എഴുത്തും വായനയും ആരുടേത് ?

Posted by Venu K.M

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In a lighter vein, Ravi Varma posted a message few days ago, in a fb group
"ഈ പാര്‍ട്ടിയെക്കുറിച്ച് നിങ്ങള്ക്ക് ഒരു ചുക്കും അറിഞ്ഞുകൂടാ"..
'ഈ പാര്‍ട്ടി ഇഞ്ചിയാണ്; അതുകൊണ്ടാണ ഞങ്ങള്‍ പാര്‍ട്ടിക്കാര്‍ ഇപ്പോള്‍ ഇഞ്ചി കടിച്ച പോലെ നില്‍ക്കുന്നത്'!
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ഒരു ഇടതുപക്ഷ രാഷ്ട്രീയ നേതാവിന്റെ അത്യന്തം പൈശാചികമായ വധവുമായി ബന്ധപ്പെട്ട് ഇത് വരെയും അറസ്റ്റില്‍ ആയ പ്രതികളില്‍ 21 ഇല്‍ 18 പേരും സി പി ഐ (എം) ന്റെ സജീവ പ്രവര്‍ത്തകരും ഭാര വാഹികളും ആണ് എന്ന യാഥാര്‍ധ്യത്തെ എങ്ങിനെയാണ് കേവലം കമ്മ്യൂണിസ്റ്റു വിരുദ്ധ ഗൂഡാലോചനയും മാധ്യമ പ്രചാര വേലയായും കാണാന്‍ കഴിയുക ?

It is poor imagination that critics could be silenced by spreading hate against  the individuals concerned and dealing such persons with threats.
Possibly, most people who still have their hopes pinned around CPI(M) in spite of many bad things recently happening, don't appreciate this kind of
dirty imagination.


Yet, and yet..
We find that hate posters frequently do appear on compound walls of homes of people who might have a different point of view; these posters seem to be specifically designed to harass , if not intended to do physical harm!

We also find columns exclusively devoted to such hate talks.. Those diatribes have nothing but plain bitterness to convey..Like referring to one's personal choices like consuming or not consuming alcoholic beverages, visiting or not visiting close relatives, and so on..What right do these columnists have to pass moral judgments on people? Is this anything about defending Left politics ?

 ഇന്നത്തെ ദേശാഭിമാനി പത്രത്തില്‍ പ്രാദേശികം പേജിലെ കാണാപ്പുറം എന്ന പംക്തിയില്‍ ഇങ്ങനെ കണ്ടു: "എഴുത്തും വായനയും ഏകോപന സമിതി സാഹിത്യകാരന്മാര്‍ക്ക് തീറെഴുതിക്കൊടുത്തതല്ലെന്നു 'ജനം' പ്രഖ്യാപിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ എങ്ങിനെ സഹിക്കും ...സി പി ഐ (എം) നേതാക്കളുടെ മുഖം കാണുമ്പോള്‍ പേടിച്ചു വിറക്കുന്നതിനാല്‍ ഭാര്യവീട്ടില്‍ പോകുന്നത് പോലും നിര്‍ത്തിവെച്ച ത്യാഗിയാണ് ആയുസ്സിന്റെ പുസ്തകക്കാരന്‍.."

..പംക്തി ലേഖനം ഇങ്ങനെ തുടരുന്നു .."പാര്‍ട്ടി ഗ്രാമത്തില്‍ താമസിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ എന്തെല്ലാം സഹിക്കണം .അപകടം പറ്റിയാല്‍ ഉടന്‍ ആശുപത്രിയില്‍ കൊണ്ടുപോകാന്‍ ഫാസ്സിസ്ടുകള്‍ എത്തും .ഒന്ന് മിനുങ്ങി വരുമ്പോള്‍ ലോഹ്യം ചോദിക്കും മടുത്തു..കോടാമ്പക്കം പോയി പഴയ സിനിമാക്കളി തുടരുന്നതാണ് ഭേദം . "

 നോവലിസ്റ്റു  , കഥാകൃത്ത്‌ ,സിനിമാ നിരൂപകന്‍ , തിരക്കഥാ കൃത്ത് എന്നീ നിലകളിലും  സാംസ്കാരിക  രംഗത്ത് കേരളത്തിലെ ശ്രദ്ധേയനായ ഒരു വ്യക്തി എന്ന നിലയിലും അറിയപ്പെടുന്ന സി വി ബാലകൃഷ്ണന്‍ ജനിച്ചു വളര്‍ന്നത്‌ കണ്ണൂര്‍  ജില്ലയിലെ പയ്യന്നൂരിനടുത്തുള്ള അന്നൂരില്‍ ആണ് . എഴുതിത്തുടങ്ങിയ കാലത്ത് ദേശാഭിമാനി ബാല ബാല സംഘത്തിലും പിന്നീട്  പുരോഗമന കലാ സാഹിത്യ സംഘത്തിലും അതിനും ശേഷം 'ഹ്യൂമനിസ്റ്റു' ഫോറത്തിലും  സജീവ സാന്നിധ്യം ആയിരുന്നു അദ്ദേഹം . സി പി ഐ (എം) നോട് അനുഭാവം പുലര്‍ത്തുന്ന വേദികളില്‍ എന്ന പോലെ മറ്റു പാര്‍ട്ടികളുടെയും പാര്‍ടി ഇതരരുടെയും വേദികളിലും സ്വന്തം അഭിപ്രായങ്ങളും വീക്ഷണഗതികളും പങ്കു വെക്കാന്‍ അദ്ദേഹം ഒരിക്കലും മടി കാട്ടാറില്ല എന്നതിനാല്‍ നാട്ടിലെ കലാ സാഹിത്യ സാംസ്കാരിക ചടങ്ങുകളില്‍ പൊതുവേ  എല്ലാവര്ക്കും സ്വീകാര്യം  ആയ ചുരുക്കം  പേരുകളില്‍ ഒന്നാണ് ബാല കൃഷ്ണന്റെത് .
 ടി പി ചന്ദ്രശേഖരന്‍ ന്റെ കൊലപാതകത്തെ അപലപിക്കാനും അദ്ദേഹത്തെ അനുസ്മരിക്കാനും തൃശൂരിലും പയ്യന്നൂരിലും അടുത്ത ദിവസങ്ങളില്‍ നടന്ന രണ്ടു സാംസ്കാരിക കൂട്ടായ്മകളില്‍ ഒരു സാംസ്കാരിക വ്യക്തിത്വം എന്ന നിലയില്‍ അര്‍ത്ഥശങ്കയ്ക്കിടയില്ലാത്ത വിധം സി വി ബാലകൃഷ്ണന്‍ തന്റെ നിലപാട് വ്യക്തമാക്കി . പയ്യന്നൂര്റ് മീറ്റിംഗിന്റെ അടുത്ത ദിവസം ബാലകൃഷ്ണന്റെ വീട്ടിന്റെ പുറം മതിലില്‍ പതിയ്ക്കപ്പെട്ട പോസ്ടറില്‍ 'കമ്മ്യൂണിസ്റ്റു ഗ്രാമത്തില്‍ നിങ്ങള്‍ ജീവിച്ചിരിക്കുന്നത്‌  പോലും കംമ്യൂനിസ്ടുകാരുടെ ഔദാര്യം' എന്നതുപോലുള്ള ഒരു വാചകം ആയിരുന്നു .  ഏതാനും വര്‍ഷങ്ങള്‍ മുന്‍പ് ഒരു വാഹനാപകടത്തില്‍ പെട്ട ബാലകൃഷ്ണനെ ആശുപത്രിയില്‍ എത്തിച്ചതും രക്തം നല്കിയതും കമ്മ്യൂനിസ്ടുകാരായിരുന്നെന്നും ഇപ്പോള്‍ നടന്ന ടി പി ചന്ദ്ര ശേഖരന്‍ കൊലപാതകത്തില്‍  പ്രകടിപ്പിച്ച  അഭിപ്രായങ്ങള്‍ 'നന്ദിയില്ലായ്മയുടെ' ഉദാഹരണം ആണെന്നും ഉള്ള ഒരു ഓര്‍മ്മപ്പെടുത്തല്‍ മാത്രം ആണെന്നും ഭീഷണി അല്ലെന്നും വരുത്താന്‍ ആണ്  ചില കോളം എഴുത്തുകാര്‍ ദേശാഭിമാനിയിലൂടെ ഇപ്പോള്‍ ശ്രമിക്കുന്നത് .
 പയ്യന്നൂരില്‍ നിന്നും ഏകദേശം 10   കിലോമീറ്റര്‍  അകലെ  കാസര്‍കോട് ജില്ലയില്പെട്ട കാലിക്കടവ്  എന്ന പ്രദേശത്ത് വീട് വച്ച് വര്‍ഷങ്ങളായി താമസിച്ച് വരികയാണ്  സി വി ബാല കൃഷ്ണന്‍.

ഇറാക്കില്‍ നടന്ന ജനസംഹാരം മാധ്യമങ്ങള്‍ ലഘൂകരിച്ചു കാണുന്നുവോ?

Posted by Venu K.M

ഇറാക്കില്‍ അമേരിക്ക എന്ത് നേടി  എന്ന് ചോദിക്കുന്നവര്‍ സാമ്രാജ്യത്വ
യുദ്ധം ഇറാക്കി ജനതയ്ക്കും അമേരിക്കയിലെ സാധാരണക്കാര്‍ക്കും എത്ര  നഷ്ടം
വരുത്ത്തിവച്ച്ചു എന്ന് ചോദിച്ചിരുന്നുവെങ്കില്‍!

ഇന്നത്തെ  ദേശാഭിമാനി പത്രത്തിൽ വന്ന  എഡിറ്റോറിയല്‍ കാണുക.

'ഇറാക്‌ യുധ്ധം കൊണ്ട്   അമേരിക്ക എന്തു  നേടി?' എന്നാണു ശീർഷകം.

 അമേരിക്കയുടെ ഏകധ്രുവ ലോകാധിപത്യത്തിനുള്ള നീക്കങ്ങളെ ശക്തിയായ ഭാഷയിൽ

അപലപിക്കുകയും തുറന്നുകാട്ടാൻ ശ്രമിക്കുകയും ചെയ്യുന്ന പത്രം ഇറാക്കി ജനതയ്ക്കു

ഉണ്ടായ നഷ്ടങ്ങൾ വിവരിക്കുമ്പൊൾ  ചെറുതല്ലാത്ത തെറ്റുകള്‍ വരുത്തുകയാണൊ? ഉദാഹരണത്തിനു 2003 നും 2007 നും ഇടയിൽ,  കുറഞ്ഞത്‌  5 ലക്ഷത്തിനും  10 ലക്ഷത്തിനും   ‌ ഇടയ്ക്കു കുഞ്ഞുങ്ങള്‍  അടക്കം ഉള്ള ഇറാക്കി സിവിലിയന്മാർ അധിനിവേശത്തെ തുടര്‍ന്നും  അവശ്യ ഔഷധങ്ങൾ അടക്കം ഉള്ള വസ്തുക്കള്‍ കിട്ടാതാക്കിയ സാമ്പത്തിക  

ഉപരോധത്തെ  തുടര്‍ന്നും കൊല്ലപ്പെട്ടതായി  ബ്രിട്ടനിലെ ലോകപ്രശസ്ത മെഡിക്കല്‍ ജേര്‍ണല്‍ ആയ ലാന്‍സെറ്റ് റിപ്പൊർട്ടു ചെയ്തിരുന്നു. എന്നിട്ടും  ദേശാഭിമാനി യുടെ

കണക്കിൽ, ഇറാക്കിലെ ആൾനാശം വെറും ഒരു ലക്ഷം! ഒരു ലക്ഷം നിരപരാധികൾ

കശാപ്പുചെയ്യപ്പെടുക എന്നതു  തീര്‍ച്ചയായും ചെറിയ സംഭവം അല്ല.  പക്ഷെ, വസ്തുതകൾ

 അവതരിപ്പിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ മുഖ്യധാരാ മാധ്യമങ്ങൾ പാലിക്കുന്ന അനവധാനതയും,  മൂന്നാം ലോകജനതയുടെ ജീവൻ  താരതമ്യേന വില കുറഞ്ഞതാക്കുന്ന ഒരു രീതിയും ഒട്ടും ആശാസ്യം അല്ല. അറിഞ്ഞും അറിയാതെയും എല്ലാ മുഖ്യധാരാ പത്രങ്ങളും ഈ രീതി പിന്തുടരുന്നു എന്നത്  ഖേദകരം ആണ്; മാത്രമല്ല, സാമ്രാജ്യത്ത്വ യുധ്ധങ്ങളുമായി  ബന്ധപ്പെട്ടു ലോകജനത ഇന്ന് അനുഭവിക്കുന്ന പ്രശ്നങ്ങളെ അത് ഒട്ടൊക്കെ അരാഷ്ട്രീയവല്‍ക്കരിക്കുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നു.

ഇറാക്കി സിവിലിയന്മാരുടെ ജീവാപായങ്ങള്‍ വംശഹത്യയുടെ മാനങ്ങള്‍  ഉള്‍ക്കൊള്ളുന്നു  എന്നതാണ് സത്യം.

അതുകൊണ്ട് അധിനിവേശ അമേരിക്കന്‍  സൈന്യത്തിന്റെ പക്ഷത്തുണ്ടായ ജീവാപായങ്ങള്‍ കണക്കിലെടുക്കെന്ടെന്നല്ല.  അമേരിക്കൻ പക്ഷത്തുള്ള അധിനിവെശ സൈന്യത്തിന്റെ നഷ്ട്ടക്കണക്കുമായി താരതമ്യം തന്നെ അസാധ്യം ആണു. പാശ്ചാത്യ  വാര്‍ത്താ ഏജന്‍സികള്‍ എപ്പോഴും  പ്രാധാന്യം  കൊടുക്കുന്നത് അധിനിവേശപക്ഷത്തിന്റെ ബോഡികൌണ്ട് കിറുകൃത്യം ആക്കാന്‍ ആണ്.( സൈനിക ലാക്കോടെയുള്ള പൊള്ളയായ അവകാശവാദങ്ങള്‍ പൊളിച്ചു കൂടുതല്‍ ആളുകളെ യുധ്ധത്ത്തിനു എതിരായി പ്രതികരിക്കാന്‍ പ്രേരിപ്പിക്കുക എന്ന സദുദ്ദേശം undaakaam എന്നത് മറക്കുന്നില്ല)
ഇറാക്കില്‍ കൊല്ലപ്പെടുന്ന അമേരിക്കന്‍ പട്ടാളക്കാര്‍ പോലും അധികവും അമേരിക്കൻ സമൂഹത്തിന്റെ താഴെത്തട്ടുകളിൽനിന്നു റിക്രൂട്ടു ചെയ്യപ്പെടുന്നവർ ആണു എന്നതും പ്രസക്തമായ  കാര്യം ആണ് .

My Response to a Blog Post Relating to Rationalism, Religion (and indirectly to Marx! )

The US Communist Party Resolves: End the wars — fund human needs not militarism

Posted by Venu K.M

http://www.cpusa.org/communist-party-resolves-end-the-wars-fund-human...

*Whereas*, U.S. military spending for FY 2011 is projected to be $1.4
trillion and this massive, wasteful spending is the might behind US
transnational corporate domination and the enrichment of the
military-industrial complex;

*Whereas*, It comes at the expense of states and local communities,
struggling with a $180 billion collective deficit, devastating cuts to
social services and education, and massive layoffs of public workers;

*Whereas*, US military spending plus the cost of two wars and hundreds of
U.S. military bases worldwide are a chief obstacle to funding massive
federal jobs creation, public education, health care, mass transit,
affordable housing, other infrastructure needs and aid to the states and
municipalities;

*Whereas*, Militarization of the economy negatively impacts economic growth,
the same money could create far more jobs in the public sphere. Deep cuts in
military spending are a social imperative;

*Whereas*, Despite the Obama administration exemption of cuts in military
spending, there is a growing recognition of the destructiveness of high
military spending and the costs of militarism;

*Whereas*, A 2009 Pew Research Poll revealed a total of 55% of Americans
wanted to decrease (18%) military spending or keep it the same (37%); only
40% wanted it to increase.  Some members of Congress have renewed a call for
a 25% cut and the elimination of Cold War weapons systems as a first step;

*Whereas*, The Obama administration is under intense pressure from the right
wing, some corporate ruling and military circles to continue militaristic
policies and the historic imperialist trajectory of US foreign policy.
However, the Obama administration, also reflecting counter-currents, has
taken some important steps in the opposite direction. This creates new
opportunities to demilitarize the economy and change our foreign policy;

*Whereas*, The Obama administration has declared its support of a
nuclear-free world while at the same time has responded to pressures from
Cold Warriors and the military industrial complex. Small steps forward
include the new START treaty with Russia, and the narrowing of terms for use
of nuclear weapons. At the same time, the administration recently requested
a 14% increase in spending for nuclear warheads in fiscal year 2011 and a $5
billion increase over the next five years;

*Whereas*, The Obama administration has continued on track to withdraw U.S.
forces, bases, and military contractors from Iraq in accordance with the
Status of Forces Agreement;

*Whereas*, However, the administration's escalation in Afghanistan further
exacerbates problems there, in neighboring nuclear-armed Pakistan and the
region. The war has cost the lives of more than 1,000 U.S. troops, and over
20,000 Afghans, including many civilians, and has devastated the country's
infrastructure;

*Whereas*, U.S. and NATO military presence allows the Taliban to represent
itself as a fighter against foreign occupation, and, the withdrawal of the
U.S. military and NATO from Afghanistan on a speedy timetable requires a
plan that helps the people of Afghanistan and the region to recover from
more than 30 years of war and U.S. imperialist intervention. UN-sanctioned
negotiations, which involve the countries in the region, the Afghanistan
government and all the armed militias, is the only basis for a total and
complete withdrawal of troops. It requires a policy of international and
regional cooperation instead of military confrontation;

*Whereas*, The continuing Israeli-Palestinian crisis and denial of the
national aspirations of the Palestinian people involve violations of human
rights and international law, inflame international tensions, and cost
American taxpayers billions of dollars in military spending that could be
used for human needs in the U.S.

*Whereas*, The continuing crisis and denial of Palestinian national
sovereignty is promoted by and serves the interests of extreme right-wing,
militarist elements in the U.S., in Israel, and elsewhere. It is contrary to
the real interests of the Palestinian and Israeli people as well as the
people of the United States

*Whereas*, Sentiment is growing among influential circles within our country
that a two-state solution is a vital U.S. interest, and there is a growing
grassroots movement for strong U.S. action to make that widely accepted
solution a reality, including a growing section of the U.S. Congress;

*Whereas*, The Cold War U.S. policy of isolating and seeking to undermine
socialist Cuba has been a failure that has cost lives, promoted and
sponsored terrorism, isolated the U.S. internationally, and hurt both the
Cuban and American people;

*Whereas*, Trade with Cuba can be an enormous job-creating factor and
economic boost for American workers and farmers;

*Whereas*, Bipartisan U.S. sentiment is growing for normalizing economic,
cultural and political relations with Cuba;

*Whereas*, Addressing these and other global challenges, during the current
economic crisis, requires an energized and expanded peace movement, which is
embedded in the struggles for economic justice and against budget cuts while
at the same time mobilizing opposition to the wars and responding to new
foreign policy crises;

*Whereas*, The peace movement must work to build broader alliances with
others fighting for social, racial and economic justice, including labor,
civil rights and immigrant rights organizations, and community groups, and
municipal and state governments reeling from the crisis; and

*Whereas*, Communists and the left can play an important role in bringing
our strategic and tactical thinking to the peace movement and other social
movements, and in helping build the organizational capacity of a broad
people's movement that can change foreign policy, end militarism while
solving the economic and jobs crises; therefore, be it

*Resolved*, That the CPUSA shall step up efforts to help the peace movement
build strategic alliances with labor and community organizations working for
economic and racial justice, as well as with the environmental movement, to
develop and fight for a comprehensive jobs program and help create a green
demilitarized economy and to help change the thinking of the American people
further in this direction;

That the CPUSA calls for dramatic and long-term cuts in the military budget,
including closing all foreign military bases, and for directing these
resources to fund human and community needs, including care for veterans,
and repair the damage of US imperialist policies, wars and occupations;

That the CPUSA supports the need for conversion of military related
industries and their jobs to peaceful uses, so as not to create any economic
hardship for workers and their families;

That the CPUSA will step up its involvement in movements calling for
slashing the military budget and support the call for an immediate 25% cut
in military spending and the elimination of Cold War weapons systems;

That the CPUSA will work in the electoral arena to defeat extreme right-wing
candidates supported by the military industrial complex;

That the CPUSA supports all efforts to strengthen the Non Proliferation
Treaty and steps toward nuclear disarmament, including ratification of the
START treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by the U.S. Senate;

That the CPUSA supports global collective diplomatic action to prevent the
spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states and strongly supports the
renewal of the grassroots nuclear disarmament movement that will help to
keep nuclear abolition on the political agenda. We support the call for the
Obama administration to initiate multilateral talks for a nuclear weapons
convention as the boldest way to fulfill the administration's pledge for a
world free of nuclear weapons;

That the CPUSA strongly opposes the redeployment of troops or military
resources from Iraq to Afghanistan or other areas in the region and supports
the struggle of democratic forces in Iraq, especially the Iraqi labor
movement, to expand democratic and political rights, able to develop Iraq
free of domination by U.S. transnational corporate interests;

That the CPUSA supports the right of the Afghan people to self-determination
and sovereignty and will work with the broad peace movement to build support
for US and NATO withdrawal. The CPUSA calls for a rapid, sustainable
withdrawal plan including a massive international development aid plan
funded through United Nations agencies and Afghan led NGOs; and an enhanced
role of surrounding countries with a stake in the long-term stability of
Afghanistan, including China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Iran in helping to
resolve the security, political and economic development of Afghanistan; and

That the CPUSA will work to defeat the right-wing attempts to derail the
Obama Administration plans to end the Iraq war and remove the U.S.
occupation forces, including all military contractors and bases.

That the CPUSA will deepen its involvement in building a broad movement to
support the Obama administration's positive moves for a two-state solution
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to resist right-wing efforts to derail
that process, and to ensure that the U.S. takes strong and sustained action
to bring about prompt establishment of a viable Palestinian state side by
side with Israel.

That the CPUSA will step up its efforts to take advantage of new openings to
build a broad movement, involving labor, farmers and other
non-traditionally-left forces, to end the embargo and travel ban against
Cuba and to normalize relations with Cuba, including building support for
legislation in Congress that moves in this direction. These efforts shall
include building broad understanding of and support for freeing the Cuban
Five as part of steps toward normalizing relations with Cuba.

*Resolution adopted by the 29th National Convention of the Communist Party
USA, New York, NY May 21-23, 2010.*

--

Apoorvanand's Article Published in Jansatta About Imageries of War Dominating the Minds of Intellectuals : Debated in Kafila.org

http://kafila.org/2010/05/22/apoorvanand-maoists-jansatta-piece/#comment-9704

"WE CAN GO INTO EXTRA TIME BUT WE CAN"T AFFORD A REPLAY"-World's 56 Newspapers in 45 Countries Publish Common Editorial This Day

Posted by
Venu K.M




“We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay”

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries took the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. But curiously, no papers from the USA and Australia featured this unique voice of humanity


Copenhagen: Seize The Chance

The World Editorial

07 December, 2009
The Hindu

http://www.counterc urrents.org/ ed071209. htm

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency. Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting, and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time, and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone. The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the President cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so. But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”

At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels. Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere — three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce its emissions within a decade to very substantially less than its 1990 level. Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe,” must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing. Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat, and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it. But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognised that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs, and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels. Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over shortsightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too. The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.



Papers That Carried The Editorial

Asia: 16 papers from 13 countries and regions

Economic Observer, China Chinese

Southern Metropolitan, China Chinese

CommonWealth Magazine, Taiwan English

Joongang Ilbo, South Korea Korean

Tuoitre, Vietnam Vietnamese

Brunei Times, Brunei English

Jakarta Globe, Indonesia English

Cambodia Daily, Cambodia English

The Hindu, India English

The Daily Star, Bangladesh English

The News, Pakistan English

Daily Times, Pakistan English

Gulf News, Dubai English

An Nahar, Lebanon Arabic

Gulf Times, Qatar English

Maariv, Israel Hebrew


Europe – 20 papers from 17 countries

Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany German

Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland Polish

Der Standard, Austria German

Delo, Slovenia Slovene

Vecer, Slovenia Slovene

Dagbladet Information, Denmark Danish

Politiken, Denmark Danish

Dagbladet, Norway Norwegian

The Guardian, UK English

Le Monde, France French

Libération, France French

La Repubblica, Italy Italian

El Pais, Spain Spanish

De Volkskrant, Netherlands Dutch

Kathimerini, Greece Greek

Publico, Portugal Portuguese

Hurriyet, Turkey Turkish

Novaya Gazeta, Russia Russian

Irish Times, Ireland English

Le Temps, Switzerland French


Africa - 11 papers from eight countries

The Star, Kenya English

Daily Monitor, Uganda English

The New Vision, Uganda English

Zimbabwe Independent, Zimbabwe English

The New Times, Rwanda English

The Citizen, Tanzania English

Al Shorouk, Egypt Arabic

Botswana Guardian, Botswana English

Mail & Guardian, South Africa English

Business Day, South Africa English

Cape Argus, South Africa English


North and Central America - six papers from five countries

Toronto Star, Canada English

Miami Herald, USA English

El Nuevo Herald, USA Spanish

Jamaica Observer, Jamaica English

La Brujula Semanal, Nicaragua Spanish

El Universal, Mexico Spanish


South America – three papers from two countries

Zero Hora, Brazil Portuguese

Diario Catarinense, Brazil Portuguese

Diaro Clarin, Argentina Spanish

Verdict 2009: Lessons for the Left [CPI (ML) Liberation- Document]

Posted by
Venu K.M

''...The epicentre of the anti-CPI(M) political earthquake lies
squarely in the Singur-Nandigram seismic zone where the CPI(M) has
been punished for its arrogant and coercive attitude to the peasantry
and the intelligentsia, for its ruthless attempt to implement the same
economic policies that it claims to have been opposing all along.."

Verdict 2009: Lessons for the Left

The results of 2009 elections can be described as a string of
surprises not only for many well-entrenched parties and seasoned
politicians but also for a host of commonsensical notions about
contemporary Indian political reality. Of late, it became rather
customary to look at elections in India through the prism of coalition
politics, caste equations and regional diversities. Verdict 2009 has
given a serious jolt to this facile view and reasserted the underlying
structural dynamics of Indian politics. Conventional wisdom would not
have given the Congress anything more than 150 seats, but the fact
that the Congress managed to notch up as many as 206 seats from across
the country clearly reveal a national verdict which cannot be reduced
to a mere sum total of the poll outcomes in different states and
regions.

The NDA had long been expecting the 2009 elections to go its way and
LK Advani had been duly designated its Prime Ministerial candidate.
‘Iron Man’ Advani saw Manmohan Singh as the weakest link of the
Congress chain and hoped the chain would snap if only he could make it
a direct clash between the UPA’s ‘weakest’ and the NDA’s ‘strongest’!
He tried to fight and win the elections in true US Presidential style,
but even before his campaign could take off he found himself
overshadowed by two more self-appointed PMs-in-waiting, the
redoubtable Narendra ‘Nano’ Modi and one Varun ‘venom’ Gandhi!

The results only reveal how miserably the NDA lost the plot in its own
strongholds. Of all the NDA-ruled states, only Chhattisgarh, Karnataka
and Bihar went the NDA way while in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, the
Congress staked almost equal claims defying its obvious organisational
weaknesses. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar’s spectacular showing cannot really
be treated as a typical NDA victory – it had more to do with the
disintegration of the UPA and the continuing public anger in Bihar
against the RJD-LJP brand of politics. Quite understandably, the NDA
emerged as the overwhelming beneficiary of this public anger against
the RJD’s legacy of chaos and misrule.

While the NDA remained confined to its own pockets, the ‘Third Front’
was humbled in its own strongholds. In West Bengal, the CPI(M) got its
worst drubbing in three decades with its own tally getting reduced to
only 9. The overall Left Front tally came down from the high point of
60-plus in the 14th Lok Sabha to mere 24. The grand alliances forged
in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh failed to click, and ‘Mission
Mayawati’ failed to fire the imagination of the BSP’s own base in
Uttar Pradesh. Forged in a hurry, the Third Front had neither cohesion
nor credibility; it thrived primarily on the exuberance of electoral
expectation regarding the fortunes of regional alliances.

The Congress on the other hand sensed the national mood that looked
for some order and stability in an overwhelming situation of crisis
and uncertainty. In the absence of any reliable cohesive alternative,
large parts of India once again turned to the grand old party now led
by the fourth generation of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Various local
factors only facilitated the crystallisation of this national mood,
and the Congress strategy was perfectly in tune with this developing
sentiment. If the Congress decision to shelve the UPA during the
elections and try the party’s own luck in the two most crucial Hindi
belt states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar was a tactical masterstroke,
the suspension of the “Jai Ho” ad campaign and withdrawal of the
candidature of Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar in Delhi reflected a
rare political sensibility.

What lessons do the results hold for the future of the people’s
movement and Left and democratic politics in India?

The Congress establishment would like to portray its revival as a
popular endorsement of its policies built around the pro-corporate
economic agenda and pro-US foreign policy framework. This is far from
the truth. The country is reeling under a massive economic disaster
sponsored by the neo-liberal economic offensive of indiscriminate
liberalisation and globalisation and steady withdrawal of the state
from productive investment and welfare-oriented public expenditure,
and there can be no question of the people endorsing policies that
spelled such disasters. It is also equally clear that the country is
not enamoured of the much-touted strategic spin-offs of a pro-US
foreign policy when the entire neighbourhood is trapped in tremendous
social upheaval and political turbulence and India’s growing
identification with the US only renders it more vulnerable on every
count. Signs of growing US involvement in India’s domestic affairs
have also been quite visible with US officials making it of late a
habit to call on leaders of different parties.
By all accounts, a more confident Congress-led government will now
tend to pursue the pro-corporate pro-imperialist policies with greater
speed and aggression while cleverly deceiving the people with the
rhetoric of secularism, empowerment and ‘inclusive’ growth. Instead of
getting taken in by the deceptive discourse of the emerging ‘new
generation’ Congress, the forces and friends of people’s struggles
must now intensify public debate over the real state of affairs on
different fronts and raise the level of popular mobilisation and
resistance to press for a real change in the policies and priorities
of the government.

Contrary to dominant media explanations, the rout suffered by the
CPI(M) cannot be attributed to its belated oppositional stance
vis-a-vis the UPA’s pro-US policies. The epicentre of the anti-CPI(M)
political earthquake lies squarely in the Singur-Nandigram seismic
zone where the CPI(M) has been punished for its arrogant and coercive
attitude to the peasantry and the intelligentsia, for its ruthless
attempt to implement the same economic policies that it claims to have
been opposing all along. It is ironical that while the architect of
the SEZ policy succeeded in masking its true face behind legislations
like NREGA and forest land rights, the CPI(M) was seen as the brutal
face of corporate land-grab offensive. Even when the CPI(M) quite
correctly questioned and opposed the Indo-US strategic partnership and
nuke deal, the point was allowed to get diluted and lost in the
party’s desperate drive to somehow prop up a Third Front” devoid of
any kind of pro-people, anti-imperialist commitment.

The results have also exposed the limits of the politics of social
engineering and alliance arithmetic. Mayawati’s ‘sarvajanwad’ and Lalu
Prasad’s ‘Mandal magic’ are clearly on the wane. Reports from UP
indicate that while Mayawati failed to sustain her newly discovered
upper caste base, cracks have also started surfacing in her core
support base among dalits. Down south, the TDP-TRS kind of opportunist
bonhomie and the desperate attempt of the PMK-MDMK-AIADMK alliance to
make political capital of the plight of Sri Lankan Tamils have also
been squarely rebuffed by the people. The CPI(M) has only discredited
itself by glorifying and peddling this opportunism in the name of
‘Third Front’ politics.

The Left clearly has a lesson to learn from the Congress. The lesson
is certainly not to seek signs of anti-imperialism or pro-people
concern or commitment in the emerging leadership of the Congress. If
the Congress has retrained its focus on its own revival overcoming the
‘BJP threat’, ‘Mandal magic’ and ‘coalition politics’, the Left must
also rebuild and reposition itself as the core of the people’s
movement for survival, justice and democracy and for the nation’s
quest for a dignified future beyond the strategic umbrella of the US.
A renewal of the communist identity as the most sincere, vibrant and
fighting platform of people’s politics is the need of the hour.

The reverses suffered by the Left in general, and the admittedly poor
showing of the CPI(ML) in Bihar, are bound to generate vibes of
demoralisation and despondency across different sections of the Left.
The noise emanating from dominant quarters of West Bengal CPI(M)
against the ‘dogmatism’ and ‘adventurism’ of the party’s central
leadership seeks to attribute the CPI(M)’s electoral rout to its
belated act of withdrawal of support to the Congress. This is nothing
but an exercise in barking up the wrong tree. If the CPI(M) had not
withdrawn support, the Congress would have anyway subjugated the Left
in national politics, while the TMC would have still monopolised the
public anger in West Bengal. Not ‘dogmatism’ or ‘adventurism’, the
greatest internal enemy of the Left at this juncture is opportunism
and the intoxication of power. Any meaningful introspection must be
aimed at identifying and eradicating the real malady and rejuvenating
the Left movement in closer integration with the people and their real
needs and aspirations.

By rejecting the NDA and rebuffing the cobweb of opportunist alliances
and narrow identity politics, the 2009 verdict has opened up new
possibilities for the entire Left and democratic camp to assert as a
fighting opposition in the national political arena. Revolutionary
communists must take adequate note of the prospects and challenges
unleashed by the verdict and rise wholeheartedly to the occasion.

MIDDLE CLASS AND NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER

Middle Class Angst: The Politics Of Lemmings- Part I

By Stan Goff

20November, 2007
CarolynBaker.net

There is a common misconception among environmentalists and peak-oilers (I count myself among both) that cars created the suburbs. The car suburb, however, became what it is with regard to cars only incidentally. The real motive for the suburbs was plain garden-variety white supremacy. Cars simply became necessary to facilitate the spatial segregation that simultaneously confined African America largely to decaying urban spaces and built the 'burbs as white enclaves. It's not that simple any more, of course. All things change all the time - as we'll see momentarily - but it was white fear and loathing of the Dark Other that set the whole process in motion.

The sudden discovery - still ongoing - that most of us (more than half the US now lives in Suburbia) are trapped here if and when our private automobiles run out of gas (or the money to buy it), came after suburbanization was a fait accompli. This is the stage in any historical process where people begin to indulge themselves in disambiguation of the past - simplifying what has happened until it appears that it was predictable all along. Since we believe this - that things are predictable - we are easily convinced that correlation equals causation in our reconstructions of history; and we apply those correlatives that are familiar and comfortable. Ergo, because oil companies and auto manufacturers participated in the development of Suburbia, they were the conscious agents of it all along. White environmentalists and many white peak-oilers are not well-versed in the history of race, and they have shitty heuristics for understanding how it is constituted.

Not surprisingly, their heuristic - the equivalent of what we call intuition, or common sense - is that of Suburbia, which has been the predominant mode of white American thought since the late 1960s. It is what Matthew Lassiter calls "the prevailing language of middle-class meritocracy and color-blind innocence."

The City of Richmond's present pattern of residential housing... is a reflection of past racial discrimination contributed in part by local, state, and federal government... Negroes in Richmond live where they do because the have no choice.

-Bradley v. Richmond (1972),

District Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr.

We think that the root causes of the concentration of blacks in the inner cities of America are simply not known.

-Bradley v. Richmond (Appeal, 1972),

Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals

Highway construction, urban renewal programs, loan policies, municipal annexations, and court decisions that re-coded race as untouchable-class, were all instrumental in the development of Suburbia, and the concomitant development of the Black ghetto. These practices were not accidental or self-organizing or the product of "market forces." They were systematic, intentional, and imposed. When the preponderance of evidence showed in court (Bradley v. Richmond) that this was the case, the Fourth Circuit established the official federal position on the matter. "We don't remember how it got to be this way; therefore we can do nothing about it."

I mention this just to set the stage for my main thesis. The history of this development is ably and accessibly articulated in Matthew Lassiter's very important book, The Silent Majority - Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt (Princeton University Press, 2006).

The population shift to the suburbs and the power shift to the Sunbelt economy requires a new metropolitan framework for political history and public policy that transcends the urban-suburban dichotomy and confronts instead of obscures the pervasive politics of class in the suburban strategies of the volatile center. Surely an honest assessment of the nation's collective responsibility in creating the contemporary metropolitan landscape remains an essential prerequisite for grappling with the spatial fusion of racial and class politics that ultimately produced an underlying suburban consensus in the electoral arena. If "the problem of the color line" represented the fundamental crisis of the twentieth century, the foremost challenge of the twenty-first has evolved into the suburban synthesis of racial inequality and class segregation at the heart of what may or may not be the New American Dilemma. (Lassiter, p. 323)

Lassiter's "dilemma" was that of racial segregation, segregation which was spatial instead of formal... segregation which required no White and Negro water fountains. The court-supported myth that the new segregation is de facto and not de jure flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In fact, it is very much like the Israeli "facts-on-the-ground" approach to the occupation of Palestine; and the condition of the vast majority of African America remains structurally more colonized than merely unequal.

But I want to look at another dilemma that has settled in on the suburbs themselves, and which has pushed the entire United States into a potentially calamitous conjuncture.

If we do not understand the suburb - as a system - based on its historical development, then we cannot understand the post-Apartheid "Sunbelt" South, which is fundamentally based on the expansion of suburbs, and with it the expansion of political power in the suburbs. This expansion of political power would culminate with the 1972 re-election of Richard Nixon.

Contrary to popular belief, Nixon was not primarily re-elected because of opponent George McGovern's ardent opposition to the Vietnam War. By 1972, a majority of the American voting public had grown sour on the war. The issue that Nixon rode back into the White House in a historical landslide (McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Colombia) was busing.

The 50s and 60s brought two tectonic social phenomena together in a potentially explosive combination: the Cold War and the Black Freedom Struggle, the latter of which took form as what is now called the Civil Rights Movement.

With the post-war collapse of the old Euro-based colonial order, and the global challenge offered to US influence by the Eurasian communist bloc, the US found itself having to justify its domestic policies to the emerging post-colonial world... post-colonial nations themselves the victims of Euro-American white supremacy.

The US appeal to a liberal vision of democratic rights - as an alternative to the "authoritarian communists" (which most of them were, significantly in masculinist reaction to hostile encirclement) - was undermined by the de jure system of racial-caste Apartheid that was practiced in the United States' former Civil War Confederacy.

The political establishment in the US found itself on the horns of a historical dilemma. Near-term political ambition, which had to take account of the South's bank of federal electoral power, was at odds with Jim Crow as a political embarrassment in US foreign policy.

The backdrop cannot be overestimated, even though it remains little remarked in most histories of the era. The average history treats these two phenomena - Cold War and Civil Rights Movement - almost as if they were hermetically sealed from one another.

These were more than merely ideological contradictions. The economic "location" of African America was such that the domestic economy of the South and the North was rigidly imbricated with this vast pool of colonial-level labor; at the same time, access to the post-colonial nations abroad represented an essential field of "primitive accumulation" upon which to construct the next upwave of capitalist valorization in the still-young American post-war system.

Deconstructing Jim Crow without undermining the economy, losing the electoral South, or making space for a social revolution would be a perilous and lengthy process.

Lassiter makes a prima facie case that this was accomplished through suburbanization.

Mass movements and grassroots rebellions compel American politicians to respond to them. This is a widely acknowledged fact on the left; yet on questions of voting and mass movements the left generally has little to say that is more than polemical. Lassiter's work - like that of "radical urban theorists" with whom he associates himself - is an important exception.

While there has been much written and reams of analysis on the Civil Rights Movement, there is a paucity of critical work on how white America has reacted to that mass movement with one of its own. Consequently, we generally share a purely ideological account of politics: Republicans are right-wing, Democrats are bourgeois good-cops, the two-party system is a ruling class fix, everyone sits at some point on a continuum from reactionary on one end to communist on the other, et cetera.

I will acknowledge demographics; that is, African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, white men are more likely to vote Republican, and so forth. I also acknowledge how racial attitudes (and less often point out how gender) is a factor in people's political-electoral behavior.

We pay too little attention, however, to the built spatial environment.

The majority of Americans now live in suburbs; and suburbs have for decades now had a particular political character and identity. That identity, and the fact suburban voters constitute the most effective voting bloc in the US, has more than any other factor facilitated the narrowing of differences between the two dominant political parties.

Suburban voters have the highest rates of voter turnout; and they represent more than half the total population of the US.

Suburban life has a number of distinctive qualities that harmonize the political interests of suburban residents. Much lip service is paid by radicals to the role of work in the formation of "consciousness." The emergence of critical geography, which studies the determinants of personality and ideology in the more general environment - in particular the spatial aspects of social development - has added a fresh and, I would argue, critically important dimension to the "materialist conception of history."

A snapshot of suburban life reveals:

•· that we are organized into exclusively residential enclaves that are bounded by a series of circumferential cul-de-sacs;

•· that we are married with children; that we are mostly "white collar" (or aspiring to be white collar);

•· that we work away from these residential enclaves, often substantial distances away, and therefore are absolutely dependent on personal automobiles and the money to maintain and fuel them;

•· that our public lives are divided between these far-flung work spaces, as well as zoned and concentrated consumer spaces; that one's local public school complex is where children spend most of their days;

•· and that the relationships formed by children as well as a common interest in schools are the source of most local social networking (adult relationships are more often formed at work).

The latter is politically significant because political power is organized spatially, with voting precincts at the most local level, followed by various subdivisions, beginning with school board districts. People are dispersed for their work, which no longer then corresponds to locally-consolidated and personally-networked political interests.

David Harvey has written on the global contradiction between the "financial logic of capital" and the "territorial logic of the state," and how there is an incipient crisis in this cross-logic. Following that argument down diminishing fractal scales, I will suggest that there is a cross-logic at work in the continuing evolution of the suburbs, between the territorial (and therefore local) logic of electoral-political practice and the trans-local grid upon which Suburbia is seemingly inextricably dependent.

Lassiter explains in his book that the suburban political identity is threefold: school parent, homeowner, and consumer-taxpayer. I will expand that identity further down; but these are essential to understand because other issues for Suburbia will inevitably relate back to one or another of these aspects of suburban political identity.

The political potency of local spatial concentration (and political debilitations inhering in spatial expansions) is a key issue in any critical analysis of the seeming political malaise of the left, which has been overwhelmingly oriented on economic class as the "primary social contradiction."

When the labor movement was at its most effective in the United States, workers and working class families were concentrated both on the job and in the residential concentrations specifically built to house workers near these points of production. With the dispersion of workplaces, and the even more dramatic dispersion of living space, and the growing non-correspondence between work and residence, many solidarities were spatially disassembled. We then saw a concurrent (and I would argue, causal) free-fall of union density in the US. Certainly, other factors, such as anti-union policies and laws, as well as the dramatic off-shoring of certain manufacturing production over the last two decades, are determinative as well. But union organizing doesn't primarily happen on the job. It happens on house visits. When those houses are dispersed over hundreds of square miles even around a single point of production, that constitutes an exponential increase in the difficulty and expense (in time, energy, and money) of something as simple yet critical as the organizers' house visits.

On the issue of class, the left has traditionally defined class in a fairly limited and mechanical way, as one's "relation to the means of production." While this may serve as some quasi-objective description of one component of class, it is inadequate to get at many aspects of class reality that actually translate into political action... in particular, the "subjective" experience of class, which varies so wildly and is so multiply inflected, that honesty compels us to admit that basic "relation to the means of production" standard is - in any real instantiation - hopelessly reductionist and inadequate.

The experience of class for American Suburbia is largely seen by the residents themselves as something called "middle class." The left is correct to say that this taxonomy obscures certain realities from the people themselves; but at the same time, the perception of the suburban middle class that they are unique is essentially correct. The reason their lives are perceived as different from that of people living in urban US ghettos or Brazilian favelas or factory towns in China is that their lives are different from all those places.

Suburbia is a cyborg. It is a techno-industrial grid within which its human residents are trapped, conformed, dependent units in a vast, entropic feedback loop. It is also - as a whole - dependent on an inconceivably extravagant and uninterrupted inflow of materials from across the globe. Without that uninterrupted inflow, Suburbia will convulse and perish.

The process of consuming these materials creates the Suburban consequence of waste. Volcanically growing islands of landfill - so vast that there is now a global import-export industry for trash, for all that abandoned technomass; and we live in an ever more micro-toxified environment.

Cyborg: an organism that is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems.

Suburbia is also a spiritual wasteland, a place where the wonder of nature is desecrated ubiquitously with corporate logos and all the artifacts of late technological society.

I myself was sitting in my front yard today, where I have kept an organic garden through a struggle against the homeowners association. Everything edible except my leeks are out now, leaving a few pansies, geraniums, heather, and the toughest of the marigolds. I also have one feral red onion. The soil is resting and matted with the red clover I planted in early fall. The breeze was blowing on my face and the apple and birch trees were dancing. There was a squirrel making circles with her tail on top of the bluebird house. A wren was on an old Haitian drum. Cardinals and mourning doves pick in the wheat straw I used for winter mulch.

I am surrounded by people who never see these things, even though it is all around them. My grandson and I look at the moon through binoculars on the front steps at night. No one else here seems to be doing these things; but they are spending plenty of time buying more technology... and nowadays struggling to balance the demands of obligatory middle-class consumption with a growing pre-volcanic debt.

Max Weber called this phenomenon "disenchantment." Commoditized culture is manipulative and utilitarian (not to mention highly bureaucratic). One of the main political identities of Suburbia is commodity "consumer."

Not surprisingly, the one truly integrated space in the US is consumer space... the mall.

It is this extreme instrumentalism - the old joke about the dog having no use for anything it couldn't mate with, piss on, or eat - that leads directly to our loss of enchantment with nature... precisely because nature is free-of-charge, and therefore without value. Worthless, and often worse... dangerous... hence, suburban germophobia, hatred of "weeds," the association of nature with dangerous disorder.

The post-Freudians called psychic connection to things beyond ourselves "cathexis." Audre Lorde called it erotic energy, "that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge."

Commoditized, instrumental culture has separated us from these deeper, non-rational psychic connections; and I will argue that inherent in this process of separation - this disenchantment - is a collective narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

I am highly suspicious of the whole notion of individual personality disorder, but I'll table that critique here, because NPD can serve a heuristic purpose.

General guidelines for NPD are (1) grandiose sense of self-importance, (2) preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, perfect beauty, idealized love, etc., (3) belief that one is "special" and explicable only by others who are almost-equally special, (4) obsessive need for attention and admiration, (5) powerful sense of entitlement, (6) instrumental attitude toward human relations (using others, or taking advantage of them), (7) low index of felt-empathy (feigned empathy is in the repertoire of manipulation), (8) feels excessive envy and suspects envy of others for him/herself, and (9) displays of arrogance... there are a few others. Psychiatry says that any five of these suggests NPD.

Not only are these characteristics not abnormal in Suburbia - or even the general American culture - they are cultivated as norms by our ideology of social Darwinism, and ceaselessly reinforced by commoditized culture through brand-name status competition, advertising, and the cultural norms of the gender hierarchy (masculinity and femininity).

Another aspect of NPD, that is also intrinsic to American Suburbia's worldview, is a hair-trigger perception of victimization. This is the twin of a sense of entitlement.

This is the most dangerous aspect of the Suburban character. Within the intellectual barricades of middle-class belief in their own meritocracy, any challenge to the myth that Suburbia is a social outcome of (natural) Market TM forces is conflated with the Dark World vestiges of propaganda from the Cold War, from the Negro threat, and now from "terrorism" and the demographic attack of the "illegal immigrants."

The suburban populism that Lassiter describes - which emerged as a struggle to prevent school integration by busing - adopted the color-blind language of Dr. Kings speech on "the content of their character," and reiterated their claim that their rights were being violated... the spatial segregation of suburb and ghetto was rewritten as class, not race, in order to provide Suburbia what Lassiter calls "color blind racial innocence."

In the same move, Suburbia flipped the script on the Civil Rights movement, and claimed oppressed status at the hands of the federal courts (beginning with Brown v Board of Education). This epistemological theft was facilitated by the Fourth Circuit's reversal-on-appeal of Bradley v. Richmond, wherein the real history of urban renewal, zoning, districting, and transportation policy and planning - which were the de jure instruments of re-segregation - were erased from juridical memory.

STAN GOFF is the author of Hideous Dream, Full Spectrum Disorder, The Military In The New American Century, and Sex And War. He also manages his Feral Scholar website and is familiar to many Truth To Power Readers as a result of his monumental series published at From The Wilderness on the death of Pat Tillman--a series to which many attribute Congressional investigation of that event.

Middle Class Value System And The Global politics

Middle Class Angst: The Politics Of Lemmings- Part I
By Stan Goff 20November, 2007 CarolynBaker.net
There is a common misconception among environmentalists and peak-oilers (I count myself among both) that cars created the suburbs. The car suburb, however, became what it is with regard to cars only incidentally. The real motive for the suburbs was plain garden-variety white supremacy. Cars simply became necessary to facilitate the spatial segregation that simultaneously confined African America largely to decaying urban spaces and built the ‘burbs as white enclaves. It's not that simple any more, of course. All things change all the time - as we'll see momentarily - but it was white fear and loathing of the Dark Other that set the whole process in motion.
The sudden discovery - still ongoing - that most of us (more than half the US now lives in Suburbia) are trapped here if and when our private automobiles run out of gas (or the money to buy it), came after suburbanization was a fait accompli. This is the stage in any historical process where people begin to indulge themselves in disambiguation of the past - simplifying what has happened until it appears that it was predictable all along. Since we believe this - that things are predictable - we are easily convinced that correlation equals causation in our reconstructions of history; and we apply those correlatives that are familiar and comfortable. Ergo, because oil companies and auto manufacturers participated in the development of Suburbia, they were the conscious agents of it all along. White environmentalists and many white peak-oilers are not well-versed in the history of race, and they have shitty heuristics for understanding how it is constituted.
Not surprisingly, their heuristic - the equivalent of what we call intuition, or common sense - is that of Suburbia, which has been the predominant mode of white American thought since the late 1960s. It is what Matthew Lassiter calls "the prevailing language of middle-class meritocracy and color-blind innocence."
The City of Richmond's present pattern of residential housing... is a reflection of past racial discrimination contributed in part by local, state, and federal government... Negroes in Richmond live where they do because the have no choice.
-Bradley v. Richmond (1972),
District Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr.
We think that the root causes of the concentration of blacks in the inner cities of America are simply not known.
-Bradley v. Richmond (Appeal, 1972),
Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
Highway construction, urban renewal programs, loan policies, municipal annexations, and court decisions that re-coded race as untouchable-class, were all instrumental in the development of Suburbia, and the concomitant development of the Black ghetto. These practices were not accidental or self-organizing or the product of "market forces." They were systematic, intentional, and imposed. When the preponderance of evidence showed in court (Bradley v. Richmond) that this was the case, the Fourth Circuit established the official federal position on the matter. "We don't remember how it got to be this way; therefore we can do nothing about it."
I mention this just to set the stage for my main thesis. The history of this development is ably and accessibly articulated in Matthew Lassiter's very important book, The Silent Majority - Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt (Princeton University Press, 2006).
The population shift to the suburbs and the power shift to the Sunbelt economy requires a new metropolitan framework for political history and public policy that transcends the urban-suburban dichotomy and confronts instead of obscures the pervasive politics of class in the suburban strategies of the volatile center. Surely an honest assessment of the nation's collective responsibility in creating the contemporary metropolitan landscape remains an essential prerequisite for grappling with the spatial fusion of racial and class politics that ultimately produced an underlying suburban consensus in the electoral arena. If "the problem of the color line" represented the fundamental crisis of the twentieth century, the foremost challenge of the twenty-first has evolved into the suburban synthesis of racial inequality and class segregation at the heart of what may or may not be the New American Dilemma. (Lassiter, p. 323)
Lassiter's "dilemma" was that of racial segregation, segregation which was spatial instead of formal... segregation which required no White and Negro water fountains. The court-supported myth that the new segregation is de facto and not de jure flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In fact, it is very much like the Israeli "facts-on-the-ground" approach to the occupation of Palestine; and the condition of the vast majority of African America remains structurally more colonized than merely unequal.
But I want to look at another dilemma that has settled in on the suburbs themselves, and which has pushed the entire United States into a potentially calamitous conjuncture.
If we do not understand the suburb - as a system - based on its historical development, then we cannot understand the post-Apartheid "Sunbelt" South, which is fundamentally based on the expansion of suburbs, and with it the expansion of political power in the suburbs. This expansion of political power would culminate with the 1972 re-election of Richard Nixon.
Contrary to popular belief, Nixon was not primarily re-elected because of opponent George McGovern's ardent opposition to the Vietnam War. By 1972, a majority of the American voting public had grown sour on the war. The issue that Nixon rode back into the White House in a historical landslide (McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Colombia) was busing.
The 50s and 60s brought two tectonic social phenomena together in a potentially explosive combination: the Cold War and the Black Freedom Struggle, the latter of which took form as what is now called the Civil Rights Movement.
With the post-war collapse of the old Euro-based colonial order, and the global challenge offered to US influence by the Eurasian communist bloc, the US found itself having to justify its domestic policies to the emerging post-colonial world... post-colonial nations themselves the victims of Euro-American white supremacy.
The US appeal to a liberal vision of democratic rights - as an alternative to the "authoritarian communists" (which most of them were, significantly in masculinist reaction to hostile encirclement) - was undermined by the de jure system of racial-caste Apartheid that was practiced in the United States' former Civil War Confederacy.
The political establishment in the US found itself on the horns of a historical dilemma. Near-term political ambition, which had to take account of the South's bank of federal electoral power, was at odds with Jim Crow as a political embarrassment in US foreign policy.
The backdrop cannot be overestimated, even though it remains little remarked in most histories of the era. The average history treats these two phenomena - Cold War and Civil Rights Movement - almost as if they were hermetically sealed from one another.
These were more than merely ideological contradictions. The economic "location" of African America was such that the domestic economy of the South and the North was rigidly imbricated with this vast pool of colonial-level labor; at the same time, access to the post-colonial nations abroad represented an essential field of "primitive accumulation" upon which to construct the next upwave of capitalist valorization in the still-young American post-war system.
Deconstructing Jim Crow without undermining the economy, losing the electoral South, or making space for a social revolution would be a perilous and lengthy process.
Lassiter makes a prima facie case that this was accomplished through suburbanization.
Mass movements and grassroots rebellions compel American politicians to respond to them. This is a widely acknowledged fact on the left; yet on questions of voting and mass movements the left generally has little to say that is more than polemical. Lassiter's work - like that of "radical urban theorists" with whom he associates himself - is an important exception.
While there has been much written and reams of analysis on the Civil Rights Movement, there is a paucity of critical work on how white America has reacted to that mass movement with one of its own. Consequently, we generally share a purely ideological account of politics: Republicans are right-wing, Democrats are bourgeois good-cops, the two-party system is a ruling class fix, everyone sits at some point on a continuum from reactionary on one end to communist on the other, et cetera.
I will acknowledge demographics; that is, African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, white men are more likely to vote Republican, and so forth. I also acknowledge how racial attitudes (and less often point out how gender) is a factor in people's political-electoral behavior.
We pay too little attention, however, to the built spatial environment.
The majority of Americans now live in suburbs; and suburbs have for decades now had a particular political character and identity. That identity, and the fact suburban voters constitute the most effective voting bloc in the US, has more than any other factor facilitated the narrowing of differences between the two dominant political parties.
Suburban voters have the highest rates of voter turnout; and they represent more than half the total population of the US.
Suburban life has a number of distinctive qualities that harmonize the political interests of suburban residents. Much lip service is paid by radicals to the role of work in the formation of "consciousness." The emergence of critical geography, which studies the determinants of personality and ideology in the more general environment - in particular the spatial aspects of social development - has added a fresh and, I would argue, critically important dimension to the "materialist conception of history."
A snapshot of suburban life reveals:
•· that we are organized into exclusively residential enclaves that are bounded by a series of circumferential cul-de-sacs;
•· that we are married with children; that we are mostly "white collar" (or aspiring to be white collar);
•· that we work away from these residential enclaves, often substantial distances away, and therefore are absolutely dependent on personal automobiles and the money to maintain and fuel them;
•· that our public lives are divided between these far-flung work spaces, as well as zoned and concentrated consumer spaces; that one's local public school complex is where children spend most of their days;
•· and that the relationships formed by children as well as a common interest in schools are the source of most local social networking (adult relationships are more often formed at work).
The latter is politically significant because political power is organized spatially, with voting precincts at the most local level, followed by various subdivisions, beginning with school board districts. People are dispersed for their work, which no longer then corresponds to locally-consolidated and personally-networked political interests.
David Harvey has written on the global contradiction between the "financial logic of capital" and the "territorial logic of the state," and how there is an incipient crisis in this cross-logic. Following that argument down diminishing fractal scales, I will suggest that there is a cross-logic at work in the continuing evolution of the suburbs, between the territorial (and therefore local) logic of electoral-political practice and the trans-local grid upon which Suburbia is seemingly inextricably dependent.
Lassiter explains in his book that the suburban political identity is threefold: school parent, homeowner, and consumer-taxpayer. I will expand that identity further down; but these are essential to understand because other issues for Suburbia will inevitably relate back to one or another of these aspects of suburban political identity.
The political potency of local spatial concentration (and political debilitations inhering in spatial expansions) is a key issue in any critical analysis of the seeming political malaise of the left, which has been overwhelmingly oriented on economic class as the "primary social contradiction."
When the labor movement was at its most effective in the United States, workers and working class families were concentrated both on the job and in the residential concentrations specifically built to house workers near these points of production. With the dispersion of workplaces, and the even more dramatic dispersion of living space, and the growing non-correspondence between work and residence, many solidarities were spatially disassembled. We then saw a concurrent (and I would argue, causal) free-fall of union density in the US. Certainly, other factors, such as anti-union policies and laws, as well as the dramatic off-shoring of certain manufacturing production over the last two decades, are determinative as well. But union organizing doesn't primarily happen on the job. It happens on house visits. When those houses are dispersed over hundreds of square miles even around a single point of production, that constitutes an exponential increase in the difficulty and expense (in time, energy, and money) of something as simple yet critical as the organizers' house visits.
On the issue of class, the left has traditionally defined class in a fairly limited and mechanical way, as one's "relation to the means of production." While this may serve as some quasi-objective description of one component of class, it is inadequate to get at many aspects of class reality that actually translate into political action... in particular, the "subjective" experience of class, which varies so wildly and is so multiply inflected, that honesty compels us to admit that basic "relation to the means of production" standard is - in any real instantiation - hopelessly reductionist and inadequate.
The experience of class for American Suburbia is largely seen by the residents themselves as something called "middle class." The left is correct to say that this taxonomy obscures certain realities from the people themselves; but at the same time, the perception of the suburban middle class that they are unique is essentially correct. The reason their lives are perceived as different from that of people living in urban US ghettos or Brazilian favelas or factory towns in China is that their lives are different from all those places.
Suburbia is a cyborg. It is a techno-industrial grid within which its human residents are trapped, conformed, dependent units in a vast, entropic feedback loop. It is also - as a whole - dependent on an inconceivably extravagant and uninterrupted inflow of materials from across the globe. Without that uninterrupted inflow, Suburbia will convulse and perish.
The process of consuming these materials creates the Suburban consequence of waste. Volcanically growing islands of landfill - so vast that there is now a global import-export industry for trash, for all that abandoned technomass; and we live in an ever more micro-toxified environment.
Cyborg: an organism that is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems.
Suburbia is also a spiritual wasteland, a place where the wonder of nature is desecrated ubiquitously with corporate logos and all the artifacts of late technological society.
I myself was sitting in my front yard today, where I have kept an organic garden through a struggle against the homeowners association. Everything edible except my leeks are out now, leaving a few pansies, geraniums, heather, and the toughest of the marigolds. I also have one feral red onion. The soil is resting and matted with the red clover I planted in early fall. The breeze was blowing on my face and the apple and birch trees were dancing. There was a squirrel making circles with her tail on top of the bluebird house. A wren was on an old Haitian drum. Cardinals and mourning doves pick in the wheat straw I used for winter mulch.
I am surrounded by people who never see these things, even though it is all around them. My grandson and I look at the moon through binoculars on the front steps at night. No one else here seems to be doing these things; but they are spending plenty of time buying more technology... and nowadays struggling to balance the demands of obligatory middle-class consumption with a growing pre-volcanic debt.
Max Weber called this phenomenon "disenchantment." Commoditized culture is manipulative and utilitarian (not to mention highly bureaucratic). One of the main political identities of Suburbia is commodity "consumer."
Not surprisingly, the one truly integrated space in the US is consumer space... the mall.
It is this extreme instrumentalism - the old joke about the dog having no use for anything it couldn't mate with, piss on, or eat - that leads directly to our loss of enchantment with nature... precisely because nature is free-of-charge, and therefore without value. Worthless, and often worse... dangerous... hence, suburban germophobia, hatred of "weeds," the association of nature with dangerous disorder.
The post-Freudians called psychic connection to things beyond ourselves "cathexis." Audre Lorde called it erotic energy, "that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge."
Commoditized, instrumental culture has separated us from these deeper, non-rational psychic connections; and I will argue that inherent in this process of separation - this disenchantment - is a collective narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
I am highly suspicious of the whole notion of individual personality disorder, but I'll table that critique here, because NPD can serve a heuristic purpose.
General guidelines for NPD are (1) grandiose sense of self-importance, (2) preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, perfect beauty, idealized love, etc., (3) belief that one is "special" and explicable only by others who are almost-equally special, (4) obsessive need for attention and admiration, (5) powerful sense of entitlement, (6) instrumental attitude toward human relations (using others, or taking advantage of them), (7) low index of felt-empathy (feigned empathy is in the repertoire of manipulation), (8) feels excessive envy and suspects envy of others for him/herself, and (9) displays of arrogance... there are a few others. Psychiatry says that any five of these suggests NPD.
Not only are these characteristics not abnormal in Suburbia - or even the general American culture - they are cultivated as norms by our ideology of social Darwinism, and ceaselessly reinforced by commoditized culture through brand-name status competition, advertising, and the cultural norms of the gender hierarchy (masculinity and femininity).
Another aspect of NPD, that is also intrinsic to American Suburbia's worldview, is a hair-trigger perception of victimization. This is the twin of a sense of entitlement.
This is the most dangerous aspect of the Suburban character. Within the intellectual barricades of middle-class belief in their own meritocracy, any challenge to the myth that Suburbia is a social outcome of (natural) Market TM forces is conflated with the Dark World vestiges of propaganda from the Cold War, from the Negro threat, and now from "terrorism" and the demographic attack of the "illegal immigrants."
The suburban populism that Lassiter describes - which emerged as a struggle to prevent school integration by busing - adopted the color-blind language of Dr. Kings speech on "the content of their character," and reiterated their claim that their rights were being violated... the spatial segregation of suburb and ghetto was rewritten as class, not race, in order to provide Suburbia what Lassiter calls "color blind racial innocence."
In the same move, Suburbia flipped the script on the Civil Rights movement, and claimed oppressed status at the hands of the federal courts (beginning with Brown v Board of Education). This epistemological theft was facilitated by the Fourth Circuit's reversal-on-appeal of Bradley v. Richmond, wherein the real history of urban renewal, zoning, districting, and transportation policy and planning - which were the de jure instruments of re-segregation - were erased from juridical memory.
STAN GOFF is the author of Hideous Dream, Full Spectrum Disorder, The Military In The New American Century, and Sex And War. He also manages his Feral Scholar website and is familiar to many Truth To Power Readers as a result of his monumental series published at From The Wilderness on the death of Pat Tillman--a series to which many attribute Congressional investigation of that event.