The Next 10 Years Will Be Very Unlike the Last 10 Years

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Fossil fuels have powered human growth and ingenuity for centuries. Now that we're reaching the end of cheap and abundant oil and coal supplies, we're in for an exciting ride. While there's a real risk that we'll fall off a cliff, there's still time to control our transition to a post-carbon future.

  OneLove

Noam Chomsky: Electing The President of an Empire

As usual, the views by MIT's renowned philosopher and linguist Professor Noam Chomsky, are on point & thought-provoking. The brainwashing mainstream press won't touch this fellow as his thoughts will only provoke people to question. To question in these dark times is akin to being an enemy of the State. 

Smell the coffee...

  OneLove  

Libya: From Africa’s Wealthiest Democracy Under Gaddafi to Terrorist Haven After US Intervention by Garikai Chengu

This past Tuesday marked the four-year anniversary of the US-backed assassination of Libya’s former leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and the decline into chaos of one of Africa’s greatest nations.

In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; by the time he was assassinated, he had transformed Libya into Africa’s richest nation. Prior to the US-led bombing campaign in 2011, Libya had the highest Human Development Index, the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy in all of Africa.

Today, Libya is a failed state. Western military intervention has caused all of the worst-scenarios: Western embassies have all left, the South of the country has become a haven for ISIS terrorists, and the Northern coast a center of migrant trafficking. Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia have all closed their borders with Libya. This all occurs amidst a backdrop of widespread rape, assassinations and torture that complete the picture of a state that is failed to the bone.

Libya currently has two competing governments, two parliaments, two sets of rivaling claims to control over the central bank and the national oil company, no functioning national police or army, and the United States now believes that ISIS is running training camps across large swathes of the country.

On one side, in the West of the nation, Islamist-allied militias took over control of the capital Tripoli and other key cities and set up their own government, chasing away a parliament that was previously elected.

On the other side, in the East of the nation, the “legitimate” government dominated by anti-Islamist politicians, exiled 1,200 kilometers away in Tobruk, no longer governs anything. The democracy which Libyans were promised by Western governments after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi has all but vanished.

Contrary to popular belief, Libya, which western media routinely described as “Gaddafi’s military dictatorship” was in actual fact one of the world’s most democratic States.

Under Gaddafi’s unique system of direct democracy, traditional institutions of government were disbanded and abolished, and power belonged to the people directly through various committees and congresses.

Far from control being in the hands of one man, Libya was highly decentralized and divided into several small communities that were essentially “mini-autonomous States” within a State. These autonomous States had control over their districts and could make a range of decisions including how to allocate oil revenue and budgetary funds. Within these mini autonomous States, the three main bodies of Libya’s democracy were Local Committees, Basic People’s Congresses and Executive Revolutionary Councils.

The Basic People’s Congress (BPC), or Mu’tamar shaʿbi asāsi was essentially Libya’s functional equivalent of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom or the House of Representatives in the United States. However, Libya’s People’s Congress was not comprised merely of elected representatives who discussed and proposed legislation on behalf of the people; rather, the Congress allowed all Libyans to directly participate in this process. Eight hundred People’s Congresses were set up across the country and all Libyans were free to attend and shape national policy and make decisions over all major issues including budgets, education, industry, and the economy.

In 2009, Mr. Gaddafi invited the New York Times to Libya to spend two weeks observing the nation’s direct democracy. The New York Times, that has traditionally been highly critical of Colonel Gaddafi’s democratic experiment, conceded that in Libya, the intention was that “everyone is involved in every decision…Tens of thousands of people take part in local committee meetings to discuss issues and vote on everything from foreign treaties to building schools.”

The fundamental difference between western democratic systems and the Libyan Jamahiriya’s direct democracy is that in Libya all citizens were allowed to voice their views directly – not in one parliament of only a few hundred wealthy politicians – but in hundreds of committees attended by tens of thousands of ordinary citizens. Far from being a military dictatorship, Libya under Mr. Gaddafi was Africa’s most prosperous democracy.

On numerous occasions Mr. Gaddafi’s proposals were rejected by popular vote during Congresses and the opposite was approved and enacted as legislation.

For instance, on many occasions Mr. Gaddafi proposed the abolition of capital punishment and he pushed for home schooling over traditional schools. However, the People’s Congresses wanted to maintain the death penalty and classic schools, and the will of the People’s Congresses prevailed. Similarly, in 2009, Colonel Gaddafi put forward a proposal to essentially abolish the central government altogether and give all the oil proceeds directly to each family. The People’s Congresses rejected this idea too.

For over four decades, Gaddafi promoted economic democracy and used the nationalized oil wealth to sustain progressive social welfare programs for all Libyans. Under Gaddafi’s rule, Libyans enjoyed not only free health-care and free education, but also free electricity and interest-free loans. Now thanks to NATO’s intervention the health-care sector is on the verge of collapse as thousands of Filipino health workers flee the country, institutions of higher education across the East of the country are shut down, and black outs are a common occurrence in once thriving Tripoli.

Unlike in the West, Libyans did not vote once every four years for a President and an invariably wealthy local parliamentarian who would then make all decisions for them. Ordinary Libyans made decisions regarding foreign, domestic and economic policy themselves.

America’s bombing campaign of 2011 has not only destroyed the infrastructure of Libya’s democracy, America has also actively promoted ISIS terror group leader Abdelhakim Belhadj whose organization is making the establishment of Libyan democracy impossible.

The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups in North Africa and the Middle East will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.

The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side Western nations and extremist political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

Since then America has used the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against Soviet expansion, the Sarekat Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia and the Jamaat-e-Islami terror group against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. Last but certainly not least there is Al-Qaeda.

Lest we forget, the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization throughout the 1980’s. Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of western intelligence agencies. Mr. Cook explained that Al Qaeda, which literally means “the base” in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used to have a different name: Al Qaeda in Iraq.

ISIS is metastasizing at an alarming rate in Libya, under the leadership of one Abdelhakim Belhadj. Fox News recently admitted that Mr. Belhadj “was once courted by the Obama administration and members of Congress” and he was a staunch ally of the United States in the quest to topple Gaddafi. In 2011, the United States and Senator McCain hailed Belhadj as a “heroic freedom fighter” and Washington gave his organization arms and logistical support. Now Senator McCain has called Belhadj’s organization ISIS, “probably the biggest threat to America and everything we stand for.”

Under Gaddafi, Islamic terrorism was virtually non existent and in 2009 the US State Department called Libya “an important ally in the war on terrorism”.

Today, after US intervention, Libya is home to the world’s largest loose arms cache, and its porous borders are routinely transited by a host of heavily armed non-state actors including Tuareg separatists, jihadists who forced Mali’s national military from Timbuktu and increasingly ISIS militiamen led by former US ally Abdelhakim Belhadj.

Clearly, Gaddafi’s system of economic and direct democracy was one of the 21st century’s most profound democratic experiments and NATO’s bombardment of Libya may indeed go down in history as one of the greatest military failures of the 21st century.
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Garikai Chengu is a scholar at Harvard University. Contact:garikai.chengu@gmail.com; His Website: https://garikaichengu.wordpress.com/

YOUTH IN AUTHORITARIAN TIMES: CHALLENGING NEOLIBERALISM’S POLITICS OF DISPOSABILITY BY HENRY A. GIROUX

Following the insight of Hannah Arendt, a leading political theorist of mid-20th century totalitarianism, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended upon the United States.Thoughtlessness, a primary condition of authoritarian rule, now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children, while children are pushed to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures that saddle them with debt and cripple their ability to be imaginative.

Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a mind-numbing anti-intellectualism evident in the banalities produced by Fox News infotainment and celebrity culture, and in the blinding rage produced by populist politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and rail against immigration, the rights of women, public service workers, gay people and countless others. There is more at work here than a lethal form of intellectual, political and emotional infantilism. There is also a catastrophe of indifference and inattentiveness that breeds flirtations with irrationality, fuels the spectacle of violence, creates an embodied incapacity and promotes the withering of public life.

The citizen is now urged to become a consumer, politicians are now mouthpieces for money and power and the burgeoning army of anti-public intellectuals in the mainstream media present themselves as unapologetic enemies of compassion, the commons and democracy itself. Education is no longer viewed as a public good but as a private right, and critical thinking is no longer valued as a fundamental necessity for creating engaged and socially responsible citizens. Neoliberalism’s contempt for the social is now matched by an utter disdain for the common good. Public spheres that once encouraged progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, democratic values, critical dialogue and exchange have been replaced by corporate entities whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins and producing a vast commercial culture “that tends to function so as to erase everything that matters.”

One outcome of this tangle of forces is that we live at a time in which institutions that were designed to limit human suffering and indignity and protect the public from the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist markets have been either been weakened or abolished.  Free market policies, values and practices, with their now unrestrained emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the denigration of social protections and the deregulation of economic activity, influence practically every commanding political and economic institution in North America. Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways and is more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains.

Given these conditions, an overwhelming catalogue of evidence has come into view that indicates that nation-states organized by neoliberal priorities have implicitly declared war on their children, offering a disturbing index of societies in the midst of a deep moral and political catastrophe. Far too many youth today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the dictates of a market-driven society or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare. As Jennifer Silva has pointed out, this generation of especially “young working-class men and women … are trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs and shrinking social support networks…. They live at home longer, spend more years in college, change jobs more frequently and start families later.” 

Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present; they are also “the first post war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.”  It is little wonder that “these youngsters are called Generation Zero: A generation with Zero opportunities, Zero future,” and zero expectations.  Or to use Guy Standing’s term, “the precariat,”  which he defines as “a growing proportion of our total society” forced to “accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living.”  Too many young people and other vulnerable groups now inhabit what might be called a geography of terminal exclusion, a space of disposability that extends its reach to a growing number of individuals and groups.

The human face of those who inhabit this geography of exclusion has been captured in a story told by Chip Ward, a former librarian in Salt Lake City, who writes poignantly about a homeless woman he calls Ophelia, who retreats to the library because like many homeless people she has nowhere else to go to use the bathroom, secure temporary relief from bad weather or simply be able to rest. Excluded from the American dream and treated as both expendable and a threat, Ophelia, in spite of her obvious mental illness, defines her own existence in terms that offer a chilling metaphor for her own plight and those of many others. Ward describes Ophelia’s presence and actions in the following way:

Ophelia sits by the fireplace and mumbles softly, smiling and gesturing at no one in particular. She gazes out the large window through the two pairs of glasses she wears, one windshield-sized pair over a smaller set perched precariously on her small nose. Perhaps four lenses help her see the invisible other she is addressing. When her “nobody there” conversation disturbs the reader seated beside her, Ophelia turns, chuckles at the woman’s discomfort, and explains, “Don’t mind me, I’m dead. It’s okay. I’ve been dead for some time now.” She pauses, then adds reassuringly, “It’s not so bad. You get used to it.” Not at all reassured, the woman gathers her belongings and moves quickly away. Ophelia shrugs. Verbal communication is tricky. She prefers telepathy, but that’s hard to do since the rest of us, she informs me, “don’t know the rules.” (my emphasis) 
Ophelia represents just one of the 3.5 million people who are homeless at some point in the year in the United States, many of whom use public libraries and any other accessible public spaces to find shelter. Many are women and children; they are often sick, disoriented and suffering from substance abuse or mental health issues, and many are barely able to cope with the stress, insecurity and dangers they face every day. And while Ophelia’s comments may be dismissed as the ramblings of a mentally ill woman, they speak to something much deeper about the current state of US society and its desertion of entire populations who are now considered the human waste of a neoliberal economic order.

People who were once viewed as facing dire problems and in need of social protection are now seen as a problem threatening society. This becomes clear when the war on poverty is transformed into a war against the poor, when the plight of the homeless is defined less as a political and economic issue in need of social reform than as a matter of law and order or when government budgets for prison construction eclipse funds for higher education.

“Problem People”

The transformation of the social state into the corporate-controlled punishing state is made startlingly clear when young people, to rephrase W.E.B. Du Bois, becomeproblem people rather than people who face problems. Young people, especially low-income and poor people of color, are now viewed as trouble rather than being seen as facing troubles. As such, they are increasingly subject to the dictates of the criminal legal system rather than subject to assistance from social programs that could address their most basic needs.

Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a society that fails to provide for its youth, the symbolic and real violence waged against many young people reflects nothing less than a collective death wish – especially visible when youth protest their conditions. As Alain Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is near zero tolerance for democratic resistance and “infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions.”  How else to explain the FBI’s willingness to label as a “terrorist threat” youthful activists speaking against corporate and government misdeeds, while at the same time the Bureau refuses to press criminal charges against the banking giant HSBC for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda?  Equally disturbing are the revelations that the Department of Homeland Security, which was “created in large part to combat terrorism,” has put under surveillance members of the Black Lives Matter movement who have been organizing against the racist conditions producing police violence against Black people in the United States.

If youth were once the repository of society’s dreams, that is no longer true. Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned into a nightmare. Many youth are forced to negotiate a post-9/11 social order that positions them as a prime target of its “governing through crime” complex. Consider the many “get tough” policies that now render young people criminals, while depriving them of basic health care, education and social services. Punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities for mediating the relationship of youth to the larger society, all too evident by the upsurge of zero-tolerance laws in schools along with the expanding reach of the punishing state in the United States.  When the criminalization of social problems becomes a mode of governance and war its default strategy, youth are reduced to soldiers or targets – not social investments. As anthropologist Alain Bertho points out, “Youth is no longer considered the world’s future, but as a threat to its present.”

Increasingly, the only political discourses available to many young people derive from privatized regimes of self-discipline and “emotional self-management.” Youth are now removed from any meaningful register of democracy. Their absence is symptomatic of a society that has turned against itself, punishing its children at the risk of bringing down the entire body politic. What I call the war on youth emerged in its contemporary forms when the social contract, however compromised and feeble, came crashing to the ground around the time Margaret Thatcher “married” Ronald Reagan. Both were hard-line advocates of a market fundamentalism, and announced, respectively, that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution to citizens’ woes.

Within a decade, democracy and the political process were hijacked by corporations and the call for austerity policies became a cheap copy for weakening the welfare state, public values and public goods. The results of this emerging neoliberal regime included a widening gap between the rich and the poor, a growing culture of cruelty and the dismantling of social provisions. One result has been that the promise of youth has given way to an age of market-induced angst, and a view of many young people as a drain on short-term investments and a threat to untrammeled self-interest and quick profits.

The war on youth is spreading out across the United States. How else might we explain the United States’ turning of schools into training centers, modeling many after prisons, or promoting the rise of pedagogies of repression such as teaching to the test and high-stakes testing, all in the name of educational reform? What is the role of education in a democracy when a society burdens an entire generation with high tuition costs and student loans? I think David Graeber is right in arguing, “Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture…. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.”  What he does not say is that many young people are also being depoliticized because they are struggling just to survive, not only materially but also existentially.

Under such circumstances, all bets are off regarding the future of democracy. What is also being lost in the current historical conjuncture is the very idea of interpersonal responsibility, a commitment to the collective good, a democratic notion of the commons, the idea of connecting learning to social improvement and the promise of a robust democracy dedicated to a full measure of personal, political and economic rights. Under the regime of a ruthless economic Darwinism, we are witnessing the crumbling of social bonds and the triumph of individual desires over social rights, nowhere more exemplified than in the growth of civic illiteracy, gated minds in gated communities, simplistic intolerance, atrophied social skills, a culture of cruelty and a downward spiral into the dark recesses of an oligarchic social order. Children pay most acutely for this. Consider that the United States is the only country in the world that has refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls for “a commitment to promote and respect the human rights of children, including the right to life, to health, to education and to play, as well as the right to family life, to be protected from violence and from any form of discrimination.” 

Politics is now driven by a much-promoted hypercompetitive ideology with a message that surviving in society demands reducing social relations to forms of social combat. Too many young people today learn quickly that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. As such, politics has become an extension of war, just as “systemic economic insecurity and anxiety” and state-sponsored violence increasingly find legitimation in the discourses of austerity, privatization and demonization, which promote anxiety, moral panics and fear, and undermine any sense of communal responsibility for the well-being of others. The curse of privatization in a consumer-driven society is intensified by the market-driven assumption that for young people the only obligation of citizenship is to consume. Yet, there is more at work here than the mechanisms of depoliticization; there is also a flight from social responsibility, if not politics itself. Also lost is the importance of those social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, public spheres and cultural apparatuses crucial to the formation of a sustainable democratic society.

As one eminent sociologist points out, “Visions have nowadays fallen into disrepute and we tend to be proud of what we should be ashamed of.”  For instance, politicians, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, not only refuse to apologize for the immense misery, displacement and suffering they have imposed on the Iraqi people – principally Iraqi children – but also they seem to gloat in defending such policies. Doublespeak takes on a new register as President Obama employs the discourse of national security to sanction a surveillance state, a targeted assassination list and the ongoing killing of young children and their families by drones. This expanding landscape of lies has not only produced an illegal and global war on terror and justified state torture, even against children; it has also provided a justification for the United States’ slide into barbarism after the tragic events of 9/11. Yet, such acts of state violence appear to be of little concern to the shameless apostles of permanent war.

The War Against Youth

In what follows, I want to address the intensifying assault on young people through the related concepts of “soft war” and “hard war.”  The idea of the soft war considers the changing conditions of youth within the relentless expansion of a global market society. Partnered with a massive advertising machinery, the soft war targets all children and youth, devaluing them by treating them as yet another “market” to be commodified and exploited, and conscripting them into the system through relentless attempts to create a new generation of hyperconsumers.

This low-intensity war is waged by a variety of corporate institutions through the educational force of a culture that commercializes every aspect of kids’ lives, and now uses the internet and various social networks along with the new media technologies such as smart phones to immerse young people in the world of mass consumption in ways that are more direct and expansive than anything we have seen in the past. Commercially carpet-bombed by an advertising industry that in the United States spent $189 billion in 2012, the typical child is exposed to about 40,000 ads a year and by the time they reach the fourth grade, children have memorized 300 to 400 brands.

An entire generation is being drawn into a world of consumerism in which commodities and brand loyalty become both the most important markers ofidentity and the primary frameworks for mediating one’s relationship to the world. Increasingly, many young people, recast as commodities, can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out, youth are simultaneously “promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote” – defined as both brands and merchandise, on the one hand, and marketing agents on the other.

What are the consequences of the soft war? Public spaces have been transformed into neoliberal disimagination zones, which make it more difficult for young people to find public spheres where they can locate themselves and translate metaphors of hope into meaningful action. The dreamscapes that make up a society built on the promises of mass consumption translate deftly into ad copy, insistently promoting and normalizing a neoliberal order in which economic relations now provide the master script for how young people define themselves, and their relations with others and the larger world.

The data-mining marketers make young people think they count when in fact “all they want to do is count them.”  The dominant culture’s overbearing ecology of consumption now works to selectively eliminate and reorder the possible modes of political, social and ethical vocabularies made available to youth. Young peoples’ most private experiences are now colonized by a consumerist ethic that deforms their sense of agency, desires, values and hopes. Trapped within a spectacle of marketing, their capacity to be critically engaged and socially responsible citizens is significantly compromised.

The Hard War

The hard war is a more serious and dangerous development for young people, especially those who are marginalized by virtue of their ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and class. The hard war refers to the harshest elements of a growing youth crime-control complex that operates through a logic of punishment, surveillance and control. The young people targeted by its punitive measures are often poor youth of color who are considered failed consumers and who can only afford to live on the margins of a commercial culture that excludes anybody without money, resources and leisure time. They are youth considered uneducable and unemployable, and therefore troublesome, if not a threat to the existing order.

The imprint of the youth crime-control complex can be traced back to the now normative practice of organizing life in schools through disciplinary practices that subject students to constant surveillance through high-tech security devices while imposing on them harsh and often thoughtless zero-tolerance policies that closely resemble measures used by the criminal legal system. In this instance, poor youth and youth of color become objects of a new mode of governance based on the crudest forms of disciplinary control. Punished if they don’t show up at school and punished even if they do attend school, many of these students are funneled into what has been ominously called the “school-to-prison pipeline.” If middle- and upper-class kids are subject to the seductions of market-driven public relations, working-class youth are caught in the crosshairs between the arousal of commercial desire and the harsh impositions of securitization, surveillance and policing.

How else do we explain the fact that in the United States today 500,000 young people are incarcerated and 2.5 million are arrested annually, and that by the age of 23, “almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime”?  What kind of society allows 1.6 million children to be homeless at any given time in a year? Or allows massive inequalities in wealth and income to produce a politically and morally dysfunctional society in which “45 percent of U.S. residents live in households that struggle to make ends meet”?  Current statistics paint a bleak picture for young people in the richest country in the world. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “the number of unemployed youth was 2.8 million in July 2015”; 12.5 million are without food; and in what amounts to a national disgrace, one out of every five US children lives in poverty. Nearly half of all US children and 90 percent of Black youngsters will rely on food stamps at some point during childhood.

What are we to make of a society in which there were more young people killed on the streets of Chicago since 2001 then US soldiers killed in Afghanistan? To be more exact, 5,000 were people killed by gunfire in Chicago, many of them children, while 2,000 troops were killed between 2001 and 2012.  What kind of society is indifferent to the fact that this country “sees an average of 92 gun deaths per day – [with] more preschoolers … shot dead each year than police officers are killed in the line of duty”?  Near weekly mass shootings aside, what has flown under the radar is that in the last four years more than 500 children under the age of 12 were killed by guns.

As the war on terror comes home, public spaces have been transformed into war zones as local police forces have taken on the role of an occupying army, especially in poor neighborhoods of color, accentuated by the fact that the police now have access to armored troop carriers, night-vision-equipped rifles, Humvees, M-16 automatic rifles, grenade launchers and other weapons designed for military tactics.  Acting as a paramilitary force, the police have become a new symbol of domestic terrorism, shaking down youth of color and Black communities in general by criminalizing a multitude of behaviors.

This was especially true in the stop-and-frisk policies so widespread under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City. In Ferguson, Missouri, the entire population was subject to a form of legal lawlessness in what can only be described as a practice of racist extortion. Rather than defined as a population to be protected, the largely Black citizens of Ferguson were arrested and fined for being unable to pay their debts, violating trivial rules such as letting their grass grow too high or jaywalking, all of which made them a prime target for the criminal legal system. As a result, the police viewed the Black residents of Ferguson “as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could, and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of Ferguson’s citizens had outstanding warrants.”

The rise of the punishing state and the war on terror has emboldened police forces across the nation and in doing so feeds their use of racist violence against young people of color, resulting in what has been called an “epidemic of police brutality.” Sadly, even children are not immune to such violence, as the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice on November 22, 2014, by a white police officer has made clear. Even more tragic is the fact that the City of Cleveland tried to blame the boy for his own death.  Rice was holding a BB gun when he was shot to death by a police officer judged unfit for duty just two years prior. The killing of Black youth and adults has taken on the image of a cruel sport suggestive of a police force spiraling downward into a form of authoritarianism that merges lawlessness with a dangerous form of militarism. (34)

Against the idealistic rhetoric of a government that claims to venerate young people lies the reality of a society that increasingly views youth through the optic of law and order, a society that appears all too willing to treat youth as criminals and when necessary “disappear” them into the farthest reaches of the carceral state. What are we to make of a society that allows New York City Police Department officers to come into a school and arrest, handcuff and haul off a 12-year-old student for doodling on her desk?  Or, for that matter, school systems that allow a 6-year-old in Georgia and a 5-year-old kindergarten pupil in Florida to be handcuffed and taken to police stations for having tantrums in their classrooms? (36) Where is the public outrage when two police officers called to a day care center in central Indiana to handle an unruly 10-year-old decide to taser the child?  Or when a school administration allows a police officer in Arkansas to use a stun gun to discipline an allegedly out of control 10-year-old girl?

One public response to this incident came from Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for Taser International Inc., who insisted that a “Stun gun can be safely used on children.”Sadly, this is but a small sampling of the ways in which children are being punished instead of educated in US schools, especially inner-city schools. All of these examples point to the growing social disregard for young people and the number of institutions willing to employ crime-and-punishment measures that together constitute not only a crisis of education, but the emergence of a new mode of politics that Jonathan Simon has called “governing through crime.” 

Stolen Childhoods

Of course, we have seen this ruthless crime optic in previous historical periods, but at least crime was followed by attempts at reforms and rehabilitation, not revenge, as characterizes the contemporary criminal legal system.  For one historical example of this broader understanding of crime and punishment, I want to turn to Claude Brown, the late African-American novelist, who understood something about this war on youth in its mid-century articulation. Though his novel, Manchild in the Promised Land, takes place in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, there is something to be learned from his autobiographical novel. Take for example the following passage:

If Reno was in a bad mood – if he didn’t have any money and he wasn’t high – he’d say, “Man, Sonny, they ain’t got no kids in Harlem. I ain’t never seen any. I’ve seen some real small people actin’ like kids, but they don’t have any kids in Harlem, because nobody has time for a childhood. Man, do you ever remember bein’ a kid? Not me. Shit, kids are happy, kids laugh, kids are secure. They ain’t scared a nothin’. You ever been a kid, Sonny? Damn, you lucky. I ain’t never been a kid, man. I don’t ever remember bein’ happy and not scared. I don’t know what happened, man, but I think I missed out on that childhood thing, because I don’t ever recall bein’ a kid. 

In Manchild in the Promised Land, Brown wrote about the doomed lives of his friends, families and neighborhood acquaintances. The book is mostly remembered as a brilliant, but devastating portrait of Harlem under siege – a community ravaged and broken by heroin, poverty, unemployment, crime and police brutality. But what Brown really brought into focus was that the raw violence and dead-end existence that plagued so many young people in Harlem, stole not only their future but their childhood as well. In the midst of the social collapse and psychological trauma wrought by the systemic fusion of racism and class exploitation, children in Harlem were held hostage to forces that robbed them of the innocence that comes with childhood and forced them to take on the risks and burdens of daily survival that older generations were unable to shield them from.

At the heart of Brown’s narrative, written in the midst of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, is a “manchild,” a metaphor that indicts a society that is waging a war on those children who are Black and poor and have been forced to grow up too quickly. The hybridized concept of “manchild” marked a liminal space in which innocence was lost and childhood stolen, and any meaningful sense of adult agency and autonomy was aggressively compromised. Harlem was a well-contained, internal colony and its street life provided the conditions and the very necessity for insurrection. But the many forms of rebellion young people expressed – from the public and progressive to the interiorized and self-destructive – came at a cost, which Brown reveals near the end of the book: “It seemed as though most of the cats that we’d come up with just hadn’t made it. Almost everybody was dead or in jail.” 

Childhood stolen was not to be salvaged by self-help – that shortsighted and mendacious appeal that would define the reactionary reform efforts of the 1980s and 1990s, from Reagan’s hatred of government to Clinton’s attack on welfare reform and his “instrumental role in creating one of the world’s largest prison systems.”  At that time, it was a clarion call for condemning a social order that denied children a viable and life-enhancing present and future. While Brown approached everyday life in Harlem more as a poet than as a political revolutionary, politics was embedded in every sentence of the book – not a politics marked by demagoguery, hatred and orthodoxy, but one that made visible the damage done by a social system characterized by massive inequalities and a rigid racial divide. Manchild created the image of a society without children in order to raise questions about the future of a country that had turned its back on its most vulnerable population.

Like the great critical theorist, C. Wright Mills, Brown’s lasting contribution was to reconfigure the boundaries between public issues and private suffering. For Brown, racism was about power and oppression – not ignorance, not fear – and could not be separated from broader social, economic and political considerations. Rather than denying systemic causes of injustice (as did the discourses of individual pathology and self-help), Brown insisted that social forces had to be factored into any understanding of both group suffering and individual despair. Brown explored the suffering of the young in Harlem, but he did so by utterly refusing to privatize it, or to dramatize and spectacularize private life over public dysfunction, or to separate individual hopes, desires and agency from the realm of politics and public life.

Fifty years later, Brown’s metaphor of the “manchild” is more relevant today than when he wrote the book, and “the Promised Land” more prescient than ever as his revelation about the sorry plight of poor children of color takes on a more expansive meaning in light of the current economic meltdown and the dashed hopes of an entire generation now viewed as a generation without hope for a decent future. Youth today are forced to inhabit a rough world where childhood is nonexistent, and they are crushed under the heavy material and existential burdens they are forced to bear.

Efforts to Break Free

The plight of poor youth of color also extends beyond the severity of material deprivations and violence they experience daily. Many young people have been forced to view the world and redefine the nature of their own youth within the borders of hopelessness, insecurity and despair. There is little basis on which to imagine a better future lying just beyond the highly restrictive spaces of commodification and containment. Neoliberal austerity in social spending means an entire generation of youth will not have access to the decent jobs, material comforts, educational opportunities or security that was available to previous generations. These are a new generation of youth who have to think, act and talk like adults. Many must worry about their family members’ inability to find work or about the incarceration of a parent.

In the United States, young people are further burdened by registers of extreme poverty that pose the dire challenge of food security and access to even the most basic health care in communities ravaged by those illnesses and special needs that accrue in impoverished conditions. These young people inhabit a new and more unsettling scene of suffering, a dead zone of the imagination, which constitutes a site of terminal exclusion – one that reveals not only the vast and destabilizing inequalities in neoliberal economic landscapes, but also portends a future that has no purchase on the hope that characterizes a vibrant democracy.

Educators, individuals, artists, intellectuals and various social movements need to make visible both the workings of market fundamentalism “in all of its forms of exploitation whether personal, political, or economic [and they] … need to reconstruct a platform” and a set of strategies to oppose it.  Clearly, any political formation that matters must challenge the savage social costs that casino capitalism has enacted and work to undue the forms of social, political and economic violence that young people are daily experiencing. This will demand more than one-day demonstrations. Urgently needed are new public spheres in which there is a resurgence of public memory, civic literacy and civic courage – that is, a willingness to both “effectively analyze the structures and mechanisms of capitalist power [in order] to formulate a sophisticated political response” and the willingness to build longstanding oppositional movements. Traces of such movements are beginning to emerge in the United States among fast-food workers and among students protesting crushing debt and police brutality. These traces are also apparent in the ongoing development of social movements in countries such as Spain and Greece that are rejecting the harsh neoliberal austerity policies imposed by the bankers and global financial elite.

In North America, we are seeing important, though inconclusive, attempts on the part of young people to break the hold of unaccountable governmental and financial power. This was evident in the Occupy movement, the Quebec student movement, the Idle No More movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. The New York Times recently reported that people all over the world are losing faith in democracy. What it missed is that young people are not dissatisfied with democracy but with its absence. In the United States, there is a new political momentum to reclaim a real democracy, one that provides all Americans with a livable minimum wage or guaranteed income; removes money from politics; reclaims the commons by reversing the pernicious nature of privatization; reins in the ravaging effects of unfettered casino capitalism; abolishes the bogus concept of corporate personhood; dismantles the permanent warfare state; reverses global warming; redistributes wealth in the interest of a vibrant democracy; nationalizes health care; breaks up the banks; eliminates the punishing-mass incarceration state; and eradicates the surveillance state, among other reforms. 

This is a language that says that no society is ever just enough and calls for new collective struggles in the hope of creating a future that refuses to be defined by the dystopian forces now shaping US society. These reforms are both profound and instructive for the time in which we live because they point to the need to think beyond the given, and to think beyond the distorted, market-based hope offered to us by the advocates of casino capitalism. Such thinking rooted in the radical imagination is a central goal of civic education, which, in the words of poet Robert Hass, is “to refresh the idea of justice which is going dead in us all the time.” 

Current protests in the United States make clear that young people need to enlist all generations to develop a truly global political movement that is accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the progressive use of digital technologies, the production of new modes of education and the safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new civic values, democratic public spheres, new modes of identification and collective hope can be nurtured and developed. A formative culture must be put in place pedagogically and institutionally in a variety of spheres extending from churches and public and higher education to all those cultural apparatuses engaged in the production of collective knowledge, desire, identities and democratic values. Crucial to the success of any collective struggle that matters is the necessity to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of unfettered “free-market” capitalism.

There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other cultural workers to develop a language of both critique and hope in which people can address the historical, structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state, and to make clear that government increasingly subsumed by global market sovereignty is no longer responsive to the most basic needs of young people. Nowhere will this struggle be more difficult than on the education front, a front in which a long-term organizing effort will have to take place to change consciousness, convince people that capitalism and democracy are not the same thing – and indeed are often in conflict – offer up a new vision of democracy, and create the ideological and collective momentum to create a broad-based social movement that moves beyond single-issue politics.

The issue of who gets to define the future, share in the nation’s wealth, shape the parameters of the social state, steward and protect the globe’s resources and create a formative culture for producing engaged and socially responsible members of society is not a rhetorical issue. This challenge offers up new categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice and politics are to be defined and fought over. This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities such as New York, Athens, Quebec, Paris, Madrid and other sites of massive inequality throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the institutions, values and infrastructures that make communities the center of a robust, radical democracy.

We live at a time in which it is more crucial than ever to imagine a future that does not repeat the present. Given the urgency of the problems we face – mounting economic inequality, creeping disenfranchisement, the rise of the incarceration state, entrenched racism, the expanding surveillance state, the threat of nuclear destruction, ecological devastation and in the United States, the collapse of democratic governance – I think it is all the more crucial to take seriously the challenge of Jacques Derrida’s provocation: “We must do and think the impossible. If only the possible happened, nothing more would happen. If I only did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything.” 

My friend, the late Howard Zinn, got it right in his insistence that hope is the willingness “to hold out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.” History is open, and the space of the possible is larger than the one on display.

The Not-So Golden Age: A Radical Take on Post-WW II America and “the Anthropocene” by Paul Street

Some Darkness Behind the “Sun-Washed Days”

There is a tendency among senior and middle-aged liberal and progressive United States intellectuals to sentimentalize the post-World War II “golden age” of American and Western capitalism between 1945 and the early to middle 1970s.   The inclination is understandable. During those “sun-washed days” (liberal author and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert), economic inequality declined, significant Civil Rights victories were achieved, jobs were plentiful, the endlessly invoked middle class swelled, wages and consumption rose, the welfare state expanded, college was open and affordable for an unprecedented number of working class young adults, a new youth counterculture flourished, popular music reached new creative heights, the sexual revolution took off, and U.S. astronauts walked on the moon. American society was riding high, it seemed, underpinned by a relatively “high-functioning” and “reasonably egalitarian” (Herbert) capitalism operating at its regulated, “Fordist,” and Keynesian best, prior to the neoliberal “globalized capitalism” that has brought us over four decades to a savagely unequal and arch-plutocratic New Gilded Age – a time when the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90% of the U.S. populace along with a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s not-so “democratically elected” officials.

The nostalgia of many for post-WWII America is less than surprising. I share it to no small degree, thanks to my many fond grade-school memories of growing up on the streets of 1960s Chicago. Still, there’s a host of reasons to temper one’s progressive nostalgia for the “golden” post-WWII era. The downwardly redistributive trend of American and Western capitalism during the period was remarkably contingent, temporary, qualified, and – in retrospect – short lived The “reasonably egalitarian” direction of the “thirty glorious years” (the French phrase for “the golden age”) reflected an anomalous moment in the history of a rapacious profits system that was never removed from its position atop U.S. society and reverted to its default long-term inegalitarian and authoritarian tendencies once the moment passed. Between 1930s and the 1970s, it is true, a significant reduction in overall economic inequality (though not of racial inequality) and an increase in the living standards of millions of working-class Americans occurred in the U.S. This “Great Compression” occurred thanks to the rise and expansion of the industrial workers’ movement (sparked to no small extent by communists and other leftist militants); the spread of collective bargaining; the rise of a corporate-liberal New Deal (later “Fair Deal” and “Great Society”) welfare state; and the democratic domestic pressures imposed by World War II and subsequent U.S. social movements. Still, core capitalist prerogatives and assets were never dislodged, consistent with New Deal champion Franklin Roosevelt’s boast that he had “saved the profits system” from radical change. U.S. capital never lost its way or its dominant role in American society. U.S. politics remained “the shadow cast on society by big business,” as Dewey prophesized it would so long as power rested with “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda” (Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” New Republic, March 18, 1931).

The gains enjoyed by ordinary working Americans were made possible to no small extent by the uniquely favored and powerful position of the U.S. economy (and empire) and the historically extraordinary profit rates enjoyed by U.S. corporations after the war, when the U.S. was briefly home to more than half the world’s industrial production. When that remarkable position and those profits were inevitably challenged and rolled back by resurgent Western European and Japanese economic competition in the 1970s and 1980s, egalitarian “golden” time trends were naturally reversed by capitalist elites who had never lost their critical command of the nation’s core economic and political institutions. They undertook a Great U-Turn (Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone) from the top down – a change of direction that was really U.S. capitalism returning to its historical wealth- and power-concentrating norm. Middle and working class Americans have paid the price ever since and Democratic presidential candidates now try to outdo each other in claiming to feel, and present progressive solutions to, their pain (though overwhelmingly preferring the phrase “middle class” to “working class”).

Perverted Priorities

At the same time, the levelling economic tendencies of the “golden age” are easily exaggerated. Across the postwar period, the radical U.S. historian Howard Zinn noted in his forgotten classic Postwar America: 1945-1971, the bottom tenth of the U.S. population – 20 million poor Americans – experienced no increase whatsoever in their share of the nation’s income (a paltry 1%). Corporate profits and CEO salaries rose significantly across the 60s boom as steep U.S. poverty remained firmly entrenched in “the world’s richest nation.” As Zinn elaborated:

“Being rich or poor was more than a statistic; it profoundly determined how an American lived. In the postwar United States, how much money Americans had determined whether or not they lived in a home with rats or vermin…whether or not they could get adequate medical and dental care; whether or not they got arrested, and, if they did, whether or not they spent time in jail before trial, whether they got a fair trial, a long or a short sentence…whether or not their children would be born alive. It determined whether or not Americans had a vacation; whether they needed to hold down more than one job; whether or not they had enough to eat; whether or not they could influence a congressman or run for office; whether or not a man was drafted, and what chances a man had that he would die in combat.”

As the nation spent billions to put Cold War space travelers on the moon, millions of 1960s Americans remained ill-clad, ill-fed, and ill-housed. The median U.S. family income in 1968 was US$8,362, less than what the Bureau of Labor Statistics defined as a “modest but adequate” income for an urban family of four. The Bureau found that 30 percent of the nation’s working class families were living in poverty and another 30 percent were living under highly “austere” conditions. “Affluence,” historian Judith Stein notes, “was as much as an ideology as a description of U.S. society” in the 1950s and 1960s. As A. Phillip Randolph and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in the summary of their October 1966 Freedom Budget for All Americans, “In a time of unparalleled prosperity, there are 34 million Americans living in poverty. Another 28 million live just on the edge, with incomes so low that any unexpected expense or loss of income could thrust them into poverty…Almost one-third of our nation lives in poverty or want.” Raised in a troubled middle-class family that did not turn a blind eye to the savage ironies of the “golden age,” I remember the ubiquitous sight (for those who sought it out and refused to look away) of mass poverty in urban ghettoes and rural Appalachia during this “sun-washed” time with great clarity.

The persistent stark disparity reflected among other things what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “perverted priorities” of a national government captive to corporate and military power. Zinn was struck by the irony in “the billions spent by the United States government to propel astronauts to the moon while millions went hungry.” A New York Times report on the first moon launch quoted a doctor who tried to serve poor people living in the shadow of the John F. Kennedy Space Center (the launch site). He noted that while Washington invested in the massively expensive lunar project, “right here …I treat malnourished children with prominent ribs and pot-bellies.” A much bigger share of the misdirected federal budget went to the giant new post-WWII U.S. military empire and especially to the massively expensive and mass- murderous “Vietnam War” – the one-sided imperial war of “golden Age” America, the wealthiest nation in history, on predominantly peasant societies in Southeast Asia. The enormous cost of that colossal crime – paid without any effort to raise taxes on the wealthy, whose sons naturally avoided combat “service” – helped strange in its cradle the so-called war on poverty that was briefly declared by liberal “Great Society” U.S. president Lyndon Johnson. The Freedom Budget – a progressive Keynesian plan to end poverty in ten years without questioning the basic structures of capitalism and imperialism – never had a chance. Dr. King died while trying to build a movement against mass poverty and economic inequality and exploitation as well as racial injustice. The people’s struggle to bring the millions of poor into the economic mainstream was defeated before the onset of the neoliberal era. The “golden age” approached its inglorious end with the execution and/or assassination of King, who near the end of his life wrote that post-WWII America was flirting with “spiritual death” and gravely plagued by “the triple evils that are interrelated…racism, poverty, and militarism…evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of society.” King also presciently worried that “golden age” America U.S. was in danger of becoming a police state.

The Anthropocene/Capitalocene Takes off

There is much more that is less than flattering to say about “golden age” America. An honest history of the post-World War II U.S. would include:

*The actual deepening of racial (white over black) U.S. inequality and the related persistence of harsh racial segregation even as overall socio-economic disparity fell in the nation – a critical factor reality behind the remarkable explosion or urban racial violence that took places across the U.S. in the middle and late 1960s.

*The birth of the racially hyper-disparate and mass-incarcerationist “war on drugs,” designed and first waged in the name of “law and order” under the late 1960s backlash presidency of Richard M. Nixon.

*The conservative “post-WWII labor-capital bargain” whereby the nation’s newly consolidated mass-production unions relinquished concern for workers’ control, workplace democracy, and social-democratic transformation (including national single-payer health insurance) in return for money and benefits for members only and automatic dues collection or labor bureaucrats – a deal that capital significantly revoked after 1970 without any giveback on what labor surrendered. (The “bargain” included the expulsion of Left cadres who had sparked resurgent industrial unionism during the 1930s and 1940s. and the triumph of a highly dysfunctional and authoritarian model of employment-based health insurance.)

*The marginalization or radicals and their ideas.

*An explosive growth of finance capital, rooted largely in the expansion of mortgages, pensions, and international trade.

*The birth of a bourgeois identity politics that has provided populace-dividing service to the corporate and financial elite across the subsequent neoliberal era.

*The criminal and mass-murderous U.S. imperial wars on Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which killed more than 6 million Asians between 1950 and 1975.

*The massive expansion of the U.S. Pentagon system and Empire, replete with pervasive and often deadly, mass-murderous U.S. military and political interference in dozens of not-so “sovereign” nations around the world under the cover of the “Cold War”– a manufactured conflict that brought the world to the very edge of nuclear holocaust in the fall of 1962.

*The atomizing spread of private television and automobile ownership, the ecologically toxic explosion of regional and interstate highway construction, and the related advent of large-scale white suburban residential and commercial sprawl.

Last but not at all least and intimately related to all of the above, the post-WWII “golden age” brought a remarkable material and cultural explosion of wasteful mass consumerism (spreading to the working class) and the related vast expansion of U.S.-led global “free trade” and production, with multinational corporations (MNCs) initiating their global expansion. The unprecedented national and American-sponsored global economic expansion of the post-WWII era produced a foreboding sense of environmental crisis by the end of the “golden time” – a crisis rooted in capitalism that Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner and other left environmentalists tried to warn the world about at the height of the post-WWII boom.

It has been clear to Earth scientists that the history of our planet has been set now for some time in a new geologic epoch called “the Anthropocene.” It is an era in which, in the words of the leading experts Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeil, “Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier era.” According to Steffen and Crutzen, it is a “no analogue state” in which “the Earth system has recently moved well outside the range of natural variability….”

The new Earth period bearing its species’ mark and name is nothing for homo sapiens to be proud of! The unprecedented changes introduced by humanity are ecologically unsustainable for decent life on the planet. Thanks to the Anthropocene, the world is not now in middle of “its sixth great extinction event, with rates of species loss growing rapidly for both terrestrial and marine ecosystems. The atmospheric concentrations of several important greenhouse gases have increased substantially, and the Earth is warming rapidly,” Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeil note.

As scientists have long warned, the nightmare threat isn’t about anthropogenic global warming marching along slowly in a linear fashion, with the planet getting a little hotter year by year.   It’s about non-linear “tipping points” producing abrupt and irreversible climate change with catastrophic outcomes. The most recent reports from the prestigious and normally restrained Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest very strongly that the Earth is approaching such tipping points – the melting of polar ice and Arctic permafrost, the acid-bleaching of global coral reefs, and the drying out of the Amazonian rain forest – at a pace and in ways that had not been anticipated.

When did the Anthropocene begin? As Ian Angus notes in the September 2015 issue of Monthly Review, all indications from the latest research point to a massive quantitative acceleration of human economic activity including “an explosive growth of fossil fuel use” (James Hansen) creating a qualitative transformation in homo sapiens’ impact on earth system trends (levels of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, stratospheric ozone, surface ocean temperature, ocean acidification, marine fish capture, coastal nitrogen, tropical forest depletion, land domestication, and terrestrial biosphere degradation) around 1950. The leading Earth scientists increasingly see this “Great Acceleration” as not a new stage but instead as the actual onset of the Anthropocene. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century pales before the gigantic expansion of world economic activities and the related third technological revolution launched during the post-WWII “golden age” when it comes to altering Nature in ways that place prospects for a decent future at serious risk and even raise the real specter of human extinction. The post-WWII period, the leading Marxist environmentalist John Bellamy Foster noted 21 years ago, brought “a qualitative transformation in the level of human destructiveness.” Sadly, the “sun-washed” days of Baby Boomers’ youth were fueled by oil, coal, and gas, not solar, wind, and water.

A compelling case has been made by Jason Moore and other left environmentalists that it is more historically appropriate to understand humanity’s Earth-altering assault on livable ecology as “the Capitalocene.” After all, it is only during the relatively brief period of history when capitalism has existed and ruled the world system (since 1600 or thereabouts by some academic calculations, earlier and later by others) that human social organization has developed the capacity and inner, accumulation- and commodification-mad compulsion to transform Earth systems. Moore maintains that human destruction of livable ecology is best explained by changes that capitalism’s endless pursuit of profit, accumulation, and empire have wreaked on the environment – changes he dates broadly from “the long sixteen century” starting in 1450). His critique of bourgeois climate thought’s historically unspecific and class-blind use of anthros as an undifferentiated entity is important and powerful. Still, recent evidence suggests that, while capitalism is many centuries old, it was during the post-WWII era of U.S.-led global monopoly-corporate and emergent multinational capitalism that humanity forever and dramatically impacted Earth systems in ways that pose grave and fundamental threats to life on the planet.

This is a great reminder to ecosocialists and indeed to anyone and everyone concerned with saving livable ecology that the greatest threat to life on Earth isn’t just the neoliberal and “de-regulated,” so-called free market capitalism of the last four decades. The “golden age” and “thirty glorious years” of Western and U.S.-led global capitalism that launched the current exterminist Anthropocene and/or Capitalocene boasted a dramatically expansive, high-growth, mass-consumerist U.S.-directed profits system operating at its Keynesian and welfare-statist best. It brought us to precisely where some of post-WWII America’s leading left environmentalists (Commoner, Carson, and Murray Boochkin) warned at the time: to the onset of ecological catastrophe – to an unfolding environmental calamity that some prominent leftists still, even at this perilously late date, treat as the dysfunctional obsession of doomsday “catastrophists” and as “just one of many concerns and possibly a diversion from the ‘real’ class struggle” (Ian Angus’s accurate and critical characterization of such horrible reasoning).

Capitalism and Everything Else

Such leftists are fools. As the great left intellectual Noam Chomsky reminded left progressives three years ago, if the global environmental catastrophe being created by anthropogenic climate change “isn’t going to be averted” soon, then “in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter.” The betting windows close on the prospects for a decent and livable future unless humanity wakes up quickly and acts on a giant scale to move off fossil fuels and on to renewable energy sources – a technically viable project. The “usual” struggles over how the pie is distributed, managed, and controlled and by and for whom are going take on a frightful feel when it becomes apparent that the pie is poisoned. Who wants to turn the world upside down only to find that it is riddled with runaway disease and decay? Who hopes to inherit a dying Earth from the bourgeoisie?

There’s a catch, however. The catastrophe won’t be averted under capitalism – the biggest ticket item on the long list of “everything else” that leftists have long opposed. As the Canadian Marxist Sam Gindin noted last year in a review essay that criticized the leading left environmentalist Naomi Klein’s tendency to focus on “neoliberal” and “free market” capitalism more than on capitalism as such in her important book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate:

“Klein…seems clear enough in the analysis that pervades the book that it is capitalism, yet she repeatedly qualifies this position by decrying ‘the kind of capitalism we now have,’ ‘neoliberal’ capitalism, ‘deregulated’ capitalism, ‘unfettered’ capitalism, ‘predatory’ capitalism, ‘extractive’ capitalism, and so on. These adjectives undermine the powerful logic of Klein’s more convincing arguments elsewhere that the issue isn’t creating a better capitalism but confronting capitalism as a social system.”

“Capitalism does of course vary across time and place, and some of the differences are far from trivial. But in terms of substantive change, we should not overstate the importance of these disparate forms. Moreover, such differences have not increased but contracted over time, leaving us with a more or less monolithic capitalism across the globe….It is not just that any capitalism is inseparable from the compulsion to indiscriminate growth, but that capitalism’s commodification of labor power and nature drives an individualized consumerism inimical to collective values (consumption is the compensation for what we lose in being commodified and is the incentive to work) and insensitive to the environment (nature is an input, and the full costs of how it is exploited by any corporation are for someone else to worry about)….A social system based on private ownership of production can’t support the kind of planning that could avert environmental catastrophe. The owners of capital are fragmented and compelled by competition to look after their own interests first, and any serious planning would have to override property rights — an action that would be aggressively resisted.”

As the Marxist philosopher Istvan Meszaros has observed, updating Rosa Luxembourg for the Capitalocene in the 21st century, “it’s [eco] socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky.”

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

There May Be Water Flowing on Mars. But Is There Intelligent Life on Earth? by George Monbiot

vidence for flowing water on Mars: this opens up the possibility of life, of wonders we cannot begin to imagine. Its discovery is an astonishing achievement. Meanwhile, Martian scientists continue their search for intelligent life on Earth.

We may be captivated by the thought of organisms on another planet, but we seem to have lost interest in our own. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has been excising the waymarks of the living world. Adders, blackberries, bluebells, conkers, holly, magpies, minnows, otters, primroses, thrushes, weasels and wrens are now surplus to requirements.

In the past four decades, the world has lost 50% of its vertebrate wildlife. But across the latter half of this period, there has been a steep decline in media coverage. In 2014, according to a study at Cardiff University, there were as many news stories broadcast by the BBC and ITV about Madeleine McCann (who went missing in 2007) as there were about the entire range of environmental issues.

Think of what would change if we valued terrestrial water as much as we value the possibility of water on Mars. Only 3% of the water on this planet is fresh; and of that, two-thirds is frozen. Yet we lay waste to the accessible portion. Sixty per cent of the water used in farming is needlessly piddled away by careless irrigation. Rivers, lakes and aquifers are sucked dry, while what remains is often so contaminated that it threatens the lives of those who drink it. In the UK, domestic demand is such that the upper reaches of many rivers disappear during the summer. Yet still we install clunky old toilets and showers that gush like waterfalls.

As for salty water, of the kind that so enthrals us when apparently detected on Mars, on Earth we express our appreciation with a frenzy of destruction. A new report suggests fish numbers have halved since 1970. Pacific bluefin tuna, which once roamed the seas in untold millions, have been reduced to an estimated 40,000, yet still they are pursued. Coral reefs are under such pressure that most could be gone by 2050. And in our own deep space, our desire for exotic fish rips through a world scarcely better known to us than the red planet’s surface. Trawlers are now working at depths of 2,000 metres. We can only guess at what they could be destroying.

A few hours before the Martian discovery was announced, Shell terminated its Arctic oil prospecting in the Chukchi Sea. For the company’s shareholders, it’s a minor disaster: the loss of $4bn; for those who love the planet and the life it sustains, it is a stroke of great fortune. It happened only because the company failed to find sufficient reserves. Had Shell succeeded, it would have exposed one of the most vulnerable places on Earth to spills, which are almost inevitable where containment is almost impossible. Are we to leave such matters to chance?

At the beginning of September, two weeks after he granted Shell permission to drill in the Chukchi Sea, Barack Obama travelled to Alaska to warn Americans about the devastating effects that climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels could catalyse in the Arctic. “It’s not enough just to talk the talk”, he told them. “We’ve got to walk the walk.” We should “embrace the human ingenuity that can do something about it”. Human ingenuity is on abundant display at Nasa, which released those astounding images. But not when it comes to policy.

Let the market decide: this is the way in which governments seek to resolve planetary destruction. Leave it to the conscience of consumers, while that conscience is muted and confused by advertising and corporate lies. In a near-vacuum of information, we are each left to decide what we should take from other species and other people, what we should allocate to ourselves or leave to succeeding generations. Surely there are some resources and some places – such as the Arctic and the deep sea – whose exploitation should simply stop?

All this drilling and digging and trawling and dumping and poisoning – what is it for, anyway? Does it enrich human experience, or stifle it? A couple of weeks ago I launched the hashtag #extremecivilisation, and invited suggestions. They have flooded in. Here are just a few of the products my correspondents have found. All of them, as far as I can tell, are real.

An egg tray for your fridge that syncs with your phone to let you know how many eggs are left. A gadget for scrambling them – inside the shell. Wigs for babies, to allow “baby girls with little or no hair at all the opportunity to have a beautifully realistic hair style”.The iPotty, which permits toddlers to keep playing on their iPads while toilet training. A £2,000 spider-proof shed. A snow sauna, on sale in the United Arab Emirates, in which you can create a winter wonderland with the flick of a switch. A refrigerated watermelon case on wheels: indispensable for picnics – or perhaps not, as it weighs more than the melon. Anal bleaching cream, for… to be honest, I don’t want to know. An “automatic watch rotator” that saves you the bother of winding your luxury wrist-candy. A smartphone for dogs, with which they can take pictures of themselves. Pre-peeled bananas, in polystyrene trays covered in clingfilm; Just peel back the packaging.

Every year, clever new ways of wasting stuff are devised, and every year we become more inured to the pointless consumption of the world’s precious resources. With each subtle intensification, the baseline of normality shifts. It should not be surprising to discover that the richer a country becomes, the less its people care about their impacts on the living planet.

Our alienation from the world of wonders, with which we evolved, has only intensified since David Bowie described a girl stumbling through a “sunken dream”, on her way to be “hooked to the silver screen”, where a long series of distractions diverts her from life’s great questions. The song, of course, was Life on Mars.

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OneLove

Consider the following......

"Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others. 

 Nor is it so remarkable that our greatest joy should come when we are motivated by concern for others. But that is not all. We find that not only do altruistic actions bring about happiness but they also lessen our experience of suffering. Here I am not suggesting that the individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others' happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune than the one who does not. Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace- anxiety, doubt, disappointment- these things are definitely less. In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense. 

 What does this tell us? Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others' happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others. Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others' happiness. A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities"

- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

OneLove

Musings

"The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show."

— Eduardo Hughes Galeano  


  OneLove

Review: Janet Jackson-Unbreakable

                                                      Janet Jackson - Unbreakable


When I read about Janet's comeback, I had some doubts about the impact it would have on the pop landscape. After all, she is now 49 years old and her last two albums received  lukewarm responses. Not being a vocal powerhouse, I wondered if her charisma, mystery and performance could weather the Beyonces, Ciaras & Tinashes of the current era.

Let me just say, Janet pretty much buried her competition with this release.

She comes back as beautiful as ever. Though her message is less take-control-of-your-destiny-ladies as it was in Control & Rhythm Nation, and more a cool & reflective sojourner, the effect remains equally persuasive & aurally ecstatic.

No, Janet cannot blow like Jennifer Hudson, but she doesn't have to---her scintillating soul is revealed regardless.Sometimes soul is a gift, and sometimes it’s earned. Janet Jackson has earned hers. Yeah, she's pushing 50 & the market orients toward youth culture, but as this release amply demonstrates, getting older in this landscape, is a beautiful thing. 

Go on Janet!!

OneLove