Rodrigo Nunes and Ben Trott examine Félix Guattari’s trip to Brazil in the early 1980s, and the way he analysed the transformations taking place at the time, asking: how can they resonate with the experiences of today?

[Read this as a PDF here (recommended)]

Introduction

The rise of a new political generation at the turn of the century put a swagger in the step of people doing ‘movement politics’. The resurgence of the global left had essentially taken place outside political parties and institutions, sometimes openly against them. There was not only a tremendous optimism about the possibility for change, but a similar conviction that this time it was not going to be a top-down affair.

In 2001 the world’s only existent superpower changed gears in its foreign policy. The new, unilateral political landscape provided a temporary solution for the management of what seemed like a global crisis of systemic legitimacy. It sent ripples across much of the globe, signifying a severe cramping of the space in which movements had been thriving. They became squeezed between growing criminalisation, a clampdown on civil liberties and a militarisation which left them up against a degree of force they could not match. Across much of Europe and Australasia, this translated as a macro-political shift to the right. It was the same process, but with inverted signs, that took place in Latin America. The quagmire effect of the ‘war on terror’ on a US administration, which would otherwise have been far more ‘interventionist’ in the region, helped create the conditions in which popular opposition to neoliberalism translated into victories for the institutional left. Desires and demands of diverse movements became inscribed in legislation and policy experiments, and new room for manoeuvre was opened. At the same time, in various cases, movements found themselves in a ‘lesser evil’ double bind whereby governments banked on unconditional support as a way of ‘keeping out the right wing’, even when making highly unpopular decisions.

This alone should be enough to demonstrate that the relations between movement and institution are too complex to be posed in ideological terms. If one pole is automatically ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’, or one side ‘real’ politics and the other only its ‘fantasm’, one misses the most important, and essentially practical, point: both are real, and relate to each other in real ways; and however much those doing ‘movement’ politics may wish to ignore it, the field of possibilities open to them is always affected by institutions. Conversely, however much institutional politics may cover it up under the narratives of governmental ‘decisions’, the acts of ‘great leaders’ are always conditioned by the field of constantly transformed social relations in which movements, well, move.

Today’s conjuncture suggests a real possibility that the political sequence opened by 9/11 may be coming to an end with the twilight of neo-conservatism in the US. Much of this hope for change has been invested in Barack Obama, a charismatic figure onto whom the symbols of ‘young outsider’, ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘multicultural background’ have been projected.

To be sure, he hardly represents radical transformative politics. His record is that of a left-of-centre Democrat. Even if one takes his pledge for ‘change we can believe in’ at face value, there are obvious limits to what he promises (and generally to what can be done within the constraints of the Washington beltway). Yet the reactions he has stirred, and the meanings with which he has been invested, suggest the possibility of a transformation in sensibility, a change in the way ‘politics’ is seen and related to. Most importantly, this implies a potential which is not necessarily limited to its object, nor entirely eliminated by the probable disappointment which will follow an equally probable victory.

Yes, of course we’ve seen this film before: (1) change is promised; (2) a lot is banked on the promise; (3) the promise is betrayed, or left partly unfulfilled. But isn’t just falling back on the comfortable, age-old narrative, that institutional politics always betrays transformation, simply stating the obvious, disguised as world-weary experience? Moreover, it precisely avoids asking what movements can/should do in a space that is opened up, for however short a moment. It is a way of dodging the practical problems of political work, similar to saying that revolutions are not desirable because they always fail or turn out bad.

In an interview, Gilles Deleuze once ridiculed those who had ‘discovered’ that revolutions turn out bad: revolutions always fall short of their stated objectives, not to mention the desires invested in them. But a revolution must be distinguished from a becoming-revolutionary: the moment when people undergo a radical transformation as a result of their increased, shared capacity to shape the world in which they live. This is not exhausted by the failure to achieve any particular goal, and can go beyond any betrayal.

It is, of course, too early to speak of what the situation opened by an Obama presidency might or might not be. Instead, we’d like to reopen a discussion on the interplay between movements and institutions, desires and demands, practices and policies, micro- and macro-politics by looking at a different historical moment. In the early 1980s, at the end of two decades of military dictatorship, Félix Guattari travelled to Brazil on the invitation of fellow psychoanalyst and cultural critic, Suely Rolnik, who wanted to expose him to the boiling culture of changes – in racial, gender, political and personal relations – taking place. They organised a series of meetings, interviews and talks across the country, debating those changes with people who were directly engaged in producing them. Some of these were edited and reworked by Rolnik into a book, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, only now made available in English, and from which we have taken the following extracts.

Part of Guattari’s interest lay in seeing how micropolitical changes in sensibility and subjectivity could find support in a focal point provided by the charismatic figure of an outsider relayed by the mass media – Lula – and be given a certain consistency through the formation of the young Workers’ Party (PT). Of course, both Lula and the PT finally won the elections in 2002, and it didn’t take long for cries of ‘betrayal’ to ring out. Soon after electoral victory, one of Lula’s aides, Frei Betto, explained, “We are in government but not in power. Power today is global, the power of big companies, the power of financial capital.” But to merely repeat the narrative of betrayal is to miss what is really important in what has happened, is still happening, and will always happen again in the future: the relations between global, non- or para-State powers and what can be achieved in the framework of the nation-State; and the dynamics between movements and institutions, or micro- and macro-politics. Once an open field of concrete relations is reduced to an empty division between ‘good’ (movements) and ‘bad’ (institutions), it is this complexity – which is always unique to each case – that is entirely erased.

Sonia Goldfeder: In your view, how does the participation of minority groups in a process of social mutation take place? Should they be coopted by society as a whole, or should they remain apart in order to maintain their difference?

Guattari: It’s necessary to distinguish two levels of reality. Firstly, the level of present reality, in which minority groups are marginalized— their ideas and their way of life are repressed and rejected. Secondly, the level of another reality, where there is a linking up of the left, and where these groups are taken into account, listened to, and have some weight in society. Homosexual groups, for example, obtain new legislation, or groups of psychiatrized people question current methods. All this forms part of a normal, traditional logic of power relations, pressure groups, and so on. Does this mean a cooptation of everything that’s dissident in the movement? That’s the kind of thing I can’t answer. Will Lula’s PT coopt the whole dissident movement that can be seen in part of its grassroots support? I hope not. I only know that among the final points of the PT program there’s one that speaks specifically about “respect for autonomy.” This kind of affirmation in a political program is extraordinary. I’ve never seen it anywhere.

To reject this attempt because of a fear of cooptation isn’t justified in the name of an incapacity to completely express our desire in the situation, in the name of a mythical ethics of autonomy, in the name of the cult of spontaneity. This is an attempt of great importance (…).

Question: Don’t you think it’s a bit over-optimistic to consider that this kind of good faith by the parties in relation to autonomy is possible?

Guattari: There’s always the risk that the parties will crush the minorities. It’s not a matter of optimism or pessimism, but of a fundamental, definitive questioning about all the systems of party, union, group, and sectarian group involved in the course of a liberation struggle. There’s nothing that provides an a priori guarantee that they won’t again transmit the dominant models in this field. Not their program, nor the good faith of their leaders, nor even their practical, concrete commitment to minorities. So what might intervene to prevent this kind of “entropy” (a term that I don’t much like, but I’ll use it) in this field? Precisely the establishment of devices (which we can call whatever we like—analytic devices, devices of molecular revolution, of singularization, and so on), devices on the scale of the individual or the group, or even broader combinations, which would make us raise the issue of the collective formations of desire.

Luiz Swartz: I would like to make an observation. It seems to me that the great paradox in your whole explanation lies in the question of the coexistence of parties with autonomous movements. In your first statement you said that certain kinds of struggle should be routed through that kind of organization, the parties. And that another kind of struggle takes place autonomously. And now you’ve put the question in terms of the party being an instrument that has to be used at a certain point, and not used again afterwards. It seems to me that there’s something very important here: perhaps there’s an incorrect evaluation of the strength of the party. The party, in my opinion, doesn’t lend itself to being used as an instrument, because it eventually acquires a bureaucratized, disciplinary dynamic of its own that practically prevents the continuity of these molecular struggles.

Guattari: I think the treatment of these issues calls for great prudence, because history shows us that this kind of view can have disastrous consequences. First of all, I would like you to understand that I’m not saying that the PT is the eighth wonder of the world (…). I know that there are many problems precisely in relation to the articulation of these minorities with a certain relatively traditional conception of organization. I also know that a trace of what I would call “leaderism” is being established, leaderism that is embodied in the media, and that triggers off a whole series of mechanisms, precisely in the field of collective subjectivity. This, of course, always introduces a certain risk of reification of subjective processes. However, when all is said and done, I believe that even so, there is great novelty, great experimentation, in what is being done here in the PT. It’s not my place to give lessons on revolution, for the good reason that, in my view, there are no possible lessons in this field. Nevertheless, there is at least one thing that I think Europe can try to transmit: the experience of our failures.

In France, after 1968, there was an intense movement of waves of molecular revolution on all levels (…). But the problem was that none of those modes of action was able to pass to another level of struggle. The only link with that other level of struggle, the struggle of other sectors of the population, continued to be the old systems of sectarian groups, the old party and union systems. What happened was that the nonintellectuals who took part in those movements became intellectuals of a kind during the experiments. So there was a gradual agglutination of those nonintellectuals—some militant immigrants, for example, who, by the very nature of the movement, eventually became isolated from the rest of the immigrant population. (…) The problem with this kind of experiment does not have to do with the establishment of an intensive contact between intellectuals and a particular group. But if those groups are actually isolated from all the other social movements, if there is an absence of essential links, they eventually lead to processes of specialization and degeneration. It’s like a kind of wave ceaselessly breaking on itself.

What I think is important in Brazil, therefore, is the fact that the question of an organization capable of confronting political and social issues on a large scale is not going to be raised after some great movement of emancipation of minorities and sensibilities, because it’s being raised now, at the same time. It is clear that it isn’t a question of creating some kind of collective union in defense of the marginal, a common program, or some kind of reductive unifying front. That would be utterly stupid, because it certainly isn’t a question of the minorities and marginal groups making an agreement or adopting the same program, the same theory, or the same attitudes.

That would take us back to the old mass movement conceptions of the socialists and the communists. It’s not a question of adopting a programmatic logic, but a “situational logic.” On the other hand, it also doesn’t mean that tendencies seeking to affirm their singularity should abandon machines such as that of the PT. If that happened, gradually we would find only one kind of singularity in the PT: that of the “hard line” professional militants (…). That’s where the problem lies. Of course, I’m not trying to outline a philosophy of this issue. But it seems to me that it’s necessary to invent a means that allows the coexistence of these two dimensions. Not just a practical means, a means of real intervention in the field, but also a new kind of sensibility, a new kind of reasoning, a new kind of theory.

Néstor Perlongher: I think that not enough importance is being given here to the problem of political statements, in the following sense: the big problem of the connection of these small micropoliticalmovements (…) is the statement with which those micropolitical movements are articulated. If this is true, I think that the power of those declarations is being underestimated. The conventional guy, whether he’s a worker or not, becomes totally unglued when a pretty, intellectual fag appears, speaking on behalf of the PT. A guy like that isn’t going to connect with this kind of statement. (…) So what I ask is: up to what point are we from the micropolitical, minority, molecular movements going to defend these archaic statements like democratic censorship, or the reduction of the idea of revolution to a modification of the economy, which leads, as has been seen, to overexploitation and superdictatorship?

Guattari: I don’t suppose you’re going to prepare a notebook of complaints for Lula, asking him for proof that he has an accurate conception of what the fate of homosexuals, blacks, women, the psychiatrized, and so on is going to be. What Lula has to be asked is to contribute to the overthrow of all molar stratifications as they exist now. As for everything else, each person has to assume his responsibilities in the position he’s assembled socially. I don’t think that Lula is the “Father of the Oppressed,” or the “Father of the Poor,” but I do think that he’s performing a fundamental role in the media, and that’s essential at this point in the electoral campaign. He’s the vehicle of an extremely important vector of dynamics in the current situation, such as the well-known power that he has to mobilize people who are totally apolitical. In this respect, Lula is not identifiable with the PT. The role that Lula is performing in the media is very important, because nowadays one can’t consider the struggles at all the levels without considering this factor of the production of subjectivity by the media.

Suely Rolnik: I’ve been thinking about how the book should deal with the considerable space that the discussions about the PT took up during the trip. Perhaps it isn’t appropriate to reproduce the “electoral campaign” facet, for the simple reason that it’s no longer a topical issue. But at the same time, it could be important to do so as long as it’s in a way that reveals, and even emphasizes, what in my view was central in your investment in the PT: not to focus on the PT itself, as something sacred, but on the kind of device that the PT represented at that time. A device that made possible the expression of issues concerning formations of desire in the social field; and, above all, a device that made possible the articulation of that plane of reality with the plane of the struggles that require broad social and political agglutinations. I would even say that the agglutination of these two planes was the leading figure in your campaign for the PT. What was unusual about your position was precisely the fact that you called attention to the need and possibility for that articulation to take place. And throughout the trip you never stopped recalling the fact that, recently, this tendency to downplay the broader social struggles has caused damage at least as serious as the disregard for the problematics related to desire.

In addition to having made it possible to highlight this kind of issue, the discussions about the campaign also helped us to tune in to the frequency of a completely deterritorialized official political voice in the voice of Lula (a kind of free radio station, but with the peculiarity of broadcasting directly from within the official media). Those discussions also helped to make it possible to see, in the PT at that time, a collective assemblage that was drawing the political scene outside its traditional domain. In short, a “war machine.” But now things are different. In addition to the fact that we are no longer in the electoral campaign, there’s no guarantee that the PT still is and is still going to be that device, which makes the presence of this element in the book questionable, at least with that emphasis. That’s why I was saying that it would only be interesting to preserve it in order to share the understanding that the existence of this kind of device is essential in order to make the processes of singularization less vulnerable. Therefore it’s necessary to be sensitive to its emergence in a great variety of social fields—not only in political parties, of course, and not only in the PT.

Guattari: It seems to me important that the problems of the organization and the constitution of a new kind of machine for struggle should be concealed as little as possible. Even as a failure—which, after all, may not be the case—it seems to me that the experience of the PT is primordial. How can we make the new components of subjectivity emerge on a national scale (in terms of the media)? What is important here is not the result, but the emergence of the problematics. There is no scope for futurology; history will decide. There are two possibilities: either the PT will be completely contaminated by the virus of sectarianism, in which case each autonomous component will “make tracks,” and the PT can go to hell; or else the process that seems to be being triggered off in some places will tend to neutralize these sectarian-style components, and it may even happen, according to Lula’s hypothesis, that, depending on the strength of the movements, those components may eventually dissolve. Everything will depend on the local circumstances and the usefulness or not of the instrument of the PT. If all this goes “down the drain,” if the PT becomes another PMDB and Lula becomes a leader of heaven knows what, then that’s it, it’s over. It would only mean that the consistency of the process didn’t take hold in this kind of assemblage, and that the struggles of molecular revolution will continue through other paths.

If we insist on dealing with the problems of a political practice from a classical viewpoint—a tendency, a group, or a method of organization versus autonomous groups that do not want to know about leaders, or to articulate themselves—we shall find ourselves in a total impasse, because we shall be revolving around an eternal debate that sets modes of apprehension of the domain of centralism against “spontaneism” or anarchism, considered as sources of generosity and creativity, but also of disorder, incapable of leading to true transformations. It does not seem to me that the opposition is this—between a supremely efficient, centralized, functional device on the one hand, and autonomy on the other.

The dimension of organization is not on the same plane as the issue of autonomy. The issue of autonomy belongs to the domain of what I would call a “function of autonomy,” a function that can be embodied effectively in feminist, ecological, homosexual, and other groups, but also—and why not?—in machines for large-scale struggle, such as the PT. Organizations such as parties or unions are also terrains for the exercise of a “function of autonomy.” Let me explain: the fact that one acts as a militant in a movement allows one to acquire a certain security and no longer feel inhibition and guilt, with the result that sometimes, without realizing it, in our actions we convey traditional models (hierarchical models, social welfare models, models that give primacy to a certain kind of knowledge, professional training, etc.). That is one of the lessons of the 1960s, a period when, even in supposedly liberating actions, old clichés were unconsciously reproduced. And it is an important aspect for consideration, because conservative conceptions are utterly unsuitable for developing processes of emancipation.

The question, therefore, is not whether we should organize or not, but whether or not we are reproducing the modes of dominant subjectivation in any of our daily activities, including militancy in organizations. It is in these terms that the “function of autonomy” must be considered. It is expressed on a micropolitical level, which has nothing to do with anarchy, or with democratic centralism. Micropolitics has to do with the possibility that social assemblages may take the productions of subjectivity in capitalism into consideration, problematics that are generally set aside in the militant movement.

In my view, it is necessary to try to construct a new kind of representation, something that I call a new cartography. It is not just about a simple coexistence of centralized apparatuses and processes of singularization, because, at the end of the day, the Leninists always had the very same discourse: on one side the Party, the Central Committee, and the Politburo, and on the other, the mass organizations, where everyone does his own little job, everyone cultivates his garden. And between them are the “transmission belts”: a hierarchy of tasks, a hierarchy of instruments of struggle, and, in fact, an order of priority that always leads to manipulation and control of the struggles of molecular revolution by the central apparatuses.

The construction of machines for struggle, war machines, which we need in order to overthrow the situations of capitalism and imperialism, cannot have only political and social objectives that form part of a program embodied by certain leaders and representatives. The function of autonomy is not that of a simple degree of tolerance in order to sweeten centralism with a pinch of autonomy. Its function is what will make it possible to capture all impulses of desire and all intelligences, not in order to make them converge on a single arborescent central point, but to place them in a huge rhizome that will traverse all social problematics, both at a local or regional level and at a national or international level.

Explainers

‘Lula’ and the Workers’ Party (PT): The Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) was founded in 1980 by workers and intellectuals. Luiz Inácio da Silva (Lula), leader of the metal worker strikes of the late 1970s, was one of the founders and is currently President of Brazil, elected in 2002 and again in 2006.

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PMDB: From 1965 to 1979, the military enforced a two-party system in Brazil, where the MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement) gathered all the politicians who opposed the regime (and who hadn’t been persecuted or had their political rights suspended). This made it into a strange amalgam of forces ranging from regional oligarchs to liberals and infiltrated leftwing elements. When a plural political system was reintroduced, many of these forces broke away and formed their own parties – many PT founders were MDB members at some point. The newly named PMDB stayed the largest Brazilian party, but without any politics of its own: a hugely contradictory, often corrupt, loose association of interests that uses its size to negotiate with each government. It is part of Lula’s parliamentary base. From 1965 to 1979, the military enforced a two-party system in Brazil, where the MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement) gathered all the politicians who opposed the regime (and who had not been persecuted or had their political rights suspended). This made it into a strange amalgam of forces ranging from regional oligarchs to liberals and infiltrated leftwing elements. When a plural political system was reintroduced, many of these forces broke away and formed their own parties. Many PT founders were MDB members at some point. The newly-named PMDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party) remained the largest Brazilian party, but without any politics of its own: a hugely contradictory, often corrupt, loose association of interests that uses its size to negotiate with each government. It is part of Lula’s parliamentary base.

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The arborescent and rhizomatic: ‘Arborescent’ means tree-like and describes centralised and hierarchical structures, where the only connections between the various parts that make up the whole pass through its single core. In botany, ‘rhizomes’ are horizontal roots systems, usually underground. They do not have a centre and tend to be characterised by numerous transversal connections. They are not static. Yet these are two tendencies that can be distinguished in thought rather than completely opposite realities: arborescent structures contain and can become rhizomes, and vice-versa. The text you are reading is probably best read rhizomatically. There is no single clear argument, beginning or end, but rather a distribution of connected thoughts and questions to be taken up and deployed in different contexts. The coloured lines (not shown here) connecting words, sentences and segments of text only illustrate a small number of some of the most obvious connections.

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Micropolitics: For Guattari and his long-term collaborator, Gilles Deleuze, with whom he wrote Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, ‘desires’ (productive, living, material flows) are always in excess of any stable system in which they can be articulated (the state, capital, but also a social or political group). Micro-politics largely refers to this excess, to the fact that there are always new connections, flows, and desires that take place. ‘Micro’ and ‘macro’ is not a matter of scale, but of levels – the first has to do with transformations in sensibility and ways of relating, the second with conscious positions, demands, open struggles. This does not mean that a ‘micro’ transformation cannot happen to a large number of people – for instance, in the way in which a figure in the mass media can serve as a relay for subjective transformations to communicate with each other.

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Molar and molecular: In chemistry, a ‘mole’ is the name given to a (large) unit of molecules dissolved in a solution. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ form a paired concept: not exactly opposites, connected yet distinct, whose use is ‘dependent on a system of reference’ (whether an object is seen from its ‘closed’ or ‘open’ side) and scale (the cell is molecular in relation to the organism, the organism is molecular in relation to the social group etc.). To the extent that it refers to larger aggregates, the political meaning of molar tends to be associated with the level of governance, the state, political parties, but also social movements, policies, demands: what is extensive and can be measured. The molecular generally refers to the micro-political level, to processes which take place below the level of perception, in ‘affects’ (impersonal sensations which transform a body’s capacity to act and be acted upon). To think of politics as composed of both molar and molecular transformations, and of the two levels as distinguishable by right but not distinct or separate in fact, provides a model for thinking the complexity of relations through which political movement and struggle takes place.

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Minority: ‘Minority’ can be understood in reference to the molar/molecular distinction. Whilst ‘major’ is taken to represent a relatively fixed, stable, perceptible and measurable mode of being, the ‘minor’ is what is potentially capable of unsettling it, being open to movements of becoming that open the major to new compositions and make deterritorialisations possible.

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War machine: The [nomadic] ‘war machine’ has nothing to do with the military-industrial-complex. It is opposed to the ‘State machine’ as exteriority is opposed to interiority. The latter always works by incorporating what is outside it, putting it to work. The former is a positive (non-antagonistic), productive, restless movement that, while always creating the territories where it gathers some temporary consistency, is always going beyond the sedentarism (stillness) and centralisation that characterise the State.

The extracts reprinted here are taken from Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik (2008) Molecular Revolution in Brazil (Semiotext(e)). Alongside several of his essays, the book contains interviews and talks given by Guattari, recomposed and edited by Rolnik.

The extracts published here were selected by Rodrigo Nunes and Ben Trott who also wrote the Introduction and accompanying explanatory texts. Both are editors of Turbulence. Rodrigo Nunes revised the translation of the English language edition of Molecular Revolution in Brazil. editors@turbulence.org.uk

Suely Rolnik is a cultural critic, curator, psychoanalyst and professor at the Universidade Católica de São Paulo, where she conducts a transdisciplinary doctoral program on contemporary subjectivity, and at the Programme of Independent Studies of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona.

Félix Guattari was a French activist, psychoanalyst and philosopher, with a long-term involvement in the experimental La Borde clinic, institutional analysis, and different movements. Best known for his collaborative works with Gilles Deleuze, particularly Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, he also authored books such as Chaosmosis and The Three Ecologies.

We can only ever think the future in the conditions of the present. And one of the most powerful myths is always that the present is the natural order of things: ‘It has always been like this, and it always will be.’ Ten years ago, against that closure of the future, a multiplicity of movements arose which claimed that other worlds were indeed possible. It went by a multitude of names: the ‘movement of movements’, alter-globalisation, anti-globalisation, the anti-capitalist movement. We knew it by the names of the cities where, in flashes, it would become most visible – Seattle, Chiang Mai, Genoa, Porto Alegre, Cancun.

Looking back today, it’s hard to avoid two simultaneous impressions: success and failure. On the one hand, the movement of movements, compared to those days, appears a spent force; yet the situation it opposed has changed. The faint outlines of a victory? The door of history is open – or at least more open than it appeared ten years ago. Things that were necessary articles of faith have been discredited even in the eyes of their proponents. Political freedom goes hand-in-hand with free markets? The invisible hand of the free market, unburdened by regulation, knows best? Utter rubbish. In the words of the UK government’s Chief Economist, Nicholas Stern, climate change is “the biggest market failure in history”. Lawrence Summers, former US-Treasury Secretary and World Bank Chief Economist publicly defects from neoliberalism when he argues that “what is good for the global economy and its business champions” isn’t necessarily good for workers. Of course, it’s easy to overstate the point. The door of history wasn’t forced open only by ‘the movements’ – not unless we re-define ‘the movements’ to include millions who’ve never heard of Seattle or Chiang Mai or Genoa. But this much is clear: the liberal-democratic-free-market-capitalist future that was the only flavour on offer at the turn of the century has gone out of fashion in 2008, and the futures paraded before us all look rather different.

We see a few stifled yawns: yet another crisis and the end, if not of capitalism, then at least of its latest manifestation – bored now! Anti-capitalists are renowned for seeing every little downturn as the precursor of complete economic meltdown. And of course, CAPITALISM IN CRISIS! is the perennial headline of choice in left-wing newspapers the world over. We’ve all been there. Exactly a decade ago, two of us sat with a stack of envelopes and sent letters with precisely that title to hundreds of the world’s social movements, in the hope of finding more people to shut down the summits of the WTO, the G8, the IMF etc. So maybe it is hard for us to say this with any credibility. But this time it’s different. Honest. Back then, the crisis was an emerging one, and it had more to do with the growing perceived illegitimacy of neoliberalism than with anything more ‘material’.

OK, don’t take it from us. Read the Financial Times, Economist or Wall Street Journal. Every day there are articles asking what is to come now that the ‘American Century’ has ended, now that food prices can’t be kept in check, climate change rolls on, the world’s financial architecture seizes up, oil production finally has peaked… It is ironic that, while on the left it seems impossible to conjure up an image of revolution – a rupture with the past and the end of capitalism – the FT imagine it all the time. If it happens, it’s the end of their readership’s power; so they’re keen to discuss what to do about it. Or take the new Shell report,Energy Scenarios to 2050. They state boldly that the era of Thatcher’s ‘There is No Alternative’-doctrine is over. Now the choice is a “scramble” for resources and some nightmarish Hobbesian war of all against all, or “blueprints”. That’s right, “blueprints”: some sort of organised supra-national planning. Meanwhile on the left, we only seem able to imagine the end of the world as Mad Max-style mayhem arising from our fashionable new friend ‘eco-collapse’.

PRESENT TENSE

The food crisis. The climate crisis. The oil price crisis. The Iraq crisis. The financial crisis. Crises are nothing new. We should know: we’ve cried wolf before. Back in 1997, in the midst of the Asian financial crisis, when millions of people were thrown out of work, governments fell and South America teetered on the brink of joining the crash-fest, some of us were excited. It was tempting to see those millions out of work, the race-to-the-bottom wage reductions, as bringing us closer to rupture, to radical change. But far from heralding capitalism’s downfall, these crises are in fact precisely what capital needs to constantly revolutionise itself and the world around it. So why think that now is different? Why think this is a turning point, and not simply another turn of the screw of capital’s waves of creative destruction? Are we not all Schumpeterians now?

Joseph Schumpeter was an economist who popularised the term ‘creative destruction’ to describe the regular revolutionising of economic and regulatory structures and institutions needed to ensure new ‘long waves’ of economic growth. Crises were seen as a helpful way of sweeping away the old and creating room for the new. In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein outlines the way economic crises, natural disasters, and military conflicts have been transformed into moments of creative destruction by neoliberalism over the past 30 years. Turning disaster into an opportunity seems to have become so much a part of neoliberal ‘common sense’ as to be comparable with US President Nixon’s 1971 assertion that – when it came to government intervention into the economy in order to stimulate growth – “We are all Keynesians now”.

The answer lies not in pathological optimism, but in the possibility of crisis management – or its impossibility, as it were. We can look at this from two perspectives. First, that of capital’s activity. Crises aren’t necessarily productive for capital, nor do they necessarily increase states’ power. They have to bemanaged to have those effects. One crisis – say, the surging oil price – is relatively easy to handle. Two can still be manageable. But five or six major crises occurring at the same time? Of course, it’s not only about numbers, because any amount of crises would be manageable if they all had the same cause or proximate causes: the solution to one would probably also solve or at least contribute to solving another. But in this case, the various crises have multiple causes that are apparently independent of each other. More importantly, the most obvious solutions to any one crisis may exacerbate one of the others to a point of unmanageability.

Take the food price crisis. This year, food riots occurred in big cities in 37 countries: arguably a speedier and more widespread revolt than anything pulled off by the movement of ’68 or the ‘movement of movements’. People in a quarter of the world’s countries said ‘enough is enough’ in a matter of weeks. A couple of governments fell; many gave rare concessions to the poor. There was panic on the first class deck, and an emergency global summit in Rome was called in June.

Then there’s the climate crisis, caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, most of which come from the burning of fossil fuels. And then there’s the oil price crisis, caused by our inability to kick our oil habit, rapidly rising demand in ‘emerging’ economies, chronic underinvestment in the oil industries of most oil-producing countries, and perhaps a growing belief that global oil production has peaked. And then there’s the financial crisis, caused by… You catch the drift.

But something very important is lost if we only look from the point of view of what capital has done to produce this situation, and what capital will do to manage it. Crises don’t just ‘happen’ all by themselves; they are also the outcome of struggles that are ongoing and constantly spilling over boundaries and borders. Sometimes these pit different capitalists’ interests against one another – for example, the OPEC countries against the world’s leading economies. But the desires and actions of people too are constantly reshaping the field of play. The food crisis isn’t just the by-product of neoliberalism’s attack on any reproduction independent of the market: growing demand in developing countries is also the result of long-term pressures for increases in real wages and wealth redistribution policies. If we simply dismiss this process as the way capital reduces the risk of large-scale uprising (by ‘buying us off’), then we end up playing the old teleology game, at the expense of other people’s lives – ‘hang in there, comrades, just one more sacrifice for the revolution!’. More importantly we ignore the fact that transformations such as access to education and basic needs also create new bases for struggle. One of the factors in the rapid spread of the food riots is the fact that since some point last year, for the first time in history the majority of the world’s population now live in urban areas, and access to means of communication allows tactical information and agitation to travel much more quickly. It’s the same with the oil crisis, where rising prices are also due to the victories of struggles in oil-producing regions as far apart as Venezuela and the Niger delta. More fundamentally, in an oil-dependent world, oil is used to do the work that workers have successfully refused: machines that are driven by oil get introduced only when labour power becomes too expensive.

In this respect, we don’t have to choose between either mourning the death of the mythical proletariat as unitary world-subject, or giving up on it and accepting that the only force of transformation in the world is the aggregate of capital’s decisions. It’s not a question of whether we can act in the face of these crises: people have always acted, and are always acting, in ways that change the world. The real problem is this: how is it possible to act on a global scale in ways that can take advantages of conjunctures like the one we have now?

FUTURE CONDITIONAL

Back to the view from the top: let’s imagine it’s your job to sort this mess out. Let’s start with high oil prices and energy security – crucial in a world where economic ‘development’ has so far been linked to access to fossil fuels. Many of the world’s governments are getting interested in the production of agrofuels, one of the very few ‘renewable’ energies that is pretty much a straight swap for oil. The problem? Growing more crops for agro-fuels would almost certainly exacerbate the food price crisis, and thus cause more of those food riots that governments would rather avoid. So what are you going to do? Annex an oil-producing country? Easier said than done: Iraq has proven that even the largest military power can become overstretched. And it doesn’t deal with climate change, which must be managed because extreme weather events interfere with production, and voters expect you do to something about it. Solving climate change? Cut back on fossil fuel use. Not really, as that would mean less economic ‘development’. More renewable energy. But what about the food riots? Ignore climate change and adapt. What about a sudden spread of infectious diseases in the wake of major flooding? This is complex stuff.

Crisis management in an overly complex and open situation becomes very difficult, and that difficulty is obvious when listening in on the conversations of global elites. Which is where we return to the beginning: it seems that the power of those who control the present has unravelled to such an extent that the future once again appears unwritten, probably in a way that it hasn’t been since the 1970s. There really are plenty of similarities: then, too, a phase of capitalist development was drawing to an end (Fordism/Keynesianism then, neoliberalism now); US hegemony was being challenged (by Germany and Japan then, by China and India now), while the country fought a neo-colonial war it couldn’t win (Vietnam/Iraq); the dollar was weak, financial systems were in crisis, stagnation and inflation were setting in, oil prices had some nasty shocks in store.

More importantly, the present seems to be a point in which various historical series are crossing each other. And they’re doing so in ways that could make them diverge in new directions. First and foremost, the series set in motion during the 1970s, where various crises – of public debt, the oil price boom, and a high level of working class organisation – overlapped and brought a ‘solution’ that involved financialisation, deregulation, the rolling back of social guarantees, and an internalisation of all risk by individuals (i.e. ‘globalisation’) appears to be coming to and end. The new wave of regulations introduced by the US Federal Reserve, along with the cries that the credit crisis is a result of ‘the free market gone too free’, would appear to point in this direction. What’s more, this seems to be happening at a moment when the decades of effort to put climate change on the agenda appear to have borne fruit; whilst the series of world events opened by 9/11 – and which had a tremendous impact in holding down the cycle of struggles begun in the 1990s – seems to be drawing to a close.

With this in mind we’ve assembled a collection of articles that, in different ways, speak to us about futures. As much as we didn’t want people’s ten-point programmes when, in June 2007 we asked ‘What would it mean to win?’, our interest here has nothing to do with futurology. There are no grand predictions in what follows. No imminent victory, because comfort-zone wishful thinking is the last thing anyone needs now; but no apocalyptic doom either. Neither are there any forward-view mirrors where capitalism recuperates everything and always gets the last laugh. We must have the modesty to recognise that the future is unknown, not because today is the end of everything or the beginning of everything else, but because today is where we are. What we do, what is done to us, and what we do with what is done to us, are what decide the way the dice will fall. This requires the patient and attentive work of identifying openings, directions, tendencies, potentials, possibilities – all of which are things that amount to nothing if not acted upon – and of finding out new ways in which to think about the future.

Turbulence, July 2008

So who is this aimed at?

The short answer is: anyone wanting to think about how to change the world. That is, potentially everybody. But doing so isn’t straightforward. This isn’t a collection of lowest common denominator writings aimed at some abstract ‘public’ whose common sense we can second-guess. Even if we could, we’d much rather undermine it. To go through the experience of thinking differently – in a different way or from a different perspective – creates new possibilities. And perspectives aren’t different takes on a same thing, but each one a world in itself. Likewise, words aren’t different ‘clothes’ for one object, but can create their own objects. So thinking differently involves engaging with ideas that seem alien because they go against some of our assumptions about the world, or come from within contexts we are unfamiliar with. Some of the writing here might seem difficult or abstract – we have tried to contextualise pieces and explain technical jargon – but each article is open to anyone prepared to make the effort of reading it. Reading is a two-way violence: a text can change us to the extent that we are willing to appropriate it to our own ends. It’s the same wager as love: if you jump in, you won’t come back to the same point (and may regret it, or be disappointed); but if you don’t jump in, how can you know what you’re missing?

Science Fiction’s Double Feature

Sci-fi movies, books and comics tend to have two common features. First of all, they all tell us much more about the present than what is to come. That which is fantastically projected into the future reflects what appears to be just beyond our current scientific limits. The Matrixtrilogy – where hacker Neo finds himself up against a simulated reality, governed over by intelligent machines which feed on the energy of humanity – could only have been created in the 1990s, in the context of the rise of both Virtual Reality and internet technology.

Second, it is precisely this first feature which allows sci-fi to demonstrate how our ‘situated-ness’ – our present lived realities and immediate histories – determines the kinds of utopias and dystopias we are able to imagine.

But maybe there is an exception: The role monsters, like Frankenstein’s, often play in sci-fi is generally less determined by the present than, for instance, the technologies used to create or destroy them. They imply a potential for, or at least fascination with the idea of, transformation. They defy easy categorisation: they’re often part-human, and tend to be embroiled in a process of becoming less so. They are the aspect of science fiction which can help open our imaginations to possibilities of becoming, rather than limit them to what seems possible from within the matrix of the present. They are an antidote to the idea of humanity as a ‘species-being’ whose essence is static; and a nod towards the idea of flight-lines out of this world.

Where does the future start?

What we take to be the present is made up of the apparent repetition of ordinary, regular points. In fact we become so accustomed to these regularities that we lose sight of the subtle differences that occur in their actual repetition. Octavia Raitt’s Today drawings, done at the rate of one a day for 143 days, are a beautiful portrayal of the difference that occurs in the repetition of ordinary points. She shows that finding the singular in the ordinary is a matter of selection. But every singular point means a break from what is ordinary, an opening up of possibility. In order to stop the future being erased by the present, we need to exploit this potential for singular points to change the rules of the game.

Turbulence is a journal/newspaper that we hope will become an ongoing space in which to think through, debate and articulate the political, social, economic and cultural theories of our movements, as well as the networks of diverse practices and alternatives that surround them.

We don’t want Turbulence to become yet another journal or yet another edited collection claiming to offer a ‘snapshot of the movement’. Instead we want to carve out a space where we can carry out difficult debates and investigations into the political realities of our time – engaging the real differences in vision, analysis and strategy that exist among our movements.

David Harvie, Keir Milburn, Tadzio Mueller, Rodrigo Nunes, Michal Osterweil, Kay Summer, Ben Trott, David Watts

editors@turbulence.org.uk www.turbulence.org.uk myspace.com/turbulence_ideas4movement

All articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike licence. You are free to share or remix as long as you attribute it to Turbulence and the author; you may not use this work for commercial purposes; you may only distribute under the same conditions. More details from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

All artwork and images are published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives licence. If you copy, distribute and transmit artwork, you must credit the work to the artist. You may not use this artwork for commercial purposes, and you may not alter, transform, or build upon this artwork. More details fromhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ 

Front & back artwork by Kristyna Baczynski

geek.chic@hotmail.co.uk

‘Today’ cartoons by Octavia Raitt

tavesho@googlemail.com

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Pundits are describing the global ‘credit crunch’ as potentially the worst crisis to befall capitalism since the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. We doubt the value of such comparisons, but there is no doubt we need to make sense of the origins, nature and meaning of the current financial crisis. Most important, we need to grasp its potential and its dangers for us. Here we print two analyses. In the first, Christian Frings suggests that not only was neo-liberal ‘financialisation’ a response to struggle, but that its crisis is now opening up new possibilities for movements. In the second (below), David Harvie argues that finance plays a role that goes to the heart of competitive calculation, accumulation and class struggle; the present crisis is thus a crisis of both measure and capital.

- Turbulence

“International financial markets have developed into a monster that must be put back in its place”

– Horst Köhler, German President and former head of the IMF

The numbers associated with finance are mind-boggling. The entire value of annual global output changes hands in just six days’ trading on the world’s financial markets! Sometimes – like now, in the midst of the ‘global credit crisis’ – finance seems to get out of control. The voices of those – such as Horst Köhler or, from the Left, Walden Bello – denouncing finance and calling for its regulation rise to a crescendo.

Is all of this financial activity merely ’speculative’? Is it a symptom of capital’s flight from ‘a stagnant real economy’, that is, from ‘production’ where it has to struggle with living labour to extract surplus value? Certainly much financial-market activity is speculative in that traders are taking risks in the hope of making a profit. But all capitalist activity is speculative in this sense. There’s nothing more speculative than throwing money into production – that is, purchasing means of production, including labour-power – and then trying to make the breathing, struggling, desiring human bearers of this labour-power work hard enough to make you a profit.

Speculation isn’t the whole story, though. In fact arguing whether financial markets are primarily about ’speculation’, or whether they are ’stabilising’ or ‘destabilising’, easily falls into the trap of implying that investment in the ‘real economy’ – the accumulation of alienated labour in factories, fields, call centres and schools – is somehow more ‘ethical’. This sort of critique of finance also misses its most important function, which goes to the heart of capital accumulation, competition, class and the class struggle.

The financial markets, and in particular those arcane instruments known as ‘derivatives’, are all aboutmeasure, measuring the production of value, measuring capital accumulation. Financial derivatives allow all the different ‘bits’ of capital (across time, across space and across sectors) to be priced against – orcommensurated with – each other. Derivatives even turn the very contingent nature of value – its contestability – into a tradeable commodity.

The ‘performance’ of different assets – that is the ‘performance’ of its associated ‘bit’ of capital, including the workers exploited by that bit of capital – can be measured by its rate of return. And thus each asset, if it is to survive, must deliver a competitive rate of return. Each must meet or beat the market ‘norm’. Financial investors, speculators – call them what you will – do not care whether they trade cocoa futures, the Argentinian peso or some index linked to the FTSE100. They seek simply the greatest return (taking risk into account). And so, by their trading actions, the ‘performance’ of those ‘top’ 100 companies is compared to the ‘performance’ of the entire Argentinian economy (if that economy is ’strong’ the peso will rise in value) and to cocoa farmers everywhere. The implications for workers across the planet are clear. Our‘performance’ is being measured. The performance of a Detroit car-worker can be compared not only with that of his neighbour on the production line, or even with her counterpart in Alabama or South Korea, but with garment workers in Morocco, programmers in Bangalore and cleaners on the London Underground. Competition is intensified, as is class struggle.

Which brings us to the present crisis. At the heart of the crisis lay ’subprime’ borrowers and so-called Collateralised Debt Obligations or CDOs, another type of derivative instrument linked to these borrowers’ mortgages. Not only is our access to housing dependent upon capitalist exchange. Not only has our struggle to keep a roof over our heads become a profit-making opportunity for investors. Our ‘performance’ as debtors is measured by the global financial market and is yoked to that market, and through it to the performance of all other ‘assets’ – the programmers and the cleaners, the farmers and the garment workers. In short, we become – in our reproductive activity as well as our waged work – subjects of competitive calculation.

Those who invested in mortgage-backed CDOs clearly believed that those borrowers, ’subprime’ and otherwise, and the US economy in general, would ‘perform’. In other words, that US householders and workers would perform their assigned role in competitive calculation. Of course, a small proportion of borrowers would not ‘perform’, but these risks had all been taken into account in CDOs’ ‘risk-and-return profiles’. Risks had been calculated and priced. In the event, many more borrowers failed to perform and, as the defaults spread, the financial system in its entirety was threatened.

At one level this crisis is a crisis about needs versus profits. Our needs for housing versus those of investors – or capital – for a rate of return. It’s a crisis that, like all crises, reveals how our access to social wealth, such as housing, is rationed by money. Just look at the growing ‘tent cities’ – American shanties – whilst houses made of timber, bricks and mortar stand empty as a result of foreclosure.

But the present crisis is also a crisis of measure. Investors mispriced risk, they miscalculated. Bankers are now talking about market ‘corrections’. What’s interesting about this crisis is not so much that financial institutions have lost a lot of money – so far $300 billion has been ‘written down’ – but that, almost a year on, they still don’t know exactly how much. Through the duration of the crisis, financial markets have failed to measure value and thus to commensurate capital. Capital – for it to be capital – must be commensurated. If ‘bits’ of capital cannot be measured and entered onto a balance sheet as so many dollars or euros, then they’re just so many barrels of Brent crude or such-and-such a number of tonnes of coffee: their status as capital is threatened. Thus a crisis of the measure of value is a crisis of value, and of capital itself.

Part of our politics must take the form of resistance to competitive calculation. The holders of sub-prime loans showed this potential negatively: the capacity of a (generally black) working class in the US triggering crisis by refusing to perform the role assigned them and the calculation implied. The challenge is to work out how to frame this power positively.

Subprime borrowers are those with ‘poor credit histories’, individuals with no secure income or assets, who may have defaulted on loans in the past. In short, the precarious!

Derivative instruments are financial assets or securities whose value derives, in principle at least, from the price of some underlying commodity, asset or set of assets. A future, for example, is a firm commitment to exchange a certain commodity or asset at an agreed price at some point in the future; an option is similar, but gives its holder the right to buy or sell, but with no obligation to do so. With swaps, the two parties exchange income streams or debt repayment commitments, e.g. a variable-interest rate loan denominated in yen is swapped for a fixed-interest rate payment in dollars. In practice, prices tend to be established in derivatives markets first, and the price of the underlying asset or commodity is derived from these. So the price a Guatemalan coffee farmer receives for her crop is actually set by traders on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) – occupied during 1999’s Carnival Against Capital. Derivatives may be linked to commodities (coffee, cocoa, pork bellies, oil and so on), shares or share indexes (such as the FTSE100), interest rates, currencies… There are now even derivatives based on the weather and, for a few a months, there existed a ‘Policy Analysis Market’, which allowed trading on coups d’état, assassinations and terrorist attacks.

The word mortgage has its roots in Norman French; literally it means ‘death grip’.

In the 1970s, another decade of escalating oil prices, Western banks ‘recycled’ petrodollars to many ‘Third World’ governments in the form of loans (at variable interest rates). Whole economies were thus exposed to the measure and discipline of international financial markets. The real meaning of discipline became apparent in the course of the international debt crisis of the 1980s and the various financial crises throughout the 1990s and the first decade of this century.

Credit has its origin in the Latin word credere, ‘to believe’.

David Harvie is a member of The Free Association and an editor of Turbulence.

‘Food riots’ in response to huge food price hikes have hit numerous countries around the world this year. George Caffentzis explores the current food crisis, its causes and implications.

Food prices are rising so much and so fast that millions are now on the verge of starvation. Between May 2007 and May 2008, corn prices increased by 46%, wheat prices by 80%, and soybeans by 72%; while rice increased by 75% in 2008 over its average 2007 price.

People in many cities throughout the world have responded to the explosion of staple food prices in the last few months by demanding that their national governments reduce them immediately. From Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Cairo, Egypt, the demonstrations often turned into riots, shutting down these cities for days. Millions are now calculating that unless they obstruct the ‘normal’ circuit of capitalist reproduction by taking to the streets they will face starvation.

Indeed, the scenes from these places are no less dramatic in the suffering and anguish they suggest than those coming from Burma after the cyclone. The price hikes themselves have taken on the character of a natural disaster. They are treated by many commentators as a sort of ‘perfect storm,’ to use the deceptive jargon of our day. According to Steve Hamm, a Business Week journalist, a multiplicity of unrelated factors from the drought in Australia, to the “richer diets” in China and India, to “the soaring cost of oil” and “the increased use of corn for ethanol” have come together to make food unaffordable for a substantial part of the world’s population.

This explanation, however, is far from convincing. It does not explain why these millions of people are exposed to international markets and hence at risk from the ‘perfect storm’. The apparently unrelated factors listed by Hamm would not lead to widespread starvation if people were not dependent on world grain markets in a way that they were not a few decades ago.

In reality, the latest grain price hikes are the last act in a long process that started in the mid-1980s with the implementation in much of the world of the World Bank’s and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), whose first task was to privatise agricultural lands and totally commodify food production and distribution.

If we look at the policies that governments across the world, but especially in the South, were forced to adopt in the name of the ‘debt crisis’ or ‘economic development’ we see that each of the recommended policies was geared to raise people’s dependence on the world market for access to food:

• government subsidies for agricultural inputs (from fertilisers to seeds) were eliminated, as were price control and marketing boards;

• land privatisation was instituted with drives to titling and registration;

• large amounts of acreage were removed from local food production and devoted to mining, oil extraction, or the production non-edible or export crops;

• most important, violating a long tradition, the World Bank and IMF insisted that governments in the South dismantle their food reserves and put them on the market, arguing they were no longer needed in a global economy.

Not surprisingly, countries that in the past had always been self-sufficient as far as food production was concerned were by the end of the millennium net food importers. A good example of this dynamic is the case of Mexico and corn. Millions of corn-growing peasant farmers have been driven from their ejidos(inalienable land held in common or by families) over the last decade due to their inability to compete with US corn exported to Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a model neoliberal trade treaty. As a result, Mexicans are now dependent on corn imports from the US for the provision of their basic staple food at a moment when corn prices are soaring.

Once this history is understood, no one can see the price hikes as in any way caused by a surprising conjuncture of unrelated factors. For the crucial question to be posed both logically and politically is: Why is it that billions of people are now dependent on an international grain market that literally condemns them to death? For if they were not so dependent, then the storm in the international grain exchanges, however perfect, would have passed by without hurting many. Far from being natural, this dependence has been constructed step-by-step, policy-by-policy despite a long series of oppositional demonstrations, general strikes, and rebellions throughout the world, and the criticism of anti-globalisation scholars.

Capitalist planners’ obstinate attachment to this strategy is not hard to decipher, for it is at the heart of the neoliberal agenda that strives to:

• establish international capital’s ever tighter control of all natural resources, especially staple food stocks, which constitute a formidable weapon, already used throughout history to impose discipline over recalcitrant workers and reward compliant governments;

• eliminate populations not considered productive;

• reduce the real wage everywhere.

In sum, these price hikes are the dénouement of a long war on the people of the planet to eliminate the most elementary right: the right to eat to live.

This is not a new strategy discovered by geniuses like Larry Summers on H Street in Washington. In fact, as the novelist Sol Yurick writes in his forthcoming autobiography, Revenge, the biblical Joseph was the archetype for the IMF/World Bank officials of today. Joseph, as financial advisor to the Pharaoh, recognised a cycle of seven “good years” and seven “lean years.” He cornered the market by hoarding the grain in the good years and was able to use the stored grain in the lean years both to sell at an exorbitant price and to buy the peasants’ land cheaply in the face of their imminent starvation. What is important to note about this story is that Joseph and the Pharaoh were not ‘middlemen’ interested in the money they made in selling the hoarded grain; they were using their control of grain to enslave Egyptian workers and to appropriate their land.

What is to be done to prevent a repetition of this ancient tale? Across the world people are rioting in desperation, as they often did in response to the introduction of SAPs. The pace of these riots and rebellions will increase, since for most people the affordability of food is a question of life and death. These uprisings might bring some restraint in the grain markets and cause governments to bend the neoliberal rules by providing more subsidies.

However, a reversal of the trend towards increasing dependence of people on the world grain market for accessing their staple food will require the strengthening of the already existing long-term international movement of both farmers and city dwellers committed to restoring land to the people producing food for their localities. The hunger generated by the food price hikes on the world market, which was meant to breed docility, will give this movement a tremendous impetus.

George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective and co-editor of Midnight Oil: Work Energy War 1973-1992 and Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War.