How is the coronavirus crisis affecting Bangalore? In this piece, Suprabha Seshan considers the fragrances of lockdown, the clearing of beautiful skies in the heart of one of India’s biggest cities, and the brief halt to the concrete machinations of industrial living.
The streets of Jayanagar, a residential area in Bengaluru are strewn with spring flowers. Yellow copper pods, lilac crape myrtles, pink-and-white honges and orange gulmohurs blaze overhead and underfoot; vitality and senescence mirroring each other. The normally hard surfaces – kerb, pavement, road and concrete – are softened by fallen petals and the duff of stamens from rain trees. Every flower seems more brilliant, more beautiful now; the air is clear for the first time in decades. Jasmine has never been so scented; the breeze is free of fumes. Koels have never sung so loudly; the city isn’t blaring and grinding. Every thunderstorm clears the grime even more. My senses too, are unrestrained. The same world is even more lovely and I take in everything without resistance. Experience is heightened naturally.
I spend my lockdown time fantasizing forests out of the cracks in concrete.
It’s even more clear to me now that life so wants to live, that air can clear and waters can sparkle, and that breathing can happen without a struggle. I fantasize about human community forming around these petals, walking and talking with each other, playing badminton or cricket on a quiet street, without the screeching machines, without the danger of being overwhelmed by emphysema, cancer, diabetes, pneumonia, tuberculosis and atherosclerosis; and other ailments of the modern world. Wherever I see non humans, I see health. Even those classified as vermin are mostly just cleaning up human filth. Wherever I see artifacts of industrial civilization, I see ill-health and disasters. Everything from paper and cloth to metal, steel and plastic – everything fashioned in the furnaces of industrial scale machinery and delivered to people like you and me – has debilitated the planet as well as our bodies. Everything has had blood in its making. Meanwhile, here is the surge of life, in the cracks of this tar, up in the trees, swirling through the skies and in the water; a vitality surging to ease us of our misery.
It seems to me that civilization is the disease we need to rid ourselves and the planet of.
By we, I mean all humans, all life forms, all present and future members of the council of beings. Including viruses (inextricable members of our microbiomes). Perhaps Covid-19 is the evolutionary challenge that will mutate humankind from psychopathy and victimhood, to communities more compassionate, life-loving and planet-friendly.
Here is beauty bursting and then dying for more beauty. I have never been so happy in Bangalore, nor so long removed from the forest where I have lived for nearly three decades. But the ebullience of the air, light, birds, sky and the trees – make my skin and organs, limbs, senses and mind, its own. The natural world is here too, embracing and not alienating me, even if I hanker for the ancient biome that is my adopted home. Every being here, is part of the vanguard of something primordial; enlivening everyone and everything; grace appearing through light, leaves, flesh, feathers and fur. Here are baby forests, grasslands and thorny thickets waiting to spring forth, offering kinship and solidarity. I’m not so alone. There are many of us here in the frontline of dissembling the body of modern civilization. We’ll find room for all beings. Even the vermin who make sure humans don’t get too cocky in their pursuit of sterility.
I venture to the grocery store most days; little walking reprieves. I also perch often on the parapet top of my mother’s apartment complex; my own lockdown eyrie. Barring the trees, the sky, the birds, the winds, and human and other mammal bodies, all around and as far I can see, are the things of civilization. Every single one of these has been made by humans. With or without machines. Everything is made, assembled, glued together or welded – by people. Fashioned and fabricated with materials from the land, from the cratered bodies of non humans; from living communities around the living earth.
I also spend lockdown time, conjuring memories of the people who made this city, and continue to keep it going. I imagine the sweat-slick torsos and limbs of men and women who made this place – this culvert, this bridge, road, tarmac, and kerb. I walk around buildings of all sizes and shapes, buildings their creators are proud of. Every contractor, owner and resident considers each of these important and necessary. Also beautiful and profitable. I imagine the glistening, strong and slim bodies of the labourers who laid every brick, carried every cement sack, masoned every wall and floor and ceiling. I think of the lives that went into making these.
Concrete structures are the skeletal basis of modern existence.
Despite the technology, they are still built like the pyramids were, by millions of poor and displaced people brought in. Co-opted and tempted perhaps; driven by aspiration or just strife and despair, masses of poor people have built the monuments and neoliberal palaces of the 21st century. How many suffered to make the concrete jungle? How many organs, tissues, senses and minds died to make this drain, or repair it? How many lungs, livers, uteruses, guts, skins, kidneys, brains and gall bladders gave in to the cement, smog and steel died, so the elite could exalt in these?
Around the corner, are the vegetable vendors. Around another corner, the grocers (everywhere the security guards and the police.) All part of this way of life, men and women doing their thing so the city folks can live. Hauling, caring, cleaning, fetching and selling, each in their own way, so we can live. Almost everyone hailing from somewhere outside this city. I stop to pick up some essentials – onions, drumsticks, atta, eggs and milk. Again images arise in my mind, but they’re palpable. Just beyond the precincts of the metropolitan area, are the farmers.
Every floret and gourd; tuber and grain; fruit, seed and lentil in these shops is from the land, worked by brown bodies through the seasons, over decades.
By now millenia. The peasantry working so the citified folks can eat, and create civilization. Below their rural bodies is the brown, black or red earth, sometimes rich and fragrant, circling death into agro-ecological community. More often than not – the land is hardpanned, cracked, exposed, depleted and toxic with dangerous chemicals, dying there as I, here, pick and choose my next meal. Right now, I am indelibly classed as a consumer. Living in a rural area normally, and growing mutualistic bonds with farming and tribal neighbours, I have a sense of what it might be like simply to gather, or partake of the bounties of the earth more directly. But right now, I’m confronted with the fact, that behind these potatoes and tomatoes I buy today, are lands worked even harder than the bodies of the humans working them, who are worked by the rest of us, to fill the tables and larders of the city. The effects of this citified existence, have spread to every part of the planet.
There are no places—no island, nor mountain nor ocean trench—untouched by the egregious wastes of industrial civilization.
Migrant labourers number some 30 percent of the population in India. No one’s appalled by this it seems. People forced to leave home and work far away so that their families can have food and shelter, who enter inhuman conditions, breathing noxious air thick with pollutants, asbestos, cement, smoke, smog, polyurethanes and tar. They live in shanties, stacked up around each other, instead of their villages and forests. The agricultural economy has failed. Gargantuan industrial projects are taking over; special economic zones, highways, ports and landfills spread over vast areas of the land, asking no one’s permission. Meanwhile people are removed from those lands to build those same projects or come into the cities to build skyscrapers, malls, monuments, gated communities, theme parks and tower-block offices for wealthier people. No one is appalled by this. It’s taken for granted that all these have to be built. Upper-class people pay for their square footage of property, and all their accumulations inside, in denial that everything has been stolen. Besides, who’s to pay for the well-being of the poor, and especially of their bodies? Is there some natural law that governs the corpulence of apartment dwellers, and the emaciation of the people who built their buildings?
“For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.”
The word that comes to mind right now is parasitism. But as a conservationist and neoforest-dweller, I have come to respect the parasites of the natural world. I’ve observed how they contribute to the resilience of the forest, and to the living community as a whole. What of these elite humans then? What of people like you and me? How do we contribute to the living community? Do we, at all?
Native American writer, scholar and political activist Jack. D. Forbes has another word for this. Wetikos. He has termed this condition of modern humans, as a form of cannibalism, or wetikos, which means sickness in Cree language. In his book Columbus and other Cannibals, he outlines disturbing examples that show how wetikos defines modern civilization and how it is spreading like a contagion across all cultures, a sickness whose symptoms are rape, greed, caste-ism, class-ism, arrogance, cruelty, warmongering, slavery, psychosis, and exploitation of another for one’s own profit.
Wetikos is a psychic disease, a virus of the mind and soul.
That humankind was sick, stressed, disordered and plagued in a million ways long before Covid-19 got out, is a point that few are in the mood to appreciate right now. That plastic microfibres have found their way into the flesh of every child being born, depressing all our beautiful bodies from their natural birthrights of vigour and vitality was a fact shrugged off long before the virus hit. That one-in-four persons suffers a mental illness, that this is a sign of insanity of the culture as a whole, had not been adequately dealt with at all. That one-in-four women worldwide risks being assaulted or raped, is on the backburner now. That the world was already in its death throes from the annihilation of the biosphere, long before December 2019, has become irrelevant. For this, the newreels din into all living rooms, is the mother of all pestilences, this Covid-19. This terrifying, raging disease is striking the elderly and the weak, those already suffering in areas of high pollution and cramming, burdened by compromised immune systems. Covid-19 is bringing modern civilization to a shocking halt, unleashing all kinds of psychological, social, political, ecological and tectonic forces. This way of life is dissembling quickly, so let’s not talk about how this way of life came to be.
Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that civilizations are never murdered, they instead take their own lives.
Whether you agree or disagree with his analysis, it’s true that all civilizations have collapsed. A few got rebooted, but all have gone down. They had an average life span of 300-odd years and ended from a slew of causes: overshoot and drawdown being the most common. They were also top-heavy with large discontented serf populations. They were also broken by war, internecine conflict, natural disasters and diseases. Starting out with chieftains, little societies grew to kingships and empires with the birth of agriculture and militarized polities. They ended as civilizations, and almost all suffered tyranny or civil breakdown.
The culprit in the Covid-19 crisis, is globalization itself (that is, the modern industrial world with runaway capitalism dovetailing into fascism). Through its own interactions, materials, infrastructures, conduits, networks and arrangements, the 21st century civilization is the main vector of these diseases. Not some bat, rat, bird or virus alone. The precondition for the havoc caused by the virus is the destruction of the natural world through the predatory spread of a rapacious mentality fueled by extraordinary congregations of people in lethal conditions. Long prior to the arrival of the virus. Infectious diseases are now spreading faster than at any time in history. It is estimated that 4.3 billion airline passengers travelled in 2018; an outbreak or epidemic in any one part of the world is only a few hours away from becoming an imminent threat somewhere else.
Humans are not strangers to death or to suffering.
Even if they’re afraid of it, and the manner by which they will die, they are not strangers to it. No living being is. The world death clock tells us that per year: around 56,000,000 people die, and per month: 4,679,452 and per day: 153,424.7. Per hour: 6,392.7, per minute: 106.7. Per second: 1.8 persons die.
1.9 million people have died by April 20th 2020, due to cancer alone. 10 million children are in slavery today, as forced labour, sex traffickers and war soldiers. A Lancet Report from WHO-UNICEF says: “By 2030, 2.3 billion people are projected to live in fragile or conflict affected contexts. Climate change, ecological degradation, migrating populations, conflict, pervasive inequalities, and predatory commercial practices threaten the health and future of children in every country.” The WHO website also says that every year the lives of approximately 1.35 million people are cut short as a result of a road traffic crash. Between 20 and 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability as a result of their injury. Why has this not caused panic, outrage and system shut down, as Covid-19 has? How has this virus attained god-like proportions, or the reverse, a devil-like stature?
Everyone knows the rules of the modern world – the victims, workers, farmers, indentured labourers, child workers, domestic servants, and also the elite. These can’t be spelled out this very moment, it seems. In this sensitive and vulnerable time for humankind, there’s a lot of resistance to history. Who is being victimized to serve whom, is not a hot topic. For who is there to listen? Everyone is only thinking Covid-19.
This is a time, when anything can happen.
And so it is a time when everything matters. Everything. So greater vigilance is required, not only against the virus, but against wetikos amassing power. In such times human psyches are even more vulnerable. Fear can make victims protect their abusers. It can make their psyches extremely suggestible.
The fear of death by Covid-19 has made the entire human race extremely compliant to authority. It has also unified a few in a bid against civilization, or its current avatar, capitalism. As the towers, pillars and edifices being built by migrant labourers stay silent, as the cement mixers stop, as the cement dust settles, as the black smog from land vehicles and planes disappears, some kind of cancellation is happening. Terror on the one hand, and resurgent atmosphere and hydrosphere on the other. Never before have despots and tyrants had such compliance, never before has human resilience and community been so compassionate and far reaching, The privileged and educated are shut in – skyping or zooming each other; the poor are corralled and shut out, in huddles with each other. Nobody lifting a finger in utter despair and outrage that this dream-of-dreams is falling apart, that this thing that everyone had aspired for is hollow, that this shiny, sterile, and smooth modern world is itself the bearer of death. Slap in the face from mother nature, some people say. The future does not exist anymore, a horror greater than slavery, war, patriarchy and climate catastrophe. Every person now hooked into the modern world, is already lonely and desperate, smogged out, concreted over, tarred and painted; in the vice of steel and super machines. Why are we not aghast at the betrayal, be we well-fed or poor? The Covid-19 horror, as portrayed by the mass media and the authorities and by every human alive, successfully erases all previous horrors.
The earth is breathing again.
Listen. Feel. Your skin and eyes and heart will tell you. Everyone’s lungs, barring the ones infected by Covid-19, are clearer and stronger again. Everyone’s bodies are freer of toxins and fumes, for just this moment. Immune systems are rallying. Everyone’s minds can take a break, get some kind of nervous system rehaul, for just this moment. While my heart (not yet locked down) goes out to patients who cannot access health care, and my arm (not yet locked down) rises in solidarity against the victims of domestic violence – right now – this is a situation that could turn for the better. If only we listen to the natural world, to human community, to air and sky and birds and stars, to the plants and animals near us, a more vibrant immunity could kick in. For just a moment, can we celebrate the freeing of all our lungs (every being that has lungs), and the breathing of our skins (every being that has a skin) and the opening of the arteries in our bodies (every being with arteries and circulatory organs), and the clearer blood flowing in and out of our hearts (every being with blood), and our livers (every being with a liver)? Can we feel the easing from overwork, of our organs being fed with clean blood that comes from clean lungs, and from cleaner air? Can we put our psychoses on pause, for just this moment? Is this not a moment to find some grit of sanity? Is this not the most extreme of ironies, the freeing of the earth while the canning of humans in the viral echo-chamber goes viral? But while we listen to our bodies, and pick up the strength and clarity to defend this new-found health-in-community, we still have to care, for the isolated, the sick and the hungry. Care of course, includes defence. For the land, for the hounded and the betrayed and ghetto-ized.
The looming threat of economic collapse, and of greater unemployment and the failure of food systems and the careening of currencies are all real.
Things will get worse. Tyrants will go even more ballistic. Systems will rupture. People will turn against each other. I say, let’s gather ourselves and listen to the earth. Let us align with health and vitality and each other. Let us lockdown the wetikos.
Those slim, taut, labouring bodies are getting a respite from the ugliest and most treacherous work in industries, roads and construction sites. Those very same bodies – that the modern world has yoked to serve its own ends – who had been driven in to something toxic and hollow, what do they really want? Or is this a typically privilieged question to ask sitting in a comfortable isolation chambers fretting about the future? I cannot presume what the poor want. I cannot presume what anyone wants. I can’t even presume what my body wants, it seems to say different things from my mind, tugging in mysterious ways. I can ask however. What do the millions who make this civilization at the cost of their own bodies and communities, want? Do they want to return to the construction sites, or do they want to return to their families and stay there? Millions of people who have been lost and lonely and desperate and overworked already. This should not be subsumed to the present horror.
The worry over money is real.
Money itself, the greatest and most treacherous trick has to be seen squarely for what it is. A con job, by con men, in a con system. Equating it to happiness, full bellies, happy communities and well being, is the result of centuries of systematic misdirection. And now it’s hooked us into the super-machine that’s destroying us all. Now it’s shown its true self. It does not care; it is a bearer of misery. It has wetikos embossed into its every molecule and meaning.
Covid-19 has unhinged the foundations of modern life, and shown it for how ridiculous and fragile it is. The horror of horrors right now is that the good life (the civilized life, the citified life with bright lights, fancy machines and endless iterations of things), is not what it was made out to be.
There is no longer any place to settle, feel well, or find any kind of security. Everything ferries the virus. Well, maybe not everywhere. Amazonian Indians rush back to their forests for they fear new infections; they can be wiped out as a people. The Zapatistas have cordoned off their caracoles and hills and valleys, in southern Mexico. They will take care of themselves they say, as bad governments are showing they cannot. The state of Kerala in southern India sealed itself off long before the others. Its people, local governments and the state government humanely and compassionately took care of each other, stayed home and observed all the protocol. Cuba and South Korea are models for not only how they’ve contained the disease, but for another kind of society. Why has the rest of the world not followed these models, why the spread of systems of despotism, tyranny, fascism, and authoritarianism that so-called liberal democracy has actually given birth to? Is this wetikos at work?
Eventually the most of the world locked down and as I write, the easing has also begun.
There are other things afoot in many places, where lockdown presages uglier things, far more deadly than the virus. Millions are suffering not from the virus, but other dangers. Communalism, displacement, loneliness, fear, sealings-in, exile, lychings, PTSD. These are bound to continue. In fact, all humankind is struggling with PTSD right now, a symptom of which is the inability to see into the future. A perfect moment for wetikos, riding hot on the heels of the virus.
Global warming continues apace, it will take a few hundred years to turn that horror around, a few hundred years of the respite experienced in the last few weeks. But global warming is a symptom of modern industrial civilization in all its avatars; aka runaway capitalism, fascism, nation-states and corporate-military complexes. All these bear more viruses, more deadly plagues, together with floods and the droughts and the fires and the hurricanes. The legacies of the chaos and destruction wreaked by the men who drive the monster machines.
“It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
That this way of life is insane, disconnected from the natural world, from its own body and community, is still not recognized. The Dhaulagiri mountains becoming visible from towns in Punjab was not just a centennial miracle, but should be the absolute norm, the way things should be, on any day. The mountains are hidden by the smog of our excess, like lovers obscuring each other through cigarette smoke. The Ganga refreshed herself in the last two months. The waters of the Yamuna are sparkling again. The Cauvery is running cleaner even downstream of Bengaluru. All this without a single paisa being spent. Why are these not heralded in banners all around the land? That they are not, is a sign of how smoggy our own vision is, and therefore our thoughts and our experience. That the living world is still here, that it did not go away, and that the land blesses us if only we stayed at home, should be the moment to radically rethink community.
The way out of psychosis is to relate again, with humans and non humans.
The only thing I wish to defend right now, is this. The right to community. I’m fiercely protective of every living being. I daily vow to save each and all. I worship life, human and non human; every insect, bird, mammal, plant, cloud, river and mountain. The rewilding of the world will happen. Future forests are waiting, surging under the tar. From the mesh of petals becoming soil becoming weed, becoming verge, becoming community becoming safe zone for native trees, birds, squirrels and humans; community will happen. In time shrubs and climbers and creepers and trees will grow tall. Coming generations will breathe clean air. No. You and I will breathe clean air. The asphalt will crack and the roots of the thousand tiny pipal trees, I find in these alleys, will make way for the rest of nature. Pipal saplings growing out of compound walls, between pavement slabs, in the drains and culverts, on top of other trees, on tops of apartment blocks, on neglected balconies. Pipal roots will go through every artefact, every thing. In the cracks soil will form and grow fertile. Rain will sink into the ground to replenish underground springs and aquifers. I picture you and I walking through this wild land, picking herbs and fruit, enjoying flowers, birds and small animals, and coming home with a free meal.
Foraging costs nothing; there is no packaging waste.
The foods will be diverse, seasonal and delicious. Forage and forest seem to be connected words, and connected ways of being. How silly that humans are the only ones who pay for food. Instead of roads, cars, shops and malls, we could have food forests and little trails by streams trickling through cool, dappled hollows. Tall trees to climb and pick mangoes and jackfruit from. No gyms. No traffic, no honking. No rumbling cement mixers and screeching cranes swinging overhead. No drilling machines, no loudspeakers. Just us, people. Human people, dog people, butterfly people, bird people. Fish people in stream people. And pipal people
Leviathan is writhing.
It’s under assault like never before. Covid-19 has come just at the right time, to put it out of its misery. It had started to flail and turn upon itself quite a while ago. Leviathan has been afflicted by several diseases and problems, from being too large and too dependant and completely arrogant. It suffers from supremacy-syndrome. It hates its dependancy on us people. On life. It is narcissistic and cannibalistic. All its parts are plagued with wetikos, the disease of exploitation. Jack D Forbes writes that “the disease of aggression against all other living beings and the disease of consuming others lives and possessions, and people, are all the same”. Paul Levy, author of Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil writes: “we become bewitched by the projective tendencies of our own mind. People afflicted with wetikos react to their own projections in the world as if they objectively exist separate from themselves, delusionally thinking that they have nothing to do with creating that to which they are reacting. Over time this activity of endlessly reacting to and becoming conditioned by one’s own energy tends to generate insane behavior, which can manifest internally or in the world at large. As if under a spell, we become entranced by our own intrinsic gifts and talents for dreaming up our world, unknowingly hypnotizing ourselves with our God-given power to creatively call forth reality so that it boomerangs against us, undermining our potential for evolution.” Leviathan is projecting itself into Covid-19. And it will boomerang into itself. I have no doubts here.
I am done with this way of life.
Except for my friends and family, and the land and forests I’ve dedicated my life to support, I need little. I’ll leave this machine and never look back. I’ll eat ferns and forest fruit, and roots. I’ll eat less. If there’s nothing I’ll starve and fall. Perhaps I’ll die. Others can take life from me. I’m stepping away from the wetikos who champion this way of being. The only revolution that matters right now is the one that liberates earth mother and all her children. Including our bodies. And our minds. From wetikos. I’ll take my chances. When the oil-guzzling machines give way and the monoliths, monuments, highways, terminals, pipelines and cables freeze, decay, crumble, crash or powder and become dust, each particle will go home to the elements. Then, after some time, each will be taken into the arms of the waiting fungi and bacteria. and other beings who made this world possible in the first place. And that too, long ago. They still have all their secrets. Seeds will soon sprout and animals will come, and more trees will grow and rivers will run and the moon will shine through into our dreams unmarred by bright violent lights and the buzz of electricity.
The spirits will be back then, and we will be embraced by the land once more. And the whole world will come ablaze with flowers.
But wait a second. I’m in lockdown. Funny how the sight of petals can spin such fantasy. When the body is trapped, the mind travels far; a condition faced by all prisoners. And yogis. This is a comfortable prison, no doubt. Maybe yoga came out of some long-ago lockdown, trapped folks seeking release. I’m privilieged, of course. And have a nice yoga mat too. But right now, I’m not calling this by any other name. It’s a prison. I do my own limbering up in a few square feet, noting the air is sweeter. What’s happening out there? Events in the wider world appear not only through the media but in fresh wafts through the window. I go for the daily parole. Commune with the trees. I do as I’m told. But I keep vigilant. All my thoughts are focussed. On a full blown lockdown: of every wetikos-ridden soul and wetikos-engineered thing. I fantasize of the lockdown of Leviathan.
The liberation of the natural world, including human kind, has never been closer.
Suprabha Seshan is a rainforest conservationist. She lives and works at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, a forest garden and community-based conservation centre in the Western Ghat mountains of Kerala. She writes occasionally. Her essay can be found in the Indian Quarterly and Journal of the Krishnamurti Schools and elsewhere. She is currently working on her book, Rainforest Etiquette in a World Gone Mad, forthcoming from Context, Westland Publishers.
This piece has been slightly edited from the original version published at Countercurrents. Featured image by Sebastian Horndasch, CC BY 2.0.
Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was a radical feminist theorist, writer, and campaigner. In this excerpt from her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin discusses the power of naming. In her analysis, the development of the culture of patriarchy has empowered men with almost sole access to the power to define language. This control over language allows for expansions in ideological hegemony, and has serious implications for women over the centuries.
By Andrea Dworkin
How Patriarchy Works: The Power of Naming
Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing it’s realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself.
As Mary Daly, who first isolated this power, wrote in Beyond God the Father “… It is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us“.
Male supremacy is fused into language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perpetual values developed expressly to subordinates women.
Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.
No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming. Their names resonate wherever there is human life. As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect. As with fire when it belonged to the gods, the power of naming appears magical: he gives the name, the name enjoys she gives the name the name is lost. But this magic is illusion.
The male power of naming is upheld by force, pure and simple.
On its own, without force to back it, measured against reality, it is not power; it is process, a more humble thing. “The old naming,” Mary Daly wrote, “was not the product of dialogue – a fact in advertently admitted in the Genesis story of Adam’s naming the animals and the woman.”
It is the naming by decree that is power over and against those who are forbidden to name their own experience; it is the decree backed up by violence that writes the name indelibly in blood in a male dominated culture. The male does not merely name women evil; he exterminates nine million women as witches because he is named them evil. He does not merely name women weak; he mutilates the female body, binds it up so that it cannot move freely, uses it as a toy or ornament, keeps it caged and stunted because he has named women weak. He says that the female wants to be raped; he rapes. She resists rape; he must beat her, threaten her with death, forcibly carry her off, attack her in the night, use knife or fist; and still he says she wants it, they all do. She says no; he claims that means yes.
He names her ignorant then forbids her education.
He does not allow her to use her mind or body rigourously, their names her intuitive and emotional. He defines femininity and when she does not conform he names her deviant, sick, beats her up, slices of her clitoris (repository of pathological masculinity), tears out her womb, (source of her personality), lobotomizes or narcotizes her (perverse recognition that she can think, though thinking in a woman is named deviant).
He names antagonism and violence, mixed in varying degrees “sex”; he beats her and names it variously “proof of love“ (if she is wife) or “eroticism“ (if she is mistress). If she wants him sexually he names her slut; if she does not want him he rapes her and says she does; If she would rather study or paint he names her repressed and brags he can cure her pathological interests with the apocryphal “good fuck“. He names her housewife, fit for only the house, keeps her poor and utterly dependent, only to buy her with his money should she leave the house and then he calls her whore. He names her whatever suits him. he does what he wants and calls it what he likes.
He actively maintains the power of naming through force and he justifies force through the power of naming.
The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way. […]
Whatever contradicts or subverts male naming is defamed out of existence; the power of naming itself, in the male system, is a form of force.
On this episode of the Green Flame, we interviewed Shahidah Janjua about women, writing, activism and the creation of a Women’s Centre in Kerry. Shahidah read one of her soon-to-be-published poems.
This episode is also dedicated to the memory of our beloved sister.
We share this memorial she wrote on the passing of Andrea Dworkin, whom she mentions in the interview saying, “I love that woman.”
On Andrea’s Passing.
April 12, 2005 05:53 AM
“I am gutted. It is the end of an era; not of our resistance, but of an era. I am a Pakistani woman of 55, a mother, a grandmother. I read Letters from a War Zone when I was 36 and it did save my life, not in any cliched way, but really. Everything I have done, thought and understood since then has evolved from reading that book. It laid bare what I had known and experienced. I went on to read all Andrea’s books. I wrote to Andrea to tell her this. Even if my voice was one of thousands, I felt it was important for her to know what she had given me. She replied with great humility.
At first I loved and looked up to Andrea as a child does to its mother, always wanting clarity, the truth, and cherishing the guidance when it came in articles, speeches, interviews and books. I grew from there into an adult and an equal, because this is the power that the truth gave me. It demanded that I grow in stature in the world and stand shoulder to shoulder with brave women, by becoming a brave woman myself. No other words, no other actions in the world had allowed me the full possibility of seeing myself in this way; someone of great worth and endless potential. Always her gendered analysis was the key. The abiding question it left me with in any circumstance was “where are the women in this, and what is happening to them?”, the question that followed was “where am I in this, and what is happening to me?” Asking these questions requires brutal honesty, and no place for complicity. I have lost a friend and a sister, and the way that I can honour this very precious relationship is by carrying on the resistance to male supremacy and domination.”
On behalf of the Women of DGR:
We lost you Shahidah in March, and we are gutted. We mourn no longer having the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with you, dear sister. We cherish the many gifts of your life’s work. We dedicate our lives, as you once did, to being brave, to continuing that work, wherever we are, with whatever gifts we have to give. With all our love and respect Shahidah Janjua, Thank You.
Rest in Peace. Rest in Power.
Shahidah was a woman of strength, a feminist, writer and member of DGR.
In this critical review, Elisabeth Robson reacts to the newly released environmental documentary Planet of the Humans. The film explains why technology won’t save us and leads viewers to question the industrial paradigm.
Liberals have been quick to attack the film, mistaking it for a pro-fossil or pro-nuclear fuel argument, and recognizing that critiquing “green” energy undermines the morality of their entire ideological project of “sustainable modern development.” The far-right has attempted to co-opt the message as well. Both are predictable and profoundly mistaken responses. See the end of this review for a few point-by-point rebuttals of these misrepresentations.
Our choice is not between “green” energy and fossil fuels. That is a false binary. We must choose between industrial destruction—including both ‘renewables’ and fossil fuels—and creating a biocentric future. We need revolutionary transformation of society, not superficial changes to the energy sources of empire. Planet of the Humans is not without flaws. No piece of media is. But it contributes critically to a movement too long dominated by cornucopian, anthropogenic industrial energy advocates.
Planet of the Humans: Why Technology Won’t Save Us
By Elisabeth Robson
Green energy is a false solution. That’s a nice way of putting it.
But green energy is the god of the left. And heaven forbid anyone from the left point out any of the pesky problems with this god. We expect that from people on the right; but the left? And now one of the left’s progressive heroes has gone and broken the rules and actually published an entire 1 hour and 40 minutes of documentary trashing this god. Needless to say, the backlash took less than 24 hours to begin.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The documentary film is Planet of the Humans. The film is narrated and directed by Jeff Gibbs, and executive produced by Michael Moore. It stars renewable energy generation technologies wind and solar, along with biomass, and with, of course, the obligatory supporting role appearance from electric vehicles.
Jeff channels Michael well. He is not afraid to look behind the curtain to see the man, or rather the fossil fuels, running the show, or to ask the uncomfortable questions. “Well, that’s awkward,” I find myself saying several times throughout the film.
We begin, appropriately enough, with a reminder of the first Earth Day, 50 years ago today as I write this now. That first Earth Day inspired the filmmaker to become an environmental journalist, and he went through a phase, as many of us have done, wishing and hoping so hard that green energy will help us kick our addiction to fossil fuels and save the planet, that he actually believed it for a while.
Wind and solar.
He soon discovers the intermittency problem: you can’t generate energy from solar panels when the sun isn’t shining, or from wind turbines when the wind isn’t blowing. Well, yes, that is a well known problem. He then discovers that fossil fuel powered energy plants must be running at the ready to fill in the gaps when the wind dies and it rains or the sun sets for the evening, and of course you can’t just stop and start fossil fuel powered energy plants on a whim. What about batteries he asks? Yes, but… they degrade quickly and require a lot of resources to make. How about the resources to make the wind and solar panels? Right, that’s a problem too.
And the land where wind and solar is installed? Oh, yes, the vast tracts of land torn up for wind and solar is yet another problem. But it’s just desert right? “Just desert”… sure, if you think centuries old cactus and Joshua trees, wildflowers that color the hills red, yellow, and purple after spring rains, and lizard and tortoise and eagle and wolf habitat is “just desert.”
Prayer walk for sacred water in the Mojave desert, home to numerous indigenous nations, a wide array of biodiversity, springs, wildflowers, ungulates, tortoises, lizards, birds, and some of the more remote lands in North America. The Mojave’s most serious threats come from the military, urban sprawl, and industrial solar development. Photo by Max Wilbert.
Gibbs looks at electric vehicles, trotted out by car companies as proof of their green credentials, but of course if wind and solar aren’t powering the grid, then all you’ve done to power the EVs is move the gas from the gas tank to the power plant. Unfortunately, the car company executive put on the spot did not seem to know much about the power grid, only about how much PR she was getting from the press about the EV she’s announcing.
Next, we meet biomass. Compared to wind and solar this is a low(er) tech solution to powering the world, which we might initially think is better–along with Bill McKibben who is shown proudly touting the benefits of chopping up trees into bits and burning them in power plants–but it turns out that no, we can’t cut down all the trees on the planet to power our lifestyles without some, you know, downsides. We see the fossil fuel powered-machines killing beautiful old trees, and the smoke and CO2 rising from the stacks while hearing about how biomass is “carbon neutral,” from people who obviously don’t understand the difference between trees, and a healthy, thriving forest. We meet the community members subjected to biomass plants that are burning, along with trees, old tires and creosote-soaked railroad ties.
And all along the way, Jeff and his sidekick Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions and co-producer of the film, ask the uncomfortable questions of the celebrities of the left: Van Jones, Bill McKibben, various big wigs at the Sierra Club, along with plenty of clips showing Al Gore at his hypocritical finest, touting capitalism and the profit he will be making personally if only we would invest more money in renewable technologies.
The only conclusion the viewer can draw by the end of the film is the inescapable fact, that no one on the left wants to admit: there is no get out of jail free card. There never was, and there never will be. As long as we try to tech, mine, build, and burn our way out of this mess, we will only make the problem worse.
Why technology won’t save us
While the film, Planet of The Humans focuses almost entirely on the problems of wind, solar, and biomass, and the corporate culture of profit surrounding these industries, we also understand that the filmmaker gets it–as in, the big picture. That it’s not just about climate change, air pollution, water pollution, or even corporate greed. It’s that even if we managed to miraculously replace all the grid energy and liquid fuels we use with so-called renewable sources of energy, it wouldn’t solve the fundamental issues at the heart of all these problems: that it is our industrial civilization and the relentless push for endless growth that is killing the planet. The film makers do not raise this point explicitly, but it is there for all to see if only we care to look. Just like these problems with renewables have been there all along, no matter how hard we try to ignore the fact that solar panels and wind turbines require massive amounts of metals mined out of the ground, ground that was once someone’s home, and is now destroyed; and no matter how hard we try to ignore that biomass is just a euphemism for dead trees, trees the same so-called environmentalists who invest in biomass energy plants tell us we must save in order to sequester CO2 and protect biodiversity.
The hypocrisy is stunning, as it always has been. We are all guilty of it to some degree–I know I am–but at least I can say that I’m trying to learn more, to keep an open but critical mind, and to spend the time to look more deeply at these issues. I’ve learned to not just take on faith the words of the corporate-backed and often fossil fuel-supported organizations mentioned in this film who tell me we can solve everything–have our cake and eat it too–if we just have enough green energy.
“Most chillingly of all, Gibbs at one stage of the film appears to suggest that there is no cure for any of this, that, just as humans are mortal, so the species itself is staring its own mortality in the face. But he appears to back away from that view by the end, saying merely that things need to change. But what things and how?
It’s not at all clear.”
Yes, this film makes the case that things need to change. What things? Everything. How? By shutting down the entire industrial machine.
The film never explicitly condemns industrial civilization as the root of our problems. However, as I said above, it is there to see for anyone who is paying attention. I might wish it had been stated explicitly and directly, but this message is hard to miss. The point of the film is that everything about how we live on this planet needs to change, and deluding ourselves about how we can continue life as we know it powered by green energy is not just a waste of time; it is criminal. Only by acknowledging this truth can we put aside the fantasy of green energy and begin to formulate real solutions. And yes, the real solutions mean shutting down the entire industrial machine. Not just fossil fuels, but everything: all the mining, the logging, the industrial fishing, the industrial agriculture… everything. It’s all got to change.
The lesson, and the moral of the story, is that we (humans) will be entirely to blame for our own demise, when it comes, if we continue down the path of using massive amounts of energy–no matter how that energy is generated–to expand our ecocidal footprint on this planet.
I hold my breath as the end of the film approaches. Will this film, like so many others, try to end on an optimistic note? The green god of the left requires optimism to end all his religious services, don’t you know.
No. This film, unlike so many others, manages to avoid the tragedy of ending with delusional optimism. We see instead the tragedy of rainforests decimated, rainforests that orangutans call home. The tragedy of lives lost to human greed and cruelty; the desperation, sadness, and confusion written all over the faces of those beautiful beings who remind us so much of ourselves.
It is the perfect, heart-wrenching ending to this film: we understand, without any words being spoken, that green energy, along with the many other horrors of our industrial civilization, is killing us and all life on this beautiful planet we call home.
False Critique #1: The film uses inaccurate information, for example about CSP (Concentrated Solar Power)
Critic: “It is stated correctly in the movie that the Ivanpah concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in California requires a natural gas power source to start it up every morning. Other CSP plants do not, however. And newer CSP designs, like the one operating at Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada since 2009, use molten salt to store enough of the sun’s heat to keep the generators running all night long.”
Robson: Most CSPs here in the USA have been an utter failure, including Crescent Dunes, which seems to be shut down now. The plant never managed to achieve its expected monthly output, and was entirely shut down for 8 months of its short life because of a leak in the molten salt thermal storage tank.
In addition, CSP plants are incredibly destructive to the land where they are installed. Typically the land is cleared of all life, like you see in the movie… which means habitat and homes lost for countless beings who lived on that land previously. When wildlife people try to relocate the desert tortoises that often live in these locations, not many survive. They fence off the land so the tortoises can’t get back in. And birds that fly through the hottest part of the light as it’s collected can sometimes burn to death.
I wonder if all that infrastructure is still sitting there, trashing up the desert? Certainly the soil and life they destroyed putting it up will take a very very long time to recover even if the infrastructure is eventually removed.
And none of this changes the fact that it requires metals and materials and fuel to build and maintain these things, that they are very low density sources of energy, and incredibly inefficient, consist of toxic waste at the end of their life spans, are designed to power the grid and our lifestyles that depend on the grid, which is unsustainable over the long term.
Laura Cunningham, Wildlife Biologist (comment from Facebook): Ten years ago I fought to save Ivanpah Valley and stop that monstrous solar power tower. This movie is accurate–the Sierra Club supported building the utility-scale solar project on the wildflower fields, translocating the desert tortoises, and ignoring my Chemehuevi elder friends who said every plant in the desert there is medicinal or edible. Ivanpah means “White clay water” in Paiute-Chemehuevi. I watched them bulldoze an ancient trail and archaeology. More giant solar projects are planned in the desert this year, this needs to stop.
False Critique #2: The film unfairly attacks certain figures
Critic: “It is hugely disingenuous, and frankly misleading, to hide in the credits at the end of a movie the fact that two of the leading organizations being damned in the movie for their support of biomass as a “green” energy source (350.org and Sierra Club) do not, in fact, support biomass any more. Bill McKibben deserves an apology for being misrepresented in this film …”
Robson: I feel the film maker gave Bill McKibben ample opportunity to refute his prior support of biomass *on film*. The film shows proof that Bill once did support it, whole-heartedly. Since the film came out McKibben has written this to say that while he used to support biomass, he no longer does: https://350.org/response-planet-of-the-humans-documentary/
Sierra Club has a page on biomass, where they state: “We believe that biomass projects can be sustainable, but that many biomass projects are not.”
Both 350.org and Sierra Club, and Bill McKibben personally, do whole-heartedly support “renewables,” including wind and solar.
350.org‘s main mission is “A fast & just transition to 100% renewable energy for all”, and their primary focus is climate change. The number one item on Sierra Club’s “issues” page is “Climate & Energy”, and speaking for the Sierra Club, ED Michael Brune said: “The booming clean energy economy is helping people create a better future for themselves and their families while, at the same time, helping to tackle the climate crisis that threatens our collective future. Workers see new job opportunities, communities see thriving local economies, and the American people see the inevitable transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.”
It is good that 350.org and Sierra Club and Bill McKibben have improved their stances on biomass; and certainly these organizations do some good work. But their support for “clean energy” will perpetuate our unsustainable lifestyles, and, as the film points out, is likely tied to corporate investment in these and related technologies, as well as the mining, extraction, refining, batteries, grids, etc. technologies that go with them.
Also, a personal note: I think using the word “biomass” to refer to trees, or plants, or whatever life form it refers to, is a horrific way to look at the natural world. It’s like using the word “resources” instead of trees, water, fish, etc. It turns real living beings into objects, and is a huge part of the problem.
False Critique #3: The film endorses problematic ideas of population control
Critic: “Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. ‘We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,’ says a well-coiffed environmental leader. ‘Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,’ says a scientist.”
I do not recall anyone in the movie advocating for one-child policies, or any other draconian population policies. I personally felt like the population issue was a relatively minor point in the film compared to the points about solar, wind, and biomass. [Population is discussed for a few minutes during the 100 minute film].
It is very clear that 8 billion humans would not exist without massive amounts of fossil fuels. I don’t think many would argue with that at this point (and if you have a cogent argument, I’d like to see it). In addition, several studies have recently shown that we humans have transformed a large proportion of the Earth in modern times. We have reduced wilderness areas to almost nothing, and wildlife to almost nothing.
So yeah, population is a problem. I thought the film did a fairly good job of raising it as an issue without being particularly “Malthusian” about it (in the pejorative sense that word is used today).
Elisabeth Robson is a radical feminist and a part of DGR.
Fear is a powerful force. Fear is not just an emotion: it is a state of heightened physiological arousal. Fear lowers our immunity. Fear makes careful decision-making difficult.
Fear also makes us susceptible to suggestion, and this is exploitable.
In Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, the author (someone we have deep disagreements with, especially on the issue of “green” energy) writes that “in moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure—whether the crisis is a financial meltdown or, as the Bush administration would later show, a terrorist attack.”
It is a grave situation, although it is as yet unclear exactly how deadly this virus is. This publication has previously covered the importance of considering underlying health issues, such as exposure to high levels of air pollution, which complicate “cause of death” considerations and implicate industrial pollution and industrial fast food. But predictably, governments are waging a “war on coronavirus,” not a war on pollution or on McDonalds.
Coronavirus, after all, doesn’t make any “campaign contributions” (that’s what we call bribes in the United States).
The Rise of Surveillance and the Chinese Model
Coronavirus originated in China, and so has China set the model for how the world responds to this situation.
Public surveillance is China is not a new phenomenon. The Chinese government employs a variety of tools to control it’s 1.4 billion people, including the world’s largest and most powerful internet censorship and control system (“The Great Firewall of China”), an AI-powered facial recognition platform linked to a network of hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras, laws requiring official IDs for mundane activities, extensive financial and communications monitoring, and a mandatory “Social Credit” system that assigns a score to each citizen based on their regular activities.
One city alone, Chongqing, was reported to have 2.58 million government surveillance cameras in operation last year—thirty times more cameras than Washington D.C.
This data is used to, among other things, assess the “political loyalty” of residents.
From China to the World
Coronavirus provides justification for expansion of these activities. In Wuhan and across the country, China is using CCTV cameras and drones to enforce quarantine. As the lockdown in Wuhan was lifted, the government mandated that residents install an app called “Health Code” on their phones to track possible exposures to coronavirus.
Governments around the world are taking advantage of the crisis to expand surveillance and police powers. In Hungary, for example, the government has passed an unlimited emergency declaration allowing the Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, to rule by decree. Elsewhere, the expansions in state power have been less stark but no less concerning when it comes to civil liberties.
For example, twenty-three countries and counting have now adopted “contact tracing apps”—a nightmare for privacy and surveillance. Even the so-called “anonymized” contact tracing apps can be easily reconstructed, leaving detailed records of social relationships. In Hong Kong, authorities have mandated wristbands which alert police if a person has left their place of quarantine. In South Korea, data from credit card transactions, smartphone location tracking, and CCTV video surveillance is being used to generate a real-time map of possible vectors.
What is the Price of Safety?
The push for a stronger surveillance is often justified by as a means for saving lives. With people fearing for the lives of themselves and their loved ones, it is easier to find support for greater surveillance. The Tony Blair Institute, a neoliberal think tank in the UK, calls it a choice between three “undesirable outcomes:” an overwhelmed health system, economic shutdown, or increased surveillance.
But these are false dichotomies. Many health professionals advocate for protecting privacy and addressing the coronavirus using other approaches. With governments pushing for greater surveillance rather than establishing accessible healthcare systems and free testing and treatment, the public should be apprehensive. And opening the economy before the proper time is a fools gamble.
Community organizer Vince Emanuele reminds us, “For capitalists, economic recessions and depressions are the best of times. After all, they can buy up assets at bargain basement prices and further consolidate their power. Capitalists raked in record profits after the 2008 Financial Collapse, which turned out to be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of this country, expanding and deepening existing wealth inequalities. The only reason capitalists want to reopen the economy is to avoid giving Americans the sort of social democratic programs that would be necessary to keep the country closed and everyone safe. They’re not worried about saving capitalism — they’re worried about giving you money, healthcare, and canceling your student loan payments. If Americans get a taste of the good life, good luck getting them to go back to their shitty jobs that provide less than a living wage, no benefits, and no future. Capitalists are not worried about saving capitalism. They’re worried about poor and working class people experiencing what it would be like to live in a decent society.”
9/11 and the Power of Fear
Once governments and police agencies have developed a new surveillance technology, there is no evidence they will give it up. The same goes for laws. To judge by history, there is no such thing as “temporary” expansions in surveillance. The surveillance system adopted during times of crisis are more likely to define the new normal long after the crisis has been averted.
“Many short-term emergency measures will become a fixture of life,” writes Yuval Noah Harari. “That is the nature of emergencies. They fast-forward historical processes. Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours. Immature and even dangerous technologies are pressed into service, because the risks of doing nothing are bigger. Entire countries serve as guinea-pigs in large-scale social experiments.”
The Patriot Act, for example, was originally designed to be temporary, and is still in effect 20 years later. Every time it comes up for renewal, it passes by a wide margin. Israel still has surveillance laws—originally planned to be temporary—dating from the 1940’s.
The September 11th, 2001 attacks on the United States created a culture of fear that led directly into submission to state authority. This in turn led to the “War on Terror,” and as a result, the world has been subjected to expansions in surveillance, detention, and torture, and to the outbreak of wars in the Middle East which have destabilized the planet and killed well over a million people.
As some would see it, lack of privacy is a price they are willing to pay for increased security. They should be reminded that “privacy” isn’t an abstract value, it is a fundamental principle of political liberty. Without privacy, dissent can become literally unthinkable.
There are countless reasons we cannot trust states to keep our personal information safe, and only use it in case of emergency. Historically, even “liberal democracies” have not been able to meet these standards. As Snowden leaks illustrated, to provide states access to our personal information and expect them to respect our privacy is analogous to giving our car keys to a known car thief and expecting him to only use it in case of an emergency.
How to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus Surveillance
So what is to be done?
We advocate for revolutionary change to the economic and political system of the world. This requires the development of political consciousness, leadership, and organizations—work that we are engaged in right now. We welcome you to join us.
While we build revolutionary power, we must protect ourselves from existing state surveillance programs. Say no to #CoronavirusSurveillance. We can keep our communities safe without ceding all privacy to the state and corporate partnerships. We must demand privacy. This level of surveillance is absolutely unacceptable, and we must push back as hard as possible. Here are some basic actions you can take:
Pressure your government to preserve privacy. Call, write letters, and meet with representatives. Support organizations fighting for civil liberties.
Campaign against installation of surveillance cameras and other intrusive technologies.
Refuse to install privacy-degrading applications, including official tracing apps as well as corporate applications like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, etc.
Use a “faraday bag” to store your cell phone when not in use to prevent contact tracing.
Turn off GPS and Bluetooth whenever you are not using them.
Protect your digital information by using privacy-respecting services like Signal, Session, Protonmail, and Tutanota for email and communication. Use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Use Firefox instead of Google Chrome, and use add-ons like uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
Consider using a VPN or Tor to protect your internet connection.
Salonika is an organizer at DGR South Asia based in Nepal. She believes that the needs of the natural world should trump the needs of the industrial civilization.
Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance. Max is the author of two books: the forthcoming Bright Green Lies, and We Choose to Speak, a collection of essays released in 2018.
Corporations are driven by a necessity to privatize profits and externalize costs. In this article, Suresh Balraj highlights how the concept of limited liability further reduces the accountability of corporations to the consequences of their actions, and asks “how can we hold corporations accountable?”
The Myth of Limited Liability
By Suresh Balraj
Prof. Nicholas Murray, former president of Columbia University, might have been wrong when he said : “The limited-liability corporation is the greatest invention of modern times”; simply because, there is nothing original about limited liability at all. In fact, it wraps new language around a concept that is as old as ‘civilisation’ itself – that of enriching rulers at the expense of the majority of humans and their non-human communities.
The American anthropologist Stanley Diamond noted : “Civilisation originates in conquest abroad and repression at home”; certainly, he is not the only one to remark that the central goal and function of the State has been, from the very beginning, that of robbing the poor in order to feed the rich.
One of the founding fathers of the American constitution, James Madison, also insisted – in the 18th century – that the main goal of the political system should be to protect the minority (elites) against the majority.
Besides, the Godfather of economics, Adam Smith, wrote : “Civil government … is instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor or of those who have some property against those who have none at all”. But, including John Locke, who stated that the State has no other end other than the preservation of property, were all being rather modest. The reason being, the main function of the State actually goes even further; not only to just protect, but more importantly, to acquire more and more property for the opulent.
Force is, of course, one way. For which, we need to probably ask the Africans, for example – more than 100 million dead during the slave trade alone; or, for that matter, the ‘American Indians’, who were decimated a dozen times over in the conquest of their homeland. Another very striking example of the times would be the scores of indigenous communities, across the globe, who continue to be both dispossessed and exterminated (as rapidly as those who came before them).
Or even better, would be to ask a present, modern day slave; for example, the e-coolies in ‘bondage’ in sweatshops and bodyshops – couched in technical jargons, such as, silicon valley, technopark, infopark, infocity, blue-chip, six-sigma and fortune 500/1000.
However, at the end of the day, force is expensive or economically unviable, at least in the long run. Therefore, it would be simply great, if you could convince the very victims to participate or co-operate in the process of their victimisation. Thus, in ancient times, those in power invoked the divine right of the feudal lords (kings) – trying to convince not only themselves, but particularly, those from whom they usurped both life and property; as a result, anyone who dares to oppose this divine intervention or Godly incarnation shall be subject to eternal condemnation.
Obviously, this was possible during the pseudo-religious era – the ‘dark’ ages. But, in today’s so called civilised world, this might seem to be pretty extreme. For example, if those in power said that Warren Anderson, the mass murderer of the victims of Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, in 1984 – the worst air pollution disaster in the history of humankind – should not be executed due to a divine mandate, it would then make a mockery of the rule of law.
So the powerful had come up with a different way to keep the victims of their misdemeanours from hurting them in retaliation.
And, for this reason, they somehow seem to have the uncanny knack of getting all of us to buy into the extraordinarily odd notion of limiting their liability (accountability) for the arson, looting and daylight robbery, including poisoning and murder, committed by them, by simply uttering the magical words : limited liability corporation. What is even worse is the fact that they’ve also somehow got us to believe that the very idea (of a limited liability corporation) is not only great, but something like that actually exists in real life. On the other hand, the eternal truth is that, the fictitious human imagination is no more than a black hole, a blind spot and, to say the least, a pipedream.
To this end, limited liability simply means that the owners – shareholders/stakeholders – are not liable, and therefore, cannot be held responsible or accountable, for the actions of their corporations. In other words, the so called investors are liable to lose only the money invested, and are in no way responsible for the genocide, ecocide and other heinous crimes committed by them or their corporations.
Above all, limited liability is not only about profits or amassing wealth (illegally); rather, it is about the institutionalisation and explicit acknowledgement of the fact that it is simply impossible to ‘create wealth’, without externalising the costs, thereby, paying the supreme price resulting in the complete annihilation of even life forms and whole habitats. The issue of energy being a classic example, at the core of the very survival of life on earth.
Limited liability has allowed several generations of corporate owners to socially, economically, culturally/psychologically and legally ignore the poisoning of the earth. Its function is not to guarantee that children are raised in an environment free of pollution, nor to respect the life and autonomy of indigenous communities, nor to protect the vocational and personal integrity of workers, nor to design safe modes of transportation, nor to support the millions of life forms on earth. It never has been and never will be.
Here, what is really important are not labels; because, no matter what language we use, poison is still poison, and death is still death. The modern military-industrial base is causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet. What we are witnessing today is the simultaneity of unprecedented ‘riches’ on the one hand, and unthinkable or unimaginable deprivation and poverty on the other. A brutal form of insatiable hunger, where the more you consume or possess, the more desperate you become. What this means is that, those running the ‘show’ (corporations) just can’t help running amok, till they actually kill the host – although it is equally suicidal for the rich, as well as, the poor to destroy the ‘goose that lays the golden egg’, i.e., the natural world.
Suresh Balrah is an environmental anthropologist and social ecologist based in South India. He has been working in forestry, agriculture, and fisheries for several decades with a focus on community-based renewable management. He is a guardian forDeep Green Resistance.
How Can We Hold Corporations Accountable?
Editors note: As Suresh explains, the structure of law and of corporations makes them legally unassailable. Therefore, there are two primary methods to roll back corporate dominance: change the law, or break the law. Both methods present serious challenges. For more on how we can hold corporations accountable, we recommend you read the book Deep Green Resistance, which explores strategic resistance methods in detail.
Whether you agree or disagree with his analysis, it’s true that all civilizations have collapsed. A few got rebooted, but all have gone down. They had an average life span of 300-odd years and ended from a slew of causes: overshoot and drawdown being the most common. They were also top-heavy with large discontented serf populations. They were also broken by war, internecine conflict, natural disasters and diseases. Starting out with chieftains, little societies grew to kingships and empires with the birth of agriculture and militarized polities. They ended as civilizations, and almost all suffered tyranny or civil breakdown.
