If you hadn’t heard, despair is old hat. Rather than retreat into the woods, now is the time to think big, to propose visionary policies and platforms. So enter grand proposals like basic income, universal healthcare, and the end of work. Slap big polluters with carbon tax, eradicate tax havens for the rich, and switch to a 100% renewable energy system.
But will these proposals be enough? Humanity is careening toward certain mayhem. In a panic, many progressive commentators and climate scientists, from James Hansen and George Monbiot to, more recently, Eric Holthaus, have argued that these big policy platforms will need to add nuclear power to the list.
In a recent issue on climate change in the Jacobin, several authors also suggested we need to consider carbon capture technologies, geo-engineering (the large-scale modification of earth systems to stem the impacts of climate change), and even GMOs make an appearance. What’s more, one of the contributors, Christian Parenti, actually proposes that we should increase our total energy use, not reduce it.
Any critique of this kind of utopian vision is often dismissed as green conservatism. In her article, “We gave Greenpeace a chance,” Angela Nagle argues: faced with President Trump promising abundance and riches, greens can only offer “a reigning in of the excesses of modernity.” Despite all its failures, modernity freed us from the shackles of nature. Modernity promised a world without limits—and the environmentalist obsession with limits, she says, amounts to “green austerity.”
This argument is associated with an emerging body of thought called ecomodernism. Ecomodernism is the idea that we can harness technology to decouple society from the natural world. For these techno-optimists, to reject the promise of GMOs, nuclear, and geo-engineering is to be hopelessly romantic, anti-modern, and even misanthropic. An ecological future, for them, is about cranking up the gears of modernity and rejecting a politics of limits.
Maxed-out modernism
Like it or not, this attitude actually fits quite well with the socialist tradition. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, modernity brought wonders and horrors. They argued the desire to go back to a Feudal world of craftspeople and cottage industries was reactionary: their revolution would try to move beyond the present, not before it.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC), is the embodiment of this kind of maxed-out modernism, rebranded for the 21st century. But, given that we are fast approaching the planetary boundaries of the capitalist system, is it really that reasonable to suggest that now is the time to power up the automated factories?
In his article “Fully automated green communism,” Aaron Bastani, one of the main proponents of FALC, tries to respond directly to this kind of criticism. For him, eco-modernist socialism can be sustainable, too.
“[T]he idea that the answer to climate change is consuming less energy – that a shift to renewables will necessarily mean a downsizing in life – feels wrong. In fact, the trends with renewables would point to the opposite: the sun furnishes our planet with enough energy to meet humanity’s annual demand in just 90 minutes. Rather than consuming less energy, developments in wind and solar (and within just a few decades) should mean distributed energy of such abundance that we won’t know what to do with it.”
For eco-modernists like Bastani, the problem is not technology itself: the problem is who owns it. When asked if his techno-optimism doesn’t understate the reality of climate change, Bastani responds that any tool can be turned into a weapon. Technology is only violent in the hands of a for-profit system.
Technology without context
The thing is, there’s very little “eco” in eco-modernism. Ecology is about the big picture: understanding the relationships between people, animals, plants, materials, and energy—how they co-evolve and are interdependent.
So, for an ecologist, any technology cannot be understood as separate from the context that created it. In contrast, eco-modernists see technology as simply a tool, which anyone could pick up and use. Their modernism becomes “eco” when we take the machines of modernity and use them to decouple society from nature.
This is certainly the case for nuclear power. Anti-nuclear activists point to the harmful effects of nuclear radiation and accidents, but, as ecomodernists point out, coal has killed more people historically and will kill many more if we don’t do anything soon. The only thing that can save us, they say, would be to replace the fossil fuel-based energy system with one dependent on nuclear power—which in turn would require large state subsidies and centralized planning. We have the technology for a low-impact energy system, we just need the political will.
Sounds simple, but let’s look at the big picture. Nuclear power requires a regime of experts to manage, maintain, and decommission; a centralized power grid; large states to fund and secure them; and, then, a stable political environment to keep the waste safe for at least the next 10,000 years. The technology is only 80 years old, modern states have existed for about 200, humans have only been farming for 5,000, and most nuclear waste storage plans operate at a 100-year time-span. To put it mildly, an energy grid dependent on nuclear means having lot of trust in today’s political institutions.
The problem with nuclear clearly isn’t technical, it’s political. The prospect of scaling up nuclear to the level needed to replace fossil fuels begs two questions. First, are our political institutions robust enough? Second, do we want the world that nuclear creates? A world full of nuclear power plants is a world of highly centralised power, an energy system removed from people by an army of specialised engineers and, to protect it, a maximum-security state. To think that any technology can be grabbed out of the current system and scaled up without consequences is a profoundly un-ecological idea.
Similarly the idea of going 100% renewable and increasing total energy use, as advocated by ecomodern socialists like Aaron Bastani and Christian Parenti also has its faults. As Stan Cox points out,
“There’s nothing wrong with the ‘100-percent renewable’ part… it’s with the ‘100 percent of demand’ assumption that [scientists] go dangerously off the rails. At least in affluent countries, the challenge is not only to shift the source of our energy but to transform society so that it operates on far less end-use energy while assuring sufficiency for all. That would bring a 100-percent-renewable energy system within closer reach and avoid the outrageous technological feats and gambles required by high-energy dogma. It would also have the advantage of being possible.”
The idea that there’ll be so much solar energy that “we won’t know what to do with it” also merits a second glance. True, solar energy is practically infinite. But unlike the alternatives, it’s dissipated and difficult to collect, transport, concentrate, and store. It’s like trying to catch the rain when you’ve spent the last two hundred years drawing water from enormous underground reservoirs. It would mean more than democratising ownership of technology, but a total reboot.
And even if we were able to press that restart button, this luxurious future would require infrastructure, land, resources, and energy to build. These are unfortunately not super-abundant, but, by definition, limited. Simply grabbing technology from the machine of profit won’t solve this problem.
Ecology or barbarism
It’s here that we’re forced to really think through the ecological position. Capitalism, as Andreas Malm argues, was built on coal and oil, and is inextricable from it. The extraction and burning of coal made the creation of the working class possible, and it generated new forms of hierarchy and inequality. In other words, any technology developed in the current system isn’t neutral—by its very design, it shapes relationships between people and nature.
Being an ecologist today certainly doesn’t mean refusing to improve humanity’s lot, but it also means having a real conversation about the limits we face. And if an alternative system is to be at all ecological, it would mean democratically weighing the costs and benefits of different technologies: which ones we want, and which ones we don’t. That’s not anti-modern, that’s a basic requirement for a better world.
So how do we get out of this mess? Now, more than ever, we need visionary proposals and new imaginaries. But, with the ecomodernists, this gesture to “think big” gets taken to the extreme: any “buts” and you’re branded as, basically, eco-Thatcher.
Today, breathless modernism—the refusal to collectively discuss limits—is no longer tenable. The dismissal of any political discussion of limits has real costs; Ironically, modernity without limits will send us back to the dark ages.
For Andreas Malm, there is only one option. If we want to avoid a new dark age, we can’t just collectivize the grid. We have to dismantle it and build a new, very different one. And if those driving the train of modernity can’t see the catastrophe up ahead, we’ll need to pull the emergency brake.
Politics is the collective deliberation of the future we want. It follows that we would also need to debate the things we really don’t want, the things whose price we refuse to pay. Without this kind of discussion, we’ll never have a truly sustainable society. Talking about limits isn’t constraining, it’s liberating—perhaps paradoxically, it’s the basic requirement for building a ecological future of real abundance.
Originally published at Red Pepper. Republished with permission.
“Deep down, every liberationist is an optimist.” – Steve Biko
Steve Biko was a South African anti-apartheid activist and organizer who was murdered by the secret police in 1978. He was 32 years old when he was tortured and beaten, resulting in his death. “I Write What I Like” is a collection of writing by Biko and includes some commentary.
The collection is defined by radicalism. Biko was a believer in the mantra that freedom cannot be given, only taken. In this idea lies the core of why the liberal solution to South African apartheid remained incomplete, resulting in a highly unequal, racialized capitalist society. This is the difference between “equality” under the law and true liberation.
Biko understood that racism and apartheid were not simply technical problems. “One needs to understand the basics before setting up a remedy,” he writes. “A number of organizations now currently ‘fighting against apartheid’ are working on an oversimplified premise. They have taken a brief look at what is, and have diagnosed the problem incorrectly. They have almost completely forgotten about the side effects and have not even considered the root cause. Hence whatever is improved as a remedy will hardly cure the condition.”
Biko’s philosophy of Black Consciousness was built on undermining both the political structures that upheld apartheid as well as the internalized inferiority and superiority that still characterize race relations in many locations worldwide. He rejected integration for its own sake, recognizing that mainstream integration ideas are “white man’s integration—an integration based on exploitative values. It is an integration in which black will compete with black, using each other as rungs up a step ladder leading them to white values… these are the concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man’s [sic] mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-Cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.”
He aimed to uphold African cultural values as important, writing “The easiness with which Africans communicate with each other is not forced by authority but is inherent in the make-up of African people… this is a manifestation of the interrelationship between man and man [sic] in the black world as opposed to the highly impersonal world in which Whitey lives.”
He understood that oppressive systems maintain their power primarily by the consent of the oppressed, which is gained via coercion, psychological tricks, propaganda, fear, and so on.
This is the reason that Biko was confident in the ability of non-violent aboveground political organizing to liberate South Africa. He was not a pacifist, and spoke in favor of the militant organizations (ANC and the PAC) that operated underground during his most active years.
These organizations had limited effectiveness in that context, but Biko strove to forge multi-generational alliances regardless, recognizing the primacy of shared goals. His approach to other groups was “tough, even aggressive language” tempered “with a basically friendly underlying spirit.”
Biko was a leader, but not an authoritarian. He promoted initiative rather than centralization. This proved to be key when many figures within various resistance movements were banned from participation in public life or sent to prison on the remote Robben Island.
He was a highly effective organizer, as one passage from his friend Aelred Stubbs C.R. makes clear. “Although Steve could hold no office in BPC because of his banning order he was constantly being consulted. It was amazing how much he knew… more than once he warned me not to get too close to certain people, white or black, whose contacts were less than desirable. He was always right. He never spoke against anyone if he could possibly help it. Even when he did, it was always in a particular context… There was this fierce integrity about them all. If you were with them you were in, and everything was given and taken. If in any way you were furthering your own ends, or trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, you were out.”
Biko, like all historical figures, was no saint. His behavior was frequently sexist, and he derided feminism as an irrelevance—not an uncommon attitude at the time (or today), but inexcusable in someone fighting for justice. Like with other historical figures, we can learn from his weaknesses as well as his strength. In 2018, those lessons are still as relevant as ever.
Featured image: Demonstration against TTIP. Sebastian Heidelberger, creative commons licence
Editor’s note: This is the second part an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 10, 2017 Resistance Radio interview with Alfred McCoy. Read Part One here. McCoy’s first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block publication. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the “classic” work on the global drug traffic. His more recent cover on covert operations, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror explores the agency’s half-century history of psychological torture. A film based in part on that book, “Taxi to the Darkside,” won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008.
His most recent book, In the Shadow of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, focuses on the key instruments in its exercise of this hegemony, including geopolitical dominion, control of subordinate states, covert operations, worldwide surveillance, torture, and military technology. The work concludes by analyzing China’s challenge and the complex of forces that will likely lead to an eclipse of U.S. hegemony by 2030.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
DJ: Let’s talk about the American response and the question of some commonalities of the response to empires on the decline of their own power, if you could fit those two together.
AM: First of all the American response. This is where the White House actually matters. You can make an argument that the Presidency doesn’t make that much difference in the fabric of American life, but when it comes to foreign policy, and particularly military power; the presidency matters. The man in charge makes a difference. Because you’ve got the economic apparatus, the diplomacy, the military, all of these concerted forces arrayed at the fingertips of a single person.
Under the Obama administration: Obama was what I call a geopolitical genius. He’s one of three Americans in the past 120 years who understood geopolitics and knew how to play it. Obama sensed the nature of the Chinese challenge, and he came up with an explicit strategy to counter it, a three-fold strategy. First of all, he realized that the logic of the Chinese infrastructure and their big new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, was basically to make sure that the trade of the Eurasian landmass was heading towards China. Obama countered that very deftly. He negotiated, mostly in the course of his second term in office, two international trade pacts. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, with a dozen nations who together account for about 40% of world trade. He also launched negotiations for another pact called the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or T-TIP, with the European Union, that controlled about another 20% of trade.
Through these two trade pacts, Obama had the idea of draining the world island the life blood of commerce. China could build its railroads and its pipelines to its heart’s content, but if Obama’s plans had gone through, these preferential trade pacts would have diverted the trade from Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, across the Atlantic, across the Pacific towards the United States.
The second part of Obama’s strategy was that because of the energy independence of the United States through fracking and the Canadian oil boom, we no longer needed Middle Eastern oil. He felt that we were energy-self-sufficient, and indeed we’re going to start exporting pretty soon. He said basically “We’re going to pull our surplus forces out of the Middle East where we don’t really have any real interests anymore, and we’re going to shift them to rebuild the U.S. position on the axial end of Eurasia” along that Pacific island chain from Japan through South Korea down to the Philippines and Australia.
He went to Australia in 2011 and announced what was called the Pivot to Asia. He then arranged for a U.S. Marine battalion to be based at Darwin along with some Navy vessels, giving the United States ready access to the South China Sea through the Indonesian archipelago. His diplomats negotiated the right of U.S. forces to position equipment and have ready access to five Philippine bases in the South China Sea, renewing that long but now fated strategic alliance. He worked with South Korea to build a new base at Jeju and he renewed the strategic alliance with Japan. He got Japan to back the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to the hilt. And by the time Obama left office, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was running into trouble, but it still had a chance of passing. The European treaty ran into the populism in Europe, which was rising very strongly. That was going to have a much more problematic passage.
The other part of Obama’s strategy was his major Africa diplomatic initiative. He had a summit meeting for about 50 African leaders. He made a major Presidential visit to Africa, which was not the sentimental journey that people imagined, but serious diplomacy. He was hoping to use diplomacy to get African nations to redirect their trade and investment toward the United States. So he had a systematic strategy.
President Trump intuited the pillars of U.S. power and began attacking them systematically in a kind of demolition job with almost a kind of unerring instinct, a malign design, if you will. In his first week in office, despite the pleas of Japan’s Prime Minister by phone call and personal visit to Trump Tower, Trump canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Prime Minister Abe of Japan said “This is a serious mistake, because China has its own regional cooperation pact with 16 members, that’s going to capture all the trade. So if you don’t have the Trans-Pacific Partnership, China’s going to direct all that trade towards it. You’ll lose out.” Trump didn’t pay any attention, he went ahead with that.
The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was already fading before Obama left office. The other thing that Trump has done is he’s systematically damaged our relationship with all of the four pillars underlying those axial ends of the Eurasian landmass. When he made his visit to NATO in May of this year, he refused to defend the mutual defense clause in NATO. Without that clause, there is no NATO. It was a major blow. Then we have the transcript of his first presidential phone call with the Prime Minister of Australia, in which Trump says it’s the worst phone call he’s ever had and slams the phone down. That accelerated the alienation of the Australian people away from the United States and towards a primary alliance with China.
We have the transcript of his presidential phone call last April with President Duterte of the Philippines. Trump’s calling up about the North Korean missile launches. It’s a very interesting transcript and it has a significance that nobody realized. Trump says “Kim Jong Un’s a real problem” and Duterte says “I’m going to call China.” President Trump says “Look, I got two nuclear subs right in the area. Very powerful subs.” Duterte says “I’m going to call China.”
And Trump says “You know, we got 20 times the bombs of North Korea.” President Duterte says “I’m going to call China.” It’s very clear. The Philippines is gone. The Philippines has moved into China’s orbit. That treaty for access to the five bases in the Philippines is basically a dead piece of paper.
Trump systematically attacked Korean history and politics, alienating Korea, so that the current President of South Korea, President Moon Jae-in, ran on a campaign slogan of “Say No to America.” I think that in the fullness of time, the tensions in the Korean peninsula are going to play out in a way that the U.S. bilateral pacts of both Korea and Japan are going to be very seriously diminished. I don’t know if they’ll become dead letters, but very pretty close to it.
Through his inept leadership on the global stage, Trump is accelerating the decline of the U.S. geopolitical position. He’s undercutting those axial ends of Eurasia that have been the pillars of U.S. geopolitical power for the past 70 years.
DJ: What are some commonalities of the end of empire that we can see manifesting in the U.S.?
AM: Empires decline through a complex series of processes. First of all, the numbers. The trade, the military dominance, the technological primacy that a rising empire has at its start, is inevitably eroded over time as other powers acquire similar skills, or they become more vital and newer economies. So the long-term trends are for any empire, at some point, they start to head downward. When the power is fading, the elites of a society who’ve enjoyed this kind of psychological sense of empowerment and dominion — the masters of the globe, the titans astride the planet – get irrational. They then can conduct military operations that are called by historians “micro-militarism.” The prime example is the United Kingdom. In the mid-1950’s, the United Kingdom had full employment, had dug themselves out of the rubble from the bombing of World War II. They had organized a systematic and very disciplined liquidation of their empire. They were giving up, through negotiations, political control over India, Malaya, etc. They were retaining the substance of their trade and investment as they negotiated their way out of colonial rule. It looked like Britain, in the mid-1950s, was on a path of comparative decline, but it was carefully managed, it was a slow decline that was leaving Britain in a pretty good position economically and diplomatically.
Then came Sir Anthony Eden in the Conservative Party. Somehow, the process of losing empire produced a psychological crisis. So when Gamal Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, the British Conservative Party collectively reacted in an irrational fury. They secretly plotted with the French and the Israelis to launch the massive Suez invasion, concealing this operation from the United States, Britain’s prime ally: 300,000 troops, six aircraft carriers, and the Israeli Army launched itself across Sinai. They occupied half the Canal before the operation began to fall apart diplomatically. The British pound in Britain couldn’t sustain this operation. It was the global reserve currency and it began to lose value. The first bailout by the IMF was not done for Mexico or some impoverished third world country. It was done for Britain in the aftermath of Suez. That’s where the bailout came from. Because the world’s global reserve currency was trembling at the brink of collapse.
Suddenly Britain went from the mighty imperial lion to kind of a toothless tiger that would now roll over when America cracked the whip. And that all happened in the space of a month, through this micro-military invasion. Clearly, leaders can accelerate the decline of imperial power. Leaders that are reacting irrationally, that are brash and bold and kind of thunder and trumpet, laying claim to power that’s slipping away from them. In doing so, they actually accelerate the loss of power.
If there were ever a Sir Anthony Eden figure to take over the United States government, that would be Donald Trump. And the micro-military disaster can occur in the South China Sea, in the Korean peninsula, or somewhere in the Middle East. It awaits us. In fact, there are those who would argue 30 years from now, that America’s real micro-military disaster was the Iraq invasion of 2003. That was the same thing. American conservatives feeling a loss of U.S. global power, decided on a bold military strike. Capture Baghdad; build a massive embassy, the Green Zone; insert the U.S. in the heart of the Middle East; unleash the tides of democracy and capitalism. Break down these kind of socialist autocracies and bring the Middle East firmly into the American camp. Didn’t quite work out. Proved to be closer to Suez than a brilliant imperial coup.
So that pathology of power that’s so rational when the empire’s on the ascent, becomes dangerously irrational when an empire’s in decline.
DJ: Leaving off the sort of immorality of having an empire in the first place, and acting in the self-interest of the imperial power in decline, how would you see a reasoned and rational response to a decline of empire playing out? What would those at the center of empire do if they were continuing to act in their imperial self-interest and perceiving the decline? How would they age gracefully?
AM: First of all, we not talking about colonies anymore. We’re talking about the U.S., what’s known in the rubric as an informal empire, where we don’t actually control the sovereignty of nation-states. Back in the heyday of the British empire, a quarter of the globe, both population and territory, were British colonies, painted red on the map. But another quarter of the globe were part of the British informal empire. From the 1820’s to the 1890’s that included Latin America. At one point it included Egypt, Iran, and China. So there was another quarter of humanity that was in the British informal empire.
The U.S. iteration of empire looks like that British informal empire. The 190+ sovereign states of the world all have presidents and prime ministers, they have sacrosanct boundaries and national sovereignty. And yet, the United States exercises hegemony over them. The U.S. empire has overtones like the British.
Now, the question is not “whether empire.” It’s what kind of empire are you going to have? You take Professor Niall Ferguson’s point, that there have been 69 major empires over the last 4000 years of human history. The possibility of the next 100 years being without an empire seems pretty remote. Think back to one of the great events that shaped the world we live in: World War II. That was a clash between two powers: the British empire – Churchill was very proud, he didn’t talk about Britain, he talked about the British empire, – and the U.S. as an ascendant imperial power on one side. And there were the Axis powers on the other. Hitler had the largest control over Europe, a continental empire. Even larger, through his allies, than Napoleon. And the Japanese empire, if you count the population, through their conquest of China and Southeast Asia, and their occupation of Korea and Taiwan, had in terms of population the largest empire in human history.
So World War II was a clash of empires. Personally, I think most of us would agree that it’s probably a good idea that the British empire and the American hegemony defeated the Axis empires Japan and Germany. Because they didn’t offer much except exploitation of the subject peoples to benefit the metropole.
The U.S. empire has not only had its dark chapters, as every empire does, but we’ve been a distinctive empire in several ways. One of them has been that at the peak of our power, right after World War II, when the world was in ruins and rival industrial powers were heavily damaged, we had something like 50% of the world’s industrial production under our control. The United States presided over the construction of a new international order: The United Nations. Then they established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was the predecessor of the World Trade Organization. They created the instruments for the management of the global economy; the IMF and the World Bank.
The United States also believed in the rule of law. There was an international court that was linked to the United Nations, and instead of lining up the defeated heads of the Axis empires, the Germans and the Japanese, and just shooting them, or throwing them into some prison island, the United States conducted tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo. Those established, admittedly somewhat problematically but nonetheless established certain international rules of law. The Nuremberg Medical Code, for example.
This was an international order, grounded in the idea of inviolable national sovereignty. Every nation was sovereign. Second, nations did not conduct their affairs via conflict and war but by the rule of international law. Third, that there were human rights, and the object of this international order was to realize the human potential, the liberation of every individual. Though we all can list, chapter and verse, all the times we failed our own values, nonetheless, those values stand. So it’s important to have a kind of slow, managed transition, so that even as U.S. global power fades, that liberal international order that we built up at the peak of our power survives us.
That’s I think the troubling part of China’s rise. Because China does not stand for those principles.
DJ: What we can do to maintain these efforts toward human rights in the decline of the U.S. empire?
AM: I think that one of the most positive signs that we saw was when President Trump imposed his initial ban on travel from predominantly Muslim nations. That looked very clearly like a betrayal of the Constitutional protection of religious liberty, and furthermore a betrayal of the part of the mission of the U.N.: to deal with refugees. There’s a U.N. High Commission for Refugees. It manages what happens when people leave their state and they’re in the kind of limbo between states. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees moves in and does human rights work, provides food, clothing, shelter, education; and ultimately tries to get other states to take in people that have left their own state. This is a very important part of the maintenance of international order. In many ways, it’s the realization of the belief in human rights. We manifest it, we prove it by the way we treat those that are within the International order, who are stateless.
President Trump was challenging that very important international principle, imposing that Muslim ban and keeping the refugees out. This is triumphant nationalism: in his endless talks about sovereignty at the U.N. he undercuts the international community of nations, the rule of law, and the commitment to human rights. Sovereignty and boundaries transcends all. So there are Americans fighting that: hundreds of thousands of people across the country turned up at airports, lawyers came out and sat in the arrivals lounge with their laptops, filing appeals on behalf of people that were in INS holding behind the Customs barrier. That sort of popular outpouring in the United States represented a very deep commitment from a certain sector, I think a majority of the American people, to these principles and ideals. I think it’s important to keep up that kind of activity to defend these principles.
Sometimes our small actions, fighting for a refugee to get a visa, seems very small, just one individual or family. But it has profound implications for the principles of the U.S. liberal international order.
Then there is the resistance against some of the more excessive moves by the Trump administration. People who are fighting the wall, for example, which is a visible symbol of the closed nation-state, nationalism above all else. There are all kinds of manifestations of opposition to Trump that are ongoing. And that’s important, because whether consciously or unconsciously, all of the impacts upon the liberal international order.
DJ: I understand what you’re saying about the importance of resistance to Trump. That makes sense. With an ascendant Chinese imperial form, how does one maintain those human rights associated with the United States internationally? How does one extend that across the world?
AM: In very real terms, there was a lot of popular opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Nobody liked the secret arbitration tribunals that were going to be created by it. The Obama administration argued that in fact labor rights, environmental protections were inbuilt in the treaty far more than any other trade treaty. So there was a heavy debate on that issue. But basically, progressives joined nationalists and conservatives in an attack on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And at the time, when we were titans standing astride the globe, with our power seemingly unchallenged, I don’t think people realized what was at stake. That 40% of world trade was at stake. And that if we gave it up it would go to China.
So the issue on the left, and even on the right was just “stop the TPP.” People were unaware of the implications of what would happen when you did that. That it would represent a kind of retreat of the United States from international trade. It would weaken our relationships with those 11 other nations, which were critical trade and strategic partners for the United States.
People looked just at the domestic side of the equation, and they didn’t realize the very important international implications. I would argue that, on balance, a kind of liberal response, maybe a centrist response to the TPP should not have been “stop it.” It should have been “Reform it, revise it.”
There will be other treaties like that. Something will come again, it has to. Because another administration is going to realize that China is capturing all this trade through these preferential agreements, and there will be a revival of these negotiations.
At that point I would say that we should have learned our lesson from the TPP. That popular forces should go in eyes wide open, realizing the trade-offs. You want to reform it, you want to revise it, you want to get the best deal possible, but if you kill it, China’s going to capture the trade and they are not concerned about the environment or the working conditions of workers. There will be no protections in the Chinese trade pacts. So if you’re concerned about the people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and in the future, Burma, who are going to be working in those factories, producing goods for export; better that they’re in an American trade pact with sensitivity to those kinds of environmental and human rights and labor protections, than in a Chinese trade pact where it’s all realpolitik cash and carry, and the Chinese don’t care about those conditions.
I think we’re going to miss the American liberal international order, now that it’s fading and disappearing. We are going to come to appreciate it. We know its excesses to a fare thee well: manipulations of elections, torture, abortive wars, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the rest. But there’s the other side. The principles we stood for, and the international community we tried to build. We’re going to miss American hegemony as it fades away. We are going to miss the international rule of law, the environmental protection, the human rights, the community of nations that the U.S. has constructed. For that reason, it’s very important to realize the stakes, and to campaign in a way so that we manage this transition to a more multipolar world carefully and cautiously.
Featured image: Gwadar, Pakistan, site of a $200 billion Chinese infrastructure investment.
Editor’s note: This is the first part of an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 10, 2017 Resistance Radio interview with Alfred McCoy. Read the Part Two here. McCoy’s first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block publication. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the “classic” work on the global drug traffic. His more recent cover on covert operations, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror explores the agency’s half-century history of psychological torture. A film based in part on that book, “Taxi to the Darkside,” won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008.
His most recent book, In the Shadow of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, focuses on the key instruments in its exercise of this hegemony, including geopolitical dominion, control of subordinate states, covert operations, worldwide surveillance, torture, and military technology. The work concludes by analyzing China’s challenge and the complex of forces that will likely lead to an eclipse of U.S. hegemony by 2030.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Derrick Jensen: In the new book you mention the word “empire” a couple of times. Can you talk about the fact that the United States has been and is an empire? What is an empire?
Alfred McCoy: First of all, the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson said that basically there have been about 69 or 70 empires in world history over the last 4000 years. It’s essentially a system whereby a dominant power exercises control, whether directly, through what was known as colonization, or indirectly through what is called “informal empire.” Those mechanisms of control include financial; political, sometimes through political manipulations of various sorts; military; and very importantly, cultural. It is the soft power, the salve, if you will, that makes all of the above a little bit more palatable for the peoples that are subordinated.
The United States has not only been an empire, but in the opinion of British imperial historians like John Darwin of Oxford University, it has been the most prosperous and powerful empire in human history. Americans, during the long years of the Cold War, particularly American historians, were a population in denial of this fundamental political reality. To summarize and simplify the politics of that period, basically the Soviet Union used the Marxist-inflected term “imperialist” to denigrate the United States. They aggressively promoted anti-imperialism, they made heroes of people like the liberator of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. In the Soviet propaganda, we were the bad empire, the pernicious, dominant, exploitative empire. For historians in the United States the United States was a world leader, a superpower, a global hegemon. But not an empire, because it contained that pejorative.
Once the Cold War was over, within a decade, when we were mired in the Middle East and Iraq intervention and the ever-more difficult pacification of Afghanistan – when it looked like U.S. global power was being challenged, like our massive military intervention in Iraq was going very badly indeed, when it looked like our power was challenged; right across the political spectrum, from very conservative all the way over to very liberal and radical, everybody started using the term “empire.” Now it was shorn of its pejorative, its propaganda value.
And they were using it to ask the question: “Was the U.S. empire over?” And the answer, generally, under the Obama administration was “No, the United States would be an empire for as long as it wanted to be.” The U.S. was the maker, the shaper of world history. We would decide when we wanted to give up our empire. Nobody could challenge us. Well, that’s changed.
DJ: What has changed?
AM: In a word: China. From the beginning of 2004 to 2012, a period of eight or nine years, in the midst of this revival of this discussion of empire, what historians found, myself included, was that the United States was the most powerful and prosperous empire in human history. But because of that evasion and denial, we weren’t the empire, the Soviet Union was the empire, we were the exceptional nation, we had American exceptionalism. The belief in American exceptionalism and its many manifestations was an article of faith, literally, among American historians during the Cold War. Not only was the United States empire the most powerful in human history, but it was arguably the least studied of them all.
I got together with some colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, and very quickly we created a global network called “Empires in Transition.” We had, at our peak, about 140 historians on four continents. We probed the comparative rise of the U.S. empire to global power. That was our first volume, a real door-stopper. In our second volume, after our conference in Barcelona, Spain, held in collaboration with the Pompeu Fabra University, we did a volume called Endless Empires about the decline of various empires; Spanish, European and American.
Although we could see the signs in 2012 when that book came out, that U.S. global power was fading, there wasn’t at that time a challenger. What’s happened in the last four or five years, particularly events in the South China Sea have made China’s challenge blindingly clear. In my book In the Shadow of the American Century that just came out last month, I drew upon that decade of study by 140 scholars on the comparative history of empires and boiled it all down into terms that ordinary readers could understand. Then explored, in a comparative sense, the rise of the U.S. to global power. What kind of empire were we at our peak, what were the bases of our power, and then how were the bases of our power being challenged by China’s rise? Those are the two problems I explore in the book.
Now China’s challenge is straightforward. It’s a strategy that most Americans don’t understand. Those that claim that the American empire will last forever, the sun will never set on the American empire, to paraphrase. The people who believe that simply don’t understand the nature of the Chinese challenge, how fundamental it is.
The Chinese challenge is twofold. And to appreciate it, we have to go way back to a cold London night in January, 1904. That night, at the Royal Geographical Society on Savile Row in London, the head of the London School of Economics, a guy named Sir Halford Mackinder, stood up and gave a paper boldly titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” He proposed, by looking at the map, that Europe, Asia and Africa were not three separate continents. In fact, if you looked at them a certain way, as a geographer could and should – and he was a geographer – they were a single continent, a single land mass that he called “the world island.” And he said that the epicenter of world history, of global power, lay at the heartland of the world island: a vast zone stretching for 4000 miles, from the Persian Gulf north and east, all the way to the East Siberian Sea.
Then he said that the human history for the past five centuries had been changed by something very simple. The people of western Europe learned to sail around the world island, from Europe all the way to Asia. And by doing so, they conducted a kind of strategic flanking maneuver over the great nomadic peoples of the heartland of the world island. The Mongols, the Manchus, the Turks, the Arabs; that had pounded at the gates of great empires: China and Europe. And by sailing around the world island, we saw then the rise of a half dozen European maritime empires.
“But now,” said Sir Halfred Mackinder, and he was alluding to an event that everyone in that audience that night in 1904 knew well – “Now the world is changing.” Because, as he was speaking, the Trans-Siberian Railway was being built by the Czarist empire, and it was stretching from Moscow for 5000 miles, all the way to Vladivostok. For the first time, Europe and Asia were actually a single landmass. They were only two continents because of the vast distances in the great empty center of this, places like the Gobi Desert. But now that this was being crossed by a railroad, Sir Halfred Mackinder predicted that there would be more railroads and that the power that learned to tap into the resources of the heartland of the world island would be the source of a new empire.
Mackinder not only made an observation about the past five centuries and a prediction about the future of global power, but in that single lecture he invented, by the application of geography to global power, the science of geopolitics. It’s in that single lecture. Everybody that’s been good at geopolitics ever since has really been basically an intellectual acolyte of Mackinder.
Of course, it took a long time for Mackinder’s prediction to come true because World War II intervened. Hitler tried to penetrate, break through at Stalingrad and capture Lebensraum, in the heartland, because Hitler was tutored by Mackinder’s German acolyte, a guy named Haushofer at Munich University. When Hitler was in prison, after his aborted Beer Hall Putsch, he was tutored by an expert in geopolitics. That’s where Hitler got the idea of Lebensraum. And then the Cold War came and dropped the Iron Curtain right across the would-be world island.
Ten years ago China began realizing Mackinder’s vision. With their $4 trillion in profits from world trade, much of it with the United States, the Chinese spent a trillion dollars, starting roughly in 2007, to lay down an amazing grid – first of all, 9000 miles of high-speed rail all across China. Then transcontinental rail links that stretch from western China all the way to western Europe, right across the world island. More importantly, they laid down a grid of gas and oil pipelines from Siberia in the north to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the center, all the way down to Burma in the south. They are bringing the oil and gas resources of central Asia and the Persian Gulf via that southern pipeline, into China. The net result of this grid is to realize Mackinder’s vision for infrastructure that will tie this vast land mass together, and shift the epicenter of geopolitical power to the nation that dominates the heartland of the world island, in this case China.
China has overlaid that physical infrastructure. Last year they opened the Infrastructure Development Bank with 57 nations, including many of our closest allies. They contributed on opening day $100 billion, which is about half the capital of the World Bank. They have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and they had a big conference earlier in the year, where President Xi Jinpin announced another trillion dollars to tie together the world island, to continue this massive infrastructure investment.
China is also going to have about $1 trillion of capital invested in Africa by 2025. Already they have three times the trade of the United States with Africa. So they’re really fully realizing Mackinder’s vision of the world island.
That’s part one. Part two is that China is very deftly threatening to undercut the basis of U.S. global power. 70 years ago the United States emerged as the world’s greatest power. In the first decades after World War II, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower laid down the instruments of U.S. global power. But everybody’s forgotten about how they did it. We no longer understand what the pillars of U.S. global power are. That same historian I talked about earlier, John Darwin, wrote a book that surveyed a thousand years of imperial clashes in the Eurasian landmass. He said that the United States after World War II became the most powerful empire in human history, because we were the first empire in history to capture what he called the axial ends of the Eurasian landmass.
By that he meant that in 1949 the United States established the NATO alliance, which gave us a firm control over western Europe, one of the axial ends. Then in 1951, we signed four mutual defense treaties with a string of nations running down the Pacific island chain running down off the Asian landmass; Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia. This gave us the other axial end of control. And then, between these two axial points in western Europe and the Pacific littoral, the United States laid down successive circles of steel. The first was a series of mutual defense treaties: NATO in the west, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in the east, and those four mutual defense treaties that I mentioned.
On top of that we had massive fleets. The 6th Fleet, based at Naples in the Mediterranean. The 7th Fleet, based at Subic Bay, Philippines, in the western Pacific on that Pacific littoral chain. After Britain pulled out of the Persian Gulf in the 1970’s, we established the 5th Fleet at Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. Our most recent addition, on top of hundreds of air bases and strategic bombers and fighters and all the rest, our latest circle of steel is: a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily all the way to Guam in the western Pacific the United States has built over the last ten years. That allow us to strike over much of the world island.
Now, the second part of the Chinese strategy is to slice through those circles of steel and break the U.S. geopolitical encirclement of Eurasia. They’ve done it over the last three years by building seven bases in the South China Sea, using dredges to convert atolls to military bases. They’ve now got antiaircraft missiles and jet landing strips on those military bases.
There is also something that Americans haven’t paid too much attention to. The Chinese have actually got even a stronger position in the Arabian Sea, which is geopolitically very important because that’s where the mouth to the Persian Gulf lies. Ten years ago, China invested $200 billion to transform a sleepy fishing village in western Pakistan, at Gwadar, which is just about 300 miles from the mouth of the Persian Gulf; about a day and a half sail, or steam. Then, a little over a year ago, President Xi Jinping went to Pakistan and he announced, with the Prime Minister of Pakistan, that China would invest $46 billion to build a road, rail, and gas oil pipeline corridor stretching from western China down the length of Pakistan all the way to Gwadar.
Then just last year, China opened a big naval base at Djibouti, at the other end of the Arabian Sea. So with their position in the South China Sea, and these two big bases in the Arabian Sea, China is slicing through that geopolitical encirclement. China is also using its trade to drive a wedge between America and its four major Asia-Pacific allies that are the foundation for the Pacific littoral that’s the axial end of U.S. geopolitical power.
So that’s the nature of the Chinese challenge. The American response has been mixed.
Stephanie McMillan:
Thank you for being determined to investigate and understand the different aspects of this catastrophic situation that we are facing. Especially I want to thank those of you here who are doing something about it, or thinking about doing something about it. It is very important that we do. I am going to get into some of the more structural aspects.
Want to join a movement fighting capitalism?
Deep Green Resistance is recruiting. We are a political movement for liberation and revolution. We aim for nothing less than total liberation from capitalism, extractive economics, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, industrialism, and the culture of empire that we call civilization.
We all know that capitalism is killing the world. In order to stop it, we can’t just keep resisting its effects. Capitalism doesn’t care if we protest on street corners a thousand times. That just proves how democratic they are. The solutions are not to be found within its framework. And they are even less to be found at the individual level. We don‘t actually have any power as consumers, I‘m sure most of you here already know. They would like us to think we do, but we can‘t buy or refrain from buying our way out of this. It‘s a social system, a class system, and it can only be addressed at a level of collective organized class struggle.
We need to understand capital, how it works, the mechanisms that keep it in place and are at the core of its functioning.
Capitalism is a mode of production, based on the exploitation of labor and the generation of surplus value. This means that workers are paid a certain amount of wages for a day‘s work. But what they produce is worth more than that. The extra value is called surplus value, and the capitalist just steals it. This is what all profit is based on. This is what private property is all about. It is considered normal for the social means of production, the factories, land, everything that produces all the things that we all use, that these are privately owned, and for those owners to simply take whatever is produced in them.
Understanding capitalism.
Capitalism is not just an economic process, but the whole way that our society is arranged. It’s an ensemble or matrix of social relations, and these comprise three main fields: the economic, the political and the ideological. The economic field is determinate, profit is the point, and everything else is set up to solidify the relations of production that keep it coming. Capitalist ideology, centered on competition and individualism, is designed to make the way we live seem normal and inevitable. It‘s forced on us by its institutions, school, the church, the nuclear family, media and culture. Why would we need advertising for example, if they didn‘t need to convince us to participate? Ideological domination is unrelenting conditioning and indoctrination to naturalize capitalism, to make us compliant, passive, greedy and self-centered. To make us identify with it, instead of understanding it as the enemy that it really is.
Political domination.
Political domination, the job of the state, has two main aims: the first, performed by the government and its laws, is to regulate within and between classes, to keep the flow of capital smooth and free of obstacles. The second is for when ideological domination fails. When we can no longer accept living this way, the state turns to cohesion through terrorism. This function is performed by the state’s armed forces, its military and police. If we don‘t comply, that’s when the guns come out. We saw that with the Occupy movement. The entire purpose of this setup is economic, the accumulation of wealth for a small minority of people–those who own the means of production, namely the factories, tools, land.
Ownership and control.
This ownership was not ordained by a God, nor is it because capitalists are smarter or worked harder than anyone else and earned that right. It‘s because they took it. They started with trading, which many societies considered and understood as thievery, since it‘s the exchange of unequal values. This is still the way that mercantile capitalists accumulate wealth. They continued with land theft, backed up by war and genocide, which is still going on today as we all know. I just got back from Haiti a few days ago and saw huge areas of land that have been stolen from small farmers and towns people, their houses just bulldozed over without warning, so that the government could bring in foreign investors to build industrial parks and tourist resorts. They justified this by saying that the people will get jobs. They‘d be able to work in the new factories and hotels. That‘s the standard way that capitalists have been getting their workforce for the past 250 years.
Oppression and control.
The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, reproducing it and driving it forward, is capital versus labor and the production of surplus value for private accumulation. This process is what produces class divisions, class domination and class struggle. Classes are groups of people, defined by their role in social production. There are those who own and control it, and those are usually not the same people who are exploited in the process. Besides exploitation, capitalism also uses oppressive practices like racism and patriarchy, and has terrible effects like ecocides and war, which we all have to deal with. It‘s a social system that dominates all of social life, and all the dominated classes and social groups struggle against this in their own ways. But the core of it is embodied in the struggle of workers against exploitation.
Value and ethics.
Workers are the ones who face capital in their daily struggle for existence, in an inherently antagonistic relationship. They are the only ones able to offer an alternative to capitalism. Other classes can resist, but can‘t break the framework. So, if we‘re to actually destroy capitalism, the working class needs to lead all the dominated classes in a revolution to overthrow the capitalist class. We are all social agents, born into a structure that we didn‘t create. We are inserted into the existing relations of production, funneled into particular social slots, serving the various requirements of capital. Capital confines our relationships within a framework of relations between things. And it treats living beings, including humans, as objects. It has no moral or ethical framework, because it‘s not alive.
Nevertheless, it does have a motion, drive and imperative of its own. Its only aim is self-expansion. Even capitalists are merely stewards of capital and have no control over it. If they have an attack of conscience, an attempt to moderate it, then they are replaced. Sociopaths are drawn to this role; in fact a higher percentage are found in this class than in the general population. Because to serve capital in this way requires a lack, or total suppression, of empathy. Capital has no subjectivity and it doesn’t recognize it in others. But it is animate, thorough and embodied in its representatives. It has imbued them with its own sociopathy.
Value and growth.
Surplus value is generated only in industrial production, when labor power is exploited in the process of converting raw materials, otherwise known as the living world, into commodities. And that‘s why it‘s ecocidal. Other forms of capital expansion, such as mercantile and finance, create inflated bubbles of fictitious value through unequal trade and speculation. All that must be based on the production of physical goods. For example, China builds twelve to twenty-four ghost-cities every year, mile after mile of malls with no businesses in them and houses with no people living in them. And those empty buildings serve as repositories for capital investment, objects to hold value and to speculate on. Surplus value must be re-invested as new capital, or it will degrade, it will lose value.
We have a choice.
Capital will do whatever it takes to prevent its own devaluation, including all forms of brutal oppression, endless wars, total disregard for the needs of any living beings, stripping us of subjectivity, and turning us into functions for its own reproduction, even up to annihilation of all life on earth. This would of course mean its own destruction as well. Marx understood this when he said that class struggle will lead to either the overthrow of capitalism and the elimination of class domination in general, or the common ruin of contending classes. We still may have this choice to make, but that window is closing. We each need to make our choice now, and do the work required of us in this very intense and pivotal historical period.
The work of understanding the structural crisis and vulnerabilities of the system that we‘re facing, plus the work of organizing our forces so that we can become strong enough to weaken and ultimately destroy it.
Derrick Jensen: For eight years, Stephanie and I have had a bitter, bitter ideological battle. It‘s so bitter that we‘ve written a couple of books together and have become very dear friends. The question, that Stephanie and I have been having a great time slightly disagreeing on, is whether capitalism creates sociopathological behavior, or whether it took sociopaths to create a rationalization for their pre-existing issues, and to create a system that rewards this terrible behavior. And I don‘t really have an answer and I think the truth is, that they are mutually reinforcing, that once you get a system in place that starts creating sociopaths, then they will create additional rationalizations for their sociopathological behavior and additional ways to reward themselves. Especially when those in power are those who make the rules for those in power, then of course they‘re going to codify their pre-existing issues.
The tragedy of the commons.
I want to say one more thing. The tragedy of the commons just pisses me off. That essay by Garrett Hardin in 1968, it’s such a lie. He basically says that the tragedy of the commons is that if you have a common area, that it will eventually be destroyed. He says this is because if you have a community area where the village is allowed to, say, run a hundred sheep, ten families and every family can run ten sheep. Then what‘s going to happen is that one family is going to run eleven sheep, and then another is gonna run eleven sheep, and then eventually the commons will be destroyed. But this is complete bullshit. What that is, is a tragedy of the failure of community.
If you have a community, and everybody knows that they can run ten sheep, if somebody runs eleven sheep, the other members of the community come to them and say: Dude, that is not a good idea. And if the person does it again, they’d say: Dude, that‘s a really bad idea. And if they did it again, they‘d burn down their house. So, what he is describing is a situation in which your community has already been destroyed.
No matter how talented he was, if Jimi Hendrix would have been playing his music in the 1920s he would not have found an audience. You have to have a receptive audience in order to have something become popular. So if you have a purely functioning community in the first place, and somebody says “Hey, I‘ve got this great idea! Everybody acting selfishly will create a greater good for our entire community!” they would say “You are nuts.” The only way you can have people go “wow, that’s a great idea!” is if they are primed for it.
Spreading ideas/propaganda.
In 1992, the year that Clinton was elected, he did this one speech that had this great moment where he said “I want to try to show that Adam Smith‘s invisible hand has a green thumb.” It was great, because the entire audience was silent. And then he said: “I thought that was a really good line,” and everybody is like “Oh, yeah!“ This is just one of the ways that propaganda works. First, and everybody knows this, is: “Adam Smith‘s invisible hand? A green thumb? You‘re fucking nuts!” But then when it‘s repeated, and of course if you have the NY Times take it up, and then if you have the neo-environmentalists take it up, and then if you have all these other groups take it up, twenty years later, everybody‘s like “Oh yeah, of course green capitalism will solve everything.”
That‘s all.
Charles Derber:
95% of environmentalists in America believe that the solution to the environmental crisis is more capitalism. I had the quote from Tom Friedman, who made that argument very powerfully. He said there is “father capital and mother earth.” The two most powerful forces in the world to be married together will solve all our problems. Why this text is super important is that you‘re going up against a myth, a deeply embedded myth in the society. That the solution to climate change is more capitalism.
Derrick Jensen:
I would actually agree, that there is father capitalism and mother earth, and it‘s a deeply abusive relationship in which he is beating the shit out of her and raping her on a daily basis, and what she needs to do is put a gun to his fucking head and kill him.
Stephanie McMillan:
There is really no way to reform it or fix it. It is not a system that has gone too far or that has run off the rails. The rails are constructed that way, the whole system is born that way. It’s not something that can be restrained or reformed or fixed. It is not broken. It‘s doing exactly what has been predicted for the last 200 years.
The accumulation of capital is an inevitable process.
The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the monopolization of production, that‘s all part of how it works. And the only way that it can be gotten rid off is if we organize and become a powerful social force, more powerful than the lies, wealth and arms of our enemy. We have to first recognize it as our enemy. A lot of people don’t, because we are ideologically very dominated, and we’ve been conditioned for generations to accept this as normal.
Working together.
The propaganda that there is no alternative, that everything else has failed, that nothing else will work, this is our only choice—we have to break out of that. Yes, there have been attempts at other systems that have failed. But these were babies, trying to learn how to walk. And if they fell down, are we going to say “this baby is never gonna grow up and learn how to walk?” We have to learn from the mistakes of people who have tried different things, modify that according to our current situation, and collectively figure out a different way to live. We evolved as collective beings. We are not like this. This capitalist society has turned us into unsocial creatures, but we are social creatures, we are cooperative. This is our nature.
Organizing.
We have to organize and collectively build a movement, a mass movement that is strong enough, that is led by a politicized, revolutionary working class, and overthrow them. Take over. Take over the political system, get rid of it and institute our own, which is going to be built in the process of the revolutionary struggle; and we need to take over the means of production and convert it to—instead of profit—human needs that are in line with the requirements of the natural world. That is not an impossible dream. That is something that we would naturally do, if we weren’t being prevented by a class of people who controls everything and enforces that control with their armed might. If we can be strong enough, organize enough to break through that arms might and control society ourselves, we can do a lot better.
It is not going to be utopia, of course. There is going to be a lot to work through in the process and afterward a lot of conflict among the people. But that’s not an antagonistic conflict; we can work it out. The real antagonism is between all of us and those few at the top, who are preventing a decent society from coming into being and who are killing us all.
Charles Derber:
The conversation we‘re having is not a conversation that‘s on the plate in the United States. You tell me, how often you have seen in the New York Times or CNN or even MSNBC, any of the mainstream media, a conversation about whether we should have or get rid of capitalism? You‘re seen as freaking crazy if you raise this question. The idea is not only that capitalism is the only good, it’s the only possible way of organizing society. That‘s the bad news. And it’s really bad, because the ideological forces of control have consolidated around this idea. It’s only in very small niches and communities where this kind of question would get on the table without being laughed off.
Community is important.
When you actually question people about what they believe, it turns out they believe that capitalism is pretty fucked up. They think that capitalism is putting money into Washington and into political processes in a way that is pretty sociopathic, they are pissed off about the bailing out of the banks, they believe that people who work in McDonalds or in nursing homes deserve a living wage, they believe that unions are good things and that community is important, and they believe in the essential need to protect the environment. So, there is a resonance. When do people become receptive to ideas?
There is a counter-culture.
The contradiction that we‘re dealing with is, on the one hand you can‘t even talk about what we‘re talking about today. Capitalism is the only reality that the ideological apparatus of the country will accept as a dialog. And in a sense, there is a resonance to that. There aren’t masses out in San Francisco even who are saying “We want to talk about class revolution or about capitalism,” who would embrace what Stephanie just said. On the other hand, when you carefully interrogate people about what it is they believe on real issues, they want healthcare, good education for their kids, to save the environment for future generations. There is a counter-resonance, a counter-culture, but it operates under the formal mechanism of politics which has become spectacle- and money-driven.
The practice of resistance.
Somehow the practice of resistance and social change has to be diving under the surface of that resonant, controlling ideology, and finding the way to speak to the parts of people’s lives that are telling them everything is wrong in the society, that we need drastic change. We have to be really smart, and I mean that in an emotional way. We have to find a way to viscerally hook into the deep discontents that people are experiencing about their lives, and about their communities, about their kids’ prospects, about their own prospects. It‘s a little bit like an abused child.
You take an abused child, and you try to pull them away from their parents, and they will run to the parent who has been kicking them, and hold on to their knees and say “Don‘t take me away!” I think the body politic in the United States is operating a little bit like that. They know that they’re being abused, and they’re holding on for dear life to the abuser. And what a resistance movement has to do is to provide a source of safety and community that will allow people to realize I can let go of that and actually get rid of it, because it has been destroying my life.
Derrick Jensen:
A lot of environmentalists begin by wanting to protect a specific piece of ground, and they end up questioning the foundation of western civilization. And that‘s because they start by asking “Why is this land being destroyed?” and then they start asking “Why would any land be destroyed?” and then they hear that the needs of the economy are in opposition to the needs of the environment and they ask “Why would you have an economic system that is in opposition to the environment?” There is that huge split between grassroots environmental activists and mainstream activists. And the split is where their fundamental loyalty is.
Grassroots Activism.
With the grassroots environmental activists, the ones that I knew and grew up with is, their emphasis is always biocentric. And the loyalty of Tom Friedman is to capitalism. I keep thinking about the line by Harriet Tubman: “I freed hundreds of slaves, but I could have freed hundreds more if only they had known they were slaves.” It‘s the same thing with capitalism. One of our jobs in this pre-revolutionary phase is to help people to articulate the understanding that they already have, that they are enslaved by the system but they don‘t yet know it, just like the slaves Harriet Tubman tried to free didn’t know it.
Connection.
Charles Derber:
The young people in the country have a feeling like what Derrick is talking about, that their connection to their world is being destroyed. At some level it is translating to an understanding, that this is a symptom of something fundamentally wrong in their way of life. That the environmental destruction and climate change, as terrible as it is, is a symptom of something even deeper. Which is the way we’ve constructed our civilization and our way of life. This is the realm of possibility. But they have to go a long way in their movement, from that very gut-level understanding to being able to articulate the connections that at some level they feel.
Stephanie McMillan:
I agree that people are discontented. They understand that something is wrong. We can‘t go out and just talk about capitalism in abstract concepts at the start. I go out a lot and talk with people, pass out flyers and stuff like that, trying to organize. I start out by saying “It’s really difficult to survive under this system, where a few people take everything and we can’t even make a living,” and everybody is like “Yeah, it‘s horrible!” And I say, “We have to organize to do something about it. We have to fight back against this!”
Building connection.
“Yeah we do!” is a very common response. How do we crush it? I talked about it in very general terms, but a lot of people really want something more concrete. There is no easy formula for it. In order to make a political change—and a revolution is a political change—we need the ideological change first. In order to have a revolution in reality, we need to be able to imagine it in our minds. Organizing people means building relationships. If you can‘t find an organization that you agree with just start one. A conversation with one person, that’s how it starts. And then you find another person, and if you can’t find one or you don’t know one, then go out in the street and start talking to people. You don’t have to have all the answers, you need to open the conversation and you need to have regular meetings.
I know people don‘t like that, but you really need them. And you need to have study, and you need to have action. And that action is widely varied. Even going out and talking to people, that‘s an action. That’s how we start. There is no easy way to do it, there is no way around the tedious work of putting yourself out there. There is no other way to do it.
Derrick Jensen:
How do we crush the system? The North won the civil war before it started. Germany lost WWII before it started. The way you win war is by destroying the enemy’s capacity to wage war. That‘s the point of war. And one of the things we need to do—well, we need to recruit first, there is like fifteen of us—but one of the things we need to do is to destroy capitalism’s ability to wage war on us and on the world. We‘re not quite there yet.
Resisting change.
One of the really big barriers to recruitment is a wonderful metaphor that somebody told me. I was asking a fisheries biologist about blowing up dams, and the fisheries biologist was saying that a flood is a natural process. Every time a river floods, it changes course. It breaks her heart, because all these fish, the frogs and the trees who were in the old channel die. But she said that‘s what rivers do, they change course all the time.
There is a phrase that just stuck with me so hard—every time a river floods there is short term habitat loss and long term habitat gain. And as soon as she said that to me I got chills, thinking Why do we stay in bad relationships? Because we are afraid of the short term loss for long term gain. Why do we stay in bad jobs? Because we are afraid of the short term loss for long term gain. I am not in any way attempting to dismiss the terror involved in the collapse of any system, which is completely dreadful. But that’s one of the biggest things that is holding us all back, because of the very real prospect of terrible short term loss in exchange for the very obvious long term gain that will be gained by getting rid of capitalism.
Perhaps the single most important aspect of our work as aboveground organizers and activists is to promote and normalize militant, underground resistance against industrial civilization. There is a lot of other important work that we do as well—organizing alternative institutions, landbase restoration, and aboveground political work to dismantle dominant power structures—but ultimately, civilization won’t be stopped (and we won’t be successful) without coordinated and strategic underground action. Working to promote and normalize militancy is incredibly important for aboveground individuals and organizations, because it prepares and tends the soil from which such action will spring. Without this support—a culture of resistance that embraces, celebrates, and promotes underground action—it is much more difficult for underground groups and networks to become established and be effective.
While this is a foremost priority for us, it can also be one of the most difficult parts of our work. Publicly speaking out in support of militancy and a diversity of tactics can be very scary, for entirely valid reasons. There is the fear that it will invite backlash and condemnation from those loyal to the status quo, as well as the fear that it will alienate us from friends and family, and perhaps most daunting of all, there is the fear that those in power will arrest and throw us in jail. Again, these are all perfectly valid fears, and ones that individuals should confront before deciding what they are and aren’t comfortable doing as part of a resistance movement.
That said, there is an array of things we can do and steps we can take to minimize those risks and navigate them more securely. The best thing to do is to familiarize yourself with good security culture practices and fully internalize those behavior patterns until they become automatic. For more on security culture, click here.
In addition to security culture, there are specific ways of talking about underground action that can help to minimize security risk and make your message more appealing and accessible for your audience. What follows are some basic “dos” and “don’ts” that we have learned from our experience speaking and communicating about militant resistance, as well as an overview of several commonly asked questions on the subject and ways to answer them.
