Friday, February 15, 2013
Monday, February 11, 2013
Four Irresolvable Antagonisms of Global Capitalism
From “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as the New
Opium of the Masses” part 1
http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm
[…]
1. Ecology:
In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution - why? Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies the trust into the objectivized/"reified" mechanism of the market's "invisible hand" which, as a kind of Cunning of Reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, we are in the midst of a radical change. Till now, historical Substance played its role as the medium and foundation of all subjective interventions: whatever social and political subjects did, it was mediated and ultimately dominated, overdetermined, by the historical Substance. What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its run by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, etc. No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history, the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter and even interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived "not only as Substance, but also as Subject." This is why, when confronted with singular catastrophic prospects (say, a political group which intends to attack its enemy with nuclear or biological weapons), we no longer can rely on the standard logic of the "Cunning of Reason" which, precisely, presupposes the primacy of the historical Substance over acting subjects: we no longer can adopt the stance of "let the enemy who threatens us deploy its potentials and thereby self-destruct himself" - the price for letting the historical Reason do its work is too high since, in the meantime, we may all perish together with the enemy. Recall a frightening detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we learn how close to nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27 1962. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. "A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident.
2. Private Property:
The inappropriateness of private property for the so-called "intellectual property." The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is thus: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music)? And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same direction? Phenomena are emerging here which bring the notion of property to weird paradoxes: in India, local communities can suddenly discover that medical practices and materials they are using for centuries are now owned by American companies, so they should be bought from them; with the biogenetic companies patentizing genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others...
The crucial date in the history of cyberspace is February 3 1976, the day when Bill Gates published his (in)famous "Open Letter to Hobbysts," the assertion of private property in the software domain: "As the majority of hobbysts must be aware, most of you steal your software. /.../ Most directly, the thing you do is theft." Bill Gates has built his entire empire and reputation on his extreme views about knowledge being treated as if it were tangible property. This was a decisive signal which triggered the battle for the "enclosure" of the common domain of software.
3. New Techno-Scientific Developments:
The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in bio-genetics) - Fukuyama himself was compelled to admit that the biogenetic interventions into human nature are the most serious threat to his vision of the End of History.
With the latest biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase in which it is simply nature itself which melts into air: the main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is thus "desubstantialized," deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called "earth." This compels us to give a new twist to Freud's title Unbehagen in der Kultur - discontent, uneasiness, in culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer "natural," the reliable "dense" background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.
4. New Forms of Apartheid:
Last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. On September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9th announced the "happy '90s," the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global, liberal world community lurks just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over). In contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border.
So what if the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times. It is effectively surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are "free" in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat ("freed" from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, "thrown" into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.
While today's society is often characterized as the society of total control, slums are the territories within a state boundaries from which the state (partially, at least) withdrew its control, territories which function as white spots, blanks, in the official map of a state territory. Although they are de facto included into a state by the links of black economy, organized crime, religious groups, etc., the state control is nonetheless suspended there, they are domains outside the rule of law. In the map of Berlin from the times of the now defunct GDR, the are of West Berlin was left blank, a weird hole in the detailed structure of the big city; when Christa Wolf, the well-known East German half-dissident writer, took her small daughter to the East Berlin's high TV tower, from which one had a nice view over the prohibited West Berlin, the small girl shouted gladly: "Look, mother, it is not white over there, there are houses with people like here!" - as if discovering a prohibited slum Zone...
This is why the "de-structured" masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a non-proletarized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. If the principal task of the emancipatory politics of the XIXth century was to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by way of politicizing the working class, and if the task of the XXth century was to politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal task of the XXIth century is to politicize - organize and discipline - the "de-structured masses" of slum-dwellers. Hugo Chavez's biggest achievement is the politicization (inclusion into the political life, social mobilization) of slum dwellers; in other countries, they mostly persist in apolitical inertia. It was this political mobilization of the slum dwellers which saved him against the US-sponsored coup: to the surprise of everyone, Chavez included, slum dwellers massively descended to the affluent city center, tipping the balance of power to his advantage.
How do these four antagonisms relate to each other? There is a qualitative difference between the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included and the other three antagonisms, which designate three domains of what Hardt and Negri call "commons," the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act which should also be resisted with violent means, if necessary: the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of "cognitive" capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education (if Bill Gates were to be allowed monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have literally owned the software texture our basic network of communication), but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc.; the commons of external nature threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity). What all these struggles share is the awareness of the destructive potentials, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run. It is this reference to "commons" which justifies the resuscitation of the notion of Communism - or, to quote Alain Badiou:
1. Ecology:
In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution - why? Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies the trust into the objectivized/"reified" mechanism of the market's "invisible hand" which, as a kind of Cunning of Reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, we are in the midst of a radical change. Till now, historical Substance played its role as the medium and foundation of all subjective interventions: whatever social and political subjects did, it was mediated and ultimately dominated, overdetermined, by the historical Substance. What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its run by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, etc. No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history, the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter and even interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived "not only as Substance, but also as Subject." This is why, when confronted with singular catastrophic prospects (say, a political group which intends to attack its enemy with nuclear or biological weapons), we no longer can rely on the standard logic of the "Cunning of Reason" which, precisely, presupposes the primacy of the historical Substance over acting subjects: we no longer can adopt the stance of "let the enemy who threatens us deploy its potentials and thereby self-destruct himself" - the price for letting the historical Reason do its work is too high since, in the meantime, we may all perish together with the enemy. Recall a frightening detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we learn how close to nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27 1962. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. "A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident.
2. Private Property:
The inappropriateness of private property for the so-called "intellectual property." The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is thus: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music)? And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same direction? Phenomena are emerging here which bring the notion of property to weird paradoxes: in India, local communities can suddenly discover that medical practices and materials they are using for centuries are now owned by American companies, so they should be bought from them; with the biogenetic companies patentizing genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others...
The crucial date in the history of cyberspace is February 3 1976, the day when Bill Gates published his (in)famous "Open Letter to Hobbysts," the assertion of private property in the software domain: "As the majority of hobbysts must be aware, most of you steal your software. /.../ Most directly, the thing you do is theft." Bill Gates has built his entire empire and reputation on his extreme views about knowledge being treated as if it were tangible property. This was a decisive signal which triggered the battle for the "enclosure" of the common domain of software.
3. New Techno-Scientific Developments:
The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in bio-genetics) - Fukuyama himself was compelled to admit that the biogenetic interventions into human nature are the most serious threat to his vision of the End of History.
With the latest biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase in which it is simply nature itself which melts into air: the main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is thus "desubstantialized," deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called "earth." This compels us to give a new twist to Freud's title Unbehagen in der Kultur - discontent, uneasiness, in culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer "natural," the reliable "dense" background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.
4. New Forms of Apartheid:
Last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. On September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9th announced the "happy '90s," the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global, liberal world community lurks just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over). In contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border.
So what if the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times. It is effectively surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are "free" in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat ("freed" from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, "thrown" into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.
While today's society is often characterized as the society of total control, slums are the territories within a state boundaries from which the state (partially, at least) withdrew its control, territories which function as white spots, blanks, in the official map of a state territory. Although they are de facto included into a state by the links of black economy, organized crime, religious groups, etc., the state control is nonetheless suspended there, they are domains outside the rule of law. In the map of Berlin from the times of the now defunct GDR, the are of West Berlin was left blank, a weird hole in the detailed structure of the big city; when Christa Wolf, the well-known East German half-dissident writer, took her small daughter to the East Berlin's high TV tower, from which one had a nice view over the prohibited West Berlin, the small girl shouted gladly: "Look, mother, it is not white over there, there are houses with people like here!" - as if discovering a prohibited slum Zone...
This is why the "de-structured" masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a non-proletarized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. If the principal task of the emancipatory politics of the XIXth century was to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by way of politicizing the working class, and if the task of the XXth century was to politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal task of the XXIth century is to politicize - organize and discipline - the "de-structured masses" of slum-dwellers. Hugo Chavez's biggest achievement is the politicization (inclusion into the political life, social mobilization) of slum dwellers; in other countries, they mostly persist in apolitical inertia. It was this political mobilization of the slum dwellers which saved him against the US-sponsored coup: to the surprise of everyone, Chavez included, slum dwellers massively descended to the affluent city center, tipping the balance of power to his advantage.
How do these four antagonisms relate to each other? There is a qualitative difference between the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included and the other three antagonisms, which designate three domains of what Hardt and Negri call "commons," the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act which should also be resisted with violent means, if necessary: the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of "cognitive" capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education (if Bill Gates were to be allowed monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have literally owned the software texture our basic network of communication), but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc.; the commons of external nature threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity). What all these struggles share is the awareness of the destructive potentials, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run. It is this reference to "commons" which justifies the resuscitation of the notion of Communism - or, to quote Alain Badiou:
The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see
any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth
doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of
communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political
becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own
affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right,
as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of
their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the
existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first
form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is
imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new
mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.
So where do we stand today with regard to communism? The
first step is to admit that the solution is not to limit the market and private
property by direct interventions of the State and state ownership. The domain
of State itself is also in its own way "private": private in the
precise Kantian sense of the "private use of Reason" in State
administrative and ideological apparatuses:
The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it
alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of one's reason,
on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly
hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of one's reason I
understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading
public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil
post or office which is entrusted to him.
What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there
is a privileged social group which, on account of its lacking a determinate
place in the "private" order of social hierarchy, directly stands for
universality: it is only the reference to those Excluded, to those who dwell in
the blanks of the State space, that enables true universality. There is nothing
more "private" than a State community which perceives the Excluded as
a threat and worries how to keep the Excluded at a proper distance. In other
words, in the series of the four antagonisms, the one between the Included and
the Excluded is the crucial one, the point of reference for the others; without
it, all others lose their subversive edge: ecology turns into a "problem
of sustainable development," intellectual property into a "complex
legal challenge," biogenetics into an "ethical" issue. One can
sincerely fight for ecology, defend a broader notion of intellectual property,
oppose the copyrighting of genes, while not questioning the antagonism between
the Included and the Excluded - even more, one can even formulate some of these
struggles in the terms of the Included threatened by the polluting Excluded. In
this way, we get no true universality, only "private" concerns in the
Kantian sense of the term. Corporations like Whole Foods and Starbucks continue
to enjoy favor among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union
activities; the trick is that they sell products that contain the claim of
being politically progressive acts in and of themselves. One buys coffee made
with beans bought at above fair-market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one
buys from companies that provide good benefits for their customers (according
to the corporation's own standards), etc. Political action and consumption
become fully merged. In short, without the antagonism between the Included and
the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the
greatest humanitarian fighting against poverty and diseases, and Rupert Murdoch
the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media
empire.
When politics is reduced to the "private" domain, it takes the form of the politics of FEAR - fear of losing one's particular identity, of being overwhelmed. Today's predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics - an awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: "post-political" is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management and administration, while "bio-politics" designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primal goal. It is clear how these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains is only the efficient administration of life... almost only that. That is to say, with the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero-level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today's subjectivity.
No wonder, then, that the by far predominant version of ecology is the ecology of fear, fear of a catastrophe - human-made or natural - that may deeply perturb, destroy even, the human civilization, fear that pushes us to plan measures that would protect our safety. This ecology of fear has all the chances of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion: it takes over the old religion's fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude: we are not Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a bio-sphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources, we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our Earth with respect, as something ultimately Sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, that should and will forever remain a Mystery, a power we should trust, not dominate. While we cannot gain full mastery over our bio-sphere, it is unfortunately in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will run amok, swiping us away in the process. This is why, although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress: every radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe.
It is this distrust which makes ecology the ideal candidate for hegemonic ideology, since it echoes the anti-totalitarian post-political distrust of large collective acts. This distrust unites religious leaders and environmentalists - for both, there is something of a transgression, of entering a prohibited domain, in this idea of creating a new form of life from scratch, from the zero-point. And this brings us back to the notion of ecology as the new opium for the masses; the underlying message is again a deeply conservative one - any change can only be the change for the worst - here is a nice quote from the TIME magazine on this topic:
When politics is reduced to the "private" domain, it takes the form of the politics of FEAR - fear of losing one's particular identity, of being overwhelmed. Today's predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics - an awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: "post-political" is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management and administration, while "bio-politics" designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primal goal. It is clear how these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains is only the efficient administration of life... almost only that. That is to say, with the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero-level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today's subjectivity.
No wonder, then, that the by far predominant version of ecology is the ecology of fear, fear of a catastrophe - human-made or natural - that may deeply perturb, destroy even, the human civilization, fear that pushes us to plan measures that would protect our safety. This ecology of fear has all the chances of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion: it takes over the old religion's fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude: we are not Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a bio-sphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources, we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our Earth with respect, as something ultimately Sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, that should and will forever remain a Mystery, a power we should trust, not dominate. While we cannot gain full mastery over our bio-sphere, it is unfortunately in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will run amok, swiping us away in the process. This is why, although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress: every radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe.
It is this distrust which makes ecology the ideal candidate for hegemonic ideology, since it echoes the anti-totalitarian post-political distrust of large collective acts. This distrust unites religious leaders and environmentalists - for both, there is something of a transgression, of entering a prohibited domain, in this idea of creating a new form of life from scratch, from the zero-point. And this brings us back to the notion of ecology as the new opium for the masses; the underlying message is again a deeply conservative one - any change can only be the change for the worst - here is a nice quote from the TIME magazine on this topic:
Behind much of the resistance to the notion of synthetic
life is the intuition that nature (or God) created the best of possible worlds.
Charles Darwin believed that the myriad designs of nature's creations are
perfectly honed to do whatever they are meant to do - be it animals that see,
hear, sing, swim or fly, or plants that feed on the sun's rays, exuding bright
floral colours to attract pollinators.
This reference to Darwin is deeply misleading: the ultimate
lesson of Darwinism is the exact opposite, namely that nature tinkers and
improvises, with great losses and catastrophes accompanying every limited
success - is the fact that 90 percent of the human genome is 'junk DNA' with no
clear function not the ultimate proof of it? Consequently, the first lesson to
be drawn is the one repeatedly made by Stephen Jay Gould: the utter contingency
of our existence. There is no Evolution: catastrophes, broken equilibriums, are
part of natural history; at numerous points in the past, life could have turned
into an entirely different direction. The main source of our energy (oil) is
the result of a past catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions. One should thus
learn to accept the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm
foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely count. "Nature
doesn't exist": "nature" qua the domain of balanced
reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris,
brutally throwing off the rails its circular motion, is man's fantasy; nature
is already in itself "second nature," its balance is always
secondary, an attempt to negotiate a "habit" that would restore some order
after catastrophic interruptions.
With regard to this inherent instability of nature, the most consequent was the proposal of a German ecological scientist back in 1970s: since nature is changing constantly and the conditions on Earth will render the survival of humanity impossible in a couple of centuries, the collective goal of humanity should be not to adapt itself to nature, but to intervene into the Earth ecology even more forcefully with the aim to freeze the Earth's change, so that its ecology will remain basically the same, thus enabling humanity's survival. This extreme proposal renders visible the truth of ecology.
With regard to this inherent instability of nature, the most consequent was the proposal of a German ecological scientist back in 1970s: since nature is changing constantly and the conditions on Earth will render the survival of humanity impossible in a couple of centuries, the collective goal of humanity should be not to adapt itself to nature, but to intervene into the Earth ecology even more forcefully with the aim to freeze the Earth's change, so that its ecology will remain basically the same, thus enabling humanity's survival. This extreme proposal renders visible the truth of ecology.
Will the Keystone XL Pipeline Go Down?
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Will the Keystone XL Pipeline Go
Down?
[…]
Extracting and processing tar sands is an extraordinarily
expensive undertaking, far more so than most conventional oil drilling
operations. Considerable energy is needed to dig the sludge out of the ground
or heat the water into steam for underground injection; then, additional energy
is needed for the various upgrading processes. The environmental
risks involved are enormous (even leaving aside the vast amounts of
greenhouse gases that the whole process will pump into the atmosphere). The
massive quantities of water needed for SAGD and those upgrading processes, for
example, become contaminated with toxic substances. Once used,
they cannot be returned to any water source that might end up in human drinking
supplies -- something environmentalists say is already occurring. All of this and the
expenses involved mean that the multibillion-dollar investments needed to
launch a tar-sands operation can only pay off if the final product fetches a
healthy price in the marketplace.
And that’s where geography enters the picture. Alberta
is theoretically capable of producing five to six million barrels of
tar-sands oil per day. In 2011, however, Canada itself consumed only
2.3 million barrels of oil per day, much of it supplied by conventional (and
cheaper) oil from fields in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. That number is
not expected to rise appreciably in the foreseeable future. No less
significant, Canada’s refining capacity for all kinds of oil is limited to 1.9
million barrels per day, and few of its refineries are equipped to process tar
sands-style heavy crude. This leaves the producers with one strategic option:
exporting the stuff.
And that’s where the problems really begin. Alberta is an
interior province and so cannot export its crude by sea. Given the geography,
this leaves only three export options: pipelines heading east across Canada to
ports on the Atlantic, pipelines heading west across the Rockies to ports in
British Columbia, or pipelines heading south to refineries in the United States.
Alberta’s preferred option is to send the preponderance of
its tar-sands oil to its biggest natural market, the United States. At present,
Canadian pipeline companies do operate a number of
conduits that deliver some of this oil to the U.S., notably the
original Keystone conduit extending from Hardisty, Alberta, to Illinois and
then southward to Cushing, Oklahoma. But these lines can carry less than one
million barrels of crude per day, and so will not permit the massive expansion
of output the industry is planning for the next decade or so.
In other words, the only pipeline now under
development that would significantly expand Albertan tar-sands exports is
Keystone XL. It is vitally important to the tar-sands producers because
it offers the sole short-term -- or possibly even long-term -- option for the
export and sale of the crude output now coming on line at dozens of projects
being developed across northern Alberta. Without it, these projects will languish and Albertan production will have to be sold
at a deep discount -- at, that is, a per-barrel price that could fall below
production costs, making further investment in tar sands unattractive. In
January, Canadian tar-sands oil was already selling for $30-$40 less than West Texas Intermediate
(WTI), the standard U.S. blend.
The Pipelines That Weren’t
Like an army bottled up geographically and increasingly at
the mercy of enemy forces, the tar-sands producers see the completion of
Keystone XL as their sole realistic escape route to survival. “Our
biggest problem is that Alberta is landlocked,” the province’s finance
minister Doug Horner said in January. “In fact, of the world’s major
oil-producing jurisdictions, Alberta is the only one with no direct access to
the ocean. And until we solve this problem... the [price] differential will
remain large.”
Logistics, geography, and finally timing. A presidential
stamp of approval on the building of Keystone XL will save the tar-sands
industry, ensuring them enough return to justify their massive investments. It
would also undoubtedly prompt additional investments in tar-sands projects and
further production increases by an industry that assumed opposition to future
pipelines had been weakened by this victory.
A presidential thumbs-down and resulting failure to build
Keystone XL, however, could have lasting and severe consequences for tar-sands
production. After all, no other export link is likely to be completed in the
near-term. The other three most widely discussed options -- the Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat,
British Columbia, an expansion of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline to
Vancouver, British Columbia, and a plan to use existing, conventional-oil
conduits to carry tar-sands oil across Quebec, Vermont, and New Hampshire to
Portland, Maine -- already face intense opposition, with initial construction
at best still years in the future.
The Northern Gateway project, proposed by Canadian pipeline
company Enbridge, would stretch from Bruderheim in northern Alberta to Kitimat,
a port on Charlotte Sound and the Pacific. If completed, it would allow
the export of tar-sands oil to Asia, where Canadian Prime Minister Stephen
Harper sees a significant future market (even though few
Asian refineries could now process the stuff). But unlike oil-friendly
Alberta, British Columbia has a strong pro-environmental bias and many senior
provincial officials have expressed fierce opposition to the project. Moreover, under the
country’s constitution, native peoples over whose land the pipeline would have
to travel must be consulted on the project -- and most tribal communities are adamantly
opposed to its construction.
Another proposed conduit -- an expansion of the existing
Trans Mountain pipeline from Edmonton to Vancouver -- presents the same set of
obstacles and, like the Northern Gateway project, has aroused strong opposition in Vancouver.
This leaves the third option, a plan to pump tar-sands oil
to Ontario and Quebec and then employ an existing pipeline now used for oil
imports. It connects to a terminal in Casco Bay, near Portland, Maine, where
the Albertan crude would begin the long trip by ship to those refineries on the
Gulf Coast. Although no official action has yet been taken to allow the use of
the U.S. conduit for this purpose, anti-pipeline protests have already erupted
in Portland, including one on January 26th that attracted more than 1,400 people.
With no other pipelines in the offing, tar sands producers
are increasing their reliance on deliveries by rail.
This is producing boom times for some long-haul freight carriers, but
will never prove sufficient to move the millions of barrels in added daily
output expected from projects now coming on line.
The conclusion is obvious: without Keystone XL, the price of
tar-sands oil will remain substantially lower than conventional oil (as well as
unconventional oil extracted from shale formations in the United States),
discouraging future investment and dimming the prospects for increased
output. In other words, as Bill McKibben hopes, much of it will stay in
the ground.
Industry officials are painfully aware of their predicament.
In an Annual Information Form released at the end of 2011, Canadian Oil Sands
Limited, owner of the largest share of Syncrude Canada (one of the leading
producers of tar-sands oil) noted:
“A prolonged period of low crude oil prices could affect the
value of our crude oil properties and the level of spending on growth projects
and could result in curtailment of production... Any substantial and extended
decline in the price of oil or an extended negative differential for SCO
compared to either WTI or European Brent Crude would have an adverse effect on
the revenues, profitability, and cash flow of Canadian Oil Sands and likely
affect the ability of Canadian Oil Sands to pay dividends and repay its debt
obligations.”
The stakes in this battle could not be higher. If
Keystone XL fails to win the president’s approval, the industry will certainly
grow at a far slower pace than forecast and possibly witness the failure of
costly ventures, resulting in an industry-wide contraction. If approved,
however, production will soar and global warming will occur at an even faster
rate than previously projected. In this way, a presidential decision will have
an unexpectedly decisive and lasting impact on all our lives.
Venezuela donates free heating oil to 100,000 needy US households
Feb 6, 2013 in Business
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Baltimore - For
the eighth straight year, Venezuela's state oil company is donating free
heating oil to hundreds of thousands of needy Americans.
The CITGO-Venezuela
Heating Oil Program has helped more than
1.7 million Americans in 25 states and the District of Columbia keep
warm since it was launched back in 2005. The program is a partnership between
the Venezuelan state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), its
subsidiary CITGO and Citizens Energy Corporation, a nonprofit organization
founded by former US Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II that provides discounted and
free home heating services and supplies to needy households in the United
States and abroad. It has been supported from the beginning by Venezuelan
President Hugo Chávez.
In 2005, a pair of devastating hurricanes, Katrina and Rita,
led to dwindling oil supplies and skyrocketing fuel costs. Some of the poorest
and most vulnerable Americans, including many elderly people on fixed incomes,
found themselves having to choose between heating their homes or providing
food, clothing or medicine for themselves and their families. Since that first
winter, CITGO has provided 227 million gallons of free heating oil worth an
estimated $465 million to an average of 153,000 US households each year. Some
252 Native American communities and 245 homeless shelters have also benefited
from the program. This winter, more than 100,000 American families will receive
Venezuelan aid. With the US government estimating that households heating
primarily with oil will pay $407 (19 percent) more this year than last, the
program remains an invaluable helping hand to many needy Americans.
"The CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program has been one
of the most important energy assistance efforts in the United States,"
CITGO CEO Alejandro Granado said at the Night of Peace Family Shelter in
Baltimore, Maryland, where he and Citizens Energy Corporation Chairman Kennedy launched the
2013 program. "This year, as families across the Eastern Seaboard struggle
to recover from the losses caused by Hurricane Sandy, this donation becomes
even more significant."
Last year, President Barack Obama and Congress reduced Low
Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funding by 25 percent, cutting
off an estimated one million US households from desperately needed assistance
just as winter's worst chill, accompanied by record heating oil prices, set in.
Fortunately, the CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program was able to assist an estimated 400,000 Americans last year.
"The federal fuel assistance program reaches only
one-fifth of all the eligible households in the US," Kennedy said in
Baltimore. "Millions of families just go cold at night in their own
homes."
US Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), who was on hand at the
Baltimore launch, expressed his gratitude to CITGO.
"The demand is greater and the resources are
shorter," Cummings said to widespread "amens" from the packed
house. "We must not turn our heads away from the working poor-- remember,
we could be in the same position. The help you provide to families is bigger
than just the oil. It's about helping children lead stable lives."
The people gathered at the shelter prayed for the recovery
of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whose condition is reportedly improving following
cancer surgery in Havana, Cuba.
Chávez is often demonized as a dictator by many US
politicians and by the US corporate mainstream media. But he remains wildly
popular in Venezuela, where he has won four straight presidential elections. He
was reelected last October with 54.4 percent of the vote.
Although his leadership style is increasingly authoritarian, his Bolivarian
Revolution-- characterized by popular democracy, economic independence,
equitable distribution of national wealth and reduced corruption-- has improved the lives of millions of Venezuela's poorest
citizens and inspired tens of millions of Latin Americans seeking more just
societies to vote in leftist governments throughout the region.
US critics claim that Chávez is anti-American. This
oversimplifies matters-- while he is an ardent anti-imperialist who raised
eyebrows and ire in Washington and on Wall Street by nationalizing the assets of foreign petroleum
companies which many Venezuelans asserted were exploiting the country's natural
resources, the US remains Venezuela's most important trading partner. And while
Chávez is highly critical of US policies and actions around the globe, he is
far from alone in his opposition. His distaste for Washington has also no doubt
been influenced by the fact that senior officials in the George W. Bush
administration were deeply
involved in an attempted 2002 coup d'état against his popular regime.
All of this matters little to most of the 1.7 million
Americans who have received free fuel from the CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil
Program.
"All I know is he was kind to the people of the United
States," program recipient Alice Maniotis, a New York grandmother on a
fixed income, said of Chávez. "He rules differently, like Obama rules
differently," Maniotis told RT last year. "Who are we to tell these
people how to live? Are they invading our country? They're not. They're being
generous to give us what comes out of their earth at no charge. So could you
really have ill feelings against them?"
Kennedy thanked CITGO, Venezuela and Chávez for
"help[ing] more than 400,000 people stay warm and safe this winter,"
adding that he has approached numerous major oil-producing nations as well as
some of the largest US oil companies and asked them if they were interested in
helping the poor heat their homes.
"I don't see Exxon responding," he told the crowd
in Baltimore. "I don't see other major oil companies heating the homes of
the poor."
"They all said no," Kennedy added, "except
for CITGO, President Chávez and the people of Venezuela.”
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Friday, February 8, 2013
Global Unions Urge Release of Imprisoned Russian Trade Unionist
February 6, 2012—Trade unionist Valentin Urusov is proof that in Russia, it’s still
possible to be imprisoned in the 21st century equivalent of the gulag for
standing up for worker rights on the job. An electrical fitter at an
ore-processing mill owned by the diamond mining company Alrosa, Urusov has spent
more than four years of a six-year term in a penal colony in Yakutia in far
northern Russia.
Described by friends as an intelligent and persuasive
leader, Urusov in June 2008 formed the Profsvoboda trade union, affiliated with
the Russian Metalworkers Trade Union. Profsvoboda sought to represent workers
at the Udachny Pipe Diamond Mine, where workers toil in brutal cold in an open
diamond pit just outside the Arctic circle.
Days after the union was founded, workers in one of the
mine’s vehicle depots, dissatisfied with low pay and working conditions,
announced a hunger strike. Alrosa refused to meet with them and instead unleashed a crackdown against trade union activists.
When workers responded by preparing for a large-scale protest rally, Urusov was
detained on suspicion of narcotics possession. The company’s deputy director
for economic security was “coincidentally” present when the drugs were
allegedly found on Urusov, enabling the deputy director to serve as an official
witness, which is required under Russian law during police searches.
Valentin Urusov was detained prior to the start of a rally
he was organizing. Photo: CSID
According to the Russian Confederation of Labor (KTR), which
for years has engaged the international labor community in pressing for
Urusov’s release, Urusov told his lawyer that the men who arrested him
threatened to kill him if he refused to sign a document stating he possessed
the drugs. They took him to the woods, and shots were fired near his head. He
was beaten with batons and told he should get ready to die. Further, they
demanded that Urusov confess that his union deputy had given the packet to him,
but Urusov refused to give false testimony against his co-worker. After
Urusov’s conviction, a higher court set aside the verdict, finding that there
were serious procedural errors in the handling of his case and referred the
case back for retrial. But in a retrial, the lower court did not change the
verdict. In 2011, Urusov applied for parole and was denied. Urusov, who suffers
from chronic kidney disease, remains in prison.
With Urusov behind bars, the KTR says Alrosa continued its campaign to destroy the
union. Management representatives threatened union supporters and even those
who had applied to join the union. By March 2009, the company fired the last 13
union activists. They appealed their dismissal in court, but lost. Those
dismissed failed to find jobs because all enterprises in the city are linked to
the Alrosa company.
The KTR filed Urusov’s case with the International Labor
Organization (ILO) which in November issued a report requesting the Russian government indicate
whether the allegation of anti-union persecution had been investigated. If not,
the ILO recommended the government conduct an independent investigation.
Russia’s Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights in January
sent an appeal signed by journalists, human rights activists and other public
figures to Russian President Vladimir Putin urging the government follow the
ILO recommendations. A recent Human Rights Watch report harshly criticized Russia’s use of laws to restrict
civil society.
Russian trade union activists face many types of workplace harassment, sackings and beatings by company thugs. But
this is the first time in recent years, trade union activity has been
“punished” with a lengthy jail sentence.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
America's Healthcare System is the Third Leading Cause of Death
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