Walter Logeman: Journal
This is a good little article – May 2010 – is there later news?
DOC holds fire on Coast dam appeal | Stuff.co.nz:
“What have Meridian got up their sleeve? Are they going to change the scheme? Are they going to find a lot more land to offer or pay out, which has been done before? We don’t know.”
I am appalled at the prospect that one of the last unspoilt rivers in New Zealand has been given government blessing to be damned for hydro power. ( A report by Mike McGavin detailing the April 2010 decision. Decision) . We just saw Craig Potton Rivers DVD episode that shows the river and exposes the threat.
The Mokihinui is in the heart of country where I have tramped and camped, just south of the Whangapeka. I love this land. Google Map. I can’t bear it’s destruction, the country should not loose this land, the animals including endangered native snails and fresh water eels and fish will loose their habitat, trees will die, the permanent loss of trees and the building and concrete will add to carbon to the atmosphere.
Damming this river rides rough-shot over New Zealand culture and Maori traditions as the Craig Potton video makes clear. Meridian (the NZ state and who else?) are a power to reckoned with and will spare no efforts as what went on here with money to Iwi might indicate: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10637348 Sounds like a case of divide and rule.
This dam will happen to our shame, we can stop this dam! Stop the Mokihinui dam, save the Mokihinui river. What to do? This is what I have in mind.
A list of action ideas and links follows, at the end a link to the Lake Pedder tragedy.
The next and needed social network will have the the following qualities:
Purposeful
The ethos will be present and overt. There will be a statement of vision and purpose about equity and compassion.
Strategic
It will aim to bring together the activist left, the digital communication forms and specialist communication and relationship skill groups.
Process Orientation
Respectful of difference in vision and desired outcomes. Strong on adherence to principles of process. Dialogical.
Sustainable Organisation
There will be a balance between being stable and being able to evolve by the actions of participants. Overt governance.
Systemic
Relates to a principle of isomorphism so that the same principles apply at the micro level operate at the macro. Enact principles consciously at all levels in the system.
Principled
Overt guidelines on privacy, transparency, confidentiality.
Ideology
Loose endorsement of charters and manifestos. Eg Compassion, Imediatist.
Digital and Physical
The system will foster effective online and face-to-face participation all within the framework of defining next actions that adhere to the ethos.
Distributed
The leadership is distributed via chapters and hubs and the digital information is not all be on one server or central hub or on one platform. (Diaspora)
Open Source
(Linux)
Not for Profit
(Wikipedia) (Linux)
Global and Local
Dialogical
Will have overt guidelines for effective participation. (Dynamic Facilitation) (NVC) (Imago) (Psychodrama)
Worth watching:
I thought there would be someone doing something like this. Dubious though I am of it.
Mark Poster – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Mark Poster (born 6 July 1941) is a Professor Emeritus of History, Film and Media Studies, and the Critical Theory Emphasis at UC Irvine. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1968, and his research interests include European Intellectual and Cultural History, Critical Theory, and Media Studies. He is known for applying the ideas of French theorists (including Althusser, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault) to the new media (including databases, hypertext and the internet). He seeks to politicize the issue of the use and development of the Internet by emphasizing the possibilities of the Internet for liberatory political change, while acknowledging the existence of a deep digital divide, as well as the interests of transnational corporations and national governments.[1]
This essay makes good sense to me, digitalisation will not of itself foster feminism, liberation, equality or revolution. However there is something missing in this piece too. What IS the impact of the information … er, revolution? is there a shift in the relationships of production? Is whatever it is significant at all when it comes to a Marxist conception of history. Has anyone really examined this fully, I bet they have.
It is important to be able to see all of history as a history of class struggle, makes sense to me. Of course there is ajso a history of the relationships of reproduction (perhaps what the essay below is about.) And there are cultural forces, racial, religious and generational forces. The art is to be able to see what, at any time is “primary”. Even if the history if information from language to the Internet is not “primary” what is its nature? The distribution of the means of information, the ability to have mass peer to peer communication… what does it all mean.
Interesting (see previous post) where Trotsky notes that the revolution in Russia was won by the group that had dialectical materialism, not just bombs. It is important to get all this right.
Class, the Digital, and (Immaterial) Feminism:
Immaterial feminisms have emerged as part of the digital movements of “new economy” and “network society” in order to help capital eliminate old ideological fetters of gender that stand in the way of the expansion of capitalist production and the intensification of the exploitation of labor for profit. By “immaterial feminisms” I mean the network of feminisms—from “cyberfeminism,” to feminist theories of “immaterial labor,” “(im)materiality,” and “new materiality,” to “network feminisms,” “digital feminism” and “technofeminism”—which, as a species of new economy theory, ideologically displace the relation of gender to class, labor, exploitation, and the social relations of production in capitalism by positing a constitutive change in the wage-labor/capital relation brought on by the innovations of “new technologies,” the growth of the service industries and of “knowledge work” (i.e., “immaterial labor”). This is another way of saying that the role of immaterial feminisms in history is to represent as “radical,” “innovative” and as “progress” for women toward human freedom what capital is economically compelled to do to temporarily stave off declines in profit.
Trotsky’s Views On Dialectical Materialism:
Pragmatism, empiricism, is the greatest curse of American thought.
I have added the tags “emergence, coherence” to this post as the “dialectics” in materialism foreshadows these conceptions. It is so unfashionable to see a big picture, it is in the ruling class interest to obscure that there is a big picture, or to make it appear that it is a static one, “human nature”, “reality”. Dynamic processes are not discovered through looking at the trees, one must see the woods.
Dialectical materialism gets a lot right when it comes to seeing the big picture. Much of the language is dated and some of the science was current at the time, but has been superseded (as one would expect in a dynamic world).
I’ve found the work of John Bellamy Foster was able to re-kindle a sense of the value of dialectical materialism – or to put it another way: ecology.
Marx’s Ecology – Monthly Review Press:
MARX’S ECOLOGY Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster
More from him here:
NVC Non-Violent Communication, how to identify needs in self and others and how to speak without shaming, blaming and criticising is one of the four or five disciplines that I’d like everyone in the world to know how to do.
Language is important, but as Moreno said:
The analysis of language, useful as it is in itself. does not lead to any change in behavior. It has to be followed up by methods of action learning which train the pupil to think and act below and beyond the boundaries of language.
That’s why I think there are four or five disciplines, but none of them sufficient alone.
Statements and actions for a cause or revolutionary change are needed, but not art. Art can be revolutionary even while its creators are reactionary in their words. Art is art because it expresses something of the unconscious.
I make politically trivial sketches, Thousand Sketches, (Like the image above) but I think they are ok, even somewhat progressive. I think it is because they are steps on a path into my own unconscious and that is the collective ethos, zeitgeist, at the same time. I don’t know how deep I go. I let the pen do the work, stuff comes unbidden, I trust my life has its roots in the culture and thus something of the culture will emerge.
It is a struggle not to judge it as crap. It is as a result of my scribbling that I discovered an affinity with the abstract expressionists, who do not rank high on the political awareness scale, but I think their roots (check out Mark Toby) in calligraphy and the spontaneity of the body (Pollock’s dance as he paints) may be a way to tune into zeitgeist. It had to do that or it would not even have been capable of being exploited by the art world.
Pollock’s statement “I am nature” makes sense to me. He does not need to look at the world and then paint it, he is nature. Social and political dimensions don’t need to be painted from the outside, they will emerge… with luck through spontaneity, ie the absence of fear and judgement. They will not be pure expressions of one class, art is too specific for that. Art is a slice of time & specific contradictions under a microscope, a probe into what is going on. The interpretation of the data is important, but before interpretation is possible it has to be mined.
These thoughts came up well before finishing this item on Reading the Maps:
Reading the Maps: Alan Brunton and the dream of a revolutionary art:
In a country where the Greens are considered a far left party, and where socialism is presently regarded as an alien political tradition, how can any coherent political programme hope to be popular, or even comprehensible, without being, from a radical left-wing perspective, ‘cowardly’? And in a country where large numbers of people still expect poetry to rhyme, and still consider any visual art movement more recent than Impressionism to be an elitist fraud, how can any self-respecting artist disavow incomprehensibility? Could, say, Colin McCahon or Rita Angus have created their masterpieces without daring to be, for a large segment of the population, incomprehensible?
The Century Of Self Part 1 (of 4) Happiness Machines:
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses.