MATRICES
OF CONTROL:
MODERNITY,
INDUSTRIALISM, AND CAPITALISM.
By
Steven Best
In
the transition to what is called “modernity”—a revolutionary
European and American social order driven by markets, science, and
technology—reason awakens to its potential power and embarks on the
project to theoretically comprehend and to practically “master”
the world. For modern science to develop, heretics had to disenchant
the world and eradicate all views of nature as infused with living or
spiritual forces. This required a frontal attack on the notion that
the mind participates in the world, and the sublation of all manner
of the animistic and religious ideologies—from the Pre-Socratics to Renaissance alchemists
to indigenous cosmological systems—which believed that nature was
magical, divine, or suffused with spirit and intelligence. This
became possible only with the dethronement of God as the locus of
knowledge and value, in favor of a secular outlook that exploited
mathematics, physics, technology, and the experimental method to
unlock the mysteries of the universe. Modern science began with the
Copernican shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe in the
sixteenth century, advanced in the seventeenth century with Galileo’s
challenge to the hegemony of the Church and pioneering use of
mechanics and measurement, while bolstered by Bacon’s and
Descartes’s call to command and commandeer nature; and reached a
high point with Newton’s discoveries of the laws of gravity,
further inspiring a mechanistic worldview developed by Enlightenment
thinkers during the eighteenth century.
For
the major architects of the modern worldview—Galileo Galilei,
Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton—the cosmos is a
vast machine governed by immutable laws which function in a stable
and orderly way that can be discerned by the rational mind and
manipulated for human benefit. Beginning in the sixteenth century,
scientific explanations of the world replaced theological
explanations; knowledge is used no longer to serve God and shore up
faith, but rather to serve the needs of human beings and to expand
their power over nature. Where philosophers in the premodern world
believed that the purpose of knowledge was to know God and to
contemplate eternal truths, modernists exalted applied knowledge and
demystified the purpose of knowledge as nothing more than to extend
the “power and greatness of man” to command natural forces for
“the relief of man’s estate.” Through advancing mathematical
and physical explanations of the universe, modernists replaced a
qualitative, sacred definition of reality with a strictly
quantitative hermeneutics that “disenchanted” (Berman) the world
and ultimately presided over the “death of nature” (Merchant).
This
involved transforming the understanding of the universe as a living
cosmos into a dead machine, thus removing any qualms scientists and
technicians might have in the
misguided project of “mastering” nature for human purposes. The
machine metaphor was apt, not only because of the spread of machines
and factories throughout emerging capitalist society, but also
because—representing something orderly, precise, determined,
knowable, and controllable—it was the totem for European modernity.
Newton’s discoveries of the laws of gravity vindicated the
mechanistic worldview and scores of eighteenth and nineteenth century
thinkers (such as Holbach and La Mettrie) set out to apply this
materialist and determinist paradigm to the earth as well as to the
heavens, on the assumption that similar laws, harmonies, and
regularities governed society and human nature. Once the laws of
history, social change, and human nature were grasped, the new
“social scientists” speculated, human behavior and social
dynamics could be similarly managed through application of the order,
harmony, prediction, and control that allowed for the scientific
governance of natural bodies.
The
rationalization, quantification, and abstraction process generated by
science, where the natural world was emptied of meaning and reduced
to quantitative value, is paralleled in dynamics unleashed by
capitalism, in which all things and beings are reduced to exchange
value and the pursuit of profit. In both science and capitalism, an
aggressive nihilism obliterates intrinsic value and reduces natural,
biological, and social reality to instrumental value, viewing the
entire world from the interest of dissection, manipulation, and
exploitation. Science sharply separates “fact” from “value,”
thereby pursuing a “neutral” or “objective” study of natural
systems apart from politics, ethics, and metaphysics, as capitalism
bifurcates the public and private sectors, disburdening private
enterprise of any public or moral obligations.
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
scientists, 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 by
abstracting 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”), industrialization,
standardization, homogenization, bureaucratization, and
globalization. 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.
From
Exploitation to Administration.
Critical
theorists and postmodernists resisted Marxist economic reductionism
to work out the implications of Weber’s “iron cage of
rationality” that tightly enveloped the modern world by the
nineteenth century. A critical counter-enlightenment trajectory leads
from Nietzsche to Weber to Georg Lukács through Frankfurt School
theorists like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and
Jurgen Habermas, to postmodernists such as Michel Foucault and Jean
Baudrillard. Although many relied on key Marxist categories, they
sought a more complex concept of power and resistance than allowed by
the economistic emphasis on capital, alienated labor, and class
struggle. Where Marx equates power with exploitation, the
capital-labor relation, the factory system, and centralized
corporate-state power, modern and postmodern theorists of
administrative rationality brought to light the autonomous role that
knowledge, reason, politics, and technique serve in producing systems
of domination and control. Thus, on this line of reasoning, in the
early twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger theorized
modernity as a huge system of “enframing” that reduced things to
mere objects and functions available for human use. Adorno and
Horkheimer revealed the “total administration” of society through
instrumental reason that sought control over objects, the
environment, and human individuals and populations by eliminating
difference and
treating everything as resources suited to manipulation and control.
They witnessed how culture and the arts had been colonized by
capitalist values and industrial methods, such that creative works
once judged on aesthetic criteria such as originality, sublimity, and
edification were assessed instead on economic grounds as commodities
with potential mass appeal capable of generating enormous profits.
Culture, in short, had become a culture industry, where artworks
became commodities for mass production, distribution, and
consumption, designed according to rationalized formulae, and
administered
through
a bureaucratic chain of command.
Similarly,
Marcuse documented the loss of critical reason, autonomy, and
individual transformation in a “one dimensional” society ruled by
capital, state bureaucracy, and technoscience. This system
precludes, represses, or absorbs dissent and opposition amid a
monotone culture of corporatism and conformity devoid of opposition
and dissent. Rather than a centralized control system dominated by
corporations and the state, Foucault analyzed modernity as a
plurality of micro-institutions such as hospitals, schools, and
prisons. Foucault argues that capital exploitation of labor is only
one aspect of power, which is far more general in its nature,
strategies, and range of effects. Power should be understood not as
exploitation, but as rationalization, or rather, as a series of
discursive-institutional employments of rationality that seek to
“normalize” and “discipline” individuals and populations
through the liquidation of alterity and the production of docile
minds and bodies. In works such as For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign (1981) and The Mirror of Production (1975), Jean
Baudrillard interprets political economy as a gigantic system of
bureaucratic administration of all social life, such that capitalism
is less a structure in itself than an institutional instantiation of
a larger rationalization process. In a notable more recent updating
of a Weber-Marx synthesis, analyzing the logic and consequences of
industrialization and capitalism, sociologist George Ritzer described
the “McDonaldization of society.” For Ritzer, this process
describes a global phenomenon in which society and culture come under
the logic of mass production, standardization, mass consumption, and
capital markets. As McDonaldization spreads insidiously, it dulls
consciousness, destroys diversity and difference, and integrates
people into the global factory system in spheres of production and
consumption, work and everyday life, while spreading markets and
commodification imperatives in all directions, always with the intent
to amass capital and power for the minority elite.
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.
A
Light Snuffed Out.
Despite
the optimistic predictions of sundry eighteenth century Enlightenment
thinkers in Germany, France, the United States, and elsewhere, the
rise of science, technology, global markets, rationality, and
critical thinking did not lead to universal peace, happiness, and
prosperity for the world’s peoples. In the alchemy of capitalist
modernity, things morph into their opposites, and thus dreams spawned
nightmares, visions of light brought darkness, knowledge bred
ignorance, productive forces evolved into destructive forces;
competition led to monopoly; wealth produced misery; automation
extended the regime of labor, and freedom multiplied domination. The
unfettered development of reason, science, technology, and markets
did not eliminate wars, abolish poverty, or annul want. Like
“democracy” and “rights,” the discourse of “Progress”—the
Gospel of Modernity—disguises private interests (the small minority
who comprise the financial, political, and cultural elite) under the
mask of universal discourse (e.g., “the rights of man”).
“Progress” thus works to obscure unjust social relations and to
legitimate science, technology, and capitalism, and thus is a mantra
created by and for elites.
The
underbelly of the Enlightenment and “Age of Reason” was riddled
with racism, patriarchy, genocide, slavery, and colonialism, and the
leaders and ambassadors of modernity had the audacity to uphold
capitalism, science, and industry as a “civilization” par
excellence, generating a society that allegedly transcends the legacy
of “savage” and “barbaric” cultures. This “pinnacle” of
human evolution, this “mature” realization of promise in relation
to which non-Western and pre-modern societies were but “infants,” proved
its superiority through two world wars, fascism, totalitarianism,
genocide, and atomic warfare, followed by a nuclear arms race and
ecological destruction on a planetary scale. In the tragic “dialectic
of enlightenment,” Adorno and Horkheimer noted, reason morphed into
its opposite as “catastrophe radiated over the earth.” Whereas
modern theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
championed the spread of reason, science, and technology as
emancipatory, “postmodern” critics of the late twentieth century
attacked these forces as coercive and oppressive. They rejected the
naïve coupling of reason and freedom to argue that reason aided by
science, technology, and capitalism produces monsters and
catastrophes. Accordingly, Lyotard finds the main characteristic of
the “postmodern condition” and fin-de-siècle malaise to be
“incredulity toward metanarratives” (i.e., modern progressivist
visions of history as a linear and purposive movement of events
toward the confluence of reason and freedom.)
Habermas,
however, rejects postmodern critiques themselves as totalizing, as
one-sided polemics that conflate different forms of rationality into
one oppressive force that allegedly has colonized all of society. For
Habermas, the problem with modernity is not too much rationality, but
too little. That is, whereas modernity is characterized by the
hegemony of instrumental rationality which seeks a technical mastery
of nature and society, the Enlightenment culture generated a
communicative rationality that is concerned not with power and
control but rather the logic of raising different validity claims
which require redemption under conditions of argumentation while
seeking consensus over important issues of government and social
regulation. Whereas Habermas agrees with critical modernists and
postmodernists that instrumental reason has bolstered the domination
of human over nature and human over human, he insists that
communicative rationality can decouple reason and domination. Thus,
he believes, there are positive aspects of the Enlightenment and
modern liberalism that can be redeemed and developed toward
emancipatory ends. The Enlightenment, therefore, is not dead or
unqualifiedly disastrous; rather, Habermas declares it and modernity
as a whole to be an “unfinished project.”
Systems
of Command.
After
World War II, and the huge gains made by U.S. corporate and military
interests, the idea of a manifold and structured power system—an
industrial complex—was first articu-lated and became common
vernacular. In his seminal work, The Power Elite (1956), sociologist
C. Wright Mills theorized the structural outcomes arising from the
mutual class interests uniting military, governmental, and business
leaders within an anti-democratic oligarchy. During his January 1961
Farewell Address to the Nation, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower warned of a menacing new “military-industrial complex,”
a post-war power bloc composed of the armed forces, private defense
contractors, weapons suppliers, the Pentagon, Congress, and the
Executive Branch of government. Invoking this unholy alliance among
industrialism, capitalism, and state militarism, Eisenhower cautioned
that weapons and warfare had become new industries and capital
markets that may boost the economy
but undermine the Constitution and upset the “balance of powers”
among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of
government.
But
it was not only the military that had exploited science and
technology, appropriated industrial models of production and
organization, used bureaucratic organization techniques, and produced
commodities—deadly weapons of war—for capital markets and profit
motivations. As Eisenhower delivered his somber address, the
foundations of the military-industrial complex were already set and
began multiplying and manifesting in different institutions,
disciplines, fields of research, and social institutions. The
military-industrial complex was but part of a larger revolution bent
on remaking American society,
Western Europe, and ultimately the entire globe in its own image of
power, subjugation, and profit. At the same time, its autonomy
congealed within basic paradigms or structures rooted in imperatives
of control, domination, efficiency, and profit within various
hierarchical systems of rule. In this sense, as Noam Chomsky has
described it, the military-industrial complex is “a misnomer . . .
There is no military-industrial complex: it’s just the industrial
system operating under one or another pretext.”
In
the decades since Eisenhower’s speech, one sees in capitalist
societies the fluid and dynamic merging of science, technology, mass
production, capitalism, bureaucracy, and hierarchical power systems.
It was not only the military that had merged with market models,
industrial paradigms, systems of mass production, growth and
efficiency impera-tives, and bureaucratic administration, but also
every other institution of society. By the mid-twentieth century, in
sectors ranging from medicine, agriculture, media, and entertainment,
to security, education, criminal justice, and transportation,
virtually all institutions were reconceived and reconstructed
according to capitalist, industrial, and bureaucratic models suited
to the aim of realizing profit, growth, efficiency, mass production,
and standardization imperatives. These systems, moreover, interrelate
and reinforce one another. We can see this, for instance, in how the
constellation in which the academic industrial complex does research
for the medical industrial complex and Big Pharma, exploiting the
nonhuman animal slaves of the animal industrial complex in
university, military, and private vivisection laboratories and
producing fraudulent research financed by and for pharmaceutical
capital. The dubiously researched drugs are patented, typically
fast-tracked into market sales by the obliging Food and Drug
Administration, and then advertised through the media industrial
complex. Up to 115 million animals die worldwide annually to
perpetuate this fraud, and the human victims of research-for-profit
succumb to the medical industrial complex for costly “disease
man-agement” (not “health care”) treatment that treats only
symptoms to focus on the ultimate objective of profit. The dissent of
animal rights activists is criminalized by the security industrial
complex, and many are sent off to languish, along with one out of
every one hundred adults in the U.S. population incarcerated in the
prison industrial complex.
Similarly,
in the fast-growing academic industrial complex, universities are no
longer noble institutions of “higher education” but rather
profit-seeking corporations that treat students as commodities;
replace costly tenured profes-sors with the cheap labor of part-time,
contract, and adjunct instructors; and emphasize the highly lucrative
fields of science, engineering, and athletics, while marginalizing
“non-performing” disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, and
anthropology. Universities also opens their doors to the military and
security industrial complexes to staff the U.S. global war machine
and repres-sive state apparatus with well-trained functionaries.
Meanwhile, our food system has become thoroughly industrialized and
corporatized as small, family farms have been bankrupted and
assimilated into the giant conglomerate holdings of agribusiness.
Thus, factory farms have become the international business standard,
as agribusiness giants such as Cargill and Monsanto absorb remaining
tradi-tional farms into their global networks by coercive attempts to
impose seeds, pesticides and herbicides, and service technologies
they patent and own, and taking advantage of “genetic pollution”
on neighboring farms to sue, destroy, and control their land as well.
But to announce the role of these multinational companies in
determining the shape and nature of our lives is to recognize that
the capitalist-industrial complex has become global, diversi-fied,
interconnected and networked.
The
Dialectic of Globalization.
In
a classic work, Karl Polyani (1957) described the “great
transformation” from prein-dustrial to industrial society. With
Douglas Kellner, I attempted previously to theorize the
transformation of twenty-first century global industrial society—the
postmodern adventure (which designated dramatic changes in the
economy and society, but also in science, technology, politics,
culture, nature, and human identity itself). (...)
The
termination of the Bretton Woods financial system and the collapse of
the Soviet Union followed in the wake of centuries of capital-driven
globalization. Neoliberal capitalism has become the new paradigm of
permanent growth. The implications of the neoliberal stage of
capitalist marketization are enormous, as capitalism universalizes
its rule, throws off “superfluous” and “injurious”
constraints on “free trade,” and increasingly realizes the goal
of purity of function and purpose through the autonomization of the
economy from society, so that the social is the economic. Over the
last few decades, Takis
Fotopoulos notes, “A neoliberal consensus has swept over the
advanced capitalist world and has replaced the social-democratic
consensus of the early post-war period.”
Not
only have “existing socialist societies” been negated in the
global triumph of capita-lism, so too have social democracies and the
bulk of institutional networks designed to protect individuals from
the ravages of privatization and the relinquishment of
responsi-bilities to people in need to case them into barbaric
barrenness of the “survival-of-the-fittest.” Over the last
several decades, the capitalist production process itself has become
increasingly transnationalized and thereby relatively autonomous (but
not in total negation) of the archipelago of nation-states in favor
of global institutions and power blocs of unprecedented influence and
might. We have moved from a world economy to a new epoch known as the
global economy. Whereas formerly the world economy was composed of
the development of national economies and state-based circuits of
accumulation interlinked through commodity trade and capital flows in
differentiated world markets, today corporations and national
production systems are reorganized and functionally integrated into
porous global circuits, creating a single and increasingly homogenous
field for massive and mobile capitalism.
Fuelled
by new forms of science and technology, military expansion, and
aggressive colonization of southern nations and the developing world,
capitalism evolved into a truly global system. Global capital is
inspired by neoliberal visions of nations as resource pools and open
markets operating without restrictions. The process euphemistically
termed “globalization” is driven by multinational corporations
such as ExxonMobil and DuPont; financed by financial goliaths such as
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
legally protected by the World Trade Organization (WTO). It
homogenizes nations into a single economic organism and trading bloc
through arrangements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the European
Union (EU). Multinationals seduce, bribe, and coerce nations to open
their markets and help drive down labor costs to a bare minimum, and
rely heavily on corrupt dictators, loans and debt, and “hit men”
and armies to enforce the rule of their “structural
transformations” of societies into conduits for the
flow of resources and capital. Globalization has produced trade laws
that protect transnational corporations at the expense of human life,
biodiversity, and the environ-ment. It is accompanied by
computerization of all facets of production and expanding automation,
generating heightened exploitation of labor, corporate downsizing,
and greater levels of unemployment, inequality, insecurity, and
violence
Debates
rage over issues such as when globalization dynamics began and if
current ones are continuous developments of centuries of global
markets and exchange or something qualitatively new; whether
corporate globalization is mainly a positive or negative dynamic; the
degree to which globalization is largely under the command of U.S.
capital and military interests or more diverse and plural powers;
whether the United States is a declining empire and a power shift is
underway from American-European capital to the rapidly modernizing
and growing economies of the East (China and India) and the South
(Latin America); the extent to which the nation state is still a
significant force amidst the growing power of international corporate
and financial networks; whether or not industrial logics such as
standardization have been displaced by postindustrial developments
(such as are organized more around communications, science,
knowledge, and service industries than traditional manufacturing
operations) and post-Fordist “flexible” production schemes, and
so on. While a vast literature explains recent epochal shifts in
terms like postindustrialism, post-Fordism, or postmodernity, we
grasp numerous novelties but nevertheless insist that significant
changes and reorganization in technology, organization, culture, and
capital are best understood not as something qualitatively different,
but rather as new stages in capitalism still dominated by profit and
growth imperatives. And as theorists such as Claus Offe, John Keene,
Scott Lash, and John Urry describe the restructuring process as
“disorganized capitalism,” we see this as a complex form of the
reorganization of capitalism, constituting a new mode of economic and
social organization with momentous consequences.
There
has been less realization, however, that structures of power are
multiple, plural, and decentralized, and that we live amidst a
tangled matrix of systems anchored in logics of control,
standardization, exploitation, and profit. Taken together, this
“power complex” continues to expand throughout the globe and to
grow new tentacles, each system or network overlapping with and
reinforcing others, and the totality integrating nature, animals, and
human beings ever deeper into a veritable global industrial complex.
The expansive,
colonizing, interconnected network is comprised of numerous
industry-capital specific systems such as the criminal industrial
complex, the agricultural industrial complex, the medical industrial
complex, the animal industrial complex, the academic industrial
complex, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial
complex, the entertainment industrial complex, and the communication
industrial complex, to name some of the more salient configurations.
the
powerful logics of industrialization and capitalism, symbiotically
interlocked at least since the nineteenth century, have expanded,
diversified, and colonized ever more institutions and organizing
systems, and expanded into a world system. In any one institutional
node of this protean and rhizomatic network, one can find logics,
functions, and procedures that include commodification,
profit-seeking, corporatization, and privatization; hierarchical
command and bureaucratic administration; exploitation of
technoscience and expertise; electronic information networks and
profit-making goals; and structures of state and military repression,
coercive violence, and prison to enforce institutional power.
By
no means is globalization to be understood as an inherently negative
dynamic or consequence of human history, as if the desideratum is
fragmentation, isolation, provincialism, and nationalism. Ever since
Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and dispersed itself globally
across the continents, human existence has been a global dynamic and
knowledge, culture, and technologies have spread in all directions,
such as with the influence of Islam on the West. Certainly, from the
standpoint of the natural environment and the countless animal
species driven into extinction, the rapid global growth of
human populations, technologies, and economies has not been a
positive development. But dissemination of knowledge, culture, and
people is a positive and enriching process; indeed, it is now urgent
that the paradigm shift from economics and growth to ecology and
sustainability take root on a global scale. A salient distinction to
be made here is between globalization from above (as dictated by
multinational capital) and globalization from below (as realized in
self-organizing and democratic ways by people in cul-tural exchange
and open movement). And just as we reject the false option of seeing
power as either macrological or micrological, recognizing both that
power, resources, and wealth are concentrated like never before and
yet distributed throughout societies in a wide range of institutions,
none of which are reducible to ruling elites or a dominant class, so
we reject framing the issue as Marx or Weber, in favor of Marx and
Weber, while affirming the need for a host of other fruitful
perspectives, such as the standpoints of gender, race, and
species.
Moreover,
it would be a serious mistake to think that the octopus of
interlocked power networks covering the globe does not generate
appropriate responses and relevant modes of resistance and struggle.
Through even perfunctory perusal of sites such as Indymedia,
Infoshop, 325nostate.net, Guerilla News, and Bite Back, one can see
that resistance is intense, global, and total, against every system
of hierarchy ever devised, giving rise to diverse and vital struggles
for human, animal, and earth liberation. As dramatically evident
in battles such as raged in Madrid in 1994, in Seattle in 1999, and
in Genoa in 2001, “anti-” or, more accurately,
“alter-globalization” groups throughout the world recognized
their common interests and fates, and formed unprecedented kinds of
alliances to fight against the globalization of capital. Global
capitalism has emerged as the common enemy recognized by world groups
and peoples, and resistance movements have come together in alliances
that bridge national boundaries, North-South divisions, and different political
causes.
Yet
struggles have not kept pace with the scope and speed of planetary
plunder; resistance movements are winning some battles, but losing
the larger war against greed, violence, expanding corporate power,
militarization, and against metastasizing systems of economic growth,
technological development, overproduction, overconsumption, and
overpopu-lation. The deterioration of society and nature demands a
profound, systematic, and radical political response, yet in recent
decades Left opposition movements have tended to become more
reformist and co-opted on the whole, growing weaker in proportion to
their strategic importance and the power of global capital. As the
world spirals ever deeper into disaster, with all things becoming
ever more tightly knit into the tentacles of global capitalism, there
is an urgent need for new conceptual and political maps and compasses
to help steer humanity into a viable mode of existence.
(..)
It bears repeating that the forces of death, destruction, and
domination today are not only capitalism, transnational corporations,
and the banking and finance institutions, but are also states,
militaries, bureaucracies, and sundry systems of control that aim to
colonize and control nature, animals, and human populations.
Additionally, the underlying mentalities of hierarchy and
instrumentalism that have driven Western culture and beyond for over
two millennia remain instantiated in the global consciousness. As
such, they shape not only the materially systemic forms that
domination now takes, but also present limiting factors for the
planetary realization of liberation struggles.
If
every moment is pregnant with revolution, this is an especially
pivotal time in history, a crossroads for the future of life. As the
social and ecological crisis deepens, with capitalism surging,
inequalities growing, control systems tightening, forests
disappearing, species vanishing, oceans dying, resources diminishing,
and the catastrophic effects of global climate change now immanent
and irreversible, windows of reasonable political opportunity for the
production of an alternative social order are rapidly closing. The
actions that humanity now collectively takes or fails to take will
determine whether the future is more hopeful or altogether bleak.
As
the corporate machines continue to slash and burn the planet,
inequalities widen and power grows, logics of profit and control
spread through social institutions, human numbers and the insatiable
appetites of the global consumer society swell as the biodiversity of
flora and fauna steeply declines, it is easy to become not only
cautious or pessimistic about the prospects for planetary peace and
freedom, but fatalistic and nihilistic. In the schools and social
movement discourse, we are beginning to hear from some who appear
resigned to the catastrophe playing out on this planet. Others,
however, remain
oblivious to this incredible moment in time and the epic tragedy of
resigning humanity’s fate to be a failed primate species because of
its inability to harness the evolutionary advantages of a large
forebrain or overcome its predilection to tribalism, xenophobia,
hubris, hierarchy, violence, alienation from nature and other life
forms, and uncontrolled growth.
Surrender,
however, is not an option. Our debt to the past and present is great,
and we have no choice but to live in the tension that pits hopes and
ideals against grim realities and unprecedented challenges. As
Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The challenge of modernity
is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.”
But every crisis harbors opportunities for profound change, and the
“grow or die” imperative that ought to shape our priorities is
not capitalist in nature, but rather evokes the need for moral,
psychological, and social evolution, to be realized in radically new
forms of consciousness, species identities, ethics, values, social
arrangements, and lifeways. There is no swift economic or
technological fix for the myriad complex crises we confront. The only
solution lies in organizing informed radical change across all levels
of the integrated systems of domination—commencing with an
emancipatory education into and critical understanding of the precise
nature and dynamics of the systematic barriers blocking our journey
into sustainable planetary community. Let us hope that this long
march through the institutions does not further transform into a
trail of tears.
