[p2p-research] john pilger on the greeks

[Michel Bauwens]

A hypothesis as to how liberals may see this, in 3 points:

what you describe is just human nature, there is nothing to do about it ..
wanting to change this is idealism, and dangerous

society consists of dynamic and less dynamic individuals, the first get
ahead, and by doing so, create the conditions for the second to progress,
and this is good ...

the focus on groups and classes and such is misleading because in the end,
all depends on dynamic individuals and their inventions and innovations, and
it is these that bring progress to humanity, all else is ideology

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 4:52 PM, j.martin.pedersen <
m.pedersen at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:

>
>
> On 26/05/10 08:42, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> > isn't progress always relative, certainly Ryan could point to a
> remarkable
> > series of improvements, while J. martin would point to parallel increases
> in
> > misery in the last 30 years, they can easily co-exist ..
> >
> > so isn't a better question, progress for who? and at what price?
>
> Indeed. For instance:
>
> Progress in the sense of Western science and technology all builds in
> colonisation, it both made it possible and was fuelled by. And it killed
> up to 90% of the population in the Americas (Applause!) and, repeatedly,
> whenever a tribe encounters That Great Thing Called Civilization, it
> seems that 90% are wiped out - such as the Huaorani/Waorani/Waodani in
> Ecuador over the last 20-30 years, for instance.
>
> And of course the rain forests have been cut down to fuel the factories
> of progress.
>
> The interesting thing here is that while racism and ignorance allowed
> these progresses to go on for centuries - since only the black, red,
> yellow and otherwise coloured people suffered at first - science and
> progress is slowly becoming self-aware (and that coulld somehow be seen
> as progress, but probably too late) through the recognition that, lo and
> behold, the planet is a relatively closed system, resources are finite,
> and what you do unto your brother's forest you do onto your own climate.
>
> Look at the immense environmental and labour costs that go into the
> production of cyberspace, glossed over by the fetishists, the terrible
> poisoning of our children by the medicinal industry, inventing diseases
> such as ADHD to cover up the great progress of the food additive
> industry etc. etc. and the cancerous outlets from all the rest of the
> factories of progress, - so until science and technologists fully
> recognise the costs to the planet and people and the history of
> exploitation associated with their socalled progress, science and
> technology remains the little white boy's toys, with which he ignorantly
> plays in his sandbox. However, they cannot, because they are locked into
> a machine called capitalism for which they have always acted as a
> primary justificatory mechanism that the capitalists and the followers
> call upon to eradicate any advocacy of equality (which doesn't mean
> gleichschaltung as in Hitler).
>
> There is too much blindness resulting from staring into the virtual
> fire, like moths we will burn.
>
> -m
>
> PS: Transcendence is a very real thing. Anyone engaging in
> self-reflective praxis will have experienced it on a personal level. In
> a good relationship it will occur. It can happen for a society or for
> humanity as well, but it requires self-critical recognition. Such a
> process begins with the history of the social struggles that have given
> many the rights which we enjoy today - and that is progress - but which
> many are so "easily" surfing past without a trace of solidarity shown
> with the bloody past that those rights entail.
>
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