Tag Archives: activism

People Over Politics: Michigan Militia Joins Michael Moore to Protest Flint Water Crisis

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By Carey Wedler

Source: Anti-Media

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan has inspired an unlikely partnership: a local militia group is coordinating with outspoken liberal filmmaker Michael Moore to demand accountability and clean water for residents.

Moore, a Flint native who first gained notoriety for his his documentary on the town’s economic hardships, has spoken out against the state and local government’s negligent handling of the disaster. The high volume of lead in public water supplies has contaminated children’s blood and led Flint’s mayor to declare a state of emergency.

The crisis has drawn widespread attention and outrage.

At a rally on January 16, Michael Moore said, “I am standing in the middle of a crime scene. Ten people have been killed … because of a decision to save money.” The city’s water supply was changed from Detroit’s water supply to the Flint River in 2014, in spite of the new source’s reputation for being filled with contaminants like raw sewage and tires.

As Anti-Media previously reported, “The shift in supply was a result of failed procedures and negotiations to continue purchasing the water.”

Further, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality has admitted its failure in not requiring that non-corrosive additives be added to the water during treatment to counteract the lead that seeps into water from old pipes. Authorities at the state level reportedly belittled concerns from Flint’s local community about the quality of their water. The national EPA has also been criticized for its involvement (or lack thereof) in the water crisis.

These examples of incompetence and corruption, along with the residents’ ongoing suffering, led Moore to speak out. Meanwhile, the Michigan militia, known as the Genesee County Volunteer Militia, has been working with the Red Cross to deliver clean water door-to-door, making stops that include a senior living facility and an elementary school.  The Detroit Free Press reported that in a news release, the militia said, “It is nothing less than shocking that our elected officials would try to hide the hazards that residents are being subjected to just by drinking a simple glass of tap water!!!” Further, the group demanded more information from the government on who was “involved in a coverup.”

Details have emerged that suggest Governor Rick Snyder and his administration ignored  warnings about the looming crisis — and that Snyder has since tried to cover up this prior knowledge. He released emails this week that were largely redacted, and Michael Moore has called for his arrest.

The militia is planning a rally for Sunday at 2pm at the City of Flint Municipal Center, and is working with Moore to ensure voices of dissent are continually heard.

“We’re trying to coordinate so the protests don’t stop,” Dave McKellar, a member of the right-wing armed force said. He owns a tree service business in Flint.

McKellar expressed his willingness to work with More in spite of differences of opinion on other matters. “We don’t see eye-to-eye on many things,” said McKellar. “For him to step forward and say something good… this time I agree with him.”

As McKellar said of the militia, “What we are is a constitutional defense force. We protect people who can’t protect themselves in time of disaster, be it man-made or other.” Still, the militia has made it clear its focus is not on weapons, but on the crisis at hand. The group posted on Facebook about its upcoming Sunday protest, noting, “We ask that you only wear side arms and not long rifles, this is not about our 2nd Amendment, this is about the infringement on the good people of Flint.”

The alliance between the militia and Michael Moore is admittedly unlikely. One of Moore’s most successful films, Bowling for Columbine, focused on the negative effects of guns in America, and the left’s reaction to the Oregon standoff — including calls to drone strike the so-called “domestic terrorists” have highlighted contentious, long-running divisions between armed protest movements and liberal causes. Animosity between left and right in the United States has reached fever-pitch on countless issues, from healthcare to police brutality to the Syrian refugee crisis.

Nevertheless, the two seemingly conflicting parties have placed the health of their fellow citizens above partisan hatred. Though they do not appear to have established a permanent relationship, Moore and the militia’s collaboration suggests that, perhaps, Americans can share a common cause.

Indeed, a wide variety of groups have stepped up to help residents of Flint. In addition to Michael Moore, the militia, and the Red Cross, an Islamic charity, local activists, and a Native American tribe have committed to helping the struggling community, along with countless Americans across the country.

This article (People Over Politics: Michigan Militia Joins Michael Moore to Protest Flint Water Crisis) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Carey Wedler and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credit: Kai Schreiber. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, A Mother Thinks the Unthinkable

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By Tom Engelhardt and Frida Berrigan

Source: TomDispatch.com

Frida Berrigan’s piece today speaks to me very personally. At 71, I have two children and a grandchild in this world, and I feel some responsibility for the sorry planet I’m leaving them. TomDispatch began as a no-name listserv, springing from a post-9/11 foreboding that, though I had been mobilized and active in the Vietnam War era, what was coming would be the worst years of my life, politically speaking. As those repetitive ceremonies in which we celebrated ourselves and our country as the greatest victims, survivors, and dominators on the planet spread, as they refused to end, as the urge for revenge of some all-encompassing sort grew and was encouraged by the Bush administration, as I began to grasp where its top officials were thinking about taking us (to hell and back, to quote a movie title of my childhood), I had the urge to do something.

I had done good work as a book editor over the years, but this was different.  It was a powerful feeling that I couldn’t just leave what seemed to be a degrading country or world to my children without lifting a hand, without trying to do something.  I had no idea what, but from that feeling, thanks to happenstance, dumb luck, and obsession, TomDispatch stumbled into existence.  And because I was then indeed doing something, I felt, amid the gloom, a certain hope.

So I’ve never looked back.  But, of course, one small critical website that attempts to offer ways to reframe what’s happening on our increasingly embattled planet hardly represents a world-saving act, nor did I ever think that such an act could be mine — or really any individual’s.  What this has meant, though, is that, 14 years later, when with utter exuberance my grandson “races” me down a city block pulling me by the hand, I feel just the sort of pleasure (at one remove since I’m no longer the parent) that TomDispatch regular Berrigan describes so movingly with her own daughter.  And every time I’m with him, just as she describes, there are those other moments, the ones when I suddenly remember what’s happening on this planet, the ones when I look at him and feel overcome by sadness verging on grief at the potentially devastated world that may be his inheritance, my “gift” to him.  Those are indeed fears “too big to name.”  Still, Berrigan does a remarkable job of bringing to consciousness a new sensibility that, however seldom mentioned, must be increasingly common currency on this planet. Tom

Parenting on the Brink
Wrestling With Fears Too Big to Name
By Frida Berrigan

Madeline is in the swing, her face the picture of delight. “Mo, mo,” she cries and kicks her legs to show me that she wants me to push her higher and faster. I push, and push, and push with both hands. There is no thought in my head except for her joy. I’m completely present in this moment. It’s perfection. Madeline embodies the eternal now and she carries me with her, pulling me out of my worries and fears and plans.

But not forever: after a few minutes, my mind and eyes wander. I take in the whole busy playground, crowded with toddlers plunging headlong into adventure and their attendant adults shouting exhortations to be careful, offering snacks, or lost in the tiny offices they carry in their hands. It’s a gorgeous day. Sunny and blue and not too hot, a hint of fall in the breeze. And then my eye is caught by a much younger mom across the playground trying to convince her toddler that it’s time to go.

When Madeline graduates from high school, I will be 57. Jeez, I think, that mom will still be younger than I am now when her kid walks across that stage. If I live to be 85, Madeline will be 46 and maybe by then I’ll have some grandkids.  In fact, I’m suddenly convinced of it.  Between Madeline and her three-year-old brother Seamus and their eight-year-old sister Rosena, I will definitely live to see grandkids.  I reassure myself for the millionth time that having kids in my late thirties was totally fine.

And then another thought comes to mind, the sort of thought that haunts the parents of this moment: When I’m 85, it will be 2059, and what will that look like? When my grandkids are my age now, it could be almost a new century. And what will our planet look like then? And I feel that little chill that must be increasingly commonplace among other parents of 2015.

And then I’m gone. You wouldn’t know it to look at me.  After all, I’m still pushing the swing, still cooing and chatting with my buoyant 18-month-old daughter, but my mind is racing, my heart is pounding. This playground will not be here. This tranquil, stable, forever place wasn’t built to last 100 years, not on a planet like this one at this moment anyway.

I look around and I know. None of this — the municipal complex, the school across the street, the supermarket up the road — is built for 100 years, especially not this hundred years. It won’t last. And I can’t imagine a better future version of this either. What comes to mind instead are apocalyptic images, cheesy ones cribbed from The Walking Dead, that zombie series on AMC; The Day After, a 1980s made-for-TV dramatization of a nuclear attack on the United States; Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novel The Road; Brad Pitt’s grim but ultimately hopeful World War Z; and The Water Knife, a novel set in the western United States in an almost waterless near future.

They all rush into my head and bump up against the grainy black-and-white documentary footage of Hiroshima in 1945 that I saw way too young and will never forget. This place, this playground, empty, rusted, submerged in water, burned beyond recognition, covered in vines, overrun by trees. Empty. Gone.

Then, of course, Madeline brings me back to our glorious present. She wants to get out of the swing and hit the slides. She’s fearless, emphatic, and purposeful. She deserves a future.  Her small body goes up those steps and down the slide over and over and over again. And the rush of that slide is new every time. She shouts and laughs at the bottom and races to do it again. Now. Again. Now. This is reality. But my fears are real, too. The future is terrifying. To have a child is to plant a flag in the future and that is no small responsibility.

We Have Nothing to Fear but…

We mothers hear a lot these days about how to protect our children. We hear dos and don’ts from mommy magazines, from our own mothers, our pediatricians, each other, from lactation experts and the baby formula industry, from the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, from Doctor Bob Sears, from sociologists and psychiatrists and child development specialists. We are afraid for our kids who need to be protected from a world of dangers, including strangers, bumblebees, and electrical outlets.

Such threats are discussed, dissected, and deconstructed constantly in the media and ever-newer ones are raised, fears you never even thought about until the nightly news or some other media outlet brought them up. But hanging over all these humdrum, everyday worries is a far bigger fear that we never talk about and that you won’t read about in that mommy magazine or see in any advice column.  And yet, it’s right there, staring us in the face every single day, constant, existential, too big to name.

We can’t say it, but we are increasingly afraid of the future, of tomorrow, afraid for our children in ways that, in themselves, are frightening to bring up. It’s as diffuse as “anything can happen” and as specific as we are running out of ______ [fill in the blank: clean water, fossil fuels, space for people, arable land, cheap food stuffs, you name it]. Even if the supply of whatever you chose to think about isn’t yet dwindling in our world, you know that it will one of these days. Whatever it is, that necessity of everyday life will be gone (or too expensive for ordinary people) by ______ [2020, 2057, 2106].

It’s paralyzing to look at Madeline and think such thoughts, to imagine an ever-hotter planet, ever-less comfortable as a home not just for that vague construct “humanity,” but for my three very specific children, not to speak of those grandchildren of my dreams and fantasies.

It’s something that’s so natural to push away. Who wouldn’t prefer not to think about it?  And at least here, in our world, on some level we can still do that.

For those of us who are white and western and relatively financially stable, it’s still possible to believe we’re insulated from disaster — or almost possible anyway. We can hold on to the comfort that our children are unlikely to be gunned down or beaten to death by police, for example. We can watch the news and feel sadness for the mass exodus out of Syria and all those who are dying along the way, but those feelings are tinged with relief in knowing that we will not be refugees ourselves.

But for how long? What if?

They say: enjoy your kids while they’re young; pretty soon they’ll be teenagers. Haha, right? Actually, I’m excited about each stage of my kids’ lives, but Madeline won’t be a teenager until 2027. According to climate scientists and environmentalists, that may already be “past the point of no return.” If warming continues without a major shift, there will be no refreezing those melting ice shelves, no holding back the rising seas, no scrubbing smog-clogged air, no button we can press to bring water back to parched landscapes.

These are things I know. This is a future I, unfortunately, can imagine. These are the reasons I try to do all the right things: walk, eat mostly vegetarian, grow some of our own food, conserve, reuse, reduce, recycle. We had solar panels installed on our roof. We only have one car. We’re trying, but I know just as well that such lifestyle choices can’t turn this around.

It will take everyone doing such things — and far more than that. It will require governments to come to their senses and oil companies to restrain the urge to get every last drop of fossil fuel out of the ground.  It will take what Naomi Klein calls a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.” In her groundbreaking and hopeful book, This Changes Everything, she writes,

“I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale [than the New Deal]. As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels many scientists recommend, we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up.”

Which brings me to fear and how it paralyzes. I don’t want to be paralyzed in the face of catastrophic climate change or any other looming calamity. I want to be motivated and spurred to action not by an apocalyptic vision of our local playground engulfed in flames or submerged under several feet of water, but by the potential for the brighter future than is surely within our grasp — within my grasp today and Madeline’s in some future that she truly deserves.

Preparing for the Unthinkable 

Growing up, I heard this a lot: “Don’t be so First World, Frida.”

That’s what Phil Berrigan — former priest, brazenly nonviolent activist, tireless organizer for peace and justice — would tell me, his eldest daughter. If I was flippant or tweenish, that’s what he would always say. “Don’t be so First World.” It was his rejoinder when I asked for spending money or permission to go to the movies. What he meant was: regulate your wants, consider others, be comfortable being alone, put yourself second, listen, be in solidarity, choose the harder path.

My father’s admonishment sounds a discordant note amid today’s morass of parenting messages with their emphasis on success and ease and happiness. But it prepared me for much of what I encountered along the road to adulthood and it resonates deeply as I parent three children whose futures I cannot imagine. Not really. Will they have clean water, a home, a democracy, a playground for their children? Will they be able to buy food — or even grow it? Will they be able to afford transportation? I don’t know.

What I can do is prepare them to distinguish needs from wants, to share generously and build community, to stand up for what they believe and not stand by while others are abused. When, as with Madeline at that playground, the unspoken overwhelms me, I wonder whether I shouldn’t sooner or later start teaching them how the world works and basic skills that will serve them well in an uncertain future: what electricity is and how to start a fire, how to navigate by the stars, how to feed themselves by hunting and gathering, how to build a shelter or find and purify water, or construct a bicycle out of parts they come across on the road to perdition.

The only problem is that, like most of my peers and friends, I actually don’t know how to do any of that (except maybe for the bicycle building), so I better get started. I should also be planting nut trees in our backyard and working for global nuclear disarmament. I can help New London (a water’s edge community) be prepared and more resilient in the face of rising sea levels and be active in our local Green Party.

I know that there’s no simple solution, no easy or individual fix to what’s coming down the road. I know as well that there is no future except the one we are making right now, this second, again and again and again. And in our world, I call that hope, not despair. Perhaps you could just as easily call it folly.  Call it what you will.  I don’t have a label for my parenting style. I’m not a helicopter mom or a tiger mom. But like a lot of other people right now, whether they know it or not, realize it or not, I am parenting on the brink of catastrophe. I’m terrified for my children, but I am not paralyzed and I know I am not alone, which makes me, despite everything, hopeful, not for myself, but for Madeline.

 

Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New London, Connecticut.

 

Insurrection and Utopia, Part 1: “We are Eating From a Trashcan; This Trashcan is Ideology.”

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By Dr. Bones

Source: Gods and Radicals

It all started innocently enough. A friend asked me a question on facebook:

“How can you advocate anarchic revolution when your political vision is so far in the minority?”

The underlying premise was a good one: In a country of 300+ million, how can you call for the upheaval of society, the breaking of societal and political bonds, when so few would readily identify as Anarchists/Socialists/Communists/Leftists/Anti-Capitalists/What-have-you? It’s a question often thrown at the Left and unfortunately many haven’t fully wrapped their heads around it.

In a way it’s a watermark. For an ideology or political vision to go from outright dismissal and laughter to being asked to provide real world examples of what would be done if it came to pass is a sign of growth; it is a signal, an omen, that the winds are beginning to blow in our favor and many want to know what might lie ahead. It’s one thing to talk about “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” but it’s quite another to discuss how restaurants would be run democratically and without profit or what exactly people might “do” on a day to day level in a classless, stateless society.

Still, the question is not an easy one. We could argue that it is the one question that has always plagued and nagged the Left: “Well that’s all good and well, but how do you plan to achieve this? How does such a world become born?” Staunch Marxists rely on a religious belief in the inevitable procession of history, Syndicalists will rail about the need for increased unionization, firebrand Neo-Bolsheviks plot to simply take power and liquidate class enemies, while the newly minted faux-left “Democratic Socialists” will hem-and-haw about passing enough laws to magically change the balance of power.

All of these options present difficult problems. History has been shown to be anything but inevitable (every year since 1914 has been “Late Capitalism”), a worker-owned McDonalds is still a site of exploitation, nobody ever bothers to explain just where all these people ready to kill for the Revolution are to come from, and the ludicrous doctrine of the Sandernistas that the wealthy and powerful will simply submit to higher taxes and the rule of law is so preposterous it’s only response should be derisive laughter.

So, where are we? Where do we go from here? How are we to change the world?

I start first with a question: Whose world?

You Can’t Teach an Old Carrion-Eater New Tricks

Society, technology, language, and culture all bear the birth marks and forms of the ideological underpinnings of the system they emerged from. Marx notes:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

The Ruling Class, whether Capitalist or State Socialist, informs and projects its will and vision onto the rest of society by the sheer nature of being the dominant force in that society. Of course we can see this politically, but Marx notes this extends also into ideas, culture, anything that could be identified as a byproduct of human interaction and thinking.

The iron steel resolve and blatant disregard of human life so typical of the fearsome Bolshevik Commissar was not so much traits born as traits cultivated; ideals taken within the individual and digested. These cultivated traits came directly from the ideological call for early revolutionary Bolsheviks to identify themselves as “hards,” to be tough, to be ruthless and uncompromising in their goals; when they took state power it become propagated on a cultural level. This meme, this political trait, spiraled out and became a creature, a position, a symbolic figure to be adored/feared all onto its own. It transcended its existence as a mere “idea” or feeling about how party members should behave.

Uber, the trendy internet-based taxi service, could have just as easily manifested into the world as a collectively owned, worker-managed co-op. The internet platform itself is not that revolutionary, the people and tools to create the business were there all along and yet….it did not. Instead Uber emerged and was formed through an ideological lens that made sense to the Ruling Class and by a CEO who’s practically a poster boy for modern capitalism:

“Let’s consider how Kalanick treated his Uber taxi drivers in New York. When he was trying to convince them to break the law to boost Uber’s footprint in the city, Kalanick offered yellow cab drivers free iPhones and promised to “take care of” any legal problems they encountered with the TLC. A few short months later, when the service was forced to close, those same drivers received a message to come to Uber HQ. Reports the Verge ‘Multiple drivers said Uber called them into headquarters, claiming they needed to come by in order to get paid and would get a cash bonus for showing up. When the cabbies came in, Uber surprised them by asking for the device back, informing them that taxi service was no longer available in New York.’”

This is how Uber is evolving, this is how the entire concept other companies will build off is evolving: through actions committed under the dictate and logic of a particular ideology. Taken as gospel or rejected as too harsh new companies will only differ themselves in shades from this first “business plan” and mold their own social and economic arrangements within this ideological parameter. Even the technologies, once thought to be “pure” of politics develop along political lines.

“In an even stronger sense, many technologies can be said to possess inherent political qualities, whereby a given technical system by itself requires or at least strongly encourages specific patterns of human relationships. Winner (1985, 29–37) suggests that a nuclear weapon by its very existence demands the introduction of a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command to regulate who may come anywhere near it, under what conditions, and for what purposes. It would simply be insane to do otherwise. More mundanely, in the daily infrastructures of our large-scale economies — from railroads and oil refineries to cash crops and microchips — centralization and hierarchical management are vastly more efficient for operation, production, and maintenance. Thus the creation and maintenance of certain social conditions can happen in the technological system’s immediate operating environment as well as in society at large.”

What’s interesting is the feedback loop this creates: technology is warped and shaped by the society(and thus dominant ideology), while at the same time the society becomes molded by the technology.

“As technologies are being built and put into use, significant alterations in patterns of human activity and human institutions are already taking place … the construction of a technical system that involves human beings as operating parts brings a reconstruction of social roles and relationships. Often this is a result of the new system’s own operating requirements: it simply will not work unless human behavior changes to suit its form and process. Hence, the very act of using the kinds of machines, techniques and systems available to us generates patterns of activities and expectations that soon become “second nature.”…

Winner gives several examples of technologies employed with intention to dominate, including post-1848 Parisian thoroughfares built to disable urban guerrillas, pneumatic iron molders introduced to break skilled workers’ unions in Chicago, and a segregationist policy of low highway overpasses in 1950s Long Island, which deliberately made rich, white Jones Beach inaccessible by bus, effectively closing it off to the poor. In all these cases, although the design was politically intentional, we can see that the technical arrangements determine social results in a way that logically and temporally precedes their actual deployment. There are predictable social consequences to deploying a given technology or set of technologies.”

In effect we our trapped in a web: We exist in a world not only molded and shaped by a Hierarchical and Capitalist mentality, but the very tools we use including our social selves maintain and reinforce this artifice. The ideology molds the world which molds the people which molds the technology which molds the world which molds the people, etc, etc, etc. As Slajov Zizek points out even those who wish to rebel against the system seem doomed(as if by design?) to remain within it:

“If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who ‘really want to do something to help people’ get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing.”

Even if State power is seized, if the old masters are cast out, the very throne itself acts like a cursed object and corrupts those that sought to destroy it. People who fought for the worker’s emancipation end up crushing strikes, Greens end up debating just how much depleted uranium to bury underground and how much to fire out of tanks, anti-austerity Leftists end up dispatching riot police to break up protests, the list goes on and on throughout history. The simple truth is you can take the most noble pauper and make him a king, and he may be a great king, but he must still maintain certain conditions(however unjust) by simply being king. The more he becomes attached to this position the more “pragmatism” takes over, excusing acts once thought unthinkable in the name keeping the current conditions going if only to “continue to do good things.” Hugo Chavez and Castro can speak all day of “people’s liberation” but the fact is people aren’t liberated if simply holding a different opinion is so threatening to your revolution they have to be jailed. And thus the throne lives on. While the Kings may change shape or party color the throne of the State and Capital continue to exist, continue to propagate exploitative and domineering cultural memes, social conditions, and technological apparatus.

But there is hope, even on the hinterlands of the oh-so-popular activism of today, in that seemingly bizarre behavior the State displays when people, protests, and organizations are met with overwhelming force.  Why can millions march up and down streets freely “as long as they do not get close to a certain limit” of behavior? What is this Hedge, this boundary we must cross? What is this line so jealously guarded?

Push it to the Limit

Remember the Cuban Missile crises? Where the big bad Soviet Union brought us within an inch to war, ready to point nuclear warheads stationed in Cuba right at us? And how it was only through tough diplomacy and American bravado that we got them to turn around? No? Good, because it didn’t happen like that at all. The Soviets, arming an ally after a recent American-backed invasion, made the deal, not us: Remove the missiles stationed in Turkey(a country that shared a border with the USSR) pointed at Moscow and they would do the same. Kennedy liked the deal and took it. This brought horror to the Military-Industrial establishment; they saw it as backing down to the Soviets. Remember that ideology bit? They didn’t see it as two individuals avoiding nuclear war; their ideological lens would not permit them to. They instead saw it in a hierarchical, dominating dialectic: we had been submissive towards another power. But the Soviets didn’t see it that way, and neither did much of the world, and therein lay the true danger: a new way of thinking, a shift in vision had been displayed and put into practice. And this would not stand.

Others have covered just how against the grain Kennedy went, and how often those who went against him howled for war. I leave the fact that one of those two combatants is dead under your feet for you to play with and ponder. I could mention that right when Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King started talking about “economic justice” and planned on occupying DC until the Vietnam war was ended he too ended up dead. Interestingly enough his family won a wrongful death suit(full court transcripts available) alleging the government killed him. But I’ll instead stick with “accepted” facts like the long history of COINTELPRO, an FBI program specializing in infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. And this wasn’t a kids games either.

“Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.

Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used myriad “dirty tricks” to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists. They used bad-jacketing to create suspicion about targeted activists, sometimes with lethal consequences.

Legal harassment: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, “investigative” interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.

Illegal force: The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break-ins in order to search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations. The object was to frighten or eliminate dissidents and disrupt their movements….

The FBI also conspired with the police departments of many U.S. cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago) to encourage repeated raids on Black Panther homes—often with little or no evidence of violations of federal, state, or local laws—which resulted directly in the police killing many members of the Black Panther Party…In order to eliminate black militant leaders whom they considered dangerous, the FBI is believed to have worked with local police departments to target specific individuals, accuse them of crimes they did not commit, suppress exculpatory evidence and falsely incarcerate them.”

Anyone who thinks this has ended is sorely mistaken. Really, really mistaken.

“Participants were tasked to “identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.”

Let me translate that for you: “We are actively studying political movements, identifying people whom might actually change things and are using propaganda techniques to change the conversations they have as well as they views they hold to better suit the military’s domestic strategy.” Let that one sink in.

Truth be told we may never fully know how deep the rabbit hole goes. But there is a unifying factor here: the State clamps down hard whenever the ongoing narrative, the ideology itself is shown not to be the only one. They’re afraid of ideas, because these things are what sparks action. The greatest threat to the system isn’t just learning things aren’t what they appear to be, but beginning to imagine a world where things are different. If something is outside the “parameters of acceptance” for the dominant ideology it presupposes that there are limitations to the system; if there are limitations to the system it can become old, worn out, made useless, and ultimately replaced.

So the Ruling Class will violently defend it’s doctrines at all costs. Can we beat such an invincible enemy, an enemy whose literally shaped us all our lives?  How can we achieve that? Can we ever free ourselves and stop eating out of the trashcan of Capitalist Ideology?

Follow me down a rabbit hole of our own making, lets…article6

 

Dr. Bones is an 8 year practitioner of the Southern occult tradition known as Conjure, Rootwork, and Hoodoo. A skilled card reader and Spiritworker, Dr. Bones has undertaken all aspects of the work, both benevolent and malefic. Politically he holds the Anarchist line that “Individuality can only flourish where equality of access to the conditions of existence is the social reality. This equality of access is Communism.” He resides in the insane State of Florida with his loving wife, a herd of cats, and a house full of spirits.
He can be reached through facebook and at drbones@gmail.com

Saturday Matinee: The Internet’s Own Boy

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internetsownboyEditor’s Note: Tomorrow marks the birthday of Aaron Swartz. Had the government not driven him to an early death he would have been 29.

Synopsis by TakePart.com

The Internet’s Own Boy follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz’s help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz’s groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron’s story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.

Full Text of TPP Released to Public… And It’s Horrible

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‘We now have concrete evidence that the Trans-Pacific Partnership threatens our families, our communities, and our environment.’

By Jon Queally

Source: Commondreams

It’s a disaster for people, the planet, democracy, and the future of the global economy.

That was the immediate assessment of informed critics as world governments, including the United States, on Thursday morning made the full text of the controversial Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) available to the public for the first time.

Though a tightly held secret throughout the years-long negotiating process, publication of the entire text (available online here) confirms the deal’s many woeful inadequacies which had been gleaned from leaked drafts and public statements by those privy to its contents.

“The TPP is a disaster for jobs, and environment and our democracy. It is the latest stage in the corporate capture of our society,” said Nick Dearden, executive director of Global Justice Now, in response to the full text.

The enormous so-called “free trade” deal between 12 Pacific Rim nations, he continued, “has less to do with selling more goods, than with rewriting the rules of the global economy is favor of big business. Like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 20 years ago, it will be very good for the very richest, and a disaster for everything and everyone else. NAFTA entrenched inequality and caused massive job losses in the USA, and TPP is turbo-charged NAFTA.”

Based on its initial assessment of the text, Sierra Club said—just as predicted—the TPP would threaten the health of communities, the environment, and global climate.

“We now have concrete evidence,” said Michael Brune, the group’s executive director, “that the Trans-Pacific Partnership threatens our families, our communities, and our environment. It’s no surprise that the deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.”

Now parked for all to see and review on the website of the U.S. Trade Representative, the deal itself is over 2,000 pages long, broken into 30 separate chapters and various indexes and appendixes.

Released one month after the final deal was secured at a final negotiating meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, the publication of the text in the U.S. begins a 90-day review period before Congress.

The good news, said Dearden, is that the TPP can still be stopped and that civil society groups in all of the countries involved will use the coming weeks and months to mobilize against its passage. “We’ll be doing all we can to support the huge swathe of trade unions, campaigners, activists and consumer groups  in all those countries fighting TPP in the coming months.”

In the U.S., said Brune, environmental groups like his will be marching and lobbying alongside allies from labor and economic justice groups to make sure lawmakers vote the deal down. “Congress must stand up for American jobs, clean air and water, and a healthy climate by rejecting the toxic Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

The true value of money

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Economics needs a revolution.

By David Orrell

Source: Adbusters

This sentiment has been expressed by people from the physicist turned hedge-fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud (in a 2008 paper), to the Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane (in a 2014 foreword for Manchester’s student-run Post-Crash Economics), to activist groups such as Kick It Over. So what would such a revolution look like?

Perhaps the archetypal model for a scientific revolution is the quantum revolution that shocked the world at the turn of the last century. In the space of a few short years, almost everything that was known about the nature of matter was overturned. The Newtonian view of the world as a predictable machine crumbled with it.

Except, that is, in economics – which continues to base its models on quasi-Newtonian economic laws.

A peculiar feature of orthodox economics is that money is treated as an inert medium of exchange, with no special properties of its own. As a result, money is largely excluded from macroeconomic models, which is one reason the financial crisis of 2007/8 was not predicted (it involved money). In many respects, when viewed through the lens of quantum physics, money behaves a lot like matter – and acknowledging that behavior promises to do to economics what quanta did for physics.

The main insight of quantum physics is that matter is composed of entities which behave in some ways as waves and in other ways as particles. This novel insight countered the Newtonian view that billiard ball-like atoms behaved independently of each other. A beam of light, for example, is an electromagnetic wave but it is also a stream of particles known as photons. At a quantum level, matter is fundamentally dualistic: neither the particle nor the wave description is complete by itself.

The same can be said of money, which turns out to have quantum properties of its own. Money is strange stuff, when you think about it – but because it has been around for millennia we rarely do. Consider for example a U.S. dollar bill. On the one hand it represents a number – in this case the number one. On the other hand it is a physical thing which can be possessed, exchanged and above all valued (even lusted after, if there are enough of them). It therefore lives partly in the abstract world of numbers and mathematics and partly in the real world of things, people and value.

The same is true of any money object that we use for payment. Here “object” could refer either to a physical object – such as a coin – or a virtual object, such as 1.2107 bitcoin (BTC) sent from a phone. What makes such objects special is that they have a fixed, defined value in currency units.

While seeing money objects as things with a fixed monetary value might appear trivial, it turns out to have complex and contradictory properties that feed into the economy as a whole. In particular, they combine two aspects, abstract number and real world value, which are as different as waves and particles.

For example numbers are subject to mathematical laws – such as compound interest – and can grow without limits, while in the real world natural processes tend to be subject to bounds. In 1850 an American lawyer did the math and calculated that five English pennies invested at 5 percent compound interest since 0 AD would have accumulated to 32 billion spheres of pure gold, each equal in size to the Earth. This is a useful exercise for anyone who thinks that gross domestic product (GDP) can grow forever.

Numbers can be negative, as in debts, but (as the English physicist-turned-economist Frederick Soddy pointed out) there is no such thing as a negative number of objects. You might be underwater on your mortgage but you can’t own a negative house. Throughout history the frightening ability of negative debt to grow without bounds has been responsible for forcing people into economic slavery.

Numbers are hard and precise, like the particle aspect of matter. Real-world concepts such as value are diffuse and fuzzy, like the wave aspect of matter. By combining these two aspects in a single package, money objects are our contribution to the quantum universe.

The dualistic nature of money explains its frequently paradoxical behavior. In the early 2000s, cheap credit in the United States meant that even low-income people could afford their own homes. Some cashed in and sold their houses at the top of the market. For them the money was real – they could go to the bank and withdraw dollar bills. But when the credit crunch kicked in most of the new money disappeared into the ether, as if it had never existed. Money seemed to be both real and unreal at the same time – a sensation familiar to anyone who has studied quantum physics.

Just as quantum physics overturned Newtonian physics, so a reexamination of money promises to disrupt economics. The reason that critics are calling for fundamental change is that neoclassical economics has failed to provide answers to problems such as wealth inequality, financial crises and environmental degradation – which is unsurprising if it treats money as nothing more than an inert, Newtonian medium of exchange. The tendency of money to clump and accumulate with a small group of creditors, or for financial markets to be inherently unstable, or for GDP growth to be valued over the environment, becomes clearer when we acknowledge the vital, active role of money and the tension and discrepancy between numbers and the real world that drives it.

Of course, one should not underestimate the resistance of economists to adopting new ideas, however the worldwide student movement calling for change is unlikely to go away. Economics is primed for a quantum revolution of its own.

— David Orrell is a mathematician and author. His latest book, Truth or Beauty: Science and The Quest for Order, explores the role of aesthetics in science. He is currently working on a book about money.

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.

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.