian cutbacks in the redistributive arm of the state that has prevailed for the last three decades, and that has intensified to an unprecedented level under the current Tory government.

The uprisings in London and other parts of Britain draw attention to these injustices, just as the Brixton uprising did several decades ago. Sustained organizing, in the media and on the ground, will be necessary in order to prevent the imposition of yet another round of popular authoritarianism in response to these uprisings.

The news today carried tidings of another huge setback for working people in the U.S.  The legislature in New Jersey, one of the most heavily Democratic and pro-union states in the country, has passed a bill rolling back benefits such as pension plans for 750,000 state workers and retirees.  Passage of this legislation, which is sure to be signed into law by New Jersey’s conservative governor, is a huge victory for the Right in the U.S.

There’s a strong thread linking this latest defeat for American public-sector workers and recent posts on the Social Text blog that I help edit concerning the campaign to dismantle unions in Wisconsin and the imposition of structural adjustment policies in exchange for a bailout in Greece.  That thread is austerity.

Elites around the world have decided to deal with the fiscal crisis of the state produced by the latest downturn in the capitalist system by raiding and in effect further dismantling the tottering remnants of the social democratic state, and, along with it, the rump of the mass middle class.

As Anne McClintock explains in her blog posting on Wisconsin, this is a nationally coordinated strategy by the Right rather than an ad hoc response to conditions on the ground.  And, as Costas Panayotakis’s blog on Greece demonstrates, it is a strategy common to elites across much of the Western world.

But this politics of austerity will inevitably intensify rather than ameliorate the current crisis.

First of all, public employees did not cause the current economic crisis.  The crash brought on by shady dealings in subprime mortgages and the many arcane financial tools invented to facilitate rampant speculation by bond traders had absolutely nothing to do with teachers, clerks, and other state employees in places like Wisconsin, Trenton, and Athens.

And pretty much everybody knows this.  So the austerity policies being imposed on public employees and their unions by the Right don’t just create moral hazard; they are also morally repugnant, and are likely to intensify the crisis, turning it into what Antonio Gramsci called an organic crisis, in which the economic contradictions of capitalism provoke thoroughgoing political and cultural crises.  In this case, the organic crisis is likely to create a political landscape increasingly riven with conflict.  The Right’s austerity policies perhaps gain short-term legitimation through arguments that pit workers in the insecure private sector against those in the public sector (who supposedly enjoy unfair perquisites), but such divisive ideology is guaranteed to polarize the political sphere in the long term.

In addition, these policies make no sense in economic terms.  As Costas Panayotakis notes in his blog about Greece, dismantling the remnants of the middle class is a sure-fire way to produce even deeper economic problems, since it is through mass consumption that 20th and early 21st century capitalism produces the three percent compound rate of growth it needs.  The Right uses the same tired arguments from the Reagan era about how we cannot raise taxes during a time of economic trouble, but it is not the rich and the mega-rich who fuel capitalism.  Their purchases of luxury goods are a relatively small segment of any modern economy.

So we can expect an intensification of the economic crisis, and, in tandem, an exacerbation of the naked class warfare of the last three years.

Welcome to the organic crisis.

Yesterday I saw Allan Sekula and Noel Burch’s powerful film The Forgotten Space.  The idea behind the film is that the sea is a space which we have come to see as nothing other than a blank surface across which vast quantities of goods can be transported in nondescript shipping containers. If we once revered the sea as a consumer of souls, today we are killing it through acidifying carbon emissions from the thousands of gigantic container ships that ply the waters of the world.

Sekula and Burch’s film offers a potent series of perspectives on the toll taken by neoliberal globalization by looking at a series of port cities: Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Bilbao. Through interviews and haunting vignettes in each of these maritime sites and their hinterlands, Sekula and Burch show how containerization has facilitated the globalization of production while also dismantling unionized labor forces in the developed world.  The result is been sweeping generation of what Zygmunt Bauman calls wasted humanity: people and places for whom the neoliberal economy no longer has any practical use.

At the same time, the “flag of convenience” rule on the high seas has meant that shipping companies can charter their boats out of highly impoverished countries, and then staff them with an ill paid and eminently disposable labor force from underdeveloped nations such as the Philippines.

The Forgotten Space offers a powerful instance of what Fredric Jameson, in his well-known essay on Postmodernism, calls cognitive mapping.  By literally traversing the maritime networks that link together the contemporary consumer economy, Sekula and Burch help viewers understand the toll taken on communities and individuals by today’s global economy.

The film can at times feel crushing.  We are repeatedly exposed to images of gigantism and heedless development that dwarf individual experience and even cognition, not to mention political organizing.  On the other hand, Sekula and Burch are careful to include instances of resilience.  So we see workers around the world finding ways to retain a sense of individual dignity and collective identity despite the often grueling conditions under which they work.

I found the filmmakers’ interview with Chinese economist Minqi Li particularly powerful.  Li, the author of The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, argues that the integration of China’s vast peasantry into the world proletariat may have given capital the upper hand for the moment by disorganizing global labor, but in the long term this strategy will spell the death of capitalism since the Chinese working class will inevitably grow more organized and more assertive.  The rub, of course, is that in the not-so-long term we are likely to all be dead given the quickening onset of climate change.  Nonetheless, the filmmakers supplement this anodyne theoretical point with heart-rending examples of human resiliency and fragility in the face of the neoliberal global economy.

During the question and answer session that followed the screening, Sekula commented that his film has been refused by a whole series of international film festivals, including the Tribeca film festival here in NYC and the Sundance festival.  This strikes me as a real crime, although one that is not so surprising given the radical message it embodies.

Here’s a trailer for The Forgotten Space:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/14987749]

India has had 55 million people displaced by large dams built since Independence.  Medha Patkar is one of the founders of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, an organization that spearheads popular resistance against these displacements. The images that accompany this live blog of the conversation between Patkar and David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, show satyagrahis, demonstrators who remained on their land as the dam waters slowly rose, inundating villages and threatening protests with a watery grave.  This conversation between the two was moderated by Biju Mathew, Associate Professor at Rider University.

Biju Mathew (BM): This is a conversation that’s been waiting to happen for many years.  Both of our speakers today have played key roles in challenging neoliberalism for the last several decades.  I want to open with the issue of land.  Land didn’t seem to be an issue in the immediate postcolonial period, but began to be more important in the 1980s.

Medha Patkar (MP): It’s a great pleasure to be part of this conversation with Professor Harvey, who has played such an important role in struggles here.  Our struggles in India are no longer isolated but are part of a broader set of struggles around the globe.  Land has become a key issue for both neoliberal capitalism and for people’s movements.  British imperialists passed Land Acquisition Act of 1894; this same act is used to take over land of indigenous and rural peoples today in the name of the common good.  What is this common good?  If a piece of land is acquire by this act, then everything attached to the land – the surface water, the mountains, the fisheries, minerals, etc – are acquired along with that land.  So it’s really about commodifying the property, and then legitimizing the take-over using juridical means, and then killing the people who live on the land.  This take over is done in the name of progress.  Multinational corporations come with one kind of capital – market capital – and say that their capital is more important than natural capital of rural peoples.  Recent transformation of the Land Acquisition Act during the last three parliaments is to include defense, education, and other “infrastructural” projects.  So is 70% of the land is purchased, the other 30% passes automatically into private hands.

David Harvey (DH): It’s a great inspiration to be here with you.  And it’s also great to be in this space, so close to Wall Street.  We need more spaces like this – we need to surround Wall Street like the Maoists would advocate.  But let me begin by talking about land issue.  Dominant economic theory ignores land issues, focusing instead on macro-economic theory.  This carries over into Marxism, which ignores land-grabs.  Much of my work has been about rescuing this notion.  It turns out that the bourgeoisie has made more money out of land speculation than they have out of industrial production.  That’s particularly true today, when there’s a financial crisis and there’s nowhere for capital to go.  So a dominant strategy to deal with this crisis is to engage in land grabs: examples include Africa and internal Chinese affairs.  Another example is the proliferation of soy bean plantations in Latin America, which is part of agribusiness networks with China.  Such land-grabs are about trying to find secure sources of profitability.  One of theses I’m looking at right now is the idea that capital has run out of options for profitable production, and that the capitalist class is therefore trying to live the rest of its life as rentiers: land-owners, IPRs, etc.  So land-grabs are not just fortuitous, but are the product of a particular phase of capitalism in which shift into land is happening.  We’ve seen this before, for example when capital shifted into land and property markets after 1999 crash of dot.com bubble.  One economy that’s going strong right now is China: property prices have increased by more than 800% over last five years there.  Speculation in housing and land are crucial to what’s happening in China and elsewhere in capitalist system.  This connects with the economy of dispossession.  If land is going to become more significant, then you have to dispossess people residing on the land.  This has characterized India after neoliberal turn, but similar things are happening in Africa.  Indian boom is not one for the masses, but for a small elite.

BM: I want to go back to the question of law that you both brought up, and I’d like David to talk a little about the history of eminent domain in accumulation by dispossession or primitive accumulation.  To Medha, I’d ask you to point to both urban and rural cases, since you’ve been active with Garbacha Andolan.

DH: Eminent domain is simply taking over private land in the name of the public good.  But to be honest, I don’t think that this is the problem.  I wouldn’t mind using eminent domain down Park Avenue.  The issue is how it works.  When I worked at Johns Hopkins, the university was planning to expand.  Their trick was to use a subsidiary corporation to buy up properties around the university and then just board them up.  They could then argue that these areas were run down, and could use eminent domain to kick the rest of the people in the neighborhood out.  So eminent domain comes at the end of a broader process of destruction and displacement.

MP: When the land, the life-supporting matrix, in the hands of the so-called poor, who are rich in resources, is seen in both rural and urban areas.  In Mumbai, 60% of the population lives in slums, horizontal and vertical slums. Yet they live on only 6% of the land. And even that is taken over.  Planners chance policies, the World Bank comes in and sets up one kind of infrastructure that fulfills the agenda of the auto industry. This displaces the people who build, clean, and run the cities.  They don’t even have a place to sleep after they spend the day working to keep the city running. Slum dwellers from around the world have come together. We came together around slogan “save the houses and build the houses.” The only thing we can live on at the end of our lives is our resource base – our land and our labor. We challenged eviction of slums by rebuilding them after they were demolished. But we also challenged the builders and the construction firms, exposing the sweetheart deals they got to purchase land. We only went into the courts after long struggles in the streets. We climb up to the 4th floor of the building ministries and blockade the banks, and then the administrators have to come down. To release the land in India is just as difficult as establishing democracy in Iraq. When we can show linkage between big Western interests and land grabs (which are represented as “lawful occupations”), we get more traction. Who are the people in the so-called slums: the Dalits and others who were on the peripheries of the rural areas, and who are now on the peripheries of urban areas.  They are the real builders. Human rights are about legal rights.

BM: The picture you paint is of naked power of the corporate sector, so I’d argue that we’re in a situation where the politics of radical change is immediate.  Capital seems to be running into limits more and more.  What is your sense of these limits?  In Latin America, neoliberalism takes place a decade or so earlier than in South Asia.  Do you see similar social movements in opposition arising?

MP: One would like to say enough is enough. But we said this in Madrid at the 50th anniversary of the Bretton Woods Declaration. But communities in Narmada still have the sword of submersion hanging over them. The struggle continues. And not just armed struggle, which may shake the state to a certain extent. It’s really the long-term non-violent struggles, including reconstruction and bringing in theorization of living with resources, that are key. The state kills the poor – once in the name of caste, now in the name of development and progress.  What is happening today in India and elsewhere is the transfer of power. Popular sovereignty over resources such as the Bolivians asserted, in order to transform lifestyles, is a key goal. We’ve stopped dam building in Narmada. But beyond issue-based movements, the bigger effort is to build alliances, which give us strength. We need to explore non-electoral popular politics. The state must not totally wither away, but it must be limited, and its occupation, dispossession, commodification, and its killing must be controlled. So we need to create new people’s politics, which is beyond electoral politics but not distinct from it. We need to know what elite’s designs are to occupy power. I distinguish between NGOs and popular power. Beyond Dalits and other marginalized peoples, the mass middle classes in India are also becoming mobilized. The Free India of Corruption campaign is an example of such civil society mobilizations: 200 people fasting were very genuine. We strive to make our movements not just national but even global – this is obviously a huge challenge just in India. We need allies in the global North who can research the connections between corruption and land-grabs in India and powerful corporations or government organizations in places like London and New York. We look at the People’s Parliament as one such struggles.

DH: One of my favorite quotes from Marx is that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie.  This is not true everywhere, as in Bolivia.  But it’s more and more true around the world over the last 30 years.  So you not only have to do battle with capital, but also with the state.  We see in the US how the Supreme Court belongs to the bourgeoisie.  All these institutions have been taken away from real democracy and the people, and isolated so that we don’t see how budgets are made.  How did this come about? It all goes back to neoliberalism and the crisis of the 1970s. out of this crisis a solution emerged.  There are two kinds of costs that capital doesn’t want to bear: environmental degradation & social reproduction (who raises children, cares for the sick, etc). Capital tries to turn these into externalities, so they don’t have to pay for them. Historically, social movements pushed the state to pay for some of these costs. By the 1970s, you have the establishment of the EPA, welfare, affordable housing, etc.  What neoliberalism was about was forcing externalization of these costs by dismantling the welfare state. the strategy behind this was interesting. When Reagan came to power, he cut taxes for the rich and launched a debt-financed arms race with the Soviet Union. Towards the end of his administarrtion, his budget advisor David Stockton admitted that his strategy was to creat a huge debt so that they could then go after social programs.  Bush Sr. and Jr. did the same thing, and now Republicans in Congress and in state governments are doing the same thing: arguing that social programs need to be cut to deal with debt. David Cameron in the UK is doing the same thing: you never let a good crisis go to waste. Same thing happening in Ireland, Portugal, and other places, and their standard of living is crashing.  This strategy was exported in the 1980s using IMF structural adjustment. The upshot is to create a global plutocracy, with about 400 families controlling a huge amount of the wealth around the world.  There’s something else crucial to put into the picture.  Capital is a growth machine; it’s committed to 3% compound growth annually. This was one thing in Manchester in 1800.  Today it’s another.  Capitalists have been running into difficulties finding profitable outlets.  So instead of investing in making things, you invest in owning them.  Which is why under neoliberalism you have an acceleration of accumulation by dispossession.  And it’s also a dispossession of rights: pension rights, health care rights, housing rights (which have been almost totally dismantled).  My argument would be that we need to think about a zero growth economy.  This is not a zero development economy.  But it is a state in which we no longer need 3% compound growth.  If we want to reject this 3% compound growth rate, we need to reject capitalism. We need a global anti-capitalist politics.  But this is hard to achieve, because we constantly hear the argument that we need more capitalism.  I say that people in anti-poverty organizations that they’re in the wrong organization: you should be in an anti-wealth organization.  You can’t solve the problem of poverty without destroying global plutocracy. People are realizing that we need a global anti-capitalist organization.

MP: Communal commons are being taken over, and so we question the present form of the polity.  Just like we question the present form of the economy, which is rule based on inequity.  We cannot look at the state as our ideal. Hence we are neither statist nor marketist. We want popular movements to be part of decision making. Here principles of self-reliance would be central: rights to resources and also human rights to life, biodiversity, etc.  We have to think about new forms of institutions, which are forms of new consciousness.  We’re also not in favor of notions of conservation that say that we can’t touch the forests etc., but we are in favor of collective responsible use of the commons. Our vision may sound utopian, but we have to be utopian today or we’re doomed.

BM: What we’re talking about is not just material change but also a change of consciousness in people. In the US, people think in terms of hyper-individualism. Such consciousness is being exported to India. How do we transform this attitude into a different sense?  Where would we look for answers?

MP: Our social identities being fragmented and atomized is worse than corporatization. In fact, what the trend towards marketization is doing is exactly this. Hence the revivalism that also sometimes takes a dangerous turn, towards fundamentalist assertion of identity at the cost of others, regionalism that excludes those who are from other areas. We need to question divisiveness. We have to be in struggles, but we also have to be in reconstruction. Creating schools so that children in Adivasi communities have a sense of identity. And even strategies like the alternative media are important.  And time is short.

DH: What I try to do in my work in works like The Enigma of Capital is to give an outline of how social change takes place.  There are 7 spheres in which change has to take place: 1) transformation in our relation to nature; 2) technology; 3) social relations; 4) production; 5) daily life and reproduction processes; 6) institutional arrangements (law, etc); 7) mental conceptions of the world.  Social theory tends to focus on only one of these spheres.  Paul Hawken for example stresses consciousness alone.  Orthodox Marxism focused on economics alone.  But Marx himself showed that end of feudalism involved all these spheres.  And this is what neoliberalism did as well.  Neoliberalism changed not just economics but also social relations: there were many more collective solidarities around in 1970 than there are today.  Social change happens by all of us collectively working on elements of this ensemble that we’re good at.  All these changes take place slowly.  The issue today is that there’s no radical new strategy emerging from the bourgeoisie.  The 1930s gave us Keynesianism etc.  The 1970s did the same, even if it was horrendous.  There’s no equivalent today.  Only strategy is to try to find an arc and ride out the storm.  So this is a moment when there’s a possibility of change.  One of the big difficulties today is that we have this huge infrastructure of universities that is almost entirely devoted to maintaining the status quo. In US, it’s totally impossible to get through to mainstream journals. And we can’t of course get through to mass media.  The Left also hasn’t done a good job since a lot of what we produce is incomprehensible.  But I recognize that no matter how much mind-changing we do, we also need institutional changes etc.

BM: Let me turn our discussion to ecology and the question of resources. In India, what we’re seeing right now is the imperative to just dig resources up and sell them to the world market.  The state and the bourgeoisie is in such collusion in this regard.  How do we deal with the ecological limits we’re up against?

MP: Our movements build not just on Marxism but also Gandhian and Ambedkarian thought. But all these ideological trends have to come together.  All these ideas are leading communities towards self-reliance. We oppose eminent domain of the state to eminent domain of the people; they would have right to use and conserve the natural world. They would know the stakes inherent in the resources at hand; these stakes are nothing short of survival. There’s a danger in addition that so-called renewable energies will continue to perpetuate dispossession.  Solar energy in India, for example, was to be a project of Enron’s.

DH: My approach to the environmental issue is based on idea not of technologies but on how social life and institutions would have to be arranged.  In the US, the attitude is that there will be a technological fix. This is totally false.  What we really need to do is to change social relations.  If we wanted to do something serious here, for example, we could just demolish the suburbs.  This would also be a big employment generator.  We need to think about a real transformation in our relation to nature.  The Cochabamba Declaration is an example of this.  Also, work is being done on challenging agribusiness and showing that more labor-intensive forms of agriculture are more productive.  This would again solve the employment problem.  There are ways we could start to reconstruct the agrarian base.  There’s also a big paradox: wind power, for example, requires rare earth metals.  Mining this is an environmental disaster, but it is also 90% controlled by China because they don’t care about environmental damage. So we’re faced with a situation in which a solution in one area creates problems in another.

Q&A:

1)    The rural-urban divide and the north-south divide: how do we theorize these?

2)    What struggles do you see that effectively challenge finance capital?

3)    What kinds of organizational innovations can we see that can bind together different struggles since we see a lot of local, molecular organizing but little more broad-based molar work?

4)    What other utopian solutions can you tell us about?

5)    What do you mean by zero growth and how is it different from development?

MP: cities are growing like mad at cost of communities that once occupied the land. The entire infrastructure is import-export based, taking a toll on both the rural and urban areas. We see no attempt to keep people on the land in India, and as a result the urban poor population is booming. There’s a huge shift of land from agriculture to non-agriculture going on in India.

DH: The tendency under capitalism is to industrialize the countryside, erasing the difference between rural and urban areas. Theoretically I prefer to use the concept of uneven geographical development, which is going on inside cities as well as between the city and the rural. In US, countryside is being taken over by the rich, who go to mansions in places like Long Island. But there’s a distinction between what’s happening in so-called emerging markets, where all the growth is taking place. As a result, there’s some geopolitical tension between the so-called BRICs, and older centers of finance capital.  The question of how to organize is a complicated one.  There’s a lot of movement going on around the world: factory occupations in Argentina, solidarity economies around the world, etc.  in part, this arises from the fact that capital doesn’t need most people any more. Some of these have been economically quite successful: eg. Mondragon in Spain. Biggest economic disparity in Mondragon is 1-3, whereas in typical US corporation disparities are 1-600. Mondragon’s genius was to not just produce, but to organize credit and retail. Having said this, I find that many radical organizations are plagued by the fetishism of organizational form: many insist on remaining totally local, are totally anti-hierarchical, and are completely opposed to any kind of negotiation with the state. The result is that you’re not in a position to scale up what you’re doing into anything that can go beyond the local.  If you say you should, you’re labeled a Leninist. There’s a strong appeal of anarchism, localism, etc. today.  But this is not to say that there aren’t organizations that put things together: Via Campesina is an example.  It has great ideas at the local level, but is also making a global movement that can deal with global environmental issues.  This seems like one of the big challenges the Left faces today.

MP: Our struggles may seem utopian today, but you never know when things may change. When we battled Enron, we never expected to see their CEO tearing his clothes in the streets here in NYC.

DH: One of the troubles with utopian plans is that they evoke a model of harmony that is static.  That’s why no Christians want to go to paradise, because it’s boring. Alfred North Whitehead talked about the perpetual pursuit of novelty as being a characteristic of humans. It seems to me that many human capacities and powers are denied by market culture.  Not that there needn’t be a material base.  But we could, in many part of the world, just freeze the economy and begin exploring human creativity, and not allow it to be channeled by corporate growth.

MP: We need to check the growth of capital, which brings in parasitic exploitation of the majority who are productive. Not that there should be no change, but change in the value framework of society. Who would define and decide what the change should be is the critical question. Zero growth and zero aid: we need self-reliance. We are struggling to set up popular tribunals, popular education, etc. to further this ideal of self-reliance. We cannot wait for this change, we have to make it now.

Last night the British movie The King’s Speech won big at the Oscars.  I didn’t watch the ceremonies, but I wonder whether the irony was apparent in the festivities: while dictators are toppled, often at the cost of many lives, throughout the Middle East, the Angl0-American establishment is engaged in full-throated celebration of monarchy.

Of course, King George VI, the stuttering protagonist of The King’s Speech, was no Louis XIV.  The film demonstrates his human qualities; indeed, his battle to overcome a speech impediment in order to rally Britain in the face of Hitler’s onslaught makes his body into a metaphor of the British body politic in general.  This is a trope that goes back to Shakespeare’s time, and that evidently continues to resonate.

And part of the drama of the film derives from the King’s need to overcome his inherited superciliousness enough to trust the Aussie speech therapist who “cures” him of his stuttering.

In depicting George VI’s struggles, The King’s Speech participates in a trend evident since the days of Princess Diana towards humanizing the British monarchy (and aristocracy more broadly).  Stephen Frears’s film The Queen managed to perform similar work for Queen Elizabeth, who had previously been famous to cold-shouldering Diana into her grave.

Of course the king’s struggle to overcome fears he seemingly inherited from the tyrannical atmosphere created by his father is powerful.  But I think there’s something deeply pernicious about the film, nonetheless.  Of course, if you’re going to be ruled by a monarch, it’s best that that they identify with the people and have their powers limited constitutionally.  However, there’s nothing particularly benign about the British monarchy.  They absorb millions of pounds worth of public funds every year, at a time when budgets for education, libraries, and all sorts of other public institutions are being slashed. As Tom Nairn demonstrates powerfully in Enchanted Glass, Britain’s enduring infatuation with the monarchy prevents it from constructing many of the significant democratic institutions of a true republic.

In addition, we shouldn’t forget the history surrounding World War II, upon which The King’s Speech turns.  The British monarchy never explicitly sided with the Nazis, but there was much pro-fascist sentiment among the British aristocracy in the 1930s.  Britain refused to side with democracy in Spain when Franco’s fascist forces began their campaign.  Moreover, during this period, Britain helped establish some of the more pernicious dictatorships of world history, including the House of Saud (pictured above).

The King’s Speech is a symptom of the enduring appeal of imperial/royal nostalgia today.  In a moment in which there is so much visceral public anger against the democratic welfare state, our culture industries nonetheless churn out paeans to national unity in the solitary figure of the “good” monarch.  What about a film about what happened to the working class kids who were displaced by the Blitz, and whom middle class Britons often turned out of their homes?  Enough with the sordid heritage industry already!

An article in today’s New York Times offers a powerful and unsettling comment on the video I made several weeks ago in Italy.

The article describes a demographic time bomb in southern Europe, where young people are locked out of the labor market by older generations and victimized by laws intended to increase the flexibility of employment.  Highly educated young people in countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal must live with their parents well into middle age since they seldom succeed in finding well paying jobs.  In many cases, they simply leave their countries, just as the young Italians in the video I shot discuss doing. For obvious reasons, these young people are also not having children, meaning that there are no future generations to support the generous welfare state that their elders are benefiting from.

Interestingly, the article noted that, in this context, protests against austerity measures imposed on the universities are intimately linked to much broader frustrations over the failure of society to create a viable future for these lost generations.

It seems that wherever one looks there are more and more of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “surplus people.”  The problems described in the article are much worse throughout the global South.

 

Worth watching today are the massive cuts to the public sector being announced by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government today in the UK.

The chief secretary of the Treasury was photographed holding a briefing paper that acknowledged the loss of nearly 500,000 public sector jobs over the next three years.

University funding is slated to be cut by 80%.

It’s a total bloodbath.

As Joseph Stiglitz explains in an interview today, it also makes absolutely no economic sense.  If you suddenly cut the jobs of a significant amount of the population, they no longer have the income to purchase products, and the economy begins to contract.  Recession turns into depression.

1929 here we come…

Hot off the press: the special issue of seminal British cultural studies journal new formations I edited on “Imperial Ecologies.”

Here’s the blurb from the journal: new formations 69 offers a timely and urgent set of contributions towards the development of what is ‘political ecology.’  Despite a history of sporadic engagements, cultural theory and cultural studies has rarely dealt thoroughly with ecological issues, tending to retreat into its habitual skepticism regarding anything that might smell of naturalism.  The fact that ecological questions frame all of the urgent political debates of our epoch, as well as animating some of the most dynamic areas of critical thought, surely means that this situation cannot continue.  As we see from this collection, it is only through a radical interdisciplinarity which can accommodate insights from geography, economics, cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, and the natural sciences that the questions our current predicaments pose can be properly addressed; and it is precisely the remit of new formations to make just such engagements possible.

Contributors include Crystal Bartolovich, George Caffentzis, Ashley Dawson, Ben Dibbley, Jeremy Gilbert, Peter Hitchcock, Leerom Medovoi, Brett Neilsen, Rob Nixon, Sian Sullivan, Morten Tonnessen, Nicholas Thoburn, Tony Venezia.

For more info, check the journal website or the listing on Amazon.