Daniel Pinchbeck: I want to let you know about a new activist movement I am supporting, Extinction Rebellion. Our movement is using large-scale direct actions to pressure governments to move faster on climate change.

We have three immediate demands. One is that governments tell the truth about the ecological emergency we are facing as a species. The second is we move to carbon neutral by 2025. This is, obviously, an extreme position but it accords with what the hundreds of scientists who compiled the UN’s 2018 IPCC Report have told us: Without rapid collective action, global civilization will collapse in the next decades. We may in fact face our extinction as a species. The third demand is for a global citizen’s council, a participatory and democratic process that oversees governments in fulfilling the first two goals. 

Extinction Rebellion (XR) also has a set of principles. One of these is that the movement is decentralized and autonomous. This means anyone can start their own local offshoot if they support XR’s demands and abide by the principles. XR recently shut down a number of bridges in London. A few months later, the City of London declared a climate emergency and accelerated its timeframe for going carbon neutral significantly. Sustained public pressure can have a powerful impact, if people are willing to risk themselves for a greater cause. Governments need us to act. 

We have our first XR Mass Meeting in New York this Saturday afternoon. All the information is here. If you live locally, please come. If you don’t live locally, please start your own group and start mobilizing. 

We are out of time and we must act forcefully and quickly, or there will be no Earth for our children to inhabit. Please message me with questions or offers of support for the movement. 

The post Daniel Pinchbeck on why we need Extinction Rebellion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Small-scale actions were followed by mass protests in 2015 and at the beginning of 2016. The watershed moment followed the demolitions of 25 April 2016, when citizens showed up in great numbers to protest, demanding resignations and laying criminal responsibility at the door of officials.

In the months to come, 10 major protests took place, each one bigger than the last. At the height of the protests, there were 20,000 people on the streets of Belgrade – the biggest civic protests since those that toppled Slobodan Milošević in 2000.

From the beginning, the initiative included direct actions and mass protests, using legal challenges to the development, as well as intense media campaigns. The development which contravenes Serbian legislation is still underway, but the protest have nevertheless injected a new sense of hope onto the streets of Belgrade. It has showed the strength of its citizens willing and ready to take back the control of their city, their lives and their future.

Today was a great protest organised by “Ne davimo Beograd”, commemorating a year after violent demolition, done by “phantoms” during election night in 2016.

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us.

Or visit nedavimobeograd.wordpress.com

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

The post Belgrade, Serbia: Ne da(vo)mo Beograd Takes on Luxury Development appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The prize will collect people’s submissions about exemplary acts of civil disobedience which have brought benefit to society by supporting the principles of non-violence, creativity, courage and responsibility, and will award 250 thousand dollars to the one which is deemed to be the most significant, according to the opinion of a jury.

It is only apparently peculiar for an institution such as MIT to deal with the topic of Disobedience.

Joi Ito is not new to the theme. In 2014 he publicly demonstrated his interest in “anti-disciplinariety”, which is the attitude of avoiding to framing one’s actions into a particular discipline, or even in a combination of different existing disciplines. But, more interestingly, to create new languages, architectures and methods.

In 2016 this approach has led to the creation of JoDS, the Journal of Design and Sciences.

Using the words from its introduction, JoDS

captures the antidisciplinary ethos of the MIT Media Lab. Like the Lab, it opens new connections between science and design, encouraging discourse that breaks down the barriers between traditional academic disciplines”.

These elements help us understand how the Disobedience Award initiative represents a continuity in MIT’s strategies, but it still does not tell us anything about why it exists.

Disobedience — in the sense of Civil Disobedience — is a term whose origin is in Thoreau’s essay, and which has found its natural outburst in the United States of the ’60s and ’70s, the ones of the contestation, of the revolution, of the protests against Vietnam.

Starting from those years, (Civil) Disobedience has become one of the symbol-words of smart, intellectual, committed revolt.

Let’s analyze it.

Dis-Obedience

To Obey. From Ob–Udire. Ob, which means forward, ahead. And Udire, which means to listen.

To Obey: to put forward what we have heard from others. To execute others’ commandments, to submit to the will of others.

And, as a result: Dis-obey, Dis-Ob-Udire: not executing others’ commandments.

This is a very polarizing word: there is an I and an Other, and the I confronts the Other directly: however non-violent it is, it’s a fight, an opposition.

Transgression

Now, let’s analyze another word: Transgression.

Transgression. From Trans-Gredire. Trans: on the other side, traversing. And Gredire, which means step, as in the ladder and as in walking. Which leads to: to go beyond, further, to overcome limits and boundaries.

With her Excess Space theory, Elizabeth Grosz says that transgressors do not fight boundaries, they recognize them and, by doing so, they move them.

Transgression is not oppositive. It is not a dis, or a non. It does not have an enemy.

Transgression is to go beyond, not against.

The Status Quo

If in Disobedience focus is on the status quo, on order, on commandments, which have to be negated, to which one must oppose and negate, in Transgression it is on traversing, in going beyond, moving, changing the cards on the table, the scenario, the landscape.

Disobedience, today, recalls Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s troublemakers, of when, in 1982, he wrote the “Industrialization of the Mind”.

When all industries become cultural, immaterial industries (like today), they suffer a paradox: their product, conscience, is a social product and, thus, they cannot produce it themselves; they can only try to induce it, and reproduce it.

In this paradox, Enzensberger highlighted the role of the troublemakers, the undisciplined, of the disobedient: it is them, among few others, who can stimulate the creation of conscience, its production.

To solve the paradox Enzensberger highlighted how the industrial complex only had one way forward: to co-opt them, to hire them, to put them on a stage, to award them prizes.

Disobedience, today, is the opposition to the status quo with a good Venture Capitalist on your side, to be ready to catch the opportunity to lead in new markets, disrupting the competition.

On the other hand, Transgression is about traversing, strolling, climbing over the fence, for the pleasure of it, without opposition, defeat, fight; for the desire to overcome, go beyond, discover, and to have experience of the Other.

Disobedience is work. Transgression is desire.

But work is disappearing, replaced by robots and artificial intelligences.

What we’re progressively left with is imagination, dream, boredom, time.

It is here, in this difference, that maybe one of the principal challenges of our times lays: in this challenge between disobedience and transgression, between this civil and industrious opposition which becomes an instrument for the market in order to defeat the status quo, to be able to bring up another one, and the capability to transgress, traverse, to access Other logics, according a philosophy of co-existence instead of dualism, contrapposition, and spectacle.

Originally published on Medium.com

Photo by Jazzyblue TR

The post Disobedience vs Transgression appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Behold today’s edition of Empire’s End—the biggest, best-ever 24/7 reality TV show! It’s been decades in preparation, with a budget in the trillions, a cast of billions! Its hero-villain is far more colorful and pathetic than Tony Soprano or Walter White. One day he and his team of oddball supporting characters appear to be winning bigly; the next, they’re crashing and burning. We’re all on the edges of our seats, alternately enraged, horrified, thrilled, or brought to tears in uncontrollable laughter. Who could bear to miss a minute of it?

Still, maybe at least some of us are better off severely limiting our consumption of American national news just now. It’s not that events in Washington won’t affect us. They most assuredly will. Rather, I’d argue that there are even more important things to attend to, over which we have far greater agency.

I’ve invested as much attention in the outrage-of-the-day distraction machine as anyone, spending scores of hours reading news reports and analyses, and I’ve written at least a half-dozen essays about our current tweeter-in-chief. And I’m here to tell you that full immersion in the news cycle is just not healthy.

Some readers may find this conclusion too cynical. I propose it only after a great deal of thought, and on the basis of two premises.

First Premise: We are at the end of the period of general economic growth that characterized the post-WWII era. I’ve written extensively about this, and there’s no need to repeat myself at length here. Suffice it to say that we humans have harvested the world’s cheap and easy-to-exploit energy resources, and the energy that’s left will not, much longer, support the kind of consumer economy we’ve built. Further, in order to keep the party roaring, we’ve built up consumer and government debt levels to unsustainable extremes. We’ve also pumped hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and oceans, putting the entire biosphere at risk. Yet our current economic and political systems require further, endless growth in order to avert collapse. Almost no one wants to discuss this situation—neither politicians nor economists. Therefore the general public is left mostly in the dark. Still, everyone senses a change in the air: despite jiggered statistics, workers know that their wages have stagnated or fallen in recent years, and members of the younger generation generally expect to earn less that their parents. This generates a persistent low-level sense of fear and dissatisfaction, guaranteeing a significant political shift such as we are seeing.

Second Premise: The new and current U.S. regime is adopting an essentially fascist character. When empires decline, people often turn to leaders perceived as strong, and who promise to return the nation to its former glory. In extreme instances, such leaders can be characterized as fascist—using the word in a generic sense to refer to authoritarian nationalism distinguished by one-party rule, the demonization of internal and external enemies (usually tinged with some form of racism or anti-Semitism), controls on press freedoms, and social conservatism. Here’s the thing: Once a nation turns decisively toward fascism, there’s rarely a turning back. Fascist regimes ruthlessly hobble and destroy all opposition. Typically, it takes a foreign invasion or a complete economic-political-social collapse to reset a national government that has gone fascist.

Now, put these two premises together. Those who get the second premise but miss the first tend to conclude that, at least until the new regime neutralizes significant opposition within the government, there is still something we can do to make everything turn out okay—in the sense that life would return to “normal.” Just defeat the fascists, no matter what the cost. But the end of growth ensures that, beyond a certain point, there will be no more “normal.” We’re headed into new territory no matter what.

Taking both premises into account, what are the likely outcomes?

It’s possible that the Trumpist insurgency will succeed in rooting out or suppressing opposition not just in Congress and the media, but also in Executive-branch departments including the CIA and FBI. In that case we may see at least a few years of authoritarian national governance punctuated by worsening financial and environmental crises, all against the backdrop of accelerating national decline. It’s just a guess, but the regime may have only two more months to somehow overcome resistance within the intelligence community; if it can do so, then the task of undercutting the judiciary and the media can be pursued at a more leisurely pace over the next year or two. But thanks to Premise One, short-term success probably will not lead to a regime that is stable over the long term. Eventually, no matter how vigorously it suppresses real or perceived enemies, the U.S. federal government will collapse as a result of war, economic crisis, or the simple ongoing erosion of biophysical support systems. At that point a possible trajectory for the nation would be to break apart into smaller geographically defined political entities.

However, the short-term success of the current regime is not yet guaranteed. It is still entirely possible that establishmentarian Democratic and Republican members of Congress, working with with renegade CIA and FBI mid-level officials and mainstream media outlets, could mire the new leadership in a scandal that is too deep to survive. Or, if Republicans lose control of Congress in 2018, articles of impeachment could be brought against Trump. This would not, however, guarantee a return to status quo politics in Washington. Not only does Premise One guarantee that the old status quo is no longer tenable, but also on its own terms the political system is now too broken and the nation too divided. In this scenario, pro-regime and anti-regime elites might just continue to escalate their attacks on one another until the whole system crashes—as I explained in a previous essay, citing the conclusions of ecologist Peter Turchin, which he based on his comparative study of over a dozen ancient and modern societies in analogous circumstances.

It’s just a guess: if the regime is successful in the short term, we might get a slower crash; if it fails, we might get a faster one. In any case, there’s no national team to root for that is capable of restoring the status quo ante Trump, at least not for long, if that is even desirable. Under either scenario, competent local governance might provide significantly better living conditions than the national average (more on that below), but the overall picture is pretty grim. A few years from now I expect that we’ll be in very different territory socially, politically, and economically. This is not a conclusion that I relish, but it’s one seemingly demanded by history and logic.

Nevertheless, what we do in the meantime could make a big positive difference to people and planet, both over the short term and also over the long term. Here are some specific things you can do:

1. Disengage from the spectacle. Learn what you need to know in order to assess immediate threats and general trends, but otherwise avoid spending long periods of time ingesting online, print, radio, or televised media. It’s bad for your mental health and takes time away from other items on this list.
2. If you haven’t already done so, make a personal and family resilience plan in case of a temporary breakdown in the basic functions of government (everyone should do this anyway in view of our vulnerability to earthquakes or weather disasters). Where should you be living? Are you growing any of your own food? Do you have some food and water in storage? Have you reduced your energy usage to a minimum, and installed solar PV (with short-term battery backup) and hot water solar panels? Do you have some cash set aside?
3. Work to build community resilience. If and when national governance breaks down, your local community’s degree of social and biophysical resilience will make all the difference for you and your family. Biophysical resilience relates to local food, water, and energy systems. A socially resilient community is one in which people are talking to one another, institutions for resolving disputes are trusted, and people look out for one another. Identify organizations that are building both kinds of resilience in your community and engage with them. These could be churches, civic government, non-profit organizations, food co-ops, energy co-ops, health co-ops, neighborhood safety groups, local investment clubs, or Transition groups. Get involved with existing organizations or start new ones. Yes, it takes a lot of time. But friends are more important than money in the bank—especially in times of social and political upheaval.
4. Direct some of your resilience-building efforts toward long-term and nature-centered concerns. This might take the form of conservation work of various kinds. In my last essay, I discussed assisting the migration of forests in the face of climate change. Carbon farming and providing wild bird and insect refuges are other options—not (only) because they’re enjoyable hobbies but because they help maintain the biophysical resilience of the ecosystems we depend on. Again, this is work that proceeds best in the company of others.
5. Take some time for the conservation of culture—arts and skills that are their own reward. Connecting with others in your community by enjoying or playing music together, singing, dancing, or making visual art deepens relationships and gives life more dimension and meaning.

While the legal and social functions of liberal democracy persist, vigorous and sustained protest efforts could help rein in the fascist tendencies of the new American government. Participating in protests could enable you to get to know other members of your community. On the other hand, protest could further fragment your community if that community is already deeply divided politically—and it could eventually get you in a lot of trouble depending on how things work out, since protest under fascist regimes doesn’t produce the same result as protest in a liberal democracy.

Don’t obey the new leaders when they call for actions that undermine democracy and justice; instead, choose to actively disobey in ways that actually matter in the long term. Refuse to define yourself in terms of the regime. Yes, at certain moments in history it is necessary to take a stand one way or the other on a particular issue (such as the issue of slavery in mid-nineteenth century America), and in the days ahead some issue may require you to plant your flag. But this historical moment may be one when many real heroes and heroines choose to engage in ways that are not scripted by any of the elites.

Photo credit: Michael Hogan/flickr.

The post Disengage from the spectacle appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“The rule of law maximizes injustice. The rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people. We ought to begin to recognize this. What we are trying to do is to get back to the principles, the aims and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority.”

Watch this video with a strong call to arms. The following text is extracted from Sophie McAdam’s article on Damon’s speech.

Matt Damon, a lifelong friend of Howard Zinn and his family, read excerpts from a speech Howard Zinn gave in 1970 as part of a debate on civil disobedience.

“I start from the supposition that the world is topsy turvy. That things are all wrong,” begins actor and writer Matt Damon in this powerful speech calling on people to question authority.

“The wrong people are in jail, and the wrong people are out of jail,” Damon goes on. “The wrong people are in power, and the wrong people are out of power. Wealth is distributed in such a way as to not just simply require small reform, but a drastic re-allocation. All we have to do is to look at the state of the world today, and you can see it’s topsy-turvy. You might watch TV and think it’s ok, but you just have to detach and come back, and you’re horrified.”

Damon then references the theme of the conference, which is ‘civil disobedience’. “As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you’re saying our problem is civil disobedience,” He says.

“That is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.”

“Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of their governments and have gone to war. And millions have been killed because of this obedience. We recognize this from Nazi Germany,” Damon says, referring to blindly obedient citizens as “herd-like people”. “We know that the problem there was obedience. That the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed. That was wrong. People should have challenged it, they should have resisted. And if we were only there, we would have showed them.”

Or would we? There’s food for thought.

Damon’s message is that blind obedience to authority is not necessarily the ethical choice. Obedience can’t replace your moral compass. In fact, it’s the root cause of all the millions of young lives wasted in senseless wars throughout the ages.

“The rule of law maximizes injustice. The rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people. We ought to begin to recognize this. What we are trying to do is to get back to the principles, the aims and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority.”

Damon advocates disobeying laws that do not serve the greater good or go against basic morality: those new, but increasingly common injustices, like jailing the kind-hearted people who feed the homeless or prosecuting people for collecting rainwater. Like trying to sue those who choose to grow vegetables on their lawn, or making parents’ lives hell for preventing them from giving cannabis oil to their sick child–  a child whose life could be saved if the plant were decriminalized (…globally). Damon thinks we should stand up against all these injustices and more.

But, he says, it doesn’t stop there. Above all, we must stop obeying the call of corrupt, lying leaders to go fight against other innocent human beings in endless, bloody wars that simply make no sense, and don’t benefit anyone except the arms dealers, the rebuilding contractors, and the oil corps. We must stop making war, and we must stop believing that to honor the fallen we have to buy into the government and the mainstream media’s glorification of war.

Comment and share if you agree.

Photo by Siebbi

The post Matt Damon: In Defense of Civil Disobedience appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Hard hitting commentary from Chris Hedges on the futility of appealing to corporate-bought regulatory agencies and bodies. You can read the full piece at Truthdig.com.

But there are moral and religious laws—laws that call on us to protect our neighbor, fight for justice and maintain systems of life—that must supersede the laws of the state. Fealty to these higher laws means we will make powerful enemies. It means we will endure discomfort, character assassination, state surveillance and repression. It means we will go to jail. But it is in the midst of this defiance that we will find purpose and, Packard argues, faith.

It was 6:30 in the morning and George Packard, dressed in a dark suit, a purple clerical bib and a clerical collar, was at church. Or, rather, at what has become church for the retired Episcopal bishop, activist and highly decorated Vietnam War veteran.

Packard stood with 20 other protesters on a chilly morning Nov. 9 to block two roads leading to the staging area for Texas-based Spectra Energy’s Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) pipeline project. After an hour, he and eight other protesters were arrested by New York state police.

Carrying out sustained acts of civil disobedience is the only option left to defy the corporate state, says Packard, who over the years has been arrested at an Occupy Wall Street protest and other demonstrations. It will be a long, difficult and costly struggle. But there are moral and religious laws—laws that call on us to protect our neighbor, fight for justice and maintain systems of life—that must supersede the laws of the state. Fealty to these higher laws means we will make powerful enemies. It means we will endure discomfort, character assassination, state surveillance and repression. It means we will go to jail. But it is in the midst of this defiance that we will find purpose and, Packard argues, faith.

“This is the renewed presence of the church, people of spirit wandering around in the darkness trying to find each other,” Packard said to me before he was taken into custody by police during the Montrose protest. He stood holding one corner of a large banner reading, “We Say No to Spectra’s Algonquin Pipeline Expansion.” “When you find a cause that has spine, importance and potency you find the truth of the Scripture. You find it inside your gut. There is an ache in the culture.” Gesturing toward his fellow demonstrators, he added: “These are a few of the people who are speaking to it. This is what the church used to be. It used to be standing in conscience.”

The high-pressure, 42-inch-diameter pipeline, slated to run within 100 feet of critical structures of the Indian Point nuclear power plant and 400 feet of an elementary school, under major power lines, across a fault line, and below the Hudson River, would expose residents along the route to toxic emissions from compressor stations, along with the threat of ruptures, leakages and explosions. If an explosion caused a meltdown at Indian Point it would jeopardize the more than 21 million people living in and around New York City and the Hudson Valley. Pipelines are prone to leaks, breaks and explosions and are poorly monitored. On average in 2014, there was an accident involving a gas transmission pipeline every three days.

The gas in the AIM pipeline, bound for foreign export, will not be available to local communities along the route or provide many jobs to local residents (workers in pickup trucks blocked by the protesters at Montrose often had Texas or Oklahoma license plates). Residents, as is common along pipeline routes, have found themselves powerless to prevent the state from seizing their property under eminent domain and turning it over to the industry.

The protesters were from a local organization called Resist AIM. They had spent more than two years attending hearings and meetings with elected representatives and county and state officials, as well as reaching out to regulatory agencies such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). But these officials and agencies, cowed or controlled by corporate power, ignored their pleas. The oil and gas industry controls FERC, the federal agency in charge of issuing pipeline permits, by placing members from the industry on the board. FERC has denied only one pipeline request in the last decade. The agency is a corporate front posing as a regulatory agency; most of its budget comes from permitting fees paid by the oil and gas industry. It rubber-stamps requests so the fossil fuel industry can transport fracked gas or shale oil in a series of pipelines from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and other areas in the Marcellus Shale region to export terminals on the East Coast. The New York AIM pipeline, which replaces a smaller pipeline, is part of this vast infrastructure project.

“Front-line communities start out by being obedient and attempting to influence legislation and regulation,” said activist Susan Rubin, who is part of Resist AIM. “They put a lot of time and energy into their two-minute talk with FERC thinking that will make a difference. We wasted about a year and a half going to these regulatory meetings and writing letters. We did not understand that FERC is a rogue agency run by gas and oil insiders.”

“It is a hard conversation to have with people, even explaining how broken FERC is, that being nice to our congresswoman is not going to fix it,” she said. “We have to turn up the heat. We have to get loud. But we live in a culture of obedience. When I was arrested in front of the White House in 2011 it caused a shift in me. I realized signing a petition would not work. I realized I needed to be in this for the long run. There would be no short victories. I do little happy dances for a few hours and then I get back to work because I have kids. This is what I have to do.”

The post Chris Hedges on the need for civil disobedience appeared first on P2P Foundation.