A radical, ecosocialist take on the climate change crisis and the challenges confronting humanity in the face of global warming, resource depletion, religious intolerance, media manipulation and social injustice.
Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP has blasted as "economically illiterate" Chancellor George Osborne's claims that tackling global warming and environmental degradation would damage the economy. On the day that Britain slipped back into official recession after two years of Con Dem slash-n-burn austerity economics, she talked about how Green Councillors have led the way in job creation.
Nationally, the green economy contributes almost 7% of GDP with potential for much more to get the economy moving and people in jobs, sustainably and cleanly.
You can hear Caroline Lucas' full interview, originally broadcast this morning at the ungodly hour of 6.50 am on Radio 4 to allow the BBC to claim it provides balanced broadcasting, by following thislink HERE.
Caroline Lucas MP (right) with Green councillors on a recent visit to Kirkburton in Kirklees; more on Cllr Andrew Cooper's blog, "Greening Kirklees" HERE.
Just before the 2010 General Election, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg took part in one of the most audaciously cynical election broadcasts in history - No More Broken Policies. (Embedding has been "disabled by request", I wonder why. But you can see it by following this link HERE.)
It is a bit like some of these emails that offer to compensate you if you've been scammed by spam email - if only you'll send your bank details. Nick offers to mend politics with no more broken promises.
Well, the rest is history as we live under the most rightwing Government in modern British political history.
As for Nick's promises in the broadcast...
Tuition fees abolished? No - trebled. A promise broken! Making votes count equally? No, sold down the river with a dreadful referendum on AV, a non-proportional system. A promise broken! Fairstart for children? Surestart centres closing. A promise broken! Break up the banks and make them pay for the damage they caused? No; broken up yes; but the profitable bits sold off at a loss to the taxpayer. A promise broken! New Green infrastructure? Not with the gutting of the Green Deal. A promise broken! Sustainable green energy? The feed-in tariff slashed, community renewable subsidies ended and nuclear power the choice for "clean" energy. Er, no... A promise broken! Fair taxes? Nope - a marginal increase in the tax allowance for everyone (including billionaires) with priority given to cutting income tax by a tenth for people earning at the top rate. With VAT increased, the poor pay proportionately more in tax; the rich even less. Broked again! A fairer Britain? Wealth gap widening; welfare slashed; unemployment up with only austerity as a response...
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem President, claimed on Question Time last week that of course the Lib Dems are in a Coalition so can't have got everything their own way. If they hadn't gone into coalition, he claimed, the Tories would be in untramelled control. Except that any look at the maths in the Commons shows that the Tories can't do anything without Lib Dem votes. And at the same time, the Lib Dems claims to have implemented most of their election promises...errr??
Well, it doesn't really matter that much. They have sunk to 8% in a number of polls, and that was before we were reminded of their expenditure of £2.4 million of stolen money obtained from the fugitive criminal Michael Brown, finally caught and brought home for trial (and yes he got a dinner or three with then Leader Charles Kennedy). If there was an election tomorrow, UK Polling Report reckons they would be down to just 7 MPs.
Nice music though... I think from a film about zombies...
Hot on the heels of George Galloway's sweeping victory in the Bradford West by-election, where he shattered the traditional politics of the city and united people from different communities, Salma Yaqoob's call shows that the Left is poised to build for change that chimes very powerfully with ordinary people. By sharp contrast to the right wing/nationalist alternative parties like UKIP, the English Democrats and the BNP, when people are polled about actual policies - like redistributing wealth and devolving decision-making to local communities - the policies of Respect and the Greens poll far ahead of their opinion poll ratings.
In the Greens' case, when the party manifesto was "blind tested" on quarter of a million people on the Vote-for-Policies website at the 2010 general election, they polled in top place. British culture is more aligned to the principles of the left than years of "middle-England"-obsessed machine politicians realise. The current recession, the dismantling of the Welfare State and the damaging reform of the NHS, as well as the privatising of the education system, are all anathema to most British people - but all three of the main parties are signed up with little but variations on a common theme to separate them.
With opinion polls consistently showing the "Other" parties at above 15% and the Lib Dems imploding to as low as 8%, this may turn out to be a key moment in creating a real, socialist and green alternative to the main parties. Galloway's return to the Commons last week was marked by a distinctively frosty receptionfrom many of his former Labour colleagues who are perhaps increasingly aware that their core vote is softer now than ever after years of being taken for granted by centrists like Tony Blair and Jack Straw, as well as the false dawn of Ed Miliband.
And then came the news that the Con Dem Government's flagship "green deal" policy (the title and some of the concept were stolen from the Green Party manifesto during the last general election, except the scheme as it stands is far more limited than the Green New Deal proposed by the Greens) received a blow. Heeding the calls of the climate change Flat Earthers on the Tory backbenches, as well as some Ministers like Eric Pickles, Prime Minister David Cameron has dropped the element in the scheme which required people building extensions to their homes to have to insulate their properties at the same time. This significantly reduces the effect of any improvements in energy efficiency - Britain could save almost 40% of its energy use if it insulated properties properly, as well as creating tens of thousands of new jobs in the process. But that is now gone.
The green fig leaf covering the naked hypocrisy of the Tories on climate change has finally been blown away. The Tories, we should bear in mind, were the party that to a candidate failed to support Greenpeace at the last election in its call for action on global warming and many surveys at the time showed the Tories to be massively more sceptical about climate change than any other party bar their country cousins in UKIP. Needless to say, the Lib Dems remain as about effective as a chocolate teapot, especially now that their Environment Secretary Chris Huhne has resigned to await trial for alleged perverting of the course of justice relating to a driving offence.
And so as we face massive drought across the south and east of England, with warnings of it continuing for up to 18 months, and with last year the warmest in history in spite of near record breaking cold during the winter of 2010/11, our political masters remain as complacent as ever, modern Neros fiddling while Rome burns. Their eyes fixed on the next share dividend, the Tories grunt that we can't afford green action on climate change. But as our world slowly goes to hell in a handcart, perhaps its the Tories and their allies we can't afford.
This is the Green Party of England and Wales election broadcast for the local elections and the London Mayoral election on 3rd May this year - the London election is held using the Alternative Vote system; people can vote Green with their first preference and still have their vote counted if they make a second choice in the unlikely event that the Green candidate does not win outright in the first round. :-)
Largely under-reported if not entirely unreported by the main-party obsessed media is the fact that the decision by the Mayoral candidates and subsequently signals from the Government that leading politicians and candidates should publish their tax records came after a challenge from the Green Mayoral candidate, Jenny Jones, during a debate on the BBC2 Newsnight programme. This is something of an innovation for supposedly transparent British politics and can be seen in the second video below.
A YouGov poll just published shows that most people - or at least the ones on the YouGov panel - suspect that Time Lord DOCTOR WHO may have a blue Tardis but when it comes to voting for the Gallifrey council, his cross is decidedly verdant in its hue.
23% said they are pretty sure that the Doctor votes Green! This is well ahead of the Lib Dems and Tories who both got 16% with Labour trailing on 10%. In spite of his alien origins and interplanetary outlook, 1% thought he might plump for the British National Party, a reflection perhaps on those voting rather than the good time traveller himself - though doubtless the 7% who suggested he would vote for UKIP would like a ride back in time to perhaps the mid-19th century, or even earlier.
The Tardis - low carbon emission travel, we hope..
It is little surprise really to discover that Dr Who is a Green. Let's face it, as well as regularly saving the earth and taking on monstrous mutants spawned by human pollution and excess, and with a distinctively peacenik theme in the revived series penned by Russell T Davies, Dr Who's ability to regenerate really is the ultimate in recycling. No sign of any nasty exhaust on the Tardis either...
The panel also picked up on good Green Party policy themes for a couple of other fictional characters. Reflecting their strong support for public services, Greens polled well withFIREMAN SAM - 13% reckon he would be careful about what chemicals are used to make fire retardants and plump for a party with an ecologically sane approach.
Likewise, again doubtlessly looking to the Greens' sound policies on keeping the mail service public and supporting local post offices, speculation about POSTMAN PAT'S psephological inclinations found a Green surge to 21%, eclipsing all the others bar Labour up on 29%.
But it was far from a clean sweep for the Greens. Predictably, the Tories got Hyacinth Bouquet as well as Corrie's sweatshop capitalist chancer Mike Baldwin, both on a massive 60%, while Labour got Smithy from Gavin and Stacey and Eastenders Pat Butcher - given the state of politics in some boroughs, Pat's recent death may not necessarily prevent her voting for Walford Labour...
The Lib Dems hang in there with the Vicar of Dibley. Well, everyone likes a good funeral...
Deep in the laboratories of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka busied himself recently on a proud piece of work. Like a scientific acquaintance who once told me that "society should f*** off and let us get on with science!" the Professor and his team decided it was in the best interests of the rest of us to create not one but FOUR hybrid strains of killer bird flu, the class of deadly virus that many in the scientific and medical communities are worried might suddenly mutate and cross over into humans and create a pandemic. Why did the Professor do this? Well, for a start, he wanted to give the newly created death virus to some ferrets. You know ferrets, don't you? Nasty wee furry bastards with sharp teeth. Killing them with a deadly bird virus is, according to the Professor, the best thing for them. Why? Because apparently if you infect ferrets, it will help protect us from bird flu if it ever mutates. Ferrets and people - like peas in a pod. Why, each time I sink my row of razor sharp teeth into a mouse, and use my hind claws to give my furry neck a good scratch, I just feel thankful for the Professor infecting these ferrets and now controversially releasing the full set of information on how to make his deadly virus so his fellow scientists can maybe have a go in their own labs at infecting their own ferrets.
Ferrets - the absolute spit of you and me. Apparently....
So, just how ludicrous have we now got to? We create viruses from elements of bird infections to kill another species of animal supposedly to protect humans and then we publish the data. At which point does it stop being wrong and just become plain stupid? There is already plenty of evidence that the routes taken by bird flu when it has been prevalent among animals have not followed the migratory paths of wild birds, but rather the routes of live animal transportation by big food companies like Bernard Matthews. Crushed into unsanitary, unsafe and cruel conditions in factory farms, animals of many species are highly susceptible to all sorts of disease and bird flu has been no exception. With live chicks hatched in Britain flown to Japan to be reared and flown back, our global transportation system is by far the most dangerous component of spreading diseases of all sorts and especially among animals moved for thousands of miles in cramped surroundings. Very often this is done with a very high in-journey attrition rate, with animals flown or driven sometimes for days with the corpses of their brothers and sisters lying next to them, rotting slowly, collateral damage in multinational food corporations quest for profit, regardless of the welfare of both the "livestock" and the eventual human consumers. Migratory birds have often been blamed for spreading Avian (Bird) flu, when in fact research suggests the opposite may be the case: the flight of wild birds disperses the virus, reducing the spread of infection, while the concentration of battery farmed animals provides fertile conditions for viruses to infect large numbers of creatures. "A lot of migratory species are unfairly blamed for spreading infections to humans," Barbara Han... of the University of Georgia and a co-author of the new paper, said in a prepared statement. "But there are just as many examples suggesting the opposite—that humans are responsible for creating conditions that increase disease in migratory species." So we have a classic case of trying to clean up our own mess by making a new mess! A bit like spending hundreds of millions on elusive carbon capture technologies rather than on reducing carbon emissions to begin with. Lets fight a virus with...a virus. And let's kill some ferrets on the way. After all, they are disposable. And perhaps they are not the only disposable items in the minds of some of these purists who want society to get out of their way.
Worried about bird flu? Maybe we should stop this rather than manufacturing even more...
For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye. — Curse Against Book Stealers Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona The curse is pronounced against one who would steal a book. But what more torments might assail one who steals not just a book, but a whole library, or ONE HUNDRED LIBRARIES? 100 libraries have been closed down since the Con Dem "Culture Minister", Ed Vaizey, took office in 2010. As the Government has wielded its axe on public services across the country, our libraries have not been spared. At best, they might hope to survive in a twilight zone of "Information Points", where it is assumed that everyone now has access to the internet and is happy to download stuff to ipads or Kindles. Books? So last six millennia! Yet this cultural Armageddon comes at a terrible cost and potential threat to our society. Ever since humans first gathered in the cities of Sumeria back around 2,600 BC, libraries have been a hallmark of civilised life, of access to knowledge and of the fostering of learning and citizenship. It was the loss of the great classical era libraries such as that in Alexandria that marked the decline of learning and reason that led to the superstition and persecution of free thinking during the Dark Ages of Europe. And it was the recovery of knowledge in libraries such as those of Islamic Spain and Renaissance Italy that set us on the path to the Enlightenment and the birth of the modern age. And Karl Marx of course constructed his mighty opus Capital on the tables of the British Library.
Cultural tragedy or real estate opportunity? The great
Library of Alexandria burns, c 30BC
But when times are troubled and resources scarce, the ruling class views knowledge as dispensable at best and dangerous at worst. If people know, they will question; and if they question, they might act. And so Mr Vaizey and his ilk, while decrying poor education standards and the collapse of community in their patronising "Broken Britain" strap line, are content to close libraries down in the name of efficiency savings. Google, it seems, is the way forward, copyright of the elite, monitored by their minions. And so, as we head back to a world of superstition, half-truths and net-powered rumour, let me be the first to dust down the ancient book of curses and gladly heap them upon the brows of the morons who ascribe to themselves the custodianship of our culture. May the worms bury deep...
Miriam Monstango, 8 years old - her face a little apprehensive but full of life as she looks to the camera. How apprehensive it must have looked on Monday morning as she ran for the safety of her schoolroom at a Jewish school in Toulouse in France, only to have her hair caught by the gunman who was firing at her classmates. When he tried to shoot Miriam, his gun jammed. But he gripped onto her while he switched to another weapon and shot her in the head. On the same day, he killed a rabbi and his two little children - the youngest just three years old.
We will never know for certain Merah's state of mind or motives now that the French police have shot him dead. But his apparent claims of revenge and self-justification of his terrible deeds echo the words of all too many political leaders who seek to sanctify their worldview with religious beliefs that place the fate of individuals, no matter how innocent, below the proclaimed, divinely-ordained interests of the respective Faith community.
Yet what minds think like this, on either or all sides? Under what religious law, what political ideology or vaguely humane rationale do children become collateral damage? By what mindset does it become acceptable to kill a child - any child, anyone's child - because of the loss, however appallingly, of a child of your own, or your faith community?
A Gazan childhood: The final, terrifying moments of the life of
Mohammed al Doura, a 12 year old Palestinian boy killed in 2000. More here.
Well, there is a mindset which contradictorily both condemns such a viewpoint and validates it. It is a mindset found within the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Between them, these three faiths are followed, at least notionally, by the majority of the people on this planet. They are linked inextricably, although many of their followers vehemently deny this fact, or are unaware perhaps - but their God/Allah is the same Divinity, their prophets - Abraham/Ibrahim, Moses/Musa, Jesus/Isa are often the same people; and the Muslims' final prophet, Muhammed, enjoined his followers to give special protection and respect to Christians and Jews as fellow "People of the Book".
Each faith universally decries killing of humans and prescribes forgiveness and love of neighbours and all humanity. But some followers of each of them doggedly hold to the concept of "reciprocal justice" or like for like punishment - an eye for an eye and a tooth for a toothas the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament set out their bloody tariff of vengeance. In Islam, although the Koran mentions rather than promulgates the principle, the other holy writings, the hadith (laws developed over centuries by Islamic scholars)sanction revenge and some versions of sharia law interpret and implement the rule literally. In all these faiths, although all their prophets advocated generosity of spirit and forgiveness, the concept continues to be held by many believers to be both just and holy.
And so we end up with the dreadful, twisted self-justification for shooting up a school playground in France or shelling schoolrooms in Gaza; or the rarely mentioned rape camps of Bosnia set up by Serb Christians with their avowed aim to breed Muslims out of existence - many of the Bosniac Muslim victims were children, some as young as 12.
In the old days of polytheism, by default, pagans held that there are many ways to the same Truth, while philosophers such as Aristotle identified good and evil acts as the deliberate choices of humans, not the mystical interventions or injunctions of God or Satan. But the potential logic of revealed monotheist faith and its potentially exclusive nature means that a gospel of love can be twisted into one of hatred by those so-minded to do so. This is all the more likely if The Word divides the world so sharply into good and evil, into fellow-believers and the unfaithful or Fallen.
Mahatma Gandhi lamented that - "An eye for an eye simply makes the whole world blind." Those who seek revenge are blind people - blind to the hypocrisy of revenge; blind to the destruction of the justice they seek by acts of injustice; blind to the beauty of the Creation they claim to be the gift of their God.
An eye for an eye - it is not a holy concept at all; it is simply the red mist of the psychopath's pathetic self-regard. Those of any faith or nationality who adopt its tenets do so at the cost of extinguishing the very humanity they claim perversely to supremely epitomise, and almost certainly betray the intent of the founders of their faith and the beliefs of most of their co-religionists. Whether Anders Breivik, or Ariel Sharon or Mohammed Merah, their empty souls are the antithesis of the lives they sacrifice for their own vanity - the lives of the children of Gaza and Toulouse, or the youths on Utoya; lives now gone, but remembered and valued far beyond the banal egos of the small men with big guns and dark hearts.
In the Name of God: since 2000, 125 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinian attacks; in the same period, the Israeli armed services have killed 1,471 Palestinian children.
And so, today, in his latest national Budget, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Gideon Osborne (whose personal fortune is valued at around £4 million) handed the very richest in society a huge tax cut - a 10% reduction from 50p in the pound to 45p on earnings above £150,000 per year - on the spurious grounds that because it was allegedly so high, it deterred our wealthy compatriots from paying their tax. So, by creating perhaps the biggest piece of tax avoidance in history, he has legitimised their non-payment - balancing the cost of doing so by freezing age-related tax allowances for pensioners - greedy old sods that they are (in George's universe, not mine dear reader!).
Yes, this is the logic of the new moral crusader in 11 Downing Street, hoisting high the flag of fiduciary purity on his crusade against the repugnant and immoral. Time for us all to pay our way. And if the billionaires don't magically cough up more tax on a lower tax bill (????), well, we'll just slash another £10 billion off the beleaguered welfare budget, ignoring the needs of an increasingly larger elderly population.
Yes, this is the logic of the moral crusader who preaches the virtues of contributing to the common purse while quietly "aggressively avoiding" a huge tax bill himself.
That's if you're old enough to have the "key to the door", as Vince's Mum probably told him would be his 21st birthday present sometime back when young people knew their place. Because Vince reckons that, if you are younger than that, you should work for less, even if you are doing the same job just as competently as older people.
So much less, in fact, that this year, in spite of high inflation and cuts to tax credits, he reckons young minimum wage earners should not have an increase at all. So, if you are aged 16 or 17, your £3.68 per hour rate stays put; and if you are 18 to 20, it remains at £4.98. (Apprentices, who the Government makes much of creating lots more, will see a whopping rise of 5p per hour to as much as £2.50!).
Now, this differential is not entirely Vince's fault. The Nu-Labour regime of Messrs Blair and Brown created the differentials when they introduced the national minimum wage (NMW). They even introduced legal exemptions to the laws against age discrimination to allow lower rates of NMW to be paid to younger people.
This was and remains really counter-intuitive. Employers can discriminate legally against younger people as long as they keep workers on the national minimum wage. As soon as they pay them any more than that, the exemptions no longer apply and they have to pay all ages the same or they can be sued for age discrimination. Quite rightly too, I say - except that this provides unscrupulous employers with a justification for keeping their lowest paid workers on the NMW.
Vince of course could be sweeping this ludicrous arrangement aside. He could be telling employers that if 19 year old is doing the same job as a 21 year old, they should be paid the same rate. Why on earth not? Would we accept such a distinction between a man and woman any more? Or a white person and an Asian? It is rightly illegal to pay older workers less - you can't differentiate between a 40 year old and a 75 year old. So why is it ok to pay young people less to do the same?
And why on earth has Cable made the gap 11p per hour worse? Well, here is the really twisted logic...
He claims it is to prevent young people being uncompetitive in the workplace and stifling job creation. How so? How can the very lowest rate of pay of all be uncompetitive? Who would be able to outbid them? And what employer would not create a real job because it was going to cost another £4 or so per week to pay? Only illegal gangmasters and ruthlessly exploited Chinese cockle-pickers come to mind. Is this really the sort of economy the Coalition is benchmarking its employment policies against?
In the Budget this week, the Lib Dems are hopeful that they will finally gain their nirvana of a £10,000 p.a. tax allowance for workers. Very nice - it will deliver an across-the-board tax reduction to everyone earning above the current tax allowance threshold of £8,105 per annum. So millionaires will be better off by the same amount as someone earning dead on £10,000 p.a.
The other week in the Guardian, as he prattled on in some sort of mysterious way about some mild disagreement with Nick Clegg, Cable reveled suitably self-effacingly yet still sickeningly smugly in the faux appellation of the Karl Marx of the Lib Dems. What a load of twaddle. This grandee of social-lite liberalism is more Groucho than Karl when it comes to Marxism, his social concern worn as shakily as the bleeding-heart-on-his-sleeve.
Celebrity Come Shelf Stacking - Cable can still see off these
young dudes
Still, at least once he is out of government post-2014, when he picks up a job working the aisles in age-enhanced-friendly B&Q, Vince won't need to worry about being undercut by some young upstart racing up from the glue section.
Well, first we had Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg calling for a "new" right for employers to have "off the record conversations" with employees they wanted to leave because of misconduct or bad performance.
If our political masters are really keen to make laws, it would be helpful if, first of all, they could take a small portion of time to check out what is already law. The three statements from these supposedly expert, high-paid men betray a total lack of research and simply a wish to pander to the ignorant or deliberately devious agenda of the right wing press that prints repeated lies about it being impossible to dismiss anyone.
Twenty minutes with an employment lawyer would have put them right about their ingenuous "new" ideas. And maybe saved the public some wasted money paying them for unnecessary work.
Personally, I'd fire the lot of them for gross negligence.
And yes, as long as I followed a fair process, if I was their employer, I could.
Oh, it turns out, I am their employer - and so are you!
The words of US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton today as she reacted to the brutal murders of 16 innocent Afghan villagers - including two year old babies shot in their heads - by a US trooper who set out on a long walk from his base with slaughter his sole aim. Clinton looked suitably shocked as President Obama called Afghan President Karzai to offer apologies and condolences.
Not who we are?
Doubtless, within hours, or days at most, the American soldier will be declared insane, his terrible act of destruction the foaming fury of a madman out of control, a man possessed by crazy delusions. Not one of us at all. Perhaps, deep down, not even responsible for his own awful actions - gripped instead by some sort of traumatic stress disorder, in turn a symptom of the great stress he was under while on his fourth tour of duty in war torn Afghanistan. Indeed, when you look at it that way, perhaps his actions were caused by the Afghans. Maybe, deep down, these unruly people with their civil war and unholy faith were really asking for it. Perhaps, he had become one of them in his red mist blood lust...
Not who we are?
Tell us another Hilary. The soldier's actions were extreme, in some respects, but his only "crime" was to do what he did without being under orders at the time. Because increasingly, the American military has become defined by precisely this sort of arrogant brutality, a death-soaked zeitgeist that lifts so-called western civilisation above the value of troublesome mountain peasants and Muslims. This was evident in spade in Farenheit 9/11, when Michael Moore interviewed American tank crews who revealed that driving into Iraq in 2003, they sat in their tanks with their MP3 players streaming music to kill by as they shot up the ill-equipped Iraqi fighters outside their mobile armoured fortress - "It was like a computer game!" one gunner approvingly revealed."The ultimate rush!"
And so it went on - the horrors of Abu Ghraib, where American troops subjected Iraqi prisoners, many taken there on the slenderest of pretexts, to tortures and "heavy interrogation" that a good number did not survive. Photos that were released were just the tip of the iceberg - showing hooded prisoners menaced by dogs or threatened with electrocution. President Obama decided in the end to suppress hundreds of photographs, including many allegedly showing the rape of many of the women prisoners kept by the US soldiers in the former Saddam prison.
And then there was the case of six US soldiers charged with plotting for some weeks before seizing a 14 year old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza, and repeatedly raping her. They then murdered her, her 5 year old sister and her parents and set their bodies on fire. The crime only came to light when one of the soldiers revealed the incident months later to his psychologist.
Abeer - raped and murdered by the US army
The same army later spawned the "Kill Squad" in Afghanistan under one Sargent Morlock, who led his men in killing innocent Afghans for sport. Other instances that have come to light - collecting body parts as trophies, playing football with the decapitated heads of Afghans, firing at random into queues of civilian vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pissing on the corpses of the dead. There are many, many more, few covered by the mass media and, of course, there will be many others we know nothing about.
What drives them to these things? The standard excuse is stress and fear - except that nearly all these cases have taken place outside of combat zones, where the perpetrators were in no fear of their lives and where their victims represented no threat at all. The arrogant dehumanizing of their enemies by these men reaches something of a hubristic crescendo in their apparent eagerness to display their exploits, caught on ubiquitous mobile phone cameras, on youtube and Facebook. The immensity of their war crimes seems to slip by these "warriors".
Referring to the Kill Team in an interview following yesterday's atrocities, Mark Boal, screenplay writer of the Hurt Locker, explained a key motive was boredom and frustration with lack of kills of Taliban fighters. He reported a high level of racism endemic among the regiment involved and how this, in turn, affected their attitude and behaviour towards the Afghans. No hearts and minds here - just pure, brute force. Brute force and profit, of course - because alongside the US army in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Blackwater mercenary company has implanted thousands of security contractors into both countries. Even less disciplined that the regulars, Blackwater has been associated with dozens of violent incidents, including killing 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Nisour square in Bagdhad in order to "clear a path" through people shopping at market.
From the My Lai massacre of 500 innocent villagers in Vietnam to the gunning down of ambulances and children by whooping helicopter gunners above Bagdhad in the video below (released by Wikileaks), the brutality of the American army is frankly far beyond doubt. If the Taliban are vicious, the US forces are constrained purely by the light restraint of vaguely possible bad publicity, a factor that clearly has little impact on what happens on the ground.
American soldiers raped and killed over 500 people at My Lai.
But then, it is not just the poor bloody infantry on the front line defending the corrupt Karzai regime, the young western lives being thrown away on a pointless war, that are responsible for the brutality of the American war machine. The massive carnage among non-combatant civilians that goes by virtually unacknowledged, allowing both the alienation of the Afghans and the continuing brutalisation of often young soldiers, is in fact a product of formal American military policy and planning.
In spite of the dreadful deaths and injuries, Afghanistan actually represents one of the safest wars for US and allied troops in history. The casualty rate pales into insignificance beside the tolls of the second world war, and even of the Korean war. This is because, ever since Vietnam, driven by the exposure of sensationalist 24 hour TV news, US policy has been to promote military adventures as being comfortable, even risk free - the safety of their own troops utterly paramount regardless of the impact on innocent civilians - defined now by the sick and sinister sanitised term, collateral damage.
The American soldier's "inexplicable" actions yesterday then become very explicable indeed - the mindset developed to turn ordinary humans into brutal killing machines inevitably dehumanizes their targets, whether combatants or civilian bystanders. With much military training neatly segued from increasingly life-like computer gaming into training programmes into reality, the boundaries are blurred between fact and fiction, like the tank commanders storming into Bagdhad to the sound of drums: and what the rogue soldier did becomes routine, becomes precisely who we are. It may not be what many of the troops put into the front-line start out being, but the cynical exploitation of their commitment - and often their dire economic circumstances when they sign up - means that the strategy and tactics of the Armed Services sooner or later makes it what they become. And, as America seeks to shore up its declining world power, we will see more and more of this in the years ahead as the USA continues to spend more on its military than every other nation on the planet put together.
So, this is not who you are?
Are you so sure Hilary? As you stand next Commander-in-Chief Obama, you should know better.
The Tories and both their Coalition partners the Lib Dems and now the opposition Labour Party claim massive cuts in spending on social services, welfare to the vulnerable and education are needed to cut the national deficit. But as Green Party leader Caroline Lucas told the party conference in Liverpool this weekend, this is very much a matter of choice driven by perspective rather than financial necessity. It seems there is plenty of money left for some pretty unpleasant choices the Con Dems are happy to splurge out on...
The Neoliberal Now The philosopher-poet George Santayana famously warned of history as being circular and so it seems is the history of Modernity – the feudal age was broken on the anvil of mercantilist capitalism, which harnessed the massive potential of new technologies to shape a whole new socio-economic order around maximising financial returns on the endless exploitation of the Earth’s resources, including its human ones. As a combination of technology and economics has led increasingly to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of owners, this elite has been increasingly globalised in its composition and its functioning. And, inevitably, it has sought the means to perpetuate its predominant position in the World Order. Consequently, we have reached the end of capitalist history – in the sense that the Capitalism of Adam Smith, involving the exchange of goods and services for money in a completely open market, exists no more. It is questionable if such a pure capitalism ever did exist, and indeed, contrary to the claims of many neoliberals, Adam Smith's pro-free trade Wealth of Nations was written as an attack on the crony capitalists of the eighteenth century, the likes of the monopolisitc East India Company, rather than as a defence of big business. Yet, while claiming Smith's mantle in the name of the free market, more than ever the elite have used para- or non-economic measures to buttress their financial ascendancy. Alongside deregulation of what relatively limited controls existed on business in terms of its accountability and use of resources, including people, neoliberal governments have provided succour to often the most appallingly inefficient private organisations in the procurement arrangements for contracting out of huge swathes of public services, in writing off billions in corporate and personal taxation and generally propagandising for a "business-friendly" environment where any social collectivisation - be it trade unions or public healthcare - is viewed with antipathy. In the rise of the religious right in the USA, we also see the phenomenon of Christian sanctity invoked in the defence of capitalism - as espoused by all the leading contenders for the Republican nomination in 2012. Rick Santorum even calls on Genesis to support the right of man to use up the Earth's resources because of his God-given Dominion over them - environmentalists by default are agents of Evil in suggesting any limitation of human exploitation of the planet's resources. In country after country, the doyens of international finance, led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have imposed neoliberal solutions any and everywhere - often at the behest of the USA Government, itself a fully-owned subsidiary of massive global corporate interests. "Liberal democracy", whether exported by bankers or bullets, has emphasised the sale of state assets and the privatisation of state services far ahead of any concern for democratic elections or freedom of speech. Indeed, as often as not, rigged ballot boxes and corruptly "elected" Presidents have been the standard bearers of neoliberal freedom - which is essentially the freedom to buy virtually anything of you have the money to purchase it. Any damage caused to people, society or the environment by the mega-finance merry-go-round is left off the balance sheet, exempted from calculation as mere externalities - the truly horrendous costs of capitalism are hidden away, uncalculated and ignored. Consequently, in the name of progress, masquerading as entrepreneurs and swirling in a trough of corruption unparallelled in recent history, we have seen huge infrastructure projects adopted by Governments in the supposed public interest but either contracted at huge cost or sold at below market value to big business in as blatant a climate of crony capitalism as anyone could imagine. It has infected nearly every society on the planet. For example,
- in Egypt, the ludicrously expensive, environmentally disastrous Toshka canal scheme was used to funnel billions of Egyptian pounds into the hands of construction companies and conglomerates run by the allies of President Mubarak and his US sponsors; the supposed objective was the creation of a new river running parallel to the Nile and bringing huge new areas into cultivation using the same supply of water as now. - in China, massive dam projects have hugely overrun costs and dislocated millions of people as former Communist Party apparatchiks have turned capitalist entrepreneurs on the most favourable terms conceivable from the Government; - in Britain, tens of billions of pounds of public funds have vanished into the shareholders' dividends of private companies engaged in ultimately disastrous projects, such as the construction of the now forgotten and largely unused Millennium Dome, or the welfare-to-work company, A4e, whose owner has become a millionaire from tax-funded contracts to get the unemployed into frequently dead-end, low-paid jobs. She has recently been given yet another Government-funded sinecure as the Czarina for Families, with the objective of giving the benefit of her insights from living in a massive rural mansion to the dysfunctional and feckless families of "broken Britain". - in Greece, a massive scam concocted between American share-traders and the conservative New Democracy party government at the start of the 21st century plunged the country into massive public debt. With breathtaking chutzpah, the same traders subsequently turned the crisis they had made into the fault of the Greek public sector and the European Central Bank, neoliberal to its core, demanded a massive squeeze on the poorest in the country, who subsequently became internationally vilified with complete myths about retirement at 55 and a lazy working life. However, the same financiers who pushed Greece into crisis are now reaping dividends from the projected privatization of much of the public sector in a new smash-and-grab raid on the common wealth in the name of efficiency and entrepreneurship. - and in the USA, a combination of punitive "three-strikes-and-you're-out (for life)" laws and privatisation of prisons has created a massive slave labour force of over two million people hired out to manufacturers at less than 25 cents an hour with no employment rights or protection whatsoever. This industry provides the American military with nearly all their helmets, uniforms and even some of their weapons. The Neoliberal elite has backed up this plundering of the common wealth with a growing willingness to deploy state security services both in increasingly brutal policing actions (witness the violent eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protests and the London G8 protest) and in increasingly intrusive private surveillance of their opponents lives, whether via the internet or infiltration of the green movement (exposed in the UK by the disgrace of undercover police agents establishing fake relationships and fathering the children of their targets). The media is bought up, public service broadcasting cowed and access to the internet increasingly restricted and commercialised. There can be no doubt that neoliberals, with all the advantages of incumbency, will fight hard and dirty in defence of their privileges; so their opponents need to choose our grounds of battle carefully.
Democratic Space The architecture and design of towns and cities and people’s dwelling places have always been on the front line of the competing ideas of what modern society should look like and how it should function. The combination of revolutionary culture and commercial development of 19th century Paris made for a sympathetically collectivist experience, where the potency of The Street was evident to both the authorities and the people, with a consequent tendency towards greater social democracy and cohesion. However, function does not always follow form, as we saw in the case of Saint Petersburg with its public spaces without public life.
Boulevards - the veins of Parisian discourse
Since the Agora, the Athenian market place, combined commerce and democratic politics, town centres and squares have been the focus of urban life. Throughout the Roman Empire, the forum was the proudly beating civic heart of any municipality. Here, as well as goods and services, people could exchange news and ideas – throughout history, everything from religion and politics to language and learning has followed the same routes as merchants took. This has persisted as an embedded historical memory which, even today, is often twistingly invoked by big business to justify its profitable engagement with the most unsavoury regimes allegedly for the benefit of their repressed people.
And yet, in more and more western societies, the traditionally public town centre has already gone or is vanishing rapidly; and it is being replaced by private, purely commercial space. Take the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, where the rise of the huge out of town Meadowhall Centre has sucked many of the shops and most of the customers out of its High Streets – the Centre, a giant American-style Mall, is privately owned. You can shop until you drop, but you won’t find anyone engaging you in political discourse or asking you to sign a petition as you might have found in an old public town square or street. Lottery tickets and store cards are the only potential life-changing options available.
Even where traditional town centres remain, some have been sold off or leased to private companies which are free to restrict the types of activities that can take place. In others local authorities impose registration requirements before people can hand out leaflets or talk to other citizens about anything other than where to get ten per cent off hamburgers. Sadly, all too often, it is taken as read that private commerce is, literally, the only game in town. Particularly under the debt-driven boom of the Blairite New Labour years, Britain saw an explosion in ironically named public-private partnership deals which signed over public assets to big private companies for often minimal redevelopment in return for leasebacks costing tens of billions of taxpayers’ money for decades to come. As Owen Hatherley has written in “A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain” (2010), the result has been a plethora of anodyne, “pointless piazzas with attendant branches of Costa Coffee”. The ill-titled Urban Renaissance drove forward more than ever the syndrome neatly coined by the New Economics Foundation as clone towns, where it really does not matter whether you are in Newcastle or Newquay, Maidstone or Motherwell, you will find the same uniform appearance, the same shops and brands, often even with the same interior layout for stock.
Where in the world?
And outside the commercial zones, the story has been similarly dismal. In Britain, New Labour’s Pathfinder scheme demolished thousands of older Victorian buildings in favour of cheap new build. Rather than expect profit-seeking developers to retrofit buildings that had been built to last, the Modern view was that they should be demolished and replaced using low-cost/ high-profit construction materials and methods which may last two or three decades at most before their maintenance costs will make them unsustainable. Even where, as is all too often the case, the existing, usually less well off population is replaced by the upwardly mobile in allegedly prestigious developments (Hatherley views their Scandinavian appearance with some disdain), they will not stay the course anything like as long as the buildings they replace – and so the Faustian cycle of destruction and renewal will kick in with alarming rapidity. All that is solid melts into rubble and cement dust.
As mixed tenure developments decline and concierge-screened apartment blocks or gated communities become the norm for the aspirational, the slightly more tasteful design of social Darwinism has, in Hatherley’s view, provided an empty, sterile Modernist edifice, “a Modernism without the politics, without the utopianism, or without any conception of the polis; a Modernism that conceals rather than reveals its functions; Modernism as a shell.”
Globally, the architecture and morality of neoliberalism are complemented in dreadful perfection in the emergence of new St Petersburgs in the most bizarre places, each of them a monument to excess, an icon to the blatant greed of an elite that is beyond the reach of any democratic restraint at all. Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk in their book, “Evil Paradises: Dreamworld of Neoliberalism” (2007) take a tour of these citadels of privilege. In 19 case studies from Managua in Panama and Arg-e Jadid in Iran, to
the notorious new Babylon of Dubai, the epitome of globalised greed, they show
the hubris of the Rulers of the World, erecting pleasure domes into the skies,
creating artificial ski slopes in the desert and conquering the sea to create a
world of their own. All this excess rests on the dreadful exploitation of the
planet and its people – a planet where two billion exist on less than $2 per
day and where the servants of the rich in these elitist enclaves sometimes
sleep on the roofs of these great buildings alongside the chickens that will
feed their Masters and Mistresses.
Against Nature - the impossible Dubai
The model for these modern Gomorrahs is, unsurprisingly, California. Although Brecht decided that “Hell must be more like Los Angeles”, this is precisely the unsustainable template for most of these pseudo-paradises. Monk and Davis warn apocalyptically that this is in effect the final stage of late modernity – behind their gilded barricades, the wealthy are gradually readying themselves for the crises to come, their unsustainable lifestyles driving us all towards an ultimate reckoning.
“In the large perspective, the bright archipelagos of utopian luxury and supreme lifestyles are mere parasites on a planet of slums...Viewed as an ensemble, these idle redoubts stand as testaments to the resignation with which humanity squanders the borrowed time on which it now lives.”
The Unreality of the Real
It is a seemingly bleak perspective. Modernity has been bought – or sequestered even – by a self-perpetuating elite which has acquired the necessary means to destroy, deflect or, if necessary, absorb any challenges. It has even been able to bury, deep within the public conscious, the concept that it is something that it patently is not – a “free” market which is increasingly neither free nor, with effectively increasingly limited genuine choices, is it in essence even a market. And, as the Soviet era fades from memory, the vulgarity of Fukyama’s absurd declaration of The End of History and the permanent triumph of capitalism is replaced with a subtler message, calibrated to reassure the masses in the wake of the neoliberal crises sweeping the world economies since 2008.
Now, capitalism is not arrogantly triumphant; rather, as Mark Fisher notes in “Capitalist Realism” (2008), it is pragmatic – it is post-ideological because, in this narrative, all ideologies have failed. In the absence of ideology, capitalism emerges as the natural system and so any challenge to it can only, by default, be a ludicrously fantastical and counter-productively ideological one. Quoting Badiou, Fisher expands of this reductive (yet seductive) call to inaction: “We live in a contradiction. A brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian – where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone – is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So, instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible...Our democracy is not perfect. But it is better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism...We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda."
Fisher pointedly describes this capitalist realism as “analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion.” Long gone is the pioneering spirit of the dawn of the Modern Age, the belief in progress, in betterment – however unevenly distributed or brutally attained, all the proponents of Modernism from Goethe onwards held to a belief that science and reason could deliver a better life for all. Whether the utopianism of Chernyshevsky’s chessboard mega-towers or the ville radiuese of Le Corbusier, in their divergent but Modernist minds, even the poorest would have happier, more contented lives.
Instead now, in the twenty-first century, the gap between the richest and poorest on the planet is greater than ever before. And abject human misery is the default experience of more people than ever before. It is a searing indictment of our way of life that when there is more than enough food to go round, two billion go to bed hungry while hundreds of millions face the problems of obesity. Even in wealthier countries, the imbalance is obscene – for example, in 2004, the mean annual income of the top 10% of US families was nearly 18 times that of the lowest 40%. With the emergence of new capitalist elites in countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, the skew of wealth is on a relentless trajectory which terminates in the twisted towers above the dunes of Dubai, the megaliths of modernity gone wrong.
Amidst this gloomy prognosis, some of the elite seek to paint a different picture – Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in particular have sought to spearhead a sort of kinder capitalism, the former in particular articulating an ethical outlook which was never particularly apparent in his ruthless development of Microsoft to a position of near monopoly of global IT software products. Both men have made great play in public about their devotion of much of their wealth to charitable causes – like all charity, ultimately based on the random desires of the donor rather than the actual needs of the recipients. And yet, in his book, “Creative Capitalism” (2010), which I purchased at a suitably low market price in a remaindered bookshop, Michael Kinsley documents a nauseating, self-congratulatory conversation between these would-be gods of charitable largesse, the Smashy and Nicey of contemporary capital. It puts into some context the value they really place on corporate social responsibility:
Bill Gates – So someone can read the words “creative capitalism” and say “Ok, Bill Gates said that you should serve the poorest two billion (people) and ignore profit.” That’s not what I intend to say at all, but then I am being a bit ambiguous about how far you go in being willing to give up something. Am I saying one per cent? Two per cent? Three per cent?.....
Warren Buffet - .....Ace Greenberg used to insist that all the managing directors of Bear Sterns give four per cent to charity and in December each year he would go round and talk to everyone who hadn’t yet given his four per cent. And he told all the Jews that they had to give any shortfall at year-end to Catholic charities, and he told the Catholics they had to give it to the United Jewish Appeal. Well, this would be a variation on that. Take three per cent – pick a figure – of corporate income (to be administered by corporations for society’s benefit)...If there are things to be done in society that the market system doesn’t naturally lead to, something like this would be a supplement to the invisible hand.”
Three per cent. In a world where the richest man on the planet, the ironically named Carlos Slim Heliu of Telmex, holds more wealth than the annual GDP of some eighty countries, these Masters of the World are generously prepared to surrender about 3% of their corporate income - on the condition they get to administer its expenditure themselves and, as the conversation winds on to show, as long as their donations generate goodwill that leads to further profit generation.
There is no more momentum to be had from this accountant’s view of the modern world. The neoliberals have largely removed objective truth from the public domain in any case; so Gates’ and Buffet’s calculated self-justification of their privileged wealth appears as nothing more significant than a half-hearted defence of a system for which no one outside the elite has any regard beyond a resigned acceptance of its claimed inevitability.
Capitalism - the least bad system? Carlos Slim Heliu, centre, was worth $63,100,000,000 at September 2011. His fellow humans, left and right, from America and Africa were worth less.
The Future of Modern And here sits the opportunity for those who want to return to the Modernism whose absence Owen Hatherley laments – Modernism with politics; Modernism with the Polity; Modernism for people, not profit. But while resolutely rejecting the grand narrative of neoliberalism, we must be deeply mindful of the need for true humanity in the alternatives we construct.
As far back as Dostoevsky’s warnings that a combination of love for humanity with hatred for actual people (is) one of the fatal hazards of modern politics, the challenge for those advocating a better world for all as opposed to a minority has been to show both that it is more than a dreamland in itself and that it is not to be achieved through some rigid ideology that in its prescriptive nature becomes self-defeating. In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), Marshall Berman queries the inevitability of a communist society as predicted by Marx on the basis that the very freedoms communism would bring would immediately undermine it – either because some people would actively choose to undertake a different path; or because communist society would have to actively suppress such choices, thus removing at a stroke the freedom it promised.
Whether egalitarian or not in their conception, the paternalistic dangers of grand, top-down Modernism illustrated by Goethe’s Faust need to be the lodestar for any who seek to snatch the concept and reality of the Modern from the neoliberals’ clutches. Both Chernyshevsky and Le Corbusier’s dreams of great scientifically planned mega cities would always be doomed because of their inherent lack of human scale - both had the potential to degenerate into the dystopian uber-city of Fritz Lang's epic film, Metropolis (1927).
The early Soviet writer Zemyatin, concerned by the fantasies of super-cities that sliced across the ideological divides of the 1920s, recast Chernyshevsky’s chessboard urbanism with one where its cities were constructed out of ice to symbolise its inherently inhospitably to real people, its sheer size coldly crushing them. “We are just little creatures...little animals,” one of the characters in HG Wells Things To Come protests when faced with the prospect of relentless development and endless "progress" to the stars and beyond.
The world of tomorrow faces massive challenges – environmental degradation, food insecurity and resource scarcity, ever rising demands for currently dwindling reserves of energy, continued increases in economic inequality, chronic financial instability and, underpinning all of these and more, growing low level conflict and terrorism punctuated by greater conflicts (all the more dangerous with the gradual spread of nuclear weaponry). Neoliberalism cannot provide a solution – although it will certainly provide a harshly authoritarian and violent response to its troubles. Nor can any remedy be found by a return to an essentially illusory "pure" capitalism, with its ludicrous commodification of everything and anything and theoretical assumption of inexhaustible supply (regulated only by the magical Invisible Hand of the market).
Baudelaire saw the Parisian boulevards, The Street, as the repository of change. It was here that the People and people could meet and mix, understand and develop their ideas. It was along these broad expanses that public life could take place, just as once thousands of Athenians gathered to hear and debate with Pericles, Alcibiades and Socrates. Recent years may have seen the streets in many cities cleared of anything more subversive than the ubiquitous metal chairs outside chains of coffee shops, but starting with the anti-globalisation movement in the late 1990s, there have been sporadic instances of protest against the prevailing Worldview. This crystallised as the banking collapses of 2008 and 2009 profoundly shook public confidence in capitalism. Since the first protesters arrived in Cairo’s Tahrir Square just over a year ago, the world has seen a remarkable, global demonstration of the People and people against the “capitalist realism” that supposedly provides the foundation stones of post-Modern society.
Baudelaire - the father of "Modern"
In city after city, first the protesters of the Arab Spring and then of the Occupy protests seized public spaces, their spaces, back from oppressive authorities and the private owners who claimed them. And with powerful effect they used the New Street - the virtual highways of the internet - to garner a worldwide movement, loose and amorphous, but unique to our times, a glimpse of something not possible before the very latest stage of modernity. The foci of the protests have been varied, although the greed of the global elite has featured frequently, and even after many months of legal wrangling and numerous brutally violent attacks by the authorities (viz the facial pepper spraying of a sit-down protest in the USA and similar assaults by police on a man in a wheelchair and a woman in her eighties), the Occupy Movement remains slow to adopt any particular political perspective. Perhaps reflecting the success of the neoliberals in establishing the idea that capitalism is the sole viable system, there is an apparent hesitance to propose any clear alternatives.
Yet, talk to the people still (just) at St Paul’s Cathedral in London (facing a bizarre coalition of City-appointed Church Trustees, City traders, and rightwing press which spends more time worrying about occasional graffiti as opposed to the despoiling of the nation’s wealth by our financial elite), and their concerns and nascent solutions chime readily with the ideas of social justice and environmental sustainability advocated by many in the socialist and environmental movements. The increasingly red-green alliances, fused in the concepts of ecosocialism, have often been born of such unformed protests initially against what is wrong as opposed to in favour of something new - as Derek Wall explored in his "Rise of the Green Left" (2011) indigenous Latin Americans have led the way in this.
Traditionally radical: Greek democracy - then and now...
There is a treasure trove of ideas for a different modernity, stretching far back, beyond Marx and Goethe. The Levellers and others in the days of the English Civil War were the first to coherently argue for social as well as political change. And as considered both in this essay and in the previous A History of Modern, throughout the last two centuries, many individuals and movements have argued with some success for the harnessing of the new learning and technologies to more egalitarian and humanistic ends. Ultimately though, the large scale of some distinctly Modernist projects, especially in building, led to concerns about social engineering and a liberal elitism that echoed Dostoevsky’s concerns about loving humanity but hating people.
The antithesis of the likes of France's Le Corbusier and New York's Robert Moses was the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. His work repeatedly emphasised the human and the genuinely natural environment. For him, living spaces were not the densely concentrated but simultaneously isolating boxes of his French counterpart – rather, they were constructed in harmony with their surroundings, in some cases, like his iconic Fallingwater house, almost absorbed by their surroundings. Within, there was an emphasis of space and continuity, reflecting a belief in the holistic nature of the human experience – an approach Wright came to refer to as organic architecture.
The future, for there to be one, will have to be more human, more local, communitarian and small scale. Rising transport costs will require more localised production and distribution of goods and services – permitting a return to much greater diversity in ownership, in form and product. Likewise, the need to develop renewable energy such as solar schemes and wind farms will only be viable on a community level - individual household schemes have only a limited potential. This will in turn drive a need for community use of public buildings and structures, existing and new.
The Modern of tomorrow can be very different to what we know now. But only if the Left can seize the moment to show that neoliberalism cannot be repaired, cannot become a magically kinder capitalism. As Bakan demonstrated pretty conclusively in The Corporation, the pathology of corporate capitalism is fundamentally psychopathic, functioning in complete self-interest and without conscience. It's time is over. It has no future to offer humanity.
In its place, we need to develop ways to demonstrate a fairer world, as ever before embracing the potential of new technologies in energy, transport and communications, but with an emphasis on the small, the near, the human. Politics has to deliver genuinely democratic participation at grassroots and a willingness to tackle and dismantle the giant corporations that now dominate our world in the ultimate interests of no one at all. Indeed, many of them are now so massive that they are genuinely impersonal entities beyond the control of any workable group of individuals. We need governments to take back and simultaneously devolve ownership of key resources, break cartels and limit the size of large companies, foster mutuals, co-operatives and community enterprises, rebuild the public sectors and massively redistribute wealth in all its forms. The concept of the Global Commons, of Earth’s resources belonging to all and held in trust for now and for the future, should be given legal status to replace the corporate privilege that currently dominates our world. Any remaining market mechanism should be heavily regulated to ensure it serves the community, not the other way round. With its emphasis on an essentially humane perspective rooted in a scientific awareness once ahead of its time, ecosocialism offers the prospect of a final synthesis of the logic and rationalism of the Enlightenment with the more intangible, even spiritual humanity of the Romantic Movement. A sustainable society will at once have to draw on logic and justice to survive. We can and must embrace a more egalitarian future, one that sees economic equality as no less important that political equality: no society anywhere is brazen enough to suggest that some people should get 10 or 20 votes while others only get 1; so if human equality is seen as standard for elections, why is it not the same for access to our limited resources, to the planet that has birthed and nurtured our species? And it will have to be a world that, in its humanity, does not just tolerate but embraces diversity - of ideas, of lifestyles, of belief, of culture. The drive of the Modern we have now is towards a single, global monoculture - whether ever hopeful poor US citizens clinging to the evaporating mirage of making it big; or the Chinese and Brazilians emerging into major economic power status; or the global elite in their pleasure city in the Dubai desert; all roads lead in the end to the American Dream. Yet it is a dream turned nightmare. Like all monocultures when they fail to mix or learn anew, the only real prospect is decline and entropy: like a closed, nationalistic society, or a community that excludes others, or a mind that sticks resolutely to habit and the comfort of the known, ultimately, it will fade and die from lack of challenge, lack of the new, the end of the modern. As resource scarcity and global warming take ever tighter hold, we cannot continue with business as usual and hope to have any chance at all. We can choose that future - indeed, for now, it is the one humanity has selected. The first Dark Ages saw the combination of a totalitarian Roman political system and a narrow, monotheist Catholic church close down all alternative current of thought, exterminating pagan and heretics and banning philosophy and science as an affront to God, leading, as the historian Charles Freeman put so eloquently, to "The closing of the western mind." So, in yet another circular cycle of history, we can bow down to the new Dark Age of neoliberal economics and an authoritarian state which isolates and demonises even its most peaceful opponents as threats to national security and purveyors of international terrorism. In doing so, we can prolong the excess of the tiny elite who are driving our planet to conflict and exhaustion, we can endorse the rapine of our natural resources and prejudice the future of our own and the next generation. Or we can choose to question - we can return to the spirit of challenge and change which is at the heart of true modern progress. We can combine the glorious potential of our modern world with its science and technology with a re-embracing of Nature, our place in it and our common humanity. It is a travesty of the glorious potential of our modern world that our carbon emissions are in fact growing faster than ever, when we have technologies that can deliver sustainable, clean energy to the entire planet - we can choose differently. Likewise, there is food enough to go round - even in many of the poorest parts of Africa, famine has come not because of the collapse of food production, but because of its commodification by international food speculators and its seizure (often violently) for export as cash crops to the richer societies. Again, this is a choice - choice driven only by the economic ideology we choose to use. As we have seen, the creativity of the human mind and spirit offers many and better alternatives. We are at a nexus. As never before, the world is facing the deepest of crisis – the threat of the collapse of human civilisation before the end of this century; and even the possibility of the destruction of our species, as well as many others. The problem is of our own making, driven inexorably forward by a system that is out of control, that has no centre, no benevolently guiding Invisible Hand.
But the answer is ours as well. Trotsky warned of “Either socialism or barbarism.” We can yet embrace a new sustainable and happier Modernity, a Future Modern where we cease being victims of the allegedly inevitable and instead share our world with each other, with Nature and with the countless generations still to come. The choice is ours.
Of everything we've made. The times it's worked before... Of all the things we've said. They've always worked. Before today.
Bibliography
"Meditations" - Marcus Aurelius, pub Penguin Books (1964)
"All That Is Solid Melts Into Air - The Experience of Modernity" - Marshall Berman, pub Verso (2010) 2nd ed.
"Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism" - Ed by Mike Davis & Daniel Bertrand Monk, pub The New Press (2007)
"The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & The Fall of Reason" - Charles Freeman, pub Pimlico (2003)
"Capitalist Realism - Is There No Alternative?" - Mark Fisher, pub Zero Books (2009)
"A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain" - Owen Hatherley, pub Verso (2010)
"Creative Capitalism: Conversations with Bill Gates, Warren Buffet & Others" - Michael Kinsley, pub Pocket Books (2010)
"The Rise of the Green Left - Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement" - Derek Wall, pub Pluto Press (2010)
