Despite the subterfuge of freedom and democracy, the rights of corporations have consistently superseded the sovereign rights of the individual and those of the community. Labor history and a litany of environmental catastrophes bear this out. For instance, everywhere one looks government agencies “ostensibly created to protect the public welfare” are allowing hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale, even when it poisons municipal drinking water and causes incalculable harm to the environment.

Our diverse forests are commodified, measured in board feet to be clear-cut and off-shored at prodigious bargain rates, like a liquidation sale. World class biodiversity is yielding to desertification and monoculture. Money changes hands. The few are getting rich at the expense of the many. The world and the people who live in it are treated like products to be exploited. We are told that nothing is sacred, save for the dollar and markets.

Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that no human being, including corporate CEOs and members of Congress, can live without potable water or breathable air. We are literally sacrificing the Earth’s life support systems and mortgaging the future, while attempting to satiate the greed of a few grotesquely wealthy individuals. Through lifelong indoctrination, Americans are persuaded that self-interested greed is in their best interest.

The rich and powerful have decreed that corporate profits “the Holy Grail of American capitalism” are more precious than life itself. The remorseless people in power are without conscience. History confirms that sociopaths do not hesitate to take what they want from their unsuspecting victims by any and all means.

But surely, even among Friedmanites, it must be allowed that some things cannot be commodified or bought and sold. For instance, clean air and potable water are the birthright of every living organism. These are necessities that belong to the commons; they cannot ethically be privately owned. In contrast to this assertion, two edicts of modern capitalism are private ownership and the commodification of workers and nature.

Capitalism, and the market fundamentalism that is associated with it, has stripped bare the Earth’s biodiversity and substituted a world of commodities in its stead. What we see and think we know is not real. It is the product of marketing and perception managers — a hologram.

There is growing conflict between capitalism and the planet’s ecology, its essential life support systems. A fierce struggle between capital and democracy is in progress. The booted foot of capitalism is pressing upon the throat of democracy. We inhabit a dying world and are inheriting dying freedoms. Corporate greed and over-population is the culprit. Conflict is everywhere.

Virtually all of the social upheaval, inequality, and environmental problems of today in some way ensue from capitalism, including overpopulation and armed aggression. Capitalism requires continuous economic expansion and a burgeoning market for consumers. This is simply not possible on a finite planet.

These tensions are manifested no more clearly than throughout the coal belt and mountains of West Virginia, where I make my home. Here, mountains are cleared of forests before being blown to smithereens in order to cheaply extract coal to enrich Massey Energy Corporation. The process, known as mountaintop removal, has poisoned streams, altered their courses, and changed the contours of the land and its hydrology. It has devastated both human and biological communities while filling the coffers of the timber and coal industries.

Conventional underground mining has claimed the lives of thousands of coal miners trying to scratch out a modest living from the Earth. At times, it has led to armed conflict between miners and the Pinkertons hired by the mining companies in places like Matewan and Blair Mountain.

In West Virginia, King Coal and the gas and oil industry run the state’s legislature. The government is effectively owned by corporate lobbyists. As a result, it is futile to make legal and moral appeals to government for redress of our grievances. If we limit ourselves to the tools that our oppressors provide us, the entire region will become a sacrifice zone. Working people and the poor make the sacrifices; billionaires and industry carry off the profit. We are left to deal with the aftermath.

The illusion of democracy “including voting in the absence of meaningful choice” is a poor substitute for direct action and anarchy. Democracy cannot flourish in the sterile soil that capitalism leaves in its wake. Either we have democracy or we have capitalism, or we create something entirely different. Radically opposing ideas cannot be reconciled.

Modern humans inhabit a human-engineered world of absurdities and contradictions. Regardless of the Supreme Court’s assertions, corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Every sentient human being knows this. However, the law says otherwise. We must deny the corporate state that victory by refusing to capitulate.

The struggle for community rights, egalitarianism, and social, economic, and environmental justice must occur outside of the system that creates inequality and fosters wanton destruction of the commons. Countless species of plants and animals that provide essential ecological services are being eliminated to create space for strip malls, gated communities, gambling casinos and golf courses. As a result, ecological and economic catastrophe loom. We are facing global famine in an anthropocentric over-heated world.

Globally, wealthy multinational corporations are gorging themselves on the biological and mineral wealth of the commons. What could be more absurd or unethical?

The brainchild of Adam Smith, capitalism, which replaced feudalism during the French Revolution, is founded upon demonstrably false premises, many of which were unknown in Smith’s time. Nevertheless, classically trained economists assert that capitalism is a primal force of nature rather than the defective human construct that it is. Modern capitalism has produced pathological symptoms and endorsed an ethos that is antithetical to life and to liberty. It is killing the world and foreclosing evolutionary possibilities.

Indeed, ethical considerations aside, and speaking purely from a biological perspective, one may emphatically state that modern capitalism is an aggressive cancer that is devouring its host. But most of us are in denial. People like me are asked not to utter the “C” word in public spaces. It might offend the well-intentioned believers. Whenever this occurs I am reminded of Thoreau, who uttered, “Any truth is better than make believe.” . One has an ethical obligation to state what one knows succinctly and clearly.

It is not in dispute that the ideology of constant expansion on a finite planet is contradicted by inviolable ecological dictums — among them, carrying capacity, ecological overshoot, and die-off. But classical economists act as if these laws do not apply, or they are mysteriously overridden by the irrational exuberance of capitalism.

In reality, every political economy is underlain by ecology and by living, evolving, biological systems. Ecology is the only economy that really matters.

By possessing even a modest degree of ecological literacy, one can make some revealing predictions with mathematical certainty. For example, the continuation of capitalism as the primary political economy can have one of two possible outcomes: the virtual destruction of the biosphere, meaning the death of the host organism, or the abolition of the capitalist system.

What would a post-capitalism world look like and how might it work?

Global capitalism, with its dependence on the availability of cheap fossil fuels and petrochemicals for food production, must give way to small-scale local economies and organic agriculture. Food must be locally grown and, as far as possible, other necessities locally produced. The age of cheap fossil fuels is ending. Industrialized man must bravely confront his addictions and embrace sobriety or he will self-destruct.

It is said that nature bats last. Humans do best when they emulate natural systems that have evolved over eons of time.

A moneyless economy based upon need must supplant the current profit-driven system of exploitation. Accordingly, goods and services may then be exchanged without the conduit of markets. These exchanges would be of equal value and thus inherently fair.

The classic business models will be replaced by worker-owned and worker-operated cooperatives. In this arrangement, workers – not a board of directors – make all of the business decisions. They share the risks and benefits and distribute the surpluses of production, while significantly reducing the work day and the work week. A portion of the surpluses of production is allocated to the betterment of the community and to the protection of the commons.

New economic models must be predicated upon ecological principles or they will fail. Existing alternatives to capitalism, such as Spain’s Mondragon Worker Cooperative, must be critically analyzed and evaluated as a model that could, with modifications, be implemented elsewhere.

There is no better teacher than evolution and natural selection. History confirms that the most revolutionary ideas are occasionally the oldest. For instance, anthropological studies indicate that early Homo sapiens evolved by implementing egalitarian principles into their tribal clans. People and the cultures they create must either evolve or perish.

The egalitarian societies of the future will look radically different from the capitalism of today. Political campaigns and elections will recede into history and quickly forgotten. Evolved societies do not need leaders or elected officials.

Every member of an egalitarian community is a leader. Power flows in a circular form rather than a linear, top-down hierarchy. It is derived directly from the people. There will be no social or economic stratification. No one shall have privileges or rights that are denied to others. Every member of the community must be equally empowered and equally valued. All people will have equal access to opportunity. Health care and higher education, like pure water and clean air, will be regarded as a right of birth and provided without cost.

Direct action will replace voting in political elections. Rather than consent to be governed, sovereign people can create the world they want to live in. In communities where people are empowered and where they have an equal stake, they will want to participate. Everyone brings something to the table. Everyone contributes and all of society benefits.

Communities will become as interconnected and interdependent as ecological systems. But each will remain autonomous within the larger matrix of nature. States and nations as we know them may eventually recede into history and disappear.

Rather than the callous competition and exploitation nurtured by capitalism, communities can be organized around the principle of cooperation and social need. As in healthy ecosystems, the welfare of the individual is dependent upon the well-being of the community — and vice versa. No one will be left behind. All of us shall rise together.

All living organisms share a common origin and a common destiny. Ecology and economy must merge into an integrated natural system suited to long-term survival in a world already ravaged by industrialized man. Ecological and social healing must be part of the process of building sustainable communities.

The transition from capitalism to cooperation will be neither smooth nor easy. There will be many false starts. At first, there will be fierce resistance to revolutionary change. People cling to the familiar and the comfortable, to what they know, even when the dominant paradigm and popular culture does them harm.

The first tentative steps of a journey are often the most difficult. There are no clear blueprints to follow. There will be trepidation and uncertainty. But we must commit to beginning. The alternative is oblivion. But if we embark on the voyage the survival of the species, and a new age of enlightenment will be possible.

Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a well-conceived and attractive book about the first weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement that was recently published by the Left imprint Verso Books. It reads like a journal, except the entries are not from just one writer, but a collection of several. They range from the well-known like prison activist and Black Panther Angela Davis to a young activist named Manissa Mahawaral. Edited by a small group of occupiers and the editors of the journals n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy, and The New Inquiry, this text primarily covers the scene at the Zurcotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan where the Occupy Wall Street movement more or less began. Part diary and part reflection, some of its most compelling moments come when the younger occupiers write about various realizations they have during the course of the occupation.

My favorite anecdote of this type is from an activist involved in the Occupy movement in Oakland, CA. When she first began participating, she found the dislike of the police from certain members of the camp to be disturbing. After all, they too were part of the so-called 99%. However, after a few days in the camp and the violent police attacks on the Oakland camp and protests following the first raid on Oscar Grant Plaza, her understanding of law enforcement’s role in protecting the wealthy and powerful changed dramatically. “I am ashamed,” she writes. “I was so naive about the cops in Oakland, but even more than this I am furious… that the police are allowed to brutalize people….” It is moments like this where the Occupy movement becomes transcendent and more than the collection of individuals, groups and and encampments that it is. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of drawings and collages that are not only visually appealing but also clever statements about the essential issues involved.

The book is not just a collection observations from the frontlines. Also included are analyses of the economic reasons behind the movement from Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and a fascinating discussion of the history of the space where Occupy Atlanta was situated. This latter piece is also one of several pieces that discusses the role of people of color in the movement.

As one of the first of many books about the Occupy movement to be published, Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America sets a high standard. One hopes it is read by many, especially among those that couldn’t or didn’t make it to an Occupy camp before the State’s onslaught on them. This movement should not die.

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Written by a larger collective of writers who modestly call themselves Writers for the 99%, the OR Books text functions as a description of life at Zurcotti Park and within the Occupy movement over the period noted above. If Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a journal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America is the literary equivalent of a wonderfully written diary. These two books are not exclusive to each other. in fact they are companion volumes that read together provide an engrossing and well-told description of one of the most hopeful protest movements to erupt in the capitalist world in decades.

The Young Lords Rise From the Pages

Speaking of attractive books to arrive recently on my bookshelf, the Haymarket Books reprint of the Young Lords 1971 book Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 certainly deserves a mention. The Young Lords Party was a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican youth that organized primarily among the young and working-class residents of New York’s Puerto Rican barrios during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Borrowing some of their style from the ideologically similar Black Panthers, this group was a dominant force in barrio politics during much of their existence. Their straightforward approach to solving some of the economic and political inequities in the barrio attracted thousands of supporters in the barrio and hundreds of powerful enemies in Christie Mansion and other edifices of power in New York. When I attended briefly attended Fordham University in the Bronx from Fall 1972 through Spring 1974 one of my smoking buddies was an active member of the group. His knowledge of Marxist theory was impressive as was his commitment to the struggle in the barrio. Needless to say, he and I had many intense discussions that taught me — as no book possibly could — the colonial situation of the Puerto Rican people and helped me unlearn years of misinformation about that island nation.

Palante is a history, explanation and discussion of the Young Lords Party from the perspective of its members in 1971. There is no bourgeois nationalism repeated in these pages. Instead, in the best tradition of other revolutionary nationalism, Palante argues that cultural and social freedom for the Puerto Rican nation is inseparable from economic freedom and a socialist revolution. For those uncertain of the difference, let me quote writer Earl Ofari from a 1969 article he wrote about the two phenomena as they relate to the black people of the United States :

“Revolutionary nationalists, unlike cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist. For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism.”

The Young Lords believed the same analysis applied to the situation of the Puerto Ricans.

Looking at it today, the most striking aspect of this book is not the audacious (by today’s standards) writings calling for a revolution in the United States and an independent Puerto Rico. It is the collection of photographs. Difficult to pry one’s eyes away from, the photos herein rank up there with the best photojournalism has to offer. The struggles of the young revolutionaries and the people they worked with are evident in the faces on these pages and the places and actions set down in a darkroom forty years ago. The pride of a people realizing its power and the anger of that people realizing why and who has wronged it radiates from the stark black and white images that fill the last half of this beautiful work.

A fifth martyr, Louis Lingg, either took his own life while awaiting execution with his comrades, or he was murdered by the police. Lingg occupied a cell that was isolated from those of his comrades. According to newspaper reports at the time, Lingg deliberately detonated a small explosive device in his mouth, which blew off most of his face. It required several hours for him to die. No one has been able to explain how Lingg, an unrepentant defendant in the most famous prosecution in US history, and under tight security, was able to smuggle bombs into his tiny prison cell. Louis Lingg was almost certainly murdered by the police.

Alternatively, some historians have speculated that a sympathizer might have somehow managed to smuggle a small amount of explosives into the prison so that Lingg could deprive the state of the satisfaction of executing him. According to this theory, Lingg, not the state of Illinois, orchestrated his own death.

The Haymarket martyrs, as they were later called, were accused of inciting violence against the Chicago police force that, acting at the behest of prominent businessmen, frequently beat and murdered unarmed strikers with impunity. No police officer was ever tried, much less convicted, for their crimes against workers attempting to democratize the workplace. This theme should sound a familiar refrain to modern protestors.

No credible evidence was presented that tied any of the anarchists to the bomb that exploded among a mob of heavily armed policemen that had attacked a peaceful public rally in the Haymarket Square on the night of May 4, 1886. Sworn police testimony was contradicted by hundreds of eyewitnesses.

The Chicago anarchists were convicted of a crime they did not commit. Their trial, like later politically-motivated trials in the US, was a sham. The jurors, handpicked to convict by a specially appointed bailiff, were paid by local businessmen after getting the conviction and death sentence the business community desired. The prosecutors knew that Albert Parsons had already left the rally and was relaxing with his comrades at a nearby tavern when the incident occurred. It made no difference.

The Haymarket martyrs were fighting for the eight hour work day, the right to peaceful assembly and for freedom of speech. It was here that the idea of “one big union” originated. The men were tried and convicted for their anarchist beliefs rather than for the commission of any crime they committed.

America pays homage to statesmen like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams — its so called founding fathers. But working people have never known or have forgotten those who gave their lives in the struggle for social and economic justice in the workplace. Few contemporary American workers honor their fallen comrades. We owe these courageous men and women our eternal gratitude.

Class-conscious working people of today are fighting the same pitched battle as the Haymarket martyrs more than 124 years ago. As we witness the final death throes of capitalism, America is regressing. We are drifting back to Chicago of the 1880s. Those who have employment are producing more for their employers, working longer hours for less pay and receiving fewer benefits.

Corporate profits are soaring. Fewer employers are paying pensions. The disparity between rich and poor is increasing. The centralized state is imposing austerity upon working people. As class conflict intensifies, we are seeing tiny enclaves of opulence embedded within a global matrix of poverty and want.

Despite alternating cycles of boom and bust, little has changed between the rich and poor since 1887. Justice is still being denied by a system that is antithetical to social and economic democracy. We are living in a dystopia that provides justice to those who have the money to pay for it and denies those who do not.

But let us remember that regression inevitably spawns an equal and opposite reaction. The class-consciousness and resistance that August Spies spoke of during his sentencing in a Chicago Courthouse long ago are reawakening. We see his prophesies manifested in the Occupy Wall Street movement that is spreading across the nation and hurtling around the Earth with the speed of electrons. We see them particularly manifested in Oakland, California. US workers are finally organizing and resisting tyranny again. The strike is still our greatest weapon.

The Haymarket martyrs were men of principle and men of ideas who envisioned a more egalitarian world and sought to create it. This is the threat they posed to capitalism and Chicago’s business community. Their struggle is also our struggle. We must embrace it.

The spirit of Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle, Adolph Fischer, and Louis Lingg, and countless others, preside over the OWS movements around the nation. These men lived large. They deserve to be remembered and honored. The state, despite its best efforts, could not murder an idea whose time had come. That idea has come again. In fact, it never really died.

There will be other martyrs. The global struggle for justice continues. Revolutionaries always circulate among us. Sometimes their heat sets everything ablaze.

Long live the spirit of resistance! Long live the spirit of the Haymarket Martyrs! Long live anarchy!

Author’s note: A detailed account of the lives of the Chicago anarchists is presented in a compelling book written by labor historian James Green titled Death in the Haymarket, published by Anchor Books.

Freedom of expression is the Matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.

– Justice Benjamin Cardozo

The Press has the right to print or not print anything it wants. That right should be supported. There is, however, another issue — that of journalistic ethics. Since OWS began, there has been a deluge of misinformation, innuendo, and inflammatory speech in print in the nation’s newspapers. I defend the right of newspapers to misinform, but I also defend the rights of citizens to push back after being misrepresented in print. It should not be necessary to own a large printing press in order to respond to a news organization.

Sometimes economic issues are at play. Newspapers don’t want to offend the money/business interests in the community. Sometimes inaccurate reporting is the result of a lack of knowledge of journalists. After all, how many schools teach a course in ‘Anarchy’? Actually, there are some schools that do have such a course of study. Surprising as it might be, one school that has a history of offering a well-taught class in ‘Anarchy’ is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI is a highly respected right-leaning institution in Troy, New York. RPI receives military contracts.

The article below is a response to an editorial. The response was submitted to the paper days ago, but has not been published. It probably won’t be. Across the country many do not have Internet connections. The only means of responding to an editorial is in the newspaper itself. A conundrum — a Catch 22.

A Response

The Editorial in the November 15, 2011 issue of the Bennington Banner deserves a reply. Thank you for recognizing OWS. As a fan of newspapers, I place great importance on the Press. It is the fabric that ties a community together. In many locations, it is the only means of mass communication. This places a heavy moral burden on the Press. I had my first newspaper job in 1952. In those days, The Big Story was a favorite TV program about newspapers. Journalism was a highly respected calling.

There are a couple of issues with the editorial about OWS. First is the use of the word “Anarchy”. It is used as a highly inflammatory, prejudicial term implying violence, often to misinform the reader. In my day, labeling — without explanation — even a small part of the movement as such would be called ‘sloppy journalism’. It is a label that paints all with the same brush. Christians, Jews, Democrats, Republicans all have members who exhibit violence. No one should ever condemn the entire group for the actions of a few.

… Professor Howard Zinn, author of the People’s History of the United States… describes anarchism in his book Declarations of Independence as following: “Anarchists, I discovered, did not believe in anarchy as it is usually defined — disorder, disorganization, chaos, confusion, and everyone doing as they like. On the contrary, they believed that society should be organized in a thousand different ways, that people had to cooperate in work and in play, to create a good society. But anarchists insisted, any organization must avoid hierarchy and command from the top; it must be democratic, consensual, reaching decisions through constant discussion and argument.”… What attracted me to anarchism was its rejection of any bullying authority — the authority of the state, of the church, or the employer. Anarchism believes that if we can create an egalitarian society without extremes of poverty and wealth, and join hands across all national boundaries, we will not need police forces, prisons, armies, or war, because the underlying causes of these will be gone.¹

”

Bennington OWS is organizationally much like Professor Zinn describes. Maybe the most important fact about OWS is that it is a horizontal movement. There is no hierarchy. No chain-of-command. No leaders. No followers. It is not only about money and banks. Yes, the misadventures of Wall Street are an issue – but only one of many issues. OWS is anything that the people want it to be – locally and globally. It is by far the most democratic organization that anyone could wish for.

It is about building sustainable communities. It is about organic farming. It is about justice for all. It is about transparency. It is about smart meters and dumb grids. It is about giving consumers choice. It is about advocating for victims of injustice. It is about hunger and homelessness. It is about home foreclosures. It is about the environment. It is about health care. It is about fracking. It is about war and peace. It is about drones. It is about the use of cluster bombs and land mines by the USA. And — my personal favorite — it is about the First Amendment. The First Amendment, as written, applies only to the Congress – but the spirit of the First Amendment applies to all. Why is censorship of political speech so common in Vermont? Why is there censorship of political books in Vermont? Why are public buildings allowed to be used for political debate, when some on the ballot are excluded — as in the Bennington Fire House? It might be legal, but it is not in keeping with the spirit of free political speech. It gets even worse. Dennis Steele, a Vermont Candidate for Governor being was arrested. His crime: he wanted to participate in a candidates’ forum.

One thing I know about Bennington OWS is that is it dedicated, passionate, empathetic, and altruistic. It is the most community oriented movement in the area. Imagine dedicating many hours every week to the community, for no money and no personal gain. Everyone is encouraged to join with us to build a fair, just, sustainable Vermont for all.

And finally, I thank the writer of the Editorial for mentioning boycotts. Many of us have been pushing for boycotts and strikes for decades. Bennington OWS is action oriented. You’ll be hearing from us. Stay tuned in.

1. An excerpt from Food Not Bombs.

During this period, what arose was a romanticism for nature (hence, perhaps, the popularity of evolutionary theory at that time), and the belief that, if only man could be freed of the corruption of society and its contrived conventions—of the state, of the clergy and, for some, of matrimony and of private property—then man, therefore, would be poised to achieve heights undreamed of hitherto.

It was these conditions which gave rise to the French Revolution, which, ironically, came to depend on the keystone mechanism of the State—violence—and gave way to a period during which France conquered swathes of Western Civilization. Still, from 1770 until 1914, many have argued that a culture of staunch self-reliance generally attitudinized Western Civilization, sometimes summarized by the concept of laissez-faire.

Much of this self-reliance held that, if society is evil, then the State—which is merely the organized vertical force of society—is doubly evil. If man is innately good, then he ought to be completely freed from this coercive power of the State. Indeed, nineteenth century Liberalism believed man should be freed from all coercive power, among which might be included the church, army and other institutions. Society, in this case, would have little power other than the power required to restrain the strong from oppressing the weak.

The idea of a “community of interests” was also very strong during this period. This “community of interests” was a realm in which what was good for one was good for all. Somewhere, according to this belief, there did exist a reality where everybody would be secure, free, and prosperous, and that this pattern could be achieved over time. In it, each person could fall into that place in society best suited to his abilities. Implicit in this belief was that human ability is innate and can only be suppressed or altered by social discipline and that each individual is the best judge of his own self-interest.

In 1880, the belief that the current generation, and indeed all generations, was the culmination of a long process of history. Oftentimes, this long process is referred to as progress, a phenomenon that had lasted millennia and would continue forevermore. This belief ran so deep that progress, by many, was seen as inevitable and automatic.

These nineteenth century epistemes have, in the twentieth century, been considerably modified—or so it would seem at first glance. Wherefore such a change? Four traumatic decades at the onset of the twentieth century, and five decades of intense militarism by two premier Empires, led to a perceivable sea change in the disposition of men. Included in these shattering experiences are the First World War, world depression, world financial crisis, and the Second World War. These were then followed by the Cold War.

On the byway of these traumas, major adjustments were made in the western brain. Men now had viable reason to doubt their entrenched belief in the innate goodness of man. Evil was no longer merely the absence of good.

In the course of these events, millions were killed and billions of dollars wasted. Impossible to comprehend for most, such a blow altered man’s disposition on their own species. The First World War was seen as an aberration—and one from which they must quickly move on and forget.

For ten years a façade was created, a lie. In 1929, the stock market crashed. World depression ensued, and was followed by financial crisis. In the late thirties, sabers rattled as rearmament and aggression.

After 1945, a new world was evident. Opposed with the nineteenth century view of man as innately good and society as corrupting, increasingly the belief that man had a seemingly infinite capacity for untold evil insinuated itself into the minds of men. Without a society—that is, large institutions designed to quell man’s beastly desires, to nudge them towards desired beliefs and behaviors—man would certainly destroy himself. Efforts hinting at such a belief can be seen in the attempted erection of the League of Nations after the First World War, and the establishment of the United Nations (UN) after the Second World War.

The former western belief that human philosophies and abilities are innate and should be free from social duress in order to display individuality was replaced by the idea that the personality is a result of social repetition and training and must be coerced to socially acceptable ends. The laissez-faire economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to be replaced by social discipline and central planning.

The “community of interests” of the free market would take backseat to the welfare community, which must be organized by wise-men. An intellectual environment would arise friendly to assertions of some sort of “de-evolution” or social retrogression or human extinction. Democracy would now be replaced by authoritarianism, and the laissez-faire Capitalism by State Enterprise or command-and-control.

Now, here in the twenty-first century, it has grown clearer that progress is not a steady force with inevitable outcomes. Rather, man’s social development can be seen as a more anarchic, spontaneous process, no matter how much rulers attempt to ensure things remain predictable. These same notions are increasingly amending Darwin’s theory of evolution, or progress, towards more perfect forms.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century were schizophrenic times, as has been so much of human history. Nationalistic tendencies undermined royal empires, and out of this flux came a vibrant forum of idea sharing. Thoughts of a laissez-faire lifestyle wherein individuals were freed from the European caste system led to the mythology of the New World, even if the New World only reflected such a lifestyle pre-Constitution, and scantily so.

A way of understanding that was promoted, if too often implicitly and not explicitly, by eighteenth and nineteenth century sentiments, holds that the natural ought to be esteemed before the political. Even today, too often do our philosophies on how life should be grow politicized, thereby undermining their original power. Humans are not political beings. They are natural beings. The questions of how we should live our lives are unanswerable by politics, for politics is merely a means of ordering life by way of the state or government. The questions of how we should live our lives are answerable only by naturalism; that is, by recognizing that which makes us humans.

Our consciousness blossoms as a beautiful aberration from other life in the natural world as we know it. The cognitive niche, inherited from nature, that we inhabit gives us an axiom from which our understanding of the world stems. This can be easily interrupted and distorted by the data and information we are fed. Whether it be outright war, depression or manipulative fiction on television or in the movies, we are all easily victimized by the campaigning of pathological behavior by the trendsetters; that is, the ruling class—and our peers who follow. They have adopted the cynicism passed down by a century marred by two Great Wars, a deep depression, and a long standoff between two nuclear powers.

The cynicism bequeathed unto us by a violent twentieth century has led us to the belief that we need centralized governments and rulers to keep us from doing violence to one another. But what we see are large institutions, instead of keeping people in-line, projecting violence down civilization’s ladder, and turning individuals against themselves, thus creating the precise environment people hoped they would prevent. Indeed, they were all along the impetuses of the bloodletting and carnage people were attempting to escape.

Denmark elected a staunch right winger as prime minister. Denmark joined in military attacks with imperialist states against weaker states. I turned to journalist Ron Ridenour, who lives in Denmark, to give a first-hand voice to what is taking place.

I support revolution against occupation, oppression, exploitation; however, I hold that the long-term viability of a revolution must be rooted in the people — not in a personality. Therefore, I have reservations about “leaders” — for example, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — who (besides implementing socialism for the masses) seemingly covet the esteem, if not the perks, of governmental office. Ridenour speaks Spanish, has lived in Cuba, written many books about the revolution there, so he is an informed go-to person for reflections on the revolution there and elsewhere.

Ridenour, notably, has also given voice to the very marginalized plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, has long been active in journalism, has his own website, and in his own words, “Besides using words in an effort to eradicate racism, inequality and wars, I have been an activist against wars, racism, chauvinism and for socialist solidarity.”

This week, I interviewed Ridenour about Denmark, Cuba, and the leaderless revolutionary stirrings against the financial elitists.

Kim Petersen: Denmark is supposed to be a peace-loving state with an envious social safety net. You pointed out in a recent article that the Danish political landscape has slanted rightwards? What caused this? And how can progressivist politics become predominant?

Ron Ridenour: The causes are several, both historical and contemporary. Leftist parties and unionists in Denmark, like people in most of the world, lost faith and hope in socialist-communist solutions due to the atrocities and corruption of Communist parties in power, and then with the fall of those governments in eastern Europe. Even those governments still calling themselves communists base their economies on capitalism today.

One of the main problems of nearly all leftist parties and governments is that they do not believe that the mass—unionists, unemployed, family farmers, students—are actually capable of ruling “sensibly.” One of the best of benevolent “dictators,” Fidel Castro, does not believe such either. Most leaders believe in themselves and not the mass. So, in fact, real socialism has yet to be attempted. No party in power has ever really begun the process of educating workers+ to use political power and then turning over power to the working class, as our ideology calls for.

Another factor, especially Danish, is a national inferiority complex. That is, “We’re just a little country, you know,” so we can’t expect to run things ourselves. This was actually a folksy saying of one of Denmark’s best known politicians, Erhard Jacobsen. For decades, Denmark relied upon Germany and since WWII it relies on the US, first for its economic Marshall Plan and since for its military might. And today Denmark is not a peace-loving state. It is involved in four wars alongside its Big Daddy.

Then there is the national complex of indifference, or “ligegladhed.” There has been a lot of charitable giving of money to the poor abroad but little engagement or true solidarity. Even the left-ish parliamentary party, Unity List (Enhedslisten), opposes support for opponents of the terrorist terror laws, or for armed resistance by the invaded of US-NATO wars.

One can never answer fully what causes policy without taking the economy into account. Danes still live comfortably economically, almost all, in relationship with others even European neighbors. I think that the left parties rely on parliamentarian politics because of this. They do not believe that significant numbers of people will actually support grass roots radical struggles. And the unions long ago aligned themselves with capitalist reformism and oppose extra-parliamentary struggles, including sustaining strikes, of any consequence. Why risk being arrested, losing your job and then your mortgage, your car or one of them simply to do the “right thing”?

How can progressive (?) politics become predominant? Well, if progressive means pushing for reformist policies within capitalism that is becoming dominant now for the two Danish so-called socialist parties in parliament. (Unity List and People’s Party/SF), and it has been so for the major Social Democratic party for decades. But if progressive means radical, then the economy has to collapse, or when it is in deep crises as it is now, then grass roots groups have to take to the streets and stay there just as is possibly happening with Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Uproar, perhaps in Spain and Greece. We have to kick the parliamentary-based politics out of our movements. We have to feel the power in ourselves and push the politicians out.

Yes, there must also be strong unions and workers must strike and/or join Occupy Wall Street. Radical-revolutionary political parties must educate and protest with sensible and morally just programs. They should not act against the more autonomous oriented grass roots groups but in parallel.

KP: This touches on the previous questions, in many countries, people scoffed that Americans could “elect” a born-again, foot-in-mouth, right-winger such as George W. Bush as president. Yet Canadians soon found themselves with Prime Minister Stephen Harper (a man to the right of Bush), and Danes wound up with Anders Fogh Rasmussen as prime minister (also a hawkish right-winger). Why do you think this is happening in much of the western world?

RR: Precisely because the left gave up actually being left. It was too difficult and most got too comfortable within the capitalist system. The left adopted the bourgeois democratic premise of making policy within parliaments whose role is to protect finance power. In Copenhagen, Wall Street is Børsen and its building is literally next door to parliament and the executive government.

When finance crises occur, you only have two sources to acquire money to pay for it: from the workers-pensioners-students or from the owners of capital and industry. The latter approach would mean that the rich will refuse to pay for their crises and so, you must nationalize their “private” property, that is, the production centers where wealth originates and the banks that manipulate the wealth for a few. But that takes guts, struggle, sacrifice.

PM Fogh Rasmussen was awarded the greater job of being the commander of NATO. He is loved by the warmongers on Wall Street and the Pentagon, and hated by the peoples who are invaded, but all the parliamentary parties here congratulated him. He should have been ostracized as well as the biggest of capitalists here, AP Møller-Mærsk, the world’s biggest shipper and a major warmonger. Instead his supermarkets, which take in half the food sales, are much of the left’s favorite stores because they are cheap.

We have to find that indignation that many Arabs have found, that some Spanish and Greeks are finding, that is part of OWS, and that us oldies had in the 60s-70s. We have to practice what we preach. Boycott the worst companies (like Mærsk and Coca-Cola…). Go on strike. Refuse to do the system’s bidding. Find our inner strength and alternative life styles. Act in solidarity with the oppressed-exploited-invaded.

KP: The progressivist image of Denmark is further diminished now with its participation in the NATO (currently headed by Fogh Rasmussen) invasion of a sovereign state. There are reports of Danish troops engaging in torture and massacres. How do you read this playing out on the streets in Denmark?

RR: Unfortunately, nothing is happening regarding these atrocities. There is one small group of pacifists who conduct a vigil in front of parliament daily since the beginning of the war against Afghanistan. But it is more of a curiosity than a threat. The anti-war movement died, in part because the Unity party dropped out of protesting because its leaders wanted “influence” with lucrative jobs in parliament. And the climate movement has so far refused to take up wars as part of their anti-pollution protests albeit wars are a major cause of pollution and adverse climate changes. I think they are just too scared of being accused of being outsiders or radicals….

KP: You hinted at a “shaky future” for the Cuban revolution. Do you see Cuba falling further away from the socialism won through the revolution? Who will stand to benefit (or lose) from Cuba’s opening to capitalism?

RR: Yes, I am afraid that what I foresaw in that piece nearly a year ago it occurring rapidly now. More and more openings for capitalism have been adopted even before the Communist party national conference body has met and decided on precise policies to propose to the state. Raul Castro as both leader of the state and the party, following his brother, has already decided. Now, private property (housing) can be bought and sold; cars can be bought in hard currency at big prices, which very few Cubans can acquire legitimately; small enterprises are encouraged to employ workers, and thereby opening up officially for exploitation of labor.

Who will benefit is a new class of small capitalists and real estate hustlers, and speculation will become widespread. Relatives of Cubans in Miami and Spain will be even more privileged than those Cubans without such remittances. Wall Street will benefit in the end, because the blockade against Cuba will be lifted in the not distant future. Other Wall Streets in the world already benefit.

KP: In a summer article on the state of the revolution in Cuba, you defined ethics partially as “We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.” You added, “We struggle to create equality for all.” If, indeed, the revolution is a revolution of the people and not about a personality or personalities, what does the unbroken political “leadership” of Fidel Castro from 1959 to 2008 speak to such ethics?

You also quoted from Che that “one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses.”

In general I support much of what Fidel Castro has helped to bring about in Cuba, but I find that his one-man leadership of the revolution is dangerous in that it embeds the revolution in a person (in this case in a family) rather than in the people. Is Fidel Castro the only person besides his brother fit to “lead” (and do the people require a leader?) the revolution for Cubans?

RR: The points you quote from my piece and your question are part of dialogue, both fraternal and violently hostile, the non/anti-capitalist left has had for more than a century. In my own view, after half a century of struggle and thought that also embraces these points, my conclusion is NO to your question. And that, of course, holds true for Hugo Chavez (and all other leaders), albeit most of the left in Venezuela, as well as a large sector of the general population, believes Chavez is unique and most be their one and only leader for, perhaps, a lifetime. That was also the case with the Cuban people and Fidel for the first decade or so. Well, that is what the Arab uproar wants to end, albeit those gruesome dictators cannot be compared to the kind-hearted Fidel.

The main problem with one leader syndrome is that it saps the vision, inspiration and energy from the mass. I have seen this happening before my eyes during the eight years I worked in Cuba and lived with the people. They lost hope that socialism could actually be the best solution when they always had to wait for answers/permission/resources/materials from above. The same happened in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Now it has come to past that most Cubans, I think, really don’t believe socialism is worthwhile and they want a chance to try supply-demand marketing. This will split the people into classes and further antagonize the true solidarity amongst themselves and with other peoples that they had assiduously built. And that is the essence of what Che meant in the cited quotation—the state and the party have become isolated from the mass and they see no other way out than capitalism with some bourgeois democratic-oriented reforms, such as what the big powers are endeavoring to impose on the Arab rebellion.

Another major mistake that Cuban leaders made is not separating some powers between the state and the Communist party. As the unity strategy goes in Cuba when the state makes a policy for short-term economic benefit or for some diplomatic reason—such as backing the genocidal, brutal governments of Sri Lanka against the entire Tamil population—the party is disallowed from criticizing this or for showing solidarity with, for instance, the much discriminated-against Tamils.

KP: There is growing dissent in the United States, but it is marginalized and propagandized in the corporate media (nothing surprising there). The Occupy Wall Street movement in the US seems to be gathering momentum, having staying power, and perhaps causing ripples in the system. If the grassroots activism proves influential in the US, how do you think this might affect Europe?

RR: I see that 66% of the people Gallop polled in the US want the rich to be appropriately taxed, and 54% want all politicians out of a job. It is that spirit that has to take root, and that is growing in Europe too.

The most important and radical elements in these protests are that they are 1) anti-capitalist, 2) not led by self-interest seeking persons or parties. In fact, OWS is more radical than what we created in the 60s-70s, because it is primarily aimed at the true enemy: capitalism, which is the main cause for adverse climate changes and aggressive wars.

The first solidarity demos with OWS in Denmark are taking place Saturday (October 15) alongside hundreds other cities in scores of lands. This initiative was taken by the indignados in Spain. There, and in other countries on the verge of bankruptcy such as Greece, there is greater potential for sustained radical movements than there is right now in Scandinavia and Germany. But this economic crisis will not just melt any time soon—a spell of anger is mounting. I think in a few European countries protests will arise and continue sporadically, at least.
I see it as a positive development, in fact, that in the recent Danish election, the so-called red block won and with it the Unity party and SF have dropped key programmatic elements of any socialist nature. I think the Unity Party/SF sellout will help create a backlash that could become a true protest movement. But we must also recognize that too few people are really hurting enough economically here to cause them to develop a real sustained fight. I hope I’m wrong.

In Denmark, we must not go to a demo to hear jazz music and a handful of “leaders” speak and then go home to TV or to a cafe for beer and wine. We must find that inner indignation and with it empower ourselves. We must develop leadership in all of us. We must take over tactical areas and stay there. We have one big problem, even greater than the might of police brutality, and that is the weather. Already temperatures are falling to freezing in the evenings in some of Europe and in NYC it is getting cold too. We might have to postpone our staying power over the cold, raining, snowy winter months and return in even greater numbers and strength in the spring.

I close with a quote from Naomi Klein’s talk at Wall Street, October 6. “We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening… Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets… Don’t give in to that temptation… Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world.” “It is!” and she points to her favorite sign: “I care about you!”

After breaking up into constituent committees (media, messaging, supply, logistics, etc.), we eventually reformed into a general assembly, adopted certain general principles, and voted to reconvene on Thursday, October 6 at Cesar Chavez Park, across from City Hall. At that point, everyone of us had been given tasks to complete and missions to accomplish. Our responsibilities were to our local group, and to each other.

No leaders of any kind were chosen. Rather it was a tenet of the movement from the earliest days to steadfastly avoid the authoritarian model. Democracy in all things was the deliberate course we chose to follow.

In the past five days, the “Occupy Sacramento” movement has grown considerably, both in size and visibility. During that time, we have attempted to create a public space (in this case Cesar Chavez Park) where our movement can attract and educate — in a positive and peaceful manner — the 99% of our fellow citizens who continue to suffer under an unfair economic regime that disproportionately rewards the greedy and utterly disregards the basic human needs of everyone else.

It was in pursuit of that goal that I (in conjunction with some three dozen other men and women) made a conscious choice to be arrested in the park, and thereby tug on that unbroken thread of civil disobedience that runs through the rich fabric of our country’s history.

Suffice it to say that in the past three days, I’ve flouted “Warhol’s Dictum” by overstaying my 15 minutes. Every time I turn around, it seems, somebody is sticking a microphone or a TV camera in my face. I’ve been interviewed twice by two different reporters from the Sacramento News and Review, and once by the progressive website Think Progress, and have appeared on all four local TV stations.

But perhaps the most amusing of juxtapositions took place when I made two separate appearances in one night on KXTV Channel 10. In one, I’m identified by reporter Dave Marquis as a History instructor and asked to comment on a story he was putting together comparing Sacramento’s recent homelessness problem with the city’’s “Hoovervilles“ of the 1930’s.

In the other, I am shown being handcuffed and loaded into a paddy wagon.

Woody Allen could not have staged it better.

But from my personal perspective, there have been three gem-like moments to press in my dog-eared Book of Memories.

1. For two consecutive days, I’ve had the privilege of watching my lovely wife’s beaming face as it graced a few frames of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown on Current TV. Thanks, Keith. Thanks, Al.

2. On Saturday, Oct. 8, about 300 of us marched from Cesar Chavez Park to the Wells Fargo Building on Sacramento’s Capitol Mall. The place was closed, of course, so the cops watched impassively as we swarmed all over the place for no apparent reason. When I got my turn at the megaphone, I identified myself as a retired history teacher. I then pointed at the wonderfully restored stagecoach in the building’s lobby, and said, “You know, there’s a huge historical irony here. A hundred-and-fifty years ago, these stagecoaches were the most attractive targets for robbery in the Sacramento Valley. Now they’’ve become the symbol of a corporation that is committing shameless robbery on the rest of us.””

After the applause died down, I was asked by a member of the crowd, “Where did you teach?” When I told them, an astonished Afro-Latina-American women in her early-twenties named Autumn Thomas shouted out, “MR. BRADLEY – YOU WERE MY AMERICAN HISTORY TEACHER IN THE 8TH GRADE!!!” Equally astonished, I embraced her and told her how proud I was to see her standing up for her beliefs. She began to cry as the crowd roared its approval. Meanwhile I, misty-eyed and overcome with emotion, quietly left center stage.

That scene was not written by Woody Allen. That one was written by Aaron Sorkin.

3. Later that night (or should I say the following morning at 1:00 am) as I was being handcuffed and taken into police custody, several of my fellow “99 percenters” shouted out “What’s your name?” “Mark W. Bradley,” I replied. “What’s your occupation?” they asked. “I’m a school teacher,” I said.

I could be wrong, but I think I saw one or two of the cops in riot gear look a little crestfallen at that point. I know for a fact that several of the men and women holding billy clubs and pepper spray canisters were called in on their day off. I’m guessing that a few of them had been planning to go skiing this weekend. They were less than enthusiastic about participating in this Kabuki.

Sorry guys. Society needs you to protect and defend their property against all of us ACLU lawyers, public school teachers, nurses, paramedics, and struggling housewives. Always remember: you are the ‘thin blue line’ that prevents people like us from burning down our own neighborhoods.

When the fourteen of us arrived at the jail and were being processed, several cops gathered to ask us what we hoped to accomplish with all this foolishness, and by the way, couldn’t we achieve the same objective without breaking the law? Did we have any idea how much money this was going to cost us? Did we realize how little difference any of this was going to make?

It was a bit like undergoing psy-ops conducted by a bunch of heavily armed junior high students with half a semester of behavioral psychology under their belts. But the most persistent question they kept asking us was “who are your leaders?”

“We have no leaders” we replied.

Their incredulity was palpable, even profound. “Do you seriously expect us to believe that you’re operating over there without leaders? Who makes the decisions?”

“We vote on everything,” was our answer.

At this point, I remembered something I had learned in the ‘60’s, but had forgotten somewhere along the way. Cops, like career military, spend their whole working lives taking orders from their superiors and dishing them out to their subordinates. They really, truly, had no idea what we were talking about.

Later that morning, as I was being processes out, I had the pleasure of being subjected to the same sort of rudimentary “head games” by two overly officious and unnaturally sour-faced young police officers – one male, one female. They were like a couple of Imperial Storm troopers dabbling in Jedi Mind Control. Finally I could take it no longer. I asked them what THEY knew about the real issues at hand, and proceeded to launch into a 20-minute lecture on the history of civil disobedience in America, from the real Boston Tea Party, through Emerson, Thoreau, the Underground Railroad, and the Suffrage Movement, to the integration of lunch counters in the racially divided South of the 1960′s.

I felt like a minor-league Jesus in a third-rate temple. The two cops I’d been talking to had, by now, grown into a group of five. They were all thoroughly gobsmacked. One blond guy looked like he was actually learning something.

The captain in charge just wanted me gone.

When the young man and woman in uniform drove me through the steel doors to release me half a block away from the jail (seriously) they told me how much they had enjoyed our conversation. I thanked them for being so accommodating, and walked off into the sunrise.

You should have been right there with me, O my brothers and sisters, throwing dangerous ideas around like roundhouse punches.

Libya: Let us not be confused as to why Libya alone has been singled out for “humanitarian intervention”.

On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of “war criminal” and “torturer”. (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can’t Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: “Aren’t you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?” She also threw in another line that’s become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that’s used when all other arguments fail: “The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God.”¹

My response to such a line is this: If you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then remarked to you how nice it was that “you actually no longer have a knee problem, thank God.” … The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem.

Unfortunately, they’ve lost just about everything else as well. Twenty years of American bombing, invasion, occupation and torture have led to the people of that unhappy land losing their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … more than half the population either dead, disabled, in prison, or in foreign exile … the air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children … a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

In 2006, the UN special investigator on torture declared that reports from Iraq indicated that torture “is totally out of hand. The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein.” Another UN report of the same time disclosed a rise in “honor killings” of women.²

“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

“I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college,” Iraqi pharmacist Dr. Entisar Al-Arabi told American peace activist Medea Benjamin in 2010. “I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything — electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein.”³

And this from two months ago:

Protesters, human rights workers and security officials say the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has responded to Iraq’s demonstrations in much the same way as many of its more authoritarian neighbors: with force. Witnesses in Baghdad and as far north as Kirkuk described watching last week as security forces in black uniforms, tracksuits and T-shirts roared up in trucks and Humvees, attacked protesters, rounded up others from cafes and homes and hauled them off, blindfolded, to army detention centers. Entire neighborhoods … were blockaded to prevent residents from joining the demonstrations. Journalists were beaten.⁴

So … can we expect the United States and its fellow thugs in NATO to intervene militarily in Iraq as they’re doing in Libya? To protect the protesters in Iraq as they tell us they’re doing in Libya? To effect regime change in Iraq as they’re conspiring, but not admitting, in Libya?

Similarly Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria … all have been bursting with protest and vicious government crackdown in recent months, even to a degree in Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive societies in the world. Not one of these governments has been assaulted by the United States, the UK, or France as Libya has been assaulted; not one of these countries’ opposition is receiving military, financial, legal and moral support from the Western powers as the Libyan rebels are — despite the Libyan rebels’ brutal behavior, racist murders, and the clear jihadist ties of some of them.⁵ The Libyan rebels are reminiscent of the Kosovo rebels — mafiosos famous for their trafficking in body parts and women, also unquestioningly supported by the Western powers against an Officially Designated Enemy, Serbia.

So why is only Libya the target for US/NATO missiles? Is there some principled or moral reason? Are the Libyans the worst abusers of their people in the region? In actuality, Libya offers its citizens a higher standard of living. (The 2010 UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of health, education and income ranked Libya first in Africa.) None of the other countries has a more secular government than Libya. (In contrast some of the Libyan rebels are in the habit of chanting that phrase we all know only too well: “Allah Akbar”.) None of the others has a human-rights record better than that of Libya, however imperfect that may be — in Egypt a government fact-finding mission has announced that during the recent uprising at least 846 protesters were killed as police forces shot them in the head and chest with live ammunition.⁶ Similar horror stories have been reported in Syria, Yemen and other countries of the region during this period.

It should be noted that the ultra-conservative Fox News reported on February 28: “As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body’s Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya’s human rights record. The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a “priority” and for bettering its “constitutional” framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens — who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal.”

Of all the accusations made against Gaddafi perhaps the most meaningless is the oft-repeated “He’s killing his own people.” It’s true, but that’s what happens in civil wars. Abraham Lincoln also killed his own people.

Muammar Gaddafi has been an Officially Designated Enemy of the US longer than any living world leader except Fidel Castro. The animosity began in 1970, one year after Gaddafi took power in a coup, when he closed down a US air force base. He then embarked on a career of supporting what he regarded as revolutionary groups. During the 1970s and ’80s, Gaddafi was accused of using his large oil revenues to support — with funds, arms, training, havens, diplomacy, etc — a wide array of radical/insurgent/terrorist organizations, particularly certain Palestinian factions and Muslim dissident and minority movements in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; the IRA and Basque and Corsican separatists in Europe; several groups engaged in struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa; various opposition groups and politicians in Latin America; the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang.

It was claimed as well that Libya was behind, or at least somehow linked to, an attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Cairo, various plane hijackings, a bomb explosion on an American airliner over Greece, the blowing up of a French airliner over Africa, blowing up a synagogue in Istanbul, and blowing up a disco in Berlin which killed some American soldiers.⁷

In 1990, when the United States needed a country to (falsely) blame for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Libya was the easy choice.

Gaddafi’s principal crime in the eyes of US President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) was not that he supported terrorist groups, but that he supported the wrong terrorist groups; i.e., Gaddafi was not supporting the same terrorists that Washington was, such as the Nicaraguan Contras, UNITA in Angola, Cuban exiles in Miami, the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, and the US military in Grenada. The one band of terrorists the two men supported in common was the Moujahedeen in Afghanistan.

And if all this wasn’t enough to make Gaddafi Public Enemy Number One in Washington (Reagan referred to him as the “mad dog of the Middle East”), Gaddafi has been a frequent critic of US foreign policy, a serious anti-Zionist, pan-Africanist, and pan-Arabist (until the hypocrisy and conservatism of Arab governments proved a barrier). He also calls his government socialist. How much tolerance and patience can The Empire be expected to have? When widespread protests broke out in Tunisia and Egypt, could Washington have resisted instigating the same in the country sandwiched between those two? The CIA has been very busy supplying the rebels with arms, bombing support, money, and personnel.

It may well happen that the Western allies will succeed in forcing Gaddafi out of power. Then the world will look on innocently as the new Libyan government gives Washington what it has long sought: a host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: “We’ve got a big image problem down there. … Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don’t trust the US.”⁸ Another thing scarcely any African country would tolerate is an American military base. There’s only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It’ll be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.

And remember — in the context of recent history concerning Iraq, North Korea, and Iran — if Libya had nuclear weapons the United States would not be attacking it.

Or the United States could realize that Gaddafi is no radical threat simply because of his love for Condoleezza Rice. Here is the Libyan leader in a March 27, 2007 interview on al-Jazeera TV: “Leezza, Leezza, Leezza … I love her very much. I admire her, and I’m proud of her, because she’s a black woman of African origin.”

Over the years, the American government and media have fed us all a constant diet of scandalous Gaddafi stories: He took various drugs, was an extreme womanizer, was bisexual, dressed in women’s clothing, wore makeup, carried a teddy bear, had epileptic fits, and much more; some part of it may have been true. And now we have the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, telling us that Gaddafi’s forces are increasingly engaging in sexual violence and that they have been issued the impotency drug Viagra, presumably to enhance their ability to rape.⁹ Remarkable. Who would have believed that the Libyan Army had so many men in their 60s and 70s?

As I write this, US/NATO missiles have slammed into a Libyan home killing a son and three young grandchildren of Gaddafi, this after repeated rejections of Gaddafi’s call for negotiations — another heartwarming milestone in the glorious history of humanitarian intervention, as well as a reminder of the US bombing of Libya in 1986 which killed a young daughter of Gaddafi.

Two more examples, if needed, of why capitalism can not be reformed

Transocean, the owner of the drilling rig that exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago, killing 11 workers and sending two hundred (200) million gallons of oil cascading over the shoreline of six American states, has announced that (through using some kind of arcane statistical method) it had “recorded the best year in safety performance in our Company’s history.” Accordingly, the company awarded obscene bonuses on top of obscene salaries to its top executives.¹⁰

In Japan, even as it struggles to contain one of history’s worst nuclear disasters, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has proposed building two new nuclear reactors at its radiation-spewing power plant. The plan had taken shape before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and TEPCO officials see no reason to change it. The Japanese government agency in charge of approving such a project has reacted in shocked horror. “It was just unbelievable,” said the director of the agency.¹¹

Which leads us to A.W. Clausen, president of Bank of America, speaking to the Greater Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, in 1970:

It may sound heretical to some in this room to say that business enterprise is not an absolute necessity to human culture … Ancient Egypt functioned more than 3000 years without anything resembling what we today understand by the term ‘corporate enterprise’ or even ‘money’. Within our span of years, we have witnessed the rise of the Soviet Socialist empire. It survives without anything you or I would call a private corporation and little that approaches our own monetary mechanism. It survives and is far stronger than anyone might have expected from watching its turbulent beginnings in 1917 … It is easy to mislead ourselves into thinking that there is something preordained about our profit-motivated, free-market, private-enterprise system — that is, as they used to say of gold, universal and immutable.

Items of interest from a journal I’ve kept for 40 years, part III

• Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, pages 349-350: April 6, 2004. Sanchez was in Iraq in video teleconference with President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. One major American offensive was in operation, another about to be launched. According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly,” Powell said. “There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” Then Bush spoke: “At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone. At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out. Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. … There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

• Noam Chomsky: “If there is really authentic popular participation in the decision-making and the free association of communities, yeah, that could be tremendously important. In fact that’s essentially the traditional anarchist ideal. That’s what was realized the only time for about a year in Spain in 1936 before it was crushed by outside forces, in fact all outside forces, Stalinist Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini’s fascism and the Western democracies cooperated in crushing it. They were all afraid of it.”

• To Hitler, America was both the enemy and a role model, inspiring in its imperial seizure of great territories by force, its use of slave labor, its eradication of native populations.

• NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, made clear in a speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington in 2008 that western interests in Afghanistan went well beyond good governance to the strategic interest in having a permanent military presence in a state that borders central Asia, China, Iran and Pakistan.

• CIA Special Collections of documents; “Instances Of the Use of US Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2010“

• Michael Collon: “Let’s replace the word ‘democratic’ by ‘with us’, and the word ‘terrorist’ by ‘against us’.”

• Ron Paul: “Those who caution that leaving Iraq would be a disaster are the same ones who promised the conflict would be a ‘cake-walk’.”

• Spc. Alex Horton, 22, writing in a blog while a marine in Iraq in 2007: “In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn’t deem that idea unpatriotic.”

• Henry Kissinger in a 1970 memo to Nixon: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on –– and even precedent value for –– other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.”

• Paul Craig Roberts: “International polls show that the rest of the world regard the US and Israel as the greatest dangers to world peace. Americans claim that they are fighting wars against terrorism, but it is US and Israeli terrorism that worries everyone else.”

• Chris Hedges: “If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist ‘madrassa,’ or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.”

• “The US has never had a ‘foreign policy’ but a fanatical domestic policy which, once it had bled through to the Pacific, sought new hosts on which to feed.” Patrick Wilkinson

• C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956): “The only seriously accepted plan for ‘peace’ is a fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.”

• The United States goes around the world sprinkling democracy dust.

• Iran, the latest threat to life as we know it.

• “Iran hit back at US allegations that it has failed to crack down on fugitive al-Qaeda members, calling on Washington to apologize to the world for its own past support of the network. ‘The Americans should present a full apology to the international community for the support they gave to al-Qaeda,’ said the foreign ministry, referring to a period in the 1980s when millions of dollars of covert US aid was channeled — through the Pakistani secret service — to Islamist groups battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.” (Agence France Presse, June 2, 2003)

• Tom Hayden: They believe that the exposure of the generals to a civilian academic atmosphere may humanize the process of war-making, not worrying that the actual danger may be the militarizing of the university.

• Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his 2007 book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World: “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”

• After an avalanche of commentary, Greenspan backpedaled and obfuscated in his comments. He insisted he was talking about “oil security” and “the global economy”. But this was just proving his own point that mentioning oil as a motivation for war is “politically inconvenient”. It’s no way to get young men to kill other young men who’ve never done them any harm.

• The American people have no more authentic control over their government than do people in countries that we call dictatorships, particularly on issues of foreign policy.

1. Video of Rice talk.
2. Associated Press, September 21, 2006.
3. Common Dreams, August 20, 2010
4. Washington Post, March 4, 2011
5. Washington Times, February 24, 2011; The Telegraph (London), March 25, 2011; Alexander Cockburn, “Libya, Oh What a Stupid War; Fukushima, Cover-Up Amid Catastrophe”; “Al Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq” (PDF), Combating Terrorism Center, US Military Academy, West Point, NY, December 2007.
6. Associated Press, April 20, 2011.
7. Gaddafi’s history of supporting terrorism, real and alleged: William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 48.
8. The Guardian (London), June 25, 2007.
9. Reuters news agency, April 29, 2011.
10. Washington Post, April 1, 2011.
11. Washington Post, April 6, 2011.

Against this simmering backdrop, psychologist and author, Bruce Levine’s book, Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated and Battling the Corporate Elite, is extraordinarily relevant. Levine tackles a massively important subject: namely, how to achieve social justice.

Get Up, Stand Up is anti-war, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. It is about how to escape such destructive systems and societies.

Levine reveals one obstacle to escape from the system is so-called democracy. Levine finds democracy to be a game rigged to be won by elitists. The last US presidential election added to the historical evidence of a system predisposed to plutocrats. The result was that Barack Obama bailed out the Wall Street financiers with the money of the masses who have been bilked by the self-same tycoons.

It is also the masses who wind up paying for the wars of the elitists. The Nobel Prize peacenik, Obama, has raised expenditures for US militarism.

Levine opposes the wars of US empire, but he mislabels them. If one were unaware, then Afghan War and Viet Nam War would sound like civil wars, but it was a US war against Viet Nam, a US war against Afghanistan, and a US war against Iraq. So let us not obscure that fact by misleadingly labeling such “wars” minus the initiator and perpetrator of the violence.

Joblessness is on the increase, and with joblessness comes loss of self-respect and despair. Without financial means, then seeking needed health care becomes a luxury one must forgo. Why are people not fighting back?

Levine says people are living in a state of fear. “Fear breaks human beings, and America’s health care system creates fear for the unhealthy and healthy alike.”

Get Up, Stand Up:
Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite
By Bruce E. Levine
Publisher: Chelsea Green
March 28, 2011
Paperback, 256 pages
ISBN: 9781603582988

Levine acknowledges the difficulty of getting past such a situation: “… without a large enough number of people regaining individual self-respect and collective self-confidence, even the best organizers will fail.”

Levine posits several reasons for people’s passivity, among them psychological explanations such as learned helplessness, abuse syndrome, cognitive dissonance, and others such as drugs, disinformation and propaganda, and alienation. Since solidarity is crucial to resistance, it follows that alienation would have a negative effect on resistance.

Higher education has long been pointed to as the way for lower-income classes to escape their penury. Some people even speciously claimed, despite palpable evidence to the contrary, that the education system was a meritocracy. Even the sham of a meritocracy crashed to the ground with the student loan debt that has burdened so many students during schooling and upon graduation. Levine calls it “indentured servitude.”

Big Brother is here. People can hardly move around in privacy anymore as CCTV has become increasingly omnipresent. Levine warns that such surveillance will be considered normal for the recent generations raised under watchful eyes.

Worker solidarity is imperiled as unions are targeted by governments and their corporate sponsors. Levine cites figures that reveal the wide gap between union and nonunion wages and benefits. Thus unions are targeted to better keep profits out of worker hands. Where unions do exist, all too often the union leadership has been co-opted by union leaders, which makes one wonder why workers don’t function by mass consensus instead.

The elitists also have a fear: workers uniting to overthrow them. That, Levine explains, is why the corporatocracy wages war on workers.

Schools are places where powerlessness in inculcated. Levine says, “A key way to break people is to deprive them of free and private time to reflect on who they are and what they truly care about.”

Levine does not fault teachers too much, noting that they function within an undemocratic system. However, in a system that routinely espouses the virtue of critical thinking, the paucity of critical thinking among educators can be staggering.

I know only too well the authoritarianism that is rife within schools. I asked at one school staff meeting if teachers were meant to impose a note-taking system upon all students or that students might be granted autonomy to choose a method that best suits them as diverse individuals. The answer was that they were to be compelled to adopt the system the school administration chose for them.

I replied, “That’s authoritarianism.”

“Yes,” came back the terse rejoinder.

No justification was forthcoming for the authoritarianism.

Levine also laments that attaining higher education entails “jumping through meaningless hoops” – contrary to what a critical thinker would willingly perform.

Levine also takes aim at mainstream psychology saying it buys into the prevailing economic system. That, however, would hold for most institutions within society. Levine touts liberation psychology, and compared to the human carnage wreaked by APA psychologists at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere in the US gulag, it is certainly a more humane human-centered approach.

Get Up, Stand Up argues that gaining individual self-respect and empowerment are crucial to overthrowing the classist system in society.

Levine sees benefit in a classless, non-hierarchical society. Levine states boldly his preference for anarchism despite the demonization of the term’s meaning.

To the argument that anarchism will not succeed because humans are intrinsically greedy, Levine rightly points out that this is assertion. Whether humans are greedy or altruistic: “no one can definitively prove their case.”

It is likeliest that human character is in large extent shaped by the system and society one finds oneself in. If so, and indubitably it is, then human character can be shaped by designing culture and society to elicit desirable traits.

The electoral battle field is a no-win scenario. The two-party Tweedle Dee-Tweedle Dum focus is distracting and enervating.

Levine holds that lesser evilism is bad for democracy. If lesser evilism is so terrible, one wonders what Levine meant when he wrote of the US presidential election in 2000, “… Nader and the Green party lost their luster.” It seems that one could just as well conversely state that lesser evilism gained luster, but for this writer, each election has adduced that lesser evilism appeases iniquity and only the evilists gain.

Levine recounts that elections are a long, long trail of defeats for progressives. What to do?

Levine calls for disruption, which he acknowledges is risky. It is not a novel call; it has been known by many for a long, long time. Workers have power in that their labor is required to work the factories and workplaces. Workers using their wages to consume is necessary to keep capitalism flowing. Disruption is another name for general strike.

Levine warns of “violent revolution, one risks the loss of life and the loss of even more power if defeated.” This is a risk. However, Levine does not address that violent revolution originates with the authoritarianism and classism of the capitalist system. Violence is the modus operandi of the elitists, and violent resistance is legitimized by the initial violence of the elitists.

Get Up, Stand Up examines alternatives to capitalist society, a dropping out of the rat race: communes, worker cooperatives, lower-cost online education or worker colleges.

The right to study in tuition free universities should be enjoyed by every person. If university academics truly are critical thinkers, they might ponder deeply whether the university hierarchy is justifiable and preferable.

Levine does not explore deeply an alternative economic system, and it would have improved Get Up, Stand Up if he had included discussion of such, for example, parecon which empowers workers and is non-hierarchical.

The basic thrust of Get Up, Stand Up is laudable. A few times the book digresses from its thesis, and that is when it read unevenly. For instance, Levine appears to take couched potshots at Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, referring to him as a “ruthless dictator” on one hand and “not all that powerful” on the other hand. Why does Levine use a figure demonized by the capitalist-imperialist hierarchy to make his points and rather unconvincingly?

Such examples are points of contention among leftists,¹ as is the current civil war with many foreign interlopers in Libya.

Solidarity is a sine qua non of revolution. The general strike will require everyone to look after each other. Electoral strategies and military or economic interference in the systems of other states are potentially unity destroying topics better discussed and decided upon after the revolution is won.

Get Up, Stand Up is valuable for societal and psychological insights into what fosters and maintains continuation of egregious violence, exploitation of resources and maldistribution of wealth, and classism (the ignoble prejudice that one group is in some way superior as human beings to other groups). Getting out of this jaundiced cycle of capitalism is needed for humanity to fully progress.

1. I do not use the term progressives here because progressives would not encourage or support violent intervention in the civil war of another state, especially by warmongering imperialist states that pursue regime change to exploit the resources of another state.

Human Resources begins with the psychological research on animal behavior, how rat, dog, pigeon behavior might be shaped. Behaviorist scientists John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner applied the behavior-shaping experiments to humans.

The human experiments turned even more sinister with an emphasis on eugenics, which is based in the notion that there are superior and inferior humans, superior and inferior races. Academia was very much involved in this movement, and as the documentary points out, it went to the highest levels of government, as president Calvin Coolidge supported eugenicist notions. Corporations funded the research, with the Rockefellers playing “a particularly devious role,” said historian Sharon Smith.

Rebecca Lemov, author of World as Laboratory, said the Rockefeller largesse made for the most funded social science project in history.

Taylorism and the Disempowerment of Workers

Even though moral philosopher Adam Smith had warned against the division of labor, another man, Frederick Taylor, disagreed. He atomized the workplace and work tasks. He set target times for worker tasks. This increased efficiency but at a cost of de-skilling workers and disempowering them.

Skilled labor was undermined by the atomization of tasks, the result being a loss of power and control by skilled workers. The exemplar is the assembly line instituted by anti-worker Henry Ford, which consolidated hierarchical control.

Human Resources calls it dehumanizing.

Labor does not need to be dehumanizing though. Human Resources interviews Michael Albert who, with Robin Hahnel, espouses an economy called participatory economics – or parecon. Albert says the corporation is pathological.¹ The pathology is the drive for profit without concern for people or the environment. The parecon workplace is egalitarian.

Paradoxically, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin supported Taylorism’s scientific management although it was disliked by workers. Human Resources quotes Lenin: “Socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly.” If this is the case, then the state has merely replaced the corporations in the economic system, and the Marxist refrain of a dictatorship of the proletariat becomes a meaningless slogan.

Human Resources argues that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed socialist institutions and waged a war against anarchists. They forced industrialization, leading to totalitarianism.

Thus, argues anarchist professor, Noam Chomsky, the term “socialism” became degraded.

Mikhail Bakunin, an anarchist opponent of authoritarian Communism, had foreseen the dangers of the state. Consequently, hierarchical political systems became entrenched worldwide.

Political scientist Stephen M. Sacks discusses the Hawthorne experiments, which looked at the quantity of work and worker satisfaction. It found that having discussions with workers, regardless of whether or not workers concerns were taken into consideration, increased productivity. Sachs says it doesn’t have to be that way. The workplace can be democratized.

Why should the economic system not be rational, for example, like a parecon?

Educating Workers

Educator John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, illustrated how the education system makes people unable to think in context. Initially, he says, compulsory schooling was resisted by parents (who battled for control) and enforced by state militia.

Corporations, however, feared educated workers, and students were converted into “obedient tools.”

Educational theorist Alfie Kohn extolled on the paucity of critical thinking and debilitation of forced competition. He argues against grading because grades 1) cause a loss of interest in learning; i.e., it is no longer learning for the sake of knowledge, 2) lead to shallower thinking, and 3) lead students to choose easier tasks (the logical choice).

Competition, says Kohn, undermines character and destroys relations. He points to research which shows that competition isn’t necessary for excellence and tends to impede excellence at most tasks. Competition disrupts more difficult tasks and problem solving.

“Excellence,” he says “pulls in one direction and competition in another.”

If the system is one of competition, then that system must have winners and losers of competition. What does that mean for a society?

The Origins of Violence

Noble segues into causes of violence. He turns again to behaviorist psychology (which really does not have that much sway in contemporary psychology) and the frustration-aggression hypothesis which states that thwarting people from achieving their just rewards frustrates them and leads to aggression.

Human Resources portrays rampant hatred of the other in American society that is promulgated by the media. Historian Howard Zinn, in one of his last interviews, saw an intentionality in design; the hatred of others is scapegoating — deflecting the anger onto to others so the system can perpetuate itself.

Anthropologist Elliot Leyton even implied the system as being partially responsible for mass murders. He saw multiple murderers as “alienated individuals … that represent central cultural themes” that “are relatively ignored by government institutions…”

Governments, said Leyton, focus much more on control of public than serial and mass killers. “Governments and politicians are the main killers.” The state is a mass murderer.

Human Resources holds that modern military training best encapsulates the frustration-aggression hypothesis. The military funnels frustration into hatred and fear of a group.

Fear was used to manipulate human behavior.

Mind-control Experimentation

The CIA’s mind-control project MKULTRA “abandon[ed] any pretense to morality, leading to a nightmarish search for the holy grail of social engineering: a fully controlled, fully obedient human being.”

Projects included Artichoke, Bluebird, MKULTRA (truth serum, mind wipes) etc. Since 1973 these projects remain classified.

Under the auspices of the government, military, CIA, academia (universities and “leading professors”) drug, electroshock, brain surgery, noise manipulation, and other experiments were carried out on animals, patients, soldiers, citizens, and even children as “unwitting guinea pigs” for various drugs. Among the outcomes were psychosis and death. Compensation is denied for many cases.

Psychiatrist Colin Ross says authorities typically deny human experimentation, or when undeniable blame the laxer restraints of the time period. In the case of children used in mind-control experiments, national security was proffered as a justification.

MKULTRA was deemed a failure except that it produced Kubark, in essence a “torture manual.” It detailed deprivation experiments, stress positions, and electric shock – all used by US personnel on humans at Abu Ghraib, as horrific video shows.

How is that humans can live in a system that subjects them unwittingly to dangerous experimentation? How is it they can allow their country to terrorize people in other countries in a “war on terror”?

Human Resources points to TV and its fear-based programming which becomes reality. TV entertains but it also induces passivity and suggestibility in people.

Eugenics underlies Human Resources. Yet, a capacity for cruelty has been demonstrated in supposedly learned people, even by those who might consider themselves superior: management, politicians, commanders, and doctors.

Human Resources is another excellent documentary by Noble – a documentary that should cause all people to question the nature of the society they live in, who the authorities serve — and even more — should society have authorities, should it exist as a hierarchy? The film causes us to ask who we should fear – the authorities who pursue the development of weapons of mass destruction, who develop and implement the practice of torture, who use their own citizenry as unwitting guinea pigs? Who is the genuine terrorizer? Who is the genuine enemy?

1. The thesis of another excellent documentary, The Corporation.

The reaction of those whose homes were raided and their supporters was quick and determined. The targeted activists, their attorneys, and local supporters held a couple of press conferences within days of the raids and original subpoenas and a national network organized protests at Federal Buildings in a number of US cities and towns. Resolutions attacking the raids and subpoenas and pledging support for the activists and the right to organize were introduced and passed by a number of city councils and antiwar and labor organizations. The office of the US Attorney for the Northern Illinois District under the direction of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald temporarily withdrew the subpoenas. However, they were reinstated in December, leading to the aforementioned refusal of those subpoenaed to appear in front of the grand jury. Several more subpoenas were served on other activists. In fact, nine more activists have been ordered to testify before the grand jury on January 25, 2011 in Chicago.

A sidebar regarding Patrick Fitzgerald might be beneficial here. If that name seems familiar, it is because he is associated with many high profile cases. He helped prosecute Scooter Libby in the case known as the Valerie Plame affair. For those who don’t remember this case, it involved members of the George Bush White House releasing the name of a CIA agent to the media–a federal offense. Although Libby was convicted of the crime, it has always been believed that others in the White House, including Vice President Cheney, were involved in its commission. This demands the question as to why no one else was prosecuted and how much the prosecutor (Fitzpatrick) was involved in limiting the prosecution to one individual, thereby sparing the White House from a criminal investigation. Patrick has also been involved in many other high profile cases, including the prosecution off Illinois governors Ryan and Blagojevich in separate corruption cases and a case involving torture by the Chicago police that resulted in the conviction of Chicago detective Jon Burge.

In another investigation targeting leftist, anarchist and antiwar political activists in the Twin Cities, several homes and offices were raided before, and during, the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. If one recalls, that convention also saw the arrest of media members including Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, brutal attacks on protestors by police and private “contractors” working with police, and a lockdown against free speech activities in certain areas of the city. Several hundred people were arrested and many were beaten. Nine organizers were eventually charged with acts of terrorism. During their trial it became clear that the organizations these individuals were affiliated with had been infiltrated by government informers.

Similarly, last week the AntiWar Committee (one of the organizations targeted in the September raids) of the Twin Cities discovered that they too had had an informer in their midst since 2008. Going by the name Karen Sullivan, this woman claimed to be a single parent and a lesbian who did not get along with her child’s father. According to statements from members of the AntiWar Committee that appeared in the press, the group’s members were sympathetic to her cover story and, despite an initial concern by some members, accepted and befriended the woman. Also, since the AntiWar Committee (AWC) believed their meetings and activities to be covered by the first amendment and were always open to the public, there was little concern for secrecy.

“Ms. Sullivan” involved herself in AWC activities and meetings, even chairing some of them. She was also one of three AWC members that traveled to Palestine. As soon as they reached Israel, the members were told they would be detained unless they turned back. Two chose to stay and were detained while “Sullivan” went back to the US. It turns out that the Israeli authorities had prior knowledge of the visit and the intention of the group to meet with Palestinian women. While no one in the group could figure out how this was so, it seems apparent now that the “Ms. Sullivan” had provided this information to her handler who had in turn provided it to US officials, who then passed it on to the Israeli government.

In the wake of the January 8, 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona there have been calls by a number of politicians, media commentators and others suggesting the need for new laws limiting political speech in the United States. Meanwhile, efforts are underway in Congress to renew sections of the PATRIOT Act that are due to expire soon. History tells us that when laws designed to curb political speech are enacted in the US, they are used primarily against groups and individuals on the left side of the political spectrum. There is no need for more laws. Instead, there is a need for more free speech. Laws like the PATRIOT Act and The Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996 and the subsequent interpretation of those laws by the courts have criminalized political activities that were previously legal. The investigation that the raids and grand juries discussed here are an example of this.

The intention of the government in this and other similar investigations is to intimidate people into keeping silent so they can carry on their business with a minimum amount of attention from the public. As the discovery of an informer in the AWC shows, they will stop at nothing in their attempt to silence protest against their imperial designs. It doesn’t matter if they get any convictions or even an indictment out of their fishing expedition. If they have intimidated those who oppose imperial war and support people around the world in their struggle against military occupation, they will have accomplished their goal. This is reason enough to support those currently targeted by the FBI in the investigations discussed here. It is more than enough reason to attend the protests against the grand jury on January 25, 2011 around the US.

These claims are so absurd, they don’t even make for convincing satire. The real irony is that much of what passes for progressive mainstream media endorses this kind of surreal propaganda. The so-called alternative progressive media, if not embracing the lies outright, is willing to play the usual “better than nothing” game of self delusion. Look what we’ve accomplished! What a great first step!

Take the financial “reform” bill. We’ll probably be hearing a lot from progressives about the whistleblower provisions in this bill. This legislation was crafted by corporate lobbyists and works largely to the benefit of their clients. But watch as progressive apologists focus on an anomaly in the bill which provides anonymity to whistleblowers and stipulates a bounty be paid for information leading to successful prosecutions. What a tasty morsel to assuage the hunger of the starving masses! The assumption is, anonymous rewards for whistleblowers will encourage more people to come forward. In addition, costly bounties, on top of fines for malfeasance, will miraculously transform corporate behavior. 

Even if one is deluded enough to believe the SEC will enforce this provision in the bill in any substantive manner, since when have financial penalties ever changed corporate behavior? Such fines are chump change to the multinationals. They aren’t deterrents to corporate crime, only additional line items to be included in future budget projections. In recent years, BP has paid more than $730 million in fines. This hasn’t prevented them from continuing to destroy our environment, killing dozens of people in the process, while at the same time posting huge profits. 

Progressives have become well accustomed to compromising their core values to achieve meaningless victories. They cite minuscule gains as justification for their participation in a system which repeatedly disenfranchises them. In this way, they become willing partners in the advancement of the corporate agenda. The financial reform bill, like all legislation, is written by. and for, corporations. But let’s rally ´round some deceptively positive item in the bill so we can maintain the illusion of progress. What rubbish!

In 2008, in exchange for lame promises to end the war in Iraq, a vast majority of the anti-war movement not only endorsed, but campaigned for and enthusiastically promoted a pro-war candidate. As a result, Barack Obama came into office with a mandate to escalate the war in Afghanistan and expand it into Pakistan. The primary goal of the anti-war movement was sacrificed to the lunatic notion that “half a loaf is better than none.” As it turns out, we’re not even getting half a slice. Surprise, surprise!

As our consumer economy digests itself and passes the poor, working poor and fading middle class like a bowel movement into the toilet of destitution, we seem unable to raise more than a whimper from progressives. They remain happily ensconced in steerage on board the ship of state as the power elite in the ballroom overhead raise a toast to U.S. Empire and perpetual war. The so-called liberal opposition has become nothing more than a subculture of this failed system of class warfare we mistakenly call democracy. 

The bloated and obscene military industrial complex indiscriminately kills and maims innocents around the world in order to maintain its capitalist hegemony. Meanwhile, our rogue partner, Israel, inflames the Middle East with its rapacious ethnocentric colonial objectives. The ongoing brutal racism and ethnic cleansing in Palestine is blatant. It takes a monumental effort on the part of progressives to ignore the horrors being unleashed on the Palestinian people using our tax dollars. But ignore it they do. They wouldn’t want to alienate the Israel Lobby. That might jeopardize progressives’ political objectives. So they forget about justice and agree not to talk about the Zionist bull in the human-rights china shop.

Many alternative news sites rarely mention Israel or Palestinian human rights. Perhaps the thinking is, if you can’t find something positive to say, why say anything at all? Have you been to BuzzFlash.com lately? How about TruthOut.org? These two progressive-except-for-Palestine sites have joined forces in their mission to promote what they perceive to be a progressive agenda, for everyone but Palestinians. You would think the Israel Lobby has no impact on world affairs at all if these were your only sources of information. 

As for the “liberal” mainstream media, you can probably count on one hand the number of times Rachel Maddow has used the ‘P’ word since her ascent to the corporate media throne. What about Keith Olberman? If you catalog his coverage of Palestine over the last seven years, it would make for a very short list. These progressive icons have a strict “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy when it comes to Israel. 

But the blue ribbon for hypocrisy concerning Palestine goes to Thom Hartmann, the intellectual darling of progressive talk radio. His pro-Zionist mindset establishes a new standard for willful denial. Israel’s barbaric attack in 2009 on the one-and-a-half million defenseless civilians imprisoned in Gaza  resulted in the deaths of more than 1400 people, 350 of them children under the age of fifteen. On his radio program, Hartmann pointed out that this was hardly what one would call a massacre. If those had been Israeli children murdered, he may have taken a slightly different position on the matter.

When criticized for their blind support of Barack “Killer-Drone” Obama, progressives produce such absurd rejoinders as, “What would you have had us do, elect John McCain?” The real question in 2008, and in 2004 as well, should have been, “Why are we working to elect a pro-war corporatist?” 

Embracing honest logic is difficult for many progressives. They prefer to cling to their religion of “hope and change” and suffer the wages of compromise, unwilling to face the simple truth. The system has diverted the energy and resources of the Left from our main objectives. We have become pawns within this self-perpetuating, parasitic corporatocracy. Our voices have been co-opted to facilitate its Orwellian existence. 

Uh-oh. Conundrum. You mean to say that reasoned dialogue won’t save us; the status quo can’t be amended and made to conform to our naive expectations; we can’t work from within to excise the cancerous tumor that is our government? Everyone begins to wring their hands and wipe sweat from their brows (using facial tissue made from recycled paper, of course). Minds close, eyes glaze over. The collective hard drive of the Left crashes and everyone is stunned into silence. The screen flashes the ominous error message, “What Now? What Now?” 

Hey, I know. Let’s head off to the polls in the next election and vote against the most terrible option. That should solve the problem. Let’s continue marching in lockstep right over the lesser-of-two-evils cliff into oblivion. Let’s give pro-war corporatists the keys to the national treasury and watch in dismay as they transfer it into the pockets of the power elite while continuing to wage senseless wars against people all over the planet. Let’s empower yet another gang of lying, sociopathic stewards of empire and hope they don’t wreak more havoc than the previous bunch. There’s a plan we haven’t tried before!

If this madness appears to be a hopeless, downward spiral into totalitarianism and despair, that’s because it is. We are taking the same action over and over again, expecting different results. Insanity has replaced rationality.

It may seem like there are few options available to us. Certainly there are none at all if we continue to push that familiar boulder up the hill, only to watch it roll back down again. But if we can buck up and face reality, retire the usual song and dance routine which is getting us nowhere, then this will allow alternative strategies to develop. Once we disengage from the status quo, stop sacrificing our principles and resources in pursuit of pointless compromise, the passionate minds of the Left will come up with different approaches. We just need to establish a few simple guidelines to keep us on course.

First, compromise is for deciding what color to paint the bathroom. While common ground may be a great place to debate acceptable means to an end, if that common ground is in a pool of someone else’s blood, we must refuse to go there. Our objectives must be non-negotiable. They should not include the occasional splatter of the blood of innocents. Politics may be the art of the possible, but advocacy for human rights should be absolute. We cannot tolerate “some” inhumanity, nor sacrifice justice for the sake of achieving a resolution. 

Second, reconciliation is an objective, not a strategy. Anger is not violence; being non-violent doesn’t require us to be passive or even peaceful.The penchant many on the Left have for “respectful dialogue” is admirable. But it’s time to get over it and get angry. We are in a very small boat on rough seas. If some posturing fools stand up, threatening to capsize the boat, there isn’t much point in having a polite discussion with them. The only rational response is to tell them, “Sit down before you drown us all!” Say it loudly, and impolitely if need be, to make yourself heard above the noise of the threatening storm. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in the water having a less-than-mutually-respectful dialogue with hungry sharks.

Third, and most important of all, stop voting! It only enables the status quo. What is this obsession we have with participating in a system which excludes the values and principles we believe in? If the menu consists of nothing but poisonous food, refuse to sit down at the table. The corporatocracy will never offer us candidates for national office who represent progressive values. Name any President and most members of Congress over the last 100 years. These are people who have participated in the slaughter of millions of innocent men, women and children around the globe. Their legacy belongs on trial in the Hague. Why do we continue to champion their fetid Empire, for any reason, under any circumstances? 

Unyielding commitment to the principles of human rights and social justice would provide the incentive we need to abandon this cycle of capitulation and instigate a true social revolution. Once we disengage from this inhumane paradigm, no longer lend our voices to its perpetuation, a world of possibilities will be open to us. It’s not as if we would be abandoning a program of proven success. The only thing we know for certain is what doesn’t work. 

In the last national election, roughly 130 million people showed up at the polls. Are you enjoying Bush’s third term yet? How many of those people hold progressive views? What would happen on election day if even as few as two percent of that 130 million showed up in Washington D.C. and cast a real vote for change. Imagine, millions of unarmed, non-violent people (too many to shoot, too many to arrest) converging on the heart of darkness to silence it, permanently.

Chaos you say? Anarchy? “OMB (oh my Buddha), what will we do now? With its head removed, this misbegotten leviathan, this bloodthirsty purveyor of terror, death and destruction, will cease to function.”

Hmmm… need we say more?

Until we refuse to endorse the criminality of our Empire, refuse to participate in our own deception, refuse to give our power to maniacs, the Left will continue to be an anachronism which pays lip service to progressive ideals. Isn’t it time we tried something new?

Arguably the three most influential end-point models of political organization are best represented by Adam Smith (capitalism), Karl Marx (socialism/communism), and Mikhail Bakunin (anarchism).¹ ,² ,³ These three men and many other persons who contributed to critiquing, perfecting and adapting or combining these end-point models were unquestionably brilliant, acute, and incisive.

The problem is none of these models has ever been put into practice in a sustainable way. This is because none of these models or their adaptations and combinations can successfully be put into practice by engineering a system for people to inhabit.

For these ideal models to work they must arise from a self-organization in which every individual has both the capacity to recognize when a foundational element of the model is being corrupted by a particular practice and the capacity to intervene to prevent or correct the corruption. With the capacity to intervene comes capacity to recognize.

The American libertarians understood this and inspired a revolutionary constitution that guaranteed the individual the right to intervene (bear arms, free speech, etc.). This libertarianism also nurtured a deep and healthy cultural distrust of governments, institutions, banks, and corporations.

To be sustainable, the above-mentioned socio-politico-economic models and their combinations cannot be imposed and managed from the top but instead must be driven from the base; must be discovered and developed by the individual connected to his/her community, and must be controlled by the individual via personal agency. As soon as the individual has little or no influence to correct the system then there is runaway hierarchical command and control and all the nasty oppressions that this necessarily implies.

For example, all three men mentioned above knew (expressly believed) that capitalism would lead to capital monopoly and the associated predation of the top corporatists and financiers. Smith wanted to prevent this by government and international regulations – although he underestimated the now obvious reality that capital would always evolve to own government. Marx saw world economic monopoly (globalization) as an inevitable consequence of capitalism and he elevated globalization to the status of a natural law. Bakunin saw that Marx’s model could not be applied without leading to the same kind of irreversible hierarchical predation as with capitalism.

Instead of being based on the power of individuals to monitor and correct, applied “capitalism” and “socialism” have been organized from the top, put in place via elite-run social engineering, and have used theoretical concepts of capitalism and socialism to rationalize and justify unrestrained hierarchical control by a dominant elite which has graciously provided illusions of democratic participation via workers’ councils, unions owned by the bosses, and fixed elections of elite-selected candidates.⁴

Activism to Stop the Exploitation Machine

This brings us to the question of First-World activism. How can individuals best obtain enough power to correct the most destructive aberrations of the present runaway command and control hierarchy of exploitation and oppression?

Here, in my view, two of the most important critics and theorists of First-World activism are Herbert Marcuse (One Dimensional Man) and Ward Churchill (Pacifism as Pathology)⁵ , ⁶ their work on the psycho-sociology of First-World activism is as acute and incisive as the works of Smith-Marx-Bakunin on socio-politico-economic models. I must add the canonical work of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) geared towards liberation of the most wrenched but, in my opinion, universal and applicable to First-World activism.⁷ ,⁸

Marcuse explains in detail the fundamental challenge of activism seated in the relative comfort and relative personal freedom of the modern middle class. Churchill focuses on the main psychological defence reaction of First-World activists challenged by their consciousness of the broad murderous underbelly of the system. Freire simply lays out the universal essence of liberation from a necessarily-oppressive hierarchy, like few others have.

The goal of activism within capitalist and socialist hierarchies is for the individuals (ordinary citizens and mid-level managers) to find ways to effectively challenge and correct the system, thereby flattening the hierarchical pyramid rather than allowing or enabling its otherwise incessant sharpening. The goal of the activist is to increase democratic participation (i.e., direct influence) in all areas of activity and to reverse or impede the otherwise increasing concentration of power.

Optimally, the activist practices direct influence at the point of his/her strongest connection to the economy; at work for the worker, at school for the student, on the street for the homeless person, etc. This is the point at which the system has the strongest grip on the individual, but it is also the point where the individual has the most power against the system’s authoritarian oppression. Expressed as the Freirian mantra – in activism, in the struggle for liberation, “one can only fight one’s own oppression.” Our oppression primarily results from the undemocratic hierarchy that controls our lives.⁹

As middle class citizens of an empire, if we create an increase in democracy and a reduction of authoritarianism, then those exploited by the empire in the under classes and abroad immediately benefit from a loosening of the system’s grip.

Of course one also supports the struggles across social classes and across national borders and one derives knowledge and inspiration from the struggles of others, but the murderous killing machine will only become more powerful and more ferocious if we do not practice anti-hierarchy activism at the point of our strongest contact with the hierarchy.² , ³ , ⁶ , ⁷ , ¹⁰

Of course, this true activism against our own oppression and against hierarchical domination, like any true activism, is an activism that carries the highest potential risk for the individual. One cannot fight an oppressor without exposing oneself to backlash.¹¹ And the best safety net against this consequence of the battle is organization and community.

And Now the Pathology

And this is where the pathology starts. Why lose a good thing? Why risk job loss? Why create tension at work? Why not just get the degree and climb the hierarchy from which one can act? Cannot more be achieved by cooperation? Isn’t confrontation what oppressors do? Won’t we just become oppressors? Etc.

There are a million elaborate and slogan-supported rationalizations to not be an activist and most involve re-definitions of activism in terms of actions that present no significant risk to one’s socio-economic status.

For example, several players pick up the above need in activism to “organize” and substitute the organizing itself for the activism. The latter organizing is not one rooted in necessity for safety and in self-defence but instead takes on the characteristics of a membership drive and an educational program to build shared opinions.

This avoidance often involves the mystical notion of the “critical mass” whereby if enough citizens acquire the same opinion, then this opinion is magically implemented by the system, by some unspecified mechanism never before observed in history. Critical mass is a concept of physics and involves a nuclear chain reaction, but it is only relevant if one has a critical mass of radioactive nuclei – determined individuals prepared to react and create an explosion. It doesn’t work for opinions acquired mainly by reading flyers and watching documentary films.

Following this mythology of critical mass of opinion, organizers note that the 1960s brought out 10s and 100s of thousands of protesters into the streets and falsely conclude that we therefore need only bring out large numbers of protesters to accomplish societal change. They fail to realize that the protesters of the 1960s were protesting as an external demonstration and extension of their real activism at work and in community and that their mass movements included riots that were a serious concern for power that was already overstretched in Vietnam.⁵ , ¹²

In the present context of relatively advanced corporate fascism and socially engineered compliance,¹³ ,¹⁴ power knows that even large numbers of peaceful demonstrators will obediently go back to work on Monday morning and will not spontaneously and physically unseat their elected “representatives” or bosses.

Pacifism is the main pathology identified by Churchill. Not the true combatant-pacifism of Gandhi who said that it was better to take up arms than to practice a false pacifism of cowardice,¹⁵ but the pacifism of dogmatic non-violence as a substitute for direct anti-hierarchical activism. This pacifism is often accompanied by pathological conflict avoidance and by escapism into religion or ecological sectarianism and by the privileged practice of isolated alternative community building as an escape from the hierarchy of the dominant system. All these reactions were explained by Marcuse.

Other diversions include the amplification of valid but secondary and privileged preoccupations to be oppressed fairly within one’s class. Here I tentatively include: gay marriage, pay equity for women, affirmative action, political correctness activism, co-optation unionism, health care protection activism, ethical investment activism, and so on.

I mean that these struggles are generally rigorously confined by their practitioners in such a way as to protect and reinforce the overarching (workplace) economic hierarchical domination which in turn continues to increase its violent oppression of the included groups and to increase its exploitation of the excluded groups.

Gay marriage activism is a move towards equal treatment for all but is practiced in such a way to increase the state’s hierarchical control of relationships by strengthening rather than reforming the intrusive institution of state marriage; and the married gay couples continue to be oppressed by work and their children by school.

Pay equity activism is equal treatment by the oppressor in the wage slavery enterprise but is generally practiced in such a way as to bring women into the fold without necessarily making the workplace more democratic.

Affirmative action corrects a wrong but maintains the oppressive workplace unless individual employees directly fight against both racism and undemocratic authoritarianism.

Political correctness is an offshoot of pathological conflict avoidance, a desire to isolate oneself from any risk of (verbal) conflict via mental environment oversight rather than a commitment to participatory cultural transformation.

Co-optation unionism, the dominant form of unionism in North America, is a cancerous affliction in which workplace democracy and individual responsibility (e.g., professional or trades person independence) are horse traded away for salaries and benefits, under the threat of global economic “restructuring.” It works hand in hand with power to drive the system towards increased central command and control, towards corporate fascism. It dehumanizes the worker. Instead, unionism could be practiced as an arm in the struggle to democratize the workplace but it almost never is.

Universal health care coverage activism is practiced in a way which further locks us into the insane Big Pharma and technological medicine trap that the medical establishment has driven us into and further moves us away from public health and towards an ignorant dependence on a corrupt profession; whereas it could be an occasion for citizen involvement and for a broad participatory and empowered debate. Instead, it does nothing to put individuals responsibly in charge of health priorities.¹⁶

Let me not even address the absurdity of “ethical investment activism,” an oxymoron if ever there were one. It’s up there with the insanity of the corporate plan to make ethanol from food as a substitute for oil which some green anti-CO₂ sectarians have supported. (If you don’t want to produce CO2, kill yourself.)¹⁷

And so on. Equal treatment activism should be an occasion for anti-hierarchical activism not a substitute for it. That is not what one observes.

Let us not forget lifestyle and consumer choice false activisms, the less extreme versions of isolated alternative community life. I vote with my consumer choices? If we all just consumed responsibly and reduced our carbon footprints, the world could be saved? In fact, all societal efficiency gains are always made up for by increased global consumption. If cars can be made to consume less energy, then there will be more cars… This false activism is a classic guilt alleviation strategy that does nothing to confront the oppressive hierarchy. Instead, it protects the system by diverting individual attention towards inconsequential pursuits.

There are as many creative psychological devices to rationalize and internalize one’s subservience to the oppressor as there are individuals that support the killing machine. Since the killing machine most brutally targets brown people, Churchill proposes that this pathology of pacifism (which enables the killing machine) is a supreme racism, no matter how politically correct one’s language and consumer choices are.

Resilience of the Pathology

The first problem is one of perception.

The single largest barrier to human perception in a hierarchy is the individual’s desire to maintain his/her status within the hierarchy, as measured by economic and class status.

This barrier to perception is so strong that it may as well be physiological. In most circumstances it is just as difficult for a slave to perceive that he/she is a slave as it would be for the slave to see in the ultraviolet segment of the light spectrum. “I need the master because he protects us and organizes the work…” Indeed, the largest practical challenge in Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed is to create circumstances and occasions in the hope that self-awareness of the subject’s oppression will be catalyzed and nurtured.

Similarly, it is virtually impossible for members of the First-World middle class to perceive the depth of their own oppression and exploitation. They reason that they are relatively privileged and therefore cannot be oppressed, and they adopt the oppressions of others; or they blame themselves for all “failures” and difficulties and practice self-destruction; or they displace their need for meaningful work and societal agency with any number of transfers and escapes; etc.

The second problem is one of perception.

Most of all, it is impossible for institutionalized individuals in the First-World middle class to perceive solutions that involve risk, the possibility of losing economic and social status. We have no experience of defending ourselves against our oppression. We only have the experience of an institutionalized existence of compliance where our lives are laid out in stages: school, graduations, diplomas, career development, student debt management, mortgage payments, retirement savings…

In addition to this, individuals subjected to a hierarchy of domination are trained to seek approval and to fit in. They lose the natural tendency to seek truth and instead accept and feed upon the “tapestry of lies” (both right and left) provided and maintained by power and its army of service intellectuals.⁴ , ¹⁸ Information that is contrary to the approved mental environment is considered threatening and is either vehemently rejected or ridiculed. A good example of this response is the vicious cynicism of so-called-progressive left citizens and “activists” that is reserved for “conspiracy nuts” such as the proponents (truthers) of the 911-truth movement.

Information that would cause the First World middle class activist to question his/her no-risk-to-status response to perceived (and transferred/displaced) injustices or to question the value of his/her longstanding investment in the particular adopted no-risk-to-status response to the perceived injustices is denied entry and attacked.¹⁹ It cannot be perceived as something that is potentially true. The truthers themselves, for example, can delve into off-the-charts considerations only because this information is not threatening to them: They have adopted the belief that simply uncovering the truth and exposing it and explaining it can produce the needed change, if only a critical mass of informed citizens can be achieved via cyber space and public event or media activism.

All in all, truth is not compatible with approval and individuals subjected to a hierarchy of domination have little regard for truth. The substitute of choice is “like-mindedness”. This is why so-called-progressives hold “education” in such high regard. They intuitively understand that flyering and documentary films (etc.) are effective ways to sway institutionalized citizens into a given variety of like-mindedness.

There is almost no realization among First World activists of Freire’s praxis of liberation via fighting one’s own oppression as the only way to uncover the truth about one’s life.

Conclusion and the Vitality of the Right

We should despise both the authoritarian Right which leads to corporate fascism and the paternalistic Left of socialism and communism which leads to communal castration and death of the individual. Both Rght authoritarianism and Left paternalism depend on and produce control hierarchies. All hierarchies are violently oppressive by nature.⁷

First World citizens cannot significantly contribute to the needed anti-hierarchy activism and will only accommodate power and protect the killing machine as long as they are unable to authentically perceive their own oppression by the same hierarchy that is violently oppressing us all because the obedience training of school, the indoctrination of graduate and professional schools, and the complete control of the worker by the finance-corporate economy are unmistakably violent processes that deprive us of our humanity.

In this regard, the Right is more effective than the Left. Left progressives mistakenly see their privilege as proof that they are not oppressed. In fact, their “privilege” is only the reward for accepting to be violated in making them into gatekeepers and supporters of the hierarchy. Intuitively they know that effective activism could compromise their “privilege.”

The Right activists, on the other hand, root their politics in individual rights and see themselves as threatened by structures and changes that would remove their individual rights. In this way, they are closer to the true impulse of the anti-hierarchy activist and therefore represent a formidable instrument of power when they are manipulated.

Leaving aside the religious fanatics on the Right that would impose their beliefs on us all and the political correctness fanatics on the Left that would impose their beliefs on us all, American libertarianism has deep roots and is a powerful potential ally of anarchy-inspired anti-hierarchy (pro-democracy!) activism.

To my reading, American libertarianism is not an insignificant fringe movement and probably has not been co-opted to the same degree as fringe left anarchism. Dedicated anti-hierarchy activists, the only hope for significant First World contributions to liberation, would do well to ally themselves with libertarians and to participate in the societal discourse about the place of libertarianism in society.

Damn yes, own guns, no required schooling, no bank bail outs, no head office corporate decisions, voluntary taxation, accountable politicians, no insurance company controls, accessible cost-recovery-interest community-bank loans to individuals, coops and small businesses, no party-selected candidates, no wars abroad, no surveillance or personal information gathering, complete transparency in public and corporate affairs, no prohibition of any substances, no personal lifestyle and work choice criminalization, voluntary personal safety decisions, no restrictions on growing your own food, decriminalized assisted (or not) suicides, no legal or government bankruptcy protections for creditors (people first), health freedom, no barriers to work, no corporate or government controlled media, only community-controlled corporations…

A consistent application of libertarian principles anchored in individual freedom could go a long way to dismantling oppressive structures.

1. “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith, 1776.
2. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848.
3. The Basic Bakunin – Writings 1869-1871 by Mikhail Bakunin.
4. For a discussion of the illusions provided and maintained by power see the essay “Some big lies of science” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
5. One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, 1964.
6. Pacifism as Pathology by Ward Churchill, 1986.
7. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, 1970.
8. “Need for and Practice of Student Liberation” (essay) by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
9. For an explanation applicable to the professional work environment see “Disciplined Minds” by Jeff Schmidt, 2000.
10. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, 1980.
11. “Activism and Risk – Life beyond altruism” (essay) by Denis G. Rancourt, 2007.
12. For example, see Understanding Power – The indispensable Chomsky by Noam Chomsky, 2002.
13. “Canadian Education as an Impetus towards Fascism” (essay) by Denis G. Rancourt, 2009.
14. “G20-Toronto and lost sovereignty — A critical examination of the role of the CCLA” (essay) by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
15. “Resolving the Israel-Palestine Conflict: What we can learn from Gandhi” by Norman G. Finkelstein, 2009.
16. See note-4, “Some Big Lies of Science”, for a discussion of the “medicine is health” lie.
17. “Taking CO2 Seriously” (essay) by David F. Noble and Denis G. Rancourt, 2007.
18. “Against Chomsky” (essay) by Denis G. Rancourt, 2008.
19. “The Activist Wars” (essay) by Denis G. Rancourt, 2009.

As the populations of Canada and the United States continue to be ruled by casino capitalism, wars without end, and widening economic gaps between rich and everyone else, some of the Left have begun asking why these conditions have not birthed significant forms of anti-authoritarian opposition, or whether such situations historically lead to dramatic social change.

Here at Dissident Voice, journalist Charles Davis’ recent piece on “The Limits of Liberalism” echoed a familiar sense in liberal and progressive quarters:

And that brings me to the recent primary elections, which I believe illustrate a point I have learned many times over since ‘06; namely, that electoral politics is at best a diversion, a tried-and-true means for the political establishment to channel public anger with the status quo in such a way that the status quo is never seriously threatened.

Davis’ realization happened in 2006, but anarchists have understood the malignant nature of states and representative politics for over a century. Davis, like many on the Left now emerging from the haze of corporate mass media indoctrination (especially in the form of the Obama Presidential campaign), provides advice for those looking to break free of statist politics:

Instead of banking on a politician improving our world, my advice? Improve yourself. Be an example to others. Work not on the behalf of a political party, but your community. Put simply, forget the polling booth and head to the soup kitchen. At least then you won’t be complicit in a bloodied, immoral system.

Why is such inspirational advice necessary at this moment? According to psychologist Bruce E. Levine, the Left needs morale-boosting not more information.

The barrage of recent leftist self-examinations began back in December with Levine’s “Are Americans a Broken People? Why We’ve Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression.” The essay, which found some circulation online, asked some basic questions about traditional liberal assumptions about the power of information to enlighten and empower individuals:

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

Levine compares the American public’s docility in the face of increasing tyranny to “abuse syndrome,” in which victims, afraid to leave the abusive relationship, are forced to endure more abuse. Offering such victims more information about the nature of their abusive relationship does not help them change their situation. Instead, argues Levine, the informational pile-on produces greater demoralization:

Perhaps the ‘political genius’ of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.

What people need are forms of morale boosting, he claims. The
April 2010 edition of Harper’s, the American liberal establishment magazine, contains a similar analysis, this time describing the state of being a subjugated American in terms of the CIA interrogation technique of “learned helplessness,” the application of random and repeated “no touch” torture such that prisoners simply give up.

Under the headline “The Vanishing Liberal,” author Kevin Baker writes:

We have learned to be helpless. And in this state of political depression, it no longer matters how many elections liberals win for the Democrats, or how badly Republican, right-wing policies fail or how much damage they do to the country or the world. There is simply no way to do anything differently.

Baker then explains how this fatalism is contrary to traditional American liberalism and its belief in “human agency.” Baker ends on a note as dramatic and fatalistic as he began:

There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in our politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it. The work will have to be done from the ground up, and it will have to be done by us.

Setting aside the laughable notion that the elites of America ever possessed some beneficent posture (part of an idealized liberal past, I suppose), the significance of Baker’s admissions and conclusions should not be overlooked: party politics in America is dead, and (in true anarchist fashion) “the work will have to be done from the ground up.

Italian Autonomist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, in his book Precarious Rhapsody, provides another explanation for the existence of this Great Liberal Depression:  the “psychopathogenic effects” of what he calls semio-capitalism, a “new regime” characterized by “the fusion of media and capital.” He writes:

Economic competition and digital intensification of informatic stimuli, combined together, induce a state of permanent electrocution that flows into a widespread pathology which manifests itself either in the panic syndrome or in attention disorders…. Depression descends on the cognitive worker because his or her own emotional, physical, intellectual system cannot indefinitely support the hyperactivity provoked by the market and by pharmaceuticals.

Berardi believes the new form of capitalism has produced “a psychopathic phenomenon of over-excitation, trembling, panic and finally of a depressive fall.” Berardi’s conclusions resemble Levine’s belief that the oppressed are overwhelmed by the new conditions of capital and media. Berardi writes quite explicitly, “The economic crisis depends for the most part on a circulation of sadness, depression, panic and demotivation.”

Is a moment like ours inevitable in the life of capitalism? “Is it ‘inevitable’ that capitalism will crash and produce the socialist-anarchist revolution?” asks Wayne Price in his March 2010 article for NEFAC. Price believes the current American Depression will continue and will worsen, along with environmental decay and state war-mongering. In response, he expects “an eventual new wave of popular radicalization, combining elements of the 30s and the 60s.”

According to Price, there are three basic narratives of how class struggle consciousness relates to capitalist crisis: the view that capitalism inevitably produces catastrophe and the working class response, or, as Marx and Engels wrote, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers”; the view held by liberals, which argues capitalism is not governed by deterministic laws, and that electoral politics might produce socialism, that “revolution is not needed”; and finally, the view that capitalism tends toward catastrophe, and so revolution, though not inevitable, is necessary to avoid “ruin and destruction.”

Price concludes:

One of these choices (ruin/barbarism/annihilation) will be the outcome if capitalism is given its head…. The other (revolutionary social-anarchism) requires that the working class become aware of the danger, conscious of the possible alternative to disaster, and decides to take the choice of freedom, cooperation, radical democracy, ecological balance, and internationalism…. The issue will be decided in struggle.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for anarchists to intervene in these liberal moments of depression and anxiety? Perhaps anarchists can be the group to transform liberal hopelessness into anarchist class struggle? When liberals admit the only avenue toward freedom, from this dire moment in history, is “from the ground up” and it will “have to be done by us,” what they are really saying is, “Only anarchism makes sense now.”

The next step is to educate liberals and others dispossessed of the current corporate statist order on the benefits of anarchism. This education should begin by dispelling common misunderstandings of anarchism, such as the idea that anarchism is about nothing but spreading chaos. As Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt describe in their recent book Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, anarchism has an international legacy of mass class struggle movements. In addition, various strands of anarchism exist and have provided philosophical and tactical forms of resistance against racism, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.

Surprisingly, and perhaps indicative of the desperation of the current situation, the next step is something on which Charles Davis, Bruce Levine, Kevin Baker, and Wayne Price could all agree: begin building communities from the ground up.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe depicts this anthropological causation. Defoe presents a character that is divested of civilization and summarily benefits—physically, psychologically, emotionally, and morally—as he is forced to live a primitive existence. Sadly, the titular figure makes the decision to replicate his lost culture and begins to suffer from many of the same ailments which he experienced prior to his separation from modern society.

Understandably, when Robinson Crusoe is first cast ashore, he worries whether he can survive. His fear is justified because, due to specialization, he does not possess the requisite skills to be self-sustaining. He knows nothing of how to construct a shelter or identify wild edibles. Only with the aide of a firearm and a naïve attitude toward the dangers of tropical water, does he progress through his first year.

By the commencement of his second year on the island, Crusoe has not only built a “castle,” but one replete with rafters, a thatched roof, shelving, two entrances, and a cellar. He fashions a table and chair along with various tools, such as a shovel and makeshift wheelbarrow. Through trial-and-error, he renders tallow from goat fat and crafts candles as well as a lamp. He learns to process food (dried grapes). Within the ensuing decade, he masters pottery, discovers the secrets to baking, engineers two boats, constructs a Dutch oven, teaches himself the art of basket weaving, and successfully tans hides and tailors his own clothing.

Crusoe is pleasantly surprised that his needs are not only met but surpassed by the island’s resources, “I possessed infinitely more than I knew what to do with.” He does become seriously ill shortly after his arrival but acute sickness is never mentioned again during his remaining 27 years on the island. This can be attributed to his heightened constitution, due not only to the nutritional diversity which the island affords—turtle, goat, fowl, hare, fish, eggs, and fruit, the latter in the form of grapes, melons, lemons, limes, and oranges—but his increased physical activity and improved mental health: He hosts an almost perpetual sense of accomplishment atop (which he makes explicit note) being relieved of social and familial pressures, expectations, and demands. Once he establishes a routine by which to sustain his daily needs, he finds that he is in possession of ample leisure time, whereby he takes up the “hobbies” (by definition, enterprises which are not vital to survival) of woodworking (as opposed to carpentry), tailoring, pottery, baking, and basket weaving.

Civilization demands that humans gain and retain absolute control. This is achieved by the immediate environment being domesticated so it no longer poses a threat before it is exploited in order to better serve a populace. Once this is completed, any (perceived) dangers posited by fellow humans are addressed in a like manner. This totalitarian approach to existence is in stanch contrast to organic integration into a previously or currently existing schematic. Anthropocentrism quickly transforms into ethnocentrism so as to further provide for a specific group, i.e. a particular society. Sadly, Crusoe begins emulating and replicating the civilization and society from which he has been cast.

His “civilized” tendencies first affect only him. He observes that the climate does not require one to be clothed and, as we see with the aborigines of the region, is actually prohibitive. His decision to remain almost fully dressed heightens the risk of dehydration (which perhaps contributed to his aforementioned ailment given he had yet to acclimate to the tropical weather¹ ). Also, despite admitting that money has no intrinsic value outside a society which acknowledges currency, “Alas! there the sorry, useless stuff lay [in a cave where it proceeded to mold]; I had no more manner of business for it,” he nonetheless puts himself at repeated risk while attempting to procure coinage. Though he states he does so for aesthetic reasons, he erects a second shelter, his “bower,” and—though one could argue this is a preventative measure should something happen to his “castle” (as witnessed when an earthquake occurred and a hurricane struck the island during the first year)—Crusoe’s capricious want foreshadows his ensuing, and otherwise avoidable, grief.

During a week-long furlong to his “bower,” Crusoe leaves a kid tethered at his “castle.” The goat nearly dies of dehydration. Though the animal was not kept as food, this incident nevertheless presages the trials of animal husbandry, which he will later devote himself. When he realizes that his gunpowder supply is diminishing, he begins utilizing traps and snares. However, shortly thereafter and believing such to be more economic, he builds a corral and proceeds to tame and breed goats. Likewise, he “accidentally” (after disposing of what he thought were mere husks) sows barley (before adding rice to his crop). He then dedicates his energies to horticulture. Granted, agriculture avails him to the possibilities of butter, bread, and cheese but it isn’t necessary for survival and results in a master-slave relationship that, inevitably, will be conveyed to people.

Crusoe was contented—and survived—upon the island’s resources yet, when he gains access to commodities which he prefers (as opposed to requires), he arbitrarily obligates himself: Not only must he plant, cultivate, and render seed, he has to feed, water, and supervise the goats and maintain their pen, atop crafting storage units (so as to keep his goods in ready supply). In a survival situation, any unnecessary expenditure, especially ones which run the risk of injury (such as carpentry), is undeniably foolish. (Which is why trapping and snaring are the best hunting methods for they are safer than using a firearm and more economic in respect to time and energy.) Though we could defend his decision to build a second shelter, few will argue that food storage isn’t a luxury, especially when produce is available year-round, and—more importantly—rearing livestock is dangerous. These stresses are compounded by the possibility of crop failure (the probability of which is abruptly increased by the cultivation of potentially invasive flora) and livestock losses as leisure time summarily diminishes due to agricultural responsibilities. As such, the “bower” becomes useless, the energy involved in its construction wasted, as the risks incurred in building it vain. Moreover, these “conveniences” capriciously restrict Crusoe’s naturally diversified diet.

Crusoe’s mental and emotional strain is further exacerbated when he discovers a foreign footprint in the sand. After 15 years of having “nothing to covet,” he fears that “[ . . . ] they [natives] [will] find my enclosure, destroy all my corn, and carry away all my flock of tame goats, and I should perish at last for mere want.” It is worthy to note that Crusoe refuses to acknowledge that, prior to his agricultural endeavors, a hunter-gatherer existence had sustained him and, thus, if said destruction were to occur, it would not result in his inevitable starvation. Upon finding the mysterious print, he spends three days in hiding and only reappears when he can no longer afford to neglect his goats. Had a threat been present, his arbitrary dependency upon livestock might have cost Crusoe his life. He devotes the next two years to reinforcing his “castle” and, to better veil his herd, builds another corral further into the island, all while abstaining from fire craft or engaging in any leisure activities for fear of being discovered. (It could also be conjectured that the illness he suffered during his first year on the island was due to unpurified water, which he now makes himself susceptible once again.² ) At the heart of Crusoe’s paranoia lies in his residual culturally-induced imperialism: Aware that other individuals might manifest themselves, i.e. a potential society, he claims private ownership of everything around him (note the frequency of possessives within the previous quotation) because he believes a hierarchy must necessarily exist—of which, he presumes he naturally resides at its apex—and, ergo, that others will desire what he “owns” as a consequence, so much so that he lives in crippling fear for approximately a decade. Whereas he once rejoiced that, “I was removed from all the wickedness of the world here; I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, nor the pride of life,” when (the mere thought of) a society presents itself, Crusoe’s hubris returns.

His propriety over objects and animals quickly metamorphoses into domestication and ownership of people. Once more, this is merely an extension of one of civilization’s creeds: A person must control one’s surroundings. He rescues a Caribbean native from being cannibalized—not on moral grounds—but because Crusoe is in need of additional labor. Unnecessary augmenting the island’s population puts both parties at risk of contracting disease and is a mortal liability for Crusoe given that the autochthon is a cannibal. Crusoe’s apprehension is evident in his forcing the aborigine to sleep outside the “castle’s” fortifications. In hopes of subduing the threat, he neutralizes the native by eradicating his identity: Crusoe issues him an English title, “Friday” (thus depriving him of his given name), Christianizing him (negating his religion), and—perhaps paradoxically—assimilating him to European customs (dispossessing him of his culture). A further irony is that Crusoe was once enslaved yet regards and treats Friday as ethnically subservient, as epitomized by Crusoe’s insistence that Friday refer to him as “Master.” Crusoe proceeds to rescue others and tyrannize them, i.e. a Spanish refugee is described as “my [Crusoe’s] Spaniard.”

Crusoe sends out a rescue mission and, in preparation for greater numbers returning, he expands crops, domesticates more goats, dries additional grapes, and weaves extra baskets in order to transport a greater amount of goods. Before the mission’s return, mutineers dock and are quelled. After subverting them, since they too are products of specialization, he teaches five of the insurgents agriculture before leaving them the island. Years later, he returns to find the island’s population so great (children are now present after women were brought from the mainland) that he designates private plots for each of its residents. (The irony is that he postpones his return to the island, in part, due to owning a Brazilian plantation which he cannot personally oversee atop fretting about the security of his money while abroad.) Not only does he compound the dilemma by adding two workmen to the colony (growing numbers necessitates the arrival of technology in the form of a blacksmith) but he sends for more supplies and women from Brazil and England. Of these goods, cows and hogs are included, which implies that he believes (and perhaps rightfully so by this time), that the island cannot—or will not in the near future—naturally sustain its human occupants. Also, as with his request for Brazilian women, bringing foreign fauna to the island runs the risk of importing disease which could result in the demise of the island’s indigenous livestock and, conversely, introduce the new fauna to native illness. Thus, if—for whatever reason—the island’s populace had to resort to a hunter-gatherer existence, Crusoe’s induction of civilization, especially in the guise of agriculture, might inhibit survival because the islanders’ unregulated numbers are now dependent upon set yields (war, the consequence of class division and/or hubris, ruined a previous year’s crops), the native habitat may be unable to support present numbers, and/or the island’s ecosystem might be compromised.

When Robinson Crusoe first arrives on the island, he adopts anarcho-primitivist principles and soon finds himself happier than he had ever been.³ Unfortunately, he decides to abide by the dictums of civilization and, as a result, his newfound contentment promptly vanishes. Though for many years his ensuing discomfort is singular and self-inflicted, he departs from the island after instilling its remaining members with the ideals which deprived him of a rewarding existence. The inevitable consequence is that the island’s inhabitants will not be afforded the life which Crusoe once enjoyed nor will the island be able to sustain its populace as it once had.

1. We cannot issue Crusoe benefit of the doubt because Defoe shifts the location of the island where his source material was lost—Alexander Selkirk was stranded 400 miles west of central Chile—to Tobago, which is found off the northeast shore of Venezuela. Thus, it is appropriate that Selkirk was clad in fur when he appeared to his rescuers because Más a Tierra’s temperate rarely rises above 80°F yet the average low is slightly above freezing. This is contrast to Crusoe’s locale—which is only 11 latitudinal degrees from the Equator—where the average daily high is 90° and the low almost never dips below 75°. Nevertheless, and perhaps due to the social implications of wearing such, Crusoe does not strip his pelts of fur.
2. Though he could be utilizing the sterile acquisition methods of solar stills, rain catchment, dew collection, water vines, and condensation bags during this time, given the region’s climate, it is doubtful that he could avoid dehydration without boiling water.
3. As outlined in John Howell’s 1844 The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, http://dissidentvoice.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=16714&message=1R.L. Megroz’s 1939 The Real Robinson Crusoe, and Richard Steele’s 1713 article from The Englishman titled “Alexander Selkirk” (in which the author interviews the castaway), after his rescue, Selkirk longed to return to the life he had on Más a Tierra. In In Search of Robinson Crusoe, Daisuke Takahashi even conjectures that, prior to his death by yellow fever, Selkirk set to sea once more with the intention of returning, perhaps permanently, to the island.

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

– Michel de Montaigne

There is a scene in Louie Psihoyos’ film The Cove where a dolphin looks at itself in a mirror. It doesn’t ignore the image, look past it or mistake it for another dolphin. It performs a serious of maneuvers, swimming upside down, righting itself, gyrating this way and that. It looks into its own eyes. It is a conscious being.

In case you missed it, The Cove is a documentary exploring the plight of dolphins in captivity, as well as the annual dolphin slaughter in the Japanese village of Taiji. Among the more interesting facts exposed by the filmmakers: prior to the slaughter, dolphin “trainers” select the best specimens (driven into pens by a wall of ships using acoustic devices) to be imprisoned in “dolphinariums” across the globe. It establishes a direct link between dolphins in captivity – a multi-billion dollar industry – and the horrific butchery at Taiji.

Sea World and other “respectable” aquariums have apparently stopped acquiring dolphins via capture, choosing to breed the animals instead. “Breed” is a euphemism, and I don’t mean sex. Online videos reveal the grotesque spectacle of Sea World trainers masturbating sedated orcas and collecting the semen in plastic bags.

Whether kidnapped or bred, The Cove makes a compelling case that for dolphins and other cetaceans, captivity amounts to torture. One can extrapolate this to most wild animals in captivity, with varying degrees of evidentiary support.

Scientists now argue that the intelligence of dolphins may rival or even surpass our own.

In the wild, dolphins live in highly evolved and complex social structures bearing unique cultures, languages and interpersonal relationships. They swim vast distances in a single day. They have sex for pleasure. They play practical jokes on other species. They comfort one another. Like humans, they have been known to engage in what we call atrocities (albeit on a much, much smaller scale) including infanticide, rape, and cannibalism. Also like humans, dolphins have been known to come to the rescue of other species in peril – in their case, us.

Their primary means of navigating the world is sound.

Quite obviously, being locked in what amounts to a bathtub, bombarded with noisy music and boisterous crowds, denied their traditional social structures and relationships, and forced to “perform” in exchange for dead food is not a healthy or “humane” living environment for the ocean’s most intelligent creature. Nor is this really open to debate. We now know that dolphins in captivity (including orcas or “Killer Whales”) develop symptoms akin to neurosis. In an average seven year time span, half of all captive dolphins perish.  Causes include pneumonia, intestinal disease, chlorine poisoning, and a variety of stress-related illnesses.

Like caged parrots tearing out their feathers, captive dolphins frequently abuse themselves by banging their heads against the walls of their tanks.

For spectators, the willingness to patronize organizations like Sea World can be attributed to ignorance. “The dolphin’s smile”, says former dolphin trainer turned activist Ric O’Barry in The Cove, “is nature’s greatest deception”. It is highly unlikely that even a small percentage of Sea World customers understand that these beloved aquatic performers are living in a state of profound distress. One cannot say the same of the “trainers” and other professionals.

Jason Hribal, author of the forthcoming book Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance, exposes the disturbing history of orcas in captivity. While orca whales do not knowingly attack human beings in the wild (and have never killed one of us, so far as we know) they frequently do so under our “care”. Incidents range from orcas leaping out of the water and slapping human beings in the head with their pectoral fins, to orcas violently dragging trainers around their pools and submerging them under water until they drown. The history reveals an unmistakable pattern of calculated aggression. In an article published in Counterpunch, Hribal outlines one incident involving an orca in San Antonio:

The orca jumped on top of his trainer and repeatedly pushed the man underwater. Sea World, afterwards, tried to pass the incident off as rough play, saying that at no time was the trainer in danger. Witnesses did not buy it. As one of them explained, ‘the whale was staying between the [exit] ramp and the trainer and finally the trainer jumped on top of the whale’s back and leaped over him and another trainer caught him.’ At that point, ‘the whale turned around and slammed down on the ramp and he was pretty upset that the trainer got out of the pool.’

And another:

We do not know which orca it was that started it, but all three, Nootka, Haida, and Tilikum, took their turns dunking the screaming woman underwater. ‘She went up and down three times,’ another visitor continued. The Sealand employees ‘almost got her once with the hook pole, but they couldn’t because the whales were moving so fast.’ One trainer tossed out a floatation ring, but the whales would not let her grab it. In fact, the closer that such devices got to the young woman, the further out the whales pulled her into the pool. It took park officials two hours to recover her drowned body.’

Dozens of such incidents have slipped through Sea World’s carefully manufactured PR wall (including numerous attacks by “smiling” or bottlenose dolphins). Hundreds if not thousands are likely to have occurred behind the scenes. In all likelihood these are not “playful” mistakes but expressions of pent up rage. For some reason, we have no problem with the idea that a tiger might lash out in anger at a Siegfried or Roy, but recoil at the suggestion that orcas might do something similar to the perky slave-masters at Sea World.

Why don’t they bite us in half or swallow us whole? Luckily enough, human beings have never been on the orca’s menu. Their failure to react with frequent and extreme violence is far more likely to be a sign of intelligence than lack thereof.

The sole remaining justification for places like Sea World is that they serve a vital educational role. I’m a good case study in establishing the absurdity of this claim.

I was taken to the Vancouver Aquarium several times as a boy, where several orcas were held captive (a few belugas remain). I remember being dumbstruck at their awesome power, but don’t recall really appreciating them as a species until I encountered them in the wild or watched a documentary video (I can’t remember which came first).

As a teenager, I was lucky enough to have occasional access to beachfront property on Saturna Island in British Colombia. The first time I encountered wild orcas was in a tiny fishing boat about the size of a bathtub. As the pod approached, my father turned off the motor and told me to reel up my line. He informed me that “killer whales” do not attack humans. He also expressed displeasure at the “whale watching” boat traveling about twenty feet behind the pod. I would like to tell you I was the picture of valor during this encounter, but the truth is that I was scared shitless.

It is difficult to communicate the sensation of sitting in a tiny boat in the middle of a dozen or so ten-ton animals with jaws the size of Volkswagen bugs. Orcas attack everything from polar bears to great white sharks to whales ten times their size. Moose have been found in their stomachs. They are the apex predator of their environment. To a puny little human, they can be very frightening indeed. Wildlife filmmaker Martha Holmes (of BBC Blue Planet fame) had this to say on the subject:

Two words describe my first encounter with killer whales in the wild: absolutely terrifying.

Yet a strange thing happened that day, sitting in my little fishing boat: as they began gliding gracefully by, not even nudging us, my fear was replaced with respect.

I’ve seen orca pods on about 20 different occasions, one while snorkeling. Each incident was exhilarating in its own way. I eventually became so comfortable around the animals that when a pod swam by, I’d row out to meet them. Foolish? Probably. But they never once rocked my boat.

Seeing orcas in nature imbues you with a deep appreciation for the animal – not least because they don’t make mince meat of you. The same appreciation can be taught from a good documentary, article or book. Sea World teaches the opposite lessons. It teaches us that it’s acceptable to take the ocean’s apex predator, confine it to a virtual swimming pool and force it to perform stupid tricks for our passable amusement. It’s degrading for both species. In the end, it’s really not much different than forcing a bear to ride a unicycle while wearing a silly hat.

We heard the usual excuses in the wake of orca “trainer” Dawn Brancheau’s death at the hands of “Tilikum the killer whale” at Sea World. The animal was only “playing”, the trainer screwed up, it was a horrible “accident”. Eyewitness reports of the orca seizing her by the waist and violently thrashing her about were replaced by a story of Dawn’s ponytail “brushing Tilikum’s nose” and causing some sort of bizarre Orcoid reflex. Some suggested her hair became caught in the big dumb animal’s teeth, and that Tilikum was actually attempting to dislodge her from his massive jaw when tragedy ensued.

Other commentators argued that Tilikum was a “serial killer killer whale” (Dawn was the third victim). Call it the bad apple theory applied to marine biology. The American Family Association urged Sea World to put the animal to death. Quoting Exodus 21:28 (“When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable”), they dismissed out of hand the notion that the animal had any rights of its own.

At this point, one is tempted to argue that Tilikum the Killer Whale is, in all probability, more intelligent that the folks at the American Family Association. This is not meant in jest. Controversial anti-whaling activist Paul Watson (star of the highly popular Whale Wars on Animal Planet) notes in his article “Why Killing Whales is Murder”:

One difference that has been used for years to differentiate humans from all other animals is the presence of spindle neurons in the human brain. These specialized brain cells are thought to process emotion and are the cells behind feelings of love and grief. The spindle cells are located in the parts of the human brain linked with social organization, empathy, speech, and intuition.

Amazingly, a recent research project has revealed that these spindle cells reside in the same area of the brain in humpback whales, fin whales, orcas, and sperm whales as in humans. More importantly, they have existed in cetacean brains for much longer than humans have had them. Even more amazing is that proportionally these whales have three times as many of these spindle cells in their brains as humans have.

All this added to the fact that whale brains are larger, four-lobed compared to our three, and have more convolutions on the neo-cortex than humans and we are looking at the possibility of a sentient creature that has emotions, thinking abilities, self awareness, and is capable of intense suffering and grief.

‘Their potential for high-level brain function, clearly demonstrated already at the behavioural level, is confirmed by the existence of neuronal types once thought unique to humans and our closest relatives.’

[Professor] Hof added, ‘Dolphins communicate through huge song repertoires, recognize their own songs, and make up new ones. They also form coalitions to plan hunting strategies, teach these to younger individuals, and have evolved social networks similar to those of apes and humans.’

In a review of The Cove, a writer for the Japan times echoes a popular sentiment: “If dolphin killing is banned, why shouldn’t the slaughters of cows and pigs be banned as well?”

The analogy is not particularly helpful. Dolphins and whales are wild animals, and very few Japanese people eat them or are even aware of events like the annual slaughter at Taiji. A better comparison would be to ask: “What’s the difference between eating a chimp or a gorilla and eating a whale or dolphin?” Or: “What’s the difference between eating a lion or grizzly bear and eating a whale or dolphin?”

Because dolphins and whales (and sharks) are the apex predators of their environment, they are vitally important in maintaining the balance of the ocean’s ecosystems. They also take much longer to repopulate when they become endangered. The health of these animals is vital to the ocean’s health – and therefore human health – as a whole. Even in the absence of ethical considerations their slaughter is not only cruel and gratuitous but foolhardy in the extreme.

When we kill these animals we play with fire. As much as we like to pretend we have nature pretty much figured out, the truth is that we don’t know all that much about our own environments, let alone the ocean. Barely a day goes by in which some new discovery challenges previous assumptions or leaves experts perplexed. Recently, scientists discovered that blue whales are now singing in a richer, deeper tone. Why?

It’s a mystery said whale acoustic researcher Mark McDonald, co-author of a report on the recent findings. “It got to be really problematic when we started digging and hey, they’re going in the same direction all around the world yet they’re different song types.”

Biologists Hal Whitehead notes of the peculiar trend:

The exciting possibility, I think, is that they’re all listening to each other. This is a worldwide cultural phenomenon, and that’s very cool.

According to The Cove, the dolphin killers in Taiji are not motivated solely by the profit that dolphins – dead or alive – brings to their community. There is an element of misplaced nationalism at play, and there is also an element of equally misplaced inter-species competition. Many of the fishermen regard the slaughter as a form of “pest control”. Dolphins eat fish, ergo, they are our competitors.

Similar sentiments are often expressed by advocates of the barbaric seal slaughter in Canada. The seals are eating up all the cod, therefore their population needs to be kept in check. John Efford, former Canadian Minister of Natural Resources, spoke none too delicately of this widespread concern:

Mr. Speaker, I would like to see the 6 million seals, or whatever number is out there, killed and sold, or destroyed and burned. I do not care what happens to them…the more they kill the better, I will love it.

When critics point out that the East coast seal population was once five-to-ten times its current size, and that cod were nevertheless so plentiful that “the sea there is full of fish that can be taken not only with nets but with fishing-baskets, a stone being placed in the basket to sink it in the water” (John Cabot, 1497), seal hunt advocates use human mismanagement of fish stocks as further justification for the slaughter. Alas, we fucked it up so bad we have no choice but to continue driving spikes into the skulls of baby seals.

In reality, there is virtually no evidence that killing seals increases cod, and quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. There are at least twenty species of fish in the coastal waters of Newfoundland that prey on cod. The seals, in turn, prey upon the cod’s predators as well as the cod itself. Food webs are exceedingly complex, and cannot be reduced to a simple “human-seal-cod” or “human-dolphin-fish” dynamic. Clupeids have been identified as major predators of cod eggs and larvae in the Baltic. Guess who eats clupeids?

Strangely enough, there seems to be a good deal of online hostility toward The Cove. Some of the anger derives from people who feel the film treats Japanese people unfairly; in other cases it can be traced to a belief that animals should not have any sort of “rights”, and that suggesting as much is akin to religious blasphemy, cultural imperialism or anti-human bias.

Charges of “Japan bashing” have been leveled at the filmmakers. This is unfair, but also understandable. Regrettably, the film fails to mention the annual pilot whale slaughter in the Faroe Islands (Denmark) by European people. It also fails to mention the thousands of dolphins killed every year by driftnets. The Cove laudably establishes a link between the dolphin slaughter and the callous attitudes that allows the continuing degradation of the oceans, but where is mention that 50% of all seafood ends up in the food dishes of livestock living on factory farms? The second greatest predator of fish is not the seal, or the whale, or the shark – it is the pig.

There is no question, however, that Japan holds the current title for greatest defiler of our oceans. Since the 1931 Geneva Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, Japan has consistently ignored quotas, international boundaries and species protections. Currently, under the guise of “scientific research”, they butcher hundreds of whales in the wildly misnamed Antarctic whale sanctuary. Each killing is an atrocity in itself, with some whales taking up to an hour to perish. Explosive-tipped harpoons strike the first blow, followed by electrocution and prolonged drowning.

Recently, the Japanese government successfully lobbied against a proposed ban on the fishing of bluefin tuna by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Bluefin are critically endangered, and will likely go extinct in the near future. One might expect, considering Japan’s voracious appetite for the prized fish, that they would have led the charge in ensuring its survival. But to suggest as much would be to overlook a far more important consideration than sushi: profit.

In Japan, a bluefin currently sells for about $100,000. The more endangered the fish becomes, the more expensive it is to buy, the more eager are fishermen to catch it. Ain’t capitalism grand?

When it comes to dolphins and whales, neither taste nor sustenance is at issue. The meat tastes like especially fatty spam, or so I’m told, and if killing dolphins may once have provided essential nourishment to the town of Taiji (this is also unlikely), it is no longer necessary. It is however profitable. A live dolphin can go for a cool one-hundred-fifty-thousand. Thus are our closest cousins in the ocean reduced to circus freaks and delicacies.

A group of scientists recently claimed that the dolphin is so intelligent that it should qualify as a “non-human person”.

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

There are many assumptions at play here, the most glaring of which is the idea that human-defined “intelligence” should be the deciding factor in the way we treat other animals (rather than, say, the ability to feel pain). But let us run with the concept.

Religious fundamentalists, amongst others, are obviously not too keen on the prospect of dolphins being granted “personhood” status. Only humans have souls, so the theory goes, and to advocate otherwise is blasphemous.  In fact, it’s a restriction on human “freedom”.

The reductionism of dolphin = any other animal is important in this respect. It maintains our position upon God’s special throne and keeps nature in its proper place – beneath our collective boot.

To be fair to the right-wing Christians and libertarians, it is not difficult to find misanthropic sentiments amongst some environmentalists. Often these remarks come from extremely wealthy individuals who would undoubtedly save the life of an endangered whale over the life of an endangered human living in poverty. Prince Philip expressed his desire to return to earth as a “deadly virus” in order to reduce the human population. Henry Kissinger once stated, “Depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World.” Dr. Eric R. Pianka argued in a speech at the Texas Academy of Science, “We’re no better than bacteria!” and said that the human population should be reduced by 90%.

Strangely absent in the work of “human cull” advocates is the work of Frances Moore Lappe. Debunking Malthus with a vengeance, her work reveals that “antidemocratic power structures create and perpetuate conditions keeping fertility high” and that “children are poor people’s source of power”:

In sum, convincing historical evidence suggests that when individuals and families are gaining power because their rights are protected – particularly the rights to education, medical care including contraception, old-age security, and access to income-producing resources – they no longer have to depend only on their own families for survival.

Thus are progressive social values such as equality and social justice inextricably wed to environmental protection. Paradoxically, it is not overpopulation that creates poverty; it is poverty that creates overpopulation. Eventually, you end up with a sort of vicious cycle in which one begets the other.

The failure of many environmentalists to link hierarchical, anti-democratic socio-economic structures with the pillaging of Mother Earth is perhaps the single greatest stumbling block to achieving real sustainability. It is far easier to recommend lifestyle changes (minimize your meat intake, use less toilet paper, recycle) than to recommend a radical restructuring of our political and economic systems. The problem with limiting our critique to lifestyle choices is that the system keeps on humming along regardless, fish after fish, tree after tree. Endless growth is the defining characteristic of our modern economies, and endless growth spells suicide.

In his advocacy of libertarian socialism or “participatory democracy”, Noam Chomsky spoke convincingly on the relationship between institutionalized hierarchy and environmental destruction:

The reality is that under capitalist conditions – meaning maximization of short-term gain – you’re ultimately going to destroy the environment: the only question is when. Now, for a long time, it’s been possible to pretend that the environment is an infinite source and an infinite sink. Neither is true obviously, and we’re now sort of approaching the point where you can’t keep playing the game too much longer. It may not be very far off. Well, dealing with that problem is going to require large-scale social changes of an almost unimaginable kind. For one thing, it’s going to certainly require large-scale social planning, and that means participatory social planning if it’s going to be all meaningful. It’s also going to require a general recognition among human beings that an economic system driven by greed is going to self-destruct – it’s only a question of time before you make the planet unlivable.

Agreements don’t require centralized authority, certain kinds of agreements do. One’s assumption, at least, is that decentralization of power will lead to decisions that reflect the interests of the entire population. The idea is that policies flowing from any kind of decision-making apparatus are going to tend to reflect the interests of the people involved in making the decisions—which certainly seems plausible. So if a decision is made by some centralized authority, it is going to represent the interests of the particular group which is in power. But if power is actually rooted in large parts of the population—if people can actually participate in social planning—then they will presumably do so in terms of their own interests, and you can expect the decisions to reflect those interests. Well, the interest of the general population is to preserve human life; the interest of corporation is to make profits—those are fundamentally different interests.

Having jobs doesn’t require destroying the environment which makes life possible. I mean, if you have participatory social planning, and people are trying to work things out in terms of their own interests, they are going to want to balance opportunities to work with quality of work, with the type of energy available, with conditions of personal interaction, with the need to make sure your children survive, and so on and so forth. But those are all considerations that simply don’t arise for corporate executives, they just are not a part of the agenda. In fact, if the C.E.O. of General Electric started making decisions on that basis, he’d be thrown out his job in three seconds, or maybe there’d be a corporate takeover or something – because those things are not a part of his job. His job is to raise profit and market share, not make sure that the environment survives, or that his workers lead decent lives. And those goals are simply in conflict.

We have reached the point where “save the humans” might be just as accurate a slogan for the environmental movement as “save the whales”.

Antibiotics used in factory farms are creating a breeding ground for “superbugs”; Avian influenza, swine flu and other viruses are emerging with alarming regularity; Monsanto’s genetically modified crops were recently linked to liver and kidney damage; a study of 291 freshwater streams by the US Geological Survey found that more than two-thirds of the fish contained unsafe mercury levels; pesticides used in industrial agriculture are killing off the honey bees (responsible for pollinating more than 90 million crops in the United States alone).

Chemical pollution is causing an explosion in cancer rates. Dr. Dominique Belpome, a French cancer specialist, charted a 35% rise between 1980 and 2000 among the same age groups in France. He argues that 70% of all cancers are of environmental origin. Cancer rates in Canada are growing twice as fast as the population.

Human beings are causing the greatest mass extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. According to a survey of 400 scientists, this “mass extinction event” is more dangerous to the survival of our species than “pollution, global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer.”

90% of the big fish in the ocean have disappeared. Again, according to scientists, “If the serial depletions continue unabated, major seafood stocks will collapse by 2048.” Seven out of ten human beings rely on seafood for their primary source of protein. If the oceans die – we die.

This isn’t a question of mere greed. Corporations are mandated by law to maximize profits regardless of social or environmental cost (see Dodge v. Ford). It should not be surprising, therefore, that overfishing has become the rule, any less that factory farming has emerged as the logical means by which we raise and slaughter livestock, or sweatshops the preferred method of producing commodities.

For warriors on the front lines – animal liberationists, sea shepherds, Earth Firsters – it is tempting to embrace a certain level of misanthropy. What kind of a dumb species spoils its own nest? And why should we care about the livelihood of fishermen or loggers when blue collar workers in countless other industries are being laid off by the hundreds of thousands due to “free trade” agreements, corporate downsizing and off-shoring of jobs?

I think it’s important to look at the bigger picture.

The reality is that so long as workers are living in a state of desperation, there will be more than enough bodies to dump toxic effluent from your friendly local factory farm into your once pristine waterways. So long as people can barely afford to eat, or are too busy working overtime to cook a good meal, McDonald’s and Burger King will persist in fattening up the populace. So long as dolphinariums make a killing, the killing of dolphins will continue.

I am sympathetic to people who scoff at “mainstream” or “liberal” environmentalists.

Most workers are too worried about their own horrific living conditions to consider the horrific living conditions of the former cow in their Big Mac. When a Bono or an Al Gore exit their private jets to lecture the plebs about sustainability, disgust is an entirely appropriate response. Many people, especially urbanites, cannot afford or do not have access to organic produce or meat from local farmers.

Ultimately, the worker/environment dichotomy is fallacious. It’s nothing more than a ruse designed by corporations to create hostility between workers and shield environmental pillage with the threat of unemployment. It suggests that the interests of animals/nature and man/sustenance/health are diametrically opposed. The opposite is true.

Real environmentalism recognizes the rights of human beings as well as the rights of dolphins. As much as we like to pretend otherwise, we are all, after all, part of the environment. This includes the “useless eaters” in the “third world” that eco-misanthropes like Prince Phillip would slaughter in the name of sustainability.

The Cove is important because it refuses to succumb to the either/or proposition. It links human health to animal health, and it also opens the door to an expanding awareness of the rights of animals in general.

If we can’t even extend human compassion to the most intelligent animal in the ocean – by all indications, a “non-human person” – then the prospects for doing so with other, allegedly “lesser” animals are bleak. This also applies to the human animal himself, who (let’s face it) should probably be placed on the endangered species list right alongside the bluefin tuna. It’s not just about saving other creatures, it’s about saving ourselves. From ourselves. At the very least, it’s about rescuing certain quaint notions about “humanity” which no longer seem justified – that we are capable of acting rationally, that we care about the fate of our grandchildren, and that short-term profit is not the sole impetus for our collective behavior.

The emerging consensus amongst scientists and environmentalists regarding our relationship with nature is not a leap forward but a leap backward. It represents a final, lasting recognition that indigenous peoples had it right after all.   What Frederick Turner described as “The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness” – the urge to conquer rather than co-exist, exploit rather than liberate – was doomed to failure from the moment we started viewing mother nature as the enemy rather than the protector.  The current, hollow speeches about green capitalism and sustainable development are the last gasps of a dying system.

Real, participatory democracy in both the political and economic realms will allow communities to act collectively and to consider factors other than short term profit. It is time for the mainstream environmental movement to recognize this fundamental correlation and act upon it. Save the whales. Save the humans.

I can only say, and I think millions would say with me, that to prohibit doctors from accepting Medicaid patients with vision, hearing, foot or tooth problems is inhuman. These are the poorest of the poor people whom we are talking about. People with these problems are primarily the elderly. So do they just want to kill off the elderly faster?

In addition, Michael Moore, in his latest article “The Green They Steal, The Greed They Wear …a St. Patrick’s Day Lament ,”says that women on Medicaid will not be allowed to give birth in any hospital in that area northwest of Flint. Here are the concrete facts and signs indicating America’s collapse into third world nation status. It is painful to read about. It is even more painful to watch. It is very painful to come out of the train at New York Penn Station and pass by a man lying down face down on the concrete with head in his hands, as if in desperation at where to go or how to live any longer.

I am protesting here at the state of America and the state of the world. These are all signs of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. There is no call, no excuse, to leave a man lying on the concrete by the train tracks in sub-freezing temperatures. Why should any man feel that desperate?

When an economic system, such as capitalism, causes thousands to commit suicide, when an economic system, such as capitalism, causes millions to die a slow, painful death from starvation, when an economic system, such as capitalism, allows our political leaders to ignore the sufferings of the toiling, labouring masses, whom we can call wage slaves, then what are we to do? We need to think about annihilating that economic system called capitalism, which wreaks havoc around the world and now here in America. We need to think about replacing that killer of human beings called capitalism with something that works.

In my humble opinion, an economic system that works might be Prout. We do not have to be preoccupied with the word Prout. But, we should examine its tenets. Its practical step-by-step principles. Prout says decentralize the economy. Give economic power to the local people. Create a country wherein every community, every hamlet, every village, every town, controls its own economic destiny. Prout says set up every business as a cooperative. Business cooperatives cause members to think not for themselves but for the entire collective. It compels people in a sweet manner to think and work collectively rather than individually. Is it not a good thing? We do not see that in capitalism, do we?

Prout says grow local, buy local. Produce local, buy local. This keeps money rolling. This keep people employed. Isn’t it? How happy we will feel to see that every man and woman in our community who wants a job, has a job. How happy we will feel to live in a community or town where no one has fear of being laid off, no one has to go through the humiliation of being unemployed and unable to put food on the table.

Prout says control our own health care system locally. Produce our own medicines, leaning heavily on ayurvedic, homeopathic and unani medical systems. Then we will not see any more iatrogenic illnesses. The thousands of iatrogenic fatalities occuring annually in America and other countries will come to a screeching halt, isn’t it?

Prout says implement the barefoot doctor system. Let the medical students and volunteers visit every home in the world to inquire if the residents are okay, if their health is okay, if they need anything, any medicine, any hygiene supplies, any physiotherapy, or if they need simple human companionship.

Prout says no outsiders coming into a community to plunder its resources, its coal, timber, limestone and other minerals resting quietly under the ground. No more outsiders! They are called capitalists! No more capitalist outsiders allowed into our communities to plunder and exploit the sweet, simple humanity!

These are simple tenets, are they not? Tenets that hold the key to economic freedom for the toiling masses. This is Prout – in a nutshell. Other tenets are there. But how much to write here?

Here is another tenet. There must be a ceiling placed on the maximum amount of income anyone can accumulate. That ceiling should be determined by the people themselves, not by any government. We know that if one man has billions, he is taking billions out of the mouths of the hungry and starving, right? Because when capitalists turn profit into their God, they become ruthless beyond measure. All sorts of beautiful social service programs for the elderly, the disabled, the weak and infirm, the single mothers, the orphans – all those service programs are obliterated by a few strokes on the keyboard in the name of the God called profit. Witness the policies of IMF, World Bank and other so-called benevolent institutions created and controlled by capitalist elites.

Prout says bring every possible service project into the community. Take care of every single person in that community, regardless of whether the person is 100 days old or 100 years old. There is to be no distinction. Have maximum, compassion and softness for the helpless persons who depend upon us to have that compassion and softness. Isn’t it? We need to convert our inhuman world into a human world. And then we need to go one step further and convert that human world into a neohumanist world, where every created being, every living entity, including the plants and animals, will be nurtured and cared for with softness and mercifulness.

This is Prout. Prout is all these things, and much, much more. So let us think collectively how we can manifest some of these ideas, some of these tenets, these principles, of Prout. If you do not want to use that word, ‘Prout’, it is okay. But see the rationality, the compassion, of Prout’s principles. See the deep love for suffering humanity embedded in those principles. Then please help me to build that kind of society, to build that new economic structure. The goal, the goal of all of us, must be to end human suffering. We want to see everyone smiling and laughing. We want to create a cooperative utopia on this earth. There is no reason why we cannot do this. Let’s together study these principles, these tenets, of Prout. Then let us use those compassionate principles to build a new world. In doing so, we will usher a new dawn, a golden era on our planet.  Millions are weeping and waiting for us to remove their suffering. So let us start this work today itself.

What worries me is the current milieu of The Country. Like all other empires before the US, over-extension of assumed power through the use of Imperial military might and misperceived economic privilege is thinning out the foundation; fulcrums are deteriorating; substructures are moldering; the plinth is crumbling.

This can be interpreted figuratively and/or literally. Anyhow, presumably, the parabolic rate at which Zero is reached invariably speeds up along the descending curve, following a zenith period. And like anything that rides Gravity’s Rainbow, the ride ends with a bang. If we apply this law to (geo) politico-economics then history, or rather, the archival anecdotes of civility’s economic persistence, or, OK, let’s refine this and call it cliometrics, illustrates that Political Zero is no fun to attain.

In the last days of Rome, G.A. Diocletian, faced with economic woes and one military imbroglio after another, decided to divide the empire, and, executed the final persecution of the Christians. This wasn’t a novel tactic but, rather, (N.B.) a veteran stratagem to maintain power by any means necessary. Division, persecution, coerced/co-opted assimilation, exodus, et al. blights the stories of civilization since latter’s beginning.

Gilgamesh murdered the Keepers of the Forest and seduced the Wild Man with prurient concessions; interpret that as you may. The Fertile Crescent dried up as quickly as the ziggurats went up. Cedar forests and bogs gave way to sprawling densities of people, later replaced by Saharan desertification.  The story of the Hittite empire narrates the Battle of Kadesh and subsequent civil war and coups galore. And it’s safe to say that that entire region’s early empires were rife with social turbulence, reaching a terminal period of economic decline piggybacking ecological problems; the two go together like beans & rice.

Then there was Rome’s political ataxia. And more to come. Skip forward a ways and Britain basically screwed over, big time, India to screw over China, also immiserating the Irish, claiming Ireland as cantonal farmland for British Commonwealth’s aristocratic collation. Spain’s monarchical tyranny persecuted Moorish tenants. Ringing up some nasty debt, Spain commissioned some seriously bloody pogroms in search of gold, coming home not empty handed but with Columbus’ “discovery” of lands rich with slave labor and Amerigo Vespucci’s unearthing of Brazilwood. Now Europe could have a surplus of sugar and red dye.

Colonialism brought with it Imperial Teamwork; i.e., proto-globalization. The Caribbean Basin was emptied of culture by the millions, and then, too, the same for the American continents. The concentration camp entered the scene. Calvinist Boers felt the wrath. (So did Kenya’s Mau Mau much later on in the 20th Century.) And the entire Global South was ravaged for resources.

Revolution spread like stochastic wildfire throughout Europe in the mid-Nineteenth Century, bringing us philosophical Badasses like Mikhail Bakunin and critiques of Marxism that couldn’t be defined as Slanted-to-the-Right (thank you Mik) because the whole political-spectrum/obstinate Humanism is a sham that sunders us all from the nurturing care of a miraculous birthing Nature; away from being true stewards of ecological Place.² The despotism of czarist Russia ended with a Bolshevik victory that culminated in the gulag. And around the same time European economic woes and gripes and feuds and feints and démarches – that incontrovertibly began as a result of Imperial Teamwork – erupted into WWI followed by an interregnum of “Armistice” only to recrudesce into WWII.

It was circa this period that technology and science and rationality cloaked in their Cool Logic made persecution efficient and bureaucratic and sanctioned by the State, insisted by the political voice, chanting in lumpen unison. Jews, homosexuals, Roma gypsies, Russians, Slavs, intellectuals, anarchists, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other social deviants were all persecuted. ID cards that later became train passes that later ferried the persecuted out of the ghettos to you-know-where is how bureaucracy, science, technology, and persecution miscegenated with economics and politics. (Himmler’s Final Solution was managed under the Economic Administration Section of the Reichsicherheithauptamt.)

It was an orgy of the utmost depravity to say the least. But evil is banal, no doubt. And this kind of dark banality spiraled diffusively outward and into the space-time continuum. In no particular chronological order, there was Japanese systematically killing Chinese; Turks v. Armenians; Americans slaughtering Koreans and Filipinos and N. Vietnamese; Israel v. Palestine and the UK v. the IRA, the Cold War, Chile’s 9/11, etc & c.

And the ratio of civilized to indigenous alludes to the unjust centrifugal forces of modernization; a hegemonic agenda defined euphemistically by globalization and latter’s misnomer pal, Freetrade™, climaxing atop a post-modern pinnacle of some seriously ubiquitous social & environmental alienation.

But — and so what is there to say about today’s integration of industry, economics, surveillance, incarceration, and militarism? Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben avers that the salient feature of the post-modern world is the concentration camp. No matter where one goes in the world today, one is indeed navigating the panoptical terrain of a surveillance culture. (And most definitely one probably has a financial stake or two in the whole gamut as well.)

Though, one need not wield Asimovian psychohistory to attempt to predict the political patterns yet to transpire. With nifty things like NARUS STA 6400s³ and recent administrations’ floccinaucinihilipilification of important things reputed to have exclusive authority like, say, FISA, while shamelessly indulging in warrantless wiretaps and data mining and drift-netting⁴ and “classified Continuity Annexes” alongside the incessant attempt to apply juridico-political power to normalize proactive strategies of preemption – with shit like this, fuck a crystal ball, the future is now.

But let’s not kid ourselves; this isn’t entirely new water we’re treading. These tricks have been up Empire’s sleeves since the get-go, and, predictably, the tricks will get flashier the tighter Empire grips its waning power in a desperate attempt to maintain order; Weed the Garden, as it were.

Last Year Barak Obama appointed one William Lynn as deputy secretary of defense. And Lynn is no stranger to the field of defense.⁵ This ace was Raytheon’s chief lobbyist; Raytheon being the defense darling that recently brought us the Death Ray, or in more technical cant: The Active Denial System (ADS). Delivering a laser-type beam of electromagnetic radiation (like a microwave does), penetrating 1/64th-of-an-inch of the target’s outer epidermal layer, warming subcutaneous molecules (like a microwave does), effecting a sensation that’s been described as burning from the inside out, Raytheon’s “nonlethal”⁶ crowd control gadget is right up there with other prized innovations such as e.g. rubber bullets, immobilizing nets and foams and sprays, chemical agents, and laser weapons that, as Ando Arike expounds upon in his recent piece for Harper’s, “cause dizziness or temporary blindness…”

Oh and there’s more, ohhhh so much more! Like, for instance, the vertiginous and bilious LED Incapacitator (no kidding around); the MEDUSA⁷ that also uses a microwave beam (I couldn’t make this stuff up) to deliver unpleasant auditory sensations inside one’s map; and there’s also Pulsed Energy Projectile (go ahead, put it into an acronym), which is just as F’d-up as all the other aforementioned items.⁸

Let’s also shine the illuminating kliegs on InfraGard. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Offices.” Neato. InfraGard is private business deputized.

According to Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, “InfraGard is a child of the FBI.” It is an FBI operation, with FBI agents in every state “overseeing” local InfraGard chapters (there are 86 chapters, VT has one). In Nov. 2001, IG had approximately 1700 members. There are now 23,682 and steadily climbing. FBI Director Robert Mueller spoke at an InfraG convention on 9 Aug. 2005, stating: “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of the InfraGard. From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts … and 11,000 [now spilling over 23,000] partners in our mission to protect America. Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

You catch that? The private sector is now America’s first line of defense. He went on to urge IGard members to get in touch with the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And also said they could “sic” [sic] the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

The funny thing is, in Bush’s NSPD 51 “National Continuity Policy,” the Commander in Chief dictates the Secretary of Homeland Security to coordinate with “private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to provide for the delivery of essential services during an emergency.”

InfraGard members are also being prepared for martial law scenarios, being told that it is their responsibility to safeguard their portion of the infrastructure, and, if need be, use deadly force to protect it.

Holy Smokes! This is heavy-duty. And go ahead and fact check this, you’ll find all the IG info in Matthew Rothschild’s article “The FBI Deputizes Business” scribed for The Progressive back in ’08.

Interpolation:

For a more global perspective just muse for a bit on the expansion of NATO, pushed further east than Russia prefers; NORTHCOM and latter’s complementary AFRICOM … and the 2008 reactivation of the US Fourth Fleet (demobilized in 1950) immediately following Columbia’s blitz into Ecuador.

Given the recent connubiality between the belligerent Right and populism in addition to the terrifying rise of popularity of this terrifying phenomenon, imagine what a US with all of its weaponized crowd control gadgets, surveillance apparatuses, and defense & securitization networks (domestic and abroad) would look like with another GOPish president. Yikes!

If financial institutions and their anaclitic significant others – the corporate institutions – heavily influenced Obama’s election in order to finish arming the Empire at the behest of a consenting populace blindsided by the advertisements of Hope & Change®, it is safe to bet that those same industrial influences will want to put a Good ‘ol Boy Patriot RWinger in the ring when it’s time to start swinging.

And so removing Seldon’s calculator pad from its belt-hung pouch and gazing at the prescient red diodes flashing and blinking on its screen representing the condition of the Empire at present … add to this all the known probabilities of a popular Rightwing movement with a successful election in two years, culminating in vice-regal revolt against All Sworn American Enemies, “the contemporary recurrence of periods of economic depression, the declining rate of planetary explorations, the…”

Oh Boy – each input makes those diodes flash crimson fast. A field-differentiation makes the numerical probability of Total Horror 92.5%.And, so, what to do? Some may say it is time to cast away the Right v. Left dialectic – that it serves our lovely planet and us no Good. Some would also opine it is time to invoke the essence of true Badassism and call upon the spirit of Bakunin and his ilk if we want to defend a real Democratic tenet as well as the health of our one and only planet.

1. (!)
2. Boromir: “How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king …?” Steward of Gondor: “Few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty … In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice.” Viz. kings are not stewards and being a steward does not warrant one to be a king.
3. (semantic traffic analyzer)
4. And I don’t mean the kind of drift-netting used to catch herring by weighting the bottom of a net and buoying the top so to allow the net to drift w/ the tide, no sir, not that kind of drift-netting.
5. And I’m not singling out Good Cop Obama here. His Bad Cop predecessor Bush.2 was way worse, no doubt. And you know, while we’re down here at FN4, taking a break from the main text, what is up (?!) w/America getting all hyper-Rightwing on everybody in the wake of an ostensibly Democratic/Liberal takeover of the same old duplicitous machinations that were set in motion decades and decades ago that have been expanded and hot-potatoed back&forth between cabinets, gaining kinetic force and mass that clearly benefits one Super Class of cambists and corporate nonpareils (which was rubbed in our face w/explicit and unwavering Whatchoo-gunna-do-about-It oligarchic juridico-politico-corporate hubris recently by a 5-4 majority Supreme Court ruling)? Seriously, the Right contingent is angry over stuff they claim is ‘O’’s Big Err, suffering from that salient U.S.Amnesia and doltishly forgetting that Bush.2 and Clinton et al. and Bush 1.0 and preceding RWR and so on to the -10 have been conveying all of these problems into the present. But really, this incessant yearlong Rightwing paroxysmatic reaction to the Most Moderate President Ever, as if (this is where I’m really perplexed) he’s a Leftist radical etatizing the US is fucking bonkers, if not just downright stupid.
6. Which, in all actuality, the DoJ tries to steer clear, at-all-costs, of using the term “non-lethal,” opting for “less-than-lethal,” probably for liability reasons. But this doesn’t cotton well with the Tough Guyz over at DoD who stick inveterately with “non-lethal.”
7. [= Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio]
8. And don’t think I’ve forgotten about the Taser. Oh this menace, the Taser. Just recently, here in my home state of Vermont a homeless 58-year-old woman was Tasered by a Barre City police officer in a Cumberland Farms parking lot … for loitering. For the record, there have been 600+ deaths heretofore in the US from Taser attacks by Coppers. I have a hunch most of these law-enforcing proles-w/-‘tudes don’t even know that Taser is an acronym, (So true: Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle. Laser, for the record, is also an acronym. And so is Maser.) not a word for a constabulary weaponized electro-laser.

Social solidarity is the first human law; freedom is the second law. Both laws interpenetrate each other and, being inseparable, constitute the essence of humanity. Thus, freedom is not the negation of solidarity. On the contrary, it represents the development and, so to speak, the humanizing of it.

– Bakunin

Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.

– Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank

The Tea Party protesters have been accused of incoherence, but increasingly, a single cult-philosopher is unifying their vision.

The signs are appearing at Tea Party protests across the country. In New York, one of them reads, “Ayn Rand Was Right”. In Boston, a sign references the hero in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, “Where is John Galt?” Immediately next to that sign: “Atlas is Shrugging”. A little girl dressed in colonial garb is also holding a sign. It reads: “When I grow up, I want to be free”.

The Ayn Rand Institute boasts that sales of Atlas Shrugged have tripled in the last year. Internet sites with names like aynrandteaparty.blogspot.com are popping up across the web. If the Tea Partiers have a guru, her name is Ayn Rand. So who is she, and why has she captured the spirit of rebellion amongst the populist right?

It would be difficult to establish that Ayn Rand’s importance derives from any philosophical breakthrough or literary talent. On the latter point, her more well-read acolytes will agree. Philosophers and political scientists have dismissed her theory of “Objectivism”, citing so many fallacies and contradictions that anti-Rand critique has evolved into something of a sport.

Her personal life was a train wreck. Described in biographies as cruel, megalomaniacal, ungrateful and tasteless, she surrounded herself with a cult of loyal followers. She made a cuckold of her husband and humiliated him in public when he began suffering from dementia. She was addicted to amphetamines. By all accounts, she was not a very nice person.

The key to understanding why Ayn Rand became a famous philosopher in the United States has nothing to do with the merits of her work and everything to do with its utility. Like her political descendant, the gynecologist turned Congressman Ron Paul, she is widely described as a “libertarian” or sometimes “Minarchist” (an advocate of small government). Paul has stated that Rand “contributed immensely” to the libertarian movement and that “all of her novels are worth reading”.

Paul is by no means alone. Other notable Rand fans include former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox. During the ‘50’s, Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle. Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh is a great admirer, as is Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas is such a fan of Rand’s Fountainhead, in fact, that he requires his clerks to read it. And you thought your boss was an asshole.

There is a big difference between a Ron Paul and a Milton Friedman. Free Market ideology is useful for the ruling class because it can be used to discipline the poor. While the rich cooperate and receive subsidies by the state, the poor are told to compete and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It is doubtful that very many people in Washington actually believe in the “free market”. Paul is an exception.

A consistent opponent of war, corporate welfare and unconstitutional legislation such as the Patriot Act, Paul actually believes what he says He is marginalized by the political establishment, yet allowed to appear on Fox News. Why is he tolerated at all? And why is libertertarianism taken seriously as a political philosophy?

The answer lies in its utility. For Paul and his supporters, corporatism is a bastardization of the free market upon which America was built. (The question of whether such a market in fact existed, or is even possible, will be addressed shortly. For now, the important point is that Paul believes, like all libertarians, that freedom is tied up with property rights and the ability to sell labor.)

You might say that Marx’s nightmare is Paul’s utopia. According to Marx, the defining characteristic of capitalism is the commodification of human labor. He described this arrangement as “transitory serfdom”. According to libertarians, not only is the sale of one’s labor power not exploitative or serf-like, it is an expression of human freedom. American anarchist Voltairine De Cleyre called this “freedom” a “mysterious wetness” unconnected to anything tangible or real; others, that it represents the “freedom to starve”. The relationship between the capitalist and the worker is similar to the relationship between an armed robber and his victim. A mugging victim has the choice not to turn over his wallet, but the power imbalance is so severe that the decision is mostly made for him. The same analogy can be drawn to workers under authoritarian communism.

Although it is unlikely the establishment would ever allow someone like Paul to assume power, libertarians serve a useful purpose in that they equate freedom with wage slavery. Their insistence that nearly all forms of public ownership (or “collectivism”, as they like to refer to it) are evil, and that pure capitalism would produce a legitimate meritocracy, are also useful myths.

Capitalist markets must always produce large wealth disparities, which in turn consolidate power into the hands of the few. This power is then used to create even larger wealth disparities. Call it corporatism, monopoly capitalism or just capitalism, it is the natural and entirely predictable end result of market competition. As the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously remarked, “Competition kills competition”, resulting in monopoly.

The only way we have of redressing this power imbalance is collective action, which explains why libertarians are opposed to democracy. To libertarians, democracy is not the rising up of the common man to his proper place at the table, it is the lowering down of the justly elite to the lowest common denominator. In place of solidarity, we should embrace “rational self-interest”. The idea that community and common ownership could actually enhance individualism by correcting the power imbalance is not considered, despite numerous studies and anthropological examples, and despite the dismal trade record of capitalist “individuality”. In No Contest: The Case against competition, Alife Kohn argues convincingly that cooperation and wealth sharing are the result of “rational self-interest”, not its antithesis.

Rand’s philosophy is not difficult to articulate. It can be summed up by the title of one her books, The Virtue of Selfishness. For Rand, the very characteristics that human beings tend to most admire about ourselves – compassion, empathy, altruism, cooperation, egalitarianism and other “higher angels” – are actually the most dangerous elements of our nature. A free society will evolve when individuals look out solely for themselves.

It should be noted, at this point, that Rand’s philosophy represents a revolt against human nature. Not only are we hard-wired to feel emotions like empathy, it is precisely our ability to share, commiserate and act collectively that allows us to survive as a species. Moreover, recent data suggests that the great bugaboo of libertarianism – equality of outcome – is actually the single most important determinant of health and happiness in society.

British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson looked at dozens of different countries and measured them on the basis of life expectancy, mental illness, teen birthrates, violence, the percent of populations in prison, drug use, and other factors. What he found was surprising. It wasn’t material wealth or social mobility that created happiness; it was the relative equality of people living in each nation.

In The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, co-written with Kate Pickett, Wilkinson details the “pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, encouraging excessive consumption.”

In fact, in more unequal societies, these problems aren’t higher by ten or twenty percent. There are perhaps eight times the number of teenage births per capita, ten times the homicide rate, three times the rate of mental illness. Huge differences.

If happiness has something to do with freedom, then not only are libertarians barking up the wrong tree, they’re not even in the right forest.

Whence Rand’s bizarre philosophy? It is likely that she developed her ideas in response to events in her own life. In many ways, she was a child of the Bolshevik revolution. Growing up as a privileged member of Czarist society, she witnessed the expropriation of her father’s factory by the state. It was not uncommon in Czarist Russia for children to be permitted to whip their adult servants. For Rand to see the master-slave relationship turned upside down would have been deeply distressing.

It is also likely that Rand, were she alive today, would be diagnosed as a sociopath. Indeed, she expressed open admiration for a serial killer active during her lifetime.

After William Edward Hickman kidnapped and dismembered a 12-year-old girl, she wrote admiringly of the state of mind that could engage in such an atrocity:

Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should”. Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’

As noted by Mark Ames in his article on the subject: “This echoes almost word for word Rand’s later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: ‘He was born without the ability to consider others.’”

How could so many Americans have come to embrace Ayn Rand? Especially considering that her philosophy is diametrically opposed to the message of Jesus Christ? The answer lies in the evolution of the “libertarian” movement.

Many American readers will be surprised to learn that the term “libertarian” was originally used to describe a specific strain of socialism. In America, the word first appeared in an article published by the French anarchist Joseph Dejacque. “Libertarianism” has traditionally referred to anarchism, sometimes described as “libertarian socialism” or “participatory democracy”. Its appropriation by advocates of free market capitalism has caused considerable consternation in anarchist circles.

If Ayn Rand is the most visible and widely read figure in the libertarian movement, the economic justification for “free market capitalism” has its roots in what is commonly described as the “Austrian School”. Leading proponents have included Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Friedrich Hayek. Rothbard, the founder of the modern libertarian movement in the United States, described his meeting with Ayn Rand as “akin to being Icarus, and flying too close to the sun.”

Like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, the Austrian school has emerged as the proverbial punching bag of political scientists across the spectrum.

Feminist Susan Moller Okin demonstrated that Nozick’s theory of rights and rule of acquisition “results in children being non-persons owned by their mother.” Mike O’Mara points out that, in principle, there is very little difference between a land lord and a tax collector: “In cases where the origins of such constitutions or deeds were based on confiscation of territory, does the passage of time eventually make them legitimate?”

Anarchist firebrand Bob Black remarked of the libertarian’s theoretical opposition to coercion that

To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst…Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

The problem of land ownership is particularly acute for libertarians. Since libertarianism is defined by property and the “freedom” this entails, the question of who should own what and by which set of criteria becomes something of a conundrum.

Ayn Rand solved the problem by avoiding it. Using the equation A = A, she said, in essence, what is is. If there were a mathematical equivalent of “let them eat cake”, this would be it.

There are so many problems with libertarianism that it would require a set of encyclopedias to elucidate them. It should be sufficient to note that were a theoretical “free market” ever to come into existence, it would quickly succumb to monopoly. Capitalism has never existed without a strong state to protect wealth disparities and maintain stability in markets, nor could it, for the simple reason that most human beings resent hierarchical relationships and will always act collectively to oppose them. Orwell dismissed the libertarians as follows:

[What Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, [is] that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.

In the absence of rational or moral justification for much of what constitutes property ownership, many libertarians recede to the bosom of the Founding Fathers. A great many liberal scholars have stressed the fallacy of viewing the Founders as “libertarians”, yet there is perhaps more in common with the two groups than many would like to admit.

There is very little difference between Ayn Rand’s comment that the United States should be a “democracy of superiors only” and John Jay’s remark that the “People who own the country aught to govern it”. Madison’s statement that a primary purpose of government is to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” is similar to the libertarian concept that the state’s role should be limited primarily to self-defense and the enforcement of property contracts. Alexander Hamilton’s reference to the people as a “great beast” needing to be tamed by the forces of law and order approximates Ayn Rand’s dismissal of the mass of humanity as “parasites”, “refuse” and “imitations of living beings”.

In two notable instances, however, the founding father-libertarian relationship breaks down.

A popular quotation (often attributed to Ben Franklin) amongst libertarians is that “democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner”. Viewed through the prism of “representative” democracy under capitalism, this makes a certain amount of sense. Yet Franklin also remarked that:

[In Native American society] all property, indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his matchcoat and other little Acquisitions absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public Convention. Hence, the public has the rights of regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the quantity and uses of it. All the property that is necessary to a man is his natural Right, which none may justly deprive him of, but all Property superfluous to such Purposes is the property of the Public who, by their Laws have created it and who may, by other Laws dispose of it.

Thomas Jefferson also noticed the relationship between common ownership and freedom of the individual. Employing the wolf/sheep metaphor in a different sense, he contrasted Native American society to that of Europe:

“Under presence of governing, [Europeans] have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep”. Whereas, amongst Native Americans:

Every man, with them, is perfectly free to follow his own inclinations. But if, in doing this, he violates the rights of another, if the case be slight, he is punished by the disesteem of society…Whenever there is, in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so extended as to violate natural right.

The reference to property and “natural rights” is especially interesting in this respect, since libertarianism equates inviolable property “rights” to “natural rights”. Jefferson turns the equation upside down. When the “laws of property” have been “so extended”, the “natural rights” of man become non-existent.

Ayn Rand was notoriously, embarrassingly ignorant of anthropology. Speaking of Native Americans, she remarked:

They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using …. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.

So much for property rights.

She loved bad architecture as much as she hated Native Americans.

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?”

More than one commenter has remarked on the disturbingly Stalinist vibe one draws from Ayn Rand’s descriptions of architecture. Comparing the Fountainhead’s architect Howard Roark to Le Corbusier, Anthony Daniels writes: “The very idea that a house ‘needs’ things while the desires of human beings can be disregarded is one that would occur only to someone with a reptilian mind.”

Would a pure “free market” resemble Stalinism? Is modern day America an example of the logical endpoint of libertarianism? Yes and no.

Libertarianism evolved as a revolt against socialism. The United States has never had anything approaching a “free market”, yet the myth of “rugged individualism” is essential to the American dream. If communism was the height of tyranny, then pure individualism would be the height of freedom. In the 20th century the American ethos was characterized by what Dr. King described as a “morbid fear of communism”. Thus did libertarianism evolve as the logical alternative. The problem isn’t free market philosophy, it’s not enough free market philosophy. The solution to the health care crisis isn’t that the government is failing to provide for its citizens, it’s that the government is involved in health care at all. The solution to the failure of privatization is more privatization. And so on.

What would such a society look? Since any “free market” would quickly produce monopoly and statism, we are only able to catch glimpses of Ayn Rand’s utopia. For example, Howard Zinn notes of Colorado mining towns at the turn of the century that:

“Each mining camp was a feudal dominion, with the company acting as lord and master. Every camp had a marshal, a law enforcement officer paid by the company. The ‘laws’ were the company’s rules. Curfews were imposed, ‘suspicious’ strangers were not allowed to visit the homes, the company store had a monopoly on goods sold in the camp. The doctor was a company doctor, the schoolteachers hired by the company … Political power in Colorado rested in the hands of those who held economic power. This meant that the authority of Colorado Fuel & Iron and other mine operators was virtually supreme … Company officials were appointed as election judges. Company-dominated coroners and judges prevented injured employees from collecting damages.” [The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913-14, p. 9-11]

Yet there is an even better example.

In his classic study, The Mountain People, anthropologist Colin Turnbull describes a society ruled by naked self-interest. It makes for supremely disturbing reading.

The Ik people in Northern Uganda, displaced from their traditional hunting grounds and forced to exist in extreme poverty, devolved into a society in name only. Children were forced out at the age of three and made to fend for themselves; intricate fences were built around each home; the elderly were mocked as they were dying; theft, rather than sharing, became the rule; family members were robbed by other family members; displeasure was expressed by Ik defecating on one another’s doorstep; people were held down and made to vomit so that others could eat their vomit.

What is perhaps most disturbing is that the Ik did not abandon their society of “rational self-interest” after returning to comparative plenty. According to Turnbull:

I learned a few other new things, but the main objective was accomplished far more readily, for it was obvious from the outset that nothing had really changed due to the sudden glut of food, except to cause inter-personal relationships to deteriorate still further if possible, and heighten Icien individualism beyond what I would have thought even Ik to be capable of. If they had been mean and greedy and selfish before with nothing to be mean and greedy and selfish over, now that they had something they really excelled themselves in what would be an insult to animals to call bestiality.

In his closing remarks, Turnbull explicitly compared the devolution of Ik society to that of our own.

The individualism that is preached with a curious fanaticism, heightened by our ever growing emphasis on competitive sports, the more violent the better, and suicidal recreations, is of course at direct variance with our still proclaimed social ideals, but we ignore that, for we are already individuals at heart and society has become a game that we play in our old age, to remind us of our childhood.

We would be wise to consider the example of the Ik, and whether this is where we want to go as a society. Ayn Rand’s belief that true freedom could only obtained by “setting men free from men”, by abolishing the idea of a “public” or, in Ms. Thatcher’s words, of “society” itself, is not only absurd, it is profoundly dangerous. There is no reason to believe that Western society could not become even more barbarous than that of the Ik. We are well on our way.

There’s a reason I began my attempt to unravel the puzzle of Nicaraguan politics under the Daniel Ortega regime here with his tocayo (person of the same first name), Daniel Alegría. Those of us who came to know Alegría respected him as one who could, and would, always give a straight, honest answer to any question about the Sandinista Revolution. When I finally managed to track him down after all these years, he confirmed my faith in him with the description above.

For those of us who worked in the Central American solidarity movement in the 1980s, the Sandinista Revolution was a beacon of hope, a light in the very dark Reagan years. The FSLN came to power 1979, uniting the social movements of the nation, proposing a mixed (socialist/capitalist) economy based on Marxist analysis, liberation theology and the nationalist, anarcho-syndicalist mysticism of Augusto Sandino, the “General of Free Men.” It was a unique moment of the late twentieth century and the confluence of forces inspired utopian hopes, as well as the very down-to-earth work of rebuilding a country destroyed by the US-backed Somoza clan, a devastating earthquake and a painful revolutionary struggle.

As I nurse a lemonade, Daniel tells me, in perfect English with an ever-so-slight British accent, “Those years in the Revolution were the best years of my life—maybe not the happiest, but certainly the most intense.” Daniel isn’t alone in that judgment. There are many solidarity activists in the US who, while we were never as close to the center of action as Daniel, felt that same inspiration and intensity. Indeed, the gains made under the FSLN Government of Reconstruction were stunning: Fr. Fernando Cardenal, then Minister of Education, led a literacy campaign that won a UN award for bringing the literacy rate up from 13% to 53% in six months with all volunteer help. Unlike any other country in Central America, in Nicaragua the campesinos wore glasses which they got free from the government and which they used to read from the river of books that were produced by the Ministry of Culture under the poet/priest, Fr. Ernesto Cardenal. Healthcare was suddenly accessible to everyone and little by little the country began to rebuild — until the US began the counter-offensive.

The CIA, with the help of Argentine fascists, fresh from torturing, murdering and “disappearing” thousands of their fellow Argentineans, began organizing and training the former National Guard of the Somoza dictatorship. These mercenaries, who came to be known as the “contras” were then sent in to kill healthcare and literacy workers, farmers and cooperative members. If the US — or the world — had had a legal system that had dared to prosecute Reagan and his cronies for financing the Contra army with profits from sales of weapons to Iran and cocaine trafficking, for the terrorist proxy war of the Contras, for the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors by the CIA and for the eventual destruction of the country, the entire Republican Party would be just another prison gang in the Federal prison system. In 1986, the World Court did find the US guilty of the terrorist war, but the US simply refused to recognize the Court. Eventually, the exhausted people of Nicaragua were bled dry by the war and did as Reagan requested: they “cried uncle.”

Daniel and I have laughed and talked loudly through the evening, but when he gets around to telling me of the elections of February 25, 1990 which turned the Sandinista National Liberation Front out of power, his voice suddenly softens and you can hear the wind rustling the leaves of the nearby lemon tree.

I ask him if anyone in the Frente knew they were going to lose. He smiles. “Yes, Tomas Borge knew. I didn’t believe it. I’d seen the opinion polls and they gave us the victory. All the comandantes were sure we were going to win. Then I found out and Tomas was in a press conference. I whispered to him that we’d lost and he ended the conference abruptly. We were all called to El Chipote,” he says, motioning with his head toward the what used to be a military base above the Intercontinental Hotel, just below the volcanic Lake Tiscapa.

“There we prepared for the worst. We strapped on guns. I was expecting another Night of the Long Knives. I don’t know who I was going to defend myself from. We didn’t know what was going to happen. Then at dawn Daniel Ortega made the finest speech of his life, saying we were going to rule from below,” Alegría tells me.

At first it appeared that Ortega and the Frente would occupy the moral high ground of Nicaraguan politics. Indeed, what came to be known as the “Piñata” was initially an attempt of the comandancia of the FSLN to protect the gains of the Revolution, according to Gonzalo Carrion of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center. “The Sandinistas, and I was one of them, were preparing to leave power with nothing,” he told me. “To protect the gains of the revolution, they began dividing up things in preparation for a return to power later.”

Alegría offers a different angle. “Up to that moment there wasn’t a distinction between the FSLN and the state. We’d taken power and ruled as a government of reconstruction. The FSLN was the state and the state was FSLN. Now, suddenly, as we were voted from power, we had to separate everything. The lands of Somoza that had been given to campesinos, for instance: whose lands were those now?” he asks. “So the campesinos were given titles and things were divided up,” he says. And that was what came to be called the “Piñata,” named after the paper maché figure stuffed with candy and broken open at children’s birthday parties in Latin America.

“It happened to me, too. I went in to the office after the election and someone put ten thousand dollars on my desk,” Daniel tells me. For a man who had started out earning $7 per month in FSLN Special Forces and had risen in rank and pay to a total of $40 per month, ten thousand dollars must have looked like a lot of money.

“I was told, ‘you’re never going to be able to get a job in Nicaragua now. You should take the money and find something to do.’ I refused. After all, I hadn’t come to Nicaragua to make money. I was there for the Revolution.”

I ask him how he felt about that now. Does he regret refusing the money?

“Not at all,” he tells me. “If I’d taken that money, I’d never be able to speak again. But now I can talk.”

Alegria went to work as associate editor and editor of Barricada International, official newspaper of the FSLN, until 1993 when Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the editor, got in hot water with the Frente. As a result of the FSLN’s refusal to undertake democratic reforms in the party in favor of maintaining a Leninist, guerrilla verticalist structure, a split had occurred and Chamorro, the editor of Barricada, had helped write the platform of the new Movement for Sandinista Renewal (MRS, Movimiento de la Rescate de Sandinismo). The Barricada was yanked from Chamorro’s hands over the objections of Alegría. “Tomas Borge had called me into his office, offering me the job of editor. I told him I thought he was making a big mistake, turning it from a reliable source of news into a party paper.” Alegría followed Chamorro out of the offices of Barricada, as well as the ranks of the Frente.

Ortega, it seemed, was willing to do anything to return to power, but there were many obstacles to be overcome. First, the Sandinista caudillo had incurred the wrath of the women of Nicaragua and much of Latin America as his step daughter, Zoilamérica Narváez in 1998 accused him of rape and sexual abuse. The Interamerican Human Rights Commission made a friendly settlement in favor of Narváez in 2002, and even though Ortega continues to deny the charge, his step-daughter has not withdrawn her statements. Then Ortega made the infamous “El Pacto” (The Pact) with Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC) leader and former president of Nicaragua, Arnoldo Aleman, which allowed the two parties, PLC and FSLN, to dominate the politics of the country. Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo then married in the church and received the blessings of former arch-enemy, Cardinal Obando y Bravo. In return, under Ortega’s leadership, the FSLN backed a law to prohibit abortion in Nicaragua, a law which passed in 2006.

Choosing former Contra Jaime Morales Carazo as his vice presidential candidate, Ortega won the presidency in 2006 with 38% of the vote. Prior to the municipal elections of 2008 Ortega maneuvered to pack the Electoral Commission with his people and then succeeded in disqualifying the MRS and the Conservative Parties from the elections. Despite these dirty maneuvers, the FSLN still had to perpetrate a fraud in order to win 94 of the 146 municipal mayoralties.

Fast forward to the present. The day I arrived in Nicaragua Ortega had issued Presidential Decree 3-2010 which would give him the power to appoint members of the Supreme Electoral Council, the Supreme Court, the Comptroller General, Attorney for the Defense of Human Rights and Superintendent of Banks. This power grab has united an incongruous and very broad coalition against Ortega, whose popularity is now on a par with George W. Bush at his low point. Former Contra commanders, including José Benito Bravo, Julio Cesar Blandón and others met with Arnoldo Aleman and former members of the FSLN on Tuesday, January 12, to organize a “civic struggle.” The Coordinadora Civil, a social movement organization consisting of some 600 groups, including many former FSLN militants, has called for a demonstration later in the month, and the seven person directing council of the National Assembly has voted four to three to reject the Executive Decree 03-2010.

My taxi driver, Mario, who joined the FSLN as a guerrilla soldier in the 1970s and left the party in the early 1980s when he said he saw in Ortega an untrustworthy leader, is inspired by the talk of unity to rid the country of what he calls “the Ortega dictatorship.” “We’ve got to make a coalition with anyone who’s willing to help us get rid of Ortega. Their politics don’t matter. First we have to get rid of Ortega and then we can settle our political differences later,” Mario told me as he weaved through the streets of Managua. Mario is convinced that if Ortega pushes Nicaraguans too far, they’ll rise up and overthrow him. Daniel Alegria isn’t so sure.

“I don’t think Nicaraguans want to have another revolution. It’s an absolutely terrifying prospect,” Daniel says.

Either way, twenty years have now passed since the FSLN lost power. President Ortega has tried to convince the people that his new term in office is simply an extension of the Sandinista Revolution, but not quite a third of the population is buying that. Daniel Alegría finds himself among the skeptics and he quotes Marx. “Didn’t Marx say all facts and people appear twice? First as tragedy, and then as farce? We lived the tragedy in 1990. Now with this second appearance of Ortega, we’re living the farce.”