Book Excerpt: On Instrumental Reason.

"The kind of rationality that drives the modern scientific, economic, and technological revolutions - instrumental or administrative reason (herrschaftwissen) - is only one kind of knowledge, knowledge for the sake of power, profit, and control. Unlike the type of rationality that is critical, ethical, communicative, and dialogical in nature, the goal of instrumental reason is to order, categorize, control, exploit, appropriate, and commandeer the physical and living worlds as means toward designated ends. Accordingly, this general type of reason—a vivid example of what Nietzsche diagnoses as the Western “will to power”—dominates the outlook and schemes of scien-tists, technicians, capitalists, bureaucrats, war strategists, and social scientists. Instrumental knowledge is based on prediction and control, and it attains this goal by linking science to technology, by employing sophisticated mathematical methods of measurement, by frequently serving capitalist interests, and byabstracting itself from all other concerns, often disparaged as “nonscientific,” “subjective,” or inefficient.
 
The dark, ugly, bellicose, repressive, violent, and predatory underbelly of the “disinterested” pursuit of knowledge, of “reason,” and of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “rights” as well, has been described through a litany of ungainly sociological terms, including, but not limited to: secularization, rationalization, commodification, reification (“thingification”), industri-alization, standardization, homogenization, bureaucratization, and global-ization. Each term describes a different aspect of modernity - reduction of the universe to mathematical symbols and equations, the mass production of identical objects, the standardization of individuals into the molds of conformity, the evolution of capitalist power from its competitive to monopolist to transnational stages, or the political and legal state apparatus of “representative” or “parliamentary” democracies.  Each dynamic is part of a comprehensive, aggressive, protean, and multidimensional system of power and domination, co-constituted by the three main engines incessantly propelling modern change: science, capitalism, and technology. In industrial capitalist societies, elites deploy mathematics, science, technology, bureaucracies, states, militaries, and instrumental reason to render the world as something abstract, functional, calculable, and controllable, while transforming any and all things and beings into commodities manufactured and sold for profit. [...]

Clearly, instrumental reason targets not only objects and things for control, but also subjects and society; and just as mechanistic science moved seamlessly from objectifying heavenly bodies to policing social bodies, so administrative rationality moved from controlling nature to manipulating society. The disciplining of bodies in eighteenth century schools, the ubiquitous gaze of guards over prisoners in nineteenth century penitentiaries, the Taylorization process in twentieth century factories that studied workers’ movements to minimize wasted energy and maximize surplus value; the eugenics discourse and mass sterilization policies in the United States during the 1920s; the networks of mass culture, electronic media, and advertising that constitute a vast “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord) that transforms citizens from active agents to passive consumers; the colonization of minds of children, youth, and adults through a cornucopia of chemical toxins that dull, deaden, and neutralize minds through pharmaceutical warfare—these are only some of the seemingly infinite methods and techniques used to regiment populations, pacify resistance, neutralize activity, and eliminate opposition."

Excerpted from The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination.

On Capitalism and Freedom

One of the central dogmas of the secular capitalist religion is that capitalism produces greater liberty. To a very limited extent this is true. It grants the most powerful factions of society the liberty to freely prey upon the powerless. For most people though, it is a dogma in direct conflict with the grim realities of everyday life. For the world's poor the rampant speculation in essential commodities such as food results in the most tragic absence of liberty. It is, however, not just in the periphery of capitalist globalization, where most of the world's extreme poverty is to be found, that we find the promised liberty to be a mere fiction. The commodification of all the necessities for a good life, at least in strictly material terms, not only confines most of us to an existence of indebtedness to the owners of money, it also forces us to sell our time and labor to others in the most vital part of the human lifespan. Indebtedness keeps our noses to the grindstone. It forces us to bow to the demands of our capitalist masters, for we cannot afford being freed from our duties. The ubiquity of the indebted subject is hardly compatible with any meaningful notion of liberty. 

Samme politik bag nye masker.

Vi har i Folketinget en mangfoldighed af partier, men denne mangfoldighed dækker i mange henseender over en udpræget uniformitet. Forskellen på hvilke af midterpartierne der sidder på magten er efterhånden åbenlyst marginal, idet der på de brede linjer hersker en så høj grad af konsensus blandt de to store midterpartier, at forskellene blegner i forhold til lighederne. Man er således stort set enige om...

1. Hvilken retspolitik der skal føres.
2. At Kongehuset skal bevares.
3. At Grundloven ikke står til diskussion.
4. At medlemskabet af NATO og af EU bør opretholdes.
5. At militant aktivisme bør være et af de væsentligste elementer i den udenrigspolitiske kurs.
6. At alliancen med supermagten USA ikke fortjener hverken kritk eller genovervejelse.
7. At overvågningsstaten er kommet for at blive.
8. At visse dele af centraladministrationen bør mørklægges.
9. At krisen skal betales af samfundets svageste.
10. At en stram indvandringspolitik er ønskværdig.
11. At Folkekirken skal forblive den statsligt foretrukne religiøsitet.
12. At kapitalismen har sejret og bør opretholdes, om så der skal statslig intervention til.
13. At PETs virke fortsat skal have ekstrademokratisk karakter.
14. At det repræsentative parlamentariske demokrati er det eneste rigtige, herunder at demokratiseringsprocessen ikke bør fortsætte, idet ingen taler om en yderligere magtspredning eller større folkelig indflydelse.
15. At der ikke bør pilles ved landbrugsstøtten.
16. At staten er i sin gode ret til at fastsætte hvorfra i verden ens ægtefælle helst skal stamme.
17. At den stramme narkotikapolitik bør bevares.
18. At man er fra statsligt hold i sin gode ret til at bestemme hvad folkeskolens elever skal undervises i. 

Vi kalder den politiske proces som determinerer hvem der sidder på magten i Danmark, for et valg, men reelt er valget et ikke-valg mellem flere alen af et stykke. Valgets udfald vil nærmest med sikkerhed, i det mindste i den nuværende politiske kultur, være ensbetydende med samme politik bag nye masker.

Fri Læring.

Liberalisternes Begrænsede Frihedsideal.

Det liberalistiske frihedsideal - især i dets nutidige manifestation - er ganske begrænset. Man prædiker konsekvent ytringsfrihedens godhed og nødvendighed og plæderer for den videst mulige frigørelse af globale økonomiske kræfter, men vender det blinde øje til den strukturelle vold, som er indbygget i det globale økonomiske system. Man spørger sjældent hvad ytringsfriheden er værd for den fattige mand, som bor under en bro med sine børn og derfor er nødsaget til, at bruge alle ressourcer på at fylde deres maver? Svaret er nok mestendels, at den er uden nævneværdig betydning, for selv hvis han havde tid til at ytre sig, ville ingen lytte. Anderledes forholder det sig naturligvis for det multinationale medieimperium, som ejer og råder over talerør i hundredevis.

Det frie marked - og tanken om dets usynlige hånd - har siden oplysningstiden været en vigtig del af det liberalistiske tankegods, men er først i nyere tid blevet den væsentligste bærende søjle. Til trods for markedets frihedsindskrænkende magt qua forgældelsen af snartsagt enhver, anses finanskapitalismens ågerindustri ikke som tilpas problematisk til, at fordre nogen nævneværdig kritik Finanskapitalismens destruktive spekulation mødes som regel blot med skuldertræk.

Kapitalismen er ikke problematisk. Det problematiske er, at de kapitalistiske markedskræfter ikke er frigjorte nok. Finanskapitalismens frie virke vil komme os alle til gode, hvis blot Wall Street får frie nok hænder. Kapitalismen skaber kollektiv velstand med dens indbyggede strukturelle drift imod evig akkumulation. Det forsikrer de markedsoptimistiske liberalister os om. Vi bliver alle rigere, når de rigeste skaber profit. Det stigende tidevand løfter alle både. Politiken skal derfor underlægges markedets økonomiske logik, snarere end omvendt. 

Denne indgroede ideologi gør blind. Blind overfor den kendsgerning, at størstedelen af verdens befolkning er alt andet end rig, selvom kapitalismen har været verdens herskende økonomiske system siden oplysningstiden og verdens eneste siden Sovjetunionens fald. Blind overfor fattigdommens inhærente ufrihed i en verden hvor alt koster penge. Blind overfor det forgældede samfunds indbyggede frihedsunderskud. Blind overfor den udbytning som de herskende økonomiske strukturer tvinger os ind i. 

Nysproglig Ordbog.

Effektivisering (massefyring).
Aktivistisk udenrigspolitik (statsterror).
Forstærket afhøring (tortur).
Profitmaksimering (udbytning).
Offentlighedslov (mørklægning).
Forsvarsminister (krigsminister).
Undervisning (indoktrinering).
Kredit (gæld).
Økonomisk vækst (økologisk masseudryddelse).
Adfærdsvanskelighed (selvstændighed).
Heldagsskole (ekspropriering af fritid).
Nationale interesser (eliteinteresser).
Kriminalitetsbekæmpelse (privatlivskrænkelse).
Sikkerhed (overvågning).
Beskatte (berøve).
Kulturbevarelse (krigsmageri).
Fællesskabet (staten).
Underordnet skadevirkning (mord på civile).
Markedsføring (bedrageri).
Human Resources (lønslaver).
Public Relations (propaganda).
Demokratipromovering (angrebskrig). 
Underholdning (opmærksomhedsafledning).

Dagens Citat: George Orwell.

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements."

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946).

Dagens Citat: Michael Parenti

“The free market core mythology, to which both parties in this country and just about all mainstream political commentators are wedded, argues in effect that the most ruthless, selfish, opportunistic, greedy, calculating plunderers, applying the most heartless measures in cold-blooded pursuit of corporate interests and wealth accumulation, will produce the best results for all of us, through something called the invisible hand.” 

Michael Parenti "Democracy and the Pathology of Wealth". 

Dagens Citat: David Graeber.

"While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs. This is precisely the system that has imposed free market orthodoxy, and opened the world to financial pillage, under the watchful aegis of American arms. It only made sense that the first attempt to recreate a global revolutionary movement, the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy." [min fremhævning]

David Graeber: "A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse."

Plant Research: Plants Can Sense Gravity.

"Plants have the ability to sense gravity. There are specialized parts of some cells called statoliths, which occur, for instance, in plant root cells, which need to know which direction to travel—in this case, down into the ground. The cell senses gravity, and changes its behavior accordingly.

Pollen tubes don’t have statoliths and they don’t sense gravity. A pollen tube is on a mission to find and germinate an egg; if it were primarily concerned with responding gravity, that mission would be thwarted. The pollen tube grows in the direction of the egg, and it takes its cues from the egg’s chemical signals. This means that any impact of gravity on a pollen tube is due to the actual effects of gravitational force on weight-bearing loads in nature."

Discover Magazine

Dagens Citat: Bakunin

"What is property, what is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working. And since neither property nor capital produces anything when not fertilized by labor - that means the power and the right to live by exploiting the work of someone else, the right to exploit the work of those who possess neither property nor capital and who thus are forced to sell their productive power to the lucky owners of both."

 - Bakunin.

Pilkington on Hayek and Neoliberalism.

Radio interview w. Philip Pilkington of Naked Capitalism on Hayek and neoliberalism entitled "Neoliberalism & Hayek's Delusion".

"This week we welcome back Philip Pilkington to the show to talk about his latest writings on the life and times of Friedrich Hayek, the ideologue behind the Neoliberal project. Philip came over to my house this week and we sat about and waxed lyrical on such highfalutin topics as Classical Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Ordoliberalism. We also got around to political propoganda and the Mont Perelin society, the similarities between the far right and Leninism, and how, after Hayek's nefarious influence, our politics has never been the same again"

Nyliberalismens Tre Historiske Faser.

"The history of neoliberalism has at least three distinct phases. The first lasted from the 1920s until about 1950. The term began to acquire meaning in interwar Europe as the Austrian school economists and the German ordoliberals sought to define the contours of a market-based society, which they believed was the best way to organize an economy and guarantee individual liberty. “Neoliberal” was embraced by participants at the famous Colloque Walter Lippmann, organized in Paris in 1938 by the French philosopher Louis Rougier to consider the implications of Walter Lippmann’s book, The Good Society (1937). The term was chosen because it suggested more than a simple return to laissez-faire economics. Instead, neoliberalism would reformulate liberalism to address the concerns of the 1930s. Present, among others, were Hayek, Alexander Rüstow, Wilhelm Röpke, and Mises, as well as the French economist Jacques Rueff and the Hungarian British polymath Michael Polanyi. These men, along with others from Europe and America, would later form the Mont Pelerin Society with Hayek, Röpke, and Albert Hunold in 1947.

The influence of Mont Pelerin liberalism was apparent in Milton Friedman’s essay, “Neo-liberalism and Its Prospects,” published in 1951. Though little noticed and in many ways oddly unrepresentative of his thought, Friedman’s article can be seen in retrospect as an important bridge between the first and second phases of neoliberalism, between the concerns of the predominantly European founding figures, located in Austria, London, Manchester, France, Switzerland, and parts of Germany, and a subsequent generation of thinkers, mainly though by no means all American, located especially in Chicago and Virginia. Of course, the “first Chicago school” of economics, comprising Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and Henry Simons, played its part in neoliberalism’s formation, but most early neoliberals were preoccupied with European concerns.

The second phase of neoliberalism lasted from 1950 until the free market ascendency of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s. At the zenith of New Deal liberalism and British social democracy, when neo-Keynesian approaches to economic policy were at their height, much of this period was a superficially lean time for neoliberals. Outside Germany, they lacked concrete political success in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, neoliberalism generated intellectual coherence and matured politically. It grew into a recognizable group of ideas, and also into a movement. An increasingly confident group of thinkers, scholars, businessmen, and policy entrepreneurs developed and refined a radical set of free market prescriptions and promoted their agenda. Ironically, it was also in this period that the use of “neoliberal” by its proponents became less common. This was odd at a time when American neoliberal thinkers in particular were defining it ever more precisely in the spheres of industrial organization, monetary policy, and regulation. But this was probably because the term meant little in an American context.

Characteristic of the Chicago approach was the “methodology of positive economics,” out of which emerged Friedman’s revival of monetarism and Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture. This empirical bent was allied to new theories and research endeavors, subsidized by sympathetic business finance and developed in the 1950s and 1960s, about the relatively harmless nature of monopoly and the positive role of large corporations. From the Chicago perspective, the more worrying manifestation of monopoly was trade union power. The Chicago approach marked a sharp contrast, however, with European neoliberalism and even with the adherents’ own departmental forebears, such as Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and, most important, Henry Simons. German ordoliberals, for example, always took the need for robust antimonopoly policies seriously. In parallel with the technical work of the Chicago economists, Friedman’s polemical arguments, put forward in Capitalism and Freedom (1962)—the “American Road to Serfdom,” as Philip Mirowski and Rob Van Horn have called it—presented the market as the means both to deliver social goods and to deliver the ends, the good life itself.

A third phase of neoliberalism, after 1980, was driven by the advance of an agenda of market liberalization and fiscal discipline into development and trade policy. Neoliberalism broke out of the predominantly North Atlantic and Western European confines of elite academia and domestic national politics and spread into many global institutions, especially in the former communist countries and the developing world. Its principles were adopted by economists and policymakers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the EU, and as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The 1980s and 1990s were notable for the notorious “structural adjustment” policies pursued through these institutions and agreements. These were summarized in 1989 by the British economist John Williamson as the now renowned “Washington Consensus” and included tax reform, trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and strong property rights. The certainty with which such policies were introduced has been much criticized by economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, as well as by uncompromising opponents of capitalism in the antiglobalization movement, which famously erupted at the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999."

Daniel Steadman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Policies, Princeton University Press (2012).

Dagens Citat: Keynes.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, The General Theory of Unemployment, 1936.

Panem et Circenses.

Romerne havde fat i den lange ende. Skal man styre befolkningen uden at skulle bekymre sig om for mange kritiske spørgsmål, er det en god idé at aflede dens opmærksomhed med "brød og cirkus". Den romerske satiriker Juvenals metafor for hul og overfladisk underholdning og behovstilfredstillelse. I Orwells "1984" er han inde på noget lignende. Han fortæller om Informationsministeriet som producerer proletarfodder i form af overfladiske aviser fulde af kriminalitet, sport og horoskoper, samt populærmusik, hvor alle numrene er skåret efter den samme form. Det lyder jo ret bekendt. I vores tilfælde er det imidlertid ikke centraladministrationen som står bag denne effektive afledningsmanøvre, men derimod kapitalistiske firmaer. Vi kender det som B.T og Ekstra Bladet, indholdsløs popmusik baseret på de samme tre akkorder, de allestedsnærværende reklamer og fra fjernsynskanaler som TV3, hvis mest oplysende program er The Simpsons.

Dagens Citat: Marshall Sahlins

"The premise of American overseas aggression, according to Donald Rumsfeld and others, is something like the line in the movie Full Metal Jacket: “inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.” All we have to do to liberate this innately freedom-loving, self-interested, democracy-needing, capitalist-in-waiting is to rid him of the oppressive, evil-minded regime holding him down—by force if necessary."

Professor emeritus of anthropology, Marshall Sahlins. 

Toby Hemenway, "Redesigning Civilization"

The New Edge of Radical Economics - David Graeber & Charles Eisenstein.

Dagens Citat: Robert Anton Wilson.

"Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs .... The result can only be progressive deterioration among the rulers."

Robert Anton Wilson: The Illiminatus! Trilogy s. 388.

Chris Hedges on Corporate American Media

"The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil. These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable. [...]

The lie of omission is still a lie. It is what these news celebrities do not mention that exposes their complicity with corporate power. They do not speak about Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, a provision that allows the government to use the military to hold U.S. citizens and strip them of due process. They do not decry the trashing of our most basic civil liberties, allowing acts such as warrantless wiretapping and executive orders for the assassination of U.S. citizens. They do not devote significant time to climate scientists to explain the crisis that is enveloping our planet. They do not confront the reckless assault of the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem. They very rarely produce long-form documentaries or news reports on our urban and rural poor, who have been rendered invisible, or on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or on corporate corruption on Wall Street. That is not why they are paid. They are paid to stymie meaningful debate. They are paid to discredit or ignore the nation’s most astute critics of corporatism, among them Cornel West, Medea Benjamin, Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky. They are paid to chatter mindlessly, hour after hour, filling our heads with the theater of the absurd."

Chris Lynn Hedges: "The Day That TV News Died"