De Mainstream Pers 212

'Poetin denkt op een 19de eeuwe manier, van verdeel en heers. Defensie kun je dus niet helemaal afbreken...

Kijk maar eens naar Hongarije, een klein Poetin-staatje is daar met een noodgang aan het ontstaan.

Geert Mak in #eenopeen

De Amerikaanse socioloog, professor George Ritzer, bekend van uitgebreid onderzoek naar het consumentisme en de globalisering, schreef in zijn boek Explorations in the Sociology of Consumption: Fast Food, Credit Cards and Casinos (2001):

What becomes important in spectacular society is the desirable surface of images, as opposes to… the critical evaluation of knowledge and culture. In this world, domination becomes objective, universal, rational and productive: it is diffused throughout social life in a comprehensive and ceaseless barrage of images and commodities. Aimed at an attentive audience who view its predigested content positively, the spectacle saturates social life, displacing lived experience with glorious images to facilitate social reproduction.

The spectacle creates the appearance of a unity or totality in spite of generalized differentiaton, separation and fragmentation. In other words, the dissolution of social life, social interaction, and community in late capitalism is masked by the false unity of the attention-grabbing spectacle. For example, in the United States we are convinced of our own unity by television commentators who tell us certain events (show trials, impeachment hearings and Senate trials, spectacular invasions, elections) are of grave importance to the American people. Such reports distract individuals from the socially destructive aspect of contemporary American culture where television has displaced conversation and commodities mediate relationships. […]

Individuals are linked to the spectacle in a one-way relationship while maintaining their isolation from one another. As a result, individuals (or spectators) find themselves alienated from each other and subordinated to the spectacle… The commodity system functions as an ideological proclamation of the affluence and justness of the system as well as a means of domination – mediating, controlling, and seducing.

En dus wordt de consument juist ook in zijn vrije tijd ‘s avonds en in de weekeinden bezig gehouden met spektakel, in pretparken, bioscopen, meubelboulevards, popconcerten, sportmanifestaties en last but not least, zoals een lezer mij liet weten, natuurlijk de televisie.  Dit allemaal nadat eerst allerlei pseudo-behoeften zijn gecreëerd 

the market must [now] produce consumption, and so it must situate the subject as a consumer, address it as a consumer, and elevate the value of consumption above every other value. Its horizon, again, is infinite expansion, and this sets emergent capital culture on a collision course with planetary ecology, 

zo maakt de Amerikaanse socioloog Richard Widick duidelijk in zijn in 2009 verschenen boek Trouble In The Forest. California’s Redwood Timber Wars. Zodoende consumeert het kapitalisme zichzelf, want als één ding duidelijk moet zijn dan is het dat in een eindige wereld de materiële vooruitgang niet oneindig lang kan doorgaan. Op een gegeven moment stort ook de spektakelmaatschappij in elkaar. Wat we vandaag de dag zien is het begin van de onvermijdelijke ineenstorting van het consumptiemodel zoals we dat in de afgelopen halve eeuw hebben zien ontstaan. In Democracy At Work. A Cure For Capitalism somt de Amerikaanse econoom, professor Richard Wolff het huidige probleem als volgt op:

Cascading economic problems and crises, coupled with dysfunctional political responses, have plunged modern societies into deepening turmoil… Yet the particular versions of anti-capitalism – the various forms of state socialism and communism – that actually prevailed over the last century no longer seem to offer a model or inspiration to those looking for an alternative to capitalism.

Begin 2012 luisterde ik in een volle zaal van de Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York naar Richard Wolff's verklaring van het feit we nu opnieuw één van die regelmatig terugkerende crises van het kapitalisme meemaken. Kort samengevat maakte Wolff duidelijk dat aangezien het winstprincipe heilig is en er dus een taboe rust op het ter discussie stellen ervan, de economie als het ware autonoom tewerk gaat. Dat wil zeggen, terwijl lonen en uitkeringen omlaag gaan stijgen tegelijkertijd de winsten. Dat is logisch, want om de winsten te kunnen maximaliseren moeten de productiekosten omlaag, zeker wanneer de prijzen van vitale grondstoffen almaar stijgen blijft er niets anders op dan de lonen en uitkeringen te verlagen. Het probleem is alleen dat het kapitalisme daarmee de koopkracht van de consumenten vermindert waardoor de productie en daarmee ook de winsten  dalen, en tevens de belastingen. Maar omdat het winstprincipe van eeuwig stijgende winsten onbespreekbaar is, is er geen oplossing. Richard Wolff:

Wages and benefits are trending downward while profits are simultaneously increasing. Just as these conditions force millions to need and want more from local, state, and federal governments, officials continue to announce ever more cutbacks in public services. This crisis is reminding millions about capitalism’s inherent instability, its historic failure for centuries to prevent the recurrence of downturns, and how poorly, unjustly, and cruelly it typically ‘manages’ them.

http://stanvanhoucke.net/audioblog/pivot/entry.php?id=46#body

Robert Reich, has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. Hij schreef 29 januari 2013 het volgende:

Not even the very wealthy can continue to succeed without a broader-based prosperity. That’s because 70 percent of economic activity in America is consumer spending. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans are becoming poorer, they’re less able to spend. Without their spending, the economy can’t get out of first gear. 

That’s a big reason why the recovery continues to be anemic, and why the International Monetary Fund just lowered its estimate for U.S. growth in 2013 to just 2 percent.

Almost a quarter of all jobs in America now pay wages below the poverty line for a family of four. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage — like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/29-2

De enige ‘oplossing’ voor het kapitalisme was tot voor kort de oude en beproefde methode van een nieuwe wereld-oorlog waarbij zoveel verwoest wordt dat alles weer op volle toeren kan gaan draaien. Maar die ‘oplossing’ bestaat niet meer omdat er zoveel massavernietigingswapens klaar staan. Een grootschalig conflict zal tenslotte voor alle partijen desastreus zijn. Bovendien speelt op de achtergrond de klimaatverandering een doorslaggevende rol. De parasitaire consumptiecultuur is in een cul de sac terecht gekomen. Op de een of andere manier zal de mensheid een mutualistisch alternatief moeten verzinnen wil het niet ten onder gaan. De soort die zich niet kan aanpassen is gedoemd uit te sterven. Maar kan de mensheid overleven? Hij bezit niet de evolutionaire intelligentie die bijvoorbeeld de wortels van een bristlecone pine heeft, terwijl deze boom in veel moeilijkere condities moet zien te overleven.

Alles in de natuur is afgestemd op het overleven van de soort, alle intelligentie van het leven spant zich om zich aan te passen aan de bestaande omgeving. Alleen de soorten die dit onvoldoende doen sterven uit, terwijl de andere soorten de meest ingenieuze methoden vinden om voort te bestaan.

Dankzij het feit dat de bristlecone pijnbomen op grote hoogte in onherbergzaam gebied staan konden ze niet commercieel worden geëxploiteerd. De bomen getuigen van het raadselachtige vermogen van de natuur om telkens weer te integreren in de meest onwaarschijnlijke omgevingen. Op die manier vinden we op grote hoogte en diep in de oceaan, in bittere kou en zinderende hitte leven. In 2011 berichtte The Daily Galaxy ‘syndicated globally by Reuters News’ dat

Among discoveries in 2006 were shrimps, clams and bacteria living by the searing 407 degrees Celsius vent on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean north of Ascension Island, the hottest sea vent ever documented and more than hot enough to melt lead.

‘This is the most extreme environment and there is plenty of life around it,’ said Chris German, of Britain's Southampton Oceanography Center and a leader of the Atlantic survey.

He said one big puzzle was how creatures coped with shifts in temperatures -- water on the seabed at 3,000 meters (9,842 ft) was just 2 degrees Celsius yet many creatures withstood near-boiling temperatures of up to 80 degrees Celsius from the thermal vent.

Researchers had not yet probed how hardy the microbes nearest the hottest part of the vent were -- a type of bacteria called ‘Strain 121’ found in the Pacific in 2003 holds the record by being able to withstand temperatures of 121 Celsius. Another expedition found crustaceans, jellyfish and single-celled animals living in darkness in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica under ice 700 meters thick and 200 km (125 miles) from open water.

‘You can think of it as a cave, one of the remotest caves on earth,’ Ausubel said of findings by a robot camera. ’Wherever we've gone on earth we've continued to find life,’ German said. He said recent discoveries could be encouraging for the search for life elsewhere in the universe.

Astronomers speculate that Jupiter's moon Europa could hide an ocean beneath its frozen surface and Ausubel noted life has been found on Earth beside subsea methane seeps -- Saturn's moon Titan also has methane. And NASA said last week it had found signs of liquid water on Mars.

Among other 2006 finds by the census, due for completion in 2010, was a ‘Jurassic shrimp’ in the Coral Sea east of Australia and previously thought extinct 50 million years ago.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/02/volcanic-life-sources-discovered-deep-in-chilly-waters-of-southern-ocean.html

Marine creatures are thriving by a record hot volcanic vent in the Atlantic and in dark waters under thick Antarctic ice, boosting theories that planets other than earth are suitable for life, scientists said.

About 150 new types of fish were among 500 new marine species, including furry crabs and a lobster off Madagascar, found in the seas this year, according to researchers in the 70-nation Census of Marine Life.

Many species were found in places long thought too hostile for life - including by a vent spewing liquids at 407 degrees celsius and other habitats that were dark, cold or deep. Some places seemed as inhospitable as planets such as Mars or Venus.

Misschien is de mens niet in staat om net als microben en zelfs bacteriën en miljoenen andere levensvormen zich aan te passen aan veranderende omstandigheden. De globalisering van de westerse cultuur is een gevaarlijke bedreiging van de diversiteit in de natuur. Die diversiteit ontstond doordat elk organisme zich op zijn eigen unieke wijze heeft aangepast aan de geografische en klimatologische omstandigheden waarin het leeft. Als we ons beperken tot de mens: het San volk in de Kalahari woestijn en de Inuit op de ijsvlakten in Canada zijn fysiek niet in staat om volledig te integreren in een 24 uur’s vrije markt economie die in de gematigde zone werd ontwikkeld. Bij slechts 30 graden Celsius spreekt de Nederlander al van tropische temperaturen, en bij 30 graden onder nul zou men thuisblijven. Het feit dat desondanks de westerse monocultuur overal wordt afgedwongen vormt een ernstig gevaar voor de diversiteit en daarmee de overlevingskansen van de mens als soort. Vandaar het groeiende verzet wereldwijd tegen het neoliberalisme. Zelfs de westerling rebelleert bewust dan wel onbewust tegen het totalitaire karakter van het kapitalisme. In 1875 schreef de grote Amerikaanse milieubeschermer en auteur John Muir:

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wildness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.

Desondanks lijkt het alsof wij ons systeem niet kunnen stoppen. Slechts twee jaar nadien constateerde Muir over de laatste ongerept wouden in Californië in On the Post-Glacial History of Sequoia Gigantea:

Unfortunately, man is in the woods, and waste and pure destruction are already making rapid highway.

De natuur was en blijft voor de blanke christen het domein waartoe hij na de zondeval verdoemd is, en dus onderworpen moet worden aan zijn wil. Het paradijs is elders. De natuur blijft de vijand. ‘We read our Bibles and remain fearful and uncomfortable amid Nature’s loving, her beautiful deaths,’ merkte Muir op. En omdat het verdoemd gebied was kon het misbruikt worden. In de hel kan men geen zonde begaan. Dr. Michael Williams, die aan de University of Oxford geografie doceert, beschrijft in zijn 599 pagina’s dikke studie Americans & Their Forests. A Historical Geography hoe

To the early American pioneers the forest was repugnant, forbidding, and repulsive. Some of those feelings and reactions had roots that went back a long way, into the culture of their ancestors in Europe, but were to be reenacted in a dialogue between the European pioneer’s mind and the American environment… The forests were the wild areas, alien to man and in need to felling, firing, grazing, and cultivating so that they could become civilized abodes. The forests were dark and horrible, places were there were very real dangers drom wild animals, particularly bears and wolves. The word ‘wilderness’ was almost synonymous with forest; etymologically, it was the ‘place of wild beasts.’

Dit wereldbeeld staat diametraal tegenover de visie zoals opperhoofd Luther Standing Bear die verwoordde:

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as 'wild'. Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness' and only to him was it infested with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.

Opmerkelijk genoeg gold deze houding ook voor de blanke dissident, zoals Michael Williams opmerkt wanneer hij schrijft over ‘a curious contradiction, even paradox’ in de westerse houding ten opzichte van de natuur

because many holy men retired to the uninhabited solitude of an island or the depths of the forest to escape the corruption of society and to purify their souls. This tradition had strong roots in the Judeo-Christian experience of the wilderness, from the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, to Moses on Mount Sinai, to Christ’s temptation on the Mount – all were exercises in freedom and purification of faith. It was with such a varied background of cultural traditions, which had evolved from antiquity and were laced with biblical metaphors, that the first settlers arrived in the New World, which afforded such an abundant opportunity to extirpate the forest, reclaim the ‘waste,’ and create some sort of new Eden, Paradise, a New Canaan.

Sinds de eerste kolonisten arriveerden in het gebied dat nu de VS heet, is er rond een miljoen vierkante kilometer bos verdwenen, een proces dat nog steeds doorgaat.

Employing satellite imagery researchers found that over a million square kilometers of forest were lost around the world between 2000 and 2005. This represents a 3.1 percent loss of total forest as estimated from 2000. While the study did not look at forest gains during the same time period, it reveals some surprises about where and how much forest was lost: including the fact that from 2000 to 2005 both the United States and Canada had higher percentages of forest loss than even Brazil.

http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0427-hance_forestloss.html#osSVI04S5Qzz9Lf1.99

Deze ontwikkeling kwam goed op gang in de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw toen 'robber barons' als John D. Rockefeller een deel van hun oliewinsten in de houthandel investeerde. Die industrietak groeide uit tot ‘the second largest industry’ in de VS. Omdat er miljoenen emigranten het land binnenstroomden waren de grote kapitaalverschaffers permanent op zoek naar nieuwe wouden en was in de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw de Westkust aan de beurt. De geograaf Michael Williams:

Thus the embryonic timber industry of the West Coast – dominated by California capital, operated by New England lumbermen, and largely dependent on overseas and coastal trade – was changed. Eastern capital and technology, Great Lake lumbermen, and a national American trade replaced them. It was the prelude to a great boom and the transformation of the forest scene.

Door de introductie van machines konden steeds grotere bomen worden gekapt en over steeds langere afstanden worden afgevoerd. Zo verdwenen razendsnel de prachtige oude sequoias en ook reusachtige pijnbomen. Alle moesten wijken voor de Amerikaanse droom, ‘the dream of betterment,’ zoals de Amerikaanse historicus en ‘The Dean of Western Writers,’ Wallace Stegner, het noemde in The American West as Living Space. Het kenmerkende daarbij was dat

the interior West was not a place but a way, a trail to the Promised Land, an adventurous, dangerous rite of passage… If, as Wendell Berry says, most Americans are not placed but displaced persons, then western Americans are the most displaced persons of all... The principal invention of western American culture is the motel, the principal exhibit of that culture the automotive roadside. The principal western industry is tourism, which is not only mobile but seasonal. Whatever it might want to be, the West is still primarily a series of brief visitations or a trail to somewhere else; and western literature, from Roughing it to On the Road, from The Life of a Cowboy to The Big Sky, has been largely a literature not of place but of motion.

Trying to capture America in a sentence, Gertrude Stein said, ‘Conceive a space that is filled with moving.’ If she had been reared in Boston she might not have seen it so plainly; but she was reared in Oakland. She knew that few Westerners die where they were born, that most live out their lives as a series of uprootings.

In tegenstelling tot bomen gunden de Amerikanen zichzelf nooit de tijd om te wortelen en in wezen is dat het achterliggende grote nationale en internationale probleem. En het Europa van 'Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel' slaagt er niet in een alternatief te bedenken voor de zelfmoordpolitiek, die de afgelopen vier decennia zich zowel heeft geglobaliseerd als versneld. Hoewel Geert Mak bij hoog en bij laag volhoudt dat 'Amerika er over een halve eeuw beter voor[staat] dan Europa,' omdat ‘Amerikanen bereid [zijn] heel hard te werken en het land heeft een grote hoeveelheid natuurlijke hulpbronnen,’ tonen goed geïnformeerde Amerikaanse intellectuelen gedocumenteerd aan dat dit wishful thinking is, en niet alleen omdat de sociale mobiliteit in de VS lager is dan die in Europa. In zijn boek The Story of American Freedom (1998) beschreef Eric Foner, de prominente hoogleraar Geschiedenis aan Columbia University hoe de ontwikkeling in in de VS is verlopen sinds president Ronald Reagan in januari 1981 begon met een politiek dat de afbraak betekende van het sociale beleid van de New Deal. Foner:

He promised to free government from the control of 'special interests' but these were not lobbyists or businessmen seeking governmental favors — the traditional targets of liberals — but blacks, trade unionists, and others hoping to use Washington's power to redress social inequalities…

An expert at symbolic leadership, Reagan associated himself with emblems of nationality, especially the flag, and repeatedly invoked the time-honored rhetoric of America's divinely appointed mission as a 'beacon of liberty and freedom.' Republicans, wrote the journalist Daniel Schorr, had 'laid siege to "free.'" Many of Reagan's specific policies, from tax cuts and reduced government regulation to large increases in military spending, had been pioneered by Carter. It was Reagan, however, who championed them in the language of freedom. 'Freedom,' indeed, became the watchword of the Reagan Revolution, and in his public appearances and state papers, Reagan used the word more often than any president before or since. 

In foreign policy, Reagan breathed new life into the rhetorical division of the world into a free West and slave East that made the United States and its allies, by definition, part of a 'crusade for freedom.'  […]

The ranks of 'freedom fighters' now included former supporters of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and of Cambodia's Pol Pot, whose regime had killed millions of his countrymen, as well as disgruntled losers of national elections in Angola, and Islamic fundamentalists bent on eliminating public rights for women in Afghanistan. All these, Reagan insisted, were motivated by 'freedom… the same ideals that inspired our forefathers.' He never applied the term to South Africans struggling to overturn apartheid, or to opponents of pro-American dictatorships no matter how brutal. The inhabitants of the free world already 'ha[d] their freedom.' To underscore his vision of the world, Reagan even proclaimed that the word 'freedom' did not exist in the Russian language. If true, this exercise in linguistic diplomacy would have revealed a deep difference between Soviet and American cultures. As it happens, however, Russian has a perfectly good word for freedom, svoboda.

Maar aangezien Mak en de 'politiek-literaire elite' in de polder als kameleons zich hadden aangepast aan de nieuwe tijdgeest, hadden ze geen belangstelling in een serieuze bestudering van wat er economisch en politiek voor hun ogen en onder hun neus zich aan het voltrekken was. Deregulering, privatisering, het overhevelen van werk naar de goedkope-lonen-landen, en de zogeheten flexibilisering van de arbeid, erop gericht de winsten van de economische macht te maximaliseren. Een desastreus beleid voor miljoenen werknemers in de post-industriële wereld, die nog in 2004 door opiniemaker Mak in zijn bestseller In Europa op een pedante toon werd geprezen met de woorden dat 

Europa als economische eenheid... een eind op weg [is].

Wist hij veel. Mak had zich niet verdiept in de materie, maar omdat de tijdgeest nog hoopvol leek, babbelde hij maar al te graag de neoliberale profeten van de globalisering na, overigens net als alle andere mainstream-journalisten. Uit mijn decennialange contacten met hem weet ik dat Mak te weinig geestelijke bagage bezit, snel beïnvloedbaar is, te weinig heeft gelezen en gereisd buiten de EU om een afgewogen oordeel te kunnen uitspreken. Doorgaans herhaalt hij wat hij het laatst heeft gehoord of gelezen. Geert Mak functioneert als ongeleid projectiel. Volgende keer ga ik in op zijn volgende beweringen:

'Poetin denkt op een 19de eeuwe manier, van verdeel en heers. Defensie kun je dus niet helemaal afbreken...

Kijk maar eens naar Hongarije, een klein Poetin-staatje is daar met een noodgang aan het ontstaan.'

Geert Mak in #eenopeen

The Power of Imagination

Posted on May 11, 2014

By Chris Hedges

John William Waterhouse’s painting “Miranda—The Tempest.”

Those in the premodern world who hoarded possessions and refused to redistribute supplies and food, who turned their backs on the weak and the sick, who lived exclusively for hedonism and their own power, were despised. Those in modern society who are shunned as odd, neurotic or eccentric, who are disconnected from the prosaic world of objective phenomena and fact, would have been valued in premodern cultures for their ability to see what others could not see. Dreams and visions—considered ways to connect with the wisdom of ancestors—were integral to existence in distant times. Property was communal then. Status was conferred by personal heroism and providing for the weak and the indigent. And economic exchanges carried the potential for malice, hatred and evil: When wampum was exchanged by Native Americans the transaction had to include “medicine” that protected each party against “spiritual infection.”

Only this premodern ethic can save us as we enter a future of economic uncertainty and endure the catastrophe of climate change. Social and economic life will again have to be communal. The lusts of capitalism will have to be tamed or destroyed. And there will have to be a recovery of reverence for the sacred, the bedrock of premodern society, so we can see each other and the earth not as objects to exploit but as living beings to be revered and protected. This means inculcating a very different vision of human society.

Our greatest oracles have sought to impart this wisdom. William Shakespeare lamented the loss of the pagan rituals eradicated by the Reformation. When Shakespeare was a boy, the critic Harold Goddard pointed out, he experienced the religious pageants, morality plays, church festivals, cycle plays, feast and saint days, displays of relics, bawdy May Day celebrations and tales of miracles that made up the belief system during the reign of the medieval Catholic Church. The Puritans, the ideological vanguard of the technological order, would eventually ban or greatly weaken all of these, and they made war on the Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters for celebrating these premodern practices.

Shakespeare portrays the tension between the premodern and the modern. He sees the rise of the modern as dangerous. The premodern reserved a place in the cosmos for human imagination. The new, modern, Machiavellian ethic of self-promotion, manipulation, bureaucracy and deceit—personified by Iago, Richard III and Lady Macbeth—deformed human society. Shakespeare lived during a moment when the modern world—whose technology allowed it to acquire weapons of such unrivaled force that it could conquer whole empires, including the Americas and later China—instilled through violence this new secular religion. He feared its demonic power.The London authorities in 1596 prohibited the public presentation of plays within city limits. Theaters had to relocate to the south side of the River Thames. The Puritans, in power under Cromwell in 1642, closed the London theaters. In Puritan New England at about the same time the authorities banned games, revels and “harlotry plays.” In 1644 the Puritans tore down Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Within four years all other theaters in and around London had been destroyed. The Puritans understood, in a way that is perhaps lost to us today, that Shakespeare subverts modernity.

Oracles were revered in premodern societies. These oracles were in touch with realities and forces that lay beyond the empirical. All societies have oracles—such as Thomas Paine, Emma Goldman, W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin in the United States—but in a modern society they are pushed to the margins, ridiculed and often persecuted. Those who spoke out of their vision quests in Native American society, or from Delphi in ancient Greece, did not employ the cold, clinical 

language of science and reason. They spoke, rather, in the nebulous language of love, tenderness, patience, justice, redemption and forgiveness. They paid homage, and called on us to pay homage, to the mysterious incongruities of human existence. A society that loses its respect for the sacred, that ignores its oracles and severs itself from the power of human imagination, ensures its obliteration.

Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization. But reason does not lift us upward to the heavens. It does not bring us into contact with the sacred. It does not permit us to curb our self-destructive urges. Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson mocked the myth of human progress and the folly of hubris. They, like Shakespeare, warned that conflating technological advancement with human progress deforms us.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_power_of_imagination_20140511

Who really wants to roll back the state? Not the right

While this government props up big business and delves into our private lives, there is a tradition of individualism on the left waiting to be reclaimed

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  • The Guardian, Sunday 11 May 2014 20.31 BST
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A miner is arrested at Orgreave in 1984. 'The police were given sweeping powers to batter down the miners 30 years ago; then came legislation giving them the right to stop and search citizens without reasonable suspicion.' Photograph: Homer Sykes Archive/Alamy

Behold, the onward march of the state. Describing the current occupants of No 10 as statists might sound provocatively counterintuitive. Ever since the neoliberals began reshaping Britain in their own image, from the 1970s onwards, state-bashing has become a kind of national religion. Critics of austerity – such as myself – have slammed today's Tories for rolling back the state in ways Margaret Thatcher would have dismissed as too radical. The Lib Dems are fellow travellers: when Nick Clegg became their leader, he promised to "define a liberal alternative to the discredited politics of big government". Projections by the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest day-to-day spending on public services will drop to levels unseen in Britain for decades.

And yet, in so many ways, this government has promoted the growth of the state through its policies. Take what the government and its allies call "welfare dependency". Last week it was revealed that, since the Clegg-Cameron love-in began, wages have tanked and the number of people in work claiming housing benefit has jumped by 59%. There were 650,561 workers claiming housing benefit when the coalition was formed. That soared to more than 1 million last year, costing the taxpayer an extra £4.8bn. Overall, 4.3 million are now thought to claim in-work benefits. The state has grown because we are subsidising employers who are paying wages workers cannot live on and private landlords charging rents tenants cannot afford.

Statism intrudes into people's lives in more pernicious ways under the coalition. The long-term unemployed will be compelled to march to a jobcentre every day: more a means for the state to humiliate those without work and treat them as feckless leeches than a serious attempt to find them employment. The state has come up with other sticks to discipline those thrown out of work: benefit "sanctions" strip unemployed people –including poppy-selling war veterans such as Stephen Taylor – of support, for the most spurious reasons.

The Lobbying Act – in reality, a gagging law – imposes onerous new regulations on nongovernmental organisations. Michael Gove is centralising education, leaving free schools and academies in the clutches of the secretary of state rather than accountable to local authorities. The idea of a crackdown on tax avoidance is hugely popular, but George Osborne proposes giving HMRC the power to seize money from people's accounts – a statist measure that lacks due process. Rather than going after giant corporations such as Amazon and Google, who find devious means to avoid paying what they owe, the state is after the little people.

Then there's the immigration bill, which compels landlords to check the status of their tenants, transforming them into agents of the state. The government repeatedly tries to resurrect attempts to give itself powers to monitor emails. The first wave of student protests against the coalitionwas met with police batons and kettles, a form of state repression condemned by the UN as "detrimental to the exercise of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly". And what else is Help to Buy than a reckless state subsidy for mortgages, fuelling yet another a housing bubble which could explode with calamitous economic consequences?

Thatcherism promised to set the individual free, but authoritarian statism was always part of its creed. It imposed laws boastfully described by Tony Blair as "the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world"; David Cameron now proposes to make them more restrictive still. The police were given sweeping powers to batter down the miners 30 years ago; then came legislation giving them the right to stop and search citizens without reasonable suspicion, and anti-terror laws that eroded individual rights in favour of the state. We've even had undercover police officershaving sexual relationships with radical activists: statism has invaded the bedroom under false pretences.

It falls to the left, then, to roll back the state. The state dependency of poverty-pay employers and rip-off landlords could be reduced with a living wage and by allowing local authorities to build homes. State powers that intrude on the civil rights of trade unionists, protesters and ethnic minorities could be repealed. A new federal Britain could take power away from the central state in favour of regions and local authorities. Public ownership is often caricatured as being about as statist as it gets, in large part because of the postwar model pioneered by Peter Mandelson's grandfather, Herbert Morrison, who introduced the Attlee government's top-down, bureaucratic form of nationalisation. Instead, the left could propose a form of democratic social ownership for rail, energy, water and other utilities that hands management to workers and consumers.

There is a long tradition of individualism on the left waiting to be reclaimed. At the beginning of the 20th century, the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès wrote about how capitalism alienated workers from their "very individuality". Indeed, the individual needs to be defended from more than the state. Poverty strips individuals of their freedom, imposing limitations on every aspect of their lives, from what they can eat to how they spend their leisure time. To provide for themselves and their families, workers are compelled to work some of the longest hours in Europe, losing time that could be spent on more fulfilling activities. Hence the need to limit the working day and crack down on unpaid overtime. Freed from financial hardship, excessive work and the constant fear of job and housing insecurity, the individual can prosper and fulfil her or his potential.

For the right, rolling back the state means allowing the wealthy to behave as they wish, while coming down hard on the poor. They hand public assets to profiteers at knockdown prices, robbing the taxpayer and leaving individuals at the mercy of private companies who have no interest in their wellbeing. Taxpayers spend far more on subsidies for privately owned railways than they did in the era of British Rail: "rolling back the state" in this case means "socialism for the rich". "Individualism" for the right means leaving the rich to prosper at the expense of society while those at the bottom must sink or swim.

The authoritarian statists in No 10 have got away with dressing themselves up as freedom-loving champions of the individual for too long. The fight for personal freedom and liberty is a great historic cause, but it now falls to the left to take it up.

Twitter: @owenjones84

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/11/state-right-government-individualism-left?CMP=ema_1364