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142 pages

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A scathing indictment of US domestic and foreign policy, this collection of interviews gathers incendiary insights from 10 of today's most experienced and knowledgeable activists. Whether it's Ramsey Clark describing the long history of military invasion, Alfred McCoy detailing the relationship between CIA activities and the increase in the global heroin trade, Stephen Schwartz reporting the obscene costs of nuclear armaments, or Katharine Albrecht tracing the horrors of the modern surveillance state, this investigation informs and incites.

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International relations

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Publié par	PM Press
Date de parution	07 décembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781604863765
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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ALSO BY DERRICK JENSEN
Mischief in the Forest (with Stephanie McMillan)
Lives Less Valuable
What We Leave Behind (with Aric McBay)
Songs of the Dead
How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth From Civilization
Now This War Has Two Sides (live CD)
As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial
(with Stephanie McMillan)
Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening From the Nightmare of Zoos
(with Karen Tweedy-Holmes)
Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization
Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance
Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution
Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control
Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests (with George Draffan)
The Culture of Make Believe
Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture, and Eros
Standup Tragedy (live CD)
The Other Side of Darkness (live CD)
A Language Older Than Words
Railroads and Clearcuts: Legacy of Congress’s 1864 Northern Pacific
Land Grant (with George Draffan and John Osborn)

With gratitude to the Wallace Global Fund for their continued support.
The following interviews appeared in slightly different form in The Sun: Kevin Bales, Anuradha Mittal, Ramsey Clark, Alfred McCoy, Christian Parenti, and Robert McChesney.
Resistance Against Empire © Derrick Jensen 2010
This edition © PM Press 2010 All rights reserved.
Back cover photograph by Derrick Jensen Cover and interior design by Stephanie McMillan Edited by Theresa Noll.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
LCCN 2009912458 ISBN 978-1-60486-046-7
PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper.
CONTENTS
J.W. Smith
Kevin Bales
Anuradha Mittal
Juliet Schor
Ramsey Clark
Stephen Schwartz
Alfred McCoy
Christian Parenti
Katherine Albrecht
Robert McChesney
INTRODUCTION
N othing comes free. This culture is based on converting the living (“raw materials,” or “resources”) into the dead: products for profit. This is as true of cell phones as it is of solar panels as it is of televisions as it is of cardboard as it is of F-16 aircraft. Raw materials always come from somewhere. And there are consequences in the taking of them.
The primary consequences are not mainly paid by those who use these products, much less those who manufacture them. They are pushed onto those who are stolen from and exploited. The empire uses violence (or the threat of violence) to obtain whatever it requires, from the lives and labor of human or nonhuman slaves to coltan, bauxite, and oil. Indeed, the central purpose of empire is the extraction of raw materials and exploitation of resources, and the displacement of consequences onto others.
This book explores many of the consequences of empire and the methods it uses to enforce its license to extract and exploit. Anuradha Mittal describes the effects of colonialism and global trade on food security. Juliet Schor, Katherine Albrecht, and Christian Parenti discuss some of the mechanisms of repression on the home front, as citizens at its center are overworked, surveilled, and imprisoned. J.W. Smith explains how empire begins in the monopolization of land and ends in a global economy based on total control.
These voices, together with the others in this book, comprise a strong indictment against the empire that holds our planet hostage to its ruthless appetite. The empire spares nothing, and no one, in the pursuit of its single, fundamental objective: profit. The first step in decolonizing ourselves is to expose its mechanisms and consequences. The next step is to resist.
J.W. SMITH

Interview conducted on July 13, 2000, at his home in Santa Maria, California.

E conomist J.W. Smith has a trenchant truth to tell us: “an enormous share of our wealth is stolen.” That theft begins with the monopolization of land by especially a few wealthy elites, and in addition all settlers, then quickly moves on to the monopolization of technology and labor. At first, people fought back against the thieves, but initial conquest has given way to laws structured to protect the “rights” of the thieves. The final step is the erasure of this history from our social memory paired with a concomitant mythology that condones the theft of the commons declaring any suggestion of a more equitable arrangement infeasible, inefficient, or impossible. We now accept monopolization as normal, and thus its harms—to the world’s poor, to workers in the industrial world, and ultimately to the planet—are rendered invisible.
But beneath the gospel of private property is the heresy of truth, and Smith is one of its heretics. He argues that cities have always depended on the countryside for their sustenance—food, building materials, and other resources—and this dependence is backed by military power. People of the countryside are forced to hand over their resources to cities and are thereby forced into the position of having to buy goods rather than produce their own. In doing so the people of the countryside give up their economic independence. This process was extended to imperial nations and their colonies and has now encircled the globe in what Smith calls a “movement from plunder by raid to plunder by trade.”
The final truth is good news: the last effect of monopolization is revolution. Smith has written, “Eliminating poverty is not philosophically complicated.” It’s simple: people in a given region need to regain control over their own economies. And they will fight for what is theirs. Once people get a “taste of freedom, it is very hard to take that away.”
J.W. Smith holds a PhD in Political Economics. He has written six books on the elimination of poverty and war, including Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty-First Century (Sharpe) and Cooperative Capitalism: A Blueprint for Global Peace and Prosperity (IED). He is director of research for the Institute for Economic Democracy.

Derrick Jensen: You’ve written, “Eliminating poverty is not philosophically complicated.” To do so, you’ve said, we would need to “eliminate the monopolization of land, technology, and finance capital, and equalize pay for equally productive work, both within internal economies and between trading nations.” Can you comment on this?
J.W. Smith: Let’s first talk about monopolization of land. If someone were born into our culture with the fully developed intelligence of an adult, but without our social conditioning, one of the first confusing realities she or he would face is that all of the land belongs to someone else. It’s a crazy situation. Before this person could legally stand, sit, lie down, or sleep, much less gain sustenance, she or he would have to pay whoever owned that piece of land. Now it’s one thing to own something that you’ve built—a chair, perhaps, or a table, or shoes—but land, air, and water are entirely different categories. They nurture life, are necessary to life, and were here before we were born (meaning they’re not our creation). Depriving others—all living beings, not just humans—access to land is to have the ability to kill them. I don’t know if this has been put more clearly than by Rousseau, who wrote, “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself as saying ‘this is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’”
DJ: That reminds me of that famous saying by the nineteenth-century anarchist Proudhon: Property is theft.
JWS: Having been so thoroughly acculturated, and having never experienced or imagined anything else, few people realize that all land ownership is nothing more than social convention; that is, that the huge timber and mining and real estate and oil companies and so on “own” their land only because we all agree—all have been taught to believe—that they own them. This social belief deprives others of their rights to what nature has endowed this earth.
DJ: Are you against all land ownership?
JWS: Not at all. I’m against this monopolization of land ownership that we all accept as seemingly natural. And this monopolization isn’t that old, when you consider it in terms of human existence. Of course, most indigenous peoples do not believe in private ownership of land but rather view communally held land as a form of social wealth, something to take pride in, to take care of. Then, as Rousseau stated, along came civilization, with its basis in private property.
DJ: The word “private,” by the way, comes from the same root as deprive, the Latin deprivare, because wealthy Romans walled off land for their own private use, depriving everyone else of access.
JWS: It didn’t take long for the Romans to get around to doing that. At first all Roman citizens had inalienable rights to a homestead, with everything else held in common. But by the end of the Roman Empire only eighteen hundred men owned all of the “known world.” Earlier the Greeks had tried the same thing: at one point only 2 percent of Greeks owned the entire empire. Today we see the same thing happening again: in 1974 the Federal Reserve estimated that 25 percent of all American citizens had no net assets. By 1988 it had risen to 54 percent. And of course today it’s even higher. This inequality becomes clear when one learns that socialist Cuba has 85 percent home ownership ratio with no debt while America has 68 percent home ownership with massive debt. If one’s debt is 85 percent of the value of the home, one only owns 15 percent of one’s home.
DJ: How does land monopolization come about?
JWS: At first by conquest, and then by inequality continually being