"I've actually come to see philanthropic organizations like foundations and NGOs, and other non-profit organizations (such as universities) as the most effective bulwark against any radical challenges to neoliberalism, as well as many of the inequalities that plague our society."

Darwin Bond-Graham is a board member of the Los Alamos Study Group, a disarmament, energy, and economic development organization based in Albuquerque, N.M. Bond-Graham has a Ph.D in sociology which he obtained in 2010 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His doctorate thesis was titled "Bounce Back: Social Movements and Self-Activity through the Katrina Catastrophe." He blogs at http://darwinbondgraham.blogspot.com/ and this interview was undertaken by email in September 2010.

Michael Barker (MB): Could you explain what you see as the main differences between hard and soft power?

Darwin Bond-Graham (DBG): It was Clausewitz who said "war is the continuation of politics by other means," a very insightful statement directly linking the two practices in one spectrum of action and intent. Thinkers like Foucault, however, turned this aphorism upside down because they were concerned about all kinds of power, not the narrow range of power Clausewitz was looking at: intra-elite struggles to seize state power, state alliances, and exercise of sovereignty over a territory. Looking at everything from the most mundane forms of subjective power, as well as the exercise of state power, Foucault said that politics is basically the continuation of war by other means. It's this formulation which I think is much more useful for us when we grapple with questions of power. The first act isn't politics. It isn't people trying to negotiate and reach compromise so that each side gets something in return for something else. Columbus, for example, didn't step off the Santa Maria and start politicking with the Arawak. No, he got off and summarily began to enslave them under the power of Spanish imperial war making technology.

War is conceived of broadly here as some kind of organized violence by which one nation, peoples, class, race, gender, faith or however it is they define themselves, invade, colonize, subdue, enslave, hire, convert, rape or in one way or another subordinate the Other. War is the first and underlying action in all of what we know of as politics. This primitive act of empowerment comes first, in a way, kind of like Marx's notion of primitive accumulation. With primitive accumulation there's a taking, a theft that happens which initiates the later so-called "civil" and "peaceful" cycles of economic growth, and the same is true in politics; there's this first act of violence which establishes the way that things are going to be, who the big dogs are and who the runts are, and then the "civil dialogs," "voting," "free elections," etc. can commence.

Like the notion of primitive accumulation though, this first act of violence or war to then establish the potential to continue the power struggle via politics is recurring and never really over. Also just like the prime act of accumulation and later cycles of "peaceful" capitalist accumulation, there's a lot of overlap, to the point where it's hard to pick out a pure act of social war and a pure act of politics. There's a lot of each in the other, even if we can kind of discern examples of each type. For example, we could obviously identify the USA's actions in Afghanistan as a war, but isn't there also a great deal of politics going on in the training and "modernization" of the Afghan state bureaucracy, and financial and political support for local and national leaders there? On the other hand I think a lot of people in the United States would identify immigration as a political issue. However the state is being employed to round up immigrants, deport them, we've seen thousands of deaths along the US-Mexico border due directly to militarization of that zone, and racially motivated attacks against Latino immigrants have increased in recent years. Politicians from both parties have been explicitly linking immigration to the "War on Terror," thus demonstrating the fuzzy and overlapping boundaries of war and politics.

So if we want to use the terms "soft" and "hard" power, they'd basically be synonymous with "politics" and "war." Soft power is the exercise of power by other means than outright physical organized violence. This doesn't mean that it's less oppressive or deadly than "hard" power though. The key thing is that soft and hard power go hand in glove.

But the other key thing is legitimation. No social, political, or economic regime can exist for very long without some semblance of legitimacy. Soft power, the kind of politics that pulls in the oppressed and calls them a "partner," or "stakeholder," or "fellow citizen," is key to stabilizing rule. And in the instance of philanthropy it not only gives things a shiny gloss of democracy and progress, sometimes it'll even band-aid a festering wound so that it doesn't ache and stink so bad, so the contradictions are not so glaring, so that there's less need to repress the products of grievance.

The utilization of soft power tactics to control the field of what's politically possible is nothing new. The USA might now have the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, and there might be a thousand foundations with ties to the CIA and State Department working in the third world to marginalize radical movement organizations and empower centrist neoliberals, but there's nothing really new in that. That's how empires have always worked. Look at how the Romans maintained their hegemony. Sure, they did march on in and conquer people with military force, but to maintain rule, sometimes even to win in war, they made alliances, co-opted opponents, politically undermined radicals. While the scale of philanthropy and the foundation organization might be unique and historically new, the tactics they use are very old.

What is new are the details. To use an example of internal-colonization: when the Ford Foundation decided it'd be better to bring black radicals into the fold, to work with them on issues of urban de-industrialization, urban renewal and other mid-20th Century ambitions of local growth machines that had met massive resistance from the ghettos, they were really doing something new. Till then the USA had been a Jim Crow society. Black communities were essentially expendable, and more than a few were destroyed in the name of civic progress or slum clearance. But the liberals who ran Ford in the 1950s and 1960s realized that the balance of power had changed in important ways. Urban regimes could no longer just ignore and run over black communities. Blacks had rising electoral power and the working class demonstrated its ability to really disrupt things by protesting and rebelling. Ford and other foundations then moved to bring black elites and some agreeable activists into the fold, give them funds, establish really serious philanthropic initiatives and lobby for federal inner-city programs through OEO and the War on Poverty.

The USA is an empire and its existence depends on the oppression of many hundreds of millions globally, and many millions within its own borders. These subjects rebel. They fight back. Some of them also lash out and embrace self and socially destructive behaviors which have to be dealt with. Some of these behaviors, like drug use for example, help to reinforce large global circuits of capital accumulation though, so you can see how complex these problems become. Elites are constantly debating the right balance of powers to deal with this fundamental contradiction which underlies the political economy of capitalism on the global level and at more localized scales. They've got to exploit people and extract labor from them. Some of them must be relegated as lumpen. They can't be given control over their own development. Self-determination would be anathema to the accumulation process. But they also recognize that you can't just entirely kill off the poor because they are the source of value. This is the first contradiction of capital, its tendency to kill off the labor which creates it. So what to do? Some elites say that the system can best be balanced through liberal social policies that more or less reduce the level of suffering and inequality to levels that are bearable, levels that minimize the need for police and military force. Then you have the conservatives who argue for straight up repression and war making, essentially that you can repress unruly workers, peasants, and prisoners much more without the system breaking, that this strong fatherly hand will in fact change their behavior. It's all a debate about using hard or soft power and it's one of the great debates of governance under capitalism.

The goals were multiple and sometimes conflicting because the foundations, federal government, and local governments and local business leaders were not at all on the same page. They knew there was a crisis of legitimacy and rule that had to be addressed, but they didn't agree about how to deal with it. Ford and other foundations tried to create a working consensus based on an enlarged welfare state, while other actors sought more conservative and repressive solutions. This is a very old debate among elites - iron fist or helping hand?

Domestically, since the 1970s, there's been a big shift away from utilization of soft power to deal with the internally colonized, African Americans, Latinos and poor people more generally. So we've seen prisons expand alongside police forces. We've seen the welfare state stripped down into a very draconian and controlling apparatus. But in other areas we've seen the extension of forms of soft power to deal with contradictions within the system, especially with what James O'Connor called the second contradiction of capital, the ecological question. So most elites today recognize that they just can't keep externalizing ecological damages and that very soon the environmental basis of the whole system could collapse. But they can't keep from using the environment as a source of material and sink for pollution. So rather than simply repress or ignore those who remind them that the planet is dying, they've chosen instead to utilize their philanthropic power to shift the environmental movement so that the biggest and best funded green organizations support preferred policies like cap and trade instead of a carbon tax, or population control instead of de-colonization. The liberals think that these reforms can stem the damages and actually perpetuate the system, while the conservative hard power advocates would say this is just another wasteful constraint on growth.

MB: I tend to think that most writers have neglected emphasizing the importance of soft power, most specifically that of philanthropy, in legitimizing and extending capitalist relations: what are you thoughts on this matter?

DBG: I think you're more or less right. There's a tendency among writers of all political stripes to focus on political parties, the state, and corporations. For those coming at things from a critical perspective, be they anti-capitalists or progressives or environmentalists, or however they'd identify themselves, there's been this fixation on corporate power over the last fifteen or twenty years. Go in any bookstore and look at the titles, many are about the predations of big corporations. It's not entirely without merit. Corporations, especially among the finance, military industrial, energy, hi-tech and bio-tech sectors, have grown bigger than ever and gained more power through the transnationalization of their structure, finances, and activities. They've poured vast money into politics. Their propaganda apparatus is more sophisticated and reaches further into our lives than ever before. But in focusing on the corporation we've missed the bigger picture. The corporation might be a hugely important organization for us to understand if we care about fighting for democratic control over our lives and the future, but it's only one organization among several that the ruling classes work through.

I've actually come to see philanthropic organizations like foundations and NGOs, and other non-profit organizations (such as universities) as the most effective bulwark against any radical challenges to neoliberalism, as well as many of the inequalities that plague our society. This is a really important point so I'll repeat it more clearly. Foundations and nonprofits are the most effective defenders of capital and the state. The problem today isn't so much that there are "evil" corporate interests ruining the planet and harming people, or that the US state has become an empire. Certainly those are problems, but we have to realize that their armor, and even much of their weaponry, comes in philanthropic form.

More so, if you actually look at how capital is accumulating, that is the process by which new enclosures are made, new land and resources and labor pools are gobbled up, you'll find that foundations and NGOs are actually playing the role of facilitator, sometimes even acting as direct financial partners with corporations and states.

To give you a sense of what I mean I'll use an example from post-Katrina New Orleans. As many people now know thanks to the attention Spike Lee gave to it in his latest documentary about the Crescent City ("If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise"), public housing was shuttered by federal and local authorities after the flood. The residents were not allowed to come home. The decision was quickly and very anti-democratically made to demolish more than 5000 units of housing, and contracts were signed with real estate developers to build new housing on these sites which would be owned and/or leased by private companies.

The role of liberal philanthropic organizations and NGOs was instrumental in making this happen. First of all, the decision to basically displace and dispossess thousands of New Orleanais of their homes and communities was legitimated by saying that the whole demolition and redevelopment process would actually help these poor people. Buzz phrases like "mixed income housing" and "poverty deconcentration," were thrown about with references to increasing people's "social capital." The new housing would be good for poor people, it was said, because they would move back in and live next to middle class families. Their "pathological" cycle of poverty would be broken. Decades of social science, much of it funded by big foundations like Ford and Russell Sage, which touted this idea that you could solve poverty simply be shuffling poor families into shiny new homes, with strict lease agreements to compel good behavior and weed out the "criminal element," was used to legitimate displacement on a massive scale. The whole justification rested on the notion that these people's poverty was their own fault, that it had nothing to do with the structure of the labor market there, the availability of affordable housing, housing discrimination, disinvestment from the educational system by whites following integration, and the countless other factors that actually impoverish people. No matter, social science weighed in through foundation funded studies to say that this would be really beneficent.

Then there is the fact that some of the developers are actually non-profit organizations and foundations themselves. So at the St. Bernard public homes where over 1400 apartments were demolished, the over-arching organization leading this enclosure is the Bayou District Foundation, a non-profit entity established by a board of real estate developers. The lead developer on the project is a big for-profit company from Atlanta, but then they've got NGO partners who are helping them privatize the City Park golf course, and build charter schools. This whole swath of the city has now been transformed into a source of profits which will flow in the form of rents to a few corporations, but it was the non-profit organizations that actually made it all possible by providing the ideology which would legitimate the scheme, and even providing much of the organizational muscle to carry out the privatization. The same is true in the other "Big Four" public housing developments there.

And yet there's this notion that what happened after Katrina down there was this example of "disaster capitalism" whereby some really big predatory corporations came in and used the flood as an excuse to privatize everything under their auspices. It hasn't been like that. Rather, it has been the foundations and the big NGOs who have led the charge and enclosed everything from housing to public schools. The stated mission of many of these funds and non-profits was to achieve a just reconstruction, to address issues of environmental racism, or to reform the schools so that there wasn't gross inequality in resources and quality of campuses. What they ended up actually facilitating though has been a complete neoliberal program in the region. I think New Orleans has been a hyper-distilled example of something operating in America and the world more broadly because it doesn't take some natural disaster to create the conditions whereby philanthropy serves as an agent to capital's needs for both legitimation and new opportunities for accumulation.

MB: When do you first remember reading or hearing about critiques of liberal philanthropists and their foundations? What was your initial reaction to such criticisms? Here I am predominantly thinking about the former "big three," the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.

DBG: My first exposure to what philanthropy really is came about as a result of working with anti-nuclear activists. Critiques of foundation power and the nonprofit industrial complex first came to me from the very people who were trying to resist and to keep social justice at the center of their work, so I'll use their experiences as an example.

What happened was that in the early 1990s the anti-nuclear movement - and here I'm talking about people opposing nuclear weapons and military applications of nuclear technology - was big, decentralized, with more than a few strong grassroots organizations spread around the country raising hell about interconnected sets of issues that included US foreign policy, ecological impacts of nuclearism and militarism, social and racial justice, and community and economic development. In other words people were talking about how nuclear weapons production was imperialistic, how it harmed local communities in the US, how it differentially impacted communities of color, and how it was just simply a bad developmental paradigm. So the antinuclear movement was able to put quite a bit of pressure on the imperial state and the nuclear weapons enterprise because of its diversity of strategies and tactics. But most of all the movement had legs because it was radical in its demands and it was talking about political issues of bread and butter, budgets and economy at real local levels where activists lived and worked in the shadow of nuclear facilities.

There was a concerted effort in the mid-1990s by staff members of a few of the elite foundations funding anti-nuclear groups to consolidate the field and focus its message on what they saw as the most practical and important aspects of the work. So the antinuclear movement went from being a big messy movement with relatively a lot of activists and groups with different strategies and goals, to being a much smaller cottage industry with fewer groups, professionalized staffs, fewer and less competent volunteers, and a narrow set of issues. This wasn't just some "natural" evolution of the field in the post-Cold War era. It wasn't that people just stopped thinking about nukes as a threat to their lives because the "Evil Empire" fizzled. No, it was because there was a purposeful effort to gain control over nuclear weapons policy by liberal elites who believed that they had the best program for the post-Soviet era. To these parties the existence of radical and autonomous local groups opposing the nuclear enterprise on grounds that it was unjust, imperialist, and economically damaging was simply a problem that had to be snuffed out. It didn't jive with the goals they had to better manage imperial power and wealth.

So exclusive meetings were had, reports and memos were written, and the decision was made to really centralize the flow of funds to a handful of organizations. Some got cut off and withered and disappeared or were shrunk so small as to become less effective. Organizations that towed the right political line, one that didn't challenge the existence of the nuclear weapons complex or try to throw a wrench into the ideological justification for US Empire were funded. Groups that "collaborated" were funded. Collaboration's logical end of course meant lining all the organizations and activists up behind a set of goals determined by the funders, so if you were a problem and didn't work with other groups you were out.

What got dropped was an analysis of imperialism. What also got dropped was any meaningful opposition to the local effects whereby these big nuclear weapons facilities and military bases basically under-develop communities and whole states. So activists were no longer allowed to talk about how nuclear weapons labs and spending have more or less turned the state of New Mexico into a basket case, foreclosing on alternative paths of economic and social development. Or how the nation is wasting precious dollars on "research" done at weapons labs; research that is low in quality to pursue really inconsequential, almost stupid questions like 'what happens when we shoot a high powered lazer at a hohlraum?'

What the foundations decided was important was a totally different and much more elite set of talking points. Arms control, they said, should focus on lobbying against specific kinds of new nuclear weapons systems, against expansion of the arms race, against new and destabilizing weapons, and activists should lobby for arms control treaties. In other words arms control should remain safely removed from questions of social justice and economics. Some environmental issues related to nuclearism have been funded generously, like if a group wants monitoring wells drilled to check for radioactive groundwater plumes and the like. But if you want to conduct an economic analysis of how, say, a federal weapons lab or military bases do harm to a region's economy - how entities like these actually create and reinforce violent forms of inequality and corrupt local and state politics - good luck getting funding for that.

If you look closely at the agenda that the big arms control foundations like the Ploughshares Fund or the Connect US fund are promoting, you'll see that they're actually serving as proxies for the liberal wing of the elite, mostly based in the Democratic Party. The policy agenda they've set for themselves is the same as what most Democratic administrations will pursue. So they're not talking about disarmament, not in any serious way. In fact they support large military budgets in principle, and they even support increases in spending on nuclear weapons, so long as the USA can be seen as a moderate nuclear weapons power. They support very aggressive foreign policies. Overall you could say that their program is to maintain the status quo of power relations, but unlike the hawks in the Republican Party, they want to maintain things using soft power.

It's this history and process which really opened my eyes to the nature of philanthropic power, how it's used to stop radical changes from occurring. People whose organizations and life's work I really respected, people who had fought against the basing of warships and nuclear weapons in the Bay Area, folks who mounted effective resistance to land grabs and ecological harms caused by nuke plants in the Texas panhandle, people who had fought and prevented massive spending on nuclear programs in New Mexico and California, they were telling me that they were targeted for elimination by foundations in the mid-1990s. So my initial reaction was to trust their analysis.

MB: Following on from the last question, could you could briefly explain what you think about the academic/activist literature that is critical of liberal philanthropy?

DBG: I think the activist literature has a long distance to go to catch up to the academic literature. The academic practice has a long way to go to catch up to the activist practice.

One of the most influential books for a lot of activists has been INCITE's The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. It's an okay anthology, a bit scattered though. Countless activists in the US who work on all variety of issues in very different communities have read this book and recognize some of the pitfalls of philanthropy discussed in some of the better chapters. There's also lively discussion among anti-authoritarian organizers, anarchists, anti-racist and feminists about the non-profit industrial complex. But I've never thought the level of discussion has progressed very far. It sort of goes in circles and it's characterized by some pretty unsophisticated positions.

Nothing that the activist community is widely reading or writing themselves compares to the work of Roelofs (Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism), Arnove (Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism), Faber and McCarthy (Foundations for Social Change), Dowie (Losing Ground, and Foundations: An Investigative History), Domhoff (Who Rules America), Robinson (Promoting Polyarchy), or Jeffery St. Clair's reporting. And if you reach even further into the scholarly literature there's some amazingly detailed research about regimes of co-optation and movement neutralization created by elite foundations, mostly to destroy the black power movement and other radical racial justice movements and anti-colonial struggles. It's all there. One only has to seriously study it.

On the other hand while academics and writers have a lot of critique to dish out about the nonprofit industrial complex, they've got little to say about new formations and practices that could avoid the pitfalls and dead ends that philanthropy is designed to suck radicals into. There are a lot of amazing organizations and activists out there doing innovate stuff, using new and unconstrained pools of resources and finding their own ways to hustle up funding for projects. Academics need to stop thinking about social movements as being merely these constellations of organizations using foundation funds to promote changes in social policy. Academics need to really expand the field and look at all the ways oppressed peoples contest power relations, and how some of the elite or some organizers with resources work in solidarity with them. It's these new and hidden practices that deserve more attention.

MB: How would you describe the general impact of liberal foundations on the evolution of research within universities and on intellectuals more generally?

DBG: Obviously it's enormous. There are a lot of foundations funding research and endowing universities and think tanks. They've shaped whole fields much in the way that the Defense Department has shaped whole fields of physical science and engineering. Foundation funding influences topics of study, the kinds of questions that get asked, all sorts of deep epistemological concerns.

To return to the example of New Orleans I used earlier, here we have a vast social experiment involving the privatization of housing, schools, health care, and other public goods, alongside the mass displacement of upwards of 100,000 mostly black working class people. How did this happen? Well a lot of social science knowledge has gone into it making it happen.

When the city's entire school system was privatized under charters one of the institutions leading the charge was the Cowan Institute of Tulane University, an academic center set up with funding from the Lavin Family Foundation. The University of New Orleans has been another player in this. UNO teamed up with Capital One Bank to create a nonprofit charter schools network which now runs six schools in the city. The universities and some academic entrepreneurs within them have seen this as a major opportunity to build up a large research and institutional program in the field. Foundations compete with one another to fund this kind of high profile, benevolent "applied research."

As I mentioned earlier the privatization of public housing drew on a lot of social science research to justify displacing 5000 families. The developers and politicians who were at the center of it all have consistently cited or used social science concepts that were developed by researchers inspired by the Gautreaux Program, the Moving to Opportunity program and HOPE VI programs. There's been large research support from foundations to study what happens when you intervene in poor people's lives by redeveloping their housing and putting them into a new context. One reason for this is because such a program lines up very well; it's very complimentary to profit motives of development corporations and the goals of many city growth machines to bust up black and brown ghettos which they identify as the cause of depressed real estate prices or a slow urban economy. While the conclusions drawn from this research are very mixed, and while it's pretty much a fallacy to think that you can get rid of poverty via real estate development, none of that mattered much. Selected products of social science research which reinforced ideas complementary to demolition were paraded about to more or less justify a decision that had been made to achieve other instrumental ends, the key one really being removing working class black communities from profitable real estate. Without a couple decades of sociology and urban studies to give them the right language it would have been much more difficult to justify. This body of knowledge in turn was created with significant foundation support.

MB: Do you think anti-capitalist activists can strategically utilize liberal foundation funding to develop an anti-hegemonic movement for social change?

DBG: No. And I'm not sure I agree with the premise that it's possible, or that we should try to build a counter-hegemonic movement.

It's not that I wouldn't like to see a socialist project that is more democratic than the system we have now emerge and achieve hegemonic status. That'd be an improvement, even if it's not my utopian ideal. I just don't think it's possible at this moment in history.

You've opened up a really big subject here though with this question, but I'll try to just stick to the essence of it, which seems to be: can we achieve positive things by strategically using liberal foundation funding. I think the question is certainly yes. The resources held by foundations are huge. The benefits of working for policy changes using nonprofit corporate vehicles are clear. It's necessary to struggle to influence which wing of the elite controls the state, and what policies they choose to implement. Even if we're bound to lose the war, we'll still win some battles, and that's good and right.

But I don't think we can use philanthropy in the struggle for hegemony, if there is even such a struggle today. The state and capitalism are so all-encompassing and the alternatives really so fictitious I really just don't see socialism as a prospect. But really the biggest reason I'm not sure a counter-hegemonic struggle is the answer has to do with what I see as the ecological reality today. To attain leadership over and against capital seems to presume that there will be enough resources, education, capital, talent, time, energy, flexibility, etc., to organize, fight and win that struggle on a grand transnational scale.

What I see as the reality today is a world that is quickly running out of energy to fuel the capitalist economy, or any other economy of comparable scale. I see converging ecological and social crises that are set to worsen in very bad ways. I see nation states that remain armed to the teeth and preparing to do battle over the last deposits of petroleum, and the stocks of water, timber, fish, arable land, and other resources that are running out or that will be drastically redistributed and shrunk by the fact of climactic disruption.

The only strategic use for philanthropic resources in this context that I see is using funds and skills to soften the inevitable crash. At the same time, however, we've got to keep in mind that many of these funds are going to be put to work on projects that will actually make the situation for the world's vulnerable much worse. Philanthropy will continue its march forward as the tip of the spear of neoliberalization. So sure, it's possible to use philanthropy in a positive way, but structurally, overall, it's going to contribute to the ecological and social crises which are converging and peaking.

I think philanthropy will more or less die as it began and thrived, as a mostly conserving force that seeks reform, but above all seeks to preserve capitalism through the exercise of soft power. It will serve until its end as Henry Ford, Jr. described it, to paraphrase; the system that makes philanthropy possible is worth preserving at all costs.

Seeing as how philanthropy is at the core of securing capitalist hegemony, I just don't see how the notion can be entertained that it could serve to undermine the system. Those who identify as anti-capitalist will need to find their own route, autonomously.

MB: No one would deny that capitalism is destroying planet earth, however, is it not possible that the current crisis is being overstated somewhat to undermine the spread of anti-capitalist alternatives? (The idea being that: 'there simply isn't time to dismantle capitalism anymore.') Arguably such crisis-orientated analyses facilitate public acceptance of the need for a green, perhaps even authoritarian, global neo-Keynesianism - which just so happens to be the latest project of the liberal intelligentsia.

DBG: Yes, that's an interesting question. I think there are plenty of examples whereby an ambitious elite have used environmentalism as a screen or cover to carry out some pretty anti-democratic and downright colonial schemes. Oftentimes talk about deforestation, overfishing, creation of wilderness preserves, and biodiversity get twisted so that a state ends up dispossessing indigenous peoples of their land. Now what we saw in Copenhagen last year was an attempt by the US, Europe and other "industrialized" nations to more or less ignore the climate question altogether, to do nothing about it, while expressing what they saw as the necessary concern about what more than 350 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere is going to do to the biosphere. There are some in the US who want a national economic plan and regulatory system to cap CO2 emissions. The trading aspect purports to solve the allocation problem under a cap, but really the whole scheme is agreeable to many of the elite because it would create a vast new market mechanism to generate profits while supposedly dealing with the planetary ecological crisis that hydrocarbon energy emissions are causing. Some are hoping there will be a global cap and trade system implemented in the near future. What such a system would accomplish would be to make permanent the neocolonial inequalities between nations. It would be a very hard limit on the ability of most of the world's peoples living in "non-industrialized" nations to develop. So yes, fears of climate change are most certainly being manipulated by liberal US and other national elites to further exert their control in a neo-colonial manner. This plan has huge support from liberal foundations by the way. US foundations spent half a billion in 2007 on climate change, and much of this money went to policy development. Many of the big green organizations are now solidly lined up behind cap and trade and other very bad schemes like REDD or offsetting, policies that actually do little to address the fundamental problem and risks, but which do serve the interests of certain sectors of capital.

Even so I think the global ecological crisis is being hugely understated, in many ways completely ignored. What we're facing, as a result of industrial capitalism's globalization over the span of several hundred years is nothing less than the die-off of much of the world's biodiversity, the radical transformation of climate into a much more volatile biosphere, desertification of the oceans - in other words the economic activity of about 30% of the world's people is more or less turning the planet into Venus, slowly but surely. We can't live on Venus. At the same time we have an economy that is running out of the carbon-based fuels that makes life possible for 7 billion people. We simply can't live without oil. With respect to oil the neoconservative maxim actually is true - there is no alternative! So the cruel possibility is that this economy may soon become one of scarcity at the very same time more and more of us become increasingly vulnerable to the loss of a robust environment that can sustain us. Right now there is zero discussion and policy being implemented that can transition our systems of food production and energy from hydrocarbons to alternative sources.

My biggest fear is not that elites will use this crisis to their benefit, if they can. Surely I think they will attempt to institute authoritarian global governance in the name of saving us all from ourselves. The Al Gore's of the world would love nothing less than to institute some neoliberal planet-saving program to measure and regulate all the greenhouse gases, even to cut back on emissions, anything to protect the precious possibility of further capitalist accumulation.

My biggest fear is actually that the Left will not take the environmental crisis seriously, that we will keep fighting for some kind of hegemonic alternative, say socialism, without realizing that not only is the ecological base of capitalism fast drying up, but that also means the base for any other kind of large-scale economy and social system is also dwindling. You might say my view is very pessimistic, that there is no political alternative and we're basically screwed, but this is not what I'm trying to say at all. I'm not going to say we can't build a better society. Of course we can; we must to survive. But I think many of the assumptions made by anti-capitalists are bad ones that don't account for some serious declining curves in "natural capital."

One of the worst things we could do is to convince ourselves that all crises or disasters are merely manufactured by the elite as excuses to steal land and privatize the world's resources. Surely they'll use crises for these ends when they can, but the crises we face are real and existential nonetheless.

Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University, Australia. He can be reached at: Michael.J.Barker@griffith.edu.au