Paul Isaacs said: I think that the major portion of any "global plan" is to get people thinking about preparing for a sudden end to the status quo. If more people believed that is was necessary to plan, that would automatically call into question the continuing viability of the current economic produce-discard regime. The thousands of local micro-plans that would flow from a "need to plan" mindset would automatically form "the plan". Dear Paul, I want to thank you for your posting (and Jan too for her contribution and for posting it all). You make very good points, with good examples, and you suggest that we face the problems squarely and think strategically in seeking sensible responses. Several other people responded postively to your comments, and I've assembled those in a second posting for today. I resonate especially with your comments above, about the 'need to plan'. My own thinking about 'What is democracy, really?', has led me to the conclusion that the paradigm of 'decision making', as institutionalized in the process of voting, needs to be replaced by the paradigm of 'problem solving'. That is, true democracy becomes possible when the 'citizen role in governance' is defined as 'participating in the solving of societal problems', instead of as 'voting for candidates or referenda'. 'Problem solving' and 'need to plan' are, I believe, the very same notion. This same thinking has led me to the conclusion that an effective mass movement needs also to be oriented around the notion of 'problem solving', rather than the notion of 'ideology'. This, I believe, is precisely the point you are making above. I recently posted an essay on 'democracy and revolution' to the cj list... I'll post it to rn in the next day or two, as a follow up to your point. --- Let's move on to your more central point: Things ARE going to change. The current system is going to collapse catastrophically. The 'capitalist system' is our self-appointed 'system governor' - it makes the rules and governs the operation of all of our various 'support systems'. These 'support systems' include the ecosystem, our societal structures, our national economies, and our populations (re: overpopulation, famines, etc). These support systems are not only _likely to collapse, but are _already collapsing - the process is pretty far along. For example in many parts of Africa, such as Rwanda, the 'total collapse' has already occurred, and a massive die-off of the populations is happening right before our eyes. Atlantic fisheries, which were once the most bountiful in the world, are now essentially non-existent. The national economy of Korea already suffered a 'total collapse'. Whole pieces of our support systems _are collapsing, and _all pieces of our support systems are deterioriating. In this regard I couldn't agree with you more! Now let's consider the 'capitalist system' itself. Obviously if the support systems collapse utterly, then capitalism collapses with them. No debate there. I suggest that we think about how the 'end-game' is likely to be played out by the capitalist elite - that top echelon of bankers and planners that guide our global system on behalf of the handful of people who own most of it. How are they likely to deal with the final stages of collapse? There are really two parts to the capitalist system. The first is the economic system of exploitive development, the second is the political-military system of capitalist elite hegemony. The two support one another, and may seem totally inseperable, but the distinction turns out to be of central importance. You continue... ...The fortress is going to collapse on its own. The Titanic analogy is not quite accurate. We are going to the bottom because capitalism is blowing holes in the hull. The "corporate elite" are sinking their own ship. Allow me to rephrase this, making use of the distinctions I've suggested... The capitalist elite, in pursuing their agenda of exploitive development, are destroying the support systems upon which they, and the rest of us, are dependent. If the process continues unchecked, the support systems will collapse, the economic system will cease operating, and the elite will have sunk the whole ship, including their own command deck. I hope I haven't distorted your essential meaning, although I've obviously modified the emphasis for the purposes of analysis. (:<) At this point, certain historical precedents become relevant. The collapse of Rome, of the Inca empire... in fact the collapse of most previous civilizations. In all these cases, their systems operated according to certain principles of operation, one of the most important being their methods of agriculture and irrigation. When those systems could no longer be supported, the societies could not, or would not, change their methods of operation - and they succumbed. In some cases the regions simply could not support the population levels indefinitely - by any means then known. In other cases, solutions were available - but rigidity of thinking on the part of leadership elites prohibited them from being considered. Instead of responding to the need for change, they buried their heads in the sand and kept right on doing what they were doing until the final end - like Hitler in his bunker moving imaginary divisions on his maps. Is the capitalist elite operating under such denial delusions? Are they simply burying their head in ticker tape quotes and hiding from the collapse the rest of us can see so clearly? I believe there is considerable evidence to the contrary - evidence that well thought out responses are being deployed, evidence that elite planners are not ignoring the collapse scenario, but instead are preparing to deal with it using drastic methods - methods almost unimaginably diabolical. Keep in mind that it was only about a century ago that Native Americans were being systematially exterminated - to provide room for capitalist expansion. We may tend to blame it on some kind of wild-west pioneer mentality, but to the land speculators, the railroad builders, and the east-coast bankers, it was a fully-conscious program of business expansion through genocide. I ran across a confidential letter written by Thomas Jefferson, for example, in which he gave advice to an official about how the natives could be most efficiently killed off (it had to do with encouraging them to get into debt.) Let's look at some of the things the West, especailly the US, is doing in African countries such as Rwanda and many of its neighbors. First of all, the IMF has systematically destroyed the economies - in some cases utterly. From this cause alone, large-scale famines began. Then civil strife 'arose'. Indeed strife did 'arise' out of the abysmal economic conditions - but it was helped along with a strong push from US military advisors, and with shiploads of modern Western armaments. The training emphasis was on 'security operations', which translates into the creation of death-squad militias, much like those in East Timor - which were also US trained. Out of these Western-sponsored civil-wars, futher genocide occurred, partly from increased famine due to disorder, and partly from slaughter. No massive 'humanitarian' intervention effort was considered, I suggest, because what was happening is exactly what was intended to happen - genocide _is the fundamental agenda being carried out! Hence the corporate global media simply reports these events as unfortunate, unavoidable, due to ancient ethnic hatreds or draughts, etc. etc. Another thing the IMF and World Bank are doing is dismantling health-care facilities in these parts of Africa. Under IMF structural requirements, the budget for health care is limited to something on the order of $3 per person per year. A new 'philosophy' of health care has been adopted. Under this philosophy professional health care is seen as being an 'elite institution', and the population instead is to depend on untrained lay people to provide their care. Of these events, the elite media is simply silent. And then there's AIDs. Some people claim to have proof that AIDS was invented via biotech methods for the purposes of genocide. Perhaps. What we do know for sure is that the West is doing nothing to deal with the epidemic in Africa. Pharmaceutical research is aimed at expensive curative treatments, not at the kind of vaccines that would be needed in the African scenario. Nor is the West making any effective effort to spread an understanding about needles and condoms in Africa. Nor is the magnitude of the AIDS epidemic featured in our media. Everyone knows AIDS is a serious problem in the West, and victims are portrayed sympathetially in the media, but Africa is generally ignored. The de-facto Western response to African AIDS is to simply wait for them all to die. So we have economic collapse, famine, civil war, and no health care - all systematically promoted by the West, and explained away or ignored by the corporate media. And then we have AIDS, with no Western response at all. Does this or does this not add up to a conscious policy of genocide? --- What I'm suggesting is that this is _one example of how our elite planners are dealing with the collapse scenario. In this case, their thinking can be characterized this way: "Too much population? No problem... let's just pick some groups that aren't contributing much to the global economy and kill them off. There'll be fewer mouths to feed, more land to grow food for the rest of us, and more water to irrigate the crops." Do you perhaps reject that anyone could think that way? Do you think all of the West's systematic actions came from nowhere? When one economy collapsed, or one civil war broke out, it could be counted up to error. Not when it becomes a systematic pattern. Genocide in Africa represents part of a 'final solution' to the problem of over-population under an economic-growth paradigm. So that the survivors can continue gobbling resources, some will have to be sacrificed. And the ones sacrificed are those who consume the _least resources, the ones _least responsible for the problems of excessive growth. Such are the ones who contribute least to global economic growth. By the measure of GDP, they simply have no value. Just like the Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals before them. In Russia - where the birth rate is down, the death rate is up, the economy is in shambles, and famine is an increasing possibility in many regions - we may well be seeing a similar strategy unfolding, even if it isn't carried out quite so thoroughly. A significantly reduced Russian population, with the economy owned by the West, would permit most of Russia's vast resources to be exploited for Western 'needs'. If any kind of nuclear exchange develops, in the region of India, Pakistan, and China for example, that could used to accomplish a great deal of genocide all at once. In such a scenario, management of media would be absolute, and whole cities or regions could be anniahilated (using neutron weapons which kill people and leave resources intact) without us hearing about it. The full magnitude of such a war might only reach the light of day much later. Most people in the US, for example, have no idea of the magnitude of the genocidal suffering caused by the Iraqi sanctions, nor the extent of damage in Yugoslavia. --- I am not claiming that these kinds of genocidal policies are an effective (albeit abhorrent) solution to the collapse scenario. What I am suggesting is that the elite are _not ignoring the collapse crisis, but instead are taking drastic measures of various kinds in conscious response to that crisis. They may be reckless drivers, but they _are endeavoring intelligently to steer around the obstacles in their path. They are awake, not asleep - even if they are demonic. We need to pay closer attention to how they are playing this 'end game'. You continue... That the corporate fortress is desperate can been seen in its "humanitarian" bombing in Yugoslavia and its continuing depraved sanctions against the people of Iraq. The corporate empire's production expansion is faultering and it is turning more and more to an economy based on military consumption. The arms industry is certainly a major segment of the economy, but it is not growing at a rate - even with these recent adventures - to make a qualitative difference in the overall problem of glutted global markets. Instead, I suggest that your examples reveal other objectives - objectives which have more payoff than simply the military-related profits. In the case of Iraq, I've already suggested that the genocidal sanctions are part of a 'final solution' to the over-population problem. In addition, keeping Iraqi oil off the market leads to many billions of dollars of increased profits to the oil TNCs - far more significant than the arms-industry profits from Desert Storm itself. And after Sadam is finally ousted, the devestated nation will provide profits from re-development, as in Russia, and will be brought under the control of the IMF so that its resources can be systematically bled dry by outside 'investors' and the West. Because drastic actions have been undertaken, you conclude that the "corporate fortress is desperate". I suggest instead that the "corporate fortress" is revealing the extent to which it will go in defending itself, and the deviousness with which it is capable of pursuing its objectives. It would indeed reveal desperation, _if the military payoff was their only benefit from these escapades. But they're not. A deeper game is being played. The collapse of Southeast Asian economies was the result of a speculator raid on the currencies - combined with an inappropriate but _predictable response from the state banks. The IMF rushed in and systematically destroyed the economies. At first glance this economic crisis may look like a "hole in the ship" of global capitalism - evidence for its collapse. But I suggest it is simply one more conscious drastic action, aimed at _maintaining the Western-based "corporate fortress". By intentionally bankrupting Asian economies, two benefits were obtained. Their productive assets could be purchased at pennies on the dollar by Western interests, and their production output was taken off the glutted global markets. The whole operation was an effective project aimed at providing growth room for Western TNC's in the short run, and at reducing the region to the status of colonial dependency - facilitating resource confiscation in the long run. --- Putting this all together, we can see that one of the strategic elite responses to the environmental-collapse scenario is to return to a drastic version of Western imperialism. The third world (to which new nations are being added every day) is to simply be milked dry so that the West can continue longer in its consumptive growth mode. Poverty, disease, famine - and outright genocide - are all totally acceptable if they facilitate this milking-dry process. Population growth in the West itself is relatively stable and manageable - so to our elite leaders there _is no_ immediate crisis of over-population! "Billions of 'them' will die - so what? Like dinasaurs and Aboriginals, they didn't adapt. Such is life. Their women shouldn't have had so many kids. It's their own fault." If you think this can't happen, then just consider the response of Western publics to the genocide _already going on. They don't even know it's happening, or else they shrug it off with a shallow rationalization, handily provided by the media. --- At a more systematic level, elite planners have set up institutions which are actively measuring and quantifying all of the Earth's resources, creating an 'end game' budget of resources. They're using the latest satellite technology to map every water source, every acre of arable land, every mineral site, etc. These can be correlated with population data, consumption statistics, and other databases, so as to work out an accurate time-sequence of the end-game of our support systems - based on current trends. You might say they're making a multi-dimensional video of the end of the world. Most assuredly, our capitalist leaders are not asleep at the wheel. They are not going to retire to the first-class Titanic deck and fatalistically watch their video while the water pours in. They're going to use this information to figure out which populations should be culled when, so as to keep the West on its consumption binge for as long as possible. As regards petroleum for example, the IMF has already set prices at a level where many parts of the third world can no longer afford to use it for transportation, and hence remaining supplies are being channeled toward the West and the other remaining industrialized nations. Our leaders have demonstrated conclusively that they will use whatever means are necessary to implement whatever measures are deemed advantageous by their spreadheet analysis. No sacrifice is too great to insure the survival of capitalism, as long as someone else pays the price. In Candada, I'm sure you're aware of the controversy regarding water rights. As part of a global water-consolidation program - the result no doubt of the kind of resource surveys described above - initiatives have been launched to privatize water resources globally, and to modify the rules by which water resources are allocated. The scheme in Canada seems to be aimed at stealing Candada's water, and making it available to US agribusiness - possibly to alleviate the effects of climate changes expected from global warming. As water is confiscated by such means in the third world, most likely to be used to irrigate corporate plantations, we can expect massive famines as a direct consequence. These no doubt will be reported in the media as being the result of 'drought' - sad, but unavoidable. Again, drastic measures - but diabolical and effective - not desperate. --- You said: We must plan for the collapse of the economic commons and prepare to refill the social commons as fast as we can. What I've been trying to show is that this strategy is inappropriate. The way the scenario is being played out, it will be take longer than you think to reach a point where we in the West are likely to experience a full collapse of the economic commons. Long before that - if we wait in the wings - we will have permitted global human suffering on a scale that would make the Holocaust look insignificant by comparison. If we believe that the 'average German' was in any way morally culpable for Nazism, then we must similarly judge ourselves today. Especially if we are aware of the death camps, such as exist already in Iraq and Rwanda. We cannot wait in the wings, or at least I certainly hope we don't. But even if we set that aside - and say that unfortunately we can do nothing for 'them' - there is no guarantee that the economic commons in the West will _ever fully collapse. We may get skin cancer from no ozone, some of our coastal cities may be flooded due to global warming, and we will surely have to give up automobiles - and yet our economic commons may continue to function. At our current phase of the end-game, drastic measures have been taken and effective results obtained - room has been created for the West to continue its consumptive growth for longer than we would have otherwise predicted. Comprehensive surveys are being made, so that these kinds of system manipulations can be strategically timed to best effect. New media rationales for military intevention are being artfully developed (Yugoslavia, East Timor) - and have been institutionalized in the Clinton Doctrine - so that an aribtrarily heavy hand will be available in support of future system adjustments. They are learning as they go, trying out ideas, looking at the results, learning from their mistakes. Weapons systems are being refined, propaganda techniques polished, destabilization programs perfected, and economic consequences carefully charted. The end-game is being dealt with like a modern engineering project. It took such a project only a few years to develop the atom bomb, and only ten years to get a man on the moon. The end-game project has been going on for, I'd estimate, about twenty years. With Reagan and Thatcher you can see the groundwork being laid to create the kind of centralized global control that is necessary to play such a game. I'd say we're pretty far into the end-game project already, and that it is at a fairly mature stage of effectiveness. We simply cannot afford to let this game take its course. Too many people will be sacrificed before they 'come for us' in the West. Of course they are already coming for _some of 'us', as we can see with all the homeless, those without medical care, and in our soaring prison populations. But these circumstances are not perceived as by most as being a collapse of the economic commons. One of our problems is that we continually lower our expectations as our conditions worsen. When I was a kid it would have been shocking and horrifying to know there was a homeless family in our neighborhood. It would have been in the newspapers, and some kind of accomodation would have been found - or they might have been arrested as vagrants - but they wouldn't have been left on the streets. It would have been publicly unacceptable. Now we pass by daily and simply avoid their glance. From my perspective, our economic commons _has collapsed - it has collapsed to a level I consider outrageously unacceptable - but our consensus perception seems to define this level as being 'still operating'. At some point we must adjust our expectations upwards. Otherwise we may rationalize our way to being the last slave serving the last ear of corn to the last capitalist, grateful to the end that our own economic commons had not yet collapsed. There will never be any defining moment of collapse here in the West - not if we continue to adjust ourselves to planned incremental degradation. In this way, waiting for the collapse of the economic commons becomes almost equivalent to those millenial cults, who wait for flying saucers or second comings. It becomes a way to buffer ourselves from the unacceptability of the reality around us, and a way to forgive ourselves for not being able to do anything about it. --- This ungodly endgame scenario can be challenged only if we stand up and claim our humanity and collectively demand to control our own destinies and those of our communities and socieities. And, as they say on some Pink Floyd track, you will 'hear no starting gun', instead 'ten years will pass' and we'll find ourselves accepting conditions that today would have us all out on the streets. The defining moment can only come from inside ourselves. We must decide we've had enough. And if we can't do that now, I suggest, there's no reason to see why it will be any different later. Which brings us back to your first point about a "need-to-plan mindset". _Yes, we need to begin planning immediately to rebuild the social commons! But instead of planning for a post-collapse commons, let's begin building that commons right now - and let's call that commons a 'grass-roots revolutionary movement' (for a democratic renaissance?). For activists, I suggest, our greatest 'need to plan' is in the area of how-to-get-the-movement-started. We can't wait to agree on ideology first - harmonizing agendas must be part of the movement process. There is nothing to wait for - whenever we're ready we can begin. The job only becomes more difficult the longer we wait. solidarity, rkm ======================================================================== an activist discussion forum - •••@••.••• To subscribe, send any message to •••@••.••• A public service of Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance •••@••.••• http://cyberjournal.org **--> Non-commercial reposting is encouraged, but please include the sig up through this paragraph and retain any internal credits and copyright notices. Copyrighted materials are posted under "fair-use". 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