It'd be nice to think that the fascist Jerome Corsi and his ilk would finally be shamed into silence by Emmanuel's appointment, but I'm sure we'll be hearing right wing conspiracy theories about Obama's treasonous support for Islamism for some time (four to eight years, at the very least).
But it is ominous that no one seems to be questioning the appointment to so powerful a position of a man who fought in a foreign country's military (the IDF) and who has long been suspected of being an agent for a foreign country's intelligence service (Mossad). Is this because the media consider Israel little more than the 51st state? Any hope that a president who once honored Rashid Khalidi and who was acquainted with the legendary Edward Said might introduce a more reasonable policy towards Israel/Palestine seems to have been dashed for the moment.
But seriously... if Emmanuel were a Latin American (as opposed to a Jewish person) who had fought in, say, the Venezuelan military and who was suspected with cause of having been an intelligence asset of the DISIP (the Venezuelan intelligence agency) how much would we be hearing about this? Chances are he wouldn't have even been elected to Congress. And--unlike Israel--Venezuela has never bombed a US Naval ship and up until Chavez's recent buddying up with FARC goons they have never invaded neighboring countries, they are not in gross and persistent violation of fundamental international law and they are not flagrant violators of international arms treaties (though admittedly Israel is not a NPT signatory, their aggression is among the root causes of the dreaded Iranian nuclear program).
In a reasonable world such a development would mean that the US Zionist crowd would shut up about mythical liberal, media or national bias against Israel. I mean, the most powerful job in the White House outside of the president himself is held by a citizen, veteran and rumored spy for the country and nobody objects. But I'm sure they'll keep up their victimization act--and along with Christians, conservatives and other gluttons for dominance they'll continue reaping tremendous rewards.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Sorry!
I haven't posted much lately. I think I'm going to start putting up quick one-off speculations to fill out the time between my rambling essays. I am also considering a switch to another host... I don't like having to put up an entire 3,000 word (or more) post without being able to put the body behind a quote. Also, it'd be nice to have more graphic elements, etc. Either way, get ready for changes!
Friday, August 29, 2008
Pornography and the Death of American Liberty
This essay is a bit rough. I could make my argument better. I may revise it considerably later, I might not. But here's something to chew on one way or the other.
-AD
“If you are afraid of the ascendancy of fascism in this country—and you would be very foolish not to be right now—then you had better understand that the root issue here has to do with male supremacy and the control of women; sexual access to women; women as reproductive slaves; private ownership of women. That is the program of the Right. That is the morality they talk about. That is what they mean. That is what they want. And the only opposition to them that matters is an opposition to men owning women.”
--Andrea Dworkin, 1983
There is an assumption that American men of a certain age—young—are natural consumers of pornography. It is so natural as to need not be said, and those of us with an acquired aversion to the medium are considered to be strange, gay or lying. Tell a group of men that you find a group of young men that you find porn to be repulsive, oppressive, wrong or dangerous and they will immediately question your sincerity. It is to our time what Scripture was to a previous: a literature of deep cultural significance calling for daily study and engagement. Its hallmarks and vernacular are normalized in the broader culture, so that jaded New Yorkers and giddy tourists to the cultural capital of our country stroll unphased through Times Square where a massive image advertising the rarely viewed television program Gossip Girl features a conventionally good-looking man and woman at the peak of coitus alongside the internet age abbreviation OMFG: “Oh My Fucking God.” Giuliani got rid of the peepshows, but mainstream media have kept the porn flying high on Broadway.
Video and then the internet have made porn something everyone can consume, not solely the dirty old men of yesteryear sneaking into unsanitary cinemas. As this has happened the US has taken an extreme tilt to the Right, two seemingly unrelated and distinct phenomena. It is my position that this tilt represents the clattering end of the US’ democratic charade and that our pornography culture is a vital part of the emergence of populist autocracy—in short, fascism. Fascism thrives in a culture of heightened masculinity and pornography creates just the kind of male sexual identity necessary for its taking root. It is undeniable that pornography has materially reworked American culture, and the result is the emergence of a politic of conquest, domination and possession—one that denies even the tepid liberal lip service to self-determination, liberty and individual independence. The line from porn to Abu Ghraib (where tortured prisoners were pornographed by soldiers in positions of sexual humiliation) is a bright one and the implications domestically are grave.
Few writers have captured the amorphous essence of fascism like the Italian witness Umberto Eco, whose 14 points of Ur-Fascism form the single best distillation of the movement’s fundamentals. A consistent theme of his analysis is fascism’s passionate exultation of the masculine and damnation of the feminine. Point twelve states “Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies… disdain for women…).” Fascist movements demean their enemies as women—assuming the title an insult—and embrace the prima facie benefits of manliness. Robert Jensen, a contemporary critic of pornography, notes that this manliness and masculinity generally are defined by a will to conquer: real men seek to control situations and express superiority in all relationships. Masculinity is defined by dominance and thus it should surprise no one that emphatic and publicly masculine political systems would be ones that seek to dominate all—whether they be the brutalized citizenry of manly fascist states or the unlucky inhabitants of lands they seek to subdue in the name of their superiority.
Selling campaigns costly in wealth, blood and energy to a populace necessitates an acclimation to the ethic of possession; it thrives in cultures where rapaciousness and ravishing are eroticized. Imperialism—a system that pursues the taking and bleeding dry of unwilling peoples under the guise of giving them what they really want deep down—is nothing more than a political movement of rape writ large. Fascism is a movement that could only come out of and which celebrates a domineering definition of masculine identity, and central to this identity and the cultural groundwork of fascism is rape culture. Imperial populism is fascism is the natural political organization of a rape culture.
Pornography is the propaganda of rape culture, as it posits sexuality as a possessive venture. This message is both textual and contextual. The text (or rather photos and films) portrays women begging for sexual humiliation and possession. Women are fucked in painful, uncomfortable, degrading and violent ways and always hungry for more. They are littered with bodily fluids to emphasize their dirtiness and ownership. They are “cunts,” “sluts,” and “whores” who are merely the titillating objects of sexual conquest for men cast primarily for their phallic supremacy. The very categorization of the medium into “softcore” and “hardcore” gives an idea of its prerogatives. Hardcore porn (also known as “the good stuff”) is distinguished by showing penetration footage—porn reduces sex to an act of aggression (“banging,” “pounding”) by men as opposed to a more meaningful connection. Hardcore is also distinguished by “money shots”—scenes of the men evacuating their semen onto the women’s bodies (rarely inside them)—blatant messages of sexual domination of men over women. The message of pornography is self-evident: women are for fucking and he who fucks rules. Their orifices are used as places for branding, and the owners are always hyper-masculine (read: big dicked) men. The sexual possession of women is a cultural assumption that finds the purest distillation of its propagation in pornography.
Contextually, pornography is the physical act of possessing women’s sexuality. Pornography is cheap prostitution, its ubiquitousness means that men can be assured access to women’s sexuality at all times. It is called “speech,” but the images are the empirical documentation of the degradation and ownership of real women. Engaging in the pornographic conversation amounts to the purchase of an act of sexual domination over a real woman’s body. This body is laid out in ways that reduce it to a collection of body parts, and this objectification means that the use of pornography is an act of sexual conquest for the user. The protection of men’s “right” to pornography is a bald-faced assertion that men have a right to sexual access to women. This assertion is the basic philosophy of rape culture, and a society that seeks to protect a literature of sexual possession at any cost is one that can be defined simply as a rape culture.
In the contemporary United States pornography is thoroughly mainstream. A $13 billion a year business, pornography can be found at almost every newsstand and bookstore, every video store and cable package, in virtually every airport, hotel room or gas station, and in every home with internet access. It is sent to us unsolicited in our email, its aesthetic towers over us on thousands of billboards. On the show Friends Joey and Chandler—characters a more quaint literature would label “heroes”—celebrate when they find they are receiving free porn on their cable. The Hollywood teen hit The Girl Next Door is about a boy who falls for a porn star in his neighborhood. All this to say pornography is undeniably a part of our mainstream culture. It even acts as the school age American boy’s primer on female sexuality. Long before most boys have so much as kissed a girl they are consumers of pornography, a state so common as to give rise to cutesy nostalgia for the “innocent” days of hiding a Hustler under the mattress. The first lesson in female sexuality American boys receive is the first law of patriarchy: men have a right of sexual access to women. This is repackaged for public consumption as “men think with their dicks,” female flesh being a constant necessity for a healthy man, human distinction between bodies unwelcome distractions in the hunt. Pornography initiates American men in this mindset, and the result is prostitution[*], rape and incest. When exposure to this literature is a right of passage for adolescent and “tween” boys, it tills the earth for the thriving adoption of masculine politics and from thence follows fascism.
Fascism, it can be argued, is the natural resting place of liberalism. Liberalism and its attendant capitalist economic organization serve as environmental conditions which select for greater and greater concentrations of power. At the basis of its political arrangement is that power over all should be granted to an allegedly representative few, and that the pursuit of greater power among these few should be “harnessed” for its progressive energy, kept in check by separations of power and the paper protection of constitutions. At the economic basis, it frankly endorses accumulation, competition and class privilege for the wealthy. Over time these bases will mean that fewer and fewer will hold political and economic authority. Political proposals that expand the ranks of the powerful may occasionally prevail, but those that empower the tiny elite who decide whether the power ought to be contracted or expanded are obviously selected for. Among those elite the limitations of constitutions only go so far as those same elite are willing to recognize, and as time goes by various branches of the state come under the control of various shrewd or capable personalities which vault those branches over their supposedly coequal fellows. And while or whether this evolution of political autocracy goes on, capitalism redistributes wealth upwards into fewer and fewer hands. Each firm is a miniature tyranny—hierarchical structures of authority unaccountable to the individuals ruled over. Under liberalism money is power and ultimately the monied interests bend political structures to the wills of their private autocracies. No conscious or measured effort is needed on anyone’s part—the fundamental inertia of liberalism leans toward fascistic systems.
This meltdown is happening right now in the United States. Under the Bush Administration we have had ludicrous advances in executive power and open contempt for what recently passed as assumptions rooted in the constitution. The president may now ignore the laws he or she signs at his or her leisure. The president may identify anyone as an enemy combatant and have them imprisoned secretly, tortured, denied a jury trial and executed. He or she may also work with private (that is to say, autocratic) telecommunications companies to listen in on anyone’s telephone or internet conversations with impunity. Much of the military’s heavy lifting is now done by private mercenary armies unbound by law, loyal first to political benefactors and outside of meaningful civilian oversight. The danger of this development is perversely reduced as Bush (like Clinton before him) has argued that he can start wars with the formal military without congressional approval, and he has. All this has occurred alongside cooperative GOP congresses, a complacent Democrat congress and courts the Administration has run around or ignored. His popularity has sunk, but the bright liberal hope for replacing him—Barack Obama—has declined to delineate any executive overreaches he would repudiate. He further extols a rhetoric wherein our greatest political terror is not creeping fascism, but rather political division. He says he will replace conflict with “Unity,” a feat only capable of being accomplished by a tyrant. Christopher Hitchens, among others, has noted that division is the natural outcome of a system that allows dissent and encourages debate. Unity can only be achieved by eliminating these freedoms and so Obama at best represents a hydra of naïve politics which cynically refuse to embrace liberal restoration. At worst he will deepen the downgrade.
And where is the outrage? Bush hating is a hot new national pastime, but the fervor is markedly reserved. Its nature is an unsophisticated one, as it declines to turn its critical eye towards neither the ravages of Clinton’s time in office nor the promise of Obama’s. All meaningful dissent to the decline of America’s already paltry freedoms are outside the mainstream. If we are a culture dedicated to freedom, how can this be? Many will just assert the stupidity of the masses, a convenient position in an increasingly authoritarian state. But these same masses drive the world’s most powerful economy, generate the globe’s dominant popular and high culture and populate its most fearsome military. It makes more sense to recognize that this culture gives only lip service to freedom, while placing its energy in rape. Pornography keeps us jaded to human suffering. It keeps us lusting after dominance. It teaches us that freedom extends only as far as a tumescent cock, and that masculine values cast off their waste onto the feminine. It is also the core of our contemporary American culture—it makes more money (the way liberals keep score) than the US’ celebrated film industry and our music industry combined. These industries look to porn for artistic inspiration. A culture so oriented cannot denounce tyranny while keeping a straight face; it can at best attack efficacy and image while keeping silent about the emergence of a domineering, aggressive, dehumanizing and swaggering elite tossing their excretions into the eyes of the girly. American liberty’s evaporation is a bipartisan affair borne of the same impulse that hustled to protect porn and turn it into a household product.
If this essay is to have a lesson, it is this: the dissident struggle against liberalism’s long awaited collapse into fascism, against capitalism’s expropriation of billions of human lives and against imperialism’s shrinking the globe to a sandbox for brutal elites to entertain themselves in is not solely a political struggle. It is a fight against a culture that sees people as things and sees the degradation and ownership of these things as arousing to the point of climax. This culture is deepened by the mainstreaming of pornography, and a nation that accepts, protects and celebrates pornography cannot assume its continued liberty. The enemy is as distant as Wall Street and as close as your Download file. The problem is as rarefied as Capitol Hill and as vulgar as a basic cable Girls Gone Wild commercial. To pursue justice without condemning and battling the $13 billion pimps of the pornography industry is to break off a weed rather than pulling up its roots. We have left this battle to rightward forces that simply seek to replace pornography’s sense of men possessing women with a clerical one. Their quarrel can hardly be with brutality (look at their holy books), but rather with explicit sexuality. The revival of a radical opposition to porn is absolutely vital if we are to have any hope of smashing the fascist scourge before it devours the world—once again—in a tragic conflagration.
This fight will be harder than ever before, but the difficulty arises from the source of its necessity: pornography’s iron grasp on our culture. If we must destroy all the culture to root out the porn, so be it. The vicious sensibilities of our declining age deem destruction as (as Bakunin would have it) a beautiful creative act. Specifics will arise after discussion and experiment, and we must recognize that the time for internal bickering is over amidst universal distress. Only we who refuse to be owned can break this fascist creeping, and we will only be worthy the honor if we break its backbone of pornographic rape culture.
[*] I realize that prostitution (the world’s oldest profession) existed long before pornography, but perhaps it is a further sign of pornography’s spot in our culture that it has replaced the wretched institution as American boys’ first exposure to women bought for a price.
-AD
“If you are afraid of the ascendancy of fascism in this country—and you would be very foolish not to be right now—then you had better understand that the root issue here has to do with male supremacy and the control of women; sexual access to women; women as reproductive slaves; private ownership of women. That is the program of the Right. That is the morality they talk about. That is what they mean. That is what they want. And the only opposition to them that matters is an opposition to men owning women.”
--Andrea Dworkin, 1983
There is an assumption that American men of a certain age—young—are natural consumers of pornography. It is so natural as to need not be said, and those of us with an acquired aversion to the medium are considered to be strange, gay or lying. Tell a group of men that you find a group of young men that you find porn to be repulsive, oppressive, wrong or dangerous and they will immediately question your sincerity. It is to our time what Scripture was to a previous: a literature of deep cultural significance calling for daily study and engagement. Its hallmarks and vernacular are normalized in the broader culture, so that jaded New Yorkers and giddy tourists to the cultural capital of our country stroll unphased through Times Square where a massive image advertising the rarely viewed television program Gossip Girl features a conventionally good-looking man and woman at the peak of coitus alongside the internet age abbreviation OMFG: “Oh My Fucking God.” Giuliani got rid of the peepshows, but mainstream media have kept the porn flying high on Broadway.
Video and then the internet have made porn something everyone can consume, not solely the dirty old men of yesteryear sneaking into unsanitary cinemas. As this has happened the US has taken an extreme tilt to the Right, two seemingly unrelated and distinct phenomena. It is my position that this tilt represents the clattering end of the US’ democratic charade and that our pornography culture is a vital part of the emergence of populist autocracy—in short, fascism. Fascism thrives in a culture of heightened masculinity and pornography creates just the kind of male sexual identity necessary for its taking root. It is undeniable that pornography has materially reworked American culture, and the result is the emergence of a politic of conquest, domination and possession—one that denies even the tepid liberal lip service to self-determination, liberty and individual independence. The line from porn to Abu Ghraib (where tortured prisoners were pornographed by soldiers in positions of sexual humiliation) is a bright one and the implications domestically are grave.
Few writers have captured the amorphous essence of fascism like the Italian witness Umberto Eco, whose 14 points of Ur-Fascism form the single best distillation of the movement’s fundamentals. A consistent theme of his analysis is fascism’s passionate exultation of the masculine and damnation of the feminine. Point twelve states “Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies… disdain for women…).” Fascist movements demean their enemies as women—assuming the title an insult—and embrace the prima facie benefits of manliness. Robert Jensen, a contemporary critic of pornography, notes that this manliness and masculinity generally are defined by a will to conquer: real men seek to control situations and express superiority in all relationships. Masculinity is defined by dominance and thus it should surprise no one that emphatic and publicly masculine political systems would be ones that seek to dominate all—whether they be the brutalized citizenry of manly fascist states or the unlucky inhabitants of lands they seek to subdue in the name of their superiority.
Selling campaigns costly in wealth, blood and energy to a populace necessitates an acclimation to the ethic of possession; it thrives in cultures where rapaciousness and ravishing are eroticized. Imperialism—a system that pursues the taking and bleeding dry of unwilling peoples under the guise of giving them what they really want deep down—is nothing more than a political movement of rape writ large. Fascism is a movement that could only come out of and which celebrates a domineering definition of masculine identity, and central to this identity and the cultural groundwork of fascism is rape culture. Imperial populism is fascism is the natural political organization of a rape culture.
Pornography is the propaganda of rape culture, as it posits sexuality as a possessive venture. This message is both textual and contextual. The text (or rather photos and films) portrays women begging for sexual humiliation and possession. Women are fucked in painful, uncomfortable, degrading and violent ways and always hungry for more. They are littered with bodily fluids to emphasize their dirtiness and ownership. They are “cunts,” “sluts,” and “whores” who are merely the titillating objects of sexual conquest for men cast primarily for their phallic supremacy. The very categorization of the medium into “softcore” and “hardcore” gives an idea of its prerogatives. Hardcore porn (also known as “the good stuff”) is distinguished by showing penetration footage—porn reduces sex to an act of aggression (“banging,” “pounding”) by men as opposed to a more meaningful connection. Hardcore is also distinguished by “money shots”—scenes of the men evacuating their semen onto the women’s bodies (rarely inside them)—blatant messages of sexual domination of men over women. The message of pornography is self-evident: women are for fucking and he who fucks rules. Their orifices are used as places for branding, and the owners are always hyper-masculine (read: big dicked) men. The sexual possession of women is a cultural assumption that finds the purest distillation of its propagation in pornography.
Contextually, pornography is the physical act of possessing women’s sexuality. Pornography is cheap prostitution, its ubiquitousness means that men can be assured access to women’s sexuality at all times. It is called “speech,” but the images are the empirical documentation of the degradation and ownership of real women. Engaging in the pornographic conversation amounts to the purchase of an act of sexual domination over a real woman’s body. This body is laid out in ways that reduce it to a collection of body parts, and this objectification means that the use of pornography is an act of sexual conquest for the user. The protection of men’s “right” to pornography is a bald-faced assertion that men have a right to sexual access to women. This assertion is the basic philosophy of rape culture, and a society that seeks to protect a literature of sexual possession at any cost is one that can be defined simply as a rape culture.
In the contemporary United States pornography is thoroughly mainstream. A $13 billion a year business, pornography can be found at almost every newsstand and bookstore, every video store and cable package, in virtually every airport, hotel room or gas station, and in every home with internet access. It is sent to us unsolicited in our email, its aesthetic towers over us on thousands of billboards. On the show Friends Joey and Chandler—characters a more quaint literature would label “heroes”—celebrate when they find they are receiving free porn on their cable. The Hollywood teen hit The Girl Next Door is about a boy who falls for a porn star in his neighborhood. All this to say pornography is undeniably a part of our mainstream culture. It even acts as the school age American boy’s primer on female sexuality. Long before most boys have so much as kissed a girl they are consumers of pornography, a state so common as to give rise to cutesy nostalgia for the “innocent” days of hiding a Hustler under the mattress. The first lesson in female sexuality American boys receive is the first law of patriarchy: men have a right of sexual access to women. This is repackaged for public consumption as “men think with their dicks,” female flesh being a constant necessity for a healthy man, human distinction between bodies unwelcome distractions in the hunt. Pornography initiates American men in this mindset, and the result is prostitution[*], rape and incest. When exposure to this literature is a right of passage for adolescent and “tween” boys, it tills the earth for the thriving adoption of masculine politics and from thence follows fascism.
Fascism, it can be argued, is the natural resting place of liberalism. Liberalism and its attendant capitalist economic organization serve as environmental conditions which select for greater and greater concentrations of power. At the basis of its political arrangement is that power over all should be granted to an allegedly representative few, and that the pursuit of greater power among these few should be “harnessed” for its progressive energy, kept in check by separations of power and the paper protection of constitutions. At the economic basis, it frankly endorses accumulation, competition and class privilege for the wealthy. Over time these bases will mean that fewer and fewer will hold political and economic authority. Political proposals that expand the ranks of the powerful may occasionally prevail, but those that empower the tiny elite who decide whether the power ought to be contracted or expanded are obviously selected for. Among those elite the limitations of constitutions only go so far as those same elite are willing to recognize, and as time goes by various branches of the state come under the control of various shrewd or capable personalities which vault those branches over their supposedly coequal fellows. And while or whether this evolution of political autocracy goes on, capitalism redistributes wealth upwards into fewer and fewer hands. Each firm is a miniature tyranny—hierarchical structures of authority unaccountable to the individuals ruled over. Under liberalism money is power and ultimately the monied interests bend political structures to the wills of their private autocracies. No conscious or measured effort is needed on anyone’s part—the fundamental inertia of liberalism leans toward fascistic systems.
This meltdown is happening right now in the United States. Under the Bush Administration we have had ludicrous advances in executive power and open contempt for what recently passed as assumptions rooted in the constitution. The president may now ignore the laws he or she signs at his or her leisure. The president may identify anyone as an enemy combatant and have them imprisoned secretly, tortured, denied a jury trial and executed. He or she may also work with private (that is to say, autocratic) telecommunications companies to listen in on anyone’s telephone or internet conversations with impunity. Much of the military’s heavy lifting is now done by private mercenary armies unbound by law, loyal first to political benefactors and outside of meaningful civilian oversight. The danger of this development is perversely reduced as Bush (like Clinton before him) has argued that he can start wars with the formal military without congressional approval, and he has. All this has occurred alongside cooperative GOP congresses, a complacent Democrat congress and courts the Administration has run around or ignored. His popularity has sunk, but the bright liberal hope for replacing him—Barack Obama—has declined to delineate any executive overreaches he would repudiate. He further extols a rhetoric wherein our greatest political terror is not creeping fascism, but rather political division. He says he will replace conflict with “Unity,” a feat only capable of being accomplished by a tyrant. Christopher Hitchens, among others, has noted that division is the natural outcome of a system that allows dissent and encourages debate. Unity can only be achieved by eliminating these freedoms and so Obama at best represents a hydra of naïve politics which cynically refuse to embrace liberal restoration. At worst he will deepen the downgrade.
And where is the outrage? Bush hating is a hot new national pastime, but the fervor is markedly reserved. Its nature is an unsophisticated one, as it declines to turn its critical eye towards neither the ravages of Clinton’s time in office nor the promise of Obama’s. All meaningful dissent to the decline of America’s already paltry freedoms are outside the mainstream. If we are a culture dedicated to freedom, how can this be? Many will just assert the stupidity of the masses, a convenient position in an increasingly authoritarian state. But these same masses drive the world’s most powerful economy, generate the globe’s dominant popular and high culture and populate its most fearsome military. It makes more sense to recognize that this culture gives only lip service to freedom, while placing its energy in rape. Pornography keeps us jaded to human suffering. It keeps us lusting after dominance. It teaches us that freedom extends only as far as a tumescent cock, and that masculine values cast off their waste onto the feminine. It is also the core of our contemporary American culture—it makes more money (the way liberals keep score) than the US’ celebrated film industry and our music industry combined. These industries look to porn for artistic inspiration. A culture so oriented cannot denounce tyranny while keeping a straight face; it can at best attack efficacy and image while keeping silent about the emergence of a domineering, aggressive, dehumanizing and swaggering elite tossing their excretions into the eyes of the girly. American liberty’s evaporation is a bipartisan affair borne of the same impulse that hustled to protect porn and turn it into a household product.
If this essay is to have a lesson, it is this: the dissident struggle against liberalism’s long awaited collapse into fascism, against capitalism’s expropriation of billions of human lives and against imperialism’s shrinking the globe to a sandbox for brutal elites to entertain themselves in is not solely a political struggle. It is a fight against a culture that sees people as things and sees the degradation and ownership of these things as arousing to the point of climax. This culture is deepened by the mainstreaming of pornography, and a nation that accepts, protects and celebrates pornography cannot assume its continued liberty. The enemy is as distant as Wall Street and as close as your Download file. The problem is as rarefied as Capitol Hill and as vulgar as a basic cable Girls Gone Wild commercial. To pursue justice without condemning and battling the $13 billion pimps of the pornography industry is to break off a weed rather than pulling up its roots. We have left this battle to rightward forces that simply seek to replace pornography’s sense of men possessing women with a clerical one. Their quarrel can hardly be with brutality (look at their holy books), but rather with explicit sexuality. The revival of a radical opposition to porn is absolutely vital if we are to have any hope of smashing the fascist scourge before it devours the world—once again—in a tragic conflagration.
This fight will be harder than ever before, but the difficulty arises from the source of its necessity: pornography’s iron grasp on our culture. If we must destroy all the culture to root out the porn, so be it. The vicious sensibilities of our declining age deem destruction as (as Bakunin would have it) a beautiful creative act. Specifics will arise after discussion and experiment, and we must recognize that the time for internal bickering is over amidst universal distress. Only we who refuse to be owned can break this fascist creeping, and we will only be worthy the honor if we break its backbone of pornographic rape culture.
[*] I realize that prostitution (the world’s oldest profession) existed long before pornography, but perhaps it is a further sign of pornography’s spot in our culture that it has replaced the wretched institution as American boys’ first exposure to women bought for a price.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Light Out Chronicles: Asheville, NC
I tried hitching out to Asheville, but made the mistake of picking a highway still well into Knoxville, and indeed in the "bad" part of town--a police officer had recently been shot by three burglars ("black boys" a local felt compelled to add) very near where my thumb hung aching for more than two hours. Nobody was taking the chance. I opted instead to cross the street, grab local public transit and get back to the Old City. Let Greyhound get me there.
The ride was short, comfortable, friendly and awe-inspiring. Those foothills were the foreplay for the torrid heat of the Smoky Mountains. Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina are a kingdom ruled by stately mountains--smaller than the Alps, Himalayas or Rockies only because they are much older. For a mountain lover the ride through the Smokies is a discourse with the elders of one's beloved class. No reading got done, as the only thing capable of prying my attention from the ineffable scenery was the enlightening conversation of one R---- --an Anglo-French exchange student in Montreal, on her own trans-US romp. We hit it off even before learning we'd both made plans to stay at the same hostel. She was sharp as a razor and with a continental wit that threatens to devastate the weak-minded. Add in a healthy dose of beauty and I nearly fell for her, perhaps I would have if I thought she'd ever stoop to my level. A new friend is better than a temporary lover any day however, and now I know someone in Toulouse.
I'm writing this at an all night coffee shop in Times Square (so you know it is corporate, take a wild guess...) because I'm almost out of money. Paid lodging is an impossible luxury at this point. But I had the cash when I got to Asheville and Bon Paul and Sharky's is worth every dime and then some. Low cost but entirely comfortable, it is run by a laid back and kind-souled staff that live in the old house now let out to travelers from across the world. Hostels engender great deals of friend-making to begin with, but at least this Memorial Day weekend crowd was exceptional. I get the idea that the business itself deserves the credit, and the mountain view from the back patio would pay for itself even without all the warm community. If I'm gushing it is only because Bon Paul and Sharky's is that special. I would say I'm not nearly being kind enough.
After two days there I connected with my first CouchSurfing.com hosts--the friends of what is informally called the "Foti House" in South Asheville. I had made plans to sniff out the rads in Asheville (about as difficult as finding a Mormon in Provo) by checking out the local Earth First! meeting and the Critical Mass bike ride. Neither was necessary as the Foti House is a community of anarchists, revolutionary in its very existence. Its official owner, D----, is an anti-civ Zerzanite with a quiet streak, but his vision has come together with that of his housemates to create a model in collective decision making and sustainable living. Much of their food is rescued from the garbage--either through a spot of dumpster diving or from housemate C----'s health food store job. This is supplemented by a large and growing organic garden made luscious by a solid composting program. Rainwater reclamation is in its early stages but improving, and all the sinks drain to buckets powered by a graywater ditch. This graywater system was my biggest consciousness-raiser as seeing your wastewater and being individually responsible for its disposal demands an unfamiliar level of conservation. You learn to wash dishes, hands and teeth and to shave with very little water. It shames one for the gushing sinkfulls of the past. The house itself is in desperate need of renovations, and with a skilled group of committed partners they are ongoing. E-----, A-----, V-----, A-----, B-----, Z-----, R----- and the others I've already mentioned put the lie to idea that egalitarian and sensible living rooted in human interactions are pipe dreams. The place is a haven and a weapon, it represents a hidden future springing from the lost lessons of our past.
Most of the Foti House crew are also involved in Asheville's best (and methinks only) collectively-owned and operated coffee shop/radical bookstore--Firestorm Cafe. A bit difficult to find, it is worth the hunt (I've forgotten the address) and located in Asheville's spectacular downtown. I was shocked to learn only about 72,000 people live in Asheville, as there is a thriving nightlife and art scene that create a bustling city center. I encountered a great deal of success with my Nobody for President tracts, as there was constant foot traffic. My best spot was right near Malaprops Books--a model independent bookstore. If one is into shopping and not so much into corporate chains Asheville is the spot. Like Knoxville it is largely unbranded--a Subway was as corporate as it got downtown, aside from major commercial banks. Street musicians play everywhere and it is small enough that I walked everywhere (with one gratuitous bus ride, just to see how it went--well). It was so impressive I immediately considered relocating there, if I were not at the beginning of this adventure I would have and when it is over I very well may.
Three or four nights at the Foti House gave way to my last stretch, staying at an elegant apartment Northeast of Downtown with veteran couch surfing hosts C----, B----- and P-----. C----- had had particular success with the couch surfing experiment, as he had commenced a romance with the intoxicating J----- --an artist from Philadelphia--shortly before my arrival. C----'s very apartment was home to Grace Kelly for some months when she once made a film in Asheville. J----- continued the tradition of gentle-souled and unspeakably beautiful women of sublime talent haunting that place. His porch hosts a burgeoning container garden and another mountain view that puts an exclamation point on every sunset.
Asheville represents the culmination of many of this country's greatest themes--natural beauty, kind yet rebellious people, optimism and warm community. It is quite possibly the US' best kept secret and I almost hate to spill the beans. good thing no one really reads this blog. Its bouquet lingers in my nose, and it smells like home. Barring the discovery of somewhere even more exceptionally beautiful, kind, insurgent, engaging and easy after camp, I think I'll flip the Texas flag upside down and make North Carolina my home. No promises, but Asheville struck me like a conversion experience. Only Greyhound's refusal to refund the discounted ticket I had purchased to Maine kept me from lounging there for several more days or weeks.
But refuse they did and so the road stretched forward again--could my recurring dreams come true? Could the World's Capital City be ahead? New York City can destroy you, but I need more calluses on my naivete. Asheville fades as fate comes into view...
The ride was short, comfortable, friendly and awe-inspiring. Those foothills were the foreplay for the torrid heat of the Smoky Mountains. Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina are a kingdom ruled by stately mountains--smaller than the Alps, Himalayas or Rockies only because they are much older. For a mountain lover the ride through the Smokies is a discourse with the elders of one's beloved class. No reading got done, as the only thing capable of prying my attention from the ineffable scenery was the enlightening conversation of one R---- --an Anglo-French exchange student in Montreal, on her own trans-US romp. We hit it off even before learning we'd both made plans to stay at the same hostel. She was sharp as a razor and with a continental wit that threatens to devastate the weak-minded. Add in a healthy dose of beauty and I nearly fell for her, perhaps I would have if I thought she'd ever stoop to my level. A new friend is better than a temporary lover any day however, and now I know someone in Toulouse.
I'm writing this at an all night coffee shop in Times Square (so you know it is corporate, take a wild guess...) because I'm almost out of money. Paid lodging is an impossible luxury at this point. But I had the cash when I got to Asheville and Bon Paul and Sharky's is worth every dime and then some. Low cost but entirely comfortable, it is run by a laid back and kind-souled staff that live in the old house now let out to travelers from across the world. Hostels engender great deals of friend-making to begin with, but at least this Memorial Day weekend crowd was exceptional. I get the idea that the business itself deserves the credit, and the mountain view from the back patio would pay for itself even without all the warm community. If I'm gushing it is only because Bon Paul and Sharky's is that special. I would say I'm not nearly being kind enough.
After two days there I connected with my first CouchSurfing.com hosts--the friends of what is informally called the "Foti House" in South Asheville. I had made plans to sniff out the rads in Asheville (about as difficult as finding a Mormon in Provo) by checking out the local Earth First! meeting and the Critical Mass bike ride. Neither was necessary as the Foti House is a community of anarchists, revolutionary in its very existence. Its official owner, D----, is an anti-civ Zerzanite with a quiet streak, but his vision has come together with that of his housemates to create a model in collective decision making and sustainable living. Much of their food is rescued from the garbage--either through a spot of dumpster diving or from housemate C----'s health food store job. This is supplemented by a large and growing organic garden made luscious by a solid composting program. Rainwater reclamation is in its early stages but improving, and all the sinks drain to buckets powered by a graywater ditch. This graywater system was my biggest consciousness-raiser as seeing your wastewater and being individually responsible for its disposal demands an unfamiliar level of conservation. You learn to wash dishes, hands and teeth and to shave with very little water. It shames one for the gushing sinkfulls of the past. The house itself is in desperate need of renovations, and with a skilled group of committed partners they are ongoing. E-----, A-----, V-----, A-----, B-----, Z-----, R----- and the others I've already mentioned put the lie to idea that egalitarian and sensible living rooted in human interactions are pipe dreams. The place is a haven and a weapon, it represents a hidden future springing from the lost lessons of our past.
Most of the Foti House crew are also involved in Asheville's best (and methinks only) collectively-owned and operated coffee shop/radical bookstore--Firestorm Cafe. A bit difficult to find, it is worth the hunt (I've forgotten the address) and located in Asheville's spectacular downtown. I was shocked to learn only about 72,000 people live in Asheville, as there is a thriving nightlife and art scene that create a bustling city center. I encountered a great deal of success with my Nobody for President tracts, as there was constant foot traffic. My best spot was right near Malaprops Books--a model independent bookstore. If one is into shopping and not so much into corporate chains Asheville is the spot. Like Knoxville it is largely unbranded--a Subway was as corporate as it got downtown, aside from major commercial banks. Street musicians play everywhere and it is small enough that I walked everywhere (with one gratuitous bus ride, just to see how it went--well). It was so impressive I immediately considered relocating there, if I were not at the beginning of this adventure I would have and when it is over I very well may.
Three or four nights at the Foti House gave way to my last stretch, staying at an elegant apartment Northeast of Downtown with veteran couch surfing hosts C----, B----- and P-----. C----- had had particular success with the couch surfing experiment, as he had commenced a romance with the intoxicating J----- --an artist from Philadelphia--shortly before my arrival. C----'s very apartment was home to Grace Kelly for some months when she once made a film in Asheville. J----- continued the tradition of gentle-souled and unspeakably beautiful women of sublime talent haunting that place. His porch hosts a burgeoning container garden and another mountain view that puts an exclamation point on every sunset.
Asheville represents the culmination of many of this country's greatest themes--natural beauty, kind yet rebellious people, optimism and warm community. It is quite possibly the US' best kept secret and I almost hate to spill the beans. good thing no one really reads this blog. Its bouquet lingers in my nose, and it smells like home. Barring the discovery of somewhere even more exceptionally beautiful, kind, insurgent, engaging and easy after camp, I think I'll flip the Texas flag upside down and make North Carolina my home. No promises, but Asheville struck me like a conversion experience. Only Greyhound's refusal to refund the discounted ticket I had purchased to Maine kept me from lounging there for several more days or weeks.
But refuse they did and so the road stretched forward again--could my recurring dreams come true? Could the World's Capital City be ahead? New York City can destroy you, but I need more calluses on my naivete. Asheville fades as fate comes into view...
Towards an Educational Revolution
There is an excellent chance that you are reading this anarchist nonsense within fifteen miles of a university. Show me a US anarchist, revolutionary or anticapitalist distant from any institution of higher learning, and I will show you a lonely person. Radical communities tend to be huddled around colleges--Austin, Madison, Olympia, Eugene, Berkeley, Boulder and Tucson jump to mind--and radical community centers (bookstores, coffeeshops, etc.) are frequently filled with grad students arguing over Gramsci or paraphrasing Chomsky. Demonstrations against the wars or for other broadly leftist causes bring out young college activists, aging first generation hippies and few else. This analysis will be attacked, but it is impossible to deny that your typical protest is likely to have a far higher education level than the public at large. Right wing propagandists such as David Horowitz or D'nesh D'souza use these facts to suggest that the left controls academia, while endemic corporatization and militarization of virtually all academic research departments puts these retrogrades in a ridiculous light.
It would be far more accurate to suggest that academia controls the left. It is my contention that this is perhaps the most central source of the thorough irrelevance of revolutionary movements in contemporary America. The place of higher education in society, its relationship to individuals and its relationship with revolutionary movements all point to its being a system of control unacceptable for those opposed to authority in all its forms.
Colleges and universities serve two vital functions in upholding systems of authority and control across US society. The first is as a source of authoritarian credentials: a degree serves as a "seal of approval" that grants exclusive access to elite systems. Degrees have no relationship to academic achievement at a societal level, rather they show that the holder had access to tens of thousands of dollars at some point. Whether they worked, borrowed, got money from family, charity or the government is unimportant--all indicate an indebtedness to systems of authority (employers, banks, parents, philanthropy, the state) that marks the holder as sympathetic to the status quo. Academics are less of a selection factor for colleges than wealth: wealthy elites from prestigious schools all go to college, regardless of academic performance in high school. On the other hand, poor and marginalized people from degraded high schools are demanded good grades, only academic elites from these schools go on to seek degrees. When they all get to college they will be repeatedly told that their major is not really that important--employers just want to know they got a degree in something. That the something is so irrelevant belies the fact that the content of one's education is not what counts--after all, a chronic class cutter with a 2.1 has just as much a degree as the valedictorian. What counts is a piece of paper signed by powerful figures in an institution of power to be used as a passkey to future bosses.
The university's second purpose is less discussed: it serves as a source of free labor for powerful interests. Unpaid internships have emerged as a second level of authoritarian weeding out, as the employment opportunties promised with one's degree are dried up without an history of interning. Students who cannot afford to work for free are thus put in a similar spot as those who couldn't afford college in the first place--indeed America's service industry and temp agencies are chock-full of degree holders, many turned away from better jobs because they lack internship slave service to corporate employers. For the public-minded student liberal and conservative political institutions--think tanks, campaigns, consultants and reformist activist causes--scour colleges and universities for well-off interns to develop into the pundits, lawmakers, hacks and do-gooders of tomorrow. As working community involvement in the political process dries up amid repeated betrayals and almost literal anemia, colleges and universities provide greater shares of the grunt-level legwork of electoral politics. Like their corporate patrons they rely on higher education to develop future rulers on the cheap.
Aside from its place in society, academia has an oppressive impact on human individuals. Most immediately this comes in the form of debt. The prospect of a $100,000 or more commitment is an enormous burden for almost every college family. As education costs have soared financial aid sources have become more and more ineffective at financing higher education for millions. The result is that all but the wealthiest students leave college with thousands of dollars in debt. This effectively limits the choices available to college graduates; even if their degree weren't solely an authoritarian credential, it would be a sort of secular fatwa: submit or be crushed. Acclimated for borrow-and-spend financial ethics, college students are a chief market for credit card companies. Using "free" t-shirts, trips or other trinkets as a lure they snooker naive students into taking on even more debt--they are often given access to students by the academic institutions themselves. The oppression of commercial debt needs to explanation to any adult, but the debt culture of higher education takes a dark turn when a credit crisis strikes. Universities are now debt-financed and as credit becomes tighter, so will access to a college education.
Colleges and universities are also typically dehumanizing. The schools where most university students get their degrees (state schools) exist on too large a scale to treat their participants as humans--a school with 30,000 students, 20,000 staff and 3,000 faculty and tens of thousands of alumni must thus necessarily be oppressive. Few institutions feature quite the jungle of bureaucracy the typical college offers. Rigid rules written by cranky committees of institutional climbers create narrow paths for college students. The grade system, professor/student dichotomy and pedagogical style are also more fit for robots than human individuals. The problems with each of these are well-discussed elsewhere, but melting down the infinitely varied and complex process of learning to a four tone scale or paying money to have an authority figure talk at you are necessarily oppressive. They both discourage or at best fail to recognize individual distinction aside from exceptional adherence to or abstention from the approved path. Administration sees students as numbers, faculty see them as potential acolytes, students see one another as competitors or sexual objects if they aren't drinking buddies. The culture of higher education is one not fit for individual humans.
Higher education's place in elite society as a vital organ for its continued survival and its function as a devourer of human dignity should mark it as a special target for elimination by self-described revolutionary movements. Instead it is their only real bastion of respect in the contemporary US. This is a primary legacy of the revolutionary moment in the 1960s. The two most noted organizations of this time (as I see it) were the Black Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society. The former were smashed by state force, but the second formed the basis for a dramatic shift in the left. Prior to the 1960s revolutionary movements were closely associated with working communities: anarchists, communists and socialists were centered in labor unions (the Pullman Union, IWW, CIO, Western Federation of Miners), urban slums or farming centers (Kansas and Oklahoma were both notorious for their radicals). The SDS marked the first time that the US left found itself most comfortable and powerful in such elite contexts. Coincident with this shift came the rise of the "New Left," a broad school distinguished by skepticism of old dogmas--Marxism, syndicalism, etc.--and an application of postmodern and existentialist thought to left concerns. As valuable as many insights of the New Left proved to be, its main bequeath was a left dialog riddled with jargon, steeped in obscurantist rhetoric and completely inaccessible to the uneducated, unsophisticated or uninitiated (and hardly more discernible to much of the rest). As the SDS moved revolutionary action away from oppressed communities, the New Left divorced revolutionary thought from the discourse of these same working communities.
This has made US revolutionaries both marginalized and useless. By ensuring that one bust be in or near a college (read: with money) to hear or understand revolutionary messages, it has made the left paternalistic--far more than it was even before the 60s. College kids seeking to "save the world" come off to oppressed people as paternalistic adventurers, giving demagogues and reactionaries a strategic place to demonize revolutionary movements from. Lacking space for real change as they remain distant from oppressed groups and not able to perceive the stakes of stagnation because of their privilege, college activism remains comfortably trapped in the absolutely ineffective political tools of 60s activism: big marches, sit-ins, production of serially failing rags and so on. In fact the most effective tools of 60s action--occupations, property sabotage and humorous spectacle--are largely jettisoned by campus radicals. They are replaced with wholly unjustified faith in technological innovations like cell phones and the internet still largely outside the budget of the poor (or of too low a quality to be useful in those communities).
This marginalization is a function of the movements' uselessness. The hope in technologies differentially available in terms of class is only one source of distance from dispossessed people. To begin, campus organizations necessarily exclude the uneducated. Unlettered laborers and illiterate farmers have overthrown more governments and fought more revolutionary battles than the educated weekend warriors. But even if college activists open their organizations to the community at large the preference for educated types can be intimidating for those who may not read well or write much more than their name--let alone those who can't speak English. Also, the selection pressures for college are racially biased: quality of one's high school, functionality of one's family (according to White norms), test scores and essays along with access to financing. There are two results of this: campus revolutionary organizations (and as a result the left generally) are overwhelmingly White or Asian and those that aren't tend to be tied down to liberal identity politics. Poor communities of color have no use for one and know all too well the dreadfulness of the other. Even if the college address of these organizations didn't discourage poor people from getting involved, the foreign culture or patronization of college activism probably would.
Finally, the elitism and bourgeois obsession with pragmatism among college students leads the campus left into the worst left elements. Authoritarian parties like the Workers World Party (behind International ANSWER), the Maoist RCP (World Can't Wait), the Trotskyist intrigues of the ISO or colonialist perspectives of the Greens all ensure that a great deal of left energy in its academic ghetto is wasted on anachronistic institutions of repression. This tendency towards the party left both marginalizes and renders ineffective the left simultaneously.
There is, as you can guess, a quick solution to this problem--leftists and revolutionaries should drop out of college or resign their faculty positions. Universities are as elite as any corporation, as hierarchical as the military and at least as necessary for the survival of capitalism as organized religion. Yet dissidents who would never work for a multinational, enlist or confess in any church hurry to defend their place in academia. Their most frequent claim is that they have more "freedom" to do their activism work because of an academic job. But this freedom is obtained at the price of oppression for their students, and this freedom renders that same activism far less effective. Better to struggle and suffer in a less prestigious, lower paying, more rigorous line of work and have less time for activism than to have hours and hours to spend rebelling as a well-paid, well-rested elite.
This solution is highly unlikely to happen, and perhaps it is arrogant or unrealistic to ask people to quit the jobs they've trained their whole lives for. Another path is for university-based revolutionaries to focus on destroying the higher education system as we know it, replacing it with institutions that would be revolutionary centers of inclusion. Imagine if instead of places where people with appropriate prior education paid thousands of dollars a semester to take a limited number of required classes where they were lectured in pursuit of a degree universities were places where anybody of any age or education paid small fees to use libraries, laboratories, tutors, researchers or other resources to educate themselves and then become teachers in their own right. Instead of exclusive, they would be inclusive. Instead of expensive, they would be affordable for virtually anyone. Instead of narrow and dictated they would have infinite variety. And instead of being about having those authoritarian credentials they would be about learning, growing and sharing our unique knowledge in order to create stronger, smarter and more beautiful communties. Dropping out is a viable solution (one taken by this author); a quick solution. A revolution in pedagogy would be a generational struggle, but could provide the foundation for a broader revolution in society. Where the anarcho-syndicalists saw productive power as the jumping off point for a revolution in an industrial society, perhaps "anarcho-pedagogialists" will use educational power as the springboard. It is at least worth trying.
It cannot be denied that higher education is a system of control, that universities are centers of oppression and that the students and faculties of our colleges are invested in the destruction of human freedom--not the least their own. What to do about this situation is vital for the future of the left, and the solutions could provide new venues for global upheaval of power relations. Please use email and comments to discuss the implications and inspirations you may come upon. Direct action solutions offer a multitude of options, one of them may save our lives.
It would be far more accurate to suggest that academia controls the left. It is my contention that this is perhaps the most central source of the thorough irrelevance of revolutionary movements in contemporary America. The place of higher education in society, its relationship to individuals and its relationship with revolutionary movements all point to its being a system of control unacceptable for those opposed to authority in all its forms.
Colleges and universities serve two vital functions in upholding systems of authority and control across US society. The first is as a source of authoritarian credentials: a degree serves as a "seal of approval" that grants exclusive access to elite systems. Degrees have no relationship to academic achievement at a societal level, rather they show that the holder had access to tens of thousands of dollars at some point. Whether they worked, borrowed, got money from family, charity or the government is unimportant--all indicate an indebtedness to systems of authority (employers, banks, parents, philanthropy, the state) that marks the holder as sympathetic to the status quo. Academics are less of a selection factor for colleges than wealth: wealthy elites from prestigious schools all go to college, regardless of academic performance in high school. On the other hand, poor and marginalized people from degraded high schools are demanded good grades, only academic elites from these schools go on to seek degrees. When they all get to college they will be repeatedly told that their major is not really that important--employers just want to know they got a degree in something. That the something is so irrelevant belies the fact that the content of one's education is not what counts--after all, a chronic class cutter with a 2.1 has just as much a degree as the valedictorian. What counts is a piece of paper signed by powerful figures in an institution of power to be used as a passkey to future bosses.
The university's second purpose is less discussed: it serves as a source of free labor for powerful interests. Unpaid internships have emerged as a second level of authoritarian weeding out, as the employment opportunties promised with one's degree are dried up without an history of interning. Students who cannot afford to work for free are thus put in a similar spot as those who couldn't afford college in the first place--indeed America's service industry and temp agencies are chock-full of degree holders, many turned away from better jobs because they lack internship slave service to corporate employers. For the public-minded student liberal and conservative political institutions--think tanks, campaigns, consultants and reformist activist causes--scour colleges and universities for well-off interns to develop into the pundits, lawmakers, hacks and do-gooders of tomorrow. As working community involvement in the political process dries up amid repeated betrayals and almost literal anemia, colleges and universities provide greater shares of the grunt-level legwork of electoral politics. Like their corporate patrons they rely on higher education to develop future rulers on the cheap.
Aside from its place in society, academia has an oppressive impact on human individuals. Most immediately this comes in the form of debt. The prospect of a $100,000 or more commitment is an enormous burden for almost every college family. As education costs have soared financial aid sources have become more and more ineffective at financing higher education for millions. The result is that all but the wealthiest students leave college with thousands of dollars in debt. This effectively limits the choices available to college graduates; even if their degree weren't solely an authoritarian credential, it would be a sort of secular fatwa: submit or be crushed. Acclimated for borrow-and-spend financial ethics, college students are a chief market for credit card companies. Using "free" t-shirts, trips or other trinkets as a lure they snooker naive students into taking on even more debt--they are often given access to students by the academic institutions themselves. The oppression of commercial debt needs to explanation to any adult, but the debt culture of higher education takes a dark turn when a credit crisis strikes. Universities are now debt-financed and as credit becomes tighter, so will access to a college education.
Colleges and universities are also typically dehumanizing. The schools where most university students get their degrees (state schools) exist on too large a scale to treat their participants as humans--a school with 30,000 students, 20,000 staff and 3,000 faculty and tens of thousands of alumni must thus necessarily be oppressive. Few institutions feature quite the jungle of bureaucracy the typical college offers. Rigid rules written by cranky committees of institutional climbers create narrow paths for college students. The grade system, professor/student dichotomy and pedagogical style are also more fit for robots than human individuals. The problems with each of these are well-discussed elsewhere, but melting down the infinitely varied and complex process of learning to a four tone scale or paying money to have an authority figure talk at you are necessarily oppressive. They both discourage or at best fail to recognize individual distinction aside from exceptional adherence to or abstention from the approved path. Administration sees students as numbers, faculty see them as potential acolytes, students see one another as competitors or sexual objects if they aren't drinking buddies. The culture of higher education is one not fit for individual humans.
Higher education's place in elite society as a vital organ for its continued survival and its function as a devourer of human dignity should mark it as a special target for elimination by self-described revolutionary movements. Instead it is their only real bastion of respect in the contemporary US. This is a primary legacy of the revolutionary moment in the 1960s. The two most noted organizations of this time (as I see it) were the Black Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society. The former were smashed by state force, but the second formed the basis for a dramatic shift in the left. Prior to the 1960s revolutionary movements were closely associated with working communities: anarchists, communists and socialists were centered in labor unions (the Pullman Union, IWW, CIO, Western Federation of Miners), urban slums or farming centers (Kansas and Oklahoma were both notorious for their radicals). The SDS marked the first time that the US left found itself most comfortable and powerful in such elite contexts. Coincident with this shift came the rise of the "New Left," a broad school distinguished by skepticism of old dogmas--Marxism, syndicalism, etc.--and an application of postmodern and existentialist thought to left concerns. As valuable as many insights of the New Left proved to be, its main bequeath was a left dialog riddled with jargon, steeped in obscurantist rhetoric and completely inaccessible to the uneducated, unsophisticated or uninitiated (and hardly more discernible to much of the rest). As the SDS moved revolutionary action away from oppressed communities, the New Left divorced revolutionary thought from the discourse of these same working communities.
This has made US revolutionaries both marginalized and useless. By ensuring that one bust be in or near a college (read: with money) to hear or understand revolutionary messages, it has made the left paternalistic--far more than it was even before the 60s. College kids seeking to "save the world" come off to oppressed people as paternalistic adventurers, giving demagogues and reactionaries a strategic place to demonize revolutionary movements from. Lacking space for real change as they remain distant from oppressed groups and not able to perceive the stakes of stagnation because of their privilege, college activism remains comfortably trapped in the absolutely ineffective political tools of 60s activism: big marches, sit-ins, production of serially failing rags and so on. In fact the most effective tools of 60s action--occupations, property sabotage and humorous spectacle--are largely jettisoned by campus radicals. They are replaced with wholly unjustified faith in technological innovations like cell phones and the internet still largely outside the budget of the poor (or of too low a quality to be useful in those communities).
This marginalization is a function of the movements' uselessness. The hope in technologies differentially available in terms of class is only one source of distance from dispossessed people. To begin, campus organizations necessarily exclude the uneducated. Unlettered laborers and illiterate farmers have overthrown more governments and fought more revolutionary battles than the educated weekend warriors. But even if college activists open their organizations to the community at large the preference for educated types can be intimidating for those who may not read well or write much more than their name--let alone those who can't speak English. Also, the selection pressures for college are racially biased: quality of one's high school, functionality of one's family (according to White norms), test scores and essays along with access to financing. There are two results of this: campus revolutionary organizations (and as a result the left generally) are overwhelmingly White or Asian and those that aren't tend to be tied down to liberal identity politics. Poor communities of color have no use for one and know all too well the dreadfulness of the other. Even if the college address of these organizations didn't discourage poor people from getting involved, the foreign culture or patronization of college activism probably would.
Finally, the elitism and bourgeois obsession with pragmatism among college students leads the campus left into the worst left elements. Authoritarian parties like the Workers World Party (behind International ANSWER), the Maoist RCP (World Can't Wait), the Trotskyist intrigues of the ISO or colonialist perspectives of the Greens all ensure that a great deal of left energy in its academic ghetto is wasted on anachronistic institutions of repression. This tendency towards the party left both marginalizes and renders ineffective the left simultaneously.
There is, as you can guess, a quick solution to this problem--leftists and revolutionaries should drop out of college or resign their faculty positions. Universities are as elite as any corporation, as hierarchical as the military and at least as necessary for the survival of capitalism as organized religion. Yet dissidents who would never work for a multinational, enlist or confess in any church hurry to defend their place in academia. Their most frequent claim is that they have more "freedom" to do their activism work because of an academic job. But this freedom is obtained at the price of oppression for their students, and this freedom renders that same activism far less effective. Better to struggle and suffer in a less prestigious, lower paying, more rigorous line of work and have less time for activism than to have hours and hours to spend rebelling as a well-paid, well-rested elite.
This solution is highly unlikely to happen, and perhaps it is arrogant or unrealistic to ask people to quit the jobs they've trained their whole lives for. Another path is for university-based revolutionaries to focus on destroying the higher education system as we know it, replacing it with institutions that would be revolutionary centers of inclusion. Imagine if instead of places where people with appropriate prior education paid thousands of dollars a semester to take a limited number of required classes where they were lectured in pursuit of a degree universities were places where anybody of any age or education paid small fees to use libraries, laboratories, tutors, researchers or other resources to educate themselves and then become teachers in their own right. Instead of exclusive, they would be inclusive. Instead of expensive, they would be affordable for virtually anyone. Instead of narrow and dictated they would have infinite variety. And instead of being about having those authoritarian credentials they would be about learning, growing and sharing our unique knowledge in order to create stronger, smarter and more beautiful communties. Dropping out is a viable solution (one taken by this author); a quick solution. A revolution in pedagogy would be a generational struggle, but could provide the foundation for a broader revolution in society. Where the anarcho-syndicalists saw productive power as the jumping off point for a revolution in an industrial society, perhaps "anarcho-pedagogialists" will use educational power as the springboard. It is at least worth trying.
It cannot be denied that higher education is a system of control, that universities are centers of oppression and that the students and faculties of our colleges are invested in the destruction of human freedom--not the least their own. What to do about this situation is vital for the future of the left, and the solutions could provide new venues for global upheaval of power relations. Please use email and comments to discuss the implications and inspirations you may come upon. Direct action solutions offer a multitude of options, one of them may save our lives.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Light Out Chronicles: Knoxville, TN
It is my favorite time of day--mid-evening, when the sun comes at everything sideways and the shadows stretch tall. We are cutting through the north of Austin, the less interesting half, but the last half of home I will see for months. You stack up enough months and you'll be talking years--could it be years before I see it again? The truth is, I have no idea, no way of knowing. Freedom costs you your capacity to prognosticate--if I go where I want, I won't be here again til I need to be. Life being what it is (temporary) I suppose there is an outside chance I'll never see these Live Oak choked, lazily rolling vistas ever again. But god what a curse that what be. it is like the last embrace of a lover, the last time lips touch before you're just occasional fuckbuddies or strangers. Welcome but painful, a symbol of an ongoing love that has nonetheless changed. That's what the first 30 minutes of a 22 hour ride on Greyhound are like.
Out of Dallas, usually the end of my line--this is where my family is and I once was. But the emotions came in Austin, now the magnitude of this sardine can experience is growing on me. The discomfort fails to really phase me, however, I end up having a good time. G----, a recently homeless guy from Virginia; K---- and A---- conjoined young lovers from Boulder (unimpressed by the merely majestic scale of the Smoky Mountains' foothills); K---- and J---- from London, UK coming stateside with cheap dollars and tickets to Dollywood; R---- the oil worker from Detroit going home from 10 long months in Ft. Stockton, TX: i made friends. Only 80 pages were taken out of Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
Riding Greyhound is a lesson in the flattening of the US landscape. When in Sulpher Springs or Benton you get to see corporate trucks identical save that in one they have Big 12 ballcaps, the other SEC. The bus stations in Little Rock, Memphis and Nashville are surrounded by the temples of corporate capitalism's last hurrahs--branded arenas and new high rise developments. High rise condos springing up in Little Rock show that the reach of the New Urbanist scourge knows no bounds. In between you have terraced farms in Arkansas and those majestic foothills. Tennessee offers as much natural beauty as anywhere I've yet seen, the foliage a chaos of species packing the landscape to create a lush texture like nowhere else. When the hills start rolling and valleys plunge away from the interstate, it is almost too much to bear. The South Texans among us were clamoring with camera phones and gushing over the view. Into this green and seductive terrain sprouts Knoxville.
There are a couple of quick ways to describe Knoxville--K-Town to friends. One is that it is a negative image of Austin: where Austin is a big city trying to be a small town, Knoxville is a small town trying to be a big city. Its downtown features a signature park--Market Square--full of public art garbage nobody minds getting rained, hailed or sat upon. It is walkable and you could see all the sights in a weekend. People still smile here, and it has got to be the least branded city I have seen. The only corporate eateries in Downtown or the adjacent Old City are an Arbies, a Marble Slab and a Subway. The only other corporate outlet of any sort I saw was a Regal cinema (its logo is downplayed on the facade of a classic movie house). No McDonald's, no Starbucks (check out Coffee and Chocolate or Old City Java), no Gap, Diesel, Express or other corporate shopping. I'm told that during the school year the place is lousy with frat guys and "sorostitutes." But I'm here the week after the other UT let out for summer so only the interns at law offices and banks are afoot. All this to say Knoxville--regardless of its ambitions--exists on a human scale.
The other way of seeing it is as very similar to Cambridge, MA 86 the self-important yankees sub laid back rednecks. It is old--founded in 1792--and it promises a great deal of stimulation. Still, it lacks a Boston over the river, offering the Smoky Mountains instead. It is a city where cars are gratuitous yet public transit paltry (though probably pretty good for its size). There are a few radicals afoot--the woman at the historical center told me that Knoxville turned out in the early 70s to protest Richard Nixon and Billy Graham. If you need any proof that there is a vein of cool running through K-Town note that it is probably the only place in a five state spread that would turn out against the war mongering Billy Graham. One of the alt weeklies has contact info for the local Critical Mass and the Green Party, as well as anti-Bush op ed screeds. It also, in a refreshing exception from its cohorts around the country, has no ads for prostituted women. There are actually two alt weeklies: the Knoxville Voice and Metro Pulse, neither offer women for rent in their back pages.
My last day in town I finally connected with the local underground. At the Southeast end of Market Square sits a Tennessee-style BBQ joint called Guss' with a "Peace In Iraq Now" sign out front. I went in, got the pork sandwich special and talked with the man behind the counter. He pointed me towards Yarnell Perkins, a local activist and writer with a group called Pledge to Impeach. The group is working to organize a general strike for East Tennessee, to be called off when President Bush resigns, the War in Iraq ends, etc. You could criticize them I suppose, and Yarnell is a left liberal type enamored of Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party. But still it was nice to connect with the lefties in town.
That same morning I sat in the aforementioned Coffee and Chocolate where I struck up a conversation with D----, who agreed with me 100% when it came to my radically bleak economic forecasts. His agreement was nice for a season, but when it came out that he was a mutual fund manager it turned terrifying. He is the sort I expect to say I'm crazy when I predict Great Depression style financial collapse. His agreement was unexpected and worrying. He made up for it though, as I was attempting to figure out where my next stop would be and he said some magic words.
"You been to Asheville yet?"
The answer was no, but per his advice it won't be soon. Keep heading east, north will come soon enough. Knoxville could only house me for a few days, Asheville here I come.
PS--Also check out Woodward Books, where I spent two hours before my bus out of town talking to one of the owners about politics. A great spot for rare and used books, not very big but comfy!
Out of Dallas, usually the end of my line--this is where my family is and I once was. But the emotions came in Austin, now the magnitude of this sardine can experience is growing on me. The discomfort fails to really phase me, however, I end up having a good time. G----, a recently homeless guy from Virginia; K---- and A---- conjoined young lovers from Boulder (unimpressed by the merely majestic scale of the Smoky Mountains' foothills); K---- and J---- from London, UK coming stateside with cheap dollars and tickets to Dollywood; R---- the oil worker from Detroit going home from 10 long months in Ft. Stockton, TX: i made friends. Only 80 pages were taken out of Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
Riding Greyhound is a lesson in the flattening of the US landscape. When in Sulpher Springs or Benton you get to see corporate trucks identical save that in one they have Big 12 ballcaps, the other SEC. The bus stations in Little Rock, Memphis and Nashville are surrounded by the temples of corporate capitalism's last hurrahs--branded arenas and new high rise developments. High rise condos springing up in Little Rock show that the reach of the New Urbanist scourge knows no bounds. In between you have terraced farms in Arkansas and those majestic foothills. Tennessee offers as much natural beauty as anywhere I've yet seen, the foliage a chaos of species packing the landscape to create a lush texture like nowhere else. When the hills start rolling and valleys plunge away from the interstate, it is almost too much to bear. The South Texans among us were clamoring with camera phones and gushing over the view. Into this green and seductive terrain sprouts Knoxville.
There are a couple of quick ways to describe Knoxville--K-Town to friends. One is that it is a negative image of Austin: where Austin is a big city trying to be a small town, Knoxville is a small town trying to be a big city. Its downtown features a signature park--Market Square--full of public art garbage nobody minds getting rained, hailed or sat upon. It is walkable and you could see all the sights in a weekend. People still smile here, and it has got to be the least branded city I have seen. The only corporate eateries in Downtown or the adjacent Old City are an Arbies, a Marble Slab and a Subway. The only other corporate outlet of any sort I saw was a Regal cinema (its logo is downplayed on the facade of a classic movie house). No McDonald's, no Starbucks (check out Coffee and Chocolate or Old City Java), no Gap, Diesel, Express or other corporate shopping. I'm told that during the school year the place is lousy with frat guys and "sorostitutes." But I'm here the week after the other UT let out for summer so only the interns at law offices and banks are afoot. All this to say Knoxville--regardless of its ambitions--exists on a human scale.
The other way of seeing it is as very similar to Cambridge, MA 86 the self-important yankees sub laid back rednecks. It is old--founded in 1792--and it promises a great deal of stimulation. Still, it lacks a Boston over the river, offering the Smoky Mountains instead. It is a city where cars are gratuitous yet public transit paltry (though probably pretty good for its size). There are a few radicals afoot--the woman at the historical center told me that Knoxville turned out in the early 70s to protest Richard Nixon and Billy Graham. If you need any proof that there is a vein of cool running through K-Town note that it is probably the only place in a five state spread that would turn out against the war mongering Billy Graham. One of the alt weeklies has contact info for the local Critical Mass and the Green Party, as well as anti-Bush op ed screeds. It also, in a refreshing exception from its cohorts around the country, has no ads for prostituted women. There are actually two alt weeklies: the Knoxville Voice and Metro Pulse, neither offer women for rent in their back pages.
My last day in town I finally connected with the local underground. At the Southeast end of Market Square sits a Tennessee-style BBQ joint called Guss' with a "Peace In Iraq Now" sign out front. I went in, got the pork sandwich special and talked with the man behind the counter. He pointed me towards Yarnell Perkins, a local activist and writer with a group called Pledge to Impeach. The group is working to organize a general strike for East Tennessee, to be called off when President Bush resigns, the War in Iraq ends, etc. You could criticize them I suppose, and Yarnell is a left liberal type enamored of Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party. But still it was nice to connect with the lefties in town.
That same morning I sat in the aforementioned Coffee and Chocolate where I struck up a conversation with D----, who agreed with me 100% when it came to my radically bleak economic forecasts. His agreement was nice for a season, but when it came out that he was a mutual fund manager it turned terrifying. He is the sort I expect to say I'm crazy when I predict Great Depression style financial collapse. His agreement was unexpected and worrying. He made up for it though, as I was attempting to figure out where my next stop would be and he said some magic words.
"You been to Asheville yet?"
The answer was no, but per his advice it won't be soon. Keep heading east, north will come soon enough. Knoxville could only house me for a few days, Asheville here I come.
PS--Also check out Woodward Books, where I spent two hours before my bus out of town talking to one of the owners about politics. A great spot for rare and used books, not very big but comfy!
Thursday, May 22, 2008
The Backwards Read I: Gitmo War Crimes File and Second Generation Agrofuels
It is my practice to read newspapers from back to front--you get to the meaty buried stories first and leave the headlines for a light and fluffy dessert. Yesterday's New York Times was a perfect example of this policy's effectiveness. All the way back on page A17, next to a piece about pet cloning (how cyberpunk is that?) the Gray Lady reports that "FBI Agents Created a War Crimes File" of abuses at Guantanamo bay.
I suppose it is a feature of these dark times that we are left to rely on J. Edgar Hoover's handiwork for protection from state oppression. Especially telling is the fact that US military interrogators worked with Chinese investigators in Gitmo to torture Chinese Muslims. No word if the PRC guys were put off that Soviet-style sleep deprivation tactics were used in their Sino-American Clandestine Torture Summit rather than Maoist techniques. The media have been known to put China's human rights contempt in the front of their coverage, but US collaboration in and notetaking on the same is seventeenth page news.
The big eye-opener here is that the FBI agents in Guantanamo weren't hippie peaceniks hoping to bring an end to the War, they were criminal investigators accumulating evidence of serious crimes. In the end, the Times reports:
Radical environmentalists seem to be seen as a more serious threat than US officials torturing in the name of preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution.
Finally, the article demonstrates the cynical destruction of the English language for totalitarian purposes:
The military's distinction between "torture" and "degrading and abusive" interrogation tactics begs the question: what is torture if not degrading and abusive interrogation? It seems that the government is committed to making the word torture meaningless, and thus it would be impossible for the US to torture--as impossible as it would be for them to ballywonk or zurk or any other word without meaningful definition. Alternately, they might redefine it as "something the US doesn't do." By definition we don't torture so sleep deprivation (the central torture tactic in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's terrifying expose of Stalinism), waterboarding (a primary tool of the Spanish Inquistion) or sexual humiliation (a favorite of Saddam Hussein) are only torture when others do them. This is the classic rationale of doublethink and the DoD's innocent quote demonstrates the depth of commitment to repression in our national state.
Moving forward, page A6 has a fascinating critical look at "second generation" agrofuels. This article--like almost everybody else--calls them "biofuels," but activists in the global South have taken to calling them agrofuels. All fuels--coal, petroleum, natural gas--are made of biological materials, agrofuels can be distinguished by the fact they are produced from agricultural products rather than drilled or mined for. Second generation agrofuels are produced from reeds and grasses as opposed to staple crops such as corn, palm and sugar. The global famine caused in part by Western liberalism's posthaste embrace of agrofuels is leading Western energy firms to consider shifting to plants such as giant reed and jatropha--non-food crops. The only hitch in their giddy up is that:
Hard to believe plants sold by their advocates as easy to grow in vast quantities anywhere might be weeds, no? It is still unclear how many desperate straw grasps from global capitalism we will endure before we recognize that the problem isn't that there isn't enough fuel or not clean enough fuel, but overconsumption. These grasps cost human lives: thousands certainly in the current famine (exceptional hunger in a world where thousands starve to death every day to begin with) and more if disastrous predictions about invasive species' threat to food supplies in poor countries were to come true. They cost lives, but they pay profits for capitalists convinced that the eternal economic growth is possible or desirable. Having ignored warnings about the first generation agrofuels' threat to food costs, they don't want to hear the expert predictions on second-generation products.
To this industry figures such as EuropaBio's Willy De Greef have this black comfort:
Inevitably? As in guaranteed to take place? I am curious what De Greef's source of such confidence might be. Unforseen, ignored or covered up threats to human life have arisen from every new energy innovation, and capitalism's pursuit of ever greater wealth explodes these threats with its consumption culture. The rapacious burning of wood, coal, petroleum and the first generation of agrofuels have all resulted in ecological crises that have killed multitudes of people. Now the "secretary general" of the newest energy concern lets us know this time will be different. We'll be waiting with baited breath.
This article ends with a scent of a solution, at least one of its dimensions.
A global resistance is called for, anything less is simply insufficient. Blessedly, we live in the first moment of human history wherein such a coordination is possible. We in the US also live in this era's great global power and have an opportunity to decapitate the beast of world corporate capitalism. But as we tarry the US wanes, our torture-buddies in China begin their ascent replacing liberal capitalism with command capitalism, borders become increasingly anachronistic and people die. Good thing the revolution starts in September!
In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.
The report, an exhaustive, 437-page review prepared by the Justice Department inspector general, provides the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.
I suppose it is a feature of these dark times that we are left to rely on J. Edgar Hoover's handiwork for protection from state oppression. Especially telling is the fact that US military interrogators worked with Chinese investigators in Gitmo to torture Chinese Muslims. No word if the PRC guys were put off that Soviet-style sleep deprivation tactics were used in their Sino-American Clandestine Torture Summit rather than Maoist techniques. The media have been known to put China's human rights contempt in the front of their coverage, but US collaboration in and notetaking on the same is seventeenth page news.
The big eye-opener here is that the FBI agents in Guantanamo weren't hippie peaceniks hoping to bring an end to the War, they were criminal investigators accumulating evidence of serious crimes. In the end, the Times reports:
The report says that the F.B.I. agents took their concerns to higher-ups, but that their concerns often fell on deaf ears: officials at senior levels at the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council were all made aware of the F.B.I. agents’ complaints, but little appears to have been done as a result.
Radical environmentalists seem to be seen as a more serious threat than US officials torturing in the name of preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution.
Finally, the article demonstrates the cynical destruction of the English language for totalitarian purposes:
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, noted that abuses at Guantánamo were the subject of a 2005 Defense Department investigation that found no evidence of torture, though it did fault some interrogation tactics and called the Qahtani interrogation degrading and abusive.
The military's distinction between "torture" and "degrading and abusive" interrogation tactics begs the question: what is torture if not degrading and abusive interrogation? It seems that the government is committed to making the word torture meaningless, and thus it would be impossible for the US to torture--as impossible as it would be for them to ballywonk or zurk or any other word without meaningful definition. Alternately, they might redefine it as "something the US doesn't do." By definition we don't torture so sleep deprivation (the central torture tactic in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's terrifying expose of Stalinism), waterboarding (a primary tool of the Spanish Inquistion) or sexual humiliation (a favorite of Saddam Hussein) are only torture when others do them. This is the classic rationale of doublethink and the DoD's innocent quote demonstrates the depth of commitment to repression in our national state.
Moving forward, page A6 has a fascinating critical look at "second generation" agrofuels. This article--like almost everybody else--calls them "biofuels," but activists in the global South have taken to calling them agrofuels. All fuels--coal, petroleum, natural gas--are made of biological materials, agrofuels can be distinguished by the fact they are produced from agricultural products rather than drilled or mined for. Second generation agrofuels are produced from reeds and grasses as opposed to staple crops such as corn, palm and sugar. The global famine caused in part by Western liberalism's posthaste embrace of agrofuels is leading Western energy firms to consider shifting to plants such as giant reed and jatropha--non-food crops. The only hitch in their giddy up is that:
Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.
Hard to believe plants sold by their advocates as easy to grow in vast quantities anywhere might be weeds, no? It is still unclear how many desperate straw grasps from global capitalism we will endure before we recognize that the problem isn't that there isn't enough fuel or not clean enough fuel, but overconsumption. These grasps cost human lives: thousands certainly in the current famine (exceptional hunger in a world where thousands starve to death every day to begin with) and more if disastrous predictions about invasive species' threat to food supplies in poor countries were to come true. They cost lives, but they pay profits for capitalists convinced that the eternal economic growth is possible or desirable. Having ignored warnings about the first generation agrofuels' threat to food costs, they don't want to hear the expert predictions on second-generation products.
“With biofuels, there’s always a hurry,” said Geoffrey Howard, an invasive species expert with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Plantations are started by investors, often from the U.S. or Europe, so they are eager to generate biofuels within a couple of years and also, as you might guess, they don’t want a negative assessment.”
To this industry figures such as EuropaBio's Willy De Greef have this black comfort:
Willy De Greef, incoming secretary general of EuropaBio, an industry group... said that biofuel farmers would inevitably introduce new crops carefully because they would not want growth they could not control.
Inevitably? As in guaranteed to take place? I am curious what De Greef's source of such confidence might be. Unforseen, ignored or covered up threats to human life have arisen from every new energy innovation, and capitalism's pursuit of ever greater wealth explodes these threats with its consumption culture. The rapacious burning of wood, coal, petroleum and the first generation of agrofuels have all resulted in ecological crises that have killed multitudes of people. Now the "secretary general" of the newest energy concern lets us know this time will be different. We'll be waiting with baited breath.
This article ends with a scent of a solution, at least one of its dimensions.
That assessment, he added, must take a broad geographical perspective since invasive species don’t respect borders.
A global resistance is called for, anything less is simply insufficient. Blessedly, we live in the first moment of human history wherein such a coordination is possible. We in the US also live in this era's great global power and have an opportunity to decapitate the beast of world corporate capitalism. But as we tarry the US wanes, our torture-buddies in China begin their ascent replacing liberal capitalism with command capitalism, borders become increasingly anachronistic and people die. Good thing the revolution starts in September!
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