Democracy in America?: Occupy Movement Calls Nation’s Bluff

Posted on 01/10/2012

In many ways, the core of the Occupy Wall St. movement’s impact in the U.S. has been to expose how corrupt our systems of governance really are, and to show in action what (direct) democracy, actually looks like. We live in an age of perverse language, when “democracy” and “freedom” are exported by drones, or at gunpoint, and where anarchism — democracy without government — is viewed by many as tantamount to terrorism.

With those specific things in mind, here is a cluster of material related to the underlying theory and evolving practice of the Occupy movement, highlighting adaptive and prefigurative organizing successes and casting an eye towards 2012.

Principled, Consistent, Wrong: The Perfectly Selfish Problematics of Ron Paul

Posted on 01/06/2012

He’s the only truly anti-war, anti-imperialist candidate in the 2012 Presidential race, but Ron Paul’s ideas about getting rid of all environmental regulation, returning to the gold standard, rolling back civil rights, and further restricting women’s access to abortion, are all extremist.

Paul, like Rick “Oops” Perry, is another right-wing free-market zealot from Texas not worthy of holding higher public office. So what is it about Paul–his brand or his substance–that pulls support from so many parts of the political continuum?

Held Hostage to Hope: Derrick Jensen on Civilization & Its Discontents

Posted on 12/24/2011

“It’s not just false hope that’s the problem, it’s hope itself…’Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency.’”

A free-ranging interview with the author of A Language Older Than Words, Welcome to the Machine, and The Culture of Make Believe about civilization, violence, activism, pacifism, reasons for optimism, and why hope is a bad thing.

A counterpoint interview about Malthusian economics and cults of catastrophism is also offered, with social historian Iain Boal, “We’re Not Doomed; That’s the Problem.”:

Many people believe, at least a little, that the end of human beings–whether by ecological disaster, the collapse of the oil economy, or nuclear extinction–is inevitable. For some, this projected collapse represents a just termination for a species they consider parasitic and pathologically unable to establish an equilibrium with the natural world and the creatures who depend upon it. Others laments the tragedy of our fate.

But what role do faith and belief play in all of this? What if the capitalist realities of scarcity and collapse have been mistakenly interpreted as natural inevitabilities?

>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 8 pages)

[From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.]

Humans Are a Virus with Shoes

Posted on 12/20/2011

People suck, and that’s my contention.
We’re a virus with shoes.
—Bill Hicks

I actually like quite a lot of people, but there’s much to recommend Hicks’ notion that people are viruses with shoes. It’s a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, “Darwin’s Surprise”:

Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone…

Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

One scientist interviewed for the New Yorker article, Thierry Hiedmann, contends that the mapping of the human genome project and recent findings about “endogenous retroviruses” show that genes and viruses are not, in fact, distinct entities, and that the concept of virus and humanity as enemies or combatants, rather than as co-evolutionary forces, is in error. Heidmann and others have even suggested that without viral influence, mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature and led to live birth. “These viruses made those changes possible, [and] It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs.”

So the stuff of us, the meat of our matter, is partially viral in origin. What of our language, and our culture? Continue reading →

Propaganda, Public Relations, and the Not-So-New Dark Age

Posted on 12/19/2011

by Stephen Bender and Brian Awehali
(from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow-The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Edward L. Bernays birthed the public relations industry in the United States. His clients included General Motors, United Fruit, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the U.S. Department of State, Health, and Commerce, Samuel Goldwyn, Eleanor Roosevelt, the American Tobacco Company, and Proctor & Gamble. He directed public relations campaigns for every president from Calvin Coolidge in 1925, to Dwight Eisenhower in the late 1950s. He was, in the estimation of cultural historian Ann Douglas, the man “who orchestrated the commercialization of a culture.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 6 pages)

Listen to the Birds: In Praise of Captain Beefheart & His Magics

Posted on 12/13/2011

“Listen to the birds. That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.”
- Captain Beefheart, “10 Commandments of Guitar Playing“

Music can do a lot of different things. There’s music to comfort you, music to make you dance, music to make the time pass easier.

And then there’s music that whacks you upside the head, assaults you, is radically unconcerned with your comfort, and comes to get inside and change you, forever. Continue reading →

Redefining Progress: An Indigenous View of Industrialization & Consumption in North America

Posted on 11/28/2011

by Winona LaDuke
(from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow-The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Rethink your geography a little bit, set aside your thinking, and try to think about North America from an indigenous perspective. In doing so, what I’d like to ask is that you think about it in terms of islands in a continent.

I live on one island, White Earth reservation. It’s thirty-six miles by thirty six miles. It’s a rather medium-sized reservation, as they go in North America. That’s one island. A little bit west of me is Pine Ridge, a slightly larger reservation. Rosebud. Blackfeet. Crow. Cheyenne. Navaho. Hopi. Some of the larger islands are further north. When you go north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada, which is somewhere a little north of Edmonton, you’ll find that the majority of the population is native. 85% of the people who live north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada are native people.

How that is perhaps best reflected is in a place called Nunavut. Northwest Territories, a couple of years ago, was split into two territories. One of those territories is now called Nunavut because the people who live there are Inuit. They are the people who are the political representatives. They are the administrators of the school boards. They are the firemen. They are the doctors, the physicians. They have a form of self-governance in Nunavut where the majority of decisions are made by Inuit people. That area, Nunavut, is, including land and water, five times the size of Texas. It is a large area of land. It is the size of the Indian sub-continent.

So perhaps for that reason alone, it is important to know something more about indigenous people…

Let me talk a little bit about indigenous thinking, because I believe that is fundamental for understanding the conflicts that exist in the world today. In the world today it is not a conflict so much between the left and right, or the communists and the capitalists, so much as it is the conflict between the indigenous and the industrial.

(This far-reaching, increasingly relevant speech Winona LaDuke gave to students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh appeared in LiP: Informed Revolt and was also included in the magazine’s anthology, Tipping the Sacred Cow, now available online in PDF form.)

Read the rest [PDF; 10 pages]

OCCUPY EVERYWHERE: A Touch of Chaos & the Making of a New World

Posted on 10/13/2011

text and photos by Brian Awehali

“The biggest difference I see between China and the US is that in China, our government owns the corporations and in the US, the corporations own your government.”

–Chinese people’s historian Liao Yiwu (廖亦武), July, 2010

On September 27th, the Occupy Wall Street rebellion was clearly gathering momentum. The NYPD’s macing of several peaceful protesters the previous weekend, and their arrest of roughly 80 demonstrators in the following days served primarily to spark more coverage, outrage and broad-based support for the movement. Donations were pouring in, a group of hundreds was turning into thousands in lower Manhattan, and similar occupations were blooming in dozens of other U.S. cities.

In the first days of the occupation, most corporate media reporters approached the protesters as would any good B-movie alien delegation: “Take us to your leader,” they demanded. Confronted with a decentralized organizing culture, they furrowed their brows, demanded demands, preferably in sound bite form, and generally derided protesters for being young, unrealistic, weird-looking, and/or unhygienic.

Continue reading →

Considering Zomia: Elevation & the Art of Not Being Governed

Posted on 09/07/2011

Last year, while traveling in East Asia, I read a fascinating book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott, a professor of Agrarian Studies at Yale University.

Scott’s book is essentially about a very large number of intentional Southeast Asian maroons or refugees–Zomians–and the book is making me re-think a lot of things, about the normal “advance of civilization” narrative and all that it assumes, presupposes, and omits. It’s also made me to recontextualize my understanding of nation-states to include the surprising importance of elevation.

Tibetans are Zomians. They are are, as I think almost everybody knows, long-term resisters against the Han Chinese empire. The Tibetans are fierce and lovely people who wish not to be told where or how to live. Their monks are known for many things, including sparking militant protest, as they did in March 2008 in Lhasa (elevation: 11,450ft) :

Continue reading →

After the Twister

Posted on 07/11/2011

Empire Electric saw its load drop by over a third in seconds as transmission lines and substations vanished from the grid… Veterans said it really looked like a bomb went off; it was like a mower went through it, chewing everything up. This is a close-knit town… It’s very wholesome, you know, it’s part of the Bible Belt…

—From June 2011 Joplin-area news accounts, one month after the most destructive tornado in U.S. history

The Brooklyn Rail has published my first person account of visiting the ruins of Joplin, where I was born, one month after a tornado erased just over a third of the town.