Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida as a strong Category 4 storm. Ian caused a destructive 10- to 15-foot storm surge, trapping many people in the rising floodwaters across a wide geographic area. Winds rose to 155 mph, causing damage to tens of thousands of homes. Over 150 people lost their lives.
We mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.
The 2022 elections pitted the authoritarian nationalism of Jair Bolsonaro against the institutional leftism of Workers Party candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Each of these rival strategies for governance presented itself as the only possible salvation for democracy. The entire campaign was marked by acts of violence, and not just from voters: at various points, parliamentarians allied with Bolsonaro exchanged gunfire with police officers and chased opponents in the streets with guns in hand.
On October 30, the second round of the election took place to determine the president and governors, and Bolsonaro lost to former president Lula. But Lula won by only 1.8%, setting the stage for strife that will continue to divide Brazil, just as the 2020 elections in the United States did not mark the end of political polarization.
What follows was inspired by a short newspaper article on the enormous discrepancy in energy consumption and CO2 emissions between the rich and the poor, in the UK. Recalling Jonathan Swift’s brilliant essay, “A Modest Proposal” of 1729, we took it up again, in all modesty, replaced Irish infants with the wealthy of this world, and discovered that it retained all of its urgent relevance.
Extreme inequality and wealth concentration undermine the ability of humanity to stop climate breakdown. Very rich people emit huge and unsustainable amounts of carbon and have an outsized influence over our economy. Unlike with ordinary people, 50% to 70% of the emissions of the world’s richest people are the result of their investments.1 They hold extensive stakes in many of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world – large enough stakes to influence the actions taken by these corporations.
The true scale of the investment emissions of these individuals is not systematically calculated or reported. However, using new analysis based on publicly available data, Oxfam calculates that the annual carbon footprint of the investments of just 125 of the world’s richest billionaires in our sample is equivalent to the carbon emissions of France, a nation of 67 million people. This represents an average of 3.1 million tonnes per billionaire, which is over one million times higher than 2.76tonnes2 – the average for someone in the bottom 90% of humanity.
Emissions from billionaire lifestyles, including their private jets and yachts, are thousands of times the average person’s, which is itself unacceptable and unsustainable. But if we include emissions from their investments, then their carbon emissions are over a million times higher.
For preventing the rich people of this world, from being a burden on the rest of us, and for making them beneficial to the publick.
by an honourable member of Autonomies, (in memory and honour of Jonathan Swift, and with indignation)
2022
It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through a great town, or travel in a country, or through the world’s ports of call, when they see the streets, the roads, and the grand hotels, crowded with the wealthy, followed by three, four, or six shopping bags in tow, and importuning every passenger for space. These individuals, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in stroling to shop for their helpless selves who, as they grow richer, either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country, to consume in more amenable climes, or sell themselves to higher bidders.
I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious degree of consumption, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these affluent citizens sound and useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the publick, as to have their statue set up for a preserver of the nation.
I’m a fatalistic Celt, and I have the example of my mother and older sister, who died like Russian soldiers at Stalingrad. Thanks to California’s aid-in-dying law, I have control over the final act. But I guess what I think about the most is that I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined — fighting. Everybody always wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not a rational conversation. I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless.
You’ve been organizing for social change your whole life. How do you deal with a future that feels so bleak?
For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless.
I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the second world war, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages?
What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.
It would be impossible to summarise the work of Mike Davis, and there are no doubt those who could do it far better than us. Partly inspired and indebted to the work of Karl Marx, he never fell to the illusion of fetishizing his writings, and this both in his own written work and in his political engagements.
The range of Davis’ writings is impressive, but perhaps no domain was more central to his concerns than the city. In his memory and as a testimonial to his presence, we share below the important essay, “Who will build the ark?”, published in the New Left Review (No. 61, January-February 2010).
There aren’t two sorts of mind. There is inequality in the manifestations of intelligence, according to the greater or lesser energy communicated to the intelligence by the will for discovering and combining new relations; but there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacity. Emancipation is becoming conscious of this equality of nature. This is what opens the way to all adventure in the land of knowledge. It is a matter of daring to be adventurous, and not whether one learns more or less well or more or less quickly.
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster
Jacques Rancière reflects on May 1968 and neoliberalism in order to contextualise his work criticising the Althusserian distinction between science and ideology, as well as to shed light on how his own philosophy developed in relation to those of Althusser, Bourdieu, and Foucault.
This is one of a number of interviews conducted Jun Fujita Hirose et Yoshiyuki Sato around the “critique of the school in post-68 French thought”, for the online site: Laboratoire d’analyse critique des modernités. (see here)
Three of these interviews have been translated into English by David Fernbach and published at the Verso Books blog. We share below Fernbach’s translation of the interview with Rancière.
When we began to write this “Manifesto”, it was to compliment an earlier exercise in manifesto writing – A moss-like anarchist manifesto – and to continue the sceptical exercise of distilling images and concepts from parallel reflections that have served as inspiration for our own, in this case, Bruno Latour’s essay, After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis.
Midway through the writing, we learned of Latour’s death, and the exercise became as much a celebration of his work as well as a manifesto. Latour’s own body of work is extensive and we make no pretence to summarising it here, much less critically evaluating it. For those wishing to explore it, beyond our own modest efforts, can watch a recent and excellent interview with Latour made for the french-german television channel Arte and now available (in french) on YouTube and at the Artewebsite (in multiple languages), in eleven episodes.
For an overview of Latour’s work, see the recent essay “Latour’s Metamorphosis”, by Alyssa Battistoni (Sidecar/NLR 20/01/2023)
By Rafael V. Da Silva, Kauan Willian and Victor Khaled
Translated by S Nicholas Nappalos
This article was originally published by Jacobin Brasil.
Introduction
With neither Bolsonaro (Liberal Party) nor Lula(Workers’ Party)able to secure an outright majority during the October 2nd presidential election in Brazil, both advance to a run off election set to take place on October 30th.There is a great deal of anxiety and tension surrounding the electoral process in the country, which has seen extreme political polarization not dissimilar to what is taking place in the United States.
This article was written as a response to a prior piece also published in Jacobin Brasil titled “Anarchists in defense of the vote for Lula.” The previous article defended the tactical use of the vote to defeat Bolsonaro as a tool in the antifascist struggle, which is the principal theme the authors take up here.
A patchwork reflection on psychoanalysis and politics, by Amador Fernández-Savater, published in Lobo Suelto (17/09/2022).
Reading Freud is an experience of great intensity. Not only because of what he brings to light, against everything and everyone (he, a bourgeois from Vienna, as if today we were saying, in the words of my friend Beñat, “a man from San Sebastián”).
It is also intense as a reading experience. Unlike Lacan, he does not think that to be suggestive you have to be hermetic. It is very clear and at the same time inexhaustible. And all the time he indicates failure in his own words: “I do not have the answer, I have not been able to advance further, etc.” Two things come to my mind, among a thousand others.
First, have we not regressed a great deal in our understanding of the psyche? The Freudian impact was slow, but inexorable. It affected all planes of reality. Literature, philosophy, cinema, popular humour, all registered its effects: the certainty that what we see is not what happens, that what is said is not what is said, that reality is double and the subject is divided.
Today, however, subjects parade themselves everywhere without any blemish or flaw, subjects that neither know nor suspect their division. The culture of the self and the will prevails: I know what I want and if I don’t get it, it’s my fault (or that of others). The techniques of access to the unconscious are conspicuous by their absence. And what proliferate are the palliatives of a malaise that we do not know how to question or elaborate.
Second, at what point has it been possible to separate the intimate and the collective (or historical-social)? Freud certainly leaves no room for doubt: psychoanalysis serves to think about the world (how else to read his Mass Psychology, Totem and Taboo, Civilisation and Its Discontents?).
And yet, in politics the reference to the unconscious disappears (objectivism and voluntarism are everywhere). And in the clinic, the reference to the social-collective disappears and there is no thought about what the collective dimension could be – the revolutionary included – of psychoanalysis.
But Freud’s discovery is that there is no difference between the normal and the pathological and that is why the psyche can be investigated through the jokes or the slips that anyone makes; and that the reality principle itself (culture-civilisation) is neurosis inducing and highly problematic as it is established.
Can the Russian Anti-War Movement Rise to the Challenge?
On September 21, following the Ukrainian counteroffensive of early September, Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” of the Russian population to support the “special operation” that the Russian military has been carrying out in Ukraine since last February. In the following analysis, written in collaboration with Russian anarchists and including translated material from the Russian anarchist project avtonom.org, we examine the response from the Russian anti-war movement and the potential of unrest in Russian society at large.
If you are looking for ways to support anarchists organizing in Russia, consider donating to avtonom.org, arguably the chief Russian anarchist media platform.
1. Fear fills the gap between false reality and lived reality, between the fictitious economy and the fundamental economy. Governmental numbers hover like drones over the deterioration of hospitals, schools, transportation networks and established social rights.
2. Fear has become the strongest rampart of the rich against the social insurrection that threatens to eradicate them. They will go for anything that renews this fear and prolongs its duration. They conduct experiments on us, as on laboratory rats, because they are anxious to know the extent to which resignation and debasement will make us support and follow their orders.
Left Electoralism, Fascist Direct Action, and Anti-Fascist Resistance – The Brazilian Elections of 2022
From the CrimethInc. collective (06/11/2022) …
The 2022 elections pitted the authoritarian nationalism of Jair Bolsonaro against the institutional leftism of Workers Party candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Each of these rival strategies for governance presented itself as the only possible salvation for democracy. The entire campaign was marked by acts of violence, and not just from voters: at various points, parliamentarians allied with Bolsonaro exchanged gunfire with police officers and chased opponents in the streets with guns in hand.
On October 30, the second round of the election took place to determine the president and governors, and Bolsonaro lost to former president Lula. But Lula won by only 1.8%, setting the stage for strife that will continue to divide Brazil, just as the 2020 elections in the United States did not mark the end of political polarization.
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