Category: capitalism

Book review: FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM, Aaron Bastani, Verso, 2019

Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ trivializes the global environmental crisis with badly-researched techno-hype and hopelessly inadequate political plans.

reviewed by Ian Angus https://climateandcapitalism.com/2019/06/22/gee-whiz-communism-is-sure-gonna-be-keen/

Gee Whiz! Communism is sure gonna be keen!

When I was ten years old, I read and re-read a stack of decades-old Modern Mechanix magazines that I found in my grandfather’s basement. Throughout the Great Depression, MM regaled its readers with breathless accounts of technological marvels that were going to change the world, very soon.

Issue after issue promised the kind of things that were later parodied in The Jetsons TV show — flying cars, air conditioned cities, weather control, robots and the like.

The same publisher produced The Technocrats’ Magazine, devoted to the claim that if engineers ran the government, new technology would lead to a world of plenty and a 13-hour work week.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism lacks the garish covers, but otherwise it reminds me of those magazines. If Aaron Bastani is to be believed, new technological marvels are about to create “a society in which work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance, and where labour and leisure blend into one another.”

The title isn’t a joke — the author, a leftish journalist who often appears on British television, seriously argues that new technology will solve all our problems and usher in a new era of abundance for all, making capitalism obsolete. Agriculture and steam engines radically disrupted human societies in the past, and now a Third Disruption based on information processing and microchips has begun — “a world dramatically different from our own is both inevitable and near at hand.”

Chapter after chapter of Fully Automated Luxury Communism hails the wonderful world of tomorrow. Solar cells will deliver limitless energy so cheaply that fossil fuels will be rapidly and totally replaced. Intelligent robots and automatons will do all the hard work and most of the easy stuff, too. Genetic engineering will “spell the end of age-related and inherited illness altogether.” Milk and eggs and all kinds of meat will be grown in vats, making vegans of us all and eliminating industrial farms. Cheap rockets built by 3-D printers will mine asteroids (“perhaps as early as 2030”) so we will never run out of raw materials.

All of this is related with the kind of gee whiz enthusiasm that ten-year-old me loved in my grandfather’s magazines. Radical changes are coming sooner than we expect, and each is awarded the ultimate futurist accolade — paradigm shift!

In case you doubt that such sweeping changes can happen quickly, Bastani repeats the oft-told story of the “Horse Manure Crisis” that “struck fear into the hearts of Londoners” in 1894. There were so many horses in the city that, The Times calculated, “in fifty years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” An urban studies conference held four years later found the problem insoluble — but of course it disappeared when automobiles replaced horses a few years later.

Similarly, Bastani tells us, “A few short decades from now, the seemingly terminal problems of today will appear as absurd as the London manure crisis of 1894 does to us.”

This was my first clue that Bastani’s research is unreliable, because the Horse Manure Crisis is a myth. The article he confidently quotes was never published in The Times or anywhere else, and that urban studies conference didn’t happen. The Times itself says the story is “fake news.” A simple internet search would have shown him that the anecdote and his conclusion are, well, horse manure.

The rest of his research is just as superficial. He provides no footnotes at all, so his claims are hard to check, but his bibliography mainly lists newspaper and magazine articles, not scientific studies. His enthusiastic account of India’s Green Revolution, for example, depends entirely on one magazine article by anti-environmentalist Gregg Esterbrook, ignoring many studies of the social and environmental damage caused by dependence on proprietary seeds and synthetic fertilizers. His accounts of robots and space mining draw heavily on statements by entrepreneurs whose prime concern is to impress investors. I’m sorry, but Elon Musk is not a reliable guide.

There’s another problem with the horse manure story. While cars solved some problems, they created bigger ones, including air pollution, climate change, urban sprawl, and over a million traffic deaths every year. Not once does Bastani even hint that his exciting new technologies might have downsides. Does engineering the human genome pose no dangers? Will synthetic meat factories have no environmental impact? He tells us that space miners will move mineral-rich asteroids closer to Earth, but doesn’t question the wisdom of pushing gigantic space rocks towards our vulnerable planet. Remember the dinosaurs?

An ecological society will certainly need advanced technologies — but implementing them properly will depend on the precautionary principle, not thoughtless cheerleading.

He doesn’t say so, but Bastani’s argument parallels the claim made by pro-capitalist ecomodernists, that technology will “decouple” economic growth from environmental damage. The difference is that they think capitalism will last forever, while he thinks it can’t survive decoupled growth that radically reduces the cost of energy and goods. “Faced with the limitless, virtually free supply of anything, its internal logic starts to break down. This is because its central presumption is that scarcity will always exist.”

As Bill Jefferies has pointed out, this confuses capitalism as such with neo-classical economic theory. Far from being threatened by abundance, capital thrives on it. If the cost of energy and raw materials falls as Bastani expects, some corporations may disappear, but others will take advantage of low costs to create new industries and manufacture more commodities. Technology may change capitalism, but nothing short of revolution will stop its deadly growth.

Bastani frequently quotes Marx, but his economics are Keynesian, his history is crude technological determinism, and his political program doesn’t go beyond social democratic reforms.

After promising “previously unthinkable abundance” and an end to work, what he actually advocates is an expanded welfare state and traditional electoral politics. Marx said the workers must emancipate themselves, but Bastani tells us that “the majority of people are only able to be politically active for brief periods of time,” so they must depend on populist politicians who will win their votes by promising unlimited luxury for all.

Those politicians will promote local economic development by encouraging cooperatives and credit unions, while central banks keep interest rates low and invest in “automation that serves the people.” Everyone will be guaranteed access to energy, housing, healthcare and education, paid for in part by a tax on greenhouse gas emissions.

Those are progressive measures that deserve support, but none of them goes one step beyond the limits of capitalism. The “transformation as seismic as that of the arrival of agriculture” is nowhere in sight.

Like Modern Mechanix magazines, Bastani’s book is long on sensational speculation, but the back pages don’t deliver on the cover’s promises. It trivializes the global environmental crisis with badly-researched techno-hype and political plans that don’t come close to addressing the world’s problems. In the end, Fully Automated Luxury Communism is just an empty slogan.

We need to stop pretending that the “greening” of business is working

We’ve reached a point where the very notion that business is in some way working hard to address our environmental and social challenges is laughable. To the contrary, the evidence strongly suggests that the greatest efforts of corporations is to maintain the status quo.

Another absurd narrative is that billionaires are somehow big-brained problem solvers who are graciously bringing their special skills to the table to address our social and environmental challenges — this is nonsense.

Billionaires are simply good business people who got lucky with a trend and who benefit from a rigged system that allows them to legally avoid paying taxes. 

They certainly don’t deserve the esteemed status that society places upon them. The ability to grow a business does not qualify them to lead solutions to the Earth’s biggest social and environmental challenges.

Throwing big dollars around that should have been paid as taxes should not be a pathway to influencing public policy; like everyone else, influence should arise from democratic channels. 

Can we agree that corporate elites and billionaires are not our saviours for progressive change? In fact, quite the contrary, through their direct and indirect lobbying efforts and subtle influence as “elites” business leaders have delivered a unique form of climate-destroying and wealth-hoarding capitalism that is sending us straight into an existential and climate crisis.

Let’s face it, the “elites” have done everything except tell us directly that they don’t want change.

Those of us who work hard, pay our taxes and follow the rules will find our lives more onerous and precarious as a climate “bomb” sweeps across the planet. But fear not for the billionaires, they will be spared from the coming social collapse.

Private estates and bunkers equipped with industrial-sized greenhouses, water purification systems, giant solar arrays, a small farm with animals and a guarded perimeter will keep the elites and their friends nice and safe while the system that they helped to create implodes.

We can say with our heads held high that until now our desire for leadership and solutions has been so strong that we accepted some pretty far-fetched ideas about business and it’s desire to reverse course and protect the planet.

Perhaps we are a little naive or maybe it is out of pure desperation that we take corporations and their puppet politicians at their word, but in the end they haven’t delivered and won’t.

Meanwhile we continue to witness the continued decline of every major ecosystem on the planet.

The corporate sustainability movement is rigged; it’s controlled by the “winners” of capitalism to complicate, stonewall and resist progressive change. Ask yourself, why is it that when an environmental crisis is identified and change is deemed necessary, the first goal of government policy seems to be about maintaining the status quo and the profits of business even when doing so would clearly be an inadequate response to the crisis? 

Imagine if the corporations and politicians were held accountable both morally and financially for the devastating harm that they have caused during the last 40 years, and stripped of their plundered wealth and assets, and their power handed to the people to democratically run the planet in the best interests of everyone.

https://theecologist.org/2019/jun/19/greening-business

Journalists Killed or Silenced for Environmental Reporting

At least 13 journalists have been killed while reporting on environmental stories around the world in the past decade, and 16 more suspicious deaths are being investigated, according to the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists. Forbidden Stories – a consortium of 40 journalists from 15 media outlets including OCCRP – also found that journalists investigating environmental issues often face arrest, harassment and violence.

Read full story here:

https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/environmental-investigations-prompt-killing-and-silencing-of-journalists

Banning plastic is not so fantastic

Bans on some single-use plastic products have been a popular but it won’t be enough: plastics demand is rising and will continue to rise through the next ten years at least, Axios reported recently, noting that demand for ethane—the largest feedstock for plastics—will hit 1.7 million barrels per day this year in the US alone, up by 83 percent from 2012.

It is this prospect of rising plastics demand that is spurring a lot more investment in petrochemicals in the Big Oil group. Big Oil goes where the profits are and the environmentalist offensive against internal combustion engines will eventually lead to a decline in oil demand from the transportation sector. Plastics, however, will endure.

Petrochemicals will come to account for more than 33 percent of oil demand growth globally in the period to 2030. By 2050, they will drive half of the global oil demand growth, raising this demand by 7 million bpd by that year, the International Energy Agency said in a report last October.

Petrochemicals are used in thousands of products, with the biggest group among these being single-use plastic products. Yet, even if single-use plastic products are removed from the supply chain, enough demand will remain to drive the consumption of crude oil. Even electric cars need plastics and according to the consensus forecast, the world will need a lot more EVs in the years to come.

BP projects petrochemicals will come to account for as much as 70 percent of the growth in oil demand by 2040. That would be up from 50 percent in 2018. No wonder, then, that Big Oil is focusing on petrochemicals. Despite the opposition despite the likelihood of more stringent measures for reining in our plastics use, the demand will be there and it will be strong enough to justify billions in investments.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-Big-Oils-Plastic-Bet-Going-Sour.html

Repair, Not Replace

We don’t throw away cars with faulty batteries. We expect to fix something when it’s broken. At least we did for a few hundred years.

“We used to have vacuum and TV repair shops, and now it’s garbage trucks taking our stuff away,” ..The very right to keep the products you own for a long time is being taken away, simply because the disposable society is promoted by manufacturers seeking bigger profits for shareholders.

According to the iFixIt website, for every 1,000 tons of electronics, landfilling creates zero jobs, recycling creates 15, and repairing creates 200 jobs.

Excellent read on fighting the corporations and their built in obsolescence here:

https://nextcity.org/features/view/the-case-to-repair-and-not-to-replace

EXXONMOBIL’S SELF-SERVING CLIMATE POLICY

This piece is an extract from a Roarmag.org article on the hidden agenda behind corporate-led reforms and how corporations’ offers to self-regulate are driven by wanting to silence criticism and expanding their own power and influence. It focuses on Exxon Mobil’s support for a carbon emissions tax to combat climate change. This is followed by a news report on how Exxon are heavily committed to growing the production of petrochemicals and plastics as an answer to uncertainty over the future of crude oil use.

EXXONMOBIL’S SELF-SERVING CLIMATE POLICY

In October 2018, ExxonMobil pledged $1 million to support a campaign for a carbon tax. But the donation by the largest US-based producer of oil and gas is no altruistic contribution to combating climate change. It is yet another self-serving corporate reform.

Exxon’s financial support toward climate policy goes toward a proposal championed by Americans for Carbon Dividends, a free-market organization that grew out of the policy think tank Climate Leadership Council (CLC). NPRcommentators summarized the CLC’s carbon tax proposal as raising “the price of fossil fuels to reduce their use and cut the amount of climate-changing carbon released into the atmosphere.” Under this plan the primary focus is to generate short-term revenue, while reducing carbon emissions is considered a mere positive side effect.

While any proposal to cut carbon emission might make environmental activists rejoice at first, there is more to the story. The CLC was co-founded in early 2017 by conservative policy entrepreneur Ted Halstead, and James A. Baker III, a former White House chief of staff and treasury secretary under Ronald Reagan, and secretary of state under George W. Bush. The CLC describes itself as a bipartisan, pro-market organization to “promote a carbon dividends framework as the most cost-effective, equitable and politically-viable climate solution.” Other founding members of the organization include former Federal Reserve chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen, with financial and infrastructural support coming from US corporate behemoths like Unilever, GM, Proctor & Gamble, and oil giants ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Total.

Given the “who’s who” slate of political bigwigs and corporate sponsors, it should come as no surprise that the CLC’s proposal intricately embeds and subsumes the pressing issue of combating climate change into a neoliberal market-based scheme that raises the price of fossil fuel in the short run, while simultaneously scaling back EPA regulations against environmental pollution and climate change in the first place.

The CLC is a prime example of American welfare capitalism. The group is touting its support for climate policy while distracting the American people from its own corporate goals and aspirations.

CLC founder Ted Halstead articulated his organization’s agenda most clearly in a TED talk in May 2017: “[T]he road to climate progress in the United Stated runs through the Republican party and the business community.” Halstead argued that the CLC’s carbon dividends plan would result in “less regulation and far less pollution at the same time, while helping working class Americans get ahead.”

Based on the proposition to repeal environmental regulation and to increase prices on carbon-based fuel, it is hardly surprising that ExxonMobil publicly supports the CLC’s carbon tax plan. Behind a thinly veiled and disingenuous veneer of concern about climate change lies an even greater and more genuine concern about the company’s profits and market share.

Moreover, as CLC spokesperson Greg Bertelsen admitted, ExxonMobil and other large corporation are happy to embrace and support regulatory policies like a carbon tax because they all want “regulatory certainty” in order to “know what the rules of the game will be.” In the tradition of Bismarckian controlled progress from above, large corporations want to ensure that reform happens only under their own purview and the parameters that they set.

This type of corporate-inspired climate change policy still forms the basis for establishment politicians in their quest for public support, with Joe Biden’s andMichael Bloomberg’s respective plans to combat climate change each representing yet another public show of capitalist benevolence to reform at a time when the stakes could hardly be any higher, and when anything less than a full, genuine commitment to combating climate change is unacceptable.

Exxon, Saudis Bet on Plastics Growth in Giant Gulf Coast Plant

Exxon Mobil Corp. and Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled petrochemicals company formally approved construction of a new chemical complex in Texas that will process production from the Permian Basin’s booming oil and natural gas wells.

The project near Corpus Christi will be the world’s largest steam cracker and create $50 billion of “economic output” in the first six years, Exxon and Saudi Basic Industries Corp., known as Sabic, said in a joint statement on Thursday. The facility will convert hydrocarbons such as ethane and propane to ethylene, a chemical used to make everything from plastics to antifreeze.
…
Industry executives have been lauding chemicals as an emerging driver of global oil and gas markets. Earlier this week, BP Plc Chief Economist Spencer Dale earlier predicted petrochemicals will dominate energy demand growth for the next two decades.

Plastics and chemicals are seen as increasingly vital to Big Oil’s future given uncertainty over crude demand and the push toward electric vehicles and cleaner energy sources. But some of the world’s most-advanced economies are increasingly clamping down on single-use plastics such as shopping bags and straws.

That hasn’t scared off Exxon. This year alone, the oil giant approved major expansions to its giant Baytown petrochemical complex and Beaumont refinery in Texas as well as a plastics unit in Louisiana. CEO Woods, former head of the company’s downstream division, sees the plants as essential to making money all the way from the wellhead to the final products.

~~~~

These two pieces show clearly how a corporation will often support reform efforts in order to detract from more wide-ranging demands  that could really damage  their interests. 

Corporations have always offered support to state -led reforms to varying degrees to quell unrest, but all the while advancing their own agendas and expanding their own economic opportunities.

Meanwhile the public may get, some marginal benefits but leaving the bodies that produce the problem in the first place intact, and often stronger.

The Pentagon: The world’s single largest producer of greenhouse gases

The United States military has emitted over a billion metric tons of greenhouse gases since the beginning of the global war on terrorism in 2001, according to a report from Brown University’s “Costs of War” project.

This is equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million passenger cars, “more than double the current number of cars on the road in the U.S.”

With over 800 military bases in more than 80 countries, the Pentagon remains the “world’s largest institutional user of petroleum” and “producer of greenhouse gases.”

In 2017, the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions were about 59 million metric tons. This was more than Finland (46.8 million metric tons), Sweden (50.8 million metric tons), or Denmark (33.5 million metric tons) in the same year.

At least 400 million metric tons of greenhouse gases are a result of consumption in war zones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria.

From 1998 to 2017, the U.S. purchased 2.4 billion barrels of petroleum fuel. Since the 9/11 attacks, annual fuel purchases have averaged more than 120 million barrels of all types of fuel. Between 2010 and 2015, the armed services purchased an average of 102 million barrels of fuel per year from the Dept. of Defence.

It is estimated the Pentagon consumed more than 85 million barrels of “operational fuel” in order to power its fleets of ships, aircraft, and combat vehicles. They also used the fuel for “contingency bases.” In total, $8.2 billion was spent.

Since 2001, the [Pentagon] has consistently consumed between 77 and 80 percent of all U.S. government energy consumption,” the report notes.

Installations that support operations, as well as military non-armored vehicles, are notorious in their guzzling of fuel. There are apparently 60,000 HUMVEEs that remain the U.S. Army’s fleet. They get about “four to eight miles per gallon of diesel fuel.”

Domestic and overseas military installations account for about 40 percent of the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Aircraft are responsible for hundreds of tons of C02. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved massive airstrikes, and materials were flown to setup bases for occupations.

The U.S. war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, which began in August 2014, has entailed tens of thousands of aircraft sorties for various missions—from reconnaissance, to airlift, refueling, and weapons strikes. 

Aircraft are particularly thirsty. For example, the B-2 stealth bomber, which holds more than 25,600 gallons of jet fuel, burns 4.28 gallons per mile and emits more than 250 metric tons of greenhouse gas over a 6,000 nautical mile range. The KC-135R aerial refueling tanker consumes about 4.9 gallons per mile.

A single mission consumes enormous quantities of fuel. In January 2017, two B-2B bombers and 15 aerial refueling tankers traveled more than 12,000 miles from Whiteman Air Force Base tobomb ISIS targets in Libya. Not counting the tankers’ emissions, the B-2s would have emitted about 1,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases.

None of this takes into account the environmental destruction and pollution also called by the Pentagon.

The Pentagon actually recognises the threat that climate collapse will cause to the world’s but in reality is powerless to act in any meaningful way. As long as the USA sees itself as the world’s policeman and maintains its imperialistic ambitions driven by profit seeking, then its defence force will continue to pollute and consume on a massive scale. It is essential that those fighting against climate collapse widen their view to take in the role which the corporate capitalistic world plays it.

Sources:

https://shadowproof.com/2019/06/12/pentagon-world-largest-producer-greenhouse-gases-report/

https://theconversation.com/the-defense-department-is-worried-about-climate-change-and-also-a-huge-carbon-emitter-118017

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs%20of%20War%20Final.pdf

THE NEW SUITS OF CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENTALISM

“Those who appeal to the state certainly cannot be branded as “radicals,”[nor “rebels”] since while they are against “extinction,” they are not against capital.

This is an extract from an article which can be read in full here: http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/06/13/the-new-suits-of-capitalist-development-the-new-green-period-of-capitalism-and-its-ecological-and-citizen-avant-garde/

…the environmental movement is infiltrated by agents of the multinationals and bought with funds of various origins, resulting in a political network of influences at the service of a new kind of capitalism. The same thing happened with the NGOs. At that moment, the purge of extremisms is necessary for the transformation of the green party of decomposition into an instrument of the dominant order. The message of moderation obedient to the little belligerent slogans would not reach the manipulable masses if the anti-system “fundamentalists” were not isolated as soon as possible, or as the informal hierarchies of ecologism-spectacle say, “bridged”.

The movement against climate change has given rise to a registered “brand”, Extinction/Rebellion, which covers the environmentalist flank of left-wing citizenry, giving it arguments in favour of state mediation of the crisis. Those who appeal to the state certainly cannot be branded as “radicals,” since while they are against “extinction,” they are not against capital. Nor against any concrete responsible; one of its principles reads as follows: “we avoid accusing and pointing at people, because we live in a toxic system”. No concrete individual (no leader) can be considered guilty of anything. For a climbing mentality, not all leaders, not all capitalists, are equal, and ecological reforms can even be beneficial to the majority. They are potential allies and benefactors. Thus, the declared objectives of eco-citizenship do not go that way. They limit themselves to pressuring governments to force them to “tell the truth to the citizens”, to take “decarbonizing” measures foreseen in the “energy transition” and to decree the creation of “supervising citizen assemblies”, true political springboards for the arrivists. Their weapon: the non-violent mobilization of 3.5% of the “citizens”. No revolutions, because they imply violence and do not respect “democracy”, that is, the system of parties and ranks.

They do not want to put an end to the capitalist regime, they want to transform it, making it “circular” and “carbon neutral”. We will not overlook the fact that the majority of waste is irrecyclable and that the production of “clean” energies implies the consumption of enormous quantities of fossil fuels. The professionals of citizen ecology do not want to destroy the State either, the great tree under whose shadow their personal careers thrive and their placement strategies work. The ecological crisis is reduced by this captive ecologism to a political problem that can be solved by the heights thanks to a Roosevelt-style Green New Deal: a new pact for the global economy between the world’s ruling class, the political bureaucracy and its environmental advisors that imposes measures for the reduction of polluting emissions and the storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide that the multiple conferences on climate change have failed to impose. Something extremely suspicious, like everything that comes from the system. The “dual” citizen strategies are “symbiotic”, not ruptured. Ecosystems would be restored by harmonizing conflicting interests from within. Duality consists precisely in collaborating (acting in symbiosis) with the institutions on the one hand, and mobilizing the catastrophe-sensitive masses on the other. However, the mobilizations are nothing more than a spectacular display of purely symbolic support. They do not aspire to much, as they do not question the status quo, not saying a word about the symbiosis of governments to those who are pressured by markets, growth or globalisation.

It has been proven that since the Johannesburg summit in 2002, if not before, the capitalist world is aware that its uncontrolled functioning produces such a level of destruction that it is in danger of collapsing. It is more than evident that despite the resistance to regulation by countries whose stability and influence depend on hard extractivism or unhindered development, capitalism as a whole has entered a green developmental phase and is trying to establish controls (Agenda 21, creation of the Green Climate Fund, fifth IPCC report, Paris Agreement, the 24 different COPs). This explains the epidemic of realism and opportunism that has taken over the ecological media “in action” to the point of provoking an avalanche of demands for employment in the political-administrative field. The militants do not want to close their doors, especially when there is a good remuneration, so that all the ideals are kept in their pockets. In truth, it is not only the capitalists who would benefit from a state of alarm.

The new subsidized ecologism follows in the wake of “green” developmentism based on “renewable” industrial energies, and sustains the alarmist leaders of capitalism against the negationists. All their efforts are devoted to adjusting the industrial and consumerist way of life with the preservation of the natural environment, despite the fact that the results have not been flattering until today: greenhouse gas emissions, far from being reduced as established by international agreements, have reached record figures. With the optimism of a newly enlightened novice, they want economic growth, necessary for the survival of capitalism, and the territory, necessary for the conservation of biodiversity, at least in appearance, to be marvelous, no matter how much the global temperature continues to rise and the climate is degrading. Incomparable advantages of the symbiotic method and the reformist narrative!

Those responsible for global warming and pollution, and those responsible for precariousness and exclusion are the same, but those who fight them are often not. They are two battlefields, the one of imbalance and the one of inequality, which do not finish converging and not because a cohort of vocational bureaucrats appears under the stones, trying to carve out a future for themselves by acting as an intermediary. Aspiring leaders have their days numbered because ordinary people lose their meekness when their means of subsistence are affected and they no longer allow themselves to be domesticated with the ease of days of abundance in less aggressive climates. The weakness of world-capital lies not in the climate, not even in health, but in supplies. The day when the techno-industrial system – either from the markets, or from the State – stops satisfying the needs of a large part of the population, or in other words, when due to the climate or any other factor the supply fails, the era of insurrections will come. A failed system that hinders the mobility of its subjects and puts them in immediate danger of starvation is a corpse system. It is probable that in the heat of the protest, community structures will be recomposed, fundamental to ensure the autonomy of the revolts. If civil society succeeds in organizing itself on the margins of institutions and bureaucracies, then ecological struggles will converge with wage struggles, as reflected in the praxis of a unified social conscience. And that slogan heard in the French rebellion of the “yellow vests”: “end of the month, end of the world” will reveal all its meaning.

Miguel Amorós

What Will the Farms of the Future Look Like?

drawing by Clifford Harper

Industrial monocultures — those big farms you see with acres and acres of corn or soy, not to mention those giant cattle feedlots — are systems that degenerate, they die, over time. They produce more carbon emissions than they sequester. Their pesticides kill insects, including pollinators, a trend which may soon initiate “the collapse of nature.” Every year, they suck the nutrients from the soil, and replace them with toxic chemicals. They draw water from local watersheds, pollute it, and let it run off into gutters, or evaporate when hot weather comes, rather than employing management techniques that would allow it to sink back down to replenish local aquifers. Eventually, land treated this way becomes barren, eroding away to create dead zones in rivers and oceans or being lifted up by the wind to join the particulate matter in the air, poisoning the lungs of human beings (it’s telling that a recent report showed that Fresno and Bakersfield, in the heart of California’s industrial farm-filled Central Valley, have the worst particulate pollution in the USA). The air is truly brown in such places. The crops grown on these farms are sent off by truck or ship to factories where they’re processed and packaged — using more resources — and finally delivered to our homes, often in a form that’s as bad for our bodies as the dust is for our lungs.

This is what agriculture looks like in a globalized corporate economy, where, like the nutrients from the soil, the livelihood is sucked from farming communities and siphoned up into the coffers of a few giant corporations .

But as I’m sure many of us know by now, this is not what agriculture has to look like, by any means. Farms can be regenerative, living systems, that produce a bounty but no waste. They can supply the needs of a local community — if that community is willing embrace the idea of eating a mostly seasonal, locally adapted diet — with no need for long-distance transport by trucks, ships, or planes. Farms do not have to be net carbon emitters — plants absorb CO2 when they photosynthesize, and only emit it very slowly, through respiration and decomposition; studies show that, if managed correctly, farms, orchards, and even animal grazing systems can become places that sink and sequester CO2.

Not only that, but these are the same kinds of diversified farming systems that make people most resilient in the face of climate change. If we grow one kind of bean, for example, as a cash crop, and then the summer is too hot for that variety, we lose absolutely everything — all of our profits, which we would have used to buy food throughout the year. If we grow a diverse variety of crops, however, all with slightly different climactic limitations, then not only will a heat wave fail to do us in, but we can feed ourselves, right from our own backyards, no matter what happens. In fact, there are many points in favor of small diversified farms. Even minimal diversification has been shown to increase crop yields, while intensive permaculture systems — which have only recently been recognized by science — have the potential to completely transform our concept of productivity, and of what a “farm” is.

…

 In the global South, some are rejecting the idea that leaving the land for polluted, overpopulated cities is a sign of progress. One’s income might be higher working in an urban sweatshop than it would be in a rural village. But that increased income does not necessarily reflect an increased quality of life. In villages where people own their own land and live as they have for generations — using clean water, eating local foods, making clothes and other goods from locally sourced materials, relying on community support for things like child care — a comfortable life can cost almost nothing. (This is why corporate land grabs, for purposes like mining, logging, oil drilling and factory farming, are among the most pressing human rights issues of our time.) In confirmation of this, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN has declared that small family farming is the only way to feed a growing population, while the economic powers that be have confirmed it by creating a climate in which those who fight for land rights must fear for their lives.

Full Read:

http://geo.coop/story/what-will-farms-future-look

We Only Want the Earth

Anarchist writer Andrew Flood started a new YouTube channel: We Only Want the Earth.

Originally published by We Only Want the Earth.

The overwhelming evidence of Climate Change is causing me significant alarm, Extinction Rebellion is a response that has gained some traction but as I show here its ‘beyond politics, declare a climate emergency’ solution cannot deliver what is needed because capitalism and colonialism are the very political problems that caused Climate Change in the first place.. This is the first of my We Only Want the Earth episodes.