Goodbye Blue Monday

Civilization's golden era is teetering on collapse

June 28, 2008

The period from 1950 to 2000 will be remembered as the Golden Era of modern civilization, the pinnacle reached by humans after a million years of evolution. This brilliant half-century was sponsored largely by fossil fuels, especially oil, which brought unprecedented economic growth, plentiful transportation and a rich and diverse lifestyle.

But the new millennium has brought the end of cheap oil, and civilization is suddenly teetering on the edge of collapse. Even if we manage to scrape through (and it would require heroic efforts), life will change. We're at one of the most important turning points in history, yet we persistently ignore the coming meltdown and just want to party on. Nero would be proud.

So, why is civilization teetering?

First, peak oil has arrived. There is no better signal than the price of oil, which has skyrocketed past $130 and shows no sign of slowing. Some shrug and claim there's still a lot left, technology will find it and extract it. Others, as represented by the editors of Maclean's magazine, feel that we have grappled with costly oil before and by applying determined conservation and new efficiencies, we will cope.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Peak oil, this two-syllable piece of jargon, is another way of saying we are on the threshold of a major crisis. From now on the supply of oil will diminish each year, but population and demand will continue to grow. This is truly frightening because our modern industrial society is built on and totally dependent on this versatile fuel. It is the foundation for transportation, industry, agriculture, fishing and much more. As the gap between what economies and nations need and what they can get widens, bidding wars will erupt (they already have) and then shooting wars (one already has).

The globe is in for tough times because renewables like wind and solar simply can't be supplied in enough quantity to fill the enormous demand. As an aside, environmental organizations are doing an enormous disservice by promoting the fantasy of a feasible renewable energy and hydrogen economy.

Second, the world is facing a major food shortage. It took two centuries but the Malthusian Devil is finally banging on the door. For seven of the past eight years global production of cereal grains has not met consumption. The price of cereal crops such as rice, corn and wheat has doubled in the past year. Poor countries are hardest hit and food riots have broken out in more than 10 countries including Egypt, Cameroon, Morocco and Indonesia.

The United Nations recently announced that large segments of the world face immediate hunger now, and global food production must be doubled in the next 30 years.

But how is this possible? There are no empty lands to cultivate and agriculture is highly dependent on oil and gas to power machinery, to make pesticides and fertilizers and for shipping. Food prices are rising in lock-step with the price of oil. And now another body blow: the mad rush to harvest cereal grains like corn to make biofuels for cars rather than food for people.

The world's food situation is deadly grim, and it can only get worse, since we are adding 70 million more people to the planet every year.

As though the oil and food crises weren't enough, we're also staring down the throat of global warming, the most insidious threat ever faced by humans. Yet our efforts to curb carbon emissions are laughable and pathetic. It's an interesting insight into our human psyche that we can ignore such a serious problem.

Space doesn't permit me to discuss cool, clean water, another vital resource whose supply is becoming painfully short.

The Future

Major changes are in the wind. At the very least it will mean paring back our lifestyles including, for example, less flying and driving, which will drive a stake into the heart of tourism, one of the world's largest industries. Tourism-dependent places such as Phoenix that are located in a desert with obscenely sprawling suburbs are particularly vulnerable, and violence and societal breakdown are likely.

James Kunstler, in his book, The Long Emergency, predicts that the United States will degenerate into a set of autonomous regions, with major urban centers replaced by numerous villages.

Societal breakdown won't happen quickly nor everywhere, but be sure of this: Change is coming and although poor nations will be hardest hit, North America will not be spared.

We clearly need to think smaller eco-footprint with hybrid cars, smaller homes, diets with less meat, more bicycling and better recycling. If we all pitch in, these changes will buy us time-but only a little.

While oil brought good times, it also allowed human numbers to soar well beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. We cannot continue to ignore this basic underlying problem. It will yield not one millimeter of progress if we decrease our environmental footprint by, say, 20 per cent but the population increases by 20 per cent over the same period.

The crisis situation is unsolvable unless we also address the population problem. It's elementary logic, a no-brainer.

Curtailing human population, however, is a daunting challenge. I hope we're up to it, for the alternative is decidedly unpleasant.

Source: The Vancouver Sun

Commodifying the psyche: Capitalism and human alienation

No concept is more central to Marx's critical analysis of capitalism than alienated labour. Marx condemns capitalism not simply because of the exploitation and inequality it breeds, but also because it impoverishes our inner lives and degrades relations among people. As the young Marx argued in 1844, conscious, creative activity that shapes the environment in which we live is central to what makes us human. But under capitalism, this essential life activity—social labour—is transformed into work done according to the dictates of capital. What is produced, how it is produced, according to what techniques and under what circumstances is determined by the logic of capitalist accumulation. Rather than an affirmation of our humanity, of our existence as create beings making our lives together, labour under capitalism becomes drudgery, a detested, mind-numbing loss of life.

The are four essential aspects of alienated labour under capitalism. First the worker is alienated from the product of her labour, since this product goes into the hands of (or in the case of services is controlled by) the capitalist. Second, the worker is estranged from the process of production itself since this is controlled and determined by the employer, managers and supervisors. Third, the worker is alienated from her fellow-workers since, rather than cooperating in a shared and planned activity, she is divided from and pitted against other workers. And, finally, workers are estranged from their human capacity for creative self-development as members of a cooperative community.

An essential feature of alienated labour is the reduction of work to a set of repeatable physical motions, in which different workers specialize, and whose speed is relentlessly increased. The use of "scientific management" to break every work process down into its component parts, each subjected to the stopwatch, is known as Taylorism, after the American Frederick Winslow Taylor. While Taylorism was initially used in assembly line systems of manufacture, it now dominates most sectors of the capitalist economy. Let me offer two examples. The first comes from A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards, a manual used by the likes of General Electric and Stanford University. Almost every imaginable office activity is subjected to time standards (based on fractions of a minute). Opening and closing drawers, stapling, typing (per character and per inching), opening envelopes are all time calibrated. Getting up from a chair should take 0.33 minutes, while swiveling a chair in order to perform another task should take 0.009 minutes.

My second example comes from Wendy's burger chain, part of the ever-expanding global fast food industry. According to the Wall Street Journal, time is of the essence, nowhere more so than in the growing drive-through part of the industry. Every six seconds shaved off time serving each customer at the drive through translates into one per cent increase in sales. So, grillers keep 25 burger patties on the grill and place one in a bun within five seconds of reviewing an order, "Once the meat hits the bun, the griller hands off to the sandwich makers, who have no more than seven seconds to complete each customized option."

An essential aspect of globalization has been a massive speedup of work processes, a drive to make production "lean," to use the jargon—that is, to get more and more work out of fewer and fewer workers. The results, as more and more commentators acknowledge, included physically exhausted workers who struggle with ever higher levels of work-related stress.

As a result of all these aspects of alienation, the very fabric of human life becomes degraded. A single, alienated goal—the acquisition of money in exchange for estranged labour—becomes the central feature of our lives. Everything becomes concentrated on this debased and debasing goal. Sacrificing our human potential in exchange for money warps and deforms all parts of our lives. Instead of a rich social life characterized by creative work, play and recreation, artistic expression, intellectual stimulation, love, solidarity and cooperation, our lives are impoverished. The rich diversity for human possibilities is mindlessly reduced to one narrow, alienated goal: accumulating private wealth. Owning things replaces all the other forms in which we can enjoy and experience life. In Marx's words:

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc.... all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses—the sense of having.

Inherent in this multi-faceted process of estrangement is that we are pressed to think of ourselves as commodities. "Selling yourself" becomes an art in this society. And more and more people are taking it literally. In the United States, for instance, growing numbers of people are agreeing, for a price, to have company logos tattooed to their heads. "Human billboards," they are called—and they sport logos of Toyota, among other companies. And if our bodies are to be overtly commodified, then why not other essential features of our identities? In 2002, for instance, four Canadians whose last name are Dunlop agreed, for about $6,000 each, to change their last names to Dunlop-Tire in order to advertise Goodyear Corporations main brand of tires.

So, while estranged labour is at the root of human degradation under capitalism, multiple forms of alienation pervade all aspects of life: our identities; our connections with nature; our sense of our bodies and our sexualities; our emotional well-being; relations between genders, between young and old, between peoples from different parts of the world. All these spheres of life become yet more areas in which we are estranged from others and from ourselves.

Then, in a vicious circle of alienation, capitalism promises us fulfillment, sense of purpose and belonging through commodities, the very markers our of alienation. Having robbed our lives of meaning, capitalism pretends to sell it back to us in the form of things. Mere means of life—cars, clothes, jewelry, and so on—are offered up as life's ends. The result is "an inverted world" in which things are substituted for human relations. In fact, in a virtual parody of Marx's theory, a whole philosophy of contemporary marketing uses a model in which a consumer brand such as Nike, Pepsi or Ford is meant to represent an actual human relationship. Rather than overcome alienation, these relationships with brands only deepen it. The more we pursue the things on offer from capitalism, the more estranged we become from the human qualities we most deeply seek—cooperation, sense of purpose, belonging, solidarity, creativity.

While Marx's analysis offers us the richest account of the deep roots of human alienation in capitalist society, many studies have confirmed much of what he has to say. A number of social scientists have been struck, for instance, by the fact that rising incomes in the dominant countries does not translate into higher levels of human happiness. Indeed, one analyst of this phenomenon chose to call his book The Joyless Economy. The author of this study noted that most people associate happiness with pleasures such as satisfying work, friendship, intellectual stimulation and so on—in other words, with non-commercial "goods." A later study confirmed the same findings: "if the things that contribute most to well being are unrelated to money, we cannot buy them," its author wrote; "this is the principal cause of money's curious failure to produce happiness." Rather than creating a high level of human fulfillment and happiness, capitalist wealth merely perpetuates the emptiness and lose of meaning built into the system of alienated labour and capitalist property. It comes as no surprise to learn, then, that a very large proportion of Americans who seek psychotherapy complain of forms of "psychic deadness" such as chronic boredom, purposelessness, meaninglessness, and alienation from themselves and others.

Source

McNally, David. Another world is possible: Globalization and anti-capitalism.  Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2006, 114-118.

The perfect swarm heads south

The visitor crossing the Mexican border from Tijuana to San Diego these days is immediately confronted by a huge sign, “Stop the Border Invasion!” Sponsored by allies of the anti-immigrant vigilante group, the Minutemen, the same signs insult Mexican citizens at other border crossings in Arizona and Texas. The ultimate irony is that a crisis invasion is indeed occurring, but the signs, it seems, may be pointed the wrong direction.

Author Mike Davis points out that, in a “reality stood on its head,” few people—at least outside Mexico—have bothered to notice that while all the nannies, cooks, maids, and gardeners have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate republicans, the Gringo masses have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes in Mexico.

The number of North Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million (one-quarter of all US expatriates) in the past decade. With more than 70 million American baby-boomers expected to retire in the next two decades, experts predict “a tidal wave” of migration to warmer—and cheaper—climates. Baby-boomers are not simply feathering nests for eventual retirement, but also increasingly speculating in Mexican resort property and gated communities, complete with Hooters, Burger King, and Starbucks. The land rush is sending up property values to the detriment of locals whose children are consequently driven into slums or forced to emigrate north, only to face increasing “invasion” charges.

The Gringo footprint is largest (and brings the most significant geopolitical consequences) in Baja California, an epochal process that, if unchecked, will produce intolerable social marginalization and ecological devastation.

Indeed, the first two stages of informal annexation have already occurred. Under the banner of NAFTA, Southern California has exported hundreds of its sweatshops and toxic industries to the maquiladora zones of Tijuana and Mexicali. The Pacific Maritime Association, representing the West Coast’s major shipping companies, has joined forces with Korean and Japanese corporations to explore the construction of a vast new container port at Punta Colonel, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which would undercut the power of Longshore unionism in San Pedro and San Francisco.

Secondly, tens of thousands of US retirees and winter-residents are now clustered at both ends of the peninsula. Along the northwest coast from Tijuana to Ensenada, a recent advertisement for a real estate conference at UCLA boasts that “there are presently over fifty-seven real estate developments with over 11,000 homes/condos with an inventory value of over $3 billion all of them geared for the US market.”
Meanwhile, at the tropical end of Baja, a US expatriot enclave has emerged in the twenty-mile strip between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose de Cabo. Los Cabos has become an archipelago of real-estate hot spots where continuous double-digit increases in property values pull in speculative capital. Judging from the registration of private planes at the local airport, Cabos has essentially become a resort suburb of Orange County—the home of the most vehement Minutemen chapters.

Davis points out that many wealthy Southern Californians evidently see no contradiction between fuming over the “alien invasion” with one’s conservative friends at the Newport Marina one day, and flying down to enjoy their Cabos investment properties the next.

One of several multi-billion dollar real estate projects being developed for the US market is the Villages of Loreto: another 6,000 homes for expatriates in colonial-Mexico motif on the Sea of Cortez. The $3 billion Loreto project boasts that it will be the last word in green design, exploiting solar power and restricting automobile usage. It will, coincidently, balloon Loreto’s population from its current 15,000 to more than 100,000 in a decade, with the social and environmental consequences of a sort that can already be seen in the slum peripheries of Cancun and other mega-resorts.

One of the irresistible attractions of Baja is that it has preserved a primordial wildness that has disappeared elsewhere in the West. Local residents, including a very eloquent indigenous environmental movement, cherish this incomparable landscape, as they do the survival of an egalitarian ethos in the peninsula’s small towns and fishing villages.

However, thanks to the silent invasion of the baby-boomers from the north, much of the natural history and frontier culture of Baja could be swept away in the next generation. The problem is, as Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch points out, “Fences don’t work if you’ve got your own plane.

— Border invaders: The perfect swarm heads south by Mike Davis

Off the map

This and that: detail. The map names what is.

What is globalization? Details become available.

The full Earth is seen from Apollo 17, the last journey to the moon, December 1972, from a distance of 23,000 miles. It looks like the blue-green marble you would trade for all the other marbles, even the cat’s-eyes. Africa is visible in its entirety. Also visible are most of Antarctica, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, a portion of India, as well as the western half of the Indian Ocean and portions of the Atlantic. The sky is clear over the Sahara Desert to the north and the Kalahari to the south.

The full Earth is seen by the World Trade Organization from the distance of a computer screen. You can see the Coca-Cola factory in its entirety. There is most of General Electric, Times Mirror, Union Carbide, and a branch office of Intel, as well as the western half of Matsushita and the travel lanes of Exxon. The sky is polluted over American Express to the north and Cargill to the south.

These details are crucial for us to understand. What once was a forest community, a seaside village, a river people thriving without need for food or tools from elsewhere, is now inundated by McDonald’s and Taco Bell, GTE and Hilton. Who once were people connected to each other, community, and the natural world are now fractured by previously nonexistent social problems and, in their confusion and pain, called stupid.

There are many details that are not available. Who makes the decisions that propel IBM and Sumitomo? How do corporate executives and government officials collaborate for their mutual benefit? How do shadow drug-slave-arms trades facilitate the legal economy? What is the relationship between the laws and institutions of this new form of empire and the economic, social, psychological, and spiritual problems of our lives? What rights that we have exercised in the past are now being eradicated? What plans are being mapped without our input, for the future?

Detail: my father is staring out the window of the nursing home where he lives his last days. He is ill from multiple sclerosis, alcoholism, and the perpetration of evil. The rural sanitarium he has run for years will be sold at the bottom of the barrel, he tells me, and a developer’s dream one-stop high-rise apartment complex/super-market/bowling alley will rise in its place. He personally will not benefit from the development. And yet, over his milk-protein drink, he smirks, “That’s progress.”

Progress.

Or rape.

The global economy is everywhere. Computers are everywhere. And the people who rely on them to link themselves to life become everywhere faceless placeless. The details of the demise of the land are everywhere evident. Now the people are strutting in puffed-up pride because the very technologies that cause the demise can also document it.

My father sighs one last raspy breath in his metal hospital bed.

Scale and distance. Direction. Detail.

The new maps are sadder than the human heart can tell.

— Off the map: An expedition deep into empire and the global economy by Chellis Glendinning

SICK AND TIRED OF HIGH GAS PRICES!!11oneone

I've been receiving these inane gasoline boycott schemes on Crackbook off and on for a while, so I figured a reply was in order. Feel free to lend your support.

It seems that groups with names such as this one spawn and spread every second week, advocating consumer boycotts in response to gouging at the pump. The companies targeted by angry drivers may vary from one to another but the premise is a constant, and laughably flawed. It has been refuted elsewhere with more eloquence than I can muster, so I shall not bother to do so here.

Simple, short-term answers to complex, far-ranging problems are fashionable, but I've none to offer. Instead we, the undersigned, propose clear vision and a long-term worldview. Consumer boycotts that ignore the underlying issues and keep drivers on the road are akin to junkies scrambling to secure the next fix. However painful, the solution is to kick the habit.

We are approaching the end of the automobile age. Clogged highways, two-vehicle households and drives to the corner store might have made sense when fuel was plentiful and cheap (questionable, but bear with me.) In our present time of scarcity, such a lifestyle is an anachronism. We can give it up by choice now, or do so kicking and screaming later when circumstances force the matter.

Astronomical gas prices, now and in the future, are a reality that must be faced without blinders. It's easy enough to blame corporate greed (which is undoubtedly a factor.) But we tend to lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with a finite resource, one which we consume (read: squander) as if there is no tomorrow. As the end draws nearer we grasp for a technological saviour, but it's doubtful that one will arrive.

(The efficacy of biofuel is beyond the scope of this group. As for the ethics of diverting food towards fuel tanks amidst growing numbers of hungry mouths, that's an exercise best left to the reader.)

What will it take to consign the gas-guzzlers that inexplicably clog our roads to the scrap heap? $200 per barrel? Goldman-Sachs predicts that we'll hit that particular milestone by the close of 2008. $300? It's a matter of when, not if, and it'll likely arrive sooner than we expect.

It isn't my place to tell you how to deal with such eventualities. Beyond trotting out the usual suspects (ride a bike, take transit...) the rest is up to you. Inform yourself, talk to friends, and take an active role in shaping your own future.

Oh, and don't buy into silly boycott schemes. Wishful thinking and internet petitions will not make things otherwise.

How Cuba survived its energy crisis

A mainstay on the fringes, peak oil has been in the headlines a lot lately. One can detect a whiff of nervousness in the mainstream media outlets as oil prices climb and climb, and continue to climb without an apparent end in sight. The tension was palpable as Bloomberg grilled industry insider Matt Simmons, one of a growing number who believe that supply peaked in 2005 and that our current level of extraction, 85 million barrels a day, might be the most we’ll ever pull out of the ground. Locked as we are into a global economy which must perpetually expand or die, the economic implications are enormous. Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is another adding his voice to the growing murmur: we have peaked. It’s all downhill from here.

None of this need be apocalyptic. It’s natural that an affluent Northerner, steeped in American consumer culture and probably knowing nothing but, might perceive the decline of that hyper-consumptive way of life as the end of the world. Nonsense. The combined brunt of resource scarcity and climate change will force lifestyle changes, and consumer culture’s days are clearly numbered. Although we stand to leave a biologically impoverished planet to our progeny, life will go on as it always does.

But as we begin to rub shoulders with the limits of our natural environment, it might be time to critically rethink the destructive way of life that has brought us to this point. Changes must occur, whether we choose them or nature imposes them. We can cling, kicking and screaming, to the old ways, or we can adapt intelligently to changing circumstances. We can choose to prepare a soft landing.

Of particular concern is the food supply which, coincident with the rise of industrial agriculture, is literally soaked in oil. Between fertilizers, pesticides, refrigeration, transport, and the myriad of other factors that make it possible for Canadians to eat strawberries in January, oil and food production are intimately intertwined. As one falters, the other will follow in close pursuit.

This may seem pretty bleak, but Cuba provides a hopeful example:

"In the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its source of cheap oil. Its industrialized agricultural system, which was heavily fuel-dependent, immediately faltered. Very quickly, Cuban leaders abandoned the Soviet industrial model of production, changing from a fuel- and petrochemical- intensive farming method to a more localized, labor-intensive, organic mode of production.

How they did this is itself an interesting story. Eco-agronomists at Cuban universities had already been advocating a transition somewhat along these lines. However, they were making little or no headway. When the crisis hit, they were given free rein to, in effect, redesign the entire Cuban food system. Had these academics not had a plan waiting in the wings, the nation’s fate might have been sealed.

Heeding their advice, the Cuban government broke up large, state-owned farms and introduced private farms, farmer co-ops, and farmer markets. Cuban farmers began breeding oxen for animal traction. The Cuban people adopted a largely vegetarian diet, mostly involuntarily (meat eating went from twice a day to twice a week). They increased their intake of vegetable sources of protein and farmers reduced the growing of wheat and rice (Green Revolution crops that required too many inputs). Urban gardens (including rooftop gardens) were encouraged, and today they produce 50 to 80 percent of vegetables consumed in cities.

Early on, it was realized that more farmers were needed, and that this would require education. All of the nation’s colleges and universities quickly added courses on agronomy. At the same time, wages for farmers were raised to be at parity with those for engineers and doctors. Many people moved from the cities to the country; in some cases there were incentives, in others the move was forced.

The result was survival. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds of body weight, but in the long run  the overall health of the nation’s people actually improved. Today, Cuba has a stable, slowly growing economy. There are few if any luxuries, but everyone has enough to eat. Having seen the benefit of smaller-scale organic production, Cuba’s leaders have decided that even if they find another source of cheap oil, they will maintain a commitment to their new, decentralized, low-energy methods."

— Peak everything: Waking up to a century of declines by Richard Heinberg

Gold, silver, slavery and murder: The legacy of Columbus

In light of the government's recent "apology" for its own complicity in the murderous residential school system that killed upwards of 50,000 aboriginal children and amounted to an official program of cultural genocide, I consider it wise to reflect upon how this continent was taken in the first place, and to what ends.

Gold, silver, slavery and murder: The legacy of Columbus

In the fall of 2001, a great brouhaha was raised in the media about a handbook produced by the student union at Concordia University in Montreal. A number of organizations came together in a press conference to denounce the publication, while incensed right-wing editorialists denounced the student union as, among other things, "anti-globalization zealots" guilty of "sullying the university's name." Among the features of the handbook singled out for condemnation at a press conference was its entry for October 8, 2001 which reads "Thanksgiving — Colonialist Holiday."

But what is it to which the right-wingers object? After all, native peoples certainly didn't initiate Thanksgiving Day, nor do they celebrate it. As Ward Churchill of the American Indian Movement has asked about the annual celebrations on this day:

Should we be thankful for the scalp bounties paid by every English colony — as well as every US state and territory in the lower 48 – for proof of the deaths of individual Indians, including women and children? How might we best show our appreciation for the order issued by Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, requiring smallpox-infested items be given as gifts to the Ottawas so that 'we might extirpate this execrable race?'... It's no mystery why Indians don't observe Thanksgiving Day. The real question is why do you feast rather than fast on what should be a national day of mourning and atonement.

Given that it is not a day of mourning and atonement, what is the holiday if not a celebration of European colonization of North America? Here the outraged conservatives turn evasive. And for good reason. For the legacy of European colonization of the Americans, beginning with the "voyages" of Christopher Columbus, is not quite the uplifting affair they choose to celebrate.

As a number of commentators have pointed out, Columbus was less interested in discovery and adventure than he was in gold. In fact, his preoccupation with the metal could be described as obsessive. One expert points out that the word gold appears in his diary 140 times on his first trip to the Americas: "It was the one constant of his Journal, the one recurring goal, and on some days he seemed hardly able to get it out of his mind." Alas, the great discoverer came up empty on his first two trips to the "New World" (1492 and 1493). Five years later, however, his luck turned: gold was discovered in the new colony of Espanola (what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic). As extensive mining began, the colony turned out from one to three tons of the yellow metal every year between 1504 and 1519. "Gold is most precious," exuded Columbus. "Gold is treasure, and with it, whoever has it may do what he wants in the world, and may succeed in taking souls to Paradise."

Paradise is not what would be visited upon the area's indigenous peoples, however. On his first and second voyages, despairing of finding gold, Columbus had hit upon another commodity that he could use to satisfy the king and queen of Spain, who had financed his journeys: slaves. Worried by his failure to locate gold, he sent several dozen natives back during his first voyage. Then, during the second trip, he captured 1,600 Tainos from the interior of Espanola and proposed to the Spanish royals that these men, women and children could be traded for cattle and supplies. With the discovery of gold on his third voyager came the decision that would shape all the early chapters of colonial history in the Americas: the great "discoverer" decreed that indigenous people would be enslaved and forced to mine gold. In time, slavery would become the preferred labour system for every major commodity in the "New World": gold, silver, sugar, tobacco.

Of course, the indigenous peoples were unlikely to submit readily to this new arrangement. In order to conquer their resistance, terror was pursued as a routine part of colonial policy. Gallows were erected in every Spanish town, 340 of them in the valley of the Vega Real alone. And these gallows were used with bloody results. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who came to the Americas as a Catholic missionary, chronicled the savagery of the Spanish. One historian summarizes part of his findings:

De las Casas reports how they made low, wide gallows on which they strung up the Arawaks, their feet almost touching the ground, Then they put burning green wood at their feet. These executions took place in lots of thirteen. Why? This was "in memory of our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles."

De las Casas continues to say that chiefs and nobles were usually not hanged like that, but burned to death on grids of rods. Once, he writes, a captain complained that he couldn't sleep because of the cries and he ordered the victims strangled. But the constable... instead put sticks over their tongues so that they could not make a song, and "roasted them slowly, as he liked." Men, women and children on Columbus' Hispaniola were hacked to pieces, and those pieces were sold from stalls to the Spaniards for feeding their dogs.

Murder, death by overwork, and disease ravaged the indigenous peoples. The scale of the human destruction is staggering. Scholarly research now suggests that there were about eight million Tainos when Columbus first arrived in 1492. Four years later, only three million remained. By the time Columbus left his duties as governor of the colony in 1500, a mere 100,000 of these indigenous peoples had survived. By 1542, perhaps 200 were alive. In short, within 50 years of European conquest, more than 99.9 per cent of the Tainos population had perished. An apocalypse had occurred, bringing in its wake a wave of human annihilation that would reverberate through the Americas.

— Another world is possible: Globalization and anti-capitalism by David McNally

We knew what we were doing all along

While the government is to be commended for offering a long overdue apology to residential school survivors and their families, the wording of the Prime Minister’s apology on June 11, 2008 implied that government officials would have acted sooner if the full extent of the damages inflicted upon First Nations children and their families had been known at the time. By repeating, as he did for rhetorical effect at the least, that “we now recognize” the consequences of residential schooling or that “we now recognize” that it was wrong to apprehend children for school, the Prime Minister cynically deflected full responsibility for a policy that extended for well over a century and that persisted, for decades, in light of all the injustices “we now recognize.”

The written historical record is full of such recognitions. In 1903 the incoming principal of the Red Deer Industrial School reported that his first “glance over the building and the sight of the ragged, unkempt, and sickly-looking children was sufficient to make me sick at heart.” Three years later, Dr. Peter Bryce reported to parliament that one-quarter of the students in residential schools died within a few years of leaving the schools. Many more died while in school and federal officials accepted this as a cost of operating the residential school system. They also assuaged their consciences by recognizing that many of these children had at least been converted to Christianity before their deaths. In 1910, coinciding with one of the earlier attempts to phase out residential facilities in favour of day schools, Frank Oliver, a Liberal Member of Parliament from Edmonton, commented on the contradictions of a church-run school system that taught children to despise their parents. The Liberal government tried, once again, to phase out residential schools in favour of federal day schools and provincial school systems, immediately after the Second World War. Speaking about those efforts in the late 1960s, Robert Davey, Chief of the federal Indian Education Branch, stated that neither the “Government nor the Churches appeared to have had any real understanding of the needs of [Aboriginal] children” prior to the Second World War, but, sadly, he had to acknowledge that efforts to change the system after the War had also failed in most respects. Federal officials acknowledged that they had been reluctant to challenge the power of the churches in the post-war period and had failed to develop adequate policies and oversight to achieve their objectives. The obvious cost of this failure was the continued removal of Aboriginal children from their parents for at least another quarter century.

There is much evidence to indicate that various governments of the day failed to act on the basis of what they recognized at the time, dating back to the 1890s. While I do not wish to diminish, in any way, the importance of the Prime Minister’s apology for First Nations across Canada, and for non-Aboriginal Canadians as well, I believe a full and frank discussion of everything that happened is in order; including a recognition that the full consequences of federal Indian education policy were recognized and accepted, and that these are not recent revelations, as the Prime Minister chose to imply. The residential school system was maintained in spite of the full recognition of its devastating consequences and alongside decades of political and popular indifference. Perhaps this is where the apology needs to begin.

Life is what they owe us

“Life is what they owe us: the right to govern and to govern ourselves, to think and act with a freedom that is not exercised over the slavery of others, the right to give and receive what is just.”
— Zapatistas, “First Declaration for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism“

In the days following the New Year’s 1994 seizure of San Cristobal and other towns by the Zapatistas, the Mexican Army launched a vicious counter-attack in which at least seventy people were killed. Many others were captured, among them twenty-four-year-old José Pérez. Interrogated as to his motives, the young fighter replied simply, “I want there to be democracy, no more inequality — I am looking for a life worth living.”

No one could have put it more clearly or eloquently. In a world of imperial wars, crushing poverty, gender, racial and sexual oppression, and appalling exploitation, the demand for those two basic things — “democracy, no more inequality” — represents nothing less than a call for revolution.

It may seem startling that this heartfelt plea for a life worth living should be so threatening to the powers that be. Yet, it is the nature of capitalism to degrade, dehumanize, and oppress — to commodify everything and to exploit all but the tiny minority who control the world’s wealth. Rather than an accident, a perverse distortion of an otherwise fair system, this drive to commodify and exploit is the very nature of the beast. With its blatant pillage of resources, theft of lands, and sweatshop exploitation, contemporary globalization merely reveals more blatantly the essence of capitalism. And so, the simple, poignant demand for a life worth living constitutes the virtual declaration of war.

A life worth living. Whoever tastes of it is transformed. George Orwell glimpsed it in worker-controlled Barcelona in 1936, where “waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.” Witnessing people “trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine,” Orwell was forever changed. He never forgot that image. All of us who live in this society of infinite commodification would be wise to hold onto it too. For it is this image — of human beings behaving decently, as equals, as humans, not as cogs in the machine — which allows us o remember that a different world is possible.

As the war planes thunder overhead, as death squads murder peasants and indigenous peoples, as factory fires take the lives of young women workers, as people struggle to make it through one day after another in a lifetime of alienated labour, the world’s leaders prattle on about “freedom,” “progress” and “civilization.” At some level, they know they lie. They know it is their interests, and those of their class, that they protect. Yet, so imbued are they with the elitism of their class that they truly believe their interests, and theirs alone, matter, that the vast majority of humankind are little more than beasts of burden. Meanwhile, they pray that elaborate spectacles of “greatness” — of billionaires and movie stars, of generals and politicians who can order a war machine to reduce a country to rubble — will keep that great mass of humanity mesmerized, that, as the rulers of ancient Rome hoped, circuses will pacify the plebians. Yet memory and imagination resist the victory of forgetting and the death of hope.

Discussing the peculiar obsession of some scientists with measuring and anatomizing Albert Einstein’s brain, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “I am, somehow, less interested in the shape and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Gould’s insight is a refusal to be mesmerized, a refusal to buy into the cult of greatness manufactured by the ruling class. It is a reminder that for eons the majority of people have been deprived of the means of attaining their own unique greatness.

Today, once again, oppressed and exploited peoples are rising. Twenty years of capitalist globalization have resulted in such grotesque inequalities, so many shattered hopes and dreams, so much suffering, that resistance has become inevitable. Twenty years ago, Bolivia was, along with Chile, one of the two countries in Latin America most slavishly adhering to the globalization model. As its economic policies were completely revamped by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, its leaders sold off the mines, the gas fields and the water supply to multinational capital. Today, Bolivia’s people are in revolt. They have smashed a water privatization contract and thrown successive neoliberal presidents out of office. As Washington’s neoliberal model for Bolivia goes up in flames, the oppressed are searching for alternative. The danger is that they will shortchange themselves, by settling for mere tinkering from above.

Desperate to tip the odds in their own favour, the ruling classes and their hangers-on work overtime to discredit the search for real alternatives. They seek to destroy the utopian idea, the dream of a better world. Yet, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at.” And that is exactly the map our rulers offer us — one from which Utopia, the place of a better future, has been removed. For the poor and oppressed, however, that place can never entirely disappear. The suffering inflicted by the present order invariably produces a struggle to overcome it. And Utopia lives in the space of that struggle, just as that struggle give it both reality and truth. Utopia marks a place yet to be found, a place where unnecessary suffering has been eliminated, where solidarity and happiness live. “When the truth cannot be realized within the established social order,” wrote one critical thinker, “it always appears to the latter as mere utopia.” Yet, the fact that the ruling class, which has perverted the very meaning of words, argues against Utopia “speaks not against, but for, its truth.” It is the present order that is false — just listen to the words that roll from the lips of world leaders. Like freedom, truth resides in that place for which the oppressed continue to struggle.

That place is one of community, freedom and solidarity. It is a place in which people have escaped commodification to live as free beings, as ends in themselves, no longer means for the enrichment of a few. It is a place where nature is no longer degraded and destroyed, where people are celebrated in the richness of their diversity. It is a place where life is worth living, the space of hope.

You won’t find that place on any official maps. But if you put those maps aside and listen, you can hear its sounds. Listen to the voices from the barrios and the villages, from the maquiladora zones and the guerrilla encampments, from the factory quarters and the coffee fields. They are whispering the word freedom. Listen. Hear the poetry of the future. One day, those whispers may become a roar, declaring to all prepared to listen that another world is possible.

— Another world is possible: Globalization and anti-capitalism by David McNally

The end of living, the beginning of survival

"When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with...

Chief Seattle was one of the last spokesmen of the Paleolithic moral order. In about 1852, the United States Government inquired about buying the tribal lands for the arriving people of the United States, and Chief Seattle wrote a marvelous letter in reply. His letter expresses the moral, really, of our whole discussion." — Joseph Campbell

The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each glossy reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give the rivers the kindness that you would give any brother.

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted with talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is to say goodbye to the swift pony and then hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

When the last red man has vanished with this wilderness, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it, as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it, as God loves us.

As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you.

One thing we know - there is only one God. No man, be he Red man or White man, can be apart. We are all brothers after all.

Quoted in The Power of Myth.