E.P. Thompson

Despite being a relatively dull peace activist, this guy is great. After reading his essay "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," I really want to completely read his history of the English working class. In this short piece, he talks about the rise of standardized time and how it related to the imposition of work-discipline and paralleled the rise of industrial capitalism. He demonstrates that there should be no "demarcation between 'work' and 'life,'" and brings up the issue of the "conflict between labour and 'passing the time of the day."(Well, I guess I should say he doesn't make any subjective judgements on these issues, but to me he demonstrates the necessity of abolishing work as an activity separate from and opposed to everyday life and the joys it should entail.) He also notes Henri Lefebvre's distinction between cyclical, or natural, time, and linear time; the former is a part of us to the extent that we are connected to nature, the latter is something we fear the passing of and internalize in order to function according to the demands of the economy. All great points, though I am not quite sure how original they are.

He also specifically attacks the factory system of industrial capitalism. He associates factory work with "monotony, alienation from pleasure in labour, and antagonism of interests [such as competitive economic structures and class conflict]," which isn't too radical a conclusion, and at times it may seem like he sees the problem as being specifically and solely industrial capitalism, as opposed to recognizing inherent downsides of industrial society itself (or in a non-industrial capitalism?) But he actually does recognize the disadvantages of industrial society itself:

Above all, the transition is not to "industrialism" but to industrial capitalism. What we are examining here are not only changes in manufacturing technique which demand greater synchronization of labour and a greater exactitude in time routines in any society; but also these changes as they were lived through in the society of nascent industrial capitalism. We are concerned simultaneously with time-sense in its technological conditioning, and with time-measurement as a means of labour exploitation.

So he merely sees the use of time-measurement as a means of labour exploitation as more detrimental than technological conditioning, though both should ideally be rejected. I more or less agree (considering its a lenient and uneducated paraphrase on my part!) I'll take the rising of the sun over the ticking of a clock any day.

Construction Spelunking Story- Yeah!

I just spelunked a local, massive construction site, which will remain unamed. I was accompanied by an also-to-be-unnamed person. We had to squeeze between a tall, chain-linked fence and shuffle behind some bushes for a while to enter the site. From there it was about a fifty meter, very well lit walk through an open, highly visible space to get to the building, which was a tad unnerving. Once inside, we couldn't locate the stairs to go up to the top stories or down into the basement, which would have been ridiculously awesome, and eventually realized they were locked behind makeshift doors (which in retrospect we should have just taken off its hinges.) After we wandered around the eerily lit surroundings for a while longer, we broke out the sharpie and left our mark (stupidly.) Right as we were kneeling down to write our names, a car horn honked and carlights flooded the area. We had no idea what this was about, but it freaked us out a little regardless. We decided to calmly exit the premises, and now everything is cool. Hooray for urban spelunking, its a blast.

This is Disappointing

So this is how Richard Heinberg answered a question from a lady intervieing him for the Eugene Weekly:

How do you respond to people who don't take peak oil seriously?

I think we need to focus primarily on policy-makers, and not try to get all of the folks who are at home watching television, eating pizza and drinking beer to sit up and start talking about peak oil. We need to get city councils, county boards of supervisors, people at the state level, and also prime ministers and presidents to look at this situation seriously, because they're responsible for other people's lives. We could see Hurricane Katrina coming for days and hundreds of miles away. Peak oil is the same thing; we can see it coming. The question is, are we going to do anything about it?

This is not a very radical perspective. Heinberg must be completely consumed with peak oil, because judging from this statement he doesn't seem to have any social perspective. Put peak oil in context, man, it isn't the only issue that will shape societal change!

The Root Grows Deeper than Capitalism- My Goddamn Sociology Essay

Ecology and capitalism are antithetical. Ecology deals with natural systems dependent on equilibrium, and capitalism is a process driven by the motor of growth and accumulation. These fundamental differences preclude any reconciliation between the two; ecological problems cannot even begin to be seriously addressed within the framework of capital. But the ultimate ecological question has to do with the root causes of environmental problems, and the root grows even deeper than capitalism—possibly as deep as civilization itself. This is why ecological problems are so difficult to effectively address.

This is not to suggest that capitalism is not the greatest obstacle to effective ecological solutions; it surely is. Since it is dependent on growth as its number one priority, it must be argued that capitalism is in fact the most ecologically destructive system realizable. This is because capital expansion recognizes no material limits until it is too late, and limits cannot be imposed on it without extreme economic drawbacks. Institutional forces and economic concerns necessitate capital accumulation, which is an important reason why agreements such as the Kyoto protocol (rejected by the US) are bound to be ineffective[i], and why oil production protocols are not even a serious topic of debate.

When leaders in the seats of power do take environmental concerns seriously, the proposed solutions often are ones that further the interests of capital. The question is rarely how to make society more sustainable, but how to make capitalism sustainable. The interest is in sustaining development as opposed to sustainable development—which basically means that the emphasis lies on development, not sustainability. For example, protecting patches of forestland in the short term leaves more resources to be exploited over the long term; to better manage resources is to more efficiently manage inputs for the treadmill of production. Such foresight cannot be accomplished with market mechanisms alone, but depends upon regulations devised by the collusion between state and industry; state planning smoothes over the cyclical crises of capital, mitigates the falling rate of profit, and leads to more rational capitalist exploitation. But even the rationality of the state capitalism that has prevailed today (assuming it even is more rational than a free market) cannot do any more than hold back impending ecological catastrophe for a while longer. This is because the system is still dependent on growth, even if regulation exists to slow the process down (at the expense of individual firms in order to strengthen the long-term prospects for capital’s overall domination.)

Capitalism can therefore be classified as an inherently decadent system.[ii] Natural limits to growth will eventually be the cause of a final crisis of accumulation and perhaps the downfall of capitalism as we know it, and when this point is reached the environment will have been pillaged and abused beyond human use. The fact is that ecological systems cannot simply reproduce at ever increasing rates to fulfill the needs of capital expansion. As resources grow scarce, the supply of the products created with the resource drops, prices rise accordingly, and therefore more incentive to produce is created. So the crisis of reproduction is worsened by capitalist mechanisms that inflict this vicious cycle whereby, just when society most needs to curb production, the incentive kicks in to increase it and wipe out natural life-support systems even sooner.[iii]

But of course, capitalism is not the sole cause of ecological degradation. The abolition of the capitalist commodity system, whether it is the state capitalist form or the free market, is indeed a prerequisite for the establishment of a more sustainable, livable society, but other issues must also be addressed, issues that extend beyond the impact of capitalism. For instance, most technologies are not neutral. The automobile, for example, is necessarily ecologically destructive in any context. Cars are responsible for two thirds of the carbon emissions in the US, they burn one third of all the energy, and produce fifty percent of the methane and forty percent of the nitrogen oxides. Even assuming a car could be created with zero emissions, it would still pollute at least a third as much as it currently does, because about a third of the environmental impact of automobiles occurs during production. Automobiles also demand complex road systems, which bisect natural corridors and human communities as well as covering 38.4 acres of potential wild space/farmland. These roads must often be salted, too, which contributes to desertification and salinization.[iv] So the automobile is a good example of a technology that is ecologically undesirable in any socio-political context.

Along with technology, domination and hierarchy should be recognized as relating directly to ecological issues as well. Murray Bookchin argues that humankind’s domination of nature arose in parallel with the institutional domination of humans, and the two are therefore fundamentally connected. Indeed, hierarchically ordered societies go hand in hand with ecological destruction because the values of domination cross over between social spheres and natural relations.[v] A conception of a social ecology is consequently necessary to connect environmental and social issues, and Bookchin provides his own view that

What renders social ecology so important in comparing ecosystems to societies is that it decisively challenges the very function of hierarchy as a way of ordering reality, of dealing with differentiation and variation- with "otherness" as such. Social ecology ruptures the association of order with hierarchy. It poses the question of whether we can experience the "other," not hierarchically on a "scale of one to ten" with a continual emphasis on "inferior" and "superior," but ecologically, as variety that enhances the unity of phenomena, enriches wholeness, and more closely resembles a food-web than a pyramid.[vi]

In other words, more horizontally organized societies exist in a more harmonious state with nature. Also, in hierarchic societies, the powerful and privileged can live in exclusive abundance while the less empowered are forced to accept and bear the environmental consequences of the overabundance produced; environmental inequalities are not limited to capitalism, but will arise in any system of power. Only in a society free from domination will it be impossible for groups to trash the environment and force others to bear the burden.

Given the huge ecological downsides of technology and domination, the sustainability of civilization itself must even be questioned. Certainly, the history of civilization has been the history of (resistance to) the state (i.e. hierarchy and domination) and technology, because civilization is the agent of domestication that historically has brought together technology and hierarchy as a means of control. So until examples of libertarian civilizations can be more or less established, there must be a degree of skepticism about the liberatory potentialities of civilization itself. Such an attitude need not lead one to conclude that primitivism is desirable, but just to recognize the possibility that civilization itself may not be sustainable.[vii] Arnold Toynbee may very well be correct when he says that every civilization is bound to collapse from the contradictions it creates. We can therefore speak not only of the decadence of capitalism, but of civilization itself.

So capitalism is not the root of environmental problems today, and this must be conceded so that we may recognize that the abolition of capitalism is not an automatic reprieve from ecological concerns. Domination, technology, and civilization (which is the matrix of domestication which unites the former two principles) must be seen as the root problems and critiqued accordingly. But capitalist mechanisms and institutions together power the motor that pushes civilization’s contradictions with nature to the extreme, and therefore they must be fully transcended before a sustainable society can begin to emerge. The deeper question may be whether civilization is sustainable, and options here must be weighed appropriately, but the anti-ecological drive of capitalism cannot be denied. A revolution against capital is not the end, but the beginning of a push towards an ecological society.

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[i] Most of the arguments here relating to the contradictions between the necessity of capitalist growth and the finiteness of natural resources can be found in John Bellamy Foster’s Ecology Against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review, 2002.

[ii] Numerous economists including Marx have commented upon the decadence of capitalism, but it is usually equated with the strictly economic crisis of over-accumulation. It seems that the real threats to capitalism, which adds new meaning to the slogan Socialism or Barbarism, are the very natural limitations which economists tend to ignore.

[iii] The crisis of reproduction is an idea borrowed from Andre Gorz’s Ecology as Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1980. 20-28.

[iv] All the statistics on the environmental impact of the automobile shown here are taken from Jane Holtz Kay’s Asphalt Nation. University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1997. 80-99.

[v] Murray Bookchin develops his theory of the origins of domination in The Ecology of Freedom. Oakland: AK Press, 2005. He elaborates on themes relating to hierarchy, society, and nature in Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Berkely: Ramparts Press, 1971. and The Modern Crisis. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986.
[vi] The Modern Crisis. 66-67.
[vii] It certainly is not necessary to adopt the absolutist views of primitivists such as John Zerzan that civilization must be rejected in its entirety. I believe it has yet to be adequately shown that civilization is inherently unsustainable, while capitalism has proven itself so almost by definition. Additionally, primitivism is not desirable to me, and the material preconditions for primitivism do not exist unless 95 percent of the global population dies off.

My Take on Perlman's Primitivist Magnum Opus

Last week I finally finished reading Against His-story, Against Leviathan months after being interrupted so rudely by winter break. I really liked it, it is a great attempt to capture the spirit of the history of resistance to Leviathan from the earliest known days of humanity (without once citing any dates, because the point is never when, but what, why, and how.) Now, this book is often degraded/hailed as an essential primitivist text, but I think it does not necessarily have to be read that way.

Perlman equates Leviathan with Civilization, but I believe the only reason he needs to do so is because the only civilizations that have ever existed are structured around the state political form. He is not necessarily rejecting civlization, only the fact that all civilization up until this point has been a monstrosity (he uses metaphors of great, out-of-control worms and octopi violently moving across the earth and destroying human community and nature.) He also rejects the historical ladder that worships this destruction as a form of progress and demeans primitive cultures. In this way, the book can be looked at as simply a grand history of resistance to the imposition of the state, and a rejection of the historical meaning of civilization, namely, the state. I get the sense that he would definitely accept liberatory technologies if he could find examples of it, and he doesn't really say that civilization is necessarily a lost cause.

But I also agree with the review in Aufheben (Civilization and its Latest Discontents) which questions Perlman's rejection of materialism. He scoffs at the materialist belief that material scarcity set the preconditions for the rise of the state, but his own view is that perhaps a drought forced the Sumerians to organize in a more authoritarian manner to deal with their emergency water issues, and that from here Leviathan grew out of control. If this is not a complete contradiction, I don't know what is.

In any case, I believe Toynbee was right when he suggested that all civilizations necessarily collapse of their own contradictions in the end. Maybe it is in these dark periods between the rise and fall of civilizations that radical hope lies...

bell hooks' Talk

Earlier today I found out that bell hooks was speaking, which made me happy. I managed to meet her in the women's center in the student union before her talk(an anti-climatic encounter), then I went on my merry way to the talk, entitled Converstaions with bell hooks. She mostly read writings from her recent, yet-to-be-published work, and there was a long Q&A.

She addressed all the questions she is known for during the talk, using the obligatory new-left jargon about the patriarchal-imperialist-white-supremecist-capitalist-system (unnecessary mouthful, yeah? Well it roles off the tongues of the old-timers!) Some specific points she made that I liked were how Rosa Parks, who certainly wasn't the first black woman to stand up for herself in her time and place, was made into the ideal civil-rights fighter because she was quiet, well-mannered, and generally embodied all of the characteristics of patriarchal society's ideal woman. Plus, fiercer resisters who preceded Parks had much darker complexions. She also brought up the idea of personal agency: of rejecting the role of victim and rejecting the blame game by simply taking matters into your own hands, affirming yourself as active subject and not reproducing your subservient role in society. She of course recognized that social problems are also highly systemic, but the system can only be combatted by active, revolutionary subjects.

Q&A was interesting as well. hooks' personality really came out: she is straightforward and frank. I like it. For example, a white woman made a very general statement that anyone who isn't a Nazi would agree with, and hooks was simply like "Yeah, I think that is overly obvious." She goes straight to the point in order to go deeper. Another interesting question came from an obvious anarcho-primitivist. Her question was about technology and how it might be the root problem. hooks basically just gave a rant about how poor blacks often don't have access to most technologies and therefore it has little affect on many people, but she also mentioned how TV is hurtful to her as a black woman (what is on TV, not the technology itself, I think). She mentioned how we are becoming too dependent on certain technologies as well, which was cool.

The major downside of the talk was how she constantly extolled Buddhism and the Divine Spirit. That creeped me out. But hey, overall it was a great evening.

...but Foster is cool too....

So my history professor, Joseph Fracchia, previously unbeknownst to me, is a marxist whose academic specialty is basically historical materialism. I talked to him during a mandatory one-on-one conference with him in his office about Das Capital upon noticing his amazing book collection. He apparently has written a few books on Marxist philosophy which look interesting, but one is in German. We get to read Marx's chapter on primitive accumulation from Vol I of you-know-what later on in the class, and we just read Pierre Clastre's essay Society Against the State. Clastre is an anarchist anthropologist whom I was introduced to through Fredy Perlman's Against History, Against Leviathan! So, we have some wonderful readings.

We also just read a piece about how life in the middle ages was more passionate with more violent extremes of good and bad (manic depression I believe is the modern word for such healthy emotions); The Violent Tenor of Everyday Life or something like that. This led into a discussion about how in our society today, people are incredibly regulated and bored. I tried to stay out of the discussion until my points had already been made for me by others(!), then I would butt in to clarify (I hope?) what we had been talking about. Lots of people came independently to the conclusion that technology mediates us from direct experiences so our lives have become increasingly mundane. Thanks to the prof, we also touched upon the fact that work used to be more closely connected with play and socializing and it was more of an autonomous activity in some societies; that work today sucks was the consensus, of course. The theme of alienation was central to the discussion though the word itself was never actually used except by me.

Of course, we were not romanticizing the feudalism of the middle ages, but the critique of the system we have now was very awesome; the extremely radical analyses of the Situationists and even the primitivists are apparently very intuitive, at least to liberal honors college kids. Rock. Anyway, I gotta go see bell hooks speak tonight, so adieu. Expect a post on her talk later today...