Category Archives: Climate Change

Autoimmune Climate-Changing Capitalism Syndrome: AICCCS

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How can we imagine the Anthropocene? Industrial capitalism is not simply harmful to human life, as we long knew, but has created its own geological era that affects everything from the lithosphere to the upper atmosphere and all the biota in between. Indeed, the dynamics of the Anthropocene are increasingly hostile to Holocene-era patterns of human life, a footnote to the sixth great extinction of carbon-based life.

Estimates suggest that between 17,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct every year. The Anthropocene is perhaps not so well named. While it is clear that humans have caused it, not all humans have done so and its consequences are far from even. What has brought about the change in planetary geology is industrial capitalism and its reliance on fossil fuels.

We now find ourselves confronting what we might call an autoimmune capitalism that seems determined to extract the last moment of circulation for itself, even at the expense of its host life-world. Like AIDS or other autoimmune disease, this capitalism has a long etiology, multiple symptoms and is resistant to cure: Autoimmune Climate-Changing Capitalism, AICs for short.

So if we concentrate on curing one symptom, like carbon emissions, the complaint goes up that we are attacking the “Western way of life.” Attack the over-consumption of Western life directly, as the global social movements have done since 2011, and you find the full force of the military-industrial police complex directed at you.

To put this more abstractly: coming to terms with AICs is a political problem that is also always and already an aesthetic one. Aesthetics here means the ability to feel or perceive and I am suggesting in the manner of Jacques Rancière that no politics that is not an aesthetics (and vice versa) can have purchase on the supplementary, non-linear and networked forms of AICs. In short it takes a supplement to interact with a deconstructed form. Luckily, we already have that supplement in the form of direct democracy, which is my update to Rancière’s notion of the an-arche of the demos.

This is usually the place for lamentations about the difficulty of doing anything against the modern Leviathans of multinational corporations, consumerism and the fossil fuel industry. I do not underestimate these forces. However, I do not participate in their visualization of the planet as a battlefield and presume that in order to return the world “upside down,” they must somehow be defeated. Rather I think that the reclaiming of the imagination entails an undoing of their authority, which they themselves literally cannot conceive. It may come from the Digger Gerrard Winstanley’s evocation of the “earth as a common treasury for all.”

A Digger Manifesto from 1649

I have long said that the most radical gesture would be if all living people were considered fully human. That could be taken further to include all non-human actors. It has been estimated that some 90% of the DNA in our bodies is not “ours” but microbial. “Our” DNA is the result of a long sharing between generations. We also now know that certain “switches” in the genome are turned on by experience—diet, toxicity, age, and so on.

Taking this for the metaphor that it clearly already is, we might say that there is a “switch” for the common. Much of the past five hundred years has been devoted to imagining ways to turn it off or even make it invisible. In the brief time since Mohammed Bou’azizi shocked Tunisia into taking action by his self-immolation, that switch has proved remarkably easy to find from Egypt to Montreal by way of Madrid, Athens, New York, London and so on. We have in effect always known how to do this. Authority has invested enormous amounts of energy, time and money to convince us otherwise.

Some proposals for an agenda:

1) Life

The right to existence was the fundamental claim of all anti-slavery movement. It is the first claim in the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth made at Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2008 by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change as part of their claim for the “decolonization of the atmosphere.”

2) The Land

Policy specialists have began recommending small-scale collaborative cultivation as a solution to developing countries economic needs. Local food movements suggest the same for developed nations. The Cochabamba accords recommend such cultivation as the key to both sustaining indigenous cultures worldwide and decolonizing the atmosphere. With the agribusiness GMO corn crop set to fail in the U. S., we can see that chemical cultivation is no guarantee of food supply in the climate-changed era. Land is a way to consider the abstractions of the global in local contexts, as it has been for centuries.

3) Democracy

The greatest myth of the climate denial movement is that we can’t do anything about this anyway, so why try? I earlier suggested in this project that if each of 400 global cities consensed on the measures taken by Beijing during its Olympics we could in fact meet the target for climate emissions reduction that would limit temperature rise to two degrees Celsius. There are other possible ways to do this of course. In other words, the choices are there in front of us and it is up to us in each of our localities to keep putting them to our local assemblies.

[a condensed version of my contribution to the Sense of the Planet symposium yesterday in Sydney]

Sense of Planet/Planet Sensing

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What are the possibilities of imagining and knowing the planet? A symposium in Sydney addressed this question today at what it called “earth magnitude.” Can the planet be “sensed’? How do the new dynamics of human and non-human within globalized networks of communication change our understandings of life itself?

Ursula Heise drew on legends like Gilgamesh to show that we have always have been haunted by fears of mass extinction. She has developed the concept of “sense of planet” to supplement the better known assumption of “sense of place.” She has less interest in concepts of place, not least because as a German she is suspicious of the Nazi rhetoric of soil and locality. Her project promotes by contrast a concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism” in which our responsibility is to learn more about the way that others envisage place rather than cultivate our own gardens.

Her new project interestingly suggests that planetary awareness stems from databases. She argues that the database is the “primary planetary sense organ,” building on Lev Manovich’s ideas that the database is “a cultural form of its own.” In this context, the database is a paradigm that generates narratives.

Such databases as the Census of Marine Life, the Catalogue of Life, the Encyclopedia of Life, and the Consortium for the Barcode of Life allow us a new means to create a planetary paradigm of life. Heise showed how artists like Maya Lin have created database-generated projects, like her What Is Missing? (Click the link to play). Indeed, the Taronga Zoo at Sydney that I visited yesterday is a form of living taxonomy of scarcity, in which the wall text next to animal enclosures highlights the extent to which the species is threatened.

Such archives oscillate between minimalist and sublime aesthetics. As an example of the former, Joel Satore photographs and displays endangered and extinct species in distinctly anti-romantic form. By contrast, the TV generated ARKive featuring David Attenborough uses a familiar info-tainment sublime by generating high-resolution full color images of rare animals with an aesthetic of imminent disappearance. For Heise, such projects are modern epics that acknowledge an inevitable shortfall in their efforts to capture the world-system. Such work sees itself as part of an epic struggle to preserve life itself, a recuperation of the heroic out of the horizontal. Here then we find the “great man” theory of history re-entering the database as an organizing principle.

The eye of Avatar

Tim Morton talked about Avatar in the frame of his dark ecology. He stressed the way in which it addressed the need for an environmental politics without satisfying it. The Anthropocene provides a precision of dating that is uncanny in relation to geological time. Avatar is a fantasy of an organic Internet, an embodiment into the planet, which Morton calls “planet sense.” Ironically, present-day environmentalism shows precisely how we are necessarily always interactive with the planet. It’s worth remembering that the film centers on the desire for colonial mining, a representation of the existing global South. Avatar centers around such binaries, epitomized by Jake who is human and Navi at once.

For Morton, Avatar is an object in the sense of Object-Oriented Ontology, an animist vision making the film into a person. OOO places things at the center of its attention, a set whose members are not identical to themselves. Reality is, in this view, “profoundly disjointed.” It moves past the logic of non-contradiction. There is no vantage point outside the set, reality cannot be peeled away. Morton has a dense philosophical analysis that is hard to summarize, it must be said.

This sense that “we are not the world” troubles the relation between foreground and background: how can we bring together beings that cannot be reduced? There is no “world” in this view. So: doom. Doom is fate and a judgement, but it is also justice, the figure of deconstruction. Humans’s doom is to recognize the presence of the non-human.

Jennifer Gabrys talked about planet sensing in fieldwork she carried out in Lapland. Environmental monitoring takes place in the far North using computational sensors, where it is a key scientific activity. This sensing creates a database, rather than recording “how things really are.” She argues that there are many forms of sensing, quoting Alfred Whitehead

We are in the world and the world is in us.

The subject emerges from the world and vice-versa. Objects like rocks have experience insofar as they are affected by the world, and says Steven Shaviro

this being affected is its experience.

From this background, Gabrys argued for “citizen sensing” as a form of environmental monitoring and participation, using open-source software like Arduino. For example, Beatriz da Costa has used pigeons to monitor air quality in Los Angeles. Such projects questions who or what counts as a citizen, a question that resonates within the Occupy movement. Perhaps such environmental action might constitute citizenship, or becoming a sensing citizen?

Finally, Marco Peljhan presented his Arctic Perspective Initiative (together with many others) as a Constructivist Engagement. He noted that satellite sensing and its massive data sets are largely open source. He has used such data in the Makrolab projects that detailed migrations of capital and climate. Working with Inuit partners in the Arctic, however, it became clear that a longer-term approach was necessary. Under Stalin, the Arctic was part of the Gulag and subject to an “accidental” genocide. In Canada, major dislocation was common and culturally destructive. The theme became one of resilience, a key theme for life in the Arctic.

The Initiative created renewable and sustainable digital labs for the Arctic, including hydroponic gardens. The group offered local Inuit film makers courses in video editing using open source software, aerial maps, The current project is called Sinuni, a climate/weather and land recording device, using satellite imagery. This interface between indigenous oral knowledge and globalized digital military-industrial technology provides a means to repurpose military visualization for autonomous purposes.

Reflections to follow tomorrow with my own contribution.

[ps written on the fly so apologies for typos etc]

 

Debt, Mining and the Global Reconquest

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From the perspective of the global South, the primary extraction of raw materials like coal, the subjugation of popular autonomy, the implementation of debt as a form of social control and the continued expansion of climate change are clearly intertwined. The repression of the miners’ strike in South Africa is part and parcel of mineral policy in Australia, oriented as both are to the expanding Chinese market. The intended consequences include ruinous African debt and the inevitable by-product is constantly accelerating climate change.

This interface has been perfectly visible from the South for some considerable time. In 1987, Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso spoke to the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in Addis Ababa. Sankara called for the creation of a United Front Against Debt:

We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before. Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave.

Sakara was assassinated a few months after making this call. His policies had also included the nationalization of the country’s mineral wealth. If Sarkana’s warnings had been heeded two decades ago, perhaps Africa would not be in its present crisis, forced to generate materials to produce foreign exchange revenues to pay down its debt.

Speaking at the memorial service for the miners killed by South African police (above), Julius Malema reprised these themes on Thursday, calling again for nationalization of the mines:

The democratically elected government has turned on its people. This marquee we are gathered under, the Friends of the Youth League paid for this. The government did nothing for you, we are helping you. Government ministers are just here to pose for pictures. We are here with you, you must soldier on – never listen to cowards. We mustn’t stop until the whites agree to give us some of the money in these mines.

The crowd responded by storming the stage, causing the rapid exit of government ministers and politicians. Police were barred from attending. As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.

Here in Australia, mining companies are retrenching. Australia has done remarkably well out of the commodities boom, servicing the exploding Chinese economy. While officials continue to forecast a renewed peak in two years, hard-line mining executives have declared Australian coal “non-cash generative.” The blame is placed on the carbon tax introduced at enormous political cost by the current government. No credit is given in Australian media for the climate-positive aspects of the tax. The implication is clear: mining will relocate to countries with a less “burdensome” tax structure–like South Africa.

To understand this, you need to know that before 2005, coal sold for about A$30 a ton. At the height of the boom, it reached A$140. Paul Cleary, a journalist for the right-of-center Australian, writes:

Mining dominates our society, our economy, and even our political system.

Now it sells for “only” A$90, a 300% increase on the price seven years ago, which is apparently not enough. The business pages are awash with articles about the end of the mining boom.

Let’s be under no illusions as to who dominates the agenda in the U. S. The oil giant Shell has been reported to be determined to begin drilling in the Arctic this summer, even though its own safety procedures in case of a blowout are not finished. If this was a movie, you know what would happen: there’d be a blowout, only for the maverick hero to return and cap the well. There are no heroes any more. The drilling has to begin to make sure that, if Obama happens to be re-elected, he does not renege on his sell-out.

Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.

 

 

 

Global vs. planetary

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The contrast between the global as instituted by neo-liberalism and the planetary, which is cumulatively under attack from its effects, is palpable in the Southern hemisphere. As the Australian public sphere continues in uproar on policy towards a few thousand refugees from the global, the slow indicators accumulate that there will be many times their number in the planetary change of geological era we have instigated.

One of the great unremarked ironies about the asylum seeker debate in Australia is that it is all intended to “send a message” to the would-be migrant. Now, I may not be the brightest person, but I do have a university degree and English is my first language and it still took me a week of reading to get a faint sense of what is intended.

The report presented to the government intends to encourage would-be refugees to go through the visa “process” in Malaysia, rather than taking to a boat and being processed in Australia. The new system will create Pacific outposts where a person will be detained for at least as long as the Malaysia system would take before being processed. Over $2 billion will be spent making the islands of Nauru and Manus capable of holding several thousand people. Clearly, then, the Malaysia system must be somewhat drawn out, or there would be no reason to hold people, When a person becomes a refugee, it is because they are afraid. Such a person may well not have the resources to fund a lengthy stay in Malaysia, let alone the language skills and so on.

The bulk of the seven thousand refugees heading for Australia this year have come from Afghanistan. Surely the reason for the increase is the growing crisis in the “country” as it breaks up into warlord-dominated regions in anticipation of the U. S. retreat in 2014. If the Karzai brothers are after you, it’s time to leave, whether the Anglophone governments of the world want you to do so or not.

One of the reasons that there is an extensive European settlement in Australia is the first globalization of whaling. Whalers shipped British convicts down here in substantial numbers. In 1791, a British whaler named Thomas Melville (ironically enough) wrote home that

We saw sperm whales in great plenty. We sailed through different shoals of them all around the horizon as far as I could see from the masthead.

It did not take long to exterminate this abundance. As early as the 1830s, whalers were selling up in Australia as the local species disappeared. There’s a slow recovery underway. Whale watching trips from Sydney usually see one or two whales on their voyages, which does not compare well to Melville’s first sight.

At least this damage was limited to what could be seen. In the current stages of the Anthropocene, the invisible structures of the ocean are changing. Today it was reported that the forests of giant kelp that support many species of life off south-eastern Australia have declined by as much as 95%. It’s a combination of effects caused by sea temperature rise, increased sedimentation and run-off from land use.

Above and beyond this specific change, scientists are using this as further evidence that the East Australian Current that runs down the east coast of the continent has strengthened because of climate change. The result is that ocean waters are warming and cold water species are moving further south to survive. There is of course a very finite limit to how far they can go.

Australia is admirably developing solar power and other renewable energy but even here it amounts to no more than 7% of total energy use and most of that total comes from a giant hydro-electric plant. Perhaps this is a naive suggestion from an outsider but I can’t help but feel that those billions spent to keep a few political refugees out might be better spent developing a far more extensive renewable energy system (for example), in order to mitigate the hundreds of millions likely to need to move if climate change develops in the way that it now appears that it it is going to do.

Dare to Know?

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I’m in Port Douglas, Australia. Like just about everyone else who visits here, I went today to see the Great Barrier Reef. It’s not unusual for people to finish sentences like that with the quip “while it’s still there.” Indeed, the Australian government has said that chances for coral reefs are very poor. Two hundred years ago, Westerners had no idea the Reef was even there. Now we’re exploring Mars, which is astonishing, but destroying our own habitat, which is worse. Have we dared to know too much?

Old Enlightenment hands will recognize Kant’s challenge in What is Enlightenment?:

sapere aude/dare to know

Who should do such daring? Kant was, among other accomplishments, the first to teach a course on anthropology, although he never traveled. In his various writings on the subject, he established what I take to be a fundamental distinction of Enlightenment between the modern North and the “islands of the South,” which were not only not modern, they could  not be modern by definition. For Kant, the South was impossible, out of time, and out of place.

When his contemporary Captain Cook was here at about the same time, he sailed right into the Barrier Reef. Despite his permanent accolade as the “greatest seaman of all time,” his navigation had no concept of such obstacles. The Endeavour had to be repaired and it took over three months. Let’s note that such bricolage would be far beyond any present-day vessel but also realize how much support Cook must have had from the indigenous population to survive, even if that support was compeled, or limited to not killing them. Now the Reef is widely known, a “trip of a lifetime” destination. Judging by the array of facilities here, many people take that trip.

Without lapsing into Romantic sublime, the Reef really is amazing. If you’ve seen Northern hemisphere corals in Florida or the Caribbean, the first thing you learn is how utterly devastated they are by comparison. I’m aware there’s no science in this statement but what I’ve seen is the best local people think they can find to sell to tourists. Although you do see Crown of Thorns starfish, which were the great threat to the Reef before global warming, what remains is nonetheless dazzling. It’s not just the color and the patterns but the interactive adaptation. A fish saw me coming and descended into an anemone, which then wrapped its stinging tentacles around it. It’s that kind of balance that carbon emissions have knocked permanently out of homeostasis by increasing water temperature and acidity. Everyone knows this. No person in a position to do anything asks how they would dare to explain to their grandchildren that, yes, there were such ecosystems but we stood by and let them die.

If you’ve seen bleached coral, it looks not unlike Mars.

Curiosity descending to Mars (artist impression)

Curiosity is the Endeavour of our time: sent for science but with hopes of gain, conquest and colonization not far behind. The sad thing is that, if we want a lifeless desert to explore, we’re making lots of them all over our own planet. What would it take for us to dare to know that? How can we learn, finally, that the South is fully and integrally part of Enlightenment, the modern, knowledge, or whatever you feel inclined to call it?

Ozone and Orientalism

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For two weeks, I’ve been coughing. In a quiet moment, I looked up New York air quality and found that, according to the American Lung Association, New York gets a D for ozone pollution and Suffolk County, including the fancy Hamptons, an F. “Illness” explained. But no-one talks much about New York smog–we hear that about LA, and now especially about China. We’re Orientalizing our ozone.

In fact, those of us who are not scientists are often confusing terms. As so often, our cultural stereotypes fill in the blanks, so we assume China is now the worst offender. Ironically, a recent study of China’s regulations during the Beijing Olympics shows that mitigating climate change would be possible if there was political will to do so, while London’s Olympics are about to open in a cloud of smog.

One of the negative side-effects of fossil fuel capitalism is poor air quality in summer, when ozone builds up in the atmosphere as a by-product of fossil fuel consumption. Ozone accumulates from the break down of nitrogen oxides with volatile organic compounds in reaction with the heat of the sun. It’s damaging to people with asthma or heart conditions but it’s invisible.

When we discuss smog, we assume that it’s a visible cloud, like the London “pea-soupers” caused by burning coal.

Noon, July 25, 1952 in London

This London smog in 1952, making the city dark at midday in summer, finally prompted the Clean Air Act of 1956. If you look at newspapers and personal records from the time, there wasn’t much comment. It was just another fog.

The brown-colored photochemical smog that is typically seen in California derives its appearance from nitrogen oxides, not the sulphur by-products of coal, which made for typically yellow “fog.”

Before the 2008 Olympics, there was great concern about air quality. If you Google “Beijing smog,” you see many images like this:

Beijing smog

Like Londoners before them, Beijing residents seem to be going about their business, although we can’t really be sure what we’re seeing here. Is it smog of the London kind, caused by coal? A photochemical smog? Some combination? Or a hazy day with lots of wood fires?

My point is simply that while we hear a great deal about China’s air quality, and it certainly appears to be poor, we hear very little about what’s happening in the Anglophone countries that has left me coughing. For example, despite the apparently never-ending wet summer in the UK, a couple of days of hot weather has created “a perfect storm” for high ozone levels. Just as the Olympics begin. For distance athletes in particular, this can cause severe respiratory problems. Indeed today Greater London was declared to be having what the bureaucrats call “a pollution episode.” No action is planned by UK authorities other than hope.

During the Beijing Olympics, however, a new NASA-sponsored study shows that by reducing industry and construction and requiring people to use vehicles only on alternate days, there were unexpected consequences, such as

dramatically cutting emissions of carbon dioxide by 24,000 to 96,000 metric tons (about 26,500 to 106,000 U.S. tons) during the event.

To put this in perspective, the authors note that this reduction by a single city represents more than one-quarter of 1 percent of the emissions cut that would be necessary worldwide, on a sustained basis, to prevent the planet from heating up by more than about 2 degrees Celsius.

So now know that if one city can make a significant reduction in the planetary calculus of climate change over a period of a few weeks, there is no need for doomsday scenarios. Just action.

This is the most positive news about climate in a long time. In his recent jeremiad about climate, Bill McKibben suggested we target Big Oil. While I could not be more sympathetic, that campaign will take more time than we may have, as he acknowledges. This data allows us to do an end-run around Big Oil by using the progressive forces in global cities to drive change. It surely will not be easy. But it could be done.

What we need is to stop pretending this is not happening and start acting city to city. It’s going to take 400 cities to do this. I have some suggestions.

 

Capital and the Drought

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From the Guardian

There is devastating drought across about half of the US, caused by fossil fuel capitalism. The drought and resulting food shortages, price rises in basic foodstuffs and resulting inflation is likely to intensify the crisis of capitalism. There will be food riots in places where incomes are low and mostly spent on food. That may include parts of the fossil fuel intensive world, as well as the domain of the wretched of the earth. All the anxiety about the technicalities from CDOs to LIBOR may pale beside the fundamental crisis in producing food for humans and animals, should the drought continue.

The photograph above makes it clear that this set of circumstances is the product of a certain form of financial capital. The ostensible subject of the picture is the wizened corn, so dry that farmers would be delighted to salvage a third of the crop. Any neutral person is also going to want to know about that sign.

It indicates that the corn being grown is not “natural” but a proprietary product of Croplan by Winfield, number 6125VT3. This varietal is intended especially for use in the West. One of its alleged benefits is being drought-resistant:

Hybrids are selected for strong drought tolerance, even when planted at a high plant population. This is important in the western Corn Belt where low plant population is used as a hedge against drought.

Oops. Now you might think that this would lead to farmers not using these crops next year. But it’s not that simple. The seed always belongs to the supplier and contracts lock you in. The particular varietal shown drooping above is a test variant being tried out in various locations. According to a farmers’ chat site, Croplan

source their germ plasm from Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer, Mycogen

meaning the major GMO food monopolists. Croplan is part of WinField Solutions, the third largest seed company and number 1 pesticide outlet in the country. Both are owned by Land O’ Lakes, the dairy conglomerate, itself part of Dean Foods. As a result of these interfaces, Croplan is very keen on corn that is pesticide tolerant.

Again, the supposed benefit to the farmer is plants absorbing more moisture and nutrient.

So farmers have paid for expensive drought-resistant seed that didn’t deliver when really tested. The ramifications of this failure go in many directions. There are vast numbers of genetically modified varietals interacting with the existing seed population to unknown effect. It’s an article of faith among dog owners that GMO corn makes dogs allergic. What does it do to us? Food is becoming more expensive with food prices officially rising 4.8% in 2011 and likely to be much higher again in 2012. An economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas explains:

The impact of higher food prices is felt disproportionately by poorer Americans, Mr. Henderson said. For Americans in the bottom 20% of income, food typically takes up more than a quarter of household income, compared with about 10% for wealthier Americans.

So if food rises 10% in price over two years, you can be sure that the wages and salaries in the lower half of the economy have not risen to match. While the poorer will do worse, the corporate fear is that food will ignite inflation and reduce profits. Dean Foods, owner of the whole chain of corn and milk we’ve been discussing is down 22% in the stock market. I wonder if capital can survive another shock of this size, despite what Naomi Klein has called the “shock doctrine.” If the largest monopolies are struggling, who can take them over?

La Via Campesina in action

So climate change is not “just” a disaster caused by capitalism, which it is; but it’s also a disaster for capitalism. Last week, Via Campesina, the international land-use and peasants’ movement, concluded a successful conference in Indonesia. The Governor of West Sumatra returned expired land use contracts from corporations to ulayat (indigenous peoples/community rights). The final declaration called for the movement:

to incorporate other peoples who are threatened by the same current phenomena, including urban dwellers threatened with impoverishment and with eviction to make way for real estate speculation; peoples who live under military occupation; consumers who face ever higher prices for food of ever worsening quality; communities facing eviction by extractive industries; and rural and urban workers.

I would say that sounds like an agenda I can agree with, wouldn’t you? More than that, it sounds like the agenda we need.

 

Bring Back The Just Price!

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One of the first consolidated revolutionary gains was the idea of a just price for food. Direct action in the French Revolution (1789-99) enforced a consensed “maximum” for staple foods and punished speculators in foodstuffs. For nearly two centuries the French state set prices for bread, coffee and sugar. Now we treat the market as a force of nature, immune to all sense of fairness. Wholesale commodity food prices are rising rapidly, exacerbated by the climate-change generated drought across the U. S. Why should the very people that refused to mitigate the warming effects of climate change be able to profit from its effects? Time to remember the maximum. 

There’s plenty of nervous discussion in the media about food prices. Somehow they seem unaware that the prices those of us who actually shop for food are asked to pay have been rising for some time. There are concerns that cereal price rises similar to those that fuelled the Arab Spring might revive dissent. Today, soy prices hit an all-time high, while corn was 1% off a record. All of this is unfortunately great news for people who trade in commodity futures, like our old friends at Goldman Sachs.

Withered corn in the Midwest

So far 2012 has been the warmest six months on record and crops are withering. There’s a certain irony here. Fertilizer plus GMO Round Up resistant corn adds up to an almost automatic corn crop. Once planted corn requires only forty days of attention before harvest, allowing farm labor to have decreased to only 2% of the total. The one thing you need is rain. But all that fossil-fuel generated fertilizer has been one component in creating the climate change temperature rise that has been accurately predicted.

Seventy percent of the Midwest “corn belt” is in an official drought, the worse conditions for half a century. Result:

Grain prices pushed to record highs on Thursday as scattered rains in Midwest did little to douse fears that the worst drought in half a century will end soon

While you may never eat corn, it’s in just about everything, as Michael Pollan has shown. In order to appease voters in the wretched Iowa caucuses, ethanol is in almost all gasoline now, although there is no net carbon emission benefit. Corn is fed to cattle in feed-lots, although they are not evolved to digest it properly. On average there are ten pounds of grain used for every pound of beef, while ten calories of fossil fuel are used to make one calorie of meat.

The price rises that are now being passed on to us were, then, in the broad sense entirely foreseeable and foreseen. It was the corporate-funded climate “skeptics” that insisted this would never happen. So why should we and, more particularly, the global subalterns who are most vulnerable to food price rises have to subsidize their political action?

When sugar and coffee prices rose in Paris following the revolution in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), even government officials found it “sophism” that “the consumer’s fancy” should determine prices. So the supposed “law” of supply and demand is nothing more than a means of policing dissent. In 1793, the French popular forces were having none of it, and set their own prices. A police report of the time described what happened:

There was a woman of fairly good appearance, about five feet, one inch tall, thirty years old, with blonde hair, white skin and slightly red eyes.  . . . This woman did everything in her power to add to the sedition. She had gone on the inspection [of the warehouse]. And once they returned, it was she who set the price for soap at twelve sous per pound and for sugar at eighteen.

What this woman had done was cut the price of sugar from 60 sous (one-twentieth of a pound) to 18, lower than the pre-speculation price of 25. I’ve written here on a number of occasions about land-sharing among the freed (formerly enslaved). Egalitarian price control was the metropolitan equivalent. It was revolutionary direct action to make the food market benefit the people rather than speculators.

Following such direct actions, the Convention (as the French National Assembly was then known) legislated maximum prices on the following essentials:

fresh meat, salt meat and bacon, butter, sweet oil, cattle, salt fish, wine, brandy, vinegar, cider, beer, firewood, charcoal, coal, candles, lamp oil, salt, soda, sugar, honey, white paper, hides, iron, cast iron, lead, steel, copper, hemp, linens, woolens, stuffs, canvases, the raw materials which are used for fabrics, wooden shoes, shoes, turnips and rape, soap, potash, and tobacco.

That list gives you a sense of the life-world of an eighteenth-century French sans-culotte, the street radicals who had created the maximums. Soon afterwards, they abolished slavery. It was Carlyle’s “hero” Napoleon who re-introduced it.

Now that we have seen that the so-called free market has been comprehensively fixed with regard to interest rates and other supposedly naturally occurring phenomena, there should be renewed calls for price maximums, and an end to speculation in food prices. It’s happened before in the U. S. Voltairine de Cleyre described how in 1912

many persons will recall the action of the housewives of New York who boycotted the butchers, and lowered the price of meat; at the present moment a butter boycott seems looming up, as a direct reply to the price-makers for butter.

In the struggle to recognize the United Farm Workers:

According to polls, about 12 percent of US adults avoided table grapes in the late 1960s, and grower prices for table grapes fell.

Anti-apartheid boycotts were also a part of the successful long-term strategy against the racist regime. There’s history here.

 

 

The Fall of the Oil Empire

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We have spent much time trying create a narrative to tie together the themes of biosphere extinction, debt catastrophe and the failure of counterinsurgency. It may be as simple as this: the oil empire built by the US was undone by the unanticipated consequences of debt and climate change. There never was a grand strategy, just the application of overwhelming force that no longer holds sway. No one knows what comes next.

What do we know is that the empire doesn’t work, the debt machine has been exposed as a fake, and the biosphere is really starting to show signs of non-viability.

In no particular order: the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) debt scandal is huge and should be the top political issue of all time. LIBOR is the means of setting global interest rates by a few men in London after polling 16 leading banks. This sets the rate for your mortgage, credit cards and student loans. And it has been systematically fixed for years. These manipulations were of the order of five or ten basis points (1%=100 basis points), which sounds negligible. But $550 trillion of credit is affected by this rate: some estimate as much as $800 trillion. Apparently tiny changes save or cost the banks billions. So far from this being a “free” market, it’s been fixed.

Not only that, it’s not just Barclays, who have paid a minimal fine of $450 million as part of their acceptance of wrong-doing. LIBOR rates automatically exclude the highest two rates and the lowest two. So to actually change LIBOR at least six, probably eight, maybe all 16 banks had to be involved. If the mafia had done this, we’d have 800 year prison sentences being handed down under RICO statutes. Don’t hold your breath to see a bankster do time. Because government must have known: or, equally scandalously, they didn’t. Either way, in a functioning political system of any kind, heads would roll. If they don’t, we’ll know that the empire has no functioning bureaucracy and that it has all been outsourced to the financial sector.

It’s been obvious for some time that global counterinsurgency has morphed into a drone-enabled assassination program, a kind of automatic merger of COINTELPRO and Murder Inc. It doesn’t work very well. Why does this matter? Because if non-US nations buy US Treasury bonds as tribute to the global empire, as David Graeber has argued, it rather makes a difference whether that empire can keep order.

Here the US has benefited from the disaster that has become the eurozone so that rumors that circulated in 2007 about oil being priced in euros have disappeared. Global liquidity has nowhere else to go except the dollar. One group of mainstream economists have described the US dollar as being on the “oil standard.” In this view, the empire kept peace in oil-producing regions and in exchange, oil was priced in dollars and not too highly. Since the invasion of Iraq, the connection that kept the dollar strong when oil prices were high has been broken.

It still makes sense to think of the dollar as a petro-currency and of its empire as being boosted by oil. In 2007, it was predicted that the US would produce about 30% of its oil needs in 2010. In fact, it currently produces about 45% of its needs, due to massive exploitation of all available resources and greater fuel efficiency. From not being in the top ten oil producers in 2005, it is now number three.

Big oil is very much alive and well as a result.  The five largest oil companies made $136 billion in net profits in 2011, with no sign of decreases this year. US Representatives that receive significant campaign contributions from Big Oil get over $150,000 each: all 250 of them. Ironically, the supposed oil man, Bush, has been replaced by a far more oil friendly regime.

There are just two tiny problems. The oil is running out, one, and the biosphere is dramatically transforming, two. Which is why, three, things aren’t going so well.

The International Energy Authority, a totally pro-fossil fuel organization, has been sounding the alarm for some time. On the one hand, according to their chief economist Fatih Birol

We think that the crude oil production has already peaked in 2006, but we expect oil to come from the natural gas liquids, the type of liquid we have through the production of gas, and also a bit from the oil sands. But in any case it will be very challenging to see an increase in the production to meet the growth in the demand, and as a result of that, …the age of cheap oil is over.

Notably, even though their percentages have improved, the big five oil companies are indeed making less oil than they used to do.
And then there’s the heat.

Temperature records for June 2012 in the Midwest

Across the country, 3300 temperature records were set or tied in June. 172 new all-time temperature records were set. The climate scientists are now able to tie these weather events directly to carbon emissions, while also being able to say that events like the cold winter in the UK in 2011-12 were not so caused.

If you were, say, running for office and needed to win in the Midwest, where 600 heat records were set in June, you might make something of all this: if that is, you had any idea what to do about it. Time’s up for pretending that everything will be OK, that some invention will come along or whatever else.

So what’s left for the empire? Good question.

 

Capitalism: “the horror, the horror”

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It is said that Eisenstein hoped to make a movie out of Marx’s Capital. If anyone wanted to make a movie out of today’s capitalism, it would be a horror film. Like all horror films, this is a sequel. The convergence of financial crisis, environmental disaster and stalled imperialism that we see today has recurred across the modern period, beginning in the eighteenth century. It’s catchphrase is “the horror, the horror,” first coined by Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness concerning European imperialism, reapplied by Francis Ford Coppola to the Vietnam war. Today, as befits the third in a series, the crisis of capitalism, imperialism and the biosphere is planetary.

As the astonishing scandals unfolding at Barclay’s Bank indicate once more, if capital is the monster in this film, it is one that is now out of control. The particular issue concerns the fixing of interest rates by the bank to its own ends. Imagine that one month you want to pay credit card debt so you want interest rates low to keep the payment down. The next month you have some savings, so you want rates high so you can make a profit.  Of course, we have no choice. For banks, it’s different, as Reuters report:

Some 257 requests were made to rate submitters from at least 14 Barclays derivatives traders over four years. Traders at other banks also tried to influence Barclays’ rate, while Barclays’ traders put pressure on the rates offered by others. Most of the world’s biggest banks are under investigation…Barclays is the first to settle.

This is at one level another Bankster scandal, in which there’s one rule for them and another for us.

The traders making these fixes were nonetheless relatively low-level operatives. We tend to assume that behind them is some Dr. Evil figure manipulating the whole scheme, in the manner of Gordon Gekko. An oral history project on the financial crisis shows rather than no-one understood what was going on. The credit derivatives people relied on their computers to calculate what their trades had actually done. In 2008, they started to discover that they were losing more money than they could imagine every time they hit F9 to make the calculation. And these were the best informed people. One trader explained:

most in the bank didn’t understand our products. Even the risk and compliance people who were supposed to be our internal checks and balances …  I learned that the people high up know just enough for the role they’re in…

all major banks and corporations are doing this.

This is the horror–the machine you have created is out of control and you don’t know how to stop it. The trader developed night sweats, skin disease and has been diagnosed with PTSD. The interest rate fixes were sticking plaster over gaping wounds.

This does not get fixed by setting a new way to calculate LIBOR. As Christian Marazzi has put it, in his analysis of post-Fordist capitalism:

What is at stake is not only the understanding of our world, but our very being in this world.

Like Mr. Kurtz, we find ourselves in an existential crisis, in which the current ways of doing things are a horror, but so is the alternative: “the horror, the horror.” It is the apparent anonymity of the crisis that creates the horror–the very fact that the algorithms have done it. As Emmanuel Levinas put it in a different context:

In the night, when we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not “something.” But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence…The rustling of the there is…is horror.

As this suggests, for existentialism, the horror is in part the absence of God, or of rational purpose. Capitalism has claimed a spiritual dimension since Adam Smith’s fantasy of the “invisible Hand” and in modern America, capitalism is directly bonded with fundamentalism Christianity. So there is a reason that anti-capitalism is also anti-monotheism.

Imperialism sees itself as erasing nothingness, whether the terra nullius of supposedly empty space or the tabula rasa (clean slate) of the “heathen” mind, requiring conversion, the very “colonization of consciousness” (Jean and John Comaroff). When it looks at land it sees nothing but “wilderness as never having entered into any economic transaction” (Timothy Morton). What the missionary David Livingstone described as the Three Cs, “Christianity, Commerce and Civilization” were intimately linked. Perhaps there are in fact then three horrors.

Marlon Brando as Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" (1979)

In Conrad’s roughly contemporary novel, it is only after Kurtz has been retrieved from his inland ivory station that he gets a glimpse of what he has truly done–“the horror, the horror.” The death and destruction wielded by his company in pursuit of accumulation finally becomes apparent to him. The devastation of the rain forest described here is still just a backdrop but this was a period in which carbon emissions escalated dramatically and biosphere extinction moved closer. You can’t simply endorse Conrad because part of his story is about Kurtz “going native” and adopting indigenous religion. Religion is part of the horror, above all colonizing Christianity, the third horror.

In today’s Congo region, millions have died since the Rwanda genocide of 1994 opened an era of wide-scale instability. From time to time, there are newspaper articles and the liberals shake their heads but, as Zizek has consistently pointed out, paying attention to the horror of the Congo then and now means not reforming the system but abolishing it.

So how does this movie end? There are those market apologists who suggest that the 1890s financial panic turned out great with a decade of prosperity following it. Most with a degree of perspective see it as the precursor to World War 1. I’m not sure that capitalism can revive itself without a dose of war profits, but present-day counterinsurgency warfare has proved spectacularly unprofitable for the population at large.

I do think we should refuse existentialist despair. The solution to the Congo question of the 1890s was in the end fairly simple: stop colonizing it. But once the new automobiles wanted rubber tires that was not going to happen. It’s fascinating how clearly the fossil-fuel economy that was modern capitalism’s first intensifier is still its last support now that the machine has gone crazy.

Against craziness and religion, we can offer rational solutions: Stop burning fossil fuels. End derivative markets. End imperialism, and use the massively reduced military budget to fund education, health care and a living wage. Here’s the thing. In the first reel of the movie, it almost seems possible that the monster will win but in the end it never does.