Just read these two short books, pamphlets really or essays, both bookstore finds, one in the MIT Press bookstore hurt books and the other in Harvard Books remainder section, both from France:
The Administration of Fear by Paul Virilio with Bertrand Richard
LA: Semiotext(e), 2012
ISBN 978-1-58435-105-4
The Path of Hope by Stéphane Hessel and Edgar Morin
NY: Other Press, 2012
ISBN 978-1-59051-560-0
Virilio is a sociologist and urban planner and the book/pamphlet/essay is about the present as a manifestation of speed and terror based upon Hannah Arendt's and Günther Anders' idea “Terror is the realization of the law of movement” from their The Origins of Totalitarianism. The title of the book/pamphlet is a play on Graham Greene's WWII espionage novel The Ministry of Fear.
Whether we like it or not, we cannot separate the magnitude of power, or success, from the magnitude of poverty, or finitude. Our collective determination to separate them has led us to the third great fear, the ecological fear. The Earth is too small for progress; it is too small for instant profit. Acceleration dominating accumulation (“just-in-time, zero stock”) is making it implode before our eyes. Consider the logics of distribution that we see today: there are fewer and fewer warehouses, almost no stock, only the flow of goods. You can see how acceleration, the pure speed of circulation, has overcome accumulation. Turbo-capitalism has exploded the capitalism of accumulation and the major banks in favor of even larger banks that no nation state will ever be able to bail out.
Stéphane Hessel and Edgar Morin are both veterans of the French Resistance and fighters against what they call Vichyism, the collaboration with the Fascist occupiers. Hessel wrote another short book/pamphlet/essay translated as
Time for Outrage: Indignez-vous! which was one of the European manifestations of political unrest in the year(s) of the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, and Occupy Wall Street. This book/pamphlet/essay is a follow-up with some recommendations of how to wrest control from the plutocrats:
A new and independent national policy is possible. This political approach would follow the twofold principles we have set forth: globalize and deglobalize, develop and envelop. Deglobalization and envelopment, as we have pointed out, safeguard the vital interests of homelands and regions, while at the same time protecting living cultures. This twofold principle is the basis for a political approach that guarantees links of global and national solidarity, fellowship among the various local collectives, and the benefits of local farming.
As someone who went from the antiwar movement into the environmental movement into the local agricultural economy, there is much here to appeal to me. Growing your own food is a radically (all puns intended) subversive act in this financialized and globalized society. That 50% of the US population do it is an unrecognized constituency for change.
Over the short term, we propose the establishment of three permanent councils.
1. A permanent council to fight inequality, which would begin by attacking levels of excess (of benefits and salaries at the very top) and inadequacy (of quality and prosperity of life at the bottom)….
2. A permanent council in charge of reversing the imbalance in labor-capital relations that has steadily grown since 1990.
3. A permanent council in charge of the social and human transformations that are needed in order to counter the natural, biological, and social problems engendered by damage to Earth’s biosphere: the battle against urban and rural industrial pollution, the development of renewable energy, the protection and improvement of the quality of life.
The scale at which to start doing these things is not immediately at the national or international level but at the municipal and state levels and some of it has already begun.
Along with Thomas Piketty's recent book,
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, these ideas from France give us something to think about and perhaps show us a way forward.