From James Martin at the Deep Transformation Network:
That is, we have a global — or planet-wide — crisis of governing.
This is widely understood. But what is not widely understood is that government is non-identical with governance, and that governments are manifestations of a state system (called ‘government’) which are ‘globally’ held in the thrall of anti-democratic processes world-wide. Anti-democratic politics are varied and complex, but the principal anti-democratic institutions are known as “business institutions,” and these are principally capitalist institutions. Capitalism is, in this view, fundamentally anti-democratic. And yet the ostensible democracies of the world are essentially institutions of a capitalist state system which has become fully globalized.
Democracy implies the self-governing of people who organize their governance of, by and for the people. But state capitalist systems have long been obviating the emergence of any form of governance which challenges state capitalism, which is presently organized as an international and global system which seeks to impose its collective will not only upon all humans, but all beings and things of Earth. Presently, this “Megamachine” (as Fabian Scheidler calls it) has managed to impose its ideological will on most of the surface of Earth.
This suggests a major conundrum in the processes of culture, history and politics. The conundrum is the living question: Can humanity re-assert itself (in relation to this Megamachine) through the state’s systems of laws? Or must the people, instead, walk away from governments–and their legal systems–in order to reassert agency in the face of the Megamachine? For the Megamachine is the most integrated current form of anti-democratic tendencies which the world has ever known. It is the essence of the thing Ralph Waldo Emerson might have been referring to when he said “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” But … perhaps not. Perhaps in that very mediocre poem, with the lovely line in it about human agency in a world of machines, meant something else. But still, humankind is in the thrall of a machine invented by men (mostly men, anyway).
I suspect that if the state and its laws are ever to serve ordinary, everyday human beings, and the natural world (ecosystems, the biosphere), we will probably have to take both paths — something never considered in Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Road Not Taken.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
(continued – The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost – Poems | Academy of American Poets)
The state, as currently constituted in most every location, is not of, by and for the people. And it is not of, by and for the Living Earth (Gaia). It is more like a Paperclip maximizer designed to concentrate money and political power (decision-making power) centripetally (as contrasted with distributing it centrifugally). To do such magic it had to subsume the state under its own purposes, everywhere. And this explains and defines our times on “this poor, poor Earth.”
(Money which is power; power which is money; the two fused into a single thing. Some long for one more than the other, and so pursue power rather than money, or vice versa.)
You talked but after your talking all the rest remains.
After your talking—poets, philosophers, contrivers of romances—everything else,
All the rest deduced inside the flesh
Which lives & knows not just what is permitted.
I am a woman held fast now in a great silence.
Not all creatures have your need for words.
Birds you killed, fish you tossed into your boat,
In what words will they find rest & in what heaven?
You received gifts from me; they were accepted.
But you don’t understand how to think about the dead.
The smell of winter apples, of hoarfrost, and of linen.
There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor Earth.
—Czeslaw Milosz, from Unattainable Earth
Who would not love to believe that laws could be just, made of, by and for the people — and for a living Earth?
Yet who could believe, after all we’ve seen and felt, that the state would stop being a bully, a thief, a rapist?
Two roads diverge in our woods, and I will probably take the both of them. But I’ll side mainly with the wild ones out away from the city, out away from the law-makers, out beyond the suits and ties and the hierarchies these proclaim. I have no faith in Machines. Then one day the city and the forest may conjoin. But not before we’ve become wild and free.