Mon Oct 25 19:01:58 MDT 2004
I've been back here for a couple of days, actually. Paying my bills has driven home the true extent of my financial insolvency, so I've been contemplating whether I should continue my "exploration" of the country a bit longer (I really want to go to California), or just buck up and get another McJob here for a while. A depressing thought. Signing up with temp agencies and staying with the parents for a little while longer before launching on another journey might be a livable compromise.
A "crazy" alternative third option would involve selling my car and becoming a "real" traveler for a while. This should leave me with a fairly decent bank balance as well as less expenses to worry about, but I'm not sure I'm ready for THAT big of a leap yet. In true materialistic fashion, I've grown quite attached to my lovely little car, and the comfort it provides me. Given the trends in gas prices, plus what experience has taught me over the past few years, I consider it quite likely that Tobias will be the last car I ever own (as well as being the first). Thus, I'm reluctant to give him up too quickly.
Even excluding "good citizen" factors such as pollution and middle east oil, car ownership just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me anymore. My story goes something like this: In 2000, got a job that paid a decent salary. Went into debt to buy a car so I could conveniently drive to and from that job, as well be free to drive around to other events. A non-trivial portion of my income went into paying for said car. As the job became less fun (thanks largely to nonsensical edicts from management in which employees got no say), one of the big reasons I found myself sticking around as long as I did was so I could pay off car debt. If the main reason I have a car is to get to work, while the main reason I work is to pay car expenses, there is something seriously wrong with this picture. (Similar points could be made about other things, such as buying entertainment as a means to endure the tedium of meaningless employment.)
Anyway...
Hung out at the club last night. Got a free demo cd, enjoyed the Tragic Black show (Radio Scarlet was ok, but nothing to rave about IMO; though the bass player, who talked to me a bit before the show, seemed like a nice guy), followed by a trademark elusis set.
Now, I need to prepare to cast my vote, for whatever that's worth. I'll be posting a log of events from my journey whenever I get around to transcribing it.
crossposting this here too...
This essay, does a really good job of describing the motives behind the global uprising movement against modern capitalism. Though I recommend reading the whole thing, I'm copying a couple of sections below, for those who just want "the bare meat" of it.
In April 2001, a few weeks before thirty-four heads of state met in Québec City to hammer out details of trade liberalization throughout the western hemisphere, a mob of merry men and women dressed as Robin Hood and Maid Marian occupied the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco, demanding that the secret negotiating text of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) be released to the public. As he was carried away by police officers, one Robin Hood yelled: “I do not recognize the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham!” The bemused police bundled him into the back of their van as he shouted to the cheering crowds, “Robin Hood will be back!”
In thirteenth-century England, Robin Hood and his band of merry men defied the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham, but not just by robbing the rich to feed the poor. One theory suggests that Robin Hood is a fable of resistance against the ruling classes’ policy of transforming common land available for the use of all, into fenced-off grazing areas for sheep to encourage the native wool industry for their own private gain. This process, known as “enclosure,” remains one of the most powerful concepts in understanding contemporary capitalism, just as tearing down fences is one of the most powerful symbols of resistance to enclosure.
These unprecedented enclosures were precursors to mass clearing of the lands of peasants, and the eventual ushering of these people into the cities to become the factory workers of the industrial revolution where their labor, too, became an “enclosed” commodity. The dramatic upheaval of industrialization in Britain between 1785 and 1830 was the first of its kind in the world. Sweeping Enclosure Acts led to millions of acres of commonly held land being fenced off, pushing people off land, taking away their common rights of usage: collecting fire wood, growing crops, grazing animals, gathering food, hunting, and fishing. Over half of all cultivated land in England was put into private hands, until no county had more than three percent of its area held in common. An entire class of people experienced a loss of independence and freedom, traditions of local exchange and mutual assistance were shattered, and formerly self-sufficient people became wholly dependent on what they could earn and buy in a cash economy.
Compare this to the contemporary process by which communal lands from Africa to the Pacific are torn apart under the World Bank and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs. The Economist magazine invoked the fence of capital when it declared that Africa’s land, “must be enclosed and traditional rights of use, access and grazing extinguished,” as it is “private ownership of land that has made capitalism work.”
And so the peasant, indigenous, and social movements of the South are facing something similar to the first wave of enclosure in rural England; they are being thrown off their lands, and having their rights to water, to pasture, to forests, to seeds taken away from them. Via Campesina, the international peasant farmers union uniting farmers, rural women, indigenous groups, and the landless is one of the most extraordinary examples of the movements’ capacity for international networking – a veritable international peasants’ revolt in the making. With a combined membership of millions, from Brazilian landless to Indonesian farmers, it represents probably the largest single mass of people opposed to the WTO. The first points of resistance to global capitalism have been those who still depend upon natural resources directly for their livelihoods.
Meanwhile, in post-industrial societies which went through this process hundreds of years ago, today neoliberalism is penetrating the everyday, having to “enclose” new areas of our lives, areas previously unimaginable. From the invasion of the material fabric of life through the patenting of gene types, from the opening of markets in health, social care, and education through to the assertion of intellectual property rights over medicines – all are tainted by the logic of capital and the elevation of the commodity above all else.
As a result the Northern post-industrial rebels against enclosure began as culture jammers, software hackers, GM crop-pullers, road protesters. Making the connections, Native American poet John Trudell calls them “blue indians,” because, he says: “The world is now an industrial reservation and everybody is the Indian, and our common colour is the blues.”
These two groups; the natural resource-based movements – the indigenous, the farmers – of the South, and the post-industrial marginalized of the North, have somehow recognized in one another a shared enemy – global capital. Suddenly, the “blue indians” and the real Indians are speaking the same language. Subcomandante Marcos rejects the “plastic playlands” of corporate development that will dispossess the people of Chiapas of their land, while Northern anticapitalists reject the spectacles of consumer capitalism, those same plastic playlands that have covered every inch of their towns, and their souls. Together they are creating a movement of movements that defies easy classification, a rebellion whose character is one of anarchic hybridity, a potent mixture of the symbolic and the instrumental.
All over the world similar struggles, struggles against the commodification of every aspect of life, are being waged every day. A poster attached to the fence in Québec City read, “Capital is enclosure: First it fenced off the land. Then it metered the water. It measured our time. It plundered our bodies and now it polices our dreams. We cannot be contained. We are not for sale.” Unbeknown to each other, a Thai rural coalition, the Assembly of the Poor, had used almost the same terms one year earlier. When thousands of rural Thais – farmers, fisherfolk, the landless – converged to protest against the Asian Development Bank meetings in Chiang Mai in May 2000, they carried a tombstone on their backs inscribed with the words, “There is a price on the water, a meter in the rice paddies, dollars in the soil; resorts in the forests.”
And this:
Neoliberalism, an economic theory which is the latest incarnation of capitalism, means rule by the market. In other words, the market should be the predominant arbiter of all the decisions in a society.
The central fact of our time is the upwards transfer of power and wealth – never have so many been governed by so few. The economy has globalized but in this new world order there is no room for people. We are ruled over by transnational corporations and the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; our lives can be ruined at the whim of the financial markets. In their view, a deregulated, privatized, corporate-led global “free” trade regime is the answer to humanity’s problems.
But “free” trade is on an inevitable collision-course with democracy. For history shows that the exercise of genuine democracy will always act as a brake on the free market. The dawning of the twentieth century saw – along with deepening democracy and universal suffrage – an increase in social safety nets for the working poor. All this has be e n rolled back since the 1980s by the advent of neoliberalism. As economies are liberalized and public assets sold off, political freedoms are increasingly curtailed and the state is employed in keeping down the objections of its own protesting populations. The key decisions of our lives do not belong to us. We are the uninvited, standing on the peripheries as others shape the world in their own image. We are disconnected from what we produce and what we consume, from the earth and from one another. We live in an arid, homogenized culture.
Neoliberalism achieves this by use of its two most potent weapons. Firstly, messages of prosperity – we can all have what the rich have, as long as we keep our heads down and keep working. Secondly, when this doesn’t work, economic muscle. Between 1990 and 1997, “developing” countries paid out more in servicing their debt than they received in loans – a transfer of $77 billion from South to North, through the machinery of the IMF and the World Bank – organizations which ensure the continued dominance of the rich nations. Meanwhile, ironically, those rich nations are being “structurally adjusted” too, as the World Trade Organization rolls back democracy in the name of trade, unraveling decades of social progress.
Ours is the complex task of resisting this power exercised through a web of political, economic and military systems, representing entrenched and often invisible interests. In a global economy, there is no seat of power for the new guerrillas to storm. This is why protesters have been targeting international summit meetings. Unaccountable institutions that determine the fate of the global economy – the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the G8, the World Economic Forum – have not been able to meet in recent years without being accompanied by protest.
The spectacle of carnivalesque theaters of popular democracy outside these summits contrasts sharply with the undemocratic and secret negotiations of trade ministers and corporate lobbyists going on behind the police lines. These tactics are potent weapons, unmasking the true nature of neoliberalism’s economic mythologies and institutions, and simultaneously blowing apart the cultural malaise of late capitalism with authentic cries of rebellion, of culture re-engaged with the real.
For together we are the inversion, the mirror opposite, of a strata of concentrated power from above, in which decisions that affect billions of human lives are made at a transnational level where the market is king. We embody the real world below, the sphere of all those factors not reducible to a commodity to be bought and sold on a global marketplace; human beings, nature, culture – an international multitude that in its diversity challenges the idea that the global surfaces of the world market are interchangeable.