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zondag 19 september 2021
BDS-activisten verstoren het Israeli Stage Festival met de boodschap: Geef apartheid geen podium!
Understanding the Basics of 21st-Century Democracy, Autocracy, and Capitalism
Understanding the Basics of 21st-Century Democracy, Autocracy, and Capitalism
Democracy exists if and when a community organizes its self-governance around the full participation, on an equal basis, of all the members of the community. Its other, autocracy, exists when a community organizes (or allows) its governance by an individual or subgroup of that community, a ruler. Universal suffrage is clearly a step toward at least formal democracy because voters elect leaders. How real this formal democracy is depends on the inclusivity of the population voting and the concrete reality of voters’ equal influence on the election’s outcome.
Residential communities in many parts of the modern world operate in formal democracies. However, they usually allow individuals with high levels of income and wealth to use these means to influence others in their voting, whereas individuals with low levels of income and wealth can and usually do wield less influence. The capitalist economic system generates precisely that unequal distribution of income and wealth that creates and sustains a wide gap between formal and real democracy in the world today. That gap in turn reinforces capitalism.
Workplace communities are those collections of interacting individuals comprising enterprises: factories, offices, and stores. In societies where capitalism prevails, enterprises are very rarely organized democratically. Instead, they are autocratic. Inside most workplace communities in today’s world, an individual or small subgroup within the workplace community, a ruling group, governs the workplace community. An owner, an owning family, a partnership of owners, or a board of directors elected by major shareholders comprises the ruler in capitalist enterprises. Their autocratic governance reinforces and is reinforced by the unequal distributions of income and wealth that they generate.
Democratic impulses, similarly provoked and suppressed inside workplace autocracies, have not yet matured into social movements that are strong and focused enough to overthrow autocracy inside workplaces.
The democratic impulses that were provoked and suppressed in turn by monarchical autocracies occasionally matured into social movements. These movements were sometimes able to alter relations between the ruler and the ruled, but usually succeeded only to a limited degree and temporarily. Eventually, some of these social movements gathered enough strength to dislodge those rulers and end autocracies in residential communities. Kingdoms, czarisms, and oligarchies were then overthrown as a result of this. In their places, revolutionaries often established representative (parliamentary) democracies.
Democratic impulses, similarly provoked and suppressed inside workplace autocracies, have not yet matured into social movements that are strong and focused enough to overthrow autocracy inside workplaces. Social movements did develop far enough to form labor unions and labor-based political parties, and to win greater diversity of race and gender among workplace participants. Unions utilized collective bargaining to alter the terms of the relations between employers and employees. Labor-based political parties used suffrage to yield laws that also changed the terms of the employer-employee relationship.
Yet labor unions and labor/socialist parties rarely targeted—let alone achieved—transforming workplace autocracies into workplace democracies. Even at moments in history when labor unions and left parties coalesced to build impressive social power—such as the New Deal of the 1930s in the United States or social democracy in 20th-century Europe—they could not or did not move to end the social prevalence and dominance of capitalism’s autocratic enterprises. No revolution occurred in the sense of a transition beyond the capitalist organization of enterprises and its autocratic division of participants into an employee majority and a governing employer minority.
Autocracies inside workplaces have endured in both private and state enterprises. In private enterprises, the rulers have often been individuals, partners, or corporate boards of directors: all persons with no positions within any state apparatus. Alternatively, rulers have also often been state officials positioned inside state enterprises (owned and operated by the state) in ways parallel to the positions of private corporate boards of directors. In such cases, the label “socialist” applied to such state enterprises might refer to some aspects that differentiated them from private capitalist corporations. But such “socialist” enterprises were not different in their autocratic internal organization.
Over the millennia, democratic impulses were occasionally able to establish democratically governed workplaces in some places and during certain times. In them, all members of the workplace community had equal voting power to determine what, how, and where the enterprise produced and what was done with the enterprise’s product. We shall call these democratically governed workplaces worker cooperatives (as they sometimes named themselves).
Across the many centuries when slavery, feudalism, and capitalism were the chief sorts of economic systems, worker cooperatives were marginal forms of workplace organization. The conditions, objective and subjective, were absent for worker cooperatives to become the socially prevalent forms of workplace organization. However, their scattered presences kept alive the notion that democratized workplaces were a possible alternative to the socially prevalent autocratic enterprises. Critics of autocratic workplaces often supplemented their opposition to them with advocacy for worker cooperatives.
Marxism’s criticisms of capitalism in the century after Marx’s death might have led it to advocacy for worker cooperatives. Instead, Marxism’s anti-capitalism focused on pinpointing which agents could accomplish a transition from capitalism to socialism. There were two key agents considered: first, the working class, and second, the state. The consensus that emerged was simple. The working class as society’s majority would seize the state. This might happen via voting, or it might require a revolution. Either way, once state power was won by an organized working class, it would use that power to make the transition from a capitalist to a socialist economic system.
That consensus led both socialism and Marxism eventually to an excessive focus on the state and all it might do to negate, overwhelm, and displace capitalism and its baleful social effects. Government regulations of enterprises, government ownership and operation of enterprises, and government control of the market: these became the various definitions of what socialists would do once they had state power. As history shows, that is what most socialists and Marxists did in fact do when they acquired state power.
What happened was another historic example of a movement for basic social change mistaking one step taken toward its social goal for the achievement of that goal itself. Socialisms including and since the 1917 Soviet revolution increasingly defined and declared their state-regulated and controlled workplaces to be “socialism.” That socialism, however, included an enduring autocratic organization of the workplace. Developing socialism thus became the continuous refinement and shaping of the government’s great influence on the economy toward approved social goals. Socialism might even advocate giving its working classes greater civil liberties and freedoms.
What Marxism and socialism had lost sight of was the internal organization of workplaces. Those stopped being seen as sites of profound class struggles once “socialism” was proclaimed. The need to transform the organization of enterprises’ internal relations of production from autocratic to democratic dropped from most socialists’ focus.
Thus, the Soviet Union, China, Sweden, and other socialist variants experimented with differing kinds and degrees of state interventions in the economy. For example, Sweden chiefly regulated private enterprises with autocratic internal structures. In contrast, the Soviets took over, owned, and operated state enterprises with autocratic internal structures. China now experiments with a combination of both Swedish and Soviet socialisms to produce its “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Chinese socialism operates with autocratic organizations inside both its private and state enterprises.
If we define capitalism in terms of the employer-employee internal structure of its enterprises—what Marx termed their “social relations of production”—most socialisms to date have not yet accomplished transitions beyond capitalism. To do that, they would have to change the prevalent internal organization of their enterprises to democratic worker cooperatives. Indeed, that has now become the task for 21st-century socialism.
Richard D. Wolff
Independent Media Institute
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
To conquer nature and death, we have made a new religion of science
In our hurry to conquer nature and death, we have made a new religion of science
19 April 2021
Back in the 1880s, the mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott tried to help us better understand our world by describing a very different one he called Flatland.
Imagine a world that is not a sphere moving through space like our own planet, but more like a vast sheet of paper inhabited by conscious, flat geometric shapes. These shape-people can move forwards and backwards, and they can turn left and right. But they have no sense of up or down. The very idea of a tree, or a well, or a mountain makes no sense to them because they lack the concepts and experiences of height and depth. They cannot imagine, let alone describe, objects familiar to us.
In this two-dimensional world, the closest scientists can come to comprehending a third dimension are the baffling gaps in measurements that register on their most sophisticated equipment. They sense the shadows cast by a larger universe outside Flatland. The best brains infer that there must be more to the universe than can be observed but they have no way of knowing what it is they don’t know.
This sense of the the unknowable, the ineffable has been with humans since our earliest ancestors became self-conscious. They inhabited a world of immediate, cataclysmic events – storms, droughts, volcanoes and earthquakes – caused by forces they could not explain. But they also lived with a larger, permanent wonder at the mysteries of nature itself: the change from day to night, and the cycle of the seasons; the pin-pricks of light in the night sky, and their continual movement; the rising and falling of the seas; and the inevitability of life and death.
Perhaps not surprisingly, our ancestors tended to attribute common cause to these mysterious events, whether of the catastrophic or the cyclical variety, whether of chaos or order. They ascribed them to another world or dimension – to the spiritual realm, to the divine.
Paradox and mystery
Science has sought to shrink the realm of the inexplicable. We now understand – at least approximately – the laws of nature that govern the weather and catastrophic events like an earthquake. Telescopes and rocket-ships have also allowed us to probe deeper into the heavens to make a little more sense of the universe outside our tiny corner of it.
But the more we investigate the universe the more rigid appear the limits to our knowledge. Like the shape-people of Flatland, our ability to understand is constrained by the dimensions we can observe and experience: in our case, the three dimensions of space and the additional one of time. Influential “string theory” posits another six dimensions, though we would be unlikely to ever sense them in any more detail than the shadows almost-detected by the scientists of Flatland.
The deeper we peer into the big universe of the night sky and our cosmic past, and the deeper we peer into the small universe inside the atom and our personal past, the greater the sense of mystery and wonder.
At the sub-atomic level, the normal laws of physics break down. Quantum mechanics is a best-guess attempt to explain the mysteries of movement of the tiniest particles we can observe, which appear to be operating, at least in part, in a dimension we cannot observe directly.
And most cosmologists, looking outwards rather inwards, have long known that there are questions we are unlikely ever to answer: not least what exists outside our universe – or expressed another way, what existed before the Big Bang. For some time, dark matter and black holes have baffled the best minds. This month scientists conceded to the New York Times that there are forms of matter and energy unknown to science but which can be inferred because they disrupt the known laws of physics.
Inside and outside the atom, our world is full of paradox and mystery.
Conceit and humility
Despite our science-venerating culture, we have arrived at a similar moment to our forebears, who gazed at the night sky in awe. We have been forced to acknowledge the boundaries of knowledge.
There is a difference, however. Our ancestors feared the unknowable, and therefore preferred to show caution and humility in the face of what could not be understood. They treated the ineffable with respect and reverence. Our culture encourages precisely the opposite approach. We show only conceit and arrogance. We seek to defeat, ignore or trivialise that which we cannot explain or understand.
The greatest scientists do not make this mistake. As an avid viewer of science programmes like the BBC’s Horizon, I am always struck by the number of cosmologists who openly speak of their religious belief. Carl Sagan, the most famous cosmologist, never lost his sense of awestruck wonder as he examined the universe. Outside the lab, his was not the language of hard, cold, calculating science. He described the universe in the language of poetry. He understood the necessary limits of science. Rather than being threatened by the universe’s mysteries and paradoxes, he celebrated them.
When in 1990, for example, space probe Voyager 1 showed us for the first time our planet from 6 billion km away, Sagan did not mistake himself or his fellow NASA scientists for gods. He saw “a pale blue dot” and marvelled at a planet reduced to a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”. Humility was his response to the vast scale of the universe, our fleeting place within it, and our struggle to grapple with “the great enveloping cosmic dark”.
Mind and matter
Sadly, Sagan’s approach is not the one that dominates the western tradition. All too often, we behave as if we are gods. Foolishly, we have made a religion of science. We have forgotten that in a world of unknowables, the application of science is necessarily tentative and ideological. It is a tool, one of many that we can use to understand our place in the universe, and one that is easily appropriated by the corrupt, by the vain, by those who seek power over others, by those who worship money.
Until relatively recently, science, philosophy and theology sought to investigate the same mysteries and answer the same existential questions. Through much of history, they were seen as complementary, not in competition. Abbott, remember, was a mathematician and theologian, and Flatland was his attempt to explain the nature of faith. Similarly, the man who has perhaps most shaped the paradigm within which much western science still operates was a French philosopher using the scientific methods of the time to prove the existence of God.
Today, Rene Descartes is best remembered for his famous – if rarely understood – dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Four hundred years ago, he believed he could prove God’s existence through his argument that mind and matter are separate. Just as human bodies were distinct from souls, so God was separate and distinct from humans. Descartes believed knowledge was innate, and therefore our idea of a perfect being, of God, could only derive from something that was perfect and objectively real outside us.
Weak and self-serving as many of his arguments sound today, Descartes’ lasting ideological influence on western science was profound. Not least so-called Cartesian dualism – the treatment of mind and matter as separate realms – has encouraged and perpetuated a mechanistic view of the world around us.
We can briefly grasp how strong the continuing grip of his thinking is on us when we are confronted with more ancient cultures that have resisted the west’s extreme rationalist discourse – in part, we should note, because they were exposed to it in hostile, oppressive ways that served only to alienate them from the western canon.
Hearing a Native American or an Australian Aboriginal speak of the sacred significance of a river or a rock – or about their ancestors – is to become suddenly aware of how alien their thinking sounds to our “modern” ears. It is the moment when we are likely to respond in one of two ways: either to smirk internally at their childish ignorance, or to gulp at a wisdom that seems to fill a yawning emptiness in our own lives.
Science and power
Descartes’ legacy – a dualism that assumes separation between soul and body, mind and matter – has in many ways proved a poisonous one for western societies. An impoverished, mechanistic worldview treats both the planet and our bodies primarily as material objects: one a plaything for our greed, the other a canvas for our insecurities.
The British scientist James Lovelock who helped model conditions on Mars for NASA so it would have a better idea how to build the first probes to land there, is still ridiculed for the Gaia hypothesis he developed in the 1970s. He understood that our planet was best not viewed as a very large lump of rock with life-forms living on it, though distinct from it. Rather Earth was a complete, endlessly complex, delicately balanced living entity. Over billions of years, life had grown more sophisticated, but each species, from the most primitive to the most advanced, was vital to the whole, maintaining a harmony that sustained the diversity.
Few listened to Lovelock. Our god-complex got the better of us. And now, as the bees and other insects disappear, everything he warned of decades ago seems far more urgent. Through our arrogance, we are destroying the conditions for advanced life. If we don’t stop soon, the planet will dispose of us and return to an earlier stage of its evolution. It will begin again, without us, as simple flora and microbes once again begin recreating gradually – measured in aeons – the conditions favourable to higher life forms.
But the abusive, mechanistic relationship we have with our planet is mirrored by the one we have with our bodies and our health. Dualism has encouraged us to think of our bodies as fleshy vehicles, which like the metal ones need regular outside intervention, from a service to a respray or an upgrade. The pandemic has only served to underscore these unwholesome tendencies.
In part, the medical establishment, like all establishments, has been corrupted by the desire for power and enrichment. Science is not some pristine discipline, free from real-world pressures. Scientists need funding for research, they have mortgages to pay, and they crave status and career advancement like everyone else.
Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial last November warning of British state corruption that had been unleashed on a grand scale by covid-19. But it was not just politicians responsible. Scientists and health experts had been implicated too: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency.”
He added: “The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”
Doctors and clerics
But in some ways Abbasi is too generous. Scientists haven’t only corrupted science by prioritising their personal, political and commercial interests. Science itself is shaped and swayed by the ideological assumptions of scientists and the wider societies to which they belong. For centuries, Descartes’ dualism has provided the lens through which scientists have often developed and justified medical treatments and procedures. Medicine has its fashions too, even if they tend to be longer-lived – and more dangerous – than the ones of the clothing industry.
In fact, there were self-interested reasons why Descartes’s dualism was so appealing to the scientific and medical community four centuries ago. His mind-matter division carved out a space for science free from clerical interference. Doctors could now claim an authority over our bodies separate from that claimed by the Church over our souls.
But the mechanistic view of health has been hard to shake off, even as scientific understanding – and exposure to non-western medical traditions – should have made it seem ever less credible. Cartesian dualism reigns to this day, seen in the supposedly strict separation of physical and mental health. To treat the mind and body as indivisible, as two sides of the same coin, is to risk being accused of quackery. “Holistic” medicine still struggles to be taken seriously.
Faced with a fear-inducing pandemic, the medical establishment has inevitably reverted even more strongly to type. The virus has been viewed through a single lens: as an invader seeking to overwhelm our defences, while we are seen as vulnerable patients in desperate need of an extra battalion of soldiers who can help us to fight it off. With this as the dominant framework, it has fallen to Big Pharma – the medical corporations with the greatest firepower – to ride to our rescue.
Vaccines are part of an emergency solution, of course. They will help save lives among the most vulnerable. But the reliance on vaccines, to the exclusion of everything else, is a sign that once again we are being lured back to viewing our bodies as machines. We are being told by the medical establishment we can ride out this war with some armour-plating from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. We can all be Robocop in the battle against Covid-19.
But there are others ways to view health than as an expensive, resource-depleting technological battle against virus-warriors. Where is the focus on improving the ever-more nutrient-deficient, processed, pesticide-laden, and sugar and chemical-rich diets most of us consume? How do we address the plague of stress and anxiety we all endure in a competitive, digitally connected, no-rest world stripped of all spiritual meaning? What do we do about the cosseted lifestyles we prefer, where exertion is a lifestyle choice renamed as exercise rather than integral to our working day, and where regular exposure to sunshine, outside of a beach vacation, is all but impossible in our office-bound schedules?
Fear and quick-fixes
For much of human history, our chief concern was the fight for survival – against animals and other humans, against the elements, against natural disasters. Technological developments proved invaluable in making our lives safer and easier, whether it was flint axes and domesticated animals, wheels and combustion engines, medicines and mass communications. Our brains now seem hardwired to look to technological innovation to address even the smallest inconvenience, to allay even our wildest fears.
So, of course, we have invested our hopes, and sacrificed our economies, in finding a technological fix to the pandemic. But does this exclusive fixation on technology to solve the current health crisis not have a parallel with the similar, quick-fix technological remedies we keep seeking for the many ecological crises we have created?
Global warming? We can create an even whiter paint to reflect back the sun’s heat. Plastics in every corner of our oceans? We can build giant vacuum-cleaners that will suck it all out. Vanishing bee populations? We can invent pollinator drones to take their place. A dying planet? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk will fly millions of us to space colonies.
Were we not so technology obsessed, were we not so greedy, were we not so terrified of insecurity and death, if we did not see our bodies and minds as separate, and humans as separate from everything else, we might pause to ponder whether our approach is not a little misguided.
Science and technology can be wonderful things. They can advance our knowledge of ourselves and the world we inhabit. But they need to be conducted with a sense of humility we increasingly seem incapable of. We are not conquerors of our bodies, or the planet, or the universe – and if we imagine we are, we will soon find out that the battle we are waging is one we can never hope to win.
The Mainstream Media
The Pentagon's Lies About the August 29 Drone Strikes Were Spread For Days By An Unquestioning Media
The Pentagon's Lies About the August 29 Drone Strikes Were Spread For Days By An Unquestioning Media
Why Molten Steel?
Ken Holden, who is involved with the organizing of demolition, excavation and debris removal operations at Ground Zero, later will tell the 9/11 Commission, “Underground, it was still so hot that molten metal dripped down the sides of the wall from [WTC] Building 6.” [9/11 COMMISSION, 4/1/2003]
William Langewiesche, the only journalist to have unrestrictedaccess to Ground Zero during the cleanup operation, describes,“in the early days, the streams of molten metal that leaked from the hot cores and flowed down broken walls inside the foundation hole.” [LANGEWIESCHE, 2002, PP. 32]
Leslie Robertson, one of the structural engineers responsiblefor the design of the WTC, describes fires still burning and molten steel still running 21 days after the attacks. [SEAU NEWS, 10/2001 ] Alison Geyh, who heads a team of scientists studying the potential health effects of 9/11, reports: “Fires are still actively burning and the smoke is very intense. In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten steel.” [JOHNS HOPKINS PUBLIC HEALTH MAGAZINE, 2001] Ron Burger, a public health advisor who arrives at Ground Zero on September 12, says that “feeling the heat” and “seeing the molten steel” there reminds him of a volcano. [NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH ASSOCIATION, 9/2003, PP. 40 ]
Paramedic Lee Turner arrives at the World Trade Center site on September 12 as a member of a federal urban search and rescue squad. While at Ground Zero, he goes “down crumpled stairwells to the subway, five levels below ground.” There he reportedly sees, “in the darkness a distant, pinkish glow—molten metal dripping from a beam.” [US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, 9/12/2002] According to a member of New York Air National Guard’s 109th Air Wing, who is at Ground Zero from September 22 to October 6: “One fireman told us that there was still molten steel at the heart of the towers’ remains. Firemen sprayed water to cool the debris down but the heat remained intense enough at the surface to melt their boots.” [NATIONAL GUARD MAGAZINE, 12/2001] New York firefighters recall “heat so intense they encountered rivers of molten steel.” [NEW YORK POST, 3/3/2004] As late as five months after the attacks, in February 2002, firefighter Joe O’Toole sees a steel beam being lifted from deep underground at Ground Zero, which, he says, “was dripping from the molten steel.” [KNIGHT RIDDER, 5/29/2002]https://brock911.fandom.com/wiki/Steven_E._Jones
https://www.facebook.com/cristobol.backhaus/videos/64492081981
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De Groene NAVO-Propagandist Maarten Muns
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