By Franco “Bifo” Berardi



The Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica was essentially a process of symbolic and cultural submission.

 

The “superiority” 
of the colonizers lay on the operational effectiveness of their technical production. The colonization destroyed the cultural environment in which indigenous communities had been living for centuries: the alphabetic technology, the power of the written word overwhelmed, jeopardized and finally superseded the indigenous cultures. The conquistadors re-coded the cultural universe of nowadays Mexico and Central America.

 

Before the arrival of the Spanish invaders Malinche (Malinalli in Nahuatl language, Marina for the Spaniards), the daughter
 of a noble Aztec family, was given away as 
a slave to passing traders after her father died and her mother remarried. By the time Cortés arrived, she had learned the Mayan dialects spoken in the Yucatan while still understanding Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. As a youth she was given as tribute again, this time to the invaders.

 

She became the lover of Cortés and accompanied him as interpreter. She translated the words exchanged by Cortés and Moctezuma, king of the Aztec population of Tenochtitlan, and she translated the conqueror’s words when he met crowds of indigenous persons. She translated for Nahuatl-speaking people the words of Christian conquerors and of Christian priests. The Christian message melted with pre-colonisation mythologies, and the modern Mexican culture emerged. She and Cortés had a child, Martín, the first Mexican. She betrayed her own people by linking with the invaders. By the moral point of view, however, she owed nothing to her own people who had sold her into slavery, and treated her as a servant. She betrayed the conquerors, too, though they did not realize it as such.

 

Malinche is the ultimate symbol of the end of a world, and also the symbol of the formation of a new semiotic and symbolic space. Only when you are able to see the collapse as the end of a world, can a new world be imagined. Only when you are free from hope (which is the worst enemy of intelligence) can you start seeing a new horizon of possibility. This is the lesson that Malinche is teaching us.

 

DEMOCRACY

 

On 31 October 2011, George Papandreou announced his government’s intentions to hold a referendum for the acceptance of the terms of a Eurozone bailout deal. He wanted the Greek people to decide if the diktat of the financial class that was strangling Greek society would be accepted or rejected. Overnight, the elected Prime Minister of Greece was obliged to resign. In the very place where it was invented and named twenty-five centuries ago, democracy was finally cancelled. It will never again come to life. Financial abstraction has swallowed the destiny of billions of people. European workers’ salaries have been halved in the last ten years and unemployment and precariousness are on the rise. Meanwhile, profits skyrocket.

 

WAR

 

The Eurasian continent is heading toward a proliferation of fragmentary conflict. At the same time, the infinite war launched by Cheney and Bush has paved the way to the establishment of the Caliphate. In Japan, the Prime Minister travels the world looking for allies against China. In India, a racist mass murderer (neoliberal of course) has been elected Prime Minister. In Europe, a Euro-Russian war is in the making at the Ukrainian border. In Ferguson, Missouri, another racialized killing reveals the American police state and the poverty industrial complex — two million homeless in the US and counting. In Gaza, Israel bombards the world’s largest open air prison and blames the victims, most of them children, for dying while the world looks on. In Northern Africa, Western powers prepare for the next season of Gaddafi blowback. In Liberia, Ebola fans the flames of civil and regional war, one bleeding eyeball at a time. In Mexico, a momentary silence shrouds the bloodiest drug war humanity has ever known, with cartels ranking among the wealthiest corporations.

 

While capitalism will continue to thrive thanks to massive slavery and eco-catastrophe, the next 20 years will be marked by the clash between financial abstraction and biofascism. A social, cognitive breakdown is estranging the masses from the body, so the decerebrated body is taking the form of aggression. Those who have been lost in the competition react under the banners of aggressive identification. We can even see fascism revived by the vengeful spirit of the dispossessed.

 

BIO-FINANCIAL POWER

 

Nation states are over, stripped by the global machine
 of finance, computation and all-pervading behavioral Big Data algorithms. Global corporations are replacing nation states as holders of power. We now embrace the first stages of the automation of mind, language and emotions ... the architecture of bio-financial power. Power, in fact, is no longer political or military. It is based more and more on the penetration of techno-linguistic automatisms into the sphere of language. Soon, life will be based on the automation of cognitive activity. Who cares if the US military machine is running on empty because of Bush’s self-defeating strategy — it’s a remnant of geopolitical thinking now dead.

 

THE CIRCLE

 

Mediocre as it is, Dave Eggers’s novel 
The Circle is a metaphor for the relation between technology, communication, emotion and power. "The Circle" is the name of the most powerful corporation 
in the world, a sort of conglomerate of Google, Facebook, Paypal and YouTube. Three men lead the company: Stockton 
is a financial shark, Bayley is a utopian and Ty Gospodinov is the project’s hidden mastermind.

 

The main character of the book is Mae, a young woman hired by The Circle during “the Completion,” the final phase in the implementation of TrueYou, a program intended to enforce the recording of every instant of life for pervasive, ceaseless sharing. Mae becomes the corporation’s spokesperson, the face that appears every day on the infinite channels of The Circle’s television network — the ambassador of the new credo.

 

The Circle is all about the utter
 capture of human attention: ceaseless communication, mandatory friendliness and creation of a new neediness — the obsessive need to express and share. One may remark that Eggers is simply re-enacting Orwell more than 60 years after the publishing of 1984. That’s true, but in the final pages of the novel, Eggers goes further than Orwell, when Ty exposes the transhuman potency of the totalitarian nightmare.

 

In the last scene of the novel, the inventor and founder of The Circle manages to covertly meet Mae, the newbie seducing
 the global audience. He has lost control of his own creature, the project he originally conceived, and is deprived of all power in its unstoppable self–deployment.

 

“I did not intend any of this to happen. And it’s moving so fast. I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network ... there used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We are closing the circle around everyone. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

 

The automaton cannot be stopped, as even the creator himself becomes overpowered by his own invention: the circle of continuous attention, the circle of perfect transparence of everybody to everybody, the circle of total power and of total impotence.

 

PLEASURE, AFFECTION AND EMPATHY

 

At the beginning of the 21st century we are in a position that is similar to the position of Malinche: the conqueror is here, peaceful or aggressive, functionally superior, unattainable, incomprehensible. The bio-info automaton is taking shape from the connection between electronic machines, digital languages and minds formatted in such a way to comply with the code. The automaton’s flow of enunciation emanates a connective world that the conjunctive codes cannot interpret, a world that is symbolically incompatible with the social civilization that was the outcome of five centuries of Humanism, Enlightenment and Socialism.

 

The automaton is the reification of the networked cognitive activity of millions of semio-workers around the globe. Only if they become compatible with the code, the program, can semio-workers enter in the process of networking.

 

This implies the de-activation of old, subconsciously engrained, modes of communication and perception (compassion, empathy, solidarity, ambiguousness and irony), paving the way to the assimilation of the conscious organism with the digital automaton.

 

Will the general intellect be able to disentangle itself from the automaton? Can consciousness act on neural evolution? Will pleasure, affection, empathy find a way to re-emerge? Will we translate into human language the connective language of the automated meaning-making machine buzzing and buzzing in our heads?

 

These are questions that only 
Malinche can answer, opening to the incomprehensible other, betraying her people and reinventing language in order to express what can not be said.

 

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition. He writes about the condition of media, mental breakdown
 and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. His next book, Heroes, dedicated to the suicidal wave provoked by financial nihilism, will be out in the first months of 2015.

 

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/116/malinche-and-automaton.html

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sacrificing_the_vulnerable_from_gaza_to_america_20140914/

Posted on Sep 14, 2014

By Chris Hedges



A Palestinian stands in the rubble of destroyed houses Aug. 1 in the heavily bombed town of Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip, close to the Israeli border. AP/Lefteris Pitarakis

Chris Hedges gave this speech Saturday at the Sauk County Fairgrounds in Baraboo, Wis., before a crowd of about 2,000. His address followed one there by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who seems to be preparing to run in the Democratic presidential primaries. The Fighting Bob Fest, the annual event at which they appeared, brings together progressive speakers from around the country and honors Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette (1855-1925), a U.S. senator from Wisconsin who opposed the United States’ entry into World War I. Parts of this talk were drawn from Hedges’ past columns.

I would like to begin by speaking about the people of Gaza. Their suffering is not an abstraction to me. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I spent seven years in the region. I speak Arabic. And for much of that time I was in Gaza, including when Israeli fighter jets and soldiers were attacking it.

I have stood over the bodies, including the bodies of children, left behind by Israeli airstrikes and assaults. I have watched mothers and fathers cradle their dead and bloodied boys and girls in their arms, convulsed by an indescribable grief, shrieking in pitiful cries to an indifferent universe.

And in this charnel house, this open-air prison where 1.8 million people, nearly half of them children, live trapped in an Israeli ghetto, I have witnessed the crimes of occupation—the food shortage, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. As I have witnessed this mass of human suffering I have heard from the power elites in Jerusalem and Washington the lies told to justify state terror.

An impoverished, captive people that lack an army, a navy, an air force, mechanized units, drones, artillery and any semblance of command and control do not pose a threat to Israel. And Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill hundreds of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war. It is state-sponsored terror and state-sponsored murder.

The abject failure by our political class to acknowledge this fact, a fact that to most of the rest of the world is obvious, exposes the awful banality of our political system, the cynical abandonment of the most vulnerable of the earth for campaign contributions. Money, after all, has replaced the vote.

The refusal to speak out for the people of Gaza is not tangential to our political life. The pathetic, Stalinist-like plebiscite in the [U.S.] Senate, where all 100 senators trotted out like AIPAC windup dolls to cheer on the Israeli bombing of homes, apartment blocks, schools—where hundreds of terrified families were taking shelter—water treatment plants, power stations, hospitals, and of course boys playing soccer on a beach, exposes the surrender of our political class to cash-rich lobbying groups and corporate power. The people of Gaza are expendable. They are poor. They are powerless. And they have no money. Just like the poor people of color in this country whose bodies, locked in cages, enrich the prison-industrial complex.

When you are willing to sacrifice the most vulnerable for political expediency it becomes easy, as Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have amply illustrated, to sacrifice all who are vulnerable—our own poor, workers, the sick, the elderly, students and our middle class. This is a Faustian compact. It ends by selling your soul to Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil. It ends by deifying a military machine, now largely beyond civilian control, that, along with our organs of state security, has established surveillance and a security state that make us the most spied-upon, eavesdropped, monitored and photographed populace in human history. It is impossible to describe yourself as free when you are constantly watched. This is the relationship of a master and a slave.

Politics, if we take politics to mean the shaping and discussion of issues, concerns and laws that foster the common good, is no longer the business of our traditional political institutions. These institutions, including the two major political parties, the courts and the press, are not democratic. They are used to crush any vestiges of civic life that calls, as a traditional democracy does, on its citizens to share among all its members the benefits, sacrifices and risks of a nation. They offer only the facade of politics, along with elaborate, choreographed spectacles filled with skillfully manufactured emotion and devoid of real political content. We have devolved into what Alexis de Tocqueville feared—“democratic despotism.”

The squabbles among the power elites, rampant militarism and the disease of imperialism, along with a mindless nationalism that characterizes all public debate, which Bob La Follette denounced and fought, have turned officially sanctioned politics into a carnival act.

Pundits and news celebrities on the airwaves engage in fevered speculation about whether the wife of a former president will run for office—and this after the mediocre son of another president spent eight years in the White House. This is not politics. It is gossip. Opinion polls, the staple of what serves as political reporting, are not politics. They are forms of social control. The use of billions of dollars to fund election campaigns and pay lobbyists to author legislation is not politics. It is legalized bribery. The insistence that austerity and economic rationality, rather than the welfare of the citizenry, be the primary concerns of the government is not politics. It is the death of civic virtue. The government’s system of wholesale surveillance and the militarization of police forces, along with the psychosis of permanent war and state-orchestrated fear of terrorism, are not politics. They are about eradicating civil liberties and justifying endless war and state violence. The chatter about death panels, abortion, gay rights, guns and undocumented children crossing the border is not politics. It is manipulation by the power elites of emotion, hate and fear to divert us from seeing our own powerlessness.

As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties. They know that nearly half the country lives in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are harder and harder to hide.

It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, has yet to rebuild itself and turn on a feckless liberal class that has sold its soul to a bankrupt Democratic Party.

The tinder of revolt is piling up. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows when the eruption will take place. No one knows what form it will take. But it is certain that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, the continued pillaging of the nation and the ecosystem, remind us that, as Karl Marx pointed out, unregulated, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. It commodifies everything. Human beings and the natural world become commodities that are exploited until exhaustion or collapse. This is why the economic crisis is intimately twined with the environmental crisis. The corporate state—a system described by the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin as “inverted totalitarianism”—is incapable of a rational response to the crisis. A rational response, especially after your uprising in Madison and the Occupy movement, would at a minimum include a moratorium on all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a forgiveness of student debt, universal health care for all and a massive jobs program, especially targeted at those under the age of 25. But the corporate state, by mounting a coordinated federal effort led by Barack Obama to shut down the Occupy encampments, illustrated that the only language it will speak is the language of force.

Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, which [today] means the articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny.

By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Alexander Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”

This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. And our backlash, if we on the left do not regain the militancy of the old anarchists and socialists, could be a right-wing backlash, a species of Christian fascism.

The people in Gaza deserve to be free. So do we. But do not look to our political mandarins for help, or expect anything but vaudevillian smoke and mirrors from the billions poured into our campaign circus.

Look within.

We too are powerless. We have undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. It is over. They have won. If we want to wrest power back, to make the consent of the governed more than an empty cliché, we will have to mobilize, to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience to overthrow—let me repeat that word for the members of Homeland Security who may be visiting us this afternoon—overthrow the corporate state. And maybe, once we have freed ourselves, we can free the people of Gaza.

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_coming_climate_revolt_20140921/

The Coming Climate Revolt  
By Chris  Hedges
Posted on Sep 21, 2014
 
More than 100,000 people march through midtown Manhattan as part of the People’s Climate March on
Sunday in New York. John Minchillo/AP Images for AVAAZ



Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in New York City titled “The
Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?”The other panelists were Bill McKibben, Naomi
Klein, Kshama Sawant and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The event, moderated by Brian
Lehrer, occurred on the eve of the People’s Climate March in New York City. For
a video of some of what the panelists said, click here. 
 
We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a
corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy
endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and
incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party such as the
senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern—who worked with Ralph
Nader to make the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health
Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with
labor unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a bloated
military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been
lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to
transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this
is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry points out, enacted any major
social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.

We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarianism.” By this Wolin
means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to
electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a
free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has
in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent.

The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of
economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified
liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of
liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton
administration. Bill Clinton found that by doing corporate bidding he could get
corporate money—thus NAFTA, the destruction of our welfare system, the explosion
of mass incarceration under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the
FCC, turning the airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of
FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall reform that had protected our banking system from
speculators. Clinton, in exchange for corporate money, transformed the
Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It
forced the Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane. 
 
By the time Clinton was done the rhetoric of self-professed liberals was a public relations game.
This is why there is continuity from the Bush administration to the Obama
administration. Obama’s election did nothing to halt the expanding assault on
civil liberties—in fact Obama’s assault has been worse—the Bush bailouts of big
banks, the endless imperial wars, the failure to regulate Wall Street, the
hiring of corporate lobbyists to write legislation and serve in top government
positions, the explosion of drilling and fracking, the security and surveillance
state as well as the persecution of government whistle-blowers. 

This audience is well aware of the Democratic Party’s squalid record on the environment, laid out
in detail in a new Greenpeace report written by Charlie Cray and Peter Montague,
titled “The Kingpins of Carbon and Their War on Democracy.” The report
chronicles what it calls “a multi-decade war on democracy by the kingpins of
carbon—the coal, the oil, and gas industries allied with a handful of
self-interested libertarian billionaires.” 

The Obama administration, in return for financial support from these kingpins of carbon,
has cynically undermined international climate treaties, a fact we discovered
only because of the revelations provided by Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. It
uses its intelligence agencies, these revelations revealed, to spy on those
carrying out climate negotiations to thwart caps on carbon emissions and push
through useless, nonbinding agreements. The Obama administration has overseen a
massive expansion of fracking. It is pushing through a series of trade
agreements such as the TPP and the TAFTA that will increase fracking along with
expanding our exports of coal, oil and gas. It authorized the excavation of tar
sands in Utah and Alabama. It approved the southern half of the Keystone
pipeline. It has permitted seismic testing for offshore drilling in the Gulf of
Mexico, the East Coast and in parts of Alaska, a process that kills off hundreds
of sea mammals. It authorized drilling within four miles of the Florida
coastline, violating one of Obama’s 2008 campaign promises. This expansion of
offshore drilling reversed 20 years of federal policy. 

If we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no capacity or desire to
carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy into a black hole. And this
is what the corporate state seeks. It seeks to perpetuate the facade of
democracy. It seeks to make us believe what is no longer real, that if we work
within the system we can reform it. And it has put in place a terrifying
superstructure to silence all who step outside the narrow parameters it defines as acceptable.


The Democratic Party speaks to us“rationally.” The party says it seeks to protect civil liberties,
regulate Wall Street, is concerned about the plight of the working class and
wants to institute reforms to address climate change. But in all these areas,
and many more, it has, like its Republican counterpart, repeatedly sold out the
citizenry for corporate power and corporate profits—in much the same manner
that Big Green environmental groups such as the Climate Group and the
Environmental Defense Fund have sold out the environmental movement. 
 
To assume that Obama, or the Democratic Party, because they acknowledge the reality of climate
change, while the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party does not, is better
equipped to deal with the crisis is incorrect. Republicans appeal to one
constituency. The Democrats appeal to another. But both parties will do nothing
to halt the ravaging of the planet.

If Wolin is right, and I believe he is, then when we begin to build mass movements that carry out
repeated acts of civil disobedience, as I think everyone on this panel believes
we must do, the corporate state, including the Democratic Party, will react the
way all calcified states react. It will use the security and surveillance
apparatus, militarized police forces—and, under Section 1021 of the National
Defense Authorization Act, the military itself—to shut down all dissent with
force. The legal and organizational mechanisms are now in place to, with the
flip of a switch, put the nation effectively under martial law. When acts of
mass civil disobedience begin on Monday morning with Flood Wall Street and later
with Occupy the U.N., the face of the corporate state will, as it did during the
Occupy movement, reveal itself. 
 
If the response of the corporate state is repression rather than reform then our strategy and our
tactics must be different. We will have to cease our appealing to the system. We
will have to view the state, including the Democratic Party, as antagonistic to
genuine reform. We will have to speak in the language of ... revolution. We will
have to carry out acts of civil disobedience that seek to cripple the mechanisms
of corporate power. The corporate elites, blinded by their lust for profit and
foolish enough to believe they can protect themselves from climate change, will
not veer from our path towards ecocide unless they are forced from power. And
this means the beginning of a titanic clash between our corporate masters and ourselves. 
  .