Category Archives: autoimmunity

Autoimmune Climate-Changing Capitalism Syndrome: AICCCS

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How can we imagine the Anthropocene? Industrial capitalism is not simply harmful to human life, as we long knew, but has created its own geological era that affects everything from the lithosphere to the upper atmosphere and all the biota in between. Indeed, the dynamics of the Anthropocene are increasingly hostile to Holocene-era patterns of human life, a footnote to the sixth great extinction of carbon-based life.

Estimates suggest that between 17,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct every year. The Anthropocene is perhaps not so well named. While it is clear that humans have caused it, not all humans have done so and its consequences are far from even. What has brought about the change in planetary geology is industrial capitalism and its reliance on fossil fuels.

We now find ourselves confronting what we might call an autoimmune capitalism that seems determined to extract the last moment of circulation for itself, even at the expense of its host life-world. Like AIDS or other autoimmune disease, this capitalism has a long etiology, multiple symptoms and is resistant to cure: Autoimmune Climate-Changing Capitalism, AICs for short.

So if we concentrate on curing one symptom, like carbon emissions, the complaint goes up that we are attacking the “Western way of life.” Attack the over-consumption of Western life directly, as the global social movements have done since 2011, and you find the full force of the military-industrial police complex directed at you.

To put this more abstractly: coming to terms with AICs is a political problem that is also always and already an aesthetic one. Aesthetics here means the ability to feel or perceive and I am suggesting in the manner of Jacques Rancière that no politics that is not an aesthetics (and vice versa) can have purchase on the supplementary, non-linear and networked forms of AICs. In short it takes a supplement to interact with a deconstructed form. Luckily, we already have that supplement in the form of direct democracy, which is my update to Rancière’s notion of the an-arche of the demos.

This is usually the place for lamentations about the difficulty of doing anything against the modern Leviathans of multinational corporations, consumerism and the fossil fuel industry. I do not underestimate these forces. However, I do not participate in their visualization of the planet as a battlefield and presume that in order to return the world “upside down,” they must somehow be defeated. Rather I think that the reclaiming of the imagination entails an undoing of their authority, which they themselves literally cannot conceive. It may come from the Digger Gerrard Winstanley’s evocation of the “earth as a common treasury for all.”

A Digger Manifesto from 1649

I have long said that the most radical gesture would be if all living people were considered fully human. That could be taken further to include all non-human actors. It has been estimated that some 90% of the DNA in our bodies is not “ours” but microbial. “Our” DNA is the result of a long sharing between generations. We also now know that certain “switches” in the genome are turned on by experience—diet, toxicity, age, and so on.

Taking this for the metaphor that it clearly already is, we might say that there is a “switch” for the common. Much of the past five hundred years has been devoted to imagining ways to turn it off or even make it invisible. In the brief time since Mohammed Bou’azizi shocked Tunisia into taking action by his self-immolation, that switch has proved remarkably easy to find from Egypt to Montreal by way of Madrid, Athens, New York, London and so on. We have in effect always known how to do this. Authority has invested enormous amounts of energy, time and money to convince us otherwise.

Some proposals for an agenda:

1) Life

The right to existence was the fundamental claim of all anti-slavery movement. It is the first claim in the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth made at Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2008 by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change as part of their claim for the “decolonization of the atmosphere.”

2) The Land

Policy specialists have began recommending small-scale collaborative cultivation as a solution to developing countries economic needs. Local food movements suggest the same for developed nations. The Cochabamba accords recommend such cultivation as the key to both sustaining indigenous cultures worldwide and decolonizing the atmosphere. With the agribusiness GMO corn crop set to fail in the U. S., we can see that chemical cultivation is no guarantee of food supply in the climate-changed era. Land is a way to consider the abstractions of the global in local contexts, as it has been for centuries.

3) Democracy

The greatest myth of the climate denial movement is that we can’t do anything about this anyway, so why try? I earlier suggested in this project that if each of 400 global cities consensed on the measures taken by Beijing during its Olympics we could in fact meet the target for climate emissions reduction that would limit temperature rise to two degrees Celsius. There are other possible ways to do this of course. In other words, the choices are there in front of us and it is up to us in each of our localities to keep putting them to our local assemblies.

[a condensed version of my contribution to the Sense of the Planet symposium yesterday in Sydney]

M17: Why Occupy is Hunger, Climate Change and GMO food

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Storm over GMO corn

OWS and the campaigns against hunger, against GMO food and against climate change are different ways of saying the same thing: capitalism is an autoimmune disease that is now threatening the viability of its host. Occupy signifies here that these issues cannot be contained, let alone solved, by the normative political process, whether at national or interstate level.

It’s important to recognize how far things have gone in the past year. Harper’s magazine tells us:

  • there has been a 33% decline on newspaper mentions of “global warming” and “climate change” in 2011
  • Obama used the phrase “climate change” once in the State of the Union but mentioned “energy” 23 times.

Autoimmune capitalism believes it can afford the planetary degradation that is now under way worldwide and is indifferent to it. European airlines filed this week to be exempted from the EU carbon levy because of a possible trade war with China: in short, climate can only be a priority if it has no impact on capital.

By the same token, there was barely a ripple when Climate Central reported on sea level rise this week:

At three quarters of the 55 sites analyzed, century levels are higher than 4 feet above the high tide line. Yet across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide. In 285 cities and towns, more than half the population lives on land below this line, potential victims of increasingly likely climate-induced coastal flooding. 3.7 million live less than 1 meter above the tide.

There’s a 1 in 6 chance that the Battery in New York City will flood– not far into the future but by 2020. Zuccotti will become waterfront. You can only assume that people either think that these reports are false or that when they happen, there will be benefits because 5 million people will need new homes.

As I’ve often argued, the reason there’s a global movement of which Occupy is the U. S. variant is the interface of climate change and hunger. In 2008, a global food crisis was caused by the interplay of climate-change induced drought;  the switch to biofuels caused by climate concerns reducing the food supply; and the creation of the Goldman Sachs Commodity Futures Index.

This index was allowed to trade in futures as of 1999, on the principle “long only,” i.e. that prices would always rise. Investors included: Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. Foreign Affairs magazine commentator Frederick Kauffman notes:

In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.

What that means is an 80% price rise from 2003-8 that has kept moving upwards. One half of the world’s population spends 50% of their income on food. The real consequences were so-called food riots in 37 countries–they should have been called anti-autoimmune capitalist riots.

From here we can summarize:

•2008 food crisis added 40 million to world hungry list
•2008: 943 million hungry
•2009: One billion hungry
•2008: 100 million Africans move into poverty
•A one-meter sea level rise, now regarded as inevitable, will destroy the Nile Delta
This already disastrous situation is now being exacerbated by the intervention of genetically-modified plants into Africa. The African Center for Biosafety, based in South Africa, reported this week:

Between January 2008 and January 2012, the cost of a 5kg bag [of] super maize meal increased by a staggering 83%. In 2007, the poorest 30% of the population spent approximately 22% of their monthly income on food, including on maize–a staple. The latest figures from January 2012 put this at nearly 39%.

In South Africa, Monsanto has cornered 77% of the seed corn market that generated over R1 billion in revenues, while one in four South Africans is “food insecure,” or hungry, in plain English.

 

In Europe this week, researchers showed that both the genetically modified component of MON810 Bt corn and the Roundup that is sprayed onto that corn kill human kidney cells. So in a particularly telling instance of autoimmune capitalism, the patented seed will either kill you by starvation because you can’t afford to grow it; or kill you by kidney disease because you emmiserate yourself to eat it.

Oh, and by the way? There are plenty of Roundup resistant plants in the U. S. now anyway, about twenty at last count. How could this have been predicted? Because Monsanto found the gene in plants growing downwind of its filthy Louisiana chemicals plant in the first place.

What to do?
For you: do not eat GMO based products–which is likely to mean anything with soy or corn in it, which is to say just about all food industry products. Go organic, go local, grass-fed meat and poultry only.

 

For all of us: be at or with the March Against Hunger tomorrow M17:

 

Autoimmunity

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The current destabilization of the political situation by Israel risks the resurgence of the post 9-11 double-bind of “autoimmunity,” in which the very system designed to make you secure undermines your viability. By setting in motion such reversible definitions, the domestic project of  Occupy can be reconfigured as “insurgency.” To occupy is to place a body-that-thinks into space where it not supposed to be. If that body makes certain choices of action, some are now willing to see that body as out of control, no longer thinking but simply acting. Against such bodies there must be what the Israeli government has termed a “zone of immunity.”

Both in practice and theory this immunity is proving hard to define. It sometimes seems to refer to an “immunity zone” that Iran might acquire, allowing it to develop a nuclear weapon and thereby become in some ways immune to Western threats. It also appears to designate a “zone of immunity” that Israel feels it must have from external threat. It is very difficult to determine exactly what Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, meant because the Israeli media are so full of debates about immunity insofar as it pertains to members of the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament. The recent involvement of an Arab Israeli MK in the Gaza flotilla has led to demands for the legal immunity of representatives to be lifted, even as the papers are also full of corruption and bribery scandals that result from this immunity.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida reapplied his earlier use of the term “autoimmunity” to the complexities of the situation in which U.S.-trained operatives (using a deliberately bland and neutral term) had attacked their former patrons. Derrida reminded us that

an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity.

It seems that this “autoimmunity” is precisely what Israel is engaged in: by attacking it will not only lay itself open to other attacks but may lose the immunity from criticism that it currently enjoys with its own “head,” the United States. Derrida shows that the beginnings of this autoimmunity were in the Cold War, whose ending reconfigured the body politic. Autocratic leaders in countries like Egypt and Tunisia whose apparent immunity depended on their place in the Cold War, or its surrogate the war on terror, found that instead they had ultimately destroyed themselves.

W. J. T. Mitchell has called this reverse effect the “bipolar” character of the autoimmune, “a situation in which there is no literal meaning.” Interestingly, the immune system itself is now understood to be capable of “cognitive abilities,” in that it learn how to recognize specific antigens and remembers them. Autoimmunity is unable to make such distinctions. Yet the result is not simply a destabilization but the reverse of what was intended, as Derrida specifies:

repression in both its psychoanalytic sense and its political sense–whether it be through the police, the military or the economy–ends up producing, reproducing and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.

The gambit of counterinsurgency was to attempt to permanently produce insurgency and yet manage it as a form of governance at the same time. As economic and police repression has escaped control from Greece to Egypt, to speak only of the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel appears to be doubling down on military repression.

Counterinsurgency has long been willing to move the boundaries between the policed  zone of authority and where we the policed are to be contained. The extraordinary Israeli tactic of the mobile checkpoint, literally manifesting the border in different places from one day to the next, epitomizes this disregard for consistency. Indeed the legalizing of the Israeli occupation itself, as Eyal Press relates, worked by

adopting an Ottoman concept known as “Mawat land.” The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire.

The Israelis thus repurposed this archaic imperial law to create a cover for legal transformation of occupation into settlement.

If the “reversible” effect of this counterinsurgency now moves into the global frame proposed by its theorists, Occupy can be rendered into a target of militarization. Note the way New York Times journalist Dexter Filkins–quoted by Mitchell as the epigraph to his chapter on autoimmunity–characterizes insurgency:

American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential character of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified.

As such, the insurgency was hard to defeat. However in the present context, with a little editing this could be taken for a casual description of Occupy. Perhaps Chris Hedges somehow confused the now-favored “Black Ops” of counterinsurgency with the purportedly violent black bloc anarchists of Occupy? You will say that doesn’t make sense–read his article again: it doesn’t make sense. It’s bipolar and has no literal meaning.

The militarized reversibility being put into motion by Israel risks more than an internal argument for Occupy: it risks redefining autonomy as insurgency. The problem of perceived “violence” in the movement is, then, the displaced affect caused by this return of the repressed. That does not mean that there is not a real issue here. We have to continue to claim our right to look, that is, to invent each other and consent to being invented by that other as part of our direct democracy. And we claim the right to be seen in the spaces and times of our choosing, whether that right is recognized by the current state of the force of law or not. Indeed, the worth of claiming that right is, as it was for non-violent campaigners from Mary Wollstonecraft to Gandhi and Rosa Parks, that the law forbids us from having it.