Documentary: The Take

In suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed auto-parts workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats, and refuse to leave. All they want is to re-start the silent machines. With The Take, director Avi Lewis, one of Canada's most outspoken journalists, and writer Naomi Klein, author of the international bestsellers No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, champion a radical economic manifesto for the 21st century. But what shines through in the film is the simple drama of workers' lives and their struggle: the demand for dignity and the searing injustice of dignity denied.

Interestingly enough, it seems that the current depression is making more and more places take a path similar to Argentina. And indeed Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein are now at the forefront of a growing progressive movement to call for nationalisation and cooperatisation of the American auto industry for example, to put the industry to work for the public good. http://thetake.org/

Presentation: Ecological Critique of Market Society

I thought I'd post this presentation text I've written for a philosophy department course called 'Concerns of the Market'. It is aimed to be a short introduction into the ecological critique of, as the course called it, 'market societies'.

It refers to a power point presentation that can be downloaded here or viewed here.

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1 Introduction

In this presentation, my aim is to give a short summary of the critique of market society and neoliberalism from the perspective of environmentalists and ecologists like Dennis and Donella Meadows, the authors of ‘The Limits to Growth’. This presentation will require some scientific discussion that is instrumental for a philosophical perspective. I believe that any fruitful philosophical inquiry into the moral problems of sustainability will have to rely on recent scientific discourse in order to ask the right moral questions. For example, questions like future generations’ rights to oil resources are outdated when it seems unlikely that there will be much left for these future generations, even when there is a consistent political-economic move to sustainable consumption. Rights to energy resources more generally might be more appropriate in this case.

I will break down this critique in two parts; the first dealing with the use of ‘sources’, the other with disposal of waste and pollutants in ‘sinks’. [figure 1, 2, 3] By sources is meant all natural resources that are used in an economy, from fishing stock and arable land to water supply and fossil fuels. By sinks are meant the capacities of ecosystems to absorb pollution and waste, from bacteria in rivers that break down sewage to the adaptivity of atmosphere to greenhouse gas emissions.

Obviously central to this critique is the notion of sustainability. I use the word here as meaning natural-economic conditions of necessity for the realisation of any reasonable interpretation of human flourishing for most people over time. Sustainability is often mistaken as some kind of moral value by itself. But, as long as we can agree that human flourishing in the future should also be an aim of political morality, so I can skip a lengthy discussion of Derek Parfit, what other value should political action ultimately have in mind, if not sustained human flourishing for all? Sustainability, then, concerns the natural boundraries for the sustained possibility of this moral end.

The question is whether societies in which markets are the dominant mechanism of allocation of goods and services are, or can be made capable of dealing fairly and effectively with the problems of increasing scarcity of resources and pollution. In other words: is there a morally acceptable capitalist road to sustainability? As I am approaching this question through looking at natural resources and sinks, Herman Daly’s widely used criteria for sustainable use of resources and pollution I think hits the nail on the head [figure 4]. If there are no questions about this definition of sustainability, I would like to proceed with the overview of the ecological critique of market society.

2.1 Sources

In countries where the price of non-renewable resources and unsustainably used renewable resources are set by the market (or are even subsidised), there is a gap between the use value of that resource and its exchange value, the price. As any normal commodity, natural resources are traded in the market, where supply and demand determine price. According to a central justificatory thesis in neoclassical economics, which treats natural resources like any other commodity, the market mechanism ensures efficient allocation of goods; but, of course, in this case we are dealing with depleting natural resources. Once used, they are gone, and somewhere along the way of depletion, (where maximum supply exceeds demand) price is set no longer by supply, demand and marginal production cost, but by natural scarcity and shortage.

So in so far as there are good reasons to assume that the exchange value, as set by the market at times of relative abundance, is much lower than the real use value of the resource, the market mechanisms of supply and demand cannot be relied upon to allocate non-renewable resources and depleting renewable resources efficiently. It follows that a society that allocates non-renewable resources in this market-based way is, from this perspective, wasting the ‘bank account’ of elementary resources considerably.

But the critique can go more fundamental. Market-based societies are also ill-prepared to adapt to depletion and scarcity of vital resources like energy or food that its economy is reliant on. A political-economic tradition of leaving allocation of non-renewables to the market produces a dependent economic infrastructure with the high consumption patterns that result from market underpricing. These infrastructures are the aggregates of long term investment; it takes several decades to replenish without extra costs the stock of cars, ships, factory equipment, electricity plants and so on. A market-based society that finds one of its essential resources depleting can maybe change allocation systems quickly, but it is stuck with the economic infrastructure and capital stock that is accumulated over time. This kind of exposure to resource shocks combined with the highly discussed increase in worldwide inequality can have morally unacceptable consequences- think of stagflation after the oil shocks of the 70s, food or water shortages and even the collapse of civilisation like on the Easter Islands. These are results of what the authors of LtG call overshoot- when a (socio-economic) system passes its external limits.

My own literature research into the depletion of different non-renewable and depleting renewable resources has convinced me there is cause for concern in many cases; oil and natural gas production are in dangerous stages of decline considering the level of dependency of most societies on these resources. [figure 5 and 6] Potable water, fish stocks and soil fertility are, albeit in different ways, at more or less maximum sustainable levels of extraction or beyond these levels. Contrary to a still dominant academic consensus, I found that the models of the Club of Rome have been quite right so far.

The fundamental question for this course is whether sustainable use of these resources can be reached with ‘market based solutions’. My position here is a negative one. Sustainable use of resources seems to be contradictory to a central thesis in neoclassical economics and market-based politics: that supply and demand allocate resources through setting prices. This conclusion I see supported in historical economic and energy policy in capitalist countries. The countries that have made the most considerable steps towards resource sustainability, Sweden, Iceland and Cuba, have done this through direct government involvement and investment. But rather than expanding on my own political opinion now, I invite discussion on this topic after this presentation.

2.2 Sinks

The question of pollution and waste shares many characteristics with the one concerning (renewable and non-renewable) resource depletion. There are sustainable levels of pollution that can be absorbed by ecosystem sinks, but exceeding these levels for a longer time results in problems of overshoot.

The most global and well-known example of overshoot by polluting sinks is global warming. There are lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions that increase temperature, but will be corrected by the world ecosystems correction mechanisms. After a certain point, however, the ‘positive feedback loops’, or the ecosystem mechanisms that reinforce global warming, become stronger than the balancing correction mechanisms. The current scientific debate concerns when exactly this point is most likely reached. The debate ranges from 350 ppm, which was reached around 1985, to 450 ppm, which would be reached in 35 years at current rates of emission. [figure 7 and 8] This is a very serious issue: if greenhouse gas levels stay above this critical point for a longer time, the genie will be out of the bottle. Humans will have lost their grip on this potential global catastrophe.

Again, the question for this course is whether there is a credible market based road to sustainability on the pollution side of the ecology-economy system. There is one especially prominent market based scheme for reducing emissions, cap and trade. This is the system in place in the EU at the moment, and it is the one that is being proposed by the Obama administration as well. At first sight and with some generous reading of the institutional argument, it seems it could work. All that governments need to do is to set the amount of emission rights, and these can then be allocated by the market in these rights. That would mean that there is a limit for emission, while the market can efficiently decide how exactly these emission targets will be met.

But if one looks a little further into the range of institutions that are involved in these schemes, there are a lot of practical problems with such a solution that I would argue are not just accidental, but institutional and necessary. Emissions can be reduced by all kinds of administrative mechanisms (fe offsetting emissions in seperate projects abroad). Furthermore, markets in emissions rights create a secondary derivative market with its speculative bubbles, and corporations always have an interest in expanding the amount of rights that are actually issued. When the system was just introduced in the EU, for example, the market and lobbying power of big corporations like the German automobile industry was so strong it even accomplished to create rights for more emissions than are produced to begin with. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, emitting corporations universally denied global warming, in a fashion rather like the tobacco industry that denied smoking caused cancer. The history does make one suspect there is a logic in this so called 'partnership of the state and the private sector'. Most environmentalists, and myself included, would argue this is because corporations always have an interest in externalising costs and internalising profits, and will use their resources to obtain their end. This market power of corporations is an institutional fact that directly contradicts any credible move towards sustainability. As long as the market is at the centre stage of environmental policy, this policy will be the result of a tug of war between even the most well-meaning governments and international governmental bodies on the one side, and corporations that externalise the cost of battling against their pollution on the other.

3 Conclusion

If one tries to imagine a credible integrated road to sustainability on all the vital topics adressed and more there seems very little room for market dominance. The most market-based ideas that aim to address these issues in cohesion all emphasise a need for stable and unjeopardised move on the different fronts, requiring price stability for long term investment. A good introduction into these arguments is supplied by Richard Heinberg in 'The Oil Depletion Protocol'. This necessity implies a government setting prices and pushing the market in a sustainable direction. But such a scheme will have to fight the same battle with contradicting economic institutions and mechanisms, like corporate lobbying and externalising of costs. Therefore, considering the actual scientific debates and economic-political practice, I am led to the more philosophical conclusion that capitalism is inherently unsustainable. Real solutions for the problems of an overshooting ecologic-economic system necessarily lie outside market thinking and market practice. Whether this should be a reformist taming of the forces of the market or a radical overcoming of its logic I leave up for discussion. In any case, it seems only a fool could expect that forces from within capitalism itself will save it from its own overshoot.

Jeremy Scahill on the Obama Age

One of America's newly risen stars in investigative journalism, Jeremy Scahill discusses American military power and economic imperialism in the coming years, related to Obama policies. Scahill has reported from post-invasion Iraq; the former Yugoslavia, where he covered the 1999 NATO bombing; and from post-Katrina Louisiana. He is is a correspondent for Democracy Now, and is a frequent contributor to The Nation. Scahill documented the use of private military contractors in his award-winning book "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."

'Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army' and other books by Jeremy Scahill

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.

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.

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.

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.