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by Carolyn Baker, Ph.D.
May 16, 2006
Two years ago when I was invited to watch the jaw-dropping DVD, The End Of Suburbia, I came away feeling terrified about the ramifications of Peak Oil, but only later did I reflect on the fact that there are virtually no women in the documentary – except the ditzy fifties caricatures who consumed everything that wasn’t nailed down. Subsequently, I began researching Peak Oil and then informing the students in my college history classes about what I consider the stellar historical event of the modern world, the end of hydrocarbon energy and probably the end of Western civilization. Yet consistently in the process of informing myself about Peak Oil, I encountered very academic charts, graphs, geological and economic studies, and lots of male voices. I had almost come to believe that the issue was exclusively a masculine concept when a female friend commented that the Peak Oil bell curve seemed to her rather phallic. My response was entirely the opposite: I had been perceiving it as a giant breast. Well, all Roschach testing and the dearth of women in the Peak Oil movement aside, what does the phenomenon have to do not only with women but the feminine principle itself? My answer: Everything! Read the rest of this entry »
“Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision”
by Barbara Ransby
2005 University of North Carolina Press
Just kept getting better as it went on. The writing style was not my favorite, the author seemed overly interested in teasing out categories or labels to apply to Baker’s life, rather than telling the bare facts. A more serious complaint is that the book spends hundreds of pages in Baker’s early life and upbringing, only to speed through the most politically interesting part of her life, in the Black Freedom Movement of the 50s and 60s. I’m sorry, but I can never get enough information about SNCC.
Nevertheless, it’s a good book, makes very useful points about radical democratic movement-building and education (that the role of the organizer is to bring people together and ask tough questions, and help nurture people to determine their own strategy and vision), and shows that Ella Baker above all others was the true mentor and parent of our grassroots organizing struggles today.
by Robert Newman
Thursday February 2, 2006
The Guardian/UK
Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change
There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won’t do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth’s life-support systems within the present economic system.Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.
Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth. Private ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive political force in the world is private power. The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis.
On these pages we have been called on to admire capital’s ability to take robust action while governments dither. All hail Wal-Mart for imposing a 20% reduction in its own carbon emissions. But the point is that supermarkets are over. We cannot have such long supply lines between us and our food. Not any more. Read the rest of this entry »
Bob Black’s indictment of work (meaning all unfree labor) is a good example of a liberatory essay, because not only does it advocate for real freedom, it also condemns the industrial systems of power which are forcing us to work, and to consume, to kill and invade, to oppress, to pollute, and to hate ourselves for being accomplices in our own slavery.
But Marx already did that with “Alienated Labour” in 1847. What makes Black’s essay 10 times better is that it isn’t a labor to read! Recognizing that social change is playful or it’s doomed to reproduce the slavery it claimed to oppose, Emma Goldman is quoted as saying “It’s not my revolution if I can’t dance to it.” Likewise, add to that “It’s not my ideology if I can’t laugh at it.”
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http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.html
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.
The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously — or maybe not — all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. Read the rest of this entry »
Declaration of Independence from Oil
July 4, 2007
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the people to rid themselves of a government which has abandoned the sound principles upon which it was founded and that increasingly threatens their lives and liberties for the sake of the Oil Industry, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are born with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. That when a long train of abuses and lies, pursuing invariably the same Middle Eastern Oil, threatens to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these American Citizens, along with the rest of the Peoples of the World. The History of the Government of the United States since the Second World War, fully exposed under the current King George II, is a history of repeated Imperial Adventures, all having in direct object the establishment of an Empire of Oil, founded upon a domestic Tyranny over these States, and a Colonial relationship with all peoples living in petroleum-rich areas of the Earth. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid audience. Read the rest of this entry »
The End of Capitalism 
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