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weditchthemap · 5 years

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A Reflection on Zero Waste Living in a Consumer-Driven Capitalist World

Overview of Article

After spending two weeks volunteering on a sustainable, zero waste, farm I was inspired to take a deeper look into the concept of “zero waste.” This blog examines what waste is, the impact of wasted/unused food, how our environment is being destroyed, and the detrimental consequences of compulsory consumerism. I also elaborate on the zero waste techniques and principles that I learned while living on the farm. This is by no means a comprehensive guide to zero waste as the subject matter is vast and research continues to grow but I hope it provides some valuable insight and illuminates the magnitude of the issues we and our planet face. Perhaps it will inspire you to incorporate selected practices into your own life.

Why We Chose to Live a Zero Waste Lifestyle for Two Weeks

After we returned from our first trip traveling around the world we took up a minimalist lifestyle. We joined, and I later became president of, the official Philadelphia branch of the minimalist movement. We became increasingly aware of our consumption of resources. During our journey into minimalism—be it through social meetups, lectures, or our own research—we repeatedly came across the phrase zero waste. We had a loose idea of what this meant but wanted to explore the lifestyle further…enter volunteering on a Zero Waste farm on the Turkish Riviera.

Sylvie and I arrived at our zero waste farm in Dalyan, Turkey with the mid-July heat in full effect. We had found the farm using workaway—a website connecting traveling volunteers with local hosts. You can read our past experiences along with what to expect from workaway. We have volunteered around the world more than a handful of times, often working on organic farms, but this would be our first zero waste experience.

What Does Zero Waste Mean

Initially I did not like the term zero waste. I felt the phrase to be a result of deceptive marketeers trying to push an agenda, on par with suggesting that eating chocolate is good for your heart and that American cereal is actually part of a well-balanced diet. The idea of producing absolutely no waste is thermodynamically impossible—our utter existence creates waste. However after a few days my understanding shifted as I became more open to the concept—the idea is more of a goal than a hard target.

The Term Zero Waste refers to a “set of principles focused on waste prevention that encourages the redesign of resource life cycles so that all products are reused. The goal is for no trash to be sent to landfills, incinerators, or the ocean.” ref. The focus of zero waste is on waste prevention as opposed to end-of-pipe waste management. Because of our consumerist-driven culture we cannot rely on companies to make these changes for us as it is in direct opposition with capitalism and its profit maximizing objective ...a grassroots effort from the consumers is the only meaningful way to implement these principles on any scale. This idea is later discussed under the productization section.

What is Waste?

Most people consider waste to be stuff that they no longer have a use for and therefore end up tossing it out with the garbage. Most people see empty plastic bottles, unused food scraps, chipped tiles, and broken electronics as waste. Thanks, in part to our consumer-driven culture, we associate many items as being trash after their initial use. We buy a widget, use it until its initial purpose is consumed and then throw it in the circular teleportation device that magically empties itself on a weekly basis, for me it was on Thursday mornings.

Some of our waste ends up in landfills that are run by private companies that profit from storing as much waste as possible. Some local regulations are in place about site management but it would go against shareholder interest for a company controlling a landfill to take any precautions above the bare minimum. Landfills contribute to climate change, toxic soil, and a mound of other issues. The volume of our trash that does not end up in domestic landfills gets sold to developing countries with even lower standards of waste removal. Over 40% of all waste ends up in uncontrolled dump sites—much of this trash ends up in our oceans.

Waste Stats:

14 billion lbs. of garbage is dumped into our oceans each year. Most of it being toxic to marine life.

The average American produces 4.4 lbs. (2kg) of trash per day (that’s over 1600 lbs. of trash per person in one year).

Americans make up 5% of the world’s population but contribute 40% to the world’s total waste.

Most communities spend more money on waste management than on schoolbooks, fire protection, libraries, and parks.

If the 140 million cell phones which are thrown out annually in the US were recycled they would save enough energy to power 25000 homes for a year.

What we did on the farm to reduce waste:

During our time on the farm we revamped our perception of what trash is. We considered not only the primary use of something but its usefulness after its initial consumption. Things that we could not find a sustainable use for were not purchased and taken back to the farm. Shopping at local markets allowed us to rid our shopping bags of unnecessary plastic packaging. We created a beautiful mosaic in the bathroom using broken tiles that we salvaged from a construction site. We turned Sylvie’s broken straw hat into a small dish to hold teabags. We tied the tomato plants and gourd vines using strands of hemp and twine. We built a shelving system using an old door along with some wood from a broken piece of furniture. I learned that a consumerist’s trash can be repurposed in a multitude of ways—a task that really gets the creative juices flowing.

Water Waste and Why it Matters

For people living near a seemingly endless supply of fresh water it is hard to imagine what water waste is. There are several impacts of water waste but I will only mention two of them. First the process to recover water used in our houses and businesses requires energy. Saving water saves energy and limits the use of harsh chemicals and therefore reduces global emissions. The second reason is a bit more complicated as it has to do with the water cycle. When a farmer waters their crop the water goes into the ground and may take hundreds of years to end up in a reservoir of some type. Because our continual use/waste outpaces the time it takes the water to return to the aquifers we are quite literally reducing the fixed amount of usable fresh water. A water-rich region that wastes water is stealing the water from future generations of water-poor regions around the world.

Water Waste Stats:

The average American uses around 575 liters (152 gallon) of water per day, more than 2x the average European and over 30x the average person living in a developing country.

Less than 1% of the world’s water is freshwater and available for us to consume (not trapped in glaciers).

A European Commission's Joint Research Centre study found that serious conflicts over water are going to arise around the globe in coming years.

1 glass of milk requires 1000 liters of water.

What We did on the Farm to Reduce Water Waste:

On the farm we limited the showers we took—though I’m not sure rinsing ourselves with a garden hose would constitute as a shower anyways. Most of the volunteers cleaned themselves daily by jumping into the nearby river. The only faucet in the house was shared by 10 people and I would estimate that the total time the water ran in a given day was less than 60 seconds. We had a system in place for how to clean dishes. After meals we would heat a small amount of water and place it into a bucket. The water was then mixed with soap and we hand washed our dishes. Afterwards we rinsed the soap off using a second small bucket of water. After spraying the dishes with a 3% hydrogen peroxide mixture we set them to dry. A few gallons of water was all it took to wash all the dishes of 10 people for 3 meals in an entire day. When watering the plants we made sure to focus on the roots, which also helped to limit soil erosion.

Food Waste and Why You Should Care

25% of the world’s fresh water supply is used to grow food that is never eaten—food waste is an extension of water waste.

Additionally, the solid waste in landfills decomposes into methane while waste exposed to the air decomposes into carbon dioxide. Methane is a gas with a greenhouse effect 25x greater than that of carbon dioxide. Basically when solid waste goes to a landfill it contributes to climate change 25x more than if it was composted or even left rotting on a vine.

Then there are other aspects of food waste such as energy consumption used to produce, transport, and store the extra food. I won’t even mention the havoc that synthetic fertilizer has on our environment.

Food Waste Stats:

1 kg of unused beef equates to the same water wastage as keeping a shower continually running for 4 days and 8 hours [50000 liters].

America alone wastes over $160 billion a year in food waste.

Americans throw out 43000000 lbs. of food each day (tossing away more than half of all food).

The food wasted worldwide could feed half our globe’s population.

If food waste were a country it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Over half of all food waste takes place in the home.

What we did on the farm to reduce food waste:

We would not cook more grains until we ate what was left from prior meals. Sometimes rice, bulgur, and lentils would last us 3 days. By day 3 we would get creative by mixing all types of leftovers into new and unique mixtures of food. We would feed our food scraps to the ducks and chickens the following day while items that had no nutritional content would be added to the compost pile. We also ate only locally grown food to limit our energy use as transporting foods comes at a large energy cost.

The Problem with Productization, Why We Cannot Count on Companies

Let’s face it, we live in a consumerist world that is driven by capitalism. Companies make and sell products, that’s just what they do. They may state to have multiple objectives but their primary aim is to make money for their shareholders—you can actually sue a company that makes a decision that is not in line with making the most money. I get sick after watching 1 episode of Shark Tank—you will see people more interested in “making it big” than on how to substantially improve humanity. We now live in a world where our culture values making money over helping people. If we value our own well-being over our neighbors how the hell are we going to get people to care about something as abstract as our planet? Most people are somewhat conscience of this problem but are too lazy, or maybe too brainwashed, and will look to companies for solutions. A consumer buying a product that marketers promise to be sustainable, green, or use recycled material is only falling victim to the trap of capitalist-driven productization.

A large problem with capitalism is that it is shortsighted, allowing for single entities to consume resources for immediate gain without providing an equal level of responsibility to its long-term damage/impact. Think about old mining towns, fishing villages, coal plants, oil wells, diamond mines, etc. where companies profit from the resources in that region. 10 years later the executives are sitting on their multi-million dollar yachts while people in the towns struggle to pay their health bills. This is what I mean by direct gain without long-term responsibility. The notion that a few people benefit at the expense of the many is what disgusts me of capitalism. Resources are finite and capitalism only aids to redistribute them. Gold into money, land into money, labor into money, etc. This mentality has been running at full throttle for decades and has left the masses morally bankrupt and in the endless pursuit of the proverbial carrot. This system was built during a time when there was enough abundance to be shared but we no longer live in that world. Did you know a young couple could actually support themselves through grad school with children working part time jobs only 50 years ago. Fat chance now! Capitalism, by its own nature, will continually concentrate our limited resources to fewer and fewer entities. Class warfare anyone?

I propose a system where we stop treating everyone and everything as a transaction for personal gain. Stop with this illusion of branding and image, it’s as fake as the photoshopped legs on this year’s Sports Illustrated cover model. Everyone will get old and wrinkled and your new car or couch will eventually rust or break. Start developing your inner worth and stop buying into this idea where your worth is even remotely connected to dollars and our plastic appearances. Develop your inner worth and you will break free of relying on something else, like a company, to set your worth.

A company may claim to be ‘green’ or use ‘recycled plastic’ but these are marketing tactics to allow a consumer to feel good about their purchase (trust me I worked as a marketing strategy consultant). Any product truly produced in a sustainable manner would be priced out of the market and developed at too low a production level to serve a population other than a regional community. You have to remember that any product you buy from a company has been produced solely for the purpose of maximizing income. Capitalism in America has led to the complete disconnection between the products we buy in the store and the impacts of its production. Thank you corporate America for successfully making profit your primary goal (read with sarcasm). I am not suggesting that buying things are bad but the market in which we participate does matter, has an impact, and is a form of activism.

— Below is an example of how a profit-maximizing company runs an egg production business where money is the prime objective. —

Egg production in profit maximizing company:

Since land, shelter, and equipment cost money chickens are crammed inside a warehouse to provide the largest yield per acre. Hens are crammed so closely that they do not have room to open their wings.

During sorting male chickens are thrown into a shredder since they are considered waste as they do not lay eggs and therefore do not generate revenue.

Hens have portions of their beaks burned off to prevent pecking each other to death (this phenomenon occurs when hens are forced to live in tightly confined spaces)

The areas are so cramped that the chickens defecate and urinate on themselves.

The light in the factories is constantly manipulated to maximize egg production.

Occasionally hens are fed reduced-calorie diets to induce an extra laying cycle every so often.

Chickens are fed corn, an unnatural diet, as it is the cheapest form of calories thanks to government subsidized production.

Even companies that market ‘free-range’ only have their chickens free to range for a few weeks of their life before being locked into their cages where they will lay eggs for the rest of their short lives.

After 2 years of these extreme conditions they are bulk sold to the pet food industry, studies have shown that over 30% of these chickens suffer from broken bones due to neglect and harsh living condition.

Read this article to learn more about the realities of egg production. You can also watch the video below!

The more you look into how our products are made—and you don’t have to look too far— the more you can see how disgraceful our profit optimizing system has become. It’s all driven by maximizing revenue and minimizing costs—or profit as it is called in the business world. Did you ever stop to consider that you food you are buying for your dog may be helping to promote the harsh conditions in the egg production industry, or the devastating impacts of the overproduction of corn and monocropping, or the damages synthetic fertilizers are causing?

Eggs are not just products! When will we start caring about the processes that create our outputs? As long as America’s materialist greed for the never-ending desire for more prevails we will be stuck with this problem at a cultural level but it doesn’t have to stop there. The choices you make and the things you buy are a form of activism.

The creation of products, or productization, is the problem—companies create things for us to buy. This creates a culture where consumers look to companies for ‘solutions’ to their ‘problems’—though smart marketers will often create problems consumers didn’t even know they had. This is why we have products like ‘cage-free egg’ and ‘the impossible burger’. They are marketing their way around the issues that they are creating. The impossible burger, a machined product that is made from more than 20 ingredients/chemicals including genetically engineered yeast, Soy Protein Concentrate, Methylcellulose, Zinc Gluconate, multiple oils, etc. is not the type of thing I want to put inside my body. I think I’ll stick to something less manufactured and something more ‘food-like’.

It has taken me years to recognize that buying the lowest price item almost always costs more, just not in dollars. The only person happy to participate in the low low prices driven by our consumerist-motivated lifestyle is the ignorant consumer. Don’t be one!

Product Waste Stats:

Packaging represents 2/3 of household trash.

4% of the world’s children live in the US but Americans buy (and throw away) 40% of the world’s toys.

Between 8,000 and 10,000 disposable diapers are used and thrown away before an average child is potty-trained.

Disposable diapers will still be in the land fill 300 years after they were put there.

Traveling extensively for several years had already allowed us to break the cycle of thinking we need to consume things being marketed by companies. On the farm we stayed away from packaged product all together. We bought eggs from neighbors that take care of their chickens and let them feed on insects and graze as they please—when the chickens get too old to lay eggs they simply roam free on the property. Did you know that chickens consume crop-eating insects and fertilize the fields at the same time? Our water did not come to us inside a Pepsi-branded bottle but from a local well several kilometers away. We used reusable water bottles like this one here. Sodium bicarbonate was used in place of toothpaste and handmade soap was used in place of shampoo and dish detergent.

Final Words on Zero Waste Living

I realize that living a zero waste lifestyle may not be for everyone—using a composting toilet can be a tough hurdle for most people. I chose to live Zero Waste not because I thought I would make a difference or change the world but because ultimately I have to live with the decisions I make and the person I respect most in this world should be myself. The more we travel the more we are exposed to and it becomes increasingly more difficult to be ignorant to our actions. If you walk away from this article with only one message I hope it’s this, “consider the impacts of your actions and stop living a life of intentional ignorance”. Next time you buy your discounted dog food, cheap gallon of milk, or half-priced pair of jeans ask yourself what their true costs really are.

Don’t forget to pin this article and share it with your friends.

#zero waste #zero-waste #Sustainable #sustainability #recycling #saving the planet #what is zero waste #how to live zero waste #what is a zero waste lifestyle #why is capitalism bad #what is productization #living on a farm in Turkey #Living in Dalya #Dalyan Turkey #volunteering in Turkey #using Workaway to volunteer #traveling the world for free #0 waste #what is zero waste?

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juniperpublishersoceanography · 3 years

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A test for Costs Subadditivity in the Fishery Sector- Juniper Publishers

Abstract

The seminal work by Baumol et al. [1] has highlighted the importance of analyzing firms' costs structure. This allows to design proper policy measures and to understand the impacts of those policies in markets. The note presents an original method and an application for testing costs subadditivity in the fishery sector, by using a system of supply functions under strict conditions and assumptions. The method is practical, though robust, and can be appied in the absence of detailed data on costs structures. Under stringent hypothesis (that delimit the application) they can be inferred from the supply functions. Subadditivity in costs, in fact, is a more proper economic definition (and methodological approach) than traditional economies of scale in fishery. The latter, in fact, does not depend from the vessel technology, but on the degree of quantity and variety of fish species in the ocean.

Introduction

Fishery vessels are multiproduct firms. The multiproduct firm's structures of costs and technology are important determinants of multiproduct industry structure. The seminal work by Baumol, Panzar & Willig [1] has established theoretical conditions for the existence of multiproduct cost advantages that can be achieved by specialized or diversified firms according to the scale and scope of their production. The concept of cost subadditivity provides an additional measure by which to characterize the multiproduct cost structure. Costs subadditivity is a property that characterize production costs. It implies that production from only one firm is socially less expensive (in terms of average costs) than production of a fraction of the original quantity by an equal number of firms. Investigating the existence of costs subadditivity (or superadditivity) is not (only) an academic exercise but can provide important hints for policy guidance. In fact, a vessel with super-additive costs can save money by braking itself into two or more divisions. Most probably, unless there are factors that preclude such decentralization, we would not expect to observe profit-maximizing firms operating at super-additive costs. In that case, subsidies could be awarded in order to minimize the vessel losses, when the "main" problems should be diagnosed at the cost function level, and the "consequential" measure be taken at that level. On the contrary, a firm with subadditive costs, may enjoy cost advantage that [1] either make subsidies inefficient or improper, [2] or render any kind of antitrust policy absolutely not apt, if the firm enjoys dominant positions due to efficient production that is represented by costs subadditivity. Such analysis can also apply to tackle the effects of policies that impact costs of production inputs, including labour, as in the case of the landing obligation [3].

It is also important to highlight that subadditivity in costsis a more proper economic definition (and methodological approach) than traditional economies of scale in fishery. The latter, in fact, does not depend from the vessel (firm) technology, but on the degree of quantity and variety of fish species in the ocean.

Formally, a cost function is said to be subadditive at an output vector, say q, if and only if it is cheaper for a single firm to produce q than to split it among more than one firm in any fashion. In formal terms: the function c(q) is subadditive at the output level “q if and only if c('q) where non-negative “q^i are that

In the case of fishery, for instance the possibility to fish different species with the same device mostly depends on the sea productivity and variety of species. This allows, a "savings" in the costs, e.g. costs subadditivity. According to Baumol et al. [1], in the theory of contestable markets, costs subadditivity might favor a market structure characterized by few firms operating in the sector (natural oligopoly and natural monopoly).

This means that the current technology allows multiproduction (e.g. simultaneously fishing different species with the same net or trawl) at a lower cost than separate production of each output that is multi-produced. In this perspective, total costs are lower than in the case the vessel had to use a different device for every type of species. Economies of scope exist if the costs of producing each product separately exceed the costs of producing all products jointly. Economies of scope and declining average incremental cost for each product are sufficient conditions for subadditivity. The presence of cost subadditivity would suggest that some form of fishermen's monopoly is appropriate on private efficiency grounds. The monopoly could be private, or could entail complete government ownership and control, or could include extensive government coordination and regulation as is found in north, or could consist of a set of single-product firms contracting among themselves [4].

The note is organized as follows: section 2 presents a survey of the (scarce) economic and econometric literature that has produced test for subadditivity in industries. Section 3 presents an original methodology, by developing testable implications and testable empirical specifications, under stringent conditions.

Tests of Cost subadditivity: a Survey of the Literature

Tests of cost subadditivity are difficult to devise, since one of the requirements is global knowledge of the cost function, while local knowledge in the neighborhood of the point of approximation is usually the best that can be achieved. Acceptance of local subadditivity then provides a sufficient condition for global cost subadditivity [5]. Although Baumol et al. [1] provide both necessary and sufficient conditions for cost subadditivity, the long-run multiproduct cost function allows only local sufficient conditions. Failure to establish cost subadditivity will then not preclude its existence. Tests of cost subadditivity specify all factors of production to be in full static equilibrium and outputs as exogenously fixed. In general, cost subadditivity requires economies from proportional expansion of the product vector along an output ray and economies arising from product combinations along a cross-sectional hyperplane[1].

The Evans-Heckman [5] test for subadditivity implies a two-product industry where all firms have access to the same technology. The cost function C(q1, q2) is locally subadditive at

With i = 1 n.

For at least two ai and bi not equal to zero. The test computes (2) for an admissible range of outputs and allows for local subadditivity. The degree of subadditivity can be measures as:

Where φ and ω are parameters that satisfy 0 ≤ φ ≤ 1 and 0 ≤ ω ≤ 1. If Subt (φ,wω) is less than zero, the cost function is subadditive with respect to the industry configuration at the selected time t. If Subt (φ,ω) equals zero the cost function is additive; if it is larger than zero the cost function is superadditive.

Another (indirect) way to test for subadditivity, is looking at the existence of economies of scope in the industry. Scope economies (diseconomies) are reflected into cost savings (cost disadvantages) associated with the joint production of many outputs. Economies of scope exist if the costs of producing each product separately exceed the costs of producing all product jointly. Economies of scope and declining average incremental cost for each product are sufficient conditions for subadditivity. The average incremental cost of output i, when the total output vector is q~, is the cost of producing out vector q~, minus the cost of producing all of q~ excludingproduct i, divided by the output of i, q'i. [5]. Scope economies are a necessary (but not sufficient condition) for costs subadditivity.

Suppose that the multi-product cost function is represented by C = C (q; w) where q = (q1, q2, q3) is the quantity of three different outputs and w = (wL, wk, wF)are respectively the prices of labor, capital and other inputs. Local measures of global and product-specific scale and scope economies can be easily defined. The measure of global or aggregate scope economies for our three-output case can be computed as:

with SCA> 0 (< 0) denoting global economies (diseconomies) of scope.

Product-specific economies of scope for output i are

where C(qi; w) is the cost of producing only output i, and Si >0 (<0) indicates a cost disadvantage (advantage) in the "standalone" production of output i.

Vessels as Multiproduct firms: a Tentative Test for Subadditivity in Fishery Production

Vessels can be considered as multi-product firms because they can fish a variety of species (given the sea productivity) with the use of the same technology and capacity. This allows in saving on costs, and might imply costs subadditivity. The individual vessel multi-product supply curve is:

where qn, is the quantity of n species caught and sold by the vessel; cn, are the vessel's production costs and on pn, the market price for n types of caught species. Vessels are price-takers and price at marginal cost. Therefore, the supply function is also the cost function

Given, c(qn) =p(qn) the supply function ithe supply function is ^

The assumption of marginal cost pricing is required to fully exogenize prices and costs and keep multi-product quantities as only control variable. Such assumption is grounded on the evidence that fish prices are determined by the market (no collusion among firms) and are pretty similar among all vessels. Given the above assumptions, our exercise implies two steps [69].

Step 1 We empirically estimate a system of supply functions (which are also the costs functions) for n different products. Required data are produced quantity for each n species and related price for each species [3].

Step 2 Recalling that a cost function c(q) is subadditive at the outfut level-q if and only if , where non-negative -q^ Aiare that then there is costs subadditivity at the output level “q, where a perfect competition market-defined price if and only if As necessary condition, when estimated parameter for quantity/quantities present negative estimated sign then we can assume costs subadditivity [3] at certain output level. An increase in prices/costs might generate a corresponding decrease in output quantities, in the relationship described by the supply function, which usually imply a positive relationship price/cost/produced quantity. This can be interpreted as a symptom of costs subadditivity. If detailed data on costs are available the usual Evans-Heckman test can be applied.

Conclusion

The note presents an original method for testing costs subadditivity in the fishery sector, by using a system of supply functions under strict conditions and assumptions. The method is practical, though robust, and can be applied in the absence of detailed data on costs structures. Under stringent hypothesis (that delimit the application) they can be inferred from the supply functions. The method can have important policy implications. Analyzing the structure of the firms' costs allows to design proper policy measures and to understand the impacts of those policies in markets (Appendix 1).

Appendix

*= 10% statistically significant; **= 5% statistically significant; ***= 1% statistically significant. FAO 3-alpha code (MON: Monkfish; EOI: White octopus; HKE: European hake; JAX: Horse mackerel; MTS: Mantis shrimp; MUT: Red mullet; SQM: Squid; BOY: Purple murex; CTC: Cuttlefish; OCC: Common octopus; SAN: Sand eel; SBG: Golden seabream; SOL: European sole).

To Know More About Journal of Oceanography Please Click on: https://juniperpublishers.com/ofoaj/index.php

#coastal science #Aquaculture #fisheries research #Juniper publishers Address #Juniper Publishers Indexing

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lilmopete-blog · 5 years

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A proposal for Toptal Scholarship

AN INTRODUCTION// I am a practicing artist working mostly out of Toronto with permanent resident status in Canada and Chile. I work as an Associate Artist with Public Recordings (publicrecordings.org), an artist-led collective based in Toronto. We develop and present hypotheses about group work using dance, theatre, music, publication and other collective gestures. While I have worked mostly in Toronto, my family have lived in a farming community outside of Santiago, in Chile, for over 25 years. (lizpeterson.org)

I think the most important struggle we deal with globally is, who has the power to effect change on the world and the means through which they come to hold that power. There have been plenty of movements that have tried to address this problem; political movements that collapse hierarchies and methodologies to devise truly egalitarian processes. In my mind there’s nothing wrong with one person holding power, the problems arise when power sits with the same person/folks for too long.

Through my work as an Associate Artist with Public Recordings I think a lot about shared leadership; its challenges and its’ value. My experience is that collective creation is often initiated by an individual, but that doesn’t mean that its authorship has to lie only with that individual. In the execution of a collaborative project there are inevitably key players who hold space and make it possible for others to act with agency. This is the kind of leadership that I hope to see more of in the future.

I would say that most of the creative projects I am part of deal with these questions and in pursuing an MFA in Directing (Theatre) at Columbia University a large part of my research will be thinking about the process of creation and how to destabilize the traditional hierarchical structures integral to westernized theatre. I believe that if we think more carefully about the ways in which we make art, we can make an impact on the kinds of art that are highly valued.

THE PROJECT// My project proposal for the Toptal Scholarship is related to my MFA in that its’ end goal is to build a project with shared leadership as its’ core value. I would be taking this research and applying it to the creation of a new co-operative organization that supports women in a rural farming community in Chile.

In Chile, increasingly, small farms are disappearing and mega farms are taking over land holdings, absorbing most of the employment in rural areas. My family in Melipilla farm on a small scale and are part of a burgeoning community of organic farmers. There are federal programs and limited small business grants to support and train folks in this community, however, the biggest challenge is education around sustainable business models, developing meaningful relationships with potential markets, and promoting organic farming methods.

Importantly, I’ve noticed that in this area, small production organic farms tend to be operated by women. Within their community I see how they exchange knowledge about all kinds of things from seeds to funding opportunities, and through a combination of intuition and necessity, they have collectively self-organized. This is the starting place for their co-operative business and they are currently taking the first steps to get permits with their local municipality to open a store on a main road that runs through a growing middle-class suburban area. In a rural setting however, where industrial farming methods are recognized as the only viable option, it’s very challenging to affirm and legitimize the work that they are doing. That’s why I would like to support them in the early stages of setting up their business and I think that mentorship from Toptal would give me access to knowledge in innovative project management and technical skills that would be integral to bridging the gap between this rural co-operative start-up and a growing market.

As an artist, I have often been inspired by examples of co-operative educational models, most notably, Black Mountain College, which is widely recognized as having been an incubator for the American avant-garde movement. However, co-operative universities, while innovative and utopic, have historically been unable to transform into sustainable financial models. Co-operative farmers markets however, seem to have more financial success. I’m aware of at least two existing supermarkets in Toronto that began as farmers’ co-ops. To me it’s exciting to imagine an alternatively structured organization with an end goal to promote the economic well-being of women and their families by building a co-op that could both benefit their farming businesses and be a site for shared learning.

I would work on this project over the course of one year to provide support and mentorship to women from the surrounding rural population in setting up a sustainable co-operative organization. Mentorship through Toptal would provide me with advice on: assessing the surrounding markets, (especially in the nearby capital, Santiago, where the real demand for organic produce lies); strategies for presenting this project to both private and government funding bodies during this key year as the UN Climate Change Conference will be hosted in Chile in December 2019; establishing an impactful online presence for the organization (that could host profiles for all participating farmers and give online sales access); strategies for marketing the ethos of the co-op itself; and developing a five-year business plan to establish a sustainable co-operative business.

While I’m aware that Toptal provides services mostly for the tech industry, I believe that the skills that I could learn from Toptal mentors are transferable and applicable to this project and almost any future creative project. Most importantly, I know that if I could provide some resourced short-term support it would have a long-lasting impact for a whole community of women in rural Chile.

I’m acutely aware of the privilege that it is to be able to attend an Ivy League university. As an artist who works mostly in collaborative processes an MFA in Directing could seem like a provocation. My hope is that if I can build a website for a co-operative farming organization run by women and help them make a business plan over the course of the next year, I will be staying true to this provocation: while becoming a leader often requires an investment in your personal development, the ultimate goal is to elevate the community around you.

-Liz Peterson.

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archiveofprolbems · 6 years

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Cognitarian Subjectivation by Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Recent years have witnessed a new techno-social framework of contemporary subjectivation. And I would like to ask whether a process of autonomous, collective self-definition is possible in the present age. The concept of “general intellect” associated with Italian post-operaist thought in the 1990s (Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi) emphasizes the interaction between labor and language: social labor is the endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds. Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and match innumerable other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital.

Semiocapital puts neuro-psychic energies to work, submitting them to mechanistic speed, compelling cognitive activity to follow the rhythm of networked productivity. As a result, the emotional sphere linked with cognition is stressed to its limit. Cyberspace overloads cybertime, because cyberspace is an unbounded sphere whose speed can accelerate without limits, while cybertime (the organic time of attention, memory, imagination) cannot be sped up beyond a certain point—or it cracks. And it actually is cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyper-productivity. An epidemic of panic and depression is now spreading throughout the circuits of the social brain. The current crisis in the global economy has much to do with this nervous breakdown. Marx spoke of overproduction, meaning the excess of available goods that could not be absorbed by the social market. But today it is the social brain that is assaulted by an overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. The social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of networked production is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the cognitive class.

I wish to pinpoint the problem of organic limits, which is often eclipsed by an emphasis on the limitless potential of technology. We should speak of technology in context, and the present context of technology is culturally oriented towards economic competition. Info-producers are neuro-workers. Their nervous systems act as active receiving terminals. They are sensitive to semiotic activation throughout the entire day. What emotional, psychic, existential price does the constant cognitive stress of permanent cognitive electrocution exact? The acceleration of network technologies, the general condition of precariousness, and the dependence on cognitive labor all induce pathological effects in the social mind, saturating attention time, compressing the sphere of emotion and sensitivity, as is shown by psychiatrists who have observed a steep increase in manic depression and suicide in the last generation of workers.

The colonization of time has been a fundamental issue in the modern history of capitalist development: the anthropological mutation that capitalism produced in the human mind and in daily life has, above all, transformed the perception of time. But we are now leaping into the unknown—digital technologies have enabled absolute acceleration, and the short-circuiting of attention time. As info-workers are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that cannot be dealt with according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge, acceleration leads to an impoverishment of experience. More information, less meaning. More information, less pleasure.

Sensibility is activated in time. Sensuality is slow. Deep, intense elaboration becomes impossible when the stimulus is too fast. A process of desensitization is underway at the point where electronic cyberspace intersects with organic cybertime. The prospect of individual subjectivation, and of social subjectivation, has to be reframed in this context, and a series of radical questions arise: Is it still possible to envisage a process of collective subjectivation and social solidarity? Is it still possible to imagine a “movement” in the sense of a collective process of intellectual and political transformation of reality? Is it still possible to forge social autonomy from capitalist dominance in the psycho-economic framework of semiocapitalism?

Dismantling General Intellect

The refusal of work—which is better defined as a refusal of the alienation and exploitation of living time—has been the main engine of innovation, of technological development and knowledge. The organic composition of capital (as a relationship between dead labor and living labor) progressively changed throughout the twentieth century as the workers’ resistance, their sabotage and insubordination, forced capitalists to hire engineers to replace human labor with machines. Similarly, the intellectualization of human activity is—from any perspective—a consequence of the workers’ insubordination and resistance to exploitation. When the cost of labor increases (as happened in the 1960s and ’70s), the capitalist replaces worker with machine, as the machine is less costly in the long run. Since the massive wave of industrial workers’ resistance, information technology has helped to replace human toil with intelligent machines, and this has provoked the enhancement of the sphere of intellectual labor and cognitive activity linked to value production.

The ’90s were a decade of alliances: cognitive labor and venture capital met and merged in the dot-com. Expectations were high, judging by the amount of investment, and creativity became an inherent feature of social labor. Then, after the dot-com bubble burst in spring of 2000, neoliberalism broke the alliance of cognitive labor and venture capital. Using technology itself, neoliberalism managed to subvert the social and political rapport de force between labor and capital. As far as we can see now, the result of neoliberal politics is a general reduction of labor cost and an impoverishment of the cognitarians. Both industrial labor, delocalized to the peripheral areas of the world, and cognitive labor, are devalued and underpaid, as precarization has fragmented and finally destroyed social solidarity. In this new context, defined by precarization of cognitive labor, we must rethink the question of subjectivation.

Just after the financial collapse of spring 2000, the dot-com crash and the crumbling of big corporations like Enron and WorldCom, the Swiss philosopher and economist Christian Marazzi, a sharp analyst of the social implications of financial crises, wrote an article on the danger of privatizing the general intellect, in which he predicted the trend that ten years later is in full swing: the reduction of research financing, the manipulation and militarization of state-financed research, and the impoverishment and precarization of cognitive labor.1

If we look at the politics of the European neoliberal ruling class, we see that they are doing exactly this: in some countries (such as Italy) they are reducing the financing for school and for research, privatizing public schools, and provoking a large-scale de-scholarization that has already begun showing signs of producing widespread ignorance and fanaticism. In some countries (like France), they increasingly limit the public financing of research to that which can immediately translate into the politics of economic growth. Subjugating research to immediate economic interests reduces the role of research, rendering it a mere tool for governance, for the repetition of an existing framework of social activity. As cognitive workers are forced into precarity, they are also denied the possibility of deciding the scope of their own research. This obviously reduces the creativity invested by cognitarians in their work, as well as the pace of innovation and progress in technology.

In the long run, this trend obliterates the progressive features of capitalism. As the cost of labor becomes so low that exploiting the physical force of a worker costs less than looking for some technological replacement, the push toward innovation slows to a halt. The interest in immediate profit prevails over the long-term development of productive force. Notwithstanding the shortsighted opinions prevailing in the field of neoliberal economics, a decrease in labor cost suggest that the progressive impulse of capitalism is fading; capitalism becomes a factor of de-civilization, of intellectual and technological regression.

Cognitarians Searching for a Body

Cognitarians are those who embody the general intellect in its many forms: they process information in order to give birth to goods and services. As the cognitive function of society is inscribed in the process of capital valorization, the infinitely fragmented mosaic of cognitive activity becomes a fluid process within a universal telematic network, redefining the shape of labor and capital. Capital becomes the generalized semiotic flux that runs through the veins of the global economy, while labor becomes the constant activation of the intelligence of countless semiotic agents linked to one another.

Cognitarians are the social body of the soul at work in the sphere of semiocapital, but this body is dimidiated in a sphere isolated from the other’s body. The form of alienation that is spreading in the living sphere of the cognitarians is a form of psychic suffering that escapes the Freudian definition of neurosis. If Freud’s definition of neurosis lingered on repression of desire, semiocapital is pushing demand for consumerist hyper-expression: just do it. Panic, depression, and a de-activation of empathy—it is here that we find the cognitariat’s problem.

Precarious cognitive workers are forced to think in terms of competition. You can become friends with another person on Facebook, but genuine friendship is difficult under conditions of virtual isolation and intense economic competition. If we want to find the way towards autonomous collective subjectivation we have to generate cognitarian awareness with regard to an erotic, social body of the general intellect. The way to autonomous and collective subjectivation starts here: from the general intellect searching for a body.

Our main political task must be handled with the conceptual tools of psychotherapy, and the language of poetry—much more than the language of politics and the conceptual tools of modern political science. The political organizer of cognitarians must be able to do away with panic and depression, to speak in a way that sensibly enacts a paradigm shift, a resemiotization of the social field, a change in social expectations and self-perception. We are forced to acknowledge that we do have a body, a social and a physical body, a socioeconomic body.

Cyber-optimists were fashionable in the ’90s, and they were able to interpret the spirit of an alliance between venture capitalists and artists or engineers. But the alliance was broken in the Bush years, when technology was submitted to the laws of war, and financial capitalism provoked a collapse that may still lead to the destruction of modern civilization. Today, cyber-optimism sounds fake, like advertising for a rotten product. In his recent book, You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier, the same person who engineered the tools of virtual reality, writes:

true believers in the hive mind seem to think that no number of layers of abstraction in a financial system can dull the efficacy of the system. According to the new ideology, which is a blending of cyber-cloud and neo–Milton Friedman economics, the market will not only do its best, it will do better the less people understand it. I disagree. The financial crisis brought about by the U.S. mortgage meltdown of 2008 was a case of too many people believing in the cloud too much.2

Governance and Cognitive Subjugation

In the present, agonizing phase of neoliberalism (an agony that is more ferocious and destructive than the previous phases) European governments are staging an assault on the educational system—and particularly on scientific research—as a part of a war against cognitive labor, a war aimed at its subjugation. The university system across Europe is based on a huge amount of precarious, underpaid, or unpaid labor. Researchers and students have staged protests against this trend, attempting to return the educational system to its original vocation: a place of non-dogmatic knowledge, of the public sharing of culture. Research should not be subjected to any restraining criterion of functionality, because its very function is to explore solutions that, although dysfunctional in the present paradigm, may reveal new paradigmatic landscapes. This is the role of scientific research, especially when we are facing conundrums that seem unresolvable within the capitalist paradigm.

The European ruling class aims to reduce research to a method for the governance of complexity. The ideology of governance is based on the naturalization (hypostatization, I would say in Hegelian parlance) of economic reasoning. The economy has achieved the status of a universal language, of the ultimate standard of choice, whereas economics should be just a branch of knowledge among others. The normative role that the economy has acquired is unwarranted from an epistemological point of view, and devastating at the social level. If research is subjected to economic conceptualization, it is no longer research, but technical management. The so-called reform of the European educational system launched in 1999 (the year of the Bologna Charter) is aimed at the separation of applied research from the questioning of the very foundations and finalities of scientific knowledge, accompanied by the subjugation of research to standards set by economic evaluation.

The epistemic implications of this move are enormous: to submit research to the laws of economic growth obliterates the most important purpose of knowledge, what Thomas Kuhn calls its “paradigmatic” function. The ability to produce paradigm shifts in the field of knowledge and in the field of experimentation depends on the autonomy of research from established standards of evaluation. Only when research can work and discover and create concepts regardless of established social interests can knowledge move beyond repetition, and open new prospects to imagination and technology.

“Governance” is the keyword for this process. Governance produces pure functionality without meaning, the automation of thought and of will. It embeds abstract connections in the relation between living organisms, technologically subjecting choices to logical concatenation. It recombines compatible (compatibilized) fragments of knowledge. Governance is the replacement of political will with a system of automatic technicalities forcing reality into a logical framework that cannot be questioned. Financial stability, competitiveness, labor cost reduction, increase of productivity: the systemic architecture of EU rule is based on such dogmatic foundations that cannot be challenged or discussed, because they are embedded in the technical function of managerial subsystems. No enunciation or action is operational if it does not comply with embedded rules of techno-linguistic dispositifs of daily exchange.

Governance is the management of a system that is too complex to be governed. The word “government” means the understanding (as a reduction to a rational model) of the social world, and the ability of the human will (despotic, democratic, and so forth) to control a flow of information sufficient for the control of a relevant part of the social whole. The possibility of government requires a low degree of complexity with regard to social information. Information complexity grew throughout the late modern age, and exploded in the age of the digital network. Therefore, the reduction of social information to comprehensive knowledge and political control becomes an impossible task: control becomes aleatory, uncertain, almost impossible, and an increasing number of events escape the organized will.

At this point, capitalism shifts to the mode of governance. It employs abstract concatenation of technological functions in place of the conscious processing of a flow of information. It connects asignifying segments in place of dialogic elaboration. It automatically adapts in place of forming consensus, using technical language in place of shared meaning resulting from dialogue and conflict. In place of planning, it manages disruption. It assesses the compatibility of agents entering the social game in place of mediating conflicting political interests and projects. And it employs the rhetoric of systemic complexity in place of a rhetoric of historical dialectics.

Looking for Autonomy

As the governance model functions perfectly, in itself, it destroys the social body. Conceptualizing the field of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener argued that a system exhibiting positive feedback, in response to perturbation, increases the magnitude of perturbation. In contrast, a system that responds to a perturbation in a way that reduces its effect is said to exhibit negative feedback.

A logic of positive feedback is installed in the connection between digital technology and financial economy, because this connection tends to induce technological automatisms, and psycho-automatisms too, leading to the advancement of destructive tendencies. Look at the discourse of the European political class (almost without exception): If deregulation produced the systemic collapse with which the global economy is now confronted, we need more deregulation. If lower taxation on high incomes led to a fall in demand, let’s lower high-income taxation. If hyper-exploitation resulted in the overproduction of unsold and useless cars, let’s intensify car production.

Are these people insane? I don’t think so. I think they are incapable of thinking in terms of the future; they are panicking, terrorized by their own impotence; they are scared. The modern bourgeoisie was a strongly territorialized class, linked to material assets; it could not exist without a relationship to territory and community. The financial class that dominates the contemporary scene has no attachment to either territory or material production, because its power and wealth are founded on the perfect abstraction of a digitally multiplied finance.

And this digital-financial hyper-abstraction is liquidating the living body of the planet, and the social body. Only the social force of the general intellect can reset the machine and initiate a paradigm shift, but this presupposes the autonomy of the general intellect, the social solidarity of cognitarians. It presupposes a process of autonomous subjectivation of collective intelligence.

All images by ISTUBALZ.

Franco Berardi, aka "Bifo," founder of the famous "Radio Alice" in Bologna and an important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan.

1.See Christian Marazzi, “The Privatization of the General Intellect,” trans. Nicolas Guilhot, →.

2. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget (New York: Random House, 2010), 97.

Source: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/20/67633/cognitarian-subjectivation/

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ghigoberni · 6 years

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There are no islands of safety outside or beyond capitalism. A more poetic future can only come from within ourselves

The ideals of ecological conservation are failing, as is the ideal to maintain global peace and harmony. Both are beyond the scope of the ordinary citizen and absent the required scale of commitment from international governing bodies to succeed. The march of capitalism renders it seemingly impossible to avoid planetary destruction, so where does this leave hope?

The failure to form a positively hopeful new idea or ideology with the capacity to neutralize the unacceptable underbelly of capitalism explains why the end of the world is observably accelerating. We have lost the cultural and political means to imagine any acceptable radical alternative because political radicalism, of the sort which would castigate greed and hubris, is offensive to the dominant neoliberal doctrine. We see nothing substantially seductive to halt the increasingly deregulated virulence of capitalism. The risks, both ecological and thermonuclear, are inevitably real.

The movement required must necessarily possess a spiritual dimension around which humanity might faithfully make sacrifices on behalf of present and future generations. And yet the perceived futility of such aims holds us in procrastination, surrendered to the ephemera of entertainment, gastronomy, carnality, and bottomless polemicism for as long as this final ride lasts. The grand ecological movements for planetary preservation were once expected to galvanize colossal international efforts, but instead the measures taken have been pusillanimous. There are many private capital initiatives racing to meet these needs but to be effective in time the enterprise requires infinitely more public money and coordination.

I propose that socialism (not communism) is the only contender with a non-violent track record of moderating runaway capitalism. It is a movement pregnant with possibility since it elicits, thanks to Corbyn, the worst kind of negative media attention unfairly connecting him to the ghosts of Soviet-era militant socialism, as well as embroiling him in a McCarthyite torrent of antisemitism accusations. Despite these bogus claims, U.K. Labour’s roots owe less to a revolutionary tradition than to the Methodist movement which originally incubated it. It already has a spiritualized birthright, founded on Christian principles of altruism and restraint. Having shed it’s founding identity to embrace neoliberal values, Labour soon engaged in several wars under Blair’s direction in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In the years since these conflicts, the UK has witnessed dramatic changes: bank collapses, extreme austerity measures, war in Syria, Brexit, and the scandal of Grenfell, which have shaken faith in both government and the press institutions. Corbyn’s popularity is unusual in as much as he has endured extremely thin support within the PLP, whilst being attacked relentlessly in the press. And despite the fact that he almost pulled off the election comeback of the century, the party’s resurgence continues to be attenuated in several significant ways.

Economic impotence and anti-socialist propaganda

Firstly the growing economic imbalances highlighted by Thomas Piketty expose the futility in believing that the overwhelming majority of human beings, by virtue of their economic deprivation, might have the will to pursue ecological causes whilst the asset-rich 1% seem destined to expand their wealth even further. And besides, deprived areas are often distracted by violence and conflict.

Perhaps, it’s shortsighted to imagine that there is no existential threat to capitalism, other than capitalism itself. Islamic extremism seems purposed as a threat, but in reality it merely serves to “strengthen our resolve”, enabling the fanatics of neoliberalism to lead the way in exporting violence.

But beyond even the remotest possibility that Islamic fundamentalism might mount a credible challenge to the present western order, there are two political ideologies much closer to home, simmering just below the surface tension: fascism and socialism. The former ideology is based on social Darwinist concepts and thus it lurks in and around the capitalist animus, straining at the tantalizing prospect of war, eager to assert power. The latter is of course just as likely to rear up in defiance, or else there could be no justifiable explanation for the remorseless, obsessive media vilification of Corbyn. And though beneath the smoking ashes of democratic socialism in the UK lies a formidable phoenix, western capitalist hegemony will do its best, as it has done throughout the world since the Cold War, to ensure that no form of socialism is allowed to prosper (at least not in South America, although the Scandinavian exception must be recognised). The use of dirty tricks to successfully sabotage it leaves it misrepresented, not only as as a serial failure, but also as a trojan horse for radical communism.

The delusion that wealth will soften the inevitable and defend the soverignty of capitalism.

Secondly, the tendency of the wealthy is to protect their accumulations in the deluded belief that either a) the ecological threat will be resolved via self-correcting free-market mechanisms, or b) that somehow they themselves will find a resourceful way to cope with the consequences of man-made catastrophe. In fact, some of the most influential and seemingly enlightened silicon valley capitalists (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk) are seriously thinking in terms of colonizing remote geographical havens on Earth, or even Mars, as a means to transcend the apocalyptic inevitability which human beings are already casually factoring into their future. Peter Thiel touts the particularly disturbing proposition that by moving to New Zealand he will be able to create artificial island colonies (seascaping) which will be sovereign, exempt from international obligations or accords. In other words, such people would recreate the very conditions of capitalist hubris which are driving us to the brink in the first place.

Framing political debate in the philosphy-free vacumm of the corporate news era

Lastly, the descent into political fragmentation, political confusion, and infantilized (dis)information madness, is largely the result of identity politics, a trend facilitated by governments and amplified in the extreme, both by corporate media, and the unprecedented phenomenal addiction to peer validation on social media. Within this endless and narrowly framed polemicism, the plurality of individual choice is paradoxically met by a severely impoverished, binary political landscape. The colossal influence of the corporate lobby ensures that no political movement antagonistic to it is granted relevance, or even political legitimacy. By virtue of this, individual free will is a chimera unconsciously formed in the culture of echo chambers and flagrant media propaganda.

Under these conditions there is little scope for believing in an alternative mode of social existence, particularly since the great social experiments of recent history have yielded only tragic failures. Accordingly, hardly anybody believes in ideology and yet, caught in a paradox, the majority appear compliant with the ideology of neoliberalism.

Still, in deference to Corbyn’s astonishing political resilience, it’s reasonable to expect his apparent immunity to continue to transcend the status quo, barring any desperate attempts to successfully portray him as a traitor to bogus patriotic causes.

Neoliberalism as the vehicle for relocating power from democracy to corporatocracy

Let’s review the official definition of neoliberalism: a modified form of liberalism tending to favour free-market capitalism. In reality, neoliberalism more than favours the ruthless rationality of free-market capitalism, whilst dressing it in the platitudinous bourgeois language of corporate marketeers. It’s a language which conceals a growing neocolonial conceit, particularly in the international development arena where, despite the evidence of economic performance figures, the doctrine often does more harm than good.

The problem grows as governments continue under unprecedented corporate lobby pressure to surrender their regulatory roles to become, instead, the facilitators of the fiscal and legislative interests of corporate and financial institutions. Thus, we find ourselves hurtling inevitably towards a form of corporate feudalism in which the wealth of the world continues to be vacuumed ever-dramatically towards the 1%. The unspoken underlying driver of this aggressive form of capitalism is social Darwinism - the idea that individuals, communities, institutions and nations are driven by the same competitive forces found in nature. It’s a taboo subject because it also underpins the capitalist principles which in the past justified imperialism, racial supremacy, and eugenics. Ostensibly, these are attitudes are still in play.

Concepts such as capitalism, corporatism, neoliberalism, exceptionalism, have coalesced to form one gigantic fire-breathing dragon. The power of its flaming seduction is formidable and many submit resignedly to its abuses, both in terms of domestic austerity and violence abroad.

The problem at home manifests when people find themselves unable to cope within these neoliberal prescriptions, and they begin to exhibit the fear and resentment which arise from failure, or the possibility of failure. Accordingly, during times of economic stress and uncertainty, and in the absence of a socialist alternative, they tend to vote angrily for competitive social Darwinists, the types of politicians (Trump/May) who offer nothing more than a reassurance that the current system (expressed in the emotive terms of national identity and shared values) is the greatest system in the world, and that it is others - immigrants, rogue foreign powers, radicalized muslims - who either game the system or “threaten our freedoms and our securities”.

To live and die according to such strictures, fully aware of the hypocrisies involved, constitutes an existential crisis of hopelessness. But for those in abject denial, or even vaguely aware of the contradictions, the effect is to elicit a cognitive dissonance which erodes the soul and ultimately leads to barbarism.

What this all means in practice is that dominant nations leverage this compliant fear and hopeless ignorance to secure competitive economic advantage at any cost, both at home (austerity cuts, lower wages) and abroad (wars for strategic control of resources, and expanding market opportunities). They use their UN council membership privilege and influence to secure strategic advantages which they usually couch in moral imperative (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria). They then muster the genuine patriotic compliance of ordinary people who are sold on the usual mantras - “exceptionalism”, “defend our freedoms”, “we have a moral responsibility”, etc.

If the doctrine were simply ‘divide and rule’ we might be more inclined to accept imperialism as a historical human inevitability. Yet today the doctrine appears to be a far more cynical ‘divide and destroy’ routine intended to plunder resources in such a way as to guarantee terror - the phenomenon of rage aimed at the western architects of an equally monstrous brand of militarized terror.

Why the post-communist era should have become so quickly mired in foreign policy unpleasantness is not too difficult to understand. The very collapse of communist ideology left America looking like the proud and justified bastion of capitalism it had always claimed to be. But peacetime was going to hurt the military-industrial complex and leave the US vulnerable to the growing economic challenge coming from China. Accordingly, preventative measures would need to be taken.

The Project For a New American Century and its global legacy.

We are talking about a transatlantic neo-conservative initiative whose pivotal roots stretch back to Blair and George W Bush. Bush’s, hawkish advisors (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle, et al) had proposed an ambitious manifesto known as the Project For A New American Century, written by Kristol and Kagan in 1997.

We must consider also that the Republican party’s traditional constituencies are the Arms, and Oil & Gas lobbies, and that Israel in recent decades has been very closely connected with U.S. foreign policy (AIPAC) regardless of incumbent party. The dynastic nature of the Bush presidencies is historically connected to the Saudi oil dynasties. This is relevant in as much as many of these connections still come into play today: Rex Tillerson (Oil & Gas) has been replaced by John Bolton (co-signatory of PNAC and former under secretary to George W Bush) as Trump’s new National Security Advisor. Then we have the recent state visit (accompanied by a very blatant PR campaign) by the Saudi Crown Prince Bin Salman, who’s country is directly responsible for bombing Yemen using U.S. and UK military weapons and technical assistance and contributing, according to the United Nations, to one of the worst humanitarian crises of the last 50 years.  

Israel and Saudi Arabia play more than an integral role in the sectarian fragmentation of the religious middle east. It’s an effective triad with the Western Alliance to maintain control and access to regional strategic resources. Securing oil is obviously one regional objective, but another is to swing the military wrecking ball so as to discourage other nations (namely China, and more recently Russia) from considering the possibility of challenging western hegemony, or even questioning its motives and methods.

I certainly recommend you read the PNAC here since it’s a startling and candid declaration about how the U.S. should remain the dominant global power following perestroika. You might be shocked to read matter-of-fact passages such as “advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” Disturbing as it is to think such diabolical propositions exist, the point here is that the project is effectively the original blueprint for the kind of strategic invasions we subsequently witnessed in the middle east, beginning with Afghanistan in 2011. Regime-change in Iraq was, for the authors, the biggest imperative, but they also suggested that to do so might require a causus belli, similar to the attack on Pearl Harbour. The same authors, Kristol and Kagan, replaced the PNAC with the Foreign Policy Initiative in 2009, but it is substantially unchanged.

All of this background helps us to connect the events of 9/11, orchestrated or otherwise, with the present. Notwithstanding the infamous attack on New York, it’s important to recognize that the strategic ambitions of the U.S. had already been expressed a few years earlier.

Julian Assange

In recent days Assange has been totally cut off from the outside world by being denied visitation rights, internet and telephone access. It’s more than likely that he is finally being silenced because of pressure on the new Ecuadorian president.

Assange is inconvenient to the objectives a power which, as I have already described, does not tolerate criticism or challenge. He’s responsible for uncovering the Clinton foundation funding of Jihadists and Isis militants in the middle east, as well as the shocking nature of indiscriminate warfare tactics in Iraq, thanks to Private Manning’s video release of civilians being murdered from a helicopter gunship.

It’s instructive to remember that he’s simply and primarily a journalist. He is performing a public service in a similar tradition to many courageous investigative iconoclasts such as Seymour Hersh, John Pilger, Robert Fisk, and Glen Greenwald

The primary function of good political journalism during democratic peacetime is to challenge power. During wartime, it’s reasonable to expect considerable cooperation on the part of the news organs. From the moment New York was attacked on 9/11, the Western press world was placed on an understandable war footing, while the intelligence community was granted significantly expanded powers to deal with the war on terror. It seems logical that journalists under these conditions might avoid questioning foreign policy for fear of being judged unpatriotic. For this fundamental reason it’s instructive to observe the way in which such courageously non-embedded journalists, and many others like them, have either been smeared or dismissed, despite the prescient quality of their previous contributions. Assange is accused of spying on behalf of so-called enemies of the US state. His brainchild, Wikileaks, is a news gathering agency sworn to protect the identity of its sources. Some of the information submitted is tantamount to spying, although it’s reasonable to conclude that whistle-blowing is usually a useful public service, even when it’s illegal.

Any journalist worth their salt ought to share such information whenever the exposure of state or corporate secrets might expose corruption or falsehood, for the benefit of the ordinary tax-paying citizen. The fact that Assange does so on a global scale is problematic to those powers whose objective it is to maintain a narrative which seeks to justify the usually unseen brutality required to retain global hegemonic control. Let’s list some of the ways in which this particular journalist has been smeared:

1. It’s patently clear that, beyond the hideously false accusations of rape (for which all charges have been dropped), Assange is highly inconvenient to those wishing to control the political narrative.

Originally he sought asylum from the government of Ecuador in order to halt the UK from extraditing him to Sweden to face the aforementioned spurious charges. Had he voluntarily submitted himself to the Swedish Government, it’s likely that he would have been extradited to the US. Though all charges against him have been dropped, he has been warned that he would be arrested by the UK and extradited to the US should he step outside the immunity of the Ecuadorian embassy, where he has been a virtual exile since 2012. It is widely expected that he would be swiftly tried as an enemy of the US state and incarcerated. Many voices justifiably accuse Russia of silencing some its own journalists yet, at the risk of countering with moral equivalencies, the West has been subtly but equally harsh on its most qualified critics, including whistleblowers.

2. According to the easily accepted Western neoliberal narrative, his pre-election criticisms and revelations about Hillary Clinton’s campaign implied to many that he was a Trump supporter, and hence collaborating with Russia to interfere in the US electoral process. It is almost unanimously claimed in US media that the political triumph of the incumbent president is an anomaly made possible thanks to Russian interference. Consequently Assange is branded a “Russian stooge”.

Much like the claims of WMD in Iraq, such convictions appear motivated and threadbare, and evidently don’t amount enough to warrant Trump’s impeachment. It’s interesting to observe that though Trump could reasonably face impeachment on a number of other issues, the state apparatus seems intent on pressing his connection to a Russian hacking story which, ostensibly, is going nowhere for lack of substance. The real reason, in my humble experience, is that the US wants nothing to do with Russia because Russia has always cautioned against reckless US foreign policy adventures. Dialog is the last thing the US wants if it intends to fulfill its planned Foreign Policy Initiatives unhindered by inconvenient arguments. Consequently it dismisses all counter-narrative as unreliable in order to suit its objective.

Besides, beyond the realpolitik view that all powerful nations interfere to some extent in the political affairs of others, the US has often interfered in this regard https://off-guardian.org/2018/01/30/us-boasts-about-interfering-in-sovereign-nations-while-sanctioning-russia-for-allegedly-doing-the-same/. The hasty expulsion of Russian diplomats following the hacking story implies that the US authorities are not interested in any diplomatic dialogue with Russia about the hacking claim - something which in itself warrants suspicion. The fact that the US government threatened to shut down the Russian news channel RT seems to indicate that it wants its citizens to feel the disapproval of the surveillance state. In the UK, RT has repeatedly been described by the BBC as a crude Russian propaganda channel, the apparent intention being to deter viewers from fostering any curiosity outside the excrutiatingly scripted political narratives.

3. Assange’s public comments on the Catalonian crisis, and his provocative questions regarding the inconsistencies surrounding the Skripal incident have attracted the most vitriolic attacks. It appears that by inviting his audience to question the official media consensus, he invites hasty condemnation from the major news channels, as well as from parliament, where Tory foreign affairs minister Alan Duncan actually called for an end to his asylum protection status, referring to him as a miserable little worm.

As anachronistically pompous such attacks might appear, it’s worth observing that the conflation tactics of the western media involve tenuously connecting Assange to Putin and Trump, providing a gullibly entertained audience with an almost amusing array of pantomime villains, including our very own Jeremy Corbyn.

And yet, Assange has never been silenced until now. So why the sudden change in political tactic? According to his mother, Catherine Assange, there are two reasons. One has to do with his criticism of Germany’s arrest of Charles Puigdemont, the Catalan leader wanted in Spain on charges of sedition. The other has to do with the fact that he was about to submit evidence on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, building on his little publicised 2014 book When Google Met Wikileaks. In it he provides an insight into how our lives (and by extension our thoughts) are both analysed and regulated. According to him, the alarming thing about the Cambridge Analytica scandal was that there is collusion between secret state services and private corporations in the shaping of public consensus. If true, it makes sense that certain states, namely the U.S and the U.K., should apply diplomatic pressure on Ecuador to completely isolate Assange from the public. The Cambridge Analytica news story was quickly swept aside to focus on near-hysterical claims of rampant anti-semitism within the UK Labour party.

The extent to which the cognitive-military complex is herding consciousness cannot be underestimated and it should certainly not be assumed that it is merely (in the fear-mongering climate of terrorism) protecting the collective national interest. The intentions are far more base and sinister. By accepting corporate funded news as gospel we are unwittingly complicit not only in the murder of truth and democratic accountability, but also in the wars and proxy wars being waged around the world on behalf of a neoliberal imperialist U.S hydra.

War is Peace

The dystopian future of Orwell’s 1984 is already fulfilled, though not in the totalitarian climate he foresaw. Instead we live in an ostensibly benign cultural bubble, in which the riot gear of fascist coercion is replaced by a subtle array of politically correct signals and protocols whose violation draws instant peer condemnation. As such, cognitive manipulation across corporate and social media has become a powerfully stealthy version of the Ministry Of Thought Control.

For the moment, the best hope is for the UK to go it alone with the anti-neoliberal project Corbyn is proposing. It’s a huge undertaking involving many structural reforms but, if successful, a historically progressive nation such as this might yet have the ability to set a powerful example to the rest. It takes just one prominent dissenter to begin the process of rejecting the tyranny of ideological capitalism.

And with the growth of sympathetic European movements such as DiEM25 you have the added possibility of further challenge through radical progressive means, as a welcome alternative to the continuing European drift towards the neoliberal right.

A confident socialist resurgence against the anachronistic tropes of established neoliberal consensus seems the only way in which capitalism will stop eating itself alive. After all it was three times elected President Roosevelt, through a radical socialist welfare redistribution program, who famously declared he had saved capitalism.

People have been conditioned to fear socialism, when in reality they ought to fear the vicious blights of neoliberal hubris.

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