The military bureaucracy is particularly vulnerable to such mythology. It is unfortunate that the intelligence community has not prepared a National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, which would better inform the White House debate. The military has

A US soldier in Pana, Afghanistan.

Myth #1: Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who commands more than 100,000 US and international forces, has endorsed a counterinsurgency strategy that views the Taliban as a collection of armed groups with different political and economic objectives. McChrystal believes that an additional 40,000 US troops would make it easier to divide the Taliban and wean a significant number of Taliban fighters away from the insurgency. In fact, it is the international coalition that lacks clear direction, and it is Taliban forces that currently have the strategic initiative. The Taliban have demonstrated an increasingly coordinated and centralized approach in their tactics and operations over the past several years, and there is ample evidence that the Afghan population recognizes this fact and has provided greater support to the insurgency. Conversely, the US offensive in Helmand this summer, which involved nearly 20,000 troops, failed to weaken the Taliban on the southern front; the British offensive there three years ago also failed. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ belief that a significant number of Taliban forces can be brought to our side is dead wrong, and this is the kind of wishful thinking that appears to be central to McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. The Taliban may not be monolithic, but they have political control of their forces. Increasing US forces will likely strengthen the Taliban and enhance Taliban recruitment efforts.

Myth #2: A Taliban presence would lead to a renewed sanctuary for al-Qaeda and, once again, the United States would be vulnerable to a terrorist attack. There are very few al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have been successful in using Predator strikes against the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. In the past year, US and Pakistani intelligence have enabled the Predator and other means to eliminate a significant number of al-Qaeda leaders, restrict al-Qaeda’s ability to operate and to eliminate some of its financial support. More importantly, al-Qaeda’s leadership does not need a sanctuary or safe haven in Afghanistan to plan its operations. The training and preparations for the 9/11 attacks in Washington, DC, and New York City, after all, took place in US flight schools as well as in several apartments in German cities. Paul Pillar, the former deputy chief of the CIA’s counterterrorist center has argued that al-Qaeda’s terrorist threat is “less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless.”

Myth #3: Any loss in Afghanistan would have a domino effect in the region that would affect Pakistan, India and Iran, with the United States and NATO suffering a significant loss of credibility. The domino effect and the credibility argument represent old saws from the Vietnam era that were discredited 35 years ago and should be dismissed today. Internal political machinations in Afghanistan, even the restoration of a Taliban government in Kabul, would not have significant implications outside the country, and there is no indication that the Taliban has aspirations beyond Afghan borders. The international community has a good sense of US military capabilities, and a reduced US military footprint would not lessen the international perception of US power.

Myth #4: As part of its counterinsurgency strategy, the United States must invest billions of dollars to create more capable, accountable and effective governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan. US nation building will enhance civilian control and stabilize constitutional government in both countries. This myth ignores the fact that Afghanistan and Pakistan are two of the most corrupt nations on the face of the earth. US aid to both countries has been siphoned off to individuals and institutions that do not contribute to US national security. US assistance strategy has been particularly ineffective in Afghanistan, which is 70 percent rural, and there is no indication that the weak Pakistani government is in a position to make the reforms needed to use US assistance effectively. We have been supplying military and economic assistance to Pakistan since the 1950s, when we based U-2 spy planes there, and the Islamabad governments have continuously misused and diverted this aid to the military front against India. It is estimated that between 2002 and 2008, while the Taliban and al-Qaeda regrouped in Pakistan, very little of the $6.6 billion in US aid actually funded Pakistani military efforts against insurgents and terrorists.

Myth #5: The Pakistani army would give up its fight against the Taliban if the United States reduced its own military efforts in Afghanistan. No matter what strategy the United States adopts, Pakistan is in no position to give up its efforts to defeat or co-opt the Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban represents a domestic problem for Islamabad because of the short distance between the Pakistani capital and the Taliban zone of operations. The Pakistani army will defend its nuclear weapons against the Taliban and it will resist Taliban military and terrorist attacks. If the ineffective and corrupt government of President Asif Ali Zardari is not up to these tasks, then a military government will replace Zardari. The United States would profess opposition to the installation of a military government, but such an outcome would not affect US national security interests.

Other myths should also be understood before decisions are made about increasing the US military presence in Afghanistan. Too many people believe that the “surge” in Iraq in 2007 was a strategic victory.

No, it was a short-term tactical success, but it created no strategic advantage because of Iraq’s inability to capitalize on the increased US presence to stabilize and strengthen its government. Similarly, a “surge” in Afghanistan would have no impact on the corruption and abuses of the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Most agree that the Afghan election in August exposed the fraudulence and corruption of the Karzai government. Yes, but it also exposed the inability of US and international forces to allow the Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Tajiks to go out and cast their ballots.

President Obama faces difficult decisions if he is to avoid making Afghanistan his own personal briar patch. He is getting too much advice from domestic advisers and from military professionals who occupy important positions in the White House and even in Kabul.

Obama needs to widen the arc of the debate and he should have started with the commission of a National Intelligence Estimate. Intelligence estimates have been compromised by the corrupt product CIA prepared for the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, but the Obama administration should familiarize itself with the excellent intelligence estimates prepared during the Vietnam War.

A series of estimates in the 1960s and early 1970s warned the Johnson and Nixon administrations that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt, that it would not be a strategic ally in the war against the North, and that the strategic bombing campaign would fail.

As philosopher George Santayana’s wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

..by: Melvin A. Goodman, courtesy http://www.truthout.org

In a brief statement in the White House Rose Garden on Friday, the president said he does not “view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments,” but rather as a recognition of goals he has set for the United States and the world.

“I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by this prize,” he said.

Obama will go to Oslo in December to accept the honor, which includes a $1.4 million award, Norway’s prime minister said.

The Nobel committee said its decision to honor the president was motivated by Obama’s initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and stress diplomacy and cooperation rather than unilateralism.

The choice was stunning nonetheless, given the nomination deadline of Feb.1, less than two weeks after the Obama presidency began.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama woke up to the news a little before 6 a.m. EDT.

“The president was humbled to be selected by the committee,” Gibbs said.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee lauded the change in global mood wrought by Obama’s calls for peace and cooperation, but recognized initiatives that have yet to bear fruit: reducing the world stock of nuclear arms, easing American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthening the U.S. role in combating climate change.

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” said Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee.

Former President Jimmy Carter said awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama was a “bold statement of international support for his vision and commitment.”

Carter won the peace prize himself in 2002, two decades after leaving office. In a statement, he described the Nobel committee’s decision Friday as support for Obama’s work toward peace and harmony in international relations.

Carter says the award shows the Obama administration represents hope not only for Americans, but for people around the world.

Another Nobel Laureate, former Vice President Al Gore, called Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize award extremely well deserved and an honor for the country.

Gore, who shared the Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on global warming, said that what Obama has accomplished already is going to be far more appreciated in the eyes of history. He cited Obama’s United Nations speech on abolishing nuclear weapons, his shifting of the missile defense program in Eastern Europe, and Russia joining with the United States and other countries to confront Iran on nuclear nonproliferation.

Gore delivered his remarks Friday at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Madison, Wis.

Still, with the U.S. at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Congress yet to pass a law reducing carbon emissions, and with little significant reduction in global nuclear stockpiles since Obama took office, some said the award was premature..

“So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far. He is still at an early stage. He is only beginning to act,” said former Polish President Lech Walesa, a 1983 Nobel Peace laureate.

“This is probably an encouragement for him to act. Let’s see if he perseveres. Let’s give him time to act,” Walesa said.

And Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican Party, said Obama won the prize because of his “star power,” rather than meaningful accomplishments.

“The real question Americans are asking is, What has President Obama actually accomplished?” Steele said in a statement.

Steele, who took over the reins of the GOP earlier this year, said he thought it was “unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights.”

He said he doesn’t think Obama will be “receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”

Some of Obama’s critics said the award appeared to be a slap at President George W. Bush from a committee that harshly criticized him for his largely unilateral military action in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The Nobel committee praised Obama’s creation of “a new climate in international politics” and said he had returned multilateral diplomacy and institutions like the U.N. to the center of the world stage.

The Nobel committee chairman said after awarding the 2002 prize to Carter, for his mediation in international conflicts, that it should be seen as a “kick in the leg” to the Bush administration’s hard line in the buildup to the Iraq war.

Five years later, the committee honored Bush’s adversary in the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, for his campaign to raise awareness about global warming.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who won the prize in 1984, said Obama’s award shows great things are expected from him in coming years.

“It’s an award coming near the beginning of the first term of office of a relatively young president that anticipates an even greater contribution towards making our world a safer place for all,” Tutu said. “It is an award that speaks to the promise of President Obama’s message of hope.”

Until seconds before the award, speculation had focused on a wide variety of candidates besides Obama: Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, a Colombian senator, a Chinese dissident and an Afghan women’s rights activist, among others. The Nobel committee received a record 205 nominations for this year’s prize; it is not known who nominated Obama.

“The exciting and important thing about this prize is that it’s given to someone … who has the power to contribute to peace,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said.

Obama became the third sitting U.S. president to win the award: Theodore Roosevelt won in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson was awarded the prize in 1919.

Obama was to meet with his top advisers on the Afghan war on Friday to consider a request by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, to send as many as 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan as the war there enters its ninth year.

Obama ordered 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan earlier this year and has continued the use of unmanned drones for attacks on militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a strategy devised by the Bush administration. The attacks often kill or injure civilians living in the area.

In July talks in Moscow, Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed that their negotiators would work out a new limit on delivery vehicles for nuclear warheads of between 500 and 1,100. They also agreed that warhead limits would be reduced from the current range of 1,700-2,200 to as low as 1,500. The United States now has about 2,200 such warheads, compared to about 2,800 for the Russians.

There has been no word on whether either side has started to act on the reductions.

Former Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, said Obama has already provided outstanding leadership in the effort to prevent nuclear proliferation.

“In less than a year in office, he has transformed the way we look at ourselves and the world we live in and rekindled hope for a world at peace with itself,” ElBaradei said. “He has shown an unshakeable commitment to diplomacy, mutual respect and dialogue as the best means of resolving conflicts.”

Obama also has tried to restart stalled talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, but just a day after Obama hosted the Israeli and Palestinian leaders in New York, Israeli officials boasted that they had fended off U.S. pressure to halt settlement construction. Moderate Palestinians said they felt undermined by Obama’s failure to back up his demand for a freeze.

Nominators for the prize include former laureates; current and former members of the committee and their staff; members of national governments and legislatures; university professors of law, theology, social sciences, history and philosophy; leaders of peace research and foreign affairs institutes; and members of international courts of law.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation welcomed Obama’s award on behalf of its founder, Nelson Mandela, who shared the 1993 Peace Prize with then-South African President F.W. DeKlerk for their efforts at ending years of apartheid and laying the groundwork for a democratic country.

“We trust that this award will strengthen his commitment, as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, to continue promoting peace and the eradication of poverty,” the foundation said.

In his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the peace prize should go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.”

Unlike the other Nobel Prizes, which are awarded by Swedish institutions, he said the peace prize should be given out by a five-member committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament. Sweden and Norway were united under the same crown at the time of Nobel’s death.

The committee has taken a wide interpretation of Nobel’s guidelines, expanding the prize beyond peace mediation to include efforts to combat poverty, disease and climate change.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

President Hu Jintao (Front),addresses the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on the Tian'anmen Rostrum in central Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Ju Peng)

The phalanx of national flag receives inspection in a parade of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on Chang'an Street in central Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Guo Dayue

Conventional missiles are displayed in a parade of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on Chang'an Street in central Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)

A float waits to take part in a parade of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on Chang'an Street in central Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Li Gang)

A float of central China's Henan Province takes part in a parade of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on Chang'an Avenue in central Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Zhao Peng)

A float takes part in a parade of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on Chang'an Street in central Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Li Yong)

People often object to this claim that it is an expression of a philosophy of history. But I think the political meaning of critique should not be mistaken for a historical telos. In history the productive forces normally produce the social relations and institutions that contain and dominate them: this is evident in all historical determinations. So why would anyone regard as historical illusion, political ideology or metaphysical nonsense the possibility of subverting this situation and freeing the productive forces from the command of capitalist relations of production (following the meaning of class struggle in operation)? We will try to demonstrate that the opposite is the case.

1) Communists assume that history is always the history of class struggle.

For some this position is untenable because history is determined and now so totally dominated by capital that such an assumption is ineffectual and unverifiable.

But they forget that capital is always a relation of power [force], that whilst it might be able to organise a solid and overbearing hegemony, this hegemony is always the function of a particular command inside a power relation. Neither the concept of capital nor its historical variants would exist in the absence of a proletariat who, whilst being exploited by capital, is always the living labour that produces it. Class struggle is the power relation expressed between the boss and the worker: this relation invests exploitation and capitalist command and is established in the institutions that organise the production and circulation of profit.

Others who claim that history cannot simply be reduced [traced back] to class struggle assume the permanent [persistance/existance] subsistence of a ‘use-value’. They qualify this as the value of labour power or as the value of nature and of the environmental surroundings of human labour. This assumption is not only radically inadequate as an explanation of capitalist development, but is also certainly wrong as a description of the current form of capitalism.

Capital has conquered and enveloped the entire life-world, its hegemony is global. There is no room for narodniki! Class struggle develops here, ‘from the premises now in existence’, not under different circumstances: class relations are founded on these historical determinations ( historical determinism ) and the new production of subjectivity (of the boss and worker alike).

Firstly, it is of interest to note that there is no longer an ‘outside’ in this context, and that struggle (not only struggle, but the substance of subjects in struggle) is now totally ‘inside’; there is no longer any semblance or reflection of ‘use-value’. We are completely immersed in the world of ‘exchange-value’ and its brutal and ferocious reality.

Historical materialism explains how and why exchange value is so central to class struggle: ‘In bourgeois society, the worker e.g. stands there purely without objectivity, subjectively; but the thing which stands opposite him has now become the true community [ das wahre Gemeinwesen ]‘, which the proletariat ‘tries to make a meal of, and which makes a meal of him’ (Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook V, trans. by M. Nicolaus, London: Pelican, 1973, p.496).

Yes, but in this alternative appropriation – that of the capitalists against that of the workers - capital definitely appears as a relation. Communism begins to take shape when the proletarian takes it as her objective to re-appropriate the Gemeinwesen , the community, to turn it into the order of a new society.

Therefore exchange value is very important, it is the common social reality, built and secured so that it can no longer be traced back to the simple circulation of labour, money and even capital. It is surplus value turned into profit, accumulated profit, rent from land and estates, fixed capital, finance, the accumulation of primary sources, machines and devices productive on earth and then launched into space, communication networks, and - finally and especially - money, the great common paradigm: ‘[Money] is itself the community [ Gemeinwesen ] and can tolerate none other standing above it’ (Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook II, p. 223). Here lies the historical determination. Exchange value is already given in a common form. As Gemeinwesen . It’s here, it’s the world, there is nothing else or other, no outside.

Take for instance the example of finance: who could conceive of doing without money in the form of finance? Money has become the common land where once the Heimat [Homeland] lay, the consistency of populations at the end of the ‘Gothic period’, when possession was organised into commons . Those commons and that land are now exchange value in the hands of capitalists. If we want this land back, we reclaim it in the conditions we find it in: at the apex of capitalist appropriation, soiled by exchange value; under no illusions of purity and innocence.

When Spinoza told us that in the Hebrew state in the year of the jubilee all debts were written off and the equality of citizens restored, or when Machiavelli insisted on the fact that the agrarian laws gave new life to Roman Republic because the plebs’ re-appropriation of the land also renewed the democratic process, they were holding onto the illusion that it was possible to go back to nature and democracy (Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse on Livy , Book I, Chapter 27, London: Penguin, p. 99; Benedict de Spinoza, A Theological-Political Treatise , Chapter XVII, p. 230) .

But for us determining the liberation of the labour force and being communists demands the re-appropriaton of a common reality that is neither original nor democratically desirable, but rather something that stands opposed to us as power after we have reproduced it with effort and blood.

But let us not be discouraged. As Gramsci taught us in his reading of class struggle, historical materialism proposes to grasp the continuous metamorphosis or rather the anthropology of the character of the worker through different experiences of the proletarian use of technologies and capitalist social organisation.

This introduces a new question, because as the worker changes herself in struggle, she imposes a real metamorphosis on capital. If there are epochs or cycles of struggle, their ontological consistency is measured against this anthropological basis. No nature, identity, gender or race can resist this movement of transformation and historical metamorphosis of the relationship between capital and workers. The multitudes are shaped and always re-qualified by this dynamics. This is also valid for the definition of time in class struggle. When class struggle appears as the production and transformation of subjectivity, the revolutionary process assumes a long-term temporality, an ontological accumulation of counter-power, the ‘optimism’ of the material force of proletarian ‘reason’, the desire that becomes solidarity, the love that is always rational, and following Spinoza, the related ‘pessimism of the will’. ‘ Caution !’, he said, when the passions are mobilised towards the construction of political structures of freedom. Our guide is not the aleatory emergence of rebellions, these divine sparks of hope that can carve paths of light into the night, but the constant and critical effort and work of organisation, the calculated risk of insurrection. Philosophical imagination can give colour to the real but cannot replace the effort of history-making: the event is always a result, never a starting point.

2) Being communists means being against the State. The State is the force that organises, always normally yet always exceptionally, the relations that constitute capital and discipline the conflicts between capitalists and the proletarian labour force.

This being against the state is directed against all the modes of organisation of private property and the private ownership of the means of production, as well as the private exploitation of labour power and the private control of capitals’ circulation. But it also against the public , that is, the state and national configurations of all these operations of alienation of the power [potenza] of labour.

Being communist entails the recognition that the public is a form of alienation and exploitation of labour - of common labour, in our case. So what is the public? As the great Rousseau said, the public is the enemy of private property, what ‘belongs [itself] to nobody’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse on the Origin of Inequality ). But it is just sophism to attribute to the State what actually belongs to everyone. The State says: ‘The common does not belong to you, despite the fact that you made it, produced it in common, and invented it and organised it as common’. The State’s manumission of the common, i.e. what we all produced and thus belongs to us, will go under the name of management, delegation and representation … the implacable beauty of public pragmatism.

Therefore communism is the enemy of socialism because socialism is the classical form of this second model of alienation of proletarian power [potenza], which also requires a distorted organisation of the production of its subjectivity. The perversions of ‘real socialism’ have neutralised a century of class struggle and dispelled all the illusions of the philosophy of history. It is interesting to see how ‘real socialism’, despite initiating massive processes of collectivisation, never questioned the disciplines of command, be they juridical, political or pertaining to the human sciences. The institutional structure of socialism and its political polarities was produced by an ideology that arbitrarily opposed private to public - whilst these, following Rousseau, overlap one another - and sanctified a ruling class whose functions of command reproduced the ones of the capitalist elité whilst they claimed to be self-elected ‘vanguards’!

Being against the State means, first of all, expressing the desire and ability to manage the entire system of production, including the division of labour and the accumulation and redistribution of wealth, in a radically democratic way - as a ‘democracy of all’.

Here it is worth providing new definitions. Historical materialism is also an ‘immanentism of subjectivity’. It declares that not only there is no ‘outside’ to the world we live in, but also that ‘from inside’ this world the workers, citizens and all subjects are ever-present elements of singular resistance and moments in the construction of a different form of common living.

They are present even when the most grievous and dreariest historical lull is suffocating us. Multitude is a class concept and the singularities that compose it are always nuclei of resistance in the relation of subjugation imposed by capital. The singular obeys because he must do so and cannot do otherwise, but always as a resistance, there, inside the power relation. The breaking of this relation is always a possibility, just as much as the maintenance of the relation of command. Here, outside of any philosophy of history, inside this common phenomenology, we perceive how central and essential the possible indignation against power, its order and abuses and the refusal of wage labour (and/or of labour subjected to the end of reproducing capitalist society) are to the formation of another model of society and the extent to which they point to the present virtuality [virtual presence] of a different order, another prospect of life. These push towards rupture, and can do so because the rupture that is always possible can become real, or rather necessary (and we will come back to the characters of this rupture). There can be revolution.

The insistence on indignation, refusal and rebellion must be able to translate into constituent power . The struggle against the State and against all of the constitutions that organise and represent it must also contain the ability to produce new power by means of new knowledge. You can never grip a lightening bolt with bare hands, only the multitude, the history of rebelling class struggle, can do so. But the relation between the historical circumstances and the production of subjectivity keeps changing. As we said earlier, this is one of the realms of development of this continuous metamorphosis of the anthropology of the worker. The technical composition of the labour force is in constant motion and corresponds to an always adequate, and different, production of subjectivity. This is a political composition that must find concrete forms of expression and desire for revolution in its present circumstances.

The production of subjectivity and new political composition can also anticipate the historical and social conditions in which the revolutionary process is constructed, but there is always a dialectical link between the material determination and the revolutionary tension of collective desire: an elastic band that might snap but remains itself. As Lenin said, dual power is always short-lived, rebel power must hold back the time of history in subjective anticipation (the pushing forward of subjectivity). Constituent power is the key to anticipating and realising revolutionary will against the State.

In traditional State theory, anarchy and dictatorship are the opposite extremes of all possible forms of sovereign command, but when we speak of communist democracy against the State, we do not do so on the grounds of a possible mediation between anarchy and dictatorship., on the contrary. We propose the overcoming of this alternative because revolutionary struggle not only has no outside but the inside that it defines knows a subversive power, that is, a ‘below’ that is opposed to the ‘above’ of sovereignty. Communist being is realised from this ‘below’, from the turning of constituent desires into expressions of power and alternative contents. So there can also be a revolution, as Gramsci taught, ‘against Das Kapital ‘.

3) Being communists means building a new world where the exploitation of capital and subjection to the State are eliminated. Starting from our present circumstances, realistically, from the historical determinations that characterise our current condition, how do we move forward towards the realisation of communism?

First of all, let us say that this determinism can be broken and overcome only by building a force that is superior to that of those in command. But how do we do that? As we said, political rupture seems necessary once indignation, refusal, resistance and struggle have produced a constituent power that wants to realise itself. Only force makes this move forward, this constituent rupture possible. From strikes, industrial sabotage, the breaking and piracy of systems of domination, migrant flight and mobility to riots, insurrections, and the concrete configurations of an alternative power: these are the first recognisable figures of a collective revolutionary will.

This shift is fundamental - communist imagination is exalted in the moment of rupture. Higher wages against labour exploitation, universal income against the financial crisis, a democracy of all against dictatorship: these are the outcomes of a history that produces constituent will. But this is not enough; even if the cause is insufficient it does not make it less necessary, less sine qua non . It is not enough because there is no revolution without organisation, just as the exaltation of the event was not enough, the resorting to myth, or the mystic reference to the bareness of bodies, to a threshold of poverty opposed to the ubiquity of oppression - none of this is enough because there still is no rational design that invests and involves the movements of rupture with the power of organisation.

As Spinoza wrote: “ Cupiditas, quae ex ratione oritur, excessum habere nequit ” [Desire which springs from reason cannot be excessive] (Spinoza, Ethics , Part IV, Proposition LXI, New York: Dover Publications, 1959, p. 229), which thus prohibits any definition of desire that arrests itself [censors itself] with (supposedly objective) limits. What I mean to say is that when we think about and experiment with this framework, no teleology or philosophy of history is at play, only a collective desire that, with force, builds up its organised surplus throughout the entire aleatory process of struggles: the surplus of communism in relation to the dull repetition of the history of exploitation. To this end, communism is closer to us today (which doesn’t mean that it’s around the corner) because the surplus labour extracted from labour power - as it changes with the cognitive metamorphosis - is only with difficulty translated and turned into that surplus value that the capitalist organises into profit. Cognitive labour is terribly indigestible to capital.

But, as some tell us, there is no evidence to claim that the relation between subjective excess and the communist project is given through the subversive and insurrectional movements of the multitude. This is true. But we would respond that historical materialism and the immanence of the revolutionary project show us a subject that goes against capital and a multitude of singularities that organises into anti-capitalist power [forza], not formally, as a party, a mature and accomplished organisation, but, by virtue of its existence, as a resistance that is stronger and better articulated the more the multitude is a whole of singular institutions in itself. The latter include forms of life, struggle, economic and union organisation, strikes, the rupture of social processes of exploitation, experiences of re-appropriation, and nodes of resistance. At times they win in great clashes on issues that are central to the capitalist organisation of society, at other times they lose, though always keeping levels of antagonism that function as residues in new modes of subjectivation.

The multitude is a group of institutions that takes on different political compositions time after time and in relation to the shades and vicissitudes of power relations. They are more than the elements of technical composition of the proletariat, and more than the aleatory and/or conjunctural organisations of the oppressed: they are actual moments of political recomposition and coagulates of the subversive production of communist subjectivity. Cupiditates ! (TR: Passions, longings, desires, eagerness!) Instances of these are different and diversified relations between the expressions of a desire for emancipation (wage labour, social movements, political expressions) and the demand of political and/or economic reform.

From the standpoint of contemporary biopolitical society, the relation between reform and revolution is different from that of industrial societies. The transformation that has intervened is substantial and can easily be verified by an analysis of the generalisation of the methods of governance in the exercise of sovereignty, in the current weakening of the classical forms of government. The flows, pressures and alterations of governance relations in post-industrial societies show a new terrain where the collision between movements and governments unfolds with alternate outcomes. But they always all reveal the multiplication of assets for the struggle and organisation of reform proposals and subversive tensions that give shape to and internally articulate the multitude. Here we start glimpsing the new institutions of the common .

This process is set off from below. It is a movement that is affirmed with force. Rather than dialectics, what describes it is its will to affirmation. It is not teleological, unless we charge the materialist theory and subversive practice of Machiavelli with ethical and historical finalism. Instead, the multitude is immersed in a process of transition , that started when ‘one divided into two’, when, as we said earlier, it is difficult to turn the surplus labour of the cognitive proletariat into profit and the latter reveals itself as revolutionary surplus [excess]. Rather than a transition from one stage or mode of production to another, this is a change that unfolds inside the multitude itself, it exposes and acts on the web that links the anthropological metamorphoses of subjects to the changes of society and politics, and thus to the possibility of communist emancipation. The society we live in has been really and fully subsumed in capital. We call this command capitalist biopower . But if biopower is the product of the activity of capital even when its hegemony is global, this still needs to be based on a relation: the capital relation, always contradictory and possibly antagonistic, placed inside the biopolitical realm where life itself is put to work and all of its aspects are invested by power; but also where resistance is manifest and the proletariat is present in all of the figures where social labour is realised; where cognitive labour power expresses the excess of value and the multitude is formed. This multitude is not disarmed, because all of these processes that traverse it also describe its institutional articulations and accretion of resistance and subjective emergences.

As we said, the multitude is a totality of desires and trajectories of resistance, struggle and constituent power. We also add that it is a whole made of institutions. Communism is possible because it already exists in this transition, not as an end, but as a condition, it is the development of singularities, the experimentation of this construction and - in the constant wave of power relations - it is tension, tendency and metamorphosis.

4) What is a communist ethics? As we have seen, it is an ethics of struggle against the State because it moves from the indignation towards subjection and the refusal of exploitation. On the node of indignation and refusal lies the second element of the definition of a communist ethics, which is that of militance and the common construction of struggle against exclusion and poverty, alienation and exploitation.

These two elements (struggle and common militance) already open onto a new plane: that of a whole of singularities that, withdrawing from solitude, work to make themselves multitude - a multitude that looks for the common against privacy. Does this mean to achieve a democracy? For almost three centuries we have conceived of democracy as the administration of the public good, the institutionalisation of the state appropriation of the common. If we seek democracy today, we need to radically rethink it as the common management of the common. This management entails a redefinition of (cosmopolitan) space and (constituent) temporality. It is no longer the case of defining the form of a social contract where everything is everyone’s and thus belongs to no one: everything, as it is produced by everyone, belongs to all.

This shift will only occur in the name of organisation. The whole history of the communist movements regarded the issue of organisation as fundamental, because organisation is a collective-being-against, a principle of institution, and thus the very essence of making-multitude. The facts of the crisis of neo-liberalism, the cultures of individualism, the natural refusal of solitude of human beings who are born and grow up in society, the recognition that solitude is death, manifest themselves as an organisation of resistance against the new reduction to solitude that, in individualist morality, capital tries to re-impose upon subjects.

The first three elements of a communist ethics are: revolt against the State, common militance, and production of institutions. Clearly these are traversed by two fundamental passions: the passion that pushes from natural neediness and economic poverty towards a power of labour and science freed from capital’s command; and the passion of love that from the refusal of solitude leads to the political constitution of the common (unsurprisingly religion, bourgeois aesthetics and all new age ideologies try to recuperate, mystify and neutralise these passions). By coming together, developing new forms of common coexistence in resistance and organisation the constituent power of communism is invented. This concept of constituent power has nothing to do with the constitutional structures that capital and its State have organised. At this point, the power [potenza] of labour power, the invention of the multitude and the constituent expression of the proletariat on the one hand and capitalist power, the disciplinary arrogance of the bourgeoisie and the repressive vocation of the State on the other are not homologous. Because the constituent ethics of communism runs much deeper and invests the biopolitical dimension of historical reproduction, and as class struggle makes historical being, it is now going to spread inside the determinations of our age onto the whole set of biopolitical dispositifs. Here communist ethics touches upon the great issues of life (and of death) and takes on the character of great dignity when it appears as the generous and creative articulation of the power [potenza] of the poor and the common desire for love, equality and solidarity.
We have now come to the point where the idea of a practice of ‘use-value’ re-emerges. This use-value is no longer outside but inside the history made by struggles. It is no longer a remembrance of nature or the reflection of a presumed origin, nor an instance in time or an event of perception, but an expression, a language and a practice.

Finally, under no circumstances is it an identity, a reflection on the concrete characters assumed as the point of the insertion in a universal, but a mixture, a communal, multitudinal, hybrid and mongrel construction, the overcoming of everything that was otherwise known as identity in the dark centuries that precede us. The man emerging out of this ethics is a multicoloured Orpheus, a poverty that history returns to us as wealth rather than origin, as desire to-come rather than misery. This is the new use-value: the common . Our existence signals a series of common conditions that we keep wanting to emancipate by withdrawing them from capitalist alienation and State command. Use-value is the newly acquired form of the technical composition of labour, as well as the common political dispositif that lies at the foundation of the practices of constitution of the world in history. The new use-value consists in these dispositifs of the common that are opening up new paths for the organisation of struggle and the forces of destruction of capitalist command and exploitation.

London, March 14th 2009

Translation by Arianna Bove

Now, there are two ways of approaching this phenomenon, and both – I hope – avoid the common errors of, on the one hand, predictable conservative fundamentalism (sex is sinful…blah blah blah) and, on the other hand, the orgiastic mantra of an ‘18 to 30s’ holiday. The first approach derives from Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian Marxist psychoanalyst, who has been described as the ‘Elvis Presley of cultural theory’. Throughout his work he stresses that whereas in traditional psychoanalysis the superego was effectively the ‘No!’ of the father, that which forbids (“Can I do this?” squeaks the meek child “NO!” booms the castrating father), today’s superego might be said to be the polar opposite: ‘You may!’ Now, superficially, that seems fairly harmless: ‘What a nice superego! It’ll let me do whatever I want! I can drink and whore till my heart’s content!’ The downside, however, is that ‘You may!’ is a command, and all commands have a

Ecstasy of saint Theresa, Bernini

“What is baffling and sometimes outrageous to the modern reader is just this assumption that, in certain circumstances, sex can’t matter that much. And I want to suggest that the most important contribution the New Testament can make to our present understanding of sexuality may be precisely in this unwelcome and rather chilling message. We come to the New Testament eagerly looking for answers, and we meet a blank or quizzical face: why is that the all-important problem? Not all human goods are possible all the time, and it would be a disaster to think that there was some experience without which nothing else made sense. Only if sexual intimacy is seen as the last hiding-place of real transcendence, to borrow a phrase from the American novelist, Walker Percy, could we assume that it mattered above all else.”[1]

In other words, precisely because we live in an age obsessed with sex and sexuality, we tend to stake almost everything on those terms. What we forget, and what the New Testament suggests, is that sex just isn’t important. Indeed, in a follow-up post, Halden provocatively concludes that “If Christ is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness”. And in this day and age, that is in no small way shocking.

[1] Rowan Williams, “Forbidden Fruit”, in Martyn Percy (ed.), Sexuality and Spirituality in Perspective (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997), pp.25-26

The New York singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega has an entertaining song entitled “Pornographer’s Dream” (from her 2007 album, Beauty and Crime). In the song, Vega asks what kind of woman a pornographer would dream about:

Would he still dream of the thigh? of the flesh upon high?
What he saw so much of?
Wouldn’t he dream of the thing that he never
Could quite get the touch of?

It’s out of his hands, over his head
Out of his reach, under this real life
Hidden in veils, covered in silk
He’s dreaming of what might be

Out of his hands, over his head
Out of his reach, under this real life
Hidden in veils,
He’s dreaming of mystery.

It’s a nice idea: the pornographer, from whom nothing is concealed, dreams only of concealment itself. Unlike the rest of us, his fantasies involve not naked flesh, but a body “hidden in veils, covered in silk.” For the pornographer, the only thing forbidden is mystery, so that his fantasises are of clothed women, veiled flesh.

As an analysis of pornography, I think this is completely correct. The real problem with pornography is not that it is too erotic, but that it is not erotic enough. In seeking to reveal everything, to fulfil every fantasy, it destroys the very possibility of fantasy and eroticism. And so the use of pornography ultimately results not in erotic ecstasy or euphoria, but in mere boredom.

Perhaps all this can serve as a parable for the contemporary preference for experiential worship styles. Where every church service becomes the opportunity for a life-changing experience of the divine presence; where every song and sermon and prayer is designed to produce immediate emotional impact; where the whole Christian life is transformed into the pursuit of a “naked” experience of the divine – here, the final outcome can only be a profound and paralysing boredom. And for those subjected to such boredom, the only remaining spiritual desire is for a mysterious God, a God not merely naked and exposed, but clothed in ritual, sacrament, tradition.

Why are so many evangelicals converting to Rome and Constantinople? Perhaps their infinitely deferred quest for a Deus nudus has finally resulted in an unbearable boredom. Perhaps they’re dreaming of a God who is not always promiscuously available to immediate experience, but is instead “hidden in veils, covered in silk” – a more modest, and therefore more sexy God.

For what it’s worth, my own opinion is that we should avoid the pitfalls both of a promiscuous experientialism and of any reaction towards ritualism for its own sake. Instead of trying by our own efforts either to strip God or to clothe him, we should look to the place where God has both veiled and unveiled himself for us: in the event of Jesus Christ.

–Benjamin Myers
He is an Australian scholar, teaching systematic theology at Charles Sturt University’s School of Theology in Sydney.

Buckminster Fuller and Geodesic Dom

‘World-around’ is a term coined by Fuller to replace ‘worldwide’. The general belief in a flat Earth died out in Classical antiquity, so using ‘wide’ is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth — a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume, but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. Other neologisms collectively invented by the Fuller family, according to Allegra Fuller Snyder, are the terms sunsight and sunclipse, replacing sunrise and sunset to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial mechanics. (via Wikipedia)

Before Paul Churchland began calling for the obsoletion of folk psychological concepts like ‘mind’ and ‘belief’, Fuller was engaged in a campaign to rid the world of the dead ideas that so dominated the common conceptual repertoire. Science had long practiced the elimination of obsolete theories, but public use of such theories often carried on for decades, even centuries afterward. Sometimes, the public circulation of newly minted metaphors backed by scientific theories would only begin after that theory was dead to scientific consideration, as when a star’s light reaches the earth millenia after it has gone dark.

Popular consciousness is so littered with dead concepts that it is practically made of them alone. This has far from negligible effects, as is sufficiently demonstrated by the remarkable poverty of understanding on both sides of the political debates surrounding topics like evolutionary theory, climate change, abortion, and so on. The use of scientific concepts in popular discourse has definite and undeniable political and economic consequences.

Churchland believes that it suffices to eliminate dead ideas from scientific discourse, and that their public obsolescence will inevitably follow. Unfortunately, even a cursory survey of the evidence reveals that this is dramatically incorrect. Fuller admirably campaigned for significant renovations to even the most basic, unreflected metaphors structuring not only our langauge, but our very perception of the world and ourselves.

Yet a politicized eliminativism cannot simply seek to replace dead ideas with their contemporary stand-ins. It must cut to the heart of popular discourse itself, which is centered around the desire to know ‘once and for all’ how things are. This is the most fundamental attitude to be eliminated, the most malignant unscientific parasite we host. Science cannot proceed without leaving every last idea totally vulnerable, exposed to the possibility of obsolescence in the face of new evidence. A politics based around this sort of ideational fragility is what is most desperately needed today.

By–Reid Kane Kotlas write him at reidkane @ gmail . com

Author biography: Kelly Bronson is a PhD candidate at York University in her fourth year of study. A converted scientist with a BSc.H. in environmental biology from Queen’s University, who now explores the social and cultural implications of technoscientific innovations. Her MA thesis investigated the legal battle between organic farmers in Saskatchewan versus Monsanto over the contamination of organic fields by the company’s GE canola. In her current work she explores the history of government science on E.coli 0157:H7 in Canada, and official discourses of food-related risk represented therein. A co-editor of the 2007 text, Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Food Studies, and a dedicated food sovereignty activist with the Canadian Association for Forod Studies and the Toronto Food Policy Council.
ksb[at]yorku.ca

AS MICHAEL POLLAN (2006) WRITES, the human desire to liberate food from nature via technological intervention is as old as eating [1]. In 1960s North America, significant developments in breeding and chemicals catalyzed the transformation of agriculture into a highly technologized business. New nutrient-efficient hybrid seed varieties, mechanical innovations, and the introduction of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides prompted astoundingly higher yields of corn, rice, and wheat (Boyens, 2001). While these “efficiencies” succeeded in lifting both rural and urban societies beyond subsistence living, they rendered many farmers economically redundant. This technological change coincided with the liberalization of national markets, which placed Canadian farmers in competition with farmers from around the world. Since this time, farmers in Canada frequently face record-low commodity prices on the global marketplace and they face incredibly high costs of chemical and technological inputs due to a lack of competition among the transnational corporations who supply them (National Farmers Union, 2007). Canadian farmers are encouraged by the agricultural economic orthodoxy and government incentives to further increase the scale and intensity of their operations in order to try and recoup their costs. Many farmers in Canada have been encouraged to use genetically modified (GM) or genetically engineered (GE) crops as a way of hopefully increasing yields and profits. At the same time, the Canadian government hopes to be a global competitor in the development of biotechnology (Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy, 1999). The DNA of these GM varieties has been manipulated at the molecular level to give them traits advantageous to higher crop yields such as increased resistance to common diseases, greater durability to climate extremes, and a higher proportion of edible or useful plant parts. One such crop, “Roundup Ready” canola, is widely used on the Canadian prairies (see Phillips, 2003). The well-known U.S. multinational corporation, Monsanto, developed this technology to allow Canola to withstand the spraying of its powerful herbicide, Roundup, thus allowing farmers to spray unselectively.

While the structural tendencies unleashed by high-input farming have forced many farmers into a treadmill of increasing technological competition (Boyens, 2001; Goodman and Watts, 1997) not all farmers have been drawn into the fray. Recent Statistics Canada (2006) data indicates that unfortunately many small family farmers have left the land because they are unable to buffer the high costs and risks associated with industrialized farming in a volatile global marketplace. Others have simply chosen not to buy into the newer technologies but continue to rely on more traditional seed varieties and farming techniques. More and more Canadian farmers are turning toward organic methods for ideological reasons but also as an economic strategy: although more labour intensive, the input costs for organic production are relatively negligible and the prices are higher for this value-added end product (Lighthall, 1995; Saltiel et al., 1994).

There is evidence, however, that the very presence of agricultural biotechnology [2]threatens the existence of non-biotech farming approaches, and as such the sovereignty of farmers and ultimately consumers to reject GM technology. A group of organic farmers in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan have taken Monsanto to court, alleging that “Roundup Ready” canola has contaminated organic pastures through seed and pollen drift to the extent that they can no longer sell their product as organic. I will draw on interview data from a two year long ethnographic study of the community of people involved in and around this lawsuit. My experience with this ongoing conflict suggests that agricultural biotechnology has not only colonized the material environment, but, more significantly in my view, there appears to be no official discursive space for evaluations of the technology outside of the language of science. As a result, evaluations of the cultural and social implications of the technology are silenced with dramatic consequences.

On January 10, 2002, two organic farmers of Saskatchewan filed a statement of claim against Monsanto Canada on behalf of the province’s certified organic grain farmers (see http://www.saskorganic.com/oapf/). The case rests on the argument that the genetically engineered canola produced by Monsanto and other biotech multinationals is contaminating canola crops across the prairies so extensively that certified organic farmers can no longer sell their product as organic, robbing them of access to a lucrative and growing market. The claim states that when Monsanto introduced their GE canola they knew (or ought to have known) that it would spread and contaminate the environment.

When I first heard about this lawsuit I was working in a genetics laboratory at Queen’s University and biotechnology applied to the food system was already controversial. When the first GE product entered the North American food supply in 1990 the public was wary (for a history of the technology’s controversy, see Smith, 2004). In late 2001 there had been public outcry against the Canadian government decision not to label foods containing genetically modified ingredients, and against the Consumer’s Association of Canada, which supported the government’s decision despite polls indicating that 95% of Canadians wanted labeling. Both industry and government insisted that labeling would be too difficult and would unnecessarily damage the GE industry since the public would make “uninformed” purchasing decisions (Canadian Broading Corporation, 2002). Also in 2001 the Royal Society of Canada, among the country’s preeminent scientific institutions, released its scientific review of food biotechnology, indicating that the technology was not free of potential environmental and health consequences.

The poverty of public debate around the question of GE foods in Canada was striking. In my own experience, trying to engage other scientists in conversations about the technology at the time was frustrating because I would commonly receive the response that since there was nothing proved wrong with the science, negative public attitudes toward biotechnology were irrational and ignorant of this fact. As I searched for information regarding public perceptions of biotechnology I began to realize that this was the dominant framing of negative public responses to the technology (see Knezevic, 2006). According to this logic, the organic farmers of Saskatchewan were irrational and perhaps even anti-biotechnology to challenge the leading biotechnology multinational in the courts.

I found myself unsatisfied with this understanding of the situation, in part because previous rulings had highlighted the courts’ reticence in addressing the issue of responsibility for the accidental spread of genetically engineered seed. In 1998, Monsanto brought another Prairie farmer, Percy Schmeiser, to court for growing Roundup Ready canola without having paid for the technology (see Sudduth, 2002). Unlike the thousands of farmers who each year settle out of court with Monsanto, Schmeiser decided to fight back, arguing that the seed had actually contaminated his property and he had unwittingly repopulated his fields with it by saving seed, a traditional farming practice. The Supreme Court treated the case as a clear-cut patent ruling and decided that whether by intent or by accident, genetically engineered canola was grown without requisite contract and that the seed and resultant crop were the property of Monsanto as the patent-holder (Sudduth, 2002). Given this precedent, it seemed unlikely that the organic farmers of Saskatchewan would win their lawsuit. Knowing they would certainly be aware of their meager chances for success in the courts, I began to wonder at the broader significance of these events.

I moved to Saskatchewan and began getting to know farmers and food policy activists in order to gain their perspectives on agricultural biotechnology generally and the lawsuit in particular. I was surprised by what they told me. Not one of the 20 people I interviewed talked about the lawsuit in merely strategic or technical terms. Instead there was an ongoing insistence on linking the specific issues being faced in the lawsuit with broader questions of social and political justice and with larger societal objectives. Doug Bone, an organic farmer, put it this way:

It’s maybe tilting at windmills to a certain extent. These companies have very deep pockets and organic farmers don’t so we likely won’t win. I think it’s a fight that has to be fought whether we win or lose. If we lose then we’ll have the satisfaction that at least we tried. And I also think this is just one little fight that organic farmers are involved in—I think worldwide there is a growing movement of people, not just farmers but the general public, that is rising up to take control of their lives back from the corporate agenda. Our class action lawsuit here is just a part of a growing movement that combines all sorts of related issues: social, political, economic…I think globally there are all kinds of groups and causes that are related and can take inspiration from this.

Surprisingly, not one of the farmers I interviewed spoke against the science of biotechnology per se. Almost half of those I interviewed had studied in the natural sciences and they were all very comfortable talking about specific issues within the language of science as they arose in conversation, such as the current status of scientific testing on the environmental and health effects of GM organisms. Yet science is irrelevant to understanding what is at the root of their dissent, which is instead cultural and social.

Those involved in the lawsuit see themselves as standing up against not the technology, but the foundations on which the corporate enterprise behind biotechnology rests. To these farmers, agricultural biotechnology in its current structure as a for-profit big business furthers the corporate ownership of land, genetic and other resources that has historically undermined people’s and community’s rights to define their own food production and consumption practices. In essence, the fight is about food sovereignty [3]:

I’m extremely negative about the whole cultural endeavour of biotechnology because I think it’s concentrated, and it’s more of the control over nature and people to extract a profit for a very small number. And I think it’s completely the wrong view of ourselves within the web of life…it’s completely the wrong view in terms of other values around culturally appropriate food, nutritious food, healthy and safe food, food for everybody…values that are undermined by this technology [Nettie Wiebe].

Farmers defined the effects of biotechnology within discussions around the integrity of the daily experience of farmers and rural communities. Many farmers see the application of GE technology to agriculture as an apogee of the corporatization and industrialization of farming, which have made “terminal” the livelihoods of many small family farmers in Canada. As one retired conventional farmer remarked, “For many of us farming is a terminal enterprise and it’s sad, because farming is a wonderful life…but under these circumstances it’s painful to try and stay in year after year” [Marc Loiselle]. Many of the conventional farmers I spoke with detailed the rising costs of farm inputs and they were palpably helpless against the power of the multinational corporations on whom they depend for things like chemicals and machinery. According to one cattle producer:

The NFU [National Farmers Union] have graphs that show grain prices slowly working their way up and fertilizer prices tracking them perfectly. And this opportunistic profiteering is what’s forcing farmers to leave the land, corporations have just squeezed us so hard that everyone’s leaving…well… they’re forced out…[Arnold Taylor].

Others detailed the loss in public and cooperative structures like local grain elevators and the old, hard fought-for Canadian Wheat Board, as private interests have encroached on once-common institutions. Many farmers talked about the growing number of corporate farms and their relationship to the erosion of rural communities and social cohesion among farmers. Those farmers directly involved with the lawsuit envisioned their action as addressing these issues of sovereignty: a fight on behalf of farmers everywhere to be able to continue farming, and in the manner of their choosing. Wally Satzewich, an organic urban gardener and a strong proponent of community food security initiatives:

If we don’t stand up now we’ll be serfs on the land—these large companies will own everything. If it’s not the chemical companies, it’s the seed companies. I think there’s a real element of greed that rises to the surface when decisions concerning agriculture are left up to biotechnology corporations…this is leading to more of a corporate controlled food system instead of one where people have real choices. And at some point not only are organic farmers going to suffer but also farmers of all kinds, and consumers too.

I asked those involved with the lawsuit why they would go so far as to bring these issues to court. If their grievances were not strictly technical but more cultural and social, why air them through the highly technical legal system? The answers were straightforward and consistent: because nobody would listen to their cultural and social concerns about agricultural biotechnology. They had tried letter-writing campaigns to provincial and even federal politicians, public forums, creative public gatherings and protests. The National Farmers Union had even staged a popular boycott of Roundup herbicide in the prairies. Yet they were repeatedly dismissed, not only by the multinationals who arguably have a “corporate social responsibility” but, even more alarmingly, they were ignored and rendered functionally silent in the expected channels of representation in a democratic system: the mainstream media and government. As one farm policy expert put it:

We’ve done everything we can to get the government to listen to our difficulties with GM technology. That’s one of the big problems: that the Canadian government can’t see the proper description that we lay in front of them, that this technology, and the corporations who own it, threatens the livelihoods of many farmers. They can’t see that, and I don’t mean can’t as in unable but I mean can’t. So, it is really hard to get people to look at the real problems–they label us backwards or anti-science. They might be o.k. to look at a drought. That’s non-controversial, it’s an act of god. But it is really hard to hold their nose to looking at the real-life impacts of a technology that they are heavily invested in [Darrin Qualman].

The close association between government and industry in the very development of biotechnology undeniably influences policy discussions about the technology and its development. But the failure of legitimate political channels to be open to cultural and social critiques of the technology is also a consequence of a long-standing cultural bias toward a technologized approach to farming. The food policy expert whom is quoted above, Darrin Qualman, is among many others in describing how, because of the dominant framing of biotechnology, there is just no room within the orthodox communication channels of a democratic system for non-technical assessments [4]. And so a group of organic farmers in Saskatchewan felt it necessary to create a public spectacle of Monsanto—a beacon of the corporatization of agriculture—using the courts, in the hopes of garnering as much media attention and public sympathy as Percy Schmeiser did. As long-time organic farmer Jim Robbins put it:

Although very few people are ever able to challenge [Monsanto], least of all farmers who are labeled as not educated about the science and discounted, there’s another picture where it looks different. We’re at the point now where there’s a whole other way of thinking—and this is the optimistic me—where consumers are getting suspicious of the dominant model and what kinds of foodstuffs they get out of it, to farmers who are starting to look more carefully at their options and pushing for better options than the productivist model of agriculture. And it’s handy to have a label for the thing standing in the way of all this positive change: Monsanto. But Monsanto of course represents a whole range of interests: corporate interests, a way of seeing the world as resources to be exploited, a way of looking at people as exploitable, a way of seeing living organisms as manipulable and exploitable. Monsanto really represents a way of seeing and organizing the political domain such that fewer actors get to determine what life, the environment, and economy will be like without any reference to the citizenry and their democratic rights. This lawsuit is in many ways shorthand for these two opposing and competing ways of making sense of the world.

Scholars working in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have cited the growing worldwide debate around the risks, benefits and social consequences of biotechnology that began in the late 1990s as exemplary of the need for greater dialogue between science and the public and for increased participation in decision-making about science and technology (Jasanoff, 2003). Interestingly, STS researchers have surveyed public disputes of biotechnology in the UK and the USA and they have shown that, similar to farmers in Saskatchewan, Canada, people in these areas of the world are interpreting genetic science and technologies in the context of wider understandings of the nature of corporate technological development (see Kerr et al., 1998). An in depth-survey coming from Laner University showed that the UK public was not simply anti-science in its intense opposition to GM foods, but the public was concerned about specific characteristics of the GM food industry (Grove-White et al., 2000). Also similar to findings highlighted in this paper, surveys conducted in Britain have found that among those most critical of specific applications of GM science are groups that have considerable scientific knowledge (Evans and Durant, 1995). Such work is key to informing current thinking about the way in which the public responds to science and as such policies on science and technology. In particular, studies like this are pivotal in counteracting the prevailing “deficit” model—the argument that if the public knew more about the science they wouldn’t be opposed to it. Interventions like those of the Saskatchewan farmers are undoubtedly contributing to the growing awareness among those of political authority that we need to supplement the narrow preoccupation with measuring the costs and benefits of innovation within the logic of scientific and economic evaluation with greater attentiveness to the broader politics and social justice of science and technology if science and politics don’t want to suffer a serious legitimacy crisis.

The organic farmers of Saskatchewan also represent the hope of renewed democratic participation among civil society around issues not only facing agricultural communities but also larger social justice concerns. In her essay, Opinionated Natures: Toward a Green Public Culture (2002), Catriona Sandilands situates herself among political commentators like Jurgen Habermas who lament a declining public sphere—a space where citizens engage one another in issues of common concern (Habermas, 1989). Sandilands agrees with thinkers like Habermas and Jeffrey Isaac (1998) who describe some new social movements as “oases in the desert,” or islands of invigorated political engagement in what is otherwise a generally politically frustrated society for whom the energies of democracy seem depleted. These thinkers agree that many new social movements, in dealing with specific problems (like GE canola contamination of Canadian organic fields) cultivate broad and sometimes international networks of organizing and information-sharing around issues of class, gender, and race, and thereby bring public awareness and participation to issues of wide political importance.

Sandilands suggests, however, that in order to transform a local movement into a more widely shared public or common interest, deliberative participation is insufficient (Sandilands, 2002). Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, Sandilands insists that an approach which makes it possible for individuals’ opinions about issues to be debated and refined in public—in essence a performative politics—is essential for invigorating a truly public culture. Unfortunately, and this is Sandilands’s main point, many movements (in her case, environmental movements) are hamstrung in their ability to generate such a public debate because of an appeal to discourses of scientific “truths” in their contestations. Sandilands reminds us that, for Arendt, political persuasion begins with forms of knowledge that are qualitatively different from scientific “truths”; performative politics is about the realm of opinions. Sandilands also reminds us that Arendt understood the claim to truth as dangerous to the formation of public opinion because it overrode the specificity of an issue as it might be meaningful to each person, its subjectivity (Arendt, 1958). The more that the “truth” about the quality of food, for example, or its context of production, is understood to lie beyond individual sense-perception and everyday experience to instead lie in the realm of, say, chemical make-up, the less a commonality and therefore a constitutive public discussion is possible.

There is of course a functional element to the actions of the organic farmers of Saskatchewan: they are defending private interests (the local organic canola market) through litigation. But they are also, and perhaps primarily, exemplary of the kind of performative politics that Sandilands sees as opening up dialogue on social issues beyond the truth-claims of science; in this case, bringing evaluations of agricultural biotechnology beyond the realm of scientific reasoning into discussions about the technology’s threat to the sovereignty of all farmers and consumers. The performative dimensions of the activities of the organic farmers of Saskatchewan not only build on the objectives of stopping the contamination of GE canola and widening the public sphere of debate around food and biotechnology, they also challenge the foundational legitimacy of scientific and economic logic as the only modes of making sense of and discussing the technology.

In conclusion, the organic farmers of Saskatchewan involved in the lawsuit against Monsanto are anti-biotechnology only if we define technology in the way they do: not simply a tool but as a set of knowledge practices that stand to significantly change social relationships, our culture. Ursula Franklin has written about the danger of what she calls “prescriptive technologies” that are designed by scientific experts to perform a specific function but which when applied reorganize social relationships according to the logic of the technology, displacing other types of social logic like compassion or community obligation (Franklin, 1990). I began this essay by presenting biotechnology as an extension of the industrialization of agriculture, which illustrates it as a prescriptive technological intervention. World War II saw considerable advances in chemicals and machinery which called for application in the post-war period. New chemicals became fertilizers and were made into food additives that allowed for longer product shelf-lives. New machinery made the individual packaging and shipment of agricultural goods commercially viable. These new goods in turn needed consumers who were at first reticent of chemical additives and increased costs. This in turn inspired the intense marketing of industrially processed food—from T.V. dinners to “Betty Crocker” products—geared toward women, promising a liberating and exciting addition to their lives (see Davis and Schneider, 2007). Discussions of the cultural implications of technology were circumscribed within these limited discourses of liberation from work for farmers and housewives alike, while discussions of the social implications of the spread of these technologies within larger structures and social organization were marginalized to the early organics and ecology movements. Looking back on the social history of these technologies we can now see that the real story was nothing less than the restructuring of food and farming. There is little reason to expect that the new technological approach and logic of agricultural biotechnology won’t have similarly vast consequences, thus making it a collective responsibility to reflect on what exactly it is we talk about when we talk about biotechnology.

Endnotes

[1] My title takes inspiration from the American writer Raymond Carver’s famous 1981 collection of short stories under the title, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. While love is clearly ineffable, there is tacit agreement that we all define biotechnology (and technology in general) in the same way(s) yet my paper’s main problematic is that there is actually a disconnect between the dominant technological regime and the way those most affected by biotechnology evaluate its implications.
[2] Industry often refers to biotechnology as any technique using living organisms to make products, such as improving plant or animals through traditional breeding. In this paper, I am referring to modern biotechnology, which is the industrial use of recombinant DNA, or the modification of genes or their transferring between species.
[3]“Food sovereignty” was originally coined at the 1996 World Food Summit to refer to an approach that claims the right of peoples to define their own food production and consumption ways in contrast to having food decisions determined by international market forces.
[4]In a recent personal communication, Darrin Qualman also pointed out another divide in technological evaluations: the government measurements of the effects of biotechnology can’t account for the real experience of the farmers because the total effect cannot be predicted by looking at the parts. Each agricultural technology, evaluated individually, is shown to improve farmers’ bottom lines but the sum total of all these revenue- and net-income-increasing technologies is to reduce net income to zero (where it has been for Canadian farmers for decades). While the individual technologies can be shown to be financially beneficial, the totality of the high-input industrialized farming system is ruinous.

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reproduced from -http://aspen.conncoll.edu/

“I am not yet born; forgive me. For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me.” - Louis MacNeice

When the British government ordered its troops to invade Iraq, it conveniently forgot to inform them that when they entered the land between the two rivers, the sights that lay before them were not those of weapons of mass destruction or Al-Qaida cells but a country whose entire infrastructure had been decimated as a result of sanctions previously imposed on them.

The march into Baghdad, was not one which was met with the glee of the throwing of sweets and flowers but a world which had been reduced to a “pre-industrial age”, which after the First Gulf War had to contend with the deaths of over one million children under the age of five, a country whose population had to endure a systematic cultural, technological and educational starvation which according to Madaline Albright, former US secretary of state, in the 1990’s was a “Price worth paying”, if it meant containing Saddam Hussein.

So why, in 2009, has it come as a shock that war trauma has occurred as a direct consequence of the invasion? Following the deaths of more than one million people inside of Iraq since the occupation started, the continuing Iraqi war has finally come home to Britain and now it appears, that it is our turn to start paying the price.

When Daniel Fitzsimmons returned to Iraq after finishing a stint as a “contractor” for Armor Group, little did he know that he would soon experience the “justice” system of a regime, which was partially installed by his own Labour government, that having killed two other British contractors and injuring one Iraqi, Fitzsimmons now faces a trial with the possibility of execution if found guilty of pre-meditated murder.

According to the family of Fitzsimmons and psychiatric reports, he was suffering from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with repeated flashbacks, nightmares and anxiety attacks. He had also been dismissed by the security firm Aegis while working in Iraq for “extreme negligence”. At the time he was taken on by Armor Group he was awaiting trial for assault having already been convicted in Britain of three other crimes including robbery, possession of ammunitions and public order offences.

Both his father and step-mother admitted to the British media that they weren’t even aware he had gone back to Iraq. That coupled with his addiction to alcohol and other substances, the failure of the security company to carry out proper medical checks, and with many independent witness reports stating that Fitzsimmons had appeared incredibly disturbed whilst back home, it appears that the intelligence of the two Manchester based teachers should have outweighed that of the Ministry of Defence, when they stated: “He patently should not have been allowed to go to Iraq. He is extremely poorly.”

So why on earth was he sent back? The fact that the bad publicity surrounding this case has only now forced many uncomfortable questions to be raised in the parliament is worrying. Less than one month before the case of Fitzsimmons hit the front pages across Great Britain, 25 year-old Andrew Watson threw himself off the top of a tower block in London, having saluted in front of the television, the televising of the returning bodies of eight soldiers who were brought back from Afghanistan.

Whilst serving in Basra, Watson witnessed the deaths of two friends as a result of a landmine, and on a separate occasion had to carry out bodies of dead babies from a bombed out building. According to Glynis Watson, his mother, psychologically Watson “was dead when he came back from Iraq and we were desperately trying to get him the help he needed.”

The family also believe that his suicide, which took place in July this year, coincided with his Army roll-call time and whilst his mother recalled her son “crying in my arms and saying, “I know I’m really, really ill”, she hit out at the Ministry of Defence for failing to provide him with the emotional support he needed.

Having ordered an invasion of Iraq, on the grounds of preventing Saddam from stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction“, which could be launched to hit their targets within “forty five minutes” and the countless allegations relating to human rights abuses and unproven links to Al-Qaida, the Ministry of Defence themselves admit to washing their hands of traumatised war veterans’ by claiming that they “cannot be held responsible” for what happens to Army personnel after they leave the forces.

Combat Stress: the Veterans’ Mental Welfare Society have even publicly stated that since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, that new referrals have gone up 66 per cent, with many Veterans from the occupations resorting to self medicating drugs, substance and alcohol abuse, along with suffering from various phobic disorders.

These statistics coincide with the dramatic increase in PTSD among US soldiers returning from the potential “forty year” occupation of Afghanistan and with the Iraqi people witnessing over 90 per cent of their children living with learning impediments brought on by trauma, we can only begin to question the legacy of Blair and Brown and what the future will hold for humanity, if PTSD is not made a priority issue on the international agenda.