Distopije i utopije (u filmu, knjizevnosti, filozofiji i stvarnom zivotu)

[eumeswil]

Ogledalo proizvodnje

 

Tehnika ili ulog veka


Čudi me da Elil dosad nije spomenut u temi.

Edited December 13, 2014 by miki.bg

[eumeswil]

Iz The Consumer Society by JB:

 

There is much talk of the right to health, to space, to beauty, to holidays, to knowledge and to culture. And, as these new rights emerge, so ministries emerge with them, such as the Ministries of Health, or of Leisure. And why not add Beauty and Clean Air? This whole phenomenon, which seems to express a general individual and collective advance, rewarded in the end with embodiment in institutions, is ambiguous in its meaning and one might, as it were, see it as representing quite the opposite: there is no right to space until there no longer is space for everyone, and until space and silence are the privilege of some at the expense of others. Just as there was no "right to property" until there was no longer land for everyone and there was no right to work until work became, within the framework of the division of labour, an exchangeable commodity, i.e. one which no longer belong specifically to individuals. We might ask whether the "right to leisure" does not, similarly, mean that leisure too has reached the stage of technical and social division which work did before it and has thus, in fact, come to an end.

 

The appearance of these new social rights, brandished as slogans and emblazoned on the democratic banner of the affluent society, is in fact symptomatic, therefore, of the elements concerned acquiring the status of distinctive signs and class (or caste) privileges. The "right to clean air" signifies the loss of clean air as a natural good, its transition to commodity status and its inegalitarian social redistribution. One should not mistake for objective social progress (something being entered as a right in the tables of the law) what is simply the advance of the capitalist system -- i.e. the progressive transformation of all concrete and natural values into productive forms, i.e. into sources

1. of economic profit;
2. of social privilege.

 

For Sahlins, it was the hunter-gatherers (the primitive nomadic tribes of Australia, the Kalahari, etc.) who, in spite of their absolute "poverty", knew true affluence. The primitive people of those societies have no personal possessions; they are not obsessed by their objects, which they throw away as and when they need to in order to be able to move about more easily. They have no apparatus of production, or "work": they hunt and gather "at their leisure", as we might say, and share everything within the group. They are entirely prodigal: they consume everything immediately, make no economic calculations and amass no stores. The hunter-gatherer has nothing of that bourgeois invention: economic man, about him. He is ignorant of the basic principles of Political Economy. And, indeed, he never exploits human energies, natural resources, or the effective economic possibilities to the full. He sleeps a lot. he has a trust -- and this is what characterizes his economic system -- in the wealth of natural resources, whereas our system is characterized (ever more so, which technical advance) by despair at the insufficiency of human means, by a radical, catastrophic anxiety which is the deep effect of the market economy and generalized competition.

 

The collective "improvidence" and "prodigality" characteristic of primitive societies are the sign or real affluence. We have only the signs of affluence. Beneath a gigantic apparatus of production, we anxiously eye the signs of poverty and scarcity. But poverty consists, says Sahlins, neither in a small quantity of goods, nor simply in a relation between ends and means: it is, above all, a relation between human beings.

Edited December 15, 2014 by miki.bg

[noskich]

Zombie Apocalypse and the Politics of Artificial Scarcity

 

http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/zombie-scarcity.html#.VJR1rl4AA

 

Dystopian narratives are no longer fiction. From birth, we are corralled into a system that scoffs at free will, stymies our creative and productive capacities, and leaves us little room to carve our own paths. The constructs directed from above are designed to strip us of our inclination to care and cooperate, and make us accept the need to step over one another to get ahead. This is not our nature. Whether we're talking about Kropotkin's studies in "the wild" or Tomasello's experience with children, observable evidence tells us we've been duped.

[eumeswil]

Isti izvor kao i prethodni post.

 

 

The Accounting of Growth or the Mystique of GNP

 

In this reference to mystique, we are speaking of the most extraordinary bluff on the part of modern societies -- of an operation of "white magic" on the figures which in reality conceals a black magic of collective bewitchment. We are speaking of the absurd gymnastics of accounting illusions, of national accounts. Nothing enters into these except factors which are visible and measurable by the criteria of economic rationality, and that indeed is the central principle of the magic. Research, culture and women's domestic labour are all excluded from these accounts on this basis, though certain things which have no business there do figure in them, merely because they are measurable. Moreover, like dreams, they have no conception of the negative and lump together everything -- nuisances and positive elements -- in the most total (though by no means innocent) illogicality.

 

Economists lump together the value of all products and services of all kinds, making no distinction between public and private services. Nuisances and palliatives to them figure in the accounts on the same basis as the production of objectively useful goods. "Motion pictures, television, cars, and the vast opportunities which go with mobility, together with such less enchanting merchandise as narcotics, comic books, and pornographia, are all included in an advancing gross national product." (Galbraith)

The deficit side -- damage and obsolescence -- does not figure in the accounts or, if it does, it figures positively! The costs of travel to work, for example, are accounted as consumer expenditure! This is the logical result, expressed in figures, of the magical goal of production for its own sake: every article produced is sacralized by the very fact of its being produced. Every article produced is positive, every measurable thing is positive. The 30 per cent reduction in the luminosity of air in Paris over the past 50 years is regarded as external and non-existent by accountants. But if it results in a greater expenditure of electrical energy, of light bulbs and spectacles, etc., then it exists -- and exists, moreover, as an increase in production and social wealth! Any restrictive or selective infringement of the sacred principle of production and growth is met with cries of sacrilege ("We shall not touch one screw of Concorde!"). As a collective obsession consigned to the accounting ledgers, productivity primarily has the social function of amyth. And anything can be used to fuel that myth -- even the conversion of objective realities which refute it into figures which confirm it.
 

But there is perhaps in this mythic algebra of financial accounts a profound truth, the truth of the economico-political system of growth societies. It seems paradoxical to us that the positive and the negative should be added together indiscriminately. But it is perhaps quite simply logical. For the truth is perhaps that it is the "negative" goods, the nuisances compensated, the internal operating costs, the social costs of "dysfunctional" endoregulation, the subsidiary sectors of useless prodigality which play the dynamic role of economic engine in that set-up. This latent truth of the system is, of course, hidden by the figures, the magical addition of which conceals this admirable circularity of the positive and the negative (alcohol sales and hospital building, etc.). And this would explain the impossibility, despite all efforts and at all levels, of rooting out these negative aspects: the system lives by them and cannot rid itself of them. We shall meet this problem again in connection with poverty, that "balancing counterforce" of poverty which growth societies "drag along behind them" as a defect and which is in fact one of their most serious "nuisances". We have to accept the hypothesis that all these nuisances somewhere enter into the equation as positive factors, as continual factors of growth, as boosters of production and consumption. In the eighteenth century, in The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville proposed the theory (already regarded as sacrilegious and libertine in his day) that a society achieves equilibrium not through its virtues but through its vices, and that social peace, progress and human happiness are obtained by the instinctive immorality which leads them continually to break the rules. He was, of course, speaking of morality, but we may also construe his words in a social and economic sense. It is, precisely, by its hidden defects, its balancing forces, its nuisances, and what seem like vices when compared with a rational system, that the real system prospers. Mandeville was accused of cynicism: it is the social order, the order of production, which is objectively cynical.

 

 

The Egalitarian Ideology of Well-Being
 

 

The whole of the discourse on needs is based on a naïve anthropology: that of the natural propensity to happiness. Happiness, written in letters of fire behind the least little advert for bathsalts or the Canary Islands, is the absolute reference of the consumer society: it is the strict equivalent of salvation. But what is this happiness which haunts modern civilization with such ideological force?

 

Here again one has to revise all spontaneous conceptions. The ideological force of the notion of happiness does not originate in a natural propensity on the part of each individual to realize that happiness for himself. It derives, socio-historically, from the fact that the myth of happiness is the one which, in modern societies, takes up and comes to embody the myth of Equality. All the political and sociological virulence with which that myth has been charged since the industrial revolution and the revolutions of the nineteenth century has been transferred to Happiness. The fact that Happiness initially has that signification and that ideological function has important consequences for its content: to be the vehicle of the egalitarian myth. Happiness has to be measurable. It has to be a well-being measurable in terms of objects and signs; it has to be `comfort', as Tocqueville put it, already noting this trend of democratic societies towards ever more well-being as a reduction of the impact of social misfortune and an equalization of all destinies. Happiness as total or inner enjoyment -- that happiness independent of the signs which could manifest it to others and to those around us, the happiness which has no need of evidence -- is therefore excluded from the outset from the consumer ideal in which happiness is, first and foremost, the demand for equality (or distinction, of course) and must, accordingly, always signify with `regard' to visible criteria. In this sense, Happiness is even further removed from any collective `feast' or exaltation since, fuelled by an egalitarian exigency, it is based on individualistic principles, fortified by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which explicitly recognize the right to Happiness of everyone (of each individual).

 

The `Revolution of Well-Being' is heir to, or executor of, the Bourgeois Revolution, or simply of any revolution which proclaims human equality as its principle without being able (or without wishing) fundamentally to bring it about. The democratic principle is then transferred from a real equality of capacities, of responsibilities, of social chances and of happiness (in the full sense of the term) to an equality before the Object and other manifest signs of social success and happiness. This is the democracy of social standing, the democracy of the TV, the car and the stereo, an apparently concrete but, in fact, equally formal democracy which, beyond contradictions and social inequalities, corresponds to the formal democracy enshrined in the Constitution. Both of these, the one serving as an alibi for the other, combine in a general democratic ideology which conceals the absence of democracy and the non-existence of equality.

 

In the mystique of equality, the notion of `needs' is indissociable from that of well-being. Needs point to a reassuring universe of ends, and this naturalistic anthropology lays the ground for the promise of a universal equality. The implicit argument is as follows: all men are equal before need and before the principle of satisfaction, since all men are equal before the use-value of objects and goods (whereas they are unequal and divided before exchange-value). Need being indexed to use-value, we have here a relationship of objective utility or natural finality, in the face of which there is no longer any social or historical inequality. At the meat-and-drink level (use-value), there are no proletarians, no privileged individuals.

 

Thus the complementary myths of well-being and needs have a powerful ideological function of reducing, of eliminating the objective, social and historical, determinations of inequality. The whole political game of the welfare state and consumer society consists in surmounting their contradictions by increasing the volume of goods, with the prospect of an automatic equalization by quantity and a level of final equilibrium, which would be that of total well-being for all. Communist societies themselves speak in terms of equilibrium, of `natural' individual or social needs, needs `harmonized' and free of all social differentiation or class connotation. In this, they too drift from a political solution to a definitive solution by abundance, substituting the formal equality of goods for the social transparency of exchanges. Thus we also see the `Revolution of Well-Being' taking over from the social and political revolution in the socialist countries.

 

If this perspective on the ideology of well-being is correct (namely, that that ideology is a vehicle for the myth of formal equality `secularized' in goods and signs), then it is clear that the eternal problem of whether consumer society promotes or hinders equality, whether it is a fully achieved democracy (or on the way to being so) or the opposite -- merely restoring earlier inequalities and social structures -- is a false problem. Whether or not one is able to prove that consumption possibilities are being equalized (income differentials being flattened out, social redistribution, the same fashion for everyone, along with the same TV programmes and holiday destinations), this means nothing, since posing the problem in terms of the equalization of consumption is already to substitute the pursuit of objects and signs (level of substitution) for the real problems and their logical and sociological analysis. All in all, analysing Affluence does not mean seeking its verification in the statistics, which can only be as mythic as the myth, but radically changing focus and approaching the myth of Affluence with a logic other than its own. Analysis does, of course, require that we assess affluence in terms of figures, that we draw up the balance sheet of well-being. But the figures do not speak for themselves, and they never provide any counter-argument. Only interpretations speak, sometimes to one side of, sometimes against, the figures. Let us listen to what they have to say.

 

The most stubborn and unyielding of these is the idealist version:

 

- growth means affluence;

 

- affluence means democracy.

 

It being impossible to conclude that this state of total felicity is imminent (even at the statistical level), the myth becomes more `realistic' and we have the ideal-reformist variant: the large-scale inequalities of the first phase of growth are diminishing, there is no `iron law' any longer, incomes are becoming harmonized. The hypothesis of a smooth, continuous progress towards ever more equality is, of course, refuted by certain facts (the `Other America': 20 per cent living in poverty, etc.). But these point to a temporary dysfunction, to teething troubles. Growth, while producing certain inegalitarian effects, implies an overall, longterm democratization. Thus, in Galbraith's view, the problem of equality/inequality is no longer relevant. It was linked to the problem of wealth and poverty and the structures of the `affluent' society have resolved the problem, despite an unequal redistribution. The `poor' (the 20 per cent) are those who remain, for one reason or another, outside the industrial system, outside growth. The principle of growth itself remains inviolate; it is homogeneous and is tending to homogenize the entire social body

The basic question which arises at this level is the question of this "poverty". For the idealists of affluence, it is "residual"; it will be cleared up by additional growth. Yet it seems to carry on down the post-industrial generations and all efforts to eliminate it (particularly in the USA, with the "great society") seem to run up against some mechanism of the system which seems to reproduce it functionally at each stage of development, like a kind of drag on growth, a kind of mechanism indispensable to the general wealth. Should we believe Galbraith when he imputes this inexplicable residual poverty to the dysfunctions of the system (the priority accorded to military and other wasteful expenditure, a lagging of public services behind private consumption, etc.) or should we turn his argument around and conclude that growth, in its very dynamic, is based on this disequilibrium? Galbraith is very contradictory on this: all his analyses tend to demonstrate in a sense how its defects are functionally implicated in the system of growth, yet he recoils before the logical conclusions which would challenge the system itself and recasts everything in a liberal perspective.

Generally, the idealists do not go beyond this paradoxical affirmation: in spite of everything, and by a devilish inversion of its aims (which, as everyone knows, cannot but be beneficent), growth produces, reproduces and restores social inequality, privileges, disequilibria, etc. They will admit, for example, as Galbraith does in The Affluent Society, that, ultimately, it is an increase in production which takes over the redistributive role ("As there comes to be more and more... so there will in the end be enough for everyone" -- these principles, based on the physics of fluids, are never true in a social relations context, where, as we shall see below, things work in precisely the opposite way.) Moreover, from these principles, Galbraith derives an argument for the underprivileged, to the effect that even those on the bottom rung of the ladder have more to gain from an accelerated growth of production than from any other form of redistribution. But this is all specious: for, if growth grants everyone access to an income and a volume of goods which are higher in absolute terms, what is sociologically characteristic is the process of distortion which sets in at the very heart of growth. It is the rate of distortion which subtly structures growth and gives it its true meaning. It is so much easier to content oneself with the spectacular disappearance of a particular extreme form of penury or certain secondary inequalities, to assess affluence by statistics and general quantities, by absolute increases and gross national products, than to analyse it in terms of structures! Structurally, it is the rate of distortion which is significant. It is that rate which, at an international level, marks the growing distance between the underdeveloped countries and the overdeveloped nations, and also, within those nations, the lower incomes falling further behind the higher, failing industries losing ground to the high-technology sectors, rural areas losing out to urban, industrial areas, etc. Chronic inflation allows this relative pauperization to be masked, by revising all nominal values upwards, whereas the calculation of the relative functions and averages would show up instances of partial decline at the bottom of the scale, and, at any event, a structural distortion throughout. There is no point constantly arguing that this is temporary or conjunctural when one sees the whole logic of the system sustaining it and the system indeed depending upon it for the fulfilment of its aims. At best, we can say the system stabilizes around a certain rate of distortion or, in other words, stabilizes, whatever the absolute volume of wealth, at a point which includes a systematicinequality.

The only way, in fact, to escape the idealist dead-end of this gloomy listing of dysfunctions is to admit that there is a systematic logic at work here. It is also the only way of getting beyond the false problematic of abundance and scarcity which, like votes of confidence in parliamentary circles, functions to stifle all discussion.
 

There is not in fact -- and never has been -- any "affluent society", any more than there is an "indigent society", since ever society of whatever kind and whatever the volume of goods or available wealth is geared both to be a structural excess and a structural penury. The excess may be the portion set aside for the gods or for sacrifice; it may be sumptuary expenditure, surplus value, economic profit or prestige budgets. It is, at any rate, that luxury levy which defines both the wealth of a society and its social structure, since it is always the prerogative of a privileged minority and its function is precisely to reproduce caste and class privilege. At the sociological level there is no equilibrium. Equilibrium is the ideal fantasy of economists which is contradicted, if not by the very logic of society as a condition, then at least by all known forms of social organization. Every society produces differentiation, social discrimination, and that structural organization is based on the use and distribution of wealth (among other things). The fact that a society enters upon a phase of growth, as our industrial society has done, changes nothing in this process. Quite the contrary, indeed, in a certain way the capitalist system (and the productivist system in general) has been the culmination of that functional unravelling, that disequilibrium, by rationalizing it and generalizing it in all respects. The spirals of growth are arrayed around the same structural axis. As soon as the fiction of GDP is abandoned as the criterion of affluence, we have to admit that growth neither takes us further from, nor brings us closer to, affluence. It is logically separated from it by the whole social structure which is, here, the determining instance. A certain type of social relations and social contradictions, a certain type of "inequality", which used to perpetuate itself in the absence of economic progress, is today reproduced in and through growth.

This means that we must take another view on growth. We shall no longer say with the enthusiasts: "Growth produces affluence and therefore equality." Nor shall we take the extreme opposite view: "Growth produces inequality." Overturning the false problem of whether growth is egalitarian or inegalitarian, we shall say that it is growth itself which is a function of inequality. It is the need of the inegalitarian social order -- the social structure of privilege -- to maintain itself that produces and reproduces growth as its strategic element. To put it yet another way, the internal autonomy of (technological, economic) growth is weak and secondary by comparison with that determination by the social structure.
 

Growth society is, overall, the product of a compromise between egalitarian democratic principles, which for support within that society can draw on the myths of Affluence and Well-Being, and the fundamental imperative of maintaining an order of privilege and domination. That society is not founded on technological progress. It is that mechanistic view which fuels the naive illusion of future affluence. It is, rather, this contradictory dual determination which underpins the possibility of technological progress.

 

 

 

The Industrial system of Poverty

 

 

When one examines the problem of the industrial system objectively in its entirety, cutting through all the liturgy of growth and affluence, one sees that the possible positions boil down to two fundamental options:

 

1. The Galbraith option (shared by so many others). This magical-idealist position consists in expelling from the system all the negative phenomena -- dysfuctions, nuisances, poverty -- on the grounds that these are admittedly deplorable but accidental, residual and eventually remediable. In this way, the enchanted orbit of growth is preserved.

2. The view that the system survives on disequilibrium and structural penury, that its logic is totally ambivalent, and that it is so not merely conjuncturally but structurally. The system only sustains itself by producing wealth and poverty, by producing as many dissatisfactions as satisfactions, as much nuisance as "progress". Its only logic is to survive and its strategy in this regard is to keep human society out of kilter, in perpetual deficit. We know the system has traditionally and powerfully drawn on the aid of war to survive and revive. Today the mechanism and functions of war have been integrated into the economic system and the mechanisms of daily life.

If one accepts this structural paradox of growth, from which the contradictions and paradoxes of affluence derive, then it is naive and mystificatory to confuse the logical processes of social underdevelopment with the poor, the 20 per cent of "underprivileged", the individuals "thrown on the scrapheap". Those processes cannot be located in real person, in real places, in real groups. By the same token, they cannot be eliminated by the billions of dollars which have been thrown at the lower classes, or by the massive redistribution programmes to "dispel poverty" and provide equal life-chances (all this being got up as the "new frontier", a social ideal to tug at the heart strings). We have to acknowledge at times the the "great societists" themselves believe in all this, their bewilderment at the failure of their "unremitting, generous" efforts being only the more comical for that fact.

If poverty and nuisance cannot be eliminated, this is because they are anywhere but in the poor neighbhourhoods. They are not in the slums or shanty-towns, but in the socio-economic structure. Yet this is precisely what has to be concealed, what must not be said, and indeed billions of dollars are spent on hiding the fact (in the same way, heavy medical and pharmaceutical expenditure may be necessary to avoid admitting that a problem is not what it appears to be, and may, for example, be psychological in nature -- the well-known process of "denial"). A society, like an individual, may ruin itself in this way, trying to escape analysis. Now, it is true here that analysis would be lethal for the system itself. So the sacrifice of useless millions in the struggle against what is merely the visible phantom of poverty is not too high a price to pay if it means that the myth of growth is preserved. We have to go even further and acknowledge thatthis real poverty is a myth -- and one in which the myth of growth glories, pretending to battle fiercely against it and yet keeping it alive all the same as its secret goals require.

Having said this, we should not believe that it is because they are deliberately bloodthirsty and odious that the industrial or capitalist systems continually regenerate poverty or identify with the arms race. Moralistic analysis (which neither liberals nor Marxists escape) is always a mistake. If the system could find an equilibrium or survive on foundations other than unemployment, underdevelopment and military expenditure, it would do so. And on occasion it does. When it can safely maintain its power by way of beneficial social effects, by way of "affluence", it does not fail to do so. It is not opposed on principle to the social "spin-offs" of progress. It takes both nuclear power and the well-being of citizens as its objective, simultaneously and without distinction: the point is that, in its eyes, the two are ultimately equal as contents and its final goal lies elsewhere.

The simple fact is that, at the strategic level, it turns out that military expenditures (for example) are more reliable, easier to monitor and more effective in achieving the survival and goals of the system as a whole than education -- as is also the case with motor cars rather than hospitals, colour televisions rather than playgrounds, etc. But that negative discriminations does not apply to public services as such. Things are much more serious than this: the system knows only the conditions of its survival, it knows nothing of social and individual contents. That should forearm us against a number of (typically social-reformist) illusions: the illusions which involve a belief that one can change the system by modifying its contents (transferring military expenditures to education, etc.). Moreover, the paradox is that all these social demands are, slowly but surely, taken up and realized by the system itself, thus slipping through the fingers of those who turn them into a political platform. Consumption, information, communication, culture, affluence -- all these things are today set in place, discovered and organized by the system itself, as new productive forces, for its greater glory. It too is changing over (relatively) from a violent to a non-violent structure: it is substituting affluence and consumption for exploitation and war. But it will win no affection for this, since it is not actually changing, but merely obeying its own laws.

The New Segregations

Not only affluence, but nuisance too has been taken up into the social logic. The ascendancy of the urban and industrial milieu is producing new examples of shortage: shortages of space and time, fresh air, greenery, water, silence. Certain goods, which were once free and abundantly available, are becoming luxuries accessible only to the privileged, while manufactured goods or services are offered on a mass scale.

The relative homogenization at the level of essential goods is thus being accompanied by a "slippage" of values and a new hierarchy of utilities. The distortion and inequality are not reduced; they are transferred elsewhere. Everyday consumer objects are becoming less and less expressive of social rank. And incomes themselves, in so far as the great disparities are being reduced, are losing their value as a distinctive criterion. It is even possible that consumption (taken in the sense of expenditure, of the purchase and possession of visible objects) will gradually concede to other criteria and other types of behaviour the preeminent role it currently plays in the variable geometry of status. Ultimately, it will become the prerogative of everyone when it no longer has any meaning.
 

We are already seeing the social hierarchy being registered in more subtle criteria: type of work and responsibility, level of education, and culture (the way of consuming everyday goods may itself be a kind of "scarce commodity"), participation in decision-making. Knowledge and power are, or are going to become, the two great scarce commodities of our affluent societies.

 

[noskich]

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Tolerate_This_Your_Children_Will_Be_Next

 

[noskich]

 

ne obracati paznju na naziv snimka, vec na sadrzinu

Edited December 31, 2014 by noskich

[noskich]

Vrhunski clanak:

The Invention of Capitalism: How a Self-Sufficient Peasantry was Whipped Into Industrial Wage Slaves

 

http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_history_everyone_but_an_idiot_knows_that_the_lower_classes_must_be_kept_poor_or_they_will_never_be_industrious/

[noskich]

“Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society…It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

 

Evo je cela knjiga: https://is.vsfs.cz/el/6410/leto2013/BA_ETD/um/3968033/The_Invention_of_Capitalism.pdf

[noskich]

Neverovatan decko:

 

http://uproxx.com/technology/2015/01/easton-lachappelle-luminary/

[noskich]

Naucni clanak koji pokazuje da se su od 11 veka u Engleskoj do danas plemici ostali plemici, a raja ostala raja. Privilegije se rodjenjem sticu sa vecom verovatnocom nego gen za visinu:

 

Family ties that bind: Having the right surname sets you up for life

http://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/springer-select/family-ties-that-bind--having-the-right-surname-sets-you-up-for-life/39694

 

Ceo clanak: http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/workingPapers/2013/WP181.pdf

[noskich]

War Is the New Normal 

Seven Deadly Reasons Why America’s Wars Persist

 

http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2015/02/01/groundhog-day-in-the-war-on-terror/

 

The 9/11 attacks happened more than 13 years ago, which means that no teenagers in America can truly remember a time when the country was at peace. “War time” is their normal; peace, a fairy tale.

What’s truly "exceptional" in twenty-first-century America is any articulated vision of what a land at peace with itself and other nations might be like. Instead, war, backed by a diet of fear, is the backdrop against which the young have grown to adulthood. It’s the background noise of their world, so much a part of their lives that they hardly recognize it for what it is. And that’s the most insidious danger of them all.

Edited February 3, 2015 by noskich

[noskich]

David Harvey: Looking Toward a Moneyless Economy and Sleeping Well at Night

 

http://truth-out.org/news/item/28879-looking-toward-a-moneyless-economy-and-sleeping-well-at-night

 

Profesor mi je uzeo reci iz usta, miran san je najveca vrednost.

[noskich]

Jos o zivoj revoluciji u zapadnoj Siriji:

 

http://www.cvltnation.com/anarchists-vs-isis-the-revolution-in-syria-nobodys-talking-about/

 

http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/kurdistan/west-kurdistan/exclusive-on-kq-from-chiapas-to-rojava-more-than-just-coincidences.html

[noskich]

I cudna li cuda, australijski drzavljani koji ulaze na podrucje kontrole PKK (koji je naravno tretiran kao teroristicka organizacija) mogu biti osudjeni na do 10 godina zatvora, bez obzira na razlog njihovog odlaska tamo. Ako odu kao humanitarci ili doktori volonteri postaju kriminalci automatski. 

 

http://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/WhatAustraliaisdoing/Pages/DeclaredAreaOffence.aspx

 

 

http://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/Listedterroristorganisations/Pages/default.aspx

 

Prema tome Australijancima je zabranjeno da se pridruze kurdskoj revoluciji koja se tretira istovetno kao ISIS na papiru (a u praksi se ISIS pomaze, dok se PKK suzbija): http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/02/04/world/middleeast/ap-ml-islamic-state-american-militiaman.html?_r=0

 

So far, the U.S. hasn't banned Americans from fighting with militias against the Islamic State group, though it considers the Turkey-based Kurdish Workers' Party, commonly known as the PKK, a terrorist organization. The PKK has been fighting alongside the YPG in Sinjar and in the Syrian town of Kobani.

 

Australians are forbidden by law from fighting with any force outside of the Australian national army. Australia was also one of the first countries to criminalize travel to Syria's al-Raqqa province, where the Islamic State group has established the de facto capital of its self-styled caliphate.

Edited February 9, 2015 by noskich

[noskich]