baudrillard k

Semiotic Capitalism K

NC Shells

Marx So Hard NCConsumption, not production, is the heart of capitalism—postmodern capitalism is a system of circulating symbols, not commodities. The production of desire is the root of capitalist alienation.Robinson 12

Andrew Robinson (Political Theorist, Activist; Writer @ Ceasefire Magazine). “Jean Baudrillard: Critique of Alienation – Draft 1.” Ceasefire Magazine, 14 April 2012, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-3 //dtac

While his theory of symbolic exchange provides an unusual account of how a non-alienated society might work, Baudrillard’s critique of alienation provides his account of how capitalism today actually functions. This work has evolved significantly over time. From an activist point of view, his early work is arguably more accessible and useful. This early work gives a glimpse of a more politically radical Baudrillard, a sense of what Baudrillard might look like when paired with Situationism or autonomism. In The Consumer Society, a work from Baudrillard’s early period

when he was more sympathetic to Marxism, consumerism is assessed in terms of the replacement of use-values with sign-values. In designer goods and brand-names , such as Nike trainers and Apple Ipods, the brand does not actually add any use-

value. It is a way of conveying or possessing particular signs, so as to project a particular self-image or pursue social status. In a system of sign-values, people consume the relations between objects – not only the objects. Sign-value is also open to endless slippage: any object can in principle signify happiness, functionality, prestige and so on. It is quite

similar to Barthesian myths. Baudrillard also tends to endorse the Lacanian view that the slippage of signification stems from an unmeetable desire for social meaning. Because the desire is unmeetable, needs are insatiable. In this work, Baudrillard is trying to answer the classic question of the New Left: why workers and other oppressed groups fall for capitalist ruses and remain

attached to the system. His hypothesis is that consumer society operates as a kind of social status competition, which carries a particular ideology. This prefigures his later break with Marxism. Already Baudrillard is suggesting that

consumption, rather than production, is at the heart of capitalism. Baudrillard uses the word ambience for

capitalism’s control of society through its incorporation into consumption. It produces a kind of diffuse, mobile experience of life. The lack of situatedness is partly compensated by the role of objects. In consumer society, we are surrounded by objects – often objects split from their place and function. We become object-like from living among objects, much as wolf-children become wolf-like. The code is substituted for the referential dimension of language. People

are caught in a world much of which is merely an internal, technical product of the code. The system destroys direct personal ties an{d} social relations. It then systematically creates simulated relations which can be consumed, instead of those it has destroyed. It also eliminates the singular, radically different content of each person, putting in its place differential signs.

And it eliminates real conflict, putting abstract competition in its place. Everyday life is constructed through a split between the everyday and the abstract or transcendent sphere of the social, political, historical or cultural. The closure of the everyday sphere, the exclusion from history, is tolerable only because it is accompanied by alibis or simulations of participation. The exclusion from history is also given value, because it is identified with security – in contrast to the scary historical events shown on TV.

Ignore the proletariat and class divisions—categories of “labor” and “production” shut off desire and buy into the system’s construction of workers—struggle not against the boss, but against being enclosed as labor!Robinson 12

Andrew Robinson (Political Theorist, Activist; Writer @ Ceasefire Magazine). “Jean Baudrillard: Marx and Alienation – Draft 2.” Ceasefire Magazine, 20 April 2012, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-4 //dtac

In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard offers a challenging critique of Marxism which radicalises certain of its theories while criticising others.

Baudrillard criticises Marxism for ignoring the underlying level at which people are constructed as workers. He argues that categories of “labour” and “production” actually capture and repress desire,

particularly when applied to non-capitalist societies. They produce a framework of scarcity , counterposed to symbolic exchange. It then reads capitalist dynamics back into earlier social forms, including indigenous social forms. This ignores the ways in which

indigenous cosmologies provide an outer perspective on western culture. This outer perspective is more radical

than inner critiques. Inst ead of a primary dispute between workers and bosses about the exploitation of labour-

power, Baudrillard sees a primary divide between conformity inside the system, by those interpellated as labour-

power, and subversion by those outside. These exclusionary boundaries are structured primarily around the exclusion of symbolic exchange and symbolic power. The proletariat does not escape capitalist power because it is within production. The truly radical class struggle is the struggle against being enclosed as labour. Similarly, instead of the economy being the last instance, Baudrillard insists that separation and alienation are the

last instance. The (orthodox) Marxist emphasis on the economy is ideological. It covers-up the operation of the system as a totality. Use-value, for instance, is an effect of exchange-value. It cannot be accorded independence as a category.

In fact, capitalism does not unleash most people’s creative forces at all – only a few people are encouraged to develop their capabilities.

Rather, it depends above all on conformity. Production counterposes itself to desire. It is reproduced, as a code, in an ‘in-depth imperialism’ in everyday life. Capitalism can extract creative power only if it is incorporated as production. Ultimately, this process if self-destructive. The suppression of symbolic exchange means that production cannot obtain the

meaning it is directed towards. Capitalism is unable to produce real commitment or participation. In this work, Baudrillard calls for a radical struggle against capitalism, on an immanent level. This struggle should focus itself at the point of exclusion. It should be a

struggle against enclosure, against redefinition of oneself as labour-power. Baudrillard expands his

transformation of Marxism in his later work, particularly his discussion of workers and symbolic exchange. Baudrillard claims that workers have always been primarily excluded, incarcerated and excommunicated by the system – not exploited. Class struggle has always been a struggle against being treated as subhuman or relegated to a marked term. The core of capitalism is not exploitation but the code of normality. This account is based on a political history of labour. Baudrillard traces the

origins of the working-class in historical forms of slavery. He argues that the first workers were prisoners-of-war who were

conserved or spared so as to be put to work. He concludes from this that labour is really a deferred death. This deferred death separates the economic order from the symbolic order. It removes the slave from the symbolic order by removing death. This means that we are all hostages of power. It also means we can’t destroy power without removing the deferral of death. Today this hostage status comes from the compulsion to be social and communicative – to manage one’s desire, capital, health and so on. To fail to do so is taken to be self-destruction. This extends to a demand that one reveal one’s secret (even if one has none) – for instance in polls and statistics. The command to communicate leads to a compulsory extraversion of all interiority. (This puts a whole different spin on the spread of CCTV, the niqab ban, anti-masking laws and so on). Baudrillard speaks of a society of forced confessions, compulsory statements of truth, obliged revelations – but in a context where there is

nothing to reveal. Capital ‘gives’ labour as a gift (think of the idea of ‘job creation’). The worker, in return, ‘gives’ capital to the capitalist. Wages ‘symbolically buy back’ domination. This relation replaces the original reversibility of symbolic

exchange with a dialectic. It is this slide from the symbolic into the economic which allows concentrated power to exist. Otherwise it would be instantly cancelled out by reverse, reciprocal gestures.

Liberation is impossible—groups are re-encoded as alibis for power—resistance merely simulates liberation, ultimately reifying the system.Robinson 12


Similarly, groups supposedly liberated – such as women, black people, and young people – are denied the effects of liberation by

being re-encoded in terms of myths. Once labelled as irresponsible, people’s liberation is attached to a coded meaning which demands and bars responsibility and social power. Real liberation is avoided by giving people an image of themselves to consume – women are given the image of Woman , the young an image of Youth, technological change

by Technology (gadgets), and so on. Liberation is thus nullified, and re-encoded as a role and as narcissism. Concrete gains for liberation movements are side-effects of this immense strategic operation to disempower oppressed groups through their reduction to a function or role. We are drip-fed little bits of democracy and progress to ensure the system’s survival. They operate as its alibis. Even if income equality is encouraged, the system can survive by moving inequality elsewhere, to status, style, power and so on. At this point in his work, Baudrillard still believes in desire, happiness, the real, history and so on. He sees them as alienated in the system’s insistence on artificial, simulated and

quantitative versions of them. The system only knows about its own survival. It doesn’t understand the social or individual forces which operate inside it. Hence, changing its contents never changes how it works. The system tries to conjure away the real and history with signs representing them – replacing them with the truer than true and so on.

Simulations are objects which offer many signs of being real, when in fact they are not.

The alternative is to reject the affirmative and engage in radical passivity. This is a fatal strategy—disengagement exhausts the system; reform breathes life into the system which makes violence inevitable.Bifo 11

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future (2011) pp. 106-108 dml

Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of

death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostage’s death for the terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial

act. (Baudrillard 1993a: 37) In these impressive pages Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution against power, of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and predicts the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the sacrificial gift of death (and self-annihilation). After the destruction of the World Trade Center in the most important terrorist act ever, Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism

where he goes back to his own predictions and recognizes the emergence of a catastrophic age. When the code becomes the enemy the only strategy can be catastrophic: all the counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity. (Baudrillard 2003: 6) This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power by the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order. This

malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share this order’s benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power

is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this

definitive order: No need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse, unintended effects. Very

logically – inexorably – the increase in the power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was party to its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-planes with

their own suicides. It has been said that “Even God cannot declare war on Himself.” Well, He can. The West, in position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal , and declared war on itself. (Baudrillard 2003: 6-7) In Baudrillard’s catastrophic vision I see a new way of thinking subjectivity: a reversal of the energetic

subjectivation that animates the revolutionary theories of the 20th century, and the opening of an implosive theory of subversion, based on depression and exhaustion. In the activist view exhaustion is seen as the inability of the social body to escape the vicious destiny that capitalism has prepared : deactivation of the social energies that once

upon a time animated democracy and political struggle. But exhaustion could also become the beginning of a slow movement towards a “wu wei” civilization, based on the withdrawal, and frugal expectations of life and consumption. Radicalism could abandon the mode of activism, and adopt the mode of passivity. A

radical passivity would definitely threaten the ethos of relentless productivity that neoliberal politics has imposed. The mother of all the bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate. We have been working too much during the last three or four centuries, and outrageously too much during the last thirty years. The current depression could be the begin ning of a massive abandonment of competition, consumerist drive, and of dependence on work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle of the first decade – the struggle between Western domination

and jihadist Islam – we recognize that the most powerful weapon has been suicide. 9/11 is the most impressive act of this

suicidal war, but thousands of people have killed themselves in order to destroy American military hegemony. And they won, forcing the western world into the bunker of paranoid security, and defeating the hyper-technological armies of the West both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. The suicidal implosion has not been confined to the Islamists.

Suicide has became a form of political action everywhere. Against neoliberal politics, Indian farmers have killed themselves. Against exploitation hundreds of workers and employees have killed themselves in the French factories of Peugeot, and in the offices of France Telecom. In Italy, when the 2009 recession destroyed one million jobs,

many workers, haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the factories, threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the direction of death, murder, and suicide, towards a new kind of autonomy, social creativity and of life? I think that it is possible only if we start from exhaustion , if we emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and money could be deserted, and exhaustion could give way to a huge wave of withdrawal from the sphere of economic exchange. A new refrain could emerge in that moment, and wipe out the law of economic growth. The self-organization of the general intellect could abandon the law of accumulation and growth, and start a new concatenation, where collective intelligence is only subjected to the common good.

Utilitearin’ ‘em up NCConsumption, not production, is the heart of capitalism—postmodern capitalism is a system of circulating symbols, not commodities. The production of desire is the root of capitalist alienation.Robinson 12











Alienation divorces the self from the body, subjecting the latter to hostile discipline—this sets the stage for symbolic capitalism, breeds the micro-fascist desire for purification, and nullifies value to life.Robinson 12


Alienation impacts especially on how we relate to our bodies. The body in capitalism is both capital and fetish, object of investment and consumption. Its many uses include fashion, adverts, mass culture, discourses of hygiene, diet and

therapy, cults of youth and femininity, and sacrificial practices such as slimming. It is exploited in a managed narcissism, perfected externally so as to exploit it to produce social ly valued signs – to appear as happy, healthy, young,

spontaneous, beautiful and so on. The various uses of the body are replaced by a single signifying function. Appearances such as

fitness are deemed near-necessities in environments such as management. They express hostility to the body, seen as a menacing object which needs to be watched over by the self. The body is turned into a package , like

clothes, and consumed like an object. One’s relationship to it thus becomes neurotic and repressive. The body is socially encoded so as to meet normative demands to produce and consume. This is even more

alienating that the use of the body as source of labour-power. It is only after the body is reinvested in this way that the demand for objects as signs occurs. People will only pursue objects as signs once their body is seen as an object. Similarly, sexuality is turned into an instrumental code of signs instead of individual desires. Especially in downturn periods, sexuality becomes frenetic but anxious. The profound contradictions of sexual problems and desires are covered-up. External censorship is replaced with an internalised censorship prohibiting liberation. A private, narcissistic, personalised sexuality protects the status quo from the

effects of sexual liberation. Sex is everywhere but in the sex-act itself. It is overwhelmed by signs. There is also a new kind of imaginary

“subject” or self generated by consumerism. Consumer society portrays all its objects for sale as carefully formulated for an impersonal “you” to whom they are addressed. It is a kind of myth which presents consumption as common sense, consuming the spectacle of consumption itself. Without the myth of consumption, it would not exist as an integrative social function. It would simply be a set of differentiated needs and desires. The word

‘consumption’ actually expresses a restructuring of social ideology. It is not in fact a victory of objects, or of earthly pleasures. Rather, it is a set of reified social and productive relations and forces. In this world, revolutions are replaced by fashion cycles. Even the retraining of workers is little more than a fashion cycle. It’s a way of imposing “low-intensity” constraints and a threat of exclusion so as to ensure conformity. Baudrillard is highly critical of the view that consumerism

amounts to liberation. It is true that certain older regimes of authoritarianism have decayed. But the new regime is also a system of control. Repression persists, but it moves sideways. The image of a sterile , hygienic body and fear of contamination establishes an inner control which removes desire from the body. The ranking of bodies in terms

of status leads to a re-racialisation. Puritanism becomes mixed-up with hedonism in this ranking process. The body as locus of desire remains censored and silenced, even when it appears to undergo hedonistic release. Sexuality is

expressed in consumption so it can’t disrupt the status quo. What is now censored is the symbolic structure and the possibility of deep meaning. Living representations are turned into empty signs. Because of this change, the old resistances to repression no longer work.

The alternative is to reject the affirmative and engage in radical passivity. This is a fatal strategy—disengagement exhausts the system; reform breathes life into the system which makes violence inevitable.Bifo 11



death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostage’s death for the terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial














many workers, haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the factories, threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the direction of death, murder, and suicide, towards a new kind of autonomy, social creativity and of life? I think that it is possible only if we start from exhaustion , if we emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and money could be deserted, and exhaustion could give way to a huge wave of withdrawal from the sphere of economic exchange. A new refrain could emerge in that moment, and wipe out the law of economic growth. The self-organization of the

general intellect could abandon the law of accumulation and growth, and start a new concatenation, where collective intelligence is only subjected to the common good.

Passivity kills the economy, but that’s good—growth is unsustainable and immediate collapse can avert extinction from ecological destruction and warming Barry 14

Dr. Glen Barry (President and Founder of Ecological Internet; Ph.D., Land Resources, Univ. Wisconsin-Madison). “Earth In Overshoot; Human Growth Is Killing Her.” 18 May 2014, http://www.countercurrents.org/barry180514.htm

The global eco logical system is collapsing and dying under the cumulative filth of 7 billion people INEQUITABLY devouring their ecosystem habitats. It is impossible to avoid global ecosystem collapse if humanity continues to breed like bunnies; tolerates exorbitant inequality, abject poverty and conspicuous overconsumption;

and destroys the ecosystems and climate that – rich or poor – are habitat for all of us. As I have written previously and will write again, the human family either comes together to address converging ecology, rights, and injustice crises – largely brought on by inequitable

overpopulation – or faces global ecological collapse and the end of being. It is not possible to go from 1 to 7 billion people in 135 years – while still growing exponentially – without profound impacts upon natural ecosystems that provide air, water, food and livelihoods. If you don’t understand this, you are uneducated, dumb, and/or indoctrinated; you need to study ecology and get

out and see the world. Or go and look at an overgrazed cow pasture and extrapolate. Merging climate , food, water , ocean , soil , justice, poverty, and old-growth forest crises – all which are to some degree caused by inequitable overpopulation – are destroying ecosystems and threaten to pull down our one shared biosphere. Earth has lost 80% of her old-growth forests, 50% of her soil, 90% of the big fish – and many water, land, and ocean ecosystems, as well as atmospheric stability , as human population has soared more than sevenfold. The human family is living far beyond its means, devouring natural capital principal and ravaging its own ecosystem habitats, which can only end in ecological, social and economic collapse . Earth's carrying capacity has been exceeded, and we must equitably and justly bring down human population and consumption inequity or else

face global ecosystem collapse. We can start the necessary social change or an angry Earth will sort it out herself by killing billions; as we possibly pull down the biosphere with us, ending most or even all life, during a prolonged collapse. Earth is not designed for 7 billion people (and growing), some of them destroying ecosystems globally as they live in opulence, others more locally through their grinding poverty and need to survive. Overpopulated, inequitable, unjust human industrial growth ravages

ecosystems; destroying all that is natural, indigenous and good, heralding a brief era of opulence for some and abject misery for many, before collapsing the biosphere and causing the end of being for all . Together the human family must

find a way to first limit and then reduce human population to avoid collapsing the biosphere. Infinite economic growth in a finite world is impossible; either we embrace a steady state economy together, or we die . Solutions to overpopulation – to ensure humanity’s cumulative consumption remains within Earth's carrying capacity – include more equity (fewer extremes, basic needs met, hard work rewarded, without communism or authoritarian regimes), educating all girls, free birth control, and lower taxes and more social benefits for families with one to two children. Ensuring every girl in the world is educated and empowered to make her own life decisions, especially about fertility, is the key. Those who cling to ancient superstitions or contemporary greed to resist these policies must be ridiculed and ignored or overthrown. There are many other common sense ways to keep population in balance with ecosystems. Some obvious and essential global ecological solutions include agroecology, ending fossil fuel dependence, protecting and restoring ecosystems including ending old-growth forest logging, and an embrace of ecology, truth, justice, wisdom, and love as the meaning of

life. The human animal is fundamentally an ecological being – as with all organic life, part of and springing from natural ecosystems. Without natural ecosystems and a healthy atmosphere, there is nothing. Tragically, centuries of advancement in human rights and welfare are at risk as climate and ecosystem collapse are being misdiagnosed and met with authoritarianism rather than ecologically based

policies. The global ecological system upon which all life depends is being systematically dismantled in the name of "development". Whatever became of aspirations for real human advancement in justice, rights and duties, truth, equity, love and peace? Instead most postmodern humanity seems only to want more stuff, self-aggrandizement, and comfort at any price including our

shared future. Now is the time for moral and political courage as together we stop and reverse abrupt climate change, ecosystem collapse, and rising tyranny – by rationally and logically using humanity’s accumulated wisdom and knowledge to craft and implement together the required social change for global ecological sustainability. Again, to survive and

achieve universal well-being, humanity must choose ecology – by leaving fossil fuels in the ground, protecting and restoring natural

ecosystems, embracing organic permaculture, and reducing our own numbers equitably and justly – or, it cannot be said enough, we face ecological collapse and the end of being. There is no other way. The challenge of the present and perhaps all time left to us is to remain free. Together, as one human family, we must embrace our duty to protect nature, end fossil fuels, reduce human numbers,

and share with other people and kindred species. There is nothing normal about being well adjusted and silent as ecosystems and climate collapse globally, threatening the imminent death of us all . Living in such a manner

can no longer be tolerated as acceptable. As global ecosystems and society collapse, chances for future survival and

well-being depend critically upon holding onto our shared humanity as together we restore ecosystems, care for each other and all

life, and find new ways to live well sustainabl y.

NC Tricks

Dedev NBPassivity kills the economy, but that’s good—growth is unsustainable and immediate collapse can avert extinction from ecological destruction and warming Barry 14

Dr. Glen Barry (President and Founder of Ecological Internet; Ph.D., Land Resources, Univ. Wisconsin-Madison). “Earth In Overshoot; Human Growth Is Killing Her.” 18 May 2014, http://www.countercurrents.org/barry180514.htm

The global eco logical system is collapsing and dying under the cumulative filth of 7 billion people INEQUITABLY devouring their ecosystem habitats. It is impossible to avoid global ecosystem collapse if humanity continues to breed like bunnies; tolerates exorbitant inequality, abject poverty and conspicuous overconsumption;

and destroys the ecosystems and climate that – rich or poor – are habitat for all of us. As I have written previously and will write again, the human family either comes together to address converging ecology, rights, and injustice crises – largely brought on by inequitable

overpopulation – or faces global ecological collapse and the end of being. It is not possible to go from 1 to 7 billion people in 135 years – while still growing exponentially – without profound impacts upon natural ecosystems that provide air, water, food and livelihoods. If you don’t understand this, you are uneducated, dumb, and/or indoctrinated; you need to study ecology and get

out and see the world. Or go and look at an overgrazed cow pasture and extrapolate. Merging climate , food, water , ocean , soil , justice, poverty, and old-growth forest crises – all which are to some degree caused by inequitable overpopulation – are destroying ecosystems and threaten to pull down our one shared biosphere. Earth has lost 80% of her old-growth forests, 50% of her soil, 90% of the big fish – and many water, land, and ocean ecosystems, as well as atmospheric stability , as human population has soared more than sevenfold. The human family is living far beyond its means, devouring natural capital principal and ravaging its own ecosystem habitats, which can only end in ecological, social and economic collapse . Earth's carrying capacity has been exceeded, and we must equitably and justly bring down human population and consumption inequity or else

face global ecosystem collapse. We can start the necessary social change or an angry Earth will sort it out herself by killing billions; as we possibly pull down the biosphere with us, ending most or even all life, during a prolonged collapse. Earth is not designed for 7 billion people (and growing), some of them destroying ecosystems globally as they live in opulence, others more locally through their grinding poverty and need to survive. Overpopulated, inequitable, unjust human industrial growth ravages

ecosystems; destroying all that is natural, indigenous and good, heralding a brief era of opulence for some and abject misery for many, before collapsing the biosphere and causing the end of being for all . Together the human family must

find a way to first limit and then reduce human population to avoid collapsing the biosphere. Infinite economic growth in a finite world is impossible; either we embrace a steady state economy together, or we die . Solutions to overpopulation – to ensure humanity’s cumulative consumption remains within Earth's carrying capacity – include more equity (fewer extremes, basic needs met, hard work rewarded, without communism or authoritarian regimes), educating all girls, free birth control, and lower taxes and more social benefits for families with one to two children. Ensuring every girl in the world is educated and empowered to make her own life decisions, especially about fertility, is the key. Those who cling to ancient superstitions or contemporary greed to resist these policies must be ridiculed and ignored or overthrown. There are many other common sense ways to keep population in balance with ecosystems. Some obvious and essential global ecological solutions include agroecology, ending fossil fuel dependence, protecting and restoring ecosystems including ending old-growth forest logging, and an embrace of ecology, truth, justice, wisdom, and love as the meaning of

life. The human animal is fundamentally an ecological being – as with all organic life, part of and springing from natural ecosystems. Without natural ecosystems and a healthy atmosphere, there is nothing. Tragically, centuries of advancement in human rights and welfare are at risk as climate and ecosystem collapse are being misdiagnosed and met with authoritarianism rather than ecologically based

policies. The global ecological system upon which all life depends is being systematically dismantled in the name of "development". Whatever became of aspirations for real human advancement in justice, rights and duties, truth, equity, love and peace? Instead most postmodern humanity seems only to want more stuff, self-aggrandizement, and comfort at any price including our

shared future. Now is the time for moral and political courage as together we stop and reverse abrupt climate change, ecosystem collapse, and rising tyranny – by rationally and logically using humanity’s accumulated wisdom and knowledge

to craft and implement together the required social change for global ecological sustainability. Again, to survive and

achieve universal well-being, humanity must choose ecology – by leaving fossil fuels in the ground, protecting and restoring natural

ecosystems, embracing organic permaculture, and reducing our own numbers equitably and justly – or, it cannot be said enough, we face ecological collapse and the end of being. There is no other way. The challenge of the present and perhaps all time left to us is to remain free. Together, as one human family, we must embrace our duty to protect nature, end fossil fuels, reduce human numbers,

and share with other people and kindred species. There is nothing normal about being well adjusted and silent as ecosystems and climate collapse globally, threatening the imminent death of us all . Living in such a manner

can no longer be tolerated as acceptable. As global ecosystems and society collapse, chances for future survival and

well-being depend critically upon holding onto our shared humanity as together we restore ecosystems, care for each other and all

life, and find new ways to live well sustainabl y.

CapitalismConsumption, not production, is the heart of capitalism—postmodern capitalism is a system of circulating symbols, not commodities. The production of desire is the root of capitalist alienation.Robinson 12











Economy / GrowthEconomic rationality imposes a violent calculative logic on an irrational world—makes violence and collapse inevitable.Bifo 11

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future pp. 110-114 (of my copy), dml

The fantastic collapse that has shaken the global economy since September 2008 has opened a new phase in the history of the world. After some months of amazement and confusion, media, political institutions and economists have started to repeat the self-reassuring mantra: recovery is coming soon. I do not know what will happen next, but I think that the word recovery means very little in the current situation. What is sure, in my opinion, is that the workers will not recover if neoliberal ideology is not abandoned, and if the myth of growth is not substituted with a new kind of narration. Unemployment is rising everywhere and salaries are falling. And the huge debt accumulated for the rescue of the banks is weighing upon the future of society. More than ever, economic rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic science is not part of the solution to the crisis: it is the source of the problem. On July 18th 2009 the

headline of The Economist read: “What went wrong with economics?” The text is an attempt to downplay the crisis of the Economics profession, and of economic knowledge. For neoliberal economists the central dogma of growth, profit and competition cannot be questioned, because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the market. And belief in the intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic theology of neoliberalism. But the reduction of social life to the rational exchange of economic values is an

obsession that has nothing to do with science. It’s a political strategy aimed to identify humans as calculating machines , aimed to shape behavior and perception in such a way that money becomes the only motivation of social action. But it is not accurate as a description of social dynamics, and the conflicts,

pathologies, and irrationality of human relationships. Rather, it is an attempt at creating the anthropological brand of homo

calculans that Foucault (2008) has described in his seminar of 1979/80, published with the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This attempt to identify human beings with calculating devices has produced cultural devastation, and has finally been showed to have been based upon flawed assumptions. Human beings do calculate, but their calculation is not perfectly rational, because the value of goods is not determined by objective reasons , and because

decisions are influenced by what Keynes named animal spirits. “We will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature,” say Akerlof and Shiller (2009: 1) in their book Animal Spirits, echoing Keynes’s assumption that the rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and Shiller are

avowing the crisis of neoliberal thought, but their critique is behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. At best, economics is a neurosis of money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in abeyance…. Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology – inflation, depression, lows and highs, slumps and peaks,

investments and losses. (Sordello 1983) From the age of the enclosures in England the economic process has been a process of

production of scarcity (scarcification). The enclosures were intended to scarcify the land, and the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to cultivate food for their family were forced to become proletarians, then salaried industrial workers. Capitalism is based on the artificial creation of need, and economic science is essentially a technique of scarcification of time, life and food. In side the condition of scarcity human beings are subjected to exploitation and to the domain of profit-oriented activity . After scarcifying the

land (enclosures) capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing people who don’t have property other than their own

life and body, to lend their life-time to capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is making scarce both water and air. Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of producing , implementing, and pushing scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak of economy, but of political

economy. The technique of economic scarcification is based on a mythology, a narration that identifies richness as property and acquisition, and subjugates the possibility of living to the lending of time and to the transformation of human activity into salaried work. In recent decades, technological change has slowly eroded the very

foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material objects to the semiocapitalist production of immaterial goods, the Economic concepts are losing their foundation and legitimacy. The basic categories of Economics are becoming totally artificial. The theoretical justification of private property, as you read in the writings of John Locke, is based on the need of exclusive consumption. An apple must be privatized, if you want to avoid the danger that

someone else eats your apple. But what happens when goods are immaterial, infinitely replicable without cost? Thanks to

digitalization and immaterialization of the production process, the economic nomos of private property loses its ground, its

raison d’etre, and it can be imposed only by force. Furthermore, the very foundation of salary, the relationship between time needed for production and value of the product, is vanishing. The immaterialization and cognitivization

of production makes it almost impossible to quantify the average time needed to produce value. Time and value become incommensurable, and violence becomes the only law able to determine price and salary. The neoliberal school, which has opened the way to the worldwide deregulation of social production, has fostered the mythology of

rational expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a selfregulation of the market, first of all the labor-market. But self-regulation is a lie. In order to increase exploitation, and to destroy social welfare, global capitalism has used political institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, not to mention the military enforcement of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being self-regulated, the market is militarily regulated. The mythology of free individuals loyally competing on the base of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie, too. Real human beings are not perfect rational calculating machines. And the myth of rational expectations has finally crashed after the explosion of the real estate mortgage bubble. The theory of rational expectation is crucial in neoliberal thought: the economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational way the best deal in selling and buying. The fraud perpetrated by the investment agencies has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical swindle.

Economic exchange cannot be described as a rational game, because irrational factors play a crucial role in social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulation are not exceptions, but the professional tools of

advertisers, financial agents, and economic consultants. The idea that social relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it is not science, and it has nothing to do with natural law. Notwithstanding the failure of the theory, neoliberal politics are still in control of the global machine, because the criminal class that has seized power has no intention of stepping down, and because the social brain is unable to recompose and find the way of self-organization. I read in the New York Times on September 6th 2009: After the mortgage

business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they

may have found one. The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds of thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return, though if people live longer than expected investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Imagine that I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would absolutely not do). My insurer of course will wish me a long life, so I’ll pay the fee for a long time, while he should pay lots of money to my family if I die. But some enlightened finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the insurer. He buys the risk, and he invests on the hope that I die soon. You don’t need the imagination of

Philip K. Dick to guess the follow up of the story: financial agents will be motivated to kill me overnight. The talk of recovery is based on necronomy, the economy of death. It’s not new, as capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughters and genocides. But now the equation becomes unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is the investment and the hope. Death is the best future that capitalism may secure. The logic of speculation is different from the logic of spectacle that was dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror of

spectacular accumulation. Speculation is the subjugation of the future to its financial mirror, the substitution of present life with future money that will never come, because death will come before. The lesson that we must

learn from the first year of the global recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going away, the financial plungers will not

stop their speculation, and corporations will not stop their exploitation, and the political class, largely

controlled by the corporate lobbies, is unwilling or unable to protect society from the final assault. In 1996 J. G. Ballard

(1996: 188) wrote: “the most perfect crime of all – when the victims are either willing, or aren’t aware that they are victims”. Democracy seems unable to stop the criminal class that has seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism. The economy has been declared the basic standard of decision, and the economists have systematically identified Economy with the capitalist obsession of growth. No room for political choice has been left, as the corporate principles have been embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.

MarxismIgnore the proletariat and class divisions—categories of “labor” and “production” shut off desire and buy into the system’s construction of workers—struggle not against the boss, but against being enclosed as labor!Robinson 12

Andrew Robinson (Political Theorist, Activist; Writer @ Ceasefire Magazine). “Jean Baudrillard: Marx and Alienation – Draft 2.” Ceasefire Magazine, 20 April 2012, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-4 //dtac

In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard offers a challenging critique of Marxism which radicalises certain of its theories while criticising others.

Baudrillard criticises Marxism for ignoring the underlying level at which people are constructed as workers. He argues that categories of “labour” and “production” actually capture and repress desire,

particularly when applied to non-capitalist societies. They produce a framework of scarcity , counterposed to symbolic exchange. It then reads capitalist dynamics back into earlier social forms, including indigenous social forms. This ignores the ways in which

indigenous cosmologies provide an outer perspective on western culture. This outer perspective is more radical

than inner critiques. Inst ead of a primary dispute between workers and bosses about the exploitation of labour-

power, Baudrillard sees a primary divide between conformity inside the system, by those interpellated as labour-

power, and subversion by those outside. These exclusionary boundaries are structured primarily around the exclusion of symbolic exchange and symbolic power. The proletariat does not escape capitalist power because it is within production. The truly radical class struggle is the struggle against being enclosed as labour. Similarly, instead of the economy being the last instance, Baudrillard insists that separation and alienation are the

last instance. The (orthodox) Marxist emphasis on the economy is ideological. It covers-up the operation of the system as a totality. Use-value, for instance, is an effect of exchange-value. It cannot be accorded independence as a category.

In fact, capitalism does not unleash most people’s creative forces at all – only a few people are encouraged to develop their capabilities.

Rather, it depends above all on conformity. Production counterposes itself to desire. It is reproduced, as a code, in an ‘in-depth imperialism’ in everyday life. Capitalism can extract creative power only if it is incorporated as production. Ultimately, this process if self-destructive. The suppression of symbolic exchange means that production cannot obtain the

meaning it is directed towards. Capitalism is unable to produce real commitment or participation. In this work, Baudrillard calls for a radical struggle against capitalism, on an immanent level. This struggle should focus itself at the point of exclusion. It should be a

struggle against enclosure, against redefinition of oneself as labour-power. Baudrillard expands his

transformation of Marxism in his later work, particularly his discussion of workers and symbolic exchange. Baudrillard claims that workers have always been primarily excluded, incarcerated and excommunicated by the system – not exploited. Class struggle has always been a struggle against being treated as subhuman or relegated to a marked term. The core of capitalism is not exploitation but the code of normality. This account is based on a political history of labour. Baudrillard traces the

origins of the working-class in historical forms of slavery. He argues that the first workers were prisoners-of-war who were

conserved or spared so as to be put to work. He concludes from this that labour is really a deferred death. This deferred death separates the economic order from the symbolic order. It removes the slave from the symbolic order by removing death. This means that we are all hostages of power. It also means we can’t destroy power without removing the deferral of death. Today this hostage status comes from the compulsion to be social and communicative – to manage one’s desire, capital, health and so on. To fail to do so is taken to be self-destruction. This extends to a demand that one reveal one’s secret (even if one has none) – for instance in polls and statistics. The command to communicate leads to a compulsory extraversion of all interiority. (This puts a whole different spin on the spread of CCTV, the niqab ban, anti-masking laws and so on). Baudrillard speaks of a society of forced confessions, compulsory statements of truth, obliged revelations – but in a context where there is

nothing to reveal. Capital ‘gives’ labour as a gift (think of the idea of ‘job creation’). The worker, in return, ‘gives’ capital

to the capitalist. Wages ‘symbolically buy back’ domination. This relation replaces the original reversibility of symbolic

exchange with a dialectic. It is this slide from the symbolic into the economic which allows concentrated power to exist. Otherwise it would be instantly cancelled out by reverse, reciprocal gestures.

Resistance / ReformLiberation is impossible—groups are re-encoded as alibis for power—resistance merely simulates liberation, ultimately reifying the system.Robinson 12


Similarly, groups supposedly liberated – such as women, black people, and young people – are denied the effects of liberation by

being re-encoded in terms of myths. Once labelled as irresponsible, people’s liberation is attached to a coded meaning which demands and bars responsibility and social power. Real liberation is avoided by giving people an image of themselves to consume – women are given the image of Woman , the young an image of Youth, technological change

by Technology (gadgets), and so on. Liberation is thus nullified, and re-encoded as a role and as narcissism. Concrete gains for liberation movements are side-effects of this immense strategic operation to disempower oppressed groups through their reduction to a function or role. We are drip-fed little bits of democracy and progress to ensure the system’s survival. They operate as its alibis. Even if income equality is encouraged, the system can survive by moving inequality elsewhere, to status, style, power and so on. At this point in his work, Baudrillard still believes in desire, happiness, the real, history and so on. He sees them as alienated in the system’s insistence on artificial, simulated and

quantitative versions of them. The system only knows about its own survival. It doesn’t understand the social or individual forces which operate inside it. Hence, changing its contents never changes how it works. The system tries to conjure away the real and history with signs representing them – replacing them with the truer than true and so on.

Simulations are objects which offer many signs of being real, when in fact they are not.

Impacts

Top—AlienationAlienation divorces the self from the body, subjecting the latter to hostile discipline—this sets the stage for symbolic capitalism, breeds the micro-fascist desire for purification, and nullifies value to life.Robinson 12


Alienation impacts especially on how we relate to our bodies. The body in capitalism is both capital and fetish, object of investment and consumption. Its many uses include fashion, adverts, mass culture, discourses of hygiene, diet and

therapy, cults of youth and femininity, and sacrificial practices such as slimming. It is exploited in a managed narcissism, perfected externally so as to exploit it to produce social ly valued signs – to appear as happy, healthy, young,

spontaneous, beautiful and so on. The various uses of the body are replaced by a single signifying function. Appearances such as

fitness are deemed near-necessities in environments such as management. They express hostility to the body, seen as a menacing object which needs to be watched over by the self. The body is turned into a package , like

clothes, and consumed like an object. One’s relationship to it thus becomes neurotic and repressive. The body is socially encoded so as to meet normative demands to produce and consume. This is even more

alienating that the use of the body as source of labour-power. It is only after the body is reinvested in this way that the demand for objects as signs occurs. People will only pursue objects as signs once their body is seen as an object. Similarly, sexuality is turned into an instrumental code of signs instead of individual desires. Especially in downturn periods, sexuality becomes frenetic but anxious. The profound contradictions of sexual problems and desires are covered-up. External censorship is replaced with an internalised censorship prohibiting liberation. A private, narcissistic, personalised sexuality protects the status quo from the

effects of sexual liberation. Sex is everywhere but in the sex-act itself. It is overwhelmed by signs. There is also a new kind of imaginary

“subject” or self generated by consumerism. Consumer society portrays all its objects for sale as carefully formulated for an impersonal “you” to whom they are addressed. It is a kind of myth which presents consumption as common sense, consuming the spectacle of consumption itself. Without the myth of consumption, it would not exist as an integrative social function. It would simply be a set of differentiated needs and desires. The word

‘consumption’ actually expresses a restructuring of social ideology. It is not in fact a victory of objects, or of earthly pleasures. Rather, it is a set of reified social and productive relations and forces. In this world, revolutions are replaced by fashion cycles. Even the retraining of workers is little more than a fashion cycle. It’s a way of imposing “low-intensity” constraints and a threat of exclusion so as to ensure conformity. Baudrillard is highly critical of the view that consumerism

amounts to liberation. It is true that certain older regimes of authoritarianism have decayed. But the new regime is also a system of control. Repression persists, but it moves sideways. The image of a sterile , hygienic body and fear of contamination establishes an inner control which removes desire from the body. The ranking of bodies in terms

of status leads to a re-racialisation. Puritanism becomes mixed-up with hedonism in this ranking process. The body as locus of desire remains censored and silenced, even when it appears to undergo hedonistic release. Sexuality is

expressed in consumption so it can’t disrupt the status quo. What is now censored is the symbolic structure and the possibility of deep meaning. Living representations are turned into empty signs. Because of this change, the old resistances to repression no longer work.

VTLConsumer capitalism replaces individual value with hollow conformity and simulation—destroys value to life—only passivity solves.Robinson 12


Baudrillard also sees communication and sociality being corrupted into sign-values to be consumed. This occurs

through the consumption of ‘services’ based on sociability. The loss of genuine, spontaneous, reciprocal

human relations (which require a symbolic dimension) is covered up by the standardised production of signs of social warmth and participation. As with the smile of the salesman, receptionist or PR executive, or the “have a nice day” of McDonald’s, it simulates intimacy. These simulated signs are what now counts as abstract ‘interpersonal skills’. In practice, Baudrillard observes, such false sociality is shot through with the flaws of the mode of

production, including aggression and frustration. It turns into a n entire value-system dressed-up as functionality. It has a constant repressive effect, pacifying social relations. The act of conforming to a model is presented as narcissistic self-assertion through small signified differences. People think they are creating themselves when in fact they are consuming themselves, or their images. For example, femininity and masculinity are models which govern, rather than express, women and men. Baudrillard believes that such

models shape how people see each other, regardless of whether people actually conform to them. Similarly, sites such as holiday resorts are constructed as planned communities and total environments realising a particular ideal of abstract happiness. These sites replace distinct elements with homogeneous ones. People set up signs of happiness in the hope that happiness will alight on them. There is a ‘fun system’ of enforced enjoyment, which imposes a duty (not a right) to happiness and

denies any right not to be happy. Consumption is a morality, an institution and a system of values with functions of social integration and control. The anarchic consumer, free to consume or not, is a thing of the past. People are now pressured to consume in standard ways and even to seek out new experiences. Yet this pressure destroys enjoyment from the inside. Consumption is haunted by its inner puritanism, rendering it compulsive and limitless. It is both lived as an affirmative myth, and endured as a kind of social adaptation to a new collective regime. At the same time as socialising people, it atomises people into private consumption. Beauty products and the like often claim to be drawing out an inherent personality, or recovering one which has been lost. In fact they are products of the

industrial mass-production of systematic differences. These differences are derived from a model and are only artificially diversified. They mark conformity with the code, not individuality. Baudrillard writes of ‘monopoly concentration of the production of differences’. The system is based on abolishing real difference (and for instance nature) so as to usher in a process of

differentiation (and naturalisation, etc). Difference within the code is based on the smallest marginal difference, used as a sign of hierarchy. Excessive social contact due to urbanism leads to psychological pauperisation. People gain an increased need for objects as signifiers of differentiation. Consumption actually excludes the possibility of enjoyment. This is because consumption is always collective, at least indirectly, whereas enjoyment is personal. The disappearance of altruistic forms of integration leads to an expanded role for state repression.

Atomisation leads to bureaucratic control, disguised as freedom. Credit is used to condition people into capitalistic forms of action. The ‘people’ or consumers are glorified as long as they do not try to exercise their putative sovereignty on a political or social

stage, and instead stick to consuming. Consumer goods are experienced as miraculous, because their production is concealed. They seem as if they come from technology, progress or growth. In fact we have only the signs of affluence, coexisting with ever more impoverished social relations. Competition, generalised across social life as consumption as

well as production is ranked, leads to generalised fatigue. Such fatigue is really a resistance, akin to a slowdown

by workers or boredom in school. Such resistance, as the only resistance available, becomes habitual and ‘grows into’ people’s bodies. It is a partial revolt necessary to prevent total breakdown, which is also instantly available as a source of discontent in

crisis situations. The real social effect of the pursuit of system-promoted goals is an exhausting rat-race. The system of unstable, precarious employment creates generalised insecurity and generalised competition for status. The constant treadmill of work, retraining and status-competition leaves some on the scrapheap and others successful but exhausted.

But the ideology of consumption lulls people into believing that they are affluent, fulfilled, happy and liberated.

Alternative

Passivity—BifoThe alternative is to reject the affirmative and engage in radical passivity. This is a fatal strategy—disengagement exhausts the system; reform breathes life into the system which makes violence inevitable.Bifo 11



death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide . So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostage’s death for the terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial














many workers, haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the factories, threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the direction of death, murder, and suicide, towards a new kind of autonomy, social creativity and of life? I think that it is possible only if we start from exhaustion , if we emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and money could be deserted, and exhaustion could give way to a huge wave of withdrawal from the sphere of economic exchange. A new refrain could emerge in that moment, and wipe out the law of economic growth. The self-organization of the general intellect could abandon the law of accumulation and growth, and start a new concatenation, where collective intelligence is only subjected to the common good.

Answers

Cap Good(Extend Robinson impacts).

(Extend Dedev).

Capitalism creates a global war economy and destroys value to life. Robinson 14

(William I. Robinson, professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, “Global Capitalism Is In the Midst of Its Most Severe Crisis” 02 Jul 2014, KB)

However, and this is the key point I wish to highlight here, US intervention around the world clearly entered a qualitatively new period after September 11, 2001. This new period should be seen in the context of emergent 21st century global capitalism. Global capitalism is in the midst of its most severe crisis in close to a century, and

in many ways the current crisis is much worse than that of the 1930s because we are on the precipice of an ecological holocaust that threatens the very earth system and the ability to sustain life , ours included, because the means of violence and social control have never before been so concentrated within a single powerful state, and because the global means of communication is also extraordinarily concentrated in the hands of transnational capital and a few powerful states. On the other hand, global inequalities have never been as acute and grotesque as they are today. So, in simplified terms, we need to see the escalation of US interventionism and the untold suffering it brings about , including what you mention – the killing of unarmed civilians, the destruction of the environment, forced migration and displacement, undermining democracy – as a response by the US-led transnational state and the transnational capitalist class to contain the explosive contradictions of a global capitalist system that is out of control and in deep crisis. You ask me who is going to compensate for these losses. That will depend on how the world’s people respond. There is currently a global revolt from below underway , but it is spread unevenly across countries and has not taken any clear form or direction . Can the popular majority of humanity force the transnational capitalist class and the US/transnational state to be accountable for its crimes? Mao Zedong once said that “power flows through the barrel of a gun.” What he meant by this, in a more abstract than literal way, I believe, is that in the end it is the correlation of real forces that will determine outcomes. Because the United States has overwhelming and “full spectrum” military dominance, it can capture, execute, or bring to trial people anywhere around the world… it has “free license”, so to speak, to act as an international outlaw. We don’t even have to take the more recent examples. In December 1989 the United States undertook an illegal and criminal invasion of Panama, kidnapped Manuel Noriega – whether or not he was a dictator is not the point, as the United States puts in power and defends dictators that defend US and transnational elite interests, and brought him back to US territory for trial. What country in the world now has the naked power “flowing through the barrel of a gun” to invade the United States, capture George Bush, Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other war criminals, and bring them somewhere to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity? Q: In your writings, you’ve warned against the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the slant accumulation of the global wealth in the hands of an affluent few and the impoverishment of the suppressed majority. What do you think are the reasons for this stark inequality and the disturbing dispossession of millions of people in the capitalist societies? You wrote that the participants of the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos were worried that the current situation raises the specter of worldwide instability and

civil wars. Is it really so? A: We have never in the history of humanity seen such a sharp social polarization between the haves and the have-nots, such grotesque levels of inequality, within and among countries. There have been countless studies in recent years documenting the escalation of inequalities , among them, the current bestseller by

Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” The pattern we see is that the notorious “1 percent” monopolizes a huge portion of the wealth that humanity produces and transnational corporations and banks are registering record profits, but as well that some 20 percent of the population in each countries has integrated into the global economy as middle class

and affluent consumers while the remaining 80 percent has experienced rising levels of insecurity, impoverishment, and

precariousness, increasingly inhabit ing what some have called a “planet of slums.” The apologists of global capitalism point to the rise of a middle class in China to claim that the system is successful. But in China, 300-400 million people have entered the ranks of the global middle and consuming class while the other 800-900 million have faced downward mobility, immiseration, insecurity, unemployment and extreme levels of exploitation. Such is this exploitation that a couple years ago, you may remember, Foxcomm workers preferred to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of their factories than to remain in their labor camps. This is the Foxcomm

that makes your iPads and iPhones. The 80 percent is then subject to all sorts of sophisticated systems of social control and

repression. We are headed in this regard towards a global police state, organized by global elites and led by the US state, to contain the real or potential rebellion of a dispossessed majority. Such structures of inequality and

exploitation cannot be contained over time without both ideological and coercive apparatuses; conformity to a system of structural violence must be compelled through direct violence, organized by states and private security forces. Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which we are now living in a global social control state, a global panoptical surveillance state. George Orwell

wrote about such a state in his famous novel “1984.” The Orwellian society has arrived. Yet it is worse than Orwell imagined, because at least the members of Orwell’s society had their basic needs met in return for their obedience and conformity. How do we explain such stark inequality? Capitalism is a system that by its very internal dynamic generates wealth yet polarizes and concentrates that wealth. Historically a de-concentration of wealth through redistribution has come about

by state intervention to offset the natural tendency for capital accumulation to result in such polarization. States have turned to an array of redistributive mechanisms both because they have been pressured from below to do so – whether by trade unions, social movements, socialist struggles, or so on – or because states must do so in order to retain legitimacy and preserve at least enough social peace for the reproduction of the system. A great variety of redistributive models emerged in the 20th century around the world, and went by a great many names – socialism, communism, social democracy, New Deal, welfare states, developmental states, populism, the social wage, and so on. All these models shared two things in common. One was state intervention in the economy to regulate capital accumulation and thus to bring under some control the most anarchic and most destructive elements of unrestrained capitalism. The other was redistribution through numerous policies, ranging from minimum legal wages and unemployment insurance, to public enterprises, the social wages of public health, education, transportation, and housing, welfare programs, land reform in agrarian countries, low cost credit, and so on. But capital responded to the last major crisis of the system, that of the 1970s, by “going global,” by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation and undermining models of state regulation and redistribution. Neo-liberalism is a set of policies that facilitate the rise of

transnational capital. As transnational capital has broken free of the confine of the nation-state, the natural tendency for capitalism to concentrate wealth has been unleashed without any countervailing restraints. The result has been this dizzying escalation of worldwide inequalities as wealth concentrates within the transnational capitalist class and, to a much lesser extent, the better off strata of middle classes and professionals. There are other related factors that account for the intensification of worldwide inequalities. One is the defeat of the worldwide left in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which led the ruling groups to declare that global neo-liberal capitalism was “The End of History.” A second is the rise of a globally integrated financial system in which capital in its liquid, that is money, form can move frictionless across the planet with no controls whatsoever. Transnational finance capital has become the hegemonic fraction of capital on a global scale, and it engages in unfathomable levels of speculation, turning the global economy into one giant casino. Transnational finance capital has come to control the levers of the global economy, to get around and to undermine any effort at regulation, and to concentrate wealth in its liquid form in a way that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. A third factor

is the rise of a mass of surplus humanity. Hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions , have been made “superfluous”, thrown off the land or out of productive employment, replaced by machines and rising productivity, marginalized and relegated to migration and to trying to scratch by an existence in the “planet of slums.” In turn, this mass of humanity places those that are employed in a very vulnerable situation, drives down wage levels everywhere, facilitates the “flexibilization” and precarious nature of wage labor, and thereby further aggravating inequalities. Q: In one of your articles, you talked of an “ever-expanding military-prison-industrial-security-financial complex” that generates enormous profits through waging wars, selling weapons and then taking

part in reconstruction activities in the war-torn countries. How does this complex operate? Is it really reliant on waging wars? A: We cannot understand intensified militarization and the rise of this complex outside of the crisis of global capitalism. This crisis is structural, in the first instance. It is what we call a crisis of over-accumulation. The rise of the global economy driven by new technologies, especially computer, information, and communications technologies, but also by the revolution in transportation and containerization, by robotics, aerospace, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and more recently, by 3D printing,

among other aspects, has allowed the transnational capitalist class to restructure and reorganize the whole world economy, and to bring about a huge increase in productivity worldwide and an enormous expansion of the capacity of the global

economy to churn out goods and services. But extreme inequality and social polarization in the global system means that the global market cannot absorb the expanding output of the global economy. The result is a stagnation that is becoming chronic. The gap between what the global economy can produce and what the global market can absorb is growing and this leads to a crisis of overproduction : where and how to unload the surplus? How can transnational capital continue to accumulate and generate profits if this output is not unloaded, that is, profitably

marketed? Unloading the surplus through financial speculation , which has skyrocketed in recent years, only aggravates the solution , as we saw with the collapse of 20 08 . Now, if only 20 percent of humanity can consume in any significant quantity it is not very profitable to go into the business of mass, inexpensive public transportation, health and education, or the production of practical goods that the world’s population needs because very simply even if people need these things they do not have the income to purchase them. A global civilian economy geared to the basic needs of humanity is simply not profitable for the transnational capitalist class.

Look at it like this: the mass production and distribution of vaccines and other medications for communicable and

treatable diseases that affect masses of poor people around the world are simply not profitable and as a result we even have new pandemics of diseases – tuberculosis, measles, etc. – that previously were under control. Yet it is profitable for the global capitalist medical industry, including the giant pharmaceutical, biotechnology

and related branches to spend billions on developing plastic surgery and every imaginable treatment for the vanity of a small portion of humanity, or to develop incredibly expensive treatments for diseases that afflict the affluent. The lesson here is that capital will seek to accumulate where it is profitable, according to the

structure of the market and of income, which in turn is shaped by the balance of class and social power and what we call the relations of production and irrespective of rational use of resources and irrespective of human need. It is in this context that it becomes quite profitable to turn to wars, conflicts, systems of repression and social control to generate profit, to produce goods and systems that can repress that 80 percent of humanity that is not your consumer, not your customer so to say, because they do not have the purchasing power to sustain your drive to accumulate by producing goods and services for them that they

actually need. Global capitalism is a perverted and irrational system. Putting aside geo-political considerations, the surplus that the global economy has been and is producing but that cannot be absorbed by the world market, has been channeled into wars and conflicts that involve endless rounds of destruction and reconstruction, and new

systems of social control and repression, independent of geo-political considerations, that is, simply as a way of sustaining capital accumulation and profit making in the face of stagnation tendencies. The US invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan – although legitimated in the name of fighting “terrorism” – have generated hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts and profits for transnational capital. The prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes in the United States – and let us recall that the United States holds some 25-30 percent of the

world’s prisoners – is enormously profitable for private corporations that run almost all of the immigrant detention centers, some of the general prisons, supply everything from guards to food, build the installations, erect border walls, and so on. Let us recall that the US National Security Agency – and we now know from Edward Snowden just how vast are its operations – subcontracts out its activities to private corporations, as do the CIA, the Pentagon, and so on. Global security corporations are one of the fastest growing sectors of the global

economy and there are now more private security guards in the world than police officers. All of this is to say that we are now living in a global war economy, in which the threat of stagnation is offset in part by the militarization of global economy and society and the introduction and spread of systems of mass social control. Of course this involves all

kinds of cultural, ideological, and political dimensions as well. A global war economy based on a multitude of endless conflicts and the spread of social control systems, from full-scale wars to the repression of racial minorities and immigrants in the United States and Europe , must be ideologically legitimated. This is where bogus and farcical “wars on drugs and terrorism” come in, where enemies must be conjured up , in which populations must be led to believe they are threatened, and so on. So the US public must believe that Iran is a threat, that Putin is now the devil, and so on. One “threat” replaces another but the system needs to keep a population in permanent compliance through the manipulation of emotion and the

senses. This transition into a permanent global war economy has involved some shifts in the gravitational centers of capital accumulation, towards those global corporate conglomerates involved in the production of war materials, of security, of engineering (for example, Bechtel and Halliburton), and other activities that involve making profit out of conflict and control.

Remember by way of example that each drone that flies, each missile fired, each round of ammunition, each tank deployed, each soldier equipped and fed, each prison that is constructed, each surveillance system put into place, each border wall installed, and so on and so forth, is produced in factories and through production chains by global corporations whose supply, in turn, of raw materials, machinery and service inputs in turn come from other global corporations or local firms. So the whole global economy is kept running through violence and conflict. But the global war economy also involves the global financial institutions that are at the very heart of the global economy, together with the petroleum complex that is coming under much pressure from the environmental movement yet is showing all-time record profits in the past few years. This is a new transnational power bloc – this complex of corporate interests brought around a global war economy and global systems of repression and social control, together with elites and state managers brought into or representing the power bloc. Remember also that the polarization of the world population into 20 percent affluent and 80 percent immiserated generates new spatial social relations, so that the privileged occupy gated communities and those displaced by gentrification must be violently suppressed and carefully controlled, while surveillance systems and security guards must patrol and protect that 20 percent. All this and much more are part of the militarization and “securitization” of global society by the powers that be. We face new doctrines, ideologies and political discourse that legitimize the construction of a global police state – “fourth generation warfare,” “humanitarian intervention,” the “war on drugs,”

among others, and above all, the so-called “war on terror.” I say so-called because, the US state is the biggest perpetrator of terror in the world. It is not that Al-Qaida and other groups do not carry out condemnable violence against innocent civilians. They indeed do. But if we define terrorism as the use of violence against civilians for political objectives, then the US state is the world’s leading terrorist. The powers that be in global society and that control the global political discourse attach the label “terrorist” to violence that they do not approve of, and they attach the label of “freedom and democracy and security” to violence that they do approve of, or that they commit themselves. Moreover, increasingly “terrorism” is used to simply describe political dissent, so that legitimate social movements and political struggles against global capitalism become labeled as “terrorism” in order to justify their suppression.

Cap Good—AsteroidsNo asteroids impact Everitt ‘8 [James Everitt, energy and environment organizer for Pickens Plan; “If an asteroid hit the earth?” published 12/20/2008; http://push.pickensplan.com/video/2187034:Video:1691581]

A computer video circulating the internet has rekindled fears that an asteroid will hit Earth and send mankind the way of the brontosaurus.

Based on NASA projections, there is indeed a chance that such an asteroid will impact Eart h in the next year.

It is 1 in 2,518,072 This number is derived from NASA calculations of the likelihood of a strike by any one of the six substantial Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) whose current course could intersect our planet's in 2009. The most likely of the

bunch, an NEO named 2008 AO112, alone has a 1 in 4,000,000 chance of impacting Earth. In other words, there's a 99 .999975 % chance the thing will miss us . By comparison, in the new year, based on recent National Safety Council data, chances are less that you will be killed by an asteroid than by the following: Motor vehicle accident : 1 in 6,539 Exposure to

noxious substances: 1 in 12,554 Assault by firearm: 1 in 24,005 Accidental drowning: 1 in 82,777 Exposure to smoke, fire or flames: 1 in

92,745 Exposure to forces of nature (lightning, flood, storms, etc.): 1 in 136,075 Falling out of bed or off other furniture: 1 in

329,819 Choking on food : 1 in 343,179 Air and space transport accidents: 1 in 502,554 Exposure to electric current, radiation,

temperature, and pressure: 1 in 705,969 Being bitten , stung or crushed by another person or animal : 1 in 1,841,659

Chances You'll Be Killed by an Asteroid in 2009! Conclusion: It would be statistically unwise to sell your home (your chances of

selling it aside) and use the proceeds for a pre-asteroid splurge in the tropics. Alternatively, if you are considering fleeing Earth, you are more likely to die by spacecraft accident than by asteroid. And if you do so anyway, given the chance of being bitten, stung or crushed by another person or animal, your chances are even worse if you bring company.

http://www.nsc.org/research/odds.aspx

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/27/watch-if-an-asteroid-hit_n_153724.html

http://push.pickensplan.com/video/2187034:Video:1691581

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk

Cap Good—DiseaseThe logic of capital is what allows exclusionary medicine – even if they win capitalism betters the pharmaceutical industry the only people who benefit from those advancements are the rich

No impact to disease – they either burn out or don’t spreadPosner 05 (Richard A, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Winter. “Catastrophe: the dozen most significant catastrophic risks and what we can do about them.” http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmske/is_3_11/ai_n29167514/pg_2?tag=content;col1)

Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its

existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been enormously destructive plagues,

such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race . There is

a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly . The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger

that AIDS will destroy the entire human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of

the human race is probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease.

The reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a lust time.

Cap Good—Space ColOnly rich get to go – poor people would become slaves to build the future for the wealthy

Disease would take us out – bones lose mass, muscles atrophy, blood production decreases, and latent viruses reactive and spread – that’ Matin and Lynch

Colonization's impossible Stross 7 (Charlie, "The High Frontier, Redux," http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html)

I'm going to take it as read that the idea of space colonization isn't unfamiliar; domed cities on Mars, orbiting cylindrical space habitats a la J. D. Bernal or Gerard K. O'Neill, that sort of thing. Generation ships that take hundreds of years to ferry colonists out to other star systems where — as we are now discovering — there are profusions of planets to explore. And I don't want to spend much time talking about the unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other

than to point out that they're there, that the case for space colonization isn't usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one. " We can't afford to keep all our eggs in one basket" isn't so much a justification as an appeal to sentimentality , for in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The

future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead : strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern . Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of

indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive. Here's a handy metaphor: let's approximate one astronomical unit — the distance between the

Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon — to one centimetre . Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.) The solar system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or 30 centimetres — one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old money). We've sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch — only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has made it out there so far. Its journey time was 12 years, and it wasn't stopping. (It's now on its way out into interstellar space, having passed the heliopause some years ago.) The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets. Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius — its outer edge lies half a kilometre away. Got that? Our planetary solar system is 30 centimetres, roughly a foot, in radius. But to get to the edge of the Oort cloud, you have to go half a kilometre, roughly a third of a mile. Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. (There might be a brown dwarf or two lurking unseen in the icy depths beyond the Oort cloud, but if we've spotted one, I'm unaware of it.) Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away.A light year is 63.2 x 103 AU, or 9.46 x 1012 Km. So Proxima Centauri, at 267,000 AU, is just under two and a third kilometres, or two miles (in old money) away from us. But Proxima Centauri is a poor choice, if we're looking for habitable real estate. While exoplanets are apparently common as muck, terrestrial planets are harder to find; Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a pretty weird one, at that), is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our

metaphor, about ten miles. Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2- 5 years to travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of ten miles . That's the first point I want to get across: that if the distances involved in interplanetary travel are enormous, and the travel times fit to rival the first Australian settlers, then the distances and times

involved in interstellar travel are mind-numbing. This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand . And in the

absence of (c) you're not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if ( a) is achievable , or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there,

they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances ( except insofar as sending them out costs us money). What do I mean by outrageous amounts of cheap energy? Let's postulate that in the future, it will be possible to wave a magic wand and construct a camping kit that encapsulates all the necessary technologies and information to rebuild a human civilization capable of eventually sending out interstellar colonization missions — a bunch of self-replicating, self-repairing robotic hardware, and a downloadable copy of the sum total of human knowledge to date. Let's also be generous and throw in a closed-circuit life support system capable of keeping a human occupant alive indefinitely, for many years at a stretch, with zero failures and losses, and capable where necessary of providing medical intervention. Let's throw in a willing astronaut (the fool!) and stick them inside this assembly. It's going to be pretty boring in there, but I think we can conceive of our minimal manned interstellar mission as being about the size and mass of a Mercury capsule. And I'm going to nail a target to the barn door and call it 2000kg in total. (Of course we can cut corners, but I've already invoked self-replicating robotic factories and closed-cycle life support systems, and those are close enough to magic wands as it is. I'm going to deliberately ignore more speculative technologies such as

starwisps, mind transfer, or AIs sufficiently powerful to operate autonomously — although I used them shamelessly in my novel Accelerando. What I'm trying to do here is come up with a useful metaphor for the energy budget realistically required for interstellar flight.) Incidentally, a probe massing 1-2 tons with an astronaut on top is a bit implausible, but a 1-2 ton probe could conceivably carry enough robotic instrumentation to do useful research, plus a laser powerful enough to punch a signal home, and maybe even that shrink-wrapped military/industrial complex in a tin can that would allow it to build something useful at the other end. Anything much smaller, though, isn't going to be able to transmit its findings to us — at least, not without some breakthroughs in communication technology that haven't shown up so far. Now, let's say we want to deliver our canned monkey to Proxima Centauri within its own lifetime. We're sending them on a one-way trip, so a 42 year flight time isn't unreasonable. (Their job is to supervise the machinery as it unpacks itself and begins to brew up a bunch of new colonists using an artificial uterus. Okay?) This means they need to achieve a mean cruise speed of 10% of the speed of light. They then need to decelerate at the other end. At 10% of c relativistic effects are minor — there's going to be time dilation, but it'll be on the order of hours or days over the duration of the 42-year voyage. So we need to accelerate our astronaut to 30,000,000 metres per second, and decelerate them at the other end. Cheating and using Newton's laws of motion, the kinetic energy acquired by acceleration is 9 x 1017 Joules, so we can call it 2 x 1018 Joules in round numbers for the entire trip. NB: This assumes that the propulsion system in use is 100% efficient at converting energy into momentum, that there are no losses from friction with the interstellar medium, and that the propulsion source is external — that is, there's no need to take reaction mass along en route. So this is a lower bound on the energy cost of transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri in less than a lifetime. To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force. For a less explosive reference point, our entire planetary economy runs on roughly 4

terawatts of electricity (4 x 1012 watts). So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a million seconds —

roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-voom . But to bring this back to earth with a bump, let me just remind you that this probe is so implausibly efficient that it's veering back into "magic wand" territory. I've tap-danced past a 100% efficient power transmission system capable of operating across interstellar distances with pinpoint precision and no conversion losses, and that allows the spacecraft on the receiving end to convert power directly into momentum. This is not exactly like any power transmission system that anyone's built to this date, and I'm not sure I can see where it's coming from. Our one astronaut, 10% of c mission approximates well to an unmanned flight, but what about longer-term

expeditions? Generation ships are a staple of SF; they're slow (probably under 1% of c) and they carry a self-sufficient city-state. The crew who set off won't live to see their destination ( the flight time to Proxima Centauri at 1% of c is about 420 years), but the vague hope is that someone will. Leaving aside our lack of a proven track record at building social institutions that are stable across time periods greatly in excess of a human lifespan, using a generation ship

probably doesn't do much for our energy budget problem either. A society of human beings are likely to need more space and raw material to do stuff with while in flight; sticking a solitary explorer in a tin can for forty-something years is merely cruel and unusual, but doing it to an entire city for several centuries probably qualifies as a crime against humanity. We therefore need to relax the mass constraint. Assuming the same super-efficient life support as our solitary explorer, we might postulate that each colonist requires ten tons of structural mass to move around in. (About the same as a large trailer home. For life.) We've cut the peak velocity by an order of magnitude, but we've increased the payload requirement by an order of magnitude per passenger — and we need enough passengers to make a stable society fly. I'd guess a sensible lower number would be on the order of 200 people, the size of a prehistoric primate troupe. (Genetic diversity? I'm going to assume we can hand-wave around that by packing some deep-frozen sperm and ova, or frozen embryos, for later reuse.) By the time we work up to a minimal generation ship (and how minimal can we get, confining 200 human beings in an object weighing aout 2000 tons, for roughly the same period of time that has elapsed since the Plymouth colony landed in what was later to become Massachusetts?) we're actually requiring much more energy than our solitary high-speed

explorer. And remember, this is only what it takes to go to Proxima Centauri our nearest neighbour. Gliese 581c is five times as far

away. Planets that are already habitable insofar as they orbit inside the habitable zone of their star, possess free oxygen in their atmosphere, and have a mass, surface gravity and escape velocity that are not too forbidding, are likely to be somewhat rarer . ( And if there is free oxygen in the atmosphere on a planet, that implies something else — the presence of pre-existing photosynthetic life, a carbon cycle, and a bunch of other stuff that could well unleash a big can of whoop-ass on an unprimed human immune system. The question of how we might interact with alien biologies is an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than the question of how we

might get there — and the preliminary outlook is rather forbidding.) The long and the short of what I'm trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic — magic tech that, furthermore, does things that from today's perspective appear

to play fast and loose with the laws of physics — interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter . And while I won't rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil. What about our own solar system? After contemplating the vastness of interstellar space, our own solar system looks almost

comfortingly accessible at first. Exploring our own solar system is a no-brainer : we can do it, we are doing it, and interplanetary

exploration is probably going to be seen as one of the great scientific undertakings of the late 20th and early 21st century, when the history books get written. But when we start examining the prospects for interplanetary colonization things turn gloomy again. Bluntly,

we're not going to get there by rocket ship. Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air

fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to

climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound all that serious — it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and recycle the washing-up water — the amount of parasitic weight you need to keep the monkey from blowing out is measured in tons . A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which, some would say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years — take heed of the pre-breathe time requirements!) weighs 112 kilograms, which pretty much puts a floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a whole lot more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to New Zealand — and I think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the

authors of the article I cited thought $2000/kg was a bit more reasonable. Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ... The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a

high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps. When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as " Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We

just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy — our robots are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there. Actually, there probably is a good reason for sending human explorers to Mars. And that's the distance: at up to 30 minutes, the speed of light delay means that remote control of robots on the Martian surface is extremely tedious. Either we need autonomous roots that can be assigned tasks and carry them out without direct human supervision, or we need astronauts in orbit or on the ground to boss the robot work gangs around. On the other hand, Mars is a good way further away than the moon, and has a deeper gravity well. All of which drive up the cost per kilogram delivered to the Martian surface. Maybe FedEx could cut it as

low as $20,000 per kilogram, but I'm not holding my breath. Let me repeat myself: we are not going there with rockets . At least, not the conventional kind — and while there may be a role for nuclear propulsion in deep space, in general there's a trade-off between instantaneous thrust and efficiency; the more efficient your motor, the lower the actual thrust it provides. Some technologies such as the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket show a good degree of flexibility, but in general they're not suitable for getting us from Earth's surface into orbit — they're only useful for trucking things around from low earth orbit on out. Again, as with interstellar colonization, there are other options. Space elevators, if we build them, will invalidate a lot of what I just said. Some analyses of the energy costs of space elevators suggest that a marginal cost of $350/kilogram to geosynchronous orbit should be achievable without waving any magic wands (other than the enormous practical materials and structural engineering problems of building the thing in the first place). So we probably can look forward to zero-gee vacations in orbit, at a price. And space elevators are attractive because they're a scalable technology; you can use one to haul into space the material to build more. So, long term, space elevators may give us not-unreasonably priced access to space, including jaunts to the lunar surface for a price equivalent to less than

$100,000 in today's money. At which point, settlement would begin to look economically feasible, except ... We're human beings. We evolved to flourish in a very specific environment that covers perhaps 10% of our home planet's surface area. (Earth is 70% ocean, and while we can survive, with assistance, in extremely inhospitable terrain, be it arctic or desert or mountain, we aren't well-adapted to

thriving there.) Space itself is a very poor environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes. And that's not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult . And finally, there's the travel time . Two and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars. Now, these problems are subject to a variety of approaches — including medical ones: does it matter if cosmic radiation causes long-term cumulative radiation exposure leading to cancers if we have advanced side-effect-free cancer treatments? Better still, if hydrogen sulphide-induced hibernation turns out to be a practical technique in human beings, we may be able to sleep through

the trip. But even so, when you get down to it, there's not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them ( such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move our families there . Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all, there's no there there — just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid

water that will kill you within five minutes of exposure. And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we'll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay. And closer to home, the commercialization of space will be incremental and slow, driven by our increasing dependence on near-earth space for communications,

positioning, weather forecasting, and (still in its embryonic stages) tourism. But the domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do something about the climate, or reinvent a kind of human being who can thrive in an airless, inhospitable environment.

Multiple diseases destroy sustainability of life in spaceMatin and Lynch 5 (2005, A. C. Matin, PhD in Microbiology, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University in Stanford, California, and Susan V. Lynch, PhD, Molcular Microbiology, Assistant Professor In Residence, Division of Gastroenterology, UC San Francisco, “Investigating the Threat of Bacteria Grown in Space,” Volume 71, Number 5, 2005/ASM News, http://www.asm.org/asm/files/ccLibraryFiles/Filename/000000001523/znw00505000235.pdf )

Although tantalizing, space is an inhospitable and dangerous frontier for those sent to explore it. Hence, progress towards more safely navigating and perhaps colonizing space are tasks that demand that we develop knowledge on several fronts , from designing radically new means of space transport to determining how space

conditions influence biological processes. Several harmful effects of space on humans are documented . During extended

missions in space, for example, bones lose mass , predisposing space travelers not only to fracture their bones but also to develop renal stones from resorbed bone material. Moreover, muscles atrophy, decreased blood production and volume damage the cardiovascular system, latent viruses ( such as Varicella zoster, which

causes shingles) tend to reactivate , the incidence of diseases such as bacterial cystitis increases, wound healing slows, pharmacologic agents act differently, and pyschological conditions such as claustrophobia and anxiety tend to be accentuated , in part because of disrupted sleep and dietary patterns. Amid these physical and

psychological conditions, there is the added problem that astronauts in space are exposed to intense radiation , involving high-energy protons and nuclei of heavy elements with greater penetrating power and increased capacity to cause malignancies and other problems , than they would be on earth. Additionally, the diminished gravity of space and planets,

referred to as microgravity, also poses a direct threat to human health.

http://www.asm.org/asm/files/ccLibraryFiles/Filename/000000001523/znw00505000235.pdf

http://www.asm.org/asm/files/ccLibraryFiles/Filename/000000001523/znw00505000235.pdf

Cap InevitableInevitability debate:The alt is to do nothing and engage in radical passivity—the inevitability of capitalism is a trump, not a solvency problem—the point is that capitalism is so ubiquitous that instead of rejecting it, we must exhaust the system by dis-engaging and becoming radically passive—this is a solvency take-out for their impacts and proves engagement only reinforces the system.

And, if I win my ethics and value to life impacts, you pull the trigger because even if passivity is difficult in other instances, every chance matters and you vote neg.

Cap SustainableSustainability debate misses the point—sure, the market will sustain itself, but that’s capitalism’s cyclical and runaway nature which relies on an ethos of labor that labels those who are unproductive or unprofitable “deviant,” reducing life to calculative value based on utility—that’s Robinson.

Economic rationality imposes a violent calculative logic on an irrational world—makes violence and collapse inevitable.Bifo 11

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future pp. 110-114 (of my copy), dml

The fantastic collapse that has shaken the global economy since September 2008 has opened a new phase in the history of the world. After some months of amazement and confusion, media, political institutions and economists have started to repeat the self-reassuring mantra: recovery is coming soon. I do not know what will happen next, but I think that the word recovery means very little in the current situation. What is sure, in my opinion, is that the workers will not recover if neoliberal ideology is not abandoned, and if the myth of growth is not substituted with a new kind of narration. Unemployment is rising everywhere and salaries are falling. And the huge debt accumulated for the rescue of the banks is weighing upon the future of society. More than ever, economic rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic science is not part of the solution to the crisis: it is the source of the problem. On July 18th 2009 the

headline of The Economist read: “What went wrong with economics?” The text is an attempt to downplay the crisis of the Economics profession, and of economic knowledge. For neoliberal economists the central dogma of growth, profit and competition cannot be questioned, because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the market. And belief in the intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic theology of neoliberalism. But the reduction of social life to the rational exchange of economic values is an

obsession that has nothing to do with science. It’s a political strategy aimed to identify humans as calculating machines , aimed to shape behavior and perception in such a way that money becomes the only motivation of social action. But it is not accurate as a description of social dynamics, and the conflicts,

pathologies, and irrationality of human relationships. Rather, it is an attempt at creating the anthropological brand of homo

calculans that Foucault (2008) has described in his seminar of 1979/80, published with the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This attempt to identify human beings with calculating devices has produced cultural devastation, and has finally been showed to have been based upon flawed assumptions. Human beings do calculate, but their calculation is not perfectly rational, because the value of goods is not determined by objective reasons , and because

decisions are influenced by what Keynes named animal spirits. “We will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature,” say Akerlof and Shiller (2009: 1) in their book Animal Spirits, echoing Keynes’s assumption that the rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and Shiller are

avowing the crisis of neoliberal thought, but their critique is behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. At best, economics is a neurosis of money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in abeyance…. Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology – inflation, depression, lows and highs, slumps and peaks,

investments and losses. (Sordello 1983) From the age of the enclosures in England the economic process has been a process of

production of scarcity (scarcification). The enclosures were intended to scarcify the land, and the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to cultivate food for their family were forced to become proletarians, then salaried industrial workers. Capitalism is based on the artificial creation of need, and

economic science is essentially a technique of scarcification of time, life and food. In side the condition of scarcity human beings are subjected to exploitation and to the domain of profit-oriented activity . After scarcifying the

land (enclosures) capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing people who don’t have property other than their own

life and body, to lend their life-time to capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is making scarce both water and air. Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of producing , implementing, and pushing scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak of economy, but of political economy. The technique of economic scarcification is based on a mythology, a narration that identifies richness as property and acquisition, and subjugates the possibility of living to the lending of time and to the transformation of human activity into salaried work. In recent decades, technological change has slowly eroded the very

foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material objects to the semiocapitalist production of immaterial goods, the Economic concepts are losing their foundation and legitimacy. The basic categories of Economics are becoming totally artificial. The theoretical justification of private property, as you read in the writings of John Locke, is based on the need of exclusive consumption. An apple must be privatized, if you want to avoid the danger that

someone else eats your apple. But what happens when goods are immaterial, infinitely replicable without cost? Thanks to

digitalization and immaterialization of the production process, the economic nomos of private property loses its ground, its

raison d’etre, and it can be imposed only by force. Furthermore, the very foundation of salary, the relationship between time needed for production and value of the product, is vanishing. The immaterialization and cognitivization

of production makes it almost impossible to quantify the average time needed to produce value. Time and value become incommensurable, and violence becomes the only law able to determine price and salary. The neoliberal school, which has opened the way to the worldwide deregulation of social production, has fostered the mythology of

rational expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a selfregulation of the market, first of all the labor-market. But self-regulation is a lie. In order to increase exploitation, and to destroy social welfare, global capitalism has used political institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, not to mention the military enforcement of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being self-regulated, the market is militarily regulated. The mythology of free individuals loyally competing on the base of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie, too. Real human beings are not perfect rational calculating machines. And the myth of rational expectations has finally crashed after the explosion of the real estate mortgage bubble. The theory of rational expectation is crucial in neoliberal thought: the economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational way the best deal in selling and buying. The fraud perpetrated by the investment agencies has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical swindle.

Economic exchange cannot be described as a rational game, because irrational factors play a crucial role in social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulation are not exceptions, but the professional tools of

advertisers, financial agents, and economic consultants. The idea that social relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it is not science, and it has nothing to do with natural law. Notwithstanding the failure of the theory, neoliberal politics are still in control of the global machine, because the criminal class that has seized power has no intention of stepping down, and because the social brain is unable to recompose and find the way of self-organization. I read in the New York Times on September 6th 2009: After the mortgage

business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they

may have found one. The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds of thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return, though if people live longer than expected investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Imagine that I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would absolutely not do). My insurer of course will wish me a long life, so I’ll pay the fee for a long time, while he should pay lots of money to my family if I die. But some enlightened finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the insurer. He buys the risk, and he invests on the hope that I die soon. You don’t need the imagination of

Philip K. Dick to guess the follow up of the story: financial agents will be motivated to kill me overnight. The talk of recovery is based

on necronomy, the economy of death. It’s not new, as capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughters and genocides. But now the equation becomes unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is the investment and the hope. Death is the best future that capitalism may secure. The logic of speculation is different from the logic of spectacle that was dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror of

spectacular accumulation. Speculation is the subjugation of the future to its financial mirror, the substitution of present life with future money that will never come, because death will come before. The lesson that we must

learn from the first year of the global recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going away, the financial plungers will not stop their speculation, and corporations will not stop their exploitation, and the political class, largely

controlled by the corporate lobbies, is unwilling or unable to protect society from the final assault. In 1996 J. G. Ballard

(1996: 188) wrote: “the most perfect crime of all – when the victims are either willing, or aren’t aware that they are victims”. Democracy seems unable to stop the criminal class that has seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism. The economy has been declared the basic standard of decision, and the economists have systematically identified Economy with the capitalist obsession of growth. No room for political choice has been left, as the corporate principles have been embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.

Cede The PoliticalTheir method cannot solve– their strategy of of calling upon the law is an attempt to reinsert escaping subjectivities into the subject-form- turns their offense Tsianos et al. ‘8

Vassilis, teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social theory at Cardiff University, Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales. “Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century” Pluto Press

To escape policing and start doing politics necessitates dis-identification - the refusal of assigned, proper places for participation in society. As indicated earlier, escape functions not as a form of exile, nor as mere opposition or

protest, but as an interval which interrupts everyday policing (Ranciere, 1998). Political disputes - as distinct from disputes

over policing - are not concerned with rights or representation or with the construction of a majoritarian position in the political arena. They are not even disputes over the terms of inclusion or the features of a minority. They occur prior to inclusion , beyond the terms of the double-R axiom, beyond the majority-minority duality. They are disputes over the existence of those who have no part (and in this sense they are disputes about justice in a

Benjaminian sense of the word, Benjamin, 1996a). Politics arises from the emergence of the miscounted, the

imperceptible, those who have no place within the normalising organisation of the social realm. The refusal of represen¬tation is a way of introducing the part which is outside of policing , which is not a part of community, which is neither a minority nor intends to be included within the majority. Outside politics is the way to escape the controlling and repressive force of contemporary politics (that is of contemporary

policing); or else it is a way to change our senses, our habits, our practices in order to experiment together with those who have no part, instead of attempting to include them into the current regime of control. This emergence fractures normalising, police logic. It refigures the perceptible, not so that others can finally recognise one's proper place in the social order, but to make evident the incommensurability of worlds , the incommensurability of an existing distribution of bodies and subjectivities with the principle of equality. Politics is a refusal of representation. Politics happens beyond, before representation. Outside politics is the materialisation of the attempt to occupy this space outside the controlling force of becoming majoritarian through the process of

representation. If we return to our initial question of how people contest control, then we can say that when regimes of control encounter escape they instigate processes of naming and representation. They attempt to reinsert escaping subjectivities into the subject-form. Outside politics arises as people attempt to evade the imposition of control through their subsumption into the subject-form. This is not an attempt simply to move against or to negate representation. Nor is it a matter of introducing pure potential and imagination in reaction to the constraining power of control.

Rather, escape is a constructive and creative movement - it is a literal, material, embodied movement towards something which cannot be named, towards something which is fictional. Escape is simultaneously in the heart of social transformation and outside of it. Escape is always here because it is non-literal, witty and hopeful.

Heg GoodAlt is an impact turn to intervention—the reason we dominate is to establish an order in our likeness and maintain global productivity—alt solves these imperial desires by withdrawing from the system.

Framework

Tech Solves Warming(Extend Dedev).

Collapse is coming now—tech can’t save us Ahmed 14

Nafeez, PhD and executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, 3-14-2014, "Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?," Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists, AB

A new study partly-sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution . Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or

controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data show ing that "the process of rise-and- collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history ." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common." The independent research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The HANDY model was created using a minor Nasa grant, but the study based on it was conducted independently. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal,

Ecological Economics. It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse , raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation : "The fall of the Roman Empire , and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced

Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced , sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent." By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline , and which may help

determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy . These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity "; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the

character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years." Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised

countries responsible for both: "... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just

above subsistence levels." The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency: "Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction , so that , absent policy

effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use ."

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from "increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period. Modelling a range

of different scenarios, Motesharrei and his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these scenarios, civilisation: ".... appears to be on a

sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much , resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society . It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature." Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse

completely, followed by the Elites." In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could

explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)."

Transition Wars

Violence Down

Their stats are bogus - it’s numerical whitewashingGregory 10 (Derek Gregory ,Prof. of Geography @ U. of British Columbia, “War and peace,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 35.2)

Ferguson is not alone in his silence. Many of those who regarded those continuing conflicts as ‘remote’– which excludes the millions to whom those ‘theatres’ were their homes – elected to repress or to re-script the role of the global North in

provoking violence in the global South. Hence Mueller’s (2009) claim that, asymptotically, ‘war has almost ceased to exist’, at least between ‘advanced states’ or ‘civilised nations’. Within those states, amnesia has now become so common that Judt (2008) describes the 20th century as the forgotten century. ‘We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us’, he writes: ‘Ours, we assert, is a

new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.’ He suggests that ‘in our haste to put the twentieth century behind us’, to lock horror and misery in the attic-rooms of our memories and museums, we – particularly the ‘we’ that is US , so to

speak –‘have forgot ten the meaning of war’ . The parenthetical qualification is necessary because in Europe the remains of two

world wars are etched deep into the cultural landscape. There, some have seen salvation in Europe’s construction of ‘civilian states’ out of the wreckage –‘the obsolescence of war is not a global phenomenon’, Sheehan (2007, xvii) argues, ‘but a European one, the product of Europe’s distinctive history in the twentieth century’– while others have sought redemption in the constitutively (‘core’) European pursuit of Kant’s

perpetual peace (Habermas 2006). But the meaning of modern war is not confined to those terrible global conflicts, and their exorbitation of war as ‘total war’ was not a bolt from the blue. Its arc can be traced back to the Napoleonic wars. Bell locates the origins of a recognisably modern culture of war in those ferocious campaigns and their ‘extraordinary transformation in the scope and intensity of warfare’ (2007, 7). It was then, too, that the ill-fated French occupation of Egypt in 1798 and the savage expeditions through the Levant inaugurated what Said (1978, 87) saw as a modern, profoundly martial Orientalism that was to be reactivated time and time again throughout the 20th and on in to our own century. We should remember, too, that Napoleon also had to contend with insurgencies in Egypt and in Europe; 19th-century war cannot be reduced to a succession of battles between the armies of contending states, any more than it can in subsequent centuries when, as Judt (2008, 6) reminds, war has ‘frequently meant civil war, often under the cover of occupation or “liberation”‘. If these observations qualify the usual European genealogy of modern war, then its supersession cannot be a European conceit either. Across

the Atlantic a number of critics worry that, in the wake of 9/11, the United States continues to prepare its ‘serial warriors’

for perpetual war (Young 2005; Bromwich 2009). The Pentagon has divided the globe into six Areas of Responsibility assigned to

unified combatant commands – like US Central Command, or CENTCOM (Morrissey 2009) – and relies on a veritable ‘empire of bases’ to project its global military power (Figure 1).2 And yet Englehardt reckons that it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. (2009) Writing barely a year after the presidential election, he ruefully observed that the Bush administration, ‘the most militarily obsessed administration in our history, which year after year submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress’, was succeeded by the Obama administration that had already submitted an even larger one. There are of course differences in foreign and military policy between the two,

but re- scripting the war in Afghanistan as ‘the good war’ , a war of necessity, even a Just War – the comparison is

with Bush’s Iraq war – continues to license the re-scripting of a succession of other wars from Korea or even the Philippines to Afghanistan (and beyond) as the imaginative scene for a heroic interventionism by the United States and its allies – Kipling’s ‘savage wars of peace’ now waged by a stern but kindly Uncle Sam (Boot 2003a) – that endorses a hyper-masculinised military humanism (Barkawi 2004; Douzinas 2003). The shifting fortunes of inter-state wars and ‘small wars’ since the Second World War have been charted by two major projects: the Correlates of War project (COW) at the University of Michigan, devoted to ‘the systematic accumulation of scientific knowledge about war’, and the joint attempt to establish an Armed Conflict Dataset by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in Sweden (UCDP), the International Peace Research Institute in Norway (PRIO) and the Human Security Report Project in Canada (HSRP). Any quantitative assessment is a battlefield of its own, involving disputes over definitions and data and, for that matter, over the reduction of military violence to abstract metrics and body counts. This holds for individual wars – think, for example, of the debates that have raged over estimates of casualties in Iraq – but it applies a fortiori to any global audit. The sources for such studies are inevitably uneven and, as

Østerud (2008a 2008b) reminds us, ‘ deaths from decentralized and fragmented violence are probably

underreported relative to deaths from more centralized and concentrated violence’ (2008a, 226). The screening and sorting devices that have to be used in these approaches only compound the difficulty . Most quantitative studies count as a ‘war’ only armed conflicts that produce at least 1000 deaths each year , which is a necessarily arbitrary threshold, and the common restriction to ‘battlefield’ or ‘ battle -related deaths’ excludes many other deaths attributable to military or

paramilitary violence . Although these tallies include civilians caught in the crossfire, they exclude deaths from war-induced

disease or starvation and , crucially, ‘the deliberate killing of unarmed civilians’. These are serious limitations. To erase the deliberate killing of civilians makes a mockery not only of the ‘new wars’ I describe below, which are widely supposed to focus on civilians as targets, but also of old ones. What are

we then to make of the bombing offensives of the Second World War? For these reasons, I also rely on a third, more recent project, the Consolidated List of Wars developed by the Event Data Project on Conflict and Security (EDACS) at the Free University of

Berlin. This provides a database that reworks the thresholds used in other projects and, in distinguishing inter-state wars from other kinds of war, operates with a threshold of 1000 military or civilian deaths (Chojnacki and Reisch 2008). These body counts (and the temporal limits their exclusions assign to war) are defective in another sense, however, because casualties do not end with the end of war. Nixon (2007, 163) writes about the ‘slow violence’ of landmines, cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance. It costs roughly 100 more to remove a landmine than to lay it, and in consequence: One hundred million unexploded mines lie inches beneath our planet’s skin. Each year they kill 24,000 civilians and maim many times that number. They kill and maim on behalf of wars that ended long ago… In neither space nor time can mine-terrorized communities draw a clear line separating war from peace. (Nixon 2007, 163) But, as Nixon emphasises, other lines can be drawn. Unexploded ordnance is heavily concentrated in some of the most impoverished places on the planet, often on the front lines of the Cold War in the South, including Afghanistan (the most intensively mined state in the world), Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and

El Salvador. Landmines not only kill directly; they also have a dramatic effect on local political ecologies ,

since they are typically used to interdict land-based resources and hence food supplies. In Mozambique, for example, large areas of prime agricultural land were sown with mines and have remained unworkable for years, which has forced farmers to bring marginal lands into cultivation with serious consequences for land degradation and food security (Unruh et al. 2003). Other slow killers that disproportionately ravage populations in the South also reach back to attack those in the North. Thus Blackmore (2005, 164–99) writes of ‘war after war’– the long-term effects of exposure to agents like dioxins or depleted uranium3– and there are countless killings ‘out of place’ by veterans returning to the North from war-zones in the South suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. These remarks are not intended to disparage the importance of quantitative studies. While I despair of those who reduce war to a mortuary balance-sheet – what Arundhati Roy (2002, 111) called the algebra of infinite justice: ‘How many dead Afghans for every dead American?’– the raw numbers do mean something. But there is a world of meaning hidden behind the tallies and tabulations, which can never summon up the terror, grief and suffering that constitute the

common currency of war (cf. Hyndman 2007). With these qualifications in place, the most relevant findings from these projects for my purposes are these. First, casting a long shadow over everything that follows, more than two million battle deaths have occurred worldwide in nearly every decade since the end of the Second World Wa r. It bears repeating that this figure underestimates the carnage because the toll is limited to ‘battle deaths’.4 Second, the number of inter-state wars has remained low since the end of the Second World War; they declined and even briefly disappeared in the last decade of the 20th century, but reappeared at the start of the present century. Third, while intra-state wars were more frequent than inter-state wars throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (with the exception of the 1930s), by the end of the 20th century their numbers were increasing dramatically , with a corresponding increase in intra-state wars that drew in other states. The considerable rise in the number of armed conflicts between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War was almost entirely accounted for by the increase in conflicts within states in the global South (Sarkees et al. 2003, 61–4). The number of intra-state wars declined steeply after 1992, though they continued to account for the vast majority of armed conflicts around the world; some have seen this trend continuing into the 21st century – in 2005 the Human Security Report trumpeted ‘a less violent world’– but others have detected a marked increase since the last fin de siècle (Chojnacki and Reisch 2008; Harbom and Wallensteen 2009).

Violence Down—Pinker

baudrillard k

Documents

early work

jean baudrillard

radical baudrillard

consumer society

social relations

system of sign

role of objects

production of desire