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Profile of Anthony Arnove
It’s an interesting question. I will try not [...]
Anthony Arnove: It’s an interesting question. I will try not to pay attention to what my neighbors are saying quite rightly. I think you can answer this two ways. No, we don’t have a right to consider our lives more valuable than lives of other species in the sense that we have an obligation to other beings with whom we share the planet. We have obligation to our environment. But, ultimately, I think we do have to make a distinction in the sense that the organization of human life has a different nature in the sense that we collectively can organize to either bring about circumstances that would lead to the preservation or the destruction of other species in a way that has a far more profound responsibility.
Well, the question has no guaranteed answer [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, the question has no guaranteed answer because what’s after capitalism depends on how capitalism is replaced. The worst case scenario of course is that there is no after capitalism. Capitalism is going to lead to the destruction of the environment or capitalism is going to lead as a result of its economic conflict to the kind of political and military conflict that creates nuclear war and the destruction of the human race, so that there will literally be no after capitalism. The capitalism will prove to have been the economic system that led to the demise of humanity, and with it other species on the planet as well. But, another possibility is that capitalism will be replaced by an alternative economic system, not of a more liberatory variety, but of a more repressive variety, a variety which really we've seen generated by capitalism. The great socialist Frederick Engels spoke about a choice between socialism and barbarism. Rosa Luxemburg echoed that statement eloquently. We do face a choice between socialism or barbarism, between replacing capitalism with a humane economic system and democratic economic system. Or other possibility that we will see is the rise of the kind of fascism that capitalism has produced when it goes into crisis, the kind of fascism that we saw in the 1930s in Germany, in Italy, and Spain, and the massive destruction that brought about. So, really the question is up to us.
I think by economic globalization we need to [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think by economic globalization we need to be more precise and say capitalist globalization as that's the form of globalization that we've encountered and that we confront today is capitalist globalization. And the reality of capitalist globalization today is that actually is leading to concentration of power, concentration of state power, concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands. And rather than promoting democracy as its defenders claim, as its apologies claim, as its propagandists claim, the economic globalization of reform that we see today is actually consolidating power in a way that encourages dictatorship. Not just the dictatorship that we tend to think of, the dictatorship of individuals that overstates the dictatorships of leaders such as Saddam Hussein or the Saudi royal family with which the United States in particular has often had political, military and economic relationships. But also the kinds of dictatorship of capital; the kinds of dictatorship of economic interests over our lives, which are removing more and more decisions from democratic control; from participation of citizenry; from participation of people. And in particular we see this in the work place where more and more decisions are being removed from the involvement and the participation of working people, who are the people making the goods, providing the services that allow globalization to proceed. So we see increasingly a gap growing globally, not only an economic gap but a political gap, participatory gap between those overwhelming majority of people who work, who provide the labor that makes globalization succeed and the people who are reaping the benefits from it. Also, I think the question of dictatorship comes back just also to the question of military dictatorship, which is still a problem that we confront today.
Really, I think the question from Jason is a [...]
Anthony Arnove: Really, I think the question from Jason is a question that Jason can answer far better than me. And in particular, I have problem with the notion of loving or defending a country when love of one’s country and defense of one’s country today is defined in terms of militarism or nationalism of an ideology. There’s something unique or special or exceptional, in particular, about the country that Jason is from, and I am from the United States. I reject that idea, I reject the premise of nationalism, which ultimately is a form or racism or chauvinism, which is used to sell war, to prop up the idea that the United States is superior to other countries, which is an idea I reject. We have to find ways of crossing these national boundaries and finding what unites us internationally, what unites us globally, because the problems we confront can’t be defined in terms of nations. And every nation has an ideology of exceptionalism, of patriotism, of nationalism, and historically, we’ve seen not only how those were used to drive countries to war, but are used to oppress minorities or oppress people at home on the basis of those ideologies, to oppress people who don’t fit into the national – the nationalist framework, whether they are ethnic groups or otherwise. So, I don’t feel a connection with that feeling of love or defense of my country. I feel quite the opposite. I feel that Malcolm X really speaks to the question when he said that what he saw in the United States was not an American dream, but an American nightmare, and I think that that approach, that understanding really speaks the experience of so many people, not only in the United States, but around the world, who don’t feel that connection with their own state.
Every human deserves basic human rights that [...]
Anthony Arnove: Every human deserves basic human rights that involve not just meeting of their material needs, although those are absolutely a must and should be met, the right to clothing, the right to housing, the right to be free of disease, which can be easily prevented. Those are basic material rights. But, beyond that, I think we have to assert the right of people to have control over their lives, the right of people to have individual personal freedom of expression, but also freedom to control the circumstances in which they find themselves. And that means not only the right to have work, but the right to have leisure. That means not only the right to work, but the right to control the circumstances and the nature of one’s work. And it means the right to be able to express oneself creatively, to be able to have the circumstances that really call out for the maximization of freedom, the maximization of creativity and expression. We can’t even begin to imagine the kind of human culture, the kind of human possibilities, the kinds of artistic possibilities that would be unleashed in the society, which meets basic human needs universally, minimizes drudgery, minimizes the amount of work, which is necessary in order to meet the basic needs of the society and seeks to maximize, creatively maximize freedom. We’ve never lived in such a society. We can’t even begin to imagine what a society might produce, but we certainly can begin from looking at history to understand that and the circumstances where people have gained those freedoms and control over their lives even in limited ways. They have been able to produce remarkable things.
I think discussion gets at the heart of what [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think discussion gets at the heart of what is the matter with capitalism in the world today. That the question of food is a question not of human need in our world, but it's a question of profit. It's a question of how companies, how corporations can make money from the distribution and sale and production of food, and we routinely confront the fact that in our world there's more than enough food to feed everyone in the world adequately; to house and clothe everyone in the world; to eliminate diseases of poverty that kill hundreds of thousands and millions, in fact, of people every year and that limit and stunt the growth and life of so many people beyond that. And we find that the reason that these ills are not dealt with, the reason these basic needs are not met, is that it's not profitable to do so. Corporations would rather warehouse goods than distribute them under conditions where distribution of food, distribution of other basic services would cut into their profit margin, or cut into their ability to make money. And the decisions in our society are made on that basis; the basis of profit, the basis of short-term profit regardless of the economic; regardless of the human; regardless of the social; regardless of the environmental consequences. It's not a question of individual will. It's a question of a basic framework of economic distribution and decision making, which is now a global system that's in place and it's threatening the sustainability of the planet, and which every day is leading to growing inequality and is leading to millions of people going without food, going hungry, when there's absolutely no need to do so. And I think really this exposes so much about what is wrong with capitalism, with the system of profit making, rather than making decisions based on human need, cooperation, democratic sharing, taking care of the needs of people, the basic fundamental human needs. And indeed, I think we have to be clear that the right to food is a fundamental, basic human right that has to be fought for today.
I think the current economic system is [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the current economic system is absolutely corrupt. But the question of corruption can sometimes be individualized. It can be seen in terms of individuals who are seeking to personally benefit by going outside of the bounds of normal economic behavior, engaging in collusion, lying, deceit, in order to advance their own personal interests. And so we often have under capitalism regulation of individual or corporate behavior to try to single out certain actions as being beyond the bounds of the acceptable operation of the economic system. But the reality is, corruption is inherit in our economic system. Our economic system encourages individual greed, competition, and systematically encourages corruption, deceit, in order to maximize profit. So it's not a question of individuals. It's not a question of a few bad apples. It's at the root of the system. So, in terms of thinking about an alternative of how we dismantle the economic system, I think we have to look at who has power under the economic system. And the irony that Karl Marx pointed out – it's appropriate to think about Marx given where we are today in Germany – and given the world that we confront which matches so much his description of the Communist Manifesto of what globalization was beginning to produce in his time and certainly has proven so true today – is that you have to understand that under capitalism the people who seemingly have the least power, the working class people, actually have a tremendous power. They make the profits that keep the system running. They produce the goods. They run the factories. They transport the goods. And if those people withhold their labor; if those people organize their collective power – individually they may not have power, but collectively they have a tremendous power – they can transform the system. They can dismantle the system. They can build something new in its place.
Well, really, I think this is one of the [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, really, I think this is one of the most important questions that may be asked today, and the question really begins to answer itself. We live in a world today that has an economic system that is in conflict with human, that is in conflict with animal, that is in conflict with environmental rights. And so, we have to raise this question, because the matter of fact is if we don't begin to answer this question soon, we may not have the luxury of being able to discuss this question. The kinds of environmental damage that capitalism is doing in the world today, the kinds of risks that its creating in terms of the possibility of nuclear warfare which could eliminate humankind, really is beginning to raise various concrete questions about the length of the human experiment on this planet. We face, in the words of Noam Chomsky, "a choice between hegemony or survival" in the direction things are going. The leaders of our planet are choosing hegemony over survival; are choosing the calculations of short-term profit over survival. So really, I think we have to say that we reject this system and we do need a new economic system. We do need a new way of organizing ourselves; organizing the way in which we meet our needs that is based on human need and not based on profit. To do that, I think we have experiments in history that we can learn from; moments when people have come together and shown collectively, collaboratively, democratically they can make the kinds of decisions that respect the right of the environment; respect the right of people; respect the needs of their brothers and sisters. In those moments, we've shown the possibility of a different kind of world than the one that we confront today, which we're told is the only possible world; which we're told is the necessary order of things; but which we know from moments like the Paris Commune of 1871, the workers' communes that were set up in the Spanish Civil War, and in other moments of revolutionary change, that it's possible to organize things differently.
This is actually a great question because [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is actually a great question because there is - I think a lot of people are right now talking about corporate responsibility, talking about socially conscious corporations. And really, I think that this is a very problematic notion because corporations exist for a reason under capitalism, which is to make profit. And at the end of the day, that is what corporations will do. And that goal, that imperative of making profit is completely at odds with social responsibility, it’s completely at odds with questions of concern having to do with the environment, treatment of workers, social concerns that are raised by those who talk about corporate responsibility, social responsibility of corporations. Ultimately, corporations, if they believe that they might be socially responsible, will find themselves at an economic disadvantage from corporations that are operating without any such concerns. And in that kind of condition of competition that exists under capitalism, those corporations will be able to drive out a competition, which has concerns that will raise the cost of production, that will raise the cost of doing business for those corporations. So, whatever the intentions of individuals in those corporations, the Directors, the CEOs, or so on, they will find that their investors, their Board Advisors or their competition will pressure them economically, and thus equilibrium on the system will then return to an equilibrium, which is based on exploitation or based on denial of any social concerns.
I think the question has to be interrogated [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the question has to be interrogated in terms of what the question of feminine values means, because I think part of the problem with [formal] sexes in this developed capitalism historically is that it has tended to create an essentialist idea about what is male or what is female in our society. And those ideas can actually reinforce sexes and can actually reinforce women’s exclusion and women’s oppression. And so, the idea that there is something natural or inherent in women, believe them to caring or more sharing and more humane than men is really a problematic and sexist idea. So, it’s important I think to get, you know, the assumptions of the question. But, understanding the concern that the question is raising, which I think is an important one, we have to ask the question of why more women are in positions of leadership and power. But, if it’s a question of just women gaining positions of leadership and power on the basis that the existing system operates, we have examples of that not being a process that leads to change, not being a process that leads to liberation. So, we have very clear recent examples of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of England or Condoleeza Rice today as the Secretary of State in the United States, or Madeleine Albright before her in that role. Women who use their power not to advance interest of other women or people, but in fact, carry out policies that were oppressive to women in the case of Condoleeza Rice and Madeleine Albright in particular to Iraqi women. And in the case of Margaret Thatcher, so many women in Britain and around the world just suffered as a result of their policies. So, I don’t believe that if women came into positions of more power, naturally the system would evolve to have less warlike, less conflictual qualities. But, if we do want to see that brought about, if we do want to see a kind of change, I think we have to show that men and women together fighting for a society is based on different values.
The question raises a question that mistakes [...]
Anthony Arnove: The question raises a question that mistakes the question of why states today are in the position that they're in. The reality that states are in the position that they're in today are on the basis of their position in the history of the development of the human species. It's not an anthropological question. It's a political question. It's a historical question. In fact, what we see repeatedly if you look in history, is that civilizations that at particular moments have created some of the most remarkable achievements in human history, had those achievements literally destroyed or wiped out through conquests; through colonialism; through imperialism; through war. If you look, for example, at the history of British Colonialism, you see the British effort to suppress development in India; to suppress development in Africa. There was a conscious de-development, under-development of the countries of Africa, of the countries in Asia that were colonized; in the countries of Latin America that were colonized. And Africa, in particular, suffered from that colonial legacy; suffered from the conscious pillaging of those societies for their resources; the conscious exploitation of their workers in such a brutal way that the workers were, in essence, disposable. The Belgium conquests of the Congo is a particularly brutal example of the understanding that the workers were disposable; that they were not human; that they can be killed in the process of extracting their labor; and that the economic calculations of the population, the approach of the colonizers to the population meant that there was no concern that hundreds of thousands; in fact, ultimately more than millions were being murdered, were being slaughtered in order to aggrandize the wealth and power of people like King Leopold in Belgium. So, it's a question of history. It's a question of conscious under-development of those countries, and it's a problem that continues today. It's a problem that we continue to have to confront today.
Capitalism has always had an ideology that's [...]
Anthony Arnove: Capitalism has always had an ideology that's gone along with it. It doesn't just have an economic system. It has a set of ideas. It has a set of beliefs that justify it. So, it's been very important since the very beginning of capitalism to have an emphasis on the role of the individual, and in particular, to create a myth of social mobility; to create a myth of individual advancement; to create the idea that individuals are rewarded under capitalism for their labor. So therefore, if you're wealthy, if you're rich, it's because you have worked. It's because you have labored. You have taken opportunities that are presented to you under capitalism. And the corollary of that is that if you are poor, if you're not rich, if you lack benefits, it's because you have not worked. You have not taken opportunities. You have not pursued the opportunities that capitalism presents to you; and so, therefore, it's a question of your individual responsibility. You are to blame for your poverty. You are to blame for your conditions. And so, therefore, people who are rich can feel justified. Now, the reality, of course, is quite different. Some of the people who work hardest in our society; in fact, almost universally the people who work hardest are the least rewarded; are people who have the least benefits and privileges in our societies, and that's almost nearly universal. Whereas, some of the people who have the greatest power and privileges in society are the people who do the least work, the least labor. Then, often, people who are rich by virtue of their birth, rich by virtue of having been born into wealth, power and privilege, and their reproduction of that in inequality under capitalism is at the heart of the way it operates. But the ideology of capitalism, of course, has to cover that up; has to obscure that.
The question when it’s necessary to break [...]
Anthony Arnove: The question when it’s necessary to break the law is an important one because we have seen throughout history a social change has occurred in circumstances when people almost without exception have had to challenge on just laws, have had to go outside the framework of existing laws to make change. For example, in the United States, there was a law called the Fugitive Slave Law, which made it illegal to help slaves struggle to find freedom, to escape slavery. And that was a law, which in retrospect people now understand to be an inhumane, an indefensible law, just like all of the laws that preserve the institutions of slavery and racism. And yet, at the time, those laws were vigorously defended and people who violated those laws were rigorously prosecuted. And it was necessary for people of conscience to challenge to confront those laws, to defy those laws, and that has been a constant in history. Really, there is nothing, which is in itself just about law. Laws tend to reflect the values of institutions that have been set up in our society on the basis of inequality and the basis of oppression. And so, there is nothing inherently correct in saying that you should obey the law. We have to ask the question of what the origin of the law is, what the law entails, and what obedience to that law entails? And then, if we reject that law, we have to then understand how effectively we can challenge it and how effectively we can go beyond it.
The question of religious rights, religious [...]
Anthony Arnove: The question of religious rights, religious values, I’m sorry, conflicting with universal rights, I think, is a question that has to be interrogated in part in terms of the current dialog on religion, which has tended to have a rather simplistic understanding of the role of religion in our societies. And today, a lot of blame is being directed at religion for our political problems that we confront in our world today, blaming for example the religious right in the United States for a number of the ills we confront in the United States for -- possibly even for being a Christian fundamental [via singularism] for the US invasion of Iraq. I think the situation is far more complicated than that. And then, every religion is a conflictual domain. Every religion has within it social contradictions, political contradictions. So, for example, Catholicism as a religion can be a religion of oppression of women, oppression of gays, oppression of working class and poor people. But, at the same time, in Latin America, we have seen Catholic religious movements take up the ideas of liberation theology of social transformation, even revolution, and the religion can be contested. So, really the underlying broader question is how do we advance the struggle for universal human rights, which at certain points will come into conflict not just with the religious ideas but in other traditional ideas, but a series of ideologies, which have an interest in preserving exploitation, conserving relations of dispossession, whether they are religious or not.
The United States and other countries today [...]
Anthony Arnove: The United States and other countries today have a schizophrenic relationship to China. But, on one hand, there is a celebration to China’s entry as a more fully capitalist country in the global market. And so, therefore, there is an embrace of China as a potential market for the buying and selling of goods, the production of goods for export to countries like the United States, and the benefits that go from that. And then, at the same time, there is a tremendous anxiety and fear about the emergence of China’s as a rival economy, rival state in the global system, and the possibility particularly for United States that its role as also a super power. The enormous gap that exists between the United States and other countries in the world today economically, politically, militarily, will eventually be closed by China as it grows, as its economy grows at a much more rapid pace than that of the United States and other countries in the world. And so, you find this contradiction expressing itself in many ways. But, one of the ways it’s often expressed is xenophobia, racism towards China. And on the other hand, you have a complete denial of the fact that the goods that the United States is importing from China, the goods the other countries are importing from China are based often on conditions of labor, which are conditions of slavery, a tremendous exploitation of workers in China. But, the other interesting part of that story is that workers in China are organizing, are resisting and fighting back, and you have rebellions taking place around that country, people fighting for an alternative, and the possibility of what that will mean for the global economy is really profound.
I think our education system is, if I’m just [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think our education system is, if I’m just going to generalize about our education system, rarely allows children to bloom. And most of our education system is actually designed to limit creativity and limit the flowering and the growth of our youth. We also have to take account of the fact that so many children in the world today are not in school and are not receiving formal education. The children are, because of economic pressures that their families confront, often remove from school in order to engage in work, often very oppressive and exploitive work to provide another source of income for families that are in very desperate economic circumstances. So, it’s a tremendous problem that so many of our kids are not in school. And then, those children who are in school are often effectively being disciplined to be the next generation of workers that are being trained not for life and creativity, free thinking, individualism, thinking for oneself, challenging authority, but a role of passivity, a role of learning the skills that will be useful to employers, but not useful for a meaningful life, not useful from the standpoint of creative participation in decision making about one’s life. So, we have an education system, which encourages subordination, obedience, following orders, accepting discipline, subjecting oneself to higher authorities, teachers, principals, police and so on, and not an education system that’s encouraging the creativity, independence, freedom, and critical thought.
Because our wealth covers up an important [...]
Anthony Arnove: Because our wealth covers up an important fact, which is "our" is a collective term. And with all terms like "we" or "our" I think we have to be very careful about who we're referring to. If you mean "our" as in the people of the first world, if you take that as your reference point, the reality is the first world is not a unified entity. There are class divisions. There are social divisions in even the richest of countries, the United States, which mean there's not a unified interest. There's not a unified collective. There are people in the United States who benefit from the exploitation of the third world. That goes without question. But then there are also people who equally are disenfranchised, who are oppressed in the United States, and they don't benefit from the exploitation of a third world; and I think that's a very important point. So, to take the first group, those who do benefit from the exploitation of the world, there's no question that they benefit from the subjugation of the third world; that they benefit from the exploitation of their resources; their labor markets; from the social conditions that exist in those countries. They have an interest in continuing those social conditions. On the other hand, if you're a working class, if you're poor in the United States or in the first world, you do not benefit from that circumstance. In fact, right now you see growing - an income gap growing in equality in the rich countries, in the so-called rich countries, in the advanced capitalist countries, as the rich get richer and working class people find themselves in competition - with seeing their benefits eroded; seeing their wages eroded, because they're in competition with a global labor market, which means that they have less resources; that their living standards are being attacked. And then also, if you look at the third world itself, you find elites. You find individuals. You find people in positions of power in the government, in the economy, who benefit from that alliance with the rich countries, with the capitalists.
This is really a tremendously important [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is really a tremendously important question, and the reality is that life is not considered to be a question of universal equality. Our life in our world today is given a dollar sign and the value of certain lives is far greater than others. We see this even, for example, in the very cynical fact that insurance companies will give money to the family of deceased people, people who had insurance, on the basis of their earning power, on the basis of their class position in our society, so that certain people’s lives have more value in death than others. And then, also, of course the question of whose lives count in a political sense is even more profoundly unequal. The lives of Palestinians, the lives of Iraqis don’t matter as much as the lives of the people who are oppressing them. There are lives that [lose] experiences never will matter, account in the calculations of corporations and the calculations of governments. And in fact, their lives are an obstacle to the pursuit of the interest, pursuit of power of those in control of our world. So, the profound inequality exists in how lives are valued today really exposes the idea that capitalism is bringing about the growth of freedom, the growth of quality, the growth of the value of human life, it’s actually the opposite.
Actually, I would want to reframe the [...]
Anthony Arnove: Actually, I would want to reframe the question, because the question on micro-finance or macro-finance assumes that the framework of the question is capitalists' development. It's a question of how countries in the third world are going to develop along a model which is based on the development of the current, existing enhanced capitalist countries. And really, it's based on the idea that the problems that exist in the third world; problems with poverty; problems of dispossession, political, social conflicts, insecurity, economic and global security, grow from problems having to do with the mismanagement of the economy often described as state interference in the otherwise smooth operation of the economic system of capitalism. And really, what we see is something far more complex that the normal operations of the system create in equality. The normal operations of the system depend on the underdevelopment of certain areas of the economy and the world. And even in those countries which are experiencing development on the terms that are considered standard under capitalist globalization, you find the social problems growing and inequality growing; poverty growing; not the opposite, which of course the defenders, the apologists of the system will claim. So micro-finance/macro-financing operate within that framework. And really, if we want true human development, human development that benefits everyone, the kinds of advancements that we would like to see in terms of meeting basic human needs for people; providing more meaningful lives; providing more freedom; more control over their lives, we're going to have to go beyond the question of the limits of development that can occur in the current economic system.
The question poses a pioneering between the [...]
Anthony Arnove: The question poses a pioneering between the effective drugs and the reality of social circumstances, reality of human relations, and I don't think you can separate those two questions. Any question of, first of all, what drugs even are, is a question of human and social relations. Any food, any medicine, any chemical that we take into our body can be considered a drug. We of course have very contradictory definitions of what a drug is in our society. But, just narrowly and accepting the definition of drugs as what we consider in day to day discourse to be drugs, we find that certain drugs do have addictive properties, which makes them much harder for people to disabuse themselves, and to -- to stop using once they start taking them. But, the social circumstances that lead people to use drugs, that lead people to become addictive to drugs, that lead people to use drugs and [lives that] are destructive to themselves and others absolutely are rooted in social relations, are absolutely rooted in the alienation that people feel, the depression that people feel, the fact that people feel isolated from other human beings, that people feel that they have no control over their lives, that people feel that they have no freedom or autonomy, that people feel their lives are worthless or meaningless. And so, those circumstances make people more vulnerable, make people more likely to be isolated, that make people more likely to suffer when they find themselves engaged in the use of, you know, certain drugs that have addictive qualities.
Our responsibility is enormous. The reality [...]
Anthony Arnove: Our responsibility is enormous. The reality is Africa today confronts a profound crisis with the epidemic of AIDS. It’s not exclusively Africa, of course. In fact, now, India has surpassed Africa as the world’s –- in aggregate, the world’s largest concentration of people who are losing their life as a result -- their life as a result of AIDS. And so, we have a responsibility to look at the role that governments and also corporations play in perpetuating the crisis and the problem with AIDS in Africa and elsewhere. The reality is the pharmaceutical companies have an interest in keeping the treatment of AIDS from being distributed on the basis of addressing the crisis rather than on the basis of what will be profitable for them. And we have governments around the world that are protecting those corporations, protecting their patent rights, protecting their ability to make a profit, which guarantees people will go without treatment. And that, of course, is for treatment for people who have already developed HIV. Another question that has to be addressed is prevention of infection and spread of HIV. And there again, we see governments refusing to take the kinds of steps to provide the social circumstances that can limit the spread of HIV, which would involve funding for education, about sex, providing reproductive rights and freedoms that are not granted in our society, which lead to conditions of sexual intercourse that are really designed to produce the result of spreading diseases such as HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases on the basis of people’s fear and ignorance of discussing sexuality and participating in sexual relations. And so, there is a profound responsibility and the AIDS crisis is something that has gone from having a sense of immediacy and urgency for many people to being something that is accepted as part of our daily lives.
I don't think that brands are more powerful [...]
Anthony Arnove: I don't think that brands are more powerful than governments. I think the question asks a very important - raises a very important concern which has to do with the role of brands, the role of corporations in our world. And while increasingly there's an awareness of the role of these powers in particular to transcend the boundaries of nations, to transcend the boundaries of states, I think it's very important to remember and take account of the fact that states continue to play a very important role in decisions about making war and conducting wars and in policing the boundaries of dissent. Also, in policing movements and resistance of sexual change, and if necessary, repressing them. So, the question of the power of brands gets at the concern of the role of these transnational actors which increasingly are seeking to uproot themselves from the state, but in the end we find that they actually still very much depend on the state. And even if corporations and brands aspire to be global, fine, they either have to rely on a state to protect them; they rely on states to act in their interest in terms of regulation and taxing, and so on. But also, we find that brands find ways of localizing their behavior in order to appeal to the particularities that still exist within this global system. So, their loyalties are quite shifting indeed. So, the other issue that I think the question raises that's important to come back to is the way in which image in our society is being used to sell something that masks the underlying relation of production in our society, in our world, and how brands are seeking – as Naomi Klein in particular has pointed out – to mask the role of labor in the global economy.
I think the question of women's position [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the question of women's position globally in the world today comes back to a historical question about the nature of women's oppression in this economic system that we call globalization today; this economic system of capitalism. From its inception, capitalism has been premised upon a division of labor that has emphasized male participation in certain activity and has tried to carve out a place for women, which has relegated women to the role of a particularly oppressed section of society; a section of society which has at various points been told it can't participate in formal work in the workplace. And that its role, the role of women, has to be restricted to taking of the sick; taking care of the elderly; taking care of children; taking care of the home; taking care of men in this society. And it's in particular led to the fact that women are very often engaged in forms of labor, forms of work, which relieve the state, relieve society of having to meet those basic needs of caring for the next generation of workers; of caring for the elderly; of caring for the sick. So women find themselves in a position often of engaging in unpaid and underpaid work. In addition, when they do enter the workforce, as more and more women have been doing and increasingly the pattern of women's participation in the workforce is growing globally, you find then a double bind. That women are less paid in the workplace, face sexism and discrimination in the workplace; but then continue to face oppression, sexism, sexual violence, domestic violence outside of the workplace, in home, in the society. And the society actually benefits from that. The society under capitalism has a material interest in keeping women in that relegated place; keeping women and men separated; keeping women in a role of providing services, providing benefits to the society that the society or the state is not providing. And so, I think we have to understand in historical terms, and then understand why today it persists.
I think the question is potentially quite [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the question is potentially quite abstract because the question is do we root anger, do we root hatred and violence in individual attitudes or do we see them as having social roots. I think the reality is that they have social roots. These emotions, these conflicts have origins in history, have origins in people’s social and material circumstances. There is nothing innate in human nature that leads to anger, that leads to hatred, that leads to violence. We are not inherently xenophobic, we are not inherently antagonistic towards one another people. Whether or not, we have those beliefs, whether or not we have those attitudes, depends on our social circumstances. And what history shows is that we can change social circumstances and reduce violence, reduce hatred. But, also it shows something really important, which is that in struggling to change history, in struggling to change our material circumstances, in struggling for example basic economic transformation to meet basic human needs, people change themselves, change their attitudes, find their circumstances changing even in that process of social change. So, for example, you see how workers in the United States in the history fighting for basic and economic rights. They have come to understand that racism, that sexism, that homophobia, that nationalism divide and weaken their movements. And therefore, you can have a process of consciousness raising among people who formally may have had racist or sexist ideas, have had xenophobic ideas come to challenge, come to question those beliefs. And so, really, the first step is in changing these is to set about the process of collectively organizing to try.
I think the danger of the question is that [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the danger of the question is that it plays into potentially the idea that the main source of violence in inner cities is gang violence or that it is an individual question of a choice between participating in gang activity or valuing education, placing importance on education. We live in a society that denigrates education and then also glorifies violence of a particular kind, when it serves the interest of powerful groups in the society, when it is carried out by the state or by the police or by the army or by the military, and then violence is acceptable; it’s glorified. And the glorification of violence is not just hypocritical, but goes hand-in-hand with very racist ideas about the source of violence in inner cities, which are predominantly people, colors -- communities of color and really the source of violence in communities of color is first of all overwhelmingly violence against those communities, violence by police, the daily violence of inequality and oppression, oppression in the workplace, oppression in structural violence that exists in those communities, and then on top of that structural violence, on top of the oppression of police forces, the sources of violence that exists in these communities overwhelmingly leads to poverty, inequality, block of job opportunity. Every increase in the rate of unemployment is correlated directly with an increase in violence in our communities. If you could provide full employment, you could eliminate much of the violence that exists today and also, you could take much greater resources and put them into education, and it’s not a question of individual’s value, education is a question of – as a society to evaluate and we do not.
This is a great question, Howard, and I’m [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is a great question, Howard, and I’m sure you’re listening right now to my answer live on the Internet. So, it’s a very important question because it makes the connection, a very real connection that we need to draw between the money that is being spent on war today and all of the social needs that are going unmet. In fact, this war in Iraq for example has already caused, according to a study by Joseph Stiglitz, $1.6 trillion, if you include the indirect economic cost. That is going hand in hand with the fact that, in city after city, state after state in the United States, people are going hungry. There are fiscal crisis, school budget programs are getting cut, education funding is being cut, health care funding is being cut, and basic human needs are going unmet. The reality is $1.6 trillion could do so much to eliminate poverty, to eliminate disease, to eliminate hunger, and how best that money can be spent, I’m really -– I as an individual can’t say, but I think it should be a question of democratic decisions, but we should put that money into communities, allow those communities to figure out what needs are greatest, which human needs are most pressing and the most urgent. And I think what you will find is that people will very quickly find the immense value of a diversion and ultimately conversion of our economy from a war economy to an economy based on other interests and needs.
Well, I think the question of why there is [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, I think the question of why there is no peace in the Middle East is a complicated one, but fundamental to answering the question is the question of what is called a peace process and the assumption that the United States, the European Union and other countries are pursuing a process of trying to resolve a conflict and that it is often basically attributed to Palestinian or Arab intransigence and maximalism that that process hasn’t achieved its aim. The United States often refers to itself as an honest broker in the Middle East, but nothing can be further from the truth. Naseer Aruri has written a book called “Dishonest Broker” that shows the real history of the United States for all in actually systematically blocking the underlying issues that create conflict and tension in the Middle East. And really, if you want to understand the roots of the conflict in the Middle East, we have to understand why -- the way in which Israel was created as a colonial settler state and the massive disposition of more than 700,000 Palestinians, why that fundamental injustice has led to a situation that has led to such instability in the Middle East and in the world today, a situation that really threatens to engulf far beyond the Middle East regions in a more and potentially even nuclear war. And so, there is a fundamental inequality there, but there is also a greater inequality and problem which is that the United States has seen the Middle East as a region of concern for the same reason that before it was an object of colonial concern because of its geography in terms of its location, for the proximity to very important trade and shipping routes. But, increasingly, it is importance as a source of energy, the location of two-thirds of world’s oil, but also the great majority of the world’s natural gas reserves. So, it is an area of tremendous conflict because those resources are a value to the United States, a value to other states, and the people who live in those countries have been dispossessed and have been subjected to dictatorship, to oppression and tremendous violence by states that seek to control those resources and by their indigenous allies, the elites of Arab world and also by the state of Israel. So, the United States has backed dictatorships, backed oppressive regimes that will give it access to those resources and suppress movements for democratic change, suppress nationalist movements, which creates the kind of anger, which creates kind of frustration, which creates the kind of social circumstances that lead to instability today. But, really, ultimately, resolution of political conflicts could be possible.
I think the question of how do we stop [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the question of how do we stop governments from going to war raises the question of who has the political power to affect government policy, who has the power to affect decisions of who is going to war. And there, I think we have to look at the role that working people can pay in confronting an empire, confronting the military/industrial complex. Because, ultimately, war relies first of all on the manufacture of the ammunitions in a war and those ammunitions cannot be manufactured if the workers in the war industries refuse to manufacture those ammunitions. And then, they also rely on people to carry out the actions of going to war, rely on soldiers, rely on troops to fight wars of profit, an empire. And the real power of stopping war ultimately lies with the working-class people, who in the industries of war and outside of the industries of war can organize to break down the institutions that drive us to war. They can refuse the orders to fire, they can refuse to ship ammunitions, they can refuse to fund the purchase of ammunitions, they can refuse to support the politicians that take us to war.
I think the question gets at a crucial [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the question gets at a crucial point, which is the problems we confront in the world today are global problems. They are not problems that have national boundaries. There is not a problem that exists only among state or local boundaries. The problems we confront today are global problems. But, the question raised is the question of a global government, and I think that the real solution is not global government, but global movements. The idea usually, as I say with a global government, is of institutions like the United Nations, which could somehow become an instrument for global decision-making and rule. The problem is the United Nations is an undemocratic institution. The representatives of states at the UN are not elected. They represent very narrow interests within their own states. And the UN itself is dominated by the United States, and a handful of other powers who have effective control. And the reality is we need global movements from below, popular movements, social movement that can confront the power of states and that can begin to create international institutions, democratic participatory decision-making institutions from the ground up, from the grass roots. The World Social Forum is just the beginning of an expression of that aspiration. But, the forum right now is a meeting space. It is a forum for dialog, but not for decision-making and not for taking action. We need to transform that and develop new institutions that reach across national boundaries, but become action bodies, become decision and action taking bodies, because the problems we are confronting are urgent and will only be changed not through dialog but through protests, through struggle.
This is an excellent question and a very [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is an excellent question and a very timely one, Israel. The term self-defense is routinely used to refer to the right of states. But, at the same time, I think the problem is slightly more nuanced in that the actions of certain states can be termed terrorism, not just the actions of, as the question asks, the weak. So, for example, if a state is an enemy to the United States, states such as Iran or states such as Syria, the term terrorism will be used by the media, by politicians, by the punditry to refer to their actions. So, the concept of state terrorism is permissible as long as it is restricted to our enemies. But, on the fundamental thrust of the question, it is absolutely correct that the right of self-defense has invoked a tremendous hypocrisy and that the term terrorism is used with even greater hypocrisy in the world today. So, for example, the United States, which invades Iraq illegally and unjustly to achieve its imperial objectives in Iraq and beyond that in the Middle East and in the world is acting in self defense and yet, the people of Iraq who are resisting occupation, resisting foreign intervention into their lives and very violent form intervention are considered terrorists for exercising their legitimate right of self defense. And the question of the right of self defense also was – the hypocrisy of how that’s used was also recently exposed with the Israelian invasion of Lebanon, where the right of self defense is systematically denied to the people of Lebanon, while it was repeatedly invoked by the defenders of the war in regard to Israel’s right to protect itself from foreign attack. The issue really couldn’t be more important to interrogate.
The question of who tolerates it and who [...]
Anthony Arnove: The question of who tolerates it and who does not has to be asked because the people who tolerate it are the people who are making the decisions that lead us into wars that are, as the question points out, increasingly leading to civilian death. The basic proportion of military soldiers, people actively involved in a conflict versus civilians being killed in war has gone from roughly 90% to 10% at the beginning of the 20th century to today now being 90% civilians and 10% military. Now, of course, you also have to ask the question of those military deaths and whether any moral distinction can be made between the soldiers who are unjustly also the victims of war and the civilians who are the victims of war. But, most people know or they in fact don’t tolerate the growth of civilian deaths. Most people feel anger, outrage, and despair. The question is do they feel that they can do something about it? Do they feel that they can change it? Do they feel that governments will respond to their concerns? Do they feel that they can organize and make change? And really that, I think, is where the gap exists, not in the degree of toleration, but the degree in mobilization, organization and protest.
I will take this as a rhetorical question in [...]
Anthony Arnove: I will take this as a rhetorical question in the sense that really it’s a question that people around the world are asking themselves right now. And the question of how that is answered is not a question of philosophy. It’s a question of very immediate practical urgency. Will people reject the equation, which is being put forward by Tony Blair, by John Howard, by George Bush, by politicians around the world that we have to restrict our freedoms in order to have security, that we have to give more power to the states and the states are protecting us from terrorism, the states are protecting us from the dangers of [the world]. And so, I think we have to reject this equation and have to understand that the policies that are being carried out in the name of security, in fact are making the world more insecure, not more secure. For example, the US invasion of Iraq [we were] told just to make the world safer, to counter the threat, the dangers of terrorism, the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, it just made the world more dangerous, more insecure, has increased instability and violence, has driven a global arms race, as countries around the world conclude that Iraq was invaded not because that it had weapons of mass destruction, but because it did not. And so, therefore, if they want a deterrent to US power, if they want a deterrent to the world’s sole superpower, which has a stated doctrine of carrying out regime change in countries that aren’t in its interest, which believes in the doctrine of so-called preemptive strikes, which uses terrorism as an instrument of policy, and is threatening regime change in other countries, that if they want a deterrent to that sole superpower, they had better develop a military deterrent, a nuclear deterrent if possible. And so, it has made the world more dangerous, more unstable, less secure, and it’s also of course, in the process the United States of invading Iraq create more anger, more resentment in the world, which is making it more likely that people in the United States will be the targets of attack.
Well, I actually disagree with the question. [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, I actually disagree with the question. The, first of all, assumption is that in the countries of the Western World or the First World, we are not living in fear all of the time. And the reality is many people are living in fear, people of color, immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, targeted political groups, targeted minorities are living in fear. People experience insecurity and fear everyday in communities around the country, in the United States, in Canada, in the countries that are so-called democracies. So, then the question becomes, are we really trying to spread freedom? Is that the reason that the United States invaded Iraq? Is that the reason the United States invaded Afghanistan? And the reality is it has nothing to do with why we invaded those countries. We have invaded those countries because of political interest, because of economic interest that actually are completely contrary to the spread of freedom, to the spread of democracy in the world. The United States is threatened by democracy and freedom, because if there were genuine freedom and democracy in the Middle East, the resources of that region could be controlled ordinary people and put to human use, rather than to the benefit of Western powers and corporations. And in fact, the United States has systematically undermined democratic movements, movements for freedom in that part of the world and around the world because of the threat they pose to corporations, to [elites] and to powerful interests in the United States. So, the reason that people are angry is not because they are opposed to democracy or they are opposed to the spread of freedom, or they hate our freedom, as George Bush says. It’s because they are opposed to the intervention in their life by powers that have very different aims in mind, and for example, in Iraq, that have devastated that society historically and are continuing to devastate that country today in its occupation. That is what’s creating resentment, the very real impact of those interventions, the violence, the suppression of democracy and freedoms they have brought about.
Well, I think the question starts to answer [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, I think the question starts to answer itself, which is first we need to accept this division. We need to understand that we are going to have to create our own sources of power. We are going to have to create our own organization. We are going to have to create our own international relationships and that we can’t rely on so-called political leadership, we can’t rely on elected officials to do that for us. We are going to have to go around them and have to challenge them. We are going to have to act independently in order to bring about change, in order to bring about a different international order, in order to bring about justice, in order to bring about greater democracy and freedom, and we are going to have to see that it is up to us to do that. So, it’s up to us to create those new institutions, it’s up to us to create those new organizations, those new networks and there is no shortcuts in politics, there is no shortcuts in history. It requires understanding that one has to go out beginning to set about doing it and finding other people to do it, because as individuals we can’t do it but collectively, with other people, we have a power and we can. And so, it is about finding those around you who share a vision, who share a set of values, who share a set of beliefs and beginning to take the steps to make that new world possible, beginning to take the step to organize, beginning to find the ways to confront, to challenge the people who are the obstacles, the institutions, the obstacle to bringing about that change. And really, there is no substitute for that, there is no simple way of getting around that. But, in the process of doing that, we begin to answer this question, we begin to find what works, what doesn’t, we begin to ask the question of what in history has worked to bring about these kinds of change, and how we can learn from the mistakes, but also the examples, the positive examples in our history that can lead us towards the insight, that can lead us towards an alternative.
Absolutely. People should have this right. [...]
Anthony Arnove: Absolutely. People should have this right. And it’s interesting that so many people in the world today do not have the rights to choose where they live, but so many people have been dispossessed from places that they would like to live, or have been compelled to exist in their circumstances that allow them no mobilization, no freedom of movement. And the reality is that the control of the movement of people is very beneficial to the interest of capital, very beneficial to the interest of politicians who act as the executive protectors of the interest of those corporations, of those corporate interests, because if you can control the migration of labor, you can control and isolate and divide workers through national boundaries, through state boundaries, through ethnic boundaries, you can keep people weak and divided. You can keep people from uniting collectively. You can keep people from finding circumstances in which they can improve their conditions and therefore threaten those divisions that are in the interest of people who find the capital, they can move the capital around the world, but then restrict the right of labor to move around the world, to find better circumstances, better conditions. And it helps to keep people isolated, marginalized, vulnerable in circumstances where they feel that they have no alternative. They have no ability to improve their circumstances or very little prospect of doing so. So, you find that. You also find people denied the right to choose where they live on political basis. So, for example, I as an American Jew, even though, I have never lived in the state of Israel or lived in Palestine and my family has never lived there, I have the right to return. I have the right to live in Israel, to be a citizen of Israel. But, people whose families were dispossessed, people who themselves were dispossessed in 1948 when the state of Israel was created, who were dispossessed in 1967 in that war and the expansion of the Israeli state and the expansion of settlements, people who have been refugees from their own homes, they do not have the right to return if they are a Palestinian, because of the political nature of that state. And that is a fundamentalist –- it’s an injustice, which is repeated in other conflicts around the world.
This is a tremendously important question [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is a tremendously important question because the reality is the US role in the world today is built on the foundation of slavery, is built on the foundation of exploitation and enslavement, and also of course is based on the dispossession and genocide of the native peoples of the Americas, who were conquered, as the United States was settled and as the United States was formed to the westward expansion, and of course also the expansion of the American empire through colonial conquest of its island possessions as well. The role of the United States as a world economic power today is inseparable from the economic gains that were made on the back of slave labor in the United States, which allowed the United States eventually to control its greatest economic power to suppress, to surpass and to exceed the powers of the previous great countries in the world economic system, leading countries in the world economic system, themselves of course benefited from exploitation and slavery, but not to the extent that the United States ultimately was able to adopt. And so, it really raises a very important counterfactual to the history of empire dispossession of slavery, to begin to think of this question and to think of the kind of political development that could have occurred in Africa and also the kind of development that would have occurred in the Americas, had slavery not taken place. The question of course also has to be generalized to the other countries that economically, materially benefited from slavery, and the list of course unfortunately is very, very long. So, a reckoning of that and accounting of that desperately needs to be done. And yet, we have never even begun to truly explore the reparations that would need to be paid, to truly explore the economic consequences, the political consequences of slavery in the world today and begin to try to address the outrageous wrongs that were committed that allowed new wrongs to be carried out on the basis of the power and wealth that was accumulated.
Well, if we accept the existing definition [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, if we accept the existing definition of democracy, then the answer is absolutely yes, because what today is called democracy is undemocratic. What today is called democracy really is plutocracy, the control of those who have money, the control by those who have wealth, and through that wealth, people who dominate and control the basic institutions of power, corporate institutions that offset political institutions. And so really democracy, as it’s called today is not in any way the high achievement of the possibility of organizing the society in a way that is participatory, that is humane, that is just. In fact, democracy goes hand and hand with the whole economic system and the political system that denies meaningful participation for the vast majority of the world’s people, even those who live under democracies. So, there is a better alternative, a truly democratic alternative, in which people rule, collectively make the decisions, govern their own lives, and participate in all of the spheres of economic life, including economic spheres. But, today, they have no saying, and historically that vision has been called socialism. I think it’s important to specify that one means socialism from below not from above, not the dictatorial brutal distortion of socialism that we saw in the 20th century with the rise of Stalinism and Maoism, but genuine democratic participatory socialism and socialism from below. And that would be far better to the democracy that we have today, and it’s something that we can achieve, it’s something that we can bring about. And that’s something that we urgently need to bring about.
I think all of these terms have been used in [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think all of these terms have been used in ways that are problematic. The term humanitarian intervention is really perhaps the most questionable of the terms. The previous question raised questions about self-defense and made a very important point about how self-defense and terrorism are used in such hypocritical ways in contemporary discussions of politics. But the question of humanitarian intervention is one that really also needs to be a question, because humanitarian intervention has become the way increasingly that war is justified, that war is defended. But, it has historical roots. The reality is that wars are rarely fought for their stated reasons or almost never fought for the stated reasons, and the politicians have always dressed up their justifications for war in terms of liberation, in terms of humanitarian names, in terms of freeing people from tyranny and oppression and advancing human rights. But, there is a new discourse of human rights, which is justifying imperialism today. And in the context of the past two decades, we’ve seen an expansion of a discourse that seeks to justify war on the basis of human rights. And the highest examples of that really came under the administration of Bill Clinton, a liberal, who saw a means of re-legitimizing the role of the United States as a global superpower in the context of the collapse of the cold war framework. George Bush laid the groundwork for the expansion of US power, the role of the United States as an imperial power, with the collapse of the justification of combating Soviet imperialism, which was the justification used for the interventions in the Cold War era for the most part, although even those of course were described in humanitarian terms. But then, ultimately, it was Clinton who used the doctrine of humanitarian intervention and gave a legacy, which then Bush could exploit.
I am reminded here of the words of Frederick [...]
Anthony Arnove: I am reminded here of the words of Frederick Douglas about the question of power relinquishing power, which as he said power never concedes its power without a demand, without struggle. Without struggle, he said, there is no progress and if you want to understand the limits of what people will accept, you will understand the limits power will go to subjugate them and repress them. I think that’s true and is particularly true of US power, US state power today that it will take a struggle to confront, to challenge and transform that power. And in that struggle, there will be resistance from those whose power is threatened, those who benefit from the existing system, those who gain from the existing framework of order. They will not peacefully give up their power. There is no example of that. There is no example of people walking away from their power without a struggle. Individuals may do so, individuals may renounce their power, but the power is much deeper in those individuals, it’s institutional, it’s material and it’s deep-rooted, it’s deep-seated. Now, question how that struggle takes place and the extent to which that struggle disrupts, creates violence, unnecessarily takes innocent life is a question of how that struggle is organized. And I believe it’s possible to organize in such a way as to involve the greatest number of people in the participation of the transformation of power that would minimize those effects. But, it is not possible for that to happen effortlessly or gracefully, it will involve conflict, it will involve struggle and it will involve violence inevitably.
A number of people are profiting from [...]
Anthony Arnove: A number of people are profiting from terrorism. There’s people that are politically profiting. For example, politicians like George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard, who are manipulating public fears, who are manipulating the threat of terrorism in order to advance their political careers, in order to expand executive power, in order to expand the power of the state, to limit civilarities, to suppress dissent, and to do so in a way that advances their personal interest, advances their careers. We also see people who economically benefit, the companies involved in the security, the companies involved in weapons manufacture, the companies that are involved in security, the companies that are involved in the reconstruction so-called of war zones that have been created as a result of the US invasions and occupations in Afghanistan, in Iraq. We see people in fact benefiting quite handsomely. We also see the fact that, in the context of the so-called War on Terror, oil companies are making record profits, companies that already made obscene levels of profit, billions of dollars, are now making profits that they never could have imagined making as a result of the massive spike in the price of oil, as a result of the instability caused by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, in particular, but also the broader destabilization that’s been brought about through the War on Terror. The question of who’s profiting from terrorism is really important because, ultimately, it exposes that the people who claim to have an interest in fighting terrorism, who claim to be leading the war against terrorism are in fact themselves not only employing terrorism, but have every stake in continuing it and they benefit from it, whereas the vast majority of us do not.
The question of what courage means now I [...]
Anthony Arnove: The question of what courage means now I think has often been taken in a context that I find distorts meaning of the word "courage". It is sometimes spoken about particularly in the West, in the United States that courage means speaking up, speaking out, speaking ones mind. The reality is I don’t think that takes nearly that kind of courage that for example it takes for someone who is in Columbia today to go into work every day, to try to organize a union in Columbia, a country where the government aren’t backed, supported by the United States. It is carrying out death squad activity, supporting militias or carrying out death squad activity against trade unions where people everyday just going to work are risking their lives just saying that they want to have a right to a [voice are] risking their lives. That to me takes courage. That to me is courageous or Iraqis today having the courage to voice opposition to stand up to resist US Empire. That to me is courageous. To be in the United States and denounce the war, to criticize the war, to me that doesn’t take courage, to me that’s a basic moral responsibility.
This is a very timely and important question [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is a very timely and important question and I really appreciate the fact that we are discussing this today, because the United States is trying to use the script that it used for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for a possible war on Iran. They are just substituting the letter n for the letter q in many of the speeches and documents that were used to sell us that illegal and unjust war. And so, we see hysteria really being manufactured very consciously by political elites, particularly in the United States, and then recycled uncritically by a subservient establishment press that says Iran is a tremendous threat to the world, because of its development of nuclear technology. Now, the interesting this is that Iran is at least five to ten years away from being able to develop a single nuclear weapon, perhaps longer given the difficulty of setting up a cascade of centrifuges that’s necessary for enriching uranium to the grade that it can be used to make weapons-grade uranium, let alone develop the technology for the device itself and then the delivery of such a device. But, even if one grants that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon and could achieve construction of one in the next five to ten years, we are meant to ignore the fact that Israel -– it has more than 200 nuclear weapons today and is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty and also, continues to deny its nuclear program and allows no inspection of its nuclear programs. Nothing is ever said about that. The reality is the concern about Iran, as a concern about a state which is not aligned with US interests. When Iran was under the Shah and was suppressing its own population, the US actually helped it develop nuclear technology.
International law is today a [chivalette]. [...]
Anthony Arnove: International law is today a [chivalette]. It’s something that we hear a lot about, but as this question points out, international law is applied very selectively in the world today. The United States is exempt from international law. Other powerful states are exempt from international law, whereas subjugated or weak states are subject to it. The reality is there is no effective international law in the world today. There is a law Might Makes Right, and that is the law of the world today, that is the kind of international law we have. The United States is able to carry out war crimes, violate Geneva conventions, torture, murder, invade other countries ,illegally and to violate numerous provisions of international law, and yet claim that it is a beacon of international law that is upholding and advancing international law. The United States at the same time, of course, rejects the world court and the international tribunal and rejects mechanisms that would bind it to international law. The United States is entering into bilateral relationships, agreements with states around the world to compel them to say that they will never bring US soldiers, that they will never US officials before courts of international law. We recently have seen other states, Argentina. In particular, we have the example of Chile and Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. We see universally a principle of trying to exempt executives, political leaders from any accountability. So, really, I think we need to question the basis of international law today and understand that it can’t possibly be meaningful in a world where the states have such power.
Politics is a form of violence in our world. [...]
Anthony Arnove: Politics is a form of violence in our world. Violence is just an extension of politics by other means, to quote [Nadir Ali] and we see more and more politics finding expression in that particular means, the means of using physical force, coercion, in order to carry out political objectives. And really, we see the growth of that method of carrying out politics, because of the suppression of other forms of political expression or organization and mobilization. And the reason for that is that we’ve seen a systematic assault on forms of democratic political expression in our world, and in that circumstance, an extension of the role of violence in organizing politics.
Absolutely. There is a modern version of [...]
Anthony Arnove: Absolutely. There is a modern version of colonialism. There is imperialism and there is neocolonialism. The term colonialism generally refers to a period in the phase of imperialism that involves the direct occupation of other countries and subjugation of those countries to the imperial capitals. The reality is one does not need to engage in that form of occupation and direct rule to have a colonial relationship that countries like the United States, and at various points in history of colonialism, other colonial regimes have concluded that at times, it’s in their interest to maintain the basic relationship of domination and control, but to have a local elite that can act as the representative of the imperial power, of the colonial power. And then, it’s in fact a more efficient means of control. It’s a more efficient means of subjugation because it removes the role of the foreign power as a military force, which can provoke anger, resentment, opposition, rebellion that creates what one British colonial official called an Arab façade, referring to the puppet government that the British had set up in Iraq with parallels to the puppet governments that the United States is seeking to establish today in its occupation in that country, which it of course claims as a liberation, just like the British had claimed that their occupation was a liberation, when there was nothing of the sort. And so, really, when we talk about colonialism, I think we have to get away from the idea that it always takes the form of taking over a government – controlling it on a government that increasingly in the world today takes the form of indirect role, indirect control, indirect subjugation. But, the reality of that is very much the way the United States relates to the world today. The United States is an imperial, is a colonial power in Iraq, in Afghanistan. It sponsors a colonial power, Israel, in Palestine, and it sponsors and endorses colonialism in many other forms.
It’s interesting that the question of [...]
Anthony Arnove: It’s interesting that the question of freedom is so often expressed in terms of a very narrow set of ideas that is freedom is expressed in terms of the interest of the American empire and the claim is made repeatedly that the United States has what’s called a freedom agenda. George Bush likes to talk about his freedom agenda in the war in the Middle East. You saw Condoleezza Rice refer so cynically recently to the birth pains of a new Middle East suggesting that the violence against the people of Lebanon, the displacement of more than 1 million Lebanese people was justified because it was in the advance of freedom. And so, I think it’s important on one hand to say that freedom is universal, but also to understand that universality of freedom is often used as an ideology to advance very particularist interests and interests that actually involve the suppression of freedom for other people. Now, beyond that observation, I would add that freedom does have some specificity in that freedom is to borrow a phrase from Leon Trotsky, something that’s part of a permanent change, permanent revolution that is that freedoms that we may fight for today ultimately [hovering] about a consciousness and awareness of new freedoms that need to be fought for and won, that there is not a perfect state of freedom that we will achieve, but we will understand and come to understand new forms of freedom that need to be fought for in the process of struggle. And therefore, the concept of freedom may have some historical specificity depending on where one is at in that overall struggle.
Well, that question is a difficult one. But, [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, that question is a difficult one. But, I think I would put the emphasis on saying that in our society, the ideology of personal freedom is one that is meant to deny deliberately the idea of a common good, so that the idea of solidarity, the idea of working for the common good is systematically denigrated or we have an ideology that in pursuing your individual interest, your individual benefit, you benefit the collective that there is an indirect benefit to greed under capitalism. I think that idea is one that we should completely reject, but the important thing I think to get at is that the idea of the common good, the idea of collective good is anathema to the interests of the powerful, is anathema to capitalism and to understand freedom is counterposed to the common good is at the heart of that ideology. We need to come to understand that we suffer from the oppression and the dispossession of others in that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others. Eugene Debs put it very well when he said, “While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” And at the end of communist manifesto, Marx and Engels talked about the free development of each being the condition for the free development of all. I think that understanding of freedom is reciprocal and is collective and is linked up with the common good that the advance of the common good is an advance of individual and personal freedom is an important idea to reclaim.
Hey, Roy, I know of course you are watching [...]
Anthony Arnove: Hey, Roy, I know of course you are watching this in Kashmir right now. The reality is we have no [formals] and we need the diversity of tactics and strategies, and we certainly cannot in any way adopt a principle stance of non-violence in a world, which is so violent, in a world which will inevitably use violence against movements that are non-violent. And so, I can’t endorse the principle of non-violence when it means saying to people who are under the gun, people who are facing the power of states, the power of military, the power of police oppression that they only can fight back, which is non-violent. And so, really, I think we have to ask a question of effectiveness of tactics in specific circumstances and specific struggles and specific situations, and we can learn from the history of social struggles. We can learn from the examples of the dangers and the weaknesses of certain [facets of] societies. In particular, we can look at the way in which violence, when it’s carried out by individuals or isolated groups, can lead to greater oppression, can lead to isolation, can lead to elitism in how one thinks about social change. Believing, for example, that only an enlightened minority can make change, whereas I think what we can learn from history of social struggles is that in reality, it’s when large numbers of people participate in struggles. And inevitably, those struggles will have elements that are violent and non-violent, which will involve the use of force, collective force, the power of the strike, the power to confront those who have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. We find that the most effective methods almost universally tend to be those that involve the greatest numbers of people and involve people engaging not just in civil disobedience, but ultimately in activity, which targets the most powerful institutions of power in the basis that they rely upon, which is the participation, the consent to legitimacy that’s given to them by ordinary people.
I have many heroes. I guess rather than [...]
Anthony Arnove: I have many heroes. I guess rather than talking about heroes who I have who are living, my focus is on heroes who are no longer living, people who have left an example of struggle, people who through their lives provide an example of social change, provide an example of how we can fight for a different world. One, in particular, who is important for me is Eugene Debs. Growing up where I did in Indiana, I never learned about Eugene Debs, never learned about his struggle to organize railway unions, his struggle to fight for the rights of working people, and ultimately his struggle to end war and bring about socialism. And when I learned about Eugene Debs through Howard Zinn who is a contemporary hero, when I learned about that struggle, the American Socialist Movement, the struggle of the International Socialist Movement, learned about Debs’ in that, really he is just one among many people who is a hero to me. Fredrick Douglas, Helen Keller, so many people who have fought, who have struggled, who believed in something far bigger than themselves, who believed in the possibility of emancipation, believed in the possibility of liberation, and people who in their own lifetime fought against tremendous limitations, tremendous obstacles, and did so against tremendous obstacles at times when individually or as groups, they were part of minorities, they were isolated, they were persecuted, they were hounded, but who became part of social movements that involved masses of people in the struggle for social transformation, people whose names we may never know, but who are also heroes in making possible the kind of freedoms that we enjoy today and making possible the struggle for future genuine expansion of those freedoms.
The reason that patent laws aren’t being [...]
Anthony Arnove: The reason that patent laws aren’t being dumped is that there are people who have economic interests in preserving patent law, there’s people who have an economic interest in what’s called intellectual property. There’s tremendous profit and growing profit today in the intellectual property industries. So, if you are in such an industry, you have every interest in limiting competition, limiting creative use, limiting the free interplay of ideas as a means of protecting your monopoly, protecting you profits. And so, we – and this question raises the question of who has an interest in preserving patent laws and who has an interest in ending such patent laws. Take for example the pharmaceutical industry. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see repeatedly how patent law is used to prevent development of information that would allow drugs to be distributed in a way that was more accessible, that would greater address the problems of a particular disease, the disease they prevent in the third world, disease associated with third-world poverty and inequality, all that diseases that are now increasingly spreading to the third world within the first world. And on the other hand, you have companies – pharmaceutical companies that profit from those patent laws. So, you need to begin -- I think to start a process of challenging the power of those companies to limit access to information, to limit the sharing of information, to limit our access to that information, which is holding back scientific progress, holding back human progress, and also in the [realm of ours] holding back all kinds of economic, all kinds of economic [audio ends].
Economic growth, as it’s now defined, [...]
Anthony Arnove: Economic growth, as it’s now defined, endless accumulation and endless exploitation of natural resources for short-term calculations, absolutely has ecological limits. And we are beginning to reach some of those ecological limits at the very moment, particularly when one looks at the fact that short-term calculations can’t factor in the long-term consequences of the depletion of resources such as oil. So, we are confronting right now very real limits of economic growth as it’s defined under capitalism. Now, there is other possible forms in which economic growth could take place, ecologically sustainable forms, but those would involve a drastic reordering of our economic priorities in the way economic decision-making takes place in our society. Growth in and of itself is not the problem. The problem is the nature of growth, the lack of planning, the anarchy of the system, and the fact that there is no accounting within the economic system for the ecological consequences of our decisions.
I think the question of intimidation and [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the question of intimidation and control is very important one today. But, I don’t think that the Internet is the main method of intimidation or control today, or it’s a correlation between access to the Internet and degree of intimidation and control. In fact, I think the greatest instances of intimidation and control are happening in communities, in institutions that have no access to the Internet or limited access to the Internet, really people who are subject to the greatest intimidation and control, for example, trade unions in Columbia, Iraqis under occupation, Palestinians under occupation, people living in refugee camps around the world have no access, not to the Internet or highly limited access to the Internet. And to see ourselves, those of us who do have access to Internet, is being controlled or intimidated by the Internet I think distorts the real dangers, the real threats to our freedom, the real efforts that are underway to limit dissent, to limit critical thinking in the world, which are being exercised through much more direct and brutal means actually than efforts to limit control of information on the Internet or to use the Internet as a method of propaganda.
I think I am going to pass on this question. [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think I am going to pass on this question. It doesn’t really speak I think to concerns that I have and ultimately I think the question has an elitist basis of understanding human beings in the situation we are in today.
I think that the question of sustainable [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think that the question of sustainable development is an important one, but I don’t think it can be addressed at the community level. Ultimately, it is impossible to separate oneself off from a system and create pockets of sustainability in a world, which is still dominated by a set of priorities that are ultimately so destructive to the environment and destructive to human interests. And so, really, there is a danger in this question of adopting a model of carving out for oneself, I kind of see a little pocket of liberty, I miss to see oppression and exploitation and environmental destruction, and really if we are going to get at sustainability, it has to be addressed on a global level. Now, through local actions, local organization, we can begin to make changes that will begin to have that kind of global impact, but I think we have to have it mind that that is what our struggle is to achieve that we are not going to achieve it through isolated changes but we are going to change it to major profound changes in the nature of production, not just in the nature of consumption, but in the nature of production, in the nature of how things are produced, how decisions about production are made. And ultimately, it is going to take confronting the domination of our lives by the principle of profit, by the principle of short-term gain.
I would say that the world can’t actually [...]
Anthony Arnove: I would say that the world can’t actually get sufficient clean water without conflict in the sense that it will take social conflict, it will take protests, it will take struggle in order to bring about a social order that provides sufficient clean water for people. The question of whether having done that there would then be conflict over water is a different question, which perhaps is underlying the concern of the group that has posed this question. But, I think that creates an artificial mistake in understanding of why there is conflict over water in the world today. And really, if we could bring about the kind of struggle, engage in the kind of conflict that it would take to fight to make water universally accessible, the current basis of conflicts over water and other resources would disappear.
I think I am going to pass on this question.
Anthony Arnove: I think I am going to pass on this question.
I think there is no shortcuts to achieving [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think there is no shortcuts to achieving the kind of social change that’s necessary to address these problems. And so, in terms of what one can immediately do, I think what one can immediate do is begin to educate oneself to understand the nature of these problems and what one can immediately do is find other people with whom one can organize, can work together in that process of education and through that process forming a commitment to action of figuring out what it is that one can do to take action. There is not a formula for what actions will be effective, but the possibility of social transformation rests on power that we only have collectively, not a power that we have as individuals. So, immediately, one can commit oneself to finding others with whom to take action, to address these problems.
This is a funny question and a good one. The [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is a funny question and a good one. The reality is, the questions of what goes on TV are based on questions of what can distribute and provide useful information, or how education can be an educational tool, how education can be a tool of enlightenment. But, it’s a question of how television can be a tool for advertising, how television can market goods and create profit and how television can spread the dominant ideas in our society. That’s how television is viewed. That’s how the decisions about what goes on television is viewed. Now, within that, of course there are artistic questions or issues that mean that there are people who are fighting against those constrictions, there are people fighting to make television a medium for information, for communication, for the distribution of ideas that challenge the dominant ideas in our society. But, given the enormous economic costs of the ownership of television stations and production of programming for television stations, those voices are going to be in the minority, unless there is a radical transformation of how television is produced, which would mean turning television into a public medium, public funded medium, and ultimately engaging in the kind of revolutionary change it would mean. Television was a medium that existed solely for the purpose of enlightenment and education and communication of alternative viewpoints, not for the selling of advertising, not for the production of and reproduction of the dominant of ideas of our society, and it ultimately would involve democratic participation in the formation of the content on television.
The reason that these risks are being taken, [...]
Anthony Arnove: The reason that these risks are being taken, the reason that genetically engineered food crops are being pursued quite reckless of the potential enormous harm that this might bring about is that a small group of people feel that they can profit from doing so, that there is tremendous profit to be made in agro business from the creation of genetically engineered foods that will create new wants, new needs, new ways of profiting from the production of bioengineered genetically modified crops from the profits on patents, from the distribution of restricted technology, particularly technologies having to do with seed for agricultural industries. And really, the people who are interested in those profits or people who are interested in those industries, people who are interested in those markets don’t care about the consequences, don’t care about the environmental, social or human effects as long as they stand to make a profit. And they will therefore deny, minimize or ignore the concerns and will do anything to avoid actually having to face up to the tremendous threat that these crops have. And as long as our business is – as long as agriculture, as long as food production, distribution is based on profit, these distortions will continue.
No science is divorced from human history, [...]
Anthony Arnove: No science is divorced from human history, from context, from social interests, material interests, so it is important to understand the situation, the situatedness of science, to understand history of [serious] science, to understand the politics of science, particularly given the history of how science has been used to very destructive ends, for ideological ends, for particularistic ends, the way in which science has been used for very subjective ends. But, in recognizing that, I think it is important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater and to reject the goal of scientific understanding, to reject the goal of objectivity and disinterestedness in the pursuit of knowledge, and that there is dialectical relationship between historical interest and a scientific method that begins to approach the question of how we can understand the world and that really – that understanding is important to ultimately transforming the world. So, I think we should always problematize the question of objectivity in science and yet understand the radical potential for that concept at the same time.
The issue of what we can do to confront the [...]
Anthony Arnove: The issue of what we can do to confront the problem of global warming is growing more urgent. We have seen a pattern of violent weather occurrences, they are called natural disasters, but they are in reality social disasters, where we have seen massive human and environmental consequences. The last several years have seen record temperature levels in the ocean, rising ocean levels, record incidents of, what are considered extreme weather patterns, hurricanes, tornados, and also tsunamis. And if this pattern continues, it’s really hard to imagine how extreme the consequences could be. It’s hard to underestimate how extreme the consequences could be. But, really, I think we have to be sober that the scale of the problem is such that individual decisions really aren’t ultimately the issue in this question that individual choices can ultimately, unfortunately substitute for taking the kind of collective action and drastic action that in fact is necessary, that involve fundamentally transforming the basis of our economies on short-term economic calculations, in particular, the role the consumption of oil has come to play in the global capitalist economy. And in order to begin to address those enormous structural problems, we are going to have to engage in more than consumption decisions or individual decisions or going to have to engage in collective political action to bring about a difference set of priorities and to create new institutions. And so, really, I think the thing that is possible, that is most effective is to find ways to organize it collectively and working with other people to bring about the kind of changes in our priorities that would make a change in how it relates to the environment possible.
The question asks how will the world react, [...]
Anthony Arnove: The question asks how will the world react, but that always begs an important question, which is who in the world are we exactly referring to, how will the leadership, the political leadership of the United States react if we mean by leadership team or the political officials, those with positions of decision making power and authority, how will they react? They will react by going to war to dominate the resources of other countries and to prevent the emergence of political and economic rivals like China and India, and it is the stated foreign policy of the United States and the national security strategy of the United States of America, which was published first in September of 2002 and recently reissued in March of 2006 to preserve the enormous gap that exists between the United States and any potential peer competitor to the United States such as India, such as China, and the Untied States recently went to war in Iraq in order to continue to dominate that region’s energy resources, understanding that the United States actually is far less reliant on those energy resources than its economic and political competitors like China, like India and like countries in the European Union that import 70, 80, in some cases 90% of their energy resources from that region. So, that is how they are answering this question. If we want to see a different answer to that question, it is going to take organizing to challenge the priorities of that political project, which is leading to a situation where we will have more economic conflict, more war, more bloodshed and more distorted development.
It is a very interesting question and it [...]
Anthony Arnove: It is a very interesting question and it raises an important essay that was written by Friedrich Engels on the housing question, where he talks about how housing architecture, how the construction of homes, how the construction of public spaces is a profoundly political question and is tied up with the priorities of a society in a given historical moment. And really, of course, when you ask the question of architecture, you ask the question of the contradictions of living in a world where some people can construct homes that cost millions upon millions of dollars, while other people go absolutely homeless, how it is that we live in a world where architecture is overwhelmingly the preserve as an art form, but also as a material form of a handful, and the question of people’s housing, the question of people’s experience of public space is one that’s overwhelmingly beyond their economic means or control. And so, I think we have to understand that the question of architecture is a political question, it’s a social question and that architects can like other artists be a part of raising awareness of those issues and also participating in an understanding of how a different kind of architecture might be possible, how a different form of creation of space might be possible in an emancipated society.
Well, this is a gift of a question. We only [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, this is a gift of a question. We only have three minutes to talk about it. But, the future that I would like to see looks like a world that we can only begin to get a glimpse of now, but a world of freedom, a world to create expression, a world of cooperation, a world of sharing, a world in which art is encouraged to flourish, creativity is encouraged to flourish. And really, the starting point for that is imaging a world beyond capitalism, a world in which we have done away with this completely irrational and insane way in which we have organized our lives. And you begin to have an idea of what that society looks like when you consider the moments of amazing solidarity that exists even in this alienated, integrated, and completely conflicted world. The moments of people coming together across the divisions that are imposed on us, across racism to express our solidarity, across sexism to express our solidarity, across homophobia, across nationalism, across xenophobia to express their solidarity, their common humanity and their collectivity. And in those moments, you really get a glimpse of the possibility and the desirability of a future world, a future world where development of each of us is a condition for the development of all of us, with greater freedom, greater potential, greater creativity. Then we can even begin to imagine today as a result of the limitations in our consciousness, the limitations on our imagination by this schooling that we get, by the experiences that we have, by the strictures on our thinking imposed by the ideologies and institutions that shore up and prop up the existing system, the existing order.
Jerry’s question raises a point, which is [...]
Anthony Arnove: Jerry’s question raises a point, which is that whether ubiquitousness of mass media is both an opportunity and it’s a problem. It’s a opportunity in the sense that it provides possibilities for gaining greater awareness of the world, it provides an opportunity for raising awareness and knowledge about global issues, about which we need to know more. It raises possibilities for organizing and providing information that can help mobilize people to work together for social change and betterment, and provides opportunities for more effectively organizing opportunities that did not previously exist for communicating quickly and efficiently and effectively. But, at the same time, the ubiquitousness of mass media is a problem because the existing forms of mass media are dominated by interests that are opposed to the use of mass media for the purpose of effectively organizing and for effectively understanding the world. They are organized in the interest of creating a passive citizenry, in the interest of creating consumers, in the interest of creating information that will be useful for the manufacture of consent of governments for their policies, to manufacture consent to support policies such as the war, the occupation in Iraq and the broader so-called War on Terror. That is the real role of the existing mass media and their ubiquitousness helps create a pervasive sense in people’s lives that the world is dominated by forces they cannot control. So, really, it is a very tough call to say whether it is one or the other. I think really ultimately it’s both and the contradiction is something we have to confront.
I think I will leave that to other people [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think I will leave that to other people who understand cognitive science and also understand computer science much better than I do.
I think the starting point of discussing [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the starting point of discussing this question is to assert that education needs to be a universal free public right. And that the starting point has to be that education is the priority and is a universal right that we will not accept any restriction on. And unfortunately, today, we are far from living in a world that has provided universal education. Increasingly, we see not only the fact that many people are denied access to basic education, but more and more education is determined on the basis of whether or not one can afford an education, that is education is determined by class, education is determined by existing privileges, power, and inequality, and that education is reinforcing those injustices in those inequalities. So, if we want to fight for education to be a mechanism for creating the possibility of everyone contributing to the world, everyone participating in the world, we have to challenge the economic basis of education today. Education in the United States is based on property, taxes, which means that rich communities have schools with far greater resources than poor communities. That inequality, which Jonathan Kozol has described in his books with such eloquence is fundamentally unacceptable, and so we will have to adjust those property and economic relationships first.
I think the question of aloneness doesn’t [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the question of aloneness doesn’t need to be linked to the question of the fact that there are so many people in the world that you can only understand isolation today in terms of social circumstances that produce isolation, that produce feelings of alienation. We have a society that deliberately tries to atomize people, deliberately tries to isolate people, and deliberately tries to make people feel that they are alone. That does so as a means of social control; that does so as a means of limiting the kinds of collectivities, the kinds of organization that could bring about social change, that could bring about social transformation and the alienation is very much linked to the conditions of labor, to the conditions of the reproduction of labor in our society. So, really, if we want to feel part of a collectivity, part of a greater global community, the first step we can take is to challenge the ideologies that encourage that feeling of atomization, isolation. But, more importantly practically to find ways of connecting even small collectivities that can become a part of challenging that process of atomization, challenging those conditions of alienation, challenging the ideologies of our society that lead us to believe we are crazy for thinking that this world is unjust, for thinking that there must be a better way of organizing our societies, thinking that there must be a better way of being in this world.
The question of how technology, particularly [...]
Anthony Arnove: The question of how technology, particularly the Internet and computers, can be used in low-income communities, I think begs an initial question, which is how many low-income communities actually have access to such technology. And the reality is the overwhelming majority of poor and working-class communities have no such access and have no such technology and that for literally billions of people around the world, this discussion is actually completely removed from the immediate concerns and life experiences of people. So, really, I think we have to ask the question whether or not this is really the urgent question of how we are going to address the concerns of those communities, is there a technological fix? And I think the reality is that this concern is quite distant from the immediate concerns that are needed to address the problems of poor communities, low-income communities around the world that face much more immediate questions about access to water, access to employment and access to basic social needs that are being denied, that kind of economic insecurity, the kind of political insecurity. It means so many people in this planet can’t even begin to have access to technology and don’t even necessarily have access to text books, to newspapers, to other forms of media than the Internet. So, while the Internet technology certainly has uses and might be profitable for those communities, I think the idea of routing the question how to address the concerns of those communities and the technological question jumps over a series of steps, and doesn’t raise bigger questions that need to be raised about what kind of social and economic development is possible under the capitalist system.
I don’t think I can quite answer this [...]
Anthony Arnove: I don’t think I can quite answer this question. So, I think I’m going to leave this to others at the table.
We are bombarded with messages from consumer [...]
Anthony Arnove: We are bombarded with messages from consumer culture and those are ideological messages, they are messages that tell us how we are supposed to live our lives, what our values should be, what men should be, what women should be, what our sexuality should be, what our lives should be. And what’s important is that those messages go against the lived experience of the lives of so many people, the values of so many people, and that people are constantly actually resisting those images. But, often people feel that they are somehow beyond the norm, they are outside of the values of the society by having that experience of contradiction. And really, we have to give people more of a sense of their own ability to reject those images, to rebuke those attempts to impose those norms on us, and to create a challenge to the ideologies of consumer culture, to challenge the ideologies that are reproduced through advertising in particular in our society, and to confront the sexism, the racism, the homophobia, the ideologies of passivity and consumerism and the individualism that are inculcated in the media. But, really, I am encouraged that those values are so at odds actually with the interests and aspirations and values of so many people that in fact consumer culture is not nearly as effective as it would like to be, as it thinks it is in being able to influence and shape our decisions and values. And so, there is a real basis for believing that we can challenge it.
This is a beautiful question from a [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is a beautiful question from a beautiful artist, and it’s very exciting that Sabastiao has been part of this table. I wish he could have been here today to answer in part his question, and to answer others. But, in terms of the question, I think it really gets at the dialectic of human life, the dialectic that you are a part of the world, and how we act upon and change the world. And that really, once one begins to have that understanding, it transforms so much in one’s world view and that can be a basis for profound rethinking of so many social questions that we confront today. Today, we see the environment is an externality to our economic system. But, of course, that economic system, which is concerned only with short-term interests, only concerned with profit, only concerned with accumulation can’t calculate, can’t understand the genuine consequences, not only for the environment, somehow distinct entity, but the very real impact that that has on us, on ourselves on the basis for our survival.
The question has a lot to do with the [...]
Anthony Arnove: The question has a lot to do with the previous question about why the food we get is of such bad quality. The reality is a whole industry has developed around the selling of drinks that have absolutely no nutritional value. In fact, in many cases, are detrimental to our health, but which are profitable. And Coke, Pepsi and other soft drinks are one of the major industries that have succeeded in creating artificial needs, artificial wants, selling a lifestyle as a way of getting people to consume drinks, which are harmful to our health. And at the same time, that system of production based on what’s profitable, based on how companies like Coca Cola can make billions of dollars has no concern for the fact that millions, in fact billions of people go without access to safe drinking water, and that people today are dying from easily preventable water-borne diseases and lack of access to water resource, which could easily and affordably be provided to everyone in the world safely and naturally, and which is really the foundation of a decent and humane society, access to water, and yet has become something that is removed for more than 2 billion people in the world today. And yet companies like Coca Cola having more and more access to more and more markets to spread this model of capitalist consumption, creation of artificial needs and creation of an image that is used to sell products that are so detrimental to our health.
I suppose I have a problem with this [...]
Anthony Arnove: I suppose I have a problem with this question in that I think we would never really ask the question what can we learn from Europe, what can we learn from the Americas, and that there is a certain reification of Africa which is taking place here, which obscures all the complexity and the diversity of African societies. Also, it raises a question of why Africa would be singled out as a single entity, as if Africa is a particular source of wisdom or a voice of knowledge that we and the rest of the world have lost. But, I would prefer to take the question in a different way and then I think I understand it, which is to ask the question what can we learn from the treatment of Africa by countries like the United States, what can we learn from the treatment of Africa by the colonial powers that participated in the scramble for Africa, what can we learn from the treatment of Africa by France and the other countries that today remain imperial and colonial forces in that continent? And what we can learn is a tremendous amount about the hypocrisy of professions to care about human rights, democracy and the spread of freedom by those countries, we can learn about the legacy of colonialism, which leads to such gross and stark inequalities in the world today. We can learn about the lack of genuine concern for suffering, death, starvation, privation that exists in the world today. And we can learn that the world cares about Africa today only insofar as a source for resources, and increasingly Western Africa is being seen as a source for oil, as the United States seeks to control and dominate not just Middle Eastern energy resources, but energy resources wherever they may exist, and of course is in the process of militarizing and supporting brutal dictatorships in that part of the world.
I think this is another question that I am [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think this is another question that I am going to leave to others who can answer much better than I can and I very much like to hear what others have to answer it.
This is everyone’s favorite question today [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is everyone’s favorite question today because it’s the last question. How do we get the world to listen? Well, I think the world is listening. The real question is, I think, how do we get people who are listening to feel that they have a possibility of making a difference? For me really I think that is the question that so many people are confronting today, that they care, that they are concerned, they are listening, but they feel isolated, they feel like people in positions of power don’t listen, that people in positions of power don’t care, that we are unable to make a change, we are unable to make a difference. And I think really the only way to begin to challenge that idea is to show in history how change has happened and to create examples today of change, to create examples today – positive examples of people making a difference, ending injustices, fighting oppression, making a difference, and to make those examples a source of inspiration to others who then will have a sense of the possibility that they too can participate in the process of change, that they too can bring about a social transformation, which we so badly need today.
This is a very important question. There are [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is a very important question. There are so many candidates for the most important unreported story in the world today, but the story that I would nominate is the issue of what genuinely is happening in Iraq today. Because the story is being reported everyday in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, on CNN and papers around the world, on radio, on television and Web sites around the world. The story of what’s happening in Iraq is being reported, but what’s unreported in that story is so important. And of course, what’s unreported tells us so much about what’s really happening in Iraq today, what’s unreported is the real reasons that the United States went into Iraq, what’s unreported is the genuine human consequences, the horrific human consequences of this war for the people of Iraq. What’s unreported is the fact that people are resisting occupation, not engaging in acts of random terrorism and sectarian violence that’s explained by ethnic or sectarian or religious divisions, but are engaging in resistance to occupation, and within that framework of course also having their society torn apart in ways that is creating civil conflict, that is creating religious and ethnic and sectarian conflict, a conflict which is shaped and distorted, overwhelmingly determined by an occupation that is destroying the country of Iraq. And really, right now, we may in fact be seeing the destruction of Iraq, the breakup of the country into three countries that can be ultimately better controlled by the arrogant imperial powers that went into Iraq hoping to set up a stable pliant regime there, to control the resources of that region and to use that to extend American hegemony globally, the US hegemony globally. But, having failed in that immediate aim, now switching to different tactics, Plan B being to create in classic colonial divide and rule strategy a Shia-Kurdish block that would create a less stable, but still a pliant state for the United States and then if that project will fail, as it seems to be failing, potentially to breakup the country to gain the greater control and domination over a weakened and divided Iraq.
Well, the answer in a word is dialectic. [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, the answer in a word is dialectic. But, I am not going to spend three minutes trying to explain that. So, I will leave it as an issue of further exploration and discussion, but I think it’s a concept that is important today given the prevalence of binary thinking in our world to understand contradiction, to understand change, to understand flux, to understand the complexity of the dialectic is an interesting philosophical issue, but this is a question that ultimately gets an understanding of the possibility for social change, understanding the possibility of resolving the contradictions of our society. There will be new contradictions in an emancipated society, but not the kinds of contradictions that we confront today that are such stark and profound ones that threaten the sustainability of the planet.
Well, I don’t think I have a piece of [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, I don’t think I have a piece of knowledge and I don’t think it is possible to give one piece of knowledge that would be of particular value to the world. I think the one insight that I have gleamed, that has been most useful to me in thinking about understanding the world and thinking about changing the world, it’s that individually one can’t really understand, individually one can’t change, individually one can’t bring about a different world that it’s only in collectives, it’s only with other human beings, it’s only in social circumstances that one can understand, that one can change the world, that even to be human is to be part of a collective. And once one begins to understand that basic premise, I think we can start -- I feel we can start to understand how to think about what it would mean to understand the world. And then any one of us who is limited in that ability and only collectively can we begin to even imagine how we might understand it, how we might change it, how we might be in a way that is emancipated, in a way that truly realizes human creativity and potential.
I think the question is whether or not we [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think the question is whether or not we are inventing new technologies to save time or whether we are inventing new technologies to make more money, to make people work harder for less money, to find ways of making people work even when they are not technically in the workplace. We found actually that people’s lives are more and more dominated by their work that people as a result of Internet, as a result of laptops, as a result of technology means that they are more and more working as they commute to work, if they take a train or bus. They are working on weekends, they are working at nights, they are working longer hours, hours that aren’t counted towards their hourly wages, hours that aren’t factored into their calculation of benefits and vacation time. And so that we are working harder and harder, and of course that’s creating stress and the claim really that technologies are being devised to save time is really not a logical one and it masks what the real purpose of the technology is.
The technology boom of the past fifty years [...]
Anthony Arnove: The technology boom of the past fifty years has been driven by market and military forces and we see the harm that is causing in the world. But, at the same time, we have to realize that some of the technology that’s been developed through military and market forces has the potential for far different use, for liberatory use. That potential is hampered by the fact of the economic system that we are in, by the political system we are in, that limits the liberatory potential of those technologies and seeks to direct them towards destructive ends such as war, such as social control, such as pursuit of profit regardless of the human social environmental consequences. But, we really can take for example any number of technologies and see that in and of themselves, they are neutral. They are not the source of the problem, but they have a potential to be used for destructive or constructive ends. And the technology that has been developed helps us address the fact that we have long lived in a society that can meet basic human needs, that can provide a meaningful and creative life and that can hopefully minimize the degree of necessity and drudgery in our lives, so that we can free human creativity, free human potential. Instead, the technology is used to far different and far more destructive ends. Whether we can put it towards liberatory ends is a question of our organization, a question of our fighting and mobilizing and struggling for technology be freed from its current political and economic contacts and to be directed towards a different end.
Well, we all certainly have responsibility [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, we all certainly have responsibility for this question of how the resources are responsible. But, we have to really understand who right now is making the decisions about how our resources are managed. And right now, those decisions are being made by a handful of people whose interests are not the interests of the majority, whose interests are not the health of the environment, whose interests are not the long-term consequences of their policies, but whose policies and interests are for the immediate maximization of their control, of their profit, of their privileges through the control of resources. And so, really, there are states that are responsible, there are corporations that are responsible, and they bear a tremendous burden, a tremendous moral burden for their actions as the current managers of the world’s resources. And I think the [corporations] are completely incapable of doing so in a way that is humane and sustainable. And therefore, we have to create alternative mechanisms of control and distribution in democratic means.
I think I will say that I don’t actually [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think I will say that I don’t actually understand this question. And so, I would defer the answer to people from indigenous communities, which certainly still exist in the twenty-first century and are still suffering so much oppression and injustice in the twenty-first century.
I actually don’t feel qualified to answer [...]
Anthony Arnove: I actually don’t feel qualified to answer this question because I don’t understand enough about genetic engineering to answer it and I really don’t also understand the question’s definition of defects and imperfections, although, I will say that certainly the concept of defects and imperfections has a political basis that I think should be foremost in how that question is addressed.
I think this is one question that I am going [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think this is one question that I am going to leave to others to answer.
Not having children or planning to have [...]
Anthony Arnove: Not having children or planning to have children, I would feel hypocritical answering this question. So, I leave this to the parents at the table or those who work with children at the table to answer.
I think one of the important things about [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think one of the important things about the arts is that it allows the exploration of so many issues, so many complexities, and then art can raise issues that we didn’t properly articulate or recognize before. And so, I think art militates against the idea of the one or the most important subject. I think art is inherently a medium that militates against monolithism, monotheism, rigidity in thinking. And so, therefore, I think really the question should be reframed and I would be most interested in reframing it in terms of how is it that we can create space for art to raise more questions, to raise more ideas, to generate new ways of understanding the world and new ways of transforming the world, and really I think that means understanding the centrality of art to political change, seeing that there is an integral relationship between art and social change. And then, [just] understand that art always exists in a political and historical and a material context, and that art can be censored, art can be limited, art can restricted, creativity can be restricted and suppressed by certain material and political circumstances. And today, overwhelmingly, it’s the market that is limiting the arts, that the market even more than states is involved in censorship and suppression, diversity of artistic and cultural expression. And so, we need to challenge those state restrictions, but also those market restrictions that limit the kinds of questions, limit the kinds of expressions that can be found in art.
What moves me? So many things move me. Music [...]
Anthony Arnove: What moves me? So many things move me. Music moves me. Art moves me. I was recently moved by a moment at the end of the World Cup in the game between Italy and France. The image that dominated that game was the image of Zidane and the head butt. That was the image that went around the world and that came to symbolize the competition, the conflict, potentially the racism, and the xenophobia, the nationalism that goes along with the sport. But, there was a moment of tremendous beauty when before the penalty kicks, before the French and Italian goalkeepers went to their respective defense of their goal against the final round of penalty kicks, where the two goalkeepers hug one another and share the moment of human affection and solidarity that cut against so much of that nonsense competition, nationalism that is a part of sport, to show the real spirit of solidarity, and resistance even that can be expressed in sports. And that image, which received almost no attention, which just slipped into the nationalism, to the greed, to the xenophobia, to the nationalism of the World Cup in a so much commercial sport today really was a glimpse and something very powerful, very moving, very human and real.
I think I would prefer to answer a different [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think I would prefer to answer a different question, which is what are the myths that we need to challenge and confront in order to change the world for the better? I don't think we need myths to replace the ones that we have that are obstacles to changing the world. I think we need to overturn the myths that are so prevalent in our society that say that we can’t change the world, that say that it’s impossible that human nature is inherently greedy, that human nature is inherently individualistic, that social change will only bring about worse conditions, that efforts to collectively right injustices will lead to worse injustices. Those are the myths that I think we need to confront and so many others. So, really rather than engage in a process of myth making, I think we should be focusing on a process of confronting and challenging myths that hold us back.
Well, the question of renewable energy is a [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, the question of renewable energy is a very important one, but the important – one important thing is - at the outset is that our understanding of the possibilities of renewable energy has been systematically undercut by the existing framework of energy extraction and exploitation, which has limited any meaningful consideration of these alternatives because it would be economically threatening to the existing oil and power industries to consider renewable energy resources and alternative energy resources. So, I think we have barely begun to see the kind of investigation, intelligence, investment that it would take to truly begin to understand this question. But, for those who have begun to look at the question, it is clear that possibilities for solar and wind energy and other renewable forms of energy have tremendous promise and urgently need to be explored given the consequences [that are becoming] more and more clear everyday of the existing model.
Whenever I see a question and there are “do [...]
Anthony Arnove: Whenever I see a question and there are “do we” in it, I think it’s worth again asking who we are, who we refers to. Because the question of who believes in nationality more than humanity, I think, has to be specified. I think a growing number of people in the world actually do believe in humanity more than nationality and are coming to question the narrow limits of nationalism, questioning the racism and xenophobia that goes hand in hand with nationalism. And for billions of people around the globe, these national ideologies, national boundaries don’t define their lives, and they do see their experience, do see their aspirations in terms of human aspirations or other aspirations that can’t be defined in national terms. So, if we were to understand who on the other hand values nationality more than humanity, I think we have to ask the question of who benefits from nationalism, who encourages nationalism, who has some much at stake in defending and in propping up nationalist ideologies. And there, I think you find in relationship to the vast majority of the world’s people, a teeny, teeny handful -– a teeny elite that benefits from nationalist ideology, and of course more people in that group because of our education system, because our media system is inculcated in those ideologies. But, so often, our lived experiences – our experiences day to day show the limits, show the contradictions, show the problems of that ideology, and I think more and more people in the world in fact are coming to that conclusion.
This is a great question and it can be asked [...]
Anthony Arnove: This is a great question and it can be asked about some of the other aspects of our lives. Why is the healthcare we get of such poor quality, why is the culture that we get of such poor quality, why is the air that we are breathing of such poor quality? And the reality is that decisions about food are being made based on the question of profit and are not being based on what will be best for human health, what will be best for the environment, what will be best even for our pleasure of consuming food. The decisions are being made on the question of what is profitable, how can corporations make more money from selling us food, from creating the illusion of meeting our needs or through consuming, not meeting our nutritional needs, but adopting a lifestyle that can be sold to us through the food industry. And so, really, I think we have systematically distorted the basic nature of food, which should be about nutrition and should be about enjoying it. Instead, it has become about everything but that and is leading unfortunately to tremendously harmful consequences in terms of increased cancers, increased diseases associated with the stress in the diet of developing and advanced capitalist countries.
I don’t honestly understand the question. [...]
Anthony Arnove: I don’t honestly understand the question. So, I think I will leave it to others to answer.
I think again this is something I am going [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think again this is something I am going to leave to people who have far more knowledge and insight than I do. But, I will say just to reference an earlier question that I think there is a lot to be learned from Mike Davis’ book, Planet of Slums, about the direction cities are going, which is -- a direction which is quite frightening. And the trend of course is towards more sameness and towards destruction of local cultures, local knowledges, and so that is a concern that I think we are only beginning to get our head around and understand about. Mike Davis really does a lot to help us begin to ask the right kinds of questions about that.
The idea that African-Americans are just [...]
Anthony Arnove: The idea that African-Americans are just Americans, I think, really obscures what the nature of life is like in the United States for people who are African-American, no matter whether they are people who are recently arrived from Africa, or whether their ancestors arrived from Africa enslaved on ships and brought to the country against their will centuries ago. The reality is, today, racism still is a defining experience for every single African-American person, and is something that limits their life chances, means that they are far more likely to face certain kinds of police violence and oppression, means that they can’t participate equally in the society as a result of the legacy and persistence of racism in our society. So, the issue of where people come from defining them, I think, leads to an ideology, an idea of nationalism, which obscures all the inequalities, all the divisions, all the forms of oppression that exists within a given country. And particularly, if you look at the United States today, you can recognize so many of those forms of oppression and inequality that persists and mean that these forms of identity remain very important in understanding the world, and understanding how it is that we can bring about a different social order that isn’t based on these arbitrary social constructions.
There are so many things that people can be [...]
Anthony Arnove: There are so many things that people can be reading, so many things. And the answer that any one of us give, is going to give is a going to be so limited and in many ways arbitrary. But, a few resources that I think youth can really benefit from reading would be Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” which fundamentally turns the teaching of history as it’s understood in our school textbooks on its head, and gives us a history from below, a history from the standpoint of ordinary people. And there are so many other resources that give that genuine history, that people’s history. Fredrick Douglas’ narrative, the writings of WEB DuBois, the writings and speeches of Eugene Debs. There is also I think an important literature of fiction that gives a sense of the possibility of changing the world today, and that creative fiction is a vital resource for youth today. I think particularly of Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, I think of the short stories of Chinua Achebe, I think of the music of resistance as well, the songs of Bob Dylan, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the music of and poetry and words of Woody Guthrie. And really, any one of these is only a beginning, a window onto that world of creative art.
The one thing about the Internet is that it [...]
Anthony Arnove: The one thing about the Internet is that it is a means of communication. And any means of communication has the potential of bringing people together, allowing people to communicate, allowing people to learn from one another, allowing people to form relationships. Technology can also be something that is used towards destructive ends, that can increase people’s alienation, people’s isolation, and that can be a hindrance to human relationships, can be a hindrance to enlightenment and education. In the case of the Internet, we see that it has a potential to bring people into communication more -- in a more timely fashion across national boundaries. That’s a positive development that brings us closer to the possibility of imagining forms of collectivity that cut across national boundaries, that cut across the arbitrary divisions that have been imposed in the curve up in the world into states, into nations. But, in order to turn that technology into something that enhances our communities, we need to direct the technology towards a specific end, we need to organize, and then technology alone won’t enable us to do that, it’s just a tool in – among many tools that have to be used to fight for that kind of vision.
I think this question has been very [...]
Anthony Arnove: I think this question has been very powerfully answered recently by Mike Davis in his book “Planet of Slums”, where he discusses the growth of mega cities, the growth of cities that involve dispossession on a scale that really rivals the period of enclosures in the early stages of development of capitalism in terms of the degree of transformation in people’s circumstances, as millions upon millions of people are being forced to move into cities to seek employment because the basis of their lives in agricultural society, agricultural economies has been shattered by the process of globalization. The process is leading to huge uprootments of human populations with health and social consequences that we are only beginning to understand, but which Mike Davis very effectively describes in “Planet of Slums”. And really, what he documents is the injustice of this process, the human causes of this process and raises a specter of very serious consequences. The fact that these trends really ultimately are not sustainable and that to counter them we’ll require really ultimately revolutionary change. So, the future of the city will depend on whether or not that change is brought about, whether or not we can begin to challenge these processes of uprootment and dispossession being brought about by capitalist globalization and start rationally planning our living arrangements, our cities, our relationship to the environment, our relationship to one another, how we determine what is produced and how it is produced, and those kinds of questions will ultimately determine the future of the city.
Well, there is a couple of different ways we [...]
Anthony Arnove: Well, there is a couple of different ways we are approaching this question. The reality is, I think we have to expose that the dominant way that this question is asked is in a racist way, which is premised on the idea that, well, it’s okay for us -- first of all, it’s okay for us in the United States to have developed a certain form of irrational public -- privatized transportation, which involved a systematic destruction of public transportation and more environmentally and also socially sustainable forms of transportation by arranging collective public transportation. Instead we have a privatized system of transportation, which was established very consciously by the auto industry, by the rubber industry, by the steel industry, and by people who had an economic stake in developing a model of privatized auto purchase and use, and it has created a whole political, economic framework to sustain and drive that economy. That economy is utterly irrational. It leads to such overproduction that the world auto industry produces as many cars as -- are bought each year twice over, and is creating tremendous unnecessary waste because of their lack of planning, a further example of the absurdities of the capitalist system. And now, you see the encouragement of a similar process in China. And the consequences are quite frightening, but they have to be seen in the context of [audio ends].
