Lost Worlds: Is Another World Possible?
AMY GOODMAN: The State Department is coming under criticism this week for refusing to allow a prominent South African social scientist to enter the country. Adam Habib was scheduled to speak at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York this past weekend, but the government refused to give him a visa.
Ironically, the theme of this year’s sociology conference was “Is Another World Possible?” At the conference, the ASA planned a series of sessions to assess the potential for progressive social change both in the US and in the world and to invite a serious discussion of “economic globalization” and its consequences.
One of the most highly anticipated sessions was to feature Jeffrey Sachs, an internationally known economist and a former special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, versus Naomi Klein, the Canadian journalist and author. But shortly before the ASA conference opened, Sachs pulled out. Unclear if it was related to the fact that Naomi Klein takes him on in her forthcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The theme of her talk was “Lost Worlds.” This is Naomi Klein.
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As we think about reaching this other possible world, I want to be very clear that I don’t believe the problem is a lack of ideas. I think we’re swimming in ideas: universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right. These aren’t new ideas. They’re enshrined in the UN Charter. And I think most of us still believe in them.
I don’t think our problem is money, lack of resources to act on these basic ideas. Now, at the risk of being accused of economic populism, I would just point out that in this city, the employees of Goldman Sachs received more than $16 billion in Christmas bonuses last year, and ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits, a world record. It seems to me that there’s clearly enough money sloshing around to pay for our modest dreams. We can tax the polluters and the casino capitalists to pay for alternative energy development and a global social safety net. We don’t lack ideas. Neither are we short on cash.
And unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I actually don’t believe that what is lacking is political will at the highest levels, cooperation between world leaders. I don’t think that if we could just present our elites with the right graphs and PowerPoint presentations — no offense — that we would finally convince them to make poverty history. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe we could do it, even if that PowerPoint presentation was being delivered Angelina Jolie wearing a (Product) Red TM Gap tank top and carrying a (Product) Red cell phone. Even if she had a (Product) Red iPhone, I still don’t think they would listen. That’s because elites don’t make justice because we ask them to nicely and appealingly. They do it when the alternative to justice is worse. And that is what happened all those years ago when the income gap began to close. That was the motivation behind the New Deal and the Marshall Plan. Communism spreading around the world, that was the fear. Capitalism needed to embellish itself. It needed to soften its edges. It was in a competition. So ideas aren’t the problem, and money is not the problem, and I don’t think political will is ever the problem.
The real problem, I want to argue today, is confidence, our confidence, the confidence of people who gather at events like this under the banner of building another world, a kinder more sustainable world. I think we lack the strength of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are missing movement power. That’s what we’re missing. “The best lacked all convictions,” Yeats wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Think about it. Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?
What is at the root of our crisis of confidence? What drains us of our conviction at crucial moments when we are tested? At the root, I think it’s the notion that we have accepted, which is that our ideas have already been tried and found wanting. Part of what keeps us from building the alternatives that we deserve and long for and that the world needs so desperately, like a healthcare system that doesn’t sicken us when we see it portrayed on film, like the ability to rebuild New Orleans without treating a massive human tragedy like an opportunity for rapid profit-making for politically connected contractors, the right to have bridges that don’t collapse and subways that don’t flood when it rains. I think that what lies at the root of that lack of confidence is that we’re told over and over again that progressive ideas have already been tried and failed. We hear it so much that we accepted it. So our alternatives are posed tentatively, almost apologetically. “Is another world possible?” we ask.
This idea of our intellectual and ideological failure is the dominant narrative of our time. It’s embedded in all the catchphrases that we’ve been referring to. “There is no alternative,” said Thatcher. “History has ended,” said Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking has already been done, the consensus is there. Now, the premise of all these proclamations was that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was conquering every corner of the globe because all other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.
Now, it’s worth remembering when these pronouncements were being made that what was failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare state, which has produced the highest standard of living by UN measures in the world, or at least it did before my government started embracing some of these ideas. It wasn’t the so-called Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a combination of trade protections to nurture and develop national industry, even when that meant keeping American products out and preventing foreign ownership, as well as maintaining government control over key assets, like water and electricity. These policies did not create explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as we see today. But record levels of profit and a rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has been attacked in these past thirty years.
What was failing and collapsing when history was declared over was something very specific in 1989, when Francis Fukyama made that famous declaration, and when the Washington Consensus was declared, also in 1989. What was collapsing was centralized state communism, authoritarian, anti-democratic, repressive. Something very specific was collapsing, and it was a moment of tremendous flux.
And it was in that moment of flux and disorientation that several very savvy people, many of them in this country, seized on that moment to declare victory not only against communism, but against all ideas but their own. Now, this was the Fukuyama chutzpah, when he actually said — and it seems so strange to read it now — in his famous 1989 speech, that the significance of that moment was not that we were reaching an end of ideology, as some were suggesting, or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as Gorbachev was suggesting, it was not that ideology had ended, but that history as such had ended. He argued that deregulated markets in the economic sphere combined with liberal democracy in the political sphere represented the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government.
Now, what was interesting and never quite stated in this formulation was that you basically had two streams: you had democracy, which you can use to vote for your leaders, and then you had a single economic model. Now, the catch was that you couldn’t use your vote, you couldn’t use your democracy to reshape your economy, because all of the economic decisions had already been decided. There was only — it was the final endpoint of ideological evolution. So you could have democracy, but you couldn’t use it to change the basics of life, you couldn’t use it to change the economy. This moment was held up as a celebration of victory for democracy, but that idea, that democracy cannot affect the economy, is and remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.
Now, I was drawn to the slogan that was chosen for this year’s ASA gathering, because I think, as many of you know and have read in the program, it comes from the World Social Forum. And I was at the first World Social Forum six-and-a-half years ago — more than six-and-a-half years ago in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I was one of only a handful of North Americans who attended. And we gathered under that same slogan, but I think it’s significant and interesting that it wasn’t posed as a question back then. There was a proud exclamation mark at the end of the sentence: “Another world is possible!”
I wrote a feature article for The Nation when I came back from Brazil, trying to explain to readers in the US — the event wasn’t covered at all in this country, although it was covered very heavily in the international press — what it felt like to be there with 10,000 other people. And a lot of people were saying that they felt like we were making history. And what I wrote was that what it really felt like was the end of the end of history. That’s what it felt like to be in that room. It was this powerful gust of wind that you could suddenly breathe more deeply. You were free to imagine. Our minds were unleashed.
And it wasn’t just Porto Alegre, because Porto Alegre was the culmination of these types of spontaneous — often spontaneous uprisings that were happening around the world whenever world leaders were gathering to advance the so-called Washington Consensus, whether it was in Seattle at the WTO meeting in 1999, whether it was the IMF/World Bank meetings a few years later in Washington, then in Genoa during the G8. And, of course, the Zapatistas and the MST in Brazil were at the forefront.
And the theme in Porto Alegre was democracy. That was the — it was about redefining democracy to include the economy: deep democracy, participatory democracy. And it was a challenge to this idea that these two streams could not intersect. The right to land as a form of democracy, the right to biodiversity, to independent media. But what was most extraordinary about Porto Alegre was that — you know, certainly there were some politicians there, there were some big NGOs there, but the people who were at the podiums, who were shaping the discussion, were the people who were the casualties of this economic model, who were themselves discarded, made landless, forced to occupy pieces of land, chop down fences and plant food and make decisions democratically.
So, you know, Jeffery Sachs talks about these model villages that he’s building in Africa. And many of them, you know, are making tremendous progress. But I can’t help thinking back to these field trips that we made in Porto Alegre to MST villages, where it was the people themselves, the landless people themselves, who were showing us their own model villages and were asking for our solidarity. And I think as sociologists, you understand this key distinction, that it was the actors who were the protagonists of their history, and that was what was historic. It was breaking the charity model in a very real way.
Now, I look at where we are now, six-and-a-half years later, and it does feel that we have moved backwards in many areas. Talk of fixing the world has become an astonishingly elite affair. Davos — now, Porto Alegre was in rebellion against the Davos Summit every year in January. This was the anti-Davos. Davos has been re-legitimized, and now solving the world’s problems appears to be a matter between CEOs and super-celebrities. And the idea that we don’t need to challenge these mass disparities, what we need is sort of noblesse oblige on a mass scale, that is very different than what we were talking about in Porto Alegre those years ago.
Now, we know what closed that window of possibility, that freedom that opened up in 2001, and it was September 11th in this country. And the window didn’t close everywhere, but it did close, at least temporarily, in North America, that sense of possibility, that putting these issues and the people affected by these policies at the center of the political debate. Now, the shock of those attacks, I think we can see with some hindsight, was harnessed by leaders in this country and their allies around the world to abruptly end the discussion of global justice that was exploding around the world. There was a door that had opened, and it was suddenly slammed shut. We heard that phrase again and again: 9/11 changes everything. And one of the first things we were told that it had changed was that trade, privatization, labor rates, all the things we were fighting for just so recently no longer mattered. It was Year Zero. Wipe the slate clean. And it was another one of these rebooting history moments. History was apparently starting all over again from scratch, and nothing we knew before mattered. It was all relegated to pre-9/11 thinking.
Now, the Bush administration justified this by saying that all that mattered was security and the war on terror. And in Canada, we were told that — by the US ambassador — that security trumps trade. That became the new slogan, that before 9/11 it was economic priorities that drove the US administration, but post-9/11 the only thing that mattered was security. So talk of economic justice, corporate greed, the loss of the public sphere, the talk of Porto Alegre, was suddenly retro, so 2001.
Now, the irony that we can now see is that, while denying the importance of this economic project, the Bush administration used the dislocation of 9/11 to pursue the very same pre-9/11 radical capitalist project, now with a furious vengeance, under the cover of war and natural disasters. So forget negotiating trade deals at the World Trade Organization. When the US invaded Iraq, Bush sent in Paul Bremer to seize new markets on the battlefields of his preemptive war. He didn’t have to negotiate with anyone. He just rewrote the country’s entire economic architecture in one swoop. But, of course, if you said that the war had anything to do with economics, you were dismissed as naïve. It was, of course, about security, about liberating Iraqis from Saddam.
Meanwhile, at home the administration quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through a radical vision of hollow government, in which everything from waging wars to reconstructing from those wars to disaster response became an entirely for-profit venture. This was a bold evolution of market logic. Rather than the ’90s approach of selling off existing public companies, like water and electricity, the Bush team was creating a whole new framework for its actions. That framework was and is the war on terror, which was built to be private, privately managed from the start. The Bush administration played the role of a kind of a venture capitalist for the startup security companies, and they created an economic boom on par with the dotcom boom of the 1990s. But we didn’t talk about it, because we were too busy talking about security.
Now, this feat required a kind of two-stage process, which was using 9/11, of course, to radically increase the surveillance and security powers of the state, concentrated in the executive branch, but at the same time to take those powers and outsource them to a web of private companies, whether Blackwater, Boeing, AT&T, Halliburton, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group. Now, in the ’80s, the goal of privatization — and in the ’90s — was devouring the appendages of the state. But what was happening now is it was the core that was being devoured, because what is more central to the very definition of a state of a government than security and disaster response? Now, this is one of the great ironies of the war on terror, is that it proved such an effective weapon to furthering the corporate agenda precisely because it denied that it has, and continues to deny that it has, a corporate agenda at all.
Now, it had another benefit, too, which was the ability to pay anyone who opposed this system as aligned with potential terrorists and so on. So our movement, which was already facing extreme repression before 9/11, was put on notice as traitorous. Looking back, it’s clear that the shock, the disorientation caused by the attacks, was used to reassert this economic agenda, to reassert that consensus that never really was. The window that was opened at the end of the ’90s in the movement known as the anti-globalization movement, but which was always a pro-democracy movement, was slammed shut, at least in North America. And it was terror that slammed it shut. The alternatives started to disappear.
Now, I want to use the rest of my time just to say that this was not the first time, that this — if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again. Many of you were here for the opening address from Ricardo Lagos, the former president of Chile, who talked about another September 11th, which was another one of those moments, a far more significant one, when a very important democratic alternative, the real third way, not Tony Blair’s third way, but the real third way between totalitarian communism and extreme capitalism was being forged in Chile. And that was the great threat.
And we know that now through all of the declassified documents. There’s a really revealing one: a correspondence between Henry Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he actually wrote was, “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world…The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” So that alternative, that other world, had to be blasted out of the way, and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.
Now, this kind of preemptive attack on our democratic alternatives, the persistent dream of a third way, of a real third way, has come up again and again. And this is what I discuss at length in the book, but I want to mention a couple of examples — unless I’m totally out of time? OK — examples of moments where there was a similar sense of effervescent possibility of being able to breathe more and dream more fully.
One of them was in Poland in 1989. June 4th was the day of the historic elections in Poland that elected Solidarity as the new government. They hadn’t had elections there in decades. And this was the event that really set off the domino — what’s now referred to as the domino effect in Eastern Bloc countries — and ultimately resulting in the breaking apart of the Soviet Union. But it’s worth remembering what it actually looked like in June of 1989. In Poland, people didn’t think that history was over, because they had just elected Solidarity as their government. They thought that history was just beginning and that they were finally going to be able to implement what the movement, which was a labor movement, had always seen as the third way, the third way not taken. Now, Solidarity’s vision was not a rejection of socialism. They said that they were calling for “real socialism,” as socialists often do, and it was a rejection of the Communist party. They were everything that the party was not: dispersed where it was centralized, democratic where it was authoritarian, participatory where it was bureaucratic. And Solidarity had ten million members, which gave them the power to completely shut down the state.
So when people went to the polls and elected a Solidarity government, what were they voting for? What did they think they were voting for? Did they think that they were voting to become a free market economy on the model that Francis Fukuyama was talking about? No, they didn’t. They thought they were voting for the labor party that they had helped to build.
And I just want to read you a short passage from Solidarity’s economic program, which was passed democratically in 1981. They said, “The socialized enterprise should be the basic organizational unit in the economy. It should be controlled by the workers’ council representing the collective” and should be operated — cooperatively run by a director appointed through competition, recalled by the council, workers’ cooperatives. So the idea was to get the party out of control of the economy, to decentralize it and have the people who were doing the work actually control their workplaces. And they believed that they could make them more sustainable.
Now, did they get the chance to try that, to act on that vision of a worker cooperative economy as the centerpiece of the economy, to have democratic elections but still have socialism? Did they get that chance when they voted for Solidarity? No, they didn’t. What they got was an inherited debt, and they were told that the only way that they would get any relief from that debt and any aid is if they followed a very radical shock therapy program. Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the person who prescribed that shock therapy program was Jeffery Sachs. And I — no, I say that because I really had hoped that we could debate these different worlds, because there are differences, there are real differences that we must not smooth over.
Now, in 2006, 40% of young workers in Poland were unemployed, 40%, last year. That’s twice the EU average. And Poland is often held up as a great success story of transition. In 1989, 15% of the Poland’s population was living below the poverty line. In 2003, 59% of Poles had fallen below the line. That’s that opening of that gap. That’s what these economic policies do. And then, we can say we’re very, very worried about the people at the bottom, let’s bring them up, but let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. These jarring levels of inequality and economic exclusion are now feeding a resurgence of chauvinism, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, rampant homophobia in Poland. And I think we can see, actually, that it’s inevitable that this would be the case, because they tried communism, they tried capitalism, they tried democratic socialism, but they got shock therapy instead. After you’ve tried all that, there really isn’t a whole lot left but fascism. It’s dangerous to suppress democratic alternatives when people invest their dreams in them. It’s risky business.
Another one of these powerful dreams was Tiananmen Square, and it’s a sort of a very sad fluke of history that on the same day that Solidarity won those historic elections and that dream was betrayed, what they voted for was betrayed, tanks rolled in Tiananmen Square, and that was the day of the massacre: June 4, 1989. It was another bloody end to a moment of effervescent possibility.
Now, the way those protests were always reported on in the West was that students in Beijing just wanted to live like in the United States. And they, you know, put a goddess to democracy that looked a lot like the Statue of Liberty. So it was reported on CNN as just kind of pro-American–style democracy protests.
But in recent years, an alternative analysis of those events has emerged. And what we’re starting to hear from what’s being called China’s New Left, and people like Wang Hui, who’s a wonderful academic, is that this was a vast oversimplification of what was driving the pro-democracy movement in 1989 in China. What was driving it was that the government of Deng Xiaoping was radically restructuring the economy along with the lines that had been prescribed by Milton Friedman — economic shock therapy — and people were seeing their quality of life devalued. Workers were losing their rights. And they were taking to the streets and demanding democratic control over the economic transition.
So democracy wasn’t an abstract idea. It wasn’t just “We want to vote.” It was, “We want to control this transition. We want to have a say in it.” It was a direct challenge to the Fukuyama formulation, which, by the way, was made that same year: the idea that you would have these two streams and that they wouldn’t intersect.
I just want to read one other thing, which is another one of these paths not taken, because we know how that one ended in Tiananmen Square: that dream was crushed. Another historic moment of possibility, when we look back on our recent history, was 1994, when the ANC government won landslide elections in South Africa. That was a victory for people power. That was one of the most hopeful days that I can remember.
I think we should remember what South Africans thought they were voting for in those historic elections. You know, it was just portrayed as something very simple: it was an end to apartheid. But what did an end to apartheid mean to South Africans? And we can get an answer from that actually from Nelson Mandela, who wrote a little note two weeks before he was released from prison. And he wrote this note because there was a growing concern that he had been in prison so long that he had forgotten the promise of liberation, which was not just to have elections, but to change the economy of the country and redistribute the wealth. And Mandela was under so much pressure that he had to release this very short statement just to clarify this point. And what he said was, “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industry is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable in our situation. State control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable.” And this was a reiteration of South Africa’s Freedom Charter, which is the platform of the ANC, which calls for the national wealth of South Africa, the heritage of the country, to be restored for the people, the mineral wealth and so on.
Now, I say this because this was one of those worlds that wasn’t chosen, one of those paths that wasn’t chosen. And I spent the past four years pulling these stolen and betrayed alternatives out of the dustbin of our recent history, because I think it matters. I think it matters that we had ideas all along, that there were always alternatives to the free market. And we need to retell our own history and understand that history, and we have to have all the shocks and all the losses, the loss of lives, in that story, because history didn’t end. There were alternatives. They were chosen, and then they were stolen. They were stolen by military coups. They were stolen by massacres. They stolen by trickery, by deception. They were stolen by terror.
We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They’re popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.
Naomi Klein is author of the forthcoming book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”
“When those prominent in the status quo turn and label you ‘agitator’ they are completely correct, for that is, in one word, your function-to agitate to the point of conflict.”
Saul Alinsky
Dare to demand the impossible.
WOW. I haven’t heard from Naomi Klein for quite a while, but she is back with a vengeance. What a speech !
I must say: I do respect Jeffrey Sachs too, but this is what a democratic debate is all about, hey ! I would be curious to read his response.
We don’t need any conferences to discuss a new world. Cheney and Bush have it all planned and are now running in second gear.
It is pretty obvious that theoretically there are an infinite number of possible implementations of socialism, and it is also obvious that no theory in economics can ever really be proved or disproved, as a theory can be through rigorous experimentation in the hard sciences. So it was always a preposterous notion that the fall of the Soviet Union proved that no socialist alternative was viable. Those who communicated that notion were always self-interested sophists working for their corporate masters, and it was discouraging that so many Americans swallowed such shallow arguments whole.
Saw the video of this speech at DemocracyNow! and am just blown away. Molly Ivins may be dead (and no one could have her acerbic wit) but at least we still have women (and Americans) like Naomi. More than thinking “outside the box”, Klein reveals for us the grand illusion that there ever was a box at all. There are so many more possibilities than what the Powers That Be want us to realize.
Not to be a downer, but little of this matters if our planetary life support system is kaput. I can’t even look at this “a better world is possible” stuff any more without thinking about that the whole way through. Sort of like a super-sized version of what Gandhi said about sanitation being more important than independence.
Very well stated “kivalis”.
I think Klein makes two excellent points here: 1) the reminder that ultimately the economy is the substructure, and that no true change can occur without economic change (meaning, change in the relations between labor and capital; under the current system, as Marx explained 150 years ago, ever-increasing exploitation of labor is inextricable from capitalism) and 2) her reminder of the importance of history, and of being able to articulate alternative histories (official history is the history of barbarism). While the study of race and gender has been revolutionized in the last 40 or so years by the writing of alternative histories, she is writing the history of alternative socio–economic movements. This seems to be a good way to think about how, perhaps, similar movements can be helped to succeed in the future. As Orwell said, “he who owns the past owns the future”; totalitarian regimes are very happy for histories of resistance, of popular movements, to be put down the “memory hole.” I think she is doing important work.
Not interested in being one of your cogs, Naomi. Pursue your better world by open and free choice with those who agree with you, and show the rest of us it actually works without you cracking the whip over us.
Many theories in economics can be proved or disproved. You merely apply the same structure and logic as any other discipline dealing with logic. I can prove a dollar spent on a truck was not a dollar spent on ice cream, I can prove some govt planner cannot spend my money the way I would for the reasons I would, many many things are provable in economics…science and logic is a structure and a process which are not limited by material concerns as the physical sciences are, yet they can still be proven and disproven, as long as the correct rules are applied. We know for example that pi is not 4, even though mathematics is not a physical science.
Good visions, Naomi. Except I think you’re playing with words when you say that rational progressives ‘didn’t loose the battle of ideas,’ but were ‘crushed’ instead.
I’d say that getting crushed is the same as loosing the battle of ideas…because obviously, most progressive-vision thinkers didn’t (and still don’t) provide effective instrumentalities to prevent their ideas from getting crushed at ’step 2′
Having no hard-hitting political schema for implementing progressive ideas is effectively equal to not having any such ideas to begin with–isn’t it? Isn’t the outcome the same?
A tiny minority of humans — capital power brokers — still outrageously misrule the world. But How Do They Do It? When there are so many more of ‘us’ than ‘them?’
Progressives only waste time by congratulating themselves about the virture of their (admitedly better) ‘visions.’ But visions aren’t the same as logistics or implementation ideas. What we progressives need are specific concrete steps by which average decent people can take political and economic power from the capital brokers and redistribute it to self-governing democratic governments/institutions (preferably w/o armed insurrection.)
Your talk didn’t make a single practical, street-smart suggestion along these lines, though many of us do, here on this website.
Tell me, for instance: How would you propose to shift control of US mass-media — away from the capital brokers –toward a broader, democratic ownership? (so progressive ideas can at least get publicly framed/discussed) Let’s have some practical blueprints. please. We already have enough good visions….
“relatively conservative Washington-based Freedom House has produced a study that, after examining the 67 transitions from authoritarian regimes to varying degrees of democratic governments over the past few decades, concluded that the changes were catalyzed not through foreign invasion, and only rarely through armed revolt or voluntary elite-driven reforms, but overwhelmingly by democratic civil society organizations utilizing nonviolent action and other forms of civil resistance, such as strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, and mass protests.”
from an article published on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 by Foreign Policy In Focus
“The United States and “Regime Change” in Iran”
by Stephen Zunes
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Look up Gandhi’s “Salt” marches of protest in India.
Things will change only when the populations around the world are sufficiently alienated from the forces of capitalism.
Then they may :
STAND UP - for what they know is right.
SIT DOWN - in the nearest street to bring transportaion, retail, everything to a standstill.
FIGHT - I hope like Gandhi’s Pathan friend Badshar Khan(Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) (check him out)a Pashtun nonviolent Muslim
FIGHT - Even if it means sacrifice to themselves to totally repudiate the oligarchic world structure.
FIGHT - As if their lives depend on active resistance - which they do - to demmand that their hopes and needs are considered
When people realize that they cannot ignore the actions of the government and relaize they themselves are the governmet, only then is change possible..
Allow me to quote another blogger of my vintage - estebandito:
(I hope he does not mind)
‘As an old hippy draft-dodger,who has been out in the streets se’veral hours a week behind my Iraq anti-war signs demanding an end to the madness since this insanity began (how many years now?), I gotta report: very few people of any age give a good goddam. Oh yeah, we “protestors” get a free coffee now an then and lots of happy honking as the cars go by, but the truth is very sad. Old radicals tell me they are afraid of losing their subsidized rents!! ” FBI lists! Got no time for it…”
Practically no one can remember that the way a people get new governments and new directions is ancient and simple: you stop up the streets and you go to jail for misdemeanors and then you go back and do it again. respectfully and peacefully. The fact that this is so self evident yet almost completely ignored tells me that our population of united statesians has largely ceased to function as truly caring, conscience-filled people. Reasons are many……but we are losing hope, and we deserve whatever happens to us now. This is not nice talk in front of the children, or at parties.
Nevertheless, I will continue to sally out and attempt to show folks the facts as well as try and get them to laugh at our predicament ( i usually dress as a clown ’cause clowns have more fun…..it seems like the compassionaste thing to do.’
Additional thoughts:
“To me nonviolence has come to represent a panacea for all the evils that surround my people. Therefore I am devoting all my energies toward the establishment of a society that would be based on its principles of truth and peace.” – Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
“Today’s world is traveling in some strange direction. You see that the world is going toward destruction and violence. And the specialty of violence is to create hatred among people and to create fear. I am a believer in nonviolence and I say that no peace or tranquility will descend upon the people of the world until nonviolence is practiced, because nonviolence is love and it stirs courage in people.” – Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan to an interviewer in 1985
I just thought of three social movements that fought the established power and won: the Protestant Reformation; the American Revolution; and the French Revolution. I am doing some reading now about the Protestant Reformation, and it seems that people were getting sick and tired of the Church’s corruption (selling indulgences, i.e. the rich can buy a ticket to heaven) and promulgation of a culture of inexpiable guilt. It took Martin Luther to light the spark, and the printing press to spread the word (which started with making the Bible available in the vernacular language instead of Latin so the people could read it and think for themselves) that there was nothing people could “do” on earth to guarantee their salvation, which freed them from a life of fear and confession, etc. that had been foisted upon them. It also took for several powerful people–princes, dukes, etc.– who opposed the Pope to take the side of the Reformers. So, there seems to be three essential ingredients to the success of a nascent populist movement: a generalized sense of corruption (check), education of the masses (negative), and support from the some elites whose self-interest is served rather than threatened by the movement (negative). Hmmm. We’ve got the first one…
Yes, this is the sort of article I want to read. Thank you, Naomi; there is another world possible, and we need to make it.
http://www.dreamingearth.net
sin_agua
“…but at least we still have women (and Americans) like Naomi.”
Sorry mate, she’s Canadian.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller
Go read Riane Eisler’s The Real Wealth of Nation…a new model because capitalism/socialism/communism are the old model….and democracy under a ‘dominator’ value only works for the few at the top. Next wave…Partnerism…..
Great stuff. I love you, Ms. Klein. You’re just like my wife, who always brings the political discussion back to one point–it’s all about capitalism. We need not only to expose the contradictions of the system but USE them! If a progressive lawyers’ group filed a number of class-action suits against the predatory lenders that are evicting poor people from their homes, we could tie up the whole “sub-prime mortgage” mess (which is really a victimization of the working poor) for years. If millions of people would stop paying their credit card bills we could ruin the credit card industry (the worst predatory lenders.) If homeless people just started occupying vacant buildings, if students stopped paying their crippling student loans (all the govt. can do to you is seize your income tax refunds),if patients with insurance stopped paying their co-pays to hospitals and other organs of the sickness-industrial-complex, if everybody stopped buying so much junk, turned off their lights and air conditioners once a week, and started a neighborhood political action group, we could begin to make change overnight. (Here in our neighborhood we recently defeated a gentrification plan headed by a bunch of millionaires and a BILLIONAIRE developer!) We have the power, we just need the confidence (as Ms. Klein points out). Dare to struggle. Dare to win.
We, the people, have been fed a crock. Capitalism is not the answer to the world’s problems - it is the cause of them.
The only people benefiting from capitalism are the already wealthy. It is a system that allows them to live in luxury while much of the world is in poverty.
It is a system that encourages war because armaments are very profitable and because, if other countries have scarce resources, you can invent some pretext then just go in and take them.
It is a system that, for profit, totally disregards the health of the planet and the suffering of the little people including one’s own.
Capitalism corrupts, destroys and divides! We need to find a better way.
Thanks Naomi for a clear and enlightening statement about where we’re at now. A lot of stuff in this speech I did not know before.
I think it would be churlish to suggest that having shared your brilliant analysis you must now tell us what to do. Keep up your great work!
Other worlds are not only possible, some are here and thriving,
See the oldest worker co-operatives, Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain
http://web.uvic.ca/bcics/research/worker/mondragon.htm
There a few hundred “communal settlements” or Kibbutzim in Israel http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/kibbutz.html
In Venezuela Hugo Chavez is encouraging their version of participatory democracy and solidarity economy via co-operatives by the thousands, see
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1739
Regardless of the historical failure of centralised planned economies I believe it was due to the represive political system and not to the economic model per se. That coupled to real participatory democracy in the economic decisions plus modern information technology should make this model a competitive viable alternative to the greedy invisible hand of Capitalism.
Stilba: A better world IS possible. It may require that a grand experiment — not the American experiment but the human experiment — be drawn to a close, though… can we stop the capitalist pigs in time — before nuclear war or global warming kill us all? Maybe, maybe not.
Is it worth trying? DAMN RIGHT! TO THE BARRICADES!
So very well said and all too important. The very nature of what the so called progressive has been and will continue fighting for until, at least, it all goes up in a mushroom cloud.
“The socialized enterprise should be the basic organizational unit in the economy. It should be controlled by the workers’ council representing the collective” and should be operated — cooperatively run by a director appointed through competition, recalled by the council, workers’ cooperatives. So the idea was to get the party out of control of the economy, to decentralize it and have the people who were doing the work actually control their workplaces. And they believed that they could make them more sustainable.
Translation, living wages and sustainability. In terms of economic laws and individual rights. Sustainability.
Mtngoat thinks he’s brilliant because he knows the difference between a truck and ice cream and speaks of proof. Well, the concept of capitalism as we know it is 100% proven to fail. As capital becomes more efficient and more centralized, and profit is dispersed more heavily in capital’s favor it is a fact that labor will not have the revenue to purchase the surpluses. Global buyers must be pursued to buy up the remaining products. As the economy becomes globally capitalistic and all countries have surplus they can neither consume nor sell, what is to become of your proof then?
As for logos.nine looking for concrete, tangible, actionable, suggestions, they are really quite simple. Refuse to watch the MSM or buy from it’s advertisers. Further, refuse to contribute to the surplus makers, the giant conglomerates who wage war to secure markets. Buy local and build a local economy. Then we won’t need to truck ice cream from Wisconsin to California…And we can use the billions that pay for transportation, advertisement, war, lobbying and CEO profits to benefit the workers who make it all happen. That’s the idea…
Atta girl Naomi!~
At least one “rough beast” (from Yeats’ The Second Coming), as Naomi astutely sees, is the “web of private companies” that are “devouring the appendages of the state.” Anything the government can do, the private sector can do better to make the rich richer. Thanks, Naomi.
Naomi Klein vs. Jeffrey Sachs could have been a great debate, So much better than a Hillary vs. Obama debate(Yawn)
Right you are, Bobbi Dykema Katsanis. We human beings tend not to give up on anything without a fight. Just shooting for some perspective between our terrible social situation and our terrible-and-worsening biological situation. It seems the two are hopelessly tied together.
Preditor: The American Corporation
I cannot understand the absence from Naomi’s speech of the great changes and victories in Latin America. Did not the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela touch her? Or the victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia, or of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and o Correa in Equador? To put it mildly, the winning socialist trends in Latin America, that are trigerring the fury of the State Department, did no seem to have touched the intellectual curiosity of Naomi Klein. Very strange.
Capitalism is America’s state religion! How dare you speak such heresy?
I would echo your sentiment vangelaras, but also point out that the cases she does point out- Solidarity, Tianmen Square, and South Africa are important. They are important to me, (at least as a self-confessed Trotskyist), because they speak to the contrasts of believing in The Theory of Permanent Revolution and Socialism in One Country, which was debated decades ago.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/index.htm
I hope if you care about the question of democracy and socialism you take the time to read Trotsky’s insights into the Russian Revolution, and applications of those lessons abroad. I think the following are very telling, and would be useful for those of looking to history for examples of the opposition between democratic socialism and who wonder, question, or criticize ‘freedom’ in a society dominated by transnational corporations (i.e., the large bourgeoisie), a conflict of interests which Naomi portrays in terms of the interests of participatory democracy being at odds with the interests of the IMF and World Bank’s ’shock therapy’ economism.
“Everyone knows, for instance, that rebellions, or even strong ferment, among the slaves in ancient times at once revealed the fact that the ancient state was essentially a dictatorship of the slaveowners. Did this dictatorship abolish democracy among, and for, the slaveowners? Everybody knows that it did not.” - V.I. Lenin ‘On the Paris Commune’
“The theoretical as well as the political dispute among us was not over the collaboration of the workers and peasants as such, but over the programme of this collaboration, its party forms and political methods. In the old revolutions, workers and peasants ‘collaborated’ under the leadership of the liberal bourgeoisie or its petty-bourgeois democratic wing. The Communist International repeated the experience of the old revolutions in a new historical situation by doing everything it could to subject the Chinese workers and peasants to the political leadership of the national liberal Chiang Kai-shek and later of the ‘democrat’ Wang Ching-wei. Lenin raised the question of an alliance of the workers and peasants irreconcilably opposed to the liberal bourgeoisie. Such an alliance had never before existed in history. It was a matter, so far as its method went, of a new experiment in the collaboration of the oppressed classes of town and country. Thereby the question of the political forms of collaboration was posed anew. Radek has simply overlooked this. That is why he leads us not only back from the formula of the permanent revolution, but also back from Lenin’s ‘democratic dictatorship’ – into an empty historical abstraction.”- Leon Trotsky, ‘The Theory of Permanent Revolution’
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr03.htm
Check out this too
www.communityeconomies.org
The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) by J.K. Gibson Graham
Few additional points: The alternatives were most recently crushed in the late 70s, after a brief expansion brought on by the 1973 oil shock. What happened then is worth reviewing.
The Department of Energy was originally set up to lead the transition to a renewable energy economy (hard to believe, isn’t it). It’s now become the domain of nuclear weapons and coal-to-liquids efforts.
Why were the solar and wind and algal biofuel programs shut down? Well, it seems that energy companies decided that fossil fuels were going to be far more profitable. This was also the era when the partnership between oil producers like Saudi Arabia and US financial interests became solidified.
The fact is that we could run the global economy on renewables, with no fossil fuels needed, assuming we can stabilize the global population. It wouldn’t be the consumer lifestyle, it would be the sustainable lifestyle - far cleaner and healthier.
As far as the “Latin American Revolution”, let’s point out that the major conflict here is over who controls Venezuelan oil and Bolivian natural gas - the people and the state, or elites and foreign interests. It’s certainly nice to see the end of colonialism, but would either of those countries really want to see all fossil fuels replaced by renewable energy? Who would they sell their petroleum and gas to in such a situation?
Those are some of the great barriers to the global growth in renewable energy. Other examples are the lack of willingness of financial institutions to invest capital in renewable energy (domestic solar panel factories, etc.), global dollar hegemony based on the fact that oil sales must be denominated in US dollars, etc.
Still, the technology is here to make the transition - it’s just being held up by vested fossil fuel interests, just as it has for the past 100 years or so. See www.internalcombustionbook.com for the details.
An alternate future scenario is the only one with a chance to work. Business as usual is not sustainable in is doomed to eventual failure. The developing world outnumbers the developed world 5 to 1. Playing a neo colonial game is not going to work. In an age where information travels at the speed of light, the developing world knows that they are not getting their fair share of a prosperous future.
“This moment was held up as a celebration of victory for democracy, but that idea, that democracy cannot affect the economy, is and remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.”
Here’s what Carl Sagan would add to this comment:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves — that we’ve been so credulous” -C.S.
Speaking of “Lost Worlds”, the Moody Blues sang that song back in the early 70’s:
“I woke up today and was crying -
Lost, in a Lost World.
So many people are dying -
Lost, in a Lost World.
Some of them are living an illusion -
Bounded by the darkness of their minds.
In their eyes is nation against nation against nation -
with racial pride………thinking only of themselves…..”
Great song! If you haven’t heard this song which was written and performed around 1972, you can probably find it somewhere on the web. It’s called, “Lost in a Lost World”.
Very good article. I think the article, and the posts here have opened up a new and serious debate on alternatives to the nasty form of capitalism that has taken root here and is spreading like poison ivy. It’s not that I don’t believe in capitalism, but any unfettered economic system is one that is easily hijacked by those unprincipled politicians RUNNING the system. Is there any difference between the monopolistic tendencies that benefitted from the fascists in Germany, Italy and Spain during World War II (The War against Fascism in Eastern Europe and The Former USSR,) AND the party controlled factories in the USSR (think MiG,) AND the BIG, BADDER Defense contractors that are sucking our tax money into programs that are so expensive, they cannot be used in the defense of this country because we can’t afford to lose them? It is time for a serious debate and a look at the changes that will occur sooner or later.
Maybe Marx had it right. It certainly looks like his writings will get the dust blown off of them and will be re-read and studied by those of us who studied them in the 60’s, 70’s and even the 80s. Good luck to all who fight the good fight. If we don’t fix capitalism, capitalism will be buried for a thousand years.
Naomi is on to something with her “shock doctrine”.
Another term to describe s specific type of shock method is “false flag terrorism”.
911 is an excellant example of a shock applied to create a political will that would not have existed otherwise. There is irrefutable video evidence that the WTC was destroyed by means of controlled demolition. It is the finest example of a “shock doctrine” one can imagine.
Why doesn’t she go there?
A new world is not only possible, it is absolutely necessary. There is no choice. We make it, or we descend into a fascist nightmare. It won’t be possible, however, if the intelligentsia remains so timid about speaking the truth.
Why doesn’t she go there, why doesn’t she study the evidence?
cruxpuppy
We need to bring the scene to Naomi’s eyes so to speak.
Naomi needs to realize the 9/11 inside job was designed to produce the “shock and awe” effect on the American people.
And as a result…
-BeingSpied24/7
I was fortunate to be able to listen to this on Democracy Now. This was a great speech, and Naomi was down right inspiring. Even if I do not completely agree with some of her ideas, or some of the methods of implementation of social-political structures that she seems to advocate.
One thing I take issue with is the old, Capitalism vs. Socialism duality. AS if these are the only two viable economic systems. Largely ignored in the larger implementations of socio-political systems, such as States & Nations, is the work of Henry George, in 1879 his work Progress and Poverty was published for the first time. If you have not read it or studied Georgeist economics I suggest you give it a shot:
http://www.econlib.org/Library/YPDBooks/George/grgPP.html
http://www.henrygeorge.org/
Henry Georges ideas can be applied to any of today’s current issues/problems and provide a fair, equitable, democratic solution. LOOK AT THIS STUFF! ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE!
Are you kidding? “the muscle to scare” are opponents? You mean my minimum wage versus their millions of dollars. CONFIDENCE!!Who is worse? You only water down issues. As logos.nine “But visions aren’t the same as logistics or implementation ideas. What we progressives need are specific concrete steps by which average decent people can take political and economic power from the capital brokers and redistribute it to self-governing democratic governments/institution”
Each time this country takes steps toward that “other world,” carefully coordinated events transpire to alter that course. Witness 9/11 and its effect on a citizenry beginning to emerge from the Cold War era eager to reap the benefits of the “peace dividend.” Yes, 9/11 did change everything. It allowed the Military/Industrial complex the cover it so desperately needed to continue strip mining America. Peace on Earth? Never happen. Peace is not profitable. The Corporatocray would never allow it. Far more money to be made in fear and death.
Yo Girl Naomi Klein for a start you rock- You have consistently been able to Reach for the moon with your different cry that takes a feminine perspective of knowledge. That the hunter profit has laid a knife with blood on it in the ice is no doubt and we struggling to identify the lie that had to pass that the false prophet told by Babel and the Judah family would hide himself in that very word profit. So finally having awoken to all this Knives in ice and blood for the wolves who after all smelling blood will lick especially if they hunger. So the false prophet profit has set a knife for all wolves that they may lick and then tasting blood drown themselves in death. Stuck only believing that monopoly can ultimate.But and ulti - mate is one who you can love and is i guess your love of whatever we believe in. So what i guess i’m getting round to saying and I am very sorry to ramble and will i promise try find your email so i can propose this again- is that I am going to Take the the laws that banks alone can print money to the human rights court of Europe. I will try and demonstrate clearly in my arguement that inflation is only held as a tool by capitalism. It is like a prism or prison that does not recognise the fallability of man. The bequeathed laissez faire was encapsulated by a law identifying a value system. This value system has an inherent hierachical structure that has put in the mirror of the shape of mountains a sacred place instead profit forgetting some would say quite negligently the duty by which money and means of trade should be established. Profit by trade is un just and has been held for many a year as such. Why we have needed to dredge up this ghostly fight will never be quite understood until we demonstrate quite critically. Inflation is a mechanism of hierarchy or gold Standard that through feduciary law and access clauses neglects people and Earth. Due to this direct mechanism that puts profit as most valuable in terms of trading concordats and access to trade deals and routes, people and planet are presented with direct barriers to U.N Charter Human rights even though the charter has even itself echoes of normative prescriptions itself - it;s principles and underlying energy is of universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right.I will propose that a system by which insurance and oil be tied under profit and the medicine sword for this inflation equation should reconcile both Ying and Yang Quantum and Universe for space has been allowed and it has taught us that we can print money- Green backs giving it back to the people through whatever the area wants and needs to establish both health, cheer , friendship and valuable life that our needs are measured and met for to toil all day does not need be our sweat. So One crazy reply not gonna check this site tommorrow but am copying this into your email with the summary. Will try posting a summary to various people- including CNN and Al Jazeera. Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou for your article yesterday. My courage is now tested coz I want to ask you or anyone of names of lawyers who would help me / support me on this case. Gonna organise a petition too. Rainbow rootspeace one world love dreams Mel
“The real problem, I want to argue today, is confidence, our confidence, the confidence of people who gather at events like this…I think we lack the strength of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are missing movement power. That’s what we’re missing…. What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?”
Patti Smith opens up Radio Baghdad on her Trampin CD with “suffer not your neighbor’s affliction, suffer not your neighbor’s paralysis…but extend your hand…extend your hand.” Of course to do this we must suffer not our own forms of affliction and paralysis, but the point to focus on is the extending of the hand with the knowledge derived from M. Feldenkrais and W. Reich that effective methodologies are very simplistic, it’s the theories and effects arising from them that become complex.
It’s the methodolgy of this simple act of shaking hands that can bring about the succesful “effervesent” transformation called for here. As PleaseThink points out: “there seems to be three essential ingredients to the success of a nascent populist movement: a generalized sense of corruption (check), education of the masses (negative)[not yet but we have the equivlant of a modern day printing press revolution with the internet], and support from some elites whose self-interest is served rather than threatened by the movement (negative)[the nuclear war going on with ‘depleted’ uranium and nuclear plant leakage threatens the genetic code and atmospheric survivalbility of everyone; photos of DU infected babies is a very effective tool].
But the main tool is the hand and it’s extention. As Marianne Williamson frequently states all you need for an effervesant boost in confidence and to get your project off the ground is the aggreement of one other person. With the blatent level of corruption in government and corporations, the constant mismanagement of trillions of dollars by these structures (with the hideous adjuct of the humanity degrading privatization wars), the threat to human dignity and survivability, all at the cost of what could be…agreement is ripe to be had by more than one other person.
And in this glorious melting pot called America we have the opportunity to extend our hands across ethnic lines as no where else in the world, and thus finally uniting the Union and in so doing the world - this is America’s calling.
We have a great gift called the US Constitution. In it is a provision for impeachment. Bush and Cheney are the poster children of all that is wrong with human behavior in the world. There is not a single area of the global population not represented in the United States and that has not and is not adversly effected by the behavior represented by Bush and Cheney. The arguement is being educated, refined and transmitted over the internet. All that remains is the direct human ingrediant to be added.
The methodology can be simple - move from shaking a sign in the street to knocking on a door and shaking a hand in a door way and discuss the call to impeach. The imagination of ideas can come easily - what would you and the person you’re shaking hands with spend a trillion dollars on other than the Iraq war to make the world a happier and more pleasurable place.
Once aggrement has been made with 1 or 2 of another ethnicity the momentum toward the tipping point for the fruition of the true American Dream will become undeniable. Therefore suffer not affliction, suffer not paralysis…but extend your hand…extend your hand…call to impeach and through this action of pariticipatory democracy help fulfill an American destiny of not hideous doom but of glory, pleasure and happiness. For it is not about Life, Liberty and the pursuit of those who threaten it, it is about Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - it is time to reclaim and consecrate this sacred social contract - for this is the time, and we are the people.
Naomi Klein:
We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks.
Doctress Neutopia:
We all have different ways of perceiving reality and ways the system crushes us. From my point of view, I’ve been crushed by places like Common Dreams and the other left wing gate keepers of information who have repeatedly rejected my essays for years. My vision is part of the collective dream of humanity, but to get it viewed, discussed, and debated within the channels of the left wing intelligencia has been impossible.
Such a reality has been crushing. Perhaps the rejection is even more crushing than being crushed by conservative think tanks because the editors who have rejected my work are people whom I thought were helping in my liberation, the liberation of humanity.
The vision inside me of building a network of arcologies (ecological cities) grows more necessary each day. For my vision to survive the crushing pain of being ignored from the left wing media, I’ve had to think outside places like Common Dreams, Znet, Truth Out, Buzz Flash, Alternet and become the alternative to the alternative. Being locked out of progressive media has forced me to build my own web site, produce a cable TV show, and now I am starting a podcast devoted to delivering the message I have of building a design/science Lovolution.
Common Dreams has improved its forum now that it allows people to make comments on its creative minority’s essays. At least now intellectual peasants—like my self–have a voice within the comment box! I don’t know what it takes for an unknown woman to break into a place where her words get read. If the Left will not support you, who will?
There are two classes of people on Common Dreams, the essayists and those who make comments. We will stop being crushed and our movement will flourish when we have a true meritocracy of great ideas. In such a world, the voices and words of every genius is read, heard, respected, acted upon, and loved.
www.lovolution.net
I’ve read Klein’s writings for years and generally respect her head and’ve always loved her enlightened spirit. If my initial post here seemed to say otherwise, I had no intention of doing so.
My suggestion that highly-visible progressives in the US, like Klein, should focus more on specifics, is driven by my perception that the USA, at least, is now as close-to-the-edge as it can get before a lock-down & fragmentation of (what’s left of) free mass discussion of alternative power forms is functionally/legally driven underground via a declaration of martial law, or some corollary thereof.
Another major ‘terrorist incident’ in the US, anytime soon, no matter who holds apparent state power and no matter who perpetrates such an incident, runs the unaceptable risk of this kind of final outlawing of open dissent (the crucial dimension of ‘compaction’)
Most old-line and many neo-Marxists think fears like mine are utterly naive and pseudo-progressive, at minimum; believing as they do that severe compaction is exactly the needed trigger for mass violent revolt in a capitalist/or other kind of tyranny.
But the formulaic notion of ‘compaction’ that Marx and many other revolutionaries posit, is not only [now] based on antiquated models of state vs People techo-equalized killing machinery, it is, as as a liberational idea, itself mass-psychologically naive.
Even when and where ‘compaction’ has historically triggered oppressed people to violently revolt, the resulting-if-successful revolutionary form has been routine reproduction of the same impregnable statism, the same fatuous and violently-imposed [re]definitions of Free Speech (if they pre-existed); the same entrenchment of rigid however ‘different’ ideologues (in control of police powers); and, withal, a dismal treading-of-water-within, if not worsening of, the stagnantly abysmal human situation.
Especiallylly given the current technological advantage of weaponry, a state like the US, fully fascist, could and would enjoyably use against its own own rebelling citizenry that suppressive weaponry, with a only mere fraction of its military needing to remain ‘loyal’ to the government. So, it’s downright stupid and insensitive for any revolutionary to not do everything possible to avoid this bloody, chaotic, and arguably avoidable advent.
Granted, no entrenched power fraternity, captialist or otherwise, yields its power to common decency, voluntarily. But, as Chavez in Venezuela so far has shown , ‘progressives’ can more courageously name to a listening public the specific steps they intend to take toward making a better society; gain formal, and then liberate human, power even within the rotten instituions, and openly begin the creative, self-organizing revolutionary ball rolling with a minimum of blood and visionary backsliding.
Chavez, himself, may fail or be assinated, but he’s already done something concrete that no US progressive, no matter how noble, like Naomi, has yet dreamt of demanding of US leaders. He’s actually made the lives of millions of suffering state victims materially better; crimped the outrageous manipulations of elitists and, more importantly,
shown step-by-concrete-step how people can empower and humanely better themselves — whether he, personally, lives longer or dies tomorrow.
Some posters here have defensively declared the virtues of what they’re doing in their immediate neighborhoods, in the US. That’s fine: They’re decent, optimistic people.
But the entrenched, rotten System in the USA isn’t going to change w/o far more drastic, people-wide enablements; enablements for more than just these ‘dare-to dream’ folks ( who all-to-often use Madison Ave. advertizing slogans, repeated hypnotically to themselves, apparently to bind their own anxieties and underlying doubts.)
Such a process in the US, I was trying to remind Naomi, needs NOW to be liberated by concrete ideas articulated by a conscious font of visible progressives who know damm well what to say and demand of leadership — while they still can openly speak.
The rest of the progressive rhetoric, frankly, is never gonna cut the mustard.
Boycott, strike, impeach. Support your local small independent farmers, craftsmen and merchants.
“Gandhi’s Pathan friend Badshar Khan(Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) (check him out)a Pashtun nonviolent Muslim”
curmudgeon … thanx for bringing this up. Its unfortunate that this great mans legacy has been literally whitewashed from history. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a great Pathan (Pushtun) leader who was closely associated with Gandhi in the sub-continents freedom struggle and was also known as the ‘Frontier Gandhi’ as he represented the great mass of people in the Frontier Provinces of India/Pakistan/Afghanistan. He believed in non-violent protest, like Gandhi, to achieve freedom and social justice from the hated english.
Since he was against the idea of ‘Partition’ present day Pakistani history books do not give him much relevance.
“The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”
How dare anyone call capitalism a disaster?
Greed is good. Or is it?
Rampant corruption in our government and corporations resulted in their production of 9/11.
The freefall of the twin towers paralleled the freefall of America’s standing in the world. What a shame.
Every inch of the ‘Freedom Tower’ will be under 24 hr surveillance, and every phone line will be tapped. How ironic. What is ‘freedom?’
-BeingSpied24/7
Klein’s essay is indeed provocative and accurate. But logos.nine is correct: where are the specifics? I’ve heard some good ones and many of them are necessary. However, the main ingredient, the most important one, the sine qua non, is too often overlooked. Namely, the school system. If we don’t start ‘educating’ the education system in North America, democracy will be useless as each graduating class exits with their minds warped by rampant individualism, mindless greed, and little or no appreciation for the long view. We’ll get nowhere until we get our message into the schools.
The rest is self-serving palaver.
For many years no one said or did anything to prevent people from smoking cigarettes.
Then some people identified the risks. Then other people spoke of these risks. Over time more and more people saw smoking as a danger and it became a social taboo. Then things changed.
Klein is is identifying the risks of “disaster capitalism.”
“Talk of fixing the world has become an astonishingly elite affair.”
What a beautiful and thoughtful article. She has put a hint of the Progressive problem here. A “select” self elected group telling the rest of the poor dupes how they should do it is no different than the same type of group at the other end of the political spectrum.
Perhaps pushing cherished ideas and policies that prove impractical or wrong by emperical data is not the way to lead or to gain support to keep from getting “crushed”.
Mtngoat, your examples are hardly theories of general laws. In the hard sciences, a theory, which describes a general law of nature, can be subjected to rigorous testing because virtually all variables of any significance can be controlled. The test is precise and repeatable under the precise conditions. That is impossible with regard to the social sciences such as economics. In economics, a myriad of assumptions are made with regard to the individuals and the marketplace involved, their variance, interaction, evolution over time, … Certainly one can argue any physical environment is of unbounded complexity, but in the physical sciences precise and exact measurements can be used to determine that all variables except the one or ones being studied have negligible effect.
Economics is not mathematics or logic simply because mathematics and logic may be applied to it. Economics is really a branch of sociology and could be renamed “Production and Consumption in Human Society.” It is nothing but a collection of hypotheses regarding individual and group behavior in human society. Now some economists may assume the individuals will act like robots, significantly reducing the complexity of the model, but such a faulty assumption would be based on their own observations of humans.
The right convinces millions of ordinary Americans to support predatory corporate capitalism by arguing that some extremely intelligent economists, some with Nobel Prizes, have endorsed corporate capitalist economic models, and so only a fool would not accept such models. What they do not want the masses to know is that economics is social science and is mostly guesswork. Since no rigorous experimentation can be done as in the hard sciences, no theories can be validated to any significant extent, as there are too many uncontrolled variables.
I think Ms. Klein makes a good argument, but it would be stronger if she could convey the sense that all economic programs are based on guesswork, and it is not just unlikely but impossible for anyone to prove they have a perfect solution, and everyone is going to have to determine for themselves what they believe is the best way forward (i.e. as Klein advocates, it must be determined democratically). If the evidence points to one path as being problematic, then there should be no hesitation to consider other paths.
I saw her speak on Democracy Now, and thought it was pretty good.
On here though, I can’t understand why folks are trying to either defend or condemn current American capitalism. What’s the point? What we have is fascism. Government working with business for profit, business managing government for profit, that’s what I see as fascism.
What we have in America isn’t capitalism. Monopolies and pandering to multi-national corps isn’t the goal of capitalism, in fact just the opposite. Corporations and industries shouldn’t be crafting and managing our laws or ruining the lives of people in other nations with no accountability or justice. That just about defines the US and South America, just to start with.
A military/industrial complex shouldn’t be ABLE to send us to war. The need for oil in our nation should not be a justification for mass murder, in another nation, to acquire it. Mass media news shouldn’t be controlled by a handful of ultra-wealthy, ultra-conservative men. None of that fits in well with capitalism. Oil companies making record profits for any industry year after year should not be given tax breaks, while gas prices continue to rise. That’s capitalism? No, it’s highway robbery, it’s not representational government, plain and simple. If conservatives want a capitalist, for-profit system with no legal constraints or penalties, why do we even HAVE a government? Is justice a waste of money too then? Does money equate to justice?
In our nation, we’ve simply elected crooks, with the recent batch being the worst in memory. Very wealthy, well-groomed crooks. What system would have stood against them? Without protection of individual rights, any government devolves into a non-representational form, doesn’t it? One that involves a wealthy land owners and many serfs. One person owns, many people work. That has NOTHING to do with fundumental goals of capitalism.
But conservative fools decided to use and abuse some ideas of capitalism. They seek only the freedom to attain as much money as possible, breaking any laws necessary to do it, and they forget the idea of individual rights. Frankly imho they’re going to lose capitalism whether it’s a good system or not. Understand me, I’m not defending capitalism, or condemning it. In looking at it’s definition, it’s NOT what we have now or recently, and I think it’s important to remember. No matter what the history or theory of it is, what we have is NOT capitalism.
True conservatives and neocons can talk independence, free market, and freedom from government oppression all they want, but they’ll never be trusted again, so they might as well throw in the towel. Any good free-market concepts will be thrown out with all the rest, as I listen to the more radical progressives and other liberals. Hatred of greed is where it’s at now.
If anything, the self-proclaimed conservatives themselves did the most to push this nation towards some other system, like socialism. They made this radical change in our thinking, not the liberals. It was the conservatives in power that encouraged predatory business practices, with government cooperation, here and abroad. It wasn’t conservative principles that our government followed when they busted our economy, but they used the conservative line to justify it. And enough conservatives followed, even though they knew better.
I bet now conservatives wish they’d have stood up for their own principles instead of drinking the koolaid.
Just for the record, while Naomi Klein is definitely a woman,sin_aqua, she also happens to be Canadian.
Talk about out-of-control capitalism…..
I was just listening to a panel of journalists who are trying to defend Free Speech under the First Amendment and learned that an insurance company that outsourced jobs overseas wanted that information to fall under the heading of…..”trade secrets”. Yes, you read it correctly! They no longer want the outsourcing of jobs to be advertised and want whistle-blowers to be punished.
If the outsourcing of jobs is going to benefit American citizens as the government has been preaching for years, why in hell would anyone want to hide it?
After reading Naomi Klein’s article, the answer is pretty much a no-brainer.
all by my heart Naomi
Well said, David Hickey! We keep educating our young into ignorance through an institution that is crumbling at its core–public schools–and watch the elite escape to private schools with agendas that have nothing to do with the good of the country or the people–or the world for that matter. Now we have the web that allows access to ideas for everyone, but to those who don’t know history or have not lived it, the overwhelming mass of information is unintelligible and all, apparently, of equal value. When and where will we teach discernment, ethics, self-value and even empowerment? Where will we provide connections and intellectual challenge and opportunities for creative thinking for all of our children? Certainly not within the current system, which was built to model the Industrial Revolution in its “factory” process of mass education, kids bouncing along the conveyor belt and being shunted to their expected and accepted roles in a Byzantine social system, or being shoved off the conveyor belt into the slag pile, the better to be melted down for prison or welfare or gangs or worse–thus keeping the status quo clanking dependably along.
That age was coming to an end decades ago and the Information Revolution growing, multiplying, changing our relationships among ourselves and the world–and yet schools have seen no change that matters and even what many would call a backward slide as more kids drop out, run away, kill each other. We blame the teachers, the parents, the kids, movies, rap music, and even the military industrial complex without looking at the structure of the antiquated school system itself, without noticing that the way we educate our children determines our future as a country and as a global society, and, indeed, large-scale human economic well-being and quality of life.
So, here’s a plan for change: a nation demanding small, personalized public schools for every child, built around teams of teachers who support, lead, and inspire teams of kids in “family-style” environments, coaching them to excellent thinking with the zeal normally devoted to the best high school sports teams; showing them connections and lines of development and helping them cope with, manipulate and use, create and understand their talents, the wealth of information buzzing around their heads, and the purposes of the common good. That’s what America needs to be doing with its children–all of its children–and anything else is sheer hypocrisy. While we bemoan our ability to put forth an active progressive agenda to change the world, here’s something we can change at the grassroots level, with enough passion, commitment and people power–once we realize, that is, that ALL of us are involved in the fate of public education, not just the parents with children in school right now.
The “ugly form of capitalism” that we have allowed to run away with our country is not about the freedom of self-determination or the joy of individual effort–but rather the dog-eat-dog Social Darwinism of a corrupt corporate age that set the agenda early in the 20th century. “Survival of the Fittest” was not interpreted the way Darwin meant it, but to justify greed and oligarchy and to blame the poor for their own condition. Is that not exactly what is still happening now? Is that not exactly what we model for kids in our schools? Yes, it is time for evolution to move on, time for human and intellectual progress to match our enormous scientific and material advances, time for new institutions that embody what we always wanted to believe were our core American values. www.changetheschools.com
When Louis XVI was brought back to Paris from the dream world of Versailles , the mob in Paris still believed the king would right the wrongs of 250 years of arbitrary rule..
Alas Louis while a decent fellow by the standards of the day ,did not understand his role of impartial arbitrator who would turn against his class of abusers and bring in an era of of constitutional monarchy.
By tring to run away to join the assembly of kings attacking France , he signed his death warrant.
The revolution went to its full extent with that revolutionary killing machine invented by Dr Guillotin. Much better than any execution methods devised in the USA. The guillotine is rapid, swift and probably near painless. And so efficient.
The democracy that ensued was so factional and murderous that the French people welcomed Napoleon until too late they realised his ambition murdered so many people there were no men in that generation.
My point is democracy is not the only virtuous system, a kingdom can be virtuous , I suppose in difficult circumstances like a pandemic (see www.birdflubook.org) a dictator may be necessary. No system is necessary good or bad ,it depends on how virtuous are the people who have authority.That is why Gandhi was suspicious of a system that was so perfect that people did not have to be good.
In a world where greed and lying is a virtue , you USA ers and we Canadians ,are led by unvirtuous men and women and the whole system of checks and balances is subverted and ineffective.
Until we bring virtue back in the public discourse , honesty and a concern for public good.
On Monday , three NAmerican leaders will meet in Montebello ,in a SECRET meeting adddressed only by 30 CEO’s. This is akin to the Mafia bosses meet in Northern New york in 1960’s. When men do Good ,they do it openly ,when they plot evil ,they meet in secrecy and darkness. jesus told us that! Y’all know it is true but few people show concern.
We have become unvirtuous and we deserve our evil leaders.
I really wish some of you would learn to use a dictionary. Really, preditor should be predator, loosing should be losing. We all make typing errors but it seems like more than that.
I entirely agree with cruxpuppy’s comment of August 16th, 2007 10:48 pm above.
Richard Gage, architect.
His lecture: How the Towers Fell, delivered on May 29, 2007, at University of Manitoba.
His Web site: Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth. The lecture can be viewed there.
I urge those Common Dreamers who have not yet taken stock of the 911 controversy to watch architect Richard Gage’s presentation of the thesis of the controlled demolition (in addition to the airliners’ having been crashed into the towers) of World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7.
The elites benefit from the humanity’s woes. You can’t talk to them. They know what they’re doing is wrong, but they don’t care because it only makes them richer. They just move to higher ground when the waters rise. They’ll move to more comfortable locales when the climate becomes unbearable. They’ll have enough safe water and food. The sun’s rays will be blocked by some sort of shields. If things get really bad, they’ll head to another planet.
Disaster Capitalism? Hasn’t Capitalism been a Disaster in itself?
There are so many good comments here, I don’t know where to begin let alone disagree. The ways in which the elites prey on the world are numerous. The problems that predation causes for the world are numerous. The ways we can attack corporate and imperial predators and predation are numerous. All I can say, I am inspired daily by the amount of candlepower here on this site, not only by the professional writers who contribute, but also by the people that merely read and comment. Every time I get discouraged and think we as ordinary humans all hate, resent, and fear and want to exploit, destroy, and exact revenge upon one another I come upon a piece such as this.
We’re all in this together. And while THEY are but a tiny circle, WE are legion. WE hold more lightning than THEY will ever know. And yes, it’s US vs. THEM.
whatever4 makes excellent basic points in his above post. Be confident, whatever4, that most of us, here, who condemn what capitalism’s become in the US, aren’t formulaic socialist revolutionaries - or on-balance, even socialists at all.
Many of us are all too familiar with the monstrous obscenity that the USSR and its clones [also] became: Too much power concentrated in too few hands; mindless sloganeering and edicts displacing Reason and the search for honest, mutual psychological insight.
Every good head, here, is groping for not just a new or radically-cleansed governin form, but for a way of getting to that half-way envisioned form from the daunting concrete mess we’re in.
It’s worth noting that Enlightenment thinkers had some of the principles of human governance laid out pretty reasonably — several centuries ago,and it’s obvious the US Constitution’s framers tried to enworld some of those princples in our national epistemology — however hypocritically many of them personally behaved after doing so….
But whatever Enlightenment principles remain valid today, are all now gonna have to be publicly re-discovered and institutionally re-built, first; because they seem largely forgotten. Especially so, if we’re to get our public schools humanely re-grounded, as some here rightly suggest we do.
In response to another point someone made, above: We don’t need elite progressives to ’show the way.’ Of Course! Not only true, but riduclous if otherwise.
Still, highly-visible progressives could be doing far more than they are to {1} legally challenge corrupt authority, and [2] help create citizen consensus on the specifics of reform in government/schools/economic institutions, etc.
Nothing wrong with letting such folks, like Naomi Klein, hear that fact; downright timid not to….
Kleins point about the percieved defeat of ideas is exemplified by commentors here who still cringe at the term socialism, who still equate it with Stalin and elite bureaucracratic rule.Read more Trotsky, Ernest Mandel or Bookchin. As to the question of what to do, this is not rocket science : organize , educate , agitate! Form an affinity group, union, organization and get to work!
Naomi asked where is our confidence? Where is our passionate intensity?
Therein lies the crux of the problem. Complacency. Who wants a revolution which shakes the very foundations of capitalism, not when Wal-Mart has a sale and everyone can dream of owning a plasma flat screen TV with surround sound.
There won’t be a grass-roots groundswell so long as the trains are running on time so long as those places negatively affected by systemic failures are remote - like New Orleans or Baghdad.
We accept the corporate model - or if we do not accept, we are content to moo and baa but little else - because there is a chance, however remote, that we might be accepted into the financial elite, that we can own the mansion, possess the cars, enjoy the perks of wealth.
What will bring the whole thing crashing down will be the global environmental crisis - and possibly before then by a global energy crisis, though I think that crisis will merely accelerate the process of concentrating wealth in fewer hands.
James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory, has warned that, after we feel the full effects of global warming, the Earth will likely only be able to sustain a world population of approximately 200 million people, and those unfortunate few will be battling for living space at each of the planet’s poles. I strongly suspect only the wealthy need apply.
Is another world possible? It is easy to become disillusioned when you can see how quickly South Africa has degenerated into a stale bath of greed and ignorance so soon after Nelson Mandela, and the Polish twins are courting American missile bases. But, to be fair, there have been some interesting developments in Latin America where the countries, following the leadership of Hugo Chavez, are emerging from the shadow of the United States. I wonder how long that will be allowed to continue?
I am uncomfortable however debating the organization of deck chairs on the Titanic while the First Class passengers are feathering and loading their lifeboats. How long do we continue to listen to the band which is playing primarily to distract us from feeling distressed by the situation? Wresting control of those lifeboats won’t be easy. They will be guarded by men with guns, guns hired by the wealthy few.
@cruxpuppy and other crazy 9/11 Consipracy Theorists
“Naomi is on to something with her “shock doctrine”.
Another term to describe s specific type of shock method is “false flag terrorism”.
911 is an excellant example of a shock applied to create a political will that would not have existed otherwise. There is irrefutable video evidence that the WTC was destroyed by means of controlled demolition. It is the finest example of a “shock doctrine” one can imagine.
Why doesn’t she go there?”
Naomi doesn’t go there because she’s not a nut. And she is more than ‘on to something’ and ‘9/11′ is not an example of ’shock therapy’ economics. 9/11 was not an inside job or a controlled demolition. And you nuts distort and inhibit the Progressive Movement, you’re not Progressives, Trotskyists, or Socialists in my book, you’re Conspiracy Theorists who I strongly suspect have a hidden agenda do to derail democratic socialist movements, projects, revolutions, and reforms. There is not ‘irrefutable evidence’ of any of your claims; for example, the windows blowing out on the lower floors is the result of air compression from the building collapsing on top of itself from where the airplanes hit above those floors.
You people sicken me as much as Bush/Cheney. Any body who wastes their time on earth fighting for a conspiracy theory with zero facts behind it (www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html) does not advance the democratic, socialist, or progressive projects in this country or internationally.
I totally agree that, “As to the question of what to do, this is not rocket science : organize , educate , agitate! Form an affinity group, union, organization and get to work!”
“…capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the “geniuses” of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialized production; but the immense progress of mankind, which achieved this socialization, goes to benefit…the speculators. We shall see later how “on these grounds” reactionary petty bourgeois critics of capitalist imperialism dream of going back to “free”, “peaceful”, and honest competition.
V.I. Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Volume 22 pages 206 and 207. Progress Publishers, Moscow 1964.
Right on queue! Naomi Klien emerges with an “historical” snippet that is to serve as an ideological basis for a new and “kinder and more sustainable world” - all the while shrouded in a thin veil of anti-Sovietism and anti-communism.
As we approach the 90th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution the pontifications of the bankrupt ideology of the social democratic petty bourgeois neo-left intelligentsia emerges to vanquish the evils of both capitalism and socialism with a more democratic 3rd way. Sounds like another Klien Alberta workers once knew.
Naomi Klien laments her way through a “searing” exposure of the evils of capitalism and the “totalitarianism” of communism. Naomi Klien remains firmly fixed and entrenched in the camp of the Naom Chomsky, Murray Dobbin variant of anti-communist unable to answer the question of “What Next?’ without a quick romp through the lucrative and profitable grounds of anti-Sovietism for the lecture circuit crowd.
Ms. Klien is unable to break with the comfortable and warm familiar home of anti-communism and more social democratic “revelations” of the evils of capitalism. Workers don’t need explanations of the evils of capitalism, they live it everyday. Neo-lefts are unable to break with anti-Sovietism because in doing so they would have to leave the warm ambience and comfort of their privileged university “jobs” and the glowing adulation of their upper middle class lecture circuit groupies to organize and prepare w