Here's a link to the web edition of the latest RESTRICTED FREQUENCY – 219: The Great Shi(f)t is Upon Us.
In other news, one of my bookshelves made the Shelfies newsletter. Really delightful initiative by authors Jared Shurin and Lavie Tidhar.
A new RESTRICTED FREQUENCY is scheduled. Titled The Great Shi(f)t is Upon Us, it goes out in about 15 hours.
Here's the link to the previous RESTRICTED FREQUENCY – 218: Between Venice, Rome, and Cairo
“The present crisis should be spurring us to reflect upon our behavior and imagine a truly different future for ourselves. But the imaginative and conceptual power necessary to do so has been taken from us by the experts and specialists who have monopolized technological development. There are surely too many who still think we can sit back and let technology solve climate change for us.”
It is indeed frightening how the belief in technology-as-savior is so widespread, when it is in fact technological development that has been the cause of so much destruction, mostly because said technological development has been subservient to capitalist interests, if not developed for them outright.
If ever there was a technological component to the solution, it wouldn't be useful without a complete revolt against the present sociopolitical economy.
“In short, the ideology of technology has become a cause of widespread impoverishment of imagination in today's society.”
Likely even more so with the advent of A.I.
“The wealth held by the twenty-six richest capitalists in the world is equivalent to the total assets belonging to the world's poorest 3.8 billion people, nearly half the world's population.”
And if you're curious who the twenty-six richest capitalists in the world are exactly, here you go:
- Bernard Arnault & Family – $233 billion (France)
- Elon Musk – $195 billion (South Africa/Canada/USA)
- Jeff Bezos – $194 billion (USA)
- Mark Zuckerberg – $177 billion (USA)
- Larry Ellison – $141 billion (USA)
- Warren Buffett – $133 billion (USA)
- Bill Gates – $128 billion (USA)
- Steve Ballmer – $121 billion (USA)
- Mukesh Ambani – $116 billion (India)
- Larry Page – $114 billion (USA)
- Sergey Brin – $110 billion (USA)
- Michael Bloomberg – $106 billion (USA)
- Amancio Ortega – $103 billion (Spain)
- Carlos Slim Helu & Family – $102 billion (Mexico)
- Francoise Bettencourt Meyers & Family – $99.5 billion (France)
- Michael Dell – $91 billion (USA)
- Gautam Adani – $84 billion (India)
- Jim Walton & Family – $78.4 billion (USA)
- Rob Walton & Family – $77.4 billion (USA)
- Jensen Huang – $77 billion (USA)
- Alice Walton – $72.3 billion (USA)
- David Thomson & Family – $67.8 billion (Canada)
- Julia Koch & Family – $64.3 billion (USA)
- Zhong Shanshan – $62.3 billion (China)
- Charles Koch & Family – $58.5 billion (USA)
- Giovanni Ferrero – $57 billion (Italy)
Surprising absolutely no one, 17 of those 26 are American.
That is not to say there is no poverty in America; about 12% of Americans live below the poverty line and a whopping 49% have less than $500 in savings.
“We usually think of capitalism as something that provides wealth and abundance, but the truth is quite the opposite. Capitalism is a system that functions by producing scarcity.”
Perhaps manufacturing scarcity might be the more apt terminology.
All quotes above are from Kohei Saito's brilliant SLOW DOWN: The Degrowth Manifesto.
Happy new year.
“Politicalism is the belief that if we simply select good leaders within a framework of representative democracy, we can leave it up to these politicians and experts to put optimal policies and laws in place for us.”
More from Kohei Saito's excellent SLOW DOWN.
“However, this is the effect of narrowing the field of political action to elections.”
Kohei is an efficient writer and rather than dance around the point he wants to make as is common in much writing undertaken by academics, he gets right to the heart of the matter.
“Representative democracy cannot expand the purview of democracy itself and cannot effect a revolution across all society. Electoral politics always reaches its limit when faced with the power of capital. Politics does not exist separately from the economy—rather, it is subordinate to it.”
Indeed, the only time in America where major policies were undertaken to the benefit of the greater general public was under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the wake of the Great Depression, after the power of capital had already led to its own implosion. Still a case where politics was in essence subordinate to the economy.
The same thing should've ideally happened in the wake of America's 2008 financial crisis (otherwise referred to as the Great Recession), but that's not quite how things worked out despite the ballot box tipping in favor of the socialist-seeming candidate of African American heritage.
“This is why the field of political possibility must be expanded through a social movement that confronts capital directly.”
Kohei Saito, SLOW DOWN: The Degrowth Manifesto.
“It would take the redistribution of a mere 0.2 percent of the world's wealth to end the hardship of the 1.4 billion people currently living beneath the world's poverty line of US $1.25 a day.”
More from Kohei Saito's SLOW DOWN.
“Economic equality if realized via the redistribution of subsidies currently spent on the fossil fuel industry ($5.9 trillion or 6.8 percent of the GDP of 2020), would produce no additional environmental burden. In fact, it would likely improve the environment!”
$5.9 trillion redistributed to 1.4 billion people would come out to about $11.5 a day per person, not a whole lot, but still 9 times more than what you've got if you're living on $1.25 a day.
One thing to keep in mind, the necessity of wealth redistribution does not only apply to the Global South vis-a-vis the Global North, but also applies within the populations of some nations of the Global North.
“The per capita GDP of most northern European nations like France and Germany is lower than that of the United States. But their standards of social welfare are much higher, and many of these nations provide healthcare and higher education free to their citizens. In the US, by contrast, some people lack health insurance and therefore have difficulties accessing healthcare, and many people struggle with student loans they will never be able to pay back Japan's GDP is also much lower than America's, but the average Japanese lifespan is almost six years longer.
“In other words, the extent to which societies thrive changes greatly depending on how production and distribution are organized and how social resources are shared. No matter how much an economy might grow, if the resulting wealth is monopolized by one part of the population and never redistributed, large numbers of people will live in comparative misery, unable to realize their potential.
“This can be seen the other way as well: even if its economy doesn't grow, if existing resources are distributed well, a society may thrive more than ever.”
SLOW DOWN: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito
“Footsteps on cobblestone bounce off the walls in Venetian passageways. Aside from the sound of the occasional motorboat, there isn't much else to be heard on the streets of Venice; A much welcomed change of ambiance for someone who does not drive but hails from a world dominated by cars and multi-lane motorways. In Venice, wherever your eyes fall, there is only beauty to be seen.”
From issue 218 of RESTRICTED FREQUENCY, scheduled to go out late this evening.
“Carbon dioxide emitted by the top 10 percent of the world's richest people makes up half of worldwide emissions.”
From Kohei Saito's SLOW DOWN.
“On the other hand, the least wealthy half of the world's population is responsible for a mere 10 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.”
One might be inclined to conclude that the answer may quite simply be to call on the rich to reduce their emissions, and the rich may even agree and conclude that the solution lies in greening the economy by shifting to renewable energy. Ain't that simple though:
“But we must also keep in mind the following: almost every one of us living in a developed country belongs to the world's richest 20 percent, and some of those who call themselves 'middle class' are actually part of the top 10 percent. In other words, it will be impossible to truly combat climate change if we fail to participate as directly interested parties in the radical transformation of the Imperial Mode of Living.”
Thing is though: a shift to renewables is by no means a transformation of the Imperial Mode of Living, given that renewable energy heavily relies on the utilization of lithium-ion battery technology, itself reliant on an exorbitant extraction of lithium and cobalt, which involves processes with severe environmental consequences, first on communities in the global south but inevitably upon the entire global ecosystem, all of which is detailed in Saito's book.
But the crux of Saito's argument is that even if that were not the case, “greening” the economy by cutting down CO2 emissions and utilizing renewable energy would not cause a reduction in consumption (it would likely even increase it), and as such would entail a continuation of the predatory resource extraction necessary to feed the current economic model and the consumerist lifestyles it fosters. CO2 emissions or not, exorbitant resource extraction spells the death of our planet.
“A team of environmental scholars headed by Australian professor Thomas Wiedmann has developed a calculation called the 'material footprint' (MF) to revise our understanding of the effects of international trade. The MF is a figure indexing the consumption of natural resources.”
The only solution then is the adoption of a different economic model altogether.
49 pages into SLOW DOWN, Saito hasn't gotten to that bit yet, but it's clear that's where he's headed. He takes his time giving us all the data and sound reasoning why not only our current mode of capitalism is doomed to fail, but why “Green New Deal”-like solutions are doomed to fail as well. Thus, paving the way for the only viable solution.
SLOW DOWN: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito
I fully intended to blog while on the road, but the way days unfolded kept me from even touching my laptop, which I must admit was a most welcomed change.
I may post a few travel pix over the next couple days, but for a few shots of the exhibition at the Palazzo del Fumetto on ganzeer.com. Not the best pix, as I neglected to bring my good camera and shot all these with my phone.
I've had a foot in and out of the cultural scene in many cities around the world, and still no place compares to Cairo in that regard. The energy, enthusiasm, and genuine interest is simply unmatched.
Above photo from a series of talks related to Egyptian and Lebanese film history at Cimatheque in downtown Cairo a few days ago.