Brendan O’Neill, editor of the British online journal spiked, has a problem with how Marx is being used.  However, his complaint is not that an important figure of intellectual history is treated so shabbily.  He complains that most commentary invoking Marx relates the current crisis to the ‘inevitable’ collapse of capitalism that Marx foresaw.  O’Neill writes that it is a fallacy that Marx considered the collapse of capitalism to be a necessary outcome of ‘progress.’  He claims this belief is a fallacy based on a ‘misreading’ of the first part of the Communist Manifesto.  To interpret Marx this way is alleged to be an attempt to turn him into a ‘prophet.’  O’Neill claims that “[t]hroughout his more profound works, Marx never talked about the inevitable collapse of capitalism.”  However, this simply is not true, and to deny the teleology of Marx is to seriously misunderstand the inherited thought with which Marx was grappling.  More seriously, however, to deny Marx had a belief in historical necessity is to miss why he is largely inappropriate as a means to understanding the current crisis.

O’Neill appears to have grabbed onto Marx’s well-known assertion that “men make their own history.”  Although, instead of this quote he  selects and misrepresents an obscure reference from The Holy Family, a Marx-Engels work critiquing the Young Hegelians.  O’Neill’s claim requires one to overlook numerous statements from Marx about the “natural laws of capitalist production.”  In the preface to the 1867 German edition of Capital, Marx refers to capitalist societies “working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.”  Marx considered himself a scientist, and his predictions were those of a scientist - in the same way that Einstein made predictions based on the theory of general relativity.  The reality is that, as with all great thinkers, Marx’s thought was full of aporias and paradoxes.  For Marx, there was an on-going tension between his realization that society is the product of nondetermined human action and his desire to discover the laws of history and society.  Cornelius Castoriadis calls this the ‘antinomy of Marx‘, and it reflects the paradox of the Enlightenment.  Enlightenment thinkers wanted to both articulate the rational policies of a society that is in tune with nature and celebrate the free individual.  However, if history is governed by rational laws, then human agency is meaningless.

O’Neill asks if those currently name-dropping Marx have read Chapter 32 of Capital.  This is a puzzling question, given that it is precisely the chapter in which Marx offers one of his most widely quoted phrases about the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse: “The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”  This knell comes out of the capitalist mode of production and it is coming “with the inexorability of a law of Nature.”  The laws of historical motion are akin to gravity in their necessity. As surely as the river flows to the sea, history flows toward industrial communism.  This was the outcome of historical materialism.  Marx focused on the mode of production because he saw it as the intersection of society and the material and, therefore, as the essential component for understanding society scientifically.

This does not mean there is no anti-teleological element to Marx.  There absolutely is, after all he did write, “Men make their own history.”  Especially in his early writings, Marx appears to be wrestling with this insight, and the conflicting belief that there are laws of history and society that can be discovered, explained and used to make predictions.  One attempt to resolve this antinomy is found in the proviso to his famous line quoted above: “but they do not make it as they please.”  The conflict can be seen in his description of the laws of capitalist society as both ‘natural’ and ‘immanent.’  Castoriadis cites the on-going battle between these two incompatible lines of thought as one of the reasons Marx failed to finish the ambitious project he set about in writing Capital.  Unfortunately, in Marx’s most important works, the search for the laws of society and history tended to win out over his realization that we make our own societies and own history.

It is precisely Marx’s realization that our societies and histories are the product of conscious and creative people that renders his teleological analysis largely irrelevant in the context of the current crisis.  Marx’s rationalist materialist political economy led him to claim that financial instruments like those at play in the current situation are “the perfect fetish.”  They are hollow; a once-removed appropriation of surplus value.  The current crisis is, from a Marxist perspective, a fiction.  It may be a fiction that has some real consequences, but it ultimately remains a fiction.  It has no roots in the material and, therefore, it is not real.  The crisis and collapse of capitalism as foreseen by Marx is a necessity of the system of production.  It is a crisis from within the nuts and bolts of capitalist-controlled industry.  The predicted crisis grows out of his metaphysical belief that labour is the source of value.  According to Marx, the accumulatory process that drives the capitalist involves both a financial and a material accumulation.  The financial has to become the material in the hands of the “functioning capitalist.”  This requires ever growing amounts of labour and draws upon technological progress.  This progress provokes increasing centralization of production and capital: “One capitalist always kills many.”  Proletarianization and centralization result in “the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market. …  Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist….”  Well, you know the rest.  Is this what is happening?  No.  You would be hard pressed to find anyone who claims that labour is becoming increasingly ’socialized.’

This does not mean a Marxian materialist analysis has nothing to say about the current crisis.  Marx recognized well before other theorists that capitalism is not a smoothly operating system.  He certainly knew that capitalists were capable of turning crises to their own advantage.  However, he still regarded such crises as secondary to the primary operation of productive capitalist accumulation.  Marx’s analysis was rooted in the heavily competitive cotton mills of newly industrialising Britain.  The reality of contemporary capitalism is well removed from those heady days of full liability, low entry costs, frequent bankruptcies, rapidly expanding demand, and a large quantity of available labour - turning man, woman and child into wage-slaves.  Where Marx once saw a distinction between productive capital and finance capital with value only created and accumulated through the utilisation of labour in production, a modern analysis makes it clear that such a distinction is impossible.

Consider just one corporation as an example.  Caterpillar is as ‘productive’ a corporation as one could imagine.  Their products are utilised by the primary industries.  They make use of smoke belching factories. They employ workers that are organised into assembly lines within those factories.  Yet, one of its most profitable business segments is Cat Financial.  At just 7% of revenue and sales, it generates 15% of profits.  Most of its lending is to its dealers and customers so that they can buy Cat built machinery.  The ‘productive’ aspect of Caterpillar is intimately dependent upon the ‘financial’ aspect.  How are we supposed to separate the financial from the so-called ‘real’?  The answer: we can’t.

If Marx’s analysis of the laws of capitalist economy cannot help us understand the current crisis, then might his acknowledgment that we are responsible for our societies and histories serve us better?  The first thing we would conclude is that this crisis emerged, not because of any inevitable historical necessity, but because of immanent decisions made by those who have political economic power.  The situation emerges from the actions of particular peoples with their own subjective desires and capabilities.  This is not the same as saying it was planned and implemented.  However, both policy and business choices were made that have contributed to the crisis.  There will be capitalists who benefit from the crisis and it is not beyond belief to imagine that conscious actions were taken to provoke a situation in which they would be able to differentially accumulate - that is, accumulate relative to other capitalists.  In fact, before Naomi Klein was talking about the “Shock Doctrine” or “Disaster Capitalism,” Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler demonstrated that the other side of capitalist expansion is ‘accumulation through crisis.’  This also means that, apart from a challenge to the system of capitalism as a whole, all capitalist crises are merely a crisis for one subset of capital.  For others, such crises present an opportunity.

Most importantly, an immanent perspective on history and society make a necessity of struggle.  The current crisis is not the inevitable collapse of capitalism, as there will be no inevitable demise written into the code of capitalism.  If we wish to proceed beyond the capitalist system, we will have to imagine alternatives and work toward them.

A public lecture by Fuyuki Kurasawa, given on March 28, 2008 at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.

How is visuality — understood here as the mutual constitution of the visual and the social (W. J. T. Mitchell) — implicated in the mediated construction of instances of distant suffering in various parts of the world, and what are the effects of such implications? After a brief history of the visual representation of humanitarian crises by Euro-American civil society institutions, the presentation turns to a consideration of the perils and prospects of humanitarian visuality. In particular, I turn to an inescapable aporia of this visual economy, the simultaneous production and negation of the otherness of vulnerable subjects. Finally, the presentation discusses certain strategies for a critical visuality, notably a defence of the image’s interpretive ambiguity as well as practices of phenomenological reintensification and structuralist expansion of the image.

Three key concepts are worth keeping in mind:

1. Visual economy: The distribution and circulation of relations of power that constitute and structure the socio-visual field.
2. Distant suffering: Instances of mass suffering and extreme situational and structural violence that are perpetrated outside the North Atlantic region and which are represented visually via the media.
3. Humanitarian visuality: The set of visual conventions that are consistently reproduced in images of humanitarian crises over time.

1. Denial: Up until four or five months ago, Barack Obama was not on the pundit radar. When I first heard him speak some year and a half ago, I knew he would go places in U.S. politics, but I did not expect it to be so soon, or even so far. To use that disparaging term, he was not even the ‘dark horse’ in the democratic party. But when that quickly changed and the delegate numbers started coming in, Clinton acted, with her characteristic sense of entitlement, as if Obama was merely a fly that would buzz itself out in a short time. As recently as Super Tuesday, she believed, or at least portrayed the belief that Obama was not a force to be reckoned with.

2. Anger: Quickly after her first defeat, the Clinton machine became angry - who is this usurper of my rightful ascent to power? The slurs began to fly, most recently with the pre-Texas round of negativity. One might even frame her shedding of a tear prior to New Hampshire as a sign of internal anger that this just wasn’t fair. She had big plans, good policies, a vision that deserves to be implemented. How could this happen?

3. Bargaining: When Obama passed her in total expected delegate count, advisors began deserting her campaign, and time was running out, she began to bargain. Just as one bargains with time to spare them from death, with considerable hubris, Hillary and Bill began proposing fantastical possibilities of a joint-ticket - with Obama on the second line. Obama, and the party leadership, quickly sped her along the road to the next stage when they flatly rejected such a proposal.

4. Depression: Most recently, Hillary has begun apologizing for all of the mistakes she made along the way. One could interpret this as an acceptance of loss, though this has not come formally or publicly yet. Rather, I see it as a kind of self-pitying that things could have been better and different, but they’re not. It is impossible to predict these kind of things, but I expect Hillary to campaign with significantly less vigour than before.

5. Acceptance: I believe this is still yet to come, perhaps after the Pennsylvania primary, but of course, if may come sooner - or later.

This is hardly a faithful interpretation of the model, and I do it thoroughly from a lay perspective. Alternative analyses are certainly possible, and welcome. However, putting aside this lack of scientific rigour for a moment, this outline demonstrates one thing: that Hillary responded to her slow defeat the way someone does to something that they actually ‘have’ - a partner, a job, their own mortality. In true dynastic form, Clinton ‘grieves’ over something that she shouldn’t presume to have had, but feels is her divine right. I’m not one to buy into the popular, sweeping assertions about politics in any country, in this case, the ‘Bush-Clinton dynasty’ argument. Still, if in the mind of Hillary, she viewed herself as the rightful ‘heir’ to the presidency, American politics has been saved from a dangerous turn towards further elitism.

• At the top of the list, 73% of people own digital cameras, while 62% own mobile phones that have access to the Internet; while near the bottom, only 27% have cable television and 9% use a Blackberry or PDA

• Additionally, the survey showed that traditional media such as books, radio and newspapers are still the most emotionally engaging. In a related trend, 18% of respondents indicated that video streaming sites on the Internet has resulted in a decrease in traditional TV viewed (while 79% indicated no change).

• There were also some fairly obvious results on the topic of social networks. The survey found that “social networks have the potential to become major content distribution platforms” and that “social networks are an essential place to be for brands.”

RETHINKING PIRACY?

Ben Jones at Torrentfreak has an analysis of the piracy section of the report here. Jones highlights that piracy is occurring because of a lack of choice and accessibility in legal media sources (70% of pirates responded that legal sources for media do not have the same range as illegal sources); and that anti-piracy campaigns are generally ineffective.

However, I think it’s worth also noting that the survey also indicates that 7 out of 10 would stop pirating if they received a warning from their ISP (Internet service providers like Bell, Rogers AT&T or Comcast). This is a significant statistic because it gives weight to the music/entertainment industry’s attempts to lobby governments for legislative changes (instead of independently suing people in the civil law courts) that would compel ISPs to enforce new copyright laws. Changes in criminal law will no doubt impact the ability of ISPs to shield their users from outside surveillance and infringements on privacy.

DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT & COPYRIGHT

A final statistic worth mentioning concerns DRM, or digital rights management. While 1 out of 5 respondents have a good understanding of DRM, 67% have either never heard of it, or have heard of it but don’t know what it is. This may partly explain why consumers who bought Santana’s All That I Am or My Morning Jacket’s Z on CD, could not understand why they weren’t able to put their purchased music on their computer or portable media player. In not adequately explaining the purpose (or even the existence) of DRM on the CD, the music industry effectively alienated a large number of customers, who knew only that the CD didn’t work properly.

This is a particularly out-of-the-ordinary situation where a technology comes under fire on two fronts simultaneously. First, there are the frustrated consumers who have trouble playing the CDs in their computers and media players. And second, there are the anti-DRM and fair copyright advocates, such as Michael Geist, who challenge DRM on the grounds that it is contrary to fair use and fair dealing laws. These two elements have each had their own effects: the first case has resulted in a steep decline in DRM-protected music, while the second succeeded in delaying new copyright reforms that were to be tabled in December by the Canadian government.

However, these two consequences are not unrelated, nor independent. The problems with DRM have driven the music/entertainment industry towards lobbying the government for stronger copyright protections and the criminalizing of DRM-circumvention. While the Canadian anti-DRM camp has so far been successful at curbing legislative challenges to fair use/dealing, it remains to be seen whether they can hold out much longer due to increased domestic pressure from the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and the US government.

Since public knowledge of DRM is low, what happens when the entertainment industry emerges with new forms of DRM that do not malfunction like the previous versions. Where will the public stand on fair use and fair dealing? The growth of surveillance and the decrease of privacy have so far met with little resistance, mainly because the public does not perceive a dramatic change in everyday life. You can still buy the products you want, and use them how you like. The rise of DRM challenged that ability and it was for this reason that public outcry ensued (though they did not necessarily know what DRM is). When and if DRM manages to reemerge in a more subtle form, will the death of fair copyright be far behind?

This concept seems quite fair, but what exactly might we constitute as “arbitrary”? Fundamentally, Frug points out that arbitrary power is any decision-making authority that is not democratically excercised. This too warrants a definition: for Frug, “democracy is a lived experience” empowering people with greater control over their lives, rather than a simple electoral formula or representativeness in a legislature. Thus, Frug’s ideal-type ‘rule of law’ is one that ensures that everyone’s voice is involved in decision-making processes. As potential sources of arbitrary power, Frug cites governments, elite experts and professionals, and relevant to his city theme, neighborhood groups.

Beyond a dichotomous assertion of individuality implicit in Frug’s understanding of rule of law, he hints at an essential point: if the legal system is founded, as in any representative democracy, on the arbitrary decisions of an elite minority (via the legislature and judiciary), then just how “legal” is it? Frug looks to the communal norms, customs, and checks on power in shantytowns around the world - in short the ‘informal’ segments of society - and determines that these arrangements are legal in their own right. The imposition of a formal legal system, especially when it is imported from afar via the WB and other development agencies, is clearly an excercise of arbitrary power that infringes on the legal structures of these state-autonomous regions. Now, the legal system of these informal shantytowns may be highly corrupt, immensely hierarchical, patriarchal, and brutally repressive - but then again, looking back on its historical development, so is our own.

Frug instead insists upon a notion of the rule of law that is flexible, situational and context dependent - one that is dynamic, not relatively static, and one that protects the “weak” from the “strong” instead of institutionalizing the power of the latter. Though he discusses this concept with reference to urban localities, he emphasizes that these local structures must not simply form an addition to the formal [national + subnational] legal structure, but radically transform it.

Elites who have a considerable stake in the particular idea of rule of law that is currently being disseminated (read: the formal liberal-capitalist legal structure) seek only to totalize its presence over society. This expansion, while often cloaked in the language of freedom and democracy, is clearly anti-democratic in the sense that it only empowers a small minority. But it is also opposed to the Frugian spirit of the “rule of law”, in the sense that it seeks to bolster the hegemony of arbitrary power. This oligarchical format runs the risk of degenerating to blatant totalitarianism, as even if the content of the laws remain fairly liberal in nature, the structure of the legal system will not. Even Friedrich von Hayek warned us against this in The Road to Serfdom!

The rule of law is a welcome ideal that we must always strive for, if it is employed in the Frugian sense. But we should be intensely critical of this concept at all turns. If the bourgeois, questioning absolutism, asked “Whose rule should we submit to?”, deciding among themselves on themselves via nascent “democracy”, we the masses should ask the same question. Whose laws do we follow, even if we agree with many of them? Who determines which laws are right and just and which are not? Thinking about these questions for only a little while should reveal a radical disconnect between our “rule of law” and democracy.

GRAFFITO

“Graffito” is singular; “graffiti” is a mass noun.
Graffito and Graffiti make the world go round.
Graffito is a little scratch, a groove on urban skin.
A record without a scratch, is simply called a mandolin.
Graffiti can be found in Tikal on a Mayan tomb,
In Hagia Sophia, like stretch marks on a womb.
A prolific graffito artist was sent to jail.
Was he a bastard for pinning the donkey on a tail?
When French soldiers carved their names,
During Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign,
They were left without a fleet
When the pyramids were stained
An “adult ghetto” is a rigid state of mind:
A Cerebral slum, is scum without a spine.
Social distances are far and near
Stretch your leadership muscles to adhere
In the ghetto, you try to stay alive
Your socks don’t match, and you start to jive.
In the ghetto, your kids get shot at school
Your car does not drive because it has no fuel
In the ghetto, graffito can’t pay the bills
Graffiti feeds the needy when poverty kills
In the ghetto, your heart is frozen to death
Art is life support: it is your last breath
In the ghetto you can’t afford to bleed
Individual pluralism leads to greed.

- Oni the Haitian Sensation

I was going to keep quiet about this for a long while… I wanted to see if it was possible to find mass radical, exciting changes within Graffiti.

Today I broke down and decided to offer up some of the stuff that I’ve been doing just to feed your eyes with an alternative or two.

It’s the kind of art that I want to see in the street but where ever I look, it seems that there’s knuckle draggin’. Just variations of the wild style, tastelesssss broth of the 80s.

If you make art in the street I say to you, take the time to look at your city and really see it. There’s so much more. It’s deep and deeper if you care to look. Old School, Hard Core and Risk don’t have to play part. Take that blinged out ball and chain off and make art that transcends. Let’s not be afraid to reset a standard that was set and handed to us.

INTERVENTIONS:

POST COVERS:

Stiglitz begins the piece with the following line: “The world economy has had several good years.” This, he claims, is evidenced by the growth in global GDP, led by India and China. It is in his reliance upon bare GDP to judge global economic well-being where Stiglitz betrays his grounding in standard economic theory.

The past few years of growing global output have been matched by relentless resource consumption and waste production. It is not a coincidence that environmental concern has increased over the same years. We are consuming well beyond the planet’s carrying capacity. Thankfully, more and more people are recognizing this reality and trying to do something about it. Furthermore, the increase in output has not ‘trickled-down,’ and global inequality has likely worsened. But, for the likes of Stiglitz, the economy is viewed in isolation. The complex qualitative meaning beyond the numbers are obscured and largely ignored. Lip-service concern is paid to ‘workers’ and ‘consumers.’ The larger context, however, remains out-of-sight, even though stories of poverty and pollution fill the pages of the same papers that publish Stiglitz’s words. The concern expressed for the well-being of workers and consumers is frequently used to criticize environmental activists, as though jobs and the environment were entirely separate issues - with the former trumping the latter.

Stiglitz’s celebration of China and India is indicative of his narrow, economist’s vision. China’s increasing contribution to global production has come at the cost of severe environmental destruction. It has been suggested that the country’s air pollution has caused hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. High levels of water use and pollution by the growing industrial sector leave a large portion of the population without access to clean drinking water. India may be an emerging high-tech powerhouse, but it is also a model of inequality. Last year, the country passed Japan for the most billionaires in Asia with 36 members in the ten digit wealth club. At the same time, food insecurity is the reality for more than a third of the country’s population.

Stagflation is worrisome. Many people will lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. However, global production needs to be reduced if we are to avoid environmental collapse. It is the residents of the economic North who should bear the majority of the costs, as they are largely responsible for the planet’s current environmental predicament. Most of the burden should fall on the shoulders of the rich (millions of dollars), the very rich (tens of millions of dollars), the über-rich (hundreds of millions of dollars) and the obscenely über-rich (billions of dollars). Yet, these people will be the last to feel the effects of the economic and environmental crisis of their making. Certainly some fortunes will be lost, but many will also be entrenched and augmented. The wealthy will be best placed to protect themselves from the environmental consequences, while the poor will see their meager resources further depleted.

Few would deny the intimate and necessary relationship between the environment, production and consumption. Yet, the isolation of the ‘economic’ is the starting point for mainstream economists. If there was ever a time for ‘Big Picture’ analysis, this is it. That means the myopic economists need to be displaced from their perch atop the policy-advising hierarchy. The fiction that informs their world-view has contributed to the present situation and can play no part in rescuing us, except in showing us the wrong way.

Although a peak and decline in oil production is a geological certainty, we should question whether it is actually occurring right now. The supply of oil within the global market depends on much more than the geological realities of production. Governments of all sorts - Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, the United States, Russia - are heavily involved. Its corporate players are among the world’s most powerful and profitable businesses. The goings-on within the market are of interest to every other business. Speculation is rife. Examination of recent price increases need to consider these factors and many more.

One of the pieces of evidence offered by advocates of the theory is the uncertainty surrounding the actual quantity of oil in the Middle East. The size of the reserves controlled by the big oil exporting countries is unknown. There is some evidence that Saudi Arabia, in particular, has routinely overstated the amount of known reserves. However, although these countries do not want to lose the political clout they enjoy from their control of the great global lubricant, it is not difficult to see how they benefit from such uncertainty. Uncertainty drives up prices; higher prices, higher earnings.

Another source of uncertainty has been the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This one-sided war is routinely labelled as a ‘War for Oil’ by its critics. The standard idea behind the slogan is that the U.S. wishes to control the global oil supply in order to ensure the easy access required by its corporations. However, the war has hardly brought an increase in supply. Instead, it has coincided with a rather drastic increase in oil and gas prices. The oil exporting countries are hardly the only beneficiaries. The oil companies have been enjoying record profits.

An increase in prices, rather than supply, as an outcome of the invasion, was predicted by political economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler in their 2003 article “It’s all about oil.” The pair challenged the conventional wisdom that the war was meant to undermine OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) and ensure the free flow of oil. They demonstrated that the fortunes of the oil companies and OPEC move together. Far from seeking to loosen the supposed iron grip of the dictators who control the global oil supply, the corporate petroleum giants have benefitted from their interventions. In fact, the invasion of Iraq was partially motivated by the the oil cartel’s ineffectiveness at raising prices. Nitzan and Bichler have shown that ‘energy wars’ in the Middle East have followed upon periods of deaccumulation by the oil giants relative to the members of what they call ‘dominant capital.’ For example, in 1988, although the return on equity of what Nitzan and Bichler call the ‘Petro-Core’ was more than 12%, the Fortune 500 - a proxy for dominant capital - had returns greater than 15%. This means that the oil giants fell behind their capitalist cohorts: they failed to beat the average. For the entire second half of the 80s the Petro-Core lost ground. The situation was not reversed until the early 90s when Bush the First invaded Iraq (see Nitzan and Bichler, 2002, ch. 5).

However, from the differential perspective it becomes clear that the interests of other capitalists are not being served by the wars in the Middle East. When the oil companies are accumulating relative to dominant capital as a whole, others must be losing - although we cannot tell exactly who unless we disaggregate the picture. An end to the U.S. occupation will likely come when the (relative) losers within dominant capital finally exert sufficient pressure upon the politicians in Washington. The oil companies realize that they cannot hold court indefinitely and it is likely the political-military tide will turn against them. Yet, they would like to retain their accumulatory advantage. If military adventures can no longer drive up oil prices, then perhaps talk of diminishing supplies will.

Peak oil will come. When it does, its effects on the global economy are uncertain. In the meantime, the oil companies must keep the following plates spinning: faith in oil as the energy source of capitalism, a high enough price to remain on top of the corporate world, a low enough and steady enough price to avoid contributing to a lengthy recession, or even a depression. While the differential perspective on accumulation makes it clear that growth is not synonymous with the corporate interest - as long as everyone else is declining faster than you, then you are differentially accumulating - depressions are dangerous for their unpredictability and their potential to threaten the capitalist status quo (see, Nitzan, 2001). Undoubtedly, one of these plates will drop. The question is: which one? The consequences of the answer to that question will come more immediately than the geologically necessary peak in production and should be of greater concern.

Nitzan, Jonathan. (2001). “Regimes of differential accumulation:mergers, stagflation and the logic of globalization.” Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 226-274.

Nitzan, Jonathan & Shimshon Bichler. (2002). “The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition.” The Global Political Economy of Israel. London: Pluto Press.

—–. (2003). “It’s all about oil.” News From Within, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 8-11.

Hamilton, Tyler. (January 3, 2008). “Is oil supply at its peak?” Toronto Star, B1, B4.

Richard Stallman is one of the founders of the Free Software Movement and lead developer of the GNU Operating System. His book is ‘Free Software, Free Society’.

JP: Can you first of all explain the “Free Software Movement’.

RMS: The basic idea of the Free Software Movement is that the user of software deserves certain freedoms. There are four essential freedoms, which we label freedoms 0 through 3.

Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the software as you wish. Freedom 1 is the freedom to study and change the source code as you wish. Freedom 2 is the freedom to copy and distribute the software as you wish. And freedom 3 is the freedom to create and distribute modified versions as you wish. With these four freedoms, users have full control of their own computers, and can use their computers to cooperate in a community. Freedoms 0 and 2 directly benefit all users, since all users can exercise them. Freedoms 1 and 3, only programmers can directly exercise, but everyone benefits from them, because everyone can adopt (or not) the changes that programmers make. Thus, free software develops under the control of its users.

Non-free software, by contrast, keeps users divided and helpless. It is distributed in a social scheme designed to divide and subjugate. The developers of non-free software have power over their users, and they use this power to the detriment of users in various ways. It is common for non-free software to contain malicious features, features that exist not because the users want them, but because the developers want to force them on the users. The aim of the free software movement is to escape from non-free software.

JP: What was your history with the free software movement?

RMS: I launched the movement in 1983 with a deliberate decision to develop a complete world of free software. The idea is not just to produce a scattering of free programs that were nice to use. Rather, the idea is to systematically build free software so that one can escape completely from non-free software. Non-free software is basically antisocial, it subjugates it users, and it should not exist. So what I wanted was to create a community in which it does not exist. A community where we would escape from non-free software into freedom.

The first collection of programs you need in order to escape non-free software is an operating system. With an operating system, you can do a lot of things with your computer. Without an operating system, even if you have a lot of applications, you cannot do anything — you cannot run them without an operating system. In 1983 all operating systems were proprietary. That meant that the first step you had to take in using a computer was to give up your freedom: they required users to sign a contract, a promise not to share, just to get an executable version that you couldn’t look at or understand. In order to use your computer you had to sign something saying you would betray your community.

Thus, I needed to create a free operating system. It happened that operating system development was my field, so I was technically suited for the task. It was also the first job that had to be done.

The operating system we created was compatible with Unix, and was called GNU. GNU stands for “GNU is Not Unix”, and the most important thing about GNU is that it is not Unix. Unix is a non-free operating system, and you are not allowed to make a free version of Unix. We developed a free system that is like Unix, but not Unix. We wrote all the parts of it from scratch.

In 1983, there were hundreds of components to the Unix operating system. We began the long process of replacing them one by one. Some of the components took a few days, others took a year or several.

By 1992, we had all of the essential components except one: the kernel. The kernel is one of the major essential components of the system. In GNU, we began developing a kernel in 1990. I chose the initial design based on a belief that it would be a quick design to implement. My choice backfired and it took much longer than I’d hoped. In 1992, the Linux kernel was liberated. It had been released in 1991, but on a non-free license. In 1992 the developer changed the license for the kernel, making it free. That meant we had a free operating system, which I call “GNU/Linux’ or “GNU plus Linux’.

However, when this combination was made, the users got confused, and began to call the whole thing “Linux’. That is not very nice.

First of all, it isn’t nice because there are thousands of people involved in the GNU project who deserve a share of the credit. We started the project, and did the biggest part of the work, so we deserve to get equal mention. (Some people believe that the kernel alone is more important than the rest of the operating system. This belief appears to result from an attempt to construct a justification for the “Linux” misnomer.)

But there is more at stake than just credit: the GNU Project was a campaign for freedom, and Linux was not. The developer of Linux had other motives, motives that were more personal. That does not diminish the value of his contribution. His motives were not bad. He developed the system in order to amuse himself and learn. Amusing oneself is good — programming is great fun. Wanting to learn is also good. But Linux was not designed with the goal of liberating cyberspace, and the motives for Linux would not have given us the whole GNU/Linux system.

Today tens of millions of users are using an operating system that was developed so they could have freedom — but they don’t know this, because they think the system is Linux and that it was developed by a student “just for fun’.

JP: So the GNU+Linux system is not an accident.

RMS: You cannot rely on accidents to defend freedom. Accidents can sometimes help, but you need people who are aware and determined to do this. Because it was not designed specifically for freedom, it is no coincidence that the first license to Linux was non-free. In fact I don’t know why he changed it.

JP: Does the difference between the GNU project and Linux relate to the difference between “free software’ and “open source’?

RMS: As GNU+Linux came to be used by thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and then millions, they started to talk to each other: Look at how powerful, reliable, convenient, cheap, and fun this system is. Most people talking about it, though, never mentioned that it was about freedom. They never thought about it that way. And so our work spread to more people than our ideas did.

Linus Torvalds, the developer of Linux, never agreed with our ideas. He was not a proponent of the ethical aspects of our ideas or a critic of the antisocial nature of non-free software. He just claimed that our software was technically superior to particular competitors.

That claim happened to be true: in the 1990s, someone did a controlled experiment to measure the reliability of software, feeding random input sequences into different programs (Unix systems and GNU systems), and found GNU to be the most reliable. He repeated the tests years later, and GNU was still the most reliable.

The ideas of Torvalds led by 1996 to a division in the community on goals. One group was for freedom, the other for powerful and reliable software. There were regular public arguments. In 1998 the other camp chose the term “open source’ to describe their position. “Open source’ is not a movement, in my view. It is, perhaps, a collection of ideas, or a campaign.

JP: Since we will be talking about this more, perhaps now is a good time to define “movement’.

RMS: I don’t have a definition ready, I’ll have to think of one. Let us define it as a collection of people working to promote an ideal. Or maybe, an ideal, together with an activity to promote it.

JP: So, “open source’ is missing the ideal part?

RMS: They recommend a development methodology and claim that the model will produce superior software. If so, to us, it’s a bonus. Freedom often allows one to achieve convenience. I appreciate having more powerful software, and if freedom helps that, good. But for us in the free software movement that is secondary.

JP: And in fact one should be willing to sacrifice some power and convenience of the software for freedom.

RMS: Absolutely.

The Politics of Free Software

JP: Many of ZNet’s readers see themselves as part of some movement — anti-poverty, or anti-war, or for some other form of social change. Can you say something about why such folks ought to pay attention and relate to the free software movement?

RMS: If you are against the globalization of business power, you should be for free software.

JP: — But it isn’t the global aspect of business power, is it? If it were local business power, that wouldn’t be acceptable?

RMS: — People who say they are against globalization are really against the globalization of business power. They are not actually against globalization as such, because there are other kinds of globalization, the globalization of cooperation and sharing knowledge, which they are not against. Free software replaces business power with cooperation and the sharing of knowledge.

Globalizing a bad thing makes it worse. Business power is bad, so globalizing it is worse. But globalizing a good thing is usually good. Cooperation and sharing of knowledge are good, and when they happen globally, they are even better.

The kind of globalization there are demonstrations against is the globalization of business power. And free software is a part of that movement. It is the expression of the opposition to domination of software users by software developers.

JP: How would you respond to those who suggest that free software activists lack a sense of proportion? Given the vast scale and suffering of war, invasions, occupations, poverty, doesn’t the freedom to use computers pale to insignificance?

RMS: Maybe our views have been misrepresented. It is impossible for one person to be involved in all issues. It shouldn’t be surprising that a programmer would be involved where his skills and talents are most effective.

If I thought free software was the only or most important issue, I can see how people might think that that lacks proportion. But I do not think it is the only or most important issue. I just believe this is where I can do the most good.

A problem arises when people who might be sympathetic to our ethical position, but focus on other issues, fall into the habit of helping to pressure others into using non-free software. It falls to me to tell them they are doing so, that they with their own actions are giving certain large companies more power. When you send someone a “.doc’ file, a “Word’ file, or an audio or video file in RealPlayer or Quicktime format, you are actually pressuring someone to give up their freedom. Perhaps because I constantly have to bring this up, people believe I don’t have a sense of proportion.

Sometimes people take for granted that I will participate in those activities with them. Thus, when I webcast a speech, I have to ask which format it is going to be webcast in. I am not going to go along with a webcast of my speech about freedom that you have to give up your freedom in order to hear or watch. Once I put my coat over a camera before giving my speech, when I learned it was webcasting in RealPlayer format.

JP: Gandhi, in his “Hind Swaraj’, which was originally a series of newspaper articles, asked himself and answered a similar question. He was talking about how India had to get rid not only of British control, but of all of the bad attributes of “western civilization’. He asked himself: “How can one argue against western civilization using a printing press and writing in English’? His answer was that sometimes you have to use poison to kill poison.

RMS: But knowing English doesn’t subjugate — you didn’t have to give up any freedom in India to know English. And I imagine that in India, with so many different languages, there was no better language he could use to communicate.

JP: When you say there was no better language than English, are you suggesting that it becomes an ethical issue when there is an alternative, but not before?

RMS: It becomes an ethical issue when there is a restriction. The use of English might be good or bad for India, but knowing it doesn’t take away your freedom. India regained independence but didn’t get rid of English; in fact, I learned recently that there are people in India today whose first language is English and don’t speak other languages.

By contrast, to put RealPlayer on your computer, you actually have to give up some of your freedom.

JP: Should ZNet use free software?

RMS: The alternative is herding people into giving up their freedom, which is acting contrary to the spirit and purpose of Z.

Most people have not recognized that there is an ethical choice involved in the use of software, because most people have only seen proprietary software and have not begun to consider alternative social arrangements. Z Mag is accustomed to looking at the justice of social arrangements, and could help others consider the social arrangements about software.

JP: But is there still an ethical issue if there is no alternative? If, say, there is no free software way of doing a particular job, for ZNet for example?

RMS: One can live without doing those jobs.

JP: What criteria? How can one decide such a thing?

RMS: If you absolutely must do a particular job then you should contribute to the creation of a free replacement. If you are not a programmer, you can still find a way to contribute–such as by donating money so others can develop it.

JP: So can you see no circumstances in which using non-free software would be the lesser of evils?

RMS: There are some special circumstances. To develop GNU, I used Unix. But first, I thought about whether it would be ethical to do that.

I concluded it was legitimate to use Unix to develop GNU, because GNU’s purpose was to help everyone else stop using Unix sooner. We weren’t merely using Unix to do some worthwhile job, we were using it to end the specific evil that we were participating in.

JP: So for ZNet, you wouldn’t advocate something that involved losing readers, scaling back operations ?

RMS: You wouldn’t have to.

There is a University in Brazil that decided to switch entirely to free software, but they could not find free software to do certain necessary jobs, so they hired programmers to develop the free software. (This cost a part of the money they saved on license fees.) ZNet could do that, too. If you participate in development of the free replacement for a program, then you can excuse temporarily continuing to run it.

In the case of ZNet, I doubt you would need any free software that doesn’t exist. Web sites and magazines already run with free software exclusively. You could probably switch very easily.

Capitalism and Strategy

JP: I have read other interviews with you in which you said you are not anti-capitalist. I think a definition of capitalism might help here.

RMS: Capitalism is organizing society mainly around business that people are free to do within certain rules.

JP: Business?

RMS: I don’t have a definition of business ready. I think we know what business means.

JP: — But “anti-capitalists’ use a different definition. They see capitalism as markets, private property, and, fundamentally, class hierarchy and class division. Do you see class as fundamental to capitalism?

RMS: No. We have had a lot of social mobility, class mobility, in the United States. Fixed classes–which I do not like–are not a necessary aspect of capitalism.

However, I don’t believe that you can use social mobility as an excuse for poverty. If someone who is very poor has a 5% chance of getting rich, that does not justify denying that person food, shelter, clothing, medical care, or education. I believe in the welfare state.

JP: But you are not for equality of outcomes?

RMS: No, I’m not for equality of outcomes. I want to prevent horrible outcomes. But aside from keeping people safe from excruciating outcomes, I believe some inequality is unavoidable.

JP: Inequality based on how much effort people put forth?

RMS: Yes, but also luck.

JP: You don’t want society to reward luck, though.

RMS: Luck is just another word for chance. It is unavoidable that chance has an effect on your life. But poverty is avoidable. It is horrible for people to suffer hunger, death for lack of medical care, to work 12 hours a day just to survive. (Well, I work 12 hours a day, but that’s unpaid activism, not a job — so it’s ok.)

JP: You get the chance to exercise your talents, which is rewarding. Do you think society should reward people for their innate talents?

RMS: Not directly, but people can use their talents to do things. I don’t have a problem with someone using their talents to become successful, I just don’t think the highest calling is success. Things like freedom and the expansion of knowledge are beyond success, beyond the personal. Personal success is not wrong, but it is limited in importance, and once you have enough of it it is a shame to keep striving for that, instead of for truth, beauty, or justice.

I’m a Liberal, in US terms (not Canadian terms). I’m against fascism.

JP: A definition would help here too.

RMS: Fascism is a system of government that sucks up to business and has no respect for human rights. So the Bush regime is an example, but there are lots of others. In fact, it seems we are moving towards more fascism globally.

JP: It is interesting that you used the term “escape’ at the beginning of the interview. Most people who think about “movements’ think in terms of building an opposition, changing public opinion, and forcing concessions from the powerful.

RMS: What we are doing is direct action. I did not think I could get anywhere convincing the software companies to make free software if I did political activities, and in any case I did not have any talent or skills for it. So I just started writing software. I said, if those companies won’t respect our freedom, we’ll develop our own software that does.

JP: But if we are talking about governments and fascism, what do you do when they simply make your software illegal?

RMS: Well, then you are shafted. That is what has happened. Certain kinds of free software are illegal.

JP: What is an example?

RMS: Software to play DVDs. There is a program called DECSS still circulating underground. But not only has the US outlawed it, but the US is pressuring other countries to adopt the same censorship. Canada was considering it, I’m not sure how the case turned out. The European Union adopted a directive and now countries are implementing it with laws that are actually harsher than the directive.

JP: How do you deal with that?

RMS: We are trying to oppose it in the countries that have not passed it and, eventually, we hope to get it abolished and liberate the countries that have. We cannot do that by direct action, but developing the software can still be done underground. I think that, in the US, developing it and not distributing it is not illegal.

Free Software Movement Issues

JP: Let’s conclude with some of the other issues the free software movement is dealing with.

RMS: The main issues are hardware with secret specifications, software patents, and treacherous computing.

On hardware with secret specifications: it is hard to write free software for hardware whose specifications are secret. In the 1970s the computer company would hand you a manual with information about every level of interface, from the electrical signals to the software, so you could properly use their products. But for the past 10-15 years, there has been hardware whose specs are secret. Proprietary software developers can get the specs if they sign a non-disclosure agreement; the public cannot.

So we are forced to experiment and reverse-engineer, which takes time, or pressure the companies, which sometimes works. The worst example is in 3-D graphics, in which most chip specs are secret. One company has published its specs, and drivers have been written for another without help. But the company “NVidious’ (that’s what I call it) has not been co-operative, and I think people should not buy computers with its chips.

An illustration of software patents is excerpted from my op-ed from the UK Guardian:

A novel and a modern complex programme have certain points in common: each is large and implements many ideas. Suppose patent law had been applied to novels in the 1800s; suppose states such as France had permitted the patenting of literary ideas. How would this have affected Hugo’s writing? How would the effects of literary patents compare with the effects of literary copyright?

Consider the novel Les Misérables, written by Hugo. Because he wrote it, the copyright belonged only to him. He did not have to fear that some stranger could sue him for copyright infringement and win. That was impossible, because copyright covers only the details of a work of authorship, and only restricts copying. Hugo had not copied Les Misérables, so he was not in danger.

Patents work differently. They cover ideas - each patent is a monopoly on practising some idea, which is described in the patent itself.

Here’s one example of a hypothetical literary patent:

Claim 1: a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and becomes bitter towards society and humankind.

Claim 2: a communication process according to claim 1, wherein said character subsequently finds moral redemption through the kindness of another.

Claim 3: a communication process according to claims 1 and 2, wherein said character changes his name during the story.

If such a patent had existed in 1862 when Les Misérables was published, the novel would have infringed all three claims - all these things happened to Jean Valjean in the novel. Hugo could have been sued, and would have lost. The novel could have been prohibited - in effect, censored - by the patent holder.

Now consider this hypothetical literary patent:

Claim 1: a communication process that represents in the mind of a reader the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and subsequently changes his name.

Les Misérables would have infringed that patent too, because this description too fits the life story of Jean Valjean. And here’s another hypothetical patent:

Claim 1: a communication process that represents in the mind of a reader the concept of a character who finds moral redemption and then changes his name.

Jean Valjean would have infringed this patent too.

These three patents would all cover the story of one character in a novel. They overlap, but they do not precisely duplicate each other, so they could all be valid simultaneously; all three patent holders could have sued Victor Hugo. Any one of them could have prohibited publication of Les Misérables.

Other aspects of Les Misérables could also have run afoul of patents. For instance, there could have been a patent on a fictionalized portrayal of the Battle of Waterloo, or a patent on using Parisian slang in fiction. Two more lawsuits. In fact, there is no limit to the number of different patents that might have been applicable for suing the author of a work such as Les Misérables. All the patent holders would say they deserved a reward for the literary progress that their patented ideas represent, but these obstacles would not promote progress in literature, they would only obstruct it.

This analogy can help non-programmers see what software patents do. Software patents cover features, such as defining abbreviations in a word processor, or natural order recalculation in a spreadsheet. Patents cover algorithms that programs need to use. Patents cover aspects of file formats, such as Microsoft’s new formats for Word files. MPEG 2 video format is covered by 39 different US patents.

Just as one novel could infringe many different literary patents at once, one program can infringe many different patents at once. It is so much work to identify all the patents infringed by a large program that only one such study has been done. A 2004 study of Linux, the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, found it infringed 283 different US software patents. That is to say, each of these 283 different patents covers some computational process found somewhere in the thousands of pages of source code of Linux.

That’s why software patents act like landmines for software developers. And for software users, since the users can be sued too.

Treacherous computing is a plan to change the design of future PCs so that they will obey software developers instead of you. From the purpetrators’ point of view, it is “trusted”, so they call it “trusted computing”; from the user’s point of view, it is treacherous. Which name you call it expresses whose side you’re on. The new XBox is a preview–it is designed to prevent the user from installing any software without getting Microsoft’s authorization. Here’s more explanation from my essay, ‘Can you trust your computer’:

www.gnu.org/philosop…

The technical idea underlying treacherous computing is that the computer includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are kept secret from you. Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can pass them to. These programs will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If you don’t allow your computer to obtain the new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities will automatically cease to function.

Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the US government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure. You might be unable to read it yourself.

Treacherous computing puts the existence of free operating systems and free applications at risk, because you may not be able to run them at all. Some versions of treacherous computing would require the operating system to be specifically authorized by a particular company. Free operating systems could not be installed. Some versions of treacherous computing would require every program to be specifically authorized by the operating system developer. You could not run free applications on such a system. If you did figure out how, and told someone, that could be a crime.

I appreciate the simplification of my point - which I wouldn’t call ‘postmodernist’ as much as a position within ‘Critical Theory’ - but I think what I was trying to get at was missed in the process. Fundamentally, the two positions you are describing involve truth claims about the world, and it is precisely this that I want to think critically about. First, I’ll explain my ‘philosophical’ (or methodological) position on this, then my ‘political’, and finally, bring the two together.

The points that Manuel DeLanda uses to justify his realism, and the ones you bring up in your posting, are inevitably anthropocentric, as is my own position. But they are also anthropomorphic, something I want to explicitly argue against. Let me ask a simple question - ‘What is Art?’ Is it art when it appears on a tableau? When it involves patterns? When it is ‘consciously’ or ‘deliberately’ created? These are extremely biased questions about what is essentially an anthropocentric concept to begin with. We, socially subjectively, define the limits of what “art” is and determine what qualifies and what does not. DeLanda imputes a thoroughly human (and likely culturally specific) understanding of ‘art’ onto the birds in his example to make a point about the realm of humans - a blatant display of anthropomorphism. In contrast, I argue that any definitive claims about realms outside the human experience are necessarily anthropomorphic, and thus we should readily disclose that position, instead of making and hiding human concepts, values and beliefs in the secure sphere of a higher authority (’nature’). This is ultimately a question of power: to what extent are aspects of humanity immutable - that is, ‘natural’? To what extent do our social institutions, practices and norms, beliefs and values have objectively independent manifestations outside of humanity?

This has important implications for the various politics that we are constantly engaged in, especially the current struggle over human ecology. But I look to history to determine how we might frame and shape it. Marxists and Anarchists have long sought to reorient the terms of their debates with their political opponents by freeing it from the realm of humans, thereby gaining legitimacy and authority to carry out their various projects. In these cases, it was partly idealism, stemming from a higher religious authority, that spurred them to embrace the kind of realism that Mao and Lenin were thinking of when they argued that the dialectic contradiction was an essential characteristic of every unit of matter in the universe. Kropotkin tirelessly appealed to the natural world to shore up support for the ideas that mutual aid institutions are a natural part of humanity, against the realism of disfigured Darwinists.

This is an appealing strategy for political action, since it appears to be the ‘easy way out’. By establishing a truth claim that supports your political values, you only need to extend that truth claim to dominate all others, and defend it vigorously against future competing truth claims. Conversely, by orienting human questions around human values, you condition yourself to an endless and grueling battle to assert the “hegemony” (used loosely) of certain values - a constant flux of power-laden ideas, unanchorable within our social vortex. We know the story of the former strategy - realism was coopted (and significantly placed on a pedestal) by those who used it to hide a different set of values within the absolute truths of our time. Pertaining to ecology, realism proved to be highly amenable to the transformation that ‘the Great Chain of Being’ was to undergo with the loss of its Christian foundations. Carried on in the tradition of Western science, and aided and abetted by scientific Marxism at every turn, what many environmentalists struggle so hard against today has its genesis in the tradition of realism.

Concerning environmental advocacy, the reorientation of debates away from instrumental rationality, though an extremely difficult task, is both necessary and desirable. But how this is done is perhaps my political point of contention. Using realism to achieve this goal - by exclaiming that, objectively, every aspect of non-human nature is “good, in and of itself” - does nothing to challenge the power structure of the human belief system, and is almost certainly to lead to the eventual resurgence of instrumental rationality. In political terms, what is needed is not a change in the government of the governance of the ecological debate, but a regime change that transforms the foundational elements of the way truths are constructed in society.

Thus, I see the philosophical component of environmental advocacy as inextricably intertwined with the political projects that make it up. However, my point was fundamentally missed by equating anthropocentrism with cost-benefit instrumental rationality and with postmodernism (it is not through discourse that we can only understand the world, but as humans, only in human terms, terms which may be fundamentally experiential and non-discursive). What Weber meant by instrumental rationality, and as Habermas has subsequently developed, is not that the the act of valuation is free of ‘ends’. I value a tree because it fulfills a psychological and emotional function of my humanity, not because it will become a chair I will sit on. Rather, it is the kind of thought (and really valuation, but a critique of Weber will have to wait), now commonly associated with ‘cost-benefit analyses’ that need to be rejected. This is inescapably anthropocentric, just as all human action must be - after all, Weber’s typology aimed to describe ’social’ action. But claiming that this is something that must be ‘avoided’ only furthers the false dichotomy that ‘humans’ and ‘nature’ are separate entities. Rather, it is the combination of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism with instrumental rationality that needs to be rethought.

All variants of realism seek to covertly extend human values onto nature, thereby claiming an objectively independent basis for their values, which mask the power that they wield. In seeking to circumvent anthropocentrism, we will only further entrench it in the structure of our knowledge systems, something that has been done for far too long in the academy and in ‘Western’ society. Rather we should embrace our anthropocentrism, and recognize that the range of values and possible actions that we can engage in are endless. This may be a gruelling and thankless task - defeatists might say impossible - but if we are to challenge the Enlightenment project that threatens the world, our world, we must attack it at its roots. Usurpation ultimately never cuts the head off the king. It only holds the place until another usurper, preaching a different message, comes along.

In outlining realism’s perspective on “expressivity,” DeLanda uses an example of crystals, which, he argues, express their “crystalness” regardless of whether humans can perceive it or not. Expressivity, in this sense, is therefore not dependent on human interpretation, but exists outside of the human experience. In another example, DeLanda speaks of a species of bird with a number a variants. The first type of bird is full of blue colour, and attracts mates with ease. The second type of bird is partially feathered in blue, and therefore must try harder to create a nest to attract a mate. The third type of bird has almost no blue at all, and resorts to finding pieces of blue - from flowers to bottlecaps - to decorate its nest to attract a mate. DeLanda argues that this example provides convincing evidence that “art” exists outside of human space and prior to human consciousness. Art, traditionally understood to be a human endeavor and construct, can exist without human interaction: “Deleuze essentially disputed the distinction between epistemology and ontology. The subject is creative and is as much a part of the given as that which floods over it. In the experience of the given we make associations that determine our actions. Those actions come up against and flow with the world external to the subject. As the subject is necessarily a subject among subjects those around it will experience its actions as part of their given. Consequently they too react. One of the most important claims made by DeLanda is that it is not only humans who are subjects. Instead all of existence interact in this way and therefore all of existence has a history.”

While Matt’s post makes a methodological and epistemological analysis, I want to think about DeLanda’s argument another way. I would argue that interrogating DeLanda on methodological grounds (perhaps even on epistemological grounds), while fruitful, misses an important pragmatic implication of the lecture. First, a philosophical question: does nature - the tree, for example - have intrinsic value or instrumental value? Is the tree good in and of itself or is the tree only good because of its value to humans? Many organizations pushing for environmental protection make the instrumentalist argument that ecological destruction threatens human survival. This instrumentalism, being anthropocentric (human-centered), is challenged by DeLanda’s argument on the expressivity of natural things. An implication of DeLanda’s argument is that nature - rocks, trees, bears - should have equal standing to humans in both philosophical inquiry and political action. However, such a non-anthropocentric approach, while arguing that trees and rocks exist independently of our interpretation of them, would not conclude that we are not part of nature. Rather, it begs the question of rethinking our relationship with and position within nature and the nature of things.

Thinking additionally about a recent blog post by Elise, a second question that follows from the above discussion is about praxis in environmental activism: is it more effective to advocate for environmental protection through an understanding of nature as instrumental in value or as possessing intrinsic value? Maybe the general apathy about ecological protection is because of the particular approach taken by environmental activists. By making primarily an instrumentalist argument (though there are some non-instrumentalist approaches), activists are debating within the boundaries of the dominant discourse of cost-benefit analysis: people will only make environmental choices if it will make their own lives better rather than worse. If the postmodern approach (in this particular instance) is anthropocentric, then would a realist (or “critical realist,” but that’s a whole other blog post) perspective be more conducive to the case for environmental protection? Promoting an argument for the intrinsic value of nature, in addition to the many instrumentalist arguments already out there, may go a long way in building support for environmentalism and stemming ecological destruction. So when we think about the expressivity of the rock or the intrinsic value of the tree, the necessary question becomes: how can we put forth more effective non-anthropocentric arguments that are both transformative and acceptable to the public?

*photo source: missouriskies.org

The subject of this lecture dealt with Deleuze’s interest in the animal world, and why humans concerned only with the human world must expand the scope of their interests to the the ‘natural’ world in order to more fully experience the richness of life. As DeLanda notes, we must “learn from the world itself”, in order to ensure that our “pride of being human” doesn’t prevent the deeper experiences we have when relating with our environments. In short, we must try to be “like rocks, or like birds”. While I thoroughly agree with the principle of this position - that life itself should not, and cannot be limited to the human realm, that instead we must embrace the phenomenal diversity of the human experience - my point of critique is primarily methodological.

DeLanda begins by discussing ‘expressivity’ as a fundamental feature of the living and nonliving world. A crystal expresses its ‘crystalness’ regardless of human interaction when its molecules interact with light, when its molecules rest atop soil molecules, when it transforms the path of wind by its simple presence. This is a very attractive concept, and so encompassing (some might say ‘totalitarian’), that it is hard to disagree with. Indeed, I don’t wish to reject the concept of expressivity, if I do think the concept is a slightly clunky replacement for materiality. However, the use of ‘expressivity’ to account for this phenomena in ontology does imply, to me, something essential, something independent, something immanent.

And this is precisely what DeLanda states explicitly - he and Deleuze are realists precisely because they believe in the independence, one might say the isolation, of materiality. Things come from themselves, not from something else. It is hard to disagree with this point as well. We cannot say that the bourgeois make alienation, or that the sun makes cherry blossoms flower. To ‘make’ this extreme claim, one would have to tread towards dangerously close determinism. However, the other extreme (though not so distanced), that every aspect of materiality is independent and individual is equally worrisome. It is not an either/or question of ontology, but rather the space in between - the interactions, the interconnectedness, the inseparability of materiality.

This must apply to the human world as well, and therefore it is more than a little problematic to talk about these separate spheres of ‘animal’, ‘plant’, ‘geologic’ and ‘human’ as differentiated worlds (and within them, countless differentiations as well). They are deeply intertwined, contingent ’spheres’. And it is here where my point of contention with DeLanda (and probably, by extension, Deleuze) lies. I can accept this differentiation of ontology as existent, but this is where the ability to say more about our world, and indeed to experience that world, ends. The next step is a question of interpretation, and this is, since we are humans, a human endeavour.

It is easy to see how, through language, our interpretation of the world is constructed. But even our experiences, constantly vetted by our socialization, (or, if you prefer, environmentalization) and by our very ‘humanity’, are regulated in immensely complex and interdependent, but finite ways. Now, this is not to make a case for a highly complicated determinism. Rather it is to say that human action is contingent on the confluence of ontology and epistemology at any given moment. Thus, it is impossible, as humans, to talk about understanding the (non)lived experience of a crystal without referring to the contextuality of the human (but more often much more cultural, social, political and personal) experience.

One might present the teleological argument that humanity is full of potential that we must actualize, and I am not necessarily against this position directly. Human nature, the range of all possible human experience and expression is impossibly vast and entirely out the scope of my thinkable range to provide even a brief overview of it at this given moment, let alone at all temporal points. However, this vastness and the unpredictability of history makes these kinds of claims extremely difficult. It is always easy to look at an Oak tree and hold a seed and make the link, but much harder to predict from the seed what will emerge.

The point of all this is to say that the interconnections of our atoms that relate to form our psyches, whose manifestations relate to form our society which relate to form our humanity, which is itself only a small part of an interrelationship between our ecology, and so on, preclude us of making definite statements on the veracity of independent reality. What we are ultimately making statements about is our interpretation of this reality.

Thus, when DeLanda says “we must be more like a rock, or more like a bird”, what he is really saying is “we must be more like our personal and social human interpretation of the expressivity of ‘rockness’”. This might be a moot point to some, but it is a debate that is laden with power. The knowledge that we create when we express our experiences affects us in very real ways but it can only ever explain the power relations that actually “do” the shaping of our realities, since it is a product of these relations themselves. Simply, there may be a “truth” existing in the world, an absolute form of ‘rockness’ independent of individual or social subjectivity – that is, traditionally ‘objective’ – but it is unimportant, since we can never know it because our understanding of it will always be mediated by our surroundings.