Collapse and sustainability: arguments we should all hear

Anthropologists and archaeologists are slugging it out with each other about how to interpret the decline of ancient societies, such as the Polynesians of Easter Island, the Classic Maya or the Roman Empire. The rest of us could benefit from trying to follow their arguments.

One issue in debate is whether the problems these societies faced on the way down, and how they dealt with them, might tell us something about our own prospects.

That has immediate resonance. Most of us, except the most extreme optimists, have at some time or other imagined the prospect of some more deep-going social breakdown following from the crises (wars, economic failures, ruptures in our relations with nature) shaking the society we live in. We socialists invest our optimism in the idea that such breakdown can be averted by society being turned upside down, being remade free of hierarchy and alienation.

The controversy about past societies was taken out of the universities to a wider audience by Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA, one of the USA’s most prestigious academic institutions, with his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, published in 2005.

The storm of interest in this highly readable best-seller stang into action a group of archaelogists and historians who question Diamond’s approach.

Cities: working out a socialist critique

Twenty-first century socialism needs a critique of cities. Why don’t we ask ourselves whether these monsters in which most of us live – at the same time awful and wonderful – will survive in a communist future?

Kibera slum outside Nairobi (population estimated between 170,000 and 1 million)

We might question the assumptions in much twentieth-century socialist thinking that cities are a necessary part of human development … and revive and rethink nineteenth-century communist ideas that envisaged communism breaking down the division between city and countryside.

This article sets out some ideas on this, and aims to put in context a prescient article on this subject written by Amadeo Bordiga, the Italian left communist, in 1952 – which People & Nature publishes here in a new English translation for the first time.

The rise of the city is one of capitalism’s most obvious achievements. In 1800, the urban population was 3% of the world’s total population (27 million people); in 1900, it was 14% (225 million); and in 2000 it was 47% (2.9 billion).  In this decade, the majority of humans – in 2010, 50.5% (3.5 billion) people – are living in urban areas for the first time, according to a recent UN report.[1]

Kicking off? This is just the start

MARK KOSMAN reviews Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

Some people may dismiss Paul Mason as just another journalist, especially since he advocated more effective policing to contain the ‘Black Bloc’ after the 26 March TUC demo.[1] Yet, this is no reason not to read Why It’s Kicking off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.

Simply by bringing together insightful reports from the uprisings of 2010/11 – in Egypt, Greece, Israel, Spain, the UK and the US – Mason helps the reader get an overview of the present state of global class struggle. But, more than this, he puts these struggles in a historical and theoretical context and so provokes more interesting questions than any other recent book.

Mason’s main historical analogy is to compare the uprisings of 2011 with the waves of unrest in Europe in 1848 and in the period before the First World War. He argues that the radical intelligentsia, the newly unionised workers and the slum dwellers of the 19th century can be compared to the ‘graduates without a future’, the shrunken trade unions and the precarious workers of today. He also claims that the globalisation of the world economy, the revolutions in communications technology and the striving for individual freedom at the start of the 20th century can be compared to similar tendencies at the start of the 21st century.

Human “madness” in an inhuman society

This essay by STEVE DRURY reviews recent research in genetics and psychology, and argues that it can deepen our understanding of the forms of alienation experienced by humans through the succession of social systems in which they have lived since Palaeolithic times

What people are now is very different from what they were before about 10,000 years ago, when agriculture emerged. Before then, humanity lived more as part of the natural world, taking only what was necessary by

Horses drawn at Chauvet 30,000+ years ago

gathering easily-had foodstuffs and increasing their protein intake by hunting. There is little, if any, evidence suggesting that they stored produce, but plenty to show that people were continually on the move – on a continent-wide, even global scale.

This simple truism – that people are very different – masks huge social changes: the tendency to remain in fixed locations and growing communities following the so-called “agricultural revolution” of the late Stone Age; storing grain surpluses; and having living protein supplies tamed and on the hoof. Central to how people have changed is the expropriation of surplus produce that inexorably led to class society and to what Marx saw as the downward spiral of “the isolated individual in civil society”, through the alienation inherent in such expropriation and growing control of the majority by minority groups, both economically and culturally.

Here I hope to explore evidence for the relationship between these changes and the inner world of individuals. That inner world has interacted with the world at large through these changes in society. The study of psychological characteristics that set an increasing number of humans apart from the rest can throw light on the way that all humans live. The discussion centres on recent discoveries in the fields of genetics and psychology, and the links between them. They appear to have uncovered wholly unexpected natural factors at work that may revolutionise our general view of people who experience deep inner turmoil. Continued HERE

Deconstructing “energy security”: some questions

The rhetoric of “energy security” – most often heard from rich country governments angry that oil and gas imports are not being delivered in the way they want – is skilfully deconstructed in a new report from The Corner House, a research and advocacy centre for community movements and NGOs.

The report keeps to the high standard of research established at The Corner House, which has supported campaigns such as those around the social impact of the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline and against the UK judicial cover-up of bribery by weapons exporters. However I think that when the authors venture into history and social theory they sometimes loses their way. In this post I highlight what I think are the report’s strengths, and raise some questions.

The focus of “energy security”, as the term is generally used, is “on ‘securing’ new and continued supplies of oil, coal and gas, building nuclear plants and even

Ecological servitude

The idea that damage to the environment can be stopped by personal restraint gets a well-deserved hammering in a pamphlet (in French) posted on the web here … and the introduction is now published in English on People & Nature here.

Here’s a little bit of the first section, so that English language readers can get the flavour:

“You, you little guy! ‘Make yourself aware of your responsibilities’ with regard to the spoilation of the planet. By sorting your rubbish bins, and saving water and electricity … you can tighten your belt, in order to allow the industrial magnates to keep polluting in complete peace! That’s what ‘being aware of your responsibilities’ is all about!!!

“Why does society encourage this type of ‘responsibility’?

“Because it’s a way of making people accept austerity. Economise on water, gas, electricity. …

“‘Save the planet’, they say. A pretty shrewd way to make us tighten our belts! In fact why not get us to stop breathing all together?! That’s not far off. [...]

The price of oil, the Kazakh massacre and the City of London

Security forces opened fire on protesters at Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan, who were demanding better pay and conditions in the country’s oil fields, on Friday 17 December. Eleven people were killed and more than 70 wounded, according to the government. Kazakh opposition media and Russian reporters, working in the face of attempts by the authorities to impose a news blackout, say the number of victims may have been much higher.

In spite of the brutality of the massacre, on 18-19 December the protests spread. There was a big demonstration in nearby Aktau and clashes between police and protesters at Shepte. (See a good report by Reuters here.)

The Zhanaozen massacre is a turning-point in two important ways. First, it is the first mass murder of protesting workers in any of the post-Soviet republics. (There was a larger massacre in Andizhan, Uzbekistan, in 2005, when security forces shot dead of an unknown number of protesters, probably several hundred: the victims there were not strikers but a more heterogenous crowd.) Second, the Zhanaozen massacre amounts to the Kazakh state’s response to workers’ insistent demands that they share some of the wealth produced by the country’s oil boom – which is in turn a result of the relentless search by big international capital for new sources of oil, that is so central to its economy. 

The Durban deal, and an inhuman gamble

After 12 days of wrangling, posturing, wheeling, dealing, cajoling and demonstrating, delegates at the 17th UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa failed to reach agreement by its scheduled close on Friday 9 December, writes STEVE DRURY. It took a further 36 hours of “negotiations” to cobble together a deal: the style of discourse was familiar for this annual UN showcase of the climatically “great and good” – devious and vague.

Following the agreement on wording, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South African International Relations Minister and president of the conference, summed up the underpinning hubris of the weary yet self-satisfied negotiators: “No one can walk out of this room and say we don’t care about climate change. … We came here with plan A, and we have concluded this meeting with plan A to save one planet for the future of our children and our grandchildren to come.” The conference agreement had “saved tomorrow, today”, she said.

OK. How?

Durban talks. They won’t? They can’t?

There is a whirlpool sucking at the Kyoto protocol, under which rich nations are supposed to curb their greenhouse gas emissions – and in Durban, South Africa, where the 17th UN Climate Change Conference is in progress, the sound of sucking is getting louder, writes STEVE DRURY in this site’s first guest post.

Before the Durban gathering (28 November to 9 December) had even begun, there were not-entirely-unexpected rumblings that the Kyoto protocol, which expires next year, will be replaced by little or nothing.

Indonesia: struggles for land, and global warming in the here-and-now

 A vivid account of the battle for land in Indonesia has been published by Wildcat, the German communist group, here. It’s well worth reading. The Wildcat activists describe “two front lines” in the struggle for land. First, peasants are fighting for the return of land grabbed under the Suharto dictatorship and handed over to state plantations. Second, they are battling private corporations that grab land, often for palm oil production or for mining – a process that takes a heavy toll on Indonesia’s forests, as well as on those who live on the land.

Peasants who don’t sell up to the corporations, for fear of becoming dependent, face conflict.