Yearly Archives: 2015

The Rise of “Criminal Capitalism”

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By James Petras

Source: Dissident Voice

About 75% of US employees work 40 hours or longer, the second longest among all OECD countries, exceeded only by Poland and tied with South Korea. In contrast, only 10% of Danish workers, 15% of Norwegian, 30% of French, 43% of UK and 50% of German workers work 40 or more hours. With the longest work day, US workers score lower on the ‘living well’ scale than most western European workers. Moreover, despite those long workdays US employees receive the shortest paid holidays or vacation time (one to two weeks compared to the average of five weeks in Western Europe). US employees pay for the costliest health plans and their children face the highest university fees among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In class terms, US employees face the greatest jump in income inequalities over the past decade, the longest period of wage and salary decline or stagnation (1970 to 2014) and the greatest collapse of private sector union membership, from 30% in 1950 down to 8% in 2014.

On the other hand, profits, as a percentage of national income, have increased significantly. The share of income and profits going to the financial sector, especially the banks and investment houses, has increased at a faster rate than any other sector of the US economy.

There are two polar opposite trends: Employees working longer hours, with costlier services and declining living standards while finance capitalists enjoy rapidly rising profits and incomes.

Paradoxically, these trends are not directly based on greater ‘workplace exploitation’ in the US.

The historic employee-finance capitalist polarization is the direct result of the grand success of the trillion dollar financial swindles, the tax payer-funded trillion dollar Federal bailouts of the crooked bankers, and the illegal bank manipulation of interest rates. These uncorrected and unpunished crimes have driven up the costs of living and producing for employees and their employers.

Financial ‘rents’ (the bankers and brokers are ‘rentiers’ in this economy) drive up the costs of production for non-financial capital (manufacturing). Non-financial capitalists resort to reducing wages, cutting benefits and extending working hours for their employees, in order to maintain their own profits.

In other words, pervasive, enduring and systematic large-scale financial criminality is a major reason why US employees are working longer and receiving less – the ‘trickle down’ effect of mega-swindles committed by finance capital.

Mega-Swindles, Leading Banks and Complicit State Regulators

Mega-swindles, involving trillions of dollars, are routine practices involving the top fifty banks, trading houses, currency speculators, management fund firms and foreign exchange traders.

These ‘white collar’ crimes have hurt hundreds of millions of investors and credit-card holders, millions of mortgage debtors, thousands of pension funds and most industrial and service firms that depend on bank credit to meet payrolls, to finance capital expansion and technological upgrades and raw materials.

Big banks, which have been ‘convicted and fined’ for mega-swindles, include Citi Bank, Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, JP Morgan, Barclay, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank and forty other ‘leading’ financial institutions.

The mega-swindlers have repeatedly engaged in a great variety of misdeeds, including accounting fraud, insider trading, fraudulent issue of mortgage based securities and the laundering of hundreds of billions of illegal dollars for Colombian, Mexican, African and Asian drug and human traffickers.

They have rigged the London Interbank Official Rate (LIBOR), which serves as the global interest benchmark to which hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial contracts are tied. By raising LIBOR, the financial swindlers have defrauded hundreds of millions of mortgage and credit-card holders, student loan recipients and pensions.

Bloomberg News (5/20/2015) reported on an ongoing swindle involving the manipulation of the multi-trillion-dollar International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) fix, a global interest rate benchmark used by banks, corporate treasurers and money managers to determine borrowing costs and to value much of the $381 trillion of outstanding interest rate swaps.

The Financial Times (5/23/15, p. 10) reported how the top seven banks engaged in manipulating fraudulent information to their clients, practiced illegal insider trading to profit in the foreign exchange market (forex), whose daily average turnover volume for 2013 exceeded $5 trillion dollars.

These seven convicted banks ended up paying less than $10 billion in fines, which is less than 0.05% of their daily turnover. No banker or high executive ever went to jail, despite undermining the security of millions of retail investors, pensioners and thousands of companies.

The Direct Impact of Financial Swindles on Declining Living Standards

Each and every major financial swindle has had a perverse ripple effect throughout the entire economy. This is especially the case where the negative consequences have spread downward through local banks, local manufacturing and service industries to employees, students and the self-employed.

The most obvious example of the downward ripple effect was the so-called ‘sub-prime mortgage’ swindle. Big banks deliberately sold worthless, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligation (CDO) to smaller banks, pension funds and local investors, which eventually foreclosed on overpriced houses causing low income mortgage holders to lose their down payments (amounting to most of their savings).

While the effects of the swindle spread outward and downward, the US Treasury propped up the mega-swindlers with a trillion-dollar bailout in working people’s tax money. They anointed their mega-give-away as the bail out for ‘banks that are just too big to fail”! They transferred funds from the public treasury for social services to the swindlers.

In effect, the banks profited from their widely exposed crimes while US employees lost their jobs, homes, savings and social services. As the US Treasury pumped trillions of dollars into the coffers of the criminal banks (especially on Wall Street), the builders, major construction companies and manufacturers faced an unprecedented credit squeeze and laid off millions of workers, and reduced wages and increased the hours of un-paid work.

Service employees in consumer industries were hit hard as wages and salaries declined or remained frozen. The costs of the FOREX, LIBOR and ISDA fix swindles’ fell heavily on big business, which passed the pain onto labor: cutting pension and health coverage, hiring millions of ‘contingent or temp’ workers at minimum wages with no benefits.

The bank bailouts forced the Treasury to shift funds from ‘job-creating’ social programs and national infrastructure investment to the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector with its highly concentrated income structure.

As a result of the increasing concentration of wealth among the financial swindlers, inequalities in income grew; wages and salaries were frozen or reduced and manufacturers outsourced production, resulting in declines in production.

Employees, suffering from the loss of income brought on by the mega-swindles, found that they were working longer hours for less pay and fewer benefits. Productivity suffered. With the total breakdown of the ‘capitalist rules of the game’, investors lost confidence and trust in the system. Mega-swindles eroded ‘confidence’ between investors and traders, and made a mockery of any link between performance at work and rewards. This severed the nexus between highly motivated workers, engaged in ‘hard work, long hours’ and rising living standards, and between investment and productivity.

As a result, profits in the finance sector grew while the domestic economy floundered and living standards stagnated.

Financial Impunity: Regulatees Controlling the Regulators

Despite the proliferation of mega-swindles and their pervasive ripple effects throughout the economy and society, none of the dozens of federal or state regulatory agencies intervened to stop the swindle before it undermined the domestic economy. No CEO or banker was ever arrested for their part in the swindle of trillions. The regulators only reacted after trillions had ‘disappeared’ and swindles were ‘a done deal’. The impunity of the swindlers in planning and executing the pillage of hundreds of millions of employees, taxpayers and mortgage holders was because the federal and state regulatory agencies are populated by ‘regulatory administrators’ who came from or aspired to join the financial sector they were tasked with ‘regulating’.

Most of the high officials appointed to lead the regulatory agencies had been selected by the ‘Lords of Wall Street, Frankfurt, the City of London or Zurich.’ Appointees are chosen on the basis of their willingness to enable financial swindles. It therefore came as no surprise on May 28 2015 when US President Obama approved the appointment of Andrew Donahue, Managing Director and Associate General Council for the repeatedly felonious, mega-swindling banking house of Goldman Sachs to be the ‘Chief of Staff’ of the Security and Exchange Commission. His career has been typical of the Washington-Wall Street ‘Revolving Door’.

Only after fraud and swindles evoked the nationwide public fury of mortgage holders, investors and finance companies did the regulators ‘investigate’ the crimes and even then not a single major banker was jailed, not a single major bank was closed down.

There were a few low-level bond traders and bank employees who were fired or jailed as scapegoats. The banks paid puny (for them) fines, which they passed on to their customers. Despite pledges to ‘mend their ways’ the bankers concocted new schemes with their windfalls of billions of Federal ‘bailout’ money while the regulators looked on or polished their CV’s for the next pass through the ‘revolving door’.

Every top official in Treasury, Commerce and Trade, and every regulator in the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) who ‘retired to the private sector’ has ended up working for the same mega-criminal banks and finance houses they had investigated, regulated and ‘slapped on the wrist’.

As one banker, who insists on anonymity, told me: ‘The most successful swindlers are those who investigated financial transgressions’.

Conclusion

Mega-swindles define the nature of contemporary capitalism. The profits and power of financial capital is not the outcome of ‘market forces’. They are the result of a system of criminal behavior that pillages the Treasury, exploits the producers and consumers, evicts homeowners and robs taxpayers.

The mega swindlers represent much less than 1% of the class structure. Yet they hold over 40% of personal wealth in this country and control over 80% of capital liquidity.

They grow inexorably rich and richer, even as the rest of the economy wallows in crisis and stagnation. Their swindles send powerful ripples across the national economy, which ultimately freeze or reduce the income of the skilled (middle class) employees and undermine the living conditions for poor working-class whites, and especially under and unemployed Afro-American and Latino American young workers.

Efforts to ‘moralize’ capital have failed repeatedly since the regulators are controlled by those they claim to ‘regulate’.

The rare arrest and prosecution of any among the current tribe of mega-swindlers would only results in their being replaced by new swindlers. The problem is systemic and requires deep structural changes.

The only answer is to build a political movement independent of the two party system, willing to nationalize the banks and to pass legislation outlawing derivatives, forex trading and other unnatural parasitic speculative activities.

James Petras is author of Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier (with Henry Veltmeyer) and The Politics of Empire: The US, Israel and the Middle East. Read other articles by James, or visit James’s website.

Catching Up With the Unabomber. When Does the End Justify the Means?

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By Brian Whitney

Source: Disinfo.com

The Unabomber, known as Ted Kaczynski, was not a fan of technology. To expose the world to his anti-technology philosophy, from the years 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23, before he was eventually caught and sent to prison. He remains there today. At one time, he was possibly the most famous criminal in the world.

He said of technology’s role:

The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.

In his essay Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski argued that while his bombings were “a bit” extreme, they were quite necessary to attract attention to the loss of human freedom caused by modern technology. His book Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. “The Unabomber” breaks all of his philosophies down for those of us that just know him through corporate news stations.

Was the Unabomber crazy, or just so sane he was blowing our minds?

I talked to David Skrbina, confidant of Kaczynski, and philosophy professor at the University of Michigan. Skrbina wrote the intro to Technological Slavery.

Can you tell me a bit about how you and Kaczynski began to communicate? Are you still in touch with him today?

Back in 2003, I began work on a new course at the University of Michigan: ‘Philosophy of Technology.’ Surprisingly, such a course had never been offered before, at any of our campuses. I wanted to remedy that deficiency.

I then began to pull together recent and relevant material for the course, focusing on critical approaches to technology. These, to me, were more insightful and more interesting, and were notably under-analyzed among current philosophers of technology. Most of them are either neutral toward modern technology, or positively embrace it, or accept its presence resignedly. As I found out, very few philosophers of the past four decades adopted anything like a critical stance. This, for me, was highly revealing.

Anyway, I was well aware of Kaczynski’s manifesto, “Industrial society and its future,” which was published in late 1995 at the height of the Unabomber mania. I was very impressed with its analysis, even though most of the ideas were not new to me (many were reiterations of arguments by Jacques Ellul, for example—see his 1964 book The Technological Society). But the manifesto was clear and concise, and made a compelling argument.

After Kaczynski was arrested in 1996, and after a year-long trial process, he was stashed away in a super-max prison in Colorado. The media then decided that, in essence, the story was over. Case closed. No need to cover Kaczynski or his troubling ideas ever again.

By 2003, I suspected he was still actively researching and writing, but I had heard nothing of substance about him in years. So I decided to write to him personally, hoping to get some follow-up material that might be useful in my new course. Fortunately, he replied. That began a long string of letters, all on the problem of technology. To date, I’ve received something over 100 letters from him.

Most of the letters occurred in the few years prior to, and just after, the publication of Technological Slavery. Several of his more important and detailed replies to me were included in that book—about 100 pages worth.

We’ve had less occasion to communicate in the past couple years. My most recent letter from him was in late 2014.

You have said that his ideas “threaten to undermine the power structure of our technological order. And since the system’s defenders are unable to defeat the ideas, they choose to attack the man who wrote them.” Can you expand on that?

The present military and economic power of the US government, and governments everywhere, rests on advanced technology. Governments, by their very nature, function to manipulate and coerce people—both their own citizens, and any other non-citizens whom they declare to be of interest. Governments have a monopoly on force, and this force is manifest through technological structures and systems.

Therefore, all governments—and in fact anyone who would seek to exert power in the world—must embrace modern technology. American government, at all levels, is deeply pro-tech. So too are our corporations, universities, and other organized institutions. Technology is literally their life-blood. They couldn’t oppose it in any substantial way without committing virtual suicide.

So when a Ted Kaczynski comes along and reminds everyone of the inherent and potentially catastrophic problems involved with modern technology, “the system” doesn’t want you to hear it. It will do everything possible to distort or censor such discussion. As you may recall, during the final years of the Unabomber episode, there was very little—astonishingly little—discussion of the actual ideas of the manifesto. Now and then, little passages would be quoted in the newspapers, but that was it; no follow-up, no discussion, no analysis.

Basically, the system’s defenders had no counterarguments. The data, empirical observation, and common sense all were on the side of Kaczynski. There was no rational case to be made against him.

The only option for the defenders was an ad hominem attack: to portray Kaczynski as a sick murderer, a crazed loner, and so on. That was the only way to ‘discredit’ his ideas. Of course, as we know, the ad hominem tactic is a logical fallacy. Kaczynski’s personal situation, his mental state, or even his extreme actions, have precisely zero bearing on the strength of his arguments.

The system’s biggest fear was—and still is—that people will believe that he was right. People might begin, in ways small or large, to withdraw from, or to undermine, the technological basis of society. This cuts to the heart of the system. It poses a fundamental threat, to which the system has few options, apart from on-going propaganda efforts, or brute force.

What do you think of the fact that when our government, or any figure in authority such as a police officer, kills in the name of the established belief system, it is thought of as just. But when a guy like Kaczynski kills in the name of his belief system, he is thought of as a deranged psychopath?

As I mentioned, governmental authorities have a monopoly on force. Whenever they use it, it is, almost by definition, ‘right.’ Granted, police can be convicted of ‘excessive force.’ But such cases, as we know, are very rare. And militaries can never be so convicted.

At best, if the public is truly appalled by some lethal action of our police or military, they may vote in a more ‘pacifist’ administration. But even that rarely works. People were disgusted by the war-monger George W. Bush, and so they voted in the “anti-war” Obama. Ironically, he continued on with much the same killing. And through foreign aid and UN votes, Obama continues to support and defend murderous regimes around the world. So much for pacifism.

Let’s keep in mind: Kaczynski killed three people. This was tragic and regrettable, but still, it was just three people. American police kill that many citizens every other day, on average. The same with Obama’s drone operators. Technology kills many times that number, every day—even every hour. Let’s keep things in perspective.

Kaczynski killed in order to gain the notoriety necessary to get the manifesto into the public eye. And it worked. When it was published, the Washington Post sold something like 1.2 million copies that day—still a record. He devised a plan, executed it, and thereby caused millions of people to contemplate the problem of technology in a way they never had before.

Does the end justify the means? It’s too early to tell. If Kaczynski’s actions ultimately have some effect on averting technological disaster, there will be no doubt: his actions were justified. They may yet save millions of lives, not to mention much of the natural world. Time will tell.

You recently wrote a book, The Metaphysics of Technology. Can you tell us a little about that?

Sure. In thinking about the problem of technology, it struck me that there was very little philosophical analysis about what, exactly, technology is. We’ve had many action plans, ranging from tepid and mild (think Sherry Turkle), to Bill Joy’s thesis of “relinquishment” of key technologies, to Kaczynski’s total revolution. But if we don’t really understand what we’re dealing with, our actions are likely to be misguided and ineffectual. In short, we need a true metaphysics of technology.

On my view, technology advances with a tremendous, autonomous power. Humans are the implementers of this power, but we can’t really guide it and we certainly can’t stop it. In effect, it functions as a law of nature. It advances with an evolutionary force, and that’s why we are heading toward disaster.

I see technology much as the ancient Greeks did—as a combination of two potent entities, Technê and Logos (hence ‘techno-logy’). For them, these were quasi-divine forces. Logos was the guiding intelligence behind all order in the universe. Technê was the process by which all things—manmade and otherwise—came into being. These were not mere mythology; they were rational conclusions regarding the operation of the cosmos.

Like the Greeks, I argue that technê is a universal process. All order in the universe is a form of technê. Hence my coining of the term ‘Pantechnikon’—the universe as an orderly construction, manifesting a kind of intelligence, or Logos. Our modern, human technology is on a continuum with all order in the universe. (Harvard astrophysicist Eric Chaisson has argued for precisely the same point, incidentally; see his 2006 book Epic of Evolution.)

The net effect of all this is not good news for us. Technology is like a wave moving through the Earth, and the universe. For a long while, we were at the peak of that wave. Now we’re on the downside. Technology is rapidly heading toward true autonomy. Our opportunity to slow or redirect it is rapidly vanishing. If technology achieves true autonomy—we can take Kurzweil’s singularity date of 2045 as a rough guide—then it’s game over for us. We will likely either become more or less enslaved, or else wiped out. And then technology will continue on its merry way without us.

This is not mere speculation on my part, incidentally. Within the past year, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have all come out with related concerns. They don’t understand the metaphysics behind it, but they’re seeing the same trend.

How has your experience communicating with Kaczynski changed you as a person and as a philosopher?

As a philosopher, not that much. Kaczynski generally avoids philosophy and metaphysics, preferring practical issues. In a sense, we are operating on different planes, even as we are working on the same problem.

As a person, I have a greater understanding of the basis for the ‘extreme’ actions that he took. It’s not often in life that you get a chance to communicate with someone with such a total commitment to their cause. It’s impressive.

Also, the media treatment of his whole case has been enlightening. When his book, Technological Slavery, came out in 2010, I expected that there would be at least some media coverage. But there was none. The most famous “American terrorist” publishes a complete book from a super-max prison—and it’s not news? Seriously? Compare this topic to the garbage shown on our national evening news programs, and it’s a joke. NPR, 60 Minutes, Wired magazine, etc.—all decided it wasn’t newsworthy. Very telling.

One last thing: Expect to hear from Kaczynski again soon. His second book is nearing completion. The provisional title is “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.” But don’t look for it on your evening news.

Things are not as simplistic as you think.

Buy Technological Slavery, by Ted Kaczynski, and The Metaphysics of Technology by David Skrbina. Kaczynski does not profit from his book.

Brian Whitney’s latest book is Raping the Gods.

Related articles: Ted and the CIA Part 1 & 2 by David Kaczynski

http://blog.timesunion.com/kaczynski/ted-and-the-cia-part-1/271/

http://blog.timesunion.com/kaczynski/ted-and-the-cia-part-2/285/

The Internet Doesn’t Exist

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By Jacob Silverman

Source: The Baffler

The Internet has been very busy. In just the last week, Caitlyn Jenner broke the Internet, but she also united it. The FCC made war on the Internet. The Internet shamed a couple. The Internet had a dark side, Nikki Finke was barred from the Internet, the Supreme Court made the Internet less safe for women, the Internet named a famous fetus, the Internet did stuff with a superhero movie, and the Internet changed. A girl also won the Internet, Jack White had a difficult history with the Internet, and the Internet “shafted” a Canadian journalist.

“The Internet” is the universal straw man, a hero or villain for every occasion. The Internet, the Internet, the Internet—this decentralized communications network has long been granted a proper noun and practically a degree of sentience. Yet few people talk about “the Telephone” as if it were some person or place, though perhaps they once did. This eagerness to grant the Internet some degree of autonomy—to make it into an actor, an entity—stems in part from its apparent abstraction. Where does all this information come from? As Ray Bradbury famously said, “To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

Bradbury wasn’t just slipping into kneejerk techno-fear. He was also guilty of the same fallacy that crops up again and again in digital journalism: the assumption that the Internet is some monolithic mass, a discrete population or interest group. “It’s distracting,” Bradbury said, without specifying what “it” was.

But in another, more important way, Bradbury was absolutely right: the Internet doesn’t exist.

A couple years ago, Rachel Law, a grad student at Parsons at the time, had this to say: “The ‘Internet’ does not exist. Instead, it is many overlapping filter bubbles which selectively curate us into data objects to be consumed and purchased by advertisers.” As she also said, a bit less academically, “Browsing is now determined by your consumer profile and what you see, hear and the feeds you receive are tailored from your friends’ lists, emails, online purchases, etc.”

What we call the Internet—and what web writers so lazily draw on for their work—is less a hive mind or a throng or a gathering place and more a personalized set of online maneuvers guided by algorithmic recommendations. When we look at our browser windows, we see our own particular interests, social networks, and purchasing histories scrambled up to stare back at us. But because we haven’t found a shared discourse to talk about this complex arrangement of competing influences and relationships, we reach for a term to contain it all. Enter “the Internet.”

The Internet is a linguistic trope but also an ideology and even a business plan. If your job is to create content out of (mostly) nothing, then you can always turn to something/someone that “the Internet” is mad or excited about. And you don’t have to worry about alienating readers because “the Internet” is so general, so vast and all-encompassing, that it always has room. This form of writing is widely adaptable. Now it’s common to see stories where “Facebook” or “Twitter” stands in for the Internet, offering approval or judgment on the latest viral schlock. Choose your (anec)data carefully, and Twitter can tell any story you want.

We fall back on “the Internet” because it gives us a rhetorical life raft to hang onto amidst an overwhelming tide of information or a piece of sardonic shorthand to utter with a wink and a grimace, much like “never read the comments.” It also reflects a strange irony about today’s culture: despite being highly distributed, and despite offering an outlet for every subculture and niche interest and political quirk, what we think of the Internet often does feel rather uniform and monolithic.

This impression is partly based in fact; the tech and media industries are currently undergoing a kind of recentralization, exemplified by the rise of massive platforms like Facebook and recent mega-deals, such as Verizon buying AOL or Charter Communications (who?) snapping up Time Warner Cable. Attention is increasingly being manipulated and auctioned off by a handful of big conglomerates. The relegation of Twitter to also-ran in the social media sweepstakes—the loser to Facebook in the rush to industry monopoly—also reflects this centralization. That a company with hundreds of millions of users can seem like a failure only shows how bad the market is at apportioning value. (But there I go falling into abstractions again—as if there is anything called “the market.”)

“The Internet” is easy, a convenient reference point and an essential concept for web journalists tasked with surfacing monetizable content from this great informational morass. Digital culture, or writing about “what people are talking about on the Internet,” is considered its own beat now. But in the same way that someone born in the 1980s might not think of himself as a millennial—an arbitrary distinction crafted by demographers and marketers—a user of an online service is not necessarily from, or part of, the Internet. Even some of the subcultures often held up as part of the Internet are mostly notional. Is “Black Twitter” a specific, homogenous entity, as it’s so often described in news coverage? Or is it more something that people do, a set of social relations acted out by varying groups of mostly black Twitter users?

The more we write about what takes place online as if it occurred in some other world, the more we fail to relate this communication system, and everything that happens through it, to the society around us. To understand the Internet, we have to destroy it as an idea.

Jacob Silverman’s book, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, is out now.

Politics as therapy: they want us to be just sick enough not to fight back

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By Michael Richmond

Source: Transformation

On 10 October it is World Mental Health Day. I used to be outgoing, but a descent into crushing depression left me housebound. After Occupy I started asking: how does social environment shape our psychology?

I used to buy the Sun newspaper. Not just to fit in with mates at secondary school but right into my first year at university. I knew there was something to be ashamed of in this filthy habit, armed as I was with my oft-deployed excuse: “I only buy it for the crossword and the football transfers.”

This was true. I never read the news. In general, I lived a remarkably apolitical existence. This was some feat considering I have a Jewish communist great grandfather, socialist grandparents, a union lawyer dad and an older brother who went through his Che Guevara phase at around fifteen.

I dropped out of university in early 2007, five months before Northern Rock bank hit the skids. Who knows whether the student experience would have politicised me? Perhaps the process would have been helped along by the backdrop of the approaching financial crisis?

But something else politicised me instead: a crushing, rapid descent into depression, social wilderness and personal crisis.

I experienced anxiety and depression as a hostile takeover of my life and sense of self. I went from being outgoing and sociable to being unable to talk to people or leave the house. This was within the space of a few days. There was no discernible cause.

It was quickly clear that I couldn’t continue at university and so I moved back into my parents’ house, where I have lived ever since.

Several years of isolation, suicidal thoughts and internal struggle followed. I remained unable to escape the confines of my bullying psyche, let alone my house.

Unable to work or study, have friendships, or experience joy, reading became my true love, my source of meaning, my attempt to make sense of what had happened to me. I obsessively read classic literature, history, philosophy, political economy – I had felt a profound sense of loss at not being able to finish university. I became determined that I would instead educate myself.

But an impenetrable sense of terror and despair continued to accompany me through my every waking and sleeping hour. I began to work my way through an impressive list of psychotropic medications and psychotherapies and eventually attended an NHS psychiatric day hospital for six months.

A “service user” within the psychiatric system gains a unique insight and practical education in state discipline as well as the lengths gone to in enforcing normativity. Having grown up white, straight, male and middle class, I was privileged to rarely, if ever, be told that I had to be something other than what I was.

I seldom encountered gross injustice or violence, blatant discrimination or the kind of treatment faced from the earliest ages if you happen to be a person of colour, don’t fit a gender binary or adhere to accepted ideals of sexual behaviour.

Apart from being a non-religious Jew and encountering minimal levels of playground anti-Semitism, this was the first time I found myself in a situation of social and political ostracism (as well as a self-ostracism that proved just as powerful). I discovered for myself that the experience of the personal deeply informs the political.

Leaving the psychiatric day hospital to instead attend the asylum of Occupy the London Stock Exchange at St Paul’s Cathedral was in many ways a descent into further madness. Many “occupiers” were well acquainted with psychiatric services and medications – as well as using drugs not sanctioned by the state, but often taken for similar reasons.

Chaotic, naïve, and ultimately politically problematic and ineffectual, the initial occupied space did nevertheless open up the possibility for social and political interaction that is elsewhere absent from society.

I felt that I was in crisis, but also that the crisis was much bigger than just me. Getting involved in political praxis seemed to be the best way to channel what I was experiencing.

There is a lot to be said for the practice of “politics as therapy.”

The personal account or “journey” format often proves insufficient when attempting to understand what we do and why we do it. An analysis of political subjectivity is crucial. Shifts in capitalist expansion, social environment and class composition, technological development and the onset of crises tend to precipitate political transformation on an individual and collective basis.

The advent of the printing press or the collapse of the automotive industry in mid-west America, for example, are not external factors to people’s lives or isolated moments in history. Indeed, any such upheaval is bound to lead to transformative changes in the lives and political ideation of those experiencing it.

Our social environment shapes our psychology. We must consider how the policy, ideology and debate that surrounds “mental health” or madness is framed.

The individualisation of suffering is key to the prevailing ideology and discourse surrounding mental illness. This will often focus on a supposed misfiring of brain chemicals, a “cure” to which can be found in the form of pharmaceuticals – often prescribed by your GP before any contact with mental health services.

Attention may also turn to an individual’s lack of positive attitude, but this problem can be “fixed” by a six-week course of cognitive behavioural therapy. So much human suffering is pathologised and medicated when it is either “natural” (i.e grief or the general variety of mental experience) or is directly or indirectly linked to social, political and economic factors that remain absent from debate, let alone actively contested on this terrain.

Psychologist and author Bruce E Levine suggests that much of today’s intervention under the auspices of “mental health” is all too political.

“What better way to maintain the status quo,” Levine asks, “than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society?”

He also argues that many potential activists and “natural anti-authoritarians” are prevented from opposing power: “Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the US. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologised and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.”

The historical origins of madness within western culture and how it became increasingly medicalised should not be forgotten. Michel Foucault exposed how the origins of “confinement” of the “insane” in asylums and workhouses were an integral part of the violent replacement of the feudal commons way of life with capitalist work discipline during the 16th and 17th centuries.

This process is in keeping with continual “primitive accumulation” akin to and contemporary with the conquest of the “New World” and the persecution of heretics and witches. Their land and means of reproduction were stolen and appropriated, while authorities continually oppressed and attempted to proletarianise them.

Initially, the “Great Confinement” saw the imprisonment of the old, the unemployed, the “criminal”, the “insane.”

As Foucault explains: “Before having the medical meaning we give it, or that at least we like to suppose it has, confinement was required by something quite different from any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative of labour. Our philanthropy prefers to recognise the signs of a benevolence toward sickness where there is only a condemnation of idleness.”

The conflation of pejoratives like lazy, sick, unemployed, idle are more than familiar to us in today’s discourse surrounding welfare benefits and the imperatives of labour. And it is not just the DWP and Atos who pressure people back into work, NHS psychiatric services also seem to believe that it is work that sets you free.

The capitalist class would like us to be just sick enough not to fight back, but not so sick that we cannot work. The challenge for us is to find ways of organising and helping each other so that we can find adequate levels of social reproduction, care and support to give us a platform to engage in the therapy of class struggle.

 

Saturday Matinee: The Fuck-It Point

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THE-FUCK-IT-POINT

Synopsis by Savage Revival:

A film about civilization, why we should bring it down and why most civilized people don’t.

[THE FUCK-IT POINT]
‘When you have had enough. When you decide to take matters into your own hands and don’t care what’s going to happen to you. When you know that from now on you will resist with whatever tactic you think is most effective.’

Towards a Critical Public Pedagogy of Predatory Anthropocene

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By Michael B. McDonald

Source: The Hampton Institute

In 2015, a group of scientists published ” The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration “. They showed that rising consumption and increasing rates of impact on Earth Systems began after the Second World War. It was the expansion of economic activity charged by increasing resource use that created new technologies that expanded rates of consumption. This was a celebrated new socio-economic phase called the Great Acceleration that was supposed to lead to full employment and a bright future for all. It was also the beginning of a next phase of world capitalism accelerated by increasing urbanization. By 2008 humanity officially entered a new urban phase where 50% of the earth’s population lives in urban spaces. More cities will be built in the next thirty years than in all previous human history. Earth System scientists have shown that all of these changes are having unprecedented impacts on the Earth. Human life is changing the Earth, they call it anthropocene.

But the Great Acceleration did not lead to full employment nor a bright future. In fact, it has led to massive inequality created by a very small percentage of people controlling a staggering amount of wealth. In 2010, OECD countries had 18% of the earth’s population but accounted for 74% of GDP. But only .1% controlled this vast wealth through a system that I call predatory anthropocene.

The system of predatory anthropocene can be found in changes to the global economy and a fundamental shift in the way the economy works through its transformation of subjective, social and environmental ecologies, what Felix Guattari called the Three Ecologies. One aspect of this change has been called semiocapitalism, the blending of imagination, ideas, language and capital. Semiocapitalism works by capturing evolutionary life. Belonging, for instance, is now produced by the consumption of psycho-social products that gain economic value in consumption and are financed by increasing debt. The GDP of the United States is now 70% consumption.

Making community through mass consumption is eroding the anthropological basis upon which human life is built. We need a language for this. Perhaps we need to recognize that the communicative and biological systems of the human species have habitats. The biosphere sustains biological life while the ethnosphere sustains communicational life. The biosphere is quite well known but the ethnosphere less so. Wade Davis suggests that the ethnosphere is a global quilt of local cultures, a band of cultural life functioning in tandem with the biosphere for the creation, organization, and expression of human communicational life.[1] The ethnosphere is a collection of languages, ideas, and dreams. It is the anthropological rituals that have accompanied human evolution, has organized social reproduction, it is the institution of language [2] in all its complexity, but is also beyond language.[3] When people talk about humanity in general, they mean the biosphere and ethnosphere, the cultures of the world in their physical, expressive, subjective dimensions. But now ethnosphere complexity is reduced by global commodities, unique cultures consumed by Hollywood-hegemony, human imagination consumed by consumer products, dreams being replaced by corporate produced and globalized desires. A single system is producing hegemony in ways that no single system was ever before capable. It is necessary for us to see that our species is under threat by a monster system that we have created, a monsterous, cancerous, predatory system poisoning the Earth. Henry Giroux has argued that:

What makes American society distinct in the present historical moment are a culture and social order that have not only lost their moral bearings but produce levels of symbolic and real violence whose visibility and existence set a new standard for cruelty, humiliation, and mechanizations of a mad war machine, all of which serves the interest of the political and corporate walking dead-the new avatars of death and cruelty-that plunder the social order and wreak ecological devastation. We now live in a world overrun with flesh-eating zombies, parasites who have a ravenous appetite for global destruction and civic catastrophe. (2014, xi-xii)[4]

Because I follow Guattari’s cybernetic view I am less certain than Giroux appears to be, that is it possible to tell zombies from non-zombies in a period where a) agribusiness replaces agriculture and transforms all aspects of domestic life that b) creates stretches of suburbs that wipe out, without social discussion, the farmland that has laid the foundation of human flourishing, c) as mounting debt continues without slowing and without discourse in the public sphere, as d) waves of fellow humans are dislocated everyday due to military, economic, and environmental calamities. And none of this is news, we watch all of it studiously, staring at our displays unmoved by the misery and pain we see on the faces, and hear in the cries of fellow humans. Too many of us escape our responsibilities to confront this pain by fleeing to walled-in communities whose walls are maintained, not by bricks but by the capacity to carry the mortgage debt (that machinically contributes to predatory anthropocene) in the hopes of living in relative safety while the poor (who can not access debt) are left in decaying city centers. But as foreclosures swept across America after the housing bubble burst, suburban safety was shown to be precarious. It is important for us to take notice of the fact that we know all of this and collectively do very little to change it. We sign petitions on Facebook, but we still shop at malls that we built on farmland and we clearly have little access to empathy. And I am not saying this to be critical of you. I am truly stuck. After many years of being inspired by Adbusters and semio-politics and culture jamming I’m not sure what the next step is. I feel free space disappearing. I’m looking for options.

This difficulty of expressing empathy tells us something about hegemony under semiocapitalism. We now know that empathy is not something we develop, but something that we shut down. Vittorio Gallese in ” The Manifold Nature of Interpersonal Relations: The Quest for a Common Mechanism” has shown that for us to “know that another human being is suffering or rejoicing, is looking for food or shelter, is about to attack or kiss us, we do not need verbal language” (Virno 2008: 175) we only need the activation of what Gallese called mirror neurons a “class of premotor neurons [that] was discovered in the macaque monkey brain that discharged not only when the monkey executes goal-related hand actions like grasping objects, but also when observing other individuals (monkeys or humans) executing similar actions” (Gallese: 522). Experiments successfully illustrated that mirror neurons were also in the human brain “positioned in the ventral part of the inferior frontal lobe, consisting of two areas, 44 and 45, both of which belong to the Broca region” (Virno: 177). Mirror neurons allow us to experience what we see. When we see someone doing something that we’ve never done, our brain reacts as if we are doing it, what Gallese calls “embodied simulation.” This means that empathy is not something that we need to develop it is something that is functioning in our brains whether we like it or not. But as Paulo Virno points out, humans are clearly adept at seeing other humans as not-humans in order to override “embodied simulation”. We are constantly unmoved watching violent death in both fiction and non-fiction, and constantly enacting laws to restrict sexuality and eroticism in the social sphere. In this context there is little doubt that a public pedagogy of human negation is taking place that values violence and negates the erotic energy that produces new human life! What this means is that “every naturalist thinker must acknowledge one given fact: the human animal is capable of not recognizing another human animal as being on of its own kind.” How does this public pedagogy of negation occur? Virno argues that verbal language, “distinguishes itself from other communicative codes, as well as from cognitive prelinguistic performance, because it is able to negate any type of semantic content.”(176). Through language we are able to negate others as not-human, shutting down the empathy that is produced by mirror neurons. But all is not lost as Paulo Freire points out, pedagogies of dehumanization can be countered through critical pedagogy. That we might learn to negate dehumanization is our hope, to dissolve the oppressor-oppressed binary through the creation of new anti-predatorial segnifications. Virno suggests that while language introduced human-negation into communication it also provides us the technology to negate-negation. In this way critical pedagogy is the negation-of-negation. But only when it is used in this way. I make one amendment to Virno’s suggestion, that it is necessary to go beyond the notion of linguistic negation to identify the ways that negation is in the production of subjectivity, not just in the linguistic negation but in complex existential negations that occur within complex machinic semiotics. It is necessary to see the ways that the production of aesthetic systems produces collective subjectivities that produce We’ness as well as Other’ness.

Cultural technologies produce cultural workers who reproduce subjectivity-producing systems that produce subjects who reduce the ethnosphere and pollute the biosphere. Theodore Adorno was right to be concerned about the culture industry just as Walter Benjamin saw with clear sight the dangers of the absorption of aesthetics into politics. They both saw that the industrialization of the satisfaction of desire, what we might call affective-capitalism, has significant socio-political-economic impacts. There is a real danger when anthropological rituals developed for the social life are replaced by capitalist products. The production and satisfaction of desire on the marketplace is a constantly undermining of love of the local, a replacement of belonging with having the same mass manufactured private property, the replacement of environmentally-embedded anthropological bonds with capital resource consuming exchange. The production of subjectivity is consumed by the factory, negating living, thus extending the contractions of capitalism beyond the factory into all aspects of live time. Giroux has called this a “new kind of authoritarianism that does not speak in the jingoistic discourse of empowerment, exceptionalism, or nationalism. Instead, it defines itself in the language of cruelty, suffering, and fear, and it does so with a sneer and an unbridled disdain for those considered disposable. Neoliberal society mimics the search for purity we have seen in other totalitarian societies” (2014, xvii). And it does so through the production of subjectivity, in the distribution of social subjection and the institution of machinic enslavement. Together these form the contents of the public pedagogy of culture industry, the negation of lived time that blocks access to mirror neurons, limits our ability to negate the negations of the neoliberal culture industry, thus limiting our ability to resist through the production life affirming social machines, liberatory and collectively produced social subjectivations and life affirming machinic enslavements.
I, Terminator

Some people however, are arguing that the changes I call predatory anthropocene are a step forward for humanity. Luciano Floridi, for instance, imagines a new humanity as interconnected informational organisms (inforgs) active in “sharing with biological agents and engineered artifacts, a global environment ultimately made of information” (2011,9). Collectively these inforgs produce an infosphere that either replaces or contributes to the ethnosphere. But Floridi does not account for political economy and therefore misses that his dreams of the infosphere are enslaved by the algorithms of capitalism.

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi however, shows that inforgs are not liberated informational workers but are ‘cognitariate’ (exploited proletarians of information) controlled by the automatisms of machinic enslavements, no longer disciplined but under subjectively captured within the new means of control. Machinic enslavement is not discipline, but it is none-the-less controlling. No longer is there a need for an authority to hover over your shoulder to keep you in line. Machinic enslavement works to lead you into accepting the circuits of capture and control embedded cybernetically in modes of production, exchange and consumption. In the machinic enslavement of predatory anthropocene your only value is through economic consumption, and control is located in your desire to fulfill your consumptive role. Desire (libidinal, economic, social) is no longer a location of liberation, but a mechanism of discipline. This is power within predatory anthropocene.

Floridi’s infosphere and its cognitarians are colonizers machinically enslaving dreams and desires. Their colonization does not in fact produce the infosphere but instead a nightmarish mechanosphere. The mechanosphere converts the anthropological ethnosphere into capitalist products, cognitive capitalism “produces and domesticates the living on a scale never before seen” (Boutang 2011, 48). Felix Guattari and Franco Berardi “emphasize that entire circuits and overlapping and communicating assemblages integrate cognitive labor and the capitalistic exploitation of its content”[5] in a model they call semiocapitalism, that captures “the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value”( Berardi 2009, 21). Our language is being transformed into capitalist value, our words, dreams, desires and subjectivities are lost to the mechanosphere, “the authoritarian disimagination machine that affirms everyone as a consumer and reduces freedoms to unchecked self-interest while reproducing subjects who are willingly complicit with the plundering of the environment, resources, and public goods by the financial elite” (Giroux 2014, xxi).

Predatory anthropocene not only massively increases earth system impacts but creates massive inequality. In early 2015 year Oxfam released Working for the Few a terrifying document that shows, “Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population” and that, “The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world,” and that this already extreme economic disparity is getting worse.

But we do not tell stories of predatory anthropocene to our children. Instead we tell myths of consumption, stories of gleeful elves happily working in non-unionized factories making toys for unproblematically good children, all the while supported by a covert group of elf spies that complicit parents move around their house for weeks. This is the childhood public pedagogy of predatory anthropocene where domestic life is machinically enslaved to global capitalism, domesticated to surveillance-of-consumption, young lives converted to effective consumer-citizens. Perhaps it’s time to start telling our children the very true story of predatory anthropocene, the killer system that we have created and released into our world but refuse to name, refuse to accept, and spend a great deal of money and words denying. There is no sense denying predatory anthropocene, we need to talk of the monster that is killing our planet, we need to develop a critical pedagogy of predatory anthropocene, to learn to negate the negation.

Notes

 

[1] Davis, Wade. (2007). Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures. Vancouver, BC: Douglas &McIntyre Ltd.

[2] Virno, Paolo. (2008). Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. Los Angeles, California: Semiotext(e)Foreign Agents Series.

[3] Here I am thinking about post Spinozist philsophers that argue for a semiotics beyond language signification and even beyond logocentric significations and include Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Maurizio Lazzarato, Rosi Braidotti. Most compelling is the Deleuze and Guatarri suggestion that Lazzarato has picked up on in Signs and Machines and Governing by Debt that there is a machinic order as well as a logocentric order. My argument here is that predatory anthropocene functions through a machinic order that is little impacted by traditional semiotics, by political sloganeering, or even by radical critique. That there must be a politics of doing, or dropping out of predatory anthropocene in the way that Franco ‘Bifo’ Berrardi suggests in After the Future.

[4] Giroux, Henry (2014). Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism New York: Peter Lang Press.

[5] Genosko, Gary. 2012. Remodeling Communication: From WWII to WWW. Toronto, Can: University of Toronto Press. (pg. 150)

Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong: Smashing the Drug War Paradigm

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

“Overwhelming evidence points to not just the failure of the drug control regime to attain its stated goals but also the horrific unintended consequences of punitive and prohibitionist laws and policies,” states a study, published by the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP).

“A new and improved global drug control regime is needed that better protects the health and safety of individuals and communities around the world,” the report says. “Harsh measures grounded in repressive ideologies must be replaced by more humane and effective policies shaped by scientific evidence, public health principles and human rights standards.”

This sudden onset of logic by political bodies across the globe is likely due to the realization of the cruel and inhumane way governments deal with addiction. Arbitrary substances are deemed “illegal” and then anyone caught in possession of those substances is then kidnapped and locked in a cage, or even killed.

The fact that this barbaric and downright immoral practice has been going on for so long speaks to the sheer ignorance of the state and its dependence upon violence to solve society’s ills.

The good news is that the drug war’s days are numbered, especially seeing that it’s reached the White House, and they are taking action, even if it is symbolic. Evidence of this is everywhere. States are defying the federal government and refusing to lock people in cages for marijuana. Colorado and Washington served as a catalyst in a seemingly exponential awakening to the government’s immoral war.

Following suit were Oregon, D.C., and Alaska. Medical marijuana initiatives are becoming a constant part of legislative debates nationwide. We’ve even seen bills that would not only completely legalize marijuana but deregulate it entirely, like corn.

As more and more states refuse to kidnap and cage marijuana users, the drug war will continue to implode.

Knowledge is a key role in this battle against addiction tyranny and investigative journalist Johann Hari, has some vital information to share. In a recent TEDx talk, Hari smashes the paradigm of the war on drugs.

What really causes addiction — to everything from cocaine to smart-phones? And how can we overcome it? Johann Hari has seen our current methods fail firsthand, as he has watched loved ones struggle to manage their addictions. He started to wonder why we treat addicts the way we do — and if there might be a better way. As he shares in this deeply personal talk, his questions took him around the world, and unearthed some surprising and hopeful ways of thinking about an age-old problem.