When the Other Shoe Drops
Daniel Pinchbeck
Recently, I have been putting myself through a crash refresher course on political philosophy and social theory, reviewing Macchiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Murray Bookchin, and others. The most satisfying analysis of the contemporary situation that I have found is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude (Penguin, 2005), which was a follow-up to their best-selling Empire (Princeton, 2000). Hardt is a political philosopher at Duke University, while Negri is Italian, and spent four years in prison for conspiring with the Red Brigade, an Italian revolutionary group (though the charges were highly dubious). Negri and Hardt aspire to be the Marx and Engels of our time; like Marx and Engels, their collaboration meshes the theoretical depth of Continental philosophy and the pragmatic tendencies of the Anglo tradition.
Today, the entire stream of radical Communist and revolutionary thought has been marginalized and forgotten in the US, outside of abstruse academic circles where it is employed in a distanced and theoretical fashion, and in shrill coteries that produce newspapers and protests but lack any meaningful influence on mainstream debate. Communism is associated with the grey, bureaucratic, murderous totalitarianisms that developed under that name in the 20th Century. What is forgotten is why Communist and socialist ideology once posed such a dangerous threat to capitalism as an alternative to the oppression of oligarchic rule. Because of this history, the very notion of ideology or social theory continues to be shunned in mainstream progressive circles, which focus on reformist initiatives.
In Empire and Multitude, Negri and Hardt do a heroic job of revisiting and revising Marxist philosophy in the light of recent developments. Negri and Hardt argue that the main or "hegemonic" form of production in our world is no longer material production, as it was in Marx's time, but "immaterial production," the production of concepts, images, communications systems, and affective relationships. If industrial capitalism created "surplus value" by hoarding the excess productive capacity of labor, our post-industrial capitalism creates value in a different way, by "expropriating" the "commons," in other words, putting tolls and privatized barriers around areas that could be freely available to humanity, such as intellectual property, the electromagnetic spectrum, or genetic material. The authors of Multitude see tremendous potential for human emancipation in the new collaborative networks of late-stage capitalism. They point out that the development of collaborative networks, such as those that produce open-source software, reveals there is no longer a need for a boss, or for any hierarchical form of organization. As an alternative, they present the possibility (though without providing any tangible models) of an emergent direct democracy that would function on a global level.
Negri and Hardt barely mention the ecological crisis in their work, and do not address the psychic and shamanic elements involved in transforming human consciousness. However, their work addresses one very real question that must now be explored, as we face the accelerating cataclysms of species extinction, resource depletion, militarism, and climate change: Whether the current political system -- with its compromises, corruptions, and multi-year cycles -- can be reformed, and transformed, to deal with these challenges to the continued survival of the human species. If not, then an alternative must be found -- and quickly.
As I learned while writing my books, certain areas and discourses are subject to extreme taboo and repression – repression not only of the ideas themselves, but even of the original intent behind the repression. In these arenas, the repressed material, when it is brought up to consciousness again, is greeted with ridicule, resistance, contempt, or utter blankness. I found this to be the case with psychedelics and psychic phenomena, along with other subjects. This knee-jerk dismissal is currently our attitude toward a straightforward reevaluation of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, and so on. On the other hand, items of "revolutionary chic" – such as Che Guevara t-shirts – are mass-produced as commodities, made ironic, and in this way emptied of significance or threat. The extreme blankness produced by repression can be a positive thing, as it opens the possibility for a quite sudden and powerful "return of the repressed," and a reassessment without preconceptions. The prospect that an egalitarian planetary culture - where, instead of being free to own private property, we are free from private property, as Marx once quipped -- would be preferable to this one now seems so impossible that it might catch on.
The absence of social theory from mainstream discourse is underscored by the lack of class consciousness in the US today. Recently, labor conflicts are becoming more visible and virulent again – the writer's guild strike in Hollywood and the stage hands strike on Broadway are just two of the most publicized examples. Yet these particular disputes are not analyzed – as far as I know – in a larger framework that looks at the development of class relationships as a whole. This is the case even though the disparity between average workers' income and the income of CEOs has grown to grotesque proportions, becoming a form of economic apartheid.
There are good reasons to propose that, in the very near future, a post-Marxist analysis of current class relations and social consciousness could become extremely relevant. Right now, we appear to be approaching a severe breakdown of the US financial system, with deep repercussions for the global economy. The ongoing meltdown of the subprime mortgage market is, according to this hypothesis, stage one of this process, and a crisis in personal debt will be the second stage - the dropping of the other shoe. Below, I have enclosed a summary of the economist David Martin's recent speech to The Arlington Institute, a futurist think tank in Virginia. Two years ago, Martin made a speech at Arlington where he foresaw the subprime mortgage market meltdown with impressive acuity (a transcript is available on the Arlington's website). His analysis of the credit landscape suggests that mass defaults on personal debt, starting in December, are going to overwhelm the capacity of banks and insurers, who will not be able to find bailouts. Bank insolvencies would lead to the failure of the privately held Federal Reserve. Currently, OPEC and China are shifting their holdings out of US currency, and the Euro is becoming the reserve currency around the world.
Martin proposes that by March we will be entering an entirely transfigured economic landscape. The logic of his argument seems compelling to me. As bank failures and mass defaults begin to mount up, people are going to need interpretive tools to understand their new situation, in order to react to it practically and deal with it psychologically. During a crisis, there is the potential for a major opening of awareness and compassionate understanding, or for a large-scale retraction into fear-based belief systems and Fundamentalisms. Sometimes you have both at the same time.
The imminent economic plunge, if it happens, cannot help but act as a multi-generational wake up call. These days, when I talk to people – especially people in their twenties – I often find myself stunned by their ignorance of the economic and social situation that surrounds them. And yet, I grew up with the same attitude of jaded indifference and the senseless assurance that nothing about politics, economics, or the environment had any real meaning, or would ever affect me in any tangible way.
This jaded indifference is the result of intensive conditioning by the media – the phenomenon of the "flattered self" brilliantly described in Thomas De Zengotita's book Mediated – and an alienated education system which "produces subjectivities" that fit the status quo. These manufactured subjectivities are cut off from any sense of responsibility for the social reality or the life-world that sustains them, and they are carefully conditioned to identify with this alienation as a mark of pride -- celebrities like Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson, or their younger iterations, are patron saints of cynical hipness and smug narcissism. The concept of the "production of subjectivity" is a major one for Negri and Hardt, who see it as the most important form of production in post-industrial civilization. I will discuss this in greater detail in a future piece.
In our contemporary context, Negri and Hardt posit a global "multitude" of working people, rather than the Marxist proletariat of the past. Class distinctions do not hold in the same way -- as Negri notes in an interview, it is the total organization of society that is the "enemy," not a particular class. They argue that the dynamics of capitalist development have been shaped, primarily, by the desires of the laboring multitude, and the antagonism between the working many and the ruling few. The New Deal, for instance, arose out of the worker's movements here and abroad, above all the Russian Revolution, which sent shock waves through the Capitalist system.
Over the last decades, the US system has been increasingly based on debt. Where the media encouraged comatose consumerism, politicians succeeded by offering happy-faced visions of a world without sacrifice while they supported policies leading to increasing economic apartheid. In an atmosphere of extraordinary plenty and overt overproduction of comforts and goods, where huge fortunes are controlled by the elite few, where enormous waste is built into the system and encouraged by it, it seems only natural to be profligate, to assume that the hard limits defined by the shrinking realities of income are actually the delusion, and the media displays of endless bounty are the reality. The delusional and self-destructive profligacy of the populace is, possibly, also an act of subliminal aggression against the system’s false promises and betrayals (the deepest betrayal being the delusion that material success leads to sustained happiness).
The profligate spending of the masses is also a natural – almost biological – reaction to the corruptions of Empire. When the populace sees CEOs, politicians, and millionaires routinely escaping from their crimes, fleecings, and defraudings, they subliminally identify with them, accepting that this is proper behavior within the society, and will be rewarded rather than punished. Of course, the assumption of massive personal debt was not a conscious and calculated strategy of the populace to dismantle the capitalist system, but it could be seen as an unconscious strategy of sabotage. This could be the case, even though the financial system developed predatory, invasive, and deceptive tactics to reach the consumer base with constant inducements to accept more credit cards, loans, and mortgage refinancings. Psychosis and hypnosis work together to reinforce consensus trance.
In his book The Politics of Subversion, Negri argues that the ultimate discovery of the 20th Century was that “Capitalism is impossible,” and this was proved by the failure of the two major attempts to reform the capitalist system, the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s. This failure of reformist efforts was ultimately linked to the integration of the world market, which defined a limit of capitalist expansion. These limits were reinforced by the many forms of resistance that developed in response to the extensions of capital, from guerrilla wars to Green Parties. According to political philosophers of the past, capitalism cannot exist without new markets to exploit, in order to create surplus value. Marx wrote that Capitalism “is the first mode of economy which is unable to exist on itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and support.” Without a new outside to absorb and digest, capitalism confronts “devaluation resulting from overproduction.”
Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, analyzes how contemporary neo-conservative practice is based on utilizing natural or manmade disaster as a tool for leveraging increased privatization. Internal landscapes of the Empire can in this way be re-colonized by capital, after a catastrophe, and transformed. This is another symptom of the evaporation of any outside realm for capitalism to penetrate and absorb. The mass psychology of capitalism centers on this continual aggression, this need to grasp hold of the Other and make use of it, to convert difference to sameness. When the entire planet has been converted to sameness, as is now the case, this aggressive psychology goes into regression, seeking to defend itself at all costs. This entrenched psychology -- given iconic form by football games and right wing "shock jocks" -- must be properly understood so it can be addressed and its violent tendencies defused.
After the 1960s, the main engine of the US financial system shifted from the production of finished goods to financial speculations and transactions. This shift was symbolized by the iconic construction of The World Trade Centers in the early 1970s, “tuning forks” for the new frequency of predatory finance capitalism that developed through the 1990s. Unlike factory production, financial speculation does not require a large working class. In the United States over the last decades, we have witnessed an astonishing degradation. As Capital moved its factories overseas, the US dismantled its productive infrastructure and converted a population of trained technicians to unskilled “surplus labor,” filling service jobs. In some ways, the US has reverse-engineered itself into a Third World country, with its nomadic elite no longer tied to nationalist obligations - the financial meltdown should make this clear. Today, our primary export to China is soy beans, a raw material, while we receive electronic devices and finished goods from them.
During this process, the US rulers were confronted with the difficult question of what to do with the huge pool of nonspecialist surplus labor no longer required for the functioning of the system. One solution was to warehouse them in prisons (the US is 5% of the world population with 25% of the world’s prison population), another was to put them in the military (but popular resistance to the draft has made this difficult); another option was to create new bureaucracies and expand unnecessary aspects of the service sector. Another idea – a short-term solution but one that created the temporary illusion of abundance – was to encourage the amassing of personal debt, and then to turn that debt into a financial product, through securities, and sell those bundled debts up the financial pyramid.
With the end of any ideological effort to reform capitalism, the oligarchic elite began to shift increasing amounts of wealth to the top of the financial pyramid, crushing the middle class and the working class in the process. As Negri and Hardt point out, this shift was accompanied by a change in paradigm. Instead of classes with different interests, we now have a dualistic divide between the “included” and the “excluded”. Politicians incite and manipulate the fear of being part of the ever-expanding group of the excluded. For this reason, to take one recent example, Bush vetoed the child health care bill. To keep the fearful populace in line, the ruling regime offers "Neo-Malthusian" policies, and enforces a divide between respectability and misery.
It is increasingly obvious that the short-term thinking behind these arrangements has created a fragile and unsustainable situation. Something, or, more likely, many things all at once are soon going to break. At that point, the US political system's drift toward authoritarianism (as documented in Naomi Wolf's The End of America) may be given another strong push. However, as we have seen in Iraq and New Orleans, the control apparatus that is emerging is nothing at all like the efficient organization of European mid-century Fascism, driven by a mythological teleology and collective fantasies of racial purity. Instead, the postmodern form of authoritarian control involves a crude application of force and a general sloppiness, an almost uncaring attitude even toward its own intentions. For this reason, it is possible that a new level of authoritarianism and an intensified, nonviolent movement for positive change, orchestrated by civil society, could exist at the same time, at least for a while. But any significant change would require a serious raising of social awareness and consciousness of oppression among the populace, along with a deeper collaboration among progressive groups.
An imminent meltdown of the US financial system, if it is indeed on the way, should be welcomed, despite the hardship it may cause to many of us, our friends and relations. The system of globalized post-industrial capitalism is quickly destroying the planetary ecology, and if it is allowed to run unchecked for much longer, we will forfeit our future on this planet. Historically, crisis is the crucible for transformation. If the illusion of US prosperity disappears, the world may be receptive to alternative development models. After all, China and India are seeking to achieve the "American Dream" promised to them by decades of our pop culture propaganda.
With the approaching economic collapse, the Left has one more opportunity to emerge from dormancy and build a social program and a transformative plan of action. Negri and Hardt suggest that a revolutionary shift might not emerge in successive stages over time, as in previous insurrections, but in one sudden unfolding: "It may be that insurrectional activity is no longer divided into ... stages but develops simultaneously. As we will argue in the course of this book, resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemy’s power, and the multitude’s construction of a new society are one and the same process."
This possibility is based on Negri’s fascinating view of the nonlinear dynamics of historical transformation. He suggests, essentially, that events lie on a spiral, and an entire complex of concepts and organizations can reassemble itself all of a sudden, based on patterns of the past that are lost to conscious awareness. The long history of humanity’s struggle against oppression is available to all of us, encoded within us. Negri’s rhizomatic view of transformative processes calls to mind Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of “morphogenetic fields” as well as the Jungian archetypes, defined as clusters of psychic energy that can spontaneously appear within the psyche of the individual or society. It also fits the alternative model of time and development that some visionary scholars find encoded in the Mayan Calendar. According to this hypothesis, the entire complex and rich history of radical thought and praxis could suddenly emerge once again, in a new iteration, when conditions are prepared for it.
The immediate need for the progressive community is to articulate a positive agenda, along with tactics and strategies for bringing this agenda to fruition in the shortest time possible. The main thrust of the “Left” in the last decades has been criticism and complaint. This has failed to create a powerful attractor or an organizational infrastructure for social transformation. As the Dalai Lama put it, everyone wants a better life. If you can show them how to get there, they will follow. The Left has failed to achieve this simple task. Regeneration of the movement requires a new visionary paradigm that integrates the spiritual shift made by the counterculture since the 1960s with a compassionate and egalitarian program that has tangible solutions to offer to a broad spectrum of the populace.
Considering the preponderance of military force, there is no hope for violence as a tool of social transformation. Any radicalized program should focus on an absorptive strategy that neutralizes its potential opponents by engaging and transforming them - a Tantric approach, that sees no dualities nor enemies. If we are going to save the world situation from pitching over into the abyss, the media – especially the mass media – has to be intensively repurposed to beam out a new paradigm that integrates sustainable practices with inner transformation. The mass media could be used for the “production of subjectivities” focused not on the toxic "American Dream" of omnipotent ego, competitive greed, and endless material abundance, but on sustainability, interconnectivity, community, and psychic development. By my reckoning, this unlikely reversal has to happen in the next few years.
Image of Antonio Negri by PE Weck, used via a Creative Commons license.
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Arlington financial analysis
http://www.m-cam.com/display_news?id=240
* The next shoe to fall is consumer creditCurrently as reports came in on 3rd quarter, foreclosures were up 470% this quarter alone. They will be up over 500% this coming quarter (4th). A foreclosure in our terms is when the bank has officially declared an account insolvent and tries to regain the asset (if it exists). The person who is foreclosed upon can no longer secure any traditional consumer credit. This in turn goes straight to the banks as no one will be able to get the store issued charge cards.
A minority of people pay off their consumer debt every month. When one considers the combination of consumer credit card debt and the compounded debt of "home equity" financing, we estimate that less than 20% of people actually carry no consumer credit from one month to the next. Many of the ones who don't pay off their carried consumer debt have at least one credit card at its limit and therefore lack credit capacity. Most have their paycheck directly covering bills and servicing the minimum balance due.
Therefore people who are foreclosed upon will not be able to obtain credit and since their paychecks will be maxed out, there will not be extra cash left over from the paycheck to service a new debt.
Next, everybody buys things at Christmas. As much as 40% of retail sales are done in the 4th quarter of the year -- i.e. the retail miracle. The purchase decline in retail goods this fourth quarter will occur because many credit-only consumers will lack the credit capacity mentioned above. Frequently, people overcharge their limit and the banks (albeit a profit center for subprime credit users) levy a penalty by increasing interest rates and charging additional fees. In the 4th quarter of 2007, the amount of people overcharging their limits will be too many for the banks to handle. We do not have a system in place to deal with overcharge on that scale. A substantial number of this December's purchases will go into an overdraft on credit limits.
CDO -- Collateral Debt Obligation -- Consumer Credit
Consumer credit pooled debt investment instruments (a form of CDO) are originated and rated based on underlying historical credit behavior and a complex series of predictive models for repayment dynamics. CDOs have "strips" which are a combination of similar profile tranches within a larger investment product. Based on the market's appetite for risk, investment performance guarantees (or credit enhancements) are packaged with the credits. These credit guarantees are issued by insurance companies, reinsurance companies, and other specialty finance companies -- many operating with extra-territorial jurisdiction rendering fiscal oversight more complicated.
These strips come in several categories:
* Investment grade
* Almost investment grade
* Junk and
* Why did we give them a credit card?
All of these grades are priced on historical default rates. The credit insurance companies (AIG, MBIA, Ambac, Financial Security Assurance, Channel Re, XL, Zurich Re and other reinsurers) have, from time to time, issued credit guarantees to the securities. Banks sell debt in the form of a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO).
Minor shifts in default actuarial activity (+/- 25 basis points) from normative behavior is absorbed within pricing of these financial guaranty contracts. However fundamental shifts (hundreds or thousands of basis points in one quarter) are not built into the model and result in credit enhancement insolvency on a major scale. When the insurer cannot pay based on its own liquidity impairment, the bank is left with catastrophic (an insurance term for excessive loss outside of expected) exposure.
If in a single quarter we have an increased foreclosure rate of 400% (or 4000 basis points) the insurance contracts simply cannot handle that kind of drastic shift as evidenced by the write offs in the third quarter. When we will follow the drastic third quarter with a loss of 500% in the fourth quarter, the trajectory becomes clear.
Neither the banking nor the insurance industry has a historical experience in dealing with this type of challenge and neither has the liquidity linked to these contracts to support system wide collapse.
* Where was the announcement of this? There was no announcement.
However Hank Greenberg is resurfacing in AIG leadership even during an SEC investigation because without him, no one else can remember where the counterparty risks are. In order to save the insurance industry, shareholders have looked past alleged SEC violations as there is no one with Mr. Greenberg's awareness of the market and counterparty agreements who can hope to navigate the coming challenges. In the 4th quarter, the US will have another record foreclosure announcement. Once you're over 25% (25 basis point) foreclosure, all models are broken.
Under a consumer credit melt-down, Capital One and/or Wachovia are likely going to put a massive foreclosure liability to an insurance company and the insurance company will not have liquidity to cover the exposure.
This is the problem we got into when we issued credit card debt on top of secondary mortgages -- (inflated the value of the home) and gave out credit based on faux equity that no one really had.
The reason why this problem is the second shoe to fall (subprime mortgage collapse was the first shoe) is because consumer credit has a different foreclosure frequency than traditional mortgage credit.
December is when the maturity of the giant buyout of the economy moves.
By December, you'll have a second round of charge offs based on consumer credit. The real big problem -- when you foreclose on consumer credit, people stop buying things. When people stop buying things, we don't have a tertiary way to pump liquidity into the market. People won't have extra cash from their paychecks and won't have capacity on their cards.
Try this case study:
Go to the mall and stand in front of counter at Victoria Secret. Watch what happens when someone wants to pay with cash. The clerk won't know how to ring up cash. They will need a manager to come over to give change and unlock drawers. When you don't have capacity on those cards, you don't buy things. VISA credit cards actually denigrate using cash in their run-up-to-Christmas add campaign.
Next, go to any savings bank data set. If you were going to spend $1000 in cash this Christmas, can you do it? For the most part, the answer would be "no" because we have had a net negative spending for the last 5 years.
Therefore there will be depressed consumer spending this Christmas but what is spent, people will overcharge. This will take what used to be good investments in CDOs and will change the dynamic. If you used to be a person who paid their bills on time, you will now only pay half. If the credit companies are counting on the top two tranches to pay their card off in full and they don't, they won't have liquidity to cover the rest. The banks cannot afford the top tranch paying half.
The estimates are out. There will be at least $400B in the first round of charge offs in the CDO market.
We're not going to be done with the subprime mortgage when the CDOs fall. Therefore we will have an insolvency problem with the banks that are mentioned above.
This is the kiss of death of a privately held Federal Reserve. For the Federal Reserve to function, its stakeholder banks (like JP Morgan Chase) must remain viable and liquid. When one of them, or any major bank in the U.S. (like Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York, Washington Mutual, etc.) is impaired or ceases to exist, the architecture of the Fed's capacity to respond to systemic challenges is unsustainable.
If the banks have no money, they can't pump liquidity into the market. Taking half of a trillion dollars out of market in a single distressed write down becomes problematic. The US banking system does not have the liquidity to take the hit.
The actual solvency of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is relatively indecipherable due to the fact that their treasury management processes (and the risks of their own investment strategies) are not uniformly disclosed with sufficient transparency. The FDIC was set up for isolated problems with a few bad banks but is NOT prepared to "insure" the system in an industry-wide crisis. The actual liquidity reserve of the "insurance" that Americans view as their safety net is 1/100th the actual exposure of outstanding deposits. The actual coverage ratio for the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF) fell below 1.25% in 2002, the same year that less stable credit practices were adopted by America's leading banks.
The funny part is that the Federal Government will be on holiday when all of this happens. There will be no one to put freeze actions and moratoria on actions. The only way you stop the cataclysm is to put together civil actions on deposit withdrawals.
As I discussed previously, the Chinese currency wild-card may become relevant far sooner than expected. An effort by China to convert its $1.4 trillion U.S. Treasury holdings into euros is not viable for many reasons -- not the least of which is the European Central Bank's inability to absorb such an event. As China continues its rush away from supporting U.S. Treasuries and as Middle Eastern investors are buying them up in more diversified holdings, a new "currency exchange" is unfolding. Realizing that they cannot liquidate their holdings, it appears that the Chinese are currently using their U.S. Treasury holdings as collateral for euro denominated purchases and long term infrastructure transactions. In other words, they may be "liquidating" their holdings as collateral and, in so doing, effectively migrating to non-dollar value without ever having to officially dump their current Treasury holdings.
Therefore, collateralize the credit in dollars -- especially if you're long in dollars. The lender/financier won't call the note because you have it structured in such a way to both allow it to perform and hold illiquid collateral that no one wants. This essentially inflates euros. Although you can't sell dollars, the whole purpose of collateral is that it is a second source of payment -- collateral is there to down rate the risk of the loan. Secondary becomes irrelevant.
When February comes, the Chinese are going to do something as they will have to decide what the exposure is going to be with the treasury. As I see it they have to just dump the treasury. They only keep it because they can use it -- they have 43% direct/indirect of US treasuries so they'll dump them on the market.
The US Congressional pressures to decouple the RMB will work, but not in the way we want. Our plan includes helping them hold on to the treasuries, it does not involve them not holding the dollar anymore. The US wanted the tether to be part of the float. This will cause disenfranchisement of the US electorate (during primary season). February is also when public (media) will realize we won't pull out of this.
Side note: Mayor Bloomberg could enter the race at this point, being the savior candidate (at least economically), but has $1B dollars in non-liquid money so he may not be able to enter.
* March is when we realize that the dollar doesn't come back.
OPEC price with the whole fluctuation of oil futures presages the event. They are going to run the price of oil as high as they can get it on the dollar, while buying US treasuries from China with the money. When the dollar does collapse, they'll flip denominations. The wild card is long about March when the OPEC cuts spot oil off the dollar to the euro. One can look at the current oil price at close to $100/barrel and fail to see that, as this premium price is currently turning around and investing in a weakening dollar, the effective price (less the dollar investment hedge) is probably closer to $50/barrel than the spot price reflects.
Currency problems will change the game -- they are financially structuring themselves to take the hit.
When we can't afford to buy oil commodities on a spot market -- it compounds the problem however the consumer that Saudi Arabia ships to is liquid (China). In the US it is a big problem. There is still a market for oil; it just changes. When you come out of Straits of Hormuz, turn left.
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
right on
Yes.
The Psycho-Spiritual Dimension of the Other Shoe Dropping
Daniel,
First, permit me to thank you for articulating these issues the way you have. They are complex and intimidating, at times incredulous, and are evoking powerful responses from people, which is the topic of my comments.
In our work together, we spend a great deal of time pouring through sources and trying to make sense of the events transpiring around us. These days, that is an increasingly difficult task, given the shocking amount of distressing news we are receiving on a daily basis, even as most of the true extent of the problems are obscured by the mainstream media, politicians, and pundits. This presents us with daunting challenges every day to maintain our diligence and continue to spread the information, all the while trying to maintain a positive attitude and not allow ourselves to be to subsumed by the grief and despair of portentous or traumatic news.
It is difficult to communicate the full extent of what is going on in the world, much less what we go through as investigators, to an audience outside our milieu. Those who aren't actively looking for this information are unlikely to come across it in the normal course of their day, and what they do see or hear tends to be watered down or spun, often without the appropriate larger context. This means that each additional new piece of information can cause a shock to their reality. Too many shocks in too short a time, such as we are seeing now, causes a kind of trauma, the response to which is often extreme. This most often involves deep layers of denial coupled with a kind of pathological positivity brought about by a culture that is chronically bad-news averse, where one is constantly cajoled to "lighten up" and "be happy." It's even worse in some of the artistic and spiritual communities which we call home, which has seen many an otherwise solid mind succumb to the empty panaceas of The Secret-like new ageisms that give people the excuse to detach themselves from the suffering of others, because those suffering others brought that suffering on themselves through their "negative thinking and bad thoughts." In a piece published last week In The Times, Silja Talvi, an incomparable journalist and a friend, writes about this secondary trauma within the context of the suicide of investigative reporter Iris Chang:
"Regardless of profession, many of us are unwilling (or unable) to look the other way in the face of war, rampant poverty, sexual violence, mass incarceration, the preventable epidemics of infectious disease and so on. The logical outcome is that we start to suffer feelings of sadness, hopelessness or despair. To do otherwise would require a level of detachment that, in itself, might be more troubling than anything else.
"As psychotherapist Gary Greenberg wrote in an essay in the May 2007 Harper’s, "These days my native pessimism was feasting on a surfeit of bad news—my country taken over by thugs, the calamity of capitalism more apparent every day, environmental cataclysm edging from the wings to center stage."
"This concept that individual mental suffering can, indeed, be closely linked to our social and political environments, is at the center of clinical psychologist Bruce Levine’s new book, Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green). Levine is a longtime critic of the marketing and manipulation of mental illnesses by Big Pharma. For Levine, the extent of mental suffering in the United States is not in question. What is questionable, Levine says, is the notion that depression is disconnected from the political economy and from the meaninglessness of a self-absorbed consumer culture.
"Levine criticizes the notion that depression can simply be medicated away with adjustments in serotonin and/or dopamine levels. Levine also sets his sights on the idea that happiness can be bought, even the idea that happiness is a desirable state of being. From this perspective, it’s not hard to see that while states of ecstasy, love and joy are one thing, our society’s relentless “be happy” sloganeering is devoid of any real meaning or lasting application.
"All stigmatizing of frightening natural human experiences is good for a consumer culture," says Levine, "because labeling something as weak, sick or diseased results in buying of more products to shut down that experience, or divert or distract ourselves from it."
I also very much doubt it is by coincidence that the New York Times recently published "Denial Makes the World Go Round" The piece, a clear apologia sans irony, tells us denial is "ok", that it's an important part of getting along in life, that the denial you hold about the fidelity or honesty of your wife allows you to perceive dishonesty in the world around you, or in the alternative, live with a bad situation. It seems to me the latter is what they are really advocating. And what better time to begin reminding people of this, as they are about to embark on a personal debt nightmare as our economy sputters and coughs in the throes of the consumer credit meltdown.
Just this morning I was rather mercilessly excoriated on my local community's discussion list by an acquaintance who, I gathered, had reached a certain saturation point with what I was circulating.
He writes: "I will be upfront in saying that I am a little tired of the seemingly never-ending Chicken Little (he of “the sky is falling” fame) doomsday predictions and the radical distrust that seem to pervade many of your postings. Not only are the contents of some of these quite questionable as to their accuracy, but there are also better forums (and potentially more engaged audiences) for these types of discussions."
He goes on to say: "I have noticed that over the past few months, quite a number of your postings have been quite bombastic, dogmatic and extreme. They are often filled with seemingly know-it-all proclamations, covering myriad topics, from global politics to international relations, to drivers of current macro-economic changes, to environmental dangers, to the legal system, to US domestic policy, to the state of corporate America, to the underlying causes of certain medical/psychological conditions, and to just about any topic under the sun. These postings, often written quite passionately, are sometimes not only inaccurate, but blatantly incorrect."
He does not, however, offer any countervailing evidence which would have corrected supposed fallacies. He does proceed to ramp up the insults, though, coloring the accusations with his own particular set of adjectives and projections, most of which come from the canon of conspiracy theory:
"The content and tone of your postings generally imply that just about every institution is conspiring to destroy us. They drone on with predictions of doom and gloom, from complete economic collapse, to a legal system about to run amok and destroy us, to a political system that is pure evil in all its forms, to corporate America that is about to annihilate ‘the little guy’, to a future in which we, as a community, may have to break away from this society and all its evils and take shelter from the calamities around us by creating an alternative reality somewhere else. They essentially predict a near-total meltdown around us, and have labeled anybody who does not position themselves as anti-establishment as a corporate shill. Even if some of your gloomy “predictions” come true, they are hardly predictions at all, for those of us who stay informed about such issues from sources as varied as the ‘Wall Street Journal’ on one hand to ‘The Onion’ on the other, from Al Franken one side, to Bill O’ Reilly on the other. So there will be no “I told you so” factor regardless of what happens. (It’s always best to get information from multiple sources, multiple points of view, trying to understand why those who disagree with you in fact disagree with you.)"
To those of us studying the trends, none of these predictions or warnings are particularly surprising, although I must point out again, the color commentary and the conclusions he drew about my beliefs, motivations, or intentions were purely his own, and I believe, meant more pejoratively to mock and insult me. My response was to say that if he disputed something I have written or posted, rather than take up pages of ad hominem attack against me meant to discredit me in the eyes of my community, he should offer a counter-point or prove me wrong. In the absence of that, I said, he should try and consider that his post may have been a typical anxiety-based response to bad news, which is to say, attack the messenger with a measure of hostility. I explained that it’s normal to be bugged out about most of it, it’s a process called “cognitive dissonance” and it wreaks havoc with the psyche. I also said it's common to attack the messenger. It’s not acceptable, but it’s common. Prophets and their acolytes, throughout history, have been unspeakably brutalized for speaking truth to power.
But after all is said and done, my efforts were most likely in vain. Not only had he, in one fell swoop, made mocking light of the crises we are facing, and made sure he cast deep aspersion on my credibility and judgment, but he also made sure to mock our efforts to address it collectively. Allow me to explain.
The dig where he says I was promoting "a future in which we, as a community, may have to break away from this society and all its evils and take shelter from the calamities around us by creating an alternative reality somewhere else" was a reference to efforts made by members of our community to come together in the spirit of positive action and begin discussing the events we see unfolding around us, and planning for possible contingencies. It was inspired by a film I saw last spring, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. The Cubans were caught totally unawares when the Soviet Union collapsed and they lost their main source of support. They had to be creative and collaborative to solve their problems, which were daunting. What we face here in the US is on a magnitude and scale that the Cubans could never fathom, and I would argue we're much less prepared, nor are we as united a culture as the Cubans. It seemed the perfect time to begin talking about it.
The logic, at least to me, seemed pretty clear: If the economy collapsed tomorrow, would you be prepared? Are you prepared in the event of a legitimate terrorist attack or disease epidemic. What about a natural disaster? How about a disruption in the food or energy supply? What about another war, and increased martial law? What about domestic uprisings? Can anyone say these are not only possible in the coming years, but also highly plausible? I would even call some probable. What's to me the most shocking part of it all is that we have no contingency plans, nor any real awareness of the need for one. Could this be because we have sublimated and outsourced our survival to the Federal government, thinking that if anything goes wrong, FEMA will swoop in and save us? I am sure that's part of it, even after FEMA has shown they are both unwilling and incapable of helping masses of citizens in a crisis. I am also equally certain it is because there is near catastrophic levels of denial about the potential for disruption to our lifestyles. Somehow, however incredulously, people think this culture is immortal.
And yet, when we try and be conscious and proactive about this, we are subjected to ridicule. Is the ridicule warranted? I don't think so. This isn't a cult of personality or a group with ulterior motive, and we're not preparing to mass-suicide or be lifted up into the rapture. These are simply friends and family coming together to express mutual hope and fear, and turn their anxiety into action. The goals are only the safety and continuity of our community: food, communication, shelter, exchange. There are no overt political or ideological ends. And in the process of planning for our future, we strengthen our community bonds, give voice to challenges and concerns and learn how to formulate group solutions. Preparation is everything, and I for one don't want to be the one left without a chair when the music stops playing.
Ultimately, I am beginning to fear that there will be a new cultural divide, what can be characterized as an "Ant and Grasshopper" motif between those who get it and begin preparing for large-scale changes to our culture and lifestyle, and those who don't and who continue enabling the system. Although we speak of no more "us and them" and how only "we" can change the world and save humanity, nothing can be done for those who refuse to see what might happen and take it with the appropriate measure of seriousness. But for those who are open to it, there is a way to cope throughout all the trauma of bad news and the possible disruptions to our lives, as well as what can easily grow into relentless ridicule by those who do not accept your beliefs.
It's no longer a fringe idea to suggest that the way through it all is not only through the power of community, but also through spiritual transformation and personal growth. As you so deftly put it in your first Conscious Choice column, we need to move from Ego to We Go. In The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, a book about the end of the oil age, author Thom Hartmann. the populist political writer, suggests that to survive the effects of peak oil we develop a spiritual centernedness. David Korten argues in The Great Turning that only a mass-evolution of consciousness with a spiritual connection will give us the strength to navigate the massive changes ahead. Andrew Harvey call this "sacred activism", – the fusion of the deepest mystical knowledge, peace, strength, and stamina with calm focused and radical action. Harvey believes that only through acknowledging and moving through our individual and collective despair--our "Dark Night of the Soul'--will we emerge out the other side strong, balanced, and grounded. Starhawk and Riane Eisler speak of reintegrating the Divine Feminine. The Institute for Noetic Sciences calls this the "global shift." All of these speak to the same theme: Only a profound spiritual transformation will have the ability to save ourselves, and each other.
It pains me that even good intention is met with hostility, but that's often the case. We need to keep the information flowing, even if it's not all sunshine and lollipops, and keep developing our spiritual core to withstand the relentless onslaught of denial. Those who see it clearly need to be reassured that they are not alone. And if we truly believe that collective action and intention can change our reality and the course of future events, then it seems all the more critical that we get on the same page, move through our collective fear, turning it into fierce compassion, and begin building the kind of world we want. It is all, of course, right within our grasp. Dare we take hold of it, is where we stand today.
Charles Shaw
Executive Editor - Evolver/Reality Sandwich
strategy
Hi Charles,
Thanks for your long, thoughtful comment.
The one thing that I would address is something we have discussed at length: What is the best strategy for persuading people to take a different perspective on what is happening right now? I think the person who assailed you on the discussion board is giving you valuable feedback - he is telling you that he feels flooded by negative information from you, and this is shutting down his capacity to relate wth your ideas or your position. The best reaction on your end would be to ask yourself, why am I not reaching this person?
I think that one has to be highly conscious of the overall tone of the messages one communicates, especially as there seems to be some truth to the idea that "consciousness cocreates reality" (even if The Secret overdoes it), or Rob Brezny's notion that "pronoia" is just as justifiable as paranoia. The failure of the Left, as noted above, has been due to its relentless harping on the negative. If you get that feedback from a lot of people, I would suggest that you listen to it and see if you can present the same issues but in the context of a larger transformative process that is potentially positive.
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
Great Piece
Daniel and Charles - This is awesome
Daniel, and Charles as well, this is awesome. Thank you, thank you so much for all your work. This is truly a lot––huge––to absorb individually and collectively.
Daniel, I just finished your 2012 -- fabulous also. You are quite a brilliant, deep, rich and soulful man Daniel. And kudos to you for being so brutally open and vulnerable, naked, with yourself––a sign of strength and courage as well.
Thank you.
The year ahead...
I haven't wrapped my head around the financial crisis much lately, as it's something that rightfully requires some focused interest to grok the deep implications of what’s unfolding. Thanks Daniel, for the valuable insights.
Instead, the focus of my research lately has been on the ballooning water crisis here in Atlanta, where I've lived most of my life. I am eager to write a piece on this situation, but to be honest, I have been hesitant to begin as I can't find much of an angle to address it outside of bleak frustration or impassioned doomsaying. The most positive aspect I can see thus far is that, for me personally, it could inspire a transformative shift in my life that I’ve yet to fully realize. As Daniel mentions above in relation to the financial meltdown, perhaps this could be seen as a good thing for the citizens of metro Atlanta, as they would be shaken from their illusions and forced to consciousness of the unsustainable demands we’ve placed on our environment. This could be a beneficially transformative moment for many people.
In my research thus far, it seems very possible for the drought afflicting the southeast to continue into the summer months of 2008 and beyond, causing Atlanta's chief reservoir to dry up. This could only lead to profound destabilization of the region and perhaps the nation at large as power generation flounders, businesses close, sanitation degrades, and the sprawling city (and suburbs) is gradually abandoned by all who can afford to get out. The only thing that could conceivably prevent this catastrophic scenario from becoming reality is a prolonged period of heavy rainfall in the next few months; however, this runs counter to the predictions of climatologists who foresee a dry winter and intensified drought continuing, perhaps over several more years. The Army Corps of Engineers is now counting 77 days of water remaining for metro Atlanta. In the meantime, not much has changed; life continues, unbelievably, as normal for the majority of Atlantans, as if nothing is amiss.
Next spring will also reveal whether the honeybees will recover from the blight of Colony Collapse Disorder that nearly disenfranchised many of the world’s commercial beekeepers. A recurrence would mean almost certain insolvency for these critical stewards of pollination, and many global harvests would suffer. Of course, we also move in anticipation toward a national election in 2008 – a historical event that should raise anxiety levels in all Americans who share with Naomi Wolf a foreboding sense of a fascist shift in the air. It seems there are indeed many powerful events culminating in the near future.
I raise these disparate issues here not to incite greater fear or despair, but out of the dutiful sense that we need to pay attention to these developments in the coming months. I can relate to Charles’ predicament of facing opposition from those in comfortable denial. I am a regular contributor to a local nightlife message board here in Atlanta, and over the years I’ve met with similar rebukes in my efforts to enlighten its readership. However, my recent postings about the imminent catastrophe facing Atlanta (no less dire than many of my more controversial campaigns there) have met with surprisingly little resistance and seem to be mobilizing awareness. This is, of course, due primarily to the fact that this is a crisis that finally hits home – denial isn’t such an attractive option in this case, when we’re worried about our own backyards.
I suppose many people have to be personally faced with dramatic effects before they will acknowledge the long-ignored cause. In the meantime, we should continue to spread compassionate awareness to reach those who are ready to accept it: as things progress, I feel many more people will reach this point and will come to us, ready to listen.
-ST
There Will Be No Applause
Daniel Pinchbeck has written an excellent piece of thought that deserves to be digested.
I have been following the economic systems which are heading towards collapse, but two figures keep resurfacing to the top. One is 80% of people on Earth have no access to water in their dwelling (this does not address the safety of water), and the second is that 50% of our fellow human beings have no facility to evacuate their urine and feces.
While the 4% of the human population that the U.S. are due for a rude awakening, many people world wide are already facing despair and a nightmare without an ending in sight.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
T. S. Eliot
Local Concerns
what to say about Atlanta drought
Hi St,
Thanks for your thoughts.
As to writing about the Atlanta drought, I think it would be good to put on a journalist's cap and see what happens. Call the Mayor's office, maybe FEMA as well, and ask what contigency plans are on the table if Atlanta runs out of water. Also, perhaps look into the history of the situation - were there bad engineering decisions made? Who has been in charge of the decisionmaking process?
The next thing that might be interesting to look at is what could happen. I read that Atlanta might siphon water from the Tennessee River. Could a conduit be built in accelerated conditions? Is this being pursued? If resettlement is necessary, where in the region is water plentiful? Are there urban planners, especially ones with Buckminster Fuller-style design science backgrounds, who are looking into this scenario? How many people could be reabsorbed into the countryside?
Are there any historical examples of a major city running out of water? Maybe Diamond's "Collapse" has some historical parallels?
Also I believe there are a number of cities and regions around the world approaching similar conditions. TruthOut listed them recently. It might be interesting to do a little searching and see what types of contingency plans they are pursuing.
Perhaps there are also visionary technologies related to water systems, desalinization etc?
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
America is Drying
Good suggestions, thanks!
In case everyone missed this NYT Magazine article from a few weeks back, it's required reading. Jon Gertner's "The Future is Drying Up" sees hard times in the near future for a water-starved and exponentially growing American West. Even the most innovative and rigorous water management techniques, under the most savvy managers, is no match for unchecked growth and a turbulent climate.
-st
the fall
Thank you
Keep at it, Daniel! The political awareness needs to come back into the psychedelic scene , ASAP! Spirituality is politics, and vice versa!
The issue is inextricably entangled with what I call hijacking. All popular movements are hijacked by pawns of the status quo, and they have over the years developed some extremely cunning ways to manifature consent and manipulate public opinion, which is referred to by the anarchist adage of "Public opinion is a whore".
The pawns of the status quo are expert at mind games, and they have managed to reduce sociopolitical discourse to dumbed-out fights between "left" and "right", when both sides are just more pawns. And the pawns have always been busy to infiltrate all forms of public discourse. So, online discussions of such matters have to be viewed in that light. There will always be parties consciously or unconsciously furthering the status quo agenda.
Many pages in wikipedia reveal this. The page on "Zeitgeist, the movie" was marked for deletion several times before it became so popular that many people piled in and spoke up against its deletion. And one has only to look at the pages dealing with Israel/Zionism/US imperialism to realise just how busy these folks are.
When people are taught to look after #1 , that's what they will keep doing all their lives, and so they will make their decisions according to how they believe they will affect their personal lives.
The New Age movement has also been hijacked, and the focus has been restricted to self-development, self-enlightenment, self-this and self-that, without almost any inclination to look at community paradigms and real-world community-orientated practical applications of the much abused "We are all connected" , "We create our own reality" (keyword : own) and other such tripe that leads to corporate coaching and further techniques of self-empowerment so as to continue with business as usual.
No amount of self-development and individual enlightenment will really satisfy, as any bodhisattva will tell us.
As I see it, a lot of the New Age seeking is seeking for escape into a private paradise , a bubble of milk-and-honey where all "negativity" is forever banished under the wisdom of the self-proclaimed gods and goddesses. There will be no predators and no prey, only fluffy bunnies and butterflies and crystals singing the music of the spheres. It is an immature ignorance, a narcissistic desire to stay where we are not meant to stay. These are places to find healing and strength , so as to move on with what we are HERE to do, not places we can imagine we will be allowed to stay forever in if we are good enough. In other words , most of the New Age is just repackaged bad ol'time religion .
Thank you Charles, for posting what you posted here. Charles wrote:
It's even worse in some of the artistic and spiritual communities which we call home, which has seen many an otherwise solid mind succumb to the empty panaceas of The Secret-like new ageisms that give people the excuse to detach themselves from the suffering of others, because those suffering others brought that suffering on themselves through their "negative thinking and bad thoughts."
This has caused me a lot of pain in the past, when I knew less about protecting myself from the false projections of others, and I can imagine it has caused even more pain in more sensitive souls and probably destroyed lives. It is particulalrty abhorrent when people , in denial of their own humanity, and their predicament, judge others as guilty deserving of divine punishment for having "negative thoughts".
I suppose the art is in expressing those "negative thoughts" in ways that will be received by people and not outright rejected.
Despite of all this, I stick with the Taoist understanding that until such a time when people are living with the Tao , as whole body-heart-mind-psyche natural organisms, people will live in falsity and suffer the consequences.
It is only under conditions of extreme threat, such as natural disasters and "anarchy" that people seem to spontaneously realise that SURVIVAL IS ONLY POSSIBLE THROUGH HELPING EACH OTHER instead of trying to cover the soon-to-be-blown-away ass.
In the light of this, we can only look forward to the melt-down and prepare for the worse. Teamwork is the greatest challenge we are faced with, and individualism will have to be thoroughly re-worked before teamwork and self-governance is at all possible ...
If something can open our hearts permanently and strenghten our bonds amidst the ongoing war, i say bring it on!
Nice place you've got here
Thanks Daniel. I just subscribed to this site, and yours was the first article I read. It answered a question I’ve had for several months now; after reading The Great Turning, Dark Night – Early Dawn, and The Ascent of Humanity, and watching Children of Men, Lions for Lambs, and Zeitgeist The Movie; whether to quietly withdraw all of my cash in the next two months.
Thanks Charles for your willingness to share the reaction you’ve had to your awakening, from those you’ve tried to shake from their slumber. Screaming “FIRE” in a burning theatre when there’s “apparently” no hint of smoke takes a lot of courage. I walked from door-to-door as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses almost every weekend for thirty years yelling “Fire!” so I know how it goes. Daniel’s advice to you is appropriate, based upon my personal experience. May you take it to heart without becoming offended. (I could feel the love, could you?).
Thanks to all posters at this blog. I also read The Secret, and wondered how one synapse of the collective human mind (any individual person) could divorce his/herself from our shared being. As if their individual little synapse could possibly survive on its own. I guess it’s called fear.
I’d intuited the coming collapse of society in my mid-twenties, which is why the Witnesses got me to join their cult. They’re on the right train of thought, just on a different track. No matter, as we’ll all arrive at the same time. Since I’ve known for many years of the coming catalyism (Like my Freudian choice of words?), I’ve watched the news with an invested curiosity, and now that I’ve returned to a broader reality, (Free of all “ism’s”) and as I now find ourselves all together on this train, I’m giddy with fascination regarding how the individual cards of this house will fall, and how quickly. It may be because I’m now sixty, and “I’ve been there, done that”, and/or because I know that my best friend and lover, Gaia, will survive come-what-may…. But I feel quite settled and ready. Hmmm. Ready?
Ready for what’s to come, and ready to help others …who are ready to be shaken awake.
Don
"The Disease is the Cure"
community mind
Pronoia
Hi Daniel,
Thank you as always.
In terms of creating "pronoia," whether artistically or interpersonally:
As a musician, I've lately found that my non-lyrical ("instrumental") compositions/improvisations seem to have a healing and/or transformative effect upon my listeners. Whereas, the songs I've written with words in them are almost totally self-absorbed, in such a way as to frequently alienate my potential listeners. They might say, "That's clever," but they never say, "That was completely awesome."
I don't want to be clever, I want to touch people and lift them up (if I have any sort of sense of responsibility toward my fellow humans, and as an artist I have to consistently remind myself that this is key).
So, although I have absolutely no idea how I will cope when our economy completely collapses (I'm not sure I'm coping economically anyway, as I have no "credit"), I feel like I'm better poised to contribute something positive now that I've had this bit of enlightenment.
Even if society changes to the point where I won't be in a position to play keyboards requiring electricity, etc. (my usual modus operandi), I will be able to remember something of the positivity of my recent performances which have given something to a community of listeners, whether strangers or known to me. I will (I hope) be able to apply that sort of spirit to perhaps less bourgeois pursuits, should the need arise. And I imagine it will.
The only time I ever have felt like that previously was at the Rainbow Gathering (2006 and 2007), and I have a feeling that that experience is excellent training for the Earth after the shoe drops, etc.
I was moved to write after reading much of your Reality Sandwich work lately, and hope my contribution here is not a waste of anyone's time.
Hey Man
Let’s be positive, the Beatles are coming back, the Yellow Submarine is surfacing, and I am hearing ‘Here Comes the Sun’.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
T. S. Eliot
China & India
India with a population 1.2 billion has 800 million people making $2 per day. Many of India’s other population is much like the U.S. living in comparable housing and luxurious shopping malls. These ‘modern’ living conditions are ‘walled off’ from the 80% of the greater part of India. India’s economy is growing at about 11% annually.
China’s economy is growing at an even higher percentage than India. The current account of automobiles for India is 11 for every 1000 registered drivers while China has 9 automobiles for every 1000 registered drivers.
It is not rocket science to see that if the U.S. goes belly up economically the populations of India and China will fill the demand for the production of more automobiles and widgets to fill their new shopping malls.
It is time to wake up and face the facts; if it ‘bums people out’ or is ‘not positive enough’ then get out of the way.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
T. S. Eliot
it's great to see everyone...
www.organelle.org
www.truetao.org
Emerging social movements
Dear David, Your text is very very congruent with the way we have tried to approach the issue of political and social at p2pfoundation.net, which is a global network for research on the open/free, participatory and commons-oriented paradigms.
May I invite you to look at my own set of proposals for the renewal of the emancipatory tradition, see:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2007/11/03/the_peer_to_peer_manifesto...
http://www.masternewmedia.org/information_access/p2p-peer-to-peer-econom...
http://www.masternewmedia.org/information_access/p2p-peer-to-peer-econom...
the above are simplified versions, based on the foundational essay available here at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499
I have summarized our point of view in a 16-point manifesto:
1. Our current world system is marked by a profoundly counterproductive logic of social organization: 1. it is based on a false concept of abundance in the limited material world; it has created a system based on infinite growth, within the confines of finite resources 2. it is based on a false concept of scarcity in the infinite immaterial world; instead of allowing continuous experimental social innovation, it purposely erects legal and technical barriers to disallow free cooperation through copyright, patents, etc…
2. Therefore, the number one priority for a sustainable civilization is overturning these principles into their opposite: 1. we need to base our physical economy on a recognition of of natural resources being finite, and achieve a sustainable steady-state economy 2. we need to facilitate free and creative cooperation and lower the barriers to such exchange by reforming the copyright and other restrictive regimes
3. Hierarchy, markets, and even democracy are means to allocate scarce resources through authority, pricing, and negotiation; they are not necessary in the realm of the creation and free exchange of immaterial value, which will be marked by bottom-up forms of peer governance
4. Markets, as means to to manage scarce physical resources, are but one of the means to achieve such allocation, and need to be divorced from the idea of capitalism, which is a system of infinite growth.
5. The creation of immaterial value, which again needs to become dominant in a post-material world which recognized the finiteness of the material one, will be characterized by the further emergence of non-reciprocal peer production system.
6. Peer production is a more productive system for producing immaterial value than the for-profit mode, and in cases of the asymmetric competition between for-profit companies and for-benefit institutions and communities, the latter will tend to emerge
7. Peer production produces more social happiness, because 1. it is based on the highest form of individual motivation, nl. intrinsic positive motivation; 2. it is based on the highest form of collective cooperation, nl. synergistic cooperation characterized by four winners (both the participants in the exchange , the community, and the universal system)
8. Peer governance, the bottom-up mode of participative decision-making (only those who participate get to decide) which emerges in peer projects is politically more productive than representative democracy, and will tend to emerge in immaterial production. However, it can only replace representative modes in the realm of non-scarcity, and will be a complementary mode in the political realm. What we need are political structures that create a convergence between individual and collective interests.
9. Peer property, the legal and institutional means for the social reproduction of peer projects, are inherently more distributive than both public property and private exclusionary property; it will tend to become the dominant form in the world of immaterial production (which includes all design of physical products).
10. Peer to peer as the relational dynamic of free agents in distributed networks will likely become the dominant mode for the production of immaterial value; however, in the realm of scarcity, the peer to peer logic will tend to reinforce peer-informed market modes, such as fair trade; and in the realm of the scarcity based politics of group negotiation, will lead to reinforce the peer-informed state forms such as multistakeholdership forms of governance.
11. The role of the state must evolve from the protector of dominant interests and arbiter between public regulation and privatized corporate modes (an eternal and unproductive binary choice), towards being the arbiter between a triad of public regulation, private markets, and the direct social production of value. In the latter capacity, it must evolve from the welfare state model, to the partner state model, as involved in enabling and empowering the direct social creation of value.
12. The world of physical production needs to be characterized by: 1. sustainable forms of peer-informed market exchange (fair trade, etc..); 2. reinvigorated forms of reciprocity and the gift economy; 3. a world based on social innovation and open designs, available for physical production anywhere in the world.
13. The best guarantor of the spread of the peer to peer logic to the world of physical production, is the distribution of everything, i.e. of the means of production in the hands of individuals and communities, so that they can engage in social cooperation. While the immaterial world will be characterized by a peer to peer logic of non-reciprocal generalized exchange, the peer informed world of material exchange will be characterized by evolving forms of reciprocity and neutral exchange.
14. We need to move from empty and ineffective anti-capitalist rhetoric, to constructive post-capitalist construction. Peer to peer theory, as the attempt to create a theory to understand peer production, governance and property, and the attendant paradigms and value systems of the open/free, participatory, and commons-oriented social movements, is in a unique position to marry the priority values of the right, individual freedom, and the priority values of the left, equality. In the peer to peer logic, one is the condition of the other, and cooperative individualism marries equality and freedom in a context of non-coercion.
15. We need to become politically sensitive to invisible architectures of power. In distributed systems, where there is no overt hierarchy, power is a function of design. One such system, perhaps the most important of all, is the monetary system, whose interest-bearing design requires the market to be linked to a system of infinite growth, and this link needs to be broken. A global reform of the monetary system, or the spread of new means of direct social production of money, are necessary conditions for such a break.
16. This is the truth of the peer to peer logical of social relationships: 1. together we have everything; 2. together we know everything. Therefore, the conditions for dignified material and spiritual living are in our hands, bound with our capacity to relate and form community. The emancipatory peer to peer theory does not offer new solutions for global problems, but most of all new means to tackle them, by relying on the collective intelligence of humankind. We are witnessing the rapid emergence of peer to peer toolboxes for the virtual world, and facilitation techniques of the physical world of face to face encounters, both are needed to assist in the necessary change of consciousness that needs to be midwifed. It is up to us to use them.
17. At present, the world of corporate production is benefiting from the positive externalities of widespread social innovation (innovation as an emerging property of the network itself, not as an internal characteristic of any entity), but there is no return mechanism, leading to the problem of precariousness. Now that the productivity of the social is beyond doubt, we need solutions that allow the state and for-profit corporation to create return mechanisms, such as forms of income that are no longer directly related to the private production of wealth, but reward the social production of wealth.
Michel Bauwens
peer-to-peer
Hi Michel,
There proposals look very interesting, and very much aligned with Negri and Hardt's ideas. A few questions for you: Do you have a tactical and strategic plan for bringing about this systemic change that you are actively working on, or is circulating the ideas enough to make it happen?
Second question: What happens to private property and oligarchic wealth in your proposal? Is physical property limited, collectivized, transitional, or what?
Third question: What specific form would reform of the monetary system take? Negative interest? Value linked to perishable goods and products? Would this be accompanied by a socialized form of income distribution?
And another one: Are there any forms of production that the peer-to-peer model would not be able to account for? Would feature films be possible under this model, for instance, or would the nature of cultural production have changed to the point where people wouldn't be interested in that form of expression?
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
p2p questions, replying to Daniel
Hi Daniel,
I was on the road for 3 days, no internet connection, but I propose to tackle your questions one by one.
First question: There proposals look very interesting, and very much aligned with Negri and Hardt's ideas. A few questions for you: Do you have a tactical and strategic plan for bringing about this systemic change that you are actively working on, or is circulating the ideas enough to make it happen?
Response:
I should start by saying that my approach is naturalistic, i.e. closely observing what is already happening, both in actuality and potential, and to interconnect best practices so that we can create stronger alternatives. As Negri says: the christians did not fight the empire, but constructed new social practices and institutions, which took over when the slavery-based meta-system collapsed.
What we must expect to see is: 1) at first transgressive behaviour, i.e. the phase of p2p filesharing; 2) constructive behaviour: this is the phase we are witnessing now, people are everywhere building and trying out p2p alternatives and consolidating them; 3) eventually, and we're clearly not ready for this, we will build a social movement that can obtain institutional reforms in the existing world.
Another aspect: because p2p is proving to be a superior mode of producing value (as production, governance, and property system), we see the existing institutions using them to their own benefit, but they thereby also strengthen p2p alternatives, which are both immanent (within) and transcendent (outside) the current logic. Both the ruling elite and the value-producers are therefore in the process of reconfiguring themselves into respectively netarchical capitalists (the platform owners) and peer producers.
As p2p is a result of distributed networks and their 'affordances', a good strategic bet is the 'distribution of everything', i.e. to support all the trends in organisation and technology that create more and more peer to peer dynamics, the good news being that the same trends we saw resulting in distributed computing, are now also happening in physical production technology.
All these things: constructing new social practices, designing new life forms, distributing technology, closely internetworking existing social movements, will take time, there is no magic bullet. I'm afraid there is no grand strategy, but co-creation as we ourselves invent and experiment with world-creation and learn from a new type of struggles.
But timing is important and I believe the following.
Humanity never reaches to radical alternatives first, but first starts fiddling, then reform within, and finally reform of the system. The fiddling stage is coming to an end, and 2012 is a good metaphor for that. But the next stage is therefore a major reform within the capitalist system, a global Keynesian, green capitalist compact. It will not be sufficient to save our planet, but will bring a number of social advances, and to be successfull, the enligthened elites will have to accept a large number of open/free, participatory and commons oriented practices. This will give room for the economy and civilisation of cooperation to grow, and may take 2-3 extra decades, perhaps more. In the end, as an infinite growth system is impossible within natural limits, the green-capitalist system will have to give way to something else, which in the best scenario is the p2p civilisation. This one will be seen first as a germ form (today), then as as part of a new equilibrium (green-capitalist phase), then finally, as the new overriding logic.
But careful, dominant logic does not mean total logic. P2P, i.e. non-reciprocal contributions, will dominate the immaterial