Archives

August, 2019

Green Fascism

Center for World Indigenous Studies

August 13, 2019

By Jay Taber

 

“Capitalism’s Last Supper” – by Stephanie McMillan

 

In his latest article on green fascism, NEA/PEN playwright John Steppling examines the New Volkisch Mythos of *Greta* that “is the validation of what amounts to royalist wisdom and the dangers of community control of anything…All the so-called New Green Deal solutions are there, it seems, to save capitalism before saving the planet.”

As Steppling observed in Scurrying Fascist Cockroaches, “the Green New Deal is the fig leaf that provides material for this manufacturing of a new fascist narrative. The green fascism of these new ‘products’ from the Democratic Party laboratories is pretty much in line with what Bill Clinton ushered in and what Obama sort of perfected.”

As he remarks,

“The same fingerprints are always found. The Gates Foundation, 350.org, the US state department and an assortment of varied NGOs of the moment.”

In my post Heart of Darkness, I wrote, “In terms of relevance to the indigenous nations often referred to as the Fourth World, the rollouts from the COP21 gathering of UN member states, Wall Street-funded NGOs, and the global financial elite resemble colonial initiatives undertaken as a result of similar 19th Century gatherings to carve up the world for capitalism. Then, as now, indigenous territories and resources were targeted for expropriation through coercion, with Africa being a prime target.”

 

Going out with a bang. Source: Tumblr

When France invaded Mali in 2013 with the blessing of the UN, it was to obtain the uranium needed to fuel nuclear power plants in France, at the expense of the indigenous Tuareg. With nuclear power development as the number one green initiative under the Bill Gates plan, Navajo and other American tribes that have uranium deposits or nuclear waste sites can expect to be treated with equal disdain.

As noted at Global Research, “Uranium is France’s key energy resource, according to the World Nuclear Association, with 75 percent of the European nation’s electricity being produced from nuclear energy, which explains French dependency on uranium. According to mineral resource analysts, beneath the deserts in Northern Mali and Eastern Niger, territory now exclusively claimed by the nomadic Tuareg tribes, exists the world’s third largest uranium reserves as well as substantial oil reserves.”

According to African history scholar Dr. Leonard Jeffries, the French don’t need permission to intervene in their former colonies because of the accords they forced on them before granting independence. “For five decades,” he says, “France has maintained a neo-colonial relationship that gave France control of components of the new African states, including their economies and military institutions.”

As reported at CEASEFIRE, France opened 2013 with a series of airstrikes on Northern Mali allegedly to prevent the establishment of a terrorist state, but had its eyes on something far more important. Like its neighbour, Niger, Mali is rich in uranium. “Following the ‘oil shock of 1973 in which the oil producing nations sharply increased the price of oil, the French decided an alternative route was needed. This alternative was nuclear energy.”

France now has 59 nuclear reactors, and, although Niger has been France’s primary uranium trading partner in the region, 5,200 tonnes of untapped uranium sources in Mali make “a favourable government and a suppressed civil society all the more urgent.”

Following the ethnic cleansing of Tuareg by the NATO-backed, Al-Qaeda affiliated rebels, a united Tuareg resistance has the potential to erode power from the central Mali government, and even control areas of land in which the Tuareg live, but the French want to mine. Thus the French had to brand the Tuareg as terrorists to justify its invasion.

While world leaders at COP 21 in Paris fawned over the Breakthrough Energy Coalition as world saviors promoting so-called ‘climate solutions’, the reality is that these con artists are setting us up for a global heist that we’ll be paying for long into the future. Breakthrough Energy Coalition is an assemblage of private sector venture capitalists whose agenda is carbon capture and nuclear power, both of which are unsafe, and require enormous public subsidies.

Two of the architects of the so-called ‘climate solutions’ — e.g. Bill Gates and George Soros — are noted for past involvement in serious fraud. The Green New Deal—like the Universal Climate Change Agreement—is nuclear power in a green outfit.

 

Degrowth Means the Production of Necessary, not Superfluous Goods

Nullus Locus Sine Genio

August 3, 2019

By Robin Monotti Graziadei

 

 

 

To define “degrowth” we first need to define “growth”.

What do we mean by the word “growth”?

Pasolini answered that this growth we talk about is specifically “a “growth” whose outline has already been formed and fixed in the context of bourgeois industrialization.

It’s evident: those who want “growth” in that sense are those who produce; that is the industrialists. And, as “growth” in Italy is this growth, they are more exactly those industrialists who produce superfluous goods.

Pier Paolo Pasolini “Growth and Progress” (1973)

Therefore by “degrowth” we mean decoupling from this outline of growth which has already been formed and fixed in the context of bourgeois industrialization: which essentially means growth as the production of superfluous goods.

Today’s term “degrowth” actually means what Pasolini calls “progress”: the production of necessary, not superfluous goods.

Those who want progress want the creation and the production of necessary goods.

Pier Paolo Pasolini:

Therefore this growth we talk about actually means the production of superfluous goods & this degrowth we talk about means the production of necessary goods. There are many other structural signifiers in the economic use of the word “growth” which should not go without mention. First among them is the unit of measure of “growth” as Gross Domestic Product or GDP.

There is of course no qualification or distinction or any attempt to measure or quantify whether GDP is achieved via the production of necessary or superfluous goods or services. It is this idea of value-less growth that the term degrowth seeks to challenge as it wants progress instead of value-less growth at all costs.

Secondly, the word “domestic” in Gross Domestic Product or GDP firmly roots this growth in the territory of the nation state, in competition with other nation states, making no distinctions for growth at regional or metropolitan scales. National competition, not national aid is embedded in the notion of “growth” as defined by the measure of GDP.

Degrowth is simply another word for progress decoupled from the bourgeois definition of growth as the industrial production of superfluous goods & services.

Degrowth does not mean ungrowth, lack of growth, stagnation, economic downturn, depression or recession, that would be anti-growth, meaning lack of growth or negative growth, not degrowth. Degrowth means to remove from growth superfluous goods and services; it is a discretionary form of growth.

Therefore the real meaning of the word degrowth is a form of progress outside of the market logic of the production of superfluous goods inherent in bourgeois industrial capitalism. Degrowth is simply, given the limited natural resources of planet earth, an intelligent form of progress which only factors necessary goods or services.

Defining what is necessary and what is superfluous in the degrowth definition of eliminating the superfluous from production is not possible at a general but only at a culturally specific level: it varies from culture to culture, from community to community, locality to locality. We should all determine what is superfluous collectively by asking that question of our own cultures as we are inevitably consumers of products: we can stop paying & participating in the production of what we consider superfluous. For example, when Pasolini was asked whether he was also part of the consumerist cycle as he published books and directed films, Pasolini admitted to one degree that he was, as it’s impossible to fully escape the cycle of consumerist production, but in another way he wasn’t, because by his analysis of the word “consume”, in his view his was a production of poetic works and poetry can’t be consumed like a superfluous product can.

Pasolini’s is a language based analysis: he learnt Italian before some of its words, like in many other languages, were hijacked by definitions derived exclusively from economic theory. There lies the freshness of his analysis: in the refusal to subjugate language to the economy, in defining words used in language from the point of view of their original meaning rooted in a pre-industrial era. Therefore when Pasolini says poetry can’t be consumed, he means consumption in the original meaning: to consume something so it’s ready to be discarded, which is not the case with his poetry, still being published and translated today. His is a literary not technocratic language.

What I argue here is that because we are living in a pervasive market logic of bourgeois industrial growth, to avoid participating in the production and exchange of superfluous goods & to save the planet from destructive consumerism, self sufficiency, whether at an individual, family, community, village, town, city, metropolis or national scale offers us all a strategy towards implementing the progress of human life on planet earth that now is implied by the word “degrowth”.

[Robin Monotti Graziadei is a London based architectlecturer and film producer. He lectures on cultural sustainability at the International Society of Biourbanism summer school and beyond and is also a contributor to the Journal of Biourbanism and AD Architectural Design. You can follow him on twitter: @robinmonotti]