Saturday, February 18, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
As benign as Lucifer: The privatization of water
By Richard Raznikov / The Rag Blog / February 9, 2012
Beginning about 20 years ago, it dawned on the bankers and some major corporations that if oil was a lucrative commodity water would be even more so... The trick was how to take it away from the people and sell it back to them.
SAN RAFAEL, California -- There hasn’t been much rain this season where I live. Personally, I don’t mind much. I like sunny days, summer weather, dry fairways at San Geronimo. The deer are not very happy, having to spend more time on my street than they’d prefer but they’ve had to come down from the hills a bit looking for food.
Where I live the reservoirs are still mostly full from the last winter’s rain and we will not experience any delays or service interruptions. I pay for water every month, the local water district sends a bill, costs maybe 30 bucks if everybody showers a lot and there are loads of clothes.
Drinking water, all I have to do is open the tap.
I take water for granted, did even during drought years when we recycled water for the garden and to flush toilets. Shower with a friend, the saying went, and we did, although that didn’t really seem to save much water.
Every year about 2 million people, most of them children, die from lack of water, either directly or indirectly through lack of sanitation; that’s twice as many people as the United States killed in Iraq. Estimates of international agencies put the number at 1.1 billion who do not have access to enough water to drink, cook with, or properly bathe.
Water in Marin County is a public utility. There’s a water board elected by the voters and various projects from time to time. For most of my life I was not even aware that water might be a problem for some people, blissfully wrapped in the Bay Area cocoon. What I’d heard seemed to be passing news bulletins. Droughts somewhere, I wasn’t sure. Relief efforts.
I’ve also been ignorant about nearly everything else in the world. I don’t think I really got how deeply evil some corporations were. I didn’t understand how money worked, nor what the World Bank was about, nor the International Monetary Fund. They sounded benign. They are about as benign as Lucifer.
I certainly didn’t understand how the World Bank and some huge corporations were, in concert, working to kill millions of people by depriving them of access to water. I do now.
Of course, their public relations departments would go berzerko at such a charge. For my opinion on public relations departments, see Bill Hicks on YouTube.
We’re helping all of those people, the World Bank would say. We’re sponsoring important developments and laying pipe all over the place. Without us, hell, that water would just lay there underground not doing anybody any good. That’s not only what they would say, it’s what they do say.
If you were naive, like I was, you might think that water, being the one single necessity of life without which you’re flat-out dead, and being a substance which comprises 70% of the surface of the planet, and which falls from the sky and runs in rivers above and below ground, you might think that water is a common property, owned by the human race. That’s pretty much been true for a couple of thousand years.
It has long been accepted throughout the world that, according to Indian author Vandana Shiva, “water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature’s gift and denies the poor of their human rights,” and “water is a commons... it cannot be owned as private property and sold as a commodity.” Water is the basis of all life. It is preposterous that it might be owned and that some may be thereby deprived of it.
Thanks, however, to the World Bank, which is actually just the operative arm of the largest U.S. banks and whose policies can bring down governments -- c.f. Italy and Greece in the past few months alone -- the commons argument is quickly dying. Most Americans, being inhabitants of a nation which does not generally have these worries, are unaware of this.
Beginning about 20 years ago, it dawned on the bankers and some major corporations that if oil was a lucrative commodity water would be even more so. Everyone had to have water, even if they rode bicycles to work or took public transit. The trick was how to take it away from the people and sell it back to them.
But with the help of the World Bank and friendly governments such as the U.S. under Bill Clinton, stipulations could be included in trade agreements and in loan conditions to developing countries.
Programs grew quickly in India, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Nigeria, Mexico, Malaysia, Australia, and the Philippines. They’ve now spread to Canada, England, Turkey, Colombia, Guatemala, Morocco, New Zealand, South Africa, El Salvador, and even China.
The impact has been to dramatically, and fatally, increase the cost of water, especially to the poor and for small agriculture, while simultaneously degrading its quality. Corporations such as Coca-Cola, Bechtel, Nestle, Pepsi-Cola, and the French company, Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, have bought off local governments, imposed horrendous conditions, and in some cases murdered people who have tried to stop them.
Maybe you’re thinking, Coca-Cola? How can that be? Things go better with Coke! But no, they actually don’t. And Bechtel? Why, that’s a Bay Area company, voted near the top of employers people like working for. I mean, it’s not as though we’re talking about Halliburton here.
Everywhere water privatization has gone there are stories of widespread misery. Quite literally, every country listed above is a horror story, with the exception of Argentina because the government there, and the people, kicked Suez’ sorry ass out (along with the World Bank). But we’ll focus on just two or three. Whatever I don’t get to in this column -- I’ve got more than 50 pages of notes and printouts -- you can find by typing in the name of a country, water, and the World Bank. That ought to do it.
The first water privatization story I ever heard was out of Bolivia. It seemed that Bechtel, somehow, had gotten hold of the country’s water supply. I didn’t understand how that was possible, plus I’d never associated Bechtel, which is mostly a construction outfit once run by Reagan’s pal (and Secretary of State) George Schultz, with water. What could that possibly be about? As it happens, Bechtel is involved in over 200 water and wastewater projects in more than 100 countries around the world.
If you were naive, like I was, you might think that water, being the one single necessity of life without which you’re flat-out dead, and being a substance which comprises 70% of the surface of the planet... is a common property, owned by the human race.
Cochabamba, Bolivia, is a semi-desert region. Water is a scarce precious resource. In 1999, the World Bank told Bolivia that in order to obtain a much-needed $600 million in international debt relief, it would have to privatize Cochabamba’s public water system, giving the concession to a Bechtel subsidiary, International Water.
The Bolivian Congress caved in, passing the ‘Drinking Water and Sanitation Law’ in October of 1999, ending government subsidies to municipal utilities and authorizing privatization. International Water took over in Cochabamba. The minimum wage is less than $100 a month, but IW raised the price of water to an average of $20 per household. The impact was immediate: many poor families had to choose between food and water.
The people rebelled. In January 2000, peasants formed the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life and through mass mobilization shut down the city for four days. Within a month a million Bolivians marched to Cochabamba and stopped all transportation in the city.
The Bolivian government pretended to give in, promising to roll back water prices; it never did. In February, the Coalition organized a peaceful march demanding that the October 1999, law be repealed, the water contract terminated, the inclusion of ordinary people in drafting a resources law, and the cancellation of ordinances permitting privatization. The government responded by imposing martial law.
The media was censored, activists were arrested, and several protesters, including a 17-year-old boy shot in the head by soldiers, were killed.
But the people would not bend. Finally, after demonstrations which rocked the country, the government was forced to revoke the privatization legislation. The water company (and its debts) was surrendered to the people, and the Coalition held public hearings to start democratic management and planning.
Bechtel, and its allies inside the government, refused to quit. They harassed and threatened activists and leaders of the Coalition. In November 2001, Bechtel filed a lawsuit before the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, which happens to be located on the grounds of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. The ICSID holds its sessions in private. The public and the media are barred from the proceedings.
I’ve written before about how the world’s largest banks control nations by forcing them into positions of debt from which they can’t escape. It’s a simple but elegant mechanism. Simply loan money to a government which desires to -- choose one or more of the following –– steal it, give it to their friends, buy weapons, build infrastructure, and then enjoy the leverage you’ve got when they can’t quite service the debt.
It’s how Spain was able to crush Haiti forever on the imposition of a debt for Haitian independence. It’s how nearly all Latin American countries have been controlled for decades, making deals to stave off bankruptcy by borrowing ever greater sums and, for the dubious privilege, sacrificing the public welfare and in many cases democracy.
It’s how the World Bank and the IMF were able to impose on Italy and Greece so-called "austerity measures" which screw the poor, privatize public resources, and install as President in each country a recent big shot from Goldman Sachs by way of the IMF.
That’s why the Kirchners sent such shock waves through the world’s banking giants when they got themselves elected in Argentina and promptly told the World Bank to go fuck itself.
But for the most part, in most places on earth, regardless of the people living there, the unholy alliance between multinational corporations, the World Bank, and governments with flexible ethics has produced vast profits for the principals and increasing misery for the people.
India is another classic example, although there it is Coca-Cola, which has essentially appropriated the water needed for agriculture, which is despoiling large portions of the country.
Although its public relations whores have recently described the corporation as “a leader when it comes to environmental issues,” the facts are quite different. One classic example would be in the Plachimada community in the state of Kerala. Coke opened a bottling plant there in 2000; the community immediately suffered from chronic drought and polluted water. The reasons are hardly in dispute. As Indian journalist Arjun Sen wrote in 2003,
Three years ago, the little patch of land in the green, picturesque rolling hills of Palakkad yielded 50 sacks of rice and 1,500 coconuts a year. It provided work for dozens of labourers. Then Coke arrived and built a 4-acre bottling plant nearby. In his last harvest, Shahul Hameed, owner of the small holding, could manage only five sacks of rice and just 200 coconuts. His irrigation wells have run dry because Coke draws up to 1.5 million litres of water daily through its deep wells...
To make matters worse, the bottling plant was producing thousands of gallons of toxic sludge and, as the BBC reported, disposed of it by selling the carcinogenic material to local farmers as "fertilizer."
That’s a “leader when it comes to environmental issues”? Christ, who finished second?
Needless to say, many people in India have fought against the Coca-Cola operations but they’ve been unable to overcome money and vast political resources of the corporation. The company is able to extract groundwater free of charge, except for a small fee for discharging wastewater. It makes exploiting India too valuable to give up. About a dozen years ago, the cost of industrial water in the United States was roughly $5 per 10,000 litres. In India, the price was three cents.
By several reliable estimates, there have been in excess of 25,000 suicides by farmers over the last decade, a majority of these in the western and southern states, no longer able to feed their families because Coca-Cola has destroyed their farms.
Popular protest finally forced the closing of the Kerala plant, at least temporarily, but the corporation simply shifted its operations to other areas of Southern India. Other companies besides Coca-Cola have begun to grab a piece of the action, all of this facilitated by the World Bank, which is promoting the privatization of water in India and all over the world.
The northern territories are also at risk. Another bottling plant, which opened in 2000, is located in Mehdiganj, where company extraction has caused water levels to fall more than 6 meters. Crops have failed and livelihoods have been destroyed. Local activists throughout the country, trying to rally opposition, have discovered that Coca-Cola, in league with the wealthier segments of the polity, have simply rerouted pipelines to bypass villages entirely.
“What we see happening with Coca-Cola has been happening all over the country,” says Tom Palakudiyil of Water Aid. “The rich (are) able to acquire powerful pumps and extract more and more water with no limits.”
It is not only Coca-Cola sucking up the Indian water. In partnership with Enron -- yes, that Enron -- it operated the Dabhol plant and is involved in water privatization in Coimbatore/Tirrupur as part of a consortium with others.
As internet journalist Tom Levitt reported two years ago,
Sitting at the bottom of the pile are the small-scale farmers. Without adequate water supplies, the 70 percent of Indians who make their living from agriculture have nothing. The Bundelkhand region in northern India is a typical example of what happens when the water runs dry. Although never a lush region, the area has now completely lost the ability to sustain small-scale agriculture.
Many thousands of villages have been unable to get water even from tankers and have been abandoned completely. The entire society is being violently altered by what amounts to wholesale theft of the nation’s water. And, of course, larger forces are prepared to “help” those most in need.
One of the powerful forces driving the growing problem worldwide has been the World Bank which, in late 2009, had the astonishing temerity to say that “under current practices” one-third of the world’s population would have access to only half the water they need by the year 2030. The report then recommended that $50 billion be invested annually by governments and business in water management projects.
Coca-Cola, which uses enough water each day to meet the entire world’s water requirements for 10 days, enthusiastically endorsed the World Bank report.
To fully appreciate how powerful the World Bank is and how significant its "recommendations," consider that it is able to wave large sums of money in front of political leaders in any country, offering not only cash which may or may not be diverted into personal bank accounts but financing for massive projects which both enrich major contractors and, for a while, please a lot of people.
The debt incurred, as you know from periodic references on the generally useless mainstream U.S. media, cannot be paid back. Many governments don’t much care at the time of the original loan, of course, because by the time the interest becomes onerous those politicos will be retired on their estates.
Any country faced with a large debt, and there are many, is forced by the IMF and the World Bank to privatize water. It is a common demand of these entities as one of the conditions of a loan. They also insist on creation of policies which guarantee “full cost recovery” and the elimination of internal government subsidies. In Ghana, for example, thanks to the World Bank, the forced sale of water at "market rates" required the poor to spend up to half of their earnings on water.
This is worldwide, it is growing, and it is killing people.
Add to this equation what happens when nations do not wish to borrow themselves into a hole. They mysteriously find themselves in wars. Ask Libya. And in the aftermath of wars, there is enormous wealth to be made.
Consider again our friends at Bechtel. Being run out of Bolivia has not daunted them, no indeed. Within a month of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bechtel acquired a $680 million contract for "rebuilding" the country we were about to destroy.
As described by Vandana Shiva in her article, "Bechtel And Blood For Water: War As An Excuse For Enlarging Corporate Rule," "The U.S. led war first bombed out Iraq’s hospitals, bridges, water works, and now U.S. corporations are harvesting profits from ‘reconstructing’ a society after its deliberate destruction. Blood was not just shed for oil, but for control over water and other vital services."
Our old friend George Schultz, board member and senior counsel to the company where he once served as president, wrote a September, 2002, newspaper OpEd in which he was a positively thrilled cheerleader for the destruction yet to come: “A strong foundation exists for immediate military action against Hussein and for a multilateral effort to rebuild Iraq after he’s gone.” How’s that for putting a price tag on human misery?
Now, let’s talk about Mexico.
The situation in Mexico is especially dire, and its impact is of course felt directly by the United States since it impacts the desire of people to cross the northern border illegally, and contributes, with NAFTA, at least indirectly, to the drug wars near the border.
Coca-Cola is big in Mexico, very big. It is the number one Coke consuming nation in the world. Its impact on the water supply has been catastrophic. The company spends more than $500 million annually on advertising. It also imposes quotas on small shop owners in exchange for promotional items such as tables, chairs, and refrigerators with the Coke logo.
“Water’s been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,” says attorney James Olson, who specializes in water rights. “Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous."
At the same time, and not coincidentally, 12 million people have no access to piped water and 32 million have no access to proper sewage. Coca-Cola’s resource monopoly simultaneously creates a scarce water supply and an abundant supply of Coke. The country is also the second largest consumer of bottled water, much of it sold by guess who.
The process of making Coke requires at least two liters of water for each liter of the finished product; some estimates are as high as five-to-one. The business end is covered by dozens of water concessions from the Mexican government which handed the company the legal right to take water from, as of 2008, 19 aquifers and 15 rivers, many of these in indigenous territories. They have also picked up the right to dump toxic waste in at least eight different public water sources.
The process of privatization has nearly swallowed the entirety of the country’s water. Yet the country hasn’t received much in return from Coca-Cola. In 2003, the company paid $29,000 for water concessions in the entire nation; in 2004, their profits from the bottling plant in San Cristobal de las Casas, the largest in the country and second largest in the world, alone reached $40 million.
An internet article by journalist Monica Wooters in 2008 described the situation in Chiapas, which gets nearly half of Mexico’s total annual rainfall and contains a large percentage of its surface water.
The bottling plant is located at the foot of Huitepec, a mountain overlooking the city, protected in part by a Zapatista ecological preserve. Huitepec is on top of an enormous underground aquifer, which is the key source for Coca-Cola’s water for the plant. In 2004, the company used 107 million liters from this aquifer, enough to supply water to 200,000 homes -- more homes than currently exist in San Cristobal.
There’s no actual record of the size of the aquifer, and the company, if it has estimates, is not saying, however the company’s operative subsidiary, FEMSA, has begun looking for new water sources in Chiapas. In addition, the waste created by the plant is often toxic, containing lead, cadmium, and chromium. The city has not imposed controls on dumping, nor does the central government, and there is now a risk of contaminating the water table.
The central Mexican government does not recognize indigenous communities as having any rights to participate in the legal proceedings concerning water concessions. Coca-Cola, via FEMSA, has achieved what is essentially a monopoly over water rights. In 1996, the Zapatista rebellion, which roiled the country for a considerable time, succeeded in gaining a measure of local voice in water decisions, however in 2001 the legislature overturned the agreements which the central government had made.
The impact around the world of the privatization of water is calamitous.
In each of the countries cited earlier, there are similar stories about privatization: the destruction of agriculture, the escalating cost to the poor, the concomitant rise in associated diseases and infant mortality. In many places, the private corporations, in league with corrupt, venal governments, simply rob inhabitants of one of the necessities of life. In many places, corporations are assisted by extortionate lending practices of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In many of these, the United States and its State Department play significant roles.
Privatization of water is making inroads in the United States. In Sitka, Alaska, which is home to one of the world’s most spectacular lakes, the Blue Lake Reservoir holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it does not need any treatment.
Now, under the auspices of True Alaska Bottling and S2C Global, hundreds of millions of gallons are being siphoned into tankers and shipped to Mumbai, and from there to several cities in the Middle East. Water is being turned into a global commodity.
“Water’s been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,” says attorney James Olson, who specializes in water rights. “Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous.” He may be right on both counts. Commodities are sold to the highest bidder for the biggest profit. They have nothing to do with human needs or even human survival.
A former vice president of the World Bank said, “The next world war will be fought over water.” If he’s right, he’d better be well-armed because most of the rest of the world will be looking for sons of bitches like him.
[Richard Raznikov is an attorney practicing in San Rafael, California. He blogs at News from a Parallel World. Find more articles by Richard Raznikov on The Rag Blog.]
Beginning about 20 years ago, it dawned on the bankers and some major corporations that if oil was a lucrative commodity water would be even more so... The trick was how to take it away from the people and sell it back to them.
SAN RAFAEL, California -- There hasn’t been much rain this season where I live. Personally, I don’t mind much. I like sunny days, summer weather, dry fairways at San Geronimo. The deer are not very happy, having to spend more time on my street than they’d prefer but they’ve had to come down from the hills a bit looking for food.
Where I live the reservoirs are still mostly full from the last winter’s rain and we will not experience any delays or service interruptions. I pay for water every month, the local water district sends a bill, costs maybe 30 bucks if everybody showers a lot and there are loads of clothes.
Drinking water, all I have to do is open the tap.
I take water for granted, did even during drought years when we recycled water for the garden and to flush toilets. Shower with a friend, the saying went, and we did, although that didn’t really seem to save much water.
Every year about 2 million people, most of them children, die from lack of water, either directly or indirectly through lack of sanitation; that’s twice as many people as the United States killed in Iraq. Estimates of international agencies put the number at 1.1 billion who do not have access to enough water to drink, cook with, or properly bathe.
Water in Marin County is a public utility. There’s a water board elected by the voters and various projects from time to time. For most of my life I was not even aware that water might be a problem for some people, blissfully wrapped in the Bay Area cocoon. What I’d heard seemed to be passing news bulletins. Droughts somewhere, I wasn’t sure. Relief efforts.
I’ve also been ignorant about nearly everything else in the world. I don’t think I really got how deeply evil some corporations were. I didn’t understand how money worked, nor what the World Bank was about, nor the International Monetary Fund. They sounded benign. They are about as benign as Lucifer.
I certainly didn’t understand how the World Bank and some huge corporations were, in concert, working to kill millions of people by depriving them of access to water. I do now.
Of course, their public relations departments would go berzerko at such a charge. For my opinion on public relations departments, see Bill Hicks on YouTube.
We’re helping all of those people, the World Bank would say. We’re sponsoring important developments and laying pipe all over the place. Without us, hell, that water would just lay there underground not doing anybody any good. That’s not only what they would say, it’s what they do say.
If you were naive, like I was, you might think that water, being the one single necessity of life without which you’re flat-out dead, and being a substance which comprises 70% of the surface of the planet, and which falls from the sky and runs in rivers above and below ground, you might think that water is a common property, owned by the human race. That’s pretty much been true for a couple of thousand years.
It has long been accepted throughout the world that, according to Indian author Vandana Shiva, “water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature’s gift and denies the poor of their human rights,” and “water is a commons... it cannot be owned as private property and sold as a commodity.” Water is the basis of all life. It is preposterous that it might be owned and that some may be thereby deprived of it.
Thanks, however, to the World Bank, which is actually just the operative arm of the largest U.S. banks and whose policies can bring down governments -- c.f. Italy and Greece in the past few months alone -- the commons argument is quickly dying. Most Americans, being inhabitants of a nation which does not generally have these worries, are unaware of this.
Beginning about 20 years ago, it dawned on the bankers and some major corporations that if oil was a lucrative commodity water would be even more so. Everyone had to have water, even if they rode bicycles to work or took public transit. The trick was how to take it away from the people and sell it back to them.
But with the help of the World Bank and friendly governments such as the U.S. under Bill Clinton, stipulations could be included in trade agreements and in loan conditions to developing countries.
Programs grew quickly in India, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Nigeria, Mexico, Malaysia, Australia, and the Philippines. They’ve now spread to Canada, England, Turkey, Colombia, Guatemala, Morocco, New Zealand, South Africa, El Salvador, and even China.
The impact has been to dramatically, and fatally, increase the cost of water, especially to the poor and for small agriculture, while simultaneously degrading its quality. Corporations such as Coca-Cola, Bechtel, Nestle, Pepsi-Cola, and the French company, Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, have bought off local governments, imposed horrendous conditions, and in some cases murdered people who have tried to stop them.
Maybe you’re thinking, Coca-Cola? How can that be? Things go better with Coke! But no, they actually don’t. And Bechtel? Why, that’s a Bay Area company, voted near the top of employers people like working for. I mean, it’s not as though we’re talking about Halliburton here.
Everywhere water privatization has gone there are stories of widespread misery. Quite literally, every country listed above is a horror story, with the exception of Argentina because the government there, and the people, kicked Suez’ sorry ass out (along with the World Bank). But we’ll focus on just two or three. Whatever I don’t get to in this column -- I’ve got more than 50 pages of notes and printouts -- you can find by typing in the name of a country, water, and the World Bank. That ought to do it.
The first water privatization story I ever heard was out of Bolivia. It seemed that Bechtel, somehow, had gotten hold of the country’s water supply. I didn’t understand how that was possible, plus I’d never associated Bechtel, which is mostly a construction outfit once run by Reagan’s pal (and Secretary of State) George Schultz, with water. What could that possibly be about? As it happens, Bechtel is involved in over 200 water and wastewater projects in more than 100 countries around the world.
If you were naive, like I was, you might think that water, being the one single necessity of life without which you’re flat-out dead, and being a substance which comprises 70% of the surface of the planet... is a common property, owned by the human race.
Cochabamba, Bolivia, is a semi-desert region. Water is a scarce precious resource. In 1999, the World Bank told Bolivia that in order to obtain a much-needed $600 million in international debt relief, it would have to privatize Cochabamba’s public water system, giving the concession to a Bechtel subsidiary, International Water.
The Bolivian Congress caved in, passing the ‘Drinking Water and Sanitation Law’ in October of 1999, ending government subsidies to municipal utilities and authorizing privatization. International Water took over in Cochabamba. The minimum wage is less than $100 a month, but IW raised the price of water to an average of $20 per household. The impact was immediate: many poor families had to choose between food and water.
The people rebelled. In January 2000, peasants formed the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life and through mass mobilization shut down the city for four days. Within a month a million Bolivians marched to Cochabamba and stopped all transportation in the city.
The Bolivian government pretended to give in, promising to roll back water prices; it never did. In February, the Coalition organized a peaceful march demanding that the October 1999, law be repealed, the water contract terminated, the inclusion of ordinary people in drafting a resources law, and the cancellation of ordinances permitting privatization. The government responded by imposing martial law.
The media was censored, activists were arrested, and several protesters, including a 17-year-old boy shot in the head by soldiers, were killed.
But the people would not bend. Finally, after demonstrations which rocked the country, the government was forced to revoke the privatization legislation. The water company (and its debts) was surrendered to the people, and the Coalition held public hearings to start democratic management and planning.
Bechtel, and its allies inside the government, refused to quit. They harassed and threatened activists and leaders of the Coalition. In November 2001, Bechtel filed a lawsuit before the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, which happens to be located on the grounds of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. The ICSID holds its sessions in private. The public and the media are barred from the proceedings.
I’ve written before about how the world’s largest banks control nations by forcing them into positions of debt from which they can’t escape. It’s a simple but elegant mechanism. Simply loan money to a government which desires to -- choose one or more of the following –– steal it, give it to their friends, buy weapons, build infrastructure, and then enjoy the leverage you’ve got when they can’t quite service the debt.
It’s how Spain was able to crush Haiti forever on the imposition of a debt for Haitian independence. It’s how nearly all Latin American countries have been controlled for decades, making deals to stave off bankruptcy by borrowing ever greater sums and, for the dubious privilege, sacrificing the public welfare and in many cases democracy.
It’s how the World Bank and the IMF were able to impose on Italy and Greece so-called "austerity measures" which screw the poor, privatize public resources, and install as President in each country a recent big shot from Goldman Sachs by way of the IMF.
That’s why the Kirchners sent such shock waves through the world’s banking giants when they got themselves elected in Argentina and promptly told the World Bank to go fuck itself.
But for the most part, in most places on earth, regardless of the people living there, the unholy alliance between multinational corporations, the World Bank, and governments with flexible ethics has produced vast profits for the principals and increasing misery for the people.
India is another classic example, although there it is Coca-Cola, which has essentially appropriated the water needed for agriculture, which is despoiling large portions of the country.
Although its public relations whores have recently described the corporation as “a leader when it comes to environmental issues,” the facts are quite different. One classic example would be in the Plachimada community in the state of Kerala. Coke opened a bottling plant there in 2000; the community immediately suffered from chronic drought and polluted water. The reasons are hardly in dispute. As Indian journalist Arjun Sen wrote in 2003,
Three years ago, the little patch of land in the green, picturesque rolling hills of Palakkad yielded 50 sacks of rice and 1,500 coconuts a year. It provided work for dozens of labourers. Then Coke arrived and built a 4-acre bottling plant nearby. In his last harvest, Shahul Hameed, owner of the small holding, could manage only five sacks of rice and just 200 coconuts. His irrigation wells have run dry because Coke draws up to 1.5 million litres of water daily through its deep wells...
To make matters worse, the bottling plant was producing thousands of gallons of toxic sludge and, as the BBC reported, disposed of it by selling the carcinogenic material to local farmers as "fertilizer."
That’s a “leader when it comes to environmental issues”? Christ, who finished second?
Needless to say, many people in India have fought against the Coca-Cola operations but they’ve been unable to overcome money and vast political resources of the corporation. The company is able to extract groundwater free of charge, except for a small fee for discharging wastewater. It makes exploiting India too valuable to give up. About a dozen years ago, the cost of industrial water in the United States was roughly $5 per 10,000 litres. In India, the price was three cents.
By several reliable estimates, there have been in excess of 25,000 suicides by farmers over the last decade, a majority of these in the western and southern states, no longer able to feed their families because Coca-Cola has destroyed their farms.
Popular protest finally forced the closing of the Kerala plant, at least temporarily, but the corporation simply shifted its operations to other areas of Southern India. Other companies besides Coca-Cola have begun to grab a piece of the action, all of this facilitated by the World Bank, which is promoting the privatization of water in India and all over the world.
The northern territories are also at risk. Another bottling plant, which opened in 2000, is located in Mehdiganj, where company extraction has caused water levels to fall more than 6 meters. Crops have failed and livelihoods have been destroyed. Local activists throughout the country, trying to rally opposition, have discovered that Coca-Cola, in league with the wealthier segments of the polity, have simply rerouted pipelines to bypass villages entirely.
“What we see happening with Coca-Cola has been happening all over the country,” says Tom Palakudiyil of Water Aid. “The rich (are) able to acquire powerful pumps and extract more and more water with no limits.”
It is not only Coca-Cola sucking up the Indian water. In partnership with Enron -- yes, that Enron -- it operated the Dabhol plant and is involved in water privatization in Coimbatore/Tirrupur as part of a consortium with others.
As internet journalist Tom Levitt reported two years ago,
Sitting at the bottom of the pile are the small-scale farmers. Without adequate water supplies, the 70 percent of Indians who make their living from agriculture have nothing. The Bundelkhand region in northern India is a typical example of what happens when the water runs dry. Although never a lush region, the area has now completely lost the ability to sustain small-scale agriculture.
Many thousands of villages have been unable to get water even from tankers and have been abandoned completely. The entire society is being violently altered by what amounts to wholesale theft of the nation’s water. And, of course, larger forces are prepared to “help” those most in need.
One of the powerful forces driving the growing problem worldwide has been the World Bank which, in late 2009, had the astonishing temerity to say that “under current practices” one-third of the world’s population would have access to only half the water they need by the year 2030. The report then recommended that $50 billion be invested annually by governments and business in water management projects.
Coca-Cola, which uses enough water each day to meet the entire world’s water requirements for 10 days, enthusiastically endorsed the World Bank report.
To fully appreciate how powerful the World Bank is and how significant its "recommendations," consider that it is able to wave large sums of money in front of political leaders in any country, offering not only cash which may or may not be diverted into personal bank accounts but financing for massive projects which both enrich major contractors and, for a while, please a lot of people.
The debt incurred, as you know from periodic references on the generally useless mainstream U.S. media, cannot be paid back. Many governments don’t much care at the time of the original loan, of course, because by the time the interest becomes onerous those politicos will be retired on their estates.
Any country faced with a large debt, and there are many, is forced by the IMF and the World Bank to privatize water. It is a common demand of these entities as one of the conditions of a loan. They also insist on creation of policies which guarantee “full cost recovery” and the elimination of internal government subsidies. In Ghana, for example, thanks to the World Bank, the forced sale of water at "market rates" required the poor to spend up to half of their earnings on water.
This is worldwide, it is growing, and it is killing people.
Add to this equation what happens when nations do not wish to borrow themselves into a hole. They mysteriously find themselves in wars. Ask Libya. And in the aftermath of wars, there is enormous wealth to be made.
Consider again our friends at Bechtel. Being run out of Bolivia has not daunted them, no indeed. Within a month of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bechtel acquired a $680 million contract for "rebuilding" the country we were about to destroy.
As described by Vandana Shiva in her article, "Bechtel And Blood For Water: War As An Excuse For Enlarging Corporate Rule," "The U.S. led war first bombed out Iraq’s hospitals, bridges, water works, and now U.S. corporations are harvesting profits from ‘reconstructing’ a society after its deliberate destruction. Blood was not just shed for oil, but for control over water and other vital services."
Our old friend George Schultz, board member and senior counsel to the company where he once served as president, wrote a September, 2002, newspaper OpEd in which he was a positively thrilled cheerleader for the destruction yet to come: “A strong foundation exists for immediate military action against Hussein and for a multilateral effort to rebuild Iraq after he’s gone.” How’s that for putting a price tag on human misery?
Now, let’s talk about Mexico.
The situation in Mexico is especially dire, and its impact is of course felt directly by the United States since it impacts the desire of people to cross the northern border illegally, and contributes, with NAFTA, at least indirectly, to the drug wars near the border.
Coca-Cola is big in Mexico, very big. It is the number one Coke consuming nation in the world. Its impact on the water supply has been catastrophic. The company spends more than $500 million annually on advertising. It also imposes quotas on small shop owners in exchange for promotional items such as tables, chairs, and refrigerators with the Coke logo.
“Water’s been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,” says attorney James Olson, who specializes in water rights. “Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous."
At the same time, and not coincidentally, 12 million people have no access to piped water and 32 million have no access to proper sewage. Coca-Cola’s resource monopoly simultaneously creates a scarce water supply and an abundant supply of Coke. The country is also the second largest consumer of bottled water, much of it sold by guess who.
The process of making Coke requires at least two liters of water for each liter of the finished product; some estimates are as high as five-to-one. The business end is covered by dozens of water concessions from the Mexican government which handed the company the legal right to take water from, as of 2008, 19 aquifers and 15 rivers, many of these in indigenous territories. They have also picked up the right to dump toxic waste in at least eight different public water sources.
The process of privatization has nearly swallowed the entirety of the country’s water. Yet the country hasn’t received much in return from Coca-Cola. In 2003, the company paid $29,000 for water concessions in the entire nation; in 2004, their profits from the bottling plant in San Cristobal de las Casas, the largest in the country and second largest in the world, alone reached $40 million.
An internet article by journalist Monica Wooters in 2008 described the situation in Chiapas, which gets nearly half of Mexico’s total annual rainfall and contains a large percentage of its surface water.
The bottling plant is located at the foot of Huitepec, a mountain overlooking the city, protected in part by a Zapatista ecological preserve. Huitepec is on top of an enormous underground aquifer, which is the key source for Coca-Cola’s water for the plant. In 2004, the company used 107 million liters from this aquifer, enough to supply water to 200,000 homes -- more homes than currently exist in San Cristobal.
There’s no actual record of the size of the aquifer, and the company, if it has estimates, is not saying, however the company’s operative subsidiary, FEMSA, has begun looking for new water sources in Chiapas. In addition, the waste created by the plant is often toxic, containing lead, cadmium, and chromium. The city has not imposed controls on dumping, nor does the central government, and there is now a risk of contaminating the water table.
The central Mexican government does not recognize indigenous communities as having any rights to participate in the legal proceedings concerning water concessions. Coca-Cola, via FEMSA, has achieved what is essentially a monopoly over water rights. In 1996, the Zapatista rebellion, which roiled the country for a considerable time, succeeded in gaining a measure of local voice in water decisions, however in 2001 the legislature overturned the agreements which the central government had made.
The impact around the world of the privatization of water is calamitous.
In each of the countries cited earlier, there are similar stories about privatization: the destruction of agriculture, the escalating cost to the poor, the concomitant rise in associated diseases and infant mortality. In many places, the private corporations, in league with corrupt, venal governments, simply rob inhabitants of one of the necessities of life. In many places, corporations are assisted by extortionate lending practices of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In many of these, the United States and its State Department play significant roles.
Privatization of water is making inroads in the United States. In Sitka, Alaska, which is home to one of the world’s most spectacular lakes, the Blue Lake Reservoir holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it does not need any treatment.
Now, under the auspices of True Alaska Bottling and S2C Global, hundreds of millions of gallons are being siphoned into tankers and shipped to Mumbai, and from there to several cities in the Middle East. Water is being turned into a global commodity.
“Water’s been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,” says attorney James Olson, who specializes in water rights. “Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous.” He may be right on both counts. Commodities are sold to the highest bidder for the biggest profit. They have nothing to do with human needs or even human survival.
A former vice president of the World Bank said, “The next world war will be fought over water.” If he’s right, he’d better be well-armed because most of the rest of the world will be looking for sons of bitches like him.
[Richard Raznikov is an attorney practicing in San Rafael, California. He blogs at News from a Parallel World. Find more articles by Richard Raznikov on The Rag Blog.]
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Saturday, February 11, 2012
A Conversation with Slavoj Zizek
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/10/theres-this-slovenian-saying/
By BRADLEY G. BOLMAN and TARA RAGHUVEER, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Published: Friday, February 10, 2012
FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia with Slavoj Zizek.
When Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek visited Harvard for a lecture on the ontology of sexual difference last October, FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 sat down to discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia.
Fifteen Minutes: What is the role of academia at an institution like Harvard in the current global crisis?
Slavoj Žižek: What is crucial and also I think—especially today, when we have some kind of re-emergence of at least some kind of practical spirit, protest, and so on—one of the dangers I see amongst some radical academia circles is this mistrust in theory, you know, saying, “Who needs fat books on Hegel and logic? My god, they have to act!”
No, I think quite on the contrary. More than ever, today it’s crucial to emphasize that on the one hand, yes, every empirical example undermines theory. There are no full examples. But, point two, this does not mean that we should turn the examples against theory. At the same time, there is no exception. There are no examples outside theories. Every example of a theory is an indication of the inner split dynamics of the theory itself, and here dialectics begins, and so on....
Don’t fall into the trap of feeling guilty, especially if you have the luck of studying in such a rich place. All this bullshit like, “Somalian children are starving....” No! Somalian children are not starving because you have a good time here. There are others who are much more guilty. Rather, use the opportunity. Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory.
Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.”
Again, I think there is a certain strategy today even more, and I speak so bitterly about it because in Europe they are approaching it. I think Europe is approaching some kind of intellectual suicide in the sense that higher education is becoming more and more streamlined. They are talking the same way communists were talking 40 years ago when they wanted to crush intellectual life. They claimed that intellectuals are too abstract in their ivory towers; they are not dealing with real problems; we need education so that it will help real people—real societies’ problems. And then, again, in a debate I had in France, some high politician made it clear what he thinks and he said...in that time in France there were those demonstrations in Paris, the car burnings. He said, “Look, cars are burning in the suburbs of Paris: We don’t need your abstract Marxist theories. We need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. We need urban planners to tell us how to organize the suburbs to make demonstrations difficult.”
But this is a job for experts, and the whole point of being intellectual today is to be more than an expert. Experts are doing what? They are solving problems formulated by others. You know, if a politician comes to you, “Fuck it! Cars are burning! Tell me what’s the psychological mechanism, how do we dominate it?” No, an intellectual asks a totally different question: “What are the roots? Is the system guilty?” An intellectual, before answering a question, changes the question. He starts with, “But is this the right way to formulate the question?”
FM: You spoke at Occupy Wall Street a few months ago. What is your personal involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and what do you think the protests signify?
SZ: None. My personal involvement was some guy who was connected with it, and he told me, “Would you go there, come there?” And I said, “Okay. Why not?”
Then the same guy told me,“Be careful, because microphones are prohibited, you know, it’s this echoing, repeating.” So my friend told me, frankly, to be demagogic: “Just try to be as much as possible effective, short, slow,” and so on, and that was it. I didn’t even drop my work.
What does [Occupy] mean? Then they tell you, “Oh, Wall Street should work for the Main Street, not the opposite,” but the problem is not this. The problem is that the system stated that there is no Main Street without Wall Street. That is to say that banking and credits are absolutely crucial for the system to function today.
That is why I understand Obama when—two years ago you know when the first, I think it was, $750 billion and a bit more—it was simply blackmail and it was not possible to say no because that’s how the system functions. If Wall Street were to break down, everything would break. We should think more radically. So again, the formula “Give money to Main Street and not to Wall Street” is ruined. That is to say, all these honest, hardworking people who do their jobs cannot find work now. Think how to change that. Think how to change [the] mechanisms of that. We are no longer dealing with short-term crises like in 2008.
FM: Why do you believe that the Right and the Left in America have failed to provide answers to the problems of inequality and the crises they predict?
SZ: It’s crazy but I’m convinced about it: look at the last two seasons of “24.” Look closely, something very interesting happens. It’s not only superficial, political correctness. In season seven, Jack Bauer investigates some Muslim attacks and then he discovers it’s not Muslims at all: it’s some American mega-security company who is manipulating these attacks. Something much more tragic happened in the last season, which I quite liked. It’s that, at the end, Jack Bauer breaks out of this authoritarian logic. Somebody has to do the dirty job, torturing, and so on. He says, “Maybe I should say it publicly, everything, I cannot live with it.” So this logic of “The true heroes are those who are ready to do the dirty job—torture for the country,” it breaks down. His liberal counterpoint, the president, Allison Taylor, also breaks down and has to quit. So that, at the end, you get a very honest assessment of a deadlock and the message is: within the present global systemic coordinates, whatever you do, you end up in a deadlock. I think this honest confrontation with the ethical deadlock is much more valuable than the Hollywood Left “feel-good” attitude of movies like Pelican Brief or All the President’s Men, which may appear radical in their accusation: “Oh my god, even the President of the United States can be corrupted blah blah blah.” Nonetheless, these are all “feel-good” movies because at the end the final message is: “Wow, what a great country! Two ordinary guys can overthrow the mightiest man in the world!” If I were to choose between this Leftist, liberal All the President’s Men or Jack Bauer, I [would] choose Jack Bauer every day. I’m sorry to tell you.
Because it does what honest conservatives want—not reactionaries: reactionaries are stupid, they think if we go back to lost values, it will work. Liberals are stupid progressives. What we can learn from honest conservatives is that they are ready to accept a deadlock.
For example, Marx said about Balzac: precisely as a conservative, Balzac depicted the deadlock of French society. Even [American political scientist] Francis Fukuyama, he no longer believes in this bullshit “end of history.” He told me that the very fact of the possibility of biogenetic manipulations makes his thesis on the “end of history” obsolete. And he thinks that to cope with this problem we need much stronger forms of social control, which liberal-democratic capitalism cannot provide. This is what I like and this is what we can learn from honest conservatives: they don’t bullshit you. And maybe this is the duty of us intellectuals. You know when people ask me on Wall Street, “What should we do?” I was so embarrassed because, fuck you, what do I know? I don’t. But what we should do is simply break the rules in the sense of opening new space. [The world is] confused as it is, always, from Wall Street to Egypt. Nonetheless, it is opening up space. People are becoming aware. It’s the first move, but nonetheless, we have to start to think about some kind of radical change. All these Leftist, liberal things—more gay rights, more abortion—of course we fight for that, but that’s not enough. Ironically, when I was young, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face; these guys are offering us global capitalism with a human face. It’s the same system but a little bit more.... We have to break this taboo, which was very strong until now: nobody even dared to imagine an alternative. Everyone was, in a way as I say, a Fukuyamist. Even radicals, we somehow accept that global capitalism and liberal democracy are here to stay, and the point is only to make the system a little bit more efficient.
No, it is clear we have to start thinking.
And this is a great responsibility, because of course there is no way back to the glories of 20th century communism. No, but that’s our duty at this point, just to open up the field and, at the same time, to undermine, break. We have to be very destructive at this point, destructive in the sense of breaking false illusions....
Who would have expected the Arab Spring, or whatever you call it? It did happen. Who would have expected these big demonstrations in Europe that are occurring? They are happening. People at the beginning thought, “Oh this is something that will explode.” No, it goes on. There is a tremendous potential in dissatisfaction. But again, this is always a potential danger.
FM: It seems that a similar deadlock appears in the context of both the economic crisis and global warming—experts can’t seem to predict them, nor will politicians or society act to stop them.
SZ: I especially hate, from my own experience, when people say, “Oh, who could have predicted this [economic crisis]?” No. I know a couple of leftists and empiricists who exactly predicted this. These are not the kinds of cheap catastrophists who all of the time give bad predictions and then something happens so that they go awry. No, no. They were very precise and predicted this crisis. Paul Krugman said something deeply true. A guy asked him, “But now that we know, wouldn’t things be radically different if we were to know 10 years back what we know now?” He said, “No, no, it wouldn’t. The system pushes you to act in a certain way.” The illusion is much stronger. Like, you may know that there may be a catastrophe, but nonetheless, we would have done exactly the same thing. I mean, it’s no longer a question of knowledge. Today many, even sociologists, have this wonderful idea of how, although we live in a society of knowledge—even scientific knowledge—[it] is becoming more and more contingent, non-binding. I think it was the German theorist Ulrich Beck who drew attention to the simple fact: today we speak about expert opinions. Are we aware how paradoxical this term is? The idea is that we ordinary people have opinions. They tell you the truth. Now experts all of a sudden are telling us different opinions and we have to decide how, who knows, if even they don’t know. This is the tragedy of our predicament of freedom of choice. The problem is...we are often forced to choose without having serious cognitive coordinates of how or what to choose.... The price is that science is no longer a homogenous science but it’s turning into kind of a pluralistic field of opinions.
For example, I once had a debate with a quantum physicist. And he accused me, “You stupid guys with your French theory, total bullshit.” He made fun precisely of this: “You can just say whatever you want.” And I told him, “Fuck you! Look at quantum physics: literally anything goes. You can claim that there is a Big Bang, that there is no Big Bang, there were multiple Big Bangs…” It’s incredible how, when science approaches a certain limit, how open it becomes. It’s as if anything you can imagine, you find scientists who advocate. I’m not saying science is just laughable. It is real. I’m just saying how difficult it is to decide today without a proper cognitive base. We are more and more compelled to this.
Andre Depui said that the problem when people say, “Oh but we don’t know if it’s really global warming.” The problem is that if you want to wait until we really know, it will be, by definition, too late. Because we will really know when the catastrophe is here. This is maybe one of the great things that has to be decided as a specific problem—in Germany there were working with certain proponents of risk society—how to decide some basic rules of decision-making in situations that are cognitively non-transparent. You have to decide because not doing anything is also a decision. You have to decide, but you don’t know. The situation is not transparent.
FM: Thank you so much for the interview. Can we get a photo with you?
SZ: Okay, okay. But I hate my stupid face. Oh, this photo will look like something that should be titled “Dumb and Dumber.” Ugh, my stupid face. It’s horrible, just horrible. There’s a Slovenian saying. It looks like it’s been pulled out of a cow’s ass.
By BRADLEY G. BOLMAN and TARA RAGHUVEER, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Published: Friday, February 10, 2012
FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia with Slavoj Zizek.
When Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek visited Harvard for a lecture on the ontology of sexual difference last October, FM staff writer Tara Raghuveer ’14 and contributing writer Bradley G. Bolman ’15 sat down to discuss the Occupy movement, pop culture, and modern academia.
Fifteen Minutes: What is the role of academia at an institution like Harvard in the current global crisis?
Slavoj Žižek: What is crucial and also I think—especially today, when we have some kind of re-emergence of at least some kind of practical spirit, protest, and so on—one of the dangers I see amongst some radical academia circles is this mistrust in theory, you know, saying, “Who needs fat books on Hegel and logic? My god, they have to act!”
No, I think quite on the contrary. More than ever, today it’s crucial to emphasize that on the one hand, yes, every empirical example undermines theory. There are no full examples. But, point two, this does not mean that we should turn the examples against theory. At the same time, there is no exception. There are no examples outside theories. Every example of a theory is an indication of the inner split dynamics of the theory itself, and here dialectics begins, and so on....
Don’t fall into the trap of feeling guilty, especially if you have the luck of studying in such a rich place. All this bullshit like, “Somalian children are starving....” No! Somalian children are not starving because you have a good time here. There are others who are much more guilty. Rather, use the opportunity. Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory.
Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.”
Again, I think there is a certain strategy today even more, and I speak so bitterly about it because in Europe they are approaching it. I think Europe is approaching some kind of intellectual suicide in the sense that higher education is becoming more and more streamlined. They are talking the same way communists were talking 40 years ago when they wanted to crush intellectual life. They claimed that intellectuals are too abstract in their ivory towers; they are not dealing with real problems; we need education so that it will help real people—real societies’ problems. And then, again, in a debate I had in France, some high politician made it clear what he thinks and he said...in that time in France there were those demonstrations in Paris, the car burnings. He said, “Look, cars are burning in the suburbs of Paris: We don’t need your abstract Marxist theories. We need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. We need urban planners to tell us how to organize the suburbs to make demonstrations difficult.”
But this is a job for experts, and the whole point of being intellectual today is to be more than an expert. Experts are doing what? They are solving problems formulated by others. You know, if a politician comes to you, “Fuck it! Cars are burning! Tell me what’s the psychological mechanism, how do we dominate it?” No, an intellectual asks a totally different question: “What are the roots? Is the system guilty?” An intellectual, before answering a question, changes the question. He starts with, “But is this the right way to formulate the question?”
FM: You spoke at Occupy Wall Street a few months ago. What is your personal involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and what do you think the protests signify?
SZ: None. My personal involvement was some guy who was connected with it, and he told me, “Would you go there, come there?” And I said, “Okay. Why not?”
Then the same guy told me,“Be careful, because microphones are prohibited, you know, it’s this echoing, repeating.” So my friend told me, frankly, to be demagogic: “Just try to be as much as possible effective, short, slow,” and so on, and that was it. I didn’t even drop my work.
What does [Occupy] mean? Then they tell you, “Oh, Wall Street should work for the Main Street, not the opposite,” but the problem is not this. The problem is that the system stated that there is no Main Street without Wall Street. That is to say that banking and credits are absolutely crucial for the system to function today.
That is why I understand Obama when—two years ago you know when the first, I think it was, $750 billion and a bit more—it was simply blackmail and it was not possible to say no because that’s how the system functions. If Wall Street were to break down, everything would break. We should think more radically. So again, the formula “Give money to Main Street and not to Wall Street” is ruined. That is to say, all these honest, hardworking people who do their jobs cannot find work now. Think how to change that. Think how to change [the] mechanisms of that. We are no longer dealing with short-term crises like in 2008.
FM: Why do you believe that the Right and the Left in America have failed to provide answers to the problems of inequality and the crises they predict?
SZ: It’s crazy but I’m convinced about it: look at the last two seasons of “24.” Look closely, something very interesting happens. It’s not only superficial, political correctness. In season seven, Jack Bauer investigates some Muslim attacks and then he discovers it’s not Muslims at all: it’s some American mega-security company who is manipulating these attacks. Something much more tragic happened in the last season, which I quite liked. It’s that, at the end, Jack Bauer breaks out of this authoritarian logic. Somebody has to do the dirty job, torturing, and so on. He says, “Maybe I should say it publicly, everything, I cannot live with it.” So this logic of “The true heroes are those who are ready to do the dirty job—torture for the country,” it breaks down. His liberal counterpoint, the president, Allison Taylor, also breaks down and has to quit. So that, at the end, you get a very honest assessment of a deadlock and the message is: within the present global systemic coordinates, whatever you do, you end up in a deadlock. I think this honest confrontation with the ethical deadlock is much more valuable than the Hollywood Left “feel-good” attitude of movies like Pelican Brief or All the President’s Men, which may appear radical in their accusation: “Oh my god, even the President of the United States can be corrupted blah blah blah.” Nonetheless, these are all “feel-good” movies because at the end the final message is: “Wow, what a great country! Two ordinary guys can overthrow the mightiest man in the world!” If I were to choose between this Leftist, liberal All the President’s Men or Jack Bauer, I [would] choose Jack Bauer every day. I’m sorry to tell you.
Because it does what honest conservatives want—not reactionaries: reactionaries are stupid, they think if we go back to lost values, it will work. Liberals are stupid progressives. What we can learn from honest conservatives is that they are ready to accept a deadlock.
For example, Marx said about Balzac: precisely as a conservative, Balzac depicted the deadlock of French society. Even [American political scientist] Francis Fukuyama, he no longer believes in this bullshit “end of history.” He told me that the very fact of the possibility of biogenetic manipulations makes his thesis on the “end of history” obsolete. And he thinks that to cope with this problem we need much stronger forms of social control, which liberal-democratic capitalism cannot provide. This is what I like and this is what we can learn from honest conservatives: they don’t bullshit you. And maybe this is the duty of us intellectuals. You know when people ask me on Wall Street, “What should we do?” I was so embarrassed because, fuck you, what do I know? I don’t. But what we should do is simply break the rules in the sense of opening new space. [The world is] confused as it is, always, from Wall Street to Egypt. Nonetheless, it is opening up space. People are becoming aware. It’s the first move, but nonetheless, we have to start to think about some kind of radical change. All these Leftist, liberal things—more gay rights, more abortion—of course we fight for that, but that’s not enough. Ironically, when I was young, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face; these guys are offering us global capitalism with a human face. It’s the same system but a little bit more.... We have to break this taboo, which was very strong until now: nobody even dared to imagine an alternative. Everyone was, in a way as I say, a Fukuyamist. Even radicals, we somehow accept that global capitalism and liberal democracy are here to stay, and the point is only to make the system a little bit more efficient.
No, it is clear we have to start thinking.
And this is a great responsibility, because of course there is no way back to the glories of 20th century communism. No, but that’s our duty at this point, just to open up the field and, at the same time, to undermine, break. We have to be very destructive at this point, destructive in the sense of breaking false illusions....
Who would have expected the Arab Spring, or whatever you call it? It did happen. Who would have expected these big demonstrations in Europe that are occurring? They are happening. People at the beginning thought, “Oh this is something that will explode.” No, it goes on. There is a tremendous potential in dissatisfaction. But again, this is always a potential danger.
FM: It seems that a similar deadlock appears in the context of both the economic crisis and global warming—experts can’t seem to predict them, nor will politicians or society act to stop them.
SZ: I especially hate, from my own experience, when people say, “Oh, who could have predicted this [economic crisis]?” No. I know a couple of leftists and empiricists who exactly predicted this. These are not the kinds of cheap catastrophists who all of the time give bad predictions and then something happens so that they go awry. No, no. They were very precise and predicted this crisis. Paul Krugman said something deeply true. A guy asked him, “But now that we know, wouldn’t things be radically different if we were to know 10 years back what we know now?” He said, “No, no, it wouldn’t. The system pushes you to act in a certain way.” The illusion is much stronger. Like, you may know that there may be a catastrophe, but nonetheless, we would have done exactly the same thing. I mean, it’s no longer a question of knowledge. Today many, even sociologists, have this wonderful idea of how, although we live in a society of knowledge—even scientific knowledge—[it] is becoming more and more contingent, non-binding. I think it was the German theorist Ulrich Beck who drew attention to the simple fact: today we speak about expert opinions. Are we aware how paradoxical this term is? The idea is that we ordinary people have opinions. They tell you the truth. Now experts all of a sudden are telling us different opinions and we have to decide how, who knows, if even they don’t know. This is the tragedy of our predicament of freedom of choice. The problem is...we are often forced to choose without having serious cognitive coordinates of how or what to choose.... The price is that science is no longer a homogenous science but it’s turning into kind of a pluralistic field of opinions.
For example, I once had a debate with a quantum physicist. And he accused me, “You stupid guys with your French theory, total bullshit.” He made fun precisely of this: “You can just say whatever you want.” And I told him, “Fuck you! Look at quantum physics: literally anything goes. You can claim that there is a Big Bang, that there is no Big Bang, there were multiple Big Bangs…” It’s incredible how, when science approaches a certain limit, how open it becomes. It’s as if anything you can imagine, you find scientists who advocate. I’m not saying science is just laughable. It is real. I’m just saying how difficult it is to decide today without a proper cognitive base. We are more and more compelled to this.
Andre Depui said that the problem when people say, “Oh but we don’t know if it’s really global warming.” The problem is that if you want to wait until we really know, it will be, by definition, too late. Because we will really know when the catastrophe is here. This is maybe one of the great things that has to be decided as a specific problem—in Germany there were working with certain proponents of risk society—how to decide some basic rules of decision-making in situations that are cognitively non-transparent. You have to decide because not doing anything is also a decision. You have to decide, but you don’t know. The situation is not transparent.
FM: Thank you so much for the interview. Can we get a photo with you?
SZ: Okay, okay. But I hate my stupid face. Oh, this photo will look like something that should be titled “Dumb and Dumber.” Ugh, my stupid face. It’s horrible, just horrible. There’s a Slovenian saying. It looks like it’s been pulled out of a cow’s ass.
Friday, February 10, 2012
MARX RELOADED RELEASED
http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/theatrical-reviews/marx-reloaded-17920
February 9 2012
DIRECTED BY Jason Barker
STARRING Jason Barker, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri
This engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Karl Marx.
Shane Herrick
The American filmmaker explains how an innovative new videogame inspired him to pose 12 film stars the most challenging of moral dilemmas.
“We are in deep shit, and we know it. But secretly, we don’t really believe it can all fall apart.”
As the global economy continues to boil, and national debts and bailouts continue to heave into the trillions, these words, by rock star philosopher Slavoj Žižek, ring louder than ever. Time to dust off your copy of ‘Das Kapital’ and put capitalism back under the microscope.
An engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc, Marx Reloaded examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Marx, posing the question of whether late capitalism is a sustainable economic force and whether communism could provide a more viable alternative.
Barker calls on several established minds to provide a balanced stream of information. Through interviews with the likes of Zizek, Eammon Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt of ‘Empire’ fame, and French philosopher Jacques Rancière, the film shines a light on the many causes of the financial crumble, creating a compelling dialogue of Marx’s theories on capitalism as they apply to its contemporary form.
As the film comes to a close, it seems the focus falls less on the idea of blame, as capitalism as the sole culprit, or on the viability of another form of communism despite the spectre of Soviet horrors, but more on the transformative power of new ideas. Through the slightly comical animated Matrix metaphor with Marx as Neo and Trotsky as Morpheus, the doc poses the question of “Which pill?” do we want to take: blue or red? Maybe neither.
As such, Marx Reloaded becomes more of a call to action: it is no longer about choosing from what is and has been, but of acting towards creating a third pill or ditching the pills all together; to finish reading, to start writing, and try something else.
Marx Reloaded is showing at ICA London from February 10-16. Book tickets now at ica.org.uk
February 9 2012
DIRECTED BY Jason Barker
STARRING Jason Barker, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri
This engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Karl Marx.
Shane Herrick
The American filmmaker explains how an innovative new videogame inspired him to pose 12 film stars the most challenging of moral dilemmas.
“We are in deep shit, and we know it. But secretly, we don’t really believe it can all fall apart.”
As the global economy continues to boil, and national debts and bailouts continue to heave into the trillions, these words, by rock star philosopher Slavoj Žižek, ring louder than ever. Time to dust off your copy of ‘Das Kapital’ and put capitalism back under the microscope.
An engaging hour-long talking-head-meets-animation doc, Marx Reloaded examines the potentially terminal crisis of the free market system through Marx, posing the question of whether late capitalism is a sustainable economic force and whether communism could provide a more viable alternative.
Barker calls on several established minds to provide a balanced stream of information. Through interviews with the likes of Zizek, Eammon Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt of ‘Empire’ fame, and French philosopher Jacques Rancière, the film shines a light on the many causes of the financial crumble, creating a compelling dialogue of Marx’s theories on capitalism as they apply to its contemporary form.
As the film comes to a close, it seems the focus falls less on the idea of blame, as capitalism as the sole culprit, or on the viability of another form of communism despite the spectre of Soviet horrors, but more on the transformative power of new ideas. Through the slightly comical animated Matrix metaphor with Marx as Neo and Trotsky as Morpheus, the doc poses the question of “Which pill?” do we want to take: blue or red? Maybe neither.
As such, Marx Reloaded becomes more of a call to action: it is no longer about choosing from what is and has been, but of acting towards creating a third pill or ditching the pills all together; to finish reading, to start writing, and try something else.
Marx Reloaded is showing at ICA London from February 10-16. Book tickets now at ica.org.uk
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Nobody has to be vile
London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile
Slavoj Žižek
Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?
Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.
So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.
Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.
Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days; collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success. Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten commandments in the French magazine Technikart:
1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.
2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.
3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.
4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.
5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.
6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.
7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.
8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.
9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.
10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.
Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.
Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their companies was as important as the direct political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company, paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa.
Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the internet?
Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money).
Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the majority, to help those in need).
Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile.
This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.
There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’
According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.
We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.
Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile
Slavoj Žižek
Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?
Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.
So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.
Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.
Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days; collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success. Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten commandments in the French magazine Technikart:
1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.
2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.
3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.
4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.
5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.
6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.
7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.
8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.
9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.
10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.
Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.
Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their companies was as important as the direct political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company, paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa.
Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the internet?
Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money).
Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the majority, to help those in need).
Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile.
This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.
There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’
According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.
We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.
Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.
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