Andrew O'Hehir: "I Was Just Following Orders"

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“I was just following orders”: Why are we so eager to obey authority, whether the boss, the TSA or the president? A new movie has some answers
By Andrew O'Hehir
Salon



All of us believe that we possess the strength and willpower to resist evil. Perhaps we do; who is to say? Most of us are not likely to face life-or-death situations out of Holocaust movies or “Star Trek” episodes. But a more important question – not to mention a more practical and ultimately far more disturbing one — is whether we will recognize evil when we encounter it, especially when it claims to be something else. As a former research subject wrote to Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1970, “Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority.”

Every time I take my shoes off at the airport, and permit my person and possessions to be invaded by intrusive technologies for unclear reasons – meekly submitting to authority in the name of getting on the damn plane – I think about Milgram. (I am not suggesting that the TSA is evil, exactly, although you couldn’t really call it good.) By the time he received that letter, Milgram had become one of the most famous and controversial figures in the social sciences. In the early ‘60s, he had crafted a notorious series of experiments that suggested that most people, most of the time, were willing to obey the instructions of an authority figure, even when they involved delivering electrical shocks to strangers as part of a patently ludicrous “teaching” exercise.

Various complaints have subsequently been aired about Milgram’s ethics and methodology; while the electrical shocks were fake, the distress of his research subjects was all too real. Unfortunately for the human species, his findings have been replicated many times and in many contexts, and are now generally regarded as valid. While his colleagues and students predicted that only a minuscule proportion of experimental subjects would deliver the full (if fictional) voltage, more than 60 percent of them pushed the final button as instructed. It isn’t that we lack empathy or a sense of morality; most people in the Milgram experiments felt terrible about administering the shocks, and quite a few began crying or laughing or otherwise behaving erratically. But they went ahead and did it anyway, because a guy in a white coat was telling them to. (I don’t know whether this is mostly hilarious or mostly horrifying, but one post-Milgram experiment involved having subjects deliver real electric shocks to a real puppy — and most people did that too!)

It may be impossible to exaggerate the historical and political ramifications of Milgram’s discoveries about humanity’s misplaced faith in authority, which would seem to shed light on everything from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib to the fact that we’ve apparently all agreed in 2012 that it’s OK for the president of the United States to kill whoever he wants to without providing a reason. (Milgram was inspired by the widely publicized trial of Nazi war criminal and Holocaust engineer Adolf Eichmann, a mild-mannered fellow who claimed to have no particular antipathy for Jews.) But on an intimate level these ideas can still prove shocking or unacceptable, as they do in “Compliance,” a nail-biting thriller from indie writer-director Craig Zobel that has been dividing, energizing and alienating audiences since its Sundance premiere earlier this year.

On one level “Compliance” dramatizes a Milgram-like scenario, but more importantly it acts out a psychological experiment of its own, right there in the theater. This film is not set in Nazi Germany or Iraq or Gotham City under the rule of a supervillain. It takes place in an unidentified American suburb or exurb, almost entirely inside a fast food restaurant whose employees are cajoled and coerced by an official-sounding voice on the telephone into imprisoning, humiliating, strip-searching and finally abusing one of their co-workers. As a fictional premise that may sound outrageous, but some readers will surely remember that there was a wave of such real-life cases in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Zobel is drawing primarily on the last and most notorious of these, an April 2004 episode at a McDonald’s in Mt. Washington, Ky., where a young female employee was detained for several hours against her will and subjected to escalating and improbable levels of degradation.

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William K. Tabb: The Crisis - A View from Occupied America

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The Crisis: A View from Occupied America
by William K. Tabb
The Monthly Review

The theme of the 2012 Left Forum, “Occupy the System—Confronting Global Capitalism,” calls for a historical imagination informed by a realistic sense of where we are. To occupy the system is first to be aware of the system as a system—a system of unequal privilege and control. It requires that we occupy the narrative of public debate, which is something the Occupy movement, to a remarkable degree, has been able to achieve. Even President Obama, who so far has followed the economic policies of his Wall Street-friendly advisers, has used campaign rhetoric taken from Occupy Wall Street. But this time around voters are hardly convinced that the “Change” Obama promised last election will happen through the existing system.

The breath of fresh air from Occupy and related activism challenges corporate power and capitalism. It rebukes the dominant political parties, which are dependent on the 1% for their funding and in turn represent them in Congress. As Gordon Lafer has said, “If the Republicans are cheerleaders for the 1 percent, most Democrats are quiet collaborators.”1 Both parties have accepted that the major problem facing the country is the deficit—which of course it is not. The project of class-coded austerity (complete with bad cop Republicans and good cop Democrats) is deemed unavoidable, both to pay for the mess and to continue enhancing the wealth and power of the 1%. Neither party wants to discuss what has happened to working people over the last three decades, a scenario which is likely to continue as incomes stagnate or fall for the vast majority of the 99% and wealth and power further concentrate at the top. This not just true for the 1%, but also for the one-tenth of 1% and even the one-one thousandth of the 1%—that is, those billionaires who decide who the viable candidates are and what economic policies Congress and the media should take seriously.

While this recognition is hardly new to Monthly Review readers, there is a sense among Americans, in numbers not seen for some time, that capitalism is losing (and, for many, has already lost) its legitimacy. There is also an understanding that the dominance by a small, corrupt, and exploitative elite is under challenge, as the upsurges from Cairo to Moscow witness. Around the world massive numbers are looking to a post-capitalist social structure based on participatory democracy and social control over the economy, and a displacement of the 1%—the elites and the ruling classes.

Whatever the Dow Jones stock average reads, the crisis for working people will continue for many years at an intense level of suffering and insecurity. Profitability and growth can pick up in the precincts of monopoly capital, while still leaving working people with less and less of the surplus they create. This is both a general aspect of capitalism and a specific trait of this period of rapid financialization that has become globalized alongside the concentration and centralization of transnationalized corporations. There is a growing awareness that the policies the 1% are imposing as their solution to the crisis will actually make things worse—even if the so-called recovery continues in the United States and can miraculously appear in Europe. The preferred policies of the ruling class prefigure a recovery that will allow a tightening of their control.

Some of the basic numbers have been presented in these pages by Michael Yates. The extreme class redistribution of the surplus cannot be overestimated. Between 2009 and 2011, 88 percent of national income growth went to corporate profits, while just 1 percent went to wages. In terms of personal income, in 2010 (the last year for which we have data) 93 percent of all income gains went to the top 1 percent of Americans. In terms of economic inequality, the CIA’s World Factbook puts the United States behind Cameroon and the Ivory Coast, but just ahead of Uganda.

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Johnny Barber: International Peace Day from Kabul, Afghanistan

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International Peace Day from Kabul, Afghanistan
by Johnny Barber
ZNet

...

Established in 1981, by the United Nations General Assembly, the International Day of Peace was to coincide with its opening session. The first Peace Day was observed on September 21st, 1982. In 1982 the Soviet Union was increasing its troop presence in Afghanistan and facing fierce fighting throughout the provinces.

Thirty years later Afghanistan is still at war. The opponents have changed, and the weaponry has changed. The War on Terror, Armored Humvees, IED’s, suicide bombers, night raids, smart bombs, and drones have all entered the American lexicon.

The constant through all these years is the suffering of the non-combatants. Just this week, a van was blown up by an IED in southern Helmand province, killing 9 women and 3 children. No group has claimed responsibility for the blast. A drone strike before dawn in Laghman Province killed 8 women gathering firewood and injured 8 more. I spoke with a father of six children in ParwanSa refugee camp. He has been an Internally Displaced Person for 11 years, living in a small mud-brick enclosure with a plastic, canvas, and cardboard roof. I asked if the government had offered any assistance for the coming winter. He said the government has done nothing; he could only count on God to take care of his family. Oct 7th will mark the 11th anniversary of America’s war in Afghanistan. 11 years and $550 billion dollars later, peace is still elusive.

The war has pushed the Taliban out of power, but the current government is full of the very same warlords that were carving up Afghanistan prior to the Taliban’s rise. These “representatives” have very little backing among the people, mainly because they have continued to line their pockets while their constituents suffer. The call for peace may fill their speeches, but to work for peace distracts from their income.

The International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) as well as the Afghan Army and Afghan Police force, often employing strong-arm tactics, struggle to bring a semblance of security to the countryside. Security in Kabul is tentative as well, with suicide bombings and armed attacks on the rise. On Sept 18th, a woman rammed a car full of explosives into a van containing 9 foreign workers, killing herself, all 9 foreigners, their Afghan translator, as well as passerby. While temporary security may be imposed with an iron fist, peace cannot be forced.

On Sept 19th, an Afghan holiday in the remembrance of the death of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a warlord turned “peace envoy” who was killed by a suicide bomber in his home, President Hamid Karzai called on Afghans to pursue peace. A generation that has known nothing but war has little faith in government calls for peace while the very same government loots the country. The government led peace initiative seems to have died with Rabbani a year ago.

The past week has been disastrous for Afghans, and points towards more mayhem in the future. While profits are still being generated for arms suppliers, reconstruction experts, and contractors, peace has not been generated for anyone. In America, peace is never spoken of outside the context of war or security. In Obama’s acceptance speech in Charlotte, he mentioned America’s “pursuit of peace” exactly once, shortly after getting cheers for claiming, “Osama bin Laden is dead.”

A partial list of American military involvement since 1982 includes Lebanon, Grenada, Chad, Libya, Honduras, Bolivia, Columbia, Peru, Philippines, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Haiti, Serbia, Afghanistan (currently, America’s longest war), Sudan, Iraq (again, after years of crippling sanctions that killed half a million children), and Libya (again). This is not an exhaustive list, it doesn’t include covert attacks, special operations, or America’s special relationship with Israel, which has rained down horror on Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli drones continue to kill people in Gaza on a nearly weekly basis. American drones are currently killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Syria and Iran loom on the horizon, with American threats of intervention and war ramping up. Death is a top American export.

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Glenn Greenwald: State department attacks CNN for doing basic journalism - Obama officials hide behind Ambassador Stevens' family to delegitimize reporting that reflects poorly on them

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State department attacks CNN for doing basic journalism: Obama officials hide behind Ambassador Stevens' family to delegitimize reporting that reflects poorly on them
by Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian

Three days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in Benghazi, Libya, CNN found a seven-page handwritten journal he had written. That journal, found on the floor of what CNN called "the largely unsecured consulate compound where he was fatally wounded", contained obviously newsworthy information: specifically that "in the months leading up to his death, the late ambassador worried about what he called the security threats in Benghazi and a rise in Islamic extremism". CNN also reported that Stevens "mentioned his name was on an al Qaeda hit list".

After finding the journal, CNN personnel did the only thing which any minimally competent journalist would and should do: they read it, identified the parts that were in the public interest, confirmed their authenticity with independent sources, and then reported those facts to the world. They also notified Stevens' family of what they had found.

In response to this reporting, State Department spokesman Philippe Reines issued a blistering, unusually aggressive attack on the news network. Denouncing CNN's conduct as "disgusting", Reines invoked Stevens' family to insist that CNN had done something unconscionable:

"What they're not owning up to is reading and transcribing Chris's diary well before bothering to tell the family or anyone else that they took it from the site of the attack. Or that when they finally did tell them, they completely ignored the wishes of the family, and ultimately broke their pledge made to them only hours after they witnessed the return to the United States of Chris's remains.

"Whose first instinct is to remove from a crime scene the diary of a man killed along with three other Americans serving our country, read it, transcribe it, email it around your newsroom for others to read, and only when their curiosity is fully satisfied thinks to call the family or notify the authorities?"

The answer to that question is: any journalist worthy of the name. CNN's first obligation is to disclose to the public information that is newsworthy, not conceal it. Had they not reported this information, that would have been an inexcusable breach of their obligation - then the word "disgusting" would have been appropriate. What they reported had nothing to do with Stevens' personal life and everything to do with his role as a government official; his family's "permission" was therefore irrelevant.

(At least a few Democratic Party loyalists have dutifully joined in the State Department's attack on CNN. One of Nancy Pelosi's daughters, Christine - yet another in the endless stream of televised pundits who is given a public platform due to a politically famous parent in a nation that claims to loathe aristocracy - went on Fox News this weekend and denounced CNN as "outrageous" and demanded that "they absolutely ought to be stopped", whatever that might mean.)

What is actually "disgusting" here is that the State Department is exploiting the grief of Chris Stevens' family in an attempt to suppress and delegitimize reporting that reflects quite poorly on them. As Michael Hastings documented yesterday, the State Department views the revelations from Stevens' journal as threatening to Hillary Clinton's reputation, the legacy of the war in Libya, and possibly Obama's political prospects in an election year:

"The blockbuster news contradicted the line the State Department and the administration had been pushing since the horrible tragedy took place almost two weeks ago: that there was no intelligence of a coming attack. In fact, the Ambassador himself was aware of a persistent high level threat against him.

"'Perhaps the real question here,' CNN responded to the State Department criticism, 'Is why is the State Department now attacking the messenger.'

"That is the real question, and State Department's bizarre criticism of CNN gives clues to the answer. Foggy Bottom is now in full-on damage control mode, with the primary goal of keeping Hillary Clinton's legacy in Libya - and in Washington - intact.

"The election-year focus on President Barack Obama meant that the White House had at first been catching most of the heat for the tragedy in Benghazi. It's certainly true the explanations from White House spokesman Jay Carney and UN Ambassador Susan Rice have strained common sense - mainly, the idea that the attack could be blamed solely on an anti-Islamic video, and that there was a protest outside the consulate at 10 p.m. (there reportedly wasn't,) among other misleading details. That initial story has crumbled . . .

"But in reality, the fiasco appears to be largely - if not entirely - a State Department botch. It was the State Department that failed to provide its ambassador adequate security; it was the State Department that fled Benghazi in the aftermath of the attack, apparently failing to clear or secure the scene, leaving Stevens' diary behind; and it was State that had taken the lead on the ground after the Libya intervention."

I'm not particularly impressed with the criticism that the Obama administration should have better secured the consulate. It is always easy retroactively to demand greater security when an attack occurs, and it is impossible to safeguard against all potential threats. Nonetheless, that is a criticism that is being widely voiced, rendering Stevens' journal clearly relevant and newsworthy. If a US ambassador is murdered, the fact that he spent months worrying about his security is obviously something the public should know.

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Skeptoid #1: New Age Energy -- An examination of energy, as new agers use the term

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New Age Energy: An examination of energy, as new agers use the term.
by Brian Dunning
Skeptoid

Faith in pseudoscience is rampant. Everywhere you turn, intelligent people fully accept the existence of anything from psychic phenomena, to angels, to new age healing techniques, to ancient health schemes based on mysterious energy fields not understood by science. Most of these paranormal phenomena rely on "energy," and when the performers are asked to explain, they'll gladly lecture about the body's energy fields, the universe's energy fields, Chi, Prana, Orgone, negative energy, positive energy, and just about anything else that needs a familiar sounding word to explain and justify it. Clearly, there are too many loose interpretations of the word energy, to the point where most people probably have no idea exactly what energy really is.

I believe that if more people had a clear understanding of energy — and it's not complicated — there would be less susceptibility to pseudoscience, and more attention paid to actual technologies and methods that are truly constructive and useful.

A friend told me of her ability to perform minor healings, and her best explanation was that she drew energy from another dimension. She had recently rented What the Bleep Do We Know, so she was well prepared to explain that alternate dimensions and realities should be taken for granted, since science doesn't really know anything, and thus those things cannot be disproven. That's fine, I'll concede that she can make contact with another dimension: after all, the latest M theories posit that there are probably ten or eleven of them floating around, and I'll just hope that my friend's is not one of those that are collapsed into impossibly small spaces. What I was really interested in was the nature of this vaguely defined energy that she could contact.

I asked what type of energy is it, and how is it stored? Is it heat? Is it a spinning flywheel? Is it an explosive compound? Is it food? These are examples of actual ways that energy can be stored.

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Timothy Wu: On the Archetype of the Heroic Inventor

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Over the twentieth century, most innovation theorists and historians became somewhat skeptical of the importance of creation stories like [Alexander] Bell's. These thinkers came to believe that the archetype of the heroic inventor had been over-credited in the search for a compelling narrative. As William Fisher puts it, "Like the romantic ideal of authorship, the image of the inventor has proved distressingly durable." These critics undeniably have a point: even the most startlingly inventions are usually arrived at, simultaneously, by two or more people. If that's true, how singular could the genius of the inventor really be?

There could not be a better example than the story of the telephone itself. On the very day that Alexander graham Bell was registering his invention, another man, Elisha Gray, was also at the patent office filing for the very same breakthrough [Note: Consequently many books have been dedicated to the question of who actually invented the telephone, and the majority seem to side against Bell, though of course to do so furnishes a revisionist the more interesting conclusion. More damning to bell is the fact that his telephone, in its specifications, is almost identical to the one described in Gray's patent. On the other hand, Bell was demonstrably first to have constructed a phone that was functional, not yet presentable enough to patent. A final bit of evidence against Bell: the testimony of a patent examiner, Zenas F. Wilbur, who admitted to accepting $100 bribe to show Gray's design to one of Alexander Bell's lawyers. (New York Times, May 22, 1886)]. The coincidence takes some of the luster off Bell's "eureka." And the more you examine the history, the worse it looks. In 1861, sixteen years before Bell, a German man named Johann Philip Reis presented a primitive telephone to the Physical Society of Frankfurt, claiming that "with the help of the galvanic current, [the inventor] is able to reproduce at a distance the tones of instruments and even, to a certain degree, the human voice." Germany has long considered Reis the telephone's inventor. Another man, a small-town Pennsylvania electrician named Daniel Drawbaugh, later claimed that by 1869 he had a working telephone in his house. He produced prototypes and seventy witnesses who testified that they had seen or heard his invention at that time. In litigation before the Supreme Court in 1888, three Justices concluded that "overwhelming evidence" proved that "Drawbaugh produced and exhibited in his shop, as early as 1869, an electrical instrument by which he transmitted speech. ..." [Note: Unfortunately for Drawbaugh, four justices found his testimony and that of his seventy witnesses not credible and dismissed the case. The dissenting Justices accused the majority of siding with Bell, essentially owing to his fame. "It is perfectly natural for the world to take the part of the man who has already achieved eminence. ... It is regarded as incredible that so great a discovery should have been made by the plain mechanic, and not by the eminent scientist and inventor."]

There was, it is fair to say, no single inventor of the telephone. And this reality suggests that what we call invention, while not easy, is simply what happens once a technology's development reaches the point where the next step becomes available to many people. By Bell's time, others had invented wires and the telegraph, had discovered electricity and the basic principles of acoustics. It lay to Bell to assemble the pieces: no mean feat, but not a superhuman one. In this sense, inventors are more like craftsmen than miracle workers.

Indeed the history of science is full of examples of what the writer Malcolm Gladwell terms "simultaneous discovery" -- so full that the phenomenon represents the norm rather than the exception. Few today know the name Alfred Russell Wallace, yet he wrote an article proposing the theory of natural selection in 1858, a year before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Leibnitz and Newton developed calculus simultaneously. And in 1610 four others made the same lunar observations as Galileo.

Is the loner and outsider inventor, then, merely a figment of so much hype, with no particular significance? No, I would argue his significance is enormous; but not for the reasons usually imagined. The inventors we remember are significant not so much as inventors, but as founders of "disruptive" industries, ones that shake up the technological status quo. Through circumstances or luck, they are exactly at the right distance both to imagine the future and to create an independent industry to exploit it.

Let's focus, first, on the act of invention. The importance of the outsider here owes to his being at the right remove from the prevailing currents of thought about the problem at hand. That distance affords a perspective close enough to understand the problem, yet far enough for greater freedom of thought, freedom from, the cognitive distortion of what is as opposed to what could be. This innovative distance explains why so many of those who turn an industry upside down are outsiders, even outcasts.

To understand this point we need to grasp the difference between two types of innovation: "sustaining" and "disruptive," the distinction best described by innovation theorist Clayton Christensen. Sustaining innovations are improvements that make the product better, but do not threaten its market. The disruptive innovation, conversely, threatens to displace a product altogether. It is the difference between the electric typewriter, which improved on the typewriter, and the word processor, which supplanted it.

Wu, Timothy. The Master Switch. NY: Alfred A. Knoff, 2010: 18-20.

Michael A. Lebowitz: The Unifying Element in All Struggles Against Capital Is the Right of Everyone to Full Human Development

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The Unifying Element in All Struggles Against Capital Is the Right of Everyone to Full Human Development
An Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz
Monthly Review

Let’s start with your ideas about rethinking Marx, capital’s logic, and the logic of the working class? And how we can relate these subjects with today’s social movements?

For some time, I have argued that Marx did not develop theoretically the side of the working class. In his major theoretical work, Capital, he looks at the nature of capital and capital’s logic. But he doesn’t really develop the other side of capitalism which is the logic of the working class and the drive of the working class and its orientation. So, I always say that people have misinterpreted Marx in the sense that they think he has given a picture of capitalism whereas he has only given the picture of capital. That analysis is important because that knowledge is a weapon for the working class. But it’s not the whole picture. In much of his other work, he does talk about the working class; he talks about working-class struggles and how workers who do not struggle in fact produce themselves as apathetic, more or less well-fed instruments of production. You won’t find an examination of struggle, though, from the side of workers in Marx’s Capital. In particular, there is no discussion of the wage struggle. He just assumes that wages are given and that there is a given standard of necessity. Removing that assumption was to occur in a later volume that he never got around to writing, the planned book on Wage-Labour.

So that led me to explore the question of that other side. And in doing that, I constantly came back to the Marxist concept of revolutionary practice, that simultaneous changing of circumstance and human activity or self-change—how people transform themselves through their struggles. But not only through struggles; they produce themselves through their daily activity. People are formed by what they do. So, for example, a person who is a wage laborer under capitalism is produced and produces himself in a certain way, as a person who is alienated, as a person who simply wants to consume because of the emptiness of capitalist production. We always have to ask the question, “what kinds of people are produced under particular relations of production?” What kinds of people are produced in an exchange relationship, which is “I will do this for you, if you do that for me” as opposed to functioning in a communal society in which people act in solidarity? You produce certain kinds of people under those conditions.

Much of what I have stressed is the way people transform themselves through their activity. That is where social movements are absolutely critical. Because in social movements people transform themselves and they make themselves into different people. That’s what Marx says in a number of places. What he says is, “well, of course, wage struggle is not going to change things. But if workers were to give up the wage struggle, they would demonstrate that they would not be capable of anything larger.” Because it is only in that struggle that they make themselves fit to create a new society. Well, that’s the wage struggle. But it is true of every struggle. In every struggle, you are transforming yourself and making yourself fit, not only individually but also collectively.

After the post-2008 historical crisis of capitalism at a global scale, in which direction and under which forms do you think of the social movements should form and develop?

I don’t know. One thing that we have to think about is that we traditionally have looked at the organized working class as this main vehicle for building socialism. Certainly that’s what Marx talked about. He said trade unions were the main center of organization for the working class. But in the creation of workers’ movements, it wasn’t only their position as wage laborers that created the workers’ movement. They also lived in the same neighborhoods. They related to the communities and this was always an element. I think that it’s a big mistake to identify the working class as simply those who are wage laborers in large-scale industry. Other people are separated from the means of production and separated from the historical results of social labor. If you take Venezuela (and Venezuela is not unique in this), half of the working class is in the informal sector. They are not outside capitalism, though. Many of the people selling goods on the street are selling capitalist-produced goods; they are simply part of the sphere of circulation of capital. They just have a such weak position that capital manages to get them to bear the risk of selling, rather than just simply being wage laborers in the sphere of circulation.

Chávez’s main base is the urban poor. What do we mean by the urban poor? These are people separated from the means of production—members of the proletariat. We have to talk not simply about the exploited; we have to talk about the exploited and those who would love to be exploited but who in fact are excluded. They are in a common position in the sense that they lack access to the means of production, to the social heritage of human beings. They are all excluded. So they are in a common position in that respect. I think that so much of the current struggles (and this is certainly what I’ve being emphasizing in my work) is that these are struggles for people’s right to full development. That transcends particular cases and is a unifying factor. The idea of everyone having the right to full development and to development of their potential means, of course, adequate health facilities, adequate education, adequate food, etc. That is an element which can unify the whole working class.

My book The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development talks theoretically about issues that I’ve learned in this process here. But the book also looks at concrete measures. One of the central measures that has to be part of a struggle for building a socialist alternative is the struggle to expand the commons. What does neoliberalism, what does capitalism, do? Its whole focus is to commodify everything. Health care—commodify it. Schools—commodify them. Commodify everything. So what is the alternative for human beings trying to develop their potential? Decommodify everything and bring things under control. Of course, when you talk about decommodifing and about expanding the commons, the immediate question that comes up is “well we all know about the ‘tragedy of the commons’ so if we have everything free and available to people then it just leads to absolute tragedy.” Well, there’s no truth to that. Communities have managed common resources all the time. But the key element is community. You have to have a local community that is effective, one that can monitor the commons. In short, I argue that social movements and all movements to remove the power of capital can unite on one common point—the right of everybody for full human development. That’s the goal in the Communist Manifesto—the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

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