With investment in stocks and property now inducing ambient neurasthenia, mainstream investors are allegedly turning to ‘alternative investments' like wine and art, not to mention gold. Although art and wine were considered riskier than property in the pre-credit-crunch era, according to one recent article they are now regarded as safer than bricks and mortar (‘Credit crunch fuels investor search for art, wine', Clara Ferreira-Marques, Reuters.com). If this appears to spell good times ahead for the contemporary art market, further inspection reveals that a new breed of fund manager specialising in this asset class is looking to ‘strip out the risk' by focusing on established artists - or wines. In other words, cultural conservatism will be (even more) the order of the day.

Meanwhile, in London's East End, the once-Young British Artists (Tracey Emin, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread, etc.) are protesting a series of planned high-rise developments in fashionable Shoreditch, and Mayor Ken Livingstone's ‘destruction of London' more generally:

Since 2004 the rhetoric of Bush’s republican party has turned curiously green, integrating climate change as a legitimation for neoliberal imperialism. At the same time the unintended consequence of America’s unsuccessful adventures has been to enrich an ‘anti-neoliberal’ class of oil rentiers in Africa, Latin America and Asia. George Caffentzis plots the changes in the US energy policy as it turns from eco-naysayer to ecowarrior

In their tango with grassroots green activists, inter-governmental policy makers are taking the lead. Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young analyse the ‘new green order’ and the carbon offset colonialism that accompanies it

David Harvey is an influential academic theorist of the spatial, cultural and economic forms of neoliberal capitalism. Chris Wright and Samantha Alvarez contrast his analysis with that of Michael Hudson, whose Super Imperialism exposed the fiscal foundations of neoliberalism some 30 years earlier

It’s not just the founders of hippy communes or artists like Amy Balkin who are looking for ‘a breathing space from the State’ in which to experiment with freedom and free-time. Big IT companies like Google apparently share their ideals. With a commitment to ‘me time’, the production of ‘universal access’, and (energy) sovereignty, corporates are leveraging the dream of the commons

Public Domain

John Jordan and James Marriott’s operatic audio tour set in London’s Square Mile is intended to awaken city workers to the impact of financial systems on climate change. But not only does And While London Burns misgauge how much the suits already know, its hysterical tone also harmonises too easily with the coming new eco-order

 

Image: activists cool off under a burst water mains during the Carnival Against Capital, June 1999

The emerging capitalist War On Global Warming concentrates on adapting technology and behaviour – particularly other nation-states’ – to mitigate environmental damage. Transformative technological and social innovation is better than meddling micro-action, argues James Woudhuysen

Liberal critics assume that climate change is a ‘man-made’ process, not a natural phenomenon. Against this view, Will Barnes argues that global warming does indeed have an inhuman agent behind it – not nature but capital

Capitalist Criminality

With invaluable assistance from modern science and technology, capital is perpetrating a crime for which there is no name, the enormity of which has hitherto been and, apart from the literary holocausts of anti-utopian science fiction, largely remains unimagined.

A commission for the Mute Vol 2 #5 - It's Not Easy Being Green edition, Summer 2007.

 
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By and large the writers in this issue of Mute accept that climate change is a reality. Earth’s rising temperature can no longer be attributed solely to natural fluctuations produced by solar and volcanic activity, it is instead the result of man’s massive consumption of fossil fuels. There are those who contest the science that underlies this idea, claiming that levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere follow rather than determine temperature – man’s activity is irrelevant. Clearly this claim should be taken seriously, and not least because the outrage it provokes indicates the economic and political stakes of man-made climate change. Rather than the ultimate causes of global warming, however, our focus in this issue is the way its spectre is put to work by the developed world.

The spectre of poverty has always been used by the powerful as a stick to goad those wishing to live without working. Here Demetra Kotouza explores the intimate relationship between the management of the pauper and the (re)production of the labourer, overseen by state and philanthropic institutions. Whether stigmatised by the workhouse, cushioned by welfare or patronised by the neoliberal rhetoric of self-help, she argues, the poor are a necessary constant of capitalism

All photography by Alessandra Chila (except where otherwise credited), taken in 
Tower Hamlets and Leyton, London, March 2006

_{Mural (1976-93) commemorating the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936 when East Londoners, including Jews, Socialists and Communist groups, forced back fascist Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts as they attempted to march through the area under the protection of the police}

Dutch parliamentary democracy has long worn the mask of multi-culturalism, but its swing to the right in recent years has exposed the limits of Holland’s famous tolerance. Now that it looks like the UK government may be following suit, we present here a new version of Eric Krebbers’ text on Dutch assimilationist racism originally published in De Fabel van der illegaal in January 2005

On 4 November, 2004, just two days after the death of film-maker Theo van Gogh, independent member of parliament Geert Wilders announced that he was going to found a new conservative party.[1] According to some polls at the time he could win almost 20 percent of the votes and that would make his party the second largest in the Netherlands.

How did the racist provocation of Muslims turn into a debate about free speech? If the discourse of freedom acts as a mechanism of exclusion and both classical bourgeois rights and their crisis-ridden multicultural corrective reproduce fundamental inequalities, should we assert our right to free speech, or listen instead for determined voices in the growing political silence?, asks Benedict Seymour

The spectacular controversy over the Danish cartoons, which came to a head in January of this year before rapidly dissipating, neatly summed up the meta-racist dialectic of multiculturalism.