(XVI) Militarism

We live at a cross-roads today –but we have lived there for some time now. Indeed, as time goes by, it would seem that the cross-roads has been widening; this also opens up more potential, if only we could get across! However, the world’s power elite, like that of the Industrial Revolution, is now hell-bent on remolding society. The “post-modern Prometheus” of hi-tech addictive capital, far from allowing the new technology to liberate humanity once and for all from the bonds of its monopolistic parasitism, is determined to make it work for its further domination. Again, we are face-to-face with the absurd, because again we come face-to-face with the expropriation of the means to life. But everything is described as only “natural” in this best of all possible worlds.

44 Writing before the French Revolution in Candide or Optimism, 1759, Voltaire used a similar phrase to attack what was known as “philosophical optimism”, best represented by the German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and the English poet, Alexander Pope.

Apparently, the system sees only one way forward: the reduction of future populations to the status of uneducated slaves deprived of any but the most basic individual (non-productive) property rights in a world run increasingly by machines and the evolution (and not impossible sudden break-down) of this system of modern slavery, via impoverishment (food wars: see above), clandestine viral or biological wars (several investigations point to AIDS –and Ebola –being the creation of covert military operations in the U.S.; of course, opponents of this view have also been evident), and regionally-contained military warfare, using non-lethal weapons as well as traditional weapons, in short: a prolonged or catastrophic genocide.

45 There is now a non-lethal weapons literature, with many sites on the Internet. One article is Michel Chossudovsky’s “H.A.A.R.P.: It’s not only greenhouse gas emissions: Washington’s new world order weapons have the ability to trigger climate change” (November, 2000). The author states that: “In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the (“Star Wars”) Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes.”
A founder of the NO HAARP movement, Clare Zickuhr, says: “The military is going to give the ionosphere a big kick and see what happens.” In other words, technological development (given the society we live in) has reached the stage where a few people could make planet earth uninhabitable, just by carrying out an “experiment”. Presumably, this is an integral part of the “globalization” promoted by the G-8, IMF, World Bank, et al. Involved in the HAARP project are U.S. transnationals such as the oil company Atlantic Richfield and Raytheon, one of the largest defense contractors in the world, which bought up the company that was previously involved in HAARP, E-Systems, one of the biggest intelligence contractors in the world, with contracts from the CIA, U.S. Defense Department, etc. From: “HAARP: Vandalism in the Sky”, by Dr. Nick Begich and Jean Manning, Nexus magazine, Volume III, No. 1, December 1995- January, 1996.

Merchants of Death Lithgraph by Mabel Dwight

Back in 1970, one of the advocates of this type of technology, Zbigniew Brzezinski (former National Security Adviser to U.S. President Carter), predicted that a “more controlled and directed society” would gradually appear, linked to technology. This society would be dominated by an elite group which impresses voters by allegedly superior scientific know-how. According to Brzezinski:

Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Technical and scientific momentum would then feed on the situation it exploits. (Nexus magazine, ibid., see note 45 above)

Zbigniew Brzezinski

(XVII) Education

Fully in line with this goal is the transformation of the world’s educational infrastructure away from one that (in the immediate post-war period until about the 1980s) sought to build up a large professional stratum and populations with varying levels of skills to re-build, run and develop the productive plants and infrastructures, etc. following the World War. Given the popular demands arising from the horrifying experiences of War, education was geared to include a certain degree of “universalism” and enlightenment. Today, the educational project coincides with a society in full fragmentation, where both material and non-material production are based increasingly on machines, where the skilled and highly educated are molded to form an elitist hermetic group, taught to serve within hierarchies, while the “masses” are pushed into unskilled work, divorced from any decision-making. This is the so-called core and periphery model within the formal sector. In addition, there is a sprawling informal sector –all of this is reflected in the mish-mash of architectural styles found in any modern city. Within this scheme of things, educational workers have already been devalued and are being replaced by machines (e.g., Internet computing), and the educational community, like all other communities, is being virtualized and broken up.

46 “Educom, the academic-corporate consortium, has recently established their Learning Infrastructure Initiative which includes the detailed study of what professors do, breaking the faculty job down in classic Tayloristic fashion into discrete tasks, and determining what parts can be automated or outsourced. Educom believes that course design, lectures, and even evaluation can all be standardized, mechanized, and consigned to outside commercial vendors. ‘Today you’re looking at a highly personal human- mediated environment,’ Educom president Robert Heterich observed. ‘The potential to remove the human mediation in some areas and replace it with automation –smart, computer-based, network-based systems –is tremendous. It’s gotta happen.’ ” From: David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills -the Automation of Higher Education, October, 1997

Aboriginal classroom, late 19th century…....

........Virtual education today

(XVIII) The Religion of the People?

If he were living today, Rousseau might well have said: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is addicted.” To some extent, we have all become the captive clients of monopolistic production through addiction, i.e. not simply to drugs

47 As beat writer William Burroughs pointed out, after spending 15 years of his life on heroin, and having managed to get off it. In the preface to later editions of his book he remarked that: ”...No research has been done with variations of the apomorphine formula or with synthetics…The world is deluged with tranquilizers and energizers but this unique regulator (apomorphine) has not received attention. No research has been done (on it) by any of the large pharmaceutical companies…” (_The Naked Lunch_, William Burroughs, Flamingo edition 1993; first published in English by Olympia Press, Paris, 1959)

but to drinks, fast food, fast cars, etc., and above all to television. It is, therefore, worth asking whether Opium has become the religion of the people.

(XIX) The Property Question

Clearly, in all of this, the property question is central.

48 “A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind,” Lewis H. Morgan: Ancient Society, 1877.

Lewis Henry Morgan

Glancing through a fairly typical history of economic thought, we can see that private property (as opposed to collective property) tended to drop out of the debate long before Adam Smith took the floor. Again it came to prominence with the development of socialism in the early 19th century, and is therefore reflected in the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (_What is Property_, 1840, and his answer: “Property is Theft”) and Karl Marx and Friederich Engels (“In all these movements they –i.e. the Communists –bring to the front the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time” –Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848).

Property expresses itself through law. U.S. international laws seek to impose prices and other conditions on foreign producers, as we have seen. New production techniques are used to destroy the livelihoods of others and extend predatory property rights on a world scale. Yet, monopolies flourish despite anti-monopoly legislation. All the other protective laws for corporations (copyright, intellectual property rights, anti-piracy laws, trademarks, etc.) are similarly imposed to benefit the transnational elite against the rest of the world, and against other companies within the industrialized countries they come from. As Hermann Mannheim notes: “the history of criminal legislation in England and many other countries shows that excessive prominence was given by the law to the protection of property,” (_Pioneers in Criminology_, 1972).

Through Law, exploiting classes express a compromise with Ethics, i.e. a class compromise, but when those who live by exploiting others make a promise we have to be ingenuous to believe it will be kept (“social molding” and the wages system are supposed to ensure that we are), and today Constitutions and the Law, including the law pertaining to property, are being “reformed”, twisted, bought. Authority speaks with a double voice. Appearances tell us that it upholds the Law implicitly, while globally organized Crime steps into the shoes of the State, an altered and schizophrenic State.

(XX) Small is Beautiful, Science and Energy

E.F. Schumacher coined the phrase “Small is beautiful”, which turned out to be a visionary statement.

49 ”[A modern economist] is used to measuring the ‘standard of living’ by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is ‘better off’ than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption…. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity.” From: E.F. Schumacher, Small is beautiful, 1989

E.F. Schumacher

The lowering of production costs thanks to the development of technology has meant not simply that the real cost of consumer goods and services has fallen, but also that there has been a significant decline in the real cost of producer goods and services. Hi-tech developments in the 1970s have gone hand-in-hand with other developments that have not simply reduced labor forces and increased machinery, but made that machinery more accessible to smaller and smaller capitals.

50 Marie-Louise Duboin points out that as a result of the application of computers and robots to production, the work is not only carried out more perfectly, but is also less energy-consuming. She notes that industrial production is completely changing, with huge factories disappearing and giving place to medium- and small-scale firms needing only few workers to give the necessary commands to computers and robots. (See: Lectures on Distributive Economy: Guaranteed Income as an Inheritance, International Conference on Basic Income, Louvaine-la-Neuve, Belgium, September 4-6, 1986. See also Note 62)

Not only that, but now electricity and telecommunications services could probably be made available to homes, offices and factories (etc.) free.

51 There are now many inventors and scientists who claim to have invented machines that generate free energy. One inventor in the United States called Dennis Lee, for example, is promoting a home electricity generator that he says will provide free electricity “for life” (the generator is estimated to have a life of 100 years). The “Hummingbird/Sundance” generator, which is currently very inexpensive to buy and install, is said to operate on two strong magnets and no fuel. It is therefore environmentally beneficial as well as virtually free.

Is this another hoax? Free energy would burst the capitalist world order (based on the commodification of resources) asunder, if it were true. It seems preferable to keep an open mind on it, especially in the light of the patent practices of large corporations mentioned above and the oil and electricity companies’ desire to protect their monopoly on power-generation, etc. Free energy claims now exist in the form of zero-point energy, cold fusion and solar power, among many others. All have their supporters, as well as their detractors (one of their detractors being Michael W. Friedlander -see, for example, his At the Fringes of Science by, Westview Press, 1998).

Proponents of cold fusion (i.e. energy from water, as predicted by Jules Verne in 1870) point to a host of experimental evidence, going back to the 1980s that backs up their claims, while other experts state that the experiments have not been performed properly and that the machines do not do what they are claimed to do. Yet claims have continually been made since at least the 1930s by inventors who have worked in the field of “over-unity” machines, i.e. machines whose energy output exceeds their energy input.
One of the hallmarks of some of these marginalized scientists is their personal eccentricities, their unscientific-sounding declarations, which tend to play against them. It should be noted, however, that these traits are certainly not limited to scientists who have been marginalized by mainstream science, as the old phrase “mad scientist” suggests. Einstein certainly had his own peculiarities, and we have noted John von Neumann’s particular brand of extremism. Another was William Shockley, a 1956 Nobel Prize-winner who was involved in the development of the transistor (indeed, it seems he used other scientists to his own glory –see Crystal Fire by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, 1998), always very close to the U.S. military establishment, who later became infamous for his racist view that “blacks are genetically inferior to whites in their intellectual capacities” (See: Crystal Fire).
Note also, that this would not be the first time scientists have been debunked by the mainstream press. Scientific American, which rubbishes zero-point energy, scoffed at the Wright Brothers airplane, saying that it broke all known laws. The New York Times on January 16, 1880, stated: “after a few more flashes in the pan, we shall hear very little more of Edison or his electric lamp. Every claim he makes has been tested and proved impracticable.” (See: Free Energy Links on the Internet)

The first transistor

The alternative energy lobby has been going on for a long time now, as has criticism of the role of Big Oil in environmental destruction. It is difficult to believe that there is no truth to the alternative energy view. It is equally hard to believe that Big Oil has any intention of switching the world towards clean energy (indeed, the position of the oil companies on their product parallels the position of the World Bank, et al, on poverty; while they “sympathize”, nothing is to be done about it). The fossil fuel lobby has become fossilized in its way of life. The only thing that concerns this nexus is the “devastation” that would be wrought to their industries if oil, nuclear energy and coal were to be replaced by some kind/s of alternative energy. Yet each year the problems caused by fossil fuels grow increasingly complex and potentially more devastating.

All of this would seem to prove that alternative energy is totally at odds with big capital and the monopolistic production it imposes on the world –does this mean that nature as a whole is being undermined by “human nature”? It does not mean that large-scale economies have disappeared, but it does mean that what was profitable only for large-scale capital in the past could be exploited by much less wealthy groups today, and perhaps not exploited at all. It also means that “productive labor” is now becoming a thing of the past, a possibility feared by the Ancient Greek rulers (as we have already seen, see note 16). Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law was keenly opposed to the “passion for work” promoted by capitalism and embraced by the proletariat of his day, and he called for a 3-hour day, at a time when French workers were toiling for as long as 16 hours a day.

52 “In 1770 at London, an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title, An Essay on Trade and Commerce. It made some stir in its time. The author, a great philanthropist, was indignant that ‘the factory population of England had taken into its head the fixed idea that in their quality of Englishmen all the individuals composing it have by right of birth the privilege of being freer and more independent than the laborers of any country in Europe. This idea may have its usefulness for soldiers, since it stimulates their valor, but the less the factory workers are imbued with it the better for themselves and the state. Laborers ought never to look on themselves as independent of their superiors. It is extremely dangerous to encourage such infatuations in a commercial state like ours, where perhaps seven-eighths of the population have little or no property. The cure will not be complete until our industrial laborers are contented to work six days for the same sum which they now earn in four.’ Thus, nearly a century before Guizot, work was openly preached in London as a curb to the noble passions of man. ‘The more my people work, the less vices they will have’, wrote Napoleon on May 5th, 1807, from Osterod. ‘I am the authority…and I should be disposed to order that on Sunday after the hour of service be past, the shops be opened and the laborers return to their work.’ To root out laziness and curb the sentiments of pride and independence which arise from it, the author of the Essay on Trade proposed to imprison the poor in ideal ‘work-houses’, which should become ‘houses of terror, where they should work fourteen hours a day in such fashion that when meal time was deducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and complete.’ See: Paul Lafargue: The Right to Idleness, Chapter II, “The Blessings of Work” (Paris, 1880, 1883)

Paul Lafargue

Lafargue’s view was (and remains) totally unbearable for big capital, which seeks to restrict, and not to allow the productive forces (and hence humanity) to flower. Thus its great interest in these matters, in hegemonizing the small-scale. It was announced in July, 2001, for example, that President Bush’s choice as Science Adviser has a long experience in Nanotechnology (building anything from the smallest possible units, atoms), exploiting the smallest of the small –though obviously with the intention of establishing hegemony over the science of the future (i.e. excluding humanity from it), and thus amassing enormous profits.

53 Cited from SmallTimes Media, June 26, 2001: “Bush on Monday said he will nominate John H. Marburger III to direct the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a post that has been vacant for five months. Marburger, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., will be the president’s chief adviser in science and technology if the Senate confirms the nomination, officials said.” Marburger has come in for plenty of criticism for the way he ran Brookhaven.

Nanotechnology may have few practical applications at this stage, and clearly requires massive investment. But it obviously has unlimited potential (of course, we shall probably hear more about its grotesque applications, as with cloning). However, unraveling its true significance in a system which throws out more in the way of new developments in science and new inventions in technology than it adopts cannot be seen from a distance. It would not, then, be surprising to find that it is linked in with the heavily armaments-oriented overall strategy that is already evident from Bush’s posture. In contrast, we have Nikola Tesla’s position:

If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever desired, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers and provide motive power in unlimited amounts. This would be the most efficient way of harnessing the sun to the uses of man......” (Nikola Tesla, June 1919 )

Nikola Tesla, 1893