In the recent show FUSION NOW!, curator J.J. Charlesworth invited his exhibitors to imagine technologically produced abundance. But without a vision of social revolution, what kind of politics was the show promoting, and were the artists on message?, asks Nuno Rodrigues

Text inspired by Will Barnes 'Climate and capital' (see Mute #2 Vol. 5)  with a more scientific and technical approach.  

Views on climate change  

There are many important topics in the news these days, but none is as
important for future generations as climate change. The decisions that
are made in the next years, months or days [1] will be determining the
future of mankind. Climate change is also a topic where political, social,
technical, biological and physical science is so heavily intertwined that it´s almost impossible to grasp all aspects of it. The following text can

Brief historicization (from www.spiked-online.com) of the latest inter-governmental eco-policy deal, looking into the way certain branches of capital established the 'Green' agenda long before its discovery by counter-culture and adoption by mainstream moralism.  The ideology of Scarcity is perpetual, but it took on this distinct institutional form during the late 20th century Supply Side ascendancy.  Incidentally the implicit contradiction between an 'eco-imperialist' drive to keep the 'underdeveloped' world that way (as a 'non-capitalist' source of loot) and industrial capitals' need to draw ever more labour-power into their orbit was explained by Rosa Luxemburg in 1913 in 'The Accumulation of Capital': "The conditions for the capitalization of surplus-value clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of the aggregate capital – a conflict which, incidentally, is merely a counterpart of the contradictions implied in the law of a declining profit rate".  

Tuesday 18 December 2007
Eco-imperialism at the Bali summit?

An all-too-believeable first-hand account from Spiked (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3730/) of the heroic Civil Obedience at the pro-Behaviour Modification protest camp outside Heathrow.  (Although Spiked's habit of labelling this lot 'Puritans' seems a bit unfair on 17th century Calvinists, given the latter group's social-levelling tendencies, hatred of superstition and insistence on independent thought.)  There are particularly telling moments when protest spokesman John Jordan says the muddy austerity of the camp exemplifies the kind of 'simple life' that everyone should live, and when another camper says all 'mainstream media' are the enemy, with two noble exceptions: Indymedia and The Independent.