Institute for Social Ecology » Chaia Heller http://www.social-ecology.org Popular Education for a Free Society Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:40:12 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Biotechnology, Democracy, and Revolution http://www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/biotechnology-democracy-and-revolution/ http://www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/biotechnology-democracy-and-revolution/#comments Sat, 01 Jan 2005 12:00:49 +0000 Chaia Heller http://72.47.250.174/?p=496 Biotechnology is a question of power. It is a question about the power to decide what kind of technologies a society will use and for what purpose. In this way, biotechnology is linked to the broader question of political power and democracy. It leads us to think about how we, as a society, make vital [...]]]> Biotechnology is a question of power. It is a question about the power to decide what kind of technologies a society will use and for what purpose. In this way, biotechnology is linked to the broader question of political power and democracy. It leads us to think about how we, as a society, make vital decisions about how to relate to each other and to the rest of the natural world. When we think about biotechnology in this way, we see that biotechnology is not just a technology per se. We see that it is also a way of making decisions about society and nature that has emerged at a particular point in history for particular reasons. If we see biotechnology as just a single issue of technology, then we miss the broader problem. We fail to talk about the broader system of power that brought biotechnology into being, a fundamental problem that we must face if we are to move toward creating a more democratic, creative, and humane world.

Biotechnology is a Society

Biotechnology is more than the technique of ‘recombinant DNA,’ the process through which biologists move strands of DNA from one cell to another. It is the society that produces biotechnology and that is, in turn, produced by it. Biotechnology is the networks of people, things, and institutions that bring it into being. It is the biotechnology industry, the corporations and government regulators that give corporations the carte blanche to produce their transgenic creations in their laboratories and to move them out into the world.

Biotechnology is the public research institutions, funded by taxpayers, who carry out the microbiology research; it is the food and pharmaceutical industries that commercialize the products of biotechnology. It is the ordinary citizens obliged to buy unlabelled genetically foods and medicines; it is the advertisers and marketing corporations that promote genetically modified products; it is the farmers who buy genetically modified seeds in the hopes of saving money on pesticides and other chemical imputs. In short, biotechnology is the wider network of all of the people, places, and things engaged in producing biotechnology. It is a distinctly undemocratic network in which particular people, in particular institutions, have the power to make decisions about the world, decisions that will affect us all for generations to come.

Why has this ‘biotechnology network’ emerged at this particular point in history? Why have corporations, government agents, industrial farmers, and public science — to name but a few — all decided to invest so much time and money into this new technology at this particular juncture? The answer to this question has a lot to do with the state of U.S. industrial capitalism at the end of world war II. It has a lot to do with the state of industrial capitalism during post-war period and the decision of particular nation-states and capitalists to find a new way of making money and galvanizing power.

Why Biotechnology Now?

Since its emergence more than five centuries ago, capitalism has morphed through several phases, relying on different technologies and social arrangements for centralizing wealth and productive power. In its mercantile phase, capitalists relied heavily on shipping technologies as they used early colonial trade routes as sites in which to gather precious goods in the colonies, transforming those goods into capital for future investment or trade. In its later industrial phase, capitalist relied heavily on extractive technologies such as mining and on the technology of the industrial factory. Rather than hoard precious goods such as silk, tea, or porcelain, capitalists began to extract raw materials from the colonies to use in the production of industrial commodities. Getting a major boost from the industrial revolution of the late 19th century, the industrial capitalist system gained strength for over a century, reaching its peak in the period following world war II.

Indeed, by the end of world war II, the U.S. emerged as a world industrial capitalist power, with its industrial infrastructure intact. For roughly thirty years, between1945 and 1975, the Detroit auto-factory was the hallmark of post-war industrial production. It was home to a unionized worker who had job security, producing a commodity that had a solid market behind it. However, by the mid-1970s, the U.S. industrial factory system began to face competition with Japanese and Western European producers. Over those same thirty years, these countries recovered their industrial infrastructure from the rubble of the war, reappearing on the scene as contending industrial super-powers. For the first time in thirty years, the U.S. confronted the fact that it could no longer guarantee its supremacy as a world economic power.

To survive as a capitalist power, U.S. government and capital did three things: They lowered the cost of industrial production, invested in new technologies, and they moved into realms of service production, heavily commodifying realms of everyday life that had been largely ignored by major industry.

First, to make industrial production cheaper, capitalists moved their factories to parts of the world where production costs would be lower and they promoted ‘free trade’ agreements to remove ‘costly’ regulations related to trade, labor, and environment. Newly independent southern nations, often headed up by elitist regimes colluded with U.S. power, permitting U.S. corporations to set up shop, pay workers slave wages, and to be freed of labor and environmental ‘restrictions’ corporations had faced on U.S. soil.

Second, the State and capital invested in new biological and electronic technologies. When ‘recombinant DNA’ became a possibility in 1973, the U.S. government met in think-tanks with corporate heads to dream up ways to convert the technology into a profitable new industry. Investing heavily in ‘biotechnology,’ the U.S. government poured millions of dollars into molecular biology research at public universities across the country. By the early 1980s, independent start-up companies began to seek out venture capitalists to finance their own research, a process that culminated in multinationals such as Monsanto and Novartis finally buying up these small start ups in the mid-to-late 1980s, transforming themselves into ‘life science’ companies along the way. By the late 1990s, agricultural and medical biotechnology promised to be a huge financial coup, putting the U.S. at the center of the post-industrial map.

In addition to investing in biology, the U.S. invested heavily in electronic technologies, particularly in domains of computerization and telecommunications. As the 1970s wore on, software corporations invested in developing the technological infrastructure to circulate this ‘cultural product’ over the air-waves, telephone wires, cables, and computer screens of the world. Once again, the U.S. government played a central role in using free trade agreements as a way to remove regulatory obstacles, opening the way for the widest circulation of U.S. telecommunications products.

Third, to fill the gap left in the wake of the relocated industrial economy, capital invested in a new form of production. Having focused primarily on industrial production, corporations now targeted spheres of cultural reproduction as new sites for accumulation. Cultural reproduction is that sphere of society in which we do all the things we need to do to reproduce ourselves from one day to the next. Cultural reproduction consists of the stuff of everyday life itself, activities that range from eating, sleeping, and reproducing the species, to cleaning, repairing, and entertaining ourselves at the end of a day’s work.

Moving into the realm of cultural reproduction, capital extends the logic of the industrial factory, creating the ‘factoryette:’ the franchised chain-store that has been steadily eating up local towns, cities, and villages across the country since the 1970s. The chain-store factoryette is really the Detroit auto factory reborn in the form of the smaller factory-style chain-store. Instead of producing large commodities such as the automobile, the factoryette produces small cultural products ranging from hamburgers and cups of coffee to auto-repair and photo-processing services. As communities across the country (and increasingly, across the planet) get Starbucked and Jiffy-Lubed, local economies are replaced with the homogeneity and ‘recombineity’ of chain-store service culture: a culture in which cultural processes are reduced to homogenous and recombined bits of patented and copyrighted ‘information.’ The strangulation of local economies by multinational factoryette chain-stores constitutes a process of ‘enchainment.’

Informational Capitalism: The Colonization of Life, Culture, and Consciousness

As capital moves into domains of biotechnology, telecommunications, and cultural service, it is morphing into a more ‘organic’ form. Today, biotechnology, telecommunications, and enchainment swallow up biological and cultural reproduction, spitting the products of biology and culture back at us in commodified form. Through this transition, we see capital shift from a primary reliance on non-reusable resources used in the industrial factory to a resource base that is inexhaustible: biological and cultural processes themselves.

Today, instead of the metals, fossil fuels, and other expensive materials needed to feed the industrial factory, ‘informational capitalism’ uses the ever renewable resources of biology and culture. Increasingly, it is the gene and the silicon chip — as well as the endless ‘reproductive’ everyday things that human beings do — that provide the very material for commodity production. We are witnessing the emergence of a kind of capitalism that is encroaching upon spheres of life, culture, and consciousness. Increasingly, our bodies, cultural practices, and our minds are mimicked by such practices as biotechnology, chain-stores, and artificial intelligence. It is our genes, our ideas, our words, our music, our food, and our everyday life activities, that are the resource base for informational capitalism.

Once we see biotechnology as more than a dangerous ‘technology,’ once we see it as constituting a key part of a broader shift to a new way of producing both nature and society, we see that we have a larger problem on our hands. We see that it is not sufficient to solely critique this particular technology, but that we must critique and remake the world that produced it.

A New Kind of Disenchantment

The shift from industrial to informational capitalism parallels a previous shift that began centuries ago: the transition from rural or agrarian societies to a world increasingly ordered around industrial production. This shift, which intensified during the 19th and 20th centuries (and continues today in many parts of the world), created an array of social disruptions as people throughout the newly industrialized West struggled to come to terms with capitalist values and an increasingly alienated industrialized, homogenized, and urbanized society. Today, this shift to informational capitalism is creating a similar climate of social disruption. As we move from industrial to informational capitalism, people across the planet are confronting a society in which their very bodies and cultures are absorbed into the logic of capitalist production in a very new way.

Max Weber wrote about a kind of modern alienation associated with the ‘first shift’ from agrarian society to industrial capitalism. He talked about a kind of disillusionment that surfaced as people watched their society be shaped by a logic of capitalist rationalization associated with the industrial factory, a logic of regularization, efficiency, and of the profit-motive as the ‘bottom line.’ During the middle of the 19th century, ‘ecology’ emerged as the way people talked about this disenchantment. Originally articulated in romantic terms, ‘ecology’ became a form of popular social critique that voiced a nostalgia for a less alienated kind of society, one that fostered greater integrity of social and biological life.

Today, ‘globalization’ may just be replacing ‘ecology’ as the primary way people are talking about this new brand of disenchantment associated with informational capitalism. In the anti-globalization movement, people are expressing alienation not only from industrial production, but from processes of biological and cultural reproduction associated with informational capitalism. The conversion of biological and cultural life processes into patented ‘intellectual property’ and the enchainment of local economies the world over, are producing a new kind of disenchantment, a growing popular disgust with the expanding logic of informational capitalism: a logic of homogeneity, recombinance, and privatization of life, culture, and consciousness itself.

The movement against globalization, a movement critical of ‘free trade,’ biotechnology, mass telecommunications, and the chain-store modality, is steadily becoming a key forum in which people are articulating this new kind of disenchantment. The recent popularity of French farmer José Bové, an international anti-globalization activist who shows the links between the WTO, GMOs, and McDonald’s, signals a new kind of consciousness that is surfacing among people seeking to make sense out of a new brand of informational capitalism that has been in the making during the latter half of the 20th century.

Discussions about ‘anti-globalization’ have the potential to be more radical than discussions about ‘ecology’ over the past several decades. ‘Ecology’ first emerged as a discourse through the writings of German theorist Ernst Haekel in the mid-1800s. As a form of social criticism, this original ‘Germanic ecology’ often romanticized particular places and peoples as more ‘natural,’ blaming society’s ecological and social problems on such unnatural ‘contaminants’ as Jews and other ‘foreign elements.’ Making a come-back years after the second world war, during the 1960s and 1970s, this ‘cold-war ecology’ often carried much of the romantic baggage of its Germanic predecessor.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, in particular, romantic ecology pervaded the U.S., often blaming euphemistic abstractions such as ‘civilization,’ ‘humanity,’ or ‘technology’ as the sources of social and ecological injustice — instead of looking at institutionalized forms of power such as the State, capitalism, or neo-colonialism. While social ecology (a left libertarian approach to ecology) attempted to stimulate dialogue regarding the relationship between nature and social hierarchy during these decades, cold-war forms of ecology such as deep ecology tended to more easily capture more popular attention, as deep ecology writers and organizations received more funding and publishing opportunities.

Rather than identify the specific sectors of ‘humanity’ that either victimize or are victimized by systems of power, many deep ecologists during those years cited ‘anthropocentrism’ or a ‘human-centered world’ as the primary problem. Cold war ecologies generally focused primarily on issues of ‘technology’ (such as nuclear technologies or computerization) and wilderness protection, often blaming ways of thinking about nature and society, such as the ‘nature/culture’ dualism (traced back to the ancient Greeks), as the source of the world’s problems, rather than examine forms of institutionalized power as well.

In the mid-1990s, we see the emergence of a new kind of ‘post-Rio ecology,’ a more political-ecological sensibility associated with international environmental discussions of sustainability, development, and free trade which pervaded the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Moving away from cold-war ecology’s focus on the ‘nature/culture dualism,’ a post-Rio ecology focuses on a ‘North/South dichotomy’ expressed through systems of global capital. Informed more by a post-Rio than a cold-war ecology, the anti-globalization movement tends to point concretely to systems of power, identifying capitalism, the State, and social oppression as the key causes of social and ecological crises. Focusing on institutionalized forms of power such as trade apparatuses, multinational corporations, or prisons, people today are understanding global social and ecological crises as two parts of a seamless whole.

Drawing from a post-Rio ecology, the anti-globalization movement has the potential to bring back discussions of power linked to global systems of hierarchy; discussions that have been absent for decades, since the cold-war tried, and largely succeeded in, purging revolutionary ideas from the imaginations of young activists throughout the country.

A New Kind of Uprising?

Today’s anti-globalization movement harkens back to a form of resistance that accompanied the last shift: the peasant uprisings of the 16th and 17th centuries. This still-ongoing shift from agriculture to industrial capitalism has always been met with resistance. Although this history is largely ignored or suppressed, the first moments of this transition, that occurred during the shift from the agrarian feudal order to the modern capitalist nation-state, was met by numerous peasant uprisings that spread throughout Europe. Freed from the feudal order, with its oppressive monarchy and religious hierarchy, there were groups of peasants who rose up, seeking a better future than the one being offered by the nation-state and capitalist economy that were replacing the old system.

While not all peasants took this stance (indeed, many peasant groups looked to authoritarian and parochial forms of religion for guidance), there were many groups who sought to move beyond parochial forms of power, moving toward a more humanist and pre-libertarian sensibility as they fought against the enclosure of common lands by the State and against the general culture of private property that was spreading around them. The people who participated in these movements imagined a world built up out of another logic, a logic of sociality that could rebuild society along the lines of non-hierarchy and cooperation.

Today, we are witnessing a new kind of popular resistance that is emerging as we move toward a re-ordering of systems of power. As discussed above, capitalism and the modern nation-state are undergoing a period of intense reorganization. While the infrastructure of industrial production is being relocated largely to the southern hemisphere, international trade bodies such as the WTO are modifying the role and function of the modern State, increasingly consolidating their power to shape the economic policy of nations across the planet. New forms of governance are emerging that are neither strictly corporations nor States. Rather, they are institutional hybrids derived from both capitalist and State power that pave the way for the smooth circulation of industrial and informational capitalism throughout the world.

Today’s anti-globalization activists might constitute an echo of the spirit of the old peasant uprisings of centuries ago. Emerging during the transition from one world order to the next, there are people across the planet today who are rising up, demanding a new kind of society. While there are many ‘radical reformists’ and ‘charismatic critics’ who call merely for a pragmatic mending of the old system, there are indeed many who are envisioning a world built up out of a different logic.

Direct-Democracy: A Logic of Sociality

For most of human history, human societies lived in small-scale communities organized around a logic of sociality: a logic of social cooperation, interdependence, and decentralization. Without romanticizing small-scale non-State societies, it is fair to say that most of these societies ordered themselves around principles of sociality that are very different from those of capitalist societies in the modern period.

While many of these societies were less than utopian, often marked by inter-tribal warfare and sexual hierarchy, they were often organized around the idea that human survival and flourishing depended upon the ability of human beings to cooperate to provide for the common good. Goods produced or gathered by community members were distributed according to a morality of reciprocity that ensured the survival of each member of a community. When individuals, for instance, hoarded resources, communities often regarded such individuals as being possessed by demonic forces. In such cases, societies had a variety of creative ways of discouraging such behavior ranging from peer-pressure to outright exclusion, or even physical punishment.

In contrast, capitalist societies are organized primarily around principles of anti-sociality such as greed and competition. Instead of stigmatizing individuals who hoard, such as Bill Gates or Donald Trump, capitalist societies worship their most anti-social members by rewarding them with social status, praise, and attention. Recent television shows such as Survivor or The Weakest Link, celebrate the ongoing and pervasive capitalist philosophy of social Darwinism that tells us that the ‘strongest’ i.e., the most greedy and competitive, survive. We live in an era in which social hierarchy is perceived as ‘natural’ and inevitable, while the ideal of non-hierarchy is met with suspicion, cynicism, and even outright contempt.

The movement against biotechnology and the wider anti-globalization movement is potentially a parallel moment to the uprisings of pre-libertarian peasants centuries ago. Those active in the movement today may become the very people who are not only willing to see beyond the limits of the past and current social orders, but willing to build a new one out of a different logic. While this ‘Survivor-Society’ would like us to think otherwise, we do have the potential to build upon the cooperative dimensions of earlier societies. Biologically speaking, we are the same species, the same homo sapiens sapiens that lived according to a logic of sociality for most of the human record. Capitalism and the nation-state are recent blips on the screen of human evolution. Despite the pervasive social hierarchies of today, we still have the same potentiality latent within us, the potential to recapture that logic of sociality and to transform it into the basis for a new society.

Culturally speaking, we are not that far from our ancestors as well. Latent within our current societies are still vestiges of sociality, principles of cooperation, interdependency, and freedom upon which we may draw for inspiration and insight. The idea of direct democracy is one of those vestiges of sociality dwelling among the many hidden histories of the West. In ancient Greece, the Athenians came up with the notion of direct-democracy, the idea that human beings could govern themselves directly, free from religious or monarchic hierarchy or rule. While they were unable to transcend the idea of slavery and patriarchy, excluding the oppressed from this new vision, they did come up with a new notion of the free ‘citizen’: a member of a community capable of rational and ethical self-governance.

This notion of self-governance and decentralized power were clearly not ‘invented’ solely by the Athenians. Again, throughout human history, particularly in small-scale non-State societies, indigenous communities often organized themselves along egalitarian lines, creating cooperative decision-making structures. What was unique about the Athenians contribution, however, was the idea of direct-democracy within a civil society, rather than within a society based on kinship. In kinship based societies, social bonds are built on notions of blood ties and marital affiliation. In the civil society introduced by ancient Athenians, social bonds are based on the notion of civic ties: the humanistic notion that any member of a community, related or not, is responsible and bound socially to all other members of the community. Today, we can enlarge the Athenian notion of humanism beyond what they could achieve, transcending slavery and patriarchy, and all forms of social hierarchy, to include all members of a community into the community of citizens.

Direct democracy is the logic of sociality carried out to its political conclusions: it is the spirit of cooperation translated into political terms as citizens work together to create the public policy that gives shape to their everyday lives. The original, most radical meaning of politics means simply the management by citizens of the polis, or of the city, town, or village. It is time to finally grasp and develop that simple yet profound notion, the idea that ordinary people, bound together in a humanist vision, could directly voice their own dreams, desires, and decisions among other members of a community.

Ethical Reasoning: What Ought to Be

Feminist poet and theorist Audre Lorde once said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Lorde’s words could not be more crucial today as we think critically about how to build a new movement out of a different logic. For the logic of anti-sociality, the logic of capitalism, the State, racism, and sexism — the logic of hierarchy itself — is indeed one of the master’s most powerful tools. The logic of hierarchy is a tool that the master has used for centuries as the mortar, brick, and spade from which he has built his many houses of domination. Today, if we are to rebuild anew, we need to find a different set of tools, a new way of thinking that will allow us not only to dismantle the master’s house, but to build a new one out of our own courage and reason.

There are two ways of thinking, one instrumental and one ethical. When we use instrumental reason, we ask ourselves, “what is the most practical means by which to achieve a particular end?” In contrast, when we use ethical reason, we ask ourselves, “what ought to be the means through which we achieve a society that ought to be?” Whereas instrumental reason is concerned with that which is probable, realistic, and efficient, ethical reason is concerned with what ought to be. It is concerned with that which a thing ought to become if it were to fulfill its unique potential to make the world into a more humane, rational, and just place.

Instrumental reason emerges out of a capitalist rationality that values efficiency above ethics. Too often in our movement, we use the master’s tool when we borrow the capitalist logic of instrumental reason to think about how to achieve our goals. For instance, in the movement against biotechnology, we often fall into the habit of instrumental reason when we choose to use ‘effective strategies’ and ‘media-ready sound-bites’ to abolish the technology, rather than thinking through what the movement against biotechnology ought to become.

We live in an instrumental society which teaches us to think like advertising agents, military strategists, or professional politicians. Appealing to instrumental reason, activists focus on the risks associated with biotechnology, believing this to be the most effective means of getting attention from the press and public. Using the same logic, they call for the labeling of GM foods, seeing this goal as more ‘achievable’ or ‘realistic’ or ‘sound-bite-able’ than an all-out ban on the technology. Yet when I recently asked a group of activists whether risk and labeling were really their primary concerns, they responded, “of course not… it’s just the most effective way to work on the issue, it makes a better soundbite.” In addition to being concerned with the risks associated with biotechnology, they were concerned that the corporate monopoly of agriculture and medicine that would lead to a more authoritarian and homogenized world. When asked what they really wanted, they answered, “a world where people are free from corporate monopolies period. A world where people are free.”

Every time we adopt a ‘lesser of two evils’ kind of thinking, every time we say to ourselves, “well, labeled GM foods would at least be better, than having no labels at all,” we take yet another step away from building the kind of society we really desire. Each time we think instrumentally about our activism, we stride that much deeper into the very world we are trying to transcend. We stride that much deeper into the world that brought us a biotechnology industry that promises to solve the world’s problems through instrumental technocratic means. Instrumental thinking will never allow us to create the good society. At best, it can give us a reformed, slightly improved version of the world in which we now live and struggle. Worse, it can allow us to create yet another world built up out of the same instrumental logic.

Seeing the Forest through the Trees — and the Horizon through the Forest

Ethical reason means seeing the society we are striving for through the same lens we use to examine a particular problem at hand. It means seeing the world that ought to be at the same time that we see the world that is, the world that we are trying to remake. The particular struggle against biotechnology must reflect the wider vision of the world we so desperately seek to rebuild. It is not enough to see the ‘big picture,’ to see the forest through the trees, so to speak, by seeing interconnecting broader systems of power. In addition, we must see the horizon through the forest, seeing the utopian horizon of freedom through the ‘big picture’ of the many problems we face.

This means moving from negative freedom, the idea of freedom from, to a substantive understanding of freedom: an idea of freedom to fulfill our potentiality in a variety of creative and humane ways. Again, it is insufficient to see the many problems before us and to seek freedom from their tyranny. In addition, we must become visionaries, freeing ourselves by bringing our own vision into being. Ethical reason means committing to becoming a revolutionary: a person wholly committed to envisioning and working toward creating a directly democratic, decentralized, and cooperative society.

When we use ethical reason, we see that the movement against biotechnology ought to become more than a movement against a particular technology. It ought to be part of a wider movement to abolish the networks of power that brought it into being and that are simultaneously enchaining our bodies and cultures in a myriad of other ways. But more than that, the movement against biotechnology ought to become a visionary movement, built up out of ethical reasoning, out of a logic of sociality; it ought to become a movement through which we reclaim our real political power as citizens to create a truly democratic society.

The dream of a directly democratic society will be one many years in the making. For we must become the very society we wish to build, preparing and educating ourselves to become the very citizens ready to participate in political life. Direct-democracy, without such preparation, is a meaningless and even potentially dangerous notion. If we were to suddenly wave a magic wand and suddenly replace the State with a string of directly democratic communities, the result could ultimately be terrifying. For without the evolution of a principled and holistic movement for social and political change, we would merely have a direct-democracy that reflected the current anti-social logic that pervades most of society. We would merely have a direct-democracy constituted by the many capitalists, racists, and sexists joined together to create racist and sexist public policy.

Instead, we need a gradual revolutionary process through which the notion of direct-democracy may be ‘filled out’ by other key ethical principles such as social justice, cooperative economics, and ecology. When these four key principles are integrated together, they round each other out, creating a fuller understanding and promise of freedom. These four principles — direct-democracy, social justice, cooperative economics, and ecology — emerge out of a logic of sociality. They are the basis upon which to build a truly holistic and revolutionary movement against biotechnology.

Toward a Revolutionary Vision: Libertarian Municipalism

To create this movement, we need to move beyond a stance of protest, reform, and alternatives-making — a stance we’ve been locked into for decades. It is time for the movement against biotechnology, and the wider anti-globalization movement, to inspire activists to rediscover their political power in the broadest and most radical sense. It is time to build a movement that explicitly demands not only freedom from social and ecological injustices, but the political freedom to create a new world based on a new vision.

Libertarian municipalism is a revolutionary vision developed by social ecologist Murray Bookchin which thinks through how to move from a representative statist ‘democracy’ toward a confederation of directly democratic communities. According to Bookchin, the vestiges of direct democracy still lie just beneath the surface of the nation-state. Though largely disavowed of their power, local political forums such as city planning boards, ward assemblies, and neighborhood councils constitute remnants of the real promise of direct democracy. In many parts of the country, citizens still meet face to face with other members of their community to discuss and inform local policy making. For Bookchin, the ‘municipality’ — the local city, town, or village — represents the cellular structure of the larger organism of the confederation, a cooperative alliance between local communities that would be united together under the same charter or constitution.

Bookchin advocates transforming the local municipal election into a viable forum in which to popularize the demand for direct democracy. By running candidates for municipal office, libertarian municipalists promote a program along with a candidate, a program for direct democracy, social justice, cooperative economics and ecology. Once this program is voted in, it would lay the ground work for transforming that municipality into a direct democracy in which citizens, rather than representatives, formed the very public policy that would shape the everyday life of the community. Rather than electing representatives, citizens would ultimately ‘elect’ a new way of organizing society around a new set of democratic values.

The movement against biotechnology, one that is currently based on protest, reform, and alternatives-making, must broaden to become a revolutionary movement. We will never move beyond the world that constitutes biotechnology, nor beyond the world that is in turn, constituted by it, until we begin to take our dreams seriously. In the spirit of the peasant uprisings, centuries ago, we too, must demand a new kind of world built up out of a different logic: a logic based on human decency, creativity, and cooperation. Through a logic of sociality, we may begin to move beyond our current state of disenchantment, seeing ourselves and our struggle in revolutionary terms.

Moving beyond an instrumental approach to movement organizing, we must begin to see our work in ethical terms, thinking through what ought to be, rather than through what is most practical or efficient. Thinking through what ought to be brings us to understand the movement against biotechnology as more than a movement to eliminate or curb particular technology. We don’t just want a world that is GMO free. We want a world in which we are free from the society that created them — and free to create another world that is democratic, socially just, cooperative, and ecological. Let the movement against biotechnology be a crucial point of departure, a movement toward creating a world in which we not only control technology, we take control over our very own lives.

]]> http://www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/biotechnology-democracy-and-revolution/feed/ 0 McDonalds, MTV, and Monsanto: Resisting Biotechnology in the Age of Informational Capital http://www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/mcdonalds-mtv-and-monsanto-resisting-biotechnology-in-the-age-of-informational-capital/ http://www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/mcdonalds-mtv-and-monsanto-resisting-biotechnology-in-the-age-of-informational-capital/#comments Sat, 01 Jan 2005 12:00:36 +0000 Chaia Heller http://72.47.250.174/?p=505 Introduction: Biotechnology as a Mode of Production

A thing is a history of a thing, and more. Indeed, history is a tangled web with frayed edges, each woven into what came before. And so it is with biotechnology. To understand it, we must understand its history, the wider universe of people, places, and things [...]]]> Introduction: Biotechnology as a Mode of Production

A thing is a history of a thing, and more. Indeed, history is a tangled web with frayed edges, each woven into what came before. And so it is with biotechnology. To understand it, we must understand its history, the wider universe of people, places, and things that brought it into being. Biotechnology is bigger than the instruments, organisms, and scientists who move strands of DNA from one cell to another. It is a mode of production, a way of thinking about and producing nature and society that both constitutes and is constituted by society itself.

The story of genetic biotechnology begins not with a great man or a laboratory, but with the wider machinations of capitalism at the end of the twentieth century. But rather than begin with the usual catalog of ecological ravages left in the wake of industrial capital, this story begins after the fact: after the pollution and the decimation of species, after the big question mark of global warming. This story begins in the morning, when capital awakens, staggering to the window with a hang-over, after the party is over, to look out over a world it has created in its own image. Out in the distance, it can see the rusted momentoes of a better time: once-glistening Cadillacs lying on their sides, their hub-caps stolen and sold by someone struggling to make it to the end of one more day in post-industrial USA.

Biotechnology is more than a scientific practice. It is a network of actors, organisms, tools, and discourses that circulate through the corporate, state, and international trade apparatuses that emerged after the dust settled over post-World War II capital. While some claim that it is ‘nothing really new’, that its transgenic creations represent a continuity with such previous biotechnologies as plant and animal breeding, they deny the underlying issue: transgenic biotechnology emerges out of a different world than plant breeding or beer making. It emerges out of a different set of economic, political, and social demands and commitments. Biotechnology is a new form of production that emerged as capital hit the limits of industrial production and began to enter what may be called its organic phase: a phase in which capital targets the reproductive dimensions of cultural and biological life as loci for intensified production and commodification.1

In this phase, a service economy marshals what I will call the organic reproductive processes of everyday life including food, health, and recreation, transforming them into franchised formations ranging from fast-food and HMOs, to MTV and Disneyland. Biotechnology emerges as part of this trend, reducing cultural and biological life processes into an ever renewable and flexible raw material for production. As Fredric Jameson points out, post-industrial capitalism is characterized by a global reach as well as by the penetration of capital into nature on a transformational scale never before thought possible.2

Recombinant DNA emerged as a possibility during a time when private industry was turning to new technologies to increase their returns on investments.3 Changes in U.S. patent law in the early 1980s that recognized genetically modified organisms as ‘inventions’ provided private industry and public universities with a commercial incentive to develop and eventually market their transgenic products.4 With rights to intellectual property assured, the biotechnology industry began to emerge as a particularly pliable and lucrative postmodern industry in the 1980s .

But public response to this new form of production has not been what corporations had anticipated. In the United States, after the initial public concern of the 1970s over genetic engineering had died down, corporations did not expect to encounter further difficulties in marketing transgenic medicines and foods to consumers in an increasingly global market. The Reagan and Bush administrations believed that they could guarantee the success of the biotechnology industry by giving a green light to U.S. corporations to research, develop, and market their products without being hindered by regulations.

By the late 1980s, however, the first signs of resistance began to appear on the horizon. In 1987, a group of Earth First! and eco-anarchist activists in the San Francisco Bay Area of California destroyed an entire field of experimental genetically modified strawberries, causing thousands of dollars in damages.5 In 1992-93, the resistance went international when thousands of peasants in India protested against Cargill, whose costly patented seeds threatened their agricultural viability and autonomy.6 In the Fall of 1996, when the first shipments of genetically engineered crops arrived by boat to Europe, Greenpeace International organized a campaign in which activists besieged ships containing transgenic crops as they arrived in European ports. Demonstrating at warehouses and processing plants in Germany and Switzerland, activists created a media spectacle that catalyzed a Europe-wide movement that is still gaining strength today. More recently, at the great demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, November 1999, activists from around the world protested against agricultural biotechnology as part of a wider critique of globalization.

As the Seattle demonstrations illustrated, resistance to technologies such as agricultural biotechnology is often broader in scope than resistance to the production of genetically modified organisms. It is also a refusal of a new way of ordering social and biological life. If technology is the network of actors, institutions, instruments, organisms, and discourses that constitute technological practice, if this network both constitutes and is constituted by a wider society, then it is clear that activists are not simply resisting biotechnology. They are in fact, resisting a world.

Let us look closely at this world. Let us see biotechnology not solely as a science or technological practice, but as part of a wider historical process: as a new way of producing nature and culture marked by degrees of flexibility, organicity, and recombinance. To examine this new mode of production, we must step back, before the emergence of biotechnology, to discuss a profound sea-change that has been occurring within capitalist production, a sea change that began thirty years ago.

Flexibility, Organicity, and Recombinance: Features of a new Informational Mode of Production

First, to examine the modality of flexibility, we must explore a dramatic shift that has been taking place in the structure of the capitalist system. The Fordist system of production (a system of assembly-line mass production that introduced the Model-T Ford), which held prominence during the heyday of U.S. economic growth between 1945 and the Vietnam War, has been undergoing a period of thorough restructuring. Political and economic practices of sedentary and rigid industrial manufacture have been gradually displaced by a more ‘flexible’ approach to capitalist production and accumulation.7

The decline of U.S. corporate productivity and profitability after 1966 coincided with the recovery of West European and Japanese economies. For U.S. industry, this meant increased competition at a time of declining profits and increased inflation, weakening the U.S. dollar as a stable international reserve currency. For the first time in decades, the U.S. witnessed the demise of its power to regulate the international financial system. To address this crisis, capitalists began to soften up the industrial system to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive global market. The Fordist system, which had reigned since the turn of the twentieth century, had become increasingly anachronistic due to inflexible systems of manufacture, including fixed capital investments, mass production systems, and inflexible industrial design. Fixed labor markets, labor allocation, and labor contracts with a unionized work force, rendered the system too ‘rigid’ to be able to compete with foreign labor structures.8

To compete with emerging industrial powers around the globe, U.S. corporations literally became “foreign corporations” by going transnational, appropriating the labor, resources, and markets of countries throughout Asia, South America, and Africa. The desire of First World capital for flexibility coincided with the need of newly independent Third World nations to achieve economic stability and autonomy. As these governments attempted to re-build the infrastructure of a post-colonial economy, they allowed First World industries to set up shop within their borders. This transfer of U.S. industry to the Third World attests to the fact that there is nothing so ‘post’ about ‘post-industrialism’: First World countries are still ‘industrial;’ they just moved their industrial infrastructure to the Third World.

Service Industry and the Organic Phase of Capitalism

Emptying out the industrial core within the U.S. left behind an enormous productive void that would be filled by new forms of service production. With the emergence of a capital intensive service industry, corporations begin to increasingly commodify dimensions of everyday life, reducing reproductive dimensions of social life to mass-produced informational product. Indeed, today, capitalism is penetrating organic domains of “life, culture, and imagination”: qualitative dimensions of social life that include the biological reproduction of the species and the cultural reproduction of everyday life, in all of its symbolic meaning.

In the pre-war industrial era, there still existed a more distinguishable line between the commercial marketplace and the realms of home and neighborhood. Stepping out of the factory, the worker could still return each night to a neighborhood community and private life that were marked by degrees of organicity, solidarity and self-management.9 If a service economy existed alongside industrial capitalism, it existed as a secondary source of job provision and capital accumulation.

Over time, the tension between forms of commodified and non-commodified cultural practice began to wane, as reproductive cultural practice was increasingly coopted by service industry. The commodities manufactured by an informational capitalist system increasingly took the form of services: restaurants, child-care, medical care, poverty service (including a panoply of social welfare agencies and prisons), and financial services.

Present-day service capital represents the dispersed concentration of capital into standardized franchised units. Whereas Fordist production created one central site of factory production, informational capitalism disperses small, service-oriented ‘factoryettes’ in the form of franchised chain-stores, chain-restaurants, and chain service-stations. Replacing the idiosyncratic flavor of local service provision that was the hallmark of the industrial era, we see the emergence of ‘enchainment’: the strangling of a local economy by a ring of chain-stores and businesses. Whether clustered together in shopping malls or along downtown strips, the appearance of franchised chain-stores, from fast-food and film processing to auto-repair stations and day-care centers, represents the move of capital into its more serviceable mood.

Such cultural enchainment is hinged on the idea of intellectual property. As a semiotic factory, a chain-store owes its economic and cultural potency to its ability to reproduce a set of patented symbols, images, texts, building design, and production protocols dispersed in the form of franchised service factoryettes. For reproductive cultural practice to become capital intensive, both the service product and process must be transformed into intellectual property. The corporation of the informational age, then, must sell more than mere service product. McDonalds’ success lies in their ability to transform hamburgers into a patented semiotic field of informational signs, symbols, images, and texts. In the post-war period, we see mega-corporations mass produce service commodities whose value is linked not necessarily to their general content, but to their form or informational value. In the end, it’s the golden arch, not the beef, that makes McDonalds a world power.

While service production itself is not a historical novelty, it undergoes a dramatic transformation when it reaches the post-industrial period. What is new is the intensifying concentration of capital into the service industry, the national and global expansion of service production through standardized, franchised chain-store formations, and the transformation of service commodities into patentable information.

By translating both its processes and products into ‘informational’ or intellectual property, the service industry is a form of informational capital relying on informational technologies. Here, it is critical to broaden the definition of informational technologies beyond its current association with technologies in microelectronics, computing, telecommunications, optoelectronics, and genetic engineering. In this definition, we may include a domain of information-based service production that is not classifiable as primarily telecommunications nor biotechnology: a domain of franchised cultural production ranging from McDonalds and WalMart to Disneyland.

As an informational technology, the franchised service industry commodifies not only domestic products within the home, but moves domestic processes outside of the home as well, relocating what were local cultural practices into often translocal franchised service centers such as fast-food restaurants, day-care and elder-care centers, shopping malls, and franchised playgrounds.

As the service industry has proven, the production of practice is often more lucrative than the production of product. By enclosing upon the domain of service, informational capital triumphs over the limits of sedentary Fordist production. For example, once a consumer has purchased a sedentary product such as a color TV, the transaction becomes rigid and complete.10 The TV manufacturer must wait five to ten years before the consumer will be obliged to remake the purchase. In contrast, once a consumer has purchased an ephemeral video-rental, the transaction is not complete, but is fluid and open-ended. The video rental agency need only await the following evening for the consumer to return the video, ready to rent another.

In turn, informational capital, as a form of flexible production, appropriates the attentiveness and situational orientation of the domestic sphere, an orientation that was dismissed by both classical liberal theory and by the rationalizing logic of industrial capitalism. By rearranging information to create specialized products, an information-based service economy mimics both the sensibility and mechanisms of domestic cultural reproduction.11 Just as an attentive parent must cope with the particularized needs of their loved ones, corporations like Burger King are ready to meet consumer needs as well, presenting the world with the first flexible burger. The 1970s Burger King jingle is truly the anthem of the service era it ushered in: “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce/special orders don’t upset us/all we ask is that you let us/have it your way…”

The Rise of Recombinant USA

If rationalization and homogenization are the hallmarks of industrial capitalism, then recombinance is the emblem of informational capitalism. Recombinance is a productive modality characterized by the continual re-melding of architecture, graphic design, radio, television, and film that have come to constitute the spectacular stage.12 Within recombinant production, the assembly line is reversed to create the ‘anti-assembly line’. Whereas the Fordist assembly line moved in a linear direction from ‘standardized parts’ to create ‘unified wholes’, the post-Fordist anti-assembly line rearranges unified wholes to create a pastiche of informational parts. For example, as the Fordist assembly line transformed standardized car-parts into whole cars, the post-Fordist anti-assembly line rearranges unified wholes such as songs, to create a pastiche of song-parts (creating endless re-mixes of songs, as in much of sampled hip-hop).

Recombinance provides the flexibility required by a standardized service industry, furnishing the informational ‘moveable joints’ for the production otherwise rigid and homogenous service commodities. The patented recipe for one standardized service product such as a Burger King “Whopper” becomes an endless series of variations of the Whopper theme. The modality of recombinance articulates itself today through post-modern architecture, art, design, music, fashion, and even social theories, which extracts signs and symbols from various cultural moments to create wholes comprised of components that often share no common history or development. Within recombinant production, cultural artifacts are reduced to information bits to be cut and spliced together to create novel commodities.

Recombinance characterizes a range of telecommunicative practices ranging from virtual reality to the hypertexts of the CD ROM, practices in which ‘users’ of interactive media engage in recombinant practice, selecting, manipulating, and synthesizing bits of text or image to create textual novelties. In the music industry, we see a shift from artist-driven music production to a music produced primarily by sound engineers who sample and mix pre-produced music tracks, which represent the hallmark of recombinant culture. And recombinance is prolific: one song can provide the seed for a limitless crop of arrangements to be sold to dance clubs, dentists, retailers, and shopping malls. More and more, we do not create integrally, conveying the gradual and coherent unfolding of one idea or image to another. Those who grew up on a diet of MTV and video games are often more comfortable selecting items from pre-prescribed digital menus or just moving things around.

Yet, we cannot base a critique of recombinant culture on a static notion of cultural integrity or purity. It is vital to distinguish commodified recombinance from the forms of spontaneous collective synthesis that are integral to all cultural practice. As the field of anthropology has acknowledged in recent years, culture-making has always been a hybrid process, a continually developing synthesis of information, language, and identity that emerges within and between peoples of different populations and cultures. Rather, it is the primacy of profit-driven recombinance, as a principal form of capital-intensive production, over non-commodified forms of local, fluid, and hybrid cultural production, that is problematic. Of great concern is the declining tension between holistic and local forms of cultural generativity and moments of translocal commodified recombinant production and consumption. The shift of capital toward an elastic and limitless production of recombinant informational service products flags a sharp curve in the capitalist road.

Biotechnology as Informational Capital

So far we have explored the wider context of the post-industrial era that gave birth to an informational capitalism that reaches into the ‘organic’ reproductive dimensions of everyday life, culture, and imagination, creating new flexible and recombinant forms of production. Now we may ask: what do McDonalds and MTV have in common with biotechnology? To answer this question, we must first recognize McDonalds, for instance, as constituting more than just a center for retail and other services. We must understand it as a new recombinant and flexible mode of production, as an informational technology for producing new understandings and practices of culture through the production of service. Once we understand what McDonalds is and what McDonalds does, the connection between recombinant DNA and ‘recombinant USA’ becomes very clear.

Like other informational technologies, biotechnology is particularly flexible, allowing capital to meet the ever-changing demands of an increasingly competitive global market. With an endless supply of ‘biological information’ in the form of genes, bacteria, viruses and other organisms for recombinant production, biotechnology allows capital to transcend its reliance on an exhaustible and expensive resource base dependent upon fossil fuels and primary materials. In turn, its scale and dexterity permits industry to transcend the inflexible factory design of the Fordist era. Exchanging the factory shop-floor with its heavy machinery and army of (organized) laborers for the sterile laboratory with its delicate instruments and hand-full of expert (often unorganized but well paid) research directors, post-doctoral fellows and technicians, the biotechnology lab is truly a post-modern factory.

The movement of major corporations into the domain of such reproductive cultural practices as seed development represents a move toward an increasingly informational mode of capitalist production. Corporations such as Monsanto, an agrochemical multinational invested heavily in agricultural biotechnology, manufacture tailor-made, specialized agricultural products to suit particular niche markets. Shifting from industrial-chemicals to information-based service production that targets ‘organic’ or biological reproductive cultural practices such as agriculture, Monsanto recast itself as a “life sciences” company, investing enormous capital on the development of agricultural biotechnology. Monsanto insists that it is the Microsoft of the biotechnology world,13 providing its patented ‘software’ of genetically programmed seeds that are only compatible with its patented ‘hardware,’ or chemical inputs. Monsanto’s Ready Roundup soybeans are genetically engineered to be compatible with its popular herbicide glyphosate (marketed as Roundup), compelling consumers to buy both products at the same time. Such product coupling allows corporations to create products so specialized that they require consumers to buy accessory ‘kits’ only they can provide.

In this way, agricultural biotechnology is a form of information-based service production not unlike domestic, leisure, and tourist services. Corporations such as Monsanto use the same franchise logic as McDonalds to extend their information-based service empire, transforming farmers into franchise middle-managers who will buy their cloned and patented informational product. Like McDonalds’ middle-managers, farmers ‘lease,’ rather than own, the materials obtained from the ‘parent’ corporation. Farmers who buy Monsanto seeds are obliged to sign one-time use agreements promising not to replant seeds for the next year’s season.

Under the reign of agricultural biotechnology, farmers become increasingly de-skilled and dependent upon the activities of service providers, such as agrochemical companies who begin to provide seeds, and products that farmers formerly provided for themselves. And just as corporations such as fast-food franchises provide food service that capitalizes on workers’ needs for quick, accessible, and transportable food by workers in a flexible economy, Monsanto promises to produce specialized seeds and chemicals that capitalize on farmers’ needs to adapt flexibly to an ever-changing agricultural economy.

However, capital must confront one problem in its attempt to appropriate biological reproductive processes: Unlike service commodities such as hamburgers, a seed has the potential to biologically reproduce itself. At stake, is the attempt to exploit the limitless dimension of biological reproductivity, even while stripping biological organisms of their autonomous generativity.14 Indeed, informational capital must be able to co-opt the farmers’ cyclical biological need for seeds while also destroying seeds’ generative properties.

Technologies such as the “Technology Protection System” (renamed the “Terminator Technology” by anti-GMO activists) signal the concentrated efforts of corporations to enhance and produce new forms of organic obsolescence. Having sought the patent for a technology that produces genetically engineered seeds whose offspring will be sterile, Monsanto hopes to one day be able to biologically obstruct farmers from saving seeds for the next year’s planting season. Although the corporation publicly announced plans to abandon the technology due to ‘sensitivity’ to public opinion, Monsanto will likely re-embark on the project once public opinion has died down.15 Once agri-biotechnology multinationals have developed a commercially viable seed sterilization technology, they will eliminate the exorbitant financial costs (as well as costs related to bad PR) of hiring private police and lawyers to identify and sue farmers accused of breaking “one-time use” seed agreements.

Backed-up Nature: Bioprospecting and the Advanced Capitalization of Nature

Biotechnology is the systematic conversion of biological nature into informational capital. As an expression of what may be called “the advanced capitalization of nature,” biotechnology represents the attempt of informational capital to profit from and transcend the limits of a biological nature that has been greatly compromised by industrial capitalist production. In the twenty-first century, capitalists deploy informational technologies to ‘back-up’ nature by identifying, patenting, and profiting from whatever is left of the earth’s diverse life forms to use for future industry. While the Human Genome Project (HGP) (the internationally funded program to map the 100,000 genes in the human genome) attempts to map out future colonial territories within the cells of human beings, attempts are being made to map out future colonial territories within the biological nature of plants, animals and other organisms. Such prospectors include botanical gardens in the U.S. and UK, the National Cancer Institute, independent biologists serving national and international institutes, and private companies.

While bioprospectors race to save the best of the last of ‘nature’, a host of “anthro-prospectors” race to save the best of the last of human cultures that are at risk of being driven off native lands and driven into assimilation within centers of urban poverty. However, rather than fight against such injustice, anthro-prospectors are collecting genetic samples from individuals living within cultures identified as being “at risk.” Beginning in 1991, the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) emerged as an anthropological correlate to the HGP. However, whereas the HGP focuses on mapping one complete genome, the HGDP focuses on exploring the subtle genetic variation between human populations.

The question of biodiversity, both human and non-human, is steeped in conservationist rhetoric. Corporations and governments posit the effects of capitalist plunder as a legitimizing cause of the need for further corporate control of what is left of the earth’s biological life.16 Genes of plants, animals, and humans considered potentially valuable are stored in “national biodiversity inventories” while awaiting potential commercial applications. It is here, within the endless rows of frozen test tubes, filled with the “best of the last” specimens of biological life, that the relationship between science and informational capital comes to light .

Politicizing Biotechnology: “This is What Democracy Looks Like”

Once we understand biotechnology as a new way of producing and ordering society and nature, we may begin to better comprehend the relationship between Monsanto, McDonalds and MTV. We can see these structures as producers of a recombinant, flexible, yet tightly controlled and standardized world of informational capital.

What are the features of the ‘biotechnological world’ we seek to resist? As we have explored, it is marked by the increasing harnessing of reproductive processes of everyday life and by a transition to a new flexible, organic, and recombinant form of service production heavily reliant on informational technologies. But even more broadly, this world is one in which citizens are disempowered, obliged to accept or merely protest the whimsical decisions of leaders who make public policy in representative democracies such as the U.S. This shift from industrial to informational capital, this transition to what could rightly be called a “mall world” of recombinant and standardized service, is not the result of citizen action. It is being chosen, regulated, and controlled by a Mafia of capitalist and governmental leaders around the world who represent less than one percent of the people on the planet. This is not democracy. It is a is world that is being managed by an elite few, not only the leaders of nation-states, but increasingly, the managers of capital attempting to assume a new governmental form.

Thus, in addition to the economic, cultural, and technological facets of the problem of informational capital, there is also a political dimension that is crucial to explore as well. Political life, both in its statist form and in its real original form (to be addressed later) is being reconstituted and further degraded by the rise of informational capitalism.

First, political structures such as the State are targets of informational capital. The emergence of such transnational institutions as the World Trade Organization (WTO), dominated by a U.S. corporate lobby, ushers in an era in which the political sovereignty of the nation-state is being overridden by new capital-driven institutions that are neither corporations nor states: they are meta-states, expressions of informational capital as it emerges into an autonomous administrative and juridical governmental power that will greatly shape both state and corporate practice. As a truly postmodern entity, the WTO is pure service: it is a bureaucratic service for the extension of capital across national boundaries to ensure the most flexible systems of production, importation, and marketing possible. One could also say that the WTO is meta-capital. It is capital-plus. Its endless documents of trade and intellectual property ‘agreements’ represent the textual infrastructure for flexible capitalist accumulation.

While movements against biotechnology often engage a political critique, contesting, for instance, the WTO’s attempt to wrest juridical power from the State, such critiques often defend State sovereignty, asserting the need to reform or abolish the power of WTO. In so doing, they fail to question the legitimacy of the State as a political institution, missing the vital opportunity to transcend the State’s hierarchical and centralized logic and structure. In turn, movements against biotechnology often express an anti-corporate rather than an anti-capitalist stance. Citing corporations, instead of the capitalist system itself, as the main source of the problem, activists attempt to turn the ‘capitalist clock’ backwards to return to a kinder and gentler form of capitalism. Unfortunately, this critique also fails to recognize the need to move beyond a logic based on hierarchy and centralization, and thus cannot move beyond a capitalist system that was born out of a logic of unlimited growth, accumulation, profit, and domination.

High noon will always eventually turn to midnight. There is a logic to a clock: its gears, springs, or silicon chips modulate its movements in particular ways. Like a clock, capitalism and the State are constituted to move in a particular direction: toward ever greater levels of centralization, hierarchy and, ultimately, non-democracy. Indeed, when we look historically at the modern nation-State, we see that it rose in tandem with, and out of the same logic of domination as, capitalism. Rather than simply attempt to turn the clock of domination backwards, we must develop a new sense of time and history, built not out of the dustbin of capital and State-driven events, but out of the potential within the human spirit and the revolutionary impulse itself. We can think beyond what is immediately before us, drawing from the logic of a different ‘clock’ that has been beating in the heart of humanity since the beginning of time.

Politicizing biotechnology entails moving toward a logic based on human freedom. It requires reclaiming the original meaning of politics developed by the Greeks centuries ago: the power to assemble as citizens to govern our own communities.17 According to social ecologist Murray Bookchin, the political life of free citizens cannot be reduced to ‘statecraft,’ or the managerial and authoritarian practices of the State that are so often confused with real politics.18 For Bookchin, real political power is the power of citizens to make decisions in general about their lives. It is the power to gather as members of communities to discuss, decide, and determine the public policies that will shape how we work, produce, and live together. Until we have this power, we will be left only to stand on the side-lines of society, fighting for rights, choices, alternatives, and improvements within a system we know to be on a collision course with most of humanity and with the rest of the natural world.

If our concerns about biotechnology are concerns about the social production of society, then we must begin to ask who indeed should produce society? Should McDonalds, MTV, and Monsanto produce the food, art, and very stuff of our lives? What would it take for people, in the towns in which they live, to be able to decide for themselves the kinds of lives they would like to lead?

The question I am posing is not solely ‘economic’. It is not enough to fight against informational service capital, waging individual campaigns against WalMart or Monsanto, trying to keep chain-stores out of our communities or to ban genetically engineered food from our supermarkets. While such campaigns are necessary in the short term, they must be filled out with a broader political analysis and reconstructive vision. In turn, it is not enough to create asylums of cultural and economic autonomy such as local food-coops or organic growers associations. While they provide (often privileged) groups of individuals with shelters of sanity and health, they cannot counter a system that reaches deep into the lives of poor people across the world who are forced to participate in both service and industrial production to survive.19

The real antidote to capitalism is to refuse its tendency to translate the world into its own terms. Capital transforms us into workers, producers, commodities, and consumers so effectively, so seamlessly, that we see ourselves primarily as economic agents, as resisters to, or producers of, economic practice. The dissolution of the idea of citizen into the idea of consumer, with the new notion of consumer/citizen, signals the final collapse of humanity into homo economicus.

But we are also, as Aristotle said, zoon politikon, a political animal. We are beings with the potential to think, discuss, decide, and determine all aspects of our lives, including matters of economics. The fact is, we cannot fight economics with economics. We can only topple an economic system by pushing back with political power. The enormous dislocation of peoples, capital, and goods throughout the world can be countered with a movement for a new kind of political locality based on principles of confederation, cooperation, and direct democracy.

If we are to retrieve the notion of citizenship from the category of consumer and from the category of the State as well, we have to ask ourselves what kind of citizens, what kind of political life, do we want to retrieve? Can we only resuscitate ourselves as citizens bound by national borders, passively represented by politicians, citizens who are dominated by the nation-State? Or may we reestablish ourselves as new kinds of citizens empowered to directly participate in the management of our everyday lives ? It is time that we begin to build a direct democracy: one in which citizens meet directly, face to face, to democratically determine their own lives.

In the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, the call for direct democracy was in the air. Direct confrontation with State military forces in the form of police and the National Guard, led to a five day period of radicalization among young activists, for many of whom this was their first encounter with military repression. The real, yet more abstract fight against the WTO concretized itself into a struggle against the non-democracy of the State and capital, as activists found themselves beaten, injured by chemical weapons, jailed, tortured and deprived of their civil rights in a ‘progressive’ First World city –merely for engaging in peaceful protest and for taking to the streets as citizens to express their freedom of speech.

There were countless marches that week as courageous activists risked their safety to take to the streets, refusing the curfew and no-entry zones dictated by the city of Seattle in conjunction with the federal government. During one march, a chant arose, poetically and spontaneously, that captured the imagination and passion of the other activists who were undergoing a life-changing transformation. After days of collective democratic decision-making and peaceful intelligent protest, after days of seizing the right to think, decide, and take public action, they began to chant over and over, This is What Democracy Looks Like. On an intuitive and rational level, activists knew that democracy is a direct act, it is the movement of real people as they take action to participate in a face-to-face embodied way, in determining their own lives.

This chant, This is What Democracy Looks Like, entails a new way of thinking about political reconstruction. It means not only that we take to the streets, but that we take to our communities, demanding and rebuilding a real and passionate political life. This chant inspires us to develop a new understanding of citizenship that is not defined in relation to a State or nation, but is instead, defined in opposition to nations and States. It is time to redefine citizenship in relation to local communities and to regional, continental, and even global confederations.

People challenging globalization often use terms such as ‘local’ and ‘global’ when discussing how to transcend the current system. Yet the local/global dyad fails us as we attempt to map out the units of political organization that will constitute the new society. While the idea of “thinking globally and acting locally” rightly asserts the need to rebuild local communities within a humanist and internationalist context, the idea must be elaborated in distinctly political terms. While the term ‘local’ could be translated into the city, town, or village as a political body, the global does not translate into a clear and concrete political structure.

What then, would be the political structure that would embody the concept of the ‘global’? The spirit of humanism and internationality that is contained in the idea of the ‘global’ could be translated into the political structure of the confederation. Indeed, the confederation is next valid level of political organization as we move beyond the local level. A more meaningful way to counter ‘globalization’ is to counter what is ‘global’ with what ought to be local and confederal.20

This approach to the question of political reconstruction is called libertarian municipalism.21 Developed by theorist Murray Bookchin, libertarian municipalism is a way of thinking about political transformation that proposes a way to counter globalization by establishing self-governing local towns, cities, and villages, linking them together to form confederations. Within libertarian municipalism, members of communities reclaim existing local political forums such as city and neighborhood councils, gradually transforming them into citizen’s assemblies. Using local electoral campaigns as one way of educating the public about direct-democracy, libertarian municipalism proposes that citizens begin to publicly seize their potency as political actors, wresting decision-making power from states, corporations, and meta-states such as the WTO. As members of municipalities form local groups engaged in the process of political transformation, they may confederate with other free municipalities to create a true rapport de force, a coordinated and united counter-power to the state and to capital as well.

To resist biotechnology is to dismantle the technical, social, and political networks that both constitute and are constituted by this technology. We too must wake up one fine morning at the beginning of a new century and take a good look at what we see. Fixing our vision beyond the transgenic fruits ripening on our window-sills, we must look even further still past the army of service workers running back and forth from job to job before picking the kids up from day-care at the end of one more day in Recombinant USA. If we look very hard, we will begin to see it all: a society based on systems of domination and social hierarchy, a network of State and capitalist institutions, and a world of people who are resisting the system to maintain their courage, imagination, and intelligence through it all.

A movement that challenges biotechnology is a movement that challenges a world. It provides a critique not only of a particular science practice, but of a society that constitutes and is constituted by that practice. But more than critique, it proposes a better world. In such a movement, people inspire and inform themselves and others, helping to make the world legible and re-makeable. A truly humane movement against biotechnology gives people hope for the future as well as the knowledge and confidence to build a future worth fighting for. It is a movement for real political power, not just over technology, but over everyday life in all of its fullness. This is what democracy looks like.

Notes

  1. The notion of an ‘organic’ phase of capitalism must be distinguished from Marx’s concept of the organic composition of capital. Marx counterpoised the organic composition of capital (the labor variable) to the variable of capital intensity. In contrast, I am pointing to the shift from a primarily industrial capitalist modality to one in which capital targets biological and reproductive dimensions of cultural practice as primary loci for creating surplus value.
  2. Fredric Jameson 1991 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Quoted in Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 21.
  3. Susan Wright, “The Social Warp of Science: Writing the History of Genetic Engineering Policy.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 18 No.1, Winter 1993.
  4. Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop. San Francisco: Harper, p. 188-203.
  5. Homo Fragaria (pseud.), “The Strawberry Liberation Front,” Earth First!, Vol. 7, No. 6, June 1987, p. 1; Brian Tokar, “Engineering the Future of Life?” Z Magazine, July/August 1989, p. 110-116.
  6. See [SHIVA/BIJA]chapter, and Vandana Shiva, “Quit India! Indian farmers burn Cargill plant and send message to multinationals,” Third World Resurgence No. 36, August 1993, pp. 40-41.
  7. David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990) offers a comprehensive and wonderful discussion of capitalist “flexible accumulation.” This work offers a creative and integrative look at the shift from Fordist to Post-Fordist capitalism.
  8. Ibid. pp. 125-141.
  9. Murray Bookchin. Lecture at the Institute for Social Ecology, Plainfield, Vermont, U.S.A., July 7, 1999.
  10. Harvey, op. cit., p. 156.
  11. As feminist philosopher Joan Tronto points out, in the domestic sphere, women demonstrate an ability to think and act in ways that are fluid. The care that women give to children and their families is particularistic and specialized, standing in sharp contrast to the universalistic stance that classical liberal philosophers such as Locke or Smith relegated to the public sphere. Whereas classical liberalism promotes the idea of ‘men’ caring about universal and unchanging values such as “justice, liberty, and freedom,” women are largely relegated to the work of caring for the particularistic and ever-changing needs of people within their households. See Tronto’s “Women and Caring: What Can Feminists Learn about Morality from Caring?” in Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds., Gender, Body, Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions on Being and Knowing, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989, p. 172-188.
  12. For a discussion of ‘recombinant culture’ see: Critical Art Ensemble The Electronic Disturbance , New York: Autonomedia, 1994.
  13. Reveling in high expectations for its own growth, the Monsanto agents came up with “Monsanto’s Law,” which states (Monsanto Company Annual Report, 1998, inside front cover):

    14. The exponential growth in the computing power of silicon chips, described by Moore’s Law, led to the development of the information technology industry, creating aggregate global value in trillions of dollars. At Monsanto, we believe that a similar non-linear trend in biotechnology capabilities is creating comparable growth potential in the life sciences. We believe that these genomic technologies will continue to double in capability every 12 to 24 months — a statement we’re calling “Monsanto’s Law.” .

  14. For an in-depth discussion of generativity in relationship to biotechnology, see Vandana Shiva, “The Seed and the Earth: Biotechnology and the Colonisation of Regeneration,” in Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide , Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994.
  15. In reality, Monsanto never really controlled the patent for “Terminator” seeds. They tried for nearly two years to purchase Delta and Pine Land, the company that developed the Terminator along with USDA scientists, and this purchase fell through in December of 1999. Delta’s executives deny they ever slowed development of Terminator, and some 30 related patents are currently held by the largest transnational biotechnology companies. See RAFI Communiqué, “Suicide Seeds on the Fast Track: Terminator 2 Years Later,” Rural Advancement Foundation International, February/March 2000, at www.rafi.org.
  16. Arturo Escobar offers a compelling and critical analysis of biodiversity discourse. See “Cultural Politics and Biological Diversity: State, Capital and Social Movements in the Pacific Coast of Colombia” in Orin Starn and Richard Fox, eds., Between Resistance and Revolution: Culture and Social Protest, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998, pp. 40-64.
  17. Murray Bookchin, the principal theorist associated with social ecology, writes about the need to reconstitute citizenship in a post-state context by creating direct democracy. See Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992.
  18. Ibid., pp. 123-175.
  19. I discuss the limits of such projects in my book, Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999.
  20. See, for example, “Libertarian Municipalism,” in Janet Biehl, ed., The Murray Bookchin Reader, London: Cassell, 1997, pp. 172-173. Biehl also provides a discussion of Bookchin’s notion of confederalism in The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism, Montreal: Black Rose, 1998.
]]> http://www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/mcdonalds-mtv-and-monsanto-resisting-biotechnology-in-the-age-of-informational-capital/feed/ 0 Revving It Up! The Revolutionary Potential of the New Anti-Globalization Movement http://www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/revving-it-up-the-revolutionary-potential-of-the-new-anti-globalization-movement/ http://www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/revving-it-up-the-revolutionary-potential-of-the-new-anti-globalization-movement/#comments Sat, 01 Jan 2005 12:00:13 +0000 Chaia Heller http://72.47.250.174/?p=503 International systems of power are bursting out of the single-issue framework. Confronted by the exponential expansion and integration of new markets, technologies, regulatory bodies, and ecological crises, activists are turning to “globalization” as a way to talk about the increasingly totalizing dimensions of capitalist and state power. Globalization-talk reflects a nascent and potentially growing popular [...]]]> International systems of power are bursting out of the single-issue framework. Confronted by the exponential expansion and integration of new markets, technologies, regulatory bodies, and ecological crises, activists are turning to “globalization” as a way to talk about the increasingly totalizing dimensions of capitalist and state power. Globalization-talk reflects a nascent and potentially growing popular awareness of the complex and transnational character of social and political systems, signaling a shift in the way people have been talking about societal transformation for the past twenty-five years.
The new social movements that began in the sixties were followed by an era of the particular: an era in which the causes of and solutions to social and political problems were largely framed in single-issue terms. The sixties widened the revolutionary lens, broadening the political agenda beyond questions of economics and labor to include a wide range of transclass social and cultural issues, including ecology, feminism, and identity-based movements in general. Yet, while rightly illustrating the subjective and social dimensions of oppression, these movements rarely generalized beyond the particular, failing to offer a panoramic vision of a new world that would be free of state and capitalist domination.

The emergence of globalization-talk signals a crucial historical opening. The idea of globalization, as a way to point to international systems of power and their accompanying cultural disruptions, carries within it the seed of a more universal analysis and critique. The growing concern with global systemic problems, rather than just particular nation-bound episodal problems, reflects a move toward a more comprehensive and integrated analysis of the sociopolitical order. For instance, popular outrage against regarding the global implications of international institutions such as the WTO, or transnational corporations such as Monsanto, reflects a concern with increasingly universal systems of capitalist and state power.

A vital question, however, confronts us: Will the movement against globalization remain embedded within the social movement tradition of single-issue protest, alternatives, and reform—or will it offer a coherent and holistic analysis of global systems of power that will open the way for a revolutionary vision and movement?

There is an undeniable tendency toward the former. Rightfully disenchanted with a revolutionary tradition associated with authoritarianism and centralization, activists have largely abandoned the revolutionary question, turning instead to a particularistic focus on social protest, reform, and socioeconomic alternatives. The cold war and the failure of the communist revolutions, as well as the demonstrated irrationality of the supposedly “modern civilization” that created the Holocaust and other horrors, have all contributed to a collective sense of revolutionary despair. In turn, the postmodernist mood that pervades academia trivializes any theoretical coherence as “totalizing.” All of these factors leave activists trapped within a paralyzing paradox: confronted by an identifiable and integrated global system of power that must be transcended, activists today are unable to create a theory or movement coherent and comprehensive enough to analyze and remake the current global system.

Skirting the revolution question, anti-globalization activists rarely assert the need to abolish and transcend systems of state and capitalist power—the very systems they describe as “globalizing” themselves. Instead, activists tend to focus on particular issues such as the WTO, international labor, and environmental laws, or on regulating or banning new technologies such as agricultural biotechnology.

The movement against globalization will only fulfill its revolutionary potential when it challenges root causes: the universal logic of domination, hierarchy, and class exploitation that guides statist and capitalist institutions that continue to elaborate themselves on a global scale. But more than merely challenging such institutions, this movement must propose a vision and means of achieving a good society; one that is universal enough to be coherent and principled, yet diverse and open-ended enough to be truly organic and democratic. Such a vision must inform and inspire, making the world comprehensible and remakable. A truly humane movement against globalization gives hope for the future as well as the knowledge and means to build a future worth fighting for.

Anti-Globalization Traps

As activists contemplate the current globalization problem, they often fall into a few analytical traps. In the reformist trap, activists often confuse radical critique with a radical reconstructive vision and program. In this trap, spokespeople for the new movement—ranging from leaders of environmental and citizen-oriented NGOs to consumer advocates—couple a crucial radical critique of capitalism and state power with a reformist approach to social and political change. While advancing an important radical critique of corporations and the WTO, for instance, these individuals often offer nothing more than reform as a reconstructive vision. As we saw in Seattle, pragmatic anti-globalization “realists” took up considerable space in a potentially critical and revolutionary movement.

Second, in the state sovereignty trap, activists call for a kinder, more citizen-friendly “socialist” state to act as a buffer between transnational capital and civil society. For instance, when critiquing international trade apparatuses such as the WTO, many anti-globalizationists merely propose that we reform, democratize, or abolish the power of the WTO, while maintaining and even reinforcing state power. Holding a liberal or radical—rather than a revolutionary position—they never question the legitimacy of the state itself as a political institution, missing the vital opportunity to transcend the state’s authoritarian and hierarchical logic and structure.

In the anticorporate trap, activists adopt an anti-corporate rather than an explicitly anticapitalist stance. Citing multinational corporations, instead of the capitalist system itself, as the cause of social and ecological injustice, they seek to turn the “capitalist clock” backward to return to a kinder and gentler form of capitalism. Their critique also fails to recognize the need to move beyond a market economy that was born out of a logic of unlimited growth, accumulation, profit, and domination.

As history has always shown, high noon will always, eventually, turn into midnight. There is a logic to a clock: its gears, springs, or silicon chips modulate its movements in particular ways. Like a clock, capitalism and the state are constituted to move in a particular direction: toward ever greater levels of centralization, domination, exploitation, and hierarchy. When we look historically at the modern nation-state, we see that it rose in tandem with, and out of the same logic of domination and exploitation as, capitalism.

Rather than simply attempt to turn the clock of domination and exploitation backward, we must develop a new sense of time and history. Ours will not be built out of the dustbin of capital- and state-driven events but out of the potential within the human spirit and the revolutionary impulse itself. We can think beyond what is immediately before us, drawing from the logic of a different “clock,” which has been beating in the heart of humanity since the beginning of time.

Redefining Power: Social vs. Political

This new logic is bubbling just below the surface of the movement against globalization. In the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, a critique of state and capitalist power was nascent as the question of revolution was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Amid the sea of signs that floated above the crowd were calls for democracy and an end to the abuses of the capitalist system.

Yet, still embedded in the logic of social movements, activists in Seattle could not translate the dream for democracy into a concrete political or institutional form. Marching still to the particularistic beat of social movements, they had not yet begun to reach for the most general expression of power. It is time to seize the general power to determine each and every feature of our social and everyday lives, ranging from the production and distribution of the common good, to education, health care, and housing.

In social movements, we have been fighting for decades for social power: for particular social freedoms such as sexual or cultural liberation, or for freedom from such social ills as poverty, prison, or ecological degradation. Today, we must begin to fight for political power: for the political preconditions of our own freedom in general. In order to be free in the most profound and general sense, we must be free as political beings. We must have the political decision-making power to govern ourselves in a way that is creative, meaningful, and responsible. Refusing to accommodate to a system we know to be foul, we must instead demand the power to create a society based on a new understanding of human creativity and potentiality.

It is the beginning of a new century. If we are going to commit ourselves to the long-term struggle for real freedom, why should we take a pragmatic or reformist approach? It is time to stop compromising and “negotiating” with those invested in maintaining the current system. It is time to go for all of what we really want.

Creating new forms of collective self-government, we may move beyond the logic of domination and exploitation on which the current “democracy” is built. Transcending a “representative democracy” with its political authorities and centralized state power, we may reach for a form of democracy defined as direct political power. The revolutionary potential of the anti-globalization movement emerges from a logic of human freedom. We must recapture the original meaning of politics developed by the Athenians centuries ago: the power to assemble as citizens to govern our own communities. According to social ecologist Murray Bookchin, the political life of free citizens cannot be reduced to “statecraft,” nor to the managerial and authoritarian practices of the state that are so often confused with authentic politics. For Bookchin, true political power is the power of citizens to make decisions in general about their lives. It is the power to gather as general members of communities to discuss, decide, and determine the public policies that will shape how we work, produce, and live together. Until we have this power, we will be left only to stand on the sidelines of society, fighting for rights, choices, alternatives, and improvements within a system we know to be tyrannizing most of humanity and destroying the natural world.

From Economic Power to Political Power

We are so identified with the capitalist system that we can only see ourselves in economic terms. We confuse general political power with particular economic power: the power to consume, produce, boycott, or create episodic economic alternatives. Yet as the last several decades have shown, we cannot create a new society simply by seizing and recasting economic power. Indeed, it has proved insufficient to simply fight corporations, waging individual campaigns against WalMart or Monsanto, trying to keep chain stores out of our communities or ban genetically engineered food from our supermarkets.

The real challenge to capitalism is to refuse its tendency to translate the world into its own terms. We must free ourselves of “internalized capitalism”: the belief that capitalism is “natural,” inevitable, unstoppable, or a system that can only be reformed or complemented with economic alternatives. Seized by internalized capitalism, we see ourselves primarily as workers or consumers—as producers of or resisters to economic practice. The dissolution of the idea of citizen into the idea of consumer, with the new notion of the “consumer-citizen,” signals the final collapse of humanity into homo economicus, or the economic animal.

But we are also, as Aristotle said, a zoon politikon, a political animal. We are beings with the potential to think, discuss, decide, and determine all aspects of our lives, including matters of economics. The fact is, we cannot fight capitalism with economic power alone. We cannot abolish capitalism by creating “economic” alternatives such as co-ops, just as we cannot boycott our way to a noncapitalist society. We can only bring the capitalist system to its knees when we can stand on our own feet, empowered politically. The enormous dislocation of peoples, capital, and goods throughout the world can only be countered by a global movement for a new kind of political locality based on principles of cooperation, direct democracy, and confederalism.

This is What Democracy Looks Like!

If we are to retrieve the notion of citizenship from the category of consumer and the category of the state as well, we have to ask ourselves what kind of citizens, what kind of political life, do we want to retrieve? Can we only resuscitate ourselves as citizens bound by national borders and identities, passively represented by politicians and dominated by the nation-state? Or may we reestablish ourselves as a new kind of free citizen empowered to directly participate in the management of our everyday lives? It is time that we begin to build a direct democracy: one in which citizens meet directly, face to face, to democratically determine their own lives. Unlike a representative democracy, which exists to serve the state, a direct democracy is a form of government that serves humanity as a whole.

In the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, the spirit of direct democracy was in the air. Direct confrontation with state military forces in the form of police and the National Guard led to a five-day period of radicalization among young activists, for many of whom this was their first encounter with militaristic repression. On the streets, the real yet more abstract fight against the WTO concretized itself into a struggle against the nondemocratic character of the state and capital. Activists found themselves beaten, injured by chemical weapons, jailed, tortured, and deprived of their civil rights in a “progressive” First World city—merely for engaging in peaceful protest and taking to the streets as citizens to express their freedom of speech.

There were countless marches that week as courageous activists risked their safety to take to the streets, rejecting the curfew and no-entry zones dictated by the city of Seattle in conjunction with the federal government. During one march, a chant arose, poetically and spontaneously, that captured the imagination and passion of the other activists who were undergoing a life-changing transformation. After days of collective, democratic decision making and peaceful, intelligent protest, after days of seizing the right to think, decide, and take public action, activists came to understand democracy in a new way. They began to see democracy as a direct act, as the movement of real people participating in determining their own lives in a spirit of cooperation.

This chant, “This is What Democracy Looks Like,” repeated passionately, over and over, summoned a new way of thinking about political reconstruction. When taken to its logical conclusion, this chant means not only that we must take to the streets but that we must take to our communities, where we may demand the power to rebuild a vital and passionate political life. This chant inspires us to develop a new understanding of citizenship defined not in relation to a state or nation but in opposition to nations and states. It is time to redefine citizenship in relation to local communities and regional, continental, and even global confederations.

As we think beyond the state, seeing ourselves as free citizens, we must begin to ask what would be the local and translocal political institutions that would empower citizens to establish a direct democracy? Indeed, as we challenge the nondemocratic character of global capitalism and interstate apparatuses such as the WTO, World Bank, or the IMF, we must propose new political institutions that embody the principles of cooperation and direct democracy.

Marked by “internalized statism,” we often find it hard to conceptualize nonstatist forms of local and translocal self-government. Wanting to move beyond the authoritarian logic of national borders, we summon the idea of the “global” as the humanist counterpart to the “local.” We appeal to the local-global dyad in attempting to name the complementary units of political organization that will constitute the new society. Yet, while the idea of “thinking globally and acting locally” rightly asserts the need to rebuild local communities within a humanist and internationalist context, the idea must be elaborated in distinctly political terms.

While the term “local” could be translated into the political institutions of the city council, town meeting, or neighborhood assembly, the idea of the “global” remains an abstraction until we translate it into a concrete political structure. In this spirit, we may translate the “global” into the confederation, the next valid and complementary level of political organization that lies beyond the local level. A more meaningful way to politically and institutionally counter globalization is to counter “the global” (global capitalism, transnational governmental structures) with municipal and confederal forms of direct democracy.

This approach to the question of political reconstruction is called libertarian municipalism. Developed by theorist Murray Bookchin, libertarian municipalism is a way of thinking about political transformation that proposes a way to counter globalization by establishing self-governing local towns, cities, and villages, linking them together to form confederations. Within libertarian municipalism, members of communities reclaim existing local political forums, such as city and neighborhood councils, gradually transforming them into citizens’ assemblies. Creating local electoral campaigns as a way to educate the public about direct democracy, libertarian municipalism proposes that citizens begin to popularize the demand for direct political power. Such campaigns initiate a long-term revolutionary process in which citizens gradually wrest decision-making power from states, corporations, and metastates such as the WTO, politically reempowering themselves in the process. As members of municipalities form local groups engaged in the process of political transformation, they may confederate with other free cities, towns, and villages to establish a situation of dual power: a united and coordinated counterpower to the state and capital.

Talking about a New Revolution

What would it take to leave the “era of the particular,” to regain our revolutionary nerve? We would have to rethink the revolutionary project, creating a new kind of universal theory and movement. In reapproaching the revolutionary question, however, we must transcend the limits of the marxist and anarchist revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing the best that these traditions have to offer. Indeed, we may move beyond deterministic, hierarchical, individualistic, and culturally biased approaches to questions of social and political transformation. A new revolutionary vision must grow out of a logic of open-ended potentiality rather than crude determinism; nonhierarchy rather than hierarchy; solidarity and organization rather than rigid individualism; and a complex appreciation of the principled yet diverse institutional and cultural forms out of which we may forge a new idea of freedom.

First, we have inherited the revolutionary model of marxists who saw the revolution as a determined, linear, inherently progressive process with one single end. In contrast, we may move toward an open-ended view of revolution that sees the good society as multiple, ever evolving, and a product of human potential and creativity. Indeed, we may see the revolution as an unfolding of human potential for cooperation, sociality, and creativity—rather than the unfolding of a deterministic law of history.

Second, we have inherited the nineteenth-century view that authoritarianism, centralization, and hierarchy are necessary and inevitable features of the revolutionary process. In contrast, the new revolution may draw from the left libertarian tradition that demands that the revolutionary process itself be based on the same ethical principles as the good society for which we fight. Within this tradition, the revolutionary process represents an educational, transformational process that forms the free citizen who will manage the new society.

Third, we must draw from the best of the left libertarian tradition. While the anarchist tradition offers a crucial critique of state power and capital, rightly calling for a more cooperative society, it also inherited an individualistic tendency from classical liberal theory. Notions of the autonomous individual, expressed through individual confrontations with authority, often end up reinforcing a sense of powerlessness and nihilism, rather than a sense of collective empowerment and a meaningful reconstructive vision. By contrast, we need to create a structured movement that empowers the individual within a greater collectivity. Such a revolutionary movement must have a sense of direction and political purpose with a respect for ideas as well as action.

Finally, the new revolution understands that we are not fighting to create one single universal model of the good society. Leaving the twentieth century, we see “the good society” as a unity in diversity: a confederation of diverse cultures and societies unified by a general, yet coherent set of ethical principles, such as nonhierarchy, decentralization, abolition of classes, and direct democracy. Such principles will always be general enough to permit a wide horizon of cultural interpretation and application, yet particular enough to allow for degrees of coherence and unity. “The good society” is the unified yet diverse expression of the human potential for freedom in all of its cultural forms.

It is vital to talk of humanity’s potentialities in an age in which a despotic minority of humanity dominates the majority. Yet we must work toward a new kind of humanism, one that is not based on an abstract universal understanding of national unity or a parochial ethnic understanding of “diversity.” Instead, we may recover a humanism grounded on the idea of the stateless citizen, a member of a free community that stands in confederation with other communities. This new expression of humanism binds individuals and communities together through a general, common constitution based on such principles as solidarity, self-determination, and direct democracy. The spirit of this new global humanism will find its concrete expression through a common, confederal constitution that can be particularized, culturally translated, and “applied” to a diverse variety of lifeways.

The New Left taught us the relevance of culture to the process of social transformation. Focused on the universal historical subject, the revolutionary tradition of the past two centuries failed to link particular forms of social oppression such as sexism and racism to wider systemic processes such as the state and capital. Today, we know that we cannot dissolve particular identities or cultures into general, universal theories or movements. We know that the elimination of class exploitation, for example, will not inherently entail the abolition of racism or sexism. The question we face, then, is how to generalize particular social struggles in such a way that general movements may reflect the particular cultures and identities of real people dealing with concrete local and cultural problems. Otherwise stated, we must learn how to particularize general struggles, or how to speak to and support the particular subject within the general movement—as well as vice versa.

Drawing from the New Left, we have learned that general human freedom may only be won by working through particular forms of oppression. Indeed, within an authoritarian society, we are dehumanized in particular ways: the often overlapping effects of homophobia, sexism, racism, and classism, for example, will shape the lives of people in ways that are both specific and multiple.

As a consequence, the struggle to regain our humanity will always be particular as well as general. The new revolution will include a process of consciousness-raising and education, raising awareness of particular forms and effects of hierarchy. It will open the way for social groups to pursue particular paths toward recovery of a human potential understood to be both general and diverse.

A movement that challenges globalization is a movement that fights for each human being to fulfill her or his potential, by challenging a world. It is a movement that strides out of the era of the particular to reclaim our collective, revolutionary imagination and intelligence. Such a movement provides a critique not only of particular social issues but of a global and integrated system that has been in place for centuries. In turn, a truly humane movement against globalization does not solely help people cope with, or accommodate to, a system that is inherently dehumanizing and anti-ecological. Rather, it is a movement for real political power that will finally allow us to create our own everyday life, collectively, in all of its fullness. This is what democracy looks like.

]]> http://www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/revving-it-up-the-revolutionary-potential-of-the-new-anti-globalization-movement/feed/ 0 Notes on an Ecology of Everyday Life http://www.social-ecology.org/1999/01/notes-on-an-ecology-of-everyday-life/ http://www.social-ecology.org/1999/01/notes-on-an-ecology-of-everyday-life/#comments Fri, 01 Jan 1999 12:00:12 +0000 Chaia Heller http://72.47.250.174/?p=501 If I can’t dance in your revolution, I’m not coming.

- Emma Goldman

We need to rethink desire in social, rather than romantic or individualistic terms. This is crucial because, while our society offers us a variety of ways to describe the many dimensions of romantic and individualistic desire, we are offered a paltry [...]]]>

If I can’t dance in your revolution, I’m not coming.

- Emma Goldman

We need to rethink desire in social, rather than romantic or individualistic terms. This is crucial because, while our society offers us a variety of ways to describe the many dimensions of romantic and individualistic desire, we are offered a paltry vocabulary with which to describe a social understanding of desire. We are saturated by consumerist rhetoric of ‘personal satisfaction’ yet rarely do we hear eloquent discussion regarding the craving for a free and non-hierarchical society. Our society worships at the fountain of capitalism whose insatiable waters of material greed and sexual domination crowd out the opportunity to cultivate a desire to regenerate rather than deplete cooperative social and ecological relationships.

Ecology is as much about desire as it is about need. While activists take to the streets to fight genetically manipulated organisms that threaten environmental and health safety, they also take over the streets, creating a carnivalesque demand for community, pleasure, and meaning. Ecology speaks to two demands, then –one quantitative, the other qualitative. Born out of the call for enough clean water, air, and land to survive, ecology is also the demand for a particular quality of life worth living.

The desire for an ecological way of life carries within it the nascent demand for an ecological society, a demand that has potentially revolutionary implications. For once we collectively translate this desire into political terms, we are able to challenge a global system that immiserates most of the world’s inhabitants, forcing them to forgo their desires, lowering their ecological expectations to the level of mere sustenance or survival. Keeping a desire-focus within the ecology movement keeps our demand for satisfaction, vitality, and meaning alive, invigorating our ability to envision a socially and ecologically desirable society.

Yet the question is what kind of desire will inform ecological movements and what kind of ‘nature’ will be the object of ecological desire? Will it be an individualistic desire for a pure ‘nature’ that is understood to be outside of society? Or will it be a social desire, a yearning to be part of a greater collectivity that challenges the structure of society to create a cooperative and ecological world?

We need to rethink desire in social, rather than romantic or individualistic terms. This is crucial because, while our society offers us a variety of ways to describe the many dimensions of romantic and individualistic desire, we are offered a paltry vocabulary with which to describe a social understanding of desire. We are saturated by consumerist rhetoric of ‘personal satisfaction’ yet rarely do we hear eloquent discussion regarding the craving for a free and non-hierarchical society. Our society worships at the fountain of capitalism whose insatiable waters of material greed and sexual domination crowd out the opportunity to cultivate a desire to regenerate rather than deplete cooperative social and ecological relationships.

Yet while we need to rethink our understanding of desire, we also have to rethink our understanding of nature. ‘Nature’ cannot be the ‘country home’ of our desires—-that place we run to in our dreams, longing to escape the pain and confusion of life at the beginningof a new century. By placing the idea of nature within society itself, we may transform society into a ground in which we may build, collectively, a new practice of both nature and community. An ecology of everyday life translates the desire for ‘nature’ into a social desire to create a society that is whole, humane, and meaningful.

Nature is not a pure and abstract thing removed from the everyday lives of people living in cities, suburbs, and towns. By bringing the idea of ‘nature’ down to earth, ecology becomes the very stuff of our everyday lives: the crowded street in our neighborhood, the water with which we wash our clothes, both sky scraper and smoke-stack, as well as the plants, animals, and other creatures with whom we share this planet.

An ecology of everyday life transforms ecology from a lofty romantic venture into an ongoing everyday labor of love. Ecology is just as much about providing day-care for parents attending organizing meetings and fighting to save urban neighborhoods from road building and gentrification as it is about protecting forests and green spaces.

Removing the idea of nature from its pristine and static display case, we may see nature for what it is: a dazzling and dynamic evolutionary process that continues to unfurl about us and within us. And in turn, we may see capitalism for what it is as well: a voracious fire burning through society and nature, reducing all that is living to ash. By recognizing our minds, our hands, our bones, and our hearts as part of a collective natural history –as an evolutionary inheritance– we become outraged by this fire, breathing it into our lungs, transforming it into a moral outrage that is fuel for revolutionary action.

Once we are able to locate ourselves within this evolution, we can begin to measure our everyday lives as they are against what they could be if only we were free to actualize our potential for such evolutionary coups as cooperation, creativity, and community and self-development. Suddenly, the dull office job, the lonely neighborhood, the poverty, or even the unsatisfying privilege –all take on new meaning.

Ecology provides a lens through which we may take a long and often excruciating look at our own lives, a chance to evaluate the quality of our relationships, both local and global. And if we are not heartened by what we see, we realize that we have an enormous challenge before us. For once we appreciate the interconnectedness of life, we understand that we cannot simply work to save a certain species of plant or animal -we realize that we must also transform society itself.

In turn, the demand for an ecological society cannot be reduced to an individual or personal quest for a better quality of life. It must be a social desire to fight for the quality of life for all, a desire that ultimately requires a dramatic restructuring of political, social, and economic institutions. It asks that we transform our love for nature into a revolutionary activist politics that strives to bring to society the best of what we long for when we talk about “nature.”

We need to rethink our desires to ‘simplify’ our lives, or our desires to create autonomous zones in which we can find asylum from the deadening society that capitalism creates in its own image. In addition, we must begin to grapple with what I call “the complexity of complicity”: a recognition that, despite attempts to extricate ourselves from systems of injustice through personal choices about how we will live, because of the pervasiveness of overlapping systems of power, we will always remain embedded, and thus complicit within, such institutions as global capitalism, the State, racism, and sexism.

Yet instead of despising ourselves for privileges we may have, we may begin to redefine such guilt as “ineffective privilege.” By identifying privileges based on such factors as gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, education, class, ethnicity, or nationality –we may transform particular privileges into a potent substance to be used for social and political reconstruction. We can transform, for example, guilt associated with class, racial, or educational privilege into time, economic resources, and information useful to political struggles. Privilege within complex systems of hierarchy can be morphed from paralyzing guilt into an active process of thinking rationally and compassionately about how to utilize particular resources to dismantle systems of power and to rebuild a new society in its place.

This desire to rebuild represents a kind of ‘visionary freedom’ that goes beyond the ‘protest freedom’ that has become prominent within social movements. While we must express our freedom to protest against the inhumanity of our times, it is also vital that we actualize our potential to become fully human, our potential to create a compassionate, beautiful, and rational world.

If we are to express visionary freedom, then we have to begin to ask ourselves what kind of society should we begin to envision? To envision a new kind of ecological society, we need a new kind of passionate politics, a new idea of what it means to be politically engaged. We must demand a revolutionary democracy in which citizens are no longer dominated by the nation-State. We may re-create ourselves as state-less citizens empowered to directly manage our everyday lives.

We must develop a new understanding of citizenship that is not defined in relation to capital or to the nation-state but is instead, defined in opposition to capital and the nation-state. We may become revolutionary citizens defined in relation to local communities that are part of a larger confederation of self-governing bodies. We may become “a community of communities.” This new way of thinking about political regeneration is called libertarian municipalism. Developed by social ecologist Murray Bookchin, libertarian municipalism proposes a way for members of communities to reclaim existing local political forums, or to create extra-legal citizen forums, gradually transforming them into citizens assemblies. Such assemblies constitute the public sphere in which we may gather together as members of communities to directly manage our own everyday lives.

Libertarian municipalism is a way in which we may publicly seize our power as political actors, taking back decision-making power from professional politicians, states, corporations, and transnational apparatuses such as the WTO. As members of municipalities form local groups engaged in the process of political transformation, we may confederate with other groups from other municipalities to create a true rapport de force, a coordinated and united counter-power to the State and capital. If we do not find this deadening world desirable, then we must do more than protest: we must create the world we desire.

To fulfill its revolutionary potential, ecology must become the desire to infuse the objects, relationships, and practices of everyday life with the same quality of integrity, beauty, and meaning that people in industrial capitalist contexts commonly reserve for “nature.” It means recasting many of the values often associated with nature within social terms, seizing the power to create new political institutions that encourage, rather than obstruct, the expression of a social desire for a cooperative, pleasurable, and ecological society.

An ecology of everyday life is about reaching for this desirable society, reclaiming our humanity as we reclaim our abilities to reason, dream, and to make decisions about our own communities. It is about looking into the uncharted ‘wilderness’ of direct-democracy itself, that delicious, empowering, and deeply social process through which we become a truly humane expression of that ‘nature’ for which we have yearned all along.

From Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (1999) Black Rose Books

]]> http://www.social-ecology.org/1999/01/notes-on-an-ecology-of-everyday-life/feed/ 0 Eco-cide in Women’s Bodies http://www.social-ecology.org/1992/03/eco-cide-in-womens-bodies/ http://www.social-ecology.org/1992/03/eco-cide-in-womens-bodies/#comments Sun, 01 Mar 1992 12:00:51 +0000 Chaia Heller http://72.47.250.174/?p=499 As featured in Synthesis/Regeneration #3 (Spring 1992)

For too long, feminism has lacked a global, ecological focus. In the 90′s, as reproductive technologies, fundamentalists, and ecological poisoning are on the rise, women’s health and self-determination around the world are on a steady decline. Thinking globally about women’s health is vital if feminism is to transform [...]]]> As featured in Synthesis/Regeneration #3 (Spring 1992)

For too long, feminism has lacked a global, ecological focus. In the 90′s, as reproductive technologies, fundamentalists, and ecological poisoning are on the rise, women’s health and self-determination around the world are on a steady decline. Thinking globally about women’s health is vital if feminism is to transform women’s liberation into a collective, international movement toward self-determination.

The environmental movement in the U.S. has not shown a tremendous interest in women’s health or self-determination. In fact, it is often rightfully accused of being a mostly white, male, middle-class movement. Many involved in women’s liberation movements describe environmentalists as being concerned only with protecting the “bourgeois beauty” of the landscape, while feminists are committed to fighting women’s oppression in society. Particularly, second wave feminists in the West have historically taken a back seat in environmental movements, keeping our feminist concerns “out of the way” of the environmental agenda. For too long these women have waited for the “right moment” or the “right movement” in which to fight for self-determination. In the New Left of the U.S., women were told that our sexual and social liberation would accompany the liberation of humanity. As it turned out, women waited patiently,lingering in the background, completing mailings and making coffee while humanity’s agenda was mapped out and prioritized by men. In the current environmental movements in the U.S., women are also asked to focus on larger ecological and social issues in order to avoid distracting the movement from the urgent goal of saving the planet.

For many poor and Third World women, “environmental issues” have always had a direct, social, visceral meaning. Poor women have always struggled with ecological issues such as poisoned water and poisoned work places where women are exposed to toxic chemicals, over work, and under-pay which perpetuates a state of stress and poverty. When women’s health is viewed from an ecological perspective, issues of gender, class, race, colonialism, and capitalism come together, illuminating a global mosaic of women’s dis-ease and survival. We see that our self-determination is inextricably linked to our demand for “health’ in its most radical sense. In this way, feminism uses the issue of health as a point of departure for transforming “bourgeois environmentalism” into a social ecological feminism; making explicit the connections between the destruction of nature and the domination of women all over the world.

The ecology of women’s health has radical implications for feminist theory and action. By recognizing the relationships between women’s social oppression and ecological degradation, feminism scrambles the neat filing system of western patriarchy by combining the domination of nature and the domination of women into one file labeled “dis-ease.” In doing this, the very categories which alienate culture from nature are blurred. Every time we make connection between things that are portrayed as dualistically opposed, we throw a wrench in the rigid hierarchy of male domination by disrupting the compartments which “organize” and control women and nature.

By showing how the domination of women and the poisoning of nature intersects in women’s bodies, the concept of eco-cide takes on a social dimension which brings racism, classism, colonialism and capitalism into one clear focus- health. Bringing together these issues into the category of health transforms the overwhelming disunity of the social and ecological crisis into an understandable whole. The issue of women’s health brings women’s emotional, sexual, and physical issues together, so we can examine the conditions of women’s bodies, labor, relationships, and community life from a global perspective. We must uncover the connections between women being injured by all forms of violence, including labor, and women being viscerally poisoned by toxins in food, water, and air.

The exposure of these relationships redefines health in the original Greek sense of the word—it becomes a measure of justice and balance as opposed to the existing understanding of health as merely an absence of acute illness. Health becomes a form of self-determination in which we control not only justice in our bodies, but in our communities and in our relationship to the natural world. Health becomes a passionate, creative state which is possible only in societies in which women and all people are free.

Unity in Diversity

An ecological feminist politics of health encompasses the entire landscape of women’s oppression, as we go beyond other feminisms by looking at women’s health and liberation from a global perspective. The ecology of women’s health reflects concern for our own and each other’s health which leads us to explore the social and ecological conditions of our own and each other’s lives. A global, ecological feminism comprehends that women cannot fight to strengthen only one part of a web. The strength and elegance of a web depends on the symmetry and tension of each thread. In order for all women to move toward a collective, global self-determination, each women’s voice must be heard. We need to know each women’s insights into the conditions of her own oppression and liberation. We need to know the conditions of women’s lives in order to understand the scope and shape of our collective struggle.

Many people involved in ecological and social justice movements talk about “unity in diversity.” This means that unity occurs in an ecosystem or social group only if diversity is allowed to flourish. The phrase “unity in diversity” conveys that “sameness” is not true unity, but is uniformity. Instead, true unity emerges out of a dynamic dance between affinities and differences. Unity, then can be understood as a larger pattern or symmetry which embraces the diversity of life itself. Particularly within social groups, the concept “unity in diversity” refers to the need for both a common sense of identity as well as respect for diversity. It calls for a celebration of our common insights and goals, as well as our individual visions and histories.

Furthermore, the concept of diversity does not just mean mixing a bit of difference into the homogeneous pot of the dominant group. An international feminist politics of health, which honors women’s diversity, should see unity as something we earn from the constant work of unlearning the ideologies which keep us apart. The solution to achieving a diverse and unified group is not simply structural—meaning that a group is restructured to embody the right amount of women of color. Unity is not something white women achieve by recruiting “diverse” women into organizations or panels at a conference. Unity is a mutual bridging of women of diverse cultures, earned through our commitment to engage in a struggle to confront such oppressions as racism and classism as they inevitably surface in our work, together with the goal of eliminating the objectification and tokenization of certain women within our movements.

As a Jewish lesbian, I can recall several experiences being tokenized by a group of people. In one situation, I was working at a mental health center in Vermont, when I was asked to enhance the center’s Christmas party by bringing in a menorah and teaching the staff about the meaning of Hannukah. At no other time was the staff interested in learning about Jewish culture or in understanding how anti-semitism surfaced in my work with clients and within the agency. I was also asked once a year to conduct workshops for the other therapists concerning lesbian and gay issues relevant to their work with clients.

At first, I was excited by the invitation, interpreting it as an affirmation of the center’s commitment to fighting lesbian and gay oppression. However, I soon realized that my workshops did not change the agency’s policy of hiring only one feminist-oriented therapist to deal with “these issues.” The workshops I led did not challenge the staff’s heterosexual norms. In short, these two contributions that I made to address the agency’s concern with diversity and representation served only to satisfy the agency’s image of being up on these issues. These experiences are both examples of tokenization and objectification—as those in a dominant group reduce those representing different experiences and perspectives into objects which can be used for education or enhancement. Just like my experiences with the mental health agency, certain women are often reduced to a cultural art object used to enhance the unity of other women’s political projects in the feminist movement.

The Complexity of Complicity

These issues are extremely important to resolve as we are faced with the ever increasing need to build international women’s networks to fight for women’s health and self-determination. Thinking globally about these issues entails that feminism does not become a “for myself” movement which works in isolation from other liberation struggles. All women are caught in the net of common and different oppressions based on race, class, age, sexual identity, and physical ability. I call this net the “complexity of complicity”; a complex tangle of women who knowingly and unknowingly are complicit in each other’s oppression. If we do not look at the whole picture, one woman’s triumph can be another woman’s disaster. Toxic chemicals that women in the U.S. anti-toxic movement fight to keep out of their middle-class neighborhoods get dumped in African-American communities. As infertile, rich women in the U.S. fight for access to reproductive technologies, poor women all over the world are resisting their government’s agenda for enforced sterilization.

In her book, Feminism and Critical Theory, Gayatri Spivak cites a case in Seoul, Korea, where 237 women had called a strike for higher wages at a U.S.-owned multi-national corporation called Data Control. Six of the union leaders were brutally injured and imprisoned, while Data Control simply watched. Later, Ms. magazine published a quotation by Kit Ketchum, former treasurer of NOW, who had worked for Data Control in the U.S., and was pleased by the maternity leave and other social services provided to her by the corporation. “I commend Data Control,” she wrote, “for their commitment to employing and promoting women … why not suggest this to your employer?” (p.89). These ironies result from the failure of feminism to think globally about interconnecting systems of oppression.

As women, we can neither assume that our struggles are the same, nor that we all have access to the same tools of liberation. In order to become a truly global feminist movement, committed to fighting for the health of all women, we must realize the centrality of creating forums in which women from all over the world are able to reflect and share their insights and stories of resistance and liberation. We must create a global women’s health movement which undermines all systems of domination that poison women’s psyches and bodies with poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, toxic chemicals, and radiation. As we strive for an authentic unity of women, we will begin to hear the brilliant and intricate diversity of women’s voices everywhere. In this way, women can bring the values of health and global responsibility into the understanding of our own liberatory processes, creating a new, revolutionary, ecological politics.

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