Requiem for Howard Zinn

The recent death of Howard Zinn is a tragedy, and leaves a great loss — a vacuum, even — amongst those who work towards peace and a better world.

But to say this is not enough. It is not enough to applaud his  pioneering intellectual work in history and historiography. It is not enough to praise his courage, intellectual and physical, against both vicious establishment academics and menacing police batons. It is not enough to admire his modesty, humour, good nature and kindness. It is not enough to celebrate his virtue while living deeply among the worst moral filth of the world — namely, those destroyers of worlds whose legacy is whitewashed and handed down to children and to future generations as heroes with great names like Reagan, Clinton, Shultz, Rice, and Bush.

In short, it is not enough to say that Zinn was a great man for the obvious reasons. More is required. Zinn was a great man, but he was a great man of a special type. He was a great man of the type that plants the seeds for the renewal of the world. I do not mean this only in a philosophical or quasi-spiritual sense. I mean it in a concrete institutional sense.

Zinn waded through the most obscene filth on an everyday basis, both  as a professional historian and an activist for social justice. True, Zinn was not at a campus like present-day Stanford, where the mass murderers were actually physically present; but he wrote about it, talked about it, unceasingly for decades; he lived within it. He was a friend to Daniel Ellsberg and Daniel Berrigan, people whose proximity to that filth, and action in the face of it, led them to face the full force of the repressive State. He worked tirelessly within this cesspool — all the obscenities and mendacity of great power, the jackboots with the fallout of a nuclear winter, the unerring brutality which killed and still kills the hope of the world.

Great power, in destroying these brief glimpses of humanity — and especially the US State since it rose to great power status, in which it is now alone — has not only killed hope, not only crushed it with military might, ensnared it with political might, and enslaved it with financial might. It has also erased it from memory: it has erased from the memory of humanity the crushing of its hope; it has erased from the memory of humanity, indeed, the radical formulation of hope itself. It has removed from collective consciousness not only the memory of the great struggles that it mercilessly slaughtered, but the memory of struggle itself, per se. Collective memory then lives in an anaemic, amnesiac twilight, bereft of the history of its soul, a soul artificially transplanted with sanitized fairytales, distracted by superficial overconsumption and lobotomised entertainment, and led into obsession with self, wealth, popularity and vanity. Collective memory is even, perhaps, bereft of the very notion of its social soul in itself, and the solidaristic impulses only clinch insofar as the fire spontaneously erupts, or catches across hermetically sealed boundaries.

The project of power in the contemporary era — or perhaps better, the processes of powerful institutions which dominate the evolution of the contemporary world — operate by various means: diplomatic, power-political, propaganda-journalistic, economic-structural, military-terrorist-barbaric. One merely runs through a list of the less powerful nations of the world — and several of the more powerful ones — to observe a litany of destruction in the last 60 years: Italy, Greece, the Philippines, Indonesia, Guatemala, Iran, El Salvador, Honduras, the Congo, Palestine, Brazil, East Timor, Guyana, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Ghana, Haiti… there are many nations on planet Earth, and few are immune. The books all testify to the facts, which are not in dispute. The yoke of indebted economic restructuring, the bullets fired into demonstrations, the rivers of blood, the mainstream-media articles celebrating the death of hope and the rise of tyranny, the establishment-academic tracts explaining the higher worth of the State’s noble purpose — these are all real enough and are not confined to the past. But one only needs examine one’s own memory, education, and knowledge, and that of others, to notice how much of this is ever discussed, can ever be discussed. Usually, the answer is zero.

And so, the project of power has a foundation below all this. Structurally, the project of power is deeper than the instant death of proxy armies and killer robots; deeper than the grinding servitude of structural adjustment and the receiving end of “free trade”; deeper than the stenographic emollient that journalists pour upon the festering wounds of the present; deeper even than the subservience of approved academic truth that rises above the need for mere fact. Below it all is an historical project: to rewrite history. Nay better, it is an historiographic project: to rewrite what history is and how it is told, so that much of it is not told.

Of course, as with all institutional analysis, I do not say that any of this is deliberate or consciously willed by any individual person, though indeed sometimes it may be. (One need only read the diaries of CIA agents!) I say this is the outcome of the operation of systems of power. I say this is how the world has worked, and still works.

And so it is in this sense that the project of people’s history, of  unearthing the histories of struggle, of retelling the stories long forgotten by dominant classes and power structures — Howard Zinn’s project — goes to the foundation of the world. It is indeed planting the seeds for the renewal of the world, in a concrete sense. It is nothing less than an attempt for humanity to remember its own soul: its heroics, its mischief, its rebellion, its intransigence towards oppression, its occasional triumphs, and above all, its relentless tragedies. For we are not there yet: the present is merely the unfinished business of history.

* * *

Time evolves, and societies also. Different times require different  kinds of action, and people to carry them out. In various epochs of history, the most effective, most complete, most transformative person of that age would have had vastly different characteristics, traits, and values.

No doubt, in each age, the transformative woman or man must be an intellectual, although not necessarily one with a formal education: one who thinks, one who thinks critically, and one whose own mind is independent enough to hold beliefs against the current — not only as against the vicious undertow of reactionaries and conservatives of every age; not only as against the crashing waves of fomentation and the swirling eddies of the minutiae of the present; but also as against the entire prevailing currents of the time. It must be an intellect strong enough to turn those currents in the direction of progress.

To turn those currents — to be the transformative woman or man, to be complete — requires more than mere thought, discourse, and debate; there must also be some form of action. At certain times in history, perhaps, the most effective agent of social progress would have been a street fighter; in other times and places, a national leader; in other times and places again, a guerilla; and in others again, a leader of nonviolent civil disobedience. It is not for no reason that the person whom Sartre called “the most complete human being of our age” was Che. Whatever one thinks of his judgment, in the present day, in the post-industrial West at least, violence against State military and para-military power is instant death, morally, politically, strategically, tactically, institutionally, and biologically. Nonviolence is the easiest conclusion of the historic present.

But the character of the present, at least in the post-industrial West, combines with this axiom of nonviolence to demand more of its transformative agents than ever before in
history. It demands nonviolence in the face of injustice, provocation, inequality, avoidable death, justificatory doctrinal apparatus and oncoming catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. It demands optimism of the will in the face of a rational assessment of near-certain disaster. It demands knowledge and accuracy as against an a corporate and State propaganda apparatus which will ignore, and an academic establishment which will defame, debunk and ridicule the slightest of mistakes, even non-mistakes. It demands courage and hope as against a prevailing culture of apathy, materialism, and doom. And, in the age of the miniscule attention span, infantile popularity contests, and global disillusionment with vision for the future, it requires wit, humour, and panache.

The complete human being today has laid upon them all these demands. They are nigh impossible. The human being who can carry them out is infinitesimally rare.

Not everyone need carry out all these demands completely. Nor would I say that everyone needs to carry them out in order for the world to emerge from its present state of crisis with humanity intact.

But there must be people of this calibre, or all is lost.

Howard Zinn was one such person. He was a complete human being of our age.

Self-determination and Afghanistan

Self-determination is a central principle of international law.

In the case of Afghan self-determination it’s probably also useful to point out that there is a sizeable Afghan peace movement, very courageous and principled, which the antiwar movement in the US should support. Malalai Joya, one of the leaders of this movement, has to be one of the bravest women in the world, confronting warlords, living under constant death threats, but continually speaking out against war and occupation. If Afghan self-determination is to mean anything, it must include voices like hers.

If the US government is to have any policy inside Afghanistan, it should include measures to (legally!) strengthen the position of those like Joya, rather than undermine them by propping up the Afghan “government” and escalating violence. The US decision to escalate seems to have come after much deliberation as to which type of bombing, which type of killing, which military tactics will serve US interests. the deliberations seems to have included all possible voices except those who advocate withdrawal and de-escalation, including the Afghan peace movement, the majority of the US population, and (I understand) most of the Afghan population. Obama’s escalation has come precisely without considering the position of the Afghan peace movement, which is for an escalation in hospitals, schools, economic assistance, and aid.

That is, the decision to escalate is only possible because the US debate entirely excludes the voices of those on the receiving end of the policy; vastly increased levels of violence and military operations,  now similar to the height of the Soviet occupation, are only possible on the condition that self-determination be excluded as an axiom of US foreign policy, just as it is included as an axiom of international law.

Overpopulation controversies

A response to this article about overpopulation. Here follow some comments.

1. The author is racist, white separatist, ultra-anti-immigration, and heavily involved with the extreme right.

I do not use these terms lightly.

She is tied to the far-right and white-supremacist “Council of Conservative Citizens”. It’s a hate group, which has promulgated ideas of racial superiority, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and so on. In 1998 there was a big scandal that a lot of Republican party politicians in the southern US had close ties to the group. They are denounced by the mainstream right wing in the US, which in my view is extremist and radically regressive enough.

Substantial ties remain to Republican politicians. There is a good summary by the Southern Poverty Law Center here. See also here.

She is also tied to “The Occidental Quarterly”, which describes itself as “devoted to the ethnic, racial, and cultural heritage that forms the foundation of Western Civilization”. The journal is anti-immigration — except from Western nations! — and isolationist. It’s also anti-Semitic: the “Anti-Defamation League”, a Jewish organisation, has an article about it at
http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/Occidental_Observer.htm . The Anti-Defamation League itself is often quite despicable — they denounce and make life hell not only for anti-Semites, which is fine by me, but also people who criticises policies of the state of Israel, thereby protecting policies of brutal occupation and repression in occupied Palestine. But their evidence regarding this publication seems clear.

Well, a single person is not a far-right hate group or an anti-Semitic journal. But she is on the editorial advisory board of the “Citizens Informer”, their quarterly newspaper. And she is also on the editorial advisory board of “The Occidental Quarterly”. She’s on the national advisory board of the anti-immigrant group “Protect Arizona Now”. So she is hardly on the margins of these groups or an unwitting participant. She’s a willing and knowing part of all this. In fact within the anti-immigration movement she is seen as “the grand dame”.

In her own words: “I owe it to my own and others’ grandchildren to work to maintain the environmental, cultural, and social integrity of the United States, and to hold the federal government accountable for their constitutionally-mandated duty to protect this nation from invasion.” Immigration apparently endangers the nation and threatens its cultural integrity. And she denies being a white supremacist but freely describes herself as “white separatist”. See here.

So, she holds despicable views. Of course, being personally despicable and holding extreme racist and proto-fascist opinions does not disqualify you from talking about anything. She does have a PhD apparently. But this may well be relevant in evaluating what she has to say.

2. The immigration and aid stuff seems to come out of nowhere.

But it is now clear, knowing her background.

Sure, “foreign aid” and “immigration” are in the title, and the purpose of the article seems to be suggesting some government policies. But the immediate motivation for the article seems very different, at least the way it’s written: overpopulation. It’s perfectly legitimate to have a concern with overpopulation, although the author’s motivations may well be a particularly racist form of overpopulation. With this concern, we then try to understand what makes fertility rates vary, which is also perfectly legitimate. We argue that it isn’t so much prosperity/education/health/etc, again perfectly legitimately. We argue that sharp economic changes may make a difference, still legitimate. I will get to this fairly reasonable stuff in a minute.

But then we turn to aid and immigration, and the standard drops
through the floor.

The argument seems to be that foreign aid increases fertility, because it provides a sense of economic opportunity that encourages more child-bearing. That is a hypothesis, and an extremely surprising one: one hardly expects people in the poorest nations to base their family planning decisions, if they are decisions at all, on the existence or levels of foreign grants or loans. Nor would one think that the existence of emigration would affect family planning decisions, although maybe it is marginally more plausible. Either way, one would think there are many more immediate concerns. They are strange directions to take after what looks like a legitimate analysis of fertility rates. Given the author’s racist views, perhaps they are more explicable. But, nonetheless, these are hypotheses. They require some evidence to support them. So let’s consider the evidence given in turn.

(a) The argument regarding foreign aid.

How do we begin this argument? With a religious statement: “giving is a tenet of [US] foreign policy”, the secular US religion that the US is the greatest, most glorious, most generous nation in the world. I’m sure this would come as a surprise to the victims of bombing, repression, terrorism, and murderous governments supported by the US. Moreover as regards foreign aid per capita, US spending is very low among developed nations.

After religion, we turn to ideology and unsupported supposition on behalf of the developing world: luckily most aid is now in the form of loans, so that the developing world does not think we are for fools, devious, or infinitely rich. The use of aid to support murderous regimes, for geopolitical machinations, to entrap poor nations in debt obligations, to support repressive militaries and paramilitaries, and to create demand for domestic constituencies, of course go unsaid. The only point is the religion, and the ideology — we are too good for ourselves; but we shouldn’t give to them, lucky we lend.

Well, this material is ridiculous but content-free. We then adduce material that worldwide foreign aid runs to the billions, even to the level where it is $20 per capita in Africa. (I’m not sure about what the timeframe is and can’t find her source.) How does this aid affect fertility? Which countries receive more foreign aid, which less, and how do their fertility rates correlate? No evidence is given, whatsoever.

The only argument given is that “Such transfers of wealth cannot but perpetuate trust in one-world rhetoric–a belief that the community of nations can be relied upon to help, just like family. A sense of security grows… Efforts to plan for one’s own future do not thrive in this climate”. That the world consists of one planet is clearly a horrid communist plot, and obviously, feeling good about their place in a humane world free of borders, inequality and material scarcity, people in the developing world, where those properties of the world are most obvious, multiply like rabbits.

That this is seriously considered an argument — and the only argument — for the proposition that foreign aid increases fertility, speaks for itself. It beggars belief.

But it gets better. We have an argument for the converse — that the absence of foreign aid decreases fertility. Two examples are cited: Mao’s China and the Burmese junta. Clearly paradigm control cases. There could not be any other factors present, clearly; no, any difference must be attributed to the absence of foreign aid, which is clearly the defining characteristic of China and Myanmar.

As for China, somehow the absence of foreign aid as a causative factor dwarfs government repression and mandatory regulation o
f childbirth; or perhaps the absence of foreign aid was what caused the one child policy? The author’s precise reasoning is unclear, but no matter. As for Myanmar, despite the lack of information and uncertainty among professional demographers, the author claims simply to understand everything: “But it is not unclear”. Even if she is right that the cause was “lack of resources” (which seems to be her previous argument), it is not at all clear what effect foreign aid had on those resources.

So, this is astonishingly bad, and the evidence for this hypothesis is basically zero. Given the lack of evidence, one wonders why the author even wrote it. But her racist political views make it clear. One should also take note that the are also perfectly consistent with believing that the recipients of aid, usually not white, are lesser human beings; this is her view in any case.

(b) The argument regarding immigration

Thankfully, regarding immigration the author is more honest: she admits there is no evidence for the proposition. Studies are needed! She has a hypothesis, and is speculating. However, lack of an argument will not stop her arguing that to stop people multiplying we must both impoverish them and shut the door on migration.

By her own argument, fertility is caused by improving economic condition; yet, at least the sort of migration she is thinking of, economic migration from Latin America to the US, one would think, is caused by bad or deteriorating economic conditions. It is a contradiction; perhaps she can twist her way out of it somehow, but she makes no attempt and appears not to realise it.

She has some tables, apparently, of immigration and fertility rate data, but I can’t see them. Apparently in “high-immigration countries” the fertility rates are declining, although she says they are “slow to decline”. I don’t know if such a correlation exists between immigration and fertility from what she says, but even if such a correlation appears, there is no reason to believe it to be causative.

One can imagine that a cause of grinding poverty could lead to both child-bearing (to bring in income for the family, contra her hypothesis) and economic migration (to escape grinding poverty). There are a lot of figures about the scale of undocumented migration to the US. This has almost no bearing on fertility. Perhaps the only, again unsubstantiated, statements are that: overpopulation is a “push factor” for migration; and communities in Latin America dependent on remittances may rationally calculate they should have more children to risk death and deportation crossing the Arizona desert. But again, despite sounding incredible, no evidence is given, and other factors like poverty and unemployment go unmentioned, which are the obvious ones.

Again, it is worth pointing out that, however flimsy the argument, this provides an excuse for racist anti-immigration policies: policies the author supports, on explicitly racist grounds.

3. Some of it is reasonable, and surprising

Before she gets to the anti-aid and anti-immigration business, she seems to cite facts and evidence that do appear surprising, about the “demographic transition”. The essay is therefore an interesting example of how racist ideology can distort an otherwise seemingly intelligent mind.

The examples of East Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Brazil, Ireland, India, France, and others, are interesting. Surely “mainstream” demographers have considered them as well. These do seem to be counterexamples to the proposition, perhaps a mainstream one — I’m not an expert in the field — that rising wealth leads to lower fertility. Of course they do not contradict that wealthy nations today have low fertility rates, but they have important implications.

On the other hand, again these are only correlations. I am not an expert on these examples. I’m not sure how they fit into the global context.  I would want to see other work and explanations, by other studies. She does mention education, health, contraception, but does not consider other potential factors: women’s rights, role in the workplace, etc.

This stuff is interesting. The racism aside, this gives nuance to the picture of how people have babies. Humans are complicated. They make decisions for all sorts of reasons.

But this article is disappointing because it following all this it becomes so atrociously bad, and probably motivated at least partly by the author’s racism.

The slipperiness of language

I am taking a French class here since my French is so terrible. I can write French fine, thanks to google translate, and also read French fine… thanks also to google translate. (Reading or writing without an internet connection is another matter!)

For speaking French, when I know the word for what I want to say, fine also, but I don’t know the words for what I want to say about 50% of the time. This is probably worse than for most people, since I always like to express things using big words and convoluted grammar. And so I end up most of the time playing the game of expressing my stupid comments with the words I do know. But in the 50% of cases where I know how to say what I mean, people seem to understand me fine.

As for listening to other people speaking French, this is still unbelievably bad. I felt like I improved in the first week here; I can pretty well pick out the sentence structure. And maybe I can understand like 2/3 of the words in any given sentence. Just not the important ones. For any sentence of any reasonable length I’m totally lost by the end of it. Some people seem to be able to get by on this level of understanding, but this requires some intuition about humans. Not so for mathematicians.

It’s a bit different to what I thought, living with a foreign language. It’s not like incomprehension all the time, it’s not totally a matter of aimless staring of incomprehension — though I do, actually, stare aimlessly without comprehending, all the time. (It’s so terrible disappointing people, because I look like i should speak the language, I am white, male, grown-up, in an office, at a university, etc.) It’s more like, you have a vague gist of what people are talking about, you know the general concepts they are talking about, but you cannot be sure of anything at all that anybody said.

French is full of too many false cognates, too many slight variations, too many words which sound the same, too many 1- or 2-syllable words, too many non-pronounced letters. It’s a slippery, slimy, thing… maybe I understood, maybe I didn’t, what exactly did you mean by that, and I know that there is no way for you to express it more precisely without switching to english. For a mathematician especially this is extremely frustrating.

Oh well, this will improve.

Torture and hypocrisy

Accepting the “after 9/11 was extraordinary” argument for torture would then justify torture in any more dire situation — such as invasion by a foreign army or outright war. It would therefore justify torture (say) of US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, or in any war. It would make war crimes, in time of war, legal. It is a contradiction in terms.

There was a good article in the NY Times about foreign policy upholding dictators and murderers. This may sound impossible; but this restriction does not apply to the sins of others. Imagine if one could get this sort of honesty in one’s own country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world/africa/13francophone.html

“Woe to you… hypocrites that you are! You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are filled with the results of greed and self-indulgence… First clean the inside of the cup and the dish, so that the outside may become clean as well.”
– Matthew 23:25-6

Reflections on history

Given that today is the 20th anniversary of a pivotal event in history, perhaps some reflections on history are in order. But “optimism” is not the right word for it; neither is “pessimism”.

Certainly, if we emphasise the world wars, utopian thinking seems like hopeless naievete. If one is to consider what human nature is capable of, the lower bound is barely imaginable: Holocausts, pogroms, pillages, rape, torture, assassinations, massacres, genocides, and war upon war upon war — these are the fodder of history. It seems to me this is less appreciated than it should be. Among conservatives and capitalists, for instance, we often hear the argument that human nature is so bad that we cannot hope for anything else. But if they really appreciated how bad human nature can be, they would live in perpetual astonishment that we have what we have today. Those who truly understand the horrors of the human species and think they are unavoidable should not be conservative, or capitalist, but Hobbesian, monarchist, or fascist. I would agree that human institutions are established and upheld by fallible and corruptible humans — but more: by murderous, vengeful, aggressive, malicious humans.

On the other hand, the range of freedoms, level of civilization, and social development achieved today would be scarcely imaginable half a century ago — and entirely alien to society a century ago. This is not merely a statement about technology, but about attitudes and general social progress. And so on: the general position a century ago would be unimaginable a couple of centuries before that. For most of human history, any notion of governance other than absolute tyranny would be considered a naive pipe dream; any notion of individual freedom an unattainable and indulgent luxury; and any notion of social equality pure treason to the tribe, or caste, or class, or race, or nation. And more, we see a steady growth in the range of beings considered worthy, or “us”, or worth defending: from the family, or tribe, to the village, the nation or race, to the civilization, to the entire world. Of course there are exceptions — exceptions spelt out in destruction and broken lives — but I find this identifiable.

A generally positive trend of course does not imply that we are approaching utopia. One may easily note that some of the greatest advances follow the greatest catastrophes — the UN after the Holocaust and the second world war; government stabilization of the economy after the Great Depression; socialist revolutions erupting out of war; monarchies overthrown out of hunger; right back to the Persian invasion uniting the ancient Greeks and further. The next catastrophes which, on a sober analysis, seem quite likely to occur — vast global climate change and the end of oil — and those which are still highly possible, like global nuclear war — are of such an order that we barely know if the human race will come out of it with any civilization intact. If we do, I would imagine that an improved social and political order would follow; but this seems to me by no means a likely outcome.

To ask what the human race is capable of, it seems to me not a complete answer to say we are horrible. We are, but we got this far, somehow. I see no reason why we cannot go further. Moreover, it’s trite to point out how fast society changes today, and that society is changing ever more quickly. The only thing we can say about the world a decade or more from now is that it will be vastly, even unimaginably different.

At least as far as economic institutions are concerned, the general pessimism has a clearly identifiable historical cause: indeed today it is the 20th anniversary of it. The horrors of the systems and governments that claimed to be “socialist” and offer the better alternative to capitalism are well known. Their collapse means that no alternative to capitalism appears to exist. (It does, but we have to look harder.) And their (false, in my view) claim to the label of “socialist” means that even to talk about a better system than capitalism is to enter a linguistic, definitional, and substantive political minefield.

The only scientific response we can give (if one were at all possible) to the question of what social systems are compatible with human nature is that we have no idea. We know some lower bounds but have no clue as to upper bounds. It seems clear that human tendencies and potentials may or may not flourish depending upon the environment, the institutions in which they develop — we do not know how far. We can say that human nature is capable of supporting vastly morally and politically better systems than have been thought possible for most of history. Moreover we have multiple previous instances of false announcements of the “end of history”. It would be extraordinary if that were actually the case today.

Can our “collective egoism” be transcended? Of course we all hope so. But we have no idea. All we can say maybe is that the collective of the egoism does seem to be historically broadening in scope — and, probably, largely due to social movements against war and for international solidarity. In truth we have very little evidence as to how human beings would live in a democratic, participatory economy, free of the authority of the boss, of the shareholder, greed, the profit motive, the authoritarianism of property, and all the deadening and infantilizing pressures and incentives that come with a market system. Such a situation has barely ever existed. We have some evidence that it is possible, from a few isolated historical examples, usually crushed by military force at the disposal of power.

And so it does not seem that history has foreclosed on us yet. I would say there is still a light upon the hill.

But still I would say that human history is not necessarily a staircase to utopia. It does not automatically progress; on the contrary. It is made by women and men, who make choices about how they act and how they live their lives. The trajectory of a society can be changed, or perhaps, perturbed from its orbit; existing habits and institutions exercise a stranglehold over much of how people act and think. Marx seems right when he says that “Men [and Women!] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” But they must make it; it is not done for them, and it is their struggle to do so.

In the case of those seeking a better economic system, reflecting on the 20th century, and its culmination in the events of 20 years ago today, again to paraphrase Marx, the weight of history hangs like a nightmare over the brains of the living.

Of course we can only be glad at the fall of the authoritarian communist regimes. We are glad they are gone. But today, a day of capitalist triumphalism, relentlessly repeating that greed has conquered the earth, is not a day for optimism. And, on any rational analysis, optimism is hard to find. Rationally speaking, the human race usually appears (and is) headed towards disaster.

But if we do not force ourselves into an optimistic orientation, we guarantee the worst. This is Gramsci’s optimism of the will.

Looked at another way, the potentials are clear. We have the technology to avert catastrophic global warming; we just need to implement it. We have technology progressing beyond our comprehension. We have a world fed up with capitalism, and yearning for something more: everywhere we look, in mainstream thought but even in popular culture, figures of power are demons and their system is leading us to doom. The institutions of global capitalism are no more than a few decades old, they are historically young. We have increasingly unified movements to oppose them, in spite of a vast propaganda apparatus to the contrary. We need a vision of what we want to achieve in this wondrous, still-young world, and then we can go out and build it for all the world.

And
if we make it out of this century intact, who knows what we may achieve? It seems to me, therefore, imperative to ensure that we do.