Tax the Rich! End the Wars!

How to end the federal budget crisis:

Tax the Rich.
End the Wars.
(And tax "capital gains" the same as wages and other income.)

Solidarity from Cairo

We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.

—from solidarity statement, by courtesy of South/South

[[[[ ]]]]
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.

An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.

The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people’s right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting –these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst.

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.

But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.

We faced such direct and indirect violence, and continue to face it. Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose.

If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never give them up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.

Comrades from Cairo.

24th of October, 2011.

Deschooling Society

A few quotes from Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society:

Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory. The attendance rule makes it possible for the schoolroom to serve as a magic womb, from which the child is delivered periodically at the schoolday's and school year's completion until he is finally expelled into adult life.
· · · · · ·School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition. ... The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and the workbench during an increasing number of the years of an individual's life. Deschooling is, therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation.
· · · · · ·At stake in the choice between the institutional right and left is the very nature of human life. Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
· · · · · ·School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man's trap.
· · · · · ·School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

More:
Phenomenology of School
By Their Institutions You Shall Know Them
The New Alienation
Promethean Fallacy
Also:  Energy Efficiency and Consumerism

Energy Efficiency and Consumerism

Micah White wrote at Adbusters:

In 1974 Ivan Illich, a maverick philosopher and priest, published Energy and Equity, a series of essays recording his seminar on the “energy crisis.” But Illich, whose groundbreaking work Deschooling Society secured his fame as a brilliant paradigm-shifting outsider, did not use his seminar to preach about the necessity of energy efficiency, security or independence. On the contrary, he challenged the assumption that energy is good for society. In a move that continues to provoke us today, Illich rejected calls for energy efficiency, which he saw as resulting in “huge public expenditures and increased [societal] control” along with “the emergence of a computerized Leviathan.” Instead, he promoted economies based on the “use of minimum feasible power”: an energy policy that he believed would facilitate modern egalitarian societies.

Illich’s argument rested on the connection he observed between the increase of energy available to a country and the decrease of individual freedom in that society. He argued that just as the overconsumption of energy in the form of calories can make a healthy person morbidly obese, gorging on excess wattage can transform a democratic society into an authoritarian one. There is a threshold beyond which an increase of energy necessitates regulatory technocrats and bureaucrats, laws and enforcement agencies, and other forms of social control. He maintained that: “High quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.” I have come to call this idea “Illich’s Law.”

It turns out that the usefulness of Illich’s Law extends beyond the problem of energy policy alone. Take, for example, the question of transportation: energy converted into speed. Illich argued that, beyond a certain threshold, an increase in speed leads to a decrease in liberty. When a society’s transportation systems go faster than 15 miles per hour, an apparatus of social control arises: “From the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger, this industry has reduced equality among men, restricted their mobility to a system of industrially defined routes and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity.” And in a prescient footnote, Illich explains that the same application of his law can be made to interrogate the consequences of energy converted into the speed of information.

In the contemporary debate over energy policy only two options are ever proposed: either we pursue technologies such as nuclear power that we imagine will allow us unlimited energy or we pursue “green” technologies that will give us greater efficiency. But if Illich is right, then both policies will lead us toward the same bureaucratized authoritarian consumer society. If a glut of energy is as dangerous to our societies as a glut of calories is to our bodies, then the only way forward may be to embrace a minimal energy lifestyle. Then the question becomes: how do we wean ourselves from the wattage addiction?

More Illich:
Phenomenology of School
By Their Institutions You Shall Know Them
The New Alienation
Promethean Fallacy
Deschooling Society

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Cutting down trees

They have thus dammed all the larger lakes, raising their broad surfaces many feet; Moose-head, for instance, some forty miles long, with its steamer on it; thus turning the forces of nature against herself, that they might float their spoils out of the country. They rapidly run out of these immense forests all the finer, and more accessible, pine timber, and then leave the bears to watch the decaying dams ... The wilderness experiences a sudden rise of all her streams and lakes, she feels ten thousand vermin gnawing at the base of her noblest trees, many combining drag them off, jarring over the roots of the survivors, and tumble them into the nearest stream, till the fairest having fallen, they scamper of to ransack some new wilderness, and all is still again. It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them, — to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. He speaks of a "berth" of timber, a good place for him to get into, just as a worm might. ...

The character of the logger's admiration is betrayed by his very mode of expressing it. If he told all that was in his mind, he would say, it was so big that I cut it down and then a yoke of oxen could stand on its stump. He admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the tree. Why, my dear sir, the tree might have stood on its own stump, and a great deal more comfortably and firmly than a yoke of oxen can, if you had not cut it down. What right have you to celebrate the virtues of the man you murdered?

The Anglo-American can indeed cut down and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. he ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them. Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which Spenser and Dante had just begun to read, he cuts it down, coins a pine-tree shilling, (as if to signify the pine's value to him,) puts up a deestrict school-house, and introduces Webster's spelling-book.

—Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods

environment, environmentalism, animal rights

News Quiz — 475:1

What is this? A ) Latest odds for various countries to win the World Cup. B ) Ratio of religious fanatics to everybody else. C ) People who believe they will be visited by aliens from another planet. D ) Ratio of pay of CEO to average worker. Hint: you get partial credit by choosing all of the above, but the research on the economics has already been done.

Political Disobedience: Indignez-Vous!

[Scroll down, or click here, for English translation of excerpts from Stéphane Hessel's "Indignez-vous"]

Bernard Harcourt writes:

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.

When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.

And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is, ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ ... What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.

One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.

This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”

[[[[ ]]]]
And Stéphane Hessel writes in "Indignez-vous":

The National Council of Resistance ... had adopted a program on 15 March 1944, offering for liberated France a group of principles and values on which would rest the modern democracy of our country. We need those principles and values today more than ever.

It is up to us together to make sure that our society remains a society of which we are proud: not this society of undocumented aliens, of extraditions, of suspicion of immigrants, not this society which threatens pensions, social security, not this society where the media are in the hands of the monied, all things that we would have refused to allow if we were the true heirs of the National Council of Resistance. ... All of the bases of the social triumphs of the Resistance are under threat today.

Some dare to say to us that the State can no longer meet the costs of such measures for its citizens. But how can there be a lack of money today to maintain and extend these triumphs since the production of wealth has considerably grown since the Liberation, a time when Europe was in ruins? Instead it is because the power of money, so much opposed by the Resistance, has never been so bloated, arrogant, selfish, with its own servants in the highest spheres of the State. The banks, now privatized, show themselves to be primarily concerned with their dividends, and the huge salaries of their directors, not the general interest. The separation between the most poor and the most rich has never been so great, and the race for money, competition, so encouraged.

The motive at the base of the Resistance was indignation. We, veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call on the young generation to live by, transmit, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say to them, Take our place, Get angry! Political and economic leaders, intellectuals, and all of society do not have to submit to, nor allow their oppression by, the international dictatorship of financial markets that truly threatens peace and democracy.

I wish for each of you, each one of you, to have your own motive for indignation. It is precious. When something angers you as I was angered by nazism, then you become militant, strong, and engaged. You rejoin the flow of history, and the grand course of history continues thanks to each one of you. And that course moves toward greater justice, greater freedom, and not the unbridled liberty of the fox in the henhouse. ...

For a peaceful insurrection

I have noted – and I am not alone – the reaction of the Israeli government confronted every Friday by the way the citizens of Bil'in march, without throwing rocks, without using force, to the wall against which they protest. The Israeli authorities have classified this march as "nonviolent terrorism". Not bad – Israel has to call it terrorism, this nonviolence. They must be especially embarrassed by the effectiveness of nonviolence as it provokes support, understanding, the support of everyone in the world who are the enemies of oppression.

The production mindset of the West has drawn the world into a crisis from which it needs to emerge by a radical break from the drive for "always more", in the financial domain, but also the domain of science and technology. It is high time that ethical concerns, justice, lasting balance come to the fore. ...

How to conclude this call to get angry? By remembering again what, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Program of the National Council of Resistance, we said on 8 March 2004, we veterans of the Resistance movement and combat forces of Free France, that surely "nazism is vanquished, thanks to the sacrifice of our brothers and sisters of the Resistance and the nations united against fascist barbarism. But that menace has not completely disappeared, and our anger against injustice remains intact".

No, that menace has not completely disappeared. Therefore, we are always called to "a true peaceful insurrection against the means of mass communication that offer our youth only a future of mass consumption, scorn for the weakest, general amnesia, and brute competition of all against all".

To those men and women who will shape the twenty-first century, we say with our affection:

TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.

Average household income, 1997-2007

New Yorker cover by Eric Drooker

Occupy… links

Occupy Wall Street: adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet occupywallst.org nycga.net (General Assembly) livestream.com/globalrevolution livestream.com/occupywallstnyc flickr.com/photos/occupywallstreet		Occupy the World: 15october.net (global change) takethesquare.net (global organization) occupycolleges.org sites.google.com/site/wealloccupy (list of groups worldwide) occupystream.com (live streams worldwide) livestream.com/guide/search?search_tag=occupy ("Occupy…" live streams) facebook.com/search.php?q=occupy ("Occupy…" facebook pages) google.com/search?q=occupy%2A.org ("Occupy…" google search) meetup.com/occupytogether (Occupy… meetups) youtube.com/occupytv (youtube channel of videos) wearethe99percent.tumblr.com (who we are)
The Occupied Wall Street Journal The Occupation Times (weekly newspaper) twitter.com/#!/search/#ows OR #occupywallstreet OR #occupy OR #occupytogether OR #15oct OR #15o OR #globalchange
Selection of Occupy… web sites (USA and Canada only):
occupybirmingham.org (AL) occupyalaska.org (Fairbanks, AK) occupyphoenix.net (AZ) occupytucson.org (AZ) occupyberkeley.org (CA) occupycentralvalley.blogspot.com (CA) occupyfresnoca.com occupylosangeles.org (CA) occupyoakland.org (CA) occupyriverside.org (CA) occupysac.com (Sacramento, CA) occupysd.org (San Diego, CA) occupysf.com (San Francisco, CA) occupysj.org (San José, CA) occupyventura.org (CA) occupydenver.org (CO) october2011.org (Stop the Machine, Washington, DC) occupydc.org (DC) Occupy Ft. Lauderdale (FL) occupymia.org (Miami, FL) occupyorlando.org (FL) occupytallahassee.org (FL) occupytampa.org (FL) occupyatlanta.org (GA) deoccupyhonolulu.org (HI) occupyboise.org (ID) occupychi.org (Chicago, IL) occupyrockford.org (IL) occupyindy.blogspot.com (Indianapolis, IN) occupywichita.org (KS) occupylouisville.org (KY) occupynola.org (New Orleans, LA) livestream.com/occupymaine (Portland, ME) occupybmore.org (Baltimore, MD) occupyboston.com (MA) occupyfalmouth.com (MA) occupynorthampton.com (MA) occupyworcester.com (MA) occupymi.org (MI) occupy-detroit.us (MI) occupyflint.org (MI) occupygrandrapids.wikispaces.com (MI) occupymn.org (Minneapolis, MN) occupystl.org (St. Louis, MO) occupyomaha.info (NE) occupyuppervalley.org (NH) occupylasvegas.org (NV) occupyreno.wordpress.com (NV)		occupyasheville.org (NC) occupycharlotte.org (NC) occupydurham.org (NC) occupyraleigh.org/ (NC) occupycleveland.com (OH) occupyalbany.org (NY) www.occupybrooklyn.org (NY) occupyithaca.com (NY) occupylongbeach.webs.com (NY) occupypoughkeepsie.org (NY) occupyrochester.org (NY) occupyutica.org (NY) occupywashingtonsquare.org (NYC) occupycincy.org (OH) www.occupycolumbus.org (OH) occupyokc.org (Oklahoma City, OK) occupytulsa.com (OK) www.occupybend.org (OR) occupyportland.org (Portland, OR) occupyphilly.org (Philadelphia, PA) occupypittsburgh.org (PA) occupypuertorico.weebly.com (PR) occupyprovidence.com (RI) occupymemphis.org (TN) occupynashville.org (TN) occupyaustin.org (TX) occupydallas.org (TX) occupyhouston.org (TX) occupyslc.org (Salt Lake City, UT) NEK 99% (VT) occupyburlington.org (VT) occupycentralvt.org (VT) occupyvermont.wordpress.com (Burlington, VT) occupy-bellingham.org (WA) occupyolympia.org (WA) occupyseattle.org (WA) occupytacoma.org (WA) occupy-madison.org (WI) occupycalgary.ca (AB) occupyedmonton.org (AB) occupyvancouver.com (BC) occupyns.org (NS) occupyottawa.org (ON) occupytoronto.com (ON) occupyto.org (Toronto Market Exchange, ON)

Proposed grievances

Proposed demands posted on October 7, 2011, at Occupy Chicago:

1. PASS HR 1489 REINSTATING GLASS-STEAGALL. – A depression era safeguard that separated the commercial lending and investment banking portions of banks. Its repeal in 1999 is considered the major cause of the global financial meltdown of 2008-2009.

2. REPEAL BUSH TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHY

3. FULLY INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE WALL STREET CRIMINALS who clearly broke the law and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.

4.OVERTURN CITIZENS UNITED v. US. – A 2010 Supreme Court Decision which ruled that money is speech. Corporations, as legal persons, are now allowed to contribute unlimited amounts of money to campaigns in the exercise of free “speech.”

5. PASS THE BUFFET RULE ON FAIR TAXATION, CLOSE CORPORATE TAX LOOPHOLES, PROHIBIT HIDING FUNDS OFFSHORE.

6. GIVE THE SEC STRICTER REGULATORY POWER, STRENGTHEN THE CONSUMER PROTECTION BUREAU, AND PROVIDE ASSISTANCE FOR OWNERS OF FORECLOSED MORTGAGES WHO WERE VICTIMS OF PREDATORY LENDING.

7. TAKE STEPS TO LIMIT THE INFLUENCE OF LOBBYISTS AND ELIMINATE THE PRACTICE OF LOBBYISTS WRITING LEGISLATION.

8. ELIMINATE RIGHT OF FORMER GOVERNMENT REGULATORS TO WORK FOR CORPORATIONS OR INDUSTRIES THEY ONCE REGULATED.

9. ELIMINATE CORPORATE PERSONHOOD.

10. INSIST THE FEC STAND UP FOR THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN REGULATING PRIVATE USE OF PUBLIC AIRWAVES to help ensure that political candidates ARE GIVEN EQUAL TIME for free at reasonable intervals during campaign season.

11. REFORM CAMPAIGN FINANCE WITH THE PASSAGE OF THE FAIR ELECTIONS NOW ACT (S.750, H.R. 1404).

12. FORGIVE STUDENT DEBT. – The same institutions that gave almost $2T in bailouts and then extended $16T of loans at little to no interest for banks can surely afford to forgive the $946B of student debt currently held. Not only does this favor the 99% over the 1%, it has the practical effect of more citizens spending money on actual goods, not paying down interest.

Bob Roberts sings the songs of our time

A couple of excerpts from the 1992 movie Bob Roberts:

Keep Shopping

NYPD crack down on jaywalking

Policemen flailing at crowd with nightsticks

Youtube/Google is protecting our sensitivities, just as this policeman is protecting Wall Street.

Coalition of Resistance

Student speaker, 27 Nov. 2010, at Coalition of Resistance conference, Camden, U.K.

Thought for the day

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

—John Maynard Keynes

Imagine scorn

Happy birthday, Eugène Pottier

l'Internationale

Awake, the cursed of the earth, Awake, the slaves of hunger, Reason thunders in its crater, It's the eruption of the end. Let's make a clean slate of the past, Enslaved masses, rise up, rise up — The world will change at its foundation; We are nothing, we will be all. This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. There are no supreme saviors No God, no Caesar, no Court — Producers, let us save ourselves, We decree the common greeting. To make the thief disgorge his booty, To free the spirit from its prison, Let us fan the forge together, Strike the iron while it is hot. This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. The state represses and the law cheats, The tax bleeds the disenfranchised; No duty is imposed on the rich, The right of the poor is an empty word. No more to languish in submission, Equality means other laws; "No rights without duties," it says, "And no duties without rights." This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. Hideous in their glory, Kings of the mine and rail, Have they never done anything But steal from the worker? In the strongholds of their gang What work created is melted down — In demanding its return The people claim only their due. This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. The kings drugged us in their smoke, Peace among us, war to tyrants, Bring the strike to the armies: Surrender and break the ranks! If these cannibals persist To make us heroes They soon will know that our bullets Are for our would-be generals. This is the final struggle; Let us unite and tomorrow The International Will be the human race. City, country, we are The great party of workers, The earth belongs only to us, The idle will stay away. How many have fed on our flesh! But if these ravens, these vultures, One of these mornings are gone, The sun will shine forever.

Testify! (Rage Against the Machine)

"If you're not turned on to politics, politics will turn on you." —Ralph Nader

First Official Release from OCCUPY WALL STREET

This was unanimously voted on by all members of Occupy Wall Street around 8pm, Sept 29. This is a living document. [It is likely to have changed since this posting.] You can receive an official press copy of the latest version by emailing c2anycga/gmail.com.

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility. ...

Click here for complete declaration.

A note about capitalism

In the minds of many people, capitalism is a system essential to individual freedom and happiness. But it is not. It is so much less.

Capitalism is nothing more than a system of banking to accumulate ever more money so that it can be loaned, with interest. The charging of interest is key, since a secured loan is already virtually risk free — when you get a mortgage, the bank owns your house until the loan is paid off, and yet you pay back almost twice as much (or more, depending on the interest rate) as the loan is worth.

That is capitalism. It does not mean trade, the use of money, or any other exchange of goods or services. It means usury.

To justify usury by claiming risk is only to underscore its inappropriateness, since risk is the realm of insurance, i.e., the socializing of expenses due to chance or probability. (The revocation under Clinton of the Glass-Steagall act keeping insurance and banking separate was so destructive because banks were then able to socialize their own risks: a "win-win" for them and a "lose-lose" for society.)

Capitalist banks are the modern means of maintaining feudal power relationships in society long after such power hierarchies have been supposed to have broken down. The banks consolidate the wealth of the people, and to the banks we must apply to use it.

Capitalism is the enemy of freedom and happiness for the vast majority of people. It shares its pleasures with just enough of a "successful" cohort of the population (particularly those selected as the people's representatives in government and those in the media) to protect its dominance.

A society centered on capitalism is a dictatorship. All of its institutions — legislatures, courts, schools, military, media, etc. — methodically enforce and defend its logic.

Our One Demand

This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.

On September 21st, 2011, Troy Davis, an innocent man, was murdered by the state of Georgia. Troy Davis was one of the 99 percent.

Ending capital punishment is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, four of our members were arrested on baseless charges.

Ending police intimidation is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, the richest 400 Americans owned more than half of the country’s population.

Ending wealth inequality is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, we determined that Yahoo lied about occupywallst.org being in spam filters.

Ending corporate censorship is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, roughly eighty percent of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.

Ending the modern gilded age is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, roughly 15% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing.

Ending political corruption is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, roughly one sixth of Americans did not have work.

Ending joblessness is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, roughly one sixth of America lived in poverty.

Ending poverty is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, roughly fifty million Americans were without health insurance.

Ending health-profiteering is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, America had military bases in around one hundred and thirty out of one hundred and sixty-five countries.

Ending American imperialism is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, America was at war with the world.

Ending war is our one demand.

On September 21st, 2011, we stood in solidarity with Madrid, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madison, Toronto, London, Athens, Sydney, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Milan, Amsterdam, Algiers, Tel Aviv, Portland and Chicago. Soon we will stand with Phoenix, Montreal, Cleveland and Atlanta. We’re still here. We are growing. We intend to stay until we see movements toward real change in our country and the world.

You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, the people will speak. Join us.

We speak as one. All of our decisions, from our choice to march on Wall Street to our decision to continue occupying Liberty Square, were decided through a consensus based process by the group, for the group.

Stand with the People!

Human needs, not corporate greed
Tax the rich and corporations
End the wars, bring the troops home
Health care for all
End corporate welfare
Protect the planet
Put workers before profits
Get money out of politics
Fifteen Core Issues The Country Must Face

1. Corporatism– firmly establish that money is not speech, corporations are not people, only people have Constitutional rights, end corporate influence over the political process, protect people and the environment from damage by corporations.

2. Wars and Militarism – end wars and occupations, end private for-profit military contractors, reduce the national security state and end the weapons export industry. War crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace must be addressed and those responsible held accountable under international law.

3. Human Rights – end exploitation of people in the US and abroad, end discrimination in all forms, equal civil rights and due process for all people.

4. Worker Rights and jobs – all working-age people have the right to safe, just, non-discriminatory and dignified working conditions, a sustainable living wage, paid leave and economic protection.

5. Government – all processes of the three branches of government should be accountable to international law, transparent and follow the rule of law, people have the right to participate in decisions which affect them.

6. Elections – all citizens 18 and older have the right to vote without barriers, all candidates have the right to be heard and to run and all votes should be counted.

7. Criminal justice and prisons – end private for-profit prisons, adopt evidence-based drug policy, prisoners have the right to humane and just conditions with a focus on rehabilitation and reintegration into society, abolish the death penalty.

8. Healthcare – create a national, universal and publicly financed comprehensive health system.

9. Education – all people have the right to a high quality, publicly-funded and broad education from pre-school through vocational training or university.

10. Housing – all people have the right to affordable and safe housing.

11. Environment – adopt policies which effectively create a carbon-free and radio-active free energy economy.

12. Finance and the economy – end policies which foster a wealth divide and move to a localized and democratic financial system, reform taxes so that they are progressive and provide goods, monetary gain and services for the people.

13. Media – airwaves and the internet are public goods, require that media be honest, accurate and accountable to the people.

14. Food and water – create systems that protect the land and water, create local and sustainable food networks and practices.

15. Transportation – provide affordable, clean and convenient public transportation and safe spaces for pedestrian and non-automobile travel.

Mountain maid, maiden mount — a song

by Eric Rosenbloom copyright 2011 A wisp of a thing, a thought on the air That often it seems she isn’t there A touch of moisture, a stir in the breeze You see her passing in the leaves of trees The birds gather seeds And people their deeds She rises and darkens in the mountain’s arms Colors with passion and furious alarms The dizzying heights now fill her with dread Now longing that knows no rest, no bed The birds gather seeds And people their deeds His grip is tight, she cannot fly From fate and this his cruel eye To swoon upon his hardened crags And croon his hills and downy legs The birds gather seeds And people their deeds He crouches beneath her, dark in her dark To know the journey he can’t embark In his craggy rocks and clinging firs That are in her, washed by all that’s hers The birds gather seeds And people their deeds All that she has and strained to hold Bursts forth — she is of a sudden old Her color fades as her life runs down The rocks and trees that ring his crown The birds gather seeds And people their deeds The waters gather and a river born Of a clash divine, of a spirit torn And the sun now shines and the valley sings And the river means so many things The birds gather seeds And people their deeds The ocean calls his wandering daughter To lose herself in his circling water While the mountain looms with a fiery glare And calls forth another maid who was fair The birds gather seeds And people their deeds

Revolution

Thought for the day: left vs. right

"Industrial wind [for example] is not a partisan issue. It is big energy–funded power politics against the people. Both right and left support wind. And both right and left are against it."

Left/right divisions as played out in the U.S. are a charade allowing the real struggle to wither and die.

The true "right" of institutional control and exploitation is allowed to continue, because its victims — for whom the true "left" fights — have been empowered to choose sides in a cartoon version of their struggle. Thus the victims of the true right fight amongst themselves: one group of victims, calling themselves the left or liberal, fighting the other group of victims as their oppressors, and the other group of victims, calling themselves the right or conservative, fighting the first group as threatening the small advantage granted them by the true power.

We are fighting over crumbs and the occasional sop.

The robber barons only laugh, when they should be cowering in shame and fear.

anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

(Thanks to windturbinesyndrome.com and commenter Pam Supign for stimulating these thoughts on the anachronism of a green fist wielding an industrial wind turbine)

Update:  Pam Supign has written to me that the editor of windturbinesyndrome.com has removed her last comment responding to the editor's reply to her first comments (and they're on the same side!, illustrating the point of the present post). Apparently experienced with the "Big Brother" censorship of comment forums, she had saved what she wrote, which she shares with us here:

The clenched fist originally and primarily and still represents solidarity of the people against oppressing power. It began with trade unionism. Communism ideally is also about uniting labor against its exploiters. It is about standing strong against violence, not wreaking it. Your equation of communism and anarchism with violence is no more valid than damning the Protestant Reformation or any fight for greater freedom because it sometimes forced people to fight back against those whose control was threatened.

The clenched fist is an apt symbol for the fight against big wind. It no more implies violence than saying "United we stand."

That's why the outrage of that conference is the misuse of the fist image in the name of industrial development, not the evidence of a connection with a pop T-shirt version of the Comintern.

Update 2:  Now the editor of windturbinesyndrome.com has removed Pam's first comments as well and added an apologia to his post to explain his fear of leftist solidarity. He has also edited, so that its pop origin isn't as obvious, the T-shirt graphic with which he raised the specter of Stalinist greens. The post remains ridiculous. And the one comment remaining to elaborate the green/nazi/commie plot makes it even more so.

Unfortunately, we don't have the editor's reply to it, but Pam has provide us with her original comment:

First, so-called “deep greens”, such as members of Earth First, are against industrial wind. The symbolism highlighted here is more incoherent than revealing. Foster’s own bio notes that “we have reached a turning point in human relations with the earth, and that any attempt to solve our problems merely by technological, industrial or free market means, divorced from fundamental social relations, cannot succeed”. Industrial wind epitomizes the dream of technological/industrial “alternatives” saving those doomed relations.

Rather than raise the flag of demonization and fear, it should be clear that greens such as these are the “useful idiots” of predatory capitalism when it comes to climate change — again, for believing, against their own philosophies, that big new technology will be fundamentally different from big old technology just because its marketers sell it as green. Many greens are not so taken by the centralized energy “solutions” perpetuated by big wind and are appalled by the license it enjoys to invade otherwise protected land [and flout existing environmental laws].

Finally, the raised fist image was an early symbol of labor solidarity, particularly used by the IWW union (the Wobblies). It was used by the German Communist Party, which was brutally suppressed by the Nazis. During the Spanish Civil War, it was known as the anti-fascist salute. It has also stood for black power in the struggle for civil rights and for rights of workers, native Americans, and women, among others. Interestingly (I’m getting all this from Wikipedia), the fist here is the left hand, which began use in opposition to Stalinism (the Big Brother specter evoked in this post).

A green raised left fist is the symbol of Earth First, who oppose industrial wind, so the outrage should be for this conference’s offensive appropriation of a venerable symbol to imply support of such non-green non-progressive energy development.

Plus, as far as I can determine, the symbol of the Soviet Red Army was a red star, never a fist. The image used here — with its silly use of the Cyrillic letter "ya" for an "R" — is completely modern and meaningless. It's a T-shirt design.

Update 3:  Now Pam tells me that our friend the editor of windturbinesyndrome.com (which work I otherwise completely support, by the way, which is why I read the "Big Brother" post there — and Pam Supign's comments — in the first place) has added a picture of a dragon eating its own tail as representing violence. Well, Pam had to comment, and again is forced to offer her words here, because now she is apparently completely banned from windturbinesyndrome.com:

More abuse of symbols! The ouroboros is a symbol of eternal recreation, not violence!

Update 4:  In an earlier post, our windturbinesyndrome.com editor (Calvin Luther Martin, PhD) calls for ruckus-raising tent cities to publicize the harm done by industrial wind turbines, and suggests referring to municipal bureaucrats who facilitate and ignore that harm as "criminals — committing torture against their neighbors". And here's the clip art he uses to illustrate the idea of protest:

Clenched fists! People power!

And, looking at just the first page of indexed posts, there's this, used as the thumbnail of at least three posts at windturbinesyndrome.com, Québecois are angry!, Australians are angry!, and Ontarians are angry!:

And this:

Are you scared yet?

Palestine is already an independent state.

Thanks to The Guardian for the following map, showing that nations representing about 77% of the world's population already recognize Palestine as an independent state. But about 91% of the world's moral authority monetary wealth is represented by those that don't.

How-to guide for wind farm negotiations

At last! The Fascist Threat

Alexander Cockburn writes this weekend:

“Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, we are now confronted by well-funded conservative evangelicals promoting a sinister vision of America as a corporate autocracy, with Dominionists as Gauleiters of a totalitarian state religion.”

So Lawrence Swaim, Executive Director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation wrote on this site last week. Swaim concluded with a familiar quote: “This recalls the prescient words of novelist Sinclair Lewis: ‘When fascism comes to America,’ he wrote in 1935, ‘it will come wrapped in the flag, and carrying a cross.’”

Not in my opinion. As a rule, the field of battle between secularism and our Christian ultras ends up stained with the blood of the latter, as Satan counter-attacks. Just glance at the the career of the original Know-Nothings or the history of prohibition. Indeed, looking across the American landscape, I’d say the Dark One has scant cause for lament amid quavering pieces about the Dominionist threat which so delight fundraisers for nonprofits touting the menace of Christian evangelism. Back in the god-sodden Fifties who could presage that a half century later tots could go online to view fornication in every guise and combination.

In my view fascism mostly crosses the threshold these days wrapped in Green clothing, with a thousand summary edicts, which people gloomily strain to read by the pallid glimmer of the new, mercury-filled light bulbs promoted by greens, the General Electric Corp., and signed into law by George Bush Jr. whose own timid effort to promote the fusion of church and state – allowing religious non-profits to run some government programs — didn’t fare too well.

The main purpose of invoking the fascist threat is to scare people into voting Democrat, as Frank Bardacke has often remarked to me. In 1964 it was the Goldwater threat, in 2011 – for now – the Perry threat. Obama will save us from fascism. Alas, fascism is currently wrapped in the decorous clothing of this self-same former constitutional professor.

Back on September 13, 2001, I wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that “The lust for retaliation traditionally outstrips precision in identifying the actual assailant. The targets abroad will be all the usual suspects — the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, who started off as creatures of U.S. intelligence. The target at home will be the Bill of Rights.”

It was maybe an hour after the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed that I heard the first of a thousand pundits that day saying that America might soon have to sacrifice “some of those freedoms we have taken for granted.” They said this with grave relish, as though the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution – was somehow responsible for the onslaught, and should join the rubble of the towers, carted off to New Jersey and exported to China for recycling into abutments for the Three Gorges Dam, with a special packet of “nano-thermite” (aka paint dust) reserved for Paul Craig Roberts to sprinkle on his porridge.

Of course it didn’t take 9/11 to give the Bill of Rights a battering. It is always under duress and erosion. Where there’s emergency, there’s opportunity for the enemies of freedom. The Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 (the bits that Bill Clinton’s DOJ forgot to put into the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act) and periodically renewed in most of its essentials in the Bush and Obama years, kicked new holes in at least six of our Bill of Rights protections.

The government can search and seize citizens’ papers and effects without probable cause, spy on their electronic communications, and has, amid ongoing court battles on the issue, eavesdropped on their conversations without a warrant.

Goodbye to the right to a speedy public trial with assistance of counsel. Welcome indefinite incarceration without charges, denial of the assistance of legal counsel and of the right to confront witnesses or even have a trial. Until beaten back by the courts, the Patriot Act gave a sound whack at the 1st Amendment, too, since the government could now prosecute librarians or keepers of any records if they told anyone the government had subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.

Let’s not forget that a suspect may be in no position to do any confronting or waiting for trial since American citizens deemed a threat to their country can be extrajudicially and summarily executed by order of the president, with the reasons for the order shielded from the light of day as “state secrets”. That takes us back to the bills of attainder the Framers expressly banned in Article One of the U.S. Constitution, about as far from the Bill of Rights as you can get.

There’s a difference between fascism and a efficiently functioning modern police state. America is well into the latter, instrumented by laws shoved through on a federal bipartisan basis and through state legislatures. Check out the DUI laws and penalties, state by state. A friend here in California was just telling me about a friend up on his second DUI, among whose penalties for his offense has been 45 days house arrest, with a camera installed to observe every move. No visitors allowed. He can go out for two hours a day to do his shopping. The supervising officer in semi-SWAT rig enters his house without knocking or permission at any time. Let’s not even talk about the treatment of sex offenders.

Which Side Are You On (Palestine edition)?

When the Tower Fell

Promethean Fallacy

(from Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, 1971, Harper & Row)

The contemporary ideal is a pan-hygienic world: a world in which all contacts between men, and between men and their world, are the result of foresight and manipulation. School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man's trap. It is supposed to shape each man to an adequate level for playing a part in this world game. Inexorably we cultivate, treat, produce, and school the world out of existence.
· · · · ·A society committed to the institutionalization of values identifies the production of goods and services with the demand for such. Education which makes you need the product is included in the price of the product. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. In such a society marginal value has become constantly self-transcendent. It forces the few largest consumers to compete for the power to deplete the earth, to fill their own swelling bellies, to discipline smaller consumers, and to deactivate those who still find satisfaction in making do with what they have. The ethos of nonsatiety is thus at the root of physical depredation, social polarization, and psychological passivity.

More:
Phenomenology of School
By Their Institutions You Shall Know Them
The New Alienation
Deschooling Society
Also:  Energy Efficiency and Consumerism

The New Alienation

(from "Ritualization of Progress", chapter 3, Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, 1971, Harper & Row)

School is not only the New World Religion. It is also the world's fastest-growing labor market. The engineering of consumers has become the economy's principal growth sector. As production costs decrease in rich nations, there is an increasing concentration of both capital and labor in the vast enterprise of equipping man for disciplined consumption. During the past decade capital investments directly related to the school system rose even faster than expenditures for defense. Disarmament would only accelerate the process by which the learning industry moves to the center of the national economy. School gives unlimited opportunity for legitimated waste, so long as its destructiveness goes unrecognized and the cost of palliatives goes up.

If we add those engaged in full-time teaching to those in fulltime attendance, we realize that this so-called superstructure has become society's major employer. In the United States sixty-two million people are in school and eighty million at work elsewhere. This is often forgotten by neo-Marxist analysts who say that the process of deschooling must be postponed or bracketed until other disorders, traditionally understood as more fundamental, are corrected by an economic and political revolution. Only if school is understood as an industry can revolutionary strategy be planned realistically. For Marx, the cost of producing demands for commodities was barely significant. Today most human labor is engaged in the production of demands that can be satisfied by industry which makes intensive use of capital. Most of this is done in school.

Alienation, in the traditional scheme, was a direct consequence of work's becoming wage-labor which deprived man of the opportunity to create and be recreated. Now young people are pre-alienated by schools that isolate them while they pretend to be both producers and consumers of their own knowledge, which is conceived of as a commodity put on the market in school. School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition. And school directly or indirectly employs a major portion of the population. School either keeps people for life or makes sure that they will fit into some institution.

The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and the workbench during an increasing number of the years of an individual's life. Deschooling is, therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation.

More:
Phenomenology of School
By Their Institutions You Shall Know Them
Promethean Fallacy
Deschooling Society
Also:  Energy Efficiency and Consumerism

By Their Institutions You Shall Know Them

(from "Institutional Spectrum", chapter 4, Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, 1971, Harper & Row)

The choice is between two radically opposed institutional types, both of which are exemplified in certain existing institutions, although one type so characterizes the contemporary period as to almost define it. This dominant type I would propose to call the manipulative institution. The other type also exists, but only precariously. The institutions which fit it are humbler and less noticeable; yet I take them as models for a more desirable future. I call them "convivial" and suggest placing them at the left of an institutional spectrum, both to show that there are institutions which fall between the extremes and to illustrate how historical institutions can change color as they shift from facilitating activity to organizing production. ...

The most influential modern institutions crowd up at the right of the spectrum. Law enforcement has moved there ... Modern warfare has become a highly professional enterprise whose business is killing. ... Its peace-keeping potential depends on its ability to convince friend and foe of the nation's unlimited death-dealing power. ...

At this same extreme on the spectrum we also find social agencies which specialize in the manipulating of their clients. Like the military, they tend to develop effects contrary to their aims as the scope of their operations increases. These social institutions are equally counterproductive, but less obviously so. Many assume a therapeutic and compassionate image to mask this paradoxical effect. ... Membership in the institutions found at this extreme of the spectrum is achieved in two ways, both coercive: by forced commitment or by selective service.

At the opposite extreme of the spectrum lie institutions distinguished by spontaneous use — the "convivial" institutions. Telephone link-ups, subway lines, mail routes, public markets and exchanges do not require hard or soft sells to induce their clients to use them. Sewage systems, drinking water, parks, and sidewalks are institutions men use without having to be institutionally convince that it is to their advantage to do so. ... The regulation of convivial institutions sets limits to their use; as one moves from the convivial to the manipulative end of the spectrum, the rules progressively call for unwilling consumption of participation. The different cost of acquiring clients is just one of the characteristics which distinguish convivial from manipulative institutions.

At both extremes of the spectrum we find service institutions, but on the right the service is imposed manipulation, and the client is made the victim of advertising, aggression, indoctrination, imprisonment, or electroshock. On the left the service is amplified opportunity within formally defined limits, while the client remains a free agent. Right-wing institutions tend to be highly complex and costly production processes in which much of the elaboration and expense is concerned with convincing consumers that they cannot live without the product of the treatment offered by the institution. Left-wing institutions tend to be networks which facilitate client-initiated communication of cooperation.

The manipulative institutions of the right are either socially or psychologically "addictive." Social addiction, or escalation, consists in the tendency to prescribe increased treatment if smaller quantities have not yielded the desired results. Psychological addiction, or habituation, results when consumers become hooked on the need for more and more of the process or product. The self-activated institutions of the left tend to be self-limiting. Unlike production processes which identify satisfaction with the mere act of consumption, these networks serve a purpose beyond their own repeated use. An individual picks up the telephone when he wants to say something to someone else, and hangs up when the desired communication is over. ... If the telephone is not the best way to get in touch, people will write a letter or take a trip. Right-wing institutions, as we can see clearly in the case of schools, both invite compulsively repetitive use and frustrate alternative ways of achieving similar results. ...

False Public Utilities

... The telephone and postal networks exist to serve those who wish to use them, while the highway system mainly serves as an accessory to the private automobile. The former are true public utilities, whereas the latter is a public service to the owners of cars, trucks, and buses. Public utilities exist for the sake of communication among men; highways, like other institutions of the right, exist for the sake of a product. Auto manufacturers, we have already observed, produce simultaneously both cars and the demand for cars. They also produce the demand for multilane highways, bridges, and oilfields. The private car is the focus of a cluster of right-wing institutions. The high cost of each element is dictated by elaboration of the basic product, and the sell the basic product is to "hook" society on the entire package. ...

Schools as False Public Utilities

Like highways, schools, at first glance, give the impression of being equally open to all comers. They are, in fact, open only to those who consistently renew their credentials. Just as highways create the impression that their present level of cost per year is necessary if people are to move, so schools are presumed essential for attaining the competence required by a society which uses modern technology. ... Schools are based upon the ... spurious hypothesis that learning is the result of curricular teaching.

Highways result from a perversion of the desire and need for mobility into the demand for a private car. Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction. Demand for manufactured maturity is a far greater abnegation of self-initiated activity than the demand for manufactured goods. ... By making men abdicate the responsibility for their own growth, school leads many to a kind of spiritual suicide. ...

The man who does not own a car in Los Angeles may be almost immobilized, but if he can somehow manage to reach a work place, he can get and hold a job. The school dropout has no alternative route. ... The law compels no one to drive, whereas it obliges everyone to go to school. ...

Today all schools are obligatory, open-ended, and competitive. The same convergence in institutional style affects health care, merchandising, personnel administration, and political life. All these institutional processes tend to pile up at the manipulative end of the spectrum. A merger of world bureaucracies results from this convergence of institutions. ...

Everywhere these bureaucracies seem to focus on the same task: promoting the growth of institutions of the right. They are concerned with the making of things, the making off ritual rules, and the making — and reshaping — of "executive truth," the ideology or fiat which establishes the current value which should be attributed to their product. Technology provides these bureaucracies with increasing power on the right hand of society. The left hand of society seems to wither, not because technology is less capable of increasing the range of human action, and providing time for the play of individual imagination and personal creativity, but because such use of technology does not increase the power of an elite which administers it. ...

At stake in the choice between the institutional right and left is the very nature of human life. Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them. He must choose between alternate styles of life and related production schedules. ...

More:
Phenomenology of School
The New Alienation
Promethean Fallacy
Deschooling Society
Also:  Energy Efficiency and Consumerism

Phenomenology of School

(chapter 2 of Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, 1971, Harper & Row)

Some words become so flexible that they cease to be useful. "School" and "teaching" are such terms. Like an amoeba they fit into almost any interstice of the language. ABM will teach the Russians, IBM will teach Negro children, and the army can become the school of a nation.

The search for alternatives in education must therefore start with an agreement on what it is we mean by "schooL" This might be done in several ways. vVe could begin by listing the latent functions performed by modern school systems, such as custodial care, selection, indoctrination, and learning. We could make a client analysis and verify which of these latent functions render a service or a disservice to teachers, employers, children, parents, or the professions. We could survey the history of Western culture and the information gathered by anthropology in order to find institutions which played a role like that now performed by schooling. We could, finally, recall the many normative statements which have been made since the time of Comenius, or even since Quintilian, and discover which of these the modern school system most closely approaches. But any of these approaches would oblige us to start with certain assumptions about a relationship between school and education. To develop a language in which we can speak about school without such constant recourse to education, I have chosen to begin with something that might be called a phenomenology of public school. For this purpose I shall define "school" as the age-specific, teacher-related process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum.

1. Age

School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three unquestioned premises. Children belong in school. Children learn in school. Children can be taught only in school. I think these unexamined premises deserve serious questioning.

We have grown accustomed to children. We have decided that they should go to school, do as they are told, and have neither income nor families of their own. We expect them to know their place and behave like children. We remember, whether nostalgically or bitterly, a time when we were children, too. We are expected to tolerate the childish behavior of children. Mankind, for us, is a species both afflicted and blessed with the task of caring for children. We forget, however, that our present concept of "childhood" developed only recently in Western Europe and more recently still in the Americas

Childhood as distinct from infancy, adolescence, or youth was unknown to most historical periods. Some Christian centuries did not even have an eye for its bodily proportions. Artists depicted the infant as a miniature adult seated on his mother's arm. Children appeared in Europe along with the pocket watch and the Christian moneylenders of the Renaissance. Before our century neither the poor nor the rich knew of children's dress, children's games, or the child's immunity from the law. Childhood belonged to the bourgeoisie. The worker's child, the peasant's child, and the nobleman's child all dressed the way their fathers dressed, played the way their fathers played, and were hanged by the neck as were their fathers. After the discovery of "childhood" by the bourgeoisie all this changed. Only some churches continued to respect for some time the dignity and maturity of the young. Until the Second Vatican Council, each child was instructed that a Christian reaches moral discernment and freedom at the age of seven, and from then on is capable of committing sins for which he may be punished by an eternity in Hell. Toward the middle of this century, middle-class parents began to try to spare their children the impact of this doctrine, and their thinking about children now prevails in the practice of the Church.

Until the last century, "children" of middle-class parents were made at home with the help of preceptors and private schools. Only with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of "childhood" become feasible and come within the reach of the masses. The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces.

Since most people today live outside industrial cities, most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes you till the soil once you have become "useful." Before that, you watch the sheep. If you are well nourished, you should be useful by eleven, and otherwise by twelve. Recently, I was talking to my night watchman, Marcos, about his eleven-year-old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a "niño." Marcos, surprised, answered with a guileless smile: "Don Ivan, I guess you're right." Realizing that until my remark the father had thought of Marcos primarily as his "son," I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons. Of course if I were to tell the New York slum-dweller that his working son is still a "child," he would show no surprise. He knows quite well that his eleven-year-old son should be allowed childhood, and resents the fact that he is not. The son of Marcos has yet to be afflicted with the yearning for childhood; the New Yorker's son feels deprived.

Most people around the world, then, either do not want or cannot get modern childhood for their offspring. But it also seems that childhood is a burden to a good number of those few who are allowed it. Many of them are simply forced to go through it and are not at all happy playing the child's role. Growing up through childhood means being condemned to a process of inhuman conflict between self-awareness and the role imposed by a society going through its own school age. Neither Stephen Dedalus nor Alexander Portnoy enjoyed childhood, and neither, I suspect, did many of us like to be treated as children.

If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution, "childhood" would go out of production. The youth of rich nations would be liberated from its destructiveness, and poor nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich. If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained.

The disestablishment of schools could also end the present discrimination against infants, adults, and the old in favor of children throughout their adolescence and youth. The social decision to allocate educational resources preferably to those citizens who have outgrown the extraordinary learning capacity of their first four years and have not arrived at the height of their self-motivated learning will, in retrospect, probably appear as bizarre.

Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.

2. Teachers and Pupils

By definition, children are pupils. The demand for the milieu of childhood creates an unlimited market for accredited teachers. School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

We have all learned most of what we know outside school. Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers. Most tragically, the majority of men are taught their lesson by schools, even though they never go to school.

Everyone learns how to live outside school. We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick, and to work without interference from a teacher. Even children who are under a teacher's care day and night are no exception to the rule. Orphans, idiots, and schoolteachers' sons learn most of what they learn outside the "educational" process planned for them. Teachers have made a poor showing in their attempts at increasing learning among the poor. Poor parents who want their children to go to school are less concerned about what they will learn than about the certificate and money they will earn. And middle-class parents commit their children to a teacher's care to keep them from learning what the poor learn on the streets. Increasingly educational research demonstrates that children learn most of what teachers pretend to teach them from peer groups, from comics, from chance observations, and above all from mere participation in the ritual of school. Teachers, more often than not, obstruct such learning of subject matters as goes on in school.

Half of the people in our world never set foot in school. They have no contact with teachers, and they are deprived of the privilege of becoming dropouts. Yet they learn quite effectively the message which school teaches: that they should have school, and more and more of it. School instructs them in their own inferiority through the tax collector who makes them pay for it, or through the demagogue who raises their expectations of it, or through their children once the latter are hooked on it. So the poor are robbed of their self-respect by subscribing to a creed that grants salvation only through the school. At least the Church gave them a chance to repent at the hour of death. School leaves them with the expectation (a counterfeit hope) that their grandchildren will make it. That expectation is of course still more learning which comes from school but not from teachers.

Pupils have never credited teachers for most of their learning. Bright and dull alike have always relied on rote, reading, and wit to pass their exams, motivated by the stick or by the carrot of a desired career.

Adults tend to romanticize their schooling. In retrospect, they attribute their learning to the teacher whose patience they learned to admire. But the same adults would worry about the mental health of a child who rushed home to tell them what he learned from his every teacher.

Schools create jobs for schoolteachers, no matter what their pupils learn from them.

3. Full-Time Attendance

Every month I see another list of proposals made by some U.S. industry to AID, suggesting the replacement of Latin-American "classroom practitioners" either by disciplined systems administrators or just by TV. In the United States teaching as a team enterprise of educational researchers, designers, and technicians is gaining acceptance. But, no matter whether the teacher is a schoolmarm or a team of men in white coats, and no matter whether they succeed in teaching the subject matter listed in the catalogue or whether they fail, the professional teacher creates a sacred milieu.

Uncertainty about the future of professional teaching puts the classroom into jeopardy. Were educational professionals to specialize in promoting learning, they would have to abandon a system which calls for between 750 and 1,000 gatherings a year. But of course teachers do a lot more. The institutional wisdom of schools tells parents, pupils, and educators that the teacher, if he is to teach, must exercise his authority in a sacred precinct. This is true even for teachers whose pupils spend most of their school time in a classroom without walls.

School, by its very nature, tends to make a total claim on the time and energies of its participants. This, in turn, makes the teacher into custodian, preacher, and therapist.

In each of these three roles the teacher bases his authority on a different claim. The teacher-as-custodian acts as a master of ceremonies, who guides his pupils through a drawn-out labyrinthine ritual. He arbitrates the observance of rules and administers the intricate rubrics of initiation to life. At his best, he sets the stage for the acquisition of some skill as schoolmasters always have. Without illusions of producing any profound learning, he drills his pupils in some basic routines.

The teacher-as-moralist substitutes for parents, God, or the state. He indoctrinates the pupil about what is right or wrong, not only in school but also in society at large. He stands in loco parentis for each one and thus ensures that all feel themselves children of the same state.

The teacher-as-therapist feels authorized to delve into the personal life of his pupil in order to help him grow as a person. When this function is exercised by a custodian and preacher, it usually means that he persuades the pupil to submit to a domestication of his vision of truth and his sense of what is right.

The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.

Teachers are by no means the only professionals who offer therapy. Psychiatrists, guidance counselors, and job counselors, even lawyers, help their clients to decide, to develop their personalities, and to learn. Yet common sense tells the client that such professionals should abstain from imposing their opinion of what is right or wrong, or from forcing anyone to follow their advice. Schoolteachers and ministers are the only professionals who feel entitled to pry into the private affairs of their clients at the same time as they preach to a captive audience.

Children are protected by neither the First nor the Fifth Amendment when they stand before that secular priest, the teacher. The child must confront a man who wears an invisible triple crown, like the papal tiara, the symbol of triple authority combined in one person. For the child, the teacher pontificates as pastor, prophet, and priest-he is at once guide, teacher, and administrator of a sacred ritual. He combines the claims of medieval popes in a society constituted under the guarantee that these claims shall never be exercised together by one established and obligatory institution-church or state.

Defining children as full-time pupils permits the teacher to exercise a kind of power over their persons which is much less limited by constitutional and consuetudinal restrictions than the power wielded by the guardians of other social enclaves. Their chronological age disqualifies children from safeguards which are routine for adults in a modern asylum-madhouse, monastery, or jail.

Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an exam is told that he is an outlaw, morally corrupt, and personally worthless.

Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory. The attendance rule makes it possible for the schoolroom to serve as a magic womb, from which the child is delivered periodically at the schoolday's and school year's completion until he is finally expelled into adult life. Neither universal extended childhood nor the smothering atmosphere of the classroom could exist without schools. Yet schools, as compulsory channels for learning, could exist without either and be more repressive and destructive than anything we have come to know. To understand what it means to deschool society, and not just to reform the educational establishment, we must now focus on the hidden curriculum of schooling. We are not concerned here, directly, with the hidden curriculum of the ghetto streets which brands the poor or with the hidden curriculum of the drawing room which benefits the rich. We are rather concerned to call attention to the fact that the ceremonial or ritual of schooling itself constitutes such a hidden curriculum. Even the best of teachers cannot entirely protect his pupils from it. Inevitably, this hidden curriculum of schooling adds prejudice and guilt to the discrimination which a society practices against some of its members and compounds the privilege of others with a new title to condescend to the majority. Just as inevitably, this hidden curriculum serves as a ritual of initiation into a growth-oriented consumer society for rich and poor alike.

More:
By Their Institutions You Shall Know Them
The New Alienation
Promethean Fallacy
Deschooling Society
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