Capitalism

Earth At Risk, sponsored by Fertile Ground Institute in November 2014, featured many of today’s most important activists and thinkers in environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, radical feminism, and anti-racism. With keynote speakers Derrick Jensen, Alice Walker, Vandana Shiva, Chris Hedges, and Thomas Linzey; plus multiple panels, the event was full of insightful and inspiring discussions. Besides Derrick Jensen, Deep Green Resistance members Saba Malik, Kourtney Mitchell and Doug Zachary spoke on panels; and Dominique Christina performed two sets of her award winning slam poetry. ...

Lierre Keith / Excerpt from Chapter 4, “Culture of Resistance,” of Deep Green Resistance The triumph of the pornographers is a victory of power over justice, cruelty over empathy, and profits over human rights. I could make that statement about Walmart or McDonalds and progressives would eagerly agree. We all understand that Walmart destroys local economies, a relentless impoverishing of communities across the US that is now almost complete. It also depends on near-slave conditions for workers in China to produce the mountains of cheap crap that Walmart sells. And ultimately the endless growth model of capitalism is destroying the world. Nobody on the left claims that the cheap crap that Walmart produces equals freedom. Nobody defends Walmart by saying that the workers, American or Chinese, want to work there. Leftists understand that people do what they have to for survival, that any job is better than no job, and that minimum wage and no benefits are cause for a revolution, not a defense of those very conditions. Likewise McDonalds. No one defends what McDonalds does to animals, to the earth, to workers, to human health and human community by pointing out that the people standing over the boiling grease consented to sweat all day or that hog farmers voluntarily signed contracts that barely return a living. The issue does not turn on consent, but on the social impacts of injustice and hierarchy, on how corporations are essentially weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on the moment of individual choice will get us nowhere. ...

Book review by Daphne Francis of Deep Green Resistance I have just enjoyed reading Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? by Katrine Marcal, translated from her Swedish into English and published by Portobello books in 2015. It certainly is a change for me to find an economics book not only informative and accurate, but also highly readable and even entertaining, with at times trenchant analysis and cutting comments. Marcal is not the first to highlight the absence of care work, done mostly by women, from calculations of Gross National Product and the decisions of that fabricated entity ’economic man’. When valued at all, this work is severely undervalued. But for me she breaks new ground in stating that, if the body was taken seriously as the starting point for the economy, it would have far-reaching results. In her words “a society organised around the shared needs of human bodies would be very different from the one we know today.” ...

by Elliott Ford, Deep Green Resistance UK Whist traveling in the North Indian State of Uttrakhand, my beloved (Rachel) and I decided to visit a small village in the Himalayas called Khati, that had yet to receive a connection to the national electric grid. We hoped to get a brief insight into existence of a people that hadn’t become ‘developed’ and at the same time take in some beautiful views of the Himalayan range. I also thought this would be an appropriate time to start a book I’d been meaning to read called Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge which describes the effects of ‘development’ of the Ladakhi people in the 1980’s. ...

Chris Hedges spoke last weekend at the State of Extraction conference at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. While most speakers focused exclusively on natural “resources” ripped from the planet, Hedges brilliantly linked this environmental devastation with the social impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism on our most vulnerable populations. He challenged the narcissism, individualism, and identity politics that have come to dominate modern culture, including most of the left. He identified as especially insidious the widespread acceptance of prostitution and pornography: no other subjugation is so widely rationalized and dismissed as these abuses of women. Even in so-called progressive and radical circles, sexualized violence and racism are fiercely defended where no one would try to justify such violations in any other circumstances. ...

One of the ironies of contemporary politics is the identification of poor whites with the Republican party, even more opposed to working class interests than the Democrat party. Taken to the extreme by the Tea Party, this cooptation takes energy which might challenge the capitalist class structure and redirects it against other poor and working class people who have different skin color. Dave Strano has worked for years against this counter-productive racism, in Kansas and Missouri as part of the John Brown Gun Club distributing anti-racist literature at gun shows, and more recently in Colorado as Redneck Revolt. In an excellent interview, Strano points out how the left, even the radical community, often practices classism subtle and overt, leaving a large segment of potential allies as easy recruits for racist elements of the conservative movement. He describes organizing within this culture to restore traditional values of opposition to exploitation: ...

The following is from Bud Nye, A Deep Green Resistance supporter in Washington State: \\\___________ After reading Pandora’s Seed, Why the Hunter-Gatherer Holds the Key to Our Survival (2007), by Spencer Wells, here are some of my thoughts: Early in the book I sensed a technotopian slant. Sure enough, as I read more it became clear that, like so many technological utopian people today, Wells seems seriously to believe that we can steal energy from Earth’s ecosystems at the scale of our fossil fuel use without massively damaging those living systems with their billions of living beings. ...

July 6th, 2011 “As Indigenous women living on occupied territories now known as Canada, who have survived over 500 years of attempted genocide, we declare: 1. We, Indigenous women, will not allow anyone or anything to break the ties that bind us. Despite the impacts of colonialism - the racism, sexism, poverty and violence that pervade our lives and communities, working to divide us both inside and out - we are profoundly aware of our connectedness to each other as women, to our ancestors, and to our lands. No man, men, or external force will ever ultimately sever these ties. ...