Promoted by Steven D. You guys know TarheelDem and how brilliant are his comments. He has stepped up big time to help out Martin, and this is a great piece, an essay that should be in a national publication, in my opinion. Yes it is long, but please do yourself and the site a favor and read this post, and leave a comment. I shortened the original title a little to make sure the comments would post. Thank-you. Steve
Regardless of the outcome of the US election, any elections in Europe, Australia, New Zealand–or even India, Pakistan, and China, the Washington consensus and neoliberal capitalism prevail as the current imagination of the global economy. Global climate change is occurring with zero response from the people who have the power and resources that could mitigate or even reverse this fossil-fuel-caused climate trend. Indeed spending the natural savings accout of environmental services, natural materials (non-renewable and renewable), and fossil fuels seems to be accelerated in one vast binge of “Drill, baby, drill. Mine, baby, mine. Burn, baby, burn.” consumption constrained only by the lower consumer demand that results from the mass impoverishment of ordinary people around the world. Privatization of infrastructure continues to be the policy direction of US Democrats and Republicans, European conservatives, social democrats, and socialists and global institutions are being rigged to force the privatization of health care systems, transportation systems, water systems, sanitation systems, education systems, and even income security systems in every country of the world. Whether pending international agreements to lock this system down are signed, ratified and implemented, these agreements — Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA), and redundant systems of interlocking bilateral free trade agreements — a lot of their provisions will be the operating assumptions of the world’s finance ministers and governments. Clearly the emphasis is to continue to shortchange public infrastructure maintenance and privatize the infrastructure assets.
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At the same time, citizens of the world’s countries are subsidizing $1.8 trillion (with a “T”) in military spending. At best, military spending is a waste of natural and human resources justified by potential failures of political processes. At worst, military spending is the active destructions of massive amounts of infrastructure and the polluting of environments with unexploded ordnance, industrial chemicals, land mines, anti-personnel mines, nuclear waste, and potential biological hazards.
And the means of social control and suppression of investigation and dissent are growing in every country, but most alarming in the English-speaking countries that long expressed pride in the English Magna Carta, various bills of rights, and, until recently, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Australia has recently passed an draconian surveillance and journalist prosecution law. In the US, the quaint Espionage Act of 1917 has been used to prosecute those who leak classified information that the the Obama administration does not want leaked (through instant declassification) and now also journalists who report that leaked information in a responsible manner to the public. The US National Security Agency of the US Department of Defense intends to collect all information on everyone, including US citizens, the US Bill of Rights notwithstanding. The US Constitution has been replaced with 225 years of court precedents that in some sense stand the intent of that document on its head, privileging corporate institutions over individuals and enshrining money as a form of speech. And in country after country, police forces that previously have not been militarized now are. And in the United States there are now more firearms in circulation than there are people in the population even as the local police forces in the US increase the deadliness of their SWAT tactics and militarize their equipment. And in the United States the Department of Homeland Security has created coordination among law enforcement agencies in a way that mimics the national police forces of many totalitarian nations. And has built a police culture of impunity and prejudice that provides a uniform means of suppression of dissent and of minority populations almost without regard to where in the United States you go. Even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has followed this trend.
Protest now that isn’t ignored is violently suppressed while the commercial media and also the public media threatened with privatization ignore or malign the protesters who are treated violently by the authorities. The poster child for this phenomenon is the trial of Cecily McMillan. And of course, there is no longer redress in most courts. The police forces, the media, the court system are all part of the infrastructure.
Here is the etymology of infrastructure just for reference:
Infrastructure
1. An underlying base or foundation especially for an organization or system
2.The basic facilities, services and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society
It reportedly dates from military uses in the 1890s, appropriated by economists and bureaucrats during the 20th century for stuff like communications and transportation systems.
And here is the ancient root of the word wealth that is combined in the word commonwealth to designate the society-wide sphere of activity.
weal
“well-being,” from Old English wela “wealth,” in late Old English also “welfare, well-being,” from West Germanic *welon-, from PIE root *wel- (2) “to wish, will” (see will (v.)). Related to well (adv.).
The word conflates contemporary ideas of well-being (economic, social, cultural) and will (political, cultural).
My argument hereafter is that infrastructure is exactly and precisely what people in the 17th and 18th century understood by commonwealth and embraced what people in the early 19th century meant by internal improvements. And until Karl Marx (or was that Friedrich Hayek) came along they were seen as normal functions of government. But no longer in the 21st century. Even the Democratic President of the United States prefers the private before the commonwealth as do most Democrats in Congress. Even the Canadian Parliament, the UK Parliament, and the French President from the Socialist Party no less are on the same page as the disciples of Hayek — because all of their central banks are.
Ordinary people are increasingly shut out of the institutions that might secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So what to do?
First and individual inventory of one’s powers and limitations. People differ in their capacity for processing information, the current buzzword is attention bandwidth. They differ in stamina, commonly called energy. They differ in the size, scope, diversity, and influence of their social networks. What an individual does is an autonomous personal decision that it will be hard for people around them not to second-guess. Resisting the temptation to second-guess other people’s decisions is probably the best first thing to do. It’s the people who show up, not the ones who don’t that you can work along with. And the crap has gone on for so long that the temptation not to show up is still very strong. One does what one can. Then network and act. The group that intends an activity or action carries it through; it either works or it doesn’t. Then that group of a different network of people carries out another activity. It’s pretty commonplace really. Not the sort of thing to get those romantic revolutionary feelings reminiscent of 1789 or 1848 really going. When the state is smashing itself through privatization, it’s time to move on to something different.
The revolution is this very humbling task: Create the commonwealth for a global population scheduled to reach 11 billion by 2100 and do everything possible to see that every human being has the possibility of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness within it. There are governance and culture and resources tasks within that, but the topic of this post is infrastructure, especially what needs to happens to cushion against the potential risk of the imminent collapse of the current system of global transnational capitalism and US military dominance. This generation doesn’t have to accomplish the entire revolution, just the first steps.
Like saying clearly what exactly it is that constitutes the world turned upside down. Before the triumph of the 99% over their 1% masters, there is a more fundamental turning upside down. That is the perspective that we do not dominate the earth; it allows us to exist despite our follies. The planetary ecosystem accomplishes much of the services and provides all of the materials for human existence that we need to understand so as not to interrupt its functioning. And act to restore its functioning where it has been interrupted. The longest term process is the rock cycle, in which surface rocks are dragged into the mantle through subduction zones, remelted and extruded out as reprocessed minerals and rocks in the spreading of rift valley ridges. I used to think that this process was over such a long term and so large in scale that human activity couldn’t possible ever interrupt this grandest of garbage services — old rocks for new. Some folks need to investigate this from the perspective of what possibly could go wrong, especially what sorts of human engineering could dramatically screw this up.
Then there’s the water and sediment cycle. Water evaporates and forms clouds that get saturated to the point that rain falls and over time washes mineral crystals out by dissolving more soluble rocks. Over many evaporation cycles, those dissolved minerals and suspended less soluble minerals scour the rocks they run downstream over and eventually settle out as sediment sand, silts, and clays. Those sedimentary rocks in turn become rocks over which water flows, dissolving them back into the mineral suspensions and solutions. Here is where the manmade environment has created large problems from erosion and siltation of strreams. Building projects that mitigate the effects of impervious surfaces and reducing the amount of impervious surfaces restores the better functioning of this part of the infrastructure. Involved in this is restoration of wetlands, well-though-out dam removal, and recycling and reprocessing of already mined materials.
Then there is the web of soil, plant, and animal life — those things popularly thought of as the ecology, the biosphere. Topsoil loss is epidemic in the world. Cultivation of plants whose sole function is the replace deep layers of topsoil if replicable in enough places is a revolutionary act. Reading narratives of travel and discovery often strikes one with how much the past 500 years of human action and global capitalism have destroyed and how fast the destruction is now moving. There is Kansas; there is Syria; there is Haiti; there is Angola. There is an immense amount of work to be done here. There is an immense amount yet to learn. There is a huge body of literature that can inform these efforts that has not yet been properly indexed and made available for rapid search. There are likely old books not yet scanned, and thus widely available, that could provide historical descriptions and insights about local ecologies. And then there is the development of best practices of mitigation tailored for each local area.
Then there is the huge network of human society with its mental maps of social organization and cultural expectations and symbols, and its activities making things, processing information, providing services, communicating, and coordinating. That it is an emergent activity of human life is evident from the failure of all attempts to design it or bring it under the control of a logical system. It fails to function when there is physical disorder, enforced idleness, epidemic ignorance, addictive behaviors, and interpersonal dysfunction. This is the area of infrastructure most a risk from the current rush to privatization; under privatization, the functions to deal with preserving the social network just completely disappear for everyone. What is required to support this network of interaction is not completely understood; there are many tasks in developing that understanding. Here are some examples of where some edge thinking is: functional medicine, which integrates conventional clinical practice with nutrition, exercise, deep understanding of biochemical physiology, yoga, acupuncture, and meditation to provide a state of health; the social creation of addictive behaviors; compilation of effective self-management practices to get tasks done; conflict negotiation; facilitation of deliberative processes so as not to bias the process; self-directed education; post-factory public education; reimagining work so that unemployment is no longer possible as a category. This list can run on an on. There are a large number of people working on many different innovative ways to deal with the issues here.
The next level is the technosphere, those global networks of human technology that we typically think of as being the entire infrastructure. Proceeding from the oldest technology to the most recent, there are plant identification and foraging practices and sharing, animal hunting and fishing practices and tools, agricultural systems, water transportation systems, water systems, transportation routes and networks, communication networks, sanitation systems, mechanical power systems, electric power systems, energy generation and production systems, electric communication systems, air transportation systems, electronic communications systems, data processing systems, information processing systems, data sharing networks, information sharing networks, global interoperative intercommunicating networks, archival storage networks, business support networks, education support networks, health care support networks. Of course, currently these networks include surveillance networks and digitial ownership rights management facilities.
That is an overview of what must be preserved, appropriated, or created over the next couple of decades and certainly on a scale to be able to support 11 billion people and a preserved biosphere both by the end of the century. That’s quite an 80-year transformation.
Here’s the part that gets at the revolution required. There will be no business or government budgets to do the real work of what needs to be done. None nationally in much of any nation. None at regional, provincial, or state levels. None at local levels. The balanced budget cult will ensure that.
One has to go out and just do it. If that thought doesn’t give you vertigo, it should because you’re missing the hugely difficult job ahead of all of us one way or the other. There are no political adults coming to save us. Of any party, nationality, or ideology. None. Ponder that a good while.
What’s say we just get to work. And then post of what seems to work.
Oh, yes, a few of us no doubt will find that keeping the current political system on life-support long enough to provide a chance of survival is their task. That’s their decision. It probably needs to be done. But there is too much sucking away of alternatives that we all have to watch carefully what is going on.
This is not a technocratic solution. It is in fact a band-aid to buy time to discover the action that delivers us from the political and economic cul-de-sac of warmaking and impoverishment that we find ourselve in. I have left out a huge amount–for example, the fact that our universities are now so corrupt that they are of little help as institutions in creating the alternatives. There are a whole new set of institutions that are required to transcend the current set of Westphalian governments interlinked through global institutions, trans-national corporations and their vendor and client vassals, hierarchical religions traditions of increasing fundamentalism, a corporate mediasphere. and the all-too-visible global university that serves all of them. I have no clue at all what these new economic, political, and cultural institutions might be except that all three involve grassroots participation that forms the basis of a more balanced and less exclusively economic social life.