Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Not-For-Profit Corporate Power: An Interview with Darwin Bond-Graham

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Not-For-Profit Corporate Power: An Interview with Darwin Bond-Graham

by Michael Barker from State of Nature. This week's must-read!

Bond-Graham uses the re-formulation of Clauswitz's famous axiom that "war is the continuation of politics by other means", to explain a lot of current political realities.

Thinkers like Foucault, however, turned this aphorism upside down because they were concerned about all kinds of power, not the narrow range of power Clausewitz was looking at: intra-elite struggles to seize state power, state alliances, and exercise of sovereignty over a territory. Looking at everything from the most mundane forms of subjective power, as well as the exercise of state power, Foucault said that politics is basically the continuation of war by other means.

I'm sure that if we were able to trace the origins of the rich and powerful we would find their sources in war.