The Legal System Will Not Save the Planet

The Legal System Will Not Save the Planet

by | Nov 1, 2019 | Colonialism & Conquest

By Max Wilbert

As the world moves further into a state of climate crisis, it’s imperative that we study and critique the strategies being proposed to address greenhouse gas emissions, and develop our own strategies based on rigorous assessment of their effectiveness.

Many of the strategies currently being pursued by the mainstream environmental movement hinge on courts and on legislative change.  This article will examine one these strategies—the “climate trust” lawsuits brought by the group Our Children’s Trust—in some detail. First, however, we must review a basic framework of how the court system, and more fundamentally, the legal system in general, serves ruling class interests within capitalism.

From early English laws like the Statutes of Merton and Westminster that authorized enclosure of the commons, to the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera” in 1493 which authorized the Doctrine of Discovery and the conquest and colonization of non-Christian lands west of the Azores, law within capitalism has always been an exercise in justifying systematic theft.

These ancient foundations continue to underlie law. For example, in the United States the Johnson v. M’Intosh Supreme Court case of 1823 is regarded as the foundation of modern property law and studied by nearly every law student. In the unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that “the whole theory of their titles to lands in America, rests upon the hypothesis, that the Indians had no right of soil as sovereign, independent states. Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and this overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives.”[i]

What is the Purpose of Law within Capitalism?

French Liberal School economist and laissez faire advocate Frederic Bastiat provided one of the most concise definitions of law within capitalism. “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” he wrote in 1850, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”[ii]

With this statement, Bastiat was attempting to critique socialism and collectivist tendencies. Marx, a contemporary of Bastiat, called him “The shallowest and therefore the most successful representative of the apologists of vulgar economics.” But Bastiat has inadvertently provided a functional description of law within capitalism.

In a similar manner, the free-market advocate, New York Times columnist, and Iraq War crusader Thomas Friedman inadvertently described the link between imperialist warfare and free-market capitalism perfectly when he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1999 that “[t]he hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for silicon valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US army, air force, navy, and Marine Corps.”[iii]

Friedman’s piece argued for “sustainable globalization” which “cannot be maintained without the active [military] involvement of the United States,” and explicitly argued for increased cooperation between U.S. corporations and military.

The Institutionalization of Organized Theft

Critics of globalized capitalism agree with Friedman’s linkage of corporate power and military hegemony, but to borrow Bastiat’s term, see these entities as facilitating the plunder that defines modern capitalism, not ushering in Friedman’s neoliberal fantasy. Military aggression and economic colonization were the foundation of imperial power in Bastiat’s time, just as they are today.  Today’s capitalist societies have evolved their methods. Instead of legalized chattel slavery,[iv] the United States now has a slave-like prison system and the global economy is fully dependent on systematic labor exploitation. Some of the most lasting impacts of globalization include the outsourcing of jobs to poor nations with artificially deflated labor costs, the outsourcing of pollution to what Lawrence Summers called “underpolluted” nations, and the explosion of international trade. All of this is facilitated by the IMF and World Bank, which leverage development loans to systematically privatize the wealth and dismantle social and environmental regulations within poor nations. Altogether, this organized theft leads to an average wealth transfer of roughly $2 trillion per year from poor countries to rich countries, not counting externalities.[v]

The accelerating extraction of wealth from the poor has been matched by similar growth in destructive theft from the planet. Extraction of primary resources—timber, foodstuffs, ore, fossil fuels, water, etc.—has tripled over the past 40 years to more than 70 billion tonnes annually.[vi] Greenhouse gas emissions have doubled since 1980, and more than 1 million species are threatened with extinction, threatening to unravel the ecological basis of life on this planet.[vii] Human disconnection from the natural world is at an all-time high as business privatizes even our most intimate private lives with pornography, dating apps, and ubiquitous data gathering.

By realistic economic measures, the owners of society are wealthier than ever and inequality is reaching record levels.[viii] And as Bastiat described, this arrangement of power is undergirded by a legal structure that authorizes and glorifies this exploitation.

The United States—still the epicenter of imperial power, despite a steady decline in influence since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001—provides illustrative examples. The extraction of profits from workers and the land is the bedrock principle of American law. The idea that workers should be in control of their own communities and benefit from the work they and their neighbors do is not even a topic of discussion in courtrooms and legislative halls. Nature is owned and managed as property. The idea that nature should be respected as the source of all human goods and life is, at best, commodified into the ideology of “natural capitalism”, while true deep ecology ideals—that nature exists and has value for it’s own sake, on it’s own terms—remain fringe positions.

The Legal System as an Arena of Political Change

Movements for justice have always used the legal system and the courts as arenas of political struggle. The Civil Rights movement, the Feminist movement, the Labor movement, and the Environmental movement have all won significant victories in courtrooms. The feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, who is credited with the legal recognition of sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, wrote in collaboration with Andrea Dworkin that “law organizes power.”[ix]

Given the current supremacy of the capitalist state, the courts are an important arena of political struggle. To concede this legal battleground to reactionaries could be suicidal. But to rely only on legal methods is also a flawed strategy. Legal reform has never proved able to do more than slow the progression of capital’s death march.

The Voting Rights Act has now been dismantled, reversing a key gain of the Civil Rights Movement.[x] Roe v. Wade, which established Federal legality of abortion, has been under incessant attack for decades. Countless state laws have closed abortion clinics, limited funding, and attacked the principle of female bodily autonomy via more than 400 laws in the last 9 years alone.[xi] With the new Supreme Court, it’s likely Roe will be completely overturned. The Clean Water Act is currently being gutted.[xii] Union membership is at an all-time low as “right-to-work” laws proliferate, undermining the effectiveness of even bourgeois workplace organizing efforts.[xiii] This reflects global efforts to undermine minimum wages and other basic labor protections.[xiv]

Recently, environmentalists in the United States and elsewhere are testing a set of innovative legal strategies. These include the group “Our Children’s Trust,” which is filing lawsuits against the federal government for failing to uphold the “public trust doctrine,” a legal principle that the government is responsible for managing public resources for the benefit of the public.  Our Children’s Trust is attempting to expand the purview of the trust doctrine to include the climate, and thus potentially force the U.S. government to fight climate change.

But the flaw in this plan is  obvious right away: the U.S. government, like all capitalist states, has never existed to wisely steward public resources, but rather to facilitate their exploitation for private gain. In truth, even most socialist states have fallen victim to industrial arms races with capitalist societies or to an industrial productivism that values development of industry as the highest good, and have thus fallen well short of this ideal.

Rights of Nature, the Trust Doctrine, and The Necessity Defense

The trust doctrine approach is just one of the innovative legal strategies being pursued by the environmental movement today. Two others are the Rights of Nature movement, and the push for the “climate necessity defense.” The rights of nature movement seeks to expand basic rights, such as personhood, to non-human ecosystems. The necessity defense is the legal principle that it is sometimes legal to break the law in order to prevent a greater harm; the classic example is breaking a window to save a child from a home that is on fire. It has been used to defend protestors in a few high-profile cases of civil disobedience.[xv]

These legal strategies aim to advance ecological struggles by providing protections for ecosystems, by forcing changes in U.S. and international law to curtail global warming, and by protecting political dissidents.

Can they succeed? And what would success look like?

I argue that these efforts, while laudable, will not lead to significant change because of structural barriers. For example, let’s imagine that the “Our Children’s Trust” lawsuit was successful, and U.S. courts recognized the obligation of the federal government to safeguard climate stability, and ordered emissions reductions of, for example, 80 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. And let’s suppose they choose to implement the methods proposed by Our Children’s Trust.

Our Children’s Trust proposes a three-pronged strategy for halting global warming.[xvi] First, they call for 100 gigatons of carbon sequestration via reforestation, perennial agriculture, and soil conservation. Second, they call for reducing emissions by “designing our cities for walking and biking, investing in mass transit, constructing high-performance energy efficient buildings, transitioning to 100% clean energy, shifting to green manufacturing and durable products, and adopting restorative forestry and farming practices.” Finally, they propose fees on carbon pollution and ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

Their first category of solutions is admirable, as long as “reforestation” is not twisted to mean expanding the monocrop plantations of industrial forestry. But as I exhaustively detail in my forthcoming book Bright Green Lies, their second category, technological solutions, is woefully insufficient for addressing global climate destabilization.

The Failure of Green Technology

According to the work of sociologist Richard York, renewable energy today rarely actually displaces fossil fuels. Instead, predictably, these energy sources are typically added on top of existing sources, helping to grow the capitalist economy. York writes that “Non-hydro renewable [energy] sources have a positive coefficient, indicating the opposite of displacement, but this coefficient is not significantly different from 0, indicating that renewables tend to simply be added to the energy mix without displacing fossil fuels.”[xvii] Another study in China had similar results, finding that “Non-hydro alternative energy did not show statistically significant displacement effect in any of the six regional grids.”[xviii]At a global level (which is ultimately the only significant scope for global warming), the burning of coal, oil, and gas has grown significantly even as wind and solar have boomed.[xix]

After five years of research, one climate solutions lab found that even “a wholesale adoption of renewable energy… would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions” and concluded that “Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work.”[xx]

Socialists have long argued that centralized planning and the lack of a growth imperative would allow non-capitalist societies to adopt new technologies cautiously and rationally. This remains a largely untested hypothesis in our era of global ecological crisis, but regardless, this is not what Our Children’s Trust is promoting. Instead, they chose to promote unproven and extremely expensive carbon capture technology (as one recent headline reads, “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered”[xxi]), electric cars, and energy efficiency which hasn’t made a dent in growth in consumption. In truth, efficiency within capitalism is almost certain to lead to Jevon’s Paradox: more profit, more investment, and more growth in resource use.[xxii]

“Green Cities” and Market Failures

Even dense, walkable cities—a favorite of “green growth” and de-growth advocates alike probably represent an illusory solution. As urban planning professor Michael Neuman succinctly explains, “Since 1960, while human population has doubled [and the majority of the world’s population has moved to cities], the global economy has quadrupled, and resource consumption quintupled,” he says. “Thus, we are getting less efficient and less sustainable as we move to cities, not more, contrary to popular belief and professional dogma.”[xxiii] Study after study from locations as widely spaced as Iran, Taiwan, and the Netherlands have shown little or no reduction in energy consumption resulting from increased urban density.

As with other market-based measures for environmental protection, carbon tax schemes have been almost completely ineffective in lowering emissions. For example, the European market is flooded with allowances, and has at best reduced emissions by 2 or 3 percent across the continent.[xxiv] At worst, it has simply incentivized pollution outsourcing and “carbon laundering” as seen most prominently in the Volkswagen emissions case.

Given these realities, even a positive ruling in the Our Children’s Trust case wouldn’t significantly slow or stop global climate destabilization. Direct approaches, like stopping fossil fuel extraction, are not discussed in their strategy, and there is no critique of capitalism apparent either.

Some proponents argue that major policy proposals like The Green New Deal or lawsuits like the Our Children’s Trust cases represent organizing focal points which expand the scope of acceptable debate.[xxv] This is certainly true. But while false solutions to the problems of capitalism are always acceptable to ruling class, they will never solve the problems they purport to address. It is past time to build explicitly anti-capitalist organizations to address the ecological crisis, and to arm them with effective (read: revolutionary) methods.

The Necessity of Dismantling Industrial Capitalism

The reason Our Children’s Trust isn’t tackling this issue is likely the same reason The Green New Deal didn’t include a proposal to shut down the fossil fuel industry. As Brad Hornick writes in Resilience, “[Stopping anthropogenic climate disruption] implies a radical retrenchment or collapse of the dominant industries and infrastructure based upon fossil fuel production, including automobiles, aircraft, shipping, petrochemical, synthetic fabrics, construction, agribusiness, industrial agriculture, packaging, plastic production (disposables economy), and the war industries.”

In other words, stopping climate chaos requires an end to capitalism, to much of the global economy, and to U.S. hegemony. This is not popular in society, nor is it politically acceptable—even thinkable—in courtrooms. The U.S. court system will never order the dismantling of the global economy and of U.S. empire. In the 19th century, Mikhail Bakunin wrote that “The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost.” This remains true today.

Legally speaking, judges can rule anything they want, as long as they can justify it using legal precedent. But there are also specific legal and doctrinal barriers that confine all judges who sincerely believe in the structure of American law. Namely, as mentioned earlier, the notion that nature is property, that property can be rightfully destroyed or consumed by its owner, and the principles of corporate rights all stand in the way in the significant legal change. Further, even favorable court rulings would depend on the Executive and Legislative branches of the U.S. government, as well as on police, military, and other Federal employees, to enforce such a legal shift.

To rely on the law alone is to concede to a never-ending tug of war—an endless battle which the ruling class wages using billions in lobbying dollars. But institutions are not monolithic. Ideological power struggles within them can change the material conditions for resistance taking place within the broader culture. And there is some promise in all of these legal strategies. For example, the Rights of Nature approach has the possibility to instill a new, fundamental respect for the integrity of the natural world throughout certain populations. The climate necessity defense approach has promise for protecting activists who engage in non-violent direct action (which we should note has been thus far entirely ineffective in stopping the murder of the planet). Therefore, the promise these new legal approaches represent is primarily cultural. In military terminology, these are shaping actions, not decisive ones.[xxvi]

Reform Will Not Halt The Crisis

These legal strategies may change the framing conditions and lead to reform. But as the last 50 years can attest, reforms will not be enough to halt the ecological crisis. At worst, ill-fated movements can divert valuable resources and energy into dead-end efforts. Left historians do not look kindly on Nelson Mandela’s pro-capitalist turn late in life, but he articulated an important consideration when he justified his decision to create the Unkhonte We Sizwe, an armed underground insurgency, writing that “There is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”[xxvii]

Modern movements would do well to consider this.

David Brower, the founder of Earth Island Institute and Friends of the Earth, and former director of the Sierra Club once said, “All I have done in my career is to slow the rate at which things get worse.” In this historical moment, we don’t have time to merely slow the destruction. We need to rapidly halt it and to reverse it. This means choosing effective methods, and at a minimum, dismantling capitalism.

The struggle to halt the ecological crisis will not be primarily fought in courtrooms, legislated by policymakers, sold by corporations, or decided by foundation-funded NGOs. It will be fought by people’s movements and by revolutionaries who are willing to fight for the survival of the human species and the global community of biotic life. That’s something that the courts will never do.

Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He been involved in campaigns against sexual violence, destruction of the planet, and racism for 18 years.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Featured image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

References

[i] Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S.  543 (1823)

[ii] Frederick Bastiat. The Law. 1850.

[iii] Thomas L. Friedman. “A Manifesto for the Fast World.” New York Times Magazine (March 28, 1999).

[iv] Although it should be noted there are an estimated 40 million literal slaves in the world today, mostly in forced manual labor, service industries, and sexual slavery.

[v] Intan Suwandi, R. Jamil Jonna, and John Bellamy Foster. “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism.” Monthly Review 70, no. 10 (March 2019): 1-24.

[vi] “Worldwide Extraction of Materials Triples in Four Decades, Intensifying Climate Change and Air Pollution.” International Resource Panel, U.N. Environmental Programme (20 July 2016).

[vii] “Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating.’” Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (May 6, 2019).

[viii] Jason Hickel. “Global inequality may be much worse than we think.” The Guardian (April 8, 2016).

[ix] Andrea Dworkin and Catherine A. MacKinnon. Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988).

[x] “Voting Rights Act Dismantled by Supreme Court.” Democracy Chronicles (June 25, 2013)..

[xi] “Roe v. Wade: The Constitutional Right to Access Safe, Legal Abortion.” Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

[xii] Michelle Chen. “Trump Moves to Gut the Clean Water Act.” The Nation (December 13, 2018).

[xiii] Gordon Lafer. “The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012.” Economic Policy Institute (October 31, 2013).

[xiv] Subodh Varma. “World Bank: abolish minimum wage, other labour laws.” Monthly Review Online (April 24, 2018).

[xv] Andrew Buncombe. “Anti-pipeline campaigners found not guilty by judge because ‘protest against climate change crisis’ was legal ‘necessity.’” The Independent (March 27, 2018).

[xvi] “Pathway to Climate Recovery.” Our Children’s Trust.

[xvii] Richard York. “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 441-443.

[xviii] Yuanan Hu and Hefa Cheng. “Displacement efficiency of alternative energy and trans-provincial imported electricity in China.” Nature Communications 8 (2017): 14590.

[xix] Barry Saxifrage. “Fossil fuel expansion crushes renewables.” National Observer (September 20, 2017).

[xx] Ross Koningstein and David Fork. “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change.” IEEE Spectrum (November 18, 2014).

[xxi] Michael Barnard. “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered.” CleanTechnica (June 12, 2019).

[xxii] John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York. “Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency.” Monthly Review 62, no. 6 (November 1, 2010).

[xxiii] Alan Oakes. “Revisiting Neuman’s ‘Compact City Fallacy.’” Green Building and Design Magazine (2013).

[xxiv] “The EU Emissions Trading System.” European Commission Climate Action (July 22, 2016).

[xxv] Carol Dansereau, John Foran, Ted Franklin, Brad Hornick, Sandra Lindberg, Jennifer Scarlott. “One, Two, … Many Green New Deals: An Ecosocialist Roundtable.” Resilience (February 26, 2019).

[xxvi] “ADP 3-0. Unified Land Operations.” Department of the Army (2011).

[xxvii] Nelson Mandela. Long Walk to Freedom (Little Brown & Co., 1994).

Defending Earth Now More Dangerous Than Some War Zones

Defending Earth Now More Dangerous Than Some War Zones

by | Aug 19, 2019 | Colonialism & Conquest

By Jayalaxshmi Mistry / Republished from The Conversation, CC license.

Despite centuries of persecution, indigenous groups still manage or have tenure rights over at least a quarter of the world’s land surface. Often inhabiting these lands as far back as memory extends, they share a deep and unique connection to their environment.

Recently released figures show that indigenous groups are continuing to pay a heavy price for standing up for their ancestral lands. In 2018 alone, at least 164 indigenous people were killed defending the environment, adding to hundreds more deaths in preceding years.

They’re not the only ones – numerous lawyers, park rangers, and journalists have also been killed attempting to protect both resource and biodiversity-rich land from extractive industries. But indigenous groups account for the largest proportion of these killings, in a global battle that according to new research published in Nature is now more lethal than some war zones.

We must make sure that these deaths aren’t in vain. The same key UN report that declared a million animal and plant species as at risk of extinction also highlighted that nature under indigenous control is declining less rapidly than in other lands. It’s time for us to sit up and take note of how they safeguard biodiversity, and why they’re willing to put their lives on the line for nature.

Indigenous knowledge

Sharing a worldview that is centred on the land and their place within it, indigenous knowledge contains two central ideas that place nature front and centre. The first is connectedness. Constantly observing the surrounding environment, indigenous peoples have an intimate understanding of the interconnected nature of all living beings and natural systems. Tied to the changing world, this understanding is thorough but pragmatic and local in scale, always open to be altered in the face of evidence.

The second idea is collectiveness. Knowledge is not considered to be owned by individuals, but held collectively by people as shared experiences that represent the sum of their wisdom. People are responsible for one another, nurturing values of cooperation, sharing and reciprocity.

Research on indigenous livelihood practices shows how these values preserve the integrity of nature. In Amazonia for example, centuries of attention to crop health, climate, and forest regeneration has led to the development of rotational farming practices, whereby diverse crops are grown within a small farming area and continually rotated across a larger natural landscape over successive harvest seasons.

Compared to modern intensive monoculture farming, this traditional method improves soil water and nutrient retention, reduces erosion and degradation, stores carbon more efficiently, increases crop biodiversity, and preserves forest habitats. The system provides a continuous flow of food through different seasons, where surpluses can still be sold, and its diversity makes it more resilient to environmental threats. The involvement of many in the success of the crops reinforces community cohesion, and a closer connection with the natural world.

At a larger scale, indigenous territories have been recognised as crucial for maintaining vital natural stores of carbon. For example, studies using satellite imagery from northern South America suggests that indigenous lands have lower incidence of deforestation rates as a result of less invasive methods of farming, fishing, hunting, and land management. These methods not only require much less open space, but also support healthy soil and animal populations, creating much more resilient ecosystems.

The Legal System Will Not Save the Planet

The Legal System Will Not Save the Planet

by | Apr 27, 2019 | Lobbying, Repression at Home

DGR member and lawyer Will Falk explains why the legal and regulatory system is structurally incapable of defending the natural world from threats, because it was never designed to do this. His conclusion is that communities must organize around revolutionary, ecological principles to defend the land themselves. We cannot rely on government to do it for us.

VISIT DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE FOR MORE RESISTANCE UPDATES: http://www.deepgreenresistance.org

Brazil: The Guarani and a Decade of Broken Promises

Brazil: The Guarani and a Decade of Broken Promises

by | Dec 26, 2017 | Colonialism & Conquest

Featured image: The Guarani continue fighting for their land rights despite continuous attacks. © Fiona Watson/Survival International

     by Survival International

 

Ten years ago the Brazilian government signed a landmark agreement with the Guarani tribe, which obliged it to identify all their ancestral lands.

The core objective of the agreement, which was drawn up by the public prosecutors office, was to speed up the recognition of the Guarani’s land rights in the southern state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

However, one decade on, most surveys have not even been carried out and the authorities’ failure to recognize the Guarani’s land rights continues to have a terrible impact on the tribe’s health and well-being.

With no immediate hope of recovering their land and rebuilding their livelihoods, thousands of Guarani are trapped in overcrowded reservations where the prosecutors say there is so little land that “social economic and cultural life is impossible.”

Other Guarani communities live along busy highways or on fragments of their ancestral land, hemmed in by vast sugar cane and soya plantations. They cannot plant, fish or hunt and have no access to clean water.

A Guarani-Kaiowa couple sit outside their makeshift roadside settlement of the Apy Ka'y community, near Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.

A Guarani-Kaiowa couple sit outside their makeshift roadside settlement of the Apy Ka’y community, near Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. © Paul Patrick Borhaug/Survival

Health workers report that these communities are suffering from severe side effects of pesticides used by agribusiness. Some communities say their water resources and houses are deliberately sprayed by the ranchers.

A recent study estimated that 3% of the indigenous population in the state could be poisoned by pesticides, some of which are banned in the EU.

Malnutrition especially among babies and young children is common. According to Gilmar Guarani: “Children cry and cannot put up with this situation any more. They are really suffering and are very weak. They are practically eating earth. It’s desperate.”

Mato Grosso do Sul is home to the second largest indigenous population in Brazil, with 70,000 Indians belonging to seven tribes.

Much of their ancestral land has been stolen from them by cattle ranchers and agribusiness, and now they occupy a mere 0.2 % of the state.

John Nara Gomes says: “Today the life of a cow is worth more than that of an indigenous child… The cows are well fed and the children are starving. Before we were free to hunt, fish and gather fruits. Today we are shot by gunmen.”

The despair among the Guarani at the loss of their lands and self sufficient life is reflected in extremely high rates of suicide . In the period 2000-2015 there were 752 suicides. Statistics collected since 1996 reveal a rate that is 21 times greater than the national one. This is probably under-estimated as many suicides are not reported.

Damiana Cavanha, leader of the Apy Ka'y community, has seen the deaths of three of her children and her husband. She is determinedly planning a reoccupation of their ancestral land where they are buried.

Damiana Cavanha, leader of the Apy Ka’y community, has seen the deaths of three of her children and her husband. She is determinedly planning a reoccupation of their ancestral land where they are buried. © Paul Patrick Borhaug/Survival

The Guarani also face high levels of violence and are constantly targeted by ranchers’ gunmen whenever they attempt to take back parts of their ancestral land. Recent data shows that 60% of all the assassinations of indigenous people in Brazil occurred in Mato Grosso do Sul state.

With a government and congress dominated by the powerful agribusiness sector, the landowners in Mato Grosso do Sul will not cede an inch. Many have resorted to the courts as a delaying tactic, to challenge the identification of Guarani territories. One core Guarani territory has had 57 legal challenges.

Despite this bleak scenario many Guarani vow to fight on: “Brazil was always our land. The hope that feeds me is that our land will be recognized, for without it we cannot care for nature and feed ourselves. We shall fight and die for it” says Geniana Barbosa, a young Guarani woman.

One Does Not Hate When One Can Despise: On Donald Trump and How We Got Here

by | Jan 30, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis

     by Derrick Jensen

When I find myself in times of trouble, I’m less interested in Mother Mary’s wisdom than I am in Joe Hill’s: Don’t mourn; organize.

There’s a sense in which Trump’s election is a surprise, similar to how we somehow seem to be continually surprised when easily predictable negative consequences of this way of life come to pass. So we’re surprised when bathing the world in insecticides somehow causes crashes in insect populations, when covering the world in endocrine disrupters somehow leads to the disruption of endocrine systems, when damming and dewatering rivers somehow kills the rivers, when murdering oceans somehow murders oceans, when colonialism somehow destroys the lives of the colonized, when capitalism somehow destroys communities and the natural word, when rape culture somehow leads to rape, and so on. And we’re surprised when a racist, woman-hating culture elects a racist man who hates women.

But there are also many senses in which the rise of Trump or someone very like him was entirely predictable.

An empire in decay leads to a desperate push to the fore of values manifested by Trump: woman-hatred, racism, the scapegoating of those who impede empire, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to maintain that empire, to “make America [Greece, Rome, Britain, China] great again.”

When those who have been able to exploit others with impunity find their way of life (and more to the point, the exploitation and entitlement upon which their way of life is based) crumbling, what do they do?

We’ve seen this before. Why did lynchings of African-Americans go up soon after the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery? Why did the KKK rise again in the 1910s and 1920s? What is the relationship between Germany’s economic collapse in the 1920s and the rise of Nazi fascism?

Nietzsche provides one answer: “One does not hate when one can despise.”

So long as one’s exploitation of others proceeds relatively smoothly, one can merely despise those one exploits (despise, from the root de-specere, meaning to look down upon). So long as I have unfettered access to the lives and labor of, say, African-Americans, everything is, from my perspective, A-Okay. But impinge in any way on my ability to exploit, and watch the lynchings begin. The same is true for my access to other so-called resources as well, whether these “resources” are “timber resources,” “fisheries resources,” cheap plastic crap from China, or sexual and reproductive access to women. So long as the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.

Oh, but we wouldn’t do that, would we? Well, what if someone told you that no matter how much you paid to purchase title to some piece of land, the land itself does not belong to you. No longer may you do whatever you wish with it. You may not cut the trees on it. You may not build on it. You may not run a bulldozer over it to put in a driveway. Would you get pissed? How if these outsiders took away your computer because the process of manufacturing the hard drive killed women in Thailand. They took your clothes because they were made in sweatshops, your meat because it was factory-farmed, your cheap vegetables because the agricorporations that provided them drove family farmers out of business, and your coffee because its production destroyed rain forests, decimated migratory songbird populations, and drove African, Asian, and South and Central American subsistence farmers off their land. They took your car because of global warming, and your wedding ring because mining exploits workers and destroys landscapes and communities. Imagine if you began losing all of these parts of your life that you have seen as fundamental. I’d imagine you’d be pretty pissed. Maybe you’d start to hate the assholes doing this to you, and maybe if enough other people who were pissed off had already formed an organization to fight these people who were trying to destroy your life—I could easily see you asking, “What do these people have against me anyway?”—maybe you’d even put on white robes and funny hats, and maybe you’d even get a little rough with a few of them, if that was what it took to stop them from destroying your way of life. Or maybe you would vote for anyone who promised to make your life great again, even if you didn’t really believe the promises.

The American Empire is failing. Real wages have been declining for decades, for the entire lifetime of most people living today in the U.S. Indeed if real wages peaked in 1973, the last of those who entered the workforce in a time of universally increasing expectations are retiring.  Sure, some sectors of the economy have done well, but what of those left behind? What of those whose livelihoods have been destroyed by a globalized economy, by the shifting of jobs to China, Vietnam, Bangladesh?

What happens to people in a time of declining expectations? What is the relationship between these declining expectations and the rise of fascism?

Two decades ago now a long-time activist said to me that Walmart and its cheap plastic crap was the only thing standing between the United States and a fascist revolution.

But cheap plastic crap can only put off fascism for so long.

There’s a difference between the ends of previous empires and the end of the current empire. That difference is global ecological collapse. Empires are always based not only on the exploitation of the poor but on the existence of new frontiers. Any expanding economy–and all empires are by definition expanding economies—need to continue expanding or collapse. America grew because there was always another ridge to cross with another forest to cut on the far side, always another river to dam, another school of fish to find and net. And the forests are gone. The rivers are gone. The fish are gone. The pyramid scheme upon which both civilization and more recently capitalism are based has reached its endgame.

And rather than honestly and effectively addressing the predicament into which not only we ourselves but the world has been pushed, it’s far easier to lie to ourselves and to each other. For some—and Democrats generally choose this lie—the lie can be that despite all evidence, capitalism need not be destructive of the poor and of the natural world, that the “invisible hand of Adam Smith” can, as Bill Clinton put it, “have a green thumb.” We just have to do capitalism nicely. And another lie—this one more favored by Republicans and manifested by Trump—is that the sources of our misery do not inhere in capitalism but rather come from Mexicans “stealing our jobs” and not remembering their proper place, from women no longer remembering their proper place, from African Americans no longer remembering their proper place. Their proper place of course being in service to us. And of course those damn environmentalists—“Enviro-Meddlers,” as some call them—are to blame for denying us access to that last one percent of old growth forest, that last one percent of fish. This lie blames anyone and anything other than the end of empire.

All of which brings us to the Democrats’ responsibility for Trump’s election. There has not been a time in my adult life—I’m 55—when Democrats have maintained more than the barest pretense of representing people over corporations. Through this time Democrats have functionally played good cop to the Republicans’ bad cop, as Democrats have betrayed constituency after constituency to serve the corporations that we all know really run the show. For generations now Democrats have known and taken for granted that those of us who care more for the earth or for justice or sanity than we do increased corporate control will not jump ship and support the often open fascists on “the other side of the aisle,” so these Democrats have calmly sidled further and further to the right.

Bad cop George Bush the First threatened to gut the Endangered Species Act. Once he had us good and scared, in came good cop Bill Clinton, who did far more harm to the natural world than Bush ever did by talking a good game while gutting the agencies tasked with overseeing the Act. Clinton, like any good cop in this farcical play, claimed to “feel our pain” as he rammed NAFTA down our throats.

What were we going to do? Vote for Bob Dole? Not bloody likely.

Obama made a big deal of delaying the Keystone XL as he pushed to build other pipeline after other pipeline, and as he opened up ever more areas to drilling. He pretended to “wage a war on coal” while expanding coal extraction for export.

What were we going to do? Vote for Mitt Romney?

For too long the primary and often sole argument Democrats have used in election after election is, “Vote for me. At least I’m not a Republican.” And as terrifying as I find Trump, Giuliani, Gingrich, Ryan, et al, this Democratic argument is not sustainable. Fool me five, six, seven, eight times, and maybe at long last I won’t get fooled again.

What we must finally realize is that the good cop act is, too, simply an act, and that neither the good cops nor the bad cops have ever had our interests at heart.

The primary function of Democrats and Republicans alike is to take care of business. The primary function is not to take care of communities. The primary function is not to take care of the planet. The primary function is to serve the interests of the owning class, by which I mean the owners of capital, the owners of society, the owners of the politicians.

We have seen over the last couple of generations a consistent ratcheting of American politics to the right, until by now our political choices have been reduced to on the one hand a moderately conservative Republican calling herself a Democrat, and on the other a strutting fascist calling himself a Republican. If we define “left” as being at minimum against capitalism, there is no functional left in this country.

For all of these reasons the election of Trump is no surprise.

But there’s another reason, too. The US is profoundly and functionally racist and woman-hating, nature hating, poor hating, and based on exploiting humans and nonhumans the world over. So why should it surprise us when someone who manifests these values is elected? He is not the first. Andrew Jackson anyone?

If that activist was right so many years ago, that cheap plastic crap from Walmart was the only thing standing between us and fascist revolution (and of course this cheap plastic crap merely pushed this social and natural destructiveness elsewhere) then he had to know also that cheap plastic crap is not a long term bulwark against fascism. It can only keep those chickens at bay for so long before they come home to roost.

The good cop/bad cop game is a classic tool used by abusers. You can do what I say, or I can beat you. You can sell me your cotton for 50 cents on the dollar, or I can hang you on a tree next to the last black man who refused my offer. Germans offered Jews the choices of different colored ID cards, and many Jews spent a lot of energy trying to figure out which color was better. But the whole point was to keep them busy while convincing them they held some responsibility for their own victimization.

I’ve long been guided by the words of Meir Berliner, who died fighting the SS at Treblinka, “When the oppressors give me two choices, I always take the third.”

By choosing the third I don’t mean simply choosing a third party candidate and perceiving yourself as pure and above the fray, as capitalism still continues to kill the planet.

I mean recognizing the truths about this whole exploitative, unsustainable, racist, woman-hating system. Recognizing that the function of politicians in a capitalist system is to act very much like human beings as they enact what is good for capital, as they facilitate, rationalize, put in place, and enforce a socio-pathological system. Recognizing that capital—including the functionaries of capitalism called “politicians”—will not act in opposition to capital because it is the right thing to do. These functionaries will not act in opposition to capital because we ask nicely. They will not act in opposition to capital because capitalism impoverishes the poor worldwide. They will not act in opposition to capital because capitalism is killing the planet. They will not act in opposition to capital. Period.

The power they wield, and the way they wield it, is not a mistake. It is what capitalism does.

Which brings us to Joe Hill. Don’t simply complain about Trump. Don’t simply throw up your hands in despair. Don’t fall into the magical thinking that the good cops would, if just unhindered by those bad cops, do the right thing or act in your best interests. Don’t fall into the magical thinking that capitalists will act other than they do. And certainly don’t take for granted that somehow magically we and the world will get out of this predicament, that somehow magically an anti-capitalist movement will spontaneously generate, or an anti-racist movement, a pro-woman movement, a movement to stop this culture from killing the planet. These movements emerge only through organized struggle. And someone has to do the organizing. Someone has to do the struggling. And it has to be you, and it has to be me.

A doctor friend of mine always says that the first step toward cure is proper diagnosis. Diagnose the problems, and then you become the cure.

You make it right.

So what I want you to do in response to the election of Donald Trump is to get off your butt and start working for the sort of world you want. Don’t mourn the election of Trump, organize to resist his reign, and organize to destroy the stranglehold that the Capitalist Party has over political processes, the stranglehold that capitalists and racists and woman-haters have over the planet and over all of our lives.

For more of Derrick Jensen’s analysis of racism, hatred, and the violence of civilization, see his book The Culture of Make Believe