#dam this capitalist economy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

india7d · 1 year

Text

Indian Agriculture Sector Investments

Indian Agriculture Sector Investments

Agriculture has been the backbone of India's economy for centuries, providing livelihoods to a significant portion of the population and contributing substantially to the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Despite the growth of other sectors, agriculture remains a critical sector, and its development is crucial for overall economic progress. In recent years, the Indian agriculture sector has witnessed increased investments from both the government and private players. This article explores the importance of investments in the Indian agriculture sector, the current status of investments, key areas of investment, and the potential for future growth. Importance of Investments in the Indian Agriculture Sector: Investments in the Indian agriculture sector are essential for various reasons: - Enhancing Productivity: Investments in agricultural research, technology, irrigation, and modern farming practices can significantly enhance agricultural productivity. Higher productivity translates to increased output and improved income for farmers. - Infrastructure Development: Investments in rural infrastructure, such as roads, irrigation systems, storage facilities, and cold chains, are crucial for reducing post-harvest losses, ensuring timely transportation, and improving market access for farmers. - Income Generation and Poverty Alleviation: Agriculture is the primary source of livelihood for a vast majority of rural Indians. Investments that lead to increased farm incomes can contribute to poverty reduction and improve the standard of living in rural areas. - Food Security: Agricultural investments play a vital role in ensuring food security for the growing population. Improving agricultural practices and technologies can help meet the rising demand for food in the country. - Export Potential: Investments in agriculture can boost production and quality, leading to increased export potential. India has significant export opportunities for various agricultural products, including rice, wheat, spices, fruits, and vegetables. Current Status of Investments in the Indian Agriculture Sector: Over the years, the Indian government has recognized the importance of investments in agriculture and has taken various initiatives to support the sector. Some key aspects of the current status of investments in the Indian agriculture sector include: - Government Initiatives: The government has introduced several schemes and programs to promote agricultural investments. Initiatives like Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana (PMKSY) for irrigation, Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana (PKVY) for organic farming, and Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) for overall agricultural development aim to enhance productivity and support farmers. - Private Sector Participation: The private sector has also recognized the potential in the agriculture sector and has been actively investing in agribusiness, food processing, and supply chain infrastructure. Companies are leveraging technology and innovation to improve agricultural practices and value addition. - Foreign Direct Investments (FDI): India allows FDI in the agriculture sector with certain restrictions. FDI inflows into the sector have been increasing, particularly in areas such as food processing, horticulture, and agro-based industries. - Technology and Startups: Agriculture technology startups have gained momentum in India, attracting investments from venture capitalists and private equity firms. These startups are developing solutions for precision farming, farm management, and market linkages. Key Areas of Investment in the Indian Agriculture Sector: - Irrigation and Water Management: Investments in irrigation infrastructure, such as dams, canals, and drip irrigation systems, are critical for improving water availability and reducing dependency on monsoons. - Research and Development (R&D): Increased investments in agricultural R&D can lead to the development of drought-resistant crops, improved seed varieties, and sustainable farming practices. - Mechanization and Farm Equipment: Farm mechanization, including tractors, harvesters, and farm machinery, can help reduce labor dependency and increase productivity. - Food Processing and Value Addition: Investments in food processing industries can reduce post-harvest losses, increase the shelf life of agricultural produce, and add value to farm products. - Logistics and Cold Chain: Development of efficient logistics and cold chain infrastructure is crucial for preserving perishable agricultural products and reducing wastage. - Market Linkages: Investments in creating robust market linkages and providing farmers with access to modern marketing platforms can ensure better price realization for their produce. Future Growth Potential and Challenges: The Indian agriculture sector holds significant growth potential, but it also faces several challenges: - Climate Change: Climate change poses a significant threat to agriculture, affecting crop patterns, water availability, and overall productivity. Investments in climate-resilient agriculture practices and technologies are essential. - Small Landholdings: The majority of farmers in India have small landholdings, limiting their access to credit and modern technologies. Investments in farmer collectives, cooperatives, and land consolidation can help overcome this challenge. - Price Volatility: Agricultural commodity prices are subject to volatility, affecting farmer incomes. Investments in price stabilization mechanisms and futures markets can mitigate this risk. - Market Access and Infrastructure: Inadequate market infrastructure and limited access to markets can hinder farmers' ability to get fair prices for their produce. Investments in market linkages and rural infrastructure are critical. - Access to Finance: Lack of access to formal credit often restricts farmers' ability to invest in modern inputs and technologies. Investments in financial inclusion and rural banking can address this issue. Conclusion: Investments in the Indian agriculture sector are essential for sustainable agricultural growth, rural development, and food security. The government, private sector, and international investors all have a role to play in supporting the sector's growth. Infrastructure development, research and technology, food processing, and market linkages are some of the key areas where investments can have a significant impact. Addressing challenges like climate change, small landholdings, and market access will require innovative approaches and collaborative efforts. With the right investments and policy support, the Indian agriculture sector can thrive, contributing to the nation's economic prosperity and the well-being of its farmers. Read the full article

#IndianAgricultureSectorInvestments

0 notes

catsnuggler · 1 year

Text

I'm simultaneously impressed and disappointed with what I've seen so far from Washington's Since Time Immemorial curriculum, although I suppose I can't say I'm surprised at the disappointment. There's a lot of vital information, and even, when talking about what can be done to counteract climate change, proposals to make communities walkable; it's mentioned that some dams have already been breached, with positive results for salmon, steelhead, and the environment; there is a particular emphasis on salmon, as there should be, and on the responsibility of Salmon People - everyone in the Northwest, whether we want to admit it or not - to protect the salmon and the steelhead trout; and importance emphasized on guaranteeing everyone's needs. They also note the diversity of Washington state, and emphasize how this is good, is a blessing - while not glossing over the fact that genocide was committed here, as it has been across Turtle Island, and that the state and settlers alike were responsible for this violence.

All that being said, most of their suggestions for what to do about the economy, environment, etc revolve around individual choices - the choice not to buy bananas that are shipped all the way over from the Philippines is a specific example. There is some merit to individual choices, but we can only cast so many ballots with our dollars, and we are always, always outvoted by those with the most dollars - capitalists, and the government they run.

Well, when I said "we" just now, I momentarily forgot there is no unified "we". Working settler dollars are outvoted by capitalist settler dollars, but Indigenous nations' dollars are outvoted by all the settlers. To say nothing of the people who are neither white nor Indigenous, or people who are both.

There is also a lot of talk about blah blah blah democracy, God bless America, where we all have choice, etc. Not unexpected; quite expected; just disappointing, because of how dishonest that is. Motherfucking Bill Gates, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, all those shits run Washington, no matter how many elections we have. Our state is diverse partly because of the impoverished and undocumented Latin American workers, a great portion of whom are in financial slavery. How beautiful is diversity, if there is a top and a bottom to it? How beautiful is it, when there are the rulers and the ruled? How environmentally-friendly are the dams which have brought the salmon from tens of millions to scarcely 1 million?

I was born in the West, a wet land, a green land, a land of plenty. I was raised in the East, a land of fire and ice, a land of roaring rivers and choking deserts, a land of rushing wind, a land of "green" nuclear power plants and dams, which hurt the N'chiwana river (it's known as the "Columbia" to us settlers, after the hand-lopping rapist). Despite growing in a land of extremes, I have learned patience... But I'm not even 25 years old, yet I fear for my future. I fear for all of our futures. Something must be done. Many things. I figure a good start is dispossessing the capitalists, replacing the old treaties with ones written by the Nations (no edits by us whites, no tricks, no nothing, just signatures), and following their directives on giving back and restoring the land, trashing the old relationship of colonial dominance, and finally, actually being good neighbors, instead.

On a totally unrelated note, I am not a fan of the rhetoric ramping up against Mexico. I have my criticisms of AMLO. He's straight-up not my guy, because he is still the president of a state which harasses and represses the Indigenous-liberationist socialist EZLN, trying to ram Tren Maya through Mayan land, despite the protests of these same Maya, many of whom are in the EZLN. That being said, the US and Canada have threatened Mexico because the government of AMLO has nationalized their power (I forget if it's in part or whole, but it's significant), which affects American and Canadian corporate interests. Pundits and war hawks have also argued on-air that the US has to "intervene" in Mexico to take down the cartels, which the Mexican government, I've got to admit, struggles to contend with, in no small part due to corruption. Imperialism and war is not the damn solution, though. I'm... Not a fan of this, to say the least. I grew up with Mexicans, my partner is Mexican, I even have Mexican blood relatives (although they're so fucking conservative, they're like Ben fucking Shapiro and Rush Limbaugh, agh I love them but they annoy and enrage the shit out of me). I don't know what I would do if the US invaded Mexico. I just know I would rather die than aim a gun South of the border, or at anyone the government tells me to.

0 notes

kny111 · 4 years

Photo

Decolonizing Healthcare: Addressing Social Stressors In Medicine

What does it mean to have a healthcare system that serves everybody? And what can physicians do to address the ways in which societal challenges impact our diagnoses?

Image Source: HealthSystemsGlobal

Rupa Marya, M.D., is exploring these concepts through numerous projects aimed at researching our current medical climate and collaborating with marginalized populations to make healthcare more effective and compassionate.

Following is a transcript from Marya’s 2018 Bioneers keynote presentation, in which she discusses her research and vision for the future of medicine. Watch the full keynote video here.View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Rupa Marya: I am the daughter of Punjabi immigrants who came to this country in 1973, with little money but plenty of caste privilege. We grew up with family vacations driving a VW van around the Western lands. My father would stop at the reservations. He would make us get out and listen and learn and look, and see what had happened to the original people of this land. He would talk to me about colonization, because we are also a people who had been colonized by Europeans.

I am a mother of two beautiful mixed heritage boys, and I am a farmer’s wife. I’m a physician who works in adult medicine, and who witnesses society’s ills manifest in my patients’ bodies, and a doctor who sees racism and state violence as an urgent public health issue. I’m a touring musician who has played in 29 different countries, singing in five different languages with the band Rupa and the April Fishes. To use a phrase taught to me by a Miwok elder, Wounded Knee, I am an Earth person.

What I’m going to describe for you is a system of domination in which we live, and what I believe are the direct health consequences of that system for all of us. I’ll begin with a description of how we have come to understand disease in a modern post-industrial context. In the 1850s, the germ theory was developed, which described how organisms such as bacteria and viruses made us sick. That led to the development of antibiotics and vaccines and systems to limit the spread of infectious disease.

In the 1960s, with the elucidation of DNA, we entered the molecular genetic era, where we are today. Here the gene creates a protein that can cause or protect from disease. How sick or well you were was thought to be preordained somehow by your genetics. This understanding has led to many powerful diagnostic tools and targeted therapies for specific diseases.In 2004, with the discovery of the role of RAS gene mutation in the development of colon cancer, exactly 2,000 years after Roman physician Celsus described the cardinal signs of inflammation, we are entering the era of inflammation. Instead of a reductionist approach to understanding disease, we are seeing how many pathways lead to chronic inflammation, which in turn creates the conditions for illness.

Today we will be talking about the impact of social stressors, which have been shown to cause chronic inflammation. These diseases require more systemic approaches, not simply focusing on the individual, but rather moving our gaze to the structures of society, helping us see how the individual pursuit of health is actually futile in a system that makes health impossible.

To understand the root causes of pathologies we see today, which impact all of us but affect black, brown and poor people more intensely, we have to examine the foundations of this society, which began with colonization. To me, to be colonized means to be disconnected and dis-integrated from our ancestry, from our Earth, from our indigeneity, our Earth-connected selves. We all come from Earth-connected peoples, people who once lived in deep connections with the rhythms of nature. I believe it is not a coincidence that the colonization of this land happened at the same time Europeans were burning hundreds of thousands of witches, those women who carried the traditional indigenous knowledge of the tribes of Europe.

Colonization is the way the extractive economic system of capitalism came to this land, supported by systems of supremacy and domination, which are a necessary part of keeping the wealth and power accumulated in the hands of the colonizers and ultimately their financiers.

In what we now know as the United States, this system of supremacy is expressed in many ways and with many outcomes. Today, we will focus on specific ones. First, white supremacy, which created a framework that legitimized slavery and genocide. Slavery created cheap labor, which is necessary for a functioning capitalist system. Genocide created unlimited access to resources in the form of land, animal parts, minerals, and raw materials, which are also necessary for a fully functioning capitalist economy.

As capitalism functions, it further entrenches these systems of supremacy.We all know that white supremacy is the scary guy with the swastika and the hood. But it can also look like any place where there is an abundance of white people in exclusive contexts, where power and access is not readily ceded to others. Please remember, lest you get caught up in a tsunami of guilty feelings, that as I talk about these things, I’m talking about systems of oppression that we are actually all a part of and that we all recreate, and these systems are what need to be dismantled.

There’s white supremacy and then there’s male supremacy, also known as patriarchy, which leads to the invisibilization of women’s labor, like creating the entire human race out of our bodies. Or in this context, reproducing the entire workforce and suppressing our wages, which further supports capitalism.

Patriarchy also leads to femicide, domestic violence and child abuse, which we see across all groups. We also see human supremacy, where people feel superior to the rest of living entities, thereby subjecting living soils, seeds, animals, plants, and water to horrific treatment in the name of exploiting resources, which in turn feeds the capitalist need for ever-increasing profits.

While this wheel of domination, exploitation, generation, and sequestration of wealth continues, we experience trauma as the byproduct and common pathway. Many studies show us that chronic stress and trauma create chronic inflammation. When we look at the top ten causes of death in occupied Turtle Island, we see diseases that have been described to us as diseases of lifestyle or ones that come about because of poor choices. Maybe we eat too much fried food. Maybe we don’t exercise enough. Maybe we have a genetic predisposition. What these diseases have in common in their pathogenesis is a component of inflammation, and we are just starting to parse out how the social stressors and the very structures of society contribute to and exacerbate this chronic inflammatory state.

It is unfounded to see these diseases as caused by individual poor choices in the context of a genetic predisposition. I see them as diseases that are virtually impossible to avoid because of the system in which we live, which generates a biological milieu of inflammation through trauma, chronic stress, environmental degradation, and damaged food systems. I see these as diseases of colonization.

If you’re a Native person, you’re like... It takes science and medicine a long time to catch up with Native knowledge. This is not news to Native people. When I met Oglala Lakota elder Candace Ducheneaux in Standing Rock, she talked to me about how these diseases that are so common in modern society and more heavily so in Indian Country are diseases that were brought by the colonizers.

We talked about diabetes, which I had been taught in medical school is a disease of insulin resistance. Either your pancreas doesn’t make enough insulin or your body’s cells are not sensitive to the insulin. These are both ways of seeing things that are based in a sense of individualism and predetermination.

On the Standing Rock reservation, before the damming of Mni Sose or the Missouri River, diabetes was rare. Actually across Turtle Island, diabetes was virtually nonexistent. Once the river was dammed, it ended up flooding nearby cottonwood forests. By shifting the ecology through a colonizing force, the people became more dependent on the cash economy for their food and medicine, and they lost the essential cultural connection to their traditional ways. This tragic loss of the commons is a hallmark of capitalist society, and the impact is felt in the individual body.

After the damming of the river, rates of diabetes skyrocketed. This story is similar for tribes all over Turtle Island. It is important to recognize this didn’t happen simply because people became more sedentary and consequently more obese. This happened because of colonization, not by changing the indigenous body, but by changing the social structures around that body, which in turn creates disease.

One powerful study from Alberta demonstrated that First Nations tribes that had maintained their cultural continuity specifically through language had lower rates of diabetes. Just imagine that.

This is what is protective. It’s not the low carb, paleo diet. It’s not exercise. It’s not the latest fad or trend. This study also showed that self-determinism has a powerful protective effect from diabetes for Indigenous People. These same factors had a protective effect against suicide for Indigenous People in Canada, who experience rates two to five times the national average. This example, to me, demonstrates how disease is a complex manifestation of social and biological influences on groups of individuals that results in a common expression – here, diabetes.

While we can understand this clearly from a Native American experience, we must be aware that these social structures of domination produce trauma and inflammation for all of us. We are all affected.

So what can we do in the face of this knowledge that can seem so overwhelming? Simple things can have huge effects.

To heal the diseases that are caused by the trauma of colonization, we must decolonize. If colonization represents a dis-integration and a disconnection, we must reconnect. Our work is two-pronged: to reintegrate and to dismantle. We must reintegrate what has been divided and conquered in our societies, between our peoples, between us and the natural world around us, and within ourselves. We can do this in many ways: by promoting acts that increase local autonomy and self-determinism, by exposing the myth of treating the individual as limited in its ability to actually address root causes of diseases, by reconnecting to who we were before our respective colonization – through songs, traditional knowledge, reawakening our food and medicine ways, and reawakening our relationships to each other, to the Earth around us, and to other beings. We must dismantle those systems of domination that create and recreate cycles of trauma and inflammation, those systems that work in service of capitalism.

This is my vision of holistic healthcare.

Integrated, Holistic Healthcare

What does that look like for my work? How do I use my whitecoat privilege to address things systemically? Aside from starting to address diseases with my patients in the hospital as directly related to these phenomena, I’m doing these things:

With regards to integration, I have been invited to help create a clinic and farm to develop the practice of Decolonizing Medicine at Standing Rock, together with tribal members and healers Linda Black Elk and Luke Black Elk, great-grandson of Black Elk medicine man. We have been developing a framework for how to offer care that centralizes Lakota cosmology, an understanding of disease and health, and to create a model that can be replicable to other places and in other specific contexts.

We have incredible partners, including Mass Design Group and National Nurses United, as well as the Do No Harm Coalition at UCSF, who are over 400 healthcare workers committed to ending systems of oppression as a way of insuring health for all. We have raised over a million dollars so far, thanks to generous gifts from the Jena & Michael King Foundation, Colin Kaepernick, and crowdfunding, and seek five million more to break ground on this exciting project.

The Justice Study

With regards to dismantling systems of oppression, I have been working on a national study of the health effects of law enforcement violence or terrorism, called the Justice Study. We were asked by the community fighting for justice for 26-year-old Mario Woods, who was gunned down by SFPD in 2016, to create a study that would answer this question: If the wound is police violence and the medicine is justice, what happens to our health when the medicine is not given?

We gathered a team of public health workers and researchers, and we are currently actively compiling data. It’s already illuminating, showing how many areas of people’s lives are affected by police violence. We know that Native Americans, Black and Latinx people experience disproportionate rates of police violence, and we can see that they are most impacted by the long-standing effects of violence. How does this reality contribute to the health disparities that we see?

Across all races, we are being traumatized, with black, brown, and Indigenous people being affected more intensely. We are continuing to collect data, and we’ll be offering it to policy makers who wish to shape community safety away from models that uphold white supremacist frameworks into ones that create safety and mitigate harm for all of us.

What I want you to remember is this:

Health is impossible when living in systems of oppression.

We cannot effectively treat diseases like diabetes with a drug without addressing the systems that make diabetes so prevalent.

We must redefine the scope of healthcare workers and the work of healthcare to include not only care at the bedside of the individual, but dismantling the systems of oppression that create the conditions for illness.

And finally, we must reintegrate with the Earth, with each other, and within ourselves. We must decolonize.

#medicine #health #science #decolonizing #decolonization #sustainability #sustainable #healthcare #medical science #colonialism #capitalism #white supremacy #resources #resource #info #information #decolonizing healthcare #wellness

140 notes · View notes

nicklloydnow · 4 years

Text

“In the United States, existing shops were rapidly extended through the 1890s, mail-order shopping surged, and the new century saw massive multistory department stores covering millions of acres of selling space. Retailing was already passing decisively from small shopkeepers to corporate giants who had access to investment bankers and drew on assembly-line production of commodities, powered by fossil fuels; the traditional objective of making products for their self-evident usefulness was displaced by the goal of profit and the need for a machinery of enticement.

“The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society,” Leach writes in his 1993 book “Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture.” Significantly, it was individual desire that was democratized, rather than wealth or political and economic power.

(...)

Even if a shorter working day became an acceptable strategy during the Great Depression, the economic system’s orientation toward profit and its bias toward growth made such a trajectory unpalatable to most captains of industry and the economists who theorized their successes. If profit and growth were lagging, the system needed new impetus. The short depression of 1921–1922 led businessmen and economists in the United States to fear that the immense productive powers created over the previous century had grown sufficiently to meet the basic needs of the entire population and had probably triggered a permanent crisis of overproduction; prospects for further economic expansion were thought to look bleak.

(...)

Notwithstanding the panic and pessimism, a consumer solution was simultaneously emerging. As the popular historian of the time Frederick Allen wrote, “Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate consumer. Unless he could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets.” In his classic 1928 book “Propaganda,” Edward Bernays, one of the pioneers of the public relations industry, put it this way:

Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained—that is if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity.… Today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand … [and] cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda … to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.

Edward Cowdrick, an economist who advised corporations on their management and industrial relations policies, called it “the new economic gospel of consumption,” in which workers (people for whom durable possessions had rarely been a possibility) could be educated in the new “skills of consumption.”

It was an idea also put forward by the new “consumption economists” such as Hazel Kyrk and Theresa McMahon, and eagerly embraced by many business leaders. New needs would be created, with advertising brought into play to “augment and accelerate” the process. People would be encouraged to give up thrift and husbandry, to value goods over free time. Kyrk argued for ever-increasing aspirations: “a high standard of living must be dynamic, a progressive standard,” where envy of those just above oneself in the social order incited consumption and fueled economic growth.

President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes welcomed the demonstration “on a grand scale [of] the expansibility of human wants and desires,” hailed an “almost insatiable appetite for goods and services,” and envisaged “a boundless field before us … new wants that make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.” In this paradigm, people are encouraged to board an escalator of desires (a stairway to heaven, perhaps) and progressively ascend to what were once the luxuries of the affluent.

Charles Kettering, general director of General Motors Research Laboratories, equated such perpetual change with progress. In a 1929 article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied,” he stated that “there is no place anyone can sit and rest in an industrial situation. It is a question of change, change all the time — and it is always going to be that way because the world only goes along one road, the road of progress.” These views parallel political economist Joseph Schumpeter’s later characterization of capitalism as “creative destruction”:

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is, but never can be stationary.… The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.

The prospect of ever-extendable consumer desire, characterized as “progress,” promised a new way forward for modern manufacture, a means to perpetuate economic growth. Progress was about the endless replacement of old needs with new, old products with new. Notions of meeting everyone’s needs with an adequate level of production did not feature.

(...)

Once World War II was over, consumer culture took off again throughout the developed world, partly fueled by the deprivation of the Great Depression and the rationing of the wartime years and incited with renewed zeal by corporate advertisers using debt facilities and the new medium of television. Stuart Ewen, in his history of the public relations industry, saw the birth of commercial radio in 1921 as a vital tool in the great wave of debt-financed consumption in the 1920s — “a privately owned utility, pumping information and entertainment into people’s homes.”

“Requiring no significant degree of literacy on the part of its audience,” Ewen writes, “radio gave interested corporations … unprecedented access to the inner sanctums of the public mind.” The advent of television greatly magnified the potential impact of advertisers’ messages, exploiting image and symbol far more adeptly than print and radio had been able to do. The stage was set for the democratization of luxury on a scale hitherto unimagined.

Though the television sets that carried the advertising into people’s homes after World War II were new, and were far more powerful vehicles of persuasion than radio had been, the theory and methods were the same — perfected in the 1920s by PR experts like Bernays. Vance Packard echoes both Bernays and the consumption economists of the 1920s in his description of the role of the advertising men of the 1950s:

They want to put some sizzle into their messages by stirring up our status consciousness.… Many of the products they are trying to sell have, in the past, been confined to a “quality market.” The products have been the luxuries of the upper classes. The game is to make them the necessities of all classes. This is done by dangling the products before non-upper-class people as status symbols of a higher class. By striving to buy the product—say, wall-to-wall carpeting on instalment—the consumer is made to feel he is upgrading himself socially.

Though it is status that is being sold, it is endless material objects that are being consumed.

In a little-known 1958 essay reflecting on the conservation implications of the conspicuously wasteful U.S. consumer binge after World War II, John Kenneth Galbraith pointed to the possibility that this “gargantuan and growing appetite” might need to be curtailed. “What of the appetite itself?,” he asks. “Surely this is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question.”

Galbraith quotes the President’s Materials Policy Commission setting out its premise that economic growth is sacrosanct. “First we share the belief of the American people in the principle of Growth,” the report maintains, specifically endorsing “ever more luxurious standards of consumption.” To Galbraith, who had just published “The Affluent Society,” the wastefulness he observed seemed foolhardy, but he was pessimistic about curtailment; he identified the beginnings of “a massive conservative reaction to the idea of enlarged social guidance and control of economic activity,” a backlash against the state taking responsibility for social direction. At the same time he was well aware of the role of advertising: “Goods are plentiful. Demand for them must be elaborately contrived,” he wrote. “Those who create wants rank amongst our most talented and highly paid citizens. Want creation — advertising — is a ten billion dollar industry.”

Or, as retail analyst Victor Lebow remarked in 1955:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.… We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.

Thus, just as immense effort was being devoted to persuading people to buy things they did not actually need, manufacturers also began the intentional design of inferior items, which came to be known as “planned obsolescence.” In his second major critique of the culture of consumption, “The Waste Makers,” Packard identified both functional obsolescence, in which the product wears out quickly and psychological obsolescence, in which products are “designed to become obsolete in the mind of the consumer, even sooner than the components used to make them will fail.””

2 notes · View notes

shippsape · 4 years

Text

How much does it take to ship from China to Germany

If you're in business for yourself or run a corporation , How much does it take to ship from China to Germany? in any case it's now the second-largest economy within the world now, and it seems to be growing and it should keep it up growing for quite a while. There are far too many of us who are too willing to label China during a single sentence, and think they understand what China is all about - are you able to imagine trying to explain the USA in one-sentence? it's for this reason that i prefer to recommend a really Bible that i feel you ought to read, the name of the book is;

This book is extremely eye-opening and really well written, the author writes for the ny Times Magazine, Money, Worth, USA Today, Business 2.0, and was a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. His book takes us from China to Capitalist Super Power, and talks about how it's expanding at roughly three-times the US rate of growth, (approximately 10% year-over-year), and the way 300 million peasant farmers left their add agriculture to figure in factories. This was the most important migration in human history from rural China to the Guangdong and other factory areas.

It is estimated that this cost 2.9 million jobs in manufacturing within the us. Speaking of which i do not want to chop into Mr. Fishman's excellent book here, but i might wish to recommend another excellent reading;

He suggests that what proportion does it fancy ship from China to Germany. it's now stepping into computers, auto industry, airlines, aircraft manufacturing, and even big pharma. during this book the author tells all about it, alongside the tough reality that follows. China is already the most important maker of computer electronics and China has over 100 cities with over 1 million in population while the us only has nine. The American Chinese moving back to China to hitch within the prosperity is causing a drain, meanwhile as their economy increases that 10% year-over-year many of the simplest and brightest with advanced degrees and therefore the ability to research who are US educated also are leaving. Worse, the drain is accelerating.

Today, China is considered the world's factory floor, it's our greatest economic threat, also for the whole developed world and it's also paradoxically the best opportunity. China's real GDP including its illegal underground economy is a minimum of 15% higher say some economists. China features a huge underground economy that's often overlooked. The book also lets us realize that 40% of all the furniture that was made within the us , a number of what visited NAFTA countries is now all basically made in China.

How much does it fancy ship from China to Germany, submarines, heavy equipment, trucks, cars, airplanes, satellites, rockets, and may build almost anything; just check out the good Wall of China, or the World's Largest Dam (Three Gorges Dam) so that's nothing new. it's difficult to stay China as a customer and supplier at an equivalent time as keep them cornered as a competitor, it's almost a no win situation states the author. The us isn't the sole one with problems - also consider China's effect on Canada, Brazil, Australia, Germany, what proportion does it fancy ship from China to Germany. China has unbalanced trade with the great number of first world countries.

1 note · View note

all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years

Text

Alienation

Alienation – the result of individuals and, through them, societies 'becoming alien' (i.e distant, disengaged, even uncomprehending) to the results of their own activity, the environment in which that activity occurs, from the people who share that environment and activity, and from themselves. Alienation is marked in those of us living out systems of social relationships which thus redirect our energy from living on our own terms in a manner we ourselves can choose and assert, and into simply reproducing and reinforcing that social system in order to attain the means for survival. Individuals with the means (intellectual, ecological, social) to create lives they freely desire are difficult to base top-down authoritarian systems upon without the draining use of constant force. Alienation makes it possible to relatively smoothly maintain the centralisation of wealth, knowledge and power, separated from us yet raised by ourselves and many like us.

A well-used example of alienation was deployed to describe private property and the economic exploitation of capitalism, by which the worker is separated from what they produce: their 'power to' do whatever it might be is sold as labour power, transforming it into an owner's 'power over' them and thereby alienating human beings from their capacity to create. However it would be a mistake to simply stop there, as Marxists mostly do for instance. (In the 20th century what became known as 'the Fordist compromise' began to allow producers a limited amount of access to the commodities they produce; without however changing the course of alienation, now even more marked in the 'post-industrial' consumer classes.)

We believe that the problem runs much deeper and older than wage relations, in both the 'external' world of habitual interactions and their ramifications and in the psyche. While alienation can be and is implemented through many institutions (religion, for one) with a far longer history, a more holistic example of how alienation begins to sink its deeper roots would be the dispiriting result on untold numbers of land-based cultures from assimilation into conquering empires, and the industrial revolution that forced a mechanical division between individuals and their livelihoods, their tools, their communities, their lands; the separation between production and knowledge itself. Let's take a step back to a more fundamental appraisal of what it might mean to be a potentially-free being on a living planet.

What do you know about the trees outside the window? What keeps them healthy? What about the other animals that live close to you; do you recognise their calls or tracks? What they do, what they prefer? What do you know about the lives of human animals that go on over the other side of the wall next-door, or the masses you pass on the street? What do they know about you? How does that make you feel?

What do you really know about where the food you eat comes from? Or about what has to happen for our homes to be lit, heated, or built? How many of your survival necessities or subsistence skills are truly in your own hands or those of your relations?

What proportion of your conversations still enjoy the depth of face to face interaction? How much of your daily environment can you navigate on foot, walking, climbing, swimming, being helped by a companion, or how much of it is it necessary to depend on regulated means of transportation through? How much of your immediate surrounding area are you physically, socially or legally barred from exploring? Why?

How much of your daily activity is to suit your own needs? Aside from within the symbolic order of the wage economy, that is. How much of it do you even really see or understand the repercussions of? Would we live in this manner if we could directly see and touch the impacts that are hidden from most, in ghettos, toxic dumps, slaughter-houses, hospitals, cemeteries, refugee camps, battlefields and felled rainforest in distant lands, youth jails, oceanic garbage-gyres? Or have we become so distanced from other lives by the allotment of everything into categories of utility, so justifying their and our exploitation, that we cannot empathise with parallel lives that become mere resources for our own, as rulers living off us cannot empathise with ours?

Does the concept of diversity have much relation to your life beyond the array of brands at the supermarket, or inter-relatedness have a meaning beyond message boards? We are tricked and trick ourselves into believing that the damming of a river or disappearance of wildlife doesn't really affect us, burying ourselves in air-conditioned coffins as a society to separate ourselves from the world we were born in.

Do you even remember how to enact and express your joy as you may have in your early years? What actually gives you deep satisfaction; or fails to, even though it may be what advertising and marketing, your parents, school, politicians or your peers tell you should do? How in touch are you with your own desires, multi-sensousness, thoughts and feelings? Might they be directed by social constructions of gender roles, 'human nature', class positions, urban desensitisation...? Might any tendencies which don't fit those constructions be smothered daily, in this world we endure? Do you ever feel like something is missing?

What about your own body; are your familiar with its cycles and drives, or are they an abstraction in a textbook or something that simply comes upon us from the blue? Is health just something obscure that a technical industry exists for and which we're objects to? Isn't the direction of our culture one directly away from the immediacy of human sensations, evidenced by inflating reliance on machine-readings of our 'vital statistics' and symptom-numbing drugs, shifting value from group play or physical activity in general into the spectacle of online games and, at best, exercising isolated with the iPod, or the generational proportion of Japanese society with a disinterest or even phobia of partner sex?

Do you find that you float from one hobby, job, friendship group or city to another, but never seem to be able to feel at home in yourself? Have you ever felt, like a comrade wrote, that the only revolutionary thing about your life is its relentless circularity? What systematically seems to push people into these directions, and aren't reflected in all histories and cultures, which suffer less of the loss of personality, loss of place, loss of purpose? What does it mean to be brought up and inherit not an intimate wealth of folklore to help us navigate a living landscape with reverence, but to be left grasping for a handle on an impersonal life that always gets away from us; as it did our immediate predecessors for multiple generations in the West, with little understanding or influence, our ancestral capabilities, skills and memories expropriated or sterilised? What does it tell us about the trajectory of this system when depression is a main cause of death in the 'developed' world?

It's this 'developed' world that we imagine most of our readers will be accustomed to: with the alienations of wage-labour, claustrophobic built-up areas, an endless routine repeated day after day to attain the means to go on surviving in the way we're used to, navigating the artefacts, mass media representations and bureaucracies of this civilisation, however irrelevant to our own thoughts and wishes. A while ago, Michele Vignodelli characterised the deeply meaningful interactions with a living Earth, as the cornerstone of existence, as having been replaced by “over-stimulation by artificial, coarse, mechanical inputs, through fashions, revivals, disco music, roaring toys, cult actors, events... a whole flamboyant, uproarious and desperately hollow world. A rising wave of fleeting inputs, a multitude of fake interests and fake needs where our emotional energies are swept away, drowning us in nothingness[...] This sumptuous parade seems to consist substantially in the stream of toxic, hidden grudges that flows beneath the surface of politeness, in the corridors of industrial hives; it consists in the snarling defence of one's own niche, to protect 'freedoms' and 'rights' that are sanctioned by law, in a deep loneliness which is increasingly hidden in mass rituals, in a universal inauthenticity of relationships and experiences.”

We're awash with communication technologies, and yet more often living alone, with fewer off-screen friends and little real-world social solidarity. In replacement we are given the imagined community of the market, the nation, or the virtual. What was once lived directly, becomes mere representation.

Alienation results in sensations including (but not limited to) powerlessness, shame, despair, delusions, hostility, social withdrawal, feeling constantly threatened or self-destructive, which are all pandemic within industrial civilisation. Its outward manifestations are on the rise everywhere that industry and 'development' have become the social norm, not just in the capitalist 'Old World' but now China, India, Africa. Alienation is needed for how our bodies are currently regulated in ways both great and small by being enmeshed within norms and expectations that “determine what kinds of lives are deemed livable or useful and by shutting down the space of possibility and imaginative transformation where peoples' lives begin to exceed and escape [the system's] use for them” (Susan Stryker). It forms a society of individuals largely isolated and dissociated from each other and themselves, despite the crowded cities, depressed, apathetic or filled with violent and directionless anger; and we identify it in how the dominant social mode pushes us further into this estrangement. It's the anguish of the living subjected to a deathly regime, and a condition that must be struggled against to overturn the whole social order – which we are demanded to adapt ourselves to fit. To adapt ourselves to ever-more limited and virtually superfluous roles, at any time liable to be replaced like a faulty cog. Beneath the surface of modern life, we live in what can only be described as a state of captivity, and the neurotic way we internalise this reality to cope with it seeps out and permeates our every interaction. The loss of perspective that the overwhelming totality of the current system engenders, casting a shadow over all past ways of life, makes it easier to be fooled when we're told that it is us who are maladjusted, malfunctioning, and when the system's guardians tell us they have just the cure for the mysterious undermining of life.

Yet in spite of generations of 'naturalisation', psychological immiseration tells us we are not at home in the world of social media, council estates, gated communities, artificial parks, billboards, office blocks, traffic jams, cash machines, asylums, factory farms, call centres and other prisons, stuck in a flaccid cycle of work, nuclear families and programmed entertainment. This is the environment our pre-determined interactions, which we all go through every day, has created; yet it is created against us and our own self-determination. Our health (inseparable from that of our landbase), solidarity, spontaneity, and indeed in the era of vast climate changes even our continued existence itself is jeopardised by our own alienated activity. The blackmail of the market keeps our habits and relationships, more often than not, not just delaying but actually antagonistic to the fullness of autonomous creativity. Mass social organisation is the separate power that stands apart from us as individuals, regulating and imposing on us, as the truly human-scale in life is dwarfed by an unending cycle of representations, bureaucracy, requirements, regurgitating what is; and what cannot fail to oppress us. The conditions of life forced upon us by the economy, the State and technological society have become powers that rule over and direct us, not tools to use as we see fit. The segregation from a multitude of lifeforms displaced by the city not just unfamiliarises us with our planet, but makes it much easier to participate in the industrial structure devouring everything.

Ignore these facts we may, they continue to come back to haunt us in the unarticulated precarity of our helpless dependence, the interpersonal violence, the deadly sadness. Self-medication doesn't cut it. Reality TV can't mask it. The chatter of the crowd won't drown it out. We are under mental and physical occupation by the capitalist-industrial system, leaving the firm but false impression of there being no outside, no choice, no escape. Is this really what we could call living?

#return fire #alienation #anti civ #communism #extinction rebellion #post left #anarchism

15 notes · View notes

punknachos · 5 years

Text

Dear friends,

The last few days have been very frustrating for the Bolivian people. Our political situation has been incorrectly labeled as a military coup. For anyone that has actually been here in the country, it has been an emotional roller coaster. I have witnessed how millions of people amassed peacefully on a daily basis all around the country for one singular purpose. To get Evo Morales to resign. These marches, protests, and blockades were not exclusively lead by oligarchs or the bourgeoisie. It was a task that everyone of all races and classes took upon their hands to remove a president that claimed to be for the people. Since his resignation, people that claim to be his followers have been breaking into homes, vandalizing businesses, burning houses and public transport buses; all of which is raising fear among Bolivians.

There is such a diversity of people in Bolivia that to claim that all indigenous people want the same thing is preposterous. Multiple ethnic groups from regions including Potosi, Santa Cruz, and La Paz have denounced support for Evo Morales as he threatened to use their resources and land for purposes that did not align with their needs. These include building of highways through indigenous land, hydroelectric dams that would flood vast Amazonian regions, burning vast areas of the Amazon for coca plantations and cattle industry, and outsourcing mineral deposits to multinationals.

While the players that take part in these endeavors are not your typical western capitalist countries, they are still funded by large economies that don’t hold the best interest for the people of Bolivia. China in particular has been allowed to buy the role and responsibility of many of our infrastructural development projects. So before you assume you know whats going on in Bolivia, I urge all of you to please take into account the context of the situation. While liberal and socialist rhetoric has been rightfully applied in other scenarios, it doesn't necessarily apply here.

-- credit (FB): Nadim Woolgar

#bolivia #bolivialibre #evomorales

6 notes · View notes

cksmart-world · 5 years

Text

The Completely Unnecessary News Analysis

by Christopher Smart

May 21, 2019

Equal Rights Except For Queers

& Our New National Anti-abortion Game

Here in the family values state, it's nice to know our congressmen are standing up for religious freedom, which means, of course, that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people can't have the same rights as others. Our beloved and sacrosanct Republican congressmen Rob Bishop, John Curtis and Chris Stewart voted against evil legislation, called the Equity Act, that would prohibit discrimination against LGBT people in housing, financing, education and the work place. Only mean, old Democrat Ben McAdams voted in favor of the civil rights measure. Many religious people, including the big wigs at the Mormon Church, came out strongly against the legislation because... well, you know why. Fortunately, Chris Stewart was on hand to explain why LGBT people can't have equal rights: “Yes, of course we should treat each other with fairness and with dignity,” he said. But “people of faith, who are also good people, deserve to have the right to express their sincerely held religious beliefs without compulsion from the federal government...” Dam faggots and weirdos. Remember, the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln — and he never said queers should have equal rights.

Springtime for Trump, Winter for Iran

OK, lookit, the Trump administration would never raise a ruckus with Iran just to take our minds off the Mueller investigation. Of course not. Taunting the Iranians with a little saber-rattling is a matter of national security. Just ask John Bolton, our warm and fuzzy national security advisor. Here's the thing: Since we've done so well in Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe it's time to bomb Iran. Everybody knows those ayatollah guys are bad news. Like Trump said, it's time for a little regime change. So, what to do? We've already pulled out of the multilateral nuclear agreement we struck with Iran along with the Europeans. And we've already called a boycott of Iranian oil exports. What's left? Ah, that's it, we'll send a carrier battle group to the Arabian Sea and scare the bejesus out of them. Then, the ayatollahs will begin preparing their defense mechanisms and our intelligence network will detect their aggression and we'll have to neutralize the threat. Remember when our Commander-In-Chief called Kim Jung Un “Rocket Man” and promised to blow North Korea to kingdom come? Well, as Trump said in his State of the Union address: “I saved us from a world war.” OK, so here's the game plan: create a crisis, then back off and declare victory. But remember what Yogi Berra said: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you're going, because you might not get there.”

The All New Anti-abortion Game

It's time to play that exciting new socio-political game, Our Abortion Law Is More Draconian Than Yours. It's a game that tests the Shakespearean skills of white, male Republican legislators from state to state. One red state passes a law that says no abortions after a heartbeat is perceived. Another Republican-dominated legislature says doctors will go to prison for 99 years. Another holds that 12-year-old girls who are raped by their uncles must give birth — but can't have food stamps. And yet another proclaims that a zygote is a person with First Amendment rights. And Second Amendment rights, too — don't forget the guns. The anti-abortion movement is spreading like a fever. Right to lifers are selling T shirts on Amazon that say things like, “Quit Killing Embryos” and “Sperm Are People, Too.” The excitement is palpable. Which laws will make it to the federal court of appeals? And which one will get all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court? The grand prize? Overturning Roe v. Wade and the end to women's reproductive rights. As Yogi Berra once said: “The future ain't what it used to be.”

Stupid Kids And Free Markets

Young people who show an interest in socialism don't understand how lucky they are to be living in a capitalist society. So said Utah Gov. Gary Herbert at the 13th annual Utah Economic Summit. “Socialism doesn't lead to shared prosperity,” the guv explained. That's right, young people just don't understand the free-market system, where all the wealth goes to the top 1 percent. Just because household spending power has remained flat since 1980, is no reason to whine. Sure, education and medical expenses have skyrocketed and for many housing is just too expensive. But that can easily be overcome if they'd just get off their duffs. “They worry that free market capitalism is failing them and that it's a win-lose system,” Herbert surmised. Man, this guy is practically clairvoyant. Since 1980 the top 1 percent has been gaining wealth at such a high rate that it has skewed data to reflect a healthy economy. As the keynote speaker, Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, said, “Everything is great.” Yep, from the rarified atmosphere at the Utah Economic Summit, everything is coming up roses. What are those young people thinking? And where is Yogi Berra when you need him?

Post Script: Pinch yourself — it's true, a Republican has called Attorney General William Barr's misrepresentation of the Mueller report for what it really is: Bullshit. Michigan Congressman Justin Amash said Trump's actions constituted obstruction of justice and are impeachable. WTF. Doesn't he know that telling the truth is anti-Trump. Don't look for his Republican colleagues to back him up. And don't be surprised if we soon see Amash's head on a pike in front of the White House.

Well, that just about does it for another strange week here at Smart Bomb, where the staff has taken to reading Alice in Wonderland and has gone through the looking glass for a reality check. As Alice said to the Mad Hatter: “It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change.” For Wilson and the band, it's all familiar territory. OK guys, take us out with a little theme music to go with our crazy times:

One pill makes you larger / And one pill makes you small / And the ones that mother gives you / Don't do anything at all / Go ask Alice / I think she'll know / When logic and proportion / Have fallen sloppy dead / And the white knight is talking backwards / And the Red Queen's "off with her head!" / Remember what the doormouse said...

1 note · View note

moodboardinthecloud · 3 years

Text

The Darwin Variant, and/or Love of the Fittest

The chaos grows and grows, everything around us faltering, falling. Who do we need to be and who are we becoming?

Once I was in a room with Margaret Wheatley, one of the people whose thinking on emergence and complexity helped me understand emergent strategy. I (or someone else) asked how we bring down massive systems through small, complex organizing. She said, essentially, that systems that are top heavy will inevitably collapse from their own imbalanced weight.

How do we survive these falling systems? Especially when many of them need to fall? How do we prepare for the opportunities in collapse?

I am thinking about that in this era of Covid, climate catastrophe, natural and unnatural disasters (this week there are wildfires, floods, droughts, earthquakes, and disaster capitalism feeding off of all of it), cultural shifts, and long-term war consequences from indigenous struggles locally in the U.S. to the Taliban in Afghanistan. It’s all connected – decisions made from a competitive, supremacist, dominant mindset lead to top heavy economies and infrastructures, which inevitably collapse, leaving the survivors to contend with the detritus of empire.

Much of the crisis now feels out of our hands – even to me as a fairly connected radical movement person, most days it feels like a series of unstoppable events, to which I can offer prayer and donations, witness and attention. There are so many frontlines, each equally important to the soldiers in that particular battle. Stepping back to see it whole, there’s definitely the sense that we are trying to hold back tsunamis by plugging a million holes in a dam.

I realize that this sense of total pending and unfolding disaster is all over my Covid responses, thoughts and interactions. I am writing to face this disastrous feeling within me, to see if I can center a different perspective down in myself.

As both an antiwar and climate activist, I remember the devastation I felt when I first realized we weren’t going to be able to stop the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. People were not going to sustain direct action, they were still going to pay their taxes towards the war, and be satisfied with resistance in the form of liberal punditry that changed nothing. This week we leave behind another nation long violated, knowing it will be eaten alive. It has taken so long to say, with humility, we lost a war we should never have been fighting.

With the climate catastrophe, I realized in my gut that we weren’t going to pivot our nation, our states, our towns to be in a just transition, not in time. Organizers inch forward proposals of survival and boundary, documentation and data, the responses much smaller and slower than the pending crises demand. We are up against capitalism, which feels so big, has so many heads. It is all so daunting. It is still the right work. But how do we make it matter? How do we meet the moment?

It could feel reasonable to give up the fight, all the fights, in light of this overwhelming comprehension of our species in its limitations. But then we are also in a period of massive cultural shift around race, anti-Blackness, rape and patriarchy. Systems designed to allow the total violence and control of those given power through a mythical supremacy are suddenly exposed down to the blueprint. Again, that labor of exposure is largely done by organizers who cleared space for the truth to be told with calls of Black Lives Matter and Me Too. We are rejecting these systems of harm in policy, action, and interpersonal encounters.

It’s all crumbling, concurrently. We are living through both the devastating fall of systems that guarantee life, and the necessary fall of systems that uphold violence.

So then Covid enters, stage right. It’s fast moving, wreaking havoc along the fault lines of existing vulnerabilities – those struggling to piece together enough inside of these multiple intersecting crises are hustling, hungry, taking risks to go to work, trying to survive eviction and exposure. Nations who let collective thinking lead are responding intelligently, and then there’s us.

Since the beginning, Covid has asked one thing of us: act collectively. First, the collective actions were maintaining the social distance of breath, hand washing, wearing masks. Then it was staying home unless you were an essential worker. And quarantining if you were sick. Then quarantining even if you were not sick. Doing work and community through virtual connections. And then, most recently, it’s been getting a vaccine that reduces the hospitalizations and deaths of those exposed to the virus. I cannot truly comprehend how many people have died as we figured out the necessary actions to take together. And now people are dying because we struggle to take collective actions.

To be fair, we are also in a period of peak socialized distrust. The divisions between us are dangerous and near total – we look to divergent news sources, have different conversations, suspect different aspects of government (from police to politicians to scientists) of wanting us surveilled, tracked, controlled or dead. Four years of a destructive and immature president did result in a wall, but not the border wall he threatened. The wall that now feels so solid in the U.S. is a cultural one that has deep roots and an ancient design, 3D printed hateful troll bricks stacked on top of colonial ruins.

Trying to be curious, to ask a question, to express a fear, to make a request, to assume a commonality – all of it quickly gets interpreted as building the division. Inside of this, on whatever side is for life moving towards life, I have been asking myself about boundaries, expectations, solidarity, and collective action. And love.

I now live by these words from my friend Prentis Hemphill, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” Love. Not tolerate or survive, but love. When I speak these words, as reminder, as mantra, they give me hope that no one has to be disposable, cut off from that vast connectivity of love. It’s just a matter of distance.

I learned some time ago that not everyone was going to survive and see liberation, or right relationship with the earth, in this lifetime. Not everyone was going to be in vibrant, accountable communities in this lifetime. Not everyone was going to choose love. Not everyone was going to even be aware that they could want or need such interdependence. For so many people, it feels impossible to experience love, to give and receive that sacred extension of adoration, devotion, care, growth, belonging, loyalty and shared experience.

But with distance, perhaps even as far away as the moon, I can always see the species as lovable. I can see that everyone deserves that deep belonging which displaces greed and grasping. I can see us, young, beautiful, powerful, clumsy, tender, selfish – and generally lovable, like a rambunctious and curious child. Or sometimes lovable like the traumatized, neglected bully child who needs so much more love and attention to soften and trust and connect again.

With enough distance, I can love even those who, up close, hate me, or hate the earth, or hate anything different from them. I know “only love can conquer hate.” From far away I can see the haters of the world – those who hate nature, difference, complexity, freedom in others – in the grip of their own spiritual work, which is daunting, which devours from within. Knowing almost nothing of the mysteries of the universe, having only our own planet’s wisdom to learn from, I deduce that even the haters are processing something for the whole, though it may be something toxic, or something heading towards extinction.

With that guidance, I have been earnestly asking myself: what is the distance at which I can love those who choose individual freedom over collective care in the short-term, at the cost of a future? Those who choose to go unmasked? Those who still don’t wash their hands? Those who breathe and cough too close to me? Those who have access to and capacity for the vaccine and choose not to take it?

This year has been a brutal and necessary reminder that control and manipulation don’t work, for anyone involved. I have had to practice self-awareness of my own controlling nature, I have had to soften my grip on a fearful future narrative and return to the humility of the present. I am not in control of any choices or boundaries but my own. I cannot manipulate others into collective action, into choosing life, not even with all my best words. I can only be vulnerable, I can only live into my own values, I can only invite others to join me, and to teach me.

Collective action is still made up of individual choices, which is the beauty and bane of our species. Especially in the colonized capitalist borders of the U.S. Even in the face of policy and punishment, the American way is to choose individual thinking and action under pressure, to fight for superiority on any hill. This focus on dominance over the living rather than partnership with life is how we have racism, rape culture, climate catastrophe, economic disparity, war and disease all in rampant disaster states at the same time.

It is perpetually disgusting to contend with the reality that these disasters benefit a bloated elite. And too many of us participate in our small scale versions of their individualistic and hoarding worldview, thinking we are better than each other and the earth, deserve unlimited resources and access, and should never have to adapt to protect others.

This is humanity at our worst. How will we change?

At a certain point, even if collective action feels far away, there has to be an awareness of the pattern. We have to develop the systemic intuition to sense that the same glitch is present throughout all the systems. Thinking that your choices only impact you or those you immediately know – that you needn’t be concerned with or accountable for the results – is supremacist thinking at the root. It gets packaged as freedom and independence, but we are not individual entities. Humans, like all of nature, live within systems of relationship and resource. Our freedom is relational. Individualist supremacy is a delusional concept, perhaps safely enjoyed as fantasy but not to be applied as common practice. One way to see all of the current crises is as a single delusional wildfire consuming time and space.

What do we do though? How do we practice another way inside so much crisis?

I have a very small circle of beloveds now. Covid required me to get clear about who I absolutely had to be in contact with, who I would invest my time in arguing boundaries with, who I would risk my life to go see. Relative to the number of people I’ve met, the number of people I’ve marched with and for, the number of people on the side of justice and liberation who populate this earth…it turns out there’s a tiny handful that I can actually hold onto. And I now believe my work is to be a good member of the human flock with that small number. Yes, I can still sing out my birdsong to the whole forest. But I move in community, in relationships that are visionary and loving at the root.

I light candles every day around my hope that the distance at which I can love most people in this era isn’t that mortal boundary between life and death.

Covid keeps adapting, like a shepherd herding us as a group through the one gate that leads forward. When we think we alone can run off and stop attending to the whole, a variant emerges to gather us back groupward. The idea of being herded generates such resistance in me, “WE ARE NOT SHEEP!”, “I AM NOT A COW!” (“imspecialimspecialimspecial”)…and yet, are these not also sacred and communal creatures from whom I can learn? In this moment, perhaps theirs is the wisdom we need. Can we adapt to be herd, to be meek, to belong, to move together, to be humble together? Or maybe it’s more simple, more literal: can we be satisfied in a smaller range of physical space? Can we be satisfied inside of necessary boundaries?

It’s quite clear that one activity that keeps the majority of people safe and, coincidentally?, has a positive impact on the planet, is to stay home, stay still, travel less, reduce each personal footprint towards a collective reduction of negative impact. Perhaps variants like Delta will come every time we attempt to return to a normal that the planet cannot sustain.

I heard someone call it the Darwin variant and I can’t stop thinking about that.

The first waves of Covid deaths were our loved ones and strangers who didn’t know what it was. Then those who knew the name and symptoms but didn’t stand a chance. Then those who didn’t realize or trust just how dangerous it was. Now we are seventeen months into the official global pandemic, playing chicken. Most of those who are getting sick and dying in the U.S. now are doing so as a result of choosing not to believe in Covid, in its viral nature, or in the benefits and safety of the vaccine; or those who think they are beyond the reach of guidelines; or those most susceptible to misinformation from unverified sources; or those unable to avoid interaction with others caught up in denial or misinformation, tragically including our precious babies.

They all still expect and need care.

I feel empathy for those who don’t trust the government, even as I feel my own righteous distrust. What’s been helping me in this moment is how much I love the divine work of science. I believe that the sacred force that designed hummingbirds and eagles and the symbiosis of bees and flowers and the desalination of the ocean through vapor and rain also moves through the minds of our scientists. I feel a primal longing for more people to trust in the curiosity-based practice of science. I feel a political need for science to be decoupled from big pharma, which feels so close to how I need movements to be decoupled from big philanthropy. But currently it’s all the same tangled rope of innovation and struggle and funding to which we cling over an apocalyptic abyss. I am not trying to be dramatic here, I’m just being with what is.

Charles Darwin was a scientist whose writing explored many concepts, including one from Herbert Spencer: ‘survival of the fittest.’ The concept reverberates into moments like this. The common misinterpretation is that it means survival of the most physically fit, an ableist view. I’m sure you, like me, have seen able-bodied people argue against Covid safety protocols by saying those with strong immune systems will survive. Many of those I’ve seen take this stance have gone on learn through sickness or loss that that’s not how Covid, or any of our other current apocalyptic conditions, actually work.

I was reminded recently (in public) that Darwin’s own writing points to ‘fittest’ meaning those most adaptive and collectively oriented, those most suited to the immediate conditions. Our immediate conditions are chaotic, frightening, fast-changing and inevitable. What is grossly imbalanced is teetering and falling. What is wildly anti-planet and inhumane is exposed and falling. What is cruel and violent and unfair and ridiculous, it’s all falling.

And the persisting question for me is, what is the work of love in all this falling? Can love help us be the fittest our species has been?

I have sought to offer and experience all kinds of love throughout my life. I have learned that I can love people who will still choose to leave me, to risk their lives, and I will feel grief. I have been learning that there is the big collective massive love I feel for all that lives, and then the tangible offer of love as an energy, resource and commitment which I can only give to those with whom I am in a mutual, consensual and aligned relationship.

I find it hard to love those who hate science, and hate me…not impossible, at least in the big picture setting. But working to actively love those who hate me is immense labor, and if I am honest with myself, it’s generally not something I’m even interested in cultivating in the irreplaceable hours of my remaining life.

Because my love feels rooted not just in myself, but in myself as a fragment of the miraculous natural world, I notice the patterns of hate at the interpersonal, interspecies and global level. There is an undeniable overlap between this resistance to science and the resistance to wear a mask, socially distance and/or vaccinate, in spite of data that affirms the life saving impacts of each choice. And all of that overlaps with the resistance to do right by the earth. The resistance to move beyond capitalism to economic models that allow shared abundance. And the resistance to give up patriarchy and white sociopathy. And national supremacy.

How do I love this vast diversity of human beings, beloved and stranger, who are currently toxic to our collective survival?

I only see one way. If I define love as the willful extension towards spiritual growth that bell hooks and M. Scott Peck told me about, then when I come across all this resistance to the miraculous and collective aspects of our species, I willfully extend my energy towards the necessary and inevitable growth evidenced by that resistance.

It liberates my love to see the resistance to science and nature and interdependence as a cry for help, a sign of how important it is that we grow our capacity to act as collective beings. And, as is my practice, when I can see where that edge of growth is, I seek it in myself. Where in my own life do I still persist in actions that presuppose my importance and supremacy, rather than accept my small role in our collective existence?

I have begun to feel gratitude inside my Covid grief. It’s the result of thinking collectively, even trying to think as a cell or atom of this planetary existence, awkward as that may sound. Even as I despair at the deaths of those who didn’t have a chance to choose, and those who did not survive their risks, I have to acknowledge what else I sense here…at a certain point we have to consider that Covid might be aligned with the earth, of the universe, designed to get us to fight for ourselves, love ourselves as collective beings, love ourselves enough to set and hold boundaries that serve more than our individual wants and needs.

Can I surrender the recent-normal for the present need? Can I commit to practicing a new and limited present-normal for the sake of a species-future? Can I listen more deeply to the earth, to the patterns? Can I keep finding the space to feel for direction within the chaos?

It’s so complicated.

It is much easier for me to love those who want collective human life to continue, in right relationship to the planet. But perhaps that’s evolution moving in me, perhaps this is a sacred attention, a ‘love of the fittest?’

Even now, as I write this, I still love people who choose themselves over the collective every time. And, I’m noticing, every day they feel further and further away. Or I do.

Seeing the pattern of life unfolding inside the destruction and chaos, I keep bringing my attention to it. I despair and then seek laughter, seek the community of others who feel afraid but keep working to connect. I relinquish being right for being present. I don’t deny reality as I find my place in the present moment and try to be of the fittest in constantly changing conditions.

I don’t wait for perfection or magic, I participate in the mundane work of staying alive. I keep my distance, wash my hands, wear my mask, carry my vaccine card. I get tested at every possibility of Covid. If something gets through my mask, if a variant finds me in spite of my best effort, it won’t be for lack of trying to live. If the vaccine works for most people who get it, but somehow not for me, I accept my role in the collective story.

And in my life I keep writing, keep working to shift myself out of the center of anything. I shift my practices one at a time away from capitalist socialization that says I need to be the best at something to deserve a quality life. I redistribute attention, time, donate money…and ask for help.

I am rooting myself amongst people who are learning to think and act together, as pairs, small groups, communities. We ask each other more questions, about what we are choosing to practice and why. We know so much more about each other’s lives and patterns than ever before. We process our inevitable risk-taking with each other because we are imperfect, and we long for each other. We are raising children inside these unclear, ever-shifting boundaries, and we are moving our resources around amongst us to get through. Sometimes we find that in the light of all this new transparency, we aren’t as compatible as we thought. It’s OK. We let each other go on different paths through the adventure, and root with the people on our path.

So are these answers, these small breaths in the maelstrom?

Small circles rooted in love. Relinquishing control and offering love. Mundane practices as acts of love.

Humility in the face of the unknown is self-love. Seeing and shaping the whole, not as a million overwhelming waves, but as a sea – this is collective love. Living in generosity and gratitude, every day, is living love. Being nature, is being love.

It certainly feels like love is the way.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

And this may or may not fit in this piece of thinking and writing, but love is asking me to mention that I am centering pleasure even now, within the small circle. We are a pleasure flock, comforting each other, cheering each other on towards our best lives even today in these conditions. Pleasure connects us to ourselves and each other, to the aliveness at the funeral, to the blessing in the crisis, to the sweet new life pushing green up through the sludge.

We who are not yet dead are responsible for living fully, without regrets, with deep reverence for the wide range of emotion in the human experience. I look for the pleasure of home, of rooting and nesting, of growing things, of moving slowly, of being honest, of writing, of cooking, of dancing, of gratitude, of love. Every single day I dose myself with pleasures small and large, knowing that as it all falls apart, so much is growing; knowing that within myself and my circle I am seeding a path towards a future in which feeling and growing pleasure and aliveness and delight, in relationship to each other and our abundant and perfect planet, is our central focus.

There. It is long, but I have shifted myself from despairing overwhelm back to visionary center. It is a gift that I can only fulfill my own small destiny, follow the instructions that are clearest to me, move with my own consecrated choreography. When I feel completely lost, I can focus each day on being kind, being generous, and being honest. I light candles for all I cannot carry, and then move into the present moment with only my love. As everything crumbles above and around us, it is still true that the most strategic move is the ever changing dance of love.

http://adriennemareebrown.net/2021/08/19/the-darwin-variant-and-or-love-of-the-fittest/

0 notes

kakaji · 7 years

Text

The Death and Life of Punk, the Last Subculture, by Dylan Clark

Punk is dead. Long live punk. (graffito in use since 1970s)

Punk had to die so that it could live.

With the death of punk, classical subcultures died. What had, by the 1870s, emerged as ‘subcultures’ were understood to be groups of youths who practised a wide array of social dissent through shared behavioural, musical, and costume orientations. Such groups were remarkably capable vehicles for social change, and were involved in dramatically reshaping social norms in many parts of the world. These ‘classical’ subcultures obtained their potency partly through an ability to shock and dismay, to disobey prescribed confines of class, gender, and ethnicity. But things changed. People gradually became acclimatized to such subcultural transgressions to the point that, in many places, they have become an expected part of the social landscape. The image of rebellion has become one of the most dominant narratives of the corporate capitalist landscape: the ‘bad boy’ has been reconfigured as a prototypical consumer. And so it was a new culture in the 1970s, the punk subculture, which emerged to fight even the normalization of subculture itself, with brilliant new forms of social critique and style. But even punk was caught, caged, and placed in the subcultural zoo, on display for all to see. Torn from its societal jungle adn safely taunted by viewers behind barcodes, punk, the last subculture, was dead.

The classical subculture ‘died’ when it became the object of social inspection and nostalgia, and when it became so amenable to commodification. Marketers long ago awakened to the fact that subcultures are expedient vehicles for selling music, cars, clothing, cosmetics, and everything else under the sun. but this truism is not lost on many subcultural youth themselves, and they will be the first to grumble that there is nothing new under the subcultural sun.

In this climate, constrained by the discourse of subculture, deviation from the norm ain’t what it used to be. Deviation from the norm seems, well, normal. It is allegedly common for a young person to choose a prefab subculture off the rack, wear it for a few years, then rejoin with the ‘mainstream’ culture that they never really left at all. Perhaps the result of our autopsy will show that subculture (of the young, dissident, costumed kind) has become a useful part of the status quo, and less useful for harbouring discontent. For these reasons we can melodramatically pronounce that subculture is dead.

Yet still they come: goths, neo-hippies, and ‘77-ish mohawked punk rockers. And still people find solidarity, revolt, and individuality by inhabiting a shared costume marking their membership in a subculture. And still parents get upset, people gawk, peers shudder, and selves are recreated. Perhaps it is cruel or inaccurate to call these classical motifs dead, because they can be so very alive and real to the people who occupy them. Like squatters in abandoned buildings, practising subcultists give life to what seem to be deceased structures.

Or is the subculture dead? The death of subculture-- that is, the death of subcultural autonomy and meaningful rebellion-- did not escape the notice of many. For decades people have decried the commercialization of style, the paisley without the politics. But such laments have not failed to produce strategies. There is something else-- another kind of subculture, gestating and growing far below the classical subcultural terrain. For two decades thousands kept a secret: punk never died. Instead, punk had, even in its earliest days, begun to articulate a social form that anticipates and outmanoeuvres the dominance of corporate-capitalism. And as the Cold War finally disappears from decades of habit, and as the political and cultural hegemony of corporate-capitalism seems unrivalled, it suddenly becomes clear that the anarchist frameworks of punk have spread into all sorts of social groupings. The social forms punks began to play with in the early 1970s have penetrated subcultures across the spectrum. After the death of the classical subculture we witness the birth of new practices, ideologies, and ways of being-- a vast litter of anarchism.

For tribes of contemporary people who might be called punk (and who often refuse to label themselves), their subculture is partly in revolt from the popular discourse of subculture, from what has become, in punk eyes, a commercialized form of safe, affected discontent-- a series of consumed subjectivities, including pre-fabricated ‘Alternative’ looks. Punk is, ironically, a subculture operating within parts of that established discourse, and yet it is also a subculture partly dedicated to opposing what the discourse of subculture has become. As the century rolls over, punk is the invention of not just new subjectivities but, perhaps, a new kind of cultural formation. The death of subculture has in some ways helped to produce one of the most formidable subcultures yet: the death of subculture is the (re)birth of punk.

Part I. Classical Punk: The Last Subculture

Consumer voyeurism is much more offensive to punk sensibilities than song themes about addiction or slaughtering dolls onstage. (Van Dorston 1990)

At the heart of early punk was calculated anger. It was anger at the establishment and anger at the allegedly soft rebellion of the hippie counterculture; anger, too, at the commodification of rock and roll (Cullen 1996:249). Its politics were avowedly apolitical, yet it openly and explicitly confronted the traditions and norms of the powers that be. Describing the cultural milieu for young people in 19765, Greil Marcus notes the centrality of cultural production: ‘For the young everything flowed from rock ‘n’ roll (fashion, slang, sexual styles, drug habits, poses), or was organized by it, or was validated by it’ (Marcus 1989:53). But by the early 1970s, with commodification in full swing, with some artists said to have compromised their integrity by becoming rich stars,a dn with ‘rock’ having been integrated into the mainstream, some people felt that youth subcultures were increasingly a part of the intensifying consumer society, rather than opponents of the mainstream. Punk promised to build a scene that could not be taken. Its anger, pleasures, and ugliness were to go beyond what capitalism and bourgeois society could swallow. It would be untouchable, undesirable, unmanageable.

Early punk was a proclamation and an embrace of discord. In England it was begun by working-class youths decrying a declining economy and rising unemployment, chiding the hypocrisy of the rich, and refuting the notion of reform. In America, early punk was a middle-class youth movement, a reaction against the boredom of mainstream culture (Henry 1989:69). Early punk sought to tear apart consumer goods, royalty, and sociability; and it sought to destroy the idols of the bourgeoisie.

At first punk succeeded beyond its own lurid dreams. The Sex Pistols created a fresh moral panic fuelled by British tabloids, Members of Parliament, and plenty of everyday folk. Initially, at least, they threatened ‘everything England stands for’: patriotism, class hierarchy, ‘common decency’ and ‘good taste.’ When the Sex Pistols topped the charts in Britain, and climbed high in America, Canada, and elsewhere, punk savoured a moment in the sun: every public castigation only convinced more people that punk was real.

Damming God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself, the music briefly made it possible to experience all those things as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs: things than had been made and therefore could be altered, or done away with altogether. It became possible to see these things as bad jokes, and for the music to come forth as a better joke. (Marcus 1989:6)

Punk was to cross the rubicon of style from which there could be no retreat. Some punks went so far as to valorize anything mainstream society disliked, including rape and death camps; some punks slid into fascism. When the raw forces and ugliness of punk succumbed to corporate-capitalism within a few short years, the music/style nexus had lost its battle of Waterloo. Punk waged an all-out battle on this front, and it wielded new and shocking armaments, but in the end, even punk was proven profitable. Penny Rimbaud (1998:74) traces its cooption:

Within six months the movement had been bought out. The capitalist counter-revolutionaries had killed with cash. Punk degenerated from being a force for change, to becoming just another element in the grand media circus. Sold out, sanitised and strangled, punk had become just another social commodity, a burnt-out memory of how it might have been.

Profits serve to bandage the wounds inflicted by subcultures, while time and nostalgia cover over the historical stars. Even punk, when reduced to a neat mohawk hairstyle and a studded leather jacket, could be made into a cleaned-up spokesman for potato chips. Suddenly, the language of punk was rendered meaningless. Or perhaps-- perhaps-- the meaningless language of punk was made meaningful. Greil Marcus (1989:438) records the collapse of punk transgression: ‘the times changed, the context in which all these things could communicate not pedantry but novelty vanished, and what once were metaphors became fugitive footnotes to a text no longer in print.’

Like their subcultural predecessors, early punks were too dependent on music and fashion as modes for expression; these proved to be easy targets for corporate cooptation. ‘The English punk rock rhetoric of revolution, destruction, and anarchy was articulated by means of specific pleasures of consumption requiring the full industrial operations that were ostensibly were the objects of critique’ (Shank 1994: 94). Tactically speaking, the decisive subcultural advantage in music and style-- their innovation, rebellion, and capacity to alarm--was preempted by the new culture industry, which mass-produced and sterilized punk’s verve. With the collapse of punk’s stylistic ultimatum, what had been the foundations for twentieth-century subcultural dissent were diminished--not lost, but never to completely recover the power they once had in music and style.

Part II. The Triumph of the Culture Industry

Gil Scott Heron is famous for the line, ‘The Revolution will not be televised’. But in a way the opposite has happened. Nothing’s given the change to brew and develop anymore, before the media takes hold of it and grinds it to death. Also, there’s an instant commodification of everything that might develop into something ‘revolutionary.’ (Dishwater Pete, quoted in Vale 1997:17)

Having ostensibly neutralized early punk, the culture indsutry proved itself capable of marketing any classical youth subculture. All styles, musics, and poses could be packaged: seemingly no subculture was immune to its gaze. So levelled, classical subcultures were deprived of some of their ability to generate meaning and voice critique.

‘Subculture,’ in the discourse handed down to the present, has come popularly to represent youths who adorn themselves in tribal makeup and listen to narrow genres of music. Subcultures are, in this hegemonic caricature, a temporary phase through which mostly juvenile, mostly ‘White,’ and mostly harmless people symbolically create identity and peer groups, only to later return, as adults, to their pre-ordained roles in mainstream society.

The aforementioned idea of subculture is not without merit: ti is often a temporary vehicle through which teens and young adults select a somewhat prefabricated identification, make friends, separate from their parents, and individuate themselves. As a social form, this classical breed of subculture is important, widespread, and diversely expressed. In this form ‘subculture’ is partly a response to prevailing political economies and partly a cultural pattern that has been shaped and reworked by subcultures themselves and by the mass media. As such it is an inherited social form, and one which is heavily interactive with capitalist enterprise. Thus, subculture is both a discourse that continues to be a meaningful tool for countless people and, at the same time, something of a pawn of the culture industry.

With its capacity to designate all subcultures, all youth, under a smooth frosting of sameness, the culture industry was capable of violating the dignity of subcultists and softening their critique. Implied in the culture industry’s appropriation of subcultural imagery was the accusation of sameness, of predictability, of a generic ‘kids will be kids.’ To paste on any group a label of synchronic oneness is, in some way, to echo colonial tactics. ‘Youths’ or ‘kids,’ when smothered with a pan-generational movement of discontent, are reduced to a mere footnote to the dominant narrative of corporate-capitalism. Trapped in nostalgia and commercial classifications, subcultures and youth are merged into the endless, amalgamated consumer culture.

No wonder, then, that subcultural styles no longer provoke panics, except in select small towns. Piercings and tattoos might cause their owner to be rejected from a job, but they generally fail to arouse astonishment or fear. Writes Frederic Jameson (1983:124): ‘there is very little in either the form of the content of contemporary art that contemporary society finds intolerable and scandalous. The most offensive forms of this art-punk rock, say...are all taken in stride by society’. So too, ideas of self gratification are no longer at odds with the status quo. In the ‘Just Do It’ culture of the late twentieth century, selfish hedonism dominates the airwaves. Says Simon Reynolds (1988:254): ‘“Youth” has been co-opted, in a sanitized, censored version...Desire is no longer antagonistic to materialism, as it was circa the Stones’ “Satisfaction”.’ Instead young people often relate to the alienation of The Smiths or REM, who seem to lament that ‘everyone is having fun except me’; the sense of failure at not having the ‘sex/fun/style’ of the young people in the mass media. Indeed, long before ‘satisfaction’ became hegemonic, the commodity promised to satisfy. But because it cannot satisfy it leaves a melancholy that is satisfiable only in further consumption. So notes Stacy Corngold (1996:33) who concludes that ‘Gramsci’s general point appears to have been confirmed: all complex industrial societies rule by non-coercive coercion, whereby political questions become disguised as cultural ones and as such become insoluble.’ Youth subcultures, after the triumph of the culture industry, may perpetually find themselves one commodity short of satisfaction, and trapped by words that were once liberatory.

Or, as Grant McCracken (1988:133) argues, commodities cannot be completely effective as a mode of dissent because they are made legible in a language written by corporate-capitalism. As he writes:

when “hippies,” “punks”, “gays”, “feminists”, “young republicans”, and other radical groups use consumer goods to declare their difference, the code they use renders them comprehensible to the rest of society and assimilable within a larger set of cultural categories...The act of protest is finally an act of participation in a set of shared symbols and meanings.

Though McCracken underestimates the efficacy of stylized dissent, he is able to locate a defining weakness in the emphasis that subcultures have historically placed in style. My contention is that style was far more potent as a mode of rebellion in the past, and that not until the demise of punk was subcultural style dealt a mortal wound. After the demise of punk’s uber-style, after a kind of terminal point for outrageousness, there is a banality to subcultural style. And it is for this reason that Dick Hebdige’s (1979:102) ‘communication of a significant difference’ can no longer serve as a cornerstone in the masonry of subcultural identity. Following this logic, George McKay (1998:20) comments on the ‘Ecstasy Industry’ of mass culture, which has seized control of style. Thus

The Ecstasy Industry, for its part, is doing only too well under contemporary capitalism and could easily absorb the techniques of lifestyle anarchists to enhance a marketably naughty image. The counterculture that once shocked the bourgeoisie with its long hair, beards, dress, sexual freedom, and art has long since been upstaged by bourgeois entrepreneurs.

We can say, too, that the economy for subcultural codes suffers from hyper-inflation. In other words, the value of subcultural signs and meanings has been depleted: an unusual hairstyle just can’t buy the outsider status it used to. Stylistic transgressions are sometimes piled on one another like so many pesos, but the value slips away almost instantly. Thus, by the 1990s, dissident youth subcultures were far less able to arouse moral panics (Boethius 1995:52) despite an accelerated pace of style innovation (Ferrell 1993:194). In the 2000s, subcultural style is worth less because a succession of subcultures has been commodified in past decades. ‘Subculture’ has become a billion-dollar industry. Bare skin, odd piercings, and bluejeans are not a source of moral panics these days: they often help to create new market opportunities. Even irony, indifference, and apathy toward styles and subculture have been incorporated into Sprite and OK Cola commercials: every subjectivity, or so it may seem, has been swallowed up by the gluttons of Madison Avenue (Frank 1996, 1997a, 1997b).

Part III. The Discourse of Subculture, Plain for All to See

We burrow and borrow and barrow (or dump) our trash and treasures in an endless ballet of making and unmaking and remaking. The speed of this process is now such that a child can see it. (McLuhan and Nevitt 1972:104-5)

The patterned quality of youth subculture (innovate style and music → obtain a following → become commodified and typecast) forms a discourse of subculture, one that is recognized by academics and youths alike. That such a discourse is identifiable over several decades, however, does not mean that it goes unchanged or unchallenged. As a social form it undergoes change in its own right, but also because it has become the discursive object of the mass media. In particular, ‘subculture’ has been in many ways incorporated as a set trope of the culture industries which retail entertainment, clothing, and other commodities. Many observers-- academics, journalists, and culture industrialists-- fail to recognize that hegemonic appropriation of the discourse of subculture has had impacts for the people in subcultures.

Observers may fall into a classic pitfall, wherein they typecast subcultures. Any number of scholars are guilty of detailing the patterned quality of the discourse of subculture, trapping subcultures in a kind of synchronic Othering. One example should suffice:

Nowhere is the rapidly cyclical nature of rock-and-roll history more evident than in the series of events surrounding punk rock. Punk broke all the rolls and declared war on all previously existing musical trends and rules of social behaviour. Rebelling against established musical trends and social mores, punk quickly became a tradition in itself-- a movement with highly predictable stylistic elements. By 1981, just six years after the formation of the Sex Pistols, a new generation of performers had already begun to assert an identity distinct from the established punk style...Here we come full circle in the evolution of rock-and-roll as seen through the lens of punk. Emerging as the antithesis of the conservative musical climate of the 1970s, punk was quickly absorbed and exploited by the very elements against which it rebelled. Undoubtedly a new generation of performers will soon find an aesthetic and philosophical means of rebelling against the now commercial state of rock, just as punks did in [the 1970s]. (Henry 1989:115,116)

Henry, like so many other commentators, repeats serious errors in subcultural studies: (1) she conflates well-known musicians with the subcultures that listen to them; (2) rather than engage punk on its own terms she reduces punk to a type of youth subculture and little more; (3) she assumes that the ‘cyclical nature of rock-and-roll’ will continue to cycle, without considering the cultural effects of its repeated rotations. Many witnesses fail to see the dialectical motion of the discourse of subculture.

Indeed, commodification and trivialization of subcultural style is becoming ever more rapid and, at the turn of the millenium, subcultures are losing certain powers of speech. Part of what has become the hegemonic discourse of subculture is a misrepresentative depolitization of subcultures; the notion that subcultures were and are little more than hairstyles, quaint slang, and pop songs. In the prism of nostalgia, the politics and ideologies of subcultures are often stripped from them.

For today’s subcultural practitioners what does it mean when subcultures of the previous decades are encapsulated in commercials and nostalgia? Punks, mods, hippies, break dancers, 1970s stoners: all seem relegated to cages in the zoo of history, viewed and laughed at from the smug security of a television monitor. (The sign says, ‘Please do not taunt the historical subcultures’, but who listens?) Today’s subcultural denizens are forced to recognize that yesterday’s subcultures can quite easily be repackaged, made spokeswomen for the new Volkswagen.

One danger industrial pop culture poses to subsequent generations of dissident youth subcultures is that these youths may mistake style as the totality of prior dissent. Commercial culture deprives subcultures of a voice when it succeeds in linking subcultural style to its own products, when it nostalgizes and trivializes historic subcultures, and when it reduces a subculture to just another consumer preference. People within subcultures, for their part, capitulate when they equate commodified style with cooptation, when they believe that grunge, or punk, or break-dancing, is just another way of choosing Pepsi over Coke, when they believe that the entirety of subculture is shallow or stolen.

Dissident youth subculture is normal and expected, even unwittingly hegemonic. Where long hair and denim once threatened the mainstream, it has become mainstream and so has the very idea of subculture. Not only are deviant styles normalized, but subcultural presence is now taken for granted: the fact of subcultures is accepted and anticipated. Subcultures may even serve a useful function for capitalism, by making stylistic innovations that can then become vehicles for new sales. Subcultures became, by the 1970s, if not earlier, a part of everyday life, another category of people in the goings-on of society-- part of the landscape, part of daily life, part of hegemonic normality.

But this fact did not go unnoticed by many in the subcultural world.

Part IV. Long Live Punk: New Ways of Being Subcultural

Looking back at the 1980s one has to ask whether punk really died at all. Perhaps the death of punk symbolically transpired with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in England (1979) and Ronald Reagan in American (1980). The Sex Pistols broke up (1978), Sid Vicious died (1979), and--most damningly--too many teeny-boppers were affecting a safe, suburban version of ‘punk’. For many people, spiked hair and dog collars had become a joke, the domain of soda pop ads and television dramas. But did punk disappear with the utter sell-out of its foremost corporate spokesband, the Sex Pistols? Did punk vanish when pink mohawks could be found only on pubescent heads at the shopping mall? If the spectacular collapse of punk was also the collapse of spectacular subcultures, what remained after the inferno? What crawled from the wreckage? In what ways can young people express their unease with the modern structure of feeling? A new kind of punk has been answering these questions.

After shedding its dog collars and Union Jacks, punk came to be: (1) an anti-modern articulation, and (2) a way of being subcultural while addressing the discursive problems of subcultures. In fact, these two courses prove to be one path. That is, the problems of contemporary punk subcultures, after the ‘death’ of classical subcultures, prove to be intimate with the characteristics of recent modernity. Punk, then, is a position from which to articulate an ideological position without accruing the film of mainstream attention.Contemporary punk subcultures, may therefore choose to avoid spectacle-based interaction with dominant culture. Gone too is the dream of toppling the status quo in subcultural revolution. The culture industry not only proved louder than any subcultural challenge, it was a skilled predator on the prowl for fresh young subcultures. The power to directly confront dominant society was lost also with the increasing speed with which the commodification of deviant styles is achieved. It may be only a matter of months between stylistic innovation and its autonomous language of outsiderness, and its re-presentation in commercials and shopping malls.

Even the un-style of 1990s grunge (an old pair of jeans and a flannel shirt) was converted to the religion of the consumer; baptized and born-again as celebrations of corporate-capitalism. With such history in mind, new social movements such as punk attempt to forego style, shared music, and even names for themselves, for fear of being coopted by the market democracy. Tom Frank, speaking at a convention of zinesters addressed precisely this aspect of the structure of feeling in the 1990s:

The real thing to do is get some content. If you don’t want to be coopted, if you don’t want to be ripped off, there’s only one thing that’s ever going to prevent it and that’s politics. National politics, politics of the workplace, but most importantly politics of culture. Which means getting a clue about what the Culture Trust does and why, and saying what needs to be said about it. As culture is becoming the central pillar of our national economy, the politics of culture are becoming ever more central to the way our lives are played out. Realize that what the Culture Trust is doing is the greatest obscenity, the most arrogant reworking of people’s lives to come down the pike in a hundred years. Be clear from the start: what we’re doing isn’t a subculture; it’s an adversarial culture. (Frank 1996)

To a certain extent, punk means post-punk-- a nameless, covert subculture reformed after punk. To recap: early punk was, in part, simulated ‘anarchy;’ the performance of an unruly mob. So long as it could convince or alarm straight people, it achieved the enactment. For its play to work, punk needed a perplexed and frightened ‘mainstream’ off which to bounce. But when the mainstream proved that it needed punk, punk’s equation was reversed: its negativity became positively commercial. As mainstream style diversified, and as deviant styles were normalized, punk had less to act against. Punk had gambled all its chips on public outcry, and when it could no longer captivate an audience, it was wiped clean. Post-punk, or contemporary punk, has foregone these performances of anarchy and is now almost synonymous with the practice of anarchism.

Long after the ‘death’ of classical punk, post-punk and/or punk subcultures coalesce around praxis. For contemporary punks subcultural memberships, authenticity, and prestige are transacted through action internal to the subculture.

Greil Marcus’ idea of punk’s greatness is that the Sex Pistols could tell Bill Grundy to ‘fuck off’ on television. The real greatness of punk is that it can develop an entire subculture that would tell Bill Grundy and safe, boring television culture as a whole to fuck off directly, establishing a parallel social reality to that of boring consumerism (Van Dorston 1990)

Stripped nude, ideologies developed in the early years of punk continue to provide frameworks for meaningful subculture. Against the threatening purview of mass media and its capacity to usurp and commodify style, punk subcultures steer away from symbolic encounters with the System and create a basis in experience.

Punks, in my work among the anarchist-punks of Seattle, don’t call themselves punks. Instead they obliquely refer to the scene in which they ‘hang out’. They deny that they have rules, and claim that they are socially and ideologically porous. After three decades, here is what has become of many of the CCCS’ spectacular subcultures. And yet, in their stead, vibrant, living subcultures remain, with sets of regulations, norms, and their own ideological turfs. Seattle’s anarchist punks, for example, disavow an orthodox name, costume, or music; yet in many ways they continue to leave, or perhaps squat, within the classical structure of subculture. Although today’s punks refuse to pay the spectacular rent, they find that a new breed of subculture offers them ideological shelter and warmth.

From whence did these latter-day punks come? In contemporary America, the relentless commodification of subcultures has brought about a crisis in the act of subcultural signification. Punk is today, in part, a careful articulation in response to the hyper-inflationary market for subcultural codes and meanings, an evasion of subcultural commodification, and a protest against prefabricated culture; and punk is a subculture that resists the hegemonic discourse of subculture. The public cooptation of punk has led some punks to disclaim early punk, while preserving its more political features. Having been forced, as it were, out of a costume and music-based clique, punk is evolving into one of the most powerful political forces in North America and Europe, making its presence felt in the Battle of Seattle (1999), Quebec City (2001), EarthFirst!, Reclaim the Streets, and in variety of anti-corporate movements.

Like the spectacular subcultures so aptly described by the CCCS in the 1970s, current punks are partly in pursuit of an authentic existence. However, now that stylistic authenticity has been problematized by the ‘conquest of cool’ (Frank 1997a), punks have found that the ultimate authenticity lies in political action. Where subcultures were once a steady source of freshly marketable styles for corporations, they now present corporations with a formidable opponent. Punk marks a terrain in which people steadfastly challenge urban sprawl, war, vivisection, deforestation racism, the exploitation of the Third World, and many other manifestations of corporate-capitalism. The threatening pose has been replaced with the actual threat.

Perhaps that is one of the great secrets of subcultural history: punk faked its own death. Gone was the hair, gone was the boutique clothing, gone was negative rebellion (whatever they do, we’ll do the opposite). Gone was the name. Maybe it had to die, so as to collect its own life insurance. When punk was pronounced dead it bequeathed to its successors--itself-- a new subcultural discourse. The do-it-yourself culture had spawned independent record labels, speciality record stores, and music venues: in these places culture could be produced with less capitalism, more autonomy, and more anonymity. Punk faked its own death so well that everyone believed it. Many people who were still, in essence, punk did not know that they were inhabiting kinds of punk subjectivity. Even today, many people engaged in what might be called punk think of punk only in terms of its classical archetype. Punk can be hidden even to itself.

Punk had to die so that it could live. By slipping free of its orthodoxies-- its costumes, musical regulations, behaviours, and thoughts-- punk embodied the anarchism it aspired to. Decentralized, anti-hierarchical, mobile, and invisible, punk has become a loose assemblage of guerilla militias. It cannot be owned; it cannot be sold. It upholds the principles of anarchism, yet has no ideology. It is called punk, yet it has no name.

#Punk #Subculture #Post-subculture #Dylan Clark #Punk is Dead #Long live punk #David Muggleton #Hebdige #Politics #Theory

21 notes · View notes

messiahtyql924 · 3 years

Text

South East Asia Flags Totally free Vector Receive A couple of,448 No cost Vector For Industrial Use Structure

It's two largest cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city, differ from each other in many ways. The word “Allah Akbar” is written on the green and red border on the prime of the white bar. List of African international locations with African languages, nationalities and African flags. Useful list of European nations with European languages, nationalities and European flags.

In many of depicted scenes, 5 plain flags are shown, each in one of the cardinal instructions' colors - green, red, white, black and yellow, similar to east, south, west, north and center, respectively .

Philadelphia became the primary county government in the us to lift the transgender pride flag in 2015.

Korea is split between an authoritarian-controlled North Korea and a capitalist South Korea.

The continent has forty eight impartial sovereign states and few dependent territories.

Of these codes, ninety eight.2 percent were green, which means practically a million folks had yellow or red codes. But the phrase was originally a battlecry for Texan independence. A Trump supporter parades a Confederate flag at the US Capitol.Of the assorted flags paraded around the seat of the US legislative department, probably the most incendiary was a battle pennant from the Confederate army. Widely appropriated by white supremacists as a hate symbol, the “Southern Cross” never has been paraded publicly inside the Capitol earlier than, historians level out.

Asian Flags

A citizen named Zeng Liansong spent several days in his attic, brainstorming ideas and designs for a brand new flag to display his patriotic support for the country. Eventually, on a July night, he gained inspiration from staring into the night sky and counting the stars. Although the united states flag does not embrace any spiritual symbols, several states have non secular imagery on their flags. For occasion, the state flag of New Mexico includes a red solar with its rays extending outward, representing the spiritual history of the Zia Pueblo. Some U.S. states, together with Alabama and Florida, proceed to feature variations of the St. Andrew’s cross.

What are the different Asian flags?

Asia (20 countries / 71 pieces)Japan (6)

Korea (7)

China (10)

North Korea (2)

Philippines (5)

Indonesia (5)

Sri Lanka (1)

Bangladesh (2)

For each selected flag, name the country whose name begins with A. For every chosen flag, name the nation whose name begins with C. For every selected flag, name the nation whose name starts with I.

This is an instance of how the individuals who identify as LGBTQIA+ have been linked to these criminal acts. The pink triangle is used by individuals in the community as a reclamation of a oppressive image, and now serves for some as a a homosexual satisfaction and homosexual rights symbol. In 1970, a lowercase lambda was chosen by Tom Doerr as the image of the New York chapter of the Gay Activists Alliance.

The Lookout: A Model New Spoken Word Movie, Aapi Books To Read And An Upcoming, History

The battle took place from dawn to sunset in 680, again within the first millennium, and resulted within the demise of Husayn ibn Ali and his household. He was the grandson of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and an necessary figure in Islam, the faith practiced by approximately 90% of Bangladeshis. It’s mostly believed that the purple circle near the center of the Bangladesh flag indicates the sun rising over Bangladesh.

The small quantity of precipitation that happens typically comes in the form of hailstorms combined with wind. There are 195 international locations on the planet, all with their own particular person flags that symbolize their historical past, values, and culture. But although these sound like very private qualities, there are dozens of nations out there with flags that look extremely alike. In current sports activities matches including the World Cup Soccer tournaments in 2008, for example, a few Japanese supporters raised the Rising Sun flags, alongside Hinomaru, to cheer the Japanese group. I assume that they did this as a result of their ignorance of contemporary Japanese historical past with no specific political agenda or intention to offend others.

What are the 48 Asian countries?

Countries in Asia:#CountrySubregion45CyprusWestern Asia46BhutanSouthern Asia47MaldivesSouthern Asia48BruneiSouth-Eastern Asia44 more rows

youtube

Plans and development began in the a long time earlier than 1994, when the construction of the dam started. The major functions of the dam are to regulate the large flooding along the Yangtze, produce hydroelectric energy, and increase shipping capacity along the river. An estuary is a large space at the mouth of a river where it meets the ocean.

Labrys Lesbian Satisfaction Flag Meaning

The finish got here after atomic bombs, one each, have been dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The phrases of Japan’s surrender in 1945 stipulated that Japan had to give up claims on the Russian islands, Korea, Taiwan, China, and all the opposite locations that they'd previously managed. Japan additionally misplaced the Kurile Islands—off its northern shores—to the Soviet Union. Japan provided Russia an enormous amount of cash for them however the matter remains unresolved. Japan additionally agreed not to have a army for offensive purposes. Japan was decimated throughout World War II, its infrastructure and economy destroyed.

1 note · View note

margdarsanme · 4 years

Text

NCERT Class 12 Political Science (India) Chapter 3 Politics of Planned Development

NCERT Class 12 Political Science Solutions (India Since Independence)

Chapter 3 Politics of Planned Development

TEXTBOOK QUESTIONS SOLVED : Q 1. Which of these statements about the Bombay Plan is incorrect? (a) It was a blueprint for India’s economic future. (b) It supported state-ownership of industry. (c) It was made by some leading industrialists. (d) It supported strongly the idea of planning.

Answer: (a) It was a blueprint for India’s economic future. Q 2. Which of the following ideas did not form part of the early phase of India’s development policy? (a) Planning (b) Liberalisation (c) Cooperative farming (d) Self sufficiency

Answer: (b) Liberalisation. Q 3. The idea of planning in India was drawn from (a) The Bombay plan (b) Experiences of the Soviet bloc countries (c) Gandhian vision of society (d) Demand by peasant organisations (i) (b) and (d) only (ii) (d) and (c) only (iii) (a) and (b) only (iv) All the above

Answer: (iv) All of the above. Q 4. Match the following:

Answer: (a)-(iii), (b)-(i), (c)-(ii), (d)-(iv) Q 5. What were the major differences in the approach towards development at the time of Independence? Has the debate been resolved?

Answer. At the time of independence, development was about becoming more like the industrialised countries of the West, to be involved with the break down of traditional social structure as well as rise of capitalism and liberalism. 1. Modernisation referred to growth, material progress and scientific rationality. 2. India had two models of modern development at the time of independence into considerations to be adopted i.e. the liberal capitalist model like Europe and the US and the socialist model like the USSR. 3. A debate had been occurred regarding adoption of model of development as communists, socialists and Pt. J.L. Nehru supported the socialist model to reflect a broad consensus to be developed during national movement. 4. Above mentioned intentions cleared that the government made the priority to poverty alleviation alongwith social and economic redistribution. 5. At the same time, these leaders differed and debated: (a) Industrialisation should be the preferred path or (b) Agricultural development should take place or (c) Rural poverty should be alleviated. Q 6. What was the major thrust of the First Five Year Plan? In which ways did the Second Plan differ from the first one?

Answer: The First Five Year Plan was commenced in 1951 to be drafted by Young Economist K.N. Roy with the emphasis on poverty alleviation. Its main thrusts were as follows: 1. To invest in dams and irrigation to improve agricultural sector with the urgent attention. 2. Huge allocations were made for large scale projects like Bhakra-Nangal Dam. 3. It focused on land reforms for the development in rural areas. 4. It aimed to increase level of National Income. The first five year plan differed from the second five year plan: (a) The Second FiveYear Planstressed on heavy industrialisation. (b) Second Five Year Plan wanted to bring quick structural transformation in all possible directions in place of slow and steady growth like First Five Year Plan. Q 7. What was the Green Revolution? Mention two positive and two negative consequences of the Green Revolution.

Answer: Green Revolution was introduced to bring about revolutionary changes in agriculture especially in foodgrains like wheat and rice to increase production through high yielding varieties of seeds, fertilisers and scientific irrigation— 1. The government offered high yielding varieties of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and better irrigation facilities at subsidised prices to farmers. 2. The government fixed the prices also to purchase the produce of farmers at a given price.

Positive Consequences: (i) In many parts, the stark contrast between the poor peasantry and the landlords produced conditions favourable for left wing organisations to organise the poor peasants. (ii) It resulted in the rise of what is called the ‘Middle peasant sections’ who were farmers with medium size holdings who benefitted from the changes and soon emerged politically influential in many parts of country.

Negative Consequences: (i) This created a stark contrast between the poor peasantry and the landlords. (ii) It delivered only a moderate agricultural growth i.e. a rise in rice and wheat production by raising availability of foodgrains in country. On the other hand it increased polarisation between the classes and regions like Northern States i. e. Punjab, Haryana, West-UP become agriculturally rich but others remained backward. Q 8. State the main arguments in the debate that ensued between industrialisation and agricultural development at the time of the Second Five Year Plan.

Answer: At the time of Second Five Year Plan, some controversial issues rose in reference of relevancy of agriculture over industry. 1. Second Five Year Plan emphasised on industry in place of agriculture or rural India. 2. J.C. Kumarappa, a Gandhian Economist proposed an alternative blueprint to emphasise on rural industrialisation. 3. Bharatiya Lok Dal leader, Chaudhary Charan Singh also commented that the planning leading to creation of prosperity in Urban and industrial sections at the cost of rural welfare. Others debated that without an increase in industrial sector poverty could not be alleviated: (i) India planning did not have an agrarian strategy to boost the production of food grains. (ii) It also proposed programmes of community development and spent large sums on irrigation project and failure was not that of policy but of its non¬implementation because of the politics of land owning classes. (in) Besides, they also argued that every if the government had spent more money on agriculture it would not have solved the massive problem of rural poverty. Q 9. “Indian policy makers made a mistake by emphasising the role of state in the economy. India could have developed much better if private sector was allowed a free play right from the beginning”. Give arguments for or against this proposition.

Answer: No, the above statement is not perfectly true because state’s intervention was mandatory to regulate country’s economy after independence immediately. Indian did not follow either capitalist model of development or socialist model completely. Instead she adopted the model of‘mixed economy’ to be criticised from the right and the left: (i) Private sector lacked enough space and stimulus to grow. (ii) Licensing and permits for investment in private sector created hurdles for private capital accumulation. (iii) The state control beyond the limits led to inefficiency and corruption. State control was emphasised: 1. State helped the private sector to make profits by intervening only in those areas where the private sector was not prepared to go. 2. Instead of helping the poor, the states intervention ended up creating a new class that enjoyed the privileges of higher salaries without much account-ability. Q 10. Read the following passage: “In the early years of Independence, two contradictory tendencies were already well advanced inside the Congress Party. On the one hand, the national party executive endorsed socialist principles of state ownership, regulation and control over key sectors of the economy in order to improve productivity and at the same time curb economic concentration. On the other hand, the national Congress government pursued liberal economic policies and incentives to private investment that was justified in terms of the sold criterion of achieving maximum increase in production”. —Francine Frankel (a) What is the contradiction that the author is talking about? What would be the political implications of a contradiction like this? (b) If the author is correct, why is it that the Congress was pursuing this policy? Was it related to the nature of the opposition parties? (c) Was there also a contradiction between the central leadership of the Congress party and its state level leaders?

Answer: (a) The author is talking about contradiction regarding adoption of development models either socialist or capitalist. Political implications of this contradiction may result the differences among party members itself and government can issue licensing and permits in more complicated manner. (b) Congress was pursuing this policy as a sole criterion of achieving maximum increased in production. Yes, it was related to the nature of opposition parties to be pursued liberal economic policies and incentives to private investment. (c) No, there was not a contradiction between the central leadership of the Congress Party and its state level leaders because state emphasised on states’ ownership, regulation and control over key sectors improve productivity whereas control leadership pursued liberal economic policies and incentives to private investment.

Very Short Answer Type Questions [ 1 Mark]

Q 1. Who was the founder of Indian Statistical Institute?

Answer: P.C. Mahalanobis to initiate Second Five Year Plan to support industrialisation and positive role of public sector. Q 2. What is ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in politics?

Answer: These refer to position of concerned party in the group. The left signifies to favour the poor and downtrodden section of society through government politics whereas the ‘Right’ favours free economy in the market not to be intervened unnecessarily by the government. Q 3. What is ‘Development’?

Answer: Development refers to the process of improving living standard of country people and economic level in reference of industrialisation and modernisation to be judged by the improvements in the quality of life. Q 4. Mention the primary responsibilities of India immediately after independence.

Answer: 1. Development of agriculture 2. Poverty alleviation of rural and urban level both. 3. Social and economic redistribution. Q 5. Why did India adopt planning?

Answer: Because: 1. To bring a socio-economic changes. 2. It was to provide a controlled and faster growth rate. 3. To resolve contradictions between societies. Q 6. What is composition of Planning Commission of India?

Answer: 1. It consists Prime Minister as its Chairman. 2. Some ministers or incharges of economic portfolios. 3. The members of Planning Commission have a high public image alongwith an administrative and educational background. Q 7. Mention the various interests associated with Orissa Reserved Iron Resource.

Answer: The reserved iron resource of Orissa is an important investment destination due to rise a global demand of Iron. The state government signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with both international and domestic steel makers in order to bring in capital investment and employment opportunities. Q 8. What are the key conflicts associated with Orissa reserved Iron Resources?

Answer: 1. These iron resources lie in some most underdeveloped and predominant tribal districts. 2. Tribal population feared that the setting up of industries would mean displacement from their name and livelihood. 3. The environmentalist feared to be polluted the environment due to mining and industrial activities. Q 9. What was Bombay Plan?

Answer: Bombay Plan was drafted in 1944 in the want of states to take major initiatives in industrial and other economic investment through a joint proposal of a section of the big industrialist for setting up a “Planned Economy”. Q 10. What are the objectives of planning?

Answer: 1. To make economy self reliant and self generating through planned strategies. 2. To activate distributive justice among various sectors of economy.

Very Short Answer Type Questions [2 Marks)

Q 1. Differentiate between the main objectives of the First and Second Five Year Plans.

Answer: 1. Objectives of First Five Year Plan: (a) It focused on land reforms for the development in rural areas. (b) It aimed to increase level of National Income. 2. The First Five Year Plan differed from the Second Five Year Plan: (a) The second five year plan stressed on heavy industrialisation. (b) Second five year plan wanted to bring quick structural transformations in all possible directions in place of slow and steady growth like first five year plan. Q 2. Differentiate between the capitalist and socialist models of development.

Answer: The capitalist model of development refers to the strategies in which the private sectors are prioritised in place of social welfare whereas socialist model of development aims at public sector and planning to establish egalitarian society. Q 3. What is meant by decentralized planning?

Answer: Decentralized planning is designed to involve the peoples through voluntary citizens organisation in making plans at the panchayats, blocs and districts level. Its example is the ‘Kerala Model’. Q 4. Highlight the two areas on which the First Five Year Plan focused.

Answer: The first five year plan was commenced in 1951 to be drafted by young economist K.N. Raj with the emphasis on poverty alleviation. Its main thrusts were as follows: 1. To invest in dams and irrigation to improve agricultural sector with the urgent attention. 2. Huge allocations were made for large scale projects like Bhakra-Nangal Dam. Q 5. Which are the two models of development? Which model of development was adopted by India?

Answer: Two models of development are the capitalist and socialist models of development, India adopted the elements from both these models together to be known as “Mixed Economy”. Q 6. What were the fears of tribal population of Orissa and environmentalist about setting up industries in tribal areas?

Answer: 1. These iron resources lie in some most underdeveloped and predominant tribal districts. 2. Tribal population feared that the setting up of industries would mean displacement from their home and livelihood. 3. The environmentalists feared to be polluted the environment due to mining and industrial activities. Q 7. What is the meaning and importance of economic planning in Indian context?

Answer: Economic planning in India refers do a systematic regulation of economic activities by government to reduce the wastage of time and resources: 1. Economic planning helps to achieve national goals in a continuous process of development. 2. It is a rational process to associate with the future needs and goals to evaluate alternate proposals also. Q 8. What was Kerala Model?

Answer: Kerala model is an example of decentralised planning at the state level: 1. It is the initiative taken by Kerala for planning and development strategies. 2. It targeted on education, health, land reform, effective food distribution and poverty alleviation. 3. Kerala model initiated to implement Panchayati Raj, blocs and district level of government. Q 9. Which state was prone to food crisis in the early years of independence?

Answer: Bihar was prone to food crisis in the early years of independence 1. It was due to a near famine situation. 2. The food shortage was very much acute in all districts of Bihar. 3. Food shortage led to acute and widespread malnutrition. 4. The zoning policies of government prohibited trade of food across states, which reduced availability of food in Bihar. Q 10. Who was J.C. Kumarappa?

Answer: 1. J.C. Kumarappa was originally known as J.C. Cornelius. 2. He was an economist and chartered accountant. 3. He was the follower of Mahatma Gandhi to apply Gandhian Principles of Economic Policies. 4. He was the author of ‘Economy of Permanence’ and a member of planning commission. Q 11. What is Plan Holiday?

Answer: 1. Plan Holidays is a gap between two five years plan, i.e. 1979-1980 and 1990-92. 2. It was a stop gap arrangements by the provisions of annual plans. 3. Plan holidays took place due to change in government to be locked in development-goals and priorities etc. 4. Those five year plans were supposed to be reviewed and changed by the succeeding government. Q 12. What results were revealed by Planned Economy?

Answer: 1. Big industrialists continued to benefit. 2. The land owning classes became politically powerful. 3. Land reforms could not take place effectively. 4. The early initiatives for planned development were realising the goals of economic development. Q 13. Which methods were used to implement the development process in a mixed economy?

Answer: 1. Planning and governmental regulation to control economy. 2. Licensing, subsidies, progressive taxing, price control and reforfhs etc. were also implemented. 3. To make a significant role of public sector. 4. To ensure a political democracy. Q 14. What is ‘Mixed Economy’?

Answer: Mixed economy is an economy to co-exist private and public sector both: 1. Both the sectors work within invisible lands of market forces and visible lands of planning set by government. 2. ‘State own’ means of production to aim social welfare and ‘private own’ means of production to be regulated by states. Q 15. How did Indian lay down the foundation of future economic growth?

Answer: 1. Some of the largest developmental projects in India’s history were undertaken during this period to include mega dams like Bhakra- Nangal and Hirakud for irrigation and power generation. 2. Heavy industries were started in the public sector like steel plants, oil refineries, manufacturing units and defence production etc. 3. Infrastructure and communication were also improved.

Short Answer Type Questions [4 Marks]

Q 1. Explain any two merits and two demerits each of the Green Revolution.

Answer:

Two Merits of the Green Revolution: (i) The Green Revolution ensured food sufficiency in the country. In many parts, the stark contrast between the poor peasantry and the landlords produced conditions favourable for left wing organisations to organise the poor peasants. (ii) The Green Revolution resulted in the rise of middle peasant sections. These were farmers with medium size holding, who benefited from the changes and soon emerged politically influential in many parts of the country.

Two Demerits of the Green Revolution: (i) The Green Revolution delivered only moderate agricultural growth and raised the availability of food in the country but also increased polarisation between classes and regions. (ii) Some regions like Punjab, Haryana and Western UP became agriculturally prosperous while others remained backward. Q 2. List any two merits and two demerits of Green Revolution. Or What is Green Revolution? Highlight any two of its effects?

Answer: Green Revolution was introduced to bring about revolutionary changes in agriculture especially in foodgrains like wheat and Rice to increase production: 1. Production was increased by the use of high yielding varieties of seeds. 2. Scientific irrigation and fertilisers were also applied.

Merits of Green Revolution: (а) The government offered various irrigational facilities at a subsidised prices. (б) It resulted in the rise of ‘Middle Peasant Section’ who soon emerged politically influential.

Demerits of Green Revolution: (a) This created a stark contrast between the poor peasantry and the landlords. (b) It increased polarisation between the classes and regions like northern states i.e. Punjab, Haryana, West UP, became agriculturally rich but other remained backward. Q 3. How was Planning Commission of India : set up? Mention its scope of work.

Answer:

Planning Commission was set up as: 1. It consists Prime Minister as its chairman. 2. Some ministers or incharges of economic portfolios. 3.The members of planning commission have a high public image alongwith an administrative and educational background.

Its scope of work: 1. To bring socio-economic change. 2. It was to provide a controlled and faster growth rate. 3. To resolve contradictions between societies. Q 4. Describe the main functions of planning commission of India.

Answer: Planning commission was set up in 1950 by a cabinet resolution as an extra constitutional body: 1. It look advisory in nature but it is very powerful to be known as economic cabinet of country. 2. Planning commission prepares a document to have plan for income and expenditure for five year plans. 3. Planning commission prepares strategies to provide adequate means of livelihood for every man and woman. 4. It also ensures not to concentrate wealth and means of production into few hands only. Q 5. What was the protest against Posco plants in Orissa?

Answer: In Orissa, Posco is the state plant. The government of Orissa signed a Memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Korean Company for enhancement of the plant. But this displaced many workers working in the plant. Hence, the workers demonstrated outside Korean Company’s office to cancel the memorandum. This demonstration was organised by Rashtriya Yuva Sanghtan and Navmirmana Samithi. Q 6. Which part of constitution helps the planning commission to ensure socio¬economic justice?

Answer. The directive principles of state policy ensure the welfare through securing and protecting them from any kind of social, economic and politieal industries: 1. Men and women equally have the right to adequate means of livelihood. 2. Prevent concentration and means of production into the few hands only. 3. Equal distribution of resources. Q 7. What do you know about land reforms in India during planning period?

Answer: 1. Zamindari system was abolished to release land from big landlord who were least interested in agriculture. 2. Lands were consolidated to bring small pieces together to increase the farm size. Drawbacks: 1. Despite a ‘ceiling’, people with excess land managed to violate the laws. 2. The tenants, who worked on someoneelse’s land were given greater legal security which rarely implemented. 3. Landowners were very powerful and wielded considerable political influence. Q 8. What is meant by White Revolution in Gujarat?

Answer: The White Revolution in Gujarat was started by ‘Varghese Kurien’ known as milkman of India to launch Gujarat Cooperative Milk and Marketing Federation Ltd., which further launched ‘AmuF. Amul is a dairy cooperative movement based in ‘Anand’ town of Gujarat to become a unique appropriate model for rural development and poverty alleviation.

Passage Based Questions [5 Marks]

1. Read the passage given below carefully and answer the questions: It was in Bihar that the food-crisis was most acutely felt as the state faced a near-famine situation. The food shortage was significant in all districts of Bihar, with 9 districts producing less than half of their normal output. Five of these districts, in fact, produced less than one- third of what they produced normally. Food deprivation subsequently led to acute and widespread malnutrition. It was estimated that the calorie intake dropped from 2200 per capital per day to as low as 1200 in many regions of the state (as against the requirement of2450 per day for the average person.). Death rate in Bihar in 1987 was 34% higher than the number of deaths that occurred in the following year. Food prices also hit a high in Bihar during the year, even when comp states. For wheat and rice the prices in the state were twice or more than their prices in more prosperous Punjab. The government had ‘honing” policies that prohibited tra.de of food across states* tins reduced the availability of food in Bihar dramatically. In situations such as this, the poorest sections of the so. . most.

Questions 1. What is food-crisis? 2. What were the reasons of food crisis in Bihar? 3. What do you understand by ‘Zoning’ policies of government?

Answer: 1. When any state or country face the problem of insufficiency of food in the region or food shortage is known as food crisis. 2. (i) Famine situation occurred there. (ii) Food prices also hit a high in Bihar than other states. (iii) Government policies of‘Zoning1 also caused it. 3. Zoning policies of government prohibit trade of food across the states which reduced the availability of food in Bihar. 2.Read the passage given below carefully and answer the questions: Decentralized Planning: It is not necessary that all planning always lias to be centralised; nor is it that planning is only about big industries and large projects. The ‘Kerala modle’ is the name given to the path of planning and development charted by the Stats of Kerala .There has been a focus model on education, health, land refoiin, effective food distribution, and poverty alleviation. Despite low per capita incomes, and a relatively weak industrial base, Kerala achieved nearly total literacy,long life expectency ,low infant and female mortality, low birth .rates and Mgb access to medical care. Between 1987 and 1991, the government launched the New Democratic Initiative which involved campaigns for development (including total literacy especially in science and environment) designed to involve people directly in development activities through voluntary citizens’ organisations. The State has also taken initiative to involve people in making plans at the Panchavat, block and district level.

Questions 1. What is meant by decentralisation? 2. Which state is the best example for this? 3. Which methods were used by state of Kerala for decentralisation?

Answer: 1. Decentralisation shares the powers even among the states and its subordinate units to run the administration in efficient manner i.e. at the Panchayats, blocs and district level. 2. Kerala which is known as ‘Kerala Model’ also. 3. 1. Campaigning for development especially in Science and environment. 2. To involve people in making plans at Panchayat, blocs and district level.

Long Answer Type Questions [6 Marks]

Q 1. What was Green Revolution? Mention its any two positive and two negative consequences.

Answer: Green Revolution was introduced to bring about revolutionary changes in agriculture especially in foodgrains like wheat and rice to increase food production through high yielding varieties of seeds, fertilisers and scientific irrigation. Positive Consequences: 1. In many parts, the stark contrast between the poor peasantry and the landlords produced conditions favourable for left wing organisations to organise the poor peasants. It resulted in the rise of what is called the ‘Middle Peasant Sections’ who were farmers with medium size holdings who benefitted from the changes and soon emerged politically influential in many parts of country. Negative Consequences: (i) This created a stark contrast between the poor peasantry and the landlords. (ii) It delivered only a moderate agricultural growth i.e. a rise in rice and wheat production by raising availability of foodgrains in country. On the other hand it increased polarisation between the classes and regions like Northern States i. e. Punjab, Haryana, West-U.P. became agriculturally rich but others remained backward. Q 2. Explain the main arguments in the debate that ensued between industrialisation agricultural development at the time of second five year plan.

Answer: At the time of second five year plan, some controversial issues rose in reference of relevancy of agriculture over industry: 1. Second five year plan emphasised on industry in place of agriculture or rural India. 2. J.C. Kumarappa, a Gandhian Economist proposed an alternative blueprint to emphasise on rural industrialisation. 3. Bharatiya Lok Dal leader, Chaudhary Charan Singh also commented that the planning was leading to creation of prosperity in Urban and industrial sections at the cost of rural welfare. Others debated that without an increase in industrial sector poverty could not be alleviated: 1. India planning did not have agrarian strategy to boost the production of foodgrains. 2. It also proposed programme of community development and spent large sums on irrigation projects and failure was not that of policy but of its non-implementation because of the politics of land owning classes. 3. Besides they also argued that even if the government had spent more money on agriculture, it would not have solved the massive problems of rural poverty.

Picture/Map Based Questions [5 Marks]

A l. Study the picture given below and answer the questions that follow:

Questions 1. What message does the cartoon convey? 2. Name the person who is making efforts to balance both the sectors. 3. How was both these sectors balanced?

Answer: 1. Cartoon is trying to make balance between the private and public sector to maintain the growth of an economy adopted by India. 2. Pt. Jawahar Lai Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India. 3. Pt. Nehru made a balance between both the sectors by adopting the model of mixed economy to co-exist the private and public sector. 2. Study the picture given below and answer the questions that follow:

Questions 1. About which state the clipping is talking about? 2. What is food-crisis? 3. What were the main reasons for food- crisis? 4. Is India now sufficient in food production?

Answer: 1. Bihar 2. Food crisis is unavailability of sufficient food or food shortage. 3. (i) High prices of food items. (ii) Zoning policy of government. 4. Yes, due to Green Revolution foodgrain production has been increased upto maximum extent. B. On a political outline map of India locate and label the following and symbolise them as indicated:

Questions 1. The state prone to food crisis during independence days! 2. The state adopted decentralisation. 3. The state where people protested against POSCO plants. 4. The state where White Revolution took place.

Answer: 1. Bihar 2. Kerala 3. Orissa 4. Gujarat

from Blogger http://www.margdarsan.com/2020/08/ncert-class-12-political-science-india_94.html

#NCERT Class 12 Political Science

0 notes