informage

I doubt anyone checks this blog anymore, I haven’t written on it for far too long. My intent is to change this next year, although it remains to be seen whether my current primary occupation doing a masters degree at Goldsmiths will inspire or deplete my writing energy here.

In lieu of any action over here take a look at the ‘Politics Link’ section over on the right, I fairly regularly add links that I think are of interest.

Feels like a good time for some beauty, some perspective…

We are so conditioned (rightly) to shun pyramid schemes, that it’s easy to forget we’re all part of the biggest pyramid of all:

This week I fly from Cape Town back to the UK. As always, nothing is permanent, but it’s a one-way ticket… next time I’m here I’ll be visiting. I’ve been needing to snap myself out of a funk for sometime now, and a transcontinental shift might just do the trick. (I know, I know, it’s really about me not where I am but it’s worth a try and anyway it’ll be great to spend unbounded time with family and old friends again).

It’s appropriate in the week I leave this nation that has been my adopted home for the last five and a half years to point to a couple of good S’African blogs. Firstly Ian’s Neverness has been subscribed in my newsreader for a while. He’s a cool Capetonian who I unfortunately never engineered to meet, but I’ve enjoyed reading his writing on politics, free and open source software, Africanism and green stuff.

Ian posted a link to a blog called Red Star Coven, written by Walton – a S’African in Scotland. His latest post “I hate Afro-optimism” strikes a chord with me, partly because I myself have at times fallen into the trap of blind Afro-optimism in reaction to the obnoxious and racist voice of whiney pessimism that emanates from privileged whites here.

Ian’s response is intelligent and impassioned, musing on the parallax of perception* between positivity and negativity, pessimism and optimism, that Walton’s critique can be inverted into a positive appraisal by simple fact reversal. I spend a lot of time thinking in just this way. Great post Ian, thanks.

Having said that, I find myself tending towards Walton’s perspective. I’m extremely impressed with what I’ve read of his blog thus far and will be reading it regularly.

* I’ve evidently been reading too much Zizek but to my credit I used to be in a band called Parallax, and we chose that name because like Zizek we regarded it as word with a significant and underused denotation – that where you stand shapes your point of view.

This superb cartoon says everything I’ve been wanting to say about this particular trend:

In case any of us Brits though it was an American idea:

“We reserve the right to bomb niggers.”

(David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister 1916-1922, from his 1932 diary as cited in V. G. Kiernan’s “European Empires from Conquest to Collapse”, Fontana 1982)

I thought myself beyond surprise at the more forthright utterances of our forebears, but this one floored me. Of course his use of the n-word would have elicited less disapproval at the time of writing than it does now—and referred to anyone with darker skin—but even putting the word itself aside this is a shocking declaration of the defining character of Western foreign policy towards the East and Africa, a character that continues to this day.

“Condoms don’t belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He’s not a schoolteacher,” said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. “The information that’s being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. … The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn’t in the DVD.”

(from seattlepi.com, 11th Jan 2007)

I’ve been reading Derrick Jensen’s remarkable book ‘Endgame’. His basic premise is that civilisation is inherently unsustainable and if allowed to continue will destroy most life on our planet. I’ve also recently watched Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ that brought home to me the very immediate threat that we’ll do this with carbon dioxide. Jensen argues that our only sane collective response to this destructiveness is to begin the task, through whatever means necessary, of dismantling our civilisation immediately. This is an extreme position, and as such the book perhaps isn’t for everyone.

Bluntly put: Endgame isn’t for those who believe that because environmental scientists have been wrong before in their models and predictions, they surely must also be wrong this time. It isn’t for those who pick holes in the overwhelming scientific consensus wherever they see even the smallest opportunity because it challenges their faith in civilisation (climate change deniers seem more and more like creationists in their rhetoric to me every day!)

It isn’t for those who think that pumping far, far more CO2 into the atmosphere than 650,000 years’ ice record shows as a maximum isn’t a problem, that melting glaciers all over the world aren’t a problem, that already rising sea levels aren’t really a problem, that falling levels of certain pollutants revealing that for fifty years we’ve been cooling the earth as well as warming it and now we seem to just be doing the latter isn’t worth worrying about (*of course* we can’t predict the effects of this stuff with certainty, we can’t even predict the weather accurately any more than about a week out, for me that’s not the point)

Moreover, the book isn’t for those who think that civilisation’s relentless and brutal murder of all life that stands in its path, sentient or not, is either in any way ethical or in any way not insane.

In short: Endgame won’t help you become sane if you aren’t some of the way there already; it’s directed at those who already think that there’s some extremely serious problems around, more serious than anything humanity has ever encountered, and that we need to understand why and what needs to be done to rescue the planet and its lifeforms from likely, if not certain, extinction.

If you think differently: if you are clinging resolutely to the faith that all is basically well with the world, bar some tweaks and minor adjustments, then the book will probably come across as fringe lunacy and will be of little value. As Jensen himself dryly remarks: if you don’t see the problem “good luck with your career in politics or business”.

Once again I’m moved by a thoughtful critique of my posts to offer a follow-up, and once again I’m grateful for the generous time given in reading and responding to my writing – this time to Marcus. I’m going to try and address some of his points, this time just offering opinions in response. There’s a whole wealth of material out there discussing these things in more detail and with more in the way of hard evidence (see my politics links for some pointers).

shouldnt you be criticising the S African government, who from what i understand have denied HIV causes AIDS, totally failed to adress the issue, failed to buy and dsirtibute retroviral drugs, and generally swept it under the carpet? thats nothing to do with british govt.

I do indeed have deep criticisms of the ill-advised stance taken by the South African government and their abject neglect of the problem. I believe one of the underlying causes of the crazy positions they’ve taken is that the kind of state spending required to address the problem (with education, alleviation of poverty, and where necessary drugs) would be looked upon extremely poorly by the likes of the IMF and the World Bank.

My biggest criticism of the current South African government is they’ve decided to try and play the game of global capitalism and in doing so have tied their own hands in repairing the damage of colonialism and apartheid. Responsibility for this must lie both within South Africa and with the institutions of global capitalism that have effectively coerced our government with threats of withdrawn investment, even harsher loan repayment terms and reductions in aid.

You believe that global capitalism can be tweaked and improved to address the world’s problems. I do not.

What would you suggest replace capitalism?

In the sentence you quoted I specifically pointed at ‘global capitalism’ which I see as a specific recent form of capitalism that is moving (to a certain extent) away from class separation within Western nations, and towards a class separation that spans nations. If you look at those fulfilling the roles classically fulfilled by the “working class” in the UK, many of them are now either fufilled by recent immigrants, or in the further, somewhat hidden, reaches of the nation (call centres in Wales etc) or even more commonly just elsewhere in the world (the “third world sweat shop” phenomenon).

This also goes towards answering the question “who are the british oppressing now?”. It may not be as explicit as under colonialism, but the wealth of the UK is largely predicated on the favourable, and I would argue exploitative, trade relationships that were developed with the ex-colonies. That much of Africa suffers under both the legacy of colonial damage (both infrastructural and psychological), and the continuing harmful intervention of global capitalism, goes a long way towards explaining the ravages of HIV/AIDS in that continent compared with its comparatively mild impact in the West.

(Of course the UK is also complicit in the murder of tens of thousands in the middle east, although that is a somewhat different – though fundamentally linked – discussion: it is partly because economic exploitation is backed by the threat of force that the exploited nations generally accede to the demands of the West).

Is Capitalism fair? Of course not. But it works – and we all know it does.

I understand that being unfair is not in itself an indictment of capitalism. If your assertion is correct – that capitalism is the only system that works – then fairness is somewhat academic. However, I do not know this, and in fact I take serious issue with both elements of your assertion.

On the one hand, for me capitalism simply does not ‘work’. It may work for now for a privileged minority (which possibly includes a much larger proportion of the British population than in the past, but I’m thinking globally here). It is in many ways an admirable system, given that it allows essentially ‘dumb’ actors (dumb in the sense of having a worldview that extends little further than their immediate interests) to en masse enact a system of production and distribution that is at least basically functional.

However capitalism requires continual expansion and overproduction (what’s called ‘economic growth’). The rise of consumer credit is an adaptive mechanism so that growth can continue whilst the owners of capital continue to siphon large chunks of created value into profit. This is not something that can continue indefinitely. Either some catastrophe like climate change will kill us all, or we will deplete our natural resources to the point where our civilisation cannot continue in the same form. We can now in this era see very clear and scientific evidence for this assertion, more so than ever before in human history.

The oppressed masses of the world (remembering that the ‘richest and most powerful nations’ comprise a minority of the world’s population) will not suffer quietly forever. What’s called terrorism in the West is an early warning sign of the backlash that will only grow and continue unless this oppression ceases. Recognition of this is taboo for us; instead we are told “they want to destroy our way of life, it’s irrational hatred, any other opinion gives succour to the terrorists”. This is a taboo we maintain at our own peril.

Secondly capitalism is not the only system that works. Capitalism has a relatively brief role in the history of humankind; a few hundred years against hundreds of thousands of years of human existence. Every non-civilised society that we have encountered, we have destroyed. They did not destroy themselves by exceeding the carrying capacity of their surrounds, a fate we seem to be blindly speeding towards. To believe that our own system is not only the best, but the only workable system, is an amazing piece of arrogance and observer bias. It’s simply not scientific. (This isn’t meant personally by the way Marcus, you are by no means alone!)

None of this goes to fully answer the question “what would you suggest replace capitalism?”. It is far easier to defend an existing system than argue for a speculative non-existent system. I would point to countries like Venezuela and Brazil as undertaking brave experiments in alternate systems.

In truth I am suspicious of those who say they know with certainty of another system that works, is socially just and does not deplete and destroy the planet, just as I am suspicious of Marcus’s claim about capitalism.

New structures for society are created in action, through the living experimentation of open-minded and passionately motivated collectives of humans.

At the same time we must begin the task of dismantling this brutal, destructive and ultimately suicidal system that permits no competitors and tramples all alternatives. Marcus quite rightly states that “it is no coincidence that the world’s richest and most powerful nations are capitalist”. On that we agree, on the conclusion drawn we differ.

David Cameron will today unveil radical plans to harness the power of the internet by reaching out to a blogging generation that is disaffected and disconnected from mainstream politics.

At the heart of the initiative, which is designed to make the Tories one of the most technologically progressive parties in Europe, is “webcameron” – a website for video blogs by their leader. Mr Cameron will provide regular clips with him speaking direct to camera, as well as written blogs and podcasts.

Tories unveil their secret weapon: ‘webcameron’, The Guardian, September 2006

The villagers have spent the last six decades dressing up in home-made US army uniforms, drilling with bamboo rifles and parading beneath the Stars and Stripes in the hope of enticing a delivery of cargo once again.

They have even hacked air strips out of the jungle and built crude wooden aircraft to tempt the speedy return of American generosity.

Culture clash in the South Seas, BBC News, May 2004

(format of juxtaposed quotes as commentary shamelessly lifted from Billmon)