The capitalist system is not the result of our collective greed; it is the manifestation of the greed of a few and the manipulation of the many. A global superstructure has been established to ensure the continuation of the current hegemony. There are some ideas worth voting for, but no party in any civilized nation will propose them, because they are not there to represent us and to ensure the necessary change to protect us and our planet but to simply maintain the current system.
Here are some ideas. I got them from a diverse group of activists, ecologists, and economists, many of whom struck me as eccentric, but these ideas are more fair than the ones that currently govern our reality and are neatly guiding us to Armageddon.
Obviously our ultimate aim is to live in self-governing, fully autonomous, ecologically responsible, egalitarian communities. Where like-minded people—or people with compatible cultures, because all our minds are ultimately alike—can live together without fucking around with what other people are up to. The organs, both ideological and practical, are already in place: We have accommodation, hospitals, transportation, and communication networks. All we have to do is disband the corruption that skews them for the advancement of an elite.
The global treaties and economic infrastructure that has benefitted the eighty-five occupants of the bejeweled bus of privilege can be subverted for the benefit of us all. It’s easy: All we have to do is agree that that is our intention.
I asked lifelong anti-globalization campaigner Helena Norberg-Hodge what to do to change the world.
Helena is mostly concerned with “counter-development”—this means providing practical opposition and alternatives to governments’ and big businesses’ continuing promotion of globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. Helena is interested in people that are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance, and establishing models of agriculture and distribution which don’t contravene obvious ecological laws. In response to my plea for solutions, she promptly sent this list:
1. Rein in the power of big business by renegotiating trade treaties to insist that multinational corporations be place-based and accountable to nation states; revoking the charters of any corporation with revenues larger than the smallest national GNP; scrapping the WTO and creating a WEO (World Environment Organization); controlling the private funding of political campaigns.
Now, you might’ve got a bit bored while reading that; you may have felt a feeling in your tummy of anxiety and a bit of psychological insecurity. “I’m not allowed to read stuff about charters,” your second, critical voice may’ve said. “I was rubbish at school.” My brain did all that stuff, and I plowed on.
All Helena’s suggesting is that global trading institutions and regulations have been set up in partnership with massive companies, probably like those snidey bastards Monsanto, and as long as the rules or “system” remain as they are, rich organizations will get richer and poor people will get poorer.
The last sentence talks about “controlling the private funding of political campaigns.” If you are an American, and why wouldn’t you be, you have never been governed by a party that wasn’t the most well funded during the electoral campaign that placed it in power. Whether you voted for the red one or the blue one, the donkey or the elephant, the brown bloke or the pink bloke, what you got was the richest party in that election. Every. Single. Time.
Now, I don’t want to come over all cynical, but doesn’t that imply that you could dispense with the entire democratic process and simply award power to the party with the most money in its campaign fund? Yes. It does. Maybe not always, just every single time in history so far.
Given that power is granted to the party with the most money, do you think it is likely that the parties in power feel an obligation to represent the desires and needs of the organizations that give them that money? Yes, so do I.
I’ll give you an example of how I saw this unfold in real time recently. About a week ago I was reading The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper that stimulates lower, primal-energy centers—like fear, sexual desire, jealousy, and mindless tribalism—when I encountered an inexplicably upbeat story about “fracking,” the process of extracting gas from deep in the earth to sell back to people as fuel.
The process is controversial, and there are several brilliant documentaries that expertly demonstrate the numerous dangerous effects. Poisoning, flammable water, cancer—the sort of negative consequences a child might guess at if you told them you were planning to explode your way into the earth’s core, extricate gas, and sell it. How can you even begin to claim to own that? On what basis can an energy corporation claim to own gas at the earth’s core? What’s next? Are they going to claim they own our earwax and our uncried tears and start burrowing into our heads for a few shekels?
Out of nowhere, one morning, probably a Thursday, or a Wednesday, one of the days, The Sun, apropos of nothing, announced with twitching enthusiasm that fracking is great.
A double-page spread extolling its virtues, with a table-thumping condemnation of those who oppose it—there are massive demonstrations at a pilot site in Balcombe, West Sussex. They even had Sun staff dressed up in comedic Batman and Robin outfits, joyously trivializing the issue to anyone who’d listen. That’s odd, I thought; why does The Sun, part of an international media conglomerate, support fracking? Is it just a general buccaneering fraternity of capitalists all helping each other out, or is there a more obvious correlation?
I once visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he is forced to live for reasons I’ve never fully understood; in fact, the whole concept of embassies and treaties and conceptual distinctions of that nature seem barmy to me.
That you can just say, “This building is in Ecuador,” and everyone has to go, “Oh, okay,” and pretend they’re not standing in the middle of London.
Or that truce in the middle of the First World War, where on Christmas Day when the English and Germans stopped and played football. Surely the realization that it was a possibility made the war on Boxing Day particularly dispiriting. Unless, I suppose, you’d been fouled or had a goal disallowed. Then you might think, “I’m glad I get the chance to spray you with machine-gun fire, Jürgen. There’s no way that wasn’t a penalty.”
If we can imagine there’s a bit of Ecuador in London or a bit of peace in the middle of a war, then surely we can imagine a fairer world and decide to live in that.
I asked Assange if he believed in conspiracies, or, more pertinently, “The Conspiracy,” which posits that global politics is governed by a shady cabal who meet in a smoky, dim-lit room and cacklingly manipulate our destiny. He doesn’t, which is remarkable given that he was answering me from internment in a pretend bit of Ecuador as the result of Swedish sexual-assault charges that arose after he exposed war crimes in a Middle-Eastern conflict.
He said that he saw the status quo more as a marauding Mongol horde of capitalists with shared interests charging ferociously in the same direction. The direction of “make as much money as possible” with no other considerations.
I disagree with Julian, but the point is moot: The result is the same. Also, all his opinions are somewhat stymied and robbed of efficacy as he’s banged up in a dislocated lump of Latin America. It was a bizarre experience visiting him in there. Not least because I, as was the custom at the time, went to the powwow armed with a yoga teacher.
I was hanging out with her a lot. I took her along to the MTV Movie Awards, which I was hosting, where at one point—perhaps the summit of my own personal Everest of Hollywood kookiness—she vetoed a joke from my opening monologue. It wasn’t unspiritual or mean; I think it was about Jennifer Aniston. It was cut “for time,” like the monologue was saggy. I don’t know if that makes it less weird.
Tej, her name was, and she was a bloody good kundalini yoga teacher, and the lessons and techniques definitely induced interesting states of mind. Most people would’ve left it at that, but with
my tendency for extremism, I first became teacher’s pet and then, in a macabre switcheroo, made the teacher into my pet.
I’ve already told you I’m a sucker for a mystic costume. I’m like a wartime gal with a thing for uniforms, swooning at a G.I., and Tej’s get-up was world-class. Kundalini practitioners dress entirely in white—why not? They also wear a turban as the yogic practice they follow is derived from the Sikh faith.
Tej was a lovely woman and we became good friends; I learned a lot and had a good laugh. A fair amount of that fun may have been derived, I realize in retrospect, from the novel thrill of turning up at unexpected places with a yogi. Like the MTV Movie Awards or the Ecuadorian embassy.
During the production of my let’s call it experimental—with the emphasis on the “mental”—TV show Brand X (surely the last punning derivation my surname can provide), the whole of Tej’s yoga class, which consisted of about one hundred people, was uprooted and placed each morning at the studio where the show was recorded. That’s pretty mad, isn’t it? We left the comfort, tranquillity, sweet smells, and fine foods of the purpose-built yoga center to practice yoga in the functioning canteen of a TV production facility. Sometimes when you’re famous you can get away with being a lunatic. Especially if you’re like me and think the system is corrupt and rules have to be broken and conformity challenged. Before too long, you have a scenario where the teamsters who do all the heavy lifting on a TV show are confronted with the daily spectacle of a hundred yoga devotees descending on their canteen.
Anyway, whichever of us is right, me or Assange, doesn’t matter, but it transpired that after I joked about The Sun’s fracking story on my online (badly named) news-analysis show The Trews and asked viewers if they could help me understand why this extraneous display of mindless propaganda was printed, I received some interesting responses. Rupert Murdoch, who owns News International, of which The Sun is a subsidiary, sits on the board of U.S. energy giant Genie Oil and Gas, which specializes in shale gas. That is another, nicer word for fracking. Shale gas sounds nice and natural, like a sea breeze, a gale made from shells. Who could object to that? Certainly not a regular reader of Murdoch’s New York Post, which has run twenty positive fracking stories since 2011. The relationship between The Sun newspaper and UK government is well documented and criminal.
The second of Helena’s suggestions concerns our relationship with food production.
2. Re-localize food and farming by taxing food miles; removing subsidies and research for large-scale, capital- and energy-intensive agriculture; giving support to small, diversified organic production and to the growing number of young people who want to take up farming.
This second suggestion is a bit easier for us to read and reiterates the difficulties we face when capitalism and its mechanics are inserted into the most fundamental and necessary aspects of our lives. Like food. Helena explained to me that most countries import and export a worryingly similar quantity of the same commodity.
America, for example, exports the same amount of beef as it imports each year. If you must have beef, and I would suggest we’re eating too much of it, at least eat the beef that’s near you rather than sending that off to Japan or whatever while simultaneously getting some far-flung beef chopped up and whizzed over on a jumbo jet like Freddie Mercury prolonging a holiday romance.
Especially as we face several ecological crises that are being exacerbated by this unnecessary bovine jet-setting. One, global warming and, two, depletion of fossil fuels. Everyone knows that, so why is a profligate and dangerous planetwide trade system being perpetuated? Because we are living under a fundamentalist dogma, the only relevant question is: “How do we make the most money?” The answer to that is: “By abiding superfluous trade tariffs.”
If that structure exists, it can be subverted or replaced. The administrative structure that serves capitalism can be used to serve a new, sustainable nutritional system. A recent UN survey concluded that the world’s agricultural needs could be met by localized organic farming. Of course, the organizations that benefit from things being the way they are don’t admit that. They’ll tell you that industrialized, genetically modified, patented farming is the only way to feed the world, half of which is starving anyway—another example of the floundering deceitful maintenance of the current order.
Remember when you were a kid and you thought that your diet had to consist of meat, eggs, cheese, bread, and milk? The food groups? All that? The people that established that nutritional template were the people that sold—wait for it—meat, eggs, cheese, bread, and milk. They discovered which commodities were easiest to produce and transport on an industrial scale and then told us that those commodities were the commodities that we should be consuming. In a way, this Revolution will be a doddle because it isn’t so much about creating new systems; it’s more about disregarding obsolete ones.
The food industry in its present form is obsolete. A food industry is necessary, but we have to remove from the system all components that are superfluous. Flying beef around the world, like a dead, carved-up rent boy, because it serves the agenda of big business to the detriment of the planet and its people doesn’t require the contemplation of a sociological or economic genius, we just have to stop doing it.
The way to do that is by disempowering the organizations that benefit from things staying the way they are. If that can be done by democratic process, fine. If not, that’s fine too. The only option that isn’t fine is things remaining as they are.
Helena told me that there are apples that are grown in Britain, flown to South Africa to be cleaned and waxed, and then flown back here to be sold and eaten. That would be indulgent for the fruit at Kim and Kanye’s wedding. It’s happening to the apple in your lunchbox. The suggestion of Revolution is not mad. That is mad. Imagine if we had locally supported, collectively organized agriculture, where our apples were grown in, I dunno, Kent, and if you lived in Kent you could buy and eat those apples. In Kent.
Then someone turned up and said, “I’ve got a better idea—let me take over your orchard and all orchards like it, fly their produce around the globe to be spruced up, and then we’ll give ’em back to you; sound like a plan?” We’d tell ’em to fuck off, wouldn’t we? Well, it has happened and we didn’t, because nobody explained it to us.
The reason they don’t explain this to us is because they know that if we find out the extraordinary lengths that they’re going to to fuck us over, we will overthrow the current system and replace it with something fair. That’s why all this important stuff is made to seem inaccessible, boring, and abstract. That is why our participation in politics has been sanded down into an impotent nub. Stick your “X” into this box and congratulate yourself on being free.
It pisses me off. It makes me want to get together a gang of Toxteth’s finest, of Broadwater Farm’s most deadly, Belfast’s most up for it, raid Molotov’s drinks cabinet, and light up the Westminster sky.
I understand why people loot shops. I understand why people in Thurrock, where I’m from, vote for knee-jerk berks like Ukip. How the tendency to condemn the vulnerable outsiders flares up. Why should people be claiming benefits? Why should people be coming over here for work, welfare, health care?
Whilst behind this concentration of innocents, marched out like a veil, lined up to be jeered at, in the shadow they cast the real criminals conduct their masquerade. The sneering puppeteers yank the strings and blind us.
Immigrants did not cause the financial crisis. Benefit cheats did not get multimillion-dollar bonuses. Disability claimants did not knowingly fracture the planet’s stability.
The final point on Helena’s list has broad ramifications and requires a huge change in the way institutions behave but oddly it’s already in line with the way most of us think.
3. Prioritize life over profit by rejecting GNP in favor of indicators that measure biodiversity, community coherence, personal well-being, and other life-affirming criteria; radically reducing public spending
on “defense”; granting legal rights to ecosystems and nonhuman species; rewriting educational curricula to meet community and environmental needs rather than the needs of industry.
Right, there’s quite a lot to think about in there. Prioritizing life over profit is a good example of how the way our world is governed has moved out of alignment with our nature. That means our system has become aberrant. Edward Slingerland, the professor of Asian Studies that explained the concept of Wu-Wei, told me the story of an artisan in the Zhuangzi.
This fella apparently carved bell stands—for bells, obviously—that were vital in ancient ceremonial rituals. These bell stands were evidently top-drawer; everyone was crazy about them.
At this point in the story, I had to make a bit of a psychological leap back to ancient China, because, where I’m from, people don’t get that excited about bell stands. I was struggling to imagine a bell stand of any description, let alone one that would really get me jazzed up. I mean, it’s not even the bell, which would for me be the obvious star of the story—that’s the thing that gets rung—but there you go. I am not a professor, so I just kept my mouth shut.
Everyone was so enchanted by this bloke’s bell stands that someone eventually asked him how he made them—the equivalent of a local news item where the man who makes David Beckham’s boots is patronized about his needlework skills.
Initially the craftsman is vague about his methods—coy, you might say—but after a probing he yields. “I meditate,” he says, “until I forget my intentions and attachments, until I forget the credit I will get for making a good bell stand, the adulation, the money. Eventually I forget even myself. Then I go down to the forest in this focused, open state and I look at trees until I see a tree that already has the bell-stand in it. All I have to do then is remove the excess wood until all that remains is the bell-stand.”
Revolution Page 8
