The Mondragon Cooperatives

A lot of writers that I have cited or linked to here have deep criticisms of capitalism, which should raise questions about what might replace it. I think this is a topic that should be far more debated than it is today, because it deals with possible answers on how life might be better if organised in a different way.

The worker cooperative 'business model' is one promising practical example of how people might reclaim their democracy in the work place and become an empowered community; and Mondragon in Spain is one of the places which can show us how it's done.

So to approach economic democracy in a practical way, I thought I might link to a documentary and a speech on the Mondragon Cooperatives, which are one of the largest federations of cooperatives in the world. Learning about their integrative system is seriously inspiring because it works so beautifully. It is a group of democratically governed businesses helping each other to get ahead. They take care of the creation of new coops in the neighborhood through coop banks using refined development strategies. If they run a profit, the workers generally share 70% amongst themselves as dividend because the workers ARE the shareholders. 20% goes into reinvestment, necessary for productive capital, and 10% goes into community services, from a research university to medical care and cultural activities. Empowered by this well-designed system, these people are in a constant process of figuring out how to live democracy in their daily lives.
The coops coordinate to ensure no member worker goes unemployed for long. If some do, they are guaranteed 80% of their original wage under the coops' social security funds. The system has been so successful that from its quiet birth in 1955 under the Franco fascist regime, it has grown into a network providing more than 100.000 jobs and countless services in the Basque country. After seeing this, who can claim capitalism is the only possibility?

Mondragon Website in English

"The Mondragon Experiment" is a BBC documentary produced in the 70s, which documents the founding and rise of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. Tracing its birth back to the time of the Civil War in Spain and its remarkable success since then, combined with an analysis of the actual structure of the company, The Mondragon Experiment makes a strong case for industrial democracy as an alternative to the present economic order.



Praxis Peace Institute Founding Director, Georgia Kelly discusses the unique collaborative business model of the Mondragon Cooperatives located in the Basque country of Spain. This presentation will cover the ethics and vision of Mondragón as well as unique success stories that are an inspiration to those seeking alternatives to business-as-usual. The goal of the Mondragón Cooperatives is to create community through economic relationships and to transform society through conscious economic practices. (Video a little bad, sound is no problem though)



Books on the Mondragon Cooperatives

Peak Oil and Peak Capitalism

Richard Wolff wrote a very interesting guest article on theoildrum.com, the world's foremost energy blog.

"Might we consider a mutually beneficial alliance between critics of abusing our energy resources and critics of abusing our productive capabilities? How about an alliance focused on a radical, democratic, and therefore anti-capitalist reorganization of production? The point would be to make citizens and workers – those who must live with the results of what enterprises do – conjoint decision-makers focused on meeting collective needs, both productive and environmental."

A great article by George Monbiot on climate change fatalism

"If you think preventing climate change is politically difficult, look at the political problems of adapting to it.

Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can."

Philosopher, historian and linguist Noam Chomsky spoke to Paul Jay yesterday on the Obama - Geithner plan. Chomsky says that "they're simply recycling the Bush-Paulson measures and changing them a little, but essentially the same idea: keep the institutional structure the same, try to kind of pass things up, bribe the banks and investors to help out, but avoid the measures that might get to the heart of the problem." The discussion ends in a conversation about what democratisation of the economy might look like.

Philosopher Manuel DeLanda gives a presentation that challenges some commonly held beliefs in the realm of political theory. Challenging systems-thinking and the essentialising of institutions, he argues that the military during peacetime has had a large influence on the structure of modern industrial societies, for example, the ways in which factories, schools, and hospitals continually manage the activities of humans. He traces the developments of European military techniques to their use in micromanaging the movements of humans in various institutions.

Even if I wouldn't discard nearly as much of Marx' theory as DeLanda, I found this speech to be a healthy reminder of the pitfalls that Marxists and systems thinkers in general too easily fall for.

On Science, Philosophy, and Public Debate

Philosophers are fond of saying that the way you conceive of a problem, theoretically or practically, already determines a range of solutions you might end up proposing. This is often considered the domain and 'practical use' of philosophy; not to answer questions but figuring out which questions to ask. Empirical science, then, deals in actual knowledge of the world around us, and is therefore able to answer questions that one formulates for some practical sake. Economists can tell us what happens when the Fed prints money to help banks, ecologists can tell us when a particular patch of sea is fished beyond its carrying capacity, and physicists can tell us how to produce energy in new ways.
So lets apply this distinction to what we are doing here; to figure out from which perspective(s) we can meaningfully analyse the moral problems posed by the economical, ecological, and political crises we read about all the time. It should be quite clear that figuring out which questions to ask is not just the job of the philosopher. In most cases you don't just need the analytical training of the philosopher to formulate the right questions and points-of-view, you also need to know something of the object-field you're talking about to find out whether the concepts you use apply well enough to the problems at hand. For example; depending on which economist you take seriously, the current worldwide recession could be a problem of failed regulation of the financial markets, it can also be a problem of greed, maybe the crisis stems from the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself, or according to others it's the free markets' self-cleansing process. Depending on your beliefs on technology and energy resources, whether these beliefs are considered and well-argued or complete faith, you will have a different idea of the possible futures for the real economy.
These scientific problems, or at least problems of applied philosophy of science, show that you need to have some sort of understanding of the matters of fact you are talking about to make a judgment about the ethical side of the topic at hand. And as it is my goal on this blog to find the right moral questions to ask, this kind of philosophy needs science just as science needs philosophy. Without a critical understanding of disputes within the sciences we cannot possibly decide which narrative to cast our moral discussions in. To put it in a simpler way; differences of opinion on the scientific level (do CO2 emissions lead to increased worldwide temperatures?) so often lead to disagreement on the moral level (Should we make a serious effort to reduce our CO2 emissions?).
This realisation is especially relevant for people who are, like me, convinced that main stream science cannot give us a satisfactory analysis of some deep crises that confront today's societies. If you are dealing with peak oil, the limits to growth more generally, trying to revive discussions about economic democracy, or understand the current economic collapse in terms like Richard Wolff's analysis (in systemic terms of unsustainability of lending workers' money in stead of increasing wages), you first need to convince people that your theoretical approach to the topic is legitimate. Only after that can you start an ethical discussion based on acceptance of a new analysis. So if we are going to understand, let alone raise awareness of the moral imperatives in this relatively new world of scarcity, climate change, and collapse of the debt bubble that allowed so much concentration of wealth, we have to fight on both these fronts.
But something is happening; the old free market narrative that was held up to disguise a system of state support for big corporations has now become so unbelievable that a lot of critical people are trying to reorient themselves. In these times there is an opportunity for ideas that are developed in the margins to enter the main stream. If we get this right, we might just be able to build the foundations to have public discussions about some real issues at last.

Mathematician dr. Albert A. Barlett on exponential growth and society. Bartlett makes a powerful application of the exponential function on the topics of economy, energy, and population.

Dr Robert Costanza, Director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics gave a talk at Wellington’s Victoria University on the best response to the ecological and financial crises that are unfolding.

Dollar being ditched worldwide

I just received an email from a good friend containing three jawdropping news stories. These just go to show the unbelievable speed of what is all happening behind the scenes; highly informative in the light of the Fed printing trillions of dollars by buying up obligations the last weeks, the US financial overseers seem to fight an onslaught of capital destruction with their only weapon to do it -printing money. As a lot of people following the big markets have noticed, this is how the financial system, house prices and stock prices can implode, but not cause the deflation of the Great Depression. But the questions of who will finance the debt, what will happen to the dollar, and what will replace the wealth being pulled out of investment in third world countries remain unanswered.


Foreign debt purchases fall sharply in January

Offshore banking centers sell Treasurys; central banks sell agencies
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - A big jump in foreign sales of long-term U.S. securities raised concerns Monday that the U.S., in the midst of a massive debt issuance to fund its economic revival plans, may run into trouble getting other countries to finance its deficit.


U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar

LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar.

Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.


China backs talks on dollar as reserve -Russian source

MOSCOW, March 19 (Reuters) - China and other emerging nations back Russia's call for a discussion on how to replace the dollar as the world's primary reserve currency, a senior Russian government source said on Thursday. Russia has proposed the creation of a new reserve currency, to be issued by international financial institutions, among other measures in the text of its proposals to the April G20 summit published last Monday.

Calls for a rethink of the dollar's status as world's sole benchmark currency come amid concerns about its long-term value as the U.S. Federal Reserve moved to pump more than a trillion dollars of new cash into the ailing economy late Wednesday.

Bestselling author and UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan. He explores the ecology of eating to unveil why we consume what we consume in the twenty-first century. Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

Former LAPD detective, whistleblower, activist and publisher of 'From The Wilderniss' Michael Ruppert presents the method for and conclusions in his book 'Crossing the Rubicon; the Decline of American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil.'

On Connecting Dots

When I picked up Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' a few weeks ago in an local bookshop, I knew it would prove a very valuable source of information. And the book indeed surpassed my expectations as it documented a systematical and conscious fine-tuning of a kind of 'laissez faire on speed'. The book follows a wealth of historical examples that reveal again and again that behind the facade of supposedly 'objective economic truths', the free market model is actually an antidemocratic seizure of the public sphere for capital to commodify and marketise.

In normal English, Klein compares today's neoliberalism with the classic days of Adam Smith: "Under Chicago School economics, the state acts as the colonial frontier, which corporate conquistadors pillage with the same ruthlessness and energy as their predecessors showed when they hauled home the gold and silver of the Andes. Where Smith saw fertile green lands turned into profitable farmlands on the pampas and the prairies, Wall Street saw "green field opportunities" in Chile's phone system, Argentina's airline, Russia's oilfields, Bolivia's water system, the United States' public airwaves, Poland's factories - all built with public wealth, then sold for a trifle." Crucial to Kleins' argument is that this is all made politically possible by powerful people exploiting crises and shocks -whether it be military coups, mass torture, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, or hyperinflation. And to take the argument even further, the useful crises have often been artificially designed or manipulated with the express purpose of creating these new frontiers for lucrative investment. In short, 'The Shock Doctrine' reaffirms the classic picture of expansionist (crony) capitalism by documenting it in historical and political context.

This alone is already quite heavy stuff to digest, but the narrative is still acceptable for a broader audience. It's still common, at least in left wing or academic circles, to follow Klein in her connection between crises, repression and corporate expansion. This is considered respectable; connecting two themes that, in the main stream media seem "totally unrelated", may require arguments and justification to many, but is perfectly within the scope of debatable discourse. However, what happens if you start assembling a larger picture from combining Klein's account of the shock doctrine with other plausible but deviant investigations?

I can simply no longer keep this conclusion to myself. I need to share it with people at least once. The point to the shock doctrine, using moments of crisis to reduce the public into a regressive, childlike state, to create a window of political opportunity for 'free market reform' and resource grabs, seems to me exactly identical to the motivation for the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. At first hesitantly, I reviewed some of the literature on the attacks of September 11th; especially David Ray Griffin's 'The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions', 'War and Globalization' by Michel Chossudovsky, and Michael Ruppert's 'Crossing the Rubicon' helped me clear up my mind on the matter. It seems only reasonable and, frankly, unavoidable to conclude at the very least that the US intelligence and top officials knew of the attacks before hand. The evidence is just too overwhelming. For those readers who need this claim backed up, just pick your favourite story. The insider trading cannot possibly be statistically accounted for without assuming foreknowledge. Whistleblowers like Mike Vreeland who warned of attacks months before they happened were being ignored, in Mike's case he was kept tucked away in Canadian prisons. The head of Pakistani intelligence (ISI) Mahmood Ahmed wired 100,000 dollars to Mohammed Atta shortly before the attacks and then spent a full week before, during, and after the attacks in the United States, meeting with CIA director George Tenet. Various people like New York fire department chief Nick Visconti, George Bush, and Rudi Guiliani displayed knowledge of the second twin tower and building 7 collapsing before it happened. Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder to building 7, admitted in a jawdropping interview that he gave permission to blow up building 7 with explosives. All this is documented in the three books I mentioned, and the list of evidence goes on much further. Are we just to ignore this or can we conclude something from these verifiable basic facts?

At least so much has to be concluded that the Bush administration top officials like Dick Cheney welcomed the attack, had intensive ties with one of its main financiers Mahmood Ahmed, and did their best to make the attacks pass through the most standard of air defense procedures. We can also be sure the Twin Towers and building 7 could never have collapsed from just the plane crashes; never before 9/11 have steel beams collapsed from fire and never after. Knowing all this, who could doubt that 9/11 was one of the most ambitious attempts yet by a closely knit ideological clique, to whom the shock doctrine is the bread and butter of advancing their politics, to advance a plan they debated and planned years ahead in publicly available documents. Both foreign policy 'realist' Zbigniew Brzezinski in 'The Grand Chessboard' and the neoconservatives of the Project for A New American Century in 'Rebuilding America's Defences' were speaking of the necessity for a new enemy to galvanise the American people into supporting an endless 'War on Terror'. Reading the Shock Doctrine confirmed my suspicion that this was nothing new, it was just high time for a daring new phase in the expansion of capital. In 'The Last Oil Shock', David Strahan writes that Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, had been arguing in 1998 that the Western oil industry will very quickly lose its productive capacity if the industry doesn't gain access to Middle Eastern oil. In dire need to open up the critical markets for pushing the envelope of collapse, a few shock doctors were willing to go a step further. (Again, all my factual claims are publicly reviewable. If in doubt, ask me for sources.)

Naomi Klein, however, would not agree (publicly at least) with this analysis; in interviews she repeatedly stated that the attacks were exploited immediately afterwards, but she won't say anything on guilty parties or intention behind the attacks. No need to look further into these obscure matters nobody can know anything about, the consequences of the attacks are all we need to build our case on, she says. Like many people on the left and in activist movements, this is where the scope of Klein's critique stops short of coming full circle. One has to ask, what event has been more of a watershed in the return to imperialism and realpolitik than 9/11? Surely one of these rare moments, on par with the Reichstag fire or the Gulf of Tonkin incident is worthy of the same investigative rigour as Klein applied to other shocking events?

Asking the same questions, many frustrated 9/11 skeptics developed notions like 'left gatekeeper'. Influential writers like like Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and Naomi Klein are seen by these 'truthers' as serving the 'powers that be' by stopping the dominant critical discourse short of investigating 9/11. They keep the issues that would be too undermining to those in power marginalised, and are therefore must be somehow complicit. In return, Chomsky, Klein, and other public intellectuals claim the 9/11 issue takes away energy from more real and actual concerns. And so the stage is set for tensions between those who think a proper understanding of 9/11 is central to understanding the war on terror and those who think the subject is irrelevant. Sometimes the debate can be a quite juvenile case of left infighting over who is more subservient to power. A debate not worth getting dragged into, one that needs to be transcended. I prefer to take from people on both sides of the debate what knowledge I can.

The inability to officially come to terms with 9/11 can be best be explained in terms of ideology, as Zizek uses the word; for him ideology is made up of 'unknown knowns', the assumptions we do not explicitly make but that implicitly guide our actions. You can sort of feel it in your gut what is speakable and unspeakable, there is no need to communicate the rules explicitly. Connect too many dots that the mainstream media and so the general public do not relate, and you are seen as simply outside legitimate debate. The herd mindset kicks in and arguments don't matter. Connecting junta coups and laissez faire economic policies as inherently related is acceptable. Adding 9/11 as the new high score to beat for shock doctors makes you a strange conspiracy theorist. And adding peak oil to explain why 9/11 was so essential for business, that the motivation was not just simply profit but the need to stay in the game for American industry and the American empire as a force in the world, and probably to be the 'last man standing' in the coming resource scarcities, that is just another bridge too far.

At this risk of sounding crazy, I want to assimilate as much knowledge of what is really going on. Every thinker quoted or linked to on this blog I believe holds an important piece of a puzzle that is too large to ever complete. The point is to try and see how much of the puzzle we can assemble in an attempt to understand the world we live in. I realise that is difficult; the more relations you see and issues you integrate into one single narrative, the more assumptions seriously need to be justified and double checked. But I believe there is no topic that a priori precludes objective investigation. The real problem is not that careful research into all these issues is impossible, but only the fear of falling down the rabbit hole we should try to overcome.

One of my favorite comedians, Mark Steel combines a sense of british humour, an amazing ability to make history come to life, and a healthy activist spirit in this lecture (or performance) on the French Revolution. First of two parts.

Why bother?

In many ways, what this page is all about is a combination of a positive perspective of advancing the plight of common people with a negative acknowledgment of the limits to growth. This combination is a contradiction in terms to many people, and so, most of the time, political debates keep to one topic or the other. That's why, on the one side, 'Malthusianism' is a derogatory term for misanthropes who really want a 'cleansing' of our overpopulated planet. (Texas radio host and New World Order conspiracy theorist Alex Jones actually puts Henry Kissinger and the Club of Rome in one and the same category.) On the other side it explains why 'peakniks' often find Chavez' use of oil revenues to create a welfare state naive in the extreme.

Issues like peak oil, the current world wide economic collapse and climate change tell us about how life has become harder and will become much harder still in the future. Looking through all the literature and information it seems like the era following the second world war was a friendly time of rising prosperity and the consolidation of the middle class, accomplished by pushing problems into the future, with the future beginning just about now. From this perspective, many people discard the aspiration for a good life for all people on this planet as a tragic wild goose chase, reminiscent of Tantalus' eternal torment in Hades.

It is very understandable that the limits to growth have turned precisely those committed people with a social conscience into utter fatalists. How can humanity possibly improve its fate when at a peak of prosperity inequality has spiraled out of control, leaving half of the world population in dire poverty and lacking the most basic of necessities? In a desperate attempt for some kind of hope and meaning, these environmental (and/or Marxist) determinists retreat into a more soothing geological timescale. They hope that even if we are not able to stop the ongoing collapses of the economy and ecology and the societies that depend on them, wiser future generations will scavenge a sustainable economy out of the corpse of industry and the natural resources it left unscathed.

I have been, and in darker moods still am one of those fatalists who retreat in their impotent determinism. The scarce forces that point in the good direction are so often so lacking in coherence and determination. But even if our darkest fears will play out as predicted, it would be good to know that someone tried to do something. You probably heard that one before, so let me put the argument another way; I also know that there are more than one or two possible futures, even if there are increasing natural boundaries to what is possible. As anyone who traced back the contingencies of his birth knows, the present world is the result of an infinite number of causes, both natural and human. Like ripples in a pond, actions that seem insignificant might change the world incrementally in unexpected ways, and you never know what is possible unless you take the initiative to find out.

What I have become increasingly convinced of is that as scarcity, climate chaos and economic collapse become ever more frightfully real, we should least of all abandon our social ideals. To many of us in the West solidarity has a quite abstract meaning; it means softening the sharp edges of the market, or giving a coins to charity. We have quite forgotten to practice the moral convictions that now seem like intellectual allegiances. As life gets tougher, we might actually have to make some more concrete life choices; we might have to share our food even if that means that we have no desert ourselves. We might have to start really opposing the international trade regime that has so systematically kept the third world underdeveloped to stimulate overconsumption in the West, in stead of just bandaging the results of this scandal with our charity money. To take seriously the imperatives of ethics, to do something for the other will only gain in its already critical importance, in small scale daily life or in grand scale international politics.

Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurter theorist and co-writer of the profound 'Dialektik der Aufklärung' is famous for saying that ethics should not be about individuals solving dilemmas in concrete life situations, but about avoiding that individuals find themselves in those situations. In other words, it should be a philosophy of social systems, not of the actions of the morally autonomous individual. I believe we need both. If we just do systems ethics, the now disappears as a moment of action and ethics becomes an interesting but ultimately pointless battle of ideology, while actual politics is left to the usual players. On the other hand, if we just do dilemma ethics, we get things like the hypocritical and shallow practical ethics that Peter Singer has been trying to escape from.

In stead, we need an ethics that is visionary enough to imagine all kinds of ways to advance the plight of common people that are now still unthinkable or politically impossible. We need that kind of broad understanding and orientation now, and in the dire years to come, to shape better societies than the ones existing now. But a better society has always been a long way away. For the shorter term and more limited scope we also need to think seriously about the moral choices that we face while we are still living in the self-destructive and often cruel systems that are in place at the moment. And, to use a rhetorical trick again, even if everything goes wrong, I would still prefer to live in a broken society in which people share their scarcities than in one where people fight each other over them. The point is that only by taking seriously both of these dimensions of ethics, both Singer and Adorno, can we profoundly make sense of what we should do to curb and to mitigate the tide of the collapse of economies, ecosystems, and societies that we are very concretely facing.

So to retreat into a deterministic analysis of capitalism, population growth, and environmental destruction I think is a mistake. Not because the analyses are wrong, but because it denies the present of its importance, being the only sliver of history over which we have any kind of influence. Capitalism may be inherently expansionist and self-reinforcing, poverty and population growth may be locked in the most cruel of positive feedback loops, and we may be too late to stop both serious climate change and the peak oil worst case scenario, but never will I give up on the only thing that can prove the predictions wrong; action by conscientious and strategically savvy people in the here and now. And I hope that anyone kind enough to read this article to the end won't, either.

Media critic and historian Robert McChesney, talks about the essential role of journalism for meaningful democracy, and puts forward a radical proposal to address the challenges faced by news media in the current economic crisis, and into the future.

The Taliban riddle

Pepe Escobar: Everybody is making a mess out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre, including Washington.

NATO Conference on Afghanistan in Holland

Today, Dutch newspaper 'de Volkskrant' announced a NATO Conference on Afghanistan will take place in Holland in late March or Early April. The Defense Secretaries of all NATO countries will be present, as well those of allied countries in the region. The exact time and location of the meeting are as of yet unknown. Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen judged that 'it's important that not just the NATO member countries, but also our partners like Australia or Singaport be present. At the conference there will be a centre role for the United Nations and the Afghans.'

This means that some two hundred million people in Holland, Belgium, France, Luxemburg, and Germany are all in travelling range to make their voices heard. For such an important event, during a time in which there is a window for debate, I will keep up to date on any activist group's plans for organising demonstrations. Let's see if Europe can muster some initiative!

Playwright Harold Pinter's masterfully eloquent and flamingly critical Nobel Prize acceptance speech on anglo-american foreign policy since the second world war and it's surrounding 'tapestry of lies'.

Historian Michael Parenti on the diversity and orthodoxy in the US media system. If you want to learn more about Parenti, click here for his website.

MIT linguist, historian and philosopher Noam Chomsky explaining what the WTO is and does in under half an hour.

Sociologist and Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on objective violence or violence inherent in systems. Double click on the video for the whole intruiging interview in which Žižek talks about ideology, psychoanalyses the (liberal) left, and necessity of radical thinking.

Cambridge anthropologist and historian Alan MacFarlane on famine. The conclusions many people have drawn from the limits to growth debate imply that we ought to be concerned with this topic again. Many experts argue that the Green Revolution has made most people on this planet immune from famine, but only temporarily. Thomas Malthus might just be back with a vengeance when fossil fuels have passed peak production and climate change starts becoming more severe.

The Ethics of Climate Change and Peak Oil

Download paper on climate change and peak oil

Download paper on climate change and peak oil

What can ethics say about the different limits to growth that we are beginning to experience? In beginning to explore this question, I presented this 6000 word paper at a conference on the ethics and politics of climate change this January. I am still busy expanding and reviewing it. All commentary welcome as usual.

Naomi Klein at the University of Chicago

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Journalist and writer Naomi Klein addresses students at the University of Chicago on neoliberalism and the economic collapse.

Economist Paul Grignon's 47-minute animated presentation of "Money as Debt" tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it is being created.

Review: Limits to Growth, the 30-Year update

'Limits to Growth' first appeared in the 1972, when students of Jay W. Forrester (the founder of system dynamics) unleashed a fundamentally important discussion on whether the planet could continue to sustain growing populations and ever growing levels of consumption and industrialisation. Unfortunately, this discussion has rarely been honest, serious or rational. All that most economists seem to know about the book is that its predictions have been proven wrong, mostly without being able to reproduce what exactly were those predictions.

The truth is that the authors of 'Limits to Growth' did not make any predictions at all. They describe what they call the fundamental problems of overshoot that result from our population-economy system's sustained growth and its reliance and impact on the world's ecology. To get some idea of what might happen in the 21st century, they set up different computer models that extrapolate different paths that humankind might take. And in stead of refuting the authors' intuitions, the experience of the 30 years after writing the first edition verified their concerns. Much more alarming information has become known on diverse issues as climate change, resource depletion, overfishing, top soil degradation, desertification, the limits and changes of the water cycle, and many more issues that are critical in ecology, economics, and society.

However careful the 'Limits to Growth' authors were with making exact predictions of the future, their view of the human predicament is quite clearly summarised in this paragraph:
"To reach sustainability, humanity must increase the consumption levels of the world's poor, while at the same time reducing humanity's total ecological footprint. There must be technological advance, and personal change, and longer planning horizons. There must be greater respect, caring, and sharing across political boundaries. This will take decades to achieve even under the best of circumstances. No modern political party has garnered broad support for such a program, certainly not among the rich and powerful, who could make room for growth among the poor by reducing their own footprints. Meanwhile, the global footprint grows larger day by day."

One of the major virtues of this book is that it views the economy as embedded in the world ecology. From the theoretical point of view of the 'Limits to Growth' authors one does not think in dichotomies like economy versus ecology, rather we see the two intimately related. The economy is ultimately restrained by the sources and sinks of our planet. If it outgrows the limits of the sources of energy and materials, or clogs natural sinks that process pollution, the result is problems of overshoot. There is much more to ecological concerns than just global warming and the disappearance of animal species, though they are part of the puzzle. The fundamental question of ecology posed in this book is whether humanity will clash disastrously with the natural boundaries it has already crossed, or whether it learns to minimise the damage and start living in accordance with the carrying capacity of our planet. 'Limits to Growth, The 30-year Update' is without question a book you simply have to know of if you want to be aware of the fundamental predicaments that humanity confronts in these times.

Tip: The website Book Finder automatically finds the cheapest copies including shipping to your country of residence.

Review: Contemporary Political Philosophy

If you are interested in acquainting yourself with the field of political philosophy this is one of the best starting points to do so. For many students of political philosophy Will Kymlicka is a household name. One of the reasons is this clearly written book, which outlays many different schools of thought that are influential in today's political philosophy. It provided me a very interesting perspectives on what exactly sets a Rawlsian liberal apart from a socialist, or what is the domain of the political and how feminists, for example, have expanded that notion to make visible power relations within the 'private sphere'. Kymlicka also convinced me that market-libertarian Robert Nozick actually makes little sense at all.

The book illuminates how moral principles have to be informed with an analysis of what are society's essential problems and how society works to give a fully rounded political philosophical theory. The Rawlsian liberal, for example, is not philosophically wedded to capitalism, but normally thinks that it works. Therefore he allows inequality in his theory of distributive justice, if that inequality in the end allows for the biggest 'piece of pie' for the worst-off.

'Contemporary Political Philosophy' has a definite analytical style, which makes comparing different theories in the book easier. This also means that as an introduction to more continental (German and French) political philosophers, even Hannah Arendt, you need to read other books. But the advantage of this particular set-up is that it allows Kymlicka to figure out whether these different political philosophical theories all start from another point of view, another principle, or whether they can all be reduced to essentially coming from the principle of equality. If that were so, there would be a common ground on which philosophers could discuss which theory has made the best account or interpretation of this communal value. Has this been succesful? Is political difference of opinion really fundamentally just a difference in ideas of how to interpret the value of equality? If you would like to know the answer to this question, or if you would like to be armed with the basics in political philosophical theory, go read this book!

Tip: The website Book Finder automatically finds the cheapest copies including shipping to your country of residence.

Documentary on Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse as a figure in the American student activist movements.

New York University Sociologist Vivek Chibber on the Capitalist State. In this very important strucural analysis Chibber explains the mechanisms that drive the state to be biased towards the capitalist or investor class' interests.

Oil, Smoke, and Mirrors: an outstanding documentary on peak oil and how exactly oil as a strategic resource was one of the motivations for 'the war on terror'. The American agreement to leave Iraq in 2011 and the election of Obama puts the end of this documentary on the road to dictatorship in a somewhat new light, but understanding the psychological mechanisms that lead to repressive states remains important today.

Dr. Colin Campbell Introducing Peak Oil: One of the best known geologists speaking on peak oil as the founder of ASPO. The occasion was the 7th ASPO International conference. (I was there!)

Economist Richard Wolff's Excellent Marxist Analysis of the Current Economic Collapse

Writer and activist Tariq Ali presents an inspiring tour d'horizon of international politics since the fall of the Soviet Union. On the rise of neoliberalism, the hollowing out of democracy in the West, and humanitarian militarism.

Paper on Philosophical Anarchism

Download Paper on Philosophical Anarchism

What if states cannot be legitimate? That is, what if we don't have a moral obligation to obey our states? Would that justify a 'war of all against all', as Hobbes would have it, or would states still be justified in their everyday coercion? This 3500 word paper of mine deals with the consequences of philosophical anarchism, and is followed up by a 2500 word discussion between me and my teacher dr. Mokrosinska.

The Story of Stuff: The Chains of Production, Consumption and Waste

Trying to make sense of it all...

This is the webpage of a student still finding his bearings in this globalised 21st century society. I am in a constant process of looking for and trying to formulate perspectives from which to identify the contradictions, injustices, pitfalls, hollow crevices and herd mentalities that abound today's societies. While everyone is aware by now that something is systemically wrong with the economy, few dare to find out more.

With resources dwindling, polupations growing, temperature rising, wealth concentrating, and politicians self-censoring, we certainly are not destined for a more pleasant future. The current process of crises coming together and accelerating each other is quite aptly described as 'clusterfuck'. We, the present generations, are clearly screwed in so many ways. But in order to do better ourselves, we need to find out what is going wrong, why, and what is possible in stead of the systems in place now. This is a very difficult task, because it requires the synthesis of so much knowledge of different kinds, philosophical flexibility of perspective, intellectual honesty and determination. And the more you find out, the harder it is to communicate your findings because you drift away from the dominant world view that is implicit in the main stream media, most universities, and public debate.

This website is an effort to bring as many pieces of the puzzle as possible together, to promote informed debate, and to encourage critical thinking. Many radical views will be allowed and proposed here, but all of them will be subjected to criticism. I will use different methods as I see fit; writing reviews for books that deserve attention, linking news, articles, documentaries and online lectures by insightful speakers. I hope that in time this collection will serve as a home base and a waypoint for people who, like me, want to make sense out of a system coming apart. As Slavoj Zizek turned Marx upside down:

'To change the world, we first need to interpret it!'

Welcome to my corner of the web,

Freek Blauwhof

A list of interests and topics to expect:

Relevant Disciplines:

• philosophy; ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of social sciences, Frankfurter critical theory.
• ecology; understanding the sources and sinks of the world's ecosystems
• system dynamics; seeing the economy as (part of the global) ecosystem, streams of energy and matter in the economy
• economics; from Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and Marx to present
• sociology
• history; especially the parts we Westeners keep omitting or forgetting

Subjects to explore:

• recent events in politics and the economy
• peak oil and gas; their consequences for the economy
• energy conservation and renewable energy
• climate change
• limits to growth
• population and growth
• ever growing gap between rich and poor
• how fiat money works
• history of political thought
• historical and actual popular movements
• history of political systems
• legitimacy of the state; (philosophical) anarchism?
• capitalism and the state; systemic mechanisms that reinforce the power of capital
• capitalism and culture; consumption society and alienation
• capitalism and the media; the trade in audiences
• community organised media
• what is democracy (supposed to be)?
• expanding the political; democracy in the work place?
• the corporation
• globalisation and the third world
• ideology and ideologies
• war and imperialism
• terrorism
• military-industrial complexes
• suppression and rise of socialist states in Latin America
• political use and abuse of language and definitions
• possibility of and necessary conditions for rational, honest, and enlightened public debate (or could Habermas be right after all, and how can we prove him right?)
• the search for reasonable and realisible political philosophies of a better lifeworld for all; social ideals within limits to growth.