The Structural Genocide that is Capitalism

First published on Truthout (copyright, Truthout.org, reprinted with permission)

“The dominant class at the world level… has become the enemy of all humanity.”

- Samir Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism?

Garry Leech, an author who had previously penned a book on the FARC insurgency in Colombia (2011), has assembled a forceful denunciation of the status quo with Capitalism: A Structural Genocide. In essence, he argues cogently in this work that the devastating structural violence experienced by societies subjected to the rule of capital since its historical emergence – and that particularly felt by the world’s presently impoverished social majorities – is, instead of being an aberration or distortion of market imperatives, central and inherent to the division of society along class lines and the enthronement of private property. Even a cursory examination of the depth of human suffering perpetuated historically and contemporarily by the hegemony of capital should lead disinterested observers to agree with Leech that the catastrophic scale of violence for which this system is responsible can be considered nothing less than genocidal, however shocking such a conclusion might prove to be.

In this book, Leech guides his readers through theoretical examinations of the concept of genocide, showing why the term should in fact be applied to the capitalist mode of production. He then illustrates capitalism’s genocidal proclivities by exploring four case studies: the ongoing legacy of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in Mexico; the relationship between trade liberalization and genetically-modified seeds on the one hand and mass-suicide on the part of Indian agriculturalists on the other; material deprivation and generalized premature death throughout much of the African continent and the global South, as results from hunger, starvation, and preventable disease; and the ever-worsening climatic and environmental crises. Leech then closes by considering the relevance of Antonio Gramsci’s conceptions of cultural hegemony in attempting to explain the puzzling consent granted to this system by large swathes of the world’s relatively privileged people – specifically, those residing in the imperial core of Europe and the United States – and then recommending the socialist alternative as a concrete means of abolishing genocide, while looking to the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes as imperfect, but inspirational experiments in these terms. In sum, while I take issue with some of his analysis and aspects of his conceptualization of anticapitalist alternatives, his work should certainly be well-received, read and discussed by large multitudes.

Leech begins his text by referencing the original formulator of the concept of structural violence, Johan Galtung. In 1969, Galtung famously expanded prevailing notions of societal violence to include consideration of “the avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or . . . of human life.” Key to Galtung’s formulation of structural violence in this sense is the gap between “the potential and the actual,” or “what could have been and what is.” Thus, avoidable death resulting from preventable or treatable diseases today constitutes violence, given the technological progression of modern medicine, whereas centuries ago this would not have been the case, according to Galtung. For Leech, then, capitalist society is indelibly marked by structural violence, as the vast inequalities in wealth and access to which it gives rise lead small minorities to be overwhelmingly privileged, while large groups of others are prevented from meeting their basic needs.

Transitioning then to consideration of the question of whether the large number of avoidable deaths observed under conditions of capitalism should in fact be considered genocidal, Leech concedes that the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide excludes mass death resulting from one’s pertaining to a given social class as constituting genocide. However, he notes that an initial draft of the Convention from 1947 did include death or injury resulting from “lack of proper housing, clothing, food, hygiene and medical care, or excessive work or physical exertion” within the definition of genocide. Hence, while such a formulation did not appear in the final version with which we are all familiar, Leech does not accept legal positivism in this case as final; in this vein, he could have done well to have also mentioned that Raphael Lemkin, inventor of the concept of genocide, himself believed the charge should include mass murder of persons following from their belonging to particular classes. Leech nonetheless does mention that the 1998 Rome Statute defines the crime of extermination in part as “the intentional infliction of . . . deprivation of access to food and medicine calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population,” so in this sense has the weight of international law behind him. Leech’s only remaining theoretical difficulty, then, is to argue that intentionality exists within the context of the perpetuation of capital-induced genocide: This proves an easy task, for the question of intent in judging capitalism is not one of examining the actions of particular persons or states (as in most traditional cases of the charge of genocide) but rather of judging the “logic” of the system as a whole. Hence, structural genocide – defined by Leech as “structural violence that intentionally inflicts on any group or collectivity conditions of life that bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” – can be said to be an intentional outcome of adherence to norms which govern a social system that by nature “inevitably results in . . . death on a mass scale,” as does capital. For Leech, the proffered defense of willful blindness – “such was not our intention,” the system’s managers might exclaim – is no defense at all. Or, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “The genocidal intent is implicit in the facts. It is not necessarily premeditated.”

Following this opening discussion of the theoretical case for considering capitalism to be genocidal, Leech takes a few particularly devastating examples from the contemporary world to illuminate his argument. In Mexico, the passing of NAFTA in 1994 has led to the dispossession of campesinos (peasants) on a grand scale, as the country’s stipulated importation of heavily subsidized maize and other crops from the United States effectively led millions to abandon agriculture and migrate to Mexican and US cities in search of employment in the manufacturing sector, in accordance with neoclassical theories of “comparative advantage” – and very much mirroring the means by which capitalism emerged historically through the destruction of the commons in England. For Leech, this forcible displacement has resulted in the explosion of precarity within the informal sector of the economy in Mexico, as many ex-campesinos fail to find traditional proletarian jobs, and it has also driven the horrifying feminicides of maquiladora workers in the Mexican border regions, migration en masse to the United States (and attendant mass death in the Sonoran desert), as well as the horrid drug war launched in 2006 by then-president Felipe Calderón. Leech sees similar processes in Colombia, which hosts the second-largest number of internally displaced persons in the world (4 million), with many of these people having been removed from their lands due to military and paramilitary operations undertaken to make way for megaprojects directed by foreign corporations.

Alarmingly, in India, Leech reports that more than 216,000 farmers committed suicide between 1997 and 2009, largely out of desperation over crushing debts they accumulated following the introduction of genetically-modified seed crops, as demanded by the transnational Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS, 1994) and the general shift from subsistence to export-oriented agriculture. In many cases, the genetically engineered seed varieties failed to expand yields to the levels promised by Monsanto, Cargill, and co., leading farmers then to take on further debt merely to cover the shortfalls as well as to pay for the next iteration of crops – which by conscious design were modified at the molecular level so as not to be able to reproduce naturally, thus ensuring biotech firms sustained profitability (a “captured market,” as it were). That such a dynamic should end in a downward spiral of death and destruction should be unsurprising, for all its horror.

Leech further illustrates his case regarding capitalism’s structurally genocidal nature in a chapter examining Africa south of the Sahel. It is this world region that has been “most severely impacted” by capital’s genocidal imperatives, claims Leech, and it is difficult to argue with this claim: Merely consider the millions who succumb to AIDS on the continent each year or the other millions who perish in the region annually due to lack of medical treatment for complications within pregnancy or conditions such as diarrhea and malaria, themselves catalyzed by pre-existing background malnutrition. All this deprivation is exacerbated, argues Leech, by food-aid regimes overseen by wealthier societies – which in the US case demands that food be purchased from and shipped by US companies, thus effectively removing a full half of the total resources intended for the hungry – and the infamous land-grabs being perpetrated on the continent in recent years by investors from such countries as Saudi Arabia and South Korea. Fundamentally, though, the conflict is one based on the guiding principles of capital: Because Africans in general do not possess the requisite income to “demand” food commodities within international capitalism, they themselves do not constitute a “viable market” and so are rendered invisible – nonpersons, or “unpeople.“

In these terms, Leech also discusses the toxic role of the capitalist pharmaceutical industry, which famously and “logically” invests an overwhelming percentage of its research and development funds in highly profitable schemes for lifestyle drugs directed at first-world consumers – at their most absurd, treatments for baldness, erectile dysfunction, and so on – instead of in essential medicines that could relieve the horrendous disease burden borne by the peoples of the global South. Leech starkly illustrates these tensions by noting that, were the eight largest US pharmaceutical companies to have gained an average profit of $6.8 billion instead of $7.7 billion in 2008, with the difference going to purchase anti-retrovirals for the 3.8 million HIV+ Africans who go without any treatment at all, a considerable percentage of the estimated 1.3 million annual deaths observed on the continent resulting from HIV/AIDS could be prevented. Leech summarizes this all rather starkly: “There is no clearer illustration of the shortcomings in trying to reform the behavior of capital than the ongoing annihilation of poor people in sub-Saharan Africa who are dying as a result of the structural violence inherent in capitalism.”

A similarly horrifying genocidal tendency for which capitalism is responsible is the next one briefly examined by Leech: that of the specter of catastrophic climate change. Leech claims it to be a “truly inconvenient truth” that the capitalist system itself is incapable of mitigating the total threat posed by global warming and instead precipitates this grim eventuality due to its incessant need for ceaseless expansion and profit, based principally on the indefinite exploitation of hydrocarbon resources. Clearly, it is the world’s poor who so far have suffered the most from capitalism’s degradation of the climate, despite having contributed next to nothing to the perpetuation of this world-historical problem: the estimated 2,000 Kenyan farmers who killed themselves upon the failure of rains in 2008, as Leech mentions, or the 260,000 Somalis murdered in the 2011 famine that followed from the worst drought in the past 7 decades. Leech observes that the ever-increasing annual death toll for which capital-induced climate destabilization is responsible will merely cause the overall number of 10 million annual preventable deaths to burgeon, leading ultimately perhaps to the deaths of “millions – or even billions,” in what may well develop into the extermination of humanity altogether.

With his antepenultimate chapter “Legitimizing the Illegitimate,” Leech follows Gramsci in seeking explanations for the means by which such a brutal system as capitalism has reproduced itself over time. He observes plainly that “most people’s world views currently reflect the values of capital,” at least within more affluent northern societies, and that capitalism proceeds with its genocidal proclivities while enjoying “the apparent consent of a significant portion of the world’s population.” Like Gramsci, Leech largely faults the hegemonic cultural processes that obtain within core-imperial societies – formal education, the media, work arrangements, etc. – for normalizing the prevailing state of affairs, in part by excluding the barbarous proceedings of capital from consideration – in contradistinction to his own volume. Channeling Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and other theorists with similar concerns, Leech notes that Western consumers remain largely ignorant of the extreme violence that is required as the very basis for the relative privileges they enjoy in global terms; worse, perhaps, most Northerners – a majority of whom, claims Leech, enjoy “middle-class lifestyle[s]” – have the capacity to escape the alienation driven by capital precisely by engaging in mindless consumerism, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle. For Leech, resistance to the rule of capital is far more evident in the global South, where Western imperial military ventures have long been employed to pacify and control the course of history, in radical denial of self-determination, dignity, and justice.

Leech closes this volume with a plea for socialism as an alternative to capitalist genocide. Given the development of his argument in preceding chapters, he declares that any means of attempting to overcome the extreme violence of capital cannot serve merely as a “band-aid” to the metaphorical “appendage severed by the brutality of capitalism.” The system itself must be overthrown, dismantled; the point is not simply to apply anemic reforms that might slightly attenuate capital’s genocidal logic, but to abolish the genocidal system altogether. For Leech, the most appropriate political alternative is that of a socialism marked by participatory decision-making and social control of the means of production; crucially, as well, this project should include concern for nature – hence, “eco-socialism” – as much of the historical experience of socialism clearly has not.

Following from assertions made earlier in the book, Leech sees the peoples of the global South as playing a seminal role in presenting anticapitalist alternatives in the present day. Indeed, he endorses Marx’s late assertions on the possibilities for noncapitalist societies to simply skip the capitalist stage and enter full communism in accordance with pre-existing communal, socialistic values.  In this sense, Leech ends with an appraisal of contemporary experiments in socialism, as in Venezuela and Cuba. While he recognizes that the late Hugo Chávez implemented a vision closer to social democracy than socialism, Leech remains enthusiastic about the various Bolivarian social programs, the thousands of worker-run cooperatives that flowered under Chávez, and the progress taken in the country toward the implementation of popular control of government, not to mention Chávez’s famous internationalism. On Cuba, Leech praises the Castro regime’s well-known successes in the fields of education and medicine – with the latter including the founding in 1990 of the Tarara Clinic, which treats Ukrainian children suffering from the ill-effects of radiation exposure after the Chernobyl disaster without cost – and celebrates the island-country’s near-abolition of child malnutrition, as attested to by UN Special Rapporteur Jean Ziegler, in addition to the World Wildlife Fund’s 2006 declaration that Cuba is the only country in the world to have achieved sustainable development. Tellingly, Leech asserts that Cuba’s main export is health care, while that of its imperialist northern neighbor is weapons!

All these successes notwithstanding, Leech makes some rather problematic assertions in this final chapter on socialism. For one, he claims that the Castros’ infamous imprisonment of those critical of the regime was undertaken “to defend the collective rights of Cubans,” and cites George Lambie’s assertion that “the Cuban state . . .  is benign towards the population.” One can think of many eminent and reasonable observers who would strongly disagree with such characterizations! Similarly, in his discussion on eco-socialism, Leech presents Bolivia under Evo Morales as taking significant measures to protect the environment – without mentioning the 2011 controversy over the government’s plan to build a highway through the indigenous nature reserve (TIPNIS), or the general charge of extractivism, as raised most significantly by the unofficial Mesa 18 at the April 2010 World People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, which criticized the Morales government’s perpetuation of mining and oil and gas exploitation and for this reason was banned from the conference’s proceedings.

Despite our disagreements – I would say that Leech has performed a great service with his presentation of capitalism as being structurally genocidal. Perhaps among the most revolutionary acts one can take, as Rosa Luxemburg asserted, is to “proclaim loudly what is happening.” Leech’s volume does this well and should be greatly commended for this, given the general struggle to “displace and estrange the world” (Adorno) from mainstream presentations of it that would have existing power relations live on indefinitely or until such time as catastrophic destruction sets in, whether through impending nuclear war, environmental collapse or a combination of these two.

It is to be hoped that Leech’s passionate contempt for the brutality and senselessness of capital will be taken up by radical social movements seeking to intervene toward the disruption of the hegemonic death-system, in favor of more emancipatory tomorrows. While it is questionable to hold, as Leech does, that such ends will be served by the seizure of state power and the development of Marxist political parties, and though I would argue that the case of proletarian complicity with capitalist imperialism is more complicated than Leech would have it, what is not open to question is the utter depravity of the structural violence inherent to capitalism. As Mark Twain wrote in contemplating the infamous legacy of the Jacobin Terror during the most intense period of the French Revolution:

“There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; . . . our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe [or guillotine], compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? . . . A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Adorno on historical progress: Can humanity avert total ruin?

Republication (with updates and revisions) with Heathwood Press of “Some Reflections on Theodor W. Adorno’s Account of Progress,” the very first essay on this blog! (1 April 2010)

12 June 2013

It should not be taken as an exaggeration to claim that the very future survival of humanity is at present imperiled.  Whereas the prospect of humanity’s collective suicide by means of nuclear annihilation seemed a plausible threat during much of the twentieth century, today this decidedly horrifying role seems to have been taken up by the specter of catastrophic climate change.  As evidence being continually released by concerned climatologists and biologists constantly reminds us, the dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate systems that has been driven by the onset and perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production stands to render impossible the continuation of much of life over large swathes of the planet in the near future.  With this in mind, it would seem that the anti-authoritarian French psychotherapist Félix Guattari was right to warn that “there will be no more human history unless humanity undertakes a radical reconsideration of itself.”[1] It is with these rather bleak considerations in mind that I argue that attention should be focused on German philosopher and social critic Theodor W. Adorno’s 1962 lecture “Progress,”[2] an intervention that Adorno sees as having its basis in the question of “whether humankind is able to prevent catastrophe.”

Adorno situates his reflections on progress within an epoch he sees as potentially giving birth to “both utopian and absolutely destructive possibilities.”  He observes that the chance for both such possibilities finds itself constrained within a present in which “the forms of humanity’s own global societal constitution threaten its existence”; no less than the prospect of “averting utmost, total disaster” constitutes then for Adorno “the possibility of progress.”  In Adorno’s view, progress is indelibly linked to “the survival of the species”—there can be no progress without the realization of the “happiness of unborn generations,” a “notion” that Adorno takes from the work of his comrade Walter Benjamin as constituting the very “notion of redemption.”  Indeed, the prospect of progress pre-supposes the as-yet unfulfilled historical possibility for the “establishment of humankind,” an eventuality that Adorno sees as opening “in the face of extinction.”  Insofar as “humankind remains entrapped by the totality which it itself fashions,” claims Adorno, “progress has not yet taken place at all.”

Existing society for Adorno thus proffers the prospect of total regression; the chance for the realization of the determinate negation of such regression is in Adorno’s view however “still not without all hope.”  Echoing some of Hannah Arendt’s commentary on the experience of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms,[3] Adorno asserts in Hegelian terms that “part of the dialectic of progress is that historical setbacks […] provide the condition needed for humanity to find the means to avert them in the future.”  The “warding off [of] catastrophe” is in this sense a possibility Adorno sees as promised in the prospect of “a rational establishment of overall society as humankind.”  Like Benjamin, who sees in “every second” of the future “the door through which the Messiah could enter,”[4]5Adorno suggests that progress can begin “at any instant.”  Expanding on this idea dialectically, Adorno asserts that present injustice “is simultaneously the condition for possible justice”:  seemingly aligning himself with claims made by fellow German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse[5] and North-American social-ecologist Murray Bookchin,[6] Adorno argues that the already-existing ‘material base’ provided by the historical development of the capitalist mode of production—and in particular, its technologies—could be-redirected and re-organized so as to provide a reasonable life for all existing humans:  “no one on earth needs to suffer poverty,” claims Adorno; “for the first time,” even “violence might vanish altogether.”  Such world-historical accomplishments could only be achieved, of course, if ‘the existent’ were somehow to be wrested away from its embeddedness within capitalist oppression.

Central to the prospect of the realization of the “utopian possibilities” Adorno envisages is the “philosophy of reflection,” or the emergence of thought critical of the instrumentalizing, life-negating realities propagated by capital and domination generally considered.  Adorno sees such critical thought by itself, though, as insufficient, for “[r]eason’s helpful self-reflection […] would be its transition to praxis.”  Practical, revolutionary intervention is desperately needed in the present, in Adorno’s view:  if, as he says, a “self-conscious global subject does not develop and intervene,” human survival itself is in jeopardy; hence, the very “possibility of progress […] has devolved to this subject alone.”  In this sense, the “awakening” of humanity is “the sole potential for a coming of age”; progress is to be attained through a “coming out of the spell,” for it is only when “humanity becomes aware of its own indigenousness to nature and brings to a halt the domination it exacts over nature through which domination by nature continues” that progress can exist, according to Adorno.  Thus, “it could be said,” Adorno tells us, that “progress occurs only where it ends.”

This critique of the domination of nature was originally formulated in the 1944 text Adorno wrote in exile together with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: there, Adorno and Horkheimer posit that the “collective madness that rages today”—that of a world “radiant with triumphant calamity”—finds its origin in “primitive objectivization, in the first man’s calculating contemplation of the world as a prey.”[7] The entirety of the subsequent development of human history after this point—and in particular, the historical creations of human self-domination, together with that visited on other humans and the non-human world—follows, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s view, from this primal sort of dominative orientation.  In this sense, then, to overturn the domination of external nature might perhaps allow humanity to liberate itself from domination  altogether.  Progress, says Adorno, “wants to disrupt the triumph of radical evil”:  it constitutes “resistance against the perpetual danger of relapse […] at all stages.”

As compelling as Adorno’s account of the prospect of humanity’s awakening may be to those taken by it, Adorno himself seems to have long been rather pessimistic regarding the possibility of its actual realization.  In “Progress,” he quite plainly observes that “[t]he idea of a progress which leads out and away is presently blocked”—this, “because the subjective moments of spontaneity are beginning to wither in the historical process.”  Such a view is without a doubt informed by his exploration, with Horkheimer, of what the two refer to in Dialectic of Enlightenment as the ‘culture industry’:  the socialization processes of existing society which work to “ensure that the simple reproduction of mind does not lead on to the expansion of mind”[8]—formal education, the mass media, television, and ‘culture’ generally.  In these theorists’ disturbing account, such processes come to reign in existing society, creating a “totally administered world” and hence fettering humanity in large part to the “gigantic apparatus.”[9] As serious as they consider the threat of the culture industry to human freedom and historical progress, however, neither Adorno nor Horkheimer seems to have believed that the colonization of mind propagated by existing social relations implies the absolute victory of the existent:  in Horkheimer’s words, “Mutilated as men [sic] are, in the duration of a brief moment they can become aware that in the world which has been thoroughly rationalized they can dispense with the interests of self-preservation which still set them one against the other.”[10] “Reason,” Horkheimer continues, “could recognize and denounce the forms of injustice and thus emancipate itself from them.”[11] Hence, the importance Adorno places in “Progress” on the “philosophy of reflection”—for in his view, “[o]nly reason […] would be capable of abolishing this domination [i.e., that of nature and thus of humanity]”—and hence also his theoretical assertion that “finally progress can begin, at any instant.”

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Given Adorno’s account of progress, then, what can be made of it today?  Arguably, a great deal.  As arresting as many of Adorno’s observations on progress are, and despite the lecture’s age, it is undoubtedly the case that his comments are highly relevant to consideration of the currently prevailing state of affairs.

The status quo, like the time on which Adorno was contemplating over sixty years ago, is marked by the potential for “universal regression” and “absolutely destructive possibilities.”  It is surely the case that “humanity’s own global societal constitution” is at present in jeopardy—human survival is itself in question.  For confirmation of this claim, one need only peruse the many climatological reports that have been released in recent years[12] which predict that, due to dangerous anthropogenic interference with the Earth’s climate, average global temperatures will likely rise between 4° and 6°C before 2100—if not more!  Climate change on such a scale would truly be catastrophic:  a world with an increased average global temperature of 4° C above that which prevailed in pre-industrial human history would likely see the break-up of the Ross and Ronne ice shelves of Antarctica, an eventuality that would in turn precipitate the collapse of the entire West Antarctic ice-sheet and hence raise sea levels dramatically; both Australia and the South Asian subcontinent are expected not to be able to support agricultural production under the environmental conditions that would likely exist in such a world.[13]  An Earth warmer on average by 5° C would likely see the downstream flows of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers—which at present provide life for billions of currently-existing humans—reduced by half their present volume; indeed, climatological conditions in such a world would simply render large swathes of the Earth’s surface uninhabitable for human life, with isolated ‘belts of habitability’ reportedly receding to the far north of Earth’s northern hemisphere and the far south of its southern hemisphere, in addition to highland regions in Africa.[14]  It is to be imagined that those who would find themselves residing outside such “sanctuaries” would be devastated by famine.  Given an increased average temperature of 6° C—the most severe case of climate change considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be likely or even possible in the twenty-first century, yet itself arguably an under-estimate—the Earth’s oceans are expected to be acidified, largely anoxic, and thus almost entirely bereft of life, while ‘super-hurricanes’ regularly circumnavigate the globe; worse, the synergy of methane-air clouds produced by the mass emission of ocean-dwelling methane hydrates released by previous climate change and of the hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) created by the mass-rotting of formerly existing organic beings could indeed result in the dismantling of the ozone layer altogether![15]  This worst-case scenario would bear resemblance to the worst mass-extinction event experienced since the emergence of life on Earth, one that occurred at the end of the Permian Age 251 million years ago, when average global temperatures rose by 6°C and approximately 95 percent of all extant species went extinct.  Clearly, humanity itself cannot be considered a species exempt from such peril.

If the science underpinning the various predictive scenarios regarding likely future climate change is sound—and no compelling reason to doubt such seems to exist—then it is surely true that the phenomenon of catastrophic climate change imperils the very future survival of humanity, in addition to the millions of other life-forms with which humanity shares planet Earth.  As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her dark assessment of recent warming trends,[16] it is as though the overdeveloped, ‘advanced’ capitalist societies are enacting their own death as well as the destruction of most of life on Earth.  Insofar as theorizing about the possibilities of averting such a horrendous outcome can be considered a useful task, then, to reflect on Adorno’s conception of historical progress may prove fruitful.

As strange as it may be to declare as regards a philosopher generally known for his seemingly desperate pessimism, Adorno is perhaps too optimistic in “Progress” regarding the very prospect of progress.  The specter of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change that hangs over the future—and present—seems to negate the very geographical and physical pre-conditions that it is to be imagined would be necessary for the realization of Adorno’s anarcho-Marxist sense of social redemption—the occurrence of the “liberating event,” the emergence of a world in which “no one shall go hungry” and no one will “fear to be different”[17]—that he sees as possible.  This latest in a long string of catastrophes that have marked human history, for its part, amounts to climate genocide, as Gideon Polya rightly claims[18]:  it constitutes the mass-murder of a hitherto unprecedented number of humans by capitalism.  Without radical intervention, billions can be expected to die; consider the quarter-million who perished during the 2011 Somalia famine, which followed from the worst drought experienced in the Horn of Africa in the last seven decades.[19]  His reactionary politics aside, renowned Earth-scientist James Lovelock predicts “about 80%” of the world’s population to be annihilated this century due to the changes threatened by looming climate catastrophe.[20] The extremity of the present state of affairs, indeed, is so absolute that its characterization by Noam Chomsky in the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent as “the possibly terminal phase of human history” is hardly a presently inaccurate conclusion.  In light of such considerations, it seems unclear how Adorno could today justify his claim that progress can begin “at any instant.”

This aspect of Adorno’s argument notwithstanding—it was a remark made during a different time, though one similarly imperiled by the megaton bomb—much of the rest of his commentary on progress could be helpful in terms of framing the extremity of the present situation.  He is certainly correct to claim “progress today” to at minimum demand “the prevention and avoidance of total catastrophe”[21]; the radicality of Adorno’s positive vision of progress—the demand that the “domination exacted over nature” be “halt[ed]” and that the “happiness of unborn generations” be secured—undoubtedly pre-supposes a thoroughly different set of social relations than those impelled by capital.[22]  Just as “[w]rong life cannot be lived rightly,”[23] so cannot affirmation be found within prevailing hegemony:  “Where bourgeois society satisfies the concept [of progress] which it harbors for itself, it knows no progress.”  Adorno rightly remarks that historical progress can in no way constitute “capitulation to the mainstream.”

If humanity truly is today faced “with its [own] extinction,” it is to be hoped that such a prospect in fact “opens,” in Adorno’s words, the possibility for “the very establishment of humankind,” among other “utopian possibilities.”  Other than a descent into total catastrophe, no alternative can be gleaned from the present:  “there is nothing left,” Horkheimer seems to correctly state, “but barbarism or freedom.”[24] If matters as presently constituted “just go on,” in Benjamin’s formulation, then “all is lost.”[25] Without a radical irruption of the prevailing world-course, humanity will fail totally to observe the new categorical imperative that Adorno sees Hitler as having imposed “upon unfree [humanity]”:  that humans “arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”[26] If the recurrence of such absolute catastrophe is to be avoided, humanity must somehow come to be established, to be born—only thus can there be the possibility of progress beyond the sets of social relations that justify nothing other than “hopeless sorrow.”[27]

The enormity of possible future negations—stated plainly, omnicide, or total ecocide—notwithstanding, it could perhaps ultimately be true that a  realization of sorts of Adorno’s account of progress is a project that is at present still plausible.  It is within the realm of possibility that Adorno’s “self-conscious global subject” could come to employ reason and so, in the words of Ronald Aronson, “awaken from [its] delusion […] to attack the social structures responsible for the impending disaster.”[28]  Surely a rational, radical re-orientation of existing technologies could help to avert impending climate catastrophe as well as introduce at least a modicum of justice and freedom for the dispossessed billions residing on Earth today; it is to be imagined that the resources presently employed to maintain nuclear weapons, militarism, and the arms trade—to name only a handful of present barbarous irrationalities—could be re-arranged so as to promote humane ends.  Such a solution naturally cannot be had as long as exist growth economies and class societies; Adorno’s concept of progress, like any other reasonable analysis of the present situation, demands their abolition.

In the end, then, Hannah Arendt seems right to assert that “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality.”[29] Only such a “beginning”[30] would allow for the realization of a state in which “people [have] no cause to fear,” wherein “there [is] no impending catastrophe on the horizon.”[31]  As Ernst Bloch writes at the close of the first volume of his Principle of Hope, humanity “and the world carry enough good future” within them[32]; the expansive revolutionary historical tradition which Adorno largely overlooks confirms this thesis.  To (re)connect with such realities, toward the end of advancing radical struggle, would seem the order of the day.  Doubtless, humankind’s present task is daunting:  “Debarbarization of humanity is the immediate prerequisite for survival.”[33]

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[1]        The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Continuum, 2000 [1989]), 45.

[2]       In Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Eric Krakauer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989) and Critical Models, ed. and trans. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).  Both translations are employed at various points in the following text.

[3]        The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, California: Harcourt, 1968 [1951]).

[4]        “On the Concept of History” (1940), Thesis XVIII.B

[5]       Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1966).

[6]      Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Oakland, California:  AK Press, 2004).

[7]      Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, California:  Stanford UP, 2002 [1947/1944]), 1, 176.

[8]      Ibid, 100.

[9]      Ibid, 194.

[10]    Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” from The Essential Frankfurt School, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1997), 48.

[11]    Ibid, 47.

[12]  See e.g. David Adam, “Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes,” The Guardian, 28 September 2009; Steve O’Connor and Michael McCarthy, “World on course for catastrophic 6°C rise, reveal scientists,” The Observer, 18 November 2009; Alok Jha, “Global temperatures could rise 6C by end of century, say scientists,” The Guardian, 17 November 2009.

[13]   Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008), 186-213.

[14]   Ibid, 214-235.

[15]  Ibid, 236-263.

[16]   Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York:  Bloomsbury, 2006), 189.

[17]    Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, London: Verso, 2005 [1951]), 245, 156-7.

[18]   Cf., inter alia, “G8 Failure Means Climate Genocide for Developing World,” Countercurrents, 11 July 2009; see also Polya’s website on the issue (http://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/home).

[19]  “UN says Somalia famine killed nearly 260,000,” AlJazeera English, 2 May 2013.

[20]  Decca Aitkenhead, “‘Enjoy life while you can,’” The Guardian, 1 March 2008.

[21]  Adorno, History & Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK:  Polity, 2006 [1964-1965]), 143.

[22]  Ibid, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK:  Polity, 2000), 176.

[23]  Ibid, op. cit. (2005 [1951]), 39.

[24]  Horkheimer, op. cit., 48.

[25]  Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4: 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, Massachusetts:  Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), p. 184; ibid, One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1997), 80.

[26]  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 365.

[27]  George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Univ. of Cambridge Press, 1975), 69.

[28]  Ronald Aronson, The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope (London: Verso, 1983), 289.

[29]  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:  Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), 247.

[30]  Arendt, op. cit. (1968 [1951]), 473.

[31]  Adorno, op. cit. (2006 [1965]), 143.

[32]  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986), 447.

[33]  Adorno, op. cit. (2005), 190.

Sartre: Intellectual responsibility is practical, action-oriented

An excerpt from Ronald Aronson’s Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (1980), which mentions some changes in Sartre’s thought and orientation following the revolutionary upsurge of May 1968 in France (p. 317-9).  Sartre’s provocative turn expressed here retains all of its relevance 40 years on.

“But as he absorbed the experience of May, he decided that the intellectual should first ‘suppress himself as intellectual’ in order then to put his skills ‘directly at the service of the masses’. [...] This new posture was most sharply and provocatively defined in his interview with John Gerassi in 1971.

Sartre here gave the simplest answer yet to his constant question: what should the intellectual do? – he should act. To be a radical intellectual was above all to be committed to put oneself bodily in opposition to the system. In conversation with Gerassi he reviewed his own political history going back to the Occupation and describing his shifting relations with the Communist party thereafter. The Algerian and Vietnamese wars had convinced him of the need to develop a movement to the left of the pcf; and by his own activity, he had helped to bring that new movement into being. ‘But I was still a typical intellectual. That is, I did my work at my desk, and occasionally joined a parade in the streets or spoke at some meeting. Then May 1968 happened, and I understood that what the young were putting into question was not just capitalism, imperialism, the system, etc., but those of us who pretended to be against all that, as well. We can say that from 1940 to 1968 I was a left-wing intellectual (un intellectuel de gauche) and from 1968 on I became a leftist intellectual (un intellectuel gauchiste). The difference is one of action. A leftist intellectual is one who realizes that being an intellectual exempts him from nothing. He forsakes his privileges, or tries to, in actions. It is similar, I think, to what in the us you would call white-skin privileges. A white leftist intellectual, in America, I presume, understands that because he is white he has certain privileges which he must smash through direct action. Not to do so is to be guilty of murder of the blacks – just as much as if he actually pulled the triggers that killed, for example, Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and all the other Black Panthers murdered by the police, by the system.’ [...]

‘It is very easy to denounce the war in Vietnam by signing petitions or marching in a parade with 20,000 comrades. But it doesn’t accomplish one-millionth what could be accomplished if all your big-name intellectuals went into the ghettos, into the Oakland port, to the war factories, and risked being manhandled by the roughs of the maritime union. In my view, the intellectual who does all his fighting from an office is counter-revolutionary today, no matter what he writes.’

‘Are you saying,’ Gerassi inquired, ‘that the responsibility of the intellectual is not intellectual?’

‘Yes,’ Sartre replied, ‘it is in action. It is to put his status at the service of the oppressed directly. Just as the German intellectual who told Hitler and talked about his anti-Nazism while he earned money writing scripts for Hollywood was as responsible for Hitler as the German who closed his eyes, just as the American intellectual who only denounces the Vietnam war and the fate of your political prisoners but continues to teach in a university that carries out war research and insists on law and order (which is a euphemism for letting the courts and police repress active dissenters) is as responsible for the murders and repression as is the Government and its institutions, so too, here in France, the intellectual who does not put his body as well as his mind on the line against the system is fundamentally supporting the system and should be judged accordingly.’”

At Left Forum 2013: “The Theory of One-Dimensional Society, the Specter of Climate Collapse, and Prospects for Social Transformation”

I will be chairing a panel during the first session of Left Forum 2013 next Saturday morning (10-11:50am) at Pace University in New York City with my comrades Sky Cohen, Jani Benjamins, and Quincy Saul.  The topic of discussion is “The Theory of One-Dimensional Society, the Specter of Climate Collapse, and Prospects for Social Transformation.”

Appropriately, the overall theme for this year’s Left Forum is “Mobilizing for Economical/Ecological Transformation.”

Please share and considering coming through, if you would like.

Abstract: Following the presentation of theories of reification advanced by György Lukács in his History and Class Consciousness (1923), and continuing his colleagues’ investigations into the “culture industry” of late capitalism (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944), German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse famously came to declare advanced-industrial society as being one-dimensional (One-Dimensional Man, 1964): a world marked by the absence of opposition to prevailing trends, with the stipulated integration of the Marxian proletariat into capitalism and generalized social conformity. This panel will examine the contemporary relevance of Marcuse’s analysis of one-dimensionality, particularly as regards the ever-worsening climatic and environmental crises, driven as they are by the exigencies of the capitalist machine and, crucially, its seemingly widespread acceptance among the U.S. populace at large (the U.S. being the single largest contributor to this problem historically). Dialectically, though, this panel will also attempt to explore the chances for a sustained “ecological general strike,” as is being currently formulated by the I.W.W., prosecuted by the masses residing within the world-system’s imperialist core, in accordance with their responsibilities, as theorized by tendencies like autonomous Marxism. Panelists will also seek to examine the contributions permaculture can provide in the struggle for a decentralized, anti-authoritarian resolution to the climate crisis.

Please also see the full list of panels for the weekend here.

One Year On: Under Empire, All Life is Imperiled

This is my latest published writing, and my first appearance in Counterpunch.  I wrote it for the one-year anniversary of the publication of Imperiled Life.

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“After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it.” – Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Channeling Adorno, it would I think prove difficult today to characterize the prevailing world-situation as anything other than highly negative.  Such an interpretation is arguably seen most readily in reflection on environmental matters—specifically, the ever-worsening climate emergency, not to mention other worrying signs of the ecological devastation wrought by the capitalist system.

Perhaps a short summary of key recent findings on the state of the environment is here in order.  Less than two weeks ago, the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai’i confirmed that the average global carbon dioxide concentration had reached 400 parts per million (ppm)—more than 50 ppm higher than James Hansen and the eponymous 350.org movement claim to be a safe level, and approximately 120 ppm higher than pre-industrial (or pre-capitalist) concentrations.  According to the Guardian, such CO₂ concentrations have not been seen on Earth for the last 3-5 million years, during the Pliocene geological era, which saw an ice-free Arctic, savannahs in northern Africa (where currently the Sahara resides), and sea levels between 25 and 40 meters higher than those which obtain today.  In Professor Andrew Glikson’s estimation, the annual rise of 3 ppm in atmospheric CO₂ seen last year (2012-2013) is entirely unprecedented during the past 65 million years; as he writes, “regular river flow conditions such as allowed cultivation and along river valleys since about 7000 years ago, and temperate Mediterranean-type climates allowing extensive farming, could hardly exist under the intense hydrological cycle and heat wave conditions of the Pliocene.”  This should hardly be surprising, given that such atmospheric CO₂ levels as those we suffer today have never been seen in the entire history (and prehistory) of Homo sapiens sapiens, though our ancestral Homo habilis arguably did endure them.  Indeed, the Earth’s current average global temperature—a slightly different matter than the atmospheric CO₂ level, given lags in the latter’s contribution to the former, in addition to the masking effect of aerosols (SO₂ et al.) emitted by industry—has recently been found to surpass 90% of all average global temperatures experienced since the emergence of agriculture some 12,000 years ago—and hence also of “civilization.”  Arguably most worrying is Nafeez Ahmad’s recent citation of a 2011 Science paper which projects that, given the current, unprecedented rate of increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, global average temperatures could rise a full 16°C by the end of the century—that is to say, nearly three times  the worst-case scenario considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2007 report (a 6°C increase).

Such considerations are no doubt horrific; they are nonetheless reality.  Some other truths manifested of late that can be associated with these trends include the following climatological news and reports: the 260,000 persons, half of them young children, who the UN recently announced to have perished during the 2011 famine in Somalia, itself catalyzed by the region’s worst drought in the past 7 decades; the hundreds of millions who Lord Stern has recently reported can soon be expected to be forcibly displaced from their homelands due to unchecked global warming; the millions who will face starvation in Africa and Asia as agriculture withers under unprecedented heat; the numerous people of Bangladesh who are losing access to freshwater as rising sea levels cause saltwater to intrude into aquifers, or the millions of Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Burmese, and Rohingya threatened by cyclones like Mahasen; the innumerable species, plant and animal, that face destruction and extinction under the projected average global temperature increases promised by climate catastrophe…  The nauseating list goes on indefinitely.

Consideration of these problematics is the focus of my Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe, published a year ago now by AK Press in collaboration with the Institute for Anarchist Studies.  Strangely enough, this one-year anniversary of publication is, unlike the case with more joyous occasions, hardly one to be celebrated, for the problems considered within the volume unsurprisingly have only worsened over that time, in keeping with the laws of physics and chemistry.  I would nonetheless continue to vouch for the work’s conclusions: its “diagnosis, prognosis, and remedies,” as mentioned in the preface by my editor Paul Messersmith-Glavin, stem from a social anarchist, anti-systemic perspective on the ecological crisis that I believe to be rational and helpful—insofar as such standards have a place today within political and environmental thought, as I should hope they might.

In structural terms, it should be clear to all honest observers that the climate crisis is the result of the dominance of the capitalist mode of production over the entirety of planet Earth; basing itself fundamentally on ceaseless expansion, the imperatives of capital profoundly contradict the modes of living—cooperative and competitive—observed throughout the world’s various ecosystems.  Capital’s “grow-or-die” maxim resembles that of the cancer cell or a deadly virus more than it does human, animal, or plant life, as theorists from Murray Bookchin to John McMurtry have rightly noted.  As against liberal analyses, then, the State has proved itself to be a mere facilitator of capital’s ecocidal project: consider Obama’s recent profession of enthusiasm for the “development” of the substantial hydrocarbon resources that are believed to reside below the Arctic ice cap, once capitalism has melted that away entirely.  In this vein, David Schwartman is right to cite Michael Klare in his formulation of the U.S. military as constituting the “oil protection service” of transnational capital: imperialism’s long and sordid history of accommodation with its autocratic Gulf petrol-enablers—and its various intrigues and interventions targeting those, from Mossadegh to Qadhafi, who might seek alternative uses of such resources—is well-known.  Recall the Iraq War.

So we cannot look to the State for meaningful assistance in the struggle to overturn the trends which are delivering humanity and Earth’s systems into ruin—as John Holloway notes rightly, the State is “their organization,” referring to the capitalist class.  What of the putative non-governmental organizations which espouse environmental concerns?  Clearly, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and company rightly merit the label of “Gang Green,” in light of their toxic incrementalism and their related willingness to accommodate the very structures which are perpetuating environmental destruction.  Similarly, Cory Morningstar has recently written a legitimate denunciation of Bill McKibben and 350.org on these pages, declaring McKibben’s world-famous yet entirely reformist and thus inadequate organization to represent little more than the “soma of the 21^st century,” given its papering over of any critique of capitalism, productivism, militarism, or imperialism.  Essentially, then, what we are faced with is the omnicidal steamroll of the capitalist machine as oiled by the world’s rich and their State, and then the anemic responses from the official “opposition” which has taken it upon itself to attempt to resolve the various environmental crises by doing essentially nothing of substance to achieve those ends.

Thankfully, of course, the story does not end there.  Humanity, as I write in the penultimate paragraph of Imperiled Life, cannot be reduced to the forms of capital and the State; these “do not have the final word.”  We are, then, on a desperate search for radical groupings among the subordinated, or l@s de abajo (“those from below”).  In strategic terms, it would seem that generally to diffuse anti-systemic ecological analyses—assuming these be tied together with humanistic, emancipatory concern for social oppression—remains a crucial task at the present juncture: the counter-hegemonic war of position today retains all of its relevance!  As should be self-evident, of course, efforts seeking merely to “raise consciousness” and metaphorically arm the populace with critical perspectives on the present multi-dimensional crisis should hardly be taken as the end of organizing; rather, such should serve as means to the “happy end” (Ernst Bloch) of a world freed from capitalist and State control, and the attendant looming risk of climate apocalypse.  How these two trends might inter-relate—and whether we can even theoretically hope that they will, this late in the game—is the question on everyone’s minds (or, at least, it should be).  As Allan Stoekl closes his recent review of Adrian Parr’s The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, summing up the struggle to achieve a post-capitalist ecological society: “But how to get from here to there?”  The question is a burning one.  In this vein, we can turn to Max Horkheimer’s obvious yet crucial point that “[t]he revolution is no good” insofar as it “is not victorious.”[1]

Horkheimer is right: it would indeed seem problematic for thought merely to appeal to airy philosophical abstractions amidst the decidedly pressing matter of capital’s destruction of the world—to speak of the promise of the Hegelian Geist, say, or the inevitable triumph of the proletariat, as managed by an enlightened Leninist vanguard—but I would argue that Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality could prove particularly useful at the present moment.  As I understand, she first introduces this idea at the close of her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), when she counterposes the possibilities of birth to inherited tradition and history, particularly of the imperialist and fascist varieties: “With each new birth, a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being […].  Freedom as an inner capacity of [humanity] is identical with the capacity to begin.”[2]

Arendt expands upon these fragmentary comments on interruption and beginning in her 1958 magnus opus The Human Condition.  Largely repudiating the repressive, fatalistic philosophy of her former mentor Martin Heidegger, she writes the following: “If left to themselves, human affairs can only follow the law of mortality, which is the most certain and the only reliable law of a life spent between birth and death.  It is the faculty of action that interferes with this law because it interrupts the inexorable automatic course of daily life, which in its turn, as we saw, interrupted and interfered with the cycle of the biological life process.  The life span of man [sic] running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that [humans], though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.  Yet just as, from the standpoint of nature, the rectilinear movement of [humanity]‘s life-span between birth and death looks like a peculiar deviation from the common natural rule of cyclical movement, thus action, seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course of the world, looks like a miracle […].  The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted.  It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born.  Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.”[3]

This hope for new beginnings—essentially, for a multiplicity of interventions which, à la Albert Camus and his Rebel, assert to power that it has transgressed vital brightlines, and hence cannot be allowed to continue on its path of destruction (“thus far, and no further”)—accords well with Walter Benjamin’s vision of a “leap into the open sky of history,” or Adorno’s contemplation of “a praxis which could explode the infamous continuum.”[4]  Each of us likely has similar visions, whether waking or unconscious—“fuck the police,” “world peace,” “fire to Babylon,” “there is no planet B.”  It is crucial that we somehow coalesce these anti-systemic passions into a generalized movement to overthrow the totalitarian systems that degrade and abuse humanity and, in a most final sense, threaten to destroy future human generations as well as much of the rest of life—millions of species—on the only planetary system that we know is amenable to its emergence and evolution.  Hope today, then, is not passivity and sedation (as with religion) but rather radical struggle (as in revolution).

While there indeed have been positive signs in the past few years in the direction of the development of what dissident historian George Katsiaficas terms a “global people’s uprising,” clearly such developments have met with distressing limitations, many of them indeed emanating from constituted power—think of the police’s dismantling of the Occupy/Decolonize encampments in the U.S., or the various imperial manipulations of and interventions against the numerous uprisings in the Arab-majority world.  The preferred approach, in my view, remains what György Lukács saw as a “mass rising on behalf of reason,” an idea he took from the 500 million signatures to the 1950 Stockholm Agreement calling for unconditional nuclear disarmament—a tradition we have seen well-illustrated throughout the streets and squares of much of the world in recent memory.[5]

The point, in sum—as well as the hope—is to radicalize and intensify these encouraging social strides from below against the system, to help along the birth of the new—or, as Bloch termed it, the “Not-Yet.”  It is past time to sound the tocsin, whether physically like Jean Paul Marat did to defend the Great French Revolution, or musically like Dmitriy Shostakovich did in defense of the memory and future promise of the 1905 Russian Revolution (as well as other revolutions).  The alarm must be continuous, not so that we grow accustomed to it, but rather so that we never lose sight of the substantial tasks with which we are confronted today, and the anarchist means by which we would most likely best respond to these.  Positively and concretely, I would here reiterate some of the proposals for action made by my comrade Cristian Guerrero nearly a year ago in the run-up to planned counter-protests against the G-20 summit in Los Cabos, México: agitation, indignation, mobilization, direct action, occupation, blockade of capital, popular assembly.

Particularly promising, I would say, is the Industrial Workers of the World’s new conception of the ecological general strike, whereby environmental sanity is to be achieved through the disruption of capitalism’s colonization of the life-world and its replacement with participatory economic models.

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[1]   Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes, 1926-1931 and 1959-1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 39.

[2]   Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harvest, 1968 [1951]), 465, 473.

[3]   Ibid, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 246-7.

[4]   Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 117.

[5]   György Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Torfaen, Wales: Merlin Press, 1980), 850.

“Climate change ‘will make hundreds of millions homeless’”

Reposting this article from The Observer/The Guardian, which comes just a day after monitoring stations in Hawai’i confirmed the global atmospheric carbon concentration has surpassed 400 parts per million, corresponding to levels within the geological record that “ha[ve] not been seen on Earth for 3-5 million years, a period called the Pliocene. At that time, global average temperatures were 3 or 4C higher than today’s and 8C warmer at the poles. Reef corals suffered a major extinction while forests grew up to the northern edge of the Arctic Ocean, a region which is today bare tundra.”

 

By Robin McKie in The Guardian, 11 May 2013

“Carbon dioxide levels indicate rise in temperatures that could lead agriculture to fail on entire continents”

It is increasingly likely that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homelands in the near future as a result of global warming. That is the stark warning of economist and climate change expert Lord Stern following the news last week that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere had reached a level of 400 parts per million (ppm).

Massive movements of people are likely to occur over the rest of the century because global temperatures are likely to rise to by up to 5C because carbon dioxide levels have risen unabated for 50 years, said Stern, who is head of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.

“When temperatures rise to that level, we will have disrupted weather patterns and spreading deserts,” he said. “Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will come when they try to migrate into new lands, however. That will bring them into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth.”

The news that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have reached 400ppm has been seized on by experts because that level brings the world close to the point where it becomes inevitable that it will experience a catastrophic rise in temperatures. Scientists have warned for decades of the danger of allowing industrial outputs of carbon dioxide to rise unchecked.

Instead, these outputs have accelerated. In the 1960s, carbon dioxide levels rose at a rate of 0.7ppm a year. Today, they rise at 2.1ppm, as more nations become industrialised and increase outputs from their factories and power plants. The last time the Earth’s atmosphere had 400ppm carbon dioxide, the Arctic was ice-free and sea levels were 40 metres higher.

The prospect of Earth returning to these climatic conditions is causing major alarm. As temperatures rise, deserts will spread and life-sustaining weather patterns such as the North Indian monsoon could be disrupted. Agriculture could fail on a continent-wide basis and hundreds of millions of people would be rendered homeless, triggering widespread conflict.

There are likely to be severe physical consequences for the planet. Rising temperatures will shrink polar ice caps – the Arctic’s is now at its lowest since records began – and so reduce the amount of solar heat they reflect back into space. Similarly, thawing of the permafrost lands of Alaska, Canada and Russia could release even more greenhouse gases, including methane, and further intensify global warming.

“UN says Somalia famine killed nearly 260,000″

Reprinted from AlJazeera English, 2 May 2013

@ FAO Somalia

Almost 260,000 people, half of them young children, died of hunger during the last famine in Somalia, according to a UN report that admits the world body should have done more to prevent the tragedy.

The toll is much higher than was feared at the time of the 2010-2012 food crisis in the troubled Horn of Africa country and also exceeds the 220,000 who starved to death in a 1992 famine, according to the findings.

“The report confirms we should have done more before the famine was declared,” said Philippe Lazzarini, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia.

“Warnings that began as far back as the drought in 2010 did not trigger sufficient early action,” he said in a statement.

Half of those who died were children under five, according to the joint report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the US-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

“Famine and severe food insecurity in Somalia claimed the lives of about 258,000 people between October 2010 and April 2012, including 133,000 children under five,” said the report, the first scientific estimate of how many people died.

Children toll

Somalia was the country hardest hit by extreme drought in 2011 that affected over 13 million people across the Horn of Africa.

“An estimated 4.6 percent of the total population and 10 percent of children under five died in southern and central Somalia,” the report said, saying the deaths were on top of 290,000 “baseline” deaths during the period, and double the average for sub-Saharan Africa.

Lazzarini said that about 2.7 million people are still in need of life-saving assistance and support to rebuild their livelihoods.

Famine was first declared in July 2011 in Somalia’s Southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions, but later spread to other areas, including Middle Shabelle, Afgoye and inside camps for displaced people in the war-ravaged capital Mogadishu.

In Lower Shabelle 18 percent of children under five died, the report said.

During the famine, it was feared that tens of thousands had died, whereas the report now shows more people died than in Somalia’s 1992 famine, when an estimated 220,000 people died over a year.

Famine implies that at least a fifth of households face extreme food shortages, with acute malnutrition in more than 30 percent of people, and two deaths per 10,000 people every day, according to the UN definition.

Mark Smulders, a senior economist for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and one of the authors of the report, said the area had suffered one of the worst droughts in over 50 years in the whole of Africa.

“Livestock were dying,” he told Al Jazeera. “People simply did not have access to food, and purchasing power went down.”

Somalia, ravaged by nearly uninterrupted civil war for the past two decades, is one of the most dangerous places in the world for aid workers and one of the regions that needs them most.

However, security has slowly improved in recent months, with fighters linked to al-Qaeda on the back foot despite launching a deadly bombing campaign.

At the time, most of the famine-hit areas were under their control, and the crisis was exacerbated by their ban on most foreign aid agencies.

‘Catastrophic political failures’

The aid agency Oxfam said the “deaths could and should have been prevented”.

“Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures,” Oxfam’s Somalia director Senait Gebregziabher said in a statement.

“The world was too slow to respond to stark warnings of drought, exacerbated by conflict in Somalia and people paid with their lives.”

More than a million Somalis are refugees in surrounding nations, and another million are displaced inside the country.

Next Tuesday, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and British Prime Minister David Cameron will co-host a conference in London to discuss how the international community can support Somalia’s progress.

More than 50 countries and organisations are due to take part.

Oxfam said leaders should “ensure that this was Somalia’s last famine” by helping generate jobs and “ensuring trained, accountable security forces”.

The UN declared the famine over in February 2012.

Guardian: “Millions face starvation as world warms, say scientists”

“World is unprepared for changes that will see parts of Africa turned into disaster areas, say food experts.”

By John Vidal in The Guardian, 13 April 2013

Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.

As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor.

Frank Rijsberman, head of the world’s 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: “Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt.”

America’s agricultural economy is set to undergo dramatic changes over the next three decades, as warmer temperatures devastate crops, according to a US government report. The draft US National Climate Assessment report predicts that a gradually warming climate and unpredictable severe weather, such as the drought that last year spread across two-thirds of the continental United States, will have serious consequences for farmers.

The research by 60 scientists predicts that all crops will be affected by the temperature shift as well as livestock and fruit harvests. The changing climate, it says, is likely to lead to more pests and less effective herbicides. The $50bn Californian wine industry could shrink as much as 70% by 2050.

The report lays bare the stark consequences for the $300bn US farm industry, stating: “Many agricultural regions will experience declines in crop and livestock production. The rising incidence of weather extremes will have increasingly negative impacts on crop and livestock production. Climate disruptions have increased in the recent past and are projected to increase further over the next 25 years.

“Critical thresholds are already being exceeded. Many regions will experience declines in crop and livestock production from increased stress due to weeds, diseases, insect pests and other climate change-induced stresses. Climate disruptions to agricultural production have increased in the recent past and are projected to increase further”.

Lead author Jerry Hatfield, director of the US government’s national laboratory for agriculture and the environment, said that climate change was already causing weather extremes to worsen. Very hot nights, fewer cool days and more heatwaves, storms and floods have already devastated crops and will have “increasingly negative” impacts, he said.

The report follows recent disastrous harvests in Russia, Ukraine, Australia and the US. In 2010, climate-driven factors led to a 33% drop in wheat production in Russia and a 19% drop in Ukraine. Separate climate events in each case led to a 14% drop in Canada’s wheat output, and a 9% drop in Australia.

A separate US government-funded study of the fertile Lower Mekong basin, which includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, states that temperatures there could rise twice as much as previously expected, devastating food supplies for the 100 million people expected to live there by 2050. “We’ve found that this region is going to experience climate extremes in temperature and rainfall beyond anything that we expected”, says Jeremy Carew-Reid, author of the Climate Change Adaptation and Impact Study for the Lower Mekong.

Two major food security summits are being held in Ireland, organised by UN World Food Programme, the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change and the Mary Robinson Climate Justice foundation.

Ertharin Cousin, the UN’s World Food Programme director, said: “We are entering an uncertain and risky period. Climate change is the game changer that increases exposure to high and volatile food prices, and increases the vulnerability of the hungry poor, especially those living in conflict zones or areas of marginal agricultural productivity. We must act quickly to protect the world’s poorest people.”

“Anarchism or annihilation”

 

In Wayne Price’s newly published The Value of Radical Theory: An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (AK Press, 2013), his seventh chapter is entitled “Socialism or Barbarism?”  Therein, Price discusses Rosa Luxemburg and Marx and Engels, among others, on the question of the prospects for social revolution vs. collective destruction and the suicide of humanity.  In this discussion, Price also presents Murray Bookchin’s brief, simple, and witty counter-positioning of the historical alternatives, one that was previously unknown to me, which I share here:

“Anarchism or annihilation.”

“Extinción 2,” Santi Armengod

Eroticism and egalitarianism among bonobos, illustrated

This graphic is taken from “The Left Bank Ape: An Exclusive Look at Bonobos,” written by David Quammen with photographs from Christian Ziegler, a piece that appears in the March 2013 National Geographic (p. 104).  It plainly contrasts some of the behavioral differences between the more aggressive and hierarchical chimpanzees (whose native habitat lies on the northern side, or right bank, of the Congo River in equatorial Africa) and the more ludic, sexual, and egalitarian bonobos (Pan paniscus, who reside south of the Congo River).

The graphic indicates that bonobos are more matriarchal where chimpanzees are patriarchal, and that sex is often used among bonobos to resolve conflict, among a myriad of other uses for such practice!

As Quammen writes in the text, opening with a quote from Dutch-American biologist Frans de Waal:

“‘Whereas the chimpanzee shows little variation in the sexual act, bonobos behave as if they have read the Kama Sutra, performing every position and variation one can imagine.’  For instance, they mate in the missionary position, something virtually unknown among chimpanzees.  But their sexiness isn’t just about mating.  Most of those variations are sociosexual, meaning that they don’t entail copulation between an adult male and an adult female during her fertile period.  The range of partners includes adults of the same sex, an adult with a juvenile of either sex, and two juveniles together [...].  Usually there’s no orgasm culminating these activities.  Their social purpose seems to be communication of various sorts: expression of goodwill, calming of excitement, greeting, tension relief, bonding, solicitation of food sharing, and reconciliation.  To that list of benefits we might also add sheer pleasure and (for the juveniles) instructional play.  Varied and frequent and often nonchalant, sex is a widely applied social lubricant that helps keep bonobo politics amiable.  De Waal again: ‘The chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.’”

PS To take such information from National Geographic is in no way to overlook legitimate criticisms of the magazine, the most devastating of which I consider to be Reading National Geographic by Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins (1993).