Parecon: Posturing and Progressive Posing at the End of the World

I just read Michael Albert’s essay “What Are We For?” trying to get the broad overview of Parecon, and I have to ask, what are we for, indeed?  It’s odd.  When I read that title I thought it meant what are we for as in what are people for?  But it turns out Albert is asking what are we for as in what are we not against?  The assumption seems to be that “we” are a cohesive group of ideologues, and the question being asked is framed as: well, we know what we are all against, but what are the constructive principles of our ideology?  And boy howdy does Michael Albert have a plateful of constructive principles to dish up.

I have to say I found it boring, dry reading.  I can appreciate what he is trying to do, you know: lay out some broad concepts about how a large, integrated, humane economy might work.  But it strikes me as false and contrived, not organic enough.  Maybe that’s just a problem inherent with theories, and if the concepts are developed further and put into trial and practice, good things can result. 

But back to my question: what are people for?  Are we workers to be arranged in  a system?  I think that is what I find offensive about economics, and Parecon doesn’t seem to be an exception.  Screw economics.  People are not for economics.  People are for experiencing life, and fuck all the artificial constructs. 

Recently I’ve been reading about the peak oil phenomenon.  What might life be like after the oil crash, indeed?  Will Parecon or any global economic framework be meaningful then?  We all may very well be dealing with vast energy shortages and struggling to eat, struggling to keep communities running, and no doubt dealing with power-hungry motherfuckers who still don’t get the idea that humanity is a family with a need to work together.  As James Howard Kunstler suggests in his 2005 article in Rolling Stone, “our lives will become profoundly and intensely local.”  And they should be.

I recognize that Parecon is theoretically concerned with and based upon grass-roots, local, democratic cooperatives.  I appreciate that about it, but find its aspirations to replace the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization with a different set of names kind of silly.  I understand that they are to be different institutions, and I understand that they have regional and local best interests in mind.  What I don’t understand is why they should be necessary. 

I envision an organically patterned world of interdependent communities with enough sense and humanity to understand that cooperative effort and constructive, creative work are good for everyone.  This is probably incredibly naive and unrealistic, because the world is full of conniving, greedy assholes.  And I appreciate that Parecon wants to alleviate some of that greediness and asshole-ishness by implementing a hierarchal/non-hierarchical global structure.  But I don’t have any faith in that.

What I do have faith in may be impossible.  The only sensible possibility to me seems to be an organic one: an anarchy of interdependent individuals and communities that understand that it is in the best interest of us all to freely associate and cooperate.  There is no need for global top-down structures.  The past five thousand years of empire-building have driven that point home for me, at least.  There can be no arm twisting, no “regulatory institutions” and no “binding Code of Conduct,” because these things undermine self-determination.  We get all bunged up around codes of conducts and regulations, no matter how well-intentioned.  Parecon, practically instituted, would lead to simply another slew of nation-states governed by some high-minded global institutions that may be altruistic, but no less susceptible to corruption than the IMF itself.  What kind of people do you think would get involved with such global regulatory commissions as the snazzy, hip, and progressive International Asset Agency, Global Investment Agency, and World Trade Agency?  Even as shiny new (not merely reformed) institutions, the damn things would be populated by elitist ofays whose vision would be completely compromised by the global binoculars, telescopes, and blinders that they would have to constantly wear.  All the cool grass-roots organizations would be tiny little gps points on topographic globes viewed from these centralized command centers.  Or am I jumping to conclusions?  Would the bankers be out working the fields, too?  Which fields, on whose topographic map?

I’m tired of systems and ideologies.  I feel like I’d rather welcome the permanent blackouts of the collapsing capitalist economy, and take my chances with my neighbors as we are forced back to the land.  At least then, things will quiet down, and there won’t be so much asinine posturing and theorizing, elitism parading as the common good.

The Situation: Exiting the Circus of Nationalism

Terence McKenna once said that people in the western world need to stop consuming culture and begin to create culture-or words to that effect.¹  Our society is a consumer society.  We live less in a democracy and more in a capitalist state.  The Situationists² described the prevailing culture of their time as one of commodity and spectacle.  How much more true this must ring in our own time.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, U.S. president George W. Bush urged his citizenry to respond to the “terrorist threat” with violence and spending.  Both are old stories, old situations.  What is new, perhaps, is the overt blatancy of the utterances: “smoke ‘em out,” and, essentially, “work and go shopping.”           

Who are we in America?  Consumption-crazed cowboys, apparently.  The national spectacle became a bizarre b-movie reality: terror threats and alert systems, anthrax scares, patriotic consumerism, frighteningly passive business-as-usual.  This surreal scene seemed to thinking people utterly terrifying in its bland acceptance and banality.  Essentially what we had was a figurehead dictator making declarations of all-out war, lacing them with simplistic patriotic platitudes and prayers, and encouraging sheepish citizenry to remain penned-in and braced and angry towards some vaguely unknowable outside terrorist threat.  Abstraction: smoke out your externalized demons: those others out there.  Concrete illustration: demonize Osama bin Laden, channel the collective fear and terror into outrage and anger.  Having done that, the Nationalistic power-that-be were unrestrained to direct public hatred and fear where they would, like machine-gun bursts strafing the alien worlds of foreign countries, those who are not “us.”

“Two basic Situationist concepts are ‘commodity and ‘spectacle’.  Capitalism has made all of social relations commodity relations: The market rules all.  People are not only producers and consumers in the narrow economic sense, but the very structure of their daily lives is based on commodity relations.  Society ‘is consumed as a whole-the ensemble of social relationships and structures is the central product of the commodity economy.’  The spectacle, then, is the culture that springs from the commodity economy-the stage is set, the action unfolds, we applaud when we think we are happy, we yawn when we think we are bored, but we cannot leave the show, because there is not world outside the theater for us to go to.”
–Carol Ehrlich, “Socialism, Anarchism, and Feminism”²

In her essay, penned sometime around 1977, Carol Ehrlich goes on to assert that “the societal stage has begun to crumble,” which leads to the possibility of the Situational “reinvention of everyday life.”

The crumbling which Ehrlich observed in 1977 is happening again now in 2008.  After seven intensely repressive years of fear, trauma, backwards movement, and deliberately incited loathing and hatred, the American people are waking up to the unreality of their situation.  Slowly recovering from cultural myopia, amnesia, and blindness, we find our parallels in our own cultural spectacles: somehow we find our situation resonant with the eerie and trippy films of a decade ago: The Truman Show, The Matrix.  Are we actors, character actors, programmed characters reacting to the constructed situations we find ourselves in?  Are there, indeed, hidden doors everywhere, glitches in the system to be exploited?  Why this heavy sense of déjà vu, of poignancy, this eerie and otherworldly sense of psychic disturbance, of indefinable cosmic connection?  Is it the spectacle of the New Age we are responding to?

If you thought The Matrix was spectacular and heady, citizen, you should watch eXistenZ.  The lines and scenarios blur.  Situation?  Spectacle?  Commodity?  The terms infect each other and bleed, oozing existential nightmares into a pit of swirling (un)realities.

I digress.  I don’t mean to suggest that we are all psychotics, deluded characters on a Hollywood set, all of us Being John Malkovich.  Yet we are in this matrix of product and consumption, looking for meaning in funhouse television mirrors.  Should we follow the white rabbit?  If we do, will we find ourselves in the bathtub in the body of Dr. Gonzo, terminally tripping, yelling for Raoul Duke to throw the radio into the water at the climax of the song?³

Boom.  Armageddon.

Which brings us back to the current spectacle: the War on/of Terror.  With the cradle of civilization, so-called, destitute and baking in steaming invisible clouds radiating depleted uranium, with Osama bin Laden-the devil, may I take this opportunity to remind you-abandoned and discarded in the rabid quest for scapegoats, vengeance, WMD, and-let’s not kid ourselves-oil-where do we go from here?  Fade out and cut scene to Iran?  No, no.  Don’t want that.

Situation:  leave Iraq.  Make reparations?
Situation:  question authority. 
Situation:  withdraw support from the spectacle of capitalism.
Situation:  live locally, conscious and aware.

Situation:  an election year!
2008.
The great multicultural hope fight: Obama versus Clinton.  Will the champion be the audacious African-American vanguard senator, or the blue blood feminist (really?) senator who stood by her unfaithful man?⁴  Goddamn!  What a spectacle!

Situation:  out in the stands, the cheap seats, the impoverished, uninsured blight that is now the birthright of every red-blooded American.  You put down your cigar, red-white-and-blue pom-poms, your popcorn box.  You tear off your war medals and campaign buttons, having had enough of the spectacle.  You focus on your work: your unique expression of being human in a dehumanized culture, your particular way of yearning for community, for culture, for creation.  Passionately, unencumbered by the noise pollution and popular fantasies that abound, you begin to cultivate the miraculous, multifaceted beings that are within you.  Gardens, worlds, microbes, interstellar imaginations all begin to unfurl from seeds.  Independence and a recognition of a simplified interdependence.  These new, constantly updated markets don’t serve you.  This federal freedom trip has been a crude racket, a poorly designed stage.

From outside the arena where politics-as-usual continue, you can see how artificial the stage has been: floodlights, jury-rigs, rickety beams, discarded cups and generic labels.  These people on the outside, who are they?  They seem like hell-bent pagan carnies, crafting graffiti on the outside structure, skateboarding away, laughing like unkempt hyenas.  One of them offers you a drink.

“Hey, Truman,” she says.

Conversations blossom around you; conversations of all colors. 

“Glad you could join us,” someone says, winking in and out of existence, a Cheshire cat.  In the distance, a clock melts.  A castle on a giant boulder floats.  Beyond those horizons, who knows?  In the sky, northern lights, fire rainbows.

Notes

1. Terence McKenna, psychedelic visionary and self-described ‘cunning linguist’, wrote such books as Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge; The Archaic Revival; and True Hallucinations.  The immediate reference can be found in this context: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ARIG-BQRATs, but also check out http://roychristopher.com/terence-mckenna-meets-the-machine-elves-of-hyperspace-struck-by-noetic-lightning  Also of interest is Terence’s rap and rave over the music of SpaceTime Continuum, caught on CD as Alien Dreamtime; transcript available here: http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/mckenna/alien.html, video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2395498051948678069
2. My understanding of the Situationists is second-hand and underdeveloped.  My limited knowledge of them comes from an essay by Carol Ehrlich, entitled “Socialism, Anarchism, and Feminism,” in a small anthology by the name of Quiet Rumours: an Anarcha-Feminist anthology.  The entire anthology can be accessed online at http://www.anarcha.org/sallydarity/QuietRumoursIndex.htm
3. If you don’t know who these characters are, you should watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Like all of the other movies referenced in this essay, it is from one decade ago.
4. It would be very cool to see Cynthia McKinney in the White House.  Barack Obama will do in a pinch.  And we are definitely in a pinch, yo.

Winter Soldiers Open Dialogue, Hold Up Mirror

“The assumption is that obedience is normal-the president is king.”
–Hunter S. Thompson, in an interview and hashish session with Marty Beckerman¹

“And then September 11^th happened.  I began to hear new words like ‘towelhead,’ ‘camel jockey,’ and the most disturbing, ‘sand nigger.’  These words did not initially come from my fellow soldiers but from my superiors: my platoon sergeant, my company first sergeant, battalion commander.  All the way up the chain of command these terms-these viciously racist terms-were suddenly acceptable….  These are the words the American people used when they allowed this government to sanction Iraq.  This is something that many people forget, and you can’t forget.”
–Mike Prysner, speaking at the Winter Soldier Hearings²

How free am I?  The citizen of a federal government that imposes its will outside of its own borders, in the name of its own citizens and esteemed principles.  The federal government has taken my name-and yours-in vain!  That’s serious shit, citizen.  But I disassociate myself from that, call shenanigans on it, shout that I called it all quits years ago, in high school, when the absurdity of ticky-tacky American home suburban corporate business dreams presented itself as what it is: false, stale, lifeless, facsimile of an outdated fantasy.  Yet that somehow doesn’t make me any less accountable.

America is still riding moments of inflated triumph, fetishizing genocide and occupation as manifest destiny and foundations.  We don’t own the land we stand on, busying ourselves with wasting and spending, on endless hi-fi connections.  We treat life like a game of football: end zone, touchdown, extra points.  Achievement.  All the while, some unknowable magnetic cosmic force-the closest name we have for it is love-spins us all around the sun.  How arrogant we can be, with our building and wasting.

Yet we can also be brilliantly creative.  We can be courageous.  I am amazed by the resilience and integrity displayed over the weekend by the Winter Soldiers, the Iraq Veterans Against the War.  Their testimony breaks my heart once more (but who’s counting, anyway?) and gives me hope at the same time.  After being dehumanized, being programmed and indoctrinated by corporate/governmental/military powers-that-be to kill, hate, and destroy-against impossible odds all bent on using them as dehumanized bodies, tools for murder-these men and women are not destroyed; damaged yes.  But damaged, they struggle to reclaim their humanity.  It never left them, actually, but was subdued by dull drilling, loud insistences on the reality of the enemy, the conspiracy against America and life as we know it.  Their fear was tapped and they signed the contract to defend, not knowing that the signature sold them to do awful, incomprehensible things to other human beings.  They have shot civilians, tortured, interrogated, witnessed torture, torn down sovereign nations at the urging of their own nation.  The patriotic clamor was deafening, riling otherwise sensible people to bloodlust, duping 90% (more? less?) of the American population to demonize the “Other:”  terrorists, insurgents, ragheads, sand niggers.

And yet soldiers the world over are still doing horrifying things.  Our country’s soldiers.  United Nations peacekeeping soldiers.  African soldiers, Afghani and Iraqi militias.  When will we crucially understand that warfare is a self-inflicted wound, is suicide revisited over and over again in billions of instances?  Man shoots man.  Man shoots woman.  Woman shoots man.  Woman shoots woman.  Man shoots child.  Child shoots man.  Woman shoots child.  Child shoots woman.  Child shoots child.  Man tortures man.  Man tortures woman.  Woman tortures man.  Woman tortures woman.  A tortured child.  Everyone is a child.  And in all these variable instance of children indoctrinated or reacting to kill, ultimately it’s suicide.  Human kills human.  Self kills self.  There is no “Other” here.  Self-inflicted gunshot wound.  Self torture.

Why are we torturing ourselves?  For economics?  Reasons of state?  Vengeance?  To maintain our freedom?  To maintain order?  Can a killer ever be free?  Seems to me that murderers mostly still have a conscience.  The murder is revisited daily, hourly, always: the torture of conscience protesting against inhumanity, struggling to reclaim integrity, dignity, humanity.

“I tried to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame….  These were people, these were human beings….  We are told we are fighting terrorists.  The real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation.”
–Mike Prysner, speaking at the Winter Soldier Hearings²

“A year becomes a month, a month becomes a day, and a day becomes a second-a second that you repeat over and over and over again, not just for your tour, but for the rest of your life.”
–Geoff Millard, Winter Soldier Hearings²

In America, we must begin to see.  We must see what we are doing, what we justify and condone, what we are complicit in by simply being tax-paying citizens of America.  If America had integrity, the nation would be collectively cringing, mourning, asking forgiveness, praying for absolution, turning restlessly through the night.

Are we morally bankrupt?  Or are we, after all, human?  Iraq Veterans Against the War have held up mirrors, portraits and self-portraits, videos, commentaries, quotes, and transcripts of atrocities.  They are looking squarely at these images.  They are claiming responsibility and pushing their superiors to do the same.  They are asking us to look at them, knowing that they are us, and that the crimes that they have been forced to commit are our crimes, all of us living here in affluence and ignorance.  We cannot let them stand alone on trial and in protest.

Millions of Iraqis have died violently in the past five years alone.  We have stood by, worked our jobs, listened to the media-spun sanitized reports.  We have slept, ignored and invalidated their suffering, taken vacations, even cheered as our president and congress cut budgets, rights-both civil and human-and funneled incomprehensible exponents of unreal, unminted, intangible cash to create tanks, drones, planes, missiles, bombs, bases, barriers, battleships, guns, weapons of mass destruction.  All this we have been either willingly or unwillingly complicit in, while government officials, media, and each other have urged us to “support our troops.”

Here we have it: the troops are not being supported.  The VA hospitals are cut, corrupted, underfunded, horrible insults to soldiers who have been maimed, amputated, psychologically traumatized, and disfigured.³  These same troops have shot children, mothers, fathers, for us.  This is how the federal government protects us: by destroying life, stripping liberties, burning the cradle of civilization, all the while brazenly and incomprehensibly promoting these actions as civil, necessary, altruistic, as a defense and promotion of freedom.

Yes, we have been duped.  More correctly, we haven’t been paying attention; haven’t been doing our jobs as citizens of a democracy; more bluntly: we’ve been stupid.  We have repeatedly refused to entertain the possibility that war is wrong.  We can no longer refuse to face ourselves: our fear, our guilt, our greed, our sense of entitlement, our hatred, our complicity and stupidity, our misplaced deference to authority and power, our meek acceptance of lies and distortions.  We have not behaved as people who believe in democracy.  We have not displayed any value for freedom, much less human life.  While we’ve busily and obediently hunkered down, shoulders to the grindstone, affirming our allegiance to capitalism, convenience, packaging, and sound bites, we’ve missed the point of the destruction of the World Trade Centers:

Economics is not worth the wasting of lives.

Notes

1. “My Chat (and Hash-Smoking Session) with Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Journalism Legend” by Marty Beckerman: http://www.getunderground.com/underground/features/article.cfm?Article_ID=1073
2. Winter Soldier, March 14^th-16^th, 2008: video: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/79865/
3. See “Military Doctors Withholding Treatment from Soldiers with Mental Health Problems” by Maggie Mahar http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/77867/

Creationary Blues

Linear thoughts refused.  Time encroaches, clockwork times races against being.  Every heavy turn of the second hand marks off a life, partitioning wilderness into a closet.  I refuse to think linearly with the fools who cut down forests and call it progress.

 Meanwhile, streams are emptying out and being filled with garbage.  Large trucks move through the neighborhood.  You can buy interactive war games in cartridges and disks, pull them down out of cyberspace onto your laptop.  This virus of affluent violence is everywhere.  We’ve all gone wrong.  Our evenings are filled with action and arcane time-worship, pushing and stuffing fun into the margins of our lives.  We work so we can overeat, horde, and drink alcohol.  God forgives us.

The road winds away into mud.  I want to live in wild time, spacious time.  I am tired of the synthesized violence of clockwork and sequences and schedules: now time for this, now this, next this, next time we’ll do better, better luck next time, time for a tune-up; time’s up.  That’s a wrap.  Time trips me up.

Time to take out the garbage.  Time to minimize the volume of garbage.  Time to compost our waste.  Time to stop wasting time.  Stop making business out of time.  Stop selling time.  Stop.  It’s time.  It’s time to stop.

Too much sequenced time and I forget how to breathe.  My heart feels pressure, my legs ache, my forehead crunches in overanalysis.

We’ve used up time.  Nothing left now but empty aluminum, depleted uranium, cultural fusion, anomalies of detritus time.  We’re post-mortem adrift among our mangled selves in the reality TV wasteland.  We’re worse off than our own excrement. 

Somewhere, a child picks up a landmine.  Somewhere, a young man hangs himself.  Somewhere, a middle-aged black man on death row faces grim time.  A mother grieves.  Another mother grieves.  Bored suburban kids waste time, starving themselves physically and neglecting their bodies.  Their minds have been disserved by their schools and social structures.  Their imaginations, screaming terror, have been forcefully shrunken to fit facts.  In time, they suffer spasms of apathy.  The TV counts time.

Plotting Armageddon, a minister of shrunken humanity, hopeless, preaches stillbirth into his congregation: a list of should nots, thou shalt nots, timelines for shame and rapture.  The Glorious Appearing has been postponed again.  The congregation skulks home with artificial smiles parching their hearts.  At restaurants, they order the Lord’s steak: dominion over all creatures.  Dominion devours the Earth, scourging life for some post-life pretend eternal life where all is forgiven.  And hence no need to practice forgiveness in the body.  Dominion.  Defy the bodies.  Gravity must give way to the Rapture.

And the eternal plan is to keep postponing life.  After all, plenty of rewards after we die.  Lived experience, this over-rated being-in-body, is to be vanquished.  Plenty of time here for shame and patience, procrastination and the condemnation of masturbation.  Sex should not be fun, should be utilitarian.  Thou, woman, shalt not orgasm.

Baby is ripped out into the world, wailing in the raw sterility of it all.  Her tiny bare ass is slapped by a latex glove.  Welcome to the world, little shit.  Mom is sewn up and baby’s wheeled away to a plastic translucent room made of disinfectant and fluorescent lights.  Small beeps and artificial vents of respiration mark time.  Welcome to the world of marked time.  You’re not born to live and die; you’re born to build and slave.  Everything is expendable, including you.  Here’s a tip: don’t start thinking.  All will be well.  Exercise self-control and patience.  Kill germs.

The nurse will wash you up, for starters, with plastic soap and chemical additives.  Your skin will be so shiny!  In the beginning, there was God, and He is a jealous God, so get used to it.  If you’re bad, He’ll cover you in boils, for starters.  Santa will bring you coal, and God will roast you eternally on it.  So you must keep clean.  Scrub scrub, wipe, scrub, rinse, repress.  Repeat.  Eat, poop, wipe, sleep.  In a few years we’ll put you to work building bombs to kill arabs, negroes, japs, indians, wetbacks.  For God and Country.  All rise for the National Anthem.  No questions.  Do this equation.  Wash your hands.  Eat your meat.  Don’t masturbate.  Thou shalt not.

If we were aware of being alive, our senses would be offended, feel assaulted by the raw machinery that runs the world.  If we had our consciences intact, capitalism would be indefensible and senseless.  If nature moved us, we would all be depressed as hell.  If we breathed freely, we’d be coming down with even more cancer.  If we moved naturally, passing cars would crush us with their sound waves.  Erosion would startle us.  Filthy water, thick with oily man-made clogs, would be unacceptable.  The repression of natural urges and functions would pain us more.  Eight hour work days and more would hurt us.  If we were conscious, what would we make of our televised media?  Some days I don’t even want to answer the phone.

I am here, desperate for some space to grow.  The land has long since been enclosed, and I can feel them coming to scrutinize and appropriate my thoughts.  I don’t want higher walls or to be pushed out or to encroach.  I’ve stopped punching a clock, but the Man measures time in every corner, standardized.  How much longer, I wonder, will I possess my imagination?  The horrifying future looms domestic and clean.

In America

Angry at the morning for opening me here in this post-consumer waste of landscape wastefill culture.  Angry at my dreams for filling me with restless energy and images to mull over in the evening that is morning.  Angry at history, at culture itself and all the heartless processes that have brought us to the current aggregation of machinery, greed, and forceful convergent media exploitation.  Angry at the degradation of sound, its commodification into a weapon.  Angry at the missing silence of morning in nature, angry at the urban streets and suburban blight.  Angry at the machine vehicles that crunch and hum, devastating any calm peace and processing it into a braking and buzzing.  Angry at the garbage dump.  Angry at the concept of the state.  Angry at the individual.  Angry at the going-along.

My stomach is a bitter turnover, my bowels full of immanent shit.  The toilet flushes it away, another debt I owe to the mechanics of grid society.  My spirit is a piece of plastic warped and wrapped around a tinker-toy cashbox cross.

In the distance, a pretentious flag waves red, white, and blue, contemptuous of lived experience, of individuals and freedoms, whipping against what is human and tying that up for the sake of paper profits and black gold.  In Iraq, permanent bases guard oil, pumping weapons and soldiers into broken Mesopotamia, scourging everything into desert and oil fields.  One hundred and twenty degrees, the sun bakes and burns.  Children lose limbs, have their heads stitched with no anesthetic.  Men insurge, take up more guns that flood the market, join militias that will be bought with American money.  The work is to be found in the arms race, not the oil fields; behind the Kalashnikov.  Engineers lose limbs, faith, have their hands bound, heads bagged, are tracked off to secret prisons to be abused for safekeeping.  All the while, troops are told they keep the peace to soundtracks of heavy death metal, white-heat aggression, American style.  Baghdad burns on the skillet, a grilled cheese of American supremacy.

That was a home.
That was a factory.
That was a restaurant, a business.
That was a mosque, a church.
That was a life.
This is all such a waste.