Nowtopian

I’ve been a bit less attentive to the many crises analyses whipping around lately, partly because I was travelling, and partly because I get tired of reading the same old things… But here’s a few pieces from near and far that I think help move the discussion to a better place. First off, if you haven’t come upon it already, my friends from Midnight Notes have released a new pamphlet called Promissory Notes (pdf). Then, I found an excerpt from “Money and the Crisis of Civilization” by Charles Eisenstein and thought it a good contribution to a deeper critique of the economistic categories that the crises discussions usually get mired in (found it in the surprisingly politically sophisticated but New Age journal HopeDance which I was given by Lois Arkin at LA Ecovillage). Another old pal, Paul Mattick Jr., has written an excellent 4-part series on the economic crisis from a fairly traditional Marxist point of view, but in saying that, it has to be said that he’s far removed from the “overproduction” arguments that you hear from a lot of self-styled Marxists. And delightfully, he ends with this refreshing prose:

Will people instead turn their attention to bettering their own conditions of life in the concrete, immediate ways an unraveling economy will require? Will newly homeless millions look at newly foreclosed, empty houses, unsaleable consumer goods, and stockpiled government foodstuffs and see a way to sustain life? No doubt, as in the past, Americans will demand that industry or government provide them with jobs, but as such demands come up against economic limits, perhaps it will also occur to people that the factories, offices, farms, and other workplaces will still exist, even if they cannot be run profitably, and can be set into motion to produce goods that people need. Even if there are not enough jobs” paid employment, working for business or the state” there is work aplenty to be done if people organize production and distribution for themselves, outside the constraints of the business economy.

When the financial shit hit the fan last fall, everyone with access to the media, from the President to left-wing commentators like Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, agreed that it was necessary to save the banks with infusions of government cash lest the whole economy collapse. But, aside from the fact that the economy is collapsing anyway, the opposite is closer to the truth: if the whole financial system fell away, and money ceased to be the power source turning the wheels of production, the whole productive apparatus of society” machines, raw materials, and above all working people” would still be there, along with the human needs it can be made to serve. The fewer years of suffering and confusion it takes for people to figure this out, the better.

We also had a couple of very exciting Shaping San Francisco Talks in the last two Wednesdays (scroll down to Global Commons/Global Enclosures on Apr. 22, and Transition City: Permacultural Transformation on Apr. 29). So there’s a bunch of good links, but my favorite recent discovery is the piece by Franco Berardi “Bifo” that I linked to last post.  I’m going to excerpt it a bunch below, connecting it to some arguments I’ve been making in Nowtopia:

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