Posts that I especially recommend today: Thursday, May 21, 2020

• How the United States Government Failed to Prepare for the Global Pandemic by Vijay Prashad from CounterPunch. (Note: You must be aware of the difference between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.)

• Brave New Normal (Part 2) by C.J. Hopkins from his weblog Consent Factory, Inc. (Note: Part 1 is here.)

• Pandemic 2020: From Statistical Fraud to Controlled Society by Vincent Mathieu from Global Research. (Note: I think "DSP" must be explained here.)

• Vaccine Wars in the USA by Russell Bentley from FRN (based in Serbia).

• Capitalism vs. science: The lessons of the 36-hour Moderna vaccine frenzy by Benjamin Mateus from World Socialist Web Site. 

• Food shortage prompts clashes between hungry protesters & police | COVID-19 lockdown from RT (via YouTube).

• 1) The Journey of the Jobless by Kalena Thomhave , and 2) Everybody Hates the SBA by Alexander Sammon both from The American Prospect.  (Note: I've included two articles explaining how many Americans are suffering from job losses.)

• Some Truths about Falsehoods by Fernando Buen Abad from Resumen. (Note: I thank Caren, an activist, for alerting me to this article.)

• Life as Commons by Stavros Stavrides from Undisciplined Environments. 

• How To Understand All This China Stuff by Australian Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog.

'Free Basics' Will Take Away More Than Our Right to the Internet

Click here to access article by Vandana Shiva from Common Dreams. (Note: Shiva uses a couple of abbreviations commonly used in India: "SEZ" and "TRAI".)

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has raised the ire of activists in India to what they see as another corporate attempt to exploit their society for profits.

Facebook’s Free Basics is a repackaged internet.org, or in other words, a system where Facebook decides what parts of the internet are important to users.

These activists have already witnessed the devastation that Monsanto Corporation has caused for farming in India (see numerous articles by Colin Todhunter by entering his name in one of my search boxes), and they don't like his latest profit-making effort to act as a gatekeeper to limit what people see over the internet.

Vandana Shiva has been one of the most vocal critics of this trend of corporate takeover and makeover of Indian society. As a strident critic of Monsanto Corporation and frankenfoods produced by using grains from Monsanto's bio-engineered crops, she writes:

The right to the internet is the right to choose what spaces and media we access; to choose spaces that enrich us — not what companies think should be our ‘basics’.

Our right to know what we are eating is as essential our right to information, all information. Our right to an open internet is as essential to our democracy as our right to save, exchange and sell open pollinated farmers’ seeds.

In the ultimate Orwellian doublespeak, “free” for Zuckerberg means “privatised”, a far cry from privacy — a word Zuckerberg does not believe in. And like corporate-written “free” trade agreements, Free Basics is anything but free for citizens. It is an enclosure of the commons, which are ‘commons’ because they guarantee access to the commoner, whether it be seed, water, information or internet. What Monsanto’s IPRs [Intellectual Property Rights] are to seed, Free Basics is to information.

Reimagining our collective powers against austerity

Click here to access article by Max Haiven from Reflections on a Revolution. (a must-read)

Wow! Absolutely stunning in its advancement of revolutionary thinking!

It's so encouraging to see people popping up in various parts of the world who are actively engaging in both theoretical projects and practical experiments to build a sustainable and peaceful world. This time we see a Canadian contribute with this essay to this grand effort.

Haiven challenges us to think deeper about what really constitutes revolutionary thinking.

Is a right something granted by a state or sovereign, or is it something that emerges more organically from communities as they struggle? I think the latter is true.

And so then how can we speak of a “right” to the commons? I think we cannot imagine that this right will ever be “granted” to us by those in economic and political power. In the end, the ideal of the commons (horizontalist, grassroots democracy, sustainable reciprocity, community-level decision-making and radical autonomy) is completely antithetical to the state-form and the Eurocentric regime of sovereignty that has, to date, been the “container” of “rights” as we are accustomed to imagining them. So any “right to the commons” would necessarily need to be an insurgent right, a radical demand aimed at undermining and replacing state sovereignty.

Cracking Capitalism vs. The State Option

Click here to access this interview with John Holloway by Amador Fernández-Savater posted in Guerrilla Translation (run by a cooperative based in Spain).

This is the best article I've found which offers the best explanation of Holloway's basic views regarding issues related to building an alternative to capitalism.

In 2002, John Holloway published a landmark book: Change the world without taking power. Inspired by the ‘¡Ya basta!’ [Enough is enough!] of the Zapatistas, by the movement that emerged in Argentina in 2001/2002 and by the anti-globalisation movement, Holloway sets out a hypothesis: it is not the idea of revolution or transformation of the world that has been refuted as a result of the disaster of authoritarian communism, but rather the idea of revolution as the taking of power, and of the party as the political tool par excellence.

He discerns another concept of social change is at work in these movements, and generally in every practice—however visible or invisible it may be—where a logic different from that of profit is followed: the logic of cracking capitalism. That is, to create, within the very society that is being rejected, spaces, moments, or areas of activity in which a different world is prefigured.

He counter-poses his ideas with the failed history of worker's taking control of the state.

If we’re not going to accept the annihilation of humanity, which, to me, seems to be on capitalism’s agenda as a real possibility, then the only alternative is to think that our movements are the birth of another world. We have to keep building cracks and finding ways of recognising them, strengthening them, expanding them, connecting them; seeking the confluence or, preferably, the commoning of the cracks.

If we think in terms of State and elections, we are straying away from that....

I think that this is correct simply because the "state" is a creation of capitalism. The state is to capitalism what kingdoms were to feudalism. Creators of a new societies must build their governing/coordinating institutions on an edifice of bottom-up authority. Federated communities? Who knows? Holloway doesn't know, and I don't know. That, in addition to weakening capitalist rule, is another task awaiting all revolutionaries and creators of a new world.

Economics of the Anthropocene

Click here if you wish to access this 20:49m video presentation by Joshua Farley from the original posting on the Post Carbon Institute's website which provides more details about the talk.

The title of this posting did little to evoke much interest in me; but as I started listening to Dr. Farley, I realized that it was very important. The vague title reminded me once again of  a phenomenon that has entered my consciousness more frequently in recent months: the use of high level abstractions to hide uncomfortable ideas. After listening to this presentation, I'll bet that you can come up with a headline that is much more descriptive of what he has talked about. This is my choice: "The inefficiency of the capitalist system to meet people's needs, and what an efficient system would look like" I am not criticizing him for this. It's the only way one can survive in an institution controlled by a capitalist ruling class.



After listening to his talk, if you are interested in reading a more detailed exposition of his ideas, I recommend this article (scroll down to it) entitled "Ecological Economics" at the same website. Notice in the talk and in the article how this academic carefully chooses his words so as not to offend his capitalist oriented masters in academia. For example he writes:

We must push for the reform of our political and economic institutions so that they once again act for the public good. From local government policies to international agreements, the structures that define how our world works are ultimately products of political consent, and thus can be changed with sufficient political will.

Instead of writing:

We must find a way to end the existence of capitalism so that we can create an economy that serves public needs rather than the wealth and power accumulation of capitalists.

The commons as an approach to governance, sustainable resource management and social wellbeing

Click here to access a summary article and 49:15m podcast interview with David Bollier from the Norwegian website Levevei. (I accessed this from P2P Foundation where Bollier has written articles.)

David Bollier is widely recognized as a leading advocate of the exciting paradigm of “the commons”, and he has recently written a book on the subject entitled Think Like a Commoner. The article provides an excellent summary of sections of this interview which can guide you to sections of interest if you do not have time to listen to the whole interview. Important topics that Bollier addresses is the concept of the commons, human nature, examples of existing commons, its contrast with existing capitalist organization of society, etc. 

My only comment on Bollier's views is that he at one point exhibits a political naïveté when he talks about communities negotiating with the state to establish a legal framework for a commons-type arrangement. Such an attitude fails to understand that the state is really a construction by the capitalist class to mediate competing capitalist interests. Thus, one must not see the state as separate from this class. Likewise, it follows that the capitalist state will never voluntarily permit the growth of this type of societal organization.

Makerspaces: More Than a Fad

Click here to access article from LocalOrg.

While the business model aspect of a makerspace can be compared to a health club, the output of a makerspace is quite different. While makerspaces are meeting and workspaces where both business and socialization (and a combination of the two) can occur, they also serve as local educational institutions, SME (small and medium enterprises) incubators, skill training centers, as well as a focal point where communities can gather and collectively pool resources and pragmatically, technologically solve problems.

Here are some other illustrations of this concept:

The art of building a new world: Freedom according to the Zapatistas

Click here to access article by Raúl Zibechi from Americas Program. 

It takes seven hours to traverse the 100 kilometers that separate San Cristóbal and the Morelia caracol. The caravan (containing thirty cars and trucks) left late and advanced at a tortoise pace. Around 2:00 am, we arrived at the caracol, and a maze of buildings that house the institutions of the autonomous region, made up of three municipalities, twelve regions, and dozens of communities governed by the Good Government Board. 

In August the author attended "La Escuelita", or Little School, arranged for people in other lands to come to Chiapas and learn about the new society that the Zapatistas are creating. This is a report on his visit and his observations about the new society.

The Promise of an Unhurried Society

Click here to access article by Mat Little from New Compass (Norway).

I have a problem with an argument presented in this piece. The author seems to be indulging in idle fantasies. No, I don't disagree with the possibility that work-free time could be put to very constructive uses. It's just that he totally ignores that our home is on fire (both literally and figuratively), and indulging in such fantasies while our home is burning down is approaching insanity. We should and must be gathering all our energies and imagination to figure out how we are going to fight this rampaging fire of capitalism and preserve our home. Once we put the fire out, then we can realize the true potential of human imagination and activity. Time is running out.

Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid Beyond Communism (New Book)

Click here to access a book description (original source is from Amazon) posted on Infoshop News of this recently published book by author Jeff Shantz. 

The author presents what is probably a new concept to most people--commonism. It is a world view within which he believes offers the possibility of providing "infrastructures of resistance" that can seriously challenge capitalism. In fact, he states that commoning is already happening, but whether such experiments can result in effective "infrastructures of resistance" is much too early to tell.

As capitalist societies in the twenty-first century move from crisis to crisis, oppositional movements in the global North have been somewhat stymied (despite ephemeral manifestations like Occupy), confronted with the pressing need to develop organizational infrastructures that might prepare the ground for a real, and durable, alternative. More and more, the need to develop shared infrastructural resources — what Shantz terms “infrastructures of resistance” — becomes apparent.

Memory and the Radical Imagination

Click here to access the 51:41m audio interview with Max Haiven, an assistant professor of cultural studies in Nova Scotia from radio station KPFA, Berkeley, California.

Max Haiven

(The following commentary was slightly modified at 9:40 PM PST.)
I could really relate to this discussion of the "radical imagination" because I experienced it in the 1960s and early 70s. It was such an exciting time. We questioned everything, and felt that everything was possible. By contrast this period we are now living seems so false, so dead, so pitiful. (Whenever I see small children in my neighborhood, I worry for their future.) This wonderful experience of my youth has haunted me ever since, and I always yearn for this kind of experience to return to the US in the form of a vibrant subculture that can challenge the domination imposed on all of us by the neoliberal ruling class. It's not clear to me how much this sort of imagining is happening now. There are definitely signs of hope that are inspired by people like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden. But we need far more people to question and to act, now more than ever before.

Because the "radical imagination" and our memory of things past are such major threats to the ruling establishment, they have made an enormous effort to kill them through their control of major indoctrination agencies--education, media, and entertainment. This is so because as stated by Professor Haiven, "the way we remember the past always shapes what we think is possible in the future". The capitalist ruling class doesn't want us to believe that our future can be anything other than this neoliberal nightmare.

I highly recommend listening to this interview.

P.S. Important mention is made of the book entitled May '68 and Its Afterlives by Kristin Ross.

Enclosure, Luddism, and Magna Carta

Click here to access the 55:00m audio interview with Peter Linebaugh, a social historian, at the studios of KPFA in Berkeley, California. 

As humanity approaches the limits of resource extraction, as "ownership" of everything is becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, we are witnessing enormous social problems in a variety of forms. This is an issue of privatization that has become a major source of conflict in the world. But, it is not new. It is only now that this issue is creating unprecedented worldwide economic and social crises due to the extreme concentration of ownership under the system of capitalism.

Privatization has created problems for working people over many centuries, and Linebaugh traces the historical record of these conflicts which began with the enclosure of the commons and when craftsmen created machines which came under the "ownership" of the new class of capitalists. The latter used the machines against the interests and welfare of working people--and they fought back. He gives us history lessons that were likely missing in our education.

Hope from the Margins

Click here to access article by Gustavo Esteva from The Wealth of the Commons.

These notes offer a quick glance to ways, in the south of Mexico, in which people are regenerating the society from the bottom up. It is a new kind of revolution without leaders or vanguards, which goes beyond development and globalization. It is about displacing the economy from the center of social life, reclaiming a communal way of being, encouraging radical pluralism, and advancing towards real democracy.

There are some writing flaws in this article and the author tends to over-idealize his commons theme; in spite of this he offers some promising examples of people who, drawing from their cultural roots, are creating islands of people-centered societies in the midst of a hostile capitalist world that serves only a small fraction of people bent on "owning" everything of value.

Building The Commons: 2013 Forum

Click here to access posting by davana from Making Worlds: a commons coalition.

The significance of this post is to illustrate that the Occupy Movement has not disappeared, but is undergoing a period of consolidation, reflection, and rebirth. Here we visit people in New York City who are involved in the work of building a commons. They are people from a variety of activist and ideological backgrounds: Transition Towns activists, community organizers, Occupy Wall Street activists, Hurricane Sandy relief workers, academic intellectuals on the left, etc. 

I think one of the core commonalities that all of them share is a sense that people must re-assume responsibility for their own lives simply because their capitalist masters have little-to-no regard for them. It is a new consciousness that our society is manipulated by people who have separated themselves from communities and who have agendas at odds with the needs of communities. These activists know that they are faced with a massive project that includes new ways of thinking and relating to each other, in short, the construction of a new consciousness and culture. It is no place for individuals who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the capitalist belief that the solutions to all problems can be obtained immediately by shopping and accumulating the stuff they want to sell you, or even a liberal's belief that participating in protest demonstrations can, by themselves, fundamentally change anything.

Anyway, I invite you to explore this website (for example, links like this and this) to understand where the commons/Occupy movement is today: it is a place where people are beginning to lay the foundations for a new society by asking important questions such as:

• How are people in NYC creating common spaces?
• How can commoning efforts support and strengthen each other?
• How do communities identify with and participate in the process of commoning?
• How can commoning be a form of resistance to neoliberal privatization?
• How can we construct a commons-inspired "Occupy theory" of collective action?

We Power

Click here to access article by Julie Ristau & Alexa Bradley from On the Commons.

Through our experience with numerous community projects, we’ve come to see how deeply contemporary society is immersed in the market mentality. So long as market fundamentalism remains the lens through which most Americans see the world, it will be very difficult for people to envision a commons-based society, let alone work to revive actual commons that are under threat in their communities.

This realization led us to examine how people’s social, political, and even personal consciousness is conditioned by their belief in the market as the only efficient system to organize society, and to look for points of entry for introducing commons-based ideas to the wider public.

The authors suggest that a revolution in consciousness is mandatory if we, the people, are going to survive the attacks on our families, communities, and society. People are beginning to see the necessity of recovering the values of the commons which sustained humanity for more than 98% of its historical existence.

Indigenous Communities Fighting For Land Rights More Than Ever - Governments & Corporations Fighting Back

by Rachel Cernansky from Tree Hugger.

"On one hand the necessity of secure rights is now widely promoted by climate change negotiators and development specialists," said RRI Coordinator Andy White. "Yet on the other, the rate of recognition is not at all keeping up with the rate of large commercial land acquisitions—so called 'land grabbing'."

The Corporatization of Social Commons

by Zeynep Tufekci from Technosociology. 

We are increasingly aware of the erosion of the traditional commons such as public services, public parks, and social safety nets, all of which are being cut back to the bare-bones. Corporations and their governments are replacing these with privately owned "public" spaces such as shopping malls. 

But, as this perceptive writer warns us, there is much more under the radar--the insidious trend whereby corporations are gradually creating our "commons" in the form social network media. This commons is also controlled by private interests, learns everything it can about us, and sells the information to other corporations to better market their products to us. Moreover, corporations likely make all this information available to the government, a "commons" which they own and control as well.

For most people, most of the time, that does not create major issues (even while creating dramatic consequences for few), but the totality of these interactions creates a tragedy of commons – actions that may be reasonable for individuals creates an environment which has dramatic consequences for everyone. In our case, the consequence we are headed for is  a world of near-complete surveillance of everyday actions that is searchable, permanent and public. We are slowly but surely creeping into this world and it is high time for a serious public discussion to take place. 

I think that this article is an important antidote to all the rosy messages emanating from the cheerleaders of localization, like David Korten and Rob Hopkins (see this) who fail to see these encroachments on our diminishing commons, and who portray localization as a romantic journey into blissful independence and social utopia. 

Localization is fine if it localizes and socializes all the 95% of the world's resources owned and controlled by private interests. Otherwise, it will only offer us the opportunity to struggle for  survival on the leftovers and scraps of the Brave New Corporate World.  Unfortunately, these spokespersons of the localization movement and darlings of corporate and government media ignore this reality. Meanwhile, the One Percent continue depleting resources and wrecking havoc on the ecosystem; and localization, as Korten and Hopkins define it, will pose no problems for them.

The Grassroots of Resilience

by Kate Bodi from Culture Change. 

This is really two inter-related articles.

This report starts with the U.S. and concludes with a presentation by a witness to Argentina's financial collapse and community-based response a decade ago.

And both relate to community organizing in this time of growing economic distress. The Argentine experience (the 2nd article) offers lots of ideas and is particularly interesting.

Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries

by David Streitfeld from NY Times. 

Just when I thought that things couldn't get much worse for life in the US, this report comes along. 

A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system. 

Cooperation Law for a Sharing Economy

by Janelle Orsi from Yes! website. 

The author is a lot more optimistic about the growth of legal support for cooperative enterprises than I am. 

Under capitalism the overlords (ruling class) like to see working people competing against each other as they enhance the profits of capitalists. As for capitalists themselves, they really don't like competition as evidenced by the ever greater concentration of corporations and the frequent reports of business collusion and price-fixing.

Still, for those of you involved in cooperative enterprises, this may offer some important information. 

As the ground swells with people adopting more sharing and cooperative work and lifestyles, we can look forward to a growing body of law and literature on the subject.