for Van
Until you left
your body
behind
You never knew
the limping god
was not a lame god.
Now he rises
to dance
to your tune,
Orpheus
and becomes
a green light
guiding you
into the woods.
But this time
the will o' th' wisp
burns true
guiding you
into the swamp
in March
where a
purple flower
rises from roots
that melt through
the ice.
Its blossom
will be your boat
for the next part
of your journey
floating on dark waters
through the cavern
of your heart
its beating
reminding you
of the rhythms
that anchored
you to the Earth.
Follow that river home.
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Political Correctness and Censorship
I have been noticing more and more lately the ways in which the concept of political correctness is stifling free speech.
I see it happening again and again. Someone in a position of privilege says something cruel or ignorant about a group of people who are marginalized, pathologized, brutalized, or otherwise generally shit on by the dominant culture. People respond, pointing out the ways in which the things the privileged person said is hurtful or inaccurate or otherwise problematic. The privileged person complains about how political correctness is destroying freedom. And then everyone else is expected to shut the fuck up.
But, you see, that's not the way free speech works. You are absolutely permitted to say whatever you want -- I will always oppose any law that gets in the way of your doing that. But, then, I am allowed to say that what you said is fucked. And if you turn around and say that I am taking away your rights by criticizing you and I need to be quiet -- well, then, who is trying to shut down free speech?
Its kind of like the way Christians claim to be oppressed in this culture right now. Allowing people to have marriages that your church doesn't approve of doesn't stop you from practicing your religion -- nobody is requiring or expecting you to change your rules about who your clergy will and won't marry. But making laws that say that Quakers and Unitarians and Pagans aren't allowed to perform weddings that your megachurch pastor disapproves of really is curtailing religious freedom.
I don't go by the bullshit about "what this country was based on" or "what the Founding Fathers intended" -- what the Founding Fathers intended was for one group of white male landowners to be allowed to make money without paying taxes dictated by another group of white male landowners to pay off the debt from the genocidal wars waged to make both groups richer. But I am a believer in consistency. If you want to invoke freedom of speech, you need to realize that includes other people's right to call you out on bigotry.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Gathering the Wild Herbalists
When I was a teenager growing up in suburban Massachusetts, the Earth First! Journal brought me news of struggles to protecting old growth ecosystems from the Redwoods of California to the Cedars of Alaska, and I dreamed that someday I would be part of giving voice to those ancient forests. Among my greatest inspirations was Lone Wolf Circles, and the Earth First! Warrior Poets Society that he founded.
After a decade and half on the frontlines of opposition to the violence of late capitalism -- visiting war zones, blockading weapons factories, planting sunflowers at nuclear power plants -- I left the city for the woods, and eventually found myself teaching and practicing herbal medicine in the Pacific rainforest, a few hours' drive south of Clayoquot Sound, where forest defenders made their stand in the '80's and '90's, and the Walbran where friends and students of mine will soon prepare to put their bodies on the line in defense of some of this island's last old growth. I venture from my forest home to come into Victoria to teach and work in the clinic at Pacific Rim College, to buy groceries, and to lift weights late at night when I am the only person in the gym. And every summer and fall I find myself on the road, teaching at herb conferences.
Plant people are some of the best people I have met, and they make me feel welcome everywhere I go. But, I have to admit, among all the amazing gatherings I attend, one has a very special place in my heart: The Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference, where, a few years ago, Lone Wolf Circles (now known as Jesse Wolf Hardin) and Kiva Rose took the risk of inviting an unknown herbalist with no formal training and a strange, poetic manner of speaking in spirals to come talk about my relationships with wild plants. They earned my eternal gratitude then by making room for a new voice, and I have watched them continue to do the same for others, as brilliant people who sat in some of my first workshops have begun to emerge as new, clear, strong, creative voices in our community. This year I had the special privilege of co-teaching with one of those still newer voices, Asia Suler, whose love and reverence for the land serve as weet but powerful medicine for the re-enchantment of the world.
Wolf and Kiva invite people like me to teach not in spite of our strangeness, but because of it. They recognize that, as Albert Einstein may or may not have said, the problems we face will not be solved by the same thinking that gave rise to them. I was particularly moved by the amount of space consciously and deliberately created for neurodivergent voices at this year's gathering.
But that doesn't mean the conference is a free for all. The strange truths spoken in the high desert are grounded in lived experience and must pass through the finely tuned bullshit detectors of those willing to challenge what passes for wisdom, be it conventional or unconventional. The same rollicking spirit that inspired me when I first encountered Earth First! lives on in a conference that grew out of the movement of deep ecology from road blockades into medicine. I am already counting down the days until next September.
After a decade and half on the frontlines of opposition to the violence of late capitalism -- visiting war zones, blockading weapons factories, planting sunflowers at nuclear power plants -- I left the city for the woods, and eventually found myself teaching and practicing herbal medicine in the Pacific rainforest, a few hours' drive south of Clayoquot Sound, where forest defenders made their stand in the '80's and '90's, and the Walbran where friends and students of mine will soon prepare to put their bodies on the line in defense of some of this island's last old growth. I venture from my forest home to come into Victoria to teach and work in the clinic at Pacific Rim College, to buy groceries, and to lift weights late at night when I am the only person in the gym. And every summer and fall I find myself on the road, teaching at herb conferences.
Plant people are some of the best people I have met, and they make me feel welcome everywhere I go. But, I have to admit, among all the amazing gatherings I attend, one has a very special place in my heart: The Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference, where, a few years ago, Lone Wolf Circles (now known as Jesse Wolf Hardin) and Kiva Rose took the risk of inviting an unknown herbalist with no formal training and a strange, poetic manner of speaking in spirals to come talk about my relationships with wild plants. They earned my eternal gratitude then by making room for a new voice, and I have watched them continue to do the same for others, as brilliant people who sat in some of my first workshops have begun to emerge as new, clear, strong, creative voices in our community. This year I had the special privilege of co-teaching with one of those still newer voices, Asia Suler, whose love and reverence for the land serve as weet but powerful medicine for the re-enchantment of the world.
Wolf and Kiva invite people like me to teach not in spite of our strangeness, but because of it. They recognize that, as Albert Einstein may or may not have said, the problems we face will not be solved by the same thinking that gave rise to them. I was particularly moved by the amount of space consciously and deliberately created for neurodivergent voices at this year's gathering.
But that doesn't mean the conference is a free for all. The strange truths spoken in the high desert are grounded in lived experience and must pass through the finely tuned bullshit detectors of those willing to challenge what passes for wisdom, be it conventional or unconventional. The same rollicking spirit that inspired me when I first encountered Earth First! lives on in a conference that grew out of the movement of deep ecology from road blockades into medicine. I am already counting down the days until next September.
Saturday, September 5, 2015
False Hierarchies and the Backlash Against Silberman's NeuroTribes
Hans Asperger, with guns to the heads of the children he treated, created the myth of "high functioning" and "low functioning" Autism in a desperate attempt to save some of them from being killed in concentration camps.
Those who insist on such a distinction today have no such excuse -- and are leading the backlash against Steve Silberman, the journalist whose meticulous work uncovered this history.
In a review typical of this backlash, Dr. Jennifer Margoulis writes "Silberman is conflating children and adults who have some neurodiversity with children and young adults who are suffering from severe autism and related health issues like gastrointestinal problems and severe pain."
Let's parse her statement a bit.
We'll begin with the most obvious -- Margoulis implies that proud Autistic people and our allies aren't interested in finding solutions to mitigating conditions that are common among Autistic people such as gastrointestinal problems and autoimmune conditions. Helping fellow Autistic people get to more happily inhabit bodies is on of my passions as an herbalist, and most of my Autistic patients have become amateur medical scholars of their own conditions -- we get obsessive about or special interests, or so the diagnostic manuals say. One thing many of have found is that conditions we are most prone to are also common among trauma survivors. To a large extent, they are likely linked to the experience of being neurodivergent in a culture of compulsory neurotypicality. (Organizations that claim to speak for us silence our voices will funding eugenic research aimed at preventing or existence in future generations. Our styles of speaking, thinking, and self-regulating are pathologized, often punitively. Some of us are institutionalized and subjected to electro-shock therapy and chemical lobotomy. Autistic People of Color are frequently looked in cells in schools as children and all too often become targets of police violence.)
But more troubling is Margoulis's main point -- that we need to make a distinction between "adults who have some neurodiversity" and "children and young adults who are suffering from severe autism."
As I have written elsewhere, such a distinction is false, and serves to further capitalist agendas that value us according to our ability to participate in the creation of wealth. Those of us who are assigned the category of "high functioning" maintain a performance of neurotypicality at a high cost to our health in order to get access to the things we need to survive in this culture. And, just as the late Dr. Oliver Sacks found with silent Parkinson's patients who were presumed to be mentally vacant, we are discovering that non-speaking Autistics have inner worlds that are rich and uncannily similar to those of speaking Autistics.
Breaking things down further, talking about "adults who have some neurodiversity" suggests that neurological divergence is something to be accepted in moderation, but policed. "You Aspies are ok Sure, you are weird, but you talk with us. Yeah, we do like it best when you are in a separate room writing code. But you aren't like those other ones. You don't bite and kick." It echoes discourses around previously pathologized aspects of human diversity, like sexuality -- "Middle class lesbians and gay men who want to get married and own houses and avoid public displays of affection are ok, but not the flamboyant ones who wave their sexuality our faces. And Trans people skeeve us out."
It is wrong when talking about sexuality, and it is just as wrong when talking about neurobiology.
We're here. Our neurobiologies are Queer. Get used to it.
Those who insist on such a distinction today have no such excuse -- and are leading the backlash against Steve Silberman, the journalist whose meticulous work uncovered this history.
In a review typical of this backlash, Dr. Jennifer Margoulis writes "Silberman is conflating children and adults who have some neurodiversity with children and young adults who are suffering from severe autism and related health issues like gastrointestinal problems and severe pain."
Let's parse her statement a bit.
We'll begin with the most obvious -- Margoulis implies that proud Autistic people and our allies aren't interested in finding solutions to mitigating conditions that are common among Autistic people such as gastrointestinal problems and autoimmune conditions. Helping fellow Autistic people get to more happily inhabit bodies is on of my passions as an herbalist, and most of my Autistic patients have become amateur medical scholars of their own conditions -- we get obsessive about or special interests, or so the diagnostic manuals say. One thing many of have found is that conditions we are most prone to are also common among trauma survivors. To a large extent, they are likely linked to the experience of being neurodivergent in a culture of compulsory neurotypicality. (Organizations that claim to speak for us silence our voices will funding eugenic research aimed at preventing or existence in future generations. Our styles of speaking, thinking, and self-regulating are pathologized, often punitively. Some of us are institutionalized and subjected to electro-shock therapy and chemical lobotomy. Autistic People of Color are frequently looked in cells in schools as children and all too often become targets of police violence.)
But more troubling is Margoulis's main point -- that we need to make a distinction between "adults who have some neurodiversity" and "children and young adults who are suffering from severe autism."
As I have written elsewhere, such a distinction is false, and serves to further capitalist agendas that value us according to our ability to participate in the creation of wealth. Those of us who are assigned the category of "high functioning" maintain a performance of neurotypicality at a high cost to our health in order to get access to the things we need to survive in this culture. And, just as the late Dr. Oliver Sacks found with silent Parkinson's patients who were presumed to be mentally vacant, we are discovering that non-speaking Autistics have inner worlds that are rich and uncannily similar to those of speaking Autistics.
Breaking things down further, talking about "adults who have some neurodiversity" suggests that neurological divergence is something to be accepted in moderation, but policed. "You Aspies are ok Sure, you are weird, but you talk with us. Yeah, we do like it best when you are in a separate room writing code. But you aren't like those other ones. You don't bite and kick." It echoes discourses around previously pathologized aspects of human diversity, like sexuality -- "Middle class lesbians and gay men who want to get married and own houses and avoid public displays of affection are ok, but not the flamboyant ones who wave their sexuality our faces. And Trans people skeeve us out."
It is wrong when talking about sexuality, and it is just as wrong when talking about neurobiology.
We're here. Our neurobiologies are Queer. Get used to it.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Confessions of a Facebook Witch
Facebook is one of my favorite magical tools.
It is an amazing tool for divination -- I know people of all kinds scattered across a continent or two, and I can see what is showing up along each thread of my connections, and also pick up on things that are showing up at really disparate parts of my web. This gives me a way to feel what is moving through the world and discern its patterns.
Sometimes, reading those patterns, it is possible to make just the slightest tonal shift in the song being sung by this part of the human world to change the music entirely. Words, images, songs have this capacity. Viral in the sense that we would mean if we embraced the necessity of the viral elements of our own microbiomes. The nature of the movement of the changes across the web predicted by complexity theory and chaos mathematics.
Facebook is in so many ways a simulacrum of the internet itself, which in turn is a simulacrum of a mycelial network, which mirrors a neural network. The internet itself emerged when neurodivergent people who had been given access to consciousness altering mushrooms and synthetic ergot derivatives were given access to enough silicon, enough electricity, and some new kinds of conductors. Right now much of the mycelium is still living under laboratory conditions, feeding off information poor simple sugars, but as we bring our wild selves into contact with the technology, it can be fed the rich nutrients of the forest floor (because some of us have forests inside us, and our very exhalations can be like falling leaves) which will allow it to blossom forth the most amazing fruiting bodies from the transformation of the nutrients.
Karina taught me that "a witch works with all things." This web is one I tend.
It is an amazing tool for divination -- I know people of all kinds scattered across a continent or two, and I can see what is showing up along each thread of my connections, and also pick up on things that are showing up at really disparate parts of my web. This gives me a way to feel what is moving through the world and discern its patterns.
Sometimes, reading those patterns, it is possible to make just the slightest tonal shift in the song being sung by this part of the human world to change the music entirely. Words, images, songs have this capacity. Viral in the sense that we would mean if we embraced the necessity of the viral elements of our own microbiomes. The nature of the movement of the changes across the web predicted by complexity theory and chaos mathematics.
Facebook is in so many ways a simulacrum of the internet itself, which in turn is a simulacrum of a mycelial network, which mirrors a neural network. The internet itself emerged when neurodivergent people who had been given access to consciousness altering mushrooms and synthetic ergot derivatives were given access to enough silicon, enough electricity, and some new kinds of conductors. Right now much of the mycelium is still living under laboratory conditions, feeding off information poor simple sugars, but as we bring our wild selves into contact with the technology, it can be fed the rich nutrients of the forest floor (because some of us have forests inside us, and our very exhalations can be like falling leaves) which will allow it to blossom forth the most amazing fruiting bodies from the transformation of the nutrients.
Karina taught me that "a witch works with all things." This web is one I tend.
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
My Theology is Mycorrhizal
Niki Whiting, just wrote a beautiful essay on the relational and intersectional nature of her theology.
My theology is also relational and intersectional -- but it is above all ecological.
I am a Feri priest, wedded to the gods of my tradition, oathbound to my kindred in my lineage and my tradition. My gods are not metaphors. But, aside from she-who-is-all-that-is-of-which-all-is-fractal-form (shhh! don't tell the other polytheists that I just confessed to monist heresy) they are not everything.
I am also an animist, inhabiting a world in which everything is alive. Gods are one form of life -- like humans and Oaks and Salmon and Mountains and Rivers. The way in which gods differ from other beings is in their persistence of form -- some have lifespans as long as a river or a civilization, others live as long as a galaxy, a handful are almost as old as time itself. But ultimately we and they and the Owl calling outside my window and the Cedar the Owl is perched in and the forest floor and the ocean are all made of the same matter and energy infused with the memory of a world born of the love and desire that arose from the Darkness gazing on Hirself in the curved mirror of space and time.
Anaar recently reminded me that in Feri, perception and experience come before belief, an that whatever is true is observable in nature. So it makes sense that our relationships with gods would resemble our relationships among other beings and other beings relationships with us.
And just as Wolves shape Rivers by preying on the Elk that graze the Willows that change the Rivers' course -- and are changed by the River and the Willows and the Elk in turn -- the presence - or absence - of gods changes an ecosystem. It leaves holes in worlds, internal and external.
The question is not whether the empty places inside us and in our world are god shaped of Bear shaped or Lady Slipper shaped holes, because all exist, all are real, the question is what are the relationships among those holes, and what do those relationships tell us about what is missing from our lives and how to invite its return. And what is ultimately absent is the sense of relationship itself. We have forgotten how to be in relation with gods because we have forgotten how to be in relation with life in all its complex, emergent forms around us. And in the absence of relationship, there is a loss of meaning.
Rhyd Wildermuth writes:
and
But where I differ from Rhyd is with his claim that "humans are the only seekers of meaning we’ve yet encountered" When I call to Owl or Raven in sounds that mimic their vocalizations, they respond in kind, even though they know I am not a bird. When a Cedar exhales volatile oils into the air, they carry messenger molecules recognized by our own nervous and endocrine systems. We are used to experiencing meaning only through the interpretation of our talking selves, but we all know that around some of the most meaningful things, words and concepts fall away and are replaced by the felt sense of being of our wild selves. Stephen Buhner writes:
I learned what I know of speaking with gods from speaking with plants and fungi. There are gods who speak like Spruce, their breath calms us, and we stand in their shade. Their are gods that seduce us like Datura, their breath all perfume and pheromones and opium, There are gods like fermented Apples, who render us drunk or put us to sleep. There are gods like the Matronae who are like mushrooms, each Matrona an individual fruiting body with her own experience, but each connected to the whole by mycelial threads. There are gods like the roots of Oaks. And there are gods like the coiling of mycelium and rhizome.
Like plants, all of them speak unmediated to the wild self, and the talking self finds its version of meaning in the traces of thought and language and narrative that arise where sensation touches consciousness.
Gods are not plants or fungi or animal, but neither are they human. They meet me at the edge of the forest. And it was the forest that taught me how to speak with those who are not human. And so my theology is mycorrhizal.
"
My theology is also relational and intersectional -- but it is above all ecological.
I am a Feri priest, wedded to the gods of my tradition, oathbound to my kindred in my lineage and my tradition. My gods are not metaphors. But, aside from she-who-is-all-that-is-of-which-all-is-fractal-form (shhh! don't tell the other polytheists that I just confessed to monist heresy) they are not everything.
I am also an animist, inhabiting a world in which everything is alive. Gods are one form of life -- like humans and Oaks and Salmon and Mountains and Rivers. The way in which gods differ from other beings is in their persistence of form -- some have lifespans as long as a river or a civilization, others live as long as a galaxy, a handful are almost as old as time itself. But ultimately we and they and the Owl calling outside my window and the Cedar the Owl is perched in and the forest floor and the ocean are all made of the same matter and energy infused with the memory of a world born of the love and desire that arose from the Darkness gazing on Hirself in the curved mirror of space and time.
Anaar recently reminded me that in Feri, perception and experience come before belief, an that whatever is true is observable in nature. So it makes sense that our relationships with gods would resemble our relationships among other beings and other beings relationships with us.
And just as Wolves shape Rivers by preying on the Elk that graze the Willows that change the Rivers' course -- and are changed by the River and the Willows and the Elk in turn -- the presence - or absence - of gods changes an ecosystem. It leaves holes in worlds, internal and external.
The question is not whether the empty places inside us and in our world are god shaped of Bear shaped or Lady Slipper shaped holes, because all exist, all are real, the question is what are the relationships among those holes, and what do those relationships tell us about what is missing from our lives and how to invite its return. And what is ultimately absent is the sense of relationship itself. We have forgotten how to be in relation with gods because we have forgotten how to be in relation with life in all its complex, emergent forms around us. And in the absence of relationship, there is a loss of meaning.
Rhyd Wildermuth writes:
"Meaning is a social-act, a kind of intercourse between us and the world, and us and each other"
and
"Meaning can’t be reduced, it only expands. Meaning has no cognate, and the only other word in the English language that comes close to functioning as its synonym is not Truth, but Love. [ . . ] When I love someone, they have meaning for me. They are meaningful to me, I derive meaning from them, we mean something to each other. When I do not love someone, they hold no meaning for me; they are meaningless to me, or they mean no-thing to me."Where there is no meaning there is no love, where there is no love their is no deep relatedness, where there is no deep relatedness there is no divinity, for divinity is nothing if not a complex emergent quality of a living system, and without deep relatedness there is no system and no complexity.
But where I differ from Rhyd is with his claim that "humans are the only seekers of meaning we’ve yet encountered" When I call to Owl or Raven in sounds that mimic their vocalizations, they respond in kind, even though they know I am not a bird. When a Cedar exhales volatile oils into the air, they carry messenger molecules recognized by our own nervous and endocrine systems. We are used to experiencing meaning only through the interpretation of our talking selves, but we all know that around some of the most meaningful things, words and concepts fall away and are replaced by the felt sense of being of our wild selves. Stephen Buhner writes:
"Human beings, long embedded within their environment, have always been sensitive to the meanings that surrounded them. Those contained within plant communications, as with all communications, generate feelings in us in response. We know the touch of the world upon us, that we have been caressed by meaning, even though we might not be able to consciously say just what that meaning is. A door opens inside, our unconscious gathers it in, and at night we dream and it is woven into the fabric of our lives. We have always been surrounded by such meaning-imbued language; later we created our own. Our language also travels through the air, though it is vibrating waves of sound. (Did you think we made all this up out of our bulging forebrains alone?) We have always lived, surrounded by original language."The new field of biosemiotics is examining communication within and between communities of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and viruses. I imagine the field extending itself to theosemiotics, which would follow the same patterns observed in the wild world.
I learned what I know of speaking with gods from speaking with plants and fungi. There are gods who speak like Spruce, their breath calms us, and we stand in their shade. Their are gods that seduce us like Datura, their breath all perfume and pheromones and opium, There are gods like fermented Apples, who render us drunk or put us to sleep. There are gods like the Matronae who are like mushrooms, each Matrona an individual fruiting body with her own experience, but each connected to the whole by mycelial threads. There are gods like the roots of Oaks. And there are gods like the coiling of mycelium and rhizome.
Like plants, all of them speak unmediated to the wild self, and the talking self finds its version of meaning in the traces of thought and language and narrative that arise where sensation touches consciousness.
Gods are not plants or fungi or animal, but neither are they human. They meet me at the edge of the forest. And it was the forest that taught me how to speak with those who are not human. And so my theology is mycorrhizal.
"
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Can Information Technology Deliver Us from Capitalism?
Will information technology succeed where popular movements have failed in leading us out of capitalism? That is British journalist Paul Mason's contention.
Mason says that because information technology has reduced the need for workers by automating more forms of work, disrupted price structures by flooding the market with an abundance of information, and facilitated new mechanisms of sharing and trade, it has begun to erode the fundamental structures of capitalism, coupled with external stresses, it will move us, over time, and with fits and starts, toward a post-capitalist world. The new project of the Left, he argues, should be the creation of alternative structures and institutions to replace those of the dominant culture as they disintegrate.
There is much to like about Mason's essay. I agree with his contention that information technology has been an important force for liberation and for the establishment of a new commons in some spheres. (Though, we ignore the ways in which it also facilitates new forms or repression at our own peril. The manifestation of Foucault's Panopticon in the form of surveillance technologies and the development of drone warfare are as much expressions of information technology as are cell phone cameras that can document police violence and technologies that democratize media.) I also agree that the Left would be well served by an increased focus on what Gandhi called the constructive program. (Though as a counterpart to, not as a replacement for, resistance. Mason argues that we need to stop engaging in defensive tactics. I think that we need to both defend communities, human and wild, and carve out new liberated spaces at the same time.) And there is the fact that a major British journalist is joining the growing and diverse list of public figures from Russell Brand to Pope Francis who are openly and directly critiquing capitalism in a culture that had been largely silent about capitalism since the end of the Cold War.
But Mason's account of the emergence of capitalism is deeply flawed in ways that also cloud his analysis of the present and the future. He writes:
This account begins with a popular misconception: that communal agriculture in feudal Europe collapsed because it over-stripped the carrying capacity of the land. The concept comes from a 1968 article by Garrett Hardin called "The Tragedy of the Commons." Hardin argued that in a situation where people farmed land in common, as was common in feudal England, nobody would protect the commons because each individual farmer would have an interest in using more than their share of resources and no incentive for conservation. Hardin's surmise was taken as historical fact -- despite a complete lack of evidence that any such thing did happen. If anything, it appears that communities of peasants organized to regulate the use of common resources.
The end of communal agriculture in England was, in, fact, quite brutal and bloody. People were driven out of their communities and into the cities as communal land was forcibly seized and privatized and sold to people who had become wealthy as a result of Spain paying back its debts to British and other Western European creditors with gold and silver looted from the Americas. This created not a shortage, but an abundance of available labor, which provided the workforce for British industrialization.
This points to the second major flaw in Mason's reading of the history of capitalism -- Mason suggests that technologies like sailing ships and mining techniques were the drivers of capitalism's evolution while ignoring the human and material elements of the system. Technology appears as a force that precipitates cultural change rather than a product of that change. (For an excellent critique of this position see Raymond Williams' "The Technology and the Society.") In his technological determinism, Mason misses a process vital to the emergence of capitalism: the process of accumulation.
Marx observed that the rise of capitalism was dependent on the influx of new wealth in the form of precious metals from the Americas which spawned the emergence of a managerial class, that most beloved class of modern politicians -- the middle class, which Marx called the bourgeoisie. Silvia Federici points out that Marx's account of primitive accumulation was incomplete since it ignored the enclosure of the commons, the driving of rural workers into the cities to form the basis of the proletariat, the creation of a domestic sphere in which women provided free labor, and the witch persecutions which created a climate of terror that facilitated these changes. Slavery provided the work force for capitalist expansion in the Americas, following on the heels of genocide.
Federici also points out that because it depends on infinite growth (nevermind the impossibility of such a thing given the laws of thermodynamics), "capitalism must engage in continual accumulation "capitalist accumulation is structurally dependent on the free appropriation of immense quantities of labor and resources that must appear as externalities to the market"
So does the information economy. This "post industrial" economy still depends on industry and agriculture, these simply occur out of the sight of most people in wealthy nations. The infrastructure of the information economy depends on the mining of minerals and the extraction of fossil fuels from lands expropriated from Indigenous communities and the labor of the displaced rural people from these areas in mines, oil and gas wells, and factories. Will these people be invited to be full participants in a "post-capitalist" economy? And is that what they and their communities want? Most likely not, but Mason doesn't tell us.
Exits from capitalism have always been available to some for a price. The communes of the 1960's and 1970's were largely populated by the children of the bourgeoisie. Burners celebrate the cashless economy of Burning Man while forgetting the process of accumulation that feeds it -- people come to the desert to give away resources they obtained by succeeding within a capitalist economy, often with the benefit of racial, class, and colonial privilege. The post-capitalism Mason envisions may have room for more people, and may even be accessible to most people in the US and Canada and northwestern Europe and parts of Asia, but its hard to see it actually having room for everyone. This is not to say that such exits from capitalism play no role in transforming it -- but they are not complete, they are not enough.
The technologies themselves at play are of mixed provenance. On the one hand they are the product of the Cold War drive to maintain military control in the event of a nuclear war. On the other hand they are the product the work of groups that included a lot of neurodivergent people who had eaten fungi and fungal derivatives rich in serotonergic alkaloids creating a silicon simularum of mycelial webs. There were both repressive and liberatory impulses involved in the emergence of our information technologies, and they continue to be used in both repressive and liberatory ways.
Adrienne Rich once wrote "Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside of history." Neither does technology. Technological developments will both shape and be shaped by the people who engage them, who in turn are influenced by a host of political, economic, cultural, economic, spiritual, and magical forces. We can't rely on technology to bring down capitalism. We have to use it and engage it strategically in combination with old, new, and very old strategies of resistance and cultural innovation.
Mason says that because information technology has reduced the need for workers by automating more forms of work, disrupted price structures by flooding the market with an abundance of information, and facilitated new mechanisms of sharing and trade, it has begun to erode the fundamental structures of capitalism, coupled with external stresses, it will move us, over time, and with fits and starts, toward a post-capitalist world. The new project of the Left, he argues, should be the creation of alternative structures and institutions to replace those of the dominant culture as they disintegrate.
There is much to like about Mason's essay. I agree with his contention that information technology has been an important force for liberation and for the establishment of a new commons in some spheres. (Though, we ignore the ways in which it also facilitates new forms or repression at our own peril. The manifestation of Foucault's Panopticon in the form of surveillance technologies and the development of drone warfare are as much expressions of information technology as are cell phone cameras that can document police violence and technologies that democratize media.) I also agree that the Left would be well served by an increased focus on what Gandhi called the constructive program. (Though as a counterpart to, not as a replacement for, resistance. Mason argues that we need to stop engaging in defensive tactics. I think that we need to both defend communities, human and wild, and carve out new liberated spaces at the same time.) And there is the fact that a major British journalist is joining the growing and diverse list of public figures from Russell Brand to Pope Francis who are openly and directly critiquing capitalism in a culture that had been largely silent about capitalism since the end of the Cold War.
But Mason's account of the emergence of capitalism is deeply flawed in ways that also cloud his analysis of the present and the future. He writes:
The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).
This account begins with a popular misconception: that communal agriculture in feudal Europe collapsed because it over-stripped the carrying capacity of the land. The concept comes from a 1968 article by Garrett Hardin called "The Tragedy of the Commons." Hardin argued that in a situation where people farmed land in common, as was common in feudal England, nobody would protect the commons because each individual farmer would have an interest in using more than their share of resources and no incentive for conservation. Hardin's surmise was taken as historical fact -- despite a complete lack of evidence that any such thing did happen. If anything, it appears that communities of peasants organized to regulate the use of common resources.
The end of communal agriculture in England was, in, fact, quite brutal and bloody. People were driven out of their communities and into the cities as communal land was forcibly seized and privatized and sold to people who had become wealthy as a result of Spain paying back its debts to British and other Western European creditors with gold and silver looted from the Americas. This created not a shortage, but an abundance of available labor, which provided the workforce for British industrialization.
This points to the second major flaw in Mason's reading of the history of capitalism -- Mason suggests that technologies like sailing ships and mining techniques were the drivers of capitalism's evolution while ignoring the human and material elements of the system. Technology appears as a force that precipitates cultural change rather than a product of that change. (For an excellent critique of this position see Raymond Williams' "The Technology and the Society.") In his technological determinism, Mason misses a process vital to the emergence of capitalism: the process of accumulation.
Marx observed that the rise of capitalism was dependent on the influx of new wealth in the form of precious metals from the Americas which spawned the emergence of a managerial class, that most beloved class of modern politicians -- the middle class, which Marx called the bourgeoisie. Silvia Federici points out that Marx's account of primitive accumulation was incomplete since it ignored the enclosure of the commons, the driving of rural workers into the cities to form the basis of the proletariat, the creation of a domestic sphere in which women provided free labor, and the witch persecutions which created a climate of terror that facilitated these changes. Slavery provided the work force for capitalist expansion in the Americas, following on the heels of genocide.
Federici also points out that because it depends on infinite growth (nevermind the impossibility of such a thing given the laws of thermodynamics), "capitalism must engage in continual accumulation "capitalist accumulation is structurally dependent on the free appropriation of immense quantities of labor and resources that must appear as externalities to the market"
So does the information economy. This "post industrial" economy still depends on industry and agriculture, these simply occur out of the sight of most people in wealthy nations. The infrastructure of the information economy depends on the mining of minerals and the extraction of fossil fuels from lands expropriated from Indigenous communities and the labor of the displaced rural people from these areas in mines, oil and gas wells, and factories. Will these people be invited to be full participants in a "post-capitalist" economy? And is that what they and their communities want? Most likely not, but Mason doesn't tell us.
Exits from capitalism have always been available to some for a price. The communes of the 1960's and 1970's were largely populated by the children of the bourgeoisie. Burners celebrate the cashless economy of Burning Man while forgetting the process of accumulation that feeds it -- people come to the desert to give away resources they obtained by succeeding within a capitalist economy, often with the benefit of racial, class, and colonial privilege. The post-capitalism Mason envisions may have room for more people, and may even be accessible to most people in the US and Canada and northwestern Europe and parts of Asia, but its hard to see it actually having room for everyone. This is not to say that such exits from capitalism play no role in transforming it -- but they are not complete, they are not enough.
The technologies themselves at play are of mixed provenance. On the one hand they are the product of the Cold War drive to maintain military control in the event of a nuclear war. On the other hand they are the product the work of groups that included a lot of neurodivergent people who had eaten fungi and fungal derivatives rich in serotonergic alkaloids creating a silicon simularum of mycelial webs. There were both repressive and liberatory impulses involved in the emergence of our information technologies, and they continue to be used in both repressive and liberatory ways.
Adrienne Rich once wrote "Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside of history." Neither does technology. Technological developments will both shape and be shaped by the people who engage them, who in turn are influenced by a host of political, economic, cultural, economic, spiritual, and magical forces. We can't rely on technology to bring down capitalism. We have to use it and engage it strategically in combination with old, new, and very old strategies of resistance and cultural innovation.
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