1671. Primitive Communism in New Zealand: Part 1. The First Communism

By Terry Coggan,  A Communist at Large, December 6, 2014

Parkinson, Sydney, 1745-1771 :The head of a chief of New Zealand, the face curiously tataow’d, or marked according to their manner. S. Parkinson del. T. Chambers sc. London, 1784. Plate XVI.. Parkinson, Sydney, 1745-1771 :A journal of a voyage to the South Seas, in his Majesty’s ship, ‘The Endeavour’. Faithfully transcribed from the papers of the late Sydney Parkinson. London; Printed for Charles Dilly, in the Poultry, and James Phillips, in the George-Yard, 1784.. Ref: PUBL-0037-16. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22753134

At a public meeting in the 1970s, I heard Maori rights activist Syd Jackson say that Europeans came to Aotearoa (New Zealand) with a culture that was “materially superior” but “spiritually inferior” to that of the indigenous Maori people they encountered. As a newly minted Marxist, I knew that by material and spiritual culture he meant the economic base, the legal and political superstructure, and the forms of social consciousness particular to each society, even if I wasn’t sure how value judgments like “inferior” or “superior” belonged with such a scientific analysis. But Marx and Engels would have agreed with Jackson. Theorists from Sigmund Freud to Jared Diamond have sought evidence from traditional Maori society, which Marx and Engels would have called primitive communism, to support their arguments, but I don’t know that much has been written about the prehistory of New Zealand from a Marxist viewpoint. It is beyond my competence to do so in any comprehensive manner, but I offer some perspectives, focusing on the the concept of primitive communism, its nature, destruction and legacy, in the light of writings by Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and others. (1)

The founders of modern communism thought it important that the workers’ movement should learn about the first communism. They described it as primitive not to disparage it – they on the contrary held it in high regard – but to relate it to the fight for the communist society of the future, which while able to incorporate the admirable elements of the earlier stage, would be a type of society “superior” in a new sense, based on a qualitatively higher productivity of labour. “Only by being clear”, wrote Luxemburg, “about the specific economic peculiarities of primitive communist society, and the no less particular features of the ancient slave economy and medieval serfdom, is it possible to grasp with due thoroughness why today’s capitalist society offers for the first time a historical leverage for the realization of socialism, and what the fundamental distinction is between the world socialist economy of the future and the primitive communist groups of primitive times.” (2)

In the opinion of the American Marxist George Novack the destruction of primitive communism based on common land ownership by the Indian tribes, indispensable to the development of U.S. capitalism, was a more radical social upheaval than the contest between the colonists and the mother country that culminated in the first American Revolution. (3) New Zealand’s colonial rulers never had to face a contest like the latter, but they were obliged to wage the same war of destruction against Maori society that their American brethren carried out against the Indians. At the start of the nineteenth century the land that was to become New Zealand was a communist society. There were no classes, no state, no commodity production, no money.

To the Maori, its only inhabitants and sole possessors, the idea that rights of private property could be claimed over the land or its bounty would have seemed outlandish. They carried out their principal economic activities, hunting, fishing, gathering, cultivating, building, collectively. By the end of the century the land was gone, in the hands of a ruling class with almost exclusively white and bewhiskered faces, controlling a modern capitalist state which rested on a society in which social relations based on private property prevailed. A society ruled by the lore of ancestors had been transformed into one ruled by the law of value. One mode of production had supplanted another, in other words there had been a revolution, and as has always happened in history when such basic social transformations occur, it had been accompanied by violent struggle.

The first communism
Pointing out the significance of the discovery that all of humanity shared a communist heritage, Luxemburg wrote, “From the mid-nineteenth century through to the 1870s, a wealth of material came to light that eroded and soon tore to shreds the old idea of the eternal character of private property and its existence from the beginning of the world. After agrarian communism had been discovered as a pecularity of the Germanic people, then as something Slavic, Indian, Arab-Kabyle, or ancient Mexican, as the marvel state of the Peruvian Inca and in many more “specific” races of people in all parts of the world, the conclusion was unavoidable that this village communism was not at all a “peculiarity” of a particular race of people or part of the world, but rather the general and typical form of human society at a certain level of cultural development. The first reaction of official bourgeois science, ie. political economy, was obstinately to resist this knowledge. The English school of Smith and Ricardo, which prevailed throughout Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, simply denied the possibility of common property in land.” (4)

Marx and Engels on the other hand warmly welcomed the new knowledge, particularly the work of pioneer American anthropologist Lewis Morgan, as confirming their materialist and evolutionary view of history, and validating their faith in the communist future. But “the reaction of official bourgeois science” only intensified, and from the end of the nineteenth century was directed at countering the growing influence of Marxism across the whole range of social sciences. Raymond Firth was part of that reaction. His Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori remains the most influential book on the prehistory of New Zealand, and is still being reprinted, and quoted in reports of the Waitangi Tribunal. He wrote it in the late 1920s, only a decade after the Russian Revolution had put the Fear of God into the international bourgeoisie, and made its ideologues’ task of discrediting the idea of communism all the more urgent. Reading his book now, it can almost appear that Firth had accepted a brief to obfuscate the communistic nature of pre-European Maori society. “It has now been sufficiently well shown,” he writes, “that the formula of “communism”, not backed by any attempt at clear definition has been loosely and unnecessarily employed in speaking of Maori institutions.” (5) His own definition is a caricature. He asserts, quite falaciously, that “Communism, properly understood, is incompatible with an extensive system of private and personal rights,” (6) and equates personal property in weapons, tools, clothing, and other common articles with private ownership of the means of production. The principle that obtained among Maori of reciprocity in gift exchange also proved, according to Firth, the absence of communism, which he seems to understand as a system in which people take from “an absolute community of goods” without contributing anything in return. (7) He assigns to the chief the role of “entrepreneur”, asserting he “acted as a kind of capitalist, assuming the initiative in the construction of “public works” if the term may be so used.” (8) On the central question of the land, Firth claims that because a whanau (extended family group) might be assigned a right of use to a certain cultivation plot, or because an individual could claim exclusive access to a birding tree or a place to set an eel trap, “In this analysis of the Maori system of land tenure it has been clearly shown that the simple description of it as “communal” or “communistic” is grievously inadequate.” (9)

The Maori King Tūkāroto Matutaera Pōtatau Te Wherowhero Tāwhiao, who numbered European workers among his people.

The emerging New Zealand ruling class of the nineteenth century had a more hard-headed view of the matter. With their sharper class instincts, they more clearly.

The emerging New Zealand ruling class of the nineteenth century had a more hard-headed view of the matter. With their sharper class instincts, they more clearly recognised what one of them, C.W. Richmond, called “the beastly communism” of the Maori for what it was. Henry Sewell, one of the prinicpal architects of the Native Lands Act of 1865, the Versailles Treaty of the nineteenth century New Zealand land wars, spelt it out in an 1870 address to the Legislative Council, which as historian David Williams rightly says, “deserves to be quoted often”:

“The object of the Native Lands Act was twofold: to bring the great bulk of the lands of the Northern Island which belonged to the Natives ….within the reach of colonization. The other great object was the detribalization of the Natives, – to destroy, if it were possible, the principles of communism which ran through the whole of their institutions, upon which their social system was based, and which stood as a barrier in the way of all attempts to amalgamate the Native race into our own social and political system. It was hoped that by the individualization of titles to land, giving them the same individual ownership which we ourselves possessed, they would lose their communistic  character, and that their social status would become assimilated to our own.” (10)

In her Introduction to Political Economy, Luxemburg drew out the connection between the wars of conquest waged by the colonizing powers against indigneous peoples and the class war they fought against the workers movement in their home countries:

“Colonial policy, as we have seen, involved a collision of palpable material interests between the bourgeois world and primitive communist conditions. The more the capitalist regime began to establish as all powerful in Western Europe after the mid-nineteenth century, in the wake of the storms of the February revolution of 1848, the sharper this collision grew. At the same time, and precisely after the February revolution, a new enemy within the camp of bourgeois socety, the revolutionary workers’ movement, played an ever-greater role. After the June days of 1848 in Paris, the “red specter” never again vanished from the public stage, and in 1871 it reappeared in the dazzling light of the struggle of the Commune, to the fury of the French and international bourgeoisie. In the light of these brutal class struggles, primitive communism as the latest discovery of scientic research showed a dangerous face. The bourgeoisie, clearly affected in their class interests, scented an obscure connection between the ancient communist survivals that put up stubborn resistance in the colonial countries to the forward march of the profit-hungry “Europeanization” of the indigenous people, and the new gospel of revolutionary impetuousness of the proletarian mass in the old capitalist countries. When the French National Assembly was deciding the fate of the unfortunate Arabs of Algeria in 1873, with a law on the compulsory introduction of private property, it was repeatedly said, in a gathering where the cowardice and bloodlust  of the conquerors of the Paris Commune still trembled, that the ancient common property of the Arabs must at any cost be destroyed, “as a form that supports communist tendencies in people’s minds.” ” (11).

Pre-European Maori society was not a homogeneous entity: there were changes both through time from the first settlement around a thousand years ago to when the first Europeans made landfall in 1769; and by region, from communities which produced about half their total food requirement through gardening, (12) to those that lived entirely as hunters and gatherers, like the Moriori of the Chatham Islands. (13) But at no time or nowhere did the society evolve beyond what Marx and Engels called primitive communism.  It is sometimes stated that the society was divided into classes: rangatira (chiefs) and tutua (commoners), or rangatira, tutua and taurekareka (slaves). But this confuses the concepts of rank and class. Class divisions are based primarily on differentiated rights of ownership of the means of production, including the land. No such differentiation existed in traditional Maori society. The fundamental fact was that the level of technology the Maori possessed, no metal tools, and the environmental conditions they faced, which didn’t allow the garden crops they brought from their East Polynesian homeland to flourish, meant that an economic surplus large and reliable enough to allow the development of sytematic specialisation in the division of labour and a class society could not be generated.(14) Even the development of elaborate food storage techniques, which according to some authorities was the most important technological development Maori made in the pre-contact period, could only suffice to get the population through to the next season. Everybody had to work, including the chiefs. One scholar says “Despite the greater access Maori chiefs had to material resources, the fixed wealth of the chief was not much greater than that of any ordinary tribesperson. The fact was that such resources were redistributed almost as soon as they were accumulated to maintain the influence of the chiefs. This was hardly likely to lead to the permanent entrenchment of chiefs as a ruling class.” (15) Captives taken in warfare were put to work as “slaves”, but because the prevailing economic conditions meant their labour power could not produce much more than was necessary for their own maintenance, slavery could not consolidate itself as an institution, as it did in some societies emerging out of  primitive communism in other parts of the world at other times.

Traditional Maori society contrasts with pre-contact Polynesian societies in other Pacific Island groups such as Hawai’i, Samoa, Tonga or Tahiti where conditions allowed of a larger population and economic surplus. Hawai’i, where the widest fissures in communal society had opened up, had reached the stage where, according to Patrick Kirch, “the chiefly class regarded themselves as directly descended from the gods and were internally ranked into seven or eight different grades, in which the highest chiefs practiced sibling or half sibling marriage to concentrate the blood line; where corvee labour was mobilised on a massive scale to build temples and irrigation works; where tribute consisted of daily food supplies offered to the extended household and entourage of the paramount chief; where insignia of rank such as feathered cloaks and finely carved food bowls were highly elaborated; and where land was alienated from the common people, who held rights of usufruct only by right of regular tribute offerings to their chiefs.” (16)

(to be continued)

Notes.

1 Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is the core work. I reject the long tradition among some “Marxist” writers to denigrate Engels in relation to Marx, claiming he lacked his collaborator’s “dialectical subtlety”, and accusing him of “economic determinism,” of setting out “unilinear” instead of “multilinear” paths of historical development, of being the progenitor of Stalinist stagism, etc. These authorities no doubt feel that as they peruse Marx’s unpublished manuscripts, they can uncover hidden gems that Engels, with his unfortunate limitations, missed. A particularly egregious recent example of the anti-Engels bias is Marx at the Margins by Kevin B. Anderson, Chicago, 2010. Anderson claims, for instance, that Marx had a “more nuanced” picture of the male dominance in classical Greece than the “utterly bleak” one painted by Engels, as evidenced by his (Marx’s) reference to the traces of a more free and powerful position of women in an earlier period that can be found in Greek drama and mythology, ignoring the fact that Engels makes the same reference more than once. He also claims that Engels misses the point that Marx makes about the existence of hierarchies and the opening up of conflict between rich and poor inside the old gentes. But Engels quotes the pertinent remarks from Marx’s notes on this. For a more general refutation of the Engels detractors, see George Novack, “In Defense of Engels”, in Polemics in Marxist Philosophy, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1978.  Or Engels’ own letters of September 21, 1890 to Konigsberg, July 14, 1893 to Mehring, and January 25, 1894 to Borgius.

2 The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume 1: Economic Writings 1 ed. Peter Hudis, Verso, London 2013, p.195

3 Genocide Against The Indians, Pathfinder Press, New York 1970.

4 op. cit., p. 156.

5 Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori, Routledge, Oxford 2011, p. 357.

6 Ibid., p. 356.

7 Ibid, p. 354. Firth forgets the first part of Marx’s famous motto “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

8 Ibid., p. 226, 119. There is no objection to the term “public works”, but the terms “entrepreneur” or “capitalist” are ahistorical if used to describe the function of the chief in traditional Maori society. Both the chief and the capitalist entrepreneur perform leadership roles in the economic life of their respective societies, but with different motives. The interests of the chief and his people were inseparable: when he acted to promote the community’s well being he at the same time increased his own mana. The interests of the capitalist and the working population are opposed: he acts to increase his personal wealth, which he can only do by finding ways to channel as much as possible of the product of their labour into his own pockets. Leaders in the future communist society will much more closely resemble the Maori chief. Recalling Marx’s remark that the ethnologists he was reading all seemed to discover bourgeois man in the primitive societies they studied, Firth finds the awareness of “individual interest”, and the “concepts of equivalent, of profit, of bargaining”, and “the notion of trade” already “implanted” in the breast of the ancient Maori. (Ibid., p. 423, pp. 425-26.) This “Firthian” line is a common one in New Zealand historiography: for example Hazel Petrie writes that the new opportunities for trade in the nineteenth century “boosted an inherent entrepreneurial spirit” in Maori, and, more generally, that “the tendency to characterise Maori ownership systems simplistically as ‘communal’ without giving attention to how individual rights were defined within them has obscured the complexity of communal ownership systems, and consequently, the process of transition towards more individualistic ideas of property that impacted on the social order during the first quarter-century of colonisation.” Hazel Petrie, Chiefs of Industry: Maori Tribal Enterprise in Early Colonial New Zealand, Auckland University Press, 2006, p. 66, p.179.

9 Ibid., p. 375.

10 Quoted in David Williams, Te Kooti Tango Whenua: The Native Land Court 1864-1909, Wellington 1999, p. 88. As Williams points out, this was not the rhetoric of an ideologue, but a matter-of-fact and dispassionate description of laws previously passed.

11 op. cit., pp. 163-4. The connection between the workers’ movement and the resistance of colonised peoples of which Luxemburg speaks here the was first made in New Zealand by one leader on the Maori side in the land wars, King Tawhiao: “All Pakeha-Maori, Pakeha storekeepers, blacksmiths and carpenters are my people.” Michael King, Te Puea, Auckland 1977, p. 29. Tawhiao’s words were famously echoed in 1924 on London’s Westminster Bridge by Wiremu Ratana: “When all your stone houses are destroyed in time to come then will the carpenters, the blacksmiths and the shoemakers be in power and I will be the government.” Tony Simpson, Te Riri Pakeha, Auckland 1986, p. 244.

12 James Belich, Making Peoples; A History of the New Zealanders, Auckland 1996, p. 73.

13 It is hard to disagree with Patrick Kirch: “Looking upon vestiges of archaic East Polynesian settlement in the Chatham Islands, lashed by the roaring forties, one can only marvel at the adaptive propensities underlying the shift from tropical horticulturists to sub-Antarctic hunters.” The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, Cambridge, 1984, p. 22.

14 James Belich light-mindedly dismisses the significance of the development of agriculture in human history by saying that mobile societies of hunter and gatherers can also produce surpluses “and a complex and impressive culture, more volatile and less cumulative than sedentary gardeners, but perhaps also more dynamic.” (op. cit. p. 64.) No one denies the cultural achievements of pre-agricultural peoples, (they do occupy ninety percent of human history), but if it is not true that agriculture is a prerequisite of political and technological development as Belich claims, what other route was there to civilization? It is a basic tenet of historical materialism that without the neolithic revolution (agriculture and animal husbandry), there would be no modern world, (and no books by James Belich).

15 Kwen Fee Lian, “Tribe, Class and Colonisation: the Political Organization of Maori Society in the 19th Century”, The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol 101, no.4, 1992, pp. 387-408, p. 399. Or “On important occasions he [the chief] was always recognizably the representative of his hapu; clad in their best cloak, seated on the ground amidst his elders, he received visitors and envoys. But he was as likely to be found digging fern root, or fishing… The sheer drudgery of Maori existence had to some extent inhibited the emergence of a leisured class”. Ann R. Parsonson, “The Expansion of a Competitive Society”, New Zealand Journal of History, vol 14, no. 1, 1980, p. 49.

16 P.V. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: an Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, University of California Press, 2000, p. 323.

1670. Climate Change: Marshall Islands--a U.S. Nuclear Waste Dump Now Is in Danger of Rising Sea

By Michael B. Gerrad, The New York Times, December 3, 2014

A concrete dome covers radioactive soil at Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands. Credit James P. Blair/National Geographic, via Getty Images.

THERE is no consistent air service to the coral atoll of Enewetak in the Marshall Islands, where the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958. On my first trip to the capital, Majuro, in 2010, to study the danger posed there by the rising ocean, I managed to get on a special flight taking dignitaries to Enewetak for the dedication of a school. From there, I boarded a small boat to visit a nuclear waste dump that the world had all but forgotten.

The Marshall Islands are only about six feet above sea level. Its survival and that of other island nations are on the minds of negotiators gathering this week in Lima, Peru, for a United Nations climate change conference.

This place stands out for its misfortunes: ravaged first by radioactivity from tests conducted after World War II and, now, by the rising seas that threaten to swallow it.

When the boat reached a tiny island called Runit, we jumped out, crossed a narrow beach and walked through some shrub brush. A concrete dome about 350 feet across loomed ahead. I saw no signs, fences or guards. My guide walked up the shallow incline of the dome and stood on its top; impulsively I followed him. I wished I had brought a Geiger counter.

The United States had chosen this string of islands halfway between Hawaii and Australia for its nuclear tests; specifically the atolls of Bikini and Enewetak. Each is a thin broken circle of coral reefs surrounding a lagoon, the remnants of ancient volcanoes. In the 1970s the United States was thinking about granting independence to the country, which it did eventually, and was considering what to do about the mess the testing left behind.

Bikini was so radioactive that there was little hope of allowing its displaced population ever to return home. But the military studied how to clean up Enewetak so that at least some land could become habitable again. The Defense Department concluded that there was so much soil contaminated with cesium-137 and strontium-90 that the safest approach was to leave it alone and let it decay naturally. Both have half-lives of about 30 years.

But also left behind by the blasts was plutonium-239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years. With enough plutonium-239 in the right form, a bomb could be made. That is why the United States participated in a $150 million operation, completed in 2012, to secure and clean up the plutonium at a Soviet-era nuclear test site in Kazakhstan.

At Enewetak, the United States decided in the late 1970s to dump as much plutonium-contaminated soil as it could gather into a 33-foot-deep crater on Runit that had been carved out in 1958 by a bomb roughly the size of the one detonated over Hiroshima.

In addition to the contaminated soil, crews filled 437 plastic bags with plutonium chunks they had picked up from the ground, left behind when one bomb misfired. These also went into the crater, which was then covered with an 18-inch-thick concrete cap. Most of the rest of the radioactive waste, with too little plutonium to trouble with, was bulldozed into the lagoon, over the objections of the Environmental Protection Agency and the displaced people of Enewetak. American officials also chose to leave radiation on the land at levels far higher than would be allowed after a similar cleanup in the United States.

The cleanup was completed in 1980, and some of the residents of Enewetak, who had been forced out in 1946 to make way for the bombs, were allowed to return. About half the atoll was still uninhabitable, however, and most of the rest had lost its ability to grow food. Canned Spam became a staple.

Longevity was not among the design criteria for the Runit dome (unlike Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where, until recently, the federal government planned to deposit its spent nuclear fuel deep underground in facilities designed to be safe for at least one million years). In fact the dome does not meet American standards for landfills for household trash.

A task force of the federal government’s National Research Council warned in 1982 that the dome might be breached by a severe typhoon. But a 2013 report sponsored by the Department of Energy saw no reason to worry. “Catastrophic failure of the concrete dome,” it said, “and instantaneous release of all its contents into the lagoon will not necessarily lead to any significant change in the radiation dose delivered to the local resident population.”

The reason, according to the report, was that the radiation inside the dome was “dwarfed” by the radiation in the sediments in the lagoon. Thus a leak from the dome would be no added threat because it is dirtier on the outside than the inside. Plutonium isotopes recently discovered in the South China Sea have been traced to the Marshall Islands, some 2,800 miles away.

An inspection last year found that the dome was deteriorating, and the radioactive groundwater below rises and falls with the tides. Storms wash sand onto the dome; vines grow in the cracks.

As things now stand, the Runit dome is likely to be submerged by rising seas or torn apart by storms, releasing its radioactive poison into the ocean and compounding the legacy our advanced civilization has left to this tiny island nation.

Michael B. Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia, is the co-editor, with Gregory E. Wannier, of “Threatened Island Nations: Legal Implications of Rising Seas and a Changing Climate.”

1669. ‘Superbugs’ Kill India’s Babies and Pose an Overseas Threat

By Gardiner Harris, The New York Times, December 3, 2014

NDM-1 Super Bacteria found in Indian hospitals

AMRAVATI, India — A deadly epidemic that could have global implications is quietly sweeping India, and among its many victims are tens of thousands of newborns dying because once-miraculous cures no longer work.

These infants are born with bacterial infections that are resistant to most known antibiotics, and more than 58,000 died last year as a result, a recent study found. While that is still a fraction of the nearly 800,000 newborns who die annually in India, Indian pediatricians say that the rising toll of resistant infections could soon swamp efforts to improve India’s abysmal infant death rate. Nearly a third of the world’s newborn deaths occur in India.

“Reducing newborn deaths in India is one of the most important public health priorities in the world, and this will require treating an increasing number of neonates who have sepsis and pneumonia,” said Dr. Vinod Paul, chief of pediatrics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and the leader of the study. “But if resistant infections keep growing, that progress could slow, stop or even reverse itself. And that would be a disaster for not only India but the entire world.”

In visits to neonatal intensive care wards in five Indian states, doctors reported being overwhelmed by such cases.

“Five years ago, we almost never saw these kinds of infections,” said Dr. Neelam Kler, chairwoman of the department of neonatology at New Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, one of India’s most prestigious private hospitals. “Now, close to 100 percent of the babies referred to us have multidrug resistant infections. It’s scary.”

These babies are part of a disquieting outbreak. A growing chorus of researchers say the evidence is now overwhelming that a significant share of the bacteria present in India — in its water, sewage, animals, soil and even its mothers — are immune to nearly all antibiotics.

Newborns are particularly vulnerable because their immune systems are fragile, leaving little time for doctors to find a drug that works. But everyone is at risk. Uppalapu Shrinivas, one of India’s most famous musicians, died Sept. 19 at age 45 because of an infection that doctors could not cure.

While far from alone in creating antibiotic resistance, India’s resistant infections have already begun to migrate elsewhere.

“India’s dreadful sanitation, uncontrolled use of antibiotics and overcrowding coupled with a complete lack of monitoring the problem has created a tsunami of antibiotic resistance that is reaching just about every country in the world,” said Dr. Timothy R. Walsh, a professor of microbiology at Cardiff University.

Indeed, researchers have already found “superbugs” carrying a genetic code first identified in India — NDM1 (or New Delhi metallo-beta lactamase 1) — around the world, including in France, Japan, Oman and the United States.

Anju Thakur’s daughter, born prematurely a year ago, was one of the epidemic’s victims in Amravati, a city in central India. Doctors assured Ms. Thakur that her daughter, despite weighing just four pounds, would be fine. Her husband gave sweets to neighbors in celebration.

Three days later, Ms. Thakur knew something was wrong. Her daughter’s stomach swelled, her limbs stiffened and her skin thickened — classic signs of a blood infection. As a precaution, doctors had given the baby two powerful antibiotics soon after birth. Doctors switched to other antibiotics and switched again. Nothing worked. Ms. Thakur gave a puja, or prayer, to the goddess Durga, but the baby’s condition worsened. She died, just seven days old.

“We tried everything we could,” said Dr. Swapnil Talvekar, the pediatrician who treated her. Ms. Thakur was inconsolable. “I never thought I’d stop crying,” she said.

A test later revealed that the infection was immune to almost every antibiotic. The child’s rapid death meant the bacteria probably came from her mother, doctors said.

Health officials have warned for decades that overuse of antibiotics — miracle drugs that changed the course of human health in the 20th century — would eventually lead bacteria to evolve in a way that made the drugs useless. In September, the Obama administration announced measures to tackle this problem, which officials termed a threat to national security.

Some studies have found that developing countries have bacterial rates of resistance to antibiotics that are far higher than those in developed nations, with India the global focal point.

Bacteria spread easily in India, experts say, because half of Indians defecate outdoors, and much of the sewage generated by those who do use toilets is untreated. As a result, Indians have among the highest rates of bacterial infections in the world and collectively take more antibiotics, which are sold over the counter here, than any other nationality.

A recent study found that Indian children living in places where people are less likely to use a toilet tend to get diarrhea and be given antibiotics more often than those in places with more toilet use. On Oct. 2, the Indian government began a campaign to clean the country and build toilets, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly sweeping a Delhi neighborhood. But the task is monumental.

“In the absence of better sanitation and hygiene, we are forced to rely heavily on antibiotics to reduce infections,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, vice president for research and policy at the Public Health Foundation of India. “The result is that we are losing these drugs, and our newborns are already facing the consequences of untreatable sepsis,” or blood infections.

Some health experts and officials here say that these killer bugs are largely confined to hospitals, where heavy use of antibiotics leads to localized colonies.

But India’s top neonatologists suspect the large number of resistant infections in newborns in their first days of life demonstrates that these dangerous bacteria are thriving in communities and even pregnant women’s bodies.

“Our hypothesis is that resistant infections in newborns may be originating from the maternal genital tract and not just the environment,” Dr. Paul said in an interview.

In a continuing study in Delhi at several government-run hospitals that has so far included more than 12,000 high-risk newborns, and was made available to The New York Times, about 70 percent of the babies’ infections were found to be immune to multiple powerful antibiotics, confirming the results of earlier and smaller studies.

Doctors interviewed in hospitals across India said that a large number of the infections they found in newborns were resistant to many antibiotics. Awareness of the problem has begun to grow, with Indian medical associations calling for efforts to reduce unnecessary antibiotic use. But there is keen sensitivity here to any alert to the dangers. A 2010 discovery of a New Delhi “superbug” caused intense controversy because of fears that publicity would threaten India’s profitable medical tourism industry. Government officials have stopped some studies of the problem, Dr. Walsh said.

The effects of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on treating disease in India could be enormous. Tuberculosis is just one example of the challenges doctors face. India has the world’s largest number of cases, and recent studies using the latest genetic tests have shown that as many as 10 percent of untreated patients in places as far apart as Mumbai and Sikkim have resistant infections. These patients are catching resistant bugs at home, not hospitals, making the epidemic very difficult to control, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, director of the National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis, said in an interview.

“It’s startling and very worrying,” Dr. Swaminathan said. Unless the government makes profound and drastic changes, tuberculosis in India may soon become untreatable, she said.

Although resistant bugs are everywhere here, hospitals have become factories for untreatable “superbugs.” A government program that pays women to have babies in hospitals has in 10 years more than doubled the share of hospital-born babies to 82 percent, but the government did little to increase hospital capacity to deal with the crush. Maternity wards often have two and three women in each bed, allowing infections to spread rapidly.

Besides being desperately crowded, many hospitals are unhygienic, allowing the bugs to flourish. A Unicef survey of 94 district hospitals and health centers in Rajasthan last year found that 70 percent had possibly contaminated water and 78 percent had no soap available at hand-washing sinks, while 67 percent of toilets were unsanitary.

Doctors across India have responded to the sanitation crisis in hospitals by giving antibiotics freely.

In Haryana, for instance, almost every baby born in hospitals in recent years was injected with antibiotics whether they showed signs of illness or not, Dr. Suresh Dalpat, deputy director of child health in the state of Haryana, said in an interview. “Now, with proper training, we are bringing that down.”

All those drugs create resistant bacteria that find their way into hospital sewage, which is mostly dumped untreated into rivers, canals and pits in the surrounding community where pregnant women can become infected.

The most frequent causes of resistant newborn infections in India are bacteria like Klebsiella and Acinetobacter, which are found in untreated human waste. Such bacteria rarely infect newborns in developed nations, said Dr. Paul.

India and other developing nations are by no means alone in threatening the future of antibiotics. Overuse of the drugs in chicken, hog and cattle farms in the United States has led to the rise of resistant strains there, and research has shown that as much as half of antibiotic prescriptions in the United States are unnecessary.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated last year that two million people are sickened by resistant bacteria every year in the United States and 23,000 die as a result. But efforts to crack down on inappropriate antibiotic use in the United States and much of Europe have been successful, with prescriptions dropping from 2000 to 2010. That drop was more than offset, however, by growing use in the developing world.

Global sales of antibiotics for human consumption rose 36 percent from 2000 to 2010, with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa accounting for 76 percent of that increase. In India, much of that growth has been driven by private doctors who deliver about 90 percent of care here and are often poorly trained. Much of these doctors’ income comes from drug sales.

Just as worrisome has been the rapid growth of India’s industrialized animal husbandry, where antibiotics are widespread. Most large chicken farms here use feed laced with antibiotics banned for use in animals in the United States. A New Delhi science group recently found antibiotic residues in 40 percent of chicken samples tested.

But the effects in children are perhaps the most heart-wrenching. After her baby’s death a year ago, Ms. Thakur, 21, was soon pregnant again. She gave birth on Sept. 21 to a baby girl. On a visit shortly after the baby’s birth, Ms. Thakur was shivering from a severe infection while staying in a home with no toilet or running water. She nursed her tiny infant, Khushi, under a small shrine with pictures of Durga and Krishna.

Nearly two months later, she reported that she and the baby were fine.

1668. Noam Chomsky on Intellectuals, Truth and Power

By Noam Chomsky, truth-out.org, December 2, 2014

"War is the health of the State," wrote social critic Randolph Bourne in a classic essay as America entered World War I:

"It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. ... Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.”

And at the service of society's "significant classes" were the intelligentsia, "trained up in the pragmatic dispensation, immensely ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared for the intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focusing of ends."

They are "lined up in service of the war-technique. There seems to have been a peculiar congeniality between the war and these men. It is as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.”

The role of the technical intelligentsia in decision-making is predominant in those parts of the economy that are "in the service of the war technique" and closely linked to the government, which underwrites their security and growth.

It is little wonder, then, that the technical intelligentsia is, typically, committed to what sociologist Barrington Moore in 1968 called "the predatory solution of token reform at home and counterrevolutionary imperialism abroad.”

Moore offers the following summary of the "predominant voice of America at home and abroad" - an ideology that expresses the needs of the American socioeconomic elite, that is propounded with various gradations of subtlety by many American intellectuals, and that gains substantial adherence on the part of the majority that has obtained "some share in the affluent society”:

"You may protest in words as much as you like. There is but one condition attached to the freedom we would very much like to encourage: Your protests may be as loud as possible as long as they remain ineffective. ... Any attempt by you to remove your oppressors by force is a threat to civilized society and the democratic process. ... As you resort to force, we will, if need be, wipe you from the face of the earth by the measured response that rains down flame from the skies.”

A society in which this is the predominant voice can be maintained only through some form of national mobilization, which may range in its extent from, at the minimum, a commitment of substantial resources to a credible threat of force and violence.
Given the realities of international politics, this commitment can be maintained in the United States only by a form of national psychosis - a war against an enemy who appears in many guises: Kremlin bureaucrat, Asian peasant, Latin American student, and, no doubt, "urban guerrilla" at home.

The intellectual has, traditionally, been caught between the conflicting demands of truth and power. He would like to see himself as the man who seeks to discern the truth, to tell the truth as he sees it, to act - collectively where he can, alone where he must - to oppose injustice and oppression, to help bring a better social order into being.
If he chooses this path, he can expect to be a lonely creature, disregarded or reviled. If, on the other hand, he brings his talents to the service of power, he can achieve prestige and affluence.

He may also succeed in persuading himself - perhaps, on occasion, with justice - that he can humanize the exercise of power by the "significant classes." He may hope to join with them or even replace them in the role of social management, in the ultimate interest of efficiency and freedom.

The intellectual who aspires to this role may use the rhetoric of revolutionary socialism or of welfare-state social engineering in pursuit of his vision of a "meritocracy" in which knowledge and technical ability confer power.

He may represent himself as part of a "revolutionary vanguard" leading the way to a new society or as a technical expert applying "piecemeal technology" to the management of a society that can meet its problems without fundamental changes.

For some, the choice may depend on little more than an assessment of the relative strength of competing social forces. It comes as no surprise, then, that quite commonly the roles shift; the student radical becomes the counterinsurgency expert.

His claims must, in either case, be viewed with suspicion: He is propounding the self-serving ideology of a "meritocratic elite" that, in Karl Marx's phrase (applied, in this case, to the bourgeoisie), defines "the special conditions of its emancipation [as] the general conditions through which alone modern society can be saved.”

The role of intellectuals and radical activists, then, must be to assess and evaluate, to attempt to persuade, to organize, but not to seize power and rule. In 1904, Rosa Luxemburg wrote, "Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”

These remarks are a useful guide for the radical intellectual. They also provide a refreshing antidote to the dogmatism so typical of discourse on the left, with its arid certainties and religious fervor regarding matters that are barely understood - the self-destructive left-wing counterpart to the smug superficiality of the defenders of the status quo who can perceive their own ideological commitments no more than a fish can perceive that it swims in the sea.

It has always been taken for granted by radical thinkers, and quite rightly so, that effective political action that threatens entrenched social interests will lead to "confrontation" and repression. It is, correspondingly, a sign of intellectual bankruptcy for the left to seek to construct "confrontations"; it is a clear indication that the efforts to organize significant social action have failed.

Particularly objectionable is the idea of designing confrontations so as to manipulate the unwitting participants into accepting a point of view that does not grow out of meaningful experience, out of real understanding. This is not only a testimony to political irrelevance, but also, precisely because it is manipulative and coercive, a proper tactic only for a movement that aims to maintain an elitist, authoritarian form of organization.

The opportunities for intellectuals to take part in a genuine movement for social change are many and varied, and I think that certain general principles are clear. Intellectuals must be willing to face facts and refrain from erecting convenient fantasies.

They must be willing to undertake the hard and serious intellectual work that is required for a real contribution to understanding. They must avoid the temptation to join a repressive elite and must help create the mass politics that will counteract - and ultimately control and replace - the strong tendencies toward centralization and authoritarianism that are deeply rooted but not inescapable.

They must be prepared to face repression and to act in defense of the values they profess. In an advanced industrial society, many possibilities exist for active popular participation in the control of major institutions and the reconstruction of social life.
To some extent, we can create the future rather than merely observing the flow of events. Given the stakes, it would be criminal to let real opportunities pass unexplored.

This article is adapted from the essay, "Knowledge and Power: Intellectuals and the Welfare-Warfare State," which appeared in the 1970 book The New Left, edited by Priscilla Long. The essay is reprinted in Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013 by Noam Chomsky.

1667. Book Review: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

By Ron Nixon, The New York Times, November 6, 2014

“Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable.” Thus spoke President Kennedy in a 1961 address to the United Nations. The threat he warned of was not climate chaos — barely a blip on anybody’s radar at the time — but the hydrogen bomb. The nuclear threat had a volatile urgency and visual clarity that the sprawling, hydra-headed menace of today’s climate calamity cannot match. How can we rouse citizens and governments to act for concerted change? Will it take, as Naomi Klein insists, nothing less than a Marshall Plan for Earth?

“This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate” is a book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable. Klein’s fans will recognize her method from her prior books, “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies” (1999) and “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” (2007), which, with her latest, form an antiglobalization trilogy. Her strategy is to take a scourge — brand-­driven hyperconsumption, corporate exploitation of disaster-struck communities, or “the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet” — trace its origins, then chart a course of liberation. In each book she arrives at some semihopeful place, where activists are reaffirming embattled civic values.

To call “This Changes Everything” environmental is to limit Klein’s considerable agenda. “There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she contends, “but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.” On the green left, many share Klein’s sentiments. George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, recently lamented that even though “the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.” Klein, Monbiot and Bill McKibben all insist that we cannot avert the ecological disaster that confronts us without loosening the grip of that superannuated zombie ideology.

That philosophy — ­neoliberalism — promotes a high-consumption, ­carbon-hungry system. Neoliberalism has encouraged mega-mergers, trade agreements hostile to environmental and labor regulations, and global hypermobility, enabling a corporation like Exxon to make, as McKibben has noted, “more money last year than any company in the history of money.” Their outsize power mangles the democratic process. Yet the carbon giants continue to reap $600 billion in annual subsidies from public coffers, not to speak of a greater subsidy: the right, in Klein’s words, to treat the atmosphere as a “waste dump.”

So much for the invisible hand. As the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson observed, when it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.

Klein diagnoses impressively what hasn’t worked. No more claptrap about fracked gas as a bridge to renewables. Enough already of the international summit meetings that produce sirocco-quality hot air, and nonbinding agreements that bind us all to more emissions. Klein dismantles the boondoggle that is cap and trade. She skewers grandiose command-and-control schemes to re-engineer the planet’s climate. No point, when a hubristic mind-set has gotten us into this mess, to pile on further hubris. She reserves a special scorn for the partnerships between Big Green organizations and Immense Carbon, peddled as win-win for everyone, but which haven’t slowed emissions. Such partnerships remind us that when the lamb and the lion lie down together, only one of them gets eaten.

In democracies driven by lobbyists, donors and plutocrats, the giant polluters are going to win while the rest of us, in various degrees of passivity and complicity, will watch the planet die. “Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews,” Klein writes. “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”

Klein reminds us that neoliberalism was once an upstart counterrevolution. Through an epic case of bad timing, the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, the rise of the anti-regulatory World Trade Organization, and the cult of privatizing and globalizing everything coincided with the rising public authority of climate science. In 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, delivered historic testimony at Congressional hearings, declaring that the science was 99 percent unequivocal: The world was warming and we needed to act collectively to reduce emissions. Just one year earlier, Margaret Thatcher famously declared: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” In the battle since, between a collective strategy for forging an inhabitable long-term future and the antisocial, hyper-­corporatized, hyper-carbonized pursuit of short-term growth at any cost, well, there has been only one clear winner.

But counterrevolutions are reversible. Klein devotes much of her book to propitious signs that this can happen — indeed is happening. The global climate justice movement is spreading. Since the mid-1990s, environmental protests have been growing in China at 29 percent per year. Where national leaders have faltered, local governments are forging ahead. Hundreds of German cities and towns have voted to buy back their energy grids from corporations. About two-thirds of Britons favor renationalizing energy and rail.

The divestment movement against Big Carbon is gathering force. While it will never bankrupt the mega-corporations, it can reveal unethical practices while triggering a debate about values that recognizes that such practices are nested in economic systems that encourage, inhibit or even prohibit them.

The voices Klein gathers from across the world achieve a choral force. We hear a Montana goat rancher describe how an improbable alliance against Big Coal between local Native American tribes and settler descendants awakened in the latter a different worldview of time and change and possibility. We hear participants in Idle No More, the First Nations movement that has swept across Canada and beyond, contrast the “extractivist mind-set” with systems “designed to promote more life.”

One quibble: What’s with the subtitle? “Capitalism vs. the Climate” sounds like a P.R. person’s idea of a marquee cage fight, but it belies the sophistication and hopefulness of Klein’s argument. As is sometimes said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Klein’s adversary is neoliberalism — the extreme capitalism that has birthed our era of extreme extraction. Klein is smart and pragmatic enough to shun the never-never land of capitalism’s global overthrow. What she does, brilliantly, is provide a historically refined exposé of “capitalism’s drift toward monopoly,” of “corporate interests intent on capturing and radically shrinking the public sphere,” and of “the disaster capitalists who use crises to end-run around democracy.”

To change economic norms and ethical perceptions in tandem is even more formidable than the technological battle to adapt to the heavy weather coming down the tubes. Yet “This Changes Everything” is, improbably, Klein’s most optimistic book. She braids together the science, psychology, geopolitics, economics, ethics and activism that shape the climate question. The result is the most momentous and contentious environmental book since “Silent Spring.”

1666. COP20: Optimism Faces Grave Realities at Climate Talks

By Coral Davenport, The New York Times, November 30, 2014

This artist's depiction of the severity of the effect of climate change may not be far fetched

WASHINGTON — After more than two decades of trying but failing to forge a global pact to halt climate change, United Nations negotiators gathering in South America this week are expressing a new optimism that they may finally achieve the elusive deal.

Even with a deal to stop the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, scientists warn, the world will become increasingly unpleasant. Without a deal, they say, the world could eventually become uninhabitable for humans.

For the next two weeks, thousands of diplomats from around the globe will gather in Lima, Peru, for a United Nations summit meeting to draft an agreement intended to stop the global rise of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

The meeting comes just weeks after a landmark announcement by President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China committing the world’s two largest carbon polluters to cuts in their emissions. United Nations negotiators say they believe that advancement could end a longstanding impasse in the climate talks, spurring other countries to sign similar commitments.

But while scientists and climate-policy experts welcome the new momentum ahead of the Lima talks, they warn that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels and widespread flooding — events that could harm the world’s population and economy.

Recent reports show that there may be no way to prevent the planet’s temperature from rising, given the current level of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and the projected rate of emissions expected to continue before any new deal is carried out.

That fact is driving the urgency of the Lima talks, which are expected to produce a draft document, to be made final over the next year and signed by world leaders in Paris in December 2015.

While a breach of the 3.6 degree threshold appears inevitable, scientists say that United Nations negotiators should not give up on their efforts to cut emissions. At stake now, they say, is the difference between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one.

“I was encouraged by the U.S.-China agreement,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University and a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global body of scientists that produces regular reports on the state of climate science. But he expressed doubts that the threshold rise in global temperature could be prevented.

“What’s already baked in are substantial changes to ecosystems, large-scale transformations,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. He cited losses of coral reef systems and ice sheets, and lowering crop yields.

Still, absent a deal, “Things could get a lot worse,” Mr. Oppenheimer added. Beyond the 3.6 degree threshold, he said, the aggregate cost “to the global economy — rich countries as well as poor countries — rises rapidly.”

The objective now, negotiators say, is to stave off atmospheric temperature increases of 4 to 10 degrees by the end of the century; at that point, they say, the planet could become increasingly uninhabitable.

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are already reporting that 2014 appears likely to be the warmest year on record.

Since 1992, the United Nations has convened an annual climate change summit meeting aimed at forging a deal to curb greenhouse gases, which are produced chiefly by burning coal for electricity and gasoline for transportation. But previous agreements, such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, included no requirements that developing nations, such as India and China, cut their emissions. And until now, the United States has never headed into those summit meetings with a domestic climate change policy in place.

This spring, a report by 13 federal agencies concluded that climate change would harm the American economy by increasing food prices, insurance rates and financial volatility. In China, the central government has sought to quell citizen protests related to coal pollution.

In June, Mr. Obama announced a new Environmental Protection Agency rule forcing major emissions cuts from coal-fired power plants. State Department negotiators took the decision to China, hoping to broker a deal for a similar offer of domestic action. That led to November’s joint announcement in Beijing: The United States will cut its emissions up to 28 percent by 2025, while China will decrease its emissions by or before 2030.

“Our sense is that this will resonate in the broader climate community, give momentum to the negotiations and spur countries to come forward with their own targets,” said Todd Stern, Mr. Obama’s lead climate change negotiator. “The two historic antagonists, the biggest players, announcing they’ll work together.”

Other negotiators agree. “The prospects are so much better than they’ve ever been,” said Felipe Calderón, the former president of Mexico and chairman of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, a research organization.

The aim of negotiators in Lima is, for the first time, to produce an agreement in which every nation commits to a domestic plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, along the model of the United States-China agreement. Negotiators expect that by next March, governments will make announcements similar to those made by the United States and China.

The idea is for each country to cut emissions at a level that it can realistically achieve, but in keeping with domestic political and economic constraints. World leaders would sign a deal in Paris next year committing all those nations to their cuts, including a provision that the nations regularly reconvene to further reduce their emissions.

The problem is that climate experts say it almost certainly will not happen fast enough. A November report by the United Nations Environment Program concluded that in order to avoid the 3.6 degree increase, global emissions must peak within the next 10 years, going down to half of current levels by midcentury.

But the deal being drafted in Lima will not even be enacted until 2020. And the structure of the emerging deal — allowing each country to commit to what it can realistically achieve, given each nation’s domestic politics — means that the initial cuts by countries will not be as stringent as what scientists say is required.

China’s plan calls for its emissions to peak in 2030. Government officials in India, the world’s third-largest carbon polluter, have said they do not expect to see their emissions decline until at least 2040.

While Mr. Obama has committed to United Nations emissions cuts through 2025, there is no way to know if his successor will continue on that path.

That reality is already setting in among low-lying island nations, like the Marshall Islands, where rising seas are soaking coastal soil, killing crops and contaminating fresh water supplies.

“The groundwater that supports our food crops is becoming inundated with salt,” said Tony A. deBrum, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands. “The green is becoming brown.”

Many island nations are looking into buying farmland in other countries to grow food and, eventually, to relocate their populations.

In Lima, those countries are expected to demand that a final deal include aid to help them adapt to the climate impacts that have already arrived.